Watchmen

There's a barrage of cliche and received wisdom that is obligatory for anyone wishing to discuss Zach Snyder's movie adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen to wade through: it's unfilmable; truncating it is akin to sterilizing it; heresy has been committed by changing it; Moore won't watch it so you shouldn't either; it ( Read more... )

I went to see Anvil: The Story of Anvil last night, a lovely documentary about Anvil - a forgotten Canadian metal band who had a brief moment in the sun in the early eighties, but have carried on regardless of age and general public disinterest ever since. The founders of the band - excitable singer/guitarist Lips and laid-back drummer Robb Reiner ( Read more... )

As if I couldn't be any more in lust with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, or any more obsessed with Ramona Flowers, the godlike Edgar Wright has deemed it right to bring the two together in his forthcoming adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim books.


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Burn After Reading

Though it may fall slightly short of the extremely high bar set by Joel and Ethan Coen, there's a leagues-deep cynicism in Burn After Reading that is thoroughly admirable. It's rare to see this level of misanthropy in mainstream Hollywood: every character is either a self-deluding idiot, a detatched and uncaring idiot, or simply ( Read more... )

The quite lovely hardbook version of Stuart Staples and Dave Boulter's Songs for the Young at Heart bumped through my door yesterday, and even though I was looking forward to listening to it, I hadn't realized quite how many of favourite singers were on it: Robert Forster, Stuart Murdoch, Will Oldham, Kurt Wagner, Jarvis (just reading The Lion and ( Read more... )

The PrestigeThere's precious little to say about Christopher Nolan's new film that won't interfere with its joyful and dizzy unravelling, so I promise to be careful - as careful as Nolan himself is with this wonderful story of two Victorian stage magicians and their escalating personal and professional feud ( Read more... )

For those unfamiliar with the premise of the Final Destination movies, it is broadly this: a premonition of a terrible accident saves a disparate group of youths from calamitous, violent death. Having survived and so essentially cheated the grim reaper, each survivor is then reclaimed by death (represented in a rather avante-garde move as a ( Read more... )

After seeing Cronenberg's latest with d_sameboy last night, I spent most of my sleeping hours trying to remember what I've seen Stephen McHattie in before. I realized upon checking the imdb this morning that the answer is every bleedin' genre tv series ever, but more specifically he was Elaine's sinister psychiatrist boyfriend in the fourth series of ( Read more... )

Throwdown

There's going to come a point at which I get tired of constantly bigging up Johnnie To around here: unfortunately for you dear reader, while Mr To keeps making films like Throwdown you'll just have to find a way to cope. A tribute to Akira Kurosawa, and specifically the Sugata Sanshiro judo films with which he kicked off his career, ( Read more... )

Alien Vs Predator

Ever since the disembodied head of H.R. Giger's famed creation was spied in a trophy cabinet in the fairly cretinous Predator 2, gits everywhere have gossiped, speculated and conspired to bring these two species together on film. There have been several comic book series already, but Paul W.S. Anderson has both realized and ( Read more... )