"One Direction: This Is Us" G
Morgan Spurlock didn't get to do the Justin Bieber documentary, so they let him do the One Direction version some years later. It's now 2013 and the kids born around 2000 get another boy band, studio made boy band. British version of American Idol, X Factor, is an international sensation, studio marketing thing, and they make bands. Back in 2010, after a rousing competition, they selected five late teenage boys to form a rock band called One Direction. This is their story, even if the title is a riff on the a Beatles, and others. It's okay because they are a boy band, and every boy band before them, going back into time to the '50s really, has had a slew of devoted fans waiting and screaming to see them on stage.
Naill, Zayne, Liam and Harry seem like handsome fun blokes, which was probably the appeal putting them together, and at times their revelry appears genuine, like driving around in as golf cart, or talking about spooky stand ups, their own personages on cardboard, or dressing up to fool fans, or playing soccer. Being tired going from concert to concert mirrors the Bieber one, and really in that was more genuine. One of their new songs parodies corporate made bands, which is terribly ironic consider yes, you are a made up band! Their parents have barely seen them since the won the Factor show, but one of them buys his Mom a house. Made you wonder if when they aren't famous anymore will the bank take the house back. Ha.
It could have helped had they actually explained some of the business, like in the Bieber one, that the studio that owns them actually paid for all of their stuff, or something. Then fans aren't as crazy as in the Bieber one, or at least are never interviewed. At one point one of them dresses as a fake security guy to tell some fans they stink. Hopefully they got it was a joke.
With the ridiculous rise of instant access internet to everywhere, all at once, they will not be the first boy band to rise incredibly and be everywhere in three years. It's a new sensation. The Net that is.
As for the songs, including an awful Blondie cover, are kind of same like, and the whole appeal is that self esteem troubled girls will listen to music where the cute boys say nice things about their looks. Literally, that is the theme of half if not most of the songs, and they're all very drab. But when you are 13 and a girl, you haven't heard the crooning of InSync or New Kids or even an old Journey song.
Then the fans grow older and they move on. Doing a movie now makes
sense. By 2016-2018 the band will likely be another memory, fond for
some, maybe not so for others.
Older siblings and parents of the 1960s might recall the Beatles along the same lines, but they were actually highly talented musicians that could sing and play, and they're still remembered nearly 50 years later. 1D will not be. In the 1980s it was New Kids on the Block, and in the late part of that, girl bands like the Spice Girls. They are still remembered.
The 2D version of the 3D concert is enough. You really don't need the gimmicky flying at your face 3D.
So technically wise the move is all right, a little lazy, and visually tries to be interesting with nice flashy venues, from the famous concert halls in New York, MSG, and London, O2 Arena to other parts. It just needed a bit more heart. Charming buddies can only go so far.
And somehow This Is Us seems an awkward title.
Go and see it if you're a recent teenage girl. It is not recommended if you are a boy.
Review by Adam Browne
Friday, August 30, 2013
Friday, August 23, 2013
Review: "The World's End" is witty drinking thriller
"The World's End" R
Edgar Wright, (Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim Saves the World), returns to Simon Pegg comedies with this coming of age has gone comedy about a band of friends who back in 1993 attempted to visit every pub (bar) in their hometown in one night and get hammered, but never finished.
Years later, Pegg's character is a loser who reunites his four friends under false pretenses to have them join him in a reenactment of the World's End pub crawl but shortly after a few oddball gags and some mishaps, it's clear the main protagonist is lying. The odd thing is though he also tangles with a strange robot with blue goo for blood. Soon they are finding robots all over the sleepy town, and they're out to get the wayward band.
The names are forgettable but the wry British humor is not, and there are some quirky good lines in this. It seems to channel both goofy party movies and old science fiction exploitation movies, a cross between Invasion of the Body Snatchers and any number of drinking films.
The antiheroes must get to the final pub before the robot monsters kill them, even though their plan seems to be to all be friends, so long as they obey. This is similar to the cult in Hot Fuzz whereas the town was in fact crazy in that one and causing accidents to get rid of dissenters. The robots also dispatch their objectionable patrons.
Funny spoof of those 2012 movies and the whole crackpot doomsday genre.
Review by Adam Browne
Edgar Wright, (Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim Saves the World), returns to Simon Pegg comedies with this coming of age has gone comedy about a band of friends who back in 1993 attempted to visit every pub (bar) in their hometown in one night and get hammered, but never finished.
Years later, Pegg's character is a loser who reunites his four friends under false pretenses to have them join him in a reenactment of the World's End pub crawl but shortly after a few oddball gags and some mishaps, it's clear the main protagonist is lying. The odd thing is though he also tangles with a strange robot with blue goo for blood. Soon they are finding robots all over the sleepy town, and they're out to get the wayward band.
The names are forgettable but the wry British humor is not, and there are some quirky good lines in this. It seems to channel both goofy party movies and old science fiction exploitation movies, a cross between Invasion of the Body Snatchers and any number of drinking films.
The antiheroes must get to the final pub before the robot monsters kill them, even though their plan seems to be to all be friends, so long as they obey. This is similar to the cult in Hot Fuzz whereas the town was in fact crazy in that one and causing accidents to get rid of dissenters. The robots also dispatch their objectionable patrons.
Funny spoof of those 2012 movies and the whole crackpot doomsday genre.
Review by Adam Browne
Saturday, August 17, 2013
Oscar buzz of 2013? Where are the Dramas?
It is now late summer, early fall of 2013 and there hasn't been a single review of an excellent drama all summer. They might have released dramas we haven't seen, but nothing comes to mind.
In the summer there were two White House gets trashed movies. Not reviewed.
They did a zombie movie or two, including a World War Z and a lesser casst of Warm Bodies. Nothing to even write much about here.
"Lee Daniels' the Butler" hasn't been seen yet, but looks like Forrest Gump with a black butler going through 8 presidents in history, except he's not like Forrest. The presidents are played by actors. Hasn't been reviewed because so far it looks kind of meh.
In November we'll have 'Ender's Game' and expect the fur to fly there, as Marx Cards doesn't like Orson Card's work. (No relation), Not going to get an oscar.
Top Oscar sites will wait until November, late in the game, before guessing on anything.
"Gatsby" isn't even going to get a nod. It just isn't that great a movie.
We would welcome a good drama.
Anyway, "Conjuring" was a good horror movie, but only Cards has seen it.
The "Carrie" remake looks like meh.
But there have been plenty of stinkers we have not seen, like "Smurfs 2", "Grown Ups 2", and the horrible "After Earth". That's what they get for stealing the title of an old cartoon and having Wil Smith and his son in it, and getting Shalayman to do anything.
In the summer there were two White House gets trashed movies. Not reviewed.
They did a zombie movie or two, including a World War Z and a lesser casst of Warm Bodies. Nothing to even write much about here.
"Lee Daniels' the Butler" hasn't been seen yet, but looks like Forrest Gump with a black butler going through 8 presidents in history, except he's not like Forrest. The presidents are played by actors. Hasn't been reviewed because so far it looks kind of meh.
In November we'll have 'Ender's Game' and expect the fur to fly there, as Marx Cards doesn't like Orson Card's work. (No relation), Not going to get an oscar.
Top Oscar sites will wait until November, late in the game, before guessing on anything.
"Gatsby" isn't even going to get a nod. It just isn't that great a movie.
We would welcome a good drama.
Anyway, "Conjuring" was a good horror movie, but only Cards has seen it.
The "Carrie" remake looks like meh.
But there have been plenty of stinkers we have not seen, like "Smurfs 2", "Grown Ups 2", and the horrible "After Earth". That's what they get for stealing the title of an old cartoon and having Wil Smith and his son in it, and getting Shalayman to do anything.
Review: "Kick Ass 2" lacks charm of original and comes off mean
"Kick Ass 2" R
Jeff Wadlow helms the sequel to the movie that made Chloe Moretz a star, Kick Ass 2, and it doesn't quite to the original justice. This being said, it is not as bad as Spider Man 3, and as a parody of the lesser Spider Man sequels, it is brilliant. The story starts off about 2 years after the first. Mindy/Hit Girl, is trying to evade her ward, and cut school, while doing double duty as a crime fighting teenager. Dave Lisewski as Kick Ass is not really helping, as he allies with a spot on riff on Robot Chicken like parody of the Justice League from Smallville. Ha. Well known geeky Christopher Mintz Plasse again returns, but not as Red Mist, as Motherf***er, a now crazed parody of Catwoman crossed with the Green Goblin's son, with the same pathos. He organizes a group of super villains, in a spoof of the Legion of Doom, and launches a war against Kick Ass and his minions. Not sure if the director should be doing a future Justice League movie, as he is competent but his story lacks the comic timing of the original. It's a mean spirited movie that tries to take the gritty world and shoehorn it into the superhero comic angle a bit too much. As times it's enjoyable and there are some truly messed up gross out gags, one including a vomit and poo device used to get revenge on school bullies, and another with a dog that sicks balls used to take a bite out of a mobster. Still there are moments. It's not as bad a critics are saying. ** stars.
Review by Adam Browne
Jeff Wadlow helms the sequel to the movie that made Chloe Moretz a star, Kick Ass 2, and it doesn't quite to the original justice. This being said, it is not as bad as Spider Man 3, and as a parody of the lesser Spider Man sequels, it is brilliant. The story starts off about 2 years after the first. Mindy/Hit Girl, is trying to evade her ward, and cut school, while doing double duty as a crime fighting teenager. Dave Lisewski as Kick Ass is not really helping, as he allies with a spot on riff on Robot Chicken like parody of the Justice League from Smallville. Ha. Well known geeky Christopher Mintz Plasse again returns, but not as Red Mist, as Motherf***er, a now crazed parody of Catwoman crossed with the Green Goblin's son, with the same pathos. He organizes a group of super villains, in a spoof of the Legion of Doom, and launches a war against Kick Ass and his minions. Not sure if the director should be doing a future Justice League movie, as he is competent but his story lacks the comic timing of the original. It's a mean spirited movie that tries to take the gritty world and shoehorn it into the superhero comic angle a bit too much. As times it's enjoyable and there are some truly messed up gross out gags, one including a vomit and poo device used to get revenge on school bullies, and another with a dog that sicks balls used to take a bite out of a mobster. Still there are moments. It's not as bad a critics are saying. ** stars.
Review by Adam Browne
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Review: "Elysium" is both dazzling and gritty showing divided worlds
"Elysium" R
Neill Blomkamp, (District 9) directs Matt Damon in the 24 movie, no actually Elysium, the trippy scifi action flick that tells of a world ruined by corporate and political stupidity. This forces the poor class to remain on Earth while the rich can live in orbit on a glittering O'Neill colony Taurus and not ever get sick or die.
Immediately the visuals strike you, as the director is a FX guy at heart and likes stunning images. The ads and movie posters show the exo suit wearing antihero, Max, posing like in the old scifi novels in the tradition of Man Plus and modern video games like Halo and Eve. (Blomkamp was originally going to do a Halo movie).
Maybe the station personnel never get sick because they had to overcome the space radiation that surely would have cooked them inside what appeared to be an unprotected atmosphere field clinging to the inside of the Taurus.
Also the thing changes size and perspective. The opening shot makes it appear as though the station is as big in diameter as the Earth next to it, but other shots show it as big as the moon, to as small as six miles in diameter. If they are generating gravity through centripetal force, it would have to be nearly the diameter of a small moon in oder to be even half an Earth g. Nobody on the station would be able to walk on Earth. That's why they would need exo suits. Genius.
Max's ex girlfriend, Frey, Alice Braga, is a nurse at a local hospital on the mean streets of a gritty, dirty ruined Los Angeles, where she also treats her daughter who has leukemia.
Max works for this evil boss, action star William Finchner as Carlyle, making robot parts and drones. (The drones are actually directly referenced in this, like in the Tom Cruise one, but not like in Star Trek, where they are torpedoes).
Jodie Foster plays the evil station manager, Delacort, who constantly schemes to usurp the power of the station from Faran Tahir, (of Star Trek 2009), President Patel. She even shoots down immigrant ships using a henchman with assorted military weapons.
Delacort is apparently insane and keeps talking with a strange mixture of French, English, highland New Yorker and something else, but it is not consistent and a little distracting. She should have just went for New England upper crust speech. That would have worked better. Eventually she just goes for that anyway.
After she shoots down the immigrant shuttles, she gets in a scheme with the evil boss,who just happens to be the guy that built the station, or at least hjis company did, and he's bragging he did it himself. It's hard to tell if he also is just a super megalomaniac and it just taking credit, and incredible if he actually was the one who built it, as there would havde been tens of thousands of workers building that thing over centuries.
The story only takes place in 2154, so unless they get started tomorrow, they will never finish it by 2154.
Max gets injured when his evil foreman tells him to crawl into a radiation zone where the robots are processed. It is not clear why the robot machine doesn't have a safety device that would immediately shut down the radiation injector thing, and it's not clear why they would have such a dangerous little crawl space on the factory floor. OSHA no longer exists in the future.
He is then sent home to die in a few days, where he comes across two friends, including a whacked out computer hacker who wants to steal the boss man's secrets from right out of his head jack. In the future they all have them. He gets the opportunity when the crazy car jacking buddies that work for him offer to put him in the exo suit so he can play like the guy in Man Plus and Man Plus 2, (an old book series), and maybe like the guy in Gattica a little. Now if only they gave that thing wings! Nope.
Presumably this one mega corporation has bought out the entire world and built the station using all of the metals and materials from Earth, so then the evil boss literally is in charge of the mess. How draconian and dystopian. It's Disctrict 9 without aliens but with a space station. Maybe it's in the same alternate universe as D9 and the station was started in the 1960s. They never said it but then it might explain how it got built so big, so fast.
Eventually Max is involved in accidentally killing the evil boss, and is being chased by the tracker and his evil allies, and Frey and her daughter are taken, and all of them meet up on a ship headed for the station, and a destiny that might change the status quo for the station and Earth.
Review by Adam Browne
Neill Blomkamp, (District 9) directs Matt Damon in the 24 movie, no actually Elysium, the trippy scifi action flick that tells of a world ruined by corporate and political stupidity. This forces the poor class to remain on Earth while the rich can live in orbit on a glittering O'Neill colony Taurus and not ever get sick or die.
Immediately the visuals strike you, as the director is a FX guy at heart and likes stunning images. The ads and movie posters show the exo suit wearing antihero, Max, posing like in the old scifi novels in the tradition of Man Plus and modern video games like Halo and Eve. (Blomkamp was originally going to do a Halo movie).
Maybe the station personnel never get sick because they had to overcome the space radiation that surely would have cooked them inside what appeared to be an unprotected atmosphere field clinging to the inside of the Taurus.
Also the thing changes size and perspective. The opening shot makes it appear as though the station is as big in diameter as the Earth next to it, but other shots show it as big as the moon, to as small as six miles in diameter. If they are generating gravity through centripetal force, it would have to be nearly the diameter of a small moon in oder to be even half an Earth g. Nobody on the station would be able to walk on Earth. That's why they would need exo suits. Genius.
Max's ex girlfriend, Frey, Alice Braga, is a nurse at a local hospital on the mean streets of a gritty, dirty ruined Los Angeles, where she also treats her daughter who has leukemia.
Max works for this evil boss, action star William Finchner as Carlyle, making robot parts and drones. (The drones are actually directly referenced in this, like in the Tom Cruise one, but not like in Star Trek, where they are torpedoes).
Jodie Foster plays the evil station manager, Delacort, who constantly schemes to usurp the power of the station from Faran Tahir, (of Star Trek 2009), President Patel. She even shoots down immigrant ships using a henchman with assorted military weapons.
Delacort is apparently insane and keeps talking with a strange mixture of French, English, highland New Yorker and something else, but it is not consistent and a little distracting. She should have just went for New England upper crust speech. That would have worked better. Eventually she just goes for that anyway.
After she shoots down the immigrant shuttles, she gets in a scheme with the evil boss,who just happens to be the guy that built the station, or at least hjis company did, and he's bragging he did it himself. It's hard to tell if he also is just a super megalomaniac and it just taking credit, and incredible if he actually was the one who built it, as there would havde been tens of thousands of workers building that thing over centuries.
The story only takes place in 2154, so unless they get started tomorrow, they will never finish it by 2154.
Max gets injured when his evil foreman tells him to crawl into a radiation zone where the robots are processed. It is not clear why the robot machine doesn't have a safety device that would immediately shut down the radiation injector thing, and it's not clear why they would have such a dangerous little crawl space on the factory floor. OSHA no longer exists in the future.
He is then sent home to die in a few days, where he comes across two friends, including a whacked out computer hacker who wants to steal the boss man's secrets from right out of his head jack. In the future they all have them. He gets the opportunity when the crazy car jacking buddies that work for him offer to put him in the exo suit so he can play like the guy in Man Plus and Man Plus 2, (an old book series), and maybe like the guy in Gattica a little. Now if only they gave that thing wings! Nope.
Presumably this one mega corporation has bought out the entire world and built the station using all of the metals and materials from Earth, so then the evil boss literally is in charge of the mess. How draconian and dystopian. It's Disctrict 9 without aliens but with a space station. Maybe it's in the same alternate universe as D9 and the station was started in the 1960s. They never said it but then it might explain how it got built so big, so fast.
Eventually Max is involved in accidentally killing the evil boss, and is being chased by the tracker and his evil allies, and Frey and her daughter are taken, and all of them meet up on a ship headed for the station, and a destiny that might change the status quo for the station and Earth.
Review by Adam Browne
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