Movies for 2010 - Part 9

[dalekboy]

16th March
Stranger Than Fiction

18th March
Transformers

19th March
The Creature from the Black Lagoon - in 3D!

20th March
Hot Fuzz

22nd March
Wanted
The Man Who Would Be King



I rather enjoyed Stranger Than Fiction while Transformers was worse than I remembered. My plan was to watch Transformers then watch the sequel, but it was fucking painful, don't think I'll bother. A film with only one likeable character (female computer geek) is just a wasted effort.

The 3D version of Creature works for all the same reasons Avatar did - the 3D is used to immerse you in a world. I remember seeing this at the Valhalla cinema in Melbourne, and the bits the audience reacted to were relatively simple shots with fish swimming about. In fact, even though I'd seen the film many times before the Valhalla screening, I'd never realised it was 3D feature, there was nothing in the direction that would be out of place in a regular movie. And the most important thing is, I genuinely love the story.

Man Who Would Be King was very good. Sean Connery and Michael Caine playing a pair of utter bastards, but still managing to make them likeable. The end of the film still guts you, even with fore-warning.

Comments

[dalekboy.livejournal.com]

Have to rabidly disagree with you on the characters. The lead is a self absorbed arsehole, and sure by the end he's improved, but only because the plot required it.

The parents, the military, the girlfriend, most of these people are either two-dimensional, fuckwits, arseholes, or all of the above. The female computer hacker was the only one that acted like a real human being. It's like she walked in from another movie.

Of course you listed all the reasons I wanted to see Transformers 2, I wanted to see how wrong they got it. But I'm not sure I can face those human characters again. I thought they were offensively badly written.

However, I will say the first film did what it set out to achieve - it had huge robots beating the sludge out of each other, and it wasn't dull... except for that over long sequence at the protagonist's house that was meant to be funny.