Is it just me or does this dude look a lot like him out of the Walking Dead…I’ll not say another word!

This is a very interesting film which holds you tightly from its beginning by confusing you and teasing you with flashbacks of minor hints.

Essentially a man wakes up in a mass grave and manages to climb out of it with some assistance from a stranger who then promptly runs away. He makes it to a house and comes upon a group of other people. The main problem for them all is that none of them can remember who they are or why they are there. They do not understand why the area is littered with corpses or generally why no one else is about..

To explain much more of the plot would ruin it for you! All I can say is that what looks considerably B-grade as it starts (and pretty much reads as such) is a very interesting film well worth watching.

Outstanding performances from Jennifer Connelly (who’s back-to-front performance in Requiem for a Dream we can never quite get out of our heads!) and Ben Kingsley make this film very much a must-watch.

The City council makes a mistake on Connelly’s taxes and confiscates her home, they then sell this to Kingsley (who is an Iranian political refugee) for the cost of the unpaid taxes. He sets about making a whopper profit on the house. When the mistake is finally sorted out Kingsley will not give the house back.

This film caused a bit of a ripple when it came out with accusations that it was being blatantly racist, posing an Iranian family of refugees “stealing” a home from a red-blooded American. This I think though is a gross misunderstanding of the film which evokes sympathy for both parties, who are victims in their own ways. Thematically the film asks questions about American culture and everything it takes for granted.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but things escalate throughout the film (as you would expect them to under such circumstances) and the ending will leave you shocked and questioning your own prejudices.

A scene from Marooned..um..2001: A space Odyssey..um…Apollo 13…um Gravity!

Ok I am going to confess up front, I can’t stand Sandra Bullock. This probably started during the Speed movies when she infuriatingly played the dumbo – when most of us could have had the bombs diffused / movie over in the first ten minutes…

George Clooney is not exactly a favorite actor of mine either, I tend to turn most of his movies off after about half an hour. Sure he is aimed at the female demographic and this is fine, but nothing much there for me in most of his films. Even in The Good German (which I almost liked but for the hag Cate Blanchett) it was a stretch to get to the end of the film.

So I did not approach Gravity with exactly an open mind! The parallels in this film to Apollo 13 and before that Marooned are quite obvious, even reminded me somewhat of 2001: A Space Odyssey in part. So it was not exactly original, but despite this it was quite an entertaining hour and bit of Sci Fi.

The heavy breathing throughout put us in the suffocating darkness of space (pioneered by Kubrick in 2001) and heightened the tension of the films many ups and downs. Bullock tended to play the helpless female quite a bit throughout and Clooney the self-sacrificing father-figure so nothing new there..ok there I go…see it for yourself, not sure I can do this review justice…!

Lets just say if you didn’t mind what George Clooney did with Solaris (as in fairness I didn’t – there’s one of his films I liked), you will probably enjoy this remake of many other films.

Alright he might have had a hair job, but it sure looked like a clown wig to me..

This movie pretty much stunk! It could have been a lot better..

Now as a balding middle-aged man myself I don’t want to knock one of the “brothers” but Van Damme looked to be obviously wearing a wig to me and one he had borrowed from a clown costume. His hair was extremely distracting while he tried to play the psychopathic villain. At times I wondered if they were trying to imitate the “Joker” from Batman as this is kinda how it played on screen.

The plot was fairly empty without much in the way of story or character development, even as a pure action flick this movie rated pretty poorly. Its all set on an island which has become a national park and some drugs or other that have been lost at sea, well you can guess the rest in the first five minutes…there was only one twist which did get me, but once it played out it didn’t redeem the movie much. Give me old-school Van Damme any day.

A compelling French film which asks awkward questions about modern day slavery and the rest of us just basically ignoring it.

A young middle-class couple are heading off for the evening in their car when they are confronted with a prostitute being beaten in the street in their path. They do nothing to help her and lock their car doors.

This sets off a chain of middle-class guilt in which the wife visits the hospital and helps the girl recover. This might seem like a fairly straight-forward type of plot, but what unfolds is very exciting and interesting, as the couple learn their is more to her story when criminals visit the hospital looking for her.

I am not known to be the biggest fan of Tom Hanks, but I have to say that Captain Phillips has changed all that.

The story follows the hijacking of an American cargo ship near Somalia by pirates which actually happened. I am sure a great many parts of the films have been teased by Hollywood to provide a ripping tale (I remember the actual story being somewhat more mundane from the newspapers), but taken as pure entertainment the film is great.

Hanks gave an admirable performance leaving a lot of of his all-American-Boy schmaltz on the sidelines, his rendering of Captain Phillips was highly believable and evoked great sympathy.

The irony of half the american fleet surrounding a small life-raft was not lost on me and I’m sure I detected a few of the musical themes from Team America: World Police in there! But then I suppose that’s just Americans isn’t it. This is probably my only criticism I guess, all in all a very watchable film.

Yes produced by a woman..can’t Aussie scriptwriters turn out better than this?

No not quite whats its sounds; Black & White & Sex despite sounding like some sort of interracial porno is an Australian film that tries to make the case that a woman being a sex worker is some form of incredible empowerment rather than the worst kind of use of human beings!

Very much an in-your-face feminist diatribe, the film provides counter arguments to every supposed myth people have about prostitution and the notion of women being “sluts”. Sorry but I am not convinced. The director spends an hour and a bit asking a prostitute about her work (there is a vaguely interesting technique of shifting the actress every now and then..same character, different person playing her which plays with our perceptions).

He however doesn’t really ask questions that particularly get into the real issues of prostitution (in particular what causes some women to only be able to feel empowered around men in a prostitute scenario), instead he allows himself to be effectively taken over and told what to do by the person he is supposed to be interviewing. Her answers to anything complicated are just brush-offs that show no real depth.

I guess if you are a middle-class feminist trying to make men feel guilty about their perceptions of women’s sexuality you will be cheering this film with tears in your ears, if however you are a working class woman forced into prostitution you may not quite be such a fan…apparently this women argues that prostitutes enjoy their work! funny I read that they call their customers “mugs” and other quite horrible things.

My opinion: a load of Australian femino-nazi garbage. Yes some very good performances by the actresses, shame they wasted their talent on this pile of manure.

Aint love grand!

This film was so bizarre it was hilarious! Based around actual voice audio recordings of the leader of a horse-love club in America, Zoo relates the events surrounding the prominent death of security-cleared Missile engineer Kenneth Pinyan of a burst colon (work it out!) on a farm one evening a few years ago. Despite everyone knowing who the man was, his work was so classified no one could name him after his death for many years. He loved missiles and he loved horses..

Whilst, despite the circumstances, his death was tragic, this film is more of a comedy listening to obviously very disturbed individuals justifying their interest in zooifilia, yes doing it with horses.

Fortunately we are spared any actual footage of said activity (well there was a tiny glimpse, but you could look away like me), despite the club filling buckets with recorded DVDs and videos of their shenanigans.

Not illegal at the time (quickly made illegal after this case hit the news) the perpetrators are free to act the victim and explain that we all just “don’t get it”.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the film was the female vet who supposedly saved one of the horses from this ill-treatment by promptly having him gelded to stop the horse-lovers coming back for more. I felt nothing but sympathy for the poor beast as it was hardly his fault and couldn’t help but think she was somewhat messed up herself in some kind of man-hating way (but then maybe that’s just those Zoo’s tricking me). The film ends with her riding the castrated animal proudly, almost as bizarre as the animals former “friends”.

A delightful compilation of all the Carry on films put together in a 1 and a half hour extravaganza, hosted by Kenneth Williams and Barbara Windsor.

If you are a fan of the Carry on films as I am this is a delightful treat bringing back memories from so many great films. Yeh ok they were silly movies and they used the same old jokes over and over, but they were comfortable and always good for a laugh!

My only criticism is probably that they ignored many of the black and white films which were just as good, if not sometimes even better.

Eddie is growing up..mostly outwards

You have to be something of a Stoic to sit through this film, I actually had a look at it because it was made by HBO (usually means a big tick) and it starred Edward Furlong who was the Terminator II boy then the trainee nazi skinhead in American History X.

The whole film is set in a prison cell (something of a regular thing for HBO if you have seen the Oz series) and a dispute that develops over the course of a night. Horrible things ensue as you might expect with men caged up like rats and this is not a film for the faint hearted. You can feel the suffocation and caged rage as the films events unfold.

I will not ruin the film for you by explaining what happens, but this is one film that goes someway to explaining why some men act the way they do in Gaol or at least tries to.