Blogcoven » Movies!

Spot the difference

uber — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 11:18:58 +0000

Two beauty contestants, two tough questions, two great answers.

Miss Alaska* on the bailout

Miss Teen South Carolina on Iraq:

*not much

Chuffed

dixie — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:17:26 +0000

I’m late to the party on this one, but “Once” won this year’s Academy Award for “Best Music (Song).” Considering three of the five nominees came from the same film, one might cynically say that the field wasn’t all that broad this year, and I suppose it wasn’t. I was happy with the outcome, however — happy that a smaller independent film won, happy that it was a decent song, happy that I’d heard of it before the nominations (I saw the film last autumn and got the soundtrack for Christmas), and happy that it was an Irish film.* You can see the acceptance speech (complete with the disgraceful ignoring of Marketa Irglova) here.

For those who didn’t grow up watching the annual spectacle that is the Oscars, each nominated song is performed over the course of the evening. “Enchanted,” with three nominations in this category, staged lavish productions in keeping with the genre the movie means to satirize. In stark contrast, the performance of “Falling Slowly” was simple and powerful. It was her at the piano, him with his ratty guitar, and the two of them singing together. The Wanderer commented that if the award had been based just on the performances, “Once” still would have won.

If you’d like to see Colin Farrell’s introduction (and Jon Stewart’s introduction of Colin Farrell), you can watch this version. Colin Farrell seems to have studied at the Wanderer’s school of hair care — long and uncombed — and managed to achieve a sort of pirate look for the Oscars. The media wasn’t sure what to do with that other than show it a lot without saying anything about it.

*A friend recommended the film to me because it was 1. highly musical and 2. Irish. The film seems to affect different people in different ways. One woman was upset at the plight of the female lead, that she was an under-appreciated woman of impressive talent condemned to a life of obscurity. Some people couldn’t get away from the fact that the two leads started dating after the filming was over, despite an impressive age difference. The Wanderer and I, however, spent the next few days homesick, as seeing familiar but distant streets and hearing familiar but fading accents reminded us acutely of how far away we were.

Spiderman 3, Spoiler-free

uber — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 10:19:00 +0000

Thanks to the good office of the Savage one, I ventured forth into the night and went to see Spiderman 3 at the previews.
The merry band of minstrels to accompany us included hug…ColmL*, Mr.E., Savage and Savage’s better half**.

The cinema was packed to the very doors, and we arrived in late because of the ludicriously annoying policy of making us put our mobile phones and other electronica into silvery bags. As Savage rightly pointed out, the last place a screener was going to happen was in the Savoy in Dublin at a preview, but they persevered, and I withered.
ColmL and I ended up down at the front row, which was not the direct shot of light to the retinas I had expected, though some of the larger action scenes were difficult to follow.

Overall, the film was 2-3 langers*** out of 5. The CGI and set-pieces were of a high standard, and they managed a cool enough anthropomorphised sand-monster without him looking too much like Morph. The script was a bit of a shocker though, it wavers badly in long sections, running out time it didn’t need to take. There is some tremendously heavy telegraphing, and a lot of scenes are backwards (where motivations are explained in advance and explicitly, then the illustrating shot is left at the end for a kind of belt-and-braces exposition).

Topher Grace does a very good job of not being Eric and makes good use of what he’s been given. It’s kind of a pity he took Venom now that Toby Maguire looks like he’s gone.

I definitely felt better about the movie than Savage did. I guess a lot of my dislikes had been vented before (I think Kirsten Dunst is a horrible choice for MJ), and this movie is a bit more confident in playing for laughs and indulging action. I’d say that overall it’s better than 2, but that it can’t compete with the freshness of 1. There are some *terrible* bits in the middle that almost killed it for me, bu
t I just can’t hate this movie as much as I did Ghost Rider or… that movie.

I reckon it comes down to this: I would go see Spiderman 4 based on this movie, and you can’t say much fairer than that.

* Only, kidding, I’m not Xaos :D
** Nickname as yet undetermined, better half status certain.
*** I don’t have the graphic to hand, sadly.