Mrs Max is an Aussie if that helps solve the randomness.

QUOTE:
her line of work entails getting loads of dvds from Bafta.

d'oh.

In my house there are always 457 screeners waiting to be watched. And yet never anything I feel like watching.

I remember the Secret Life of Us. We all got hopelessly addicted to it at work. I just googled it and there were 4 series, I didn't know that. Um. it looks like it might have been deleted. Likely there'll be a reissue at some point though.

You can rent it off Lovefilm...

Before the Rains with Linus Roache. I liked it well enough - it's beautiful, Kerala is always photogenic. and the story is so sad. Kind of in the Merchant ivory type style.

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The Flock, with a solid Richard Gere (despite the absurd plot) and an absolutely woeful Claire Danes (I'm afraid).

It's a cross between 8mm with Nicolas Cage and Se7en. But nowhere near as good as either of them ... no, not even 8mm.

I think bits might have been chopped out for general release, because it was very confused in places.



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Wanted.

This was aces fun. Silly plot, as you would expect, but a cut above the usual VFX fests thanks to a sharp, witty script. And what VFX! Nice to see innovative effects actually used innovatively, cleverly, even sometimes meaningfully.

And oh, the pretty. I am totally in love with both James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie.

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I am in love with only one of those mentioned.

But it appears that Nuno Gomes has fallen out of love with you, Lyra. And it was going so well ...


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'S all right really - I'm used to it...

I just watched Hannibal on TV cos now I've been to Florence I was interested to see it again. I think Scott did a pretty OK job in the end with this. There's a few rubbish moments but generally it's thoughtful enough. greatly helped by the photography of course.

I saw Wanted this weekend. It's not bad. It's not great either.

This is one of those rare films "based on" a book that deviates wildly from the book and manages to be better for it. The beginning is roughly the same. But the premise of the graphic novel by Scottish writer JG Millar is that the world's supervillians have killed all the superheroes or brainwashed them to forget they were ever superheroes. They've also brainwashed the world's population to forget the world was not always as shitty as it is now. There's some kind of rift among the ruling cabal of supervillians, but I don't recall what.

The film has nothing to do with supervillians or superheroes.

The book is beyond dark. It's nihilist. Wesley kills lots of people just for the hell of it. Nothing gets better. Nobody learns anything. Actually, come to think of it, it's kind of stupid. The film is actually more interesting in that regard.


Tonight I saw Pixar's WALL-E. It's fantastic. Another triumph for Pixar. My brother said that my four year old nephew and two year old niece liked it, but didn't understand it completely. A lot of the story probably won't make sense to small children because it's not explicit. But they may enjoy it anyway because of all the clever robots.

Also, the film is proceeded by a clever animated short that was written and directed by a guy that I knew growing up. His sister was born within hours of me in the next room and my mom got to know his mom.

I thought I saw a mention of the new Will Smith movie Hancock somewhere on these boards, but I can't seem to find it. Haven't seen it myself (so not really Current Watching), but it was raved about in the local paper today--3.5 stars out of 4.

The Independent gave Hancock one star out of five. The trailer looks amusing enough - I'll probably go when it opens here.

I saw Wall-E at Glasto. It's a pretty bold move to release a feature length cartoon these days with basically no dialogue for the first half and only two characters who have any number of actual lines. It's definitely a good film, but I was a little underwhelmed. The trademark Pixar moments (the traffic system on the spaceship, for instance) were brilliant, but there didn't seem to be much meat to the film as a whole.

*************SPOILERS*******************

As you say the backstory was hinted at rather than told, in a way that wasn't quite satisfying to me. It threw up a lot of questions that would have been fun to address directly but never were. What are the politics/religions like on the spaceship? How do they deal with waste if they couldn't on Earth? How would the people cope when they returned to Earth? Wouldn't they be better off on the ship? How do you go about recolonising a planet with one plant?

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The Orphanage - seriously creepy, several jumps out of seat and lots of "don't go in there you stupid woman!" moments ... but as I said on another thread, the ending is a bit diappointing.


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