Howard Who?

I’m back!

The blog vacation was quite nice thank you very much. But it’s even nicer to be back and sharing my thoughts with you all.

So what did I do with all of my non-blogging time, well….I saw three movies, which is more of a chore to do than it sounds. I think I’m pretty movied out if there is such a thing.

Casino Royale was not so much a return to form as a fresh and different take on the genre and our hero. Daniel Craig is terrific as a more thuggish and impulsive Bond. While all of our previous ones have been campy dandish pretty boys (in the best ways possible of course), Craig looks hardened…which was originally how our hero was suppposed to be coming out of World War II. The action was inventive, and the humor just right.

Borat was offensive comedy at its best, which is to say its worst. I laughed at the show, I laughed at all the public appearances, but somehow this movie didn’t quite move my funny bone quite as much. Maybe it was because I had seen the same 5 or 6 jokes done already with variations. But the ways in which they pushed things even further, things that were not safe for TV, were not really funny, but just offensive. Even the much vaunted commentary on bigotry in America was not really insightful because it was constantly upstaged by Borat’s antics. For my money, I’ll take Borat’s “Throw the Jew Down the Well” or his trip to a hunting ranch over the movie.

(edit) I did however find Sasha Baron Cohen’s portrayal of Borat to be unexpectedly solid. It was definitely a performance that had more meat than I imagined it would.

Happy Feet was actually quite an amazing movie, especially when compared to its counterparts during the year. It had a really interesting way of using pop music as the penguins had to sing to find mates and thus engage in musical mashups. It had some really fine tap dancing courtesy of Savion Glover and company. It featured some very funny comic relief featuring a Latino cast and …Robin Williams. And it had a very strong ecological message. Coming from the Australian director George Miller that is quite significant…the culture in Australia seems drawn to a connection to nature (with the Aborigines and the Outback and Paul Hogan and all). Antarctica, home of the penguins, actually is geographically a neighbor. To further push the poignancy of this, Steve Irwin’s final screen performance was in this film, voicing a vegetarian seal. Of course, my pleasure comes with lowered expectations, but this is definitely something aiming higher than just fart and crotch-kicking jokes.

In closing, I will be attempting to kill my remaining mp3s so please download them now if you would like to keep them for posterity. The execution will probably occur soon and soonest to the tracks that I deem easy to find elsewhere. I’ve got to protect the bandwidth.

L’execution (mp3) - Angelo Badalamenti Buy

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 7:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Movies, Film Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.