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23 days ago
The Long & the Short – Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a prehistoric shark flying through the skies attacking air traffic while his eight-legged arch-enemy shakes submarines to death in a truly terrible monster from the depths of movie-making. ‘Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus’ - a movie so mindlessly dreadful from start to finish that the temptation is to raise the fon t size to maximum and just write the word ‘Shite’, safe in the knowledge that the review would be accurate. And yet it’s so terrible that it actually starts to nudge into the same category as ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’, ‘Manos’, ‘The Swarm’ and T2D’s personal favourite ‘Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter’ which, despite their failings, exude a near-mesmeric kind of goofy charm because you just know the directors of those cracked gems all thought they were making cinematic masterpieces. Bearing that in mind – and that I’ve lost 85 minutes of my life that I’m never getting back because of it – I feel ...
25 days ago
The Long & the Short: Heralded in recent weeks as America’s answer to ‘Shaun of the Dead’, ‘Zombieland’ may never quite hit the heights of Edgar Wright’s Zom-Com masterpiece but it’s still a thoroughly enjoyable watch. For college student Colombus (Jesse Eisenburg) the only change theUSA being overrun with zombies makes to his life is to give him dead people to lock himself away from rather than living ones. Nervous, phobic, geeky and near-terminally virginal, only his comprehensive list of survival rules keep him alone, alive and out of trouble. Until he hooks up with redneck survival specialist and enthusiastic zombie-killer Tallahassee (Harrelson) who, along with sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), teaches him that some rules are meant to be broken. More a comic road movie with zombies then a horror outing, Zombieland’s great performances, laugh-out-loud moments and short runtime make up for the fact that nothing much really happens. We’re ...
43 days ago
Has been a while since T2D's been moved to comment on a genuine news article (though Moir's gratuitous piece on the death of Stephen Gately (see it here) qualifies as news in the loosest sense) but sometimes there are stories you just can't ignore. For a newspaper journalist to write an article of this type so near to Gately's death is in poor taste. For the paper to then print it just days before the funeral whilst friends and family are still openly traumatised and the details are still emerging is an appalling error of judgement. Even though the Mail is known for its rabidly right-wing stance, to push such an agenda with a story like this so near to the young man's death is disgusting. I'm sure arguments and defenses will have been prepared.That Moirs piece appears in some kind of showbiz gossip-style column suggests they may hide behind this being personal comment rather than the paper's own stance. Rubbish - the newspaper editorial staff hold ultimate responsibility for ...
44 days ago
The Long and the Short: Beautiful, intense, moving foreign film that redefines the vampire genre and will move you to tears. This may just be the best film of 2009… 12 year-old Oskar is a troubled child. Misunderstood by his mother, neglected by his father, whipped and beaten by the school bullies and achingly lonely, he yearns for friendship, love, revenge and a companion as he enters puberty. When Eli, another 12 year-old, moves in next door a tentative friendship begins between the two. Yet the girl has a terrible, dark secret and as love blossoms between the two, tragedy is never far away… Despite a barrage of film festival awards over the past year, ‘Let the Right One In’ seemed to become a victim of its art-house success upon release to a wider audience. A slow-paced horror/drama/coming-of-age/romance starring 2 preteen lead actors that’s filmed in Sweden on a limited budget and subtitled may just have been too hard a sell to UK cinema chains, whose target audience for ...
49 days ago
Time for a general disorder update – not too great if I’m honest. Latest attack came on yesterday…same as many of them in recent months, pretty much out of nowhere w/o a great deal of warning beyond a huge feeling of mental exhaustion over the past few days. This time I woke up Saturday morning at around 7am and found msyelf locked onto thoughts about Uni from over 10 years ago and incidents where I’d fallen out with people. All stuff which is water under the bridge now of course, but I guess where normal peoples brains automatically kick that coping method in, mine requires me to try and sort it out manually w/o that help. Cue intense strain, followed up by tiredness and an unhealthy dose of depression. Perhaps that’s another way of understanding this disorder. Not only do OCD sufferers lack the necessary chemicals in the brain to calm their anxieties but the natural thought processes that work in tandem with them are disrupted too, so we have to work through many things which ...
