Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

We went to see Dark Knight today.

( Just in case you ain't seen it and plan to... )

Boy, I thought Batman Begins was dark...

We plan to nip along and watch X-Files: I Want To Believe later in the week, despite the mediocre reviews. Had tonight not been games night, we might have seen it today after Dark Knight as a showing started about ten minutes after the ending of the first film. Still, after 21/2 hours of sitting watching a movie and slowly getting cramp, it was probably better to leave it until later. Besides, if the weather doesn't pick up, we may have to do that instead of having our picnic on Hampstead Heath one of the afternoons...

God help me, but I can’t get "Something Tells Me (Something’s Gonna Happen Tonight)" by Cilla Black out of my head.

It’s Wogan’s fault, he played it on the radio this morning and it’s bored its way into my skull and stuck until something equally catchy pops up to dislodge it. That will be some hours at best as I do not have my walkman with me today. I probably shouldn’t mention that I even looked (out of idle curiosity, thank you) on Play.com to see if they had any “Best of” albums.

And they do. For £12.99 I could own a collection that runs from 1963 to 1978 and features 80-odd singles. I’ve even heard of many of them. I feel old.

To break me of this, I see that today’s Times has listed their movie critic’s top ten scariest horror movies:

The Exorcist (1973);
The Blair Witch Project (1999);
Psycho (1960);
Alien (1979);
Ringu (1998) – Nakata’s original, not the remake;
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974);
Hallowe’en (1978);
Dawn of the Dead (1978);
Don’t Look Now (1973);
The Sixth Sense (1999).

I have to confess that I have not seen either Ringu or Don’t Look Now. When I was 18, a heavily cut copy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre put me off ham sandwiches for over a year. I was a tender flower in those days.

A lot of these films have lost their shock value these days, though I think Psycho and Alien would still grab the first-time viewer by the entrails at the appropriate moments.

What should have been on that list and is missing, what is on that list that shouldn’t be?

Entertain me with lively debate: I am bored and I still have Cilla Black rattling around my head. Now there’s a horror movie.

Edited to add: Two films that I particularly like and one, certainly, is very creey are: The Haunting (1963, dir. Robert Wise) and Night of the Demon (1957, dir. Jacques Tourneur) - despite the latter's cheesy demon effect toward the end of the movie.

Well, a few more stills - or rather character portraits have been released from the Watchmen movie, which is due for release a year from today on 6 March 2009.

trav28 posted up a couple of pics on his LJ, so I wandered over to the Watchmen site and found the rest. Most of them are behind the cut to save bandwidth if there's still anyone out there on dial up.



Rorschach

( Others here )
No pictures of Dr Manhatten. I think we can guess why.

With the death of Roy Scheider a couple of days ago, I toyed with the idea of writing an entry about it, but in the end I didn't bother.

But now I have found a fitting epitaph and I have changed my mind:



Roy Scheider's obituary on the BBC.

I'm all hot and bothered; we've been home about half an hour after nipping out to watch Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

I've never read any of the books and I'm pretty sure that this is one of those cinematic mistakes that means only people who have read the book first can properly fill in the plot elements that hit the cutting room floor, or understand the significance of half of what's going on. I knew that the stories get darker as Harry gets older and I don't mind that. What I did mind was the fact that with occasional exceptions, the sense of wonder that made the earlier films so fun was missing and had been replaced not by well-scripted character development, but an over abundance of teenage angst. Harry needed a damned good slap about twenty minutes into the film to snap him out of it. Sadly he never got it and that was that.

I shudder to think what was cut out; certainly some necessary plot points. Maybe they will be added back for the DVD release. What was left in was hmmm... pretty. I didn't realise that Sirius had copped it when he did and to be honest, I didn't care when I found out. The greatest irony of the movie though, is that having identified that huge plot points were missing, making sections of the movie almost incoherent as the cast just appeared in one place or another for no apparent reason, was that what remained was too long. Too long by about 30 to 40 minutes.

It seems that afterwards, I came a cross as rather over-vehement while I was explaining my disappointment to ellefurtle and I inadvertently left her somewhat dismayed. That was not my intention and it didn't start out like that in my head. At some level I clearly disliked the movie more than I am owning up to. It certainly didn't make me want to rush off and read the book.

All in all a damned shame; I was really looking forward to seeing the movie and I feel completely deflated and rather disappointed.

Ah well, other than a day out of the office and some rather magnificently reduced working time, all of which was rather splendid on a personal level, I am not sure that the trek out to Hemel Hempstead achieved much yesterday. Still, the extra lie in and early return home was appreciated.

We took the opportunity to watch Belleville Rendezvous on DVD. (Don’t panic, the link gives the French name, is all). If you haven’t seen it and you like surreal animations, I recommend that you do. It’s worth it for Bruno the dog’s dream sequences and the frog fishing in New York (Belleville)...

And is it just me, or does the kid look like an unholy cross between Uncle Fester and Adolf Hitler?

According to The Times the pooch will be called Trigger.

No news yet on the casting of Wing Commander Roy Rogers Guy Gibson.

I think I concur with the people who have seen the film already; not a bad film, just not as good as the first two.

Comparatively little character development, some nice action set pieces. I think I should have enjoyed it more had I gone on 'Orange Wednesday' and paid half price, but I don't feel ripped off or as if I wasted a couple hours of my life.

So, what odds a fourth movie, despite this supposedly being the last of a trilogy? The final scene before the credits and the scene after the credits left it wide open.

I'll say no more, lest I get shouted at for spoilers.

Now with added spoiler in comments section for wulfboy. Don't want to see it, don't read the comments.

So last night was movie night again, on account of it being Orange Wednesday, and all that hoo-ha. We’re running out of movies we want to see; make that have run out, at least for the next couple of months.

Anyway, we went to see The Fantastic Four. Now I was prepared for the movie to be pants, so I adjusted my expectations downwards in anticipation: the reviews have been uniformly poor, and the fact that the producers kept dragging it back into post production for tweaks never bodes well. So what was it like?

( Reviewed with minor spoilers. )

Overall impressions?

Wait five years for terrestrial TV to pick it up for the appropriate Saturday night, or bank holiday blockbuster slot. Note the time and channel, and watch another channel instead.

Tonight, DT sans LJ and I took advantage of Orange Wednesday again and disappeared off to the Vue cinema in North Finchley to watch the latest Tom Cruise vehicle, War of the Worlds.

Interestingly, DT thought it could have been longer, whilst I thought it could have done with tighter editing and brought back closer to the 100 minute mark. In many ways, it's a reasonable update of the story, and the plot is there, easily seen underneath the Spielberg schmaltz. The special effects were impeccable, and Dakota Fanning acted the arse off of Tom Cruise. I guess it's the invisible aliens sucking at his aura that loses it for him, strange little Scientologist jaffa that he is.

I think, however, that I have deduced the problem with the movie, and I am now going to commit science fiction heresy.

As original and forward thinking as it may have been when it was published in 1898, War of the Worlds is essentially a boring and old-fashioned plot line. The pacing is of the Victorian drawing room, and the central premise assumes that an advanced alien culture knows nothing about bacteria. This may have been clever new stuff to a traditional Victorian society, but in the 21st century, any one who has watched a bleach advert knows what the little blighters are like. The story works as a period piece, but really it hasn't aged at all well. This is not to denigrate Wells; standing on the shoulders of giants and all that, but let's be honest, he has been outstripped by the later SF writers such as Asimov and Clarke. And even the earlier parts of their work is beginning to show their age a little now.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi indeed.