I’ve just bought some DVD’s on a 3 for £20($40) deal from HMV. Now there are usually great bargains when they do this, and this time was no exception. I managed to bag The Magnificent Seven (with all the trimmings), House of Flying Daggers (trimmings again, and a double pack of The Producers (original and remake – counted as one) so I’m pretty pleased. Now, we don’t usually get much time to watch films, so I had a couple of DVDs on the shelf waiting to be watched; one was Pan’s Labyrinth. Don’t mistake this with Pan’s People. This was not what I expected at all – I was thinking it would be something closer to The Labyrinth; it was pretty gruesome in places. I haven’t hidden behind my hands for a long time, but some of the scenes set in the aftermath of the Spanish civil war are pretty horrific. The story is centred on a girl who is surrounded by monsters, both human and mythological, that make her life a misery. She retreats into the fairy tales that she loves while carnage is taking place around her. It is definitely worth watching, but not for kids.

When you’re on a flight, you either watch the movies, or you read or you sleep. I generally can’t sleep, and find it hard to read if there is a tv on, so invariably I watch the movies. Fly Zoom, being a budget style airline doesn’t do the screen in the back of the seat with movies on demand, so you get four titles, one after the other, and a chance to buy the headphones to listen to them. I’m not going to bother doing a proper review, but here are a list of the movies I saw and a line about what I thought:

• Spiderman 3 – watched the mime version because I didn’t get the headphones out. Made no difference as I could still easily follow the plot. Was pretty good, actually better than the other two that I did also listen to.
• Freedom Writers – I don’t know if all Zoom flights must have a “teacher goes takes the worst class in the worst school and brings the best out of them with hugs all round” movie on each flight, but it was very similar to Take the Lead that we watched in January with Antonio Banderas. It was quite good, and helped the time pass by. Would probably have rented this
• Shrek 3 – 1 was better, 2 not so good, 3 too many.
• The Guardian with Kevin Costner was pretty good, and definitely passed the time. It was about a high school swimmer who joined the US Coast Guard. Kevin Costner played the hard guy with problems following a dodgy assignment. Was pretty formulaic, and got a bit stupid in the last five minutes (like Leon did – mind you, that was a a good film.)

When you are on a plane, you have a lower quality threshold – yo uare just after stuff that makes the flight go more quickly, so it’s great when you get a couple of movies that are really good like Waitress and Wild Hogs – this was the best road movie I’ve seen in ages, and Blades of Glory was great as well – hmm, I’m into mindless movies on planes, does that say anything about me?  Now, when we were in Fernie we saw that the Simpson’s Movie was on. I can always sit down and watch the Simpsons. When I couldn’t get a job for 18 months, The Simpsons marked the end of my nominal day’s work (reading up on things, job hunting etc), so I’ve seen quite a few of them. All I can say is the movie is absolute rubbish. It is so bad that we almost walked out of the theatre. There’s supposed to be a joke a minute, but I have to say that I must have missed loads of them. Thank goodness we didn’t watch it in Islington (£8/$18 per person, kerchinnng!)!