Greetings programs! Our favourite time of year is back; the Vancouver International Film Festival is on now! The 2024 edition features a ton of great films, and we’re here to talk about two of them: Gillian McKercher’s family drama Lucky Star and Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front follow-up Conclave. It’s a good discussion about two films we liked, so join us!
Continue reading “VIFF 2024: Lucky Star & Conclave”
It’s hard to believe that the September 11th attacks were 20 years ago this month. It was an event that scarred the American psyche and that the country has been trying to reckon with through art ever since. We remember vividly things, such as the images of debris-covered civilians fleeing the scene or the American flag hanging over the ruins. There are things we don’t remember so well also, though, such as the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund which was created by an act of Congress just days after the attacks with an end goal of stopping the victims from suing the airlines involved.
Worth tells the story of Ken Feinberg and the administration of that fund, from its inception through the struggles to bring all the victims families on board and to its final resolution and payout to nearly 97% of them. If this sounds like it’s a little dry, well, you’re not entirely wrong.
Continue reading “Review: ‘Worth’ is worth seeing for Michael Keaton alone”
Here’s a true story. When The Witches came out in 1990, it scared the crap out of me, and I don’t think I have seen it since. That might be something I should rectify now, as Robert Zemeckis has directed a new adaptation of the Roald Dahl story.
Continue reading “‘The Witches’ trailer remakes a classic”
There’s going to be a vocal contingent that argues that _Age of Extinction_ is the best Transformers movie. It isn’t. It’s not the worst (here’s looking at you _Revenge of The Fallen_) but it’s really not the best either. That whole discussion is kind of ridiculous though because when you stop and think you’ll realize that you’re arguing which f these terrible movies is the least terrible. If you think that’s _Age of Extinction more power to you because the movie does fix a few of the problems that the previous three had but it also introduces a bunch more problems to deal with.
Continue reading “Review: Transformers: Age of Extinction Is Bad”
It’s hard to believe that it has only been a year and a half since _The Hunger Games_ came out. There has been a string of young adult books adapted into movies following the success of Harry Potter, most of them featuring an up and coming young actor in the lead surrounded by Hollywood veterans, usually fighting against some oppressive regime. The Hunger Games was no different. Jennifer Lawrence was aiming for her big break and Lionsgate was looking for a new cash cow.
The film itself wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t really _good_ either. Suffering from a small budget and a weak screenplay it fell comfortably into the “good enough” category and made enough money to warrant adapting the rest of the series into movies.
It’s a good thing too because where _The Hunger Games_ was just good enough, _The Hunger Games: Catching Fire_ is actually really good.
Stanley Tucci and Alice Eve are both talented actors and in this new film from Niel LaBute it looks like they basically get to have a 2 hour long argument. I’m down with that. Let’s watch!
We finally have a full trailer for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Let’s take a look!
Continue reading “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Trailer, In Which Things Really Kick Off”
Good news everyone!
[Angie Han writing for Slashfilm](http://www.slashfilm.com/stanley-tucci-joins-transformers-4/)
> The 3D IMAX camera wasn’t the only new addition to Transformers 4 announced at CinemaCon yesterday. Michael Bay also revealed that Stanley Tucci had boarded the cast, joining Mark Wahlberg, Nicola Peltz, and Jack Reynor.
> Character details have been kept under wraps, but an earlier report suggested that the film could center around a young woman, her dad, and her racecar driver boyfriend. Peltz, Wahlberg, and Reynor seem to fit those descriptions, but it’s harder to say how Tucci fits in.
I’m holding out basically zero hope that Transformers 4 will be any good, but adding Tucci to any movie is a welcome bit of news. Him and Wahlberg both know how to be fun to watch, so maybe this one will turn out better than the last three.
Not that that’ll be hard….
The Hunger Games, like it or not, was a huge hit last year. I didn’t think it was bad, I just wished it were better. So here’s the first teaser for the second movie, Catching Fire:
To be fair, there’s a lot we don’t see here and it is just a teaser, but it any of this is as well executed as it looks and the cast brings their A game (which they are all more than capable of doing) then this might end up being great. Hopefully.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire comes out this November.
It’s been less than two hours since I walked out of Jack the Giant Slayer and I can barely remember what happened. That’s not exactly a good thing, is it?
Here’s the basic set up: Nicholas Hoult plays Jack who goes to the market and sells his horse for some beans that grow a giant bean stalk into the sky via which giants attack. Pretty straightforward, really.
The problem is that despite all it’s intentions, the movies just kinda boring. There’s some pretty cool set pieces but even though it kills off some characters –including ones I understood going in were major characters– it just never felt like there was any real peril, and the movie spends so much time going back and forth between the giants being farting, nose picking bumbling fools and menacing, angry, “let’s bite the head off this human” monsters that a tone isn’t ever really effectively set.
Similarly, Jack is chastised by his uncle for being a lazy and easily distracted fool but as soon as the bean stalk grows he immediately proves himself neither lazy, easily distracted or foolish. No development there, just a switch that gets flipped to serve the plot.
The plot itself is pretty thin and it’s not really compelling at all. In fact, it’s almost like they came up with a bunch of ideas for things they wanted to see happen first and then wrote just enough of a story to string those things together and nothing else. It’s frustrating even, since there are just a few changes they could have made which yes, would have made the story a bit more cliche but which would have given Jack a better personal, relatable arc. I get the feeling they might have been avoiding the heroes journey on purpose but the end result is uninteresting.
If you’ve seen [the trailer](https://awesomefriday.ca/2013/02/trailer-jack-the-giant-slayer/) you might go in thinking that it’s going to be an effects extravaganza but it’s not. There are effects everywhere to be sure, but the giants don’t look good enough for me to have suspended disbelief enough for me not to notice that all the CGI is good but nowhere near being great.
In fact at the start of the film the back story is provided by Jacks father reading the legend of the giants which is played out on screen in what’s meant to be stylized animation but instead just looks like terrible video game cut scenes. You can see that they were going for something similar to the [backstory sequence in Hellboy II](http://www.anyclip.com/movies/hellboy-ii-the-golden-army/story-of-the-golden-army/) but they missed the mark utterly.
It’s annoying too that the despite a pretty stellar cast I couldn’t really bring myself to care about many of the characters. Nicholas Hoult is fine as Jack and Eleanor Tomlinson is fine as the princess (yes of course there’s a princess) but Stanley Tucci is basically just being Slimeball Stanley Tucci here. It’s not terrible to watch but it would have been nice to see some experimentation. Bill Nighy is the same as the leader of the Giants. It’s a voice role to be sure, but it’s just Bill Nighy’s angry voice and nothing more. (side note: despite voicing over the trailer, Sir Ian McKellan isn’t in this at all that I could see/hear. Weird.)
The standout for me is Ewan McGregor who basically dials up the swagger to 11 and runs with it. He steals most every scene he’s in, and every time he’s not on screen I found myself wondering when he’d be back.
In my mind I like Bryan Singer. He’s made some amazing movies, two of which I count among my all time favourites, but everything he has done since X-Men 2 has fallen pretty flat. He doesn’t nail down a tone, his pacing is all over the map, and character development is at a minimum.
That’s not to say that there aren’t bright spots. Again, there are a couple of good set pieces, there are a few funny moments and there are some nice character moments, but all in all the film is just mediocre fluff. Not outright bad, just boring.
My question is this: how many more of these “let’s take an old story and go all M. Night Shyamalan ‘what a twist!’ on it’s ass” movies are we going to have to go through? Can we be done now? Please?
Meantime, if you want to see Nicholas Hoult act well then go see if [Warm Bodies](https://awesomefriday.ca/2013/02/review-warm-bodies/) is still playing.
***Rating: 5/10
[rating=5]***
Apologies for the lack of posting folks, real life happened a bit this week. Should be back up to speed by Saturday or so.
In the meantime, Jack the Giant Slayer got a new trailer.
Originally this was scheduled for last year. It certainly looks prettier than the original trailer but this one does a far worse job of selling me on the idea that it might actually be a good movie.
What do you guys think?
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