Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category

24 Nov

Movie Review: Argo

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , , .

I have recently acquired a new full-time job and that impacts heavily on my free time and blah blah etc etc. My blog shall continue regardless! Anyway I saw this film a couple of weeks back.

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Starring: Ben Affleck, Alan Arkin, John Goodman
Director: Ben Affleck (Gone Baby Gone, The Town)
Rating: M
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If there is one director who has risen to the top tier of my favourites list faster than anyone else in recent times, it’s Ben Affleck. His 2010 effort The Town blew me away, particularly as it kept me interested in a plot I did not think I would particularly enjoy. After seeing it I went back and watched Affleck‘s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, and I enjoyed it just as much. It turns out I wasn’t alone in my opinions, as Rotten Tomatoes attested to. Being two from two with critics is one thing, but what makes Affleck‘s case all the more fascinating is that for most of the first decade of the 21st century, he was the laughing stock of Hollywood. Just watch Team America: World Police. He had an entire song dedicated to his acting and it wasn’t exactly glowing with praise.

But the role of Affleck‘s past in his current popularity is besides the point of this article. The point is that Affleck is now three from three behind the lens, with critics and with me. Argo, one of my most anticipated films of 2012, is fantastic.

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25 Oct

Movie Review: Looper

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , , .

I saw this one a couple of weeks ago but it absolutely deserves to be talked about.

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Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt
Director: Rian Johnson (Brick, The Brothers Bloom)
Rating: MA15+
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Before I had so much as seen a trailer, Looper was one of my most anticipated movie releases of 2012. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is quickly turning into a guy whose movies I can just assume will be good, plus, I mean, Bruce Willis. Throw in one hell of an intriguing premise and I was pre-sold on this one. Thankfully, it turned out to be rather good, and not even in the way I was expecting.

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24 Oct

Movie Review: Taken 2

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , , , .

I caught this unexpected sequel in the cinemas last night. Man, I am fighting an uphill battle to see 100 movies by the end of 2012…

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Starring: Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen, Maggie Grace
Director: Olivier Megaton (Transporter 3, Colombiana)
Rating: M
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I absolutely loved Taken. It became one of my favourite action movies after I saw it two years ago and I wasn’t alone in my opinion. But it wasn’t the kind of film I expected to spawn a sequel. So when I saw the trailer for Taken 2 earlier this year, I was initially intrigued – until I heard its star Liam Neeson utter that title-dropping line. The stakes had apparently been raised; now instead of just his daughter being taken, Neeson‘s character had to deal with his wife’s abduction – alongside his own no less. That’s when a feeling of dread swept over me not unlike the one I felt when I saw the trailer for The Hangover 2. You know the one: “They expect us to believe that the exact same thing would happen again?” That feeling. So needless to say I became a bit less keen to watch the film.

But watch it I did.

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5 Sep

Movie Review: The Expendables 2

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , , , , , .

I hadn’t seen either Expendables movie two nights ago, but now I’ve seen them both. It’s certainly quite a lot to take in over 48 hours. The Expendables 2 came out in Australia last Thursday.

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Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger
Director: Simon West (Con Air, The Mechanic)
Rating: MA15+
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Wow. No matter how you look at it, the fact that The Expendables 2 is even a movie at all is pretty cool. Sylvester Stallone, who directed the first movie, deserves some fairly raucous applause for bringing together all those action heroes the first time around, crafting a rather enjoyable, if openly cheesy, movie in which to fit them. But his achievement as producer of the sequel is arguably greater. The Expendables 2 streamlines the action formula from the first film, cutting out the unnecessary and packing in more of the ridiculous. The result is a movie that knows just how stupid it looks and runs with this self-awareness in a startlingly effective way. Continue reading →

26 Jul

Movie Review: The Dark Knight Rises

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , , , , .

It’s here. What almost certainly amounts to the most anticipated film of the year has finally hit screens worldwide. I’ve seen it twice and I will admit that the second viewing made me change the score I was going to give it.

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Starring: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway
Director: Christopher Nolan (Memento, Inception)
Rating: M
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TDKR_Poster

It is finished. The most critically lauded superhero trilogy of all time is done and dusted, wrapped up with considerable skill by visionary director Christopher Nolan, who rebooted the Batman film license back in 2005 with Batman Begins. The Dark Knight Rises is a visual, audio and psychological tour de force that demands to be seen by any self-respecting film fan. While it doesn’t quite reach the heights of the second film in said trilogy, 2008’s The Dark Knight, it comes incredibly close and won’t hurt Nolan‘s already very impressive resume. Continue reading →

16 Jun

Movie Review: Prometheus

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , .

I saw this highly anticipated Ridley Scott epic last Tuesday. Thoughts follow!

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Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron
Director: Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner)
Rating: M
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If you were Sir Ridley Scott, director of such massive critical and commercial successes as Gladiator and Black Hawk Down and architect of one of the most ponderous sci-fi films ever made in Blade Runner, you could probably do whatever you wanted with your late career. So thirty-three years after he practically reinvented the horror genre by sending it into space with Alien, Scott figured it might be a cool idea to revisit the fictional xenomorph-infested universe he built himself with a new film, Prometheus. In doing so he whipped up a storm of hype and, as so often happens with these things, all kinds of questions started flying around fan circles. Would the film be a direct prequel or just set in the same universe? Why that odd title? How would the advent of CGI impact the atmosphere of the film? And perhaps most importantly, in what new direction would Scott take the series? Continue reading →

29 Apr

Movie Review: Battleship

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , .

Back to back madness! Here’s a review of the latest “blockbuster” effort from Hasbro’s association with Hollywood. It came out in Australia two weeks ago. The Avengers it certainly ain’t.

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Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson, Rihanna
Director: Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Hancock)
Rating: M
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Who could possibly have expected to see something like this in theatres? Toy company Hasbro, who pushed the Transformers film franchise into existence and rebooted the My Little Pony television series into its most successful edition ever, must have been so confident in their ability to put their toys on screen and bums on seats that they thought a celluloid adaptation of a board game was viable. Now, after a huge marketing push, Universal Studios have released the multi-million dollar project in cinemas. The results are what you might expect. Continue reading →

28 Apr

Movie Review: The Avengers

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , .

I saw this hugely anticipated film on Wednesday when it came out, leaving a couple of days to think it over before posting a review. Enjoy.

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Starring: Robert Downey Jr, Samuel L Jackson, Mark Ruffalo
Director: Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly)
Rating: M
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And so it is that the superhero project seven years in the making finally arrives on our screens, carrying with it the kind of hype that can only be generated by five prior films loaded with teasing elements. The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger have all come and gone. While some of these films were more obvious in their hype-generating efforts than others (*ahem* Iron Man 2) and suffered for it, such trivial matters are in the past. The reality is that Marvel Studios’ The Avengers is one of the most ambitious action films of our time, attempting to tread the unprecedented ground of adapting a much-adored comic book super-team concept into a movie that doesn’t fall to pieces.

The reason it succeeds, more than anything else, is because it avoids just that.

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24 Mar

Movie Review: The Hunger Games

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , .

Yes, the wait is finally over. Whether or not you are a fan of Suzanne Collins’ insanely popular teen novel trilogy, you can now check out the “next Harry Potter/next Twilight” phenomenon in cinemas (it came out on Thursday and I’ve already seen it twice). I suggest you do, lest you become bitter from the hype and turn into a hater.

This could be a long one…

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Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth
Director: Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, Big)
Rating: M
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the-hunger-games-posterI do not read novels. Like, ever. Snails move faster than my eyes across a page and so I generally find my leisure time better spent with other forms of entertainment media. So when my brother recommended I read Suzanne Collins‘ post-apocalyptic thriller The Hunger Games in January of 2010, it was only out of desperate boredom that I complied. I was hooked within minutes on its insanely fast-paced first person narrative style and over the next several months I made my way through the entire trilogy. Little did I know that I had stumbled upon what would soon be hailed as “the next big thing” in book-to-film translation.

Yeah, I liked it while it was underground. What of it?

Fast-forward two years and after months of anticipation, I found myself before a screen watching what was once confined to my imagination take shape as a shining example of how to do justice to literary source material while creating a unique identity as a film. There is nothing in the world that quite feels the same as the relief of justified hype. Continue reading →

14 Mar

Movie Review: John Carter

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , .

The movie reviews on Vagrant Rant finally get started today with John Carter, a film I saw last night in the cinema. It came out on March 8 and you should see it.

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Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Mark Strong
Director: Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E)
Rating: M
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John Carter Poster
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It’s always interesting to see the results when a film director known almost exclusively for one type of work tries his/her hand at another. Filmgoers got a taste of this phenomenon earlier in the year with gangster movie extraordinaire Martin Scorsese‘s family film Hugo, which won several Oscars despite its director’s violent screen reputation. In a similar vein, Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton tried his hand at making a live action film recently and the result is John Carter, which was one of my most anticipated films of 2012. While it certainly isn’t Academy Award material, the big budget Disney blockbuster is an admirable first effort.

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