Posts from the ‘2008’ Category

Nov 22

What Happens in Vegas

What Happens in Vegas is one of those modern rom-coms that gets everything wrong. I’m not sure what I was expecting out of an Ashton Kutcher movie, but it wasn’t much. The poster shows the Kutcher and Cameron Diaz and refers to them on a first-name basis, presumably to give us the idea that we’re seeing two of our friends starring in a movie that we can relate to. It’s a very similar movie in tone to Just Married, another obnoxious Ashton Kutcher vehicle that also featured lots of yelling and stupidity.

I don’t care how many followers Kutcher has on Twitter. The fact of the matter is that he’s not a good actor. He’s not even remotely close. If he is a good actor on another planet, I haven’t visited it yet. That said, I truly believe he could be a good actor if he wanted to but I think he’s more fixated on the fame game than he is on his craft. This popularity stuff is for the birds if you want to be taken seriously, but Kutcher’s not exactly interested in risk-taking with respect to his acting career.

Nov 5

1 Comment

Bolt

Disney tries the CGI thing again with 2008’s Bolt and it looks like they’ve learned from their past mistakes. Bolt is a dazzlingly colourful and exciting motion picture that makes the most of its vocal talents and a broad, exciting story. Disney’s 48th animated feature is directed by Chris Williams and Byron Howard. It was originally going to be called American Dog and had Chris Sanders as director and writer. As with most Disney pics, a lot of shuffling took place in staff before the movie came out.

A big reason that Bolt works so well is the John Lasseter factor. He serves as producer here and his mitts are all over the project, which is most assuredly a good thing when it comes to CGI features from Disney. Lasseter is one of the most gifted minds in the entire Disney universe now, so his welcome influence really helps Bolt get to a place that it might not have been had he not been involved.

Oct 31

Death Bell

Chang, a music video director, makes his filmmaking debut with Death Bell. A 2008 South Korean horror picture, Death Bell is sort of a Saw movie set in high school. It’s a stylish piece of work, without question, and it features a pretty decent pile of elements that offset the gory killings quite nicely. There’s a lot at work under the surface of this one and it really is a picture worth more than the sum of its parts.

Death Bell features some pretty sleek HD cinematography and looks every bit the contemporary horror feature that its astronomical budget calls for, so that’s a start. Throw in the appearance of K-pop star Nam Gyu-ri and actor Lee Beom-soo in his first horror role and you might be thinking Death Bell is the perfect set-up for a well-financed disaster. Chang ably juggles the elements, though, and manages to control the film well enough to run it through its bloodied paces.

Aug 26

5 Comments

Red Cliff

The sprawling and intense Red Cliff is an incredible saga that could be reasonably compared to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy in terms of scope. The Chinese war epic, split into two parts and totaling around 280 minutes in its original form, is a spectacular motion picture. This review is for the first part of the picture as released in 2008 in Asia. Outside of Asia, a significantly snipped version of the two films was released as one two-and-a-half hour picture. Such a shame.

Red Cliff truly is a John Woo masterpiece. It is a stunning story based on the Battle of the Red Cliffs and it tells tales of engrossing history with its lavish set pieces, incredible battle sequences and surprisingly complicated characters. It is the epitome of the sweeping epic, going down as the most expensive Asian-produced motion picture to date. Red Cliff broke the box office record previously set by Titanic, too, and grossed $124 million in Asia.

Jul 19

3 Comments

The Time Traveler’s Wife

Convoluted and bland beyond belief, Robert Schwentke’s The Time Traveler’s Wife tries to encapsulate Audrey Niffenegger’s popular book of the same name. I’ve not read the book, but I am aware of the novel’s alternating first-person perspectives and a few of the plot points. How The Time Traveler’s Wife measures up to the book as a film, however, I cannot say. I can only judge the movie as a movie.

That said, this movie is a mess. Some of that may well be the fault of the book, as the plot carries so many needless facets that it becomes tedious to try to work through them. The concept at the core is time travel and the difficulty of engaging in a “normal relationship” with one who travels through time. To make matters worse, the time travel is done haphazardly with seemingly no rhyme or reason. This, as you might expect, is difficult on the titular bride of the time traveller (I’m using the Canadian spelling of “traveller” in all other instances except the title).

"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible." – Alfred Hitchcock

Posts from the ‘2008’ Category

What Happens in Vegas

Bolt

Death Bell

Red Cliff

The Time Traveler’s Wife

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