Ghost Tours is done!!!

I think you all know this, but just to make it official, Ghost Tours is done. The thank you gifts for the donors have been sent, and I've started work on the festival submissions. I haven't made a post on the film's blog because I haven't actually gotten final sign off from the committee. But Charles liked it and the others are unlikely to overrule him.

Now one of my rewards is catching up on all my movie watching.

Wild
I had never heard of this, but Katie and Brenda wanted to go. I watched the trailer and thought, well it will be a good social occasion anyway. As it turns out, I enjoyed it a lot. One person on a 1000 mile walk alone to find herself is not usually my thing, but I was engaged and entertained the whole time. I wouldn't say it's the best movie ever, but it was a surprise good movie for me.

The Imitation Game
It was every bit as good as I expected it to be. Aaron and I had a discussion about the structure of the storytelling and the use of archival footage - he didn't care for either - before I had seen it. Now that I've seen it I think if I were directing it I wouldn't have bothered with the archival footage. It didn't hurt but it didn't really need it. But I liked the jumping around in time. You (or I anyway) were never unclear about when you were, and you needed to learn certain things at certain times. If they'd done it chronologically I don't think it would have worked as well.

Into the Woods
I'm too much of a fan of the original Broadway soundtrack. It was well enough done. If you like musicals but don't necessarily know this one by heart you'll probably like it. But Meryl Streep is no Bernadette Peters when it comes to singing, and I was also disappointed in Johnny Depp. As an adaptation I think they made good choices, but I still missed the songs they cut.

Birdman
Going this afternoon. Everyone talks about this film; I have to be able to join the conversation.

Ok, now I know why everyone's talking about it. It was interesting, I'll definitely give it that. Definitely an actor's movie. Certainly a movie with Things It's Trying to Say, in rather unsubtle ways. Jim had told me that it's all one long take - which it is and it isn't but is the way he meant it - and I asked if that just felt gimmicky. He said no. I'll say I only noticed it about half the time, which means the story was engaging enough to distract me from it, but only half the time. On my scale of a movie being good or bad based on how little I'm paying attention to the craft of the moviemaking I'd only give this about a 6/10. Partly that's due to the gimmick, and partly that's due to the fact that they wanted you to know you were watching a movie. It was all part of the larger theme of examining movies vs theater, celebrities vs actors, wanting to make Art, having something to say.

Interstellar
I made a point of keeping myself unspoiled for this film. It was sci-fi, it was by Christopher Nolan, it was well received, so I knew I would go, I didn't need to know much about the story. I'm glad that I didn't. I really liked it. For all the beautiful and interesting effects, it was very character driven. It was a story about people, not about space flight. Did it need to be 3 hours? Possibly not, but there were no parts I would have cut, there was no section that my mind was wondering to the lighting or the camera techniques. Though I did notice the sound design a lot. But really, I'd say I was engaged with the story 98% of the time, which is quite a success.

[spoilers follow] I really liked the women in this film. The protagonist was a guy, but apart from him all the interesting characters were women. I liked that there wasn't romantic tension between Cooper and Brand. Possibly, after the credits rolled, when he finally catches up to her, they get together. They leave that option open, but it's not part of the story really. They have a good working relationship, in very tight corners, each relying on the other's expertise, working together to solve a problem, and there's never any sexual tension. They can be friendly without it having to mean more. I loved that about this movie. Also loved that the scientist who ultimately saved humanity was a woman, and she wasn't a "woman scientist" she was just the person who was smart enough to figure it out. I mean, there's more to it than that, 3 hours more really.

Hobbit
I will be honest, I didn't hold out a lot of hope for enjoying this film, but having seen the first two of the trilogy I wanted to see how they ended it. I figured any 3 hour film with a subtitle "Battle of the Five Armies" was likely to be 2 hours of epic CGI battles, a bit of emotional stuff as people died (the story is practically Shakespearean in that way), and then a long drawn-out ending since it's the last of 6 films set in Middle Earth. That sounded boring to me. What I got instead was a fairly lengthy set up, enough emotion mixed into the battles that I never did duck out to pee as I'd planned, and an ending that was bordering on abrupt. I'm not sure I'm ready to be done with Middle Earth. I walked out feeling like now I want to watch the other two again. I don't actually own the other two. I was waiting to get the 3-film box set; no point doing it piecemeal. Having set the bar low, I got to leave thinking it was pretty good. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen the others though.

I am pretty impressed with the scale of the production. In some ways, the director had the easy part: pay attention to right now. What scene is this, what emotion are we going for. But the Production Designer, and the First AD and people like that who had to keep track of a billion little details (I'm not even exaggerating) to make sure that everything and everyone was in the right place at the right time so that the director could do his job, that was inspiring. Big, epic, effects movies like this aren't really what I'm interested in creating myself, but I definitely appreciate the craftsmanship that 1,000 people (maybe more, I'm guessing) put into it.

The Theory of Everything
Taking Mom and Dad tomorrow to round out my biopics about smart guys season.

Well that was a good choice for Mom and Dad. It's often hard to get Dad to go out to the movies, he's got to be in the right mood, but I've now managed two weekends in a row of him walking out saying, wow, that was a good movie.

It would have been so easy for this performance to become a caricature, and it wasn't. I had been thinking of The Imitation Game as Cumberbatch's chance at an Oscar, but I'll be shocked if Eddie Redmayne doesn't get it. Everybody else who is a contender must be thinking damn, I might have won if this hadn't come out this year.