A blog about actual things that I’ve done for once
February 10th, 2008 at 02:22

I went to London today with my friend Bouff, and have unexpectedly got three interesting, yet unrelated stories out of it. I’ve ranked them least interesting to most interesting - which is incidentally also chronological order - to keep you reading to the bitter end.

STORY ONE

Bouff suggested we go to London a couple of weeks ago, and I readily agreed, as I bloody love London. A few days ago when discussing what to do there, I suggested to him that we could, say, go to Highgate Cemetery, and have a look at Karl Marx and Douglas Adams’ graves. Bouff replied “I was thinking of H&M”.

“Nah, we won’t end up simply shopping”, I thought. Then we ended up in the Vans shop on sickeningly fashionable Carnaby Street, so he could buy the sort of shoes skateboarders wear to show that they’re totally sticking it to the man, from a large multinational corporation. Here is an “action shot”, and I use the term “action” incredibly loosely, of a man you don’t know purchasing shoes to validate this story as truth:

STORY TWO

I was shocked this evening when I checked the news earlier and found out about that massive fire in Camden. Why? Because I was there only a couple of hours earlier. Its a bit weird switching on the news and seeing the street you were just on (the one with the shop with the aeroplane on the front) covered in flames.

We went to The World’s End pub, which is famous enough to have its own Wikipedia page. Well, some people do predict that the world’s end will be in a hellish scene with lots of fire and destruction.

Whilst not technically in Camden so not relevant to this half-baked story, but it’s not like it was actually going anywhere in the first place. We also ventured to Holloway Road, which is basically just a suburban street somewhere in north London, but we went there because it was all about the destination: the club Nambucca, which is apparently some sort of famous Indie venue - I vaguely knew of it because its referenced in a Frank Turner song. Yeah, its horrendously obscure, but Bouff was excited, going through his phone book, texting everyone he knows. All I really saw was a closed building. Here is another exciting picture:

STORY THREE

This is the best story. If you’ve skipped the other two to see what’s here, then it was worth the effort. You’ve seen Shaun of the Dead, haven’t you? Well, do you recognise this newsagents:

No? Its the one from Shaun of the Dead. Really, it is. That’s why we took what looked like an unlicensed mini-cab half way across North London to a small parade of shops in a heavily residential area devoid of a Tube to take photographs of ourselves standing outside a newsagents.

Annoyingly, the shop was sold out of Cornettos.

Here’s Shaun’s house. It’s changed a bit since the film:

It was dead exciting. See, that’s a pun there. Sort of.

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Christmas Film Reviews
December 28th, 2007 at 15:49

I am Legend

Most of the human race have been killed off by a virus. The survivors have been killed off by Vampires. And Will Smith is alone in New York city, struggling to survive. Its a festive frolic for all the family!

I am Legend is basically 28 Days Later set in America. Its also a tale of one man and his dog. But rather than mow a meadow, or whatever it is that men and dogs do in a post-agrarian economy, they sort of faff about a bit in the deserted streets of New York without much narrative for about the first hour. The plot doesn’t really go anywhere and dialogue is largely superfluous - its just Will Smith talking to his dog and letting the audience make an emotional investment in the dog character, setting us up for a horrible twist.

The dog’s screen hogging isn’t necessarily a bad thing - the dog should be in line to win Best Supporting Actor at the next Oscars, as there are literally no other major characters. Unfortunately though, about half way through, the film decides to mess with the sacred unwritten rules of cinema - and kills off the dog.

Will Smith is good in it though, and until the religious overtones kick in towards then end, its pretty good. 28 Days Later is still better.

Rocky and Bullwinkle

Yeah, 2000 called. A handful of pretty good visual gags (amusing signage in the background, that sort of thing), as well as Kenan & Kel make a bad film vaguely tolerable. The best gag is when a cop, played by John Goodman arrests the female FBI agent for impersonating an FBI agent: “But I am an FBI agent”, “Yeah, and I’m John Goodman”.

Après Vous (with English subtitles)

A French comedy film, that would have been shit if it were made in English. Its more or less a “romantic comedy”, but because its in French, you can call it art house and get away with watching it, with all of your manliness intact.

Long story short, a bloke (Antoine) saves another bloke (Louis) from committing suicide, and then has many hilarious japes whilst taking on the task of rehabilitating him and helping him get over his ex-girlfriend. The best bit of the film is without doubt towards the beginning when Antoine goes to meet Louis’s blind grandmother, to intercept a now-redundant suicide note that he had posted before she gets a chance to read it. Antoine has to read the letter to her changing all of the suicide-esque things to happy things on the fly, and ends up giving the grandmother a lift in his car (with Louis hidden on the back seat) - where the grandmother explains to Antoine it was her who suggested his girlfriend dump him. It was better than The Office at that sort of “awkward scenario” comedy.

Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers

Delightful. Even after fourteen years, Wallace and Gromit are still excellent. Which goes without saying, I guess.

War of the Worlds

My indifference towards this film is only matched by my disdain towards its star’s religion. I watched it a few days ago now, and thinking back, I can’t remember anything of note, other than the basic gist of the plot. Sure, the special effects were pretty good, but they’re ten-a-penny in this day and age. So, er, watch Wallace and Gromit instead. That’s my advice.

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Christmas Films
December 24th, 2007 at 02:41

At risk of stating the obvious, I think its pretty clear that we’re getting close to Christmas. There’s explicably decorations up all over the place, I honestly couldn’t tell you what day of the week it is in absolute terms (only in terms of the number of days until Christmas. You could say that we’re current at tree-minus 1 day until Christmas. Ho, ho, ho.), and perhaps the most obvious indicator: my propensity towards watching terrible films has increased.

Its almost become a festive tradition of mine to watch Small Soldiers again, as it is invariably shown at some point during week 51 or 52 (in TV industry terms). After scanning the Radio Times website though, it looks as though I won’t be enjoying Kenan & Kel’s seminal classic Good Burger this year, as it doesn’t appear to be scheduled anywhere.

Earlier this evening I watched a film which is more or less the antithesis of a cinematic classic: Tommy Lee Jones starring in Volcano. I’ve seen it a couple of times before (much like nearly everything else you watch at Christmas) and repeat viewings don’t unravel more layers of a cinematic onion - there’s no subtle allegory about humanity’s fragile place in the universe - you know what happens just by reading the title.

One particularly dire bit was towards the end when (spoiler!) they’d stopped the volcano and a rescue bloke asks a kid what his mum looks like. The kid looks up to see everyone covered in volcanic ash and remarks “Look at everybody… they all look the same” - which seemed a bit unnecessary as the film wasn’t about race relations. And it was undermined immediately afterwards when it rained, the ash was washed off and the apparent apartheid returned.

Are there any films on in the next week that I should watch, readers? Let me know, as we can make this blog interactive, and I could, like, comment on your recommendations, and you could make me endure watching crap for your own sick amusement, or something?

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Transformers
August 15th, 2007 at 02:08

I went to see Transformers this evening. Despite being an awful student, I didn’t actually watch Transformers when I was younger (or if I did, it didn’t make much of an impact on me), nor do I watch it these days “ironically”. After seeing the trailers, I genuinely thought it looked like a good film.

Alright, “good” is the wrong word. It looked like a fun film, and it was.

One thing that really impressed me was the computer generated stuff. It looked really realistic. I mean, obviously gigantic robots that inexplicably can transform into regular looking things don’t exist, but everything looked photo-realistic, and it was hard to tell where the CG started and the live action began.

I also enjoyed the sort of buzzword bingo that occurred at various points in the film. “You’ve got to think quantum physics”, to explain the transformers, “maybe they’re DNA robots?”. Not to mention the standard “computer hacking with amazing 3D visualisation” stuff.

I also enjoyed the sickeningly “cool” robot, who when sitting down on to a car said “this is a nice place to kick it [ie: relax]“, or something similar to that. It was ridiculous.

Plot-wise, the film isn’t exactly a shining beacon of intellectualism floating in a sea of ignorance. It was very much submerged. As long as you don’t think about it too much, it is a throwaway, entertaining watch - much like the Fantastic 4 in that sense.

Unfortunately for the people who made the film, I have a tendency to think too much. I have several points of contention with the film:

A big chunk of the start of the film is about setting up the human character’s backstory. The kid from Even Stevens wants a car so he can try and impress a woman. You get the standard scenes of the sports-playing wankers making fun of him, and as you might expect, at the end of the film he gets the girl. At risk of sounding a bit Newsnight Review, I don’t think the emotional journey was explored very thoroughly. Don’t get me wrong, I’d prefer to watch fighting space robots interspersed with pseudo-science, but it made the build up feel unnecessary. What’s the message here? “Get a car that transforms into a robot and the world’s most fickle woman will be yours”?

Early in the film, one of the autobots (the good guys) is captured by the US military. Optimus Prime, the leader, explains to the others that they can’t rescue him because “humans might be harmed”. This is all well and good, but why then, did the good guys deliberately direct the end battle into the centre of a city full of thousands of people? Were they not expecting any collateral damage? You even see at one point a good robot wrestling a bad robot in its jet fighter transformation, flying through a building, and helpless white collar workers running for the windows and jumping.

Its explained in the film that Megatron, the boss of the evil Deceptacons, came to earth a century or so ago to look for this cube which is vital to the plot. The reason he doesn’t go on a killing spree or whatever is because he is frozen beneath the Arctic. This is all well and good, but how did he even get to Earth in the first place? If he’s been travelling across the solar system, if not galaxies, then he would have surely encountered even colder temperatures? Absolute zero is -273.15 degrees centigrade, yet the temperature at the North Pole is a comparatively warm -43 degrees. That’s right, I’m picking up on dodgy science in a film about robots from space.

There’s also a massive piece of circular logic going on with the plot. Apparently the Deceptacons have come to Earth and are going to use this cube thing they’re after to turn all of Earth’s technology into an army and use it to take over the universe. Fair enough, but in the film, in the scene with Megatron dug up and hidden in the Hoover Dam (wouldn’t he have thawed out in transit?), the US army explains that all technology is reverse-engineered from the technology found on Megatron. And obviously, when Megatron first arrived, there was no earth technology of the type they can take over. In the 19th century there were no microchips or whatever. Illogical.

It was an alright film though - not unmissable by any stretch of the imagination but an entertaining watch none the less.

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The Simpsons Movie
July 25th, 2007 at 22:39

I went to see The Simpsons Movie with Katy today. When I first heard they were making it a couple of years ago, I approached it with a similar level of caution as I did Die Hard 4, but as time grew closer to release day, having seen the trailers and so on, I set my expectations ludicrously high - it was apparently written by some of the earlier writers after all. They were mostly met.

It was 84 minutes long but didn’t feel like it was long enough - there were a number of plot lines that felt unresolved, such as Abe Simpson experiencing the “prophecy” in church (I’d have liked a pseudo-scientific explanation rather than the assumed supernatural one), and I got the impression that the ‘Lisa has a boyfriend’ sub-plot could have been explored in more depth - as could ‘Bart prefers Flanders to Homer’. These latter two would make excellent stand alone episodes of the series but they felt underused in the film. I wonder if Lisa’s boyfriend will pop up in the series now? And Homer’s pig for that matter - they didn’t resolve that either.

As I’m a big Simpsons nerd, here are some minor quibbles with an otherwise decent film:

President Schwarzenegger (not Wolfcastle) - previously the Simpsons has always claimed that the current real President was President, and would retcon the timeline appropriately - or perhaps more accurately, exist on a floating timeline. A fictional President is most definitely a break from the norm.

They also appeared to be retconning Homer and Marge’s marriage - Homer and Marge’s wedding video features at one point, yet it doesn’t look how it did in the series. The first time they got married in a casino - but Marge actually divorced Homer in one episode and they remarried in their own home. So I’m not sure where this wedding video came from, but then again, continuity has never been the Simpson’s strong point. Jon Stewart on the Daily Show when he had Matt Groening on mentioned that Homer is supposed to be 38… and he met Marge in high school, but Bart is only 10.

(Obsessive compulsive) fans will also know that the layout of Springfield regularly changes to suit the plot, but there was a truly atrocious example of bad continuity when early in the film it shows the Church and Moe’s being next door to each other, when only a few minutes later it is shown to be on the edge of the area covered by the Dome the EPA lower on to Springfield… and Moe’s has vanished.

It was a really good film though - tonnes of excellent gags. To name one, the blackboard gag at the start: “I will not illegally download this movie”.

I would: recommend it. Even if you are lining Rupert Murdoch’s pockets.

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“You killed a helicopter with a car”
July 5th, 2007 at 01:03

I went to see Die Hard 4.0 this evening. Despite reservations about the lack of swearing, it was most definitely a Die Hard film. There was a lot of action, which when described, sounds ludicrous. I’d have hated to have been the guy who’s job it is to turn a script into a film when confronted with the following scenarios:

• Bruce Willis drives a car up a concrete ramp, jumping out at the last second - the car continues flying into the air and destroys a helicopter that had previously been shooting at him with a machine gun mounted on it.
• Another helicopter is destroyed by driving into a fire hydrant, releasing the water upwards, tipping the helicopter over.
• A fighter jet fires missiles at a big truck, that Bruce Willis is driving. It fails to destroy the truck but manages to destroy a lot of the motorway. Undeterred, the plane slows down and hovers around the motorway, using machine guns to fire at the truck.
• An SUV is driven into a lift shaft, and an entire fight scene occurs on the SUV as it dangles down.

And that’s just the start of it.

Whilst the action set-pieces were spectacular, the plot, whilst interesting, was a little… questionable. The whole film revolves around a group of hackers, so obviously the computers they use are very Hollywood friendly GUIs: 3D graphics, unnecessarily spinning bits on the interface, “DOWNLOADING VIRUS” in big letters on the screen, and so on. It all seemed slightly out of place for a Die Hard - it always struck me as the sort of franchise that’d solve all of the problems it encounters using brute force and violence.

Any plot bottlenecks were advanced simply by saying “hacking! hacking!” whilst someone tapped away at a keyboard. And bizarrely, after breaking into the central power grid building, whilst the baddies were hacking into it, they thought to bring a webcam with them, so Bruce Willis could get a good look at the bad guy.

I think the best exchange of dialogue in the film, aside from the title of this post, was the baddie saying “set off the Anthrax alarm”, followed by an “anthrax alarm” button being pressed on the computer screen, followed by cutting to the FBI headquarters where the chief bloke exclaims after hearing a siren “It’s the Anthrax alarm! Everyone out!”

Great way to contain a virus, evacuation. I wonder if the anthrax alarm sounds any different to the nerve gas alarm?

I feel the need to shoe-horn in some unnecessary political analysis. It was a bit too nationalistic for my left-wing studenty opinions. As the good hacker explained how the media are complicit in a conspiracy to control us all, Bruce Willis tells him to shut up. This is obviously just 20th Century Fox breaking the fourth wall and telling off people who complain about Fox News Channel. Obviously. Yeah.

Anyway, it’s a good film. I’d recommend it.

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Ocean’s 13
June 21st, 2007 at 17:22

Before all of that unpleasantness last night, I went to see Oceans 13 with JD on something of a whim. So now I’m going to attempt to review it. By “review”, I mean write a few unconnected sentences that are loosely about the film that I saw.

Back-story: I haven’t seen Ocean’s 12, and only have vague memories of Ocean’s 11. Which probably makes me the least qualified person to judge the film. I mean, other that George Clooney, who’s review would presumably “Excellent! Recommend it to all of your friends!”.

The film felt like an assault on my brain. Every second of the film was just an unrelenting forwarding of the plot. I realise this is how films tend to work, but there was a lot to keep up with. There was about fifty billion characters all of whom had a separate role in the plan, and the film kept jumping between them. And it was all packaged in a stylish, sickeningly brash way.

There weren’t any sort of action set-pieces either, which I’m not entirely used to. I was expecting at least a car chase or a shoot-out or something.

There was more humour than I was expecting, which was nice. (There’s the quote for your DVD cover, if you’re reading, Warner Bros)

My only concern with the film is the morals. I mean, are we supposed to sympathise with a bunch of people who are robbing a casino? I don’t get it.

And my only complaint is moderately tedious. A lot of the film hinges on the difficulties the gang face in planning the heist. “Oh no, we need to steal the diamonds too”, and so on. So it strikes me as odd that some problems earn screen time and elaborate ways of overcoming them, and other times they just magic stuff up from no where - like a helicopter. And how do you import a tunnel boring machine and get it under Vegas without anyone noticing? And how did the key people keep getting useful jobs in the casino? Surely they’d be on strict shift patterns as low paid drones and thus not be able to select to “clean” one very specific room and one very specific time?

But this didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the film over all. Surprisingly good.

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“Alright, Not Bad” 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer
June 17th, 2007 at 20:27

Last night I went to see the new Fantastic 4 film with my dad, because of father’s day. I think my verdict is similar to what I thought about the first film: it’s pretty good, as long as you don’t think about it too much. It has all of the action scenes and superpowers that you’d expect from a superheroes film and is entertaining to watch. Just don’t go in there expecting to see a Spiderman calibre film.

The unfortunate thing is that since seeing it last night, I have been thinking about it too much and have come to the conclusion that the film contains more holes than a Swiss cheese with a termite infestation.

For example, throughout the film the Fantastic 4 travel around the world in pursuit of the Silver Surfer - this takes them to central London and the Black Forest in Germany - bizarrely though, they’re under the command of an American General. Despite this explaining why the real life London Eye currently has a big picture of the Surfer in the middle of it, it doesn’t explain why the London Eye wants to promote a film in which it gets nearly destroyed and its passengers put in significant peril.

Even more confusingly, (spoiler alert!) when the Silver Surfer is captured, he is taken to an American military base in… (wait for it)… SIBERIA. Seriously, wtf?

Also, what I imagine is a more of a proper film-critic criticism: the characterisation of the Silver Surfer seemed a little bit too human for someone who was supposedly an alien. Ignoring the other character’s blind acceptance of the existence of alien life, the silver surfer had some distinctively human characteristics to his personality, not to mention that he looked like a human and spoke English.

The way in which he (major spoiler alert) changes his mind and decides to fight of Galactus (and easily defeat him?!) was a bit too quick too. It seems a thirty second conversation between the Invisible Woman and an alien who has spent a career destroying planets is all it took for him to change his entire world-view.

I think it goes without saying that science in the film is completely implausible. But as I’ve said time and time again, I like my sci-fi to have some plausible pseudo-science to explain it - otherwise accepting the plot is a bit like accepting creationism.

Reed Richards, or “Mr Fantastic”, as he’s modestly known is set up to be this amazing scientist - but I think the film makes him appear just too fantastic. He seems to be an expert at everything. In the film you see him build and analyse some sort of cosmic ray machine - as well as the “Fantasti-car”, a flying car that has no wings or wheels and is inexplicably is capable of separating into four separate flying machines mid-flight.

Considering an alien had just popped up on earth, Reed certainly knew how to deal with them - apparently a Tachyon field will stop the surfer. Alright then, if you say so.

One of the key plot points in the film was The Human Torch gaining the ability to swap powers with the other three - this is set up throughout the film with a few power swaps. What bothers me about this is that the finale hinges on (spoiler alert!) the Human Torch getting all four powers at once simply by touching the other three people at the same time - something that was previously untested. Why would this even work? Even if he had gained the powers of his three team-mates, surely they’d all have his original power? Yet the final fight clearly showed him being a human torch.

But anyway, this is getting a bit sad. It was a good film, really. I enjoyed watching it. And that’s what its all about. Probably.

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Magicians
May 21st, 2007 at 00:36

I’ve just been to see the Mitchell & Webb film, Magicians, which was written by the same people who write Peep Show too.

It was quite good - not as funny as Peep Show though, and almost as if it had been toned down a bit for more family audiences (although there was still plenty of swearing). It was interesting to see Mitchell & Webb playing almost identical characters, in terms of personality, to those they do in Peep Show (and indeed the Mac adverts).

I already think it’s scary just how similar my mind works to that of Mark in Peep Show, so seeing Mitchell’s character in Magicians working in Wilkinsons (really) was ridiculous. Its almost as if they’re raiding my mind for plot ideas.

Whilst the laughs were perhaps a bit to few and far between, the narrative was certainly entertaining enough to keep me interested, although it ended in the most predictable way possible.

Perhaps the most notable thing was the cast - it was full of tonnes of famous British sitcom celebrities, all of who were famous enough that you recognise them, but not famous enough for you to be able to name them, or probably name anything they’ve been in. There was the Nazi from Peep Show, the kid from Saxondale, the sweary chap from The Thick of It, the woman from Hyperdrive, etc etc etc.

It was good though. My recommendation, which the makers can feel free to quote on the DVD cover: “Yeah, its quite good. Go and see it at the cinema if you like, or you could wait until its out on DVD”. It’d be a good quote to put on a DVD cover because it mentions DVDs.

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28 Weeks Later
May 12th, 2007 at 01:16

I went to see 28 Weeks Later this evening - y’know, the sequel to the excellent 28 Days Later. Its a zombie film full of blood and death and calm scenes being interrupted by awful zombies.

Yeah, I know that they’re “infected” and not “zombies”, but these two things are practically identical. So I’m going to refer to them as zombies throughout, just to be needlessly irritating.
It is set some time after the first film - 168 days after in fact. Britain’s entire population has been wiped out by the rage virus, so the Americans are leading efforts to reconstruct the country. FAIRLY OBVIOUS POLITICAL ALLEGORY ALERT.

The Americans try their best, setting up a ‘green zone’ on the Isle of Dogs, but fail to control a determined local population of zombies leading to chaos, and the indescriminate shooting of civilians.

The film follows essentially the narrative of the first film after the setup: “Phew, we’re somewhere calm and secure, there is absolutely no-way the zombies can get us now“, followed by “Oh no! The Zombies have found us! We should run to somewhere else!“. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

There’s an excellent scene when a helicopter is trying to rescue an uninfected soldier, when hundreds of zombies appear - so it flies at them and chops them up with the blades. There’s also a horrible scene when a newly infected bloke kills his wife by pushing his thumbs into her eyes.

The only notable bad point about the film I can think of is that because the two main characters are kids, you know they’re going to make it through the film* alive, as kids, much like pets, are indestructible when projected on to a cinema screen.

But overall, it was good. Yeah, that’s my review: “good”. Put that on your DVD cover.
(*If you ignore the vague epilogue, perhaps)

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