Showing posts with label top movie review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label top movie review. Show all posts

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Wonderful Movie review: ‘Insurgent’ – on March 23, 2015

Even as it makes no concession for people who may have not read Veronica Roth’s Divergent books, or who may have missed the first movie based on them entirely, Insurgent works better than its 2014 predecessor. 
 


It moves faster, puts Tris (Woodley) firmly at the centre of things, and its action scenes sizzle with thrills and suspense. With all the justifications of this post-acolapyse world dealt with in the first film, Insurgent purely involves three women who are making the world around them spin. A middle film that has no beginning or an end can hardly ask for anything better. 

Having laid the Abnegation faction to dust, Jeanine (Winslet) is hunting for divergents who pose a threat to the world as she knows it. She also wants one divergent strong enough to apply his/her mind’s powers to opening a box that holds the secrets of the founding fathers of this world. Tris, Four (James) and the others who had fled the annihilation of Abnegation last time are hiding out at Amity, before they are forced to make a run for it. 

As they gather the remaining members of the Dauntless faction around them, the problem remains how to hold off Jeanine, who will stop at nothing including embedding transmitters into people to force them into suicide. In the meantime, Four, who guards Tris with his heart and all his well-muscled body, has a crucial reunion with the head of the faction-less (Watts). 

The “remainder of humanity” confined to one city (Chicago), enclosed within a wall and divided into factions Erudite (the learned scientists), Candor (the honest jurists), Amity (the kind cultivators), Abnegation (the selfless administrators) and Dauntless (the fearless protectors), is surprisingly 20th century about its idea of clothing. All the fighters wear tight leather and fitted dresses, the more laid-back can be found in loose overalls. The lawbreakers lie somewhere in the middle. 


The architecture is uniformly tall and colourless, except Amity’s people who stay in round, wooden structures. 

Schwentke, who takes over from Neil Burger as director, knows how to tweak the story well enough to keep it running at a good pace into the third and fourth instalment. Deadly encounters are shot with minimal fuss, talk is kept to the adequate little, and Watts and Teller as the untrustworthy Peter bring in enough unpredictability to serve the story well. This also helps keep the plot from turning too maudlin which it threatens to become every time Woodley comes on screen, or even James. 

Woodley is not bad, but she isn’t Jennifer Lawrence, who brings in just the right rebellious, resentful, angry streak to make us cheer for Katniss in The Hunger Games. James, for his part, is meant to just play second fiddle. 

And that is perhaps the biggest thing to celebrate in Insurgent. It may be long before you continued…

Source: http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/movie-review/movie-review-insurgent/

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Moonwalkers first look review – Kubrick myth becomes misfiring comedy

Rupert Grint and Ron Pearlman star in tall tale of CIA agent employed to find Stanley Kubrick and pay him to create moon landing footage. 


 
Details: 
Comedy  |  14 March 2015 (USA)
Director: Antoine Bardou-Jacquet
Writer: Dean Craig
Stars: Ron Perlman, Rupert Grint, Robert Sheehan |See full cast and crew 
   
Conspiracy theory has it that Stanley Kubrick was employed by the CIA to fake the Apollo 11 moon landings. This is the jumping off point for the dodgy comedy Moonwalkers. Set in 1969 (obviously), it stars Hellboy’s Ron Perlman as Kidman, a CIA agent searching for Kubrick in Swinging London, and ending up with a hapless band manager played by Rupert Grint masterminding the footage America needs in case the real-life space odyssey goes awry.  

It’s hard to imagine a film less like one of Kubrick’s, an idea which must have tickled director Antoine Bardou-Jacquet. Sadly, Moonwalkers is not just a mile from its inspiration in style, but in quality. Despite some decent performances from Gint as Jonny, the hapless manager of a terrible rock band, a swivel-eyed Pearlman afflicted by flashbacks from Nam and Robert Sheehan as the permanently wasted friend Leon dragooned into standing in for Kubrick, the film is only intermittently funny, and its targets – camp experimental filmmakers, meatheaded Hell’s Angels, deluded wannabe rock stars – are not so much tired as catatonic.  
  
When things look in danger of flagging, which is frequently, Bardou-Jacquet adds a lavish sprinking of topless women and throws in yet another drug-taking scene, culminating in the inevitable apocalyptic acid trip. While celebrity rubberneckers may enjoy seeing Harry Potter star Grint getting in amongst it, that’s the only note of subversion the film contains. Billed as an action comedy, Moonwalkers is also incongruously violent, with (for instance) a public-toilet beating too brutal for hilarity, though Bardou-Jacquet has fun with the Performance -style Cockney gangsters led by a godfather who’s making a matchstick model of the Tower of London, before Perman furiously smashes it to smithereens.  



The funniest bits play on the differences between the Brits (effete, stoned and useless) and the Yanks (macho, ernest and dim), and there’s a decent joke about 2001: A Space Odyssey. But what sinks Moonwalkers is not that it’s broad and crude, but that it fatally lacks decent gags. 

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/15/moonwalkers-first-look-review-kubrick-myth-becomes-misfiring-comedy#img-1