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Prometheus (2012)
NO(omi)
I'm a big fan of Ridley Scott. I also believe Noomi Rapace is a great actress, especially in "Män som hatar kvinnor" and that brings me to my point:
If you enjoyed "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" please watch the swedish original and you'll see that the Hollywood remake isn't anywhere near as good even if it's quite okay for what it is. Noomi just IS Lisbeth Salander but she also far away from being a Ripley as Sigourney Weaver killed that part for any sequal or in this maybe I should say pre-Alien movie but it really is not, is it?.
I would probably give this movie 6, 7 or even a low 8 stars if I hadn't watched Ridley Scott's earlier masterpieces but this is just a stupid remake without the feeling of watching something new and that just makes it impossible to watch without gasping and losing interest for the story that you know from before and know how it will end. The acting is also in total a couple of notches downhill and the only thing that stays afterwards is the question of what's Scott's problem with humanoid robots with AI?
Watch it if you as me wants to have seen all Ridley Scott's movies otherwise skip!
One nice thing though is artist Gieger getting his acknowledgement in big letters in the credentials.
Death at a Funeral (2007)
Superb 10 Star Britcom
For everyone who watched the useless Hollywood remake that is a maximum 4 star crap movie just as most (all?) Hollywood remakes take a look at this and enjoy!
This just going to be a short review so I don't give anything away as it starts up with a surprise and just carries on in the same matter.
Actors are very much the britsh elite when it comes to comedy and I loved Ewen Bremner ever since Trainspotting and the scene where he takes speed before going to an job interview and enjoyed his acting since in many odd movies.
Just watch it and be amazed laughing your asses off!
Heartbreak Hotel (2006)
Colin Nutley Showing Swedes Their Souls Through His British Lense Once Again
As always Nutley is also showing off his by 2006 still sexy wife Helena Bergstrom in one of the leading parts. This of course sounds repetative and it is but to me Colin is a genious when it comes to directing swedish actors in just being swedish.
However this movie does nothing for me so the 5 star grade is only for the fact that it is just average. In one way it should as it is a story of middle-age bitterness and feeling your life is already lived but still wanting to find love and kicks to change that feeling.
With that said the kind of bars the two female main characters go to says exactly nothing to me except for getting picked up by cougars a couple of times in my youth and as I never been married or had any kids Nutley shoots way off me as a target.
The movie for sure shows a Stockholm I know even if I haven't done that city in decades even if I've been out on the town maybe 4-5 times during the last 15-20 years but then it's been to rock bars or in connection to some ice-hockay game and maybe double that amount to local bars without any of the life shown here.
Also this movie shows city life for two middle-aged women and for me as a very male man living far out in the woods of Sweden now for 10+ years I can't connect to the characters at all so I really can't recommend it to anyone like me.
London Has Fallen (2016)
Movie or Video Game?
In action movies like this I don't need credability but in this most of the scenes looks more of a game for X-box or Playstation and when the big buildings go down all I see is just black smoke from the explosions and from the explosions and fires I witnessed IRL that's just not even remotly plausible.
If you can see through that as well as the video game scenes with the air fights it might be an okay action movie although below average so my 3 star grade is a weak one but I do admit I just couldn't watch it to the end for lack of interest.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Useless Acting Totally Destroying a Crappy Story to Begin With
Where to start... let's face it - if Peter Jackson, who's work I love, casted this joke of a movie he must have been drunk as a skunk. Elijah Wood is hardly an actor at all and here he's flanked by some clowns just as bad as actors as him. And Liv Tyler? Viggo Mortensen? This is like the Hollywood bottom feeders all together in a story most people already knows after reading Tolkien's in my eyes quite ordinary and not more than a 2-3 star trilogy this just can't be more than a one star movie.
It's entertainment value for me is zero but I gave it another chance after watching the also Peter Jackson directed Bilbo trilogy which to my surprise I found startling and even as I find the novel Bilbo a lot better than The Lord of the Rings it's not more than a 5 star but my rating for the Bilbo movies is 8-9-7 in that order.
The Bilbo movies have everything this lacks: good casting, good acting and a Peter Jackson showing how good he really is. This movie is to me like some cosplay morons playing together and should never have been filmed doing so.
A little bit I can't stop to wonder how free hands Jackson really had making this crap. There is some good acting by some good actors and they all turn up again in the Bilbo movies and together with other good actors as well making them great and enjoyable to watch and you can feel Jackson handywork making the scenery wonderful and believable just like in King Kong. This movie has nothing of that really. The outdoor scenes with snow is laughable and so are the more acting type action scenes where stone pillars seems made of plastic and all the boring chit-chat scenes is overly theatrical and that doesn't work for me in movies with even great actors so for me this is just catastrophal and not even funny as these scenes can be in some movies trying hard to be serious but never get there.
With that said I remember giving away a couple of tickets to the premiere to some friends who hadn't read the books and they loved it and still do. I also have a couple of Tolkien fans for friends but they're more with me even if they just think of this a bad filmatisation of what they believe is great litterature which I obviously don't but even if I rate it crappy it's a movie you should watch just as I'm going to watch the other two movies again and that's just not only because it's -25 C outside and I don't want to move from my TV sofa but to make your own opinion of one, or three then, most talked about movies so far on this side of the millenium break.
An 8,8 average rating is for me a total mystery but I guess the Tolkien fans and cosplay clowns are many...
Cast Away (2000)
At Least an Hour too Long and Never Really Takes Off
The first thing that strikes me with this movie is how irritated it makes me during the scenes when our Robinson Crusoe tries to make a fire. For god's sake man - use the skates and a rock and you get sparks in seconds!
But why do I get that irritated? This movie is just too long and whatever happened to the perfect movie lenght of 1.30 h? Even if it would be shortened with an hour it's still too long as nothing really makes the story bind together and from a promising start there's just short cuts for almost two and a half hour with beautiful photage but that's not enough to keep me interested.
A weak 4 star movie not recommended to anyone except for having Tom Hanks in the leading or maybe I should say only part.
The Untouchables (1987)
Great Movie with One Big Flaw
Noticed someone else already made this point but this is fiction using a reality format and unfortunatly hasn't much to do what really went down.
However if you know de Palma's work and read up on history this is a much better action movie than most or maybe even every Hollywood "truth to screen" made today and It's up in the 9-10 star region in my eyes except for the fact that it might have started a new era when it comes to disregarding facts for fiction in movies.
Watch if you want a great action thriller but seek out some facts if you want to know what really happened!
Chocolat (2000)
Same Old Story
This movie really contains all the top actors of Sweden as well as Brad Pitt that I love and overall the cast is superb. But Lasse Hallstrom as a director hasn't evolved at all even today and it's like he's shooting "My Life as a Dog" over and over again.
This is beautifully filmed and directed but I couldn't keep focus anyway. It's sad as Hallstrom could do so much with this cast but it just becomes a sequal of nothingness all through this film.
For me personally this is a 1 star movie and the 5 is just for the wonderful scenary filmed with perfection and really good performances from Lena Olin, Peter Stormare, Brad Pitt and others but I have the same problem with this as I got with Ingmar Bergman movies but in a different way. Lasse made his name and just continued from there with nothing new to surprise me just as Ingmar did in my mind.
If you got no problem with tiresome repetions or haven't seen any movies from Hallstrom earlier so watch it. Just don't think you can watch another of his movies and feel even slightly surprised.
Otherwise watch Pitt in 12 monkeys, Olin in The Unbearable Lightness of Being or why not Stormare in Fargo or The Big Lebowski. I guess Bergman did his share in educating Olin and Stormare but Hallstrom just makes them almost into ghosts of the silver screen and I just checked the time-line for Pitt on wiki to get things right in this review and amongst all movies he acted in over the years this one is not even listed so I rest my case...
Watch and enjoy if you can live with not remembering anything of it in 5 sec or skip if you have better things to do with your life!
Action Point (2018)
Wow!!! An american comedy worth watching!
Well... this movie is most probably lost to everyone who didn't experience the first wave of (european) punkrock in the late 1970's / early 1980's but for me it's a given 10 star movie. Sure - i would rather watch "The Great Rock'n'roll Swindle" over and over again before watching this again but we're talking of an american comedy made in 2018 with useless Jackass Knoxville fronting and the last funny american comedy I watched was for sure made 10-20 years ago but only the soundtrack from this movie makes me smile!