Chatter Of The Squirrel

Movie: Old Dogs

Wild Hogs was a fantastic comedy. So the producers thought that bringing in another combination of old guys together will work equally well.

Wild Hogs worked because you can relate with the characters. There’s that faint possibility that anyone of us might one day go through a midlife crisis and buy a hog and go traipsing into the middle of nowhere.

Old Dogs has Travolta and Robin Williams as two bosses of a big sports company, and Williams suddenly finds himself to be the father of a pair of precocious bastard twins. Not exactly characters people can relate easily with. Not even a social situation that typical decent human beings will find themselves in. There’s an unnecessary scene with Bernie Mac and a technology that turns a person into a human puppet. And a Rocket-Man finale?

Old Dogs is just another serving of Disney family crap that convinces me that American kids just aren’t smacked often or hard enough. It also continues to prepetuate the Disney-generation larvae’s delusions that their mere existing confers upon them a mandate from heaven to rule over everybody around them through guilt and volume.

The only thing halfway amusing is Seth Green. It was amusing SEEING him in a film. He’s funny when he’s playing with his old G.I.Joe toys. Not so much in an actual film.

How to fill a 100Gb harddisk

So a colleague tossed me a harddisk to fill up with goodies.

That’s a bit like making a mix-tape. Without any parameters given.

I see this as an opportunity to impress some culture and introduce a healthy expectation of quality to the youths of tomorrow.

So, my insane media collection of diverse genre and periods. And an itteh-bitteh little harddisk.

Although there are no parameters, it’s probably not the best idea to put in too much self-indulgent geek stuff in there. Had to leave out Kevin Smith’s stuff. It’s with a heavy heart that I was unable to put Futurama and Family Guy on the list either. Can’t include Firefly, cos who wants a story that was left hanging? But what made the cut, should still be pretty good.

The following TV Series:

Coupling – best British sitcom ever
Dexter – season 4 ended BRILLIANTLY!!
Scrubs – I’m still walking down nostalgia lane

The following animations:

Avatar The Last Airbender – brilliant writing, for a cartoon
FLCL – most visually amazing anime, accompanied by music by The Pillows
Persepolis
American Tail
Fievel Goes West
Bolt
Coraline
Hoodwinked
Horton Hears A Who
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – still the best Disney cartoon ever
Secrets of the Furious Five
9
Over The Hedge
Ponyo
Wallace and Gromit
Wall-E

The following movies:

Departures
The Shaolin Temple – the first kungfu movie I ever watched and never forgotten, made during a time when I could afford to pay Jet Li’s salary
300
Assassination of a High School President
Before Sunrise
Equilibrium
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
Forrest Gump – I can’t just assume that everyone has watched this already
Hot Fuzz
Identity – great whodunit
Iron Man
Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog
Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail – a vital component of geek references in these pas
SPL – drew my attention to Donnie Yen
Stranger than Fiction
Surrogates
Taken
The Butterfly Effect
The Emperor and the Assassin – most re-watched Chinese movie
Red Balloon
The Usual Suspects
The Cove
Watchmen
Zombieland

Movie: Zombieland

It’s Shaun of the Dead vs the Rage zombies from 28 Days Later. But you set it in a REAL country where the survivors have ready access to serious firepower. It’s comedic zombie apocalypse. With BILL MURRAY!!

Before dissecting this movie further, I have to say that IT IS GOOD! A brilliant hybrid of a few disparate genres… The only way it could be better, is if it was starring Fred Savage, and the voice from The Wonder Years was doing the narrative. Zombie killing action, dead-pan comedy, and loveable characters. And I also learnt that “Passing the gravy” is a euphemism for sex. I really can’t ask for more.

To properly appreciate a good zombie movie, one needs to understand that zombies transcend all political correctness.

In these ‘enlightened’ times, it’s just not PC to graphically depict acts of violence committed on your fellow man.

Things like Hostel and SAW are gorn. Although these at least have some dark creativity, which you might be able to appreciate cerebrally, but you would rather not ever be in the same room as the people who thought this shit up, cos you just don’t know what kind of darkness might be hiding behind their eyes….

Things like Tokyo Gore Police and Robo Geisha are just sad, twisted, perversions of cinematic atrocity. ["FRIED SHRIMP" !! OMG~! I wish I never saw that trailer! >.< ]

Then 300 and Kill Bill, where the blood and violence is mostly ‘acceptable’. But it takes a good strong story, and a fair bit of build-up so that the recipient of said graphic violence has been suitable dehumanised and you’re able to dissociate any sympathy with them.

And that’s also how war movies work too. It was perfectly acceptable to mow down Krauts, Nips, Charlies, bearded mid-easterners in any quantity during the relevant periods in history. Dehumanise first. And then it’s OK. Most of these movies don’t age well.

So it’s all about context.

And here’s where the beauty of zombies come in. The zombiefication process, be it via a virulent pathogen or voodoo, dehumanises the ‘victims’. Their skulls will still explode in a gooey crimson in a manner that’s oh so similar to a human skull. But nobody gets upset, cos it’s just a zombie. Heck, many people will get upset if you graphically decapitate a cow. But you can do the same to a zombie, even amputate it, burn it, blow it up, introduce its head to a frying pan, a mallet, piano, vinyl LP records, or the ceramic cover of the toilet seat. And it’s OK! It’s truly equal opportunity where the dismembered walking dead can be of any creed, color, gender, or nationality. Nobody gets upset.

This is how you appreciate a zombie movie.

And Zombieland is doing it right.

Movie: The Inglorious Basterds

First glance: Oh, another WW2 movie.

First whispers from a random review: Tarantino. Doing a war movie. With very little pew-pew. Sounds odd, but intriguing.

Another look: So it’s a fictional story about a team of Jewish black-ops killing Nazis in Germany. I can accept that.

At the end of the first viewing: HOLY CRAP!! This isn’t a war movie! It’s an alternate time-line fantasy!

The movie is all about the Tough Guys. Everyone’s a tough guy talking tough. Oozing menace / charm / power / vanity / authority through dialogue. And this made it extremely interesting and very, very fun to watch!

The strong-as-oak man-of-the-land facing off a German detective hunting Jews. The stereotypical drill sergeant shout-talk. Intimidation of Nazi captives. An SS officer sniffing out British spies. A war hero sweet-talking a French belle. Or just eating and talking about strudels.

Lots of very interesting face-offs with high stakes verbal dueling. Every scene well acted.

There must be an odd dozen and more fantastic quotable quotes in the movie. If the dialogue didn’t keep shifting between English, German, French and Italian. High points for realism. But a little annoying perhaps.

The ending blew me away…

With Hollywood being so Jewish, I’m surprised that a movie like this never materialized much earlier. It’s like everybody in Hollywood just flipped Germany the Bird.

One word to describe this movie? I’ld go with SCHADENFREUDE.

“Schadenfreude is German for: taking delight in the misery of others.”
“Schadenfreude. Taking delight in the misery of others. That IS German.”
~~~ Lyrics from Avenue Q ~~~

Movie: The Lazarus Project

One gimmicky idea. One Sixth Sense moment. 1hr 35min to tell the story.

And it’s not even a blow-your-mind 6th Sense moment. It’s a crazy person is really government conspiracy kind of story.

Granted, that for a moment the movie tries to build a Purgatory feel in the story… But the story is just too darn SLOW! And it’s got the kid from The Fast And The Furious.

Irony.