I’m pretty sure I linked to it before.. but if you haven’t already seen Episode III : A Lost Hope, go and see it!!! HERE

Made in Jan ‘05, I reckon it’s pretty spot on

Just a quick one.. Went to see Ep III tonight with a few mates, including the one and only Matt Rowan, who has a glorious 10 or 15 seconds of fame in the movie.

How was it? Well, the movie was surprisingly good! It’s still not brilliant, but a huge, HUGE improvement on the first two movies. Some action sequences are simply breathtaking, and there is a wonderful lack of any substantial Jar Jar idiocy (in fact, he gets no lines at all).

Hayden Christensen still can’t act, but he IS much less of a whiny bitch in this episode. The loose ends tie up more or less satisfactorily, with varying degrees of success.

Yoda is cool.

Definitely worth a look.

I finally went and downloaded DVD Profiler again, and spent a bit of time typing in UPC codes of all my DVDs… So if you want to check out our collection ahead of your next visit to the Stanbury Megaplex… go HERE.

Makes keeping track of them a little easier anyway. Highly recommended if you have a large collection and need to make some sense of it all….

It’s been a while since we bought a book of movie tickets (as is our tendency), so a couple of weeks ago, we got some more and watched Bridget Jones : The Edge of Reason. It was reasonable. Pretty funny, but nowhere as good or clever as the book.

Tonight, we went and saw Team America : World Police.

In short, go and see it.

In slightly longer… Granted, it was simply a highly offensive, crude exercise in bad taste, with a script that was painfully bad at times. BUT. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much at the movies since I saw South Park : Bigger, Longer and Uncut (which unsurprisingly is Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s last movie, and also a hilariously bad movie).

And hell, it’s all done with puppets. How can that be anything other than ridiculously funny?

It’s not for everyone, but if you enjoy puppets killing, maining, blowing each other up, and having sex… then you just might enjoy it.

Been a while since we took in a movie (of the non home theatre kind), so last night we headed out to see Spider-Man 2. Apart from a shitty little shit who wouldn’t shut up (as in talking at normal volume, to his father/grandfather/uncle/whoever), it was actually pretty good.

As all the set up had already been taken care of in the first movie, this one was able to just get off the ground immediately and launch into the story. On the whole, the acting was pretty decent (especially compared to Attack of the Clones, which I had on the DVD the night before). The action sequences were brilliant, as expected.

Worth a look if you enjoyed the first movie, and/or the comics. After all, no movie featuring Bruce Campbell could possibly be bad!

… isn’t too bad either.

Obviously, not as good, funny or clever as the first movie, but it still has its moments.

By the way, she survived the surgery just fine.

In brief - it’s good.

Not so brief…. The pacing is a lot better in this movie - while the first two seemed to drag along at times, this one tends towards rushed. There is a lot of assumed prior knowledge though - if you have not read the book, you may struggle at times to work out just what is going on.

Boost have a new smoothie - it’s a blueberry thing. Quite good.

After sitting on a shelf collecting dust for weeks, we finally managed to crack open my DVD box-set of the Three Colours trilogy! First up, Three Colours : Blue - first in director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s trilogy of films.

The movie tells the story of a woman who loses her husband (a famous composer) and young daughter in a horrific car crash in the opening scenes. The main focus is on her recovery from the accident, and from the loss of her loved ones.

A bit artsy, and my tired head was threatening to cave in due to having to read subtitles as well as TRY to understand the movie. Stunning photography and score, as well as featuring Juliette Binoche, one of my favourites.

And definitely a damn sight nicer to watch on DVD than the only other time I’ve watched it, on SBS when our reception was dreadful.

So so very busy. So busy that we hadn’t gone to a movie in a while, not since Underworld. But on the weekend, we went to see Once upon a time in Mexico, which is Robert Rodriguez’s sort-of sequel to Desperado, which is the sort-of sequel to El Mariachi. The story continues the legend of the aforementioned El, and features plenty of guns firing, things blowing up and general craziness, as you would expect.

Antonio Banderas does his usual amount of smoldering, Salma Hayek turns in a brief cameo, and Rodriguez Regulars Cheech Marin and Danny Trejo turn up in small roles. The legend Johnny Depp shines in an all-too-short appearance as the corrupt CIA agent Sands. Basically OUATIM is Desperado with a bigger budget, bigger explosions and a bigger, more convoluted and overly complicated plot.

I reckon Desperado was more effective because Robert Rodriguez kept it as a simple revenge flick. Once upon a Time has a decent enough cast, but the characters aren’t as memorable (in fact, the main villain is deadly boring). Good mindless fun though. 6.5/10

Not much happening today…. Went out to dinner at Castle Terrace with a few others to welcome DG home from a semi-junket. The same guy was singing as last time.. Same cheesy keyboard, same cheesy karaoke selection. Not many people got up to join in though, which was both a blessing (no kids! hooray!) and a curse (we had to listen to more of Captain Blandpants singing). The waitress had a go (singing I will always love you and My heart will go on) - she was actually genuinely frighteningly good at singing (though only reasonable at getting our order right).

Earlier in the day, we went to see Underworld. I saw previews for this months and months earlier and the premise looked pretty cool. Vampires and werewolves with guns in a bleak modern city. Trouble was the whole place was always too bleak - It’s always nighttime and raining, with no clear indication of time passing. It’s obviously spread out over several nights, but you never see any day-time.

And the guns were obviously a bit too cool. You never really see the vampires being vampires, they’re too busy being bloody Rambo. You can see the vampires’ reflections in mirrors, there aren’t any wooden stakes or crosses, and hardly anyone gets their pointy teeth in.

The action sequences are cool, but the acting is almost universally crap. Kate Beckinsale does an okay job, but spends the entire movie being sullen and artificially cool. The guy playing the head vampire (until Bill Nighy turns up) turns in the most painfully bad angry acting (complete with snarling expression) I’ve ever seen.

The storyline is quite a bit to contend with too. Unnecessarily complicated and not very well told either, I’m afraid. You definitely have to turn your discerning movie appreciating brain off for this one, it’s purely just a fun mindless action movie. Not the worst I’ve seen, but the intriguing premise deserves more… 6/10.