Inception (2010)

A film that most film critics have been raving about in the last year, Inception has taken people to a new level of filmmaking and has impressed film fans and critics to an acclaimed status worldwide. It was named the best film of 2010 on numerous occasions and won four Academy Awards including: Visual Effects, Cinematography and two Sound Awards whilst being nominated for four others including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. To me this Christopher Nolan's third best film after Memento and The Dark Knight.

Now for my Review of Inception. The term "Inception" is defined as someone planting an idea into someone's mind using a device which lets humans invade another human's sub-conscious (dreams). This film's plot is about a skilled thief played brilliantly by Leonardo Di Caprio, who needs to perform Inception on the heir of a Business Empire in order to get back to his home. Now if this technology existed, we would never be considered safe anymore even if we really thought this was groundbreaking. The thief Dom Cobb, is said to be the best at stealing information from a human's mind and he proves this at the beginning of the film when he and his partner Arthur played by Joseph Gordon Levitt, steal information from the mind of Mr Saito played by Ken Watanabe as part of an audition to see if the best extractors can perform "Inception". 

The whole premise of this film makes it sound like a Stanley Kubrick film as we can recognize some motives and ideas constructed in the visual style of Kubrick's films. This film has so many great ideas inside it and uses those ideas to create a two hour long maze of a film as if it were created to make us confused and feeling motivated to use our minds to work every piece of what was coming next. I honestly thought I that this film was not an amazingly great film but I thought it was a good film even if it did borrow some ideas from films of Stanley Kubrick and the science-fiction action film, The Matrix (1999). My reasons for my liking of Inception are as follows:  Point 1. Its Art Direction, Visual Effects and Original Score make it one of the best looking films I've seen in recent years. Those three elements are so brilliantly put together that it gives the film a greater edge towards it. Point 2. The Cast was very wise choice especially with the enigmatic performance of Eames played by Tom Hardy. The actors in this film make it a very realistic film as it explores corporate espionage in it's ruthlessness and dishonesty. One actor I was pleased to see out of the rest was Tom Berenger. Berenger has acted in many films including my personal favorite War film Platoon (1986). I have never seen him in anything recent and it was a delight to see him on top form as the corporate bad guy who is also the godfather of the subject of Inception played by Cillian Murphy.

Inception is proof that blockbuster and art can be the same thing. I listed it as the sixth best film of 2010.

I will give this film 4/4 stars. This was my review of Inception and you can get all my reviews via Blogspot.

Fierce Creatures (1997)

A lot of people seem to mistake this film for being a sequel to A Fish Called Wanda (1988), but it is indeed a follow up or as Kevin Kline called it, an Equal. A Fish Called Wanda was an immense success and it happens to be one of my favourite films because it is just to good to be ignored. But this film would produce an equal named Fierce Creatures. The name Fierce Creatures comes from the name of a Monty Python sketch written by Michael Palin and Terry Jones (Michael Palin and John Cleese being the only members of Monty Python to star in both of these films).

In 1996, John Cleese hired directors Fred Schepisi and Robert Young to direct the film Fierce Creatures which Cleese had written shortly after A Fish Called Wanda. When the film was released in cinemas in 1997, nearly most of the people and critics who saw it were disappointed with the film as it just didn't make anyone amused or interested because it wasn't nearly as funny as A Fish Called Wanda. 

Fierce Creatures is a story about a New Zealand Businessman named Rod McCain (Kevin Kline) (a metaphor for Rupert Murdoch) who purchases a zoo named Marwood (based on Marwell Zoo in Hampshire, United Kingdom but is named after John Marwood Cleese) in London, England. The corporation that McCain owns Octopus Inc., requires it's investments to return 20% of the profits it earns to Octopus and if it doesn't it is sold or put on the scrapheap. McCain hires a retired British Hong Kong Policeman (John Cleese) to run the zoo. When the policeman controls the zoo he insists that the zoo adopts the new "Fierce Creatures" policy in which only very lethal animals will be kept in the zoo to increase popularity and revenue. This plan fails as the zoo keepers protest in favour of running the zoo the way it was normally run in the past. A businesswoman from Octopus Inc. played by Jamie Lee Curtis and the businessman son of Rod McCain (also Kevin Kline) quickly take control of the zoo with disastrous results.

When I first saw this film, my first impression was that it was not going to be as impressive as A Fish Called Wanda. I then saw it and thought to myself, should this film have called itself Fierce Creatures because we only see the moment of the Fierce Creatures within the space of half an hour and then it disappears with the film degrading out of control as soon as Kevin Kline enters as the son of the New Zealand Buisnessman. This character that Kline plays has moments of laughs but in the end could be described as nothing more than stupidly pointless. This is because he never seems to be of some use to the film, he's not enjoyable to to watch because he tries to get laughs with this character but he makes this character somewhat unlikeable. John Cleese's role in this film is foolish in the extreme, mainly because he is to old to be playing his character and his parts that are meant to be laugh out loud for example, the scene when the younger McCain and Jamie Lee Curtis pay him a visit about the zoo, they seem to think that he is philandering around with more than one woman when in fact he is trying to keep more than one animal quiet in his bathroom. There was more than one character I liked in this film and unusually it was the Michael Palin Character, who keeps a tarantula named Terry (after member of Monty Python, Terry Jones) and Rod McCain. I liked the Michael Palin Character because unlike A Fish Called Wanda where Palin played a stutterer who could not speak, he plays a chatterbox who does not shut up and there are some very amusing scenes with him. The character of Rod McCain was enjoyable because he insults virtually everyone around him and it is funny to see when he is usually on the phone closing down another enterprise and also getting the rights for China's public executions.

Fierce Creatures in a nutshell is a worn out, tiresome film that I think has destroyed a part of John Cleese and Kevin Kline's as they have not been in anything better after this film. It certainly was as good as I thought it might be.

I will give Fierce Creatures 2/4 stars. This was the count and you can see all my reviews via Reviews from the Count on Blogspot.

                                                        

First Film Review by the Count: Grindhouse (2007.dir.Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez)

The definition of the term "Grindhouse" is that of an old rundown American cinema that would usually show exploitation/horror films with extreme sexual content from the 1970's to early 1980's. Examples of such films include The Last House on the Left and Cannibal Holocaust both of which have managed to gain cult status with fans worldwide. The Grindhouse cinemas suddenly just disappeared in the middle of the 1980's and were completely forgotten about for nearly 22 years. This was because people were completely shocked by the extremeness of the films shown. But let's face the facts, they were terrible films with the exception of The Last House on the Left. In the United Kingdom, some Hammer Horror Productions were shown in our equivalent of a Grindhouse known as a Fleapit.


Now for my review. In 2007 the film Grindhouse was set up by film director Quentin Tarantino who is a known fan of Grindhouse Cinema as well as other genres of films like Spaghetti Westerns and Hong Kong Action Cinema. Tarantino teamed with Spaghetti Western film director Robert Rodriguez, to have two films and some fake trailers for films that don't exist, all to be put into one long massive explosive homage/tribute to Grindhouse. First would be director Robert Rodriguez' film Planet Terror and then Quentin Tarantino's film Death Proof followed by the fake trailers in the middle. Both films were to be shot in the style of Grindhouse so the cinematography would be jumpy, scratchy and even a missing reel was in on purpose put in Planet Terror. Both films were box-office bombs and met with mixed critical reception.


Planet Terror involves a group of people who aim to escape a zombie plague which is caused when nearby Military officials accidently release a deadly toxin/gas that turns all the local townspeople into pus and blood ridden zombies  who stop at nothing to kill people. Now that is pretty basic Grindhouse plot as usually there wouldn't be much plot to these films in the first place but let us not be mistaken this doesn't make it a very good film. The acting in this film does a lot to help itself because you have Bruce Willis playing the twisted Lieutenant and Naveen Andrews playing a sinister scientist who for some reason chops people's testicles off if they don't comply with him. There was only one actor who I thought was wasting his talent and I'm sad to say that it was Josh Brolin as the menacing doctor who treats the infected townspeople. Josh Brolin should  know better than to  than to star in this film while also proving his talent in No Country for Old Men in the same year. The best thing that anyone could say about Planet Terror is that is a very honest film because it doesn't release itself from it's premise which is trying to remain a successful tribute to Grindhouse with cheap wooden acting and being a badly written film. It's success is because it doesn't pretend to be something it isn't and I believe that Robert Rodriguez has created a good homage because it is for most people who were around back during Grindhouse, as if they were re-visiting the bad past but in a good way. It is neither a good film or a bad film but it carries out the mission employed by Tarantino. 


On the other hand Quentin Tarantino's homage Death Proof is anything but an honest film. It's basic plot is about a sadist who goes around killing women with his allegedly "Death Proof " car. When I saw  this film I couldn't actually mentally imagine how Quentin Tarantino the man who created Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction could drag himself down to this, a boring and confusing film with nothing that could be describe as honest or at least attempting to execute what had been Tarantino's initiative. Tarantino appears in the film briefly as a bartender but fails to deliver his lines as everyone else in the film talks like Quentin Tarantino which means that other actors are better at doing Quentin than Quentin is as himself. The Sadist is portrayed by Kurt Russell, a veteran actor famous for Escape from New York and Poseidon. Now funnily enough, Kurt Russell is not a bad actor and in Death Proof he gives a dark and quietly sinister performance as Stuntman Mike, the Sadist. I enjoyed watching  Kurt Russell in this film but I really didn't care much for any of the rest. On terms of Honesty this film goes from Drama to Horror to Thriller and then descending into Action at the end where we have a large car chase completely ripped off from the film Vanishing Point. I suppose that Tarantino wants to use motives and themes from other films just to make his own films. This part I thought was the weakest end of Grindhouse.


If there was anything I did like out of the film it was the fake trailers. I thought that they were right in the style of Grindhouse Cinema because they looked just like what I had imagined or wanted to imagine right from the start. The trailers were for films that don't exist and they included: Machete, Don't, Thanksgiving and Werewolf Women of the SS. I was pleased to see that Don't was created by Edgar Wright whose films Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead I have treasured ever since I first saw them. Don't was just in the style of the Hammer productions being played in the British Fleapit. The rest were interesting apart from Werewolf Women of the SS which I thought was really letting the side down because of it's unrealism. Machete was constructed into a feature film in 2010 by Robert Rodriguez. Thanksgiving was another good piece of work by Eli Roth, the director of Hostel and Cabin Fever, however this does not make up for his work in Death Proof.




I will give Grindhouse 2/4 stars.


This was my review of Grindhouse and you catch all of the Count's reviews in due time.

                                                                               

First Review Announcement

Tomorrow I will commence my first review. The review will be of a film that has been memorable to not only critics but also to me as well. This will be a review of the film Grindhouse (2007). It is a film that has had a lasting effect on me for the last four years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grindhouse_(film)

First Post of First Blog by the Count

Hello to all my fellow followers of my blog. From now on I will be making posts for reviewing old and new motion pictures. Please read because it would be great to know what people think about my opinions on films today.