Brazil
Topic: Movies
I JUST finished watching this movie, the Criterion Version, the one that the director intended.

Here is what it's about, the cliff notes version:

1984 mixed with a little Noir-ish LA Confidential mixed with a little bit of office space mixed in with a little of a french movie called Delicatessen.

That's as close as I can get in a cliff notes version.

One thing though is that it's old, it's from 1985 and some of the stuff is kind of eerie to see and watch in a post-9/11 time.

For example:

"Doesn't it bother you, the things you do in Information Retrieval?

I suppose you would rather have terrorists?"

It's really creepy. It's also creepy how terrorist attacks are normal and most people just shrug them off and go on their way. What's even weirder is that this is a comedy.

I certainly felt the spirit of 1984 (more the book, the movie I thought was just OK) in this movie, right into the end and everything.

Very bizarre though, and I'm not quite sure I entirely "got it," though that may be part of the deal here.

Nonetheless, I'm glad Tollo recommended it. Very original.

Narnia in Guatemala?
Topic: Movies
Turns out that some of the special effects in the movie (350 scenes, which makes me wonder what the Guatemalan paper means exactly by "scenes") were shot/created in Guatemala by a company called Studio C.

For those that read Spanish:

http://www.elperiodico.com.gt/look/article.tpl?IdLanguage=13&IdPublication=1&NrIssue=537&NrSection=1&NrArticle=19065

They also did work for Ring 2 and Chronicles of Riddick. Check them out at http://www.studioc-online.com/

That's pretty cool.

Movies vs. Video Games
Topic: Movies
There is an interesting debate over on rogerebert.com about whether or not video games should be considered "art" in the same way movies and literature are.

In my view, it really doesn't matter what you want to "classify" video games as being. All I can say is that there are a few games out there that are capable of making you feel the same way you do after reading a great book or seeing a good film.

For me, I'll never forget the way I felt when I first turned on my brand-new N64 and powered up Super Mario 64. It was amazing. Then I remember playing Zelda:Ocarina of Time - and it was the same thing with that game. The story, the visuals, the characters and land you covered were so vast and epic, not unlike Lord of The Rings.

So if you want to call it art or not, I don't care, as long as it's acknowledged somewhere - perhaps at least here - that some video games are capable of doing to our spirit what the very best forms of "art" can do.

Paper Clips
Topic: Movies
It's a documentary I first saw on Blockbuster when I was doing their "Netflix" style promotion.

But I didn't get it.

This weekend I saw it. It's about a small town in TN that is trying to learn about tolerance and diversity by studying the Holocaust.

It's incerdibly powerful, some parts are just so strong you have to accept that you're going to cry.

Roger Ebert
Topic: Movies
Here is a tiny blurb of a review Roger Ebert wrote on his website about the movie "Zathura":

The opening credits of "Zathura" are closeups of an old science-fiction board game, a game that should have existed in real life and specifically in my childhood, but which was created for this movie. In these days of high-tech video games, it's remarkable that kids once got incredibly thrilled while pushing little metal racing cars around a cardboard track: The toy car was yours, and you invested it with importance and enhanced it with fantasy and pitied it because it was small, like you were.

That last line hit me pretty hard, that's some good shit right there!

Devils Don't Dream
Topic: Movies
Virginia told me about this documentary in Paris and I finally got my hands on it. It's about Arbenz and the CIA getting him out of power.

I watched it with Mindy, eager to show her some of the country's history.
Unfortunately, this film is pretty bad at storytelling. Even someone who knows what happened, me, had trouble knowing what the hell he was talking about. Mindy was dumbfounded and I didn't blame her.

Bad bad bad.

Capote
Topic: Movies
I'm looking forward to this movie. The trailer didn't jazz me up all that much, mostly because I really never knew how Capote talked or was "mannered," so I wasn't blown away. But it seems that whatshisface from the Dirk Digler movie did an amazing job. Plus, I just read the book about a month or so ago.

Don't you love it when you just happen to read an old classic like that, totally unaware that a major movie is underway and then bam! here's the movie.

I like that.

Whereas for LOTR I read the books before the movie came out so I could go in the appropriate order.