The Piano Teacher

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: No
Watched With: Tyler, Jordan, Amberly

Hard to believe this is 10 years old already. I love Michael Haneke films but you do have to be prepared for them. This is one of my favourites of his too, I think Isabelle Huppert is amazing. The camera lingers on her often just observing and she barley does anything but there's little hints at what crazy thoughts are going on through her head.

And that's one of the things I like about the film, it doesn't judge it's characters and lets the audience interpret their actions to a certain degree. I also like the very bare style, the shots and editing, the way he just lets scenes naturally play out in long takes and doesn't rely on music. It's masterfully directed and acted.

It can be a little confronting at times and is something you need to be prepared to concentrate on but if you're willing to do some of the work it's very rewarding. I absolutely love the films final moments.

Take Me Home Tonight

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Myself

Perhaps it's just the 80's setting but I get a very John Hughes vibe from this one although the characters are out of high school, but It does play out as one of those kind of stories.

I love love love the design of the opening credits, it's a typical yearbook montage kind of thing but the 80's-ness of it all was just super.

Topher Grace is a charming lead. I see he has story credit too so this must have been something he wanted to do. Anna Faris is a B storyline that doesn't do much and Dan Fogler is just slightly less annoying than usual, but only just. He just has a nack for playing characters I hate in films I dislike, except for many Taking Woodstock.

Funky soundtrack, nice period detail, the film is enjoyable enough, follows all the beats of an 80's teen comedy romance but it does it well so, can't complain.

East of Eden

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: No
Watched With: Jordan

Sometimes I think all it took to be considered a good actor in the 50's was to mumble your lines.

Kidding! Maybe. Not really. But James Dean does go nice and crazy at the end there. It's a pity I found the start of this film so hard to get into. I don't know the John Steinbeck story but I did know the there was a vague Cain and Able connection so I was just waiting for the smackdown.

The drama in the last 20 minutes is great although I was very surprised by the ending given Steinbeck's penchant for downer finishes.

The wide screen cinematography is very nice. And you can always tell the drama is gonna crank up when the dutch angles kick in. All the scenes of two people talking, it feels like a bit of a waste of screen real estate and that is what the majority of the film is but there are a few crowd sections where you can really see the framing and blocking working beautifully.

It also has one of those great wall to wall melodramatic scores and it actually has a pretty modern sound for 1955.

I did like finally checking this one out. There's some good scenes at the end there but I didn't really care for the rest. Not the best film to watch late at night either.

Spy Kids 4: All the Time in the World

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Myself

Robert Rodriguez seems to do a kid film for every adult one these days. The 4th film in his Spy Kids franchise isn't really as good as the others from my memory but it has its moments.

The best part about the film was the opening sequence with Jessica Alba chasing after the bad guy whilst 9 months pregnant. Some hilarious stuff there. Being a Jeremy Piven fan, I picked him right away despite the disguises and voice alteration, which blew the ending a little but as it didn't make any sense anyway there wasn't much to loose. Joel McHale isn't given much to do but Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara show up again and there's even a very very brief Danny Trejo cameo hidden in there. Ricky Gervais is the dog. Hah.

There's also a lot of fun nods to the older films and all the devices kept in storage from the previous films.

I've said before how I'm very particular about my time travel rules but I have no idea what's going on in this films universe. Thematically it's great, the message to do everything you can with the time you have and not to waste any moments is fine, but the logic of revelations at the climax of the film is a little strange. No kid would ever know though, so I guess it doesn't matter.

The 3D It's the first film I know of that I've seen shot on the Arri Alexa. The images were fine but the post-converted 3D was really dodgy. I expected much more from Rodriguez, the 3rd film had section of 3D but this was screened at a time before 3D hit big and most cinemas didn't have polarised projection systems so it had to be anaglyph, with red and blue tinted glasses, which also meant it couldn't last the whole film and did strain the eyes somewhat. It's unfortunate because he shot it to be projected polarised and the 3D worlds in that film worked really well. I just would have thought he'd go for shooting this film in 3D too.

This is also the first smell-o-vision (or Aromascope as the film calls it) film I've seen. Like the 3D the smells were completely arbitrary and didn't do much to enhance the film. They had Bacon, Blue Cheese, 3 candy flavours and 2 farts and some boogers or at least they were supposed to, the smells don't exactly match up very well or even work that great. The best thing about them was having Ricky Gervais explain how to use the scratch and sniff card at the star of the film.

What it will be good for is keeping fidgety kids doing something for the brief running time. I'm just glad I got it out of the way before the school holidays start.

Fright Night

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Jordan, Amberly

I said in my original review that I wasn't sure if my enjoyment of the film was heightened by the fact that I just hadn't been to the cinema for such a long time and was so happy to be back I would have loved any old crap. Well I will confirm now that it's not that, this film just rocks my socks. Really love it, thoroughly entertaining even the 2nd time around. And I'm glad I got to see it again in 3D on the big screen, it's definitely worth while checking out.

Unlawful Entry

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: No
Watched With: Myself

Another great 90's thriller! And it works mainly because Ray Liotta does intimidating very well.

This one starts off with a bang but then it's a gradual build to the end where he's full on crazy town. I guess that's where all thrillers end up. But the abrupt start and and of this film is nice, it doesn't feel like it overstays its welcome.

Pacific Heights

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: No
Watched With: Myself

I'm back on my early 90's thrillers. Michael Keaton! Yes. Awesome.
Well this one is certainly more successful than the last few I watched. It isn't as sleazy or trashy, which for some would be points against but I'll go either way.

And I gotta say, although I've never seen it before for some reason I recognised the theme by Hans Zimmer. I don't know where from, with in a spoof or a trailer for another film but I do know that music from somewhere. It's going to drive me nuts.

Enjoyed this one!

Abduction

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Myself

Don't underestimate the power of Taylor Lautner. I don't get it myself but I was surprised to find that at an action thriller I was probably one of the only males in the cinema. Just before the lights dimmed literally a busload of teen girls raced in and took their seats.

Well I hope they enjoyed the film more than I did. They got Taylor Lautner with his shirt off, I guess that's all they were after. He does nothing for me so I had a few more problems.

The fighting was ok. There wasn't much bigger action than that though. Maria Bello and Jason Isaacs are the best thing in the film and they kill them off 20 minutes in. You would never believe for a second that they were Taylor Lautner's biological parents so you expect to find out he was indeed "abducted" but when you do finally get the revel of his biological parents they are also both pale skinned and blue eyed. It just seems unlikely.

Even more unlikely is the extremely contrived romance between him and Lily Collins. If you are a regular school kid and just saw your parents murdered in front of you, found out they aren't your parents, had your house blown up and keep narrowly escaping being killed by professionals with all manor of weapons you're not going to laugh it off and have a little make out session.

Some horrendous dialogue. I don't know if good acting was going to save this. Hell, even Alfred Molina and Sigourney Weaver come off look like idiots. But some kind of charisma from either of the two leads would have been nice.

The Lion King

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: No
Watched With: Myself

Thought I'd check out the 3D re-release at the cinema, it's been many a year since I last checked it out.

This film really does stand apart from the rest of the golden era disney films. There's something a little more adult about the story and the way it's told than most other animations from the studio at the time. That might be one of the reasons I never really warmed to it much as a kid even though I watched constantly.

Viewing it again, what amazed me was the economy of storytelling. The story feels grand and yet it flies by under 90 minutes. It gives you just what you need to know and songs, montages and some refined key dialogue do the rest.

There's not that many songs either, I think 5 in total. It probably gets overlooked exactly how awesome Hans Zimmer's score that plays throughout the rest of the film is. It handles it's fair share of the storytelling too and many of the themes I remember from the movie aren't from the songs but from his score.

Visually it looks as great as ever. It's filled with great iconography and the 3D was really well done. I thought it may have been more along the lines of separating the 2D layers into 3D space but they's dimentionalised the 2D characters to a degree as well. Sometimes this works better than others. Characters that have a lot of flat colour areas in their design means there's no discernible detail to put depth to, so the colours look flat while the line work pops out in space on top of it. But for anybody not looking for it, it's probably not noticeable. So shots look incredible too, the one that stands out in my head was Scar leaping through the flames towards Simba at the climax.

Really great to watch this again. I'm just in awe of the storytelling and how it's seemingly boiled down to its bare essentials but still gets everything across. And I'm glad they didn't include the new song that's on the last DVD release.

The Smurfs

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Jordan

Well I suppose it could have been worse. But it's certainly not great. I don't have any particular nostalgic affinity with the Smurf characters but even I cringed at a lot of the lines they were sprouting. "I kissed a smurf and I liked it." No.

There are a few things in the film that I really did like. There are a couple of funny lines here and there, Hank Azaria's physical portrayal of Gargamel is great and it's nice to see everyone seems to find the smurf song as annoying as I do. Like Raja Gosnell previous efforts with Scooby-Doo, there are a few fun digs at the logic of the original show. Those along with the many nods to the creator Peyo and Belgium are probably the best parts.

Jayma Mays and Neil Patrick Harris make a nice couple. When it was first revealed that she was pregnant I thought that would obviously lead the Smurfs to question how reproduction works and that would be the main thrust of the film, but alas it was about becoming a "papa." Still, it's going to leave parents with a lot to explain to their kids.

There is a plot line involving Gargamel's magic being used by the cosmetics company Neil Patrick Harris works for that just stops halfway through the film and is never mentioned again, like it was left over from an earlier draft and they changed the ending but ran out of time to fix the start.

Most baffling of all is the invention of Gutsy Smurf. When you have such a wealth of characters to draw from there should be no need to invent one of your own. But the fact that they made him Scottish is particularly confusing. There's precedence for Smurfs having facial hair, not orange though, a few also have unique clothing but the main problem I have is this: Smurfs don't have nationalities. That and he's quite annoying. And his inclusion at the expense of other well known characters is a little upsetting.

I must be more accustomed to the original cartoons voice cast than I knew because I had trouble adjusting to these new voices. Jonathan Winters's Papa Smurf grated with me the most. George Lopez as Grouchy raises a few too many questions as well. Anton Yelchin as Clumsy did the best job in my opinion.

The animation is all done very well, the 3D post conversion looked pretty good but didn't add much. Overall not that great but I guess it's serviceable.

Monte Carlo

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Myself

I had a good time with this film. I am almost surprised at how genuinely enjoyable this was. I hesitate to label it trashy, like Chalet Girl, it feels a little classier than that but again that's probably only due to the european setting. This film has even less "silly" moments than Chalet Girl, despite its hoaky mistake identity premise.

While that is the main plot line, each of the three girls on holiday has their own romantic story that could have easily been the main plot of any other teen romance, plus there are a few other things thrown in for good measure and yet the film juggles all these threads exceptionally well. It keeps the pace moving and makes what are usually the supportive best friend characters just as important and fleshed out as the main character. I noticed it was adapted from a novel, so I presume the screenwriters had some good material to draw from.

The cast all do a good job. Andie MacDowell shows up in a 5 minute cameo at the beginning and looks as stunning as ever. Catherine Tate is also on hand to save the day. The girls are all fine and the guys are all handsome. Home and Away stars with strong Aussie accents must seem so enticing to american and european audiences but that accent just always seems out of place to me.

From the trailer I thought this would be more of a silly holiday farce but while it does have all those elements firmly in place and is quite funny in places there's a small slither of something genuine at the heart of this. Or I could be completely insane. Whatever the case, I really did enjoy this film and might have to see it again to make sure I just wasn't delirious at the time.

The Opposite of Sex

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: No
Watched With: Myself

Voice overs are tricky things. I wonder if this is where the current comedic obsession with post-modern self-referentiallity or as they say today, being "meta," comes from. A lot of the humour derives from highlighting the filmic conventions they are using or occasionally breaking. It's a hell of a way to get away with cliché or bad writing. I do find films with narration and "meta" sensibilities can be quite lazy, but thankfully it wasn't used to that effect most of the time in this film.

Christina Ricci plays a real bitch in this, she does it rather well too. The story is kinda funny and nicely convoluted, the dialogue and characters are probably its best feature. I enjoyed watching this one, entertaining enough and didn't make me think too hard, perfect late night viewing.

All Good Things

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Myself

This film had the amazing ability to keep me completely disinterested. All the way through. I think it's the subject matter, the characters and the way they decided to tell the story, with the court trial framing device. It just never clicked for me.

It's a shame, it had a really really great cast including an unexpected Kristen Wiig still managing to be funny in a serious role.

I didn't know it was based on a true story until the end. Perhaps they were trying to stick closer to the facts rather than making something entertaining. It's a tough line to walk and I would never want to be responsible for something like that. And technically the film was well put together. I really loved those cool timelapse shots you can see in the trailer and the 70's period detail and 8mm film stock look they used in a lot of it. But in the end I just didn't care about any of the events or characters.

Hanna

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Tyler

Here's my first write up. Here's the second.

This film is just a joy to watch.

Jane Eyre

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Tyler

Here's my first write up.

I actually liked the music more this time.

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: No
Watched With: Tyler

Oooooo another early 90's thriller I've never seen. This one rather blatantly spells out everything that will happen very early on so I don't know exactly how thrilling it can be but I guess there were some fun bits along the way.

They mainly had to do with Julianne Moore being awesome and the way some rather tenuous evil plans always played out perfectly and without arousing any suspicion.

So it has to be asked, why all the Gilbert and Sullivan? Poor Wandering One is used so much it becomes a signifier, always associated with the evil nanny's impending plans, both within the film and throughout the score by Graeme Revell. Not just that song but a bunch more are sprinkled throughout the film. I wonder if there was any reasoning behind this or it was just for fun.

Rebecca De Mornay gives some great evil looks in this film. And Madeline Zima is once again stuck with Nanny problems. It's technically well made and works on a very basic level but there's not much more to this one but some cheap thrills.

Rocket Science

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: No
Watched With: Tyler, Amberly, Jordan

This is a fun little indie coming of age high school movie from the doco maker that did Spellbound. This film is probably most famous for unleashing Anna Kendrick into the world of film (although she had done that Disney movie Camp before this, but nowhere near as memorable as this). It's one hell of a role and she's just on fire the whole time. Reece Thompson is also quite endearing as the stuttering lead. Nicholas D'Agosto is a bonus too.

This rapid fire style of debate is something I'd never seen before. It's quite a thing to behold. The rest of the film does sit's job just fine. It's very funny in places but other times I feel it drags. But I do like the big dramatic revelation to end the film is ordering pizza.

Hesher

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Myself

Works for me.

I would relate this film in the same way I do Visitor Q, in that it's a very basic Mary Poppins archetype of a stranger works their way into a family's life and helps sort out their issues. Of course the subject matter and tone a completely different but that spine is there.

Once you get a handle on the tone, it's very funny. At least the first few acts are. There's an undercurrent of sad melancholy that threatens to overwhelm and almost does at the end but I think they get away with it. I was worried by the inclusion of the ol' impromptu hopeful speech at the end of the movie to sort everything out but Hesher being the delightful character he is just ends up talking about his testicles at an old lady's funeral, a perfect spoonful of sugar to make the resolution go down.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is always good to watch and he's got a great character to play with here. Piper Laurie still making films excites me to no end. No matter how frizzy her hair, no matter how big her glasses and no matter what kind of shitty job Natalie Portman's character works as, she still looks stunning. Rainn Wilson plays a shattered man so well and he can be heartbreaking. Devin Brochu as the young kid is the stand out though. He's really great. I didn't pick him as the same kid in Rubber and a few other things, but he carries the movie effortlessly.

I didn't know a bunch of Aussie dudes wrote and made this. Good for them. I was hoping for a cinema release here, sadly that wasn't to be, but I'm glad I finally got to see this one, it was very enjoyable.