Dead Man Down

A) I saw the movie Dead Man Down today, and I enjoyed the film very much. Colin Farrel was very good in it and I felt that he and Noomi Rapace managed to strike up a good chemistry all the way through the sombre world of this story. One thing to point out about this movie, despite the fact that it was made in America possibly for an American audience, it has every reason to fail there because this Danish director of the film managed to create a film with a distinctly European feel to it. The pacing of the piece may also have been disturbingly foreign foreign such as the way we were introduced to the depths of the character's worlds in such a fast way. I felt it was fabulous film with a great sense of atmosphere and maybe if people had a bit of a problem trying to work out which side of the Atlantic it was filmed in, I wouldn't be in the slightest bit surprised. It highlighted maybe the feeling that America was made up of people from distinctively different foreign cultures. Sometimes however the words uttered by characters in various parts of the film were inaudible, Armand Assante briefly turned up in a scene and it certainly wasn't easy to work out what he was saying at all, but he calmly spoke through the scene in this thick strange accent never the less, and the very last words said by Colin Farrel's character to Dominic Cooper's character didn't actually come through in an audible way. Was this due to the sound system at the Odeon Leicester Square. The film left me with a wonderful mild sense of a poetic bleakness.

B)  The next thought about this film, since I am a scifi buff, it reminded me about the fact that Ridley Scott loved his film Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and from what I saw in Dead Man Down, the director Niels Arden Oplev ought to be given the job of directing the Blade Runner sequel if Ridley finds himself too busy to direct it personally and wants it done and is happy to produce it.

C) One curiosity in the movie for me were the tiny lights that seem to zip across the grass in the graveyard. Were they leaping grasshoppers that reflected the lights of the set or were they fireflies or something like that instead of the weird hallucination that almost seemed to be. Maybe I was indeed seeing something that wasn't actually there.

The new Star Trek movie

I went to see the new Star Trek movie today, I remembers that it's called Star Trek and really can't be bothered to look up the other bit of the title since it seems completely irrelevant. However I thought this movie had a plot that was just about as grossly irritating as the previous one, I didn't like the way the plot unfolded, it was all too obvious.

I was irritated by most of the cheesy dialogue scenes and once I found out who the villain actually was in terms of who he was in the old universe of Star Trek, I felt compelled to cringe as the name was spoken and this villain in this movie looked nothing like the one that we might remember from old. If I were drinking something at the time I might have choked over it my drink as well because of the complete and utter dissimilarity between the two.

Every time I saw Benedict Cumberbatch shooting his gun blowing up various aliens and their space crafts, I cringed at the way this person could be seen to be so powerful and when he was soon under the light of the Enterprise, he looked so lean and pale almost as if he were made from plastic. The moment that Benedict Cumberbatch's charcter's true name was revealed, I thought, "oh no, there's no way they can change this now, they couldn't just leave it as someone who was in a situation like Khan Noonien Singh from the original series what the hell can this actor have to do with the likes of someone played by Ricardo Montalban. What the hell! I expect the next thing that will happen is that Benedict Cumberbatch is going to be approached in a future series of Fantasy Island"

Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan Noonian Singh almost resembling the android character 
Data from Star Trek: The Next Generations who was created by Professor Noonian Sung.

However Cumberbatch gave a great performance in Star Trek irrespective of what he was supposed to be.  Maybe one might just pretend that when he declared his name, what we heard was a misheard mumbling about Professor Noonian Sung the inventor of the android Data from Star Trek The Next Generation and maybe this Cumberbatch character was another one of his androids and just explore further forms of confusing thoughts from there

The new Klingons didn't look very good, the makeup for the main Klingon really looked ridiculous in my point of view and I was glad when the Klingons had gone.

There were many good action scenes. Some of the acting was fine, but the comedy in it was tedious. And quite honestly the interior of the Enterprise seemed now very ill designed when it came to people needing the support of handle bars along a bridge in the ships engine room and large parts of the ships interior tended to get loose and fly around almost killing people when the ship lost it's power and found itself caught within the gravity of another large body. Otherwise the camera work and colour design were great, I saw it in 2D and feels maybe it might have been better to see the film in 3D. Otherwise the camera work and colour design were great, I saw it in 2D and feel maybe it might have been better to see the film in 3D.

One misses the old cast, William Shatner as Kirk with his familiar voice and indeed while there is an appearance from Leonard Nimoy as Spock, it is never enough and Zachary Quinto as the new Spock as much as a good actor he is in his role doesn't quite have the voice one associates with Leonard Nimoy. The less I say about the voice of Anton Yeltzin as Chekov and Simon Pegg as Scotty the better.

Well despite the typical way that J J Abrams pisses all over the Star Trek universe with the aid of the likes of Damon Lindel-something-or-other , I will watch it again in 3D and will of course see the next one when it comes out.

What have I got myself involved with here, I might perhaps wake up in the middle of the night screaming because I have to digest the conflicts and oddities of this new Star Trek movie and the ones to follow. It is a situation likely to be a cause of post traumatic stress having to agree that this is the way that cinema is going where we are endlessly experience of tolerating all the rubbish thrown at the audience from the movie to extract something that might be a small but worthwhile vision somewhere within the film

Evil Dead

1) I headed off to central London, my questions was about whether I would get there in time to see the Evil Dead remake or will he suddenly get there and wonder why on Earth he'd want to see that film.

2) Yes, it was a complete waste of my time, and had I got my dates correct, there was somewhere interesting that I could have been instead of watching this movie

2) I must have been in dire need to see how my time could be wasted if ever there was a way. To all those people who adored Evil Dead remake, I hope you had fun watching it but it's not something I could appreciate

3) Well I am not sure what one is supposed to appreciate about the movie. It was totally lost on me as I sat there. It was a day for me to be out of sync with a few things today.

4) Well I am not sure what one is supposed to appreciate about the movie. It was totally lost on me as I sat there. It was a day for me to be out of sync with a few things today. 

5) well, I suppose that's where it started to get disinteresting. I hoped for some backstory that might make some sense and really I didn't find one that interested me 

6) Spoilers A week later May 12th, I expand on my experiences of the movie including spoilers. Minutes into the movie, the possessed girl found herself tied to a wooden post about the be set fire to, and then suddenly there was a moment when used CGI as she mocked her father, and this for me was the end of this film, there couldn't be anything interesting about it once they showed CGI being used like this. The girl possessed at the beginning and the main girl possessed through the film seemed like second rate The Exorcist style possessions. I really wasn't going to have any fun with this. A dog is soon terminally injured and somehow transforms into a stiff corpse like thing long before it had died.

I felt more horror about humans stuck in such a filthy place than I did about what was going on, I had given up on it. I felt awful for which ever film actors they were who had all the fluid mixed with food covering them when they were being vomited on by the demon. 

The actors were actually giving fine performances considering the nature of this movie but they were not going as far as to be that interesting and the scenario that they had going amongst themselves regarding one girl giving up cocaine or whatever it was and she needed the help to go cold turkey during the weekend really didn't interest me.

At the end, one of the boys builds a makeshift defibrillator machine to restart the heart of a girl once her body had died and the demon has dead. This is another thing that suddenly lost my interest that the boy could make a complicated piece of equipment like that in the movie so easily and have it be so effective. 

There was the irritating fact he had to go back into the house and be injured by a zombified fellow of his, the makeup just made it all irrelevant and of course his injury meant that he would be infected by the dark demon which meant he had to commit suicide. Anyone could find themselves possessed in this movie and bound to commit some sort of act of self destruction. The idea that all it took to summon the demon and cause such destruction was to utter some of the words from the book found in the hut disinterested me as well. So, what else should I expect to see to make the summonations valid. Maybe I preferred the idea of a cassette recording being found with some strange chanting, I might have assumed that the recording caught the essence of a ritual sacrifice that was taking place at the time.

The girl appeared to be involved in a fight with the physical embodiment of the demonic spirit, I couldn't work out whether the latter was supposed to be the same actress as the living girl. Later she had her hand caught under the car when it was tipped over and when she pulled her arm away leaving her hand behind, the skin looked more like latex rubber to me as it was being pulled.

There is a whole film for me to have to point out details about why I didn't like the scenes and I can not be bothered to feel responsible for all of these various facts and point out what they are to other people. It would exhaust me and I doubt that I am going to be able to point out to people the relevance of any of these thoughts.
 

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