This Week in YouTube

[handful_ofdust]

Finally saw the trailer for Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and my Lord, that looks like tripe. OTOH, Iron Man 2 benefits heavily from each repeat viewing, not least because the version up at iTunes kept timing out every half-second, causing me to miss little details like the fact that when Tony Stark is dropped out of a plane at the beginning--yelling "You complete me!" back at Pepper, after she's kissed, then punted, his helmet--he isn't actually going into battle, or anything. Instead, he lands center-stage at the Stark Expo, surrounded by stripper-nubile ladies in Iron Man-colored bikinis with fake arc reactors stuck to their ample, scantily-clad chests. Oh, Tony: Never change.;)

Something I'm surprised to find myself increasingly excited about: Clash of the Titans. Something I'm not surprised to find myself excited about, but am nevertheless gratified to observe seems not to suck: Sherlock Holmes. Jude Law makes a particularly pretty, put-upon, man-of-action Watson, as it should be. I also love the clip which has Holmes mentally breaking down how he's going to break down his bare-knuckle boxing opponent, then physically doing it, while Irene Adler completely ignores him in the background.

Hmmm. I wonder if there's a trailer up for Neil Marshall's Centurion yet...

Comments

[sovay]

Finally saw the trailer for Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and my Lord, that looks like tripe.

I have not yet seen the trailer; I've been dubious since Comic-Con, where Burton declared in re prior versions of Alice in Wonderland that "It was always a girl wandering around from one crazy character to another, and I never really felt any real emotional connection," at which I decided he had completely missed the point. Also if you want a film about Alice's complicated emotional relationship with Wonderland, what you want is Dennis Potter's Dreamchild (1985); it's not yet on DVD and it has a weak B-plot, but the stuff with Alice Liddell and Carroll and her aging hallucinations of mad tea parties and sobbing turtles is flat brilliant. Also, I've always liked the Mad Hatter, but somehow, with Johnny Depp, I worry.

I also love the clip which has Holmes mentally breaking down how he's going to break down his bare-knuckle boxing opponent, then physically doing it, while Irene Adler completely ignores him in the background.

Okay; that's great.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Dreamchild! It shouldn't surprise me that you've seen it, let alone liked it, but boy is it rare. Ah well; I never thought The Company of Wolves would be released on DVD during my lifetime, and now I own it.

[mlamprey.livejournal.com]

I saw Dreamchild at some point when a few of Potter's films were available on VHS, and agree about the real world aspect of it being better than the fantasy. And yes, we had a really worn-out tape of Company of Wolves that was replaced with a DVD as soon as one was available. I always figured this would be the girls-coming-of-age story that our daughters had forced upon them, and to some extent that's true...one of the two has seen it now. I'm not sure it aged well, at least for them.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of resistance to 1980s cinematographic tricks, like Vaseline-ing the lens, and various lighting patterns, which I used to notice all the time in students of mine under a certain age. The hope is that they can eventually train themselves to simply filter them out and accept a piece for its content (structure included) rather than its execution, and this may well--if unfortunately--not happen until long after the film would have been most effective as a commentary on puberty/boys/wolves of every possible stripe.

Then again, I still can't get over the fact that in Danse Macabre, Stephen King admits he just couldn't stop thinking about how the original Cat People was obviously shot on a soundstage, to the extent that it destroyed his appreciation for the film completely. Intellectually, he knew that there was no technical way Val Lewton could have done a night location shoot at the time, but it didn't matter. For Jordan, OTOH, shooting soundstage was a calculated choice, and it mainly pays off...mainly.;)

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I realized about a year ago that I can’t re-watch any early-eighties Canadian tv, because the lighting bothers me too much – I saw a re-run of The Great Detective and found myself thinking “writing’s held up, acting’s held up and oh hey look, Maury Chaykin – but the lighting’s making everything look distractingly cheap and set-bound, even when it’s a location shot.”

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the CBC for you.

[jackal-lies.livejournal.com]

Some of Alice in Wonderland looks dubious, but the Cheshire Cat is voiced by Stephen Fry. That and its lunatic grin cinched it for me.
I heartily agree with you on Jude Law as Watson. The moment in the trailer where he's telling Holmes off for practicing the violin at 3 in the morning and stealing his clothes is pure gold.

[jongibbs.livejournal.com]

I'm looking forward to Iron Man 2, Sherlock Holmes and Clash of the Titans (though I'll miss the clockwork owl in the latter) :)