Author: Mosh

Movie review – Shelter

I had most of Saturday to kill and managed to get hold of Tracey who also has a CineWorld card. The next film starting was Shelter so off we went.

Plot-in-a-nutshell: A psychologist encounters a man with multiple personalities, only the number of personalities seems to be increasing… and including people she knows.

I had no preconceptions about Shelter at all as I’d not even seen a trailer as far as I could recall. A quick check on the website said it was a psychological thriller which was fine. As an aside I was ridiculously tired when I went to the cinema so probably wasn’t mentally fired up for watching two hours of film, but never mind. I didn’t realise how tired until Tracey nudged me and said “You were snoring”. Don’t take this as comment on the film which was actually alright.

Julianne Moore plays Cara, a single mother after her husband was killed a year or so earlier. I last saw Moore in the rather enjoyable Chloe and she’s just as good in this although it’s not quite as good a film. Her father introduces her to Adam (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a man who seems to have a fair few identities kicking around in his head.

As she investigates these personalities, she finds there seems to be something linking them – but to tell you more would be spoiling the story.

There’s a bit of a mix of old-style horror, thriller and religious subtexts. Indeed, the film blurb focusses on the religious aspect and this does actually have a bearing on a plot point later on in the story.

While Moore is good, Meyers is excellent given the number of roles he’s actually playing as Adam’s personality expands and fractures over the course of the film.

It does get a little hokey and the very final twist is almost expected rather than being a shock. It’s still creepy though!

The fact that I only nodded off very briefly despite being so exhausted says a lot for Shelter. It isn’t a classic – Silence of the Lambs is a better thriller and Drag Me To Hell a better horror to grasp at two movies along vaguely similar lines. It does run a little too long but it’s entertaining enough and doesn’t labour its points.

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It’s a bomb! No… a shoe. No… a ciggie.

No-Smoking Logo
Danger - smoking can lead to (alleged) terrorism

Good grief. the news is alarmist these days. There were reports of a Quatari diplomat trying to down an aeroplane using a shoe bomb during the early hours of this morning. After an hour or so the real story comes out – he was trying to have a crafty smoke in the toilets and – having immunity – won’t face any charges.

Apparently he was “tackled by air marshals” which obviously means he was a terrorist. I can see how this one panned out. Someone smelled the smoke, had a word with the stewardess and he was approached or warned. It’s likely he kicked up a fuss – perhaps refusing to put it out, or simply being arsey. There will have been an air marshal on board who will have seen the commotion and a passenger in some state of annoyance.

Said marshal will have announced who he was loudly enough for other passengers to know he was involved. He may have had to grapple with the passenger to calm him down.

So our scene is a recognised air marshal confronting a man. A coloured man. Perhaps even a coloured man wearing traditional Middle East dress (I’ve not heard what the diplomat was wearing). These being the paranoid days they are and this flight being within the US the obvious conclusion to jump to – the man is a Muslim and a terrorist.

I wonder how many of the “witnesses” who came off the plane told reporters they’d “seen” the man trying to set fire to his shoelaces?

Much as I hate smoking and smokers who assume the rules don’t apply to them it is a bit of a jump from “sly ciggie” to “shoe bomber”. I’m annoyed this guy’s been released without charge – I assume due to diplomatic immunity – when he has committed a crime. However, I also think it’s a disgrace that as soon as a person from an Arabic country causes a kerfuffle on an aeroplane, witnesses’ instinct is to label him a terrorist with such conviction it makes it into the news.

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Clash of the Titans

Clash of the Titans 1440x900 Wallpaper
Clash of the Titans

“But you are not just a man.”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Perseus (Sam Worthington) is rescued from the sea as a baby by a fisherman, grows up to find out he’s the son of Zeus and has to save the world.

I settled on the 2D version of Clash of the Titans as the film times suited better. This is a hugely effects-based film, and you can spot the sections where the 3D would “enhance” things. Most of them look rather forced. Actually, most of the film is rather forced.

I’ll be fair – I saw the film at a 7pm showing having had four hours’ sleep, getting to bed at 7am that morning. This may not have helped, but my cine-going companion shared almost all of my views and she’d had a decent night’s kip. Both of us summed it up at the end with “Hmmm” and a shrug. Not what you want from an explosive action epic.

I think we’re hitting an problem with films made up predominantly of special effects. We’ve seen it all before, quite often in the trailers. The one for Clash shows the giant scorpions and the Kraken – the huge beastie from the climax. They’re impressively done… but they just don’t seem “special”. I mean, how many films have you seen over the last year with some huge CGI monster in it? I’ve seen loads.

While the effects are very well done, the overall impression of the film is pretty scrappy. I don’t know whether it’s deliberate but the giant scorpion battle scene is reminiscent of the old Harryhausen epics in more than just idea. While the monsters are somewhat better animated than the old stop-motion ones, they don’t seem to fit on the screen properly, seeming a bit washed out. I seem to remember the old chroma key techniques giving the same unwanted effect.

As has been pointed out in a load of other reviews, this is a film that was crying out for a remake with modern technology. I love the original, but it’s fair to say the animated monsters are a little dated. However, it’s far better scripted and less ostentatious than this modern effort. One bit that really tipped me against the new one was a near-throwaway moment. Perseus picks up a mechanical owl from a box and asks what it is. He’s told to just leave it. To me, that seemed more of a slap in the face to Harryhausen’s original than a homage.

Much as you can say it looks better than the 1981 film, it simply isn’t a better piece of entertainment. I think a lot of it boils down to it being far too simple. They’ve taken a masterpiece of theatre – such that the original was – and turned it into a low-brow, effect-heavy show reel.

The gods look incredibly gay (PC police – sod off) with their over-shiny armour. Except Hades who, in fairness, has some awesome effects related to his appearance – much as the same character did in the recent Percy Jackson film. Liam Neeson manages to utter a wonderfully commanding “Release the Kraken!” but otherwise, the dialogue just isn’t up to much.

I’ll finish with some dialogue from the end of the original. Theatrical? Perhaps. But isn’t that how gods should be? There is simply nothing in this updated version to compare. For more, check out the IMDB quotes page for the 1981 film. Gorgeous prose.

Zeus: Perseus has won. My son has triumphed.

Hera: A fortunate young man.

Zeus: Fortune is ally to the brave.

Thetis: What a dangerous precedent. What if there more heroes like him? What if courage and imagination became everyday mortal qualities? What will become of us?

Zeus: We would no longer be needed. But, for the moment, there is sufficient cowardice, sloth and mendacity down there on Earth to last forever.

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iPad – WOW! [note sarcasm]

Apple iPad
Not. Interested.

No, I’ve not got an iPad. No, I’m not getting an iPad. I just wish people who’d bought them would shut the hell up about it.

Since yesterday when they were released I’ve been inundated with tweets of “This is my first tweet from my new iPad” and “I can tweet with my iPad!”. TweetDeck went so far as to retweet what seemed like every one of these so that even idiots I didn’t know infiltrated my Twitter feed.

Then we’re getting all the news items about “look – our application works on the iPad! Isn’t it great?” No. It isn’t. Regardless of what I think of the iPad (not a lot), it’s a tool for a job and the programs distributed are supposed to work on it. So why the elation about seeing them running? When Acer release a new range of laptops, do software houses make a big deal that their latest utility runs on it? No, of course not.

One post I found amusing (sorry, I’ve lost the link) was a web site detailing the top five addons for the iPad. Number one was a keyboard ($70). Then there was a dongle for letting you connect your camera ($30).  The others were equally inane and due to one major issue – the iPad has sucky connectivity.

Look, even my mobile phone has a USB socket and not a proprietary one. As does every digital camera I’ve ever owned. And my PSP. Why does the iPad have to be different? In a word: *kerching*. If you want to connect any device to the iPad, you have to fork out money to Apple to buy another cable so that you can do so. With USB being an established standard there is simply no other reason for this.

So iPad users – please, just shut up. I don’t care how wonderful TweetDeck looks on your new expensive semi-laptop. Fact is, you can’t multitask on it so you’re stuck with one app at a time anyway. Sure, you’ve got a new GMail layout… but the rest of us can get that with a simple browser hack anyway.

The iPad is just a novelty. A toy. One with an inbuilt reputation for having a propensity for breaking down as highlighted by Apple’s policy of shipping you a new one for “only” $99 when/if the battery fails. The fact that complete battery failure will prevent you from rescuing any data on your dead pad is beside the point. Oh, and don’t forget if you want to back your data up to a USB device you’ll need to have purchased a connector cable as mentioned above.

People ask why I don’t like Apple. I think their stuff is sleek and attractive. I think they put a lot of effort into making it make all the right “ping” noises and the display seem clear and intuitive. But underneath all the gloss is a company hell-bent on trapping you into their own system in a way that Microsoft (to name one large competing example) genuinely doesn’t.

What’s almost funny is that all these people who’ve spent $500 on the iPad with all its known limitations will undoubtedly pass it on to their kids (if the battery’s not died) in a few months when the inevitable replacement arrived – with all the stuff that should have been on the original one.

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