There has been so much hype regarding the latest offering in the Batman franchise that my curiosity has got the better of me, and this afternoon we are going to see it.

There has been much talk about the mezmerising performance by Heath Ledger as The Joker, it has been said by many that it is an oscar winning performance. It has been said that it is a performance that will be etched in your mind for many days, whether tis nis true or just hype is yet to be seen.

The movie has a 12A cert, but in one review I heard on the radio it is too violent for young children and should be a 15cert, indeed, one reviewer said this does not have the feel of a standard superhero movie, but is more like a dark horror film.

I will let you know my views later.

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8.00 pm

OK, up date. Just got back from the cinema, and I have to say to my surprie it lived up to the hype. I will say it is the best of all the batman films, including the Keaton / Kilmer / Cluney and the last Christian Bale movie, batman begins. I will even go as far as to say, it is one of the best films i have seen for a long time.

That said however, Michael Keaton is still the best bat man in my opinion.

As for Heath ledger, that was one truly mezmerizing performance. His loss is a massive blow to the movie world.

If you have'nt seen it I urge you to do so. You will not be disapointed.

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?

Hi to everybody...I recorded a film last night on Sky Premiere called 'The Lives of Others' it was the debut of writer-director Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck and came out in 2006. It was a slow burn expose of the work of the Stasi in East Germany before the Wall fell and the changing of an ardent Stasi operative into a sympathiser as he listened to the lives of a well known dramatist and his lover, a famous actress on the East German stage...The sense of repression was painful and, as the film progressed, the sense of despair and bleakness of life there became more and more clear...it's not a happy film by any means but it's an excellent study of a man who gradually gets drawn into the lives of the people is watching, and, eventually...well, I won't tell you any more because it will spoil it if you do happen to decide to record it for yourselves....it's on each night this week and is the last film showing on Sky Premiere most nights, with one showing around nine....it's well worth watching because it draws you in even if you don't want to go where it's taking you...Hollywood made a similar film called 'The Conversation' in 1974 with Gene Hackman playing the operative, and I would say the writer/director of 'The Lives of Others' was extremely influenced by it....
Hope you get a chance to see it...

Ha ha! What to see when you're a bit late for Indiana Jones.

"I SAID no mayonnaise."

Ed Norton - rare scene with his shirt on.

In typical Marvel style, a cartoon strip beginning showing us the premise very briefly (everyone knows the story, but there'll be a few who won't, like those who live under rocks and come to the cinema once every 10 years) and we are launched straight into the 1970s Bruce Banner on the run, trying to keep his blood pressure down. No spoilers here, but a cat and mouse game ensues and Brucey Baby is soon having to fight with a new enemy, a medically enhanced soildier.

Aaah, bless. However, I fear it may all end in tears.

So a word on the cast - Ed Norton, brilliant - you've got to make your Hyde skinny and pale when Jekyll's a huge muscle bound beast. Couldn't really fault him in the role. Had the right amount of repressed angst. Liv Tyler - didn't quite annoy me as much as I thought she would - usually (apart from LOTR) watching her on the screen is similar to someone running their fingernails down a blackboard, but the glasses and 'smarty pants' clothes somewhat gave her a bit of credibility as Betty Ross. Tim Roth, always briliant, on good psyco form as usual.  William Hurt - well, hard not to pull off a grumpy General, but I did think the General from Ang Lee's Hulk was more  convincing (as, I thought was Jennifer Connolly's Betty Ross) - in fact, mix and match a few cast members from both films and we're OK!

Can I have your autograph? I'm a big fan...

And a Lou Ferringo cameo - brilliant (he's still built like a brick privvy).

Effects? Awsome, especially fight scene at the end.
Humour? Just about the right amount.

Hi to everybody....sat and watched a Danish film last night on BBC4 called 'After the Wedding' starring Mads Mikkelsen and Rolf Laarson....it was slightly difficult to watch as it was a hand held camera and made the film a bit jumpy here and there, but, on the whole, it was a good story that gradually unfolded to become much more complex than it originally appeared...The acting was very good...particularly Rolf Laarson, who played a billionaire. I don't want to spoil the story by telling you the plot concerning him, because to do so would ruin the film. I don't like spoilers when I'm telling you about a film because I can see no point in recommending one and then telling you what the film was all about...makes it rather pointless bothering to watch it if you already know what's going to happen...
Also, the week before I saw another Danish film called 'Open Heart' again with Mads Mikkelsen. It was a completely different story about an accident that has a devastating effect on all the lives of the people involved in it, and was well paced and well acted again...I can recommend this one as well...Mikkelsen reminds me a bit of Vigo Mortensen in that he doesn't seem to act much but is a very powerful presence nonetheless...
Hope you get a chance to see both...good to see well acted European films being shown on BBC4...

Today I saw a film with Will Smith which was actually very good. It was called Hancock it was about a superhero with problems. Unlike other superhero films I've seen the main character was deeply uneasy about himself. He had problems with alcohol and often children would see him with very few clothes on. Hancock was truly not your average superhero he spent much of his time sleeping on park benches and when there was an emergency he needed to be woken up. Added to that most people did not even really like him. The result was deeply flawed superhero in many ways he was almost an anti-hero.

Then Hancock saves the life of a PR man and on the advice of the PR man he agrees to go to prison for all the criminal damage to Hancock has done. In one scene he throws a basketball be on the perimeter fence he flies out of the prison just to get the ball but causes an alert then goes back.

It later on transpires one of the main character's problems is that he does not even know who he is. Sure enough later on he finds out but us the audience this is unfortunately never fully explained all I will say is that he's not the only one of he's kind and his immortal and guessing at this point that there will be a sequel and I'm fairly sure that there are more than just two of them...

oh an where is he from?

yours Ian Rosmarin