"KvltSite is our collective scribbling pad, a way to talk about all the things that we get off on – music, movies, games, books, comics. We do so in the hope that when others come along and hear of our tastes and recommendations, they would realise how awesome we are. Hints of our old irreverence surface ever so often, with witty dissections of popular trends and cultural fads, in the form of textual harassment as well as crafty comics. In short, we're in the business of writing about anything we think is cool."
It was a short story collection in which a lot of well known authors did their own Holmes pastiche. This was the second story. I really couldn't finish this or move on with the rest of the collection.
Harry Brown is really more Death Wish than Gran Torino. Decent fun, and Michael Caine's performance is very studied and consistent, but I doubt I'll want to see it again.
Saw Death Wish after downloading all 5 films. This is a fairly decent 70s thriller. Charles Bronson's absolute lack of emotion or ability to portray any gives his performance a demented edge. Good fun.
I should post here more often. I keep watching stuff and forgetting about it. So...
Stephen Fry in America - Fry is as amiable and charming as always. Even when he's taking digs at Americans, he frequently pulls punches and a lot of the snarky feel is handled with editing rather than commentary. Most of his loathing is reserved for Miami, and it's awesome to watch just for that scene alone. It feels breezy even at 6 hours (split into 6 episodes), since he rips through the states at a good pace and puts priority on featuring interesting people/places rather than visiting the usual touristy spots. Recommended viewing, unless you have zero interest in anything Americana.
The Green Room with Paul Provenza - The concept is that Provenza gets 4 other comics to sit down with him and talk about whatever, with (I'm assuming) other aspiring comedians and minor celebrities as audience. It feels more spontaneous than most stand-up routines, and there's a lot of fun back-and-forth between them quite often. Of course, most of the unfunny people get exposed quite fast in this setup, though even that has potential for comedy when the others start ripping on them. Usually each episode has around 1 or 2 lame ducks, from what I've seen so far. Fun stuff, and a good way to get the heads-up on some funny obscure comics.
Futurama Season 6 - Pretty bad, I've got to say. The first episode was completely indulgent with the self-referential shit and, 2 episodes later, they still haven't got shit off the ground.
Top Gear Season 15 - Reliably kickass. Funniest shit so far was when Clarkson did the piece on the Reliant Robin. They beat that joke into the ground but it was still worth some chuckles by the end. In fact, it was even funnier when it made an appearance in the next episode.
Pirate Radio/The Boat That Rocked - A yarn about the first pirate radio station (based on Radio Caroline) in the UK, broadcasted from an independent offshore ship. In theory, it should have been a kickass movie. The characters were fun, the acting performances were pretty good, but the script was just too bland to pull it off. It got aimless somewhere around the halfway mark and at 2 hours running time, that's a pretty long while to be meandering about. At least they edited the thing - the original length was supposed to be more like 3 hours.
Django - Worth it just for the scene where Franco Nero mows down an army of men with one Gatling Gun. Otherwise, it's got some of that Yojimbo playing-one-group-against-another feel, and some regular western badassery.
A couple of stand-up shows:
Stephen K Amos - Find the Funny - Guy should have listened to himself, because there wasn't much funny to be found here. Especially galling because he used the exact same routine from an earlier show. Didn't finish this one.
Richard Pryor - Live on the Sunset Strip - Pryor's a lot more self-deprecating than I thought he'd be, and it helps the act. There's very little of the white-man bashing that one usually associates with black comedians, though maybe this was toned down since it was from later in his career. He's got the observational and introspective angles covered here. Fun shit.
Also - saw this trailer for an upcoming all-star-cast movie based on a Warren Ellis comic:
Seemed like another wussification job, so I went to check out the source material to get dibs on whining. Downloaded a series of Ellis short comics which featured the above. As expected, the original is way dark and too much of a downer to survive a mainstream movie adaptation unscathed. Anyway, here's a brief overview of the comics in the collection:
Down - Maverick cop is sent undercover into the biggest organised crime outfit in the city. The catch? It's headed by another cop who was sent undercover before her. Can she avoid the fate of her predecessor and hang on to her humanity in the process?
Mek - In a future where cybernetic implants have become commonplace, one of the founders of the Mek movement, who has since gone on to become a pro-Mek lobbyist in Washington, returns to where it all started. An old ally of hers has been murdered, and she suspects more to the case than what has been reported. The best part here is the way it presents how seamlessly cybernetics could be used in daily life, and how it would not be a far cry from our gadget-crazy existence today. The plot feels a bit rushed, but pretty satisfying nonetheless.
Red - Alright, you've seen the trailer. A retired CIA hitman finds himself forced to go back into survival mode when the new director of the CIA sees his file and decides he is too dangerous to be allowed to continue living, and sends a hit squad to take him out. This one comes across very Frank Miller-ish (specifically Sin City), with one man killing his way through hordes of cannon fodder to get to his target. Fairly brutal.
Reload - This was the least compelling of the four. A rogue agent assassinates the President and targets the Chiefs of Staff for ... well, some reason or the other. Servicable, but not much more.
Rahul Chacko wrote: Red - Alright, you've seen the trailer. A retired CIA hitman finds himself forced to go back into survival mode when the new director of the CIA sees his file and decides he is too dangerous to be allowed to continue living, and sends a hit squad to take him out. This one comes across very Frank Miller-ish (specifically Sin City), with one man killing his way through hordes of cannon fodder to get to his target. Fairly brutal.
I didn't fancy Red much. Warren Ellis is capable of doing so much more- case in point- Desolation Jones.
Apart from Toy Story 3, which was pretty awesome, here's what I watched the last couple of weeks:
Juan José Campanella's The Secret in Their Eyes alternates between modern day and 1970s' Buenos Aires. The story opens with an ex-cop turned writer trying to pen down the opening lines of his novel, set on a real-life murder case that he was assigned to 25 years ago. The seemingly unrelated opening flashbacks resolve themselves in the course of the movie as the ex-cop keeps going back to his muse/flame, his boss and we find that this case interests him deeply as his personal life had got intrinsically tied in. To wind down the novel, he traces the fortunes of the main players of the case- the murder victim's husband and the murderer- with interesting results.
Duncan Jones' Moon immediately brings to mind David Bowie's Space Oddity and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. In an unspecified time in the future, a corporation has figured out how to mine the moon's soil for an alternative fuel resource known as helium-3 and has set up a 1-man unit known as 'Sarang' as base on the dark side of the moon. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the lone human in the fully automated base assisted by a robot known as GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey). Sam is two weeks from finishing with his 3-year contract when he becomes mentally unhinged and gets into an accident while hallucinating. Things become very strange just about then and the term 'human resource' takes on a completely new dimension in the course of this movie. Sam Rockwell carries this movie through wonderfully and Clint Mansell's background score is a treat.
Outrageous Fortune Ran through three seasons of this Kiwi comedy/drama and its good fun. It turns a little soapy around the second season but there's some kickass writing and some very interesting characters to keep things going.
trix wrote: I didn't fancy Red much. Warren Ellis is capable of doing so much more- case in point- Desolation Jones.
Well, I guess it's fine for what it is - a short, sharp jab. Obviously not Ellis at his best, I would never think to claim anything on those lines. I mean, anyone who's read any single issue of Transmetropolitan knows that for a fact.
Oh, forgot to mention - went through Hard Boiled by Frank Miller and Geoff Darrow, which is about a malfunctioning cyborg who goes rampaging through the city and tries to come to terms with its identity. Miller definitely plays second fiddle to Darrow here, as the best thing about the comic is the ridiculous amount of detail packed into every panel. It's so damn busy that you need to take it at a leisurely pace and soak it all in. While it's awesome on the art front, I'm undecided on the story. I suppose it just serves as a convenient excuse to pack more art in.
I started watching the first few episodes of Pushing Daisies and it looks good. The show is told in an adult fairy styled manner and is about this guy who has the power to bring dead people back to life. But if the person were to touch him again he/she would die. The designs are excellent and the acting is apt. But it was not interesting enough to make me watch many episodes on a stretch. So I started watching Outrageous Fortunes and very much liking it so far.
Also saw two of Jean Cocteau's films in the theater: Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus. Both are great works of imagination and are worthy watches even if the proceedings seem a little shaky.
Almost totally fed up with Kraken by China Mieville. Between the leaden pacing, occasionally clumsy writing, cliched end of the world premise and wholesale thievery from Neverwhere, this has been the biggest disappointment from a favourite author since The Glass Palace. It is REALLY hard to go through given there's not a single character I give a rat's ass about. One more try to see if it gets better. If not, anyone who is interested can have it for 200 bucks. Hell, I'll even throw in a free CD to sweeten the deal.
This week's movie viewing was mainly in the mediocre/unintentionally entertaining bracket. First off, the only really good movie I saw was
The House with the Laughing Windows. An artist/restorer goes to a small deadend town to work on the paintings of this controversial artist that apparently litter the entire township. It's obvious quite early on that something's not right and the rest of the movie is devoted to finding out just what via a slow but gradual increase in menace and unease. Unfortunately, the film's budget gets in the way of its grand revelation and one of the most horrific surprises in the film looks like the absolutely uninspired shit Ed Repka's been serving up these days (though to his credit, most of the neo-thrash bands these are for are so uninspired and shitty, he's doing a public service by warning people off them).
Solomon Kane A film about a Bible thumping badass in the early 17th century that's not bad. It's not good either. A lot more could have been done, I thought, with a plot about a damned warrior fighting for redemption in an alt-history version of England where the Pilgrims were making their way to America to escape the demonic hordes that swept the country. It was good fun in parts, tedious in others. Could've done with a lot more OTT violence.
The RockerThere are pathetic sequences alll throughout the movie that keeps telling you that rock is fucked , rock is chhootiya, rock is gand. The only thing matters is the cock and whos sucking it. - buggshash on Almost Famous
Eternal words. And he may as well have been talking about this movie. How bad can a movie that stars both Rainn Wilson who is pretty fucking entertaining in The Office and the guy who plays Gob in Arrested Development be? Pretty fucking awful as it turns out. The Rocker is built around the same fucked up bugbear that powered homegrown turd Rock On and Jack Black's beer smelling urinal full of piss School of Rock; the loser rocker being given a second shot at glory etc. Several things amaze me about these movies; none of them good:
1. How secondary music is to the plot of these films: These films would work just as well if they were about an accountant who returns from a dull boring alternative career as a professor of accounting to balance the books for his old friend Ramalinga Raju. Or a plumber who gives up a soul crushing career as a dishwasher to unclog the Indian style toilet he was once exiled from in disgrace. The least you can do when you have such a BORING AS FUCK character arc is to make the journey interesting and/or bizarre. But the assholes who make such films would die a 1000 deaths before they'd do any such thing. Anyone who makes a film like this is by definition a talentless hack.
2. How utterly awful the music is in all of these films: The Sound of Music had more rock in its soundtrack than this shit film. The songs in it make the Mary Poppins OST sound like death metal. The movie is supposed to be about Fish (Wilson) who was in this cock rock band but was shafted out of the group just before it hit the big league. He decides to have one last stab at fame by playing the drums for ADD the shitty emo band his nephew is in and add to the band a sense of energy and blah from the cock rock era. Except there's no chance in hell that was EVER going to happen, or reflect in the sound of the band, given the fact that non ironic cock rock would not fly with the target demographic of this film: pantywaists and pussies who listen to pop and the bullshit that people like to call 'indie' but is in fact indifferently marketed pop. The music essentially sounds like Hoobastink, The Killers and lots of other terrible bands with earnest singers warbling in balless falsettos. Wilson is tasked with the embarrassing job of pulling ridiculous faces while he drums to tepid shit that an absolute boob like Ringo Starr could have done after having an entire side paralysed by a stroke. As a final act of punishment doled out to anyone who went into this crapstorm expecting to be even mildly entertained, they allow incompetent asshole Teddy Geiger a throwup and coming singer-songwriter, who plays the emo chut vocalist of the band the opportunity to first murder 'Nothin' But a Good Time' by Poison and then...let's just say there's an entire goregrind album's worth of content just based on what Teddy Geiger does to Nothin But a Good Time.
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