The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Really really bad, and it never ends. What the fuck? Similar to Forrest Gump but they took Tom Hanks and replaced him with a plank of wood. Also, where is Gary Sinise? 

I agree, I didn't enjoy it at all. It meandered, and took an extremely long time to get nowhere. I compare to to Aronofsky's The Fountain, another really long, pretentious, experimental love film from a talented director, except that The Fountain was far more interesting. 

Slumdog Millionaire

I was just happy not to be watching Benjamin Button. Also, this film is excellent. The plot is contrived, sure, but when seen as a modern day fable, that isn't necessarily a negative. It like it was dragged towards a modern pop-culture setting though. Also, dialogue is a little rough, and the end a little rushed. Those were the bad points, the rest is almost universally great. 

also, yeah Nynort, I see where you're coming from, but while they're both undoubtedly pretentious, the Fountain is interesting and mysterious (to me at least) and truly experimental, while Benjamin Button is just an emotional-fast-food, pseudo-intellectual oscar-fishing bucket of cocks, devoid of all merit.
Also, the Fountain looks pretty, and I like pretty pictures.


Sex Drive
I am something of a shit-teen-movie connoisseur as you may know, so when I say this is the greatest shit-teen-movie of the last few years, I hope you appreciate the weight of my sentiment. Us shit-teen-movie fans are simple beasts, as Hunter S. Thompson once said: "Too weird to live, and too rare to die", so I'll keep it simple:

Hilarity: Very high
Boob Count: Fairly Low
Stifler Count: Zero, but they got a guy that looks just like him and got him to play the same character. 

Madagascar 2: Boring, stupid, boring, clichee crap. Mild chuckle at best. Too much singing, crappy music. Might be fun for kids, but there are many so much better movies (for them). 

Crimson Tide : Enjoyed this very much, lots of suspense and felt very realistic (No idea if it is actually realistic). Good acting all round I thought.

U-571 : Yeah so I have a submarine fetish at the moment :P Historical inaccuracies aside I thought this was as good as crimson tide, but with weaker acting on the whole. Its always good to see Bill Paxton in a movie, and I was rooting for him to start shouting and flailing his arms around (game over man, game over!) but sadly he is quite subdued here.

The day the earth stood still : Seriously WTF, this remake was shit. Reeves basicly puts on his Neo acting profile but doesn't do anything other than talk. I wanted to throttle the kid by the end, and the female lead was quite forgettable but certainly better than the rest. I've not seen the original of this film so I cannot compare...

Rocknrolla : I heard this was Guy Ritchies return to greatness but overall I would call it OK. There are some moments of greatness (All involving Russians) but not enough to save the film from mediocrity imo. 

Recent Watches
#2666 posted by DaZ [80.41.151.213] on 2009/02/18 14:08:36
Crimson Tide : Enjoyed this very much, lots of suspense and felt very realistic (No idea if it is actually realistic). Good acting all round I thought.

Well, not really. I had the pleasure of watching this one with my brother who was a petty officer in the U S Navy for a decade and he was one of the guys responsible for one half of the code and pull pin that executes a launch. I got to enjoy</i. reaching over every ten minutes and telling me what was wrong with the current scene.

Two facts stay with me.

1) The petty officers of his position are armed at all times. When a senior officer gives them a command that breaks the nuclear protocol, the petty office is obliged under law to kill that officer.

2) Whenever a submarine loses communication for any length of time, they are obligated to return immediately to the port of origin and not execute previous orders. So if a Hackman did what he did, he would be coming back in freezer storage not as a court marshal. 

I did wonder about that, it did seem a bit strange that they would even consider launching nuclear missiles on possibly incomplete or cancelled orders.

Made for a good bit of suspense tho =) 

nuff said 

forget I said anything 

Rocknrolla : I heard this was Guy Ritchies return to greatness but overall I would call it OK. There are some moments of greatness (All involving Russians) but not enough to save the film from mediocrity imo.

Until the shit that is the essence of Madonna is cleansed from his soul expect mediocrity, and that is assuming she hasn't entirely sucked it dry and shat it our of her mummified ass. 

I treated myself to on my birthday after that last quote. 

I picked the icon that looked most like a shit. 

That movie is strangely Bergmanesque, btw. Not to be pretentious about it to justify watching it because you all know I have taste for shit, but it really does remind me of both Wild Strawberries and the Seventh Seal.

Cast Away?

Not a big Hanks fan here. I mean, I don't hate him, I'm just indifferent to his acting. Now Sinise as Lt Dan, fuckyeah, that was the only thing that made Gump remotely tolerable. 

If you haven't seen BubbaHotep, it is about a mummy who sucks people's souls from their ass orifices and then shits them out which destroys the souls for all eternity. Which is pretty much Madonna's MO. 

think Starbuck meant Swept Away.

and Daz, as far as submarine movies go, you cant go past Das Boot. 

But I am not gonna sit and watch a film for..what was it? 9 Hours? Is there some sort of sensible cut I could have a look at though? :P 

What! You, DaZ Boot, have not seen the movie yet?
Seriously not? My world collapses. And there is no icon to express my feelings.

The director's cut is 3 1/2 hours or something, just pause and return the next day. 

Spirit,
Petty Office Tom loves that movie, and he went apeshit happy when he recognized the villain in Beerfest (he played the First Officer). 

what nitin said, I meant swept away. I actually watched a good 20 mins of it too. Oh and I saw Audition last night, that is not the ideal date movie. 

like spirit said, the dir's cut is about 3.5 hrs. 

is an ideal last date movie 

Just watched Hoodwinked again (4th time I think). I still love it and highly recommend it. The animations are very crude at times, but overall it is miles ahead of the mainstream animation movies for me (especially after watching Madagascar 2 recently...).
A shame it is such an underdog. 

Just watched Hoodwinked. For a kids CG movie it's badass.

As you say, the actual graphics are a bit dated (on par with the early CG stuff like Toy Story, mebe a bit better), but the writing/acting/depth is a lot, lot better than majority of animated films. 

30 Rock Season 2 - even more uneven than the first series but the good episodes are worth wading through the all the mediocre ones. The show seems to have only one setup for a joke (someone makes a comment to the effect of "that can never happen" and then it does) which also makes it routinely predictable but luckily the performers are good enough to still milk the joke that you are expecting. But when it call comes together, as it does in about 3 episodes in this season, it can be very very funny.

6.5/10 (just)


Entourage Season 4 - still entertaining but there is definitely a feeling of lazy familiarity through the whole season, particularly with the storylines of Vince and Eric.

6.5/10


Lost Season 4 - probably the most consistent show on tv, it continues to toy with interesting ideas even though it keep stretching out its main story a little too unnecessarily and keeps adding more and more new characters for no particular reason. The use of flash forwards added a fresh dimension though and was used quite well too instead of just being a gimmick, hinting at the overall arc of the series.

7/10


Life Season 1 - it's pretty tragic when good characters get stuck in mediocre shows but that's Life I guess. Damian Lewis plays a cop who is released from prison and rejoins the force after being incarcerated for 12 years for a crime he did not commit. There is an overarching story about his investigation into who framed him but the general structure of the show is standalone police procedural episodes.

Unfortunately, despite good characterisations and performances, the standalone investigation episodes are just plain weak. To be fair, the longer the season goes, the better it gets but the early episodes are just plain bad. By the end of the season though, I was looking forward to more so overall I guess its worth a watch.

6-6.5/10


Rachel Getting Married (2008) - a little bit self indulgent at times but otherwise a fairly fine film from Jonathan Demme. I'm not quite sure the Dogme camerawork was all that necessary, and its particularly distracting in the first fifteen minutes or so, but eventually the strength of the script and performances win out over its detractions. Anne Hathaway is excellent in her role as a recovering addict out of rehab to attend her sister's wedding and causing all sorts of family tensions to come out during her visit.

There is no real plot throughout the movie, its basically a covering of the day before and of the wedding in a home video fashion but the script from Jenny Lumet (Sidney Lumet's daughter) is filled with great moments of character interaction that nicely manage to interchange between black comedy and serious drama. Look out for a hilarious scene involving a dish loading competition.

7-7.5/10