Top Ten Looking Forward to in 2014

I've done Past with the post-mortem of my anticipation list, I've had Present with this year's top ten titles, so here's Yet-To-Come with a peak across the next twelve months.  I'm pretty sure I'm not overlooking something really obvious this time, although there are a few I might have had on here (like Max Landis' Frankenstein) if I was more certain if they're coming in 2014 or 15.  (Hell, I've already started work on 2015's list as a result.)  Once again, it was a tough choice, so sorry The Monuments Men, The LEGO Movie and The Woman in Black: Angel of Death.

Top Ten Movies of 2013

Time once again to go over all the films I've seen this year, and consider which ones held up best, and chances are I'll revisit in later years.  Note that's "films I've seen", there's a few I have heard great things about, but alas haven't gotten to see yet (such as The Act of Killing, although I've heard that one's pretty tough to sit through).  Last year's list would have included A Royal Affair if I'd seen it in time, so this is nothing like definitive.  With that in mind, let's jump in!

Movie Highlights of 2013

Part two of my look back at 2013 at the movies.  There has been some great stuff out this year, my list could have been at least a top twenty, but I'm worried I'd just wear my keyboard away into nothingness if I rant about everything I loved. So let's have a trailer reel, along with links to reviews I've done of some of these!

Top Ten Looked Forward to Movies of 2013 - How did they stand up?

2013 is wrapping up, so it's time to take a look at my year of going to the movies.  This time last year I did a blog post wherein I discussed my ten (technically eleven) most looked forward to movies of the year.  Now let's see whether they were worth the wait.  To save repeating myself, I'm only going to talk about the titles that didn't end up in my final top ten of the year.

Sherlock - The Empty Hearse Spoiler Free Review (Plus a bit about The Tractate Middoth).

So I got to see a special preview of the first episode of Sherlock Season 3 at the BFI yesterday.  In attendance at a Q&A afterwards was the director Jeremy Lovering, producer Sue Virtue, showrunners Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss (Who wrote this episode) and stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, being asked questions by writer Caitlin Moran.  I'll let you finish the rounds of "you lucky bastard" before I continue after the break.

As good a look as my phone's camera could allow

#SaveTheDay

I have never been more excited about what's coming on Doctor Who before this special.  After seeing it, I'm now even more excited.

That's going to need some context, isn't it?  This isn't going to be a complete review of everything I loved about the special, simply because there's too damn much to say here, and I'm still digesting all of it.  What I am going to focus on are the main thematics at work...

(Needless to say there are some pretty hefty spoilers about the special from the word go if you haven't seen it yet.  To all those who have, an additional warning that at the end of this I'm going to reveal something that may blow your mind!)

RIP Lou Scheimer

Today we lost Lou Scheimer, one of the founding members of Filmation Entertainment.  In his honour, I present the 21 (or however many clips I can find) kid's show salute!

My Top Five Films of the Year (So Far)

So, Dr. Mark Kermode has done his list of his top five films of 2013 so far, his midterm report so to speak.  It's a good collection, and I'm a bit embarrassed to write this, but I haven't actually seen any of them.  I'll correct this later...

Well, I might as well give my tuppence worth.  Not counting a few films where I'm not sure if they count as a 2013 or 2012 film or not (I'll figure it out later, for now, sorry Cloud Atlas and Wreck-It Ralph), here're my favourite five films I've seen at cinemas between January and June this year...

Google Project Placement: The Movie! - The Trailer, and why a highlighted joke doesn't work.

So I've been seeing this trailer before almost every movie I've seen in the cinema over the last few months...

Huh huh, they don't know geek stuff and they're trying to work at Google!  That's so, so deeply unfunny.  Seriously, what's become of you guys?  You really went from Wedding Crashers to this?

Any resemblance between this film and its source material is purely co-incidental.

So, World War Z; I think it's safe to say that from the moment the first trailer was released, it was pretty clear this wasn't going to follow the book very strongly.  The action taking place during, instead of looking back at the Armadeaddon, the use of fast zombies, the main character actively on a "save the world" mission; there's so little of Max Brooks' novel left, there's really no point in comparing the two.  Therefore, I'm not going to mention the novel at all, I'm purely looking at the film on its own in my rating of it, as let's face it, it is its own movie with the title slapped on at this point.  So on it's own, how does it stand up?  Let's say that this year's Warm Bodies, a rom-zom-com that could be seen as the zombie answer to Twilight, made for a far more enjoyable and truer-spirited zombie movie than this...

(You are now crossing Spoiler City limits; we welcome careful readers!)

Man of Steel, Script of Kleenex (SPOILERS A-PLENTY)

Sigh, it seems to have become a tradition of late, that each summer contains a pretty disappointing DC Superhero movie; first Green Lantern, then The Dark Knight Rises, now this.  Let me clarify and state that I am not implying all of these films are equals; DKR and MoS are nowhere near the utter clusterfuck that GL was, but they were all to a degree disappointing.  This is the one that really a lot of Warner Bros. hopes of finally getting Justice League of the launch pad are based on, and while financially I'm sure it's going to do well enough to get that ball rolling, given how well it's doing already, the actual finished film though has almost terminal issues that can mostly be summed up in a quote from another Chris Nolan production; "Why So Serious?"

After Earth's Implications & Why you must see Pacific Rim

So it's beginning to look like already that M. Night Shyamalan's latest After Earth may be the first big flop of the blockbuster season.  The reviews that have been turning up haven't been spectacular either, some pretty much confirming what I've already suspected (I can't directly comment since I haven't seen the thing year and am still hmming and hahing about doing so).  The thing is though, I actually am really disappointed about it not doing so well, as there are certain aspects about it that mean it's failure may have some serious impact on the industry...

The ABCs of Death

I love horror anthologies, from Dead of Night to Trick 'r Treat to Amicus' entire output along the way!  So much so I've already done over on FilmJuice a couple of looks at them here and here, and this was prompted by the fact that the subgenre seems to be making a bit of a comeback this year.  First was V/H/S (more on that in a second) and then there was what I just got back from, The ABCs of Death.  Read on for what I made of it...

Evil Dead - The Remake

The original The Evil Dead in 1983 blew audiences away by sheer unrestrained gore factor pumped up to an absurd degree at the hands of a real talent of a director showing off just what he was capable of.  In 2013, given the fact that like fare as Saw and Hostel had no trouble at all getting into multiplexes, and we're even comfortable with zombie fare that'd put Lucio Fulci to shame on the TV these days, the new Evil Dead has quite a few burdens against it.  The legacy of the series is a pretty big bar set to begin with, but one must add to that the fact it's gotten a lot harder to shock us these days.  Well, this remake certainly gets the gore level down, it's the (forgive the term) execution that's the issue.

Doctor Who - The Bells of St. John (SPOILERS)

So, last night's opening episode to this demi-season was a fun little (3rd) intro to Clara and a good start to the series.  Afterwards though, I realised that this episode was based on a truly terrible pun... (SPOILERS for the end after the jump).

Ed Rants - Paranormal Activity 4

So just been shared via Total Film's website is an infographic meant to promote the DVD release of Paranormal Activity 4, my nomination for the worst film I saw at the cinema last year because I was smart and didn't go to see Keith Lemon.

The basic point it's trying to make, so I gather, is that it's trying to prove with SCIENCE that this must be a good horror movie, the numbers say so!  As someone who understands a lot about statistical mathematics, scientific testing and film criticism, I can't help but have a few questions to raise about this graph.