Whinehouse

I guess now is a good time to admit to having watched an awful film at the weekend. I feel like I spend more time watching crap movies than actually decent ones that are more worthy of my time. I really have to draw a bold line at how far I am willing to take this in the name of irony.

Lost River Lake was a thriving resort... Until they discovered Piranhas.

Killer Mutant Piranhas, in fact.

I honestly don't feel the time investment was worthwhile enough to give a detailed plot summary about this movie. JLM, who also had the misfortune of watching this, and who is much better at summarising these films in a way that does the time wasted watching this justice, will likely give one. But here is a basic summary, which contains spoilers for anyone who really cares.

Some small time female detective who is 2/3rds bloodhound is set on the trail of a ruthless corporate tycoon's missing niece. They've gone missing in some remote rural village. She ends up dragging this unlikeable 'protagonist' along to investigate some dodgy shack deep in the bowels of the hills. This event culminates in genetically altered piranhas, which have an insatiable appetite for human flesh and an ability to survive in salt water, being released into the river, and a frantic scientist being brain damaged by a mini aquarium. The only way to stop them is, for some contrived reason, to ride a rickety raft up river to warn people of the approach of these piranhas. Numerous dogs, white trash, racist negroes etc. are laid to waste by the piranhas, with the protagonists predictably arriving too late to be of any real help. The scientist commits suicide in the most baffling fashion. Many, many second-long shots of piranhas advancing shown to the sounds of a dissonant string chord are shown, as well as the legs of insouciant, immortal children frolicking in the resort upstream. High quality tension. Lots more boring stuff happens in between, but eventually the piranhas wreak havoc at the resort and almost get to the sea only to be poisoned by the main hero's release of toxic waste from some rig, which is about the only good thing he does. Also, the entire endeavour is rendered futile, as the film suggests the piranhas made it to sea where they can terrorise the nation's water dwellers anyway. Ugh. Questionable event writing. Pointless extra characters. Loathsome protagonists. Irritating film.

Oh CEX...

I 100% agree on principle, especially as I have a lovely shiny 40" TV myself. However, sometimes the cinema trip just has to be done. I'd love to kidy myself and say that my TV and a good sound system recreate the cinema experience but it simply isn't true. Some movies are meant to be blared at volumes you could never legally use in your house and on a screen the size of a building.

 

Inglorious Basterds has some showpiece aural and visual moments that make it one of those films. I would urge you to bite the bullet and go and see it on the big screen. It's an 18 too, so pick a weird showtime at a particularly pedantic cinema and you'll cut out at least some of the annoying kid factor.

 

We have 2 cinemas in Northampton. Both are chav infested.

 

I actually bent the rules not so long ago (one month today to be exact). My son wanted to watch Harry Potter and as me and his mum were flying off on our honeymoon without him 2 days later I felt abliged to take him. I wanted to see it too, but I would have waited. Inglorious Basterds is purely for me, so the rules must be obeyed.

Admirable resolution, but you're missing out. The cinematic experience really adds to the effect of this film (I, too, have also seen it twice now). Plus, it was actually fun to observe how the audience were feeling the tension the second time round. I found the fellow cinema-goers didn't detract from the experience at all. As JLM said, 18 certificates generally cut down the pre-pubescent annoyance, and if you hit a late night viewing in a week or so, you'd probably have the screen mostly to yourself.

Greg James is a friend of a friend who I've met a couple of times before he became a Radio 1 DJ. He's pretty affable as you'd expect, and seems a lot like I remember him on the radio.

In my first year of university, I also found an injured Ricky Wilson by the roadside in Leeds as he'd been hit-and-run. He'd hurt his foot quite bad. As much as I dislike the man, I politely waited with him for an ambulance to come as he kept droning on about wanting to go home and watch Phone Booth...

It also had bizarre little robots that resembled something between daleks and bins, which would explode if you even accidentally grabbed them, taking off well over half of your health. Little bastards.

It pleases me to see the love for Yoshi's Island and Quake. Both are fine games that look strange in a direct juxtaposition with each other.

I've recently had a bash on Yoshi's Island, but now I've got a Quake urge. I've never really played the PC version. May have to do some scouting...

That said, I think we should all have a chuckle at the CD32 pad anyway:

 

http://www.thosewerethedays.de/items/joyst...ga_cd32_pad.jpg

 

Jesus Christ.

That thing needs to be humanely euthanised.

Thought I'd post my list, apologies as it does go on a bit:

15. Worms Armageddon (PC)

Painfully addictive and often cruelly unfair, this game deserves praise because the mechanics are so user-friendly and simple. That

I watched Angel-A earlier this week.

*SPOILERS* In case anyone really wants to see this.

Directed by Luc Besson (which was quite surprising, given how understated the film is), it's about a deadbeat loser named Andr

Two entries so far for me (heelo 3 and harvest moon). Two quotes in there too. For the record I hate excel and all it stands for. Charts would be grand though. Sterling work on the presentation front garrence, nicely done.

Damn, I thought you loved it with all the spreadsheet based distractions. I guess it's making the most of a bunch of rocks for entertainment.

Yes, I also forgot to praise the presentation. Screenshots are nice, and I think people are pleased there are quite a few UKFF quotes. I've had 1 of my picks so far and I honestly don't expect another to appear. Being quoted was nice, but reading it back, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense

One thing, which is personal opinion, is I'd rather not have the list of what will come beforehand. There's something satisfying about scrolling down to see them. I couldn't help myself when I saw the list and began reading it. It's silly, as I will find out imminently what the countdown is, but I wanted to know if it's just me who thinks this...

Wow, you possibly enjoy Excel more than JLM, and that is a tough accolade to acquire... Nevertheless, it could be quite interesting to see charts.

I'm glad you cleared that up; I had since realised that you meant you were in a quandary over which SF entry you wanted to put into your personal submission, but I had initially interpreted it in the way I detailed. You seem to be on top of things... Carry on, carry on.

Fantastic. I guess the surprise entries make the countdown a whole lot more specific to the UKFF. Those are some good picks - I was totally toying with the idea of putting DKC 2 in there as my favourite game of the series, so am glad to see it represented. I went with another awesome SNES platformer instead. Man I hope it gets in there...

Lemmings is fantastic, though I never kept enough codes, and still don't think I ever did the first level of Mayhem difficulty. Maybe I should go back to it.

Hmm... Are you amalgamating votes for a series and choosing the one you feel best represents it, Black2? It's what I interepreted your quote that went with SFIV as. I'd just be interested to know whether you counted individual votes for individual games, or chose to represent one of a series depending on the modal value. Or perhaps both, if they got enough votes. Share your mystery...

I haven't. It's on the list along with "The Women". And now "Nick and Norah's infinite playlist". It sounds heartwarming.

 

More immediately, a friend has kindly bought me "Serving Sara" starring Chandler Matthew Perry and Liz Hurley. It was received somewhat poorly on release:

 

Reception

As of August 2007, the film had score of 18 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 26 reviews, indicating "extreme dislike or disgust." On Rotten Tomatoes, 5% of critics gave the film positive reviews based on 103 reviews (5 "fresh", 98 "rotten").

 

Oh my.

Much time was spent perusing CEX's cornucopia of shit rom-coms to find a film that had a balance of triteness and, erm, value.

I shouldered the shame of this purchase purely for a contemptuous review. It certainly sounded like it had the material to deliver the goods. Get writing!

A marriage of archaic, 14th Century (I think) monks and the technology to go to Mars somehow exist.

Steam punk, baby.

 

I am told it was a straight-to-DVD release, which is surprising given the nature of the film, but would explain things.

It wasn't, I saw it in the cinema...

 

... And thought it was pretty poor, to be honest. I can see how, if you get told it's straight to DVD, you'd be quite impressed. I didn't know anything about it going in other than it had John Malkovich in it, I just got a text one night inviting me along. I did like seeing steam punk stuff done to such a high degree, although I'm not really into that sort of stuff as much as some of my friends. Reading about it on Wikipedia the next day, it turned out it was loosley based on some RPG boardgame.

I will note that term. Many thanks!

Ah, my housemate has not got his facts straight. It did seem a bit odd given the nature of the film, it just must have been a crap copy of it because it looked really grainy. Unless that was the intention. In which case it adds little... But I understand your point; If I'd have paid to go see this film, I would have been very disappointed!

He kept hammering on that the storyline was very much like Resistance: Fall of Man, but I'm not familiar with it...

Mutant Chronicles

My housemates decided to alleviate boredom with a rental DVD from Blockbuster. Apparently, they asked for a recommendation and got this. I don't know why this would be the first thing you'd recommend, but I'll go with it...

It's about a doomed race of humans who must fight a war against the 'machines' that push them to the bring of extinction. A marriage of archaic, 14th Century (I think) monks and the technology to go to Mars somehow exist. Anyway, a few selected humans can be evacuated to go to Mars, the rest have to die. Standard stuff. But a monk decides he wants to assemble a crack team of people to go down into the Earth and destroy the machine. An army is not capable of doing this, but the explanation as to why is not very well given. It basically goes off to feature the team being assembled, briefed and sent down on the mission, which inevitably has them killed off in a predictable fashion. Nothing particularly original about it, though I'm always amused by a film that has no problem with who it kills off (a plane full of people is exploded early in the film, a little boy in particular is shown in the crux of the blast).

First things first, it is shot cheaply. Very cheaply. I am told it was a straight-to-DVD release, which is surprising given the nature of the film, but would explain things. It has a bizarre cast. The guy from Hellboy plays the monk who assembles the team. Devon Aoki stars as the token female marine (though there is a female monk who is nearly, so nearly kickass). John Malkovich stars as the head cheese who speaks in an annoyingly slow and intermittent manner. He also does practically nothing before he dies. Pah.

Anyway, about the actual film. It is badly acted. It is pretty predictable. But when you're told it's straight-to-DVD, you pretty much expect these things. However, it's also fairly entertaining for a night in watch. It's short enough to hold your attention, and it doesn't hang around with the action when it gets started. The backstory is uninteresting and boring, of course, but the action is capable of holding your attention as it keeps going until the end. The deaths are pleasingly spaced out. even though you can see half of them coming. My housemate correctly predicted in which order the characters would die from the moment they were assembled. Even though she did it in a very politically incorrect manner, the film makers must have been thinking along the same lines. Kudos to her, I guess.

It seems when you have low expectations for a film and it turns out decent, you generally tend to rate it more highly than it's worth. To be honest, I think that of this film - I expected shitness, and what I got was passable entertainment. Not bad for a night in that otherwise would have resulted in boredom, but there are tons of better films in this genre. I wouldn't exactly recommend it to anyone, so feck knows why a Blockbuster worker would. Pfft.

Haha, I totally lost interest in that review half way through. This is hard work!

J7M?

 

I like that one. Replace the "7" with "L" and you're onto a winner there.

 

I like EWWChris' suggestion almost as much as Ulf's. They definitely have similar levels of quality and originality.

But it makes it look like your kid will just be an evil version of you! If Nintendo has taught me anything in 21 years, it's that upside-down letters = unspeakable evil.

A dark tale of racist violence and its aftermath, from British academic and critic Bigsby (Still Lives, 1996, etc.). In Tennessee, at an unspecified moment in the 20th century, various elemental characters are brought together in a heavy moral fable of humanity, racism, redneck violence and dogged lawmaking. False accusations of rape in a country store lead to the lynching of Johnson, an innocent black man whose 14-year-old son James is struck dumb after witnessing the murder. Poor local field hand Jake Benchley, who tried to defend Johnson, is punished, too: beaten, burned and branded on the chest with letters to signify that he's a "nigger lover." James helps Jake to recover, then defends him when two of the lynch-mob's inbred brothers threaten to shoot him, gunning them down instead. Now the mismatched pair goes on the run, with the rest of the brothers in hot pursuit as well as the sheriff, whose miraculous powers of deduction are on a par with the lynch-mob's tracking skills and instinctive logic. Bigsby's parable is melodramatic and breathless, generally more heavily focused on the bloody and busy, sometimes superhuman foreground action than the motivation behind events, although there are moments of introspection and lyrical, even sentimental reverie. All points of view are expressed, and all with some sympathy, although sometimes (especially in the dialogue) not all that authentically. The author's message lies partly in the bond that develops between James and Jake, partly in the mood of inescapable doom that plays itself out in the final scene in Indian territory. A brief, intense, self-conscious stab at an American tragedy. (Kirkus Reviews)

 

I wasn't expecting much from it, and picked it up last night just to have a quick flick through and it grabbed me. It's very engaging. I'm almost through it now, it's only 180 pages.

Heh, sounds like a hefty read. You're gonna need to go hug some bunnies after that. But it seems that such intense books are often that short, and that's partly what makes them engaging. All that intensity crammed into a meagre few pages, it's like a literary orgasm.

I'm, er... 'reading', as I have been for the past 5 years, Crime & Punishment. Some day in the distant future, I imagine I will finish this. Many a tale has come and gone whilst I've attempted this and the satisfaction of finishing this mighty task promises to be overwhelming. Or so I tell myself...

I recently watched The Science of Sleep, which is a rather artistic and incredibly surreal French (actually, the majority of the film was in English for storyline purposes) film directed by Michel Gondry. His inspired music videos are enough to make me watch his films anyway. And Eternal Sunshine doesn't hurt either. It's about this run-of-the-mill guy who falls in love with his neighbour but fails miserably (yet highly amusingly) to win her affections. Except he also becomes some kind of creative genius/borderline loon when he falls asleep. As you do. A nice, feel good film with a bizarrely unclear line between dreams and reality and some pretty amusing outbursts of speech, I'd recommend it as a watch for anyone who is amused by unpredictable, random occurences leading to even more unpredictable situations. Or if your sense of humour goes well with things that make little or no logical sense.

It's surprisingly hard to accurately rate a good film! Ninja Tiger/Ninja Terminator have spoilt me for easy 'reviews'...