Surprisingly bad. Awful script, pretty awful acting, lots of Commies getting blown up. Would be an amusing satire on US hypocrisy over ‘terrorism’, except that it isn’t a satire, it’s a military propaganda film.
Me and my basketball team started to watch that movie one time (before I knew how relevant it would be in the future) and we all hated it too, turning it off quickly. Still, I commend whatever coach of ours had the balls to put it on.
Probably. It is part of the reason I watched the original, I want to see how it differs from the remake.
Possibly, I have heard people outlining some scenarios which I think are moderately plausible but the optimist in me says it won’t happen soon. I can see a controlled political revolution happening in the US, which might look a lot like Red Dawn.
Amusing thriller about a guy in smalltown America who turns out to be a gangster trying to escape his former life. Very violent in places, darkly funny, bit of an underwritten script but rattles along very quickly. Highly enjoyable.
70s thriller about spying on people. About an hour into this film I realised it was Gene Hackman playing the central character, a bugging and surveillance expert who gets mixed up in a corporate conspiracy when he is hired to bug a conversation between a man and a woman. Wonderfully paced, largely well acted except for a young Harrison Ford who is far too pretty to pretend to be menacing, some great camerawork too. Lots of visual storytelling - these days they’d have the central character rabbiting on all the time so you knew what he was thinking, and they’d probably cast Shia Lebouf in the main role. Still, this was awesome, right up there with All the President’s Men (and the haircuts are even better in this film). Perhaps not quite as good as Three Days of the Condor, but it doesn’t have Faye Dunaway so it can be forgiven that.
Dredd 3D was a total let-down, a waste of 15 English pounds, and I can’t believe they went with such a crap storyline… was that story ever in one of the comics?
CamGirl (2011) - Seriously terrible. Even watched in 10 minute chunks the near-constant nudity was sickening. Maybe that was the point but I just didn’t care. Kinda a micro-budget Showgirls.
I wouldn’t flirt with James Bond if I were you. Most of the women who go near him end up dead, and in Skyfall he didn’t even give a toss (unlike in previous films).
My thoughts: It was a massive improvement on Quantum of Bollocks, and the new Q was nowhere near as annoying as I thought he would be. He was fucking stupid though - when you have a master hacker’s laptop the last thing you do is plug it into the office network to enable it to wreak havoc.
In terms of cultural programming there was the obvious, i.e. the ex-agent cyberterrorist that is quite a common bad guy role in these sorts of films and TV shows, and the slightly more obtuse, i.e. the portrayal of the Intelligence and Security Committee as a bureaucratic waste of time. Now, it is a waste of time, not to mention hugely corrupt and incompetent, but not for the reasons portrayed in the film. I was highly amused by the ascent of the chairman of the Committee to replacing M at the end of the film, mirroring John Scarlett - the man who put his name to the fake Iraq war intelligence.
The climax up in Scotland was pretty good, but there wasn’t enough shots of the mountains. Those mountains are great, like a 19 year old woman’s breasts. There was a distinct lack of cleavage in the film and I felt some more lingering shots of the mountains would have made up for it. The token comedy Celt was a bit run of the mill, and the expositional dialogue rather ham-fisted and lazy. Still, the amusing booby traps and the return of the Aston Martin were nice, imaginative little
ideas. In general the movie did make me laugh a lot. I don’t know if that was what they intended.