solace in cinema : A vast wasteland of movies

Ok so maybe i've left this a bit late but if it isn't New Year yet and i'm not back at work then it's still christmas to me. Anyway, let's run down from 5 to 1 and see where we get to.

5. National Lampoons Christmas Vacation

Back when Chevy Chase was still funny, slightly perma-tanned and still had most of his hair he brought us this gem. By far the best 'vacation' movie, and probably the best Chevy Chase movie that there ever was (Caddyshack comes a close second for me, but he's not in it enough for it to compete… "I was born to love you..I was born to lick your face, …I was born to rub you, …but you were born to rub me first"). It's all the good things, and all the bad things about christmas encapsulated in one movie; relatives, food and drink, overeager parents, decorations, and wok-sledging (i've never done this, but it looks like a lot of fun).

Check out the trailer here 

4. Gremlins

I know for a lot of people this should be higher on the list, and for those that were children in the 80's, Gremlins was a big part of their childhood, well, Gremlins and Phoebe Cates. For me, Gremlins was one of the first horror films I ever saw (yeah I class it as a horror film, it's mild but gremlins still scared the shit out of me) back to back with 'Piranha', both on VHS at my cousins house. A beautiful memory.

Gremlins is a good christmas movie because it's the perfect 'great present gone wrong' movie, an almost allegorical tale for all the parents that buy their kids pets for christmas. The film was so popular when it was released at Christmas 1984 they re-released it at Christmas 1985 hence the "we're back" tagline on the poster.

Check out the Gremlins trailer here 

3. Home Alone

Certainly the best thing Chris Columbus has ever directed (yes, MUCH better than the first two sucky Potter films) and near to the top of the list for writing credits for John Hughes. I think it's the mix of humour (hard to remember when Culkin was funny and not just annoying. See also 'Uncle Buck'), home-made contraption-sadism, stupid criminals, John Candy cameo and white-picket fence suburbia that enamours 'Home Alone' to me.

Wow.. good day for Grindhouse goodies; new pictures, a new trailer and the official site has gone live (technically the trailer was released yesterday, but it's christmas and i've been in a drunken stupor for 24 hours). The trailer is pretty cool and it's good to finally see Kurt Russell creeping-it-up as Stuntman Mike. We get to see more of the characters from Death Proof as a whole and some more zombie action from Planet Terror (even giving us a little shot of Bruce Willis, who's not been listed in the official credits yet).

Check out the trailer here (in various formats)

Stills from Planet Terror here

Collected stills from Death Proof here

The official Grindhouse site is here 

Ted, the big man at bigscreenlittlescreen dropped me a mail to let me know the 'Black Snake Moan' trailer was online, and for that I thank him. I really liked Craig Brewer's breakthrough film 'Hustle & Flow', and have been looking forward to 'Black Snake Moan' for a while. From the looks of it Ricci's pants and Samuel L's furry chops won't be letting us down…

check out the trailer at 'Rope of Silicon' here here 

I can't say that this will still stand in a weeks time, but If I pre-suppose today is christmas day, and I have to think about the films I'd most like to watch, these are them. Ok so not all of them are straight up christmas movies, but all are close enough in my mind to make the list.

So here's the first part of my list (numbers 10 - 6), and accompanying each movie is an excellent trailer (some complete with gruff voice-overs) via youtube.

Counting down from 10 to 6… here's the first part of the list.

10. Scrooged
I love Bill Murray; Ghostbusters, Meatballs, Ghostbusters 2, Lost in translation, Stripes, Groundhog Day, I could go on. The guy just cracks me up, and making him a character where for a good portion of the film he gets to be rude to everyone he knows is a good move. Throw that in with some great direction from Richard Donner and some funny cynical takes on christmas programming "Lee Majors in … the Day the Reindeer Died" and you have a great movie for the most festive of days. 

The trailer for scrooged here (your forget how good It is until you actually watch this trailer again)

9. White Christmas
I'm really not a big fan of musicals, I have very little love for them, but 'White Christmas' is one of the few i'll make an exception for. The thing you really notice about this film straight off (and something that gets more breathtaking all the way through) is just how incredibly beautiful it is, the colours in this film are incomparable. It's all that was good about the old Hollywood system thrown up on the screen and is so un-ashamedly schmaltzy you just need to roll around in it. The film also has that great look from the days when everything looked like, and was a set (especially the outdoors scenes) and they knew it, so they perform it like a stage play. There's no crazy camera angles or experimental techniques here, it's straight up celluloid portraiture. A beautiful thing to behold.

The trailer for 'White Christmas' here

In some kind of really annoying flash format, the small version is rubbish quality and the big version crashes my browser… sweet thanks! yeah no that's much better than just giving us nice quicktime versions… let's use some complicated fullscreen flash video player that crashes everyones browsers. awesome choice idiots.

Either way the trailer (from what I can make out) Is sweet as hell, we get transformers a plenty, and little glimpses of Optimus Prime… and no matter who you are, giant rampaging robots are awesome.

check it out here (via AICN x)

**UPDATE** check out the Windows media/quicktime/ and hi-def versions here

Okay so for the next couple of days on Solace we're going to dedicate the site to that glorious holiday, Christmas. We're going to be running down our top ten films from the past year, talking about our favourite christmas movies and maybe even about the films we just like to watch when we stop working and start chowing down on some turkey face. Just like actual christmas I expect it will bring disagreements and more than possibly, some tears, but out of all of it, hopefully we can get some discussion going.

So let us know your favourite christmas movies, and your top movies from the last year, has it been a good year for films or bad?

Come christmas afternoon and you're stuffed yourself to the point of heart failure, what will you be settling down to watch?

So this turned up over at Bloody-disgusting. '30 Days of Night' (as you'll know if you read this site at all) is one of the few comic book properties i'm obsessed with. This pic however didn't really get my blood flowing, it just looks… well… fake. If it's not fake it must be pre-visual stuff from the movie because to me the whole image looks like a bad cut-and-paste job in photoshop. The angle of the floor the vampires are standing on compared to the floor the car is on looks wrong, and vampires seem to be not far enough away in the distance to be as small as they are… I could go on…. but I won't.

Well, whatever hack job they've done with it aside, I'm sure parts of it are genuine and that's enough to get me excited again. Bring on the darkness, and bring on the blood suckers. October 2007 seems like a long time to wait, but it'll be here before you know it.

Check out the latest video blog from the set here

This is the kind of bit of news I really love. It's stupid, it's old, it's largely irrelevant, and the film itself probably won't ever get made. I talked a little while back about 'D-War' a South Korean monster movie that's been in production for what seems like forever. So one of the writers at twitch turned up a poster in the back of an early promo for D-War for the directors proposed follow-up titled 'Fish War' (click on the poster to see a bigger version).

In the deep, bottomless sea … There are undersea cities where mutated fishes with highly developed intellectual power live together peacefully. But, they got into rage and swore revenge against human beings who continue to catch fishes indiscriminately. One of those days, mysterious events started happening, such as pleasure boats at sea sunk and submarines exploded in the sea. Finally, fishes declared a war against human beings on land and came out on the ground to conquer the human beings with highly advanced weapons and military strength, several times more developed than those of human beings. Human beings was defeated instantly by fishes equipped with bombers shaped like a stingray, battle tanks like an octopus, and special forces like a seahorse, and finally put the world under the control of fishes, not of human beings anymore. At court, Dr. Octopus sentenced human beings who habitually tormented fishes. At a sushi restaurant, a catfish, puffing cigars, waited for dishes made of human beings. And fishes caught and refridgerated human beings as exactly human beings did to fishes and completely controlled the whole world. In Japan, meanwhile, Yamamoto family, the well known sushi master in business for 3 generations, became an most infamous enemy of fishes.

I love it. Even the poster itself is weird, odd looking gothic fish with armour on and 'Spinal Tap' style font to top it all off. There's a high chance this film will never even get made, but if there's any justice in this world it should. They could even get Mr Scruff to do the score (following on from the obscure reference in the title of this post).

via twitch 

'A baddie robot has a pointy noise like that and he has a gun in his hands and he kills a goodie little robot NOT 3PPO - Mum don't write 3PPO he does not kill him - it's another little robot. Chewbaka goes into a doggie robot A-Tat and then Hans Solo was scared and Chewbaka came up. Chewbaka waited to go in there because of Princess Leia. Han Solo got frozen by the baddies The Sand Kids. After that Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader fight. Luke Sky walker has a black hand because his Daddy died. He came back alive with his blackhand. Then it's the end

Oscar will be bringing us more reviews, as the mood takes him.

I think I need more reviews like this, age specific. Star Wars is obviously a different case (although you'll be glad to see Oscar is being raised right with the original trilogy) but when I had a recent discussion with a little cousin of mine, she claimed that 'Princess Diaries' was the greatest film to ever grace the screen. While I disagree I'm sure there's a million other little girls that would claim she's correct and probably kick me in the shin for saying different.

I want to see Casablanca being reviewed by an old guy saw it when It was first released, and more reviews of kids films by kids.

You can check out more 'kid reviews' over at Anorak-magazine here