herbiehancock

No 330 - Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith Director - George Lucas Episode 3 is the prequel which finally (at times) looks like Star Wars. Episodes 1 and 2 are all taking place in the grand old palaces of Naboo or the super busy super-city of a Coruscant - places which are massively different from the general aesthetic of the original trilogy. However, after the scroll of episode 3, we get to see the old school Star Destroyers back in action. We're beginning with an inter-galactic dog fight and it all feels like star wars. And yet, what Lucas has managed to do is take the basic designs of Star Wars and use CGI to make it feel wrong. Lets start out with that initial dog fight. The action is big and dramatic , but there is so much CGI thrown into the sequence that it just becomes a bit of a mess and difficult to follow. But CGI is a bit of a curse for the film. Everything has been replaced with CGI . Every single shot has CGI in it. Let IMDB put it into context with ...

No 449 - Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace Director - George Lucas This may be controversial, but you know what? Whilst there are some massive MASSIVE flaws with the film (which I'll discuss in a bit) - there are some really exciting bits. Lets focus on the positive shall we. Firstly, there is something which I've omitted from my previous Star Wars blogs - John Williams' excellent score. It is always a dramatic highlight of every film, underpinning the action with a real sense of drama and excitement. When it comes to the new trilogy, the score has been dramatically improved. I mean, cast your ear holes over at the frankly amazing ' Duel of the Fates ' which acts as Darth Maul's theme. It is a frankly epic and terrific piece of music. John Williams is an amazing composer (it is such lazy blogging to continuously point to another person's blog.... but still ). In fact, besides John Williams score, Darth Maul is probably the saving grace of the first f...

No 316 - Trainspotting Director - Danny Boyle Ah the 90's and Cool Britannia. We had Blur . We had Oasis (though I prefer Pulp - who have a song in this film - over either of them). We had Lock Stock and we had this . 'Hollywood Come In - Your time is up' rang the critic quote on the poster. The poster which even today adorns roughly a bazillion bedrooms of students and young adults. This is one cool film. From the first seconds of the film with the ' dum dum dum ' of Lust for Life playing under Ewan McGregor's Renton's iconic 'choose life' speech this film is showing itself as incredibly cool. Yet it walks a very intelligent (and very dangerous) tightrope. You see this film is incredibly cool and it shows taking heroin to be a very lovely and somewhat morish thing. But... in NO way does it glamorise heroin use. The characters live in horrible squalid squats. There is a lot of poo throughout this film. There are a lot of robberies and a lo...