The Pictures

Hot, hot, hot.

What in the world is going on? I am cooking. Anyway...in an attempt to beat the heat K and I went to the Astor last night to see a double feature. A double feature? you say. Yes...they still exist...and the cheapskate within me cannot resist the bargain of paying something like $13 for two films in a nice old cinema.

Now the double feature is a tricky venture...one may be great but one may suck, one may be boring but the other fantasmagorical...etc, etc. We'd been to one of these before...the first feature was the beautiful Irish musical film called Once that everyone loves, including me...and the second feature...yep, you guessed it, Mel Gibson's bloody epic Apocalypto!! What were they thinking!? Well...shut your mouth! It was a perfect combination! It brought together a film we really wanted to see and one that we would never even think of viewing...and WHAM! It was really great. They balanced themselves out so that a perfect night could be had. Sure the latter was violent but it was also exhilarating and breathtaking and intense, and the former was light, bittersweet and just beautiful to watch.

Now I'm aware that was probably a rarity...the right moviegoer and the right time and at the right place...if it was a week later I might have hated the whole experience but it worked a treat...so it was with mixed emotions that I went to this double feature last night...the movies on offer: Cloverfield followed by Stardust.

Now we had no desire to see Cloverfield when it first came out or even now come to think of it, but K had wanted to see Stardust since it first hit the cinemas sometime last year but didn't get the chance to, so that was what we were really there to see.

Well, Cloverfield had us at different opinions. K thought it sucked and I thought it sucked less. I appreciated it for what it was...a different approach to a pretty specific genre of cinema...but we both had similar gripes...particularly the dialogue. Hokey pokey to say the least. It's fine if you're going to make a monster/disaster movie in the traditional vein...you can have dialogue like 'They're gone, they're all gone' and it doesn't seem so...crap, but in Cloverfield where they're going for some form of cinema verite...people don't talk like that in real life...or have 'actorly' inflections when they say the crap dialogue...so it just sounds awful.

There were fans in the audience...well one in particular who had seen Cloverfield 25 times...she was a priceless addition to our movie going experience and actually made the first film worthwhile...but the time the credits rolled on she was bouncing away to the 5 minutes of musical scoring, and conducting the whole thing pretty much at the end...priceless.

Also the monster was scary enough...but I've seen scarier movie monsters before:

You tell me what film she's from...you get a prize.

And on to Stardust - we really enjoyed it. It was fantasy but still quite British in a quirky way and Charlie Cox and Claire Danes were really quite good together...with some good chemistry...plus the fey Robert De Niro, Spike from Press Gang, Ricky Gervais, that guy from The Fast Show, and Peter O'Toole and Ian McKellan fighting it out for impressive British vocals, it made for a nice end to the evening.

But Claire Danes doesn't look right with light hair and light eyebrows...just didn't click for some reason. And doesn't Ricky Gervais have some fangs on him? They look quite sharp and pointy.