The last movie you saw

[HM-PuFFNSTuFF]

Did you see JCVD yet? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1130988/

No, any good?

Jean Claude Van Damme as you've never seen him. It's really good.

[LawL]

I'll check it out.

[4days]

the spirit 2/10

a glistening turd

[GONNAFISTYA]

Batman & Robin = 0/10 - lol...just for kicks to contrast the approach the new Batman has taken to the utter tripe which nearly killed the franchise, I couldn't resist downloading this piece of shit when I saw it.

I mean this literally: you can tell how shitty a movie it is within the first second after the intro logo with those cheesy camera zoom-ins. Arnie was fucking laughable and - I think - purposefully forgot how to speak english for his role. This movie is the prime example of Hollywood brainlessly fast-tracking a sequel to milk every last dollar before tossing it in the trash.

Swing Vote = 8/10 - The first Kevin Costner movie I've liked in a while. Good story and great characters. The little girl (her debut) is a really good actress. No ped0...just fact.

[GONNAFISTYA]

No, any good?

Jean Claude Van Damme as you've never seen him. It's really good.

On your recommendation I checked it out and I agree, possibly one of the best movies he's ever done. 8/10.

[Captain]

The Client 8/10

John Grisham's solid writing and great acting, especially from a young Brad Renfro.

[Deathshroud]

The Forbidden Kingdom

5 Semi-entertained sounding "meh" /10

Pretty nifty movie, but falls short on any sort of substance. Lots of fighting, including praying mantis style.

[wart(y)hog]

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

8/10 - Great Documentary on a great writer and a great American.

</Raise double thumbed fist>

[7zark7]

The Wrestler= The best movie I ever saw this year.

Slumdog Millionaire= Really good.

OLDBOY= 10/10. One of the best films I ever saw ever.

[Dr_Watson]

i'm confused as to whether you think oldboy is better than the wrestler; or did you just see them in different years?

also... isn't is supposed to be knight of the rueful countenance?

[Chupacabra]

i trust zark's reviews less than mazda's.

[7zark7]

i'm confused as to whether you think oldboy is better than the wrestler;

Oldboy was better.

Its about this guy who goes out drinking one night, and then gets kidnapped and held in a room for 15 years. Has no idea why. then one day, they set him free. he has 5 days to to find out why..... There's teeth getting snapped off with a claw hammer and tongues getting cut off with scissors... Its badass.


Here's a link to the trailer on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHhRgBcVYeQ

An "American style voice over" trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0llEO3GgDg

And

Here's a link to the badass "side scrolling" fight scene:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxZenU-R ... re=related

[7zark7]

i trust zark's reviews less than mazda's.

yah. i don't blame you. I only ever post about films I really like.

I guess i could mantion some of the bad ones:

Rocknrolla: 4/10

fucking shit. what a waste of my time. Guy is out of ideas.
Except for Bank robber by The Clash...the soundtrack is shit as well.


Riding the bus with my sister: 3/10

directed by Angelica Houston....Rosie O donnel plays a retard who rides the bus. The only reason I watched it was it was filmed in my home town. It wasnt as hilarious as I thought it would be.

Curious case of Benjamin Button 5/10

Boring, and the story was kinda stupid. The effects of Pitt as an old midget were cool...but I just didn't care about the story or the characters.


Wall-E 3/10

A cartoon about a robot with downs syndrome.


CHOKE 6/10

What an embarrassment. Not my favorite Palahniuk book anyways.... but holy shit that sucked. The soundtrack was completely misplaced, and every scene seemed more like a rehearsal. They left out so many of the best lines fromt eh book that the ending was even more retarded than it was in the book.

[Grudge]

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - 8/10

Beautiful.

[Whiskey 7]

Love Actually - Quiet a pleasant movie and not really a chick flick imo. 8/10

Clicky

... and yes just watched the latest Omega Man - I am Legend

Personally I liked the original better and give that still an 8.5/10. Get and watch it on DVD or what ever

I am Legend was missing something, corpses for one. Although it told the story well imo (like the bit were he covered his tracks at this front door, it just lacked that something that would give a rating of 8+ so sadly I have to drop it to 7/10 and I am into sci-fi so it is a hard rating.

[surgeon62]

Scrubs seasons 1-5
Where the hell have I been high five/10

Excellent!

[Therac-25]

Bolt = 8/10 I guess. I don't know how to rate kids movies. Good at what it does, and it's watchable. It's been added to the Cars / Wall-E rotation now, so I'm sure I'll have the whole damn script memorized shortly.

[sliver]

Bolt = 8/10 I guess. I don't know how to rate kids movies. Good at what it does, and it's watchable. It's been added to the Cars / Wall-E rotation now, so I'm sure I'll have the whole damn script memorized shortly.

is the hamster as funny throughout the movie as he is in the previews? a couple of his lines ("LET IT BEGIN!" and "I'll get my ball!") really cracked me up watching the trailer.

I Spit On Your Grave: 5/10
One of the infamous banned "video nasties," this is an ultra-low-budget revenge flick about a woman who moves into a summer home only to be terrorized and raped repeatedly by a gang of men who live nearby. The acting was better than I expected, but the low budget really shows, the direction is pretty shitty, and by today's standards it's just not that graphic (mostly speaking about the revenge acts, here, not the raping). Still kind of hard to watch for its sheer physical-emotional brutality, though.

Red: 9/10
Great revenge movie with a very simple premise: some teenage hoodlums come across a retiree (Brian Cox) fishing with his dog, and when he doesn't have any money (they want to rob him), they shoot his dog (named Red) just to be cruel. The man is an army veteran with a very sad history (his whole family died and he lost everything except his dog, which is now gone as well), but he has as much grace and integrity as a human being could ask for, so he seeks out the parents of the boy who shot his dog so that they will impose some sort of justice. When they refuse (the dad is a smugly secure-in-his-status socialite, awfully reminiscent of Blagojevich, played by Tom Sizemore), he takes matters into his own hands, triggering an escalating (if improbable) battle between ideals of justice and of chaos.

All The Boys Love Mandy Lane: 6/10
A teenage slasher flick which has the sense to realize that everything's been done before, so it unabashedly portrays its characters in broad-stroak cliches. It's about a girl who suddenly becomes hot one year and finds herself in the good graces of the popular crowd, who invite her away for a weekend at a ranch; but then people start dying because someone wants to be alone with Mandy a little too much. There are some hotties, a hilarious amount of drug use, and sporadic funny lines, but none of the deaths are particularly gruesome or inventive, and I called the ending about half way through. Meh.

I also saw "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Frost/Nixon" last night, but I'm going to wait and post full reviews once I've written them.

[Therac-25]

is the hamster as funny throughout the movie as he is in the previews? a couple of his lines ("LET IT BEGIN!" and "I'll get my ball!") really cracked me up watching the trailer.

Yeah, he's awesome. It's actually a good movie. I don't know if it's a sign of childrens movies becoming more mature, or our generation having much lower expectations for what constitutes a good movie, but I don't mind watching it.

Mind you, I've only had to sit through it twice now. I'm sure that I might feel different after I've had to hear the dialogue for the hundredth time.

[GONNAFISTYA]

The Wrestler = 9/10 - Awesome in every way.

Nothing But The Truth = 8/10 - A fictional story based around Plamegate, focusing on some very important questions about the rights of both getting to the bottom of a crime and protecting confidential sources. The ending is great.

You Dont Mess With The Zohan = 8/10 - Typical Adam Sandler but funny enough to keep the laughs going throughout. No sappy romantic comedy here....just straight forward comedy. Fuckin hilarious.

Drop Dead Gorgeous = 7/10 - Funny and stupid, it makes fun of vanity and superficial competition in ways no slapstick approach can touch. Will Sasso just cracked me up.

[Doombrain]

You Dont Mess With The Zohan = 8/10 - Typical Adam Sandler but funny enough to keep the laughs going throughout. No sappy romantic comedy here....just straight forward comedy. Fuckin hilarious.

lol

[sliver]

I don't know if it's a sign of childrens movies becoming more mature, or our generation having much lower expectations for what constitutes a good movie, but I don't mind watching it.

Children's movies (excepting the bargain-bin, direct-to-DVD crap) always have pretty decent scripts. I think it's because they never end up throwing away their budgets on effects, hot-topic prima donna stars/starlets, and because the people making them are generally in it to tell a good story rather than to make a quick buck/blow a bunch of shit up (vs. anything Michael Bay or those Epic Movie/Disaster Movie idiots have done). Mainstream "adult" fare has declined in writing quality since the advent of CGI, if not even earlier than that, but I'd say big-budget children's movies have generally maintained their integrity since disney's original cadre of films (Snow White et al).

------------


Slumdog Millionaire: 7/10

One question away from winning 20 million rupees on India’s version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is detained by detained, interrogated, and tortured by police on suspicion of having cheated in the game show. Instead of confessing, however, Jamal recounts the various experiences which, over the course of his life, supplied him with the answers.

After his mother was killed in Hindu-Muslim riots in the slums of Mumbai, Jamal grew up under the protection of his brother, Salim (Madhur Mittal). Under the malevolent ‘care’ of a gangster named Maman (Ankur Vikal), who recruited street children to beg for him, he met the orphan Latika (Freida Pinto), and fell immediately in love.

But brotherly discord saw Salim claim Latika for himself, and subsequently lose touch with Jamal. Years later, working as a chaiwalla, or tea server, at a call centre, Jamal devises a scheme to appear on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? in order to reconnect with his brother and his long-lost love.

Over and over, at every stage of his life, Jamal is shown running: from police, from crooks, from captors, from his brother. And his appearance on Millionaire is merely a continuation of this conceit, a last, climactic attempt to escape from the life of a chaiwalla and from the claustrophobic confines of anonymous, impoverished mediocrity.

At its best, Slumdog Millionaire is a story about love, sibling rivalry, fraternal insensitivity, and destiny, told with a semblance of the settings and sensibilities which made Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance one of the most riveting, heart-wrenching reads of the last two decades; but its present-tense Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? wrapping paper reduces it to a predictable and outrageous soap opera.

It is a nod to the Bollywood style, perhaps, which relies on a mythic sense of predestination rather than our accustomed Hollywood suspense—and wherein a happy ending is even more assured than in the western tradition; alternatively, one could chalk it up to laziness on the part of the screenwriters, for as much as there is an enthralling story here, it’s far too gussied up to touch the social or emotional nerves it might have in its raw form. (The film is based on Vikas Swarup’s novel, Q and A, but the weakness of the gameshow/flashback structure is such that the filmmakers would have been farther ahead to jettison that plot-line completely and tell “Slumdog” as a coming of age story without the “Millionaire” at all.)

Danny Boyle’s direction is assured, although his award-winning Indian co-director Loveleen Tandan surely shares most of the credit. The cinematography is beautiful, and will certainly give Benjamin Button a run for its money come Oscar night. But the biggest, most pleasant surprise is a cast of mostly new, mostly marvelous child and youth actors, who render with vivid sincerity scenes from Jamal’s childhood, beginning with his preposterous acquisition of an autograph from revered Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan (who has attacked the film for its portrayal of India).

The setting, too, is breathtaking, alternately in its resplendence (the Taj Mahal) and in its squalor (the titular slums of Jamal’s childhood). Moreover, it is a refreshing change from the American small-town or ghetto story it could have been; for this self-same reason, that it could have been another all-American feel-good story, charges of “tourism porn” and exploitation are generally fatuous.

Given the all-around cinematic pedigree on display, Slumdog’s occasional lapses into absurdity are relatively easy to forgive; however, they are impossible to overlook. Ultimately, the narrative cements itself in just the sort of mediocrity its protagonist is trying to escape—too strained and improbable to be taken at face value, but not sufficiently lofty or poetic to achieve the operatic status it aspires to—but for every aspect of the film aside from its storytelling, Slumdog Millionaire is more than up to snuff.

[4days]

the crew

deeply weird and humourless scouse (liverpool) version of a guy ritchie movie. lot of new faces on either side of the camera and sometimes it shows, but the crew builds up tension better than the last half-dozen caper movies i've seen and keeps things seething along nicely - 7 unmarked graves out of 10.

[Captain]

The Last Legion 4/10

Interesting adaptation of the King Arthur story, but that's about it. It would've been a decent movie without the paki chick.

[Dr_Watson]

I am Legend was missing something, corpses for one. Although it told the story well imo (like the bit were he covered his tracks at this front door, it just lacked that something that would give a rating of 8+ so sadly I have to drop it to 7/10 and I am into sci-fi so it is a hard rating.

seriously? that movie sucked... totally fell off the rails 1/2 through and had god awful special effects to boot.
i'm tainted by loving the book; but that movie wasn't even good on it's own.