Reviews

I have been a fan of Alexander Payne since About Schmidt, because I love the way he manages to keep things simple and clearly structured throughout. And this film is no exception. The story is pretty simple: Matt King is owner of a large parcel of Hawaiian land along with his family, as they are the distant descendants of the people who first came to that island and claimed it hundreds of years ago. But that's really just a part of the story. It's mainly about family struggle and mid-life crisis. King's wife suffered a boating accident in the fist few frames of the film and is in a coma throughout it. In her will it said she wanted King to live together with their two daughters Alexandra and Scottie. I won't reveal any more here, but I can say that all the actors, especially Clooney as Matt and Woodley as Alexandra, put in a great performance and their characters are all completely believable. It's been a while since I last saw drama executed this well.

What a film! 9 is a really high rating for me, seriously, but this film deserves it. Every working man has had moments like this: when they're just sick of it all and they fell like shooting up something, someone, anything really, just to release their anger. Well, this man (played beautifully by M. Douglas) takes that to the next level. He's in his car in a still-standing line at a roadworks site. Suddenly he gets out of the car, and when a police officer yells at him what he thinks he's doing, he says simply 'I'm going home.'And he blasts the things that stand his way out of it with, of course, guns. You see, this is no office worker. This is a man who works secret projects for the U.S. army, so he has access to lots and lots of guns. Every time he sees something that angers him he begins to yell about how society has broken down, Meanwhile the police, lead by detective prendergast on his final workday before retirement, try to track him as he leaves a trail of murders and shooting-ups behind in the city. He is doing all that to get to his ex-wife and children. His ex-wife divorced him because one day he went crazy and beat her up, and so he was given police orders to stay at a distance of at least 100ft from her st all times. Prendergast really understands what this man is doing and why he's doing it. All this leads to an epic showdown at a pier, where he is ultimately shot by Prendergast, which is the end of the film.

Conclusion: Rent this movie and watch it. You will not be disappointed, Pinky-swear.

This is the prequel to the 1968 sci-fi masterpiece, which shows us the very beginning and how the apes take over the world,

It begins with a scientist, Will Rodman, who is developing a cure for Alzheimer's disease, which is made more interesting by the fact that his father has it, too. Anyway, he thinks he has it, but he decides to test it on apes first. It turns out to enhance the apes' brain capacity hugely, and they try to break out. The humans barely contain the breakout and kill all the apes, but one of them was pregnant and a baby ape is rescued by Will and taken home. Over the years Will and Caesar (the ape) grow a tight bond, but Caesar is growing up and when he attacks a person in the street he must be taken to a containment center. Behind the facade of the nice ape-playground there are cruel, small cages in which the apes are kept 23 hrs of the day. This hugely angers Caesar, and because he is almost as smart as a human, he crafts a plan. He manages to steal some of the Alzheimer's cure and give it to the other apes. Meanwhile the researchers find out the Alzheimer's cure is poisonous to humans, and when the apes break out they spread the virus around the world. This is where the movie ends.

Besides being a very entertaining movie and very well acted by the not- so-famous cast, it also bears the message that we shouldn't experiment on animals, because all sorts of things could go wrong. If it's not out of the theater yet where you live, go see it. Whatever your taste, you will not be disappointed. Pinky-swear.

I'm writing this about 1 hour after I got out of the theater.

I go to everything that Steven Spielberg had anything to do with, and I haven't yet been disappointed. And that didn't change with 'Super 8'. The story is set in the 1960's, five boys and a girl who are obsessed with making movies are going to shoot a scene at midnight at a train station. As they're shooting a car drives onto the tracks and collides with a passing train, causing a huge explosion. Having survived the crash they go over to the car that caused the crash and find their science teacher, severely injured, pointing a gun at them and telling them no to tell anyone, or THEY will kill them and their parents. This is where the movie takes off.

The acting in this movie is really good given they're all just kids, and the grown-ups also do a good job. It's really noticeable that SS produced this movie, it's all perfectly made. That man has a great talent and I hope we'll be able to see much, much more of his work.

Later in the movie we find out the train was an airforce train, which was carrying parts of an alien spaceship, and that the science teacher stopped the train to help the monster that hides below ground escape. The monster was locked up underground and is very angry, so when he can finally go aboveground he starts abducting random people, including the girl I talked about earlier. The boys (3 of them; one chickened out, the other has a broken leg), of course, go into the alien's lair to save her, which they manage, but then they are chased into a dead end underground tunnel passage. Joe, the main character, then bravely steps forward and convinces the alien to stop what he's doing.

And then comes the bad part. There's just a huge gap of information. How was the alien suddenly able to build a ship when for 5 years he was unable to? That and the ending is incredibly cliché. If not for the ending the movie would have gotten an 8 from me. But don't blame SS, he's just the producer. It's the director's and the writer's fault.

7/10

I've read positive and negative reviews about this masterpiece, and most of the negative reviewers seem to suggest that there's too much blood and that the series is just about hunting. You could not be more wrong. About the violence, I admit, there is some footage of animals feeding, but really, there isn't as much blood in all of the 10 hours of this series than in the average horror flick. Killing is not against nature, it IS nature. The animals, like cavemen, use everything from their kills. They do not kill for fun, like we do when we go hunting. If you were in the shoes of say a lion needing to feed her cub you wouldn't care about a little blood. And those who say the series isn't scientific enough, it wasn't meant to be scientific. It was meant to be a look at the few places on our planet that are still (almost) untouched, was meant to show you animals in their natural habitat. Bottom line: it's for amusement, not for expanding your mind. I still learned things though. My favorite episode is Caves

I'm a South Park fan, and I like EVERY episode. But this... this is the greatest piece of dark comedy ever made. There are more jokes and plot twists in this 20-minute episode than in any comedy movie. The laughing riot begins with Stan's saying 'Cartman, you're so god damn stupid, it's unbelievable', with an expression that is funny because it's unexpected and unique. That expression was never used again. The episode has lots of little jokes that you might miss while laughing, like Cartman being delivered a package and the deliverer saying 'Cart-man' in a funny way, or all the men running from the bushes when Mr. Tenorman finds out Cartman, Jimbo and Ned are hiding there. There is simply nothing better ever made. I've watched it many times and it has yet to become stale. If you like Cartman's horribleness, you could check out 'Casa Bonita' or 'Ginger Kids'or 'AWESOME-O'or 'Die, Hippie Die' or 'Cartoon Wars'. Hell, I could name 20 episodes, but I won't.

Being a Stephen King fan, I obviously read the book and I have to say this film does skip a lot of parts. It's like they film everything up to page 200 then skip right to page 400. They missed the Sally Pratt/Lester Pratt bit, they missed Polly's destroying the thing in her azka, they missed how Pangborn's wife and son died, they missed Ace Merrill, The actual store doesn't look a bit like it is described in the book (In the book it's in the middle of the street, in the film it's just standing on its own somewhere), and it would've been nice to see a bit where Gaunt travels to another town, which are the final pages of the book. But King adaptations usually miss out a lot, and that's not necessarily bad. In fact the only faithful adaptations I've seen so far are Misery and Pet Sematary. But the actors all do a very good job. I like von Sydow as Gaunt, I like Harris as Pangborn, the only actors that could've been better were the ones who played Wilma Jerzyck and Nettie Cobb. So all in all a decent job, though it would've been better had it been a little longer and had it contained more of the things that happen in the book.

I mean, really, what hasn't been said about this film yet? That's right, nothing, and so I'll now write a review that doesn't go anywhere.

There are those that say this (or maybe pt2) is the best movie ever made, but I couldn't agree with that. One of the best, yes, but not the best. And then you have those who say it's overrated and boring. I think those people are just not used to extremely long movies anymore, and that's sad, because these people are missing out on some other awesome long movies (casino, GF 1,2,3, Heat, Once upon a time in the west, etc.) Anyway, back to the movie. It was the breakthrough for several great actors, including Marlon Brando, in the brilliant role of the compassionate but cruel Don Corleone, and Al Pacino of course, in the role of Michael, the Don's son who didn't want to take over the Corleone empire at first but in the end does anyway. When I fist sat down to see this movie it was with thoughts of 'overrated' and 'way too long', but the 2h55 just flew by, really. Though it was the longest movie I'd ever seen, it felt no longer than say Inception, which is 30min shorter and (in my opinion) a really boring movie, and at the end I couldn't wait for pt2, so it was a convenience that I had it standing right next to me in my DVD-rack.

Most Stephen King movies are good, some even awesome (Misery, Shawshank Redemption, Green Mile), and The Mist can count itself amongst those three. If you've read the book, you'll know how close the movie keeps to the book, but that's only good, because the book is so awesome (i'm a Stephen King fan too :). The fact that there's almost no music (apart from some music at the end, but that fits in perfectly) makes the atmosphere tense and makes the characters seem more realistic. The movie, far from being a run-of-the-mill horror flick, shows how people can lose their heads and turn to anyone who promises them savior (Mrs. Carmody). Apart from that frightening idea, there's also plenty of 'regular' horror, with about 3 bloody scenes. That may seem nothing compared to say Saw 3,which is basically one big bloody scene, but if there were too much blood no one would take it seriously, because (forgive me) those "Other dimension creatures" are a bit too fake to believe. But the very best part of the movie is the terrible ending in which **HUGE FREAKING SPOILER** the main character, David, his son of 5, a woman he met at the supermarket, and two old people, one of which is his old elementary school teacher, are sitting in the car in which they had fled, which had run out of gas, and so they know that they're going to die because the Other dimension creatures are everywhere in the mist. David takes out his gun, which has 4 bullets in it but they are with five. He shoots the others, including his 5 year old son, while he really wanted to die himself too. He crawls out of the car, wanting to be killed by the creatures, but then the army come down the road. And the terrible truth occurs to you: he just killed 4 people, including his son, for nothing! With that thought, the movie is over. I remained dead still in my seat for 2 minutes. A masterpiece.