fillum

i like how northeners pronounce the word film.

i've had more time of late to watch films. i never used to like old films. anything before the 80s i mostly just dismissed. and then a few months back i saw one flew over the cuckoos nest (19/20). sadly, it was after seeing the house version (episode 1+2 of season 6 iirc), but that didn't detract from it at all. with hindsight, i think house did a great job of copying but not copying it.

even having seen the house one first, it didn't detract at all from the movie. a movie which is fantastic. it even had the c word in it! i didn't know they did that in the 70s. since then i've watched a bunch of older films. the good, the bad and the ugly (the film, not my description of them in general) was one of the best (18/20). some of the alfred hithcock films were great too. the first one i saw of his a few years ago was birds (or 'the birds'?) and it was terrible. i watched the maltese falcon (17/20) and north by northwest (16/20) but my favourite so far was vertigo (17/20). ive seen a few other 'classics' such as casablanca (14/20). I also made sure to seem some which i had amazingly never before seen were star wars. so i watched all 3. in fact, watching them all in under a week was probably bad since i didn't think much of them. for example, if he's a jedi who can essentially fly and control things through telekinesis, why doesn't he do those things all the time!! ridiculous. i think they're above average films, but only worth a generous 14/20.

two films that were really great were alien and aliens. solid 19/20s. atmosphere, story, twists and great characters.

James Stewart, who is in a bunch of hitchcock movies, including rear window (17/20) reminds me very much of that annoying useless president in 24, charles logan, played by Gregory Itzin. He seems to have copied all the mannerisms and speech of President logan, 50 years before logan appeared on screen!

as for my rating system, 10/20 is, by definition, average, and should be the mean score. 10/20 is not a bad score in my system, no matter what imdb tells you about films rated 5/10! why i use 20 and not 10, is because ratings out of 20 are perfect. /10 is not enough, as you find yourself sometimes wanting to use halves. and obviously 100 is too much, i can't tell the difference between 64% and 63%.
if you are still in any doubt over this rating system, may i just remind you that championship manager (now renamed football manager), the greatest simulation game of all time, has been using ratings out of 20 since it's inception. i assume it still does? the last one i saw was 2009.