If this SOPA thing actually went into effect, does that mean all the free advertising and hype-making from rabid fangirls gets banninated? If so, how is that good for the film industry?

I saw 2046, the sort of sequel to In The Mood For Love, back when it came out at the cinema in a spur of the moment double bill along with Hero. I remember it involved a mad dash from one screen to the next with my friend Corinne. 2046 makes a lot more sense now after seeing In The Mood For Love.

I <3 how you never see Mr Chan’s face and you never see Mr Chow’s wife’s face either. Totally works the whole absent spouse thing. The out of sequence bits worked really well too. Not sure it’s a film you can really talk about, you just experience it.

Scott Pilgrim, the next night, was aces. I <3 Scott Pilgrim…though I don’t really like Scott as a character. He’s kind of weaksauce.  It’s the rest of the characters that really make the film for me.

Annnd before each film, I went to the Behind the Screen talks. Which were pretty good. Although the 2nd was a tad hilarious since I realised I was probably in a room full of people who work on computer games or films and there I am… the legal cashier who’s technically a software engineer. Oops.

On Sunday I went to see “The Life of David Lloyd George“. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from what is basically a silent documentary – or how that whole idea works. It was *amazing*. The music was awe-inspiring – the guy playing was the composer and this film is 3 hours long so he was playing non-stop (well, apart from the interval!) the whole time. The music was a great accompaniment to the film and the film is structured very well – you get a wonderful introduction to how Lloyd George grew up and got to be a MP first of all and then the second part of the film focusses more on his action through the First World War. If you get a chance to see this, I heartily recommend it.

Dan Snow gave a sort of introduction to the film. I say “sort of” because he got stuck in traffic and arrived late to the screening so the introduction got moved to the interval. As a however-many-great grandson of Lloyd George he has quite a different perspective on the man – more of the stories he got told about him from his grandma rather than the war leader, I guess. He was right though about there only being room in the British conciousness for one great war leader at a time – and for us now, it’s Churchill who has eclipsed Lloyd George and all those who came before. I’m kind of glad though that there hasn’t been a war that has affected me that personally on such a scale as the world wars effected those who lived when Churchill and Lloyd George were in power.

When Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson and his cast and crew, including Gerard Butler and Stellan Skarsgård, set upon Iceland to film Beowulf & Grendel in 2004, they expected the usual complications involved in making a major motion picture.

What they encountered was a ruthless Icelandic winter on a foreboding landscape, financing complications and a bizarre run of bad luck that led some of them to believe they were in an epic battle with the Norse gods themselves. Filmmaker Jon Gustafsson was along for the ride. Hired to play one of Beowulf’s warriors, he’s one set with his camera as the crew battles hurricane force winds and he’s in the backroom as the producers scramble to shore up a collapsing deal, creating an intimate portrait of filmmakers fighting the odds in pursuit of a vision.

I really enjoyed Wrath of Gods. Not only is it good value for money (it has hours and hours of stuff to watch), but watching all the problems that they had making the film Beowulf & Grendel was bizarrely interesting, as was seeing what kind of sort of “normal” things go on behind the scenes. Like stuff to do with cashflow and accounting and health and safety and mud. And it make makes me want to see Beowulf & Grendel even more, because the little bits you get to see to do with the film look wicked cool.

Plus Iceland is a beautiful place.

…going to the cinema is bloomin’ expensive and there seems to be some surprise that less people are going?

For one adult ticket at my local cinema it’s about £7.50. Now on orange Wednesdays, I bring my mum along and then it’s two for £7.50. Which is tolerable, except I like going to the cinema on my own.

In Birmingham however, one adult ticket is about £3.50 and then with Orange Wednesdays again, it’s two for £3.50. Far more tolerable.

So why is there the huge variation in ticket price? For the cost of one ticket to my local cinema, I could WAIT until the film comes out on DVD and then buy that. It’d probably end up cheaper.

So exciting. I’m still suffering from 90s nostalgia brought on by getting a box-set of the entire series last Christmas, so this may just satisfy it.

Of course, they’ve been saying there’ll be another X-Files films for years.

The idea of an alien civilisation sending us the instructions to build a computer which is then found to be able to potentially save lives and bring us everything we could dream of is an interesting one and the question of whether we should blindly do what we are told and not question why they might be doing it is something that is addressed in the film. Although, of course, we never find out in “A for Andromeda” why (other than to destroy humanity) the computer design is sent – it’s suggested that it might be because this alien intelligence is looking for a new place to live as their current home is under some kind of threat.

The characters, especially John Fleming, all undergo some sort of transformation – with Professor Dawney and Dr Fleming swapping viewpoints. Initially Dr Fleming wants to keep working on his quantum computer and deciphering the message that they are being sent and Prof Dawney tells him to stop (or at least, passes on instructions from the powers that be). Then, when Prof Dawney is building Andromeda according to the instructions from the alien civilisation’s computer, Dr Fleming voices his doubts and misgivings and says that she should stop.

All in all, a good film.

Another small point that I liked was Swagger always standing to attention when faced with any kind of authority – even vague authority, which he kind of mentions later on, saying something about being trained to follow orders.

I think I will probably go and see Next or Spiderman 3 next, but I’ve not really heard anything good about Spiderman and at least if Next is bad, it’ll be hilariously bad. Whereas Spiderman will be just… meh. I don’t remember seeing the other two films in the cinema. In fact, I don’t remember seeing the second film at all. I’ll probably just wait until it is on tv.

In some ways, this films reminds me of 8mm. Maybe it’s the way that it’s shot more than the general investigating a death theme. Although Nicholas Cage’s character in that film has more to lose than Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, Brendan, does in this one – he has no friends, no family that you ever see (though they must be there) and in fact, I think all he does have is his dead ex-girlfriend. Who’s dead, of course.

Incidentally, while the way that this film is shot reminds me of 8mm, Brick is shot really beautifully. I could just watch this with the sound off and enjoy the composition of the scenes. I could watch single frames in random orders and I would still enjoy it. I could take screencaps and put the stills in a frame and hang them on my wall and it would work well. I would love to see this turned into a sketchy animated film too, because I think that visually that would look cool too. With a stick-figure Brendan mooching about and angry stick-figure Tug beating him occassionally. That kind of thing.

This next bit really goes after that last part of this entry, but that bit kinda spoilers things and well, this doesn’t really. Mmm coherency. Anyway, one of the other things I noticed when I first watched this film is that, at any point during it, there barely more than two speaking characters in a scene. That and the entire film follows Brendan, the main character, and his point of view – though without being able to hear his thoughts, like you might in a book, he always knows more than the viewer. Or at least, more than I do about how everything interconnects and works out. Then all is revealed with the exposition at the end, like he’s Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. But I guess that’s just the nature of the genre really.

Also, the glasses & glasses case thing kind of works like the cigarette and cigerette packet seems to in a traditional detective film.

What follows may spoil the film for you (even though it doesn’t entirely have much to do with the actual film), so I’ve cut it from the main blog page. Click below to see it.

I bought this film on DVD because it was cheap and I’d heard good things about it and I know I must have read the blurb on the back when I got it. Then, I put it down somewhere in my room with a couple of other cheap DVDs that I got at the same time and totally didn’t watch it for like… a couple of months. And when I did pick it up again, I couldn’t remember what it was about but it made me think about the song “Brick” by Ben Folds Five. And if you know what that song’s about (and you’ll find out if you check out the wikipedia page I linked), strangely it is vaguely related.

Not just the theme, but at least for me, the way I can listen to it over and over and over and it still has the same impact every time I hear it.

Sunday was Mother’s day, so there was presents and breakfast in bed for my mum. In the afternoon I was helping to run my local church’s confirmation class. So far, it looks like the classes will probably cover more of the actual theological stuff to do with confirmation than the classes I had did and will also touch on some of the other stuff that comes with making your own decisions and being an adult and that. The kids however, are all typical 14-year olds for the most part.