Movies...a few bits and bobs...

A few bits and bobs and different things at the movies...

• Flickchart - yet another website that lets you rank the movies that you've seen.  This one goes for the simple mechanism of ranking two movies against each other and putting them into one big ranking as you rank more and more movies.  At the moment, Chicago is my top movie, but I'll make sure that falls over time.  Hero and Raging Bull and Up and a bunch of others need to slide up.
• 30 Best Films of the Decade - I'm using this as a checklist of flicks to see over the next couple of months.
• Films Based on DC Comics - I was looking for a list of all the direct-to-DVD releases that DC had done in the past few years and came upon this Wikipedia list instead.  It's got what I wanted, just further down the page.  I'm kind of surprised at how many of these I have not seen, really.
• Dinner for Schmucks - I hadn't heard very many good things about this one before The Girl and I went to see it with the Calen clan this past weekend, so I didn't have very high hopes.  Turns out, however, that it's really funny.  Yeah, the Steve Carell character is pathetic and does integrate a number of actually sad, kind of touching notes throughout, but he's hilarious, too, so that more than makes up for the minor pathos.  And the ending is a little too neat and tidy, happy and hopeful, but it doesn't really matter because there were a bunch of times throughout when I - and The Girl and the rest of the theater - were laughing out loud.  No, it's not perfect, but it is funny.
• Tropic Thunder - meh...there are a few chucklesome moments throughout, but in general, I just found it at best chucklesome.  At worst, there are a number of scenes that were pretty boring.  I don't think I'll ever be seeing this one again.
• Wall-E - This leaves only Cars on my Pixar to-see list (amazing roster of films that they've put together, easily the most consistently excellent run of films from any studio, even above Ghibli in my view).  I was actually a little disappointed in Wall-E.  Yeah, it's really well done, and it's phenomenal that they were able to turn two almost non-speaking lead characters into an engaging story, but I felt that the environmental theme was heavy-handed and simplistic.  I get that Wall-E in an analog for our modern, disposable, sedentary society, but could you maybe make the people a little less helpless, a little less rotund, a little less tuned into their screens to the expense of the rest of their world, please?  And the fact that a single plant germinating - inside a refrigerator, no less - means that the entire world is ready to be repopulated seemed a little simplistic in light of the barely-visible sun, dust storms, and piled detritus all around the Earth to which humanity is returning.  I dug the film, yeah, but I don't think it's nearly the equal of Up or Ratatouille or the various Toy Stories.  I'll put it above A Bug's Life, but that's about it. Oh, and I loved Fred Willard's part.  Good stuff from him yet again.
• Top 10 Modern Magic Realism Movies -These are some excellent films.  I would've never thought to connect them into this theme, but I really like the concept.  They feel somehow similar thematically.  I would include LA Story instead of Run Lola Run - not that LA Story is necessarily better (it is one of my favorites and the second date that I went on with The Girl), but it's simply more magical.  I don't see that Lola is all that 'magical'.  And I'd've put Big Fish in instead of Adaptation except that Big Fish doesn't feel like it fits the 'modern' part of the label.