Last movie watched...

[The Enigmatic Dr X]

I'm about to watch Don't Mess With the Zohan. Me, a Stella and a bottle of Disarono. Never seen it before.

[shaolin_monkey]

Princess Bride is possibly my favourite film of all time. There's a few fighting for the title but its up there. The book is brilliant too.

Yep, the book is brill - very 'fourth wall' with the narrator cutting out what he describes as massive political diatribes, wasted on the modern reader.  An excellent read, and, dare I say it, better than the film.

[Mabs]

Rise of the Guardians with the family today. Surprisingly, I really, really liked this. Wich is a bit of a shock because very little from Dream Works has interested or even entertained me in years, yet here is something that is really quite moody and frankly original. It was a breath of fresh air ad I found myself enjoying it more and more. One of the best movies of the year? No, but certainly one i'll be revisiting.

I was the same, i used to hate every output by Dreamworks but i really feel they have come of age. Some of their recent outputs have been superb such as the Kung Fu Panda double, How to train your dragon, hell even the last Shrek was brilliant. And their animation is now maybe on par with Pixar. On the other hand Pixar seem to be losing some of their magic. Cars 2 was a big disappointment and Brave felt more like a Disney output, not a Disney-PIXAR one.

Really looking forward to watching Rise of the Guardians.

[TordelBack]

Rise of the Guardians with the family today. Surprisingly, I really, really liked this.

Yeah, the whole family (41, 41, 6 and 3) went to the cinema together for the first time Christmas Eve, and we all thought it was great - not one fidget, not one toilet break, not one demand for more food and drink (and that was just the wife).  Absolutely exquisite animation and design, some good gags, maybe a bit short on ideas, and a resolution that I would have liked to have been slightly different ([spoiler]I'd have had Pitch and his nightmares accepted as a necessary part of childhood rather than banished from it [/spoiler]), but basically it's the best Pratchett that Pratchett never wrote.  Dual-wielding Santa in particular was brilliant.  That the Easter Bunny is Australian was a bit mystifying, what with Easter and Spring being unrelated in the antipodes, not to mention rabbits.  But hey, great sustained fun, and really lovely to look at.

Also on the kiddie rabbitcentric front, I finally saw the much-derided Burton Alice in Wonderland, which despite being misleadingly named, lacking a lot of the celebration of wit of the books and featuring the compulsory completely superfluous Lord of The Rings action sequence at the end was actually very enjoyable, and generally a satisfying and quite beautiful reworking of the material.  HBC's Red Queen was superb, and I normally can't stand that woman in anything.  My attention span may have been lengthened by the prospect of the gorgeous Mia Wasikowska repeatedly slipping or bursting out of her increasingly flimsy dresses, but so what.

[TordelBack]

...And the class kids' movies keep coming with Brave.  The wife and girl had seen this in the cinema and raved about it, but I only watched the DVD with the kids today.  Magic.  Animation-wise some powerful and subtle work on body language and facial expressions, supported by the best animated hair/fur effects I've ever seen.  As far as characters and plot go, this film is virtually unique in my experience.  A kids' animated feature where both parents are alive and happily married, where the core relationship (and driver of the plot) is that of a young woman and her mother, and where the female lead is completely unencumbered by male interests (except as comedy backdrop)? From Disney?  Amazing, gawds bless Pixar.  All this plus some good gags and comedy turns, an involving plot and setting, and gorgeous backgrounds.  A bloody treasure of a thing.  I'll be watching this again.

[Professor Bear]

Demolition Man has been the only thing I have been sober enough to watch this last week or so, and while fun, the tone is over the place and I'm not sure who it was aimed at, with gory deaths and motherfucker this and cocksucker that all over the place even though there's room to excise both in the name of the work itself via commentary on censorship and San Angeles' ambiguous morality laws.
I remember being distracted first time around by what the rest of the world was like seeing as it's always clear that the city is the work of an individual resident whose death even spells the end of the city's security and prosperity, but this time around it was nagging even more because it could have been sidelined easily by a comment or two about the city being walled off from a horrible world - both feeding back into the satire on LA culture by making the entire city essentially one huge privileged gated community, but also making it an inversion of the status quo established at the start of the film where LA is fenced off from the world because it's such a shithole.
It makes a good Dredd run-through right down to the romance subplot from nowhere between colleagues and the presence of Rob Schneider, but uneven tone aside, DM has a clear idea of the story it's telling even when that story doesn't make much sense, actually making a virtue of the inherent assumption required of the audience that Stallone's character is a hard-as-nails maverick cop with the chief on his ass who causes explosions everywhere he goes and has earned the name Demolition Man as the film starts, because the story doesn't establish this at any length and it's even a major plot point that he's actually hopelessly outclassed by his tax-dodging nemesis.  The story here is that we all know we're watching ephemeral, noisy shit, and on that score, DM delivers.

[Zarjazzer]

Total Recall 2012. The designs and the look of the mega cities is great and even the plot had some nice twists especially towards the end but my God the ridiculousness of the incompetent mooks was just unbelievable. A scene where hundreds of troops mange to miss the two rebels made imperial stormtroopers look like Annie Oakley. Up till then I'd put up with Farrell playing Farrell and admired Kate Beckinsale as psycho wife from hell. After that i predicted the bad guys ending ( [spoiler]lovely if rather imporable lift through the centre of the earth mahhn crashing back down.)[/spoiler],otherwise a watchable but uneven version that became just another action movie (evil empires,and Hollywoods denial of physics -jumping off a high building to another ledge in those heels darling? Don't think so).

[TordelBack]

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  What a very, very strange film that was.  Essentially a kids' movie that goes out of its way to not be for kids, and I'm very glad the wife and I left them with their uncle for an early morning 3D 48fps Hi-Def viewing. 

Now I love The Hobbit and LotR and I love (most of) the LotR films, and I'm a fan of Jackson as a helm as well, and I enjoyed this long cinema outing very much.  Even so I was gobsmacked by a slew of almost unforgivable flaws, almost of all of which can be summarised as unspeakably lazy filmmaking.  Acres of the film were ludicrously, pointlessly flabby, almost as if nobody could be bothered editing it or indeed adapting it and just cut a full-length reading of the book with some OTT action scenes and some heavy talky prequelism. 

I was absolutely delighted to see so much the whimsy and charm of the book represented on screen, with faithful delivery of lines and representations of some of the sillier characters and situations - Barry Humphey's Great Goblin was just spellbinding, the Trolls were suitably amusing and the Dali-like realisation of the mountain Giants was very impressive.  The dwarves' singing and washing-up routines were beautifully executed, and Ken Stott's wonderful Balin sold the whole group perfectly.  Similar in tone if not in source Sylvester McCoy's Radagast and his furry/feathered  chums were scene-stealers.  I was also pleased to see that Thorin's company weren't all tooled-up Warhammer warriors, but were well-leavened with doddery largely harmless folk.  A very pleasant divergence from the grim doom-laden atmosphere of LotR, and a very solid children's film.

Unfortunately this rather fine work was interspersed with incredibly long repetitive (if impressive) action sequences, rendered almost indecipherable by having no less than 14 heroes to keep track of amidst hundreds of foes.  Why did we need to see [spoiler]Radagast and the wargs swooping past the company[/spoiler] four times?  How many collapsing/swinging walkways can you fit into one sequence?  How many different ways can dwarves get knocked aside by trolls?  Any of the action sequences could have een halved in length and been better for it.  The hopelessly contrived almost-risible conclusion-a-third-of-the-way-through-the-book was actually the action scene that worked best, because it kept most of the characters out of the way and you could actually see some motivation and resolution rather than endless running-and-swinging.

And then there's the overindulgent nonsense, long sequences of mindless relentless exposition, a reprehensibly unnecessary scene with Frodo that derailed the opening completely, a 'Riddles in the Dark' scene that seems to be the full text of that chapter delivered slowly and ponderously... someone in authority needs to realise that is is a film, not a 20-part radio serial or 60 hour audio book.  I just can't imagine my kids sitting through this, which is a shame, because there's so much that's worth their time.

As to the look of the thing, well wow.  The 3D was truly excellent for a change, adding depth and even texture with no obvious loss of clarity of movement or darkening of lighting, or even inducing of headaches, and after a few double-takes the 48fps really seemed to infuse everything with an almost shocking realism - I thought it supported the merging of CGI and real/model elements brilliantly.  Some odd sped-up-movement effects when viewed out of the corner of my eyes, and a bit of a shock at the start, but on the whole I thought it worked great. I loved Erebor, I loved Radagast's home, I loved Hobbiton and Rivendell all over again, I even loved the insanity of Goblin Town  The New Zealand Tourist Board ad breaks every half hour or so were as wonderful as ever.

When this film was being itself, it was superb.  When it was trying to be Temple of Doom, The Mummy or Lord of the Rings Extended Editions, it was deeply frustrating.  If Jackson can spare some time to actually edit the next two instalments into actual films I have very high hopes, and I'll be first in the queue regardless.

[Spikes]

The film versions of the Millennium Trilogy.

Is the extended versions boxset worth tracking down?

[Ancient Otter]

Two Russian films on dvd: Come and See followed by Battleship Potemkin.

[HdE]

The film versions of the Millennium Trilogy.

Is the extended versions boxset worth tracking down?

YES! I have this, and there's a fair bit of stuff in the six 90-minute episodes that was cut from the movies. Methinks I'm due for a re-watch soon.

We have visitors at the mo, so tonight we watched the first Tobey Maguire Spiderman. The action scenes are still fun, but it hasn't dated so well. Dear lord... Dafoe is awful as the Green Goblin. Real scenery chewing stuff. And the script has a few wince inducing lines that seemed so much less of an issue way back.

Still - Spidey 2 tomorrow night! And I genuinely LOVE that one!

[Tiplodocus]

Ive not seen COME AND SEE for ages. Great, grim stuff.

[SmallBlueThing]

For two days now i've been trying to say that i saw 'Harry and the Hendersons', and each time i've lost fucking reception before being able to post.

Well, we saw it and it was bloody great, as it was when i went to the cinema to see it back in december 1988.

So there.

SBT

[SmallBlueThing]

Thank christ for that.

SBT

[DeFuzzed]

Total Recall, 2012 - Interesting ideas and effects. Found Farrell, Beckinsale and Biel too bland. Actually, the whole movie could have used some spark; there was a distinct lack of something something.

Premium Rush, 2012 - Joseph Gordon Levitt biking dangerously. Good fun, and funny, ending could have been better. If you shake your fists at some cyclists in the city though, like I do, this film will show we are perfectly valid to shake shake shake.

Snow White and the Huntsman, 2012 - Stunning visuals. Chris Hemsworth again very watchable. A sequel is coming but I didn't find it interesting enough to warrant one.

Mirror Mirror, 2012 - Snow White again, the funny version. With bollywood bhangra even. Quirky, uneven, and Julia Roberts in some far out gowns.

Hunger Games, 2012 - Whoever dismisses this as a Battle Royale rip-off? Similar injustice as with Dredd and Raid comparisons. Good movie, good story. They took away a lot of the gore but the tension comes through loud and clear and Jennifer Lawrence is great.

Lawless, 2012 - I know a lot of people who want to slap Shia and this movie will just make you want to do that some more. Guy Pearce doing a wierdo outing. Without eyebrows.

Lockout, 2012 - Fun. Defo Snake in Space with a more dry and witty Guy Pearce.