We watched a couple of movies on Friday night, including:

Confetti

A British comedy, and therefore a risky proposition. For every Shaun of the Dead there is an Alien Autopsy.

Confetti is closer to SotD than it is to AA. It features a cast which has so many of the current comedy stars that its a surprise Simon Pegg doesn’t crop up somewhere. Martin Freeman (Tim from The Office), Jessica Stevenson (Spaced), Felicity Montague (Alan Partridge’s assistant) and Robert Webb (Mitchell & Webb) are all there, along with half the cast from the Green Wing.

The film is better than any film deserves to be which starts with a close up of Jimmy Carr, and even he is not as annoying as he could be. Well, OK, maybe he is, but he is playing a character who is supposed to be annoying, so thats all right.

The story is that A wedding magazine is running a competition for the most unusual wedding and selects three couples as finalists. The documentary-style film then follows the three couples preparing for the big day and culminates in a triple wedding attended by a panel of judges.

One couple want a tennis-themed wedding, another want one in the style of a Busby Berkely musical and the third want a naturist wedding – resulting an extraordinary amount of full-frontal nudity. There are porn films with less nudity.

Apparently most, if not all of the dialogue was improvised, which means that it has a very realistic feel – like The Office. This means that it did feel like Tim from The Office was in it, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

With the whole story being about weddings it could be seen as a bit of a ‘girly’ film, but I enjoyed it, particularly Alison Steadman’s appearance as the Mother-in-law from hell.

I’m not going give away the ending, but the DVD gives the option to see the film with any of the three couples winning. A nice touch I thought.

Silent Hill

The film Silent Hill is based on the computer game of the same name. Films based on video games tend not to be too good, and this one did not really do much for me. Maybe if I had ever played the game I would have enjoyed it more – the only video game adaptation I have really liked was Doom, coincidentally the only one where I played the original game.

The visuals on the film are stunning, the abandoned town of Silent Hill has a fantastic atmosphere, and some of the special effects are brilliant, but I just didn’t get the story. I think they were trying too hard to shoe-horn in elements of the game to keep the game fans happy.

The director drew inspiration for the setting from the real-life town of Centralia in Pennsylvania, which has had a fire burning in coal seams under it for 40 years. The same town is the inspiration and setting for a book called The Planets by James Finney Boylan, a book so tragically under-rated that it is not even mentioned in the Wikipedia page about the town. (I’ll do something about that when I am back on my own PC)

If you feel the urge to enjoy an entertainment based on the town of Centralia, you will be far better off reading The Planets than watching Silent Hill.