Watching movies

It had been a while since I'd watched a movie that I hadn't seen recently. Mostly this is because the movies I tend to watch lately are whatever my 3 year old is quoting at the moment. This past weekend I was able to break that trend and watch not one, but three and a half movies.

Three and a half? Yeah, well I tried taking said 3 year old to see Happily 'Never After and he decided to was time to leave before the movie was over. I don't think that is because he didn't like the movie. He watched it most of the time and was very quiet. I think he just got restless and wanted to run around a bit.

The ohter movies were all DVD rentals. They were The Hunting of the President, The Day After Tomorrow, and Art School Confidential.

The Hunting of the President is a documentary about the investigations into Bill Clinton during his terms as President. From a filmmaking perspective it was a nice documentary. They cut in some old film footage here and there to spice up the video. The footage was varions, but had some connection to what was being said at the time.

I felt compelled to watch The Day After Tomorrow because of all the acclaim I'd heard about the effects in the film. Personally, I think effects are the main reason to see the film. The story is only so-so and some parts are laughable. The whole think with the wolves was really hard to swallow, even if you allowed all the pseudo-science of the climate change. The effects were convincing on the whole. They worked well given the far-out nature of the events.

I really enjoyed Art School Confidential and feel it could garner the exact pseudo-intellectual dissection as the pieces in the film recieve from the students. It mocks itself by being what it mocks in the film. I think it works well. It's a fun film that can't be taken seriously. And it knows it.

As far as the portion of Happily 'Never After that I saw goes, it was a decent flic. It didn't have quite the same charm that I thought Hoodwinked had. It was cute enough and I wanted to know how it ended, but the characters just weren't as full as they needed to be. Maybe I would feel different after seeing the whole thing.

On my own movies, I have recorded a small bit of video for an exercise I'm doing. It's an attempt to create a simple effect. The footage has been captured to my computer, but I had to use Premiere Pro 1.5 to do it. For some reason, my camcorder did not work within Premiere Pro 2.0. I was able to control the camera there, but no video showed and I couldn't capture.

If I'm successful with this exercise, I'll post the result here. That's it for now.