Great advertising - Honda

I love the new Honda advert. (Link at the end). I love it so much I am going to give them the extra advertising of posting it here. 

It is smart. 

It makes you watch it and it makes you pay attention. 

If you don't focus on it it doesn't make sense, but also it challenges you to watch it and it rewards you with praise for watching it. It isn't just celebrity nonsense (Asimo's appearance is so short and I am not sure he really counts as a celebrity anyway). 

And it shows you the products without stuffing them down your throat or lying about what they do.

It is advertising and entertainment together. 

I love it.

Make more adverts like this please! 

Film Review - Insurgent (aka Divergent 2)

By far the best thing about the first Divergent film was Shailene Woodley's hair. Here is my review of that. That lasted about 3 minutes into the new film before she goes nuts with a set of blunt shears. 

At first that is just a terrible mess but during the filming cycle her hair is recut and styled, and either she starts on a gym programme or the amount of running and jumping during filming starts to show. Clothes that fit tightly in some scenes then hang off her in other scenes, and the more toned her butt gets the more obvious that becomes. IN the meantime her spiked pixie cut gets wilder every time the camera angle changes until one point where she wakes up in the prison with a full Jedward. 

Theo James 'Four' and Ansel Elgort 'Caleb' are completely pointless in terms of the story. I assume they are in to attract more teenage girls to come and watch with their brains switched off by hormonal overload.

Miles Teller's 'Peter' changes sides so often that neither side killing him has already passed the epic stupidity of an Austin Powers villain.

Naomi Watts obviously sets herself up as the villain for the rest of the series, but her main contribution to the affair is to show up everyone else's wooden acting skills everytime she is on screen. Sorry Kate Winslet and Ashley Judd but you are on the list with 'everyone else' for this statement. I would quite like to see her and Miles teller just go on a murder-binge, clear out the rest of the cast and take over the world and do something sensible with it. Make sure they get the script team and director when slaughtering the cast. 

And like the first movie we continue with plot holes all over the place. One of them mentions that he often sees lights outside the walls, yet everyone blindly believes that there is nothing out there, until she opens a magic box and a 15 second speech from a 300 year old hologram shifts the entire world view? If the founders are so smart and powerful why did they come up with such a stupid set up? The child is too young to be developed and screened (see Film 1) so why is she judged as Divergent? How does this handheld widget suddenly produce massively better results than the huge amount of testing in movie 1? Why do half of Dauntless work with Janine and half against her, especially the half that were brainwashed and released, why would they still help her?! Why is the rest of the city, and most people's clothing, so dilapidated but the faction buildings are super high tech futuristic?

I have ranted a bit now, but this is actually still a better film than the first one. I still didn't like it, but I didn't hate it quite as much. 5 out of 10 from me.

Film Review - Chappie

It is basically Neill Blomkamp does Robocop. 

So he takes the Robocop characters throws them into South Africa and cheeses up all the accents very much in his District 9 style. Then he gives everyone silly outfits and utterly stupid haircuts and we are off (although apparently without a script editor onboard). 

Spoilers from here.

Some people are going to argue about Robocop as a comparison but look at what we have underneath. A humanoid police robot with a brain that comes to life, decides it's own moral code is an improvement on the one it was given by its boss and sets out to prove it which involves fighting against authority figures trying to kill it to prevent their failed experiment from becoming public. And lets not even pretend that the battle robot is anything other than a straight ED-209 rip off.

The effects are pretty good for the most part. 

The plot holes are ridiculous. 

It takes them nearly a week to notice that the key is missing, and once they do the reaction to the most important top secret lock is missing is just to phone up the guy who took it and tell him to bring it back. And then he doesn't and they don't react at all. 

While being threatened for his life, Dev Patel's engineering robot genius claims there is no way to turn the robots off remotely, but 5 minutes later Hugh Jackman does exactly that to a single robot and then half an hour later he hacks into the supposedly secure system and turns them all off at once. 

They start downloading conscious minds in minutes (ok, I can give you artistic licence on that despite knowing the Lawrence Krauss calculations) and the humans being downloaded don't have any problem with waking up as robots?!

The police battle bot is designed to shoot down aircraft? And comes with cluster bombs?

The police battle bot rips a guy in half, shoots an unarmed man etc. but there is no problem with oversight?

It almost gets more stupid with every scene.


Overall, it is better than Jose Padhlia's Robocop or Fred Dekker's Robocop 3, not as good as Irvin Kershner's Robocop 2 and not even in the same class as Paul Verhoeven's original Robocop.

Rating 5 out of 10. 

Film Review - Unfinished Business

Quite a bit of trailer fraud going on with this one. The trailer suggests that we are going to get something along the lines of 'The Hangover - German style' but this whole section of the movie only runs for about a 10-minute section and is quite far into the film.

The story misses a few key ingredients and at the same time tries to cram in too many other things that aren't really necessary. Pretty much the entirety of the family background section and everything that comes with it could go. The only funny thing that would go with it is the facetime freezing gag which could have been fit in elsewhere. 

The three protagonists are meant to have been working together for a year but fundamental character details about the basic mental abilities and characteristics of one of them are only just being revealed.

Nick Frost is pretty funny for the short time he is on the screen. 

James Marsden does what he is meant to in giving you someone to dislike, but there isn't really any reason why he acts like such a dick, other than possibly because he is a bit of a dick. 

Sienna Miller is as hot as ever, (ok maybe not as hot as the bit in her undies in Layer Cake) but despite all the sex jokes flying around she makes one about herself, but no-one else even makes a vaguely sexual comment in her direction. 

It isn't a bad film by any means, just it is a bit underwhelming for what it could have been. To be honest and a bit cheesy, it is all just a bit Unfinished.

Rating 5/10.

Film Review - Focus

Will Smith does his version of the big con, while Margot Robbie provides an excellent distraction. 

I loved the first half of this one. The set up was good, the standard look behind-the-scenes of the con games was very well done and pretty funny in parts. Then Brennan Brown's Germanic fixer Horst leaves and the second half is a bit of a let down.

There are some great little confidence tricks on show in the film, but nothing you haven't seen already somewhere else and there are a lot where the tricks are done just by camera trickery or selected cuts. The most obvious of them being the pickpocketing training scenes where the angles are all too close for you to see them cheating with camera and editing tricks rather than actually teaching. 

Then all of this evaporates in the second half.

There isn't really much of a confidence trick going on in the second half. it is just a cheap software theft which could have been achieved by the 'inside man' any time in the previous 2 years. 

Also the ending has been telegraphed. You are told in the first half of the film EXACTLY what they are going to do at the end, who is going to do it, why they are going to do it, … all a bit too obvious. And the twist to get you there is so blatant that you get it 5 minutes before it happens.  

And to finish it, they leave a room full of ferraris, by driving away in a stolen Fiat Doblo?! And the holes in the ending are fairly huge. The idea of the big con is to leave the victim with no means or motive to pursue or to have them hog-tied by the consequences of that pursuit, but in this film the 'victim' has no such impediment to just chasing them all down straight after the credits roll.

Overall 6 / 10 but 5 of those for the first half of the movie and the 6th for Margot Robbie's bikini.