I just got this on DVD tonight. I was never much of a fan of the first one, but I have to admit Johnny Depp made it supremely watchable, even if the story itself wasn't up to snuff.

I did enjoy this slightly more, although it suffered from similar problems. The plot is spread very thinly to cover the two and a half hour running time but still managed to jump all over the place. I was pretty bored of the constant Kraken attacks towards the end of the film, but Davy Jones and his crew were cool to look at, and a lot more menacing than the zombie pirates of the first film. Bill Nighy made a good Quarren.

Overall though I think this is a perfect case of the film just getting lost in visual spectacle. Less is sometimes more. 

What a great little thriller about a young held hostage under demand on an airliner. Fast paced, but well worth seeing, probably one of the most tense and just creepy films I've seen that didn't involve horror - and came from Wes Craven. 

it was above average and reasonably well made but the silly ending was a bit much.

But way better than I thought it would be. 

Felt so, so contrived. And the heat-seeking missile that locks on to... a hotel room? wtf? 

2. to bring about or effect by a plan, scheme, or the like; manage: He contrived to gain their votes.

Well, yeah. And? 

Les Amants (1958) - The second collabration between Louis Malle and Jeanne Moreau is nowhere near the quality of their first, Elevator to the Gallows, but it's still an above average look at the emptiness of an upper class socialite's life in 50's France.

Malle's direction is good and Moreau once again demonstrates why she was one of the best actresses in history but it feels quite dated and the second half in particular comes across as lazily scripted.

6.5/10


Kenny (2006)- Aussie film done in the Spinal Tap mockumentary format about a portable toilet deliverer.

Very funny, and surprisingly, its also a very good film when it's not being funny. That second apsect is really why I think this really works as well as it does, because while the comedy would have been good enough on its own, it would have become a bit one note.

Plenty of poo jokes and plenty of very funny non-poo related jokes.

8/10 

Daisy (2006) - how you go from making Infernal Affairs to this is hard to understand but this is quite a bad movie. Its well shot but there is next to zero directing ability shown here and the script is a hopeless mess of B grade melodrama mixed with B grade crime thriller.

4/10 

Jindabyne (2006) - another aussie film and this one's a potentially great movie marred by some overportentous (and completely unnecessary) camerawork and background score. Its at its best in the second half, where Ray Lawrence sits back a bit and lets the script and acting come to the fore.

Petty good as it is, but could have been much much more.

7/10 

Casino Royale - return to form ? Sort of.

Craig makes a fine Bond and Eva Green is also well upto the task but this needed to have been trimmed by around 30 minutes. It could have gotten away with its length if the pacing was better, but the movie starts off on acid and is hobbling on crutches by the end.

In the middle of all that is not a bad little action film with competently handled action scenes, but nothing extradordinary.

6.5/10 

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - rewatch, and while the watching on a big screen with surround sound plays up to two of its strengths, namely some fine cinematography and John Williams' impressive score, this still doesnt really work for me.

I find the acting shoddy, the drama not believable and the narrative pretty much non existent.

Worth a watch for some isolated scenes.

6/10 

Simpsons season 8 - The last of the good seasons IMHO, sure there were good episodes after this, but not good seasons on the whole.

This one was actually better than 7 and had some great episodes and event he lesser ones were very consistent.

8/10 

Paths of Glory (1957) - Stanley Kubrick's later work might have been bloated and overly ponderous but his early career is littered with great films. This is arguably his tightest film, an amazing achievement considering how tightly wound his fabulous film noir The Killing was.

Quite possibly being the second greatest war film, it is staggeringly well made with one of those great endings that only appear in a handful of movies. Its impeccably shot, I believe Spielberg when he said he was basing the war scenes in Saving Private Ryan partially on what Kubrick did here. It might not have the effects but the intensity is still captured in some great camerawork. And it's not only great cinematography during the war scenes, every scene is shot not just as an exercise in style but as supportive of the content.

Kirk Douglas was a limited actor but this is his best role. And the script about 3 men who are tried as scapegoats during a military failure is very well written, never bowing to cheap sentimentality, but still remaining very powerful.

The only minor flaw is that some of the supporting cast could have been slightly better.

9/10


The Thin Man (1934) - Above average comedy-thriller with some sharp dialgoue between its two leads, one a retired private detctive and the other his affluent wife. The script is better than the plot allowing its main characters some great dilaogue. Unfortunately the plot manages to retain too much focus, something that works against the film given its tongue in cheek tone.

6.5/10 

Frida - another middle of the road biopic.

It's nicely scored and, although it only looks stylistically beautiful without the cinematography serving any real functional purpoe, its well shot.

Salma Hayek tries hard and is ok in the title role but the script suffers from the same problem as the majority of biopic scripts, trying to cram the whole life of its subject into the running time, rather than picking on a period or certain events to highlight what the character was all about.

5.5/10 

Carnivale Season 2- ok, I have 3 main problems with this season so I'll get those out of the way first. None of them are related with the show being canceled and not finishing as it should have (although that is another negative but one that cant be helped).

Anyway :

- The pacing this season is very schizophrenic. Some of the episodes are very chaotic (especially the first 4) and seem completely at odds with the pacing of season 1 and also the majority of the second half of this season. It does settle down after the first 4 but there's still few in the scond half that display the same chaoticness.

- The manner in which some of the questions raised during the entire first season are answered is clumsily handled. This is quite a pity as it is really apparent that the majority of the major plotline was worked out well in advance and was not being made up as the show went along (eg Lost). This is also the reason most of it links together and fits reasonably well but if the execution of the exposition was better, the show would have been even greater.

- It plays the weird card far too often and for no real purpose. Season 1 had the balance right, this season felt as if it was trying to be weirdjust for weirdness' sake.

Right, with all that out of the way, this show is extremely well put together and even with all those problems, this is still great television. It might not be as close to perfection as season 1 was, but there's lots to admire and like. And at least it provided some answers, unlike certain other shows which just like to keep piling on the questions.

8/10 

I've seen this in an on and off bits and pieces -fashion, but being a snapshotty story, it didn't bother me that muhc... I just now watched the last part.

I find a lot of it strangely... sobering? Stiller is a pretty strong character here and feels natural in the lead role.

One of those films that stand out a bit for me.. I guess it's the unordinary but still somehow reality-connected life that is so fascinating.
It's not a perfect family life shattered by a mass murderer, but instead just some guy trying to get by and stumbling a lot on the way. Explained in a sort of inadequate way.


Oh and twin peaks is re-running again... I never really watched it before.
The pilot and the first episode at least mostly make sense but from what I remember it goes downhill with time. :/ 

Saw this over the weekend. A simple, well-crafted dark fairy tale. Recommended. 

looking forward to it. 

Scoop - well Match Point was a change in direction and a return to form somewhat, but this is basically the same type of Woody Allen film we've been getting for the last 15 years or so, a tired attempt at trying to recapture the wit and freshness of his earlier years.

This extremely slight comedy/murder mystery runs briskily but that's about all it has going for it. Scarlett Johannson is way out of her league in trying to put in a comic perfromance, Allen is annoying, and Hugh Jackman doesnt havemuch to do. The script is less than half baked and the whole thing is quite uninspired.

5/10 

Bringing Up Baby (1938) - not sure why I didnt really like it the first time around but upon a rewatch I was quite impressed by the zaniness of the whole thing. It still drops in the second half but to keep up this amount of wackiness for a whole movie should not really be expected anyway.

I'm also unsure what I thought about the performances last time around, but Katherine Hepburn really worked for me here. This is an inspired performance, which is much more than I can say for some of her later (and more celebrated) efforts. Cary Grant does well playing off her too.

7/10


Manhunter (1986) - Michael Mann's pre-Silence of the Lambs version of Red Dragon is, as usual, moody, well shot and well directed. However, it is also clusmily scripted, not very well acted and hampered by a very dodgy 80's soundtrack.

Brian Cox is actually pretty good as Hannibal Lecter but Lecter's character is not given as much screen time here as he was in the remake. But it's William "CSI" Petersen who is really unconvincing in the main role that later was played by Edward Norton. Petersen singlehandedly manages to undo all of Mann's good work with a fake performance that doesnt ring true in any way.

5.5/10 

Ringu (1997) - rewatch, and I still think this is one case where the american remake is far superior. For one thing, Naomi Watts is much better in the central role of the journalist investigating the mysterious video tape deaths. Also, gore verbinski's version had some nice memorable imagery which the low key japanese version is lacking and there was also a more well created sense of weirdness and dread in the remake. The original has a slightly better plot, with the remake adding in some unnecessary and silly scenes, but given that the whole setup was fairly preposterous anyway, that didn�t bother me. I liked the ending on the remake, but I do think the ending on this version is superior (although it wouldn�t really have fitted in with the remake).

5.5/10

Red Dragon - Michael Mann's Manhunter was fairly average but this version of the novel is even weaker. Edward Norton is slightly more watchable than William Petersen in the role of Will Graham but only just, its still a fairly lacklustre performance. And although the dodgy 80's soudntrack from Mann's film is not present, the replacement by a generic thriller score isnt all that much better. Obviously, Hannibal Lecter's role is expanded, but this time Anthony Hopkins phones in his perfromance from Camp Cheese. And even though both movies had virtually the same plot and an identical screenplay, this version had the addition of an extremely dumb and silly hollywood ending. Mann's film was better directed, better shot and also much more moodier (despite still being very average).

5/10

A Scanner Darkly - Richard Linklater's lucid and trippy film is perhaps the best realised version of the essence of Phillip K Dick's work. Total Recall was a decent film, but its only the expansion of one of his short stories. Blade Runner is a great film, but it deviated significantly from the source material. And Minority Report is only above average.

The animation style adopted (basically real footage superimposed with animation) suits the material very well, and renders a drug induced world quite nicely. The first 2/3 is short on substance, but is surprisingly very funny, with Robert Downey Jnr and Woody Harrelson providing plenty of laughs.

But the movie takes a different turn in the last 1/3 and if you can withstand a meandering and sometimes aimless screenplay till then, you get a pretty good payoff as all the lightheartedness gives way to a rather haunting little sequence of events.

The final end credits, replicated straight from the book, make sure that feeling stays with you for a little while.

7/10


Thank You For Smoking - hmm, it's perfectly watchable but it definitely feels stuck in middle ground, where it's thankfully not as soppy as a feel good redemption tale, but is also not as biting and cynical as it could have been.

It's arguable that going further in either direction would have resulted in a lesser film, but as it is I found it to be a nice enough distraction but not really engaging.

6.5/10 

The Bad Sleep Well (1960) - Akira Kurosawa's loose adaptation of Hamlet mixed with equal parts film noir, procedural thriller and corporate corruption expose is a great film let down slightly by a few missteps in the last act.

The opening twenty five minutes is devoted entirely to a wedding sequence and is a sheer masterclass as Kurosawa flawlessly sets up all the characters and slowly reveals all the information that will be necessary for the next two hours. Francis Ford Coppola must have been taking notes as his vitrual rehash of the scene to open The Godfather is as perfect.

What follows is a brilliantly shot, paced and acted movie that has a lot going on, and its only the anticlimax right at the end that doesnt quite deliver after the tremendous buildup.

8/10 

Futurama Season 3 - Nowhere near as consistent as seasons 1-2, and there's no real great episodes either, although there's a handful of very good ones. The second half's probably the strongest so I hope that continues on to season 4.

6.5/10

The Black Dahlia - I really dont get all the negative criticism this has been garnering. Sure, it's a flawed movie that feels a bit empty and flat, is awkwardly paced and is miscast, but its also quite evident that its made by a real filmmaker.

Brian de Palma's skills have almost always been compromised by shoddy material (which he sometimes writes himself) and it's arguable that he blew a chance to make a great film here given the quality of the source material, and it does feel like the movie's missing several crucial scenes, but what is there is quite well made. He and the scriptwriters just needed to let it breathe more.

6.5/10 

The Lady in the Water - M. Night Shyamalan's stories become increasingly childish and pie-eyed as this one revisits his theme of opening with a bedtime story he made up and then dwelling on characters that play parts in that story except he never told them. They spend two hours coming to terms with their 'purpose', having magically skipped over the part where they might actually question why their superintendent is telling them they have to protect a naked chick he found in the pool from a red-eyed dog made of grass so that the sky eagle can take her away. It might have been nice to throw that kind of bone to the audience first, because we're not buying it either, but instead Shyamalan almost acknowledges that he had no idea how to solve the problem of using his characters to elicit suspension of disbelief from his audience by ignoring the fact that he needed to in the first place and hoping we wouldn't notice. In one shot, frumpy stuttering protagonist learns that one of his tenants fits an archetype in this sea nymph myth the director made up, and then in the next that tenant has now miraculously been fully convinced of the reality of this myth by the frumpy stuttering protagonist and is totally cool with the whole thing.

Cinematography was the directorial equivalent of speaking in a monotone - nearly every shot is a long static cut from an utterly neutral angle, with editing that completely ignores all action and emotion his characters attempt to convey. It's like Stephen Wright was reading me the words to a lullaby he didn't care about. That's apparently Shyamalan's style, but I don't see how it adds a thing to his storytelling. 

but usually christopher doyle is pretty impressive behind the camera. But I guess you can only shoot in the way you are told to :) 

I saw the trailer yesterday evening, and it seems the movie will be interesting. The story comes from a legend of ancien Greece. the action takes place in Spartes. 300 Spartes warriors have to fight against hundreds Persians to save their city. It is as dark as Hell, the battles seems to be epic as "The Lord of the Ring" battles, and bloody as far as possible ! Everything I like in a movie...