Random Factoid #295

19 05 2010

Yesterday, in my history class, we played a game based on guessing themes from movies.  The tunes ranged all the way from “Gone with the Wind” to “Avatar.”

My group got 29/40 (73%) but that still wasn’t enough to be top dog in my section (31/40) or in all the classes (34/40).

Here are some of the themes that slipped us up – AKA I didn’t know them:

“Ben Hur”

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s”

“The Bridge on the River Kwai”

“Out of Africa”

Shamefully, I missed the themes of four movies I had seen – “Batman,” “Forrest Gump,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” and “The Terminator.”


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Random Factoid #294

18 05 2010

This factoid inspired by Ross v Ross’ post (and new series) “RvReprieve.”  The writers consider granting unfairly trashed movies a second chance.  They started with “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” a movie which star Shia LaBeouf has publicly condemned.

However, I didn’t exactly read the post well enough before I started writing the factoid.  I assumed they were just talking about movies that they had decided to give a second chance.

Wrong.

But nevertheless, I still want to make my factoid today about giving movies a second chance.  Often times, when I don’t feel the love that others feel for a certain movie, I’ll give it a second watch.  Sometimes I still hate it.  But others, I wind up finding something that I hadn’t discovered before.

Such was the case when I rewatched “Michael Clayton,” a 2007 Best Picture nominee.  I’ll save the specifics for a later post, but know that I think it’s never a bad idea to give movies a second watch.


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Random Factoid #293

17 05 2010

A weird “out-of-body”-esque experience happened at the screening I attended on Saturday morning.  When I entered the theater, all the lights were on.  I could see the exact color that the walls were painted.  Really, I could see everything.  It felt weird to be so … illuminated.

Anyone else had the same experience?  It could just be me, but I think it’s strange.  It’s like seeing a turtle without its shell.


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Random Factoid #292

16 05 2010

I went to a free screening yesterday morning at 9:30 A.M.  Yes, that early.  I was in line by 8:15, thank you for asking.

But that’s not what this factoid is about.  It is about the crazy concession purchases that were happening at 9:00 in the morning.  I saw people with hot dogs, nachos, and all sorts of lunch foods.

I was shocked!  People eat breakfast at 9:00 and here these people have moved on to lunch.  My general rule is not to have popcorn until after lunch.  Drinks are always OK; pretzels don’t really have a rule of thumb.  Buncha Crunch, my sweet snack, always wait until after lunch.

Anyone else have any concession “rules” or timeframes?


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Random Factoid #291

15 05 2010

Watched “Requiem for a Dream” last night – wow.  Not going out and doing any drugs anytime soon.  Talk about a movie that tests your ability to stomach a movie.

I pride myself on being a fairly tolerant moviegoer.  I can sit through most movies that most people can’t stomach.  Most horror movies don’t disturb me, mainly because they are too far-fetched to have any impact.  I can barely watch movies like “Requiem for a Dream” or “Precious” because I can’t fall back on thinking that it’s not real.  The fact is, people do face drug addictions or abuse.

However, there are some movies that I won’t subject myself to watching.  Mainly, “Antichrist.”


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Random Factoid #290

14 05 2010

Curse you “Fight Club.”

You were a great movie, but you have forever changed the way I watch movies in the theater.  Thanks to your sequence on the “cigarette burns” that projectionists put on film to remind them to change the reels at strategic amounts of time, I can never watch a movie without using them to judge how much time has gone by.

Which also means I can judge about how much time is left.  And I hate being conscious of time while watching a movie, although I often force myself into being in such a state.


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Random Factoid #289

13 05 2010

Two months after it won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars and one month after it opened in the USA, “The Secret in Their Eyes” (FUN FACT: the Spanish title, “El Secreto de sus Ojos” actually means “The Secret of Their Eyes) finally makes its way to Houston tomorrow.

As some of you may recall, I was in Argentina for three weeks in January.  “The Secret in Their Eyes” is an Argentinian film, and when I was there, I knew it had made the shortlist for Best Foreign Film.

I saw posters advertising the DVD of the movie in the windows of electronics stores in the streets of Buenos Aires.  They were practically ubiquitous.  I thought about buying it, but I don’t know what stopped me.  South American DVDs work in our players.

When I came back, it made the list of five actual nominees.  I then realized that very few people in the United States had seen this movie, and if they had, they were critics or high-society film people.  In other words, it would be doubtful that any amateur bloggers would have seen it.

So now, I’m hitting myself (figuratively, not literally) for not buying it.  Hopefully it doesn’t leave in the next two weeks … don’t know how much moviegoing time I will have with finals coming up.

P.S. – Thanks to Mad Hatter at “The Dark of the Matinee” for inspiring this factoid with his review of the movie.


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Random Factoid #288

12 05 2010

“Funny People” ruined “The Great Gatsby” for me.

We’ve been reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless novel that criticizes all things wealthy and eastern in my English class these past few weeks.  When we started reading, I happened to recall a friend’s conversation I overheard a few weeks after the movie’s release talking about a few very striking parallels.  The only part of the discussion I specifically remembered was that they thought it was clever that Judd Apatow named a character in the movie Daisy after the love interest in Fitzgerald’s book.

So, while reading “The Great Gatsby,” I kept thinking in my mind that this book would be like “Funny People” just set eight decades earlier.  While there are a great deal of similarities between the two, they exist mainly in the first part of the novel.  The second half takes its own course.

But since this conversation was in my mind, I had a sort of preconceived notion that it would end like “Funny People” ended.  A part of my mind had trouble wrapping around the ending of “Gatsby” because of that.

I guess thanks to Fitzgerald for writing a novel so great that Judd Apatow would want to incorporate it into one of his movies.  But I can’t really blame Apatow for taking his own creative license with the movie.


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Random Factoid #287

11 05 2010

Frank Mengarelli, the “Pompous Film Snob“, tagged me in one of these seemingly endless memes.  This one is about the Criterion Collection DVDs.  The point of the thread is to find out who has the most of these very special DVDs.

How many do I have?  One.

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

To be honest, I don’t buy many DVDs nowadays.  And the Criterion Collection focuses on older movies, which I’m more prone to rent.


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Random Factoid #286

10 05 2010

I saw “Casablanca” for the first time (yes, I know that’s shocking) a few weeks ago and ogled at how many quotable lines there are.  I knew, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and “at least we’ll always have Paris.”  But I had no idea it was the origin of “this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” or “round up the usual suspects.”  Not to mention that the movie is the reason for Warner Bros. theme song on their logo and the inspiration for the title “Play It Again, Sam.”  (Fun fact: no one ever says the words “play it again, Sam” in the movie.  It’s always a variation.)

I thought about it, and movies are quoted so often that we say certain lines enough to forget that they came from a movie at all.  A more modern example is “Mean Girls” for me.  I had been rattling off “she doesn’t even go here!” and “you go, Glen Coco!” for months on end – and I had seen the movie!

I think it’s a testament to the writers if their movie has the staying power to be quoted.  I don’t know if we’ll be quoting “Mean Girls” in 70 years, but surely some phrases are going to enter our average conversational phrase book.  I wouldn’t count out “why so serious?” from “The Dark Knight” for one of them.


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Random Factoid #285

9 05 2010

“Iron Man 2” missed the opening weekend record that “The Dark Knight” set by $25 million.  Phew.  Batman will “live to fight another day,” as Harvey Dent says.

But AMC MovieWatcher Network’s blog Script to Screen pointed something out about the summer opener that I really wished I knew on Friday: there was an extra scene after the credits!  And I even told the friend I went to that I suspected there might be a supplemental scene.  He hurried me out, telling me his friends had seen it at midnight and said there wasn’t anything.  But there was!

I’m the kind of person that gets up as soon as the credits roll unless there is some sort of scene going.  Unless I had heard that there would be an extra scene at the end of the credits, I would never stay through the credits.  It’s just too much time to spend if you don’t know.  And credits are getting pretty long nowadays – “The Lovely Bones” and its 15 minute credits, anyone?

Anyone out there willing to stick it out without certainty?  I applaud you if you do.


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Random Factoid #284

8 05 2010

Entertainment Weekly’s blog PopWatch asked an interesting question regarding trailers this week: how many is too many? Apparently, studios are paying to play more before the bigger movies.  I can tell you that six of them played before “Iron Man 2” last night.

I don’t mind a few trailers before a movie.  They give me an opportunity to go to the bathroom before the movie starts.  They give me a nice grace period to be tardy to the movie, although I don’t like to be.

But sometimes, they do go a little overboard.  Like the author of the EW post, I think four is a healthy number.  It still grants that grace period and gives you a glimpse at what’s coming up but doesn’t encroach too far past the scheduled start time.


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Random Factoid #283

7 05 2010

PopEater brought up an interesting point: the marketing campaign for “Iron Man 2” has been almost ubiquitous.  Really, Paramount has spent a whopping $100 million marketing a movie that every American is going to see anyways.  (And for the record, my prediction is that it will NOT beat the opening weekend record held by “The Dark Knight.”)

Nonetheless, it looks really cool to put that metallic mask on a Dr. Pepper can.  And who can resist a Whiplash Whopper?  (The answer: anyone who wants to spare a thousand calories from their daily diet.)

But it’s not designed to target the teenage blogger who rejects being bought out by Hollywood executives looking for a quick buck (see: my stance on 3D conversion).  It’s designed for the not-so-consumer-savvy among us.

Mainly, children.  I know this because I was particularly vulnerable as a child to movie promotion pushes.  Whenever a new Disney movie came out, I would go to McDonald’s several times that month just to get the Happy Meal toys.

I also bought plenty of toys and stuffed animals.  I was part of a target demographic they hit the bullseye with me.


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Random Factoid #282

6 05 2010

Don’t know what inspired this factoid, but I’m going with it.

Remember back in Random Factoid #267 when I talked about movies that I couldn’t finish?  Or Random Factoid #266 when I talked about movies I slept through?  I said I could only remember one for each.  Now, however, I think I have found another that falls into both categories.

This is going to shock you.  This is a movie that some people really like.  It was “Once,” the Sundance hit.  I love the music, and I’m really glad it won Best Song.  But the movie itself just could not grab a fraction of my interest.

I’m willing to give it another try, though.  I want to see why it is that people like it.


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Random Factoid #281

5 05 2010

Following a series of linked posts the other day, I wound up at this interesting USA Today article: “What happens to those 3D glasses after Avatar?”

Here’s an excerpt, featuring some pretty astounding statistics:

Laid end-to-end, the 3-D glasses worn by avid Avatar-goers since the blockbuster movie opened 46 days ago would reach from Los Angeles to Angmagssalik, Greenland — about 3,987 miles.

That’s a whole lot of plastic. With about 75% of people who see Avatar seeing it in 3-D, it works out to about 42.1 million pairs of glasses worn, or 935,834 a day.

Four companies provide 3-D systems for showing the wildly popular sci-fi epic in the USA: Dolby Laboratories, IMAX, Real-D and XpanD.

Each has a recycling program in place, for hygiene and to keep what would otherwise be a mountain of plastic out of landfill.

Real-D has the lion’s share of 3-D projection systems in the USA, accounting for at least 700,000 3-D glasses used a day. It distributes cardboard containers so movie-goers can recycle their glasses. According to Real-D’s Rick Heineman, the glasses are shipped to a cleaning facility near Los Angeles, where they’re sanitized, checked for defects, repackaged and shipped out.

Real-D provides the glasses for most of (if not all of) the 3D movies I see.  I must say, their cleaning facility is slacking.  When I went to see “How to Train Your Dragon,” there was a humongous scratch on my lens!  If you know me or have read any factoids, then you can probably guess this did not make me happy.  Eventually, I was able to get past the scratch and enjoy the movie.  But if that scratch had been on the lens during “Clash of the Titans,” I might not have been so kind.

I have a good pair of 3D glasses hanging from the karaoke machine in my room.  Maybe I ought to keep them in my car and take them to all 3D movies I see.  Can’t trust Real-D anymore.


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