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There's really no good way to explain what The Great Movie Experiment is other than just testing it. It's quite addictive and you somehow feel like you're contributing to something great.

"The gist is that we're compiling a list of movies based on head to head votes, matching them up in a giant round-robin tournament."

It's not really what head-to-head voting is about but there are times I would like a third button when a film sucks. Many times you're confronted by one mediocre film and one film which is only ok; then you're "forced" to vote for the one that is only ok.

Great work Matthias!

Me and my friend Andreas accidently went to see Kingdom of Heaven yesterday. We had extremely low hopes having seen the trailer but thought we'd give Ridley Scott a second chance.

What a load of crap it was. It was constantly unrealistic and pathetic. All the bladdering about honour, love and pride made us sick. One word summorizes Orlando Bloom's character: pretentious!

There's a moment when he speaks to the soldiers before a war like we've seen so many times in Braveheart, Lord of the Rings etc. except this time I get uneasy in my seat because it's so god damn embarrasing. Don't get me started on the recurring theme where the main character tries to prove that you don't have to a lord or knight to accomplish this and that.

I feel sorry for the people who kind of people who like stories like this. It's been done a million times before but those other times much less pretentious and often with a hint of humanity.

There were some impressive scenes I must admit but I'm hoping that Ridley Scott just got trapped with his wonderful camera techniques in a shitty screenplay given to him by senseless executives.

I knew nothing about this film went I went to see it at the cinema yesterday. No one had told me that it was a comedy and the opening scenes gives the impression of a black depressing film about a alcoholic loser who hates his life and contemplates committing suicide. Well, this is what the film is about. Him and his partner, a shopping mall and a fat bullied kid.

What makes the film to funny is the language Santa (played by Bill Bob Thornton) uses. The swearing and the sarcasm. Comedy is always funny if it's unexpected. The story is really quite sad and destructive much like Leaving Las Vegas and in such a morose environment every little joke is much appreciated.

Go and see this film. Don't expect a joyride but do muse over some of the little things in it.

UPDATE: Check out these photos of kids being afraid of santa

Have you, like me, had problems with downloaded .AVI files that you can't fast forward? There's a solution to that. Install mplayer and run it like this:

Z:\Films>mplayer -idx Movie.avi

Might for some be old news but I've not until now discovered this and hopefully by writing about it now, someone else will be happy to know how to do it.

Classic Movie Scripts is a site that hosts a long lists of, unsurprisingly: movie scripts. The list isn't very long but keep it in mind, it might grow. I was happy to find the script to Annie Hall by Woody Allen. One of my favourite films of all times. This is taken from Annie Halle:

                       ALVY 
       Tsch, I know.  A relationship, I think, 
       is-is like a shark, you know?  It has 
       to constantly move forward or it dies. 
               (He sighs) 
       And I think what we got on our hands 
               (Clearing his throat) 
       is a dead shark.

This Sunday I went to see S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine at NFT which is what I wrote about in The Chinese Martial Arts Film at BFI

It was a documentary about the prison camps under the Angkar regime in the late seventies. Victims (the few of them who survived) and prison guards met and talked about what happened. A recurring theme was the indoctrination of the prison guards who still until this day can't explain the cruelty the were responsible for. Some of the stories about the interrogations sound very much like 1984 by George Orwell, but for real. Horrible.

The film was at times dull and depressing but the stories faces made up for it. This film makes Schindlers List look like a comedy at times, much because it felt much more real since it was a documentary. The terror that was going on in Cambodia probably still happens in some communist and fascist states today to a certain degree.

"How often do you get the chance to stare directly into the face of evil? S21 gives you that chance, and what do you know - evil's face looks just like everybody else's." A review from Rotten Tomatoes

Site with some of the paintings by the painter who appears a lot in this documenary.