TV And Films

The shows and movies I like (or don’t).

Odd Movie Combinations

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I saw a couple movies in my Netflix New Releases feed that made me laugh today…

Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid — Anaconda plus Adaptation? It’s actually a sequel to Anaconda, has gotten worse reviews than the original (which is amusing, as I hated the original), and I’m sure it has absolutely nothing to do with Adaptation, but the idea of trying to combine the two amuses me.

Alien Species — Alien plus Species? Aside from both being sci-fi/horror films featuring creatures conceived by H.R. Geiger, they’re not really that similar, and this just looks like a generic sci-fi flick. The cover image (here it is on Netflix, Amazon apparently doesn’t have one) even looks like they’re ripping off the martian attack machines from the old film version of War of the Worlds.

Some days it really seems like we’ve run out of original ideas.

iTunes “Lover Boy/Lover Girl (B[Eat Me Up])” by Lords of Acid from the album Lover Boy/Lover Girl (2000, 5:36).

Made it!

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The Fellowship

Well, we survived!

Man, that’s a lot of movie. When all’s said and done, it was a lot of fun, and all agreed that it was well worth doing, and definitely something that should be done again.

In a year or so.

The Extended Edition of Return of the King is wonderful, though — at least as good as, if not better than, the extended versions of each of the first two films. A few major additions and a number of minor ones that do an incredible job of fleshing out the film.

However, it’s now almost 12:30, and as we’re well worn out from a long day of sitting on our butts, it’s bedtime for us.

Getting ready…

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Lord of the Rings collection

So far, unless anyone does a surprise show on my doorstep (well…secured entrance to the apartment building), it looks like it’ll be a fairly small group for the Lord of the Rings fest today: myself, Prairie, and Robert, unless something falls through on his end.

We’ve got the house clean (or at least presentable), and Prairie’s working on putting together a plate of munchies to carry us through the first stretch of the day.

I’ve got one half-written post open, and another couple in my head, so there will be more things appearing to make up for my relative quietude of late, but they’ll likely not show up until tomorrow at the earliest.

Just some general ramblings while we putter around and get ready for the day…

32.4 Days

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After adding as many of the 100 overlooked films to my Netflix queue as I could, my queue is now 389 discs long (not counting the four discs of Buffy and West Wing I have left).

Assuming an average of two hours per movie, that’s 32.4 days of movies lined up. Something tells me that that’s going to take a while to get through. ;)

Right now, my queue is ordered only by the order that I’ve added items to it. I’m halfway debating sorting it by year of release and starting with the oldest films, working my way towards more recent titles. Anybody tried this? Think it might be worth it?

For the terminally curious, here’s my queue (358k .pdf).

iTunes “In Dreams” by Masters from the album Essential Chillout (2000, 6:27).

LotR:TYEBEE update

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A reminder e-mail with directions and details has been sent out to those of you who expressed interest in attending my little Lord of the Rings: Till Your Eyes Bleed Extended Edition deal on Saturday. Looks like it’ll be a rather small crowd of about five or six people if everyone who was interested can make it.

No matter what, it should be fun. Prairie’s baked lots of cookies for us to munch on — the going theory right now is that if the screaming battle cries of the orcs don’t keep us all awake by the end of the last film, the sugar rush sure will.

See y’all then!

iTunes “Reverence” by Faithless from the album Reverence (1996, 7:44).

Quick Review: Dawn of the Dead

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Last night’s fun was the modern remake of Dawn of the Dead. I’ve not seen the original, so I can’t compare the two in any way, but this one was exactly what I expected it would be — a fun, sometimes silly, and very gory horror flick.

No reason is given for the zombies, but then, that’s not really the point. Plausibility, rationality, and logic have no place here. What does have a place is lots of creepy dead and decaying people, exploding heads, and creating a enjoyably icky couple of hours of entertainment, all of which were pulled off quite well enough for me.

About the only bummer for me were some of the special features. Occasionally during the movie we’d see snippets of television news broadcasts reporting on the catastrophe in progress, and these are presented in full on the DVD. Unfortunately, it turns out that there’s a reason that we only saw snippets during the actual film — most of the zombies (who didn’t have to do much more than scream, grunt, growl, grimace, ooze, and bleed) were better actors than the reporters in the broadcasts. The extra background was entertaining enough for what it was, but they were a little painful to watch straight through.

On the bright side, though, the ten minute long featurette exploring the special effects behind the myriad exploding heads was really entertaining. As much as I enjoy computers and digital effects, I’m always fascinated by the real physical effects work — everything from the puppetry of Jim Henson’s films to the blood and gore of horror films — and it’s fun to watch the effects crew geek out when they get a good shot of some zombie’s brains blowing out the back of their head.

Okay, so it’s a little sick. That doesn’t mean it can’t be fun!

iTunes “Drama” by Club 69 from the album Junior Vasquez, Vol. 2 (1997, 3:36).

Quick Review: Timeline

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I just finished watching Timeline, based on the book by Michael Crichton. I don’t know anything about the book it’s based on — I haven’t read a Crichton novel in years — but the movie?

Oooh, ouch. Bad movie. No biscuit.

Bad enough that I spent most of the movie bored and often rolling my eyes, but I pretty much knew I was in for a dud (well, I’d picked it up already by the utter lack of acting ability by anyone in the cast, but…) when the group arrived in the late 14th century and anyone they ran into who spoke English spoke perfectly understandable, if anachronized, modern English.

Given that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales around the end of the 14th century, and it reads as follows (as many people will remember from their high school english classes)…

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.
Bifil that in that seson, on a day,

In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye

Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

…and generally needs a translation for modern readers to comprehend it, the fact that the language barrier wasn’t even mentioned in passing, let alone given any sort of (however implausible) explanation, was enough to have me scoffing.

Bleah. Don’t bother.

iTunes “Happiness (Dub)” by Front 242 from the album Mut@ge.Mix@ge (1995, 6:10).

Blade Trinity

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I’d been iffy on whether I wanted to bother, but this pre-release review of Blade Trinity just put it on my “must see” list:

I attended a free sneek preview of Blade Trinity this evening at Pacific Place…. I expected very little from this movie and I received my expectations in abundance.

Pluses:
– Parker Posey as a vampire
– Ryan Reynolds mostly naked
– visual effects

Negatives:
– plot
– dialog
– editing
– direction
– poor action scenes
– Kris Kristofferson
– cliche footage of the city moving at 20x normal speed
– unintentional comedy
– excessive product placement (iPods)
– lame pop cultural references
– vampiric pomeranian (really!)
– “Dracula” err, I mean “DRAKE” groan

Parker Posey is always fun to watch, and a vampire kick-me dog?!? Oh, this I’ve gotta see!

(Maybe not until it hits video…but then, I’ve occasionally paid for worse in the theaters…)

iTunes “Melt” by Leftfield from the album Leftism (1995, 5:13).

Netflix Friends

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Yesterday word starting flying around the ‘net about a new feature on Netflix‘ site: Netflix Friends. I read about it on Hacking Netflix and was definitely interested, but by that point there were already a ton of people asking for invites, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable joining in the “add me!” crowd, so I just tossed a link into Eclinkticism instead.

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Of course, what I didn’t think about was MovableType’s automatic Trackback discovery feature, so when I posted my link, Hacking Netflix got pinged — and Mike was kind enough to toss an invite my way after all.

After playing with it a bit last night and this morning, I’m really enjoying this. The first thing I had to do was toss out some invites to people that I knew had NetFlix accounts, and some have already responded and joined in. The more people listed as friends, the more choices there are on your friends page, of course, and it’s been fun watching the recommendations change as more of the few people I invited in join in the fun.

NetFlix Friends

The main NetFlix Friends screen is divided into a few sections. Over to the right is a list of your friends and how many movies they’ve rated, a list of people you’ve invited but haven’t accepted yet, and links to either invite more people in or edit your friends list (delete friends or edit their display name on your list). The main column of the page starts off with a list of movies that your friends have watched and rated recently, with their ratings displayed in purple below the movie. Further down the page (and not displayed in my screen shot) are sections for “New and Upcoming Favorites” (recently released and soon-to-be released films), “Unique Films Your Friends Love” (movies that people you know have given an above-average rating), and “Friends Top Favorites” (four- and five-star ratings from your friends).

NetFlix Friends Share Page

Clicking on one of your friends names in the “Your Friends” section of the page takes you to that person’s “Share Page”, with a larger list of what they’ve watched recently on the right side of the page, along with the same “Recently Watched” and “New and Upcoming Favorites” lists (in slightly longer form) from the main Friends page.

Netflix Movie Page

One of the nice touches is that once you’re part of the Netflix Friends program, there are little adjustments throughout the Netflix site that tie in to your Friends pages. On any page in the site, if a movie is displayed that one of the people on your Friends list has seen, a little purple person icon appears in the lower-right corner of the movie icon or next to the movie’s name. Also, on individual movie listing pages (which recently gained a “Watch Preview” option — nifty!), there is now a listing towards the bottom right of ratings from any friends who have rated the film, and you can add short one-line blurbs about what you thought of the film.

So far, it’s looking like Netflix has a really good thing going here. If you’ve got a Netflix account and want to join the fun, just let me know!

iTunes “Connected” by Alabama 3 from the album Exile on Coldharbour Lane (1997, 6:15).