Tag Archives: American Cinema

Movie Review – xXx: Return of Xander Cage

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TL;DR – This is a perfect popcorn flick, as long as you don’t try to think through the plot, which you can’t help but do in the 2nd act.

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

xXx: Return of Xander Cage. Image Credit: Paramount.

Review –

XXX: Return of Xander Cage is a film of many things, interesting set pieces, an incredibly diverse cast, a title that you really need to be careful with when searching on the internet for researching the movie, but also some missed opportunities. So it should come as no surprise that everyone is trying to create the next Bond, and why wouldn’t you? if you could swing 25 feature films out of a single premise. There have been multiple attempts over the years to create the new spy king, a fresh new face. Now for me, the best attempt has to be Kingsman (Click here to see Review), but many people have tried and one direction they went in was recasting the Bond-type with an extreme sports star, and well I have heard worse premises. However, after twelve years, and fifteen since Vin Diesel has been the lead, did we really need another crack at this formula to see if it works, well if this is anything to go by then … maybe?

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Movie Review – Monster Trucks

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TL;DR – Honestly this is one of the silliest premises I have ever seen for a film, but wow it was a surprisingly good film, with great creature creation, and some great action, well worth a look.

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Monster Trucks. Image Credit: Paramount.

Review –

I was not expecting much from Monster Trucks, I mean it has one of the silliest premises I have ever heard, well not the silliest, I mean it is no ‘Tetris the Film’ silly but still. However, the more it went on the more I really started to like it, maybe even against my better judgement, but here we are. Now I am under no illusion that it is not a perfect film, none at all, but in a world where children films is usually a cover for lazy filmmaking, it is great to see a film take care and effort with the small details.

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Movie Review – Collateral Beauty

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TL;DR – Collateral Beauty has me wondering how projects in Hollywood gets greenlit, how did this mess of a film pass through so many different layers of approval, and at no point did someone go ‘Hey maybe this is a terrible idea for a film’

Score – 2 out of 5 stars

Collateral Beauty. Image Credit: Warner Bros.

Review –

It is ironic that a film about an advertising company would be lambasted in the press and critic circles for the advertising of the film. Indeed, all of this would actually be quite amusing if not for the fact that Collateral Beauty fails spectacularly on nearly every front. How a film with this much talent, yet such a clearly terrible premise for a film, got put into production I do not know. Of course there are a few saving graces for Collateral Beauty, which is what stopped it from getting a lower score than this, but I can tell you right now, unless we have a truly terrible year for cinema I know this will be on my worst films of 2017 list, and we are only three films into the new year.

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Movie Review – Passengers

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TL;DR – The biggest problem with Passengers is that it keeps hinting at a better film out there, but unfortunately it never quite gets there.

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

Passengers. Image Credit: Sony.

Review –

So would you say goodbye to everyone you love, board a spaceship in a hibernation pod for a 120-year journey just for a chance of a new life on a new world, even though you know when you get there everyone from your past will be dead. It’s an interesting thought experiment and one of many that Passengers speculates on throughout the film. When the film is at its best it is looking at an answering these questions, when it is at its worst it’s ignoring them to quickly tie the story up.

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Movie Review – Assassin’s Creed

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TL;DR – The best movie adaption of a video game, but that was not really a high bar to cross and Assassin’s Creed kind of just stumbles across it.

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

Assassin’s Creed. Image Credit: 20th Century Fox.

Review –

It is one of those weird things of Hollywood that no matter how many times they try, no one has made a decent adaptation of a video game into a movie. Now part of this has been that people have been adapting video games without understanding what there were, and also there are a lot of difficulties condensing a long interactive experience (sixteen hours for the first Assassin’s Creed game) into a two-hour passive movie. To the point where the most successful and critically acclaim versions of this genre Wreck-It Ralph & Tron used video games as just the backdrop for their story. This can be complicated even further as video games are big multi-billion dollar industry so if you’re making a film, you’re gonna want to franchise the heck out of it, the big problem with last year’s Warcraft (See Review). So within all this mess comes the Assassin’s Creed film, based on the incredibly popular series of games that has the fascinating caveat that you could set it at any point in human history. So how does it go, well for a video game adaptation movie, it goes quite well, for just a movie, it is a bit meh.

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Moana Review: Powerful Story and Beautiful Animation

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TL;DR – A beautiful film from the animation, to the story, to the characters, a must watch this holiday season

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Moana. Image Credit: Disney.

Review –

Moana is a powerful story which is brilliantly animated, wonderfully acted and tells a great story. All of that would have been enough for me to recommend it to you, but on top of this Disney took a big risk in telling a story from Polynesia a place that rarely gets a look in this modern media landscape yet it is full of fascinating stories. I highly recommend you check Moana out at the movies if you can.

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Movie Review – La La Land

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TL;DR – La La Land has its issues, but it was such a joy to watch and I walked out of the cinema with a smile on my face and a song in my heart, and I can’t remember the last movie to do that to me.

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

La La Land. Image Credit: Lionsgate.

Review –

La La Land is a rare movie for these days, not only is it a live-action musical in an age where musicals are mostly restricted to animated children’s movies (with the odd Les Misérables to change things up), but it is also is an unapologetic homage to the films of the classical era, your Singin’ in the Rain and such like. However on top of all this, La La Land is also a very modern movie set in modern times, so at its core is this juxtaposition of old and new. Now this is a very difficult tightrope to manage, if you go too old the film will feel dated rather than the homage it is, and indeed if you go too new, then all those call-backs start to feel gimmicky and forced. Luckily for La La Land, it turns out to be the goldilocks of filmmaking, and a case study in getting that balance right, look there is a reason it is an Oscar favourite for many.

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Movie Review – Rogue One (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story)

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TL;DR – A bit of a mess at times, but any complaints I have are overridden by the strongest ending in the franchise’s history.

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Rogue One (Rouge One: A Star Wars Story). Image Credit; Disney/Lucasarts.

Review –
So here we are with Star War’s first attempt at a standalone film (a film set in the Star Wars universe, but not one of the main numbered entries) and a prequel no less, by any measure this was a risky gambit for the Mouse House, because the last thing you want to do to your $4 Billion investment is damaging the brand with a bad movie. Now this coupled with extensive reshoots in a year where extensive reshoots have led to mediocre films like Suicide Squad and outright failures like Fantastic Four had a lot of people concerned, is the prequel curse going to continue? Well, I am happy to say those reshoots must have only improved the movie because Rogue One is a blast. Now is it a perfect film, oh no, it has some real problems, but any issue I could have with it is blasted away by some quality filmmaking. Now we will be discussing the story later in the review, so I’ll put a  Spoiler Warning out before that, but I feel with a property like this, it is important to say, I will be discussing aspects of the film and the characters and you may find that to be spoilery, so you have been warned to continue with caution.

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Movie Review – For The Love Of Spock

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TL;DR – For The Love Of Spock is a beautiful reminder that human beings are immensely complex entities and a masterpiece in asking the question of where do our views of a man intersect with who he really is.

For The Love Of Spock. Image Credit: 455 Films.

Review –

Tomorrow Rogue One is coming out in cinemas and once again Star Wars is going to absorb the cultural and science fiction landscape for a while, but before that happens I wanted to take a moment to look at the other sci-fi juggernaut Star Trek, and as we draw to a close on the 50th anniversary of Star Trek it is only fitting that we examine one of the characters that started it all Spock, and the man behind it Leonard Nimoy, and of course who is better to tell that story than Leonard’s son Adam.

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Movie Review – Office Christmas Party

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TL;DR – This is the same kind of movie as every R-rated comedy of the last couple of years, but thankfully with a bit more substance than usual

Score – 2.5 out of 5 stars

Office Christmas Party. Image Credit: Paramount.

Review –

So as we race to the end of the year, and in the lull before Star Wars destroys the box office, in its wake, we have Trolls and Office Christmas Party fighting it out to see who will get that dollar, dollar bill. Since I don’t have children I don’t have to be subjected to that Trolls nonsense (truly you guys are the MVPs) which I was over about the same time JT was performing at Eurovision, so instead this week we have Office Christmas Party. OCP is another in a long line of R-rated comedies that have sprung up in the aftermath of Hangover and Bridesmaids, and has many similarities with other films that we have looked at this year like Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, Bad Neighbours 2, Grimsby, and Dirty Grandpa, indeed it fits into the same category as The Night Before which was last year’s R-rated Christmas comedy, and more so it seems to be taking a lot of queues from Unfinished Business with its plot, but somehow OCP makes it work when most of these other films were a mess.

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