Jason Bourne

Last night was pretty quiet. I did some reading (I'm currently reading The Fireman by Joe Hill). I also did some writing, and downloaded a Mary Chapin Carpenter album,State of the Heart.

This afternoon I went out and saw Jason Bourne, directed by Paul Greengrass. It's the fifth in the Bourne franchise and the fourth to actually feature the character Jason Bourne (played by Matt Damon). In this movie a hacker investigating secret CIA operations, runs across documents revealing secrets about Bourne's past. Soon Bourne finds himself on a globe trotting quest for the truth, pursued by the CIA and a brutal hired killer. It's a good thriller and pretty exciting. Although I would warn you, it's filmed in this fast cutting, constantly shaking, moving camera, which kind of gave me a headache by the end of it.

Source Code

Last night I started writing the script for Script Frenzy. I got about three and a half pages written. It's a kind of horror, cyberpunk science-fiction script, based on a story idea I've had for years. Later on I watched the 1998 movie Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, directed by Steve Miner. It's the sixth sequel to the original Halloween film, and takes up the story of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) twenty years after the original, where she has a 17 year old son (Josh Hartnett) and is now working as a headteacher at a prestigious boarding school. While the rest of the school are off on a camping trip over Halloween, her son and three of his friends decide to take advantage of having the deserted school to themselves. Obviously before long, Laurie's murderous, invulnerable brother, Michael Myers (Chris Durand) to indulge his favourite hobby of slicing up teenagers, and anyone else he comes across, with large kitchen knives. It's actually a lot better than most of the others in the series. It owes a lot to the Scream series (Scream writer Kevin Williamson performed an uncredited rewrite on this film and acts as executive producer), with the same blend of shocks, jokes and movie references. Today I went out to the movies and saw Source Code, directed by Duncan Jones. The movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a US soldier who wakes up on a train with no memory of how he got there. He also doesn't know the woman sitting opposite him (Michelle Monaghan), but she knows him even though she seems to think he is someone else entirely. When he looks in the mirror he sees someone else's reflection staring back at him. Eight minutes after he wakes up, the train is destroyed in a bomb explosion. The soldier wakes up again to discover he is part of an experiment called "Source Code", which allows the participant to relive the last eight minutes of someone else's life. The train was destroyed that morning, and he has to keep going back through those last eight minutes in order to find the bomb and discover the bomber on the crowded train, before the same bomber detonates a nuclear device in downtown Chicago. It was a good movie with a really complex, intriguing plot and some great action and twists. Both of the movies are reviewed over at Permanently Weird.

Les Diaboliques

Last night I was watching the movie Kick Ass, directed by Matthew Vaughn, on TV. It's based on a comic-book by Mark Miller and John Romita, Jr. and tells the story of a New York City teenaged comic-book fan (played by Aaron Johnson) who, despite having no powers and no training, decides to become a superhero named "Kick-Ass". Despite the abysmal failure of his initial attempt he soon becomes an internet celebrity and attracts the attention of vengeful ex-cop turned superhero "Big Daddy" (Nicolas Cage) and his murderous 11 year old daughter "Hit Girl" (Chloe Grace Moretz). It is a really entertaining movie with plenty of humour and action.

Today I got some more of the Akira graphic novels by Katshiro Otomo delivered in the mail. Mostly I had a really quiet morning watching TV. In the afternoon I went out to the Filmhouse cinema to see the 1955 movie Les Diaboliques, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, with the Horror Group. The movie is based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who also wrote the novel that inspired Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo. The film deals with the brutal and cruel headmaster of a second-rate boy's boarding school (Paul Meurisse) who is married to a fragile young teacher, Christina (Vera Clouzot), who has a weak heart, while openly carrying on an affair with another teacher, Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret). Tiring of his ill treatment of them both, Christina and Nicole decide to murder the headteacher. However, after the murder, the body goes missing and a succession of strange and disturbing events begin to occur. It is a really good suspense film, and features a memorable twist. Apparently it was one of the influences for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and Robert Bloch (who wrote the original novel Psycho) named it as his favourite horror film. After the movie we went out and had a couple of drinks. The movie is reviewed over at Permanently Weird.

Darkman

Last night I watched a 2009 movie called Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, directed by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea. It's a documentary about the production of acclaimed director Henri-Georges Clouzot's unfinished and unreleased 1964 film Inferno. The documentary was triggered by the discovery of 185 film canisters (totalling 15 hours of footage) and some 30 hours worth of soundtrack. The movie comprises of footage from the unfinished film, a couple of actors performong scenes from the script on a blank stage and talking-head interviews with the film crew who worked on the movie telling the story of the production and it's eventual collapse. The movie Inferno was intended to be about a man who is driven insane by jealousy when he suspects his wife is having an affair, and they shot hours of test footage for the hallucinatory dream sequences. According to the documentary, Clouzot didn't endear himself to the crew. He was an insomniac who thought everyone else should sleep as little as he did, and was in the habit of phoning people up at all hours of the night whenever an idea came to him. He also didn't like people taking time off and on Sundays, when the crew had the day off, he would hang around in the lobby of the hotel where they were staying and grab the first crewmembers he saw and tell them to go out with him and shoot test footage. One of the camera crew apparently took to coming and going through the ground floor bathroom window in order to avoid Clouzot. It was a very interesting documentary and well worth seeing for movie fans and especially aspiring film-makers. It shows just how difficult film-production can be and how easily everything can just fall apart.

Later on I watched the 1990 movie Darkman, directed by Sam Raimi. It stars Liam Neeson as a scientist who is working on a synthetic skin, which always becomes unstable and melts after about an hour and a half. However one night he is attacked by gangsters and his lab is blown up with him inside it. He survives, but is horribly burnt. The medical treatment that he undergoes renders him unable to feel pain and gives him sudden bursts of superhuman strength and flashes of violent rage. He escapes from the hospital and uses his synthetic skin to visit his girlfriend (Frances McDormand) and take violent revenge on his attackers. It is a really fun movie which moves along at a good fast pace. Both of the movies are reviewed over at Permanently Weird.

Today I went out to a stationary store and got some cardboard magazine storage boxes for my comic-book collection, two packs of Sharpie pens, and two A4 size sketch-pad journals (which were in a "buy one get one free" offer). They'll be really good for drawing comic books and other stuff.

My parents are going to see True Grit this afternoon, and I'm meeting them once their movie is finished to go to Pizza Express for dinner. Tomorrow lunchtime I'm going to the Dental Institute, and then I'll probably get some lunch and go to the comic-book store or somewhere.

Ashes of Time

I managed to write another two thousand words of my NaNoWriMo story yesterday. Last night I watched the latest episode of True Blood, which was really good. I also watched the movie Ashes of Time Redux, directed by Wong Kar-Wai. The movie was first released in 1994, but the director released a re-edited (or "redux") version last year. The film is set in medieval China and concerns a cynical swordsman (played by Leslie Cheung) who sets himself up as a hired killer after his wife leaves him to marry his brother. He is hired by a man (Brigitte Lin) to kill his sister's boyfriend, who happens to be the swordsman's best friend, on the grounds that he deserted her. However the sister (Lin again) wants to hire him to kill her brother on the grounds that he is too possessive of her. He also ends up helping two other younger swordsmen in their seperate battles against the same group of bandits. It's a really beautiful looking film which, unusually for a martial arts movie, focusses mainly on emotion and philosophy rather than action (the fight scenes are depicted almost as fast-moving blurs of sound and colour). Apparently it was a huge flop on it's first relelase and was barely released.

Today my mouth is still quite sore, and I'm still needing painkillers. Also I am absolutely sick to death of eating soup (apparently I need a "soft diet" for a week after the procedure). I did manage to go out today though and I got the movies There Will be Blood and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street on Blu-Ray DVD.

Night Watch

Last night I was listening to an episode of The Twilight Zone radio series called "Free Dirt", which was originally written for the TV series, but never produced. The story revolves around a man who gets free soil from a cemetery in order to grow his vegetables, however the vegetables are of an unusual time and won't stop growing. Afterwards I listened to an episode of Classic Tales of Horror called "Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand" based on a story by Sheridan Le Fanu in which a family are plagued by strange tapping sounds and the unexplained print of a single hand. It was pretty good.

Later on I watched a Russian movie from 2004 called Night Watch, directed by Timur Bekmambetov, and based on the novel by Sergei Lukyanenko. Basically in the movie , alongside humans live a race of vampire-like supernatural creatures called "The Others" of which some are good ("Light Others") and some are evil ("Dark Others") and according to an ancient truce, they are policed by the "Night Watch" (on the side of the Light Others) and the "Day Watch" (on the side of the Dark Others). However in present day Moscow it appears that the truce is about to be broken which could bring about the final battle between good and evil. The film is kind of a blend of horror and action, and it certainly is action packed from beginning to end. It's really stylish and full of special effects. In fact the problem with the movie was that it was too stylish at times. Even the English subtitles are heavily stylised (moving around the screen, appearing in unexpected locations and in different sizes, and in a couple of instances appearing in blood red text which then seems to dissolve like blood in water). There are four books in the series, and there is a sequel to the film (Day Watch) with a third film on the way.

Today was another really dull day at work. We all had to work a full day, so I couldn't do my regular six hour day.