Because Everybody Else Has One

Finishing off this week's releases... Anchorman 2. I really wanted to like Anchorman 2. I was a big fan of the original when it came out and I am a fan of a number of the people involved in the film. Unfortunately, whether it's a simple case of sequelitis or the fact that what once seemed so fresh now feels so stale thanks to constant repetition in other McKay-Farrell vehicles, Anchorman 2 is too long, too scattershot and nowhere near funny enough. There are some chuckles to be had, to be sure, but they're cancelled out by far too many stretches of uncomfortable silence and the only sharply satirical bit that has to do with the current state of news was handled better in the movie Network, which came out more than three decades ago. (4/10) The Monuments Men. Speaking of disappointments, despite the stellar cast, interesting story (with its central thesis about the worth of art over human lives) and impossible-to-escape Clooney likability, The Monuments Men is a, wel...

The Oscars go scifi and there's no way that I was going to miss it! Spike Jonze has never been the most prolific of feature filmmakers as Her is only his third movie since his 1999 breakthrough, Being John Malkovich, but considering just how creative and involved all of his films have been, it's easy to forgive the long gestation of each of these projects - even if they haven't always been worth the wait. Being John Malkovich was indeed a tremendous, if slightly flawed, calling card for a new director but it was one that he had trouble truly matching. Adaptation was excellent for the first two thirds of its running time, only to unravel into irritating self-indulgence in its third act, while his kid-lit adaptation Where the Wild Things Are never quite got off the ground, despite its best intentions. Her, however, isn't just worth the wait, it may very possibly his most coherent, most fully accomplished film to date. It may not have the boundless off-the-wall cr...

Loads and loads of films to catch up on so some of these mini reviews will be a paragraph or two, other merely a line or two. There are some decent flicks in here, though. Best Man Holiday. This clearly should have been released around Christmas, not a month and a half later. Either way, it's OK when working as a tearjerker but is bloody awful when it tries to be a comedy. (3/10) Romeo and Juliet. Another adaptation of Shakey's most archetypal story is a solid, if perfunctory retelling, with largely questionable performances (only Paul Giamatti and Lesley Manville are the only true standouts) made all the worse by the fact that they altered the original text. If you're going to do Shakespeare in the original text, don't randomly change lines to make it more "understandable", do it in the original text! (4/10) Robocop. Talking about pointless remakes. Robocop could have been worse, as it is competently made and not unintelligent and it's hard to g...

It may have been overlooked by the Oscars but this is a must see for Coen Brothers fans and all aficionados of challenging, multi-layered and poignant cinema.  Incidentally, I have upped the rating to a full-on 10/10 after seeing the film a second time. It's a masterpiece. This review is also up at Channel 24  What it's about Based very loosely on the life story of legendary folk singer, Dave Van Ronk, the Coen Brothers' latest tells the story of Llewyn Davis, a down on his luck folk singer , who is left to pick up the pieces of his quickly disintegrating career after the suicide of his singing partner, Mike. As he tries hopelessly to make a mark in the overcrowded and generally impoverished Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961, he has to navigate his way through incompetent management, fraught relationships and one seriously tenacious cat. Or is that cats? What we thought It's hard to know where to even start with this one. What looks at the outset to be...