Nerd Not Geek

And just another quickie....

Burn After Reading was the first flick to get me out of the house for a while and it was worth it. The humour is subtle and dark , the acting , especially by Brad Pitt, is wonderful, and the story is captivating.

To say more is unnecessary - go see

Burn After Reading - Two Thumbs UP

OK , its been a while but its time to get back in the saddle and get some blog down.
Its been a crazy month or two that started with Bathurst. Bathurst is a 1000Km car race around Mount Panorama. Its also 1000 km from home.
After a days drive we rocked up and had a great time on the mountain, camped for four days and came home again. Nobody got injured severely and all had a good time. Pics at Flickr , search for Nerdnotgeek .

Since then we have had Hannahs brthday , the Melbourne Cup horse race and just today Steve and Margies bub MJs christening and BBQ.
Next week is Marns work Xmas BBQ and then we have a couple of weeks off before xmas (if you dont count Josh having basketball saturday mornings at 8.30 till then ! )

Sooooo , apologies for missing the blog but I will try to update a bit more now. And then on to the shiz.....

How to lose friends and alienate people - as has been said before I am a Pegg fan , I loved Spaced and of course Shaun of the Dead. I was even a fan back in the days of Big Train. I was however reticent to watch "How to" after the disappointment of "Run Fatboy, Run". The problem is not so much with the films, they are both quite well made things. The issue is with the fact that Simon Pegg and myself grew up watching stuff and listening to stuff in what appears to be parallel worlds (and Im sure I am not alone in thinking this), the lines he writes for his characters make sense, his references are for english 30 somethings and the link is obviously real.
Imagine my disbelief when I find a clip of him on Youtube on a panel with Kevin Smith, another dude whos work I greatly enjoy.
This leads to the major flaw in the recent two movies - I dont believe them. I guess if given the same chances I would move to LA and start making "funny" movies about relationships but that isnt what I want from Pegg. Ho hum

Good enough movie but not if you are a fan of real comedy.

How to lose friends and alienate people - One Thumb UP

ok , Liv Tyler , so she was OK in LotR but can she cut it? According to The Strangers I would have to say yes. She does a convincing job and carries a tense and often jumping shocker.
The movie is the generic story of deserted folk being stalked by nutters but pulls it off (mostly) with a reasonably OK run of links which take the characters from scene to scene and fright to fright.
Was I convinced - nah , did I jump - oh yeh . overall - its a very sparse storyline but well performed and filmed. (The soundtrack is interesting and very well used also)
The Strangers - Two Thumbs UP

A brief film review before bed.... I burnt this flick to a disk , tried it in the DVD player and it stuck about ten seconds in. Reburnt it and got the same result! Went back to the puter and converted it to DVD and reburnt (about an hour) Finally put it in the machine watched less than five minutes and turned it off.
The script is pitiful, the acting is on a par with the script and the overall feel is one of neglect. It is almost as if the extras tried to make a movie after the crew went home. Very Poor.
Strange Wilderness - Two Thumbs DOWN

21 is the based-on-a-true-story movie of some super smart Uni students who go to Vegas counting cards and making money.
Based on the book "Bringing Down the House" which a friend of mine told me about about a year ago it makes a mockery of all things good and right.
I do not need Hollywood to treat me like a child, I can understand long words and follow a plot progression without large neon arrows.
This movie was as far from the true story as it could go without being a different story altogether. It takes the facts and drops them into a standard Hollywood story template including the obligatory love scene two thirds of the way through and a chase through the kitchens at the end. Sad and sickening. (And yet still strangely watchable)
21 - One Thumb DOWN

Once again I have neglected the blog , but I am back again !! Yay !!
I kinda thought Ironman would be a bit crap , a bit too ordinary-comicbook-made-into-a movie and I was almost right but its better than that. It does all the right things, it does them well and it leaves you smiling , even though the smile may be a little wry. The upsides are the actors, performing their trade excellently, the downside is the hideous Audi product placement which was just stupid. Overall this this did not detract from a rollicking romp of a flick with plenty of laughs.
Ironman - Two thumb UP

Last night I watched Children of Men. I knew nothing entering into it and was, as always, a little disappointed to see the face of Clive Owen greet me. If ever there was someone for whom fame should have shied it is he. I have heard today of people who disagree with this point, in return I may say King Arthur - truly the worst casting of any movie.
But back to C of M , a very fun romp through a post apocalyptic ( not exactly true but true enough to cover the story line) world in which no babies have been born for near 20 years. The acting is solid and the direction is OK. The story is solid enough although explained in a little bit too much hollywood style , we are not children and need not be treated as such. The acting is nice but the music seems to be thrown in completely randomly and I was never sure if I was listening to incidental or soundtrack.
Overall this flick has plenty of negatives but is held together by its positives. It may be a new take on 28 days later, and it may have Clive Owen in it , but overall I quite enjoyed watching so its ok with me.
Children Of Men - One Thumbs UP

Mathew Fox who was in Lost and Dennis Quaid who was in Meg Ryan star in this President gets shot movie. The flick follows the short time frame of an assassination attempt and then replays it through the lives of the different characters. This trick has been used plenty of times before and much better on several occasions (Short Cuts for example), I think the trouble with this attempt is that the time frame is too short, the characters are a bit dull and it happens too many times in quick succession. As we moved on to the fourth character in what seemed to be the first 20 minutes I had had enough.
The characters timeslots grow though until we move into a pretty straight forward final half hour with a nice car chase (though poorly staged you cant beat a good car chase) and plenty of shooting. If that had ended it I might have gone with a positive but in the end it was all spoilt with sickly sweetness which strangely left a bitter taste.

Vantage Point - One thumb DOWN

A dramatic comedy about a self-induced attention-deficit disordered, learning disabled, Tourette's syndrome suffering, balance impaired, ex-alcoholic young man from the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the gold-digging girl who inspires him to try to get it together. - IMDB
I thought I would just paste that in as it is a pretty tricky description.
Again I find myself watching an arty character based, mental illness inspires flick, this time based around alcohol - hmmmm

Seann William Scott does a very reasonable job in a straight role playing Jeff in this movie which starts out feeling like it will bore you to tears but then kind of grows into a nice little piece. Neither engaging nor repellent I have to say that it was ok .

Trainwreck - One thumb UP

Sometimes you get a gem, just sometimes. I usually dont read much of reviews, I tend to skim the first couple of lines and snap a judgement out so I was surprised to find myself deciding to watch a movie with Mathew Perry in it and much more surprised when I found it to be probably my favourite movie of the year so far.

Perry plays a guy with a mental problem called depersonalization. He meets a girl and they fall for each other. Thats the story. The beauty is in the comedy, it is slight and it is subtle but it really caught me deep down.
The characters and situations are believable and so very played out. I give this my full recommendation.

Numb - Two thumbs UP