| | You'd Be A Lot Sexier If You Weren't Covered In Scar Tissue
E and I went to see The Aviator yesterday, and I was mildly surprised to find that I liked it. My boss had previously given me a capsule review which implied it wasn't all that much to speak about, despite its length, and aside from the fact that Leo is nude (which he pronounced with three syllables: "noooood") repeatedly in it. What he failed to mention is that said nudity occurs after a rather horrific plane crash-up, so Leo's only got like one-and-a-half nipples, bears a passing resemblance to Freddy Krueger, and has dirty fingernails the length of a grocery-store cashier (i.e., long ones). Uck. Not my kind of nudity - my kind would be frontal, in case you're wondering.
There's also something fishy going on with the color in the movie, something that fellow Xanga-er Ed Shepp had pointed out in his capsule review of the movie. The strangely cyan colors reach their peak in a scene where the future obsessive compulsive agoraphobe orders a steak and 12 peas at a pre-inferno Coconut Grove, and is served a lovely steak and 12 bright blue pea-sized objects. I'd like to assume there is some artistic reason why only half of the scenes were allowed to have yellow in them, but I can't figure what it might be.
On the plus side, Cate Blanchett is perfectly adorable as Katherine Hepburn, and she's in about an hour of the movie so it's pretty exciting during those parts. She manages to do a very nice and not-caricatured Kate, with all the vocal tics and twitches and none of the bladder-on-a-stick head flopping that plagued good ole Kate in her latter years, so that was nice to see.
It really made me wish that I had grown up in Kate Hepburn's day, more specifically in her house, and quite specifically as her. I mean, have you ever seen Desk Set? I don't know what it is about a smart witty strong pretty woman wearing pants that I'm so attracted to...oh, right, I'm gay, and she's practically a man. I guess that's it. Anyway, she's a shoe-in for Best Supporting, and Leo will get Best Actor if I have anything to say about it - and I don't.
On Saturday, I went with the Stump to see White Noise, which is a horror picture with Michael Keaton in it. For the first ten minutes I couldn't stop thinking, "I need to wear sunscreen more often!" as I looked at Michael Keaton, who is, I'm sure, a nice man, but who has managed to get wrinkles on his earlobes, of all places. Please remind me to become an agoraphobe later- they may let their fingernails grow long and save their pee in mason jars, but at least they don't get severe sun damage.
White Noise is about a man whose ridiculously-younger wife dies and starts sending messages to him through the static on his computer, a fact which is brought to his attention by a man so obese that his neck is actually larger than his head. There are various plot points which, in retrospect, made no sense, but as the movie was happening were very exciting and spooky, and I found myself hiding behind my coat in the theater in case something scary popped up and caused me to let out a high-pitched girlish scream. Scary things did pop up, but luckily my coat protected me. It wasn't a super-amazing horror movie - I'm personally partial to an M. Night Shyamalan-style summing-up where the plot makes even more sense in retrospect - but White Noise had its moments, and we had a good time watching it and hiding behind our coats.
The strangest thing was that at the very, very end of the movie, [don't worry, this doesn't give anything away] after the last scene, it fades to black and the following words appear on the screen:
Out of the thousands of documented EVP [Electronic Voice Phenomenon] messages, 1 in 12 is threatening.
Uh, what? You want me to leave the theater with a chilling statistic?!?! Personally, I would find it spooky that the dead are speaking to me on my computer. They could be giving recipes for chicken and dumplings and it would be spooky, but 1 in 12 is really not any more spooky than 1 in 8 or two-in-the-bush or whatever. If you really wanted to scare me, it should have said:
Of the 600,000 cases of skin cancer reported each year, approximately 9 in 10 are sun-related.
That is all. |
