Metamatic Forums Socialising The Green Room What are you watching?

Well, latest series of That Mitchell And Webb Look hasn't been as great as it appeared, and in fact I've found the new series of Shooting Stars that follows after it to be much funnier, and I never watched that last series of SS, when it returned from a very, very long gap, I had no interest in it.

On the subject of comedy, don't watch My Family, I do, I don't know why, maybe I'm just hard up, or maybe it carries a subliminal message saying 'watch me', 'watch me', 'you don't want to, but you will', and after one or two laughs I get to the end of it and wonder why I bothered watching. It sure is a rubbish show, it makes even Terry And June look like comedy gold.


The Mentalist finished its second series on Five recently, oh how much I miss Patrick Jane on my TV, sigh... always solving the mysteries, drinking tea, and resting on that beat-up sofa in the detectives office, and with no need for a Butler or a Batmobile either, surely he's the coolest crime-fighter ever...

Mushi Productions film "Kureopatora".

This is described as "a stunning piece of art" from Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion and Blackjack. Often considered the Walt Disney of Japan

Enjoy the trip...!

Father of Macoto, creator of "Kaiyagura" on D.N.A.

I checked out the most recent episode after reading your post. Something about its visual style reminds me of the work of comics/illustrator Charles Burns.

How to make a good movie –

Grand Torino with Clint Eastwood as Walt Kowalski, a Korean War veteran and widower who is emotionally removed from his family and generally angry at the world, and at the demise of his once white neighbourhood.

I didn’t know anything about this film before watching, not even that the title referred to a car! But this is a really good old school movie story that turned out to be a ‘western’ in disguise where the old gunslinger overcomes his stereotypical prejudices, and does the right thing by his Asian neighbours. After reluctantly befriending the teenage boy of a new family that move in next door, Walt soon becomes an unlikely hero to the boy and his sister. This movie had a fantastically logical ending which for once I did not actually see coming, and it’s one of those good plotted and well written dramas, neither sentimental, nor does it feel contrived, particularly when the secret regret of Walt’s life is neatly revealed towards the end.

I always think of Clint in the Spaghetti Western and Dirty Harry role’s, which I love, and I expected this film to be all predictably macho and certainly not endearing, but it was quite the opposite, it took that macho stance and made it less one-dimensional, but importantly, it also avoided over-complicating it as well.


And,

How to make a bad movie – get Michael Bay to Direct it.

Transformers, Revenge Of The Fallen

What a total bag of sh!te

I like robots in films, Michael Bay apparently likes robots, and makes films, but I don’t like his robots in disguise, nor his films.
Okay, I did not really set out to watch this, I learned my lesson from watching 10 minutes of the first Transformers film on TV, and I know from experience that Michael Bay is one of the worst (though financially successful) Directors in the world, but really, as a bad Director he not only takes the biscuit but he comes back for the whole packet, and he over-enthusiastically smashes up your chocolate digestives before your eyes while all you can do is to writhe in horror at the abomination he perpetuates onscreen.

With ‘Revenge Of The Fallen’ I thought it would be a good idea to have this playing in the background on Sky TV as I set about assembling a flat-pack piece of furniture from a well-known Swedish interiors chain, but I stopped watching the movie long before I finished assembling my Trollsta side table.
This must be one of the worst pretend sci-fi movies ever made, nasty, unoriginal, and unglamorous digital effects. No style, no subtlety, no plot, and ultimately no regard for the intelligence of the audience.

Did I say no plot? Sorry, here’s a cut and paste of the plot:

“Optimus is revived just before The Fallen ambushes him and his allies, slaughtering a few soldiers, stealing the Matrix and taking off to activate the Harvester. Jetfire sacrifices himself so that Optimus can fuse with Jetfire's parts to fly to the Harvester and ultimately stop The Fallen. He successfully destroys the Harvester with a well-placed shot. Immediately, Optimus engages The Fallen and Megatron in the ruins by fighting non-stop with his new parts from Jetfire, blast Megatron's jaw off, and kills The Fallen by impaling him with his own spear, ripping off his face, and then punching through the Fallen's chest and ripping his spark out”

Add in a lot of explosions every five minutes, some lame attempts at (robot) humour, the most unlikely dolly-bird girlfriend that a geeky guy could never hope to have as his squeeze, and this is the sum of the movie.

But even if I was an eleven-year old boy I would know that something were not right in the kingdom of robots with this one, I’d be taking my Japanese transform-bot back to the toystore, hopelessly expecting that robot master Michael Bay would be caught and exterminated by angry droids. Sadly though they wouldn’t be able to find him, he’d be off and laughing all the way to the bank in a galaxy far, far away.


Sticking with the theme of robots in films, I also recently watched Surrogates on the box. Bruce Willis typecast as a cop yet again, this time it’s a world where we can have our own personally tailored alter ego, and this is in the form of the perfect robot double minus all of our particular flaws.

Forget the fact that there’s presently a world recession, mass unemployment, ongoing disasters and war in other parts of the world, etc, it seems like robots are affordable for the masses in the very near future.

We can spend all day lying on a bed at home in a stew off our own making while we live out our daily lives through our perfect robot vehicles. Whole cities are seemingly populated by smartly turned out people working in offices and stores, shopping by day, and socialising by night, and presumably in the pursuit of sex and adventure, and none of these people are real. All are surrogates being controlled by our unwashed, and possibly ugly selves as we stay alone at home and operate our machine personas through a brain-linking device.

This could have been a good sci-fi movie, but predictably it was a typical fake sci-fi, and it never convinced you of the likelihood that such a society could exist, or its possibility on such a scale either technically or fundamentally. There were a few hints mostly aimed at cosmetic and vanity reasons, and dissatisfaction at the lack of achievement in ones life as a consequence of living in a consumer society, but it was really just another run of the mill story about a cop pursuing the bad guys. Bladerunner it is not.


Imagine: David Hockney – A Bigger Picture BBC Programmes. (first shown on TV last year).

David Hockney is not a robot, but he is a highly productive and skilled artist machine.
I’ve never thought of myself as being a Hockney fan, it’s a bit like saying you are a Van Gogh fan, Hockney is something of a household name so it’s almost a bit twee to mention him if anybody asks ‘name an artist that you like?’

I really enjoyed this programme for two reasons. One, you get to see the 70 year old artist actually working, doing the art, in the field (quite literally), you can see the process, there’s no showmanship or contemporary artspeak bollocks, and we also get a bit of insight into Hockney’s day to day working life during the three year period of his painting that this documentary covers.

Two, he’s out and about in the Yorkshire countryside, and his love of the surroundings is quite obvious in his depictions of trees by the road, and trees in the woods, and quiet places under ever-shifting clouds in the skies, fields, lanes and paths, and the constant seasons of change…

or rather, what am I not watching...


Now that CH4 has finally got the message and dropped Big Brother and its annoying housemates from its summer shedules just what are the media high-flyers down at the station gonna do now to quell the masses during the months of June to August?

what terrifying bread and circus's do they have up their sleeves in store for the millions of tranquilized TV addicts out there :rolleyes:

100 cats cooped up together in an IKEA house in Wembley perhaps? :

http://widetrends.com/100-cats-ikea/

Just finished "Psychoville", a full year after it was transmitted. Timing might be good though because apparently there is a new episode due for Halloween.

Seen a few films at the cinema and on TV during these summer months that have stayed in my mind, one of which is Inception, and I initially had no desire to go see it, but I ended up thinking that it was excellent.

Inception.

At the start I was put off by the trailer, in spite of it being a Christopher Nolan film. The scene used to advertise the movie has Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page (who I found extremely irritating in Juno) sitting outside a café, while things explode in the air around them in a slick unnatural manner. It seemed like an uninspired effects heavy advertisement for a mobile phone company or some lifestyle product fantasy, and usually it’s those sort of advertising directors who seek to break into movie-making, so I was thrown by Nolan’s apparent reversal of this.

But against my better judgement I went to see the film, and by the time it was over I was honestly thinking that it was the best sci-fi movie I’d seen this decade, the last time being the first Matrix film ten years before (I’ve erased the crap sequels from memory!)

As it turned out, there were very few naff CGI effects, but rather the effects were used to convey dream landscapes as presented in reality mode, and to provide the dramatic backdrop with a touch of the surreal being present in the various situations and dilemmas. Its a good script about the infiltration of peoples dreams, with cliff-hanging moments, intelligent sci-fi, and the visual action of a classic bond or spy movie together with some smart artistic licence thrown in.

Ellen Page was good in her part, thankfully she was not there as a romantic interest for DiCaprio, and it was clear that she and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Tommy in 3rd Rock From The Sun) were cast to appeal to the younger audience or those who were not likely to be drawn in by the older DiCaprio. Cillian Murphy and some of the other actors were quite memorable, but the only thing that stuck out for me was actually the casting of DiCaprio, although he acted well and I accepted him I still could not shake the feeling that his part should have been played by someone else, he did not quite ‘look’ right.

At the heart of the story is the suggestion that the planting of an idea deep within a persons psyche is the most powerful thing that one can do, like an undetectable virus it rapidly spreads throughout the subconscious, and as it spills over into their waking life it completely takes over their being.


I had an argument with a friend who insists that he hates DiCaprio, so wouldn’t watch this, and that the idea for this film had already been done in the early ‘90’s in a much cheaper and cheesier movie. Damned if I can remember that, except for a naff film involving virtual reality, which was a bit of a Hollywood thing at one point, but I just hope they don’t get sucked into making an Inception sequel, as with the Matrix it would serve no purpose whatsoever and would only lessen the strength of the initial film.

Me again

Coraline,

directed by Henry Selick, a film I kept putting off watching, thinking that it had some connection to Tim Burton, and having seen his boring Corpse Bride film some years back I expected Coraline to follow suit and be average to say the least. Not the case at all, based on a Neil Gaiman story, Selick has created a great fantasy that genuinely crosses the divide between adult and children’s animated films, and the animation is superb.

Set in an old rented house that Coraline’s parents have just moved the family into, she finds a passageway through the bedroom wall to an alternate set-up where two people claiming to be her ‘other parents’ are living. There are some differences with her alternative parents though, they are more attentive towards her, and they have buttons for eyes, but each night as she journeys over to this place she is unwittingly falling into a trap.

I loved Selicks work on Nightmare before Christmas, and I made myself sit through James And The Giant Peach at the cinema just for the sake of the animation, but with Coraline I was left wondering at its construction, as to what was stop-frame, and what was CGI, and where it all crossed over. Some of the thinking around one or two of the minor characters does feel a bit contrived in that way of the private world of animators, but it is quite beautiful in many places, and it’s a well crafted movie that convinces you about its particular world and of its main character Coraline.


Knowing,

directed by Alex Proyas, I was looking forward to watching this one for obvious reasons! But its one of those uneven films that at times feels like a horror movie, then it’s a thriller, then it bounces back and forth between B-movie sci-fi, and sci-fi with a message, and it doesn’t blend the elements of these genres together well enough to produce either a convincing hybrid, or something that’s of its own nature. I wouldn’t say that there were particularly bad moments, it’s more a case of things sticking out too much, or things that don’t really take off. And at the end there’s an unconvincing new-age style conclusion to events that really let’s it down though, with it’s Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhoods End style of outcome meeting up with a somewhat lame and fluffy Disney landscape, it does not work and it seems to negate all of the journey that came before.

But there are also some scenes throughout the movie that are quite distinctive, there is a very effective and unexpected plane crash that works really well, but the scenes that were of more interest to me were the ones that took me back to what I consider to be Proyas definitive style, that of his Dark City film.

In the story Nicholas Cage plays the part of an overtly depressive widowed father. In some ways his manner is understandable, seeing as his wife died only a year before, but Cage acts out his role as if he’s someone very much in need of counselling, and he lives with his young son in what must be one of the most creepiest houses, that’s deep within a creepy wood. Just why his son does not run screaming out of that place every time dusk falls is never explained, but if I’d had to live there and had old Cage continually looking like his world is about to implode then I’d grow up to be a basket case.

The film begins with what I felt was an unnecessarily over the top sequence involving a girl going mad, writing random numbers obsessively, (numbers later transcribed by Cage as dates relating to catastrophes). The girl is discovered hiding in a cupboard and writing with her bloody fingernails on the back of the door, this is in the late 50’s, but strangely enough the authorities don’t stick her in an asylum, as this intense scene would suggest, and (as we discover later when the film moves to the present), she has gone on to have a family, and we get to meet her grown up daughter Diana, who now has her own daughter Abby. Diana crosses paths with Cage’s character John Koestler, a professor of astrophysics, and it becomes apparent that something mysterious is happening around his own son Caleb, and Diana’s daughter Abby.

The children are being visited by ‘the whisper people’, and its here that Proyas is at his best, and playing to his real vision as a film-maker. There are some great scenes at night with these mysterious visitors, and they have a particular beauty about them, one is where Caleb is in his bedroom and a whisper person appears and presents him with a vision of the woods outside the house, the trees are on fire, and animals alight are racing through the maelstrom. In another scene a mysterious figure confronted by Cage screams in his face and then bursts into a flame-like light before disappearing, and later on the characters come across a clearing in a forest where the ground is covered in small polished black stones.

Should I worry about saying that the film was rubbish or something like that on this forum, seeing as how the Director is a friend of John’s, well, no I don’t think it’s an entirely bad film, more one that should have been a great deal more than the sum of its parts, and because of that it’s just average and probably a forgettable film, which is a shame as some scenes really do stay in my mind, they had a very strong visual quality. It’s frustrating as I’d love there to have been more of those particular scenes, just a pity that the whole movie did not have the same charge to it.

Anyone interested in knowing what The Stranglers sound like in 2010?

From the Live at The Apollo DVD

Genetix

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws5VSzY-hZc

Down In The Sewer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_4-PpVK8yE

Definitely gonna see 'em live in 2011.

Back to a four piece... back to their best!

I'll see you in the sewer darlin'.

This afternoon I watched Jean-Michel Jarre: Music And Lyrics

A good insight into his career.


Now I'm settling down to watch Oxygene - Live In Your Living Room dvd