One Month in the Blog-less Wilderness: Part I

Time flies when you're having fun, and despite the stress of an unsuccessful OLPAS application season (boo) it's been a fun month . I've even DONE some exciting STUFF. Which I intend to relate over a few parts - hopefully something which will also get some posts going in this barren desert.

Firstly Movies. It had been a pretty disappointing year for brainless pap (pretty much my staple cinematic diet at present) and Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix did not much help matters. Stodgy rather than stupid it swapped any sense of urgency or pizzaz for a dogged tread through the plot of the book. Though not as guilty in this regard as the first two, in comparison with the genuinely good third movie it's just not a film, coming across more as the middle installment of a (very well-funded) TV miniseries. Moreover I'm a 28 year old with reasonable tolerance for long films - I'd hate to take a child to see this.

However, salvation came in the form of an old bald man. Die Hard 4.0 was the first film of the year to deliver on the promise of its trailer. It went bang on a suitably regular basis and to a suitably extreme degree. Was far from perfect, and is cearly the least good of the series but was such a relief not to be landed with a film which was ambitious beyond its means or hampered by a leaden script and plot. More interestingly its emphasis on 'real' stunts amounts to a reasoned critique of CG effects - to the extent that the plot pits computer hackers against an unrepentently physical cop. This is partially spoiled by a massively incongruous climactic CG spectacle but generally it's an interesting approach - now to come up witha suitably pompous title for self-consciously physical blockbusters. Organic popcorn?

All that said, Transformers happily overturned any ideas that there should be a tilt towards the 'real'. It's a nauseatingly put-together film bith in terms of editing and sound, and there are some serious plot flaws but the saving grace is - oddly - the film' inconsitency of tone. It shfts from scene to scene between serious sci-fi melodrama (in the vein of Independence Day) and almost slapstick comedy (with a great performance by John Turturro). However, this makes for enjoyable action sequences with some palate-cleasning genuine laughs in-between. It's unlikely to stand a repeat viewing, and in any case would never work on the small screen but for a one-off piece of entertainment will do just fine.

Right, next time video games.