IT'S OFFICIAL, I WATCH TOO MANY FILMS - A Plethora of Film Reviews

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve watched quite a few movies on DVD and seeing as how I enjoyed them quite a bit I thought I’d write a brief review of all of them. Brace yourselves

We’ll start with THE LINCOLN LAWYER. Adapted brilliantly from Michael Connelly’s huge bestseller this was a far better translation to screen than Blood Work. Although the fairly hefty story has been condensed down to 110 minutes they’ve done it very well so everything is all there and it makes perfect sense, as long as you pay attention. Matthew McConaughey, an actor I’ve never been that fond of is pitch perfect as Mick Haller (he’s called Mickey by most people in the book) who manages to make the character charming despite the fact he’s a defence attorney who makes his living getting guilty clients off charges. There’s able support by Marisa Tomei as his ex-wife and Ryan Phillippe as his current client and it’s all actually very exciting. The best advice, read the book, then watch the movie. Fingers crossed that this leads to future adaptations of Connelly novels.

Next up is a Korean revenge thriller called I SAW THE DEVIL which I heard about a while back on the Empire website. They popped up a red band trailer for this movie starring the actor Choi Min-Sik who I’d last seen in the immense film ‘Oldboy’. This time around he’s a serial killer who murders a young pregnant woman who turns out to be the daughter of a retired Police Chief. She was also engaged to a Secret Service operative who’s really rather unhappy at the love of his life being brutally killed. Once the ‘hero’ has tracked the killer down there then starts a brutal punishment game as the killer is repeatedly beaten and maimed and then released all for the ‘hero’ to do it again. Until things go wrong. This is a very dark and grim movie which does loose it for a little bit in the middle with a side story featuring a cannibal killer and you can certain say that the film is too long. That said it is pretty intense and some of the violence is wince inducing, especially a truly horribly graphic scene involving an Achilles tendon and a scalpel (I’m soooooo not joking about that) which is still giving me the willies even now. Despite being overlong this is still a very worthwhile watch, as long as you have a strong stomach, although I must confess it is not something I would want to watch again.

Changing the mood somewhat, ZOOLANDER is next. Yeah I know it came out 10 years ago and I only watched it on tv but I f**king love this movie. It’s totally silly and not really all that funny but it makes me chuckle everytime I watch it. Something about Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson as male models just has me laughing everytime. And speaking of decades old movies, Tim Burton’s PLANET OF THE APES deserves a retrospective look. Seeing as we’ve got the new movie ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ out this week which is a reboot I thought it was worth watching the last attempt, Burton’s much maligned ‘reimagining’. To be fair it’s not actually that bad. Yeah the plots no great shakes but having read the synopsis of ‘Rise’ on the net, that one doesn’t have a particularly awesome plot either yet that one is getting 4 star reviews. Still at least with that one it’s kind of a prequel rather than a remake of ‘reimagining’. Burton’s Planet is a fair straight forward action adventure chase movie that happens to have some of the best make up effects known to man. The film may be a bit ordinary but the look of the actors as the apes is anything but. Michael Clarke Duncan as a gorilla is amazing and to be totally honest how the hell did Tim Roth not win an Oscar for his evil warmongering chimp, Thade. Everything about him oozes menace and death, a triumph of actor and make up in perfect unison. The only one comparable for me is Ron Perlman as Hellboy. It’s a shame then that Mark Wahlberg is a bit of a wet blanket and don’t even get me started on the ‘twist’ ending. If only Burton had done some foreshadowing of this, perhaps we’d seen Thade finding a way out of his impregnable prison, maybe seen him going back to the site of Marky Mark’s crashing space ship, it would have all made a little more sense rather than just the ‘WTF’ moment in the finished film. Alternatively if Mr Wet Blanket had decided to stay on the planet and help forge a new Ape/Human society it would’ve worked and maybe we’d have had a sequel to that film instead of a 10 year wait for a total reboot/prequel to the original 60s/70s series. I don’t think it’s a bad film, it’s just a pretty ordinary film with a sh*t ending.

Onto a couple of classics now, the late, great Akira Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO and SANJURO both made in the 60s and both in black and white. They also both star the same main character, a seemingly nameless ronin played by the equally late, great Toshiro Mifune. I’m lumping these films together as they both compliment one another although they have very different feels. Yojimbo is in essence a bit of an action movie, featuring a ronin who comes to a town ruled by two warring gangs and decides, seemingly for fun, to destroy both sets by getting them to wipe each other out. Sound familiar? Well that’s because this is the film that A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing are based on. It’s also a bit of an unofficial adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s brilliant novel Red Harvest. Full of fast and brief sword play and some black comedy this is a slow paced but wonderfully made movie that despite the Japanese setting feels every bit as much a Western as a John Wayne movie. Sanjuro is a far lighter affair. Much more obviously a comedy than it’s predecessor it’s a far more talky affair too, with Mifune’s character teaming up with 9 samurai who are fighting corruption in their town. That’s not to say there isn’t some sword play, there is but that’s not really the main focus of this film. These might be considered lesser films in Kurosawa’s resume compared to the likes of Seven Samurai or Ran but they are light years ahead of most other films of that time and I thoroughly recommend them.

Next up we have SUCKER PUNCH, Zack Snyder’s fantasy that he described as ‘Alice in Wonderland with guns’ or you could say it the first movie computer game. The shame with this film is that the fantasy action scenes are truly quite amazing. The first fantasy scene in feudal Japan with the lead character battling three giant Samurai demons is stunning and they get better from there. The highlight for me being a scene in a fantasy World War I with the heroine’s battling German Zombie’s powered by Steam and clockwork is just brilliant with gouts of escaping steam as substitutes for blood. The sad thing about this film is the framing plot is totally illogical and nonsense. A girl gets sent to a mental asylum by her abusive step father who is paying the head orderly to have her lobotomized in 5 days. The girl escapes into a fantasyland where she’s been dumped in a bordello and is going to have a man known as ‘The High Roller’ deflower her in 5 days. She plots escaping and then goes off into another fantasyland when she hunts down items she needs to escape. Are you still with me? It’s all just a bit confusing and not really that interesting. Why couldn’t she have been in a car accident and as she’s fighting for her life why didn’t she go off into a fantasyland where she has to do battle with creatures etc to come back to the real world? Maybe that’s my plot line for a Sucker Punch 2, better copyright that fast. It is a pity that the framework is so ‘meh’ and ‘huh?’ as there was potential here to make a really good fantasy film. It should also be mentioned that the film is a total ‘boys’ movie as the girls are all very pretty and wear skimpy outfits, in both fantasy worlds, as well as having totally objectifying names, Babydoll, Sweet Pea, Blondie, it’s all a little dirty old man trenchcoat fantasy really. Obviously I love this film.

Right we’re back off to Korean, well a Korean film that is with THE MAN FROM NOWHERE which bills itself as ‘Taken meets Oldboy’ when a better way of describing it would be ‘Taken with more plot’. I really enjoyed this film which is not as violent as you’re expecting and actually has some decent characters and a story. Following the same rough plot of Taken this has a little girl being taken by nasty men and her neighbour (a bit similar to Leon really) going out to save her. It’s during this that we discover that the neighbour who runs a pawnshop is actually ex-military intelligence and a dab hand at ‘goingtokickthef**kingsh*toutofyou-fu’. The action does take quite a while to arrive, mixed in with a plot involving the police running in conjunction with the main bit as well as flashbacks fleshing out the pawnshop man, but it’s well worth the wait. The final denouement is a blood soaked battle which climaxes in probably the best knife fight I’ve ever seen on film, eclipsing previous title holders ‘Under Siege’ and ‘The Hunted’. This will definitely be going on my ‘must buy list’

I told you I watch too many films.

Still with me though? Nearly finished, I promise. Just three more to go. Actually that’s a lie, there’s four, but I’m gonna deal with JONAH HEX really quickly. It’s not as sh*t as everyone says. It may only be 70 minutes long before the 8 minute end credits kick in but it’s a perfect beer and pizza movie. It moves fast, has plenty of explosions and Megan Fox doesn’t wear very much and looks stunning. There done.

Moving swiftly on, and I’m getting a bit bored now, plus there’s this thing called work and I’m meant to be doing it, I’ll deal with the next three very fast. MACHETE was really good fun. An expansion of the fake trailer from ‘Grindhouse’ and ‘Planet terror’ this is a gory exploitation kill fest with an A list cast who look like they’re having a ball. Danny Trejo is awesome as Machete and I do hope he gets to do more. The film would benefit from being a little shorter and perhaps a little less preachy/political but it’s still worth a watch. TRON LEGACY was a visual feast that makes the first one look decidedly prehistoric. The story is essentially the same and the second half isn’t quite as exciting as the first but it’s still a very entertaining action picture. Lastly and by no means least we have TRUE GRIT, the Coen Brothers version that is. This is an absolute work of art. Jeff Bridges is stunning as Rooster Cogburn, Matt Damon is wonderfully understated as LaBeouf and Hailee Steinfeld is terrific as the central character of Mattie. Wonderfully paced and a near perfect translation of the novel this is arguably the best western since Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.

Right I’m done. Work time.

Not sure which movie I’ll watch tonight though, hhhhhhmmmmmmmm will have to think about that.