Fuddland

Entries concerning the world of film.

Mostly entertaining.

Read the rest of “David’s Guide to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film”…

• At around four seconds past midnight on New Year’s Day, I turned to my fellow twenty-eight year olds and reminded them that we’re going to be thirty next year. Erk.

• 2005 is the year in which Transformers: The Movie is set. Watch for news of dormant volcanoes erupting on the West coast of the United States. Perhaps we’ll finally find out how the ones which turned into cassette recorders and handguns shrank down from their usual ten- or fifteen-foot height to resemble normal-sized electronic equipment.

In reporting the technology and team behind the clean-up of the Star Wars trilogy for their release on DVD:

In Hollywood the mighty movie stars still rule the empire, but as companies like Lowry Digital are proving, there is a growing rebel alliance of technical wizards getting ready to play their part.

Erm … huh?

About a year ago, I was praising Amazon’s “Recommendations” engine for finding me several excellent musicians, and today I was selected to be one of a hundred people chosen to preview LOVEFiLM’s own version of this idea.

Every time you rent a DVD from LOVEFiLM, you’re asked to give it a rating from 1 [unwatchable] to 7 [loved it]. It used to be out of 5, but recently they switched to out-of-7, presumably using the highly complex mathematical technique of rounding to adjust the old scores.

Now it’s become apparent what these ratings are used for: along with other factors [such as “people who rented this disc also rented these…”], a list of recommendations is generated for you to make easy selections of DVDs you might not have thought of or come across otherwise.

Somehow, the engine feels more “natural” than Amazon’s; if you choose to just add a rating to one or more of the recommendations, the list gets more refined to your tastes. If you choose the [clumsily-worded, I wonder if it’s a typo?] option “Don’t recommendation this again”, you get three choices:

1. Seen it already: rate it and it’s removed from the list.

2. Don’t like this type of thing: disc is removed and related discs are not recommended.

3. Just don’t like this one: only this disc is removed, recommendations unaffected.

See, I knew there was a reason to fastidiously rate each movie I rented. Seems like I need to do a bit of refining though: for some baffling reason it’s recommended “125 Great Everton Premiership Goals”! I clicked the “Why was this recommended?” link, which is supposed to list the discs that I’ve already rated which produced this match, but it came up with no matches — I’ve rented nothing that even mentions football. No matter though, just a quick click on option 2 of the three choices above and I shouldn’t see any more of its ilk in my list again.

Read the rest of “LOVEFiLM recommendations”…

Confirmed by this capture of a fleeting shot in the documentary which accompanies the recently-purchased Star Wars Trilogy box-set DVD, it has come to light that the real brains behind the sci-fi phenomena was not George Lucas at all, but mono-browed purveyor of ultimate filth, Chris de Burgh.

He originally intended to star alongside the other key actors — as we see in this scene, eventually cut from the final release, where de Burgh draws enemy lasers away from his friends with an impromptu concert — but came to blows with Lucas over disagreements about Leia’s costume. De Burgh wanted her to be always wearing red, so he could release his recently-penned “classic” song in a tie-in merchandising deal, whereas Lucas insisted he re-titled the song “Lady with Buns on the Side of Her Head”. “It still rhymes!” Lucas reasoned, but de Burgh wouldn’t listen to his rhyming reason.

Bill Murray is lending his voice to Garfield the Cat in the all new, computer-generated, Odie-looks-a-bit-crap-why-didn’t-they-computer-generate-him-too? feature film coming soon to a big screen near you.

The voice of Garfield in the 80s animated series which more closely resembled the original comic strip was provided by Lorenzo Music.

Lorenzo Music also voiced Peter Venkman in the cartoon series The Real Ghostbusters, which was, of course, based on the movie Ghostbusters, in which the role of Peter Venkman was played by Bill Murray.

Coincidence?

Read the rest of “Circular casting”…

Last night I watched John Woo’s Windtalkers; I really must urge every one of you to go out and buy this film immediately. In fact, buy two copies of it. Then — and this is the important bit — jump up and down on the box, pour acid over the DVD, swear profusely at the little booklet, and finally send it all back to John Woo and the lead actor Adam Beach with a nice note explaining what a terrible film they’ve made. There follow what might be called “spoilers” if they weren’t all entirely predictable elements of the film.

Read the rest of “Windtalkers”…

i took some time out last night to tackle the mountain of dvds i want to get watched. since it was a rental, i opted for ‘rabbit proof fence’; as bsag said, this film was excellent: heartbreakingly so at times. i liked the matter-of-fact approach to the story-telling — after all, this was the obstensibly true [if inevitably fictionalised] story of three half-caste girls in 1930s australia who were taken from their aborigine mother and put in a camp 1,500 miles away to ensure their offspring had their aborgine ‘bred out’ and be raised as lower-class citizens, only to run away soon afterwards and attempt to walk the entire distance home, following the recently-erected fence built to keep the diseased rabbits of the east away from the farmlands of the west.

all the performances were terrific, but for me the standout was david gulpilil as moodoo, the tracker trying to bring the girls back to the camp. it’s a fantastically understated display, stoically going about his duties but occasionally letting slip the merest hint of a smile when the girls once again evade his capture, secretly proud of their guile.

tuesday nights are flashback nights at the local cinema — i think a staff member unearthed a load of old reels in a cupboard somewhere and the management decided to make some cash by showing them under the banner of ‘classic movies’.

last night it was ‘beetlejuice’, a film i enjoyed whenever i saw it way back when, and still thought it was pretty good — as always, the big screen and mahussive speakers added to the experience. obviously the special effects looked a little dated, but not as badly as you might think, and michael keaton was still funny in a quite disturbing way as bio-exorcist betelgeuse. is there any truth in the rumour that whilst the character is named betelgeuse, and all written instances of his name within the film are spelt identically, the film itself is entitled ‘beetlejuice’ to stop people mispronouncing it?

if you want to get a headstart on dealing with being dead, to cope better than the maitlands did, you could get yourself an advance copy of the handbook for the recently deceased. the film teaches us a few basics too: sheets with eyeholes cut in them — not scary. huge violent snake with humanoid head and gnashing teeth intent on killing — damn scary.

i also saw the matrix: reloaded last night, but just to be different, i’m not going to do a post about what i thought of it. ner.

Read the rest of “will he, won’t he?”…

seeing as my vhs copy is almost sixteen years old and wanting to own a more hardy version purely for the cinematically historical reason that it was orson welles’s last film [okay, and also because it rocks], i ordered the…

Read the rest of “what a difference a curse makes”…

play.com selling ‘transformers: the movie’ for four and a half quid!…

Read the rest of “reason to be cheerful”…

i went to see ‘the recruit’ this evening, and was treated to one of bmw’s pseudo-short-films-come-adverts before the main feature. it stars james brown as himself, with gary oldman as the devil; brown goes to see him because the wants…

Read the rest of “needs must when the devil drives [just remember to fasten your seat belt]”…

just watched speed for the first time in ages — can’t really fault it for your basic stupid, action-packed, good-guys win through state of affairs, which is sometimes all i’m looking for in a film. definite lack of nudity though…

Read the rest of “get ready for rush hour”…