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The other thing I did this weekend, besides the Derby party, was watch some high quality children’s movies. On Friday, due to a canceled date, I stayed in to hang out with my roommate Sriram and watch Inkheart, which is about a man who, when he reads aloud, causes people and things to jump into and out of books. He loses his wife in this way and gains a gang of bandits for his trouble. The graphics are pretty good on the many fantastical things that get read out of the books. The story also winds its way around a bit, and keeps some suspense for a movie with a foregone conclusion.

The foregone conclusion is what I forgot about with Bridge to Terabithia. I ended up spending Sunday night relaxing with the house to myself and rain threatening outside. Inkheart at put me in the mood for another imaginative tale, and imaginative it was! They did a great job with the subtle use of special graphics to reinforce that Terabithia exists only in the minds of the two main children. The little girl, by the way, AnnaSophia Robb, is a dead ringer, at least in the movie makeup, for a 14 year old Keira Knightley. I had forgotten how the movie came to be on my watch list in the first place, but was reminded in the credits that its because the always wonderful Zooey Deschanel is in it. She plays a music teacher with an interesting take on teaching, and an arbitrarily invitation to take one student to a museum in the city. This suddenly leads the movie down an unexpected road. In retrospect, I remember Richard Roper warning parents about this in his review, but I had forgotten. This only helped my appreciation for the film, however.

Bridge to Terabithia sits somewhere on the same scale as Pan’s Labyrinth. That is a scale between realism and fantasy. Pan’s Labyrinth spends far too much time in the real world, but it’s fantasy world is quite vivid. Bridge to Terabithia spends less time in the real world; well, maybe not film time, but the real world is less harsh and so that counts for it. However the fantasy world is not quite as beautiful, and again, like Pan’s it is but a taste. Somewhere on this scale exists a perfect escapist fantasy. The Chronicles of Narnia movies had a shot at this, but they screwed the pooch with the bland interpretation of the fantasy world.

I saw The Dark Knight on Friday, as part of my birthday celebration, with a group of 16 friends. First and foremost it was a fun time, despite that the group broke up into 3 parts to find seats. I was not disappointed by the movie, but I do have some criticisms, some of which I already aired on Chris’ blog. There are some spoilers below.

My first criticism is that they tried to do too much with one movie. They should have saved Two-Face’s demise for the next film. It was not required to drive home the idea that Batman is a figure that can, and must afford to be hated by the people he serves. That point was beaten into our heads one two many times at the end of the film. I also thought that Two-Face detracted from The Joker. The inclusion of Two-Face cause the plot to contort in unnatural ways, much like what happened in Spiderman 3. Of course, the comparison to that pile of trash stops there; the performances in The Dark Knight are a world apart from Spiderman.

Clearly Heath Ledger’s performance of the Joker ends the Best Actor Oscar race for this year. I’m also willing to give them the actress swap that they pulled with Rachel because of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s stand up job at filling Katie Holmes’ shoes. Her refusal to come back for the second movie is a black mark against Holmes in my book; previously beloved from her Dawson’s Creek days and the string of bad movies that followed. Christopher Nolan has also earned a bit of a scuff on his record with this movie.

The scuff has to do with consistency of setting of the movie. I feel that one of the problems besetting the the original series of Batman movies was an inconsistent feel of the setting. It seemed, in Batman Begins, that they were starting over on this as well. The big feature from this new setting was the monorails centered on Wayne Tower. There are many shots showing what looks like Wayne Tower from Batman Begins, which is in fact, the Chicago Board of Trade Building. But there are not any monorails. This is a huge let down for me, because this story takes place in the same city as the last one plot wise, but it does not setting wise. This is compounded by a shot (that I can’t find a screen capture of) of a Wayne Tower that looks different (sort of black and stocky) like this building. I don’t have a problem mixing and matching buildings from various cities, Gotham is a huge city, so there is certainly room for all of sorts of buildings strewn about it, but to forgo the monorails, which were too big to be removed by any reasonable civic authority.

I saw Iron Man today with some of my coworkers. It is as good as you have heard that it is! Assuming that you heard that it fucking rocks. I didn’t know anything about the comic book before seeing the movie, but that didn’t matter. It is defiantly in my top 3 super hero movies. That list also includes X-Men 1 and Spiderman 1.

What made it so great? Well, all the acting was very genuine and authentic feeling. This is especially true for Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr. Also, the plot had some great twists and turns. There was good pacing with lots of action, but also plot and character development. Oh oh, and, as one of OSU Paul’s friend’s described it the movie consists of “2+ hours of gadget porn.”

There are some flaws, one glaring that I will call out. In the movie at the start the Iron Man must carry around a 12 volt car battery to power an electromagnet in his chest to keep him from dying. This, as you might imagine, is highly inconvenient. If the magnet is off for too long he will die. That fails to use the switching on/off capabilities unique to electromagnets and opens up the easy option to just use a regular MAGNET! Of course, if he had a regular magnet the iron man might never have been made, so I guess its forgivable? Anyways go see it.

After months of uncharacteristically not seeing any movies in theaters In the past two weeks I saw both The Bourne Ultimatum and Transformers, this is a late review. Lets start with Bourne because I saw that one first, on opening night, in the cheap, quaint, and nearby Somerville theater, which had surprisingly good movies playing for once. Usually they have a bunch of crap that caters to the frat boy demographic, but not that night. The other movies there were the Simpson’s movie, Knocked Up (both of which I still need to see) and No Reservations, which I haven’t really heard of. Anyways the Wednesday before seeing Ultimatum I watched Supremacy for the first time, and well that just showed exactly how little I remembered from Identity; so, I watched that on Thursday. I thought it was a big help in understanding the third one, and would recommend rematching them before seeing the new one. Although the fun action will keep you entertained anyways. I was a big fan of how they used the Julia Stiles character, and I especially liked the hair dying scene as a parallel or foil to the first movie.

I finally saw Transformers yesterday down at the Fenway theater with Post after we were the only two people who showed up to play games. I can’t add much to the discourse on this one it was really entertaining. Afterwards I decided I’d take advantage of the no sales tax weekend and get some new shoes, so I used my new phone and found some stores in the back bay, but of course I didn’t find anything there in my price range. Well I guess thats all for now, I’ve been slowly getting less busy so maybe I’ll fill in the gaps a bit in the coming weeks.

No spoilers to follow, I would not do that to you. Oceans 13 got 2 thumbs up from Richard Roper and whoever was filling in for Ebert this week. Man it suck Ebert’s been off the air for more than a year now with health problems, here’s hoping hes back sooner rather than later. Anyways I also recommend Ocean’s 13. It is way better than the second one; not as good as the first of course, but worth seeing. It was little faster and more straightforward than I would have liked, Roper described this as “tight” and a good thing. It was good to have it set in Vegas again; that and other things brought back a lot of the feeling of the first one. I agree with Roper that Al Pacino’s character could have been a lot darker. There was one cheesy part where they put up neon lighted numbers next to everyone’s heads; there had be a better way to do what they wanted to do than that. In the end it made me want to goto Vegas, and it made me want to watch the movie again, possibly in slow motion just to catch everything, definitely the same effects as the first movie.