Zohan was two hours of cheap shots at Arabs, Jews, women and Mel Gibson. But there were plenty of bad bits too.

We just watched George Romero's original Dawn of the Dead. It was fully sweet. I really loved the remake, but this was great in a whole different way. It wasn't as funny or smart, but it was quality. And interesting, which isn't something one tends to say about zombie films. Except 28 Days Later I guess.

It was real good but. Good gore spatterings. Lots of gore spatterings. More than you could reasonably ask for in one film.

I thought Hostel was meant to be good, so I made myself sit through it. It wasn't very good, or interesting, or even very scary. Bits of it were kind of gross I suppose, but that's all you could really say.

Was very funny. Although I slept through possibly half of it.

Beowulf was winner. Good battles and fun mythology. They even threw in a dragon at the end. I like Ray Winstone too. And I love Crispin Glover, who did an awesome job of Grendel... except for one part where he possibly whined a little too much while he slaughtered villagers. I felt like it should have been more of a growl. Even a frustrated whinge would have been OK. But this was a self-pitying whinge, and it didn't fit in with head-munching.

On my third attempt I finally got to watch the end of Night Watch. It was one cool film. So nicely shot and different. Good characters. Lots of fun Armageddony moral ambiguity. I really love the last scene. Why is it that every country in the world except for the US has a sense of irony? Or at least, every major film-making country. A few Latin American countries are a little light on irony as well. But all the European and Asian film-making countries make winner ambiguous films.

And I like fighting. Almost any film with fighting I will enjoy. Even if there aren't any guns. There weren't any guns in this film. But there were some good weapons. Swords made of spinal columns and that sort of thing. Pretty nifty. And good fights. I like good fights.

Alone, I went to see Rambo 4 last night. I thought it might suck a lot, although I was hopeful because Tom had liked it so much. And as it turned out, I did too. It was pretty intense and visceral and you couldn't really say it romanticized violence. I don't feel like the Rambos are about glorifying violence in any sense. I reckon their just trying to make us think about that side of ourselves. The bit with the rock at the end didn't feel like it was trying to demonstrate that violence was right and necessary, just that everyone has a breaking point.

The fourth film looked much, much better than the others. I think they took a lot more care. It was still a simple film, without a lot of nuance. And it is the same ideas, but then the issues haven't changed that much. A lot of stuff happens in this film that looks like it's demonisation because it is so unbelievably barbaric. I don't know much about Myanmar, but having read a little about the Khmer Rouge, I didn't doubt that any of the stuff that happened in this film was based on true stories.

Most people would probably hate it, and there's plenty to hate. And plenty of killing. I'd reckon only about half of it is done by John himself though.

Fracture was a pretty good film. Very Hollywood, but not bad considering.

I went and saw There Will Be Blood by myself last night. That was a bad idea. I thought it was a very bad film. And the film was very long and it started very late. Daniel Day-Lewis was totally fantastic and the script was rather mesmerising, in a good sort of way. I was enjoying it a lot at first, just for the dialogue. But the story and characters didn't make much sense to me at all. There were a lot of WTF moments. I did fall asleep for a few minutes at the end, but I don't think that made the difference.

I think the problem came down to not having a hot, busty love interest. Bust is a great device for binding plot strands into a coherent story. It's a staple of American cinema, even historical oil-fossicking stories. This director thought he was clever enough to make an oil film without any bust in it, but he was sadly optimistic.

This director, Paul Thomas Anderson, did Punch-Drunk Love, Magnolia and _Boogie Nights. I reckon all three were far better films than this.

A disturbing piece of trivia - it appears that our chum Paul directed Boogie Nights when he was 27. Gee golly. I am almost that old, but certainly not almost that clever.

Emmeline and I spent our Valentine's Days eating suburban pizza at No. 1 Alberto's Pizza and watching Vanishing Point. It's my third seeing of it, and it doesn't get any worse. What a lovely film. And there are a few great scenes that I really love. Even Emmeline thought it was reasonably alright I think.

I spontaneously watched The Kingdom with a soporific Mathew last night. It was rather brilliant. It was sufficiently like other American action movies for me to occasionally yell out loud at the crapness of Americans. But I ended up deciding that this was a choice the director made rather than obliviousness to the crapness of Americans. If you were in doubt about that, I think the final scene made it clear. The movie-goer was there to observe the Americans more than empathise with them.

I'd heard that it was politically incorrect. But I think the intensity and brashness of the film was meant to wake us up more than to titillate. Although titillate it certainly also does. I feel like that is more because it's a fascinating country with all sorts of crazy shit happening, than because Peter Berg over-dramatised it. And more than that I felt like it was fair. Obviously I know less about Saudi Arabia than plenty of people, but I know a little bit and none of it felt wrong.

I love explosions and battles, and all of those scenes were great. There is an huge, intense scene in the first bit which is so well done. The film was a long series of cuts between culturally insensitive comments from Americans and grand, beautifully choreographed battles. Even though I got excited about everything blowing up the film was pretty careful to make sure you kept worrying about all the stuff you didn't see. Some of that was totally overt, but I think that there was more subtle stuff there as well. There was zero sense of conquest or success in it. It was all just shitty. But also interesting and great.

After a bit of reflection I decided I didn't like Lust Caution. It had a couple of interesting sex scenes - interesting in the interesting sense more than the erotic sense - but apart from that it was rather plain. It felt to me like it was produced by a committee of film students. All the sets were so perfectly settish. The script was so artistically sparse and perfectly conceived. The plot was so neatly structured and unfolded so smoothly and inevitably. The ending was appropriately uncompromising.

Throughout the whole film I felt nothing. Apart from perhaps the occasional crossness at the director - which is certainly better than nothing at all. But despite their best and intensest efforts, I don't think the characters convinced me of anything. I felt more for the baby in Shoot Em Up. Bless his heart.

Juno is a fantastic film. Robert and Jenny have clearly been kidnapped and their blog passwords tortured out of them. Who knows how long their captors have been blogging in their place? Let's hope they are still alive.

I think maybe Shoot Em Up is close to my favourite movie ever. It was awesomely violent and clever and funny. We had so much fun.

If it were up to me, every movie would be set in an era without mobile phones and Google, every movie would put the hero in a situation where he could not call in an air strike via his BlackBerry but would actually have to slit the terrorists' throats and strangle their frothing dogs with his bare hands.

Sydney Morning Herald

I think this fellow makes a good point. The practical aspects of life are so much more straight forward for people these days, and that doesn't make for good stories. Or perhaps it just makes for very different stories we haven't worked out how to tell yet.

It started out really well. Everything about it was quality. There were lots of interesting scenes. Will Smith was great. The dog was great. The visuals were great. The empty New York city was very cool.

Then it went down hill. The vampire zombies were cheap and corny. Dodgy CGI and lame head-stretching CGI screams. It's like all the CGI horror movie modellers have read the same B-Grade Horror Movie CGI Techniques for Dummies book.

After that I felt like it totally lost it. The last half was hopeless. It didn't make much sense. The dialogue deteriorated. The main character became way less good and interesting. As with most Hollywood movies they seem to invest a lot of effort building characters and plot, just to fritter all the hard work away at the end with some traditional anti-climactic ending.

I think it's reaffirmed my belief that there isn't enough time in one film to do good action and good character development (unless you're very good or make a long film). I think when Hollywood makes action films it tries to compromise by sticking in character development as well. The outcome is mostly a wash out.

Lars von Trier needs to be cloned many, many times over. His clones must then be sent out into the world to do their extraordinary work and thus save the world from itself.

He makes the most satisfying, important and complete films I have ever seen. Dogville and Manderlay have to be two of my very favourites. He's rather like the J.M. Coetzee of movies. Brutal and unrelenting and brilliantly terrific.

Matt and I spontaneously decided to watch something violent last night and we came home with The Protector. It is a strange low-budget, Thai movie set in Sydney and is about some elite Muay Thai fighting farmer lad who comes to Sydney to find some stolen elephants. Almost everything about it was totally stupid. Terrible plot, tempo, script, acting. With the exception of the fighting which was totally awesome. There is a 5 minute long, single-cut shot where the lad fights his way up five stories of some restaurant. It's one of my favourite movie scenes of all time.

Despite all the non-stop awesome fighting, Tom is probably the only person I'd recommend it to, and he thought it was shit. And Matt fell asleep in it.

The Reaping was crap. Bad special effects and the dumbest plot since the Teletubbies. Hilary Swank sure is good looking, but that was all it had going for it.

I found a nifty site which lets you [search for albums and artists who aren't distributed by members of the RIAA. Most people probably won't care about the RIAA, but some might.

I've decided that for 12 months I won't download music and I will only buy music from non-RIAA distributors. Luckily The Shins are OK. Bob Dylan, sadly, is not. But then I already have nearly all his good albums.

Update: I should have included movies in that as well. No movie piracy for 12 months either.

It was pretty bad.

I watched Death Proof and Planet Terror in the last couple of days - although in the wrong order. They were two of the coolest films I've ever seen. Planet Terror was just hilarious and cool. Death Proof was beautiful and perfectly made. Quentin really is the best director we have. I don't think he tells the stories that I most want to hear, but the stories he tells he tells better than anyone. He's the ultimate example of how much the world benefits from OCD artists.

Once is a tremendous, beautiful film. I thought I was just going to fall more in love with Glen Hansard, but I ended up liking his little friend just as much. He met her (Markéta Irglová) in Czech six years ago and he slowly got a crush on her, even though she was pretty young. Then they made an album together. Then they made a movie together and this was it.

It's about being a musician and who are the best sorts of people to fall in love with. The girl is a way cool character, and you get the feeling that everything Glen Hansard likes about the actor got poured into the film. She's a seriously friendly, outgoing young lass with the relationship boundaries of a Jedi. And there's nothing sexier than healthy boundaries.

And the music too. Good music. Good Framesy music.

Zach Braff is awesome. So are they all.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High was a fun film. It's meant to have been one of the first teen comedies, which speaks against it, but it was both a) much less funny than modern teen comedies, and b) much better. Silliness might still explain a lot of the plot line, but it was meaningful silliness and with believably silly teens. There was more nudity and less sexual obsession. The film didn't have a cynical or naive agenda about presenting sex as something or other. Sex in most teen films feels like a toy, which probably isn't surprising because actual sex for lots of teenagers might not be that fun or funny. To make sex amusing you need to eliminate emotional hypochondriacs (or just make fun of them) and stuff the cast with a bunch of hormone driven men and hopefully women (although we'll make fun of the women too).

There wasn't even any alcohol in this film. I miss the days when teenagers had brains. Films like American Pie tend to describe a teen culture to us, even if it isn't representative. Old movies remind you that there wasn't always just that one, slutty teen comedy way of doing teen-ness.

Hostage is some Bruce Willis film I'd never heard of, but I got it the other night because Martin and I wanted something more violent than Wah-Wah to settle ourselves. It though it would suck, but in fact, it rocked. Lots of shooting and explosions. And a fun story where nothing seemed that obvious to me. There need to be more good hostage movies with smarter hostage takers. These hostage takers weren't that smart, but they did have a bit of a technological advantages.

I reckon it's one of the best movies Bruce Willis has done, and that is really saying something because he is a total champ.

Wah-Wah had some nice moments but most of it I thought was silly. Poor story construction, poor script but with a bunch of fantastic actors. Emily Watson is still my favourite though. She couldn't do anything wrong.

Mum and I went to watch Lady Chatterley last night in Leichhardt. If you're the kind of person that likes 3 hours of flowers, trees, pensive face shots and 1920s sex, then there is a reasonable change you'll like this film. Luckily I am that sort of a person and I really enjoyed it. Mum was getting pretty bored after an hour and a half and starting to feel hungry. A while after that she suggested we leave early to go get pizza. I told her I thought it must be almost finished. It wasn't but I was glad we stayed. And the pizza tasted even better.

I don't know what else to say about the film. It's French. There is a lot of long periods without talking. There's a lot of nakedness and a lot of sex. It's good sex though. And the sex traces their relationship nicely throughout the film, rather than just being one sweaty, consummative final. I might even recommend it to a few people.

Thanks to the porous nature of my DVD moratorium, I watched SherryBaby with Jo and Emily last night. I am glad I did too, because it was a fine film. The film-makers obviously put a huge amount of effort into making it good. The characters were all just amazing. Nobody was straight-forward. And that is the sort of thing I like.

Although one thing I don't like is the habit of taking strange computer conventions like camel-casing, and using them out in the real world. Proper nouns were fine as they were.

We watched Miss Potter last night. Despite having Emily Watson in it, I thought it was pretty bad.