Dec. 28, 2002 - 7:25 pm
i'm very happy to announce the arrival of the new template. still working out a few kinks, but i'm mostly pleased with it. let me know if you have any suggestions. for those of you who know html, don't ever try to make a diaryland diary with frames. it doesn't work. it would have been perfect for my little java applet that i use, but no...no that's impossible. i had to just stick with an inline frame instead.
i'm also pleased to announce that people have actually started using my new movie suggestion form ("suggest a movie"...to the upper right of the site now) and submitted a couple of good suggestions to me. the first of those suggestions from a few days ago was this film, Kate & Leopold, which my mom loves. please make note though, that it does feature a scene from The Prisoner (1967) in it, and that totally biases her.
i should also point out that i chose to watch the director's cut of this film which includes a somewhat incestuous aspect of one of the relationships from the film that was not shown in the theatrical version. i'll explain in a moment.
well, the basic premise of this film is that a guy from the late 1800s goes through a timewarp and lands in modern NYC and ends up falling in love with a female marketing exec. it stars Hugh Jackman and Meg Ryan. if you know that basic premise of the film, you'll know the entire plot outline after you watch the first 5 minutes of the film. basically you find out that Hugh Jackman's character is a duke looking for a wife and that he is the inventor of the elevator, and you also see Meg Ryan there at the party he's at for a split second. yeah, you know what happens at the end of the movie now. it's a big circle. it's still fun to watch though and even though you know the plot outline, you still want to see all the in-between stuff.
what's with the incest you say? well, Meg Ryan of course ends up marrying the duke. the thing is that her previous boyfriend Stuart (who discovered the warp and accidentally brought the duke into the future to begin with) is the duke's descendant. so there you go. i wasn't bothered by it, but i guess some Americans might've been. especially with the generally mild-mannered Meg Ryan fanbase.
i was very glad that this film owned up to the fact that it was mimicking Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) with the whole apartment placement thing. in both films, the girl lives below the guy and they only ever visit each other by going up and down the fire escape and through each other's windows.
so a good film, good acting and good music. a cute plot, but nothing outstandingly original here.
one thing that i would like to discuss is the thing that seems to be happening lately where movies put their "big song" at the end credits of the film. like the Sting song "Until" which was nominated for the big awards (Oscar, Golden Globe) from this film did not play throughout the movie itself. only as the final credits ran. i know the same thing happened last year with The Lord of The Rings (2001) and the Enya song "May It Be." and also with the U2 song "The Hands That Built America" which is nominated currently for a Golden Globe from Gangs of New York (2002). i personally think of this as being sort of cheap. and i don't like it when things in the movie industry like this become standardized. but maybe that's just me.