'I do wish we could chat longer, but... I'm having an old friend for dinner. Bye'

Last night saw an emotional farewell to one of our favourite characters and one of our favourite franchises of film. The Hannibal Lecter series (The Silence of the Lambs (film 24), Hannibal (43), Red Dragon (53), Hannibal Rising (108), all based on the four books of the same name) have given us both many fond memories of cannibalism and superb acting from Anthony Hopkins that we shall never forget.

• In 'The Silence of the Lambs' (1991), training agent Clarice Starling seeks the advice of imprisoned Hannibal Lecter to try and solve another crime involving a killer known as 'Buffalo Bill' who skins women alive.

• In 'Hannibal' (2001), ten years later after the events of 'The Silence of the Lambs', Starling is trying to find and arrest Lecter before one of his surviving victims finds him and kills him.

• In 'Red Dragon' (2002), a prequel to 'The Silence of the Lambs', Lecter is sought after by Will Graham, an FBI trying to catch a murderer known as 'The Tooth Fairy' who kills families every full moon. The events at the end of the film set up the first time Starling and Lecter meet in 'The Silence of the Lambs'.

• In 'Hannibal Rising' (2007), a prequel to all the films in the series, we go back to Lecter's childhood, as far as 1941, Lithuania, where he becomes orphaned after a Soviet-German shoot out near his home and his sister is eaten by a group of Nazi's. 8 years later, he escapes a Russian orphanage and escapes over the USSR border and travels east to France, where he meets Lady Murasaki, and plans revenge on those who killed his sister. 

Our verdict:
Rosie -
The Silence of the Lambs - 9/10
Hannibal - 8/10
Red Dragon - 8/10
Hannibal Rising - 6/10

Ollie -
The Silence of the Lambs - 10/10
Hannibal - 8/10
Red Dragon - 7/10
Hannibal Rising - 7/10

Average -
The Silence of the Lambs - 9.5/10
Hannibal - 8/10
Red Dragon - 7.5/10
Hannibal Rising - 6.5/10

IMDb Ratings -
The Silence of the Lambs - 8.7/10
Hannibal - 6.6/10
Red Dragon - 7.2/10
Hannibal Rising - 6.1/10

These films will always hold a special place in Rollie history but fear not, many more franchises and series are currently being completed and some are about to begin. And Rosie and I have said we will rewatch 'Silence' soon too.

Farewell for now Hannibal Lecter, we love you <3

"Ta-ta, 'H'."

x

Our biggest stars

Most appearances on films nights:

A list by ollie

•                    Morgan Freeman – 7

War of the Worlds, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Invictus, The Dark Knight Rises, The Shawshank Redemption, Se7en

•                    Cillian Murphy – 7

Inception, Sunshine, Red Lights, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, In Time, The Dark Knight Rises

•                    Anthony Hopkins - 6

The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, Red Dragon, Fracture, Hitchcock, 360

•                    Liam Neeson - 5

Taken, Taken 2, Unknown, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight Rises

•                    Donald Pleasance – 4

Halloween, Halloween II, Halloween IV, Halloween V

•                    Kevin Spacey – 4

 The Life of David Gale, American Beauty, Se7en, A Bugs Life

•                    Leonardo DiCaprio – 4

Inception, Shutter Island, Django Unchained, The Beach

•                    Ryan Gosling – 4

Drive, The Notebook, Fracture, Stay

•                    Brad Pitt - 4

Babel, Tree of Life, Inglourious Basterds, Se7en

•                    Jamie Lee Curtis - 3

Halloween, Halloween II, Christmas with the Kranks

•                    Joseph Gordon – Levitt - 3

Inception, (500) Days of Summer, The Dark Knight Rises

•                    Jamie Foxx - 3

Django Unchained, Valentines Day, Law Abiding Citizen

•             Jack Nicholson - 3

The Shining, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chinatown

27 films later? oh em gee

SO I just want to update you all on my fantastic progress of this exciting new challenge which Ollie thought up in the shower (yes really, he cut his shower short to tell me the exciting news).
I have watched 2 WHOLE FILMS, which is actually 2 more films than Ollie has. Already i can see that it is going to be really hard to narrow down the 27 to my 2 favourites, and i can also already see that it is going to be soooo hard for me to watch any films made before the year 2000... I just really dont like the idea of old films, most of them are laughable in this modern era.

I have also given my CV into the local cinema of which ive had no response :( so, owner of Playhouse Cinema Louth, if you're reading this pls pls pls give me a job :'(

That is all i wish to inform you of on this fine night. 

Yours sinfaithfully,
R. x 

What next?

So after the orgasm inducing thrills of 100 films under our very tight belts, what will happen next with Rollie Film Nights? Will we hit a plateau? Will we discover our new favourite film ever? Will we witness the awfulness of Attack the Block and Tree of Life combined? The future is unclear. What would you like to see? There is plenty more to come. Here are some films we may or may not be watching in the near future.

2nd Annual Rollie Awards

Hello there and welcome to what you've been waiting all year for (all two of you that read this blog)...

THE 2ND ROLLIE AWARDS!!!!!!!!!!!

That's right ladies and gents, guys and girls, revel at the marvel, foam at the mouth, and get ready for the Rollie journey to begin!!

So we begin with the awards meal of course. After the rush of our first Rollie awards (we got to film 50 far quicker than we realised and didnt do much planning) we wanted the 2nd awards to be even bigger and better, with no less than a three course meal! The menu was something even the greatest chefs couldnt pull off:
Starter - Lake Placid soup with 'Croodons'
Main - Sinister Stir-fry (which was too gross to even include a picture below)
Dessert - Clockwork cake

As you can see we spent many hours finding 'fun' names for the food and cooking everything from scratch (the cooking is a lie. All hail Morrisons ready chopped veg and pre-baked cake)....

The critically acclaimed Rollie cake (In all good supermarkets now)

#Bucksfizzcus2young4champagne - excuse my school photo..

Lake Placid soup with 'Croodons'

One half of Rollie

The other half of Rollie (please note how we have dressed up for the occasion)

Cutting of the Rollie cake. Tears were shed

After the meal we had the awards - the main event - what we had waited weeks for with bated breath.

We decided on the categories and chose 4 nominees for each, so without any further ado i give you the award winners:

Most Referenced Film:

Hitchcock

Worst Film:

Tree of Life

Best Female in a Film:

Kathy Bates (Misery)

Best Male in a Film:

Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)

Best Character:

Norman Bates

Best Story:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest

Scariest Film:

Sinister

Saddest Film:

The Notebook

Most Forgettable Film:

Stay

Hottest Guy

Joseph Gordon Levitt (500 Day of Summer)

Best Soundtrack:

500 Days of Summer

Best Film:

Django Unchained

Film that didn’t win anything but should have done:

The Pianist

After the awards came the watching of the 100th film. This film needed to be special, something we both wanted to see so we decided on Shawshank Redemption. And what a brilliant choice, we could both see why it is rated so high in the IMDb top 250, it was truly marvelous (even though Ollie's DVD was a load of shit as per and stopped half way through meaning we had to find it online). 

Next came the Rollie Disco!!!!!! (yes we are nearly 18 and yes we did sit at home and make a spotify playlist for a disco then sit on the sofa and listen to it with excitement)

Click here to listen to the playlist (if you want your ears to bleed) > Rollie Films Disco w/ DJ Davidson

To conclude the evening we watched film no 101 and again we wanted something that would wow us. We watched Se7en, which we both really liked (we also really liked staring at Brad Pitt for 2 hours). Its a must watch thriller, with great twists and turns along the way and a brilliant cast.

So we come to the end of our Rollie Award journey, hope you stayed around to read. We are determined to make the next awards even bigger and better, and we hope we will have more people to share them with by then!

Announcement: 27 Films Later Challenge

Newsflash.
Over the next few months, both of us will be taking part in an idea of mine '27 Films Later'. Basically, it's a challenge to expand out film knowledge and to find new favourite films. Basically we watch 27 films, beginning in each letter of the alphabet plus one beginning in a number! For example:
1. 1408
2. A Clockwork Orange
3. Battle Royale
4. Child's Play
...

At the end of this, we both reveal to each other what 27 films we have watched and pick the best 2 and then watch the four films over one very special weekend. It will be all fun and surprises.

However there are rules. We can't watch films we've already seen or said we would watch together. They also have to be a range of genres and from different time periods. This means sadly I will have to abandon my obsession of 1960's horror/Hitchcockian thrillers whilst Rosie will have to abandon her modern action blockbusters. 

It will all be lots of fun and when we have our big reveal (it will probably be 2 or 3 months time), we wil make a post here with the full list of films we both watched and the 4 films we watched on our film night as a result.

xxx

Ollie's observations on films 90-99

#JOURNALISM
Well well well welly well.
The final 10 films viewed before the 100th Film Awards for me were probably the best run of 10 films since the beginnings of our film nights. And since I'm pretty bored and don't want to revise Russia I thought I'd write up some notes on these films. You're welcome.
Starting on a low with Leonardo DiCaprio's 'The Beach' (2001), which neither of us particularly enjoyed, we watched a variety of films in our final 10 before we hit triple figures, from the recent 2012 horror 'Sinister' to 'the best crime film of all time' (1974), 'Chinatown'. 'Chinatown' turned out to be a bit of a let down for both of us, having heard such great things about it neither of us would've given it anything over 5/10. I had seen 'Sinister' when it was released last autumn in the cinema and Rosie had been pestering me (as usual) to get it on dvd for us both to watch. It didn't lose it's scare factor second time round. In fact it was probably scarier. Baguul, or 'Mr Boogey' for me is one of the most terrifying horror antagonists ever, and Rosie was literally hiding behind her cushion after the first 15 minutes.
After watching 'Batman Begins' and 'The Dark Knight' in the previous set of 10 films, we watched the concluding part of Nolan's trilogy 'The Dark Knight Rises'. I had enjoyed the previous two films in the Batman series however neither had really made me go 'wow'. However the third film was definitely my favourite, and I would give it 10/10, the others entries into the trilogy getting 7/10 and 8/10 respectively. Rosie gets off to this trilogy so she loves all of the films, 'The Dark Knight' being her favourite,  I was just glad to have finally understood the hype of the Batman series.
One little trip to the cinema was made of late, to see the animated adventure 'The Croods' (which later inspired a soup, that's another story for another day). Enjoyable but at times bland, for the both us it was a forgettable and slightly average flick that gained momentum in the final 15 minutes. It was cute, quite emotional too, but hardly anything to write home about. We went home and watched 'Bent' after that which we both enjoyed so all was well. You can see both of our reviews for 'Bent' below.
'Inglourious Basterds' is another film we watched that I feel the need to make comments on. I feel that this is Tarantino's 'attempt' at a masterpiece, and he nearly achieves it, however one section of the film is extremely unnecessary and drawn out beyond belief. But fear not, he made his masterpiece earlier this year with 'Django Unchained', very similar to this film but much more enjoyable.
The other films we watched were 'Invictus' (nice but slightly boring and yet again... drawn out), 'Silver Linings Playbook (refreshing and fun) and 'The Sixth Sense' (seen it before but wanted to watch it again with Rosie, she liked it and hid behind her pillow again). Overall a very good selection of films. If I had to pick 3 out for you to watch I'd pick:
- The Dark Knight Rises
- Sinister
- The Sixth Sense
Avoiding:
- The Beach
- Chinatown
So thats my little (that turned into a quite large) round up of these fine selection of films. Well done to the both of us for choosing such a good selection!
After watching film 99.. 'Silver Linings Playbook', we both rushed around to prepare for our 100th film/2nd annual Rollie film awards. We shall post about that later on, however I can tell you it was very exciting and very very special.
Stay tuned for more posts!
xxx

Bent - Review

Rosie's review - 

This is a very long and drawn out film, the sort of film where you think 'i could have filmed that in 10 minutes' but it does capture something which no other film I've seen has. We all know about the holocaust and how all the Jews were killed in the concentration camps, but we rarely see or hear about what happened to the other people who died, especially the homosexuals. This film explores this.

It could be classed as a very strange, or 'out there' type of film with the scenes of a bondage filled drag bar to open the film, but it does go on to be something more than that. The film is centered around one man played brilliantly by Clive Owen, named Max. Having being sent to a concentration camp for being a Jew (but actually homosexual which the german guards are unaware of) he soon meets Horst and falls in love in the only way he can without being killed by the Germans. Lothaire Bluteau who plays Horst is simply spectacular in this film and the real highlight of the whole thing for me.

It is hard hitting and emotional and is definitely one to watch, don't fall asleep during the first 20 minutes - it does pick up!

Verdict: 7/10  

Ollie's review -

After viewing ‘Bent’, Rosie and I both said it would be interesting to review. It gave me mixed emotions. On the one hand it’s very unique in its subject however it has its cons. For one, the concentration camp seems deserted, just Max, Horst and the guards are the only ones who seem to be there (the train also seems quite deserted). It seems an inaccurate representation of the persecution of the gays in Nazi occupied Europe, for one it doesn’t explore issues such as attitudes of other prisoners (there are none) or really in much depth that of the guards. It seems that Bent could’ve been a lot more than it actually was. It could’ve been ground-breaking but it simply isn’t enough to be so.  However there are some scenes that stick with you, such as the scene on the train where Max is made to ‘prove’ he isn’t gay and the ‘sex scene’ between the lovers.

Overall it’s enjoyable but had a lot more potential than this.

Verdict: 6/10