You never know quite what you're going to get when you watch one of Sir Alf's films, and Stage Fright is no exception. Starring, among others, Marlene Dietrich, the film follows a young actress as she tries to tip the police off to the real murderer when all the time the police suspect her closest friend. With the help of her dad she takes on a variety of guises in order to push the police into catching the right person... although being Hitchcock things aren't always quite what they may at first seem.

This is far from Hitchcock's best, far from the best of the 50s in fact, nevertheless it's still a pretty good film standing up easily on its own merits. The cast are good - not just Dietrich but also Jane Wyman and in particular Alastair Sim. The score from Leighton Lucas is workmanlike, yet it still works really well - as does the photography which although not particularly striking does contain the occasional interesting shot or two. I dont want to undersell the film, although i dont really want to make it out as a masterpiece, but as good classic films go you can't go far wrong with this one at all. 7/10

And Tom Cruise is reprising his roll .

Not so sure a follow up was needed.

Hi to everybody...BBC4 are showing now one of the original Batman series....I realized why I never bothered with it...it's absolutely awful...HLOL...have seen a couple of the latest Batman films and, while not overly enthusiastic about either, they are a millions times better than the originals...still not sure whether I'm going to see the latest as it costs us quite a bit to go to our local cinema now because we have to take taxis there and back as there are no buses to it...think I'll wait for it to come on TV...we're waiting for Hellboy2, which should start its run at the beginning of August...now that we're both looking forward to seeing...

I got two films to talk about today.

Hancock
You've probably heard all you need to hear about this film, so I'll keep this short.  Whenever I watch a 'hero' film from America, I end up thinking about how it relates to American foreign policy.  I can't help it, to me heroes embody America's self perception and I felt Hancock falls squarely into this category.  Hancock - the super-powerful hero, the only one of his kind.  He's well meaning but the responsibility of the world resting on his shoulders for 80 years (he doesn't age) has taken its toll.  He's ceased caring about what people think of him.  He's beligerent and rude to the people he helps to they end up hating him.  The only person who has faith in him are an idealist and his young son.  This premise perfectly sums up the direction US politics on the international stage has taken recently.  For the first half of the film anyway.  I expected the film to be about atonement and overcoming odds.  I expected Hancock to discover something about living in prison, about why he does the things he does and who he should do it for.  But half way through the film, it appears to me that the script-writers abandoned this rather didactic theme and opted for a super-hero adventure involving chases, tight suits and half-hearted attempts at 'explaining it all'.  I liked this film but I felt it backed away from the real issues it made at the beginning, the love-triangle and personal history felt inserted and irrelevant.  The novel it was based upon was a much darker affair - about a superhero who decides to seduce a woman and destroy a marriage.  The studio didn't have to go all the way with this idea, but more 'edge' would have been nice.
I'ma give this a 6/10 cos I like Will Smith, the SFX were good, and for the first half of the film, I thought this was gonna be a belter.

The Mist
The Spider, It Came from Outer Space, The Day the Earth Stood Still.  These are classic drive-in B-movie horror films of the 50's that The Mist tries to replicate.  I liked those films, but I didn't like this one.  Where Hancock fails to deliver, The Mist attempts to in a very cack-handed and overly deliberate way.  The situation, the suspense and the whole structure of the film was well within the confines of the B-Movie conventions.  That i don't have a problem with.  The problem I have is with the characters.  I had been told that the character development and reactions in this film were excellent, but I felt they were terrible.  There were really only two types of characters; idiots and clever-dicks.  The idiots (the majority) were irredeemably idiotic.  Like sheep they all get scared together, start to believe the doomsaying of a clearly insane woman and after only two days revert to savage tribalism.  Meanwhile we have the clever-dicks - people who quite transparently seem to represent the intelligensia of America - the Democrats.  These people are level headed, rational, tolerant and sympathetic.  None of their decisions are fool-hardy or reactionary.  They can understand with crystal clear perception exactly the politics of the situation, but remain stoically aloof until pushed to the limit.
This film I felt was preachy and not in a good way.  Unlikely dialogue was overloaded with 'subliminal' messages about how we percieve the world and what people are like.  It had the subtlety of a sixth former's political poetry class.  I wish it hadn't done that.  It was a decent attempt at 50s style horror (possibly explaining why I didn't find it scary in the slightest), but the dialogue was shocking.  And once I started trying to ignore the dialogue, I found that the music was also dire.  Cheesy, cliched crescendos of frantic non-language specific choristers and thundering kettle drums.  The music seems to have been made just using samples filed under 'generic suspense music'.  Left this film feeling slightly irritated.

Hi to everybody...well, we went to see 'Wall-E', Pixar's latest offering, this afternoon, and I can say that it's a brilliant animation film. The work that went into it is stunning. The characters are excellently thought out, and very endearing. It's an ideal family film, but is also for adults as well who still have access to the child in them. The little waste disposal unit that is Wall-E is very, very lovable and the pristine high tech robot he falls in love with called Eve is equally well done.
I don't want to go into the plot here because I hate spoiling a film by telling you all about it, but it's very fast moving and never drags...there's only one major flaw at the end, but, if you can get past that, you should have a really good visit to the cinema...I won't say what it is, but will wait to see whether anybody else picked it up...LOL...I can highly recommend it.
Great big hugs to one and all...

Hi. Hubster and I quite liked this film, but we both had one distinct feeling after it had finished which I will share with you later. Jumper has had a bit of bad press (I never listen to these much now as I liked the Da Vinci Code and hated Superman Returns) so I was surprised a little when I thought it was quite good.

Yes! This is my Peter Parker moment  - I can jump to that tree over there...

We first meet David in High School when he realises that he has the ability to immediately transport himself to anywhere he has been and seen before and, later, this becomes anywhere in the world. It's played really well by a young actor called Max Thieriot. If he was old enough, he could probably have played Hayden's part just as well, if not better. Definitely a touch of the Marvel Peter Parker copy-cat intro to a film though. Still, not a huge problem there, still done quite well.

So what does David do with his new skill? Robs banks of course, generally becoming a bit of a jet-setting playboy. It's clear that his abandonment issues have led him not to consider saving the world with his new found skill and enjoys kicking back in a flash apartment in New York jumping to the remote because he's 3 inches too far away from it and surfing. That is, until Samuel L Jackson turns up (and we all know when he's a baddie in a movie that is generally a thing to be scared of) announcing that he kills his kind and enjoys it to. Oh, and I realised Sam was his old nemesis from Star Wars days - a bit of payback!


I think you'll find this is my natural hair colour M-F-

Hayden Christiansen is OK in this, luckily doesn't go through with the full Anakin ham up. His girlfriend (perhaps a little too easily seduced by a guy she hasn't seen in years, although a first class ticket to Rome I guess was her price ) was good, never heard of her. Apparently in a programme call OC , which is probably an updated Dawson's Creek for all I know. Samuel L Jackson bulges his eyes out when he gets pissed off (as usual, he's very good). The disappointment was Jamie Bell, of King Kong and Billy Elliot fame. It's not that he can't deliver the goods acting wise (although it seemed at some points that he was trying too hard)  - it's his accent. He can't decide whether he's Queen's English, from Yorkshire, Newcastle or Northern Ireland, it bugged me every time he spoke. It meant he almost mumbled his lines, and I couldn't catch all of it. Pick one already! He was a bit of an annoying character and I didn't feel much sympathy for him.

Jamie Bell - annoying (with a bum fluff beard)


Hi there - haven't seen you in 5 years. So - flew you to Rome first class, here's the Colosseum - will you put out now?

The effects were good, as you would expect and one particular fight near the end was well executed, although by the end of the film, you were thinking - yes, OK, you can jump already. Use a door! Jumping the bus was cool though.

Well, a bit of a brain-in-neutral film, some lovely sets (Colosseum, yum!), fair acting, eye candy all round, good effects, interesting story with an OK twist, but nothing mind boggling. And that thought me and Hubster had? That it felt like a film pilot for a TV show, just as with Stargate or Buffy. The premise of the Jumper on the run combined with the twist at the end probably would make for an excellent TV series, rather than a film sequel, which would probably be a bit lame.

Here's the trailer:

Some things in life could be argued to defy explanation. The ability of a duck to know which direction south is. The tenacious determination of a chicken without a head to run around moments before death. And perhaps most of all, the compellingly self-destructive downward spiral that is M Night Shamayalan’s career. Having heard Mark Kermode give a damning review, I decided to see for myself if it really was even more fantastically awful than The Lady in the Water.

I've seen all the rest of Shyamalan's films and I wanted to be sure that the God complex, the badly written dialogue and the apologetic acting were still there. They were. It must be a horrible thought to know that your greatest film is already nine years behind you. How does M Night get to sleep at night?

"Under the Same Moon"

This is the story of a boy whose mother is an illegal immigrant working in the states. He lives with his grandmother in Mexico and when she dies he decides he will cross the border to find his mother.

This is a very good movie, the brutality of a journey such as this is softened to allow family viewing. It highlights, again in a softened form, the injustices faced by those who are working illegally in this country, and presents them as real people to those who might forget this.

Again you can watch this with your kids, though really young ones will not appreciate it and would be bored. You will come away feeling good and if you're like me, teary.

Last night I decided to stay home from work and entertain my son. We went to the movies, his choice.

This movie is certainly good enough if you are looking for some adventure and you don't want it to be too intense for kids. It is Brendan Frasier doing what he does best and writers who really churned out something less than extraordinary. There are some good special effects and enough scenes involving heights to make me close my eyes a couple of times.

We both enjoyed it though later laughed about all the things that really didn't make sense(who cares) and the scenes that were downright stupid.(Frasier beating up giant venus fly trap plants)

It's a great movie for kids if they like this sort of thing and parents will enjoy it too. Just don't go on Friday night and pay top $$ for admission like I did.