Thor The Dark World (2013)

Me and my dad went to see The new Thor film the other day (our local cinema shows things a couple of months late) we enjoyed it to an extent. As in the same extent that everyone else enjoyed it. We were just waiting for Loki.

Seriously those films would be nothing without Tom Hiddleston. He has got a good deal going on. He’s the draw. He’s the reason we go to the cinema. Well done that boy.

The Wolverine (2013)

Me and my dad rented Wolverine and though I’m not keen on the ol’ ninjas, samurais and Japanese things in general (yawn) I thought it was a great comic book movie!! And I enjoyed it way more than the previous Wolverine film! Well done Hugh Jackman!

Man of Steel (2013)

Father's day. My dad has always loved Superman but hated what they do to him in films, he hates most of all that Lex Luthor is always portrayed as a ridiculously campy figure of fun, Superman Returns continued this and we were so disappointed because Kevin Spacey can be super evil, we all know it.

There was no Luther in this one so I was hopeful, also I liked the look of Henry Cavill, he looked like Superman as I imagine him even if he was not as my dad did. Anyway, within two minutes of the film starting I knew my dad would hate it and hate it all. Russell Crowe (who dad had so enjoyed in Les Mis!) riding about on a 3D dinosaur, wtf?! After the first ten minutes I stopped worrying how my dad was feeling and just decided to concentrate on how I felt. 

Everyone seemed to hate it but I liked it. I agree with my dad that Kevin Costner was awful and should not have been allowed but Jonathan Kent is always a douchebag so it doesn't bother me that much. I liked it. I actually really liked it. I liked it all the way through and I loved the end. 

Sorry dad, it was the best Superman I'd seen! Still not right at all, I agree, but a better effort than ever before.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

 Saw it with Dad-Y after a lunch at Jamie Oliver's York restaurant. Both of us went in saying "Well, I just don't see how it can be better than the last one." We both came out saying "It was a million times better than the last one!!" We only saw it once and we haven't analysed the crap out of it, I enjoyed it SO much I can't wait to get it for Christmas and watch it a second time- might fast forward all Michael Caine's overacting though.

The Amazing Spider-man (2012)

 Me, Anna, Mikey and Roger all went out to the big cinema to see Spidey, we had pizzas and crap at Frankie and Benny's first and Roger's student ID got us FIFTEEN pounds off the final bill! Now that was amazing. I don't know, it was ok, Anna really enjoyed it (and she hates comics!) She was really upset when Uncle Ben died, and it was great because she'd forgotten he does die, I suppose that's the advantage of not being a nerd, that film actually surprised her!

The Avengers (2012)

Me and Mikey saw it the day after it came out, for comic shop duty of course... and Lauren and Steve went another time, for comic shop duty of course! It were great! I'd like to see it again, but this time Iron-man should die. That's right, I said it! I find him irritating, cocky and wankery beyond belief, I wanted Loki to kill him.

X-Men First Class (2010)

I got the lurgy early November and my dad rented this for me to watch which was fun because I'd been meaning to see it, especially as I now work in a comic shop!
I enjoy the X-Men films, in fact I enjoy a lot of the Marvel films despite having no interest in any Marvel comics (apart from Frank Miller's Electra and Daredevil). I enjoyed this one too.
Fassbender's pretty damn good isn't he? If he hadn't have been in the film it would have been a lot of shite, the only highlight being Hugh Jackman's two word cameo. I liked Magneto and his past and his relationship with Bluey. The rest was pretty shite though, 'specially Kevin Bacon and his lame gang!
I don't know about James MacAvoy being miscast, I think he would have made a very good young Prof X if only the script hadn't been so awful! Why did the writers choose to write him as a cocky arsehole? It wasn't his fault. If they'd written him serene and wise and not a sexpest I'm sure he would have been very convincing.

The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

I saw it in 3D. I think I would have hated it in 2D as well. To me the thing about Herge is that his drawings are very beautiful, the characters are great and the backgrounds are great, it's good art.
The thing I hated most about the film was not the fact that hardly any of the voices seemed to fit the characters, Toby Jones was good but underused and Jamie Bell was fine, it wasn't that the whole thing looked like it had been animated around the idea that there would be a theme park ride based on it within the year, no, the thing I hated was how beautiful drawings had been transofrmed into utterly grotesque characters.
I could not get around how vile Captain Haddock was to look at, all the character designs, even Snowy, made me uneasy. Fleshy and horrible with tiny eyes, ugh. I hated it.

Captain America (2011)

I was really looking forward to Captain America. And the first hour really delivered, it was a great origin story and then the bit with the USO show was so much fun, what a great song!
After that though, when he actually started being Captain America it was so boring and you don't really learn anything about the characters, no pasts, no motivation, what was the Red Skull actually after? What was it actually about? Why did JJ Feild have no closeups?
I was very annoyed that the girl character was so typically what they're always like in those Marvel films, she said at one point that she had struggled in life too, but that was as much character development you got!! She was just there to really really like Captain America.
I liked all the British character actors (Toby Jones, Richard Armitage, Dakin, Filch, etc.) and the end credits were very nicely done.

Les Aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010)

I imagine if I had read the comic, rather than just looking at the collection of cards that my dad has taken from the comic strips (he's a fan of the artist Jacques Tardi- French comic artists are way better than American), I might have known to expect such a weird film. There were no pictures of the pterodactyl in my dad's cards! Just Adele with her tits out!

Anna thought it was terrible but I enjoyed it, if it wasn't for the hatpin incident, the tits (French film) and the Egyptian mummies it would have been a good kids' adventure film! Anyway, I liked her. Her face was great.

V for Vendetta (2006)

So after seeing all these British actors I felt like rounding off my trip home this weekend with another dose of ensemble on DVD. Eddie Marsan and Guy Henry have a line each while sitting at a table with Tim Piggott-Smith (who is proper brill in this film), Ben Miles and Stephen Rea. Stephen's sidekick Gravesy plays the Sergeant Troy to his Barnaby (I watched a good Midsommer Murders today, it was one of the ones with Richard Johnson in it) Stephen Fry pretends to be an actor, Roger Allam gets naked, Mrs Jeremy Irons gets killed nicely and John Hurt makes a joke out of the fact he was in the film 1984.

The only problem I have with this film- well, I don't like all the torture Natalie Portman goes though but she does have that accent...- is that, Britain is this Hate-State and it needs to be brought down through revolution, yeah? Why does it have to be shown this by an Australian and an American? Pah! You don't even see V's face so why can't he be voiced by a Brit? Don't give me that 'But it has to appeal to wider audiences' shit! Bloody Yanks.

Tamara Drewe (2010)

This is a brilliant photo of that dog-actor mimicing Dominic Cooper's face. With impressions like that that dog is set to be the next Michael Sheen.

I really like Posy Simmonds. She's one of my main influences art-wise and her story telling is great, I like her graphic novels, they're fun and saucy. Gemma Bovary was a great modern retelling of Madame Bovary (and I really liked the shape of the book). Tamara Drewe was a good take on Far From the Madding Crowd but I preferred Gemma...

Doesn't matter though, when I read the casting on Tamara I thought, yes, yes, yes. I'm a fan of Dakin, I love Gemma Arterton's face and body and YES; Roger Allam as Nick. I was excited.

And it was all pretty much to the book, sort of, I didn't like how they changed Tamsin Greig's character into actually liking the American loser, urgh! But it turned out that the best thing in the movie was the two teenage girls so I'm glad they changed the ending because Jody was ACE and that song Dakin sings over the end credits about her was brill.

The Chatterly Affair (2006) -And general Christmas round-up

As per usual the family got a load of porn for Christmas. Just kidding, but seriously, when am I going to see Rafe Spall with some clothes on?!

We've done loads of Christmas watching, and it's not over yet, we like to stretch Christmas out for at least a month so I guess we're only half way through. Telly: I enjoyed Michelle Dockery in The Turn of the Screw, I thought they gave her shit hair in Cranford but then that is Cranford... Tom Hiddleston and Jodi Whittacker were good but let's face it Cranford was written by Mrs Gaskell as a bet. Not really, but she did write it as a piss-take and now it's the most successful thing the BBC has ever done!? It's shite! And The Christmas episodes that weren't even written by her were even worse than her send up of country-types and happy endings. Ugh. But obviously if both Jonathan Pryce and Nick le Prevost (And Rory Kinnear- one of my absolute favourite actors to see on stage) are appearing I'm going to be watching. So I did.

Anyway, I enjoyed the final Gavin and Stacey and Tennant's final Doctor Who- though my favourite bits were remembering Bernard Cribbins voicing Orinoco the lazy womble thinking he was invisible when he got stuck in that net... "Bramble Pudding! Oh no!!!" I look forward to Stephen Moffat's writing and Matt Smith's big grave stone slab of a face in the next series.

Missed Hamlet but we got the dvd in the post this morning so I will see it soon.

And now the gifties! We've been working our way through series one and two of The Inbetweeners and I have to say I totally love it. So reassuring to see realistic teenagers in realistic situations, Anna spends her mornings in bed watching 90210, everytime I go in there I say "teachers or teenagers?" because all the cast look the same age; in their plastic botox thirties- HORROR. The Inbetweeners is a wonderful British tonic to American sitcom/soap teenagers, all four boys are hysterically well suited to their roles.

We've watched lots of shite of course; Wolverine, an utterly awful Fantastic Four movie (Turns out he bought it in Lidl on Christmas Eve- he should have resisted.) Bridge to Terabithia- Suzie's favourite book as a child, totally un-cinematagraphical material so a terrible film, etc.

And today me and Anna watched The Chatterley Affair. Anna said flippantly afterwards of Andrew Davies the scriptwriter "Pervert. Always writes a lot of filth!" which made me laugh an awful lot.

Lady Chatterley's Lover is I think a key part of my strange history, my grandfather was one of the blokes who smuggled it into the country long before the court case, he was proudly photographed for the paper as a "local pervert", Nana was reet pissed off... I love it though, Anna probably thinks I'm a pervert too.

Watchmen (2009)

So I watched Jonathan Ross review Watchmen on saturday just to make sure I wouldn't be disappointed what with the hype and all, he said "I don't know if you have ever seen a movie and felt like it had been tailor-made for you..."

I saw it with my dad, whose comic collection I have been reading for the last 23 years, I hadn't read any reviews, and only seen the trailer once- before Christmas. Before we left for the cinema Anna flashed a Guardian page at us showing how it had been panned by all the papers, four out of ten all round, no more than a five anywhere. But I didn't worry that much, Jonathan Ross had enjoyed it, and he's a comic nerd so surely it couldn't be 4/10 bad, could it?

I re-read Watchmen in November after I heard they had made the film (at last), I first read it probably about seven years ago, my dad bought each issue as they came out in 1986, hmm...I wonder if I was eating my mashed 'nanas by his side while he read them. Anyway, the book is complex, in between each chapter, as it were, is a crucial piece of plot in the form of extracts from books, police files, newspapers etc. These bits I always found kind of a pain to read- not because I can't read without pictures! Just because it slowed it down a lot. (honest!)

After the opening fight resulting in The Comedian's death these (boring) bits of the comic are played out in an amazing title sequence with Bob Dylan crooning appropriately over them, the times they are a-changing. (I'll add now that the soundtrack was excellent) It was brilliant. I didn't want to blink! It was amazing! It was genius! It was perfect!

I did feel that this film was tailor-made for me. Does this make me a massive nerd? Yes. Do I care? Hell no! I just saw the most amazing film of my life! I'm insanely happy! I keep trying to think about this from an outsider's perspective (ie someone who has never read the book) but I don't want to! Because I know they'd hate it! It was unnecessarily violent- I don't mind thugs and bad guys getting bashed up, I don't mind super-heroes getting bashed up (they can take it) but I do mind kid's disembodied parts being chewed by dogs and innocent women's legs getting shot. Yeah, I don't care about heavies getting their arms sawn off (I closed my eyes) but I draw the line at women and children... People have heard of Superman, Batman and the X-men, they know what to expect from a "super-hero" film, that's why I think they will be disappointed.

What, the bad guy just gets away with it? The one guy who's fighting for justice gets blown up at the end? The lead is a wimpy nerd who can't get it up?! Wha-?! Yes. Deal with it. And He's not a bad guy! He's awesome!

Yes the cast. Wow, the cast! Perfect casting! Completely perfect casting! They were all people I'd never seen before (except sweet little Brooke Burgess from He Knew He Was Right playing Ozymadias, holy hell I can see why they picked him for the Brideshead remake he practically is Jeremy Irons! -oh, and Billy Crudup). This was good, if there had been anyone big in it I would have been like "ugh, he was so-and-so in that awful film about whatever!" And not once did I notice that Nite Owl was Raoul from Phantom of the Opera! The only thing I noticed about him was that he was HOT. Yes, all the men (sorry, not you Rorschach) were GORGEOUS. And all the women were GORGEOUS which was great because seriously, Dave Gibbons cannot draw women, they look like ugly men most of the time, so I was like "Wow, all the male characters are perfectly cast and the women are all being played by beautiful women!" They looked perfect, spot-on. And the film itself was spot-on, possibly the best and most faithful adaptation of anything- ever! Brideshead Revisited (1981) is almost word perfect, Watchmen is picture perfect.

I can see why they cut certain sub-plots, but who the hell cares?! As a fan of the graphic novel I was still touched to see the newspaper-stand guy hug the kid before they were blasted into smitherines, it was an excellent touch to keep little references even if whole parts of the novel were cut. But most of it wasn't cut! Most of it was there! All the bits I was waiting for were there! All the chapters with all the characters' backstories! Rossy said it was slow in parts, when? When was it slow?! I didn't notice! Wow! I am still excited about it and it's been two hours now since the credits went up.

I can't wait to see it again. I can't recommend it to anyone though. That's the problem... 

"Hey, this was the best film of my life, but you'd hate it."