Wednesday 30 May 2007

Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End

Cast
Johnny Depp
Keira Knightley
Orlando Bloom
Bill Nighy
Geoffrey Rush
Director
Gore Verbinski
Screenwriters
Terry Rossio
Ted Elliot
Running Time
168 minutes

Elizabeth Swann (Knightley), Will Turner (Bloom), Tia and the reincarnated Barbossa (Rush) head to Singapore to meet Captain Sao Feng in a bid to get his help in recovering Cap’n Jack Sparrow (Depp) from Davy Jones’ (Nighy) locker. But even as they set off, the dastardly Lord Beckett is using Jones’ heart to tighten his grip on the seas, and threatens to eradicate piracy once and for all.

The first film was good, suprising and very enjoyable. The second was break neck paced dullness and the third is endlessly spectacular crap and I mean endless.

Wednesday 23 May 2007

Zodiac

Cast
Jake Gyllenhaal
Robert Downey Jr
Mark Ruffalo
Anthony Edwards
Director
David Fincher
Screenwriter
James Vanderbilt
Running Time
158 minutes

It’s 1969, and the San Francisco Chronicle receives letters from serial killer ‘Zodiac'. Reporter Paul Avery (Downey Jr.) covers the case, frustrating cops David Toschi (Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Edwards). Years pass, until only Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Gyllenhaal) is still in pursuit.

It is fascinating and I learned a lot about the case but a little long. It reminded me of All The President's Men but just not as good. Maybe because the performances are less memorable and it doesn't build to anything, that film had the resignation of Nixon but this is anti-climatic.

Sunday 20 May 2007

Surface DVD Box Set

Cast
Lake Bell
Jay R. Ferguson
Carter Jenkins
Leighton Meester
Ian Anthony Dale
Eddie Hassell
Creators
Jonas Pate
Josh Pate
Running Time
10 Hours 34 Minutes NTSC
Aspect Ratio
1.78:1 Anamorphic

Something new is lurking in the Earth's oceans, and now you can be part of the mystery as all 15 episodes of The Complete Series of Surface emerges on to DVD for the first time ever! When young oceanographer Laura Daugherty (Lake Bell) discovers a massive underwater creature her obsession to uncover the origins of this dangerous "unidentified species" will lead her and others on a mysterious adventure through the darkest, deepest parts of the sea and the most sinister and shady places on Earth. The fate of the world is in their hands - they just don't know it. Including explosive new bonus features and phenomenal special effects, the amazing series that People magazine calls "a show with some Spielbergian tricks of suspense" is now the must-own DVD set for every fan!

I guess maybe a year and a half ago I saw the first two episodes of this show broadcast on ITV1 which were really great but then no more as it switched to ITV2 and I don't have digital. So I kept checking on DVD PriceCheck after the box set came out waiting for it to drop below £1 an episode which is my price ceiling for this stuff. It did and I bought it. Bloody hell do I regret that purchase!
First the "Including explosive new bonus features" mentioned in the blurb on the back are a few deleted scenes and a 8 minute featurette. The first two episodes are as good as I remember, they are really put together well with integrated digital effects that give it an [almost] action movie feel. The story is sort of a blend of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Jurassic Park but the quality of the show just drops like a stone a few episodes in and doesn't recover. Although they do at least give the story some resolution in the last episode.
Obviously the show was cancelled in it's first season so had that not happened things might have worked out differently but this is a train wreck and to be avoided at all costs!

Wednesday 16 May 2007

28 Weeks Later

Cast
Robert Carlyle
Rose Byrne
Jeremy Renner
Imogen Poots
Mackintosh Muggleton
Director
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Screenwriters
Rowan Joffe
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Lopez-Lavigne
Jesus Olmo
Running Time
99 minutes

Britain has been emptied. There's nobody there. It's completely dead. And six months later the Americans arrive to reboot it back up again. But, of course, something goes wrong...

There's a plot twist early on which I didn't see coming although apparently some publicity gave it away but I must have missed that. I won't give it away here but I thought it was a nice touch. It's very grisly like the first one and loud. Basically it's an average low budget horror movie with an unusual location and added political metaphor but with the requisite gaps in logic and idiotic characters.

Wednesday 9 May 2007

Spider-Man 3

Cast
Tobey Maguire
Kirsten Dunst
James Franco
Thomas Haden Church
Topher Grace
Director
Sam Raimi
Screenwriters
Sam Raimi
Ivan Raimi
Alvin Sargent
Running Time
139 minutes

Peter Parker (Maguire) is happily in love with Mary Jane Watson (Dunst). But he comes under attack from escaped convict Flint Marko, AKA the Sandman (Church); former best friend Harry Osborn (Franco), now the deranged New Goblin; and at the Daily Bugle, where ace snapper Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) threatens his job. Worst of all is a black symbiotic goo that affixes itself to Peter’s spider-suit and changes his personality. Can Spidey survive the venom within?

I enjoyed Spider-man 3, although not as much as the first two films.
I suspect that a lot of footage had to be cut out to get down to the 2 hour 19 minute running time. A lot of detail about the Sandman character, including his family, were missing in comparison to how much there was of the villains in the first two movies. There were a lot of scenes that seemed very abbreviated and there were lurches in tone between others. Hopefully there will be a DVD version released which will contain a longer cut of the movie that will solve most of these problems. I don't believe it will solve all of them, if we get that version at all, because I think it was a fundamental mistake to introduce two villains [The film-makers somewhat shot themselves in the foot by killing off the villains in the first two films, if they wanted multiple villains they could have brought back those two].
The inclusion of Gwen Stacey for a few scenes seems unnecessary when they could have just used and built up the existing Betty Brant character, it just seems an easter egg for Comic book readers without any other point to it. Also I find it strange that they seem to forget what happened in the previous films, surely John Jameson as an astronaut was the avenue to have Venom brought to earth. The repetition of Mary Jane as hostage I didn't like, it was enough after the first two and seemed a little lazy, surely she should now only play a part of his life when Peter Parker and changing Ben Parker's killer, to retcon after just 3 films!
The film seems to have done well financially as did the missed opportunity that was X-Men 3 [The Dark Phoenix saga as a B-story!] which is good as they are the two biggest pillars holding up the Superhero movie genre. I don't think it's as simple as them not making money or dissapointing the core audience to have it fail which it one day inevitably will but I hope it will last for a few years yet and we'll get some more great films from it.

Wednesday 2 May 2007

The Painted Veil

Cast
Naomi Watts
Edward Norton
Liev Schreiber
Toby Jones
Diana Rigg
Director
John Curran
Screenwriter
Ron Nyswaner
Running Time
125 minutes

China, 1925: Bacteriologist Dr. Walter Fane (Norton) jealously ends his spoilt wife Kitty’s (Watts) adulterous affair by making her accompany him to a remote province where a cholera epidemic rages. Amid hostility and disease, the couple rediscover purpose, and each other.

The cast is uniformly great and it looks beautiful but it's a little too minimalistic in tone. I just wasn't drawn into strongly caring about the characters and what happened to them.

Tuesday 1 May 2007

Tru Calling DVD Box Set

I bought this simply because Eliza Dushku played the lead role, she first came to my attention playing the supporting character Faith on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then the spin-off Angel. Apparently she had declined to do a Faith spin-off in order to make this show Tru Calling.
In hindsight it was a monumental error on her part because this show was mediocre. Buffy is one of the classic television series and the spin-off with input from Joss Whedon would have been in all likelihood brilliant and anyway lasted more than one and a bit seasons.
The plot involves Tru Davies an aspiring medical student who finds herself working at the city morgue, for some reason when cadavers are left alone with her they come to life for a half second and ask for assistance. Her mind is then transported back in time to the last time she awoke, who was responsible for this and how they did it was never explained. In the beginning of the show this was when she had woken up that morning but later they seemed to tire of this and had her taking naps during the day and she would travel back to that point. She would then try to prevent the person's death. The show had a fantasy setting but it still must have its own internal logic which this frankly did not. There were logical gaps in Buffy like why crosses would work on vampires when in the universe of that show the Christian religion was just a made-up story but this did not matter because it was such a good show that you did not care about such small quibbles. The writing of the characters was simply not good enough, they were not interesting enough, plot-wise they tried to make it more complex by not having her be able to save everyone but this complexity simply jarred with the two-dimensional characters and simplicity of the show.
They did seem to be trying to build it on a Buffy template. Her boss Davis was a mentor figure like Giles and referred to her as having a calling, her brother Harrison was the platonic male best friend like Xander and Lindsey was a fashion obsessed character like Cordelia who starts up a relationship with Harrison (Xander) and in the second season when she went to medical school there was a female character in her anatomy class who had the series not ended might have been destined to become a Willow figure.
There are 26 episodes presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen on eight discs with a basic booklet, each disc has its own plastic tray and are all hinged together like pages with a cardboard cover. The whole thing fits into a cardboard sleeve.
The extras are few, there are some deleted scenes which nicely are presented with the episode they come from and not altogether at the end of the last disc like The Shield or Battlestar Galactica DVDs. There are some short featurettes, a music video and an Easter egg of Zach Galifianakis' audition. Nothing of any value and as usual the commentaries are few and pretty poor, only the one with Jason Priestley and series creator Jon Harman Feldman is decent because crazily Jason Priestley seems to want to make it good whereas no one else seems to care.
I'll end on the good points. Eliza Dushku. It has Jason Priestley in it, his role is utter nonsense but he plays it brilliantly. Zach Galifianakis is great in the role of Davis.