Category Archives: Film

Film, Personal

A scanner, darkly

I’ve just had a bunch of great experiences.

First, Makan, a Malaysian restaraunt on Portobello Road. They have ROTI CANAI. Any Malaysians reading this blog will know how significant that is. And they had Nasi Lemak with real sambal. Taste-tastic.

Next, The Electric Cinema. On the bigass red sofas at the back. Awesome. Eveyone looked at me and Arvind and thought we were bling. It was fun to pretend to be famous for a while.

DSC02049 And then – the scanner darkly. I won’t pretend to know a lot about Phillip K Dick. But I can say this is the most empathy I’ve had with Keanu Reaves character in a movie since he played Ted “Theodore” Logan in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure in the early 90s. The animation is *awesome* – weird overlays on conventional action cinematography. Functional dystopia. Drug-ridden conspiracy theory.

Real pain.

It was awesome, twisted, frustrating, unfinished, dark. Mostly dark. But everything about it is good, if you’re in the right state of mind.

Of course, the actual big speech?

What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly?

Complete, meaningless drivel. No more drugs for that man.

Film

Snakes on a Plane (i)

Awesome.

Entirely conventional in everything but its premise and its spectacular pre-launch hype, it is nonetheless an enormously entertaining film. More to follow… but in the meantime, if you can take some gore and fright, don’t listen to the critics – go watch.

Film

Vice

Mullet centraalMiami Vice was distinctly unimpressive. Michael Mann got caught up with that thing he does, taking beautiful shots of beautiful scenery, and along the way… he seem to forget it was an action movie. Of the 132 minute film, only about 12 minutes is taken up with (admittedly quite good) action sequences.

Now, I normally criticise traditional action movies for having too many explosions and not enough character development etc., — am I being a bit of a hypocrite? No. Sadly, Vice doesn’t bother with normal characterisation either, at least not of Rico and Sonny as a pair, which, IIRC, was what was interesting about the original series. This humourless film builds each character up almost completely separately — and apart from moments when one says to the other “I trust you completely,” (or words to that effect) — the two actually barely speak to each other.

So – no explosions, no characterisation… what does the movie have? A few nice cars (and some less nice ones – was that a BMW? C’mon man, apply imagination!), an absurd mullet, brief moments of fantastic brutality… and that’s about it. Not the kind of film you get angry watching and leave, as individual components seem to sit well enough — but I was definitely bored well before the end…

Film, Technology

Whiteleys. White-leys. WHITELEYS. Goddamnit, Bayswater.

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Had to call the Odeon filmline last night. I’m sure their voice recognition technology is awesome, but we just couldn’t get the damn thing to understand the name of our Cinema. After some struggle and experimentation, we were finally able to get the film-times we were after out of it… but it was not what you might call a smooth interaction. And I’m not sure Miami Vice was worth the trouble.

I’m all for new technologies – my technophile status generally goes uncontested – but in this case I would have preferred a touchtone option. Or even (shock, horror) a person.

Film, Personal

Superman Returns

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When I was about three or four years old, my Dad came back from a trip to the US with four Superman t-shirts for me. The were little white t-shirts with pictures from the comics on them, and a little red, polyester cape hanging off the back. Tacky as anything.

But I didn’t wear any other t-shirt for the next three years.

I have some idea why I’ve always empathised strongly with the character of Superman; isolated but much loved, wanting to save the world but frustrated by personal limitations, raised by a supportive family. Oh, and the powers of flight, invulnerability, super speed and heat and x-ray vision. Those would all have been good, too.

For whatever reason, the emotional attachment stuck. When I was 17, I rediscovered comic books and now have a couple of crates of graphic novels lying around my house. I have most of the Superhero movies on DVD – even the really, really bad ones. And so expectations for the new Superman movie – as they were for Batman Begins last year – were high.

And they were met. The new film is emotionally poignant, visually spectacular and, for me, pretty damn enjoyable. It’s not perfect – it doesn’t come close to matching the narrative pace of Batman Begins. But Bryan Singer’s eye for sweeping, glorious visual imagery is… artistic, all the set pieces work, the dialogue – whilst limited – conveys what it needs to about the characters. And even though I didn’t particularly like Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane, the trials of their relationship… were engaging. And moving.

Although the Spielberg-esque happy ending was faintly tedious (“Hello, beastie” is a much better way to set up a sequel ;)) and did drag on for about 20 minutes longer than it had to, I left the cinema – very moved. It played on the myth without being too derivative, and whilst daring to try new things.

And wouldn’t it be cool to fly?

I’m loving YouTube at the moment. Here’s the trailer, for the uninitiated. Go see… now.

Film, Gaming

Pirates II – revisited

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Tom pointed out to me last night that a few people have been comparing Pirates II to ‘Empire Strikes Back’ – apparently it has exactly the same story structure – which, on initial discussions and reading, I can see. Mackenzie Crook and his parter in crime as R2 D2 and C3PO, I suspect the Black Pearl was the Millennium Falcon, Jack Sparrow as Hans, Norrington as Lando Calrissian etc… Makes a weird kind of sense.

Three things I wanted to say about it, though…

(1) I did not think ‘Why has the rum always gone’ was the best line. I thought ‘Hello, beastie’, was the funniest line in the film. Don’t ask me why, I probably couldn’t explain it.

(2) I maintain that it was a good film, in spite of everyone’s naysaying – didn’t mind the fact that it was long, loved the ridiculous and fantastic action sequences, coped with the convoluted plot.

(3) Am I the only one to see the massive parallels between these films and the brilliant Monkey Island games? [[Guybrush Threepwood]] and the dread pirate [[LeChuck]] had almost exactly the same counterpoint that Jack Sparrow and Barbossa have (the third film will be great).

Here’s a reminder for you, courtesy of YouTube.

Film, Music, Personal, Technology, Television

Update

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Sorry for relative sparseness of posts of late, this weekend in particular. There’s load of stuff I’ve been meaning to blog on but have been spread fairly thin and have a pretty busy week ahead, so things are likely to continue to be quiet.

A very rapid update on what’s been keeping me out of commission:

I’ve been treating my addiction to Lost, and am getting onto the second season now. It’s v. exciting, and there’s some fantastic storytelling in there. Character-driven fiction; simply wonderful, and something that the big screen really doesn’t seem to do as well (on the whole) than the little screen.

I’ve been getting my “studio” in order. Those of you who know me know that I at least like to pretend to be musical, and have, erm, well, some equipment. And have just finished hooking it all back up for recording – so may bash out some song-attempts, now that I have a drum machine in place to deal with my own rhythmic inadequacies… Now where did I put those MIDI cables? And where’s Pob when you need him?

I’ve been shoe-shopping: I’ve had quite bad shin splints for a while so am finally getting the physio I need for them. Good new shoes are going to be a cornerstone of that treatment process, and a very tedious visit to Oxford Street today is sending me straight to Run and Become (conveniently near the office) to get some proper recommendations. I’m almost glad they have a completely inadequate e-commerce facility, as the in-person-ness is crucial for this.

My cousin David has come to stay for the next few weeks; he’s a media engineer, essentially, interning at a post-production studio for the next month or so. More on that later; David’s a mac-fan and a geek in lots of the same ways I am (comic books, Lost, technology, etc) — so we’ll probably have a few good chats at least ;). I’m not a mac-fan, you may have noticed, so… Mac vs PC… FIGHT.

I’ve installed Office 2007 beta. Yes, yes, I know I’m crazy – further destablising my PC and slowing it all down… but I do like the new MS toys and having spent months reading about it and the last two months trying to implement a version of Sharepoint that really, really does not support blogging (the new version, according to a Scoble interview I watched bits of on Channel 9, supports blogging and Wikis natively)… well, I thought I’d give it a whirl. Initial thoughts? It sure is purty… and of course I decided against installing Sharepoint on my home machine anyway!

We went to the Comedy Store last night for the midnight showing, too. 5 acts, 5 accents (Indian, Welsh, Irish, American, ‘London’, and a geordie compere) — one entertaining evening. Although was knackered by the time it wrapped up at 2.30am…

And, of course, the most exciting thing this weekend was… SUPERMAN RETURNS. But I really need to spend some time crafting that post. It will have some feeling put into it.

Signing out for now… The Arminator.

Film, Internet, Technology, Television

Movie on demand, oh yeah

I was feeling slightly under the weather yesterday so came home an collapsed in front of the TV – to find that, as we’re out of season for most of my favourite programming (with the notable exception of the new series of Scrubs…) that there wasn’t much on.

So I finally got around to checking out the on-demand experience that is Lovefilm. Now, I really don’t like the Sky on-demand experience – and renting the film off Lovefilm cost exactly the same amount but was in a format that I – as an ubergeek, I guess – was comfortable with, and with a payment method I was happy with. £3.49 on my credit card and 20 minutes later (how long it takes for 1 gig of hi-res DRMmed video content to come down an 8 meg pipe), I had my movie.

An altogether painless experience.

Of course, rather too many stumbling blocks for the average user – I have TV-out, am unintimidated by the need to enter a password into Windows Media Player, erm, have the latest version of Windows Media Player… etc.

So just a little bit pre-mass market. But do recommend it to anyone with the tech-savvy to make it work.

Oh – the film, btw, was the Dukes of Hazzard (2005 remake). And I don’t recommend that, really, for any reason other than the pretty people in it. Which isn’t a recommendation. Don’t see this film. Under any circumstances.

Culture, Film, Internet, Media & Marketing, Personal, PR

Like shot from a sling

Arvind’s company officially launched this week, to a chunky piece in the Guardian, amongst others (loads of peeps I know seem to have been in the guardian this week).

I’ve mentioned before that Slingshot Studios is specialising in all-digital film production – and Arvind’s working with some cool folks, on some interesting looking projects (from the little I’ve seen). I imagine more will go up at the Slingshot blog (in due course).

I’ll be speaking to them at some point soon about blogging and movie making — will need to look into quite how successfully people have used blogs to market films of late — but the if the paridigmata that are the King Kong and Superman Returns blogs is anything to go by, I suspect film-goers do want to hear things straight from the movie makers mouths (although those examples are arguably atypical ;)).