Saturday, April 29, 2006

Flightplan

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much from this movie, the trailers had pretty much put me off ("WHERE'S JULIA?!"), but I let Vic (Vicky my g/f) pic the film for the evening, and she chose this. ("WHERE'S MY DAUGHTER?!") I duly decided to give the film a chance and promised Vic that I wouldn't keep doing my derogatory Jodie Foster impressions ("JULIA!?"), while the film was on.

Also, for any of you who have a vague interest in what I'm doing (?), I'm writing this on a train and the table is just that little bit too far away :/

SO! Flightplan (2005), produced by Brian Grazer, who's name I recognise but can't place and directed by someone else who's name escapes me at this time, from what I remember, came out roughly the same time as Wes Craven's Red Eye (which I'll comment on another time), and I believe was one of the first post 9/11 plane movies to hit the cinema (could be wrong on that). The basic premise as given in the awful trailers, Jodie Foster boards a plane home with her young daughter. Said daughter goes missing, where can she have gone "we're in a tube", Sean Bean steps in as the plane's captain and declares that her daughter never boarded the plane!!!

Jodie and her kid, who's name will be permamently burnt into your memory ("WHERE'S JULIA?!"), are travelling back with the body of their husband/father and then Julia dissappears, what follows was actually quite interesting, the film seemed to be actually quite intelligent, keeping you up in the air as to what 'exactly' is going on with her daughter and her alleged dissapearence. A couple of political issues are tentatively thrown in for good measure (as it's on a plane) and overall you're captivated wondering what the hell is going on!

But this goes on too long, Jodie Foster (who's character name is Kyle Pratt ferchrissakes!) is...grating, kind of like nails on a blackboard. And then the film descends into bog-standard action territory when JF goes all Ripley.

Summary?, starts off reasonably well, but is ultimately, dull, slow, distracting camera work & direction, annoying and misses many an opportunity to do something new. 4/10

Ok, 2nd review in and I realise a couple of things 1)I rant and waffle 2)It's really hard to make sense without giving the plot away! Was gonna see Slither tomorrow, but apparently that's NEXT Sunday (so Vicky informs me!) Hoping to see a good film soon!

Friday, April 28, 2006

Aeon Flux - mediocre


What a one to start with! It just happens to be the last film I watched, so here goes...

Aeon Flux (2005), basically set around 400 years in the future, most of the population of the world has been wiped out by an "industrial virus" and the remaining survivors live in a sealed off community, goverened by "The Chairman", however all is not well and a group of rebels called the "Monicans" seeks to assasinate the chairman (courtesy of Charlize Theron's character, Aeon) and overthrow the government. However (there's always one of those!), things don't go to plan and the assasination mission reveals more secrets!

Did ya understand that?? Basically it's an effects laden, no-brainer sci-fi action flick. Charlize Theron is ok as Aeon, although, Riply could kick her ass, basically, she doesn't strike me as being all that hard...just lucky. The other cast are ok, took me a while to realise that Johnny Lee Miller was in it, show's how long it's been since he's been in a major film! The plot is ok, as best as you can expect from a film like this but it does the job.

Like a lot of sci-fi it riffs off the '1984' theme, and ends up kinda like Equilibrium with girls, less brains and not so serious.

A throw-away movie, I wouldn't go so far to say it was fun, but I didn't turn it off. (just noticed I rated it 6/10 on IMDB, was just thinking more 4 or 5, DOH!)

Welcome and Good Day!


Hey hey!

Welcome one and all to my new blog, dedicated to brief yet incisive (?) reviews of the films I watch, some will be new , some will be older films that I like or have simply re-watched.

I kinda started this on my old MSN Space, by giving one line views on films I'd recently watched. I hope to expand on this, maybe to a paragrah or two ;)

Bear in mind, I'm not a "qualified" film critic, but I do like films and as far as I'm concerned this is good enough!! Also bear in mind that although I do bear a certain amount of technical knowledge about the film making process, I watch films cos I want to enjoy them, and will hopefully review them as such, any technical points in the review are there because that's what I noticed, not what I was looking for, also there will be no specific times for posting, just as and when I watch something and feel like commenting on it. (I do watch stuff pretty regularly tho!)

Feel free to comment on whatever you read here, It's an arse that Blogger doesn't provide categories other wise I'd do that, but I couldn't be arsed to register yet another account somewhere!


Oh yeah.. enjoy ;)

Matt