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RoyStead
Reviews
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)
Dreadful and unnecessary rewrite
An adaptation of a book can't be completely faithful. We all understand this and accept it: There just isn't space even in a two hour movie to include everything which happens in an entire novel.
But this travesty wanders so far away from the source material, introducing an unneeded quest for magical swords and a pointless "big bad" invented from whole cloth which adds nothing to the story but merely takes time away from the relevant.
Add in the mysterious change of Reepicheep's voice - what happened? Was Eddie Izzard unavailable for this one? - and the lamentable shift from intelligence to brute force as a solution to, for example, the Lone Islands slavery problem and what we have here is a dreadful movie which completely misses the point of the book.
King Kong (2005)
Tedious and Badly CGIed
I actually got bored while watching this movie.
Think about that a moment: While watching an "action adventure" film with a giant gorilla, oodles of dinosaurs, giant insects and centipede attacks, I got bored.
The film is about twice as long as it needs to be, and I was astonished that the CGI was so poorly done. Not badly animated: The animation and model design was superb. No, it was badly integrated: The live human actors hardly ever seem to be a part of the scene with, say, dinosaurs or Kong. Rather, they look like very badly done greenscreen: The lighting's all wrong and the colours on the live actors are noticeably brighter than the animated creatures.
In short, then, this is a terrible movie and far inferior to the 1933 original, despite the lovely creature animation which, thanks to that poor integration of the live actors, actually detracts from the movie in many places.
A great disappointment.
[Rec] (2007)
The best horror movie ever made, bar none
Calling "rec" the best horror film of the year would be a huge understatement: It is the best horror movie I have ever seen, and that's a statement I don't make lightly. Absolutely stunning, completely terrifying and flawless in terms of writing, directing, acting, pacing, visual style, cinematography, ...
I'm sitting here, having just watched it, and experiencing something I've not felt since the first time I saw Robert Wise's original "The Haunting" and the "Bobby" segment of the 1970s portmanteau horror, "Dead of Night" My heart is racing and my head is cotton wool-wrapped from the sheer exhilaration of watching a pretty much perfect horror movie which manages to touch every base, from psychological to gore, without at any time feeling forced or...
I'm just stunned that horror movies can be THIS good.
Ken Park (2002)
Contains No Gratuitous Sex
Most of these comments seem to be complaining about the sex scenes, either that they are too explicit, that the movie is near-pornographic or that the sex scenes should be overlooked as a directorial indulgence, in favour of the stories or characters.
On the contrary, the sex scenes are essential to the point of this film, since they function as a distinct shorthand to indicate the nature of the characters, and the nature of their relationships with others.
For instance, Shawn's relationship with his girlfriend's mother is illustrated very clearly by the nature of the sex he prefers (pleasing her, rather than merely himself) both with her directly and, indirectly and by proxy, with her daughter. Even the fact that his *public* relationship is with her daughter, despite his clear preference for the older woman, serves to indicate the depth of his feelings, in the lengths to which he is going to spare the mother's feelings. All of which acts as a very clear shorthand which underlines every discomforting moment at the subsequent dinner.
Then there's Tate, whose masturbation scene underlines both his own sexual frustrations, his selfish and self-destructiveness (the auto-erotic asphyxiation aspect) and his incestuous fantasies (note whose robe the belt comes from).
Peaches' choice of bondage with her boyfriend (clearly a choice she made, as he asks for "normal" sex for a change) shows her clear conflicted desires between wanting control (she ties him up) and wanting to be controlled (she wants him to tell her what to do). An admittedly non-too-subtle comparison with the relationship she has with her rather demented father.
And the scenes between Claude and his mother, his phone call to a friend (that he clearly has a crush on) and the echoes of that phone call in his father's attempted rape of him shortly afterwards all make for difficult viewing, and are all further sharpened by the trawling-for-hookers sequence with Claude's father and Murph (who I had assumed was Claude's grandfather).
And then, finally, we come to the threesome scene, which serves both to indicate the closeness and freedom the three find with one another, and also, in subsequent conversation, to emphasise just how little impact Ken Park's death actually had on their lives.
The sex scenes, then, are not something to be passed over or decried: They're there to provide precise, and fairly detailed, sketches of the characters in what is, admittedly, too short a film for the tales it tries to tell.
Dressed to Kill (1980)
Extremely Silly
A very silly movie, this starts with a soft porn sequence, ventures into farcelike comedy in the art gallery, adds a shocker of a discovery in the hotel room then introduces a random murder for no obvious reason.
What follows is bizarre and surreal (the stopwatch scene in particular is exquisitely unnecessary), culminating in a revelatory "twist" ending which is as obvious as it is unfair on the viewer (see the trivia section for precisely why it's deliberately unfair).
The movie goes out of its way to be offensive to as many groups as possible - transsexuals, the insane, and the wonderful "Huggie Bear"-style racial stereotyping on the subway - and condescendingly treats the viewer like an idiot in the closing scenes, as characters endlessly explain to one another in great detail and over and over again what just happened in the film. Though the background female characters in the restaurant scene at the end are a joy to watch.
In fact, the whole movie is a joy to watch: Despite its many, many flaws, the whole package just, well, works.
The Resurrected (1991)
Faithful but Awful
This movie is exceedingly faithful to Lovecraft's original story, and I loved the original story ("The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"). So why did I dislike the film so much? Essentially, because it's NOT an "adaptation" of the source material: It's a straight line-by-line reconstruction of it, with no concessions of any note made to the adaptation process, to the differences in story telling technique which are required for film, as opposed to the written word.
In short, it's uncinematic and what works on the printed page does not - most definitely does NOT - work on the flickering screen unmodified. The end result is tedious in the extreme.
Sleepwalkers (1992)
Magnificent
This is a truly wondrous movie. Possibly one of the worst films ever made, and yet... and yet... It's simply gripping.
Why is it gripping? Simply because, like such classics as Zoltan: Hound of Dracula, this film manages to enthral and engross by the simple virtue of horrendously bad direction, acting, plotting, characterisation, production... Need I go on? Some major spoilers: Any movie which includes Luke Skywalker (uncredited) before the opening credits; incorporates a scene which explicitly has *nothing* to do with the plot (such as it is) but is there purely to provide Stephen King and Clive Barker with cameos; has somebody stabbed to death with a *cooked* corn on the cob (uncooked I could just about believe, but cooked? That'd be like stabbing someone with a banana); has the central villain go out of his way - yes, actually go out of his way - to call attention to himself, speeding past a police car and trying to run down small children *for no reason whatsoever*. This being the same character who preserves his secret identity by writing a story about it and reading that story in his school classroom. Any such movie can't be all bad.
All this would be wonderful enough, but it all pales into insignificance beside the grandeur of the true star of the film: Clovis this Super Cat.
A cat who can sprint up a tree and break into a house by smashing a window with his paw.
I can't recommend this movie highly enough.
Intimate Relations (1996)
breathtaking
A movie which is breathtaking in its simplicity and honesty. The cinematography perfectly complements the storyline, and the director/writer manages to carefully deliver each item of character backstory precisely when it's needed, without seeming in any way contrived.
A true character-driven movie with the always-reliable Julie Walters.