Tag Archives: Catching Fire

Hitting Two Birds with One Post (mostly Catching Fire and an underrated James Bond film)

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First of all, I have finally seen Catching Fire on IMAX with my girlfriend a few days ago. For now all I have to say that it was pretty good. It is certainly an improvement over The Hunger Games, but overall, it’s at best just another YA film adaptation. It doesn’t break new ground, nor does it offer something life changing. At its best, it’s a pretty entertaining film, though a bit overlong at times.

Additionally, the Arena sequence was shot in IMAX so you can really see the screen filled up. I have reservations about this as the image quality isn’t that all impressive. At most, the IMAX resolution seemed to highlight the obviousness of the CGI so, yeah, it wasn’t all that impressive. I’m guessing the benchmark would still be Nolan’s The Dark Knight and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (at least for the Burj Khalifa scene) for IMAX feature presentations. Still, check it out; it’s definitely sorth the Php401.

Secondly, I’ve been going on a James Bond marathon of sorts. So far I’ve seen Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (I’m planning to skip all but one Roger Moore flick). For films made in the Sixties, I definitely expected to see how certain aspects of the filmmaking have aged, especially the first three Sean Connery Bond flicks. However, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (OHMSS) was one which surprised me: while I admit that this film seemed to have aged, it didn’t age as much as compared to the first three ones.

Now, I don’t want to delve too much, but I really think that OHMSS is one of the best Bond films ever made next to Skyfall and Goldfinger. The character development is top-notch (though not necessarily George Lazenby‘s acting), and the action sequences are actually quite modern. There is a reason why Christopher Nolan did an homage to it in Inception; the ski-chase is indeed a well-photographed sequence, and despite certain aspects of it being aged, still hold up till now.

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