I did a very good job of keeping myself ignorant about the Hancock movie, my knowledge coming solely from the excellent and funny trailer that sold me on the high concept of Will Smith as a dissolute Superman and Jason Bateman as the pr agent who tries to revive his bad public image. The trailer didn't even mention the other big star in the movie, who is a favorite of mine, and the sudden twist in the middle of the movie took me completely by surprise. It's been a long time since I've been that pleasantly surprised in a movie (mostly my own fault from reading too much entertainment press), so I wish I could've liked the movie more than I did, but the discordant pieces don't ever gel, and the movie mostly falls apart after a twist that should have made it much more interesting.

Bateman is very funny, the acting of the three leads is good (though the supporting cast doesn't provide a lot of support, and one wants to throttle every child actor who appears in the movie), the funny scenes from the trailer are funny, but not much else works. The directing and camerawork are appalling, two big set-piece action sequences in the middle and end of the movie don't work in the slightest, the writing was mediocre, and someone from the studio really should have done something about the weird and sudden tone-shifts and inconsistent characterization. It doesn't help that the main villain never read the Evil Overlord list. The movie never decides whether it's dark or light, and there's a racial dynamic that's never addressed. Slim complained about weird musical choices, too.

A quick Google search reveals that this was originally written as a very dark movie that got punched up to be more of a kids' movie, but the result kind of gets stuck in the middle without satisfying either goal. The movie is a very hard PG-13, and not appropriate for kids; apparently, the first two cuts were rated R. The seams painfully show where edits were made to satisfy the ratings board, but that really should have been anticipated much sooner and rewritten so the movie isn't standing on the PG-13/R line.

All of this is frustrating, because this easily could have been a much better movie if the script had been a bit more polished and if the director had been less intrusive.

OK, this is just awesome. Someone spent a long time on that. Don't miss the disclaimers and waivers and privacy policy.

With absolutely no evidence to back this up, I strongly suspect that an earlier draft of "Wall-E" had a much, much, darker ending, and that that ending got focus-tested and Disneyized out of the movie.

I can't blame them: the charming ending they have versus the Strangelovian ending I imagine it originally having probably makes a $200-million difference not including the merchandising and theme-park possibilities. But rewrite the last ten minutes to be more internally consistent with the satiric message of the movie, and it would be one of my all-time favorites. That said, even with the nod to commercialism, it's one of the best movies I've seen this year, was quite entertaining and even moving. I saw nods to bits of Star Wars, Titanic, Planet of the Apes, Silent Running, 2001, Matrix, Sleeping Beauty, City Lights, Terry Gilliam—and a lot of Idiocracy. Thumbs up. I'd be curious what my readers think of my theory of the ending.

Updating my summer movie list:

• Iron-Man very very good, perhaps best comic-book movie ever (aside from the questionable legal machinations over corporate control);


• Indiana Jones was teh suck;


• I may be willing to give the Hulk movie a shot if it gets good reviews;


• Same with Hellboy II;


• Now that I know Robert Smigel wrote it (warning: link has far too many spoilers) with Judd Apatow, I'm intrigued by the "Zohan" Sandler vehicle.

Brawndo!, now being advertised. And it's greener than Green River, which was pretty darn green when my Easterbrook co-clerk and I tracked down a couple of bottles at the old Heaven on Seven in Chicago.

(Have I mentioned how awesome Idiocracy is?)

May 22 - Indiana Jones
June 20 - Get Smart
July 2 - Hancock
July 18 - The Dark Knight
August 8 - Pineapple Express

Maybe?
May 2 - Iron Man
June 27 - Wall-E
July 25 - Step-Brothers
August 15 - Tropic Thunder
August 29 - Barcelona

We're watching the beginning of Double Indemnity.

Slim: Is he shot?
Me: What? In the shoulder? He's holding his arm funny. Maybe. It's not colorized, so I can't tell.
Slim: There isn't a lot of blood.
Me: It was 1944. Less blood then. There was wartime rationing.

Via MM, another complaint about King of Kong's Moore-esque editing.

Isn't it remarkable how Michael Kamen's remix of "Brazil" is still used in several movie ads every year more than twenty years since he composed the score? It's a shame, because it turns that spectacular Terry Gilliam tracking shot in the Ministry of Information (okay, not really a tracking shot, because there are two or three cuts in there to hide how small the set was) into a cliche because we're so sick of the music.

If you're willing to buy into the construct "What would 'Godzilla' seem like in the first-person perspective of the average man-on-the-street?", the framing device of the entire movie being shot by the handheld video of that person (including the silly functioning-cellphone, anachronistic tape-over and infinite-battery continuity issues), don't mind the occasional scene where the actors are looking up at the sky in different directions, and are willing to go for the roller-coaster ride without worrying too much about the implausible physics and biophysics, then you'll agree with Tyler Cowen that Cloverfield is a "remarkable cinematic event." If you aren't willing to buy into that, can't tolerate ambiguity in movies or get seasick without a Steadicam, you'll be very unhappy with the movie. It's a smart-and-subtle dumb movie that I like more the more I think about it, though I found the unspoken 9-11 references discomfiting when I was watching it.

Some reviewers complain about how unrealistic it is that Hud doesn't stop filming, but (1) it's sixty minutes of tape in a seven-hour experience--because of the lack of omniscient perspective, we don't see when he's not filming; and (2) I didn't have a problem with it, because I obsessively watched every 9-11 videotape and photo album put on the web and saw plenty where one is wondering why the camera is still running. Hud is adequately established early in the movie as the sort of clueless galoot who'd keep filming when it makes no sense to do so, and we're necessarily seeing the filming only because someone didn't turn off the camera.

When are you willing to suspend disbelief and immerse oneself in the movie? I was able to do so for "Cloverfield" and "Children of Men." For "Live Free or Die Hard," I shook my head repeatedly, but enjoyed the ride. For the trio of trilogy sequels "The Bourne Ultimatum," "Oceans 13," and "Spider-Man 3," I was just utterly annoyed.

Slim and I saw "King of Kong" with Shani and Dave. And, now the rest of the story (spoilers):

• Mitchell and Wiebe played head to head in 2004 in a San Diego tournament. [MTV News]


• Wiebe's wife was "was ready to throw the machine off a cliff." [New York Magazine]


• Mitchell's videotape, sent to Funstop, wasn't counted as a high score; Twin Galaxies revoked it a couple of days later. Mitchell says he didn't play Wiebe in Hollywood because he hadn't played for six months and was out of practice. (Of course, he loses sympathy when he murmurs of hopes lawyers would seek him out to bring a lawsuit.) [MTV News]


• If one is going to have record-keeping, it's not entirely crazy to have verification procedures: like most arcade games, Donkey Kong has dip-switches, and four of the dip-switches affect difficulty of play.


• Mitchell isn't a referee for Donkey Kong scores. [Steve Sanders @ EFilmCritic]


• And, oh, by the way, Mitchell has beaten Wiebe's high score again. [MTV News; Twin Galaxies; Twin Galaxies]


• Mitchell seems to do his share for charity, but that restaurant appears to be inherited family business. [Twin Galaxies; Rickey's Hot Sauce]

I liked the movie when I saw it, but now I'm feeling kind of manipulated—with 400 hours of footage, and unlimited access to music, it's invariably possible to put together 90 minutes that tell a story different from what happened if doing so makes a better arc, but it's still nauseating when you learn you've been taken. I do feel bad for the people who made Chasing Ghosts, as I suspect that the market for documentaries featuring Walter Day is rather saturated now. (ObWikiGroan: former solicitor general Walter Dellinger vs. Walter Day.)

There's Internet babble about a fictional adaptation of the documentary that has achieved Wikiality, but reading the source shows that it's wishful thinking that Johnny Depp and Nathan Fillion would reprise the real-life leads. I can't imagine any agent would let either make the movie, much less a studio greenlighting something that required people to be paid.

But there really is a Roy Awesome, and some of the scenes in the movie appear to come from this longer NSFW interview.