The Importance of a Title

When it comes to cinema there are a million reasons a film can fail and another million reasons a film can succeed. One of the reasons that is often overlooked, is the title. This week I went along to see The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, a charming film from the director of Amelie, Pierre Jeunet. It was by no means my film of the year, but it was a sweet touching film about a genius child attempting to deal with the death of his brother and the rather eccentric family he has been born into. Now despite this film coming out in a week that was, to put it nicely, slightly lacking in strong cinema releases, it completely failed to scrape the top ten. So why was this? Well the only thing I can think of is that people are being turned away by the title.

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24/06/2014 0

Hollywood and the Curse of the Comedy Sequel

Much like the last article, this was originally going to be a review but I decided to do something a bit different.

Comedy sequels are notoriously difficult ground. Ask someone to come up with a list of five good Hollywood examples and most people would struggle. Most often they fail as they attempt to cover old ground, forgetting that often what is funny the first time around, has already become dull by the second. The Hangover is probably the best recent example of this. Two films after the original (which despite the amount of people who may claim differently, wasn’t that good itself) the formula has now been milked past any short shelf life it may have had and left the laughs behind a long time ago.

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16/06/2014 1

Edge of Tomorrow

Tom Cruise summer blockbusters are always a bit hit and miss. For every Mission Impossible there’s a Knight and Day. With recent years seeing a bit of a backlash against Cruise, he’ll be hoping that new release Edge of Tomorrow is one of the good ones. Based on the Japanese novel All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, this is essentially Groundhog Day with robots and aliens.

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06/06/2014 0

X Men: Days Of Future Past

The X-Men franchise has had it’s ups and downs. From Bryan Singer’s first two films, which started the franchise off with a bang, to the awful clusterfuck that was The Last Stand. It seemed to be finally starting to find it’s way again by going into the past and providing origin stories in X-Men: First Class. The follow up Days of Future Past now attempts to combine the two timelines, taking the classic cast of Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and co and combining them with the new guns in James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender.

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04/06/2014 1

The Two Faces of January

If you have recently quit smoking I would stay far away from The Two Faces of January. Set in the 1960’s, director Hossein Amini obviously decided that alongside the fashion choices of his central characters, the best way to depict the time period was to make sure that every character spent at least 3 quarters of the movie with a cigarette hanging out of their mouth. Based off of a novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith (who’s novels have previously provided the base for films like The Talented Mr Ripley) this is a film that oozes style and class, plus a hell of a lot of smoke.

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03/06/2014 0

OFF! – Wasted Years

When it comes to musical pedigree not many are going to compete with OFF! Boasting former members of Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Redd Kross, Rocket From the Crypt and Burning Brides they are a band that know their way around the music business and in particular the punk scene. Their latest album Wasted Years was released earlier this year and despite being 16 tracks long manages to come in at just over 23 minutes.

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29/05/2014 0

Godzilla

Godzilla has an unusual place in movie history. Originally a Japanese creation, all attempts by the West to transfer it to their own have been a disaster, with the 1998 Roland Emmerich version being the prime example. Despite this it’s fame appears to have only grown, with the Internet playing a major part in that, along with help from institutions like the BFI, which in 2005 released the original uncut Japanese version to a British audience for the first time. Therefore it was surely only a matter of time before the big lizard got another attempt to hit your cinema screens, however few might have predicted that the director put in charge of such a vision would be Gareth Edward’s, whose only previous movie was a monster movie, but was made for around $500,000 compared to the $160 million that Warner supplied for Godzilla.

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28/05/2014 0

Frank

It takes a lot of balls to take one of the acting’s fastest rising stars and put him under a mask for an entire film. Yet that’s exactly what Lenny Abrahamson has done with Michael Fassbender in his latest feature film Frank. Written by Jon Ronson the film is based on Chris Sievey and his comic alter-ego Frank Sidebottom, who’s band Ronson spent time playing keyboard in. Although in reality the only concrete link between the two characters is the giant mask that covers Fassbender’s face for the duration of the movie. The character itself takes not just from Sievey, but troubled musical souls like Daniel Johnston and Captain Beefheart.

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22/05/2014 0

Next Goal Wins

Football at the highest level is a bloated, corrupt and quite frankly horrible sport. Overpaid pre-Madonna’s prance around earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a week in teams assembled by Russian billionaires with little thought towards the fans. Yet we all still love it. We all come back week after week to buy the overpriced pies and worship at the altar of teams that quite often do not give a shit. Why? Well because of stories like that told in Next Goal Wins. Continue reading “Next Goal Wins” →

14/05/2014 1

Bad Neighbours

Bad Neighbours (or just plan old Neighbours in the US of A) is the latest film to star Seth Rogen, a man who in the last few years has risen to the top of the Hollywood food chain. However, this is Rogen with a difference. Rather than the slacker stoner, he is now the married, working man with a kid stoner. It’s a change that… Well to be perfectly honest it makes very little difference to the character he plays, except every now and then he looks a bit guilty before he grabs the drugs.

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13/05/2014 0