You just gotta love a movie that opens with our hero as a small boy in a Nazi death camp. Of course, Erik is not really the hero, but then, he’s not exactly the great villain either. At about the same time, we find Charles at home at stately Wayne Manor, well, stately Xavier Manor. Little Charles meets little Raven and they are happy to find that they are not alone in being ‘special.’ And so starts X-Men First Class. We jump forward to 1962 where most of the action…
Category: movie review
Toast on the BBC
I read Nigel Slater’s toast a couple of years back and really loved it. A wonderfully odd little book about food, sex, and the glories of an Aga Range. The BBC film is a little glimpse into those bygone days of the 1960s. We see what it’s like to be a foodie in a house where cooking consists of putting unopened tins into a pot of boiling water and letting them rattle around for a bit before opening them. This was our nine year old hero’s Mum who couldn’t cook, but could do a bit of baking-and she did a…
Made in Dagenham
Among the Coming Attractions on the DVD of The King’s Speech was the trailer for Made in Dagenham. It looked like my kind of film, an underdog story, a cute British cast, and good old Bob Hoskins. I grew up in the 1970s with no father to speak of, a working mother, and an older sister who was quite taken with the women’s liberation movement. It is a bit shocking to see that male chauvinism and outright sexual discrimination was still going strong in 1968. For some reason I thought that whole Suffragette thing would have fixed this problem as…
The Illusionist (2010)
A French cartoon about a magician nearing the end of his career. We follow him around as he performs his tricks for disinterested audiences, or practically no audience at all. He is an old school sort of act, who can’t compete with things like rock n roll. For company he has a slightly ill tempered rabbit-and a young woman who follows him from one of his few successful gigs. The animation is in the style of Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, the original version with it’s hip and cool 1961 feel to it. The Illusionist is a stunningly beautiful film. London and Edinburgh have starring…
The King’s Speech
The King’s Speech has received various awards and nominations, including twelve Academy Award nominations (the highest number of nominations in 2011), seven Golden Globe nominations, fourteen BAFTA nominations and wins from various critics’ circles. –Wikipedia I was expecting The King’s Speech to be a good movie, and I am often disappointed by movies I think will be good. Not this time. The King’s Speech was great. It’s an almost literal fairy tale of a Price who becomes a King through no real desire or action of his own. First his father, played by Sir Michael-Dumbledore-Gambon, goes a bit mad and…
Never Let Me Go
British Sci Fi never ceases to amaze me-the same people who bring us Doctor Who and Space:1999 also bring us The Prisoner and Outcasts. From the very silly to the simply baffling, British Sci Fi is never predictable. Never Let Me Go was written by Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for his love song to the serving class in The Remains of The Day. Like that film, Never Let Me Go starts out slow, and pretty much stays that way. The film opens with a little slug card telling us there were some serious advances in medicine in 1952 and that…
Paul-An Alien Road Picture
A man in black shoots a radio and says-It was a boring conversation anyway. Just one of the many inside sci fi, super nerd jokes in the silly sci-fi flick Paul. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who everyone seems to think are gay, find themselves in nerd heaven-Comicon in San Diego. As a nice follow up they decide to hit all the famous UFO sites in the western USA. They visit the the Little A’Le’Inn and The Black Mailbox and Vasquez Rocks where the reenact the battle between Captain Kirk and The Gorn. While at the Black Mailbox they see…
I Am Number Four
Shown in Theater Number 4, cute, huh? The story of a group of aliens being hunted by another group of aliens all of whom have supernatural powers and are hiding in plain sight here on Earth-while blowing up everything they run across and showing up on YouTube. It’s a pretty standard issue story and a movie only made possible by super cheap CGI. Like all setup movies, I Am Number Four is crammed full of dull and boring backstory about our super hunk alien and the nasty fish people who want to kill him. Only it’s backstory that doesn’t really…
The Social Network
Before The Social Network movie came out, I had never heard of Mark Zuckerberg. I certainly had never heard of the many other people who went to battle with him over the billion dollar empire that Facebook has become. And even now, just a couple of hours after watching The Social Network, I couldn’t tell you who any of these other people are. Other than the fact that two of them were twins with weird last names who rowed in the Olympics. But I did like the movie. There is something just flat out amazing about the idea that some…
Cemetery Junction
The story of a group of desperate young Brits who want more out of life than their parents got. We follow around three losers in their early twenties who still enjoying getting drunk, starting fights, and painting obscene graffiti. One of the young hoods decides that he doesn’t want to work in The Factory, but wants to make something of himself. So he becomes a door to door salesman. Cemetery Junction is set in 1973. There is still open racism, women are ment to stay at home and fetch things for their men, and men are meant to work until…