Film you recently watched: part 3

The Swarm on Netflix.

The preview gives the impression of a swarm of killer locusts rampaging through the French countryside when the reality is that they escape into freedom with about 30 seconds of the film left, (obviously leading to Swarm 2).
Please save yourself 2 hours and don't watch this.

 

I remember quite enjoying the original film titled ‘The Swarm’ at the old Odeon in Watford. With the time you save by not watching the latest ‘The Swarm’ you can watch this 2 minute trailer for that 1978 version with Michael Caine which is, on reflection, quite hilarious.

 

Those 2 minutes were infinitely better than the whole film I watched last night.
Watch the trailer for the Netflix version...



Looks great right? Wrong.

 

Looks perplexing to be honest. What’s the daft lass up to? No don’t answer that. Clearly it makes no sense.

Unlike It’s going to Piss Down! which is the disaster movie to end all disaster movies.

 

Watched Trainspotting this afternoon for the first time in about ten years.

I've watched it and read the most quotable stuff so many times that it doesn't quite excite me as much as it used to, but it's still one of my favourite films. Has anyone caught the Abbey Road reference which I noticed the first time today?

 

Anna.

Didn't realise it was a Luc Besson film until halfway through and thought to myself this is a damn good film and a bit like my favourite, Leon.

Worth a watch.

 

It's amazing how naff trailers used to be, even as recently as ~20 years ago.

 

It's clear in the trailer, that while the bees are wreaking havoc, they are not wreaking anything like as much havoc as the fellas with flame throwers. Bees are rarely known to start fires and the blame for them must surely lie with the military.

It's also quite evident that many of the 'bees' are simply raisins or such like thrown in enthusiastic fashion by crew just off camera.

 

To be fair, a high velocity raisin can be quite painful and is no laughing matter.

 

Dunno as it's bit out of my league. B'wood's Studio 70 was a marvellous place (I think that comments are wrong as that's the 'Cityscape' lighting that I remember from my youth so the photo was obviously taken after '66). The soundsysem was pretty far-ahead of its time I remember seeing Apocalypse Now with my grandfather (my dad refused to take me as he couldn't get a drink) and being blown away by the helicopters flying overhead. The assistant director Patrick Clayton was the granddad of one of my best mates at school and he took us to see 'Airplane' there and had no complaints about the set-up of our local 'flea-pit'.

To my eternal shame I still haven't visited any of the various 'Odyssey' cinemas.

 

https://www.vam.ac.uk/shop/art-deco-london-64649.html

Might be worth getting through Inter-Library Loans (or one of ebay's 2nd hand book dealers).

 

The V&A's last big art nouveau exhibition was in 2003(?) there might be one coming soon(ish).

FWIW because of my nightly stretching regime I have to sit motionless for 45min to warm-up. I did enjoy the early LWT Poirots - they seemed to have excellent location scouts to find some of the most exquisite art nouveau buildings in London and the SE.

 

ISTR that the Tate Modern's bookshop is pretty good on art nouveau- browse & see later if you find it online cheaper. Same for the Design Museum.

 

So many one liners it needed a second viewing. Saw it the first time with my 10 year son. Second time round without couldn't believe the amount of innuendo I missed first time!

 

We watched 'Dog Soldiers' last night. It was utter ballocks.

Ciff said she quite liked it, but it was too fantastic. What pathetic werewolves too. Couldn't even break through car window glass or a ramshackle wooden door. If you've just found a whole platoon wiped out and furthermore seen one of your mates (Brrrrrruuuuuce!!) get disemboweled and sliced and diced, your radio is broken and the situation is desperate, then WHY would you stop the car at the abandoned farmhouse and not just carry on to the motorway? Or the hospital, considering 'the sarge' had his guts rattling round his knees. Why continue to shoot bullets at the werewolves when they clearly had absolutely no effect. However the pan of boiling water thrown on one sent him away running and howling. Surely they'd have been better off boiling the kettle. They could have chucked rocks at them. It would have had more effect than the bullets.

I couldn't really distinguish between one shaven headed army laddish bloke and another, but they were such wooden actors that I was definitely on the side of the extras in the furry costumes and fervently hoped all the army types would be turned into pedigree chum meaty chunks so that the film would end. I thought it was badly shot too - poor camera work and zipping from one thing to another really quickly so you couldn't register what was supposed to be going on.

Never did find out how it ended. Hopefully they all died. After Ciff fell asleep in the chair, I switched over to MOTD, even though it was the grand finish of the film and there wasn't long to go. That's a measure of how rubbish it was.

 

Coming To America 2.

I mean it's not highbrow or have a complex plot in any way and the storyline was pretty lame. But it was ok.

Probably most of it was that pretty much all of the original cast were in it and it was really nostalgic throwback to simpler times.

Made me laugh a few times.

 

THE Suicide Squad - not to be confused with the crappy 2016 Suicide Squad - was great fun.

James Gunn seems to have salvaged it, it's not as good as Guardians but it's got alot of funny scenes. However, just like Boba Fett in Star Wars, I don't get the adoration for Harley Quinn, she's not a leading character for me.

 

Long Story Short

Another twist on the the Groundhog Day concept, nowhere near as good as Palm Springs (it’s an Ozzie attempt at it?) but passable.

 

Th Mule with Clint Eastward. Wanted to hate it but just couldn't, loved it.

 

Double Date on prime, a weird British version of hellraiser. Crap but good.

 

Gunpowder Milkshake. Dreadful. Utterly dreadful.

 

I started that last night and turned it off

 

A very nice way to spend a couple of hours. Be interesting to see with Britannia on the idiot box and this whether more would be made looking at out mythology.

 

I thought it was decent in places, but ultimately fell short of being good. It just felt a bit too disjointed in places, a little too unclear about what was going on. And I say that as someone who is quite familiar with the source material.

A little more smoothening around the edges, a bit more time to explain and breathe in certain sections, and I think they'd have had an excellent movie. As it is, it was quite close.

Some absolutely beautiful shots in places, and Dev Patel's performance was fantastic. It was interesting that the movie set Gawain up as a non-heroic figure, too, given he was a paragon of virtue in most tellings. It felt like a real coming of age by the end of the story, although I'm not sure all the changes made to the source material's plot necessarily added anything to the story.

I did appreciate that Arthur had a regional acccent other than RP though. Very nice touch.

 

Spent a lovely, lazy Sunday afternoon with 'Free Guy'. In retrospect we really should have watched it in the cinema not on the idiot box (lots of clever things in the background). Very amusing with some genuine laughs at the end - good old fashioned family entertainment (if your kids play ultra violent video games).

 

Went to see the new Bond

8/10 pretty good but spoiled by the ending, and can't help but think its all going to be spoiled by a Bond who could be any one of the 99 genders except a male next in a move of max wokery

Casino Royale is still Craig's best imo

 

Max Wokery sounds like an excellent Bond villain. Trying to take over the world by forcing people to use his ever changing pronouns, constantly evading detection by dying his hair different colours and wearing ever bigger pairs of glasses. Gender so fluid, he can use any toilet or changing room whenever xhe likes, stopping Bond in his tracks outside the ladies.

 

Does anyone know why every Bond villain has to have awful skin?

 

Lorry driver shortage on skin product?
Bonds used all the Nivea 007.
Dr No specialised in dermatology and they've not replaced him?