Bad movies need to stop being made or else I am going to die. Today’s plan was to write a screed about reviews in response to Shamus‘ review lore. But first I am going to have to kill X-Men Origins: Wolverine in the face for being such a slipshod, lazy and uninteresting movie. Even as someone who doesn’t have an investment in the X-Men franchise, it wouldn’t have taken much to make this movie enjoyable. The premise of the franchise is sound: dudes have cool powers, get discriminated against because of it, and blow shit up in a variety of ways using those powers.

If you’ve seen the trailer for Wolverine you’ve seen all of the cool bits. The extent of the long awaited Gambit’s involvement is really throwing a few cards and using a sort of shock stick (I’m not a scholar; I don’t know the technical terms). What you have left after that is a total lack of momentum and a lot of smirking from Liev Schreiber. Hugh Jackman’s arms really cannot carry a movie by themselves, not even in conjunction with the unmercifully brief showing of Ryan Reynolds’ arms. It’s just not on.

Twitter is the place to go if you want a fairly instantaneous review from me, and I said all that needed to be said in 123 characters:

Wolverine was poorly shot, badly motivated and the characters seemed little more than cameos. I would recommend against it.

But I’ll write a little more and get the word out. I would suggest that if you were a kneejerk reactionary who doesn’t think about his choice of words, you could suggest that several of your favourite X-Men characters have been “raped” by this movie. If you want to say stuff like that, I’ll see you for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in a couple of months!

There’s a right way to go about making a film centring on nostalgia, and Richard Curtis’ The Boat That Rocked goes about it the right way. Casting aside the shackles of romantic comedy that have burdened him for so long, Curtis has produced a funny, largely plotless, broadly charactered examination of a period of time plainly dear to him accompanied by an excellent soundtrack.

Knowing is probably not 2009’s The Happening, but that doesn’t make it a good film. It takes a special kind of movie for me to say “but nothing’s happened” when fifty minutes remain and I’ve borne witness to a fiery plane crash and a lengthy train derailment – and all at high speeds!

Knowing is a singularly unconscious film. It’s impossible to pinpoint the genre of a film that can’t decide whether it’s a supernatural mystery, a thriller, horror or a treatise on the apocalypse. It doesn’t quite manage to be any of them and the result is not so much incoherent as it is inconsequential. If the audience (that is, me) doesn’t care about the fate of the world, let that mother burn.

Every time I attempt to do something new and exciting, I invariably get bitten in the arse. This is precisely why, in these heady times when I am inexplicably attempting a second degree and also thinking “perhaps I should make a go of actually writing as part of this writing gig”, my laptop has died.
It may be a short lived death; it may return, like Lazarus, and walk once more.

The fact of the matter is, until then, I’m living on borrowed computer, sneaking peeks from the iMac downstairs (are they still iMacs? I don’t know. The ridiculously large screened ones that have the built in hard drives), and breaking into the UNSW libraries and using their computers for an hour at a time.

If you never hear from me again, it is because I have been devoured by people who are utterly mystified by the internet. People who are within the 18-22 age group, and don’t know anything about this online world excepting Facebook and Youtube. It’s depressing, really. How can you never have heard of the Great Firewall of China, be unable to conceive of government censorship?
How, for that matter, can you be doing a Media degree and not notice that the government has, for the past little while, been trying to censor and strangle our own internet with all the grace of an ocean trawler indiscriminately taking in dolphins and narwhals along with the pedophiles, anorexics and paranoids?

For my own part, regret nothing. Have lived life, free from compromise… and step into the shadow now without complaint.
If reading this now, whether I am alive or dead, you will know truth. Have done best to make this legible. Believe it paints disturbing picture. Appreciate your recent support and hope world survives long enough for this to reach you, but tanks are in East Berlin, and writing is on wall.

You know what? I stayed up until midnight watching these Oscars and writing a good million words (or something like 2,500, I don’t know) by hand in a notebook. I can’t stay up much later transcribing them, and the scanning process will be flimsy. You’ll get them later.

That said, I was pleased with the process. Hugh Jackman was unimpressive but the ceremony wasn’t terrible, the speeches were reasonable, and the results were pretty good – especially Sean Penn! Way to upset the narrative, guys!

I can’t be the only person who thinks that Sophia Loren has become angry in her advanced years, surely?

Now everyone should go out and see Slumdog Millionaire, the little movie that could ’08.

After that, look at Mark’s Liveblog Hoedown.

I find this poster offensive.

I’ve long been a proponent of matching a trailer to a film. This has never been clearer than the last few weeks, my beloved Oscar Season. I understand that sometimes there simply aren’t enough films to match to any given film, particularly if that film is heavy. Still, some things aren’t quite excusable.

With the Oscars a mere two days away, I present the partially written ages ago …

So I’ve had a week (hah!) to think of these babies, and here’s some initial thoughts. As with every year, it’s a hodge podge mix of what I would like to happen and what I think will happen. I’ll most likely deadblog the event again this year. I mean, seriously, I care about the outcomes but the ceremony itself eventually grinds you down regardless of who the host is.
Three years ago I went to see Brokeback Mountain for a second time instead of staying home and watching Crash win. I still think I made the right decision.
(I've updated parts where necessary, and marked the parts out. Everything past Original Screenplay was written on February 21 or later)

An underline means what I think will win, a bolding means what I kind of think should win but might not be 100% certain about on a case by case basis.