Rory Parle

Along with Angel and Beast it appears that Psylocke is to appear in the next X-Men movie. I remember having a comic many years ago–an Essential X-Men, probably from the Age of Apocalypse saga–that had a fantastic picture of Psylocke and Archangel on the cover. This was some time in my early teens when it was possible to have a crush on a cartoon. Oh, Princess Jasmine, where are you now? Sorry, what was I saying? Yes, Psylocke in X3. Apparently she’s a baddie, which is news to me. I guess they’re not all that pushed about continuity. Still no sign of Gambit.

I had a very cinematic day yesterday. I had been stuck at home for a few days due to, at first, illness and then the fact that everything shut down for a few days at the beginning of the new year. So yesterday i decided to go shopping just to get some air, scenery and human contact. I ended up falling victim to a DVD sale. I guess it’s a good thing I decided against that ‘no more buying DVDs I won’t watch’ new year’s resolution.

I was looking for Mallrats in HMV to finish my Kevin Smith’s Jersey Trilogy collection (I had the other four already; it’s a long trilogy). Strangley they didn’t have it in HMV. But when I walked past the tiny Golden Discs on Grafton Street I happened to spot Mallrats sitting in the middle of their 2 for €20 display. I spent a few minutes failing to find another movie in that promotion that would be worth buying. I didn’t find one, but i did find Taxi Driver, which I had failed to see on TV several times last year, and Evil Dead, which was the best-selling video in the UK the year I was born.

Wlaking around Dublin with a bag of DVDs and a copy of the new Empire I figured the only reasonable thing to do was to go to the cinema and start my Top 5 Movies of 2006 list. Match Point isn’t out until Friday so The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe got my €6.

It’s good, but it’s not great. I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear that it was longer than it needed to be. There were four separate scenes of discovering Narnia in the wardrobe. It felt like an age before the children were actually all in Narnia and the plot got going. Even after that it got slow at points. For example–andI know this is a flaw in the source material rather than the movie–what the hell was Santa doing there? They could have got their special gear from Aslan and saved a few minutes, as well as avoiding a completely out-of-place character.

From my perspective there was just about nothing emotionally compelling about the movie, save the opening scene of German bombers attacking London, which motivates the children’s move to the country. After that scene the children, particularly the younger two, become annoying very quickly. It’s difficult to see how they could be considered heroes in even the most lax sense. They’re a huge liability to their side in the war, but they’re treated as heroes as soon as they arrive. What gives? Two of them sleep out the major battle instead of helping; one of them continuously commits treason. I have a major gripe with Aslan too, but it’s a spoiler so I won’t post it here.

So none of the main characters are likeable, and the movie is at least half an hour too long. Those are pretty large obstacles to overcome to make a good movie. But it does work. The film is beautiful, the locations fantastic, the effects just plain awe-inspiring. The battle is great. While I watched it I kept thinking "this means fantasy movies are here to stay." It holds up despite itself. I’m not queueing up to see it again, and it won’t get into my DVD collection, but it was worth the price of admission, it was worth the three hours it took to watch, and I’ll probably see the inevitable sequels.

Apparently a ‘drabble’ is a short story containing exactly 100 words. For these purposes I presume that a string of numeric digits like ‘100’ can be considered to be a word. I read about this on the alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup, though "read about it" might be a bit extreme; all I read was that it’s a short story of precisely 100 words. The point of this rambling paragraph is to determine just how much text you can make with 100 words. A quick look at the statistics for what I’ve written indicates that the lexical century is not an awful lot.

As I indicated in my review of Serenity I have long intended to publish a list of my top 5 movies of 2005. Through a combination of memory, searching through saved ticket stubs and glances at my movie reviews from the last 12 months I have reconstructed the list of eligible films. If I’ve left anything out then it obviously wasn’t memorable enough to earn a place on the top 5 list anyway. These are the 13 movies I saw in the cinema in the year 2005 (nine of them in UGC in Dublin, my favouritest cinema ever):

1. Team America: World Police
2. Garden State
3. Alexander
4. The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
5. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
6. Wedding Crashers
7. Batman Begins
8. The Longest Yard
9. Serenity
10. Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride
11. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
12. Doom
13. King Kong

The list is in approximate chronological order. Unfortunately Greystones cinema doesn’t print the movie name or the date on its tickets so I’m not certain when I saw Alexander, and I don’t seem to have my ticket from Batman Begins.

They’re the contenders, these are the winners:

5. Batman Begins

The best Batman since the 1960s version starring Quahog’s mayor Adam West and alleged porn star Burt Ward. This could have placed in the list just by virtue of its amazing addition to the movie link game (just look at that cast list!) Fortunately it also happpened to have a great story, spectacular photography and visual effects, and a cast that was mostly composed of people who aren’t engaged to lunatic scientologists.

4. Wedding Crashers

Potentially the best Frat Pack movie to date (pending a second viewing to make a final comparison to Old School). Owen Wilson plays… well, Owen Wilson. Come to think of it, Vince Vaughan pretty much plays Owen Wilson too. I guess you’ll like this if you’re an Owen Wilson fan.

3. Garden State

I went to this because there was nothing else in the cinema that looked even remotely interesting. It turned out to be the best film I had seen in months. I hate to say "quirky" because you’ll think of Ally McBeal, which wouldn’t be a good comparison. I’m not going to sum this one up any better than I did first time around.

2. Serenity

I had never seen Firefly before I saw this. I bought the whole series on the strength of this movie, and I haven’t been disappointed. This one was hugely popular with a less-than-huge group of people. I was one of those people. I just love Joss Whedon’s characters, and these are at least as good as the ones I gave a decade of my life to in Buffy and Angel. The fact that this movie has barely recouped its budget in the worldwide box office, but that it was top of Amazon’s DVD sales chart for weeks, is probably indicative of the change that has being taking place in movie economics in recent years. But who cares about economics when there are explosions and psychics and canibals and spaceships?

1. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

I said in my Serenity review that I would be impressed if Peter Jackson could beat Joss Whedon to the top spot in this list. Who would have thought that it would be taken by a movie I only heard of days before I saw it? One which enjoyed, let’s say, rather less than widespread hype. I cried laughing at this movie many times. The only place I saw this movie take in anyone else’s yearly roundup was number nine in Empire. That was while I was skimming the magazine in my cinema seat just before the movie started. It really deserved a wider audience than it seems to have found. I expect it will do well in smallscreenland.

I know there are some popular movies that I missed this year. Narnia probably wouldn’t have been a contender, but would Sin City have been? It made both Empire‘s and Jonathon Ross’s top five. Sideways seemingly got good reviews from everyone except my brother, who hated it. What have I not seen that would be on this list if I had? And do you agree with me on the ones I have rated? What’s your top 5 of 2005?

I realise that I’ve been a little less productive thanusual around these parts, having posted twice so far in a month that is about to end any day now. At least the last few days of this can be blamed on my being unwell. Despite my ill health I have dedicated literally minutes of my life to overhauling Soylent Red’s old visual design. I call the new design simply, prematurely and unimaginatively 2006. Yes, it’s basically just new colours. It probably still breaks in Internet Explorer. Anyone care?

While queueing for a ticket to see King Kong last week (more on which… um, never, because I don’t think I’ll have time to review it before everyone has seen it; it’s good; go see) I was horrified to see that there is a sequel to Cheaper By the Dozen. Worse, it seems that someone has missed a brilliant opportunity to give it one of those stupid sequel names where they just increment any number that appears in the title. You know, like Ocean’s Twelve,102 Dalmatians and The Whole Ten Yards.

Well I started thinking what other sequels could be given such names. How about:

• Eleven (Dudley Moore and Bo Derek)
• Fahrenheit 452 and Fahrenheit 9/12
• The Three Towers
• Jet Li’s The Two
• Ei8ht
• 1493
• Four Men and a Baby
• Five Weddings and Two Funerals
• Miracle on 35^th Street
• Air Force Two
• Two Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• The Man With Three Brains

Those should get you started. Any other ideas?

Oh yeah, I used to keep a blog didn’t I? I wish I could claim to have been busy doing something world-changingly brilliant or fascinating, but frankly I don’t recall anything like that going on around these parts in the last few weeks. Before I press on with rambling apologies about my brief absence let me give you a few recommendations:

On the film front, you absolutely must see Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. The one review I read before I saw it was bursting with praise, and the movie comfortably lived up to it. I know I’ve used the phrase "best film this year" a few times so far this year, but they really do keep getting better. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is hilarious, original, surprising and quirky.

So from a great film to… um… Doom. I’m not going to go so far as to say this movie was actually any good, but I will say I was entertained. The first-person shot that everyone keeps talking about is pretty cool. There are guns and explosions. If your brain has an off switch, or some sort of limiter, then you should be able to enjoy it.

Finally, Firefly. If you’ve seen Serenity you know what to expect. If you haven’t seen Serenity then you should go see it, then you’ll know what to expect from Firefly. Then you may feel the need, as I did, to buy the whole series (only 14 episodes) on DVD because that’s the only non-Internet-piracy-crappy-quality-watch-it-on-your-computer way to see it in this country. It’s worth it, especially since everyone seems to be doing major deals on it for Christmas.

That’s what I’ve been watching for the last couple of weeks. Have I missed anything good?

I learned some things today: I learned that the Windows System Tray is not actually called the "System Tray", but is in fact called the "Taskbar Notification Area". This is despite what the documentation coming from other parts of Microsoft would have you believe. I also learned that if you read the word ‘tray’ too many times in the space of a few minutes it stops sounding like a real word ("’Tartlets’. ‘Tartlets’. The word has lost all meaning.")

For the benefit of Jamie, who has apparently decided to learn French, I should tell you that this post’s title ‘Tray Bien’ is a pun on the French phrase ‘trés bien’ meaning ‘very good’. This also doesn’t sound like a real word. So now hopefully you’ve learned something too.

I graduated again yesterday. This seems to be becoming a habit of mine. I’m now Rory Parle BSc HDip. I took the opportunity to go out with some of my classmates from last year and get to know some of them. Better late than never I suppose.

Yes, I realise that I’m in danger of making this blog nothing but a sub-par Family Guy news source, but in this instance I figured it was a good idea to correct an error I made when I reported on the Guy last month.

Back then I reported, based on the TV.com listings, that there was only going to be one more episode aired this year. In fact it seems that their listings were incomplete, and that there are quite a few episodes left to air. The show returned from a break last Sunday and Fox will continue to show new episodes weekly for at least three more weeks.

This week’s episode is called "Brian Goes Back to College (and Stewie Goes With Him for Obvious Comedy Reasons)".