My dad dragged me to Dune when it was first released; I was just a kid and the sci-fi bored me, but I knew Sting, so every scene he was in was a high point for me, bad line readings and all. Also, Virginia Madsen. Sigh.

I also rented Alpha Dog last night, mostly to see if Justin Timberlake can act. He was quite good, as were the rest of the mostly young cast. The movie itself faltered towards the end. I could have done without the sequences of Bruce Willis and Sharon Stone (in a fatsuit) talking about their children (murderer and murdered, respectively) . It was just wholly unnecessary and interupted the flow of the plot. I realize the story was over at that point, but I think they could have skipped straight to the 'what happened to' part.

My other thought is that Emile Hirsch looks like a younger, thinner Jack Black.

Ah Dune. The Toto score has to be my favorite overwraught music. The set desing was seriously fucked up, when I think sci-fi i don't think Baroque. My Lynch-obsessed sister made me watch this.

In that vein Logan's Run. Everything so wonderfully bad and so great about 70's sci-fi. The blatant mall sets, the horribly dated 8-track aesthetics, richard Jordan camping it up, miles of exposition, horrible synth/therimen score and sci-fi modifyers. and all the while a quite sexy movie.

Honestly though, how long could sheltered people such as those really survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland? The demmented freezer cyborg picked off all the runners who preceded Logan. It would be like the pioneers dying at an average age of 29. If I knew I'd take the 30 years of hedonism... and run like a coward once my hand crystal started blinking.

And the cats! Can't forget the cats! That movie was my introduction to Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

God, the cats. The Peter Ustinov scenes were so interminable, I actually paused the DVD twice to take a walk just so I could get through them. Logan's Run seemed like exactly the kind of movie I would like since I'm a sucker for pre-Star Wars '70s sci-fi (Soylent Green, Rollerball, Phase IV, Silent Running). And the first half has everything you could want in '70s sci-fi: Hooded cloaks! Clunky computers! Loud, clashing colors! Incomprehensible jargon! And then they leave the dome, and Peter Ustinov goes on and on about his damn cats, and I wandered off somewhere, with the DVD still prattling on. As luscious as Jenny Agutter was, I just couldn't take it.

I did realize, however, just what a blatant rip-off Michael Bay's The Island was. It's basically a rewrite of this movie. Except without so much about cats. Which may, in fact, be an improvement.

I'm having myself a little Claude Rains festival (and raging impotently against the heavens that so few of his films are available) so last week it was Mr Skeffington, yesterday was Here Comes Mr Jordan (in which he's suitable urbane but has his hair died an unattractive white). I've got more on the way courtesy of Lovefilm but tonight mght just have to be The Adventures of Robin Hood because it's simply the most fabulous film ever made and you can never see it too many times.

What I'm sayin! My friends have recoiled in horror at my hatred of Dune, and I wonder how they could stand to watch it! All that VO whispering and camera glaring, ugh. I tried to read the book, too, but I... I just couldn't. In my mind all I could hear was a husky whisper: "Spiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice." Too distracting.

I live in one of those crumbling towns where the theaters have 20 year old sound systems and stadium seating is something you can only find in the, uh, stadium. And yet, I've been tempted to go finish out the trilogy just because I have a girl-crush on Tia Dalma. :)

Small wonder - that's how the book is written, too. Dune is the perfect example of why slavish devotion to source material is not necessarily a good thing.

See also Chris Columbus' two entries in the Harry Potter series.

I'm currently watching The DaVinci Code (I cancelled my membership with Blockbuster Online two weeks ago and they're still sending me movies from my queue).

It's not very interesting (but again, neither was the book, aside from my amusement with the particular dots Dan Brown chose to connect and how he connected them).

But, amid all the expository scenes of expository dialogue of expository flashbacks, one thing is clear - in any other setting, I would love to listen to Tom Hanks tell me stories. His reading of the tale of the Knights Templar was wonderful on its own, even if it's one more scene of no one actually doing anything.

Agreed. I've enjoyed the books, but seriously, books aren't movies. There are things that work when imagined that suck in actuality. (I also think they're stupid to make these movies before all the books are done... instead of being able to create one long sweeping series that has cohesion and draws on the ENTIRE story, we instead get directorial hiccups and halting narrative. Of course, I'm one of those jackasses that thinks Jackson & co. improved on that old dodger, Tolkien, so what do I know?)

I almost felt sorry for Columbus upon the release of the first HP movie. The film was so obviously constructed with a laborious sense of pageantry, as each scene offered its own postured and dramatic unveiling of yet another moment from Rowling's book. It would have to be tough to direct a film based on such a staggeringly popular book series, and perhaps nearly unprecedented when you consider the synchronicity between the release of the books and the movies. (Lord of the Rings, for instance, had several decades to mellow as literature before Peter Jackson came along.)

One time I was watching Dune and I fell asleep on the couch, and I started having dreams that were basically narrted by dialogue in the movie. Also, I woke up when the credits started showing, with the characters fading in and out. So the whole trippy aspect was magnified.

I woner if David Lynch because he's afraid of them being emotional. Because when he keeps things simple like The Elephant Man and The Straight Story, they can be heartbreaking.

I will admit that Columbus has made livelier movies than those two, which I've seen described as "staged readings". But he's never really connected with me with anything (though I admit I missed Adventures With Babysitting in its first run, and thus was too old to connect the way everyone else did). My personal favorite from his ouvre is Bicentennial Man, but even that isn't a movie I'd add to my collection and watch again. I still don't get who saw what in his resume that made him the choice to direct Rent.

All this to say, I think even with decades to cool the literary heels of the novels, Chris Columbus still wouldn't have made a very good HP movie.

When my wife and I were first dating, we were "watching" X-Files reruns. It was 1AM, and I'd had my college graduation ceremony that morning, followed by a long day on the beach afterwards, and I was exhausted. So I was mentally asleep even as my mouth continued kissing on automatic and my ears continued to process Mulder and Scully's conversations, and I remember the dreams I had being extremely bizarre, even as I knew I was dreaming, but sadly I can't really remember anything.

No clint Howard either!

I have a feeling he's going to be starving for roles now because of Jackie Earle Haley, who in Little Children showed himself to be a darker, Batman Begins version of Clint Howard.

Holy crap, you're right! Is it possible that Ron Howard's directing was even more unimaginative and pedestrian than normal, that I was catatonic and didn't notice that fact?

This movie is so dead to me now.