Posted on July 13, 2009 by Darren
I’ve finally gotten to see all the five Best Picture nominees for the 81st Academy Awards. I’m honestly disappointed it took me so long, but that’s what happens when a flood of prestige movies hit the cinemas over three weeks in January and the Academy doesn’t even pick the good ones. I’m honestly not sure how I feel about the contenders, in retrospect. The previous year’s awards featured a fantastic line-up – Juno, No Country for Old Men, Atonement, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood – that hit just about every demographic and represented the awards at their best. This year, we got a closed shop.
The statuettes are actually quite creepy when you get to looking at them...
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: 2009 oscars, 81st academy awards, academy awards, AMPAS, best picture, films, frost/nixon, milk, Movies, Oscars, slumdog millionaire, the curious case of benjamin button, The Dark Knight, the reader | Leave a comment »
Posted on July 13, 2009 by Darren
Even four years after is original release, The Dark Knight casts a pretty big shadow. Not only is it the best Batman movie ever produced, and easily one of the best stories to feature the character in any medium, it’s also a wonderful piece of cinema on its own terms. Christopher Nolan is an astounding craftsman, and one who constructed his superhero sequel without ever feeling the need to dumb down. The Dark Knight is a wonderfully effective and stunningly constructed piece of popcorn cinema, but it’s also the most profound and engaging (and, importantly, even-handed) meditations on the War of Terror that Hollywood has produced. It’s bold and accessible, but it’s also intelligent and engaging. More than an astoundingly impressive blockbuster, it’s just a superb piece of cinema.
It all goes up in flames…
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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: aaron eckhart, batman, batman begins, christian bale, Christopher Nolan, dark knight, film, gary oldman, gotham, harvey dent, heath ledger, joker, Movies, non-review review, review, two face | 4 Comments »
Posted on July 10, 2009 by Darren
We knew it was coming. A solid reason to hold out for Christmas – Warner Brothers has announced the motherlode of Watchmen DVD’s. The Ultimate Edition we’ve known to be coming for a while has been confirmed and – despite Zach Snyder’s protest that it would be a bare-bones set – it looks to be massive. Five disks, all inclusive. To quote the great Keanu Reeves: Woah…
Those paying for The Director's Cut must seem quite blue right now...
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: absolute edition, blu ray, dc comics, directors cut, DVD, films, Movies, ultimate edition, watchmen, watchmen: ultimate edition, zack snyder | 2 Comments »
Posted on July 9, 2009 by Darren
… aka, I love you even more, Roger Ebert!
That man really hates Transformers 2 – in case you didn’t read his response to those critics of critics. Or maybe it was the announcement of a Viewfinder and an Asteroids movie within the same week that led him to publish a list of his most-anticipated toyetic movies in the years to come. It is awesome and totally worth a look at the link. Anyway, one of his ideas was so fiendishly brilliant I couldn’t resist doing a draft mock-up of the poster…
I give you Marbles: The Movie, with Ebert plot summary below…
Alternative Tagline: "Get some balls"
Marbles! Secret of the Universe! Nicolas Cage plays an astrophysicist at MIT who intercepts the feed from the Hubble Space Telescope and determines that the stars in the sky are in fact giant, brilliantly-glowing marbles. Enhancing the digital information, he discovers a giant thumb and forefinger in the abyss beyond space. They hold an aggie.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: asteroids, films, games, marbles: the movie, Movies, nicholas cage, poster, roger ebert, toyetic, toys, transformers 2, view master, view master movie, viewfinder | 1 Comment »
Posted on July 8, 2009 by Darren
Ah, the musical. The genre of choice for middleaged women everywhere. One of those glamourous shallow callbacks to the golden era of Hollywood. I was intrigued when Tim Burton announced his next project was a musical – an adaptation of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. I was familiar with the myth of the man, but not the musical. I ended up being served a treat almost as fiendishly decadent as Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies: a little flaky and suspicious in places, and a lot more filling than it should be. Magical, macabre, magnificent. It’s isn’t classic Burton, but it’s certainly vintage.
Get ready for a close shave...
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: films, helena honham carter, johnny depp, Movies, musical, musicals, non-review review, reviews, sacha baron cohen, stephen sondheim, sweeney todd, tim burton, victorian london | 2 Comments »
Posted on July 8, 2009 by Darren
I used to love going to the cinema and watching the trailers. Teasing me with movies I hadn’t heard of yet, showing me my first look at movies I was anticipating all summer or perhaps reaffirming my faith in a movie I’d written off. It doesn’t matter that the trailers always lie (Sweeney Todd is a musical? Not according to the trailer) or they spoil too much (not sure if it’s possible to spoil a historical biopic, but Public Enemies had a trailer which ran until Dillinger escaped in Indiana, which is at least two-thirds the run time), but I loved ’em. And if one of those trailers stunk, I didn’t mind, because there were five or six more waiting for me. I don’t mind having twenty minutes of advertisements before a movie (as happened when I saw The Hangover), but I do mind if these ads are focused on selling my things I don’t really want or care about.
I want to see more of this...
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: advertising, adverts, cinema trips, cinemas, film trailers, films, Movies, products, rant, Television, trailers | Leave a comment »
Posted on July 7, 2009 by Darren
There’s nothing like a little bit of political correctness gone crazy to get the blood flowing. I’m amazed it’s taken me this long to find a story that piqued my interest enough that I would cover it. Ask and you shall receive and all that. Last week’s hubbub over the trailer for Warner Brothers’ film Orphan is exactly what irritates me about our current PC-focused state of mind. For those who don’t know, Orphan sees an adopted little girl proceeding to wreak havoc on a small suburban family. The trailer was released last week and prompted a huge outcry from various interest groups for including the line, “It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as your own.” Because apparently every line spoken in movies must be the unadulterated truth, right? No characters would ever make a subjective statement about their own incorrect world view, would they?
Creepy children never go out of fashion...
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: adoption, age restrictions, censorship, complaints, controversy, film classification, film ratings, films, interest groups, Movies, orphan, orphan movie, pc, political correctness, R, restricted, Warner Brothers, world gone mad | 1 Comment »
Posted on July 7, 2009 by Darren
This could go really well, or really badly. On one hand, I’m all about horror films that aren’t about psycho killers stalking and slashing scantily clad teenage girls. On the other hand, it takes a lot of restraint to do psychological horror well. Either way, the Stanford Prison Experiment looks set to terrify more than just first year psychology students, with the similarly-themed The Experiment in the works.
Would you let this guy lock you up for a psychological experiment?
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Abu Ghraib, adrian brody, das experiment, elijah wood, films, forest whitaker, horror, Movies, philip zimbardo, psychological experiment, psychological thriller, psychology, stanford, stanford prison expiremnt, the experiment, true stories, zimbardo | Leave a comment »
Posted on July 6, 2009 by Darren
I have to confess I was not overly impressed with Public Enemies. In fairness, it was mostly down to the choices Mann made in filming the work – the high definition cameras and the insistence on shakey hand held movement. You might argue that it was a choice designed to place us in the real world of the Great Depression – to put us on the streets with Dillinger and immerse us in his world rather than the sanitised grandiose version of the 1930’s that typically finds its way on to our screens. This ignores one fundamental fact about Mann’s film making: it is no less grandiose or fantastic than those myths of times past. Mann is a film maker who works best exploring the dynamics of a masculine ideal that never existed. His male characters are drawn in the mold of a classic image that never actually existed.
I'll bet Pacino ordered the Large Ham. Overdone. VERY LOUDLY!
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Filed under: Movies, Television | Tagged: action movies, ali, collateral, director, film, guns, heat, john dillinger, male, masculine, masculinity, men, michael mann, modern man, Movies, public enemies, themes, violence | Leave a comment »
Posted on July 3, 2009 by Darren
I want to love this film. I really do. I enjoyed Miami Vice, so devoted am I to the cult of Mann and his study of the modern man lost in the world of violence and suffering. And Public Enemies has a lot going for it, it does. A fantastic cast, a better-than-fantastic lead, a solid script. On the other hand, the film is, technically speaking, a mess. And not the good kind of mess.
Don't get Christian Bale angry... He won't like you when he's angry...
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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: billy crudup, christian bale, crime, fbi, film, high definition, history, j edgar hoover, john dillinger, johnny depp, michael mann, Movies, non-review review, public enemies, public enemy number one, review | 11 Comments »
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