Posts Tagged ‘films’

The future is here!

12 hostages. 24 hours. 1 Partridge.

Steve Coogan bringing Alan Partridge to the big screen has been long awaited. Was it worth said wait? Yes, it probably was! While other comedies build up to huge, though sometimes disappointing, funny moments, Alpha Papa delivers clever, funny dialogue from start to finish.

There is always the danger that a comeback will ruin the franchise, but Alpha Papa has no such concerns. It does a fine justice to the Partridge legend.

We went to Everyman Cinema, which once again offered an excellent experience. We meet up with Chris and Carly beforehand for pizza in the restaurant that delivered to its usual standard as well.

I’ve finally got round to watching The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. It’s the first in a trilogy of films based on the book The Hobbit, which is a lot of films given the whole of Lord of the Rings was covered in the same time. As Elina points out, if you have time for a song at the start, your film is too long.

Overall, I didn’t think it that good, but I wasn’t disappointed (because I had already lowered my expectations).

I didn’t like Martin Freeman as Bilbo. I like Martin Freeman in general, but we spent most of the film asking why Arthur Dent slash John Watson was running round Middle Earth. Not a problem I’ve had before, but he seemed a little more out of place here.

While The Hobbit was always a lighter book than Lord of the Rings, I felt the film was almost comic and silly. For example the orc king in the Misty Mountain was just a silly joke character and the fact that they survived that while being mobbed by such huge numbers was one bridge of disbelief too far.

Despite that though, it held my attention for the whole time (though we did watch it over two evenings) and I’m looking forward to seeing the remaining films.

Recently, I watched the film The Master, that was released last year.

Overall, I wasn’t that impressed. While it was interesting, I think there are a number of points that let it down.

It’s loosely based on the life of L Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. Though it is also based on some other works, I don’t really think it would make any sense unless you were familiar with Scientology and its origins.

This really shows in the fact that the plot line doesn’t make much sense. Again, if you’re familiar with the origins of Scientology, then you can see what they have done. But if you’re not, I imagine you would by simply left wondering what was happening and why, when there doesn’t seem to be any apparent reason behind it.

Secondly, nothing really happens in the film. It doesn’t really feel like it’s the story of a man who gets taken in by a cult – because he just walks in there on day one and signs up to everything. It feels like just a series of things happening, with no interesting storyline behind them.

It is worth noting however that the film received almost universal acclaim from the critics – so what do I know.

I don’t normally go to the cinema – it involved sitting still for two, maybe even three hours. But this summer I’ll be making an exception. Why, in one sentence? A Seth MacFarlane film, featuring Mila Kunis!

If the video isn’t embedding properly, you can also see it here.

If for some reason you’re not already 100% convinced then a) there is something wrong with you and b) here is a different trailer, this one voiced by Patrick Stewart. Enough said.

Given we were all a big fan of the original Johnny English film, myself, Elina and Norm headed out to the cinema to see Johnny English Reborn.

The film was good, not great. It was entertaining, I didn’t find myself clock watching, which I often do at the cinema, and presented quite a few laugh out loud moments, but it was always going to get compared to the original and in the end, wasn’t quite as funny.

More of a concern though was the fact that my ticket into the cinema was £9.25! I’m sure when I was a kid it was like £4 to go to the cinema, now it’s more expensive than being a DVD to own :S.

I also got an earful off the guy checking out tickets in on the way in because I had bought Elina a student ticket but she didn’t have her student card on her. I understand they need to check it occasionally, but given we had bought full price tickets for myself and Norm, it seems pretty obvious that we were being honest – if we were trying to scam them we would have just bought three student tickets.

Last week, Atheist Society were taking it easy during the exam period, with a screening of the film Saved. It has an important moral message – that we need to book Michael into Mercy House. He didn’t seem to keen on the idea though.

Afterward, we headed down to Stick or Twist, where I enjoyed a free mixed grill after having filled out all the required stamps on my loyalty card 😀 .

I was thinking about the selective attention videos Jonni was showing me earlier and that lead me on to thinking about some videos I saw many years ago that made me jump.

Such videos to something along similar lines of this: they present to you two identical pictures and ask you to “spot the difference.” Of course there isn’t any and as time goes on your eyes move closer and a closer to the screen as your concentration increases to try and spot the differences you are told are there to be spotted.

Suddenly a ghostly image appears and a scream comes hurtling through your speakers and the majority of people will jump. There is a crude example of such a video here.

This got me thinking, it’s actually quite easy to scare someone. How many times have you walked up behind someone concentrating on a computer screen for them to suddenly realise you are there, jump and claim you “scared the life out of them.” Probably many times.

And yet, horror films continually fail to scare us on a regular basis. When was the last time you watched a horror film that was actually scary? I found Silent Hill had a good attempt but that was a few years ago now and most people found that rather tame. Of course it varies from person to person but most people I talk to, at least among my male friends, claim they haven’t seen a scary movie in a long time. Of course they could just be embarrassed to admit they were scared but for the moment lets take them at their word and assume all recent horror films haven’t scared them.

Surely we must be able to put some science behind this?

Take roller coasters for example. There is a lot of research and engineering that goes into making roller coasters and exhilarating experience. The problem is now that they simply can’t make them go any faster, drop any steeper or throw people around any more than they already do without injuring people.

So, as a friend was explaining to me, they’re now working on techniques to make people feel disoriented. The current avenue of research is to attempt to recreate the feeling we all had when we were children and went rolling down hills (I say children, I would imagine in Michelle’s case, it was last week as I presume it still works 😉 ) and that sensation of tumbling over and over. They can do this already but not without people throwing up everywhere, so the research continues.

I would have thought, in the same way, we could apply new techniques to horror movies rather than just adding even more blood, gore and guts to each film. Maybe they already are of course, but I think so far, the general consensus is that it isn’t working.

I was feeling ill on Monday but with work to be done I headed round to Rich’s flat with George to get editing away on Something Good ’09.

I had already spent three hours the day before on pre-editing and Rich had spent the morning doing some too so luckily we were able to dive straight in and get things done. Even with this big head start it was still 1am by the time we were finished as well as being several bottles of wine later.

The result, however, was well worth it.

Here’s me busting a groove earlier today.

I spent the day on set filming an Atheist Society parody of Utah Saints’ Something Good ’08, a little idea I had had for an intro video for the society this year.

It was actually a really quick shoot – we didn’t kick off until 4pm and we were finished by about 8pm. Of course this is where the real world begins – since getting home I’ve spent nearly three hours doing the pre-editing for the camera I have – we still have all the editing to do on top of that and that is just one of three cameras we were using!

Never the less the film is now in the can so with a little bit of magic editing and after effects we should have something pretty good.