Total Recall (1990)

[Movie 229 / Day 243]


In this classic Arnie movie, the big man plays Douglas Quaid, a construction worker who has a recurring dream of living on Mars (it's set in 2048 when Mars has been colonised). He goes to see a company that sells virtual holidays by implanting memories in your brain. After specifying his perfect memory as a secret agent on Mars, Quaid wakes up to find... That he is a secret agent and he must get to Mars to help the resistance fighters there. Or is he? Maybe he's just having a bad time in the implant centre.

Features lots of violence and bad one-liners as Arnie despatches various baddies, Total Recall is one of his best.

My rating: 7.1 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.4 / 10
Running time: 113 mins
IMDB link

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

[Movie 228 / Day 243]


Tarantino's take on WWII is a return to form and easily his best movie since Pulp Fiction. The Basterds are a rag-tag group of (mainly) American soldiers whose sole purpose is to strike fear into the hearts of the Germans. They do this by wandering around behind enemy lines, killing as many Nazi's as they possibly can and claiming their scalps.

More than that and the plot becomes a bit complicated, featuring a multi-layered story. It's funny, tense, violent, exciting; everything a Tarantino movie should be. Special props to Christoph Waltz who puts in an excellent turn as nasty SS man, Colonel Hans Landa.

Also nice to see (or rather, hear) Tarantino regulars Harvey Keitel and Samuel L. Jackson both get cameos!

My rating: 8.3 / 10
IMDB rating: 8.7 / 10
Running time: 153 mins
IMDB link

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)

[Movie 227 / Day 240]


Boasting more cameos than you can shake a dirty stick at, not to mention more than the average number of Star Wars references, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is one of Kevin Smith's sillier films. The plot, such as it is, involves Jay and Silent Bob attempting to get to Hollywood in order to stop a movie based on their fictional counterparts, Bluntman and Chronic, from being made.

It's silly, it references all of Smith's previous movies heavily, but it's pretty funny. I like.

My rating: 6.8 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.8 / 10
Running time: 104 mins
IMDB link

Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994)

[Movie 226 / Day 239]


200 year old vampire, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt) tells a young reporter (Christian Slater) his life story so far through a series of flashbacks. An interesting take on the vampire story, well acted and pretty good.

My rating: 6.8 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.4 / 10
Running time: 123 mins
IMDB link

Just Cause (1995)

[Movie 225 / Day 238]


Sean Connery is a lawyer that hasn't tried a case in years, now spending his time as a college professor. Until he is coaxed out of retirement by the case of a young black man that is thrown onto death row after confessing (under duress) to brutally murdering a young girl.

It's clear what the twist is going to be two thirds of the way through the movie, but it's very watchable nonetheless.

Ed Harris is brilliant as another death row inmate, Blair Sullivan.

My rating: 6.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.1 / 10
Running time: 102 mins
IMDB link

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

[Movie 224 / Day 238]


Eddie Valiant is a washed up private eye who has been at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey since his brother (and partner) was killed during an investigation.

He has had a severe dislike of Toons since then and won't take on any of their business, until he is hired by a studio boss to take some incriminating photos of Jessica Rabbit cheating on her husband Roger.

Brilliant fun and still holds up well.

My rating: 7.4 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.6 / 10
Running time: 104 mins
IMDB link

Hard Boiled (1992)

[Movie 223 / Day 237]


John Woo actioner featuring Chow Yun Fat as Tequila, the titular 'hard boiled' cop, trying to track down a weapons smuggling ring that killed his partner. The body count is high, the violence is pretty hard core and the story is pretty good. Plenty of dual pistol, jumping through the air action, as you'd expect from Woo.

The terrible, terrible, terrible dubbing marred it for me though - the DVD I watched had no original language/subtitle option, so I was stuck with Chow Yun Fat sounding like an Oxbridge graduate crossed with a New Yorker.

My rating: 7.8 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.9 / 10
Running time: 126 mins
IMDB link

Flubber (1997)

[Movie 222 / Day 237]


Robin Williams plays Philip Brainard, an absent minded professor who forgets to attend his wedding. Three times. His fiancee, understandably, is a tad upset and leaves him. An academic rival swoops in to steal her away and it's down to Brainard to use his latest invention, Flubber, to save both his fiancee and the college they both work at.

It's silly but amusing in places - and the kids loved it.

My rating: 5.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 4.6 / 10
Running time: 93 mins
IMDB link

Eastern Promises (2007)

[Movie 221 / Day 236]


Directed by David Kronenburg, Eastern Promises follows Anna, a midwife in a London hospital who helps deliver the baby of a Russian prostitute who dies during childbirth. Unwilling to let her be buried as a Jane Doe, Anna takes the girls diary and tries to get it translated in the hope of discovering who she was.

Unfortunately, that diary leads her into the middle of a Russian mafia dispute.

I wasn't sure if I was going to like it, but it turned out to be an excellent movie - Viggo Mortensen was very good in particular.

My rating: 7.9 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.8 / 10
Running time: 100 mins
IMDB link

Space Chimps (2008)

[Movie 221 / Day 236]


I was expecting this CGI cartoon to be terrible. It exceeded my expectations, but not by a huge margin. Essentially a space probe gets pulled into a wormhole and lands on an alien planet, complete with alien life. So, a trio of chimps are sent into the wormhole to see if humans would be able to survive the trip. Obviously, the chimps are all intelligent and end up helping the aliens fight against a nasty tyrant who wants to kill them all.

My rating: 5.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 4.4 / 10
Running time: 81 mins
IMDB link

Ong-bak (2003)

[Movie 220 / Day 235]


When the head of the village deity is stolen, a young martial artist (Tony Jaa) is sent to the city to retreive it. There, he inadvertantly ends up taking on the underworld and kicks ass.

Brilliant action, simple plot. Very enjoyable.

My rating: 7.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.2 / 10
Running time: 105 mins
IMDB link

The Full Monty (1997)

[Movie 219 / Day 234]


Sheffield, the late 90s. Many steelworks have been closed and consequently, many steelworkers are unemployed and struggling to find work. Carlyle and Addy are two such workers resorting to petty crime in order to scrape together enough money to survive. When the Chippendales arrive at the local men's club and the entire town's female population turn out to watch them perform, the two come up with a scheme to make some money by stripping - except, in order to add something extra to make up for the fact that they aren't Chippendales, they decide to show 'the full monty'.

Predicatably amusing scenes follow.

Stand out for me are Mark Addy and Tom Wilkinson, both of whom are pretty good. I found Robert Carlyle really annoyed me after a while, not least because his accent left a lot to be desired.

My rating: 6.9 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.3 / 10
Running time: 91 mins
IMDB link

The Core (2003)

[Movie 218 / Day 234]


Ridiculous action movie. The earth's core has 'stalled' and stopped spinning - with disastrous results for us. The only solution is to use an untested, newly invented type of metal to build a ship and use an untested, newly invented laser to drill a hole big enough for that ship to carry a bunch of scientists and a couple of astronauts down to the centre of the earth in order to set off a couple of nukes in order to jump-start it.

Average, but fun enough. I'm not sure if Film4 cut it for an advert or if I managed to miss a whole segment, but one of the scientists on the ship literally disappeared half way through the film.

My rating: 5.1 / 10
IMDB rating: 5.3 / 10
Running time: 135 mins
IMDB link

No Retreat, No Surrender (1986)

[Movie 217 / Day 233]


No Retreat, No Surrender is mostly about the mob trying to take over several karate dojo's in order to use them as a legitimate front. They go about the taking over by intimidation, in usual mob style - although the heavies they bring along are both karate experts. One of those heavies is Van Damme. I'm not sure why he's working for the mob though, as, presumably to cover his accent up a bit, he's billed as 'Ivan the Russian'.

Anyway, once a teenager's dojo owning father leaves town to avoid a confrontation, the teenager goes to Bruce Lee's grave and asks him for help. Oddly enough, the spirit of Bruce Lee (who doesn't really look anything like him) appears in an abandoned house and trains the kid.

Then he has a fight with Van Damme, who should have been able to destroy him with his eyes glued shut. After the fight, the credits roll, but I imagine all the kids he gets into scrapes with during the movie looking at him with newfound admiration and subtly hinted homosexual overtones. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see that scene in one of the longer cuts available.

It's bad it's good. Straight from the Joey Tribiani school of 'smell the fart' acting, No Retreat features a terrible plot, terrible camera work and terrible acting. However, it's gone past being simply bad and has become funny.

If you enjoy crappy 80s action movies in a comedy kind of way, you'll probably enjoy it as much as I did. If you want an action movie, this ain't it.

It also has the distinction of having the worst picture quality I've ever seen on DVD. It looks like someone has transferred it from VHS; but not a new, pristine VHS, rather one that has been rewound and recorded over a few thousand times before being used to tape the movie off Channel 4.

Amazingly, it's spawned a whole bunch of sequels! I may just have to check them out next time I want a laugh.

My rating: 4.9 / 10
IMDB rating: 4.6 / 10
Running time: 79 mins
IMDB link

Watchmen (2009)

[Movie -- / Day 232]

Still an awesome film. I really want to see the Director's Cut. Not sure why it's not being released in the UK.

My rating: 8.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.9 / 10
Running time: 162 mins
IMDB link

Ghost Town (2008)

[Movie 216 / Day 230]


Bertram Pincus is an obnoxious dentist who goes into hospital for an operation and spends 7 minutes dead on the operating table. When he wakes up, he discovers that he can now see dead people wandering around the city - and they all have a problem they need fixing in the land of the living before they can continue their journey into the afterlife. Once they discover he can see and hear them, it's not long before they're continually pestering him for his help.

It's a romantic comedy and it's far better than I was expecting it to be. Ricky Gervais plays his usual character, but it works well enough. Téa Leoni looks absolutely fantastic - so much so that it jars a bit whenever she's on screen with Gervais. Still, she's hot and he's funny, so it's all good.

My rating: 6.9 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.1 / 10
Running time: 102 mins
IMDB link

The Brave One (2007)

[Movie 215 / Day 229]


So-so thriller about a radio DJ, played by Jodie Foster, who suffers an horrific attack in which her boyfriend is brutally killed. Obviously, in order to cope with the grief, she buys a handgun and turns vigilante. That makes it sound more exciting than it is.

My rating: 5.7 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.9 / 10
Running time: 122 mins
IMDB link

High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2008)

[Movie 214 / Day 229]


Pretty rubbish musical about several hideously pretty teenagers and how hard their perfect little lives are.

My rating: 3.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 3.7 / 10
Running time: 112 mins
IMDB link

Traitor (2008)

[Movie 213 / Day 227]


Above average thriller about an American citizen, born in the Middle East, who is selling explosives to terrorists while the CIA are trying to track him down and stop him.

My rating: 7.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.1 / 10
Running time: 114 mins
IMDB link

Police Academy 6: City Under Siege (1989)

[Movie 212 / Day 226]


A prime example of a franchise that's about 5 installments past it's best. Absolutely terrible.

My rating: 3.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 3.2 / 10
Running time: 84 mins
IMDB link

Moon (2009)

[Movie 211 / Day 223]


Set at some point in the future and mankind has learnt to harvest helium3 from moon rocks in order to provide Earth with almost limitless energy. Sam Bell (Rockwell) is at the end of a three year contract working on the far side of the moon as a technician keeping the harvesting machines running. His only company is a computer called GERTY (voiced by Spacey).

He has a mere two weeks of his contract left before he can go home and see his wife and daughter again. Then he starts hallucinating and has an accident. When he wakes up, he is in the infirmary being tended to by GERTY. After his recuperation, he finds GERTY is under instructions not to let him leave the base until a rescue shuttle has landed to clean up the aftermath of his accident. He manages to take an unauthorised trip out to the broken harvester and what he finds there makes him doubt his sanity and, ultimately, his belief that the company he works for has his best interests at heart.

To say more would spoil the plot, but suffice it to say, Sam Rockwell is absolutely brilliant. It is, at times, like watching two different actors on screen. That he manages to hold your attention for 90 minutes with very few other actors is testament to both his talent and the script.

One of the best films I've seen this year.

My rating: 8.3 / 10
IMDB rating: 8.3 / 10
Running time: 97 mins
IMDB link

Crank: High Voltage (2009)

[Movie 210 / Day 222]


The original Crank was a brilliantly fun action movie. It was ridiculous, it was over the top, it was low budget, but it was novel. All of those things added up and it worked.

High Voltage tries to repeat the trick and, for the most part, succeeds. Obviously it's not such a novel concept this time around, so the film-makers have opted to add all sorts of bizarre interludes (from a flashback to Chev's youth to an odd Godzilla-style fight scene). I found it detracted from the movie. If they'd just stuck to more of the same, it would have been better.

As it is, it's pretty good, but nowhere near as much fun as the original. They did leave it open for a third though - if they make one, let's hope they go back to the original style.

My rating: 6.3 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.8 / 10
Running time: 96 mins
IMDB link

17 Again (2009)

[Movie 209 / Day 222]


In the spirit of Big or Vice Versa, 17 Again is the story of Mike O'Donnell (Zac Efron and Matthew Perry) who, suffering a mid-life crisis and in the middle of a divorce, is magically transformed into his 17-year old self again and realises that he doesn't want another shot at a basketball scholarship, he wants his family back.

Aaah.

It's OK. Relatively amusing in places and harmless enough. The funniest thing about it is Thomas Lennon who plays a character called Ned Gold, Mike's best friend, a geek who made millions in software, who spends the majority of the movie trying to woo the headteacher at Mike's school. I think I enjoyed it more than I expected because I was thought it was going to be as big a campfest as High School Musical, and it wasn't.

My rating: 5.3 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.5 / 10
Running time: 102 mins
IMDB link

Race to Witch Mountain (2009)

[Movie 208 / Day 220]


Dwayne Johnson plays a Las Vegas cabbie who gets caught up in a race against time, the government and an alien race when two kids get in the back of his cab, claim to be from another planet and ask for his help to recover their spaceship so they can return to their own planet in order to save both it and Earth.

It's an average kids actioner.

My rating: 5.8 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.0 / 10
Running time: 98 mins
IMDB link

Being John Malkovich (1999)

[Movie 207 / Day 219]


One of those bizarre films that should be a bit rubbish but somehow seems to work. Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) is a failed puppeteer who is forced to get a job as a filing clerk in order to make some money. The company he goes to work for is based on the 7.5th floor of a local building. One day, he finds a mysterious doorway behind a filing cabinet. When he crawls through it, into a wierd tunnel, he finds himself transported into John Malkovich's head for 15 minutes before being spat out onto the side of the New Jersey turnpike.

He teams up with a woman that works on the same floor (Maxine - a woman he's trying desperately to have an affair with) in order to turn the discovery into a business proposition by selling tickets to be John Malkovich for 15 minutes. Enter his wife, Lotte (played by an extremely dowdy looking Cameron Diaz), who enters Malkovich's mind and decides that a) she should have been born a man, and b) she is also in love with Maxine. Maxine decides that she quite fancies Lotte, but only when she's inside Malkovich. Cue a bizarre love triangle. Unfortunately, Craig can't cope with that so he locks his wife in a cage and tricks Maxine into meeting Malkovich - but he's inside his head instead of Lotte. He then discovers he can control Malkovich by harnessing his puppeteering skills.

There is an explanation for the portal, and yes, it is odd.

Somehow it works though and is quite enjoyable.

My rating: 7.5 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.9 / 10
Running time: 112 mins
IMDB link

James and the Giant Peach (1996)

[Movie 206 / Day 219]


Based on Roald Dahl's classic childrens novel, James and the Giant Peach follows the story of a little boy whose parents are killed by a runaway rhinocerous. Packed off to live with his mean aunties, they force him to do chores around the house while giving him the bare minimum he needs to live. One day, while saving the life of a spider, a mysterious man appears and gives the boy a bag of magical worm things, telling him they will change his life. Unfortunately, he drops them and loses all but one.

The others get into the dead peach tree at the bottom of the garden and an enormous peach grows on it. To cut a long story short, he ends up hitching a ride to New York in said peach, along with some enormous insects.

It's OK; but the book was better.

My rating: 5.6 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.7 / 10
Running time: 79 mins
IMDB link

Mr Deeds (2002)

[Movie 205 / Day 218]


A comic reworking of the 1950s classic Mr Deeds Goes To Town, Adam Sandler plays Deeds, a ordinary man that runs a pizza parlour in small town America. His great-uncle (that he didn't even know existed) dies and leaves him a $40 billion fortune.

The film is spent with Deeds falling in love with an undercover reporter while the head of the company he has just inherited schemes to remove him from the picture.

It's a fairly average comedy, lifted mainly by the usual Happy Madison cameo of Steve Buscemi as Crazy Eyes and by John Turturro playing the incredibly sneaky sneaky butler. If you like Adam Sandler though, there's a fair chance you'll like this.

My rating: 5.9 / 10
IMDB rating: 5.5 / 10
Running time: 96 mins
IMDB link

Hook (1991)

[Movie 204 / Day 218]


In a twist on JM Barrie's classic play Peter Pan, Hook imagines what if Pan left Neverneverland and did grow up after all? Williams plays Peter, who is a high flying lawyer until he visits his childhood foster home in London and discovers that he is really Peter Pan - when Captain Hook (a marvelous Dustin Hoffman) kidnaps Peter's children and holds them to ransom pending the war he is craving.

Fun and imaginative, Hook is a nice little fantasy movie that my kids loved. It is a little on the long side though!

My rating: 5.8 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.2 / 10
Running time: 144 mins
IMDB link

The Krays (1990)

[Movie 203 / Day 217]


Based on the story of Britain's infamous criminal brothers, the Kray twins, the film follows their lives from birth through their rise as the kings of London's underworld. Unfortunately, it spends far more time examining their early life and their personal relationships than it does their firm and how they came to rule London's East End.

It's OK, and the Kemps are very good in it, but it could have been so much better. I do love the scene where their mother has a roomful of gangsters checking their shoes for dog muck though.

My rating: 6.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.6 / 10
Running time: 119 mins
IMDB link

The Hangover (2009)

[Movie 202 / Day 215]


Doug is getting married. His best friends (and his slightly odd future brother-in-law) take him for a night in Vegas.

They wake up the next morning in a trashed hotel room containing a tiger in the bathroom, a chicken in the lounge and a baby in a cupboard - but no groom.

After this simple set up, the rest of the movie is spent retracing their forgotten night in an increasingly desperate attempt to find Doug and get to the wedding on time.

The trailer looked funny and the movie delivers. It's hilarious in places.

My rating: 8.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 8.2 / 10
Running time: 100 mins
IMDB link

AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem (2007)

[Movie 201 / Day 213]


The original AVP was bad. The plot was OKish, but all of the suspense and violence was taken out of the franchise in order to obtain a ridiculously low rating (I think it was rated 12 in the UK). This was the movie in which two of Hollywoods baddest of bad-ass baddies met for the first time. It should have been a bloodbath. Instead, it was a gayfest. The Predator even had compassion for humans; he should have been skinning them alive and hanging them upside down in trees, not scanning them for terminal illnesses then leaving them alone.

Watching the trailer for the sequel, it seemed that they may have righted some wrongs. Instead of trying to fit the movie into the Alien/Predator universe, it looked like they might have made a stand-alone movie, with some of the violence of old reinstated. There are no recognisable actors in it, so you just don't know who was going to make it to the end. That's where the good stuff ends. Unfortunately, although the plot isn't too bad (essentially a Predator ship crashlands on Earth, unleashing a bunch of face-huggers and a "Predalien" on the unsuspecting small US town it inevitably landed next to, prompting another Predator to come and clean up the mess), the film throughout seems to be extremely dark and over-contrasted. So much so that it's difficult to make out what's actually happening (I'm assuming it's the movie and not my projector going wrong). This is made much, much worse by the editing, which features lots of fast cuts and super-close-ups on the Aliens and Predator fighting. Consequently, you can barely tell who is attacking who.

The resulting movie is a mess and we spent the majority of it trying to piece together what was happening. It's about time someone made a GOOD Alien vs Predator movie, because the source material is awesome.

My rating: 4.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 4.9 / 10
Running time: 94 mins
IMDB link