Alex Doenau is an Australian film and book critic based in Sydney. His interests include video games, Pokémon, and amiibos as far as the horizon.
Fellow citizens! I come to you from a strange and wondrous place. You see, I find myself in Doenau Wine Country, tapping this to you on my Wii. It is easier than expected while still somewhat tedious.
And I’m floating in a most peculiar way …
The rules, shrunk down:
With the success of the last round at last come to rest, Spencer offers us this tasty morsel! I know the answer as she told me – but otherwise I would have no clue!
Click to enlargeMark wins, it’s The Big Tease! Round Five, ho!
The whole history of the contest!
Round 1: Mark’s opening gambit
Round 2: My hubristic retaliation
Round 3: My humbling gimme
Round 4: You’re looking at it.
Round 5: Mark’s right back at it.
As per the rules, I’ve put in a new screenshot for the Movie Screenshot Game. No one knew the last one, it seems.
Click to enlargeThis one is much more of a gimme. Now come out of the woodwork, errant readers!
Update: Success! Reader Spencer successfully suggested that the movie in question was Love Actually! She doesn’t have her own blog, so hopefully I will get an email from her soon to put up the next image.
Behold! Round 4
Continuing Mark’s Adventure, let’s play the Movie Screenshot Game of destiny! Here are the rules, unceremoniously cut and pasted from the original:
Now, let’s go with mine!
Click to enlargeDare to guess, friends. Dare to dream.
Update: No one guessed. No one dreamed. The answer was Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which has even been covered on this site before. Here’s Round IIa: a sign of my abject failure.
“Bahaha … Transformers … beheheh … More Than Meets the Eye … BWAHAHA”
Straight from your childhood, it’s Adventures in Product Placementâ„¢, starring Shia LaBeouf! Now, we all know that Transformers is more my brother’s vintage than my own, but robots is robots. By the time that I realised Transformers had hit a cinema near me, I was almost excited to be seeing such a mystical beast, flown to me on the wings of other people’s nostalgia. This morning, I read a friend’s report: that it was the best movie ever (in terms of “pure distilled awesome”).
I’m not of this opinion, myself: it’s hard not to laugh at a movie that opens with “Paramount Pictures and Dreamworks Present … in association with HASBRO”. Contrary to my beliefs that it would be a terrible film, it turned out to be not terrible. It falls mainly in my “not exactly worth it” pile, and in a dead zone where I’m not entirely certain of its demographic: children of the internets, liable to pick the movie apart? Children of today?
I think that the answer may lie in the later scenes of the movie: Transformers is made for people who want to see Jon Voight fighting robots with a shotgun. If you want to see that you’re in for a wild ride, mister.
I bought The Queen on DVD yesterday. It was an easy choice, in that the DVD was cheap and the film is, for all intents and purposes, fantastic. My Grandmother has frequently lamented that she had missed her chance to see it at the movies, and so I was going to share the love.
I looked at the back of the case when I got home, and saw that the DVD boasts no subtitles. What is wrong with some films that we can’t get freaking subtitles on them? It seems that this problem falls largely on the side of British films. Gosford Park, for instance, held no subtitles and, despite being an Altman project, was at least honorarily British.
I can lend this movie to my Grandparents but there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to fully appreciate it simply because they might not catch everything – although, given that the cast speak the Queen’s English, it would be less difficult than several other films.
I will not lie to you, though, my motives are not entirely altruistic. In my house, we watch everything with subtitles. The moment we got a TV with teletext, I turned those suckers on. My parents complained at first, but then they realised that the subtitles were useful and so they stayed. If I’m watching a DVD with my parents, then I’ll turn on the subs. A lot of the time, I’ll watch stuff by myself with subtitles. It helps me focus, and they’re just something that you’ll always expect to be there.
It angers me, therefore, when I do not see them on a DVD. Especially on something as high profile as The Queen. You won an Academy Award for Best Actress, damnit! You aren’t going to win any awards for subtitling, The Queen, and you could have had them in the bag!
In the new world order, DVDs without subtitles will be punished. The Queen will be first against the wall.
My XBox 360 appears to be taking something of a nap. A nap with its friend the Red Ring of Death. Now, I don’t think that the life span of an innocent console should be a mere eight months, but that’s all that me and my companion were gifted with. I’ve composed an ode to it:
Two of a kind
That’s what we are
And it seemed
Like we were always winning
But as our team
Is torn apart
I wish we could go
Back to the beginning
The time has come
It’s for the best I know it
Who could’ve guessed that you and I…
Somehow, some way
We’d have to say goodbye.
Somehow today…
…we have to say goodbye.
I’m choking back the tears, now. I’ll miss you, old friend.
Actually, that may have been the time that I thought I was freeing my Pikachu, but our bond could not be broken.
So the bond between myself and my 360 will not be broken! We have had too many good times together! Also 120+ hours of Oblivion, at least sixty of which were pure masochism!
To this end, and also to the fact that the mythical beast was still under warranty, I called the 360 hotline today. This call, of course, connected me to India. Across the bad connection I gave my details, and I was told that it is suspected that my power supply is at fault. The light is the wrong colour.
It will be good if I don’t need to replace the HD or the console itself, because then I would presumably lose my saves, and have to play through everything in Dead Rising again. This was a happy thought at first until I realised that I had spent an entire weekend in a room watching My Name is Earl one one half of the screen and playing Dead Rising on the other to earn the incredibly tedious Zombie Genocider achievement.
Let’s hope that my 360 lives, and does not become one of them and I have to run it over with a jeep kindly left here by a group of convicts! I will keep you posted as to my console mortality … and then weep if I have to restart Enchanted Arms if I ever want to see the ending.
I don’t care much for Transformers, myself, and have only vague memories of an incursion into a Autobot melting plant that survives from my youth. I was more of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan, always.
That said, this fellow is awesome:
Artoo-Potatoo is also pretty cool, and this is infinitely better than the fairly lame “Spider-Spud” that they’ve also got going on. “Peter Parker Potato”? Please! Only if it can brush its hair over its eyes and punch its red headed potato blackmailed ex-girlfriend in one of the most embarrassing scenes ever committed to celluloid!
I’m going to see Transformers for masochism value (and out of curiosity to see if Optimus Prime dies – everyone wants him to), and I almost bought this toy today. Key word is almost: I decided that I couldn’t really justify spending $25 on a novelty potato. The fact that such pointless artistry exists in this world warms my heart.
“Landslide” & “How to Stop an Exploding Man”
What, did people honestly expect me to write about these Heroes? When your penultimate episode is so lacklustre that you couldn’t be bothered to even watch the finale until almost a week after the fact, something is wrong.
Fortunately for Heroes, I failed to be disappointed. I yelled at the screen and felt a little angry, but it’s impossible to be disappointed when you can’t raise hackles enough to care.
Spoilers
My brother says that he walked out of Tales from Earthsea about two thirds of the way through. This is a concept that I find quite alien.
My friend Phill tends to give up on DVDs if he doesn’t like them in about ten minutes. My cousin Jonathan generally gives a movie he watches at home the chance of half of its running time to prove that it is worth his while. This seems like a decent enough deal. I have a hard enough time watching DVDs in the first place, so if I fear something won’t be worthwhile I generally won’t stick it in my player.
Yet walking out of a cinema seems somehow wrong to me. In theory, one would have spent money on a DVD as well, but it’s not the same level of commitment as going into a cinema, sitting down and then enduring a movie with an audience. If I was a walker out, I would not have endured Rampo Noir to completion. As it stands, I’m surprised I managed to consume the entirety of Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai on DVD at a friend’s house. Then, I’m a movie masochist: I’ve seen 300 twice.
What I want to know is, what kind of person walks out of a movie? Are they serial walkers? What does the movie have to do to offend them so? Does it have to suck, or does it have to simply mention sucking off? What is the mentality? The only analogous situation I can think of was the Popcorn Taxi for Fast Food Nation last year when people walked out of the Q&A session because it was getting late and Linklater was being stubborn in his boringness.
The human condition calls for all things to come to an end: can you leave a movie hanging?
Image: Google Top Ten for “Cinema Walk Out”. I don’t know either.
