Green Egg has a list on their home page.
The Wild Hunt offers a list of notable Pagan dead for this year, as well as links to other significant deaths of 2010.
Blessed Samhain.
Archive for October 30, 2010
Dueling Movie Reviews: RED versus Salt
Over recent weeks, I’ve seen two movies with striking similarities, so I’m reviewing them both at once. This also helps to catch up on my enormous movie review backlog.
Salt stars Angelina Jolie as a CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy. Rather than allow herself to be taken into custody, she goes rogue, exhibiting superhero-level abilities in the process. An excellent supporting cast includes Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
RED (technically, it’s “Red,” but the title is revealed to be an acronym), stars Bruce Willis as a retired CIA agent marked for assassination. Fighting back, he assembles a rogue team, exhibiting almost superhero-level abilities in the process. The astounding supporting cast includes Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, Mary-Louise Parker, John Malkovich, Brian Cox, and Karl Urban.
So, you can see why I’d place these two movies side-by-side.
Be specific
I hate vague, meaningless movie titles. Inception, Defiance, Out of Sight, Conviction. I don’t want a movie title that makes me ask, “Is that the one about….or is it the other, similarly-titled one about something else?”
A great title is specific and particular and probably can’t get past focus groups. A great title identifies the movie; for good or ill, you won’t be mistaking it for another movie (except for that time I went to the video store for Edward Scissorhands and came home with Ed Wood).
Proper nouns really work in movie titles. Saving Private Ryan. Schindler’s List. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? The Outlaw Josey Wales. Erin Brockovich is a great title because you definitely don’t mix it up with anything else, but of course, Hollywood thinks women are icky, so Betty Anne Waters gets renamed Conviction. Which might be the movie about dreams with Leonardo DiCaprio, or it might be the movie about adultery with Diane Lane. Or some other movie.
I would much rather see a marquee with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford than Life As We Know It, or You Again, or As Good As Dead. With the first one, I see a filmmaker and production company with the courage to stand behind their film. With the others, I see producers afraid of nouns. If you’re afraid of nouns, you probably aren’t making a very ballsy movie.
Monday Movie Review: The Town
The Town (2010) 8/10
For Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck), Jim Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), and their friends, bank robbery is the family business. They live in the Charlestown section of Boston, a center for bank and armored car robbery. Now Doug wants out. He’s falling for Claire (Rebecca Hall) and the FBI is looking into his last robbery. But getting out isn’t going to be easy. Directed by Ben Affleck.
The Town makes an art of gritty, but it still looks good. Maybe I should say Affleck can’t make up his mind, but instead I feel like he recognizes the fine line between realistic and annoying. There’s certainly a trend towards documentary-style, hand-held, muted colors, and the like, to broadcast to the audience, “Hey, we’re authentic!” Yeah, sure. What Affleck does is cut in little bits of grittier filming, blended with a more conventional look, and it works. It’s important, because it’s the kind of movie where people say “the city is a character,” and so you do have to feel the locations. There’s a strong sense here of alleys, bars, shops, crappy apartments, gentrification—the whole way in which a city lives, breaths, and grows.
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