Last movie watched...

[Dark Jimbo]

Last night I finally sat down for The Thing double bill. I've seen Carpenter's original a few times, but this was my first time watching the prequel.

I prefer the Carpenter version, but with all the references to the original, I kept thinking you were referring to the Howard Hawks version (full title - The Thing From Another World - which is what the Dark Horse comic was also called).

Carpenter's film is king, naturally - but the second best adaptation of the novella is neither the belated prequel nor the 50's original but 1972's glorious Horror Express, which sets the alien shape-shifter carnage on a train(!) and adds zombies, cossacks and Rasputin, all set to a twanging funk soundtrack.

[Hawkmumbler]

I'll second that. Horror Express also has an all star cast with Lee, Cushing, Telly Savalas, and de Mendosa all knocking it out of the park. An excellent, under rated horror gem. Get the Blu-Ray while you can!

[Buttonman]

The lamentable 1980s disaster film When Time Ran Out... which, despite a decent cast, was totally dreadful and has rightfully been forgotten.

[Keef Monkey]

So last night I random pick a film on Netflix,

Odd Thomas

wow what a great entertaining film! Anton Yelchin is great as Odd Thomas!

You should check out the book series if you haven't Goaty, I love them!

[I, Cosh]

A few things I saw over a weekend at the Neuchatel International Fantastic Film Festival.

First up on Saturday afternoon was Spider, a Cronenberg film I'd managed to miss since it came out. On balance, it wasn't a great start. There's a decent central performance from Ralph Fiennes as a man afflicted with one of those exceptionally cinematic forms of mental illness. All tics and twitches and studied mannerisms which allow the actor to indulge himself but which I increasingly find borderline offensive.

A bit of a shame as the cinematography and sound design do a good job of evoking the idea of a fractured mind and the visual metaphor of a man effectively lost in his own memories is a good one. Gabriel Byrne gives a strangely wooden performance as Spider's flashback father but I couldn't quite decide if that was accidental or a deliberate choice to try and portray it as a child's memory.

I had managed to misread the programme notes and didn't realise Tokyo Tribe came with French rather than English subtitles. Lucky break, as I was still able to grasp la plupart and this blast of kinetic lunacy was not just the highlight of the weekend but roughly the second best film I've seen all year.

Billed as a Yakuza gangsta rap musical, it's set around one hot night when a series of preposterous circumstances lead to the balance of power amongst Tokyo's gangs falling apart. It's filled with OTT grotesques straight out of Takashi Miike and, much like The Warriors, each gang has their own gimmicky look and rap style. As it goes on, it piles more and more disparate elements – from the sleazy to the supernatural – on top of each other until it seems it has to fall apart.

Somehow, it just keeps moving forward, propelled by the insistent soundtrack and the dream logic of the musical for sure, but every scene moves and spins and is stuffed to gills with background details you could never hope to take in in one sitting. That it doesn't resolve half the things it sets up doesn't seem to matter in the face of such energy.

If it wasn't afflicted with a hugely problematic dose of casual misogyny I'd urge everyone to see it. Instead I find myself wondering whether I should even buy the DVD.

As night fell, it was time for a free open-air screening of Footloose by the lakeside. It's actually quite a sweet film which plays its utterly ludicrous premise with a completely straight face. I'd forgotten that John Lithgow's censorious preacher actually seems to be voice of reason when compared with some of his flock.





(Those are deckchairs)

The next morning opened with a languid brunch in a lakeside brasserie before catching Slow West. Not much to say about this really. It's one of those films where an odd couple trudge across magnificent American skylines having self-consciously whacky encounters with other travellers.
Fassbender is quiet, the Scotch lad is a bit wet and his idealised love is the best thing in it and clearly far too good for him.

I had a ticket for lurid looking Ozploitation picture Wake in Fright but didn't make it in the end. The mercury was closing in on 40 degrees, most of the screenings were in old buildings without air conditioning and the previous couple of nights were catching up with me. In solidarity with my spiritual brothers at Glasgow Comic Con the same weekend, I decided the best course of action was to go for a lie down in a local park.

Refreshed after my nap and a late afternoon repast of egg kebab and Vimto, I was ready for the last leg. Billed as the first Ethiopian sci-fi film, Crumbs turned out to have been made by a bloody Spaniard on his holidays. At least the cast were predominantly locals.

There's a fine line between absurdity and plain old shite. I'm not quite sure which side of the line this story of a deformed lad going on a quest to free Santa Claus from prison (which happens to be connected to the lad's girlfriend's house via a haunted bowling alley)  so he can be granted his wish to return on the imaginary spaceship to his own planet falls.

Give it a try. There are some beautiful and quite alien looking landscapes, Santa Claus turns out to be a right old cunt and there's an endearingly silly turn from an old shopkeeper who gleefully rips off everyone who turns up trying to sell him some old plastic tat from before the fall.

Sadly I had to catch the train before Sunday night's outdoor showing of Mad Max 2 started.

TL;DR: Spider? Shiter, more like. Crumbs? Bums, more like. Et cetera

[inkymonkey]

Shame you missed out on Wake In Fright, that's a great little film.  1970s raw Australian goodness - and a kangaroo cull (not for those who are easily upset - went to the first screening of the film after its rediscovery a few years back at the Sydney Film Festival, there were a fair few walkouts at that point).

One of the two films that really kicked off a resurgence in the Australian film scene back in the early 70s.

The irony of the whole thing though, of course, is the director is Canadian...

[sheridan]

It's filled with OTT grotesques straight out of Takashi Miike and, much like The Warriors, each gang has their own gimmicky look and rap style.

Somehow, it just keeps moving forward, propelled by the insistent soundtrack and the dream logic of the musical for sure

Sounds like a combination of Dredd stories Rumble in the Jungle and (insert musical story here).

[Tiplodocus]

JAWS at the GFT.
What a fantastic film.
Spielberg on the ascendancy.
Forty years on and it still had me on the edge of my seat and still had the power to make a paled out cinema audience jump (despite the majority of them, like myself, having probably seen it a dozen times).

A genuine joy to be able to take my two boys (well man and teenager) to experience it on the big screen.

Tiny Tips said "Jaws on the telly? Meh. Jaws at the cinema? Traumatic!".

[Mardroid]

The Faculty

Aliens taking over US High School film. A bit clichéd (but it knows it is, one character even telling other characters what archetype they are) but good fun. Borrows a lot fron Invasion of the he Body Snatchers, but still does its own thing. Interesting to see the amount of recognisable actors in fairly small roles. And a (physically) small actor in a fairly large role (a pre Lord of the Rings Elijah Wood).

[TordelBack]

Ant-Man.  The boy and I went on an outing to see this tonight, and it was a real pleasure - what a well-made, engaging, and dare I say restrained movie.  A universally good cast, well-used (and I speak as someone who generally cannot abide the sight of Michael Douglas, amazing CGI-youthening notwithstanding, and I'm no fan of Paul Rudd either) - with Michael Pena and (gasp) Evangeline Lilly stealing the show, but against stiff opposition.  I am a sucker for heists and capers, and this had plenty of good 'uns, .

Yes, some of the later sight gags don't fit too well with the established rules of the size-change premise, but they are damn good gags, so who cares.  I thought the mix of ensemble humour, fast-cutting Wright-y vignettes, and po-faced world-saving worked really well.  The decision to fully embrace the concept and limit the mini-beast action to ants gave it a distinctive character, and for once actually found myself wishing for more CGI action sequences.

Much as I enjoyed the fireworks and wisecracking of Age of Ultron, I thought this one really highlighted the potential of the Marvel movie milieu for telling all kinds of different superhero yarns: a tight well-developed cast, two simple parallel stories of a search for redemption, and twin superpower conceits fully exploited visually.

And a proper, comprehensive happy ending where regular people manage to not be dicks! 

[Albion]

Pixels.

Went to see it with Mrs Albion, her daughter and the two grandsons, aged 9 and 13.

I was expecting this to be poor but we all really enjoyed it. Lots of 80's nostalgic fun to be had for us who were around at that time. The boys, who are keen gamers, really enjoyed the old game characters (they knew who most of them were) and had much to laugh at. I was surprised to see a certain character from 80"s TV turn up too.

My only criticisms are that it was a bit slow a couple of times during the soppier parts of the film and Peter Dinklage was disappointing. Not one of his better performances.

[Dandontdare]

Fantastic Four. It was okay I suppose, but just a bit grim (as opposed to Grimm). I'd love to see a retro whizz-bang FF film in the style of the original comics, rather than all these "dark" interpretations which suck all the fun out of what was always one of marvel's sillier series.

No problems with the casting or the effects, just not a very exciting story. And in the end [spoiler]when all the generals who wanted to keep them captive and exploit them suddenly agree to give them the Baxter Building and let them call the shots[/spoiler], that struck me as jarringly implausible.

[Professor Bear]

Insurgent - I don't mean this as a slight on Judge Minty, but Minty has much better FX work than this 110 million dollar movie.  I do not know what they spent the cash on, presumably it went towards hiring one of the cast of Hawaii Five-0, in which case it may have been the one smart thing this movie actually did, because this movie is horseshit.
The direction is terrible and none of the story makes any sense even by the continually-lowering standards of YA adaptations, and the acting - Jesus.  I am aware that the lead actress was praised for her performance, but I have no idea how she got any praise for this, she is awful.  To be fair, she's in good company because no-one in this turkey can act, and to be doubly fair, there's fuck all worth acting out, so maybe that's what they were praising - that rather than try to stand out in this shit sandwich of a film, she just knuckled down and got through it and didn't try to waste anyone's time.  This is two hours long so she wasn't entirely successful, but I can only appreciate the sentiment.

[Steve Green]

Heh...

usually bad effects are the result of studios pushing the limits of time and/or money, rather than lack of talent in the VFX team. Or the director overrides their advice.

One producer once boasted that it was his job to bankrupt the VFX company...

I certainly want to improve on what I did for Minty in Stront, it serves it well enough though for what it is.

[Professor Bear]

I can see the director not taking advice to get a shot he wants, but the resulting visuals are so flat and unimaginative I can't see why they would have been a bother for a seasoned FX artist, being one of two kinds of FX shot*: overhead views of post-apocalyptic Chicago straight out of a cartoon show, or location shooting footage in the foreground and slightly wobbly CGI buildings superimposed on the background like they were doing at the dawn of film-making to much better effect.

/goes off to the internet to look at Syd Dutton paintings of post-apocalyptic Chicago.