Tell them, my song.

I watched the steel box edition of Shoot ‘em up today. 83 minutes of pure action, running at 105% and only slowing down to 100% during the last few minutes of the movie. The body count is almost as high as the bullet count. I’ve never seen something like this before. It was unbelievable.

Except for the slow-down to mere full speed near the end, which feels oddly slow in this otherwise ultra fast movie, they did everything right. That is, when you’re the target audience, which could be described as a shooter-loving, heterosexual male who’s into Heavy Metal and everything that goes with it. I’m positive that I fit into that target audience, so I can only recommend Shoot ‘em up. However, when you usually only watch what I call ‘flower movies’, don’t touch this DVD. You’ll get nightmares and your stomach will turn around. But when you want to know what the ultimate action shooter looks like and you’re confident enough that you can handle what you see, this is your pick.

Shoot ‘em up raised the bar for this genre and is having films like Desperado or Pulp Fiction for breakfast.

My wonderful woman came home today with a freshly bought DVD of Pixar’s latest release Ratatouille, and later in the evening we made ourselves comfortable and watched it on my Powerbook.

Ratatouille is a beautiful animated movie in the best Disney-Pixar tradition, but without any of that embarrassing singing Disney used to torture us with. Of course, nothing bad happens to anybody in this flic, even the bad guy makes it to the end in one piece, we’ve got a nice happy ending (without it being sickening sweet), and it’s all just a lot of light-hearted fun. The only option for people who love to cook is to fall in love with this movie. Eventually, you will put a screen and a playback device in your kitchen just to watch it while you are preparing dinner.

I think it’s the best film Pixar have made so far, and that includes the pure technical aspects as well: Ratatouille really looks great, the render farms at Pixar are probably still steaming from the heavy work they had to do to create all those highly detailed pictures.

If you’re in the mood to be entertained by a simple fun story in a ‘beautiful world’ setting, watch Ratatouille. You’ll have a laugh and a good time. Don’t forget to put a copy next to your cook books.