Metamatic Forums Socialising The Green Room What are you watching?

Just came back from the movies, watching '2012' by Roland Emmerich.
The plot is a bit childish and charachters are flat, but hey, what d'ya expect from a popcorn movie? Having said that, the first thing I did when I came outside was looking if all the buildings were still there. They were ...
A great movie when you want to feel like a child again (lots of "ooh"! and "aah"! moments).

Jst watched COUS COUS (La graine et le mulet)
Excellent
Some good music too I can see where Echo and the Bunnymen and The Mission are coming from , and I don't mean Liverpool and Bristol

Continuing on a Film Noir kick, just watched "Murder, My Sweet." Dick Powell's portrayal of Philip Marlowe couldn't possibly be as good as Bogart's and the plot was convoluted but it does have great atmosphere and cinematography:

BBC 6 Music : Gary Numan/Little Boots & Heaven 17/La Roux.


I haven't bought a Numan record since The Live e.p in 1985 & kind of lost interest in him but this has rekindled that interest. The version here of Are Friends Electric was immense. I may have to delve into youtube to find more of Numans recent work. I have Little Boots Hands album & like her a lot.

The Winter Olympics cross-country skiing events . It's a real pain staying up late to watch them . Sometimes I drop off and miss them .It was much easier 4 years ago when I had them on my doorstep* and actually got to see some events live

*yes, I live in a little chalet 3000 feet up in The Alps !

Talking about Numan.

After such a long wait (not from Townsend that is )The Touring Principle '79 DVD finally arrived. It has two versions, the orginal with the interruptions, and the new version without the interruptions. It's shot a bit dark but the DVD has greatly improved the quality of the video and yes you can see Billy on his Odyssey solo On Broadway .

I was very pleased with the Conversation DVD. A great idea from Steve Malins to carry out the interview at Benge studios. A perfect setting. I like it when Gary says that he didn't know and didn't care a f**k about the technical bits about the Minimoog. He just played with a few knobs and the sounds came out. Pure genius! It's great to see Benge with an ARP t-shirt. Makes a change from Moog t-shirts!

The other video I watched was Duran Duran -Live at Hammersmith '82 . This one I particularly liked as you can see Nick Rhodes moving about three stands of keyboards arranged nicely in a square. The fourth end is where the rack of effects units etc are. An impressive set of equipment although I couldn't see his first synth, the EDP Wasp. I doubt it was used on the first and second albums. The fat strings sound on their earlier album is indeed the Crumar Performer through FX as we can delightfully see on Girls on Film . Cheeky smile he has! Thanks for letting us know!

Chris

Shutter Island - Martin Scorcese.
Lovely oldfashioned cinema.

Makes me curious about 'The Box'.
Anyone seen it?

"Frank Tovey by Fad Gadget"

Thanks to Fons for the recommendation, I ordered and saw this (at last). Great insight to Frank Tovey. If you are a hardcore fan it may not present anything new, but if like me, you liked his music but never researched him, it is a great summary of his all too short life.

Two DVD's (I'll see the live shows DVD tonight) and two CD's - pretty good value.

Saw the latest Alice In Wonderland film last week.

Truly, truly disappointing.
Sadly as bad as I feared.

Thus I am watching Jonathan Miller's 1966 version which stands head and shoulders above the contemporary version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr29lx5LNcU

Super soundtrack too

Totally, but I expected as much!

Saw it a few weeks ago myself, was persuaded to go along after watching the achievement of Avatars 3D world, so I thought that Alice and 3D would surely be good to see, if nothing else given that Burton is an artist I expected it to be a visually interesting picture. But the addition of 3D felt un-natural in places, particularly if there was any fast movement, made me feel slightly dizzy. The colourful landscape was nice, but nothing was as fantastic as I’d expected it to be, there was no originality in Burtons Alice. In the scene where the Red Queen’s army battles with the White Queen it was obvious to me that the visuals had been inspired by Mark Ryden: http://www.wondertoonel.com/ (an artist whose work Burton collects), but this was a sanitised version of the ‘retro children’s book style meets butchers shop nightmares’ typical of Ryden’s world.

Alice appearing in a shining suit of armour for the battle was a nice touch, but there must be some filtering over from other films in Hollywood that happens during production, at the height of the story she had to fight a Dragon to save the day, I felt that I’d recently seen the same thing in a film, oh yes, in Avatar, with Sam Worthington’s character Jake Sully fighting the corporate business Dragon to save the Na’vi, (and in fact there were two Dragons for the price of one to fight in Avatar, the corporation, and colonel Quaritch in his exo-skeleton machine, or AMP Mech for all the techies out there).

I used to like a lot of Burton’s films, back in the days of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (long before his big adventure was in a sex cinema!), and Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhand’s, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. But it was with Planet Of The Apes and ever since then that I’ve gradually been disappointed by his films, and with Alice he was clearly going through the motions. As an ex-animator he should have taken some inspiration from this film for a bit of fantastic interpretation: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jan-Svankmajers-...70113832&sr=1-1

Burton’s usual posse’ was assembled for Alice, Best Wife as Mad Queen, Best Friend as Mad friend. With Helena Bonham-Carter as her tiresome ‘kooky’ self, kooky at least since she kicked the Merchant Ivory gigs long ago and got in tow with Burton. Johnny Depp (who I like a great deal) phoned in his usual I’m mad and camper than the campest Christmas Panto performance, this time swapping the Paul Whitehouse cockney for a Scottish cartoon based on Rab C Nesbitt’s smelly dirty string vest.

The acting of the White Queen was annoying, basically consisting of holding her hands aloft in the air like she didn’t quite know what to do with them, and tilting her head from side to side like she’s hearing sounds that no-one else can hear, probably from some far away place where little fairies and elves sleep soundly in a sheltered glade and the wind whispers gently through the tiny little blue-bell trees…

Worst of all was the dully predictable and unnecessary back-story concerning Alice’s enforced engagement, stuffy English middle-class in-laws-to-be, and her late fathers business empire, and yes, in Burton’s Victorian England even a strange and pale faced little girl can get a job in her daddies business with her crazy dream about enforced colonialism of Johnny foreigner, sorry, I meant to say of course, wholly acceptable business expansion with China that wouldn’t involve the exploitation of anyone, especially the poor.

The film ended on a musical song and dance, a true sign that a film is a stinker, (unless it’s a musical), my companion to the cinema looked round at me during that scene, knowing full well that I was sinking into my seat in horror at this point. Johnny Depp, doing his Mad Hatter McFartyWarty dance, or something like that, he’d so longed to do it throughout the film, finally he got his moment, and we got our climax, was it good for you dear, err, no, I think I’ll go just back to giving Tim Burton films in the cinema a miss in the future, cheaper to watch them on TV.