Author: Alex Doenau

August was a month where I made the pilgrimage to the end of Oxford Street not once, but twice! It therefore yielded some very fine movies indeed. It is around this point that I look at one of my very, very distant friends who has claimed that 2007 yielded less than six good films, and at my own experiences thus far, and at the more-than-one film critics (the one being Roger Ebert!) who have claimed that 2007 was a great year for film – and come to the conclusion that this friend of mine was talking out of his arse.
2007 rocked hardcore!

Is Will Smith gonna have to choke a bitch?

Something must be wrong with me. I didn’t find I Am Legend to be a bad movie. Having done some further research it has almost nothing to do with its source material, but it’s not a terrible movie by itself. I get the impression that promotional materials in Australia didn’t tell anyone what it was about beforehand, save for Will Smith being alone.
Fortunately, Will Smith can carry a movie.

Also I can pick out a film’s motif straight up! Especially when it’s totally unsubtle as it is here.

Time got away from me again, as it always does. I managed to keep my resolution last year, so this year I think I’ll follow up that success!

Next year I resolve to make a sitcom about a family of dinosaurs!

Oh, wait.

Anyway, rather than spend New Year’s Eve typing, as I vaguely recall doing last year even as I was in attendance at the party that ended spectacularly with everyone vomiting in the backyard while I slept way too hot upstairs, and then me watching The Incredibles with people vainly questing for mid-morning sobriety … I decided I’d just worry about it next year.
I’m sure that you can wait for my director’s cut, now including Spider-Man 3 for the month of May! Hint: it sucked. Also October featured a grand total of two movies, and only one of them was any good, and I saw it in September as well.

So I’ll see you all next year, and may you stay on the right side of alcohol, the law, and your good lady, or man, but not your lover’s fursona, because even I have my limits.

“Come back. Come back to me.”

Sometimes I forget it but, at base, I love movies. I also love books, and I don’t always think that the two forms can translate effectively. I have not read Atonement, but I feel that so many parts of its filmic adaptation are the perfect synthesis of sound and image that I simply cannot imagine it being rendered into anything so mundane as words.
I don’t think that this is the greatest movie ever, nor is it absolutely perfect, but it has so many tiny moments of wonder that one cannot help but be enamoured of it.

Despite having a trailer that revealed nearly nothing of its content, Atonement has drawn me in from the very beginning of its campaign for my heart. Having just seen the US trailer, it gives rather too much away, but the one that we used over here: the music of the mysterious trailer was what captivated me. Strangely enough, the score doesn’t quite replicate that feeling in the movie itself, but rather substitutes it with many other grand things.

What was I doing in May this year? I did not realise the nature of the drought until I consulted the diary. Talk about your mixed bag month, too! Some of it was left field, but not all of it was good.

Here’s my impression of what happened in April 2007:

Alex:Hey, April 2007! Impress me!
April 2007: Okay! Bawitaba, ba doo da dee diddy diddy …
Alex: What the fuck?
April 2007: I dunno, it played well in the frats!

Around this time you, and by you I mean me, start to realise that a lot of the highlights of my year in film were actually made in 2006. I’m not sure if I said it last year, but the “Twelve Months of Movies” feature is about my twelve months of movies, so that’s my work around, my excuse, and I’m sticking to it. So February had some grand stuff in it, refugees though they may have been.