Last movie watched...

[JamesC]

I watched Hanna last night and really enjoyed it.
I'd seen it before but couldn't remember too much about it. Eric Banna was great and the girl who plays Hanna is delightfully weird but still likeable and convincing in the fight scenes. I really liked the way the fights were filmed actually - they weren't flashy but sort of brutal and quick in the way that fights are in real life.
Some nice moments were the characters just shoot their opponents before you get the chance to shout 'just shoot him' at the telly.

[Professor Bear]

Hey, I've just seen a Uwe Boll movie that's actually pretty guuuuh... it's pretty goooooh...  I'll try again - this Uwe Boll movie is gggggg... guhhhh... this is harder to admit than I thought it would be.
While no Citizen Kane, Assault On Wall Street is a mostly-sympathetic portrayal of several of America's latter-day boogeymen - bankers and spree killers - and no-one is really a bad guy, crimes being opportunistic bad investments or accidental murders before the lead character takes his jump off the deep end and premeditates the killings of Wall Street bankers who lost his money, but the slow build-up as his life falls apart through no fault of his own and his silent, dignified rage bubbles under as volcanoes are wont to do right up until they explode is a brilliant flip-side to the snide, juvenile and hateful spree-killer of the week story in shows like CSI.  Gone are the safe snarks and snipes at the Occupy straw men that typify shows written by well-off white men like Castle and The Newsroom, and instead there's just crushing inevitability and no answers to be had - this guy's done nothing wrong, he works hard, he plays by the rules, and for that he's crippled with debts created by other people to the point that he's not even paying off the debts anymore, he's paying off the interest on those debts and all it does is go up until it takes literally everything from him.
Uwe Boll makes terrible films, so I suppose in being a decent movie that technically makes this the worst Uwe Boll film ever made.  Not crazy about the final voice-over, as it and the Big Bad's comic book villain monologue where he basically gives a potted history of American finance brings things a bit too far into panto territory and makes it look like the origin movie for the world's angriest superhero franchise, but the rest of it is pretty ggggguuuuuuuhhhhhhhddd.  There, I said it!  That wasn't so hard after all - not that you'd know it by the many vicious reviews that have little to say about the film and seem fixated only on who made it, but ignore those, as this is actually a decent post-Occupy flick that does a very good job of articulating the anger and confusion of working Joes living in the wake of the financial meltdown to the extent that you will actually feel cheated if the film doesn't end in a killing spree in an office.

[JamesC]

Just watched The Shawshank Redemption. I always get a manly salty eye at the end of this film. Brilliant. And if you bring up plot holes you're a joyless c**t!

[Ghost MacRoth]

^That.  'Shitty pipe dreams' makes me smile every time! Top film.

[radiator]

Double bill of Alpha Papa and Kick Ass 2 for me at the cinema last night.

AP was pretty good but its definitely on the lower end of the Partridge scale. I heard that Armando Ianucci wasn't involved in the writing and it definitely shows. Some brilliant bits here and there but overall a bit of a let down.

3/5

Was surprised how much I enjoyed KA2. Yes it's insanely dumb, morally dubious, a little offensive, often unintentionally funny, way over the top and suffers from an overstuffed plot which unravels at Nolanesque montage-like pacing, but as with the original, taken as a cinematic experience with beers and friends its a hoot. Amazing cast featuring lots of great character actors in minor roles (Andy Nyman, John Leguizamo, Iain Glen, Donald Faison, Benedict Wong, Steven Mackintosh). Easily the best thing Jim Carrey has done in years.

A high 3/5 or low 4/5 for me and a worthy sequel.

[Theblazeuk]

You heard wrong, or at least a little differently (chinese whispers I guess). Armando Ianucci has been interviewing/promoting for the past couple of weeks and says that he wrote at the beginning, buggered off to America during filming, came back for post.

[JamesC]

Monster Island

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and a bunch of other teens win a holiday to an island in the Bermuda Triangle and meet Carmen Electra. Carmen is then carried off by a giant flying ant and they have to go and rescue her.
This is a silly MTV film that's supposed to be a homage to 50s creature features. It's actually quite good fun and has a great cameo from Adam West who plays 'Dr Harryhausen'.
The best thing about the film is the monster design - they look great. There's a mix of CGI, stop motion (actually it could be CGI made to look like stop motion but I don't think it is) and model work and whoever made the props obviously had great fun. I'd love to get my hands on one of the preying mantis models.
This is always coming on the Movies 24 channel and is worth a watch if you're at a loose end and don't mind a bit of silly teen humour.

[TordelBack]

Monsters vs Aliens.  A mixed bag, with some good gags about scale and a solid premise let down by pitiful character design and flat soulless backgrounds.  You can't have a movie where the main characters are freaks and monsters living in a realistically-rendered contemporary world, and still draw the humans as bobble-heads with stick-legs.  It doesn't work. I did enjoy House: Mad Cockroach-headed Scientist and the furry caterpillar kaiju, and while worryingly similar to Pratchett's Susan Sto-Helit, Susan 'Ginormica' was a strong central character who learns to self-actualise, or something.  One good painfully laboured joke about global warming raises its grade to C+.

[Theblazeuk]

Don't forget Stephen Colbert. Though his presidency suggests that the movie is in fact set in the Marvel universe, which should be both used to and prepared for all manner of monsters and aliens.

[Recrewt]

Thir13en Ghosts

Firstly, this film holds the rare record of 'film I have seen twice at the cinema'.  I don't tend to see films more than once at the cinema but due to some planning mistake between friends, this became the only film that I have. 

OK, so the basic setup here is that some bloke and his family are not doing too well after a fire took their house and his wife.  A Lawyer turns up to say that a Rich Uncle has died and left him a house and fortune.  So we arrive at a fancy looking glass house, however all is not well.  There are actually 12 ghosts trapped in the basement and the house is actually a machine that will open a gate to hell.  As you can imagine, the ghosts escape and start to run amok.

It is worth pointing out that this film is not scary, but it does make you jump in a couple of places.  I would probably describe it as an action horror, in a similar vein to House on Haunted Hill or Ghost Ship.  What is good about this film though is the visuals - especially the house itself and the ghosts.  I checked IMDB and if the $20 million budget stated there is correct then they did very well for the money.

Having a glass house is a nice touch and the walls are meant to be inscribed with spells to keep ghosts out which leads to some good cat-and-mouse play.  The ghosts also tend to be real actors in make up so you don't get any silly CGI wobbly-ness, they look real and substantial.  Make-up is really good - the ghosts look fantastic and I would happily spend a couple of hours just watching them walk around. 

The plot is silly but if you want something lightweight and entertaining then you can do a lot worse than this.  Horror (if you want to label this as such) tends to come in batches and I am as unexcited as the next person when yet another zombie movie comes out.  This is what makes this film so good.  OK, it's basically a haunted house film but there is so little like this out there that it feels like a treat simply because it is more unique.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

The Adventures of Buckeroo Banzai across the 8^th Dimension

Haven't seen this since I was a teenager. I still don't really know what to make of it. It's fun but weird.

I reckon someone wrote an entire season's worth of a sci-fi series, but none of the networks would pick it up, so they condensed EVERYTHING into one movie and fobbed it off on some studio trying to cash in on the sci-fi movies boom started by Star Wars.

Describing the plot would be an exercise in TL;DR posting. It just keeps throwing out ideas without giving them a chance to breath, but I think that's on purpose. Convoluted doesn't begin to describe it, but it's convoluted in a fun, almost self-aware way. The performances are great, you've got Robocop deadpanning brilliant lines like "I was ionized, but I'm ok now" and then you've got John Lithgow gorging on scenery. This movie has basically every cult character actor of the early 80s, every couple of minutes you're saying to yourself, "Hey look, it's that guy from that thing, I like him".

It's a shame, but not a surprise, that the sequel was never made.

[amines2058]

The Adventures of Buckeroo Banzai across the 8^th Dimension

Haven't seen this since I was a teenager. I still don't really know what to make of it. It's fun but weird.

I reckon someone wrote an entire season's worth of a sci-fi series, but none of the networks would pick it up, so they condensed EVERYTHING into one movie and fobbed it off on some studio trying to cash in on the sci-fi movies boom started by Star Wars.

Describing the plot would be an exercise in TL;DR posting. It just keeps throwing out ideas without giving them a chance to breath, but I think that's on purpose. Convoluted doesn't begin to describe it, but it's convoluted in a fun, almost self-aware way. The performances are great, you've got Robocop deadpanning brilliant lines like "I was ionized, but I'm ok now" and then you've got John Lithgow gorging on scenery. This movie has basically every cult character actor of the early 80s, every couple of minutes you're saying to yourself, "Hey look, it's that guy from that thing, I like him".

It's a shame, but not a surprise, that the sequel was never made.

I love that film again for the surreal-ness of it all. I also love the final outro music as all the characters are walking across the damn or large concrete structure or whatever it is. I may have to look for it again myself for a re-watch!!

[TordelBack]

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief.  No.  Just no.  Some good centaur effects, cancelled out by the worst overall casting choices since The Saint, and what I in my ignorance can only assume in is an adaptation that drops all pretence of narrative sense in its slavish attempt to squeeze in the kewl bits form the book.  If you can imagine a two-hour episode of Xena, replace our ass-kicking heroine with Wesley Crusher and Bruce Campbell with Pierce Brosnan, and then chuck in the Hunger Games remade with the the cast of High School Musical and you're almost there.  It has a key location called Camp Half-Breed.

Gods, no.

[Spikes]

The Adventures of Buckeroo Banzai across the 8^th Dimension

A strange, strange film that i too, havent seen in an age. The UK dvd was pretty piss poor, but the US version was an special edition affair. Jamie Lee Curtis also starred in the film, but got cut out, i believe - now viewable thanks to the deleted scenes that was included.

[Mardroid]

Thir13en Ghosts
It is worth pointing out that this film is not scary, but it does make you jump in a couple of places. 

I quite like that film! I thought the ghosts were quite scary. That whole thing with the special glasses (or was it goggles, I forget) that allow you to see into the spirit world added an extra 'brrr'. Factor.

I seem to remember a scene with a character in the bath tub. Cue: vision of the spirit world with a female suicide ghost in a bath full of blood. Dear me.