Thursday, December 29, 2005
WALLACE & GROMIT in THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT
Featuring: Peter Sallis, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter (voices)
Brief Synopsis: A monster is eating up all the vegetables in the village. Wallace and Gromit try to put their hands and mitts on it.
Comments: What I love about Wallace & Gromit is that they are quintessentially English. The tea, the cheese, the car are all wonderful and quaint reminders of a faraway land (well for me!).
Plotlines for all their films are always very tight with a well written story gathering pace and drawing you in before you are hit with unexpected twists and the side serving of subtle humour (again a bit British - Totty anyone? Even the planes at the end have the allied markings found on British planes in the second World War!) thrown in. The attention to detail was always lavish (which you would expect if you are making films where it takes a day to make 3 seconds of footage) and with this being their first feature film, all this was not going to change.
I can't say much more than that without ruining the story completely but it is well worth watching and if nothing else, always interesting to see (and support) a medium on screen that is completely different to life acting and animated films. My wife's words, "it was very good actually."
Things to learn from this film: Beware of your ordinary garden gnome when stealing vegetables. He may just be a motion detector for a burglar alarm system.
Rating: 7.75 /10
Featuring: Peter Sallis, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter (voices)
Brief Synopsis: A monster is eating up all the vegetables in the village. Wallace and Gromit try to put their hands and mitts on it.
Comments: What I love about Wallace & Gromit is that they are quintessentially English. The tea, the cheese, the car are all wonderful and quaint reminders of a faraway land (well for me!).
Plotlines for all their films are always very tight with a well written story gathering pace and drawing you in before you are hit with unexpected twists and the side serving of subtle humour (again a bit British - Totty anyone? Even the planes at the end have the allied markings found on British planes in the second World War!) thrown in. The attention to detail was always lavish (which you would expect if you are making films where it takes a day to make 3 seconds of footage) and with this being their first feature film, all this was not going to change.
I can't say much more than that without ruining the story completely but it is well worth watching and if nothing else, always interesting to see (and support) a medium on screen that is completely different to life acting and animated films. My wife's words, "it was very good actually."
Things to learn from this film: Beware of your ordinary garden gnome when stealing vegetables. He may just be a motion detector for a burglar alarm system.
Rating: 7.75 /10
Friday, December 16, 2005
KING KONG
Featuring: Jack Black, Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody
Brief Synopsis: An intrepidious film maker decides to go and look for a mystical island and gets a lot more than he bargained for. A lot = a really big monkey...
Comments: When deciding to watch any film at midnight, you want it to be engaging enough to keep you awake through the bewitching hours. And King Kong does this with aplomb keeping the viewer on his toes throughout the second and final third of the films. I believe my brothers' words regarding the first 40 minutes were, "it's been an hour and we still haven't seen King Kong" but the first third starts off by merely introducing the characters in their various settings before they all ominiously board the ship.
However it all swings into action once they reach the island. The natives are enough to frighten any grown man (well ok all the men in my family), King Kong is pretty scary when you first meet him, the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex (and there were more than one!) but nothing made my brother put his hands in front of his face more than the giant sized creepy crawlies that hid in dark spaces of the island. Someone on Peter Jackson's team has a twisted memory and there were some fairly young kids sitting in the audience too!
For me, it was all an enjoyable cinematic experience. I don't think the film pretends to be anything more than a thrill seekers ride, despite the odd moments of romance, as there are a fair number of holes in the plot than swiss cheese (how did they get such a large mammal onto the boat? what happened to all the natives?). The women that I know who have seen it say amusing things - my wife says it was damned violent, my work colleague (who disliked it) says King Kong just behaves like your average Indian man!
Regardless if you are going to watch it, you have to watch it the film on a large screen to get the full effects; I caught a short section in a pirated DvD shop and King Kong just looked puny and cheap!
Things to learn from this film: Don't make a big beast angry. Learn some stage tricks. Whenever you fall into a large abyss, make sure you have a plentiful supply of bright lights.
Rating: 8 /10
Featuring: Jack Black, Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody
Brief Synopsis: An intrepidious film maker decides to go and look for a mystical island and gets a lot more than he bargained for. A lot = a really big monkey...
Comments: When deciding to watch any film at midnight, you want it to be engaging enough to keep you awake through the bewitching hours. And King Kong does this with aplomb keeping the viewer on his toes throughout the second and final third of the films. I believe my brothers' words regarding the first 40 minutes were, "it's been an hour and we still haven't seen King Kong" but the first third starts off by merely introducing the characters in their various settings before they all ominiously board the ship.
However it all swings into action once they reach the island. The natives are enough to frighten any grown man (well ok all the men in my family), King Kong is pretty scary when you first meet him, the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex (and there were more than one!) but nothing made my brother put his hands in front of his face more than the giant sized creepy crawlies that hid in dark spaces of the island. Someone on Peter Jackson's team has a twisted memory and there were some fairly young kids sitting in the audience too!
For me, it was all an enjoyable cinematic experience. I don't think the film pretends to be anything more than a thrill seekers ride, despite the odd moments of romance, as there are a fair number of holes in the plot than swiss cheese (how did they get such a large mammal onto the boat? what happened to all the natives?). The women that I know who have seen it say amusing things - my wife says it was damned violent, my work colleague (who disliked it) says King Kong just behaves like your average Indian man!
Regardless if you are going to watch it, you have to watch it the film on a large screen to get the full effects; I caught a short section in a pirated DvD shop and King Kong just looked puny and cheap!
Things to learn from this film: Don't make a big beast angry. Learn some stage tricks. Whenever you fall into a large abyss, make sure you have a plentiful supply of bright lights.
Rating: 8 /10
Friday, December 09, 2005
THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH & THE WARDROBE
Featuring: William Moseley, Skandar Keynes, Georgie Henley, Anna Popplewell
Brief Synopsis: 4 children literally find a whole new world at the back of a err wardrobe .
Comments: The Disney lot sure did their marketing on this film. I had no idea why but I knew I JUST HAD TO SEE IT. Actually I wasn't overly keen on the film as I am a great fan of the book (well from 18 years worth of memories) and films rarely live up to the imagination of a small child. The problem with having read the book first is that you spend the whole film trying to remember what happened next and if you do manage to remember, you think critically to yourself whether it was what you imagined and if it didn't, well it's all a bit of a downer.
The start of the film had quite a lot of promise for me with World War bombings and evacuations but somewhere in the middle, it really just got bogged down. At times the dialogue was too long or else the plot seemed to drag in a few scenes. The queen's ice palace didn't look as intimidating as I imagined it would and it seemed a bit strange that they suddenly came across Aslan's army. Of course, you could weigh these scenes against the time where the humans first met the beavers, the battle towards the end (Aslan's army looked as if they copied Tom Cruise's tactics from the final battle in the Last Samurai) and well the problem was that with the battle, I also kept comparing it to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. (So generally the film had to compete with a childhood imagination and a Oscar winning film!)
The views of other people were quite enlightening - my wife said it was 'so-so' whilst my other friend went for 'ok.' However one of my footballing friends said it was brilliant and enjoyed himself immensely (definitely sure he's not read the book so does that make a difference?). Who's to say you won't enjoy it?
Haven't heard the words 'Turkish Delight' for years though...
Things to learn from this film: Never trust a woman who can conjure chocolate out of thin air... Or snow for that matter.
Rating: 5 /10
Featuring: William Moseley, Skandar Keynes, Georgie Henley, Anna Popplewell
Brief Synopsis: 4 children literally find a whole new world at the back of a err wardrobe .
Comments: The Disney lot sure did their marketing on this film. I had no idea why but I knew I JUST HAD TO SEE IT. Actually I wasn't overly keen on the film as I am a great fan of the book (well from 18 years worth of memories) and films rarely live up to the imagination of a small child. The problem with having read the book first is that you spend the whole film trying to remember what happened next and if you do manage to remember, you think critically to yourself whether it was what you imagined and if it didn't, well it's all a bit of a downer.
The start of the film had quite a lot of promise for me with World War bombings and evacuations but somewhere in the middle, it really just got bogged down. At times the dialogue was too long or else the plot seemed to drag in a few scenes. The queen's ice palace didn't look as intimidating as I imagined it would and it seemed a bit strange that they suddenly came across Aslan's army. Of course, you could weigh these scenes against the time where the humans first met the beavers, the battle towards the end (Aslan's army looked as if they copied Tom Cruise's tactics from the final battle in the Last Samurai) and well the problem was that with the battle, I also kept comparing it to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. (So generally the film had to compete with a childhood imagination and a Oscar winning film!)
The views of other people were quite enlightening - my wife said it was 'so-so' whilst my other friend went for 'ok.' However one of my footballing friends said it was brilliant and enjoyed himself immensely (definitely sure he's not read the book so does that make a difference?). Who's to say you won't enjoy it?
Haven't heard the words 'Turkish Delight' for years though...
Things to learn from this film: Never trust a woman who can conjure chocolate out of thin air... Or snow for that matter.
Rating: 5 /10
