Tag: review

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Reviews TV

We’re the good guys, Michael – Review: Lost Season 2 finale

So we reach the end of season two of Lost and again we have had some revelations and questions answered but new questions are raised by it leaving us eagerly awaiting the new season.

The Skinner Box is not a Skinner Box!

I seem to have been a step ahead of John Locke on this throughout the season. I figured it wasn’t real and was just a psychological experiment in the first episode of this season when Locke thought it was real. Then upon the discovery of The Pearl Locke lost his faith but I started to wonder if The Swan was not as I had first surmised a Skinner Box but was in some fashion real.

The Others are not as we were led to believe a bunch of barbaric survivors who had been stranded on the island in some incident many years ago. What are they hiding by pretending to have been reduced to a Lord of the Flies like savagery?

Danielle has been on the island for 16 years now and the Others pre-date her arrival, have they only recently adopted this false front following the Oceanic 815 crash or have they been doing it for many years? Kelvin tells Desmond about the Hostiles that live on the island, was this a reference to the Others?

Also the Faux Henry Gale tells Michael that they are the good guys when he asks who the hell they are.

They seem quite sophisticated and the fact that they are hiding their true nature would lead me to believe that they are quite possibly scientists working for the Dharma Initiative studying the behaviour of various groups of castaways and who must pose as yet another of these groups in order as to not jeopardise the results.

The way that the Faux Henry Gale was able to manipulate the Oceanic 815 survivors particularly Locke would suggest that he had extensive psychological training. Is he perhaps one of the scientists employed by the Dharma Initiative to study the participants in the Swan/Pearl observation experiment.

What the hell is the four-toed foot of a destroyed statue all about?

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Movies Reviews

Review: Shanghai Knights

Shanghai Knights

It’s very silly and hugely inaccurate but I do love the Shanghai Knights.

I find the bit where Lin kills Jack the Ripper very funny and Aidan Gillen as Lord Nelson Rathbone makes a very wondefully sadistic villain. It is one of my favourite Jackie Chan movies.

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Movies Reviews

Review: Thank You For Smoking

Thank You For Smoking

A satirical comedy on the machinations of the tobacco industry it stars Aaron Eckhart as Nick Naylor a spin doctor and spokesman for the The Academy of Tobacco Studies.

Aaron Eckhart’s character is brilliant he almost had me convinced that I should buy a pack of cigarettes when I left the cinema.

The great state of Vermont will not apologise for its cheese!

Brilliantly black comedy. I love the way that you never actually see anyone smoke in the movie as well.

I also watched Russian Ark yesterday, well about half of it. Jeez that’s a fucking boring piece of pretentious bollocks. I think my major problem with it was the character of the French diplomat, he was incredibly annoying and sapped any enjoyment I may have had.

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Movies Reviews

Review: Romance and Cigarettes

Watched Romance and Cigarettes this afternoon.

Odd film, a comedy musical starring James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi and Christopher Walken amongst others. It didn’t completely work but the acting and characterisations were great. Some laugh out loud moments particularly some of Buscemi’s and Walken’s lines.

I’d recommend people see if they get the chance but I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch it, particularly if like me you have a crush on Mary-Louise Parker she’s dead sexy in it.

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Movies Reviews Security Terrorism

Review: V for Vendetta

Just got back from watching the movie adaptation of V for Vendetta. I have mixed feelings but it was enjoyable and a lot better than I had feared it might be especially given my feelings for the previous adaptation of a comic that was close to my heart Hellblazer which became the painful Constantine.

I thought that Hugo Weaving was very powerful as V and Stephen Rea did a great job as Inspector Finch. Natalie Portman was merely adequate as Evey and her accent was not as awful as some have written but she was a little wooden in her performance. I thought Stephen Fry was remarkably good also, other characters such as Chancellor Sutler were too poorly written to allow much from the other actors in the cast.

The movie lasted two hours and yet it felt like a lot had been edited out. There was very little characterisation outside of the central few main characters all the others seemed like stereotypes painted in broad strokes. Some events such as what happened that night at Larkhill which enabled V to escape were glossed over as was Finch’s visit to the derelict Larkhill.

I think the general mood of the film was established well, it was visually stunning and there were a number of very powerful scenes especially the fingerman’s shooting of the girl and the subsequent uprising of the townspeople.

In many ways the movie felt like it was set in some parallel universe version of Britain rather than a dystopic near future of our own Britain, possibly due to it being an American production. The Britain of the movie was very twee and a little off, Rupert Graves as a copper using the word “chummy” when apprehending V, eggy in a basket and the Benny Hillesque TV satirical attack on the Chancellor.

A number of things in the movie make me feel like the points of the original graphic novel were lost or misunderstood by the writers. V was too overly made to be identified with Guy Fawkes who in the introductory scene is portrayed as a freedom fighter rather than the religious nutcase that he actually was. I thought that the Guy Fawkes mask in the graphic novel was a useful disguise which was merely appropriate given the date of key events in the story and a shared interest in blowing up public buildings. But the motivations of V and Guy Fawkes are in no way the same.

In fact Guy Fawkes has more in common with the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists our society is being made to fear at the moment. The character of V is different but is no hero either really he is a force for change through destruction, rebirthing society by destroying it’s institutions so something better can be born out of the ashes.

The surveillance aspects were altered and there was no sight of surveillance cameras in the movie odd given their ubiquitousness in modern Britain and given the totalitarianism surely there should be even more in evidence. Plus the populace do not seem cowed by the authorities, living in constant fear of speaking out of turn. Certainly this so called dystopia is to my eyes a lot deal better than we can really hope to expect several years down the line from now once we have a National Identity Register, cameras that can scan our faces to identify us and track our movements and legislation that gives the ruling party pretty much free reign to do whatever it wishes.

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Movies Reviews

Review: Syriana

I saw Syriana today and I’d have to agree with every single point that my friend Abhi made about it. He wrote:

Syriana is a brilliant film. Deeply flawed in some ways (packs in too much material and some characterization suffers as a result, as does the film’s lucidity) but the strengths render these quite irrelevant IMHO. There are some brilliant performances (Clooney is sublime, even with limited screen time) and the screenplay is ambitious as all hell. Its about time a movie like this came along. Its scathing and realistic and unabashedly political and pulls no punches. Also features one of the more stomach churning torture scenes I have seen.

The issues of corruption and US foreign policy influencing domestic policies in Middle Eastern states is a complex one and too much to fit into a movie of this length but I think it managed very well to cover all it’s bases even if that meant that the pacing was off at times and characterisations were broad strokes for many characters.

I think the message is more than just that oil companies act reprehensibly. Of course they do they are large multinational companies they’ll do whatever turns a profit and to do that as an oil company means corrupting or influencing governments. The message also is that our governments let them behave this way because it is believed it is in the best interests of our nations (both the US and the UK) for them to do so. This is kind of paralleled with the movie The Constant Gardener but in that it is pharmaceutical companies.

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Reviews TV

Review: Lost season 1 finale

I was thrilled but also a little disappointed by the final episodes of Lost last night.

We got to see a little more of the nature of the monster in the jungle and yet it is still a mystery in fact more of a mystery now as what I had thought that it was was proved not to be accurate.

We finally got to see The Others and they appear to be just yet another group of survivors but separate from those of Flight 815 and Danielle’s crew. In fact the island seems to have attracted many different groups of people over the years what with the Nigerian drug smuggling priests and then The Black Rock which appears to be a very old ship that somehow ended up 2 miles inland.

So The Others appear to be just a group of survivors that have been on the island for longer than even the 16 years of Danielle. Yet they are are armed and have a boat with a motor plus they seem to posses knowledge about Walt’s abilities.

I was left feeling there wasn’t enough resolution to plot threads and yet more questions have arisen in my mind. But I’m gripped enough to make the wait til spring for the start of season 2 seem almost unbearable at the moment. But I’m worried that due to the nature of US television we’ll never get that final resolution, it will just be dragged out for years and years and then the series will get cancelled.

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Movies Reviews

Review: Wolf Creek

Wolf Creek

I think Wolf Creek is more disturbing for the fact that it was a small budget movie the acting seemed naturalistic and the whole production lacked the Hollywood gloss.

I wasn’t as impressed as I thought I might be having heard so much good stuff about it but thought there were some really good moments in it.

Got me to wondering though about how different is Mick from the normal member of society. Can he just be written off as a psychopath or would many blokes put into a similar isolated environment and given the opportunity to get away with horrific crimes do exactly the same?

Plus the other side of the equation having been abducted but then gotten free somehow what would the average person do? Would they flee, save their friends or would they seek out their abductor to get act out some retribution?

In Liz’s situation after she’s shot Mick in the neck I think I would have made sure he was definitely dead. If the gun was empty now I’d find some tool like a spade and gave the bastards head until it was just a smear of gore on the floor.

Reading the user comments for the movie at IMDB is quite interesting as there seems to be a large split between those that loved it and those that thought it was rubbish.

Also it seems many users are not understanding the concept of being based on true events not actually meaning that it is totally accurately portraying the events that really happened.

I also admit the TRUE STORY part had me intrigued as I’m sure they could not make this stuff up. At the end however, and this is the big spoiler, one guy does escape. However he was incapacitated/unconscious and unseeing of all the other torturing and chasing going on for the whole ENTIRE movie, and the authorities reveal how none of the bodies were ever found, nor was any evidence, or a bad guy. So how the hell is this a true story? This only victim that escaped certainly didn’t know what happened, other than his friends did not return. That pretty much leaves the director/writer or whoever to make the whole thing up. Right? Think about it if you’ve seen the movie.

Okay mate how about you look up the meaning of the phrase artistic licence and then read the following about Ivan Milat, the real Australian serial killer upon which the killer in the movie was loosely based.

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Movies Reviews

Review: Sahara

Sahara

Just watched Sahara which I thought was a cracking movie despite the poor reviews it’s received.

Yeah so it’s got plotholes the size of craters from meteor strikes and it ain’t going to win any Oscars but it did exactly what it said on the tin in my opinion.

Just a very enjoyable action adventure.

The pairing of Matthew McConaughey and Steve Zahn works really well, totally believable as friends since being kids. Zahn was great not just a comedy sidekick but a balls to the wall action hero in his own right.

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Books Reviews

Review: Identity Theft: What it is, How to Prevent it, and What to Do if it Happens to You

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing reviews the book Identity Theft: What it is, How to Prevent it, and What to Do if it Happens to You

Hamadi assembles dozens of identity-theft cases in short narrative form, like little cautionary tales, and then strings them together with some interconnecting material to show you who commits identity theft, who falls victim to it, how identity thieves work, and what steps are most likely to mitigate the threats.

Amazon.co.uk link