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mattcook1983
Reviews
Back (2017)
Dark and funny
The writing is satisfyingly excellent. Dark humour, much as with peep show, causes that pleasingly awful cringe. Where this differs is that the tension arches its back from the first episode to the last, like a malevolent cat performing a tickle stretch.
The level of observational comedy in this is so consistent, I begin to wonder if the writers discovered an unwritten diary of mine labelled "things I half-noticed, but neither properly analysed, nor was diligent enough to write down."
As for the compelling darkness, "Back" opens out intrigues to outdo much "serious" TV drama. These are the shadows of comedy - a perspective on real lives that can handle being pushed into caricature.
One of the best things I've seen on TV.
The Double (2011)
Yuck
Shouting is acting, the macho cast of this man-film seem to think.
Richard Gere is astonishingly wooden, especially during the token Russian dialogue. The sound, script, direction and pacing is straight out of every other bore-snore CIA film - I was astonished to find this was made in 2011, albeit Gere's silver fox looks are a giveaway - it feels like it could have been just as dull in 1985.
Weak-willed and expendable female characters, and some of the most insincere lines I've ever heard in cinema. Predictable fist-fights, tired gunfights, wrote car chases.
I might start calling him Gere the insincere.
A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)
Funny first half
The crass and slapstick first half of this film made me bellow with laughter. There are some really good, really dirty jokes, and I wish it had just carried on and on, but it didn't.
The trouble with the steering of these kind of titles is that Hollywood just doesn't seem to understand that in a comedy, there should be unremitting comedy, even where there is romance and tragedy, instead this film gradually feels its fingers slipping on the levee about half way through, and becoming a sappy, generic underdog romance, with a rubber-faced half-wit, whose rubber face becomes less and less likable with every minute the film labours on under the millstone of having to say something about something.
For Pete's sake Hollywood, just let a film be funny at the expense of the slush!
5 out of 5 for the first half.
District 9 (2009)
A belter
This has a similar feel to it to "The Host" a South Korean movie. If you liked that, watch this. If you like this, watch that.
It's a dark comic film with much ambiguity. Those looking for plot accountability are idiots - and have missed the point. It's not a staggeringly deep film, but it's a really good watch, with some very interesting points to make about long lasting prejudice, and our obsession with violence. It presents some potentially rather predictable set pieces with novelty and poses difficult moral questions in a tragicomic manner. See also: The Host, Four Lions.
The film constantly references the sci-fi genre, but never with the tired dreary one-upmanship of an action movie. This is a film which succeeds in inducing outrage, directed at whichever skinhead racist south African you feel is most vile. Nothing makes me happier than to see a racist xenophobe zapped with the most inconceivably vicious alien- artifact-weapon-thing. Does that make me a bad person?