Random Hoo Haasthe blog with the guff

Bomb on board

Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 12:34 am Comments (4)

We’ve got ourselves an update on the Bomberman shrine, and a new General Writing. Don’t forget to check the title tags!

Watched Flightplan a couple of days ago. It’s a bit like two films wedged together – one is an atmospheric, almost psychological thriller about a crazy lady on a plane who claims to be missing a child, but there’s a bunch of evidence that she never had a child on the flight at all – and the last half hour is a very cookie-cutter-if-ridiculous “single mom thwarts impractical terrorist threat” plot. I’d try and wrap my head around how the bad guy actually organised his scheme or what he even wanted, for that matter, but it’s the sort of dumb thing that isn’t worth wasting time thinking about.
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Housewife

Friday, January 20, 2012 at 12:03 am Comments (3)

Watched Monster House. Well, uh, it was nice to finally watch it, but it did nothing for me. Mind you, the fact one of the writers apologised for it might have skewed my first impression.

There’s a grumpy old dude who don’t like kids! One kid, DJ, spies on the house and notices that toys lost on the lawn are never seen again. After accidentally giving the old man a heart attack, he notices weird, freaky stuff going on, including people going missing. He and his friends investigate.
If that doesn’t sound interesting, about an hour in we discover that the house is actually an angry woman’s soul. And the house has got, like, a digestive system. Does that sound cool? To me, it’s cool! It’s a pity we only learn it an hour into the film.
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Soupy twist

Saturday, January 7, 2012 at 11:37 pm Comments (1)

I spent New Years Eve watching the 2009 Sherlock Holmes with the folks, and just so happened to get invited to see the sequel with my uncle on New Years Day. I can’t really say much, it’s about what you’d expect if you saw the first one – the same kind of romping around, the same kind of banter. Not bad, not fantastic, just on par with the first one. If you didn’t like the first one, it won’t change your mind.

I was looking forward to seeing Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes, but I was a bit disappointed – partly because Mycroft doesn’t have much screen time and doesn’t actually do much (true to the character, I suppose), and partly because, well, it’s hard to actually see Stephen Fry as a character. I can suspend my disbelief for everyone else – Robert Downey Jr. is Sherlock Holmes! Jude Law is Dr. Watson! Stephen Fry is… Stephen Fry wearing a hat, or Stephen Fry in period dress or something.
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Vertical

Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 9:49 pm Comments Off on Vertical

I watched Vertigo yesterday. I won’t deny it’s one of those classic movies that, although great to finally see, didn’t offer many surprises since it’s been parodied so many times. Heck, the Sledge Hammer! episode “Vertical” basically compresses the two hour-long movie into 22 minutes without too many omissions, if you don’t mind it being totally out-of-character and losing out on Hitchcock’s great visuals.

The visuals were the true treat for watching the film – it’s practically a glamour video for 1950s San Francisco! So many beautiful landscapes combined with terrific frame work – it’s a great story and all, but goddamn, those sights! And everyone had such terrific eyebrows. I’d dare say it’s a very sexy film for people who like landscapes and eyebrows. I can’t be the only one, can I?
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Les Gees!

Friday, December 2, 2011 at 2:12 pm Comments (4)

I watched The Iron Giant last night. I’m in one of those miserable curmudgeon-y moods where I’m totally uninspired and a colossal bore and curse arbitrarily to myself (because that’s what bummed people do!), and as such I’m really disappointed that I don’t even have much to say about it. But I really quite enjoyed it! The visual style was really slick and colourful and just gosh darn swell, and for a simple story, it carries itself pretty well. I might even have to admit it tugged on my heart strings a little. I can definitely see what all the fuss is about. Bonus points for John Mahoney voicing the army general, because I just love the dude’s voice.

So there’s this cartoon that I’ve caught more episodes of than I’d liked to; it’s not dreadful or anything (I have to appreciate the effort!), but something about it just plain irks me, y’know. It’s called The Gees.
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Fingere, fingere!

Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 10:45 pm Comments (2)

It’s that time of year, so you know what to expect from the blog: Blah blah cold, blah blah misery, blah blah needlessly graphic descriptions of snot and undesired bodily functions.

I watched Volere Volare (or Wanting To Fly), an Italian movie my dad must have recorded off TV about twenty years ago.
Maurizio works in the dubbing business, dubbing silent cartoons with his own sounds, and frequently visits hardware stores to buy new instruments for their sound effects (his brother, meanwhile, hauls in scantily-clad women to dub pornography). Martina is a freelance… “social worker,” who ‘entertains’ clients in whatever they wish to do, such as a couple who roleplay grieving each others’ death; a taxi driver who revels in terrorizing customers; and a chef who decorates her legs and buttocks like a cake.
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Ugly motherfuckers have feelings too!

Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 5:47 pm Comments (4)

I watched Predator 1 and 2 over the past couple of weeks, and last night I watched Predators. Unless I want to subject myself to the Aliens vs. Predators films (and given how I burst out laughing when my brother recapped the plot of the second one, I can’t imagine I will), I’ve had my fix of Predator-related entertainment.
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The years move faster than the days

Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 9:32 pm Comments (1)

Well, September was a bit of a tizzy. Harking up and down across the country to attend a course during the week and then being too exhausted during the weekend to do anything. That routine hasn’t exactly changed, it’s just I had the pleasure of getting a cold and spending the whole week in one place, which helped me gather my bearings, I guess.

I watched Dark Star. This is the first film I’ve watched since the start of September, and man, I didn’t realise how much I missed that little routine! (I think the last film I saw was Dragon Ball Evolution. It was a decent little romp. My dad described it as something to the effect of “Buckaroo Banzai on crack.”)
You know it’s a Ragey review when it wonders if it’s even worth summarising the movie’s plot.
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Who defends the Defendor?

Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 5:53 pm Comments (1)

Just a heads-up – the Defendor review is pretty unfinished, it’s mostly just my notes cobbled together into a very clumsy whole.
It’s an intriguing film and it really got me thinking of a lot of things to discuss, but I left the review off for too long until I’d forgotten a lot of what I wanted to ramble about.
In a nutshell it was basically how Defendor as a character is really intriguing, the atmosphere and locale around him just isn’t anywhere near as gripping, but the two do need to be blended for it to work well.
Well, I’ve basically summarised my whole review anyway. You can skip it if you want! There’s two other reviews shoved at the bottom somewhere.

I watched Defendor last week. It came out two years ago, but I’d never even heard of it before; I’m not sure if that’s just because of poor advertising or if it even got a cinema release over here, but it’s an interesting little film. The city is being run down by the no-good goings-on of the mysterious and nefarious Captain Industry, the head of a gun, drug and prostitute smuggling ring. By day, Arthur Poppington works as an unassuming construction foreman, but by night, he dons his black sweater and VCR-backpack and becomes… Defendor!

In actuality, he’s a well-meaning if literal-minded man with mental difficulties. He dons the superhero guise as a means of escaping from his embarrassing civilian identity, and his vendetta against Captain Industry is due partly to his mother being a prostitute who died from drugs, and partly due to misinterpreting something his grandfather said. The first two acts of the film are actually told through flashback, as Arthur retells the events leading up to him dunking a paedophile in a rubbish bin to a psychiatrist.
Yeah. It’s advertised as a comedy, but it’s a bit of an odd film.
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“It was a nice thought, G.”

Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 3:56 pm Comments (3)

I rented Shadows of the Damned and finished it on Wednesday. I kinda knew nothing about the game – all I’d watched was the Two Best Friends Play video of it, and didn’t think much about it. Saw it for rental and thought “why not.” It’s the perfect game for a five day rental!

Garcia F. Hotspur is a demon hunter. The demon overlord Fleming kidnaps his nondescript love interest, so with the help of Johnson, his talking British skull / gun / torch / motorbike / snarky sidekick, he sets out to Fleming’s castle to get her back.
Am I actually talking about a video game’s story in my review? Heavens above! Not that you can really call it much of a story. When I say “he sets out to Fleming’s castle,” I mean the characters basically romp through a series of increasingly disjointed locations with no bearing on geography or sense. There’s a lot of dialogue and a fair amount of movie scenes, but there’s not a lot of actual story going on.
Not that I’m complaining.
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