"The Newsroom" and "Prometheus"

My friend loves the Alien movies and I love going to the movies, so tonight we went to see Prometheus. I've got a lot of problems with this movie. The main thing is- it doesn't make a lot of sense. No, it's main problem is that it's slow and almost unwatchable. Halfway through, and then especially towards the end, I just wanted it to be over so I could go out and have a cigarette. Prometheus is really two movies: it's a movie that asks questions about where humans came from, and it's also a horror movie about Alien-type creatures attacking people. Here's something that bothered me: during the opening credits I saw "Guy Pearce". I was pretty excited; I like him and haven't seen him since The Rules of Engagement in 2000. He was so good in that. So I watched the movie and forgot all about him. Then during the closing credits I saw his name again. Oh, right- I forgot about Guy. So, who did he play? Then I realized that he was the actor under all the old person make-up. The movies are not good at aging people. I'm thinking about The Godfather Part III and A League of Their Own. The only example of good old-person make-up is Father Merrin in The Exorcist. The funny thing is, now that he really is old, he looks just like Dick Smith made him look in that movie. By the way, this past weekend I saw both the first episode of The Newsroom and Aaron Sorkin on Piers Morgan talking about The Newsroom. The show was exactly the way I expected it to be but I'm not complaining. I don't know if I'm gonna like it as much as The West Wing but I think it will be good. Anyway, Morgan asked Sorkin about acting and good actors and Sorkin said that one thing that actors can't fake is being smart. I agree and there's a good example in Prometheus. I'm not saying that Logan Marshall-Green, the guy who plays Charlie Holloway, is dumb or stupid. He's probably pretty bright. But in this movie he was playing an archaeologist and I didn't believe it for a second. You watch him and you know that he hasn't read a book since he was a senior in high school. It isn't Green's fault; he's just mis-cast. By the way, through the whole movie I was trying to remember where I'd seen Green before. It wouldn't come to me so I looked him up when I got home and then I found it: he played the guy who made it to the end in Devil. Before i started writing this I looked up Prometheus on Wiki cause I was confused about the story. I still don't understand why people (and robots) did the things they did, and I'd like to find out, but I'd like to find out in any way that doesn't involve watching the movie ever again.

Booker T and the MGs

A few weeks ago I bought Elvis Costello's Get Happy again, this time the 2 CD set from Rhino. 50 songs. In the liner notes he mentions that when they were making this record he picked up a bunch of Stax singles and that the bassline for "Temptation" was taken from the Booker T and the MGs song "Time Is Tight", so I really wanted to hear that song. Booker T and the MGs are best known for their instrumental song "Green Onions". You know it. If you've ever gone to the movies and sat through trailers then you've heard it. They always play it to show that a character is cool. Anyway, I've also been obsessed with the movie The Blues Brothers (and 1998's Blues Brothers 2000) and the Blues Brothers Band feaures two MGs: Steve Cropper (who I first heard of when he played on Frank Black's Honeycomb LP) and Donald "Duck" Dunn (Dunn recently died). The Blues Brothers was on last night so I watched it again. The songs are so good, especially Ray Charles doing "Shake A Tail Feather" and Aretha doing "Think". Aretha also has some great lines in the movie and she nails them- "Don't you blaspheme in here! Don't you blaspheme in here!" and "So you can leave without your dry white toast, and without your four fried chickens, and you can leave without Matt "Guitar" Murphey!" The best thing that happened last week is that I was flipping around and one of my movie stations was playing a documentary called Respect Yourself- The Story of Stax. It told the whole story of Stax Records and was narrated by Samuel L. Jackson.