High on an Avengers buzz, I went and bought the animated series on bluray. So far, I’m loving it, but sweet Christ, do I leap for the fast forward button every time the opening credits start. It’s like somebody took the brilliant electric guitar of classic cartoon themes like Thundercats and Transformers, then shat all over it and lay some whiney nu metal vocals everywhere.
And the worst thing is, it sticks in your head.
So it’s now a fact. Spiderman 3 had no excuse for being so bad. The “too many villains” angle was a criticism frequently levelled at Raimi’s third spider-flick. And yes, there were too many villains, there was too much going on, but no, that’s not why Spiderman 3 was so bad. Spiderman 3 was so bad because it didn’t blend all its ingredients together properly. What we got was too many disparate elements, carelessly juggled onto a page and then thrown together for a finale as if it would make up for the previous 90 minutes of messy neglect. A smoothie, if you will, whose ingredients were all blended separately and then tossed together in a mixing jug of disappointment, resulting in them all sitting flat on top of one another.
On the other hand, The Avengers is the exact kind of smoothie you would want to drink and proves that you can have too many ingredients and still make it taste delicious. I promise I will now stop talking about Spiderman 3 and smoothies. Continue reading
I still haven’t played Mass Effect 3. In three weeks from now, I’m having my Xbox 360 and Mass Effect save files delivered from Ireland to Dubai, where I will pick them up and return them to my home in Sydney and finally catch up with the rest of the world. A very inelegant and elaborate solution to this problem, but one which I hope will be worth it.
I mean, I’ve heard that the ending has been a massive letdown to 99% of gamers, but can it really be so bad that it ruins everything that has come before, over three games and five years? I wouldn’t think so, but if the balanced opinions of the general public are anything to go by, Bioware have ruined the lives of millions of people in ten little minutes.
Here’s some of the very considered and reasonable opinions available on Amazon’s customer reviews of the game: Continue reading
Dave is partaking in a death-defying one man high-stakes challenge that involves him watching movies. This is it.
"I can't believe I travelled 800,000 years into the future and forgot my toothbrush"
H.G. Wells’ classic novel, brought to life with all the panash and hi-tech wizardry that 1960 has to offer. What’s not to love? Not much really. Double negatives aside, what I’m trying to say is, I liked it.
The Time Machine is the story of an inventor who invents a time machine. He then uses it to travel through time. Plot summary: check.
The Time Machine has some genuinely cool stuff in it. I like that the machine demands the user to sit in one spot and watch time move around him, rather than just quantum leaping from start to finish as we’ve come to expect. Watching time go past at the speed of a Benny Hill sketch is sort of hilarious, and with the use of stop-motion, an impressive and time-staking effect. Pun, of course, intended.
Speaking of effects, there are a lot of cool visuals going on in The Time Machine, clearly earning it its Visual Effects Oscar. The stop motion and model work is great for the most part, but a lot has dated, and dated badly. The volcanic magma streaming past London streetcars looks more like a kid spilling jam on his favourite toy car than anything. And don’t you dare question why there’s a volcano in London. But it’s all so kitsch and charming, you can’t help but admire the work that must have gone into it. Continue reading
“Pleasure Craft” should not sit between two Robocop movies, either thematically or alphabetically.
But it clearly has earned its place for its tagline: “In space, no-one can hear you moan.”
I’ve seen four movies over the last four weeks. Three of them surprised me. One of them was Battleship.
21 JUMP STREET
Level of Surprise: Quite Pleasant
I was expecting very little of this, having never seen the TV show, or having never liked Jonah Hill. But this was quite a pleasant surprise. The script cleverly plays with high school genre conventions in a fish out of water way. Hill and Tatum are the best buddy cop duo I’ve seen in a long time – Hill proving there’s more to his comedic skills than loud-mouth swearing and Tatum proving to all his detractors that he is more than just rom-com eye candy. He’s a funny guy. Continue reading
Hot on the heels of the success of “New Year’s Eve” and “Valentine’s Day”, Warner Bros. have announced the third entry in the “vacuous celebrity cast promote public holiday” trilogy, to be released next year.
This time around, things will focus on the most foolish of days, April 1st. No details have been released about the plot, but it’s safe to say there will probably be hijinks and pranks aplenty.
The full cast list has been announced and there are some surprises, to say the least.
Joining returning cast members Ashton Kutcher, Jessica Biel and Zac Efron are: Queen Latifah, Eddie Murphy, Justin Bieber, Sylvester Stallone, Joan Rivers, Steven Tyler, Tyler Perry, Christina Aguilera, Taylor Kitsch, Corey Haim, Ozzy Osbourne, Sean Bean, Liam Neeson, Al Pacino, Neil Patrick Harris, MeatLoaf, the guy who did the voice of Optimus Prime, Wil Wheaton, Kiefer Sutherland, the main guy from Krull, the Olsen twins, two of the three brothers from Hanson, the third brother from Hanson, Janet Jackson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, Bear Grylls, Snooki, Hank Azaria, Jennifer Aniston, Bradley Cooper, Gordon Ramsay, Rihanna, Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Lawrence, Richard Gere, half an onion, two carrots and one vegetable stock cube.
Returning director Garry Marshall insists that each character will get a minimum of 25 seconds of screentime each and there will be no more than 89 separate plotstrands.
Didn’t realise how funny the tagline for Rebel Without a Cause was until I spotted this poster in the bathroom of a cafe in Newtown.
And yes, somebody had painstakingly drawn moustaches on every single poster. Even Barbarella.
Either they were making a bold statement about Hollywood misogyny and the lack of developed roles for female actresses in the film industry, or they were taking a really long shit and happened to have a pen.
