This may be a good time to suggest that you not allow the seeds of cruel hope to sprout in your soul.

Spoilers - But it's Gigli, so do you really care?

First of all, and just for fun, it's pronounced "gee-lee." I know it's good times to make fun of the name and it's ridiculous pronunciation, so I thought I get past that and skip the low hanging fruit.

There are movies that are really genuinely bad. They're the ones that you know will be a total and complete waste of a piece of your life. But those movies get a different kind of negative buzz then Gigli got. Which is fitting, because this one isn't in that category. Granted, it's bad, but it's not wretched and horrid. I avoid those really bad ones, but I see a fair amount of the just mostly bad ones. That's how I came to rent Gigli.

Gigli is a bit of a paradox. It's quite well made, reasonably well acted, the cinematography is solid, the score's pretty good (if a bit heavy handed at times), but the whole thing just doesn't fit. It's weird, it's like they started with a totally flawed concept and then executed it beautifully. And the solid execution isn't surprising either, you've got good talent on screen with J.Lo and to a lesser extent Affleck, and side appearances by Christopher Walken and Al Pacino who are both great. Martin Brest directed it, who has made some great movies. It's no surprise they executed well - I just want to go back in time and be a fly on the wall in the pitch meetings that happened for this one.

Here's the problem. The plot is disgustingly thin and unrealistic. It's so bad I'm not even going to trouble myself with writing the most obvious reasons it's dumb. It's not a plot movie, but that's ok. Sometimes they just have a plot in movies to allow the characters to interact, and you end up with a pure character and dialog movie. But here's your issue. Almost all the screen time is with three characters. There's the mentally ill kid, J.Lo, and Affleck. The kid doesn't really have dialog and just exists for the other two to deal with him, so you're down to two characters. But Affleck's character is a moron. This doesn't work when he has to hold up half of a dialog and character movie. If he'd been smart and he and J.Lo could have a little back and forth this could have been interesting. Instead it ends up being J.Lo saying something reasonably interesting, Affleck saying something dumb, and J.Lo laughing at him. I'm sure situations like this happen in real life (they do to me) but they really aren't to interesting to an audience. Things improved when the side characters came in, but by definition they brought the plot back into the story and the plot was silly, so it ended up being a wash.

Then to really make it silly they had to bring up issues of J.Lo being a lesbian but falling for Affleck (or more accurately making him her bitch - no, really.) But it treats that whole plot line terribly. If you want to watch a dialog and character movie that deals with issues like this go see Chasing Amy instead, it even has Affleck in it. If you want to see movies about gangsters softening and turning from their life of crime there are many better examples. But if you want to see J.Lo scantily clad doing yoga while talking about the sensuality of women, or better yet if you'd like wonder how such a horridly flawed idea could make it past all that talent and still become a movie - this one's for you.

- Why are you always one step behind me?
- Because if I wasn't you'd be the most popular economics professor at the University of Wisconsin

With all The West Wing reruns I've been watching on Bravo you'd think I've had my Aaron Sorkin fill recently. But aparently that's not the case, as I felt compelled to pop The American President in today. Sorkin is just a crazy talented dialog writer, and he gets good actors to do his dialog, so I've pretty much resigned that I'll watch just about anything he's involved in making. This turns out to not be too risky of a statement because I've seen everything he's been involved in making (at least everything that's distrubeted widely, including every minute of both of his TV series) and liked it all. With that kind of track record it's easy to see why I'm a fan.

The bottom line is he's the only script writer I know by name (except for all the guys that do everything, write - direct - produce, they don't count) and I eagerly await his next project. So I guess until then I have to get by watching his excellent movies (he also wrote A Few Good Men) and TV show reruns.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
- Richard Feynman

I saw that quote on a T-Shirt some Cal Poly Physics people made and felt like I just had to post it. Yes, I am that much of a nerd.

Pizza?
You can't eat flowers, it's the more practical apologetic gift.
You have a lot to learn.

I feel strange saying it, but I think Everwood on the WB is one of the best shows on TV right now. It's a little homey, and tends to simplify complicated problems (what TV doesn't?) but it at least tries to add some moral complexity into hard problems. Plus it doesn't play it safe - the show ventures into hard areas and doesn't take formula exits from them. This allows it a couple of things: It isn't predictable (like the wonderfully guilty pleasure The OC) and more importantantly it allows for some real character development. There are tensions in the relationships that carry over to the audience because we don't already know what will happen, we can share in that tension instead of knowing the plot will go where the formula requires it to. It's good tv and if you like family drama's at all you should tune in - Monday nights at 9pm.

I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member - that's the key joke for my adult life in terms of my relationships with women.

I'd never really seen Annie Hall before and decided I really should. If nothing else I figured I should see the movie that beat Star Wars for the best picture Oscar. It was a fun movie to watch. It was funny, smart, and had lots of great quotable moments. It's just a good movie, and one that any movie fan should see. Plus it's weird to see Christopher Walken when he was young (and yes, he was way creepy then too.)

It would be delightful to report they reached the nursery in time, but then there would be no story.

I'd read many glowing reviews of Peter Pan so I made a point of going to see it before it rotated out of theaters. I think I made it just in time, since there was only one theater in Seattle still showing it, and their last showing was at 4:30 pm. But I'm really glad I put the time in to seek it out.

This was a great movie. It was fun and entertaining and most importantly it had some good things to say about adolescence and growing up. What I was most struck by was how much it felt like a play. The set designs and colors they used certainly seemed like the kind of things you'd find in a play. But the similarities were deeper then that. There was overacting much like you'd see in a play and the shots felt longer and more focused on a character - allowing them to do a little more acting outside of dialog.

It's important to note that this movie really takes it's cues from the play and is darker and more mischevious then the Disney version. They also follow the play storyline quite closely and even have a scene where bring over the play tradition of getting the audience to help bring Tinkeybell back to life. I think it's interesting that they tried doing this, but their method of having lots of random people all over the place chanting on screen "I do, I do, I do believe in fairies" just didn't fit in the film context for me. It's the kind of thing that pulls be out of being really engaged in a movie, and I'm thinking that's one of the places where a change in medium dictates a change in content. It probably would have been a better movie with a different solution for that plot point.

Go get it, I'll come back for you.
OK, I'll be quick.
I got it.

Minor Spoilers

To be honest I'm not really sure if that's the actual dialog I'm thinking of from Paycheck. But it doesn't really matter, the point is the dialog from that scene (motorcycle and car chase through a constuction area) really was that bland. It was even worse then that, it was laughably bland.

Paycheck was a strange movie. It was all at once smart and dumb. They managed to be good with time paradoxes, and clever with this idea of trying to change your future knowing that you won't remember anything when the changing needs to happen. There are some logical holes in there (there always are with time travel type stuff) but the movie mostly avoids them by not trying to explain everything. This one is very much about being along for the ride instead of explicity exploring new ideas about time.

So they have all this great stuff with Ben Affleck showing that his character is very clever and smart. And it would have been wonderful if he'd been able to continue that throughout the movie, escaping situations by being smart. Instead there was this dichotomy, the Affleck before the memory wipe was smart and clever while the Affleck after the memory wipe is dumb. Notice that he doesn't do anything clever that wasn't set up for him by his previous self - this annoyed me. Uma Thurman though was able to be clever, and continued that all the way through to the final fight scene.

And on top of all of it Affleck really isn't that good of an action star. He just looks clunky doing all that stuff. John Woo tried to make him look good, but he just wasn't working with the kind of talent he had with say Chow Yun Fat (or even, movie gods help me, Jean Claude...)

The movie is ideal for audiences who kinda know that we have a president, and he could have a teenage daughter, and she might be protected by the Secret Service, but don't know a whole lot else.

Roger Ebert's review of Chasing Liberty is just plain hilarious. It's not often that I laugh out loud multiple times when reading a review. But this one did it for me. Sadly, it sounds like the review is more enjoyable then the movie. Although I'm not really planning on finding out for myself any time soon.

In a seperate note Along Came Polly finally releases next week. I absolutely can't wait for this to happen. But not because I want to see it, I'm just tired of seing that damn trailer before EVERY SINGLE MOVIE I see. It's old, and really not all that funny...

I don't know you, but you look like you're about to do something crazy. I'm in.

I caught the last 30-40 minutes of Bad Boys 2 the other day. At the end of that little stretch I actually asked the other people in the room if it would be possible to physically inject the DVD with more testosterone. It really was that much of a guy movie. It actually even brought a challenge to Terminator 3 for most collateral damage done in a movie (I still feel T3 owns this category.)

They also did a lot "cool" shots. All the time you have these stylistic shots of people standing there looking tough and grizzled with the camera swirling around them zooming in or out. They were kind of neat, and certainly well done, but there were way, way too many of them. Those kinds of shots need to be used sparingly to add impact to a scene. When used all the time it's like the boy who cried wolf.

I also caught some other movies while visiting friends.

The In-Laws was fun - silly but fun. Michael Douglas does a reasonable job as a spy, although he's hamstrung by having to do a silly and comedic spy. He does get the fast talking, no fear part of his character down though. And it's good to see Albert Brooks again, even if his character was a bit one dimensional. This is one I hadn't really planned on seeing, but was happy to watch it with my friends.

At another friends house I caught the middle of the Leathal Weapon marathon. They were doing all four in one day (I guess it's as good of a thing to do as any when the city shuts down for a snow storm.) I saw the end of two and all of three. I had to pull myself away from four before Jet Li showed up and sucked me in. (I've been a sucker for Jet Li ever since the Bijou theater in Eugene did a Hong Kong martial arts movie series featuring him back in '95.) It was odd for me watching some of the Lethal Weapons again because the plot points in all the movies just kind of blend together in my head. The movies are so similar I couldn't remember if this is the one with the nailgun, or the bathroom bomb, or if the bad guys were stealing drugs, guns, money, etc. In the end it doesn't really matter, the movies are just about watching pretty good action and the quips between Murtaugh and Riggs.

What was actually really fun about watching these was that I was with four girls who go to SPU (a Methodist univeristy in Seattle.) It was interesting watching them squirm uncormfortably during the sex scenes (except for Holly who has an unnatural obsession with Mel Gibson.) Squirming like that is something I got over a long time ago, even when watching movies with my parents. It just reminded me that we're from different cultures. It's a good reminder to everyone that cultural differences don't always have to be across racial or socio-economic boundaries - culture is much deeper then that.

Daughter: Oh my god, can you guys just please wait till I leave the room?
Dad: Can you hurry?

I have no clue what it would be like to have 12 children, but Cheaper By The Dozen does a pretty good job of convincing me it would be something like that. The whole house is just pure chaos, and when mom leaves town there's no way that Dad can handle running the house and his new job (that's predictable.)

But that's not really the point of this movie. The real point is to watch the insanity and laugh a bit. It's not uproariously funny, but it's reasonably funny. This is a movie born out of the ABC TGIF Friday night sitcom tradition. It's feel good, has not some not so concealed moral messages, and supporting characters that are pure cliche. But if you just want to be entertained for a few hours it should do you fine.

How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back? There are some things time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, and take hold.

I saw Return of the King one more time over the holidays. This time I was most struck by the consistency between the three movies. It's not just that all three have a consistently high quality, there's something deeper then that. All three have the same cinematic feel. This is very rare, even among sequels done by most of the same people. This is easily explained though. They made them all at the same time so they had all the same people, and those people didn't get to go off and do other projects to break up the flow. Plus Peter Jackson exerted a huge amount of creative control over the whole process, so while there were lots of contributors it was his vision the whole way though.

Major Spoiler Warning...

I do have one real complaint with Return of the King though. I need to thank Mike and Stacey for helping me flush this one out. The ending of RotK is a bit ridiculous. I enjoyed it, but it was kind of like the gag where a guy is trying to get in a car and the car keeps lurching forward. This movie had, by our count, eight endings:

Ending 1: Frodo and Sam calapse on the rock. They have destroyed the ring, saved middle earth, believed that the quest would take their lives, accepted that, and now fondly remember home.

Ending 2: Frodo awakes in Rivendel and is reaquainted with the fellowship (as an aside, remember that Frodo has seen none of these people since he parted with the fellowship at the end of the first movie, as an audience it's easy to forget that.)

Ending 3: The crowning of the king on top of Minas Tirith.

Ending 4: The map overlay of how far they had traveled, which nicely sums up the whole adventure.

Ending 5: Sam's Wedding

Ending 6: Frodo finishing the book in Bag End.

Ending 7: Ship sailing into the sunset.

Ending 8: Sam back with his wife and kids.

(Note that for this analysis I'm going to try to do it from a movie watcher perspective instead of from the perspective of someone who has read the books.)

This is just stupid.

I understand why they can't end with Ending 1, and normally a false ending like that wouldn't be too bad, except for the huge number that follow. Ending 2 is important to reintroduce the characters, but doesn't really capture the power that that moment should have had. As proof of this I didn't remember that Frodo hadn't seen any of these people for a long time until I sat down and thought about it later.

I understand you want to see Aragorn crowned king, see him and Arwen reunited, and show the respect everyone has for the hobbits. So ending 3 is good, and I think it would have been fine to end it on the fade out from Minas Tirith. But then to taunt us even further they fade from Minas Tirith into a map and do a little voiceover showing the magnatude of the adventure, and solidifying it's importance. This would have been a great ending.

But people want to see the hobbits back in the shire showing that life is back to normal. And we want to see if Sam get's the girl. So Sam's wedding would have wrapped that up. Or even when Frodo finishes the book, that would have been fine as well.

But where I really get frustrated is when they go, have their big good bye, and a frickin' ship sails into the sunset! Seriously, if that's not an ending I don't know what is. But no, they come back to the Shire and show Sam moving on with his life.

All of these have music and acting cues that they are the ending. The also all have some sort of fade out or fade to black. They're fine and I like seeing them all (except the last one) but they really do jerk the audience around way too much. I'd like to think that the extended edition will fill in some of the rough spots like the other extended editions have, but deep down I'm afraid they'll add another 3-4 endings.

And as usual, Roger Ebert has a few good words to say about the subject:

You know those people who can't wait to stand up at the exact moment they sense a movie is over, and put on their coats and race out of the theater, blocking the end titles and credit cookies for the rest of us? This movie drove them nuts.

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