What DVD / Video did you watch last night? (pt3)

I don't have one, as violence elicits all sorts of emotions and is used for different reasons. I just reject your comparison of violence with pornography.

are you fucking dim, the term violence porn is in relation to violence that serves as an end towards itself, it isn't saying it's meant to arouse in the same way porn is.

Plane takes off

I get it. You haven't thought it through to the point where you have a coherent idea on the subject.

It's easy to reject: harder to back your position up with a counterpoint.

I just reject the equivalence between porn and violence you keep making, especially in the films you cite as they all portray violence in very different ways.
Is Tom & Jerry 'violence porn'? That shows violence as an end in itself

Via the wonders of youtube, from which I downloaded about 30 movies before I came out here, I have watched the 1980 film Caboblanca (local internet connections in Sierra Leone are really coming on, but the bandwidth isn't quite big enough for streaming yet). Dominique Sanda wanders around late 1940s Peru wondering where her career went. This is genuinely one of the worst films I have ever seen: Charles Bronson plays a Rick Blaine type who can’t go back to the USA for heavy legal reasons, and Jason Robards is the ex-nazi who lives in a Bond villain lair overlooking the town of Caboblanca, obscure Peruvian fishing village.

The Macguffin is a ship with a precious cargo, sunk by Sanda’s ex-lover, and which Robards is trying to find before a royal navy ship (captained by a splendid young chap played by MIchael York) gets to it first. Sanda herself plays an ex-French resistance fighter, so you could have fun pretending she’s playing the same character that she did in Il Conformista. That, of course, was actually a half-decent film. Those of us who appreciate Ms. Sanda’s talents (in various fields) will appreciate this movie. Others, to quote Alex Cox, will not.

In other news: while I was watching the aforementioned drivel (a 14 year old boy’s idea of what real life is like, and also features a talking parrot as a key plot twist: in fairness, maybe there should be more flicks with talking parrots), the torrential rain that enlivened this evening in Makeni stopped. Of course, this was just a brief lull in the storm that is the rainy season.

You'll have to watch BarbWire now

Breaking bad. Good as ever.

The mrs and her gran were watching The Help downstairs which I caught the second half of, pretty good

The Seven Year Itch. Really one of Billy Wilders lesser films despite the iconic Monroe image it's known for (which doesn't really feature in the film). It's a stagy film based on a dated sex farce and largely reliant on Tom Ewell's monologuing his inner thoughts about wanting to knob Monroe. Starts out well and then becomes monotonous.

You present that, I assume, because it's animated, and so therefore doesn't count as much.

The visual reductio ad absurdum counterpoint to the argument that cartoon violence doesn't matter, would be Itchy and Scratchy

We are so constantly bombarded with violence in our media entertainment, that we can no longer see anything wrong with it.

So you contend that Itchy and Scratchy is violence porn?

Itchy and Scratchy is, like I said, a reductio ad absurdum device.

It presents violence as an end in itself. It is pornographic by your definition.

It's a comedy device meant to make us examine our relationship with media violence.

And Tom & Jerry?

http://www.awn.com/articles/production/tom-jerry-produced-prague

I'm going to bed now. No point conversing with an ignorant obtuse lawyer. Good night.

Good night to you too.

Haywire, a decently written action/conspiracy/thriller movie from Soderbergh with a fairly good cast too. Weird music.

The Exam. If it wasn't don having the Olympics on in the background I would have switched off long before the end.

Watching the Olympic opening ceremony got me into a Danny Boyle mood, so I re-watched 28 Days Later. Even just a decade on, it hasn't aged that well. The first half is still pretty good and has some creepy moments, but when they get to the army base the film loses momentum and starts falling apart. It almost feels like its own inferior sequel from there on (a re-run of Romero's Day of the Dead after the first half was a mixture of Night... and Dawn...), introducing a whole bunch of new, thinly sketched characters this late in the film. I also don't think shooting on non-HD video was a great idea. I understand that they went for gritty, but often the image is so blurry, its hard to make out what's going on. The actress who plays the teenage girl is distractingly terrible.

Then I watched 28 Weeks Later. This one has gone the other way round for me. I wasn't that keen on it the first time round, maybe because in many ways its a more conventional film, but it's also far more exciting and entertaining than the first one. It has some surprising twists and turns and its so bleak, it makes the first film look like a stroll in the park. I like the way the outbreak starts again, it's cleverly tied into the main plot. And because the first film never showed the outbreak, this one can stage it without the film seeming repetitive. Now I think this is one of the best horror films of the last decade and the rare sequel that improves on the original in spades.

I watched The Omen films on Film Four this week.
They are not as scary as i remember but still as effective as many recent horror films. The use of music is effective and the death scenes are inventive, though not so convincing effects wise.
It was hard to be scared by the cuddly Rottweilers too. Dobermans make much more effective devil dogs (cf Tenebrae).
I was particularly interested in the Damian: Omen 2, as it's the first horror film I saw. I saw it with my cousins in NZ when I was 8. The kids had a separate annexe to the house and parental control of television was non-existent. Needless to say, it scared the shit out of me! The deaths in it are pretty grisly still, but I appear to have been conflating one death scene with another in another unidentified film, so perhaps U75 can help me.
In Damian: Omen 2, there is a scene in which a man is bisected in a rogue lift by a cable. I remembered it differently. It was a scene in a lift, I think in a hotel, in which some unknown force (I don't remember if we see it or not) bludgeons a man to death, until his eye pops out of his socket. The scene ends with the lift opening on the hotel lobby (or public space) and the man falling out, causing horror to witnesses. Anyone know the film?
Oh, I forgot about the 3rd Omen film. It started well, but I soon lost interest and went to bed.

Damien: Omen 2 was the first of the Omen films I saw because by then I was old enough to get into the cinema. The lift cable bisection is really the most memorable scene and it's a decent enough sequel. It's hard not to laugh when Lee Grant revels herself to be the whore of Babylon.

I recently re-watched them all. The 3rd one is poor, though seeing Ruby Wax in a small role was rather odd.

Sorry, I don't know eye popping out of socket in lift film.

I noticed her voice first. She was the first ambassador's secretary wasn't she?

Yes.

I watched 2011 sci-fi film "Love" by director William Eubank, about a man who gets stranded in orbit on the International Space station after some event suddenly wipes out all life on earth. At times it evokes memories of Solaris, Moon and 2001: A Space Odyssey, it can't live up to those greats but for a film made on a half million dollar budget it punches above it's weight.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1541874/

Sounds interesting!

I rewatched the first half of Force 10 from Navarone last night.

I have very fond memories of watching this WW2 action flick with my da and grandfather and in the old cinema in Bandon.

And I can't say my childhood memories were ruined, but I noticed a lot of laughable plot holes that were probably lost on the eight year old me.

I really enjoyed it. I see on IMDb it's got a cinema showing somewhere in the UK in Sept, I'll hopefully go see it as I'd like to see it on a big screen.