Be Excellent To Each Other

Yeah, but the book is just as awfully slow. I listened to them on audiobook and the final book was tedious as heck. And it wasn't set in Hogwarts, where all the cool stuff is. Duh!

Monsters Inc is a great film, maybe my favourite Pixar. So full of nice touches, funny and sweet.

This is how I hope my marriage is going to develop. She forgets my more unpleasant traits as dementia sets in life goes on.

The Last Hunger Game film was so crap, its so obvious all the decent story line and action has been saved for the last film

Thing that pisses me off is that they never look at all 3 films\books and take a considered view on where they should split into 2, its like "shit what do you mean this is the last book? Better make 2 films then"

I LOVED Mockingbird part 1. I found it so engaging that I was really shocked when it ended. But maybe that's more showing how it was improperly split into two parts. It ended at the wrong time.

Watched ABCs OF DEATH 2 last night on Netflix UK.

I was not aware of the existence of the first once, but apparently this is a sequel running along the same lines. Basically they got 26 directors from around the world, they each got a letter of the alphabet and made a short film with a death theme based on that letter - in each case they were given complete artistic freedom with no censorship or studio intervention.

So it's basically 26 completely unconnected short films in the space of two hours. Some of them are undeniably crap, however a fair number of them are really rather good and a handful of them are superb - genuinely twisted and disturbing.

I'll say no more than that, just go into it knowing nothing about it as I did - certainly a 'different' couple of hours viewing!

8/10 - Novel.

We watched them both and tried to guess what they would be just knowing the letter. Some were really abstract!

Inside Out - Ok I guess. Tugged on the heart strings a little at the end but largely just adequate.

Maggie - 90 minutes of misery with not a great deal happening really and not an awful lot of screen time with Arnie. Not sure about the way it ended. Felt a bit wrong.

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Yes I watched Automata. It's not really very good I feel. It tried to be like such as I Robot and Blade Runner but didn't have the directorial ability to achieve its aims. Wandering about in the desert for much of the film was something of a mistake I feel.

We watched this last night. I enjoyed the film in and of itself, but from a parenting perspective it's brilliant. We've been talking about emotions since. Glad we stayed to watch the credits too, the cat's emotions made us properly belly laugh!

Can't wait for The Secret Life of Pets!

Bing Bong

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Where The Trail Ends - One people go and ride mountain bikes in the back of beyond. Good photography and riding in stunning scenery. Documentary on Netflix.

Watched OBSERVE AND REPORT last night which is billed as a 'dark comedy'.

I quite enjoyed it but it does have rather a mean streak and fundamentally it's really quite bleak as well. It's got someone called Seth Rogen in it who is supposed to be quite famous but I've never seen him in anything before. He seemed good though. It's also got Ray Liotta in full-on frothing mode which is always a pleasure to see.

Runs to a very compact 86 minutes, worth a look I'd say.

7/10 - Fat man's hot willy action.

Plot summary from Rotten Tomatoes - At the Forest Ridge Mall, head of security Ronnie Barnhardt patrols his jurisdiction with an iron fist, combating skateboarders, shoplifters and the occasional unruly customer while dreaming of the day when he can swap his flashlight for a badge and a gun. His delusions of grandeur are put to the test when the mall is struck by a flasher. Driven to protect and serve the mall and its patrons, Ronnie seizes the opportunity to showcase his underappreciated law enforcement talents on a grand scale, hoping his solution of this crime will earn a coveted spot at the police academy and the heart of his elusive dream girl Brandi, the hot make-up counter clerk who won't give him the time of day. But his single-minded pursuit of glory launches a turf war with the equally competitive Detective Harrison of the Conway Police, and Ronnie is confronted with the challenge of not only catching the flasher, but getting him before the real cops do.

MPAA says it contains - pervasive language, graphic nudity, drug use, sexual content and violence.

Has anyone seen Ant Man yet?
It's the first recent Marvel film I've been completely unenthused about and can't decide whether to bother.

Yeah, I went to see if after initially not being bothered and then loving the trailer; mostly due to the fact it demonstrated an awareness of how ridiculous the concept is. It wasn't quite as entertaining as the trailer implied but still very good fun and well worth watching.

I thought Ant-Man was excellent, and it was nice to see a Marvel film that was more grounded (no pun intended) and didn't have a stupid final act where THE FATE OF THE WORLD is in the hands of the hero.

I don't know if it's been mentioned here before but I watched the brilliant 13 Tzameti last night and thoroughly recommend it. NOTE: DO NOT READ PAST THE FIRST PARAGRAPH OF THE PLOT SUMMARY ON THAT WIKI PAGE! The setup is that a young and poor roofer is working on a house when the owner dies leaving him no way to get paid for the work he's done. He'd previously overheard the owner discussing the contents of an envelope pertaining to a job that would make him a lot of money, so the young guy takes it and follows the mysterious instructions contained within despite having no idea what he's getting himself into. Tense and compelling shenanigans ensue.

I'd forgotten all about that film. It's pretty good.

I've got it on DVD (remember them?). It's very excellent much.

I watched the new Mission Impossible film the other day and it was decent; coherent enough as these type of things go and a pretty fun couple of hours. The product placement though was fucking shocking.

The amount of times the camera gave us a loving view of the Windows Phone handsets everyone was using was bad enough, though depressingly par for the course, but the Xbox One stuff was laughable. There's a scene where Simon Pegg's character is at work but he's playing a game instead of working. When he sees someone coming to his desk he hits a button to pull up his desktop instead then dumps the controller in a drawer which he then pushes shut. As all this happens you're given a much longer than usual view of the control pad (so you can see it's an Xbone controller) plus, when he drops it in the drawer, the camera zooms on the contents of the drawer and lingers for a good few seconds on the cover of the Halo box that's been so obviously arranged within the drawer.

The entire scene blatantly exists only to show off all this stuff and doesn't even entirely work because (a) he's playing the game across a three monitor setup which you couldn't do on an Xbone and (b) the guy who comes into the room has got a totally clear view of all three screens right from the start so the whole pantomime of clearing the screen and chucking the controller in a drawer is just jarringly stupid. I can't even find it in myself to be massively bothered about product placement as a concept if it's done subtly enough but this was properly laughable stuff.

I just saw MI5 today and indeed that bit of product placement was terrible. I found the film as a whole rather a waste of time. A pointless retread of everything that has gone before. No one really has much character and everyone has super human skills and the team is basically utterly invincible (Tom Cruise in particular). The F+F films are doing basically the same thing but so much better now. Ghost Protocol was great but this is just bland.

I also saw Hot Pursuit with Reese Witherspoon starring. Female geek cop has to look after a mafia wife and ends up on a road trip of hijinks with her. Comedy film obviously. Most of the jokes miss their mark but it's an amiable enough film that just about passes the time. Nothing to make it really stand out in any way shape or form with it being as predictable as a very predictable thing.

I know I'm being crap, but what's F+F?

Fast and Furious.

He could have been using the Xbone controller to play a PC game on three monitors.

I'd rather watch any of the MI films than those bloody F&F films.

I think it was Halo 3 he was playing, which presumably isn't out on the X-Bone.

'fraid it is: Halo: Masterchief Collection, init.

:

The Frozen Dead is an odd film to screen on a weekday afternoon, during the school holidays, even though there was probably only me watching it.

Looks like the new Fantastic 4 movie is roughly as good as most people expected it to be (ie. not very....)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fantastic_four_2015/

The trailer really did make it look shit. Not that I want the whole plot revealed or anything but it was just a load of scenes that could've come from random different films with no real connection between them (aside from the actual actors involved obviously). Even Dr Doom was just short of shoved in at the end with no idea who he was, where he came from or what his deal was at all. If even your trailer doesn't seem to know what your film about then you're probably in trouble.

I sort of had high hopes for it. I really liked Chronicle from the same director, and the cast is pretty good.

Obviously it was one of those that could go either way though.

I didn't realise it was done by the Chronicle guy, that's a real shame it's shit then.

Aye, but Chronicle also had Max Landis on board.

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As well as having inferior screenwriters, by all accounts there was a lot of studio meddling and the director wasn't happy with it.

But that could just be him making excuses.

Josh Trank, the Fantastic Four director, briefly tweeted:



...so that's probably the end of his career, then. Rumours abound that he had huge problems with the studio (to the point where he was taken out of the running to direct a Star Wars film) and big chunks of the film were rewritten/reshot, which may be why it's so terrible.

On the other hand, it's brought us great reviews like http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/revi ... r-20150806.

Yeah regardless of the veracity of his claims, that's career suicide.

Absolutely. It's somewhere between 0 and 100% true, but it's definitely 100% unprofessional.

Oh I dunno Fincher did alright and he was fairly forthcoming about his hatred for the executives et al. at Fox, re: Alien3

was that prior to release? I dont have any memory of it.

Fincher is a genius, which helps.

Hindsight is useful here. I dont think he was in the genius category circa Alien3

Alien 3 was '92. Seven was '95, and if you don't think Seven is evident of his genius you're a wrongface.

Fincher also didn't badmouth Alien 3 on Twitter on the opening weekend. He's been very vocal about hating it and hating the process, but only many years later.

This is the main problem. He's just trashed the film as it was opening in cinemas. That's just a fool move.

He's probably scuppered his chances of working on any more big budget superhero crap but maybe he's extremely angry and not that arsed. I'm sure he knew what he was doing.

The original cut of Alien³ was far better than the cut the studio released.

They had to fight to keep the ending of Se7en that they wanted, the studio wanted it so that Morgan Freeman shot Kevin Spacey so that he wouldn't 'win' in getting all the seven sins done the way he wanted with Brad Pitt committing the final one. (Or to even not have the wife's head in the fucking box man.)

Fincher and Pitt fought that one out, Pitt properly put his foot down over it apparently.

In the end Fincher agreed to put the (slightly) upbeat speech by Morgan Freeman in right at the end, he wanted the film to just finish as soon as Pitt shot Spacey. (Cut to black, wait a few seconds, and then credits roll, for a total gut-punch.)

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Seven-En ... 70339.html