All 4 entries tagged Film

Violence of the Lambs

Writing about web page http://www.blacksheep-themovie.com/

Tonight I went to see a New Zealand film. It was about killer sheep.
So why am I going to urge you all to see it (Black Sheep) when it comes out in June in the UK?

Because if you’re a fan of the old Peter Jackson films, Braindead or Bad Taste, you’ll love this one too. It’s full of gore, full of Kiwi humour, full of sheep (whatever floats your boat), completely stupid and utterly hilarious from beginning to end. It’s kinda New Zealand’s answer to Shaun of the Dead only replace the zombies with sheep and remove the more obvious film homages. It doesn’t try too hard at a plot (genetic experiments on sheep – tick), the acting isn’t crap and it doesn’t mess around for too long so it’s perfect if you just want no-nonsense entertainment. So yeh, watch out for it in the future.

Next up is probably Hot Fuzz. So we’ll see how that matches up…

James Riley : 24 Apr 2007 15:04 |  Tags: Film New Zealand Sheep |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A Film/Game Observation

I was gonna post this after my little adventure series, but I figured I've got so much to post already, just queuing it up would just make things harder to organise

I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest this week at the cinema. The ending was cheap. The action scenes ridiculous. The plot quite strange. The mood somehow darker, and maybe more artificial. But I enjoyed it muchly. I can't explain it, I'm not a film student.

Some things I did notice though, were a few little throwbacks to an old Amiga game called Monkey Island. You played a pirate, Guybrush Threepwood, and at one point he rows a coffin across a swamp to a voodoo lady. I was surprised that in the film, a mouth didn't take their boat up into the voodoo hut. Whether it was homage or not, it was a weird recognition, and the creator of said game also noticed a few similarities between Pirates' main bad guy Davy Jones, and Monkey's evil zombie pirate LeChuck.

Just a thought.

James Riley : 04 Aug 2006 16:55 |  Tags: Film Game |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A Scanner Darkly

…is a very decent film indeed.

Very faithful to the book, sublime acting from Robert Downey Jr. (not too shabby from Mr. Reeves either) and despite the rather serious overtones, the film has a lot of funny moments in: mainly to PKD's credit as the writer but also for Linklater and the actors for pulling it off. The rotoscope animation is more restrained than in Waking Life but it works all the better when things go weird because of it. Nothing is really cut out or combed over and Josh (who'd never heard of the book) enjoyed and understood (more important?) the film so it's bonuses all round. In fact, it cleared some things up I weren't sure about when reading the book and made it all the more worthwhile…

Enjoyed very muchly, go see it when it's out, or read the book.
Highly recommended

James Riley : 19 Jul 2006 06:25 |  Tags: Film |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Black Swan

Writing about Thom Yorke – The Eraser, Review from á la discothèque

Just read this review and I remembered some things…

It's the Auckland Film Festival starting tomorrow, and an advance screening (I think it's not out for a while in the UK at least) of A Scanner Darkly will be playing on Monday. The reason I remembered is because 'Black Swan' by Thom Yorke is apparently used over the credit sequence. I've found a few guys and gals (American, naturally) who've been fans of Waking Life (a permenant staple in my video collection dans le computer), so I'm gonna head down with them.

I just decided to check out the rest of the schedule , and found some other stuff I might be checking out:

• Jack Nicholson's The Passenger (not released since 1974)
• Michel Gondry's follow up to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, called The Science of Sleep starring Gael Garcia Bernal
• Random documentary about punk rock movement in Beijing
• Mind Game, a surreal Japanese anime
• loudQUIETloud A Pixies documentary
• A mockumentary about a fake reality TV programme, American Cannibal
• The King and the Mockingbird, an interesting French animation from 1980.

Hopefully, I'll be able to check most of these things out, at least ASD and the new Michel Gondry film.

James Riley : 11 Jul 2006 13:30 |  Tags: Film Music Review |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem