Film Reviews by MM

This may well be a great film, but the DVD transfer is awful. It's a widescreen movie hard-letterboxed into a 4:3 image, meaning that when you watch it on a widescreen monitor, the entire frame sits in a small box in the center of the screen. I assume the Blu-ray versions don't suffer from this problem, but if you're using a DVD player you should skip this one.

This is a bigger-budget live-action version of BFG re-imagined for Generation Snowflake, with all the darker elements airbrushed out. The strict orphanage with its horrible mistress is replaced with something like a youth hostel in which Sophie apparently has free reign to wander around at night shouting at drunks in the street. The giants of the animated version were terrifying; these giants are little more than knuckle-dragging frat boys who bully the BFG but never actually harm any children. Perhaps young children will enjoy this, but adults should give it a miss.

This is a well-acted and thought-provoking film that I enjoyed watching. The problem is that the blatant #MeToo agenda-pushing rather gets in the way of the plot. Carey Mulligan plays a young woman who feigns drunkenness in clubs in order to get picked up by exploitative men, after which she punishes them by... what? Killing them? Cutting off their balls and keeping them in jars in her basement? No, she just reveals she's not really drunk, gives them a stern talking to, and leaves. Are we supposed to believe that of all the hundreds of men she's humiliated in this way, not one of them has turned out to be genuinely violent or dangerous? That would seem to be a significant risk, but for all her "wicked smartness", Cassie seems to take no precautions against this possibility, or have any self-defence skills to speak of. On the one occasion where she does try to get physical, it ends very badly for her.

This had the beginnings of a great plot — a slightly less fanciful Kill Bill, or a female version of The Crow. But it seems that the writers were reluctant to make their hero too much of a femme fatale, because it would get in the way of the idea that women are morally pure and innocent. The result is a film which feels like it's constantly leading towards a satisfying payoff which never actually arrives. The message seems to be: all men are bastards, but not such bastards that they won't be stopped in their tracks by a ticking off from a strong and independent woman. I'm pretty sure real life doesn't work like that.

This is a fairly entertaining (if unrealistic) sci-fi take on the invisible monster story, but couldn't they have made the characters a little less stupid? I know that dimwitted and helpless victims are a staple of the slasher horror genre, but when your abused sister's violent husband is smashing his way into your car and you sit there pointlessly asking "Is something wrong?" instead of putting your foot on the gas, it doesn't make you seem vulnerable and sympathetic, it makes you seem like a idiot.

When I first started watching I assumed it was actually performed live as a play in front of TV cameras, and was amazed: the actors seem to have no problem falling several feet onto a wooden stage (even head first!) without injuring themselves. If you watch the 7 minute featurette you discover that there is a certain amount of TV editing going on, and they are really falling onto crash mats as you would expect, but that's all part of the brilliance of the show — it looks completely real. Every mistake is perfectly scripted and choreographed, and the actors do an incredible job of pretending to be bad actors, while the real acting is in how they respond to each disaster as if it's completely unexpected.

The only film I've ever given up on halfway through because it was a completely incomprehensible waste of time. I've never experienced a psychotic break or a brain haemorrhage but I imagine it must be something like watching this film. Perhaps it makes more sense if you watch it stoned.

Aside from the CGI rendering, which is so realistic it might as well be a nature documentary, it's difficult to see what this remake adds to the original. Most of the songs are the same, but the changes they have made are certainly not improvements — "Be Prepared" is reduced to about 45 seconds of mostly spoken chanting, to make way for "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and some shouty auto-tuned rubbish by Beyoncé. Mufasa and Scar have decent voice actors but the rest are pretty mediocre: child Simba is just a generic whiny American kid while adult Simba sounds like a comedy actor who is out of his depth in a serious role. The film is almost a shot-for-shot remake but somehow manages to be 30 minutes longer without actually adding anything of value, which in a way is something of an achievement.

I don't expect action films to contain complex plots and characters, but I do expect to get some sense of what the protagonist is fighting FOR. In John Wick 1 he is taking revenge upon people who killed his dog, which was left to him as a goodbye present from his dying wife, giving him a strong motivation that we can empathise with (similar to other revenge movies like "Taken" or "The Crow"). But by this third instalment I really have no idea what the point of it is. John Wick is running from other hitmen who want to kill him over something he did in the equally-forgettable second movie, and seems to spend a lot of time bending the knee to this "High Table" organisation full of people with ugly tattoos. I stopped caring some time after the ten minute mark.

As an animated parody of internet culture and other Disney princess stories, this film is certainly entertaining, with plenty of easter eggs and meme references that only the adults will get. Plotwise, it's a little weak compared to the first one. I've no problem with making Ralph a big-hearted softie — the first movie already established that he "doesn't want to be the bad guy" but tends to mess things up regardless — but the story shouldn't JUST be about his feelings. The voice acting is pretty good (I liked that almost all of the princesses were voiced by their actual actors, although it's probably not too hard to pull off if you're Disney), but I felt that Sarah Silverman takes the "chipmunk voice" a little too far this time.

To be honest I found the plot pretty boring; in fact I can't really remember much that happened in it. Something about a train and a person who controls people through their smartphones. The film seemed to be less about telling a story and more about pushing fashionable Hollywood social commentary (we're all smartphone zombies who marginalise women, yeah?). The best thing about the film is Violet but there's nowhere near enough of her. The voice acting is decent but the obvious age gap between the actors and their characters is starting to grate — there's only so much even the most talented 49-year-old can do to sound like a teenage girl.

Stylistically this is recognisably Del Toro — just like Pan's Labyrinth, it's a sort of fairy tale told in a very dark style with the occasional bit of gruesome violence (both films seem to involve people losing fingers and getting holes cut in their cheek). Storywise, it's so straightforward as to be almost boring: plucky underdogs smuggle an abused captive out from an inhumane government facility, with no surprises, plot twists or complex moral decisions to be found. Sally Hawkins is likeable as the mute Elisa who manages to show plenty of emotion despite not saying anything; most of the other characters are standard Hollywood archetypes. Some of the scenes stretch credulity far too much — filling your bathroom to the ceiling with water by putting a towel under the door might be funny in Paddington, but in a more serious film it is just ridiculous.

I don't know if it affects the Blu-Ray, but the DVD edition doesn't seem to be a very good transfer; there is quite a bit of jaggedness and pixellation visible in certain scenes, which I don't see in any other DVD content.

This film feels like a nostalgia piece produced for the sole purpose of giving middle-aged Hollywood execs a chance to reminisce about the arcade games they enjoyed playing in the 80s. The plot is so painfully contrived it's ridiculous, and every character is an unlikable jerk. If you want to see a good film about video game characters, give this one a miss and watch Wreck-It Ralph instead.