NightWatch has NOT been picked up for a hollywood remake. I've seen the first half of it here at a promotional event, the jist being the Hollywood has purchased the rights to distribute all three eventual NightWatch movies, as a cut rate Matrix Trillogy thing.

2046 I kinda enjoyed. Godzilla Final Wars has not made the big screen over here

I went to see Kung Fu Hustle last night. If you ONLY go and see one movie this year, it should be this one.
From the creative stylings of Stephen Chow (the genius who gifted us all with Shoalin Soccer) comes the all singing (actually, I don't recall much singing) all dancing, martial arts, Baz Luhrmann style extravaganza. Filled with romance, revenge, cheap & comic gags, wild & crazy special effects and far too much english for a chinese movie, this is definitely one of my favourites for the year.

^^^ what she said...it was hilarious. Took the piss out of Kung Fu movies (and heaps of other stuff, like the matrix & starwars to name a few) while still being a great Kung Fu movie in its own right.

Dazzle wrote:'Kung Fu Hustle' - quite possibly the best 'Stephen Chow' movie that Stephen Chow will ever make. This takes the humour, themes and compashion of his other works like 'Shaolin Soccer'/'Good of Cookery'/'Forbidden City Cop'/'From Bejing With Love' and just boils it down to pure Chowisms. At moments touching, silly, gross, cruel, side splittingly funny and kick arse. It out matrix's the Matrix, with some of the least likely looking kungfu masters cutting loose in the traditional cinematic style. For a writer/director/producer/star, he is incredibly generous with how much time and glory everyone else gets. Highly recommended.

'The Island' 2005 - Saw the UK premiere being set up in Leiscter Square, or atleast the baracades cos it would seem they were keeping the crowd as far back as possible. As for the movie, its Michael Bay all the way, big, loud, explosive, bigger, louder and then more explosions. Live your mind at the door for acceptable low IQ big noise Hollywood entertainment. Companion comment "It wasnt as bad as the reviews were making out"

Now, get your eyes around a true all time classic movie (currently 105 on the IMDB all time movie list), from one of the masters of commedy. Entirely free as it is now in the public domain. You have all been raving over a more or less black & white movie (Sin City) so check this out, its brilliant.
http://www.archive.org/details/TheGeneral

Revolver (2005)

Guy Ritchie scored big with a couple of movies that made Brit gangsters cool again, 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' and 'Snatch'. And then he had to go and make an arty movie with his misses (Madonna) that got so hammered criticaly that it went straight to DVD in most terratories. So, you would think 'Revolver' would be a safe return to the gangster genre with a few familiar faces and a couple of big names thrown in.

But no. This movie starts out all cool music and attitude gangster, but then it decides it wants to be 'The Usual Suspects', or 'The Sixth Sense', or 'Momento' or 'Fight Club'. You know, one of those movies that kinda later on admits its been lying to you, and twists things so as the credits run you can go away mulling over what realy happened when and why and if it is good enough it will be floating around in your mind for days afterwards.

But not here. People were leaving confused, unhappy and disappointed. Its just a mess of 'just out of film school' ideas, completely muddled character motivations and metaphorical clap trap. To be fair, there are some very cool set pieces and a gunman that absolutely owns the screen once he cuts loose, so Mr Ritchie still has 'cool brit gangster with pumping music' cred, if only he could have jetisoned the rest of the shit.

Dont see this on a big screen. If you have an arse strong enough to sit through a sitting of this, do it on DVD, such that you can either skip back to the cool set pieces, or go back and try and figure out exactly what the heck he's on about.

I just watched Vanishing Point on DVD after not being able to find it anywhere, I found out my sister's partner had just bought it. Big cars, high speeds, drugs and christian undertones. One of the best car films I've seen.

you didnt mention the naked chick riding the CL350

No, no mention of nudity, you have to like cars first.

but I like boobies too.

HDC, I love you're new signature.

Red Eye (2005)

Wes 'Elm Street/Scream/Hills Have Eyes/Last House on the Left' Craven steps back into the directors chair again and this is the result. Glad to see him back, as of late he has mainly attached his name as Exec Producer or 'Presented by' tag line to a number of craptastic horror movies.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421239/trailers

Okay I love the trailer for this, and the first 20 minutes of the movie plays the same way. Overnight flight home gets delayed, cute girl meets cute guy at check in, they end up seated next to each other, the romantic sparks fly as the turbalence kicks in. If you manage to distract your date at this part of the trailer she/he might think they are in for a romantic thriller, or maybe even a disaster movie, they would have missed the bit where the guy goes batshit psycho crazy at 30,000 feet and little miss cutie finds herself in a stalker/action/movie.

You've seen a lot of this sort of thing before, but what is here is well done and gets the required jumps, thrills and action up on the screen at the right points.

companion comments:
'Eeeeeeeeeeurrrk!' (complimented by jumping half a meter out of her seat when Mr crazy stalker makes a sudden knife wielding appearance)
and
'YEEEEEEESSS' (lead actress has just found a practical and bloody use for high heel shoes)

I would rate it above average, perfectly acceptable dvd rental or on the big screen with an auidiance of gasping and shrieking young women.

Just For Kicks (2005)

The tag line sums it up nicely 'A documentary about Sneakers, Hip-Hop & the Corporate Game'. It is a fun documentary where you can laugh with or laugh at the people on display here, from the Hip-Hop pioneers of the 80's, to the wannabe-hip sneaker executives, to the sneaker collector addicts through to the modern rappers with entire rooms of fresh signature series sneakers so they can pop a fresh from the box pair on every day.

They have managed to collect a bunch of strange, interesting and funny people (hard core sneaker collector in best jive talkin NY accent 'I gave up the drugs, I gave up the drink, I'm 36, yo, 36, I eats, I sleep, but I'm always thinking about the sneakers.), as well as some of they key people that were there when Run-DMC sent a private video to the exec's at Addidas ('so yo, give us a million dollars' ), which leads to the non basketball celebrity endorsement, and the step away from NBA mandated white athletic sneakers to the multibillion dollar modern sneaker market.

Along the way you get slick editing, a thumping sound track, and you'll learn just how important clean laces are for popping freshness and just what white up 13s are.

This will be showing up on various TV channels world wide in a 67 minute version, and an extended 90 minute version on DVD. If you lived through the 80's hip-hop era, or wished did, check this out. A lot of fun and a recommended from me.

http://www.justforkicks.tv/

'Serenity' (2005)

Best fucking sci-fi film in god knows how long. This is the true 'Han Solo - the early years' prequel that a thousand George Lucas hacks at a thousand keyboards for a thousand years could never produce. You know, the REAL Han Solo, fires first on unfriendly green guys, leader of the pack on a barely functional space ship and sticking it to the Evil Empire and not yet pussed out and sappy for Lukes coked up sister.

NZ wont get this till November, but if your an original untampered Star Wars / Empire Strikes back fan, book your tickets, get in line opening night and just fucking enjoy. Don't bother reading any more of this.

But hey, want to see the first 9 minutes for free, legaly, online?
http://video.vividas.com/CDN1/3929_Sere ... index.html


So whats the slightly spoiler related stuff to provide some background?

So, some guy with a bit of sitcom writing experience breaks through in Hollywood and actualy gets a feature film sold, and even more miraclulously it actualy gets produced, and.... it more or less sucked (although having Peewee Herman in any movie prevents it from completely sucking). He followed that up by contributing to a little movie called 'Toy Story', then somehow getting his sucky original movie turned into a TV series, the little series that could, that survived poor ratings and being kicked off one network to become the cult cash cow 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'.
He gets himself another Tv series, a sci-fi with a lived in world/cowboy/eastern twist. It bombs, cancelled, kicked off to dvd where it sells a fair few copies to its fanboy base. A movie gets okayed, the studio liked the early cut so much they threw a bunch more money at it and pushed the release date back WAY back to polish and promote it.

So - do you have to know anything about the tv series to understand the movie? - nope, all you need to know is covered early on. Some of the characters have previous history, but its all spelt out quickly and intelegently.

The crew of the bucket of bolts Serenity (Millenium Falcon) pick out a slightly criminal existance on the Western like outer fringes of the galaxy(Tantooine) while trying to avoid the attentions of the Empire. Unbeknownest to them, the girl they have with them is an accident waiting to happen (Buffy to the power of three), and is being pursued by a relentless tall black fellow who is rather good with a sword (Vader).

The 'lived in world' looks great, the cowboy/eastern flavour works realy well, its very funny where it needs to be funny, spectactular when the action kicks in and has one of the best bad guys I have seen in a long time.

Enough ranting from me. Damn good movie. Now pass the pop corn.

My pick for extremely silly movie of the year is Anchorman, with Will Ferrell. I thought it was going to be a Ben Stiller type "funny" movie, but I was pleasantly surprised by the almost Britishly anarchic silliness of it. My wife and I were in hysterics at several points of Anchorman, and that is without the aid of alcohol or drugs! Five thumbs up on the Oli scale!

Roadie wrote:My pick for extremely silly movie of the year is Anchorman, with Will Ferrell.

very good movie - love the jazz flute solo.
There is an alternative version out as a 2nd dvd made up alternative takes and dropped sub plots that I am hanging out to see. Also check out '40 year old Virgin', which has several of the same people involved in it, and is also a very funny and slightly twisted movie.

Music Doco time:

Rock School (2005)
Paul Green's musical dreams didn't pan out, so he took the road less traveled and set up and afterschool Rock School program for kids 8-18.

Yep, its the real life 'School of Rock', where the teacher is possibly more demented and definately more demanding that Jack Black. His basic teaching philosophy seems to be set the kids an impossible task, and once they achieve it, set and even more impossible task, because they are too young to know what they shouldn't be able to acheive.
This also seems to involve a lot of things that would get him arrested in NZ, like swearing at and rough housing the children, being vulgar and generaly acting like a 13 year old with ADD. ('If you kids screw up on that stage tonight, when you come back I will tell you the story of how I lost my virginity, and its not a pretty story.... it smelt like a cross between whale blubber and tobacco').
But the kids seem to accept he is one of them, and is doing it for the right reasons.

The documentary makers follow a couple of, special, children including the 10 year old guitar prodigy, the social freak who will probably never be good at playing an instrument but fits in nowhere else, the talented girl that can sing and play a mean guitar but unfortunately doesnt entirely get the rock thing being a quaker and all. They show you just how bad a band of children trying to play rock covers infront of an audience can be before showing you what pushing his top students above and beyond can do...when they head to Germany to appear on the bill at a Frank Zappa tribute concert.

This doco has rightfully won a bunch of awards, recommended.

The follow up to this is Paul Green has franchised this after school rock program all across america, and this year they returned to the annual Zappa tribute concert to do a Zappa set, then a 2 hour complete 'Dark Side of the Moon' set. Remeber, these are school age children, acheiving this level of skill before leaving high school.

DiG (2004)
Spinal Tap of the highest order. The director spent 7 years living with, touring and filming two bands, collecting 1500 hours of footage whitled down to this doco.

It starts with the Brian Jonestown Massacre fronted by Anton Newcombe and the Dandy Warhols fronted by Courtney Taylor being friends and fans of each others work. Both groups play a 60s influenced alternative rock during the age of grunge, both aim to change the world of music, both openly advocate drug use and both are getting a large degree of interest from the music labels.

But Anton and Courtney are kind of twisted reflections of each other. While Courtney leads his band down the road of major label money, the problems that label control creates, shares his song writing royalties with fellow band members and only looses one band member along the way, Anton is on the highway to hell. Childish fits, on stage fist fights with audience and bandmates, blowing big label chances, drugs, drugs, more drugs and a band that eventualy goes through 60 (1) members.

The friendship turns into a rivalry, as the BJM get onto a label and seem to be getting past the self destruction with a succesful tour of Japan, but then they have to record their label debut album, which wouldnt be a problem (they had done 4 full length independant albums he year before) if it weren't for the drugs....

An intimate all access look at the rock and roll life style, with so many bizarre and funny Tap moments that the cameras were there to capture. Stuff that you wouldn't believe if you werent seeing it up on screen.


Anton comes across as a talented but mentaly unhinged asshole, but subsequent interviews I have read since paint him as being a bit more focused than the doco might lead you to believe. He is still walking the completely independent music path, with almost all the BJM catalogue availble free from their official website. The Dandys are on their 4th or 5th studio album, and both bands seem to have enjoyed an elevated profile from the success of this doco.

Highly recommend, especialy to Spinal Tap fans, even if you have not heard of either band.