I know I only did the last one of these this morning, but I’m so behind everyone else on this and I had a spare few minutes on my lunch break, so here’s another one today.
“If I’m Not Back In 10 Minutes, Call the Pope!”
The title pretty much says it all. Definately the most obscure film I’ve ever seen, shown to me at the Scifi Society at uni and we had an interesting time watching it. Be warned though. It’s really, really bad.
This low-budget Canadian psychological thriller/horror film made almost entirely on a single set with different lighting is really great. Included in the cast of at the time unknown actors are Nicole DeBoer who went on to play Ezri Dax in Deep Space Nine and David Hewlett who is now known to Stargate fans as Rodney McKay.
Day 25 has been delayed for reasons that are unlikely to become apparent at the moment. It will appear in the next few days.
Flags of our Fathers is a fantastic film, but it’s lesser known accompaniment is even better. It is, in my opinion, Clint Eastwood’s best achievement as Director. This brilliant film shows the horrors of the battle for the island of Iwo Jima from the point of view of the Japanese. Very interesting to see a war film from an unusual side. Despite the American director, this is very much a Japanese film.
Gerry Anderson’s collection of Supermarionation series were my absolute favourite shows growing up and this was their first foray onto the big screen. Fantastic fun. I mean just look at all the explosions just in the trailer!
We return to normal service on the blog today.
Selected by the BFI as the greatest British film of the 20th Century, this Carol Reed film really deserves the title. Set in Vienna in the ruined post-war period when the black market thrived, an American called Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) arrives to meet his friend Harry Lime who had offered him a job, only to discover that he had been killed in a car accident the day before. As Martins tries to find out what happened he realises that some of the details do not match up and with the help, and sometimes hinderance of Major Calloway (fantastic performance by Trevor Howard), the local Royal Military Police commander, he investigates.
Also worth mentioning is the amazing and unique soundtrack played entirely by Anton Karas on the Zither.
Once again, this film is out of copyright so available in it’s entirety on youtube for free: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un26BBFQ5_M
But if you don’t have time for the whole film, here’s The Opening Theme and First Scene which introduces the setting:
This afternoon I had my first experience of how nasty and rude some people on twitter (certainly no-one I follow) can be sometimes if they don’t agree with you, even people in positions of responsibility with thousands of followers.
I got a call from my fiancée Lizzie while I was out at lunch today and during the conversation she mentioned that she’d seen the cover for this month’s Doctor Who Magazine when their twitter account had been retweeted by someone she follows and that she was annoyed that she’d been spoiled by it. DWM (@DWMtweets on twitter) use their latest magazine cover as their twitter picture and this latest cover contains on it spoilers for the fourth episode of this current series of Doctor Who.
Granted the only spoiler text on the cover was the title of the said episode but the picture that accompanied it showed significant information about the characters in that episode that you wouldn’t get just from the title of the episode. In fact, the title of the episode would suggest other characters entirely based on information previously given in the series.
Anyway, I have no particular problem with minor spoilers, but I know quite a few people who do so I avoid passing on those spoilers that I know and I follow basic internet-spoiler etiquette which is that spoilers should always come with a warning and have to be clicked through to or highlighted or similar. Likewise I don’t think that magazines should print spoilers on the cover where it can be seen by anyone browsing a newsagent. Spoilers should come with warnings and only inside the magazine. One of the reasons I love SFX magazine is that spoilers for everything are always well marked so I can avoid them when I want to.
This was also not the first time DWM had printed spoilers on the cover. In just the previous issue (#433) they’d printed a very big spoiler on the cover of the magazine regarding the season premier episode so I thought I was pretty justified in tweeting the following
“Doctor Who Magazine (@dwmtweets) do love to print spoilers on their front cover don’t they? Not very responsible.”
Not much happened, as is usual when I tweet, but after about 40 minutes I got my tweet re-tweeted by Tom Spilsbury (@tomspilsbury) the chief editor of DWM:
“IT’S THE TITLE! RT @jacobnorton DWM (@dwmtweets) do love to print spoilers on their front cover don’t they? Not very responsible.”
I tweeted back politely, attempting to explain my point and while I was doing so I started getting my @mentions column filling up with supporters of Mr. Spilsbury telling me I was ‘stupid’ and and an ‘Idiot’ and that they were sorry that he had ‘to put up with this kind of idiocy’ from fans. After attempting to explain my point for a while and recieving this sarcastic and rude response:
“Would you prefer we print a load of blank pages every month? WOULD YOU?!”
I decided to give up. It amazes me how someone who is a professional in a probably quite highly paid job can’t take a little criticism without shouting at me over twitter and rallying all his fans to attack me for it. Just because I have a difference of opinion to him doesn’t mean that I deserve to be belittled. It’s not as if I was engaged in a persistent campaign against DWM or anything. He’s an editor of a national magazine and has to be prepared for people to disagree with him on things occasionally. If he wanted to engage me in dialogue, a reply to me rather than a retweet that showed my comment to all his followers would have been far more appropriate.
About half an hour after the tweet attack had stopped, Mr. Spilsbury actually tweeted an apology at me and gave some decent points in his defence for the magazine cover. If that had been his initial tweet to me, we might have been able to have an intelligent conversation about it, but it was not to be.
Today I was attacked, albeit digitally, by a decent number of people for my opinion because it differed from theirs, that this can go on among adults in the modern day astounds me. I don’t want to attempt to retaliate or anything, that would be sinking to their level. They’re really not worth me getting angry about, but I certainly won’t be buying any copies of Doctor Who Magazine during Spilsbury’s tenure as editor.
Happy Star Wars Day everyone! May the fourth be with you!
Wes Craven’s masterpiece is my favourite Horror film. It’s great fun and a brilliant spoof on the horror genre while still being genuinely terrifying.
I’ve been away in the Lake District for the long weekend, staying half way up a mountain with no mains electricity or mobile phone signal so I hope you’ll forgive my lack of blogging the last few days.
Indiana Jones is my favourite fantasy film series and Last Crusade is the best of them as far as I’m concerned. It’s got Sir Sean Connery as Henry Jones Senior and John Rhys Davis’s character Sallah is one of the best things about the series. Other than that you have evil Nazis, tank chase, a zeppelin and the greatest quest ever.
Ok. This is stretching it a bit, but the only proper romantic film I really like, I already chose for Day 14. They did say this film was a RomComZom (Romantic Comedy…. with Zombies).
Fantastic action film. Ed Harris brilliantly plays a rogue US Marine General who takes hostages on Alcatraz island in San Fransisco Bay while pointing poison gas missiles at the city. The FBI director (the late great John Spencer) brings in their top chemical weapons expert Stanley Goodspeed (Nic Cage) and the only man to ever have escaped from Alcatraz, John Mason (Sir Sean Connery) to go along with a Navy SEAL team to release the hostages and secure the missiles. Action brilliance ensues. This is probably my favourite Cage performance and Sir Sean excels as an aged James Bond well. With three such strong leads, this film could scarcely put a foot wrong and it doesn’t.
I'm a big Star Trek and other Scifi fan from London, United Kingdom. I'm also a Scout Leader, IT Technician and Podcast fan.
