I almost forgot to title this!

How do you go from making a movie as unique as High Tension to doing 2 consecutive remakes? Bloody-disgusting and Rueters are both reporting that Alexendre Aja's has signed on to direct Into the Mirror. Yes, that would be the same Into the Mirror that I spoke of only a few days ago.

The thing I don't get is, you're just coming off of The Hills Have Eyes, so why do another remake? I don't know. I liked High Tension and I liked Into the Mirror, so, I have pretty high hopes for this. I hope it turns out well, but it will likely be some time before we know.

More video.

Shaun of the Dead is pretty easily one of my favorite movies. As a result, I became a fan of the British tv series Spaced. Why you ask? Well, it's the Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright connection. They worked together on Spaced which led to them writing and making Shaun of the Dead.

So, you can begin to imagine my interest in their upcomming movie Hot Fuzz. Where Shaun of the Dead was their loving tribute to zombie movies, Hot Fuzz is a loving tribute to cop movies. And even though it won't be out until next year, and is only now in the process of filming, here are some video diaries that Simon Pegg has been working on.

It's video-riffic

Chan Wook Park's Lady Vengeance hit's theaters on May 5th. It's a very good movie and I think you should watch it. It's very different from Oldboy in that it has a much lighter feel to it.

I have a present for you though, a trailer. Yeah. Watch it.



You know, I'm really starting to like YouTube.

Only thing missing was Alice.

After this, I'm all caught up. This feels like a rush job, doesn't it? Dammit. I'm trying to take my time. Write what I want to write. *sigh* Well, let's get on with it.

Into the Mirror. Korean movie. A lot of supernatural stuff, but not really a horror movie. It's more of a detective story. You see, there's this department store called Dreampia and a year ago, there was fire. And one of the employees died. And now, she's haunting the store. Ok. I'm in. Tell me more.

Well, the woman's body was identified by four coworkers. Her sister was in a mental hospital at the time and couldn't do it herself. Did I say sister? I meant TWIN sister. That's right. Identical twins. Same face, same dna, same blood type. You name it.

Meanwhile, head of mall security is a former cop (and excellent marksman) who one year ago, in an attempt to save his partner who was being held at gunpoing, took a chance at tried to shoot the hostage holder. Unfortunatly, he shot a mirror. His partner was killed.

A mirror! That's how the ghost is now killing the ones who "identified" her body. One by one, their reflections attack them.

The whole premise is that there are two worlds and that mirrors are the divider. Following? Good. You see, if you die on one side, you can stay alive on the other. Vampires for example, have no reflection, because they DIED on the other side of the mirror. DiVinci, according to the movie may have been the opposite, perhaps coming through from the otherside (speculation because he wrote his name backwards).

And I'll tell you this, the mirror thing is done real well. It looks good when the mirror image is not doing what the person is doing. Like, the reflection slitting it's throat with a pizza cutter and the person's neck starts to bleed. In the reflection, there's blood on the pizza cutter but on the floor, it's clean. Those sort of things are done consitently well through the movie.

Oh! I said this was a mystery, right? So, what's the mystery...well, it's who's killing these people and why. Pretty simple. But, we know who like halfway through, so it becomes a what happened kind of thing. If I say more, I risk giving things away. So, we'll stop the play by play there.

Overall, it was good. I really enjoyed it, which was a relief after being pretty disapointed with the movies I've seen lately. It was definatly a relief to see something that I not only enjoyed, but it made sense. Everything came together well. This is something that I would definatly recommend.

All the budget of a porno, but none of the fun.

I'm just flying through posting today. Gotta catch up on that backlog. One more after this and I might be done for the day.

Friday night, I watched a movie. It was called...I don't know. Apparently, it is SANADA KUNOICHI NINPÔ-DEN: KASUMI. Or, as it was advertised on eBay when I bought it, Azumi 3. Or Kazumi. It's a female ninja story, in the vein of Azumi, which is a terrific movie if you get the chance to see it, it's sequel is very good, too. This movie, however was a massive pile of crap.

Low buget, that's fine. I'm cool with that. The acting was...like I know, it was subtitled. And this is the fun part. Apparently it was "machine subbed" which as far as I can tell means that the loaded the subtitles into a machine gun and let the words go where ever they felt like. It made no sense. Remember that homeless guy you met downtown? The one with 3 teeth and a radio playing static arguing with himself? Made him look like a mensa member. If you translated something to english with no consideration for tenses or sentance structure, you'd get something like this.

And then there was the sex scenes. And I have to bring this up...it wasn't enough to be considered pornography. Just some boobs. And, trust me, you've seen better (or worse depending on your perspective) on Cinemax. And here's the worst part, it was boring. Like, skip over it boring. As in "can we get back to the funny dialouge" boring.

So, it was bad. It was nonsense. It wasn't Izo bad...but it was close. So, if you ever get the chance...watch it. No, really. I'm not suffering on my own. You have to watch this. It's worth trying to read the subtitles after a few beers with your friends. You'll get alaugh out of it. And at less than an hour and a half, it's not a horrible waste of time.

But, no, don't, it sucked.

This is short, don't worry...

It feels like I'm catching up on things that I just haven't had the motivation to write about...

<- That there is from Dr Zaius' Replacement DVD Cover Art. A brilliant little site with currently about 20 replacement covers that hopefully, will continue to grow.

The other site I want to mention, mostly because I'm considering stealing the idea, (and I am NOT above stealing an idea from someone... ) is MMM Commentaries, who provide alternate commentaries for movies. Which, like I said, I love the idea of. And am currently thinking about setting up a similar sort of thing. It'll take time, money and...well, motivation...but someday, I just might get around to it.

Arrgh! Thar be movies over yonder

You know, maybe I talk too much about downloading movies here. Specifically, I like to talk about legal downloads. I do this because the subject of downloading movies hits close to home for me.

Huh? No. Wait, did you think I...no. No. Of course not. What I mean is that I think that legal downloading is the future, and as much as I hate Digital Rights Management (DRM), I understand that it is going to be a part of this future. It's unfortunate because it's DRM that will ensure that legal downloads will never work. It will be the albatross around the studios' collective necks.

For example...both Movielink and CinemaNow offer legal movie downloads from the major studios. Movielink is OWNED by five of the studios (and hates your firefox browser), CinemaNow is only going to be getting movies from Sony, MGM and Lions Gate. Both sites allow you to PURCHASE (for about $20) a movie and download it to your computer, where it will stay. Forever. Unless you delete it. It will never be someplace else...like a physical DISC that you can play in your dvd player and watch on your tv. No. You can watch it on your computer, or if you have a video card with a s-video out, you can run your computer to your television.

So, as the kind of person who goes to my friend's house with movies all the time, I fail to see this as a wonderful innovation that greets the digital age head on. All it means is that I would have to BRING MY ENTIRE COMPUTER to my friend's house to watch a movie or to at the very least let him watch it.

I love my DVD collection. I love everything about it. I love how hard it is for me to find anything and how much space it takes up. Ok, maybe not everything, but the dvds...I love. Deleted scenes. Commentaries. Video diaries, interviews and making ofs. Love them. As such, I have had no problem justifying the purchase of altogether too many movies. Movies that I had already "owned". Stuff that I acquired (one way or another) and liked and bought. I constantly do this. Why? Because there's nothing like that new DVD smell....mmmm.....half new car and half airplane glue...smells like purple....

Like I've said in the past, just make a simple system and people will come. That was the beauty of iTunes. It wasn't anything spectacular, but it was simple. For 99 cents, you can download any song they have. Between the simplicity of the system and all the downloads they gave away with Pepsi and 7-11, it took off. And while it isn't cd quality, and it covered in DRM, it's a pretty good system. It's not perfect, but, for the most part you can do what you want with the songs you buy. And that seems to be the biggest thing still missing from the movie studio's download equation for success is the ability to do what you want after buying the movie. Hard drives are, yes, relatively cheap these days, but not as cheap as blank dvds. And certainly not as easy to deal with. I don't see why it's so hard.