Hello everyone,
I’m pretty sick right now, so there won’t be an update today. I’ll spend a couple of days in bed and will return on Wednesday or Friday.
See you!
(P.S. This year’s Halloween movie: Shaun of the Dead)
It may seem like ages the question was asked on DV, but don’t think we ever forget a question here. DV asked its members which movie scared them most when they were young and after an excruciating long time a top ten was compiled. Just in time for Halloween. So here it is:
10. David Cronenberg
Oh, allow us to cheat for the tenth place. Yes, we know David Cronenberg isn’t a movie but a director, but we have good reason to add him here. First because his movies are apparently so scary nearly every movie was mentioned in our poll but none stood out as the scariest (which is why you won’t find Alfred Hitchcock in this list either). And because we genuinely like his movies. Surprisingly it wasn’t Jeff Goldblum slowly turning into a fly or James Woods inserting video tapes and guns into his belly, but Naked Lunch that was mentioned most. I must admit having given typewriters suspicious looks myself after watching the film. David Cronenberg, scarring audiences since 1975. A tenth position most definitely deserved!
9. The Wizard of Oz
Now there’s a film I wouldn’t expect here, but a lot of members remember being forced to watch The Wizard of Oz by their parents and getting scared by the Wicked Witch.
8. Nightmare on Elm Street
Many members recalled how Freddy popped up in their dreams the night after they’d watched the first Elm Street movie. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 managed to get zero votes, proving not even Freddy Krueger remains scary.
7. Alien
Number seven is another classic and for some reason it’s the film that members felt least necessary to explain why they found it so scary. Let us guess: the monster that kept hiding in the dark? The creature that broke its way out of a stomach? Alien is constant creepiness.
6. Irréversible
“Uncomfortable”, that’s the word that popped up most when members described this film. The vicious rape, the fire extinguisher… they found this film brutal and graphic. I Spit On Your Grave was mentioned in a lot of comparisons, but Irréversible was allegedly even more uncomfortable. (No mention of Extremities then, the rape revenge movie that was so awful I found myself turning against the revenging victim.)
5. The Shining
It seemed scary too, ending up on the 11th spot (joining Romero‘s Dawn of the Dead), but nothing could beat Johnny being “here” and several other scenes that made our membership hide behind the couch. Even the hallways looked scary.
4. Threads
It’s not just monster movies in here. This BBC movie made in the 80s showed the fallout of a nuclear attack in such detail it managed to scar nearly everyone who ever watched it. It’s not a pleasant trip to sit through, but it packs enough punches to make you join the next anti-war movement. Threads at 4, because nothing is scarier than humanity.
3. A Clockwork Orange
Which brings us to number three. If we’d made a list of the scariest directors, George A. Romero would’ve ended up third, Cronenberg on the second spot, but noone is scarier than Stanley Kubrick who’s ended up twice in this poll. Rape, violence and Beethoven: does anyone know a scarier combination?
2. Jaws
It made our members afraid to swim in the sea and, let’s face it, isn’t that a sign of powerful horror? (Good thing they didn’t watch Psycho on the same night or our members would only wash themselves with soaked washcloths.)
1. The Exorcist
Mark Kermode would’ve been proud of us: The Exorcist ends up on top again. And two more votes would’ve made The Exorcist III end up in our top ten as well. So apparently DV’s members like pea soup, scary stairs and novel ways of using a crucifix. We’re catering to a sick bunch, we are.
They call it The Final Destination, but just how final is Final Destination 4? There’s only one question that’s been asked more about this film. That question: was there really a need for this movie? The answer, you may be surprised to hear, has two 
possible answers: yes and no. No, because the third movie showed there may be an endless variation of elaborately executed deaths but the fluffy story around the deaths was starting to wear thin. One could pretty much guess how the movie was going to develop: a long introduction with a lot of deaths, the scene where it turns out to be some sort of omen followed by the rescue of a couple of characters and the subsequent series of scenes where the saved characters turned out to be less safe than they’d imagined. Let’s face it: after a while a monkey could write the script. But now for the yes answer: let’s not forget the basic idea may have come from Jeffrey Reddick, but it was duo Glen Morgan and James Wong who turned it into the highly successful series Final Destination has become. The second film was made without the duo’s participation to prove there was the possibility of a sequel for a movie that looked like it couldn’t use a sequel. Which is why Wong returned for the third movie, to claim back his series. The third movie turned out to suffer from sequalitis: the story dragged on and the fresh flavour was 
gone. Which sounds like more proof to say we didn’t need to have another movie, but director David R. Ellis, who’d also helmed the second instalment, had hopes to milk out a fourth movie: “Let’s do another instalment,” he thought, “but this time let’s do it in 3D.”
Which brings us to a vital question: who would have it, the ayes or the nays?
And the winner is: yes. Because Ellis’s addition to the by now familiar series made it fresher again. Sure, you’d be treated to another 80 minutes of elaborately conceived deaths, but now the deaths were in function of the added gimmick: the 3D effect.
Some critics may say that sometimes Final Destination 4 looks badly directed, especially in countries where the film is offered is 2D. I happen to live in such a country, but last month I was in the UK 
and I had the chance to see the film in 3D. This week, thanks to the glorious benefit of my local movie card, I watched Final Destination 4 (in 2D) at my local cinema. Like most 3D movies, certain scenes are clearly made for 3D experiences and look a bit odd without the added dimension. This is definitely the case for The Final Destination which doesn’t just content itself with shooting the death scenes in 3D. Even a seemingly unsuspicious scene like the wake is shown in 3D, with a candle appearing between the viewer and the character.
Which is fairly irritating if you watch the film in 2D: you may not notice some 3D effects, but other scenes – like the champagne cork rocketing towards you – look pretty stupid without the third dimension. As if Michael Bay is attempting to film like David Lynch.
So let’s face it, The Final Destination is functionally directed and can only be truly enjoyed in 3D. Apart from the scene where two characters go and watch a movie in 3D, which isn’t shown in 3D in The Final Destination.
And let’s face it: it is a good joke: the movie series which is built around carefully placed objects which look harmless but are lethal if being in a chain of domino effects, now uses those same elements and films them in 3D. So yes, the gimmick works, but that still doesn’t mean it’s a good film. Well, the good news is that this fourth instalment is definitely better than its predecessor but that it’s still 
less fresh than the first and second movie. I for one found the visionary scenes, where the main character sees everyone’s death before waking up out of his/her dream and warning everyone to move their asses, suffering from a severe case of déjà vu (which is a bit ironic, coming to think of it) and sadly it is done more than once in this film. The only saving grace here, apart from the final scene, is that it allows Death (the always invisible real star of these films) to come up with variations for the same location.Case in point: Nick saves his friends and a couple of others from the race track disaster and, just when everyone is quite relieved,a tyre from one of the exploding cars jumps over the track and decapitates one of the survivors.
Not that the decapitated body looked terribly convincing. In fact, some of the special effects let the film down, whether you’re watching it in 2D or 3D. Much like my other problem with the film: a lot of horror movies need a total jerk, who’s so irritating you really want him/her to die. In this film it’s brainless Hunt (surely that’s intentional rhyming slang) who even grabs his phone during sex with a girl because he has already orgasmed. It’s the sort of character one can stomach in movies with vicious slashers, but I always thought the Final 
Destination series didn’t need this sort of cliches, but Ellis and Bress (the writer) must’ve thought otherwise. It’s a shame, really.
So what does that leave us with? A movie with better ideas and actors than Final Destination 3, a successful gimmick that brings us a bit of fresh blood and a clever climax. See it in 3D or don’t bother and pray the producers weren’t lying when they called this fourth film The Final Destination.
Score: 7/10 (3D version)
Score: 5.5 or 6/10 (2D version)
Because we don’t always have the time and energy for full-length reviews and because some movies just don’t offer enough material for a long review, here’s three mini-reviews. From best to worst, here we go…
PARTIR
As mentioned in the introduction, sometimes a mini-review is sufficient. Partir is a French movie about a woman who feels responsible for a builder’s accident (well, in a way she is) and eventually ends up madly in love. She wants to leave her rich husband and two kids from the poor Spanish builder, but her husband doesn’t really like that idea and uses his influence to make sure that she doesn’t get a penny and that she loses her job (which she managed to get thanks to her husband). Life ain’t fair and this movie is keen to show that. So what’s stronger: being in love or being able to pay for your life? Find out in Catherine Corsini‘s Partir. And yes, Kristin Scott Thomas speaks French throughout the film, in case you wondered.
7/10
DE STORM
The Dutch movie De Storm (yes, that does translate as The Storm) is all about the Dutch storm in 1953, which cost thousands of people their lives. The storm itself looks visually impressive but suddenly the focus moves to a young unmarried mother (Sylvia Hoeks, left on the photo) who was separated from her baby boy during the storm and who obstinately goes looking for her child. Oh, and this being the catholic 50s, the village is very much against her being around. She’s a loose woman, after all.
All this leaves you with the feeling of “so what’s the point?” and the quite lame start of the film is no help either. Sylvia Hoeks has to act like a stubborn young woman in shock, which led many to claim she didn’t act too well. Our opinion: the last thing the film needed was an overacting actress, so we’re not complaining. Well, apart from the overall blandness of the film. For all that’s good about it, there’s something bad about it, so 5/10 seems like the perfect neither fish nor flesh score.
AWAY WE GO
Away you go? Please do. Prepare for 90 minutes of “ooh, look at me, I’m smart”. The only thing good about this film is how supple it is: it incessantly manages to lick its own arse and achieves lots of pleasure from that. For the first time in five years I left the theatre for a bathroom break, which for me was the highlight of the movie. (Though I was shocked to find out only 35 minutes had passed since the beginning of the film… surely my watch was broken and more than an hour had passed… no? Bummer!)
The film is about a pregnant couple who go and meet some people all over the United States. The scene in the nightclub is the only one that has some depth and marks the only highlight. Atrocious anti-folk songs are played throughout the film, annoyingly loud so you’ll really notice them. Basically, Dave Eggers (writer) wanted to redo Juno for thirty-somethings. The result is an absolute triumph in pompous and redundant filmmaking. The director is one Sam Mendes, whose first protagonist (Lester Burnham in American Beauty) was dead by the end of the film. It seems the killer also managed to shoot Mendes’s talent. Go away!
2/10
Some call it the definitive Iraq movie, but wouldn’t it a bit too early to claim this mission was accomplished? Fact is Kathryn Bigelow directed a movie that gives you some idea as to what it can be to serve in Iraq. And to leave the place after your tour of duty. By not spending too much time between the final mission and the first trip to a gigantic supermarket in the US, you understand how it must feel to go from a desolate area full of death and decay to 300 varieties of corn flakes.
The Hurt Locker is 90 minutes of male bonding and recklessness, because that’s all there is. The opening quote (by author Chris Hedges) sums it up neatly: “War is a drug.”
But I do have a couple of bones to pick and each bone will cost the film 0.5 point:
1. This is the sort of film that can do without a star studded cast. In fact, the sudden arrival of the Brits completely kicks you out of your imagination because the Brits (portrayed by a.o. Ralph Fiennes and Guy Pearce) are so much better known than the American leads of the film. Suddenly you’re aware it’s only a movie, something the soldiers in Iraq can only dream of.
2. Most of the time the shaking camera added to feeling nearer to the soldiers, but sometimes its use was exaggerated.
Final score: 7/10
The highly popular District 9 is a movie produced by Peter Jackson and it shows. More than once during this film I had to think of Jackson’s origins as a filmmaker. Bad Taste, Jackson’s debut, was a highly entertaining exercise in comedy gore. And right after his first ‘proper’ film (the drama Heavenly Creatures) Jackson directed the mockumentary Forgotten Silver that would trick thousands of viewers into thinking pioneer director Colin MacKenzie actually had existed.
But now Jackson gave the director’s chair to Neill Blomkamp and took a producer’s role. But District 9 proves Blomkamp has watched Jackson’s older movies. District 9 allegedly chronicles what has happened since the moment an alien spaceship hovered over Johannesburg. The aliens, who have been given the derogatory name ‘prawns’, were in bad shape and were placed in District 9, a ghetto for aliens. Given the growing tensions between the humans and non-humans the government finally decided to relocate the aliens to a new district outside of Johannesburg.
The man who’s chosen to lead this operation is Wikus Van Der Merwe, a character that seems to have escaped from cringe comedy like The Office. Wikus and his team need to go to District 9, gather signatures from the ‘prawns’ claiming they’re okay with the subsequent move and, while they’re at it, find a couple of rogue aliens who’ve been involved in several fraud schemes. Hey, we’d told you District 9 was a ghetto. There’s even a bunch of Nigerian gangs, mind you.
Well, guess what, things don’t go exactly as planned and Wikus accidently uncovers an alien plan to leave the planet. Sadly, he doesn’t realize this and opens a canister with the fluid necessary to launch the ship. At first, the substance only seems to make Wikus sick, but after a while Wikus discovers the fluid slowly turns him into an alien. Not that great because now both the aliens and government are on his tail, the former to get their fluid back and the latter to experiment on this unique hybrid.
District 9 starts off as a documentary on the subject with interviewees talking about the (apparently deceased) Wikus. Once Wikus enters District 9 the film suddenly can’t seem to make its mind up anymore: sometimes it pretends to be a documentary and sometimes it’s a regular movie. It’s not the only time District 9 demands a lot from your suspension of disbelief: early on in the film we’re being told the aliens have been amongst us for several years now, but nowhere was the movie able to convince me twenty years had passed.
These reservations aside, District 9 manages to entertain you on the same level as Jackson’s early movies, constantly shifting from comedy to horrific bits. The film also gives nods to other well-known horror movies, especially Cronenberg‘s version of The Fly.
The CGI aliens look good in as much as they don’t try to look state-of-the-art. Instead, they look a bit dodgy and all the more convincing. Speaking of 
which, all the aliens were voiced by one person, so Jason Cope should deserve a special mention.
That the film takes place in Johannesburg isn’t just because director Blomkamp is from South-Africa. The way the aliens are treated can only make you think of the South-Africa of not too long ago, with its system of Apartheid. We’ve said this before: over here we like it when movies use a horror scenario to talk about real life. District 9 manages to talk about the townships in a completely different but equally effective way from movies like Tsotsi.
What a shame then that District 9 doesn’t really know how to behave. Had it be more consistent in its form (as either a faux-documentary or a regular movie) it would’ve been one of the most remarkable films of the year. Now we’ll just stick the label ‘good’ to it.
This time from 1967. The name of the film is 1999 A.D. and it predicts some sort of machine on which we’ll be able to shop, read mails and pay our bills. A bit more accurate than last time’s video then.
Fashion designers of the 1930s were asked to imagine what men and women would look like in the year 2000. And… were they accurate? Watch this short clip and find out. Also admire the phrase “containers for coins, keys and candy for cuties”.
Original source: ITNsource.com
They call me an avid reader even though I don’t even read a third of the amount of books I used to read. The BBC compiled a list of the 100 most beloved books in Britain. Occasionally on blogs you see this list with a twist. The books you’ve read yourself are in bold, the titles in italics are the ones you own but haven’t read. The rest is neither bold nor italic. Here’s my list (because it doesn’t always have to be about movies here). If you want to, you can list the numbers you’ve read in my comment zone below.
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible (well, to some extent)
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma- Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker (I was forced in school)
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables- Victor Hugo
Conclusion: I do read a lot of books, but apparently not the British favourites.
Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for coming to this site to read my review. Are you sitting comfortably? Then let us begin with my analysis…
Without wanting to draw lots of parallels between movies, it’s damn hard when two similar movies are released at approximately the same time. Case in point: The Prestige vs. The Illusionist. I’ve already told you my views of The Prestige last week, so now it’s high time I gave you my verdict of The Illusionist.
If you don’t like long anxious waits to reach a conclusion, let me just tell you that a) you’d better not go and see movies about illusions and magic and b) I was more drawn to The Prestige, which I found beat The Illusionist on most points, except possibly the most important one: the plot twist.
The Illusionist is based on a short story, “Eisenheim the illusionist”.
The story tells us the tale of an young illusionist, who has a fond spot for a young aristocrat (and she for him). They don’t see each other for a couple of years, but then meet again during a performance, where she is seated next to her fiance, the crown prince.
The crown prince is jealous and has an inspector investigate whether the illusions are fraud or supernatural, anything to get the illusionist banned.
Edward Norton is Eisenheim the illusionist, Jessica Biel the aristocratic lady (but we’re allowed to call her Sophie), Rufus Sewell is the crown prince and Paul Giamatti is the inspector.
The director of The Illusionist is one Neil Burger. I hadn’t heard of this man and apparently he’s only directed one other movie, Interview with the Assassin (2002).
My first impression of The Illusionist was rather poor: I found the score by Philip Glass quite irritatingly posh,the credits were written in a font that showed us “look people, we’re doing a period piece here” and if you were still too stupid to spot this, the colours have been retouched to show us we’re watching a thing of the past.
Now I don’t mind this sort of cheap technique when there’s a flashback in a movie, but surely not an entire film?! How condescending can a movie get?
What is worse – and here we’ll draw another parallel to The Prestige - is the way the actors speak. I don’t know about you, but I have always hated it when actors use a fake accent to show us their character’s natural language isn’t English. This is okay the way David Bowie did it in The Prestige: Bowie played Tesla, a foreign inventor who was conversing in English and therefore had an accent when speaking.
In The Illusionist however, the characters speak ‘German’, which means they’re speaking English with a few hints of a German accent (the way an Austrian would speak English, but not when Austrians have to speak German) and – because the audience is really considered moronic – we add words like ‘Herr’ or ‘bitte’ to prove the couleur locale.
Why can’t actors just converse either in the actual language or just say the words in English? Do they think we’re so stupid we’d imagine English is the native language in Austria? Apparently yes.
Another bone I have to pick with this film is that some of the illusions are shown as supernatural stuff. Now, whereas this becomes a plot element in the second part of the film (and so I didn’t have a problem with it there), in the first scenes of the movie Eisenheim is but a regular illusionist, which makes it even worse that some effects look clearly made with digital effects.
For a movie about illusions, you can wonder how much more a movie can shoot itself in the foot?
If you can ignore the bad effects, the annoying score, the condescending tone and the okay but not exceptional performances with irritating fake accents, can the movie still deliver?
Well, as said in the review of The Prestige, a lot depends on the grand finale and the build-up. This story definitely has more bone and so the script is more layered and the twists more interesting.
Sadly, that is one of the only good things I could say about this film.
The Prestige had its problems, but overall the movie had more prestige and better ideas. The Illusionist looks like a failed opportunity and it’s a movie that should be kept as far from arms as possible: because, if you let it, it’ll surely shoot itself in the foot time and again. And sadly, as you can tell from the blood stains on the carpet, that is not an illusion.
4.5/10
