If anyone had told me a few years ago that I become an avid reader of film reviews by a man who holds Bruce Willis's Die Hard trilogy up as the pinnacle of film-making, I would have laughed in that person's face. But that was before I ran across Outlaw Vern, "a Writer who is trying to go clean after a life of crime, alcohol, etc." Sometimes I wonder whether Everyman, ex-con, action flick-loving Vern is real or just a persona created by Roger Ebert so he could use the word 'fuck' a lot, but his film reviews (as well as his occasional longer rants) make me laugh out loud. Anyway, I don't think Vern can be done justice by my descriptions, so I'll just let him speak for himself....

I've been waiting for Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story to come out on video—I knew it would never come to our local theater—ever since I heard an NPR story about it months ago. Well it finally did, and we finally rented it last weekend. Very pleasing. I can imagine some being put off by its indulgence in self-referentiality and metafictional bullshit (I'm pretty much a sucker for that sort of thing, but I understand that it annoys people), but given that the source material is one of the most indulgently self-referential pieces of metafictional bullshit in the English language (and I say that in the most laudatory way), I can't imagine the film being any other way. If anything, the film deserves credit for bravely staying the course down to the very end (where the fictional film producers are complaining to the fictional film-makers about the omission of scenes the filming of which occupied a significant portion of the film we just saw). Sometimes the key to comedy is pushing a joke so far past the point where it stops being funny that it starts being funny again.

An ...

I borrowed a (deluxe 2-disk) DVD of The Incredibles from friends a little while ago, and I proceeded to watch the whole thing three times in a week (including once listening to the director's commentary track). It's really delightful, though I find it hard to say exactly why. As one would expect from a Pixar production, the 3D animation is pretty impressive — especially when compared to the conventional flat animation of, say, Madagascar — but it does have limits: I found the characters' unappealingly rubbery complexions an occasional distraction, for example. This has really been true of all the computer-animated films to date (at least from what I've seen.). Even Finding Nemo had similar issues, but they were only really noticeable when during the occasional intervals when humans were on screen.

(On...

This weekend, we formally marked the beginning of summer by making our first trip of the season to the Judy Drive-in (in nearby Judy, KY). The Judy is one of the hidden treasures of this area, an authentic drive-in experience (it's been in continuous operation since 1952) plunked down pretty much in the middle of nothing. Making your first visit — becoming "Judified" — is something of a rite of initiation within our circle. We like to arrive early with a couple other families and establish a kind of campsite in the front row (lawn chairs, sleeping bags, coolers, the whole bit). The supplies are kind of a necessity, since making a visit is a significant commitment: the movies don't start until dark, so staying for both features means being out well past midnight during high summer. There's enough room to set up a portacrib, though, so our daughter made her first trip when she was under a month old. This weekend was our son's Judification.

The...

In another act of slavery to my early adolescence, I defied every better instinct I had and went to see Revenge of the Sith last weekend. I knew it was going to be bad. You knew it was going to be bad. We all knew it was going to be bad. Why the fuck do we keep giving George Lucas our money for these ham-fisted space operas? ...

Out of loyalty to my adolescence, I went to see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Sunday night. Reading the Hitchhiker's "trilogy" was one of the tests for entry into the inner circle of suburban American teenage geeks in the early 80s. Other tests included: reciting π to an arbitrary number of significant digits (I never got beyond 8), reading Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach (poked around in it in highschool and finally read it through in grad school), intimate knowledge of Monty Python's Flying Circus and/or Doctor Who (I reached moderate proficiency with the former but never did become a Whovian), creating recursive acronyms (OK, this one may be a little obscure, but I remember being both impressed by and jealous of "Bram, the Recursive Acronym Man," whom I met at geek summer camp), and playing Dungeons & Dragons (yup, and the less said about this the better).

I...

I've been through a long dry stretch when it comes to movies. I've seen damn few (nothing has come to town and we've bled the video store almost dry) and liked virtually none in the past several months. I (Heart) Huckabees was inoffensive fluff; Sideways (despite the presence of fellow Yalie Paul Giamatti [PC '89]) grows more disappointing each time I think about it; Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Elektra were simply acts of desperation. ...

Currently showing at our one local moviehouse: Meet the Fockers and Ocean's 12. Coming attractions include Bewitched and Son of the Mask. Oh joy. Three pointless sequels (one to a remake of a mediocre 60s film), and a film adaptation of a lame 60s television series. Is anyone in Hollywood capable of having an original thought?

I didn't get around to writing about it when I saw it (back around Christmas), but the stunning Oscar sweep by The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is as good an excuse for reviewing the film as any. By simply not sucking, ROTK is easily the best end-of-a-trilogy I have ever seen, and I dare say it's a good bit better. The loving care with which Peter Jackson and Co. recreated the world of Middle Earth separates it from the usual fantasy dreck that gets made, as does the non-absurd plot. In short, I liked it. But given my screed a while back about the glorification of war, I've been wondering why I don't find ROTK offensive on the same grounds. I'm not sure if I have a sufficient answer, but the answer I do have has to do with evil....

With only 36 minutes left in my favorite holiday, I must note that Punxsutawney Phil (the groundhog, as far as I'm concerned. Don't even talk to me about General Beauregard Lee or any other pretender to the throne) is predicting six more weeks of winter....

I saw The Hours a while ago, but Tom Negroni's review at BackupBrain reminded me of my disappointment with that movie. While I don't really understand his claim that the movie suggests that "to be heterosexual is to doom yourself to an empty life of misery" (it seems that everyone, gay and straight, in the movie is miserable), Negroni's main complaint that "all of the main characters are selfish, tortured, and not at all sympathetic" is spot-on. I feel like there's a whole class of "artsy" movies that take the same approach (though examples aren't springing to mind at the moment), where selfishness and self-indulgence masquerade as integrity or idealism. One other thought, alluded to by Negroni, this is a thoroughly bourgeois movie: all three central characters are comfortably middle class or above, and although the bourgeoisie is as entitled to emotional crises as anyone else, the characters come off as spoiled whiners more than people experiencing real pain.

Uggh. That's my reaction to The Matrix Revolutions, which, regrettably, I went to see last night. Let it be known that I was not overly impressed by the original, and I was disappointed by the muddled melange of poststructuralist theory and quasi-Christian imagery that was Matrix Reloaded. But those movies were at least entertaining as long as you didn't try to make too much sense out of them. Revolutions falls well short of even that low standard. ...

Last weekend, I went to see Kill Bill, vol. 1, and I'm still trying to figure out what to think about it. I think, in the end, I liked it, but certainly not unreservedly. As one might expect from a Tarantino effort, it has remarkable visual style, a quirky but interesting soundtrack, and a dark strain of humor that caused me to spontaneously smile more than once. It also has a lot of violence. No, more than that. It has a whole fucking lot of violence. ...