p e n g u i n d e v i l

So I’m listening to I Started a Joke. Another one of the Bee Gee’s pre-disco classics of depression. Am I the only one who doesn’t think of it as a Jesus song?

As you may recall, last night we watched The Hills Have Eyes and felt inspired! Inspired, that is, to seek out the real one. So I trotted off to Everyday Music and found a used copy of the 2 disc version. Well, I haven’t watched it yet, but soon! I also broke down and bought the director’s cut of Das Boot, though I’ve been holding out for the 5 hour mini-series cut, I just can’t get around to spending the money to acquire it. So I figured, well, this one would work. I also, last night, downloaded some Zolar X mp3’s. Who? Well, I still haven’t heard them yet, so I don’t really know.

The backlog of media to consume never really seems to go away. I should be watching these, instead, tonight we watched the new Omen. Now I don’t really remember too much of The Omen, but it seemed that this one followed it pretty well. And that’s the good part. The movie just wasn’t that good. I didn’t think that they did a good job with tension, the movie wasn’t scary or foreboding. Visually it wasn’t too exciting and the scene where the priest dies is too terribly corny. I normally enjoy any Vatican goings-ons in movies, but this was a lame papacy and their impending armageddon presentation was dumb. But a big part of the film’s problem was the cast. The fellow playing Thorn wasn’t good at all. Not only did he seem wrong for the role but he played it very dully and was not at all convincing. His wife did a better job but still seemed totally wrong for her role… And Mia Farrow? No, not good either. Even the black dogs didn’t convince me. On the plus side there were a couple of good bloody scenes (just a couple though) and I thought that David Thewlis was entertaining as the photographer.

All in all, another terribly unneeded remake that adds nothing to the original, yet certainly loses something to it. The original had Gregory Peck and David Warner (the evil genius from Time Bandits)! This one has Liev Schreiber? No. That’s just not right.