Thursday, December 06, 2007

London, films, Bay and SF4

Well, our trip to London didn’t go quite as smoothly as we’d hoped. Well to be quite frank, it seemed to be one problem after another.

The whole reason for the trip was so that Roz could go and watch Mika live in concert (I must stress again, that I was not going to see this – I was just accompanying her to the venue). So the biggest disappointment of the trip was when we arrived at the venue, only to find out that it had been cancelled due to illness (Mika that is). However, that was not the only hitch or quirk during the trip… These are the others that spring to mind:

- Elliot got another case of tonsillitis just prior or our trip and whilst we were away he managed to be sick in Roz’s parents bed.
- Guernsey Customs getting anal with us about the style of clear plastic bag in which we had stored out liquid medication. Apparently it has to be resealable… naturally ours was, but it didn’t match their exact specifications.
- I messed up the cinema times and as such, missed Beowulf at the IMAX (got to see it at the Vue instead).
- There were numerous delays and cancellations on the Tube, at one point making a 20 minute trip take 2-3 times longer.
- A passenger with us on the Tube decided to have a hissy fit after hearing an announcement, and whilst swearing profusely, he decided it would be fun to take his aggravation out by kicking the side of the tube train several times.
- Just prior to entering the departure lounge at Gatwick, the airport was evacuated due to a fire alarm, thus making the queues to re-enter departures frankly ridiculous.

Anyway… onto the films.

Films watched:
Beowulf


CGI nearly nakedness in action fantasy 3D fun fest.
7.5/10

Ratatouille



Pixar can do no wrong. Charming, fantastic, engaging and moving.
9/10

Watching Beowulf was my first experience of watching a full feature length film completely in 3D. I have in the past seen the likes of Terminator 3D and Bugs Life 3D in Universal Studio’s and Disney. I have to say that at first, I found watching the film a little off putting and almost wished I could watch it normally, but after the first 15 minutes I got used to it. I think it clicked with me when Grendel first attacks, which looked simply brilliant and damn frightening in 3D.

The film does suffer a lot from shots that have been purposefully framed for 3D (namely someone pointing their spear at the screen etc) and to be honest, the 3D effect tended to look best when it was used subtlety, or alternatively during action scenes. The finale, with the dragon was also nothing short of spectacular in 3D.

I do not like Michael Bay, I do not like Michael Bay’s films (with the exception of The Rock). However, I must admit that Michael Bay has for the first time (to my knowledge) spoken some sense in public about the HD format war. Something which I also have suspected for some time…

Microsoft conspiracy ahoy!

Finally, the first screenshot of Street Fighter 4 ha popped online… It looks pretty damn sweet!

2 comments:

Sinbad said...

Sorry to hear you had so many problems, Roz must have been very disappointed. Remember when we were going to see REM live and the drummer had a brain haemmorrage the week before?

Bazlurgan said...

Yep...

I told Roz about the very same thing the other day.

Thankfully we were able to cancel that outright - unfortunately we didn't know about Mika until the very last moment.

Oh well!