29 Mar 2011
Posted in Fillums, Reviews at 5:56 pm by alby
I watched District 9 for the first time last night. It’s a fillum that was much talked about at the time of its release but I managed to miss.
So what to say about it?
I rather liked it. Mainly in a “that was well done” way rather than a visceral “that moved me” way tho.
Your main actor (Sharlto Copley) was excellent. His portayal of a bloke that we all know (if you’ve worked in an office) doing his job was very good as was his descent into the meat of the plot.
The story was nothing desperately new, nor were the morals: “humans are the nasty ones”, “aliens may not be all they seem”, “money trumps everything”, “alien weapons are waaaaay cooool” and of course “Nigerians are evil money-grubbing bullies and psychopaths” (err maybe not that last there). But I thought it handled them well.
Until.
Oh until.
The last section. It moved the fillum from quite a thoughtful one into a Transformers movie of all things. I guess it was only to be expected; after all what’s a sci-fi fillum without exploding heads and fizzy weapons? I reckon they had to sell the thing to distributors and without the fizz-bang of the ending it wouldn’t have been bought.
Stil there’s ample scope for a sequel (I’d guess that was in the deal as well) to address these short-comings. As we know sequels often improve upon the original…
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27 Jan 2011
Posted in Reviews at 10:09 pm by alby
Just watching a show about the Supreme Court on BBC4. The first real footage of any of the Supreme Court judges was one of them getting to work on his push bike.
Ha! He had flashing front and rear lights only. That’s illegal!
Bloody hypocrites!
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09 Jan 2011
Posted in Fillums, Reviews at 12:34 pm by alby
I’ll implant a bloody idea into your subconsciousness shall I? How about this fillum is massively over-rated?
If you haven’t gathered I’m talking about the top rated (by Mark Kermode among many others) fillum of last year, Inception.
The basic theme of a thriller taking place in dreams etc yes fair enough. But what on earth has the fuss been about?
Apparently it’s a tricky fillum to follow. Really? Seemed pretty straight-forward to me. “ah yes which dream are they in and what’s real?” Erm haven’t you been watching? That bit is dream 1, that is dream 2 etc. Very very easy if you ask me.
“Ah but it all fitted together so well”, well duuh, that’s called using parintheses. Any beginner computer programmer or mathematician can do nested parintheses. Why’s that so special?
Ah there we have the nub of the problem. This is a fillum with logic instead of a soul.
The story is fairly ludicrous but let’s go with it otherwise I’d be dismissing all sci-fi everywhere and I’m quite a fan of good sci-fi (5th Element still rates as the best proper sci-fi fillum ever).
We have a damaged and disturbed lead character trying to get home to his kids (torn between a yawn and a retch here), doing “one last job” (more yawning) but one that’s never been done before (chain yawning). Don’t care for him, don’t care for the other characters, don’t care that he gets home or what. There’s so little character building going on that it seems they’re only there as pegs to hang the script on.
So then we get to the business end of the plot. Nested dreams. Ok so we’re going to get wild roller-coaster dreams of fabulous imaginings. Well no. What we actually get are various video game levels (the city one, the one set in a hotel, the one in a snowy landscape) full of men running and shooting. Ooh imaginative then.
Where were the everlasting stairs they mention early in the fillum? Where is the bit where someone’s running but getting nowhere? Where was the waking up naked on a tube train (oh that was prolly best left in my head)?
It does seem that the writer and director has very poor dreams.
They also have a rather poor sense of using music in their fillums. There were plenty of opportunities for a bit of silence and reflection but pretty much all conversation was covered by music of varying degrees of intrusivity ranging from totally obfuscating to merely very distracting.
Oh yes and the character stuff was between main character and his wife who’s died. They were in a dream world for 50 years apparently and they built a wonderful life down there. Apparently. What they did seem to build was a horrific concrete metropolis with no aesthetic joy nor extravagance nor imagination. A pair of tedious dullards.
9/10 on IMDb? Best fillum of 2010? If so then what a poor reflection of how bad people’s experience with movies has become in recent years.
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04 Jan 2011
Posted in Fillums, Reviews at 1:21 pm by alby
Morning all.
It’s a tired start to the new year this time. Not through over-indulgence nor nothing like it. Just a bit tired.
Life’s proper busy at present with family stuff, work stuff and very little time for much else. A pain as I’m supposed to be doing an OU course in my spare time. Ah well it’ll get there.
I do still insist on an occasional fillum though and a couple of them stick out from recent days.
Both score highly on IMDb, not convinced I agree with the relative scores tho.
The better of the two goes by the rather impressive title “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford“. A true story told very well by a cast doing extremely well. Apparently they didn’t over-dub at all which was a shame as their speech is often very mumbled. I was annoyed by this at first but eventually stopped worrying and decided to treat it like Shakespeare dialogue – IE loads of it goes past me but I generally get what they’re on about.
The main actors are fantastic, the cinematography is gorgeous and the tension builds well.
Considering it’s a long fillum (160mins) and we watched it over 2 nights I was surprisingly enthralled. The title tells you what happens but if you don’t know the story, you don’t know when things happen and what kicks off at what point.
It’s a very good telling of a tale where few of the characters are likeable, and of what happens when bad people start turning on each other.
There’s also a strong note regarding Jesse James’ fame and reputation. He’s a viscious git of a man responsible for murder and armed robbery, quick to use torture and violence for his own benefit but somehow he got into the state of being seen as a bit of a hero for sticking it to the man etc. Weird.
Highly recommended if you don’t mind long fillums that take their time.
It scores 7.7/10 on IMDb (at time of writing).
The next was supposedly a family fillum we got for N. Now R tells her stories about a character called Penelope. In these stories Penelope is a very thinly veiled N taking part in big adventures.
We found a fillum called “Penelope” so it was watched n’all. N was excited.
I’d not heard of it before, had no clue what it was about but hey it’s “u” rated so should be good for N eh?
Well no.
It was apparently a family fillum but the moral compass was all over the shop.
The titular Penelope was the unlucky recipient of a family curse from years past and was born with the face of a pig. Well that’s what the narration said. Actually it was Christina Ricci with a minor amount of make-up.
She was supposed to be repellent to all suitors so had hidden away whilst her mother tried to marry her off (which would break the curse).
There’s a man blah blah blah, a reporter tryiing to get pics of pig faced girl blah blah.
Eventually she realises that she has to be happy in her own skin and the curse is lifted (meaning the nose turns into a normal nose). She then gets the guy. Fin!
So ugliness is a curse, men will run screaming from ugliness and you’re only acceptable guy fodder when you look good. Nice moral there!
N didn’t understand most of this fillum. There were no adventures, the script was confusing and why are those men running away from the pretty girl with the weird nose? Bless her for sticking with it but we wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d got bored and wanted to do something else.
Somehow this dross scores 7/10 on IMDb. There’s no way the two fillums can be considered in the same league. The second isn’t cinematic, the acting is over-done (think standard US comedy acting) and the moral remains dubious at best. Shocking failure in taste by IMDb readers there!
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12 Dec 2010
Posted in Rants, Reviews at 9:26 pm by alby
Bloody hell it’s been an eye opening week in the cultural world.
I had a christmas do at work in the other day. It was in a caff somewhere near the main shopping precinct/mall. As it happened I had a few minutes to browse the local shops. My word! Does anybody actually buy the shite in the shops nowadays? Unbelievable! Cheap tat sold as luxurious, electronics that work but seem utterly pointless (3d telly I’m talking about you) and many many more examples of just how to wreck the planet for no good purpose.
Then the food was very “meh” and they sold drinks at about £5 a pint. Hardly worth it but I’m sure they’d claim a certain ambience. Oh yes and we had crackers (christmas ones not Jacobs ones); every single one of the dozen or more we had included exactly the same “novelty”. I’ve said it before but novelties only count as novel when there’s one or two of them.
The big news on the telly seems to be that X Factor and some ridiculous dancing show are the new “bread and circuses” distracting huge numbers from the realities of life. I watched a bit of the beeb one which seemed to be a geriatric trying to do jokes followed by some z listers (and Pamela Stephenson) hurling themselves around a bit notable only for some Tory MP to embarrass herself to the background of derisive hooting of many a phone voter desperate to keep her in so they could hoot derisively again in future weeks.
But tonight I’ve actually caught a song’s worth of the X Factor. Really? Is this good enough folks?
Some woman murdering a classic track (in this case “Sweet Dreams” by The Eurythmics) with ludicrous dancers while stationary warbling standing on a dais with wobbly legs as well as vocals.
And the winner is Cowell who proclaimed something like “a great choice of song and a fantastic performance”. No it wasn’t. It was an ok Kareoke performance with ideas far far above its station. How people can’t see that the only winner of this ridiculous piece of crap is Cowell escapes me.
Come on people there’s so much more out there that’s infinitely more inspiring and emotional and wondrous than the utter crap htat’s being fed through the telly nowadays and it’s really not hard to find.
It’s a damned good job we have the students around to demonstrate that some people still care about life and haven’t just given up.
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04 Oct 2010
Posted in Reviews at 10:38 pm by alby
This feels like an AA meeting.
My name’s Alby and I’m a fan of Britain’s Next Top Model.
There I’ve said it.
Well, stop. Actually I “was” a fan. I’m currently watching the “live finale”. Bloody hell what a sad messy end to a very well produced series.
After weeks of make-overs, photoshoots, challenges and eliminations in a format that’s tried, tested and entertaining they decided to do a live finale.
So cheap set, cheap presenter, no real tasks or photoshoots, appalling “bands” lip-syncing, whooping lunatics in the audience, acres of advertising in over-numerous ad spots and more. Truly dreadful. It’s like they decided professional judges, good production values, taste and decency weren’t appropriate.
Imagine if this was Masterchef: every episode is full of inventive food judged over by pro foodies and teaching by the best chefs in the world. Would they then do a final in a warehouse where the contenders get to show off beans on toast or a ready meal. All with the tedious musical backing of a boy band, a girl band and some apparently good rapper (sounded like a tedious little £!%$ who should have been told he was crap a few more times in his youth).
Honestly I don’t think I’ve ever been so disappointed with a series finale in any tv show. The judges in the series were a pain in the backend all series but one seems to have had a bad wig fit and snorted far too many drugs for the live show; Elle MacPherson who’s been classy and tasteful all series must be mortified at how bad it all is. Shocking. It really reminded me of that Brits ceremony with Mick Fleetwood and Sam Fox from years ago.
There was a highpoint. Twitter was mildly exploding with #bntm tags. The host even commented that #bntm was “trending”. Indeed it was, mind you 90%+ of the tweets were expressing shock and amazement at the monstrosity unfolding in front of us. It gave us major giggles reading the views of fans all uncensored. A shame they didn’t read them out.
But the right one won so maybe it wasn’t all wrong (mind you she was Maltese rather than British). Let’s hope they buck their ideas up for the next one (and don’t see the revenue from phone-ins as essential).
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23 Sep 2010
Posted in People, Reviews at 6:47 am by alby
Went to a Skeptics in the Pub on Tuesday with R and her dad. It was a rather good talk by Dr Michael Brooks (author of “13 Things That Don’t Make Sense“) who turned out to be an engaging and entertaining speaker.
His thesis is that it’s the anomalies that lead to progress in science. For instance when a young astronomer proposed that anomalies in the orbit of Saturn’s moon Io could be explained by the speed of light being finite rather than infinite instead of people looking at him on wonder at this astounding leap of logic they looked at him like he was mad and kept the status quo until the most eminent opponent of the theory died 30-odd years later.
He talked of different works looking at medical and epidemiological research and concluding that 80-90% of it is nonsense. To quote (well paraphrase at least):
“Don’t bother with the science, just use your common sense”
No no no! Common sense is neither common nor sensible (usually). Science was set up purely to combat “common sense”. It’s common sense that suggests that the planet is flat or that the sun goes round the Earth after all.
At the end I asked him this and he gave a good answer about needing common sense but I still have the feeling he was missing something. The example he gave was a medical study saying breathing in polluted air was good for the heart – he argues that if the researchers had used some common sense they would have seen that this was nonsense. I’d say that sometimes you need to ignore that common sense and this outcome they describe may be true. And it’s the scientific method that gets you to these odd conclusions. After all it was common sense that light travelled at infinite speed.
There were two notable questions from the floor. One was from R’s dad which was about wave/particle nature of matter and bedum bedum bedum…. I don”t think too many folk understood the question let alone the answer.
The other was a woman complaining about a stat the guy had used in his talk. Apparently 42% of US doctors (GPs) admit to using placebo in their practice. She took this stat to mean that only 58% of US GPs used actual medicine and she was appalled at this. Talk about something going over her head. I mean really.
A good evening I’d say.
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13 Jul 2010
Posted in Reviews at 8:22 pm by alby
“This laser works at a frequency of 1.9 microns”
Anyone fancy teaching the writers any basic physics?
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15 Apr 2010
Posted in Juggling, Reviews at 8:41 pm by alby
I were up in Yorkshire on Friday past. OK I’ll stop that now.
The BJC this year was in lovely Huddersfield. Not been there before and somehow I doubt I’d have picked it as a place to visit were it not for the BJC plonking itself down there and inviting us in. Surprised how nice the place was. Probably another of those “shush don’t tell the southerners how nice here is, we don’t want an influx” things.
Sadly I only managed to get there for about 12 hours from midday Friday. I’d picked the Friday as I wanted to see the BYJotY show. Word had it that the normal org Luke B had cried off, some pitiful excuse like “not being in Europe” no doubt. So it seemed young Tom D had valiantly stepped into his shoes instead. Not a bad play considering he only had 3 weeks to pull the thing into shape.
Not long before the BJC I’d heard more, that there weren’t many takers for the show. Could it really be so?
On getting to the site I slowly made my way to the main juggly hall, being constantly waylaid by lovely folk going “Ooh Alby, Hellooo!” and offering hugs and chats, from Dr H at the reg desk to the P-Bs once I finally fought my way into the hall.
Some juggling was done in the afternoon with some measure of success. Later I parked myself in the tent where Tom was stressing about the BYJotY show.
He’d managed to get himself a load of entrants the day before so the show was on. Mind you it seemed that many people who should have been around weren’t. And a workshop was due to take place in the tent at the same time the tech run was due to be held, and on and on…
Then, at the right time, a bunch of folk wandered in and dutifully played their own role in the show’s prep and things looked good.
In come the audience and then we begin.
Nina compered again and immediately apologised for her shocking use of the word “Lie-sester” last year but then ruined it by blaming Luke’s handwriting. But in the main she got on with it and things ran pretty smoothly.
The usual things happened, the drop count, the best trick comp (still using the old rules tho – still think 1 min per participant would be better, where the whole minute is the person trying to get their trick sorted rather than 10 secs per go). Perhaps she could have pushed the drop count game more during the interludes, maybe would have got more money if it’d been pushed more, perhaps even someone could have walked the queues before the show to garner money and participants, ah well maybe next time. (NB this is hindsight of course, I wish I’d thought of it at the time)
Notable in the show was our pal ^Tom doing his first go (and what would be his last due to being too old next year) at BYJotY. Droppy but funny and a worthy first go at jungling on stage.
There was a girl too! Emma-Jane I think she was called and she was pretty good. Not much joining in and connecting with her audience but the technical skills were clearly there.
Other notables were Jonny who won with a lovely routine of skillful juggling and having a lot of fun which he communicated well to the crowd; Josh and Lewis larking about and showing off some different skills such as head bouncing and sharing patterns – also the first ever double act (I think it was previously against the rules); and David Haslam with some excellent club juggling.
After all this was successfully concluded with Jonny winning just about everything and a couple of other silver awards (still no golds) Tom looked mightily relieved so I suggested food out with him and a few others. We ended up in an excellent steak place in town, good choice.
After about 2 hours of further wandering and goodbyes I headed home via a 2 hour night time drive. Lovely quiet roads at that time.
I’m left with a strange feeling of having missed an excellent convention but I did enjoy what I managed to see.
I do hope there’s a strong offer for next year, I’ve heard nothing beyond “someone has a plan”. Fingers crossed.
Cheers to the orgs, well done.
Pics from the day here.
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01 Apr 2010
Posted in Reviews at 9:40 am by alby
I watched “Masterchef” last night. Not really my bag but it was on and some of the contenders were likable enough. The judges are quite odd and unpleasant. One of them looks like he’s had far too much to drink over the years and is a tedious cockney stereotype – “That mash is lumpy – SORT IT AHHT!” etc.
2 contenders stuck out. One was dismissed from the competition. He was called Terry and is unemployed. He clearly has confidence issues and has the annoying habit (in a chef) of playing with his hair, or wiping his face, or fiddling with his ears when stressed – which is constantly. Yum, nice seasoning in them there dishes.
The other one of note is a bloke whose name I forget. He’s a paediatrician. The programme makers decided to call him a “children’s doctor” throughout. Erm why?
The only reasons I can think of are:
a: They think people are too stupid to know what a “paediatrician” is.
b: they think people are stupid enough to think “paedophile? Facking BBC giving someone like that time on the channel. What were they thinking? I’m going to smack someone.”
Are the public really that stupid? I know possibly a silly question.
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