Long time, but not no see.

It really has been way too long. I'm afraid life has caught up with me a little, and laziness has also had a part to play. But, that doesn't mean I havent been keeping a watchful eye over the cinematic world and here is a quick overview of the best films ive seen over the past few months (both at the cinema and on dvd)

                  

                                            

             

The Help, was to be expected: sweet, poignant and with some very strong performances, portraying a possibly very real look at the lives of the black help in 1950s america. It's only downfall, may be the fact that it is exactly what you expected, and to the standard you expected it to be. Certainly no worse, but not that little bit extra special either.

50/50 was the bitter sweet comedy about a young man dealing with the fact that he has cancer. It's weird that a film which doesn't really have much going on and isn't really that comedic (even with seth rogan throwing in the quips) can be a quiet yet moving film, thats enjoyable to watch and has you rooting for it's very likeable main character (played by a very good joseph gordon-levitt). I don't particularly like seth rogan in his predictable vulgar best friend role that he is sooooo used to playing. I just want him to branch out a little. For me, he was the only let down in an otherwise very sweet and poignant movie.

I didnt see The Beaver at the cinema. It got average reviews and I have very strong opinions around mental health and how it's portrayed. However, it was on sale in hmv and i was bored, so i thought what the heck. It's a film about a man (mel gibson) who is suffering (and has done so for many years) with severe depression. He learns to deal with this by living through a puppet he finds; creating a total different character, and beginning to regain his life back (as a beaver puppet...). Now i know it sounds a little odd, and i'm not sure it comes across that clearly onscreen, but i actually think it is a very important and real look at depression and how it can make a person feel, and the desperation it can lead them to. Gibson (as controversial as he may be at the moment) did a brilliant job of playing two parts of the character, and although the film as a whole did lack somewhat, his performance, and the focus on his illness was brilliant.

I've said it before and i will say it again; i could watch robert downey junior paint a wall. Thereby i was always going to see Sherlock Holmes: a game of shadows even when the first one was distinctly average and i didnt have high hopes for the second. However, i was very pleasantly surprised. The plot was better, the "baddie" was better, and the jokes were funnier. But most of all, the bromance between sherlock and watson was worked on, developed and played on, and that is what makes these modern remakes so entertaining.

The Artist: unexpectedly beautiful, refreshing in todays society, gorgeous to look at and superbly acted. I didnt know what to expect, and i think the "silence" takes a little to get used to, but once you do, you are thrown into a heart warming story which is lavished with detail, care and love. GO see it!

Well, there's an update, lets hope it doesnt take me as long to write the next one.

Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Ahh two cinema trips in a week. This is more like it. And what's more two good films in a week. Success.

   Crazy, Stupid, Love is a quirky, funny and refreshing (yes it is possible) chick flick, about the marriage of Cal (Steve Carrell) and Emily (Julianne Moore) which is pretty much falling apart after Emily has an affair and asks for a divorce. Whilst feeling like his life is falling apart, and acting quite pathetic, Cal is taken under the wing of the unlikely Jacob (a very swoonable Ryan Gosling) who is given advice on how to pull himself together, dress fashionably and pull women. On the other side of this, we also have a realtionship between Jacob and Hannah (an always brilliant Emma Stone) whose unlikely romance is sweet and awww inducing.

   I know, on paper, it sounds quite predictable and goofy, like most of the wishy washy rom-coms that are produced, and there are some things about it that are a teeny bit cringeworthy. For instance moments with Cals thirteen year old son and his crush on his 17 year old babysitter, are just a little, well, creepy. Moore is also not up to her normal excellent standard; not portraying her characters strengths, and Kevin Bacon is really quite under used.

   However, lets not focus on the few negatives. Firstly, I love Ryan Gosling. He has absolutely just shone in the last year or so. Giving a brilliant performance in Blue Valentine and also the very highly critically acclaimed "Drive". In this role, he is back to the buff and beautful love interest (that he played so well in The Notebook). Jacob, however does not resemble Goslings previous roles. He is cocky, arrogant, pretentious, very beautiful, and very likeable. When he is on screen, it brightens up. What makes the room brighter is when Stone enters with him. I cannot praise this girl enough. She just has some very dry humour about her that is so attractive. It will be interesting to see her play very different roles in both "The Help" and "Spiderman".

   Of course, we cannot forget Carell, playing as he most often does, the predicatable and likeable "every guy". He gets put into these same roles because he does it very well, this film being no exception. There are some very sweet words and moments shared between him and Moore, and some funny bromance moments between him and Gosling.

Overall, this is the sort of film that leaves you with the very rare (now-a-days) warm, fuzzy, loving feeling, (others may call it nausea). It has also restored my faith that there are, at least a few, intelligent, entertaining and sweet "rom-coms".

4/5

Jane Eyre

Ahhhh my heart has been sad with the lack of film watching (especially at the cinema), but what with cinema tickets in Lincoln cost over 9 pounds (I KNOW), that mixed with the fact that I was getting married and moving house, well, it just wasn't happening.

   However, today i offically broke the cinema fast, by watching the classic remake Jane Eyre, starring the very lovely Michael Fassebender and the actually very talented Mia Wasikowska. The mood is set perfectly, the settings and countryside; beautiful, and the actors are all very well suited (even, the sometimes questionable Jamie Bell). I was a little dubious at first about Jane and Rochester's relationship, what with her looking barely 18, and he all rugged and old (er), however, they both managed to do it really well. Wasikowska was actually perfect as Jane, looking especially plain but not acting it at all. I also have to commend her english accent with aspects of quite a decent northern one. For an aussie that can't be easy, but it is actually very good.

   Fassbender seemed to warm into his role a bit more, suiting the flirty lingering moods, rather than the harsh abrupt ones. It was in these moments that the films stars truly tingled. I did feel like there wasn't enough of these moments, before leading to a quite anti-climactic finish. I feel (and this means a lot coming from me) that the reunion could have been more gushing, and die hard romantic, but, oh well.

Overall, this film is both stunning and disturbing at the same time (another pg film that i jumped at), the acting(especially Wasikowska) is very good, and it's about time we had another classic remake on the big screen. All I would ask for, is a bit more of Rochester, and his relationship with Jane, most especially at the end. Maybe next time eh?
3 and a half / 5

Super 8

Yes, it has been a while. No I didn't blog on Harry Potter (of course I saw it - and yes i actually liked it), but my love of film and film watching at any time of the day has seemed to be drained away, all motivation and concentration gone. I think this probably has something to do with hideous job hunting, and trying to organise a wedding.
   However, Super 8 - a seemingly simple plotted alien movie - has changed all this for me (at least for now).



  Super 8 (directed by J.J Abrams with help from the mighty Spielberg) is on the surface a movie about an alien visitor (of sorts). It focuses on a group of young teenagers one summer, who are making their own zombie movie for a competition. One night they are filming their production by a train track, when a train is suddenly ran off the track and a massive disaster follows. After this catastrophic event, things start to get extremely weird in the town, dogs go missing, microwaves go missing, and people start to disappear. Soon the kids realised that they may have filmed more in their movie than what they bargained for.

   As expected, the special effects in this movie are big and impressive. The acting and actors are perfectly chosen, and Abrams has got it right with the amount of "creature" that you see, and what it looks like when you do see it. What is unexpected, is an extremely sweet movie about a group of friends who are ever so likeable, and not only have to cope with the mysterious goings on from the train crash, but also their own tragedies that have occured in their lives.

   The charm of the film, is added to by the fact that the children are all played by relative unknowns. Even though Elle Fanning (Dakota's sister, playing the part of Alice) has done movies before, and has very much been brought up in show business, it doesn't matter, because she is emotional,  beautiful and generally quite a superb young actress. The relationship between her and Joe Lamb (the main protagonist, whose mother has just died and is trying to live with this fact, played very well by Joel Courtney) is lovely. Abrams has got the mood and the atmosphere just right, showing emotion and depth, without making their relationship tacky and trivial.

Not only are the children brilliant, but the whole film is quite something. However, although this film is based on kids, and is made for kids / teens, it isn't light. Abrams doesn't lay off the suspense or the occassional bloody moment, and the way in which this is incorporated into real  life, and real people, is quite amazing.

My only criticism, would be that towards the end of the film, it seemed to get a tiny bit trigger happy - explosions happening here there and everywhere - when quite frankly the characters create enough tension and excitement all by themselves.

   This 70's based film, is reminiscent of some of the classics made in the 80's. It has the charm of the goonies, the friendship of stand by me, and the hint of the unexplained of E.T, but what's new and exciting, is the success of mixing all this together and creating an intelligent, heartfelt yet exciting summer blockbuster.  5/5





My week of indie movies

   

   Okay. Firstly I need to apologise for the pictures that are dotted randomly across this

page. I am technologically inept, and the computer's not too great either. But anyway. I've had a very uneventful last week or so, job hunting, and wedding finishing off (nightmare) but I have managed

to fit in some films that have come out on dvd that i wanted to see, but were a little less mainstream than the

ones on at vue in Newcastle Under Lyme...

Like the Pictures, my writing is all over the place too, yay. The first two movies I watched

(one after the other) were 127 hours directed by Danny Boyle and tarring James Franco, and Monsters, a low key independent movie directed by Brit Gareth Edwards, and made on a shoe string budget.127 hours is the most mainstream of all the movies I've been watching, but this isn't a bad thing. The film follows the true story, of adrenaline junkie Aron Ralston, while he's mountain climbing in Utah. I don't really think I'm spoiling the plot when I say that Aron falls down a steep edge and has his arm pinned beneath a huge rock, resulting in him being stuck there for days with no food, very little water and only absurd hallucinations to keep him entertained. Now, with the exception of Open Water, I quite like "survival" films, where the camera and the film is focused on one person (occassionally more) and their battle to survive (like the superb "Buried"). This film did not let me down. Boyle's direction, and artistic way of shooting and merging the real life with Aron's vivid hallucinations, is both crazy and frightening, and not once does the viewer become bored by Aron's fight for survival. Equally, Franco is brilliant, as the man who is so desperate to live, that he drinks his own urine. Even the part where Franco has to cut off a certain limb *ahem*, is done in a realistic and respectable way, regardless of the fact that I wanted to weep and scream at the same time. This film, is a great example of how to shoot a movie about a real life battle, and how to do it well. 4 and a half out of 5.

   I think whatever film was watched after 127 hours was always going to be a little disapointing, I'd be very surprised if any film could compete with the amount of tension that Boyle and Franco managed to create. Sci fi and alien based films are not usually me genre, but Monsters got very good reviews, and I was extremely curious to see how a film on such a low budget, with no known actors (in fact a lot of the extras were actually just people who lived in the area) and low cost props could create such high critical acclaim. It's not a bad movie. The two main characters Samantha (Whitney Able) and Andrew (Scoot McNairy) are likable enough, and do a good job with what they are given. The fact is, they're not given much. The plot goes something along the lines of Samantha is Andrews boss's daughter, they are both in the "infected" area of mexico, and Andrew needs to escort Samantha safely to the uninfected America. The actors are good, the extras, to say that some of them really were just asked on the day to read some lines, were actually quite brilliant, and the area is lush and exotic. However, the "monsters" are pretty rubbish. It is too slow for the most part, and the title of the film is let down by the lack of such. But, it does look good, and Edwards has proven that decent movies can be made without the hollywood injection of millions of pounds.

3 / 5.

My last two movies, are very different in pretty much every way. First there was Blue Valentine, Starring Michelle Willams as Cindy, and Ryan Gosling as Dean, Cindy's Husband. Do not watch this film if you are expecting another "Notebook", because you're not going to get it. Rather, what we do have, is a stark and bitter look at a marriage that's falling apart, and the horrible situation that occurs when one half of a marriage is loveless. It's not that I have an interest in unhappy marriages, but I do have an interest in good acting, beautiful cinematography and sitautions that are actually more real than the idealistic and sickly sweet chick flicks that inundate our cinema. I was expecting a film similar to Sam Mendes' "Revolutionary Road", although a lot of people disagreed, I thought that film was beautiful, devastating and very well acted, but what I got wasn't quite up to scratch.

Whilst Gosling and Williams are good, their characters are really not very likeable, especially the seemingly apathetic Cindy. This makes it harder to care when their marriage falls apart. However, it is watchable and the soundtrack by Grizzly Bear is very good. 3 /5.

And this (to your relief) brings me to the last film: Rabbit Hole. Again, not a light and happy context, based around married couple Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) who are trying to deal with grief after having lost their young son in a road accident. Again, not a lot happens here, as you can probably imagine, yet the acting is beautiful, and the message of it is just right. Not that I have any experience with such awful circumstances, but it does not feel falsely morbid or hopeful. I think director John Cameron Mitchell, tried really very hard to set a realistic atmosphere and create a film that looked truthfully at how a couple could possibly deal with such devastating circumstances.

You can't really call a film like this entertaining, but it is moving, and it is watchable. 3 and a half out of 5.



Bridesmaids

   This isn't a blog about the merits of bridesmaids (though i'm sure i could probably blog about that soon), but about the highly entertaining new film, deemed as "the hangover for women".

The story is set around two childhood best friends Annie (Kristen Wiig) and Lillian (Maya Rudolph). Lillian announces that she is getting married an appoints Annie as the Maid of honour. Chaos (and much laughter ensues) as Annie organises quite catastrophic events, whilst trying to compete against fellow bridesmaid Helen (a very versatile Rose Byrne). Meanwhile, Annie's love life is a mess, her job is dire, she has no money, and her life in general is falling apart around her. The film follows Annie as she tries to be a "good" maid of honour, whilst dealing with the messy situations in her life.

This film could have gone one of two ways. It could have actually been the female version of the Hangover: extremely crude, rude, vulgar - funny yes, - but with no substance, or, it could be too whimsical and chick flick - esque, replacing the laughs with bad unrealistic sentiment. However, Bridesmaids somehow manages to create a brilliant mixture of the two. There are some genuinley gross out moments (normally involving larger than life bridesmaid Megan - Melissa McCarthy), including a scene where the girls have food posioning in a bridal shop, and cannot control their bodily functions... However, what makes this such a good film, are the laughs that you get alongside the reality of living in a recession, the laugh out loud moments that come from a really rubbish sexual relationship, and the sentimentality of friendship, and the importance it plays in this film.

All the characters are well cast and played out, but Kristen Wiig, is as always brilliant. She just seems to have a natural funniness that comes across on screen brilliantly. Chris O Dowd was also extremely enjoyable and sweet to watch, as the goofy but good guy Nathan Rhodes.

My only criticism, is that this film could have focused more on the bridesmaids and their outings, mainly because of the name of the film which implies that the focus was going to be on the group, rather than just Annie. But that really is only a tiny niggle, compared to this feel good, funny and sweet movie, that i imagine could also appeal to guys (even if they wouldn't admit it).

4/5

Goodbye Keele

   I rarely write blogs about my life, because i fear i will drone on and bore everyone, or sound like a whimsical idiot (not that i don't do that sometimes anyway). However the end of three years at university is going to have to be an exception to this rule.

Anyone who knows me, maybe even a little bit, will know that univeristy isn't really for me, and that I haven't had the greatest time here. Actually it's probably been the hardest and sometimes hideous three years of my life. I'm not going to lie to you, but Stoke on Trent really isn't for me (although i do now refer to people as sugar).

I don't want to go all mushy, but there are so many people who have helped me survive. And I genuinley mean survive. It may sound melodramatic, but maybe i am melodramatic, that's just how it is.

University may have been bad, the work may have been hideous, and the environment (not to mention the rain) may have not helped, but to the people who stuck by me regardless, who helped when they didn't have to and loved me despite everything else, well you got me through and I thank God for you.

Don't abandon other people, even when they push you away, even when work seems more important, even when you have issue going on in your own lives. Stick by them, and thank God that you have people to stick by in the first place.