Retro Movie Review – Riddick
The Riddick franchise has always held style over substance and the filmmakers of the first edition, Pitch Black were quite adept at turning what was a low budget science fiction yarn into a big dollar money making machine. This latest edition looks marginally better than its predecessors but the emphasis is still on mood and not pinpoint detail.
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The film also has a lot of humour (and not always intentional) at its core as Diesel’s dialogue is a succession of ...
Retro Movie Review – Shutter Island
The film starts out with a boat ride that would be helped by a shot of Dramamine as U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are sent to a hospital for the criminally insane located on an isolated island to investigate the disappearance of one of its patients. This sets off a chain of events that will push the already unstable Marshal to and over the edge.
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The movie’s trailer to the contrary, the film is more of a psychol...
Retro Movie Review – Robin Hood
Robin Longstride (Russell Crowe) is an expert archer in King Richard The Lionheart’s army who becomes disillusioned with some of the things he was forced to do while in battle and when the King is killed, he and his cohorts escape France and return to England. The boys soon arrive in Nottingham, where Robin meets Lady Marian (Cate Blanchett) and joins the town’s battles.
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The tale of Robin Hood is one of cinema’s most well used story lines and many films and ...
Retro Movie Review – The Social Network
Jesse Eisenberg has never been better as Mark Zuckerberg, the man/boy who turned and burned most everyone he came in contact with while creating the Internet tsunami that is Facebook. Director David Fincher tones down some of his more overt mannerisms and gets things just right. Even Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker (the creator of Napster) delivers career-defining work.
It’s a sign of the level of film mastery that a subject with so little visual identity could be made into such a ...
Retro Movie Review – Rush
A little knowledge of that period of Formula 1 does however enhance some of the film's emotional impact as the sport at that time was incredibly dangerous and killed its drivers with a gruesome regularity. This knowledge puts what is a sporting event into the realm of a real life or death battle.
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The film’s main protagonists couldn’t have been any different as well. The British playboy driver James Hunt (played with an impressive verve by Chris Hemsworth) was ...
Retro Movie Review – Robocop
Now revisiting Robocop in 2014 is a plan fraught with risks and Brazilian born director/documentarian José Padilha hasn’t really helped matters by choosing some elements within the first version to revisit while casting aside others. His more moralistic take is interesting while his almost complete discarding of some of the eighties version’s most humorous elements (mainly the hilarious TV ads) have taken a lot of the fun out. Original director Paul Verhoeven’s biting social satire ...
Retro Movie Review – Paul
The two dweebs have rented a huge RV after a visit to Comic Con and are in the midst of a road trip to visit all the cult friendly UFO locations in the western United States. They soon hook up with Paul and the craziness begins (sort of). For a film with such an unconventional premise, it quickly becomes a very conventional road movie.
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This conventionality results is a story that is more human nature than Science Fiction and as such has some obvious lessons to ...
Retro Movie Review – Micmacs
Jeunet’s films always have a political edge (even if it’s just personal politics) and an opinion about the state of play and in Micmacs; he has the weapons industry firmly in his sights. Our main character Bazil (Dany Boon) has had his life drastically affected by the tools of the arms trade and decides to fight back.
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The humour in this film is of a very psychical nature and a reasonable starting point of description would be the works of Charlie Chaplin. The ...
Retro Movie Review – Morning Glory
The humour comes out most strongly when Becky become desperate to raise the show’s ratings and deal with the old school curmudgeon Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford) who as a link to the real news reporting of the past stands firmly in the way of her plans. The reel where those plans come to fruition in the film’s funniest twenty minutes.
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The film has strangely uneven pacing and sometimes lacks direction, so there are times when your interest wanes in the proceedi...
Retro Movie Review – Monsters Vs Aliens
The story revolves around the government’s cover up of actual monsters that inhabit our planet. These monsters are eventually revealed to the public when the earth in invaded by aliens, who of course have ideas of world domination.
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Setting the story in the world of CGI animation gives the filmmakers carte blanch to create and destroy what ever they want and this leads to some outstanding moments of mayhem including the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge.
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