Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Podcasts and Movie Reviews

Howdy folks,

This weeks show landed on Martin Luther King day, so you'll notice in the second hour of the show I played some music from Roots and from a couple of films starring Sidney Poitier. Also, played music from First Blood, cause Rambo comes out friday, YEE HAW! Enjoy the show!

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The Swarm - Jerry Goldsmith - (1978)
Le Grand Blue - Eric Serra - (1988)
Terminator 2: Judgement Day - Brad Fidel - (1991)
Sugar Colt - Luis Bakalov - (1966)
Roots - Quincy Jones - (1977)
In the Heat of the Night - Quincy Jones - (1967)
They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! - Quincy Jones - (1969)
First Blood - Jerry Goldsmith - (1982)

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In other news, I saw a few films over the three day weekend so I thought I'd tell you about em. First up on my weekend movie list was a film called The Genius Club. This movie is on extremely limited release and for some reason it was playing in my town. Go figure? I have a theory about why it's on extremely limited release, and it's because it's one of the most amateur films I think I've ever seen on a big screen. The fact that this wasn't a straight to bargain bin DVD release makes me wonder what rich uncle paid for this to be in theaters. Seriously. Tom Sizemore is pretty entertaining, but as for the rest of the acting...I've seen better performances on old movies played during USA's Up All Night with Gilbert Godfrey. Editing, sound design, dialogue, everything was complete schlock. Plus the whole movie was based around conversations I hear between self absorbed hipsters/college students at local coffee shops. It should have been called "Coffee House Chronicles: A Libertarian Tale". Not that I disagree with stuff that was brought up; but if I want to watch propaganda, I'll do it without paying an admission price and busting my ass to smuggle in a pound bag of peanut clusters and a liter of diet sprite. This wasn't the only movie I saw however...

The second film I viewed was the much hyped "Cloverfield". Seeing as how I had just rented and watched Dragon Wars on DVD just a day or so before hand, my expectations for giant monsters crushing shit was pretty low. After watching Dragon Wars you could have filmed your 3 year old nephew wearing a Spongebob mask topple a small town made out of Sesame Street blocks and I probably would have talked about how bad ass it was. With that said...I ended up enjoying Cloverfield, with a few caveats of course. First, the whole 15 minutes at the front full of pointless garbage to get me acquainted with a bunch of characters I'm not going to give two craps about when they get smooshed/gobbled up. J.J. Abrams is great at weaving lots of story lines together, why not do it here? He has the perfect platform...multiple views of a monster attack on various cameras from various people. Nope. Instead let's focus on one group of annoying people that I actually am happy when they all die in the end. I suppose that does at least leave me happy. Also, those chompy spider jobs? What's up? I mean I understand and actually LIKE the concept of a bunch of parasitic creatures living on a giant sea monster, but do they all have to be face huggers from the Alien movies? Do they have to make you explode when they bite you? Do they have to totally suck? Guess so.
Things I liked? Runtime 84 minutes. Not only is that great for the fact that I don't always like sitting in a theater for 2 and a half hours, but any longer and it wouldn't have made sense. Seeing as how it was from the perspective of someone filming on a handycam, they'd only have 90 minutes of tape anyway. Glad they thought of that. I also liked not seeing the monster for most of the movie. I don't like seeing crappy CGI jobs, and the shaky cam hid it well...till the end of course where they had to get the money shot, which totally ruined it for me.
I'll keep things short and end here...it's not the best movie for certain, and also not worth all the hype. It is, however, a movie about a giant monster going ape-shit and breaking lots of city stuff...which has its place. It captured the chaos okay in my book without having to show me too much CGI hot doggery. Don't pay $8 though...matinee at best, but don't wait for DVD, cause it'll lose something in your living room.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

goddammit, how did everyone i know see cloverfield and i didnt??

i heard it made folks sick.

The Boom Operator said...

Well it's like watching a home movie shot by your grandma for 84 minutes, so yeah...might want to take a Dramamine if you're prone to motion sickness.

Anonymous said...

Aaah, Cloverfield.. haven't seen the monster yet, but one of these days I will. Today i saw 3 movies. The Nines, The Invasion and Juno (Again). I like them all!

I wish my internet connection was stable enough to get some of your podcasts, they look great! Maybe I'll use the internet connection at work then.

I've put your site on my blog roll as it truly deserves it. Keep up the good work!