We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

Mark Kermode's top film of last year stars Tilda Swinton as the mother of a child who seem to have a grudge against her from the moment he is born. This is adapted from a novel (by Lionel Shriver), but I have absolutely no idea how this story would work within a book. Unlike most adaptations, there's something especially visual and tonal about the film. While there's clearly a plot line running through the film and we've seen films which use mixed-up timelines and flashbacks before, the whole film is quite disorientating in the way it skips from past to present with occasional glimpses of events in between.


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Retreat (2011)



What a cast eh? There's Cillian Murphy, Jamie Bell and um... Thandie Newton. I actually remember quite fancying Thandie Newton in MI:2, but mainly because I thought she had a pretty face. If anything she's lost weight since then so she's looking rather gaunt. Naturally we shouldn't judge actresses by their weight, but that upsets me anyway. In any case, all three of these actors are clearly excellent and so this really ought to be a fantastic film as a result. Sadly, it isn't. The set-up at the beginning feels awkward, the pacing in the middle is slow, the behaviour of the characters (not just Jamie Bell's mysterious figure but the other two as well) is often confusing, the ending ends up looking like a silly cop-out, and I'm not convinced that the director is getting the best out of any of these performers. Yes, they are all brilliant, but I couldn't help but feel that the performances were in spite of rather than encouraged by the director.


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cross posted to Halloween Candy

Avengers Assemble (2012)

Spoiler-free review, as always. (Though there may be some mild spoilers for Lord Of The Rings.)

I must admit that I was initially rather sceptical about this one. How hyped people were for this film must have some relation to how familiar they are with the comics and how much they enjoyed the past five Marvel Studios movies. For me that comes to "not at all" and "middling to good levels of enjoyment", so I wasn't exactly buzzing with excitement. When everyone else started raving about it though, you can be damn sure I was keen to see what I was missing.

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Tyrannosaur (2011)

I had been pretty excited to see this, but on the other hand I was a little worried by it. On the one hand it stars Eddie Marsan who I think is a brilliant and wonderfully versatile actor as well as Olivia Colman who I mainly know for comedy, but who had always seemed like a capable actress and had received accolades for her performance here. On the other hand, this is a film about domestic violence. In order to treat that subject properly it HAS to be harrowing and I don't really like my movies to be harrowing. I mainly look to movies for entertainment, albeit thought-provoking entertainment.


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The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Let me start this review by pointing out that I LOVED the books. I know plenty of people think they are overrated and heck I might not even deny that. I'm not exactly a big reader so there could be much better material out there of which I am unaware, but I absolutely loved the way that the books built up this protagonist who is both a victim and a hero. She is both simulataneously for the simple reason that she has learnt that the only person she can rely on to end her victimisation is herself. The storyline isn't even about her learning to trust others, but rather about the truth coming out and her needing to make use of those who'd consider themselves friends when things come to a head. Lisbeth Salander does not trust authority, so she uses her powerful intellect to find ways to do without it and sometimes that involves using brute force.


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Heya! Thanks to everyone who voted. With a total of 28 votes (with the opportunity for each person to vote twice) that means that at least 14 people voted on this poll. Finally, here are the results....

Seventh Place: Critters

With just a single vote, the movie series featuring the cuddly ravenous monsters from outer space take the lowest place in this poll.


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Okay, so the "A Nightmare on Elm Street" series reviews are finally complete. Or at least, as complete as my reviews for "Friday the 13th" were. "Freddy Vs Jason" still remains and I'll get around to that one as soon as I can (trust me!). However, asides from that here are reviews for the last two "A Nightmare On Elm Street" movies prior to the aforementioned team-up and the 2010 remake.

Part 1 here
Part 2 here



Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

I suppose this was the logical next step for the series. From the very first film there were a few somewhat jokey elements to Freddy Kreuger. While it was toned down a lot in the second one, we still had the "I've got the brains" line. From the third film onwards the amount of cheesy Freddy lines has only gone up and so with the sixth film we finally have an out-and-out comedy. The question is: Is it a GOOD comedy movie?

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Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)

After part 6 had made Freddy into a goofy comedian and the horror was seemingly entirely lost from the series, Wes Craven comes along and promises a totally fresh approach. While Craven had been involved in writing Part 3 a lot of his ideas had been ignored and much of the writing can be credited to Frank Darabont (who also had writing credits for the eighties remake of "The Blob" and "The Fly II", as well as later writing and directing "The Shawshank Redemption", "The Mist" and the tv series "The Walking Dead"). So really this was the first time Wes Craven had proper creative control on the series since part one. Fans were very excited.


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Ranking the franchise
I'm putting part 4 and the remake both in the top spot because while I felt the Remake worked best as a horror film, Part 4 was the one of the fun Freddy movies that appealed to me most.

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Briefly comparing the two franchises...


I'm still looking forward to "Freddy Vs Jason" where the two figures get to face each other head-to-head, however it's not the characters competing here but the franchises as a whole. There's an odd sort of balance between the two here since out of the seven Freddy movies I've seen I have enjoyed four of them, while out of the eleven Jason movies I've seen I have enjoyed just four and a half. (I count the first Friday the 13th film as just a half-like because it was only the final act that I really enjoyed.)

However, while I thought several Freddy movies were very good and felt the quality of the franchise was more consistent, I didn't really enjoy any of them as much as "Jason Lives" or "Jason Goes To Hell". These choices from the Friday the 13th franchise perhaps betray my fondness for horror comedy, but considering that Freddy is accused of being "funny Freddy" in most sequels you'd expect some of them to have a similar impact on me.

I'd also note, however, that while I might not think the Nightmare on Elm Street movies hit the same heights as a few of the Friday the 13th films, I don't think it hits such lows either. While I gave "New Nightmare" and the "Friday the 13th" remake similarly low scores and consider both to be very personal insults to their respective franchises, I still think that "Friday the 13th" is the more offensively awful of the two.

Friday the 13th has a wider spectrum of quality, including some absolute personal favourites, but A Nightmare On Elm Street has a more consistent level of quality. Overall that seems to put the two franchises on a similar level for me and I can see how the two figures ended up being matched up as a result. I just hope this final elusive entry in both series ends up living up to the hype!

Second installment of my reviews of the "A Nightmare On Elm Street" series. If you want to see my first entry you can find it here. I'm afraid I have as yet to get hold of "Freddy Vs Jason", but you can expect this to be followed up with reviews for Parts 6 and 7 fairly shortly.



A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)

Having decided to watch Part 3 first, naturally I already knew this wasn't expected to be as good and I'd heard that there weren't vital plot elements carrying through the series in this one too. What surprised me was finding just how much this film veers off the normal formula.

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A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

I went into this one not expecting too much, mainly because of a joke from the tv show "Roseanne". The family get a VCR and Darlene says "we can rent Lethal Weapon 2, Jaws 3 and Nightmare On Elm Street 4". The joke is partly that this is a sequence of sequels that have nothing to do with one another, partly that there were plenty of series with ridiculous numbers of sequels, but I also thought it meant that these were judged as poor sequels too (having never personally liked Lethal Weapon 2).

Since watching the film, I've listened to a few podcasts about it and I do actually get the impression that this film is looked down on, but I'm not entirely sure why.

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A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

A new set of friends have to be brought into this movie because so many of cast were killed off last time around and none of these new people feel like real people. We don't have the well-defined characterisation of the last movie and the attempt to show the children all casually talking to each other just comes across as overly scripted and even somewhat confusing. The parents are particularly dreadful one-dimensional caricatures.

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A long while back the_gel made this loltastic video of him playing "Kinect Joy Ride" without moving his arms. (He comes third. Check it out here.) So when GEL decides to do a video looking into the new Kinect Star Wars game, what's he going to find when he tries out Pod Racing?

(Video link)

4:50 - You know what time it is!
7.10 - Race finally begins



(via the-gel)

Update: Turns out in the second video that the game is automatically set to auto-steer. Though I still think it's pretty strange that a Kinect game would have the "you are not able to lose" mode as the default setting.

As promised, here's my series of reviews of the "A Nightmare On Elm Street" franchise. This follows on from my Friday the 13th Franchise reviews which can be found in the following three parts: (installment one, installment two, installment three). Unfortunately I still haven't got a copy of "Freddy Vs Jason".

I'm following the films in a bit of an odd order. I'd already seen the first film and gave a short review here, but I decided to make Part 3 my first sequel and I've also checked out the remake early to get it out of the way. As with the Friday the 13th series, I'm often quite surprised by my reaction to these films. I never seem to be quite in line with the general critics consensus...



A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

I reviewed this a while back. I have to say, one thing that made it difficult to rate it on first watch was that firstly other Wes Craven movies like "Scream" and "The People Under The Stairs" had made me disinclined to believe that I was going to like it. But perhaps more importantly, after actually watching it I wasn't all that impressed. I eventually decided that the imagery and creativity made it worthy of a "B+" but now I'm inclined to think I overrated it.

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Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

I decided to move straight to this sequel because it appeared to have the best score and I heard that you didn't need to see the second movie in order to understand it. I was keen to check out what appears to be seen as the high point of the sequels before diving in and I have to say, I was not disappointed.

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A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010)

Yes, I decided to check out the reboot already, but my reason for this is actually because I was expecting it to be awful. Quite a few users on the Friday the 13th remake's IMDB board seemed to have loved the remake with many even ranking it as the best of the Friday the 13th films. There was no such ambiguity about the "A Nightmare On Elm Street" remake on the IMDB boards for that. Some people said it wasn't that bad, while a large number were actively panning it. Finishing with the remake left such a bad taste in my mouth when I was doing the Friday the 13th marathon, so if this was going to be even worse I was inclined to get it out of the way early.

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Reminder: The poll for which movie series I tackle next is open until the end of the day on Sunday.
The choices are:
- Child's Play
- Critters
- Halloween
- Leprechaun
- The Omen
- Phantasm
- The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(More details on each of the options here.)

You can choose a maximum of TWO out of the seven options.
(Click here to vote on your choices.)

I've already finished my reviews for the Friday The 13th series and on Halloween Candy I'm most of the way through the A Nightmare on Elm Street series. (On Halloween Candy you can already check out the first and second installments of my reviews for that series.) I haven't yet got hold of "Freddy Vs Jason", but perhaps I'll have it before I close the following poll in a week's time.

What I want from you is a suggestion as to which franchise I should review next. If you actually find my opinions on movies useful you could pick a franchise which you haven't checked out. Alternatively if you aren't too concerned about the scores I give then you could pick one that you think I would enjoy. In either case you can choose a maximum of two out of the following seven options provided in alphabetical order:


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Click Here To Vote For Your Choices...!