fine whine

So an idea struck me for an interesting programming project and a fun diversion: a single-elimination bracket for ranking the movies I've watched, 64 random ones at a time.

You see, it's March, and with that month comes the annual basketball tournament, and while I enjoy making the brackets I don't know about or care about the teams involved. So movies it is.

The logistics of entering and displaying the data made for an interesting challenge, and it's taken me a week to clean up my code. It worked fine for me the second day, but the code was horrible and disorganized and very, very bad.

I've rewritten it twice already, and with the magic of regular expressions* I've condensed some eighty or ninety cut-and-pasted lines down to around ten, and now I can make brackets of more arbitrary sizes (well, powers of two, unless I introduce some sort of 'bye' functionality) filled with whatever I want to tourney-ize.

So enough talk. Take a look at this example of the final output.

Yes, it's huge. Yes, it's difficult to read. I'm still working on making it legible at smaller sizes, but that's another project for another day.

Let me walk you trhough some of the more interesting match ups of that particular bracket. You may notice that The Shawshank redemption beat The Godfather, and here you can see my opinions in action. I know Godfather is probably the better movie, but I also know that any time I'd see any bit of Shawshank, from any point in the movie, on TV I'd watch the rest of it all the way through. I've ranked the winners by how much I enjoyed watching them, not necessarily how good they really are.

Moving back to round 1 (the one with 64 titles), we have some interesting bouts:

• Local hero vs. Terminator 2: This isn't the first choice that would probably get me drummed out of the armchair film school. While the former is a fantastic movie, T2 is even more fun to watch, if not one-tenth as intelligent.
• The living daylights vs. Mr. Deeds: This was not a choice to be made lightly: I didn't really enjoy either film all that much, and neither will be held up on a pedestal anytime soon. In the end Deeds got the nod because the copy I watched had Malaysian subtitles that were as informative as they were entertaining.
• The conversation vs. The last action hero: Actually this isn't that interesting. It's a blowout.
• Soylent green vs. Cube: I thought about this one longer than many others. I enjoyed both films, but in the end I liked Cube that little bit more. It's not nearly as dated as Soylent green, and nowhere near as parodied.

Later notable matchups include these:

• The Blues brothers vs. The conversation: Both of these films are the sort that should appear in the final four; I was sad to eliminate either of them so early on. Other times I've run brackets each one has 'won' at least once, but the advantage goes to the SNL movie since it's so much fun in every way that Coppola's film is serious. They both so darn great, though.
• M*A*S*H vs. The tall blonde man with one red shoe: I doubt these shared any marquees in 1972, unless Altman's film got stuck in the art houses. The latter is a small French picture made into a rollicking remake with pre-Forrest Tom Hanks, and it's a good movie too, but like most foreign movies remade here, it loses just a little in the translation. M*A*S*H, on the other hand, is too loose, too unstructured, too disorganized to grab onto without watching it five or fifteen times. I may like it more someday, but I've only watched it once so far and I'm in no hurry to see it again.

I've found this method for picking the movies I liked far better than picking favorites. I could never pick the one (or five, even) movie I enjoyed the most to yoke myself to it as a favorite. Grabbing sixty-four at once means I can subjectively pick the ones I liked most, on something of an equal playing field.

Of course, something like pitting Scary movie 3 against The Empire strikes back isn't exactly a meeting of equals, but I'm pretty sure that's how these things work out with the athletes, too.

* Regular expressions are cryptic strings of letters, numbers and other characters that make matching patterns inside text much, much easier. I wish I'd learned them in grade school, or at least high school. Read more about them here; at least, that's what I do every time I need to use them.

The Wedding Crashers (2005)

It doesn't live up
to the frenetic montage
in the first one-third*.

Christoper Walken
plays himself; it's not enough
to carry the film.

The Longest Yard (2005)

Copied from the old
its basic plot and editing**,
but not all the fun.

Rob Schneider stands out
near the end of the film, bringing
it to a halt--twice.

How to murder your wife (1965)

Backward, out of date,
it's even embarrassing
how wrong it all is***.

The Punisher (2004)

Travolta's a ham;
too bad there are no sequels,
he'd not be in them****

Who played the main guy?
I've already forgotten-
left no impression.

Family Guy presents Stewie Griffin - The Untold Story (2005)

The show is funny.
This movie isn't*****. In fact,
it's painful to watch.

There's a case to be made that these aren't haiku, but closer perhaps to senryū in that they don't mention the seasons. I'd heard such talk before, but ontly now looked it up. Maybe I'll rename my haiku tag to senryu, or maybe just 5-7-5. Then again, until I learn Kanji and the rest of written Japanese, it won't really be either in its completely traditional form anyway.

* This is a fairly common thing in blockbuster films. Characters are introduced, they do the wacky hijinks they do, until something happens about one third of the way through (Act 2 starts, that's what happens) and then it's a whole new ballgame. Would a movie only about their exploits be better? Maybe. Maybe I just felt like complaining. Chasers is ripe for complaints. Take Chris Walken, for example. Just having him playing the oddly menacing fellow he always plays isn't enough. He needs to be given with which to work. By now, I wouldn't be surprised if his character is described to him simply as, "You, you know, you. Be yourself" and it just doesn't work this time. Any other actor in the part (except perhaps John Travolta) would show the part to be so poorly-written. His motivations are unclear, his rages almost random. He's not the only one-dimensional character in the film, just the oddest one.

** The original Yard wasn't just about bucking authority in society (well, prison) but also conventions in film, with some rather innovative editing and framing done in the last football game. The new version apes that style well, and even extends it to a game of 1-on-1 basketball quite faithfully. Little touches like that were nice, but too many big problems overshadow them, like broad character generalizations (stupid big football player can't even speak something sounding like correct grammar), easy jokes taken to stupid extremes (big dumb guy takes estrogen, becomes big dumb effeminate guy overnight), and the few, but still sore-thumb-esque, Sandlerisms, most notably Rob Schneider's appearance in the bleachers. We know he's your pal, Adam, give him a break (and us too) next time.

*** Murder flops on so many levels. Jack Lemmon's not convincing as a cartoonist (though his swinging bachelor bit is believable enough), but that's just the smallest of the faults found here. Every mean stereotype, every broad generalization ever used in the so-called battle of the sexes rears its ugly head, even the annoyingly yappy dog. It's embarrassing, even, to think that anybody could've taken any of this seriously to even want to write it. If this is what Hollywood thought normal people were like (well, the richer portion of them) back then, then the disconnect was as big then as it is now. Only the budgets have changed. This movie belongs with Houseboat in a genre all their own: poorly made artifacts of a past that never happened, resplendent with annoying foreign actresses and otherwise bankable leading men. Crap, utter crap.

**** I hope I didn't spoil the surprise for anybody. To elaborate: our eponymous protagonist (played by some unknown forgettable guy) hunts down John Travolta, and in the end, probably kills him. I say probably because he makes the commonest of mistakes: not watching his victim die. Admittedly this is the same lazy loophole that propels the movie, in that at the beginning Travolta's thugs set him up in a certain death situation and leave him to die. Don't these people know that only people you watch die are dead, and even then, only most of the time? I realize the makers wanted to leave room for Travolta's surprise return in a sequel, deep into the franchise, but everything about this movie is like that: overdone. For once I'd like to watch a superhero movie that didn't waste time with the setup and origin story, and end with the defiant declaration on a bridge or near a cityscape. Just drop us into the middle of the action and let us figure out where the superhero came from, if we even care. Punisher strikes me as somebody whose actions I'd want to watch, not his motivations. Oh well.

***** It's annoying how far removed this Family Guy movie is from the show. The first ten or so minutes of the DVD are painful; somebody's idea of a great intro by way of a self-referential newscast and red carpet scene with the cartoon 'actors' acting out of character (or rather, even more in) and the wacky hijinks that ensue. The 'uncensored' aspect of the film is almost nonexistent, or a stunt at best, as the profanity will be easily bleepable for broadcast, and things such as the giant walking, talking scrotum (don't ask) will probably show up on TV eventually anyway. Did I mention there's a gag about a walking, talking scrotum? That's actually not the low point of the movie (though it may be for Michael Chiklis, again, don't ask). Don't watch this expecting it to be as funny as the show. Watch the show instead, at least until the three 'acts' are reconstituted into ordinary episodes, and sub-ordinary ones at that.

Or, rather, the best Ryan O'Neal and/or Barbra Streisand movie I've watched all year

What's up, doc? is delightful. It's the funniest movie I've watched all year, and I'm not being flippant in saying so.

Well, not too much.

It had me rolling on the floor*, laughing out loud.

It's certainly the best Ryan O'Neal picture I've seen so far this year, with Barry Lyndon being its only competition.

And it's the only Babs movie I've ever seen, since I wouldn't admit to watching the dreadful Meet the Fockers nor would I want to remember doing so. For some reason I'd avoided this and her other films based on some odd bias I've never quite determined that I have. I don't know her songs, know very little about why else she is famous, and don't really know anybody who either loves or hates her movies. Even then, every time I saw this on the shelf I'd leave it sitting there, even if I had nothing better to choose in its place. All because I thought I didn't want to watch a Streisand picture.

But I digress.

I've wanted to see this since when I enjoyed watching Paper moon so very much. With that film I was impressed both by the writing and the perfomances, and to have watched a number of Ryan O'Neal's films in the interim shows me just how much Peter Bogdanovich was able to squeeze out of him. Did I mention the writing was brilliant?

Well, What's up, doc? is all the more brilliant, and hilarious to boot.

It's probably the last great screwball comedy, and it was a pitch-perfect rendition of the genre. It was so good I almost watched it again right thereafter, except that it was getting rather late.

I'll certainly be watching it again sometime when I need a good laugh, or rather, lots of them.

* Of course I was already on the floor, since I still have not built a computer desk, but I hadn't been laughing before. Certainly not this raucously. I'm almost certain that I scared the cats, and possibly even woke Jessica up.

Or, rather, the worst David Lynch movie I've seen all year

Dune isn't actually all that bad. It's just not that good.

Unlike, say, its protagonist, Paul Atreides. Who is only good, through and through, or his nemesis, the Baron Harkonnen, who is so thoroughly evil his skin bubbles with evil (or maybe it's just malicious pus) and he's so lazy he floats around everywhere with special effects. He chews up scenery and drinks the blood of his subjects, or anyone else handy with a convenient heart plug, or something like that.

They might as well have given him a black hat, too. Almost everyone in the movie has such clear-cut, obvious motives. But this is a David Lynch movie, you say. Where is the ambiguity, the perplexity, the strange? I'll get to that.

Permit me to admit up front that I've never read Frank Herbert's novel* of the same title (and possibly the same story), and that probably meant that I was going to be more confused or less interested than I might otherwise be.

In the end, all that matters from one source to the other is determining which one is the root of my complaints about the film. My guesses will follow.

First of all, and as I mentioned above, the sides are too simple. The House of Atreides is too good (the traitor is among them but not of them) and the house of Haddaddaddaway too bad. Where are the shades of grey? There's a total of one person who isn't necessarily aligned with who he should be, and even then it's beaten about our heads just in case we'd miss it.

Which is odd, considering all of the things that were left unexplained and not shown so blatantly, but I can't really say what I missed. I'm willing to bet this is from Lynch compressing and abridging Herbert's novel.

I didn't pay attention to all of the dream sequences. Here was the largest showing of Lynch's touch. Weird, jarring dream sequences that were either foreshadowing or far-sight, that served more to slow the film down and telegraph upcoming scenes (sometimes even afterward the characters would repeat the foreseen dialogue, just uttered 'live', in the ever present inner voices).

What was with all of the inner voices, anyway? I know a big difference between novels and movies is that in general, it's impossible to get in the characters' heads without the written word; in this film it was difficult to stay out of their internal monologues. I don't mind one narrator with the occasional voiceover, but to have every major character, on the good guy side, get his or her moment in the spotlight, makes me recall much more fondly the scene in Wayne's world where Mike Myers grabs the camera back from an Ed O'Neill character who is attempting to, literally, walk away with the movie, and Mike admonishes him that only he and Garth can talk to the camera. If only this movie had the same restraint. Maybe Dune should've been named Paul's world. Probably not. I'll blame Lynch again for writing us into the innermost thoughts of so many people, and not just Herbert for probably having some of the thoughts in the novel, too.

More annoying than the dream sequences was all of the magic and other mystical cop-outs for moving the plot forward. At the risk of spoiling them, I won't mention any. Probably more Herbert, again.

I don't know who wrote most of the dialogue, but I kept hearing mantras everywhere. So much of the dialogue sounds like they're reading it off of propaganda posters. Again, this is probably Lynch. Check out these examples: "Fear is a mind killer." "Moods are for cattle and loveplay, not for fighting!" "He who controls the Spice, controls the universe!" "My name is a killing word." "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." "Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken." "And how can this be? For he is the Kwisatz Haderach!"

Well, probably not that last one. The movie, and probably the book before it, is filled with the requisite ridiculous lingo that litters many a 'great SF novel'. That last line above is the movie's final line, and it makes absolutely no sense unless you know what the Kwisatz Haderach is, and even then, there's no good explanation for why they don't just call the Kwisatz Haderach the Messiah or some other simple, not-fabricated noun. So much of the rest of it is made up, too. By the end I knew what "wormsign" was, but I'm still not certain what the whole "weirding" process entails, and those are just two examples brought to you by the letter "W".

In the end, it's visually interesting, technically impressive (for its time, by now the matte work looks quaint if not altogether dated), but all of the focus making things like the worms work right could've been spent working on making the story more fleshed out, or the dialogue more natural, or many other little fixes that are probably only with the years of hindsight.

Although at the time, somebody must've wondered why they'd spend so much time (and money) on a special effect like the blocky personal shields, only to revisit them once later in the film, and in a rather inconsequential moment. Or was somebody being clever, setting us up to think that this neat and useful technology would be used for good (or evil) later. Instead, it was just tossed aside, no doubt so another epic dream/drug flashback could be shoehorned in.

An epic, Dune certainly is. Interesting, it isn't so much. I gave it some thought, and decided it was no worse than Waterworld, though certainly no better. It's about the same level for combining high-concept ideas with high-profile talent, but forgetting to add in rhyme or reason. Interesting effects alone don't make the journey interesting if you already know at the beginning where you're going to end up.

* While that in itself is rare for me, I moreover do not plan on ever reading the novel (and by extension, its sequels). Nothing, not one thing, in this movie convinced me that I'd have any interest in the book.

Permit me to again point you toward All Consuming. While it allows members to designate books, albums, and movies as "worth consuming" or "not worth consuming" (or, neither, though that's not the way it's supposed to work), but that two -state system (well, three) isn't enough for my tastes. Some stuff is not not worth consuming, in my opinion, but I'm not so fond of it to actually claim it to be actually worth consuming.

I'm not willing to commit, I guess.

But some stuff I watch and read and hear is, in fact, well worth watching or reading or hearing, and I'm not afraid to say so. So that's when I use the easy-to-use tagging capabilities of the site, and have tagged such master works "fantastic". That link leads to a list of some twenty or so of them, and I'm working on a way to find all of the others. I've added Batman begins to the list (so bowled over by it as I was by it), and it's just one among a good many other movies and books that I've enjoyed consuming recently.

So I'm still not playing favorites, but I'm willing to show some favor and shower the superlatives. I may yet develop a heirarchy, from "crap"* to "adequate" and so on, up to "excellent" and with "fantastic" or perhaps something superior at the top. But not today. I'm willing to pick just the topmost for now.

* And you can find a list of the ones I deem to be "crap" in a similar, easy fashion. Like clicking "crap" in the previous sentence, or this one.

I've found a movie more deserving of the "worst I've seen all year" honors than High tension, much to my chagrin*.

House of 1000 corpses just did not appeal to me. Much the opposite, in fact.

I'm not so prudish or of such high standards as to be offended by the film, but many a time it came very close to doing just that. Mostly it was just disgust and annoyance that would characterize my reaction, and then apathy. I didn't pay much attention to the middle and last bits, just because I didn't care about the people on screen, wasn't interested in the gore or impressed by the effects, and could have done without the weird video effects interludes/jump cuts that littered the whole thing. Whatever technical merits it may have had weren't enough for me to overlook all of the other demerits, and I suppose it is a failing of my tastes and preferences that I couldn't enjoy the misguided attempts by schlock-rocker Rob Zombie in what is probably a labor of love, well regarded by its cult of fans. I'm just not among them.

* If not for the fact that this could well keep the title all year, I'd consider adding a "worst movie I've seen all year" list for the rest of the year, implemented as a simple blog or some such. I may still, since it's really just laziness so far keeping me from doing it. I've contemplated the idea since the first half hour of House of 1000 corpses, and started browsing around for appropriate PHP scripts to use, but soon got distracted even from doing that.