Archive for the 'Reviews' Category

Even though we were on the second row and one seat from the left of the auditorium this was still a fantastic movie. As always it has a superb, gritty, frantic feel about it. There’s always one stand out hand-to-hand fight in every Bourne film and this one is no exception. The fight choreography is exceptional, I think I forgot to breathe for the entire duration. I agree with Michael Heilemann’s comments though that it seems all CIA hitman have to be male models with man-bags.

The final scene nicely echoes back to the opening scene of the first film with Bourne once again floating in the water. Plus, for once it was a blockbuster that wasn’t blatantly fishing for a sequel at the end of the film.

• Very surreal scenes in the “locker”, a lot more so than I was expecting
• Faultless CGI, as you would expect from ILM
• Keira’s hair seems to change every other scene
• Keith Richard’s cameo is entertaining and not overly gratuitous
• Initially the plot is a bit all over the shop but it comes together in the end
• Good usage of Sea Turtles
• Chow Yun-Fat is nicely menacing as the pirate king from Singapore
• You get to see Bill Nighy minus CGI!
• So Jack really is mad…

• Slightly too many bad-guys.
• An even better Bruce Campbell cameo than the first two films. His French accent had Kerry in stitches.
• The plot isn’t as smooth as the first two, it was like they were trying to cram loads of “cool stuff” into the last one in the trilogy.
• Excellent sandman “sand” CGI.
• Emo spiderman!

Danny Boyle’s latest film is hugely influenced by old skool sci-fi like 2001 and Alien. Lots of slow graceful special effects shots, very reminiscent of the ballet-like docking scenes of 2001. Mixed with the claustrophobia and utility of the internal shots of the spacecraft. It has a cast of relative unknowns apart from Cillian Murphy who interestingly isn’t initially portrayed as the lead. I’d recommend seeing it at a cinema as the “solar” special effects are awesome on the big screen.

• Aranovsky’s latest is his usual bizzare mix of “what the f*ck” and amazing visuals.
• Weiz/Jackman are both good.
• Jackman crying is sad.
• Awesome space visuals especially inside a Nebula.
• Another Mayan film?
• Remember, nobody expects the Spanish inquisition…

Well, this was a total snooze fest. I was expecting another noir-ish cop thriller like L.A. Confidential or maybe The Untouchables. But this is just a very stylish mess. The plot is hardly even attempted to be explained and it just meanders between Scarlett looking teary to Josh looking confused. The first film for a while where I was actually mildly bored.

Jason Statham (The Transporter) is the bus from Speed. He is double-crossed by his gangster boss and injected with a synthetic Chinese drug. If his heart rate slows below a certain rate he dies. Great! As this means the film doesn’t damn stop for the next hour and a bit. Chuck in some hilarious David Fincher style camera zooms and on screen explanation, a pumping sound track and you can’t go wrong.

Just watched Running Scared and I have to say, I was pretty impressed! It’s another of these gritty movies that deals with the low-level mob dudes that do all the real dirty work. Joey Gazelle (Paul Walker, the guy from 2 fast 2 furious) is the mob guy who “disposes” of guns when some shit has gone down. Except he doesn’t dispose of them, he stashes them in his basement… Pretty dumb huh? As you’d expect, this leads to shenanigans and the film follows the next 18 hours of his life as he tries to put everything right. It’s style is very similar to NARC, Training Day and Four Brothers. It is pretty violent and has a particulary twisted moment in the middle which is very un-settling. Has an ace gun fight at the end and even has the bad guy from Hell Boy in it! Oh yeah and there’s a twist…

Last night Kerry and I went to see Jim Henson’s Puppet Improv at the Fringe. It was great! Now, this wasn’t the muppets, as that is a specific off-shoot of the Jim Henson company, this was just a bunch of the Jim Henson trained performers with more of the ‘generic’ puppets. Animals, aliens, cartoony humans and such. The stage was set up in such a way that the performers just did their stuff out in the middle of the stage with the puppets above them. There were various large screens in the auditorium which showed the feed from a fixed camera set looking at the stage, but at the level of the puppets. So you could watch the screens and see the kind of view you get on Sesame Street or watch the stage and see how the performers make the puppets do what they do.

With it being an improv show there was a lot of audience partipiation which centered around filthy suggestions and topic which usually got a response of “did that yesterday” and “had that already” from the compére. My favourite sketch was when the audience had to suggest four letter words. Then the assembled puppets had to get from word A to word B by just changing one later at a time in a normal conversation. Needless to say, they got stuck pretty quickly as we chose ridiculously hard words, but that just added to the comedy as the pupppets started sniping at each other. In the end they did manage it but had to resort to a few spanish words and comedy words like “mooo” and “owww”. An excellent show, worth the money, definitely recommended.

Saw this with Kerry and Jed yesterday afternoon after a cracking ‘Hangover Cure’ breakfast at Double Dutch. This being the second in the trilogy it was always going to be the film stuck in the middle. This is slightly noticeable in the film as the sheer amount of quests and sub-quests they’ve managed to cram in to speed the story along is a bit too much. But, put all of that aside and it’s still an awesomely fun movie. Johnny is still up to his usual tricks and gets his character fleshed out a bit more, Orlando is watchable but as dull as a plank and Keira does her usual hot and feisty pirate wench stuff. Jack Davenport makes a good return as a washed up, bitter (ex) Commodore Norrington. Bill Nighy and the CGI team are excellent as Davy Jones, his tentacles and the rest of his crew were some of the best CGI I’ve seen. Likewise for the Kraken, Jones’ pet sea monster that pulls ships down to the Big Black. I would have liked more naval type engagements and less running around with comedy “natives” and sharp sticks, but hey, this isn’t Master & Commander. Throw in a creepy voodoo fortune teller (straight out of Monkey Island), all the English extras from the first film, an evil scheming Empire East India Company and you’re on to a winner. By the time it got near the end I’d forgotten it was a cliff hanger and so was surprised when it suddenly ended! I think that’s a good sign.