Rate the last movie you watched.

[Garp]

Primer

Time Travel on a Budget

It's a little hard to know what to say about this film, or even quite how I feel about it, so I'll whip the summary from wikipedia:

The principal characters are Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan), two engineers who accidentally create a device which allows an object or person to travel backward in time. The pair initially test the device by using it to cheat the stock market, but are ultimately unable to resist the temptation of using their machine to meddle with nearly every aspect of their own lives. Through their increasing recklessness, they create problems and situations and their newfound power begins to destroy their friendship.

The film was done on a shoe-string budget, just $7k, but it doesn't show at all. They didn't fall into the trap of pointless CGI which would normally be expected with Time Travel.

What you get is an interesting yarn about the consequences of time travel, causality and how two people handle the power differently.

It's staged, filmed and edited brilliantly. It is slightly confusing though. I had to watch it twice through to make sense of it, I must have missed something on my first run through. I reckon it's well worth a watch, but I honestly couldn't give you a rating out of 10, which is rather similar to my thoughts about Donnie Darko.
Spoiler Alert! - Highlight below to read!

Some fun can be found in digging into little throwaway bits that reveal that even the timeline we're watching has been tampered with, for example at the start of the film they have a new freezer. A few scenes later it's an old freezer that they're cannibalising for parts. That slipped by unnoticed the first time through, I didn't pick up on it until the next day when I was thinking about the film. The implication being, I guess, that the old freezer was cannibalised for parts long before the film started, but then that time line was mixed up by someone

End Spoiler Alert!

[Kitten]

Due Date 8/10

Surprisingly good for a 'road movie', some silly bits, some bits where you think..'uhhh....ok', but on the whole, considering what it could have been with lesser actors, pretty good. RDJ is superb (and super-hot as always) playing the highly strung *just on the right side of psycho* that he does so well to complement the incredibly annoying & dim character Ethan Tremblay.

Entertaining 2 hours or so - and better than most movies of this type that I've seen. More Planes/Trains/Automobiles than Road Trip.

Best quote "You hand me that dog and I'll RIP it in half". And the kid's name is genius.

[Belmit]

Weekend At Bernie's 2

Atrocious. Makes no sense. Loved it.

3/10

[Fayshun]

All 3 Pirates of the Carribean films

Pirates, Pirate Zombies, Fish Pirate Zombies and Jonny Depp (Oooh, I would as well!)

9.75/10

[Kitten]

Unstoppable

OMG - edge of the seat stuff. Brilliant.

[Garp]

Megamind

9/10

Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Brad Pitt.

Megamind (Ferrell, sounding nothing like his normal self) and Metro Man (Pitt) are sent to Earth from two different planets that are being sucked into a black hole. Metro Man lands in a large mansion where he's adopted by two well-to-do parents ("You got me a baby?","Oh yes dear, I saw it and thought of you".. "Our baby can fly!","Only the best for my darling"), and grows up using his powers to save everyone.
Megamind lands in a prison, and turns his mind to a life of crime, and naturally he and Metro Man are forever fighting, and he is forever losing or nearly, but not quite winning.

It's hard to start on the plot without providing spoilers, but Kari and I both loved this immensely. As typical with animated films, lots of jokes aimed at every level. Some subtle and some blatant, mostly all brilliant Well worth seeing.

[Greenlizard0]

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

A lot of people raved about this so I thought I'd give it a bash. The story's been done to death a million times already and to be frank, by the time I'd seen only five minutes I began to get disappointed and bored.

However that aside (which usually is enough for me to completely dislike a film) it wasn't a bad 'turn off your brain' effort. This was all about how it presented itself; the references and little comic book and 80s video games' graphics were pretty good. It led to a style of shot which for me was new, in a way like when I saw Sin City for the first time.

It's worth a watch, and looks great on Blu-Ray because of these effects. However I couldn't get over the fact that the script was pretty weak. To the point I'd wondered why the pretty decent cast took the roles and why clearly a lot of money was spent on those graphics.

8/10 graphics
3/10 story
5.5/10 over all...

Leaves of Grass

This film stars Edward Norton as an Ivy League professor whose career is going very well. He's very happy with himself as a result of an impending promotion, until he learns that his twin brother (also played by Norton) has passed away. The rest of his family are polar opposites i.e. they're unsuccessful - in fact his twin is a drug dealer. He returns home with an eye to sort things out.

I'm a big a fan of Norton and have liked all of his films. Great actor and a fantastic voice. This one's all about him playing very different identical twins and he pulls it off well.

The story's much better than the previous film and has quite a decent plot and score. Worth watching in my opinion.

7/10

4 3 2 1

This British film charts the adventures of a few girlfriends whose stories are all intertwined. A girl has a rubbish job at a convenience store in London and one day everything kicks off as a robbery takes place and some diamonds are involved.

It's one of those films where we see one first, then the second while noting how it connects to the first, then the third etc. etc. I don't mind that style of film at all and the decent plot makes it worth a watch. It's a low budget Brit flick, so doesn't have the fancy effects or editing of Hollywood, but that shouldn't be at all enough to be off putting.

6/10

Splice

Adrian Brody and some bird play two lovers and research bio engineers who are at the front of DNA research and the creation of new animals. They one day hit the jackpot and successfully produce strange creations, but are told by their employers to stop their work and focus on more profit driven targets. Ignoring this, and after making out a bit, they go ahead and create something from human DNA.

Natalie Portman plays the part of this thing and it's always a bit weird people play odd parts but she doesn't do a bad job.

The cast is pretty solid and it's not a bad watch. But the script is pretty predictable and it's not an amazing film.

5/10

[Belmit]

I watched Splice last night, and Natalie Portman definitely isn't in it!

I expected it to be a typical Hollywood horror film with a seen-it-all-before story but it surprised me by being a lot darker and psychological than I was expecting. There was always a tenseness provided by the idea that every step of the way they were doing something morally wrong, and never for the right reasons, which added a lot to the film. Suffered a bit from a more mainstream horror/slasher ending which you could see coming from a mile off, and a somewhat tedious 'twist'. 5/10 is fair, maybe worth a little more for the 'Dren' effects.

[Greenlizard0]

Oops you're right.

[Flibster]

Fanboys

Geeky it may be, but this could well be one of my favourite films of the year. Laughed so much at it. Not a film for you if you've not seen or didn't like Star Wars - it's set in 1998 around a group of fanboys *and a fangirl* trying to break into Lucasfilm to steal a copy of Episode 1 before it's revealed as one of their number has cancer.

The number of cameo's in it is up there with the later View Askewniverse films - Billy Dee Williams, Ray Park, Carrie Fisher, Seth Rogen, Danny Trejo, Ethan Suplee, Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes and William Shatner all appear in various roles.

George Lucas saw an early cut of the film and gave the producers access to the original sound effect library so it's now loaded with sound effects from the original trilogy.

Filled with in jokes as well, it's a total geek out. I loved it.

9/10