I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

WHAT MOVIE SHOULD I WATCH NEXT WEEKEND?

Early April's not quite the summer movie season, but, in recent years, it's been getting some spill-over where films that might once have been released in "summer" (meaning, in movie terms, from Victoria Day/Memorial Day weekend through to early July) are now released in April, or even late March. In recent years, the original Matrix, The Core, and Hellboy, to name just three such films, were all released in early spring.

So let's see what movie choice I'll be making next weekend.



Sin City, Robert Rodriguez's film based on Frank Miller's comic book. It's a neo-film noir set in a hyper-stylized gangster city and has several loosely connected stories of hit men and strippers and such who like to knock off each other in stylish ways. Most of the locations in the city are computer-generated to look as much like a comic as possible, and the film is presented in black and white with a handful of colour highlights, which is true to the comic apparently. This is the movie nearly everyone in the RottenTomatoes.com forum is making a big fuss about.

So, what else is there next weekend?



D.E.B.S., where the S.A.T. also contains certain questions, where, if you give the right wrong answers, it shows hidden abilities to think outside of the box, and the government uses the correct incorrect test scores to enlist schoolgirls into an elite top secret squad of undercover crime fighters. And some of these schoolgirls are in love with each other.

So, what would I rather watch?

Well, duh, if you read this blog, you know me... D.E.B.S., obviously! I mean, it sounds almost like a combination of Charlie's Angels, and I'm one of the few people who love those films, and Super Gals!, which is my favourite anime series of the past decade or so. And, you add in a little Haruka Tenou and Michiru Kaiou a.k.a. Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune chaste lesbian action? My god, it almost sounds like exactly the sort of movie I'd write. Except, screw movies, this idea's good enough for a series! Three cheers for campy fun!

And I must point out that the high school girls are all played by actresses in their twenties, so a thirty year old man liking this film is not creepy in any way.

I dunno about Sin City... this film has been hyped to no end on RottenTomatoes.com, and I'm allergic to hype.¹ And it looks like one of those films made for modern comic book fans, the pretentious ones who take comics far too seriously and call them "graphic novels" or, even more pretentiously, "sequential art", and prefer it when their comics are dark and gloomy and unrelentingly grim. And I haven't been sold on the "look" of this film; I think it looks like a cheesy music video. And I'm just not in the mood to see a bunch of gangsters and other lowlifes offing each other, no matter how well it's acted. Maybe the assessment of the film is unfair, maybe it's something I'd watch and I'd find that I'd enjoy it more than I anticipated, like Kill Bill. Just I'm in no rush to find out.

Both of my brothers seem to want to see Sin City, though, so maybe it has some merit.

I'd probably watch Steamboy if it made it to Ottawa, but it only expanded by seven screens this weekend, and none of those screens were in the nation's capital. Apparently, the Paramount in Toronto isn't even showing it anymore, not that I had any plans to travel to Toronto in the near future, but this does not bode well for it showing anywhere else in Canada other than the predictable screening at Fantasia in Montreal this summer.

¹ Yes, yes, I'm hyped about Star Wars Episode Three: Revenge of the Sith, but the unfairly maligned prequels are so widely hated that this film's anti-hype on RT more than evens out they hype. It's almost the rebellious thing to do to actually like the prequels, so I consider myself to be part of a Rebel... damn, what's that other word? It's on the tip of my tongue. Rebel Thingy of People Who Work Together to Advance a Common Goal or Cause.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 11:45 PM