W ell, that was a fun-packed few days. Two Cinema Days days of movies and also a brief foray into London for today's Transformers press activities. Let's have an overview of the best and worst, shall we:
500 DAYS OF SUMMER: High Fidelity is one of my favourite movies (if women have the 'rom-com', then this is the guy's version: the 'dick-flick') and this film should appeal to anyone who loved that one. Funny, poignant and full of recognisable 'moments', it's a boy-meets-girl story told out of chronological order. Quite brilliant.
THE HURT LOCKER: Kathryn Bigelow, the director who made the great vampire movie Near Dark and the seriously weird Strange Days, delivers one of the most tense movies I've seen in ages: It tells the story of a bomb-disposal unit in Iraq and features appearances by Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes and David Morse. Literally edge of your seat stuff and only just a bit over-long. Not a film you 'enjoy', so much as 'experience' but one that shows a director at the top of ehr game and one that will or should win awards.SUNSHINE CLEANING: Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as two frustrated sisters that set up a cleaning service that clears crime-scenes. Quirky, gentle character dramedy that's nicely, amusingly poignant rather than being hilarious.
THE PROPOSAL: Sandra Bullock in rom-com about an marriage-of-convenience. She can do this sort of thing in her sleep. I think she just did. Consider this a... limited engagement.
And, okay, since you really insist...
TRANSFORMERS - REVENGE OF THE FALLEN: You know you're in trouble when one of the most 'amusing' scenes thrown at the audience in this robotic sequel is a small gremlin-like Decepticon dry-humping Megan Fox's leg. Oh, the hilarity. Then again, this is a Michael Bay outing and it's as subtle with a capital B, painted in such stupifyingly broad strokes that some seventeen years olds who think NUTS is the height of cultural magazines are going to feel their intelligence has been insulted. Bay trawls through his back catalogue and homages his own work with ideas from Pearl Harbor, Armageddon and Bad Boys thrown in between shots of Megan Fox's cleavage and derriere (admittedly not awful) and up-skirt shots of a Decepticon creation that can only be described as a cyberslut. I kid you not.Yes, the CGI battles are all very impressive, the backdrops nicely utilised (the pyramids may never be the same) and Mark Ryan gets a much broader voice-role this time around which is always good. But the dialogue is hardly the film's strong point and it feels that when Bay isn't letting the camera lust after female flesh, he's positively salivating over military hardware instead of driving the plot. Then again, anyone expecting Shakespeare in Love is in the wrong cinema. Ironically, crude, bland and by-the-numbers though it may be, it could be the most honest film of the year, doing exactly what it says on the tin. Silly, stupid, undemanding, low-brow. Could be worse. Possibly.
Thanks for the update. Think I will go for 500 days of Summer and Sunshine Cleaning with a "I just happened to accidentally see transformers on DVD at a friends house while there was alcohol involved". Booze always seems to help bad movie medicine go down!