King Kong (2005)

I watched the recent remake of King Kong tonight. I thought the editing, direction, effects and script were actually a bit disappointing, and yet I enjoyed the movie as a whole.

The giant slug sucking the guy's head off is probably the grossest thing I've seen in a movie. A few of the other effects were a bit 1960s though. It certainly dragged in the jungle, but overall the 3 hours flew by for me.

At one point I thought I recognised a place in New Zealand, and then afterwards I realised that of course it had been filmed here!


Available here.

A while back I was asked to take over a new English class for students planning to take the IELTS English language test. Initially there were two of them.

Pretty soon, one of them had left.

Yet by today, the class had caught on and swollen to nine.

Today was the last day of term, and our once-termly outing to share yum cha proved another good opportunity to get a class of '07 photo...


Today I've also been asked to teach a special holiday course throughout the upcoming 3-week term-break.

It's go-go-go.

Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End

A reunion both on-screen, and off.

After the four of us had been to see the second movie nearly a year ago, this time Rhett, Sarah, myself and Katie were joined by Greg for the final (to date) instalment in the series.

First up, I’d like to nerdishly mention that all the adverts before the film carried the subtitle "REPLACE THE LAMP".

The film:

Very good, but just not much fun. Still, I admire them for going down a darker, less crowd-pleasing, road with it.

As with the last one, I checked my brains at the door as we went in, and was just swept along by it all for the whole three hours. There are inevitable comparisons with the painfuly slow threequel Matrix Revolutions, (also shot back-to-back with its preceding sequel) but Pirates 3 was a whole lot less arduous.

Biggest regret though would be how all those quotable one-liners from the first movie have now become just a joyful memory. There are good lines in this too, but I can't remember any of them.

I always thought that the fantasy element in the first movie spoilt it rather, and this third movie is ALL fantasy. It's more visual and less verbose, which is a bit of a shame. I rather preferred seeing Jack on dry land dealing with more 'real' situations like being in prison. Here he prances around being funny, but getting to actually say little.

Mmmmmmmmm - 8 out of 10. I enjoyed it, but overall it wasn't really my kind of movie.


Roll on the next two.

(available here)
Related Posts:

Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl
Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End
Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Taken earlier this week in Scandinavia by Flatmate Dave.

Ice Age

Fairly apathetic entry into the CGI cartoon genre, getting-by with the bare-minimum of jokes, story and research. Even the dodos died-out millions of years ago now.

That said, the few characters we get to know are quite nice, although Scrat never even seems to meet the others. The scene in which Manny discovers what happened to his family is absolutely galling.

Sure, I’ll watch Ice Age 2, but only because it’s there.

(review of Ice Age 2 here)
(review of Ice Age 3 here)

Romans 5:1-9

I was pleased to be asked to do the reading again at Cession tonight... until Jacob distracted me by suddenly winning our on-stage game of snakes and ladders...

Now that we have been put right with God through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. He has brought us by faith into this experience of of God's grace, in which we now live. And so we boast of the hope we have of sharing God's glory! We also boast of our troubles, because we know that trouble produces endurance, endurance brings God's approval, and his approval creates hope. This hope does not disappoint us, for God has poured out his love into our hearts by means of the Holy Spirit, who is God's gift to us.

For when we were still helpless, Christ died for the wicked at the time that God chose. It is a difficult thing for someone to die for a righteous person. It may even be that someone might dare to die for a good person. But God has shown us how much he loves us - it was while we were still sinners that Christ died for us! By his sacrificial death we are now put right with God; how much more, then, will we be saved by him from God's anger!

Office Space

Office Space (one of Joe’s favourite films) has an opening 20 minutes like no other.

For those of us whose natural habitat is an office, the frustration and apathy of working behind a desk is summed-up in a way never even attempted by any other film I’ve seen. The opening sequence – in which the main character tries against the odds to drive to work but is overtaken by an OAP with a zimmer-frame – sums up perfectly the incredulous mindset that corporation-life nurtures in its oppressed employees.

When the film then ditches this unique approach and instead delves into a samey tale of embezzlement, it’s slowly downhill all the way. Jennifer Anniston, as the token girl, is introduced to appear in a few scenes that totally and utterly don’t affect the story at all, yet at the same time I got the impression that her scenes were the only reason this production got funded.

Because even this very film was made by just such a company.


Available here.

Found my pen...

...on my shoes!

link

He IS Superman™, apparently…

Hot Fuzz

When Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg made their brilliant zombie-parody Shaun Of The Dead, they also doomed themselves to a living-dead career.

It was so good, that anything they made after it would surely get compared with it.

The only solution to this riddle was to keep on making better and better movies, however that plan would have to all start with their next movie - Hot Fuzz.


Hot Fuzz is good. Hot Fuzz is funny. Hot Fuzz is not as good or funny as Shaun Of The Dead.

Stuff.

The film chronicles Police Officer Angel(Simon Pegg)'s transition from a good real-life cop into a stereotypical movie cop, or so the writers seemed to believe.

The thing is, along the way their desire to prove the character's real-life heroism, whilst repeatedly foiling it for laughs, inadvertently turns him into just a real-life terrible cop.

For example, the opening sequence tells us of all the hard work he’s put into his training – good cop. Then we’re told that his arrest-rate is 400% above any other officer – terrible cop.

On his first night in new town Sandford he arrests a guy for drink-driving (good cop) before realising that he doesn't know where the police station is, and has to ask his prisoner for directions. (terrible cop)

Even his catchphrase – “There’s always something going on” - is presented as though it’s a good thing, when in reality such a paranoid outlook would make his usefulness disastrous. Ultimately, such repeated smugness for a gag quickly wears away at the character's initial 'good-guy' image, until I was left really taking sides against him. Arrogance is only admired by arrogance, and rarely (if ever) any use in authority.

While the writers seemed unaware just how much they were discrediting their hero's appeal, this did however have the unexpected side-effect of giving him some depth, in a town full of knowingly one-dimensional characters.


Speaking of the guest-cast, unlike Shaun, the famous names just keep on distracting, until even The Kinks show up on the soundtrack and completely fail to get the movie's subtlety.

As mentioned above though, by the end of the film the only thing Officer Angel really learns is how to have a bit of fun, which coupled with his escalating self-assurance results in the – quite funny – bloodbath at the end of the film. Sadly however, by this stage his over-confidence is no longer the source of comedy, but something that we’re actually meant to get on board with and share. Err, no thanks.


Like Shaun Of The Dead, the first two-thirds of the film don’t really match the last third, and as such both parts are quite funny in quite different ways.

These guys still know comedy back-to-front though, (there are tons of funny lines, sight-gags and no crippling love-story), so I'm quite definitely looking forward to their next one, especially if they can finally learn to get over their ratings-killing swearing too.

(available here)
(review of Shaun Of The Dead here)
(review of The World's End here)

It's Elementary...

About a month ago the Chinese school where I teach English as a second language asked me to cover the Elementary class for a while.

This was a challenge. I’d taught Advanced English classes right down to Pre-Intermediate level before – but Elementary?? Without knowing any Chinese, how on Earth was I going to do that for three whole hours? Every day? Indefinitely???

But then, maybe I’d got it all wrong. Maybe they knew a bit more than just “hello.” Or maybe they only knew “hi.” I just didn’t know, simply because I’d never really met them before.

To make matters worse, I was told that they felt apprehensive of me for much the same reasons.

Well – if God could pull this off, it could be another very useful new skill. It was definitely a task for my daily stock teaching prayer: “God, I know you love these people, and I believe that you want to teach them English, and you seem to want to do that through me, so I just want to get out of the way and let you do it.” It’s worth noting here that as well as my giving it to God, I was also convinced that it would take a genuine commitment from me too, to get him on board.

The first morning. The course director had equipped me with a heap of advice, and the teacher from the next classroom had matched it with a couple of huge children’s storybooks.

I strode confidently in to face the room of about a dozen chatting adults, and wondered if I could get away with spending the whole three hours carefully putting my coffee cup down.

“Good morning!” I bellowed slowly and cheerfully in a way not entirely dissimilar to Troy McClure.

“Good morning!” they all chanted back. Good, that was four seconds. Only another 10,796 to go, this was going well so far.

Within the first minute someone asked me to slow down, and I realised that this just might be the key to making it through to lunchtime.

That first lesson was definitely the make-or-break one. By now I had been told a few phrases that they already knew, and I slowly milked them for all they were worth. Everyone got plenty of opportunity to understand what I was saying and prove it.

Come twelve o’clock, it was the course director’s turn to pile on the encouragement – to me. “You’ve done it. You’ve befriended them, and they’ve accepted you.”

Well of course I had. I’d had to. I’d had the General Manager and the Principal watching.


As the days became weeks, and the weeks became a full month, the best thing would be the pleasure of getting to know them all. A few people left the class finding my speech too difficult, which is cool and to be expected, and a few others joined to hear a native English speaker from England. They even took me out to yum cha:


Finally one lesson there was a knock on the door, and their proper teacher returned. It was welcome back, goodbye and see you later all at the same time.

I still see them around the school, and today both their regular teacher and I took them on a field trip to Remuera Library to hear a talk on homeopathy:


Some of them want to join the homeopathy course that I’m to teach from next term. For those who don’t, it’s encouraging to know that I’m now their relief teacher of choice.

It’s been a very hard month, learning to communicate using even less English than usual, but in one way it’s panned-out just as I expected. It seems that, thanks to God, I now have that new skill.

Despite this, I paradoxically feel that I’ve been taught far more this month than they have.

1 Chronicles 7-10a

The colossal mass-murder caused by King David in the Old Testament. It often reads as though God wanted him to brutally kill so many tens of thousands of people, but yesterday I came across a tiny little verse from the end of his life:

David said to Solomon, "I wanted in the worst way to build a sanctuary to honor my God. But God prevented me, saying, 'You've killed too many people, fought too many wars. You are not the one to honor me by building a sanctuary—you've been responsible for too much killing, too much bloodshed. But you are going to have a son and he will be a quiet and peaceful man, and I will calm his enemies down on all sides. His very name will speak peace—that is, Solomon, which means Peace—and I'll give peace and rest under his rule. He will be the one to build a sanctuary in my honor.

1 Chronicles 7-10a (Message)

The verse about David being “a man after God’s own heart” is quoted in isolation far more often than this one. I don't understand why, as without the forgiveness of the above excerpt as context, it scarcely makes any sense.