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ufancat
Reviews
Posti (2022)
Indian version of the Marx Brothers
I hate the Marx brothers, and unfortunately this reminded me very much of that style. Cartoonish sound effects, plain silly characters, and a humour I couldn't get involved with. Cannot recommend.
Babysplitters (2019)
Over-rated
Too long, too slow, too laboured (no pun intended). Characters too bland, and not funny enough to carry the ridiculous plot twists.
Twenty Twenty-Four (2016)
Awful
I usually try to give films that are supposed to be scary a fair viewing - especially psychological thrillers like this one. However, I ended up having several problems with this:
1. He calls himself a scientist. Why? All we ever see him do is engineering / electrical work, not science - and since all he's supposed to be doing is preparing a bunker for habitation by the remnants of humanity, following nuclear holocaust - why would they send a scientist down there anyway, just to run maintenance?
2. This guy gets overwrought too early. Good acting would require a realistic meltdown - this guy flips too soon. And it just makes the whole film ridiculous.
3. Confusing rather than scary - I didn't understand half of what was going on, never mind the ending. Ambiguous is one thing - bonkers is quite another.
Avoid.
Calloused Hands (2013)
Why was this given a public release at all?
I saw this in the Venezuelan embassy in London, as part of the Latin American Film Festival. You'd think you'd know what to expect, right? Eh, no. The festival website describes it as "The struggle for identity in the face of a broken world..". Hmm. At least I'd have expected it to be about Latin American identity, maybe. Not really.
The only things Latin American about this film were (a) that it was set in Miami (which is pushing it) and (b) it's a coming-of-age story about a teenage boy whose father (whom we never meet, he's in prison) is obviously Latino, by the boy's colouring. Considering that his mother is a blue-eyed, blonde, Caucasian woman. Oh, and his "struggle for identity" involves rejecting the path his mother's abusive, cheating, drug-taking African American boyfriend has laid out for him - into professional baseball, and doubtless an easy ride for himself - and instead embracing his mother's Jewish heritage, embodied by the clean-living young rabbi and the boy's workaholic, businessman grandfather. So, eh, where's the Latin American-ness? I guess the production team have Latin-American names, that's something..
As for the film itself, as you can tell from the above description, the story is one cliché after another. When the mother's boyfriend shoots the guy who was supposed to be looking after his dog, but neglected him, there seem to be no repercussions, apart from the boy's mother throwing him out when he comes home with blood on his shirt. We have a lot of racial stereotyping here - black men are lazy losers (witness the boyfriend's behaviour, and the testimony of the black woman that the boy's mother works with). Jewish men are upstanding citizens - the rabbi, the boy's grandfather (who may be offhand with his daughter, but somehow manages to find time for his grandson).
It's an enjoyable enough watch, and the acting is good. But it doesn't belong in the Latin American film festival, it doesn't deserve a cinema release - it's more a TV movie - and it certainly doesn't merit its rating of 8.2 on IMDb! Interestingly, some of the audience members shared my complaint about the start of the film, that the actors might as well have been speaking in Spanish, because we couldn't understand a word. I think that had more to do with the diction of the lead actor than anything else. I did actually wonder, at the beginning, whether it was in English at all..
The Ward (2010)
boring
I have no idea what anyone gets from this film. I nearly left after half an hour, and it didn't improve. I spent more time laughing than anything else. The ghost is predictable, what the ghost does is predictable. Seems rather an incompetent ghost, actually. As ghosts go, these days.
"Jump" moments are easy to achieve. Every time the ghost appeared, I groaned. "Not again." Yawn. And we even have the tired old device of a last "jump" moment after the story has concluded, in the second before the credits roll.
Designed for Friday night date nights where easily-scared girls shriek and can be comforted by their boyfriends. Otherwise, to be avoided.