simonb.com: blog > articles tagged with movies

Last week we took the office to see Avatar. Purely for research purposes of course. It's a good movie in that it, helped by a very drafty Shanghai cinema, keeps the viewer engaged for 2.5 hours. Probably should have spent a bit of the budget on the story though rather than re-hashing Pocahontas. We saw the movie on the morning of its first day in Shanghai for RMB 45. Since then Shanghai has gone Avatar crazy. CCTV reported that the Imax cinema would increase its price to RMB 200 from RMB 150. However, following online outrage, the Imax has…

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What is it about nines and movie titles this year?

• 9
• District 9
• Nine

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LegoMatrix is a frame accurate Lego re-enactment of The Matrix Bullet Time dodge scene. 440 hours of work! Wow. It's embedded below from YouTube.

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An amazing historic clip has appeared on YouTube (embedded below). It shows London in colour from 1927. Things I noticed: the sky is blue, everyone wears hats and England beat Australia at the Oval. The film, The Open Road, was made be Claude Friese-Greene, who together with his father is one of the early pioneers of colour film. Sounds like a fascinating chap.

See also The Open Road at the BFI and a BBC/BFI documentary DVD.

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In a country in which every movie can be watched essentially for free it may seem making money from movies is impossible. It's not. As this report about Transformers opening weekend from the LA Times proves.

It was the No. 1 movie in all 58 countries where it opened, with particularly impressive ticket sales in Russia, Australia, South Korea and China, where it opened to $21.9 million, the biggest-ever debut for an English-language movie.

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