watch tHe skies

After an evening of hypnosis at the practice group I returned home to find itv showing “Open Water“, a movie about two scuba divers stranded in the ocean.

Presumably shot on hi-8 the movie gives a pretty good impression of what that experience might be like - the dehydration, jellyfish, sharks, the fear of dying in the sea and, er, did I mention the sharks? It’s a very effective movie, particularly the moments towards the end where the blackness of night is punctuated by the flash of lightning which gives us a few brief glimpses of the ensuing shark attack.

But of course Jen and I sat patiently and waited for the happy ending. Of course there’ll be a rescue… there always is, apart from that “Perfect Storm“… it’ll be too depressing otherwise, and I don’t want to go to bed depressed. I much prefer ambiguous endings… that way I can make up my own ending, which can be as fluffy and happy as I want.

Oh, right, is that it? Bloody hell why did I watch this?

Hang on… there’s something over the end credits….

oh. Right, that about finishes me off for the evening then.

Might skip having a bath tonight, I’m still suffering shark movie post-traumatic stress.

Let’s dig out Finding Nemo… that’ll make things better. Oh no, where do Nemo’s parents go? Blimey even in Disney movies the sea is a dangerous place.

Why is it that boilers only fail in the cold? And why does the 24 hours it you have to wait in your refrigerated home seem to take days? Fortunately the wait passed slightly faster with five lovely disks of Blade Runner to watch.

In November, Warner Bros released the Blade Runner: Ultimate Collector’s Box, five DVDs covering five different versions of Ridley Scott’s cult vision of the future. Also included is an arse-numbing 210 minute documentary on the story behind the movie, which is every bit as engaging as the feature. I’ve been steadily working my way through the documentary, entitled Dangerous Days (after the early script name for the film), which takes you from initial concept through to the heady days of VHS tapes, where the film found a home (and finally made some money).

It amazes me how much trouble the film was. The crew seemed to clash on almost every level; nationalities, work ethics, creative demands, acting, scheduling. And in addition the movie was shot outside and at night, so the whole thing was done in the early hours of the morning. Then of course there is the much documented “studio interference”, the poor test screenings and the final shots hastily borrowed from The Shining outtakes.

And yet out of all of the conflict, pain and overspending came a majestic, visionary tale that stands today as one of the great scifi movies of all time. Without Blade Runner we wouldn’t have seen the rise of cyberpunk; scifi would probably still be like THX 1138 and Harrison Ford wouldn’t have a movie to complain about.

And there’s certainly something to be said about the result of all of that conflict. Certainly in a work environment the most creative situations I have found myself in is where there’s a healthy level of conflict - people that feel that they can disagree and be disagreed with, in a way that builds on ideas to make them better. Those situations come along less often than I’d like… too often is there a sense of false contentment where people don’t feel safe to air their views, and so we miss out on innovative ideas, or being called on things that are just plain stupid.

It seems to me that beauty like Blade Runner is a fine balance between order and chaos, where creativity lives but still has some boundaries, but where the boundaries don’t sanitise the ideas and the passion that comes from doing something new and challenging.

Hmmm perhaps I should watch the movie whilst the boiler is broken… too much comfort and I’ll probably miss the point.

The film to see next year, this exclusive clip is great. Once I work out how to embed this, I, er will.

Mmm that worked quicker than I expected. The first person shaky handcam works really well… even on the PC screen this is a pretty exciting clip. Kind of Blair Witch meets Godzilla?

As we head deep in to Wedding season, the Hen nights and Stag dos are coming thick and fast. And so it was on Saturday when, following Live Earth, a well-intentioned mish-mash of artists who had flown around the world on private jets and driven to events in Humvees, and a watch of Jack Black’s silly but occasionally very funny Tenacious D in The Pick Of Destiny, I settled down to wait for Jen to return from a hen night.

Channel hopping, I happened across David Fincher’s genius movie Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. This is one of my all time favourite films, yet it is one I hadn’t seen for many years, particularly since I got really interested in some of the subjects that I waffle on about nowadays. Back then I was mostly occupied with doing my MBA, which meant I didn’t have time to philosophise, just learn lots of theories and hope that one day that I would understand accountancy.

So it was with a fresh eye that I watched the film, and found myself relating to it on a whole new level. The last time I watched it, I viewed Tyler Durden as an anarchist, spouting a lot of poppycock. Yet this time I understood, and sympathised with many of his views. Sure I don’t think it was necessary to commit acts of terror… I don’t feel the need to impose my views on others so forcefully. (more…)

Stuck in a hotel in Swindon last night, I watched the Director’s Cut of Payback, starring Mel Gibson. I remember hiring this movie when it first came out, and I thought it was terrible. However I read that the original director (Brian Helgeland) had walked out following creative differences with Mel Gibson and the studio, had been allowed to piece together his version of the movie from the  original footage, returning his vision to us.

Central to the story is Mel Gibson’s Porter, a guy looking to get $70,000 that was stolen from him by Val, his partner-in crime, some time before. Tracking Val down, he is double-crossed, blackmailed by the cops, beaten up and loses his wife to heroin. Yet he keeps after his money, leaving a bloody trail of organised crime bodies in his wake. As he climbs up the mob ladder, he is surprised to find that they even laugh off his paltry demand, and even forget how much he wants. Yet he never wavers, asking only for his $70,000, unconcerned about the carnage that he has to cause to get it.

Now some people would think it’s daft. “Why wouldn’t he take the $130,000 they gave him?”, “why is that so important to him?” and people asking those questions are right. Of course they are, if Porter’s motivation seems odd to them then it is because it isn’t their motivation. To you or me it might seem a little daft but I guarantee there are people out there that would watch the movie and nod in agreement with everything Porter says regarding the debt he owes, without necessarily being sociopaths.

Because it just means that their values are aligned with Porter’s in that respect.

My guess on Porter’s motivation is that his world rotated around the validity of a promise, an agreement between two people. When that word was broken by Val it invalidated the very foundations of his view of reality, with the effect that until that money was regained, nothing else held any sense or value. To the point where death was a viable option if balance couldn’t be restored. And you will find that the most supremely motivated people are those that have made a direct line of sight connection between actions that need to be taken and the achieving or maintenance of a fundamental belief. “Singlemindedness” is the term that comes to mind. I’m sure you can think of someone that is singleminded, not about everything, about certain things, and those things are closely aligned with their values.

Now Porter’s values aren’t mine. However I do sympathise with him… being let down by a broken promise would certainly wreck my foundations of belief. And I do find that actions that best align with what is important to me motivate me most.

So I wonder, have you ever considered what’s important to you, in life, love, work and play? Think about the things you simply love doing and ask yourself “what does that give me?”, and keep asking that question (chunking up) until you can go no further… those criteria that you get are your hot buttons… and if you can connect whatever you need to do to one or more of those criteria by line of site, then your motivation will be off the scale.

So as Porter drives off in to the sunset with Rosie, I smiled, and agreed with myself that the Director’s cut was a far better movie. Very cool in fact, and very re-watchable. I was glad that having gotten his money back, Porter could find time to notice what new directions his heart would take him in.

Another night in Swindon, I wonder what philosophical nonsense I will extract from old movies this evening?

So with Jenny currently refusing to see film of my suggestion following our recent disappointments, I decided to do this one solo. 

Now as a kid I loved the FF - I eagerly anticipated getting the next comic or annual, the crazy bad guys, the evil Dr Doom, and I longed to be The Human torch. FF was one of the earlier comics I was in to, I then moved on to Spider-Man, The Avengers, Iron Man, Daredevil etc. etc.

I was incredibly excited when the first movie came out, and I thought it did a great job of bringing the spirit of the comics on to the silver screen. It did, however, lack any depth at all, and was over without the FF actually having much of a challenge.

So I wasn’t sure about the sequel… although it would be cool to see The Silver Surfer (toughest hombre in the Marvel Top Trumps) on screen, I wondered how they were going to make it work.

Fortunately the production team seem to have taken the criticisms from the first movie and put about creating a more substantial sequel. It still retains the sense of fun from the comics and the first movie, with plenty of the inter-team squabbling you would expect from the FF, and it adds a few sub-plots and some personal anguish for a couple of the characters. Knitted around this is the arrival of the silver surfer who sets around preparing the earth for destruction whilst a resurrected Dr Doom seeks to use him for his own ends.

All in all its an enjoyable movie and a better overall experience than the first outing. That’s not to say that it’s a classic - it is still fairly superficial entertainment.. some characters being badly under-used (the thing could have pretty much taken the week off), and you dont see that much FF action. However the SFX are very good, and these few gripes aside it’s a lot of fun. Hopefully the movie does well enough to justify a third and we can see the improvement continue.

And I wrote that whole review without mentioning Jessica Alba in a catsuit.

Since Ben’s arrival our cinema trips have been severely rationed. Now we need to procure a babysitter (Jen’s mum), get Ben ready for bed in time and head off to the flix, whereas before we used to go on a whim.

So our trips are precious.

And yet this year the summer blockbusters have looked enticing, and there were two films that we were both eagerly anticipated.

First up was Spider-Man 3. With 40 or 50 years of rich storylines and characters to pick from, as well as the same team of people who made Spider-Man 2 (up there with Superman: The Movie and X-Men 2 in my estimation), and a budget of some $250m how could they possibly go wrong? Well they did. Big time. High expectations and too much pressure to cram in bad guys and SFX left us with a bloated, badly paced, idiotic mess of a film that shouldn’t even be on the same shelf as its predecessor. That bad? You ask. Yes, it is all over the place, even at 2.5 hours there simply isn’t enough screen time for you to care about any of the characters. If they had ditched Venom and gone just with Sandman then we would have had a decent movie. Unfortunately the need to cram in all of these plots meant that none of them got the attention they deserved and the whole thing left me with a sour taste in my mouth.Jenny was not pleased. A rare evening out and it was wasted by this movie.”Don’t worry, Jen, Pirates 3 is out in a couple of weeks, that will be good..”

Famous last words.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse Of The Black Pearl is one of my favourite movies. It’s got a great plot, fantastic gob-smacking special effects, a superb cast and the whole thing is conducted in such a spirit of fun that it is still watchable after 4 or so years on DVD. Its sequel - Dead Man’s Chest didn’t quite reach the heady heights of the first movie. Suffering from over-indulgence in places, and a convoluted storyline, it was a very funny movie, wrenching up the camp factor from the first one. We really enjoyed it and looked forward to At World’s End.

Unfortunately this movie made Spider-Man 3 look like an Oscar winner. I can forgive the total change in tone (it’s not that funny) if the story made any sense (it doesn’t) or they gave the audience a chance to follow it (they don’t). Characters from the first film come and go with no reason given (exactly why did the squid that was so fundamental to the last movie turn up dead?), new plot items and concepts are introduced in conversation that suddenly become vitally important, and characters suffer from complete amnesia when it suits the writers (surely Chow Yun Fat would have known Elizabeth wasn’t Calipso if he was one of the pirates that bound her?).

The result is a complete mess of a film, that even the special effects can’t save.  I tried really hard to like this movie however it just wasn’t likeable. By the end credits I couldn’t wait to get out of the cinema.

Jenny was fuming. 2 nights out wasted. That meant Shrek 3 was off the table. We just couldn’t risk another duff movie.

And so these so called blockbusters have put my cinema viewing schedule in jeopardy. The scary thing is these movies will make so much money, sequels are inevitable. I just hope that if these franchises come back then they give them the time to actually produce entertaining films with decent scripts that we can enjoy.

Rant over.

At some point, scientists say, our Sun will die. It will burn itself out and cease to give us the life that we all enjoy. In Sunshine, Earth has sent its last hope to the Sun in an effort to revive it before our planet freezes in space.

Aboard the Icarus II are eight astronauts and scientists, their mission; to fire an immense nuclear bomb in to the heart of the sun which will, hopefully, resurrect the star and breathe new life on our freezing homeworld. Protected from the Sun’s rays by an immense reflective shield, the vessel glides towards the centre of our solar system in relative darkness whilst its inhabitants wonder whether they will succeed and what happened to Icarus I, the original vessel that disappeared 7 years previously. (more…)

I read with abject horror that Hollywood is planning a remake of the legendary Escape From New York. The cult movie, starring Kurt Russell and Donald Pleasance, tells the futuristic story of one-eyed Rambo Snake Plissken going in to Manhattan (now used as a prison) to recover the US President whose plane has crashed on the island. Full of crims and nutcases, this John Carpenter movie is every bit daft as it is fantastic, and it also features a superb soundtrack by Carpenter himself.

Rumour has it that Gerard Butler will be filling Russell’s shoes. Quite frankly I don’t know why they are bothering. The original is a classic but the remake is hardly going to break the box office - even if it is superb it’s not going to make much money, unless they turn it from a downbeat futuristic thriller in to an all out action movie, so why not leave well alone?

I suppose the saving grace is that John Carpenter isn’t directing it. He seems to have had his good directing organs surgically removed many years ago, and is quite happy to hand over his scripts for remake and simply coin in the money.

I would like to point out at this time that if they decide to remake Blade Runner then I am leaving this planet for good.

Jen and I decided to make this our Valentine movie. We were originally going to do Music & Lyrics, but this looked like a blast so we gave it a go.

The movie tells the story of Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), ace cop in the London Metropolitan Police force, who is reassigned to the sleepy Gloucestershire village of Sandford. Here, Angel soon gets stuck in to the local crime (or lack thereof), but things soon become suspicious when, one by one, people start to suffer horrendous “accidents”, which soon set Angel’s spidey-sense tingling, as he takes it upon himself to investigate, with the hindrance of his new partner, the partially-brained Danny (Nick Frost). The investigation is tough as he gets to grips with the odd collection of villagers, and soon Angel begins to question his own sanity, as did the policeman he replaced, who lost his mind with fatal consequences…

The first thing of note is how great the cast is, a wide selection of well-known faces make cameo or greater roles, from Steve Coogan to Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton and Edward Woodward, all give entertainingly quirky performances, which work brilliantly against Pegg’s straightlaced Angel. On top of this some top-class direction keeps the story moving at pace, and there was only perhaps once in the movie when I thought that it could have been edited more tightly. This is a minor comment really because the script is so loaded with gags of every kind that I was really too busy laughing to notice such things. And much of the laughing was the genuine belly laughs that are hard to come by, particularly with such regularity in a movie. Many times I was still chuckling about a previous gag when the next joke came along, a sign of a very funny movie. Loads of references to the movies that it parodies \ homages, it competently manages to take off everything from Midsomer Murders to Die Hard and everything in between.

In the thick of this, it’s Pegg and Frost who really make this movie work, as genuinely likeable and completely unbelievable action heroes, such that even though we aren’t supposed to take the film seriously, we were still cheering them to the end.

If you haven’t got it by now - I loved this movie, and if I could go watch it again today I would, because I’m sure that I would still laugh more at this on the second, third or fourth viewing than I would most so-called comedies that arrive on the big screen. As far as I’m concerned, if you can only go see one movie this year, see Hot Fuzz. Spiderman and Pirates will no doubt take more at the box office, but they won’t be as entertaining as this.