The Week In Movies (28/8/11 - 4/9/11)

Anyone else having trouble with the blogger scheduling feature? I had to wake up to post this! It's making me want to break something! EDIT: Apologies for the spam in your readers. I can't criticise this scheduler enough.

Can you believe it's September already? Spring has well and truly begun in Perth, the sun has been out, I've been wearing shorts to work and my mind has drifted on to the outdoor cinema season once more. Oh how I love outdoor cinema. But more on that as soon as programs are released.

This week I have re visited 3 movies, reviewed 4 movies, turned off 2 movies and signed up for a Twitter account at last. First up the 4 movies there will be full reviews for.

3-Iron was loved and reviewed here, inspiring Tyler at Southern Vision to bump it up his queue. Fast Five was delicious cheese and reviewed here. The Maltese Falcon is this weeks Noir-a-Thon movie and will be coming on Tuesday as always and Everything Must Go should be reviewed by Wednesday. Something to look forward to.

That only leaves three more films that I finished this week.

Thor. I've been working on some nicknames for this. Bore. Yorn (pronounced yawn.) Not very inventive are they? About as inventive and interesting as the actual movie. I kept telling Leah to turn it off but neither of us did, instead reading interesting blogs such as Film Ha-Ha and The Great Movie Project with Thawn in the background. I appreciate Portman, Dennings and Skarsgard but everything, including the normal posters, is just so dull. That alternative poster commissioned by Marvel is pretty awesome though right?

Rewatching Shallow Grave this week prompted my Ewan McGregor list but could easily have prompted a Danny Boyle list. I loved it. I saw it a long time ago as a wee pup of a film viewer and Leah had never seen it. She always gets a kick out of seeing Dr Who in other things. I wish she didn't have that association as Christopher Eccleston is such a good actor. Anyone see the brilliant BBC series Shadowline recently? An enjoyable low budget British thriller from a soon to be huuuuge director starring one great, one pretty good and one mediocre actor. Watch Kerry Fox closely, her accent travels the globe. I must ask, how did she get cast? Hels at A Whole Load of Blah recently picked it as the best movie of 1994.

And then to Buried. A movie about a guy in a box. I loved the idea and if anyone was going to have the charisma to pull it off it was going to be Ryan Reynolds (I love watching him, I admit it, I haven't sunk to Green Lantern levels yet however.) I never really got in to this one though. It was interestingly filmed, I love the purpose built really tall casket story for example and Reynolds was good at being upset but I ended up not caring about him or his situation. A bad thing for a movie about a guy in a box on a mobile phone. Brian saw it and thought it was a horror and Stevee thought it was her fantasy come true.

This weeks blahblahblah turnoffs are two teeny tiny Ellen Page movies that I thought I would give a shot as Page is great to watch. However it is a shame the same couldn't be said for The Tracey Fragments and Mouth to Mouth. Tracey Fragments is a great idea, a young girl is traumatised by something and we experience the movie in flashback as she pieces together her memories of the event. The problem is that the story is told with multiple shots simultaneously and even multiple dialogue at times, representing her memories coming together; which causes your head to hurt and you to lose a lot of important information. Another problem is that it's noisy, which gives you a headache. Movies shouldn't give headaches. Mouth to Mouth is such a cheap and horrible and dull movie I have nothing good to say about it.

Leave me some blah, I'd love to know what you think of my turnoffs this week, that awesome Thor poster and whether you are as excited at the thought of trapping Ryan Reynolds in a casket as Stevee is?

Movie Review: Fast & Furious 5 (2011)

You don't usually get a review for Hollywood action films around here but this weekend we saw the movie that I took to dubbing 'The Expendables Without The Wheelchairs' and had such a blast that I thought I'd try to detour from what's expected. Kaboom, first car pun.

Fast Five, is incredibly the fifth movie in franchise about illegal street racers and Justin Lin's third stint driving it. Bam, second car pun. There it's out of my system, I shall try to refrain from now on.

What happens? There's some not so bad guys, one of whom used to be a good guy played by Vin Diesel and Paul Walker being hunted by the good guy, The Rock himself, Mr Dwayne Johnson. In the middle of it is a Rio De Janeiro underworld kingpin taking the tag of actual bad guy, Joaquin de Almeida. The not so bad guys plan to rob the bad guy and outwit the good guy.

What you are treated to may as well be Gone In Sixty Seconds meets Oceans Eleven. It's that generic. There's cars, but no street racing, simply some nods to where the franchise has come from with some gratuitous car chases and an incredibly absurd final heist. There's a 9 man crew instead of 11 but it fits the bill nicely with Vin playing George Clooney if Clooney was unable to speak properly.

Yes the plot is obvious and no I don't remember a thing from the other 4 movies, aside from the awesome truck heist from the opening of Fast 4, but it's enjoyable all the same. OK action scenes, fun car chases that don't include explosions (that I can remember) a whole bunch of truly absurd things happening and The Rock stealing the show.

Whatever happened to Vin Diesel? I swear he used to act occasionally, speak words and stuff. This movie would never have happened if it wasn't for his performance in the original movie not to mention how cool Pitch Black was and how not bad xXx is. He is no longer somebody I particularly care about seeing in an action movie after this however as he can barely grunt and at one point he tries to smile whilst taking a sip of beer. Bad move Vin. If his inability to act is troubling the fact that he now looks quite similar to That Yellow Bastard from Sin City is downright scary.

I love watching Dwayne Johnson in movies. Personally I think he has some real talent and a massive amount of potential if he can find the right roles. In Fast Five he steals the show completely. His ridiculous beard was obviously required so you could differentiate the two muscly bald guys fighting each other but other than that he is on a whole other level to Diesel.

The franchise now belongs to Dwayne Johnson, if he doesn't kick Vin's ass once and for all then I'm not sure I can be excited for Fast 7. This movie knows exactly what it is and delivers exactly what was expected, nothing more and nothing less.

So that's my first attempt at writing about something I can't take seriously, my first admission of having a dirty little secret, my guilty pleasure is here for the whole world to see. Feel free to criticise in the blahs.