Yeah, I mean I'm not a hard core comics fan, but thats always been a pet peeve.
it's like calling porn 'erotica' or 'adult literature'. it is what it is, fuck! 

. 

By either Graphic Novel, or comic book. I just don't find the word 'novel' to be that high fallutin', after all Harlequin romances are novels. It is just a means to delineate format. 

IT Crowd season 3 is bollocks. 2 was great, 1 was nice. 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0329632/

A refreshing excursion away from the steaming pile of shit german movies usually are ;-) Touching, disturbing, raising questions. 

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965) - forget Bond, forget Bourne, this is probably the best spy film going around. It forgoes action for plot and character and is heaps better for it. Having John Le Carre's novel as a base was probably a big help too because it feels and looks authentic and realistic as far as the details go. Richard Burton is fantastic as the craggy veteran who thinks he has one last chance at glory and Martin Ritt and cinematographer Oswald Morris use black and white very very effectively in creating a gritty world where there is always someone watching someone else.

8/10


Cross of Iron (1977) - pretty decent WWII film from Peckinpah which is more interesting than most because the main group of characters are members of the german army around the time of the german retreat from the Soviet Union. This choice gives it an interesting, if superficial, depth because it asks you to sympathise with enemy soldiers who are not too dissimilar in their behaviour than the soldiers of most american based war films. James Coburn is fantastic as Steiner, the cynical and bitter infantry platoon leader constantly at loggerheads with Maximillian Schell's Stransky, a prussian aristocrat who is his superior and only interested in obtaining the cross of iron.

The movie is severely disjointed and comes to a halt on more than one occasion, but there is some extremely good dialogue in it as well as some very memorable scenes. Peckinpah also uses his patented slow-mo technique brilliantly during the action sequences which are very well staged.

6.5-7/10


High Plains Drifter (1973) - impressive gothic western by and starring Clint Eastwood that has a questionable variation on the revenge theme but is well made enough that matters of taste can be easily overlooked.

7/10


The Roaring Twenties (1939) - another stellar 30s gangster film with James Cagney, and probably his best along with the later White Heat. As the name suggests, most of the movie centres around the climate of prohibition era america and director Raoul Walsh works in some nice social commentary without being too heavy handed about it and without getting in the way of what is really a cracking crime film. Cagney is great once again and his scenes with Gladys George and Bogart are especially impressive.

7.5/10


The Story of Qiu Ju (1993) - A pregnant peasant woman's husband is kicked in the groin by the village head and she takes it upon herself to find justice by taking the matter with up the authorities and eventually to court. It might sound like the Chinese version of Erin Brockovich but that description would be an insult to Zhang Yimou's exceptionally even handed tragi-comedy which objectively observes both the pitfalls of chinese bureaucracy (sometimes in deadpan hilarious fashion) and the single mindedness of stubborn individuals. Gong Li is nothing short of amazing in the title role, and even more amazingly, has tremendous rapport and chemistry with the majority of the rest of the non-professional cast.

The second half has occasional issues with pacing but then sucker punches you with an ending that is unexpected and vicious.

7.5/10 

preferred this to his later pale rider. high planes seems almost evil, even if it is revenge, while pale rider seemed watered down. both are good of course, but i liked the first more. 

saw it with some other people, I was wary because the trailer for 300 made it look good, but it was a waste of time. Watchmen was far more interesting and ambitious but overall I didn't enjoy it. To me it shows what I think is wrong with most comic books: they smush together diverse and incompatible influences from 19thc/20thc popular literature (case in point: not that I saw it, but, the league of extraordinary gentlemen), with no concern for coherence. I read comics a lot when I was young, but the only one that has held together after all this time is Batman. And the reason for that is, barring the more extreme tangents that have been taken, the whole thing takes place in a coherent universe, where it's not like any random crazy shit can happen. Everything else reminds me of Mortal Kombat (which I love) - dramatic, flashy, violent, making absolutely no sense and retarded. But MK is a GAME, the primary purpose of it is not storytelling. (/rant) 

the whole thing takes place in a coherent universe, where it's not like any random crazy shit can happen.

Bruce Wayne was recently killed by alternatively a helicopter crashing into a building (fair enough, but not actual canon) or sacrificed by an escaped god due to firing a bullet backwards in time from a temporal gun in order to kill said god and avoid a magic inducued universal apocalypse... (official canon, even if spectacularly retarded) 

Also, watch the new South Park (13x02).

The Coon will save us! 

"congratulations, you've played Guitar Hero enough to score a million points, you're......


.....FAGS!" 

or Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
The humor just doesn't really work. There's no subtlety. There's no "getting it". :/

Also, product placement is really annoying these days. 

I intended to veto what you pointed out in your reply by saying "barring the more extreme tangents that have been taken" - ie, batman faces off against dracula, spawn, spiderman, PREDATOR, etc...

the point is what they are generally going for is something coherent.

Btw, anyone remember the storyline where Azrael was Batman from the early 90s?

Also, last night I was discussing watchmen with a few other guys and one of them invented a new tagline for it which I found hilarious: WHY - SO - SAD!?!?!! 

While I concede that using a cross DC Crisis plot wasn't the best example, I was actually trying to highlight the fact that it's pretty much the norm for the batman universe to introduce fantastical/magical/madshiznat elements as and when the writers feel the need.

And yeh, Nightfall, was a good story arc. Prefered No Man's Land/Cataclysm tho... 

fair enough, they do put that stuff in Batman, but it's possible to do a serious interpretation of the material - the core concept does not involve marvel-type wacky pulp scifi. That said Wolverine does look sweet. 

Role Models (2008)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430922/
Awful. The story, morality, emotions are for kids and maybe young teens (puberty and struggle at home). Yet the language and some of the jokes are very not for kids.
If you watch the trailer and think "OMG! It's Stiffler and some kid doing pretending he asked him to get his pants down, this is gonna be laugh fest" you will be disappointed. 

Haven't read the graphic novel, approached the film in it's own right.

Thought it was great overall. Powerful, flamboyant, and kept me interested for it's whole length - not knowing the plot helped with that. Really liked some of the characters, Dr Manhattan was fascinating, and Rorschach was viciously excellent.

I did find it a bit camp in places and a bit gory in other places, which was an odd blend. But in between that it was good, gritty entertainment.

Yeah, so, cool. 

usually paul rudd is damned hilarious. :P 

Watchmen (2008) - pretty good adaptation of the source material and a pretty good movie in its own right. There are a few downright bad scenes, and Malin Akerman is responsible for most of them, and there are a few overly gratuitous scenes, but on the whole it�s a pretty impressively paced and made film. It also works better when it sticks to the themes and characters of the source material rather than when Snyder demonstrates his obsessive fascination with slow mo (really a lot of the action scenes are very similar to 300 and just as ineffective). But by retaining most of what made the source material so good and by nailing the characters of Rorshach and Dr Manahattan, it still provides an entertaining deconstruction of the superhero myth.

7.5/10


Seven Days in May (1964) - excellent political drama from John Frankenheimer that will be familiar in terms of plot to anyone that has seen a season of 24. But the script has class, some of the dialogue is particularly well written and the performances from Burt Lancaster, Frederic March and Kirk Douglas are strong. It feels a bit overlong, especially since the plot is too familiar these days, but there is enough quality in Frankenheimer's classical style to keep you interested throughout.

7.5/10


Les Enfants Terribles (1954) - a collaboration between Jean Cocteau and Jean Pierre Melville but it really does bear Cocteau's stamp on it much more than Melville's minimalist style. Having said that, it�s also noticeably less surreal than Cocteau's other works, presumably because Melville's realism compromised Cocteau from maintaining his more preferred approach. Otherwise, its basically a more likeable version of what Bernardo Bertolucci tried with The Dreamers, with two siblings isolating themselves from the world and creating their own world to live in until reality catches up with them as they grow up.

6.5/10


Robin Hood Series One - I'm a bit of a sucker for medieval set movies/shows and this one nicely fits the bill despite never really being above average. Shot in and around a hungarian forest, it looks fabulous and although the episodes follow a formula and are pretty hard to tell apart in terms of plotting, it�s a lot of fun. Keith Allen chews as much scenery as he can as the sheriff of nottingham which provides a nice contrast to the otherwise straight faced nature of the show.


6-6.5/10 

She is pretty WET isn't she :S.

I didn't notice the slo-mo apart from the start. Maybe because I much prefer it to the MTV-style chop-a-thon that ruins plenty of action scenes in plenty of films. 

So no BSG fans on this board, I take it? Or are there any thoughts on the finale / series as a whole? 

because I could never work out if it was any good or just a cult thing like star trek :) 

well, it is to some, but it's actually a great show which deals with a lot of interesting topics (militarism, AI, what constitutes life, terrorism, religion, racism, war, love,...), and it's one of the very few sci fi shows that don't use the fact that they're sci fi as a plot device. It's simply the setting in which the story takes place. There are no space monsters, there's no techno babble etc. like you may know from star trek. It's about the characters first, which is what all the great shows have in common.

In fact, every person I have showed the pilot to became hooked instantly, even those who usually loathe sci fi. I would really suggest you give it a try because I think based on your taste in movies that you might like it. Plus it has a fantastic soundtrack! Just go get the miniseries plus a couple of episodes from the first season. If you're not convinced by then, you probably never will be. 

Liked the originals :) 

Yeah great show, the finale was a mixed bag in my opinion, careful, SPOILERS ahead!


It feels like they cut off all the lose ends with the "religion" thing, which annoys me. It would have been ok if there was just one religious aspect (Kara, or Gaius and Caprica's imaginery friends) but having two kinda sucked. I also can't imagine a people that would willingly get rid of all their technology, but I guess they've been on the run from their own machines for a while now, so I guess it's believable in context.
The first half of the finale was bloody awesome.

I'll miss my weekly BSG. =(