Rocky Balboa

this one is the best in the series!what a way to end it!Stallone,you are God!

Saw Machete last night and it was okay. Some cool action scenes but overall too long and too much talking. Still, the sight of Tom Savini crucifying Cheech Marin in a church with Jeff Fahey looking on, Michelle Rodriguez dressed up in tribute to Christina Lindberg, Jessica Alba's godawful dialogue right through the movie and Lindsay Lohan's nun makes this is a very trashy and occasionally fun movie. Could have been 20 minutes shorter though.

Also saw Dabaang which was ridiculous and corny and nonsensical but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Fight Club

General Knowledge wrote:


Also saw Dabaang which was ridiculous and corny and nonsensical

what else where you expecting? especially with it has a duffer like Zalmaan Khan! that bitch is pretty hot though,at last someone who is not size -0 and doesnt wear her hankie as a bra and it looks like a shawl on her!LOL!

LOL. Bang on, Vikk.

Saw Dabangg and think its one of the most flatout fun films to come out of Bollywood in a while. It's a sanitised (but not too sanitised), marginally upmarket version of the films that Mithun and Dharmendra were doing through the mid-90s. The focus is principally on ass kicking action, corny dialogues and not too much on silly things like plot and drama. A very effective performance by Salman Khan who has been method acting to play this selfish brutal asshole of a character through his entire life. And a very effective performance by Arbaaz Khan who has been method acting to play an incompetent mandhbuddhi lout all his life.

Watched a couple of documentaries over the weekend. First up was North Korea: A Day in the life by Dutch filmmaker Pieter Fleury. This is supposed to be a propaganda film made with the blessings of His Holyness The All Father Of the World, Kim Jong Il. The camera follows four members of an average Joe Korean family: the husband spends his time in an English speaking class, the wife in a factory that makes suits, and the kid in kindergarten. North Korea feels like Kim Jong Il read 1984 not as a cautionary tale on the effects of totalitarianism but as a 'How To' guide on building a dictatorship. There are murals all over North Korea devoted to his magnificence, citizens sweep the areas around his statues to earn 'merit' from the government. Children in school learn that the great leader was once a child just like them! A child who once went out to play in his new boots but was so upset at seeing his poor friends in wet sneakers that he went right back home, and got himself a pair of sneakers (wet ones!). (This could also be read as an example of young Kim Jong being such a suck up that he would put himself through actual physical discomfort just so he could fit in, but that's not a possibility that's ever discussed in class). Municipal officials chastise themselves publicly for having failed the great nation when there are power failures and hint darkly about how America is being a dick to North Korea. Completely nightmarish and totally engrossing for its less than an hour long duration, this is quite a masterpiece. Fleury isn't admitting it but some of his choices in terms of music and footage clearly betray his discomfiture with this country.

Shake Hands With The Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire is a profoundly depressing documentary about Romeo Dallaire's return to Rwanda, 10 years after a genocide that he could not prevent. Dallaire was sent as a part of a UN Peace Keeping Force to Rwanda in 1994, and thanks to the world not giving a fuck about what went down in a remote part of Africa, was left watching helplessly as the Hutus killed an estimated million of the Tutsi ethnic minority. Accompanied by a camera crew, Dallaire visits several places: the site of his mission, the UN headquarters at Rwanda (where he's bizarrely enough, denied admission), the venue of some of the worst massacres, a football stadium that used to be a makeshift refugee camp. He comes across as a decent, conscientious man, racked by guilt and depression, who has no credible answer to the many people in Rwanda who want to know how and why this happened on his watch. And yet, the documentary (and Dallaire himself) focus more on the atrocity that was the genocide than his attempts at dealing with its aftermath. Which brings us to the aspect of Shake Hands With The Devil that makes it really hard viewing: archival footage of a massacre, the sheer scale of which is nauseating. One of the most powerful pieces of documentary film making I've ever seen.

Four Lions Excellent pitch black comedy about 4 wannabe Jihadis in England, 3 of them from Pakistan and one home grown white boy. The leader of the pack and his best friend head to Pakistan for a 2 week training camp for Jihadis and return to England to find out that the white boy in the group has taken over and plans to bomb a mosque so the muslims will think they're under attack and rise up as one. The humour is very bleak but I found myself giggling away through this movie and while the acting is occasionally a bit amateurish, the movie on the whole is very tight and very entertaining.

22 Bullets is a stylish French gangster movie with Jean Reno playing a retired gangster who's shot 22 times in a parking lot. He recovers, recuperates and then goes on a revenge fueled killing spree with style. what more can one ask for from the french?

General Knowledge wrote:
what more can one ask for from the french?
Fries?

Saw Murder on The Orient Express, which was a pleasant old-skool closed room (or in this case, a luxurious train) mystery with a preposterous solution. Amusing and good-looking

Meat Grinder,a rather highly regarded Thai gore flick about a noodle selling woman who serves up some very questionable meat with her noodles. It had a couple of good moments but the hype is wholly misplaced and after a point the movie becomes so plodding and melodramatic you just want it to end.

Re-watched the fun Tere Bin Laden in my endeavor to force the Diabolical Conquest main man to see this movie laying aside all his effeminate protests about not wanting to watch Hindi films.

Been watching episodes of the second season of A Touch of Frost. I like detective shows and Frost also helps by having self-contained episodes (at 100min each, they better be) which don't require you to keep track of an overarching plot.

The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes book should really be called The Inferiors of Sherlock Holmes since almost none of the stories here hold the merest candle to any decent Holmes adventure.

Re-read some of the stories from a horror anthology including such classics as The Horla, The Monkey's Paw, The Great God Pan and How Love Came to Professor Guildea.

Brooklyn's Finest Sort of like Training Day meets Crash with three cops and their individual stories connecting in the last 10 minutes. Was way too long, boring and has Ethan Hawke in it which I found out after pressing play. Was overall a remarkably annoying movie with dirty cops, undercover cops and redemption seeking cops.