BatFlattery

As a longtime user of Amazon’s DVD rental by post service, I was a little annoyed when they sold it to LoveFilm. But after some initial teething problems relating to the transfer of my account, I have to admit that LoveFilm is pretty good. The website has some great features, like categorisation of your list into high, medium and low priority movies, and multiple lists if you and your partner each want their own list. And if you search for movies by eg genre they are sorted intelligently, so that more recent and more popular movies feature first, making it more likely you’ll find what you want, rather than having to plough through every weird film ever released in the genre. (Of course if you want to find that obscure cult film, you can easily do it by searching directly.) The service is fast, so you get a new movie a couple of days after posting an old one back, and of course you can keep a movie as long as you like.

This is in strong contrast to the BlockBuster rental by post service which I did a free trial on. The website was awful. Searches produce lists sorted alphabetically, so you have to wade through dreck released fifty years ago to get to the movie you want. The whole experience was very un-user-friendly. You cannot return the movies to a BlockBuster store, so there is no integration between the online and the physical store network. The whole thing just reeks of poor execution. Which makes sense, I suppose: LoveFilm do this as their main business, while BlockBuster were forced into rental by post to deal with the decline of their core business model. BlockBuster’s heart isn’t in it.

These days I use LoveFilm more for TV than movies: you can rent series on DVD, usually getting three episodes per disk, so it’s quite a nice way to catch up on all of a series that you might have missed some episodes of, or stopped watching because you lost the thread of the plot. You can even plough through a series of 24 in near-real-time: a three-disk rental scheme would give you enough disks for 12 hours of 24, giving you a bit of a break and some sleep before the next three disks arrive!

LoveFilm is definitely worth checking out if you love movies and TV.

Just finished watching The Kingdom. Immediate thoughts:

1. I’m very glad I didn’t see it before my trip to Saudi Arabia in January. The compound that gets blown up looks very similar to the compound I visited, even though the scene was shot in Arizona.
2. Then again, there really is a compound called Arizona in Riyadh!
3. The security that you see at the entrance to the compound is absolutely for real. When you drive into a compound, they really do check under the car with a mirror. Every time. You really do have to drive the meander between huge concrete blocks, and there really are national guardsmen in tanks parked outside. All the time.
4. In many of the city shots it was very obviously not Riyadh. I haven’t been to Abu Dhabi but in photographs I’ve seen, it contains far more huge glass buildings than there are in Riyadh, which really has only two tall buildings, the Kingdom Centre and the Faisaliyah, and neither is a glass box.
5. Although none of the film was actually shot in Riyadh, in some shots you can see, on the horizon, the distinctive shape of the Kingdom Centre (which contains the Four Seasons hotel that I stayed at). I presume it was digitally added in post-production.

I was quite impressed by the movie: it felt authentic for the most part, and the writing avoided stereotypes and cliches. The plot was surprising and reached a satisfying climax, and all of the performances were solid; only Ashraf Barhoum really stood out. Recommended.

So at work today we’re talking about Guy Pearce for some reason, and someone mentions Memento. A girl says she’s sure that she’s seen it, but can’t remember what it’s about…

I am old enough to remember the great VHS versus Betamax battle. In those days (yea! long ago) I was a Sony fan, and so of course I made sure our family supported Sony. Betamax was the technical superior in any event. But if it was made by Sony, it was good. I think we had two or three Beta VCRs at one stage, including the famous Beta Hi-Fi.

I still remember the day Sony brought out its first VHS VCR. Like a knife in the gut, it was.

(more…)

I saw Transformers last week: not brilliant but certainly enjoyable. The bits that made me grin the most starred the yellow Autobot Bumblebee, at least when he was in his guise of a yellow Camaro. At first he’s a model that has seen better days, but then he, um, transforms into a very sleek-looking Camaro indeed.

Now I didn’t realise this at the time, but it seems that the car is supposed to be the 2009 Chevy Camaro. Since that model doesn’t actually exist yet, GM had a specialty car company graft fibreglass mouldings of their new Camaro concept car onto the running gear of a Pontiac GTO from Australia. All the gory details are here, together with some more pictures.

Fred Thompson makes some excellent points about Iran’s reported unhappiness with the movie ‘300′.

It does pretty much beggar belief that a regime which sponsors a conference entitled “A World Without Israel” can complain that a work of fiction, representing events that happened thousands of years ago, is an act of warfare against it.

Anyway, I think this guy would make a pretty good president.

So I watched Diva again last night, courtesy of my Amazon DVD Rental by post subscription. It’s perhaps one of the coolest films ever made, and holds up pretty well after 25 years. If you’re not familiar with it, the plot revolves around young Jules, who makes a bootleg tape recording of a concert of his favourite diva, Cynthia Hawkins, purely for his own enjoyment, as she refuses to make any records (the film marginally predates the CD). He ends up with two sets of villains on his tail, both trying to get the recording (one for the wrong reason).

Now I could imagine the director facing a few problems if he tried to make the movie today:

JEAN-JACQUES BENEIX: Good morning, gentlemen.

FIRST MOVIE EXEC: Hi there Jacques, may I call you Jacques? I just wanted you to know how excited we are about doing your movie.

SECOND MOVIE EXEC: Oh, totally, totally excited. I mean, we’re thinking, Orlando for the lead, and Walken for the police chief. Am I right?

FIRST MOVIE EXEC: Oh yeah. But, ah, Jacques, just before we get to that… about the opening scene….

JEAN-JACQUES BENEIX: Yes?

SECOND MOVIE EXEC: Well, we’ve got this young guy, right, and he’s sitting in the Paris Opera, and he’s got a mini-disk recorder on his lap, right…

JEAN-JACQUES BENEIX: Yes?

FIRST MOVIE EXEC: Well, he’s recording the performance.

SECOND MOVIE EXEC: I mean, he’s a fucking pirate, for God’s sake. Little bastards just like him are sitting in movie theatres all across America, right now, taking bread from our mouths! (Wipes spittle from lower lip.)

JEAN-JACQUES BENEIX: But zis is ze central conflict zat drives ze story: as Jules is making love to Cynthia, he knows if she knew he was ze pirate who is causing her all zis trouble…

FIRST MOVIE EXEC: But Jacques, baby, we can’t have the hero doing that! No-one will want to play him, I guarantee you! Forget Orlando, baby!

JEAN-JACQUES BENEIX: Actually, I was zinking of Johnny Depp…

SECOND MOVIE EXEC: Oh, fucking GREAT!! The Pirate of the Caribbean himself!

FIRST MOVIE EXEC: You know, I’m starting to think maybe this wasn’t such a good idea…

SECOND MOVIE EXEC: Yeah, I mean, opera?? What were those guys thinking?

FIRST MOVIE EXEC: You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking Da Vinci Code…

SECOND MOVIE EXEC: …meets Pretty Woman!

FIRST MOVIE EXEC: No, you moron! Were you dropped on your head as a child? Listen to me…

EXECS walk off, arguing, leaving JEAN-JACQUES BENEIX alone. Very alone.

I went to the Pixar exhibit at the Science Museum yesterday. It was a bit disappointing in that it wasn’t nearly as extensive as the Lord of the Rings exhibit a couple of years ago, but I still found a couple of things of interest. For one thing, it made it completely obvious that Pixar is dominated by artists. Most of the exhibition was made up of incredible drawings, paintings, even collages, executed by the artists during the design phase, as well as incredibly detailed clay sculptures which were digitized to create the “in-computer” character. The level of skill exhibited in almost all of these works was pretty impressive.

Another really cool thing was the “21st Century Zoetrope”, which was a 3-D zoetrope, made up of models mounted on a turntable, which, when spun and then illuminated by strobe lighting, brought a multitude of Pixar characters to seeming 3-D life! Great fun.

I also enjoyed the movie made for the exhibition. In keeping with its theme, all of the art in the movie was painted by hand, although computers were used to animate these static drawings in a quite evocative way.

Finally, the exhibition really made me want to see Cars, the next Pixar release. I found this poster on the web, and it’s got all kinds of cool jokes in it. (Look now if you want to see what you can spot yourself.)

Back already? OK, what I saw was the petrol-cap-shaped rock in the foreground: the tall rocks in the background shaped like the fins of ’50s cars: the contrails in the sky which look like tyre tracks: the helicopter with the Dinoco logo (the gas station in Toy Story was a Dinoco): the LightYear blimp. If you spot any others, let me know!

Jeff Goldstein at Normblog:

Nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

For those of you who missed one of the greatest movies of all time, it’s one of the best quotes in Aliens.

I’ve been using Amazon’s DVD rental by post service for a while now, and it’s really been great to catch up on some of the classic movies I’ve enjoyed before, plus ones I never got round to seeing before for some reason or another (like The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense).

Usually when I go to a rental store I wander around for ages, trying to remember movies that I might like, but with the Amazon rental list, anytime I think of a movie I just add it to my list. The web interface lets me change the order of the DVDs at any time, and for less than ten quid I get four DVDs a month, two out at any time (as soon as I send one back, they send the next one on the list, unless the monthly limit has been reached). Plus you get a discount if you buy any DVD from Amazon.

If you’d like to check it out for yourself, just click on the banner: