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Thanks for the great review Wednesday It sounds like a movie i would like added it to my list of must see
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Good review... I think I won't watch that movie.



Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Good review... I think I won't watch that movie.
Which movie? And why not? Or are you one of those irritating people who makes inane comments on people's review threads to get themselves enough posts to post spam links?



Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)



Once upon a time in (an alternative version of) Nazi-occupied France, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), a young Jewish woman who runs a cinema, attracts the attention of a celebrated young Nazi and spots an opportunity for revenge, while a band of Jewish-American soldiers known as the Basterds led by Brad Pitt roam around the continent scalping Nazis. The two plotlines converge in an orgy of violent revenge of Shakespearian proportions (if Shakespeare had had more stuff being blown up) at the premiere of a German propoganda film at Shosanna's cinema.

This film enthralled and irritated me in equal measure.

The music, a lot of it by Ennio Morricone, was excellent, very atmospheric. There were some beautiful shots and some wonderfully tense, well scripted scenes – the opening scene in which Christoph Waltz's amoral Nazi Col. Landa interrogates a French farmer suspected of sheltering a Jewish family is a stand out. I loved that the French characters spoke French and the German characters spoke German – none of your 'Allo Allo' style Germans speaking English to each other in bad German accents. And it had August Diehl (The Counterfeiters). It didn't bother me at all that the film changed history, films always do. Although I think I'd have preferred it if I hadn't known beforehand that it did.

But on the other hand, there were a few things that bothered me. Mike Myers, for one, in his Austin Powers English accent cameo. When the unplaceable German accent of the English spy in another scene is a plot point, it seems ill judged. Although perhaps it was deliberate. The whole film, frankly, could have been done as well (maybe better) without the eponymous basterds; Shosanna's side of the story is much more interesting. I wasn't keen on Brad Pitt in this at all, although I know others have praised him. Adopting a Tennessee drawl and a constipated squint doesn't quite cut it as an acting performance for me. And the style of the film wasn't quite as consistent as it could have been. Some of it was quite restrained by Tarantino standards, but then a burst of voiceover and little cartoon arrows pointing out who everyone is would happen, which was a little jarring – I think it needed either more of that, earlier on, or none at all. It lacked the kinetic style of Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill but failed to quite replace it with anything solid and the odd bursts of grim humour didn't quite gel, for me. There's no subtlety to it. Although perhaps I shouldn't be looking for subtlety in a Tarantino movie.

The whole concept of the film bothered me. It's like fanfiction for history. Inglourious Basterds is not so much a revenge movie as a revenge fantasy. It's not characters taking revenge on characters - the characters of the Basterds are never developed beyond "we're gonna be doin' one thing and one thing only... killin' Nazis."
WARNING: "Inglorious Basterds" spoilers below
It's like a ten year old first hearing about the holocaust and saying 'yeah, well if I'd been there we'd have had this whole secret army of Jews and we'd have gone round scalping Nazis and we'd have trapped Hitler and a bunch of Nazis in a cinema and we'd have pumped them full of bullets and set fire to them and then blown them up.'
It's a bit immature. Which is a shame, because parts of it really are brilliant. I think perhaps Tarantino needs to co-write with someone who can rein him in a bit.



(Sections of this review previously posted in the Inglourious Basterds review thread)



Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Avatar



Disabled marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) takes his dead twin brother's place on a specialised mission which involves him taking control of a giant blue 'avatar' body in order to negotiate with the indigenous population of the planet Pandora for mining access on behalf of a big and typically evil corporation. Soon Jake is torn between his loyalty to his military superiors and the corporation, and his growing respect for the Na'avi culture and love for the chieftan's daughter, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). Sigourney Weaver, Giovanni Ribisi, Stephen Lang and Michelle Rodriguez play stock supporting characters to mediocre effect.

I don't know if Avatar is the most expensive film ever made but it's almost certainly the most expensive film in terms of how much it cost me to see it. The extra price for £D is a rip-off, imo. I try not to let that influence my opinion of the film, though. The £d itself has its pros and cons. Some parts of it look absolutely stunning, while at other points I got a headache from my eyes not focussing on the right part of the screen quickly enough. I have to wonder how well this film will work on the small screen, or whether it's all spectacle and no substance (*cough*Titanic*cough*). Oh, and they decided the best use of the £D technology is to make Michelle Rodriguez's cleavage £D. Sort of shows you what sort of level this film is on.

It looks thoroughly brilliant. It's just breathtaking in places. I did get swept up in the story, especially the first half. The Na'avi don't look like cgi. I won't say they look real, because they're giant blue aliens, but they look effective. The special effects in this are top quality (unless you subscribe to the view that cgi doesn't count as special effects in which case, the cgi is top quality). It looks like James Cameron kicking Peter Jackson's arse in the effects department (Na'avi 1 – Hopelessly unrealistic dinosaurs on skull island 0).

I watched this film with Mr. Next who said afterwards he was enjoying it up until the alien sex. The alien sex didn't bother me. The lack of chemistry or interest in the romance did. I don't know whether that was down to the cgi or the dialogue. I didn't like the too-obvious eco-friendly anti-war love-the-earth-and-respect-the-native-people message; it was neither subtle nor clever nor particularly new. More Ferngully than Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, sadly. Where were the interesting moral grey areas, the conflicted loyalties, the difficult choices of a grown up film? It seemed to promise some of these but never quite delivered.

Overall, Avatar is a bum-numbing 2 and a half hour-plus disappointment. And I'm not even talking about all the hype, or the fact that it's really really not the new Star Wars or the new Aliens after all. The worst thing about this film is that it doesn't live up to itself. The first bit, with the disabled soldier arriving on another world after the death of his twin where he can control an avatar body - it's a brilliant set up. The way Jake has to deal with increasingly conflicted loyalties is good. But by the end we've got sledge-hammer subtle goodie vs. baddie in hand-to-hand combat and
WARNING: "Avatar" spoilers below
everything saved by a magic tree
. The ending was unforgivable, really
WARNING: "Avatar" spoilers below
they set up this really rather good irreconcilable situation where he has a happier life in his avatar body but it can never be real, setting everything up for tragedy even in victory and then... oh yeah, a magic tree saves the day
. It's childish. I wanted a more grown-up film. Maybe that's my problem, maybe that's just not what this film is but it was still woefully unsubtle and... well, kind of lame. Still, it looked great and I enjoyed half of it so I'll give it half marks.



(Parts of this review previously posted on the Avatar review thread)



Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
A Single Man (2009)

"It takes time in the morning for me to become George, time to adjust to what is expected of George and how he is to behave. By the time I have dressed and put the final layer of polish on the now slightly stiff but quite perfect George I know fully what part I'm suppose to play."

Colin Firth plays George Falconer, a middle-aged English college professor living in America in the 1960s. To his neighbours, colleagues and students George is an ordinary, somewhat ineffectual single man. What they don't see is the depths beneath the surface - George is suffering from a broken heart, his partner of 16 years, Jim (Matthew Goode), having died recently in a car crash. The film follows George through one day in his life, a day he decides will be different as he makes preparations for his suicide. Throughout the day his interactions with other people, particularly his best friend Charley (Julianne Moore) and a curious student (Nicholas Hoult) test or strengthen his suicidal resolve.

Directed by fashion designer Tom Ford, A Single Man is, as you'd expect, stylish and stylised. But it's far from vapid, there are subtle emotional nuances and hidden depths within the film, just as there are behind George's facade. It looks exquisite, the 1960s rendered in convincing detail. The use of colour is very deliberate, in some scenes the colours grow warmer as George receives some kindness from another human being, almost glowing. It sounds gimmicky, perhaps, but it works perfectly. It's a beautiful film, in the way it looks and in the emotions it reveals. Colin Firth's performance is excellent, the anguish at the start of the film as he relives his discovery of his partner's death is quite heartbreaking. The flashbacks to George and Jim when Jim was alive are warm and convincing. The supporting performances from Juliane Moore and Nicholas Hoult are also very good, their characters ambiguous in their intentions and seeming very real. The music, too, deserves a mention, a beautiful score.

It's not a fast-paced film and it might frustrate some, at time it seems to drift, but that you don't know quite what will happen isn't really a bad thing. The ending, which I won't spoil, I wasn't at first sure was quite right, was maybe a little too neat. There were maybe a couple of scenes which were awkwardly unsubtle in comparison to the rest of the film; the owl for one and the lecture George gives on fear of minorities for another.

This really is is an exquisite film, with genuine sadness, humour in the midst of tragedy, hope and beauty.




"If it's going to be a world with no time for sentiment, Grant, it's not a world that I want to live in."





Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Burke and Hare (2010)




John Landis takes on the infamous tale of the West Port murderers Burke and Hare – and loses.

Burke (Simon Pegg) and Hare (Andy Serkis) are down-on-their-luck Irish conmen living in Edinburgh who strike it rich when an elderly tenant dies and they discover his cadaver is worth five pounds when sold to an Edinburgh doctor (Tom Wilkinson) who needs dead bodies for his anatomy lectures. From there they quickly descend into murder, and the film quickly descends into farce.

There is no reason why a serial killer cannot make a perfectly convincing anti-hero of a comic film – just look at Kind Hearts and Coronets. Actually, the scriptwriters would have done well to take a look themselves. Here, we feel no sympathy with the protagonists, their descent into murder is quick and accompanied by no sense of moral questioning, beyond Pegg's character looking a bit gormless and unsure. Worse, it isn't funny. The subject matter seems to demand black humour, but all we get here are pratfalls. People fall over, people get food on their face, or excrement dumped on their heads, they chase after a dead body in a barrel down a hill.

Any pretence at historical accuracy is abandoned with the introduction of Burke's love interest, Ginny (Isla Fisher), a former hooker who aims (in a ridiculous, tedious and horribly tacked-on subplot) to put on the first all-female production of Macbeth. It would be unfair to criticise Fisher's wobbly accent, since it seems apparent that nobody in the film is taking accents or accuracy of any kind seriously. It's quite clear about that from the start, and it would be fair enough, if only it was funny. But it isn't. The film plods along made up mostly of a string of one-joke scenes and celebrity cameos including Bill Bailey, Michael Winner and Paul Whitehouse. Tom Wilkinson is in the unusual position of falsely taking credit for the invention of the photograph again (as he did in the 1998 movie The Governess) which is an oddly specific sort of type casting. Or coincidence. Why, given the slapdash attitude towards facts, it was felt necessary to have a closing sequence saying what happened to the characters after the events of the film I don't know.

The music is dire. There is a good deal of over-acting, perhaps in an attempt to make up for the under-writing which really only makes it worse. The biggest oddity is not how bad the script is, but why, having read the script, any of the people in the film decided to get involved with it at all. I can only imagine the majority of them are feeling thoroughly embarrassed. (Interestingly, David Tennant dropped out before filming. Sensible choice on his part.)

The whole thing is a wasted opportunity.





I can't say I'm surprised. The moment you see this is a comedy, you can be fairly certain it'll be crap. My own bias against Serkis and Pegg was enough to put me off.



Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
a Michael Winner cameo too. Oh how hilarious that must've been
If it makes you feel better
WARNING: "Burke and Hare" spoilers below
he does die