The Movie Thread

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Wot a barstard.

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Splice. Absolute bobbins. Why on Earth they make films so formulaic I'll never know. It doesn't make for a good film, though I suppose it means making it is easier. Predictable, silly, stupid, and at least 40% of Adrien Brody's face is nose. Avoid.

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Get Him to the Greek. Just not as funny as it's supposed to be. Jonah Hill simply isn't funny, at all, and Russell Brand is only occasionally amusing. The film as a whole is amusing, but I think it's intended to be a hilarious knee-slapper and far too much of it falls flat. Does have some good laughs, otherwise a bit crap.

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Paranormal Activity 2. Ratchets up the tension nicely, some good scares, but unfortunately there is one unintentionally hilarious scene which wrecks a good part of the effect. A decent plot, but let's face it, should never have been made.

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Red. Not as funny or exciting as it could have been. A lot of the jokes are not timed right, though it delivers plenty of chuckles, there are very few big laughs. The action is a bit pedestrian, but again, with the odd standout moment. Freeman is underused, Mirren is hardly there, Malkovich steals the show. Willis is Willis, and simply doesn't play the role right. The love interest, Mary Louise Parker, is good, but is just lumped with being the helpless woman. A shame.

[Knan]

The Troll Hunter alias Trolljegeren. Good fun, good scenery, good old Norwegian trolls as they should be. (That is, scary and hungry and huge, lurking Out There.)

 

Not the sharpest knives around. As the movie says, when you can subsist on granite, there are limits on how smart you need to be.

 

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The Objective. This is a natural winner for X-Com fans, I think. A small special forces team is inserted into Afghanistan to find out what's going on in a mountainous region, afflicted by strange lights, radiation, and weird structures. Worth a watch, let down slightly by the ending.

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Let Me In. A decent film, but nowhere near as good as Let The Right One In. Less subtle and more stupid than the original. Still worth a watch though, and it has a slightly different take on the whole subject.

[Thorondor]

Cowboys and aliens teaser.

 

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Might actually do better than Feds and totems...

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Anyone read the comic?

 

Men at Work. The cover alone reduced me to tears of laughter. Now, you can either sit back and be all superior and think critically and not laugh once, or you can switch your brain off and wet yourself. It's either absolutely pathetic or sheer brilliance. Who knows!

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Winter's Bone. Makes some unneeded changes from the book, but still pretty good. A tale of hard times getting harder in a very insular community.

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Universal Soldier: Regeneration. Not as bad as you'd think, but still shit. Lundgren and Van Damme underused, the rest is nonsense. Some of the action is decent.

[Pete]

The Losers - never quite realised it's potential. Bit of a shame and found myself not particularly caring (or even being entirely surprised) about the twist near the end. I imagine the comic is better. It wasn't entirely bad, o was just expecting more from it I guess.

 

The A-Team. All kinds of silliness. In a GOOD way. Gloriously stupid with a mostly great cast - Bradley Cooper doing a grand job, some likeable bad guys and Sharlto Copley superbly stealing every scene he's in. Fire up the DVD and disengage brain

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The Losers is an excellent comic, but a crap film. I love the comic to bits, but the film is just a wasted opportunity. Perhaps its because the comic takes so much from action films, but it still seems idiotic to me.

[Pete]

Go and watch the A-Team then. That'll cheer you up.

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Is it actually worth watching? Really? Don't lie to me, Pete, not at Xmas. Baby Jesus' tears are on standby.

[Pete]

Really. Watch it. It's so intentionally stupid in parts it borders on genius. Easily the best action flick of the year (though I haven't seen the Expendables yet). Suspend disbelief before pressing play obviously

 

Right up until the final showdown I thought they'd kept it pretty plausible - yes, even the bit after they exit the plane has some basis in physics, silly as it is - but they'd surely all be dead in the finale which just seemed too over the top (again, yes compared to the rest of the relatively sane shenanigans).

 

It is a funny film. And what's more I think everyone who made it and starred in it intended it to be funny for a change, rather than it unintentionally ending up that way as films that take themselves too seriously tend to do nowadays.

 

If nothing else, watch it for Copley. That man just needs to stand in front of a camera and say and do mildly amusing things and I'd pay to see it. If not even for that, then it's a great one to play "spot the TV/film references" as they're dotted all over the place intentionally but not so's you'd notice unless you were really looking for them. And if for neither of those reasons, the lady in it (Jessica Biel) looks nice. And failing all that, some likeable and watchable bad guys for a change.

 

(I gave myself a pat on the back for spotting the reference to Reginald Barclay, although that was a pretty easy spot).

 

Oh, and Baby Jesus' tears would be streaming as the little tyke laughed so hard he cried because of this film. Both at the funny bits and the mildly over the top bits so it's a safe bet he'll cry either way.

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Yes, okay, it was a good laugh. Quite enjoyed most of it, as it was totally daft and was amusing practically all the way through.

 

The American. Worth a watch. Clooney plays the loneliest hitman since Leon, and the bird he knocks around with is as hot as a very hot thing indeed.

[Thorondor]

https://i.huffpost.com/gadgets/slideshows/14798/slide_14798_206162_large.jpg

 

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[Pete]

It amuses me no end they mentioned it's around the other side

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Resident Evil Afterlife. Managed to offend every single brain cell I have independently. The only film series to get more awful with geometric predictability.

[Matri]

I just watched Transformers Prime - Darkness Rising. It's a 5-part pilot episode for the new series. Optimus looks even freakier this time around. The rest of the bots are ripped from several different continuities. Also, some rather... disturbing subtext thing going on between Arcee and her human. (Unless you're into that sort of thing. )

 

But the cast list includes Peter Cullen and Frank Welker. If your memory needs refreshing, 30 years ago they were also known as Optimus Prime and Megatron.

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World's Greatest Dad. What was the last funny film Robin Williams was in? Black humour, this time, but genuinely amusing. Also a tad disturbing.

[Azrael Strife]

That'll teach me to never ever pay attention to review scores. Tron Legacy got mediocre results on Rotten Tomatoes, yet I enjoyed the movie to no end. It's not the best movie ever made, but it's highly enjoyable, to me it's a 90%, without being too generous.

[NKF]

I'm not normally in the habit of watching movies these days (not sure why), but I managed to watch two films recently: Be Kind Rewind and Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny.

 

Be Kind Rewind I first caught the first half on TV and enjoyed what I saw. Found and bought a really cheap copy on DVD to see the rest of it. The short of it is there's these two guys and one is given charge of a VHS rental store. Through the only unbelievable aspect of the movie, the other chap gets zapped at a power plant and is magnetized. Sure enough, all the tapes are erased and the two end up recreating (or the term used: Sweding) the movies that they rent out. Their amateur takes on some of the films like Ghostbusters is hilarious. Eventually the whole town pitches in. One of the best scenes in this film is probably the quick montage of the films they recreate. It's not edited together, rather the actors literally had to rush about the set and hastily change their outfits while the camera panned around. Certainly not a groundbreaking film in any way, but it was entertaining.

 

The second film Pick of Destiny I got since it came packed with Be Kind Rewind. The short of it is there's no real story to it. The band Tenacious D is formed, they aren't that well received, they go in search of the Pick of Destiny in hopes it'll make them play better, and the end up confronting its owner later on. I didn't enjoy it as much as the other film, but in a less family-friendly stoned heavy metal rocker kind of way it had plenty of gags that were amusing.

 

- NKF