Well, I’m guessing no one else noticed these because they’re both anal and require obscure knowledge.

In The Virgin Suicides (which was a great movie, even better than Lost in Translation in my opinion) there is a scene of James Woods teaching a math class and he has pi to around 40 places posted above his head. Except it’s not pi, at least not after the first ten digits. Pi is 3.141592653589… and the movie shows something else entirely: 3.14159265376 blah blah blah. Obviously most people in set design probably didn’t do well in math, but you’d think someone could have looked it up.

Beth and I watched Jerry Maguire again this weekend, and I noticed a Brainiac CD in the foreground (so close to the camera it’s very blurry) of one shot inside Rene Zellwegger’s house. Well, I guess it’s actually Bonnie Hunt’s house, but that doesn’t make any more sense. Listen to some clips from the CD and tell me that the self-described, “Oldest 26 year old in the world,” or her divorced older sister would listen to that.

You’d think Cameron Crowe would notice that since he used to be a music writer. Maybe he did, or maybe he was a big fan, and he put the CD into that scene as a little joke. If so, do I win something for noticing?

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I saw Batman Begins and was extremely impressed with the script and the acting (not so much with the cinematography, more on that later). Every single actor in every bit part seemed to be either an Oscar winner (Michael Caine), a huge star (Katie Holmes), or both (Morgan Freeman). Christian Bale was possibly the least famous, least acclaimed actor in the whole movie.

While I was watching I counted four actors who had been nominated for Oscars. But I missed one and I got one of them wrong. It seems ridiculous but Gary Oldman has never even been nominated, and I didn’t recognize Tom Wilkinson or Ken Watanabe. So a summer action blockbuster has five actors who’ve been nominated for thirteen Oscars (five supporting and eight lead) and won three of the supporting awards. Michael Caine’s been nominated six times and won best supporting for both Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules, Morgan Freeman has been nominated four times and won for Million Dollar Baby, Tom Wilkinson was nominated for In the Bedroom, Liam Neeson for Schindler’s List, and Ken Watanabe for The Last Samurai.

Plus, Christopher Nolan got a nomination for best original screenplay for the first movie he directed, Memento. Why was that an original screenplay, by the way? I thought it was based on a short story by Jonathan Nolan.

I think it’s insane that the producers would pay for that kind of talent for small parts in a movie that could have made money even if it was brainless, poorly written, and badly acted. But I’m glad they did. Especially since Nolan’s script was so clever, weaving past, present, and hints of the future together in ways that must be satisfying to both the die-hard comic fans and also the laymen (the group I belong to).

Nolan was a great choice as writer, but was probably a poor choice for director. The fight scenes sacrificed comprehensibility for kineticism and then were so dark that most of the kinetic punch was lost anyway. All that is forgivable, though, if only because so many recent action films by accomplished directors do the same thing. I hated Gladiator, for instance, because the camera work was so fast and jerky that I could hardly tell what was going on. And that was from Ridley Scott, who should know better.

In the end, I loved the movie, and I can’t wait for the sequel. There will be a sequel, right? I don’t think the studio would bother reviving a dead franchise with so many famous faces if they weren’t going to make at least two more. But Beth thinks the allusions to a famous Batman nemesis at the end make this movie lead directly into the Michael Keaton one, ruling out any more Batman flicks. We’ll have to see, but I hope she’s wrong.

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This doesn’t scare me the way it does Bill. Amidala is going to die, and I’d expect them to milk that for all it’s worth. Hopefully Portman and Christensen have learned (or relearned) how to act since the last installment. If not, expect extreme suckitude.

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According to George Lucas, the final installment in the Star Wars movies (is it a sexilogy? Or just two trilogies?) will be much more violent than the all the previous episodes.

Filmmaker George Lucas says his upcoming sixth and final installment in the blockbuster “Star Wars” film franchise is the darkest and most violent of the series, and is likely to be the first movie in the six-film set to land a more restrictive rating than PG.

Of course, it’ll have to be, since the main plot point is Anakin becoming Darth Vader, and major subplots include the death of Amidala and most of the Jedi. That PG-13 is even more remarkable when you recall that the first movie had some dead bodies added to a scene so it would get a PG rating. Lucas didn’t want it thought of as a kids’ flick so the G had to go.

Why am I excited about a downer of a film? So far the best, by a long shot, Star Wars movie was The Empire Strikes Back, and it also happened the be the darkest of the bunch. Luke finds out he’s spawned from evil, and the movie ends with him losing his hand and Solo being frozen into a sculpture. As far as I’m concerned, the darker the better.

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I went into the movie theater with high hopes. Mander and Commaster (as Beth and I have been calling it since seeing a funny Letterman sketch) has been getting great reviews, and the trailers looked great. “They’ve got twice our numbahs, and twice our guns!” Russell Crowe should be the Captain in every one of the many swashbuckling epics we’re likely to see in the near future.

But nothing I’ve seen about the movie quite prepared me for what I saw. The sea battles were filmed with an amazingly violent energy. It’s unbelievable to see two ships circling each other while shooting dozens of iron balls through each others’ hulls. Wood splinters, men go flying, the doctor is cutting men open while mere boys dump sand at his feet so he doesn’t slip in the pool of blood. I didn’t think about just how close these ships would be to each other during a battle; they’re only two hundred yards apart, everyone on each ship can see precisely the destruction they’re inflicting on their foe.

But the movie isn’t just fast paced action, war was a much slower and more deliberate thing back then. Most of the time the crew of the Surprise could see their pursuer when it was miles and hours away, and that’s considered a sneak attack. The captain can issue orders to avoid the attack at his leisure and then have time to look at the opposing captain through his telescope. The amazing thing to me is that this kind of warfare was ever successful… the ships were out of contact with their land based superiors for months at a time, they didn’t have radar, very accurate maps, or even mechanical clocks (they were constantly using egg timers to judge their speed). How did they ever find anything to attack, and how does a navy function without any chain of command? The captain of a ship is a complete dictator as long as the ship is at sea, what happens if he goes insane or proves incompetent in some respect? Most of the crew besides the officers was drafted, and many of those are carpenters, or cooks, or from other professions that have nothing to do with water. Many can’t even swim, yet there they are, furling the sails while balancing on a rope one hundred feet above the water during a gale. It boggles the mind that empires like Britain’s could have been based almost entirely on their naval prowess.

There were also several subplots about sailing, cursed crew members, and the surgeon’s interest in naturalism and biology. The movie seemed a bit long and dragged at times, but I’m not sure which of these threads I’d cut, they were all very interesting and seemed to humanize the characters. Perhaps the director meant for us to be bored for minutes at a time, it’s a realistic depiction of sea warfare in the 18th century: hours and days of boredom puncuated by short periods of sheer terror and destruction.

Master and Commander is well worth the eight bucks to see it on the big screen, and I can’t wait to try it out on my Dolby 5.1 system at home. I also can’t wait to start reading Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels.

Update: I meant to point out the extremely refreshing anti-French bent of this film. Of course it’s about the naval battles between England and Napoleon, so I found myself yelling, “Take that, Frenchy,” throughout the movie. That really amused Beth.

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I’ll have to do this little review prematurely since I have yet to, and never will, watch all the extras. Just to watch the commentary tracks alone would take over twelve hours, and I don’t think I can deal with three hours on production design and makeup. So this will be about the added and extended scenes.

I waited for this edition of the movie because I loved the additions to The Fellowship of the Ring. I’m not always a big fan of super long director’s cut DVDs; I really liked the fact that when the Coen Brothers did a director’s cut of Blood Simple they actually cut a few seconds out of a scene because they thought the pace was too slow. But the new scenes in this movie weren’t quite as meaningful as those in the first, a lot was just comic relief (Merry and Pippin, mostly, and they are quite funny) or endless exposition (notably a scene where Gandalf basically sums up the whole plot of the movie in one breath. Peter Jackson said something like, “Ahh, the scene where we explained it all,” in the commentary track). Of course, that’s to be expected. Editors aren’t going to leave a bunch of really expensive battle shots on the cutting room floor.

That said, the new scenes did add quite a bit to the story. There’s one where Aragorn explains that he’s eighty-seven years old since all of the human kings are extremely long lived. The cool thing about the scene is that it’s played for laughs, he’s embarrased to admit his age to a woman. Another few scenes flesh out the death and burial of Theodred. They don’t give much information, but definitely add to the texture of the movie, making the culture of Rohan that much more real. And there was actually a bit of CG battle footage put back in. At the end of the battle for Helm’s Deep the orcs are retreating and run into the Fangorn, which has moved to cover the valley. The forest then comes alive and starts thrashing back and forth to the sound of orc screams. Pretty cool stuff.

Is the special edition worth twenty-five bucks? I think yes, and that’s without even seeing any of the special features on the second two discs. I didn’t buy it for the features, anyway, I bought it for the extended movie.

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Could several of you please buy The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers through my link? That way I’ll get a gift certificate to use towards my own copy.

What, you say you already bought the crappy, now worthless two disc version? Sucka.

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I saw Quentin Tarantino’s fourth film (he lets you know it’s his fourth in the credits) last night. I could have seen it on the IMAX screen, but their website didn’t detail which screenings were playing where, so we went to the earlier one. Like Gregg Easterbrook I thought this movie was disgusting, but, unlike the TMQ, I didn’t think it was morally disgusting, just visually and auditorily (a word?). Every wound seemed to be an amputation or a disembowlement, and every one of those was a firehose of blood either forced through a mister or just gushing all over the floor. One woman lost an arm, spun around spraying blood in a six foot radius, rolled around on the floor for twenty minutes, and lived.

Then there were the sounds. Countless people made this crazy gurgling noise when they were stabbed, and in one scene a young female bodyguard was thrown through a table and I swear it made the sound of bowling pins crashing. The soundtrack was great, but very different (which you’d expect from the RZA, of Wu-Tang Clan fame). I describe it as blaxploitation/spaghetti western/tribal drums fusion. Other songs on the soundtrack included a Zamfir (Zamfir!) and a mimimalist Nancy Sinatra track. Course, none of us should be surprised by anything Tarantino does musically at this point.

The plot is simple: Uma Thurman is the main character, known only as the Bride (her code name was the Black Mambo, but she doesn’t go by that anymore). Rather than just never give her a name, the movie bleeps out the two or three mentions of her Christian moniker. That was kinda weird, why not just be silent about it? I guess we also shouldn’t be surprised when Tarantino resorts to a gimic. But I digress…

The Bride was nearly killed on her wedding day, and the eight other members of her wedding party were killed. She wakes up four years later in the coma ward of a hospital and comes into a ridiculous vehicle with Pussy Wagon written on the tailgate. She trains herself to walk, going from telling her toe to wiggle to walking in thirteen hours, and heads to Okinawa to begin getting revenge.

From there it’s just non-stop knife and sword slaughter. Thurman makes a surprisingly good action hero, those long lithe limbs flying, those huge blue eyes effortlessly showing shock and anger. She doesn’t exactly look good throughout the movie, she’s usually covered in blood, but she is shot expressively, and she does a pretty good job with some wooden dialogue. I think Tarantino the writer has taken a vacation so Tarantino the director gets full use of that weird brain.

Whatever else you can say about Tarantino, he can shoot a fight like no other. Most directors try to do the insanely quick cuts and end up making every scene incomprehensible. Tarantino can seemingly cut anywhere, switch to any angle, and you still know exactly where you are and what’s happening. He combines chaotic excitement with easy visual comprehension, but he doesn’t seem to be having any fun anymore. Check out his crazed, white-boy dancing in this clip from the DVD of Pulp Fiction. Can you imagine him doing that on the set of Kill Bill or Jackie Brown? I didn’t think so. Stop taking yourself so seriously, pal!

Kill Bill was good but not great, and man am I glad they split it up. I don’t think I could have handled three and a half hours of this mayhem, and I know that Beth couldn’t have.

Update: Beth has her reaction here. Not as negative as I would have thought.

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I wasn’t at all sure what to expect from a romantic comedy made by the Coens (except that it’d be good). A classic screwball romance from the guys that brought us Raising Arizona, Blood Simple, and Fargo? You know it’s gonna be strange.

I haven’t always loved George Clooney. I liked him on E.R. alright, but I thought he leaned on that persona in his early movies. You know, head down, sheepish smile… it only goes so far. But ever since Out of Sight he’s been a much more confident actor. He’s just full of charm, and he has such snap to his line readings. I truly think he’s now our Cary Grant, and I nominate him to be the next James Bond.

Anyway, he’s great in this new movie, and he’s matched well by Catherine Zeta Jones. She’s another actor that started out with a promising role (The Mask of Zorro) but then didn’t really follow up on it. Now she finally does. She’s an excellent comic actress, and I can’t wait to see her in more roles like this one.

The plot of the movie is simple and enticing. Clooney is Miles Massey, the best divorce lawyer in Los Angeles, and he’s representing Marilyn’s philandering, rich but indebted husband. He manages to get him out of the marriage by finding Marilyn’s Tenzing Norgay. Massey’s theory is that this divorce is Marilyn’s Mt. Everest, and for every Edmund Hillary there is a sherpa to do the heavy lifting. Well, the sherpa is found, and he’s used (to hilarious effect) to rip apart the wronged wife’s profession of love for her husband.

Meanwhile Miles falls for Marilyn (of course). Can they get together? Can Miles even fall in love? You’ll have to watch to find out.

The only problem I had with this movie was its length. It could have been a good thirty to forty-five minutes shorter, there was plenty that wouldn’t have been missed. No bother, even when it dragged it was fun.

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I have to say I was surprised by the great reviews this movie received. I thought it would just a stupid, enjoyable comedy, and I guess that’s what it was. But I didn’t realize that it was directed by Richard Linklater, of Before Sunrise fame. So it was a really funny and well made stupid, enjoyable comedy. Plus it had Jack Black, who is really funny but hasn’t been in a whole bunch of good movies. Sure, he had a great bit part in High Fidelity and Orange County had its moments, but other Black movies have uniformly sucked.

The movie had a great supporting cast, too. I love Joan Cusack, although she was a little underused. Amy Sedaris was in the movie, too, playing (I think) a fellow teacher at the prep school, but I didn’t even recognize her. And Sarah Silverman has to be the best annoying, over-bearing girlfriend ever.

But Black and the kids were the stars. Especially good were Zach, the lead guitarist, Tamika, the overweight, underconfident backup singer, and Summer, the kiss up band manager and teacher’s pet. Beth really liked the tiny little blonde girl who was a backup singer, and I thought she was cute, too.

Of course I have to mention the soundtrack. It was awesome… lots of AC/DC, some Clash, and a Stevie Nicks (who I hate) song was really well used. The original number that School of Rock (the name of the band, as well as the movie) used for the battle of the bands was pretty cool, too, although it should have rocked out more on the verses.

All in all, a wonderful little movie. The movie frequently made me laugh, smile, and brought a few tears to my eyes, especially the triumphant battle of the bands. Everyone will enjoy this one.

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