Tag Archives: Media

Recent Films

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Some notes on films and loosely film-shaped things that I’ve recently watched.

The Two Popes

From the Vatican’s New Media department comes… ‘The Two Popes’; a 125 minute explanation of how the infallibility of the Catholic Church turned out to be a little less infallible than initially thought. Ultimately, we find out that while the old Pope was old fashioned, dogmatic, and bad (and was conscripted by nazis as a boy), the new Pope is in touch, modern, and an all round good egg (who just so happened to choose to back murderous dictators as an adult). Like most of the Netflix Original movies, it has that odd TV/Film hybrid feel about how it was produced that I am yet to become comfortable with.

YMMV.

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Recent Films

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Notes on films I’ve recently watched.

28 Days Later

See here

Contagion

A medical drama with clear roots in The War Game, Threads and The Day After. Well filmed and well cast, it seems to loose confidence in the story it’s trying to tell when it diverges into a Chinese kidnap plot that neither explores the desperation that a village in China might feel or ratchets up the overall tension.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Rubbish! A mish-mash of ideas and themes and – quite possibly – scripts makes this a terrible sequel. The first – though a little wooden in places – understood the concept of the slow reveal and that, while human drama was a traditional element of a Godzilla movie, the drama was always wrapped around the actions of the monsters rather than the other way around.

Oddly enough, I think there was actually the hint of a good idea hidden under the layers of mess. The eco-terrorism angle had potential legs and could have led to a very nice Night Moves-with-giant-monsters concept. Perhaps that’s an idea who’s time has yet to come?

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DOOM

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A trailer for the new DOOM dropped at E3 yesterday and I have to say that I’m rather looking forward to it. I’ve played DOOM – in it’s various incarnations – since the mid-late 90s and, in a world where stories seem to be ever more complex, the simplicity of DOOM is a refreshing change.

  • A portal to hell is opened.
  • Bad things come through.
  • Kill them all (and, preferably, do it to a rocking soundtrack).

It’s mindless escapism with black and white antagonists which, given my ever more limited gaming time, manages to strike a deeply appealing note to me.

An Alien short for the 40th anniversary of the first film

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Alien turns 40 this year and, to me, remains the pinnacle of horror movies and ranks amongst the top tiers of the science fiction pantheon.

Dirty, claustrophobic, unrelenting; it was the complete opposite of another great personal favourite – 2001: A Space Odyssey. Gone was the shining white heat of Kubrick and Clarke’s future, where a top tier crew pushes the boundaries of man’s knowledge with not a mote of dust to be seen. Instead our A Team is replaced with tired industrial workers, each one vested in little more than getting safely back home with their pay packet in their pockets. It was a grimy, tired future, one created by people worn out by the end of the post war dream and who were looking to see a future that reflected a present that refused to change.

Interestingly enough though, both crews get screwed over by a remote governance structure that doesn’t trust them and an artificial intelligence that acts as their local agent. Apparently some fears never change.

As part of this 40th anniversary celebration, a set of Alien themed shorts has been commissioned. The first, below, is a nicely compact piece that manages reflect the fear and claustrophobia of the original film whilst ignoring the pseudo-philosophical tripe that tainted recent efforts. I look forward to the release of the remaining shorts over the next month or so.