The one with Michael Caine and Shirley Maclaine? That's such a good film! I love the whole concept of (spoilers in white) seeing the heist go off without a hitch..then discovering it's not actually happened yet and it all goes a bit mammeries perpendicular in reality!

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Finally saw the original Alfie the other night...

Shame on me for not catching this earlier...

Was suprised at just how much of a sh!t Alfie is... Really good film...

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Warriors, come out to play!

Between other activities last night I caught the scene in the Dirty Dozen that Sam and Greg made fun of women who cry over the movie An Affair to Remember. Lee Marvin and the soldiers pouring the gas on to the generals.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEwDmc3FI_Q

Because of Tom Hanks I crack up every time I see it even though I know I shouldn't. It WAS sad when Jim Brown was killed. Of all the prisoners he was the one who most deserved to live.

Saw a movie called 'Remains' this past weekend. A(nother) Zombie apocalypse. An ecclectic bunch of survivors in a run down Reno casino try to fight there way out with whatever comes to hand fllowing an nuclear explosion. We quite enjoyed it..clearly it didn't have a huge budget and these zombies are a bit odd. Some are fast..some shuffle..some you can go really close to without them lunging at you..some are vicious. When they can't find fresh flesh they'll eat each other or even themselves and they sleep..standing up!. It's no Day of the dead but if you like your zombie flicks it's worth a rental.

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Just watched Frozen last night...

It's about 3 people who go skiing, and take a late ski lift ride... Which shuts down half way, and then all the lights go out leaving them there for {potentially} 5 days.

Pretty good stuff...

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Warriors, come out to play!

Bit of an eclectic mixture this weekend.

First off the re-make of 'Straw Dogs'. This actually wasn't that bad. I was a bit apprehensive because the remakes of other faves of mine,'The Ladykillers' and 'The Wicker Man', both sucked donkey balls. However, as a fan of the original, I was concerned they would change too much but apart from the setting (The deep south instead of Cornwall) they pretty much stuck to the same plot exactly. I enjoyed it.
James Marsden doesn't come across as 'nerdy' as Hoffman did (just sticking a pair of Clark Kent specs on him..although to be fair in this he's a screenwriter not a mathematician) and the boney, flat chested Kate Bosworth can't hold a candle to the sexiness of Susan George. However, James Woods as 'Coach' the town's violent, beligerent, drunk was brilliant. The violent (and notorious) rape scene that Peckinpah added to his version (it wasn't in the original book) is still here but less violent and mostly played out off screen.

Second up was 'Ozombie'. I was expecting this to be a pile of cheap, badly acted pants or to be quite tongue in cheek (after all..it concerns Osama coming back as a zombie after his death). However, surprise-surprise.. it's actually not a bad zombie flick. A group of American soldiers in Afghanastan are up against insurgents who have been turned into zombies by a chemical weapon devised by The Taliban. Some are prisoners who have been used as guinea pigs but some have volunteered seeing it as 'Doing Allah's Will' (as pointed out in the film "What better than a suicide bomber who can kill over and over again?"). The squad come across an American woman who has come out to Afghanistan to find her brother. He's a NYFD member who, on 9/11, was at home sick and his whole team were killed when the WTC collapsed. He's heard a rumour (and read online..so it must be true) that Bin Laden is actually still alive and has come to Afghanistan to kill him once and for all. They team up to fight insurgents both alive and dead. It's actually much better than the title and premise would have you believe.


Thirdly..'Red Riding Hood'. Again..I was expecting something pretty crap but it redeemed itself somewhat. This re-working of the fairy tale tells of a medieval village terrorised by a werewolf. Enter Gary Oldman (mit yet anuzzer foreign agzent and chewing da zeenery, yah?) as Soloman, a priest-cum-witchfinder-cum werewolf slayer who informs the villagers that the werewolf is one of their own and he intends to lock down the village and slay said beastie. However there is also a bit of a sloppy love story between the teenage 'red riding hood' ('Valerie' played by Amanda Seyfried) and her two suitors ,Cesair,(a R-Patz clone) the orphaned woodcutter she loves and Henry (the blacksmith she's been betrothed to by her parents). If it all seems a bit 'Twilight' it may be because this was directed by Catherine Hardwicke who directed the first Twilight film.
I hardly recognised Julie Christie as The Grandmother!


Finally 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' a CG animation aimed at kids that was just a lot of fun after several hours of rape and violence.

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Straw Dogs was a decent remake, it didn't have the impact of the first one and was a hell of a lot tamer, but it was pretty entertaining...

I've been introducing my kids to some of my childhood movies recently. We've done Karate Kid, Karate Kid II, Kindergarten Cop and The Goonies...it's so much fun reliving the first time viewing of these movies through the little ones and watching them get so into the films...

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I bet you never thought about your kids watching the same movie when you were young. I know I never did.

My fiancee watched Die Hard for the first time with me... last night we started Die Hard 2, but didn't finish.
We watched The Hunger Games last wknd. While it wasn't terrible, it wasn't awesome either. I'd say if you catch it on tv some day and are bored, watch it... but don't rent it unless you're a fan of the book (which I read half of and stopped reading because I didn't care for it).

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With my girlfriend..actually come to think of it..'girlfriend' is a bit of a misnomer as we clocked up 10 years together last Friday. perhaps 'partner' would be more accurate. Any way..she's 15 years my junior so quite often when these remakes come around she's never seen the original and so has no point of reference or comparison so often she we like a film more than I did as I can't help but compare it to the original. She really liked the remake of Frightnight..and she enjoyed Straw Dogs more than I thought she would.

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