• The Breakfast Club (1985)
• Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
• National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983)
• Mr. Mom (1983)

…and if I were to extend this list with other movies from the Eighties which I really enjoyed but couldn’t necessarily count as “among my favorites,” you’d see:

• Sixteen Candles (1984)
• Weird Science (1985) (Yes, really.)
• Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)
• National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)

That’s a pretty impressive list, especially for covering only a six-year span. Every one of those movies was written (and some were directed) by John Hughes, who passed away yesterday.

Hughes didn’t look down on nerds, unlike so many of his contemporaries. In fact, Hughes celebrated them (mainly through his nerdly avatar, Anthony Michael Hall) and showed us — or, rather, showed all of you who weren’t nerds in the 1980s — that they were real people, too, and their stories deserved to be shared just as much as the pretty people’s do. Even iconic “cool kid” Ferris Bueller was really a nerd at heart: he might have gotten a computer instead of a car for his birthday, but he used that computer to hack into the school’s computer and change his number of absences, a very nerdy thing to do.

Of all of Hughes’ movies, The Breakfast Club most particularly spoke to me (and many others like me, I’m sure), in no small part because I was basically the same age as its characters when I first saw it. That movie was the first time I can recall that I was presented the idea that we are all freaks in some way, we are all of us different, no matter how “normal” we may look on the outside. I remember a couple of long walks from my house with my dad to get milkshakes at McDonald’s, and we’d talk about that movie and the characters and what it meant and how it related to me and my friends.

So thank you, John Hughes, for creating so many characters I could relate to when I was a teenager, and for creating so many movies I enjoyed so much. You can be sure my kids will be watching your teen-oriented movies when they’re teenagers themselves — which will be thirty years after those movies came out — and that’s a fantastic legacy for you to have. (Of course, my kids adore Beethoven, which you also wrote, so they’re already in love with your work.) Rest well.

I’m not sure how I feel about this development; recognizing more quality movies is very much A Good Thing, of course, but I’m wondering how this change will work out in practice.  Will it mean that we’ll get to see more of a diversity of the kinds of movies which get nominated for Best Picture — movies that surely won’t win because they’re just not the kind of film to which Hollywood wants to give its top prize, but still deserve some commendation?  And by that, of course, I specifically mean:  will we see more comedies nominated for Best Picture?  Or more big-budget (but well-done, of course) action movies?  If this rule had been in place last year, I think we can safely assume The Dark Knight would definitely have gotten the Best Picture nomination it deserved.  (Hell, if they’d expanded to ten, even Iron Man could possibly have slipped in there.)

And what about animated movies?  Are they still stuck in the three-nominee Best Animated Feature ghetto?  Let’s look at Up, which is already a mortal lock for a Best Animated Feature nomination, if not a victory:  can it get both nominations?  I think a great many critics would agree that Up will likely be one of the ten best movies of the year, and I’d wager more than a few will have it as the best.  So let’s say it does indeed get a Best Picture nomination — if it’s then ineligble for Best Animated (and please note that this is purely my speculation/concern right now; I have heard no information to indicate it’s true ) and loses Best Picture…and then something else wins Best Animated Feature…well, that just seems kind of wrong to me.  Up (or any future Pixar movie you care to imagine) would sort of end up screwed (for some very loose definition of “screwed”), and that would be a damn shame.

We’ll have to see how it shakes out, of course.  We still have more than six months before the Academy announces the first expanded batch of nominees.  But I’m sincerely hoping it allows for more diversity in what gets honored rather than simply doubling the number of pretentious piles of Oscar-bait we already get.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, that little project kicked off a slew of similar videos which are all over the YouTubes, reimagining classic and not-so-class movies in new ways.   URLesque has compiled ten of the best and put them all together for your viewing convenience.  I haven’t gotten to watch all of them yet, but I can tell you that the horror-fied take on When Harry Met Sally was pure brilliance.  Go check ‘em out and tell ‘em Moviegeekz sent ya.

[1] Why, no, of course I’m not talking about my eleven-year-old self there!  Why would you possibly imagine I’d be terrified by the sight of Scatman Crothers graphically taking an axe to the chest?

For the second straight weekend, Up was the top movie at the box office in the United States Ummm, oops, scratch that…Up was the second-place movie at the box office in the U.S. this last weekend – its gross dropped only 35% from last weekend to this weekend. People, that’s absolutely spectacular, at least for most movies, and it’s still pretty impressive even by Pixar’s lofty standards (see chart below). For some perspective, industry pundits celebrated Star Trek’s 42% second-week dropoff as an example of excellent staying power, and this is…well, it’s seven better, isn’t it? (For further comparison, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian fell off 55% between the first and second weekends and X-Men Origins: Wolverine fell off 69%.)

The lesson to be learned here? Short movie titles lead to better audience retention numbers, of course.

Up has already grossed $137 million and is still going strong after weekend number two, meaning it’ll easily sail over the $200 million mark with a decent shot at $250 million by the time it’s done, which would put it in the upper echelons of Pixar’s top moneymakers (but well below Finding Nemo, their biggest hit to date). For more numberiffic comparison, here’s how the nine previous Pixar flicks did in their first two weekends and overall:

So, it’s official: Up is a blockbuster commercially and critically: an astonishing 98% fresh on RottenTomatoes.com and, honestly, probably already something of a lock for next year’s Best Animated Feature Oscar (or at least a nomination; we do still have half the year left). That makes Pixar ten-for-ten, consistency which is almost mind-boggling. They’ll have to wind up with a swing-and-a-miss someday, of course, but this streak is one I’m hoping doesn’t end anytime soon.

10. A Bug’s Life (1997)

While A Bug’s Life might be my least favorite Pixar movie, I want to note that I don’t at all think it’s bad. It’s still perfectly entertaining, and the leap in technology from Toy Story, their first film, to this, their second one, was immense – just look at that model bird in the big climax. But A Bug’s Life also featured their most annoying lead character, and most of the secondary cast, while funny, didn’t have any of the emotional connection that the great Pixar movies have. This one gets a solid B from me, which is still damn good for being in the bottom slot on this list.

9. Cars (2006)

I know John Lasseter’s The Man at Pixar and all, but this labor of love from him was…underwhelming. Again, certainly not bad – and it’s held up surprisingly well to the several thousand of viewings of it I’ve endured thanks to my two daughters. But I think the fundamental problem with Cars was much the same as with A Bug’s Life: its lead character simply wasn’t compelling enough (Owen Wilson‘s voice just didn’t connect with me) and the supporting cast was colorful but not especially engaging (Paul Newman‘s Doc Hudson aside). Maybe that’s a problem which will get rectified in the sequel.

(Side note: I have a separate post brewing about that difference between these two “lower tier” Pixar movies and all the ones above it; I hope to get that written sometime this week.)

8. Monsters, Inc. (2001)

And now we enter the solid A-minus-and-up range with the movie which has bumped farthest down the list simply because all the films released after it have been better. And that “emotional connection” thing I mentioned was missing from numbers nine and ten above? Yeah, totally present here. There’s more pure emotion in the closing shot of Sully than in those last two flicks put together. (Pixar Show-Off Shot: Sully’s fur, especially when blowing in the wind and covered in snow.)

7. Toy Story 2 (1999)

In many ways, probably a superior film to the original Toy Story, but this list is rating my favorite Pixar movies, not necessarily the best, and that’s a small but important distinction to make. Story goes that Toy Story 2 was supposed to be a straight-to-video release (banging out straight-to-video sequels was pretty much standard practice with Disney’s animated features then), but when Disney realized just how good it was, they had Pixar finish it up for theatrical release instead. And good thing, too: it went on to gross $245 million, making it the third-highest-grossing film of ‘99.

6. Up (2009)

My full review’s coming very soon, but for now I’ll say that Up is the first animated movie since The Iron Giant to make me cry. (Yes, I know that’s more knocks against my Jason Statham-like Tough Guy image.)

5. Ratatouille (2007)

One of the things I absolutely adore about this movie – even aside from the gorgeous renderings of Paris and the celebrations of both cooking and eating – is the fact that lead characters are so flawed. Remy is petty, obstinate, defensive and rash; Linguini is weak (to begin with, anyway), cowardly, willing to take credit not due him, and equally rash. Yet together, they manage to lift themselves above their “humblest beginnings” (so says the critic Anton Ego) to incredible successes – and they lift Ratatouille up, too.

4. Toy Story (1995)

I first discovered Pixar in 1992 when I saw their short film “Knick Knack” as part of an animation festival in Tampa. I immediately fell in love with the company — while they certainly weren’t the first company to produce computer-generated animation, they were far and away the best I’d seen yet — and I desperately looked forward to seeing more work from them. Then two years later, I heard they were producing a feature-length animated film to be released by Disney. I saw Toy Story the weekend it opened in theaters — a tradition I’ve continued to follow with all nine of their subsequent releases — and loved it even more than I’d been expecting to. The technology obviously doesn’t hold up as well as one might hope, but hey, it’s fifteen years old; that’s lifetimes in terms of software development. The story craft was already there, though, and (here’s a little secret for you) that’s just as important to me as the actual animation. (Toy Story also sparked some of my earliest love for Joss Whedon, before I even knew who the hell he was!)

3. WALL-E (2008)

WALL-E has to be one of the most engaging, sympathetic leads in any movie in recent history; the fact that director Andrew Stanton and his crew managed to convey those qualities with such limited dialogue really is amazing. Yes, OK, fine — the environmental message can come across a little preachy. Or a lot preachy. But it’s a good message, so it doesn’t much bother me, especially in the service of such an excellent movie.

2. Finding Nemo (2003)

One of the most finely-tuned scripts of any movie I’ve seen, animated or otherwise. Not a scene or line feels wasted to me: the Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay director Stanton received for this movie was very well justified. Nemo features one of the strongest supporting casts of any of the Pixar flicks, and the interplay between Ellen DeGeneres‘ Dory and Albert Brooks‘ Marlin still makes me laugh (and care) every time I watch it. Unsurprisingly, the bit about the overprotective father learning to let go gets to me, too. (Also, Nemo was the first of four Pixar movies to date to take home the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.)

1. The Incredibles (2004)

Honestly? The Incredibles is my favorite movie, period. Here’s the thing: when I first saw the teaser trailer for this one before Finding Nemo and found out what it was about and who was behind it, my mind was already blown. It’s Pixar? And superheroes? And it’s written and directed by Brad Bird, the genius behind The Iron Giant, my favorite non-Pixar animated movie? My expectations were so high that I was convinced there was no way this movie could possibly live up to them.

But it did. To make a bad Pixar joke: if my expectations were infinite, then The Incredibles went to infinity and beyond. The characters are richly nuanced and believable, the animation and design are stunning, the script respected its audience’s intelligence, the heroic action scenes are, well, incredible…honestly, The Incredibles is pretty much my platonic ideal of a movie. I sincerely hope they never make a sequel, because I don’t think it could do the original justice.

Of course, Pixar’s blown away my expectations before…

I’m a little surprised that I find myself in this predicament; I’ve seen every one of Tarantino’s films (with the recent exception of Death Proof) and I’ve enjoyed all of them. Even Jackie Brown. I’m in awe of his ear for dialogue, the performances he’s able to get out of his actors and his ability to synthesize wildly disparate elements from his wide range of influences into something uniquely his own. Reservoir Dogs? Excellent. Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2? Loved ‘em both. Pulp Fiction? Brilliant.

But all of the early marketing I’ve seen for Inglourious Basterds, in which a small troop of Jewish-American soliders in World War II try to strike fear into the Germans brutally killing Nazis, implies a very high level of violence — even high by Tarantino’s standards. The posters, while graphically very striking, are also more than a bit disturbing: various implements of brutality shown in heavily desaturated colors…except for the dark red of the blood splattered on everything. The trailer certainly plays up the ultra-violence angle as well.

I should note that I don’t have the tolerance for extraordinary violence in movies that I used to. I’ll usually be fine with a certain level of stylized violence in my movies, as long as the bloodletting isn’t the entire point: I could handle the almost cartoony level of limb-chopping and blood-spurting in Kill Bill, for instance, but I have absolutely zero desire to ever sit through any of the recent “torture porn”-style horror flicks. One of my best friends when I was a teenager was a diehard devoteé of Fangoria magazine and made me sit through countless gore-filled horror flicks, and I just never was able to gain any real kind of appreciation for them. And I seem to be becoming even less appreciative of excessive amounts of blood in movies as I approach forty.

Now, though, I’ve started reading early reviews of Inglourious Basterds after its debut at the Cannes Film Festival that indicate that it’s…well, that it’s far more talky than reviewers had expected. Early buzz is that it’s dialogue- and actor-driven with a fairly limited amount of action. Dialogue- and actor-drive Tarantino? That I very much can get behind — but I’m still not sure about the amount and kinds of brutality implied by the film’s marketing. I realize that hyping the violence angle is far, far more likely to draw in viewers than hyping the quality of the dialogue — especially of the demographic most likely to want to see a Tarantino movie. But as someone who feels like I should have this movie marketed to me, I’m more than a little turned off by all of the blood. And isn’t misrepresenting the movie, if it is indeed as talky and less action-y as it now sounds, an awfully dangerous (if time-honored) marketing strategy?

Do any of you have any thoughts here? Anyone have any sort of early opinion one way or the other?

And I feel some small sense of loss myself, just from seeing Ranft’s name so prominently in the credits of all of the Pixar movies. It’s always amazing to me just how much the passing of someone whom I don’t know at all can touch me just from the quality of his work. And for all of the technical skill and visual wizardry the crew at Pixar possess, it’s the stories and characters in each of their movies that make me love these movies as much as I do, and the high quality of those stories can be credited at least partially to Joe Ranft.

Today we come back to Alex Hernandez, who’s already discussed the role of sound and music in Serenity. Today he does an old-school compare-and-contrast between Serenity and Star Wars, which is all well and good–but Alex, dude… you might want to be careful about how you’re slinging around comments like “our” movie and calling Star Wars “our parents’ sci-fi.” Not everyone digging this movie was too young for the original Star Wars, y’know. Hell, the fact that you referred to it the first flick as A New Hope tells us something–no one who experienced Star Wars as a kid would dare call it “A New Hope.”

But all poking fun at Alex aside, he’s got some cogent points…for a whippersnapper. (I keed, Alex, I keed!)

The “Star Wars” of Our Generation?

I’ve heard rumblings these past few weeks in places geeks gather, cyber or otherwise, and the buzz is always the same: Serenity is our Star Wars. Most of us can’t really claim Star Wars as our own, even though we grew up watching it many times on video, and then on DVD, it’s really our parents’ sci-fi. Sure, we’ve got the prequels, but they’re a far cry from what our parents got. The prequels are too glossy and talkie and stiff. We never got our dirty rebellious space opera. I remember when The Phantom Menace came out. We collectively bit our bottom lips, dug our nails into our knees, and waited to get a glimpse of what our parents felt when they first saw A New Hope. Sadly, we didn’t even get a fraction of that feeling. So where is our underdog sci-fi saga? Well, it’s here.

Waiting in the theater to see the special screening of Serenity, I fought not to bite my lip or nervously claw at my knees. I told myself to relax, that I’ve been disappointed before, that that kind of sci-fi doesn’t exist anymore. I tried to stifle the bubbling anticipation with much sarcasm and eye-rolling, but then something happened in the theater that burst the dam of dry wit. People started singing, “Take my love. Take my land. Take me where I cannot stand.” Not only was I flooded with giddy anticipation, but there was something new welling up inside me, hope.

What I proceeded to see that night, not only in the audience but in the film itself, was exactly what I’d been looking for. This little film that shouldn.t exist was everything that I loved about Star Wars. Serenity is the original trilogy compacted into one brilliant film. So what do I love about Star Wars? Well, Han Solo, the Millennium Falcon, the whole Rebellion aspect of the thing (a ragtag bunch against the entire universe), wise Yoda as opposed to the “Action Hero” Yoda. And I was surprised to discover that Serenity delivered on all accounts, with a grit of a 70s Western and the wit of a British comedy.

Whether Nathan Fillion is the next Harrison Ford remains to be seen, but in Serenity he evokes the best of Han Solo and Indiana Jones in Captain Malcolm Reynolds, only adding much more depth to the character. You can actually feel his internal struggle between doing what’s morally right and doing what’s best for his crew. Mal flies in the face of Hollywood’s latest crop of ultra-cool, calm, and collected kung fu heroes. He’s emotional, charming, a bit confused, and he falls down when he gets punched. The thing that makes Mal admirable though, is that he always gets back up.

Another thing a lot of reviews are saying, almost as if it were a slogan or battle cry, is that “Mal always shoots first.” Indeed, there are instances in the movie where you can’t help but think of Han blasting Greedo in the cantina or Indy casually shooting the highly skilled swordsman on the street. Not to mention the bickering/flirting with a girl who’s obviously more refined than he is and the reverent way he regards his beat-up old ship is very akin to Han Solo. This is the kind of scoundrel-hero that girls swoon over and boys pretend to be. The kind that’s sorely been missed in recent sci-fi.

Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that the similarities do not end there. River is so a Jedi Knight. The talented Summer Glau deftly manages to convey an innocence and menace that Hayden Christensen never mustered. You truly believe that nobody in the ‘verse has the midichlorians to stop her. Also, the ship Serenity is a space jalopy that can punch it when the need arises; Jayne is the best of Chewbacca and Lando (big, loud, and back stabbing) rolled into one; The Operative is almost equivalent to Darth Vader; and Book harkens back to the wizened Yoda of old, imparting words and putting our hero back on track.

Most importantly though, the film contains the raw emotions of the original trilogy, the excitement of A New Hope, the fear, sadness, and shock of Empire, and the satisfaction of Jedi (without the Ewok picnic). I’m not saying Serenity is better than Star Wars. Hell, I’m saying it is Star Wars, only a more concentrated, potent product and this time, it’s undeniably ours.

I don’t think it’s at all pretentious or inaccurate to say so. You’ll just have to watch it and compare for yourselves.

George Lucas should not have been allowed near the business end of a script or a camera for any of these last three films, nor any other film in the future until the end of time. In Entertainment Weekly, Lucas says that he asked both Spielberg and Ron Howard to pick up the directing chores for him, and both said that he needed to do it himself. The only reason I can think of that they would have said such a damn fool thing is that they both must have seen the script of The Phantom Menace and have gotten severe stomach contractions at the mere thought of trying to navigate that crappy prose. Rumor has it that Tom Stoppard, of all people, was called in for a script polish on Sith, but let’s be honest and note that not matter how much you polish a turd, at the end of the day, all you’re going to get is a highly polished turd. Scriptwise, Sith is a turd which positively gleams.

Why, you might ask, will I not be able to see Sith for some time if I’m as big a Star Wars fan as I’ve always claimed to be? Because the wife and I have a limited allotment of babysitter time and we’ve already got that time for the near future spoken for: we managed to snag tickets to the special preview of Serenity in Providence next Thursday night. And as much as I love Star Wars, given the choice between Lucas-penned dialogue and characterization and Whedon-penned dialogue and characterization (especially four months before Serenity comes officially out)…well, there’s really not much choice.