Be Excellent To Each Other

Drive. A film buoyed by a fun soundtrack (yay for 80's synthpop) and lush golden hour cinemaphotography, with an excellently mesmerising unintentional creepy-face performance by Gosling. But bedevilled by exactly the nonsense MaliA so pithily sumarised. I enjoyed watching it and drunk as I was found the DVD menu titles oddly mesmerising. But a classic? Fools.

Mind you, Bullitt is hailed as a classic but is actually incredibly tedious. Nice car chases though.

Watch Point Blank with Lee Marvin for lone hard man being awesome hi-jinks. "Why?! Why are you doing this?!" "Well, I want my money." Sounds like crap dialogue, but it's hilarious and awesome when you watch it.

Admit it, you were just upset because it wasn't like Fast and Furious.

The first Fast and Furious is awesome. Three times as good as Drive.

I honestly don't know if I've even seen it.

I was about to say that I liked Payback as a film that was a bit similar to Drive. Turns out it's a remake of Point Blank, so that makes sense. Gotta watch the Directors cut though.

Actually, that's true. I expected it to be good.

Did someone mention Christina Hendricks' tits?

[edit]Wrong woman

Films we watched this weekend.

Hugo. Far, far too long. There were some nice bits but I can't imagine kids being enthralled by it, much less me, fell asleep. Better than Scott Pilgrim or Drive, though.

Paul. Great fun, made me properly laugh a few times.

I watched Sucker Punch with the eldest boy at the weekend, he got a bit lost with the plot but we enjoyed the fighting and he enjoyed the outfits. The story-line was perhaps a little dark but being a 12A and knowing nothing about it, I let him watch, I'm sure a lot of the stuff they alluded to went over his head.

I thought Hugo looked lovely and all coggy and steamy. Didn't get into the story at all, and didn't give a damn about the characters.

Yeah, it looked great and I liked the recreation of the silent movie sets and stuff but I just wanted it to end.

Totally

It was one of those films where you feel you've been watching it for ages already, then you look at the timer display on the front of the player, and there's still over an hour to go.

Seriously though, I so wanted to be enthralled by this as I was by Tintin the other week, but it just didn't work. The problem for me is the story at the heart of it. See I read the book a few months ago and ended up feeling it was all a bit blah, and I felt the same with the film. Of course it looked gorgeous and everything, but still left me rather cold and uninterested.

Watched Matrix: Reloaded over the weekend. Again. What an overinflated load of piddling shit it is0, I skipped over the dialogue just to get to the action sequences to see how cool they were.

Turns out, not much. It just dawned on me that the reason people remember the original Matrix action sequences had absolutely nothing to do with the Kung-Fu. It was the guns. The glorious gun ballets, that Equilibrium would go onto better in a few years. The slow mo bullet gymnastic show. All awesome. But what does Reloaded have? None of it, just the most boring fight sequences this side of, um, whatever film Jackie Chan was in last, with none of the punches looking realistic or having the impact that they sometimes displayed. Neo punches man into a wall having barely touched him and there being no feedback from sound or on screen. If you punch a man into a wall even with super powers you expect at the very least a THUD CRACK WHOOSH KABLAMMO. Bored me to tears. The highlight, Morpheus rocking a G18c with an extended mag letting the whole clip drain out in less than a second fighting the twins.

Should have stuck with some awesome Gun-Fu. Instead, not even the action can save its piss poor dialogue.

This is where you lost me. The Matrix sequels were so bad they went back in time and made the first film suck, but Equilibrium was tosh.

Well yeah, but the Gun-Fu sequences are awesome.

All the best Equilibrium bits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9fnYGK ... ata_player

There were no sequels to the matrix.

Equilibrium was great.

I thought only the third Matrix film was awful. I actually quite enjoyed the second one.

Yeah, I quite enjoyed the second one.

To be fair, the three main action sequences in the second film (the highway fight, the Burly Brawl, and the one on the stairway with the warping albinos) were pretty decent. I thought the rest of it was shite though, and (even worse) it was a harbinger of the apocolytpic levels of shite that was the third one.

It wasn't about the fight scenes. It was about the Jesus metaphor.

... man.

You are quite wrong. In the animated film it was revealed Reeves was actually Aslan.

I also liked the second Matrix film.

The third one, not so much.

I wouldn't have thought that changing the ethnicity of the main character would alter things so much. I wonder why they did it.

The stairway fight in particular was the one that annoyed me most. Punches with little weight or impact replicating the Chinese styles but forgetting to add in the sound effects by slapping two bits of wood together.

Point was: needed Guns. Like The Matrix.

I watched Machine Gun Preacher today.

I expected it to be awesome and silly, about a man that bellows things like "In His mighty name" while shooting someone's lungs out with a shotgun because they stole the lead from the church roof, or something.

What I didn't expect to be doing was donating money to a psychopath as soon as it had ended. It wasn't a great film, not even a particularly good one (although it was well worth the watch). But fuck me.

[edit]Ooh, there's a book!

Cabin in the Woods is awesome. Go watch it soon!

Sweet. The first two Iron Maiden albums were excellent.

Watching it tomorrow. Haven't seen the trailer or read DocG's thread yet, so it'll be a surprise if nothing else.

First look at Hopkins as Hitchcock.

Nailed it!

I was a little wary of where it was going at one point, but I needn't have worried... very good film.

I enjoyed Real Steel quite a lot more than I thought I would.

Kooky (available as part of the latest Humble indie bundle) is great.

It's basically like a Czech Toy Story.

I really want to see this.

Before both Battleship and Cabin in the Woods, they played the trailer for Dark Shadows. I don't know if me and comedy films just don't get on, but I just sat nonplussed through it, while the audience seemed to laugh at all the weak one-liners. I think I'll be passing on it, anyway.

Pirahna 3DD looks awesome, though.

Wes Anderson has a new film out next month (trailer), so I've been watching all his previous films again. They're a bit magical. The Life Aquatic is probably where I'd start if you've not seen any of them.

Looks fabulous. Life Aquatic is amazing.

Watching Blacula. I have Blackenstein up next. Unfortunately I couldn't find The Blunch Black of Blotreblame.

Just watched Haywire.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Ewan Mcgregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas and Gina Carona in her first action acting role. Not a bad pedigree, it should be watchable at least

Utter fucking tripe in every way possible.

Gina Carano. But yes it oddly is really. I was hoping for much more but just found it rather unengaging. Though Gina was nice in it.

Red State was pretty good, and properly in parts. Well worth a watch, and if you don't know anything about it, I recommend not doing so - just watch it.

In other movie news, Warrior is going to have to work really hard in its last half hour to not plant itself firmly at the top of my "best film I've seen in 2012 so far" list.

Red State was ok, a bit weird in the end, but not too bad, however Warrior is awesome

Mrs T is away for a week from today, so I put loads of films on her ipad for her, including Battle Royale which she saw a bit on the TV and wanted to see the rest.
I forgot to put the subtitles on

Heh, I've watched a few foreign films without subtitles, I think Battle Royale would be pretty much fine. Tokyo Gore Police didn't seem to make much sense but I'm not convinced that it would even with the subtitles.

District 9 is *better* without subtitles.

It's even more mental with the subtitles!

Holy shit. Holy shit! What a fucking incredible film!

*downloads*