3D tax

I like going to the cinema, but aspects of it do piss me off.

As you may have worked out by now I live in the lovely valleys town of Merthyr Tydfil, sadly all we have is a Vue. We used to have nothing, and for years so it's progress and everything, but we did get stuck with the lesser of the chains. Always expensive, limited showings, only the most mainstream of films and not always at their best (no 3D showing, films only there for a few days, you know the kind of thing.)

But there are things I don't understand, there are possibly perfectly good reasons but what they are... not forthcoming. The main one is the couple of quid they chuck on the (already nearly £8) price for 3D films. I went to see The Hobbit this weekend with the good wife and £20 of tickets for the bog standard seating (if we'd wanted the nice seats it'd be the same price to get into the Odeon IMAX in Cardiff Bay) makes cinema going prohibitive. Plus generally the effect isn't worth it, in this instance it looked nice on a few landscape shots and looking into the Goblin city (no spoiler warnings, the book's been out long enough) but for the film as a whole, I could have done without it.

Do they need special projectors? (I assume so) Does it cost for to put on? Are we paying for those poxy glasses they demand back at the end? I've never seen a film which I initially saw in 3D back in normal 2D and thought... missed that 3rd dimension there. That includes Avatar and Avengers! As a gimmick its fine, as it was in the 70s and the 40s (I think) but it died then and may do so now.

If I wanted to take the full set of sprogs and wife... £8 extra. That's a whole extra person! On release weekend that cinema was 1/3 full at most. I'd imagine cost would be a factor. People wonder why films like Dredd 3D fail, the fault may be as much with the cinemas themselves as with the films.

People weigh up the excessive cost of going and the majority of the time things like cinema lose.

Oh and why couldn't we get an Odeon or a Cineworld... Sad face.

The film itself was good, didn't think it was great. Acting was OK, Freeman was good as Bilbo and it was good to see Sylvester McCoy in work but I found James Nesbitt highly annoying, but then again I always do. The first and last hours were very good but the middle kind of sauntered along waiting for something to happen. It's worth a watch but the 3D isn't a deal breaker.

Bits felt padded out/unnecessary and this didn't always work, it brings me back to other moans about a 300 page book being stretched beyond what is healthy.

I'll be watching the next two but I'm struggling to see how they'll fill 6 more hours!

£20 worth... Nah.

American Pie: Reunion

From previous posts, you may know that I dislike it when people bleed a franchise for everything it's worth, and the American Pie franchise has seen it's fair of bleeding. Namely Band Camp, Naked Mile, Beta House and Book of Love (Shame on you Eugene Levy, even though he apparently did the DVD ones on the cheap).

So excuse me if I was a little blasé when it came to American Reunion, or the 65 other slight variations on that title. It looked generally more of the same as the first 3 (and maybe the DVD ones, I haven't seen anything bar the first), same characters, same setting etc, could work, may not... It was also billed as the 4th in the series, excommunicating the straight to DVD stuff. Ha!

But it looked worth watching, purely for an element of nostalgia, and the wife wanted to see it too so bingo, we're off.

                  

Some of it felt tired (hmm I wonder if Jim'll end up in an awkward situation... oh yeah, there he goes) and to be fair the film was exactly what you'd expect, almost frame for frame. Some of it felt... wrong (no spoilers). However that isn't necessarily an entire negative, as it was easy and familiar to watch and enjoyable throughout. But please don't make any more.

Oh and why was Oz not mentioned in the 3rd film at all, not even a breath, he vaguely mentions it here but still...

Oh and there were tits, of course there were tits it's american pie. Oh and Jason Biggs cock (or stunt plastic variation). No pie though... but well worth seeing.

Avengers

I like my superhero films, and while my first loyalty will always be to DC (mainly due to Batman being my fav superhero by a distance), I've got time for Marvel even though some of the films have hit n miss.

There has been years of build up to The Avengers (or Avengers Assemble if you will as us Brits are too thick to distinguish between it and the horrific 1998 The Avengers or indeed the 60's TV series) in the form of the previously mentioned films, Thor, Captain America, 2 Iron Men and one of the Hulks (I think the first one didn't count) and that mean allot of money spent on it so far, and indeed allot of money taken! This thing had to be good.

They got Joss Whedon to write/direct, always a good sign (even if it has seemingly delayed/killed Dr Horrible 2) got the cast back from the set of earlier films (except Ed Norton, replaced with Mark Ruffalo who was much better anyway) all was set. I paid my rough-value-of-a-kidney for my 3D tickets and myself and the wife ventured onwards.

2 and a bit hours later... result, awesome film!

The whole was greater than the sum of it's parts by some distance, the dynamic between the characters (particularly Cap and Tony Stark) was excellent, it has plenty of action, more humour than the last 3 Police Academy films combined. Joss rarely lets down with a script... ahem and he hasn't here. The acting was excellent, it contains Samuel L. That's always an endorsement (I've had it with these motherfuckin' Avengers on this motherfuckin' helicarrier), Downey Jr if anything was even more smarmy and arrogant here than in his own films, Ruffalo should have the part regularly from here on in, Hemsworth was good, better than he was in Home and Away anyway, Jeremy Renner was excellent as Hawkeye and Evans was... the same. Combine that with Hiddlestone being an excellent antagonist and you're on to a winner.

I rarely think films need 3D but to be fair while there were cheap stuff-blowing-up-at-the-screen shots, most of it was just for effect and actually helped the action sequenced. Supporting the claim it wasn't shot in 3D, but was changed in production. Although that still makes me question where the cheap shots came from, it must've been in the back of Joss' mind at least.

The ending implied sequel and I've no doubt there will be. There's already an Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 confirmed (wow they didn't get killed in the film then, of course they didn't, it's Disney) and I hope there will be. I'm even looking forward to Iron Man 3 a bit, Thor 2 not so much.

No plot spoilers in here, it's not even out over in North America yet (lol) but it's a really good film I'm immensely looking forward to owning the Blu-Ray of (crimbo maybe?).

I'd still rather a justice League film, yes their name is awful, but they have Batman!

Go watch!

Amazon reviews

From time to time, and on a massive total of 32 occasions, I have written reviews for a website some of you may have heard of... amazon.co.uk. I do it for the same reason I write this, none in particular, but it's a nice diversion every now and again and with a bit of luck, the stuff I write does occasionally help somebody decide whether something is worth buying. The whole process is quite basic, but the weird part of it is their rating system.

Well not so much the system itself, but maybe some of the users.

Amazon works on a 'Was this helpful? yes/no' type scenario. But I get the impression a minority, but a vocal minority, of users read this is 'Do you agree? Yes/No', and as a result I do sometimes feel reviews are marked as unhelpful for not giving a popular item 5 stars. Also there's also some cases where people review an item, then mark the other reviews of the same item down, to hopefully push theirs up to the featured review. The Internet is a reasonably twisted place for self promotion.

However most reviews don't get any votes at all, I've only ever received 52 votes over my 32 reviews (40-12, 77% helpful, which is quite shit).

I honestly think this isn't the best way of running a rating system, especially if you're going to run some kind of league table off it to introduce competition. Why have a no button at all? Yes or ignore would be fine and remove the possibility of bitching. Or maybe require some kind of reason or feedback to go along with a negative vote? If people have to back it up...

But hey I'm sure the amazon dudes know what they're doing.

Well this morning I went up 100 or so places to crack the top 10,000 reviewers for the 2nd time (someone marked a review down straight away last time, so I dropped again) at 9,955th. This means nothing of course and I'll probably drop straight back out tomorrow, but for now I have a picture visible and everything. If anyone's interested here's a link to my 'public profile' but I'd imagine after making it this far, you're sick of my attempted wit and typos already:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pdp/profile/A3SIES8A01NZAN?ie=UTF8&ref_=ya__56

Off topic, well kind of... kindle is amazon, there was just a guy getting off the train, reading his kindle intensely, but the screen saver was on, I could see it from here. It was the picture of John Steinbeck.  Some people are weird.

Battle: Los Angeles and How To Lose Friends & Alienate People

Over the last couple of nights I've been flexing my blu-ray muscles and have rented a couple of films I quite wanted to see ion the cinema but me 'n' the wife (got used to saying that now, it just kinda rolls off!) never got round too it.

Thanks to a few (rapidly expiring) blockbuster vouchers we have from when we bought the player we went down and picked up, Battle: Los Angeles and How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, two slightly different films no doubt.

Well first up was Battle: Los Angeles.

I quite like my alien invasion sci-fi films (shocking I know), Independence Day is overly cheesy but remains a favourite to this day, I even quite liked the Tom Cruise War of the Worlds... sorry. I was expecting a cliché ridden, over the top, 'Go America!' film, with minimal character development and stuff blowing up all over the place, ending with a initial victory for mankind but looked like it would result in overall glory.

Got what I was expecting.

It's by no means a bad film, the predictable plot and the flag waving patriotism are hallmarks of a bad film no doubt, but I didn't go in thinking it was going to get many screenwriters guild nominations. After a bit of a slow start, which set up many of the clichés from the outset (1 guy close to retiring, 1 guy's wife having a baby so fighting to protect it etc) it is action packed, the constant action to action movement with the narrative done in the lulls was very video game in it's style, shame then the game of the film, as with so many film tie ins, sucked ass.

The acting was very standard for the genre, I'm pretty sure Aaron Eckhart's jaw has never been so square for so long ever before, and (unless there's a sequel of course) wont be ever again. But overall I think the film worked on most of the levels it went after, stuff blew up, mankind started to win, a good time was had by all. I've made it sound like a very by-the-numbers 3 star film, and yes I think that's fair enough and sometimes that's all you want from a film.

Second, and on the following night, was a British film, ropey territory for a start, set in America How To Lose Friends & Alienate People.

For which I didn't really know what my expectations were. I'd wanted to see it purely as Simon Pegg was the lead and he's usually pretty good, but had never got round to it. From the box office (quite a heavy loss) I wasn't the only one.

Turn out this film was pretty good. I wasn't aware of the support cast, but to be fair once they were on screen they were mostly good, Megan Fox (who was awful, but it suited this part), Kirstin Dunst, Jeff Bridges, Gillian Anderson, Danny Huston, Bill Patterson, even 2 of the 3 leads from the IT Crowd, Miriam Margoyle and James Cordon were in it.

It was mildly funny where necessary, I didn't think all the slapstick was really required, but it kept the film moving along. It got quite predictable towards the end when it was always easy to see who would end up as the love interest, but it was a good watch. Pegg was very good, Dunst was good as she tends to be in a more supporting role (E.g. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Bridges was a little subdued but was funny on a number of occasions.

Bonus - no game to slate, it'd be awful anyway, just assume.

Battle: Los Angeles took better advantage of the blu-ray looking better, but then it's an sci-fi slash action film not a comedy, it would!

Of the two, it's hard to compare, but if it came down to watching one or the other again, I'd go for How to Lose Friends. It just worked better as a story, as it actually had a concrete not 100% predictable one. Go watch, if enough people do, it may one day break even!