Film

My movies and the movies I like.

Coraline and Neil Gaiman

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ Leave a comment

CoralineThis is Neil Gaiman week for me. I’m audiobook-ing his The Graveyard Book (excellent so far) and we just watched Coraline, based on his book.

First, Coraline. This is a Henry Selick movie, so if you’ve seen The Nightmare Before Christmas or James and the Giant Peach, you know the look/feel. It’s a movie that doesn’t reveal all the secrets of its world. A world that could house a million other stories, of which our story tellers have chosen the one about Coraline. Pan’s Labyrinth or PJ Hogan’s Peter Pan come to mind.

It’s a story of the neglected little girl Coraline, who finds her other mother in an alternate other world behind a small locked door in her house. Her other mother, and her other father, seem perfect– they give her almost too much of all the things she craves from her real parents. Of course, they are not as they seem. For one, they have buttons instead of eyes.

Neil Gaiman and Henry Selick are made for each other– I would love to see Gaiman’s Sandman or The Graveyard Book animated in a similar fashion. The background music, by Bruno Coulais, is especially good: listen to the track Exploration here.

I’ll review his The Graveyard Book when I’m done– it’s a riff on Kipling’s Jungle Book, substituting ghosts and other spooky types for animals. But it’s a lot more than that. I’m more than halfway through, and I’m having a lot of fun.

Oh, and Gaiman’s an excellent audiobook reader. He’s perfect for his material.

∞

I am a huge Neil Gaiman fan. The Sandman series is probably my favorite series of graphic novels. Good Omens and American Gods are great. But more recently, I’ve discovered that he has a really fan-friendly online presence. He answers reader questions on his blog, quite regularly. And he’s a avid twitterer. And he looks like Sandman.

What About a Funky Bunch Movie?

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ Leave a comment

Mark Wahlberg is thinking about an Entourage movie. So now it’s my most anticipated imaginary movie, along with Arrested Development: The Movie and Star Wars Episode VII.

Even though Marky Mark is actively pushing Entourage, and Episode VII has been hinted at (30 years ago, and actively denied since), the only one I’d put any money on actually happening is Arrested Development. Because, every few months, we get an article like this: ‘Arrested Development‘ movie: ‘It’s really happening!’ And Entertainment Weekly doesn’t lie.

gobias Continue reading →

End of Decade Lists

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ 2 Comments

I’ve started to collect data in order to put together lists of my favorite music, movies and books of the decade. And this is the first decade where I have data.

netflixI’ve been a Netflix member for close to 8 years and religiously rate everything I watch. Now thanks to a script I wrote (and has been improved since by others), I can pull the data out of Netflix and analyze. For example, filter the data on all movies where year>1999 and stars=5. There’s my best of the decade, or at least a place for me to start.

itunesI’ve been managing my music in iTunes since 2005, and have been pretty religious about accurate tags and rating tracks. At this point, I can slice up the data with Smart Playlists and scripts in any fashion I like. I have more than 2000 songs from this decade of which about 300 are rated 5-stars. Yeah, I’m liberal with ratings. Also, I like my own collection. So those 300 are where I would start for my list of favorites. Everything from The Marshall Mathers LP to The Hazards of Love. Or from Dhadkan to Delhi-6, for you Bollywood types. In addition to my iTunes playcounts, I have my Last.fm play counts. The Last.fm data is not a complete representation, but it is public.

Here’s a song which will definitely figure in my top 10:

Books are tougher. I haven’t rated or cataloged everything I have read, not even close. And I’ve read many from the library, a few borrowed, a fewer still online. And none of those places have my reading history. The library would keep history if I asked it to, but I asked it not to. And most of the books I read were probably written before 2000, so they wouldn’t be the best of this decade. So I may not have a *list* of my favorites, but a general non-definitive whatever-I-think-of.

*UPDATE*: Of course, I haven’t actually put my list together yet. Coming soon, to a blog near you…

On Staring at Goats

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ 1 Comment

Men-Who-Stare-at-Goats“The Men Who Stare at Goats“ is a fun, if deranged, movie. It succeeds by takings its derangement seriously, to its logical conclusion. The story is a (allegedly, partially true) history of psychic operations in the US army told through a crazy Ewan McGregor/George Clooney jaunt through Iraq. It also stars Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges.

The casting is crucial– the psychic army men call themselves Jedi, which makes Obi Wan McGregor an especially fun casting decision. And Jeff Bridges plays a version of Lebowski. Everyone plays it straight, and that’s crucial– it makes sure the movie remains campy fun. The movie starts with a notice: More of this is true than you would believe. With an opening like that, you have to play it straight and hope it works. Continue reading →

and already we have an archive

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ 1 Comment

As the 2 people who have read this blog today may have noticed, this blog now has an archive that goes back a few years. Like a Tarantino movie, it has history without having age.

All the pre-2009 posts come from a movie blog I used to run called widescreenglory.com. It has a lot of short reviews, some film notes that I wrote for a local indie theatre and other random stuff. Like the summer I tried to document 100 days, 100 movies. I got to 55. Enjoy.