Back in the blogging saddle again

I'm recovering surprisingly well from my oral surgery, and just in time too - there are a BUNCH of good prospects at the theater this weekend, all of which I plan to see in the next few days.

First, there's the movie with the best title of the season, The Men Who Stare at Goats. The reviews have been mixed, but I'm still there, because the trailer makes it look like a hoot, and because it stars George Clooney, whose presence lately has become like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. If he's in it, I'm pretty much assured the movie will be at the very least interesting. Since The Peacemaker way back in 1997, the only movie of his I've considered an out-and-out disappointment was Intolerable Cruelty, which was a rare miss for the Coen brothers.

And speaking of the Coens, I'm VERY hot to see their latest film, A Serious Man. It has very good reviews, but really, that doesn't matter. I could be told a film was a comedy about the manufacturing of HDMI cables, and I would go if I knew the Coens were behind it.

And finally, there's the new version of A Christmas Carol, directed by Robert Zemeckis. Zemeckis is/was another director whose movies I always saw no matter what they were about - and indeed, he hasn't made ANY movies that were complete misses by my reckoning. His weakest film is Back to the Future Part II, and even that sports a lot of ingenuity.

Still, I have my misgivings about his obsession with motion-capture animation, which he used in The Polar Express and Beowulf. It was also used in the underrated Monster House, which he produced but not not direct. I liked all those films to one degree or another, but I remain unconvinced it's any wave of the future. And I'm still FIRMLY convinced remaking Yellow Submarine in this process is a LOUSY idea. 

All that said, will I still see A Christmas Carol? Yes, but I will wait until Tuesday, when I can see it in IMAX 3D at a reasonable price. I always tell people that if you haven't seen The Polar Express in that format, you haven't really SEEN it - you've only looked at it. Big difference. I suspect the same is true of A Christmas Carol. Even Roger Ebert, who has been an opponent of 3D, gives the movie 4 stars, writing "Disney's A Christmas Carol" by Robert Zemeckis (and Charles Dickens, of course) is an exhilarating visual experience and proves for the third time he's one of the few directors who knows what he's doing with 3-D."

So that's what's on my agenda - how about yours? What have you seen lately?

Was I wrong about 'This is It'?

After Michael Jackson died in June, on my original blog, I expressed honest but pointed misgivings about the so-called "King of Pop" -  a post that caused quite a bit of consternation.

Then, when it was announced that the rehearsal footage was going to be made into a theatrical film, I recoiled. The whole enterprise seemed ghoulish to me, and I didn't want to see it.

But then the reviews came in for This Is It.

Wow. Granted, the Metacritic score isn't the greatest, but there are an awful lot of raves - including one from Roger Ebert, my favorite critic.  And this review by Michael Wilmington on Movie City News makes for fascinating reading, especially when he compares Jackson to Judy Garland, one of my all-time favorites:

It’s a fact that some great entertainers are only truly at home and only really live out their lives fully on stage (or screen) -- and chief among them were both Jacko and that other great child star turned incandescent show biz diva, Judy Garland. If Michael lacked that eventual maturity of a Bing, a Frank, or even a John and Paul, what he did have, in spades, was Judy’s supreme stage magic, and show biz chops --  in his case, a little more in his dancing (in a class by itself) than in his singing. He also had her overwhelming vulnerability and, it seems, some of her talent for self-destruction.
      
It’s fitting that, like Judy, Michael played in a movie musical based on The Wizard of Oz (The Wiz), though they gave him the wrong role. Instead of the Scarecrow, Jacko would have been much better as a male Dorothy. (Diana Ross should have been Glinda.) If Michael was no Elvis, he was no Ray Bolger either. But like Garland, he was the monarch of dreamland and master of the rainbow, child/ruler of the arena -- probably most alive when the band started playing and the fans started screaming.

Even though I was never a great fan of Jackson's, I did miss that era when what he did seemed so effortless and otherworldly. It looks like maybe the movie brings some of that back. I guess there's only one way to find out - I have to change my mind and see it after all.

What about you? Have you seen This is It? Will you? Have the reviews changed your mind? Oh, and who wants to bet that "two weeks only" run gets miraculously extended?