Cinema Trips: June to October
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010 19:36![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeThe Mayhem Horror Film Festival took place at Broadway over the last four days of October, and I went to see three of the films.
AVN: Aliens Vs. Ninjas
This is surely the best film about ninjas fighting aliens ever made. It's certainly the funniest and had the whole audience in fits of laughter. A low-budget Japanese film with sub-titles.
Frenzy
A Hitchcock film from 1972, shot in colour with a pinkish-brown sepia tint. Set in and around Covent Garden when it was still a fruit and vegetable market, it is the story of a man who is suspected of being the infamous necktie strangler. Surprisingly there were some funny moments between all the strangling. It seemed vaguely familiar, so it's possible that I have seen it before, or else I may have seen some clips of it at a film evening class.
Monsters
This road movie / love story / monster movie is set five years after alien life suddenly appeared in Mexico after the crash landing of a space probe. The northern half of Mexico is now a fenced off infected zone, although people still live there side by side with the monsters. The plot concerns a photojournalist who has come to Mexico to do a story on the monsters, reluctantly escorting his boss's daughter back to the American border. Monsters has got mixed reviews on the Internet, but it seems as though people were mislead by the trailers and expecting a different kind of film (one with more monsters and less romance). On the other hand, I didn't see any trailers or read up about it on the Internet beforehand, as I only decided to go a few hours before the screening so I had no expectations to be dashed. I really liked it and it seemed to go down well with the rest of the audience too. There was a Q&A with the director after the screening, which was very interesting. The film was shot on location and only the main couple being played by professional actors; the other characters were played by locals, including the guy who sells them tickets for the ferry who really worked in a cafe by the ferry terminal. After filming finished, the director, whose film career started in digital effects, did all the effects himself, including changing ordinary road signs to give directions to the evacuation zone or the distance to the infected area, and television screens to show news programs including footage of the monsters and maps of the infected zone.
Other films I have seen in the last few months:
Certified Copy
A British academic called James Miller who has written an art book claiming that copies are as good as originals, is on a publicity tour of Italy, where his book has been an unexpected success. In one of the small towns that he visits, a woman who attends his talk offers to take him out for the day before he leaves town. But after a cafe owner assumes they are husband and wife and the woman doesn't correct her, Miller and the woman start to talk about the past as if they used to be married to each other, and it ended badly. It is all rather odd and it isn't at all clear whether they are talking about something that actually happened, or are just play-acting.
So did they already know each other or not? The Evidence:
1) She professes to be interested in Miller's book and gets him to sign six copies for her friends and relations, but although she sits in the front row for his talk, she doesn't listen to it. She spends the time chatting to the Italian man who has organised the talk, and leaves halfway through because her son is hungry.
2) She drags her son along to the talk even though he is not interested, and then leaves because he is moaning about being hungry. He is aged about 13 or 14, so she could have left him at home or sent him off by himself to get something to eat. So maybe she wants his father to see him, even if the boy does not realise they are related.
3) Miller mentions having watched his wife in the past, walking ahead of their son, waiting at each corner to ensure he is still in sight, but not waiting for him to catch up, which is something we have seen the woman and her son doing earlier in the film. But it is possible that the author noticed them during the short time he has been in town.
4) Her son asks why she got the author to dedicate a book to him by his first name only, when his surname is . . . but his mother cuts him off before he says the surname, leaving me guessing that he would have said Miller (I read a suggestion on-line suggesting that the name was cut off because she wouldn't have said Miller. That poster's theory was that the woman was Miller's mistress, or ex-mistress, the boy was their illegitimate child, and the play-acting was about whether their pretend marriage was as good as Miller's actual marriage).
5) The son teases his mother about fancying the author, but otherwise shows no interest in him. If his parents split up five years ago, he would surely remember his father and be able to recognise him.
6) The author and the woman are very awkward with each other. Maybe Miller thinks that the drive into the countryside with a stranger was a mistake, and wishes that it was over. On the other hand, maybe he agreed to the meeting to humour his ex-wife, and is now regretting if.
7) They both seem quite unbalanced at times, so maybe they are just feeding each other's craziness.
On balance, I think that they are play-acting, perhaps to see whether a copy of a failed marriage can be as convincing as an actual failed marriage. Of course I may be entirely wrong. I think that the woman started the game tentatively, and when Miller responded by talking about having watched his wife in the past, walking ahead of their son, waiting at each corner to ensure he is still in sight, but not waiting for him to catch up, she knew he was willing to go along with the game, and it escalated from then on. By the end of the film, I think that Miller is regretting it and wishing he had never met her at all, but he is stuck as he needs her to drive him back to town
Despicable Me
I have never seen a 3-D feature feature film before, although i did see a short 3-D film with bees, flowers and scenery at the film museum on South Bank a long time ago, and I didn't realise that this was going to be in 3-D until i was handed a pair of glasses as I went in. It was a fun story about a super-villain who adopts three little orphan girls as part of his plan to steal the moon and outdo a new villain who stole one of the pyramids, but I don't think that the 3-D really added anything to the story, and I never forgot that I was wearing a second pair of glasses over my own. The best use of the 3-D was during the credits when the little yellow minions (who were cute, I must admit) competed to see who could stretch out the furthest over the audience, but during the film itself, it broke the spell very time I consciously noticed the 3-D.
Devil
This is a horror movie that starts with five people stuck in a lift, with lights that keep going out and a malfunctioning intercom which means that they can hear the security guards and police who are trying to get the lift moving again, while the security guard and policeman can see them on camera but not hear them. The Mexican security guard sees a demonic face (I think that's what it was anyway, I couldn't really tell) flash up on the screen and is convince that one of the people in the lift is the Devil, and that the others will all end up dead, as in a story his mother told him as a child. but no-one else, but the cynical policeman and the other guard do not believe him. I didn't actually find it scary at all, maybe because the story is told from the policeman's point of view, so that the viewer is outside the lift looking in, and therefore does not feel in any danger. It also had a surprisingly feel-good ending, given that several people ended up dead.
Grownups
A Hollywood comedy starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock and some other well known actors. Five middle-aged men (some of whom are more successful than others), bring their families back to the small town they grew up in to attend the funeral of their former basketball coach. Over the course of a weekend in a lake house they reconnect with their families and each other. More enjoyable than "The Other Guys".
Inception
I avoided reading any spoilers before going to see Inception, which definitely increased my enjoyment, as the concept and the twists and turns of the plot were all new to me, and I hadn't heard about the ambiguous ending, so there was a lot to take in. After going home and reading all the spoilers and discussion about what actually happened, I had to go back and watch it a second time to spot what other people had noticed and see whether my opinion about the ending would still be the same. However, it's not a perfect film; there was an action-filled part near the end (when the characters were trying to get all the 'falling off a chair' moments lined up) which I found quite tedious.
Made in Dagenham
This is the story of how 187 machinists at Ford's Dagenham plant went on strike after their job was downgraded from semi-skilled to unskilled in 1968. The dispute escalated into a demand for women to be paid the same as men doing the same job, and led to the Equal Pay Act of 1970. As well as confronting the Ford bosses (including a big-shot sent over from America), the support from their union is lacklustre, as they see the women as taking attention away from disputes raised by their more important (male) members, and their husbands and fellow-workers (who the woman always supported when they went on strike) become distinctly less supportive when the lack of finished car-seats and door trims means that they are laid off. I saw it at a well-attended Sunday afternoon screening, with an audience made up of people of all ages, from students to retired people, all of whom appeared to love the film. Sally Hawkins was very good in the lead part, as the machinist thrust into the limelight hen she agrees to represent the women at a meeting with management, as was Bob Hoskins, playing the shop-steward who encourages them to ask for equal pay, because he remembers how his mother struggled to bring her children up on less than 50% of the wages of a man doing the same job.
Tamara Drewe
A British rom-com based on a graphic novel. London journalist Tamara returns to the Dorset village where she grew up, to get her late mother's house ready to sell. Other characters include Tamara's rock stat boyfriend and his boxer dog, two teenage girls who find the idyllic village extremely boring and get up to all kinds of mischief while lusting after the rock star, a philandering crime novelist and his wife who run a writers' retreat, and a local man who was Tamara's first boyfriend. Unusually for a rom-com, it isn't all about whether Tamara will end up with the rock star of her ex-boyfriend, as the story concentrates just as much on the teenagers' antics and the marital problems of the novelist and his wife.
The Other Guys
This is is a very silly cop/buddy movie, which passed the time adequately.
The Social Network
The story of how Mark Zuckerberg set up Facebook, and was involved in two different court cases at the same time, after he was sued both by the friend he screwed out of his fair share of the company, and the students whose idea he stole. An interesting film about a group of unlikeable people.
The Third Man
I've seen this classic movie several times before, and decided that seeing it again was a good way to escape from the football during the World Cup. However I didn't escape it entirely, as the football was being projected onto the wall in the cinema bar.
AVN: Aliens Vs. Ninjas
This is surely the best film about ninjas fighting aliens ever made. It's certainly the funniest and had the whole audience in fits of laughter. A low-budget Japanese film with sub-titles.
Frenzy
A Hitchcock film from 1972, shot in colour with a pinkish-brown sepia tint. Set in and around Covent Garden when it was still a fruit and vegetable market, it is the story of a man who is suspected of being the infamous necktie strangler. Surprisingly there were some funny moments between all the strangling. It seemed vaguely familiar, so it's possible that I have seen it before, or else I may have seen some clips of it at a film evening class.
Monsters
This road movie / love story / monster movie is set five years after alien life suddenly appeared in Mexico after the crash landing of a space probe. The northern half of Mexico is now a fenced off infected zone, although people still live there side by side with the monsters. The plot concerns a photojournalist who has come to Mexico to do a story on the monsters, reluctantly escorting his boss's daughter back to the American border. Monsters has got mixed reviews on the Internet, but it seems as though people were mislead by the trailers and expecting a different kind of film (one with more monsters and less romance). On the other hand, I didn't see any trailers or read up about it on the Internet beforehand, as I only decided to go a few hours before the screening so I had no expectations to be dashed. I really liked it and it seemed to go down well with the rest of the audience too. There was a Q&A with the director after the screening, which was very interesting. The film was shot on location and only the main couple being played by professional actors; the other characters were played by locals, including the guy who sells them tickets for the ferry who really worked in a cafe by the ferry terminal. After filming finished, the director, whose film career started in digital effects, did all the effects himself, including changing ordinary road signs to give directions to the evacuation zone or the distance to the infected area, and television screens to show news programs including footage of the monsters and maps of the infected zone.
Other films I have seen in the last few months:
Certified Copy
A British academic called James Miller who has written an art book claiming that copies are as good as originals, is on a publicity tour of Italy, where his book has been an unexpected success. In one of the small towns that he visits, a woman who attends his talk offers to take him out for the day before he leaves town. But after a cafe owner assumes they are husband and wife and the woman doesn't correct her, Miller and the woman start to talk about the past as if they used to be married to each other, and it ended badly. It is all rather odd and it isn't at all clear whether they are talking about something that actually happened, or are just play-acting.
So did they already know each other or not? The Evidence:
1) She professes to be interested in Miller's book and gets him to sign six copies for her friends and relations, but although she sits in the front row for his talk, she doesn't listen to it. She spends the time chatting to the Italian man who has organised the talk, and leaves halfway through because her son is hungry.
2) She drags her son along to the talk even though he is not interested, and then leaves because he is moaning about being hungry. He is aged about 13 or 14, so she could have left him at home or sent him off by himself to get something to eat. So maybe she wants his father to see him, even if the boy does not realise they are related.
3) Miller mentions having watched his wife in the past, walking ahead of their son, waiting at each corner to ensure he is still in sight, but not waiting for him to catch up, which is something we have seen the woman and her son doing earlier in the film. But it is possible that the author noticed them during the short time he has been in town.
4) Her son asks why she got the author to dedicate a book to him by his first name only, when his surname is . . . but his mother cuts him off before he says the surname, leaving me guessing that he would have said Miller (I read a suggestion on-line suggesting that the name was cut off because she wouldn't have said Miller. That poster's theory was that the woman was Miller's mistress, or ex-mistress, the boy was their illegitimate child, and the play-acting was about whether their pretend marriage was as good as Miller's actual marriage).
5) The son teases his mother about fancying the author, but otherwise shows no interest in him. If his parents split up five years ago, he would surely remember his father and be able to recognise him.
6) The author and the woman are very awkward with each other. Maybe Miller thinks that the drive into the countryside with a stranger was a mistake, and wishes that it was over. On the other hand, maybe he agreed to the meeting to humour his ex-wife, and is now regretting if.
7) They both seem quite unbalanced at times, so maybe they are just feeding each other's craziness.
On balance, I think that they are play-acting, perhaps to see whether a copy of a failed marriage can be as convincing as an actual failed marriage. Of course I may be entirely wrong. I think that the woman started the game tentatively, and when Miller responded by talking about having watched his wife in the past, walking ahead of their son, waiting at each corner to ensure he is still in sight, but not waiting for him to catch up, she knew he was willing to go along with the game, and it escalated from then on. By the end of the film, I think that Miller is regretting it and wishing he had never met her at all, but he is stuck as he needs her to drive him back to town
Despicable Me
I have never seen a 3-D feature feature film before, although i did see a short 3-D film with bees, flowers and scenery at the film museum on South Bank a long time ago, and I didn't realise that this was going to be in 3-D until i was handed a pair of glasses as I went in. It was a fun story about a super-villain who adopts three little orphan girls as part of his plan to steal the moon and outdo a new villain who stole one of the pyramids, but I don't think that the 3-D really added anything to the story, and I never forgot that I was wearing a second pair of glasses over my own. The best use of the 3-D was during the credits when the little yellow minions (who were cute, I must admit) competed to see who could stretch out the furthest over the audience, but during the film itself, it broke the spell very time I consciously noticed the 3-D.
Devil
This is a horror movie that starts with five people stuck in a lift, with lights that keep going out and a malfunctioning intercom which means that they can hear the security guards and police who are trying to get the lift moving again, while the security guard and policeman can see them on camera but not hear them. The Mexican security guard sees a demonic face (I think that's what it was anyway, I couldn't really tell) flash up on the screen and is convince that one of the people in the lift is the Devil, and that the others will all end up dead, as in a story his mother told him as a child. but no-one else, but the cynical policeman and the other guard do not believe him. I didn't actually find it scary at all, maybe because the story is told from the policeman's point of view, so that the viewer is outside the lift looking in, and therefore does not feel in any danger. It also had a surprisingly feel-good ending, given that several people ended up dead.
Grownups
A Hollywood comedy starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock and some other well known actors. Five middle-aged men (some of whom are more successful than others), bring their families back to the small town they grew up in to attend the funeral of their former basketball coach. Over the course of a weekend in a lake house they reconnect with their families and each other. More enjoyable than "The Other Guys".
Inception
I avoided reading any spoilers before going to see Inception, which definitely increased my enjoyment, as the concept and the twists and turns of the plot were all new to me, and I hadn't heard about the ambiguous ending, so there was a lot to take in. After going home and reading all the spoilers and discussion about what actually happened, I had to go back and watch it a second time to spot what other people had noticed and see whether my opinion about the ending would still be the same. However, it's not a perfect film; there was an action-filled part near the end (when the characters were trying to get all the 'falling off a chair' moments lined up) which I found quite tedious.
Made in Dagenham
This is the story of how 187 machinists at Ford's Dagenham plant went on strike after their job was downgraded from semi-skilled to unskilled in 1968. The dispute escalated into a demand for women to be paid the same as men doing the same job, and led to the Equal Pay Act of 1970. As well as confronting the Ford bosses (including a big-shot sent over from America), the support from their union is lacklustre, as they see the women as taking attention away from disputes raised by their more important (male) members, and their husbands and fellow-workers (who the woman always supported when they went on strike) become distinctly less supportive when the lack of finished car-seats and door trims means that they are laid off. I saw it at a well-attended Sunday afternoon screening, with an audience made up of people of all ages, from students to retired people, all of whom appeared to love the film. Sally Hawkins was very good in the lead part, as the machinist thrust into the limelight hen she agrees to represent the women at a meeting with management, as was Bob Hoskins, playing the shop-steward who encourages them to ask for equal pay, because he remembers how his mother struggled to bring her children up on less than 50% of the wages of a man doing the same job.
Tamara Drewe
A British rom-com based on a graphic novel. London journalist Tamara returns to the Dorset village where she grew up, to get her late mother's house ready to sell. Other characters include Tamara's rock stat boyfriend and his boxer dog, two teenage girls who find the idyllic village extremely boring and get up to all kinds of mischief while lusting after the rock star, a philandering crime novelist and his wife who run a writers' retreat, and a local man who was Tamara's first boyfriend. Unusually for a rom-com, it isn't all about whether Tamara will end up with the rock star of her ex-boyfriend, as the story concentrates just as much on the teenagers' antics and the marital problems of the novelist and his wife.
The Other Guys
This is is a very silly cop/buddy movie, which passed the time adequately.
The Social Network
The story of how Mark Zuckerberg set up Facebook, and was involved in two different court cases at the same time, after he was sued both by the friend he screwed out of his fair share of the company, and the students whose idea he stole. An interesting film about a group of unlikeable people.
The Third Man
I've seen this classic movie several times before, and decided that seeing it again was a good way to escape from the football during the World Cup. However I didn't escape it entirely, as the football was being projected onto the wall in the cinema bar.
