Elyes Gabel | Cinema Parrot Disco

It’s my blogiversary! And I baked you all a cake!

Okay, I lie – I Googled “Studio Ghibli cake“. I couldn’t bake a cake to save my life. Also, my blogiversary was actually on Thanksgiving… Close enough! And I say this every year but I really can’t believe I’ve done this blogging thing for three years now.

As my blogiversary is so close to the end of the year, I always do a little recap of my year so far. The holiday season always gets very busy so I’ve been taking a bit of a break but, up until November, I kept up with my “post once a day every weekday” schedule fairly well. This is actually post number 995 for me so I’m finally almost to 1,000 overall. I haven’t yet reached 1,000 followers like I know a lot of you have recently but that’s also getting close (I currently have 980. Hi all!).

I was very happy to start the year out with Studio Ghibli Month in January. I only managed to review Grave Of The Fireflies plus all the Hayao Miyazaki-directed films (except The Wind Rises… I will do that eventually!) but I’ll still work my way through the remainder of the Ghibli movies at some point. You can find links to all my Ghibli reviews HERE.

The project I didn’t manage was to watch & review as many John Carpenter movies as I could throughout the year (you can see from My Top Ten John Carpenter Movies list that I hadn’t yet seen some popular ones). Well, I’ve only managed to watch TWO & review a whopping NONE. I can say that both of them will be added into that Top Ten: one very high (I’d put it at number three) and one very low, so it may not stay in there after I watch some more. Maaaaybe I’ll make another attempt at that project in 2016. Maybe. 😉

That leads me to the movies I’ve seen so far this year. You can see a very exciting list of EVERY SINGLE MOVIE I’ve seen in 2015, rated & ranked, HERE! Yeah, call me anal but it makes end-of-the-year lists very easy to put together. Here are my Top Five favorites I’ve seen at home & in the cinema so far:

Seen In The Cinema:

1. Mad Max: Fury Road – 9/10
2. Ex Machina – 8/10
3. It Follows – 8/10
4. Inside Out – 8.5/10
5. Suffragette – 8/10

Seen At Home:

1. Escape From New York – 8.5/10
2. Grave Of The Fireflies – 8/10
3. The Last Unicorn – 8/10
4. Escape From Alcatraz – 8/10
5. We Are The Best! – 8/10

I always like seeing which posts & pages get the most views. I don’t like how Worpress has changed Stats so that you can only see year by year instead of overall totals, which I’d find more interesting (maybe it’s different on a computer?). So above is a list of My Most Viewed Posts & Pages for 2015 only.

I’ve learned to accept the fact that my 2013 post of My Top Ten Shower & Bath Scenes In Movies will NEVER DIE. It’s always been & always will be number one. Thanks to the person who shared My Top Ten Body Horror Movies on Reddit (I know who you are! Thanks again! 🙂 ), that post gave me the most views I’ve ever had in a single day. I’m glad that my review for Mad Max: Fury Road has done well, since that movie RULES and that post isn’t pervy in any way. As always, a lot of the most-viewed are due to something pervy (Odd Thomas has a girl, Addison Timlin, in barely-there knickers and Spring Breakers of course has a photo of a topless girl). Believe me, I’m far happier when non-pervy posts get a lot of views. I still find it funny that so many people search for that gnome from Project X…

I LOVE GNOMES!!!! I still want one just like that angry little dude. A “fuck you” gnome! Anyway – As you can see, that’s one of My Top Search Terms:

These search terms are the same as usual and, yes, “Mr Peabody & Sherman porn” pops up a lot. Seriously – what’s wrong with people?? Is there really such a thing?! I promise that is NOT on my blog (just a simple review of that crappy kids’ movie HERE). Lucy Deakins, from my review of The Great Outdoors, is always a popular search term (although I’m a bigger fan of her movie The Boy Who Could Fly).

I knew exactly which posts were responsible for each of these search terms other than “Elyes Gabel shirtless” so I had to search my blog to find he was in World War Z. Sorry – I had no idea who he was & don’t have any photos of him without a shirt! I looked him up & saw that he was Rakharo in Game Of Thrones. Then, as there are approximately 132 characters in each episode of Game Of Thrones, I had to look up Rakharo (he was one of Daenerys Targaryen’s Dothraki “Bloodriders”). Okay, then – here he is with bare arms in Game Of Thrones:

Oh, yeah – I’ve also read a lot of books this year (for me) and even managed to review a few. Here they are! I’ll try to review a couple more of these before the end of the year. Maaaaaaybe.

The Scorch Trials by James Dashner
Horns by Joe Hill
NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
The Martian by Andy Weir
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Revival by Stephen King
Florence & Giles by John Harding
The Gospel According To Drew Barrymore by Pippa Wright
The Shock Of The Fall by Nathan Filer
The Unlikely Pilgrimmage Of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
Tank Girl by Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin
Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin

Finally, thanks as always to everyone who stops by & “has a chat” with me in the comments. I love that! I didn’t really expect that when I started this blog but it’s the main reason why I still stick around. I’ve finally looked into these stats & see that they’re the top commenters based on the last 1,000 comments. It’s a weird way to do it & I wish WordPress would show more people but thanks to ALL of you, not just those below – everyone has popped up in these stats at some point. 🙂

Hopefully I’ll see you all next year for a 4th blogiversary celebration! Maybe I’ll bake a real cake next time. 🙂

World War Z

Directed by Marc Forster

Produced by:
Brad Pitt
Dede Gardner
Jeremy Kleiner
Ian Bryce

Based on World War Z by Max Brooks (Supposedly. Like… Extremely LOOSELY based on! Lol.)

Starring:
Brad Pitt
Mireille Enos
Daniella Kertesz
James Badge Dale
Fana Mokoena
Ludi Boeken
Matthew Fox
David Morse
Elyes Gabel

Plot Synopsis:

Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), a former employee of the United Nations, is called upon to leave his family & travel the globe in search of the cause of a worldwide zombie pandemic and in the hope of finding a cure.

My Opinion:

So, okay – I read World War Z by Max Brooks (son of Mel!). I LOVED it – I thought it was one of the best books I’d read in years. Then I heard they’d be making it into a movie and I’m usually happy about that – although I rarely like the movies as much as the books, I still enjoy seeing how they adapt them. After all kinds of known problems while trying to make this movie, we finally got to see the first proper trailer. And, like everyone else who read the book, I was like “what the HELL is that?!”. Lol. I don’t need to say more – I think everyone knows by now that, aside from the title, the book and the movie have VERY little in common. So let’s move on…

Knowing this was NOT going to be the World War Z I know, I went to this with fairly low expectations and also went to it knowing it was going to be more of a serious “nationwide pandemic” film than some kind of Romero zombie movie. This is more I Am Legend or even Contagion than Night Of The Living Dead. And that’s fine – I ended up enjoying it more than I had expected. Not that the book was a full-on zombie thing anyway – it’s more like a book on war… (Sorry – not going there! I won’t mention the book again). 😉

Apocalyptic Movies of any sort are always my type of thing. Don’t know why… And World War Z is a decent enough example of this type of film. We got to see the human side of things through seeing Brad Pitt’s character have to leave his wife and two daughters behind as he travels to try to discover the cause & a cure. We briefly meet some soldiers that we get to know a little bit about – this was one of the better parts of the film (and a small part of this was in the book!!). And Brad helps a female soldier in Israel played by Daniella Kertesz. She’s probably one of the best characters in this and she wasn’t even listed when I looked up the actors’ names on Wikipedia! We meet quite a few characters as Brad travels the globe and I enjoyed that and actually wished they’d been able to spend a little more time with some of these characters.

As for the action & “gore” – well, there IS no gore. Honestly. Never seen a zombie movie with pretty much NO blood whatsoever. But that’s fine by me. As I said, this isn’t some zombie horror movie – this is a human drama exploring the effects of a worldwide pandemic. And, aside from a few minor silly things, this movie does the “apocalyptic” thing so much better than a Roland Emmerich movie. Other than some CGI zombies piling on top of each other and looking a little silly, World War Z felt much more realistic than an Emmerich film ever has. And the action seemed just right – just enough but nothing too insane and over-the-top (hello Man Of Steel!).

Summary:

If you go to World War Z with an open mind and expecting a human drama about a worldwide pandemic instead of a gory zombie horror movie, you may find that you actually enjoy it. It certainly has some problems and is far from perfect but it isn’t the total disaster we were all expecting after hearing about all the production problems and all the changes that were made. I’d have liked to see a bit more character development of some of the lesser characters but we meet them all too briefly to really achieve this. So, overall, I’d probably recommend this film. But I’d DEFINITELY recommend the brilliant book. You can do both – they’re completely different things…

My Rating: 7/10

**I think a lot of people will have by now read about the original World War Z ending and how it was massively changed. If you’re interested, this is a very good article explaining the changes: The Playlist.