You Wouldn’t Steal a Car…

December 17th, 2009

I’m sure you’ve all seen it, that annoying, unskippable advertisement from whichever anti-piracy outfit is infecting your particular country. It focusses on a teen girl in a bedroom downloading something or other from a site titled “Feature Films”.  The dodgy, shakey-cam style titles read:

You wouldn’t steal a car.
You wouldn’t steal a handbag.
You wouldn’t steal a television.
You wouldn’t steal a movie.
Downloading pirated films is stealing.
Stealing is against the law.
Piracy. It’s a crime.

All well and good, except that downloading pirated films is not stealing, it’s Copyright Infringement. Piracy is where you board a ship out at sea and make off with it. Rum may be involved, and also planks.

But the best bit, the kicker, is that these ridiculous ads only appear on the legitimate, paid-for version of these films because pirates strip them out. Not only that, they serve to remind the buyer that they could have downloaded the film instead of paying for it, and without the annoying Anti-Copyright-Infringement ad on the front.

And yes, if I could download a car that had all the crap stripped out, but which was otherwise identical to the original, then I bloody would “steal” one.

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Stephen King – Misery

September 6th, 2007

Something that’s been bugging me for years is the end of Stephen King’s otherwise brilliant book, Misery, which wasn’t repeated in the film starring James Caan and Kathy Bates since the relevent scene was changed anyway.

In the book, Paul Sheldon wakes from a drug-induced sleep to find himself tied to the bed. Annie enters, makes a speech about hobbling and promptly chops Paul’s foot off with an axe.

At the end of the book, Annie has crawled out to the shed and has her hand wrapped around the handle of her chainsaw. This smacks of a last-ditch attempt to get a little bit more horror into it, and is tacky as a result – I think it would have been much more effective to have had her going for the axe again since she’s already used it on him once.

That said, she also cut off his thumb with a carving knife, didn’t she? Maybe it’s an escalation of hostilities in retaliation for being smacked in the head with a typewriter.

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Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World’s End – Epilogue

June 1st, 2007

Went to see Pirates of the Caribbean III last night and for some reason it wasn’t really very crowded at all. The film itself was enjoyable but not as hilarious a romp as the second installment. Depp, Bloom, Knightly and co all put in decent performances (Keith Richards made a cameo too) but it was strangely lacking, and at over two hours it dragged on.

But anyway, here’s the very last bit of the film, shown after the final credits have rolled. Most of the people at our showing had left and so missed this. I advise you not to press Play if you haven’t seen the film already, since it contains a minor spoiler.

Apologies for the crappy quality – I forgot to clean my camera phone’s lens. I didn’t realise the tiny movements would translate into quite so much juddering, either.

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09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

May 2nd, 2007

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

It beats 4 8 15 16 23 42, that’s for sure.

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Silent Hill

May 1st, 2006

SO I finally dragged open my wallet long enough to pay for a ticket to see Silent Hill and woah – talk about a trippy mindf*ck! Is this thing a homage to Hellraiser or what?

Basic plot: Little girl is very ill, mother refuses to accept psychiatric treatment and sets off to find a faith healer. On the way there she’s chased by a cop and ends up in Silent Hill. Little girls vanishes from the car (because, yeah, they all do this) and mother chases her all over town through several severely screwy scenarious including, but not limited to, burning children, Thriller-style nurses and a dude with a pyramid for a head.

The acting was actually pretty good and the effects were downright creepy, but either I’m more jaded than I thought or the film just wasn’t that scary. For me there were no jumpy moments and no mounting terror, just totally weirded out gore. There was a lot of gore actually. A suprising amount considering the film is 15-Rated.

But it’s fairly faithful to the games, complete with the road being broken off at each end, the never-ending rain of ash and the rusted metal alternative dimension level… bit. Even the camera angles when we first get into the town of Silent Hill are very much like the game. It’s a faithfull rendition but I can’t help wondering if that limited the scope for developing the characters and plot.

Ah well, it was an… interesting… 2 hours.

Overall Rating? 7/10
Best Bit: Meh, I dunno – it was all pretty f*cked up.

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Movie Reviews…

July 13th, 2003

I’ve been watching a few dodgy SVCD downloads at a friends place recently, seeing as I don’t currently have the cashola to actually go to the flicks myself:

The Matrix: Reloaded
The Matrix: Reloaded When I origiinally saw the trailer for this film I thought it looked a bit dodgy, and it turns out I was right. The fights just don’t have the same brutality that they did in the first film. OK, so they’re in the Matrix and so things like the Laws of Physics are probably only guidelines, but too much of the fights are made of up the actors flying around on strings. Fights between the two are what it’s all about baby, yeah! Oh, and Choice, apparently.

The computer graphics haven’t really improved fron the original, either. In that fight scene, there are several shots of an obviously fake Neo floating all over the shop. To make matters worse, at the end of that fight, the Smiths watch Neo take off and most of them go through the same movements, making the whole scene so darned tacky-looking it’s embarrassing.

Someone once described this movie as a ‘holding pattern’. I’m tempted to agree. Some groovy car chases though.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines Another one that had some big shoes to fill, but which didn’t do too badly. Arnie returns as a (somewhat older, haha) ‘good’ Terminator and has to face down a much more advanced female robot. Remember how the T1000 (Robert Patrick) couldn’t form complex machinery or weapons? Well this one can.

Given that you know Arnie is gonna win, you’d expect this to be an epic battle, right? Wrong! The Best. Car. Chase. Evar. occurs really early on but the whole movie just kinda trudges after that. As for plot holes – don’t get me started! I’d list ‘em but that would be spoiling it for you.

But at least this sets the scene for Terminator 4, and I really hope there is one. Arnie probably wouldn’t be required for this one as it would mostly be about the war between humans and the machines, and so there’d be no sending anyone back. Shit, they could probably render it all anyway.

Another filler, not a brilliant movie in it’s own right. Spot the Robocop-style ‘hard reset’ routine.

Mortal Kombat 2: Annihilation
Only kidding – it started on Channel 5 a while ago and I managed to watch about five minutes before getting bored and going off to do something else. Only I couldn’t find anything else to do. Meh.

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