Across The Universe is actually a fantastic film.
The Beatles were amazingly good at what they did. And what they did was write songs that transcended all space and time and became part of the collective subconscious.
Dr Robert, as played by Bono, is more than amazing. It’s perfect.
In fact, as far as I’m concerned, Across The Universe is one of the best musicals ever. Ever.
Go buy it for a fiver. Now!
‘I’ve, seen things you people wouldn’t believe…’, and so said Rutger Hauer at the end of what quite possibly might be my favourite film of all time.
Released in a slightly bastardised, studio friendly form in 1982 Blade Runner nigh on instantly flopped, only resurfacing a few years later as a cult-classic (a phrase I hate), whereupon it was proclaimed a modern masterpiece (and that one) by the people who proclaim these things. Subsequently it’s been released in a DVD box set that features about thirty six diffrerent cuts.
Harrison Ford plays retired detective Rick Deckard, the Blade Runner of the title, who’s job it is to track down and kill (or ‘retire’ as the film would euphemistically have it) rogue robots who return to Earth.
After being dragged out of retirement, he’s assigned the job of ‘retiring’ a few ’skin jobs’ that have strayed back onto Earth it’s business as usual, until that is he meets Rachel.
Rachel, a very advanced replicant, so advanced she doesn’t even realise she’s a replicant, works for The Tyrell Corporation. She meets Deckard when he’s sent there to make sure the test they use to identify replicants, the so called Voight-Kampff test, works on the newer Nexus-6 models.
So they meet, he realises she’s not human and the story begins.
Continue reading ‘He Say You Brade Runner!’
So, there I was, relaxing and having a bit of an afternoon snooze when I was rudely awoken by my phone going off.
By golly I’m glad it did though, it enabled me to remember what is quite possibly the best dream I’ve had since the one where I leapt onto a double decker bus to escape a Predator that was chasing me down Oxford Street.
The dream only lasted about ten minutes, but in that ten minutes I managed to really feel fear, proper I’m going to die style fear. It was awesome.
I was hiding out in a house, a small house, the sort you’d see in American movies set in the mid-west. It was all one floor and the rooms all joined on to each other so it formed a sort of four room circle. I was in the front corner of the house to the left of the front door and I was peering through the blinds.
From my vantage point I could see a Terminator standing on a big metal shipping container, the type the ship cars and things in. This Terminator was a T888 like in the TV series, it had its back to me and was slowly scanning the horizon.
My immediate assumption was that it was looking for me, so I carefully and quietly crept out of the house by the side door and, ducking down, ran through more of the shipping crates. At one point I was passed by a police cruiser, what it was doing I wasn’t sure but my only focus was on escape from the Terminator that I was convinced had been sent to kill me.
So after a short crouching jog I came across a rather old, dark blue pick up truck. I quietly opened, what should have been the passenger side door, and climbed in. Even though I was convinced I was in America the truck was right hand drive. There were no keys in the ignition, so after pulling down the sun visor and discovering there weren’t any there either I resigned myself to going back to the house, talking my chances with the Terminator and looking for some car keys.
At that point I woke up. My heart was racing and I thought that the whole thing had been real, it took a good five minutes for me to relax.
This raises some questions though.
It was all very strange and I can’t help but think there’s more to this than meets the eye! All thoughts on a post card to the usual address.
Read this. Carefully.
Not tricky is it? ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. …’, it’s not like anyone’s trying to catch people out is it?
It states clearly at the beginning of every Star Wars film (even the shit ones, I-III and VI for the record) that this movie isn’t set in the future.
But it’s got spaceships in it? No! Shut up, fuck off, look, listen. It is set in the past, a long time ago.
But it’s got robots and stuff? And? So has the Toyota factory in Derby and that’s not from the future. What part of this is difficult?
But people shoot each other with lasers? Aaaargh! Look it says in bright blue fucking letters at the start of the film: A. Long. Time. Ago. End of story.
Yet still people insist on describing Star Wars (any of them, they’re not fussy) as a futuristic film, or a fanciful futuristic romp, or whatever.
Look at these reviews for further proof of people not paying attention:
Ken Tucker - New York Metro
“…his [Lucas’] lurchingly thought-out rendering of futuristic politics prevents the entire series from achieving the greatness to which it aspires.”
Jonathan Young - Theosophical Society Of America
“Because the Star Wars stories are set in the future on fictional planets, we are able to get beyond the naturalism of most movies.”
Sean Axmaker - Amazon.com
“Luke faces the black-clad villain Darth Vader (David Prowse, voice of James Earl Jones) in a futuristic sword fight.”
Oh, and for the record the ellipsis at the end of the sentence? There should be four dots, seemingly the first one acts as a full stop. There should also be an extra space between the first dot and the ellipsis, but hey, if no one’s reading it anyway. …
Ooh, look an unreleased still from The Empire Strikes Back.
Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia Organa just about to share a tender, and by the looks of things steamy, kiss. Isn’t that so romant… Hang on! They’re brother and sister! Twins in fact! This is a kids movie, kids don’t need to deal with incest in their films.
And so begins the first exhibit in the case of George Lucas vs. Coherent Film Making.
Remember when we are first introduced to Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke asks about his dead Dad? It went a little like this.
Right, well, ok, no. No, doesn’t fit with any of the other movies. Lucas had originally intended for Darth Vader to be a name, not a title. All this bullshit of it sounding like dark father is guff. Strike two for consistency.
In the Empire strikes back Vader is obsessed with finding Skywalker all of a sudden, where did this come from? How come he didn’t sense that Skywalker was his son when he followed him down the Death Star trench proclaiming ‘The Force is strong with this one’?
Not only that but if, as every fucker seems to think, he’s the most powerful Jedi ever, why didn’t he sense that Leia was his daughter when he boarded her ship, imprisoned, interrogated and tortured her in A New Hope?
At the end of the day Lucas got lucky with A New Hope (as it later became), it was great, people loved it and it was fun. A trilogy it was not meant to be. In my opinion the Vader as father thing was thought up for The Empire Strikes Back and Luke and Leia as twins was thought up for Return Of The Jedi.
A New Hope was designed to be a stand alone movie.
I can buy this even if he was thinking of a trilogy, if it failed it would have had to be judged on its own, this I can understand. However it was hugely successful, so instead of saying right, let’s go the fun starts here, Lucas started making out that it was always his plan to have three, six or nine movies.
Let it go George. Please.
It’s amazing the difference a large screen makes to a movie, the amount of extra detail I saw last night was astounding.
For example I didn’t know Roy Batty had tattoos, yet there they were all over his left shoulder plain as day! It wasn’t only the little things though, some of the big stuff was given a new lease of life as well.
The opening sequence in particular was very much enhanced by the feeling of scale afforded by the big screen, even the opening crawl felt more exciting!
All in all Blade Runner will always be a great movie, seeing it in a cinema just makes for a better experience.
Now all I have to do is convince The Wife to shell out for a 1080p projector!
Ooh, it’s all very exciting, I’m going to see the new cut of Blade Runner on the big screen tonight.
The last time I saw Blade Runner at the cinema I got dumped, hopefully I’ll avoid that fate tonight. Fingers crossed.
So it finally happened, Toshiba have stopped fighting it and put HD DVD out of its misery like a horse with a broken leg.
Of course it wasn’t always this clean cut, I for one backed HD DVD at the start, preferring it to Blu-ray for its inherent backwards compatibility and strong standard feature set. Then again what do I know?
As a bit of a gadget freak I’m lucky enough to own both formats, HD DVD courtesy of my Xbox 360 and Blu-ray as part of my PlayStation 3. However, had the Xbox 360 not had an add on drive I certainly wouldn’t have bought a standalone player, in fact I wouldn’t have bought the external HD DVD drive either, I only have that because it was a gift.
My film collection includes one HD DVD, compared to nine Blu-ray titles. While that’s a pretty significant ratio it’s probably more significant that I only have two PlayStation 3 games! So in essence my cutting edge games console is actually only a glorified DVD player.
Blu-ray stole the march on HD DVD by its inclusion in the PlayStation 3 but it wasn’t until movie studios started to waiver that things looked to be swinging in either format’s favour.
When Warner announced their defection to Blu-ray it was game over. Everyone knew it.
I still maintain though, that Blu-ray will be the last major disc based format. In five years time DVD will still be around, replacing VHS as the de facto standard for the unconnected world, but HD content will be delivered to consumers as a download, ‘bonus’ content will be chargeable and you will never own the films. You’ll either rent movies or pay a fixed monthly fee for unlimited access.
This model won’t just stop there though, the next generation of games consoles will do the same with their games, in fact the next batch of consoles will probably be the conduit to all this entertainment.
The Oracle has spoken. Mark his words!
I’m really looking forward to Cloverfield, the new J.J. Abrams produced monster movie. From what I’ve seen so far it seems like a fairly well executed piece of schlock, in the vein of all the monster movies I remember watching as a kid.
Hopefully the creature will live up to expectations and be somewhat more imaginative than the 1998 Godzilla. As you’d expect there’s lots of internet chatter around what the creature actually is, with some saying it’s some form of mutated sea creature (yawn) and others theorising that it could be one of the Cthulhu from H.P. Lovecraft’s stories.
I’m hoping for the Lovecraft angle myself, it’d be a neat turnaround to have an origin like that in this sort of film. The whole radiation mutation angle is tired now, it might have worked in the 50s but you’ve got to come up with something a little better nowadays.
Roll on the first of February…
I wasn’t looking forward to The Dark Knight. I thought the Bat-bike looked like a ploy to sell toys, The Joker looked sort of strange and was going to be played by Heath Ledger and it all just smacked of being a huge big mess.
Then I watched this.
Fuck me that looks fun, the bit at 1:28 where Batman punches The Joker? Just the sort of lines you want from a movie like this.
As you may have noticed the YouTube version there is somewhat dark and smudgy but it’s worth looking at the HD version because it looks simply stunning.
I’m forever making huge turnarounds on stuff, and this is another one, but suffice to say I am now very excited at the prospect of the new Batman film. What about you?
Loading …Just a quick update, hopefully you’ll have noticed a new tab at the top of this page. It’s my new quick movie review page!
Go along and have a look, and let me know what you think.
Whilst out on the stag do Andy reminded me of the song Convoy. Have a listen.
It was a bit of a hit back in 1975 and in a hokey kind of way it fucking rocks. It even lead to a movie starring Kris Kristofferson that was directed by Sam Peckinpah! Not bad for a one hit wonder, huh?
They’re making a Bill Hicks biopic! Seemingly Russell Crowe is in the frame to play him. Seems an odd choice to me.
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