Posts in Movies
Side effects of codeine.

I've been sick the past few days with what I've decided was probably the flu.  Just an upset stomach, slight nausea and a headache combo meal of sadness.  To pass the time I've spent hours, upon hours, upon hours, watching the above trailer for the new Star Trek movie.

I know some traditionalists are a bit skeptical of the idea of rebooting the Star Trek series the way that Batman Begins relaunched Batman movies, but I think things are looking promising.  Sure nobody is ever going to make us for get William Shatner as Kirk or Leonard Nimoy as Spock, but that doesn't mean we can't accept newer versions of these characters.

Plus Zach Quinto (best known as Sylar from Heroes) looks pretty good as Spock.  There also does not seem to be anything that, off the top of my head, contradicts previous Trek canon.  At least not in the trailer.

May, the movie's release month, can't come quick enough.


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X-Men Origins: Wolverine trailer


I'm most likely not going to see the terrible looking The Day The Earth Stood Still remake. The only real reasons I'd go would be because I still like Jennifer Connolly and to see the trailer for X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Thankfully I've managed to find it online.

I do worry that giving the film a name that's more convoluted than a lot of comic book titles probably isn't a good move. It's the kind of name that Marvel gives to their limited series, as opposed to main books. Of course maybe I just dislike the fact that it's named after the fairly dull Wolverine Origins comic.

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MoviesJeffery SimpsonComment
Picnic at Hanging Rock is crap

About a movie where falling into a time warp is the most reasonable explanation of events, as opposed to a something that isn't bullshit.

Picnichanging9828I think that it's fair to say that for the most part I'm fairly easy going on movies. With a few exceptions, Love Stinks [wp] staring French Stewart for example, I'll find something to enjoy in even the most mediocre film. Rarely does it a film annoy me to the point where I need to blog about how much it annoyed me the very next day.

Last night we watched Picnic at Hanging Rock which Lydia had gotten from the library. I'd heard the name of the film a few times before, mostly in relation to how it influenced the Blair Witch Project [wp], which is especially apt because the novel on which Picnic at Hanging Rock is based is presented as a factual account of events.

This film was no Blair Witch Project.  The trouble largely that I had with it was that there seems to be no reason nearly anything happens, things are not explained and nobody in the movie acts in anyway like normal humans would.  The movie focuses on three British boarding school girls in Australia who vanish while on a school trip to Hanging Rock, which is basically a big rock.  Also vanishing is a school teacher, who either went to look for the girls, killed them or just ran around with her skirt off.  That bit is never made clear, nor are any number of things.

Things that reasonably the characters themselves should know, but the author, director or whomever, simply doesn't think we'd care to know.  What happens when the Foppy British boy follows the girls before their disappearance?  Despite the fact that the girls take an inordinately large number of naps while walking up a moderately steep hill, he never catches up to them and later when he's really the prime suspect in their disappearance his explanation to the police of what happened after he ran after them amounted to him shrugging his shoulders and saying, "Meh".

"Meh" presumabely being the early twentieth century equivalent of "You'll have to ask my lawyer", because the police ask no follow up questions.

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Frost | Nixon

I'm excited for the soon to be released film Frost | Nixon, which dramatizes the famous interview between the British journalist and former President Richard Nixon. Though the original interview is hours upon hours long, there's a few great clips of it up on YouTube that are worth taking a look at though now you have to pick through various trailers and features for the movie to find them.

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