Rate the last movie you watched.

[semi-pro waster]

25th Hour

Starring

• Edwart Norton
• Philip Seymour Hoffman
• Barry Pepper
• Rosario Dawson

Drama

8/10 A good film with strong performances but quite an open ending, you can take a message of hope from it regarding a life that almost didn't happen or you can assume it was all a dream.

Dog Soldiers

Starring

• Sean Pertwee
• Kevin McKidd
• Emma Cleasby
• Liam Cunningham

Horror film

7/10 An entertaining horror film with some great lines and certainly one of the better horror films of the past 10 years.

My Name Is Bruce

Starring

• Bruce Campbell
• Grace Thorsen
• Taylor Sharpe
• Ted Riami

Horror comedy

6/10 The score is an actual rating of it as a film but if you're a fan of the man, the chin, the legend then you can add on 2 marks. Sorry I got that the wrong way round - if you're a fan of the legend, the man, the chin then add on 2 marks. Cheesy and oh so kitsch but with nods throughout to the Campbell oeuvre, it doesn't take itself seriously and it's much the better for that.

[Belmit]

How could I forget I'd seen...

Doomsday

Ex-Lara Croft model turned actress Rhona Mitra plays a special forces operative who, as a little girl, was airlifted out of Scotland just as the border was shut off due to a hideous disease. The whole of Scotland is quarantined and left to rot for 30 years. Surprise surprise, she has to return to try and find a cure after people in London start to fall foul of the same illness, and satellite images show survivors in the old quarantine zone.

This film is hideous.

The first ten minutes leading up to the sealing off of Scotland are absolutely gripping and I really hoped we were in for a hidden gem. Unfortunately the second we're transported to 'present day' (30 years on) it all goes a bit tits-up. To begin with, the main character has a removable bionic eye. There doesn't seem to be any reason for this except for the purposes of tying the movie up at the end. They could easily have done it another way that didn't involve this ludicrous premise.

The film just feels very much like a hotch-potch of other ideas from films - it's pretty much Tomb Raider meets Mad Max meets 28 Days Later meets Aliens meets Escape from New York meets Waterworld... in a kilt... with full scrotal exposure. The survivors in the zone (formerly Glasgow) have basically created a hideously stereotypical pseudo-punk society, which is seemingly anarchic but with a kind of hierarchy. They all seem to waver incredulously between super camp and ultra violent and the little stageshow complete with dancers has to be seen to be believed. Part of me wondered if maybe they just filmed Glasgow as-is.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any stranger we find there's a bunch of other people who are living a sort of medieval existance with horses and swords. There's another old chestnut in the form of a gladiatorial battle-pit with baying peasants around the parapets. Malcolm McDowell is their leader, as if it couldn't get cheesey enough.

There's also a pretty much unused plot device where she has an envelope with her old address on it. A lot is made of this near the start and again, serves only to explain something right at the end that could have been done in another way without having to force the issue.

I haven't even mentioned the Mad Max style road race in a Bentley, or the completely random team that's assembled to go in at the start that gets butt****ed by punks with sticks. Nor have I mentioned Sean Pertwee being cooked alive and eaten, though I probably should have held back and let you find that lovely nugget of cellulloid greatness yourselves.

Bob Hoskins plays Bob Hoskins. There's a brilliantly unintentionally funny bit where he shoots an infected person approaching a safety bunker just before they reach the closing safety doors... and seconds later in the same scene after the doors have closed is on the inside after presumably coming through some sort of unsecure side door!

I'm giving this 1 point for Rhona Mitra, who is hot, 1 for the unbelievable scene with the dancers on the stage in the Mad Max style arena, and 1 for them not giving in to the cheesiness and trying to make this a proper action-horror flick.

3/10


However, if I was rating it out of ten on whether you should watch it or not... Definitely ten.

[semi-pro waster]

I'd rate it worth watching just for Rhona Mitra's arse if I'm being perfectly honest, the odd thing is I went to watch it at the cinema with a mate and his girlfriend and we could all swear that it was a lead up to an ending shot that zooms in low through her legs and is framed by her backside again - I've got the DVD now and that scene isn't in there so I don't know whether it was mass hallucination or if it was just removed from the DVD release.

[Flibster]

Not a movie, but I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue - Live!

The late, great Humphry Lyttleton, Barry Cryer, Tim Brook-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Jeremy Hardy.

I'm in so much pain from laughter... Jeremy Hardy really can't sing at all. So of course, they get him 'singing' as often as possible. Cruel buggers.

Excellent - 9/10

[Snuggle Ferret]

Star Trek

A blinding 2 hours of silliness, quips, green alien women, Simon Pegg *sigh* and geekness.

8/10

[Garp]

Terminator Salvation

Damn that's a loud film. I heard that criticism before I saw the film but figured it was the cinema. Nope, my local was just as loud. Volume was set right too or the dialogue would have been too quiet.

Wow.

Wow.

It's a superbly envisaged film. The post-apocalypse earth is stunning, suitably grimy and dangerous. The Terminators themselves have never looked quite so realistic as they did in this film.

Brief spoiler free outline of the plot:

2003: Marcus Wright is on Death Row in Texas, having killed some folks. He signs his body over for research post-mortem... and then wakes up in 2018 discovering the world to be post-Judgement Day. That's got to be a shock to the system. Waking up randomly near LA with no idea how you got there, what's going on or why the world is nearly totally destroyed. Especially when your last memory was being strapped to an execution table and having lethal drugs pumped into your arms. One Kyle Reese, only a teenager at this stage, saves his life and they set out to find the resistance.

John Conner isn't even a squad leader, but is known as a prophet to many in the rebellion thanks to his regular radio broadcasts telling people what is likely to come, and things are changing. For reasons he doesn't say, the T800 (Arnie model) is slightly different from the one he knew. The resistance forces have discovered a way to wipe out Skynet and it's up to John Conner to achieve the goal.


It's a different kind of animal to the previous Terminator films, aided in no small part by drastic improvements in CGI. Christian Bale does a good job as John Conner, though I now point blank refuse to get in a helicopter with him. Sam Worthington is trying to be american, but his aussie accent keeps slipping through. That said he does a good job of playing the time-lost man, desperate to find his place in the world.
Second time this month I've seen Anton Yelchin, who was Chekov in Star Trek, this time playing a believable teenage Kyle Reese, desperately trying to survive and fight back.

The kinda-Arnie cameo is some of the best acting I've ever seen him do. Probably at most 30 seconds screen time, one clear shot of his head.. and it's a very young Arnie, probably in his early 20s at most. Superb CGI, you couldn't tell it was fake at all (but obviously is).

The film is nothing OMG Amazing, MUST WATCH AGAIN!!!!1111oneoneonetwothree, but it's also not utter pap (unlike T3), it's actually quite a decent film and bodes well for the future sequels.

I'm sure with Fox at the helm we'll never see the end of the Terminator series, not whilst they can squeeze out a few more meager $$$s from the franchise, but who cares as long as the individual films remain solid? The fight against Skynet is merely the framework in which stuff can be explored.

7/10

[A Place of Light]

The boy in the striped pyjamas

First up, I have to say that I enjoyed it.....perhaps due to the main subject being an interest of mine. The movie is shot from the childs perspective, showing the reality of nazi-ism as it slowly dawns on him. You see the confusion in the boy as his tutor tells him that he should stop wasting his time with the stuff and nonsense (as he calls it) of fables and fiction, only to replace it with their twisted version of history which, to the boy, is even more ridiculous and far fetched.

I'm having trouble scoring this one, but I'd add that it's not (IMHO) as good as Schindlers list but it is a different movie with a different perspective.

Watch it.

[Flibster]

Wanted

Piece of crap.

2/10

[Greenlizard0]

Superman Returns.

I only really just got round to finishing this off, and I have to say it's not that bad. I fell asleep after ten minutes the first time round and woke up by my shoe rack.

The special effects were a little cheesy, but the dialogue didn't do too badly and fall into the same trap. I thought the bloke who was superman was pretty cool, Kevin Spacey pulls off another good (but by no means his best) performance as Lex Luther. The woman who played Louis was just annoying though.

6/10

[Belmit]

Pathology

Was apprehensive about this as Milo Ventigmilia (or however it's spelt) isn't renowned for being a good actor (it's Peter from Heroes for those unfamiliar with the name).

The film started out really solidly as he transfers from his perfect life to a city pathology lab, where he instantly starts showing up some of the current doctors with his knowledge and instinct.

Unfortunately the first half hour is probably the strongest part - where you're unsure of the motives of his colleagues and there's a real sinister air to the whole piece. Pretty soon there's a big reveal about why this is the case, and it turns out the other pathologists are all playing a sick, twisted game with the dead bodies... both before and after they're dead. At this point it all becomes a bit ridiculous, with people getting away with things that just wouldn't go unnoticed. The main character's descension into 'The Game' is, well, out of character.

Overall it's a decent attempt at a psychological thriller, with the guy playing Dr. Gallows turning out a great performance as the ringleader. Just a shame it wasn't put together better. It's a potentially great premise but falls the wrong side of the intelligence line, promising something really clever in the first 30-45 minutes but relying on tried and tested psycho-thriller material towards the end. They also seem to tie it all up in about ten minutes, and although the ending has some kind of satisfaction it just feels like another betrayal of its potential. The end performances are also disturbingly unemotional, and not in a good way. Like the actors just can't be bothered and want to get it over with.

Alyssa Milano in a minor role tips this further toward B-movie territory.

7/10 for a promising start, 5/10 by the time it was over.