The original, not the remake

This is hardly a new movie, but over the weekend, I finally made myself sit down to watch a classic.

"Psycho" is pretty intense. It's not shocking like the contemporary slasher flicks try to be, it's shocking in a totally different way. There's not an overflow of blood and gore, there's just terror, and suspense and mystery.

Well, there's mystery if someone hasn't already spoiled it for you. That's one trouble with classics; they are referenced and parodied too much in popular culture. I wonder if the next generation won't bother watching "Fight Club" because they already know how it ends.

Anyway, I avoided "Psycho" for years, because even parodies scared me. But it's a great movie and shouldn't be missed.

My new job has me contributing to a blog here on blogger.com, so I revisited the Film Narrative this morning.

I now have my own much more active blog, but it is of a more general nature, rather than focusing on movies.

But that doesn't mean I don't still love/hate the film industry, and I do still care about posting online reviews and previewing obsessively that which is to come ("Arrested Developmnet: The Movie," anyone?)

However, since the last movie I saw was "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2," primarily to make fun of it, reviews will have to wait a while longer. But then again, if you've stuck with us this long, might you stick around another week or so?

Sex and the C-bus

The "Sex and the City" movie was a lot of fun; it was better than reviews led me to expect. That doesn't happen frequently, so it was nice to see a movie I thought would be a disappointment succeed instead.

I mean, yeah, it was hokey, but so was the show. In that sense, it was true to fans. Mr. Big was still a jerk, who writers attempt to make redeeming, Miranda was still cranky, and Samantha was still a big loveable slut bomb.

Carrie, self-absorbed as ever, is still the character I identify most with, no matter how much I wanted to slap her at her most pathetic. The only one who had things going her way was Charlotte, the prissy, yet maternal one. Despite a mishap in Mexico early in the movie, she hits the jackpot by the end.

Jennifer Hudson's character wasn't really necessary, but she added some humor to a low point in the movie, when Carrie is reeling and struggling to recover from the worst clash with Big yet.

One big complaint I heard about this movie was that it dripped with commercialism. Judging from the Vitamin Water, Sprint, and new car tie-in advertising I saw weeks before the movie came out, I had to agree. However, the complaint that Carrie focuses too much on labels in the movie is not as valid; sure, she tries on a bajillion designer dresses at one point, but weren't all those magazine photo shoots and runway cat walks from the series more of the same? Carrie's style has always been individualistic, but labels were still in their somewhere, right down to the Manolo Blahniks on her feet. The show was just as much about fashion as it was about relationships. Hence the whole "love and labels" bit is justified.

Those who followed the show, whether it was the orginal HBO series or the tame TBS version, will love it. If you haven't seen too many episodes, you may find it hard to care about these characters.

All in all, I liked it; despite a run time of 148 minutes, it goes a lot faster than you'd think. So go on, dress up and get out there. I saw a lot of Carrie wannabes in the theatre the other night, and worred my hair might count me among them unintentionally. Fortunately, I was wearing an outfit Carrie wouldn't be caught dead in-- jeans and a hoodie.

Cloverfield: The Blair Witch Project meets LOST?

A big group of us took advantage of having the following day off and saw Cloverfield on Sunday night.

Hopefully no one has spoiled this one for you yet, because I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I did if someone had told me what everyone was running away from in terror in those teaser trailers. Of course, to say I 'enjoyed' it is a little strange, because I kind of felt like I was going to throw up the entire time. There's suspense for you...

It's a short movie, but I don't think I would have been able to take it if Cloverfield had been much longer. That sounds like a bad remark, but that's just coming from someone who doesn't like being freaked out for much more than 84 minutes straight.

I won't say much more, but here are some tips:

1) Watch closely in that last scene and you might just notice something that my brother noticed that no one else in our group did.

2) After you watch it, hit up Imdb's entry about the movie for some fun trivia.

3) You might have heard that you need to stay for the credits, but to be honest, I'm not sure it's worth sitting through. Although the one song in the film, played during the credits, it kinda fun. This movie has little to no soundtrack otherwise.

I was somewhat dreading seeing this, because I do NOT like being scared. This movie was pretty freaky, but I still thought it was good. It's a neat concept: filming a terrifying event with one hand-held camera, with clever "flashback" sequences in between filiming segments. And as a fan of LOST, I can see where J.J. Abrams's hand was in this project.