Tag Archives: Morgan Freeman

Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D

Today was supposed to be disc golf day, but then Eric’s kid was sick and the weather was drizzly. Not to worry, we found a kid-watcher and the weather turned into a downright beautiful 60s extravaganza, so that part worked out okay, except for where I played really badly. But that’s not the point. The point is how, in the meantime, we headed off to the IMAX to see the Tom Hanks produced Magnificent Desolation, which is all about taking a bunch of astronaut quotes and voicing them with famous actors (including, obviously, Morgan Freeman) while Tom Hanks narrates and the astronauts keep kicking moon dust right in your face!!!

No, seriously, it’s pretty cool. Lots of magnificent, if desolate, scenery to gaze upon. Plenty of 3D, even if a lot of it was screen with data superimposed over the moonscape. A sidebar on how the landings themselves were faked. An examination of how they might have dealt with an emergency situation if they had one. (They did not; everything was pretty much blowjobs and funnel cakes.) Glimpses of the future. But mostly, people walking around on the moon in 3D. Let’s face it. If you go for that at all, the visuals with a completely silent soundtrack would have been sufficient to cover the price of admission.

La Marche de l’empereur

First of all, let there be no doubt that this falling behind thing is of the suck. It makes it really hard to adequately review serviceable-yet-mediocre fare when you’re a week or more after the fact. So, you’re asking yourself (or at least would be, if my titling scheme was not so utilitarian), what movie have you finally gotten around to seeing after a month out of the theaters? The Cave, surely. At the least, Red Eye, or maybe that Brothers Grimm thing, right? Well, no, instead, March of the Penguins.

There are two things to understand that will make sense out of this travesty of movie-going. 1) I do have some amount of interest in learning about things as well as stuff, and sometimes just for the sake of knowing things, not merely because of all the chicks at cocktail parties who hang on my every word and inevitably pay for the cab back to their respective places afterwards. 2) I really dig penguins. I mean, a lot. I blame Opus.

Anyhow, worthwhile movie? Yes and no. My instinctual reaction while watching was to assume that the Discovery channel is going to get a lot more advertising money over the next quarter or so. This is both its success and its failure. Excellent job of providing concise and comprehensible information about the world out there where most of us can’t afford to be. Terrible job of escaping the boundaries of a made-for-TV documentary. The only things that truly distinguish it from one of a hundred other such documentaries that have and will air on basic cable this year alone are a) a massive advertising budget and b) probability of winning an Oscar. Unless I’ve fabricated this into my days later memory banks, there were actual commercial break fades.

I forgot c), though. Probably, if this had not been theatrical, you’d have had Patrick Stewart narrating rather than Morgan Freeman. Of course, maybe this is his way of retiring and he’s hitting all of the big documentaries from here on out. Between this and War of the Worlds, he’s already off to a big start.

Glory (1989)

Another movie night just past, and thusly do I dash off another quick correspondence. Although there are not always themes, the theme this week was ‘movies with Denzel Washington’, and the one that got picked was Glory. (Actually, part of that is a lie; it was picked last week but not watched in favor of general jabbering. So, this week instead. Now You Know!)

The thing I don’t like about period pieces are all the touches of accuracy. I’d rather not hear the soldiers sitting around their campfires or the officers in their captured mansions playing tootley music of the type I associate with Yankee Doodle Dandy. I understand that something being right is supposed to immerse me in the moment, but having to contemplate how bad peoples’ taste used to be ends up jerking me out of it.

My bitch out of the way, this was a really good movie. I mean, it was a really good movie all on its own, about what people find to be worth fighting and dying for, about the way that officers and enlisted men can, should, and do interact, and to a much lesser extent than the title would have you believe, about what honor and what accolades are to be found on the field of war. Then, on top of that, you’ve got the shades of our racist past that I find it all too easy to forget probably still exists even today, when I’m not busy contemplating it (like now). I can’t say exactly why, nor what it says about my psyche, but I always tend to enjoy more a movie that makes me mad because the characters are being so stupid about a question that I find it hard to remember wasn’t always long ago answered. Probably I just like the adrenaline rush of being angry, though.

Also, there should be more movies with Ferris, Morgan Freeman, and Westley all sharing screen space.