Last movie watched...

[Frank]

Lone Survivor, which would like you to think it's a war film about military adventure gone awry, like Deer Hunter or Black Hawk Down, and Eric Banana even shows up in the Sam Shepherd role from that latter film, allowing you to imagine he might be the same character a decade on and that the two films might take place in the same continuity and the same Marvel Universe.

It also opens with the same boot camp montage of raw recruits being turned into the goddamest sum bitches in the world which has featured in every film about the military since An Officer And A Gentleman through Full Metal Jacket and Tigerland, and ends with the same homoerotic exchange of glances between a muscled US special forces veteran with bad hair and a feminine Afghan boy. It even features the same black screen text dedication to the bravery of the Afghan people as Rambo III, although churlishly neglects to congratulate the resilience of the mujahidin as Stallone's film took the time to do.

Despite this martial window dressing, Lone Survivor actually belongs to the same genre as Deliverance or Southern Comfort, where weekend warriors looking for an excuse to field test their latest high tech purchases Burt's carbon fibre bow, the guard tempted to fire off his blank ammo) inadvertently find themselves transported back in time and fall foul of folk who actually live this shit.


(continued)

[Frank]

(Lone Survivor, continued)


Not too long ago, the humanising character moments at the start of the movie intended to help audiences identify with the leads would have established that they had grey haired mothers back home who were worried about losing the farm, or fiancés called Gina who worked the diner all day, bringing home her meagre pay because times were tough, mm, so tough. These Navy Seal's bodies might be in Bagram, but the heads of the members of Spartan 1 (irony!) are still umbilically connected to the domestic bliss of home, as electronic technology allows them to buy thoroughbred Arabian stallions as wedding gifts and fret over interior design choices with their female other halves.

The best of the best figure their activities in terms of consumer durables like imported beers and pop culture references to Rick James and Jamiroquai, and even hold BGT style auditions, where contestants dance and recite the closest thing they have to a code (see trailer, above), which has all the depth of Baz Luhrmann's Sunscreen. The essential frivolity of dropping these aesthetes off in the woods cosseted head to toe in Kevlar, night vision laser sights and satellite internet technology continues right up the command chain, as bureaucracy, budgetary considerations and health and safety mean their superiors effectively abandon them to their fate * at the hands of peasant warriors who operate by a much simpler code and don't care whether they or anyone else lives or dies.

It's a film about a civilisation whose idea of hell is losing your 4G coverage and having to drink supermarket brand bottled water, and how the period during which Western nations' economic and technological advances allowed them to project their power and advance their ideology beyond their own borders is effectively at an end. The action's well staged, I was never bored, and if you enjoy that bit in The Simpsons where Homer falls off a cliff and hits his head on every single rock on the way down, there's a 10 minute sequence where the bone crunching brutality and sheer physical damage done to the men's bodies is fetishized in a way you'll love.



* [spoiler]they lose their air support and rescue team because guidelines state billion dollar Black Hawk helicopters can't fly without their flanks being covered by million dollar Apaches[/spoiler]

[GrinningChimera]

The Great Mouse Detective.

I had much delight in watching my girlfriend, who was only watching for the second time (the first being many many years ago) realize that Basil is Sherlock Holmes. Being a huge Sherlock fan she loved it. I haven't seen it since I was a boy so it was great watching it again. I was a little disappointed that Disney haven't seemed to put as much restoration work into it but I can't say it's that surprising as I'm sure it was never as popular as Beauty And The Beast or Cinderella or any of the "classics"

A very good film, as as an added bonus one of my favourite actors Vincent Price provides one the main voices, so that was nice.

I really do encourage anyone with kids or having kids to start collecting the Disney Blu-rays. They are an investment well worth making and truly are fun for the whole family.

[Daveycandlish]

Superman II.
Still a better film than Man of Steel.

[Professor Bear]

Superman 4 is better than Man Of Steel - there, I've said it.

[deadman1971]

last night i watched John Dies at The End, interestingly a good film.

[Ghost MacRoth]

Superman 4 is better than Man Of Steel - there, I've said it.

You ain't wrong, and superman 4 was shite.

[Spikes]

Bloody Sunday on ITV last night.

A film that always grabs me from the very start, and refuses to let me go, right up to the inevitable - and appalling conclusion.

[Professor Bear]

Lone Survivor,

At some point during this, I realised that there was no point watching the action scenes as there wasn't any way to tell what was going on, and characters would just die in slow motion when the story required them to, no need for an investment of attention or concentration on my part, I just had to wait for the music to swell a little to know that someone was going to pop their clogs so I should look up from the phone for a minute or two.  The plot seems to be the first five minutes of a 1980s action film spread over two hours, the bit where the helicopter explodes being where Chuck Norris would be sent for.
The film seems constructed of shots someone came up with while listening to a Flaming Lips album interspersed with scenes cribbed from the first contemporary Medal of Honor game, the plot actually mirroring that game's central section almost exactly not just in narrative construction but also in visuals, though I imagine the latter is unavoidable when you take setpieces from what is already a cinematic game and film them in exactly the same locations.

An offensively inconsequential nothing of a film whose main entertainment for me was when I couldn't stop myself laughing at the montage of dead soldiers at the end.  I'm not proud of it.

[Frank]

Lone Survivor,

An offensively inconsequential nothing of a film whose main entertainment for me was when I couldn't stop myself laughing at the montage of dead soldiers at the end.  I'm not proud of it.

That was god-awfully mawkish, wasn't it? Nobody click on this if you don't want to throw up.

[Frank]

The plot seems to be the first five minutes of a 1980s action film spread over two hours ... with scenes cribbed from the first contemporary Medal of Honor game, the plot actually mirroring that game's central section almost exactly not just in narrative construction but also in visuals

So many of the narrative beats correspond to the first quarter of Bravo Two Zero - stumbling upon the goat herds, the comms failure, the injured leg of one of the team - it's difficult not to imagine that the one person whose word we have to take for how events unfolded had read it too, and thought both that novel and the subsequent career of its author might serve as a useful template for their own.

[Emp]

When I first saw the trailer for Lone Survivor I immediatley thought it was another example of Hollywood re-writing history, making the story of Bravo Two Zero (or The one that got away) into an all American movie where the audience could feel a swelling of the heart and chat "USA,USA!" at the end. I was pleasantly surprised when this was not the case, although the similarities are astounding.

As for the montage of those who died (thanks for that link saucie)..I managed to watch a mere 1 minute 15 seconds before deciding that I would rather be shot myself than watch any more. It's not that I don't commiserate with the families of the soldiers that died, it's just that that seems to be more about propoganda and pulling on the heartstrings of patriotism in an attempt to have more people sign up.....or am I too cynical.

I'll eventually watch it...when it's on Sky...for free...and when I can record it in the middle of the night...maybe.

[HdE]

The old man's been down in the dumps today, so I grabbed a couple of cheapo DVDs for his amusement, which we sat and watched drinks and snacks.

The goods in question were 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' and 'Addams Family Values' - both of which were pretty darned funny!

'Burt Wondertone' was a bit of a surprise - I'd genuinely expected it to be a bit crap, and only picked it up as it was something HdE senior had expressed interest in. 

But those Addams Family movies of the early '90s... what delightful silliness!

[SmallBlueThing]

GHOST SHARK

Bought for my youngest's birthday, being that it contains two of his favourite things- ghosts and sharks- this really was, from an adult perspective, utterly awful. A shark attacks a boat, is killed, floats into a haunted cave and gains an afterlife as a semi-transparent glowing blue death machine. It then targets people swimming off an idyllic beachfront town (sadly filmed in cheap-season, so it rains a lot) while using its newfound power to manifest through any water- appearing out of buckets, sprinklers, in the bath, and even in the standout gore scene, an ingested cup of water, to get people on land. The split-down-the-middle office worker wobbling away while a badly-composited Great White emerges from the hole went down the best in our house, along with the kid playing in the garden who was swallowed by the shark on a water-slide.

It reeks of Scooby Doo, even down to the character of the drunken lighthouse worker with a terrible secret, is completely lacking in nudity or bad language (barring a few "son of a bitch!"es, which elicited a strong "Ooooh!" from my kids) and has a few amusing gore scenes, but nothing my nine-year-old blinked at. It has an air of a children's version of The Fog, crossed with something like Sharktopus. Pleasingly bollocks.

THE COLONY
Laurence Fishburn leads a group of post-Global Warming survivalists living in an underground bunker, the world having frozen and humanity having been all-but wiped out by a flu. They get an SOS call from another similar colony, and a small band head off to help. When they get there, they find the place over-run with cannibal punks, who then track them back home for a big climactic fight. Bill Paxton plays a psycho ex-army second-in-command to Fishburn, who has ideas of taking over and running things his way in his absence. It looks great, is structured like a modern zombie movie, but ultimately says nothing new.

ARACHNOPHOBIA

Hadn't seen this in decades and it was on tv last night. Better than I remember, but still annoyingly stupid. I remember being disappointed at the time that it was so comedic, and the presence of John Goodman doesn't help. The real spiders themselves are well-wrangled, but the prosthetics let it down, at one point a furry glove seems to be used in lieu of a puppet. The final battle with the General is still hilarious, especially its death-scream. However, in spite of that, it remains a good story well told, and did enable a few minutes wondering at whatever happened to Julian Sands.

DRAG ME TO HELL

On tv after Arachnophobia. I very much love this film, it being the only decent thing Sam Raimi has done since Evil Dead 2- but like Dagon, which I tried to watch last week and which I had previously been passionate about- I found it a drag this time. Maybe it's my mood, but it seemed so by-the-numbers this time. I turned off halfway through and went to Dave for Mock The Week. One to watch with the kids later, I think, as I feel it's still a genuinely great horror film and does actually deliver the scares without being in any way nasty or mean-spirited or grounded in any form of reality.

SBT

[Charlie boy]

'Addams Family Values' ... what delightful silliness!

This is a great one, littered with brief yet funny scenes like were you see Gomez filming talk-show host Sally to see if she has the contact details of the voodoo priests etc she is talking about. One of the last times I watched this, I Googled Amy Fisher following the mention of her in the violent killers trading card collection so, you know, I actually learned something new!