While on the surface, it’s a standard love story plot with a minor twist, it is, in fact, an educational video showcasing the perils of wedding planning, and as such, is a must watch for any guy who has any inclination of getting married and settling down at some point in his life.

The instructional nature of the movie takes men through all the stages that a bride experiences during the planning stages of a wedding, from the initial, slightly touched phase, where everything is rainbows and puppies and white doves, all the way through to batshit insane, when the best thing you can do is agree.  Unless of course you are supposed to have an opinion about something which is a polite way of them finding out which of the two options being presented should be thrown out.

Now, what I found most interesting about this edutainment, was not the content itself, but rather the response of the average guy when watching.  This all depends on where they are.  The ones who are dating or single think it is a most amusing over-exaggerated piece of mockery about the excesses of the wedding industry and the fears they play upon.  Those who have found themselves with fiancée, spend the first half of the movie going “done that, been there, hmmm.” And the second half thinking “shiii-iiit, what the hell have I gotten myself into.”  Those who survived the pre-wedding madness look at it and go “they almost got it right, but perhaps they had to tone down the crazy a little bit to make it more believable to the non-wedded.”

The film is entertaining, and with Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson as the leads, at least there is eye-candy, especially during the bachelorette party, and if you’re going to have to sit through this to earn brownie points it is nice to know there will be some reward.

As this is a chick flick and not a dodgy movie, there isn’t a dodgy rating.  Instead, what we have is a brownie point system – as in, how many brownie points watching this with your significant other will earn you.  For Bride Wars, this is a little tricky to score.  If, when the inevitable “I wasn’t like that, was I?” question is asked, you are able to remove any trace of sarcasm from your answer, this one probably rates equivalent to flowers.  If you can’t, you may as well follow your answer up with “and when I said those pants didn’t make you look fat, I lied.”  After all, if you’re going to be sleeping in your car, at least make it for something worthwhile.

Bride Wars is, fortunately, relatively rewatchable, scoring a 3 mutant smileys out of five.  I say fortunately, as it’s worth watching a number of times to remind yourself why you’re going to make sure not to screw up because you’re never voluntarily putting yourself through that madness ever again.

This educational product should be mandatory viewing with every engagement ring sold.  And Honey, if you’re reading this, you were nothing like the brides in Bride Wars.  I enjoyed every minute of wedding planning and I’d happily go through it again with you. (I’m so glad tone of voice isn’t conveyed by text).

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.

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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I’m always a little nervous when people suggest movies to review. I never know whether they think they are asking me to review a cool dodgy film, or whether I’ve pissed them off and they are inflicting another Shoot ‘Em Up on me.  Fortunately, I’d already seen Tank Girl, so I did have some idea of what I was getting into.

Now, the last time I saw Tank Girl I was young and foolish.  Now, I’m just as foolish, but it has been a number of years since I watched Tank Girl, and age dims memories.  I remembered the kangaroos, I remembered the comic book interludes, I even remembered the awesome broadway style hooker dance sequence to “Let’s Do It”.  What I didn’t remember was the proliferation of Australian accents.  Now, some accents are lyrical, sexy and gentle on the ears.  The Aussie twang is none of these.  There are worse sounds, like a vulture that arrived last at the animal carcass, but those aren’t present in Tank Girl.

Despite this, Tank Girl is watchable, especially because it includes Jet Girl, the subject of boyhood fantasies everywhere.  But, even cooler (depending on your definition of cool) is the sentient tank.  Since watching this I often imagine sitting in an armchair on the roof of my car while it blows up the people who piss me off in traffic.

It’s hard to find a moment in Tank Girl that isn’t dodgy.  From the mutant mangaroos to the kick-ass weapon that sucks the fluid from a body and turns it into potable water.  And yet, the dodginess tried to tread the line between completely over the top and genuine superhero/comic-book movie.  This should always have gone for over the top and the bits that weren’t dragged it down a little yielding a score of 4 on the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man Index.  The dodgiest moment in Tank Girl was relatively easy to pick.  it had to go to the choreographed hookers dancing to “Let’s do it”  The  movie is worth owning just for this scene.

As I’ve mentioned before, there are a number of Australian accents which detract from the viewing experience.  however, if you can get past this the film presents an enjoyable, if disjointed, show.  And while it’s not going to be the first choice on most peoples list, it is worth a watch.  Tank Girl scores a respectable 3 Mutant Smileys.

On we go to the part that occasionally I really dread.  Picking a memorable quote in some movies is almost like finding a virgin at Mardi Gras.  There are plenty of lines that look like they might be suitable, but on closer examination you find that you’ve been duped.  Fortunately, Tank Girl has a line that perfectly sums up my feelings about poetry, especially that taught at school. “Look, if you want to torture me, spank me, lick me, do it. But if this poetry shit continues, shoot me now, please.”

Tank Girl is a pleasant diversion if you are a fan of mindles violence, skimpy outfits and can put up with the Australian twang.  Otherwise, you may want to skip it.

(<—-  Buy it here if you want to watch it, because no self-respecting video store would have a copy on it’s shelves.  I’ve got a copy, but then self respect doesn’t really have any part to play in my DVD collection)