Film Shapes

Had a look at Avengers: Age of Ultron a few days ago. Seems to be doing good business at the worldwide box office - around 1.4 billion at the mo but two thirds of that is from outside the US. Maybe this is why most of the action ISN'T set in the US (Eastern Europe, Southern Africa, South Korea - incidentally, Sokovia and Wakanda BUT New York and South Korea??). I like the fact that the leads are saving 'people' not just 'Americans' as is usually the case in Hollywood moolah spunk-fests. A couple of new characters - Scarlett Witch and Quicksilver - slotted into the film well enough, though their back story differed from the X-Men one. Here they're referred to as 'enhanced', not mutants. This has something to do with legal wranglings between Marvel and Fox. Not sure about their casting, especially Taylor-Johnson as the fast one. He's super bland. In contrast to Paul Bettany as The Vision. His entrance, including the hammer pay-off, is probably...

A character in Birdman suggests to the titular figure that he 'confuses love for admiration' and this neatly sums up the film for me. Easy to admire, very hard to love. The admirable part mostly shows itself through the celebrated cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki. His hand-held, 'one take' style, though hardly ground-breaking, is technically brilliant. Lubezki has tried his hand at this kind of technique (gimmick?) before with that great scene in Children of Men . Take this away though, and I'm afraid the film appears as something of an actors wankfest. Some of the acting is pretty good and I'm thinking of Emma Stone and Ed Norton mainly here. The others seem to be pushing things a little too hard (Galifianakis is shite). It may be that acting as earnest theatre types, so in love with their profession, rubbed off a little because some of the ham was actually sniffable. The biggest problem was that I didn't give a rat's arse about any of the ...

No mid-year report this year as by the end of June, I hadn't seen ten films that were good enough. No worries for the year in full though. Here are the ten best films I saw in 2014. 1. Interstellar (2014) 2. The Hunt [Jagten] (2012) 3. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) 4. Spaced: Skip to the End (2004) 5. Gone Girl (2014) 6. X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) 7. Philomena (2013) 8. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) 9. Ace in the Hole (1951) 10. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) And here are the ten worst. Really only the first on this list made me angry. The others were just mostly crap. 1. We Bought a Zoo (2011) 2. Riddick (2013) 3. The Best Offer [Deception] {La migliore offerta} (2013) 4. Les Miserables (2012) 5. Priest (2011) 6. Noah (2014) 7. Day Watch [Dnevnoy dozor] (2006) 8. The Inbetweeners 2 (2014) 9. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013) 10. The Wind Rises [Kaze tachinu] (2013)