themadone | Entries tagged with apadm

So it's been a whole year (more so cos I'm slack at writing this on time) since I started my Pound a Day movie project. To recap, there's an XKCD comic about a guy who loves getting packages and sets up a bot to search ebay for items costing $1 or less with free shipping and buy him one of them every day. Someone actually decided to implement this with a bid site in New Zealand (I hadn't noticed, but it looks like they'd only just set it up when I stumbled across it). But anyway, inspired I thought I'd see if I could do something similar looking on Amazon UK for cheap blu-ray movies. The main difference is that I didn't trust Amazon's data set not to have bad data in it and accidentally send me a non-Blu-ray or something that wasn't a movie, so I didn't include it's autonomy. Plus, I'm very squeamish so I didn't want Horror movies or Musicals. Instead I got it to email me whenever it had something it wanted to buy and I'd then ensure it was something applicable and go and buy it.

( The full details )

Current Mood: pleased

The "Pound a Day Movie Project" has been going for 353 days so. I figured doing it for a year would be a nice round period of time. Unfortunately with barely a couple of weeks left, Amazon have changed their API in a tiny way that will nerf the project.

The change is that Amazon now limit their API searches to just 100 products. Which is fair enough - we don't want to overload them with requests etc... The problem for me, though, is that typically when I search for Blu-ray's I get around 200+ items. And they're sorted by price. But the API includes market place prices in that sorting, so the first 100 items are mostly market place items. Which aren't eligible for free shipping.

Bah. I'm going to have to scrutinise their docs to see if I can find a way to filter out market place stuff or sort by actual price not the stupidly low market place prices or something. I don't hold out much hope.

This APADM offering isn't technically a movie - it's really just an extended pilot episode of the TV series. It only made it into my shopping basket because I'm a soppy nostalgic wotsit sometimes.

( So on to the review. )

So this film is about a former badass military type (Dolph Lundgren) who has retired to raise a family and have a normal job, except some bad men kill his family. Insert some random excuse to go find the bad men and murderise them all in revenge and that's pretty much it. Unlike other films I've watched as part of this project that have been formulaic, this one is a pretty poor example of it's trope(s). There's not much meat on the plot and the action sequences are too few and watered down to make up for this.

And for a film shot in 2005, the blood effects are pretty rubbish too. It's almost like they had a budget for blood effects and ran out half way through, so had to send someone out to get a big bottle of ketchup. Cos there's some bits where there are bodies/people with what clearly looks nothing like blood pooled around them. And then other times they have blood gushing out and it looks (based on my experiences of such things) pretty realistic. Why they couldn't have used the same fake blood in both situations as it'd have at least made the film seem a little less crap.

( Here's a review of Traitor )

( and a catch up ) of where things are so far.

Had M & E around last night for movies. After I showed them how bad (their choice) The Crow 2 was and how similar it is to the first, M decided that we should watch Paul Blart - Mall Cop, which is one of the more recent movies I'd got on the Pound a Day Movie project.

I must admit, we were expecting something truly dire but we were pleasantly surprised that it wasn't that bad actually. It's sort of like homage to the Diehard franchise, but set in a mall and played for lols rather than high octane action. And it's not the ludicrous over the top kind of funny that comedies seem to like doing either.

Firewall is one of those many films that follows the plot of; Protagonist's family/loved ones are kidnapped by bad guys and they're forced to perform some task or other only to end up turning the tables on the bad guys and saving their family/loved ones.

The acting is good enough though, Harrison Ford (the protagonist) plays an aging IT security expert well, although I have to admit to finding the IT side of things a little bit too much Hollywood-ised. The bad guys (lead by Paul Bettany) are suitably cruel and thuggish as they coerce Ford into robbing the bank that is protected by his security software.

But yeah, I think this is the kind of film that if you've not seen any of the dozen other films that are just like it, you'd probably find it enjoyable. But you can pretty much work out how the film is going to end once you work out the trope involved and that takes the sting out of it being a thriller. All that is left is the exact hows and whys and whilst the cast carry this off more than adequately, you're still left with a cookie cutter film.

Wow, it seems like forever since I last posted about this. And that's backed up by the very large list of movies I've got since I last posted.

Title	IMDB Rating
My Blueberry Nights	6.8
Firewall	5.8
Interceptor	3.9
Leap Year	6.1
Proposition	7.5
Mechanik	5.5
Pimp	3.0
Bunny And The Bull	6.6
The Score	6.8
Shaolin Soccer	7.3
The Mask	6.7
Stargate	6.7
Son Of Rambow	7.1
My Name Is Bruce	6.5
I'm A Cyborg	7.1

EDIT: So that now brings the running average score to 6.4, down from the previous 6.65. I blame that Danny Dyer film (Pimp).

I've also updated my online catalogue page so that it'll just list movies I've got with this project too.

I also watched Shaolin Soccer, so I suppose I should do a ( review )

Haven't had a chance to watch any more of my A Pound A Day Movies, but their numbers have been growing steadily...or mostly steadily. The SNAFU of Xmas deliveries has meant that some things I ordered well before Xmas have been over taken by things bought afterwards. The backlog has at least cleared and there's only the one I ordered earlier this week bimbling through the postal service.

Title	Score
The Burning Plain	6.8
In The Electric Mist	6.1
Copying Beethoven	6.8
The Getaway	7.5

As you can see, no rotten tomatoes in that bunch. And the average has creeped up slightly to 6.65 from 6.55.

I got to watch the first movie that my movie bot "bought" the other day and I figured that as part of the process I should write up reviews for them too.

( JCVD )

I've also come up with some kind of goal for the end of the project. I'm going to work out what the average score is for all the films and see whether on the whole the movies I've got have been good or utter shite. Using IMDb's ratings I've got the following so far...

JCVD	7.3
Beowulf & Grendel	6.1
Wallace and Gromit in 'A Matter of Loaf and Death'	7.7
Becoming Jane	6.9
Candy	7.2
Code Name: The Cleaner	4.1

...and doing the sums I make that an average of 6.55 which on the whole isn't too bad. It'd be 7.04 if it wasn't for the latest addition dragging things down, but I think we all expected I'd be ending up with a few less than quality movies.