The other night I found The Kingdom amongst my collection. Can't remember how it got there but I thought I'd give it a shot.
Plot Summary
Jamie Fox heads over to the middle east to find a naughty bomber. He keeps his sun glasses on throughout. It's like Ray basically, with machine guns.
Piven, does good slime.
The film gets out of the blocks fast, the first 10-15 are explosive, literally. I was writing out my shopping list for tomorrow and I simply couldn't concentrate with all that was happening. As a result I went into Tesco later the next day and had to completely wing it. Luckily I'm a creature of habit and knew exactly what I was going to get. However a carefully prepared list does take the pressure off. This is another film where Jeremy Piven plays a slippery character drenched in slime. He plays it so well it makes me wonder if he has trouble attracting women in real life. The women Piven snares for sexual congress must first enter a terrible dichotomy of choice; Yes they can claim the bragging rights to sleeping with a hollywood A-lister, but at the cost of it being with Jeremy Piven, the actor who is primarily synonymous with slime. If you're a woman that's had a one night stand with Jeremy Piven, please write in and explain the thought process behind your actions.
Tomato Meter - 51% (critics) Tomato Meter - 76% (audience) Peter Meter - 79%
Captain Phillips. Plot summary Erika Eleniak stays in the cake, Casey Ryback never makes it out the kitchen.
A water hose is no match for a semi-automatic
Well first things first. Tom Hanks is strutting around the boat barking orders, telling people to lock doors, go faster, slower, left, right etc. I mean there were many audible groans from the audience when at one point he told his crew to drink up their coffee and get back to work. It obviously hit several nerves and Hanks had a long way to come back from if he was going to win over the hearts of these anti-jobs-worth movie goers. Paul Greengrass the director has this knack of telling a story cinematically with incredible realism. One of the ways he achieves this is by having real Somalian pirates in the film punch Hanks repeatedly in the face. Only joking. People talk about Woody Allen having a return to form, but I think maybe Greengrass needed one more. Bourne Ultimatum was ultimately forgettable, even more so Green ZZZZzzzzone. But this was a hit and destroy if we are talking Battleship terms.
Tomato Meter - 94% (critics) Tomato Meter - 94% (audience) Peter Meter - 92%
Verdict
Well let me tell you something. This is probably Hanks's best film since The Money Pit. It will get him an oscar nod but I've heard he won't win. Yes I am in the know, thanks for asking. However it isn't as good as The Money Pit and not many films are. If you want to see some exquisite Hanks acting then watch him laugh in the clip I have dug out for you. A real treat i promise you. So WATCH Tom Hanks laugh in The Money Pit, and NOT The Kingdom OR Captain Phillips.
Daniel Caviezel played The Count of Monte Cristo once. Dumas's fictional character that was wrongfully imprisoned for a over decade. Well now it's his turn. He wrongfully imprisons Sly and Arnie and he loves it.
I saw Batman and Rocky 4 at this cinema.
I saw Rocky 4 at the Granada theatre in Bedford when I was 6 years old. It was one of the biggest in the country and had nearly 2000 seats. It had a stage pit where a Wurlitzer organ emerged slowly and played for 20 minutes before each feature. It was also home to concerts back in the day. My Dad said he saw Hendrix play there and told me he was shit. But this coming from a guy that thinks Cliff Richard is the best rock n roll star to have ever lived. Anyway I digress. The point is, Sly Stallone was scorched into my psyche at a very young age and I thank God that I grew up watching the best action stars that have ever been. I saw the likes of Schwarzenegger shoot a mini gun from a high rise. The kids of today have charisma vacuum The Rock and Channing Tatum who blinks when he fires a gun. On the subject of Escape Plan, I announced early in the week that I have changed amaze-balls to tits balls. And this film is the tits-balls.
Though when is Sly going to allow a little grey at the side of his temples? He must be having a grey hair stand off with McCartney. Which one is going to budge first?
By the way the Granada was flattened in 1989, it's now a car park I believe. A building that survived the war, that was gigged by Hendrix and The Beatles is now a car park. Wonderful.
Tomato Meter - 45% (critics) Tomato Meter - 95% (audience) Peter Meter - 90%
So I caught The Man Without a Face on the iPlayer earlier in the week. Which is a bit cruel, and misleading. He does have a face, and half of it ain't bad.
Plot Summary
Harvey Dent is living in exile after rumours abound that he interfered with a kid back in the day.
Don't ever google man without a face
This film isn't that bad. A strange inquisitive boy wants to be taught Shakespeare and finds a friend in
freaky face Gibbo. It has a slice of Scissorhands in there without the charm, and when Gibbo tells his new student to dig a hole it took me right back to my 'wax on wax off daniel-son' days. Why are all teachers so intent on being mysterious and oddball? The curriculum is there for a reason you know.
Tomato Meter - 67% (critics) Tomato Meter - 52% (audience) Peter Meter - 75%
Verdict
If you love a good Stallone prison flick like I do, you could go Tango and Cash or Escape to Victory, but why don't you treat yourself to the wonderfully under-rated Lock Up. I have included the football game scene which is just nuts. Billy from Predator plays the antagonist, a real brute. And even the big fella from Batteries Not Included pops up and has a go. SO watch Lock Up and NOT Escape Plan OR The Man Without A Face.
I am a man of leisure come Monday's. It's slightly surreal to not work Monday's after working every monday of my life for the past 13 years. I still haven't established any decent routine, but it really is the only day in the week where I get to do capricious things. Like blacken the bumper of my crappy car. Or hit the cinema whilst still dressed in my gym shorts. I caught the only showing of Blue Jasmine that day.
Plot summary
Cate Blanchett gets hammered a lot and shows off her sweaty armpits in every other scene.
When I was watching films growing up my dad would always join the film halfway through. He would ask me what film I was watching, which I would repeat 3 times. Then he would ask, 'Who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys? Face Off was incredibly confusing for him. But I always admired his black and white approach to films. He was basically asking: 'Who do I root for in this?' And the main problem this film has, is that there are no characters you can really get behind. Cate Blanchetts character doesn't redeem herself and I found myself a little bored during some of her scenes. However her sister (Sally Hawkins) with whom she lives, actually had a more interesting role, and together with Alec Baldwin there is enough interesting stuff here to make this worth a watch. Did you know that Woody Allen writes all his scripts on the same typewriter that he's used since a teenager? of course you did. Incidentally has anyone ever thought that John Parrott could make an excellent stunt double for Alec Baldwin?
Ahhhhh maybe not. In fact, I'm way off. Tomato Meter - 91% (critics) Tomato Meter - 83% (audience) Peter Meter - 69%
So I caught Judgment Night on the iPlayer the other week. Plot summary Emulsion Estevez thinks he's well hard in this. Unbelievably, so does everyone else. You know if you type Emilio into your blower, the predictive text will come up as 'Emulsion'. I have now got into the habit of looking up words that I don't know the definition of and when I looked up 'Emulsion' on wikipeadiea it came up with this An emulsion is a mixture of two or more liquids that are normally immiscible (nonmixable or unblendable). Emulsions are part of a more general class of two-phase systems of matter called colloids. Although the terms colloid and emulsion are sometimes used interchangeably, emulsion should be used when both the dispersed and the continuous phase are liquids. After about 15 minutes, I was still not entirely sure what the word meant, but I realized the 15 minutes I spent reading up on emulsion was far more enjoyable than the 2 hours I spent sitting through Judgment Night. The main disappointing thing is that I'm a huge fan of Emulsion Estevez, but he is not a tough looking dude. Jeremy Piven does his slippery weasel schtick well enough to keep me interested, but he's better in Very Bad Things. Which isn't a flawless film by any means and completely loses itself in the final act, but it's Gone with the Wind compared to Judgment Day. I couldn't find the scene where he accidentally murders the prostitute in the bathroom whilst shagging her, but I did find the bit where he accidentally murders his brother with the car.
Tomato Meter - 31% (critics) Tomato Meter - 30% (audience) Peter Meter - 29% Verdict
I realize when I watch some of my favourite actors appear in shitty films, I get cravings like a pregnant woman to watch the films that made me like them in the first place. Helps me cleanse the palette so to speak. So I looked up some scenes on Young Guns on YouTube this week and started to feel a lot better about life. Emulsion, I forgive you because you were in one of my favourite western films of all time.
Enjoy this scene where his mate Charlie loses his shit in a shoot out. So WATCH Charlie lose his shit in Young Guns and NOT Blue Jasmine OR Judgment Night.
Early in the week I took my buddy Neil to the local cineworld and caught Prisoners.
Plot summary
Jake Gylenhaal proofs that not all people with neck tattoo's go shoplifting in Tesco's. Meanwhile Hugh Jackman's daughter gets abducted. Jackman tells his wife he has to help the police with the search, slips her a load of pills to sedate her, then goes out and gets shit-faced instead. What a hero!
I was very impressed with Jackman's innovative makeshift torture shower. That might make me sound like a sadist. However I'm sure all the carpenters out there would be paying attention to that scene and giving the secret nod of approval. At the core of the film lies the message, is it moral to use torture as a device to extrapolate information that could be key in saving life's? Who knows, but it would be interesting to see if a patent is available for that torture shower. Lastly, the writer of this film clearly couldn't be arsed to write a decent part for a woman. Jackman's wife is written out of the film altogether as she inexplicably decides to stay in bed and down shit loads of sleeping pills. It kind of gives you an indication of how good Rene Russo was in Ransom. Which I thought about alot whilst watching this, and for the majority of the time, wished I was watching instead. Tomato Meter - 81% (critics) Tomato Meter - 89% (audience) Peter Meter - 78% So during the week I caught Hart's War on the iPlayer Plot Summary Bruce Willis and Colin Farrell get put up by some quite pleasant Nazi's in a POW camp.
Honestly these Nazi's aren't so bad in this. It's all quite amicable really until someone gets whacked and a kangaroo court is put together to find the perpetrator. At times it reminded me of A Few Good Men, and then it made me want to watch that instead. Other times it bore a close resemblance to The Great Escape, which due to the tone and backdrop was probably going to be unavoidable. So imagine The Great Escape fused at the hip with A Few Good Men, then imagine not really giving a fuck about anyone involved, and you have Hart's War.
I enjoyed the football bread scene though, so I included it here for your viewing pleasure.
Tomato Meter - 60% (critics) Tomato Meter - 53% (audience) Peter Meter - 64% Verdict
Lastly I got a got a reply from Alexei Sayle by email the other day. I posed the following question to him:
Q# Sean Connery has gone on record by saying that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was the best film that he has ever been involved with, could you share those sentiments in regards to your own film career?
A# Well I only had one scene in Indy 3 which I enjoyed and it is a great movie. I think the best films I've made are for TV and I would say that The Comic Strip film "The Strike" is the best performance I've given in a movie.
I haven't seen Strike myself so unfortunately i can't recommend it. However I have seen A Few Good Men and have included a wonderful clip of Jack delivering a cracking line about blow jobs. So WATCH Jack Nicholson talk about blow jobs and NOT Prisoners OR Hart's War.
