You are currently browsing posts tagged with movie

We belong dead.

Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 11:12 pm Comments (5)

Well, things have been slow and awkward this month. Northern Ireland has been swamped with heavy rain and ferocious winds that’s kinda kept me indoors until yesterday, and life as a whole has been very meandering and sluggish. I get by, but it ain’t the most enjoyable of predicaments.
(CONTINUED)

Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged , , ,

Frankie & Fritz – crime fighters of the sea!

Saturday, May 14, 2011 at 7:34 pm Comments (1)

I watched Frankenstein a couple of nights ago; the old 1931 version.

Everyone knows this story. Do we even need a summary? Dude wants to create a functioning human being with science, and then the monster gets a bit uppity and eventually they both die. Bada bing.

For a film over eighty years old, it’s held up remarkably well, at least in the visual design. I think it’s hard to top Boris Karlov’s monster, and Colin Clive is a really, really rad Dr. Frankenstein, at least if you like having the ‘stark raving mad’ aspect played up . It’s a pity the guy died like six years after the film was made, as Clive has such a distinctive look that I feel he could’ve gotten a cult following in later years. Or maybe that’s just me.

It’s kind of interesting watching this and comparing it to other ‘early’ horror movies I’ve seen, particularly Nosferatu and Creature From The Black Lagoon. Music is a vital part of those two, particularly for Nosferatu since it hasn’t any spoken dialogue at all, while Creature practically sledge hammers music in your ears when it wants to set the mood (you could probably see the Creature shopping at Asda and that bloody ‘terror’ music would still be playing). Frankenstein has absolutely no mood music whatsoever; outside of the opening and closing credits there are no music cues to try and set the scene. The stark and unfriendly atmosphere carries the film by itself, and the absence of music really boosts it along. I don’t know if I’ve blogged about it before, but I’ve always wondered how different movies would be if you dropped all the music. I mean, Star Wars relies so much on it to imply “look, this is whimsical!” or “watch out for this dude, he’s a bad guy!” that if you removed all the music… well, who knows. Would be interesting to see, though.

The monster himself is a very tragic character, although I imagine the producers back in the day didn’t fully intend for it. Yes, the monster has a “criminal brain”, but he doesn’t wake up and immediately think, “I know, let’s strangle the shit out of everyone in sight!” The only reason he acts out against his masters is because Fritz, the hunchbacked assistant, is a real nasty piece of work who takes pleasure in threatening him with fire, and it seems Frankenstein and the professor are just itching to snuff the poor guy the moment he acts out of line. And when you can’t even rest in the dungeon for some peace and quiet without a hunchback waving a flaming torch in front of your face, you can’t blame him for being grouchy. The reason he kills is because that’s the only way he knows how to solve his problems; it’s not like Franky and Fritz ever tried interacting with him any other way. Let’s face it, the monster is practically like a big baby (with better listening skills) in the body of a 7 foot tall power house; you don’t try and set fire to a newborn the moment it kicks aside its breakfast. Then again, maybe they did in 1930s Germany?

I’ve still got Bride of Frankenstein to watch, so… well, I’ve no expectations, but it sounds like it’ll be an intriguing watch.

Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged ,

By Hemsworth’s nipples!

Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 4:03 pm Comments (1)

I’m getting increasingly concerned about how quickly this year is skimming me by. Are we really nearly halfway through? That’s not fair, mang!

Well, what is there for me to say? From the viewpoint of a productive mindset, I’ve done a lot of work on the perpetually-upcoming site revamp, and although slowly progressing, it’s coming along really nicely. I’m, uh, not sure if there’ll actually be much in the way of new content besides the directory rearranging, CSS design rampaging and so on, but it’ll be nice to get the stupid thing done. From the viewpoint of interesting blog entries… well, yeah, I have not been up to anything exciting.
(CONTINUED)

Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged , ,

Sonic Colours made me sad

Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 11:15 pm Comments (5)

Finally got around to covering Resident Bongo on Random Action Hour. It’s actually got some good bits, but the rampant repeating of sound effects and voices just gets grating real fast.

 

So, I rented Super Street Fighter IV about two weeks ago. It took a while to get into, if just because I’m a total scrub and was so used to Marvel vs. Capcom and its newbie-friendly Easy Mode, but after three nights of light playing I had warmed up to it quite nicely. Having no choice but to properly learn the control inputs for moves really encouraged me to learn these characters and their movesets (though I only had the time to spam Hadoukens and Shoryukens as Sakura), and even the really brief story modes had a certain charm to them – I barely know these guys, but the short glimpses of gentleman boxer Dudley talking about roses and drinking tea with boxing gloves on, it was all rather cute. I had picked up the game on a whim, but I thought it was a worthwhile rental. Heck, if the temptation ever crosses me I might even buy it! It’s not like it ever kept its original £25 price tag for long.

It left me quite optimistic after returning it, and I thought – why the hell not – let’s rent Sonic Colours!

Aheh.
(CONTINUED)

Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged , , , ,

I’m oldschool.

Monday, April 4, 2011 at 5:48 pm Comments (1)

More Resident Evil goodness is happening by Random Action Hour.

 

How about some more really brief movie reviews of kids films? I caught the CGI film of Astro Boy a couple of days ago. It had decent animation and some surprise voice actors (Nicholas Cage as Dr. Tenma! Donald Sutherland as the evil president! Samuel L. Jackson voices a giant robot for all of three lines!), but it really had nothing to offer no other CGI kids flick couldn’t. They got the license to a franchise with nearly fifty years worth of history behind it, and then they just didn’t seem to have any grand ambitions with it.
(CONTINUED)

Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged , , ,

I only know one Resident Evil joke

Saturday, April 2, 2011 at 12:21 pm Comments Off on I only know one Resident Evil joke

The second part of the Resident Evil coverage is up on Random Action Hour. Get your sandwiches ready!

 

I watched Up a couple of nights ago. I’ve a bad habit of seeing commercials for animated films, thinking “I must go and see that sometime in theatres!” … and then I spend too long thinking about it that by the time I’m ready, it’s no longer listed. Same thing happened with The Princess & The Frog. Kinda vexing!

Like all of Pixar’s stuff, everyone else on the face of the planet (and probably a few Venusians for that matter) has gone on about how they’re great films in better paragraphs than I’m capable of. I could run through my regular review routine, but I’ll just focus on the element I admired the most.
(CONTINUED)

Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged , , ,

“You’re programmed to be an asshole!”

Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 11:22 pm Comments (3)

And so, I’ve finished the Alien quadrology (I can’t help but laugh every time I hear that) with Alien Resurrection. It is better than Alien3 in a lot of ways, but it just came across as the least appealing film.

Ripley died in the last flick, but two hundred years later a new organisation clone her using a blood sample so they can extract the alien. Surprise surprise, that eventually goes tits-up, and Ripley, a scant few crew and a bunch of bounty hunters are trapped on the space station with them. That’s about as far as the plot goes, really.
(CONTINUED)

Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged ,

Rental night!

Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 11:48 pm Comments Off on Rental night!

Paid another visit to Xtravision today, where I rented Transformers: War for Cybertron, Prince of Egypt, and Space Chimps. The last one was at my father’s choice. He’s got a thing for all things simian.

Just a head’s up – this entry’s gonna be looooong and largely about Transformers. Just a warning for the many folks who don’t give a damn about that little obsession.
(CONTINUED)

Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged , , ,

Wankers! In! Spaaaaaaaace!

Friday, March 18, 2011 at 12:06 pm Comments (6)

Watched Alien3 last night. I’d seen it once before years ago; it was actually the first movie in the Alien series I’d seen, but I couldn’t remember much about it besides the totally gratuitous deaths of everyone but Ripley from the previous movie – before the movie even begins! – and the ending, so I was looking forward to seeing it in full.

You’d need a lengthy list to detail all the ways it’s different in tone from the first two films, but the main point is that there’s only one alien, the place they’re trapped on has no useful working technology to fight the creature with, and for some reason, despite being set on a dingy prison planet in the ass-end of the universe, it’s probably the brightest of the first three movies. I can understand Aliens because it was on a ravaged human colony that about to blow up or something, but who’d thought a near-derelict prison would be lit well?

Yep, that’s a great comment to start the review off with.
(CONTINUED)

Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged ,

Battle for Originality

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 11:49 pm Comments (3)

Went to see Battle: Los Angeles, because that’s the kind of braindead movie one wants to watch after you’ve done nothing but feel ill and write code all day.

When I say braindead, I really do mean it. The movie is practically Military Movie 101, it throws in so many clichés. The first half hour is spent ‘getting to know’ the main players in the force, which is not only needless because their personalities are summed up in less than a minute, but also… well, let’s face it, they all end up looking the same in the heat of a battle. One guy is joked about by the others because he’s a virgin, but it’s difficult to see what other contribution he makes to the movie because it’s so damn hard to keep track of who’s who. We have emotional overreactions thrown about every ten minutes. The group find two adult civilians who provide one useful bit of support and then are made redundant. There are the kid civilians are there just for the marines to give inspirational speeches to. At one point there’s a helicopter with wounded soldiers (who are all given emotional good luck speeches from their comrades) that is blown up mere seconds after takeoff. There’s a rather needless scene where the hero and female civilian (who I guess is meant to be a love interest, but it sure isn’t developed!) muck about with an alien corpse and try to find its weak spot (which is to the right of where a human’s heart would be. Yeah, like you wouldn’t hit that eventually through regular fire). All the film needs is a dog that somehow survives all the hellish action until the end of the film and the aliens taking over a human’s body and that would nearly complete the set!
(CONTINUED)

Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged ,

« Older posts Newer posts »