The Constant Gardener opens with Justin saying goodbye to Tessa and Arnold as they board a plane, cuts to an unidentified upturned vehicle, then to Justin being informed of the death of his wife before the narrative enters a flashback to the first meeting between Tessa and Justin. This elliptical start to the film is indicative of the style of City of God (2002) director Fernando Meirelles.
Best of all, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang offers the double-your-pleasure thrills of watching Robert Downey Jr., at the top of his game playing thief-turned-actor-turned-PI Harry Lockhart, and Val Kilmer, divine as the fabulously macho Gay Perry.
The film follows the crew of the spaceship called Serenity, basically a group of criminals, who find themselves involved in an adventure that none of them asked for, after a young girl that they have taken in is revealed to be the product of a government experiment. River Tam (Summer Glau) fills the obligatory Whedon role of the superpowered teenage girl and is imbued with the ability to read minds as well as kick ass.
Pantomime comes early this year as The Legend of Zorro leaps and bounds onto screens with a helping of camp and a large slice of ham.
‘How much blood would you shed to stay alive?’ serial killer Jigsaw asks one of his victims considering gouging out his eye to escape a fiendish ruse. This is just a taster of the kind of gruesome torture on offer in the sequel to surprise hit Saw (James Wan, 2004), and it is sure give fans of its inventive killing mechanisms a few horror kicks.
when viewing a movie based on a video game, it is downright unreasonable to expect anything more from it than a few awesome looking monsters, a few good firefight scenes, and some extremely cheesy dialogue. On these humble grounds, the film succeeds… for the most part.
Yet while he thinks it all adds up to some dazzling conclusion that will leave the audience stunned with admiration like The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995) or Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), he has merely earnt a smack in the face from every single person who watches this convoluted, pretentious and over-blown nothing of a film.
The humour has been developed from simple, homely observations about the relationship between man and dog, to incorporate a wide range of comedic devices, including complex visual gags, especially the kind of blink-and-you-miss-it gags that’s often used by Matt Groening.
Sadly, like Mean Machine (Barry Skolnick, 2001), there is no escaping from an uninspiring script and dull characters.
Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) lives out the American dream in a picture-perfect small town. He runs the local diner, has a pretty wife and two children, both boy and girl, and has friendly relationships with everyone. The Stall’s lives are near perfect, almost in a sickly way, but this is soon to change.
Although initially attractive, The Island turns out to be a dumb whore of a film – energetic, but caked in make-up and lacking brains.
The story is this. The city is separated along social lines between the rich, led by Kaufman, (a megalomanic shit played by Dennis Hopper who effortlessly oozes slime) who live a life of luxury in palatial tower blocks, and the poor, who slum it on the streets and are constantly in conflict with zombies and Kaufman’s oppressive rule.
Indeed screenwriter Carl Ellsworth fails to deliver on the concept half as well as Larry Cohen did with his tightly claustrophobic script in Phone Booth, as only thirty minutes of action actually takes place on the plane.
The first question is: Did you read the books? If the answer is yes, you are going to like this movie, but have a few problems with it. If the answer is no, a) you should and b) you are in for one of the most odd experiences of your life when you see this film.
At the heart of the ‘the Sith’ is the birth of Vader, and the film essentially revolves around a simplistic political debate, seemingly written in crayon by four-year old children, of whether to take the side of good or evil.
Jaa exhibits a total disregard for health and safety, running across barbed wire at top speed, getting punched through walls and attacked with axes and saws.
a plethora of bone crunching blood splattered violence, and more shocks and scares than most of the horror films of the past three years put together.
The fetishistically obsessive habits of Baldwin as artist, media-archeologist, and revisionist historian are communicated through arcane phenomena as experienced by the resident characters of twentieth century scientific progress, symbolizing the perpetual power struggle of creative visionaries threatened by tireless corporate conquerors.
The meaning of the film has to do with the slippage between fact and fiction, as a parallax view upon a speculative history of the future, perversely justified by use of the throwaway detritus of postindustrial excess.