Unstoppable
Posted by Patrick Hodges
Action movies often take on many forms. Some are nothing more than visual spectacles that feature explosions galore and CGI out the wazoo, with little or no emphasis on developing the characters involved (cough Transformers cough cough); others take the time to actually explore the back stories of the characters in between gun-battles (the original Die Hard comes to mind immediately). It's an especially difficult task to have character development in a film that is blatantly there for us to get an adrenaline rush, mainly because movies like that tend to take place over very short periods of time, sometimes less than a day, so when an action film is able to find that equilibrium between story and character, it's a good thing. Unstoppable may not make the balance 50/50, but it comes fairly close.
Megamind
Posted by Patrick Hodges
Ever since Kung Fu Panda, DreamWorks has shown that even if they are not able to overtake Pixar as the best animated outfit in town, they can at least keep stride. With hits like Panda, Monsters vs. Aliens and this past spring's exemplary How to Train Your Dragon, they finally seem to have realized that the key to making great animated stories is not to pepper them with pop-culture references that will become stale within a year, but to make stories that can be retold countless times and for future generations.
It's to DreamWorks' credit that they were able to take Jack Black, a comedian I really have no taste for, and create a character for him (in Kung Fu Panda) that held his most annoying mannerisms, for the most part, in check. I had similar hopes that Megamind, which stars the voice of Will Ferrell (a comedian I truly can't stand), could do the same thing. And they ALMOST did.
Monsters
Posted by Patrick Hodges
Review submitted by David Tredler
What you think of a film sometimes (only partly of course) depends on the setting, on "how" you see it. I saw Monsters in early September, at a film festival, without any previously-seen images in my head beyond a couple of posters I saw on the Internet. I didn't exactly know what it was about, except that there were going to be aliens involved, and I certainly did not know what they would look like. I didn't know, going in, what to expect, but from what I had heard, I thought it would be a cheap but gripping feature.
Due Date – The Hangover’s Leftovers
Posted by Eoin O'Faolain
The unpredicted success of The Hangover could only mean one thing: clones. Unfortunately, the law of diminishing returns suggests that upcoming clones, including The Hangover 2 (due out next year), won’t be as funny. And The Hangover wasn’t even that good in the first place. Arriving into our cinema screens this week is the first clone, Due Date. Directed by The Hangover’s Todd Phillips, it really does feel like an exhausted comedy.
The story is a typical road journey. An odd couple - the uptight Peter Highman (Robert Downey Jr) trying to get home for the birth of his first child, and the downright bizarre effeminate wannabe actor Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis) - are placed together in an awkward situation after losing their flight to LA, and end up having to share a rental car across an entire continent, driving each other mad in the process.
We’ve seen this kind of story before, most notably in John Hughes’s likeable Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, in which Steve Martin is infuriated by the well-meaning but idiotic John Candy. But what differentiates Hughes’s film from Due Date is how relatable the characters are. Martin is uptight but relatively normal: we could all react in the way he does. Candy is a dimwit but never dangerously so. In Due Date we get a very different situation. Galifianakis, pretty much reprising his role as Alan in The Hangover, ranges for delusional to childish to mentally-disabled. In fact, like Alan, he’s more of a collection of quirks from society’s extremes as opposed to a full-bodied character. But the real problem lies in Peter. Downey relies far too much on his trademark smarm, and rather than represent the straight part of who we all are, we instead get possibly the most unlikable character of the year. In one scene he punches a child in the stomach. In another he spits in a dog’s face. He’s made so obnoxious that we ultimately couldn’t care less if he manages to witness his child’s birth or not. And neither scene is particularly funny in light of Peter’s nasty streak.
Saw 3D and Paranormal Activity 2 – Past and Present?
Posted by Patrick Hodges
In the past week, I have watched the most recent entries of two very different horror franchises, but before I get to revewing them, a brief history lesson. In 2003, director James Wan made a movie called Saw for just a little more than $1 million. It appeared at various film festivals (Sundance and Toronto) to critical acclaim before being picked up by Lionsgate Pictures. It went on to gross over $100 million worldwide, and a franchise was born. I, personally, was shocked by how much I liked it. "Intelligent horror" is almost always an oxymoron, and I just couldn't get over how cleverly written it was and delightfully twisted the imaginations of its creators were. It remains one of my favorite films of all time, and I wanted more. However, I don't think I could have accurately predicted just how much MORE I was going to get.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest – The Beach Book Trilogy Ends
Posted by Eoin O'Faolain
And so the hugely successful adaptation of the Millennium Trilogy closes this week with the US release of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. These Swedish movies have been so popular that David Fincher is already directing an English-language remake. But is it really worth it?
The final film in the trilogy follows the gothic, mildly autistic, Lisbeth Salander as she recovers from the attack of the previous film, and faces a court case that may return her to the corrupt institute that damaged her as a child. Helping her from the outside is journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who gradually uncovers a secret group responsible for “making decisions that the government were too afraid to”, who not only want to get rid of Salander but also destroy Blomkvist’s reputation. And on top off all that, the unhurtable beast Niedermann plots revenge on Salander.
There’s no doubt that this series is anymore than the equivalent of a holiday novel: Plenty of intrigue but only on a surface level. The first film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was a tired whodunnit about a deeply unsurprising case of a Nazi serial killer. The two sequels segued together better, following a sort of political conspiracy that put Salander in the centre of something bigger than anyone could suspect. But all of the films in the trilogy are deeply unspectacular. The stories are largely silly, both in plot and in execution. For example, the murderer Niedermann, who cannot feel pain of any sort, is straight out of a Bond movie. Only the Millennium films take themselves so seriously that its tone clashes with such a ridiculous figure.
Conviction
Posted by Matthew Starr
So I am a sucker for survival stories and yes I do consider Conviction a survival story. It is for Kenny Waters (Sam Rockwell) sentenced to life for a murder he didn't commit and to a lesser extent for his sister Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank) sacrificing most of her time and life to do what is necessary to set him free. Stories revolving around the wrongfully imprisoned (Shawshank Redemption and Hurriance), men tested by nature (Cast Away, Touching the Void) and of course horror films, specifically zombie films are always able to connect with me more fluidly than other narratives. So when Conviction was over and Juliette Lewis was suddenly making her way down the aisle to begin an audience Q and A it was no surprise that I felt I had just seen an interesting, moving and generally enjoyable film.
Hereafter
Posted by Matthew Starr
I caught Hereafter yesterday and had the same reaction I have had to most of Clint's films since Mystic River. It was interesting, some scenes were really well done but there was nothing exceptional about it. I say most because I thought Letters from Iwo Jima was slightly better than Clint's usual work and I did not react similarly as most people did to Million Dollar Baby.
Hereafter opens with a compelling tsunami scene that at times did look at little too digital but still captured my attention and got me hooked into the film as is all you can ask for from an opening scene. From there it slows down to the usual Clint Eastwood pace which I am fine with if I care about the characters and their plight but in his films of late I almost never do. Matt Damon plays George Lonegan, a man who can speak to the dead and at one point ran a business taking advantage of his unique gift. He had to quit because it was consuming his life and what he once considered a gift he now considers a curse as it holds him back from living a normal life.
Red
Posted by Patrick Hodges
If you have it in your head to see Red, it's probably not because you're a fan of the DC Comics graphic novel that the story is based on. It's because of the cast, plain and simple. In a business where fame and popularity is as fleeting as the proverbial wind, it's nice to see a film every now and again where a gaggle of savvy Hollywood veterans - who, from top to bottom, possess numerous Oscars and nearly two centuries of acting experience - come together to produce a truly entertaining romp that contains enough fun and whimsy to more than remind you why you love them in the first place.
Not bad, but not worth it
Posted by Matthew Starr
I saw Let Me In a little over a week ago now but just never gotten around to writing about it. When I first heard they were remaking what I consider to be one of the great horror films of the decade I thought, why? There was no way they would have improved upon the foreign version and if the reason was driven by dollars then that has been a failure as well. After two weekends, Let Me In has not even made ten million and has to be considered a flop.