Last movie watched...

[radiator]

Imo the actual plots are not the Potter books strong point - too contrived, too complicated, and massively overlong. They always go off on boring tangents and frequently make little sense (or break the rules of their own logic). It was always the characters and the sense of wonder that kept me reading them.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think the screenwriters should have been even more brutal when pruning and simplifying them for film - rolling multiple characters or magical objects into one etc etc.

I remember reading Deathly Hallows and wishing everyone would stop banging on about Dumbledore and just get to the action! Likewise with Order of the Phoenix - what on earth is all that fluff about Grawp? Endless, tedious chapters devoted to him, but he literally does nothing of consequence for the entire series, bar turning up for a few seconds in the final battle.

[COMMANDO FORCES]

Watched Killer Elite the other night and realised that it was based on The Feather men by Sir Ranulph Fiennes quite early. Highly enjoyable action romp with some excellent design work as it was set in the early 80's. Just look at those cars, clothes and the groovy facial hair 

The way the story unfolds with the hunters becoming the hunted is quite clever especially when the government is suddenly brought into action in one major scene. The only let down (but only if you know why) was the part when [spoiler]Fiennes is about to be executed as we all know he is alive today[/spoiler] but otherwise it moved rapidly along with no flaws.

Best part for me was the Statham/Owen fight scene, nice and brutal with some excellent moves employed by both actors. Great to see the final put down in the scene, so simple but so effective.

8/10

[TordelBack]

Imo the actual plots are not the Potter books strong point - too contrived, too complicated, and massively overlong.

You're not wrong, but one of the interesting things about the books for me is the dominance of form and structure over plot.  Because each book takes on a year (or ten months) an awful lot goes on that really has very little to do with the individual plot of each book, or even the overall plot of the series. I actually like that, that you almost need to winkle out the plot from in between the 'normal' goings on of the cutesy magic world, boarding school life and teen angst.  The in-filling of the pages in between unravelling the deal with this year's Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher is what I find charming, which is probably why Half Blood Prince is my favourite book. 

You do however identify one of the biggest shortcomings of the books for me - the investment you make in characters like Grawp, Lupin, (Fake) Mad Eye, hell even Dobby, only for them to hang about in the background of subsequent books and then basically die.

[radiator]

...don't forget Sirius!

[Goaty]

I know this is Movies thread, but enjoy This Is England '88 tonight, so good.

[Buttonman]

The In-Betweeners Movie which was OK and pretty much what you'd expect except for an unwelcome bit of character development and growth which was counter to all of the 3 series gone before. Couple of laughs though, and suitably offensive. It's no 'Kevin and Perry Go Large' though!

[Roger Godpleton]

Darts person Ted "The Count" Hankey said that K&PGL is his favourite film.

[Professor Bear]

The Thing - which is a decent sci-fi about a CGI monster chasing some folks around.  There are a lot of monster vagina faces to the point I wonder if Bob Byrne might be onto something about the film-makers being a bit distracted about getting fanny into the film at all costs, but while it's not what I'd call great or anything the only real problems it has are any connections to the original which make enjoying it objectively a bit of a bother because you're being taken out of a perfectly serviceable creature feature and reminded that it's a cash-in.
It's okay, like, it's just doing itself no favors.

[Keef Monkey]

Had a bit of a movie night last weekend with a friend, where we watched...

The Ward, which I'd seen but my mate hadn't so it was my pick for him. I like it a lot, it's not The Thing or Halloween, but it's also not Ghosts of Mars so I'm happy to count it as one of Carpenter's good 'uns. I'm sure I mentioned on here before that the ending is lifted from another movie so doesn't hit very hard, and the threat isn't particularly effective when seen in plain sight (although there are some great shots where the face is largely obscured to play up the eyes which works a treat) but other than that it's an above average horror movie.

The Devil's Rejects, which I still find a very fun film with a lot of lines and moments that still make me chuckle. There are things which are deeply unpleasant, but it is a horror film and I still find it bizarre that Zombie managed to get me rooting for these evil characters despite all the nastiness. They're just too much fun to hate.

And we also finally got round to watching A Serbian Film. I don't normally go near pirated movies, but given how censored the UK version is we sourced an uncut rip of it, as if you're going to watch a banned movie to see what the fuss is about, you kind of want to actually see what all the fuss is about.

I can certainly see what all the fuss is about, as possibly for the first time it was a nasty that lived up to it's reputation. It's a strange film to discuss or evaluate, as it's very well made (it looks great and the performances are brilliant) and has a very profound effect which will stick with you (possibly forever) but it's so brutal that I'd have trouble recommending it to anyone. I'd also worry that anyone I told to watch it would worry that I should be locked up. The really contentious scene (the "newporn" scene) isn't actually as horrific as it looks on paper. It's still in concept probably the most awful thing I've ever seen in a film, but it's mainly implied and very brief, so that doesn't actually turn out to be the upsetting part.

What does leave a mark is the extent to which the abuse escalates towards the end, and even the early scenes are fairly disturbing, with the way they seemingly comment on the downward spiral that extreme porn seems to be on. The political analogy which has been used in it's defense is totally lost on me, but it seemed to me to be equally about the effect that some porn could possibly have on attitudes towards relationships, women and basic right and wrong. If people are always chasing something more extreme then where is the line basically. I'm not anti-porn, but I'm sure we've all stumbled on stuff that takes things a bit too far. The film also doesn't seem to be throwing gore and unpleasantness around to titillate gorehounds, everything about the way the graphic moments are set up and scored is designed to make you feel uncomfortable about what you're seeing.

So yeah, not for the faint-hearted, but if you want to see a film which will evoke a reaction in you and linger in the mind (and to be fair, any good film should) then it might be worth a look. Personally I think it's a great film, but not one that I think I'll ever watch again.

[SmallBlueThing]

Oh dear grud, I've just finished watching the new Conan The Barbarian.

I really don't know where to start. It's not just that we've seen it all before so many times. It's not just the charisma-vacuum that is Jason Momoa, or the overuse of massively rubbish cgi establishing shots of various locations that then bare no resemblance, either in feel or lighting or anything, to the physical location. It's not even just the site of various middle-aged men in ridiculous 80s Mad Max haircuts or Rose McGowan dressed up like Aurra Sing from Star Wars but wearing cheap 90s goth finger-claws and using them in a crap homage to Freddy Krueger, or even the boring humdrum carnage which basically comes down to a fountain of cg-blood and the victim somersaulting away from the blow over and over again. It's not the blandness of the whole production; the locations chosen make the whole thing feel like an extended, expensive version of the BBC's 'Merlin' or the more repetitive bits of 'Robin of Sherwood'. It's certainly not just the script- which doesn't have a single memorable line, or idea, or beat. Or the editing, which resembles the line between the cut-scenes and gameplay in an early Playstation game. Or the decision to cast Ron Pearlman as Conan's father- then have him look exactly like 'Harry' in 'Bigfoot and the Hendersons'. Or the meandering, boring, garbled opening narration by Morgan Freeman, or the first sequence on the battlefield, where Pearlman displays astonishing midwifery by performing an impromptu caesarian without even looking and whips out the most unconvincing baby since that one sewing its mouth shut on the pillar of souls in Hellraiser II. Christ, it's not even just the music- which is so lacking in any kind of chutzpah as to be almost hilariously inappropriate at times. 

This is just one of those times when everything comes together in one massive shitstorm of boring, overlong, pissy crap that everyone involved should be utterly ashamed of. It's not just worse than the original, it makes Conan The Destroyer and Red Sonja look like masterpieces.

At one point young Conan is pursued through a BBC Robin Hood forest by the cast of Duran Duran's 'Wild Boys' video- who emit dubbed lion roars and strut on all fours. I should've hit 'stop' at that point- as that's when the wife and I started to take the piss. In the end, even the pisstaking became boring and I'm forced to admit it's probably the worst film I've seen in a good few years. Nothing to recommend it. Nothing.

EDIT: At one point a man on a horse is shot by an arrow, and the horse immediately dies. And a nun becomes Spider-Man when the script demands it. And, best/ worst of all, there's a terrible Mills & Boon sex scene in a cave; which is inexplicably kitted out with a floor of hay. This hay-filled cave is the bridge between two locations (a beach and a forest) and bares no resemblance to either. I will shut up now, before I get cross and can't sleep.

SBT

[Professor Bear]

I'm not convinced Conan the Barbarian isn't actually some sort of three-episode pilot for a tv show since everything makes it look as such, from no-mark actors to episodic script to a visually middling production standard.  I liked how, after the love scene in the cave on the beach the lass walks back to the ship via a forest somehow.  GEOGRAPHY FAIL.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZHoHaAYHq8

Contagion - which is a very sober take on a Spanish Flu outbreak in the present, with some nice parallels drawn between viral communication and the panic it causes being as bad as the viral spread of a disease.  There's a matter-of-factness to how events play out that probably flummox the popcorn-chomper who went in thinking it's a big dumb star vehicle of some description with asplosions and that, but the lack of bombast helps underscore the horror of what's happening offscreen as numbers like "12 million dead" are bandied about without our ever seeing the full scale of such an epidemic beyond how it impacts locally, like trash piling up on deserted streets and high school gyms and football fields being re-purposed as hospitals and mass graves.  A nice touch is that there isn't any "it gets worse!" twist at the end, it really is just a drama that postulates what might happen in microcosm in such an event rather than a visceral horror splatterfest.  Worth a watch, and if you've seen Rise of the Planet of the Apes, you can sort of squint at this and pretend it's kind of related to that.

Intruder in the Dust - a 1949 flick about a black farmer in America's deep south being stitched up for the murder of a redneck, which goes down not too well with the latter's family.  A couple of young lads and an uppity spinster get ideas in their head about fairness and doing right by someone maligned for his colour, and so set about disinterring the victim to do their own autopsy much as the Hardy Boys might do.  It's odd for me to see such a stance in a mainstream 1949 film given that as late as the 1980s blacks in the media were still segregated from whites on the screen, but the sentiment that this is a bad thing we do to ourselves is unambiguously expressed here and is still a welcome one to see reiterated.  Good film.

The Rising of the Moon - an anthology of tales set in early 20th century Ireland from director John Ford and abridged by Tyrone Power standing in a doorway like he's been accosted by a milkman into being in the film.  When he says "we're a peaceful people" it sounds like a threat to me, but the tales err towards blarney gobshitery for the most part until the last one, which touches upon the Troubles and the 'old' IRA without really taking sides in the matter beyond that any story that's against capital punishment is by default taking a side against the ruling body.  The tone is twee and sentimental even then, mind, and while the whole thing is decent and not overly stagey given the source material, it's hardly essential viewing for Ford fans or lovers of general paddywhackery.

[JOE SOAP]

The great thing about Contagion is despite its 'objectivity' and jargon filled banter, it still remains affecting on an emotional level.

[Professor Bear]

Yeah, Gweneth Paltrow's character has a couple of great moments: when it twigs with her husband why she was in Chicago and [spoiler]the first few minutes when you're thinking she's going to be part of the main focus of the film in some way and then... "already?!"[/spoiler]
Also Kate Winslett's workmate.

[JOE SOAP]

True.

[Eric Plumrose]

Rewatched SKYLINE and I still can't understand the hostility towards it. Ditch the stupid tacked-on ending along with all the stuff shoehorned in to justify it (the pregnancy, the lead character's superhuman turn, the brain-snatching) and you have a nifty base-under-siege that ends up being Earth's last stand.