Life in the Bus Lane

An early start means we had time for this lengthy masterpiece tonight.

I believe Schindler’s List was about 14^o

That’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” for the uncultured amongst you. A classic movie which I’ve not seen for years. However this special edition version seems to suffer from some slightly bizzare audio mixing where it’s been “upgraded” from mono to 5.1, it’s quite disconcerting at times.

Schindler’s List took a backseat this week as Dan ended up working late, so the much shorter The Usual Suspects took it’s place. One of my favourite films, but one I’d not watched for a while due to over-exposure a few years ago.

The second of our “top films” season, this time aided by a curry from the local takeaway.

I’d not seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for quite a while, and didn’t realise how many big names were in it. It was one of the first films for Brad Dourif, Christopher Lloyd, and Danny DeVito (who none of us actually recognised).

Coming next: probably Schindler’s List.

Bat-tastic.

Last night we started an attempt at working our way through the top movies as listed on IMDB yesterday evening. I’m not sure we’ll make it through those we already own out of the top 250, so we’ll probably aim for just the top 100 to start with.

To kick things off we watched Full Metal Jacket. I’d forgotten quite how many quotes from the film have made their way into popular culture.

I’m currently sat watching Punk’s Not Dead, and the only person that they’ve seen fit to subtitle is Wattie from The Exploited, and it’s not as if he’s particularly difficult to understand. They musy have a particular problem understanding the Scots over in the US.

Update: They’ve subtitled his brother as well.

In the last week I’ve picked up the Rambo Trilogy, Planet of the Apes box set, Omen Pentology, and Black Adder - The Complete Collection, all for silly prices in the HMV sale.

I also ordered my ticket to see Spiers & Boden at Widcombe Social Club, it’ll be strange going to a gig in the dingy dump where I played skittles for 14 years.

Al and Ginger Dan failed to go climbing tonight, so we ended up heading out to the local curry house for a curry, where during the course of the meal Al and I discovered that Dan had never seen This is Spinal Tap, something we had to rectify straight away. So on our return we sat in front of the TV with a few beers and my DVD of the film and chuckled our way through 80 minutes of genius.

Despite having watched it on numerous occasions, it’s still one of my favourite films. The curry was pretty damn good as well.

The award for worst DVD ever must surely to go the recent release of Charlie Wilson’s War which features a 4 minute "advert" for a charity which I won’t name as they don’t deserve the publicity. This wouldn’t be a major problem except you can skip or fast-forward through the advert, and are therefore forced to wait nearly five minutes before you can actually watch the film.

My advice, don’t buy the DVD, just download a pirate copy which won’t force you to watch "adverts" you don’t want to see.