Thursday's Reviews

→ in
Tools    





Thursday, I watched In My Father's Den on your recommendation and very good it was too. Full of brooding and foreboding. Recommended by me too



Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
The Boat That Rocked


The Boat that Rocked

I feel slightly bad for not liking this film, considering that it is essentially a good-humoured and affectionate British comedy about pirate radio stations in the 1960s, but I’m afraid the best that can be said for it is that it is intermittently amusing.

Although there is an interesting ensemble cast, with Philip Seymour Hoffman the stand-out as an irreverent die-hard rocker, there are simply too many characters to keep track of, especially since some are so similar. There are at least two inexplicably-attractive-to-the-opposite-sex middle aged men, both of whom sleep with the girls that the younger men who look up to them have their eye on in remarkably similar plotlines. There are at least three ‘lovable loser’ types. None of the characters gets quite enough screen time to make us really care about their storylines and the dramatic moments feel manufactured. The central character Carl, as played by Tom Sturridge, is far too pretty and modern looking to be convincing as an unpopular virgin.

Kenneth Branagh is clearly filling in time until he is old enough to play Lear by hamming it up as snooty villains (see also Rabbit Proof Fence, Conspiracy). In the film’s least convincing subplot (and it is a hotly contested title) he plays a politician trying to shut down the pirate radio stations. Jack Davenport should sack his agent, as he appears here as Branagh’s slightly put-upon snooty villain sidekick, a role that is virtually indistinguishable from the one he plays in Pirates of the Caribbean. Oh, and his character is named Twatt. Subtle comedy indeed. I bet he wishes he was still in This Life.

The sixties music was better than I had expected, not generally being a fan of anything pre-1977, but there were a few prominent soundtrack choices here that would put Watchmen to shame with their blatant obviousness. Songs about a girl’s name were particularly silly choices, especially when it is quite clear that the characters’ names have been chosen as an excuse to use the songs. And Father and Son during a dramatic scene between a father and son? Please. If it was meant to be a joke, it wasn’t funny. If it was meant to be poignant, it wasn’t. The whole predictable and mawkish ‘who’s the daddy’ plotline made me yawn; although I didn’t know who the father was until about ten minutes before it was revealed to the character, I really didn’t care that much. It was like watching Mamma Mia again with slightly better music.

If I was feeling particularly uncharitable, I could call the film misogynistic. Apart from the token shipboard lesbian, all that the female characters do is to sleep with one or several of the dj crew with very little encouragement. Unlike previous Curtis hits, it is not romantic at all. The teenaged Carl losing his virginity to the girl who previously left him to sleep with another dj while he was looking for a condom is presented as some kind of victory, although it is hard to see why. Perhaps this was a deliberate choice by Curtis to distance this film from slushy romantic ensemble Love Actually. But sentimental as that film was, it managed to handle the multiple characters and plots with more skill and heart than The Boat that Rocked which ultimately drifts along like a boat with nowhere particular to go.

And finally, I rather think the djs of Radio Rock would be shaking their heads to learn that their legacy is that we can now listen to Scouting for Girls and The Saturdays all day on bbc radio 1…

2.5/5




Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
I liked your review , but I love this cast and the idea so much I still got to check it out.
Go ahea It's not unwatchable, but with the cast and the idea, it really should have been a better film.



Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Thursday, I watched In My Father's Den on your recommendation and very good it was too. Full of brooding and foreboding. Recommended by me too
Pleased you actually thought my recommedation worth following, and glad it proved to be worth watching.



The Boat that Rocked is the sort of film to be avoided like the plague. I can't stand Richard Curtis's cringeworthy version of England, thank god we don't live there
Can't stand Rhys Ifans either.



The People's Republic of Clogher
The Boat that Rocked is the sort of film to be avoided like the plague. I can't stand Richard Curtis's cringeworthy version of England, thank god we don't live there
Can't stand Rhys Ifans either.
I can't stand Richard Curtis, full stop. Or Emma Freud for that matter...

Nice review, Thursday.
__________________
"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan



what a great review! (not) to be completely irreverent, i now want to see the movie, just to watch for your observations.
__________________
something witty goes here......



Registered User
Its a good revies of a great film. Glad you started a review thread.I'd efinitly by checking back for new ones. Its a good and favourable movie.I like this very much.its a fully entertainment and mind blowing.



Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Magicians (2007)



Watched Magicians, because at £3 it was actually cheaper to buy this than rent something new and as a fan of Peep Show I'd been meaning to get around to this for a while. Starring Mitchell and Webb as Magicians who fall out after Mitchell's character, Harry, discovers his wife in a compromising position with Webb's character, Karl, and subsequently - accidentally - chops her head off in a guillotine trick gone wrong. Fast forward a couple of years and they both attempt to regain their former glory in the magic world by entering a magic competition. Mitchell has a new assistant in the lovely form of Jessica Hynes (Spaced) and Karl has become the psychic ‘Mind Monger’.

It doesn't look like a good film. I hadn't heard good things about it. But it was better than I expected it to be. Not brilliant. Considering the brilliance of Peep Show, the writers had a lot to live up to and fell disappointingly short, as all the reviews indicated. They seem to think a lot of swearing will do in the place of subtlety and wit, when they should know better. It doesn't look like a film. It's hopelessly un-cinematic and there's no excuse for that. Especially when they make use of cheesily clichéd endings to their various subplots. It is Andrew O’Connor’s first outing as a director and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was his last.

But it's not all bad. It is, despite all this, funny. Not hilarious. Not clever. But it is a bit funny. Compared to Peep Show, or Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead it may look drab, but compare it to Brit-com dross like Confetti and Blackball and it doesn't look too shabby after all. It managed to entertain us for an hour and a half. Most of the best bits in the film come from the always excellent Peter Capaldi (As seen in The Thick of it and recently Torchwood) as the organiser and of the magic competition, and Darren Boyd as Karl’s hopeless manager who has a crush on him.

(Insert witty closing line with pun about magic here… failing that, maybe I could just swear and hope for the best…)

3/5




Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Lars and the Real Girl (2007)



So much of how we perceive a film comes down to expectation. If a film is average, yet we have expected it to be poor, it has exceeded our expectations and we therefore feel more positively about it. If we are expecting something dazzling and find it is merely average, we are probably disposed to feel less kindly towards it than towards the ‘better than expected’ film, even where they are of equal quality. It all comes down to the gap between expectation and the actual experience. Perhaps the best policy is to avoid all reviews and prejudgements.

But if you were going to do that you wouldn’t be here reading my reviews thread.

I’ll start by quoting some dialogue:

Gus: What are we doing? Why are we doing this for him?
Karin: Oh, come on. It's funny!
Gus: Is it?
Karin: I don't know. I don't know, maybe not.

Good understated dialogue, which sums up the movie quite accurately. It’s funny. But is it really funny?

Lars (Ryan Gosling) is mentally ill. Largely as a result of his mother dying in childbirth and being shut out by his grieving father and self-absorbed brother. His father now also dead, he lives in the garage of his parents’ house, now occupied by his brother, Gus (Paul Schneider) and his pregnant sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer). He suffers from social anxiety and doesn’t really know how to communicate with people. One day, his workmate shows him an online site where you can buy life size dolls. A little while later, Lars buys one and introduces it to the community as his girlfriend, Bianca.

I have seen this described as a feelgood film. I can see why, it’s kind of sweet how everyone rallies round and helps Lars, pretending to believe his delusion that Bianca is real, and how through this experience Lars learns how to connect with the people around him and how to speak to girls, eventually forming the beginnings of a relationship with another co-worker.

But it didn’t make me feel good. It was just too sad.

There were a few other reasons I didn’t like this film as much as I thought I would. There are the little things – why is Margot, Lars’ co-worker, so besotted with him in the first place? The way that Lars’ fears about his sister-in-law dying in childbirth like his mother are never really resolved. That Lars and Margot get together at Bianca’s funeral struck me as slightly distasteful, even though she wasn’t real, she seemed real to Lars. It was overall (and I hate saying this because it’s the kind of thing that people who only like comic-book action movies say about anything slower paced), a little bit dull. On top of that, I found it a little too self-consciously quirky.

That said, it did have its share of comic and touching moments. The acting was all very good, it would be difficult to pick a stand-out performance although I like Patricia Clarkson as the doctor who counsels Lars under the pretence of giving treatments to Bianca. None of the characters is a cliché or stereotype. I liked the way Lars’ unconventional dependence on his doll was subtly contrasted with the more acceptable attachments his co-workers had to their action figures and teddy bears without this ever being made explicit in the dialogue. It was unusual and, I suppose, thought-provoking.

I know I'm being unduly harsh because I expected to like it more than I did. But I wonder if some of the reviews I read were unduly charitable because they expected from the 'small town man gets sex-doll girlfriend' premise that it would be much worse.

3 and a bit/5



Nice reviews...
Thanks for sharing..



Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
28 Weeks Later(2007)





So I thought I'd watch 28 Weeks Later. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, bloody awful. I liked 28 Days Later, I really did. I was sceptical about a sequel with none of the same actors or characters and with a different director. Turns out I was right to be sceptical.

The meetings for this film must have gone something along the lines of:

"Danny Boyle doesn't want to make a sequel."

"That's ok, Aliens wasn't directed by the same person as Alien. Just get the director to copy Danny Boyle's style a bit, nobody will notice."

"Copy Aliens, ok, got it."

Because seriously, how do you do a sequel to an 'ordinary people caught up in horror' film? Yes, you bring in the wise cracking US military. And a couple of kids in danger. Just like Aliens.

Except that despite this ripping-off-Aliens thing, none of the people involved in the film (characters and/or writers) has ever seen a horror film, clearly, because they think that it’s a good idea to open doors when somebody knocks even though they know full well it could be a zombie, say ‘I’ll be back in a moment’ (yeah, you or your bloody corpse), and approach family members who are clearly infected with the Rage Zombie plague.

The military are so wholly incompetent you wonder how they ever made it through basic training. The whole thing is full of logical problems that make Cillian Murphy’s fantastical transformation from ordinary Joe to skinny Rambo in the first film seem perfectly plausible. Why are there no rats in the underground? Why is it pitch black one minute and then light? Do they really expect us to suspend our disbelief enough to accept that if you fly a helicopter low enough you can cut the heads off an army of zombies and not crash, and still have enough fuel to cross the Channel?

If the film was any good, if the story, characters or acting swept you away then perhaps these small points wouldn’t matter. But sadly the story is lame, the two children at the centre of the story are incredibly annoying. The boy wanders around with apparently no fear of anything, the girl wears far too much make-up, even when she’s in bed or has been on the run from zombies across London. The zombie outbreak is entirely their fault for deciding implausibly to go exploring in un-quarantined areas of the city and you really don’t care if they survive.

There are a couple of good points. It’s not badly filmed, in places. There are a couple of haunting images, such as the grass having overgrown on the pitch at Wembley. The opening sequence isn’t all bad. But having it retold and shown again in flashbacks is overkill. The music is good. But I’ve heard it somewhere before, possibly in the first film. And it’s overused. The ending isn’t syrupy, at least. The moral of the film is: in the event of a zombie plague, make sure your family members are dead.

1.5/5



Welcome to the human race...
I like the review - could argue for one issue which you consider implausible (the issue of kids exploring I put down to a naturally childish curiosity, not to mention the boy's wish to find a photo of his mum), but won't bother. Can hardly wait to see what they come up with for the inevitable 28 Months Later...
__________________
I really just want you all angry and confused the whole time.
Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0



Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Yeah, but they go exploring the very next day after they are reunited with their father? The girl goes into the pizza place and steals keys from a rotting corpse not because she has to, but just to go for a little scooter ride? They're having fun? They're not scared at all, despite the recent death of their mother and 99% of the rest of the population, to go exploring in an area they have been told is infected? And the trained soldiers on guard duty don't notice them creeping across the bridge...?



28 days...6 hours...42 minutes...12 seconds
I think other than the fact that the infected guy got into the one area with all the humans, this movie was good.

I kind of liked it better than 28 Days Later.
__________________
"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have."

Suspect's Reviews



Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Bunny and the Bull (2009)



You are spared the rant I was going to go on about the impossibility of finding a cinema that bothers to show smaller/independent films by the discovery made by one of my friends on Sunday afternoon that the charming Prince Charles cinema off Leicester Square was showing the film we wanted to see, Bunny and the Bull. Downstairs screen, £5. Bargain, I must say.

Bunny and the Bull, written and directed by Paul King, is a delightfully odd road trip comedy which opens with Stephen Turnbull (Edward Hogg, endearing in the lead role) attempting to leave the flat he hasn’t left for a year after his carefully stock piled freeze dried vegetarian lasagnes unexpectedly go off. Leaving the flat is difficult for Stephen and we find out why in a series of flashbacks to a disastrous road trip round Europe Stephen undertook with his friend Bunny (Simon Farnaby) the year before.

Stephen is a nervous, organised vegetarian who enjoys visiting shoe museums, at odds with the bon vivant Bunny, a self-centred gambler who likes to take the bull by the horns. Literally. Stephen falls for a spiky Spanish beauty (Veronica Echegui) he meets in a Captain Crab restaurant in Poland – but does he have the balls to go after what he wants, or will Bunny get there first?

This is a very funny film, full of surreal details. Along the way Stephen and Bunny encounter a succession of oddball characters including a dog-bothering tramp played by Julian Barratt (who has worked with King on cult TV comedy series The Mighty Boosh). The tramp scene was a little too gross-out for me, I have to say, it wouldn’t have been out of place in Borat. There is also an appearance by the other half of the Boosh, Noel Fielding, as a deluded Matador who, in possibly the film’s funniest sequence, attempts to train Bunny as a bullfighter in a car park using a shopping trolley with horns.

Funny as it is, though, there are also some quite poignant moments. Stephen’s obvious mental illness, the reasons for it and the way he attempts to overcome his fears and compulsions are really quite touching and lend an extra depth to the film.

The look of the film is the real highlight. Wonderfully quirky there is a mix of home-made seeming sets, animation and more traditional scenery. All the flashbacks are triggered by household objects – postcards, a takeaway box – and these objects form the sets for the scenes on the road trip – newspaper trees, bottle crate walls, even a fairground made from clock parts in one gorgeous sequence.

I think Paul King has done a really good job on his first feature film, it’s good-looking, it’s quirky, it’s thoughtful and it’s still funny. I only wish there were more films like this, and more cinemas which would show them.

4/5