Walking With Special Effects!

Dave got us comps to "Walking With Dinosaurs!" a BBC edutainment product that consists of a lot of very expensive, very cool life-size dinosaur animatronic puppets walking around the stage while a human character does a very frothy gloss on their lives, habits, etc. It was probably great for the ten-year-olds in the audience (of which there were many), but childless adults should avoid this show. Yes, the puppets are cool. They look great, they move with a ponderous strength that may or may not be realistic -- but they don't do much except move with ponderous strength. They move forward. They move backward. They move their necks to and fro. They roar.

Snore.

The human (Beazley? Bosley?) spoke with authority about all sorts of things I know we don't know about dinosaurs, which was kind of annoying for a supposedly educational show. Oh, but that's right -- it wasn't education, it was edutainment. I guess it's okay, then.It struck me that theater is now doing exactly what Hollywood movies have too often been doing since at least the '70s -- focusing on special effects to the exclusion of all other elements, such as story, conflict, drama, character, emotion. Blame it on Julie Taymor or Les Mis, or better yet don't blame it on anything at all. It's an attempt to keep and maybe even grow an audience for a medium that is losing audience. Good on them. But here's a clue -- combine the super-expensive, super-cool puppets with a plot, character, emotion and you might achieve something higher than edutainment. Whatever the hell that is.

Review: Things Change

I used to think it was cool to say, "David Mamet is one of my favorite filmmakers."

Best known as a playwright, Mamet is sorely underappreciated as the director of such awesomeness as Spartan, State and Main, The Winslow Boy, and House of Games. But maybe moviegoers got off to a rocky start with this boring twaddle, Mamet's first movie. Things Change is so dull and disappointing it makes me use grandpaw terms like "boring twaddle."

Don Ameche is, admittedly, kinda charming as an Italian shoeshine guy who gets chosen to take the fall for a murdering mobster whom he resembles (the mobster really resembles James Joyce, but that's neither here nor there). Joe Mantegna (never a favorite, despite House of Games), is the eff-up low level goombah charged with keeping track of Don over the weekend before he "confesses". Joe gets all Last Detail and decides to take the 'shine to Tahoe for a last weekend of fun (i.e. boring hookers and boring gambling). Lack of hilarity ensues. Avoid Things Change so you don't get gun-shy about Mamet, who is definitely great.

Blogcheating

As I get deeper into this cyberlife, I'm finding myself torn between online communities. Example: I wrote a review tonight of David Mamet's execrable Things Change on NetFlix, mainly because some new friends had joined my NetFlix community (shout out to Alder and Anson!) and I wanted my presence to be known. But then I thought: "I should post this review on my blog!" But it was too late. I had submitted it to NetFlix, which may not post it for two business days. Apparently, someone actually reads the things. The point being, is it somehow cheating if I copy my review from NetFlix and post it here as new content (which is precisely what I did with the Rescue Dawn review, below)?

Drunken Photography

I took my newish digital camera to Dave and Snark's New Year's Eve Ham Feed, got drunk, and took a lot of pictures. Beside the usual snaps of folks partying I took art pictures and insisted on showing them on the 2.5" LCD to anyone who would look. "Look at that, that's a beautiful picture," I'd say, proudly showing off the macro shot of the chrome plated towel rack I'd just taken in the bathroom. Reactions were polite at best. Turns out that at least a couple were beautiful (not the towel rack, though). But in sober retrospect I can see that it might be obnoxious to have some drunken artist insist on you looking at his obscure photos on a tiny display just seconds after he snapped them.

I am in love with digital photography because it gives me what I could never afford in 35mm: unlimited film.