Film Review - Cake

Jennifer Aniston does acting. 

Not just turning up and looking pretty, or pretending to be a bit empty headed, but actual acting, with character development and everything. Some of it is a bit forced but I felt that was more the scripting and direction than her performance. This is the sort of role she is going to have to take more often if she wants to be a serious actress and start appearing on the nominations list for a future Oscar. She isn't quite there yet, but again I am not completely convinced that it is her skill falling short rather than those around her. 

Her injury make-up is very good. When she is in the pool and you can see her legs the scarring and stitching marks were as accurate as anything I have seen. 

And that is just about where the good bits of this film have to end.
Considering the weight of the rest of the cast it is slightly disappointing that Aniston is left to carry pretty much the entire film herself. As always Anna Kendrick merely has to turn up to make an impression and virtual unknown Adriana Barraza does an overly stereotyped cliche role to give Aniston some background to work with but a lot of the rest of the star turns do little or nothing. 

Sam Worthington and Felicity Huffman do very little, and their respective career histories distract very much from what they are doing. And Worthington's character makes no sense, why does he just let her in the house, and from there all his behaviour just gets more bizarre to fit around the core character? 

And then it starts to get really silly from there. If you are going to have someone turn up for a 30 second role, say two lines and disappear; why bother wasting someone of the calibre of William H Macy on it? Similarly the two short scenes that Mamie Gummer (Meryl Streep's daughter) turns up for could have been done by any jobbing actor. Lucy Punch's single scene appearance just leaves you waiting for a bad joke to close it out. And Chris Messina as the ex-husband is just flat. I couldn't help but thinking that switching him with Worthington would have given them both more suitable roles. 

The story is patched together in a way that doesn't really make sense. 
The direction is a bit hit and miss. 
The ending is 20 minutes too late, everyone thought it was ending on the railway tracks, the bit tacked on after that is just meaningless. 

Overall 6 out of 10. 

Film Review - The Wedding Ringer

To be honest, I didn't really expect much from this one. 

It looked very much like a standard formula, with all the best bits in the trailer. And after the last few months of being fed Oscar candidates week after week, then a few huge budget nonsense efforts that have been pretty predictable, I really expected for this to be a virtual week off with a lazy formula comedy that I could write all the jokes myself.

Josh Gad doesn't do anything particularly special, but at the same time he doesn't interfere with the virtuoso performance from Kevin Hart. 

Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting wasn't great but maybe that was my fault because I so associate her with Penny from Big Bang Theory that I couldn't really see her as a different character. Olivia Thirlby on the other hand was great. And her variety of performances, following this on from Dredd and the Darkest Hour shows she has a great range that I can see this complete change of pace paying off for her in future. 


Kevin Hart though is an absolute gem throughout. It isn't that he steals every scene, because he doesn't. That would imply somehow that he gets in the way of the other performances, which certainly isn't a fair description. He lets everyone else do what they can and then he fills in the spaces around them just the right amount to round everything out. 

On the very minor downsides, some of the language is unnecessary, and some of the cheaper, ruder gags are unworthy of the general quality of the film. 

This is right at the top of the 7/10 range. If I wasn't such a cheapskate with the 8 and 9 scores this would probably have earned the 8.

Film Review - Fifty Shades of Grey

There are enough bad reviews of this movie on the internet. I don't need to add another one. It is simply terrible. 

4 out of 10

Film Review - Kingsman: The Secret Service

The music through the opening credits, Dire Straits hammering out Money For Nothing in true 80's nostalgia, and the links to that video in the way the credits themselves roll out, give a great lead in to the idea that this isn't going to be a 2015 style spy movie. In a world where the likes of Bourne and Bond are tending more towards a (very) stretched version of realism, Kingsman goes old school with a ridiculous premise and a crazy bad guy with an impossible scheme to destroy the world and a ridiculous henchwoman. 

The ridiculous goes from there, and gets equally silly and fantastic but seems to manage the balancing act of never taking itself too seriously but never getting too silly. 

The action fight scenes with Colin Firth are strange, but in a good way. He turns his hand to the action hero role a lot more readily than I expected. Spoiler - Once he is killed off the remaining cast struggle a bit to carry the film to it's conclusion.  

Mark Strong's Scottish(?) accent wanders around a bit too much for my liking. And Samuel L Jackson's lisp is just strange. The secondary characters are a little underdeveloped, relying on stereotype to fill the gaps and the female characters even more so. At over 2 hours long already this has to be forgiven a little but I would have preferred slightly less of the action sequences in favour of a bit more story. 

There are some great sections where the bad guys try to justify their schemes and actually put a decent bit of story and morality into the movie. Mark Hamill is wasted, but no worse than Jack Davenport is.

One thing that really did bug me though was that some of the ruder jokes and unnecessary swearing could have been cut back. In many cases the swearing for effect became swearing for the sake of it and the scandinavian princess bits are completely unnecessary. 

Somewhere around the 7 or 8 out of 10 but I am going to go for 7 just for some of the little niggles. 

Film Review - Jupiter Ascending

Considering the amount of heavyweights in the cast, you would think that one of them might have stood up and said that the script needed a bit of work.

The visuals are excellent. I never really like CGI characters appearing on screen with real actors, Jar-Jar Binks has really ruined that for the foreseeable future, but the half-lizard henchmen are smooth enough, as are the half-elephantine pilot and the androids (I assume androids because this is one of many things that isn't explained). This illusion may be helped by the prosthetics featuring on many of the other actors. Tatum's half-wolf is explained but there also seem to be half-bat, half-blackbird and so on.

The political machinations are a bit convoluted. Not quite the nonsensical complexity of the Star Wars prequels, but messy enough that they distract from the story as you try and keep up. The role of the Aegis as interstellar police is covered, but when they are actually called on to enforce the law they are actually a bit useless. Legions, Skyjackers, and host of others get throwaway mentions in what obviously should be a larger universe. A lot of this needed fleshing out a bit more.

The 5 minute Terry Gilliam steampunk bureaucracy segue in the middle has his fingerprints so heavily on it that there is almost an anti-climax when he appears at the end of it. 

But up to this point I still really enjoyed it. It was great to watch, plenty going on, decent performances, although Kunis does seem to phone it in a bit in terms of a toilet cleaner not being shocked about being the owner of this planet and several others.

Eddie Redmayne is disappointing. He will be hoping that none of the Oscar voters saw this effort until after they had cast their vote for his Stephen Hawking impression in Theory of Everything. 

The real problem comes with trying to squeeze the film into 2 hours. It really should have been two films but I can understand that the Wachowskis couldn't do that. They would have effectively have had to cut it so that the first film was just the Matrix but with space instead of computers and then created a vastly different film for their sequel. The result being that the second film would have to be such a massive change of pace and vision and they can't afford to have another sequel like that on their record after the disasters of the Matrix sequels. So I understand why they cut it to one film, I just think that the amount of explanatory scripting they had to sacrifice to make that work was too heavy a price to pay.   

I am going to give it 7 out of 10, but I feel maybe I am being a little generous here. 

Film Review - Big Hero 6

Another double movie weekend as we went to get Big Hero 6 on Sunday.

It is an animated movie, whose main audience is definitely children, so there is some forgiving to be done about the holes in the story. 

But being from Disney I expected more. And with Toy Story's John Lasseter on the production team I expected a LOT more. He can make animated children's films that work for adults. With the possible exception of Miyazaki, who arguably makes animation for adults that sometimes works for children, Lasseter is the absolute brand leader in making children's animated films that work for adults. Yet somehow this film just doesn't do anything in an adult level. 

Also the animation quality wasn't up to the normal Pixar standards. The surfaces seemed flat and they look animated. That may seem obvious enough, but in a world post-Toy Story, where the characters and story are so developed that you can forget they are a cartoon, and post-Frozen where the snow and the shadows and light all seem to be as alive as the amazing characters, BH6 just doesn't even come close to competing against those. 


Overall it isn't a bad movie, it just isn't good enough for what it is competing against.
My rating 6 out of 10.