(I am attempting to make sure that by the end of the year I have watched every single one of the top 100 rated films according to IMDB as of 18th March 2005. This film is the first. I have 24 to go. The full list is here.)

dir. Park Chan-Wook
wri. Hwang Jo-yun, Lim Chun-hyeong (adapted from Tsuchiya Garon)
st. Choi Min-sik, Yu Ji-tae, Kang Hye-jeong

Stunning! Absolutely fantastic. That’s all I’ve got to say about Oldboy, the second in a trilogy of revenge films by Park Chan-Wook. I’m always sceptical about films that appear in a top 100 list so shortly after their release. But this film blew me away.

First up, a caution. This film is not for the faint of heart. If you don’t like violent films then you won’t like Oldboy. It is a tale of vengeance and it’s a Korean film based on Japanese manga. There is blood and violence and a particularly disgusting scene involving a live squid in a sushi bar. (I’ll leave you to figure out what might happen - but bear in mind cultural sensibilities and the fact that this is a Korean film…)

The story centres on Oh Dae-su, a normal, everyday man with wife and child. For reasons unknown, he is abducted and imprisoned, detained one room with nothing but a T.V., pen and paper for company. He sees news reports of his wife’s murder and watches as he is named number one suspect. Then, after 15 years of confinement, he is released, again with out any explanation. His abductor provides him with clothes, money and a simple task: to find out why he was abducted in the first place.

There’s so much to recommend about this film. In the wrong hands this could have been another trashy, badly scripted, poorly shot film featuring bloody vengeance for bloody vengeance’s sake. But it’s not. It’s beautiful to look at. The lighting and cinematography is fantastic. The acting is tremendous. In Oh Dae-su, we see an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances. We see him change from being a chubby, loud mouthed drunkard to being a lean, mean, laconic, vengeance machine. We get caught up in his quest to find out who imprisoned him and why. The story twists and turns and the revelations and surprises keep coming.

There is a lot of action and it is very well done without being over the top (watch out for the fight scene in the corridor and try to remember that it’s all done in one take) but it never detracts from the human element of the film and that’s a credit to the director. Chan-wook Park mixes the right elements of a Hitchcockian thriller with the sublime action of a Takeshi Kitano film and the payoff is a marvellous film that, in my humble opinion, fully deserves the Grand Jury Prize it won at last years Cannes Film Festival.

This year has already seen me take a leap to join the twentieth* century. I’ve just ordered Sky Digital which, impressively, is going to be installed next Tuesday, a mere four working days after I placed the order. (It could have been Monday but I happen to be at home on the Tuesday). The incentive was mainly owing to us not having a decent terrestial reception since about christmas and I can’t be arsed to sort out the shared ariel at the end of the terrace. Anyway, there’s normally stuff on BBC3 which I keep wanting to watch (not to mention Sky One, Sci-Fi channel and National Geographic…)

This is in addition to buying a PS2 earlier in the year. I’ve never owned a console before because, well, I couldn’t really justify it as although I like some console games, it’s much more exciting to go around to someone else’s and play theirs instead. Anyway, I’m a committed PC gamer and if I’m going to spend thirty quid on a game then it’s going to have to last me a long, long time. My timeliness, as ever, is unerring - what with the imminent unveiling of Xbox2 and the Playstation 3 due for release in the not too distant future. Me? Up to date? I tell you, I wear my badge of being the most untechnical technical person you’ll ever meet with pride.

*Not a mistake

A little over a year ago there was a meme going around that particularly appealed to me. It took the list of the top 100 rated films from IMDB and asked you to highlight the ones you’d seen. I’d seen 60-70% of them last year and made it my mission to watch the ones I hadn’t seen by the end of the year.
(more…)

“The Hand That Feeds” is the new single from Nine Inch Nails that’s being released in the UK on April 18th. (Halo 18 for those that know about such things) The new album, “With Teeth” is being released in May 9th according to Amazon. They are touring Europe in the summer.

I have tickets. Do you?

(And just to highlight what a good year it’s going to be, the new Foetus album, “Love”, is coming out the very next day!)

I’ve never started a meme before but while I was down at the gym (leching(sp?) at the lycra rather than working out) I had a great idea for a new meme, inspired by the copious amount of adverts for downloadable mobile phone ringtones on the telly. Seeing as I was down at the gym, I thought there could be a physical, outdoorsy side to this but read on before that puts you off.

Okay, the task is this: go out and find someone who has one of those fucking annoying and insipid downloadable ringtones - you know the ones I mean, that sodding frog on a motorbike, the singing chick, that sort of crap. Snatch the owner’s phone and destroy it in the most imaginative way possible (extra points of it involves ramming it any of the chav’s owner’s orifices), take a photo and publish it on your blog. Of course, it doesn’t have to stop there - feel free to take a picture of the owner too but it has to be in a famous and recognisable style (such as an “Abu Ghraib prison” photo for example, or a “forensic photographer in Ted Bundy’s flat”).

You know it makes sense.

The second trailer for Speilberg’s adaptation of War of the Worlds is out now. Download it here.

All I can say is that it’s got to be better than Independence Day and Signs. The one thing I will be prepared to give this is the fact that if they do the whole virus/bacteria killing the aliens thing then I’ll be okay with that as it is an adaptation of the original version of that story. I’m still waiting for the ultimate alien invasion movie that actually get’s it right. (Let me rephrase that, I’m still trying to write the ultimate alien invasion movie…)

Rumours are abound that the aliens in Spielberg’s version don’t actually come from Mars but are from somewhere else. So if you’re a stickler for adaptations, then don’t worry as there’s another version being released this year too that is set in the 19th century, has the aliens coming from Mars, Thunderchild, the artilleryman and the rest of it. But considering how low budget it is, it’s probably going straight to video. Check out the official site and trailers here At the moment, it’s got a release date for 30th March in the USA only. (Incidentally, if you watch the low res theatrical trailer, what the hell is wrong with the singing woman’s mouth?)

Spielberg’s film is out on the 8th July in the UK.

I have a load of DVD reviews of films I’ve seen recently but they’re all sitting in draft at the moment so bear with me. Some of them I’ve seen recently, some not so recently. I don’t care. It’s Friday, Wales are going to win tomorrow and the sun is out and boiling my brain.

dir. Adam McKay
wri. Will Ferrell, Adam McKay
str. Will Ferrell, Christina Applegate

By Odin’s beard I have no idea whether this film was funny or not. “Anchorman - The Legend of Ron Burgundy” is a very, very silly film and, unusually for contemporary american comedy, is neither gross-out humour or wacky slapstick. Instead it’s just very, very silly. Will Ferrell was inspired by a documentary about the first female news anchor and in particular one of her male associates who was a self confessed chauvinist back when the news room was male dominated. And so this film, set in the seventies, is the story of a self obsessed, ratings topping anchorman, Ron Burgundy (Ferrell), and what happens when a young ambitious female reported (Christina Applegate) joins the team.

There was a lot in this film that made me laugh. Jack Black’s biker, the cameo laden, the news team streetfight, “jazz flute”, the random (and obviously improvised) dialogue and some of the general silliness made me smirk. But I can’t help feeling they missed a trick here. There’s no real character development or character arc (not that you’d necessarily expect there to be), no real conflict and no real substance. Although I wasn’t expecting much, there were times when I felt that they could have afforded to take more of a swipe at the news industry. But this is no “The Day Today” and certainly not “Drop the Dead Donkey”. Either one of those fantastic TV shows could have been made into a film and had a similar story to Anchorman but I’m sure they would have been more cutting, more subtle and, ultimately, far, far funnier than this was.

Anchorman, however, is harmless. It’s lightweight and amusing and consistently silly but is by no means a satire or, for that matter, very subtle. It doesn’t feel very ninspired and, essentially, like one long SNL sketch. Still, I did laugh so I can’t ask much more than that.

“Black, black, blaaaaccckkkk!!! You lock me in the cellar and feed me pins! My eyes… my eyes are pies and yours are lies! Black, black, crawl on your hands and knees to impending doom!”

It wouldn’t be my site unless it was an offputting design, had pseudo gothic (not goth, damn you, not that warped, Sisters of Mercy loving, wannabe angsty pretentious “lookitmee - I’m so rebellious and you just don’t understand” whining, long coat wearing, anaemic stereotype) pretensions, some sort of congealed blood red logo and off-white on black text that makes it impossible for anyone over about 13 to read..

And with this new version of Wordpress, I might just be able to sort out a white version too. All I need know is code for a decent style switcher.

Yeah baby!

With Bryan Singer off directing a new Superman film, the spot for a new director for the successful X-Men franchise is open.

I love the X-Men. It was the only superhero comic I remember reading as a child (in the pre 80’s Wolverine days when there was just Professor X, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Angel and a non blue, non hairy Beast). The first film was fantastic (apart from Halle Berry’s very, very bad accent) and more or less heralded a renaissance in superhero films. The second film was as good (which, for a sequel, is unheard of) and there’s a lot of anticipation for the third film.

So who’s going to take over the hot seat? Apparently it’s going to be Matthew Vaughn, Guy Ritchie’s former producer and director of the surprisingly good Layer Cake (review later). But I seriously hope we don’t start getting some crafty cockney mutant getting embroiled in an elaborate scam with Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants that results in massive blood bath and crafty double cross. Then again…!

The latest rumours about new additions to the X-team are that Beast, Gambit and Angel will be joining with the existing crew but they’ve been talked about since the first film. Let’s face it, as long as we have more of Hugh Jackman’s beserker rage as Wolverine, and Alan Cumming’s Nightcrawler BAMFing in and out of the action, who cares?

Joel Silver, erstwhile producer of such blockbuster hits as Weird Science, Predator, Die Hard and The Matrix, has announced that he has persuaded Joss Whedon to sign on as the writer of a forthcoming film version of “Wonder Woman”. Great news, you might think, considering the fact that the best ever episodes of both Buffy and Angel were written by Whedon himself.

But the truth of it is that Whedon’s cinematic ventures have been, well, less than successful with one notable exception. Firstly there was the movie version of Buffy The Vampire Slayer which, to be fair, was nothing like the TV series. The script was allegedly mangled by the studio who didn’t really get what Whedon wanted to do and so you have one of the hammiest and cheesiest films ever. Then there was Alien: Resurrection. The ideas were there but the film was abysmal. (There’s a joke about this in one series of Angel when Fred’s mum tells the gang that Fred’s dad liked all the Alien films …”Except for the last one they made - he dozed off!”) After that was Titan A:E which, frankly, no one saw. Then there was an uncredited script write for X-Men of which they kept one line in, the truly awfully delivered line by Storm to do with toads and lightning.

The only “success” Whedon has had in the cinema is with the screenplay for Toy Story which he and his fellow writers got an Oscar for.

But still, he’s proven his writing credentials with both Buffy and Angel (and allegedly Firefly but I haven’t seen any of that) and the vague similarities between Buffy and Wonder Woman (err… strong, heroic, independent females who save the world. A lot.) explains why Joel Silver hounded him down to do it. That being said, will the world of DC Heroes and Wonder Woman accomodate Whedon’s off hand wit and pop culture references? More importantly, will Lynda Carter be making a cameo appearance? We need answers and we need them now.