Some of them were even at the cinema and everything. Along Came Polly was about as funny as you would expect really. That’s the thing with Ben Stiller films, they’re always precisely as funny as the last one (which means the odd chuckle here and there, and a general feeling of indifference once it’s over). Phillip Seymour Hoffman was the best thing about it unsurprisingly.

Monster was a weird one. What could have been an interesting tale of a female prostitute turned man-hating serial killer was told in a pretty boring and lacklustre way, which is saying something considering the often graphic violence. Christina Ricci was fucking dreadful as always, how does she have a career? By far the best thing about this one was Charlize Theron’s astonishing transformation into a real skank, which was very convincing, and probably worthy of an Oscar (if anything really is).

A recent trip to Blockbuster yielded some interesting results. Versus was a crazy tale indeed. Clearly very low budget, it looked like some film students got together and said “Lets film a bunch of people chasing each other round a forest. We’ll give them guns and there will be some Kung Fu. We’ll also throw in some zombies, and give them guns also. There definitely needs to some samurai fighting action too. Ooh, and we should probably do something with dark magical powers and trans-dimensional weirdness too. Fuck storyline, let’s make a fucking MOVIE!” That’s what they said (word for word) and it worked very well indeed. Frequently absurd, often cool, and always a lot of fun. There wasn’t an original idea in there and it didn’t matter, it was just made by people who enjoy film and don’t mind completely disregarding The Rules.

Not quite as fun was Naqoyqatsi. I mistakenly picked this out thinking it was one of the earlier films of the series, Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, which I’ve always meant to see. Unfortunately the one we got came out in 2002 and was lame. I guess some people enjoy watching an hour and a half of terrible CGI of mathmatical equations floating in space, and slow motion footage of the sea, but I don’t. I guess some people see this kind of thing as avant-garde since it comes from Hollywood, but I thought it was about as avant-garde as a Scottish Widows commercial. Tripe masquerading as subtlety and insight, avoid.

Happy birthday to John for last Saturday. I agree that the way birthday cash slopes off is highly depressing. It seemed to happen far more abruptly for me, I swear one year, maybe 18 or 19, they just didn’t come any more. Granted, I hadn’t seen most of the parties in question for a number of years, let alone remembered their birthdays, but it’s just something you come to expect from childhood, birthdays=money. And John, you should count yourself lucky, I’m younger than you and I got about 3 cards last birthday. Oh, the pain!

Posted: 02|21|04 at 9:59 am. Filed under: film and video.
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