The Chronicles Of…

Avatar. Saw it last night. It drew me in. I liked it.

I didn’t have great expectations of this movie, given what I already new of the story line, but I was suprised at how much I enjoyed it. My brother reckoned it was worth the price of admission just for the visuals, and he’s probably right.

Really, my only big hang up is the name of the precious mineral which is really the catalyst behind the story… They called it “unobtainium”. This is all a little John Bunyan/Pilgrim’s Progress for my liking…

Why not just go completely obvious and call the main characters Evil Villian, Hero, and Love Interest? Dumb.

Anyway, I’d go see it at the movies if I were you. Fairly spectacular.

I was reading Tom’s blog and noticed his mention of James Gandolfini as a character in ‘Where the Wild Things Are’.

Now I can’t possibly think of Mr Gandolfini as anyone other than Tony Soprano. He was that character, and that character was him. I’ve seen him in a few other films, playing other roles, but I’ll never be able to see him as anyone else. Blame that on scripts/ acting talent/ production/ whatever, the character in the show was made real for me.

There are other actors out there who have made characters their own, and can never really move on. I think of most of the cast of ‘The Bill’ for example, who will probably never move on and get a different role.

But what about in other areas of life, beyond TV or film – are there characters in books that you’ve read, and imagined to look a certain way, that could just never be different, no matter how they were portrayed in a film? Or a definitive version of a song, whether it’s by the original composer or a particulalry inspired cover version. Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah comes to mind. No matter how many times I hear someone play that song, the version that I’ll always be comparing it to will be the one I heard on ‘Grace’, that starts with a sigh and ends with an amazingly sustained falsetto note.

Or your nanna’s sausage rolls, or your first kiss with ‘that person’, or whatever… what are some of the things that have set the benchmarks in your life?

James and I went to the movies last night and saw District 9.

It’s an Alien flick but it’s not like any alien flick you’ve seen! It really is different and also brilliant! What I particularly like was the subtle satire of all the big american end of the world alien movies like independence day etc… An alien space craft that looks very similar to that of independence day settles not over Washington or New York, but over Johannesburg South Africa… And the aliens, far from being hostile overlords, are vulnerable refugees (which is why I guess they picked the continent of Africa…)

I think there are some intentional parallels drawn with the apartheid in SA and some of the current refugee issues on that continent, certainly there’s a stab at the Nigerian scammers.

It’s a bit “Hot Fuzz” is structure, with a slower moving first half and then some very fast moving bloody action for the second. It’s bloody, but not too hard to handle… a few bodies exploding and the occasional head and limb torn off… you know, Shaun of the Dead style.

Anyway, I liked it. Worth the money to see at the cinema or at least a must DVD rental.

Here’s a movie trailer for you, at first it looked a little, cheap old laughs, but by the end I thought it was funny and want to see it.

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

…is the exciting cheese.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace as much as the next guy (and he seemed to like them a lot), but they didn’t feel like James Bond films… they just felt like generic action films, owing a lot to the Bourne series.

What I missed were the essential Bond elements of:

1. Super Car
2. Gadgets
3. Exciting Cheese

The first two speak for themselves, but to explain the third, I’ll simply use an example:

Notice the way the Bond theme music is used throughout, then suddenly comes in at the dramatic moment when you think he’s about to die?

Now that is James Bond.

I saw Tropic Thunder the other night and damn it was funny!

the premise for the movie is fantastic, basically it’s the making of the making of a film. It really takes a good dig at Hollywood. Robert Downey Jr’s character is a bit of a take off of Russell Crow (his character is a white Australian actor with a bit of a temper and a strong emphasis on method acting…) essentially he plays a white man playing a black guy throughout the movie and it’s a crack up!

An extra brilliant feature of this film is that it starts without you really knowing it’s started… the movie begins with a (fictional) candy bar ad and some movie previews which again are a wonderful satire of the real things. When the fake previews started everyone in the cinema was like “what the hell is going on?” are they really selling that product/making that move?” and then you get the joke. Brilliant.

This movie is worth your money at the cinema. I was even still laughing on way home when I thought about some of the lines.

P.S. beware some naughty language. Although I should mention here that the movie is not a gross humour style movie… some stupidity yes, but not like the really puerile humour you get with some of the other movies of recent times – you know the ones…

Fi and I saw Get Smart at the $7.50 lounge cinema in Byron Bay.

I was expecting the same sort of silliness that the TV show had but I was surprised…

Maxwell Smart was not the same incompetent buffoon of the TV series! In fact in this movie MAx is quite competent… He’s a crack shot with a gun, he can fight, and he lateral problem solving skills. They’ve even mixed in a bit of Dr Phil with his character… This is not the TV Maxwell Smart and I’m guessing they’re trying  really hard to justify this movie as different from the 80’s Get Smart movie.

The laughs aren’t too bad in this movie. There are some great lines but there are some cheap laughs as well. Don’t expect a laugh a minute and don’t pay $15.50, it’s more of a DVD movie and it’s a movie that will please the kids more than an adult but it’s a good flick – not great but good.

From a fantastically bad film called Mac and Me:

Whilst this could be referring to my continued efforts at fitness, it’s also the title of a movie we saw this evening.

It’s quite funny, with a number of ‘guffaws’, but I wasn’t moved to hold the seat in front of me, whilst choking with laughter, which is my mark of a ‘classic film’ (see Hot Fuzz).
It had many of the elements of the other Simon Pegg films (such as Dylan Moran), but missed a few others (Nick Frost, and “you’ve got red on you”).

Well worth a DVD viewing, but probably not worth $15. We used some movie vouchers that we’d been given last year, so it was probably well worth what we paid…

I enjoyed the preview for the new Will Ferrell film (Semi-Pro), so that could be my next venture to the city of expensive drinks and popcorn…