When watching a movie there are two questions you should ask yourself at the end.  This first and least important is “How dodgy was that movie?”  In this case, the answer was supremely.  The second, and really the only question that matters “Did I enjoy that?”  For Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the answer was a resounding No.
Normally, a collaboration between Tim Burton and Johnny Depp has my dodgy sense tingling, and when I first saw this film advertising it rang like a fire bell. The opening sequence had me a little concerned, but it is Tim Burton and I was kind of expecting what was delivered. Then the singing started, which, I was also expecting. What I wasn’t expecting was how repetitive it would be. Needless to say, this was more than a little offputting.

Now, I was vaguely familiar with the source material and the storyline, so I wasn’t expecting a whole lot.  After all, it’s about a barber who kills his clients, and then disposes of the bodies by turning them into meat pies through Mrs Lovett’s Meat Pie Emporium.  I was expecting a fairly dark musical with some humor, instead of a dark repetitive tune with different words.

In case you haven’t noticed, the music was repetitive and annoying (kind of like my lack of vocabularly for describing it).

This was supremely dodgy and would have gotten a high rating just based on the Burton/Depp collaboration.  Throw in the throat slashing barber and you have a 5 on the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man scale.  It’s kind of hard to single out the dodgiest moment with the whole film attaining a pretty constant level, but the opening sequence showing the bloody path through the mincing machinery sets the stage and makes you wonder just what you’ve got yourself in for.

While rating very high on the dodgy stakes, I found myself wondering on more than one occasion why I was continuing to subject myself to this.  The answer, I did it, so you won’t have to.  This one ranks right up there with Aeon Flux and Catwoman as far as whether or not you should watch it.  Don’t!

It was a musical, so not much dialogue.  Even the lyrics weren’t all that memorable.  Or they may have been and I’ve just tried to block them all out in an effort to forget I ever watched this.

When not even Alan Rickman can save a movie, you know it shouldn’t have been made.  Don’t waste valuable hours of your time watching this one.

I finally managed to get my grubby paws on a copy of Avatar.  I wanted to see what all the hype was about.  Why this was “The Film of the year” and more importantly why so many people were surprised that it didn’t win the Oscar (although, that says a whole lot more about the people who thought this was a great movie than it does about the quality of the movie itself)

As you can tell from the ratings, I didn’t think all that much of Avatar.  It was enjoyable, but I have a large number of, well, let’s say comments, because I’m in a good mood and don’t want to scare you all off just yet.

Let’s start with the length of the film.  It did not need to be what felt like 6 hours.  At least half the film was taken up with pointless scenery and “look what we can do with computers”  If they had’ve cut even half the pointless scenes out of the film they could have saved an hour and 100 million dollars, and no-one would have cared.

Normally, I like simple to follow plots, which Avatar has.  But the hype around how great the film was centered on the storyline as well as the visual effects.  So, let’s look at that.  The damaged hero get’s a new lease on life and learns how to live again has been done so many times that it doesn’t even count as a plot anymore.  Clicheperhaps might be a better.

But these are minor gripes.  What kind of a God complex must humans have for us to force all intelligent life in the universe to conform to a bipedal humanoid shape.  Surely it’s possible on a planet that doesn’t seem to have any apelike creatures and that most of the lifeforms encountered have 6 limbs, that the dominant lifeform would not be human shaped.  (only having four fingers does not count as a significant enough difference).

Perhaps, the reason is more mundane.  Maybe, the audience is unable to identify with anything that isn’t a recognisable human derivative.  This really doesn’t bode well for when we finally make contact with the intelligent unicellular blobs from Alpha Centauri.

My final comment on Avatar.  Why were they on Pandora.  To obtain a mineral.  The name of the mineral, Unobtanium.  Fuck.  At least use a name with 37 syllables, not something taken directly from “The Core”.

Perhaps I should have seen Avatar at the cinema in 3D, but I feel that 3D is merely a gimmick designed to distract the audience from a dull uninspired movie, and given my reaction to the television version, I’m unlikely to change this opinion any time in the near future.

If you’ve got nothing better to do, go watch Avatar.  But you’d be better off watching a real alien movie like “Alien” or Evolution.

It’s not often that you watch a cartoon that is just so cool that you don’t care about the sickly sweet kiddie friendly plot, or the message that the producers tried to shoehorn into it about how we’re all the same underneath the different colour skin and how we can all live together in peace and love and rainbows and puppies and all that other crap.  (There are “puppies” in this film, but they’re cool and we’ll get to them later)  Planet 51 manages all this, and it’s just great.

The film revolves around some kind of plot in which the human astronaut lands and becomes the alien.  Something that was done before in Monsters Inc.  But that’s all besides the point.  The point of Planet 51 is to be a complete mockery of “the Ameican Way of Life” in the fifties, and, all the cool big budget horror/sci-fi films that have happened since then.

There’s even a scene in which the citizen’s patrol are being instructed on how to deal with the Alien invasion through a series of instruction manuals, two of which were attacked by sea monsters and attack by a 50 foot woman.  Planet 51 is even better than Monsters Vs. Aliens. (and i loved that film more than I should probably ever admit).

Cartoons really have to overachieve to reach 5 on the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man scale, and while Planet 51 often had me going all Keanu Reeve’s “whoa, that was cool!”  it never had me going “wow, that was fucking dodgy”.  There isn’t really a dodgiest moment, but rather dodgiest characters, and the award is shared.  Both characters are “puppies”.  There’s the alien dog from whichever alien movie had a dog infested with an alien (I think it was Alien 3 but feel free to correct me in the comments), complete with acidic urine and a tongue that was basically a face hugger.  The second dodgiest character was Rover, an unmanned probe that had the personality of a dog.  It was basically Wall-E, but with more personality.  The meeting of the two of them, complete with butt-sniffing had me falling off my chair.

Planet 51 got a gigantic 5 alien smileys.  It rocked.  I just wish I had’ve found it sooner so I would have more time to appreciate it.  As it is, I suspect that each time you watch it there are going to be additional alien movie cliches that you pick up.

The film’s script is alright.  In general, it’s not fantastic and is suitable for kiddies.  however, it does contain some real gems.  “Your daily dose of Chuck” is one of them, but the real winner in the most memorable quote is “The whole planet is full of alien life and you send back pictures of rocks.”  I’m sure this is what happened with the Mars Rover.  The sent the thing there to get interesting pictures of the rocks, so that’s what it sent back.

Normally, this is where I have final comments.  But there is something that needs to be added.  Planet 41 has the best use of “The Macarena” I’ve ever scene.  It starts playing when the aliens drop Chuck’s ipod and all of them fall to the ground holding their ears in agony (think Mars Attacks style, without the exploding heads) until someone shoots the device.   It’s even referred to as a “Heinous weapon” and if that wasn’t sufficient as a cruel sadistic device.  Stop the Madness indeed.

Planet 51 didn’t get nearly as much hype as it deserved, but fortunately, I managed to watch it before it descended into obscurity.  You should too.

Catwoman starring Halle Berry held a lot of promise. Halle Berry, in tight leather outfits wielding a whip. That was an image that should have been able to carry the movie by itself. Unfortunately, it didn’t. It’s kind of hard to decidde why the movie was so bad. The terrible dialogue, stiff acting or abysmal cinematography may all have contributed to the feeling of despair I had while watching this film. I think the only thing that managed to keep my interest was waiting for the ad breaks, after all, there might be a new advert or at least an old advert that I enjoyed.

Any superhero movie that takes 40 minutes before the superhero even starts to get her powers is off to a bad start. I should have stopped watching then, but morbid curiosity got the better of me. The only redeeming feature in the film was Patience’s, (Catwoman’s alter ego’s), boss as he was the actor who played the Merovingian in the Matrix series, which allowed me to think of the Matrix and the happier times that that memory brought me. Unfortunately that didn’t last for long as I was brought back to the horror of the scenes on the television. Time to wrap this review up before I run out of polite adjectives and have to resort to swearing.

There are many dodgy moments in the film. At 24 frames a second for 6240 seconds that makes 149760 dodgy moments, and there wasn’t a single one I would call my favourite. Actually, I lie. The end credits had a certain something. Mainly because they signify that the carnage was over and I could now get down to the serious business of forgetting that I ever saw the film. I found it hard to assign a dodginess rating to this film, mainly because I see dodgy as a good thing, which this film was not. In the end, it scored 2 on the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man scale, After all quantity is not always a good thing.

If a 1 on the scale is reserved for movies that I would only watch once, this one scores a 0, otherwise known as the antinike, just don’t do it. Yes, don’t even watch it to see if it really is as bad as I say. That is the trap I fell for.

Again, a tough choice, mainly to find a quote that was remotely memorable. In the end I had to go with one with which I could identify. “Would you go out on a ledge to save a strange cat?” “Only if the cat was carrying pizza.”

I think I finally understand the true meaning of the phrase curiosity killed the cat. Don’t watch this film, ever.

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The Wachowski Brothers were geniuses.  Not only did they manage to make floor length black trenchcoats cool again, but 10 years after the original release, The Matrix is still mindblowingly awesome.  In fact, The Matrix is so cool that even if they devoted the rest of their live to making movies like Aeon Flux, Catwoman and Elektra, their awesomeness would still rank well in positive numbers.
I’m not going to bother going into the plot here because if you’re reading this after seeing The Matrix I needn’t bother, and if you’ve got this far without seeing it, you need to go directly to your favourite dvd retailer, buy it, and come back after watching it.  You may find you need to watch it a couple of times before you can drag yourself away from it though.
While some of the acting is pretty good, (not Keanu Reeves’ performance, but he just had to look pretty), it’s not the acting that makes the movie, it’s the special effects.  The invention of “Bullet Time”, without which Max Payne would have just been another completely ordinary FPS, was a stroke of true genius, and allowed them to create gunfights that gave John Woo wet dreams.

The Matrix is one of those movies which causes me to feel great sadness that the dodginess and rewatchability scales only go up to 5.  It just jumps from scenes that make you go “Wow” to ones that cause you to exclaim “Oh My God, that was sooooooo awesome!!1!1!!1!oneone”  In case you hadn’t figured it out already, The Matrix scores a 5 on the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man index.  Choosing the dodgiest moment in this movie feels like having to choose between puppies in a pet store.  They’re all so good it doesn’t matter which one you choose you’ll still feel bad that you had to leave some behind.  In the end, I had to look for the least dodgy moment, which is Mr Anderson getting into trouble for being late to work again.  At this stage, you could still almost believe that this was going to be just another office-drone-cuts-loose movie.

The Matrix scores a 5 on the rewatchability rating, but really deserves more, pesky limited rating system.  Normally, movies like this have a couple of scenes that make you want to rewatch the movie.  The Matrix is not like this.  The whole film makes you want to rewatch the movie.  Even the scenes that progress the story rather than devolve into action orgasms are necessary as they allow you a chance to recover before another wave of toe-curling cinematography explodes on the screen in front of you.

You’re always tempted to go with the more common main stream quotations like “There is no spoon,” or “Why didn’t I take the blue pill?” when looking to quote a movie like the matrix. However, this would cause you to miss what is undoubtedly the best line in the film, “Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

Just remember, you can’t watch The Matrix, you have to experience it.

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