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Beetlejuice

Still, to my mind, the best film that Burton's ever done.

Just saw Iron Man

L-O-V-E-D it.

Nuff said.

2 more hours then I'm off to see it!

jesus camp - did you get to the part yet where they say that science hasn't proven anything?

becky fischer works at a summer camp for evangelical christian children and their families. her aim is to instil the kind of religious fervour into the children, which would have them willing to die in the name of christ. the documentary focuses on a summer at the camp, the children who attend and the right-wing, christian fundamentalist message which they are being indoctrinated with.

this is a film which is fascinating, terribly sad and terrifying in equal measure. religious fundamentalism, especially when it is combined with political agendas, is never a good thing. in fact, i'd go as far as to say that it is abhorrent. heidi ewing and rachel grady have crafted a very powerful documentary, simply by allowing the likes of fischer and tom haggard to talk candidly, about their aims and their desire to promote their extremist brand of christianity to children and the american administration, bookended by footage of radio commentator mike papantonio.

a great watch, but by no means an easy film to digest.

Ladder 49

My sister put it on and I kept falling alseep because I was so tired, but I've seen it before anyway.

Charlie Bartlett

Essentially a teen/comedy drama, with the expected schmaltz, but very well executed and genuinely funny in places. As per usual, a wonderful performance from Robert Downey Jr. and the kid playing Charlie was surprisingly good.

Very enjoyable.

The Last Boy Scout

Overnight

Boondock Saints

Spiderman 2

Sideways

A good films day.

Seems like the right order to watch those. He's a right mental.

Charlie Wilson's War

Fun with Hanks and Seymour-Hoffman, but why'd they have to drag Julia Roberts along for the ride? She's just dull!

Good film, though. Short, but not overly so; preachy, but not overly so; sleazy, but not overly so; and a few good explosions, too. Sorkin writes a good movie, Nichols directs well, and they've got a mostly-decent cast working for them on this one.

It was. I watched Overnight with several friends who all commented "Whaddaprick."

Just saw Iron Man. My thoughts:

Oh hell yeah!

Iron Man or Iron 'Meh' would be more appropriate. Don't get me wrong, it was pretty fun, the principal cast committed themselves admirably to their roles (except Terrence Howard who spoke in a listless wimpy whisper the whole time), and the special effects were commendable. But not a lot happened, and what did happen wasn't especially interesting. I understand origin stories need to be told (well, actually they don't, but never mind), but the film ran out of plot and humour, resulting in vague Arab nasties and an obvious villain before a sub-Transformers climax (which is pretty bad considering how crap I thought most of the action in Transformers was) to yet more chugging guitars and Audis being driven everywhere. If it weren't for Downey. Jr., there'd be little to be positive about. Entertaining, but totally disposable.

Also, I hope this Avengers/SHIELD thing doesn't pay off, so we just get Samuel L. Jackson popping up in Marvel movies and then nothing coming of it. It'd be like Skeletor at the end of Masters of the Universe saying "I'll be back!".

It all depends on how the Thor/Hulk/Whoeverhasn'thadafilmyet films do, but since Iron Man has already made its budget back over its opening weekend I suppose they could get one made solely off its back. Fury will almost certainly have a bigger role in the second Iron Man, though.

Woke up late last night with the TV still on, only to get engrossed in the watchable black comedy crime caper Curdled (1996) on the BBC, somewhat captivated by the gorgeous Angela Jones. It was bugging me where I recognised her from, so I had a quick gander on IMDb.

Turns out that 'Curdled' was originally a 1991 short in which Jones was spotted by Tarantino, prompting him to cast her in the role of taxi driver Esmeralda Villalobos in 'The Gold Watch' sequence of Pulp Fiction*, which I chose to watch this morning. 'Curdled' was then remade with a bigger budget, executive produced by QT, and co-starring William Baldwin (one of the downsides of the film, granted).

* A tasty burger of a film, I'd forgotten just how excellent it is.

In summary though, Angela Jones is teh hotness.

track five

Not quite sure what to say about that.


Aside from "got my hopes up, you git".

it's an ace track, shame you only got a snippet...

Downfall -The story of the last days of Hitler & Berlin. Not bad. However, I find Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary to be a much more engrossing film on the same subject. I know there's a difference between a talking head & the dramatization of the same thing, but to hear his secretary telling the story from her point of view has no equal.

Adam's Apples -A Neo-Nazi is sentenced to community work at a rural Danish church run by a blindly optimistic priest. Very, very dark black comedy but really, really good. Highly recommended.

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers w/ Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Phillippa Boyens Commentary

The more I watch, the more convinced I become that it's the best of the trilogy. Good commentary as well but quite dry and a lot of what they say is covered in the extra features anyway.

For some reason, I really wanted to buy an Audi, and LG phone, a Dell computer and a burger from Burger King after watching Iron Man. Don't know why...

I got off on the flying scenes more than I was expecting. But overall, the film didn't do much for me.

Sudden Manhattan

Adrienne Shelley's debut feature as writer/director, available to watch for free this week here.

A little self conscious and a little amateurish but there is enough interesting stuff going on to keep you interested (just) and has a lot of genuinely funny moments. And even though I may be biased because I have loved Ms Shelley so much for so long, I don't think anyone can argue that she wasn't a talented film maker, with the few films she did make coming across like a missing link between Hal Hartley and Wes Anderson. Who knows what might have been.

The product placement overall didn't bug me so much - Dell's pretty ubiquitous, Burger King is fair enough as it's part of a gag, and we only really saw Stark's phone which just so happened to be LG. But every bloody one drove Audis, and the Audi people carrier that gets lifted up during the big finale was just too much. If it was Ford or Fiat or something, fine, but Audis are more on the luxury side of the market; understandable for Stark, not for everyone else.

Well seeing as it already has a release date, I think it's likely.

"Iron Man 2 announced for a release on April 30, 2010, followed by three more movies for the summers of '10 and '11. Matthew Vaughn's Thor is set for a release on June 4, 2010, and The First Avenger: Captain America (the working title) will kick off the summer of 2011 on May 6, followed by the highly-anticipated and foreshadowed The Avengers scheduled for July 2011."

Ant-Man is also in production, but early stages.

That one could be interesting, seeing as the current idea about it seems to be that Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish will make it quite comedic, so it would be interesting to see that character interact with other, perhaps more serious ones. Assuming that he ends up in the Avengers movie.

Well he was in The Avengers, so you'd assume he'll be in the movie. Especially if they're making a film about him, too.

Yeah, but the Avengers are a fairly fluid group so they don't have to include every member if they feel that one of them doesn't fit into a story they are trying to tell.

He was a Quiet Man (2007)

'Office Space' meets 'Falling Down' meets 'The Hudsucker Proxy' meets 'Punch Drunk Love' meets 'Taxi Driver'.

I was intrigued by its concept, but never expected a film of this quality.

Recommended.

Benn meaning to see that for a long time. It's on my "to watch" pile.

It's fantastic. Christian Slater and William H Macy are wonderful, as is Elisha Cuthbert, in an incredibly challenging role. That girl really can act. You also get to see her tits - at least I presume they were hers - which should put it above 'The Girl Next Door' in teenage boys 'to watch' pile. She plays a porn star in that, and you don't see them once!

The end will divide an audience, but I think the film is good enough to get away with it. I was certainly more than on its side by then.

I loved it visually, I loved the score, I thought the dialogue was genuinely witty, with more than a touch of Neil LaBute, generally it was a really pleasant surprise. The concept that had intrigued me is all played out in the film's opening scenes, and it becomes the fall-out that's fascinating.

Very unusual for a satire to be this biting, with a subject matter so dark, and yet have characters you actually care about.

Yep, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Yes, but Ant Man / Giant Man / Henry Pym / Yellowjacket has been in almost every incarnation of the Avengers and was also one of the founding members. It would be like having the Avengers without Thor or Iron Man. Just wrong.

I'm not saying he won't be or shouldn't be, just that he doesn't have to be.

Iron Man

I haven't really got that much to add - it really is as awesome as everyone says it is. Even Paltrow couldn't mess this one up for me - she wasn't actually bad. RDJ is a star, though. His performance reminded me of Christian Bale's in Batman Begins; when I saw Bale as Bruce Wayne, I thought 'Yep - that's Bruce alright'. When you see RDJ, he just is Tony Stark, the same character I read when I was a kid or saw in the cartoon, brought to life. Great stuff.

You have to feel sorry for Tobey MacGuire a bit, though. Each new comic book movie they keep releasing with better and better leading men, well, it's just proving how inadequate his portrayal of Spider-Man is. I got more depth and emotion from RDJ in one film than I did out of 3 with MacGuire. Mainly because, in my opinion, RDJ can actually act, and not just be able to weep on cue.

He can cry and dance, though.

He hasn't got the range, dear. I said to him, Tobey, you haven't got the range, dear![/Bassey]

I fully agree. The Return Of The King, as great as it is, stills falls a little short for me, in terms of its slightly uneven transition from the book. And while Fellowship was probably the closest to the source material IMHO, The Two Towers just seems to improve with each viewing.

I really love the complexity to it and how they handle all the plots so well. Fellowship is surprisingly linear, Return of the King has to wrap everything up, but Two Towers can just revel in the sheer scope of the story its trying to tell. I really can't find any fault with it, and Sam's little speech about stories at the end always makes me well up.

Damn you Ed, that's my Tuesday evening eaten up now.


I agree with all that you say yet again. I bloody well love the Two Towers. The opening sweep across the snowy mountain range always has me completely transfixed from the get go, and everything after just gets better and better. And Sam's speech, for me, seems to summarise perfectly everything that I love about the entire book.

The Bank Job
What a lovely surprise. I knew my opinion on this would be swung by the presence of The Stath, bu this is a genuinely above average heist flick. Great stuff.

Fido
This Canadian oddity is well worth checking out. Set in 1950s a smalltown America that looks like it has been lifted straight from Pleasentville. All looks normal...except in this small town you will find zombies, either working as personal slaves or "employed" by the community. This is post Zombie War America. A virus arrived from outer space re-animating all corpses. This means that not only are bites from zombies a threat but so is death itself - everyone is buried in two coffins, one for the body one for the head, or "go zombie".
Schoolboy Timmy befriends his new zombie slave (Billy Connolly) who was recently bought by his mother (Carrie Anne Moss) in order to "keep up with the neighbours". Not only does Fido become a father figure for Timmy, but also a husband figure for his mother - their actual father/husband neglecting them for golf and extra work in order to pay for Timmy's funeral fund! Things do, however, go awry, when Fido's control collar malfunctions and he causes a new zombie outbreak.
A real pleasent surprise, and made all the more wonderful by the fact that it is set in a beautifully re-created 1950s.

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Opening with a news report on the number of serial killers that curse various towns in America, namely Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, the reporter reveals they have exclusive access to the man who intends to be the next great psycho killer.
The fake documentary following Leslie Vernon during his preparations for his first big killing spree. The news reports are filmed as documentary, but events away from the news team's camera are presented as a horror film.
While not gory or suspenseful enough to work as a horror, it works quite well as a mockumentary, presenting interesting and sometimes funny insights into a cinema psychos methods and background.

National Treasure 2 : Book Of Secrets
I quite enjoyed the first one. This was just dull. Bit strange that a film about slandering a fictional chracter's name and a quest to clear it, actually slanders a real person's name (Queen Victoria) in the process!

Thanks a lot, man! I'd completely forgotten that film even existed!

What about late twenty-somethings'?


It's my least favourite, because it fucks with the books so much. It's the most straightforward of the books but they managed to stuff the film full of really bad CG wargs, add Elves to the Helm's Deep battle, and shoehorn Liv Tyler in pointlessly.

I thought the bit with the planes was a far superior action sequence to the final battle. I also thought Pepper Potts would get in the tank that was behind her in every shot where Tony was getting her help. I was a little dissapointed that she just pressed some buttons.

Sunshine

Visually very impressive but the plot was really slow to start-up and there were a lot of gaps. Scenes would jump all over the place with little explaination of what was going on and characters would suddenly end up one place or another without us really knowing how they got there or why. I was really quite disappointed to be honest.

The trailer looked impressive, the rest of the film let it down.

I really cannot disagree with anything posted here... Loved it!

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang -Not bad. It felt a little sloppy to me. Needed some tightening up. Robert Downy Jr held it together though. Without him it would have been shit.

Count me in.

I can see where you're coming from, but I have to disagree. As much as I love the books, I felt that they made a film which is superior, really working in the context of the film trilogy, even if it makes a lot of changes to the book. Ultimately, they made a trilogy that stands apart from its source material and all the changes they made benefited the final product.

Hook (1991)

As I mentioned elsewhere, this is one of the first films I remember actively disliking as a child. All these years later, I still can't find much to like.

I mean, it's not terrible, it's too visually pretty to be completely without merit, but it is very, very boring. The performances aren't great, though that might be more to do with some really bad miscasting, the Lost Boys are really crap and its attempts at humour are so very forced and so very unfunny. Great production design does not a good film make.

Saw Iron Man. Probably one of the best book to screen adaptations ever.

Superman II - The Donner Cut

Superman II had never sat right with me. It was good and all, a very enjoyable film, but there was something...wrong. Something not quite right.

For years I attributed it to the fact that I'm really not a fan of Richard Lester's direction style - 'Help' and 'A Hard Day's Night' seemed to be thought of as good films purely based on the fact that they starred the Beatles, and his other movies (Robin and Marian, the 'Musketeers' films) had never appealed. So it wasn't surprising that certain elements of his vision of Superman didn't sit right.

Now I know why. It was never his movie, in the truest sense of the term. He'd been walking in someone else's footsteps the whole time, and going left where they had gone right. 'They' is Dick Donner, the man who brought us Superman - The Movie, and who should have brought us Superman II, if not for the Salkinds deciding that they wished Donner off the project.

Donner eventually got a cut of the movie he had shot most of (which had been mostly stored away - Lester re-shot over 70% of the movie), and it's brilliant, I must say. Certain scenes now make sense, and a lot of scenes Lester had shot have been excised completely, making the movie flow better, and taking out a lot of the, quite frankly, atrocious slapstick. I'm thinking specifically of the 'phonebooth' incident when Zod and his gang are blowing a gale through Metropolis - it made me cringe as a kid, for gawd's sake.

Zod and his cronies now seem like a real threat, as does Luthor, rather than comedy villains, and Superman truly learns a valuable lesson. Lester, it would seem, didn't quite grasp that, and just made a comedic movie, obviously not having the same affinity for the subject matter as Donner did/does.

Don't think that I'm Lester-bashing for the sake of it; he was asked numerous times for a contribution to the DVD set, and refused each time, stating that he 'wished to forget' that he ever made the movies. A shame, really, because his Superman II wasn't bad, but it's nowhere near as good as Donner's original vision.