I found a DVD box set containing all the Die Hard movies in a shop today. It was the added extra that came with the DVDs that caught my eye:
More info is on the side:
I’m pretty sure that phrase is famous for being a little more … colourful.
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UPDATE: Now running for president! You can support the campaign.
I have a sneaking suspicion that my relative disinterest in the Olympic Judo and Tae Kwon Do bouts is directly proportional to the number of kung-fu movies I’ve seen.
I’ve been wondering what Clone Wars [*] was all about - remake, prequel/sequel/interlude, or what? Now it’s even more abundantly clear that I don’t need to see it.
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[*] Warning - if you click on this link an obnoxious flash site will load, demanding your immediate attention. It’s probably not worth it. ↩
Futuristic-sounding name for some amazing technology. This kind of video enhancement boggles the mind, and suggests some creepy possibilities. Having moved way past the age of where a photo of something meant proof, seamless ‘photoshopping’ of moving video looks like it’s now readily achievable.
The linked video has a bunch of technical image-manipulation terms, but is still quite watchable.
And awesome.
Just saw The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Absolutely brilliant.
Although quite brutal at points, this is a truly remarkable movie. The characterisation is deep and engaging, the story is wonderfully told, the scenery and cinematography is nothing short of breathtaking, and the director felt no compulsion to jam it full of stuff it didn’t need.
It’s not often you hear silence in movies at the cinema. At points I felt I was watching a foreign film (whose directors are not afraid of silence, but can at points let things drag far too much). The scope of the landscape was simply fantastic.
As I said, there are a couple of violent parts which are not really for the faint-hearted. As modern movies go they aren’t all that terrible, but the shock of something like that happening amongst these characters that you really care about, in a world where such a thing is both everyday and alien, is really part of the craft of the film. You will care when the title-scene happens.
You should see this film.
The official movie site will give you a taste of the feel of the movie, but don’t stop there. Watch this movie. It’s the best I’ve seen in a long time.
Kristy and I just watched the movie Hot Fuzz. Absolutely awesome.
Part Bad Boys/Point Break, part romantic comedy, part The Bill, part spaghetti western, part mockumentary, it’s a cop action movie set in a quaint town in the British countryside.
Fantastic. Watch it.
Maybe I’m getting to be more discerning. Maybe I’m just getting fed up with the Star-Wars-Effect: big budget, bad script, good action sequences, average result. Perhaps movies are just sucking more these days.
We saw Transformers the other day. Now I used to be a fan - I had an Optimus Prime toy as a kid (and a bunch of others). Transformers were really, really cool. The movie, however, was awful.
It set me up to be bad. Very early on in the movie the Defence Secretary was talking to a roomful of ’signal analysis experts’. Oh-oh. That’s what I am. That’s my field.
Whenever movies delve into anything that I happen to have some level of expertise in it’s bad news, since they invariably get it wrong, distort the possibilities, and just generally make a bit of a hash of it. Computer interfaces, for example - who has a desktop like that? Take Enemy of the State for example: US satellite cameras apparently have infinite resolution, as they can keep zooming in indefinitely. And wall-mounted surveillance cameras can move around a room to look at the other side of a person. What possibilities! Such technology! (Incidentally, this is why I really dislike Dan Brown - the two areas he writes his page-turners on are religion and science, specifically Christianity and technology. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, he gets it wrong.)
Luckily, apart from a stupid line about the government needing to move their signal analysis from ‘Fourier transfers to quantum calculation’, there was little cringe-worthy techno-fiction. What was cringe-worthy was the dialogue. There were a number of set pieces where characters would discuss what they already knew to be true, in order to inform the audience. For example, a group of transformers at one stage talked about their collective history, for no other reason than to inform the audience. Scriptwriters - find another way of communicating that information! People don’t talk like that, informing their colleagues of what they already know as basic truths. It’s entirely unnatural and very contrived.
I think my basic problem is that I don’t like to be treated like an idiot as an audience member. I don’t need big signposts pointing to who the good guys and the bad guys are (for transformers it’s easy - blue eyes good, red eyes bad). It was laid on pretty thick in places - the bad secret service agents all drove up in big black cars, so that you knew they were bad. At one point, if you hadn’t yet been convinced that the main baddie-transformer Megatron was truly what he appeared to be, he transformed into a plane and flew through a multi-storey tower-like building. He flew through a building! Unbelievable.
The action sequences and CGI were, however, nothing short of astounding. The transformer models were incredible, and watching them go from car/truck/helicopter/etc. to giant robot was very nifty indeed. That’s why it’s such a shame that the dialogue and bad editing let it down. Long slapstick scenes could have (and should have) been cut, if only to make way for the action. That’s why we’re seeing it after all.
After all of that, here’s one light note about the movie to finish on: I read a great little article recently about the guys who did all the computer graphics work for the film. The production company offered to send down model samples so the designers could work their magic, but being the massive computer geeks they were they declined the offer - between them they had all of the transformer toys from childhood. Nice.
