This past weekend I decided to stop moaning and worrying about how many of my goals I’m going to miss and instead just get on with doing what I can. It’s unlikely – very unlikely – that I’ll complete at least two of them, but let’s try anyway, right?
Here’s what I’ve been watching this week: Continue reading
All I can think about right now is Star Wars. I’ve been trying not to get my hopes up for The Force Awakens, but it’s now just three days away, so I’m getting more than a little excited. Today I picked up my pre-booked tickets in an effort to avoid queues come Thursday evening (I was tempted with the one-minute-past-midnight showings, but they didn’t have assigned seating and I don’t want to have to queue up for hours and fight for a decent view for the sake of a few hours), and now the day is almost upon us. That’s the next Lambcast episode as well, and if there’s one thing I’m looking forward to more than finally seeing the film is discussing it with some other like-minded nerds, that’s where the real fun will begin.
Oh, and speaking of Star Wars, to celebrate the release of The Force Awakens the guys over at Simplistic Reviews have created some re-enactments of how some scenes from Star Wars maybe should have played out, and I participated by recording some suitably degrading intros and outros for each show. They’re all hilarious (especially my bits) and you can find links on their site here, or at the bottom of this very page. Anyway, here’s what I watched this week: Continue reading
I’m feeling overwhelmed, run-down, depleted and frantic, so it must mean we’re nearing Christmas. As such I don’t have time for this introductory nonsense this week, plus I haven’t got much to say, so let’s get straight into the movies. Here’s what I watched this week: Continue reading
This is going to be tough. Tomorrow is the first day of December. 25 days until Christmas, 31 days until the end of the year, and I’ve got a heck of a lot still left to do to meet my goals for the year, and that’s without taking into account everything I need to do in real life for this time of the year. There’s just four weekends left until 2016, and I’ve got four Road Trip posts left to write for FTS, so that’s one a week, no option. The only problem is I haven’t watched any of them yet (we got about 10 minutes into Garden State for New Jersey and had to bail about a week ago, and I’ve been unable to bring myself to turn it back on again since.). Add to that 14 nominated movies, 2 “Bad” movies and a bunch of others I’ve watched but not reviewed yet, and it works out that I need to watch 17 and review 26 all in the next month. Jeez.
On the plus side, however, this week has seen me all but complete another goal, to watch 59 movies released in the UK in 2015. Granted I’m only at 58 as of typing, but I’ve already got my ticket booked for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, so this goal is in the bag. That, and San Andreas has just been dispatched from LoveFilm, so I’m going above and beyond with this little chestnut. As for those other as-yet-uncompleted goals? Well I guess I’d better stop prattling on here and get back to writing a review or two. I’m all-to-aware that after Christmas I’ve got three days at home alone whilst my partner is at work, so I’m anticipating a deluge of watching and writing taking place then, but given how poorly past plans have turned out, there’s no guarantee. Here’s what I watched this week: Continue reading
I listen to a lot of podcasts. A lot. I’d estimate I spend about 7 hour of each working day listening to them, with an additional hour or so in the morning and evening before work, walking the dog and such, so I get in a lot of listening. I’m subscribed to maybe 30 or 40 shows, most of which are film-related and most of which I try to listen to every episode of, postponing the occasional few until I’ve seen the specific films in question, but there was one show, one that’s not film-related, which I’d heard a great deal about last year but never got around to listening to until this past week, and that show is Serial.
If you’re unfamiliar, the first season of Serial, released last year in 2014, was a twelve-part show documenting the re-investigation of a reporter, Sarah Koenig, looking into a murder trial from 1999 in Baltimore, Maryland. A man, Adnan Syed who in 1999 was _ years old, was convicted of the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, but always denied the charge. Koenig was contacted by Syed’s family. who fifteen years later were still adamant of his innocence, and after a little digging Koenig found some interesting inconsistencies within the evidence of his case, prompting her to re-evaluate every morsel of information from the case. I downloaded the show when it gained popularity, but knew its serious content deserved my full attention. Last Friday I found myself at work trudging through a fairly monotonous task, so I decided now was finally Serial’s time. I marathoned six shows that day, and the latter six earlier today. Clearly, from the off I was hooked.
The case was fascinating, and it was truly interesting just listening to how the proceedings took place, how the evidence was gathered and the cases built. Too often I assume the depictions shown in films and TV are overly dramatised, and for the most part they are, but listening to this true life documentation I got a far greater insight into how these kinds of cases are really handled. I’d hoped for a more satisfying conclusion, but it was still a highly informative and gripping listen, and I’m very much looking forward to the next series, whenever that may come. Now, onto what I watched this week:
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I was all set to regale you this week with my latest arduous tale of woe. This past week I suffered a loss so fraught, so traumatising, that I found myself at a loss with what to do with myself. I wandered from room to room, occasionally looking forlornly into the far distance as if momentarily considering some past lover or long forgotten moment from my youth. I’d sign, subtly shake my head a little then proceed with my day, knowing part of me was missing, out there, in the great wide world.
And then I found my lost notebook, and everything was fine. It had the notes I’d made on some of the overdue reviews I’ve yet to write (The Wages of Fear, Traffic, A Little Chaos, La Jetee and Sans Soleil, to be exact), and in the upheaval required to redecorate our guest bedroom/my podcasting lair it had gotten lost in the shuffle, but low and behold if it didn’t turn up under a pile of other notebooks. Who’d have thought? Anyway that’s why today’s review of Koyaanisqatsi went up a little late, as I’d intended to write a few more reviews over the weekend but only found the notebook last night. Champagne all round.
The aforementioned redecorating has severely limited by cinematic intake this week, but I did watch a few things. Here they are:
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Spending my time catching up on pending reviews (Three more crossed off! Twelve still to go!) has seen me watching less review-necessary films in an attempt to prevent the pending list from growing ever further. However, I still have those gaps in my week that need filling with audio-visual content, so I’ve been watching more TV. Not just new stuff, I’m catching up on some older shows too. Specifically I’ve started watching Parks & Recreation, a show I’d heard was good but had never gotten to, mainly because I don’t think it ever made its way to UK TV. I’m three episodes into series 1 so far, and I hop it gets better. I’ve heard that it’s from series 2 onwards that the show finds its feet, and at the moment the characters and situations have potential, but just need to settle into themselves a little more. I could also do with perhaps a little less Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope, who so far comes off as more annoying than endearing, but there’s enough going on to make me continue with the series and move onto number 2 when the time comes.
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You know what my sin is? Envy. And also Pride. I’m also quite gluttonous, can be pretty lazy and have bouts of wrath now and then too, so I’m covering everything except greed and lust, so 5 out of 7 ain’t bad, I suppose. Mainly it’s the envy thing though. My life is controlled by list, and no more so than this blog. It’s entirely a product of of my own doing, I get that, but structuring my writing around a pre-determined selection of films that must be reviewed can lead to a lack of variety and motivation at times. That’s why I enjoy writing for other sites like French Toast Sunday and Blueprint: Review because, whilst I often still end up reviewing a List film, I also review other things that interest me, like new releases or pieces about a specific, non-List film or subject.
I heard Alex Withrow from And So It Begins (a site you should not check out if you hate amazing film blogs) on a podcast a few months ago. When it came to the end of the show he was asked what he had coming up soon, and his response was along the liens of “You guys don’t just come up with an idea and post it?” I found this whole concept of not planning ahead and posting on a whim to be utterly alien, especially now when I’ve mapped out a plan to get achieve as many of my goals before the end of the year. I’ve drawn up a list of approximately 120 tasks, some minor (“Watch a 2015 film”) some more time consuming (“Archive all the Lambcast shows” [though admittedly that’s been broken down into chunks]) with the aim of completing at least 2 a day from now until 2016. So far, three days into this mini-mission, I’m ahead of schedule, and finishing this weekly post will cross another task off the list. I get a spring of joy whenever I can highlight something in green, but I can’t help feeling envious of those other less restricted bloggers who don’t suffer my qualms of meeting deadlines. The ones who don’t beat themselves up for not writing a review on a film they don’t have much to say about.
Also, next year’s missions will be far less restricting. I’m still planning to aim for reviewing a lot of films – I’m currently thinking at least 100 off the List – but the break-down as to what each of those films should be will be far less strict, which should see me complaining on these weekly posts a whole heap less. Speaking of which, a busy week with two podcasts to edit and a bunch of DIY to do (redecorating the guest bedroom/my office) saw me watching not a great deal this week. Here’s what I saw:
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I’ve been thinking about a couple of things this past week, one of which is density – sorry, I mean destiny. I’m a sceptic about pretty much every aspect of life, so I hold no faith in notions of pre-determined actions and events projecting the routes our lives will follow, yet sometimes so many obstacles will conspire against one particular thing I’m trying to accomplish that I can’t help but have my doubts, especially when that thing at least tangentially relates to otherworldly situations. Yep, I’m still going on about the John Carpenter Lambcast, the one I fought tooth and claw to arrange last weekend, only for just one other person to show up.
Well we re-arranged it for this past weekend, immediately after the normally scheduled show and, as could have been predicted in the Gilliam-esque quest that has been this show, people had to drop out. Firstly was the guy who was there last week, who couldn’t make the new recording time, so I felt really crap about having to let him go when I couldn’t move the time around. Then someone else dropped out a few hours before the show. Cue me scrambling around Twitter and my email contacts, scouting out for anyone who had seen just a handful of his films, enough to have a discussion. Two people replied. Phew. The first show recorded well, albeit with one slightly under the weather guest, and when it came to recording the Carpenter show, one of those last minute replacements didn’t appear, and still hadn’t shown up 30 minutes later. It turned out to be technical difficulties, and from a guest who doesn’t have an Internet phone, so contacting me wasn’t a possibility, and fortunately a replacement was found mid-show, and overall the show recorded well, has been edited and posted (hence why this show is a little later this week, sorry about that), but I can’t help thinking maybe there were so many “signs” that it shouldn’t have taken place. Then again, if that really were the case then the brief period I suffered through yesterday when Internet went down for a few hours (another reason this post is late) would surely have occurred either the night before, when I was trying to post the show, or on Sunday evening itself, when we were recording. No, I think it’s safe to say I’m just being paranoid and melodramatic.
It’s this easily-quashed realist’s approach to the supernatural that makes it so difficult for me to become absorbed into paranormal horror films. I’ve seen a few this past week and as soon as it becomes blatant that something otherworldly is behind the scary situations I instantly check out any possibility of this film scaring me, because I know it isn’t real. Over the next few days you’ll see what I mean a little better, with reviews for the likes of Poltergeist and Halloween heading your way, but for now, here’s what I watched this week:
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Sometimes I think of my blog as a means of chronicling my failures, and this week’s post is no different. The fact that I refer to it as “This week’s post” rather than being more specific says it all as to my output lately. It seems I’ve lost my review-writing mojo recently. Whenever I sit down at the keyboard my mind dries up like a sponge in a kiln. I’ve had half a review of Carrie written for French Toast Sunday for weeks, and I’m about a month late for a review of John Wick for Blueprint: Review, not to mention the 12 other films I’ve watched and not reviewed yet.
It doesn’t help how busy I’ve been recently, and how little has gone to plan weekend and evening-wise. Take this past weekend, for example. Yesterday’s scheduled Lambcast was a John Carpenter Director Retrospective. The intention was for myself and my guests to discuss nine of Carpenter’s bigger films, all of which were ones I’d either never seen, wasn’t very familiar with or really wanted to re-watch, so I’d planned to watch them all, which is what most of the rest of this post will cover. Tuesday to Thursday saw me watching one a night, subjecting Aisha to a bunch of films she had negative interest in seeing. On Friday she was supposed to go out for a work meal, meaning I’d have a full evening into which I could cram three of the films she’d want to watch the least (I’d anticipated The Fog, Prince of Darkness and They Live), leaving me three to watch, one Saturday morning, one Saturday evening and a final film on Sunday morning. Alas, whilst Aisha was walking Murphy before I got home from work (she’s blessed with an early finish on Fridays) Murphy ran off, following a runner who refused to stop despite this unfamiliar dog jumping up at him. Coming across a road on the runner’s presumed route Aisha was understandably distraught at the notion that our little fluff-ball might have come a cropper with a car, but fortunately another kind dog-owner had wrangled Murphy onto her lead, called Aisha’s number on his tag and waited for her to arrive. Bless this woman and all she ever does. The whole experience rather put Aisha off an evening out, so we stayed in and watched Big Trouble in Little China instead.
This little kerfuffle obviously put a dash into my Carpenter-viewing schedule, so I attempted to make up for it on Saturday, knocking off two films early in the morning. Problems arose when real life crept in. We were due to have our guest bedroom re-plastered this week. It was supposed to be done late in the week, so Saturday afternoon we prepped the room, removing the furniture, wall-fixings and stripping the wallpaper from the walls and ceiling. Why is there wallpaper on the ceiling? Because the previous inhabitants were lunatics, clearly. Moving the furniture was fine – though the house is now so cluttered that navigating our bedroom now feels like I’m playing a game of minesweeper with my feet – but when I came to detach the radiator the valve nut was painted shut so much that the nut didn’t turn, the downpipe bent and began leaking water. The emergency plumber stopped the leak but didn’t fix the pipe and later it started leaking again with no signs of stopping. a few buckets of water later and it subsided, after we ran out of dry towels, and the next morning we fixed it after a trip to Wickes (all praise Wickes, the church of DIY), but after that ordeal we didn’t get a lot of films watched on Saturday night. Sunday proved just as fruitless, with me just about cramming In the Mouth of Madness in a couple of instalments between radiator fixing and wallpaper stripping before the podcast recording at 5pm. The plasterer got in touch, moving the proposed date I just about finished stripping the ceiling in time, hastily pieced an intro together and logged onto Skype, only for two of the guests not to show up (with valid reasons, so I won’t name and shame). The only present guest, Aaron from The Code is Zeek, and I decided the best course of action would be to reschedule, so all the rushing was for nought, but at least it gives me a chance to watch the two Carpenter films I hadn’t re-watched yet (They Live and Halloween). It also meant Aisha didn’t have to finish the wallpaper stripping alone, I could help out with dinner and take Murphy for a walk and have more of a relaxing evening after the weekend of stress, so there’s a silver lining to the cloud. Also, I got to phone my Dad (whom I’d called to help out with the leaky radiator, as he is something of a DIY guru, but who was in Wales watching a football match at the time) and say that I’d fixed a problem without his assistance, and that made me really rather happy.
Oh, while I’m at it, I’m going to go ahead and call the time of death for HitchcOctober 2015. Apologies, but it’s not happening this year. I’m too far behind on other things as it is, but next year. There’s always next year. Here’s what I watched this week:
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Life Vs Film 