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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

A 'What are you watching' thread

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D Terminator XXXIII

18:03 / 11.03.04

Based on the example of the long-running thread in the Books forum, which has recently been branched out to the Music forum, I felt a thread dealing with your impressive DVD and video cassette collection was entirely called for. Here you can titlecheck your latest purchases, what you recently saw and something.

As for me:

Meet The Feebles is the one on my DVD player right now, and even though it's on pause halfway through, what I have thus far seen tolly redeems the tosh that are the LOTR movies. The second tired me out of the genre, and I have yet to see the third. I might be alone in this, but I sso wish that Jackson had been given 300.000 instead of the 270 millions and created something as insanely funny as this.

And afterwards, I'm going to enjoy the complex, delicate and rich pleasures of Charlie's Angel's: Full Throttle again. Which was, like, only the worthwhile blockbuster movie of summer 2003. Mmmm. Justin Theroux is my god.

19:49 / 11.03.04

Last few films seen: It's All About Love, which will get a thread to itself soon; Infernal Affairs; School of Rock.

Currently watching (on TV): Six Feet Under, ER, Without a Trace, was watching Darkplace and now getting stuck back into Black Books.

To watch soon: must get around to my DVDs of Once Upon A Time In The West and The Kingdom, as well as quite a ton of films taped from the telly. Still haven't seen Odd Man Out yet which I've been meaning to get around to for a year. I'm a tapewhore.

21:16 / 11.03.04

I'm halfway through watching "The Devil Ship Pirates", the old hammer pirate movie. So far it's not as much fun as I'd hoped, although it's sturdy enough fare I suppose.

The other day I watched that film "Malvern Callar" on BBC2. It was really, really good. Excellent in fact. Well done to all concerned. It's always thrilling to encounter a low-key British film which is actually worth watching.

21:38 / 11.03.04

The excellent Ultraviolet is still in my dvd drive - its fantastically written - nothing is wasted.

On telly watched the BBC's apocalpse show IF last night - pretty fun - like casualty you are playing spot the stiff, only with the means of death rather than the id of the victim. And its got the added bonus that the disaster of the week could be coming to a country near you within 10 years...

21:56 / 11.03.04

Yes, Ultraviolet is ultra cool, sleazeboy. I too watched the If... thing last night, expectantly, and have to say I was bored to channelhopping by the format and execution. I clearly have attention deficit disorder or something but just couldn't get it up on the night somehow.

Entranced by the song from the show on the Oscars, I bought myself "Belleville Rendezvous" on dvd. Can't praise it highly enough. The music is haunting and bloody good but so is the artwork. The story is Frenchly weird and executed like a Caro brothers film. So many marvellous touches. Five stars, gold star, VG tick. Voodoo caca rendezvous indeed. Treat yourselves.

The Natural Way

13:24 / 12.03.04

Telly and DVDEALMEALS.... Fantastic. So, wonderful, but what DVDs have been exploding out of the screen and into my head this month?

Spent a day caning through 'Six Feet Under' season 1. Fucking amazing. A DVDeal if ever I saw one.

'Spellbound' made me glow and worry in equal measure. Made me tense, too. So horrid watching the kids yr rooting for bite it in the first rounds.

Just viddied 'Mystery Train' on a crappy old VHS (not DVD AT ALL) and I can't believe I didn't get round to it sooner. My fave Jarmusch pic bar none. He leaves the narrative sooooo open.... MMMMH! They're all like ghosts......

Watch out for 'Wrong Turn', it has bad things to say about poor people and the mentally disabled. I think the writerdirector beast has settled on the idea that spastics are probably orcs.

'In The Cut' provides room for a beard, but I can't help thinking: the "erotic thriller".....weird genre, innit? Something to do with sex/death injections, prolly.

And, yes, Belleville RendezROCKS!

Will be watching 'Rabbit Proof Fence' tonight.

Been a right old week for telly movies, innit?: Morvern Callar, Hard Eight, All The Presidents Men, Marathon Man, American Movie (Amazing - even better than McG), and I quite like Cruel Intentions, too....

And, yes, I am quite liking 'Angel' and 'The OC', but the former still gets too fetishy re the magicspeak. In 'Buffy' it was simply there to further plot/make stuff explicit, but 'Angel' is in danger of taking that shit into Star Trek territory.

13:38 / 12.03.04

Latest DVD purchase was Dukes of Hazzard volumes 1 & 2. Watched the first two episodes and thoroughly enjoyed it and was even more excited when I found a picture of my General Lee toy in the merchandise section of the extras on the disk. So many happy memories!

Last nights TV delight was "Carrot or the Stick" and I was pleased to see the Stick team win! To me the program proved that 80% Stick, 20% Carrot gets the best results. The Stick teams morale was so high when they got to the cottage first since it was the first thing they had won the whole time they had been there whereas the carrot team were crushed at being punished for the first time. I thought the Carrot team were better at thinking for themselves but the Stick team worked better as a team and had a better sense of comradary. Thoroughly enjoyed the series!

15:38 / 12.03.04

Damnit, missed so many films on telly - really wanted to see American Movie, and to see Morvern Callar again, though my TV/sound system isn't quite up to it. Ah well. Another week, more opportunities to miss...

16:28 / 12.03.04

I'm working my way, very slowly indeed, through the Twin Peaks series one box set. It is a joy forever, as everyone else seems to have figured out before me, and the slow pace is only because my flatmates wouldn't be too happy if I monopplised the TV for the night.

On TV proper, it's all the usual suspects -Without A Trace, which is turning out to be very good indeed (except for last Monday's episode, which was rather weak), ER, Six Feet Under, and Black Books to which I am also new.

Kind of sorry I missed Cruel Intentions when it was on. I hated it when I saw it in the cinema but feel like I should give it another chance. Still, got to see Starship Troopers and Apocalypse Now for the first time on TV a couple of weeks ago, so it's not all bad news.

18:26 / 12.03.04

Thursday night TV is the best TV!

Black Books + Father Ted + Six Feet Under = pure televisual joy! Even the fact that it was the Claire Grogan expisode of Father Ted (which I have seen far too many times) failed to put a dampner on the evening!

I know I'm using a dangerous amount of exclamation marks in this post but I really need to throw another couple in the direction of SFU for the sheer genius of the whole Arthur/Ruth plot!! God, but I can't wait to see where this goes...

I missed Morvern Callar when it was on TV just there, but I think I might watch it on DVD some time this week, as I'm in just the right mood for it right now.

Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!

19:37 / 12.03.04

Is it good? I taped it. I think I've seen lots about it's goodness, but I'm not feeling it, just yet.

Probably because I haven't watched it.

D Terminator XXXIII

21:34 / 12.03.04

That woman, Samantha Morton, is terrific. Have not yet seen Morvern Callar because of the tragically short running time at my local art cinema, but I have been hearing beautiful things about it.

I am trying to man myself up for a bout with the Big Blue or the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre - the short running time of the latter means that I'll prolly go with it, so, I shall see if the remake was tosh compared to this. For your information, I thought it was perfectly passable, and nasty enough, without being too scary.

18:01 / 13.03.04

Morvern Callar is excellent - reaction to it amongst my friends was pretty 50/50, but I rate it nontheless. It's very immersive, both visually and sonically (someone, I think it was Todd, wrote a couple of really excellent blog posts about this aspect of the movie ages ago), and yeah, Samantha Morton is excellent in it. Her performance is both striking and hard to pin down in emotional or psychological terms, which is just right for this film, really.

18:19 / 13.03.04

Law and Order (obviously) Six Feet Under (obviously) and until recently, Bremner Bird & Fortune.

the last good film i watched was the Dangerous Liasons remake - Cruel Intentions? Da bomb.

D Terminator XXXIII

21:49 / 14.03.04

Six Feet Under, indeedly, the best teevee show on planet dark son. I just wish I could afford the DVD box sets now, but they are just sso pricey and I am a cheap bastard.

I just finished Willard and an odd little movie it was. Undeniably stylish, cohesively acted. But why the hell did it leave me apathetic and vacous? It's not because it's bad - bad can be good - and it's not because it's a trite story. Perhaps it's too stylish and with it brings detachment, or perhaps the editors and moviemakers just had difficulty maintaining enthusiasm, passion and whatever. And this translated into a forgettable bout with madness. And rats. Lots of them. What's the story on Crispin Glover? I have read allusions to an all but sane mind, and this is potentially more intriguing. Seriously, it could have been so much better, that movie.

Brigade du jour

00:22 / 15.03.04

Shadow Of The Vampire. Not quite sure if it's nuts or just clever and funny. And nuts. John Malkovich as FW Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck, who in this film is a real vampire.

MURNAU (angrier and angrier): Why did you attack the cinematographer, why not the ... the script girl!?

SCHRECK (calm as you like): I'll eat her later ...

03:03 / 16.03.04

Friend and I buy Brit TV DVDs or get someone to record for us, watch 3-4 eps at a sitting, interchanging The Vice, MI-5, Ultaviolet, Manchild, Coupling and now Bob and Rose. Dazzled by the range and sheer brilliance...

There's also the American show we love to hate: The L Word. Entertaining because it's so loopy: we like to blurt out things at the characters...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

13:22 / 16.03.04

The last thing I watched (yesterday, on video) was the new Battlestar Galactica. It was surprisingly not as crap as I expected- OK, I was drunk, but I actually really enjoyed it. Initial worries about the female Starbuck evaporated when I realised she was exactly the same as the original Starbuck- but female.

uncle retrospective

13:56 / 16.03.04

I'm watching season1 of Blakes 7.
Jesus, I forgot how good it is. I'm only at ep 6 but, like wow. Don't fuck with the welsh in space!

10:38 / 18.03.04

If and Alan Clark Diaries. Dutch cable carries BBC1 & BBC2, so I get shows about a week later.

The If episode is the one about the widening gap between rich and poor. It's not bad but, coming from a country with a much wider gap between rich and poor, some of the drama was lost on me. *Of course* the rich in the US take the law in their own hands, when the ones they write aren't passed quickly enough. The obvious villain, a property developer plays on middle-class fears of crime, but the show doesn't say whether the statistics bear them out. Presently in the US and UK, violent crime has dropped along with the numbers of young men 18-35. Maybe in 10 years the "baby boom echo" tells a different story.

I saw the first Alan Clark Diaries episode. I remember most of Thatcher-era history, but I've never heard of Clark, whose politics are apprently like those of another country squire, the one in "Absolute Power." But his secretary (played by Julia Davis) can lecture me sternly anytime.

19:57 / 18.03.04

Just watched Eyes Wide Shut again last night, phenomenal movie, but I wish we could get a version of the orgy without those digital figures, it just ruins the whole mood of the thing.

I've been going through Angel on DVD, just watched Season 4's Spin the Bottle yesterday, great episode. Around season 3, the show just took off, and really became indepdent of Buffy, a great show in its own right.

21:05 / 18.03.04

I stayed home with a cold today and watched The Odd Couple on TV. It was bloody brilliant.

16:12 / 19.03.04

While Angel is in repeats, not a damn thing.

And yes, Meet the Feebles is fucking brilliant. The Sodomy song kills me every time.

You must think it very odd of me...

stephen_seagull

00:09 / 20.03.04

Today I has been watching...

'The Way We Was' from Disc 2 of Season 2 of The Simpsons,
2001: A Space Odyssey
Citizen Kane

AND...

I am now watching Fight Club.

And I am loving every single minute of them. (Except for 2001 - sure, the cinematography is wowie, but Kubrick will forever be boring in my book. Perhaps I'm just stupid - but I've not yet connected with him.)

03:05 / 20.03.04

2001: You need to be significantly interested in the subject and trust Kubrick implicitly to love that film. It can be one of the most rewarding film experiences.

Boring you say? How is A Clockwork Orange boring? Or The Shining? Or Full Metal Jacket? Or Dr. Strangelove?

On a different note, I saw Lost in Translation a few days ago.

A deeply evocative and sensory film that succeeds in just about everything it attempts. It's such a charming, clever and heartbreaking love story that left me feeling a bit depressed. The acting was marvellous. It deserved Oscars (nominations if not wins at least) for the cinematography or the music. The screenplay nomination and win was puzzling.

10:52 / 20.03.04

Yes to all points made in the previous post.

For the lack of anything better to do last night, I watched 'Day of the Dead'. Good as ever. Better, in fact.

D Terminator XXXIII

12:32 / 20.03.04

Just retunred from Paris, just to let you know that Immortel opens on the 24rd there - it seemed cool judging by the poster that was everywhere. An Enki Bilal comic translated to the screen it would seem, and most likely stylistic genious. How come I've never heard of it? Does anyone have info to spare?

(I didn't want to open a thread devoted to it, in case it is a shitcreation)

D Terminator XXXIII

07:41 / 26.06.04

FUCK YEAH! Just yesterday I purchased a DivX-player on sale.

Which means I'll finally be able to see (or see again) all the movies I got my friend to download for me. Titles such as Scandal, Pi, um, loads others that I can't recall right now.

But this means I'll finally be able to plug movies directly to my vein.

20:22 / 02.01.07

I saw A Tale of Two Sisters tonight and recommend it. It´s based on a korean folktale and isn´t creepy, more a dreamy and haunting experience. It is a bit like a detective movie, because you´re constantly wondering, "was that a clue?", "what is she up to now?", "was that another flashback, is it important?".

I like that the father for the most part seems uncaring, indifferent and you only slowly understand why it makes sense that he acts the way he does.

Reading the linked wiki article, I had most of it figured out at the end, although some stuff is left dangling. But that´s allright, it doesn´t diminish the experience.

v

11:18 / 03.01.07

friends with money - not bad at all

12:31 / 03.01.07

I watched The Squid and the Whale yesterday and found it too depressing for me to even comment on it objectively. It's a quality film - well scripted, well acted and very very tightly edited - but man, it got me down. I didn't know anything at all about it when it started, but having poked around the internet a bit it seems people describe it as a hilarious comedy, which completely baffled me. It does have some laughs, but only in a disbelieving way; astonishment at the plausible but outrageous selfishness of two parents getting a divorce, getting on with their lives and putting their kids way, way second.

So anyway. It's kind of lodged in my head now, and it made me think alot about kids I knew at school whose home lives were falling apart and whose distress manifested itself in very similar ways to the kids in the film. It all seemed bleakly realistic and utterly miserable. Wierdly, on the IMDB board for the film there's a thread called 'Funniest moment?' and it seemed to be a list of the cruellest and most upsetting scenes in the film. I'm not even sure most of them were supposed to be funny. So. Good film, but approah with caution.

Whisky Priestess

13:08 / 03.01.07

Abandoned at home, alone, with nothing but a bottle of cava and a packet of cigarettes for company, I was pretty much morally obliged to watch This Life + 10 last night - quite a few cliches (East Asian quiet/psycho bride for Miles, blonde twentysomething shoehorned in as a documentary-maker, the whole conceit of someone making a documentary about now-famous novelist Egg), and not nearly as much sex as the review promised, but kind of fun and certainly interesting to watch.

Followed by The Thick of It special, which had more great actors than you can shake a rosette at and some fantastically funny bits. In fact, most of it comprised fantastically funny bits. Why are political comedies generally so sharp and brilliant even if you hate politics?

13:38 / 03.01.07

Been watching Dexter. Top drama fare with a nicely developed over-arching plot. It also has the best high-concept ever "he's a serial killer who fights crime in his spare time!"

Still watching Scrubs. I don't think I've seen an episode that isn't hee-hawlarious.

Recent episode. Dr. Cox brings his son, Jack, to work. His wife is complaining that Cox is being way too blunt and honest with the five-year old. Cox just says he's trying to raise his son to be honest. Cut to Jack talking to Chief of Medicine, Bob Kelso.

Jack: Mister, mister, your skin is super-wrinkly.
Kelso: Yeah, little guy? Well, that jumper you're wearing makes you look gay.

lawl

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

14:39 / 03.01.07

Spaced, lots of it. Repeatedly.

Favourite episode? Tim accidentally giving the oregano to the young hoodlums. And the idea of male telepathy.

God, I hope that's true.

15:29 / 03.01.07

I spent last night in front of exactly the same telly as Whiskey, which isn't that surprising given that everything else on the box was shit and that, well, you really did have to watch This Life +10 if you were any kind of fan of the original show.

I broadly agree with Whiskey's assessment of it: there were some rather rubbish cliches in evidence and the docudrama angle really was an appallingly weak and totally unnecessary plot device, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. I'm left thinking, however, that I mainly enjoyed the idea of it and the chance to see those faces again - a bit like seeing R2D2 for the first time in TPM. The drama itself seemed to have little in common with the series I loved. It was too pacey, too much happened, too contrived, there was too much closure in that many of the questions that were left quite rightly hanging hanging in the series were reeled in and answered.

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