The Traveller January 9, 2006
Posted by Mark in : Books , add a commentI have just finished reading The Traveller by John Twelve Hawks, I bought it a while ago but only just got round to reading it (you know how can be sometimes).
The book is set in current times and is a kind of sci-fi stroke thriller I guess. I’m not massively into reading fiction but this book was quite an interesting read from from debut author John Twelve Hawks (which is a pseudo name apparently as he lives ‘off the grid which is very in-keeping with the theme of the book) which apparently forms the first of a trilogy.
The book is about the travellers (who can shift between dimensions), the harlequins (who protect the travellers from the tabula) and the tabula (who wish to destroy the travellers for one reason or another) who are all secretive groups who have been around for centuries and have unfinished business to attend to.
The book is VERY far fetched and reminded me of a number of movies I’ve seen, probably most notably the Matrix movies. It’s got fighting, swords, knives, guns, martial arts experts, mutant dogs, Jack Bauer 24 style surveillance equipment, super computers, new worldly dimensions, church groups, oh and some snakes thrown in for good measure. So the author has gone all out to try and excite the reader and for the most part it works, I could almost here the heavy metal music pumping while reading certain parts of the book.
I did find that certain parts of the story were dragged out a little too much and I sometimes found myself racing through some of the chapters to get to the next exciting bit, which was never that far away.
All that aside, it’s a decent read if you fancy some high tech, crazy sci-fi shenanigans. I’ll definitely have a read of the next book to see how things turn as as it ends on a mild cliff-hanger. I’m sure I read somewhere that the movie licences have been sold.. so we may see another Matrix style trilogy coming to a cinema near us soon… hmmmmmm.
La Vita è bella (1997) January 8, 2006
Posted by Mark in : Movies, Movie Marathon 2006 , add a commentOkay here we go, let’s kick this movie marathon off right here, right now!
My first two random discs from ScreenSelect arrived yesterday and they are… queue drum roll please… La Vita è bella (aka Life is Beautiful) and Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (aka Spirited Away). I have heard good things about both of these movies, but they are just not movies I have previously gone out of my way to watch.
So this afternoon after lunch I settled down to watch La Vita è bella (1997) which in very brief terms is a comedy/drama set in during World War II following a Jewish man named Guido as he romances his future wife with his unique humour for the first half of the movie and then in the second half must use the same humour and spirit to protect his young son when the family are forced into a Nazi concentration camp.
That’s a very brief plot summary and going forward I’m not going to spend a huge amount of time with the plots of the movies during this movie marathon challenge, if you would like to know some more about the movies you can always take a look at imdb.com. I’m just going to concentrate on recording my thoughts and views on some of these classic movies as I watch them for the first time.
I’ve got to say that for the first half of the movie I was unsure if I was enjoying it or not, I was curious and it definitely has a very charming manor but I wasn’t sure that I was really ‘getting it’. But this all changed in the second half of the movie and although the movie is set during world war II and features a concentration camp I don’t feel like that’s what it is really about. For me the movie was about the lengths people will go to for the ones they love even when under exceptional circumstances, where everything is otherwise stacked against them. So it’s probably quite an unusual mix of humour and tragedy, I know that I certainly haven’t seen many movies that combine these two elements. I’m sure there are people who would be offended by the mix of humour set against the seriousness of the background subject matter but there are a number of thought provoking, powerful movies like Schindlers List, The Pianist and Der Untergang that deal with the holocaust and the suffering that went on during World War II which isn’t really covered in great detail in this movie.
By the end of the movie I had a tear in my eye and a lot of warmth in my heart. It’s a really unique film and I’m not sure I’ve seen anything else quite like it. I can’t imagine I will want to watch it again any time soon, but then I have a LOT of movies to get through so repeat viewings are going to be few and far between in the foreseeable future.
I’m certainly very glad I’ve watched it and it has made me come away thinking about the atrocities of the holocaust of course, but also about people in general and what’s important in life. Sometimes it’s easy to complain about what we don’t have and forget about all the things which we do have.
The movie marathon is off to a great start and that’s one down, only 43 left to go! I’m going to go back and cross it off my list of movies.
Spirited Away thoughts coming soon…
Top 100 movie marathon
Posted by Mark in : Movies, Movie Marathon 2006 , 1 comment so farOkay here we go, the catalyst behind this blog and my second entry (I’m starting to feel like an old pro already)… it’s the ‘IMDB Top 100 Movie Marathon - 2006′ - my on-going project this year will be to try work my way through these movies and chronicle my journey right here. The blog will be good for me to look back upon in a years time if nothing else.
This idea is inspired by a thread on The DVD Forums and involves watching the top 100 movies from the Internet Movie Database top 250 movies of all time list. I’ve also spoken with a friend from work who is also going to be taking up the movie marathon challenge. Now the list seems to change quite a bit with titles moving up and down a few places as users vote so to avoid confusion I’m going to have to ‘fix’ my top 100 as it was when I decided to do this which was on the 2nd January.
Out of the top 100 I have seen 66 of them which leaves me with 44 to watch and they are as follows:
(I’m going to come back and cross them out as I watch them)
5. Shichinin no samurai (1954)
7. Casablanca (1942)
11. Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966)
18. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
21. Citizen Kane (1941)
23. C’era una volta il West (1968)
29. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
30. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
31. Sunset Blvd. (1950)
38. Paths of Glory (1957)
40. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
42. Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001)
45. The Third Man (1949)
46. Boot, Das (1981)
47. Chinatown (1974)
50. Hotel Rwanda (2004)
54. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
55. Rashômon (1950)
56. M (1931)
58. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
59. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
60. Modern Times (1936)
61. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
62. All About Eve (1950)
68. Some Like It Hot (1959)
69. Double Indemnity (1944)
71. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
72. Vita è bella, La (1997)
73. Metropolis (1927)
77. Amadeus (1984)
78. City Lights (1931)
79. The Great Escape (1963)
80. The Sting (1973)
81. Touch of Evil (1958)
83. On the Waterfront (1954)
84. Rebecca (1940)
87. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
88. Ran (1985)
89. The Apartment (1960)
90. Sjunde inseglet, Det (1957)
91. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
93. Strangers on a Train (1951)
94. Nuovo cinema Paradiso (1989)
95. The Great Dictator (1940)
Now let’s get one thing straight from the off, I love watching movies! I enjoy mainstream Hollywood movies, foreign movies, documentaries, old movies, new movies, pretty much any kind of movie in pretty much any kind of genre. Looking at the above list I notice that the vast majority of them seem to be from the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and truth be told there are a couple in there I haven’t actually heard of, but I think that’s what makes this such an interesting idea as I’m going to get to watch a bunch of movies that I may not have been aware of before and more than likely would not have just happened across any time soon.
In order to make progress with these movies I’ve signed up with ScreenSelect, starting with a nice 30 day promotional trial to kick things off (which I found out about here) and I’ve added my list of titles to watch excluding a few that I already have in my DVD collection but haven’t got round to watching yet. I’m planning on watching them in whatever order they arrive and not being tempted to go for the movies I find most appealing first. I’m going to try and post a quick entry each time I watch one of these movies and give my thoughts, although I’m certainly no Mark Kermode, Jonathan Ross or even Richard Bacon for that matter (thank goodness..ahem…) so as a forewarning it’s probably best not to go expecting highly considered and well structured critiques.
By the end of the year I plan to have watched them all and hopefully gained even more of an appreciation of movies and opened my mind to trying new things - what’s the worst that can happen?
A blog is born…
Posted by Mark in : General , add a commentSo it’s the new year, it’s 2006 and along with a bunch of new years resolutions I’ve decided (thanks to a thread on thedvdforums.com) to try and watch the top 100 movies in the imdb.com top 250 movies of all time list. Now it just so happens that I’ve already seen over half of them but by the end of the year I would like to have seen them all, so I’ve decided that a blog might be a good way to chronicle my journey of movie discovery as much for my own reflection as anyone else’s benefit.
Now I’m not pretentious enough to think that anyone is likely to give a damn about my random day to day ramblings, so I’m not expecting a huge surge people rushing to view my blog BUT it’s something I have been interested in experimenting with for a while and this seems to be as good an opportunity to start one as ever.
I’m going to create a separate category about my 2006 movie marathon so if you happen to be interested keep an eye for an entry with the details very soon. Other than that I may have the odd ramble about current affairs, music or things I come across on the net etc but at the moment I’m really not to sure.
So here we are, I have a blog… I have a project… Lets just see what happens.
Happy New Year to you!
Mark