Reviews

Australian films have a bad reputation, and this film is a prime example of why. It embarrassingly fails to entertain in any way whatsoever.

The sad truth is that it is not in any way funny. It uses some of the oldest and lamest comedy clichés imaginable. It was hard to believe this was written in the 21st century. I remember Australian comedy from the 70s which was more adventurous and cutting edge than this.

Seriously, when I think that the makers of this film are hoping that I will laugh at the use of rhyming slang, a bloke being unsubtly seduced by his girlfriend's mother and uncool dance moves, I'm insulted.

When i was about five or six, I might have been amused. The scary thing is that when I was five or six, I was indeed amused by pretty much the same stuff. It was called Adventure Island, a TV series that drew on pantomime theatre traditions.

Unfortunately, this is film designed for adults, and someone needs to explain to the makers of this film that the world has become a lot more sophisticated since 1970, and that grown- ups expect a bit of wit in their entertainment.

This comment can't contain any spoilers because there's nothing to spoil in the entire movie. What happens? An Austrian girl goes to France, gets married, has a couple of kids, dances, sleeps, wakes up, gets dressed, eats, drinks, giggles a bit.

It seems that Coppola has deliberately gone out of her way to take something as fascinating and monumental as the French Revolution and make it as dull and insignificant as possible.

On the plus side, the scenery and costumes were pretty. I also liked the music. Therefore, I'll allocate one star for the visual impact of the lovely frocks and palaces, and two stars for the quirky pop music.

To that I'll add absolutely nothing for the plot. I'm not bloodthirsty, but in a film set during the revolution, I want to see at least a couple of angry peasants and a few of the nobility getting what they deserve. It was very disappointing.

I'm a die-hard Abba fan from the mid-70s, so I loved the music. Always have. And the cast did a reasonable job of singing the songs. They don't hold a candle to Anna and Frida, but it would be wrong to expect them to. But I did expect the movie to add something to the music. It didn't. I came out of the cinema thinking I should have just stayed at home and listened to Abba Gold. My 3-star rating is for the music alone.

The plot was worse than corny. It was lazy. Not even the slightest attempt to make a plausible link between SOS and Gimme Gimme Gimme. They could have played all the Abba film clips one after the other and the resultant plot would have been more coherent than this tosh.

Finally, although I've always admired Julie Walters, I'd like to wring her bloody neck for her performance here. Shameless slapstick is all I can say. Extremely offensive, and the last resort of a brainless filmmaker.

Don't, under any circumstances, watch this film.

There, that's the warning I wish someone had given me. I admit I didn't walk out, because I held out hope that there might be a funny moment before the end, but I waited in vain. There were two chuckleworthy remarks from the bitchy widow early in the film, but her character wasn't developed at all.

In fact, character development is thin on the ground in this tosh. Half of the cast didn't seem to have any connection to the plot, and, apart from the two lines I mentioned, there is nothing in the script to make you like, dislike, or give a flying fig about any of the characters.

I just watched. and waited, and built up murderous grudges against anyone who was involved in the production of this codswallop. If I ever run into you, I'll expect an immediate apology and some sort of compensation.

I saw this because I was impressed by 28 Days Later. It was thought-provoking and very disconcerting. 28 Weeks Later, however, pushes the boundaries way too far, to the point where it became revolting and extremely annoying.

Firstly, it was much too loud. I suppose the makers were trying to involve us by giving us a sense of the chaos the characters were enduring, but I really could have done without the headache that was inflicted on me.

The opening scene was bloody and violent, I was thankful when it was over, but my relief didn't last long. It seems every single scene in this movie was designed either to scare the daylights out of us or to revolt us with gore. After a while it got on my nerves and I longed for a bit of intelligent writing. There was a bit, but not enough to outweigh all the blood and guts and noise.

The most engaging aspect of this show is that it's filmed around Pyrmont (despite the fact that the male leads says it's in the Rocks), and you see some beautiful samples of Sydney sandstone that haven't been hidden by the monstrosities of the casino and the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority (greedy vandals).

The plot and the script, however, are utter garbage. For most of the film I was asking myself whether they REALLY said what I just heard. Didn't anybody wonder about the credibility when they were learning their lines? Did they have rehearsals? Did anyone think about how plausible the film might look?

The actors proved their credentials. Rebecca Gibney has nice blond hair and John Adam has a chunky torso.

Oh, come on, David Bloody Lynch. It's not enough just to be quirky and enigmatic in your films. They have to make a little bit of sense to the audience. Just a little, OK?

This one started off very confusingly and I was thinking that as time progressed the pieces would all fit together. That was a foolish thought, as it turned out. The pieces didn't so much fit together as disintegrate.

So perhaps David was trying to tell me that I shouldn't make such assumptions, that things don't always fit together. Well congratulations, pal, you've made your point. Problem is, I already knew that. Everyone knows that. But when I watch a film, I want to be entertained. With this one I gave up after an hour and started reading a book.

This film really got to me, probably because it was almost perfectly realistic. The characters are brilliantly drawn - no simplistic goodies or baddies. The setting, in the not-so-wealthy suburbs of Berlin, is very believable.

Full marks for the acting and directing. There are some gutwrenching scenes in this film. I won't go into the details because I don't want to spoil a thing, but both physical and emotional violence are portrayed with an alarming conviction. I wish more film makers could achieve this instead of resorting to comic book fights or glossing over the brutal reality.

I sincerely hope that this film is released internationally, and that it escapes the censors' scissors. It would be a shame if only German-speaking audiences could see it.

It starts off in a promising way. Some interesting characters with some way-out ideas. It even reminded me a little of an Almodovar film at the beginning, and that's always a good thing.

However, it doesn't live up to its early promise. The characters turn out to be very shallow. Some of the more interesting ones just disappear from the plot without a trace of explanation. There are some "twists" in the plot which which had my eyes rolling around in my head. I wanted to scream out a request for a bit of originality.

Worst of all, it relies, like far too many other films, on the outrageous concept that problems of violence can be solved with guns. This notion is not just annoyingly simplistic. It's extremely dangerous

Poor Brad and Angelina. They're so good-looking, it must be hard for them to get interesting roles in films. Then again, Brad did score Tyler Durden and the bloke in Snatch (Was he called Snatch?). So maybe Brad has no excuse for his involvement in this tosh.

Yes, there are a few amusing moments. Annoyingly, the good lines all come from Brad. He gets to have fun, while Angelina Jolie acts dour and tough. They should have given her character ,and in fact the whole script, a bit of substance and humanity.

Apart from these few moments, the film consists of a lot, an awful lot, of violence. He hits her. She shoots him. They knife a target. Someone bombs them both. It's all extremely entertaining if you you find that sort of stuff entertaining. I don't. Most of Arnie's action movies were cleverer than this.

They were asking for it, so for the first half hour I was comparing it to Muriel's Wedding and thinking how bland it was. Then I tried judging it on its own merits, but found that really hard going because the merits were few.

Sacha Horler is a great actor, but you could see the agony on her face, realising that she was stuck in this film. Rebecca Frith was great too, but the two lead actors, playing the bride and the mother, were embarrassingly awful. I remember Val Lehmann because of Prisoner, but as for the bod who played the bride I'm grateful that her name escapes me. They didn't seem to understand the meaning of what they were saying. Worse than cardboard.

The script had a few good moments, and a few intriguing plot developments, but I got the feeling that they wasted the opportunities. I think I'd like to see the play - performed without Val Lehmann and that other one - to find out if it worked any better.

Why do I hate this film? Here we go. 1. It's supposed to be a comedy, but it raises a faint smile a maximum of THREE times. All other attempts at humour are failures, and really obvious failures. 2. It features Russell Dykstra, who was fantastic in Soft Fruit. Even in this crap, you can see that he's talented, but who is ever going to take him on after he's been tainted by this excrement? 3. It's sexist. 4. It's racist. 5. It's homophobic. 6. It relies on a "cute" kid, who delivers his lines with all the plausibility of a hatstand, and for some reason calls undies "jocks," though he's supposed to be Australian. 7. It sets out to satirise the Wiggles, but is so feeble that any Wiggles video would outdo it easily in the wit stakes. 8. It has a cameo by Bert Newton. 9. It has a cameo by Rove McManus. 10. Rove McManus! And there was no warning on the cover, or before the film.

I must say I'm surprised by all the strongly unfavourable reviews. I saw this one back in 1984 when it was first released and I loved it for the very reasons that some people here seem to hate it. It was deliciously weird. Our heroes are in an incestuous relationship, and the movie is uncritical of this. That gets the brain working from the start. Then you discover the other bizarre characters and their relationships and the movie becomes, to me at least, extremely lovable.

Admittedly, Rob Lowe's acting isn't up to much, and that's glaringly obvious here, but it doesn't destroy the film, and there's great work, as usual, from Jodie Foster to compensate.

Basically, this is a light-hearted, feel-good film that I would expect to have mass appeal. To top it off, it achieves this effect without being overly sentimental. That's rare. If you haven't seen it, give it a whirl. If you don't like it, keep on passing open windows.

Hard to believe the writer of this tosh also wrote "The Sixth Sense." That was a cleverly constructed plot with engaging characters.

This one seems to have been written by a ten-year-old.

You can't transgress the boundary, or "those we do not speak of" will get you. The dialogue is excruciating. In the end, I was hoping the unspeakables would just raid the village and do away with its inhabitants merely because that would mean I wouldn't have to listen to their drivel anymore.

Near me in the cinema, there were two people chatting constantly throughout the film . Normally I'd have a go at them for being so inconsiderate, but with this film I didn't feel it was justified. I'm sure their conversation was far more entertaining than the rubbish on the screen.

If you've seen any disaster movie, I don't reckon you should bother forking out too much money to see this one. It doesn't offer much in the way of innovation.

There are some great disaster scenes - a gang of tornados terrorising Los Angeles, helicopters freezing in mid air, monster hailstones in Tokyo and the signature tsunami hitting New York. All these are very entertaining, and enough to keep you watching.

Which is very fortunate, because the rest of the plot has almost nothing of interest. You might bide your time between the action scenes by counting the disaster movie cliches in the storyline. There has to be at least a dozen.

Another way to make it more fun would be to repeat some of the lines of dialogue and try to make them sound realistic. It's probably imposssible, but it at least provides a mental challenge - something the director obviously tried to prevent at all costs.

The thought behind this movie is utterly terrifying. I think the audience is supposed to be pleased that young Sam gets rid of his make-up, piercings, hair dye and neo-punk wardrobe in favour of the blandest form of conformity available in the United States today. Three cheers for individual freedom of choice, as long as all individuals choose to behave the same way as all the other individuals.

Did he say something about an underwear fetish? A few minutes later I realise the boy's underwear fetish is central to the film's plot. The overstated arrogance of the kid's father is perhaps bearable, but once the promiscuous ex-teacher appears by chance, my jaw drops. The ideas could make a great John Waters film, but this is played straight, with stunningly wooden acting worthy of any porno. One of the most perplexing movies I've seen.

It gets 2 points for the cute and entertaining young bloke, but the rest of this is at best bland and at worst insulting. Implausible plot developments and characters make it both confusing and annoying. The ending made me want to scream.

Not joy the abstract noun, as in happiness, but oh, Joy Smithers, what misguided careers advisor ever told you that acting was the job for you? The script has a few good ideas, but a lot of bad lines and some really embarrassing ones. The cast tries hard to cope with it. Miranda Otto stands out as the most competent actor, and Joy stands out as someone you might use in the background of a toothpaste ad.

This looked bad from the start, but I gave it an hour to show some indication that it might become interesting, scary, intelligent or humorous. After that I weighed up my options. I could watch it to the end or go into the kitchen and wash the dishes. Thus, one good thing came out of this movie. I have a sparkling clean set of dishes.

There's been a lot of talk this year that Australian filmmakers are failing the public. True, there have been some shockers this year, and I fear that the criticism is apt when it comes to comedies.

But Japanese Story is up there with the best of Australian drama like Soft Fruit, Lantana and Walking on Water. The two main actors are fantastic. The premise is not highly original (two people who hate each other stuck in the outback alone), but the script is clever and well executed.

OK, the film is based on real life, and real life is complex. However, it does not pretend to be a faithful re-enactment, so WHY include a whole lot of unnecessary characters and plot developments? Nothing much happened in this film until the last half hour, and that was pretty silly. If it wasn't for Alex Dimitriades looking as cute as he gets, this film would be terrible.

Hugo Weaving, Sacha Horler and David Wenham, all fine actors, put in their usual standard performance, but it doesn't do much good with such a weak and implausible storyline. The whole thing hangs on the credibility of Katia, the title role. Natalia Novikova makes a huge effort, but I believe it's an impossible task.