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Peet42
Reviews
I Am Number Four (2011)
A blast from the past, and not in a good way.
This is a 2011 movie apparently made using a 20-year old script. How else can you explain the fact that every man and his dog has an iPhone, yet they're never used for anything more than sending *texts*. No, not even "chatting". Texts.
And despite the availability of iPhones wherever you look, every time someone wants to look up a website or watch a video they go indoors to switch on a big, old computer.
Oh, and you know how more than half the photos taken in the USA are taken on an iPhone, if Apple's marketing is to be believed? Not in this town. The only photos are being taken by the high school girl using a camera with rolls of film. Which she develops and prints in the high school's lavishly appointed and huge photo lab, before scanning them in to upload them to her website.
Like I say, this script was obviously written 20 years or so ago, and someone at Disney must have come across it stuck to the bottom of the barrel while they were giving it a good scrape. Adding the letter "i" in front of every occurrence of the word "phone" in a script doesn't qualify as an update.
Impact (2009)
Dreadful. Truly dreadful.
This was billed as "Science fiction", but frankly it's just "Fantasy". There isn't the slightest attempt to involve any actual science - the scriptwriter just keeps saying outlandish things and the actors struggle to make it seem like they believe this is how the world works.
In the minute or two before the beginning titles, for example, we are told that "the biggest meteor shower for (X) years" is about to happen. We cut between crowds of people gathered in fields all round the world, every one with a telescope on a tripod, peering into a dark sky.
1) Meteor showers happen as the Earth passes through a particle cloud; they're only seen on the leading side of the planet, not the whole planet simultaneously.
2) Astronomers only gather in that way to view localised phenomena such as total solar eclipses, not wide-ranging phenomena such as meteor showers.
3) You don't use a telescope to look at a meteor shower. Ever.
4) With all these astronomers around, didn't anyone notice it was a bit odd that it was dark *all the way round the world at the same time*...? I would have thought the sudden and complete disappearance of the Sun would have provoked more comment than a meteor shower would.
And all this was before the titles.
Other things, like the fact there was a rock on the Moon that was one and a half times the mass of the Earth, yet the Moon only changed its orbit slightly (when, in reality, at that point the Earth would have, at best, been in orbit around the Moon...) were glossed over.
Or how they managed to fit five people, a huge "scanner", a 2-man rocket sled and a missile launch platform into the nosecone of a rocket that can usually only hold three people maximum, and they still had room to get in and out of their space suits? Oh, and the missile had huge stabilising fins and could manoeuvre in huge, graceful curves - in a vacuum. And despite being only about twice the size of an astronaut it had enough power to split the moon in two. Oh, and somehow it mysteriously dissipated the rock with 1.5 Earth masses, without any of it falling to Earth.
I've seen a few reviews saying the actors were "good". Well, they were "good" *for soap opera*, which is what the script degenerated to fairly quickly.
It was *almost* as bad as the movie "The Core". Almost.
Man on Fire (1987)
Just an observation
Is it just me, or is Joe Pesci in this movie a dead ringer for Sylvester McCoy of the same time period (1987)? When he was wearing the sunglasses it could have been outtakes from "Doctor Who".
That's really all I have to say, but there's this dumb "10 line" restriction.
Ho, hum.
It was a good movie.
I can't see what prompted Denzel Washington to remake it; he added very little to the role.
Is that enough text yet?
EastEnders (1985)
Allegedly, it's got better over the years.
I spent three months living in the East End of London in the latter half of 1987, when the show had been on the air for almost two years. It was considered a running joke there.
Why? Because it had an all-white cast. Every cast member and extra in the first couple of years was white.
The street where I lived was a long one, with over 800 houses, and to the best of my knowledge I was one of only three or four white faces living on that street. We were on the corner of the Indian and Turkish "quarters", and even if you excluded those two races the Asians and Afro-Caribbeans outnumbered the white people twenty-to-one. Plus, of course, of the very few white people who *did* live in the area, the vast majority were Scots like me - a "Cockney" accent was never heard.
That wasn't a racist rant, just a simple statement of fact. The BBC either couldn't be bothered crossing London to do their research before writing this soap, or else they only had white actors available and decided to bluff it out.
Either way, as I say, in the East End of the time, we considered it a comedy show. :-)
The 100 Greatest TV Ads (2000)
Entertaining, but biased
This was amusing enough fare, but hugely biased towards the English and in particular the "Home Counties".
There were at least two brands of Lemonade mentioned that I've never heard of before (I live in NE Scotland) yet there was no mention of Barr's Irn Bru.
Irn Bru was responsible for many of the longest running and funniest ad campaigns on TV, many of which were spoofs on some of the "bigger" soft drinks companies such as Coke and Pepsi.
The reason for their omission - they didn't advertise in the South of England.
Carriers (1998)
Compellingly dreadful
OK, imagine that every state in the US, nay, every country has exactly the same trees growing and ground foliage. Imagine, also, that a monkey-trapper's camp so far off the beaten track you had to do the first half of the approach by river has a beautifully tarmac'd, perfectly straight road leading up to it. Imagine a world where you have to wear a full biohazard suit to collect a floppy disk, then you just drop it in a ziploc bag and transfer it to your pocket with no precautions as soon as you get back to the office. A world where two nine-year old girls are happy to give lots of blood without complaining. This is the world this movie is set in.
On top of that, it's one of the most cliché-ridden pieces of excrement it's been my misfortune to witness in many a year.
I liked it. :)
Eegah (1962)
This is not a review; merely a lament.
I haven't seen this movie yet, despite trying very hard to do so. Just over ten years ago I subscribed to the original "Bravo" channel on Aberdeen Cable TV, back in the days when the "Bravo" movies were delivered as a box of tapes every month and played out manually. I was thrilled to see that "EEGAH!" was due to be broadcast at 3am, and that it was the last showing. It had presumably been on every night in the two months leading up to my subscription, but I had just managed to catch it!
I sat up till 3am, with a bottle of cider and a warm sleeping bag, to see this shlock horror classic. 3am arrived and... The tape ran out. :( The controllers at Aberdeen Cable had forgotten to cue up "EEGAH!", and had left for the night. I was devastated, and I still scour the schedules in vain for it...
Red Dawn (1984)
American teens become terrorists and "Illegal Combatants"
A foreign power occupies your country. What do you do?
Become a terrorist guerilla fighter and kill them, of course! Don't let it worry you that you're not an official member of the armed forces - after all, what're they gonna do?
This film should be watched as a fascinating adjunct to recent (early 2003) news coverage of the US attitude to "Illegal Combatants". In this context it is both disturbing and ironically amusing. Local teenagers with guns taking pot-shots at highly trained foreign forces; blending in with the locals; planting bombs... Sound familiar? :)
Hard Rock Zombies (1984)
Not *entirely* bad, despite previous summaries
I saw this movie over a decade ago, but it sticks in my mind. After reading a fairly harsh summary on here I felt the need to set the record straight...
It's a bad movie. That's a given. But, it has a number of memorable set-pieces which, while others may characterise them as "forced", still raise a smile for me a decade later when I think of them, and you can't ask for much more than that from a movie of this genre.
An example, at the cost of revealing a trivial plot point, is the wheelchair bound mother of the hillbilly family. When the full moon comes around, she transforms into a werewolf... Predictable. But the twist is that she's still in the wheelchair! I still smirk at the thought of a teenager running screaming through the woods being chased by a wolf on wheels... :D
Don't watch this movie unless you have a high tolerance for clichés and are moderately drunk at the time of screening. If you fulfil these conditions, however, it's highly recommended!
American Playhouse: Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (1983)
It's a bad movie, but that's no reason not to watch it...
I've read 20 other reviews on this site describing just how bad this movie is. I've seen it three times, and I can't argue with any of the problems they point out. But... That still doesn't negate the fact that I have fond memories of the movie, with its Apple II graphics, reuse of stock footage and old sets from other productions and frankly ludicrous plotline! My favourite movie of all time is "Casablanca", yet unlike many other reviewers I don't find the references to Casablanca in this movie offensive; I always saw them as a "sideways compliment", a sort of good-natured ribbing at a great film which too many people take far too seriously.
Just imagine a student movie with a couple of good actors, written by someone who watched Casablanca on acid while flipping channels to a nature documentary... I can promise you won't be disappointed. :)
Casablanca (1942)
Superb!
I can't recommend this movie highly enough. If you're in a position to see it in a proper cinema, then make every effort to do so, as the subtlety of the lighting and set design doesn't quite make it through on video...
There's not a single element of this movie that I can conceive of being improved upon. The casting, direction, acting, score, lighting, script... All mesh together simply perfectly in a way I've never seen on any other movie. Bring tissues - I'm a fat, cynical, 40-year old Scotsman, and I still cry every time I see it. :)
Airplane! (1980)
It's a spoof on airport disaster movies, but that's not important right now...
I was dumbstruck yesterday to find someone who had not merely failed to see this movie, but who had never even heard of it! When it first came out, I *paid* to see it five times, just to see all the simultaneous layered jokes going on in the background... And, uniquely in my experience, just because a gag was in the back of the frame, that wasn't taken as an excuse to make it cruder or less funny. Never before has there been such a degree of subtlety in such an unsubtle film - I love it!