3 posts tagged “film”

I'm normally not the type to do this, but I just did a test that was actually pretty interesting.

It just has a bunch of mp3s of different frequencies; you just go through them till you can't hear.

And a movie review!

On a related note, I saw Noise the other day at the Newtown Dendy; it's as good as the reviews say it is. It has some very funny moments, it's not maximum tension for the entire movie (cough Sunshine cough), but it is still completely engrossing. The lack of any identifiable plot actually adds to the suspense, and the acting is subtle and makes the world of the film seem very close to you.

Definately watch it while it's still at the cinemas; unless you have a kickarse speaker setup at home, it just won't be the same on DVD.

As any-one who knows me (or read my last post) knows, I'm a big X-Men fan.

The only comics I read when I was young were the 50c newsprint re-issues Marvel and DC used to make, so I never read anything in series and just go what was there. Even then, despite the difficulty in learning almost a dozen heroes and villians while reading the story itself, I was hooked. The X-Men comics just seemed to have a seriousness I never saw in Spiderman or JLA or Superman. (In retrospect, I would call that seriousness Claremont.)

I was a little confused, though - if these were the 'Uncanny' X-Men, who were the others?

I think Marvel may be missing the point with what their readership want, or at least used to. It was prevailing wisdom at Marvel that people wanted heroes who were like themselves... Power Pack for young readers, Black Panther for black readers, and the 2nd generation of X-Men were meant to appeal to foreign readers*.

Nope. Readers want interesting characters and a good story.

Young readers want to feel like they're reading something 'grown-up', and hate the idea of something being 'aimed at them' (the present generation even more than my own), because it usually implies dumbing-down. So what if I couldn't follow all of the story? I loved the bits I could follow, didn't mind about the bits that I couldn't follow and was always dying to know what happened next (which I very rarely found out, bar piecing it together from much later issues).

Later, when I was 12-13, my mother started buying me issues as they arrived (around the Fatal Attractions arc), but stopped. There were just too many titles (that's for another post).

Let me summarise: I like the X-Men

As for the films...

While most comics focus on an individual or a small team, X-Men focused on an entire sub-species of humanity. This has meant a lot of characters.

Unfortunately, it appears the movies have tried to cram them all in together. The first movie was fine - you see a few minor cameos, but they are all just students and nothing happens. You see Gambit and Psylocke on a file at the Weapon X facility in the sequel. All fine.

But in the third film, the introduce so many characters that I missed a few myself, and then they killed them! I mean, why? If Magneto needs a bunch of Red Shirts, make them up! Why kill Callisto? Isn't that just cutting off a whole potential story? It isn't that they died that bugs me, it's that they died without the audience getting a proper chance to get to know them. I cannot think of any reason other than "we got a bunch of letters wanting Callisto in the film".

OK, I'm done (for now)

* Although making Wolverine Canadian may have increased Canadian interest, I wonder if the same can be said for an Irish Banshee or an American born Egyptian raised Kenyan descended Storm?

I feel a bit ignorant reviewing this, givent that I have yet to see Infernal Affairs, but here goes.

It starts well, a monologue by Jack Nicholson (Frank Costello) that perfectly establishes his old-school hardman character; through him you meet Matt Damon's character (Colin Sullivan). The movie spends a few minutes hopping through his life, done at just the right pace but it still feels a little forced. This ends with him being interviewed by Wahlberg and Sheen, who next interview Leo DiCaprio (Billy Costigan), where Wahlberg recites Dicaprio's biography to him. And that's the exposition done with.

The film focuses on identity and loyalty; both of the two main characters know where their loyalties lie, except for one point late in the film where they seem to go native for a moment, but otherwise seem to have little trouble continually lying to people who trust them; their issues are with the dangers to themselves.

The action scenes are as good as you expect from Scorsese, and the pace is kept up almost perfectlyfor the entire 2.5 hours. I say almost because the movie reaches a climax with several scenes left to go.

The Boston and Irish accents are mostly great, the camera work is superb and the characters are all consistent and believable. The gunshots sound perfect.

Don't wait for DVD or torrents; see it on a big screen.