Filed under Comedy

The Avengers: Too many superheroes improve the broth

So it’s now a fact. Spiderman 3 had no excuse for being so bad. The “too many villains” angle was a criticism frequently levelled at Raimi’s third spider-flick. And yes, there were too many villains, there was too much going on, but no, that’s not why Spiderman 3 was so bad. Spiderman 3 was so bad because it didn’t blend all its ingredients together properly. What we got was too many disparate elements, carelessly juggled onto a page and then thrown together for a finale as if it would make up for the previous 90 minutes of messy neglect. A smoothie, if you will, whose ingredients were all blended separately and then tossed together in a mixing jug of disappointment, resulting in them all sitting flat on top of one another.

On the other hand, The Avengers is the exact kind of smoothie you would want to drink and proves that you can have too many ingredients and still make it taste delicious. I promise I will now stop talking about Spiderman 3 and smoothies. Continue reading

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Three Surprises and Battleship

I’ve seen four movies over the last four weeks. Three of them surprised me. One of them was Battleship.

21 JUMP STREET

21 Jump Street

Level of Surprise: Quite Pleasant

I was expecting very little of this, having never seen the TV show, or having never liked Jonah Hill. But this was quite a pleasant surprise. The script cleverly plays with high school genre conventions in a fish out of water way. Hill and Tatum are the best buddy cop duo I’ve seen in a long time – Hill proving there’s more to his comedic skills than loud-mouth swearing and Tatum proving to all his detractors that he is more than just rom-com eye candy. He’s a funny guy. Continue reading

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This Just In: “April Fool’s Day” Coming to Cinemas in 2013

April Fool's Day Garry Marshall Valentine's Day New Year's Eve

Hot on the heels of the success of “New Year’s Eve” and “Valentine’s Day”, Warner Bros. have announced the third entry in the “vacuous celebrity cast promote public holiday” trilogy, to be released next year.

This time around, things will focus on the most foolish of days, April 1st. No details have been released about the plot, but it’s safe to say there will probably be hijinks and pranks aplenty.

The full cast list has been announced and there are some surprises, to say the least.

Joining returning cast members Ashton Kutcher, Jessica Biel and Zac Efron are: Queen Latifah, Eddie Murphy, Justin Bieber, Sylvester Stallone, Joan Rivers, Steven Tyler, Tyler Perry, Christina Aguilera, Taylor Kitsch, Corey Haim, Ozzy Osbourne, Sean Bean, Liam Neeson, Al Pacino, Neil Patrick Harris, MeatLoaf, the guy who did the voice of Optimus Prime, Wil Wheaton, Kiefer Sutherland, the main guy from Krull, the Olsen twins, two of the three brothers from Hanson, the third brother from Hanson, Janet Jackson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, Bear Grylls, Snooki, Hank Azaria, Jennifer Aniston, Bradley Cooper, Gordon Ramsay, Rihanna, Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Lawrence, Richard Gere, half an onion, two carrots and one vegetable stock cube.

Returning director Garry Marshall insists that each character will get a minimum of 25 seconds of screentime each and there will be no more than 89 separate plotstrands.

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Ultra Culture lashes out at Slash Film for lashing out at Twilight

See, they can smile! Or at least, they're trying to.

Their penance? A thousand lashes.

Click these words with your mouse to open a link that will allow you to read the article I am about to discuss.

I’m writing about this because both these sites populate my Google Reader and I enjoy them both for very different reasons.

Ultra Culture, while bizarrely named, is home to some of the most incisive and hilarious film commentary you will ever find and is steeped with a contagious love of fonts and animated gifs.

While Slash Film’s writing may not come anywhere near the level of Ultra Culture’s, I just keep going back for the sheer quantity of content they post every day. They cover pretty much every possible bit of news in the film and TV industries, right down to the most mundane stories.

And I’m a big fan of their podcast.

Which leads me to the point. Ultra Culture has written a very spot-on criticism of Slash Film’s overt hatred of the Twilight movies, which makes for a good read.

I still haven’t gotten round to watching any of the Twilight movies, but I feel like I should, if only just to have an opinion. I’m toying with the idea of attempting some sort of Twilight marathon session, but I’m not sure that would be a constructive or enjoyable use of my time.

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The Artist: (All the good silent puns have been used already)

The Artist is an easy film to like. It’s funny, charming, endearing and simple. And it just won most of the good Oscars. What the Academy likes is rarely what I like, but this is an exception.

It’s easy for a film to be swallowed up by its own hype and awards-praise and this can often result in disappointed viewings from those expecting one of the greatest films of all time. The Artist is not one of the greatest films of all time, but it is a fun and light-hearted tribute to an era of cinema we don’t talk about much (I crack myself up). It’s a fine accomplishment and deserves all the attention its getting, whether or not it was the best film of 2011. Continue reading

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Just saw an early test screening of The Dictator…

… and I signed something saying I’m not allowed to tell you what I think.

But Captain Pike can tell you what he thinks…

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This Just In: Transformers and Michael Bay cannot be stopped

Michael Bay Transformers 4 Direct Bumblebee

Confirmed. Not only will there be a Transformers 4, but Michael Bay will direct it. The Mayans were right about 2012.

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Mark Kermode’s Superb Summation of Journey 2 The Mysterious Island

The film exists to have 3D fruit thrown at you by somebody’s muscular man boobs, so that a wrestler can sing “What a Wonderful World” with a ukelele and so Michael Caine can ride a bee in 3D and wake up in the morning and go ‘I’m in Hawaii and I bought a house’.

From Kermode and Mayo’s Film Reviews 03/02/12 (timecode 1:17:17)

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