Adventures of Prince Achmed

I went out today and saw a 1926 German animated movie called The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest surviving feature length animation. It's animated in silhouettes as shadow puppetry. The film was silent but it was shown with live musical accompaniment from a three piece band.

On the way back I got some take-out Chinese food.

Cafe Society

Last night I watched the movie The Usual Suspects, directed by Bryan Singer. The movie is told in flashback as con-man "Verbal" Kint (played by Kevin Spacey) recounts the events leading up to a horrific gun battle at the Los Angeles docks which led to 27 dead. Events that began six weeks earlier when Verbal and four other crooks (played by Benicio del Toro, Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollak and Gabriel Byrne) are brought together in a police line-up. The film has one of the most famous end twists in cinema history. The movie won Oscars for Best Supporting Actor (for Kevin Spacey) and Best Original Screenplay.

The new issue of Sight and Sound arrived in the mail, as did a new hat that I had ordered.

I went to the movies this afternoon and saw Cafe Society, directed by Woody Allen. It stars Jesse Eisenburg, Kristen Stewart, Steve Carrell and Blake Lively, and is set in the 1930s and tells the story of a young man from New York who goes to Hollywood to work for his uncle, who is a big-time Hollywood agent, and where he falls for a girl who is already involved with a married man. It's not very funny, but it is one of the better Woody Allen films, it's certainly his best looking film, the whole thing is beautifully shot.

The Wind Rises

Last night I saw the movie The Martian directed by Ridley Scott, based on the novel Andy Weir. It stars Matt Damon as Mark Watney, an astronaut on a manned mission to Mars who is left for dead after the mission is aborted. Alone on Mars, Watney has to find a way to get in contact with Earth and survive long enough to be rescued. It is a hugely entertaining film, and very close to the book.

I went out to my parent's house today. This evening I went to the Filmhouse cinema to see The Wind Rises, directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It's a biographical animated film telling the story of aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi, it is a beautiful and powerful film.

Life on the Road

I went out this afternoon and got my groceries for the coming week. I also went out later and got a couple of DVDs: Fantomas, collecting a French movie serial from 1913 to 1914, and the movie Mystery Train.

I went up to the Cineworld cinema and saw David Brent: Life on the Road, directed by Ricky Gervais. It involves Ricky Gervais reprising David Brent (from the British version of The Office) as he goes on tour with his band Forgone Conclusion, and proceeds to bemuse, insult or annoy everyone he comes into contact with. It's funny enough. If you like Ricky Gervais or The Office, then you'll be familiar with the humour.

Only Yesterday

I went out today to The Stand Comedy Club and saw Josie Long perform stand-up comedy. It was a very funny show.

Later on I went to the movies and saw Only Yesterday, a 1991 animated film directed by Isao Takahata. It tells the story of a bored, 27 year old Tokyo office worker who goes on a working holiday to her brother-in-law's family's farm to help out with the harvest. Along the way she becomes increasingly absorbed with memories of when she was ten years old in 1966. It's a beautiful, powerful, slice of life drama.

Suicide Squad

Last night was pretty quiet. I did some reading and some writing.

The new issue of Sight and Sound magazine came in the mail this morning, it had a feature about actress Isabelle Huppert, a piece about the early career of Ingrid Bergman and an interview with Pedro Almodovar.

I went out this afternoon and saw the movie Suicide Squad. It's set in the DC Comics Universe, where, following the events of Batman vs. Superman the US Government decide to form a taskforce of the most powerful "metahuman" (superpowered) criminals in order to combat any future alien or supervillain threat. It's had really bad reviews from almost everywhere, but I quite enjoyed it. It's kind of a mess and tries to be several different things at once, but it had some great moments and was never boring.

Jaws

I watched an episode of Game of Thrones last night. I was feeling really kind of down afterwards and listened to a whole lot of Mary Chapin Carpenter songs.

This morning a Kuretake brush pen came in the mail from Japan. The new issue of Fortean Times arrived in the mail as well. I went out to the Cameo cinema to see a one off showing of Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg. The movie is probably one of the most influential ever made, because it pretty much started the whole idea of the Summer blockbuster. If you've never seen it, it's about a small beach town which is terrorised by a giant, hungry Great White Shark. It's a great movie, I've seen it many times before, but never on the big screen. It was actually better than I had remembered it, although I had forgotten that it is actually pretty gruesome.

Scream 4

Last night I was watching a TV show called Awfully Good Ads which was about TV commercials that are so bad that they are funny. Some of them were really terrible. I fell asleep on my couch again. On Fridays I get up much earlier than usual, and I tend to stay up quite late so I often end up pretty much crashing out. Today I went out to see Scream 4, directed by Wes Craven. The movie opens on the tenth anniversary of the murders from the first film, when two teenagers recieve taunting phone calls and are then brutally stabbed to death by a "Ghostface" killer. The following day, Sidney Prescott (played by Neve Campbell) returns to town to promote a book and becomes involved in the murders. It wasn't a bad movie at all. I was kind of doubtful about it because it was coming out eleven years after the last Scream movie, but it was fun. I loved the Scream movies and I used to watch them all the time. The movie is reviewed over at Permanently Weird.

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.

The Adjustment Bureau

Last night I was watching a movie on television called Book of Blood, directed by John Hamilton. It's based on two short stories by Clive Barker ("The Book of Blood" and "On Jerusalem Street") which were the frame story for Clive Barker's six volume Books of Blood short story collection. The film is set in Edinburgh and concerns a professor of parapsychology (Sophie Ward) who is investigating a house that is supposed to be haunted and has been the scene of several violent deaths. With the aid of a supposedly psychic student (Jonas Armstrong), she sets out to investigate. It turns out that the house is an intersection on the highways of the dead, and that they don't take kindly to what they percieve as mockery and before long the experiment spirals violently out of control. The movie is actually pretty dull. It follows the plot of the Clive Barker stories fairly closely, but there isn't enough there for a feature length movie, so it's fairly obvious that they were trying to pad out the run time. Also the stories are fine in print, wehre they are like the frame for a collection of short stories, but on their own they don't work as well. The movie was obviously made on a very low-budget, and is shot so murkily it's difficult to see what is going on at times, and there are some really bad computer special effects. Also the opening scenes give away a lot of what happens in the end.

Today I headed out to the Cineworld cinema to see The Adjustment Bureau, directed by George Nolfi, and very loosely based on the short story "Adjustment Team" by Philip K. Dick. It's about a New York political candidate (Matt Damon) who falls for a ballerina (Emily Blunt). However, it turns out they were never intended to fall in love, and a sinister organisation known as the Adjustment Bureau, who control and manipulate the course of individual lives and human destiny according to a pre-determined plan, are determined to keep them apart. It was as much a romance movie as it was a science-fiction fantasy thriller, but it never really managed to blend the different genres together. It's still quite enjoyable in places though, and Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are very good in it. Both of the movies are reviewed over at Permanently Weird.

I stopped off for some groceries on my way home. I have to say that I am really not a fan of romantic movies. Some I like, though (some of my favourite movies are Before Sunrise, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Juno and Garden State). I have never really experienced romance myself, and it never really seems to make a lot of sense to me, and I have ruled out dating and romance and whatever until I've emigrated and become successful.

I've ordered the first couple of volumes of the graphic novel series Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo. I've wanted to read them for years, since I first saw the movie in 1994, but the books were very expensive but I found out they were available on Amazon and so decided to get a couple of them.

All sympathies and best wishes, of course, to the people in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami.

True Grit

Last night I was modtly reading my new comic-books. I really liked all of them. I'll have to buy some boxes or something to put them in so they don't get damaged or faded or anything.

Today I went out to the Cineworld cinema and saw the new movie of True Grit, written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. The film is set in Arkansas in 1878 and tells the story of a fourteen year old girl (played by Hailee Steinfeld) whose father was murdered. She decides to hire a US Marshall to help her track down her father's killer. She selects a grizzled old drunk called Rueben "Rooster" Cogburn (played by Jeff Bridges), who has a reputation for being the most ruthless Marshall around and who the girl believes has "true grit". I really enjoyed it. It was a really fun Western. I remember the older version with John Wayne. I've not seen it in years but I remember really liking it. This one is slightly more intense and violent then the earlier movie, but it is still good.

After the movie I went and had a bottle of beer and a plate of fish and French fries with peas which was nice.

Then I went back to the movies and saw Paul, directed by Greg Mottola. The movie involves two British science-fiction fans (played by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) who are on holiday at the San Diego Comic-Con and decide to make a road-trip across the US, visiting famous UFO crash sites. Along the way they meet a wise-cracking, foul-mouthed alien named Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen), who is on the run from the Government. Soon the three of them are being chased across the US by a trio of "Men in Black"-style agents (headed by Jason Bateman). It is a really fun movie, full of references to science-fiction films and TV shows. It's aimed very much at science-fiction fans, but there is enough there to appeal to broader audiences. I thought it was really funny. Both of them are reviewed over at Permanently Weird. I've got a card for the Cineworld so I can basically see any number of movies as and when I like without paying at the box-office.

Black Swan

I was up at five today and was into work at seven. I was working a half day and left at about eleven. I went up to the Cineworld cinema and saw Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky. The film stars Natalie Portman as Nina, a devoted and innocent young ballerina, who is determined to win the lead role of the Swan Queen in the company's production of "Swan Lake". However, while she is perfect for the part of the sweet, innocent and virginal White Swan, Nina is less well suited for the part of the evil twin, the seductive, cruel, manipulative Black Swan. In order to win the role of a lifetime, Nina has to delve into the darkest parts of her own nature. It's a very dark, and very powerful film. The movie is reviewed at Permanently Weird.

I stopped off at the comic books store and bought Spawn issue 201, Scalped issue 45, New York Five issue 1, Hellblazer issue 275, Fables issue 101, American Vampire issue 11 and Detective Comics issue 873.

Season of the Witch

Last night I was watching a few of the extra features on the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World DVD set. I also watched an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on DVD, which was a pretty good episode.

There was a lot of snow on the ground again today. I went along to get my groceries for the coming week. Then I went up to the movies to see Season of the Witch, directed by Dominic Sena. The movie is set in the 14th century and tells the story of two knights (played by Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman) who return from the Crusades to find their home ravaged by the Black Death. Arriving in a town, they are ordered to help transport a young woman (Claire Foy) accused of witchcraft, who is believed to have brought down the plague by sorcery, to a remote monestary. Mostly it was a pretty bad movie, but it did have it's moments. It will probably become a cult film in the future. It's reviewed over at Permanently Weird.

When You're Strange

I had another day off today and went along to the city centre. I got a few books in the sales, namely The Soft Machine by William Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded by William Burroughs and Mr. Nice: An Autobiography by Howard Marks (I saw the movie adaptation a couple of weeks ago at the Film Festival).

After that I went up to the Cameo Cinema and saw When You're Strange, directed by Tom DiCillo. The movie is a documentary about the influential 1960s rock band The Doors. Mostly the film focuses on the group's charismatic lead singer and songwriter Jim Morrison. It's made up of concert footage and some backstage footage along with clips from the rarely-seen 1969 film HWY, which was written by and starred Jim Morrison as a murderous hitch-hiker. The movie, narrated by Johnny Depp, will probably not have much new for Doors fans, but it is a good overview of the history of the band and of the period which they helped define. The concert footage shows just how powerful a performer Morrison really was. The only real omission is that it doesn't have anything about what the surviving Doors (organist and founder Ray Manzarek, guitarist and songwriter Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore) did after Morrison's death. It's definitely worth watching though. Actually in the audience while I was watching the movie there was some guy who must have been kind of drunk or something who was singing along with some of the songs and pumping his fist and making heavy metal style devil horns at the screen.

After the movie I went along to the Rutland Hotel and had a pint of Heineken beer and a club sandwich before heading off home.

Two in the Wave

Last night I started reading the book The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami. it's a collection of short stories. In the first one, "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women" an unemployed man finds his dull morning routine disrupted by a series of increasingly explicit telephone calls from an unknown woman, and later, while looking for his missing cat, meets a strange girl in the garden of a deserted house. The story is actually the first thirty or so pages of Murakami's novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. In the second story, "The Second Bakery Attack", a young couple who are suffering from late-night hunger pangs decide to hold up a McDonalds.

I was up early this morning, for the weekend, to book tickets for the Edinburgh Book Festival in August. I've got tickets booked to see the actor Simon Callow, comedian and author Will Self, and actor Andrew Sachs (all of whom my Mum wants to see so I got two tickets). I also got tickets for my parents to see Frederick Forsyth. Later on in the morning I went up to get my groceries.

This afternoon I went up to the Filmhouse cinema to see Two in the Wave, directed by Emmanuel Laurent. The film is a documentary about legendary French film directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. The two both worked as film critics for the same magazines, and collaborated on each other's film projects, both becoming leading lights of the French New Wave movement. However in the seventies there was a bitter falling out between the two of them and they stopped talking. It was a pretty good documentary and very interesting. This is the final film that I'm seeing for this year's Film Festival. I also got the movie Vampyr on DVD while I was there. I've been really interested in seeing this movie for years.

Back home I saw the season finale of Doctor Who which I thought was really good.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

Today it was another average and fairly long day at work. I left shortly after five and I was pretty much the only one left in the office.

After work I went along to the Filmhouse cinema to meet up with my Mum and to see My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, directed by Werner Herzog, at the Film Festival. The film was produced by David Lynch, and set mostly in San Diego, where a young man, Brad (played by Michael Shannon), has just murdered his mother (Grace Zabriskie) with a samurai sword at a neighbour's house. After the murder, he holes himself up in his house with a shotgun and two hostages. A homicide detective (Willem Dafoe) attempts to unravel the man's motives for his crime with the aid of Brad's fiancee (Chloe Sevigny) and friend (Udo Kier). Their stories, shown in fashback detail Brad's increasingly bizarre existance since his lfe was changed during a traumatic visit to Peru a year earlier. Apparently based on a true story, the movie has many touches of both Herzog and Lynch. It has plenty of strange humour, such as Brad describing his pet flamingoes as "eagles in drag" and strong performances and a memorable soundtrack. Occasionally it meanders a bit but the movie retains a strange power. According to Herzog the intent of the film was to make a horror movie without any explicit blood and gore but with a "strong mounting sense of dread". One interesting thing about the movie, which may have been due to Lynch's influence, is the amount of coffee that the characters drink, and they make a big deal of it. The main charcter even has his "special coffee cup".

After the movie we went along to Pizza Express to meet my Dad. I had doughballs and garlic butter to start, and then a Four Seasons pizza, basically it's a pizza devided into quarters witha different topping on each quarter: cheese, mushrooms, pepperoni and anchovies with olives. It was really nice.

Back home I finished reading the book "Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer!" Writings on Bruce Willis, Badass Cinema and Other Important Topics by Vern. Vern, no second name given, writes movie reviews for the Ain't It Cool News website, and the book, as the title suggests, is a collection of reviews and essays on films. They mostly concentrate on action movies but there is a wide range of movies covered. The reviews are mostly well-written, witty and intelligent, although one thing that I did notice is that there was a lot of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, presumably partly due to the fact that they were taken from websites.

Mr. Nice

It was another really dull day at work, and not a particularly good one. It was one of those days where I just couldn't wait to get away.

When I left work I went up to the Cineworld cinema to see my next Film Festival movie which was Mr. Nice, directed by Bernard Rose and based on the autobiographical book by Howard Marks. The film opens with Marks (played by Rhys Ifans) taking his first experiemnts with drugs in the early 1960s at Oxford University and follows his eventful life as he becomes a notorious marijuana smuggler and sometime spy. The movie was often very funny and packed with incident, although due to the nature of it being a biographical film, there wasn't really a proper storyline just a succession of incidents. It was very stylishly made and unusually, instead of using captions to denote the passage of time from the early 1960s until the mid 1990s, the look of the movie changes to mirror the look of movies that were being made at the time the action is set. I've never read the book, although I have heard that it's very good. I'll have to check it out now I've seen the film.

At the screening were the actors Rhys Ifans and David Thewlis along with the director, Bernard Rose (who directed Candyman among many others), and also Howard Marks himself, who has become a real cult figure following the huge success of the book and often goes on speaking tours and which made for the unusual experience of watching a film biography of someone and knowing that the film's subject is there in person. The four did an entertaining question and answer session with the audience afterwards. Thewlis mentioned that he was genuinely worried that the person he played, a violent killer, was still on the loose and was unlikely to be particularly thrilled with the movie. Apparently Thewlis had been warned that he "might receive death threats... but not to take them seriously".

The People vs. George Lucas

Last night I was watching the 1948 movie The Naked City, directed by Jules Dassin. The film is set in New York City and deals with the police investigation into the murder of a young woman. The movie's notable now mainly for it's semi-documentary style. It's a pretty good example of the 1940s film noir style. The movie was the basis for a popular TV series, The Naked City, which ran from 1958 until 1963.

Today I went up and posted a couple of postcards to a friend in North Carolina and a letter to a friend in New York. On my way back I went and got my groceries for the week.

This afternoon I went up to the Filmhouse cinema to see The People vs. George Lucas, directed by Alexandre O. Philippe, as part of the Film Festival. The movie is a documentary about the complex relationship between Star Wars fans and Star Wars creator George Lucas, especially in regards to the 1997 Special Editions and the prequel trilogy. The movie consists of talking-head interviews with fans and people who have worked with Lucas, including director Francis Ford Coppola and author Neil Gaiman. It also contains numerous clips from amateur fan films, some of which were really good. It came as no surprise that pretty much everyone hated Jar-Jar Binks in the prequels. The movie was really funny and very entertaining. After the movie the producer and the director came up and did a question and answer session with the audience.

I grew up with Star Wars. I was born in 1978 and a lot of my earliest memories centre around the movies. I collected the toys and games and comics and I saw all the movies, including the Ewok ones, and the cartoon spin-offs and played the video games. One of my earleist memories was going to the cinema to see Return of the Jedi when I was four or five and being really caught up in it. I went to see The Phantom Menace on the day it opened in 1999 and I actually liked it, although I thought Jar-Jar Binks was annoying and I don't know why they made Natalie Portman look like some kind of space clown, but it was a fun movie. The thing is that Star Wars is George Lucas' thing. It's his world and they are his characters and, to be fair, it's up to him, not the fans, what he does with it. The thing is that the prequels could have been the greatest films ever made and people would still have hated them, because what they wanted was the experience they had when they were kids and they first saw the Star Wars movies, but that is impossible to recreate, and unfair to expect. I suppose it's like the first time you fall in love really. Subsequently it might be better or it might be worse, but that initial feeling will forever be impossible to recapture.

When I got home I watched the first of the two part season finale to Doctor Who, which was pretty good.

The Bad Lieutenant

Today was another day off from work. A True Blood T-shirt that I had ordered on Monday came in the mail today so that was really good.

Later on in the morning I went up to the cinema to see The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans, directed by Werner Herzog. The movie is set in New Orleans several months after Hurrican Katrina and tells the story of a police lieutenant (played by Nicolas Cage) who suffers from severe back pain after saving a prisoner from drowning. The lieutenant now has a severe drug problem and is a very reckless gambling addict, resulting in him owing the bookies thousands of dollars. Adding to his problems is the brutal murder of an entire family of five in an apparently gang related execution, a teenage witness that he has to guard, and finding someone to look after his dad's dog. The film is neither a sequel to nor a remake of the controversial 1992 Abel Ferrara film Bad Lieutenant, which starred Harvey Keitel. This one is a good movie and often darkly humerous with Nicolas Cage doing one of his best, and most unhinged performance in the title role. The film is possibly one of Herzog's most mainstream and accessible films, although it does have plenty of his unique touches, such as filming the investigation into a car crash from the point of view of an alligator. Ferrara himself was apparently furious about the idea of the film saying about the film-makers: "I wish these people die in Hell... I hope they're all in the same streetcar and it blows up." Herzog claimed that he had no idea who Ferrara is and had never seen any of his films. After the premiere Herzog said that he would like to meet Ferrara saying: "I have a feeling that if we met and talked, over a bottle of whiskey, I should add, I think we could straighten everything out." Personally I thought that both of the movies were good in their own ways. They are completely different.

On my way back i stopped off and bought a few posters for home and also the DVD of Rashomon, which should be really good.

I'm back to work tomorrow for a day and then it's the weekend.

Clash of the Titans

Last night I was watching the movie Theorem on DVD. It's an Italian film from 1968, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and basically involves a wealthy family in Milan who are visited by a mysterious stranger (played by Terence Stamp) who proceeds to seduce every member of the household one by one, and then abruptly leaves, resulting in each member of the family reacting in bizarre and extreme ways. It's a pretty interesting, and very strange film, which is very much a product of it's time, but still pretty watchable.

Following that I watched Three... Extremes on DVD. It's basically an anthology film of three short horror films from three of Asia's most celbrated horror film directors. From Hong Kong comes "Dumplings", directed by Fruit Chan, about an ageing actress who is happy to pay anything for some of Aunt Mei's youth-restoring dumplings, which do however have a shocking secret ingredient. From Korea there's "Cut", directed by Park Chan-wook, in which a successful film director and his painist wife are imprisoned by an insane movie extra and forced to play a gruesome and sadistic game. From Japan comes "Box", directed by Takashi Miike, about a successful young novelist who is haunted by dreams and visions concerning the death of her sister. It's a fun movie and there is plenty to entertain fans of Asian horror. They are all very impressive in their own right, especially "Box" which is actually quite a beautiful film with amazing images.

Today I went out and bought my groceries for the week. After that I went up to the cinema and saw Clash of the Titans in 3D. The film is a remake of the 1981 movie based on Greek Mythology. In Ancient Greece, Perseus (played by Sam Worthington) has to embark on a dangerous journey in order to save the city of Argos from the revenge of the Gods and their pet monster, the fearsome Kraken. It's an entertaining enough movie with some impressive monsters, even if at times it's more like going from one battle scene to another, and it never really takes advantage of being in 3D (which apparently was a last-minute decision imposed on the production after the success of Avatar). Also the computer generated monsters lack the charm of the Ray Harryhausen model creatures from the 1981 version. However, it does lack the annoying robot owl from the original, and it has Gemma Arterton who is cute.