A weekend of watching

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - I'm sure that critics worldwide were tempted to quote Macbeth's Act 5, Scene 5 this weekend by this adaptation of Alan Moore's splendid comic, but as I didn't actually read the words "fury" or "signifying" anywhere, I'll have to say that I admire the restraint of my fellow journalists. Rather than ramble on about what a boring piece of crap this movie was, I'd rather point you to Matthew Baldwin's thoughtful article on Hollywood's "have your cake and eat it" attitude regarding copyright protections, which has resulted in legislation extending American copyrights for decades. As someone with copyrights of my own I can understand the desire to hold on to one's intellectual property forever, but I have to wonder if Walt Disney knew that his company would become synonymous with corporate greed.

Ironically, Disney was responsible for the better of this weekend's two adventure movies. Pirates of the Carribean was everything an adventure film should be, including a good bit of comic relief that, by all rights, should have been odious, but miraculously was not.

Punch Drunk Love - by golly, Adam Sandler can act!

Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which played yesterday to a nearly full house at the Tampa Theatre, was exactly the sort of break from modern Hollywood I needed. Their Summer Classics film series is always a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but it was especially gratifying to see a theater full of Pokemon-generation kids enjoying a thirty year-old film with slower pacing. Unfortunately this was the original, shorter version of the film with nearly twenty minutes cut out, including two musical numbers. Now I need to pick up a copy of the 30th Anniversary DVD, which apparently has all of the restored footage.

Why exactly MTV felt the need to create their own version of the Friar Club's roasting tradition, I'm not sure; it's indicative of MTV's target audience that their first candidate for a roast is a mere 30 years old. Hey, that's a lifetime in MTV-land; after that point you might as well be dead. The Carson Daly Bash was as puerile as you'd expect; with the exception of a couple of older ringers who were genuinely funny (Jon Stewart, Adam Carolla, and the inimitable Jimmy Kimmel, whose "best man" toast was both original and hilarious), the presenters were all too young/stupid to provide the needed yuks. How many times can you reiterate the fact that Carson Daly had a lot of girlfriends, some of whom are famous? Unless you have Tivo and can zip through the parts that don't feature the people I mentioned above, I suggest you skip it.

Terminator 3

Terminator 3: There sure has been a whole lotta bitching about this movie. Guys, what did you expect? No James Cameron, no Eddie Furlong, and no Linda Hamilton! My expectations were dragged way low for this one, and in that context I was pleasantly surprised. The story was fairly well thought-out, if you can ignore some of the goofier plot elements, like the new Terminatrix's ability to control other machines remotely. (Nanobots might have been a better explanation than computer virii.) I didn't mind so much the idea that a war between artificial intelligence and humankind was inevitable, but extending that idea of fate to the particulars of who marries whom was a bit silly.

Scott complained bitterly about the humor in T3, and I'll admit some of it was over the top. But trying to out-do T2 would have been a mistake, and I'm glad the creators of this film chose a different path. A little self-referential humor can be a good thing, so long as you don't overstep your bounds to make it an out-and-out parody. Leave that to the makers of Scary Movie, who can suck in isolation.

Finally, the complaints that the Terminatrix was a step down from the T1000, technologically speaking -- remember the bit about the T1000's inability to create mechanical weapons from its liquid metal body? The T-X had built-in mechanical weapons and the ability to mimic people. Even without the computer virus thing, it seems like the next logical (if somewhat unimaginative) step to take.

Anybody remember the Terminator comics, in which Terminators were disguised as children and dogs? Now that was scary.