Ovation channel. Cabaret is on in a few minutes. Be there! Or be square. Word.

I've a high tolerance for nonsense but this was utter tripe.

Yeh, doesn't look as good as Cabaret.

it wasn't, which is really saying something, seeing as how much i fucking hate Cabaret.

EDIT: I overstated things with the word 'hate', but it's a film i really really don't like.

Back To The Future

just saw The Big Lebowski for the first time and now I'm watching NIRVANA: LIve at Reading

kids return which gets an 8/10
and ghost in the shell which ALSO gets an 8/10!

I can't say what the point was. Especially since it's the same exact thing. But truth be told, I liked the "remake" better.

I thought it was good, but... well, it wasn't really scary. And the acting was really bad. Like, I had trouble suspending disbelief during a lot of the dialogue cuz it felt like a script being read. But the low budget attack scenes at night did look cool. Oh well.

Really? Why? I suppose part of the appeal for me is the huge crush on Liza I got when I saw it when it came out. I was 17. The rest of the school year I chased one of my sister's friends who I thought looked like Liza.

But I came to appreciate much more about the movie. I normally don't like musicals at all, but I like how this one works. You have the Cabaret setting, which is the natural outlet for the movies music, and at the same time, the Cabaret setting mirrors what is happening on the outside, not only in the characters but also in Germany.

I dunno. I think Joel Grey's performance is genius, Liza is relatively stunning, and Michael York's performance is spot on. I also like the "feel" for Berlin in the 30s that the movie captures.

I think in my case it's more a result of personal circumstances: that I had a girlfriend who was obsessed with Cabaret and made me sit through it countless times while endlessly declaring her affections for Michael York, who I always felt looked like a bit of a ponce. Equally subjective but I've never understood the whole thing about Liza Minelli, either. Of course, this is coming from a man who wants to marry Illeana Douglas.

Well, that would kill it for anybody. I would never make somebody I loved sit through something just because I liked it, especially over and over.

I thought Liza was cute back then. Of course, she was a lot younger then, and I was a teenager with raging hormones.

As for York, I get the ponce. But I also think that's what makes him fit the role. Ever see anything on Christopher Isherwood? (York's character is modeled, of course, after the character in Isherwood's Berlin Stories, in which the character is very closely modeled on Isherwood, who even back in the 1930s was an uncloseted homosexual and rather ponce-like.)

Yeah, I can't diagree with any of that. I just have this unfortunate habit of letting things become tainted by association.

Anyway, I finally watched Quantum of Solace on Boxing day and was really disappointed. I'm just not feeling Daniel Craig as Bond at all.

That isn't a good Bond movie. Casino is worlds better. Craig is Bond, but Quantum sucked.

I've never read a Bond book. Are you saying Craig is Bond because he's closer to Fleming's original conception of him?

Perhaps. Though Fleming created Bond as a spoof originally. He's closer to the first Bond movie, and he's also better than that. Mostly it's that the movies are better--that is, they've done away with the outlandish gadgets, the supervillians, etc., and are making them grittier and more "real." There's much more emphasis on intrigue; Casino Royale would have made a good spy/mystery movie no matter if it was Bond or somebody else. Casino Royale is the ONLY Bond movie aside from From Russia with Love that I thoroughly enjoy from beginning to end. Quantum tried to follow this up but went way overboard on action.

Yeah, I suppose I just prefer Bond when it's a bit more tongue in cheek. Once it starts taking itself at all seriously it just seems all the more preposterous to me. I like the grittier side of espionage (Smiley, Harry Palmer, etc) but with Daniel Craig as bond (and the utterly annoying Judi Dench as M) it seems to be moving into a kind of no mans land, neither one thing nor the other.

Hmm, see I think the opposite, that with Craig, the Bond movies are moving into that grittier side. Though I have to be careful to qualify that it's not Craig necessarily but the storylines and the way the films are being made. Far as I'm concerned, you could put anyone who looks halfway good in there and these would still work. Craig has the advantage of being muscular and tough looking, and he can manage a sort of coldhearted look, enough that you believe he really could kill someone with his hands. And Craig is just an actor who seems more willing to get dirty than previous Bonds. Pierce was way too much of a dandy.

See Brosnan was maybe my favourite Bond of them all, largely because of his aloof knowingness throughout the whole thing. I suppose it all ultimately comes down to what Bond actually means to a given person. I suppose in that sense, the genius of the Bond franchise is its ability to accomadate so many different interpretations. As such, the fact that some might favour one interpretation over the other becomes ultimately beside the point. Bond endures, regardless.