Very soon they will be releasing the Guy Ritchie (boo) directed Sherlock Holmes (yay) film starring Robert Downey Jr (yay) and Rachel McAdams (yay), with Jude Law (booyay!?) on DVD.  I have not seen that film, mainly because it doesn’t have any dinosaurs in it (as is my want).

I’m sure you are all in the same position as me; you like Holmes and you all like dinosaurs, but can’t find a place where these two passions meet. Until now. Ladies and gentlemen let me introduce you to this film, available on DVD now in shops and other places. It is called ‘Sherlock Holmes’. There are dragons and ‘cyber-men’ and dinosaurs… but it all starts with a simple GIANT OCTOPUS ATTACK!!!!!!!

Spoilers within…

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This has been around the webs already I’m sure (that is my last apology on the matter)… but this is an amazing review of James Cameron’s film Avatar by it’s own creation! Kind of. Dog version? I dunno. Stunning animation, which by the way, Cameron, is alot of hard work.

via cartoon brew

Yes. One of the events that we failed entirely to catalogue during our absence was the release of Cameron’s Avatar. Smurfs on acid, Thundercats in Fern Gully, yadda yadda yadda. It was good. Below, witness babies try to take over the adult world in this funny haha box…

viva Topless Robot

1.)It has Carrie Fisher in it

2.) It’s about an Appalachian Clog dancer

3.) By the awesome name of Jesco White

4.) Who is wild-eyed and deranged and violent and a bit obsessed with Elvis.

5.) Did I mention it has Carrie Fisher in it?

6.)If the introduction at EIFF is anything to go by Edward Hogg is a shy, modest, charming, extremely talented, slightly drunk and rather gorgeous (British) actor in his first big role. One to watch, yes siree.

7.) It’s by a British first time director.

8.) It is unusual in that it is less a biopic than an ‘imagining’ (and what an imagination) of the life of a real live person

9.) The soundtrack is awesome, most especially tracks by the wonderful and very ‘unique’ Hasil Adkins

10.)You’ll see one helluva glue-sniffin’, gas-huffin’, banjo-duellin’, wood-burnin’, hog-pickin’, toe-tappin’, foot-stompin’, barnstormin’, honky-tonkin’, hell-raisin’ foggy mountain breakdown

Yes, we may have forgotten this but art, and cinema, can be important and beautiful and life-affirming. Bill Douglas knew this.

I am ashamed to say I have never seen the autobiographical Childhood trilogy for which he is famous, despite the fact he grew up just outside Edinburgh, the nexus of my existence. But I am very proud to be the owner of the new DVD of Comrades, which until now - well officially tomorrow (BFI sent mine early, woo hoo)- it was almost impossible to get hold of by all accounts… ad a six week run in London only and then practically disappeared.

Released during the Thatcher era (go figure), the film is based on the Tolpuddle Martyrs of the early 19th century, sent to Australia for daring to be involved in a ‘Friendly Society’ (basically a trade union) and still celebrated today. But far from being a factual documentary, what makes it stand out are the moments imaginative experimentation, of ‘fantastickal reverie’. (It reminds me a wee bit of one of my favourite novels, maybe the Great American Novel, Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon which is based on factual events from late 18th century history but connecting the gaps are flights of imagination from talking dogs to alien abduction.)

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I’d like to do more movie reviews. But then I think I’d sound like an arse. On the other hand, Brad Neely is cool. See also his Best Movies of 2008 essay and Harry Potter commentaries.

Thanks brother for the introduction.

This film was released in 1910 by Thomas Edison’s film production company, the same year his friend and neighbour Henry Ford released the Model T. It was the first film adaptation of Frankenstein and thought lost until 1970s but the innovative special effects have barely been improved upon- witness the sequence where the monster materialises in the flames…

But it can’t claim to be the first sci-fi; that honour would probably go to the fantastic and phantasmagoric Le Voyage dans La Lune (The Trip to the Moon) by George Méliès, 1902. Those of you that spent £15 and five non-refundable hours on the recent Star Trek and Terminator movies be consoled, these are in the public domain (free to download from Internet Archive) and will be roughly 24 minutes to last a lifetime.

Went to see Dario Argento horror film Suspiria last night. I’d wanted to see an Argento movie ever since I heard George A Romero talk about him at Edinburgh Film Festival. It was the last film to be made in Technicolor and it definitely has something of Wizard of Oz about it. Apparently Argento was inspired by Snow White.

Here’s a particularly brutal-but beautiful- early scene. WARNING: not for tender of age or faint of heart.

I guess you could say I was ‘bewitched’. Was just thinking how much I’d like to see of the maestro’s work when I opened an email announcing his new film ‘Giallo’ will be given it’s world premiere at Edinburgh Film Festival 2009.  Tickets on sale this week. Spooky.

There have been too many happy happy penguin films of late. And the March of the Penguins in particular  was interpreted some right-wingers to suggest that penguins and, by extension, humans are naturally socially cohesive, monogamous and loving parents. Now, I have nothing against these values, I wish it were true but it seems that penguins may actually be little more like Gordon Ramsay and Chris Tarrant (only less fishy). For an an extremely funny if disturbing critique try to find Stewart Lee’s diatribe,  ‘March of the Mallards’ (until 25 April on BBC i-player: Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle ep 2, 15 minutes in).

Now witness this clip from lovably bonkers film genius Werner Herzog’s awesome new documentary Encounters at the End of the World .

I could go on and on about Herzog and his manifesto. But I won’t. I’m not saying Herzog here isn’t as equally biassed and non-scientific. Just indulge in the contrast with some of the sentimental pap we are served up on a regular basis.  Go see it.

And so the year begins with a great film. What joy! But bleak, murky, steroid enhanced joy.

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We must have a sexy revolution now, jah?

Just released in the UK, The Baader Meinhof Complex bops your liberal bourgeois head with a policeman’s truncheon, tear-gasses your take on tyranny then screams profanities like “fascist swine” and “arschloch” at your granny. Even if your granny is dead…

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There’s only one thing worse than being raped, and that’s being raped twice in one day!

But such a hideous occurrence spells doom for the scum and villainy of downtown Manhattan…

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3 out of 5

“Mneh”

That was the sound I made after I had watched the all new sparkly, gritty Bond film Casino Royale, a sound that I was soon to regret; the sound that turned my friends against me, and after I’ve finished writing this I may have to place some large rocks into my pockets and slowly walk into the sea never to return, shunned by all right minded people, no longer welcome in a world so enamoured with the new look Bond.

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It’s not that I didn’t like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I loathed it. As I walked out of the cinema I needed my wife to comfort me. From somewhere primal, deep down inside I abhorred that movie. Yuk. Yuk. Yuk. But then I noticed some parallels…

I noticed that I hated IJatKotCS in the way some Star Wars fans hated The Phantom Menace. Which got me to thinking because I didn’t hate Episode I (or II or III), I actually really liked them and found them mostly in keeping with the tone of the original trilogy. I was a little too young for Star Wars, only discovering them as a teenager in 1995, four years before the new ones kicked off.  Really they were all new to me - I wasn’t having to accept follow ups to films I’d formed my identity around so I was able to see things a bit more clearly. Not so with Indy.

Dr. Henry Jones Jr. is my childhood hero. The first film I remember going to see as a family was Last Crusade when I was 7 years old. My love of movies, history and notions of male identity (I’m not kidding!) all stem from that film. We got all the movies on video and I watched them to death. When I was 10 I wrote my own Indiana Jones Adventure book (including the ‘words’ to the theme tune: Dun-du-dun-dun-dun-da-dun!)! I grew up but always returned to Indy. After a ten year break I watched them all again and terrified I’d hate them I found I loved them just as much.  And so I looked forward to a new film with the same fervour my elder Star Wars brethren looked to TPM with. Read the rest of this entry »