In The Shadow Of The Moon

I bought this purely on spec as it was a Ron Howard documentary about the Apollo project.

It's really good.

It contains interviews with the surviving Apollo astronauts as well as re-mastered footage from the moon landings.

I'm a bit of a moon buff. I really enjoyed the From The Earth To The Moon series that Ron Howard and Tom Hanks produced, and this film was again full of trivia and little stories about the astronauts. For example, I knew that the navigation computer on the LEM effectively crashed twice on the decent. What I didn't know was that it was Buzz Aldrin's fault. Buzz is of course a nickname, but he has another nickname; "Doctor Rendezvous", because of his work on orbital rendezvous. Because he was concerned that the landing would be aborted, he left the rendezvous radar on so he could find the command module quickly. This radar continued feeding data to the computer, while it was simultaneously receiving data from the landing radar. The computer couldn't cope with this and spat out error message 12 02 (buffer over-run).

Also in the film are the usual shots of the spacecraft that we are familiar with, but the re-mastering really brings them to life and a lot of footage will be new to most folk.

Score: 7/10 Good documentary, and quite funny in places.

OQ: Neil had been two seconds from death that morning but afterwards he'd got up and just gone back to his office to do paperwork.

Leatherheads

I'm not certain why this film is getting the pasting it is, because it certainly doesn't deserve it.

It's a, by all accounts, fairly accurate if somewhat embellished story of how football (or American football to us limeys) became the nation's favourite sport. It starts in 1925 and immediately highlights the difference between college football with their young stars and thousands of spectators and "professional" football where the players travel the country, trying to make enough money to buy food, board and train fair to their next game.

Dodge Connolly (George Clooney) has a plan to get the game into the big time, by borrowing an up and coming war hero turned college football star Carter Rutherford, who has his face advertising everything from shaving razors to gasoline. However Rutherford is hiding a secret and reporter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellwegger) is out to bust him.

Where the film does drag is the whole war hero part, which seems to be included only to alternate between it and the football story. I think it works though, because the only other reasonable story that could be focussed on is the romance between Dodge and Lexie, which I think would have been distracting rather than diverting.

Is this film trying to be "Welcome to Colinwood"? Well, I don't know, I've never seen it. But it's very well shot, the sets are very impressive and the story's quite good. The problem seems to be that it's a historical film about a sport that few in the UK care about. As such, its main hook for the audience doesn't work well. Take a look at the UK trailer. There's not one mention of football at all, and it appears to be marketed as a romantic comedy, which it certainly isn't. It is funny, and it does have romance, but it's mainly about a handful of players and the birth of a national game.

Oh, and in case you were wondering where the film's name comes from, it's because in the 1920s all players wore leather helmets during the game.

Score: C
It's not a great film by any standards, but I found it enjoyable and worth a look. This commentary may be marred by the fact that because of my Cineworld pass, I didn't pay £6 to see it.

OQ: There has to be a better way to advertise starch...

Bender's Big Score

It's a worrying time when the first sign of senile dementia sets in. Especially if this occurs before your thirtieth birthday.

I of course, being a big Futurama fan, ordered the direct to DVD feature length episode "Bender's Big Score" as soon as it became available, as well as preordering Stargate's "The Ark of Truth". Arriving home last night I found two packages from Play.com. My initial excitement that perhaps the Stargate release date had slipped forward was dismissed when it turned out that at some point in the past I had preordered Bender's Big Score, and promptly forgotten about it. Or perhaps one of these is a temporal copy of the other one?

Thus, I am now the proud owner of two copies of this DVD.

I've always preferred Futurama to The Simpsons.I've just found the humour better, more surreal and quite often very cerebral. I could make a joke that this is why Americans didn't like it, but the main reason it was cancelled was because studio executives fully understand what the show was about.

There's a great opening where Professor Farnsworth is explaining that the idiots who cancelled them were in fact themselves fired for incompetence. The Box Network visual gag is very good. Then Leela asks "What does this mean for us and our many fans?" while standing in front of a rack full of desk fans. As soon as I saw that, I knew they were back on form.

The pace is maintained throughout, not even slowing down for the musical number. There were a couple of unnecessary cameos but on the whole, it was well written and very funny.

Score: A

OQ: Well....we're boned.

Stargate SG 1: The Ark of Truth

The first of the direct to DVD movies that Stargate has jumped medium to. This film is intended to wrap up those loose threads left unresolved at the end of the series. I don;t want to spoil it for you, as it's something you probably want to see first time yourself, but I can say it's very good. It starts well, keeps up the pace throughout and has a satisfactory conclusion. The character interaction is still an important part of the mix, and no-one is sidelined. Each character is used well and nothing feels out of place or forced. There's also the usual comedy moments, which I realised I had missed terribly from the TV show.

Overall, the look and feel is exactly like an episode from the series, albeit a little longer with a bit more budget for special effects.

Personally I hope that this new business model works for them. It would be a great wake up call to the Hollywood TV producers that the DVD market can more than cover your production costs, if the show is good quality with a loyal fan following. Hell it could even pave the way for cancelled shows to make a comeback in a new format. Here's hoping.

Score: A But then, I'm a huge Stargate fan.

OQ: .... Ahh...now that would be a spoiler, wouldn't it?

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

...or "Why pushy parents should be taken out and shot."

Caught this on BBC 4 last night, and it was surprisingly good. Not that it shouldn't haven been, given the names attached, it's just that biographical films are not generally my bag. Still, I found it very watchable.

Starting with his radio career and his desire to break into films, the story concentrates on the self imposed tragedy of his private life. There are some up-beat moments, such as when he fools the casting director of his first film into thinking he's an eighty year old war veteran, after first being rejected for not looking the part. This first break catapulting him into stardom, which the film cleverly completely skips over in order to avoid detracting from the main story. But behind all his success, right up until her death was his pushy mother. A woman who instilled in him the idea that fame comes at the cost of your friends and family, but it's a price worth paying. This isn't to place all the blame for his problems with his mother, it's clear he's a deeply flawed individual. Geoffrey Rush plays him in an almost child like state, throwing tantrums whenever things don't go his way. But her pushy and demanding nature certainly didn't help him.

Only two of his four marriages are shown in the film, his first wife Anne and second, Britt Ekland (played wonderfully by Charlize Theron). Whether the film takes artistic licence or not, the implication is that both of these marriages broke down because of Sellers' selfish nature. The scene where he tells his two children and wife Anne that he loves them, just not as much as Sophia Loren is stomach churning, not least because his affair with Loren is all in his head.

Whenever something traumatic happens in Sellers' life, the narrative changes completely to Rush (as Sellers) stepping into the role of one of the other characters (Anne, his mother, Blake Edwards) as the world around the scene turns out to be a studio set, and shows Sellers re-editing his own life, altering their dialogue to create the happy ending he never had. It's quite evocative, rather unusual, but it strikes home because this is something that everyone has done in their own lives at some point.

Later in his life, he comes to despise the characters he has created and strikes out to do something completely different. However financial urgencies force him to do one more Pink Panther film. Ultimately when he does finally make a film that really matters to him, playing Chance the gardener in 'Being There', the film cuts to Sellers watching the movie on TV in an empty house. Having finally won the critical acclaim he always strove for, he now has no-one to share his success with.

Score: C+
Not usually my thing, but very watchable if a little sad.

OQ: You think he was harsh to me? He was. But that just means he learnt his lesson.

Vantage Point

Vantage Point is the sort of film that makes you want to run up to the director, shake him vigorously for ten minutes and say "Well? How do you like it?" There's a lot of shaky-cam. A lot*.

The film leans heavily on its use of showing the same event from eight points of view. In fact without this storytelling technique, it would be quite a dull film. Also a shorter film. The story is fairly compelling, although it's just not enough of a plot to fill the time on its own. It is filled with plot twists and cliffhangers. And when I say filled, I mean filled like a foot long Sub of the day with everything in it that's so big you get lockjaw trying to bite into it.

The constant cliffhanger and reset used throughout gets really irritating about half way through. I felt like I was watching an episode of Lost. "I'm never going to get any answers, am I?" was a nagging thought that kept popping up. The film seems to be an answer to the question nobody cared about; How many cliffhangers can you get in one film? It is constantly perforated with people looking at something out of camera shot going "Oh My God!" before rushing off and the focus immediately jumping to the next person. By about the fourth one of these I could hear the audience shifting in their seats and feel their frustration. Fortunately, the producer seems to be aware of how irritating this is and at about this point, the focus shifts into "more action, less faffing about".

After the twist in the middle (this isn't really a spoiler as there are so many twists), the film does pick up pace a lot, almost like it's looked at its watch and realised how little time is left before the end. However, this doesn't really make amends for torturing us with cliffhangers for the first half of the film.

I guess the moral of the story is that terrorists are quite happy to shoot hostages, assassinate presidents and blow up plazas full of people, but they won't run over small children or cute animals who have wandered into the road. So really, all we need to do is surround all our important buildings with small children and cute animals and they'll be perfectly safe. Also, the closer you stand to a bomb, the better your chances of survival with only a few cuts and bruises seem to be.

Score: C- A distinctly average plot bolstered by a tired and overused narration technique.

OQ: "Oh My God!"

*You can always tell the films where the city council refused to let them drive cars at high speed through the streets. They use shakycam to cover the fact that the "car chase" is being driven at 30 miles an hour.

Knight Rider (2008)

A new Knight Rider? Blasphemy, I say! Or said, when I first heard about this film being made. For some very strange reason, I thought this was a cinematic release. It isn't. It's a TV movie.

Now I know that a few of you are already heading for the exit hearing those words. And to be honest, I almost joined you. But I thought; I'll give it a go.

The whole thing feels very much like a long pilot for a TV show. That prospect had be shivering. Knight Rider was brought back a few years ago in the guise of TKR (Team Knight Rider). Team Knight Rider was dreadful Watching it was arse-wrenching (like gut-wrenching but much worse).

The only way to convey how bad it was, is to compare it to other horrors of TV and Film. For Star Wars fans, it's like watching the Star Wars Holiday Special (something that according to every fan who has seen it should never be attempted sober). For Star Trek fans, it's like watching a director's cut of Generations, where Picard travels across time to rescue Kirk, whereupon they fall in love, move to Venice Beach and set up a nightclub where Picard performs showtunes, dressed as a woman.

With my expectations set suitably low, I bunged this on and had a gander. It's surprisingly good.

The technology of KITT has been updated considerably. Instead of an indestructible shell, he now has a nano-morph skin that regenerates damage almost instantly. The effect for this is suitably impressive. They've kept the "super-pursuit" mode, but updated it so it doesn't look so naff. And having KITT be able to mimic other cars (albeit only other Shelby Cobras) is a nice and rather logical addition.

The story is what you'd expect from Knight Rider. Bad guys want to do bad things, KITT and his driver have to stop them. The lack of the Foundation for Law and Government was a major plot contrivance. This film also "de-canonises" Knight Rider 2000, the TV movie made with The Hoff after the TV series finished, and I can't shake the nagging feeling that something nasty has happened to the original KITT in the interim.

There are a few places where the CGI is a little obvious, and I'm not convinced that Val Kilmer was the best choice for KITT's voice. By all accounts he was a last minute choice after the original actor (Will Arnett - see trivia section) had to withdraw after he had recorded all his lines.

Soundtrack is quite good, updated title music is pretty neat and for the most part the special effects deliver. However if it does spawn a TVshow they're going to have to drop at least one character, as there's a couple too many in this film and they don't all have a major part to play.

Score: Overall it's a B - -

Trivia:

Originally, Will Arnett was cast as the voice of K.I.T.T. However, after he had finished recording his lines to everyone's satisfaction, a conflict of interest was raised. His is the distinctive voice heard on General Motors car and truck commercials, but K.I.T.T. is a Ford vehicle. As a result, Val Kilmer was cast as K.I.T.T.'s voice and all of the car's dialogue was re-recorded.

In the beginning, as the thieves are going through the garage, you can see many of the parts from a third generation Firebird, including the outline of an opened hood, a Tune Port Injected engine, as well as the dash of the Knight Industries Two Thousand. Continuity (which I spotted):

When Welther and Smoke are pursuing KITT and Sara in the helicopter, the exterior of the black helicopter is shown three times and each time it is a different helicopter.