Movies, movies

This week my roommate left town, so I've been watching lots of movies. I'm a Netflix addict, so I watch a lot of movies anyway, but over the last few days I've been watching them all twice: once just to see them, then again with the commentary. I generally like to listen to commentaries, even the boring ones, both for the insight they can provide into the creative process and as a window into what professionals in the movie industry are like.

Commentaries come in several flavors: the director alone, the director with crew, the director with cast, the producer with crew, the writer(s) alone, and just the cast. Sometimes they're cobbled together from separate recording sessions and sometimes all the participants are in the same room. The latter are usually the most fun to listen to, and the least technical. Gossip and set stories are thrown around when people get to bounce off each other. On the classics, they sometimes get a film historian to comment and provide insight on the movies place in the canon. I consider most of them lessons in filmmaking, which I hope to do someday.

Today I went and saw The Incredibles, and it lives up to the name. This is one classy, exciting movie. My only quibble would be that they let the story go a bit long, when there was an earlier point to wrap it up that would have left more opportunities for a sequel, which I would very much like to see. The animation is so good you don't notice it, which is really saying something. Although, come to think of it, now that live action movies are making so much use of computer animation, there may be less difference between the two than there used to be. What really elevates this movie is the writing. It feels so true to life, you just find yourself laughing at its rightness. And the end credits are worth sitting through, even though they've dispensed with the animated outtakes of most of their previous films in favor of the stylized reprise of many scenes from the movie. It reminded me of the opening of Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, right down to the music.