Saturday 28 November 2015

The Good Dinosaur


I'm at a loss as to how such disparate elements can still carry Pixar's emotional heft. It's a Western only with intelligent dinosaurs as the main characters, the landscapes are breathtakingly photorealistic whilst the dinosaurs themselves are basic, plastic cartoons. Whether it works is in no doubt however, as at the end I turned to find the teenager reduced to a blubbering wreck forcing the words 'Saddest kids film ever' through a substantial quantity of snot.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace


The flaws run too deep for this to ever be considered a good movie but only the most committed of cynics can deny that it's likeable, at the end of the day for every 'Yippee!' there's an awesome lightsaber moment.
Charlotte's reactions this time round were mostly incredulous, i.e. "THAT'S Darth Vader?" or "Why would somebody's mum let them go off to certain death in space? They have a nice home already" or "Is that thing going to be in the whole movie?" at Jar Jar.
Although when she acted indignant at the idea that young Anakin could destroy an entire spaceship with one shot, it did give me the opportunity to tell her that the shot was one in a million and he is a kid.

Sunday 15 November 2015

Inseminoid [Horror Planet]


The large crew of a spaceship, that looks suspiciously like some caves in the UK, are killed by a woman who has been raped by an alien with a giant glass tube for a penis and who then goes on to give birth to two oversized Kinder Egg toys.

Saturday 14 November 2015

The Hand That Feeds Death [La mano che nutre la morte/Evil Face]


A very Italian attempt to create a gothic horror tale about graphic skin transplants using a series of incongruous props, costumes and sets clearly left over from an old Western movie.

Friday 6 November 2015

Anguish [Angustia]


As the end credits rolled I found myself watching an audience, who had watched a film about an audience getting seriously freaked out by an exaggerated, tripped-out version of Psycho, a large portion of which involved a madman terrorizing an audience as they watched a film about dinosaurs.
King.