Be Excellent To Each Other

I watched The Number 23 last night. It was interesting enough to hold my attention, but I didn't find it particularly engaging or interesting, and the plot twists arrived as 'Oh, right' moments rather than shock or surprise. I guess I got the feeling it was trying too hard to be deep, but I can't put my finger on exactly the reason I didn't enjoy it so much. The paranoia seemed quite stereotypical, too.

Children of Men on blu ray for £4.47:
http://tinyurl.com/y8lyr3k

Final episode of Kick-Ass book 1 is now on the web , so the actual comic should be out about now as well.

Watching "Choke" on the Skyplayer, it's one of the funniest films I've seen in ages.

Watched "The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans" last night, apart from having a very long title, it's a splendid bit of fun, fun if you like Mr Herzogs' work. It could even be called a feel good movie, feel good in the Werner Herzog kinda way.

Anyway it's mad as a box of frogs, Nick Cage is on full on crazy mode as the titular Bad Lieutenant and to my mind does a much better job at it than Mr Keitel and his cock (and I think I speak for all of us that we've seen far too much of that particular member). Nick Cage is also beginning to look like Gene Wilder, at least in this film. As to story, it's basically a very naughty boys descent into hell and possible partial redemption towards the end...although I'm not sure wether that's real or not.

For Herzog fans it's an interesting curio as it's so different from the rest of his work but is in line with his mantra that 'Life is pain'.

Just got round to seeing Avatar the other night and was utterly underwhelmed. I think I've largely become immune to awesome special effects, and so it just a bunch of tall blue people who I didn't care about jumping around a unpleasantly garish forest.

You're dead inside.

Very possibly true.

How much of the film was actually "filmed", rather than composites of all kinds of computery stuff, do you think? I doubt there was a single shot that was done the "old fashioned way".

Is that really a problem? Technology marches on. Did you object to colour? Or sound? Or wide format? Or stereo?

No problem with it, just a ponder. The dullness of the whole thing I had a problem with.

Needs more dimensions.

Fair enough. It did have the same story as Dances with Wolves, or even Pocohontas, but damn it was beautiful.

I think that's why I didn't really like it that much - I knew the effects were amazing and it was very impressive and technically brilliant, but I didn't find it particularly "beautiful". I know that's utterly subjective and entirely down to my own aesthetic tastes and all, but as a result it left me feeling slightly unimpressed.

Oh, fuck all that nonsense. What about the big robot suits, the awesomely hard-bitten main bad guy, or the massive dude that just says "GET SOME!" throughout the film? I assumed that the message the film was trying to put across was that army guys with robot suits are way cooler than blue hippies. That's what I took away from it, anyway.

I saw Superbad. It's worth it just because of this awesome scene:

I love that film.

Superbad is great. The cops are superb.

Even though Seth Rogen in this bears more than a passing resemblance to our very own tame welsh shortie

Pretty much , except the main bad guy wasn't hard-bitten - the main good guy was.

Oh dear fucking God, Black Dynamite was brilliant.
Some choice quotes:
"Who dares to interrupt my Kung Fu?"
"You'd give your sweet ass and half a titty not to."
"Your knowledge of scientific biological transmogrification is only outmatched by your zest for kung-fu treachery!"
And

Just watched Red Dragon for the first time since seeing it in the cinema at release. I'd forgotten how excellent it was, and now I'm going to have to revisit Silence of the Lambs etc. too.

Yes indeed. Hannibal Rising and Hannibal are not so good, though.

It's probably quite telling that I can't remember anything about either of them, but I know I've seen them.

Hannibal's the best out of the three films. It's brilliant and languid.

hannibal rising has at least one highly memorable scene

Hannibal Rising was a horrible film that simply took delight in horrible horrible torture scenes. Yes we get Hannibal is not a nice man but the torture in it is just too extreme for my liking. Love gore, hate excess torture porn.

Anyway I just watched Robocop again and it's still incredible.

By the way does anyone know where to get a list of the top 20 highest grossing movies of the 80s? I've got 1-10 but can't find 11-20.

Yes. Movies were at their best in the 1930s.

I see no need for stereo sound when the action is taking place on a screen in front of me. Mono plz thx. I'll give you widescreen and I suppose colour has its moments. Black & White can be so delightfully atmospheric though.

I love the sound from black and white films. It's simply not an all out barrage on the senses that passes for films nowadays. My brother-in-law was watching Transformers 2 on boxing day and it made me unwell with the amount of booming bass crap that his sub was kicking out.

Anyone seen TimeCrimes ? Watched it last night & was thoroughly impressed.

It's a very clever Spanish time-travel thriller made on a very low budget.

So zero special FX, zero movie stars, but a very inventive plot complete with some dark humour.

Get's a solid 8/10 from me.

If you've seen & enjoyed that other low-budget time-travel film "Primer" from a few years back, this is similar in ways, but better overall (IMO).

you got that right, brother -

Public Enemy



Night of the Hunter - probably the greatest scene in cinema history in my honest opinion.



Gort doles out the lesson.



Quatermass!



And so on...

Just because certain movie making techniques are old, don't mean they're broke.

I have lovely memories of dozing on a Sunday afternoon to black and white flims. Letting out puddingy burps.

I too adore old movies, but if things don't change, then ideas quickly dry up. Imagine something like Lawrence of Arabia in a square frame, in black and white, with tinny gutless sound. Or Fight Club done in a stiff, 1940s style with clipped accents and high collars. In fact, ignore me, that sounds awesome

That's one of the things I loved about Moon. Ok it's Clint Mansell who I want to have man babies with anyway but the haunting and completely un-intrusive melodies that accompanied the scenes were the perfect complement to the retro sci-fi feel of the whole film.

Having said that when I went to see Avatar the sound of the missiles made the whole cinema vibrate and it took a massive effort of will not to get my cock out and start wanking.

I don't actually remember any of the torture scenes. I do remember that they totally humanised Hannibal, though, and completely ruined him as an evil character.

The worst bit in particular was involving a rope and a tree and a neck.

But yes they made a mess of the character as well.

Oh and I saw Ninja Assassin today (the title of which could be a cunning play on words actually). It's quite good. Quite hollow but enjoyable enough while it lasts. Some of the gore is quite sick early on. The multi-national cast feels nice. Especially the grey haired english bloke in it who seems terribly nice really. Oh and Berlin not being massively glamorous made things feel a bit more fresh too.

This [Tell No One] is on iPlayer if anybody hasn't seen it and wants to. Brilliant film.

Clicky

Went to see Avatar in 3D again on saturday (went with parents this time) and since I'd done the 'wow it's so beautiful' stuff last time, I figured I'd try an watch it as if I were a human prospector on Pandora. With this mindset, the two best scenes of the film were the destruction of the Hometree (damn deserter, leaving her post!) and the 'There are thousands of them out there and they want to kill us!' speech by the Colonel. The second of those two scenes had some very impressive 3d also.

The human tech was excellent. Where one man in a exo-suit can beat a huge alien panther with a knife and a sneer, who needs 11 feet tall smurfs? I reckon they should've just landed a terraformer and smoked out the natives. Sod this small scale nonsense.

FFS.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/movies/news ... tline.html

Digitalspy post a story with a spoiler warning, then blow the fucking spoiler with the subtitle on the front page. Cheers, dicks.

So what you're saying, essentially, is "don't click on this link or you'll be annoyed like I was".
Thanks.

I watched Pandorum over the weekend.

There's a semi decent Sci Fi idea in there somewhere but I think someone hidden every 10th page of the plot. Not sure if it's based on a novel, can't be arsed to find out.

D+

Oh, yeah, don't click that link.

Saw Angels and Demons at the weekend.

It is, at least, better than the "I AM SERIOUS FILM" piece of shit that was the Da Vinci code, simply because it rattles along much more quickly and has loads and loads of stupid things to spot. Lots of amusement can be gained by laughing at the terrible exposition, the awful science, the sheer fucking idiocy of half the plot and the fact that the lead female character has nothing - nothing - to do.

It's fucking awful, really, but it's fun to watch because you get to laugh at its badness and then shit blows up and then you can laugh at its badness again - unlike The Da Vinci Code, which was a very hard film to sit through.

It's quite bloody, too. I was impressed with the sprays when people got shot in the head. A generous 4/10

Also, I saw The Hand, directed by Oliver Stone, starring Michael Caine as an artist who loses his hand in an accident... AND THEN IT COMES BACK - TO KILL! Better than I was expecting, with an amazingly gratuitous, lingering shot of some lady boobs. I liked the ending, too. No classic, but worth a watch. 7/10

Also also, I saw the recent remake of My Bloody Valentine. It's fun to spot all the stuff that was meant to be in 3D and there's some nice gore, but there's nothing much to the characters and the whodunnit plot cheats like a fucking bastard. Only really notable for the fact that I had a nightmare starring the villain, despite it not being remotely scary. 3/10

Doesn't it though! I hate that in films.

Saw The Last King of Scotland last weekend - horrible stuff. I had been expecting a jolly comedy, to be honest, with much "white man gets embarrassed by local naked lady customs" and Forest Whittaker doing his big laughing.

Got half way through A Scanner Darkly and then wished death on everyone involved.

My Bloody Valentine did that. It made me very angry. What's the point?

The local video shop has that in the "Films about Britain" section, which made me chuckle.

Perhaps I should have been a little less selective in my quoting.

Me too. I actually rewound to check. It just shamelessly lies. Grrrrrrr. I'd have liked it a lot more in a hokey, bloody sort of way if it hadn't done that.

Going to watch Pi tonight.

It's one of my favourite films, but I've not seen it for a few years.

Oh, hahah!