XIPHOS AND EVIL DEAD

I saw this on Sunday 7 April and here are my thoughts. This will be quick since everybody and probably their mothers know about the Evil Dead franchise so no back story mumbo jumbo from me.

VETERANS DAY/REMEMBERANCE DAY 2012

A dirge for the dead and a roll call for the fallen since WW1

XIPHOS FINDS SOME FOUND FOOTAGE FILMS

Apparently I’ve also found a love for alliteration which is just one thin hair above the lowest form of primate communication, the high five. Saturday, due to some patchy weather, I went to the movies and since we are coming up on Halloween I decided to go see Sinister and Paranormal Activity 4 because both use the same conceit, the found footage angle and I wanted to see which flick was better able to use that lame story telling device. I am happy to report that one movie used the found footage angle very well probably the best use in a film I have seen to date. The other movie was a Paranormal Activity movie so……

XIPHOS and TV

Here’s a look at some shows I have watched lately. Some are brand new, some are just starting their new seasons and some were summer shows that have now ended. There will be spoilers. You’ve been warned. Continue at your own risk. I tender no apologies if you whine about learning something you didn’t want to know after you chose to read this after you’ve been given fair warning. Also most of these will be pretty short except for a couple.

SAVAGES

I am not a fan of the works of Oliver Stone. I think he is an untalented and thus highly rewarded and tongue bathed Hollywood hack of a director and worse he is a supreme asswipe of a human being. He’s a junkie anti-semite conspritarded half-wit dumbfuck. I am however a fan of the works of Don Winslow who wrote the book and allegedly worked with the junkie on the script. For a Don Winslow book, Savages is a pretty straightforward affair and easy enough for even a simpleton like Stone to adapt and yet that moron utterly failed in that and missed some of the most important ideas of the book.

Jarv and Xiphos explain why Game of Thrones Season 2 sucks giant flaming dragon balls

Game of Thrones is unfairly lauded across the Internets and by bored TV critics salivating over something shiny. However, in all honesty, the second series of it hasn’t only been not very good but actually awful and quite unmeriting of the slavering adoration showered upon it.

Myself and Xi had varying opinions of the first series, in that we both liked different bits, but one thing we agreed on was that there was plenty of room for improvement, and the second series could well turn into something special. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case- and we both held the opinion that the second series is an absolute televisual atrocity.

Contains serious spoilers below- you have been warned. 

6 JUNE 1944

“You are about to embark upon the great crusade toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you…I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle.” Gen. D.D.Eisenhower just before he gave the GO order to Allied Airborne Forces.

XIPHOS vs HOMELAND

I am of two minds about this Showtime original program. On one hand, it’s a somewhat entertaining show with some decent acting and occasionally good writing. On the other hand, there are some major league boners that would be easy to fix if the writers cared enough to fix the issues (more on this down below). There are also some stupendously bad choices made by the writing staff and a retardedly outlandish and preposterous “twist” that is monumentally stupid and insulting. Further, the show got a tongue bath by nerds and online critics so that makes it suspicious in my book since a majority of online nerds and critics have shit smeared where their taste buds should be.

So basically the purpose of this post is me working out if I like the show or not because I haven’t been able to figure that out just thinking about it. I finished the 12 episode run like a month ago and I’m still trying to sort my feelings out over Homeland so I decided to write this up which I really wasn’t planning on doing. I hope by the end of it I finally pick a side, we’ll see if that happens.

Xiphos vs The Book to Movie Adaptation: The Sand Pebbles

 

I’m sure this review is going to come as shock to most readers since it deals with the United States Navy and I am on record often and vigorously shitting on the Navy but The Sand Pebbles is such a great movie and book that for the purposes of this post the Navy gets a pass sort of.

Made in Britain Special: Book to Movie- The Cement Garden

Before I start, I’d like to thank Xi for the use of his excellent Book to Movie idea. Given the content of this mega-review, I’ll return it only slightly soiled.

Ian McEwan’s novella The Cement Garden was a novel that I read at school, and stuck with me for much longer afterwards. A haunting dreamlike novel, with a consummately unreliable narrator, it is both celebrated and reviled in equal measure. Having said that, I never for the life of me thought that anyone would be nuts enough, given it’s intensely controversial subject matter, to even attempt to adapt it for the screen. Yet in 1993 Andrew Birkin (remember that last name, it’ll be important later) took a stab at it, and turned in a haunting, lyrical, sombre little film that wasn’t afraid to look at the inherent unpleasantness of the novel’s plot.

OK, here we go. Buckle up, this one’s stormy.