the Prisoner

"The Prisoner is a 17-episode British television series first broadcast in the UK from 29 September 1967 to 1 February 1968. Starring and co-created by Patrick McGoohan, it combined spy fiction with elements of science fiction, allegory, and psychological drama.

The series follows a British former secret agent who is held prisoner in a mysterious seaside village where his captors try to find out why he abruptly resigned from his job. Although sold as a thriller in the mould of McGoohan's previous series, Danger Man (called Secret Agent in its U.S. release), the show's combination of 1960s countercultural themes and surreal setting had a far-reaching effect on science fiction/fantasy programming, and on popular culture in general.

The series features striking and often surreal storylines, and themes include hypnosis, hallucinogenic drug experiences, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination. A major theme of the show is individualism versus collectivism." (WikiPedia)

I just recently started watching this series, and I must say it's great! The plot built around the main character, number 6, is kept very consistent, each episode reveals some minor details about him, the mysterious Village and it's leaders. Even though the special effects are very outdated and often rather funny, the story is still very entertaining.

If you're into mystery-series', I definitely recommend checking out the Prisoner!

Movie quiz

Sorry for the lack of new posts in the past few days.

Yesterday I found this very nice movie quiz game, and thought I'll share the fun with you guys:

 http://www.veer.com/ideas/clockbusters/

It's a good time-waster. Some of the clues are very obvious, but some of them I thought were actually quite clever!
My score after the first try was 33/50  :)

Edit. fixed the link

Psychological thrillers

Psychological thrillers are one of my favourite movie genres, they're usually well written and sometimes even attempts to trick the audience with false leads. It might cause the audience to strain a few brain cells but that's a good thing isn't it? This is also why these movies are often fun to talk about with your friends, people tend to look at different things in these movies, so it's interesting to see how some people might have gotten very different image of the film than you.

Here's a few very interesting movies:

Beautiful Mind (2001), The Machinist (2004), Old Boy (2003), Memento (2000)

I've been looking for another movie similar to the ones above, any recommendations?

Sanctum (2011) 3D

Sanctum is a 3D adventure drama film directed by Alister Grierson and executive produced by James Cameron. It's a survival story of a small expedition group*  that gets trapped inside an underwater cave. They suspect the air pocket they're trapped in will be filled with water before they would be rescued, so the group decides to take the risk and try finding another way out.
*(George, Carl, Victoria, Frank and his son Josh, played by in the same order: Daniel Wyllie, Ioan Gruffudd, Alice Parkinson, Richard Roxburgh and Rhys Wakefield)

Sanctum has got many very beautiful scenes in the underwater caves, and this way it makes good use of the 3D effects. On the other hand, there are many annoying details in the 3D such as the ones I mentioned before, tree branches etc., and also in some scenes there are a huge amount of these 3D air bubbles, which are mostly distracting instead of being nice to watch.

The movie is easy to follow, because the plot is fairly simple. The side plot between the father and son wasn't bad either. Now that I think about it, the storyline is also quite repetitive. After the group is trapped inside the cave, practically the same few main events keep happening till the very end of the movie. Despite the repetitiveness, the movie does take a good hold of the audience and doesn't have many boring or uninteresting dialogue scenes. It has got a very strong and tense atmosphere throughout the adventure, and some diving moments are literally breathtaking (heh). Could say there are a few quite shocking moments aswell.

There are a few minor points which I didn't find very reasonable. For example the scene with the deadly foamy water pool inside the caves, it wasn't explained at all, the movie just expects the audience to believe these kind of underground geysir-vortexes exist. Secondly the fact that they didn't seem to have any safety plan or alternate measures made to escape the cave in a worst case scenario, even though they knew a huge rain storm is coming! Yet another odd thing is, that there just "happened" to be a rock big enough to block the only entrance to the part of the cave they were having their exploring camp in, and it just "happened" to start moving when this particular rain occured.

The cast of this movie is pretty much unkown to me. In my opinion, they did a fine job as the characters. In the beginning the acting and dialogue reminds of some sort of a soap opera, but it got better later on. And once again, when there are interesting side characters, the movie gets them killed them as soon as possible. Annoying.

As a conclusion, Sanctum does meet the expectations pretty well, it has some exciting moments and it's overall entertaining. I think it is worth watching in 3D, since it doesn't have those annoying "flying towards the camera" effects.