www.lewiz.org

I finally sat down to watch Match Point last night.

It’s been sat around unwatched for quite a while now, I had it figured as a fairly standard sport comedy film, but it’s far from that.

The first Woody Allen film I’ve ever seen, it will serve me as a good introduction to his films… if they hold their own against this film.

The film revolves around Chris Wilton, a retired tennis-pro turned instructor, who uses his charms to work his way into the upper echelons of society.  He has the house, the wife, the job… but ultimately he becomes involved with his friend’s fiancée, Nola Rice [Scarlett Johansson].

Over at IMDb it has a 7.8/10 rating, which is pretty good for any film, but really, I think this deserved a higher rating… I thought I knew what was going on all the way through, but I quickly found out I was way off the mark (not necessarily a difficult thing to achieve).

Definitely worth a watch.

Just been skipping through a 720p Kill Bill Vol.1 rip and I spotted that the scene where The Bride is checking out Hatori Hanzo’s swords uses the same music as Lily.

Awesome.

I’ve just finished off watching one of the awesome films kicking around on my DVD shelf thing.

Lily is a fine example of a film with a non-linear storyline.  These days quite a few films seem to be done in this way, but in many cases the result adds unnecessary confusion to the whole thing.  Now, Lily is certainly confusing… this is partly because whenever I watch Asian films I tend to have just figured out who is who towards the end… but in a dreamy way.  I don’t know, maybe Iwai wanted us to feel puzzled and confused like the kids in the film.

Like many good films, watching it isn’t always easy.  I’ve found that I enjoy films like this by watching them bit-by-bit.  A few years ago I’d have scorned at anybody who suggested this, but now I think it really is the way to go.

As before, the DVD is on my shelf if you want to borrow it :)

The last and only Tarkovsky film I saw was the epic Andrey Rublyov from 1969.  Vlad and tumbled down to the Cornerhouse to see this one, and of all the films I’ve seen, good and bad, I believe this may be the most memorable.

I probably wrote a blog entry about it at the time.

I now wake to discover that Amazon is recommending me Tarkovsky’s Mirror from 1974 (based on my rating for Bergman’s The Seventh Seal).  With past experience in mind, I am unsure what to do.

For the second installment of the “What’s on my…” series, we’ll be discussion what stuff has been showing up on my right-hand monitor over the past couple of days.

Generally I use the right-hand monior for displaying chat, terminal windows and the like. Here’s a screenshot of my desktop:

In addition to this, I use the right-hand monitor for watching TV series, films, etc.  This is the topic of this post.

I’ve just finished watching episode 14 of the new US TV series Heroes.  This latest episode was called “Distractions”.

Heroes is without doubt the most amazing TV series that has ever been.  I’m a big fan of stuff like Lost, Prison Break, The X-Files, yadda yadda yadda.  But Heroes is just mind-blowing.  This last episode was no different.

I’ve discovered H264, which my computer cannot decode properly.  This results in slightly wonky audio and a less-than-perfect image… but overall it still knocks HD XviD out of the water.  Maybe one day soon nVidia will release some Linux drivers for their PureVideo hardware acceleration stuff.  Then things will seriously kick ass.

This evening I also enjoyed two episodes of South Park on my right-hand monitor.  They were the first two episodes of series eight… I particularly enjoyed the Japanese subtitles for episode one, which was where Cartman, Kenny, Kyle and Stan had purchased themselves some authentic ninja weapons from the market.

The last film I had the pleasure of watching was The Last Emperor, which has a fair number of Academy Awards wins, including Best Picture.  It follows the life of the last Chinese emperor and offers some interesting insights to the modern history of China.  In my opinion it also provides an impressive argument against Communism.  Well worth a watch.

That’s it from the “What’s on my…” series for now!

Say what?

Last night we headed to the funky English-subtitled cinema in the Isetan department store in Shanghai.  I couldn’t give any more precise directions if I wanted… I’ve just got no idea where we were :)

The film we went to watch was the new Zhang Yimou film: Curse of the Golden Flower.

The poster didn’t inspire quite the same enthusiasm his previous films, House of Flying Daggers, Hero and Raise the Red Lantern.  Zhang Yimou’s later films have all been truly stunning and packed full of incredible action choreography… this film was similar, but at the same time, lacked a lot that the predecessors offered.

The film was largely set inside the Forbidden City, which had been tarted up with lots of yellows, golds and sparkly bits.  All nice bright colours… until the projector packed in and we were left with about half of the light output and knackered sound.

The main characters were the Emperor, Empress, three princes and one of the maids.  It was all very comical, I thought, which wasn’t helped by the computer generated imagery that only just equalled the closing scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark.  The plot was weak, some of the acting was pretty poor and the overall result was a real disappointment by comparison to his other films.

I’d recommend giving this one a miss.

Woo!  Infernal Affairs == the good version of The Departed.

Looking back at The Departed it kind of worries me that Martin Scorsese managed to ruin such an awesome film.

It was going to happen soon. I’ve just paid £20 for the new three-disc region one version of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

Anybody that’s ever talked to me about films knows that this is my favourite film. It’s an amazing story of villagers hiring masterless samurai (ronin) to protect their village against bandits expected to arrive after the harvest.

This new release by Criterion blows away all of the previous transfers, including the dodgy Korean version that previously held the crown. From dvdbeaver.com:

“Frankly though, there really is no competition—this is so far ahead that visually (screen captures) comparing it seems to report it as an understatement. Criterion should be given a huge grant as what they are doing is helping pristinely archive some the greatest cinema the world has ever known. What they are achieving is really quite incredulous. The comparative improvement in this coveted films’ digital rendering is one of the most flagrant I can recall. What adds to my amazement is that we are comparing it to 4 (no 5!) other editions—all of which drastically pale beside the REISSUE.”