Tommy's Mindlessly Stupid Project, Volume 8

Warming my fingers up again.  I'm roughly 30,000 words into my project.  I'm keeping a little better pace with my nanowrimo goals than I'd thought I would, but I'm still about 10,000 words off that pace.  November's just a little too difficult for it.  The workdays creep up to 12 hour days.  I tell myself it's just an excuse, but way has to be given for reality.  I do manage to write, even if it's just a couple hundred words.

Day off today.  I'd like to put 2000 on the page today.

Anyway.  Just a finger warm up

Close Encounters of the Third Kind    (1977, D: Steven Spielberg)

At the end of the day, when I think of Spielberg's well-put-together flicks, I keep wandering back to this one.  Beautifully shot.  Fantastic, but in a way that it doesn't depart from reality.  And I love that the antagonistic forces are antagonists not because they're "bad guys," but are simply coming at the alien problem from a different viewpoint.  In a movie perhaps more rooted in science than any of Spielberg's other flicks, I like very much that faith in your fellow man is just as much a theme as any in the flick.

Cloud Atlas     (2012, D: The Wachowskis & Tom Twyker)

I love this movie.  I know it's flawed to the point of distraction with the prosthetics.  At times, trying to decide which actor is portraying whom can be distracting.  Still.  I consider this a beautiful achievement, and a good adaptation of a great novel.  I don't cry at movies much, and this is one of the very few that made me tear up that didn't involve a dog dying.

Club Dread     (2004, D: Jay Chandrasekhar)

I think I mentioned it with Beerfest, that Super Troopers is a home run.  This one is a solid triple, as a follow up from Broken Lizard.  It makes me smile.  Bill Paxton and MC Gainey end up having the best lines of the flick, especially:  You just shat in the one apple pie that knows how to shit back.

Any movie that manages to use shat as a verb will be alright in my book.  Forever.

Cobb    (1994, D: Ron Shelton)

Tommy Lee Jones revels in the role of Ty Cobb.  And that's why I've kept the movie.  I don't know why hearing Tommy Lee Jones say "Napoleon Lajoie" so much, but I do.  On the whole, though, the flick's an uneven mess.  I really, really disliked the whole hallucination scene at the Hall of Fame banquet, and the scene in Las Vegas with Cobb paying the girl for her silence is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, and maybe sad.  I couldn't help laughing, for some reason.  Maybe that's a point, too.  Is it assholish to say that there's too much of Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face, a cartoon lacking all subtlety, just like Jones's performance as Cobb.

I admit that my own conflicted feelings about Cobb come into play here.  My tendency from pro wrestling to root for the heel made me enjoy reading about the man.  Further reading has soured that feeling toward him, though.  Cobb was a shitheel.  As much as this movie wants to point out a horrible upbringing as reason for that, I still can't get behind the man.  And i will admit toward Tommy Lee's performance....there just might not have been a lot of subtlety to Cobb, either....

Maybe I'll sit and watch