Last movie watched...

[JamesC]

Forgive me, James, but are you high?

No although I haven't actually read any of the reviews for this film so maybe I'm missing something that upset everybody else!

[Hawkmumbler]

I saw it in the cinema and even with a drink and a mate it wasn't fun to riff. The acting wasn't amusingly bad. I felt like i had been lobotomised. Pretty scenery and some decent effects ruined by some of the most Appalling acting i've seen in my life and a nonsensical script that has things happen "just because". Like, if these aliens are so dangerous, why the hell would they take on on a long distance military exercise to begin with?

[JamesC]

I thought the acting seemed okay - it was very downbeat but I thought that was intentional.
Do you mean why were they transporting the alien on the spaceship? I think they were taking it to a training ground so that new 'ghosts' could get close to it in a semi controllable environment. Seems fairly sensible to me.

[radiator]

Not a film, but since we don't have a 'Last Musical Watched' I'll share it here - The Book of Mormon, which was just phenomenal, and totally lived up to the (considerable) hype. I haven't laughed so much in years.

Brilliantly constructed, wonderful songs and choreography, amazing costumes and production design and an outstanding cast, and the script is sharp, moving, at times shocking, and pant-pissingly funny from start to finish.

Not only the best thing I've ever seen in a theatre, but also just one of the best THINGS I've ever seen full stop.

Tickets were expensive, but worth every penny. If you ever get a chance to see it, do not pass it up.

[HdE]

Friday nights appear to have become movie night at HdE towers. So, in that vein, last night we watched:

'Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.' Which is quite fun, undemanding fluff.

The kick-to-the-teeth ending isn't quite so shocking given the absence of momentum through the body of the movie, but there's enough fun stuff here to make it worth a watch. There's an excellent moment in the blu ray out-takes as well.

We followed that with 'Run Lola Run', which is still great. It's one of those 'the same stuff happens several times over' movies that manages to hold viewer interest, which is where a lot of these sorts fo films fall down, I think. Some of the 'and then' sequences are hilarious!

Whatever happened to Franka Potente?

[JamesC]

Summer Magic

One of those old live action Disney films starring Hayley Mills.
It was a drama about a wholesome family fixing up an old farm house with a few songs thrown on for good measure (The Ugly Bug Ball!) It's all incredibly dated but also really funny and charming as these old films tend to be.

[Tiplodocus]

I might check out AFTER EARTH; I missed that and OBLIVION at the cinema and I like Will Smith and Tom Cruise. (So sue me!).


THE AMERICAN
George Clooney is a contract killer and weaponsmith seeking redemption in some gorgeous European locales.
It's not an action movie by any stretch of the imagination - the pace is glacial - and it's barely a character piece - George pares his style down to the bone and the dialogue is nearly non-existent.
But it's really enjoyable in a Kurosawa or Leone-Lite kind of way. It might as well be a western with it's troubled gunman befreinding the local priest and hooker with a heart of gold. Fantastic cinematography too - not a side of Italy you often see.

For me the interesting bit was that, despite being almost entirely formulaic and predictable (you really have seen these tropes plenty of times and everything pans out exactly as you can predict) it was entertaining in a way that PRETTY WOMAN (also full of tired, predictable stuff) was not.  Why is that?

Oh, and TBF;TL.

[I, Cosh]

I normally love that sort of thing but I just found The American dull I'm afraid.

Without further ado, Spring Breakers. Amazing. It's by Harmony Korine, so questions of taste, propriety and cake consumption/retention are never far away but I found it entrancing. It's like if Enter the Void was a rap video.

[Steve Green]

Man of Steel.

Never watched it at the cinema.

Less in the Dark Knight mould than I was expecting from the trailer - the crash zooms irritated, as did jittery camerawork (which I'm normally pretty accepting of).

It's tough to naturally film something unnatural like a superhero fight, but when the neo-Ursa starts sliding across the floor like a Streetfighter character, I do feel like I'm watching someone else play a game.

It's a tired cliche to trot out 'it looks like a videogame' for any CGI, but it's more the direction of the animation, or direction in general (see also the Hobbit platformer)

I really wasn't bothered by *that* scene, and I really liked the Lois escape with Rusty Crowe playing at TomTom. The World Engine was nicely realised as well.

It took a while for me to get used to the Kryptonian style - and to be honest I wish they'd stuck with the established film look.

I thought the perfomances were great overall, just not keen on the direction really.

[Frank]

Man of Steel. It's tough to naturally film something unnatural like a superhero fight. but ... I really wasn't bothered by *that* scene ... I thought the perfomances were great overall, just not keen on the direction really.

Before Midnight, which - like Man of Steel - featured thirty minutes of characters pounding each other without mercy, but without the [spoiler]neck snap[/spoiler] either. Even a metaphorical one

[TordelBack]

ST-II: The Wrath of Khan.  Gosh, I'd often have argued that this is my favourite ST film, but a shiny new DVD copy revealed this is definitely not the case. 

I was aware going in that I'd probably seen it way, way too many times, but thought this was only connected with being able to recite virtually the entire script, but after last weekend's viewing of ST:TMP, TWoK also looked terrible - even the uninspired opening credits looked like they were from 10 years before the first film. All the SFX shots from the seemingly endless first 45 minutes were re-used from TMP verbatim, right down to the simulator Klingons and same spacemen in Spacedock doing the exact same distinctive things, which made proceedings seem incredibly cheap from the outset (I also can't believe I never noticed that Regula 1 is just the Earth-orbit station from TMP upside down).  The lighting is dull and overdone at the same time, the sound fuzzy, the costumes garishly overstuffed, the action painfully slow, the emotion forced and manipulative.  Where have the crisp futuristic lines and ambitions of the first film gone?

Ricardo Montalban carries the whole thing on his beautifully hammy shoulders, sometimes assisted by Shatner's furtively spectacle-wearing but somehow sleepy Kirk, and while Nimoy's Spock shows considerable evolution as a character, it's towards somewhere far blander than the starting point.  The Reliant model is very fine, the Ceti-Alpha 5 brain worms are very well executed, the Genesis effect is still impressive, and the outside of Enterprise herself still glows as a paragon of design, even as her interiors feel cramped, dingy and filled with cheap TVs.

I'm being unduly harsh, I know I am, but this film really suffers from being viewed in close proximity to its far slicker predecessor, or brisk contemporaries like Empire Strikes Back.  I hope next week's scheduled viewing of Search for Spock finds me better disposed.

[von Boom]

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

This was simply a fantastic film. Don't let the previews put you off. This film is much, much better than the previews. While I will admit the beginning is a bit odd at times, once you get past that and into the main point of the story the film becomes humorous and a whole lot of fun.

And the cinematography will leave your mouth hanging open. I don't know if this film was shot in Imax, but it should have been.

I enjoyed this film so much I wanted to stay for the very next showing to watch it all over again. I probably could have too without any problem as almost no one is seeing this film. I say do yourself a favour and make some time soon to see it.

[Hawkmumbler]

Im surprised more people aren't singing praise for Walter Mitty. I saw it on wednesday and really enjoyed it.

[Mabs]

The Truman Show which was on tele earlier, god I love that film! The last few minutes always gets me - such a powerful moment. And Jim Carrey is bloody marvellous as the title character, I cannot envision anyone else who could've done a better job than him, just all the emotions that he so powerfully captures on the screen. It's an Oscar worthy performance without a doubt. And the message of the film could not be more vital than right now, when reality TV shows are everywhere and the loss of privacy through social media is prevalent.  Also, I don't know what's become of Peter Weir of late, but with Witness, Gallipoli, and The Truman Show he has certainly cemented his place on my list of most favourite directors.

[JOE SOAP]

Also, I don't know what's become of Peter Weir of late, but with Witness, Gallipoli, and The Truman Show he has certainly cemented his place on my list of most favourite directors.

Peter Weir is someone who's always in the background and unlike many of his generation churning out consistently good and sometimes exceptional films every few years. His last one is The Way Back.

Picnic at Hanging Rock, Fearless and The Truman Show and even The Mosquito Coast are some of my favourites but you should also check out The Cars that Ate Paris and The Last Wave.