Bomber's movie spot

At last it's here! The unwanted spot that you've all been scratching subconsciously worrying that it might erupt into an actual pustulescence, it's bomber's movie spot!

I saw Sin City and a very interesting remix of Batman Begins last week. Sin City first;




Clive "can you tell I'm not American?" Owen

Not having read the originals, I came to this mostly impressed with the visual style of the trailer and ad art and the promise of skull crushing violence in strip clubs. Sadly I feel a little let down. The visual style is certainly excellent and engaging, for sure we are going to see more of this sort of "retro decolourisation", the blood effects (which were rendered in white, sort of like IR photos) are very effective, the highlighting of the myriad scars on display is great and what they've done with Mickey Rourke's face is phenomenal. Clearly they decided to accentuate the disasterous plastic surgery rather than hide it; a definite top drawer decision there. The acting is of a particular style; it's Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer with an extra dollop of flat foot on top. This is where I have my first problem with the movie. The style (certainly for the male roles) is fully hammed up to match the athmosphere and the problem is that, from what I saw, Mickey Rourke is the only one who really manages to pull it off. Benicio Del Toro is definitely up to the task, but doesn't stay alive long enough to make an impact, Bruce Willis almost manages (but not quite) and Clive Owen proves that he could have almost matched Rourke but can't do an american accent. As for the females, they were all dressed like strippers the whole time so I wasn't really listening. Oh, and the bespectacled killer dude, well all I could think of was "You look hungry Mr Frodo, sir" and the spell (such as it was) was broken. As if this wasn't enough, I felt completely let down by the potential / end product ratio of the plot. The movie is based on 4 different stories happening at overlapping times, each of which provide a slice of Sin City life. Each stands alone OK, but we are constantly reminded of common threads that run through all the stories, especially the Roark family, who I think appear in all of them, mostly in positions of abused power; Mayor, bishop - guess what he's in to and Mayor's son. Mr Frodo's character is some sort of controlled psycho used for political assassinations by the Roarks, or something. This had a huge potential to intermingle the plot lines of the different storeies and create a really tight whole (ooh err) all very Pulp Fiction but it never happened. The closest they get is all being in the same strip joint at the same time, once, at the end of the movie. :"what of the skull crushing violence in strip clubs?" I hear you cry. Well, the violence could be violent but I was never carried away with it. At one point, one of the characters tortures another one by cutting his armes and legs off and feeding them to an alsacian, then letting the dog start to knaw on the stumps. This should have been fucking brilliant but it just left me wondering where the other bottle of red wine was. Which brings me to probably my fundamental problem with thius film (apart from the plot and the acting) and that's the rythm of the story. It just seemed to bump along withouit ever catching light. Theer are several very violent scenes (although sadly missing a hammer fight) but the timing of them left me flat, when it could have kept the whole show pumping. Perhaps that was just down to my state of mind at the time but I'll have to watch it again to see.

In the end I thought this movie was a great idea, technically superb but badly executed in the plot / character department. Except for Mickey Rourke, who was God. I'll watch it again, but only because I can't believe I had built myself up so much to be so dissapointed and perhaps I wasn't paying attention while I was watching. And I fucking paid for it on DVD, so I suppose I should get my money's worth.

On to Batman, which I did not pay for on DVD, although perhaps I should have done...

I've been dabbling in P2P stuff, choking up the office network and such, and thought I'd have a go at downloading a movie to put on my PSP. My attempts at DVD ripping have not yet been wholly succesful, although we are getting there, and I thought this would be a good short cut to see what a movie looks like on the little fella. Having missed batty begins in the cinema, I gave that a whirl. After download and conversion (PSP has a non standard file format or something, wouldn't you guess it from Sony...) I decided to watch some on the bus home last night.

Well I never; I never knew that the latest Batman movie started with two girls, one with now ubiquitous small of back surfer tat, which must have been quite ground breaking back in the 40s when batty was a boy, "enjoying" themselves on a beach towel. Phew, I thought, perhaps not exactly public transport material but if this is the start, what happens when batty flies in to teach them a thing or two about public nudity and gives them a good going over with his batterang... Actually, I never got to find out. Two minutes in and one bird decided to squat over the other bird and it all went shitinplasticbaginmouth-tastic (only no plastic bag) and I realised that I had been had.

Bugger

Bomber out