Gravity

a) I went to see Gravity three times in the cinemas and each time experience wonder at the visual poetry that was taking place. I was overcome with the concept of tombs in space when watching it and the essay about the movie in Sight And Sound picked up on the idea, bringing up the subject of J G Ballard and his writings about the astronauts and death, and so all the way through I was feverishly thinking about those orbital coffins that he wrote about and wanting to use that as a platform of thoughts to expand my view of what I was watching and appreciating in this movie. It has been a favourite experience of the year, it has engulfed me and brought me to forget that I had seen a good number of wonderful movies and now by the end of the year, I can only remember that I saw Gravity. This is to outer space what Jurrassic Park was to dinosaurs, yes, the unbelievable plot holes may as well be allowed to float around for all to see.

b) The underside space shuttle at the beginning of Gravity gently came into sight across the outer atmosphere appearing as an obsidian ancient Egyptian Sarcophagus, and the Hubble telescope that was seen to be repaired was the giant inner sarcophagus unloaded into space.

c) The cast consisting of Sandra Bullock as Ryan Stone and George Clooney as Matt Kowalski could forty five years ago have easily have been instead Barbara Streisand paired with the likes of Jack Lemmon or Elliot Gould. But Sandra Bullock features remained like a recently mummified corpse fitted with a wig gasping to keep it's last breath having been brought to life once again in the depths of space. George Clooney was Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear in the flesh.

d) Upon the screen, the space suits appeared as cocoon like three dimensional giants of immense size. Looking down upon the planet Earth, I was afraid myself of falling out of my seat and down into the outer atmosphere to eventually fall to my doom burning up. After the destruction of the space shuttle and the Hubble space telescope and Ryan Stone retrieval from the depths of space by smooth talking Matt Kowalski. The space shuttle had become a tomb itself with the dead bodies of the crew inside, and the remnants of ultimate missile of doom spinning endlessly with nowhere to go.

e) Ryan Stone leaves Matt Kowalski to drift into space to his own death at his own request and she gets aboard the Russian Space Station, and becomes as a fetus curling up in a womb, but this interior a hightech version of a deserted warren like catacombs is about to be filled with fire

f) The Russian space station is smashed to pieces by a storm of wrecked satellite parts, as if something beneath the sea being torn to pieces by underwater currents , it is done in the manner of an elegant ballet, and as Ryan Stone exits her space capsule to disconnect the parachute, the way her air umbilical follows her twisting into a delicate shape suggests the membranous form of a giant jelly fish, and only barely survives, while I myself feared for brief moment that I would be caught up in the wreck and thrown off the capsule into the depths of space

f) Sandra's character is about to give up her her attempt to return to Earth, turn of the oxygen and turn the capsule into her orbital coffin. The answers come in this movie more and more as acts of defiance at the laws of physics because putting a story together to make the film happen is the major objective where physics would not allow anything for that long to take place. The journey to the Russian space station would surely have led to disaster, as much as the fire and Ryan Stone's attempt to escape from the place. Perhaps the experience of Matt Kowalski coming back from the dead to tell Ryan Stone how to get to the Chinese Space Station when she had given up was perhaps the more likely a thing than the mentioned death defying act. Did Ryan Stone ever get back to Earth or was it all part of some dream like illusion telling her to let go while she was sleeping in bed all the time. 

 

Anchorman 2

1. I had  a plan to see Anchorman 2. I had never heard of the Anchorman movie that came out about a decade ago which was supposed to have been a hit. Will the act of watching Anchorman 2 be like having one's brains scooped out through one's nostrils while still conscious? 
2. Afterwards overwhelmed with the urge to cringe like crazy at times but was impressed with the dreamlike motivations of the film.
3. The entrance into the movie of the character Brick will never be forgotten and perhaps I might think twice about what's inside the breadcrumbs of my fried chicken in the future. 
4. Echoes of small acts of surrealism peppered through the film
5. Thumbs up from me even if he had a good debraining by the movie 
6. Still 18 hours later, the effects of the weird confusion have not worn off. It is like being stunned by some predatary sea creature  

Misreadings of Metro newspaper headlines

1. While sitting in a train to London and reading someone else's copy of the Metro over the person's shoulder, Wmm misread the news story heading "Fear as toxic load is stolen" as " Fear as sonic toad is swollen" 
2. And moments later in the same column misread "20,000 rush for 400 Ikea posts " as "20,000 rush for 400 tea pots "
3. Then misread "Just pals or has Liv fallen for Orlando's magic spell" as "Just spills or has Liv fallen on Orlando's magic spew?'"

Ender's Game

1) I have memories of having watched the movie Ender's Game today
 
2) It was amiable enough but where's the fun in watching people play video games that look like video games?
 
3) The rest of was otherwise very good and well acted. Haven't read the book though. Alien ship designs seemed slightly over used if one has seen a number of scifi films in the last few years
 
4) Was there a side to the original story left out of the movie? Don't know how Enders Game compares to The Last Starfighter either. The connection to suddenly make with with the latter is that the film seems to be about a boy who plays a computer arcade game and he's so good that an extra terrestrial organisation seek him out to bring him into their starfleet to fight of alien enemies. Vut really I don't know anymore than that and that might not be very accurate.
 
5) I took a quick look at the Enders Game novel ending and wonders with some confusion about the whole thing as if having visited a mausoleum or a memorial for thousands of dead soldiers

The Counsellor

I enjoyed The Counsellor. Vicious deaths, stylish sets and somewhat disjointed story leaving one to wonder what was going to happen next. The story that slowly unravelled its fragments felt fresh and unencumbered. Maybe there's nothing to discuss but take in the imagery. Often it felt as if the characters and events came out of a white light and went back into the light as soon as each scene was over. I take this as a quality of the film's story and perhaps the long words of advice given down the phone to Fassbender's character enough the sense of it all. If people have fallen asleep during The Counsellor, indeed it has a certain soporific quality but a number of these slow arty movies do.

Overlong words to describe thoughts on Hannibal

1. I think that my favourite TV series of the year of 2013 has to be Hannibal, which is loosely inspired by the novel Red Dragon which i have not bothered to read, but I have watched the various movies based on the novels and although I have liked them have found that I can only be bothered to watch them once and never really find the interest to see them again. I admit that these days I can't stand watching much television at all since I don't value many of the new television series. I have watched enough lawyer series and police series where somewhere in America they have they have an unbelievable crimelab facility. I have not been interested in these television series about serial killers as the main character, I have avoided them. and so in the end, I ought to have avoided Hannibal, I was wondering what sort of awful liberties that the creative team might have taken to make a series, but there was something that seemed devilishly interesting to me about the whole thing especially with Mads Mikkelson, a Danish actor with an almost strange skull like face taking up the role of Hannibal Lector.
2. When I first watched this series I was charmed by it but I was horrified to find out that other people who loved it were boasting that the series' creator was paying homage to David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick through the series, I didn't want to hear any of this and I was a little horrified by the idea of this because I liked David Lynch's films very much but I don't like seeing people attempting to copy his work and when a TV series creator openly talks about his need to show off comparisons to Lynch and Kubrick, as with a lot of American TV series creator who goes on blowing his trumpet about what he is doing, I tend to want to shove everything they say down the toilet. I wouldn't be asking David Lynch what he ought to say about the Hannibal series just because the creator mentioned his name. It might be this reason that I don't like reading or seeing interviews with Damon Lindelof or Joss Whedon. But having watched Hannibal every week that I could, I have enjoyed the strange surrealistic sequences in the movie, the artistically displayed corpses of the murder victims and the imagery of the TV series has ignited fires in my dreams, I would almost want to imagine Mad's Mikkelson's Hannibal as a person who comes from a Dali painting.
3. In scenes Mads Mikkelson sometimes tends to mumble his lines with his thick European accent but he does it gracefully and it's wonderful to have someone so un-American at the front of a TV series like this, it seemed to go enough against the grain. It's quite possible that we're not missing any of the words that we didn't understand, perhaps in this series there is nothing much actually being but are transformed the lines perhaps with ghosts of meaning in the spaces in between that never quite appear. Perhaps all of the dialogue is supposed to be nearly forgotten and then when rewatched, forgotten once more, there are no particularly memorable quotes from the series to entertain friends with
4. The other main character, Will Graham played by Hugh Dancy probably is playing him in such a way that he doesn't outshine Mads even when he mumbles his dialogue the most. His character is perhaps flat and boring or maybe Hugh plays his role well as a mentally burned out schizoid man skilled with using some sort of pyschic senses in solving a crime, it might be hard to sell that concept even if he was playing such a person. Despite his gifts, he is another character for Hannibal Lector to run rings around.
5. Perhaps I have not been so interested in the way that there are guest stars for various episodes, such as British stand up comedian Eddie Izzard turns up as a serial killer in one episode and as much as I like Lance Henriksen in many of his roles, he turns up as a serial killer and I wonder what the hell he is doing there apart from being an actor playing his role, but I look forwards to seeing him in the series again later on. However we have the likes of David Bowie soon to be playing Hannibal's uncle and I am not sure what to say about that either, but in the end, perhaps the answer is why not.
6. I like the series because it seems to be about people dealing with psychic worlds and problems of the inner world and some surrealistic imagery. I am a fan of the TV series Monk and enjoy his quest to adapt to the world around him and so I enjoy the scenes where Hannibal is talking to his psychiatrist played by Gillian Anderson about his own problems such as dealing with the whole concept of having an actual friend which in his own way perhaps Hannibal makes out of Will Graham because he feels they have some form of connection through their dealing with criminal investigation. Hannibal has problems himself in having personal friendships and breaking down his personal walls is an issue
7. There are a lot of conflicts that these people have to deal with and steering in slightly the wrong direction with Hannibal could mean their death is imminent and then those who he appears to value the friendship of most of all appear to be the subject of his games
8. As it seems, Hannibal's own psychological problems appear to be part of a facade for ulterior motives because anyone who gets in his way he is likely to kill and his psychiatrist who secretly knows something is perhaps not wholly aware of his intentions. Hannibal is a psychiatrist himself and one of his patients who obsessively identifies with him also wants to become an actual personal friend of his, but this results in Hannibal seeing him as a nuisance and eventually having to kill him. When he invites a man who is revealed to be a serial killer around to his house for dinner, one might have been someone who he could have made a friend out of but it turns out to lure him into a situation where he can have an opportunity to kill him . When he tries to help a young woman that has got involved in a murder case that he feels fatherly tendencies for, the result in his failure to help her means that he has to kill her. Will Graham starts out with absolutely no desire to befriend Hannibal Lector but Hannibal appears to want to be friends with him and it soon results in Will Graham finding himself behind bars accused of murder , and maybe this is where Hannibal planned to put him because he was likely to find out sooner or later that he himself was a serial killer and it appears that perhaps he valued his life enough not to have found himself killing the man.

Frankenstein's Army

a) I very much liked "Frankenstein's Army" on DVD, I wish I had seen it at the cinema but when it was shown at a Film Festival in Leicester Square, all the decent seats were bought up before I could buy a ticket.

b) As much a bizarre mind boggling visual treat as some might assume, despite the low budget. Probably a sizable chunk of the movie seemed like a shoot-em-up computer game, but still very interesting like a long nightmare

c) What we see in the film is as seen through the camera of the lens of a soldier who is supposed to be filming the whole thing as we watch the movie. So this means it's a "found footage" movie and quite honestly I wouldn't know anything about that normally but there are some films that I have seen where film footage is found one way or another.

d) There are twists and turns to be encountered amongst the gang of Russian soldiers who are the main characters of the film and a long part of the film is spent just exploring the environment with nameless skeletons, piles of nuns placed on a fire, a seemingly empty building that is revealed to be Frankenstein's monster factory. Numerous Frankenstein's various monsters are to be found populating the movie in killing mode, however many are very easy to kill off once they are seen for what they are. It's amiable nonsense in which I found no ultimate depths, I was probably happy to see all the characters killed off. Perhaps I might even want to watch parts of it again.