[CAT] Scratching Post

The Sopranos is about as exciting as being constipated. Nothing happens or moves. Boring show is fucking BORING.

This coming from a man who likes nothing, so I guess its a compliment to the show.

They should rename the show from "The Sopranos" to "Fat Guys Sitting Around."

Admittedly I didn't give it as much of a chance as maybe I should have, but Gandolfini's Tony voice is the most annoying thing since Fran Drescher's laugh.

Hated the Sopranos.

But than, anything having to do with organized crime pisses me off because in my mind anyone involved in OC should be executed - man, woman, child.

Sopranos.

My fave TeeVee ever.

That comes as no surprise.

I watched Public Enemies yesterday.

For those of you wanting a grade straight away: 6,5 out of 10. And wait until it comes out on DVD or BLU-RAY, the video filming does not go along well with the large format of the theater.

On the plus side: great weapons realism, very much unlike what we see in the movies today. Both the visual side and the sound side of that is awesome. Secondly, there is a great sense of historical realism in the background and in the details. Michael Mann LOVES the details and you feel like you have been lifted from your seat and into 1930s Chicago: it is all there: the concrete plate roads, the buildings as they were back then, redressed to full effect, the clothes of the actors, the cars, the interiors of the buildings: everything. The third thing that makes this movie good is the acting: Depp is fantastic and Cotillard is very good as well. Bale also shows why he is such a professional actor, and even the secondary actors, especially the ones who played J Edgar Hoover and Pretty Boy Floyd, are very trustworthy. Also, the soundtrack is great, albeit it too often is underused or comes at the wrong times and doesn't add to the drama.

And now come the negatives. The story is muddy. Introductions are too short, the characters are not explored well enough because you get thrown right into the action without really understanding well enough what is happening and the scenes are not dramatically interconnected too well. The movie only on a few occasions makes your pulse go up: in the rest of the scenes Mann lets it roll like he usually does: nice and slowly, but without the character detail that he is so good at making. Many of the scenes also seem to be done wrong, meaning that they could've been done better. Even though the actors have a fair amount of very good lines the depth of character exploration is never good enough: the introductions are poor and there isn't much dramatic interconnection.
But all of that would still make me give an 8 out of 10 easily, just for the video realism: anyone who says this is not important is an idiot. However, the camera movement, quality and editing is simply awful in too many shots. The editing seems all wrong: movie was cut too drastically and it loses the sense of cohesion. Secondly, the decision to shoot on digital turned out bad: the quality is bad, the background can hardly be seen good enough and there are at times pixels all over the place, when you see fast sequences the video encoding can't follow the action and we see a lightened-up version of the "slow-down" effect you may know of from video game lag. The night scenes are at times badly lit and in the day scenes the quality and especially when you have light coming in towards the camera creating a bad glare effect on the screen ruins the great sets that they made: if you film it so badly, why waste the tim e on effects? In my opinion they should've used 35mm film and coloured it afterwards like in the aviator: that would've saved it for me, however we will see how it will look when it comes out on DVD.

And my last comment is the camera angles, some of them are simply awful for a movie of this magnitude. Mann is too good to make shitty shots like we saw here, at least so I thought. He uses too much handheld camera which again fucks up the beautiful detail shots, and too many of the picture frames just seem disbalanced. That combined with the HD video quality makes the movie at times look like a mess of an 80s tv reality documentary. Also, sound editing is bad at times: not filtered for noise and voices too silent (far away from microphone)

All in all, watch it: anyone who likes history and guns will not be too disappointed, but this movie has underperformed heavily considering the director, the acting material and what good details they made for the background. The movie is let down for me by the video quality, camera angles and sound editing: in short, the technical parts, which is quite sad because you wouldn't have expected this bit to fail so badly. This is no Heat mk2 or Collateral, which it easily could've been

Just watched Bronson.
Hes our most famous convict, and a fucking nutter. Yes, he changed his name to Charles Bronson.
It was frigging nuts. If you like nutters going into mass brawls with prison officers then this is it.
Quite a trippy film with interesting story telling.

Watch the two min trailer, sums it up well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAxOUyVs3O0

Seeing Public Enemies on Friday. Also quite interested in seeing Bronson, does look good but will wait 'till the DVD release me thinks. Apparently it's quite Kubrick-esque? If you liked it Wunder, I think you'll love Hunger if you haven't seen it already. Steve McQueen's a fascinating director in that his previous work has always been artistic shorts, so having a 1.5 hour film in this style is fucking intense! Also, Michael Fassbender is unbelievable. Going from tonk bastard in 300 to Auschwitz look-alike in Hunger takes a lot of dedication!

Trailer's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP_aaQTXVN0

Episode 2 of Dexter was much more entertaining than the first. I found a lot more to like about the show.

Pretty much all I've been watching lately has been the History, Military, and Food Network channels.

Outdoor Life Network, History, Discovery.

I've been enjoying dog whisperer on the national geographic channel lately. It is crazy how dogs submit to him.

Just watched the latest Friday the XIIIth. Boobies. Some.