Grand Hotel - I was extremely surprised to learn that this was made in 1932. The narrative here is fairly complex for an early talkie. If I had to guess I would have gone with early 40's.

Anyway, I found this quite enjoyable, some nice plot developments which I wasnt expecting. Part of the ending is a bit silly and some aspects a bit dated but overall it was well worth watching.

7/10

The Killer - some nice action sequences like Hard Boiled (although that probably had one of the best in the hospital scene), but not much else at all. I still think Face Off is Woo's best because he had some semblance of a narrative there (not that it was all that earth shattering but it was there). Then again Face Off was missing the kind of kinetic action sequences on display here.

Also, I've come across a few dvds of this film (and Hard Boiled) and all of them, while claiming to have dts and 5.1, sound hollow. Proper DD or DTS would improve the impact of those action sequences a lot.

5/10 

Kingdom of Heaven - Blah. Boring, dull, woefully directed movie by Ridley Scott. And I never thought I'd say this, but it's also poorly shot by Ridley.

A lot of flak was directed towards Orlando Bloom but he doesnt really have to do much and its the script and direction that are the main culprits. The pacing is incredibly wrong and everyone seems to be walking around not knowing what the whole thing is trying to achieve.

Stuff like this, Troy, Alexander and King Arthur make a decent, but flawed, film like Gladiator look like a masterpiece.

3.5/10


Point Blank - B movie crime script given to an 'Arty' director who gives it A grade style, but not enough to drag it out of the B grade.

Woefully remade 30 yrs later as Payback (with Mel Gibson), this is at least an always interesting film if not entirely successful. Lee Marvin is good in the title role and the psychedelic direction by John Boorman is akin to Martin Scorsese's methods in his Cape Fear remake.

6.5/10 

Completely agree. Directionless and with some of the worst dialogue I've ever heard. And god I love ham-fisted attempts to make a contemporary political statement in a historical (well sort of) film.

Stuff like this, Troy, Alexander and King Arthur make a decent, but flawed, film like Gladiator look like a masterpiece.

Double agreed. Why are the recent crop of epics so damn disappointing? 

The main problem is in the scripting.

Some of them are overly ambitious IMHO. Like you said, ham fisted attempts to make a contemporary politcial statement in a historical film. I think both KoH and Alexander fall in this category.

Others take the best aspects of the story out of the script for various reasons. Troy (the gods) and King Arthur (the arthurian legend) fall in this category.

Gladiator, flawed as it was, had a simple story and stuck with it throughout the running time without pretending to be about anything else. I think it also benefited from not trying to revolve around a character/event from history.

Secondly, on top of the script, poor casting. Whilst some of the mentioned films cast certain parts well, there was some woeful miscasting present. And although he didnt warrant an oscar for the role, Russell Crowe is in a completely different league to brad pitt, orlando bloom, clive owen and colin farrell when it comes to acting/performing. I say performing because in the end Gladiator was less about acting and more about presence and Crowe understood that.

Lastly, I guess the newer ones have to compete with LOTR. They try to emulate/top the battle scenes and in an effort to do that, forget completely about choreographing the battles in an imaginative way.

My $0.02 

The Driver - A Steve McQueen movie if there ever was one but it doesnt have Steve McQueen. A fairly pedestrian crime film with 1-2 decent car chases, no real plot, uninteresting characters and poor casting.

4.5/10

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Havent read the book but I found it fairly enjoyable, albeit extremely hit and miss. A lot better when it had quirky observational type humour than when it focused on the special effects.

6.5/10


The Road Home - Simple story, nicely told and shot brilliantly by Zhang Yimou. The plot's a bit too contrived and sentimental to be one of his best films, but it's still quite good.

7/10


Femme Fatale - I've always regarded brian de palma as an expert director who works with awful scripts.

And this is really no different. Classy direction and storytelling, but they cant hide a C grade script with one of the most ridiculous 'twists' I've seen in a while.

5.5/10 

House of Games - Regarded as one of Mamet's best but I just dont see why. The whole thing is extremely predictable (although I'll admit I didnt see the first con coming) and due to some poor casting, the Mamet style of dialogue where everyone talks the same way comes off badly.

5/10

The Astronaut's Wife - textbook example of how not to make a thriller. What should have been a moody, atmospheric polanski type of movie instead opts for needless exposition, making a silly plot just plain ludicrous. Wastes reasonable efforts from Theron and Depp.

3/10


From Hell - Dont usually like to criticise a decent film for not being great but this is one of those exceptions. Good acting (except for a miscast Heather Graham), good premise (if a bit preposterous), good tone and mood, but rather slapdash direction. It's a good film but the potential was there if someone like David Fincher was involved for this to much much better.

And I havent read it, but you can just tell that Alan Moore's graphic novel must have been a corker.

7/10


The Jacket - A screenwriting train wreck if there ever was one. It's so convoluted and weak and characters so badly written that it's surprising you can actually sit through the whole thing and not hate it too much by the end. I think Adrien Brody rises well above the material and his performance might be the reason for the above.

On another note, at least it's an original script, even if it is a dog.

5.5/10

Serenity - Has a tv feel in almost every department from the characters to the writing to the look to the acting to the effects. But apart from that, I still couldnt get into it

Dont know how it made so many top lists of last year.

4.5/10


The 400 Blows - Easily Francois Truffaut's best film out of what I've seen and one of the true classics of cinema. You could loosely describe it as a "coming of age" film but it completely avoids the usual structure of such films and is a cinematic truimph in almost all departments. Guisseppe "Cinema Paradiso" Tornatore should have taken notes.

9/10 

showed Kiera's perky little tits, that should raise it to a 7.5, unless you already adjusted for the curve, and it is really a 3.5. 

I have to disagree. I didn't find the plot all that convoluted. It was a standard 70's science fiction plot (Gene Wolfe, Phillip Dick, and Kate Wilhem, the great ones), once the time travel aspect is understood, the rest of it pretty much comes together. The character development was minimal for all but Brody's character, as it should be; the story could have been more detailed on why Kiera's life went to pot but that would have bogged things down. 

I wasnt referring to convoluted in regards to time travel, like you said it's the standard time travel plot.

How about explaining the sudden romanticism between the two that develops over two seconds, or the sheer bullshitness of her taking him in (yes I know it's christmas eve etc) and the numerous paradoxes that the script fails to address.

Sorry if I'm ranting, but I've seen too many half baked scripts lately (also see below). 

Stay - another pseudo intellectual script that's not as intricate or clever as it thinks it is. Marc Foster seems to realise this and imbues the film with a billion visual tricks, some actually quite nifty. But none of it can really hide the flaws in the script. It's comptetently made and acted, but there's nothing in there that really satisfies you.

5.5/10

Elizabethtown - another turgid mess of a script, this time from Cameron Crowe. Essentially a meandering, lumbering and dull attempt at a coming of age story. Doesnt really give much to the actors to work with and they arent really good enough to rise above the material.

5/10 

or the sheer bullshitness of her taking him in (yes I know it's christmas eve etc

but taking in strays just doesn't strike me as that big of a deal, esp. since Kiera's character had a good reason to feel a kinship with Brody's character, even if at the time it may have been inexplicable to her.

I would like your take on some of the paradoxes; you likely noted things that I missed. 

fair enough, that and the sudden romanticim came across as too contrived for me. And I dont buy the kinship since upon their first meeting in the future, all he did was fix their car once.

Regarding paradox stuff, cant recall all bits specifically but the fact the he learns that he helps cure the kid but then also learns how to cure the kid in the future. If he had to learn how to cure the kid by going to the future, how could Keira have known that he helped cure him (as it hadnt happened yet) ? 

King Kong - Is it overlong and self indulgent ? Yes.

Is it Fun ? Sort of.

I actually enjoyed the first third more than the middle which went on far too long for my liking and with some very dodgy CGI. The 3 tyro fight was pretty well executed though. I also like the last third but felt that parts of it were too sentimental and romanticised. The effects work was probably at its best here too.

Naomi Watts again delivers (she is by far my favorite actress going around), putting in arguably the best blue screen performance to date.

Could have cut out the Jimmy character in its entirety without losing anything except a crap reference to Heart of Darkness.

6.5/10


Le Samourai - A bit too simple and lean to call great but there's no denying the understated brilliance of Jean Pierre Melville's crime/gangster classic. A man in complete control of the material, Melville strips down the crime film to its bare essentials with great attention to detail. Well worth a watch.

7.5/10 

While paradox is very difficult to avoid in Time Travel stories, that would qualify as a gaping plot whole you could drive a truck through. I saw
the movie when it first came out on DVD, but from what I can recall you are most likely right about the sequence disorder. 

HT's homonymicaly impaired. 

Dark Water - not a big fan of the original, I only saw this because of Connelly and because my brother wanted to see it. Competently acted and surprisingly retains most of the plot and structure of the original. Despite not being a fan of Hideo Nakata's film, it was definitely much better than this, stronger drama and tighter direction.

5/10


Layer Cake - dull attempt to make another movie, although slightly harderedged, in the Lock Stock vein. Daniel Craig is quite good (finally understood whyhe was chosen for Bond) and its photographed nicely, but the script is all continuous exposition of new subplots and characters pretty much the whole way through, so much so that it doesnt leave room for much else. Sienna Miller looks hot too.

5.5/10


Whirlpool - classified as a noir, this is actually a so-so melodrama by Otto Preminger. The acting ranges from decent to bad throughout the film, as does the script. Suffers from the same issues that plagued Hitch's Spellbound as it treads similar psychoanalysis territory.

5/10


Domino - This must have crossed the "so bad it's good" line very early on because I kept watching even though it had a trainwreck of a script and the zenith of MTV type direction that just assualted your senses. Tony Scott's a hack, but this was even beyond his abilities, he must have had some help to direct something like this.

Still, it's sort of entertaining for a while till it just keeps going on and on (it's over 2 hrs, which is ar too long fo rsomething like this).

4/10 

I saw the original a few years back... I think there's some pondering of social trends there, like how kids are left alone so much nowadays (same in ring, parents are never around and kids just watch tv)... And then there's the whole theme of the mother abandoning the baby. With the elevator and the filthy water and all. Dunno, maybe I'm reading into things too much. 

you're right, they are definitely there, and I was surprised they kind of ported those over to the remake too since it was marketed as a horror film there which it isnt really. 

From Russia With Love - dont know why this is regarded as one of the best along with Goldfinger, I found it exceptionally tacky and boring.

3/10


Audition - Probably best to see this without any knowledge of the plot (although the cover gives a lot away) but suffice to say it finishes up completely different to where it started. There are not so subtle hints along the way as to where this is headed, but none of them still prepare you for the impact when it arrives. Havent seen any other stuff by Takeshi Miike but this was quite impressive. Dont know how well it would work a scond time around though.

7/10 

From Russia With Love - dont know why this is regarded as one of the best along with Goldfinger...

Well, people who like From Russia With Love (such as myself) like it becuase it's the least gadgety, gimmicky, and science-fictiony of the Bond movies (For Your Eyes Only is another one.) It feels more like an actual espionage film -- no death satellites, no world held hostage, etc.

I actually don't think Goldfinger is as good as people think -- it's got a good theme song, Pussy Galore, Oddjob, and the "i expect you to die" scene, but aside from that, Bond is a fairly unimpressive superagent and spends most of the movie letting his female friends die, and being goldfinger's prisoner. 

the timothy dalton bond movies?

I always liked those - way better than normal bond :) 

that timothy dalton is too "feeling" for a Bond in the vein of the previous ones. He always seems somehow sulking and devastated and saying to the girls like "how do you feel?". Others womanized and shot people like hell, and were mentally rock-solid the whole time... Talk about psychopathy. 

yeah it was definitely more Bond the secret agent rather than Bond the action hero, but I guess I just didnt find it interesting enough as an espionage film.


Megaman,

no this the second Bond film, with Sean Connery. 

Land of The Dead - pretty good zombie flick with a nice dosage of subtext from Romero. Not exactly subtle in its critique, but it is reasonably effective. Of course, it works nicely as a zombie flick plain and simple, though the lack of any real narrative does hurt it a bit.

7/10


40 yr Old Virgin - I must have seen a completely different movie to most people because despite it being highly recommended and also one of the most well reviewed movies from last year, I found it extremely unfunny. I had heard a lot of things about a witty script, but this is as far from witty as I could imagine.

3/10


Le Cercle Rouge - Usually there are a handful of films that define a genre and showcase its highpoints. Sometimes there is one film that does it all. This is that film for the heist genre.

Jean Pierre Melville's masterpiece is impeccably acted, beautifully shot and directed by a man who knows he is in complete control. The confidence of the director in his material is exuded in almost every scene.

9/10

According to imdb, John Woo is currently working on a remake and although he is a massive Melville fan, IMHO there is no way he can replicate the brilliance if it aims to make any money whatsoever.


Cinderella Man - nice looking, feel good against the odds boxing film, mediocrely directed by Howard as usual but with two very good performances from Crowe and Giamatti that stops it from becoming too sappy. It does go on for far too long for what it is given that there is zero character development for any character. Overall though, worth a watch.

7/10


Tombstone - Second viewing, the first was a while back, I still dont like it. It just looks horribly forced, from the acting to the directing to the music. Val Kilmer is the one saving grace but he just draws attention to the ordinariness of the rest of the production.

4.5/10


The Girl with a Pearl Earring - Plodding, dull and uninteresting, mainly due to miscasting of the principle leads. Colin Firth was very unconvincing as Vermeer. Scarlett has a certain acting style (that she always adheres to) which works very well in some roles and makes her look like a lost puppy dog in others. In this one, she comes across as the latter.

3.5/10


A Beautiful Mind - Second viewing of this too and its still how I recall it from the first time round. Apart from a handful of scenes in the second half where Crowe flexes some acting muscles and Connelly lends good support, this is an awful awful film. The script is mostly to blame in my eyes, and then the hamfisted direction.

4.5/10


Wallace and Gromit - CotWR - Quite good, reaosnably witty and funny and the claymation is brilliant. Much better than some of the recent cropt of compuetr animated films like Madagascar and co.

7/10 

I liked it too, esp. Giamatti and Crowe, and the actor who played Max Boer (am I remembering the right boxer, here?) should not be overlooked as his performance was well done. There was one incredibly bad distraction in the movie, Renee Zellweger's accent; it sounded comicaly contrived, like a WB cartoon character from the Bugs Bunny era more that an actual person.