the m0vie blog

Non-Review Review: The Terminator

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Darren

Wow. What a debut. Okay, I know this wasn’t quite a debut for James Cameron, but Pirhana II hardly counts, right? Terminator is perhaps the best example of a talented young director producing a large-scale action movie on a miniscule budget. I’ll provoke the disdain of many a film buff out there when I declare I have a very slight preference for the sequel Terminator II: Judgement Day, but the first two movies are some of the best examples of action movies from the eighties/nineties. Hell, they are both some of the best examples of any action movies.

Don't ask him to show you his guns...

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Arnold Schwarzenegger, james cameron, kyle reese, Movies, non-review review, review, terminator, the terminator | 7 Comments »

Suspending Your Belief: Age Before Beauty…

Posted on June 11, 2010 by Darren

It’s strange, isn’t it, what will break our suspension of disbelief? I mean, we’ll accept (while watching Superman) that a man can fly around in his underwear, but the fact he advertises his weakness to kryptonite in a public interview is distracting. Or we’ll somehow buy into an archeologist who searches for the holy grail and encounters all manner of occult phenomenon, but when it comes to aliens extra-dimensional beings… well, a lot of us call foul. Still, I’ve been thinking a bit of late about the really quite weird fascination that movies seem to have with age and recasting.

Grasping at straws to keep Patrick Stewart on board...

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: ageing, casting, charles xavier, cynicism, dawson casting, dominic cooper, howard stark, james mcavoy, old, patrick stewart, suspension of disbelief, x-men, X-Men: First Class, young | 7 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Airplane!

Posted on June 11, 2010 by Darren

Surely you can’t be serious?

I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.

The lads over at Anomalous Material are running a ‘greatest comedy of all time’ tournament at the moment, which is well worth a gander if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t yet seen all 128 movies. What I have seen, however, is Airplane!, and I can assure you that it deserves serious consideration for the crown.

A take off of all your favourite films...

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: airplane!, comedy, film, Movies, non-review review, parody, pop culture, puns, review, zucker | 6 Comments »

Are Spin-Offs the New Sequels?

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Darren

It seems that year-on-year, the cinemas are flooded with sequels to banal action movies. This year we have Iron Man 2, Shrek 4, Predators and Sex and the City 2, among others. It’s been that way for years. If you summer blockbuster isn’t an adaptation (of television show, novel, comic book, earlier film or even video game), chances are that it is a sequel (or a prequel). It makes shrewd business sense. Given the huge amount of money spent on these tentpoles ($150m for just the production budget, let alone other costs), so it feels somewhat safer to spend it on a known quantity. Franchises have built in fanbases, more merchandise, already had several DVD releases (which means more people are aware of it than casual cinema goers), which means a bigger audience, more awareness and more money. It can be quite exhausting, however, from a cinema goer prospective. However, Hollywood likes to innovate in its own insanely boring way. Much as they redefined cinema by bringing back a gimmick from the fifties, and turned the glut of sequels into prequels, it appears Hollywood has found a new way of generating money from established properties: the spin-off.

Think of the Gross, baby!

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: aldous snow, business, films, franchises, get him to the greek, hollywood, les grossman, Movies, sequels, spin-offs, tropic thunder | 20 Comments »

Sequel Query: Hollywood’s Fascination With Sequels…

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Darren

Can you remember a year when the summer wasn’t dominated by sequels or spin-offs or reboots or prequels? If you can, most of them were probably adaptations. There’s been a lot of back-and-forth recently about the abundance of such films in the summer lineups, so I thought it might be worth a little exploration into the history of the sequel and of Hollywood blockbusters, and also worth considering the suggestion that has been mooted a lot recently: are movie-goers tiring of sequels?

: Even death couldn’t keep Spock out of the next Star Trek movie…

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: audiences, films, hollywood, Inception, lowest common denominator, Movies, original films, originality, prequels, remakes, sequels, sex and the city 2, spin-offs, studios | 2 Comments »

Days Like This – 24:Day 8

Posted on June 9, 2010 by Darren

24 is over. It’s a bit of a shock. Don’t worry, there will be a movie. At least, they promise there will be. Eventually. In fairness, long before the news that the show was going off the air, this season had the feel of a final season. Eight years is a long time for any television show to be on the air, not least of which one founded on such an interesting gimmick (though, admittedly, “real time” had its definition stretched over those eight years) and Day 8 felt like a perfectly dignified send off.

24 has a captive audience...

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: 24, 24: day 8, anil kapoor, annie wersching, day 8, keifer sutherland, necar zadegan, omar hassan, Television, twenty four | 6 Comments »

Kick-Ass

Posted on June 9, 2010 by Darren

Remember how I said during my review of The Ultimates that Mark Millar was a love ‘im or hate ‘im writer, sometimes within the same work? Well, Kick-Ass offers Millar at his best and at his worst. He gets the superhero genre, understands why and how it works the way it does. That’s why he’s so good at deconstructing and reconstructing it. He grasps the escapism element and knows his target audience like the back of his hand. However, he’s a writer who refuses to ever accept that there is such a thing as “too far”. There is no taste, there is no top to go over. But, more than that, there’s no restraint. And there’s the problem with Kick-Ass: for a novel so interested in giving us a relatable protagonist and heroes grounded in “the real world”, it’s too absurdist to really work.

"They should call him ass-kick..."

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: big daddy, comic book, controversy, film, graphic novel, hit girl, john romita, kick-ass, mark millar | 10 Comments »

Taking the Joker Out of the Pack: No Joker in Batman 3

Posted on June 8, 2010 by Darren

Christopher Nolan confirmed over the weekend that the Joker would not be recast for the sequel to The Dark Knight. Which I suppose means we can rule him off the “list of potential villains” we’ve all been putting together in our heads as Batman 3 approaches. As much as I get the sense (and as much as rumours about the ‘trilogy’ that emerged before The Dark Knight was released would suggest) that the Joker was clearly imagined as playing a fairly lerge role in the conclusion of Nolan’s Batman saga, I can see the reasons for and respect his decision to not to recast the role.

This card is off the table...

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: batman, Batman 3, casting, Christopher Nolan, film, heath ledger, Movies, The Dark Knight, the joker | 20 Comments »

Non-Review Review: For a Few Dollars More

Posted on June 8, 2010 by Darren

Early in the movie, our anonymous bounty hunter, Blondie or The Man With No Name or whatever you want to call him, wanders into a tavern looking for his target. Identifying the bandit gambling at a table, inches from an impotent sheriff, the hunter wanders over to his mark. He silently grabs the cards and starts counting them out. The hardened criminal stares up silently, and he plays along. The game is poker. The two men settle their hands and trade their cards. The villain lays out his cards on the table. It looks good, and then the stranger reveals his cards. Of course, his hand is better. The gambler at the table looks up to this drifter who has so silently intruded on his game. Apparently behind the audience, he asks what the stakes were. As it always is in stories like this, “Your life.”

You know how it ends.

Sometimes you have to take the Good with the Bad...

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Clint Eastwood, deconstruction, dollars, eastwood, films, for a few dollars more, Movies, non-review review, review, sergio leone, western | 2 Comments »

The Absolute League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. II (Review)

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Darren

I don’t think it’s really fair to split up The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen into two separate volumes. I’d argue that they are instead two halves of the same tale. It’s to the credit of this second storyline that it doesn’t feel like a sequel to the original – it feels like the second half of a circle, closing it out.