Man I feel like a total philistine but this film was just dull. There was some impressive technical work but the plot swithced between overly predicatble and totally loopy.
Also: Charlton Heston as a Mexican? No!
Valuable sentiment: police work is supposed got be hard, the only place where it's not is in a police state.
IMDB
As good as the first one. More a horror film, the plot is flaky in the extreme and I found myself supporting the actinos of the military pretty consistently. Not usual for a zombie film. Maybe it was because the civilians weren't behaving in an even remotely convincing way for survivors of highly contagious plague which had wiped out nearly the entire population of Great Britain, really you just wouldn't try to sneak out of the safe area, they needed to be fire bombed.
IMDB
Really enjoyable. Not the Cohen Brothers at their best (that would be Fargo or Millers crossing for me) but a nice addition to their CV along the quirky lines of The Hudsucker Proxy but with a more serious edge.
Watching it on a TV it didn't hang together quite as well as I remembered from the cinema but only in a small way. The music, produced by the great T Bone Burnett is brilliant and I've been humming it all week.
IMDB
There's not much story to speak of here; Marie Anoinette gets married, doesn't enjoy the strictures of the French court but gets used to it and lives a decadent and unreflected life, lots of cake and nice dresses, she does all this to a poorly integrated soundtrack of post-punk pop hits.
So Sofia Coppola has made another film about how terribly difficult it is to be an over-privileged young woman (biographical much?). We never see anything outside a very small world. The script, such as it is, could be lifted straight from a film set in 2006 so what's the point in setting this in France on the cusp of revolution? Well mainly so that Vivienne Westwood can really go to town on the costume designs, undoubtedly the films saviour.
The whole film is infected with the dullness and emptiness of it's characters who the cast largely fail to bring to life. There were points at which I though, "this is supposed to be some comment on celebrity or something" but most of the time such comments are banal and really this is a poorly made film which luckily has some nice costumes in it. Also confirmed my suspicions that Kirsten Dunst really isn't a very good actress.
IMDB
For me, this is the first must see film of the year. It's one of those films in which the characterisation is so rich, the performances so convincing, and the texture of the society shown so solid and believable that other films just seem flimsy and flat by comparison. It's going to be really hard to view the supposedly dark and gritty Spiderman 3 as anything but candy floss after this.
Basically the story is about 12 year old Shaun who falls in with a bunch of skinheads who offer him a sense of identity and support after the death of his father in the Falklands war. Things turn sour when older skinhead Combo turns up, released from prison, and moves the group towards neo-nazism. Meadow's sympathetic treatment of Combo, who is by any standard a complete bastard, is one of the highlights of the film. In fact I think this is the key to the films greatness; by refusing to treat even the most abhorrent characters as anything but human beings Meadows offers the strongest argument possible against extremism.
This Is England is tremendously socially and politically relevant but that makes it sound a bit dull, it's not, the film is as gripping and emotionally involving as anything I've seen. The obvious points of comparison are Meadows' own earlier films with which This Is England shares a natural feel and a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature, but I was also thinking of Lukas Moodysson's early films, (Show Me Love and particularly Together) showing the inconsistent nature of personal beliefs and the collision between ideology and real life.
Really, you should see this.
IMDB
The easiest way to review this film is probably just to list all the films/books that it rehashes and lifts from, so:
John Carpenter's own older films
It's easy to mistake this for a teen high school film but really it's more of a mid-life crisis film as a respected high school teacher Mr Mcallister (Matthew Broderick) painfully and hilariously sets about destroying his life, ably assisted by impossibly ambitious student Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon).
IMDB
A solitary Stasi officer monitors, through wire taps and hidden microphones a potentially subversive playwright at the behest of his superior who is having an affair with the playwrights girlfriend.
The only character who knows everything that goes on is the observing officer, who comes to sympathise with his subjects, and he has very little direct communication with the other characters lending most of the film a detached air which makes the final act all the more dramatic.
A compelling story and technically adept film making, but I don't think it deserved to win the best foreign film Oscar at the expense of Pan's Labyrinth.
IMDB
Produced towards the end of the golden age of 70's kung-fu films Dirty Ho, along with 5 Deadly Venoms and Last Hurah For Chivalry, represents the apogee of the Shaw Brothers tradition. Whilst it can't match Last Hurrah's visual style (surely an inspiration for Yimou Zhangs recent epics) or the taught plotting of 5 Deadly Venom, it does offer some of the tightest and most imaginatively choreographed fight scenes this side of Jackie Chan's hey day, all of which take place on sumptuously dressed sets (seeing it on the big screen was great). One thing that really impressed me that's often overlooked is the sound design for the film, the impact noises and incidental synth drones are brilliant giving the final fight in particular a really musical feel, a great sense of rhythm and crescendo.
The plot is nonsense and finishes abruptly after the last fight scene (though it's not as apparently arbitrary as some Shaw Brothers films), not helped by the fact that the print I saw had subtitles which could most charitably be described as functional, but really that's not what these films are for.
[the two guys with moustaches, are having a fight but trying not to let the guy in white know what's going on]
IMDB
