Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category

« Older Entries

Well Conceived Inception

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Inception Movie Poster

FILM REVIEW
07/15/10 (LONDON) Joel Meadows

Inception

Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Leonardo Di Caprio, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe
Studio: Warner Brothers

Inception is a film that’s hard but not impossible to pin down in a review. Christopher Nolan is probably the smartest director currently working in Hollywood, so when The Dark Knight made buckets of money, it gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted to do next. He played his cards a little close to his chest and what coverage there had been was deliberately vague and cagey. In these days of everyone knowing every intimate detail of every new TV series and big movie, that was rather refreshing.

DiCaprio plays Cobb, a man who has the ability to enter people’s dreams for a living and he is hired by Saito (Ken Watanabe) seemingly to enter the dreams of Robert Fischer Jr, the son of magnate Maurice Fischer, to force him to alter the path of his life and follow in the footsteps of his now-deceased dad. So Cobb assembles a team that includes the suave Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt), Englishman Eames (played by Tom Hardy) and a very young Ariadne (Ellen Page) to get inside the mind of Fischer Jr. We are thrown into a world of many layers watching the team at work. But not everything is as it seems: Cobb has a wife, Mal (the gorgeous Marion Cotillard), who appears to have disappeared.

Visually, Inception is incredible with everything from the sound editing to the production design working in concert to offer a fully-immersive experience and the performances are very consistent. The one wrong note on the acting front is Ellen Page, who feels miscast here amongst a more accomplished and experienced group. But this is a minor quibble and Nolan shows why he is one of Hollywood’s best stylists, creating a series of well-realised interlinked worlds.

Inception does have its progenitors in films like The Matrix but there is no epic conspiracy at play here. Inception deals with far more intimate and emotional concerns, despite scenes that are obviously homages to the Bond films and even a little nod to Planet of The Apes. There is a lot going on in the film, especially when the team are operating on several dream layers at the same time and it is essential for the viewer to concentrate when watching. In fact, it could be argued that Inception is a film that needs to be seen more than once to pick up everything that Nolan has intended to do with it.

It is the ultimate antidote to flabby summer blockbusters filled with noisy explosions and battling robots. And although sometimes the director’s reach exceeds his grasp, at least he is striving to do something a little bit different. With Shutter Island and Inception under his belt recently, DiCaprio is also firmly established as one of the best actors of his generation. Inception is a film that will be discussed for years to come and, dare I say it, was worth the wait…

Posted in Movies, Reviews | 1 Comment »

Green With Envy: Shrek Forever After

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

Shrek Movie Poster

FILM REVIEW
06/12/10 (LONDON) Joel Meadows

Shrek Forever After

Director: Mike Mitchell
Voices: Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Antonio Banderas
Studio: Dreamworks

It’s staggering to think that the first Shrek movie was a whole decade ago. It’s been a phenomena that refuses to die. Shrek Forever After is the fourth, and promised to be the last, in the green ogre’s animated franchise. The series has adhered to the law of diminishing returns: the first one was fun, the second film was slightly less fun and the third one was rather dull. So expectations were pretty low when I went to see this at a press screening at the Empire Leicester Square, probably London’s nicest cinema, on a Sunday morning.

The filmmakers have done a reboot of sorts here with the mcguffin of Shrek Forever After asking what would happen to this world if Shrek had never rescued and married Princess Fiona. It’s a smart but entertaining conceit, showing us a world ruled by the poisonous Rumpelstiltskin where ogres operate a resistance against the tyrant’s iron fist. It also gives them the chance to turn the status quo on its head and reintroduce the relationships between Shrek and supporting characters Puss in Boots, here a very tubby house cat and the pet of Princess Fiona, and Donkey. Rumpelstiltskin has an army of witches to keep the population in check. It makes it all a little more entertaining than its most recent predecessor, but it also makes you realise that the whole concept has run its course.

In terms of the animation, the quality is great as you’d expect and it never outstays its welcome. Of course, it’s showing in 3-D but this doesn’t add a great deal to proceedings. Its running time is around the 80 minute mark and the voice talent are enjoyable as ever. Shrek Forever After is a decent wrap up to 10 years of Shrek on screen and as I write this review, the box office has reflected this with its takings currently at $146 million just in the US. Let’s hope that they leave the characters alone now…

Posted in Better Late Than Never, Movies, Reviews | No Comments »

Shoot to Thrill?

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Robin Hood Movie Poster

FILM REVIEW
05/14/10 (LONDON) Joel Meadows

Robin Hood

Director: Ridley Scott
Cast: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett
Studio: Universal Pictures

The new Robin Hood film directed by Ridley Scott and reuniting him with his regular collaborator Russell Crowe is a film that’s changed direction several times. Originally it was going to be called Nottingham and have the evil sheriff as its protagonist. But that idea was ditched and so what seemed like a more traditional Robin Hood tale was filmed. At last the results are available for all to see and I was lucky enough to catch a press screening of it at Empire Leicester Square, probably London’s nicest cinema.

Scott has played fast and loose with history here as Richard The Lionheart, played by a chunky Danny Huston, is dispatched quite early on here and it is Prince then King John (Oscar Isaac) who becomes Hood’s adversary. But it doesn’t matter as, like King Arthur, Robin Hood is a legend and a folk tale and criticising it for its lack of historical veracity is like accusing James Bond of inaccurately portraying modern space technology. It just doesn’t matter as what really counts is putting together a compelling and exciting cinematic ride and Scott with the help of Crowe and its supporting cast have certainly done that.

Here Crowe plays Robin Longstrides, a footman in King Richard’s army who, with his three mates Will Scarlet, Littlejohn and Alan A’Dale, are thrown into the stocks after insulting the King. When the King mets his untimely end, the foursome decide to make a hasty exit and flee France to come home. Unfortunately Prince John is a feckless playboy more interested in bedding the cousin of the King of France than taking the country in hand and turncoat Godfrey (a truly sinister Mark Strong) is determined to act as facilitator to allow the French to conquer what they see as a now weak country ripe for plucking. So Robin, after a promise to dying knight Sir Robert Loxley to bring word of his demise to his wife and father in Nottingham, makes his way to the Midlands in England and masquerades as Loxley. Loxley left a wife behind, Marion (Cate Blanchett) and so he lives with her, while her estate is endangered by local youths and the danger of the Sheriff of Nottingham taking his tithe. Things come to a head with Robin and his men joining forces with the barons and the King to prevent King Philip of France’s forces from taking England from the sea.

Robin Hood looks fantastic and is as rousing and exciting as Gladiator with everything definitely on screen. Crowe has come in for flak with his accent but the fact is that no-one knows definitively  how the residents actually spoke in Nottingham during this period and so this is such a minor quibble. When we’ve had to suffer the bouffant-haired indignity of Kevin Costner and that Bryan Adams song in the 1991 version, a slightly inconsistent accent really isn’t anything that should cause concern. Crowe, as an older Robin, feels right on screen and another thing that Scott has done here is that the English look particularly unglamorous and down to earth and at no time are Robin or his fellow bowman dressed in Lincoln Green. The scenes where they use their bows in battle are shot and edited brilliantly with everything pared down and sparse. Mark Strong as traitorous English Knight Godfrey is a great villain and unlike most of the other films he’s appeared in over the last couple of years, he exudes menace and is perfectly cast here. Cate Blanchett as Marion is a little bit redundant here as she doesn’t have much to do except look pretty but in a Boy’s Own Adventure, the female characters don’t really play much of a part.

Robin Hood is a fantastically well-executed and entertaining summer movie with some amazing touches from Scott, who shows that he hasn’t lost his unique ability to bring something new to something seemingly so familiar, and the introduction of a backstory for Robin, where we see that his father was a crusader for better treatment for England’s people, which puts a new spin on proceedings while still fitting in with what Scott has brought to the screen. Things are left open for a sequel and the viewer comes out of the cinema hoping that a sequel will see the light of day. Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe should be very proud of what they’ve achieved here…

Posted in Better Late Than Never, Movies, Reviews | No Comments »

Pressing Issues: Iron Man 2 Sort of Flat?

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

Iron Man 2 Movie Poster

FILM REVIEW
05/07/10 (LONDON) Joel Meadows

Iron Man 2

Director: Jon Favreau
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Gywneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Sam Rockwell, Mickey Rourke
Studio: Paramount / Marvel

The first Iron Man was a real joy to see at the cinema, filled with fun and a likable screen presence in Downey Jr. So expectations for this sequel were fairly high. I went to see it at a press screening at Odeon Leicester Square in the evening. I bumped into a few fellow journos there as I often do. Unfortunately my verdict on Iron Man 2 is that it lacks the cohesion and fun that the first one possessed.

Here, Tony Stark (Downey Jr.) is publicly known as superhero Iron Man now and the US government is pushing him to share that technology. Enter slightly shady business magnate Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) who joins forces with Russian supervillain Whiplash, played by an increasingly strange looking Mickey Rourke. He believes that his father was hard done by Stark’s father Howard and is out for revenge. Meanwhile the technology that is keeping the millionaire alive is failing and so he turns to the work of his long-dead dad to help him out.

Downey Jr. is still good value here but the quips are fewer and the increased screen time of Paltrow, at her whiniest as an actress, makes for a less-than-engaging movie. Rockwell is obviously a fantastic actor under normal circumstances but he’s just a plot device here as is Rourke. Stark’s battle with his failing health is resolved very neatly and the one nod to the classic ‘Demon In A Bottle’ story from the comics is a clumsy scene that is up there with Peter Parker dancing in Spider-man 3 for misconceived superhero film sequences. Also, the Favreau cameo as Stark’s bodyguard, while charming and short in the first film, is rather too long and protracted here.

There are a few nice set-pieces here (the senate committee to force Stark to hand over the Iron Man suit, the Stark weapons expo and a sitdown with Samuel Jackson’s Nick Fury) but overall it doesn’t gel. And the final battle between Iron Man and War Machine versus the drones looks and feels like a video game. Scarlett Johanssen as Black Widow is totally redundant here too: while she looks pretty amazing, there’s not a lot for her to do.

Perhaps Iron Man 2 has been hit by second film syndrome but it’s an empty and hollow experience, that will leave little impact on the viewer once they’ve left the cinema. At the end of the film, we are left with a nod with another Marvel superhero but let’s hope that the third film is more like the first and this was a temporary blip.

Posted in Movies, Reviews | No Comments »

WORLD-BEATING? TRIPWIRE takes a look at James Cameron’s Avatar in 3-D…

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Avatar Movie Poster

FILM REVIEW
01/10/10 (LONDON) Joel Meadows

Avatar

Writer/Director: James Cameron
Cast: Sam Worthington, Stephen Lang, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver

Avatar is a film that’s been about a dozen years in the making. James Cameron hasn’t made a movie since the monster hit Titanic back in 1997 and so there has been so much expectation for this picture that if it wasn’t the greatest film ever made, then people would be whingeing constantly.

I went to see Avatar at a press screening at the IMAX cinema in Waterloo on last Monday night. I only managed to get the press tickets that morning so I wasn’t even sure if I was going. My expectations were mixed too as the couple of trailers I saw didn’t necessarily fill me with optimism about its quality. But I have to say that from the opening sequence where we are introduced to Jake Scully (Sam Worthington), it did have me hooked.

In a near future, Scully is a US marine whose brother was killed and so he is sent to replace him in a programme on a fictional far-flung planet Pandora, where the US have developed sentient artificial versions of the native Na’avi, bodies that can be linked to the minds of humans via technology that projects the subject into the body. So Scully is projected into one of these Avatars with the aim of learning more about the culture of the native Na’avi. But Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) has an ulterior motive: the humans want to drive the natives away so they can access a valuable source of energy.

Scully makes a number of trips to the interior of the planet and falls in with the Na’avi, initially thanks to an encounter with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana from Star Trek), who saves him from peril at the claws of one of the planet’s many deadly animal occupants. Scully is joined by the avatar of Dr Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), a scientist whose interest in the natives is benign. But impatient to extract the material, the corporation and Colonel Quaritch accelerate their programme to destroy the Na’avi’s most sacred spot and grab the valuable Unobtainium (a reference to an engineering term for an element in a design that is impossible). So Scully is trapped between his own people and the natives, who he has become very attached to. In a wheelchair, in his avatar body, Scully is able to live an active life and that is partly what makes it so appealing.

Some critics have accused Avatar of having an overly simplistic and unsubtle eco-friendly plot and while its plot and occasionally its script have flaws, they are decent enough that they carry you along for the duration of the film. Visually though it does take cinema to a whole other level: I’ve never been to such an immersive film before and there were moments when you are such an engrossed observer that you forget you’re watching a movie.

There are also occasions which make you feel a little bit wobbly, as if you were actually there. The flora and fauna of Pandora look alien but mostly credible and Scully’s integration into Na’avi society, while hugely conventional and pretty predictable, is enjoyable with some spectacular set pieces. The animation of the indigenous peoples is nothing short of incredible and they should be applauded. You really do have to slap yourself sometimes to remember that the Na’avi bodies are nothing more than extremely sophisticated motion capture CGI and the planet itself also looks like literally nothing on Earth, yet it obeys the laws that Cameron have set for himself.

After over a decade away, James Cameron has created the ultimate cinematic event, directed and orchestrated with the deftness of touch that his previous best efforts (Aliens, Terminator 2) have also displayed. The efforts of companies like Weta, Framestore, Gentle Giant and the rest have elevated what can be achieved on the big screen and everyone else has to follow their lead. Avatar is astounding and shows that James Cameron is one of the most impressive directors currently working in big-budget Hollywood today. It is a film that will be talked about for decades to come.

Posted in Better Late Than Never, Movies, Reviews | No Comments »

Top Shelf Entertainment

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

surrogates-poster-1

FILM REVIEW
11/13/09 (LONDON) Joel Meadows

Surrogates

Director: Jonathan Mostow
Writers: Michael Ferris, John Brancato
Starring: Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Ving Rhames

Surrogates is based on a Top Shelf science fiction graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Wiedele. Directed by Jonathan Mostow (U-571, Terminator 3) and starring Bruce Willis, Surrogates posits a world where everybody has an artificial avatar or surrogate made of metal and plastic and most of society live their lives through these surrogates. Willis plays a policeman who has to investigate murders of these surrogates but these killings injure or kill the hosts too so he is dragged into a world of intrigue and deceit. Not everybody is in favour of the surrogates and the leader of the rebel movement is self-styled “The Prophet” (played by Ving Rhames).

Surrogates does explore some nice ideas about identity and living in an increasingly digital world (Facebook, Twitter) and Willis has decent value on screen as ever but it feels like a pilot for a TV series that will never be made. Also the themes here (such as alienation, etc.) are ones that are the stock in trade of Philip K Dick’s most seminal works so it does feel like you’ve been here before. However Surrogates does move along at a decent pace and with a running time of 90 minutes, it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Visually there are some nice flourishes and Mostow controls the action with a deft hand. The script is also a little bit smarter than your average summer blockbuster. So recommended with a few reservations.

Posted in Better Late Than Never, Movies, Reviews | No Comments »

Positively Criminal with DEAD CERT

Friday, November 20th, 2009

11/16/09 (LONDON) Joel Meadows

SET VISIT

Last Monday, TRIPWIRE was lucky enough to be invited on set for new British vampire gangster film, Dead Cert. Shooting took place at a warehouse in Dagenham in Essex (the Eastern border of London for our non-English visitors.) While it is a film with a small budget (less than a million pounds), from what we saw it should look and feel like they spent a lot more on it.

The cast includes former EastEnders actors Craig Fairbrass and Billy Murray (who also happened to be one of the voices in the new Call of Duty video game), Andrew Tiernan (from ITV’s Cracker and more recently Murderland) plus cameos from Jason Flemyng (Benjamin Button) and Stephen Berkoff. With such a loaded cast the film should make more of an impact than your average low budget British movie.

Myself and Andy Colman spent all day on set, watching a couple of scenes being shot and we chatted to the main stars Fairbrass, Murray (who is also one of the producers on the film) and its director Steven Lawson. The nightclub set looked pretty impressive and this movie, which basically pits East End gangsters against vampires, should be an enjoyable experience when it hits cinemas next year.

Here’s a few shots I took while I was there…


 

 

 

 
 

Posted in Movies, Profiles | No Comments »

TRIPWIRE on the Yorkshire Moors with John Landis

Sunday, September 6th, 2009

09/01/09 (LONDON) Joel Meadows
One of the reasons why it’s great to be located in London is that there is always something going on in terms of film and culture. At the end of August for the past decade, FrightFest has been a festival celebrating the new and the classic in horror. In 2009, they showed An American Werewolf in London, presented by its director John Landis, to celebrate its imminent release on Blu-ray. Held at the Empire Leicester Square, one of the most prestigious cinemas in the UK, it was spectacular to watch a film I’d been obsessed with as a teenager but had never seen on a big screen before. It was also clear that the film has lost none of its impact in the intervening years with the director’s clever choice of incidental music still as inventive as it ever was and the black comedy still raw and affecting. We are planning a full-blown Landis feature in the next TRIPWIRE and I’ll be reviewing the Blu-Ray in the next month or so but here are a few photos for you from the event including John Landis with some of the British crew from the film gathered together in a brief Q&A after the showing…



Posted in Features, Movies, Reviews | No Comments »

The Life of Terry

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

International Move Poster for The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

FILM REVIEW
8/23/09 (LONDON) Joel Meadows

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus

Director: Terry Gilliam
Cast: Christopher Plummer, Lily Cole, Tom Waits, Heath Ledger, Jude Law, Colin Farrell and Johnny Depp

A new Gilliam film is always an event. Sadly, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus was overshadowed by the premature demise of Heath Ledger. Luckily, Gilliam, as one of the most enterprising and imaginative directors still making moving images, managed to finish the film with the absence of one of its major players.

Nearly all of his films have serious flaws: with the exception in my opinion of Brazil, they are filled with visual flourishes and impressive setpieces but never quite manage to gel as a cohesive whole. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) was slated when it was released because the director went significantly over budget, his first attempt to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote at the beginning of the Noughties was doomed to fail (although it did make a scintillating documentary, Lost in La Mancha, that came out in 2002) and Gilliam is having another go at putting that on the screen for 2011.

Director Terry Gilliam at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2009

So, considering the fact that Gilliam is not one to let a hindrance get in his way, I have a soft spot for his work. It could be argued that he is one of the last auteurs currently working in his small corner of Hollywood and this is in evidence in The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. He has put together a good, if eccentric cast for this endeavour, something that he has always had a real knack for: Christopher Plummer, as the eponymous Dr Parnassus is excellent, Tom Waits acquits himself well as The Devil and even catwalk model Lily Cole shows range as Parnassus’s daughter Valentina. The late Heath Ledger isn’t bad on screen but his role is a little unformed here compared with the rest of the cast.

Christopher Plummer as the titular ParnassusParnassus, played by Christopher Plummer, is a carnival turn who travels the world with his old-fashioned act, accompanied by his daughter Cole, plus Verne Troyer (Mini Me from Austin Powers) and Anton, played by Andrew Garfield. They all live in a rundown gypsy caravan-cum-portable-stage but everything seems to change when they rescue Tony (Ledger), hanging off Blackfriars Bridge. To top it all, Mr Nick (Waits) follows them in order to collect on the wager that Parnassus and he made years ago, a bet that Parnassus really doesn’t want to honour.

Teaser art from the film.

Gilliam gets around losing Ledger in the second half with some canny cameos from Depp, Farrell and Law but the script is shaky and it doesn’t all hold together. Some of the CGI also looks a bit questionable here. Having said that, there are some very ingenious moments, like the flashback to Parnassus as a monk in an unnamed country centuries ago and Waits is born to play the Devil. So Imaginarium works 70% of the time and while its reach exceeds its grasp, at least Gilliam is attempting something a little bit different. He does have a deft touch for dark fantasy and, if you’re a fan of the director, you should see this film.

Posted in Features, Movies, News | No Comments »

The Fan Who Wasn’t There

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

inglourious-basterds-movie-poster1

FILM REVIEW
8/13/09 (LONDON) Joel Meadows

Inglourious Basterds
Director: Quentin Tarantino;
Starring: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth

I went to see this film at a screening room in London’s West End, in Soho to be precise. I am a big fan of war films and I count The Great Escape amongst one of my favourite movies. Quentin Tarantino has been threatening to make Inglourious Basterds for a number of years with the script floating around. So in 2009 we get to see what he has been playing with for the last few years.

The fact is that his last effort, Death Proof, one half of his and Robert Rodriguez’s love letter to grindhouse cinema, was an unmitigated disaster because his ear for dialogue had completely deserted him and its plot descended into amateurish farce about halfway through. So you might think that he has considered the mistakes he made with Death Proof and tried to focus on how a film like Inglourious Basterds could work. If you thought that, then you would be sorely mistaken.

Tarantino is one of the luckiest people in Hollywood, or perhaps the world: starting life as a video shop cashier, he managed to get friendly with people in the movie industry. At the start of his career, it all looked very promising: Reservoir Dogs is a great film, Pulp Fiction, while flawed, holds up very well and Jackie Brown has a sense of style to it that preserves the atmosphere of the Elmore Leonard book that it is based on. But then it all started to go wrong. Kill Bill parts one and two were nothing more than poor pastiches of other people’s work and Death Proof showed that you could make films as badly now as they did back in the Seventies.

Inglourious Basterds, about a group of Jewish soldiers dropped into Europe during the Second World War to dispatch Nazis and a Jewish girl, Shoshonna, bent on revenge after the Nazis murdered her family, is the most indulgent film of the year and very possibly the most indulgent film released in decades. Tarantino will never be a great director like Scorsese, Coppola, Hitchcock or Reed because he is, at his heart, nothing more than a fan of the material. You might say that there is nothing wrong with admiring the practitioners within the industry that you work and you are correct. However, he never transcends being a fan and so Inglourious Basterds, at an arse-punishing two and a half hours, is a series of clumsy pastiches and idiotic set-pieces that don’t hold together in the least.

It begins with one of the most transparent nods to another film that I’ve ever seen, one that isn’t even a war film! The opening sequence tips its clown hat to Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West in an almost parodic way, where we see Denis Menochet, who plays French farmer Perrier Laperdite, wash his face out in the open to prepare for the arrival of the German soldiers. Brad Pitt, who has shown himself to be an accomplished and intelligent actor in films like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, plays Lt. Aldo Raine, who heads up the Jewish soldiers sent to collect Nazi scalps. He is so annoying that whenever he is on screen you have to resist the temptation to lash out at the cinema in anger. The rest of the soldiers are fairly interchangeable and Tarantino tries to invest them with some sort of iconic presence a la Steve McQueen or James Coburn but the fact is that a director of bad slasher flicks (Eli Roth) and a gaggle of vaguely familiar European actors just isn’t going to cut it.

So the question becomes whether anything redeems this film at all. Christoph Waltz as the Nazi Colonel Landa whose job it is to sniff out Jews in occupied France, acquits himself well considering the poor script and lack of characterisation and Melanie Laurent, who plays Shoshonna Dreyfus, is very likable on screen. But the flaws here are so immense that there isn’t a classic film hiding somewhere.

The problems lie in the script, directing and editing. Scenes that would work as short vignettes outstay their welcome by minutes. Mike Myers has a cameo as US General Ed Fenech, who we see briefing British spy Lt Archie Hicox but this scene is so badly directed that it’s almost painful to watch. The sequence where Hicox gets revealed to the Germans as an interloper starts intriguingly, with us seeing the Allied soldiers surrounded by Nazis, but it goes on far too long and the only way Tarantino knows how to end it is to get everybody to shoot at each other. And The film ends as incompetently as it begins. Everything builds up to this scene where Hitler and many high-ranking Nazis make their way to the screening of a propaganda film about German war hero Frederick Zoller, played well by Daniel Bruhl. This scene, which includes Pitt and co pretending to be Italian to infiltrate the Nazis, descends quickly into unfunny slapstick with Pitt clearly sounding American.

If it were directed by some green around the gills, straight out of film school naive graduate, it would have been laughed at and buried somewhere out of sight. Inglourious Basterds is a horrible, nasty mess which if we are lucky may bury Tarantinto’s directing career forever.

Posted in Movies, News | No Comments »

« Older Entries