The Mist Trailer
Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Mist is finally a reality. Word is that Darabont’s been trying to make this movie for years (he had planned on making this his directorial debut, even before The Shawshank Redemption). I’m glad to see it’s actually happening, because the movie looks awesome, if something of a departure from his usual style. Shawshank, The Majestic, and The Green Mile (two of which were also King stories) all had strong similarities. They shared some spiritual qualities and sort of coming-of-age, philosophy-changing moments in the lives of the characters. The Mist looks much more gritty and in your face in the style of 24 or Battlestar Galactica.
The Mist tells a story of a fictional town in Maine which, after a storm, is overtaken by a mysterious “mist.” Concealed within the cloud of mist are strange and terrifying monsters that begin attacking the citizens of the town. The plot centers around a group of people trapped by the mist inside a supermarket, and the psychological breakdown of the survivors as they end up destroying one another in their attempts to stay alive.
Netflix, you sucked me in
I know I’m a latecomer to the party, but I just subscribed to Netflix. yesterday. I’ve been debating subscribing for a while now and I couldn’t resist trying it out anymore. It seems like I’ve constantly got this long list of movies I want to see, and it always gets longer, never shorter. I wouldn’t call myself a “film buff” exactly, but I do like seeing movies. My laptop even has a running text file I use called “movies to see.txt” that grows ever longer by the day.
Anyways, I signed up for the lowest possible plan they’ve got, which is $5 per month: 1 DVD at a time, 2 per month. Seems like a good enough starting point for me. Lately we’ve probably been watching 1 per month, maybe less. I see more movies in the theater than at home. But ever since we got the 47″ HDTV, it’s been pretty underutilized. I play a fair number of games on it in HD, and watch the paltry few HD channels we get, but we never watch movies on it. I think we downloaded one HD flick off of Xbox Live Marketplace (BEERFEST!) since we’ve had the TV. I’m sure there are some jealous damn people out there right now.
For Colette and I, watching movies at home has always been something of a chore. You have to think of what you want to see, remember to get it somehow, then actually have it laying around somewhere accessible when you want to sit down and watch it while eating dinner. The TV is usually on the History Channel, or Discovery or something like that because we just never have the stuff we want in an easy-to-reach place. The whole business model of Netflix is as if it was created for people like me. Remove all roadblocks to getting movies onto my TV. For my $5 per month, all I’ve got to do is check the mail. Done.
Their rating and queueing systems are amazing, too. I ran through the whole rating game and rated about 30 movies initially, and the first 8 suggestions I got were all 5 star comedies in my book (even though I’d already seen them all). Without the rating system, finding something to watch is as bad as wandering around Blockbuster at 11pm with no idea what to grab. I think the effectiveness of the queueing system is evidenced by my queue length in about half an hour: 35 DVDs.
So yeah, now I’ve got like a year-long queue already on my account. I can’t wait to actually watch some stuff, instead of simply wanting to watch stuff.
The Order of the Phoenix: don’t mess with wizards
Harry Potter 5 is now officially my favorite (both the book and the movie). I just saw the film on Sunday and it has proven that wizards don’t always have to look fruity when pointing wands at each other. On the contrary, this movie shows us some bad ass wizard skills. The third installment, the Prisoner of Azkaban is still a close second in both the book and movie categories, but it just doesn’t have the magical ass-whoopings that Order of the Phoenix has. The massive wizard battle in the Ministry of Magic alone edges this movie over all the others, in my opinion. Watching Dumbledore and Voldemort go head to head is, I think, what we’ve all been waiting to see throughout the whole series. I only wish Richard Harris hadn’t died after the second film… he was a much more authentic Dumbledore. He made Dumbledore feel older, wiser, and more respectable, sort of like the Yoda of the wizarding world. Imagine the shock and awe had it been Harris dominating Voldemort instead of Michael Gambon. It really would’ve been like finally seeing Yoda bust out his true Jedi skills in Attack of the Clones.
Though I loved Phoenix, I still think that all of the Potter movies suffer slightly from “bookish-ness” (sometimes you gotta make up words, right?), which is to say that it’s trying to be a little too true to the continuity, pacing, and storyline from the books, so the movie feels more like watching a book than watching a movie. In some ways this is a good thing, especially having read each book before seeing the movies. You get more of that fulfilling of expectations when you already know the story and events. But when it comes to watching a blockbuster movie, the bookish traits wear on me a little. It’s not that staying true to the novels’ events ruins the movies, it’s just something that I’m constantly aware of while watching them. I think given a slightly tweaked screenplay and a little different pacing/directing, you could achieve the same goal without making it so obvious that Harry Potter is a book first, and a film second.
I hope they can keep this stellar cast around for all seven films, even though Dan Radcliffe’s gonna be 35 by the end of this saga.