It´s a fairly well documented fact that most of the developed world believes a large proportion of Americans have their heads firmly stuck up their own ‘ass’. Not a month goes by without hearing some bizarre but neverthenevertheless believable fact or statistic about American stupidity. “93% of Americans don’t own passports”, “20% of Americans can´t locate the US on a world map”, “72% of Americans unable to tell arse from elbow in consumer taste test”…the list goes on.
This isn’t just my habitual xenophobia speaking I have many American friends and I don’t count them in these inexplicable statistics and neither do they. In fact some of them have taken to telling people they hail from USA (pronounced OOSAR) in an attempt to separate themselves from the country that voted Jesus as the 3rd greatest American.
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Posted by Rob in Blog, New this week
30/01/10
Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last week, you’re bound to have heard about Apple’s latest innovation… iPad.
No, that’s not an iPod from darn sarf, it’s the latest and greatest device that does allsorts and everything… The most important ‘feature’ of the iPad… Movies. (more…)
I’ve read this book a dozen times, easily. I have at least four copies as I lend them to all of my friends in a bid to get the whole world to read it, and inevitably want to read it once my copy is visiting someone else’s house.
It reninds me of an argument I once had with a thankfully now ex-colleague. When I said I was in the process of re-reading Watership Down, he snorted derisively and said “Why bother reading a book more than once? Bloody English students”. His reaction really surprised me – coming from a family of self-confessed (or should that be self-obsessed? Arf) readers, it never crossed my mind that other people only enjoyed a book once. My answer was “Why not? Would you listen to a CD once?”, which I thought was pretty quick, even if I do say so myself. I find myself gravitating towards certain books time and time again – the aforementioned rabbit saga, A Proper Little Nooryef, Phillip Pullman’s saga, Black Beauty and a couple more that I’ve forgotten.
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In what we at ‘thisfilmison’ hope to be a continuing series, we find people that we think are just the bees knees and ask them all about movies and such. Then we copy and paste their answers for you to read. Because we’re nice like that.
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When 2007’s Spider-Man 3 limped past its predecessors to surprisingly become the most successful instalment of the Sony produced franchise, the general consensus, backed up by a poor performance at the US box office, was that it just wasn’t as good as the first two films.
From that moment on the future of the wall crawler looked precarious at best. I can’t have been the only one who was a little shocked when Sony announced that both Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire were on board for a fourth outing. Internet buzz seemed to suggest that both were a little disappointed by the third film and were hoping to put right a few wrongs before clocking out.
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Everybody loves a trilogy. It’s part of the natural order of things like the Fibonacci sequence or the golden ratio- it just works, beginning middle and end, top middle and bottom, Hope, Empire and Jedi.
Pythagoras was really onto something 2500 years ago when he was going on and on about those bloody triangles. But what mathematical genius sought to illuminate, Hollywood marketing has seen fit to destroy. Why settle for gay Greek triangles when you can have endless all American quadrangles, pentagons, hexagons and so on until once again the audience are chewing their own tongues off with frustration and happy memories have been set about like Marilyn Monroe’s still twitching corpse.
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It’s a widely accepted facet of the Hollywood status quo that Nicholas Cage gets first dibs on any superhero project in early development. Having watched Mark Steven Johnson’s Ghost Rider I’m sure I’m not the only soul grateful that only one such project has clawed its way out from development hell.Whether you love a bit of ‘Cage’ action or not, his star prowess is noticeably absent from the early promotional material for Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass. The cynic in me would suggest that this is a conscious effort by the film’s producers to distance Kick-Ass from recent box-office dead weight like Ghost Rider however, the fan boy in me hopes that it is in fact an attempt to let the product speak for itself.
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When asked what my favourite movie was, I had a long hard think about what “favourite” means to me. My favourite movie changes on a weekly basis, depending what mood I’m in. But what is that one reliable film, that I can watch over and over again and never get tired of? To be honest there are many more credible and better movies out there, but for me favourite is the one film I put in my DVD player when I’m feeling poorly, had a bad day, just broke up with someone, or just bored. So, it is pretty clear this film has immense powers of cheering me up. Therefore fully deserving of my “favourite” film.
Ok so it’s an adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel and one of the most beloved books of all time. I still have my A’level copy on my book shelf with all the notes written in the margin and fell in love with the story then, however I’m not a big fan of reading unless I have an excess of free time, so the film does the job in 129 minutes and it does it, so so well.
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A little while ago a story came out of Hollywood that an A-list actor and director was pulled over by the LAPD so heavily intoxicated that he’d have killed any small child that jumped out in front of his big, moving car.
The celebrity, who shall remain nameless, then proceeded to verbally insult the police with mysogynistic and anti-semitic remarks. But as Mel Gibson’s latest film, The Edge Of Darkness explains, conspiracies are everywhere. So that story that I just told you was probably all made up. Like the holocaust, hey Mel, Hey? Hey?!
Like an erstwhile Dr. Sam Beckett, Mel Gibson is trying to put right what once went wrong by standing in front of the camera (for the first time since his arrest) and playing such a thoroughly likeable chap, that you can’t help but root for him. For chrissakes his daughter’s been murdered! Therefore Mel must be a nice guy and couldn’t have possibly said stuff that would have made Hitler blush. Well, that’s the theory.
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Posted by Owen Nicholls in Reviews
28/01/10
It’s a very difficult thing to review a film when you’re romantically involved with the female lead. Brothers has produced for me, such a quandary. While, yes, I’m not strictly dating Natalie Portman and she rarely returns the e-mails that I bounce to every account I can think of (nat.portman@hotmail.com /natalieshizzle@yahoo/ georgelucascantwrite dialogue@gmail.com) she will one day be my future wife, so here lies bias. I even own Where the Heart is and Anywhere But Here on DVD but don’t tell anyone.
If for some reason you don’t think that God was showing off when he made her then there isn’t much else to persuade you to take a punt on Brothers.
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