Ramblings on Minority Report and Star Wars, or some junk.

2002-07-01 || 9:31 a.m.

Once again, I have scared myself. I was trying to think of a work to describe a band I put in my profile (Delirious?), and all I could think of was awesome. Has my mind really degraded that far? Oh, like, wow, Becky!

Well, I saw Minority Report. I figured out the secret to enjoying movies: go in with really low expectations. I thought it was gonna be just like MI:2, and really suck (just like MI:2). I was wrong. It really surpassed my expectations. As a result, I really enjoyed it. I saw it with my mom (who really is the ultimate movie critic, and that is a compliment) who had higher expectations for it, and was very disappointed with it. We came to the same conclusions, but, I was willing to see it again very soon and she was not. One thing that you can't miss: the first part of this movie relied WAY too heavily on special effects. I thought it was unnecessary.

Why do they always have to change eveything in these futuristic sorts of movies? I thought the way he ran the system looked less like Bill Gates and more like Keith Lockhart. Didn't ring true. Also, the familiar old keyboard was gone. I also thought the wooden ball system they had to reveal the names of the victims and accused was completely unrealistic. No real police station would make such concession to artifice, especially not when people's lives hang in the balance. Besides, when was the last time YOU saw a police station? They really do look like they just came from the set of Law & Order, rather than looking like an interrogation room at the Jedi Temple.

The advertising was a shameful paradox. I thought it was a lovely touch of realism to see brand names all over everything, and advertising everywhere. But I bet those companies paid handsomely to get their names and logos in that movie. And I think that's bad (sorry, even though I am a capitalist, I am very high-minded and idealistic about a lot of things).

I've changed my mind about Ep II. I like it now, better than Ep I (I forgot how wooden people were in that movie. But I stand by Natalie Portman, saying that as the Queen, she was supposed to act regally, which often translates into a perception of woodenness among the ruled class. And Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor were very realistic characters as well, truly the best in the movie.) But it still smells of money, in the sense that it was from the outset not a movie, but a media event. Rrrr...