Match Point — a very dif­fe­rent Woody Allen film. So very very tense, the per­fect thriller?

3-Iron — A quiet and allu­ring love story, astoun­ding work by Kim Ki-duk.

Old­boy — Another Korean film. I’ve been mea­ning to watch this for 6 months now. Having seen this I must now seek out the rest of Chan-wook Park’s ven­geance trilogy.

Lady in the Water — An inte­res­ting fairy tale but nothing to match Pan’s Laby­rinth. I also spent the whole movie trying to work out the twist.

Le Ballon Rouge — a short and sweet french film.

Ong Bak — A fun filled action pac­ked romp (or just another OTT kung fu flick, though at least bet­ter than most — but they did make sure to show all the good bits twice… every big jump was shown from ten dif­fe­rent angles).

Wait Until Dark — Another top thri­ller, although Hepburn’s por­tra­yal of a blind house wife isn’t enti­rely con­vin­cing. This trai­ler is horrific.

Renais­sance — The super­mo­del of movies — beauty without brains.

Miami Vice — Terrible.

Adrift — Terrible.

That movie found in the trash, the tag line, “A sup­po­sedly idy­llic wee­kend trip to the country­side turns into a never-ending night­mare of traf­fic jams.” really says nothing. This is cate­go­ri­cally the most weird, per­ple­xing and inte­res­ting film I have recently seen. Whilst I unders­tand some moments my lack of know­ledge of the era, poli­tics and movie his­tory lea­ves me lost in the subt­le­ties and the bri­lliance, that many revie­wers claim, is beyond me. I would love it if a kind sole could point me in the direc­tion of a good analy­sis or some back­ground infor­ma­tion. The above video is a 10 minute clip from the movie.

After wor­king on the artist ima­ges pro­ject, essen­tially a site that shows you an image of any musi­cal artist you spe­cify, I deci­ded to home my efforts on movies. IMDB has all the movie details you could ever need. Using a simi­lar sys­tem I have devi­sed a method (which again will not be made public) to obtain direc­tor, pos­ter image, year, run time, plot out­line, rating and most impor­tantly title when given an IMDB num­ber (the num­bers with which movies are cata­lo­gued). On each movie load the infor­ma­tion and image is sto­red or cached respectively.

My first use for this new script is to dis­play my IMDB movie votes on my blog in a neat little pac­kage. Recently my votes list was made public by IMDB so I did not have to create a bot to login etc. Scra­ping the IMDB num­bers and my votes from this page has allo­wed me to enter the movies into my ser­vice and create a sexy little list. You can now find this list of 500 movies here: http://​fofr​.tri​vial​being​.net/​p​a​g​e​.​p​h​p​?​p​=​m​o​v​i​e​v​o​tes (or under the “My Movie Ratings” link to the right)

I caught this last night without any prior know­ledge of the story­line, pre­mise or Cédric Kla­pisch except that I recog­ni­sed the title “L’Auberge espag­nole”, a phrase that comes in refe­rence to Klapisch’s pre­vious film. The trai­ler doesn’t paint the per­fect pic­ture; it is a love story that tells us to avoid clichés in wri­ting before thro­wing them back at us in a delight­fully unpre­dic­ta­ble fashion. Xavier Rous­seau remin­ded me of Tomas in The Unbea­ra­ble Light­ness of Being adap­ta­tion, maybe he just bears a like­ness to Daniel Day Lewis, but I could see Rous­seau calmly echoing that “Take off your clothes” catchph­rase. Kelly Reilly is delight­ful to watch. Dolls is an effu­sive trans-culture love tale that main­tains a heart­war­ming ques­tio­ning out­look on the great mys­tery without having to resort to mind­less sic­ke­ning sweet­ness akin to the colour pink. Such is, a self res­pec­ting movie goer can hap­pily watch a roman­tic comedy without nee­ding a buc­ket, and this is a sig­ni­fi­cant achie­ve­ment in its own right.

Now offi­cially my favou­rite film of 2006, I thought I would post this trai­ler con­si­de­ring Abi­gail Bres­lin has been nomi­na­ted for an oscar in this years short­list, by the way… she is only 10 years old. I sin­ce­rely hope this fea­ture per­forms well at the aca­demy awards (which has snub­bed The Pres­tige in my opi­nion). I shall also note that Bres­lin is the little girl in the film “Keane” that I com­men­ted on a few weeks back, where her per­for­mance is once again ste­llar yet the films are starkly different.

If you’ve not yet seen Little Miss Sunshine I urge you to buy the DVD or rent it, it is one that can­not be mis­sed. The DVD came out last mon­day here in the UK.