Video footage of a Lucasarts presentation of the technology they’re going to be using in the next Indiana Jones and Star Wars games. This includes the latest version of the Havok physics engine.
Besides the killer technology on show, this video is also interesting for the part where they blow up Jar Jar Binks encased in Carbonite.
So the IFF Surprise Film was 300. Not that much of a surprise. The queue was a bigger surprise – jesus, I’ve never seen anything like that. Even the premiere of the Lord of the Rings movies had shorter queues.
Anyway, 300 completely floored me. It’s a love song to graphic violence and romantic heroism, told with the most stylish visuals this side of Sin City. The movie suffers from more than a few jerky moments with a lot of the dialogue falling apart as hammy and unconvincing, but I personally found that these were mostly in the parts where the screenwriters actually tried to by historically accurate (“Return with your shield, or on it” being the most obvious). The political sub-plot had real trouble hiding the fact that it existed only as ‘filler’ and illicited an inappropriate titter from the audience, which only highlighted its awkwardness.
But who cares about all this? This movie is about the action sequences and these are what make the movie stand out. Probably not the most epic battles ever filmed, but definitely the most beautiful and balletic. The fact that this was filmed in a warehouse means we never see more than a handful of ‘real’ people on screen at any one time but the director works this to his favour, giving each individual skirmish an intimacy that would be otherwise lost.
Tremenous stuff. Gives me high hopes for what Zack Snyder can bring to Watchmen.
Have you ever had a movie finish and end credits roll, with the entire audience sitting back in stunned silence? Maybe it’s just the type of film I tend to go see, but this has only happened to me a handful of times. The Fountain being one of them.
The Fountain is a love story. Rather, it’s three love stories, told across a thousand years. In the past, a conquistador searches for the tree of life to save his beloved Queen. In the present, a doctor searches for the cure for cancer to save his beloved wife. In the future… well… a guy travels with his tree, in a bubble, to a dying star wrapped in a nebula.
Hey – noone ever said this would be easy.
Arthouse blockbuster or blockbuster arthouse? Either way, this is not a welcoming film. At times, the ambitious storytelling threatens to derail the entire production, and the more cynical among us would almost certainly have trouble giving this film the room it needs to breathe. But for the more persistent, there’s a great reward – something completely and defiantly unique. A sci-fi movie with a very human heart. A film that can leave an entire audience breathless.
I would say this is as close to unmissable as any movie I can think of.
Back at the start of February, I was talking about the films I was looking forward to at the Dublin International Film Festival. Talking about the surprise film, I said
A tenner says that this will be Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain
Well, I was wrong. Sorta. Shortly before the festival began, I got an email to say that the showing of Sunshine was cancelled and they would be showing The Fountain in its place.
So instead, the surprise movie was…
Yeah, it wasn’t the cleverest movie shown at the festival, but personally, I couldn’t have been happier. I’m a huge fan of the comic, and of Frank Miller in general, and this was the most beautiful adaptation of his work so far.
I think I got this with my Commodore 64. I seem to remember a Christmas Day where the rest of my family was off watching the Great Escape on TV and thinking to myself “Fuck you, last-generation losers. With this super-powerful computer, I AM Steve McQueen. I AM the Great Escape.” The game itself didn’t really follow the movie very strictly, but I still like the way it forces you to follow a pattern and ‘keep up appearances’ while you’re digging your way out. Never finished this game though. I got into my tunnel, was heading under the fence — I could taste the freedom — when, with no warning, my C64 crashed, taking a tiny bit of my heart with it.
Most movie tie-ins on the C64 are of the side-scrolling shooter variety (‘sup, Robocop?). And this probably could have worked with the Ghostbusters license. But instead, they went down an altogether more interesting route: part-resource management, part action. You have to build up a Ghostbusters franchise into a profitable venture while dealing with the escalating amount of paranormal activity. Whenever I get bored and want a C64 fix, this is the first game I reach for. Oh, and the synthesized speech is still amazing.
In this game, you play the worst ninja in the world. Running around a park in broad daylight beating up jugglers and mimes doesn’t seem very ninja-like to me. And what kind of ninja staunchly obeys the “keep off the grass” rule? A fucking pussy, that’s who. Okay, so it’s not exactly Ninja Gaiden, but it’s still pretty awesome.
I never, never understood the point of this game. You run around a weird temple, trying to collect… what? Lamps? While being constantly chased by a ninja and a fat guy? Still though, you’re motherfuckin’ Bruce Lee!
Zorro is still the most punitive game I’ve ever played. It’s stupid and dumb and I hate it. But I can’t stop going back to it. Maybe one day I’ll actually, y’know… finish it. I imagine that would be like the end of WarGames and my C64 will turn to me and say in a Stephen Hawking voice, “A strange game. The only way to win is not to play.”
Wolf from Gladiators, Maria Whittaker’s tits and graphic decapitation. How could a pre-pubescent boy not love this game?
I remember being so engrossed in this game, I missed a bunch of swimming lessons and as a result, only got a silver medal in the end-of-year contest. Every time I see that silver medal I think about how, if I’d just played a little less Beach Head, it could have been a gold medal. And then I think “Fuck it, it was totally worth it.”
I can’t really explain this. I’m a messy bastard, but I really enjoy this game about tidying up a park. Cleaning vicariously, that’s what it is.
Much better than the barmy Nintendo version, this was a platform game where you took control of two of the kids and had to use both to solve puzzles. Kind of like a proto-Lost Vikings. For example, to get past the first screen you have to navigate one kid to the roof to print fake money and distract the Fratellis while the other kid ran into the basement. Further on, the screens get ridiculously hard and you’ll find yourself blowing through each of your eight (EIGHT!) lives just trying to figure out what you’re supposed to do.
Download Goonies from c64.com
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I originally played this game on the Amstrad CPC-464. You try playing a game with colour-based puzzles on a crappy monochrome green-screen monitor. Only when I played it again on the C64, on a colour telly, did I finally get to appreciate just how incredible this game is. Sound puzzles, colour puzzles, geometry puzzles and a kick-ass magic carpet ride tying them all together. Years ahead of its time.
For his dramatization of Eric Schlosser’s tell-all expose of the Fast Food industry, Richard Linklater chose to focus on just two points from the book.
Although they’re both very important points, they are stretched past breaking point across a two-hour movie. This means, worryingly, that by the fifth time someone on screen has repeated “there’s shit in the meat”, it’s lost all of its emotional impact.
And though there is a token discussion of the morality of the fast-food lifestyle (courtesy of a brief appearance by Ethan Hawke), this thinly-veiled sermon is so naive as to be offensive.
Heavy-handed and overwrought. I wonder if a documentary might have been the better option for this material?
HD version available on Yahoo Movies.
Resident Evil: Mad Max, more like. Still though, it’s got Milla Jovovich and zombies – I’ve got my tickets booked already.
I’ve been pretty busy, so I missed this slightly, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still celebrate!
Monday was the 20th birthday of Apple.com. The domain was registered on the 19th of February 1987 and was the 64th registered dot-com address.
So happy birthday, guys!
Oscar-nominated local boy done good, Ruairi Robinson recently finished his new short film, The Silent City, and put it online in both HD quality and in shitty Youtube-quality. It’s an astonishing achievement considering the amount of quality he managed to eke out of his small budget, including appearances by Cillian Murphy (pictured) and Don Wycherley.
It’s a seriously impressive movie and I’d encourage everyone to check it out. You can find all the download details on Ruairi’s site. And while you’re there, you might as well check out his other short films, the previously-mentioned, Oscar Nominated Fifty Percent Grey (cruelly denied an oscar win by those Pixar bastards) and House on Dame Street.