Mel Gibson is fast becoming a regular at PooterGeek. Forbes magazine estimates that he could walk away with around 40% of $650m collected at the box office for his Passion. That doesn’t include the merchandising income from such tie-in delights as replicas of the nails used in the crucifixion. Apparently we shouldn’t consider this tasteless […]
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Call the Analogy Police!
Pamela Wade of the New Zealand Herald compares Peter Jackson’s winning 11 Oscars to her buying the perfect teapot. Perhaps there are special kinds of irony in New Zealand, rhetorical variants that could only have emerged and developed in such extreme isolation from major landmasses of culture—linguistic marsupials, if you will. Or perhaps she’s crap.
Read MoreLet Me Count the Ways
If you’ve got a QuickTime player, you probably visit trailers.apple.com for an occasional fix of gravelly voiceovers and exploding helicopters advertising the latest Hollywood releases. Currently the big genres are still barrel-scraping comic book stories (The Punisher, Alien vs. Predator), unfunny chick flicks (Laws of Attraction, Pieces Of April) and historical epics (The Last Samurai, […]
Read MoreYuck
[warning: spoilers] Now, if you’re looking for sick-makingly sentimental (as opposed to just cuddly), then according to the Times the upcoming Julia Roberts vehicle Mona Lisa Smile sounds like just the thing. I might be interested in Ocean’s Twelve, though. UPDATE: Outside the UK you now have to be a subscriber to read most Times […]
Read MoreA Gift For Précis
Savapoint is a source for cheap software and hardware. Even before the savings on sales prices, the Savapoint Website provides completely free entertainment for visitors. Some of the perfunctory descriptions they offer of the movies they sell on DVD are a scream: The Hours: “A story of three women living in different time periods of […]
Read MoreStarbuckled
Maoi took Amber and me out for her graduation dinner last Friday. [Thanks, Maoi!—I’ve been trying to email you, but your destiny.net account is bouncing.] After good food at Light we bustled off to see Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. The film has such a clumsy title because it is bolted […]
Read MoreThunderbirds Are G-!
I’ve been looking forward to a new, live-action film of the model-and-puppet based Thunderbirds television series for years now. The rumours have flitted around, green lights have been given and then burned out. Finally it seems the movie will, as the Americans say, get a theatrical release in 2004. The creator of the original “Supermarionation” […]
Read MoreMovie Review Round-Up
I thought Hollywood Homicide wasn’t bad; Judith and Arnon thought it was bad. Leasey, Jo, Mark, Sonya and I thought Finding Nemo was good. Judith and Arnon also thought Down With Love was very bad. I thought American Pie wasn’t anything like as bad as I expected; and, surprisingly, (film buff) Terry thought it was […]
Read MoreEnemy at the Gates
Enemy at the Gates is to Saving Private Ryan as Battlestar Galactica was to Star Wars. Enemy at the Gates does several big-budget things well. It terrifies us with its depiction of a Stuka attack on troop carriers. It renders the grim vistas of the destruction of Stalingrad so spookily you’d feel sad just looking […]
Read MoreHigh Traffic
I don’t think I’ve ever woken up to so many PooterGeek comments. If you haven’t visited it lately you might be shocked by the stack of messages from lusty schoolgirls, demanding to see their hero in the buff at the “Naked H**** P*****” entry. Every Blogger in Christendom has linked to this, but you might […]
Read MoreDirty Pretty Things
Months ago, when it was on general release, Hind told me that I would enjoy Dirty Pretty Things. A friend of Sonya’s had recommended the movie to her too. So the two of us watched it on DVD yesterday afternoon. It’s an excellent, low-budget drama/thriller about the lives of refugees in contemporary London; a little […]
Read MorePish Pash
Judith sent me a link yesterday and I rewarded her with an email rant implying that she was being over-sensitive. (I was so ranty that I spelt “brilliant” with one ‘l’ and attached a random possessive apostrophe to “Conservatives”; pretty serious stuff by my standards.) I suppose it shows that I am ready to argue […]
Read MoreTo The Point
Training Day and About Schmidt are excellent films. Rent them. Surprisingly, in Training Day, Denzel Washington doesn’t play Denzel Washington and, in About Schmidt, Jack Nicholson doesn’t play Jack Nicholson. The Academy was impressed by both performances—and Denzel and Jack didn’t even have to act from wheelchairs.
Read More“It doesn’t matter what I believe.”*
You’ve got to hand it to the Wachowski brothers, they know how to maximise their franchise. Leasy kindly lent me her copy of The Animatrix so that I could enjoy the latest offshoot of the original Matrix movie without lining the Wachowskis’ pockets further. (So far I’ve paid to watch The Matrix itself in New […]
Read MoreUn-sophist-icated
Yesterday evening an attractive, smart woman took me out for dinner. Then we went to see The Matrix: Reloaded. I came home and stayed up until 1:30am… …listening to a documentary on the World Service about the current state of Afghanistan (or, as the BBC have it on their Website summary of the programme, “Afghansitan“). […]
Read MoreEdgy
Bryan Singer has been responsible for some of the best opening sequences of films I have ever seen, in The Usual Suspects, The X-Men, and now The X-Men 2. Unlike the first in this series, which declined steeply from a beautifully directed and affecting first few minutes to a camp-a-thon between stagey Brit lead actors, […]
Read MoreMann Alive
Whatever happened to that Benicio Del Toro movie they trailed last year? You know, the one about the guy under investigation because of his impossibly good luck on the markets and at the gaming tables. A year later than everyone else I have found the answer. Nothing happened. There was no film. But there was […]
Read MoreBad Hire
One of Hollywood's great traditions is to make the same sub-sub-genre of film three times in the space of five years. For example: The Sixth Sense, The Others, and What Lies Beneath. The Recruit is the first of what will inevitably be a bunch of post 9/11 CIA movies. It won't be the best—especially if […]
Read MoreThe Long and Winding Road…
…that leads to my sister's place has a number of distracting branches. I usually manage to take a couple of them on my way to visit her and her family. Today was no exception. My sister is darker than me; my niece is a scarily pale, blue-eyed, blonde six-month-old. I watched her squeal and blow […]
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