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Time flies when you’re having fun, especially if you can’t count.
I expected that shortly we’d have to do a special Twitch-O-Meter because number 100 was coming up. But when I finished counting them all, guess what: I was already too late. Last week was actually the hundredth of these that got published.
Which makes this Twitch-O-Meter number 101.
And that gave me the idea to put up a list with links to all the 100 which had come before.
Sometimes we do get asked what the Twitch-O-Meter is supposed to be, or what its purpose is. What it is is quickly answered: it’s a weekly column, mostly (but not always) in the form of a list or a countdown.
What the purpose is takes a bit longer to explain, but it basically amounts to this: here at Twitch, most of the time we write about news. New movies, new plans from actors and directors, new DVDs…
But we didn’t become film fans because of news. We started to love films because of specific titles, specific events, specific genre highlights. The Twitch-O-Meter was invented so we had a chance to write about things we love and hate. And to share opinions and other stuff which does not necessarily constitute news.
These are our labors of love, or at least they should be. And what have we done with the freedom this column grants us? Find out after the break!
Continue Reading "What Came Before 101: A Big List Of All Twitch-O-Meters So Far"...
As a Twitch-O-Meter, this post will remain up on top of the page for one day. There might be newer posts below this, so don’t forget to take a look!
When you start collecting films it sometimes is hard to stop, especially when you finally land the sort of job which gives you the financial thing to buy a crazy thing or two. Looking at my collection I certainly did my share of “blind buying” and sometimes that means you end up with a few duds. Then again, really bad movies are a fun and beloved genre all by themselves, and sometimes you even see truly crummy movies get a lovingly lavish DVD edition.
Sometimes I have the mind of a magpie. I can’t resist shiny things.
Which means I have bought a few titles solely on the basis of them being rather flash editions, or having a set of extras I was really interested in. It’s an odd thing when the “making of” documentary is more fun than the film it describes, but that does happen. Sometimes it’s because the feature is an epically bad movie and therefore easily eclipsed by some standard extras, but sometimes the movie isn’t really bad, yet the documentary is just so damn good.
A good example of a film I grabbed solely for the extras was “Faces of Death”, which I reviewed earlier this week.
Even though I hold that film (and indeed its entire genre) in low esteem, the commentary track and documentaries on the disc easily warranted acquiring this disc.
So after the break you can see my list of five other examples of DVD-editions where the extras in my opinion outshine the main film.
Continue Reading "WHEN EXTRAS ATTACK (or: when disc 2 is actually better than disc 1…)"...
The misplacement of trust is a go-to device within the whole of dramatic storytelling. It allows us to root for or against a protagonist’s decisions, and can make us question our own beliefs and prejudices. There’s a subset of films out there that take this notion and apply it not to characters but an institution, and within that subset there’s a wonderfully campy corner we’ll examine today. Past ToM’s have addressed plants and animals run wild – it’s time to tackle technology. If you can’t trust your dishwasher, what can you trust?
Continue Reading "Technology Gone Wrong!"...
One of the movies which is extremely high on my anticipations list is the upcoming vampirish thriller “Thirst” by Park Chan-Wook, starring both Song Kang-Ho and Shin Ha-Kyun. It will be the third time these three major talents are gathered together for a film, and with the first two being “Joint Security Area” and “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” I can say my anticipation is deserved.
Song Kang-Ho already got his turn here at the Twitch-O-Meter, but today let us look at Shin Ha-Kyun. His specialty might be portraying quirky and likeable characters, but nearly every role he played had far more meat on it than normally expected for a “funny guy”. Shin Ha-Kyun uses his comic talent and flexible mug to endear us, and that makes it hit all the harder when tragedy strikes. Given a good script and a good director, I don’t think there is anything he cannot do. He is that good.
Take his role in “No Mercy for the Rude”, where he plays a caricature of a killer-for-hire. The character is mute and often wears big sunglasses (no eyes visible), so all Shin Ha-Kyun had to work with was bodylanguage and timing. Not only does he pull it off, he does it subtly.
So once again I’m going to use a turn in the Twitch-O-Meter to do a gallery of 5 close-ups of one of my favorite thespians. Guess which 5 movies they’re from.
No competition, no prizes, just for fun, try to see how far you get without using IMDB.
And I’ll post the answers on Tuesday (earlier if someone has all 5 of them right).
Good luck!
Ever notice how Halloween allows for the opportunity for the fairer sex to dress with an extra helping of vamp-camp during a costume party? A scary and sexy transformation make for a heady combo, perhaps the only day of the year that solves the paradox of the so-called madonna/whore complex. In classic noir cinema, the femme fatale is as key to the story-telling as the lighting and urban cynicism. She is a two-faced manipulator that leaves the poor fellas reeling and to the point of not knowing what side is up and what side is down. Of course, there are hundreds of great lists of classic noir ladies who fit the bill and at least one modern incarnation (the femme fatale on steroids) is included in this list. But here the focus is on the unleashed supervixen who might quite literally be a man-eater as she brings her generally-not-so-innocent victims into her web or stares down the barrel of her heavy caliber weapon. When giving Rick Dekkard his target briefing in Blade Runner, his boss uses the phrase, “Talk about beauty and the beast - she’s both.” The sexy-killer has transcended the stereotypical cult origins (notably the brawnier Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS and the lady trio of Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) to populate all manner of movie and genre; from action movies to sly satire pieces, and high camp to seriously disturbing horror. This kind of crazy-sexy-cool can (and should) invite a little Halloween role-playing.
Continue Reading "Sexy-Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est? (Seven Crazy Ladies To Die For)"...
As a Twitch-O-Meter, this post will remain up on top of the page for one day. There might be newer posts below this, so don’t forget to take a look!
Last year I moved to another address so I had to put everything I own into boxes. This automatically makes you aware of just how much stuff you collect over the years, and packing my CDs I noticed how many of those were soundtracks.
Not too surprising I guess (being a movielover), but then I noticed how many of those were from Japan and that DID surprise me.
Surely there is no shortage of listenable and / or catchy soundtracks from other parts of the world?
Anyway, I seem to gravitate towards Japanese movie soundtracks and one of the reasons is that they sure do have some fine composers over there. I own several anime series soundtracks too as they are often matching their movie-counterparts in quality
So after the break, read my list of five people who each created several unforgettable Japanese scores…
Continue Reading "♬ Tonari No To-Toro To-To-Ro ♫…"...
Do these five movies have anything in common?
5. Jersey Girl (2004)
The most damning praise that can be heaped upon Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl is to call it “sweet” and nothing else.
All his movies have a core of sickly sweetness, but his other movies—including his upcoming Zack and Miri Make a Porno —masquerade the sentimentality beneath a blisteringly outrageous stream of obscenities and sex talk. If he were born 70 years earlier, he could have become a perfectly competent scriptwriter, perhaps following in the wake of Preston Sturges and becoming a writer/director of tart-tongued witfests that pushed the boundaries of the time. But he was fortunate enough to be born in 1970, coming of age in the early 90s when technology had advanced sufficiently to allow him to make a movie that showcased a sense of humor itching to push the boundaries of his time.
Despite the occasional salty/sexy dialogue, Jersey Girl could have been made in the 1940s. It would have worked better if it had been set in that era, substituting straightforward sudsy melodrama for the profanities and diaper jokes. George Carlin still would have given the best performance.
After the jump: Spoilers for Atonement, plus: what the movies have in common.
Continue Reading "Movies That Apparently Have Nothing in Common"...
As a Twitch-O-Meter, this post will remain up on top of the page for one day. There might be newer posts below this, so don’t forget to take a look!
In 2001 / 2002 the first mutterings and rumblings around “Shaolin Soccer” arrived on Western movienews websites, and I was very surprised when the articles mentioned an actor who was MORE popular in Hong Kong than Jackie Chan.
Huh? Was that even possible?
That actor was Stephen Chow, and although the type of comedy he excells in doesn’t always travel well beyond Chinese borders, on occasion he shines with utter brilliance. He is not the best actor out there, not the best fighter and not the best acrobat, but he has a vision for gags which combine his talents splendidly.
Even bad jokes can be a lot of fun when the timing is right, but Stephen Chow adds an unbelievable amount of effort and special effects to that, always pushing it slightly farther than you would expect at first. None of his movies will be in my personal top ten, but I cannot deny that they all contain sequences that are near-perfect.
Case in point: one of the reasons why this article is so late is because I couldn’t stop watching the films I took the screenshots from. I had to go to a certain scene to score a close-up, but before I knew it twenty minutes would have passed.
Anyway, in the end I managed to tear myself away from the screen. So once again I’m going to use a turn in the Twitch-O-Meter to do a gallery of 5 close-ups of one of my favorite thespians. Guess which 5 movies they’re from.
No competition, no prizes, just for fun, try to see how far you get without using IMDB.
And I’ll post the answers on Wednesday (earlier if someone has all 5 of them right).
Good luck!
[In accordance with the book of “Things Todd Lets Us Get Away With” this post will remain here on top of the page for, well, most of the day. Please scroll down for today’s news.]
Some people look weathered, but few people look leathered!
I don’t know what Danny Trejo has been doing with his skin to make it look like that, but I’d hate to try it myself.
With a face that transcends conventional opinions about “beautiful” and “ugly”, the man has been a walking special effect since his near-accidental tumble into the film industry in “Runaway Train” at age 40, and from the start he has been almost lethally recognizable and continuously typecast.
But instead of wearing out his welcome Danny Trejo only became more popular, especially after Robert Rodriguez started to use him to great effect in his movies.
Even though he is by all accounts a very nice guy these days, Mr. Trejo has had a rather, eh… checkered past, so to speak, spending nearly all of the sixties behind bars in a wide selection of famous prisons. Funnily enough he still gets asked at auditions if he can play a convict.
Next year he’ll turn 65 but there’s no sign of him retiring yet. In fact the man is almost insanely prolific: in 2008 alone Danny Trejo was already visible in more than 10 films, another 10 are scheduled to be released later this year, and he did television work too!
Anyway, Danny Trejo’s face almost seems created just for the purpose of being zoomed-in on. Which means that once again I’m going to use a turn in the Twitch-O-Meter to do a gallery of 5 close-ups.
Guess which 5 movies they’re from. No competition, no prizes, just for fun, try to see how far you get without using IMDB. Because he always looks more-or-less the same I’ve kept it relatively easy and stuck to movies which have opened wide. So forget about those titles which were released Direct-To-Video only, these shots come from real movies with real budgets!
For those not aware, the first debate in the upcoming U.S. Presidential election is this Friday, September 26th. It’s currently impossible to avoid – whether trolling the internets, turning on the TV, opening a newspaper, or even just walking outside – the crush of political pontificating and posturing on display 24/7 in the weeks leading up to the election (November 4th). With all this inexorably in mind, I’m taking this week’s ToM to touch on a few beloved(ish) pictures set in the political realm – all of which lay bear more truth than 90% of what passes for news reporting these days. There’s no shortage of great films focused on Washington’s glories and gaffes and the genre, if there is one, is endlessly malleable so sound off below – what are some of your favorites?
Continue Reading "Politics as Usual"...
[In accordance with Twitch Law this post will remain here at the top for the one day. Please scroll down for today’s news. I’m a day late but I have an excuse. In a couple hours I heading out to the airport to head to Austin for Fantastic Fest and I had to pack last night after getting home from work.]
One of the great joys of being a movie geek is that you get to share your joy with friends and family. Hopefully, your feelings are contagious and they to will watch and enjoy a film based on your recommendations or praises. One of the down sides is of course owning a collection that comes mostly from half way around the world and is region coded for anywhere except your country. I cannot count how many times I had to subdue my enthusiasm because I couldn’t show a movie I was really excited about. My place is just not suitable for entertaining guests. On the rare occasion I have been able to lend out movies to friends and family so they too may experience the joy of cinema. Last weekend I lent out Inside, Dog Soldiers, Shutter and a screener for [REC] to a friend who is trying to bulk up on his horror. A more substantial down side of owning such a collection is that your enthusiasm could be replaced by feelings of great loss as you never see those movies again. I’m sure we’ve all been there. I ran this week’s ToM theme by the rest of the guys here and a few of them have had the same experiences. This is one of the greatest risks of being a movie geek; lending out a movie and never getting it back! Read through my five great losses and share yours with the rest of us. It’ll help ease the pain if you get it off you chest and share with the rest of the group. ”Hello. My name is Mack and I’ve lent out movies and have never seen them again”.
Continue Reading "It is more blessed to give than to receive."...
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“Can you remember where you were when John F. Kennedy was shot? What you were doing when you heard the news?”
For my parents’ generation, the assassination of JFK was such a major event that nearly everyone of their age can answer these questions with “Yes”. A moment in history that is anchored to collective feelings of shock, loss and mourning. Being born after the fact, growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, whenever the Kennedy topic was raised I was a bit miffed at not being able to truly participate. Surely the remembered emotions were exaggerated? At the time it was just a news item, right? Sure, a major one, but still… And foreign news too (for us here in The Netherlands)!
Little did I know that my generation got it’s very own defining moment of collective shock, loss and mourning. Only it wasn’t just MY generation: I do not know a single person who is unable to remember where he was and what he was doing when he heard about the planes hitting the New York World Trade Center on the 11th of September, 2001.
Seven years ago, to the day.
At the time I worked for a multinational oil company, with lots of American colleagues. I remember the colleague who told me: “Have you heard...?”, and I remember the shock, and later panic. The people trying to phone friends in New York, but unable to get through. The uncertainty if more planes would crash, especially after the Pentagon got hit as well. Running for the cellar, not to hide, but because we had a big auditorium there with a beamer which started to project the live CNN footage on the screen. Hungry for news (desperate even), we saw the towers fall. Live. Monstrously enlarged on, believe it or not, a cinema screen.
No, the stories about collective mourning being linked to such an event were NOT exaggerated, as I learned.
And I fully understood the people who, in 2006, clamored about the film “United 93” as being “TOO SOON!”.
Because many of them considered the wound to be too raw to commercially release a movie about it.
After the break there is a list of 5 movies which are in some way connected to the events of seven years ago.
Continue Reading "Too Soon!"...
With a career spanning fifty seven years and one hundred ninety four credits - and counting! - it is impossible to be any sort of film fan without being aware of Ernest Borgnine. Borgnine is arguably one of the finest - and certainly one of the most prolific - character actors in the history of film, a man who seldom, if ever, takes the lead but remains in incredibly high demand because he’s just so damn likeable, never seems to take himself too seriously and consistently turns out solid work. He’s also someone who I’ve developed a bit of a weakness for over the years, someone who has turned up at a number of key moments in a number of key roles. Sure, Borgnine’s always Borgnine, there’s not a huge amount of range, but he’s someone who’s been with me since childhood and his presence anywhere has become a sort film equivalent to a childhood security blanket. If Ernest’s in it, it’s going to be okay.
And so here are five key moments in the career of Ernest Borgnine, as chosen by me. They’re not necessarily his biggest roles. They’re not necessarily his best roles. Heck, I’m not nearly old enough to have come to Borgnine’s key work - The Wild Bunch, anyone? - while still in my formative years. What you’ve got here are five key bits, in roughly chronological order, documenting how and when Uncle Ernest has popped up throughout my life.
Continue Reading "An Ode To Uncle Ernest"...
As is tradition with our Twitch-o-Meter installments, this baby will stay on top for the next 24 hours.
When I was handed a guest spot in this ToM thingy, the first thought coming to mind was rather scary, I might say. That is, some bell among that ocean of neurons (all three of them), sharing space in that big thing over my eyes, telling me “but, but… you hate lists.” I don’t hate the idea of making lists per se, and I even enjoy reading other people’s lists profoundly (you are what you watch, after all). Problem is, if I make a list, about 3 milliseconds after completion it’s very likely I’ll change my mind, at least when it comes to details (first place is always first place). That is why, if you ask me my list of Top 10 Korean films of all time, I’d probably give you about 200 titles or ten slightly different lists in a two week span; and why even the mere thought of listing my favorite 10 dramas would be akin to asking Uncle Bill what his favorite dead president is. On paper. The dead president, that is.
Nominations started flowing: “craziest Korean films with the longest (Korean) titles,” in which case 대학로에서 매춘하다가 토막살해 당한 여고생 아직 대학로에 있다 (Teenager Hooker Becomes Killing Machine)‘s madness could have prevailed. Or, how about “best 60s Korean film that you’ve never heard of?” Then again, it would be like a cook reminiscing of his best filet mignon dishes to a vegetarian. But then I accidentally popped the wrong DVD inside my DVD player, and something gave me an idea. It was the opening of an historical drama, a pretty bad ass one at that. So, how about it, The Asian Games of Sageuk (of course sageuk is only the Korean spelling of the genre) openings? On your marks…
Continue Reading "The Asian Games of Historical Drama Openings"...
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Recent computer troubles had me buying a new one, and as always I was amazed at the huge leaps in (affordable) information technology which happened in the past few years. My old model had a single CPU with a speed I could fathom (or at least judge), the internal memory was less than a ten-year-old hard disc, and the videocard didn’t eerily glow yet. But the new one… woohoo!
Of course I tried some visually impressive games from a few years back, to see if they still ran as ‘choppy’ as I remembered. Two of the games that still managed to enthrall me (and ran silky smooth on the new machine!) were actually movie licensed games. Normally a movie license would mean certified damnation, cursing a videogame with a not-to-be-missed deadline and making sure the end result was buggy coupled with bad gameplay.
But not so with these: the ”The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay” game was very good and looks impressive to this day, and the same goes for “Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game Of The Movie”.
Maybe insanely long titles lift the movie licensing jinx on videogames? Nah, even before those, “Goldeneye” on the N64 proved that a license didn’t need to be the kiss of death.
Anyway, this got me thinking a bit. What sort of game based on a movie would I like to see but hasn’t been released yet?
Hmmmm....
Read on for five of my silly ponderings on this subject…
Continue Reading "This Film’s Got a Game in It"...
