Parkland was an interesting take on the whole JFK assassination. Not a who dunnit or a conspiracy theory flick as you would think, but a film that deals with the impact the shooting had on the people around the events.

The film pretty much says that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only shooter (sorry conspiracy folks) and looks at the medical staff that tried to revive Kennedy, the Secret service that cared for his body and the families of the central characters. Most of the characters are left with their own personal mark by the event and its aftermath.

What could have been a shameless sobfest for American filmgoers is actually a very sensitive piece that even looks at the impact on the Oswald family after the assassination. Note quite the “important” film I think its director would like it to be, but nevertheless an interesting piece of history.

Damon all tech’ed up to even the score..

A rather interesting piece of Science Fiction, rather timely in terms of the current political feud in America over Obama-care.

Director Neill Blomkamp (with the help of Matt Damon and Jodie Foster) paint a picture of a bleak future where hi-tech medicine is only available to the very wealthy who live on a space station orbiting the earth. The earth itself is a complete dump (looks rather like Mexico not surprisingly) with mass overpopulation and problems galore. The space station Elysium is a paradise of nice tidy houses and beautiful people.

I found some interesting parallels in this film to Sleep Dealer, with a working underclass that supports a smaller wealthy one. Of course the obvious comparison is Metropolis, but then how can a film be bad if it is anything like Metropolis! I won’t spoil it for you anymore, definitely worth a look.

Jason Statham stars in this remake of the classic Charles Bronson film. To be honest I was expecting beforehand to completely hate this purely because it was a remake of something so good, I was delightfully surprised…

This remake pretty much followed the original with a bit of modernizing and extra twists and turns dropped in for better affect. In a lot of ways it was a standard Statham action fare, but if I am being completely fair he did do the original work justice.

As I like to do with a lot of remakes, you just really have to ignore the fact that this is a film based on another film and look at it as a separate work. Whilst you can then still see glaring similarities, you will also enjoy the extra interpretation the new director adds.

In some ways this approach worked for The Mechanic, but you could also not get away from the fact that Statham captured brilliantly the broodiness and detachment of the Bronson character in the original. Frankly it is hard to ask the question “was it as good as the original” as the new version of The Mechanic is such a good film in its own right.

A bit of a classic film from the hey day of Governor Schwarzenegger, when grunting and flexing his biceps pretty much got him through every scene.  That’s not to say that Arnie did not make slightly better films after this as his range improved, but Red Heat was still firmly steeped in the days of grunting!

Arnie plays a hard-nosed Russian cop sent out to America to intercept a Russian gangster. Jim Belushi wise-cracks his way through an hour and a bit with reference after reference to masturbation (well that seemed to be what most of his lines were about) and does a fairly good job as his local cop babysitter. Laurence ‘Larry’ Fishburne looking very thin and young plays a somewhat straight fellow cop who tut’s and huffs about Belushi throughout.

Not much here in the way of story or character development, but it stands up quite well against similar films of the ilk coming out in recent years. Call it a guilty pleasure.