Review

The Great Escape - An oldie but a goodie to start the year. Superb movie - if you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a service and have a look-see. ★★★★★ I Am Legend - Will Smith is the last man left alive, a virologist named Robert Neville who has survived a virus which turns people into aggressive, cannibalistic, vampire-esque zombies who cannot come out in the day. Great effects, especially the empty New York, makes the setting effective. Smith plays the character well, and the zombies for the most part live up to the hype, but the plot has some holes in it that you’re expected to ignore for the sake of the horror/action part of the flick. Very different from the book, apparently. ★★★ ...

Balls of Fury - bwahahaha! :D Love this kind of movie that doesn’t take itself seriously at all. ★★★★ Rush Hour 3 - Can you ever go wrong with a Jackie Chan movie? Makes the first two Rush Hours look like paragons of plot complexity in comparison, but it is the same old formula and it works, by and large, for a laugh at least. ★★★ You Kill Me - I’d heard practically nothing about this movie until I saw the posters for it around London, but with Ben Kingsley and Téa Leoni (I’ve had a crush on her since Bad Boys), assassins, mafia and a darkly comic atmosphere to it all… err… well, ★★☆ anyway, and it is a bit of a different story. ...

Ok, I get the idea of alternative universes. I even dig the concept of a semi-steampunk world where people’s souls are ‘outside their bodies’, and exist as anthropomorphic animals that may or may not have the ability to speak (dependent on the importance of the character). I can even follow the idea of Nicole Kidman… well, when she is dressed as fine as that, I can follow her pretty much anywhere. ...

“The audience knows the truth; the world is simple, miserable, solid all the way through. But if you can fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, then you get to see something very special - you really don’t know it? It was the look on their faces.” Wow. What a screwball of a movie. Just when you really think you’ve got it more or less figured out, it jumps sideways at you. It’s a real magicians trick of a movie - afterwards, when the trick is explained, you pick up the little clues, and think “Oh yeah, I could’ve told you that from the start.” But, of course, you can’t, hence the brilliance. ...

Reign Over Me: Funny, touching, and wonderfully written drama about a man (Adam Sandler) who retreats from his life after losing his family on September 11, 2001. Don Cheadle plays a dentist who appears to have it all - wife & kids, a house in Manhattan, and a successful practice - only to find he envies his college roommate Sandler. Whenever Adam Sandler strays from his ‘comedy’ stereotype, he manages to do reasonably well - Reign Over Me is by no means his best drama effort, but it is certainly a powerful performance. Minus points for being so overwrought about things. ★★★☆ ...