"Nothing but the rain"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Screw you @BBCNews you showed a picture of Godzilla on your website BEFORE I’ve seen the film. Been trying to avoid it.
— Ian Parish (@iparish) May 16, 2014
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.
I rated this film as 4/10 on IMDB. See my ratings guide here. There were parts of this film that were funny and others where the buddy-buddy thing was well written but the overall plot was terrible. This film lived nowhere near reality. It was a gore fest for the Call Of Duty generation. Plenty of illegal killing and two dimensional characters. At the exact point where I thought “Oh dear, please don’t let them have sex”, they had sex. The epilogue was comical.
An irritatingly poor film that had promise at times. Not worth paying for.
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.
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.