Last movie watched...

[TordelBack]

It's fitting that there is a character called Hyman in Godfather 2, because people who like it are pussies. Your're just pussies who are scared to see a woman being experimented on so that they can make her into a woman that has a lathe for a hand.

Best review evah, especially the spelling of 'your're', which I will be adopting.

[brendan1]

(cont) applied to his face, and yet neither of them bat an eyelid about seeing 'the best bits from the elm street and friday the 13ths'?

I wonder what process the brain goes through that accepts the effects in star wars as 'perfect' in 1978 yet in 2012 as far less so, even with a bit of cgi tinkering?

SBT

Yeah. How come the audience fled in terror when "arrival of a train at La Ciotat" was shown?

The process the brain goes through is called "experience" and "learning", and is driven by cultural change and technological advances. This means that cinemagoers now wouldn't watch the train arriving at the platform and think it was going to hit them.

Same principle applies to special effects, although personally, I thought Arnie's rubber head in Total Recall and Terminator looked rather a lot like a rubber head.

As for Max Schreck, some images are just rather unsettling and don't rely too heavily on technological advances and marvels.

[Professor Bear]

These are important questions to ask as geek culture changes and grows, and the answering of those questions would make an interesting movie.

Spurlock also missed out on the more obvious geek-culture insights to how Comic-Con has morphed over the years from a convention about comics to a trade show that includes genre fiction stars and porn stars side by side.  There's probably something interesting to be said about how it could be either that the strands of popular culture pull tighter together in an information age to create a microcosm of the geek interests of comics, sci-fi and wanking (or as I like to call it: 9am to 11am), or it could be a symptom of the death-knell of print comics that so much else has to be in play at the cons in order to make them financially viable.
Comic-Con could have been an invaluable insight to a vast section of once-niche pop-cultural consumers who now seem to be deliberately-targeted thanks to a combination of a low bar (set by years of being ignored and/or marginalised in culture) and large amounts of disposable income, but as you point out, it centers on human stories specific to the culture rather than the culture itself, though I can understand why Spurlock went there in order to make his documentary more relatable to... uh, well, to the large amounts of 'regular' people who would want to watch a documentary about people who like comics, I guess.

[Evil Pants]

These are important questions to ask as geek culture changes and grows, and the answering of those questions would make an interesting movie.

Spurlock also missed out on the more obvious geek-culture insights to how Comic-Con has morphed over the years from a convention about comics to a trade show that includes genre fiction stars and porn stars side by side.  There's probably something interesting to be said about how it could be either that the strands of popular culture pull tighter together in an information age to create a microcosm of the geek interests of comics, sci-fi and wanking (or as I like to call it: 9am to 11am), or it could be a symptom of the death-knell of print comics that so much else has to be in play at the cons in order to make them financially viable.
Comic-Con could have been an invaluable insight to a vast section of once-niche pop-cultural consumers who now seem to be deliberately-targeted thanks to a combination of a low bar (set by years of being ignored and/or marginalised in culture) and large amounts of disposable income, but as you point out, it centers on human stories specific to the culture rather than the culture itself, though I can understand why Spurlock went there in order to make his documentary more relatable to... uh, well, to the large amounts of 'regular' people who would want to watch a documentary about people who like comics, I guess.

Good point. I think that in order to gain the access he did, he had to avoid talking about anything that could possibly critique what Comic-Con has become....not to mention the fact that he wanted to keep it accessible to the "regular" folks.

[TordelBack]

It's always fascinated me how the concerns of those who control the media (in whatever form) eventually dominate so much of the content of a culture.  When the written culture of ancient Egypt was in the hands of the pharonic patron class, everything was about their glory.  When the only literate people in Ireland were priests and monks, expressions of culture were dominated by religious groveling - even secular conflicts over cattle and slaves were memorialised and disseminated as the power of one saint's foundation or another.  Now the geeks have been handed the means of production global culture will soon be reduced to porn, Joss Whedon and Glee.  Well, two out of three ain't bad.

[Professor Bear]

If you watch Family Guy, we're there already.

[Frank]

It's always fascinated me how the concerns of those who control the media (in whatever form) eventually dominate so much of the content of a culture.  When the written culture of ancient Egypt was in the hands of the pharonic patron class, everything was about their glory ... Now the geeks have been handed the means of production global culture will soon be reduced to porn, Joss Whedon and Glee.  Well, two out of three ain't bad.

That'd be 'the pictographic culture of ancient Egypt', and your image as a louche, Radio-Four-listening aesthete is compromised by taking your conclusion from the title of a Meatloaf song.

I take your point though; I enjoy Renaissance art despite its (specious) religious purpose. Though the point at which the Impressionists decided that an arresting image posessed a value in and of itself is probably what led us to our current state- in which porn, celebrity and CGI toy/comic book movies are consumed indiscriminately and uncritically, and promoted to the level of the sublime.

I agree that there's a more interesting documentary to be made on the topic of the hegemony of geek culture. Spurlock's doc sounds like it'll be largely uncritical, gently mocking and affectionate; rather than insightful.

The decision to construct the film around human interest stories is predicated upon the mistaken assumption that audiences are interested in other humans; whereas the success of BGT, BB and CDWM demonstrates that what humans are really interested in is seeing flawed individuals fail, being humiliated, derided and ostracised.

[TordelBack]

That'd be 'the pictographic culture of ancient Egypt'...

See, this kind of polite semantic argument is just what I want, at least until Woman's Hour comes on. 



(Hieroglyphics are writing, just writing where the meaning or phoneme is conveyed through visual resemblance to something). 

[I, Cosh]

How does it handle abstraction?

[Roger Godpleton]

The new Apatow comedy is 124 minutes long. What the actual fuck?

[TordelBack]

How does it handle abstraction?

Sorry, listening to Today.  That Sarah Montague, so insightful.

(If I remember aright, by adding a third determinative symbol (in addition to phonemes or pictorial representations), heiroglyphs could be used to represent abstract concepts, like 'knowledge'.  The disadvantage was that they were cumbersome to produce, even compared to similar pictographic systems like cuneiform)). 

[Satanist]

Chronicle – 3 teens get superpowers and how they cope with it. What it lacks in budget it makes up for in enthusiasm. Very predictable script but it was like they looked into my head and filmed my dream super fight. I mean someone gets a bus LOBBED at them! But not how you'd expect.

Enjoyable popcorn fodder.

[SmallBlueThing]

The Wolfman (2010)

The thing to remember about the Universal remake of The Wolf Man (did you see what they did to the title? It's a fucking disgrace!) is that the original is one of only about a handful of good werewolf films ever made in over a century of cinema. So when you turn it off at the end, slightly disappointed, keep in mind that- with the exception of the Chaney Jnr original, Landis's seminal parody, The Howling, Dog Soldiers and possibly the Oliver Reed one if you're in a forgiving mood- that's likely how you'll respond to any of them. Werewolves have had a pissy life on screen, the poor old things. No work of classic literature to wet the knickers of those for whom horror is only tolerable if it has roots in big shirts and suicidal poets, you see. Instead, everything comes back to Curt Siodmak and his screenplay for Universal's 1941 film- which is why this one sticks pretty close to the earlier film, and why it panics and loses its head when it realises it has almost twice the screentime to fill.

So yes, the romance is clumsy and yes, Anthony Hopkins's alpha daddy-wolf is ridiculous and the final battle so dumb as to be straight out of a wrestling video, but- ah fuck it, I love this movie. There, I said it. No use denying it. I love it because it takes the brilliant Chaney jnr monster and recasts him as Benicio Del Toro- who is basically Chaney's slightly unkempt time-twin- then puts him in a makeup that's just Rick Baker having a massive laugh, and then lets him do all those fantastic things that Chaney never could. So he eats human liver (in the film's best visual gag), runs like a monkey, knocks heads off with a single swipe, eats people while they're alive and gets to play on a film set that would have had the original Universal crew from 1931-45 crying like babies. Rip out the long sequences of Del Toro exploring Talbot Manor, and the fauxmance and you've got about an hour of cod-gothic entertainment, some pretty spectacular bloodshed, a couple of fairly magnificent transformations and at least one scene that deserves to be a lot more well-known than it is; when Talbot transforms in the lecture hall.

This was requested by my boys- specifically Bela, who at seven, doesn't remember watching it already a couple of years ago. His response this time was to declare it "too gory! too scary!" and hide his eyes for a few minutes until he worked out he was missing bits. Bram guffawed through all the gore and decided he'd "quite like to be a werewolf". When his brother, quite shocked, pointed out this would mean he's have to kill people, Bram responded with "No, I'd be a good werewolf. I'd eat steak instead of people and fight crime." Both of them thought it too long, and both asked to see the original some time next week. And I'm off to track down The Monster Squad, for when we inevitably run out of black and white classics.

SBT

[HdE]

Well. I should be asleep now. But I'm not. Because I just watched Thor.

I actually enjoyed this movie a lot more than I thought I would. Probably moreso than Captain America, which I thought was solid if slightly lacking in storytelling punch.

Anthony Hopkins, great as usual.
Rene Russo (still gorgeous) also great.
Eyepopping visual effects - eyepopping.
Thor getting tasered mid-Asgardian-posturing - priceless!

[judgefloyd]

Me, I spent a bit of Anzac day watching The Avengers.  I really liked it.  The characters were  mostly good - the Black Widow didn't do anything for me, but all else was quality.  The guy who played Hawkeye, although nothing like the comics Hawkeye, reminded me a lot of Daniel Craig.  The main men worked well together.  I did get a bit explosioned out by the end, but overall it was damn good fun.