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Post by Philip Ayres on Oct 19, 2012 10:05:08 GMT
Ooooo, Stephen Fry Documentary Boxset for £8 in The Works: America, Last Chance to See, Secret Life of the Manic Depresive and Wagner
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Post by legios on Oct 20, 2012 19:03:26 GMT
"The Awakening", last years Brit-horror flick which I missed on its very short theatrical run emerged from my rental queue this week. Good grief, it is a rare film that puts the fear in to me in quite the way this one did - and in my own living room too.
A perfect example of why horror works best without gore, intenstines etc. "The Awakening" has absolutely masterful timing and a truly assured use of camera and sound. It knows the difference between frightening an audience and disgusting them (something that so much modern horror seems to have either forgotten or willfully discarded).
Actually, watching it has made me realize that it isn't horror that I have ever disliked. More that it is Splatter that I have no time for as a genre. I think next year might see me make a bit of a deeper foray into horror as a genre, in search of more of the good stuff in the genre.
Karl
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Post by The Doctor on Oct 20, 2012 19:06:11 GMT
I have similar thoughts re: the type of horror that works for me. The Awakening is indeed a damn good film. Proper British ghost story. This year's version of The Women In Black also worked for me on a similar level: sound, imagery and atmosphere used to spook rather than entrails or buckets of gore.
-Ralph
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Post by Andy Turnbull on Oct 21, 2012 18:33:48 GMT
I saw one of the Marvel animated films yesterday - Next Avengers.
I shall never see that time again, poor animation, poor voice acting, bland story.
Andy
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Post by legios on Oct 21, 2012 18:55:21 GMT
I saw one of the Marvel animated films yesterday - Next Avengers. I shall never see that time again, poor animation, poor voice acting, bland story. Andy I haven't seen Next Avengers. I got off to a decent start with the Marvel Animated films with "Planet Hulk" and then the two "Ultimate Avengers" films undid all the goodwill that the former had built up. This year's version of The Women In Black also worked for me on a similar level: sound, imagery and atmosphere used to spook rather than entrails or buckets of gore. -Ralph I also managed to miss that at cinema as well. It rests in my rental queue and will be watched in due course. Karl |
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Post by Andy Turnbull on Oct 21, 2012 19:18:27 GMT
Yeah Planet Hulk remains the high point of the Marvel Animated films by quite some margin.
Andy
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Post by The Doctor on Oct 21, 2012 19:25:25 GMT
The only one of them I actually thought was any good was the Doctor Strange one. That was great!
The low point was the Iron Man animated feature (punted out a few years before the live-action films). It was unspeakably dreadful.
Actually out of the Marvel and DC DVD animated features the one that came closest to proper greatness was New Frontier though it was fatally crippled by the enforced short running time. Generally for me: straight to DVD comics based animated feature = not good enough to broadcast. Long since lost interest in keeping up with them.
-Ralph
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Post by The Doctor on Oct 23, 2012 18:24:23 GMT
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Post by Grand Moff Muffin on Oct 23, 2012 20:09:57 GMT
Magnificent, Ralph. Just watched it straight through. Can't believe I missed this on the telly. Thanks for drawing it to my attention! Martin |
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Post by Marc Graham on Oct 23, 2012 20:34:26 GMT
Patrick Stewart gets about - saw him on the Daily show the other week (and quite amusing he was too!)
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Post by Bogatan on Oct 23, 2012 20:44:10 GMT
I'm always surprised when I see him being funny and I dont know why as he has a great track record. Extras, Family Guy/American Dad/Cleveland Show and more recently the narrator in the movie Ted. And as Marc said as replacement John Oliver on the Daily Show. Also his one man A Christmas Carol was laugh out loud funny in a couple of places.
I suppose its due to always expecting serious Capt. Picard/Prof X.
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Post by The Doctor on Oct 23, 2012 20:54:10 GMT
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Post by Andy Turnbull on Oct 28, 2012 21:12:17 GMT
Cool as Ice - starring Vanilla Ice.
Why this isn't an internet meme farm is beyond me, so utterly mental and he also gets to beat up one of the tv Superboy's.
Andy
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Post by legios on Nov 4, 2012 17:56:30 GMT
"Cool as Ice" is indeed well and truly mental. I wasn't sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't anything as wonderfully bonkers as that!
This weekend I have pretty much been restricted to the couch by the Space Lurgy, so I have had plenty of time to be watching things. As well as the Mark Gatiss european horror documentary I also spent yesterday evening watching "The Woman in Black (the recent version with Daniel Radcliffe). Now that is how to scare folks good and proper - a genuinely frightening film which manages to induce a goodly amount of fear with nothing other than very clever use of sound. The highlight of the film is an extended sequence where Radcliffe has the screen to himself, and all of the fear and unease comes from audio landscape. Good, old fashioned gothic stuff. Genuinely well-crafted stuff.
I have also spent a while watching black and white episodes of "The Adventures of Sir Lancelot" with William Russell (Doctor Who's Ian Chesterton) in the title role. These are great slices of classic adventure series - tales of knightly deering-do and righting of wrongs in twenty-five minutes with fair maidens to rescue, foolish, boorish or villianous knights to be shown the error of their ways and always time for a good british sword-fight. It is all very entertaining fight - Russell's Sir Lancelot is more in the square-jawed, noble and upright hero mold than the more flawed Mallory/modern revisionist version, Russell puts such an energy and a liveliness into the role that he is terribly likeable. The highlight is Merlin however, a performance fast becoming one of my favourite screen Merlins. Rather than a brooding sorcerer this Merlin is an out-and-out charlatan, using simple parlour tricks with smoke-bombs, invisible ink, magnifying glasses and the like to pretend to be a mysterious magician - which may fool the rest of the court but neither Lancelot nor the audience. Merlin is an absolutely fantastic turn and the show would be worth it for him alone even if Lancelot wasn't in it!
Karl
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Post by legios on Nov 11, 2012 19:37:33 GMT
This weekends DVD movie was a voyage back to the early eighties for "Wheels on Meals" - the second last film to team up Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung.The general premise - two friends who own a mobile kitchen help out an old detective acquaintance and a beautiful pickpocket didn't initially sound promising, but on the other hand I always love a film where Sammo Hung directs Jackie, he does tend to get the best out of him - whereas Jackie most enjoys slapstick physical comedy and a good physical stunt Sammo is very old-school about getting good crisp martial arts technique on screen so he does tend to concentrate his old friends and get the very best out of him physically.
I needn't have worried though - "Wheels on Meals" is a cracking example of a Hong Kong summer movie - some good comedy (Richard Ng's turn in a guest role is great), a great car chase, a really entertaining three-handed "sneak into a castle" sequence and some absolutely fantastic fight sequences. The real stand-out aspect of the film however is the fact that it was entirely filmed in Spain - rather than on the Golden Harvest backlot or some random now-vanished Hong Kong location. It really looks like Sammo relished the opportunity to film overseas - and that he really liked Gaudi's architecture as he seems to have been determined to show it off as much as possible.
Karl
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Post by Grand Moff Muffin on Nov 15, 2012 20:26:12 GMT
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Post by legios on Dec 16, 2012 19:54:14 GMT
I have been watching the pilot of "Space: Above and Beyond" this weekend. I'd seen bits of the series, but only in a very disjointed way - I caught a few episodes in the wee small hours when I was in New Zealand but missed the UK airing. I'd quite liked what I had seen of the show but it was nice to see the very beginning. It is quite striking how well they nailed the tone of the show right out of the gate. Pacific Theatre World War II in space was something that I'd really only seen done by the Wing Commander games previously, and "Space" manages to pull it off with so much more aplomb than the movie adaptation of Wing Commander. There is no Wing Commander movie. It never existed! Yes, quite right Shadow....sorry about that...
Anyway - the pilot for Space does the obligatory boot camp sequence really well - there is nothing like having an actor who has not only played Drill Instructors but actually been a DI to get the quality of the shouting just right! The characters are all pretty much stereotypes, but the actors do a decent job of making them likeable stereotypes.
The effects work may have dated a little now but it does have some really nice design decisions - having separate designers for the Earth and alien hardware means that they really do look like they came out of completely different mindsets. The Earth carrier - which I suspect is going to be "home" for the rest of the series has a wonderful functional look to it as well. Essentially a brick, with gun turrets and a bridge.
I shall stick the rest of the series in my rental queue and see how it shapes up I think.
Karl
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Post by Andy Turnbull on Dec 16, 2012 22:02:15 GMT
It's a great series, at the time I was gutted when it was cancelled, but looking back it was a good point to end it on.
Andy
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kayevcee
Fusilateral Quintro Combiner
The Weather Wizard
Posts: 5,527
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Post by kayevcee on Dec 17, 2012 1:14:31 GMT
I followed this series as best I could by virtue of our VHS timer back in the day, when it was on C4 any time between 1 and 2 a.m on Sunday nights. It's great stuff. Like Futurama it seemed like they knew they were doomed to cancellation well in advance and put out all their big ideas in the space of those 13 episodes.
-Nick
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Post by The Doctor on Dec 17, 2012 8:11:05 GMT
Doom laden SF war series suit a shorter run. *cough BSG cough*
-Ralph
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Post by legios on Dec 17, 2012 12:58:41 GMT
It's great stuff. Like Futurama it seemed like they knew they were doomed to cancellation well in advance and put out all their big ideas in the space of those 13 episodes. -Nick Judging by some of the comments in the commentary on the pilot and the associated special feature that is pretty much the way it went down. As early as when episode five was airing they apparently noticed in the meetings when they were running upcoming episode ideas past the network folks that they were just getting uninterested nods, folk looking at their watches, and they started to get fewer and fewer notes from the network. They seem to have figured at that stage that their renewal was somewhat dicey, so they decided to put the foot down and move swiftly through the metaplot. Karl |
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Post by Shockprowl on Dec 17, 2012 20:43:04 GMT
Space: Above and Beyond! Blimey, I loved that show. Wasn't it on BBC initially?
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Post by The Doctor on Dec 17, 2012 20:44:51 GMT
It was on BBC2, often at 2 in the morning!
-Ralph
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Post by blueshift on Jan 13, 2013 18:10:28 GMT
Absolutely no idea where to put this. Someone has made a live-action Toy Story!
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Post by The Doctor on Jan 13, 2013 18:18:58 GMT
I tried to watch that. I really did.
-Ralph
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Post by Philip Ayres on Jan 17, 2013 23:57:07 GMT
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Post by Andy Turnbull on Jan 17, 2013 23:57:46 GMT
I happened to catch this on air when I was drawing.
Thoroughly enjoyable.
Andy
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Post by Philip Ayres on Jan 18, 2013 0:07:28 GMT
More to come too
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Jan 27, 2013 15:48:28 GMT
I occasionally watch Dog The Bounty Hunter
on the subject of Patrick Stewart....he does voiceovers for ads such as Moneysupermarket.com + others
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Post by legios on Jan 28, 2013 21:50:11 GMT
This weekend I finished off the last few episodes of "Space: Above and Beyond". Some series run too long, some are killed too soon - SAAB is neither of these. By being cancelled at the end of the first season - and through the producers being fairly sure from relatively early that they were done - the show was allowed to go out at the height of its powers. And what a back half of the season it is - "Sugar Dirt" is a fine study of people under extremes of pressure, and the last two episodes just get to deliver a half-seasons worth of gutpunches about the overarching plot in two hours. There is some lovely character development going on in the series as well. They may have been constrained to do the traditional stand-alone hour stories but the writers and the actors laced some really nice thematic stuff about the characters through them nevertheless - Vansens development from someone who wants to be the kind of officer she remembers her parents being to, by "Sugar Dirt", being a sterling example of a combat officer, Hawkes journey to discover what "family" means (I'm not usually fond of the whole American TV "family" thing, but here it is really nicely underplayed) .
I am very surprised by how well the show holds up as a whole. Every so often you see a piece of effects work that you realise could be done much more easily nowadays, but the CG work has such a modern feel to the way it is lit that it is very striking. The general sense and feel of the effects work isn't far removed from Zoic's work on Firefly or Battlestar Galactica.
Much as the ending saddens me in terms of witnessing what happens to some of the characters I've followed it feels so in keeping with the tone of the series that I don't think any other ending would have been quite so fitting. I don't think I regret that it was only one season long, I think rather I am pleased that it delivered 22 hours of really good quality Mil-SF, I'll class that as "Mission Accomplished" I feel.
Karl
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