For the last few years I've done monthly run-downs of what's been flavouring that past four weeks - the sorts of things I've been watching, listening to, reading, playing, or doing that have been most prominent - and so I figured I'd do a retrospective of the fullest flavours of the year of 2012.
Click "READ MORE" below to see the Flavours of the Year 2012...
Showing posts with label year. Show all posts
Showing posts with label year. Show all posts
Tuesday, 1 January 2013
Monday, 17 September 2012
The 2nd worst movie I've seen all year...
Screamers: The Hunting
What's it about?
Sequel to the 1996 sci-fi thriller "Screamers". A distress signal from the mining planet Sirius 6-B brings a ship-load of rescuers to search for survivors some thirteen years after the events of the first movie.
Who would I recognise in it?
Lance Henriksen, and a bunch of people you probably won't recognise from the odd flick you might have seen.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
While the first movie wasn't perfect by any means, it had a robust script, a solid premise, and good actors (led by Peter Weller) ... the sequel has none of these things. The original didn't have a massive budget, but it really looked far more expensive than it was - The Hunting (generic enough sub-title for you?) on the other hand, just looks cheap. Really cheap. Despite a handful of grand CGI shots (such as the factory where the screamers originate) and some nice touches in the production design (some spiffing hand-held computer devices), the rest of the movie really feels cheap-as-chips, and this most definitely extends - in abundance - to the, frankly, atrocious script.
Incredibly, Screamers: The Hunting was written by the co-writer of the first movie (the other writer being Dan O'Bannon, he of Alien, and Return of the Living Dead fame) ... goodness knows what happened then, because the script for this sequel is lazy and generic - endlessly so. The characters are weakly drawn, and if they have any motivations at all, they're as done-to-death as the dialogue (which often repeats itself ad-nauseum), and idiotic as the plot. A ham-fisted 'ticking clock' device just makes the rescue team look even more moronic than they initially appear - they seemingly have so little time, yet they're forever bunking off work early to catch yet another nap. Furthermore, if the killing of the only black man on the team right up front wasn't a deliberate piss-take of a genre-convention, then deary me. Deary me indeed.
Click "READ MORE" below to continue reading about just how awful this garbage is...
What's it about?
Sequel to the 1996 sci-fi thriller "Screamers". A distress signal from the mining planet Sirius 6-B brings a ship-load of rescuers to search for survivors some thirteen years after the events of the first movie.
Who would I recognise in it?
Lance Henriksen, and a bunch of people you probably won't recognise from the odd flick you might have seen.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
While the first movie wasn't perfect by any means, it had a robust script, a solid premise, and good actors (led by Peter Weller) ... the sequel has none of these things. The original didn't have a massive budget, but it really looked far more expensive than it was - The Hunting (generic enough sub-title for you?) on the other hand, just looks cheap. Really cheap. Despite a handful of grand CGI shots (such as the factory where the screamers originate) and some nice touches in the production design (some spiffing hand-held computer devices), the rest of the movie really feels cheap-as-chips, and this most definitely extends - in abundance - to the, frankly, atrocious script.
Incredibly, Screamers: The Hunting was written by the co-writer of the first movie (the other writer being Dan O'Bannon, he of Alien, and Return of the Living Dead fame) ... goodness knows what happened then, because the script for this sequel is lazy and generic - endlessly so. The characters are weakly drawn, and if they have any motivations at all, they're as done-to-death as the dialogue (which often repeats itself ad-nauseum), and idiotic as the plot. A ham-fisted 'ticking clock' device just makes the rescue team look even more moronic than they initially appear - they seemingly have so little time, yet they're forever bunking off work early to catch yet another nap. Furthermore, if the killing of the only black man on the team right up front wasn't a deliberate piss-take of a genre-convention, then deary me. Deary me indeed.
Click "READ MORE" below to continue reading about just how awful this garbage is...
Thursday, 12 August 2010
Triple Bill Mini Musings: One Pish, Two Good...
Year One:
I'm really quite glad I didn't waste money on this in the cinema. It didn't look funny from the trailers, and it certainly wasn't funny (bar one decent gag every fifteen minutes, pretty much) in its full form. Considering that this came from comedy icon Harold Ramis, the sheer dullness of Year One was most perplexing. Jack Black was on autopilot and Michael Cera was just annoying ... thankfully Ramis put in a decent cameo, and Oliver Platt was a hedonistic high point in an otherwise naff venture.
The Deal:
I'd never heard of it until it came onto Sky Movies recently. I saw that William H. Macy was in it, and that it was a "Hollywood satire", so that was interesting enough. It's not riotously funny, but it's far from bland - it was actually quite enjoyably silly. You're pulled along for the fun little ride, much like Macy's semi-suicidal filmmaker pulls Meg Ryan's stuck-up producer into his whirlwind world of blagging a way through. Worth a watch.
Red Heat:
I've always gotten Red Heat and Raw Deal mixed up until recently when they both turned up on ITV-4 ... note to them, by the way, stop showing 2.35:1 movies in cropped 16x9! Just stop it! ... and now I know how to distinguish them. Raw Deal is the cheesy, pretty rubbish load of old nonsense about an American cop (Arnie), and Red Heat is the arse-kicking proper action flick about a Russian cop (Arnie). While Raw Deal was an example of a movie being a bad representation of 80s action flicks, Red Heat is the exact opposite. Good action, good script, and good direction ... I do wonder why it's taken me all these years to finally get around to seeing it.
I'm really quite glad I didn't waste money on this in the cinema. It didn't look funny from the trailers, and it certainly wasn't funny (bar one decent gag every fifteen minutes, pretty much) in its full form. Considering that this came from comedy icon Harold Ramis, the sheer dullness of Year One was most perplexing. Jack Black was on autopilot and Michael Cera was just annoying ... thankfully Ramis put in a decent cameo, and Oliver Platt was a hedonistic high point in an otherwise naff venture.
The Deal:
I'd never heard of it until it came onto Sky Movies recently. I saw that William H. Macy was in it, and that it was a "Hollywood satire", so that was interesting enough. It's not riotously funny, but it's far from bland - it was actually quite enjoyably silly. You're pulled along for the fun little ride, much like Macy's semi-suicidal filmmaker pulls Meg Ryan's stuck-up producer into his whirlwind world of blagging a way through. Worth a watch.
Red Heat:
I've always gotten Red Heat and Raw Deal mixed up until recently when they both turned up on ITV-4 ... note to them, by the way, stop showing 2.35:1 movies in cropped 16x9! Just stop it! ... and now I know how to distinguish them. Raw Deal is the cheesy, pretty rubbish load of old nonsense about an American cop (Arnie), and Red Heat is the arse-kicking proper action flick about a Russian cop (Arnie). While Raw Deal was an example of a movie being a bad representation of 80s action flicks, Red Heat is the exact opposite. Good action, good script, and good direction ... I do wonder why it's taken me all these years to finally get around to seeing it.
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