My 1/2-Ass Movie Blog

 Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Michael O'Keefe, Charlie McDermott, Mark Boone, Jr. Dir. Courtney Hunt, Sony Pictures Classics, 2008 **** When I came to Mississippi from Cincinnati in 2006, I traded a bed in a homeless shelter for men for a bed in a singlewide trailer in a 'park on the storied outskirts of town. Before the homeless shelter I spent two weeks sleeping in a park, in unfinished basements, and walking the streets of Downtown all night to stay warm, nodding off for 10-20 minutes at a time in sheltered doorways. Friends helped me eat if I couldn't get to a soup kitchen. A local ministry gave away bagged lunches. I lived on bologna sandwiches on Wonder Bread and hot pockets cooked in c-store microwaves. At the trailer park, my girlfriend and I had an old Chevy Lumina for which our neighbor, her best friend, put up the down payment. The Chevy had no air conditioning. Average temperatures in Oxford, Ms. that August lingered in the high 90s, without the heat index, a...

 Voices of David Gordon Levitt, Emma Thompson, David Hyde Pierce, Brian Murray, Michael Wincott. Dir. John Musker & Ron Clements, Disney, 2002 I experience a perverse temptation, upon viewing a famous flop, to perform an exhaustive post mortem, drilling down to the minutia to explore why something which must have looked so promising in development failed so totally to deliver. It's overkill, though, and the flop, already a study in said, fails to merit that much effort. In the case of Disney's 43rd animated feature, the most expensive traditionally-animated picture in history (budgeted at $140M it took in $38M in the US, making it one of the most expensive flops ever), Treasure Planet's failure proves almost too easy to explain.  Utilizing traditional 2D animation over top of 3D digital, Treasure Planet's visuals and set pieces showcase Disney at near-top form. It's a breathtaking, beautiful film. Emma Thompson, South African voice actor Brian Murray (as John Si...

 I love movies. I collect dvds and watch movies almost daily. The object of the game is to see both as many movies and as many types of them as I can before I die.  Roger Ebert once said the movies are a machine for generating empathy. I agree with that. I watch movies to see other people's perspectives and experience. I go into movies wanting to be entertained, to be told a story, and hopefully a story told from a different point of view than mine.  Every movie I see gets full benefit of the doubt, suspension of disbelief, and sympathy for its characters until it ends. I do not watch movies with a checklist of my sociopolitical values in hand, keeping a running tally of all the ways it pushed my buttons by failing to conform to my values. Movies exist for my entertainment and enjoyment, but they are not about me. My values and I are not more important than the movie while I'm watching it.  I like Hollywood movies. Mainstream, middlebrow, middle class entertainments....