Thursday December 31st 2009
Well done Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince for being the highest-grossing film of this year. You totally deserved it. And with The Dark Knight topping last year’s list, you managed to reduce the portion of this decade that was dominated by utter shit to a manageable 80%.
For a full run-down of 2009, see our Review of the Year which isn’t actually available any more (although there might be a couple of copies left at the BFI).
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
THANKS FOR READING!
P.S. Our ‘Best of 2009′ should be back up tomorrow, and we may even be revealing the start of our ‘Best of 2010′.
Wednesday December 30th 2009
Exam is the latest in a long line of British movies that manage to fool the public (and me) into thinking they might actually be good based solely on a snappily cut trailer and a Hollywood-imitating poster.
It was written, directed and produced by a man named Stuart Hazeldine, who also wrote Knowing and The Day The Earth Stood Still (excited yet?). Stuart is a very bad writer, a fairly incompetent director and a complete sadist – why else would he unleash this lame old crap on the general public?
His characters are stolen from Lost (literally), his premise is unbearably idiotic and illogical, and he seems to have solved the problem of an overlong runtime by having his actors race through their dialogue without a single pause or emotion.
Let’s not be too harsh on Stuart though, he’s a modern-day Alfred Hitchcock compared to his cast.
Actual exams are more fun.
[Sorry - that's the kind of sentence Cosmo Landesman would end a review with]
Tuesday December 29th 2009
… they put this shot in the trailer. Surely it can’t get any better.
Watch the full trailer for Inception here.
Monday December 28th 2009
The Sony screening room in Soho is one of our favourite places to watch movies. They have a great bar, provide absolutely crystal digital projection and have great big stacks of all their latest Blu-ray releases which are very very tempting. At this time of year, they also have a very large Christmas tree, which prompted one of the real critics to speak one of the BEST REMARKS I’VE LITERALLY EVER HEARD:
‘That tree outside is so huge…
… you’d half expect to find James Cameron hugging it.’
Bravo.
Bravo.
Sunday December 27th 2009
I’m all for not judging a book by its cover, but with a poster this crap, a trailer this awful and a title that sounds like an ITV2 Christmas drama, Did You Hear About The Morgans? was destined to be bad.
CAST
For some reason, a new Hugh Grant movie is still considered an event. Especially when it’s a romantic comedy with him and an actress he hasn’t co-starred with before. It happened with Two Weeks Notice, it happened with Music and Lyrics, and now it’s happening with this. In reality, the idea that anyone would get excited about seeing HG and SJP wobbling around together for 2 hours is insane.
Even weirder is the fact that they don’t even bother to explain why Hugh Grant is British.
PLOT
Think Hannah Montana: The Movie but without the thoughtful political subtext and the delicate characterisation. Separated big city couple forced to go into hiding in small town America and learn to love the simple way of life. WARNING: This is not one for fans of logic. In what world would a separated couple be forced to relocate to the same house (against their will) when that would only increase the probability of them being discovered by 100%?
HUMOUR
Don’t get your hopes up, because DYHATM? is entirely laugh-free. Even worse, they’ve left big pauses after the ‘jokes’ for people to laugh their heads off, so every minute or so there’s a terrible awkward silence in which the actors just look quite pleased with themselves.
RELEASE
This is out on January 1st 2010, which is lucky because there is no way the state of next year’s movies could get any worse. The Spirit was released on the first day of this year so maybe a shit starter is just par for.
ULTRA CULTURE PATENTED REVIEW BITES
