Movies I Watched This Week 23-4-11
Scre4m
I said to a few people that this film is to me, what Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was to Star Wars fans. I loved the first three movies as a kid, and I've been waiting over a decade for a new instalment to the franchise. The question is; as an adult, will I be impressed with the flashy pod-racing sequences or will I find it all to be a bit Jar-Jar?
Thankfully Scream 4 lives up to its name and is a proper Scream movie, giving us more of what was fun about the first three. It takes pot-shots at remakes and long running franchises and turns the snark up to eleven. It even parodies the concept of the meta horror movie (in a brilliant opening sequence that had me grinning from ear to ear) a concept that the first Scream pioneered, so I guess that makes this movie meta meta horror?
I thought the movie missed a trick in that there was 10 years of horror tropes that it could have played off, but ignored (J-Horror and 'Torture Porn' spring to mind). Instead the film chose to go with the internet-savvy-killer angle but then proceeded to fail to make it at all realistic.
Overall I had fun with this film, spotting the references and laughing at the one-liners, even some of the kills were quite creepy. If you like the Scream movies this is a solid entry.
La Soufrière
Early Werner Herzog documentary (director of Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams in Threee Deeee!) in which the crazy German leads a film crew to the island of Guadalupe after it has been deserted due to the high probability of a volcanic eruption.
The movie consists almost entirely of eerie images of deserted streets, abandoned shops and homes and stray animals wandering aimlessly in search of food. All the while Herzog's distinctively soothing monotone narrates the scenes, giving us background as to what we are seeing.
At one point the film switches gears and gives us a quick history lesson about what happened when the volcano erupted previously in the early 1900s and it is here that the film is most interesting, even going so far as to show us a loaf of bread that was turned instantly to coal in the blast.
Eventually Herzog comes across a couple of the island's inhabitants who refused to leave with the rest, the men talk (translated for us in Herzog's trademark drawl) about being ready for death, or having no choice but to accept the inevitable. The men seem resolute, unafraid and even satisfied that this is the end of their lives. This doc is a tale of man versus nature, and it shows that in the end the only way to conquer her is to accept that you are powerless against her.
Fast Five
There is one line in the trailer for this film that sold me. Vin Diesel says something like 'by the end of this job we'll be in jail or a dead or both... but not todayyyy' and his otherworldly delivery of that line convinced me that I would find this movie as entertaining as all hell. I was right.
The action in this film is top notch. Bar a few CGI moments you can tell that they did all the stunts for real, with real cars and real wanton destruction and that lets you really feel every impact. I had heard good things about the other Justin Lin-directed Fast & Furious movies (this is the first in the franchise I have seen since the original) and it's true; the man can shoot a badass car chase.
In between the action set-pieces there is still fun to be had, you can gawp at Diesel's insane line delivery and rubbery expressions, or you can giggle at The Rock chewing up scenery like there's no tomorrow (he knows exactly where he is and pitches it perfectly by the way) or you can just sit back, geek out, and enjoy the car-porn.
As a side note, I'm noticing a trend towards action stars getting bigger and bigger in recent years. We had the golden era of Arnie and Stallone in the eighties, then a long period of less muscle-bound heroes. Now with the prevalence of comic book movies, and actors bulking up massively to better resemble their costumed counterparts (see this summer's Thor, Captain America and The Green Lantern) we seem to be seeing fashion shifting again. The upshot of this is that Diesel and The Rock in this movie are so big that they almost seem hyper-real, and that definitely plays in to the cartoonish tone of the movie and works in it's favour. Just something to keep an eye on.
I said to a few people that this film is to me, what Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was to Star Wars fans. I loved the first three movies as a kid, and I've been waiting over a decade for a new instalment to the franchise. The question is; as an adult, will I be impressed with the flashy pod-racing sequences or will I find it all to be a bit Jar-Jar?
Thankfully Scream 4 lives up to its name and is a proper Scream movie, giving us more of what was fun about the first three. It takes pot-shots at remakes and long running franchises and turns the snark up to eleven. It even parodies the concept of the meta horror movie (in a brilliant opening sequence that had me grinning from ear to ear) a concept that the first Scream pioneered, so I guess that makes this movie meta meta horror?
I thought the movie missed a trick in that there was 10 years of horror tropes that it could have played off, but ignored (J-Horror and 'Torture Porn' spring to mind). Instead the film chose to go with the internet-savvy-killer angle but then proceeded to fail to make it at all realistic.
Overall I had fun with this film, spotting the references and laughing at the one-liners, even some of the kills were quite creepy. If you like the Scream movies this is a solid entry.
La Soufrière
Early Werner Herzog documentary (director of Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams in Threee Deeee!) in which the crazy German leads a film crew to the island of Guadalupe after it has been deserted due to the high probability of a volcanic eruption.
The movie consists almost entirely of eerie images of deserted streets, abandoned shops and homes and stray animals wandering aimlessly in search of food. All the while Herzog's distinctively soothing monotone narrates the scenes, giving us background as to what we are seeing.
At one point the film switches gears and gives us a quick history lesson about what happened when the volcano erupted previously in the early 1900s and it is here that the film is most interesting, even going so far as to show us a loaf of bread that was turned instantly to coal in the blast.
Eventually Herzog comes across a couple of the island's inhabitants who refused to leave with the rest, the men talk (translated for us in Herzog's trademark drawl) about being ready for death, or having no choice but to accept the inevitable. The men seem resolute, unafraid and even satisfied that this is the end of their lives. This doc is a tale of man versus nature, and it shows that in the end the only way to conquer her is to accept that you are powerless against her.
Fast Five
There is one line in the trailer for this film that sold me. Vin Diesel says something like 'by the end of this job we'll be in jail or a dead or both... but not todayyyy' and his otherworldly delivery of that line convinced me that I would find this movie as entertaining as all hell. I was right.
The action in this film is top notch. Bar a few CGI moments you can tell that they did all the stunts for real, with real cars and real wanton destruction and that lets you really feel every impact. I had heard good things about the other Justin Lin-directed Fast & Furious movies (this is the first in the franchise I have seen since the original) and it's true; the man can shoot a badass car chase.
In between the action set-pieces there is still fun to be had, you can gawp at Diesel's insane line delivery and rubbery expressions, or you can giggle at The Rock chewing up scenery like there's no tomorrow (he knows exactly where he is and pitches it perfectly by the way) or you can just sit back, geek out, and enjoy the car-porn.
As a side note, I'm noticing a trend towards action stars getting bigger and bigger in recent years. We had the golden era of Arnie and Stallone in the eighties, then a long period of less muscle-bound heroes. Now with the prevalence of comic book movies, and actors bulking up massively to better resemble their costumed counterparts (see this summer's Thor, Captain America and The Green Lantern) we seem to be seeing fashion shifting again. The upshot of this is that Diesel and The Rock in this movie are so big that they almost seem hyper-real, and that definitely plays in to the cartoonish tone of the movie and works in it's favour. Just something to keep an eye on.
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