Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD box set:
****

On the one hand, they’re obviously saving a lot of good stuff for a hypothetical volume 2: What’s Opera, Doc?, Robin Hood Daffy, most of the Roadrunner & Coyote opus. On the other hand they’ve given us Rabbit of Seville, The Scarlet Pumpernickel, Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, Hair-Raising Hare . . . plenty enough to keep you entertained while you eat enough Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs to make yourself very, very sick.

Bugs (sheepish): Mechanical.
(Pause. Then, defiant:) So it’s mechanical!

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Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
****½

A creditable exercise, Mr. Weir. I could find some faults with it if I wanted to, but by and large I think the film holds true to the spirit of the books; on top of which it’s a fine character drama and a jolly good adventure movie. (The best Star Trek movie ever made, as J. Bradford de Long says.) Apart from his height, Russell Crowe makes a plausible Jack Aubrey; and apart from his height, Paul Bettany makes quite a fine Stephen Maturin — I very much look forward to seeing him get to explore more facets of his character in further O’Brien films — of which I assume, given the success of this one, there will be at least one or two.

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The Two Towers Extended Edition
****

Whereas the added scenes and lines in Fellowship were simply nice to have, the additional footage for Two Towers makes it a far, far better movie. We now spend enough time getting to know the House of Eorl to actually give a damn when Theoden weeps over Theodred’s tomb — and Eowyn singing a funeral dirge in Old English doesn’t hurt, either. We now get enough of the Treebeard plotline and the Faramir plotline for them to make sense — and to mean something, too. Since the rest of the film no longer feels rushed, the Helm’s Deep sequence no longer drags. I still wouldn’t have chosen Walsh & Boyens’ solution to the filmic problems Faramir’s character presented; and I still think there’s no way even the Rohirrim, even led by Gandalf, could charge down that sixty-degree gravel slope into those pikes and live. :) But never mind — any lingering doubts I might have had that Fellowship was a Matrix-like flash in the pan are now dispelled, and that’s what counts.

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2001
*½

Just rented this with the intention of finally watching it all the way through for the first time — I’d seen it several times over the years, but never made it farther than about the point where David Bowman starts yanking out HAL’s brains. Now I know why, and this time I only survived due to the miracle of DVD chapter selection. Sure, it’s beautiful, but my God, could Kubrick and Clarke have made it any more dull if they’d tried? 2001 is the moral equivalent of a bad summer blockbuster: all special effects, no screenplay. The film is a disservice to hard science fiction. What’s sad is that it wouldn’t have taken much — no changes to the plot, just a little less classical music and a lot more dialogue. I think about what a competent Hollywood screenwriter — William Goldman, say — could have done with it, and it makes me want to cry.

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2010
***½

So that’s why Bob Balaban seemed so familiar! Yeah, I was planning a double feature. I don’t think I’ve seen 2010 since it was in the theatres, but I didn’t have any trouble staying awake. It might be a little thin, it might not have broken any new ground the way 2001 did, but it’s got plot, it’s got acting (Helen Mirren! John Lithgow!), it’s got tension, and the special effects hold up pretty well. Actually everything, except (necessarily) the computer screens and the Cold War and (unnecessarily) the synth-heavy score, holds up pretty well. Plus, it uses real physics, something you almost never see in a space movie; and it uses real SFnal ideas, not recycled horror or men’s adventure. I blame 2001 for the fact that there aren’t more SF movies like this.