Recently in Film Category

Film fest is finished and it was a blast. While we didn't dive right to the deep end of the pool as some friends of ours chose to do (taking two weeks off and seeing as many films as possible back-to-back for two weeks), I thought we got a pretty good number under our belt. ...

Went to see this at the IMAX in 3D last week (I went with some colleagues, one of whom told me that our job lets us write off going to the movie sas a tax deductable expense. Awesome.) While the 3D technology has not yet been perfected, there were definitely a few 'wow' moments that made it worthwhile. And thank God really, because the story was a clunky, misogynstic shout-fest that was really on ...

Saw a preview for this last night, and it was really good. It's a funny film, in both senses of the word. It is frequently hilarious, often to the degree that the audience missed large chunks of dialogue due to their own laughter. But it's also a very strange film, and often feels like watching a series of homages to different films rather than a film complete unto itself. The film certainly makes ...

I watched, ah, 'Death of a President' last night. Probably the only time I've actually stopped what I was doing and made a special point to watch TV since the last episode of Battlestar Galactica. It was quite heavily hyped, so I knew it would be a part of pop culture, or water cooler talk, if you like, and plus I'd heard some intruiging things about it, so thought I should give it a look. To be ...

I often have thoughts about things which I find hard to articulate. I know I think something about those things, but I'm not entirely sure what. One example that sticks out in my mind was a poster which had a London street, and everyone's heads had been replaced with security cameras. I think the slogan was something like: "Help your community by reporting suspicious activity." or something, but I ...

Ludicrous anecdote via half-a-movie review, I went and saw Hard Candy last night, which contains a certain infamous scene which some of you may have heard of and some of you may not have (I certainly had, so it's not like it was the suprise factor that got me). I actually got through the scene okay. (annoyingly, I needed to go to the bathroom before the scene started, but I didn't want to give th ...

I've posted about Channel 101 a couple of times in the Linklog but I really believe that they deserve more than that. If you haven't experienced it yet (and you really must), 101 is a sort of playground for wannabe film-makers. How it works is: People send in a five minute 'pilot' for a new show. All the pilots are screened to a live audience of 400 at a cinema in LA The audience votes on which ...

I'd better tell you about this film Mirrormask quick smart, because it seems like the sort of film that'll drop out of its limited distribution in about two weeks- catch it while you can. Mirrormask is, as anyone with even a scintilla of decent popculture knowledge will already know, the brainchild of Neil Gaiman and David McKean, both of Sandman fame. And that's basically all you need to know- ...

There's something very elemental in the idea of crawling into the back of a giant, fur-filled cupboard and finding it leads into a magical, timeless world. The sort of feeling, when you read it, that you kind of thought it up yourself when you were a kid, and someone else wrote it down for you. Which I think goes a pretty long way to explaining why a lot of people have a pretty strong connection w ...

Did I never tell you the story of why I stopped reading Harry Potter? Oh, it's a humdinger, check it out: So, being an Engrish teacher and very pleased that Harry Potter made reading 'cool' (and this was particularly odd in Taumarunui, where demonstrating any form of intelligence was usually rewarded with brutality), I decided that, in the interests of keeping my finger on the pulse of popular cu ...

Looking back over the films I've reviewed in this rapidly closing year (all 21 of them! That's like two a month. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?), I seriously wonder if any of them is as good as The Constant Gardener, which is uniformly excellent from beginning to end. I can't really tell you much about the plot because the very first thing to happen in the film is an enormous spoiler that I ...

There's a great scene in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, where the titular menace comes rampaging into a garden festival. The owner of the 'Garden Supplies' stall slaps up a hastily scrawled 'Angry Mob' sign over the word 'Garden', and quickly starts selling pitchforks and spades to the townsfolk. The whole scene is probably less than two seconds long, and by the time you've regist ...

I considered substituting this review with a photo of a big pile of dog poo....cause that's what this movie is. Other visual representation options might include: some sweaty dead monkey balls, a high powered vacuum cleaner, an anthropomorphic sickle & hammer masturbating all over the Hollywood sign, and so on and so forth. Night Watch has two plots, barely related to each other. The first is, th ...

Here's an odd thing: A script that's smart and funny, but also about something at the same time. Or perhaps odder- an 'issues' film that's not too busy beating you over the head with the issue to be both clever and amusing. Structurally, Lord of War reminded me a lot of Goodfellas- the narrator, Yuri Orlov, gives a voice-over as he takes us through his history as a gunrunner from his youth to the ...

I know it shouldn't matter, but it's funny how certain auteur directors can be crippled or advantaged when they try to make a film against type. For example, when David Lynch made The Straight Story, it was so completely normal, so the opposite of his usually dense and incomprehensible plotlines, that is seemed positively bizarre. David Cronenberg, director of such classic mind-bending films as ...

There's really two Serenitys, and I'm afraid I can only review one of them. The first Serenity is what you would see if you had never watched the show, didn't know there was a show, didn't care about these characters. If this is you, I went with several friends who saw this film and said they enjoyed it. Go see*. The second Serenity, the one I saw, is what you'd see if already watched the show, e ...

I think the theme of Crash is twofold: If you're racist, you're a bit of a dick. Everyone is racist. This message is played out repeatedly (indeed, the whole affair seems to occur in some kind of netherverse in which one's race is the only permitted topic of conversation) as the film covers 36 hours in the lives of seven (possibly more, it's kind of hard to tell) families as their lives interwe ...

Unleashed is an odd film, and one I quite liked. It's sort of a strange cross between Rumble in the Bronx and Awakenings...set entirely in Glasgow. I went in knowing absolutely nothing about it, so perhaps you might want to, as well. It's obviously being sold as a martial arts film, and indeed it does contain at least three scenes of fantastically choreographed martial arts, the final climactic s ...

Every year, 30,000 people are reported missing in Australia. 90% of them are found within one month. The other 10% are never found at all. So reads the opening screed of Wolf Creek, a frightening and sometimes gruelling cross between Crocodile Dundee and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This immediately raises a few eyebrows. Surely that's like....82 people a day? Even discounting the folks who sho ...

Like many, I was initally extremely resistant when I heard that the new War of the Worlds movie was going to be set in contemporary America. This was mainly because no-one's ever made a decent version of the original story, set in Victorian england. I can see it so vividly in my head when I read it, I really wish someone would get as excited about it as I am and make a proper movie. The architectu ...

The Descent will scare the shit out of you. Let's get that straight right off the bat. I jumped out of my seat at least three times, probably a lot more. The director definitely sat down and said, first and foremost, before anything else, let's give people a few good frights. It's some scary stuff. (You can always tell a good scary film when you're walking home from the cinema in the dark and you ...

In the 1920's, Japanese novelist Takeda Rintaro wrote a short story about a young woman which was far more successful than he'd bargained for. Immediately after its publication, hundreds of people contacted him, demanding that he write another story. She seemed so real to them that they needed to know what happened to her "next". I could kind of symapthize with them all coming out of Maria Full ...

"It's Memento meets Fight Club!" the posters proudly announce at every possible oportunity. And they're not half wrong. In terms of being a murder-mystery in reverse with a man who refuses to remember the details, it's very much like Memento. And in terms of being the story of an insomniac who slowly figures out he's lost his mind, it's also a lot like Fight Club. However, while it is a decent and ...

Kung Fu Hustle is just a joy. I can't remember a single moment in the entire film in which I wasn't grinning like a loon. This is kind of odd for Kung Fu movies. Having watched, oh, I don't know, a hundred-odd Jackie Chan films, the formula seems to be: Fight scene, 20 minutes of "wacky" (Lord, preserve us from wackiness) comedy and some strained plotting, another fight scene, rinse and repeat. ...

The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is great. That is to say, the radio play, the novel, and the TV series are great. The film is mediocre. Maybe this opinion is just a product of my own encyclopedic knowledge of Hitch-hiker's (when I was fourteen I read the first four books in one day), and I was simply judging the film from my own preconcieved notions of how the film 'should' be. Certainly ...

The interesting, or I should say one of the many interesting things about Batman is that he is the most re-interpreted, cross-media renditions of a contemporary character. People tend to think of him as a 'comic book character', but that ceased to be true a long time ago. It's true that there are thousands of comics out there, but when you pile on the live-action TV show, the four animated series, ...

The script sucks. That doesn't mean you can't eke some enjoyment out of the film. It just means that not only is the dialogue clunky, the scenes don't flow. The scenes exist purely to teletype (in bold) the plot points, as the story struggles to weave all the pieces together before the end of the film- you can almost audibly hear the 'revelations' clicking into place. "This scene exists to expl ...

One of the interesting things about Sin City is that when I think back on the film, I see the comic strip in my mind, not the live action. This is kind of rare. Can anyone now read The Lord of the Rings and not visualize Gandalf as played by Ian McKellen? Let's face it: Comic-to-Film adaptations suck. They suck because Hollywood gets in there with their fucking retarded fingers and starts mess ...

The worst thing a sequel can do, in my opinion, is make the original film worse. If a sequel sucks, fine. They usually do. But if it retroactively goes back in time and skull-fucks the source material it derives from, then it really pisses me off. The worst (that is to say, most glaring) example I can think of this is Alien 3. Aliens is the greatest sci-fi actioner ever made. Like all great ac ...

Sideways joins American Beauty as a quiet, bleak comedy that came out of nowhere and surprised a lot of my friends with its quality. Said friends subsequently recommended it quite highly, only for me to discover that, while it is amiable enough (and certainly very funny in places), it certainly isn?t the sort of film which watching on video would reduce one iota (it might improve it, given that yo ...

First things first: I loved this movie, and came out with a really big grin on, just as I did coming out of Rushmore and The Royal Tenembaums, the directors previous two films, with which this film shares the same kind of deadpan, laconic humour, in which very little is laugh out loud funny, but there's an almost constant level of quiet bemusement. I found The Life Aquatic to be superior to both t ...

I?ve always been a big fan of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. I remember quite distinctly going to see The City of Lost Children, having heard absolument rien about it, and being taken by utter surprise. I think the thing that impressed me most was that he used cutting edge special effects not for their own sake, but to give the audience a new perspective on the story. While he stumbled seriously with the exe ...