Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered

The Orange Wednesday ticket is all ready, tonight we’re off to see Transformers! I have to admit this was one film I actually wasn’t eager to see until I saw the trailer…for once a film which was sold to me purely on the basis of eye candy and action. I’m not saying my enjoying a film based purely on shallow aspects such as “It looks good and there’s loads of action” is rare (Take Die Hard for example), however for a cult show like this it is rare for me to come into it purely on this basis. I shall be sure to let you all know what I thought.

Speaking of cult followings, the teaser trailer for The Dark Knight was finally released onto the net in all it’s glory this week. As with all teasers, there’s almost nothing visually to get excited about, though there’s a rather nifty flashing of light which slowly illuminates the bat-symbol before turning into what seems to be an avalanche of destructive light blowing it apart. The audio is what is interesting, there’s a lot more of it than I’m used to from a teaser, and it revolves around a conversation between Bruce Wayne and Alfred. The conversation pretty much sums up the plot of the movie (though only in generalised terms) before a familiar voice chimes in…then breaks into psychotic laughter. Ledger does sound a little too much like Jack Nicholson for my liking though.

p.s. There’ll be far more about non-movie related themes after the cut.

Finally on the movies front, I did get around to seeing Pirates of the Caribbean: At Wits End so now I can pass a more informed judgement, rather than basing my opinion purely on Mark Kermode’s review. This final installment was an unforgivable waste of three hours of my life! Seriously, I want a refund (of my life as well as of the fee I paid to see it.) The sad thing is it wasn’t a total disaster, there were moments, however the disjoint nature of much of it combined with the length of three hours, an extra hour it hadn’t earned the right to have, is what made it unforgivable. Had it merely been a one and a half or even two hour movie I would probably be interested in seeing it again on DVD sometime. As it is, I’m going to avoid ever watching it again purely as a protest against the director/producers who deserve a kick up the backside for such self-indulgent crap. However I can’t agree with Kermode on everything, his opinion of Keira Knightley and Johnny Depp was so far off it was unbelievable. In fact Depp was one of the few things this film actually had going for it for most of the time, so it’s a shame that most of the extra hour the movie chose to award itself involved nothing of him whatsoever.

So what else have I been up to? Well I did indeed queue for Harry Potter, some photos of the event are up in the gallery, though I missed the shots of the piles of books and the huge House banners they had hanging in the store. I did get a couple of their fake Hagrid (the guy even used stilts to get the height) and the owls they had brought in especially…two adult ones and a titchy little baby owl. The two hours I spent weren’t to everybody’s liking, especially when you could walk down to the nearby Tesco and buy it without queuing however I thought it was fun just to have been there. Without giving anything away, despite a few points that I thought were total cop outs, the book lived up to expectations and even if you’ve been spoiled as to how it ends, it’s still well worth the read. An entertaining 600-odd pages, it had me hooked.

Life’s been mostly quiet otherwise. On the gaming front, with the continuing disappointment that is Vanguard (a re-release is apparently scheduled for the end of 2007 when they may actually have a ready-for-release game rather than something reminiscent of Beta) I’ve been keeping an eye on Pirates of the Burning Sea. With a very unique new approach to the MMO genre this is definitely one to be watching right now.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Celluloid, Gadgety Goodness, Literature, Media, PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.