"I'm afraid, I was very, very drunk"
Have you ever watched a film at the cinema and found that some people in the audience were laughing hysterically, when you’ve only just been mildly amused? You know, others are almost to the point of requiring medical attention and you’ve only just quietly tittered at the same jokes?
Well that’s exactly what happened to me last week when I went to see The Hangover with my mate Andrew. Honestly, you’d think some of the audience had never been out of the house before, let alone to the cinema.
Now the cynic in me thinks that as the film was a free preview screening, there might’ve been a few, shall we say, “special” audience members who might’ve been paid to laugh noisily for atmospheric purposes and ‘pump up’ the rest of the audience to generate a positive buzz ahead of the official release of the film. But, that’s just a hunch. Wouldn’t surprise me though!
Of course, it could just be that the rest of the audience hadn’t seen the trailer, which contains most of the major plot points of the film and so leaves few surprises for those of us that have watched it. The short version is: Four guys go to Vegas on a stag do, get drunk and have a wild night, can’t remember anything in the morning, realise that the groom has gone missing, spend the rest of the film piecing together what happened the night before so they can find him and get him back for the wedding.
For me, The Hangover was a watchable half-decent comedy at best. But if the audience we saw it with were anything to go by, 95% of people would disagree with me – especially as it’s currently an imdB top 250 film (#126 as I type! *facepalm*) with a sequel already in the works.
6.5/10.
Coraline's "Other Father" has just come home from a recording of Gladiators.
It’s been a funny old few weeks. What with work, my general slothfulness and other stuff going on in life, I’ve not really felt in the mood for blogging. But I’ll try to remedy that now with a quick catch-up film review. You know, just to keep the blog wheels lubricated…
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Angels & Demons really is as exciting as it looks.
I watched Angels & Demons last week, and bugger me it’s been difficult finding the enthusiasm to blog about it. I even cleaned the oven yesterday in preference to writing about it.
You see, as with The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown certainly appears to have done his religious research. Ok, I’m sure there is probably a similar amount of artistic licence involved in Angels & Demons as there was in TDVC, but quite where the line that divides historical fact from historical fiction would be exactly, I don’t know. The problem is, I don’t much care either, so I just can’t get excited about Angels & Demons no matter how hard I try. Perhaps other people who give a monkey’s won’t find the backdrop of this film quite as tedious as I did.
Anyway, Angels & Demons is basically National Treasure with the fun sucked out. Except Captain Wooden isn’t looking for treasure, he’s looking for an anti-matter bomb that’s going to wipe out Vatican City. He’s not alone though, and some might say that rather conveniently, he’s got a good looking particle physicist / part-time religious crime fighter, and a part-time helicopter pilot / stand-in Pope for company. Denise Richards playing a nuclear physicist in The World is Not Enough doesn’t seem quite so silly now, does it now?
So, they trot around Vatican City following clues, looking serious and spouting some religious guff that in turn leads to the next religious location. And repeat. It all must’ve been a hoot to film.
I think sitting through The Da Vinci Code was quite enough for me and despite what I said in my original review of that, I’ve not once had any inclination to watch that for a second time. 138 very long minutes of Angels & Demons makes that even less likely too.
4/10.
How many ears does Spock have again?
You know, I had my doubts about the new Star Trek film.
I mean, Captain Kirk will always be William Shatner, right? Everyone knows that, surely? It just wouldn’t be right to have someone else play him, would it? And Spock… well that role is forever associated with Leonard Nimoy, isn’t it? Always will be.
The thing is, those two characters are cultural icons from the original Star Trek series. Even a non-Trekkie like myself can appreciate that. So when you hear that a new Star Trek film is being made, with the original characters – but not the original cast and that JJ Abrams (*cough* Clovershit *cough*) was directing it… well you can’t blame some people for being a bit skeptical.
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RAWR!!
Want to know why Wolverine from X-Men is only able to grow 90% of a beard? Are you itching to find out if he sometimes stabs himself in the eye when he picks his nose? Perhaps you’re wondering why he didn’t go into the professional potato peeling business? Well, you’ll be none the wiser to any of those questions if you watch X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
We do however find out where he gets the rest of his trademark look, learn a tiny bit about his love life and his family and even get a montage of his war history, but I can absolutely positively confirm that no explanation of his uneven facial hair growth is offered at any point in the film.
The general gist of Wolverine’s past is that after kickin’ ass with his brother (Sabretooth) in various wars over the last century, Wolverine finally gets bored of having to stop his sibling from raping and pillaging, so he decides to leave him to do what he wants and walks off without so much as a wave goodbye. Feeling totally ‘abandoned’, his brother decides to kill Logan’s girlfriend. Now some might think that’s a tiny overreaction and wondered what would’ve happened had Wolverine done something much more serious to Sabretooth instead. I’d wager that there’d be some sort of nuclear revenge attack had Wolverine given him a wedgie or hidden his teddy bear. But anyway, that’s the basis of the film and Wolverine is quite happy to get upgraded with an Adamantium injection to allow him to duff up his brother and avenge his girlfriend’s death. Of course, this feeble plot might be part of a bigger, equally feeble plot…
Don’t get me wrong, it was entertaining enough for a couple of hours and there’s a handful of decent bits, but I’ll have to say that unlike some of my fellow cinema-goers, I wasn’t really ‘feeling it’ (admittedly I’ve not really thought any of the X-Men films have been that good). Relationships between the main characters were a bit thin and unconvincing, as development mostly takes a backseat to the really obvious CGI action. Hey ho. It was better than X-Men 3, but I guess for some inexplicable reason I was just expecting to see something, I dunno, much better this time around.
6.5/10.
Oh, and as Columbo would say, “just one more thing”…
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