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I too am liking the IT Crowd - in fact yesterday the whole office was watching the first episode over the net - these peasants without sattelite dishes.
As for Friday nights on BBC, I would like to see this:
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Fair enough, I will download it for tomorrow. I haven't been that impressed with Earl either. Nice enough for one episode, but the whimsical white-trash comedy seemed stretched when I watched three in a row.
That was mildly funny in a safe, dated way -- sit-com as depiction of a stylised world with one-note secondary characters who start slapstick fights -- but it only broke through into something surprisingly better at two points for me, the Chris Tarrant phone call midway through, and the "you're making it go back up" two seconds before the end. The scene in "Mesijo's" reminded me of a Crackerjack sketch. Most of the rest was Father Ted standard at best.
Having one character spend maybe 10 of the 25 minutes guffawing at her co-star seemed pretty unfortunate; if the laugh track wasn't enough, writing hearty yuks into the script is kind of desperate.
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I watched Green Street today. It is perhaps the worse film in a genre (football hooligans) that seems to produce the worse films ever.
One bloke, Charlie Humman, had such a bad cokerney accent that I thought he must have been Australian or something, but he is actually from Newcastle. Now, I'm not an actor, but I can do a passable Geordie accent. More passable than Charlie's East London accent, anyway.
Elijah Wood wasn't as bad as I though he would be. He looks quite good in Stone Island gear.
Now I'm going to watch R-Point, a Korean horror/war film set in Vietnam. God knows what this will be like.
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Don't even get me started on Green Street - appalling film - the bad cockney accents, the immediate translations and subsequent immediate admittance to a hardcore football violent crew, and by all the worst thing of all - the big punch up at the end, with a faux Brothers in Arms type song had me not knowing weather to laugh or cry.
Any other football team then it wouldn't have mattered, but my West Ham? Puuurleeease............
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I couldn't work out when the film was supposed to be set. When the 'Major' was giving his "I quit football violence 10 years ago" flashback, the hair everyone had and the clothes they wore looked like the 1970s, but I'm certain the film is meant to take place 'now'ish.
And the brothers in arms music was excellent, you just can't come up with that type of bad, you have to have a real talent for it.
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It is. I'm watching it now, and the premise is good (according to IMDB it is based on a 'true myth') but this army unit has the discipline of a class on a school trip.
Why do they have to call each other assholes and slap each other all the time? No wonder the VC and NVA won.
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It's getting better now. I was in the apartment, just washing and stuff. A cop turned up and things got a bit edgy.
It's hard following the sequence of directions after four cans of Guiness, though.
And I jumped when the victim appeared in the mirror. I'm a bit of a girl at these things. The original Silent Hill made me shit myself too.
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H1ppychick
We all prisoners, chickee-baby. We all locked in.
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I just watched Solaris. It was beautiful-looking, but kind of empty at the core. Although I did appreciate the lingering shots of naked Clooney butt.
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posted
watched hard candy last night. Not terrible, but not great. Intersting setup though - handsome thirty something dude picks up teenager in chatroom and gets her back to his place. Vodka, larks (no sex or anything), and then he passes out, only to wake up up tied down to a chair, at the mercy of his new playmate.
Hard Candy is written by a playwright and directed by a music video director, and both show. It's very talk heavy; long speeches are spewing from both mouths throughout the film, and charisma has been dropped in place of concepts. The characters are neither believable nor likable, and personal complexity is faked by just having them either lie about their pasts, or not reveal them at all. For a drama about paedophilia, it fails because it tries to pack in too many ideas at the expense of the players. HOWEVER, it looks lovely, like an Ikea catalogue on valium, or a perfume advert. Kind of bland, but dreamlike.
There is one good bit in it, that lasts around twenty minutes, and while it isn't gory, it was extraordinarily effective at generating groaning and wincing from the male members of the audience. I was watching through my fingers, and was left with a weird feeling in my nuts for about half an hour afterwards. Up to this point I'd been interested in the film, but after it, it fell apart, repeated itself like a drunk, and failed to ask any interesting questions. I've read people in the States comparing it to Oleanna, but don't be fooled - it's not as penetrative nor as disturbing, because it's crass and clunky in its attempts to stir debate, and ends up impressing itself so much that it tries to answer its own questions for the audience.
Still! It's sure to make it into the papers as it's about paedos and chatrooms and the like, and it won a couple of awards at a film festival. While it's got a sequence that will certainly stay with you for a long time, its only real point of interest is that it's yet another film about somebody tying somebody down and fucking with them, another 'revenge' movie to add the pile.
Oh one more thing. I got in about five minutes after it started, but to my knowledge there are NO clunky 'chatroom' scenes, which is a plus point. You know, either a screenshot of somebody using weird looking chat software where everybody uses massive writing, or somebody reading the whole thing out. Actually, you know what, if you had people typing at computers, and had the two different voices reading out the different lines, that might work, but I've never seen it done like that. Bit of a note-to-self there.
[ 14.02.2006, 06:53: Message edited by: Dr. Benway ]
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That's such a fucking smarmy, pointless film. It's actually more like a lifestyle piece in one of the Sunday supplements than the intelligent portrait of modern relationships it so deperately strains to be.
It was so hard to give a monkeys about any of the characters I was driven to consider whether it is still credible to make affecting cinema about love affairs in a contemporary setting. The most moving romances of the past few years have all been set in the past - usually at least as far back as WWII (eg. The English Patient), often further.
Is there a sense that the stakes aren't quite so high in modern romance - you know, "Julia Roberts isn't that fucking unique, m8... you'll find someone else before long!"
People are more mobile, they have busy and diverse social lives beyond their lovers, many even regard monogamy as some sort of throwback perversion: does this mean the pursuit of love doesn't quite have that be-all-and-end-all quality of former times?
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posted
I only saw about 7 or 8 minutes of Closer. Octavia showed me a slice as a kind of a sampler of its crapness. Normally I wouldn't want to write off a film on the basis of a seven minute segment, but the dialogue was such a horrible ghastly back-and-forth load of nonsense that it made me sick - in fact it really made me hate Patrick Marber, and now I can't watch him on The Day Today. It was such try-hard clever/stupid nonsense. It was the scene in the strip club, with natalie portman and Clive 'tongue' Owen, and it had this nasty false tone that the writer wanted to show everyonehow clever he was. There was an awful bit, for example, where he says something like "do you find this a turn on", and she replies "yes", and he says "Don't just say that to me because it's what I want to hear", or something. Anyway - basically the problem is that Patrick Marber seems to want to make it explicit to the audience that he's savvy and switched on to the manipulations of strippers, and that he kws the real score. I got the impression that this tone carries on through the film - his (awful) words oming out of the characters' mouths in a bid to tell you how smart he is.
Something like
"Dan: You love her like a dog loves its owner. Larry: And the owner loves the dog for so doing. Dan: You'll hurt her. You'll never forgive her. Larry: Of course I'll forgive her. I *have* forgiven her. Without forgiveness we're savages"
soundd like something you might come up with on the train and scribble down. It sounds like a back-and-forth in the same mind, and not a particularly astute mind at that.
I think I'm finding this hard to explain, but basically it looked like a great big pile of shit.
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posted
This review in Salon pretty much sums up my opinion of Closer.
But
I really like it
Moneyed alienation, emotional dysfunction, aesthetically pleasing desperation and emptiness. What's not to like? The Natalie Portman character - a girl like that, I know women like that, I've been obsessed with women like that. All the characters are so lost - it fucking spoke to me, what can I say?
quote: With dialogue so meticulous it bears no resemblance to the way people actually talk, let alone think. "She has the moronic beauty of youth, but she's sly."
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Also, I don't understand. Are you being sarcastic when you say how much you liked Closer, Vikram? It's just, that Salon reviewer seemed to fucking hate it.
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: basically the problem is that Patrick Marber seems to want to make it explicit to the audience that he's savvy and switched on to the manipulations of strippers, and that he kws the real score. I got the impression that this tone carries on through the film - his (awful) words oming out of the characters' mouths in a bid to tell you how smart he is.
Bang on. I think the problem is that this is exactly the type of bullcrap that theatre-goers get off on. It maybe allows them to feel they've shelled out on an evening checking out 'the new Mamet' rather than a pile of undergrad wank.
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quote:Originally posted by jonesy999: Also, I don't understand. Are you being sarcastic when you say how much you liked Closer, Vikram? It's just, that Salon reviewer seemed to fucking hate it.
No, I do like it. The review doesn't and I must agree, but still I genuinely enjoyed that movie, bought the DVD in fact.
Natalie Portman - I want to save her, trap her, tame her. And everyone else, their comfortable self-contempt, I don't know, I identified with it I guess. I live pretty privileged really, but ultimately it's all pointless, hopeless, lonely. Find, find your place etc.
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The final scene, where Portman is walking down a NYC street in slow motion, and numerous random males' heads turn as she passes, is probably the gayest non-Andie-McDowall-featuring moment in modern film.
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