peteg's blog 2003-10-09.autumn

All The President's Men

With Della and Lev on DVD, which was supposed to be a classic movie about the Watergate scandal. It annoyingly only recounted the early part of the story, fastforwarding through the escalation of the official investigation and Nixon's resignation.

Bad Boys II

With Lev. Pretty terrible.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

With Lev at his place. A tacky eighties movie featuring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage, Forrest Witaker, Eric Stoltz, ...

Lord of the Rings 3 and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

With Lev and Della at Loews at Fresh Pond Mall. The last LotR was visual spaghetti. Supposedly had "real emotion" (according to US reviewers), but seemed overblown and quite cheesy to me. Wasn't so impressed when things went all Pirates of the Caribbean, what a story hack.

Watched Priscilla for the first time on DVD afterwards. Very impressed with Guy Pearce. Quite enjoyed it.

Kill Bill Vol. 1

Matrix Revolutions

With Andy, Kyle, Marcin, Harald and Markus Hörsalen, the lecture theatre in the basement of the current CS building. I don't know if there are equivalent facilities in the new building.

The deal was this: Kyle had acquired a copy of the movie on his laptop, so we spent quite a while figuring out how to hook it all up. In the end the flashy-looking sound system sounded terrible, so terrible that Harald, Markus and Steffen stayed for only part of it. Whatever the compression format was didn't handle the action scenes very well - the sample rate dropped noticeably. What we need is semantic compression: for example, the bit where Carrie-Anne Moss pretends to cark it could've been replaced by a silent-movie style "Trinity Dies from Multiple Machine Tentacle Punctures After Much Agonising Dialogue" sign.

Finding Nemo

With Markus.

The People I Know

With Markus. A recent Al Pacino effort which could've been decent if only the editing had been competent.

Dogville

With Jan-Willem at Bioplatset. This is the least depressing Lars von Trier movie I've seen — I remember going to Breaking the Waves with Lev back in '98 or so and wondering how the hell he enjoyed it as much as he did. Dare I say Nicole Kidman does a decent job here, at least in parts... there is still some melodramatic over-acting, but perhaps that's the kind that won her the Oscar.

24 Hour Party People

With Markus. I quite enjoyed it. I reckon the writers stole some ideas from The Office for the unselfconsciously greasy manager character, obsessed by his personal integrity.

The Hunted and The Boondock Saints

With Markus. While Benicio Del Toro is a first-rate actor, he picks some really crappy movies to partake in; The Hunted was terrible. Conversely, The Boondock Saints was great; Willem Dafoe hammed it up amongst an impressive cast of Irish and wannabe Irish. The Russians, as always, got the rawest deal.

Pirates of the Caribbean

In Göteborg, in English with Swedish subtitles at Filmstaden. The ticket was about and the seats are cramped (and pre-allocated). This might be the best way of picking up the vocab... (The movie itself was pretty funny, with Johnny Depp hamming it up beautifully. Geoffrey Rush makes a good pirate... Only probs were that I couldn't make much sense of the plot, and the fight scenes were a tad predictable and mostly pointless. Great CGI, though.)

The Italian Job

At The Ritz with Dave. A steaming pile of crap, a one-idea movie.