Sorcerer

Absolutely amazing movie. This is in my list of favourite movies of all time, so dark and that Tangerine Dream score! William Friedkin really is firing on all the guns in this one.

A Serious Man

Another film I saw at the London Film Festival and another where I have mixed feelings about it. It is a brilliant movie, I loved Roger Deakins’ cinematography and some of the scenes were great ( particularly when the young son was having his Bar Mitzvah ). However like most of the Coen brothers’ recent films it left me feeling a little cold. I couldn’t really emphasise with the characters and the ending as always infuriated me. Still definitely worth seeing if only for the discussions raised by the Coen’s mediation on God and life in a Jewish Middle class environment.

Extract

Saw the new movie from Mike Judge and I have to say that I enjoyed it. There were a few laugh out load moments and the movie was consistently funny. Jason Bateman made a good lead and I have to say Ben Affleck was really funny, I think he is much better when he is a side character rather then the main lead.

Up in the Air

Just saw this new George Clooney film at the London Film Festival and I have to say it was pretty good. It had some funny lines and Clooney turned in a solid performance. However I do think that the script was a bit undeveloped. The funny lines when they came were real zingers and the situation was smart and pithy; Clooney plays a consultant who is hired to do the firing when companies need to fire people and the managers don’t have the backbone to do it themselves. Certainly apt given the current climate. However it does peter out towards the end and I wasn’t too keen on the ending..it was based on a book which I haven’t read and most of the times books seem to handle these things better. I think the script needed more shape and could have done with a rewrite or two. Although not with the jokes or the situation, it just needed more shape and could do with being a bit more tighter. Also I think they should have made more of Clooney’s relationship with the new employee that he has to train rather then concentrating on the romance with another women. That relationship seemed more true to life and without spoiling the ending, the way the romance ends is just a bit weird, you don’t see it coming and it makes some of the conversations that happen in the previous scenes a bit redundant even though they aren’t…anyway you will only understand it once you see it which I recommend you do.

Wii Vs PS3

I’ve been meaning to talk about both of these consoles and their relative merits and now that I have had a decent play of each I going to weigh in with my thoughts .

First off they are both great consoles, however they offer a different slant on the future of gaming. The PS3 has the most amazing graphics that I have ever seen, and its multi-media capabilities are fantastic. I use it as a PVR, to watch trailers and all the other online junk when I can’t be arsed to boot up my laptop. However on the gaming front the story is a little different. Don’t get me wrong the games some of the games are truly beautiful. What bothers me is the game play and plot/story. I can understand how the wii has captured the casual market because its so easy to just pick up the remote and play. The PS3 on the other hand is not so eay. Recent I have been playing Mirror’s Edge and although it is a great looking game one of the things that annoys me about it is its infuriating control system. I just can’t be arsed to learn what each of the 8 buttons do and which combination I have to press them in to perform a move. Its so much simpler on the wii, you just have essentially 2 maybe 3 buttons that do all the work. The rest is all gesture based. Also I have yet to find a plat-forming game on the PS3 that matches the sheer enjoyment I had when I played Super Mario Galaxy.

I know I’m going to upset hardcore gamers but quite frankly the shooting games on PS3 are staring to grate. It also explains why the wii has captured the market. Appealing to hardcore gamers is all well and good, but the general public don’t want complicated, visually realistic games. They want games like tetris and pac man, simple, and fun.

Well thats what I think anyway

DJ Z-Trip@matter

Z-trip was off the hook! I can understand now why he was voted America’s Top DJ because quite simply he was stunning. Every track was delivered with a slickness that other DJs spend their whole lives trying to chase down and master. He knew his crowd and he knew what tracks to drop to get them going. I’m so glad to have caught this master at work.

Oh and on a side note matter’s sound system…it literally made the hairs on my body stand on end…no I’m not joking it did…the base on that sound system was just fom another world…You have to go to that club if only to hear that sound system and be amazed.

Inglorious Basterds

I have mixed feelings about Tarantino. He is a very good director but watching Inglorious I started to think that there was something mssing. Don’t get me wrong Inglorious is good, with some amazing performances ( though not from Brad Pitt who is dreadful in this ) and some magnificant scenes andsetpieces but the movie just doesn’t hang together. The problem for me is two fold. His films are about movies themselves and I’m starting to tire of this, I want to watch a film with a plot that doesn’t involve references to other movies. The second is that Tarantino needs to work on telling a story, I get the impression that he just doesn’t care about telling a good old fasioned story he seems to be stringing scenes along which look great but don’t really move the narative forward. Maybe he needs to direct from a script written by someone else or is it sacrilegious to suggest such a thing?

Taken

This film is one of the most racist, europhobic films I have seen in recent years. Its like a Republican wet dream of how ‘evil’ France, Arabs and the rest of the world is. Unfortunately, I really enjoyed watching Liam Neeson beating the crap out of everyone on screen…he’s like the Jedi Master to Jason Bourne’s young Padawan ( I love it when I can shove a Star Wars reference in ) ….oh well.

Public Enemies

I saw Michael Mann’s new film a few weeks ago and I’ve been mulling over what to write about it for some time now. I’m a huge fan of this director’s work. I have every movie of his on DVD ( apart from ‘The Keep’…when are they going to release this on DVD? ) and was hooked on his directorial style the moment I first saw ‘Heat’ which was also the first movie of his that I ever saw. After watching this magnificent movie I went back to watch everything else he had done. I loved Thief ( I’m of the opinion that this is James Caan’s best performance in a movie ). Manhunter is one of my favourite movies from the 80s, and I can’t believe I never went to see Last of the Mohicans at the cinema…I must have been asleep at the time….I was old enough!!…:$. Anyway recently Mann’s output has been a bit hot and cold, with Miami Vice being his most weakest ( though I still think its a good movie though not great ) This brings us to ‘Public Enemies’. I really enjoyed this movie, it was a good solid thriller and god only knows how we need good thrillers at the cinema given the current predilection for robots that turn into cars or robots that are hell bent on destroying mankind unless John Connor stops them.

Technically the film is amazing. A lot of people have been complaining about the use of digital photography but I thought it added something different to the genre of gangster movies and created a real and intense ‘in the moment’ feel. I was impressed by all the actors ( though Bale seems to be turning into an Oak Tree with every subsequent film he does )…one stand out performance was from Stephen Lang…where did he disappear to for all those years? Its not as boring and flat as people make it out to be, the ending especially with Dillinger wondering through the police station looking at all the pictures of his dead compatriots and watching ‘Manhattan Melodrama’ and sensing it as a version of his death to come was quietly beautiful.

I can’t think of the last time where I saw such well staged action and gun fight scenes. You watch this movie and you realise that there is real craftsmanship behind it. The gunfights are intense but you know exactly whats going on and they are beautifully paced…none of this ‘Michael Bay you’ve killed my brain’ shit. He and others of his ilk need to be schooled on how to shoot action.

Above all else this film is a mature piece of work and not at all to do with anything about robots which in itself is incredibly refreshing.

Network

Sidney Lumet at his best. I love this movie not only because it has some great performances; William Holden,Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway….but also because its seems to be so prescient. I watched this movie for the first time today and it was scarey at how it has captured where television is today. Watch it….