Saturday, October 27, 2007

Saturday Afternoon at the Movies

This morneing I went out and bought a book as a birthday present for my mum. The book was Making History by Stephen Fry. Mum was saying last week she wanted to read one of his books, and it should be very funny if it's by Stephen Fry. I also bought a card and some wrapping paper. On my way home I stopped off at the supermarket for my weekly groceries.

After a very quick lunch, I went out to the Cineworld cinema. The bus took ages to come, probably because there was a big football (soccer) match at the nearby stadium. I saw the film Saw IV, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. The Saw films concern an ingenious serial killer, nick-named "Jigsaw", who abducts people he believes don't value their own lives and places them in lethal traps. In order to escape the victim has to do something extremely painful, either physically or psychologically. This film takes off directly after the end of the previous one, with the discovery of a new killer apparently imitating Jigsaw's methods. While two FBI agents attempt to solve the case, a cop is forced to play his own lethal game. This was probably the weakest of the Saw films. Despite a few effective scenes and plenty of blood and gore, it really seemed kind of bland.

After a quick bottle of Budweiser at the nearby McCowans Brewhouse bar, I went back to the cinema to see Eastern Promises, the new film from David Cronenberg. This film is set in London, and revolves around a midwife, who attends a young Russian girl who dies in childbirth. Discovering the girl's diary, written entirely in Russian, the midwife sets out to translate it with the help of her Russian uncle. In the book, she discovers a leaflet for a nearby restaurant, which it turns out is a front for a Russian mob Family. The dead girl was a victim of their human trafficking schemes, and the gangsters want the diary back by any means necessary. The movie, which stars Naomi Watts as the midwife and Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel as two of the gangsters, was very good. The script is well-written and suspenseful, with some great performances. David Cronenberg seems to have almost completely moved away from the so-called "body horror" films that made his name.

It was a nice afternoon and, because of my Cineworld pass, it's like a full afternoon's worth of entertainment for almost free, except for the beer.

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