crewless news and notes

Stacey and I caught a matinee of Snakes on a Plane today, a movie anyone with an Internet connection has been hearing about for what seems like forever. Snakes is basically a combination of two of my favorite film genres: horror and cheesy-70s-disaster. Not a particularly intelligent recipe, but an effective one.

Except for the brilliantly-disgusting Slither, I haven’t enjoyed any of the horror movies I’ve seen this year. Films like the Hills Have Eyes remake and The Descent are well-made, but they’re so convincingly disturbing that they end up being no fun. In Snakes, an attractive couple is attacked by venomous reptiles while smoking grass and having sex in the lavatory of a 747. Said couple broke a federal law when they disabled the lavatory smoke detector, so I guess they had it coming. Set pieces like this one might not be very realistic, but they evoke a smile and, sometimes, even a scare or two.

The movie isn’t perfect. Like many disaster and horror movies, it spends too much time setting up the motivations of a plethora of characters who aren’t particularly interesting. But, after the snakes get loose, and the only motivation for any of the movie’s characters is “don’t get killed,” Snakes on a Plane is a good time.

I helped Chuck shoot some Super 16mm film tests last weekend. On Wednesday, we went over to CineFilm in Atlanta and got the 12 minutes or so of footage transferred to high definition video. Hi-def has twice the resolution of standard video, and we were wondering how well the Super 16mm would hold up. The answer: it held up pretty damn well. I’ve heard people say that hi-def video origination is sharper than shooting Super 16mm. After seeing Chuck’s tests, I ain’t buying it. I’d been getting more and more annoyed with the shortcomings of video origination lately, and these tests were kind of the last straw. You can keep your Panasonic and your Sony stuff – I’ll stick with Kodak and Fuji.

Also… the drive to and from Atlanta still sucks. Especially when you get pulled over by an Alabama State Trooper along the way. For no good reason. Seriously, I used to be okay with the Troopers, but no more. Those guys are dicks.

In Birmingham, Alabama, we get all the wide-release shitty movies – you know, stuff like You, Me, and Dupree and Little Man. But it takes forever for smaller movies (A Scanner Darkly) to show up here, and sometimes (Brick) they don’t play here at all. So it was nice to get to see Little Miss Sunshine in the a Birmingham theater just a couple of weeks into its limited release. I often get annoyed with “indie” movies, which can get too precious and quirky for their own good. Little Miss Sunshine has its quirks, but the movie is consistently entertaining, especially when it brings the funny. There’s a scene at the end that had me laughing so hard, I was crying.

I really shouldn’t read the “user comments” on the Hide and Creep IMDB page. Everybody’s a critic, especially on the Internet, and all those critics are happy to explain exactly how and why Hide and Creep is the “worst of the worst” (actual IMDB user comment).

I’m not about to start bashing critics, which seems to be a fashionable thing for filmmakers to do these days. Heck, M. Night Shyamalan made a whole movie about how much he hates critics. I enjoy reading well-written reviews, even when I don’t agree with them. And, since I have opinions, I’m a critic, too. For example, when it comes to music, I think Creed is the “worst of the worst” (actual scientific fact).

But liking critics doesn’t mean I like to read bad reviews of my work and my friends’ work, so I’d be better off staying away from IMDB, but I’m weak, and I check it regularly, hoping that now, finally, everybody has decided they love Hide and Creep, even though I know better.

So imagine my surprise when I found an IMDB user (handle: “Anti-Hollywood") actually defending Hide and Creep on the comments page. A little taste: “I would bet that this film cost a minimum of $30,000 to make. While its aesthic certainly wasn’t the polished, 35mm canvas of a Spielberg stinker, I found the look to be quite refreshing for a genre piece. In this day and age of digital video, I’m glad to see there are still some guys out there sticking with celluloid.”

I was happy to see that this person enjoys our movie and that he/she understands and appreciates that making movies is neither cheap nor easy. Not that I expect this thoughtful opinion to change anyone else’s mind…

For somebody who considers himself a fan of director John Carpenter, I haven’t seen many of his movies. I love Carpenter because I love The Thing, the best horror movie ever as far as I’m concerned. The Thing is a remake of sorts – it’s based on the same novella as the 1951 flick The Thing From Another World, also a good horror flick, but very different from Carpenter’s paranoid and gruesome take on the material.

So it’s no real surprise that I dig the heck out of Carpenter’s Starman, which I finally caught this past weekend on the Sci Fi channel. It’s a fun story about a curious alien, kind of an E.T. for grown-ups, informed equally by NASA’s Voyager program and the Biblical virgin birth. It’s held together by Carpenter’s solid direction and an enjoyable performance from the always-reliable Jeff Bridges.

I’ll have to watch it again on DVD, since Sci Fi showed a pan-and-scan version of the movie. One of my favorite things about Carpenter’s movies is his use of widescreen cinematography, and I bet I’ll like Starman twice as much when I can see the whole picture.