The idea is to eventually do podcasting about games and maybe even P&R (shudder). The idea is that this will be stuff by this small community and for this small community. So to get the ball rolling, XtienMurawski, Kelly Wand, and I will be doing a weekly movie podcast.
Our first outing is a bit bumpy. The voice levels got somehow knocked off-kilter half-way through, so I sound even more overbearing than usual. But it’s not like those other guys say much worth hearing anyway.
Go here to listen using the front page’s player while admiring a lovely Google ad. Or go here to stream or grab the MP3 directly. We’re currently in the iTunes submission queue, so that should be an option soon enough, assuming they don’t object to Kelly’s innate weirdness. You can never be sure what effect she’s going to have on people in positions of authority.
Yeah, really good guys. It drew my wife in from the other room and she ended up listening to the whole thing with me. Several laugh out loud moments. Cant wait to see ones on games, though P&R podcasts scare me a little.
Tonight I watched American Zombie and Quarantine which Tom refers to in the podcast as “another found footage movie.” I’m curious if anyone saw Rec and how it compares to Quarantine.
SPOILER ABOUT A SPOILER
For Quarantine why did they make the end of the movie the centerpiece of the ad campaign? I mean, I’ve seen that “girl gets pulled away from the camera” shot everywhere, and then it’s the end of the movie and it hasn’t happened yet and you know it’s coming and you realize, “Hey, the spoiled the end of this movie for everyone.” Wow, the marketing guys should be shot.
END SPOILER
American Zombie starts as a documentary about the plight of zombies in LA and how they’re mistreated, gets some interesting creepiness going when the filmmakers go to the zombie version of Burning Man, but then doesn’t really pay off. And they break their own documentary genre by using found footage the documentarians couldn’t possibly have gotten.
I guess this whole “found footage” is a big thing in horror nowadays, only ten years after Blair Witch.
Rec has a much better sense of build-up, and the actors are a lot better. Especially the firemen, who look like civil servants and not television actors. Rec is also more subtle with the tension between the white Spaniards and the Arab family. The melting pot aspect of the apartment building just seems a lot more plausible given the setting.
Also, the main actress in Rec is really good, in that she starts off as a lite TV hostess type (cute, but annoyingly chipper) and gets increasingly more battered, bloodied, and sympathetic as events unfold. The actress really carries the horror of what’s happening and you see a strength emerge from her, which is what you need in a movie like this. I also got a much better sense for her bond with her cameraman.
I liked the Quarantine actress as Dexter’s sister in the Showtime series, where she was supposed to be slightly awkward and uncomfortable in her own skin. But in Quarantine, she just came across as poorly cast and not quite up to the task of performing in a zombie apocalypse microcosm.
As for the Quarantine spoiler, you have only yourself to blame. Stop watching trailers and commercials and you’ll be just fine. :)
For anyone who didn’t listen to this episode, we’ll have a Where The Wild Things Are At episode up on Monday, and we’ll be introducing a new regular feature.
