Iron Man 3

1) I went to see Iron Man 3 today and enjoyed it enough, was very glad that Iron Man didn't urinate in his suit but felt that the film pissed all over the public who were keen to the super villain Mandarin that they might have come to know through the comic books and cartoons. However I wasn't too bothered about the latter problem.

2) I thought that the way the Iron Legion at the end all exploded like fireworks was more or less just a repetition of the time the robot army from Iron Man 2 all exploded like fireworks. The villains in this movie was a man who had his DNA altered, although he had become super fit because it, it did have a problem causing extreme over heating leading to the possibility of the person exploding like an bomb giving thousands of degrees of heat vaporising others around leaving shadows against the wall as if they were caught in a nuclear explosion. At times the people who had their DNA altered like this resulting in their eyes and other parts of their bodies starting to glow as if they were one of the scanners from the film scanners in the final fight sequence. 

3) I found it to be a very fun movie and then days later it seemed to be less interesting and almost forgettable. The substance just wasn't enough. The pointlessness of the Mandarin villain after having seen the cartoons was just too much.

Trance

a) I went to see the movie Trance today. It seemed to be quite a complicated matter going to see this movie, firstly I doesn't think much of Danny Boyle as a director, I usually found everything that he makes as a film boring and derivative whether it is or not. However the subject matter of the movie seemed interesting and the cast of the movie seemed good as well. 

b) To some degree I liked this movie, but the loud thumping soundtrack made me wonder if I was stuck in some building society advert that was trying to be modern, the music took away the feeling of any sort of mystery that the film might present as it went into hypnosis dream worlds and then it appeared to present dream worlds within dreamworlds making no clear destinction about what was supposed to be the real world. 

c) Often this can be an interesting thing such as in films like Brazil, Inception, Last Year at Marienbad, etcetera, but I got lost towards the end and I really wasn't that interested in trying to figure things out, it could be anything and I wasn't really that certain the movie was really worth spending time figuring out afterwards. Some people make movies that are supposed to be confusing and ought to inspire people to have conversations about it to figure it out but sometimes it might be better to steer oneself out of playing along with their games. 

d) The previous movie by Danny Boyle that I saw was the scifi movie Sunshine that was a fair effort but I suddenly realised that it was a reworking of the 1960s movie The Day The Earth Caught Fire and really wasn't impressed by the way that none of the people involved in the movie didn't mention a thing about the film trying to make out that Sunshine was a new movie. However the further into the past Sunshine goes, the better a movie it seems to be. 

e) However if Trance is another reworked ripoff of something, I don't know what it is but it might seem like a better film to remember in five or six years time but in the present time it seems rather annoying. But I definitely had to go and see it.

f) I never saw Trainspotting because I read an article about the hallucination sequences showing how they payed homage to certain movies and I became overcome with the idea of disinterest. Beyond that, the idea of the movie didn't really interest me. I haven't been drawn to the Trainspotting author's work either. The only thing that I have seen and like that came out of someone's interest in Irvine Welsh's work is the Scottish pixie from Chris Cunningham's Playstation advert years ago. Perhaps if I could empathise with Danny Boyle as a person a little more, I might have a different point of view about his movies but I don't and that seems to be that. I think another thing about the movie when it came out, I didn't like the idea of watching a movie full of people with thick Scottish accents.

g) Someone suggested that the reason why they had to show Rosario Dawson's vagina up close on the film screen was to make sure that no one could get to think she was some sort of character like the one played by Jay Davidson in The Crying Game. Well I admit that this isn't a Neil Jordan movie but I really have no idea what goes on in Boyle's movies, I hardly ever watch them and there's Cillian Murphy who was in Sunshine by Danny Boyle who went off to play a transgendered person in Neil Jordan's movie Breakfast on Pluto so you can never tell what's going on in the background of the world of these films. One might wonder at what the point of such exposure was and whether it would be blurred over or trimmed out in the DVD and Blu-Ray

h) Days later the story fades away and strange random blurred images remain in the mind which is actually a good feeling

A Place Beyond The Pines

1) I managed to get to see a movie, it may have been called A Place Beyond The Pines, a long grim trawl through three seemingly desperate scenarios that connect with each other, Ryan Gosling once again plays a man who's good at making a fast getaway and is dangerous with his bare fists (see Drive), while Bradley Cooper again plays a role where he seems to be too intelligent for his own good (see Limitless and A-Team) and in the last act of the last segment, and as the main character of the last segment slowly comes to understand the scenario that has built up along with set of other realisations that unfold, the feelings of grimness become expertly unpinned and they begin to dissipate.  

I am happy that I saw the movie , it felt like quite an experience and maybe I do not need to see it again, but on the other hand I will look out for the director's next movie, although I still haven't seen his previous on.

2) Chris Pines had no role in this movie whatsoever.

3) (24th April 2013) I continue to think about the infernal world of the "The Place Beyond the Pines" movie and how the light broke through towards the end. I saw the movie last Thursday and although quite a trawl, it remained interesting and the materlal handled almost masterly. It was not a world in which I cared to hang around in or think too much about but it remained with me. Most of the characters were not to my liking. That might even have been one of the good things about it.

Oblivion

1) I recollect that I went to see the movie Oblivion today. It was actuallly a visually very lovely film with the post apocalyptic destroyed Earth landscapes but I thought it was a but strange to think that the sky scrapers that formed the sides of the canyons amidst deep layers of earth or silt that buried the cities seemed a bit abstract, surely those exposed buildings would have collapsed under the weight a long time ago but their presence at least seemed poetic, quite wonderful visions.

The story line appeared to have a plot twist in common with the movie Moon, so it was somewhat a Philip K Dickian storyline. The flying machines had a wonderful sense of design to them. Maybe the truth about what the true villains seem to be looked as if they were running out of budget or ideas but was at least displayed on a grand scale. 

In one way the movie was utterly ridiculous and pointless and a complete load of cobblers but on another level it was quite a piece of wonder and seeing on the big screen certainly extended that abstract sense of wonder and perplexity that one might experience, and the almost abstract revelations in the plot that maybe if one has seen a good number of scifi movies it all might make sense where the ideas are coming from. 

Maybe if one admired such Tom Cruise films as Vanilla Sky one might enjoy this movie very much and those who remember the scene at the end of the original Planet of the Apes film where the Statue of Liberty is found almost completely buried might marvel at this film. Recognisable second hand ideas served up with 21st century vigour that those who are happy with Tom Crusie movies might indeed admire. I could very watch this again soon at the cinema and will get the blu-ray disc for sure.

2) Weeks later I am still overwhelmed by the feelings of this movie, the wonders of the post apocalyptic landscape and the puzzling half understood revelation about how real as humans Tom Cruise and his red headed partner were. Perhaps the details about the back story given by Morgan Freeman's character Beech about the truth of Jack didn't need to be completely understood by the likes of myself, I allowed half of it to remain as half misunderstood and misheard fragments because ultimately the truth can be only boring. 

The strange space craft with the many thousands of Toms being grown inside didn't really interest me that much, I had seen better visions at the end of Star Trek: The Motion Picture when the Enterprise entered V'ger and when Neo entered the Machine City at the end of The Matrix. With the likes of Cloud Atlas suddenly which brought the watcher to assemble fragments of stories from over many aeons, this film Oblivion almost invited the watcher to do the same with the fragments of the lives of Jack, Julia and Vika.

I thought that the red head woman who played Vika was an interesting choice in the movie and quite a curious face, I really hadn't heard of her before let alone thought that I'd seen her in anything. She certainly looked nicer in this movie than she did in Never Let Me Go. Someone informed me that she looks a bit like a young Bette Davis and yes I see what that's about

The side effects of Side Effects

1) I enjoyed the Side Effect. It might have been a run of the mill story but the direction that Soderberg took it was very inspiring. I thought that the photography and the music was like where Soderberg was trying to go with Solaris and he he got better at it. I was relieved that Lewd Jaw went for a nearly normal London accent and felt that it was his best performance since eXistenZ, but having said that I am not much one to comment on his performances since I have only seen a handfull of them. But in that light it might be one seemed to make him appear to be a valid actor again after many years.

There might be a few things to say about Lewd Jaw's different accents that are often unkind but it is probably good that he went into acting to try out his variety of different ways of speaking from around the world rather than sit in front of the TV instead practising dodgy ever changing accents. His eXistenZ Canadian accent sounded fine enough.

I liked how Soderberg shoved down the audience's throats lists of psychiatric medication names and their side effects andthe way the way these women were so happily recommending the latest pills as the ultimate thing to the main female character. In the end the products of the pharmaceutical industry are the extreme form of punishment rather than the saviour . Once Lewd Jaw's character found his place, it showed what an evil bastard he could be. I wanted Roony Mara's character to be free, and I thought that Roony Mara and Catherine Zeta Jones started to look nice together, they almost became forgivable. Helmut Newton might have come back from the dead to photograph them together doing interesting things with one another

2) A few days afterwards, I came to terms with the idea that Side Effects must really be about some bored Psychiatrist living out a Walter Mitty type fantasy. It's probably great movie to read too much into in that way without making too much out of it

3) Just for those confused about who Lewd Jaw is, that is the name I give to the actor who goes by the name of Jude Law. Renaming him this way gives the world something to chew over.

Hansel and Gretel

Well, saw the film and it was an enjoyable action packed load of old cobblers, not ideal for toddlers since it gets rather bloody at times with brains being splattered one direction and another, the appearance of the witches started to become a little bit boring after the appearance of one or two witches but the movie was interesting enough to get me to want to see the director's previous movie Dead Snow. It looks as if my experience of the movie was fairly typical. However one might say that the actors and the production staff etc involved in the movie didn't completely waste their time by making the film. This one I will definitely pick up in DVD form because it was that enjoyable

Lincoln

I went to see the Lincoln film yesterday at the cinema and enjoyed it very much, but started off wondering for a moment if the battle at the beginning was supposed to be one of the ones from Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter where the Confederates were vampires, I was sure that I saw someone ramming a metal spike of some sort that had broken off something, into the chest of one of the victims of the mud in this film.

However I got lost most of the time about who was supposed to be who, and who was supposed to be against or for the abolition of slavery in the film, but now I realise it looks as if Spielberg's script writer wasn't actually sure himself.

I thought that the Lincoln character was very pleasing and the brief dream sequence near the beginning of the film was very interesting to see and so I wondered because of that what sort of direction the movie would take but it didn't go any further with that sort of thing at all. However I thought that Daniel Day-Lewis held the film together very well

But I might even buy the DVD for the quick dream sequence in the Lincoln movie and not bother to watch the rest of it. I suppose they could have cut out a good chunk of what was filmed in Lincoln and give it some better form rather than forcing viewers to trudge through endless scenes where possibly very little was actually taken in from the dialogue. 

I received a text message this morning from a friend named Peter who wrote "Brief note. Discussing truth v. 'Artistic licence'- or LYING -in films, this morning on Radio 4, a film critic said that, though both Argo & Lincoln distort history- for instance the congressmen-or do I mean senators- from Connecticut did NOT apparently vote against the 13th amendment- All four voted in favour -and a current representative for Connecticut was extremely angry that his predecessors were portrayed as opposing abolition (of slavery); -it seems that neither film will suffer at the Oscars as a result,- while Zero Dark Thirty, with its contention that Bin Laden was tracked down due to information by torture, is as a consequence likely to have its haul of awards diminished. Maybe the message is that if you distort history in a way which which doesn't offend too many American's self-righteousness, that's OK; but present, in your movie, Americans being as vicious, ruthless, cruel and corrupt as people of other nations, then you'll be punished by the academy awards committee". 

However I also very much liked the shots of the dimly lit room with the net curtains and the light pouring through those windows.