Reviews

This movie was about as Asian as Nebraska. Sure...the parents of the actors were Asian and Singapore was in Asia, but everything else about the movie was cookie cutter Hollywood...including most of the actors themselves.

Hailed as a beacon of diversity, we were shown exactly nothing about any Asian culture. For all of the dialogue about what it means to be properly Chinese...Singapore isn't China...and people who live in Singapore will go to great lengths to make that clear to you.

Most of the cast was American or British and all of the characters bragged about their American or British education. They were studying the bible in one scene and the wedding was held in a Christian church. Even the music was either in English or Chinese versions of English hits. They drove western cars, wore western clothes, mostly spoke English and danced to Western music.

The PC climate being what it is at the moment, where skin colour, physical features and the heritage of ancestors, (rather than your own life and actions), define who you are, this movie has fallen into the fallacy that American Asian is the same as Asian Asian. Though, they do use that premise as a plot point as part of the movie, Crazy Rich Asians is being promoted as an Asian movie.

It's not. It's a pretty average Hollywood movie, featuring mostly Hollywood actors based on a pretty typical Hollywood plot. It is a great ad for the city/state of Singapore, a very interesting place well worth a visit.

To be clear...diversity IS good...but this isn't really diversity. It's not a terrible movie but you won't be missing out on anything by saving the price of admission and waiting for it to show up on pay per view.

Oh my lord... what a refreshing movie. The pap that has been foisted upon us for so long has made choosing an entertaining movie an excruciating chore... then along comes Spy. If you loved The Fifth Element and RED as much as I did, then you'll love Spy.

Sure, the movie is festooned with F-Bombs, but they added to the hilarity. I literally laughed out loud for most of the movie and wasn't disappointed by a single scene. The casting, acting, direction and dialogue were bang on. Yes, it was vulgar but so what? Every Melissa McCarthy movie has quadruple entendres as subtle as an earthquake. Even her TV show, pushes the limits of what the censors will allow. Subtle, it ain't.

If you're looking for another Marigold Hotel, do yourself a favour and just don't go. Besides lately, we have had enough heartrending cinema blah, blah, blah to last several decades.,,and before I get cast as a philistine and a boor, I also gave Women in Gold a 9.

This movie stars Melissa McCarthy and features Jason bloody Statham... why would anyone expect anything different? The previews don't do the movie justice. They made the movie look like silly slapstick... but it was so much better than that.

I will see this movie again and again, as I have with The Fifth Element and RED. It had character development, excellent dialogue and spot on timing. I could keep raving about this movie but you get the point. This is what Get Smart and Johnny English should have been.

Take note, budding film makers... the bar has been set very high. If you consider Springer, Survivor and Big Brother entertainment... just don't go. If you believe a movie without subtitles could never be considered worth watching, much less entertainment... just don't go. If you think comedy is truly an art form and can contain depth, character development, skilled direction and inspired performances, just go.

Spread the word... tell your friends... heck, tell strangers. Help make Spy a blockbuster success so studio accountants will allow more films of this quality to be made.

Spy is as solid a 9 as I have seen. Just go.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS....THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. Ex Machina is almost a direct rip off of, "The Machine", and not even as good. I give huge points for the CGI, which was brilliant but the rest of the movie was plodding and pretentious. The cinematography and mood seemed like movie student interpretations of 2001...and not nearly as good as that either.

What might have been interesting is if we got to experience the development process to get to the point of AI, not the physical so much, but the cerebral...that might have been interesting. Instead. we get this pretty robot, which looked like a cross between the robots of "A.I." and "I Robot", with a fully formed intellect. The movie spends most of its time reinforcing what we already know from the first session between Ava and Caleb which is, , "Yup....she's an AI all right...now what?". They blathered on about the Turing Test, and didn't do anything close to it...which they didn't need to because it was darned obvious that she was and AI...or close enough for a movie.

So that takes up most of the movie...that which wasn't taken up with shots of the cold, stark, orderly interior of the house/lab and contrasting shots of beautiful, untamed wilderness outside. It was subtle, but I think they were trying to make a statement right there.

As if to add insult to injury, one of the main characters, Caleb, had no purpose in the movie at all...his absence would have changed nothing. The scientist knew everything that was going on and correctly predicted the outcomes of everybody's actions. Yet, and this is a hoot, he couldn't figure out why the power kept going out in his house/lab. He could have made a call to the local power company, but no, he assumed that this annoyance didn't need the investigative time or effort it would take to make that call. It was kind of a big part of the plot...yet the very practical and easy solution was completely ignored. When you miss something that obvious, it's difficult to take anything else seriously.

I'm not going to give you the plot because you'll be able to guess it within about 15 seconds of seeing Ava. It looked good, but it wasn't good. It has only been out a week or so and there were exactly 5 people in the theatre. We talked on the way going out and we all came to the same conclusion; It just wasn't very good. You'll get much more watching any of the other movies I mentioned, even AI, which owned the previous low spot on the AI scale, until Ex Machina. It gets a 4 only because of the very good CGI.

First, Chappie doesn't come close to breaking any new ground. It was the boring stepchild of Short Circuit and Robocop... both of which were infinitely better movies... better directing, acting and dialogue.

The good; Chappie looked as real as any of the actors. The bad; Chappie was the best actor.

If one or two actors are mediocre, I lay the blame on the actors. When all of the actors give wooden yet, ironically overacted performances, I blame the director...in this case, partly for his directing and partly for his odd casting choices and in this case, definitely for the dialogue. Even Sigourney Weaver and Hugh Jackman, both of whom I usually like, struggled to fit into their roles.

In the end, it almost looked like Neil Blomkamp was trying to make a sequel to the very good District 9, using earth bound robots instead of space faring aliens, but try as he might, he missed every mark he aimed at.

I think he spent way too much time on the cgi and not nearly enough writing appropriate dialogue and directing the humans.

This movie is exactly a 5... you will probably stick around until the end but you'll regret paying full price for it. You will be best off if you wait to see it on pay per view on the big screen at home.

This movie was terrible... so terrible I walked out, something I have done maybe a half a dozen times in my life. Sure, it looked good, as did the main characters, (though Will looked old when he was trying to put on a 'serious actor' face)

The sad fact is, he can't do drama. He has two characters; Fresh Prince and the Men in Black guy. He can do those guys well if he has strong enough fellow actors to balance out his shtick. In this case, the other main character can't act either, so we ended up with 2 pretty people trying to organize their faces into realistic expressions... and failing miserably.

Margot Robbie is absolutely stunning. She makes Barbie look like a 60 year old plumber. She does a great job of distracting the audience with her looks, but looking hot is about all the depth she can handle.

In contrast, the supporting cast was quite good, and their performances were the only reason I stuck around as long as I did. They randomly appeared throughout the movie with little impact on the plot. It's almost if the director(s) accidentally hired a bunch of actors then couldn't figure out what to do with them.

This movie really could have done with some light hearted banter from the main characters, but they wanted to aim for gravitas... and missed the mark by a mile. It was almost painful to watch. Neither the characters or their scams were realistic or believable in the least. As someone else said; I really wanted to like this move...but it turned out to be a gigantic waste of my time and 12 bucks. At least the popcorn was good.

Learn from my mistake; just say no.

I really don't like professional critics. Very, very few of them write a review with the money paying movie watcher in mind. You see, they never pay...for anything.

I spent over a decade in radio, not paying for movies, and when your job depends on getting citizens to read/watch/listen to, what you do and say, it doesn't pay to be boring and just 'like' a movie. You must employ as much hyperbole as your thesaurus will allow, because of your deep seated insecurities that you might not be the next Hemingway or Arthur C. Clark or whomever your dream author is.

They don't write reviews for the ordinary, ticket buying mook...they write reviews for each other. Trying to seem clever is much more important than giving a reasonable or honest assessment of a movie. Look on any site where user and critic reviews are displayed. It's a rare thing when their respective ratings averages are within 20% of each other.

Granted, user reviews span the 'love it' to 'hate it' spectrum but for the most part, you can be assured you are getting their honest feelings.

OK...rant over...Now for the movie at hand. I liked Jupiter Ascending. I thought every performance worked in whatever context it was supposed to...except for Channing Tatum's. He tried his best to be stoic, but ended up being as wooden as a log. Mila Kunis was especially good...given the mediocre plot development allowed by the seemingly endless space car chases. Basically, the movie needed much more time on plot, dialogue and character development and less on the much too plentiful, (though lovely), graphics saturated scenes.

You probably won't feel much need to see it again, at least in a cinema, but it will make fine viewing while lazing on the couch.

I really do hope there's a sequel with much more Mila, and a leading man who is much more Pratt much less Tatum, (what was with his eye shadow? It made his eyes look tiny...and not in a Dirty Harry way...more of a 'trying to read the small print on an aspirin bottle' way). His role needed more of a rogue...and hopefully, if there is a sequel, it will get it.