This looks like a charming fairy tale about a cute mouse, and you may enjoy it more if you just approach it that way. You may be tempted to ask yourself various troubling questions, such as: Why are the bloodthirsty and uncivilized rats portrayed with somewhat Middle-Eastern-sounding accents and background music? What on earth is the convoluted moral the writers are trying to illustrate—on top of the simple platitudes about the virtues of honesty, honor, and bravery—about the nature of pain and forgiveness? What is the deal with the genie made of vegetables with the vaguely Italian accent? Allow yourself to ignore these questions, however, and instead you should have a good time watching cute animals and picking out which celebrities did the voices.

It was okay. Good, non-intrusive special effects, generally decent casting, though more goofy humor than necessary. I was never a fan of original Trek, so I didn’t feel invested in how this was made, but still, I feel like the best Star Trek stuff has always been about something—ethical questions and social commentary on the Cold War, colonialism, race relations, genocide, whatever. This new movie is a relatively generic Hollywood action flick about saving everyone from the bad guys (with enough time travel wankery to give them carte blanche as they reinvent the franchise). In short, sufficiently fun to warrant few complaints, but I hope they go for something more interesting in the inevitable sequel.

I don’t think Watchmen is impossible to adapt to film: The last couple decades of blockbuster superhero movies—and, arguably, the concurrent, increasing irrelevance of “mainstream” comics in the development of the “graphic novel”—might suggest to us that the superhero’s new natural home is on the big screen. It should have been possible to make the movie version of Watchmen a commentary on superhero movies in the same spirit as how the original was a commentary on comics.

That’s not the movie the director set out to make. Zack Snyder clearly has respect for the source material; in some ways, it’s a little too faithful an adaptation, with not enough changed or omitted to play to this different medium’s different strengths and weaknesses. You can’t just take a serialized story with a natural rhythm, provided by page and chapter breaks, and condense it into a 2.5-hour movie. Watching each character go through flashbacks during the Comedian’s funeral reminded me of how that technique has been used to good effect on Lost, leaving me to feel like this could have been done better as television. Of the changes and additions that were made, some made great sense to me (e.g., replacing the “squid” with something else quite logical), while others felt like they ironically undercut the intentions of the original work (e.g., excessive use of music in dramatic scenes, slow-motion in moments better presented at an even rhythm, and a sex scene so drawn out and reminiscent of softcore porn that I’m almost willing to give credit for being intentionally awkward). In short, this was an ambitious, well-intentioned failure, but at least it was no LXG.

The third and final installment in Leone’s Dollars trilogy is the lengthiest and the most iconic, if for nothing other than its trademark theme. Eastwood’s Man with No Name (here called “Blondie”) is the good, taking on the bad, in the form of the amoral contract killer Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef, who played the sympathetic Colonel Mortimer in For a Few Dollars More). Then there’s the ugly, Mexican bandit Tuco, played by a show-stealing Eli Wallach, who can’t quite escape his Brooklyn accent and occasionally looks eerily like a pudgy Dustin Hoffman. All three are looking for a box of Union coins, but the convoluted plot features more twists and alliances than your average game of Risk. The version I saw was the extended 2002 version, with an almost twenty additional minutes of footage that had never before made it into the English cut and required Eastwood and Wallach to return to dub more lines 35 years after the original film (van Cleef had died in the meantime, with another actor filling his role—and I also swear I caught The Middleman‘s Matt Keeslar in the credits, though I haven’t been able to confirm). Frankly, several of the cut scenes probably could have been left on the floor, since they stretch the movie out almost 3 hours, and make it lag in parts, but whole film—including the 5-minute Mexican standoff at the end—is still a work of beauty.

Based on the novel by acclaimed author Neil Gaiman and brought to life on the screen by Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach), Coraline is the tale of Coraline Jones, who discovers another world behind the tiny door in her new house’s living room. The movie, filmed as stop-motion, is absolutely gorgeous and exquisitely crafted, with the kind of attention to detail you’d expect from such a production. Of particular note to me was the recurring theme of reflections—for instance, a scene in which Coraline and her mother are driving in the car, and out the window you can see the side mirror, in which you can watch the road disappearing behind them. They could just have not bothered—but the fact that they didn’t tells you something about the immersion of the world they were trying to create. The 3-D effects were used to good effect as well—too often it’s a technique used mainly for cheesy gags, but here it added depth and texture to the experience (in particular, I loved the shots of the corridor that connected Coraline’s house with the other world—it was like you could actually feel it). Oh, and they snuck in a They Might Be Giants song, which was pretty cool, too. On the whole, the movie is a little bit creepy (probably too much so for the younger set), but does a fantastic job of creating a living, breathing world.

As I haven’t been posting a lot, I’m sure what you’re all (okay—what some of you) wondering is: what am I up to when I’m not helping unstick widgets.

Well, boy am I glad that you let me appropriate your voice and ask. I recently spent some time working on a little film project, featuring my friends Merlin, Scott, Adam, John, and, most especially, John. Delightful folks, all. I hope they don’t sue me.

Anyway, you might enjoy watching the trailer below. Or you might not. Admittedly, it’s got a pretty limited audience.

Fireball – The John Gruber Story Trailer from Dan Moren on Vimeo.

Seriously? I can’t help but compare this to The Spirit: over the top hero speeches, rain drenched alleys, color palette zaniness, and of course ultra-violence. The difference is that as stupid as The Spirit was, at least it was ridiculous and occasionally amusing, Max Payne is just an awful, awful move… and this is coming from someone who enjoyed Death Race… 

P.S. If you are an evil corporation secretly controlling the city through hot new designer drugs, don’t have all your thugs and drug dealers tattooed with the corporate branding. (Though it took Max Payne about 30 minutes to notice it after I did.)

Most people will not like this movie.

I haven’t read much of Vertigo’s Hellblazer series, and that’s probably a good thing going into watching Constantine the movie, which bears only a superficial resemblance to the comic books on which it was based. It’s not a bad movie, though: it’s well-plotted, with clever twists and turns, and great production design and special effects. There’s also a pretty good cast, with the likes of Tilda Swinton, Gavin Rossdale, Djimon Hounsou, and yes, even Shia LaBeouf—which made it that much more frustrating to me to have to spend most of the movie watching Keanu Reeves plod woodenly through the title role. Jason and I differed on the quality of his performance, but I just wonder how the movie would have turned out with someone a little more charismatic playing John Constantine (I’m not suggesting you make some sort of David Bowie-Sting lovechild, but…okay, maybe I am suggesting that). Hounsou’s one of my favorite actors and even though his role as Papa Midnite is somewhat limited he makes the most of it; likewise, Peter Stormare as Satan and Max Baker as Beeman do nice work. And there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance by future leading lady Michelle Monaghan (opposite Shia LaBeouf, no less!) as a demon. Make sure you watch all the way to the end of the credits, too.

I guess I enjoyed it well enough while watching it, but only because I was trying real hard. The plot was dull and predictable, and Tom Hanks plays a very boring person perhaps a little too well. Ian McKellen was pretty good, though. At least it was free via On Demand, thanks to the exact same three ads cycling every five minutes or so. And, to its credit, the film version doesn’t make you read the worst sentence ever or attempt to pretend that there’s bar soap in the Louvre washrooms. That’s something, I guess. Oh, and it also put me in the mood to watch National Treasure. Not sure if that’s to this movie’s credit or not yet.