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Cop Car.

Loved this movie! A taut, sparse little thriller that does a lot with a really simple premise and has a really nicely judged, semi-humourous tone and some great performances. Strong recommend.

5/5

Empire covers are usually shite

I think the design, chintzy fonts and layout of that 'Heroes of 2012' cover really does not present the image in a good light - there's something really awkward about the pose that - to me - makes him kinda look like an old man... But the subscriber cover was actually really cool. Classy. It's a shame they didn't put out more material like this:



I vividly remember all throughout the production of Dredd being really confused as to why they were actively keeping everything about the movie under wraps, but thinking "any minute now, they'll begin the media blitz".... "they're bound to release some really slick promotional art that will put the unfortunate leaked set photos into context and reassure everyone"... and it just kinda... never arrived. No character-specific posters, no teaser trailers, no premiere, very little social media prescence, just a couple of promotional bits that just kinda dribbled out in a very unceremonious way... I know they didn't have the marketing budget of a blockbuster, and Karl, bless him, clearly did the best he could humanly do, appearing on just about everything he could to promote the heck out of the movie, but it just kinda felt, to me, that the distributor perhaps didn't have much confidence in the film.

Dredd always faced an uphill battle at the box office, but the marketing sank it.

From the word go, it was a disaster. From the aforementioned media blackout (still utterly mind-boggling), the delay of the film's release (meaning Empire's exclusive cover feature was published an entire calendar year before the film eventually opened) to the decision (IIRC, against the filmmaker's wishes) to tack '3D' onto the title and to largely release the film only in that format at the exact moment the 3D bubble burst, to the rubbish theatrical trailer, to the failure to communicate that it a)wasn't a sequel to or remake of the Stallone film, and b) the pedigree of the film and the talent involved. Man, even the promotional stills they did release were, in my opinion, very unflattering of the film:





It didn't really stand a chance.

The problem with Dredd is that it needed to do well in the US, despite being a blunt-instrument satire, broadly anti-US in outlook, extremely violent, following a terrible prior movie, and with some iffy marketing. It's notable that Deadpool did well, despite being violent in a less moral manner (he's a vigilante, slicing up anyone who gets in his way and almost certainly causing considerable collateral damage; Dredd's a cop doing his job). Still, when you're a juggernaut, you can barge your way in. Dredd was a minnow at the cinema.

While they're very different films, the key difference for me is that Deadpool was actually marketed, and marketed well, whereas the distributors of Dredd, for whatever reason, seemed to actively suppress any and all news and material related to the movie getting out to public. As a result, there was simply zero awareness of the film in the run up to release, even among genre movie and comic book fans.

I'm an artist, but when I buy comics, I follow writers, not artists. So long as the art is competent, fine. If the art is good or even great, that's a bonus.

Bought and played Machi Koro for the first time at the weekend. Good fun game which needs a bit more space and time to play than its compact box would suggest.

Ha, yeah. It gets pretty crazy by late in the game.

We like Machi Koro, but it never quite became one of our mainstays, I think perhaps because its a little repetitive - ie just buy all the forests and mines to win.

We tend to prefer Splendor, which is similar-ish, but feels a little more satisfying to play.

I really hope that Nintendo are looking at the phenomenal in demand for the NES Mini, and take that as a sign to make the Switch the console for retro gamers - ie have a huge back catalogue of classic Nintendo games ready for download right out of the gate.

They have of course dabbled with this before, with the Virtual Console, but it has largely failed (imo) due to hamfisted implementation and typical Nintendo backwards thinking (crap UI, unrealistic pricing, tying purchases to hardware instead of an iTunes style single account). Even the name 'Virtual Console' isn't great for attracting casual fans.

So, genuinely curious; is there a specific reason why Apple make it so maddeningly difficult to import images from a desktop onto an iPhone? I quite often need to do this as I like to review and upload artwork and photos from my grown up camera, and with the latest iOS 'upgrade' they have now (seemingly spitefully) killed the ability to download and save image attachments from an email, which up until now has been the most convenient and hassle free workaround.

Yes, I'm aware it can be done with dropbox and iTunes and the Photos app, but both ways are far more difficult and convoluted than need be (requiring you to sync photos albums and all that palaver).. It's truly baffling. Is it a privacy thing?

Personally I don't want the precise geography of MC1, and the wider world of Dredd for that matter, to ever be locked down. The layout of the city has always been (imo deliberately) vague and malleable, and I'd prefer it to stay that way. I see it like Springfield from The Simpsons - the geography is what it needs to be to facilitate a good story/gag, and in the case of MC-1, surely the point of making it so vast in the first place is so that its limited only by the imagination of the writer, and you can suddenly introduce whole areas and concepts that have never mentioned previously?

While it's great to lay out a general set of rules for a fictional universe, to me all the fun and mystery from things like Star Wars have been severely diminished by this need to have everything be explained and catalogued in the minutest detail, every little bit of ambiguity and backstory filled in.

I think the production is so strong in most respects, but I think it's fundamentally weak in the one that really counts; plot and writing.

Most of the actors are great, but the material they have to work with is very thin. A series like this lives or dies on it's cast of characters, and I simply don't care about any of them.

They've only made a shred of effort to flesh out a single character with any kind of developed backstory, [spoiler]and all of that amounted to was an obvious red herring[/spoiler]. It's not good enough. Again, going back to the Game of Thrones comparison - it had at least half a dozen genuine breakout, fan-favourite characters, even by the end of season 1. We're at, what, episode 7 of Westworld now, with no compelling or remotely memorable characters in sight.

Someone needs to tell the writers that a mystery ≠ a story.

Genuinely gutted that I can't watch Planet Earth II right now, being in the US. I don't think it's available here until January. Would be the perfect thing to watch right now to take my mind off all the craziness.

You can tell the showrunners were very pleased with themselves about [spoiler]the twist in the latest episode, but frankly it just made me roll my eyes at its obviousness and lameness.

Twists only work in fiction when character motivations and the context, rules and logic of the setting of the fiction have been firmly established, which Westworld has - for me - singularly failed to do.[/spoiler]

Think I'm done. A shame.

[Deadpool]

I saw that Deadpool popped up on HBO, and decided to give it a go. Much to my surprise, I quite enjoyed it. I'd say the jokes were about 50/50 - some legitimately funny bits (loved the credit roll at the start) but I still find a lot of Deadpool's schtick to be insufferably cringey and juvenile.

Overall though, yeah, quite liked it. Didn't take itself seriously, actually had some balls as an action movie, had a nice contained plot and didn't outstay it's welcome.

A high 3/5.

No I'm fucking loving this and don't like to judge a mystery half way through. If it does pull a Lost then I'll fucking hate it so time will tell.

I don't have any confidence whatsoever that it is even possible to resolve something as opaque as the 'maze' mystery with anything remotely satisfying. It's the 'hatch' from Lost all over again - mystery box plotting at its worst.

I can't help but feel that the people making this show are trying to emulate the qualities they (mistakenly) think makes Game of Thrones so compelling - violence and boobs in abundance, a cast of dozens with no central lead character, multiple disparate plot threads - when I think what Westworld desperately needs is more focus. A good editor would, for example, perhaps combine the characters of Dolores and Maeve, and maybe say Bernard and Elsie too - so we end up with a reduced cast of more defined characters rather than dozens that we don't really have a handle on.

Key to the success of Thrones was that it, right out of the gate, presented us with rich, well-rounded characters like Tyrion and Ned who immediately resonated with audiences. I don't know who we're expected to like or root for in WW? Everyone is very loosely sketched and/or dour. The only character that seems to be actually having any fun is the one-note scumbag brother in law guy.

I wish I was enjoying it more, but as they pile on mystery after mystery (and continue to avoid defining the 'rules' of how the world they present operate) I just find myself increasingly confused with it all, and so I'm starting to care less and less because I can't engage with any of it.

I tried reading the first book of this series and ended up ditching it half way through, bored.

Too many cliches, too few ideas. It might translate better as live action and I'm tempted to give it a shot now it's on Netflix.

Me too. I tried reading the book, but didn't make it very far. 'Cliched' sums it up. It seemed like a weirdly anachronistic or retro sci fi novel, full of ideas about what someone from the 60s or 80s might think the future might be like, and I honestly couldn't tell if that was a stylistic choice or just a bland, dated aesthetic...?