craigoxbrow

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists! is very silly and rather charming. Seeing the models moving around in 3D is cute too. And so many sight gags in the background that will be unreadably little even on Blu-Ray. Go see.

Trailers: Streetdance 2, Ice Age 4(?) and Hotel Transylvania.

Dead By Dawn this year - including a preview of CABIN IN THE WOODS.

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

I knew I'd like The Muppets but I was hoping I'd love it, since I love the Muppets. Lots of fun but could have been packed with more, I think. Could have given Amy Adams more to do for starters (and Chris Cooper, and Animal, and Bobo the Bear... mostly Amy though). Made me laugh a lot but not constantly, didn't quite make me well up. Not quite.

Coincidentally, today I got the first book of The Storyteller comics. It's lovely.

Trailers: Brave (eeee) and a Toy Story short (fun) and the Tarsem Snow White and some other stuff.

Right then. Five points (out of fifty or sixty or so) at the Conpulsion pub quiz will be determined by Indiana Jones And The Title Round in which contestants have to work out the original character name in a movie title which has been replaced by Indiana Jones.

So, easy example, Indiana Jones And The Philosopher's Stone. If you can't get that one, I believe you have to be thrown out of Edinburgh.

Of course these will all be answers where replacing the titular character with Indiana Jones would make a cool movie. But then this is the case with most movies.

It could also be applied to books, as it is in that example - Chris oft joked/threatened running Indiana Jones And The Mountains Of Madness - but let's keep it simple.

And yes, this is also how I write Buffy convention adventures.

(What would Indy hunting for the Philosopher's Stone be like? Obviously there are rivals looking for it as well, a mysterious figure who may be immortal, and probably a clue in a castle in Scotland which is now a boarding school.

And that's not the weirdest put-Indy-in-a-movie idea I ever had. That would be Indiana Jones And The Last Of England. Indy travels to London during the Blitz to help the removal of key works from the British Museum, and discovers a mysterious map on the back of a Durer painting of the Virgin Mary. Teaming up with a brilliant art historian (Tilda Swinton) he travels first to Switzerland, a hotbed of intrigue, and then to partially occupied Norway in search of a prophecy that might mean the Allies cannot win the War!)

So the print of Raiders looks to have been from around the original release, complete with BBFC A Rating. Scratchy and turning brown rather suits it, fortunately.

In other news, found a nearly pristine copy of Adventure! in a charity shop for £2.50. I think the world is trying to tell me something.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol on IMAX is visually and aurally pretty impressive, but I don't know if it's £12.60's worth of impressive. And while it did have the DKR trailer (as well as Journey 2, MIB 3, Underworld 4 which by its captions is "Kate Beckinsale - In 3D" and John Carter 1) it didn't have the prologue. Booooo.

Whoa.

Rebecca Hall, Dominic West, Imelda Staunton, BBC Films, Scottish Screen and the creator of Ghostwatch get together to be rather autumnal and bleak with a few good jump scares and a bit too much going on.

Trailers: something sentimental where Tom Hanks dies on the 11th of September, Roman Polanski makes a play, the trailer of the year although with a different tagline.

And it would be mad if they didn't show this, Hammer's The Woman In Black. Which I plan to go see, though due to starring Daniel Radcliffe I suspect it will suffer the same problem as the American version of The Grudge starring Sarah Michelle Gellar straight after Buffy - failure to believe a ghost would cause the hero much trouble after seven years fighting monsters and saving the world.

Preview screening thingy

Well, that's what the poster says. I think it needs a : in there.

... was something I never really read as a kid, I went the Asterix route instead, as I could never really handle the mix of realistic-ish artwork and plotting with cartoony faces. On reflection, I should, as pulp adventure comics are rather my field of interest these days.

So I was largely ignorant as we went to see the movie, my interest piqued by Steven Spielberg directing, Peter Jackson producing, and Steven Moffat, Joe Cornish and Edgar Wright writing.

It moves at the pace of an Indy movie (and is about as hazardous to life and limb for bystanders - apparently the comics are as action-y as this shows). Most of the character comedy comes from Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock, and much of the slapstick from Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and Thomson and Thompson (or possibly the other way round) although a fair number of folk including Jamie Bell's Tintin and even Snowy the highly capable dog get knocked out in assorted funny ways.

Some great crazy only-possible-in-CG stuff, some heightened-reality cartoony stuff, the odd look-it's-3D gesturing with weapons at the screen. And ironically, the mix of realistic-ish artwork and cartoony faces is retained - there are medium and long shots where it looks like live-action with people wearing Tintin character masks.

Prolly watchable enough in 2D, although there are some fun playing-with-perspective bits, especially in an imposible-to-film-for-real one-shot chase through an entire city.

Trailers: we missed all the ads and 2D trailers (darn) apart from The Muppets (yay!) who also do the new Orange ad (yay!) so just the 3D ones - The Phantom Menace with a curious lack of Jar-Jar being visible for some reason... Arthur Christmas, Puss In Boots, and Hugo, which is a 3D children's film from Martin Scorsese starring Sascha Baron Cohen, Jude Law and HitGirl. Yes, you read that correctly.