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Film Archive


2nd December 2010

Top 5: Weepies

1) City of Angels – Nicolas Cage plays an angel who falls in love with Meg Ryan. It actually sounds a bit comical. Trust me, it isn’t. The bicycle scene, combined with Sara McLachlan’s ‘In the Arms an Angel’ is the most depressing thing that you’ll ever see. Or hear.2) Beauty and the Beast – A tale as old as time, a song as old a rhyme – it gets me every time.
2nd December 2010

Preview: Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel of the same name reads like a film, so it seems completely logical to copy and paste the story onto the big screen. Time Magazine might have gone a bit off the rails calling it ‘the best book of the decade’, but it’s definitely film worthy.
2nd December 2010

I Hate: Peter Jackson’s King Kong

The original 1930s King Kong is an hour and a half, and even that feels like it’s dragging in some places. It’s a very thin concept; a giant monkey on an island. You certainly wouldn’t have thought that it needs to be three hours. Apparently Peter ‘I’m not going to edit any of my films’ Jackson thought otherwise.
2nd December 2010

Review: The Town

Many of you out there will believe, as I do, that awarding a piece of work three stars is highly frustrating. This magic number is inoffensive, uninspiring and tells the reader nothing of the subject matter. However, The Town may just be the exception; it conjures up enough brilliant moments and frustrating plot devices to be truly worthy of an average review.
2nd December 2010

Top 5: Poorly delivered lines

5. Lord of the Rings – ‘I’m no man’ So says Elf-girl Eowyn as she thrusts her blade in the Witch King’s face. I tend to think that the Witch King, when he said that ‘no man could kill him’, meant Man: the race and not Man: a male. Either he didn’t recognise female prowess or he didn’t foresee being stabbed in the head when he made this claim.
2nd December 2010

I Hate: Transformers 2

Michael Bay spent so long working on the optical madness that is Transformers 2 that he forgot to develop his storyline or characters. The end result is CGI on steroids and very little else. It’s always a bad sign when you feel genuinely embarrassed for the actors in the film for having their names permanently besmirched by such an atrocity. The cast and crew behind this film would probably be happy if there was a nuclear holocaust, something to wipe out civilization, as this would finally erase their shame.
2nd December 2010

Original Vs Remake: Psycho

You would be hard pressed to find a worse reason to remake a film than Gus Van Sant did in his revival of the classic horror flick Psycho. Remakes generally find their way into cinemas on the back of huge film studios believing that there is potential in bringing the originals to a new generation. Inept scriptwriters and shoddy directors generate millions at the box office with the slightest effort, as seen with recent shambolic revivals such as Clash of the Titans.
2nd December 2010

I Heart: Withnail & I

Withnail has such an incredible life; ‘Look at him’, you think, ‘He’s having such a good time’. There really is no better advert out there for chain-smoking alcoholism than Withnail. An inadvisable drinking game states that the players must match Withnail drink for drink. It’s impossible. In the course of the film he drinks nine glasses of red wine, six glasses of sherry, one pint of cider, one pint of beer, two shots of gin, thirteen whiskeys and a shot of lighter fluid.
2nd December 2010

Event Review: Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass

Picture the scene: It’s 10.30pm on a Saturday night and I am surrounded by glitter, false eyelashes and the distinct smell of hairspray; as a marvelously glamorous sequin-clad drag queen takes to the stage, welcomed by the rejoicing roar of an eclectic crowd of bourgeoisie zombies and blood-splattered doctors. One might be excused for assuming that what I am describing is a nightmarish Halloween night on Canal Street, that, however, is not the case.
2nd December 2010

I Hate: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland

In typical Burton style, stripy socks, unnervingly twisted flash-backs, and Helena Bonham Carter are in abundance; (no one could mistake this for any other director), and Tim makes the almost unforgivable mistake of detailing the ending at the start of the film.

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2nd December 2010

Review: Mr. Nice

Taking its inspiration from Marks’ 1996 autobiography of the same name, Mr Nice is unsurprisingly reverential and seems reluctant to ask any real questions of its protagonist. Most crucially, by presenting Marks as ‘Mr Nice’, the film fails to explore the moral dilemma inherent to his profession. Instead, Rose’s script opts for a rather shallow pro-legalisation, pro-Marks stance which ultimately suggests, to quote one glib piece of dialogue, that ‘it’s the law that’s wrong’.
2nd December 2010

I Heart: Grosse Pointe Blank

Since John Cusack made his name as the face of the 1980s teen rom-com, it is fitting that Grosse Point Blank is, at its heart, a high school movie. Martin Blank, (Cusack), is a hit man facing something of a midlife crisis; he has recurring dreams of his prom night sweetheart; he no longer derives satisfaction from his job; and he’s being pressured to join a union (yes, apparently professional killers have those), led by union chief Dan Aykroyd.
2nd December 2010

Preview: The Social Network

Zuckerberg came up with the notion at Harvard and launched the primitive website from his dorm room. Weird to think; that something that has become a scarily large part of everyday life for 500 million people, was started in what a lot of first years are experiencing now: a room where old beer cans used as ashtrays are literally heavy with cigarette butts, where old orange skins cling to the bottom of waste paper baskets and where blackish grime and bits of indefinable matter stick to an unwashed bowl on your desk. Maybe it’s different at Harvard, but it’s still a fairly novel (if disgusting) notion.
2nd December 2010

I Heart: Push

An unfair rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a couple of overly-harsh critiques, means that this movie is one that rarely appears on the student radar. However, it is, in my opinion, arguably one of the most entertaining and interesting ‘superhero’ films in a long time.
2nd December 2010

I Heart: Lars and the Real Girl

‘Anatomically correct blow up sex doll’ and ‘heart rending tearjerker’ aren’t usually phrases that appear in the same sentence. This film, however, somehow manages to seamlessly entwine the two and sit them together as naturally as emos and Twilight.