Stale Popcorn

One of the things that I am utterly fascinated by is history. I love watching documentaries about the past and where we have come from, as it gives us a wonderful insight into what the world was like, what it has become and where we have come from. Read the rest of this entry »

I know I don’t usually post about DVD releases, but this just hit my inbox and I thought I’d share it with you as I’ve got a trailer too.

On Monday the recent family movie Aliens In The Attic is released on Region 2 DVD & Blu-Ray. Here’s the official synopsis: Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, my wife & I took our daughters to the cinema to see G-Force in 3D and, during the trailers, we saw one for Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, which they absolutely loved the look of. Unfortunately, we never got the chance to take them to see it in the cinema. So how popular was I when the Blu-Ray landed on my doormat for me to review? Very!

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So now here’s me [finally] throwing out my thoughts on what I consider to be the twenty five BEST films of the year! The first time I ran this series, I came in for quite a bit of criticism when I published my list because I incorporated the review screeners I’d been sent into my list and people didn’t consider that fair. Many thought that seeing as we had the US represented in the form of Kristina then I should be representing the UK – namely I should not be paying tribute to films that had not had a big screen release between the given dates, on British soil. The following year I changed the list to represent those released singularly between January and December of 2008 in the United Kingdom.

This year I’m going to have to re-break that rule, I’m afraid, because the best film of 2009 is a film I experienced through a much-sought after screener because it was having trouble (and still having trouble) securing a release over here. And no matter how much I tried and tried to write up this list, I just couldn’t do it without this film on it and where it deserves to be! Read the rest of this entry »

Back on the 31st of October 2008 Gazz brought you a review of Feast 2: Sloppy Seconds on Region 1 DVD (which you can read here. It was the follow up to the fairly decent, in a dumb kind of way, Feast, which has been available on Region 2 DVD since around September 2008 and now, finally, all those without multi-region DVD players, or the desire to import Region 1 titles, have a chance to see if Gazz was right in his review.

Here’s the “official press release”: Read the rest of this entry »

The DVD release of Paranormal Activity is fast approaching, with it hitting the UK shelves on the 22nd of March, but did you know there was a way for you to be possibly included on the release?

You see, there is currently a competition being run where people can submit their own “paranormal” short and submit it via the official Youtube page before the closing date of 31st of January 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Remakes. They’re a strange thing, really. Sometimes they can be something which results in a fresh take or perspective o a much loved classic. Sometimes they can be better than the original. And, more often than not, they just don’t manage to evoke the same feelings, atmosphere or brilliance of the original. Which, to be honest with you, is the reason that I don’t generally like remakes. Which brings us to Tony Scott’s 2009 remake of the classic thriller, The Taking of Pelham 123. Want to guess which category of remake it falls into?

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And now… During some technical problems at my end, I’m going to pull a switcharound and bring you my list tomorrow. In the meantime… Here’s Kristina with her Top 25 of 2009:

“… 2009 was a pretty crappy year for film, overall.  The vast majority of this list is made up of stuff that I didn’t particularly enjoy, but since I only saw about 30 films, I had to make do with what I had.  Just so you know, it isn’t until we get to the top 12 or so that we are getting into the stuff that I’d actually want to watch again.  Also, I haven’t had a chance to see any of the award-winning films this year like Up In The Air and Precious, so that is why they have not made the list.  So, out of what I saw in 2009, here is the best of the bunch!” Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday saw the publication of the rather pitiful ‘Reader’s Vote’.

Yesterday saw me throw my thoughts down on the best and worst of 2009.

Today, Stale Popcorn’s resident goddess Kristina puts forth her lists (in reverse numerical order to how the lists have been thus far, coz she likes to stand out!) for your dutiful consideration.

What do you lot reckon? I’ll tell you what I personally reckon – having had a sneaky peak at what Kris has lined up for her upcoming Top 25, only in her world could she fill places on that list with movies she’s got down here as the worst of the year! :S

LOL! Peruse and disguss as you so wish! Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the fairly surprising news that Sony were going to be rebooting the Spider-Man movie franchise after director Sam Raimi & lead actor Tobey Maguire left the production of Spider-Man 4.

This is Sony’s “official statement”: Read the rest of this entry »

So here we go with what I consider to be the “Best” and “Worst”  of 2009 at the movies. Kristina will be here tomorrow with her picks, and you’ve already seen what you readers have voted for in the same categories so here’s my two-pennies-worth!

I should explain that both mine and Kristina’s selections may NOT necessarily be reflective of our eventual Top 25 list. There may be some clues as to where we’re heading by what we include here but just because a film places highly in say a ‘Best Scene’ category  here, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is going to place highly or at all on the eventual lists we publish in a few days time!

Here we go. Starting with the BEST that the year had to offer… Read the rest of this entry »

With plenty of notice given in advance of this year’s vote taking place, I was expecting a mass influx of submissions to the reader’s vote section of this year’s ASPEYAs – an amount to rival last year’s heady number of 68. This year we got… ready for it… Well, let’s not disclose that, huh? It’s just embarrassing – but as a result, it was incredibly easy to correlate, however none the less frustrating to see the final results. They are not, I am forcing myself to believe, to be a fair reflection of the type of reader we have here on Stale Popcorn but… well, without further ado…

I just want to thank each and every one of you for taking the time to send in your submissions and I hope that the eventual correlation of results is representative of what you suggested in your vote – you sick, sick, tasteless bastards… and I do not say that lightly, rest assured. Over the next few days you’ll get both mine and Kristina’s opinions on the same category in our ‘Best & Worst’ articles, and then we’ll finish up with our individual TOP 25 pieces!
Anyway, without further ado, here’s The Annual State Popcorn End of Year Awards 2009: Reader’s Vote as voted for by YOU:

PS – don’t shoot the messenger, eh? :P Read the rest of this entry »

First week of January 2010 and we have our very first competition on Stalepopcorn! Not bad going, eh?

I have been given two copies of the documentary Big River Man,which is out on the 18th of January, on DVD to give away, and to be in with a chance all you have to do is submit an entry using the form below. No question to answer, no tie-breaker, no nothing apart from sending me your details before the closing date of 22nd of January. Read the rest of this entry »

District 9, the brainchild of writer/director Neill Blomkamp & produced by Peter Jackson, could possibly have been one of the greatest Sci-Fi movies of all time. If only they’d had the courage to follow the amazing work they did on the opening 30 minutes of the movie into the rest of the running time.

As it is, it is possibly one of the biggest missed chances of recent years. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow.  This was a weird one to watch, and it’ll probably be an even weirder one to review.  I remember when I first saw the trailer for this flick a while back, and it impressed me a lot.  It looked like your standard revenge movie to me: a guy watches his entire family get massacred, the system screws him over, and he massacres back, but the twist of going after the entire justice system was too good to pass up.  Sounds like my kind of movie.  The addition of a certain Scottish hunk certainly doesn’t hurt matters, either.  I’m quite fond of The Butler, and I’ll watch just about anything he’s in, although his face is starting to look more and more like a puffer fish these days.  I’m not on the Jamie Foxx bandwagon at all, as I find him overrated and arrogant, but I figure if The Butler is there, it’s going to be quite difficult for Mr. Foxx to ruin this one for me, right? Right?!  Well…

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I had absolutely no interest in going to see this.  None whatsoever.  I found the trailers to be laughably underwhelming.  Blue cat people?  Huh?  I found the concept of “Avatar Day” to be laughable as well, compounded by the fact that a couple of my good friends actually got into a car and drove for three hours to an IMAX in Charlotte to watch FIFTEEN MINUTES of footage.  Not the whole film…fifteen minutes.  A six-hour round trip for fifteen minutes.  Jeez.  Despite the hype, despite the glowing reviews, despite James Cameron behind the camera, I found myself completely uninterested in seeing this movie.  I don’t care about “exciting” new technology.  I don’t care about 3-D.  I care about a movie with a story, and yet all I seemed to hear about preceding this film’s release was “oh my God, this movie will be revolutionary…for TECHNOLOGY!”  If it wasn’t for my aforementioned friend buying me an IMAX ticket for my birthday, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to see it, but off I went to my IMAX last week to check out Avatar.  

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And so, here we are – finally in the company of James Cameron’s Avatar. A film fourteen (and then some) years and, depending on your source, between $250 million and $350 million in the making. For Cameron addicts like myself, was it worth the wait and, for 20th Century Fox, was it worth the expense? The question should, in fact, be “Was there any doubt that it would be?”

I mean, come on. Let’s look at the stone-cold facts that we have available: The last time we doubted James Cameron in his ‘crazy’ endeavour with Fox he delivered Titanic upon us and, say what you will about the overall quality of that film in terms of script and performance, it was a film of both huge spectacle AND enormous (the word doesn’t in fact cover it) financial success. On top of this, he is the indisputable master of action cinema:

Think about some of the best adrenaline-pumping moments in cinema history in the last twenty-six years – the assault on the police station in The Terminator, the air-duct sequence in Aliens, the submersible chase in The Abyss, the police van versus helicopter escape in Terminator 2, the Florida Keys set-piece in True Lies, the ship going up ended in Titanic…. They’re all envisioned and delivered by James Cameron. To say that he’s a master at his game is an understatement.

I’d followed the possibility of Avatar since it was spoken of briefly (as “Project 880”) in a press interview on the publicity trail for Titanic. I became somewhat obsessed, devouring every morsel of information I could get on the project. For twelve years I have hoped and dreamed of what Cameron’s Avatar would be like to experience. There were periods that I started to wane and believe that it had become just too big to be an actuality, and would only end up resting alongside Kubrick’s Napoleon, Quentin Tarantino’s Casino Royale or a sequel to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang / The Last Boy Scout in the movie multiplex of myth.

When it DID finally get going the casting choices left me underwhelmed, the teaser trailer turned me off ever so slightly and I started to realise that there’s very few directors who are handed the “keys to the kingdom” following an unbelievable success and come good with it: Spielberg followed the double-whammy of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind with the (it’s really not that bad!) 1941. Michael Cimino followed The Deer Hunter with Heaven’s Gate. As much as the extended trailer for Avatar renewed some faith in me towards the project, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was going to be the one hurdle Cameron couldn’t leap clear of. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh. My. GOD.

OK, nothing really more needs to be said. Iron Man was fantastic and we all have high expectations for the sequel and watching this first trailer I think those expectations could well be exceeded. Read the rest of this entry »

The first trailer for Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood has appeared online and, I have to say, I like the look of it. A lot!

There are no tights here, but it does seem to have the same hard edged feel as Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven (which I really like. Well, the Directors Cut, anyway). Read the rest of this entry »

The second trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland has appeared online and, while it looks suitably macarbe, imaginative and macabre I’m still left feeling a little underwhelmed by it.

Maybe the excitement I had for Charlie & The Chocolate Factory and the eventual disappointment from that release has left me wary of getting sucked in by a Tim Burton trailer, but whatever it is, I just don’t feel as excited about this release as I thought I would. Read the rest of this entry »