More movies

Another batch of watched DVDs to report on...

Day Watch
The follow-up to Night Watch, sensibly enough! Not as good as the first, but still an interesting journey through a stylish fantasy world, with a uniquely Russian flavour. The effects are great, and trying to work out what exactly is going on kept me watching.

Poseidon
One word: Spectacle. Josh Lucas and Kurt Russell are excellent co-leaders, and the supporting cast was also successful in making me care enough about them to not want them to die (with one exception, watch and see if you can guess who annoyed me). Especially good was seeing Mia Maestro in a non-Alias role.

Bender's Big Score
The long-awaited first of three straight to DVD Futurama movies, this is an excellent addition to the 4 series I've rewatched so many times. 90 minutes of mind-bending time travel, in-jokes aplenty, nude aliens and Fry's butt. For the truly nerdy (i.e. me) there's even a video lecture on the maths of Futurama.

10 Things I Hate About You
I'd only seen this once (or maybe twice) before, but after my latest viewing I'm surprised this hasn't been one of my fallbacks for more frequent viewing. Lots and lots of laughs, relationships you can root for and a happy ending. Hurrah!

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One more

Slither
Eager for a Nathan Fillion fix? Not bothered by some (read as 'lots of') gratuitous gore? This just may be for you. Plenty of laughs to be had, largely through Fillion's Bill Pardy character and his realistic reactions to the craziness of alien worm infestation. Not for the squeamish, but enjoyable for others.

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Spider-Man 3

I finally got around to watching this, and wasn't disappointed. There's a weird tonal change a bit over halfway through the movie, as an alien parasite turns Peter Parker into 70's John Travolta, but that's funny rather than jarring. Venom looks great, and the fight scenes suitably one-up the earlier movies.

What else?

And since I finally found the receipt telling me what other DVDs I'd seen the past few weeks...

The Illusionist - You can't go wrong with Edward Norton, and this is a moody murder mystery very different to what I'd expected.

Pan's Labyrinth - Meshes the horrors of the real world seamlessly with fantasy elements to create a distinctly Guillermo del Toro vision. Don't watch this if you're looking for some chuckles, but it's the movie equivalent of a compulsive page turner, really drawing you through to the end.

Hot Fuzz - Just as good the second time around, and having watched the first season of Spaced (with many of the same creative talents involved) since I saw this at the cinema, it's enjoyable seeing just how many of the action techniques were already in place back on Spaced, just cranked up to a larger scale here.

X-Men 3 - Some cool set pieces, but ultimately lacking the sense of real threat which X2 had.

Click - Not the laugh-fest the premise suggests, really focuses more on opportunities lost, with the middle third quite dark... then again... Kate Beckinsale!

Doom - Not bad as videogame adaptations go (at least I'd actually played the game in this case). A couple of surprises, but really it's all about the first person shooter scene which comes late in the movie.

Trontastic

The past 2 weeks have been quite a health struggle, with first my fatigue and then a return of nausea. Neither has been so extreme as to require time off work, or even a return to the doctor (yet), but it's taken up all of my energy and concentration just to get through each day, meaning blogging has been low on my priority stack.

In an attempt to push past this latest illness bout, I've returned to walking, thankfully enabled by a couple of awesome, warm days this weekend. A little over 3 hours of traipsing the suburbs since I got home from work Friday, with DVD watching in between to ensure recovery.

So, what have I been watching?

Tron - I hadn't seen this since my early teens, and I was surprised how well the effects hold up. Maybe I'm viewing it through nostalgic, old-school computing eyes, but it almost made me want to return to coding again.

Alexei Sayles' Stuff - a blast from my mid-teens past, this was mandatory viewing for me on TV back in the laste 80's. And it still has plenty of laughs. If you want to see socialist philosophers advertorialising press-on nails and hair curlers, this is the comedy for you.

The Late Show Presents Bargearse and The Olden Days - Far too many years in coming to DVD, but still genuinely funny, with a few extra tastes of other Late Show sketches.

Thank God You're Here S2 - Sadly only 10 eps long, but this is an even stronger season than the first, which was already hilarious.

The 4400 S3 - Another excellent season, with heaps of surprises all too rare on TV. Thankfully a 4th season is being made, so the story continues.

Why movies are...

... awesome

• The Simpsons Movie lived up to my expectations, and really ramped up the scale of animation, and took advantage of the longer run time. Plenty of laughs, great in jokes, and pretty much every character who's ever appeared in an episode shows up.

... crappy

• $15.50 for a ticket.
• It took 3 staff 10 minutes to get through the 4 people in line in front of me.
• I got into the cinema 10 minutes after the movie was supposed to start, and still had to wait another 5 minutes before the trailers even started.
• Is "Bratz" really a movie which will appeal to Simpsons fans?

Ah, just like the good old days of "the whinge"!

En garde

While I have no real aspiration to be a Director, I've quite enjoyed my first week of EL2 acting (with another 5-11 weeks to go). The transition has been far easier for me given that:

1. my team leader role had me overseeing 60% of the staff/projects in my section already,
2. I've been in the section for 18 months, and am familiar with all the clients and most of the systems,
3. my boss is still around, just in a changed role.

Pretty much the ideal intro :)

Outside of work, I've finished watching 3 seasons of Alias over the past month, along with plenty of Scrubs, a dash of Fawlty Towers and, over the past couple of days, several movies...

Boytown - I was always going to enjoy this, Mick Molloy and Co. never having let me down before. While there was not nearly enough Bob Franklin, and the ending was a bit "down", this was a good way to wind down the end of my working week.

Ghost Rider - The effects were very cool, Eva Mendes looked great, but otherwise it was only so-so. I admit I'm not any kind of big fan of the comic, but it just plain didn't grab me as a Rider newbie.

Pulse - One word: Kristen Bell :) It did a good job of being creepy, but hasn't scared me away from my computer...

Flippant excoriation

My DVD watching today, enumerated for your edification:

Gremlins - I haven't seen this since high school, so there were still some surprises. It's a weird mix of slapstick humour and gruesome death, along with still convincing puppetry. Plus Corey Feldman as a little kid!

16 Blocks - an excellent movie, once again showing the awesomeness of Bruce Willis, as well as another great character performance from Mos Def. Contained some genuinely surprising twists, and I'd definitely recommend this, if you want to see a variant on the world weary cop comes good genre.

The Break-Up - not really a feel good movie, I wouldn't say. Enjoyable enough, with a couple of funny patches, but probably darker than I like my romcoms (i.e. actually had moments of reality in it).

Peripheral exigency

Thanks to the B's generosity and complementary DVD library, I got to see the following five movies over the weekend:

American Dreamz
Some excellent comic characters, with unsubtle digs at current US policy (always welcome). Paul Weitz hits again, after American Pie and About A Boy also in his canon.

Bring It On - All Or Nothing
or, as I'd prefer to call it, Bring It On-est (the second sequel to Bring It On and Bring It On-er).
Stars the super-powered cheerleader from Heroes as... a cheerleader. I started off watching this a little critically, then thankfully stopped taking it even slightly seriously and enjoyed it thoroughly as a result. Some entertaining crunkin', lots of stereotypes and an unsurprising but cheery happy ending.

Harvard Man
I was expecting a stock-standard girl-whose-Dad-is-in-the-mafia tries to fix college basketball game using her boyfriend-the-point-guard, but instead it's some crazy drug-taking, FBI-college-professor-threesome, Al-Franken-cameoing trip. Weird.

... and the big Corey double ...
Just One Of The Girls
I can't believe I didn't watch this as a teen. I mean, c'mon, Nicole Eggert! Nonetheless, anyone believing Corey Haim as a female cheerleader... I guess it was the era of big shoulders!

Dream A Little Dream
I don't even know where to start with this. Old man dreams himself into Corey Feldman, and Corey doesn't seem that keen to resume his old life... the rest I'll leave to interested viewers to discover :) And, if you like it, there's even a sequel!

[DVD] Superman Returns

On the cutting edge of entertainment, as always, I finally got around to watching the continuation of the Superman movie saga...

And it was excellent! Brandon Routh was perfectly cast, and managed the duality of the Clark Kent/Superman roles really well. There were a few moments of inconsistency with Lois Lane, but through the script, rather than Kate Bosworth's performance. James Marsden was strong in his role as the third vertex of a love triangle. And you can't go wrong with Kevin Spacey and Parker Posey, as they balanced the comedic and dramatic needs of their characters perfectly.

I'd read that the movie was low on action, but I thought it had just the right balance between character and full-on spectacle.

A worthy addition to the Superman canon. (Plus, with 3 hours of making-of on the DVD, you're left in no doubt how it all came together).

[Movie] Nacho Libre

If you like dodgy accents, creative salad arrangement, spandex and the weirdest training montage you'll ever see, then this movie is for you.

A little of Jack Black's trademark song styling, extensive use of the word "crazy" and impressive fight choreography add up to a non-stop thrill ride of spills and chills... or, more accurately, a consistently laugh-inducing, warm and fuzzy 90 minutes well spent.

(Thanks for the invite B!)

[Movie] Cars

For someone who has no interest in cars, has a short attention span, and is easily irritated by people of all ages, it was a pleasant surprise that I loved "Cars" the movie.

The animation was spectacular, the characters were well defined stereotypes, and there were plenty of laughs (not just for the plethora of kiddies who shared the cinema). At 135 minutes long, I was expecting it to drag* at some stage, but I think the pacing was really good, and the lack of fidgeting in the tykes indicated the bright colours and loud noises were captivating them too :)

Or maybe I just like hanging with B, and wouldn't really care what movie we saw ;)

* definitely no pun intended...

[Movie] Mission: Impossible III

Lots of big explosions, cool stunts, some funny lines and great gadgets. These all added up to a very entertaining ride for a committed Impossibleite like myself.

This was only the second movie I've seen at the cinema this year, and after 4 ads vs 1 movie trailer, I was wondering why I forked out over $15 to be force-fed crap. Luckily they threw in a few more trailers, including X3 (yeah, baby!), and my ad-rage was narrowly averted...

Old Smokey

Back in the days when VHS videos were new-fangled technology, each member of our family had a single video tape with which to record their favourite shows. If you found a new favourite, you had to lose an old one. It's a little hard for me to comprehend, with 530+ DVDs and climbing, that I could ever have coped with only one movie to depend on. I must certainly have had more hobbies and interests to fill the time which now gets absorbed in devouring DVDs.

In 1986, and for several years afterwards, my one and only movie was Back To The Future. I never actually taped over that, but over the years saved up the small fortune necessary to buy a second blank tape, to keep Michael J. Fox and his Delorean available for regular watching. But before Mr. Fox's movie classic, my single video contained Smokey and The Bandit, and I loved that movie. My Dad was a truck driver, so imagining that his job was anything like Burt Reynold's exploits was pretty cool. After watching the latest Clerks 2 making-of clip yesterday, with the "Reynold's Style" theme, and discovering a conveniently priced copy of the DVD at lunchtime today, I'm once again in possession of one of my fondest childhood movie memories. Will it stand up to close inspection? I say it will. Prepare to be bombarded with "Breaker, breaker. 10-4 good buddy." for weeks to come :)

[DVD] The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Bill Murray once again proves how awesome he is. As with any Wes Anderson film, this isn't all about gut-busting laughs (although there are some of these) but gentle, subtle humour which leaves you feeling happy as the movie ends. Not as dark as The Royal Tenenbaums, stranger than Bottle Rocket, just a wonderful, thoguhtful ride.

[DVD] Be Cool

Vince Vaughn kicks comedy ass (no surprise there). The Rock was entertaining, as always, in a role you've never seen from him before. Andre 3000 carried across the humour evident in Outkast videos/music to a hilarious performance. Oh, and some little known performers called John Travolta, Uma Thurman and Harvey Keitel do their thing too. A thoroughly enjoyable Sunday afternoon diversion :)

DVDs good for my brain

OK, that's not exactly what this says, but I've been doing pretty well at entirely avoiding ads and TV news, and feeling much less ANGRY all the time. Admittedly, much of my DVD collection could not be classed as "food for the brain", but a guy's got to watch "Old School", "Road Trip", "Without A Paddle" and "American Pie 3" sometime...

Lackadaisical

I had a whole post-in-waiting prepared - Seeking a Calling - but after it got to 2 written pages, and rambled aimlessly for most of that, even I got bored with it.

Mostly it talked about searching for some kind of purpose for my life, and how my work doesn't seem to fit with what I want to be doing, which is building a strong team, seeing my team grow in skill and confidence thanks to my leadership. Once I'd gotten rid of 2 pages of whining, I decided to take one more try at converting my current role into what I want it to be, before I finally admit I'm due for some radical change in how I make my living, something which I can be passionate about, the way I used to be when I started at the ABS. So how did that plan work out today? Not too bad.

I kick started one of my projects, getting the only person who's free to do work with me involved and moving forward. Tomorrow I'll be meeting with another of my "virtual team" and that will also make me feel a little more relevant. Still nothing looking like keeping me busy, though, and I left after only 6 hours of work today because there's simply not enough to do. In the past I've run a team of 7, with 16 different projects on the go, and still had time to do some programming work. Right now, I have 2 projects (one of them very small) and only 1 staff member (who doesn't even directly report to me). Fairly obvious why I feel underutilised... because I am.

At least I made use of my extra time at home. Instead of sitting frustrated at work I got to do some weights (5th times in the past 16 days, which I'm pretty happy with), and watch WarGames, with Matthew Broderick (pre-Ferris) and Ally Sheedy (pre-Breakfast Club). It actually holds up OK, considering it's 22 years old and about computers. OK, we don't use 8" floppy disks much any more, or rotary dial phones, but I was won over by Ferris (I mean Matthew) changing his grades using a computer. Wait, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" is just a huge rip-off of "WarGames"!!! I can't believe I never saw it before...

[DVD] Runaway Jury

I just watched "Runaway Jury" last night, and was thoroughly impressed. I'm not usually a courtroom drama fan, but this had me genuinely interested throughout the entire 2 hour running time (impressive considering how unfocused and impatient I've been lately). Having talent like John Cusack, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman and Rachel Weisz involved certainly adds credibility to any movie, but I think the story was strong too, and I cared about what was going to happen.

While I'm hawking John Cusack's work, you should definitely catch "Grosse Point Blank" as well. I re-watched it during the week and it was even better than I remembered. Excellent supporting characters and a fantastic performance from JC make this conflicted and yet hilariously funny. Any movie which makes me laugh out loud consistently is a success in my book.

Uncle Orson agrees with me

Praise for Serenity from possibly my favourite author. Now I just have to wait till "Shadow of the Giant", book 4 in the Shadow series following on from the Ender saga, is released in paperback, to conform with the rest of my collection.