Baud Attitude

Let’s try to make this a little more work-safe, shall we?

Oh, dear, that’s really not much better.  Let’s just get on with things.

I quite liked “Man, Woman, and the Wall” when I watched it a couple of weeks ago, so when Netflix recommended that I should check out “Siren” as a related move, I figured I’d give it a go.

I have to admit, I didn’t have very high expectations.

The description on the Netflix site made me think that it was going to be a standard direct-to-video horror movie with some gratuitous nudity thrown in rather than what it turned out to be, which was a, oh, let’s call it an “homage” to Reservoir Dogs with some light supernatural elements, much less violencel, 100% less 70s rock music, and, yes, some gratuitous nudity.

On the other hand, a quick browse through wikipedia taught me that the lead actress – who was also in Man, Woman, and the Wall, explaining the Netflix recommendation – actually spends a good bit of her career making straight-up adult videos, so doing a movie where she’s actually dressed 90% of the time is probably a bit of a change of pace.

Anyway, to get back to the movie: I quite liked it.

The description on the Netflix site rather gives away the setup – you have these five bank robbers, they realize that an innocent bystander has seen their faces, they kidnap her so they can kill her somewhere else, she turns out to be more than she seems, insert ominous music and so on and so forth – but it’s well-executed.  It never bogs down ( it’s barely over 70 minutes ), it doesn’t crowd the screen with unnecessary characters, there’s just enough character development to give the bank robbers a bit of individual personality but not enough that you ever really feel bad for them…

It also gets points for picking an unconventional supernatural beastie; zombie and werewolf movies are a dime a dozen but it’s rare that screenwriters go browsing the “S” section of the Monster Manual.

Finally, it wins points with me for being very low key on the gore & violence. There’s some blood, a few gunshots, a couple of brawls, that sort of thing… but for the most part there’s nothing to make you wince.

I’ve not an expert on J-horror by any means, but I have watched a fair amount of it and I’ve found it to be a genre that is, bluntly, VERY hit-or-miss. Siren is one of the hits.

It’s just bloody hard to find safe-for-work artwork to lead off a post about.  🙂

Funny thing happened while my wife and I were watching Red the other night.

The movie has an awful lot of Gun Porn in it.  All the characters have their Signature Guns, there are lots of close-ups and Improbable Action Shots and it’s got the requisite Storage Shed Full Of Guns.

You know what’s crazy?  There’s no Tvtropes page for “Storage Shed Full of Guns”.  You’d think there would be.

Now, I don’t own any guns myself, but I’ve played a fair number of pen & paper RPGs and even more first-person shooters, so I can occasionally identify what a gun is from sight and my wife often asks me to do so when we’re watching one of these sorts of movies.

As an aside, I don’t have anything particularly against guns or their owners, but I live in a fairly safe city so don’t feel I need one for self-defense, I don’t go hiking anywhere too far off the beaten path, and as much as I think I might enjoy going target shooting someday, I’m too cheap to go out and buy one if that’s my only justification.  🙂

Anyway, back to Red.

John Malkovich’s character has a Damned Big Revolver, and my wife asked me if I knew what it was.

I hadn’t a clue, but just for the hell of it I threw some search terms at Google, and this site popped out.  It’s an entire site devoted solely to answering the question of “hey, what gun WAS that in that movie?”, with lots of screen captures and some really detailed discussions along the lines of  “this is an X gun with Y option fitted and a custom Z which normally wouldn’t be on this model but was added for the movie.”

It’s one of those sites that I didn’t know about, didn’t know I needed to know about, and now will probably use on a fairly frequent basis when watching action movies, even if it – sadly enough – has rendered me just a little more obsolete.  🙂

I have two midterms this week, so naturally it seemed like a great idea to sit down and watch movies most of the weekend.

I really have the Six-Weeks-And-Out syndrome thing going on.

On the other hand, it meant that I got some couple time with my wife, which is always a good thing.

Together, we watched Red, Inception, and Pi, and I watched Lorelei, Witch of the Pacific by myself after finally getting around to studying and then getting utterly sick of that.

Red was probably my favorite movie of 2010. It’s funny, things blow up on a regular basis, and it really feels like the cast had an awful lot of fun making it. We saw it in the theaters in second run and were honestly a little worried that it might not hold up on another viewing – if anything, it was more fun the second time around.

Inception was, well, it got a lot of hype and I’d put off seeing it maybe a little too long. It was quite good, and I’m kind of curious to watch the first 20 minutes or so over again, but I think I went into it with excessive expectations.

Pi was a film we bought sight-unseen on DVD because it was quite cheap and we’d heard that it was a film you Ought To See.

It really isn’t. It’s got some funny bits and a couple of thought-provoking moments, but those only account for about 5 minutes of the movie. The remainder is spent wanting to cover your ears – the main character suffers from chronic headaches and it seems the director wanted the audience to share in the experience – and wanting to give said main character a good slap.

Put even more simply, it fails my “Bloodrayne: The Movie” test; I’d sooner sit through Bloodrayne again than re-watch this.

Lorelei, to wrap up my weekend and this post, is a Japanese war movie with a “What-if” of “What if we had a super-advanced prototype Nazi submarine at the end of WWII?”

Of course, they manage to shoehorn a cute and ambiguously psychic girl, a tragic-puppydog love interest, and a massive right-wing nationalist conspiracy into the thing.

Definitely not for everyone; it’s been accused of trying to paint Japan as the victim rather than the aggressor in WWII and there’s certainly some of that. I quite liked the characters, however, and the effects were worth a watch. I have to question some of the physics involved; some of the underwater combat scenes were close to dogfighting and I don’t think subs actually move like that, but if you can turn off your sense of disbelief and ignore some of the political overtones, it’s a fun couple of hours.