Author: Rory

I went to see Pearl Jam in The Point on Wednesday, and then to Radiohead in Marley Park yesterday. Both were good, but Pearl Jam were better.

It was the first time Pearl Jam had played in Ireland in six years. Since I only listened to them for the first time about four years ago this was obviously my first time seeing them live. I’m sorry to say that my knowledge of their music is pretty much limited to Ten and their new, self-titled album, so there was quite a lot of unfamiliar material for me. Still, they played everything I wanted to hear and I got to sing along to the one song that I actually know the words to, "Alive". We were treated to their interpretation of "The Boys Are Back in Town" during the second encore.

Radiohead were good, but there was more filler than I would have liked. There was one sequence of two or three songs during which I pretty much switched off and stopped listening. Partly because there were a couple of songs I didn’t know and partly because some of their songs are just difficult. They still covered all of my favourites. Easy enough, given that I tend to like their most popular songs. I’m told that they don’t tend to play "Creep", but they’ve played it both times I’ve seen them.

Some people bought T-shirts for Snakes on a Plane. But I realised that the whole point of the movie is the grassroots fan support. So I made my own T-shirt.

The back reads:

Ezekiel 25:17 The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by MOTHERFUCKIN’ SNAKES

Good news for fans of South Park, Team America and BASEketball. Trey Parker and Matt Stone are working on two new movies: a highschool comedy (you know how much I love them) called My All-American and something called Giant Monsters Attack Japan! which I assume is some sort of girly romantic comedy.

Even stranger news is that Matt Stone appears to have cut his hair. I hope that wasn’t the source of all his powers. Not that that would really matter much. We all know he’s Ben Affleck to Parker’s Matt Damon.

I’m trying to find Army of Darkness for sale on DVD. Play and CD-WOW don’t have it. I went to Amazon’s UK store and was told that there was an error serving my request (their main page). It seems to be back as I write this, but not without problems. Seeing the UK store having a problem like that I decided to check the main Amazon store, and got a similar error (still there as I write this).

Thinking this notable enough to post about, given that Amazon probably loses quite a lot of sales if they’re down for even a short time (even accounting for the fact that most people will wait and try again), I took a screenshot. But Flickr won’t let me upload it. Is the whole Internet broken?

Title: Snakes on a Plane

Genre: Horror/Action/Thriller/Snakes on a Plane

Plot synopsis: Snakes on a Plane

Watching Snakes on a Plane was without a doubt the most fun I’ve ever had in a cinema. I don’t even know how to begin describing its awesomeness. There’s nothing left to say. It’s about snakes. On a plane. That’s it. If you don’t already love it then you won’t love the film. But if you do love it, well then the film goes so far beyond what I expected in living up to its name.

It’s two hours of utterly shameless pandering to the audience. Everything you want to see is in the film. "I hope it bites her on the… Ow! It bit her right on the…!" Of course it helped that the whole audience was completely behind the movie, cheering every one-liner and whooping at every gory snake bite. We had audience participation of a level perfectly suited to a movie that has relied so much on its fan base thus far.

If the SoaP phenomenon is something you want to be a part of you have to see it soon before the hardcore fans start to disappear from the cinemas leaving you to watch it on your own. It just won’t be the same.

You may remember my glowing praise of little-known indy flick, Brick, back in May. In case you’re interested it’s still sitting comfortably in the top spot for best film of the year. Then again Garden State happily wandered along in that spot for most of last year and finally came in with shameful shameful bronze in my Top 5 for that year, so you never can tell.

A hypothetical reader who’s paying altogether too much attention and who really should go and find something better to do might note that, since I noted Dirty Rotten Scoundrels as my favourite Steve Martin movie, I’m obviously a fan of the con-man genre. Like I said, that hypothetical reader is way too interested in my opinions on movies. Leaving that aside, let’s put film-of-the-year-so-far and really-great-genre together and see what we come up with.

Well if it isn’t the promise of a con-man movie from Brick writer/director Rian Johnson. Awesome! And despite Brick‘s success he’s staying independent so that he doesn’t have to sacrifice control of the film to a studio. (By the way, if you’re wondering what effect removing full creative control from a visionary film-maker has on a movie, compare Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Serenity. Urgh.)

I just really don’t have any interest right now in doing studio work or being a director for hire or doing other people’s material or selling my material for other people to do. Right now I’ve got a couple of stories in my head and I want to be able to tell them in my own way. I want to be able to make my own movies.

It’s still a long way away, not planned for release until 2008, but The Brothers Bloom is going to sit prominently on my movies to look forward to list in the mean time.

The major complaint that I read about this movie before going to see it was that it starts and ends well but slows down too much in the middle. Let me just say right now that the people who made this complaint obviously didn’t watch the film. That "slow" bit in the middle is the film. The other bits are just the setup and the payoff. There are absolutely no pacing problems with Cars as long as you realise that it’s not a racing movie.

What it is is a reflection on what we may be losing out on as our lives get busier and the world gets faster. It’s designed to slow you down and allow you to reflect on what’s really important. Now, being 23, what’s really important to me generally doesn’t include small middle-American towns past their prime.

I think the whole quiet remembrance of golden days past is likely to alienate some of Cars‘ younger viewers (although, as usual for Pixar, the very young are amply catered for). But even though I found the ideal of tranquillity it presented to be, well, less than ideal, the film made such a good job of presenting itself that it really didn’t matter.

Jokes were fewer than in previous Pixar movies. Don’t expect a Toy Story level of hilarity. There are still some moments that elicited a laugh or two from me.

Overall, and here’s where it becomes blindingly obvious that I wasn’t born to do film reviews, I would have difficulty saying exactly why I liked this movie so much. There’s honestly not an awful lot that I can point to and say "that’s why I liked it." Owen Wilson is among the reasons. As is the extraordinarily high-quality animation (which continues to wow me even having seen Pixar out-do themselves so many times before.) Throughout the film I was aware that it had been made by very talented people at the top of their game, and that at no point in the years of its development had anyone ever said "that’s good enough, let’s go home." I think that really shows in the finished product.

Word to use in its place: enterprise.

Word to use in its place: normality.

Like you, I grew up being told that if I have nothing nice to say I shouldn’t say anything at all.