Friday, February 5th, 2010
This film is already dividing opinion, one local reviewer begins his article with “The first 32 years passed without incident. Then I saw Transformers in 2007 and my life was changed forever”. The Times newspaper had a slightly different viewpoint and eloquently described it as the equivalent of director, Michael Bay, “beating his chest and waving his penis at us for a couple of hours”. The truth lies somewhere in between.
This movie is an absolute orgy of stunning computer effects. It’s simply jaw-dropping stuff. It succeeds in this where the latest Star Wars efforts failed simply by displaying just what is possible when you unite the best visual director in the world today with a lot of money and a genre like science fiction.
For an hour I gaped in awe as it built from everyday human events into a national crisis with an unseen and unknown enemy, attacking with a force and intensity never witnessed before on Earth. Everything was buzzing along nicely as the evil Decepticons asserted their dominance and then the holier-than-thou Autobots landed and Optimus Prime, their leader, opened his big fat gob. In an instant, I realised the movie I was watching wasn’t going to finish the good work it had started. The payback never came.
It’s actually quite easy to see why it came to this. Michael Bay simply tried too hard to tick all the boxes. You cannot create a movie based on a set of kiddy toys who come packaged with their own simplistic and incomplete back story and hope to ever produce something that pleases the children that played with those toys, the geeks who have latched on to the character cult status, and the movie buffs.
The basic premise of good robots versus evil robots is completely bang-on the money. Where it fails is the human element. By making the robot effects so awesome, Bay has overcompensated by making the human reaction try to equal it. You simply can’t do it without losing the credibility. The stunts are obscenely complex, the vehicles are spotlessly shiny and the sets just get bigger and less realistic.
The result is the movie equivalent of a tag-team wrestling contest between Terminator 2 and The Rock versus 2 Fast 2 Furious and Matrix Revolutions. One minute it’s the best disaster movie ever, the next it’s a lad’s wet dream. Go and see this by all means, but when you turn off you mobile, remember to do the same with your brain.
© John Clarke
I’m a part-time reviewer trying to build up a portfolio of published work to break into magazine journalism through the back door. All my reviews (music, film or otherwise) with pictures and ratings can be found at: http://johnskibeat.blogspot.com/
Visit : Ceredigion Tw Denmark http://bracessblog.co.cc/ http://micesettecase.co.cc/
Tags: Review, [2007]
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Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
Oliver Twist (BBC) [2007] [DVD] Oliver Twisted. – big al – northumberland
This production bears no resemblance to the Charles Dickens classic. In fact it makes you wonder if the people involved have read Oliver Twist. If you like Dickens don’t buy this,buy the book instead. You will enjoy that.
When I saw this advertised I was wondering whether to watch this but I’m glad that I did.
I thought ‘Monks’ was a nasty piece of work.
Timothy Spall wasn’t exactly my idea of fagin.
But overall well played by everyone. : Another costume drama, another classic literary adaptation, and another stellar cast. You can’t help thinking that it all becomes a matter of routine for commissioning editors at the BBC. But panic not: Oliver Twist is, yet again, a strong piece of work, and well worth adding to the corporation’s impressive collection.
Based, as you’d expect, on the Dickens text, and adapted with real skill by Sarah Phelps, Oliver Twist is a strong three hours of drama. The script isn’t ideal for the Dickens purist, as Phelps has brought some new ideas to her work, but it’s hard to quibble with the quality of the drama that results.
Oliver Twist’s outstanding cast is led by Timothy Spall, and also brings together Tom Hardy, Sophie Okenedo, Edward Fox, Sarah Lancashire and Gregor Fisher among others. They inherit and inhabit Dickens’ varied collection of characters with exceptional skill, and they help to vividly bring the tale of the artful dodger to the small screen.
It should be noted that Oliver Twist isn’t a perfect production, with the deviations from the source material presenting a couple of talking points. But it conforms ably to the high standards we’ve come to expect from BBC costume productions, and while it’s not their finest work, it’s a very good piece of television drama that’s well worth investing your time in. –Jon Foster Oliver Twist (BBC) [2007] [DVD]
Tags: Bridge, Oliver, Solutions, [2007]
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Monday, November 23rd, 2009
Mad Men – Complete Season 1 [DVD] [2007] Very good idea – helene gerard –
Excellent portrait of post-war America through subtle characters and situations.
This is where today’s world comes from…
Enjoy !
MAD MEN may be the best television series ever produced. I speak in terms of quality and writing, photography and acting.
It calls to mind the best of glossy Hollywood movies, circa 1950s-60s. The writing is comparable to Arthur Miller.
The Director/Writer of this series has hit upon the perfect moment…..1960……in America’s history to present to us today in 2009. It was before Kennedy’s assassination, before Martin Luther King’s and Robert Kennedy’s assassinations, before the Manson murders and before 9/11. It was indeed an ‘age of innocence’, and yet also an age of hypocrisy.
These macho Advertising MadMen, with their three-martini lunches, constant smoking (as sanctioned by doctors in their adverts!) and non-stop womanizing, are like a slap in the face to us today, in the politically correct “Noughties”. The mystery of Don Draper and his beautiful wife is there from the start. Who are they, really? The perfectly designed settings and details brings us back to 1960 as if in a dream.
Each actor is superlative in his/her role. I am a hopeless addict after watching this first series. I hear from friends in USA that Series Three is even better. Can’t wait! : Welcome to a world where Monday has a three drink minimum. Mad Men exists here and it’s a fabulous place to visit, back before Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique really made much of an impact and before there were health warnings on cigarettes. It was an America on the brink of social explosion and Mad Men, which tells the story of a group of Madison Avenue advertising executives in the early 1960s, captures that surface stillness perfectly, complete with the growing tension barely contained below the surface. The show succeeds on every level. HBO famously passed on Mad Men, created by former Sopranos executive producer and writer Matthew Weiner. AMC picked it up, and thank goodness they did. From the first episode, season one becomes an essential, utterly addictive television-watching experience. Beautifully filmed and masterfully written, the show manages to present the period honestly but with little nostalgia, and as soon as you get over the constant smoking, drinking and treatment of women as little more than “girls” who get coffee and answer the phone, the complexity of these characters (especially the dashing Jon Hamm as Creative Director Don Draper) will leave you completely captivated. Season one features clandestine office romances, shadowy pasts, a ton of adultery, closeted homosexuality and a lot more drama that seems risqué even now. But again, one of the most impressive things about Mad Men is that everything is executed with absolute class, style and elegance. A bonus for the DVD viewer is that, like The Sopranos, Mad Men has a ton of little moments and hints leading up to character revelations and plot twists that make watching the episodes over and over continually rewarding. –-Kira Canny Mad Men – Complete Season 1 [DVD] [2007]
Tags: Complete, Season, [2007]
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