Friday, September 14, 2007

Minority Report


Another re-watch. Probably one of the better Philip K. Dick adaps that's been done and one of Cruise's better films.

Dealing with the Department of Pre-Crime, which is based around 3 pre-cogs who predict murders, the system is supposedly perfect (yeah right!)

So, clearly things go awry and The Teeth is caught in the middle of it and has to sort things out, not much else to say, Colin Farrell is quite good, in fact overall it's just a good, easy going sci-fi thriller.


Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Snakes On A Plane


It's terrible, really really bad, but there are some funny bits.
I think everybody knows by now that it's about Sam Jackson having enough of these muthafuckin snakes on this muthafuckin plane, and pretty soon after it came out everybody had enough of the hype and realised it was shite.

The pilot is funny, one bit made me jump, some of the bites are pretty gruesome.

Personally I recommend Eight Legged Freaks.

Monday, September 03, 2007

Unleashed


An uninspiring advertising campaign and the teaming of  Jet Li and Bob Hoskins encouraged me to avoid this one for quite some time, however...

Just watched it on Sky and it's actually not bad. I mean I'm not really a Jet Li fan, I'm more of a Jackie Chan guy and more recently Tony Jaa (who kicks fucking ass), but the fact that the opening credits told me that it's written by Luc Besson was a surprise and intrigued me.

Well... it's pretty good, Li plays essentially a simpleton, who's only purpose in life is to beat the shit out of people for Bob Hoskins (imagine!), it's called "Danny The Dog" in other territories so you get the idea, anyway there's the usual, awakenings and stuff to give it some sort of purpose higher than that of a JCVD movie, and Besson's writing has a bit of a 5th element feel towards the climax, and was and enjoyable watch. Oh an Morgan Freeman plays a blind guy, need I say more?

Unleashed - 7/10

Sunday, September 02, 2007

Sunshine


Danny Boyle's a bit hit and miss as far as I'm concerned;

Trainspotting - Hit
A Life Less Ordinary - Surface damage
The Beach - Miss apparently
28 Days Later - Miss
Millions - Um...
and now Sunshine...

It's basically Alien, but of all the films that have tried to emulate Alien over the years this is probably the best I've seen so far.

It's 2057 and there's a problem with the sun, some sort of quantum thing has buggered it and it's not chucking out as much energy, thus the Earth is stuck in a "Solar Winter" (as opposed to...), so the Icarus 2 is sent to the sun with a crew of 8 and a fission bomb with the mass of Manhattan to restart the Sun. (So we've got a little bit of The Core in there too) and Icarus you'll remember from Greek mythology died because he got too close to the sun.

It's an ensemble piece, and although billed alphabetically I think everyone knows Cillian Murphy is the lead, he plays Capa the ship's physicist, the guy in charge of the bomb. Other crew members include Mace the engineer, played by Chris Evans, which I think was surprising to pretty much everyone and to be fair, he's very good in it, the rest of the multi-national/racial crew (none of this cold war or US only stuff!) are very well played.

En route to the Sun they come across the distress signal (Alien) of the Icarus 1 that disappeared seven years ago (Event Horizon), now they must weigh up the choice between continuing on their current mission or investigating the Icarus 1...cue everything going wrong.

Sunshine clearly doesn't do anything overly original, in all the press stuff I saw for it one of Danny's main points was that nobody's been to the Sun before, yes and no if I may point out Star Trek IV: They Voyage Home and it's inspiring TOS episode, they didn't land on it no, but it's close enough, however what it does do, it does pretty well, there's tension, good character conflict, and it's pretty realistic from a technical point of view (they had to take some dramatic liberties such as artificial gravity for instance). It's a bit slow in it's mid section at times, but overall it's a good film.

Ridley Scott recently stated (for the Blade Runner re-re-re-re-re-release I think) that Sci-Fi is dead, nobody can do anything original with sci-fi. And without getting into a big rant about the overall originality of cinema, he's right to a degree, but what Sunshine does is take proven sci-fi elements and works them, well.



Sunshine - 8/10

Saturday, September 01, 2007

Inside I'm Dancing


A comedy drama about two disabled guys, first thought could be funny for the wrong reasons, then you watch it and, yet again a British film surprises everyone in being actually quite good, touching, funny, both James McAvoy and Steven Robertson are brilliant and although it's not entirely the sort of film I'd watch on a regular basis it's still a good watch.

Why is it that most really good British films are the ones that the average audience won't actually pick up to watch??


The Mullet Uncut


Um....

Um....

Um....

It's not on IMDb, go watch something on YouTube instead

The Mullet Uncut - 0/10