DVD’oh!: Sea Wolves

A friend of mine loaned me a copy of the 1980 war film Sea Wolves recently and I was struck by the cover. Can you spot the incongruency?

Top billing goes to, in order, Gregory Peck, David Niven and Roger Moore. However, in the illustration, the order is Roger Moore, Gregory Peck and David Niven. Granted, Peck is standing out front, but if you look at the combination of words and pictures, you would think they match up.

I used the term “incongruency,” in the opening paragraph because it’s not really a “mistake,” it’s just a quirk. Obviously, Peck gets top billing and because we read left to right, his name goes to the left. And of course, being the top billing, he stands in front of the other two actors … in this case the center.

It reminds me of the original DVD cover of The Big Lebowski, where the names a pictures don’t seem to match:

I don’t really have an insightful observation about this clash of marketing priorities, but there seems to be something there. Maybe it has to do with our cultural norms of words and pictures. Some sort of battle for supremacy between the printed word and the image. Why can’t we all just get along?

What about you? Have you noticed any similar mismatches?

Barney, you’re entering a world of pain

Came across this beauty of a cross-over-mashup-what-have-you mixing two of my favorite loud-mouthed bowlers: Fred Flinstone and Walter Sobchak.

It’s on one of those short-term, limited edition t-shirt sites. Luckily, this one is a three-day sale, so I got time to try and talk myself out of it …

What characters would make you want to buy a t-shirt?

Lebowski Fest Tampa Poster

I’m kind of late to the party here, but the great thing about this Lebowski Fest Tampa (February 25 & 26) is that it combines two great Coen Brothers’ movie.

The Big Lebowski Valkyrie is obvious, but what really geeks me out is the setting, which hearkens back to one of my top-five, desert-island movies: Barton Fink.

See the resemblance?

Barton Fink hit me at just the right time. I was in my first apartment, living on my own for the first time (which, obviously, mean HBO) and this movie was so weird, so quirky, so different, I just knew it had to mean something. I mean, “I’ll show you the life of the mind!” just drips with meaning, doesn’t it? Right?

Maybe not to you … but to me, it applied to nearly everything. Ever had a movie hit you like that?

Anyway, back to the poster. This art was designed by one Bill Green, who was one of our first subjects of a 5 Question Friday. He’s a good man. And thorough.

Off-topic movie review: Tron: Legacy

 

OK, here’s the deal: I only saw the first Tron in early December and it was a struggle to get through. The kind of struggle that made me question whether I wanted to see the new movie in the first place.

That’s not good, is it?

I mean, I could see how influential the original Tron was. I could definitely see how it influenced The Matrix. And now, after watching Tron: Legacy, I can see how The Matrix has repaid the influence.

It all comes down to imperfections. Aberrations. It’s the imperfection that defines perfection. Without imperfect models, how do we know what perfection is? We define it by what it is not.

So that’s Tron: Legacy. That and a father-son tale. And a heaping helping of Dudeism.

If The Big Lebowski sets Dudeism in motion, Tron: Legacy seems to be Dudeism’s letters to the Epistles … except more entertaining.

It was good, better than I expected. However, it is NOT worth paying the extra for 3D. Especially when, at the beginning of the film, a graphic pops up and says “Most of this film was shot in 2D.”

The should have just said something like: “If you are wearing 3D glasses right now, you are a sucker. Thank you.”

Off-topic movie review: Due Date

Translation: Due Date equals the sum of Planes, Trains and Automobiles minus the pillows, multiplied by the sum of pot and wiener jokes plus a little bit of Donny in a coffee can.

As someone who thinks Planes, Trains and Automobiles represents a peak of buddy comedy (if not Everest, at least a Kilimanjaro), Due Date was a knockoff. A pretty good one, but a knockoff just the same.

But what should really flip our noodle is this: If I saw Due Date before I saw Planes, Trains and Automobiles, would I think the opposite? Would I wonder why Steve Martin is trying so hard to be Robert Downey Jr.? Hmmm ….

What we experience first often becomes the template through which we view everything that follows.

The coffee can Donny, for example, will forever be his own template.