I love movies, and I love watching movies on DVD in the comfort of my own home.  Here are some of the great DVDs I’ve watched recently:

Heist and State and Main — I’m in the midst of a sort of David Mamet retrospective, tearing through a number of his earlier works, many of which I haven’t seen in years!  I’ll be writing a more detailed piece about my journey into Mamet-world in a few weeks, so keep your eyes open for that.  Next up, I’ll be watching Spartan (which I’ve only seen once and am eager to revisit) and The Spanish Prisoner (possibly my favorite Mamet film after the incomparable Glengarry Glenn Ross.  ”Will you go to lunch?!!”)

Wonder Boys — What a masterpiece.  Having just completed the summer of Robert Downey Jr. (in Iron Man and Tropic Thunder), it was a lot of fun to re-watch his magnificent turn in this film.  Tobey Maquire is also great, as a talented but rather messed-up youngster.  (Its sort of bizarre to watch Maguire and Downey Jr. in this film, having seen them together in one of the fake trailers that preceded Tropic Thunder.  If you’ve seen it, you know exactly which one I mean!)  The always terrific Frances McDormand is quietly touching as the university chancellor torn between two men.  But this film belongs to Michael Douglas.  He plays college professor Grady Tripp, a man who once wrote an extraordinarily successful first novel and has seen his life slowly crumble as he has struggled, over many many years, to write a follow-up.  Wonder Boys is a coming-of-age story — for Maguire’s character, and also for Douglas’ Grady.  Its a rare movie that can balance deep laughs and powerful poignancy, and Wonder Boys just nails it.  I give director Curtis Hanson a lot of credit for that, as well as Steve Kloves for the sharp screenplay.  This movie sits next to Igby Goes Down on my DVD shelf.  The two films have a lot of similarities, both in terms of tone as well as the themes explored.  If you’ve seen and enjoyed Wonder Boys but have never seen Igby, I encourage you to check it out.

City Slickers — Boy, I haven’t seen this movie in YEARS!  I remember going to see the sequel, The Legend of Curly’s Gold, in theatres when it came out and being so disappointed that I don’t think I ever watched the original again.  The film is a bit dated — its not quite as timeless as When Harry Met Sally — but it was a lot of fun to return to Billy Crystal’s little ode to suburban men looking to find themselves.  Some of the jokes are a bit groan-inducing, and some of the characters are a little flat (I think Helen Slater is adorable, but she really doesn’t have much to do here other than be cute).  But there are still some moments of great comedy, and also some moments of surprising sweetness (even though some scenes are a bit heavy with the schmaltz.)  The late great Bruno Kirby’s monologue about the best and worst day of his life is really powerful.  Just terrific.  And what can I say about Curly himself, played by Jack Palance?  Still gold.

Spaced — A twelve episode British TV series that launched the career of Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), its about two twenty-something friends (Tim, played by Pegg, and Daisy, played by Jessica Hynes nee Stevenson) who wind up sharing an apartment.  I’ve been reading about this show for positively YEARS, so when it finally was released on DVD in the states last month I snatched it up.  I’m only a few episodes in, but already I’m really enjoying the balance of silly comedy, obscure pop-culture references, and over-all bizarre goings-on. 

The X-Files: Season One — In between watching episodes of Spaced, as well as our regular dose of The Daily Show (which has been PHENOMENAL these past few weeks, covering the Democratic and Republican conventions and all of the fall-out that’s happened since then), my wife and I have been making our way through the first season of The X-Files.  (Very slowly, since we started LAST September!  But we’ve been picking up steam recently, watching much of the latter half of the season in the past 3 weeks.)  My father introduced me to the X-Files mid-way through the first season, and I quickly became a die-hard fan of the show, following it all the way through to the final episode.  During the peak seasons of the show, I watched and re-watched the re-runs endlessly, trying to sort out all the different storylines and hunt for hidden clues and meanings, and to enjoy each scary, creepy episode.  But by the end of the show’s run, I was pretty down on it.  Since then, with the exception of one or two viewings of the first X-Files movie, I don’t think I’ve watched a single episode.  So it is with great delight that I’ve been re-watching the first season.  There’s a lot of greatness to be found, starting right with the terrific pilot. There’s also the haunting episode “Beyond the Sea” about the death of Scully’s father… the creepy “Squeeze” and “Tooms” episodes about the liver-eating mutant… the intense “Ice,” in which Mulder and Scully are trapped in the arctic while the members of their team slowly are driven mad by parasitic worms… “E.B.E.” in which the show’s famous mythology about a conspiracy to conceal the existence of extra-terrestrials begins to take light… and of course the stunning season finale “The Erlenmeyer Flask,” in which a surprising number of important characters and concepts that the show would later explore in great depth are introduced, most notably the shape-shifting Bounty Hunter.  Interestingly enough, all of those above episodes were shows that I had on tape, and had seen tons of times.  It was great fun to see them again after a number of years away.  But there were also a LOT of stand-alone episodes throughout the season that I don’t think I’ve seen for well over ten years… and THOSE were a LOT of fun to watch as well.  The quality varied as the writers, directors, and actors all worked to figure out the style and tone of the show, and what sorts of stories they wanted to tell.  But getting to watch so many episodes that I really didn’t remember… it was the next best thing to actually having a brand new series of the show to enjoy!  Let me close by mentioning one final item that really pleased me.  For all of the (I think very valid) criticism that the writers never really had an over-arching plan for the show’s “mythology” — that they were making it up as they went along, leading to the show’s finally collapsing under the weight of all the stories and lose ends that ultimately went nowhere or were never explained — it was fun to see a lot of notions introduced very early in the first season that wouldn’t be fully explored until much later in the show.  I’ve already mentioned the appearance of the alien Bounty Hunter in the season finale.  But my favorite example is a scene at the end of the very second episode.  Mulder, desperate for some sort of validation of his work and his beliefs, asks his mysterious informant (nicknamed Deep Throat), “They’re here, aren’t they?”  To which Deep Throat replies “Mr. Mulder, they’ve been here for a long, long time.”  That statement wouldn’t make any sense until years later, when the first X-Files movie (released between the fifth and sixth seasons of the show) revealed that extra-terrestrials had first visited earth during pre-historic times, and much of the alien weirdness that Mulder and Scully had been chasing was related to that first contact, 10,000 years before they were born.  I was surprised and impressed to see those ideas layered into the show at such an early stage.  Now I’m excited to get to Season Two, which has always stood as my favorite season.

Its always fun to be watching an old episode of a favorite TV show and spot a great guest star actor you’d never realized was there before.  This happened twice to me recently.  

I was watching an old episode from the first season of The X-Files called “Shapes.”  Its about cowboys, Indians, and werewolves.  Its a decent first season episode — solid, but nothing spectacular.  But, even though I’d seen this episode a few times before, I was startled to notice that one of the cowboys was played by Donnelly Rhodes, none other than Doc Cottle on Battlestar Galactica!  He looked totally different — in this X-Files episode he was all decked out in cowboy gear, with grey whiskers — but that gravelly voice was unmistakable.

The same thing happened only a day later.  I was watching an old Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode called “Shakaar.”  It’s a third season episode that introduces us to several of Kira’s old chums from the Bajoran resistance movement (including their leader, Shakaar).  In the course of this episode, Kira and her old mates wind up taking up arms again, and find themselves pursued by other Bajorans — lead by a tough general named Lenaris Holem.  Now, I’ve seen this episode many many times before — but not since having devoured all five seasons of The Wire last year.  And so it was with delight that I realized that General Lenaris was played by John Doman — Rawls himself!  (According to imdb, its one of his earliest film credits.)

Who knew?

LOTS of fun stuff continuing to hit the interweb in this past week, after the San Diego Comic Con.  Check out these links:

Creepy new trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince can be found here!

Is the new Terminator movie going to be any good?  I doubt it.  But is this poster pretty cool?  Why it surely is.

Speaking of posters, some gorgeous new posters for the Watchmen movie can be seen here.

The entire hour-long Battlestar Galactica panel from Comic-Con (hosted by KEVIN SMITH!) is on-line here.

If you’re going to go see the next X-Files movie, this somewhat humorous recap of the final two rather lame seasons of the show can be found here.  Of course, the movie doesn’t deal with any of that stuff.  But its a fun trip down memory lane, as well as a reminder of why I haven’t rewatched any of the episodes from those final years of the show recently!

And finally, who better to sum up the entire Comic Con experience for those of us who couldn’t attend than Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.  He is merciless.

OK, that should keep you all off the streets for the next little while…

One of the movies I’ve been most anticipating this summer, and also one of the movies I’ve been most concerned wouldn’t meet my expectations, is the long-awaited second X-Files feature film, The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

My father introduced me to The X-Files mid-way through the first season.  By my recollection, I was hooked pretty immediately.  I quickly became an enormous fan of the show, and I have fond memories of catching a midnight showing of the first X-Files movie (which was titled Fight the Future on all the posters, although that title did not appear in the opening of the movie itself even though that phrase was used throughout the film).  That first film was disappointing in that it was marketed as delivering the answers to many of the long-standing questions of the show, which it most certainly did not.  However, the film also in many ways encapsulated everything that was great about the show (the Mulder/Scully dynamic, the cigarette smoking man and government conspiracies, aliens, chases, explosions, creepy meetings with shadowy people in dark alleyways, etc etc etc), while also really amping things up to a movie-level: the chases were more exciting, the aliens more violent and dangerous, the visual effects more elaborate, and more.  Its definitely a film that I have watched and enjoyed many times since.  That movie’s release was, in many ways the high-point of the show.  It was followed by two very strong seasons (the 6th and 7th), and then two fairly mediocre seasons (the 8th and 9th, which were almost completely without Mulder).  The show ended, at least for me, in a very lousy way.  I recall finding the two-hour finale, “The Truth,” to be incomprehensible and, even worse, something the show NEVER had been for me before — a total bore.

So now, years later, the launch of a new X-Files movie gave me a lot of hope of a return to the glory days of the show.  When Chris Carter announced that this film would be a “stand-alone” monster story, not tied to the show’s labrynthine conspiracy stories, I had mixed emotions.  I liked the idea of jettisoning a lot of the complex baggage that had weighed down the series in its final years — and yet, I really LOVED the so-called “mythology” episodes of the show, and wasn’t sure a movie not dealing with any of those stories would be worth anyone’s interest.

So, what did I think?

Well…its mediocre.

(I’m going to try to stay clear of spoilers in the below review, but I suppose that anyone who wants to see the movie without knowing anything about it should probably come back to this posting only after seeing the film.)

There is a lot I really enjoyed about the movie.  First of all, its just terrific to see Fox Mulder and Dana Scully again.  These are two wonderful characters, and its very enjoyable to get to watch the two of them in a new adventure.

The movie did a great job at, on the one hand, not ignoring the weird place Mulder and Scully were left at the end of the series (in love, on the run from the FBI)…they’re not magically back in the FBI after five minutes.  And yet, the movie doesn’t get too bogged down in all of that back-story.  Mulder and Scully’s new status quo is set up quickly and efficiently and then we’re able to jump right into this new tale.

There are some really interesting ideas in the story, particularly when it grapples with the issues of god and faith that I always found so fascinating in the show.  Billy Connoly’s Father Joe is a great “guest star,” and his character provides and excellent focal point for these issues.

There’s some nice suspense, some great creepy atmopsheric moments in the snow and ice, and a terrific classic X-Files Mulder foot-chase about two-thirds of the way through the film, that really captured a lot of the fun of the old TV series.

And yet…

The movie feels “small.”  The mystery that is the centerpiece of the movie doesn’t feel like enough of a reason for the FBI to reach out to Mulder and Scully…and it also doesn’t feel like enough of a tale to warrant this story being a movie.  If we’re going to revisit these characters in the form of a feature film, it seems to me that the story being told should be one of more CONSEQUENCE to the long-term lives of these characters, and the long-term story being told by The X-Files…not just one more monster story.

(Speaking of that, there really isn’t much of a monster at all.  There are actually very few paranormal goings-on at all, other than Father Joe’s supposed psychic visions.  I really was expecting more of a fantastical, X-Filesy bent to the story, and was surprised that we didn’t really get that.)

Again, the movie felt “small.”  I know it was made for very little money (around 30 million, reportedly), and very quickly…unfortunately, the film feels that way.  This is especially evident in the end of the movie.  The first film built to an enormous, exciting climax with a buried space-ship in Antarctica.  This movie builds to Scully knocking someone out with a beam of wood.

I also found the storytelling to be a rather inconsistent.  Some scenes and sequences seemed truly excellent – suspenseful and exciting.  And then some other scenes just fell totally flat to me.  I’m not sure if the problem was the writing, the directing, the acting, the music, or some combination thereof.  But there were some moments in the film just didn’t work for me at all.  The most egregious example of this?  OK, spoilers here, so go away if you don’t want to read.

Still here?

About 45 or so minutes into the movie, things are going well.  I was enjoying the building suspense, and also the return of the great Mulder/Scully dynamic, and the way they were slowly getting sucked into this new case.

Then, suddenly, we cut to Mulder and Scully in bed.

And I was like, say what now?  Apparently, Mulder and Scully have been living together all this time.  But NOTHING in the first 45 minutes of the film gave me that impression.  When Scully goes to find Mulder, at the behest of the FBI agent who reaches out to her, I had no idea she was going to HER OWN HOUSE, and that the two of them had WOKEN UP IN BED TOGETHER that morning.  And nothing in their dynamic in all the scenes that followed lead me to that conclusion, either.

So either the film-makers deliberately withheld that information until this scene, intending it to be a shock and surprise to the audience — which I find to be foolish because it totally threw me out of the film for a while — OR they thought it was CLEAR that Mulder and Scully were together — in which case they failed utterly because that was totally UNCLEAR to me.

Either way, that scene was a major failure of storytelling.  (I also found it to be rather, well, icky — I just didn’t want to watch Mulder and Scully canoodling in bed.)  A few other moments like that bring down what is otherwise a very fun, tense, and interesting story.

I feel like I’m dwelling on the negatives, and I don’t want to do that.  There was indeed a lot that I really enjoyed about the movie.  This is no Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, by any stretch of the imagination.  It’s just, I wanted a lot more from the first new X-Files story in 6 years.  And if this is the LAST X-Files story, I don’t think this was a particularly storng way to end.  (Although I guess it IS a lot stronger than that last episode of the show!)

Here’s hoping we’ll get at least one more X-Files movie, and that it’ll deal with the upcoming date of alien invasion, as indicated in the last season of the show — Dec. 22, 2012.

Oh man I am so pumped:

http://movies.ign.com/dor/objects/379767/the-x-files-i-want-to-believe/videos/xfilestrailer_050908.html