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Here’s a challenge – given how behind I am, I must restrict myself to no more than two sentences per review for this post. Deep breath…
Bedtime Stories
Adam Sandler’s facile attempt to make a film his kids can watch before they turn 15. He manages a mildly amusing, utterly unmemorable flick that loses the plot, literally.
Slumdog Millionaire
Vividly shot, honestly acted and oddly clichéd. Moving, involving, riveting and, yes, Oscar worthy.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Complete Oscar bait. Far too long, but the concept is the key – driven by breathtaking special effects, a decent Pitt and some old southern charm.
Bolt
I always thought of 3D movies as some long con urban myth with nothing to show for it but stupid glasses. Colour me wrong – this is an amusing buddy comedy that will thrill the kids with its fancy gimmick.
Role Models
Incredibly un-PC and very funny, Paul Rudd embraces his inner arse hole. Looks like a definite case of man-on-ground.
The Reader
Kate Winslet dominates, making a hard woman mildly vulnerable, slightly sympathetic, strangely moving… and all the while completely unlikeable. An interesting movie about a well-worn topic.
Watchmen
Pretty, violent, pointless. Read the graphic novel instead.
Duplicity
Clever the way Ocean’s 13 should have been, with less of the casting budget. Slick, heartless but entertaining.
Easy Virtue
Hilarious old fashioned romp, with a killer soundtrack. Jessica Biel even manages to overcome her own miscasting.
The Duchess
The most pleasant surprise of the year. It’s not like I’m a Knightley hater (I liked Atonement, but I think Romola Garai pulled a lot more out of the material). In this Keira finally proves to everyone she can act – I mean severely act, with range and complexity. Her flawed heroine anchors a beautifully crafted period piece. Its ending may be gut-wrenching, but somehow it all makes sense. Hayley Atwell gives a fabulous showing as an even less sympathetic character. That’s the true achievement of this film – everyone is supremely flawed, but you can not help but ultimately wish them well.
My Best Friend’s Girl
A sloppy, openly offensive film that so embraces the unlikeability of its characters that you can’t help but be entertained (as long as you, can overcome the continuing, phenomenal offensiveness). I always struggle to decide whether Dane Cook deserves a career or not – it varies from movie to movie. In this case I am going to say yes, because I can’t imagine anyone else committing so utterly to being such an asshole. Kate Hudson is game, and if she’s sticking with the romcom, at least she’s changing it up a little. Jason Biggs is just not funny anymore. Unless he’s having an eyebrow removed. Meanwhile Alec Baldwin continues to pimp out his brand of wacky – at least he does it well.
The Women
Ouch. Front runner with Jumper for worst movie of the year (my measurement of worst, means the ‘bad-ness’ of a film is amplified if it somehow implies in some part of its pedigree that it could be good – thus completely misleading us all). It’s really bad. Badly written, inexpressively acted (I’ll get to that), people aren’t likeable and they also aren’t funny (in this type of movie you really need to be at least one of those things). I’m all for the women-power, but this movie undermines it in a huge way. I think it is possible to make an interesting movie without men in it (as it seems easily proven that the reverse is possible virtually all the time) – but this isn’t an example of that theory. I was bored. I was cringing. I spent the entire time wondering what was wrong with Meg Ryan’s face, and trying to figure out when she lost the spark of charisma that allowed her to get by on frazzled zany. Clearly a good script is a good start – I believe the original may have had one. This was just lame and irritating.
I have been slack, remiss and utterly inattentive. For two months. I decided to get back on the Wag Wagon, but was dumbstruck at where to begin. Just because I haven’t been writing, doesn’t mean I haven’t been viewing with continuing obsessive regularity. When picking up an old relationship, sometimes it’s best not to discuss what happened while you were apart. I say screw that – there have been a series of films I still want to weigh in on. Too late for a full review, but not too late for a wrap up of a few of them. So…
Wall-E
Hello cinema perfection, hello wall of critical praise and box office. All deserved. Makes me, of the generation raised in a world of Michael Bay editing and David Mamet dialogue (neither necessarily bad… that’s mostly Mamet who’s not bad… obviously), finally understand the magic of the silent era. Not completely silent though, or my head might explode with the difficulty of processing the concept. Brilliant, breath-taking and adorable.
House Bunny
Yes I saw it. This is a blog of trust, leave your judgement at the door. Or don’t (if you’ve ever watched Meet the Spartans in full I am currently looking at you with raised eyebrow). I watched this because I am a believer. I believe that one day Anna Faris will rise up above the crap she keeps saying yes to and make movies that deserve her. She has better timing than Diaz (who basically requires a Barrymore or a Collette to anchor her), more pathos than Hudson and more facial flexibility that Meg Ryan (not hard). No, she has not found nirvana in a film featuring recurring cameos from Hugh Hefner and 3 blonde women who should never have become famous. This is genuinely crap. The only other decent actor in it is Emma Stone – she and Faris manage to almost seem like they’re improvising together. This cannot save it though. Watch this only if you want to marvel at that fact that someone, somewhere believes Rumer Willis is qualified to act through genetics alone.
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
This is what being an original fan of Indiana Jones must feel like. This franchise is dead to me – even deader than the foes Brendan Fraser half heartedly hacks at. Money was spent in all the wrong places as far as effects go, giving none of the sense of grandeur and scale to be found in the 1st (and even 2nd) effort. At least in 2 you actually believed they were in London on a bridge. In this stale, pale reproduction it’s like they’ve dropped in a cardboard cut out behind the cast. The script is in no way amusing, the casting is horrendous. Luke Ford made me beg for the return of the junior Anakin Skywalker clone as the son, and Maria Bello should forever swear off playing English women. Her accent is wobbly, her action scenes are lame and she has absolutely no chemistry with Fraser. Oh Rachel Weisz, you are wise beyond your years. You and your Oscar. Only the fact that I can still remember watching Jumper at the start of the year stops me from declaring this the worst film of 2008.
Eagle Eye
I know I should get picky when I watch this, but my love for Michelle Monaghan and Shia LaBeouf is pure. Surely a solid pairing can redeem almost any movie (except Jumper… which didn’t have a solid pairing anyway). These two are charismatic, vulnerable and flawed enough to be believable. Without actually being believable though – the plot pretty much sees to that. Still, the action is well staged and imaginative, and the pace is so fast you won’t get time get too critical. Incredibly, for the thriller genre, the individual plot points are quite unpredictable. A fun, tense piece of entertainment that delivers on its promise.
Wanted is the film you get when you write a script in between shots of vodka, casual matches of Russian roulette and taking turns punching each other in the stomach. Only one of those things doesn’t actually happen in the movie, and that’s the Russian roulette, which is remarkable when you consider the director is indeed Russian. Vodka and stomach punching all round. This is big, loud, stupid fantasy escapism that gets away with it because it’s done with commitment and charisma – something big, loud, stupid things from Hollywood typically lack.
James McAvoy plays Wesley Gibson, whose self-loathing voice-over introduces him as a nobody. He carries on his meaningless, repetitive existence, interrupted only by the occasional panic attack, until one fateful trip to the chemist. There he meets, Fox, Angelina Jolie’s alarmingly slender assassin. She’s there to tell him that the father he never knew was in fact a highly skilled hit man, and Wesley has inherited his abilities
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There has been a lot of adulation and hype surrounding the sequel to Batman Begins, so I am going to try and keep this under control. The Dark Knight is the best comic book movie that has been made so far. See what I did there? I qualified it. I left room for someone, someday to make a better super hero movie… one day. Quite rational really.
Let’s wrap up the key points here. Ledger absolutely owns every frame he is in. That’s not hype talking, that’s fact. This is an actor who was mythologized within days of his tragic death, his personality and real life story should overwhelm the character. It is a testament to his achievement that as the Joker, you completely forget you are looking at Heath Ledger. That’s not due to make-up friends, that’s due to performance
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I wish I knew what to make of Mamma Mia. I went in with such overwhelming goodwill towards the whole thing, and in the end it feels like it failed to match me on that. True, the enthusiasm of the cast and crew is evident throughout the film, but it doesn’t make up for the shocking performances peppered through it, the boxy staging and the fact that some of the ABBA songs wedged into the plot are profoundly ill-suited for those moments.
At least they didn’t try and justify attaching Super Trouper to a plot point – that would have signalled the death rattle of the whole thing
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Hancock dreams of being so much edgier and original than it is that you can’t help but smile at it politely as it goes about its business. In between the smiling you’ll pause and marvel at the plot inconsistencies. After that you may well never think of the movie again, unless it’s to ponder the scope of talent that came together to create such a mediocrity.
You can see what they’re trying to say in the opening sequence. Take the flawed hero chestnut and put it on steroids. Will Smith is Hancock, a drunk who swears at kids (that’s the attempt at edginess). He also happens to be a flying immortal with Herculean strength, who goes about saving the day with maximum damage. LA, being the city it is, finds the cost of cleaning up after him far outweighs the benefit of his ill-conceived heroics. Enter a PR guru Jason Bateman, who decides he needs an image makeover, which goes perfectly to plan. Enter PR guru’s wife Charlize Theron who splits her screen time between being a dedicated wife and mother, and having maximum eye tension with Hancock. Except you know there’s more to her than that… because otherwise there is absolutely no reason to hire Charlize Theron. The rest is a garbled back-story, a character back-flip that makes no sense, and some reasonable comedy
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Get Smart is a movie best appreciated by itself. Fans of the television series are just setting themselves up for disappointment if they expect more than the occasional nod towards the 1960’s classic. In isolation (a cone of silence, if you will)) it can be enjoyed as a light action adventure with above average comedy thanks to the casting of Steve Carell.
Carell is the master of making mundane statements hilarious with a mere twitch of his face or a vocal inflection. He plays Maxwell Smart (Don Adams’ former domain), a bumbling analyst desperately vying to become a field agent for CONTROL (the kind of bizarre, but far more credible agency the CIA would be if Alan Arkin truly did run it). When circumstance thrusts him toward the promotion he’s only dreamed of, he’s partnered with a deeply unimpressed Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway). The Chief (Arkin) assigns them to track down a couple of nuclear weapons stolen by KAOS, before they get the chance to lob them in the direction of the US. Cue shenanigans, sight gags, dance-offs, betrayal and most memorably (for me) a sword fish
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Sex and the City gives fans of the show everything they’ve been asking for. Whether they’ll actually leave satisfied is up in the air. People who never got on board the original escapades of New York’s favourite foursome of designer walking product placement need not apply.
The film begins with a neat set of opening credits, including an update of the television theme. They’ve made a smart move by acknowledging the passage of time and not picking up from exactly where they left off. It allows the movie to have a hint of being its very own entity, while still tying it back and refreshing us with the characters situations
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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a mediocrity, wrapped in an enigma tied up in a bow of expectation. I know, I died a little on the inside as well. That’s not to say that Indy 4 is horrid, far from it. There are plenty of mediocre films around, they’re perfectly watchable, they just also happen to be flawed and uneven. We accept mediocre films and give them fabulous box office rewards. I embrace mediocrity like the irritating little brother it is – loveable, but occasionally grating. I do not embrace mediocre Indiana Jones.
The movie opens perfectly. We’re straight in to the action, with Harrison Ford in whip-cracking form and classic retro villains all round. The period detail is right, and the political tensions of the day (reds under beds, the cast of Grease brawling in milk bars) provides a nice subtle score against which everything is set
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Comment by Jess Paine
on Bite Size Film: part 1