Mini Movie Reviews 2 - The Reviewening

[Avian]

I didn't know he was in Hotel Rwanda.

I think he's very good, but he needs the right sort of movie.

[Easy E]

Just finished watching all 4 season of X-Men: Evolution

The first season is mostly bad, but then the series starts to find its groove. The Brotherhood gets a lot more development in this series, and sometimes they even are the heroes! It was nice to see a chracter like Avalanche, who usually is only there to get beaten by the X-men; actually have some development and be a major player. I think the series treats almost all of the characters they present with respect. However, I could not stand the voice of Magneto, it just didn't fit the artwork at all.

Pass

[Dai-Mongar]

The Avengers
Went to a midnight screening of this last night, so needless to say I was excited to see it. I certainly wasn't disappointed.
The general plot is relatively well known now I think; Loki comes to Earth to conquer us all with an alien army, forcing the disparate heroes to band together and save the day. The characters all seemed to be ported from their own movies successfully, and none of the Avengers really seemed like they had a lesser role than the others (except possibly Thor, which is funny considering his brother is the villain). Plus everyone gets at least one Crowning Moment of Awesome.
Being a Joss Whedon film, there are plenty of quoteable one-liners, and his fingerprints are all over the humour. Which is another thing that I wasn't expecting - this movie is really, genuinely funny. Guess they remembered that there's supposed to be some "comic" in comic books.
So yeah, my aimless ranting aside, I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed at least one of the preceding Marvel films (and everyone likes at least one).

Watch It!
And of course, this being a Marvel movie, there's an end-of-credits surprise scene which reveals who's actually pulling the strings.

It's Thanos.

[emperorpenguin]

21 Jump Street

I didn't expect to like this movie but it won me over and had me in stitches for almost the whole movie. Basic plot breakdown is that Jonah Hill was the nerdy kid at school, Channing Tatum was the jock. Both become cops and strike up a friendship. However following a bad bust they both get demoted to the 21 Jump Street program for infiltrating high-school crime. According to the captain "It's an old program from the 80s which has been restarted because those in charge have run out of new ideas"
The movie is full of knowing little jokes like this.
The two have to go undercover as brothers at a high school to find out who is behind a new deadly drug which has killed a kid. Hill fits right in with today's eco-friendly students but Tatum is a fish out of water, lamenting that jocks are no longer cool and blaming a certain tv show

**** you Glee!

while everyone wonders why "He looks like he's 30".


There is a great car chase scene showing just how unlikely stuff is to actually blow up, only for the most hilarious explosion ever to happen. There is also a great cameo from

Johnny Depp and Peter De Luise as their former 21 Jump Street characters, now turned DEA agents

.

Watch it

[Burnthem]

Just watched TT - Closer To The Edge. Phenomenal. The only word to describe it. Even if you've never ridden a motorbike in your life you have to see this film. Moving, exciting, and in places pretty horrifying, it's easily one of the best film I've seen in a long long time. Everyone I've spoken to that's seen it has loved it, so trust me, take a chance, and see it.

Watch.

[nagash66]

Avengers Assemble- i am not one for long reviews, that being said if you think the trailers give too much away you are wrong. If you think this movie has too many characters mashing to be good you are wrong. The script is brilliant, the one liners are natural and funny and the action is fantastic.

WATCH IT

[Kiro]

Avengers

Beaten to the punch already. Pretty much what others have said; the action, the story, the characters were all spot on. I was really surprised at how genuinely funny the film was. Rarely, rarely, give such a score out, but this one deserves a perfect 10/10.

Do anything and everything you can to WATCH IT

[Avian]

Two hours to go. This is going to be so great.

[Avian]

The Avengers (2012)
Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?
Awesome movie, really showing how big action is meant to be done. Michael Bay take note. There were NO moronic characters (on either side). You could follow the action. You weren't actually rooting for the bad guy, even though he was great. Even the 3D wasn't that bad, though I still can't see why they bother.

Verdict: Watch it, again and again, I know I will soon
(five out of five)

When Hulk was smacking Thor and Loki around in New York, I thought I was going to die laughing.

[El_Machinae]

I'm a bit jealous! I cannae see it yet.

[Nocculum]

Tekken

This missed the mark on so many levels.

Tekken, please take note of all the cheesy fighting game classics; Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter.

Copy, paste.

Serious, memory based 'real world transitions' of something entirely detached from reality does not work.

The character adaptations were plausible, the cameos were good, and the basic plot was easily recognisable to anyone familiar with Tekken.

Some good fighting choreography, but no King, murdering Steve Fox, and no lightning/devil presence...no, just no.

This is two hours I wasted.

Verdict: AVOID.

Hopefully I get to watch Pirates! and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and Avengers and Prometheus in the next few weeks to make up for it... coming soon, DVD reviews!

[sigur]

To take a quick break from that Power Rangers film or what it is that these people get all excited about.... ( )

The Machinist (2004)

I may have reviewed that one in the first Mini Movie Review thread back then. Not sure. Anyhow, I found the film playing on late night tv and watched it again since my first viewing of the film in 2006 or something. It's about Trevor Reznik (played by Christian Bale) who keeps on losing weight and can't sleep and he doesn't know why.

Well, anything beyond that would be spoiling a brilliant, suspenseful psychological thriller. The whole film has a very strong mood which ranges from eerie to creepy, to desperate and is always very suspenseful as we go along with Reznik on his journey of finding out what's happening to him, if his growing paranoia is justified and who the heck this guy is he keeps meeting in the most random places.

Great mood, slow and moody but never boring, really good performances (Christian Bale is, as they say, da man. He really is. Michael Ironside's in it too and he's good of course.), well thought out script, very, very good, moralist piece of film.

It really pays off following the film along and it definately is not wasting your time.

Watch It.

[Terminatorphoenix]

The Avengers (2012)
It was alright, I suppose.

Watch

[Shush]

Avengers

There's already lots of reviews for this. I'll just add that I really was surprised how good and funny it was!
I would have liked slightly more Captain America (wasn't sure about the costume change) but it didn't focus too much on any of them too much.

There really are some very funny bits mostly with Hulk
I think all the bits with Hulk were great for one reason or another!

There's a lot of action some of the best bits of which are normal people fighting, especially the Black Widow bits. I liked that her and Hawkeye were very dirty! Stabbing at the monsters eyes and things!

Watch!

[blackcherry]

The Cabin in the Woods.

Ok and a fun enough film to see. The meta plot is hammered home just a little too much (I mean, the person who runs the company is called the director- I can make crap meta play on words gags too), but the delightfully black humour of those working for the company sort of redeemed the film.

It was hard to care about the main characters (which may be part of the point but backfired in the climax of the film when they left to carry the film) and the dialogue did take me out of the film at points.

Overall, I think I'm being too critical as most of the critics who raved about it probably got a lot more of the injokes due to experince with the genre. When it comes down to it, its a basic plot with funny, smart dialogue that I enjoyed for the most part that you can watch and enjoy for multiple reasons.

Watch.

[amijp]

The Avengers

What can I say about this film that hasn't already been touched upon? Great acting, awesome action scenes and yeah, it's really funny. Like genuine laugh out loud. Can't stree enough how much you have got to see this film!

Watch.

Captain America was my favourite Avenger for sure, he's pretty awesome. I've seen The Cap movie, and personally liked it, even though I know loads of people who didn't. I'm curious as to what you guys think of his origin movie?

As I said, I liked it. But one thing gets on my nerves, the whole film is basicly a demonstration of how a guy needs to be ripped and built like a brick sh*thouse in order to get the girl, i.e;

Weedy, average Steve Rogers is severly friendzoned by Peggy Carter, whereas let's just say Captain America is slaying ass as well Nazis, ifyaknowhatImean.

[Shush]

Captain America was my favourite Avenger for sure, he's pretty awesome. I've seen The Cap movie, and personally liked it, even though I know loads of people who didn't. I'm curious as to what you guys think of his origin movie?

As I said, I liked it. But one thing gets on my nerves, the whole film is basicly a demonstration of how a guy needs to be ripped and built like a brick sh*thouse in order to get the girl, i.e;

Weedy, average Steve Rogers is severly friendzoned by Peggy Carter, whereas let's just say Captain America is slaying ass as well Nazis, ifyaknowhatImean.

I loved the Captain America film, it's my favourite of the films building up to Avengers but I must admit I haven't seen Hulk.

I completely disagree with you on the weedy thing. If I remember right he doesn't ask Peggy Carter out before he gets turned into Captain America, so whose fault is that?
The term you use is awful but leaving that.... the only extra attention he gets is from a secretary and she is obviously only after one thing. I think you're seeing that film through your own bad filter.

[Shush]

The Adjustment Bureau

It's kind of a weird Sci-Fi love story. It has Matt Damon as the lead and Emily Blunt as the woman he keeps just missing. I almost feel like anything I say could be a spoiler here.
There are some really good ideas in it. Matt Damon, I thought, was quite good. I didn't feel lots of chemistry between them in the film but there were some parts where it worked.
The people on the other side were interesting I thought their characters could have been developed more though.
I did like the film though so

Watch it if it's free.

[sigur]

From Beijing with Love (1994)

Now here's something different - it's a James Bond spoof from Hong Kong from the early/mid-1990s. It definately was interesting. It's not necessarily "funny" in the classic sense due to its age and I'm sure I didn't get a ton of things because it's spoofing a lot of Hong Kong-made films from that time but there are some very funny ideas. With things like these the dubbing always is very important. German dubbing of comedies (especially spoof comedies) used to take great liberties with dubbings and inserting diagogue where it's not meant to be so that people off camera would say quick one-liners sometimes while the person on camera is looking at them, often to great effect because the writing and timing was excellent. In some cases this meant that films or series were much funnier and more entertaining in the German dubbed version than in their original language (The Persuaders!, the Tony Curtis/Roger Moore series, was a HUGE success in Germany back then due to this and I like to argue that the German dubbed version of the short-lived SciFi channel show The Invisible Man was much more fun than the English-language original for very similar reasons). Nowadays of course German dubbing on feature films is very much a 1:1 translation whilst very often much of the wit and whole jokes are lost because translators seem to be utterly uninvested at times (also, the American language seems to become more playful and abstract as time goes on). Dubbing on tv shows used to be kind of dire but got better again over the past few years (How I met your Mother is hell to dub but has a certain charm in the German language version. I remember Kim Possible having pretty good German voicework and scripting as well).

Aaaaanyway, after this long, insubstantial bubble of trivia and opinion on local stuff... the film was fun. Some silly bits, some very random bits that made probably more sense in the original cantonese. With films like that, even before the reintegration of Hong Kong into China, it's a given that you're on the lookout for somewhat ideologically-dyed things. There is one scene in which the main character uses a mickey mouse plushie for target practice. That was kind of fun or interesting. On the other hand, many of the state officials are pretty dense or downright bad guys (that's why the film is banned in China at the moment).

Some of the humour seems to be forced, some stuff has been seen a few times before (or since) so it won't work as well nowadays and the last 20 minutes are pretty cheesy action stuff but it's all in good fun.

Watch It if you're int the mood for something fun and different.

[Easy E]

Dangerous Beauty
Apparently, this was a bit controversial in 1998 or so when is was made.

It is set in Venice, just before the Plague hits. A girl has to make a choice to become a Nun or a Courtesan.

The movie is interesting enough, but the end strains my ability to suspend disbelief. This was supposedly based on a true story. That's Hollywood speak for "We made this up, but we want it to seems more important than it really is!"

Pass