Severe Jam Damage

In 3-D!
Next year!

This is the youtube video, but if you’ve got divx, Neil has a high-res version on his site.

Possible spoilers ahead

‘Jesus, that looks atrocious’ the Barfly grunted as Nic Cage towered above us on the screen spouting some jingositic shite while hanging off the edge of Mount Rushmore.
‘Well however bad ‘I am Legend’ is it can’t be as bad as that one looks.’
‘How the hell did they manage to get funding for a sequel anyway? I didn’t think the first one did much business?’
‘At least we’ll have Vampire-Zombies’
‘Have you even READ the book?’
‘I’m not sure about this’ mumbled the Philosopher. ‘Maybe we should have gone to see something else.’
‘Like?’
‘Umm…Enchanted?’ he suggested and then recoiled from our combined Stare of Death.
‘Can you imagine the three of us going to see Enchanted?’ I snorted.
‘Its supposed to be good… ‘ was his weak rejoinder.
‘No more speaking from you!’
‘How long have the ads and trailers been on now?’
‘Feels like an hour at least.’
‘Jesus, can you imagine being married to that guy?’
‘Who?’
‘The Burger King voice-over bloke.’
‘I just wish they’d start the fuckin movie.’
‘Not many in the cinema.’
‘Its New Years Eve’
‘What do you wanna bet three basketball players will sit in front of us? -Actually it’ll be ONE basketball player and he’ll sit in front of you.’
‘Har dee feckin har. You’ve probably jinxed me now.’
‘With big ears or a hat you can’t see around.’
‘Shup - the movie is starting.’
‘Who is talking?’
‘You are’
‘No, its those two twonks down the row.’
‘SHUT UP!’
‘They can’t hear you.’
‘Shhhh!’

The twonks didn’t stop their conversation until about an hour in which drove me absolutely mental. However I eventually managed to ignore them and watch the movie. Which wasn’t THAT bad - except that I had read the book. I’m beginning to think I should stop reading altogether as Hollywood has a way of turning my favourite scenes into something unrecognisable - or cutting them altogether - and completely ruining the endings.

‘Based on Richard Matheson’s ‘I am Legend'’.

Very, very loosely based. The vamps looked like the creatures from The Descent with better lighting. Ruined New York looks great and for me - a self professed misanthropist - an ideal way to see the city. Smith is surpringingly restrained in his role - not a sign of a ‘HELL YEAH, that’s what I’m talkin’ bout mo-fo’ and plays the ’slowly going insane’ in a rather measured way. Although when he quotes the ‘Ogres don’t have any friends’ scene from Shrek it sort of beats you over the head with his feelings of isolation. On another layer Neville being able to identify with the monster could be a tip of the hat to the book - but it is over so quickly and so at odds with the conclusion that it seems more like a conceit of the script.

There are a number of such nods to the book which are never fully explored (or explained) and are then overshadowed by guns, explosions and mass carnage. This could have been an interesting character study - and been more truthful to the book - but anytime it looks like it may head that way Smith blows some stuff up and the movie returns to its cliched ‘all action all the time’ roots.

Don’t get me wrong I like a bit of crash - bang - wallop as much as the next guy - but where the book slowly builds to a crescendo of tension and horror the movie slaps you about the face with a block of C4. The dynamic of the statement ‘I am Legend’ is completely turned on its ear. William Goldman wrote* that in Hollywood you’ll never get an A-list actor to take a role that required them to be less than a hero, unless they were specifically cast as the villain. Such a pity, Hollywood might have more interesting movies.

Ultimately, there might be too much Will Smith in the role and not enough Robert Neville in that you are always aware that it is Smith who is on the screen. At one point during a highly charged scene I was more struck by the sight of the Fresh Prince with greying hair than what was actually happening to his character. Distracting. Although given that Arnie was originally penciled in for the role it becomes obvious that the makers were always looking for a big name for the poster.
With brief touches somewhat reminiscent of Danny Boyle’s zombie flick(s) this is more ‘28 Days Too Late‘ than ‘Omega Man’ - which itself was criticized for not being enough like the book.

As an actioner ‘I am Legend’ is pretty much typical of it genre and entertaining enough. As a faithful rendition of the book - a sci-fi CLASSIC… well, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

*It was either in ‘Which Lie did I tell Now?’ or ‘Adventures in the Screen Trade’. Also I am paraphrasing.

I was going to title this entry ‘Northern Lights’ in defiance of the renaming of the book for the Yanks - but having seen the movie I’m leaving it as ‘The Golden Compass’ so that it cannot be mistaken for the book.
Which may give you an idea of what I thought of the movie…

Not that I completely hated it - exactly. It was more of a sense of ‘Ohmygawdthatscoolwaitwhataretheydoingandwhyisthathappeningandstopitstopit!’

But I get ahead of myself.

Firstly the cast is excellent - a more A-list bunch of (mainly) British thesps you could hardly hope to see outside of LoTR or the Harry Potter franchise. Unfortunately the cast is wasted. The plot, the script, the EXPOSITION - oh my GOD the exposition.
‘Now Lyra, as you very well know we all live in parallel universes and in THIS one we wear our souls outside our bodies and we call them daemons.’
Not an exact quote from Derek Jacobi, but close bloody enough.
There were bits I loved. London from the airship - the perpetual motion machines on the carriages - the steampunkness of it all - Nicole Kidman perfectly cast as the cold Mrs Coulter - Lyra’s grubby face and defiant fear-nothing attitude, a pretty damn good heroine for young girls to aspire to - The Gyptians ships - and the exhilaration of seeing the plot points in the book right up there on the screen.
Trouble was, it was all so rushed. The movie comes in at just under 2 hours. It should be at least three. Lyra bounced from Oxford to London to Svarbald and her encounters with other characters - which in the books slowly opened her universe to the reader - became laughably coincidental in the movie. She gets chased through the streets of London and the Gyptians just happen to jump out and save her. Oh, have I mentioned the constant exposition? The Goth - who deigned to join our outing - opined that there was probably too much for someone who had read the books but not quite enough for him (who hadn’t) to make any sense of it. In addition the ending SUCKED - if they do get the funding for the next two books I have no idea how they are going to clean up the mess they’ve left. The Gin Lady wholly approved of the knitwear - but that was about the only nice thing she had to say that evening.
Overall one thumb down and one somewhere in the middle for the sake of the sterling cast - wholly underused and wasted in a film that could have been just as amazing as the book - if Chris Weitz - who I have just found out was responsible for the script of ‘Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps’ - had given the scriptwriting duties to someone else.

So they did the usual thing of having a big flashing cursor where the password gets entered and if you want to blow up a house all you have to do is upload a virus but besides all the hollywoodification of the Haxxor side of things this is a pretty good movie. A bit cheesy in parts of course, but this is Die Hard we are talking about.

Bruce is showing his age a bit, but for all that he still drags his broken, bullet-riddled body through the movie beating anything in his path to death - leading me to surmise that the ‘Die Hard’ franchise is actually a series of zombie movies, cos seriously no-one could live through that amount of shit.

Timothy Olyphant is the bad guy and my, my hasn’t he aged well - although he appears to be channelling Tim Robbins throughout - which is still no bad thing. Justin Long (the Mac guy) isn’t bad as the side-kick and Kevin Smith is hilarious as the overweight-still-living-at-home-comic-con-loving-haxxor geek. There’s a bit of parkour, a bit of humour and a lot of explosions and fighting.

I’m not going to give away any spoilers here - because think about it, it’s Die Hard - what do you think happens? I’ll just leave you with this inspired tribute to the franchise (now with added 4th verse!)

Everybody sing:
‘We’re gonna die (die) die (die) die (die) DIE HARD
We’re gonna die (die) die (die) die (die) DIE HARD
Yippee kayay! Mother fucker!!
Yippee Kayay! Mother fucker!!’

One word:
Gorefest.

Ok, actually I’m going to have to expand on that.
FUCKING GOREFEST!

That better?
For those who haven’t figured it out, I’m talking about the sequel to 28 days later. It’s not as good as the original because by now we are used to the superfast zombies and this film continues in that vein. Theres also an underlying political message that’s writ large in very broad strokes that made me turn off the brain and try to ignore whatever the director was trying to put across.

But the first 15 minutes are worth the price of admission alone.

After that we’re into plot and exposition territory - but not too much as its not long before all hell breaks loose again. The gory scenes are incredibly visceral - especially sitting five rows from the front. One scene about half an hour in had me hiding behind my hands, but that couldn’t block out John Murphy’s score. ‘In a Heartbeat’ thrums mercilessly thoughout, getting deep into your blood.
It is (as with the original) filmed digitally and the jump-cuts and slashes can be almost headache inducing on a big screen.

There are a couple of ‘what the…’ moments that lie like huge gaping holes in the plot, but soon enough someone is ripped to pieces by ravening hordes of the enRAGEd so you forget about it. The cast is fairly unknown - the exceptions being Harold Perrineau (Micheal from ‘Lost’) and Robert Carlysle - but strong enough for it. The yanks aren’t overpowering and the kids are good without being cloying. London is once again amazing - and you are left wondering how the hell they managed to film so many landmarks completely deserted?

Overall pretty enjoyable - turn off your brain, ignore the political shit and enjoy the gore.

Those of you who know me are aware I have an interest in fairy tales. Old ones, new ones, the original versions, etc. I’ve got an entire shelf of books dedicated to fairy tales. So, while this is a rather modern tale it is by one of my favourite authors and I can’t wait for it to finally be released:
Stardust - the trailer

How do I put this? Where do I start?

Hrrrm. I went to see ‘Perfume’ on Wednesday night. Decent sounding cast - John Hurt, Alan Rickman, Dustin Hoffman and relative newcomers Ben Whishaw and Rachel Hurd-Wood. I read the book a few years ago but couldn’t remember much of the plot except that it involved perfume and murder. As I remembered it the book was a wonderful maelstrom of images from 18th century France, ably written from the perspective of one man’s excellent nose.

It is one thing to write the image of a putrid fish market, or an acidic tannery as experienced through scent, it is quite another to film it. Long lingering shots of Grenouille (Whishaw) sniffing the air. Lurid - almost lascivious - camera shots that linger over nostrils. Macro zooms up the adenoids. The human nose is not an attractive body part, especially when it is 10 foot tall. From the opening scene of Grenouille’s birth where his mother pops him out (literally) and pushes him into a rotting pile of fish guts and garbage the film is drenched with the directors attempts to instill the idea of Smell-o-vision into the tale.

The respected cast does the film no favours either. John Hurt is the narrator and halfway through I wondered how he had gotten himself involved in such a pile. Ditto Alan Rickman. And as for Hoffman, well… Where in Gods name he got that laughable ‘Italian’ accent is anyone’s guess. It veers from completely unintelligable to Soprano-esque. At times he just speaks with his normal accent which makes it even more jarring when he suddenly appears to remember he is supposed to be Italian and throws a ‘Basta! Basta!’ into the dialogue.

The plot is good, the murders horrible and the scenery spectacular. I was - despite the critisicms - rather enjoying the movie and then suddenly the director threw in a mass orgy scene using out-takes from Caligula. The over-long slo-mo ‘wandering the back alleys’ scenes complete with OUR LADY OF SOUNDTRACK SORROW* were er, over-long.

Worth going to see if you’ve read the book. Not one you’d go back to again, and I’d imagine it won’t translate well to DVD.

2 thumbs hovering somewhere near the middle, tending downwards.

*Borrowed from Cleo at Movies in 15 minutes.

On Friday myself, Priscilla, the Barfly and The Philosopher went to see ‘Children of Men’ in the Savoy. It was very quiet for a Friday night, and we noticed as we waited for the patrons of the early show to leave that many of them looked rather glum.
‘Looks like a winner’ I remarked.
‘Yeah, guessing it’s not a good date movie’ said Priscilla through a mouthful of popcorn. My popcorn. I was starving and had no food after leaving work, so the popcorn was my dinner, but that didn’t stop the other three from helping themselves. By the time we got into our seats my bucket of popcorn was almost empty.

Caution: There may be spoilers ahead.

The movie begins with a bang, literally. The world is in turmoil, there are no childen and many of the countries of the world have fallen to chaos and barbarism. Only Britain stands firm with any level of civilisation. But even that is rocked when the death of Baby Diego, the youngest man on the planet is announced. In a clear satire of the death of Princess Di, Clive Owens character ‘Theo’ walks numbly through a London frozen in grief. On his way to work one morning a coffee shop he has just passed is bombed, a woman exits from the wreckage screaming, carrying her own arm. Theo just looks at her and walks on. On arrival at work, he immediately heads to his boss’ office and requests the day off as he has ‘been more affected by Baby Diego’s death’ than he thought.

So begins a tale of a future dystopic England where immigrants (ie. Non-English) are rounded up and shipped off to an Abu Ghraib-like detention centre, where Homeland Security watches everything and everyone and the government hand out a suicide drug called ‘Quietus’ (‘Quiet Us’) to every adult for use when they can’t cope anymore.

Enter ‘Kee’ a young foul-mouthed angry ‘Fugee who needs to get to the coast. Kee has a secret.

She’s pregnant.

The first pregnant woman in 18 years. It is never explained why the human race cannot have children anymore. The characters in the film don’t know themselves. Early on a hippified Michael Caine (‘Jasper’) explains to Theo that no-one knows why women can’t concieve. Which I find interesting as it vaguely puts the blame on women for the whole thing. We are told that there was a flu pandemic around about 2008 that killed a lot of children and then somewhere around 2009 women began to miscarry at an alarming rate.

Clive Owen plays a man going through the motions in a world with no future, Julianne Moore (Julian) is his ex-wife, now a wanted terrorist and leader of the FISH. (It’s never explained what FISH stands for – or at least if it was I missed it over the noise of crunching popcorn.)

There are a number of shocking moments in the movie and the violence is dark and gritty. I would imagine the body count gives any Schwarzenegger movie a run for it’s money. Mixed in with this are a few rare moments of humour. A fight between Theo and Julian on the top deck of an empty bus results in Theo’s parting shot ‘Oh, that’s right,just walk away as you always do’ Julian looks at him, vaguely puzzled from the top of the stairs ‘This is our stop.’

The director has an eye for the subtle and absurd. (Watch for the Pink Floyd pig floating over the Battersea Power station) The first sight of the Bexhill internment camp recalls those now-infamous images of the detainees in Abu Ghraib. Definitely not a date movie. There is one point where things take a decidedly sentimental turn, however it doesn’t last long and the atmosphere is broken with the explosion of one well aimed bomb. Afterwards the boys said they could have done without that bit, but I think that was just boy-talk as they immediately segued into talk of body parts.

The cinematography is stark and involves a lot of hand-held work, following Theo and Julian as they race through the countryside. In one shot a bomb results in the camera lens getting splashed in someone’s blood, the camera never moves from Theo’s side and the blood remains on the lens.

A thumbs up from me, and a general grunt of assent from the boys. (‘It’d be better without the sentimental shit’) A British film, with a Mexican director that makes a nice change from the normal Hollywood schlock of ‘one man with great teeth saving the world.’

Or the exact opposite of ‘Free Dublin.’ Yes, as I mentioned in the previous post it is very easy when you are not working to find ways to spend money. Buying a new laptop for instance, like the very one I am currently tapping away on. I picked it up on Friday and have been messing about on it for the weekend. Now all I need to do is get broadband in and I’ll be laughing (more money.)
Other ways to spend money are to go to the cinema, and at a tenner a pop (plus ‘corn) the coinage in your wallet soon disappears. I went to the cinema a couple of times this week, catching matinees of ‘You, Me and Dupree’ and ‘A Scanner Darkly.’ I wasn’t asked for a student card so obviously my wrinkles are getting worse.
Food is also a way to spend more money than you may have wanted. On Wednesday night I met Priscilla for a bit of food and ended up in La Taverna di Bacco in the new ‘Italian Quarter’ on the north side of the Millennium bridge. I would have been happy with a platter of meat, bread and cheese but somehow we found ourselves ushered upstairs to the proper ‘restaurant’. The menu was one page, containing 4 or 5 starters, 4 or 5 pastas and 4 or 5 meat courses. I ordered a soft cheese strudel with onion marmalade and Priscilla ordered the Smoked Goose to start. The strudel was nice although it was a good 50 minutes before our orders came through. We were drinking a bottle of wine and had been chatting away so it was only when the table beside us received a basket of bread that I realized we’d been sitting with no food for so long. Eventually the waitress returned with a basket of bread for us, but it was another 20 minutes or so before our starters came out. The strudel was quite nice, and I tried some of the smoked goose, which came thinly sliced and to my palate tasted fairly bland. There was another interminable wait for our main courses and the waitress apologized that there was a problem in the kitchen. At this stage there were only 4 tables of people, so a ‘problem in the kitchen’ meant it didn’t look good for anyone coming in for food for the rest of the evening. Anyway eventually our mains came, I had ordered sea bass which was served topped with some rather watery ‘sauteed’ potatoes, what appeared to be half a bushel of dill and a handful of pine nuts. I scraped the toppings off to find the fish was only half cooked. One side was done perfectly, it flaked away from the skin. The other side was translucent and slimy.
‘If I’d wanted sushi I’d have gone to Aya’ I muttered. By comparison Priscilla’s beef was cooked to perfection. Overall the meal, with the delays and the half cooked fish was not worth the money we paid. I’ve been to a few of the other places down in that area and they are much better both service and foodwise. Overpriced… definitely. If you are in the area I suggest you try one of the other places.

Before I start let me announce I haven’t read the book. Yes, I know. You’re thinking to yourself, but Eli has usually read all of the sci-fi shite that no one else likes or reads, but on this occasion I am forced to admit that Philip K Dick is not - and has never been - high on my list of reading materials. Which means that I went into this movie completely blind not having a clue about the plot except that it involved drugs and featured an animated Keanu Reeves - and who would have thought you’d ever see that?

I went to the afternoon show which meant it was me and 11 guys, all in various phases of geekdom. There was the loner at the front who was reading while the lights were on, the bloke who sat way at the back all by himself and the two guys who wandered in all beardy glasses and looking like they’d just stepped out of a 48 hour marathon session of D&D.
Yes, all of (geek) humanity was there including one bloke who chose to sit behind me and kick the shit out of the seats.

Reminder: I hate fidgety people.

There were 120 seats in the theatre (I counted. Yeah, I know…) so I can only guess that it must be me. WHY LORD WHY? A mostly empty theatre and I get the fidgeter sitting behind me. If you are wondering why I didn’t move seats the reason is that I had a lovely seat with no one in front of me and the fecker wandered in as the lights went down and the movie started and he didn’t begin his World Cup re-enactment until about 20 minutes into the show.

Other than that I had a good time. The first few scenes you are very aware of the animation-over-film and it’s slightly distracting but you soon get used to it. I wonder also at the ‘16′ rating. If it was fully live-action would it have been rated as an ‘18′ movie? The plot, well I sorta had that one figured out from one particular conversation held early in the first act. Keanu is best when he’s a drawn in character, Downey and Harrelson are typical stoners, doing what they do best and Ryder is surprisingly un-annoying - again perhaps this is due to the animation.

I don’t know if this one is worth the price of admission, that is, do you get anything more from it on the big screen than if you waited to see it on DVD. Overall, a general thumbs up.