Film The Redcafe Movie review thread

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll - Mat Whitecross (2010)

A biopic on Ian Dury. Never liked Ian Dury and the Blockheads and his whole cockney, modern day Noel Coward schtick at the time and absolutely loathed the songs Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll and Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick et al, although I did have a good laugh when he came out with Spasticus Autisticus for the celebration for the year of the disabled people, or whatever it was.

But the movie was great. Andy Serkis was brilliant as the polio ridden Dury, and it was very well directed. The film basically goes through his youth, career and rock star addled family life. Was a bit of a cnut, but aren't we all, except without his talent. And you got to hand it to him for what he made of himself and the rock star excesses he got to enjoy despite his polio shriveled disabilities. Think I might even have to go back and have another listen to his stuff.

8 cocks up
 
The incredible Burt Wonderstone - I admit that I watched it just because of Olivia Wilde. It's not boring because there is some "magic" in it, but it's still pile of shit. Best part was the Carrick's song at the end.
 
The Seventh Seal (1957)

Absolutely stunning film. Haven't really found the right frame of mind to put what I exactly feel into words. I think like Ikiru (1952), this is the perfect example of a successful integration of film and philosophy. Has there been a better film that deals with religion and existentialism? A lot credit must go to the imagery, it is powerful and bleak with the use of the overcasting clouds and dark landscapes. Characters are complex, their dialogues are multi-layered with so much to analyse. People complained that it is boring but I found it to be thoroughly engaging. Didn't know Max Von Sydow is such a great actor, what a powerful performance!
 
Just watched a couple on Netflix

Cabin in the Woods - Very enjoyable and it's rather funny in places as well. 7/10

And having never seen it, and still in the horror category I went for the Blair Witch Project. Absolutely terrible film. 2/10.
 
Man Of Steel

As a spectacle, it really delivered. Huge action set pieces, some corny/cheesy sections for the less die-hard fans, a good lead and a good antagonist. Tried to pull at the heart strings and was literally a blockbuster movie. However, the fact that the actions scenes felt really super-human, flying into orbit and through sky scrapers yet always landing where they left off from was very jarring. Still an enjoyable film none the less. 8/10
 
End of Watch - 8/10. I really enjoyed this. I'm a fan of Anna Kendrick, which also helps. Apparently when they were researching for the film, Gyllenhaal and Peña did 3 months of ridealongs with LAPD. Their first night, they got a call for a murder.
 
World War Z was pretty disappointing and the feckers didn't have the AC up yesterday which was the whole point of going.

Why did he risk his life going into the wing to get all the diseases when all he really needed to do was to call up his UN mate and have them organize a squad to clear the building. As far as I could tell there was no hurry so why not just get on the blower and call in the calvary? Presumably it's how he got out of Wales after his solo heroics. The ending was fecking bollocks too...some UN shite that was probably Angelina's idea. Also, why were all those thick Israelis having a big party and completely oblivious to the infected?

What a waste of money...could have been epic.
 
Grinner said:
World War Z was pretty disappointing and the feckers didn't have the AC up yesterday which was the whole point of going.

Why did he risk his life going into the wing to get all the diseases when all he really needed to do was to call up his UN mate and have them organize a squad to clear the building. As far as I could tell there was no hurry so why not just get on the blower and call in the cavalry? Presumably it's how he got out of Wales after his solo heroics.
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The Calvary had already made it clear that he was only on board the ship due to him being essential personnel, they would be unlikely to come out to Wales on a hunch as the theory he came up with was yet to be tested.

We also have no idea how he escaped Wales but if he was picked up by the UN guys it will be because his discovery then made it a priority to rescue him ASAP. However considering what they discovered they may well have made it out of Wales themselves.

He also had to consider time constraints due to his family situation where they were in a place with less security than in Israel.
 
thepolice123 said:
The Seventh Seal (1957)

Absolutely stunning film. Haven't really found the right frame of mind to put what I exactly feel into words. I think like Ikiru (1952), this is the perfect example of a successful integration of film and philosophy. Has there been a better film that deals with religion and existentialism? A lot credit must go to the imagery, it is powerful and bleak with the use of the overcasting clouds and dark landscapes. Characters are complex, their dialogues are multi-layered with so much to analyse. People complained that it is boring but I found it to be thoroughly engaging. Didn't know Max Von Sydow is such a great actor, what a powerful performance!
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Yeah, the imagery is sensational. I recite the opening lines now and then since so many people know them in Sweden. The Passion of Joan of Arc, Stalker and Bergman's Winter Light are some other good great films that deal with faith and existentialism.
 
Grinner said:
World War Z was pretty disappointing and the feckers didn't have the AC up yesterday which was the whole point of going.

Why did he risk his life going into the wing to get all the diseases when all he really needed to do was to call up his UN mate and have them organize a squad to clear the building. As far as I could tell there was no hurry so why not just get on the blower and call in the cavalry? Presumably it's how he got out of Wales after his solo heroics. The ending was fecking bollocks too...some UN shite that was probably Angelina's idea. Also, why were all those thick Israelis having a big party and completely oblivious to the infected?

What a waste of money...could have been epic.
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My thoughts exactly, well, apart from the AC thing. Such a disappointment.
 
Tropic Thunder - A movie which does not take itself seriously. Immensely enjoying. Rob Downey Jr playing a black guy, Tom Cruise in a overweight bald getup...it was all :lol:. Very nice timepass movie. 8/10

Olympus has Fallen: Not many movies get me into a rage, but this one did. For it's sheer mediocrity and immense stupidity. Bad direction, worse dialogues & a shite of a screenplay that even Morgan Freegan could not escape from. 0/10
 
Hey fruit cake, lets play a game of feck off.......you go first
 
pauldyson1uk said:
I was looking forward to this, I like Morgan Freeman, but its reviews have been dreadful.
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Don't bother. It's so....uber shite that it makes normal shite movies look less shite.

1. A bunch of about 25 korean taking over the white house that easily is ridiculous. The way they breach the defences that easily is as if they are invading timbuktoo and not DC. They hear a big ass maching gun outside and all agents run straight out of the door and die!
2. Hero just kills multitude of terrorists who hold machine guns with his pistol
3. Hero just walks into the white house and wanders around freely and nobody else does.
4. Freeman and the rest of officals must be the most gullible governtment ever elected. The terrorist has the trigger to a potent weapon and decides to commit suicide without using it....they fall for it.
 
Anna Kerenina - Liked - The stage-setting, the way the characters moved around said setting and the overall atmosphere of the film. Disliked - The story, the characters, any time there were outside/field shots. Hated - The acting, which was so incredibly over the top it took me straight out of the film. I'd it was an intentional direction given in order to mimic a theatre production? But ultimately, this is a film, and it didn't work. Keira Knightly and bloke from Kick Ass were especially bad... terrible performances from both.

Unthinkable - It was okay. I'd heard loads of good things about it, but I don't think it was as it had been made out, and takes a lot of shortcuts in order to ramp up the drama/tension - especially towards the end. Still, it does keep your attention and intruiged in the plot, though I didn't really care for all the terrorism/what it means to be american/torture shit that it wanted to talk about. It's only 90 minutes though, so it moves along fairly rapidly and doesn't over stay it's welcome, so it's probably worth your time overall. Also, Michael Sheen is graet, Carrie Ann Moss is not.

Premium Rush - Jordon Gordon Lordon on a bike. It's quite a bit of fun, and does a pretty good job of capturing the thrill of racing around New York on a bike at high speed... but it is also, totally ridiculous and nonsensical.


Mother - Very good Korean drama about an elderly mother trying to get her wrongly accused, mildly retarded son out of prison. It's well made, it does a great job of capturing life in a small Korean town, and the lead performance from the mother is fantastic. Also, being that this is a Korean film, you're never overly sure on how it's going to end (well, I wasn't) but I did enjoy the ride the film took me on come the end.
 
Springbreakers: enjoyed this, thought it was clever-er than I think expected it to be, and it's a pretty good nihilistic take on America's youth and how they try to lose themselves to find themselves in those orgiac springbreaks, cut from all sense of reality. The film is constructed like one big dream that the characters snap out of progressively, and visually is like loads of MTV clips put end to end which gives it a very bleak atmosphere.

Movie 43: one of the worst film I've ever seen. No logical sense or connection between all the shorts containing an impressive cast, pure nonsense. A lot of gross and crude humour that sometimes makes you chuckle, but as a film, it's dreadful.

The Internship: Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson get fired and are confronted with the job search market. They get an internship during the summer internship program at Google where they're teamed up with a bunch of misfits. They'll compete against all the other interns and at the end only one team will get a full time job. I was expecting to hate it, but overall I enjoyed it. The chemistry is good (both between Vaughn and Wilson and with the rest of their team), some of the dialogue is very funny and despite it being completely devoid of any kind of surprises, it's easy to watch, you marvel at the beauty of Google's headquarters (the Googleplex), and just have a good time. Nothing groundbreaking but easily watcheable. At first sight, it seems like a huge advert for Google and its philosophy of work, but if you look just a bit deeper, there seems to be a bit of criticism of their system. But that's not really looked into that deeply and stays very superficial.

The Help: enjoyed this story about how the black help in white families in Jacksonville in the 1960s decided to tell their stories to Emma Stone's character. It's a nice story, well acted (I thought Jessica Chastain's character especially was quite interesting) and it has the merit to present this story that I'm not sure everyone was familiar with (I wasn't).

Dark Shadows: Tim Burton's latest movie, that I kept falling asleep during. Even though the cast is good and some dialogue is funny, it's overall pretty boring and you never really get into it. I'd give it a miss.
 
If you like Josephor Goryanov Losephine, check out 'Mysterious Skin', one of his earlier films, he's incredible in it. A warning though, it's a very hard film about paedophilia and even though I don't remember it having that much explicit content, it's a hard watch.
 
Including the reliable secondary-trope of gorgeous lead actress made to look "homely" and normal by giving her unkempt hair and glasses.
 
Hummingbird - (or Redemption for the rest of the world...) So yeah, I quite enjoyed this movie... though I really couldn't tell you why. It's pretty slow, not a lot happens, it doesn't do anything all that new or inventive, bar a few character twists that you can see coming anyway... and yet, despite this I found myself oddly intruiged throughout. I also find Jason Statham to be extremely watchable/entertaining... so that helped.
 
World War Z - Love the book, knew before watching thats its essentially nothing like the book. The most ludicrous use of location jumping I've seen in a while, its almost like they asked Brad Pitt which countries he felt like adopting from next and then wrote a plot around it.

This film was clearly butchered at the script stage, thats why it goes to shit very quickly. Add in the fact they went certificate 15 on a film with World War in the title and CGI'd the feck out of it and you just end up with a poor film. I know it has some re-shoots so I know without looking it up that the final act wasn't the original ending, it went all Resident Evil on us and gave Pepsi a big cameo.

2.5/10 - the two comes from David Morse and Peter Capaldi with brief roles, the half comes from casting Matthew Fox and cutting his role to what is essentially a 3 second cameo which I found funny.
 
Wonder Pigeon said:
The Help is another classic in the grand Hollywood genre of white people solving racism.
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That's just being overly cynical. The film is about how the black maids had the courage to step forward and tell their stories despite the dangers that it entailed. A great emphasis is put on this aspect and the importance of courage. Have you seen the film? Emma Stone's character is almost a supporting role to Aibileen and Minny who are the real leading roles of the film.
 
Man of Steel 2/10

The worst movie I have seen in many a year. It's simply poorly acted, poorly shot, poorly scripted dribble, with an hours worth of shaky CGI thrown in for good measure - superman fights bad guy, someone gets thrown through a wall, gets up, looks mean, repeat 3724 times.

It only got two marks because the wife paid for the cinema tickets.
 
King of Kong - Fascinating and gripping documentary. I'd guessed that this serial competitive side of the video game world exist, but this was a brilliant look into it, and into the people that exist within this world. It had a great sympathetic lead, who you really end up rooting for, and in this Billy Mitchell bloke, it has one of the best screen "villains" I've seen for quite some time! Great documentary, thoroughly enjoyed it.
 
Baxter said:
I enjoyed it, but I have not seen the original. I thought it was very entertaining, and the gory scenes were done brilliantly.
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I feel that compared to the original its pretty charmless and lacks tension, it had a budget of $17,000,000 compared to the originals $375,000 yet isn't a patch on Sam Raimi's masterpiece. Check out the original mate, you won't be disappointed :)
 
I actually think people's views on the original are slightly warped because of its cult status. Sure back then when it came out it was original and you can admire Raimi's creativity at making the film on a shoe-string budget (apparently he invested himself hugely in the project, it was a real work of love), but on the face of it, it's not that good a film. The sequels are good because they embraced the silliness and over-the-topness that make them true classics. We had this conversation a while ago in this thread, but the first one had those characteristics unvoluntarily apparently, the bad acting and all the rest were just consequences of the little means they had at their disposal, but it was more of an accident than anything else.

But it does have a cult status and has influenced a lot of the genre since its release, that's undeniable. I don't think it makes its remake pointless at all though, it was a very decent film, well crafted (the cinematography in it was beautiful) and kept the spirit of the Evil Dead films. It was a bit of a fresh take and for amateurs of the genre I think it's a pretty enjoyable watch.
 
Rooney in Paris said:
I actually think people's views on the original are slightly warped because of its cult status. Sure back then when it came out it was original and you can admire Raimi's creativity at making the film on a shoe-string budget (apparently he invested himself hugely in the project, it was a real work of love), but on the face of it, it's not that good a film. The sequels are good because they embraced the silliness and over-the-topness that make them true classics. We had this conversation a while ago in this thread, but the first one had those characteristics unvoluntarily apparently, the bad acting and all the rest were just consequences of the little means they had at their disposal, but it was more of an accident than anything else.

But it does have a cult status and has influenced a lot of the genre since its release, that's undeniable. I don't think it makes its remake pointless at all though, it was a very decent film, well crafted (the cinematography in it was beautiful) and kept the spirit of the Evil Dead films. It was a bit of a fresh take and for amateurs of the genre I think it's a pretty enjoyable watch.
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Agreed with this 100%
 
We talked about it here, where I quoted one of Edgio's posts (and he answers a few posts below). It was him who talked about reading an interview with Bruce Campbell where he explained that the first installment was actually meant to be scary.
 
Yes, but you aren't able to judge it on 1981 standards. What they were able to achieve on such a small budget was incredible and it was far superior to a lot of the dross that was out at the time. Splatter and gore was just coming in and it exploded the genre in every way and was a hell of a movie to watch for the first time.

The bad acting was inconsequential and not uncommon to most horror movies of the time. The tension, effects, innovative camera work, sound and cinematography more than made up for cheesiness. The Raimi style was new too...you're probably used to it with his Spiderman films etc. but back then it looked very different and was great.
 
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