Field of Deets

I'm a bit of a film geek. Some call me "movie-mon." I own about 105 DVD's. I possess a lot of extremely useless film knowledge. For instance, Tom Selleck was originally cast to play Indiana Jones. Edward Norton only did The Italian Job to finish out a contract, otherwise the company would have sued him. Vincent D'Onofrio gained 70 pounds for his role at Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket, a world record. Stupid Shit. I can own the Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon game. By the way, if you learn the cast of only a few of Bacon's movies, you can own that game. I suggest JFK, Sleepers, Mystic River, Apollo 13, and A Few Good Men. Many actors in those movies will get you to many other actors. Whatever. Where does this get me? Nowhere, except up late at night on a computer. Wonderful. Anyway, I was writing about movies because I read this piece today. It made me laugh, and all jokes are rooted in the truth. It makes a great point about Hollywood producing some really shitty movies. To find the really good films that become your all-time favorites, the ones that touch you, the ones you can watch over and over, you almost need to seek out the smaller budget or independent films, like Memento, The Usual Suspects, Moonlight Mile, Boondock Saints, Donnie Darko, The House of Sand and Fog, and any Coen Brothers film, at least for me. I mean, seriously, who is going to see "I, Robot" and walk out saying it is their favorite move of all-time?!? But how many people walked out of the theatre after seeing "The Shawshank Redemption," an independent film, and said, "That was the best movie I have ever seen."? I, Robot is going to be a box-office hit because of the star power of Will Smith and the CGI geeks who get a hard on over crazy special effects that aren't even relevant to the plot who see it just for that purpose. Take the movie Artificial Intelligence for example, it cost the studio 90 million to make and only grossed 78 million in the box office. This doesn't include the marketing campaign for it. And the movie sucked. Boondock Saints grossed 25 million on a 20 million dollar budget. But then you have really strange and sad cases, like in The Usual Suspects and Donnie Darko. Both of these movies are in imdb.com's Top 250 list of all-time, based on votes from users on the site. Suspects is at #18 with an 8.7 rating and Darko is at #91 with an 8.3 rating, but those films did horribly at the box office. Suspects cost 6 million to make and made only a little over one. Darko had a 4.5 million dollar budget and didn't even take home three-quarters of a million in its first release. So, do box office tell the tale as far as quality goes? Of course not. And I'm not saying all big-budget Hollywood movies are crap either. I liked Minority Report a lot; I own it. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy is another example, although I don't own those, yet. One company to keep an eye on is Focus Features. They have put out Gosford Park, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Traffic, Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn't There, 21 Grams, Lost in Translation, and many more. They put out quality stuff time and time again. Anyway there's a bit about that. Any movie I listed in this entry I recommend you rent on your next trip to the store, except for I, Robot and A.I.

Until Tomorrow