Indiana Jones is Returning!

Two years ago? Batman. Last year? James Bond. This Year? Indiana Jones!

This is my Graceland!

Worst Movie Trailer Ever

If you're wondering what Wolfpack's comments are about on this post, here's the story.

Wolfpack (my wife) and I were at the movies and this trailer came on. Keep in mind, I'm a HUGE Batman fan. And after Batman and Robin, I was feeling pretty betrayed.

The trailers came on, and this one starts with the Warner Bros. logo, and it started winding up through this creepy house, and the voice over was something like this (heavily paraphrased - I can't find the trailer online anywhere): "For decades, he has protected us from the forces of evil. He has prowled through the night, searching for evil and exposing it wherever it was found...." Meanwhile, the camera's still going up stairs, around corners, until it gets to an open window with the moon outside. And the camera stopped behind this very familar silhouette - what looked like a head with two bat-ears coming out of the top.

I was sitting on the edge of my seat, getting totally geeked out. I hadn't heard about any new Batman movie being in the works! How did this one get past me? Would it fall into the cartoony crap-trap that the original Batman movies did? Who was playing Batman? WHEN WAS IT COMING OUT? Meanwhile, Jenn was sitting next to me and shaking her head.

The voiceover continues: "And now, after years of waiting, to bring his justice to the night!" And then, just as you're expecting the Batman music to start, or something like that, the figure turns around... and it's FREAKING SCOOBY DOO!

I seriously let out a howl, right there in the movie theater! A soul-wrenching "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" Meanwhile, my wife, who's a big Scooby Doo fan, let's out with a "YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

So there's the story of the worst movie trailer ever. And now you're in on the joke.

Edit: "Thanks" to Matt: Here's the stupid trailer.

Scooby Doo - Batman Trailer
Uploaded by Leeowen

Makes Me a Little Bit Weepy

I don't even know what to say about this. It's absolutely beautiful. I'm already agog.

Iron Man!

You know, I was never really a fan of this comic, but this looks really freaking cool!

Oscar Nominee Fiasco

Well, the nominees for this year's Academy Awards are in, and once again, I've seen NONE of these movies.

So, I'm going to offer up my own personal award nominations for your approval, based on the movies I've seen this year:

Best Supporting Actor

• Mads Mikkelsen - Casino Royale

Best Supporting Actress

• Judi Dench - Casino Royale

Best Actor

• Daniel Craig - Casino Royale

Best Actress

• Eva Green - Casino Royale

Best Soundtrack

• David Arnold - Casino Royale

Best Original Song

• "You Know My Name" - Chris Cornell and David Arnold - Casino Royale

Best Adapted Screenplay

• Neal Purvis and Robert Wade - Casino Royale

Best Director

• Martin Campbell - Casino Royale

Best Picture

• Casino Royale

Some thoughts:

1. Hey, who are you callin' fan-boy?
   
2. Perhaps I need to see more movies.
   
3. Nah...
   

I'll Take Potpourri For $1000, Alex

Just a little bit of catch-up to cover the holiday happenings here, before I go off tomorrow on whatever the result of the Sugar Bowl is.

• Christmas was great. I got to spend some quality family time at home with Jenn and Duncan and he really had a good time (though I'm getting a little weary of his Wiggles piano). Duncan also got a pair of padded (of course) hockey sticks and a ball. He's happy as a clam - the kid has picked up on hockey as his favorite sport, for whatever reason, and he runs around the house with one of the sticks, not flailing it around as much as I'd feared, and having a great time trying to hit the ball.
  
  For myself, I got a lot of James Bond stuff from my wonderful family; a pair of bike tights, some gloves, and a pump/repair kit from my folks; a beautiful Irish sweater from Jenn; and some other fun trinkets from various other folks. The tights are going to work out nicely, I think, plus they show off my sexy legs really well. ;)
  
  The one disappointment - our global-warming-addled climate not having enough snow for me to take Duncan sledding on the sled I restored for him for his gift. Hopefully we'll get some of Denver's weather.
  
  
• The best bowl game I've seen so far is the Fiesta Bowl and the upset win by the Boise State Broncos. Despite my disappointment that the Glendale staff didn't paint half the field blue for the visitors from the potato state, the game was the most fun to watch of all of them. Normally I hate the NCAA's overtime structure, but darn it if that wasn't a great one. To watch a team actually go for a two point conversion instead of playing it safe and taking the one-pointer to force a second overtime period was a joy. And I always (with one notable exception, Jenn) enjoy watching Big 12 teams look like a bunch of over-hyped jokers.
  
  And the incurable romantic in my heart appreciated Fox covering the post-game proposal by Broncos star running back Ian Johnson to his cheerleader girlfriend... true Americana there!
  
  
• I started a new twist on my workout routine - instead of saying "I'm gonna work out every day" or something like that, I am going for numbers this year: I set a goal for the year of 100,000 Hindu squats and 30,000 Hindu push ups from the Matt Furey Combat Conditioning workout. And keeping track of those reps all year long will hopefully help me to have something to really strive for. We'll see... check out my other blog if you're curious about how that's working out (no pun intended).
  
  
• The Sugar Bowl has me a bit scared. LSU is gonna be tough, and we've not played up to our potential in a lot of games this season (with the exception of the Penn State game). Hopefully Weis has the boys ready. And hopefully we'll be surprised as we were back in the Cheerios Bowl a decade ago.
  
  
• I watched a great documentary from Discovery Times that I'd Tivoed a couple months ago (finally) called Addicted To Oil. Created by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas L. Friedman, it goes into the damage that oil does to our national security and to our climate, really breaking it down and showing the effects on both our security and the world's weather. He also goes into oil alternatives for both vehicles and general consumption, pointing out the good and bad of the various ideas. Very cool - check it out if you have the chance.
  
  And yes, I still need to see An Inconvenient Truth though I know most of what he's talking about already.
  
  
• On a similar train of thought, I watched Syriana over the holidays. This movie was outstanding though very disturbing at parts. Theatrically, it was a bit confusing, though that's part of its charm - you never are quite sure what's going on any more than the characters themselves are. It's definitely a movie you can see over and over and make new connections all the time.
  
  But the more important thing to take from it is the hypocrisy of the oil industry and its proponents in the government. The part that got me the most is when the eldest son of the emir, Nasir, is talking about how the US wants his brother to be the new emir because they consider him a Communist, simply because he decided to sell the country's oil to China as they offered him the best price (a very capitalist idea, wouldn't you think?).
  
  Go see this one if you haven't already. Though, if you're looking for a typically buff and sexy George Clooney in it, you're going to be watching the wrong movie because he reportedly put on 30 pounds for the role.
  
  
• There are still a couple things I want to get for my biking experience - a set of bike lights for the dark days and for my own safety, and some panniers so I don't have to use a backpack (and hopefully are a little more waterproof than the backpack I'm currently using. A set of fenders would also be nice - so I don't have to keep putting on rain pants.
  

I think that's everything.

Casino Royale From A Bond Fan's Point Of View

Over the weekend, I was able to see a movie that I've wanted to see for some time: the newest entry in the James Bond series of films, Casino Royale.

It absolutely ruled.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!

Daniel Craig has indeed deserved all the apologies I've seen from long-time Bond fans, critics, and pretty much everyone else, as his Bond is the closest to the gritty, egotistical, cold-eyed agent about whom Ian Fleming originally wrote. As I said to my wife when trying to describe the movie to her: it's like all the other Bond movies - lots of great stunts, action, intrigue, etc., and then you add in ACTING.

This is not to say that the other Bonds were bad actors (well, almost all of them), but I often got the feeling that they were simply foils to advance the plot of the movie and show off lots of stunts, etc. Craig, on the other hand, is an actor's actor. He's dissected the role of 007 and made it his own by making it Fleming's. The cheesy lines, when they were included (and that wasn't often), were delivered in a way that you know the character enjoyed saying it, instead of just saying them because it fit the pattern of a Bond movie. The ego was readily apparent, as was the loss of the ego when he found himself

The supporting cast was also excellent. I'll start with Judi Dench as M. It would be very easy for Dench to have simply gone into autopilot and put out a performance that was similar to the other movies - referring to Bond as a misogynisitc dinosaur, criticizing the playboy appeal, etc. But the good Dame did not do that at all. This was a different Bond, and she played to that new Bond extraordinarily well. She had whole new sets of problems with him, new sorts of respect for him, and a different relationship with him. He wasn't the golden boy of MI6, he was the newly promoted guy who was basically under probation. And he was sort of a pain in the ass to deal with. Dench pulled this off magnificently.

Eva Green was the perfect femme fatale for this new Bond. She was a strong personality, and it was clear that she didn't like Bond nor the mission because she didn't really understand either it or him. And she was clearly horrified by what he did for a living after the fight in the stairwell, but was also clearly attracted to him by his ability to realize that not everyone could deal with his work and lifestyle (as evidenced by the rather tender shower scene).

Mads Mikkelsen was perhaps the most believable Bond villain we've ever had (though Sean Bean's Alec Trevelyan in GoldenEye is a close second if not equal). For almost the first time, the villain wasn't just some rich guy with a weird tic of some kind. We actually understood where he was coming from, as the terrorist's banker who lost his clients' money with an "investment" gone wrong. And he was under serious pressure to get the money back before his clients found out about the situation. If he hadn't been such a schmuck, you could almost feel bad for him.

The action scenes made sense, instead of being done just to be visually stimulating. The fight scenes showed the real desperation of men locked in combat instead of being a cheesy way to show Bond's superiority over a bunch of guys foolish enough to try to attack him. And the editing was great too - they truly showed the awful-ness of two men fighting to the death - no silling karate chops a la Roger Moore or the famous two handed Captain Kirk punches. Daniel Craig has obviously been working hard on his fighting skills to make this look so realistic, and it paid off.

And another thing about the action scenes that was pointed out to me on my newest favorite podcast, Being James Bond: they weren't just a music video. The music, if any, was very incidental and let the action happen. In the past it's seemed like McG was the director for all the action sequences, and this one was the most realistic-seeming that I could imagine.

Now, as a Bond fan, I've read all the Bond work that Fleming has put out. Casino Royale was the first Bond novel written and therefore the first one I ever read (as I like to read all my works by an author in order). And it was the perfect book to start over with for that reason. But I wasn't prepared for just how much the movie was going to adhere to the plot. You can't say it was dead on, because it wasn't. The original was based during the Cold War and therefore was very much a NATO vs. USSR conflict, with Le Chiffre being the SMERSH banker. In this, he's more or less a private contractor who bankrolls terror organizations. But that's where the differences end, for all intents and purposes.

As anyone who's ever gone with me to a movie adapted from a book I like knows, I'm a stickler for being faithful. Now that's not to say that the stories have to follow the work exactly and to the letter, but they have to capture the spirit of the book and follow the same basic plot. The Batman movies frustrated me to no end, until the release of Batman Begins. That was an absolute masterpiece. And this was the same: I walked out thinking "Oh my stars and garters - they finally got it right." I was completely satisfied with the movie with one exception - it wasn't long enough and it's too long to wait for the next one. I got home that night and was disappointed that Amazon.com didn't have a link to pre-order the DVD yet.

I can sort of understand why Bond movie fans might have been disappointed with parts of this movie. Craig does not play the same cheesy super-agent guy that Moore and Brosnan played. In fact, his portrayal of Bond is closest to that of Timothy Dalton, in regards to the seriousness with which the actors play the role. And they didn't make use of Q, the gadgets, boat chases, spaceships, Jaws, and ladies who couldn't help but undress Bond with their eyes every time they saw him. And in all honesty, I sat there expecting it and was surprised by those scenes not being there. An example of this was when Bond first walks into the Ocean Club and talks to the lady at the desk. That was exactly the spot in a Moore movie when the undersexed hotel worker would check him out from top to bottom and suggestively respond to his request, followed by a smirk and polite rejoinder by Moore. We didn't get that in Casino Royale.

As I just mentioned, Craig's Bond is most like Timothy Dalton's Bond, IMHO. But the Dalton movies suffered from not trying to be realistic enough with the rest of the movie. Casino Royale never has that problem. They have re-started this series on the right foot, in my opinion, and I can't wait for more.