Paul Haine | Tales from the city
Film & TV
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Trailer for Duncan Jones’ Source Code
I really miss Quantum Leap
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Trailer for Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty
It’s about prostitution but it’s mysterious and beautiful so it’s art so that’s ok.
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Trailer for Matthew Schilling’s Avarice
Looks like No Country for Old Men except instead of a case full of money it’s a box full of science fiction.
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Trailer for Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia
A stray planet threatens to disrupt Kirsten Dunst’s wedding or something. Looks bleak.
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Black Swan fails to impress
Black Swan, its cast and crew apparently scheduled to be showered with Academy Awards and such, is the second Aronofsky film — the first being The Wrestler — that’s left me wondering what everyone else is seeing that I’m not.
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Trailer for Spartacus: Gods of the Arena
The prequel series to Spartacus: Blood and Sand starts on January 12th. I’m looking forward to this — Blood and Sand turned out to be gratuitously enjoyable.
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The Walking Dead
A typical episode of The Walking Dead is pretty much how I’d imagine a real zombie apocalypse would be; incredibly boring for about 90% of the time, teeth-grabbingly exciting for the remaining ten.
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Review of The Secret of Kells
Remember when you were off sick from school, and because it wasn’t during an official school holiday, the only thing on TV was day time television and S4C? If you were lucky, Channel 4 would be showing some animated films from eastern Europe or somewhere; they smelt vaguely of education but at least they weren’t Pebble Mill. Later in life, you would discover that you’d seen Jan Švankmajer’s Alice and would feel quietly smug. The Secret of Kells is one of those films.
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Babylon 5: A retrospective
By and large, Babylon 5, the SF show created by J. Michael Straczynski during the late ’90s, is almost indefensibly poor. I say this as a fan; of the main series, at least a third of it is borderline unwatchable. Of the spin-offs and made-for-TV films, I have nothing good to say.
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Trailer for Battle: Los Angeles
Alien invasion in Los Angeles. Looks nice and explodey.
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Trailer for The Secret of Kells
Loving the art style for The Secret of Kells, an Irish-French-Belgian
production based on an illuminated manuscript from around the year 800. -
Trailer for Winnie the Pooh
I don’t care if this is a children’s film, Eeyore cracks me the fuck up.
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Trailer for Cowboys & Aliens
This looks so wrong and yet so right. Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig star in this adaptation of the 2006 graphic novel of the same name. On a related note, Daniel Craig is really looking like he should take the Yul Brynner role when they remake Westworld.
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Edgar Wright and the videogame aesthetic
The videogame film adaptation has a sorry history. Street Fighter; Super Mario Bros.; almost the entire filmography of Uwe Boll. That the barely-passable Tomb Raider with Angeline Jolie is generally seen as the pinnacle of the game to film transition speaks volumes.
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Why I like the rumours of Jon Hamm being the next Superman
Mad Men star Jon Hamm has recently been rumoured to be taking on the role of Superman in the upcoming Man of Steel, to be produced by Christopher Nolan and written by David Goyer. I would never have thought of Hamm myself but now the idea is there, it seems perfect to me.
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The Eighth Doctor
Having eventually enjoyed the modern-day RTD-helmed reboot of Doctor Who and what is arguably its second modern-day reboot in the form of the fairytale-style Moffat and Smith series, I thought it was worth giving the failed 1996 reboot a second look to see why it never made it.
In a nutshell: it’s because it does almost everything wrong.
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Slavik Anishchenko’s Synthetic World
Slavik Anishchenko’s Synthetic World, part of the Philips Parallel Lines project.
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Some thoughts on The Avengers
Comic-Con saw confirmation that Joss Whedon is to be the director of Marvel’s upcoming The Avengers, an attempt at pulling off what is commonplace in the comic world; bringing headline stars from various comics into one single whole.
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Inception
Inception plays as if Christopher Nolan was in a pub one night and an angry drunk shouted “Oi! Nolan! Think you’re clever with your intertwining narratives and chronological playfulness? I bet you can’t juggle five different threads at once though, spacially, temporally and in a coherent and entertaining fashion!”, and Nolan went off and did it, just to prove a point. He succeeds, but at the expense of characterisation and a sense of any meaning or purpose.
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The Book of Eli
The Book of Eli is a decent post-apocalypse film largely devoid of the ‘destroyed landmarks’ porn that often affects this genre, feeling more like an Eastwood-era western set in the world of Fallout 3, with heavy overtones of Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and suggestions of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
