Category: review

The God Delusion is one of those books that polarises the readers – either you agree with it or you don’t. Its premise is that the half-way position cannot conscionably be held without some compromise, and ultimately the issue of religion is a divisive one in any case.

Its topic? Why, that’s simple: God doesn’t exist and religion is a dangerous lie. Dawkins doesn’t just argue that god doesn’t exist; indeed, he dispenses with that argument very quickly. The primary focus of this book is not God – it is that the role religion has played in society has not been a positive one, and here he departs from what many in the middle ground hold – which is to say, God might not exist, but there’s nothing wrong with religion. Perhaps this is the only way to argue the case of God convincingly, given how tied up the question is with religion, but as you can tell, this strident position is sure to make many a little uncomfortable accepting Dawkins’ message.

Continue reading “The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins”

Sepia-toned does not a period flick make, but this one did use it well to set the tone. The illusions are well crafted, though you’d struggle to believe they weren’t CGI. The setting isn’t entirely convincing either, but the underlying story could be set in any century (which is a complement).

Paul Giamatti is excellent in so many ways – his performance has just the right mix, and his character ultimately drives the story along. Ed Norton and Jessica Biel, despite being the leads, really don’t get lines or action, surprisingly – their characters are by and large almost static, introduced at the start of the movie and that’s more or less where they remain. Giamatti on the other hand moves along, going from innocent bystander to key protagonist, restrained subtext expressed carefully – he wants to be loyal to the prince, but he’s also fascinated by the Illusionist of the title and his awe-inspiring magic. Ultimately it’s him you’re cheering for – perhaps that is the intention after all? I’m not entirely certain, but The Police Chief of Vienna might not have been such a enticing title.

★★★

(spoiler free – I’d never do that to you!)

Why is it that by the third of a trilogy, the producers feel like they have to stretch things out just that liiiiiiiitle bit more, as though to reward the loyal fans? They did it to The Matrix, with its umpteen final gasps, to Spiderman, with its unnecessary villains, to Lord of the Rings, which admittedly is more Tolkien’s story, to Star Wars (both times!)? Is it a way to “wrap up” somehow?

Admittedly, I by and large love the stuff. Swallow it whole. The third movie is the last one that counts, right? Any series which breaks out to the fourth is just cashing in, and any existing credit goes out the window. See Rocky, Rambo, Lethal Weapon, etc. Three is the upper limit, and you’d better bloody well hope they keep it that way. Name a good IV, anyone. (Star Wars IV doesn’t count, m’kay?)

Except for Pirates. Which is a universe that should just keep on rockin’ =)

Yes, At World’s End is too long by 20 minutes. There’s action sequences they could have chopped in half and still acheived much the same effect. There’s dramatic tension moments that are stretched to the point where you’re wondering why they’re not getting on with already (it’s because they have to speak like a pirate, and that’s hard). But, despite all this, it’s awesome. There’s more Jack! (yes of course he’s alive. What would a PotC movie be without Jack Sparrow?) With Barbosa to play off! There’s the usual goofiness of his crew. There’s Keira Knightley playing dress-ups, occasionally even fetchingly :D. There’s the sincere action that crops up at all the right moments. There’s mysticism and a little melodrama, along with a villain you can properly dislike. I’d say it wraps up all the threads from Dead Man’s Chest, but many new ones raised here are left open – fertile ground indeed.

Oh sure, there’s aspects that disappoint, but it’s a good ride to the end. There are certainly aspects which actually may be considered a bit of a cop-out to IV – I beg the producers, don’t, no matter how much money you mint off this one. Use different characters, a different plot structure, maybe go back into the past? I don’t know, just don’t try to reunite these three again.

Also? If anyone tells you to hang around for a little bonus after the credits? Hint: wait for it on DVD.

What did I think? Worth the money. ★★★★☆

Despite this being an excellent movie, in terms of acting and script writing and the message it has to carry, it depressed me.

Despite the naturally upbeat attitude of Will Smith as Chris Gardener, despite his son’s great performance, despite all the amusing lines and situations, despite the happy ending that is real and shows that you can get ahead in the face of adversity… it made me feel a little angry at the system, and at how little we care for the poor in society, and even a little guilty of my own easy path, and a little personally terrified of how I’d handle the situation.

Great movie, but god, it is (potentially) depressing. ★★★☆

The CIA, its predecessor the OSS, the Skull & Bones fraternity, MI5, the KGB, the Cubans, World War II, the Cold War that quickly followed in its aftermath, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Kennedy era, Matt Damon, Robert De Niro (also directing), Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, Joe Pesci, spies! Espionage! Cloaks (or at least trenchcoats) and daggers! Bad guys and conspiracy theories!

It all sounds like a list of ingredients for a bloody and good action-spy flick, a popcorn pleaser, doesn’t it? But alas and alack, it is nothing of the sort. The Good Shepherd is a careful and slow paced look at the origins and early development of the CIA. And when I say slow, I do mean it – it is a good hour too long, most of which is taken up by long apparently meaningful shots of Damon looking… flat. Emotionless.

Damon’s character, Edward Wilson, is loosely based on James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA Counter Intelligence through the 60s and 70s, Jesus being the titular “Good Shepherd”. A Yale student, he is inducted into the Skull & Bones society, and drawn from there into the world of counter-intelligence, as World War II breaks out. He is initially courting a deaf girl, but after a night with Clover (Jolie) which leaves her pregnant, he does “the right thing” and marries her, before heading to Europe a week later. He returns 6 years later to a son and a wife he doesn’t know. The CIA is formed shortly after out of the ashes of the OSS, the intelligence agency in the war, and the cat-and-mouse game with the Russians begin.

All of this back story is intercut with the ‘present’, where the agency is trying to clean up following the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, as the US Government covertly tried to stop Fidel Castro. Edward is trying to find out who could have leaked information that caused the operation to go wrong.

Throughout the movie, there is the repetition of the theme “Who can you trust?”, and how secrets destroy lives and relationships. Edward is prepared to sacrifice nearly all in the service of his country, and he is depicted very much as a loner character. You want to cheer him on, but at the same time the drive and lack of emotion that he’s got is a little disturbing. The lack of emotion displayed by Damon only serves to further slow the pace of the movie and make it feel like there was so much more that could have been done to make this a more engaging film. You almost cheer when the Russians are on screen, because you know they’ll show emotion and liven the scene, their dark suggestions of action and manner of talking living up to the stereotypes of the Soviet era.

Ultimately, it’s more of a history lesson layed under a family story, one where the family relationship is steadily destroyed by the secrets that envelope Damon’s character. Jolie plays the dutiful but frustrated wife in the loveless marriage well, though it’s getting a little harder to believe she’s a young budding girl that she appears as at the start of the movie. Baldwin puts in an excellent performance, albeit with limited lines.

I’ve seen too many movies recently that moved much too slowly (Infernal Affairs II & III especially), and this was just another one on the pile. ★★☆

Deja vu: Good police-case movie with a sci fi twist that is totally unbelievable if you actually care to think. Still, the tension is good. ★★★

Blood Diamond: Brilliant and visceral movie with some great acting and engrossing albeit predictable plot. Leo goes from strength to strength and Jennifer Connolly just looks good :) Djimon Honsou really needs to find different roles though… ★★★★

Smokin’ Aces: Gun action turned up to 11. Mostly a by-the-numbers Mafia movie, but does have its moments. Alicia Keys does surprisingly well, and Ryan Reynolds shows he can act serious convincingly. Still, let down by some needless violence and bland predictable characterisation. ★★☆

TMNT: Oh why-oh-why couldn’t they just call it Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? To sound like they are part of the SMS generation? Half the people in the audience were late teens to mid twenties – they don’t buy the pretentious crap. The movie though? Kicks ass! Serious ass! (Don’t get bogged down in details, dude) Good laughs and decent animation, only slightly let down by blatant foreshadowing of “TMNT 2” (please don’t!). One for the fans. ★★★★

This is a story about a man and his wristwatchwe’re told by the narrator. Harold Krick is a mild-mannered everyman who works at the IRS (the American Tax Office). He goes about his daily life like clockwork, until one day…

Ah, a twist. Cue standard plot device.

Well, it’s hard to say if the over-arching plot rises above the standard – mild-mannered man, influenced by outside factor/plot twist turns his life around – the trick here is that it all gets a little Kaufmann-esque: Harold starts to hear his narrator. And the narrator tells him that he will soon die.

I was going to describe this as a “cute movie”, but then again I’m not entirely sure what I mean by that. I like these kind of meta-stories where things get a little stranger than usual [ed: allusion not intended], and Stranger than Fiction fits right into that style. There are places where it could have gotten more creative, but that’s only a “perfect world” scenario.

Will Farrell plays straight-laced excellently, though I can imagine Jim Carey pulling it off just as well (as long as somebody kept him in check). Maggie Gylenhall is cute, eventually, as the love interest, and Dustin Hoffman pulls off a brilliant professor. Emma Thompson looks sufficiently haggard, suiting her role perfectly, but Queen Latifah is about the only actor that really misses – more because of her character not being given anything to work with, merely acting as a facilitator for plot points.

Good movie, worth watching on DVD.

★★★☆

Max Barry is one of those rare writers – able to weave humour and a thick plot into high-paced action, and to do so consistently. Previously, he’d written Syrup, largely unheard of and unnoticed, and Jennifer Government, his “break out” novel that took branding to the extreme. Company, his latest, continues the fine tradition of corporate satire with serious plot.

Jones is a new graduate joining Zephyr Holdings – the reason for joining being the drop-dead-gorgeous receptionist who drives an Audi – but he doesn’t really know what Zephyr does, per se. And since there’s a hiring freeze due to budget restrictions, he’s being paid from the copy paper budget. He starts to ask questions that make his co-workers, Freddy the sales assistant who hasn’t been promoted in 5 years, and Holly the fitness freak, a little bit uncomfortable – they’re all thinking it, but no-one asks out loud, until Jones at least.

And then there’s a twist, about a third of the way in, that skews everything, and prevents me from writing any more. But let me provide an extract:

“First we had to cut out above-the-line advertising,” the communications manager says. “Then we cut advertising altogether. After that we were down to market research and PR. But lately, we don’t even do those.”

“Then what do you do?”

“Nothing. We don’t have the budget.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Not since June.” The communications manager winks. “Don’t tell anybody. So far, no one’s noticed.”

“Huh,” Holly says.

“Before then, we were really under the gun. We got warned on expenses three times in a month. But now everyone’s feeling really positive. Morale is way up.”

“But what do you do all day?”

“Oh, we’re still working. We’re working harder than ever. Every day we identify new ways to lower expenses. Just yesterday, we boarded up our office windows.”

“You have windows?” Holly cries.

“Had. Now they’re covered in cardboard.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Infrastructure Management bills for windows. Covering them up cut our overhead by 8 percent.”

I dunno; I found it hilarious :D

If you’ve ever worked in a big company, Company is chock full of things you’ll recognise, and occasionally think about yourself. Most excellent book all round :)

★★★★

Mumble is an emperor penguin with a problem: he can’t sing like the other penguins. Indeed, his singing is so bad, he’s practically an outcast. Also, he has this funny thing going on with his feet, and this is causing all sorts of upset to his parents, and the tribal elders. The elders cast him out, saying his destruction of their traditions is what’s responsible for their “god” witholding fish; he finds a group of smaller penguins and with them goes and finds the cause of the lack of fish, the “aliens”, penguins with flabby faces, no beaks or feathers (i.e. humans). The humans see how cute his dancing is, they think the penguins are trying to send them a message, see the error of their ways, and they move on banning fishing in the Antarctic zone, and all’s well that ends well.

This movie takes anthropomorphism to such extremes, it’s nearly ridiculous.

The emperor penguins have these broad stereotype-based accents – “Memphis” is an Elvis, opening with “Heartbreak Hotel”. “Norma Jean” is Marilyn Monroe. The crabby eldest-elder sounds like Liam Neeson in that Irish movie (:P). The badass leopard seal has a vaguely threatening east german accent. The gulls sound like Italian mobsters (here’s lookin’ at you, De Niro). The small penguins are latino through and through (I called them the party penguins). The elephant seals have such broad Aussie accents, you wonder if they’re going to ask about prawns on the barbie next.

Don’t even get me started on the plot. There’s the childhood-friend-turned-romantic-interest, the guilty-father, the hero’s sojurn through adversity; so many stereotypes, it’s like they threw the book of kid’s movie plots against the wall and saw what stuck. There’s a song-and-dance number every five minutes, there’s no less than 4 occasions where they demonstrate technical wizardry in “chase” like scenes, especially penguins sliding across the ice, for no discernable plot reason what so ever. The denouement is about as fast as it takes to read the final sentence of my plot summary. Characters are foreshadowed as recurring villans, but never show up again. And how the hell does a penguin floating on the seas end up missing all of the southern hemisphere and land on a beach of Florida?!

And yet, despite all this, it’s a cute kids movie; that’s one undeniable aspect. The animation is excellent, the character designs cute and the whole package is served up with a Disney-esque sugary sweetness to it that can’t be denied. Robin Williams shines, injecting some much needed humour into the movie. You can’t really fault the song-and-dance numbers because they’re well executed, and for the most part enjoyable.

Best animated feature, though? No way. Hoodwinked deserved that by a country mile (though I think that was a 2005 release in the States).

★★★