Visited flickums for the long long weekend. Holly the evil satnav tried her best to get me stuck in traffic but I arrived there eventually. We spent most of the weekend watching movies. Many of them bad, most deliberatley chosen for that reason.

Thursday:

The Fifth Element: I love this film! So quotable. So gorgeous. So funny. Soi much action! Mila Jovovich with orange hair, kicking ass!

Friday:

Zootropolis. Disney's latest. So we have a rabbit voiced by Snow White from OUAT, who is the first rabbit ever to graduate from Police Academy. Despite finishing top of her class she gets put on traffic duty. She insists on being put on the missing animals case, and gets given 48 hours to solve it. She finds a con artist fox that she previously encountered ight have information and sets off to solve the case. This was really good. The jokes were perhaps a little predictable, and the plot was not that original - 48 hours combined with a couple of other buddy cop movies - but the main character was adorable. ("Ooh, ah, you probably didn't know, but a bunny can call another bunny 'cute', but when other animals do it, that's a little..."), but the animal society was really nicely thought out and the voice acting talent was great.

Star Trek Tribbles: Double tribbles. Trouble With Tribbles is still funny but it's a little heavy handed with the humour. Fortunately Kirk is po-faced enough that he does make a good straight man. DS9's followup "Trials and Tribbleations" is a lot more subtle with the humour, and throws in a lot of fan service, taking advantage of Dax having been around back then. We finally learn who it was throwning the tribbles at kirk.

Saturday:

Supernatural. Two episodes. Both silly ones. One about a lucky rabbit's foot, the other about a wishing well. Poor Ted Raimi. His characters can never catch a break. I felt sorry of the teddy bear with existential angst.

Bad Movie Marathon

Started with Flash Gordon. It's daft and campy and almost too self-aware to quite qualify as a bad movie. The special effects may be crappy but the actual creativity in the design is fantastic!

Followed up with The Three Musketeers. Pretty certain Dumas didn't have fleets of airships in the original story. Although several of the plot elements are, surprisingly, fairly accurate to the source material. Still convinced that Miulady De Winter should be a cat, though.

Finally, Masters Of The Universe! A terrible film, amusingly starring Tom Paris and Monica from Friends. I seem to have offended a few people by saying how bad it is. But it has nothing to do with the series! No Prince Adam, no Orko, the characters do not look similar to their cartoon counterparts. Change the character and place names, and nobody would realise it was based on the toy range.

Sunday:

Did role playing in the afternoon. Then followed up with an episode of MST3K. We went for "Time Chasers". A 1994 movie, made in 1990, that looks like it was made in 1982. It's about the world's most unattractive leading man, who builds a time machine in his plane, using a commodore 64 (which seems to be PC compatible). He tricks a blonde reporter and a representative of the evil company to come along so he can show off his technology and get funding (because self funding time travel is, apparently, difficult). He takes them to the future, then the reporter falls for him so they go back in time, to check out the 1950's, then go into the future again where it's turned into a dystopia. MST3K clearly cut a chunk out of this section because it's not all that well explained (and to be fair to the film the plot is at least mostly coherent). So they try to convince the head of Evil Company™. to not destroy the future. Evil Boss refuses and tries to have them arrested. Ugly Time Travel geek runs heroically escapes from cosmically inept security.

Ugly computer nerd and blonde reporter go back in time to try to convince himself not to give the demonstration in the first place. Evil Boss armed with a copy of the software, takes off after Ugly computer nerd, and shoots him down. And to be honest this part of the film isn't so bad. Anyway, after some running around the recent past, they escape back to the American revolution where they have a final showdown.

Forbidden Planet: An impressive film for its day. A lot of it still stands up pretty well. Special effects look a little dated, but not all that bad. The animated monster (animated by Disney Animator Joshua Medeor) still looks fantastic. Everyone loves Robbie The Robot. And, like Flash Gordon, you really get a feel that this is an alien world. Something that Star Wars never quite managed.

Monday:

Batman V Superman. Meh. I don't hate it. I can see that there was a definite effort here to make something worthy and thoughtful. The problem is I found it dull. I couldn't really work out what the film was really about except for a bunch of vague excuses to have Batman and Superman in conflict. The film is too grim even for my tastes. There's no levity and not a lot of character development. Lots of plot threads that don't really get a good payoff, and a feel that Snyder wants to turn Superman into the X-Men.

I have the lonely goatherd song from the sound of music stuck in my head! Damn you Rogers and Hammerstein for your catchy songs!

It was a nice sunny day, we decided to do the Sound of Music tour today rather than the planned Flick's birthday thing. They have minivans with 7 passengers, but I expect they have a big bus during peak tourist season.

Our guide was a Spanish man named Antonio. So we drove around town, saw the lke that Maria and the children fell into, went to the gazebo where a 22 year old sang how she was 16, going on 17, took a photo of the wrong yellow house... We didn't get close enough to the Von Trapp house (and I'm not sure if it was the actual house or the movie prop) to get a good pic of that one. We did see some nice views of the Alps though. Not the Hil Maria twirled on, because that was miles away and in another country. Tour finished at Mondsee where we see the church where Maria was married.

Antonio was lovely. He was very talkative, and pointed out all the key locations for the sound of music as well as other sites of interest, including Doppler's birthplace, and took our photos, and stopped the one person who wasn't part of couple frm beinglonely.

Finished the day at a nice restaurant where they provided hefty Austrian luberjack sized protions of pork. Also two beers! Yum.

Saw The Force Awakens last weekend. I enjoyed it.

Non spoilery technical stuff - It was in Dolby 3D - the version with shiny glasses. It's better than the previous version with horizontal and vertical polarisation, because it handles head tilting a lot better. Downside is it doesn't handle 2D very well. One of the lenses sees nothing at all. It was bit distracting when they switched from 3D trailers back to 2D ads. Also since when have they been showing ads after trailers? Technically though it gives really awesome 3D.

Anyway - there will be many spoilers here so here's a cut.

( SPOILER ALERT! )

I saw The Martian twice. The first time in 2D, because there was an unidentified "technical fault". I felt I was missing a lot by seeing it in 2D. But I had a free ticket so I saw it in 3D.

It's a great film. Go and see it if you haven't yet. Ideally in 3D.

I don't say that about all films.

One of the 3D trailers was MockingJay. I found the backgrounds jarring. They looked like early 3D games. The main parts of the image are in 3D but the details aren't and the details are what matter. So we have a building in the background that looks like a photograph. Walls that may have an angle but they are perfectly flat and smooth. There's a scene in a ballroom or something and it's clear that a bit more effort has been made to get lamps at a different depth but they look like cardboard cutouts rather than real things.

The Martian was filmed in 3D. 3D cameras that capture the extra information themselves. As we pan across the Mars habitat's desk, we see a Rubik's cube and juggling balls and pens and equipment. All of it has depth and texture. But it's not jsut that. The Hermes corridors flows past us as we follow an astronaut through the ship. A 2D television screen blends smoothly into a 3D live press conference. Ridley Scott uses that extra dimension to impress us. And the shots of Mars are stunning!

Seeing it a second time I could focus on other aspects. The music. The music is an important part of the film. Much of it is Disco! Tied into the plot in a charming way.

More movies on their way this winter. Spectre is the next one. MockingJay after that, and I hear there's another installment of that cheesy 70's space movie.

Another fun weekend with flickums.

Did part 3 of the cultural exchange. Flickums showed me Hercules. I think that was my favourite of the films so far. Less girly, and the animation nerd in me loves the Gerald Scarfe character designs, the absolutely brillant use of colour, and the sassy Gospel singers, and James Woods was brilliant as Hades! I showed her Dark City. This was the Director's Cut. The version where the nature of the city and of the strangers is revealed slowly. It makes it a very different film.

Downed a bottle of Rioja while watching Hercules. That was probably a mistake. It meant I didn't sleep that well. Was very tired the next day. But flickums wanted to know what I was like when drunk and Rioja is very nice.

We went to The National Space Centre. Kinda fun for space nerds. I'm a space nerd, so I had fun. The planetarium show was a nice thing about where all matter in the universe came from (narrated by Andy Serkis). Upstairs they had a show of Le Voyage dans la Lune - The classic George Melias silent movie where they fire the capsule into the moon's eye. Also two genuine full sized rockets (still a little peeved that the British Rocket programme ended. Black Arrow was cool!).

Flickums made chocolate brownies. They're a little squidgy but very tasty. They were made with black cherries in kirsch. I still have the syrup (Perhaps that will be poured onto a future batch of waffles).

Also managed to show some "Look Around You" - which went down well, and Star Fleet - which apparently hasn't aged well.Perhaps it appeals more to those of us who were 5 when it was first on.

Now I need me-time again. This makes me very conflicted because I also want more flickums-time. Silly brain.

It turned out flickums had never seen the Karate Kid! Naturally I was shocked!

I had never seen Beauty and the Beast. Natually flickums was shocked!

So we had a cultural exchange. We watched both films (over two days - time was not on our side).

I enjoyed it. Loved the animaton style. Not so sure about the songs - seemed a bit old fashioned. The animated furniture was cute.

We had deep fried camberty with it. I also learned that deep fried camambert takes about 15 seconds to cook. Not sure exactly how long. Also it should be served quickly otherwise the cheese leaks out. We did have a few empty wedges that had lost all their cheese.

Need to work out what's next for the cultural exchange. I'm sure I'll find a few other holes in Flick's media experience. For now though, next on the agenda is Free Enterprise. And I'll watch The Little Mermaid. Apparently we're getting the more girly ones out of the way first.

So, I rather enjoyed this film, but there were a few glaring historical inaccuracies.

Sherlock Holmes was actually a consulting detective in London and not a code breaker.

Elizabeth Swann actually married Captain Will Turner

Tywin Lannister was lord of Casterly Rock and not a navy commander.

WW2 battles were faught in colour. Black and White was a hollywood invention.

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Seriously it was enjoyable. I think you need to accept a certyain level of Hollywood metaphor. A group of experts working as a team industriously breaking codes on a round the clock basis with the full support of the commanding officer would have been accurate but somewhat lacking in drama.

If we assume that Alan Turing is being used as a metaphor for Bletchley Park, and Cdr. Alistair Denniston as the part of the military that thinks code breaking is a waste of time, it sort of works for the historical narrative.

Bought 2 DVDs. The €2 used DVD zone. Needs to be good enough to actually think I might want to watch it and to take up space in luggage. Not so good that I'll be disappointed not to have it on Blu-ray. Went for Chronicle and The Fast annd The Furious. Chronicle is pretty good if you like Faux documentary type things. The Fast and The Furious is pretty stupid. That goes into the very small dumb action movie pile, on top of Underworld. Am wondering if Star Trek (J.J Abrams version) also belongs there. Still not sure how I feel about that movie.

Started reading Temeraire book 7. This is an actual paper paperback made of paper! Temeraire seems to be a bit of an angsty teen these days. He's close to saying "That's so unfair!" and flying off in a sulk.

Papers Please is the best Tedious Bureaucracy based game I've played (Although Anchor has promise if you're a LARPER)

New season of Legend of Korra, Also Sleepy Hollow, Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D are demanding my attention. Atlantis, plus the finale of IT crowd still to watch.

Podcast grabber has been listening to More or Less and The Now Show!

Saw Cabin in the Woods. Impressed how we get a slasher movie, it gets deconstructed, subverted, twisted and turned into a film that still hits all the right notes for a slasher movie! Saw Wreck-it Ralph last week. Disney Studios can do good films rather than the shameless cash-ins they seem to go for.

So much media to consume. It's tough job but somebody's gotta do it!

Swiped from davidbrider

A. Pick 10 of your favorite movies.
B. Then pick one of your favorite quotes from each movie.
C. Post the quotes in your journal.
D. Have those on your friends list try to guess what the movie is.
E. Bold the quote once it has been correctly identified and place the guesser's user name directly after the quote.

1. I loved it when you nuked Las Vegas. Suitably biblical ending to the place, don't you think? gaspode got this one
2. Negative. I am a meat popsicle guessed by xanthipe.
3. Star sapphires take a week to crystallize properly. Would diamonds or emeralds do?
4. Wiping out the human race? That's a great idea. That's great. But more of a long-term thing. I mean, first we have to focus on more immediate goals.
5. I've just got pixlexia, OK? got by l_j_b and tlanti
6. I know a little German. He's sitting over there. Another point to gaspode
7. Look at it this way: in a hundred years, who's gonna care? gaspode who also identified which scene:)
8. Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something. got by xanthipe, omylouse and the_smut_fairy
9. Whoever wrote this episode should DIE. the_smut_fairy
10. Don't empty my mind! Please, I beg you! My mind is all I have! I've spent my whole life trying to fill it! omylouse

Was expecting someone to have got #5. #1 and #6 are slightly more obscure, still think I might need to add an extra clue for #4. I think most people will have seen it, but it's not a very quotable movie.

And feel free to post and guess. They're screened so you won't spoiler them.