Movies | the m0vie blog

Watch! The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug Trailer!

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Darren

The latest trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug has arrived on-line. Check it out below. While I’ll concede that The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was over-long and quite padded, I enjoyed it more than most. Part of that is down to Martin Freeman’s charisma, but also in the way that Jackson seems to relish the relatively lower stakes of this story. (Musical dish-cleaning sequence anyone?) I’ll admit that I’m curious to see what Jackson’s second installment holds in store. That said, the trailer does seem to suggest quite a lot of superfluous material – a Legolas romantic subplot? really? – but it also teases Benedict Cumberbatch as a flame-throwing pun-wielding dragon. So it’s safe to say the jury’s still out.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Benedict Cumberbatch, Evangeline Lilly, Hobbit, Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, ian mckellen, Martin Freeman, peter jackson, Smaug | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Darren

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 is like an extended visual sugar hit. There’s always something happening, the characters seem in perpetual motion, and there’s never a moment where the audience is allowed to catch up. A technicolour marvel, there’s an endearing energy to all this, allowing the plot’s riff on classic monster movies (from King Kong to Jurassic Park) to become infectiously enjoyable. There are moments where the movie almost seems too sweet and too insubstantial, but they are only fleeting – there’s another neat visual gag, corny pun, or exciting slapstick joke only ever seconds away.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 is hardly food for the soul, but it’s certainly a satisfying meal.

A berry good idea…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: anna faris, Bill Hader, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, Flint, James Caan, jurassic park, king kong, Perpetual motion, Steve Jobs, Will Forte | 2 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Terok Nor #0 (Review)

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Darren

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’m taking a look at the first season. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

We’ll be supplementing our coverage of the episodes with some additional materials – mainly novels and comics and films. This is one such entry.

Terok Nor might be the best of Malibu Comics’ Star Trek: Deep Space Nine range, a one-shot written by Mark A. Altman and illustrated by Trevor Goring. It isn’t so much the plot that makes Terok Nor so distinctive – there is a lot of running around, some betrayals, some action sequences – but rather the execution of Altman’s story and the atmosphere provided by Goring’s pencils. The origin story of the space station Terok Nor, Altman very shrewdly frames the story as something of an oral history. It’s almost mythic and grand and epic, drawn in broad strokes rather than finer detail.

It serves quite well as the story of the construction of the central hub of the Star Trek show most concerned with legacy and history.

A monument to the Bajoran people…

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Bajor, Bajoran, Benjamin Sisko, Cardassian, Dax, deep space nine, Ensign Ro, Julian Bashir, List of Star Trek characters (T–Z), Mark A. Altman, Star Trek Next Generation, Star Trek Original Series, star trek: deep space nine, Star Trek:Deep Space Nine, StarTrek, Terok | Leave a comment »

Jameson Cult Film Club: Die Hard

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Darren

I had the pleasure of attending Wednesday evening’s Jameson Cult Film Club screening of Die Hard. As we’ve come to expect from the guys, it was a wonderful evening hosted in the Tivoli Theatre, from the black-and-white cop car waiting to greet us outside right down to the cut out copy the Nakatomi lobby sculpture, the team clearly put the usual amount of love and affection into crafting an immersive experience for the audience.

(My personal favourite moment was the decision to announce that the film would be starting shortly by having an Alan-Rickman look-alike and his goons storm the dance floor. It was a lovely touch, particularly given the decision to have the directions shouted by the gun-weilding goons rather than the Rickman impersonator.)

Photos and more after the jump.

Click to enlarge.

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Action film, alan rickman, arts, cult film, cult movies, die hard, dublin, film, jameson cult film club, Karl, los angeles, Movie, Screening (medicine) | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Blue Jasmine

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Darren

Blue Jasmine is Woody Allen’s irreverent modernised take on A Streetcar Name Desire. Sure, some of the finer details have been changed to protect the not-quite-innocent. The story is relocated from New Orleans to San Diego. (“This is such a European city,” our lead notes, as if to suggest it isn’t such a significant change.) The character of Stanley Kowalski has been divided across several different supporting characters – the Polish Augie and the car mechanic Chili. (“He’s just another version of Augie,” Jasmine suggests of her sister’s later boyfriend, drawing attention to the fact that they are both other versions of another character.)

Allen plays of the structure and the beats of Tennessee Williams’ hugely iconic play, even playfully branding his Blanche Dubois stand-in as the movie’s “blue” Jasmine French. The result is enjoyable and intriguing, anchored on a fantastic central performance from Cate Blanchett as the Southern belle who might not be quite the victim that she claims to be. As with so many Allen films, there’s a rich ensemble at work here, but Blue Jasmine works beautifully by riffing cleverly on a classic of American theatre.

“… the kindness of strangers…”

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: alec baldwin, Allen, Blue Jasmine, cate blanchett, Jasmine, New Orleans, Sally Hawkins, San Diego, san francisco, Stanley Kowalski, Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams, Woody Allen | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Prisoners

Posted on September 17, 2013 by Darren

Prisoners is very much a game of two halves. Feeling like two separate films grafted together, Prisoners feels at once like a psychological exploration of American masculinity and also a far more conventional serial killer film. Indeed, had director Denis Villeneuve and writer Aaron Guzikowski decided to cut suddenly to black two-thirds of the way through Prisoners, we’d have a frustrating but much more cohesive atmospheric drama.

Instead, it seems like the duo conspired to surgically attach the last act from a far more conventional thriller on to their robust framework. The result is intriguing, but disappointing – the conventional paint-by-numbers final third diminishing a lot of the richness to be found in the first section of the film.

Somebody is about to get Jack(man)ed…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Aaron, Alex Jones, Denis Villeneuve, Detective Loki, hugh jackman, jack bauer, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Keller, Paul Dano, Roger Deakins, serial killer, The Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok, United States, viola davis | Leave a comment »

Watch! UK Trailer for The Fifth Estate!

Posted on September 13, 2013 by Darren

Entertainment One just sent of this latest UK trailer for The Fifth Estate. It is very similar to the trailer we previewed way back in July, running just five seconds shorter. Still, it looks like it should be one of the more interesting features of award’s season, exploring the life and times a personality whose story is still very much on-going. It’ll also be interesting to see how the movie addresses the controversies surround Assange. (And whether it will help cement Benedict Cumberbatch as the kind of actor who can anchor movies like this.)

Anyway, the trailer’s below. The US version is here. It is released in the UK on October 11th.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Assange, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bill Condon, Daniel Brühl, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Fifth Estate, Julian Assange, Wikileaks | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Insidious – Chapter 2

Posted on September 11, 2013 by Darren

Horror sequels are tough to execute, particularly where you have a returning cast. After all, strong horror films typically work by ramping up the pressure on the central character, building inexorably towards a climax. It’s very hard to follow on from that – where do you go? It’s very difficult to wind the tension back down and start ramping up from scratch, and the same trick is never as effective the second time.

Insidious: Chapter 2 faces these challenges, and – to its credit – it tries to work around them. It embraces an almost camp aesthetic to help compensate for the fact that it effectively kicks off at maximum volume, relishing the sheer absurdity of its demonic co-stars. It splits the main cast up in order to allow it to try to maintain a constant sense of pressure, while also delving into back story and origin. It subtly shifts its frame of reference from movies about possession and haunting toward a different sort of horror film.

However, these attempts aren’t as successful as they might be. While there are moments of wit, the humour and heightened camp occasionally causes tonal confusion. Splitting the cast up is too convenient a narrative device and diffuses (rather than maintains) the tension. Slasher and serial killer movies are hard to get right at the best of times, and the movie’s climax feels awkward grafted on to a possession story. Insidious: Chapter 2 has moments where it works very well, but also spends a significant amount of its running time groping in the dark.

Well, at least it’s an amicable haunting…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: box office, Chapter (religion), film, Horror film, Insidious, James Wan, Leigh Whannell, Lin Shaye, patrick wilson, Scream 4, Trailer (promotion), Whannell | 4 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Call

Posted on September 10, 2013 by Darren

The Call is one-half knock-off of the underseen and underrated Cellular, a delightfully pulpy high-concept thriller which perhaps felt a little bit too similar to Phone Booth. The Call is also one-half knock-off of Silence of the Lambs, with the second half of the film in particular feeling like one of those psycho killer thrillers that were oh-so-popular in the mid- to late-nineties, but which became less popular in the post-CSI era. The Call has a delightfully ropey central premise, a high-concept for the mobile age, straining all manner of credibility and suspension of disbelief.

However, the problem lies in the execution. The Call wallows in heightened melodrama, struggling to sustain its central premise by trying to make us “feel” for the central characters in the most coy and manipulative of manners. Director Brad Anderson’s intrusive style doesn’t help matters too, seemingly unsure whether he’s making an action movie, a psychological horror or a high-concept thriller, and so instead tries to mash the three genres together with limited success.

Holding the line…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: brad anderson, business, Call, Dispatcher, Halle Berry, hannibal, hannibal lecter, Lambs, michael imperioli, Movies, murder, Premise, serial killer, silence of the lambs, thomas harris, thrillers, will graham | 3 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Diana

Posted on September 10, 2013 by Darren

Diana is a rare beast. You have to try very hard to make a biography film that is so perfectly and so calculatedly terrible. Diana isn’t the product of people who don’t care, it’s the product of people who care too much about the cynical market of prestige biography films. As such, with focus-group precision targeting, the film hits what might be the most bitter of sweet spots. It is both toothless and incredibly cynical; manipulative and shallow; vacuous and crammed with unnecessary and irritating detail.

Most damning of all is the way that the film seems perfectly calibrated to fit the public image of the People’s Princess, never bold enough to challenge or explore her work, her life or her legacy. Given how raw the public’s nerves are, even sixteen years after her tragic death, it might have been expecting too much to hope for a provocative or compelling exploration of one of the most iconic figures of the past three decades. However, we might have hoped it would at least be interesting.