Last movie watched...

[SmallBlueThing]

I always wondered whatever became of Tom and Barbara Good... Do you still keep in touch with Margo and Jerry?

There's more truth in that than you'd imagine Sharky- I was brought up by mum and dad doing exactly (well, almost) what the Goods were doing in the show. We had a fully-stocked garden, chickens and my dad made his own double-glazing, did all the DIY and decorating and even used to wrap presents in newspaper. I think some of it may have rubbed off!

SBT

[SmallBlueThing]

chickens and my dad made his own double-glazing,

Clarification: Chickens did not help my dad make double glazing.

SBT

[Beaky Smoochies]

Just watched Brooklyn's Finest on BBC1 (HD), a rather excellent slice of gritty police business, pity the corporate lackies at 20th Century Fox put back the 24 movie until next year because they were being ridiculously tight with the budget (producers wanted $45m, studio only wanted to spend $30m, go figure!), had it went ahead this year, Antoine Fuqua would have directed it, and after watching his work on ...Finest tonight, he would've been the perfect choice to helm some major Jack Bauer action on the big screen, sigh...

[SmallBlueThing]

The Amazing Spider-Man

Didn't expect much, and was quite prepared to dislike it due to the inclusion of all that nineties confused gubbins about Peter's parents, the redundant new take on the costume and a massively rubbish Lizard.

However, much to my surprise it was massively entertaining and the retelling of the origin surprisingly both worked and improved upon Raimi's version. Andrew Garfield inhabits Parker just as Tobey McGuire did in the first one, gains points for having better material to work with, but loses them for being too gangly and not matching my (Romita/ Romita Jnr/ Ditko inspired) ideal as to what he should look like. But I'll live.

The costume has been changed purely so disreputable foreign companies can't repackage unsold action figures and cheekily flog them at inflated prices. There is no other reason for the metal shoes and alterations on the 50-year-old design- but it's never dwelt upon, so doesn't matter. The Lizard is more problematic- both my kids declared that it "didn't look like The Lizard" and was "wrong". "The Hulk with a tail" and "a muscley man painted green" were the considered comments. When pressed, neither felt it mattered because the Lizard scenes were "exciting and scary". The silent fight behind Stan Lee was picked out by all of us as the film's highlight.

Bram felt Spidey unmasked himself too many times, which was "stupid" and "too many people knew who he was". As usual with a Spidey movie, he was completely right.

From my point of view it's the best of the four- certainly the most interesting, "adult" and exciting, with the best action scenes and closest to the comic as I know and love it. I hope it does so well we get 'The Spectacular Spider-Man' in a couple of years. Our trip home consisted of a discussion of who should be the villain- I went for Mysterio, Bram for Carnage or Kraven and Bela for Morbius.

I can't really leave the trailer for Batman Rises unremarked upon. I really cannot believe so many people seem so excited about this- the very epitome of taking a bold, comic-idea and battering it into boring mundane pseudo-reality. Ooh, how grown-up. I've seen the last two Batman films and won't be seeing this, as it looks to be even worse, and I didn't that possible. Thank grud it's the last one. The argument that wider audiences somehow "won't suspend their disbelief" to allow comic films to be done properly would hold so much more water if the trailer wasn't attached to a film about a teenager in a red and blue suit who fights a talking man-lizard while cracking gags and forgetting to buy eggs. Poor old DC/ Warner- they'll never sell any comics off the back of that.

Anyway- Amazing Spider-Man was just that; amazing. Can't wait for the next one. Oh, and 'The Life of Pi'- or whatever it's called (bloke in a boat with a tiger and flying fish) looks great!

SBT

[Richmond Clements]

Ohhh. Hadn't even considered Kraven for the movies. That would ROCK.

[SmallBlueThing]

Ohhh. Hadn't even considered Kraven for the movies. That would ROCK.

As long as he was the proper, Russian Kraven- not the Steve Irwin character from Ultimate (or am I misremembering?)

Now they have a hit, it's fairly obvious that this new trilogy is being set up to reveal Norman Osborn was behind Peter's parents disappearance/ death and will turn up as the Goblin in probably the final film. I'd imagine that was him in the extra bit during the credits at the end. So, if we write off Gobby for the next one, I reckon it'll be Morbius and The Vulture. But it could easily be Kraven, Electro, Mysterio, Hobgoblin, The Rhino (and I'd LOVE that!) or Hydroman (bit probably not that last one). Spidey's plethora of villains is so strong these movies could happily go on forever.

Brilliantly, during the the extra bit in the credits, my eldest got to his feet and shouted "MORLUN!" at the screen. Quite how he came to that conclusion I have no idea, but it made me laugh.

SBT

[DeFuzzed]

84 Charing Cross Road, 1987.

An interesting slow piece, based on real life correspondence between the American author and a British bookseller. Romantic but not quite a romance. Fascinating insight into life on both sides of the Atlantic.

[Tiplodocus]

Tiny Tips also declared AMAZING SPIDER-MAN to be amazing. His sole complaint was that Spidey was a bit too powerful and invulnerable at times (a fault with the Raimi films also).  I never went to see it with him sorta wish I had now.  Still reckon that first hor of the first Raimi Spider-Man is as good as superheror origin movies can get.


As for DARK KNIGHT RISES, I know it won't be everyone's cup of tea but I always feel that one of the strengths of Batman is that he is far more open to many different styles of interpretation than most superheroes.  He can do camp and funny super knockabout stuff (he'd have easily fitted into an AVENGERS style movie) but can equally be treated in the grim, gritty psuedo-realistic style or goth fairytale.  All are equally valid and I'm happy they exist. 

Same true to a large extent of DREDD. 

Something like SUPERMAN or DOCTOR WHO on the otherhand, just looks daft if you try and do it as grim and gritty or realistic; it always has to be treated with a mythical touch. 

[DeFuzzed]

Something like SUPERMAN or DOCTOR WHO on the otherhand, just looks daft if you try and do it as grim and gritty or realistic; it always has to be treated with a mythical touch.

I don't know - take away the phone box and you could do quite a realistic take. But then it won't be Who without the phone box, the fans cry, and I can well see sometime in the future this exact clash when 'remake Who' enters the minds of TV execs again. As for grim and gritty, they manage that fairly well already sometimes.

Man on a Ledge, 2012.

Sam Worthington. Had no idea it was him I was watching until the credits. Looks very different to when he was in Terminator Salvation; he was a lean machine then, now, squat came to mind. Maybe it was my TV at fault? The movie itself wasn't bad, but it all felt old, tired. A bit like Ed Harris who looked very gaunt.

Tower Heist, 2011.

I love Ben Stiller. I remember loving Eddie Murphy during his Beverly Hills Cops days and the last few years, I've been dying to love him again. And this had Alan Alda too! MASH4EVA! So I wished to love this movie. Unfortunately, it's quite a strangely unlovable one. Strangely un-actiony and unfunny for an action comedy too. Disappointing.

[I, Cosh]

Possibly one for the Kung Fu Fighting thread but hey ho. Raging Phoenix is about as much fun as you can have with an ass-kicking Thai girl in your own living room. I've been meaning to get a hold of Chocolate, Jeeja Yanin's first film, for ages but this has shot it to the top of the list.

It's the sort of film where the kicks and punches often visibly fail to connect but it's full of such fun and inventive fight choreography that I'm happy to let that go. You've got a couple of guys whose fighting style appears to be a strange mix of capoeira and breakdancing. Sounds ridiculous but works surprisingly well in context. This then leads to our heroine being taught a form of drunken Thai boxing where the alcohol is used to sublimate emotional pain into fighting spirit!

The nuttiness doesn't stop there as the standard sex-trafficking villains morph into a gang deriving a lucrative perfume from the sorrowful tears of beautiful women. Visually, the film frequently fidgets into strange camera angles, jerky hand-held shots (although that might just be my broadband) and garish colour saturation. This is occasionally used to highlight story elements and never really gets too annoying as they always remember to knock it on the head when a fight starts. Tremendous fun.

[Fisticuffs]

As for DARK KNIGHT RISES, I know it won't be everyone's cup of tea but I always feel that one of the strengths of Batman is that he is far more open to many different styles of interpretation than most superheroes. 

Same true to a large extent of DREDD. 

True. As much as I like Urbans gritty, hard-edged Dredd, I long for a more easy going, loosely adapted movie. They could even include a sidekick character for light comic relief to counteract Dredds personality.









Wait a drokkin' minute....

[SmallBlueThing]

ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET THE INVISIBLE MAN (1951)

There's a little gag routine in this, involving the palming and pocketing of money, that is so clever and amusing that it completely justifies spending an hour and a half watching a sixty year old vehicle for two comedians nearing the end of their time in the spotlight.

In this, Bud and Lou graduate as detectives and immediately take on the case of a boxer who was wrongly convicted of murder and promptly escaped from the big house. Along the way, he visits his doctor pal and gets injected with Griffin's invisibility serum as a way of clearing his name and exposing the seedy underworld of fight fixing.

Bud and Lou do their thing and another Universal horror character escapes unscathed- the invisibility effects are excellent and there's a respect for the source material that highlights Bud and Lou as a class act. For years we've looked at these movies as 'what happens when horror runs out of steam', but the truth seems to be that they are just as (cont)

[SmallBlueThing]

(cont) interesting and worthy of note as the now more-popular 'straight' horrors. And Lou Costello was a real star- he's brilliantly judged and measured even when he's clowning- which is surely the mark of an exceptional talent.

By popular demand, we're apparently watching '...Go To Mars' tomorrow... After a hilarious mix-up where i thought they were asking to see 'Ghosts of Mars' and explained in some detail why that was unsuitable and wasnt going to happen, over tea.

SBT

[Emp]

HANNAH - bought simply because it was cheap and the blurb stated it to be " A modern day Leon" (which made me feel a little old I have to admit).

I was lied to, apart from a few decent fight scenes it was shite. Whoever was in charge of photography decided to use everything he'd ever seen in anything else..we had the shakey hand held stuff, running with the cameras so there was plenty of shots of pavement and spinning it around so people were running upside down. The film itself could have been 20 minutes shorter if all the scenes of the main character jogging along either to or from somewhere were trimmed.

To be honest, by the end I couldn't give a toss how it ended, just as long as it did.

[judgefloyd]

I've just seen a really good French flick called 'Comme Tout Le Monde' (Australian title: 'Mr Average').  It's about a bloke who is a one-man representative sample, ie his tastes match most peoples.  An advertising company sets him up with a flat full of hidden cameras  and a girlfriend who keeps asking him to choose things, so they can find out which products will succeed.  The French president gets in on the act.  It falls apart a bit towards the end, but overall it was interesting and enjoyable.  My son liked it, but not as much as 'B-13'*, which is a 12 year old's idea of a perfect French movie.



*not as you might think, the Bannanas in Pyjamas latest member, but a Froggy version of 'Escape from New York', with parkour