[Closed] Recent Viewing Part II

It would sure as hell be more enjoyable than anything by Stockhausen.

But then I'm of the opinion that unanaesthesized open-heart surgery by drunken quadriplegic Polish builders using spoons would be more enjoyable than anything by Stockhausen.

Crank - High Voltage

Why?

0.5 out of 5

Yeah, as much discussion as there is about BSG and its ending, the effects have been widely accepted as some of the best work on TV ever. They are indeed very impressing, and they continued to impress me up to the very end.

Did anyone catch "Bang Goes The Theory" on BBC1 last night?

I hadn't come across a "vortex cannon" before and was suitably impressed by what I saw!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyAyd4WnvhU

BTW, anyone know the music?

Wow! Wish I'd watched it. No, I don't know the music?

RV: King Kong (2005)

My first time seeing this film. Unexplained giant bugs, dinos, and a strange civilization of natives, not to mention Kong. It was an OK film, but there was way too much stuff left unexplained. I really did enjoy the score, though.

I have the same issue with the score. Half expecting another Waterworld, it was a bit of a let down. Good themes, not enough development and interesting underscore. The movie's a blast though. Play this in on a good AV receiver and there's some big sonic fun to be had.

About KONG:

1) The stampede scene was meant as an homage, I believe. The way it not only looks, but feels like back projection is too artifcial to be an unwanted side-effect. The whole scene is absolutely ridiculous, and I think it was meant to be.

2) The score is a masterpiece if you keep in mind that JNH was brought in after Shore left the project. Yeah, I know, Waterworld was a replacement job, too; but still I think King Kong is a fantastic, great adventure score with a lot of beautiful themes and breathtaking action stuff. I prefer it over most other JNH´s adventure scores.

3) Skull Island
Wow, where to begin? Jackson realised from early on that Kong would only be believable if his surroundings were believable, too. They spent an eternity to develop the background history and the different ecosystems of Skull Island. Yeah, it´s a fantastic island with dinos and giant insects on it, but they really took this task seriously. You can easily see how much work was put into it by visiting the homepage. Choose "Special Features" and then "The Bestiary" to take a look at a small fracture of the stuff they came up with about all those creatures. There´s a book out there, The World of Kong, which fully explores Skull Island, and one of the DVDs features a special in National Geographic style that tells a lot about that place, how it came to be the place we´ve seen in the movie, and what happened to it after the events we´ve seen.

One small example, the huge wall we see which protects those natives was never build to protect these natives. It once protected the ancient city that lay at the now sunk center of the island. And the natives aren´t the original natives. Of course you are not expected to get all this by simply watching the movie. But Jackson wanted to make sure that Skull Island was that ancient, lost world you can fully explore if stuff like this interests you. For once, those people really invested a lot of energy to come up with a great and fully thought-through place for a great adventure movie. And the deeper you dig, the more stuff you find... just take a look at the Skull Island entry on Wikipedia...

It´s amazing how great this movie actually is, in a lot more aspects than I would have imagined in the first place.

Agree! A lot of the dino scenes I actually found tiresome and I'm a dino fanatic.

which probably says it all as I'm no big fan of fantasy dino nonsense as portrayed in Kong 2005

I still can't figure out why people bang on about how amazing JNH's score is....yes, it's good. It's also very generic, in less crappy film score times it would be forgettable.

Its most glaring flaw is being sixteen times more overblown and histrionic than necessary. What's more, the cast are just plain weird to look at. Jack Black looks like he's playing the lead in Young Prescott and Naomi Watts spends the entire film gawping, sobbing, screaming or turning into Nicole Kidman in your head. Until the final scene, when she does all four at once. In slow motion. Atop the Empire State Building. In 3D.

As a film, it's the fattest, most swaggering, numb-headed and pointless assault on the senses it's possible to imagine.* What I can't understand is why I enjoyed it first time round.



*edit: Oh wait, I just remembered I've also seen Transformers.

RV: What About Bob?

Bill Murray is hilarious! Great film!

Word. Not too excited about the movie i was when i watched it, but still the score's amazing. The beauty killed the beast parts contain some of the most mature and beautiful musical material he's ever written!

I guess part of the problem - for me at least - with SIN CITY is that there's nothing remotely profound at the heart of it. I can take an unpleasant film that offers an argument to go with the lack of redeeming content - e.g. Haneke's CACHE - but I can't take it for the sake of nothing. (I count Miller's abundance of masculine fantasies as 'nothing' in this case.)

At least Morgan Freeman brought a sense of reality to SE7EN with his performance. It gave it real world credence for me. Mind you, I doubt I could sit through SE7EN ever again. I went for it when I saw it, but these days I'd find it very hard to take. We do change with age. (FIGHT CLUB is much the same - I'm not sure I want to ever see it again, much as I took to it the first time.)