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

If you didn't know Julie Andrews did the voice for the mother, you'd never guess.

Just watched "Robot & Frank" (on Netflix). Lovely little film - I recommend it.

I have just come home from watching The Theory of Everything.

It seems to me that it may well be bristling with Baftas, Oscars, Palm D'ors and Golden Globes.

Absolutely, thoroughly recommended. I'd never heard of Eddie Redmayne. What a brilliant performance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-v1_OttK4A

PP.

Yes, the film may very well get lots of awards. I expect that Redmayne was lucky to look so much like Hawkings and to have so much acting talent. Looking right for a part counts a lot! If Carrie Dreiser had looked more like Katherine Hepburn, she might have been offered more roles than Tugboat Annie.

Sorry, I meant Marie Dressler.

Indeed looking right helps. The film would have been destroyed if Steven Hawking had been played by Ray Winstone, Martin Freeman or BRIAN BLESSED.

PP.

You mean Meryl Streep couldn't have pulled it off?

Birdman.

Just home and I'm still not sure what to make of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jAfBd3g6bA

Certainly 20 seconds too long.

PP.

The Ipcress File

Really enjoyed it (right up to the point where people started being mean to Michael Caine ). Worth a watch if you get the chance.

Mol

We were made to watch that at school (like in 1969 or something) - I can't remember anything about it though, but our English teacher thought it was so great, he had the whole school in the gym to watch it as an end-of-term treat.

"Whiplash"

One of the most intense, take-no-prisoners movies I've ever seen. My favorite line: "Alternates, clean the blood off my drums."

Apparently, if you want to become one of the great drummers of all time*, you must bleed for your art.





*for all I know, "great drummer" may be an oxymoron, but the director of this movie did not think so. For the record, I have a nephew who is studying to be a drummer. I hope he has enough bandages.

The Ipcress File is easily my favourite spy thriller. I watch it rather a lot... probably at least once a fortnight...

Last Tuesday, I played a DVD of "Cassandra's Dream". I think Woody Allen seriously miscast some of the characters. Either that, or his screenplay was not one of the best.

Thursday I saw "Blackhat," a thriller about a computer hacker/body-builder who is in prison but gets furloughed to help the U.S. and Chinese governments track down some hacker criminals who have caused a nuclear reactor meltdown and manipulated the soy futures markets to make huge profits. That's rather a lot of improbable elements to be thrown into the same pot. Chris Hemsworth ["Thor"] plays the main character. Viola Davis does a more than credible job as a U.S. government functionary who arranges the furlough. There's lots of hacking and lots of brawling and great camera shots as the action moves from China to Washington and back to Hong Kong and thence to Jakarta.

Missed "The Theory of Everthing" - they only showed it for a week before it was ousted by the Cumberbatch/Turing film. Now that I shall definitely go and see. Unless this snow has built up too much by Monday evening.

We're getting buried by snow here, too. I guess it's the season for that....

It amuses me that "Frosty the Snowman" and "Winter Wonderland" are heard much of the time before Christmas, when there's rarely any snow to be found, but now that we actually have some snow, you don't hear those tunes. "Les Patineurs" [the ice skaters] is one of the few winter-themed tunes that doesn't get slotted for Christmas listening. Mostly the cold, wintery months are greeted by head-in-sand behavior, i.e. if we don't mention the cold and snow, they aren't really there.

As if....

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (at last - been trying to get to see it for months).

Absolutely hilarious. I started taking notes about a third of the way in because there was so much about it that was silly, and I'm looking forward immensely to getting it on DVD so we can rip the pss out of it (obvs in an actual cinema we had to be quite restrained, although that didn't entirely stop Sic ('Yeah, don't run, Galadriel, will you?')).

I liked the way it set up various bits of LOTR (eg Legolas and Aragorn being good friends), I loved the bit with the acorn (Martin Freeman is just superb, isn't he?), Richard Armitage absolutely nailed Thorin (it was brilliant when his voice went Smaug-y) and we particularly liked Alfred dressed as a woman with gold in his chests.

We also finally got to see how riding a moose into battle could actually work. What's not to like? Really enjoyed it.

Mol

Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies

I can agree that the it was a great movie, especially the battle between Azog and Thorin along with when the elven jumped over the dwarven into battle. But, deep down in my heart, I was really looking forward to seeing orcs and goblins being picked up by eagles and dropped from 100 meters like in the book.

Yes, we didn't really see the eagles doing their stuff (although the trouble with taking notes during a film is that you can't actually watch every second of the film ). But we did get lots of stuff not in the book, such as Galadriel sending Sauron to the Cave of Wonders.

Also (bit of an aside) I did enjoy all the trailers - for films I probably won't see until they come out on DVD, if then, but still ... I do *really* want to see Shaun the Sheep

Mol

I doubt that I will get to see movies this week because of the massive snowstorm that is coming our way -- 20 to 30 inches between Monday night and Wednesday morning. I will probably need to limb the ladder several times, rake in hand, to pull snow away from my furnace vent so it can get oxygen and not shut down. Gusts of 60 to 70 miles an hour are likely near the coast in addition to the heavy snow. The record for snow was set in the Blizzard of 1978, which shut down the whole state for a week.

I will be holed up in my house for days. If I'm lucky, I can get DVDs from the library tomorrow afternoon and play them on my computer. trouble is, almost everyone else will have he same thing in mind. The selection may be meager.

I also have a dozen books to read.

Maid in Manhattan
Awful. Truly awful rehash of a couple of others (Cinderella, Pretty Woman) purely as a showcase for the "talents" of some singer who was popular at the time.

The Zero Theorem
Weird. It was so very typically a Terry Giliam film, lots of weird scenery and costumes with a script and storyline that pulls you along with it desperate to find out more, and then just stops leaving you wondering what the point of it was.