Pacificapocalypse

We Watch Movies: Severance

Ever wonder what you’d get if you made a movie about the cast of The Office (UK original) getting trapped in Hostel?
You’d get something like Severance.

An odd little film that didn’t get wide release here, but we caught on Netflix streaming. even though the humor/horror mix is just a little off, Severance is still pretty enjoyable.

International weapons manufacturer, Palisades Defense, sends one of their sales teams on a  team building excursion in Eastern Europe. When the road is blocked, on questionable advice of the boss, the employees abandon their tour bus and head down a heavily wooded road to find their “luxury” lodge. Little do they know a killer is lying in wait around the corner, bent on slashing each of them to a horrible demise. In proper British style, victims die with a stiff upper lip (though not all of them accept their fates without a fight) and killers snuffs them in suitably absurd fashion (bear trap?).

Is it a dark comedy or a horror movie with brief moments of funny? Don’t know, it can’t seem to decide and that’s it’s biggest problem. There are a lot of bloody scenes but I can’t think of  one really graphic death scene. Just before the death, the camera pulls away and sometimes returns just after the death, so it doesn’t feel like a strict horror. There are a lot of attempts at comedy but only a few will leave you laughing out loud, so it doesn’t feel like a sinister comedy. Severance isn’t completely void of humor though, there’s a scene near the end that that involved the… uhm… very uncomfortable demise of one of the bad guys that’s pretty funny.

All in all not the best example of the comedy/horror genre that the British do so very well (I’m looking at you Shaun of the Dead) but not a bad rental.

Random Flickr picture

by powerpig

If you have no idea what’s going on here, try this.

So what exactly does the purchase of Marvel by Disney mean?
Maybe a little… something.. like… this:

Donald/Wolverine by SaiyaGina.

Or this:

Beauty and the Thing – - one of several mashups A. David Lewis posted here.

All from Super Punch.

Well we weren’t planning on making the jump to Blu-Ray so soon, but…. our less than thee year old JVC DVD player went tits up the other day so we picked up a Samsung BD-P3600 yesterday and frankly it’s pretty awesome. All the standard stuff, up converts standard DVDs to 1080p but here’s the kicker – it has integrated WiFi and is set up for Netflix streaming and Pandora radio out of the box. Set up was painless and it recognized the network and self configured, and just like that we had access to our Netflix streaming que. And damn ain’t it good to be a gangster.
Course we’ve made a promise to only buy new releases on Blu-Ray, so we picked up Watchmen… and some older films that we didn’t already have.

And 28 Days Later.
And From Hell… okay so we duplicated a few films.

We Watch Movies: Watchmen

You know what? There’s millions of reviews out there for this film, literally. And some (most?) of them are by people who’s skills far exceed my own, so I’m not going to even try. It was epic. I was entertained. It hit all the right notes re: the source material. And it earned it’s hard R rating and didn’t puss out where it counted.

So if you liked the original graphic novel, you’ll probably enjoy this too. But please please please, don’t go not having read the original AND thinking it’s a costumed super hero movie. And leave the kids at home.

We Watch Movies: Taken

The trailer sold me. In the maybe 3 minutes of scenes, they set the entire film.
No spoilers here.
Badass ex-CIA dude is making nice with his daughter. Daughter gets kidnapped. Badass ex-CIA dude does scary monotone soliloquy over phone to kidnapper. Kidnapper basically tells him to fuck off. Swift and mind numbing violence ensues.
See? No complicated relationship? No comedic element. Just badass ex-CIA dude kicking ass and taking names. A little gunplay, a little car chase, some hand to hand. Maybe a twist or two, but we’ve see this movie a couple of times now (I’m looking at you Man On Fire and Ronin) and sometimes I just want to be entertained.

Except…

Along the way to being entertained, I was a little let down. Don’t get me wrong, the bad guys were bad, the good guy was good. The car chases and fight scenes were about what I expected. Just not quite. It felt like the director was holding back and that there was soooo much more that they could have done. It felt conflicted – SPOILER ALERT There’s a tense scene with badass ex-CIA dude and an dirty official of a foreign intelligence agency. They’re at the dinner table. Foreign dude’s wife and kids are there but they don’t know that there’s a conflict. Ex-CIA dude needs information from foreign dude, but he’s not getting it. Things pop and ex-CIA dude shoots the wife. I mean he just turns and shoots the wife. It’s cold and effective and unexpected. I wanted more of that! But then we’d have scenes that just felt like there was more graphic content missing.

Over on calguns we were going back and forth on this and someone suggested that there was a European Directors version that filled in these missing scenes. I wasn’t so sure:

I wonder if there really *is* a Euro version. If there is and it’s more graphic, I’d be mad; hey man this is America, we INVENTED violence in movies. Heck we practically invented VIOLENCE.

Ok so maybe not invented it, but we’ve damn well almost perfected it.

And I let it go at that until this:

Come on man! Seriously?
Damn Europeans.

We’ll watch it again of course. Won’t feel right until we do.

We Watch Movies: Quarantine

Ok let’s get this out in the open first: I’m over the docu/horror flick. Enough with the handheld camera work. Yes I get it builds a sense of place and realism, but I’m done. I’m really really done. ( I’m looking at you Cloverfield ).

With that said this movie scared the crap out of us. I mean damn, that was a scary flick. Here we are four years on from Dawn of The Dead (2004) where we got fast zombies and also six years out from 28 Days Later (2002) where we had, not quite zombies, but pretty damn close. And they were fast AND infected AND turned friendly happy guy into flesh ripping Mister Cranky Pants in, what was it? 30 seconds? Damn. Those two twists to the classic zombie paradigm really shifted everything.
They used to be slow, shuffling things who relied upon sheer numbers to eventually whittle down the plucky band of survivors. Now. They’re fast. They can run and climb. Oh hell no.
Since then there’s been little innovation in the cinema zombie, but Quarantine does manage to put a few new spins on the zombie schtick, setting it in a single sealed building was a neat idea for one, making the .gov a partner villain was another. What causes the pleasant residents to turn into mouth foaming killers is actually pretty clever as well as believable, I actually thought that part was one of the more intelligent aspects of the film. I mean, it’s pretty plausible.  Which is freaky.
Ok I *did* get a little tired of Jennifer Carpenter’s giggly cub reporter in the first part of the film, as quickly as I got tired of her, later in the film, screaming and freaking out unintelligibly. ENUNCIATE DAMMIT!. Right, you’re terrified. I get it. Sure I’d probably be babbling and peeing my pants as well, if I were in that situation, but GET A GRIP!.
Some great gotcha terror scare of the leap out and freak out variety, and a bonus sense of the creeping dread as the characters realize, that the .gov has written them off and they are NOT getting out of that building even *if* they survive the nastyness within it.

So yeah, good old fashioned scary film. Pretty smartly written and relatively believable.

Oh! And yet another movie with the greatest actor who’s face you’ve never seen, if only for the last few minutes.

Man, Latino Review has been getting some good stuff lately.
Now they have the latest Max Payne posters. They look pretty good I think; captures the dark feel and oppressive constant snowfall of the first game, but they’ve turned the brooding Wahlbergness (Wahlbergian brooding?) up to 11,  and dude! Look up for once! But the Brooklyn Bridge angel wings are as subtle as napalm. And where’s Max’s Hawaiian shirt?

Click for full size.

What’s with Batman’s voice in Dark Knight?
I thought it was a bit much, seems I’m not alone.

Watched Léon the Professional again this weekend. Such a great film.

Busy! I need another full day around the house. Saturday started early and completely disassembled my old office desk and hauled the pieces down to the driveway. Need to call Claude the JunkMan to come pick them up. Put together my new desk and chair. So cool. Now I just need to find homes for everything; files, printer paper, knicks, knacks and paddywhacks. Still have to hook up the printer and finish up with the PC and external drives. *sigh* yeah one more day would do it.

Sunday Court and I went to go see my Mom. Stayed for a couple of hours just hanging out.
Sounds pleasant and innocuous, but this is a pretty significant milestone; Mom had never met Court before and we (Court and I) thought that it’s time Mom faced up to facts. It’s been two years, everyone else has moved on, now it’s time for Mom to start. It was a little awkward, but not overly so. I had to explain to Court that, sometimes, that’s just how Mom is. But it was good, and now that Mom has met Court and talked to her, perhaps, she’ll be able to finally understand that life goes on and that the past is a different country.

Anyway, Court’s side of the office/studio space is pretty much completed. As soon as we’re finally through I’ll post some pictures. It looks brilliant and she’s very happy with all the work we did.

Ok, Monday morning, let’s do this thing.