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I think I need to have a chat with Kathryn Bigelow to establish what message she was trying to send with this film. It seemed to be intended as homage to the heroic bomb disposal teams in Bagdad, highlighting the constant pressure that they work under. Instead, it came across as the epitome if why the USA should never have invaded Iraq. These guys work disarming bombs intended to kill them. If they weren’t there to begin with, then neither would the bombs be. It was a shame to be so disappointed in the movie after such a great trailer.
When heterosexual friends Ben and Andrew make a drunken pledge to film the two of them “bonin’” for an art festival, each wants to out-do the other’s open-mindedness by not backing down from the task. The three stellar lead performances are what makes this film – largely improvised from Lynn Shelton’s extensive notes; giving this film a wonderful and realistic fly-on-the-wall feel. The terrific dialogue makes for palpable awkwardness as the dare is explained to Ben’s wife, and the logistics of the task are openly discussed. How do you show your friends how much you care about them?
There’s nothing about this movie that isn’t in bad taste; whether it’s the exploitation of the Kazakhstani culture or Sacha Baron Cohen’s ability to make anyone seem ignorant and foolish (though, that probably wasn’t that hard in some cases, here). I don’t, however, mean that as a bad thing. This movie is hilarious. It’s more than just “laugh-out-loud-funny”; it’s “laugh-so-hard-you-start-making-snorting-noises-funny”. And it’s all the real people that make it. There really is nothing better than the shadenfreude of seeing uncomfortable people trying to accept what they see as “foreign”.
Being the Harry Potter geek that I am, I like the fact that this film seemed to open the characters’ motives to the audience more than any other in the series. The casting and acting are again strong, with Tom Fleton showing perfect desperation with the downfall of Draco Malfoy, and Alan Rickman once again proving that he really *is* Professor Snape. But while it was a positive that the film captured both the humour and the dark emotion of the story, there seemed to be no segue between these in the script, leading to some jarring shifts in tone.
To enjoy Transformers II you need to simultaneously be six (Yay! – Robots), sixteen (Yay! – Megan Fox), and twenty-six (Yay! – I like the way they handled the themes of morality and free will by treating the Autobot/Decepticon distinction as an issue of personal choice, rather than race). And on all three of these levels (well, really only the first two), this film performs admirably. The plot is simple enough, the characters are endearing, and the fight scenes will blow you away. I believe this and its prequel are some of the best visual action films of the past five years.
Light-hearted and eminently likeable, ‘Ratatouille’ is a nice Pixar film for relaxing to, but it doesn’t quite live up to the standards they set themselves with films like ‘The Incredibles’, ‘Finding Nemo’ and ‘WALL·E’. The story is passable, with a good-natured message of accepting differences, and the characters have a classic cartoon warmth. But the pacing seems a little off, and you’re never really sure which revelation is the real climax to the film. That being said, Peter O’Toole’s ‘Ego’ the food critic is fantastic and serves as a lesson for anyone who chooses to share their opinions with others.
