h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

12 Years a Slave.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiw1cYXQw4g

Excellent film that is a tough watch. A vivid portrayal of the disregard with which slavers and 'owners' treated fellow human beings.

BBFC rating and warning - 15 and ' Contains strong violence, injury detail, sex, nudity and racist terms'.

I wanted to see the period AFTER that covered by the film too, although the film is based on Solomon Northup's own book and relatively little is known about his later life.

PP.

He was lucky to *have* a later life. Many slaves died. Only about 1 per cent of them ever made it to the age of 60.

Singin' In the Rain. My daughters happened to be in the room and got sucked in and it was *brilliant*

Mol

I watched "Now You See Me..." the other day. There are some parts of the plot that don't hold up to scrutiny, but a movie worth watching anyway.

Just back from "Inside Llewelyn Davis"... erm, nothing happens and it does so quite slowly.

I have just come home from the cinema and I'd like to report that 'Everything is Awesome'.

PP.

"Everything is awesome" is a song from "The Lego Movie." I take it that you enjoyed it?

I just got home from seeing "That Awkward Moment." Not a deep film, just a kind of silly buddy movie about three young guys who vow to stay single for a while, until relationship complications start kicking in.

It was good fun with some great attention to detail. The 1980's spaceman / racing driver's helmet always used to break at the thin bit by the chin. And the 1980's spaceman in the film - sure enough had a broken helmet.

A bit frenetic at times.

I really didn't think it was going to work out ok in the end. To tell the truth I was worried. I was bricking it!

PP.

It doesn't come out till April here. I wonder if it's worth the wait? The idea is intriguing. I love the youtube Lego films.

August: Osage County. We thought it was a comedy, instead it was a gritty drama about a dysfunctional family. Harrowing performances by Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, it was uncomfortable to watch. Not a feel-good film and it ended strangely. We both chose different endings, neither was satisfactory

GB

How were you able to choose endings? Only one ending was available when I saw it.

In our discussion afterwards.

Yesterday I saw "Robocop." Not my first choice [I don't usually go out of my way to see action/suspense films unless there's a good dollop of comedy stuck here and there -- think "Lethal Weapon"], but my schedule was tight, and this film was shown at the most convenient time. I had seen the original version of the film, and was curious to see how much they had changed the story over the intervening decades.

As it turns out, they changed it a great deal. The visuals of the main character's extreme physical damage reminded me of some scenes in "Source Code." The idea of giving a badly-wounded person a second chance to do good was the same in both movies. The "means" of doing good was quite different, though.

I left the theater after an hour, having seen where the movie was going. I liked the acting. Some good people were involved. How much gunfire and violence is really necessary in a film? I think I reached my quota after an hour. I don't regret seeing it. It was just time to move on to something else.

Nebraska.

It was one of those, you know, "nice" films that I feel better for watching. An old man gets one of those Readers Digest "You have won $1,000,000" letters and is convinced he has won so his son drives him from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect his winnings. On the way, father and son bond.

Some stellar performances. Bruce Dern is superb as the sometimes confused, crotchety old man, June Sqibb steals the show as the quite frank mother and Stacy Keach makes for a convincing villain.

Unusually it was shot in black and white but the detail in HD was stunning.

Thoroughly recommend it.

I recommend it, too. I was trying to describe the plot and characters to my sister and father last night at supper. A *lot* of people can relate to the family dynamics in the film.

Saw Pompeii last night. After about 10 minutes I wanted to run screaming from the cinema. The script was so awful, even the translators had obviously given up on it (we were watching it in German). The historical mistakes were obvious even to me, and the volcanology was all over the place.

Most obviously - the first glimpse you get of the volcano showed it looking exactly as it does now.

Now - I've seen a volcano erupt (in Iceland, honestly, we were then when Krafla went up in 1980). It didn't look anything like that. AND Pompeii was not built so close to the sea that it could slide into it, as depicted in the film.

And two people were holding an "I can rustle my sweet papers louder and longer than you" competition.

An utter waste of time and money. OK we had expected a little of that, as the reviews had all been fairly bad, but it's the first time I've sat in the cinema thinking "I wish I'd stayed at home and done that ironing."

My husband went because he is off soon to that part of the world with a field trip group and wanted to see if it was worth recommending the film to his pupils.

The only reliably genuine things were the quote from Pliny the Younger (who kept a diary of the events at the time) and the photos of the fossilised remains of the people who were literally caught in a snapshot of what they were doing when the gas and dust from the volcano enveloped them. These are well known images, and the exhibition has been to several places.

The fabricated story which we were told against the background of the erupting volcano was thin, contrived up to its eyeballs, and so full of cliches that it completely failed to captivate you. Kiefer Sutherland was the main big name in the cast list, and Carrie Anne Moss, (just Trinity in Roman costume).

Maybe it's a great film and the magic got lost in the dubbing, but I won't invest in the DVD just to find that out.

Yes, but what did you REALLY think of it?

PP.

It comes out in the UK on 2 May. Maybe you will have forgotten my warnings by then.....

Just rewatched most of the Avengers films, didn't bother with Hulk as I was never really enamoured with it the first time around.

But seeing them all together really highlights a lot of cross-overs between them that you'd probably otherwise miss out on. Things like the British agent in Captain America having the same name as the Shield agent assigned to Tony Stark in the Iron Man films.

They're all very much interwoven, and done in such a way that it doesn't matter too much if you've not seen them all.

It wasn't the story line or the acting that I went to "Pompeii" for. I just wanted spectacle, and the movie delivered. Some of the lines were memorable. "Gladiators do not beg!" was the most memorable. The collapsing grandstands at the arena was pretty spectacular. The tsunami that dashed the galley boats against the shore, thus preventing their escape from the volcano. Probably that scene was shot with miniatures.

From what I've read about Pompeii, you would need to be at least twenty miles away from the volcano in order to escape it. By the time the lava started rolling down the4 slopes, it was too late to escape unless you had a horse, and even then safety was by no means guaranteed. The last scene, in which the horse can't run fast enough due to carrying two people, is pretty accurate. I'm not sure what good it did top release the horse so it could escape. Even being at sea was no guarantee, as the lava went 600 feet out to sea. No mention is made of Herculaneum, the sister city that was also buried.

You want gross historical inaccuracy? There was a stretch of water between Vesuvius and Pompeii in the movie.