Sad news...

Paul Newman has died at age 83. News just breaking.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/09/27/paul.newman.dead/index.html

Dammit. One of Hollywood's last truly great movie stars gone.

Movie plans for September.

Only three movies I want to see- Hamlet 2 (I meant to go last week, but was too busy); Burn After Reading (which looks fantastic!); and The Duchess (Keira Knightley in a costume drama. What's not to like?). Hopefully I'll get to see them. I don't know if The Duchess will play in my area.

Not much else coming. I'll have to be happy with DVDs for a while!

KM's Official End of Summer Wrap Up!

Summer is "officially" over, and I managed to squeeze in ten movies, two of them (Get Smart and Mamma Mia!) twice.

Here's my top ten in order:

1. The Dark Knight- awesome.
2. Mamma Mia! Lots of fun. Saw it twice- second time was a sing-a-long!
3. WALL*E- Brilliant
4. Pineapple Express- Funniest movie of the year.
5. Indy IV- flawed with a WTF? ending, but a great time anyway.
6. Tropic Thunder- an excellent send-up of movie making in general and war movies in particular.
7. Step Brothers- Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly are bad, bad, boys!
8. Get Smart- a fun movie, nice update of the T.V. series.
9. Hancock- entertaining, but the plot got confusing.
10. You Don't Mess With the Zohan- funny stuff.

Missed Iron Man and Kung Fu Panda. Still want to see Hamlet 2 and House Bunny.

Good summer quotes:

Pineapple Express-

Saul: Just sit back and get ready to enjoy some of the rarest weed known to mankind.
[he lights a joint and inhales]
Dale Denton: It's really that rare?
Saul: [exhales] It's, like, the rarest.
[he examines the joint]
Saul: It's almost a shame to smoke it. It's like killing a unicorn...with, like, a bomb.

Step Brothers-

Brennan Huff: I tea-bagged your drum set! *note- I didn't know what tea-bagging was before I saw this movie. I didn't want to know...*

Get Smart-

Siegfried: How do I know you're not Control?
Maxwell Smart: If I were Control, you'd already be dead.
Siegfried: If you were Control, you'd already be dead.
Maxwell Smart: Neither of us is dead, so I am obviously not from Control.
Shtarker: That actually makes sense.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull-

Col. Dr. Irina Spalko: No defiant last words, Dr. Jones?
Indiana Jones: I like Ike.

Indiana Jones: [jumping out of the car] Big damn ants, go!

Tropic Thunder-

Alpa Chino: [why he's in the movie] I had to represent. Cause they had one good role for a black man, and they gave it to Crocodile Dundee!
Kirk Lazarus: Pump your breaks, kid, that man's a national treasure.

Hancock-

Ray Embrey: Did you shove a man's head up another man's ass?
Hancock: [nods]

*that one had to be seen to be believed...*

Well, that's it for the summer of 2008. With Harry Potter moved to next July, there isn't much I'm looking forward to this fall.

That was fun...

I went to the Mamma Mia! Sing a Long on Monday. It was great! I wish more of the audience had actually been singing. I guess they didn't know all of the music. Everyone sang along with Dancing Queen, Mamma Mia, Waterloo, and Money Money Money, but I felt like I was the only one singing Honey Honey and Voulez-Vous.

"You can dance! You can jive! Having the time of your life...Ooooooooooo see that girl, watch that scene, diggin' the Dancing Queen!" *lol*

I always did like ABBA!

"Voice of the Movies" silenced...

Don Lafontaine has died. The King of Voiceovers did over 5,000 movie trailers and thousands more commercials over his career. What are movie trailers going to be like without his voice saying, "In a world..."? RIP.

http://us.imdb.com/news/ni0559639/

Sing along with Mamma?

I don't know if there's going to be a showing in my area, but I've heard that there will be Mamma Mia! Sing-a-Longs in some theaters. I hope I can find a theater! I'd love to do it. I had trouble not singing when I saw the movie last month.

Other movies- I will probably see Hamlet 2 on Monday. It looks like a total scream!

Heard the Thunder yet?

I saw Tropic Thunder today. It was awesome! Hilarious, though not as funny as Pineapple Express. It's a great send-up of war movies and movie making in general. Five actors are dropped into the jungle by their director to make their performances more realistic- when the director is killed by an old land mine, they have to try to make their way back to safety. They are captured by heroin producers who think they're actually DEA agents out to shut them down.

The beginning is a series of fake movie trailers to introduce the audience to the actors- Ben Stiller's Tugg Speedman is an action hero who wants to be taken seriously; Robert Downey Jr.'s Kirk Lazarus is an Australian bad-boy Oscar winner who is so method he has his skin dyed to play a black soldier; and Jack Black is the star of gross-out comedies who wants respectability. They're joined by a rapper-actor (named Alpa Chino- genius!) who is rather offended by Lazarus and a young newcomer who idolizes the older actors.

It's great fun to watch these five actors struggle with the reality of their situation. There's a lot of movie-style blood and gore, though it's used for laughs rather than to scare. The funniest part of the movie is the film's financial backer- played by an unrecognizable Tom Cruise. He's vulgar and selfish, and has no problem with letting his big stars die rather than pay ransom demands (to collect on insurance later). Nick Nolte also appears as the phony war hero whose book the film-in-progress is based on, and Matthew McConaughey is Tugg's agent.