March of the Morgul Host.


With Return of the King less than a month away, several all-new spoilerish pics have shown up online, including this shot of Minas Morgul emptying for war and this striking picture of the event that kicks off the third film. If you haven’t read the books, leave that second link alone. I wouldn’t have posted the other pic here if (a) it weren’t so gosh darn pretty and (b) Minas Morgul didn’t feature so prominently in the RotK trailer (and FotR.)

Hell hath no fury.

The trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Hellboy, one of the more eagerly awaited fanboy projects out there, is now online. I’m actually not all that familiar with the comic, so to my mind this could go either way. It’s hard to go wrong with John Hurt against souped-up Nazi evil, but some of the effects look mighty CGI. We’ll see.

This Film is On.

As an hour’s distraction, I’ve created a central clearinghouse for movie reviews on GitM and added it to the sidebar at left. Unfortunately, some of the older ones (written during the hand-coded Geocities days) may be hard to find, but they’re in there…somewhere. I’ll also probably try to reconstruct the 10-point ratings at some point, but that’s an improvement for another day.

Unscripted K-os?

Max of Lots of Co. points the way to this intriguing article on the pitfalls that have befallen K Street. I finally saw a few episodes at a friend’s house and, while James and Mary came off well, I thought the show suffered from a few strategic errors. For one, as this story points out, the only people who will recognize (or will care about) all the uncredited cameos are the same ones who’ll realize how ultimately fake the show is. For another, the show’s greatest strength was that it seemed news-dependent, but…if you have no news for a few weeks, trouble ensues. (Hence, the not-very-engaging personal subplots that have taken over.) Still, I think there’s definite potential for a show like K St.…perhaps Soderbergh & co. should try a second run a little closer to election time, if HBO wills it.

Pacific Heights.

So I caught Peter Weir’s Master and Commander last night and, if you have little trouble discerning the differences among a gaggle of grubby British salts (One looks like Eric Idle, another talks like Captain McAllister, and who knew Pippen was coxswain material?) and don’t go in expecting the action-fiesta promised in the ads, you should come out satisfied. Like pretty much all of Weir’s other films, Commander is an extremely competent piece of work, in some ways even masterful. And, while Crowe’s Captain “Lucky Jack” Aubrey is yet another variation of the strong, silent type he’s done several times elsewhere, he nevertheless commands attention and seems plausible as the glue that holds the creaky H.M.S. Surprise together.

I’d never read any of the Patrick O’Brian novels, so I can’t attest to the movie’s literary veracity. But the historical details seemed right to my landlubber’s eye, and I thought the languid, episodic pacing of the film — which some may find boring, particularly after Jack Sparrow’s romp earlier in the year — helped to convey the rhythm of life at sea in the Napoleonic era, when it took forever and a day to get from place to place. Speaking of which, there’s not all that much suspense about where the film’s going — like the crew of the Surprise, you can see the destination long before Commander gets there. But most of the detours, from the woeful tale of an accursed Jonah to the pre-Darwinian excursions in the Galapagos, are gripping in their own way. In the end, I left Master and Commander feeling like I’d sat through a longer film, but also feeling that I’d traveled somewhere. And while I doubt Commander will spawn many sea epic sequels, nor do I think I’d want to see this film again anytime in the very near future, kudos go out to Peter Weir & crew for making a picture as engrossing and transporting as this one.