Crackerwax

Right. We’ve had The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machine, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and now Terminator: Salvation. So, what have we learnt about Terminators from all these films?

Well, they’re practically indestructible aren’t they? Well, except in Terminator: Salvation where it seems like they could be taken out with a pea shooter.

The entirely inconsistent nature of damage sustained by Terminators is – ironically – the only consistent thread between all the movies and the TV series! (more…)

The new Star Trek is shaping up nicely. Can’t say that I like all of the casting choices but Spock and Bones are perfect.

It sounds like they’ve sorted out a decent plot too. Guess we’ll have to wait until May to see for sure though won’t we?

Spock’s a nice touch but is it me or does he look uncannily like Brucie in this trailer?

As anyone who knows me will testify, my favourite activity, after having downed a few cherry beers, is to quote Captain Kirk’s immortal lines from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

It was this one scene that last night, lead to a drunken conversation where it was decided that the goal for 2009 is to meet William Shatner.

I will be ruminating about how to go about doing this but all suggestions will be greatly received. First on the list though is the setting up of a Google alert for ‘William Shatner’.

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.
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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.

1. What were all the shipping crates doing surrounding a lovely little bungalow/house thing? Could mean a lot of things that one.
2. Was the Terminator actually after me? Could it have been protecting me? Does this suggest or signify that I’m unjustly suspicious of those that care about me, or that they’ve turned their back on me?
3. What significance does the passing police car have? Do I feel that those that should help me are unwilling to or can’t anymore?
4. Why was the truck right hand drive, even though everything else was obviously American? Am I the odd one out?
5. Why was the Terminator a T888, which isn’t the traditional and more obvious T800 Arnie-looking Terminator? Is the fact that the T888 series have never been the good guys significant?

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 save enough to get 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?

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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.

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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?

Looks like both The Long Good Friday and The Sweeney are being remade and are due for release in 2008.

Mark my words, only bad will come of this.

The Long Good Friday is the most worrying of the two. Not only is Paul W. S. Anderson attached to direct but the hole shebang has been relocated to Miami. Now give that a few moments to sink in. Miami. How the fuck is that going to work?

You’ve got a director that’s so shit he managed to fuck up Alien Vs. Predator, which if he’d actually stuck to the Dark Horse story would have been amazing, and to top it off they’ve moved the whole thing to Miami. Why?

As for The Sweeney, I’m reserving judgment on that for the moment. The big rumour is that Ray Winstone is going to be Regan and Carter might be played by Danny Dyer. This is all well and good but The Sweeney was a piece of its time, the 1970′s were integral to the stories and it just wouldn’t be The Sweeney if it were set in any other time.

Face it, The Sweeney in the eighties is The Bill, in the nineties it’s Homocide: Life On The Streets and in the noughties it’s The Shield. Unless they make this a period piece it’s fucked, at best it’s something other than The Sweeney.

Not very macho I know, but hey I never claimed to be macho. That’s the trouble when you look as overtly manly as I do, people judge you, they judge you. Damn this cruel world.

Nevertheless let’s get a countdown of the best love scenes in movies, ever!

1. True Romance
   Clarence and Alabama meet, not altogether by chance, they enjoy pie, he takes her back to the comic store he works in, shows her Spider-Man, takes her to his pad, they make love and so it begins… All of the above takes place as Charles and Eddie warble Wounded Bird and is followed by a touching conversation atop a roof. Awesome!
2. Blade Runner
   Deckard’s told Rachel she’s a robot, she’s not too happy about it, Deckard’s a robot too ‘cept he don’t know it, so in his clumsy robot way he decides to comfort her. Cue Vangelis and some dodgy fumbling. Of course it all ends well-ish, robot love is tough in 2019.
3. Out Of Sight
   George Clooney, smooth criminal that he is, manages to seduce the Fed that’s on his tail (the actually quite good J-Lo). They meet in a hotel bar, snow falling outside the window, exchange some sexually charged chat and before you know it, it’s all gone slow-mo and they’re getting undressed in a hotel room.

The reason for this list’s existence is that we happened to watch True Romance on Sky Movies tonight. That and the fact the Leprekorn says that all I do is rant, so Leprekorn this one’s for you!

From start to finish this movie is fun. X-Men is about super heroes that are rock hard and completely serious about saving the world, the Fantastic Four are more light hearted, and if I’m honest looking at their super powers that’s the way it should be.

In Rise Of The Silver Surfer we get to meet, well, the Silver Surfer and quite frankly he rocks too. Voiced by Laurence Fishburne, the Silver Surfer really shines as a character.

Galactus on the other hand has become smoke. How this happened I’m not quite sure but that’s the way it is. To be perfectly honest I don’t think the movie suffers any for it. Although the Andys of this world may disagree!

The whole movie rollocks along at a fairly brisk pace, never becoming serious and never digging into character any more than it really needs to. The product placement is a little overwhelming at times and could do with being toned down, but the underlying story is fun. Forget that Ben Grimm is a bit too rubbery looking, just watch cool stuff happen and enjoy an hour and forty minutes of silly fun that lets you switch your brain off.

The bottom line is that this is a popcorn movie, characters like Batman need a little bit of gravity. The difference being that they’ve got a decent human back story that allows for that. The Fantastic Four got zapped by cosmic radiation, yeah, cosmic radiation. Almost as bad as gamma rays.

If you’re at a loose end go and see it. Take a bit of booze with you and it’ll be even more fun!

They’re only going to release a new cut of Blade Runner!

That’s right everybody’s favourite dystopic view of the future is getting digitally fiddled with, new scenes added, old scenes re-shot and generally tinkered with by Ridley Scott, and I for one can’t wait.

It’s the best film ever and to think that all the annoying little gaffs (geddit!) will be ironed out and a definitive cut, that Ridley Scott is truly happy with, is going to exist for the first time ever is just joyous.

But wait, there’s more! They’re only going to go and release it on Blu-ray and HD-DVD! You fuckers, get in!

I’m so happy right now I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep until October.

My copy of long forgotten 1981 classic Condorman arrived in the post today.

I popped it in the DVD player excitedly expecting to see Michael Crawford hamming it up with Oliver Reed, what I got was nothing of the sort, I couldn’t see a fucking thing. It’s the world’s worst DVD transfer. It’s shit! Really, really shit, and that’s coming from a man who owned the original transfers of Casino and Blade Runner.

How could something so great have been butchered so badly?

It’s presented in non-anamorphic 2.35:1, so that’s approximately 240 lines of vertical resolution gone straight away. Having said all that by ten minutes in you’re glad there’s so little resolution, it helps avoid seeing all the shit in the print they used for the transfer. It looks like it was found in a bucket full of soil and razorblades. I won’t even start on the 2.0 sound track (the marketeers way of saying stereo).

What is it with piss-poor transfers like this? How difficult can it be to get a decent anamorphic transfer off a relatively clean print and chuck a remixed 5.1 soundtrack on it? It’s as if Disney doesn’t care about the lesser known movies it did and just wants to churn out straight to DVD toss like The Fox And The Hound 2.

I’m really worried about the future of the hi-def formats if this is the best they can do with DVD.

I loved 28 Days Later, it was gruesome but clever. The start of the film probably sold it to everyone, Cillian Murphy ambling through the streets of a deserted London shouting hellloooo at the top of his voice. Superb!

Why is 28 Weeks Later such a pile of wank then?

The movie opens around the time of 28 Days Later with Don (the mumbling Robert Carlyle, forever Begbie) and his wife holed up in a quiet little cottage in the middle of nowhere. Luckily their kids were on a school trip to Spain when all this zombie business kicked off, so it’s just them and a small group of other survivors.

Shortly after we meet the group, a child, orphaned by the infected and also seemingly incapable of using cutlery, starts banging on the door to be let in. Soft bastards that they are, they do. This is a plot point, so pay attention, it’s a kid right? They’ve not seen their kids for a while. Hmmm.

After dinner is out of the way a group of the infected, who were no doubt led there by said orphan, break in. Don pegs it, leaving his wife who, stupidly, tries to protect Oliver. Clearly Don is married to a stupid cow who deserves to die at the hands of the infected.
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Fucking ace, that’s how good. Look at this guy, recognise him?

Ok, he looks a wee bit indistinct in that shot, but if you go and have a look at the trailer you’ll see how kick ass this movie is shaping up to be.

We see, what I assume to be, Ramjet jumping into the air, transforming and screaming off into the distance. In fact we see all sorts of transformations in the trailer and they are all fantastic. Fantastic. Oh, hang on I don’t think I made that clear. All the transformations (am I overusing that word?) are stunning, they look just like you’d hope they would.

I remember lusting after the toys as a kid, but luckily my parents were too tight to buy them for me so I’ve managed to retain that lust, just in time for Steven Spielberg to produce a live action version. Ace.

Hang on though, it’s Friday night, I’ve been at the gin so maybe it’s just me but this looks like it’s going to be fucking dynamite.
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Set fifty years in the future Sunshine is the story of eight brave astronauts attempts to restart the failing Sun. With a nuclear bomb. The size of Manhattan. In a big space ship.

Yawn.

Anyway, the plucky bunch set off for the sun in their flying space bomb and everything’s going great guns, we learn that a previous mission has failed, Icarus, and that we are now watching the crew of Icarus II, we also learn that no one knows why the original Icarus (let’s call it Icarus I) failed on their mission. Oooh, spooky.

As they jet through space we watch them do the usual futuristic space ship things, look at screens, check dials, eat space-food, bicker, you know the sort of things they do in sci-fi?

However this is where my first problem starts. This isn’t set in the sort of universe that Star Wars or Firefly is, it’s set in what is ostensibly the here and now. Anyone going into space on what was essentially a suicide mission would have been put through every psychological evaluation under the sun, they would have been screened and screened again, not one trace of susceptibility would have been allowed on that ship, or for that matter the Icarus I.
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Daniel Craig. You’ve seen Layer Cake right? If not go out and buy it now, Morrison’s sell it for £5.99. I always thought he’d make a great Bond and ever since I saw the teaser posters I knew he would.

There aren’t many spoilers in this but if you’re worried about having the plot revealed just go and see the film now, I promise you won’t regret it.

Anyhoo, let’s start at the beginning. Some exposition in black and white (echoing the original filmic beggining of Bond), how does Bond become a ‘double O’ agent? This is answered swiftly and brutally and we spend the rest of the film being shown how Bond becomes Bond, James Bond.

Did I mention? This new Bond is hard as fucking nails, when he gives you a kicking you stay kicked. Right from the start we see he has no truck with any grace under pressure nonsense, whethers it’s killing someone with his bare hands or running through walls (yes, through walls) there’s no mucking about with new Bond.
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Shit.

No, sorry, let me expand. 161 minutes of shit.

I can’t believe I wasted this much of my life on a stuttering bespectacled mongoloid.

First off: Oi! Lucas! Leave writing movies to people who can. (JK Rowling we’re watching you too).

Started this Clone War has. No Yoda let’s get this straight, included this Clone War was because George thought a ‘Clone War’ sounded hip, cool and oh so spacey in 1977. Alec Guinness hamming his way through two hours of sub standard fairy tale nonsense, calling John Gueilgud every evening and sobbing down the phone. You can almost hear him spinning like a Hotpoint in his grave as Ewan McGregor splutters out line after line of piss poor dialogue doing his best 1705s Ealing comedy Alec Guinness impression, while Hayden Christensen skulks in the background looking petulant.
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