I was home unwell yesterday so I took advantage of the situation and had a movie marathon! My watch pile is huge and growing every day, unfortunately some of my choices were not really good for someone feeling down in the dumps and sick in bed
Blastfighter 
I've never seen this Lamberto Bava action epic before, in fact until 88 announced it I had never even heard of it! Going from the gaudy gun-toting cover artwork the film wasn't even remotely like what I was expecting, in fact the first 45 minutes is pretty gentle fare with some human drama, ex-con cop back in his home town and trying to get on with his life but the locals don't want him to have an easy ride... It quickly escalates into Deliverance with guns! It's a fun film and helped probably by the fact that Michael Sopkiw is a DILF
Antichrist 
OK, this is the first of my film mistakes - although I guess that makes it sound like I didn't enjoy the film right from the off which isn't true. I actually really liked this film up to a point... and that point was
Chapter Four: The Three Beggars. I enjoyed the psychological intensity of everything up until that point, well enjoyed isn't the right word really, appreciated maybe! I think my main problem is that Charlotte Gainsburg is not all that interesting to watch unlike for example, Adjani is in Possession. I actually remember thinking that it's been a while since a film has actually made me feel uncomfortable while watching and that is quite an achievment, no-one can deny that von Trier is a master of his craft and in fact one of the last times I felt as utterly disconnected from reality and quite un-nerved was when I first watched
Dancer in the Dark. All in all, a good film, very bleak and not the correct film for my frame of mind at the time but I'm not in any rush to revisit it!
Norwegian Wood 
Film mistake number 2 came in the afternoon when I momentarily forgot the plot of the
Haruki Murakami book that this film was based on. I just thought, 'oh that's a film about love i'm sure that'll cheer me up after Antichrist' but no, it's much more than that. It's a film about loss, about never recovering from the death of a close one, about suicide. It's set in Tokyo 1968 against the back drop of student rioting which is mirroring the main character Watanabe's inner turmoil. His best friend killed himself at 17, we don't find out why we just see indications that his life was great he was doing well in school, he was popular and he had a long time girlfriend Naoko. Watanabe goes off to university and one day he sees Naoko in park, suffice to say she's still very troubled from the loss and thus begins and emotional rollercoaster for everyone. It's a good film with a great soundtrack from
Jonny Greenwood of
Radiohead, the cast are really good actors but the story was so sad that I didn't quite know what to do with myself by the end of the film.
Elvira Mistress of the Dark 
Let's put this out there, I love the
idea of
Elvira but I had never seen this film before and I wish that I had left it that way. There are some good bits in this film and I can see what they were trying to do but I think that the script was a major mis-step which unfortunately was co-written by Cassandra Peterson herself... The jokes fell flat but there were a few quotable moments which were good such as
"Oh well, there's nothing wrong with G-rated movies, as long as there's lots of sex and violence."
I wonder now whether I should give the sequel a miss