Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

While reading dooce’s reasons for why she stopped reading music reviews, I had a thought along the same lines, but for the movies.

A music reviewer runs into a problem that plagues most writers: coming up with new ways to say the same thing.

Why is that most of my movie review reading consists of checking the first half of the IMDB page for the movie?  (The part with title, genre, user rating, producer, and top of the cast).  Well, because that’s all I need to know about most of the movies that I get a chance to see (TV, rentals, and cinema).

Yes, most of these movies are either total crap or half crap.  They don’t amaze. They don’t make me think.  They don’t bring back the memories, and neither do they stimulate my imagination.  Most of these movies have a pretty straightforward story, shallow characters with long time coined phrases. You know the ones I’m talking about.

It’s a tough job being a critique for such movies.  You’ll indeed run out of words to describe them, and that will happen pretty fast.  I know, because I tried a movie blog ones.  It’s dead for a long time now, and I don’t have much will to revive it.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time now.  One thing that scares me a little bit is this move towards shorter time frames.  I’m guilty in participating, of course, but that makes it even scarier.

What I am talking about is this general move towards smaller pieces of information and entertainment.  We used to have printed books.  Those took a few days to read each.  Gradually, the majority of the population moved from books to movies.  Movies are much easier to consume, and then only take a couple of hours.  With the raise of the Web, the time frames got even shorter.  YouTube is one of the most popular entertainment resources on the Web, and it has a limitation of a 10 minute clip.  You just can’t upload anything which is significantly bigger than that (give or take a few seconds).   Now with mobile devices coming up strong, and popularity of short message services, such as Twitter and Jaiku, something tells me that we’ll go much under those 10 minutes of YouTube.  Of course it won’t happen in a day or two - I’m talking a general trend here.

Now imagine the reviewers going in step with the progress.  Writing a book review was simpler ( I guess).  Movies got tougher, because there are so many of them and because they are so much alike.  YouTube clip reviews turned into tiny user comments and star ratings.  You just can’t talk about a few minutes of video for hours I guess (again).  What will happen with a reviews of Twitter messages and tiny mobile video clips?  They’ll disappear.  It’ll be easier and faster to watch the original rather than spend time on the review.

Of course, it won’t all turn out that bad.  It’s just I’m having one of those pessimistic days…

It’s been a slow news day, so here is something to make you smile on this Sunday afternoon - martial arts video clips from one Indian movie - Hebetudinous:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snJYagxgx5U
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNxBdG4TZT8
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_7208QRX6Q
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-InxPME85eM
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zngt8OdXWSo

Intense, beautifully choreographed, bloody as hell, and, above all, hilarious…

Via exler.

If you think men don’t cry, you’re out of touch with reality.  If you think men never cry in the movies, you are terrible wrong again.  Check out this article, and scroll through Digg comments to the original post.

When it comes to crying the cinema, I have to admit, I’m among the wettest people ever.  The list of movies that make me cry is long that it makes no sense in compiling it.  It’s probably easier to name movies that didn’t make me cry.  And even with those, it’s probably that I haven’t seen them enough times…

My mother’s New Year present to me was a DVD with Kim Ki-duk’s “Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom” (better known as “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring”). I didn’t have either time or the right mood to watch until today.

Directed by: Ki-duk Kim
Genres: Drama
Cast: Yeong-su Oh, Ki-duk Kim, Young-min Kim, Jae-kyeong Seo, Yeo-jin Ha, Jong-ho Kim, Jung-young Kim, Dae-han Ji, Min Choi, Ji-a Park, Min-Young Song
IMDB raintg: 8.1
My rating: 7.0

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Usually, I am not that interested in watching The Oscar. Usually they are pretty boring. And usually I don’t agree with both nominations and awards.

But this time I had two reasons to watch the show.

The first one was Jon Stewart of The Daily Show fame. He is hilarious. This is the only TV show that I have watched almost religiously in my life. I missed him already, because he didn’t appear on the show for the few days (probably because of his preparations for the Oscar ceremony). I needed my humor fix.

The second reason was “Crash“. I was very surprised to see it nominated. If you don’t remember, I reviewed it earlier last year. It was one of the best movies I’ve seen ever. And it was one of the most underpromoted movies too.

In case “Crash” would have won any awards I could read about it the next day, so I didn’t have to see the show for that. What I wanted to see the show for was the reaction of the audience if wouldn’t have won anything.

I’m glad to report that I both enjoyed watching the ceremony (Jon Stewart was as good as I expected him to be, or even better) and “Crash” won a few Oscars, including the “main” one - The best motion picture of the year.

My faith in Oscar awards and ceremony shows might just get a little stronger…