Category Archives: Movie

Movies, ten and twenty years ago

Posted on by

So, although it’s hard to believe (for me), 1990 was twenty years ago.  Here’s the movies that did well in 1990 (top US grossing movies that year, source IMDB, full list).

  • Home Alone
  • Ghost
  • Dances with Wolves
  • Pretty Woman
  • The Hunt for Red October
  • Total Recall
  • Die Hard 2
  • Dick Tracey
  • Kindergarten Cop
  • Back to the Future Part III
  • Days of Thunder
  • Another 48 Hrs

Ten years ago in 2000, this is the list (or part of it, full list here).

  • How the Grinch Stole Christmas
  • Cast Away
  • Mission Impossible II
  • Gladiator
  • X-Men
  • Charlie’s Angels
  • Unbreakable
  • Space Cowboys

Doesn’t feel like 20 years since Home Alone, or even 10 since X-Men.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

Posted on by

Every now and then I trawl through Amazon’s bargain bin for old films I fancy watching again or feel like owning.  Just been through today.  Almost bought the complete Terrahawks DVD box set but it’s not exactly bargain price, likewise for Star Fleet (Staaarrrrfleeeeeeet).  Did end up getting some other gems though, a few I want to be a surprise for Grete so I won’t mention those, but I felt it was about time we owned the first Police Academy, Airplane 1 & 2, the Naked Gun movies, Lost Boys, Little Shop of Horrors, Dark Crystal, and Reservoir Dogs.  Most of them are under £3!

We recently watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Wargames.  Both of them are as good as I remember.  Wargames stands the test of time remarkably well considering the subject matter.  I was amused by how the FBI dealt with our super-hacker, these days the movie would probably have him being caught, bagged and shipped abroad for ‘special treatment’ without so much as a second glance, but in the 80’s they just put you into a store room with a randy guard on the door and lots of sharp objects in the draws.  How times change.  If Wargames wasn’t the movie that taught you what the term DEFCON meant, then I’m not sure I want to be in your gang.

I think Wargames should be part of all Computer Studies courses at university.  Both to remind people what daisy wheel printers were along with acoustic modems, and also to remind them why closed loop computer systems are bad.  Oh, and to prove to them all that even the geeks can get the girl (or guy, if you’re a girl geek, but you know what I mean).

That reminds me, I should probably get a copy of Sneakers on DVD at some stage.

Was Wargames the first movie to give us the trope of text appearing on the terminal one character at a time and making a noise while it did it?  I wonder.

Anyway I leave you with this quote, one of my favourite movie quotes of all time,

Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.
Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.
Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

2012

Posted on by

I’m not really a fan of disaster movies.  I would describe 2012 as traditional global-disaster movie fare.

  1. We have an estranged family (husband and wife divorced, two kids, new husband in the frame)
  2. We have a growing threat, and a plan
  3. We have a few other key story members with either existing relationships that will be stretched by the disaster or new relationships that will be formed as a result of it
  4. We then get 158 minutes of a single threaded plot, which brings these people together or forces them apart and provides heroes the chance to stand up and be counted while villains perish in fiery justice.

I spent most of the first hour doing something else as well.  Checking e-mails, browsing IMDB, playing Plants vs. Zombies.  It’s pretty predictable, as the estranged husband takes his kids on a camping trip and discovers a global conspiracy over some cataclysmic event.  However, eventually the acting and the action and the shear madness of the whole thing drags you in, and by about the one hour mark I was engaged.

The special effects are impressive, the destruction is amusing, the solution is far fetched and insane and the moments of heroic sacrifice are about as cliche as they get.  It’s not a good movie.  It’s too long for one, and it’s far too predictable for another, but it was eventually engaging.  The only two actors who seemed to have any meat on their roles were John Cusack and Chiwetel Ejiofor.  Cusack managed to bring some life to his character, Ejiofor did the best he could with some pretty slack writing.  No one else stood out, which isn’t to say they did badly, but just that the source material was so entirely bland.

Should you see 2012?  Maybe, if you fancy killing 158 minutes and can’t think of anything better to do, but don’t buy it, rent it for as little as possible.

Loved Film, but not LOVEFiLM

Posted on by

Just cancelled our LOVEFiLM subscription.  For a couple of reasons.  Firstly we’re getting Sky HD+ and due to the way LOVEFiLM works by the time they sent us a disc, you could already pay a few quid to see the film on Sky+ anyway.  With Sky HD+ it means I’ll be able to watch HD versions of the films and get just as good a quality experience.  The second reason is that despite letting you rank your selections as low, medium and high, LOVEFiLM consistently didn’t send me my high priority choices, probably because they were in demand.  That’s okay, but what’s the point of having the system if high demand films just ignore it?

We only managed to get what we wanted to watch by micro-managing the list of movies, and if I have to do that, personally, I may as well spend 10 minutes walking around our local Blockbuster picking up 2 or 3 films to watch.

I still think that online rental is going to be the way to go – either as digital delivery or physical delivery, but until you can log on, click ‘I want this’ next to the film and get it in the post in 2 days (rather than having to micro-manage a list of 30 films and always getting the low priority ones) I’m not sure it’s going to be good enough for me.

Kick Ass

Posted on by

There’s something both distressing and fascinating about watching a 13 year old actress play an 11 year old kid dressed as a superhero getting beaten up.  But then, distressing and fascinating really describes pretty much the entire movie.  There are plenty of shocking things on screen in Kick Ass, although it’s the first and second deaths in the movie that carried the most weight for me, but there are plenty of laughs, some great dialogue, and plenty of comic book humour for those who enjoy it.

Kick Ass is an over-the-top comic superhero action movie.  We are presented with a young guy who turns himself into a superhero, because he can’t work out why no one has done it before, and is tired of being the victim, a father who has turned both himself and his daughter into real killer vigilantes, and an evil crime boss.  The movie doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a re-telling of many of the superhero stories we’re used to, it both pokes fun at those stories and poses questions about the consequences of the behaviours involved.  The result is a familiar plot of rescue, betrayal and redemption, but the delivery of that plot is slick, shocking and thoroughly entertaining.

It’s not without flaws, I felt it was a little long and could have done with being tighter in the middle when I was left wondering if I was enjoying it or not, but it crests that hump and shoots off into a rapid and excellent finale.

What really made the movie enjoyable for me were three things.  I loved the style and the cinematography.  The sound track was superb.  And Chloe Mortez rocked. Compared to the acting we saw in the early Harry Potter movies, from actors of a similar age, her acting is a world apart.  She rocked, she owned her scenes.  Everyone else was excellent, I loved all the characters, from Red Mist, Kick Ass himself, through to Big Daddy but Hit Girl (Chloe) really did steal this movie.

The action sequences are brutal, but there’s plenty of warning that’s how it is going to be, and I’ll be honest, it’s not easy watching an 11 (13) year old kid get their ass kicked on screen.  Nor do you escape unscathed by watching her shoot, stab and slice her way through the bad guys, I was left with an unsettling feeling of having seen something wrong.  But that isn’t a mistake, or a fault, I’m certain it’s intentional.

The ending was superb, very satisfying and dripping with cliche.  You should go see this movie, it should make money in the cinema because it’s a good film.  I loved it, despite the pacing issues.

Hobbit news

Posted on by

The BBC just reported this,

Shooting of the long-awaited film version of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit is set to begin in New Zealand in July.

You can read the full article here.

The most exciting bit for me personally is the last sentence,

The second will be an original story focusing on the 60 years between the book and the beginning of the Rings trilogy.

Original material in the Tolkien universe?  Now that is worth getting excited about.

I love you Beth Cooper

Posted on by

Every once in a while you can be surprised by a film.  I put I love you Beth Cooper on our LoveFilm rental list because the trailer had seemed quite amusing.  I’m so glad I did.

One the outside, this is a reasonably standard coming-of-age American highschool flick.  The main cast, a couple of newly graduated boys and a similar bunch of cheerleaders come together in amusing circumstances and learn lots about themselves, life and living.  But on the inside, it’s an always funny and often heartwarming story which is more than worth the time invested in watching it.

Denis Cooverman (Paul Rust) is convinced by his best friend Rich (Jack Carpenter) to be honest during his speech at the graduation.  He extols the virtues of honest during his speech and how people should take this moment to say the things they feel so that they don’t regret not saying them later.  Taking his own advice, he (among other things) declares his love for Beth Cooper (Hayden Panettiere), the head cheerleader and upsets her brawny, meat-head boyfriend in the process.

What follows is a collect of fast pace set pieces full of humour, some truly cringeworthy embarrassments and some entertaining and engaging dialogue.  There are almost no surprises, although you might not guess the exact outcome (which I actually thought worked really well), but there are some true laugh out loud moments and plenty of reasons to want to keep watching.

The wet towel fight is well worth watching.

Not as gross-out as the likes of American Pie or Road Trip, and certainly funnier than some of the more recent American Pie movies, I love you Beth Cooper is something I think I could watch again and again and enjoy every time.  It reminds me of Weird Science, and deserves to be just as much a cult classic.

Gamer

Posted on by

I had mixed hopes for Gamer.  On the one hand, movies about computer games tend on the whole not to be very good, on the other hand it had a pretty good pedigree and some of the clips from the trailer looked promising.  The premise is simple, through the use of nano technology the human brain can be modified so that a person can be controlled remotely.  Some people will pay for the ability to control people, and those who are controlled can get paid.  The Sims made real.  Alongside that, criminals on death row are offered the chance to be controlled in live first-person-shooter style games, with the promise of surviving 30 games giving them their freedom.  The technology was developed and is sold by Ken Castle (played by Michael C. Hall) who is now a multi-billionaire.

Our grisly combat-savy hero (Gerard Butler) has survived 27 or so battles controlled by a young male gamer.  As he nears his 30th match, things take a turn south.

One could be forgiven for thinking this was a remake / reworking of The Running Man.  Certainly there are many similarities, prisoners given a chance at freedom for the entertainment of the masses, those in charge of the game being corrupt or manipulating the outcome and media interest in the whole thing.  In fact, there are plenty of comparisons to be made to the recent Death Race movie as well.  Given the plot in general isn’t that original, the movie really needed to bring something else to the table.

The pop culture references are entertaining, with the look of the Society game clearly modelled on many current real-world MMO’s, and there are a few pokes and prods at the mindsets of a certain type of game player.  The dialogue is okay, it’s no where near as cheesy as I feared, and the pace clips along pretty well.  The characters are interesting, but not very deep, and there’s a definite sense of having seen much of this film before elsewhere (the anti-establishment hackers in Johnny Mnemonic for example).  The action scenes are brutal (you’ll recognise the writers/directors from Crank and Crank 2) but give you a good sense of being inside a first-person-shooter.

The first two thirds of the movie are the strongest, sadly once our hero inevitably comes up against the bad guy, all sense of danger is lost and the story becomes almost a parody of itself.

Gamer was mostly enjoyable, and I’m glad I saw it, but I think it was a huge missed opportunity.  It could have been a classic, a solid action sci-fi movie with something serious to say about where culture is heading with on-line gaming.  But I don’t think the writers/directors quite had the balls to pull it off.  Maybe the screenplay was better and it lost something on the way to the screen, but the movie misses the mark too often.  Which is a shame, because it deserved to be and had the root of something much bigger than it turned into.

The true measure of irony?

Posted on by

I’m a LoveFilm subscriber and I wanted to rent Public Enemies.  However, it’s not been available on LoveFilm since it was released, always listed as just unavailable for rent.  Keep that in mind.  I have four lists on LoveFilm, Movies, TV, Wish List and Comedy.  Movies are stuff we want LoveFilm to send right now and likewise TV is the list we use to get the next disc in whatever TV series we’re watching.  The Wish List and Comedy lists have no discs next to them – so LoveFilm doesn’t dispatch anything from those lists.  They’re reminders of things we might want.

Back to the first point.  I wrote to LoveFilm to ask them why they didn’t have Public Enemies.  They replied and said they were having issues with their supplier, sounds like bollocks but okay, fair enough.  They also said, here have a free disc! Cool I thought, although let’s face it, it doesn’t cost them any money.

So I checked, and there was no sign of my new disc allocation.  And I waited.  I wanted to put the new disc next to the Movies list so they sent something to watch.

Later that day I received an e-mail telling me they’d dispatched something, but it was something from the Wish List.  Disappointing I thought.  Because I was sure you were supposed to be able to pick where the free disc came from, and I assumed I’d just missed something.

Anyway, I sent them another mail to thank them but say that it was a little frustrating that they had dispatched something without letting me pick the list, since the Wish List they used isn’t something I wanted a movie from right at that moment.

They replied, they were very sorry, to compensate me for my trouble they had given me a free disc!

Which I had no way of allocating to a particular list that I could find.

And so they dispatched something else I don’t really want to watch from the Wish List.

I believe this, my friends, is the true definition of irony (in combination with a battery powered battery power checker they make a wonderful couple).