Holmes v1 finished and v2 in the oven ...


After watching House for a while, one gets the urge to read back old Holmes' novels, if only to find out how faithful our Greg is to the original character (BTW, if anyone out there knows who Cuddy is in the books, I'm dying of curiosity here, dudes) I've finished the first set of novels this last week (A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes) and will start on the second soon. It turns out that it's like CSI for me, I just guess who's behind everything in the first fee pages but don't have the nerve to prove it, so I just sit and watch. Not much mental exercise for me, it seems :(
All in all, I just found out that Holmes and House are even more similar than I thought at the beginning (and, yep, I noticed at first glance that they both live in 221B), plus in the novels it's also never lupus :P
What to read now, what to read ...

Ow, the horror ...



Maybe I'm growing exigent with the years, but where are scripts when you need them? The last movies I have seen had none, and, ok, we have just finished that writers' strike, but it was mostly about TV series and those seems okay to me...
Film 1: Jumper. How can something with so much money in it be so bad? And I'm the first to acknowledge that Christensen is kinda cute but, unlike Orlando Bloom, who has just two expressions, he only has one! Jumper makes you wish you had the same power that Christensen, if only to jump out of the cinema and into anything less boring, like thr wedding video of your cousin in Ibiza. Scifi films must be careful to keep the rules they've establish themselves for the sake of credibility, but here they don't even care for that. There is no story apart from, hey, I've got these cool powers and I'll enjoy myself. It would be better if there were no dialogues either. Those last lines with Christensen going "so I am a jumper" (dramatic pause) "and you are one of them" (another, longer, dramatic pause) Pleeeeeeaseee! They also make the same error that independence day, daylight for our flat earth all along (except in Japan, it is always night in Japan, of course). If you want to lose your money and 90 minutes of your life, suit yourself. Otherwise ...



Now, on DVD, we go to spanish movie The Abandoned, which is a good show of how spanish people can do movies as bad and boring as the rest. Unlike good flicks like Darkness, or tolerable ones like El orfanato, this one is boring from the very beginning. The director says he wanted people to spend a bad time for the whole film and he gets it,but not for the reasons he thought. It goes about a woman who goes back to a farm in Russia when her biological parents die and finds out she has a brother and also that the farm is quite haunted (but in a boring way) Lots of Silent Hill (another little jewel, like this one) like-dumps and few light and you get a movie. I don't even recall what the rest was about because I slept through some parts, I'd only say that they both die and save you from suffering through this flick all along.



Finally, 30 days of night was sort of nice, even if only because the comicbook was a bluff in my opinion. Vampires look just like in the comicbook also and the town gets a pretty scary look. Just in case someone wants to know, the story goes about the village most in the north of the US (Barrow, Alaska), where the sun sets for 30 whole days in winter. At some point, vampires realize that and prepare a banquet-party over there, First they isolate the village and then they attack. I think it is nice in the film that they remove the email vampire organization part and put instead the initial vampire attack which was not in the book (probably because it would have been either too tiresome to draw or maybe it was and I could not find it among all those undefined paint splashes). Time passing gets a bit unrealistic and vampires are not very savvy, but, all in all, the flick was okay.

I like to movies-movies ...

Okidoki, so here are the latest news on the movies I've seen these last weeks. Minor spoilers ahead!

First of all, we go to Alex de la Iglesia's Oxford Murders. Good filming and all, but not too interesting plot, some Deux ex Machina (Leonor Watling practically find the solution herself and does not even have to sing :P) and a slow starting. I think I was expecting something more after "La comunidad", specially with all the advertising this movie had. It's entertaining, though, if you try not to think about maths as Da Vinci Code is entertaining if you know nothing about heresy, Leonardo's painting and criptography. Anyway, I'm kind of partial to action flicks or Sherlock-like mysteries so pay no attention to my opinion on this ...



Cloverfield! This one, I really liked! Same structure as REC, but far more entertaining. It looked like old survival films with Heston and friends and FXs were amazing! Plus the monster is really scary, as they show only minor parts of it most of the time. Slow start, but perfect tempus and well tied end. What are you doing reading this? Go watch the film!



Oh, and I also read, even though I don't usually post about it. This is the last book I've finished (I'm now back to Sherlock Holmes, House made me nostalgic): Terry Pratchett's Wintersmith. It is about how Winter falls in love with young witch Tiffany Achings. Even though we've got the major ingredient for the book to be in my list (Granny Weatherwax), all in all, it didn't make it. I find books about Tiffany a bit too serious and introspective, quite different from the busy, messy pacing of the rest of the Discworld Universe. Anyway, any Pratchett is better than most authors for me, so as long as he writes, I read. BTW, the new book of exerts from Discworld is really a nice edition ...



So this is all for now. See ya soon, guys!
Powered by Blogger