Well where else would I start with a season of Tarantino reviews than with Reservoir Dogs? My Best Friend’s Birthday you say? Stop being a completionist. No-one has seen that. Not fully anyway. What do you mean I’ve already done a load of Tarantino reviews? That’s just sounds like the ramblings of a mad man. Does this not say it’s review 206? that means it follows on from review 205 which was Scrooged, not a Tarantino film. Pffft… kids today. Click the link why don’t ya!
You know what is quite a nice experience? Revisiting a film you haven’t seen for a long time. I don’t mean a long time as in a couple of years, or even a decade. I mean long enough to not be entirely sure that the film was a good as you remember it being. Quite often this doesn’t pay off as anyone who I’ve forced to watch the Garbage Pail Kids Movie will testify. But sometimes it really pays off, as it did a number of years back when I re-watched Robocop for the first time since I was a kid. Nostalgia is a fickle bitch. Last night I watched a film I haven’t seen since it was released on VHS here in the UK which has to be around 18 years now. Lets see how well that film, True Romance, holds up.
How old is Tom Cruise now? Gotta be like 55 surely. It’s actually 50? Fair enough. Feels like he’s been around forever. You’d think his dubious mental state and the fact he belongs to a religious cult that grossly exaggerates it’s numbers as well as having some very dubious practices would have waned his star power over the years. But here we are at the fourth entry in the Mission Impossible film series. For a 50 year old Cruise is looking pretty youthful. Maybe there’s something in this Star Trek cult of his.
Someone should really do a new series of Mission Impossible.
I’ve got into the habit on this here blog-space thing of reviewing some of the worst films cinema has to offer when it comes to my milestone reviews. At review 50 I covered Mortal Kombat Annihilation, at 100 the classic that is Troll 2, on the one year anniversary I trolled people by reviewing The Avengers… The one with Uma Thurman and Ralph Fiennes and the 150th review was for the obscure cult nightmare that is Death Bed. As review number 200 began to appear on the horizon I really couldn’t decide what to watch. I had a few ideas, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, Story of Ricky-Oh, that sort of film. There was one problem though. The month of November 2013 has been a financial bitch for me and as such I’ve been unable to afford to purchase those films. So I raided my film collection instead. Now seeing as I am one of those weird people that always purchases physical copies of films rather than downloading them from dubious sources my actual collection at home is most either films I greatly enjoy or cinema classics. It is from the latter category that I chose review 200. One of my personal favourite films of all time, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.
Well this is it. The end of my Bond themed journey. I’ve spent the whole of October watching and reviewing every Eon produced Bond film and now this is the end. Skyfall has just been released here in the UK and I saw it last night. After the link is my full review. Here’s my short one: This film is excellent.
I really, really liked Casino Royale. It was a superbly shot, written, performed and executed movie. Everything in it clicked exactly the way it needed to. As a result it became a tall order to follow. I certainly wouldn’t envy director Marc Forster taking on this challenge. Forster is a pretty decent director having put out a few interesting and well made films such as Stranger Than Fiction and Finding Neverland. I have no idea what went wrong here. I know what he’d likely blame, that writer’s strike everyone was blaming back then, but that’s not really an excuse. I’ll tell you why at some point after the link.
If anything this film has allowed me to complete the entire alphabet of film titles reviewed so far.
First off, how awesome is that poster. It’s a fan art by a guy called Jeff Chapman. Find his Deviant art pager right here and tell him how cool it is. Did anyone read my review of Die Another Day I posted last night? Wasn’t really much of a review. More of a rant about how much I despise that film. Prepare to read the total opposite. Not sure how you’d prepare for that… try tensing up a little… anyway, click the link for the review!!!
I honestly do not know where to start with this one. There’s so many words I could use to describe this film. None of them well be the words “good”, “exceptional”, “beautiful”, “acceptable” or even “below average”. Well I might use the last one if it’s preceded by the word “way”. Click the link to see what words I will use.
What takes 14 minutes to get started but still goes nowhere? Why The World Is Not Enough of course! OK so I’m being a little harsh. Whilst the film does take 14 minutes to get through it’s pre-credit scenes what follows does lead somewhere… just very slowly and via the medium of some of the slowest dialogue scenes ever in a Bond film. Oh and Denise Richards is apparently supposed to be believable as a nuclear physicist. Click the link!
Fun fact: Tomorrow Never Dies revisits two location from previous Bond films. The Stoke Park Club, which was the location where Oddjob knocked a statues head off with his hat in Goldfinger, here used as an interior for a romance scene between Pierce Brosnan’s Bond and Terri Hatcher’s Paris Carver. The other location was Khow-Ping-Khan islands near Phuket which were used as Scaramanga’s island home in The Man With The Golden Gun. No reference is made to those films when they visit these locations. Opportunity missed Bond. Anyway… that’s what I’m passing off as an intro to my review of Tomorrow Never Dies, the 18th film in the Bond series. Not far to go now…
Copy & paste this for the Bond theme that almost was: http://youtu.be/POLn1jgajkc
