Sunday 19 May 2013

Fast & Furious 6

I went to see Fast & Furious 6 today. It was enjoyable, fairly solid, stylish superfluous action movie with great fights, car chases and other vehicle chases. I didn't find the film funny in the slightest but every other person in the audience was giggling away at all the comments that were intended to be humorous. I thought that the big action sequences had an abstract impossible dream like appeal to them that was very enjoyable. 


The last act of the main story movie seemed easily tacked on rather flimsily but seemed like a great sequence. It seemed to be the sort of movie where they could easily have just added another big sequence just as easily as that though. just when you thought it has ended after it seemed to have come to an end earlier on. 

This movie will be a great one to watch on TV in future in the early hours of the morning without any clue required as to what is going on and who is really what and , indeed it seems to share two film performers with this years G I Joe but one only makes a cameo appearance. 

I thought that I remembered that Bruce Willis was in it somewhere in the trailer but there were numerous bald heads so to be mistaken like that might be pretty easy. I might have the urge to take a look at number 5 maybe the next one when it comes in the cinema. The 2.5 hour journey through the film goes quickly. 

All the thrills and excitement from seeing it quickly dissipate after the movie. This must be the ultimate reason to see it.

Tuesday 14 May 2013

Dead Man Down

A) I saw the movie Dead Man Down today, and I enjoyed the film very much. Colin Farrel was very good in it and I felt that he and Noomi Rapace managed to strike up a good chemistry all the way through the sombre world of this story. One thing to point out about this movie, despite the fact that it was made in America possibly for an American audience, it has every reason to fail there because this Danish director of the film managed to create a film with a distinctly European feel to it. The pacing of the piece may also have been disturbingly foreign foreign such as the way we were introduced to the depths of the character's worlds in such a fast way. I felt it was fabulous film with a great sense of atmosphere and maybe if people had a bit of a problem trying to work out which side of the Atlantic it was filmed in, I wouldn't be in the slightest bit surprised. It highlighted maybe the feeling that America was made up of people from distinctively different foreign cultures. Sometimes however the words uttered by characters in various parts of the film were inaudible, Armand Assante briefly turned up in a scene and it certainly wasn't easy to work out what he was saying at all, but he calmly spoke through the scene in this thick strange accent never the less, and the very last words said by Colin Farrel's character to Dominic Cooper's character didn't actually come through in an audible way. Was this due to the sound system at the Odeon Leicester Square. The film left me with a wonderful mild sense of a poetic bleakness.

B)  The next thought about this film, since I am a scifi buff, it reminded me about the fact that Ridley Scott loved his film Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and from what I saw in Dead Man Down, the director Niels Arden Oplev ought to be given the job of directing the Blade Runner sequel if Ridley finds himself too busy to direct it personally and wants it done and is happy to produce it.

C) One curiosity in the movie for me were the tiny lights that seem to zip across the grass in the graveyard. Were they leaping grasshoppers that reflected the lights of the set or were they fireflies or something like that instead of the weird hallucination that almost seemed to be. Maybe I was indeed seeing something that wasn't actually there.

Saturday 11 May 2013

The new Star Trek movie

I went to see the new Star Trek movie today, I remembers that it's called Star Trek and really can't be bothered to look up the other bit of the title since it seems completely irrelevant. However I thought this movie had a plot that was just about as grossly irritating as the previous one, I didn't like the way the plot unfolded, it was all too obvious.

I was irritated by most of the cheesy dialogue scenes and once I found out who the villain actually was in terms of who he was in the old universe of Star Trek, I felt compelled to cringe as the name was spoken and this villain in this movie looked nothing like the one that we might remember from old. If I were drinking something at the time I might have choked over it my drink as well because of the complete and utter dissimilarity between the two.

Every time I saw Benedict Cumberbatch shooting his gun blowing up various aliens and their space crafts, I cringed at the way this person could be seen to be so powerful and when he was soon under the light of the Enterprise, he looked so lean and pale almost as if he were made from plastic. The moment that Benedict Cumberbatch's charcter's true name was revealed, I thought, "oh no, there's no way they can change this now, they couldn't just leave it as someone who was in a situation like Khan Noonien Singh from the original series what the hell can this actor have to do with the likes of someone played by Ricardo Montalban. What the hell! I expect the next thing that will happen is that Benedict Cumberbatch is going to be approached in a future series of Fantasy Island"

Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan Noonian Singh almost resembling the android character 
Data from Star Trek: The Next Generations who was created by Professor Noonian Sung.
However Cumberbatch gave a great performance in Star Trek irrespective of what he was supposed to be.  Maybe one might just pretend that when he declared his name, what we heard was a misheard mumbling about Professor Noonian Sung the inventor of the android Data from Star Trek The Next Generation and maybe this Cumberbatch character was another one of his androids and just explore further forms of confusing thoughts from there

The new Klingons didn't look very good, the makeup for the main Klingon really looked ridiculous in my point of view and I was glad when the Klingons had gone.

There were many good action scenes. Some of the acting was fine, but the comedy in it was tedious. And quite honestly the interior of the Enterprise seemed now very ill designed when it came to people needing the support of handle bars along a bridge in the ships engine room and large parts of the ships interior tended to get loose and fly around almost killing people when the ship lost it's power and found itself caught within the gravity of another large body. Otherwise the camera work and colour design were great, I saw it in 2D and feels maybe it might have been better to see the film in 3D. Otherwise the camera work and colour design were great, I saw it in 2D and feel maybe it might have been better to see the film in 3D.

One misses the old cast, William Shatner as Kirk with his familiar voice and indeed while there is an appearance from Leonard Nimoy as Spock, it is never enough and Zachary Quinto as the new Spock as much as a good actor he is in his role doesn't quite have the voice one associates with Leonard Nimoy. The less I say about the voice of Anton Yeltzin as Chekov and Simon Pegg as Scotty the better.

Well despite the typical way that J J Abrams pisses all over the Star Trek universe with the aid of the likes of Damon Lindel-something-or-other , I will watch it again in 3D and will of course see the next one when it comes out.

What have I got myself involved with here, I might perhaps wake up in the middle of the night screaming because I have to digest the conflicts and oddities of this new Star Trek movie and the ones to follow. It is a situation likely to be a cause of post traumatic stress having to agree that this is the way that cinema is going where we are endlessly experience of tolerating all the rubbish thrown at the audience from the movie to extract something that might be a small but worthwhile vision somewhere within the film

Thursday 2 May 2013

Evil Dead

1) I headed off to central London, my questions was about whether I would get there in time to see the Evil Dead remake or will he suddenly get there and wonder why on Earth he'd want to see that film.

2) Yes, it was a complete waste of my time, and had I got my dates correct, there was somewhere interesting that I could have been instead of watching this movie


2) I must have been in dire need to see how my time could be wasted if ever there was a way. To all those people who adored Evil Dead remake, I hope you had fun watching it but it's not something I could appreciate

3) Well I am not sure what one is supposed to appreciate about the movie. It was totally lost on me as I sat there. It was a day for me to be out of sync with a few things today.

4) Well I am not sure what one is supposed to appreciate about the movie. It was totally lost on me as I sat there. It was a day for me to be out of sync with a few things today. 

5) well, I suppose that's where it started to get disinteresting. I hoped for some backstory that might make some sense and really I didn't find one that interested me 

6) Spoilers A week later May 12th, I expand on my experiences of the movie including spoilers. Minutes into the movie, the possessed girl found herself tied to a wooden post about the be set fire to, and then suddenly there was a moment when used CGI as she mocked her father, and this for me was the end of this film, there couldn't be anything interesting about it once they showed CGI being used like this. The girl possessed at the beginning and the main girl possessed through the film seemed like second rate The Exorcist style possessions. I really wasn't going to have any fun with this. A dog is soon terminally injured and somehow transforms into a stiff corpse like thing long before it had died.

I felt more horror about humans stuck in such a filthy place than I did about what was going on, I had given up on it. I felt awful for which ever film actors they were who had all the fluid mixed with food covering them when they were being vomited on by the demon. 

The actors were actually giving fine performances considering the nature of this movie but they were not going as far as to be that interesting and the scenario that they had going amongst themselves regarding one girl giving up cocaine or whatever it was and she needed the help to go cold turkey during the weekend really didn't interest me.

At the end, one of the boys builds a makeshift defibrillator machine to restart the heart of a girl once her body had died and the demon has dead. This is another thing that suddenly lost my interest that the boy could make a complicated piece of equipment like that in the movie so easily and have it be so effective. 

There was the irritating fact he had to go back into the house and be injured by a zombified fellow of his, the makeup just made it all irrelevant and of course his injury meant that he would be infected by the dark demon which meant he had to commit suicide. Anyone could find themselves possessed in this movie and bound to commit some sort of act of self destruction. The idea that all it took to summon the demon and cause such destruction was to utter some of the words from the book found in the hut disinterested me as well. So, what else should I expect to see to make the summonations valid. Maybe I preferred the idea of a cassette recording being found with some strange chanting, I might have assumed that the recording caught the essence of a ritual sacrifice that was taking place at the time.

The girl appeared to be involved in a fight with the physical embodiment of the demonic spirit, I couldn't work out whether the latter was supposed to be the same actress as the living girl. Later she had her hand caught under the car when it was tipped over and when she pulled her arm away leaving her hand behind, the skin looked more like latex rubber to me as it was being pulled.

There is a whole film for me to have to point out details about why I didn't like the scenes and I can not be bothered to feel responsible for all of these various facts and point out what they are to other people. It would exhaust me and I doubt that I am going to be able to point out to people the relevance of any of these thoughts.