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Tormented (2009)
I wanted to like it. Regrettably, I didn't. (MINOR spoilers)
(MINOR spoilers) This film was made locally (I know people who work at the school in which it's set, and my niece was married in the church where they hold the funeral) so I thought if I didn't support it, nobody would - low budget indie comedy horror is a bit of an acquired taste.
I went in knowing only that it was about a teenager who came back from the dead to get his own back on the bullies who'd made his life hell, and that it was a "comedy-horror".
I could make a very long list of where this film failed to impress, but I can summarise them in three words: plot, characters and dialogue.
The plot holes are big enough to drive a cart and horses through. To call the characters stereotypes is a dis-service to every cheap television sitcom, and the dialogue is risible.
One element I found delightful were the constant references to the malfunctioning art-room guillotine - it's obvious that it'll come in handy, and the payoff could have been bigger, but it's well drawn-out.
The film sells itself as belonging to the slasher horror tradition and two of the dispatches work very well, others less so. And of course where there's teenage slash horror, there has to be sex and we are given a couple of fair sex scenes, although for my money Tom Hopper's shower scene tops them both for erotic content.
If I had to come up with a short tagline for this mess, it'd have to be "A lesson in how NOT to make a teen slasher movie!"
Star Trek (2009)
This is the way to reboot!
Although the film isn't officially released for another day, there are already nine pages of comments here. Interestingly, the vast majority of the negative ones (all but two) either admit or infer that their authors haven't actually seen the movie. Clearly some people just want to say something to get their monikers out there, even if it's completely irrelevant, meaningless and born of prejudice. That said, I can understand why some hardcore fans didn't like this re-boot.
Let's get my own credentials out of the way. I'm not really a hard-core Trekkie, and although I don't know episode titles of stardates, I used to be prominent in the online fandom and ran a couple of websites. I'm not really all that enamoured of the original crew, although they were a presence in the background as I was growing up.
I've had a problem with the spin off series and some of the movies, especially those presided over by Rick Berman - like a lot of modern science fiction, they got bogged down in the mechanics of the imagined universe with the actors having ever-increasing volumes of techno-babble to spout, and the stories were often about the technology rather than the people. If nothing else, I expected JJ Abrams' involvement to eschew that aspect, and he didn't disappoint.
When I first heard that a Trek "origins" movie was planned for this franchise reboot, I feared Star Fleet Academy hormonal teenagers invading the screen. I was ultimately delighted when the story skipped from Kirk enrolling in the Academy to to his (re)taking the Kobayashi Maru scenario we know from The Wrath of Khan, "Three Years Later".
The pre-publicity for this movie has stressed more than most that it isn't just for Trekkies but for a mass audience. In that, the makers have succeeded. The plot is really fairly banal and unoriginal - we follow Kirk and Spock growing up with Oedipal issues and like any buddy movie, they dislike each other on first meeting. What a lot of people seem to forget is that the original TV series wasn't just built around them, but included Bones too, as the slightly more world-weary figure who could knock their heads together when needed. And so Dr McCoy gets a fair amount of screen time too. Although only a bit-part in the series, Uhura's role gets expanded as it's always been painfully obvious that she's the only female member of the crew and in this day and age, that just won't do.
The need for a wider appeal is the backbone for the dialogue, offering a structure to hang those character-defining bits you don't need to be a hardcore fan to know about: Spock saying "Fascinating", Scotty saying "I'm giving it all she's got" (although "I cannae change the laws of physics" is only implied); McCoy gets gets an "I'm a doctor not a ... " joke, Chekov gets to mispronounce his Vs, Uhura shows her legs, and so on. We even get to have a red-shirt, a character with literally two lines of dialogue who has to get himself killed just to underline that space is a Dangerous Place where Bad Things Happen. And of course there's "Live Long and Prosper".
All the actors have the chance to offer their own take on the characters they play rather than being obliged to impersonate their predecessors - this is particularly tricky in Zachary Quinto's case as unlike the others, he has to share the stage with Leonard Nimoy for one scene and their slightly divergent aptitudes are revealed (as well as the fact that, frankly, Quinto is the better actor). Thankfully, Chris Pine doesn't make the slightest move towards Shatner's trademark faltering dialogue delivery but nails the swagger and bravado (and self-congratulatory smirk) every time. Sign of the times, though, Pine gets to do something Shatner never did, and that's to appear in nothing but a pair of baggy y-fronts at one point...
I must mention Karl Urban's Dr McCoy which stops just the right side short of an impersonation (physically, he and DeForrest Kelley have little in common) but keeps all the energy and almost-omnipresent indignation of possibly my favourite character from the series.
My enthusiasm shouldn't hide a few reservations I have. This new Star Trek has more in keeping with the current spate of superhero movies rather than space opera (a genre the original TV series created) in the way it's scripted, shot and also scored. But if James Bond can do it, why can't Trek? And that grated on me just a bit.
On to my main reservation, though. Like most buddy/superhero movies, the main characters start by hating each other and then grow to respect and perhaps even care for each other. But the final act is just a little too rushed for my liking and the Kirk-Spock relationship we know ultimately comes from nowhere, largely by order of future-Spock rather than any real natural character development. And that's a huge pity because it's the core of what the film thinks it's about.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)
Not as good as it thinks it is
I'm not going to go over the ground so many of the other comments have made, although several of the comments frankly baffle me. Tilda Swinton was great as the ice-cold Machiavellian ruler, but fell far short believably beguiling Edmund. Why he should have considered trusting such an obviously ill-intentioned character was incomprehensible, and I put this down to her simply not understanding what her character was up to. I read the book the best part of 30 years ago and recall her being sweet and enticing rather than simply ordering him to betray his siblings. (Surely, being just a little older than myself, she read the books as a child? They were all the rage in the late 60s with younger kids, as LOTR was with older ones.) My other big gripe is with the SFX. Did I really see the same film as the one those who praised the CGI, the landscapes and the animals? A significant amount of the blue/green screen work looked cheap and unfinished - it may have passed muster 10 years ago, but not today! I've never been a fan of anthropomorphous animals (except for the occasional cartoon), but with the possible exception of the beavers, the sounds being made did not believably emanate from the animals' mouths. I found this particularly weird given Adamson's experience with CGI animation.
Of course, many of the reviews here (and elsewhere) have compared this movie to the LOTR trilogy or the Potter franchise: Disney probably doesn't discourage such comparisons, if they're favourable. Regrettably, in my mind, such favourable comparisons are misplaced: LOTR's scope and geography beats Narnia into a cocked hat, and the mass battles of Jackson's trilogy have set a very high benchmark; Narnia doesn't come close with its battle, which I couldn't even call "eye candy". Potter is a very different animal, the continuing storyline being its main attraction, and characterisation built over the series as the trainee witches and wizards mature. Attempting to show such growth in the limited running time of a single movie was always going to be difficult, and given even my foggy recollection of the book, much development was lost at the expense of under-whelming visuals.
A fairly crude measure of my enjoyment of a film is how long into it I am desperate for a break and how often I need to check my watch, and by that measure, this film fails rather spectacularly, as I lasted no more than half an hour before my attention wavered. LOTR and all but the first Potter movie came off admirably in comparison, but even that did better than this piece of over-hyped bandwagon-jumping.