What to Expect When You’re Expecting – Review

May 25, 2012 Leave a comment

What to Expect When You’re Expecting (2012)

Director: Kirk Jones. Cast: Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Banks, Chace Crawford, Anna Kendrick, Matthew Morrison, Dennis Quaid, Chris Rock.

Don’t ask me what possessed me to go and watch this film. In my defence I can tell you that I had seen everything else at my local multiplex and I had 2 hours to spare. Also the cast seemed impressive enough… and, to top it all up, my wife is pregnant, so I thought at least I would fit its target audience just perfectly.

To be completely honest I was expecting (sorry about the pun) something a lot worse: this is one of those average ensemble comedies where, as always some of the stories and some of the characters are more successful than others but in the end they are so many of them that if you are a parent or preparing to be one, you’re bound to find a something to like… Other than that, this is all pure middle-class Hollywood, pretty slick, light-hearted but with enough sweet-and-sour moments to make it feel like it’s actually about something. Obviously at the end of the day it’s all rather forgettable, and it’s actually a great shame, because the acting talent a shown here is impressive (surprisingly even Jennifer Lopez showcases a nuanced performance unlike much we’d seen before) both directing and editing are potentially quite skilled at doing what they do and the few good moments here and there give you a little glimpse of what it could have been.

The main problem is that the film is just not funny enough to be able to be a crowd pleaser and looses itself among the too many subplots, some of which are way off the main subject, to be able to become a classic (the golf cart chase sequence is one of the lowest and unfunny points and the father group sequences, despite Chris Rock, are just too indulgent, over the top and long).

However having said all this, I must confess, even though I laughed very little, I found myself moved a couple of times: oh dear, it really must be the hormones (I think they call it sympathetic pregnancy).

5.5/10

Filed under latest movies, Reviews Tagged with Anna Kendrick, babies, Cameron Diaz, Chace Crawford, Chris Rock, crowd pleaser, Dennis Quaid, Elizabeth Banks, golf cart, Jennifer Lopez, Matthew Morrison, parents, pregnacy, What to Expect When You're Expecting

The Raid – Review

May 23, 2012 Leave a comment

The Raid (2011)

Written & Directed by Gareth Evans. Cast Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim.

Ok, let me start with a little confession: I am not a huge martial arts fan, I have always been quite indifferent to Bruce Lee, I can hardly tell the difference between Jet Li and Yuen Biao and to this day I still don’t get all the fuss with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (I know, I know… but hey… nobody is perfect!). However I am a great action-flick-lover, so much so that I able to bypass this feeling of indifference and still appreciate and enjoy a martial-arts-based action movie, whether it’s karate kid, blade, Hero, 13 Assassins, Ong-bak (especially the first) and even the recent Warrior.

So when I heard that this was “one of the best action/martial arts movie of the last few years” (or so the papers said), I could hardly resist checking it out for myself.

Let’s get this out of the way right from the start, so you’ll know the kind of movie we’re dealing with here: the story is minimal, in fact it doesn’t really matter. The raid is 100 minutes long and has action, fights and shoot-outs for at least 95 of them!! It is an incredible tour de force like no other: 95 minutes of people shooting at each other and fighting with all sorts of weapons, knives, machetes, bare hands… and that’s pretty much it. There’s not a lot of attempt at creating three-dimensional characters, or at giving a back-story. It’s just unrelenting action unravelling in front of your eyes.

You may wonder: doesn’t it get a bit tedious after a while? Well, this is the incredible strength of the raid: not only it gets away with it, but it’s also fascinating. Watching the choreography of these fights is almost like watching a ballet at the opera, or a dance in a theatre. It is mesmerising at best. And once a fight has reached its climax and it’s about to run out of steam, a new one comes along, faster, slicker, more inventive and even more over-the-top than the previous one.

This is unlike anything we’ve seen before. I don’t think I ever remember watching a film which had this insane amount of action, with hardly a moment to breathe. Yes, some of the fights might go on for a little bit too long, but let’s stop picking needles please! It is amazing, full stop.

Welsh director Gareth Evans obviously belongs to the PS3/X-Box age and the film does look like one of those shoot-them up games, where you’re moving from one level to the next as your enemies become more and more dangerous and the amount of violence and blood increases more and more. Even the building itself with its muted colour and its endless claustrophobic and shabby corridors look straight out of a bad dream while its exterior is reminiscent of a digital creation.

But Gareth Evans is not just playing a game here, he has studied his genre inside-out and throughout The Raid you can spot reminders of John Woo (Hard Boiled, of course), Sam Peckinpah, John Carpenter and of course those thousand martial arts movies from Bruce Lee, to Jackie Chan. However Evans is not just another fanboy willing to make a pastiche out his sources (Did you get that, Mr. Tarantino?!), he’s actually able to create his own action-packed, adrenaline-fuelled and pulsating and visceral movie, whipped along by a propulsive score and the deafening drum-roll of automatic fire guns as the pace never lets up leaving no room for humour and irony. He plays it straight and comes up with a real winner.

8.5/10

Filed under latest movies, Reviews Tagged with action movie, Bruce Lee, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Gareth Evans, Iko Uwais, Jackie Chan, John Carpenter, John Woo, Martial arts, Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior, PS3, Quentin Tarantino, Raid, Sam Peckinpah, shoot-them-up, Tarantino, video games, Walter Hill, X-Box, Yuen Biao

Piranha 3DD – Review

May 22, 2012 1 Comment

Piranha 3DD (2012) –

Directed by John Gulager. Starring Danielle Panabaker, Ving Rhames, David Hasselhoff. Christopher Lloyd, Gary Busey, Jean-Luc Bilodeau, David Koechner

The only achievement of this film, as far as I am concerned, it that it has managed to get the lowest score so far on my blog. Of course, I was never expecting to see a masterpiece from a movie with such title… But at least I was hoping for something just as self-consciously trashy, funny and splatter as the deliciously camp B-movie first part (which itself was a remake) directed by Alexandre Aja in 2010.

There have been several trashy splatter/exploitive horrors in the past (mainly in the 80s and early 90s) which I still consider classics within their own genre (Re-Animator, Society, possibly even Tremors and to a degree the Evil Dead movies just to mention a few). Why couldn’t this have been one of them? All the ingredients seemed to have been there: an R rating (18 here in the UK), tits-galore right from the title, exploitive 3D, horrible little hungry monsters (piranha in this case), and a series of more or less famous stars willing to play along…

Unfortunately what I found was the most un-inventive, uninspired, un-funny, un-scary, dull piece of junk I have seen in a very long time… (Well, I guess that by itself is quite an achievement since I do watch quite a lot of movies). Yes, it’s boring too, despite being only 83 minutes long.

How can somebody like Christopher Lloyd, the man with a resume sporting such masterpieces like One Flew Over the Cuckoo‘s Nest and Back to the Future, could have accepted to have his name associated with such an insult to human intelligence is beyond me! Was your rent really so behind, Chris?

The film is badly conceived, badly filmed, really badly post-converted into 3D (possibly the worse conversion I’ve seen since a cheap stereoscopic comic I had when I was 10!). The story (if we can call it such) makes no sense (there’s a piranha in the swimming pool… well, get the f**k out it!). The characters (again… characters?!) all merge into one and even the gore is way below anything one would have hoped for such a movie and most of the potentially gruesome stuff is happening off camera (I guess they didn’t have enough imagination to figure out how to make it on camera!)

For the first 30 minutes or so, you don’t really know how to take it. It seems a film aimed at 14 or 15 years old kids who are hoping to get a peek at some boobies for the first time in their lives… except that this film is actually rated 18…which kinda defeats that purpose. So in the beginning it all starts building up as a straight horror (a bad one of course, but still a horror). Only once David Hasselhoff shows up you actually begin to get a hint of the fact that this is all supposed to be taken for a laugh… If only it were remotely funny. The “jokes” (please notice the inverted commas) are so puerile and genuinely unfunny that it becomes almost embarrassing. Not only we are not laughing with it, but we are not even laughing at it… in fact we are just not laughing at all.

This is one of the few films where not even the endless outtakes during the end credits can make you smile (And when I say ‘endless’ I do mean really endless.. What an indulgent and embarrassing moment!. There is nothing worse than seeing a whole bunch of actors and grown-up film-makers laughing at things which are not even remotely funny to us outside.

To be honest, I think the film doesn’t even deserve such a detailed review, so I’ll just stop here and urge you to give it a miss, even (and especially) if you love this genre.

3/10

Filed under latest movies, Reviews Tagged with 3D, B-movie, Christopher Lloyd, Danielle Panabaker, David Hasselhoff, David Koechner, Gary Busey, horror, Jean-Luc Bilodeau, John Gulager, Ving Rhames

The Avengers – Review

May 21, 2012 10 Comments

THE AVENGERS (2012)

Directed by Joss Whedon. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Samuel L. Jackson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Hiddleston.

At the time I’m writing this, just 2 weeks after its release, the Avengers (or as it is, stupidly, known in the UK, Avengers Assembled) has already broken all the possible records at the box office (biggest opening, biggest week-end, biggest poster, longest end-credits and so on) and it’s fast and steadily climbing along the list of the top grossing movies in history. So basically no matter what I think or say (read as “bugger off moviegeek!”), this movie is a massive success anyway! To be anti-Avengers would mean being pretty much against anyone who’d be interested in reading this blog… So going into the theatre I had a certain trepidation and fear at the same time… What if I don’t like it? Will I be able to tell my friends… and readers?

Well, you know what? We can all relax, because I actually found the Avengers (I’m sorry, but I refuse to call it with the UK title), not just entertaining, but actually among the best movie about superheros I’ve seen in a while. It is certainly up there with both Spiderman 2 (my favourite from the Spiderman-Raimi trilogy… but then again I have a Spidey soft spot), and, might not be as stylish those first two Nolan-directed Batman movies, but it’s certainly a lot more fun.

If you’re going to see a superhero movie, this is exactly as it should be! And if you’re going to see a movie where lots of superheroes get together, this is exactly as it should be done!

Hats off to Marvel and Joss Whedon, whose gamble seems to have really paid off!

We’ve been teased by tantalising snippets, trailers and film clips for years and the expectations seemed to be just a little bit too grand to be gracefully met… and yet the Avengers is everything it should have been and probably a bit more than that.

It understands exactly what comics are and the kind of wide range audience they are speaking to: for a start it is all very light and tongue-in-cheek the way it should be (after all this is a make-believe-world where people fly, turn green and travel from space), it is very funny (I surprised myself a couple of times laughing out-loud as I had not done in a long time in an action film. There a couple of moments involving the Hulk which caused the biggest and most spontaneous laugh from an audience I can remember since Indiana Jones shot the sword-man in Raiders of the lost Ark). But aside from this, however far-fetched and silly it all is, the action is done skilfully, the story is told with conviction and characters are rooted in enough reality to make it all much more enjoyable, so that even though you know exactly that no superhero is ever going to die, you are still sitting on the edge of your seat trying to work out how on earth they’re all going to come out alive.

The film is beautifully balanced, filmed and crafted with meticulous attention by a studio and a director who clearly care and they are not just going for the big explosions a-la Transformers (though, you do get those too!). Whedon has created a something for the hard-core fans, the geeks and nerds but also the freshman, the first-timer and the novice. He gives each character the right amount screen-time and whoever you’re a fan of, you won’t feel shortchanged. He created the perfect baddie, he orchestrated the smoothest actions scenes, fast and yet always clear. He even answered the ultimate geeky questions like “Who’s stronger Thor or Captain America? Iron Man or the Hulk?”, but on the other hand he was always aware of his newcomers and gives them enough information to be able to enjoy the film and follow the story without resorting to boring expositions.

Clocking at around 2 hours and a half the Avengers rarely looses its steam (it has a bit of a dip just before the last battle, but it picks up straight away and it’s hardly noticeable): yes you may argue both the two great action set-pieces go on for a little too long, but there are so many characters to follow, that it’s a weakness I’m willing to forgive.

The Special Effects are pretty seamless and the music is well judged throughout: you get the hero theme, but also you get the silence when there should be some. Even the 3D wasn’t as annoying as it usually is and the retro-fitting was very well done too.

Of course, it’s ludicrous, but hey, it’s the Avengers, it’s not a arty-French drama! To be honest I had not had so much fun watching an action movie in a long time! Only one suggestion: try to watch it in a packed cinema with an audience of fans and just go with it!

Does it deserve to be the third top grossing movie in history? Certainly not, but as long as it knocks down Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest I’m happy.

7.5/10

CHECK OUT MY OTHER REVIEWS OF SUPERHEROES:

Thor

Captain America

Green Lantern

Filed under latest movies, Reviews Tagged with action movie, Avenger, Avengers Assembled, comics, Hulk, Jeremy Renner, Joss Whedon, Mark Ruffalo, Marvel, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Robert Downey, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hiddleston

2 Days In New York – Review

May 20, 2012 Leave a comment

2 Days In New York (2011)

Director: Julie Delpy. Cast: Julie Delpy, Chris Rock, Alexia Landeau, Alexandre Nahon, Kate Burton, Albert Delpy, Dylan Baker.

Strictly speaking this is a sequel of the 2007 Woody-Allen-esque “2 Days in Paris” (well…Woody Allen in his old days, of course), but it also stands on its own and works simply as a stand-alone story and certainly you won’t need to have seen the first part in order to find your bearings through this. However if you have seen “2 days in Paris“, you’ll probably come into “New York” with a certain baggage and knowledge which might help you in appreciating (and liking) the central character of Marion a bit more than this film gives you reason for.

A lot in the depiction of Julie Delpy‘s character Marion and her relationship with American boyfriend Mingus has to be taken for granted here, even if it’s all quite unbelieveable. Don’t take me wrong, it’s all rather charming and light enough to be entertaining, but the script lacks the subtlety, the romanticism and the sharpness from its predecessor, while at the same time it plays up all the possible French clichés one would expect: and so the French seem to have no sensitivity,nor social skills, no hygiene and of course they all love their fromage: these are all predictable targets and I suppose the only surprising twist is that all comes from a French person willing to make fun at her own country (Julie Delpy also wrote and directed the film).

It’s all rather superficial but the jokes keep on coming, the culture clash at the centre of the film brings enough laughs and mercifully the overall lenght is only 96 minutes. There are some indulgences which I didn’t find particularly successful: Mingus’s monologues in front of a cardboard cut-out of Omaba are not as funny as they should be and the sequence where Marion tries to buy her soul back from a notoriously difficult actor playing himself (I won’t spoil here who it is, but if you google him you’ll be able to find out quite easily) is too indulgent, too knowy, and outstays its welcome and in the end looses that potentially quirky charm it could have had.

But the biggest and most refreshing surprise of the “2 Days in New York” is actually Chris Rock who despite the lack of chemistry with his co-star and an underwritten role, manages to pull out not just the best performance in the film (sweet, understated and charismatic) but possibly the most interesting and revealing of his career. Let’s just hope this is the first of many others to come.

6.5/10