Mr_Pink05 Reviews

Standard Operating Procedure (2008)

Excellent stuff

[7/10 · 3 December 2009]

Respectful silence from the audience throughout. Not a word spoken by anyone exiting the theatre afterwards. Standard Operating Procedure is the film no one is talking about.

Errol Morris' documentary on the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison is smart and informative. While talking head interviews with the people directly and indirectly involved provide the backbone, cinematic reconstructions of 2003s grizzly events coupled with the well known photographs taken by soldiers work successfully at pulling an emotional response from the viewer.

Though intriguing, SOP doesn't really benefit from the big screen treatment and would probably have just as much impact if viewed on TV.

Dark and depressing, shocking and enlightening: SOP is 2008's must see documentary.

Irreversible (2002)

time destroys everything

[8/10 · 26 November 2009]

Sex, drugs and deplorable violence: all part of a crazy night out for Parisian Marcus (Cassel) who, while leaving a party, discovers that his girlfriend has been defiled and mutilated. Essentially a revenge story told backwards, (think Memento meets Baise Moi) with nauseating camera work, unsimulated sex acts, graphic depictions of violence and one of cinema's most horrific rape scenes, this is a hideous car wreck that you can't take your eyes off of!

Noé's unconventional approach to cinema, coupled with some very high concept dialogue add real credence to one of the decade's most disturbing films, making it much more than just another Last House on the Left.

A strange masterpiece that's gripping from start to finish (or from finish to start depending on how you look at it) Irreversible is at once unwatchable and unmissible.

The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

The Drivel Wears Prada

[2/10 · 18 November 2009]

An attractive woman with nice clothes, a handsome boyfriend and her own apartment working at a fashion magazine? Well I never! Stop the presses! That's hysterical! Frankel's fashion farce is a comedy missing one essential ingredient: humour.

A mess of montages and moral emptiness, it's impossible to feel connected to any person, place or thing during this whole ordeal. The characters are so one dimensional you'll wonder if you're watching it on your Sega Master System. There's no real storyline and its intentions seem totally unclear.

It's also far too long. 1hr 40mins might seem O.K, but with pacing that would make the editor of Ang Lee's Hulk cringe you'll think you're approaching the end at around 36 mins....then you'll realise you're wrong...and you'll cry.

Tiresome and nauseatingly smug: I don't know if the Devil wears Prada but he probably helps rubbish like this get made.

WARNING: contains self indulgence and mild Meryl Streep.

Caché (2005)

Haneke's appeal remains well hidden

[4/10 · 29 October 2009]

Right from the endless opening shot of Michael Haneke's tepid thriller Hidden, I knew I was in for something a little...different. Haneke is known for 'playing with the conventions of cinema' and he lives up to his reputation here using sustained camera angles and a lot of natural light. This may sound theoretically interesting, but in practice you just end up with an amateurish and very ugly film.

The story is of a family being terrorised by someone sending them hidden camera footage wrapped in creepy drawings, the police won't help, they investigate themselves, it's all very dull. In terms of narrative content, Hidden's staggering mediocrity makes it feel like lukewarm water made all the more boring by not being served in a particularly pretty cup.

It's not all bad though, Daniel Auteuil gives a strong performance as an emotionally conflicted quasi-celebrity.

Pretentious dreck from the master of pretentious dreck. Michael Haneke's appeal remains, for this reviewer, very well hidden.

In the Loop (2009)

fan-bloody tastic

[8/10 · 16 October 2009]

Co-written by Jesse Armstrong of Peep Show fame, In The Loop is an awkwardly funny and often alarming look at the world of government work.

Cabinet Minister Foster (Hollander) is put on the spot during a talk show and inadvertently finds himself in a world of spin and corruption as government officials on both sides of the Atlantic try and cover up a leak in intelligence while others try to exploit it.

If you're expecting a sweet Curtis-esquire Brit rom-com then prepare to be disappointed; this is an old fashioned satirical lion that goes straight for the jugular lampooning the Iraq war, the 'sexing up' of the Iraq dossier and the USA's 'special relationship' with Britain.

The comedic handling of some truly dark subject matter won't settle well with easily offended viewers and with enough curse words and vulgarities to make George Carlin blush, ITL is perhaps not as sophisticated as one might expect, but there's still plenty of laughs to be gleamed from its sharp dialogue and depictions of government corruption.

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

decent enough 70s flick

[6/10 · 9 October 2009]

Murders, Shady government agencies and a plan to invade the middle east for oil: to call Three Days of the Condor a foreshadow would be a gross understatement.

Book-keeper Joseph Turner (Redford) returns to work one day to discover all of his co-workers murdered, assassins attempt to track Turner down while men in suits sit around talking in codes. Imagine Marathon Man crossed with Dr. Strangelove.

Redford is good in the role and is backed up by an excellent supporting cast, particularly Von Sydow's deliciously sinister Joubert. The tension is consistently high and the action sequences are satisfying enough, but the film is ultimately let down by its plot holes and inconsistencies in realism. It's also too long, at almost two hours the twists and turns lose their appeal and the tagged-on love story grows tedious.

While some of its themes are relevant today the film just isn't as important as it thinks it is and could easily lose 30 minutes. But there is still much enjoyment to be extracted from its twists and frequent gunfights.

Darling (1965)

The Darling buds of dismay

[6/10 · 4 October 2009]

Sex, decadence and more sex. For a film with such limited narrative content, Darling certainly is convoluted. We follow vapid social climber Diana Scott (Christie) as she sleeps, charms and schmoozes her way into Europe's in-crowd.

Though Christie's Diana is layered enough for the audience to get some enjoyment from the film, Bogarde's performance as her brooding, cardboard cut-out husband is tedious and uninspiring. The supporting cast are as flat as steam-rolled pancakes, showing only smugness and apathy. This highlights the hedonism of 1960s youth, but doesn't make exciting viewing. In 128 minutes, so many characters and events whiz by it's hard to care.

The tone jumps from humorous to tragic without warning or subtlety. The themes and satire "explored" (poverty, racism, political ignorance) are too big for a film as whimsical and charming as Darling thinks it is: serious issues are dealt with in a way that seems laughable and occasionally distasteful.

Dull but not without merit, Darling breezes by like an early Beatles B-side.

Blood Gnome (2004 Video)

Gnome-tastic

[8/10 · 29 January 2007]

If you are considering renting this film then do so! Go down to blockbusters, rent "blood gnome" get some ice cream, a load of beers and get a small group of your friends together. I guarantee you will have a great time watching this movie. It's funny as hell, it is both witty and silly at the same time and has that real "excessive" feel to it.

What makes this film special is its sheer defiance to accept reality. It cost next to nothing and the script calls for a special effects masterpiece, yet they somehow manage to pull it off with a real charm to it!

This is a really enjoyable movie and a thoroughly good laugh. In short: See it.

The Descent (2005)

weak

[1/10 · 17 May 2006]

To call this film dull would be the equivalent of calling Hussain slightly unpleasant. It is my firm belief that if you were to conduct an experiment whereby one subject would snort five lines of cocaine and the other would watch "The Descent" the person who had taken the coke would walk away with more brain cells still intact.

The 'acting' is truly atrocious; as the film was beginning I had a wonderful nostalgia trip back to the old Nativity plays we used to perform at Primary school every Christmas.

Anyway, the film begins simply enough with a family driving through the country when they are involved in a car accident resulting in an over elaborate death for the husband and daughter of the lead character. We are then treated to a hospital scene with enough green filter to make the Wachowski brothers vomit with rage. The lead character has a breakdown and then quickly gets over the loss of her family.

Soon afterwards we meet her supermodel friends who are all supposedly rough ad rugged rock climbers; it is more likely however that their idea of an adventure would be going shopping for dresses. These extremely beautiful women all stay in a log cabin together and drink beer while hugging an awful lot, all we need is a nice pillow fight and we're sorted. Unfortunately there is no pillow fight, but there is a nice unnecessary scene of a woman showering. Lovely! The women then spend a good hour in the cave where nothing actually happens! Seriously, nothing happens for an entire sixty minutes! After an entire gruelling hour we are "treated" to an attack made by the monsters, where have I seen this before? Ah yes "Creep" another poor horror film, but it came first and the scene in "Creep" where you first see the monster is genuinely quite scary, the revealing of the creatures in "The Descent" however, is pathetic.

In fact, while I'm on the subject of "Creep", the monsters in this film are absolute rip-offs of Craig, not only do they resemble him, but they make identical noises and move in a fairly similar manner. Both films are about being trapped in the dark in someone else's territory, the only difference is Christopher Smith can actually direct a film whereas Neil Marshall has no real skill as a filmmaker whatsoever! Everything I saw in this film, I have seen a thousand times before, executed a thousand times better! I have absolutely nothing good to say for it.

Recent horror films are, on the whole, dreadful. If you want to see what a REAL horror film looks like then watch "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or "Ringu"

Doom (2005)

In the name of all things sacred!

[2/10 · 17 May 2006]

As a fan of the original Doom game for PC and a hater of most (if not all) video game to movie conversions, I was not expecting much.

But, nothing in the world could prepare me for the cinematic catastrophe I was about to witness. When a game is turned into a film, one can only expect the story to be changed a little, but surely not to such a degree that the title is the only thing linking the two. Let me give you a little run down on the storyline differences.

Game:- A secret research base on the moon accidentally creates a rift between the moon's surface and the shores of hell, people become possessed, satanic rituals take place, demons run riot and soon the base begins to merge with hell itself, the player (you) is the last surviving member of a team of marines sent to investigate (pretty basic stuff) Movie:- A research facility on Mars try to make a serum to make people into super humans. But it does not work on everyone, some people when infected mutate into large monsters that have detachable tongues which pass the infection onto others. Confused yet? There's more. Using what seems to be floating liquid mercury, The Rock and his team of equally talentless actors travel to mars to investigate a distress call. While there they discover what has happened and are all killed except for The Rock and some white guy who's name I can't remember, both of which become super humans and have to battle it out.

Now that I'm done bitching about the differences between the film and the game, permit me to explain to you the other reasons why this seizure of a film is not worth your time.

The dialogue is, how should i put it?, very structured, by this I mean that when the characters interact with one another, you are very aware that it has been scripted and there is no ad-libbing.

The cinematography is clumsy. The camera angle never quite knows what it wants to do, and the lighting (where there is any) is just irritating.

The filters are not subtle, they use lots of red (probably because it's set on Mars) and a fair bit of everyone's favourite green (because it's "post-Matrix") But the most laughable part has to be the five minute long first person sequence, which looks exactly like "Doom 3" on Xbox, the CGI in this scene is laughable (although possibly deliberate) and it ingeniously shows the big hulking monsters attacking the main character with a chainsaw which he later uses against what can only be described as a "boss" All in all, this film is terrible. Less of a film, more of a Labotomy on celluloid. Spend your £3.75 renting price on something more worthwhile, like paying Lenox Lewis to punch you in the face, it would be more fun I assure you!

Creep (I) (2004)

a great deal of fun, surprisingly enough

[4/10 · 31 December 2005]

Despite how loathed this film is by critics and the public alike, I cannot help but feel drawn towards its camp charm. The atmosphere of the film is very tense and helps to create a real sense of fear in the audience (although it quickly turns very silly.) The scares are multiple and are the kind where you go "Jesus that was horrible" and many of these take place before we are even introduced to Craig (the film's villain.) When Craig makes his first appearance, he is shrouded in darkness until a light flickers on revealing his face. The director's choice to not have a musical sting here works very well (so well in fact I almost soiled myself) Shortly after Craig is revealed, the film goes from being an atmospheric chiller to a gross out slasher flick, but a damn good one! We are treated to one of the greatest torture scenes in horror history when one of the female characters is captured by Craig, the scene builds up greatly as he 'washes' his hands in a sink with no water, puts on some latex gloves that do not fit in the slightest and puts a gas mask over her mouth that isn't actually connected to anything, all the time he is stroking her hair in a comforting manner. He then proceeds to perform some kind of 'abortion' that concludes with her very violent death and then…oh and then comes the horrible shot of the babies in pickle jars with the sound of a screaming baby looped over repeatedly. Lovely. One thing that does really annoy me about this film is the protagonist's lack of anything that can be considered a rational thought, by this I mean that she has many opportunities to kill Craig but takes none of them. To conclude, I think that 'Creep' is a very enjoyable film, although nothing special.

Jaws 3-D (1983)

Beyond awful

[1/10 · 19 October 2005]

Words cannot express just how bad this movie is. I love JAWS and I am also quite a fan of its camp sequel JAWS 2. But this 'film' contained NONE of the elements which made its two predecessors great movies. The first mistake made by the screenwriter has to be, his decision to move the story from the open sea to an amusement park of some description (but I for one was far from amused.)The thing that truly frightened me about the first two films was that "it was out there lurking in the vast deep ocean" I live by the sea so this was an extra terrifying notion for me. This element is sadly no longer present in the franchise by the time JAWS 3-D rolls around. The Director, clearly has no respect for Peter Benchley or Steven Spielberg, nor does he possess any real skill as a filmmaker, This is apparent in the fact that for a movie about a giant killer shark, there isn't exactly an abundance of shark attacks, in fact, there's about two! No director who respected Benchley/Spielberg's vision would subject his/her audience to endless scenes of meaningless dialogue between characters that we really do not care about. The 'climax' of the film is what really does it for me though, the visual effects are simply laughable as the barely manoeuvrable shark 'storms' the park by smashing a bunch of windows, surely it could have done this earlier and saved us a whole 90 minutes of drawn out waffle. Not only are the effects bad, but the scene itself is just plain stupid. The fact that people underwater appear to be running from a shark, and the man who is eaten does not surface once but somehow manages to scream! Priceless. Well, that's about it. In conclusion, JAWS 3-D is a Turkey worthy of the great Eric Roberts himself, so bad it's not even funny.

War of the Worlds (2005)

A cliché ridden disasterpice, but surprisingly entertaining

[3/10 · 7 August 2005]

I decided that I would not go to the cinema to see this film (I use the term 'film' in its loosest possible sense) based on my principles as a lover of the novel. However, I was not going to pass up the opportunity to see it when a free ticket was given to me by a friend.

In order to salvage any kind of enjoyment from this trashy flick, one must first get over the initial shock of how Spielberg has raped Wells' visionary classic.

The logic-less plot wrestles with the bizarre idea that the Martian war machines have been buried under the earth since the dawn of man. Which begs the question that if man has advanced so much technologically since the time we were throwing rocks at one another to prove masculinity, why have the Martians not invented more efficient ways of laying waste our planet and destroying our way of life?

When the movie begins, we are 'treated' to several scenes of Tom Cruise's home life, we find out that the protagonist is not a writer, nor is he middle class, he and his wife are separated and they have children together. Cruise's character swaps the quill for the hard hat; one can only assume this is to make the philistines that the movie is aimed at feel as though they can relate to the hero in some kind of pathetic way.

Once the Martians land however, the film starts to look up, first they eliminate our technology with E.M.P then they attack us. A tripod raises itself from under the earth and emits its death cry, this is the first time you hear "the voice of the Martians." This scene, although impressive, is fatally flawed. We learn quickly that all battery operated erm…. Things, have been wiped out (even Cruise's watch) yet when the first of the fighting machines appears we see someone standing around filming it on his video camera. Silly enough for you yet? You would think so, but sadly it's about to get a whole lot sillier. The genius Martians, who (as we later are told) have been planning this invasion for centuries, decide to use the most inefficient method of extermination ever put to film. They unleash their heat ray on individual humans fleeing the scene. Hats off to the screenplay writer for that little gem. However, there are many positive thing about this scene and subsequent others. As much as I did not wish to enjoy the film, one cannot deny that it is an awesome visual spectacle. The special effects are truly stunning; they may well be the best I have ever seen. I must also confess; that the first time the Martians 'spoke' from within their machines, I was amazed, so amazed in fact, that I came shockingly close to soiling myself.

I enjoyed every action scene in this film. I especially like the part where a huge crowd of people trying to board a boat in order to escape the carnage are suddenly thrown into massive panic when a fighting machine appears in the distance. True Spielberg suspense reminiscent of 'Jaws!'

One aspect where Spielberg has failed to live up to his previous films was the pitiful attempt at adding a human angle to the film, luckily, this is ended quickly with some killing and lots more explosions… lovely.

The verdict

Pros

Martian Voice.

Amazing Special Effects.

Suspenseful.

No Cheesy Destruction of Famous Landmarks.

Red Weed.

Homage To The Original. (Hand Crawling Out Of The Craft After Death.)

Cons

Dreadful Script.

The Martians Looked Like Pocket Dragons.

Badly Edited. Martians Were Suddenly Dying After A Handling Machine Scene.

Tom Cruise.

The Ending, You Must Be F***ing Joking!

Script 7/20 – Some very good lines like "there's no more of a war between us than there is a war between men and maggots" but largely poorly structured.

Visual Effects 19/20 – almost flawless, but the Martians themselves were very CGI looking.

Character Development 1/20 – Cruise became a better father, that's it! It wasn't handled well either.

Thought Provocation 2/20 – completely stripped the story of all social and political comments.

Entertainment value 17/20 – annoying scenes with Tim Robbins nearly ruin the movie, other than that, I was massively entertained.

I enjoyed this Movie. It is important that I refer to it as a movie and not a film, as it was a piece of entertaining garbage and had nothing to say. The special effects were wonderful and the action scenes were so entertaining that I no longer cared about how terrible this movie was when compared to the novel.

7 out of 10 Great Movie. Rubbish Film.

Slashers (2001 Video)

Satire at its finest.

[7/10 · 22 May 2005]

A true work of Genius. I found "Slashers" to be a magnificent film. It's social comment was fantastic. I loved the concept of people killing one another for money. I also liked the idea of the women having to remove their clothes to become more popular, a great satirical comment about today's "Big Brother"/Jodie Price generation. Some of the dialogue was so clever, for example lines like "those dollar bills that you worship do not bare the face of the lord" really reflect the true intellect of the writer. This film was a great piece of social satire, reminiscent of George A Romero's "Dawn Of The Dead."

10/10

Butterfly and Sword (1993)

amazing

[6/10 · 12 May 2005]

this film is truly incredible, please people, comment on it. I think it is one of the best martial arts films I have ever seen. However, it is very cult and i could not imagine most mainstream audiences enjoying this film. If you are not a philistine, then you will probably appreciate the very high quality of this film. i would give this film 10/10 because it is not only an excellent kung fu movie, but the cinematography is also jaw droppingly good.

I must warn people that the Michelle Yeoh death scene is cut off in most DVD copies of this film, so it goes from her standing there, to butterfly and sword sitting in the back of a cart weeping... how bizarre.

Kick ass film though!