Tag: film

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Birdman

Right, before I type more I need to collect my cup of tea from the kitchen. Perhaps you can look at this tweet:

So, this is where I tell you what I thought of the film. I really liked it. I’m not sure what the fuck I watched but I thought it was great. I’m going to write this before I go and investigate the film and figure out what happened so that you get a more “raw” review.

I liked the story line. It was quite brilliant casting as Michael Keaton was my first movie Batman and I pretty much still think of him as such. He acted brilliantly. The style of filming with the camera walking around the theatre was great. I loved the sound track although I would say that jazz drumming is not my thing it really added to the film, it made it more simple than a different type of score would have.

The filming or post production was really clever as they removed the camera from the reflections in the mirrors. This made it feel more ghostly as the camera moved around. All the cast were great and I think their performances really made the film.

This whole thing was a great experience. Well worth seeing.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOLLOW

I’m not sure if the writer, Raymond Carver, is meant to be fictional or actually existed. It’s something I’m going to look up.

I thought the film caught the paranoia of stage actors brilliantly. Along with their terrible egos. Now, I don’t really know any stage actors, I’m just extrapolating from my days treading the boards.

I’m not sure if the whole telekinesis thing is meant to be real or just a figment of his imagination. I hope it’s real, but then, TK doesn’t really exist!

I’m not sure what the last scene meant although I know what it was.

I am now going to go and read a little about this film. It’s unlikely I’ll post that stuff here. Go read it yourself.

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The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1

Just got back from seeing this film. Let’s call it Mockingjay because the full title is too long. As ever I tweeted about this here:

It was ok. In all honesty I got bored pretty much from the beginning. I haven’t read the books and am quite unlikely to. There seems to be a lot of quite successful YAL out there. It doesn’t need my help. Anyway, dystopian futures were done better in the old days. Logan’s Run anyone?

The film livened up towards the end and actually almost became exciting at one point. This series of films have really left me cold.

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The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies

So, I went to see this film at the IMAX cinema at Bluewater last night. I have written about the previous films Part 1 and Part 2 if you click on the links. So, it would turn out that I haven’t written about the first film. That means I have no idea when or where I saw that film. Maybe (seeing it was released at the end of 2012) I didn’t get to see it at the cinema as that was a disaster year for me. I may have seen it at the cinema but not written about it in this particular forum. I just don’t know. I can recall listening to podcasts talk about High Frame Rate from the distant past. Sorry, let’s move on.

This, latest and last, part of the film series was OK. I think my rating of OK just reflects the fact that over the last 15 years we have seen plenty of orc armies fighting the elves and hobbits helping out. The Lord of the Rings films had the element of awesomeness as that sort of thing just hadn’t been seen on the big screen before. For this film to be brilliant I needed to see something new. Overall, this film ended the series perfectly well.

There was quite a bit of wistful staring straight into the camera. The film could have been a lot shorter without all that stuff.

As a hint to the peoples of Middle Earth, if you think you’ve killed a big monster, cut the head off or stab the thing through the heart again. It makes simple battle sense.

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The Imitation Game

I went to see The Imitation Game at the Cineworld cinema in Rochester, except the cinema is in Strood and not Rochester. It actually located at the intersection of four main transports links through Kent! It’s almost as if these were ley lines [made-up shit] that indicate that the confluence of these lines are important!

cinema ley lines

In this map you can see that the numbers correspond to the numbers below, like it was planned!
1) M2 Medway Bridge. Two parts. Four lanes each way. Interesting construction.
2) High Speed Rail Link, Paris to London, River Medway Bridge.
3) Strood Railway line, I’m not sure where it goes, I’ve never used it!
4) The River Medway. Used to be used lots. Not so much now. The bricks that made parts of Buckingham Palace were crafted at Burham Brick Works and then transported along this river, see here for more information.

Anyway, I digress. I should mention the film. As ever I rated this on IMDB and I broke my rules which can be viewed here.

I shall explain a little. But first, The Prologue . . . .
[bit of a tribute to a classic television series there]
The Film.

I already knew quite a bit about Alan Turing, his work during the second world war, his death and his work on computers and nature. He was a titan of modern mathematics. It was such a shame that he committed suicide at 41 years old.

I liked this film. It was filled with humour. You couldn’t help but like Alan Turing, which was odd because he pisses off everyone in the film. The cinema was reasonably full and I hope that everyone there realises just how much he contributed to our society and the world as a whole. The guy was stupendous. There were some obvious points of “dramatisation” and I am willing to forgives these. I guess when you make a film you have 120 minutes at most to get across certain stories and sometimes you have to compress what would really happen. Some parts felt a little clunky but it didn’t matter too much. This film is well worth seeing.

I rated this film a 9. This doesn’t fit into my rating scheme. This film is worth more than just its value as a film. It shows how mathematics and mathematicians change the world. Everything out there is influenced by our use of mathematics. It’s such a shame that mathematical ignorance is admired and boasted about in this country. “I can’t do maths” or “I was never any good at maths” are common things that people I meet say. What sort of society boasts of being innumerate?

This film highlights what our country did to homosexuals over the time it was deemed illegal by our society. We see this treatment and we should be rightly horrified. Yet, this treatment and far WORSE is going on in our world today. There are plenty of countries where homosexuality is illegal. I get angry when I think about this and the ignorance of people who run these countries. My solution? Education. Society and everyone needs to be educated to at least secondary level. The problem with that? An educated society tends to be a more liberal society, a less religious society. This causes control issues for leaders and governments. Notice how bigoted and mostly religious countries refuse to educate their populations. Currently the main offenders of religious leaders happen to be Muslim in our current time, however, Christianity and other religions have been equally guilty of repressing their populations in the past. All governments should be secular, giving their populations the choice of religion [or not].

A good education and free access to ANY books leads to equal rights for all.

Education leads to a wealthier country, greater life expectancy, lower population growth, lower fertility, greater stabilisation, higher GDP. Nothing in this list is bad. It just also happens to lead to people wanting more say in the rules that govern them.

Cracking the enigma code was kept secret for over 50 years as explain by the film. I already knew this. In fact we [the UK] didn’t tell anyone because there were plenty of governments still using the enigma machine for years after the second world war and we just quietly listened over all that time. Remarkable.

I thoroughly suggest that you read anything you can find about breaking the enigma code and Bletchley Park. It is a fascinating story.

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Interstellar

I went to see Interstellar on Friday at the IMAX theatre in the Bluewater shopping complex. As with all my reviews you might want to check out how my ratings system works. I rated this film 10/10 on the IMDB.

I didn’t know a great deal about this film before I went. I loved it. I would go to the cinema to see it again and I would watch it again at home. Therefore, it gets 10 on my rating system.

I liked the story, I loved the visuals and I liked the suspense. Overall the film made me feel great and I still have parts of it whirling around in my head. After seeing a film with sciency stuff I read the reviews of people who really understand this stuff and having read them I have the following to say:

[there now follow SPOILERS]

Thinking about the film and some of the criticisms given by science buffs I have to agree with them. There are some glaring errors in science. These I can forgive.

The dialogue in some places was terrible. It was clunky and poorly written. This I can forgive.

The politics of the future where the world’s food production and economy has gone to shit and yet the government can fund a huge NASA budget AND headquarter them in a mountain is utter bullshit but conspiracy twats will love it. I’m not sure this is forgivable.

Most of the motivations of the characters were terrible. This is forgivable.

Cooper explains to the high school teacher that not only is he a NASA pilot but he is also an engineer. Just in case we doubted his cleverness.

The exposition of certain scientific principles to the main character who is a NASA pilot and Engineer is ridiculous. It’s there to help stupid people understand how parts of the film work but it won’t help them because they would accept anything if they don’t get wormholes.

GRAVITATIONAL SPAGHETTIFICATION

This film could be 11/10. The script could have been improved by being good. I can forgive the sciency problems. It’s ok to bend science to fit your film. It’s not ok to have a bad script. I still loved this film. The overall thing just left me amazed.

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Akira

A few days ago I went to see the film “AKIRA” at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank. It was part of a Sci-Fi series of films they are showing. I have already rated it on IMDB because it is of my favourite films.

By the pure definition of my IMDB rating system Akira gets 10. This was the first time I have seen the film in a cinema but I have purchased it in many formats, VHS, DVD and Blu-Ray. I have the books. It is a film I have watched many times.

I think I first saw this film in around 1990 or 1991 or so. I remember John had a copy and we must have watched it one evening. I was instantly fascinated. It was a cartoon, hand drawn, but it was violent, it was futuristic, it had biker gangs, it had teenage angst, it looked bloody brilliant and I didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. Until that point cartoons had always been childish, happy, Disney and Looney Tunes. They left me nostalgic for my childhood and growing up. Cartoons used to be innocent, but incidentally full of violence. Akira changed all that. It, whatever it meant, was DIFFERENT.

I went and bought it on VHS.

Akira – the story of a post world war Tokyo where the government struggles to maintain power, religious sects rebel, biker gangs fight each other, the military experiments on telekinesis subjects and it all goes to shit-town. Who is Akira?

Every time I watch this film I see new things. I notice new stories. I am amazed by the ending. There aren’t many films that do this. I thoroughly recommend watching this but be prepared to be shocked and freaked out.

My next main memory of the film was living at Winchendon Road with the Fulham Five. Rich and I must have watched Akira at some point, it’s always worth seeing once every few years. This ANIME thing was rare, different, exciting and “underground”. Rich had read the story when it was released in magazines and we quite likely spent a while discussing the film, while wearing sunglasses in a dark room and with Megadeth playing. So, we found other Manga films, most notably

Urotsukidoji

It is at this point that you realise that Anime and Manga is different. It is great stuff but is quite likely to mess your head up a bit. None is the sort of film to show your parents.

Here’s a problem: Akira was my first Anime film. Akira is probably one of the best Anime films. Therefore, most films I see after that always fall short. I love the Japanese animation films. They still excite me and simultaneously make me question everything and I struggle to understand what it happening quite often.

A good Anime film leaves you stunned at the action and amazed by the story.

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Fury

Last night I went to see Fury. It’s a film about a tank crew in the Second World War and their movement through Germany in the last few months of the war. As a film it was OK. I rated it an 8 on IMDB, as ever, see this page concerning my ratings. [check out the bottom of this communication but avoid the spoilers]

So, overall this film was an acceptable piece of Hollywood film-making. I probably will watch it again one day, not because I seek it out, but because it is on TV and I don’t change the channel.

The film seemed realistic enough [although I have never been in a tank, nor war] and I liked the way they tried to portray the cramped conditions inside the tank. This was a bit like Das Boot in that sense. As in all war films there was lots of death and strange behaviour because, let’s face it war is fucking weird.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOLLOW

I didn’t like that the young boy, whose progress we follow [apart from the first ten minutes] survived. I guess someone had to survive to tell the story. I have no idea as yet if this was based on any real story, I doubt it as it never said so. I don’t like happy endings, I prefer more real endings. When the boy was discovered underneath the tank I am sure an SS member would have shot him there and then. I realise that the SS member was young and that he was in shock too but given their fanaticism he would have alerted the rest of his troop, especially given the amount of dead they had. The Americans had murdered plenty of Germans earlier in the film and I am sure they would have killed the Nazi scum, as the Brad Pitt character already did at the beginning of the film.

I didn’t really understand the breakfast scene in the middle of the film. Or rather I did understand it but it told me nothing new. It showed that Brad Pitt was a caring leader [who knows the bible] as well as being tough, that he had “morals” [he quotes the bible] and that this crew respected him. Problem is that they didn’t do as he told them. They flouted the boundaries he set down much like naughty children. Was this scene purely for the “kid” to have sex? And then to see his love destroyed and killed by a mortar shell? I don’t know. This scene felt most like the French plantation scene in Apocalypse Now! and that was cut from the cinema release. I guess this twenty minutes would have made Fury too short had it been removed. It served nothing. Added nothing. Told me nothing. Pointless.

 

 

 

 

Addendum:

I’ve changed my rating to a 6/10 after writing this review. I clearly didn’t like certain aspects of it.

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Gone Girl

Gone Girl. In all honesty I haven’t decided whether I liked it or not. Last night I rated it as a 6 on IMDB.

Please remember to see my previous explanations of how my IMDB scoring system works.

Was this film a comment on the rabid invasiveness of the media upon private lives? Was this film a comment on sociopaths? Was this film a comment on poor little rich girl who liked a bit of rough to get back at her parents?

POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOLLOW

(I haven’t worked out what I’m going to write yet and although I could come back and edit that header I won’t, mostly what you see is the train of consciousness of me)

Overall, this film was neither of those. I have no interest in reading the book, although I probably wouldn’t have read it before seeing the film. I think we end up coming back to the main crux of the problem. After a while neither of the main characters were likeable. The wife was appalling and the husband annoyed me. To make a film effective you need to create characters that people can empathise with. In this film there is the poor little rich girl with a trust fund who has degrees from Harvard and the writer for a men’s magazine who has a smooth patter approaching someone at a party. They live in a big house in the middle of shit-ville. They have a cat. He owns a bar.

Would this film be made if the main characters were scum bags living in a trailer park? Why doesn’t film (or TV) show us real life with normal characters? Where are the films that represent normality. People who have lost their homes or struggle to make ends meet. People who love and laugh and cry. People who form MOST of our society. People who have friends and family and tragedy but humility? Soap Operas do not count. Look at what happens in soap operas. Look at the tragedies that befall a single person. Look at the terror and strife that happens to all. Where are the happy and comfortable couples? Television and cinema thrives on scandal.

My friend would tell me these films exist but I chose not to see them. I would argue they don’t show them outside of London art-house cinemas. I would also argue that for the majority of the time I see films that are clearly escapism. I see sci-fi and trash action movies. I don’t often see humdrum films. Maybe I should.

Well, there you go. It turns out I didn’t like the film.

Gone Girl was written by a writer about a clever writer who had a mum who wrote children’s books. The husband character was a writer. Say no more.

 

Added extra [06:24]

WTF was up with the Doogie Howser ex boyfriend guy? Who was he? What kind of relationship was it he had with the wife? ANOTHER rich spoilt brat enjoying life. There’s about 5 minutes of him in the film but was he controlling or was the wife? WTF? How? Who? Where? Actually, I’m glad there wasn’t any more of him in the film, it was over two hours long anyway.

Again I arrive at the conclusion that rich people suck. They mostly don’t pay taxes, don’t give a shit about those who work hard and they aren’t likeable. Stop making films about privileged twats.

Right, time for me to calm down and to go and do some work for the day.

Please let me know if you watch this film and actually like any of the main characters. I’ll let you like the police investigation and the sister, these seemed to be the only two main people who had any decent morals, approach to life.

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The Equalizer [sic]

I have just got in from watching The Equaliser. There are probably going to be spoilers in here so if you think you might watch it and yet don’t want to know any more than the trailer tells you then feel free to pop back another time.

Overall I rated this film a 6. As with all my ratings you need to refer to this previous communication.

I enjoyed this film. It’s hard not to like a film that opens with warnings of graphic violence on the ratings certificate. I often remember a friend saying

It’s good to see a proper 18 film now and then

this may have been in reference to Ong Bak.

The Equaliser:
A good action movie. The opening was pretty good and set the mood. I liked the slow pace of it. The problem was that the initial killing sequence was over the top and from there the only place to go was to make it more “involved” and more elaborate deaths.

I kept trying to remember the TV series I watched with my dad. I’ve a feeling there were adverts so it may have been on ITV (shock, horror). Edward Woodward played a man with a mysterious past who helped people in trouble. He would do so in a menacing way and with lots of guns, did he have a secret wardrobe full of weapons? I’m pretty sure that he was rather low-key and sinister in that English way.

In this film version there wasn’t any real subtlety. The first killing was five men brutally executed after a slight altercation about nearly $10,000. Oh, and it turns out these people were key players in the Russian mob. After that the Equaliser can only go on and root out all evil that plagues modern Boston and Russia.

There wasn’t a need to make this a nasty, violent film. It would have been better if the first story in this inevitable franchise was a low key story of a man helping those in his neighbourhood. It could have been a slow-burner of a film and then about three into the series we could have had the decimation of all the mobs running the East Coast.

This film, while enjoyable, missed the point of the Equaliser and I think they also missed a trick. It could have been better.

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Before I Go To Sleep

This film was one of the very few “normal” films I have seen over the last while. I think by that I mean it wasn’t an action movie or science fiction. Those are probably my favourite type of film to see as they don’t require emotions or thought. They can just be watched and enjoyed.

I liked this film and I thought it was quite good. I rated it a 6 on IMDB, mostly because although I thought it was good a deserves an 8, I am unlikely to see it again, which means it is relegated into the “good but Parish won’t watch it again” category.

I liked the idea of this film. Although it would appear than someone paid Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman on a BOGOF deal. This is the second film of recent time when they have both played the leads, the other was The Railway Man. The story is a woman wakes every day unable to remember anything about her past. Each day she has to discover who she is and how she lives. Over time she uncovers what caused the injuries that made her like this.

I won’t say any more than that. I enjoyed watching it and the suspense it created. I liked the little “frights” the director added but gradually I am learning to calm my emotions to a Zen like status when I watch these films to remove the roller coaster. Overall, this was worth the watch and is probably far better than the trailer for some shock-horror-film where the evil thing is an ugly doll [I thought we had done all that with Chucky!].

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Lucy

I’m writing while the film is fresh in my head. I’ve got home, made a cuppa and am thinking about messing around on my new project DBL-MF. That can wait a short while as I give you my verdict on the latest Luc Besson film: Lucy.

It was shit.

It started well and I was quite excited at the prospect of a good film. The first twenty minutes or so were pretty good. They set the scene. Taipei looked pretty good and the baddies were Chinese, or rather Taiwanese, and I’m happy to let the island self-govern. There were some very odd cut-scenes and I’m pretty sure they were just there to make the film a little longer, they must have run out of film that was any useable. I was going to say “good” instead of useable but there wasn’t anything good and this film had Scarlett Johansson in it.

Girl gets duped. Girl gets super powers but a short while to live. Girl kicks ass.

This, on the face of it is a pretty good synopsis and could be made into a much better film. There was a ton of science mumbo jumbo throughout the film it made it almost unwatchable. I very nearly walked out, but it had Scarlett in it. Anyone else and this film would have made a distinct 2/10 on IMDB instead of the 4/10 I gave it.

Why, oh why, does the myth that we only use 10% of our brains keep reappearing in the popular media? Isn’t enough that we exist without belittling our capabilities! Fuck you wankers. This film could have been made without all that shit in it. Girl gets drugged, gains super powers, no explanation needed. See, it works. If this myth had been mentioned once I could have coped but the whole premise was what would happen when Lucy reaches 100%. Morgan Freeman quite clearly makes the point that we are just supposing about what might happen. just as well as this was a crock of shit.

Cut to more pre-made low definition scenes of animals mating.

Then we have the same issue I had with Transcendence. Why, when we make our brains really powerful (in films) does this allow us to manipulate everything around us? Why is telekinesis suddenly OK? I’m happy that we might become very intelligent, and we might even be able to feel more using our existing senses but control electromagnetism and material objects, more wankish writing. If we had ignored any brain stuff and just had girl gets drugged and then has super-powers this film would have still worked. In fact, it would have worked a whole lot better.

Finally, I’d thought I’d summarise:

I didn’t like it

Also, just in case you think I’ve been drinking, I haven’t. I’m just writing this within an hour of leaving the cinema and normally I write these the next day. This is the teacher equivalent of having a crap lesson and then writing reports on the kids you’ve just taught. It’s all deserved.

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Expendables 3

I rated this film a 6 on IMDB. See this page about my scoring system.

I went to see this film expecting something that I knew would be a terrible film but great fun at the same time. That is what I got.

It’s an obvious adventure with some laughs and great cameos. Worth a watch but don’t expect to be intellectually challenged.

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Guardians Of The Galaxy

Awesome.

 

I loved this film. It had a perfect mix of beautiful, funny, space-stuff, action, characters and trees. I rated this film 10 on IMDB, however, see my ratings guide. I cant’ wait to see it again and also watch it with my family.

After the first few minutes I was worried that the rest of the film was going to disappoint me as the space scenes looked gorgeous. I was concerned that the quality was going to drop over the rest of the film. It didn’t.

 

 

 

 

There’s one big thing that annoyed me. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the film rather than censorship. The character played by Peter Serafinowicz is meant to use the word “asshole”. However, for what I can only consider reasons of censorship he says “A-hole”. It just didn’t fit with the rest of the film, especially when you consider the word “shit” was used a few times. What is it about “ass” or “arse” that can’t be said when the word “shit” is used anyway? It bugged me when it was first said and then the second time “A-hole” was used I just found it very strange. What a strange world we live in.

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Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes

This was a much better film that Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes which I watched at the weekend and was just not fussed by it. I went to see “Dawn” last night because it was the only thing on at the cinema worth watching and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to spend the time going. It was only after I looked at the IMDB Critics’ Metascore that I decided I would see the film because it had scored 79, which is pretty good.

The animation was stunning. The acting was stunning. I believe ape culture was reproduced accurately. I thought the whole film was a good piece. It showed just what assholes apes and people can be, this film could be attached to any of the trouble spots around the planet at the moment and used as an allegory. The film is worth watching.

This film is really about two groups who know little of each other and how they handle the first encounter. All of the behaviour is brilliantly human. It quickly descends into violence. Just look at human history and what we have done to each other over the years. Overall this is a sad film commenting on how crap humans treat each other.

SPOILERS
I had a couple of issues with certain points of the film. I was happy to accept intelligent apes, that’s the main premise. I wasn’t particularly happy with three people being able to get an hydro-electric dam working again after 10 years of non-service. That seemed rather unlikely to me, but it was a minor thing.

I was also rather unsure of Caesar’s final conversation with the man. I felt that Caesar wouldn’t have accepted that war was an inevitable part of the future. It didn’t quite fit with the rest of the film. It was exactly at the point that the two characters needed to stand up and be leaders and organise peace. Two cultures can exists next to each other but there has to be movement and discussion. There is always a need for negotiation. As an example I give you the fact that all the time the IRA were bombing the shit out of the UK in the 1980s the government [we do not negotiate with terrorists] were secretly negotiating with the IRA. It is the only way to make progress, to allow differing cultures to live together. Forgiveness needs to be learnt by all to allow healing and future cooperation.

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Transformers: Age Of Extinction

I went to see this at the cinema last night. It was the first time I had seen a film in about two months due to commitments elsewhere. Over at IMDB I rated this film a 4/10. Go to this page to see what that means.

Overall, I just got fed up with this film. I was quite happy with the first hour of the film. It was a Michael Bay film and so I wasn’t expecting much. I’m not a massive Transformers fan and I wasn’t excited about this film but it was something to see. This film was 165 minutes long and after the first 60 I felt every minute of the remaining CGI fest. This film could have been 2 hours long and much better for it. It suffered from what Phil Plait calls “too-much-stuffism“.

The characters were two dimensional. The story line was fantastical. The acting was poor. Kelsey Grammer was pretty good but Stanley Tucci was absolutely over the top and brilliant he was the only high point of the film apart from a gratuitous top-of-the-legs-shot of Nicola Peltz. This isn’t really a film I’d show my children eventually as once you’ve seen one battle between Transformers you have pretty much seen them all, there wasn’t anything that stood out as new or different.

While I was writing this I had a lovely idea of a sentence to end this communication.

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Rio 2

This was a special film because it was #1’s first cinema trip. However, as a film, it was bad. There wasn’t really a decent story, or rather there was and it was just handled poorly. There were random songs all over the place. There was a football section (yawn). All in all it was pretty poor. The animation was pretty good but that isn’t enough to save a film, there needs to be a story. Even #1 got bored and he’ll watch any kind of rubbish.

I rated this film a 4 on IMDB. This score when standardised is really a 2 but IMDB don’t allow zero stars. See this communication here for more guidance on my IMDB ratings.

One amusing observation was that the cinema was full of grandparents looking after their grandchildren because it was half term and, I guess, parents were at work. One old dear in front of me was eating her sandwiches, which is better than all the crap they serve in the foyer. As my grandma used to say (she was an avid cinema goer, but didn’t like it when they swore):

You pay to watch a film, not eat your lunch.

She was a wise old lass.

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The Two Faces Of January

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched a thriller at the cinema. Recently I’ve been seeing action movies mostly because they are the only type of films around.

I enjoyed this film although I did find that my most usual problem with films starting the creep in half way through. I really struggle with films where I don’t like any of the characters. Although I did not actively dislike the characters in this film I did find them hard to like by the end of the film. The plot was pretty good although I have one problem explained below [spoiler alert].

This film looks as though it was shot on location in Athens, Crete and Istanbul. It was set in the sixties and looked nice. The Cretan countryside looks otherworldly. It has been added to the list of places I would like to see sometime.

I rated this film a 6 on IMDB. See my ratings guide here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Issue [spoiler]

After the accidental death of the private investigator the two main characters decide to leave the hotel straight away. They don’t check out and leave in the late evening with some clothes packed in suitcases. Firstly the woman would have had much more than the single suitcase and she wasn’t told why they were leaving. The big issue is that by leaving without checking out they didn’t have their passports. If they had actually thought for a moment, they would have hidden the body, placed a do not disturb sign on the PI door and then checked out in the morning collecting their passports. The body wouldn’t have been discovered for almost half a day and there would have been no evidence connecting them all [as long as they cleared the photos in the PI room]. Poor situation planning I fear although the film would have been a lot shorter.

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Godzilla

I try not to watch the trailers for movies I really want to see. Yes, I probably see the first trailer and then after that I don’t want to know any more information about the film. After seeing the first trailer for Godzilla I was curious but not too worried about it as there were aspects to the trailer that didn’t seem to make sense to me. The second trailer I saw (without realising it was for Godzilla) made me really want to see the film. I try to ignore all information about films before seeing them. Therefore I was really annoyed with BBC News for having a full picture of Godzilla on the front page of their entertainment section the day I am going to see the film. My tweet:

I went to see this film in 3D IMAX at Bluewater. Normally I don’t watch 3D, I don’t think it adds to the film and I can’t be bothered to pay the extra. However, IMAX 3D is pretty awesome. I was really impressed with how much I felt the 3D added. The shots were gorgeous. It was a beautiful film, the natural scenery was outstanding and some of the cinematography was just wonderful. I think the director had a thing for “dramatic smoke” and he/she used it creatively to give menace. The detail in the smoke was impressive [coming from someone who understands fluid dynamics that’s praise indeed].

I found that the 3D special shots, you know, those shots where you think “that was an odd perspective” and then you realise it was put in to make use of the 3D effect, pretty well planned and they didn’t distract from the film. A lot of the time I find that CGI is made to work fast and blurry which I don’t like, this film didn’t really have that. The pace of the CGI worked well for me, you could actually watch it without feeling that you couldn’t see it all.

Without giving anything away for this film [it would be unfair] I really enjoyed it. I though the entire thing was gorgeous. The story was pretty good and interesting. There were a couple of flaws in the plot but I can overlook those. I was even reasonably willing to accept giant fauna as real by the end of the film but I always come back to the energy requirements of such large biological creatures and it distresses me slightly. I liked the idea that one of the main storylines was pretty much incidental to the overall story.

I gave this film a 10 on IMDB because I can see myself buying it in the future and watching it in 3D on my TV. It is a film I will watch with my sons, when I feel they are old enough. I’d probably have to turn the sub-woofer down by quite a bit though, the sound at the cinema was pretty body-shaking.

I understand that the quality of this review is a little less than some previously, if I have a quality-rating. However, I really don’t want to give anything away. The final observation is that if you like comic/monster movies then you should this one as it’s damn good [try and avoid any information about it in advance including reading this! [ha ha]].

On the way home from Bluewater I got to drive a MX-5 and I will admit that it was rather good fun. If I could I’d probably get one just for messing around in. Mind you, I do have the offer of borrowing this particular MX-5 so I might have to take that up.

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Spider-Man 2

I had a bit of a Spider-Man marathon recently. On Friday evening I watched The Amazing Spider-Man on 3D Blu-Ray and I enjoyed it. I found the new actor far better than Tobey Maguire who just annoyed me. I rated this film an 8 on the understanding that I will probably watch it again (mainly with my sons). See this communication for an explanation of my rating system.

I mainly watched the first (new) film because I went to see the second film at the cinema. I, again, rated this new film an 8. I enjoyed it and this film goes to show how you make a good super-hero film.

I won’t give too much away except to say that I found it rather curious that every product within the film was made by Sony. Some people might be thinking that because Sony paid for this film it allows them to place products [it does].

I won’t go into the organ-destroying acceleration experienced by the people that Spider-Man saves by swinging and catching them, also the conservation of momentum law seems to have been forgotten. Mind you, the film is about a man who can walk up walls.

 

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Transcendence

I had expected worse. I think there are some films where the tag line needs to be:

Better than the trailer suggests

I think the best film I saw which was let down by a terrible trailer was the Road To Perdition.

Transcendence wasn’t the worst film I saw this weekend. It was a well made and glossy film and there was lots of stuff. The overall plot line was pretty good for the first half of the film and then it went bad. At lots of points I found myself thinking “what?”, “how” and “why?”. I just didn’t get it. I could write the plot flaws below, but I don’t often do spoilers. It would be best for you if you just watched The Lawnmower Man from the early 1990s.

I gave this a 4 on IMDB. See this communication for my rating system.

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