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[Replaced_Texan]

I wrote this earlier for another forum, but since I mentioned I was doing a movie weekend here, I figured I might as well re-post.

Friday night, I went to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Saturday, I saw A Dirty Shame and Shaun of the Dead. The first two were entertaining and amusing, but the last one was divinely inspired. Go see it as soon as you can.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

I'm not Gwennyth Paltrow's biggest fan. I can't really put my finger on it, since I think that she's a fairly good actress, but something about her just bugs me. While I realize that the character was written true to the archtype, this particular actress playing this particular character just irritated me. The plucky, determined reporter who won't let go of the big story and takes stupid risks in order to get a good angle has never been my favorite. Paltrow played the role perfectly well enough to annoy me but appreciate it at the same time. Jude Law was fine in his role. Also prototypical. I thought that Giovanni Ribisi really stole the show, but he wasn't in it for very long. The effects and the feel of the movie were spectacular. My understanding was that it was entirely shot with props and actors, but without sets. Everything else was digitally inserted. They did a beautiful job, and I would recommend seeing the film for that if you're into that sort of thing. I really liked the first thirty minutes or so, but after the main characters went off on a "find our friend" quest, the movie started to drag for me.

A Dirty Shame

A dirty confession: I might be developing another one of my unaccountable crushes (the list includes Seann William Scott and Sam Rockwell): Johnny Knoxville. As with the others, I'm not sure how it happened, but whatever. Anyhow, I really liked this movie. Tracy Ulmann plays Sylvia, a woman who denies sex to her husband Vaughn, played by Chris Isaak, because "the sun is up" early in the movie. Their daughter Caprice (Selma Blair) is under house arrest for having broken the local obscenity law three times. The charges are related to the fact she's had her breasts enlarged to basketball level size and she dances at the local strip bar under the name Ursula Utters. Sylvia gets hit in the head, and her perception about sex changes entirely. Ray Ray (Knoxville) witnesses her accident, and he explains to her that the concussion has caused her to become a sex addict. Ray Ray is on a quest to find a completely new sex act, and he thinks that Sylvia can help him find it. Sylvia discovers that she's not the only sex addict in the community, and the movie is sort of a commentary on how sex is dirty and crass and pretty much all around us, and that's perfectly ok, even though there's a school of thought that actively tries to suppress it. I loved it, laughed a lot, and I thought it was a lot of fun. It would have been my favorite movie of the weekend, if I hadn't gone to the next door screen to see

Shaun of the Dead

Oh. My. God. I can't remember laughing this much in a movie in a very long time. The tag line sort of gives you an idea: A romantic comedy. With zombies. The director calls it rom zom com. Shaun is 29, working in a dead end job, and living with some friends from college. One, Pete, is sort of moved on to adultness and wants to drag Shaun with him. The other, Ed, is sort of exactly where he was in college: pretty much useless. Of course, Shaun loves him, probably in an effort to hold on to his youth and partially because Ed really does need someone to keep everyone else from kicking his ass. Shaun's girlfriend, Liz, doesn't really appreciate Shaun's total lack of responsibility, his inability to change, and his aimlessness, and so when he makes yet another blunder in moving the relationship forward, she breaks up with him. Recovering from the hangover of the post-breakup saucing, it takes Shaun awhile to notice that zombies are taking over, but when he does, he and Ed develop a plan to rescue Shaun's mom, rescue his ex-, and race like hell to the Winchester Pub, where they'd be safe.

The above doesn't even begin to cover how hysterical this movie is. Watching Shaun and Ed argue over which LPs to use to decapitate the slow moving, but nonetheless persistant zombies is probably one of the high moments in cinematic comedy ever. And the movie is full of such scenes. At times, it's hard to differentiate zombies from non-zombies. My standard of comedy is A Fish Called Wanda, which is a movie where I'm laughing pretty much from start to finish. I think that Shaun of the Dead meets this standard.