Weekend at the Movies

I saw The Woman in Black yesterday at the theatre. It was a very fun movie. It also has Harry Potter in it (Daniel Radcliffe). Though if you go to see movies because Harry Potter is in them and will admit it, you are likely younger than I. This one, based on a Susan Hill novel that became a play (in fact, the second longest-running play in the history of West End theatre - you can still see it today), is edge-of-your seat scary. It's an Edwardian ghost story with all the trappings. Harry, sorry, I mean Daniel, plays a handsome young British lawyer who is sent to a remote country estate to 'put some papers in order' - a task that has been shorthand for 'be tormented by supernatural baddies and suspicious townspeople', since Bram Stoker's day.

This movie just happens to also be a Hammer Film, so be prepared to jump. They didn't miss a trick - scary old house with things lurking in the shadows around every corner, faces that disappear, the scariest dolls I've maybe ever seen, and dead children in abundance. Ok, you probably aren't thinking "Yes! Dead kids!" And if you are, please send me your full name, description and address, and I promise I won't forward it immediately to the police station nearest your house. But all of the best scary movies have dead kids in them. The Shining. The Ring. The Others. Probably a plethora of other movies starting with "The". But this plays on very primal fears - our inability to protect the defenseless. The idea that kids (and maybe animals) see things that adults cannot, so really we are the defenseless ones. The idea that despite our best efforts to protect them, some people (even our children!) maybe won't ultimately want to be saved (just look at Whitney Houston for a recent example of this). And of course, no matter how cute they were before, if they've just come out of the graveyard and are blue, dripping wet, and rattling your doorknob, you really won't want to let them in. (But what to do about the wet footprints that you see already inside, once the door has been secured?)

There is nary a moment of downtime, so drinks at the theatre are not recommended. If you go to the bathroom during the movie, you will miss a crucial plot point or a big scare. And this is probably schlock horror, to be sure, so the scares are sometimes cheap, but isn't that why we go to a film like this? If that's your cup of tea, it's well worth the price of admission.

Why the Green Hornet Beats the Green Lantern, in My Book (and what they both have on today's Batman)

I'm just watching the five million previews before the beginning of the movie Salt, and I wondered, dear blog reader - who is your favorite superhero lately? I wondered this because they had a preview for The Green Hornet, reminding me why I like him so much, especially compared to The Dark Knight's Batman, or any number of Superman retreads. Here's why:

1. The Green Hornet is a guy. More than that, a believable guy. He's not a person-shaped alien who can fly through space, his skin doesn't turn green or silver at will, and he doesn't spend his time trying to track down weird baddies with skulls for heads, or eight mechanical arms. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But I think a touch of reality makes any display of superheroism more super. Like the tv show Heroes, when it first started.

2. Awesome gadgets. Especially the car. In fact - human origins and cool gadgets remind me of another standout superhero of late - Iron Man. And that reminds me of a third thing that the Green Hornet and Iron Man (as played by Robert Downey Jr.) have in common.

3. They're funny. Not like brooding Batman, who nowadays has Heath Ledger's psycopathic Joker to keep him company, rather than Jack Nicholson's, who treated the role like a kid with a flair for showmanship. Heath Ledger's Joker wasn't having any fun when he made that last Batman. And neither was I, watching it.

4. This leads me to the only flaw I see in the glut of superhero movies these days. They take themselves so seriously. I'm not sure I'm watching for The Origin Story to End All Origin Stories. Or superhero as social commentary. Scratch that - I'm all for social commentary. But I'd rather watch The Daily Show than read an academic treatise on the inner workings of Congress. Similarly - if I'm going to have a seemingly escapist work of art present some new truths about life, I'd rather discover that for myself rather than have said artwork metaphorically jump up and down in front of me saying, "Look! Look! Now do I deserve an Oscar?"

Superheroes still come from comic books. And I know that comic books are Graphic Novels now, and adults read them, and they buy them in bound volumes, and they keep them carefully arranged in their plastic sleeves, and they never, ever, ever let anyone touch them with dirty hands, or dog ear the pages, because they are important (and besides that, they are books, and we are adults, and we don't do that to books!) But before all of that, they were supposed to be fun. Escapist even. And just because we are adults doesn't mean we stopped having fun. So, while I may take care with my friends' comics when I read them, when I go to the movies I still want to have fun.

Different, not less

Yesterday I watched a movie about a woman I'd never heard of, who I now consider one of the most inspiring people I've ever not yet met. Diagnosed at age 4 with autism - not Asperger's, but full-on, spinning in circles, extremely worried about change, afraid of sliding glass doors, autism - nevertheless, Temple Grandin went on to become one of the world's experts in her chosen field, as well as showing people that they had seriously underestimated and failed to understand children with her condition. She is a living hero who also happens to be a professor at Colorado State University (in my very town, no less!).

Apparently, her different perspective allowed her to see with fresh eyes how animals reacted to the practices slaughterhouses and cattle stockyards employed, and to completely redesign them to allow animals the most possible dignity through the process from field to um, freezer. She has been quoted as saying, "Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be," - a profound and true statement if I ever heard one. I can't find the quote now, but I believe that the movie said that 60% of slaughterhouses now use her methods. I wonder what she thinks of the practices employed by big meat processing operations these days, like Tyson, and others - like the sort of factory farming that leaves cattle pumped full of antiobiotics and penned in narrowly side by side, never seeing the sun - the kind of thing that the movie Food Inc. brought to the public consciousness. I do know though, that to find out what Ms. Grandin thinks on many other issues, including some very sensible autism/parenting advice, you have only to look at her website.

If you haven't seen it yet, I invite you all to watch Temple Grandin. It's an excellent film, and a real eye-opener.

The Best of 2011

Today's list post takes a page from Entertainment Weekly, or any number of other magazines and newspapers at this time of the year, as we announce our annual Best of awards. Being a completely biased publication, this blog will now submit, in snappy numerical format, my favorite (and therefore, the best, of course!) books, movies and music of 2011. If the Mayans are right and the world ends next year, I guess that makes these submissions the best of all time, since there won't be a 2012 list. But I think there will be one.

Drumroll please...

Books (Perhaps Not All From This Year, But Books I Read This Year)

1. What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
2. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
3. What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets by Peter Menzel
4. Feed and Deadline by Mira Grant (2 books, but one amazing series)
5. One Salt Sea by Seanan McGuire
6. IraqiGirl: Diary of a Teenage Girl in Iraq
7. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
8. Lisey's Story by Stephen King
9. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua
10. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Movies and TV

1. Dollhouse
2. American Horror Story
3. Glee
4. An Education
5. Firefly
6. Army Wives
7. Never Let Me Go (a double category winner :) )
8. Fringe
9. Clare and Francis
10. Black Swan

Music (or, This Year's Soundtrack)

1. Owl City
2. Lady Gaga
3. Glee music
4. Harry Connick Jr - "Stardust"
5. Fastball - "The Way"
6. Music from Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog
7. Jack Johnson
8. The Pogues
9. "What You Don't Know" by Jonatha Brooke
10. "Adventures of Isabel" by Natalie Merchant

Games

1. The Sims Medieval
2. Who Would Win?
3. Pandemic
4. Smallville
5. Top Ten: The Bill of Rights
6. Words with Friends
7. Fluxx
8. Mad Scientist University
9. The Sims 2 (still a better game mechanic than Sims 3)
10. Kung Fu Fighting

Descriptions of said winners are, perhaps, yet to come. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your best of lists, readers!

Haven't We Been Here Before?

Yesterday, my family and I went to see a movie that was frankly, silly. I hadn't really wanted to see it, but I love going to the movies, and every time I think, "Wow! Won't this be a terrible movie?" I remember what a good time I've had watching terrible movies in the past, like Starship Troopers or the movie with the hamster secret agents. Sometimes it's as much about the theater experience as it is the movie itself. So, a Christmas outing seemed like a fine idea.

But as I was sitting in the movie - The Darkest Hour, which, for those of you who missed the preview, is about invisible aliens made of electricity who overtake Russia and kill instantly by blasting people unlucky enough to touch them to smithereens - as I was watching this, I started to think of how much this set reminded me of another set, which leads me to today's topic: movies that share sets. I thought this would be the kind of thing that is easy to look up online, because the internet is filled with both trivia lovers and movie buffs. Sadly, it is not. There are a few websites who have been here before, among them this one. I've also learned of a few specific examples. Did you know that the Desperate Housewives live in the same neighborhood as Samantha from Bewitched? Or that Back to the Future and To Kill a Mockingbird shared the same town? The most blatant example I can personally think of is a BBC crossover moment. When I watched the old BBC version of Ballet Shoes (a cute movie about three orphaned girls who excel in the arts, based on a book by Noel Streatfeild), I was surprised to see that the girls apparently lived in Jean and Lionel's house, from As Time Goes By. Their living room had been rearranged, but it made for an eerily familiar effect, especially when they went up the stairs. It's hard to change stairs.

Unfortunately, I could find absolutely no indication that the movie I saw yesterday shared a set. Apparently, most of it was shot on location in Russia. But I still think this topic is ripe for a website. Well, readers? Do you have any other good examples of this phenomenon?