There is one small element in the Die Hard franchise that has led to my overall reluctance to embrace the new film. Sure enough, like the previous picture, Die Hard With A Vengeance the absence of Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) is felt, dismissed with our working class hard-to-kill cop John McClane as just coming off a divorce. Now, considering the first two films, it’s a tough pill to swallow. In the last film, the end showed John reconciling on the phone. With all the near-death expierences, I suppose it is too much excitement for some women to handle. Sadly, the worst part of Live Free deals with the kidnapping of John’s hard- edged daughter, Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) so late in the film, it not only appears desperate, but also the idea that Lucy has merely switched places with dear old off screen mom isn’t lost on me.
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I’m not quite sure the obsession James Wan and Leigh Whannell, the creative duo behind Saw have with dolls and puppets. I suppose under the right conditions of thunder and lightning, they can look a bit spooky. Just see Tobe Hooper’s Poltergiest. But not content to stop there, the team also creates up an evil ghost in Mary Shaw, a ventriloquist who wanted to create a perfect puppet, and who killed little kids in order to do it. Inspired possibly by A Nightmare On Elm Street the townsfolk of Ravens Fair hunt her down and maim her. She swears revenge from beyond the grave. Does she get it: if you scream when you see her, she’ll supernatually rip out your tongue and, while it isn’t said, the tonsils go too.
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When I read this movie’s plot outline I couldn’t help but notice similarities to Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece Shichinin no samurai. Seven swordsmen rush to the aid of a village under attack… sound familiar. Hark Tsui, the director of Seven Swords, as this movie is called internationally, has said in interviews that although he admires Kurosawa, any resemblance is purely coincidental. Yeah right.

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After seeing the very mediocre martial arts drama Wu Ji a few days ago I thought it was time to give Chinese cinema a chance to redeem itself. This movie, called Curse of the Golden Flower internationally, had been on my list of things to see for a while, and I was not disappointed. But Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia is definitely not for everyone.

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China has produced a bunch of very interesting movies the last couple of years. Martial arts dramas like Crouching Tiger, Hero and House of Flying Daggers. This movie (international title: “The Promise“) combines elements of the three and adds some (more) fantasy to the mix. The trailer definitely looked promising, so I decided to go and see it. Well, let’s just say not all promises deliver.

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Ocean’s Eleven is one of my favorite movies. A lighthearted heist movie with an unbelievable cast that was simply lots of unpretentious fun. And then they went on vacation to Europe to shoot the sequel and thing went haywire. 2004′s Ocean’s Twelve was a mess and I considered walking out of the cinema halfway through. And now there’s ‘Thirteen’. I didn’t know what to think, so I went to see it.

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My first contribution to CoP is an old remniscence on Grease I (another on Star Wars III is to follow shortly). The movie proves that a good soundtrack can go a very long way. Easy Rider, for example, is very boring without music, unless you like watching post-card perfect pictures of the American West of strange looking men on Harleys. (By contrast, the battle at Helms Deep at the end of the second Lord of the Rings just needs rain on the soundtrack). While there were a few scenes where I expected The Fonz to make a cameo appearance, Grease surprised me with its sense of humour (you keep a straight face during Frankie Avalon’s “Beauty School Drop Out!”), and its treatment of 50s (or high school) nostalgia. The musical succeeds because even though it does not aim to rise above ‘mere entertainment,’ it does not condescend to its characters or its audience. (More ‘serious,’ artsy/indie movies would do well to remember this.)

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“Inspired by a true story” says the opening message of the film Primeval, and as one might suspect, those words like most other films that carry the phrase, does have some elements of truth. Everything else is made up by various rumor and imagination. Bad news for Primeval is that it also contains uninspired imagination and out of place one-liners that don’t belong. Out of place actors, too.
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I don’t even do crossword puzzles when I get a newspaper, but I think I was drawn to this movie expecting to see a bizarre subculture of people who are obsessive about them. This well executed documentary, made me feel like I was the only person on the planet who doesn’t love a good crossword puzzle! Yes, there is a sub-culture of competitors who each year vie for the little known celebrity of being the champion puzzler. And yes, the movie shows plenty of that subculture, but the movie never patronizes these puzzlers. I may have snickered once or twice about what nerdy goofs these people are, but I also saw a good deal of myself reflected in them and I found myself genuinely swept up in the competition that becomes the narrative focus of the movie.
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One of the big comics debates has come into play with the sequel to 2005′s lackluster but mildly entertaining Fantastic Four, and is in regards to a classic comic book villain being represented mostly by the eye of an intergalactic storm cloud. Yes, it is something of a disappointment. But man, the uber fanboys and hard to please ‘comics fans’ should really give it a rest. Because other than that, there is very little wrong with Rise Of The Silver Surfer
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