Saturday, August 02, 2008

del.icio.us, dark knight, deals, depeche mode, draught

1. Is it just me or does anyone else take a perverse pleasure in constant painstaking refinement of the organisation of their del.icio.us links?

2. The Dark Knight is excellent, though mostly about as much fun as being stabbed in the face. The female characters once again get short shrift and I was so very happy to find Origin Story, a fanfic by minim_calibre that she'd written in response to Jim Gordon's daughter (future BATGIRL for goodness sake) barely getting a look-in. Also, I like to imagine the Joker attends these:

3. The following is an annotated extract from an Amazon email I got the other day (I am probably far more amused by its unintentional accuracy than is strictly necessary):
It's funny because it's true

(Obviously Dean SHOULD have sold his soul on Demon eBay, that's been established (at least in fic), but failing that, perhaps Damnazon Marketplace?)

4. Depeche Mode are made of win covered in awesomesauce. Never Let Me Down Again is an entirely perfect slice of '80s new romantic/synthpop/electronica/wossname, and it's totally about Dean and Sam Winchester. Oh yes it is.

5. Why don't they sell ginger beer on draught in pubs? It's much nicer than that hop-based stuff.

[ mood | thoughtful ]
[ music | Depeche Mode - I Feel You ]

Labels: amazon, awful awful puns, batgirl, batman, dark knight, del.icio.us, depeche mode, fic, films, five things, lashings of ginger beer, links, supernatural, women

Liz wittered on at 9:22 PM | 0 comments | #

Saturday, July 26, 2008

In which I watch a Rob Schneider film and hurtle into an abyss of self loathing

Even though I've had an eminently respectable Werner Herzog film out on rental for ages now, last night for some reason I decided to watch Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo - which isn't just a bad film but a SEQUEL to a bad film. And it was so thunderingly, bizarrely horrible that once I'd started watching I SIMPLY COULDN'T STOP.

I have only myself to blame. I could have switched it off after the first two minutes when Deuce is impelled to visit his ex-pimp in Amsterdam because he's trying to lay low having inadvertantly caused a TERRIBLE CETACEAN DISASTER. Or a bit later when TJ the pimp is worried people will think he's gay because he keeps getting caught looking at DEAD MEN'S PENISES. Or when Deuce has to start whoring again in order to investigate the gigolo murders and takes out a woman whose mother worked at Chernobyl and who was born with a PENIS instead of a nose, and I'm assuming she has a little pair of FACIAL GONADS as well because, well, you can guess what happens when she sneezes. Or when another client of Deuce's turns out to be a woman with no larynx who is somehow able to geiser wine out of her TRACHEOSTOMY. Or when I discovered that Deuce's pretty Dutch love interest is played by a woman who is LITERALLY YOUNG ENOUGH to be Rob Schneider's DAUGHTER. Or when TJ drops some chips in a toilet but decides to eat them anyway and then a cat comes in and SAVAGES HIS BALLS.

BUT I DIDN'T SWITCH IT OFF.

I sat through every damn knob, tit and fart joke. Every gag about Asian men's penises being small (which is a stereotype I'd heard of but never actually seen deployed), or how funny it is when men get sexually assaulted by women (or by other men. In prison), or people accidentally eating SPUNK because someone just sneezed it into their soup. HA HA! And Oded Fehr was in it for all of two minutes - which is a ridiculously short amount of time for Oded Fehr to be in something - and most of that time he spent CHOKING. And then it did that thing that ALL American gross-out sex-comedies do, which is to have a completely incongruous sweetly conservative unsubtle message. Deuce is kind of a spod and probably a hopeless lover, but women like him because he TOTALLY ASKS THEM ABOUT THEIR DAY and is all nice to them and shit. And it's sweet and NOT AT ALL CREEPY that he carries his dead wife's prosthetic leg around with him and encourages his clients to get boob jobs.

And I sat there and I watched it and I watched it and I didn't watch the eminently respectable Werner Herzog film that I've had out on rental for AGES NOW and I marvelled at how much skill and time and effort had gone into making this HORRIBLE FILM and I hated Rob Schneider and I hated Adam Sandler but most of all I hated MYSELF.

[ mood | cynical ]
[ music | Kula Shaker - Sound of Drums

Labels: films, late night, stupidity, why oh why oh why

Liz wittered on at 12:09 PM | 0 comments | #

Monday, June 16, 2008

Is anyone else amused

...that the volume on the BBC iPlayer goes up to 11?

[ mood | amused ]

Labels: films, of utter inconsequence, tv

Liz wittered on at 12:45 PM | 0 comments | #

Friday, March 23, 2007

Basic Instinct 2

Sex 'n' death in London as Sharon Stone reprises the role of Catherine Tramell.

Basic Instinct 2 (Uncut Version) [2006] I'd have been happy to give this one a miss except that Mark Kermode - a critic whose opinions I always find worth listening to, even if he does hate Pirates of the Caribbean - gave it a positive review. Reasoning that it definitely had an edge over the first film, as far as I was concerned, simply by not having Michael Douglas (who I find creepy and horrible even in relatively fluffy fare like Romancing the Stone) in it and that frankly, any film that kills off Stan Collymore in its opening scene couldn't be all bad, I added it to my rental queue.

Well, it turns out that I would much rather look at David Morrissey and his nicely defined stomach muscles than Michael Douglas, so it was certainly not a difficult film in that respect. Sharon Stone clearly has a whale of a time playing Tramell as she slinks about fellating cigarettes and being all ambiguous and icily clever. I do think she's an interesting character; she comes close to veering into the misogynistic archetype of the seductive, manipulative, evil woman, but ultimately escapes it because her ambiguity means the film never judges her. We never find out whether it's her committing the murders and she doesn't receive any sort of "comeuppance". Well, there's a bit where she's nearly drowned in her jacuzzi, and she gets called some vile names, but basically she comes out of that none the worse for wear.

David Morrissey's pleasantly sculpted midriff

London looks gorgeous in this film, constructed entirely out of metal, sheets of glass and cool, classic stone, it's all sleek office buildings and elegant squares and even the seedy, neon-lit urban decay of the Soho backstreets seems chic in its grubbiness.

Basically this is the sort of film you expect to catch on BBC1 on a Saturday at some ungodly hour of the night, except with a really glossy finish, and Charlotte Rampling being classy. Ultimately silly but pretty enjoyable nonetheless.

[ mood | sleepy ]

Labels: films, london, mark kermode is always right

Liz wittered on at 11:23 PM | 0 comments | #

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Bloody Pirates!

Well, the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is up.

Whuh?

I'd like to offer some sort of insightful commentary here but I'm currently too busy making a high-pitched squealing noise not unlike that of a kettle mid-boil.

It's sad really, the depths of fangirlishness this trilogy reduces me to. I am putty in its gunpowdery, barnacle-encrusted hands and I completely want to be Elizabeth Swann when I grow up.

Damn you, Bruckheimer! Can't you just let me have my dignity?

[ mood | bouncy ]

Labels: films, links, potc, squee, trailer

Liz wittered on at 9:47 PM | 0 comments | #

Sunday, March 04, 2007

In which I am dense

So I'm waiting at a bus stop in Notting Hill Gate and two women come up and start asking me something in broken English. I think they may have been Spanish; there were a lot of "th" and "hch" sounds. Anyway, the only words I can make out are "Notting Hill" and "door" and "film".

Well, I tend to panic when english-speaking strangers talk to me let alone ones who are struggling to make themselves understood, thus my brain isn't inclined to work too well in such situations, so the only thing I can think is that they're trying to find the local cinema. I say I'm sorry but I don't know, and they thank me and go on their way.

It's not until I'm getting on a bus a few minutes later that I realise they were trying to find Hugh Grant's front door from the film Notting Hill (not that I knew where that was anyway).

God I'm slow sometimes.

For future reference, it seems the main Notting Hill locations were along Westbourne Park Road, near where it crosses Portobello Road. Although, apparently, the actual front door that appears in the film is no longer there. So, sorry possibly-spanish tourist women! I hope you found it in the end and are not still wandering around the back streets of west london, hopelessly lost in the rain.

[ mood | Silly ]

Labels: communication, film locations, films, london, stupidity

Liz wittered on at 3:53 PM | 0 comments | #

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Transporter 2

Nope. Nothing homoerotic here. Jason Statham is an actor so relentlessly masculine and uncamp that he goes right round the dial and back into gay. Thus any scene featuring him interacting in some way with another man almost always manages to be deeply homoerotic. Transporter emphasised this by having such things as a fight scene in a garage wherein a ~~topless~~ shirtless Statham tussles with a veritable army of baddies and everyone gets increasingly smeared in spilt engine oil.

Sadly, Transporter 2 doesn't really have anything quite so gloriously slashy, although it has its moments: Statham gets at least part of his shirt ripped away before having his arm dragged through something which may or may not be spilt engine oil, and does fight some baddies off using a hosepipe which eventually swells to rigidity. He also doesn't have sex with a woman.

Does this bug you? The story is unimportant, because frankly it's a load of rubbish, all you need to know is that there are baddies, some with vehicles, and Jason will stomp on them, sometimes using a vehicle. There is a henchwoman called Lola who has a gun in each hand and a tattoo at the top of her inner thigh; when she's not shooting people she does things like lick Jason Statham's face, dance around in her underwear and get ogled. She is, in fact, eroticised to the point of utter non-sexiness, a matter not helped by being played, as per usual, by a model cast for her striking looks and not her acting talent.

And yet, I had an unfeasibly good time with Transporter 2. The fight scenes, stunts and set pieces are so wonderfully ludicrous, and pulled off with such conviction, I simply couldn't help but enjoy them.

Jason Statham is also really good at this stuff.

[ mood | lethargic ]
[ music | Erasure - A Little Respect ]