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Reviews
Chariot (2013)
Your chariot awaits
7 strangers wake up on a plane not knowing how they each got there. All communications on the plane have been cut so no one on the plane can contact anyone on the ground, though someone finds an iPhone and through it they find out that most of America has been destroyed in a nuclear Armageddon.
Poor to average acting (and overacting galore), lots of shouting, no real stand out performances by anyone. The characters are all generic cutouts that you've seen a hundred times before, the reluctant hero, the arrogant computer nerd, the powerful government official with a weak personality who crumbles under pressure, they're all here.
Visually I liked the way that it was filmed, it looked decent enough. Don't expect any action shots or shots from outside the plane though. The entire movie is set inside the passenger cabin of the plane.
Now onto the story, it wasn't bad, it kept me interested, though I am a sucker for anything that is even remotely related to the whole end-of-civilisation genre. The writing wasn't the best, the overall plot was OK but the individual characters actions sometimes made no sense at all. For example (SPOILERS) at one point in the movie there are F16 fighter jets coming to shoot the plane down if they stay on their current heading. Someone asks "how long do you think we have?" to which another person replies "minutes, if that". So does the only person who can fly the plane immediately jump in the cockpit and alter their course? Does anyone show any signs of urgency at all? Of course not. With "minutes, if that" remaining, the only person who can fly the plane then spends the next 5 minutes having heart to heart conversations with the other passengers back in the cheap seats!! If you can get past nonsensical things like that, and there are quite a few of them in the movie, but if you can then the movie isn't so bad.
Be warned though, if you don't like cliffhanger endings then you'll hate this movie. I would of given it a 6/10 if it wasn't for what I would consider a very lazy cliffhanger ending.
Stalled (2013)
A worthy successor to Shaun of the Dead? No.
The first thing that should worry you about this film before even watching it are the words prominently displayed on it's poster stating that it is "A worthy successor to Shaun of the Dead". After watching the movie I decided to go and read the full review where that little excerpt was taken from, just to make sure that the words 'This is not' didn't come immediately before or after it, because this is not a worthy successor to Shaun of the Dead and a worthy successor to Shaun of the Dead this is not.
In 1989 a family flying from Venezuela to Brazil crashed in the dense forest of an unexplored part of the Amazon rain forest. The tribe that lived there had never seen TV or movies, never heard of horror or zombies, yet I would bet my first born child's soul that with the home video camera that the tribe found in the wreckage, they would manage to make a better horror/comedy zombie film than what the makers of Stalled delivered to us.
First things first, Stalled is about a janitor working in a large office block who sneaks into the ladies restroom to quickly use one of the toilets, while in there the zombie apocalypse happens and he get's trapped. They should of made a movie about a person trapped in the toilets with a TV playing this movie and no way to turn it off, at least that would be true horror.
There are 3 main problems with this movie, firstly the camera-work is just horrible. Close ups and weird angles that are obviously meant to make the movie look interesting do nothing except make the movie look like a bunch of film students were given a camera with no teacher around to tell them when they were doing things wrong. Also it just looks cheap, it doesn't have that movie feel to it, it looks more like a half decent home made video posted on Youtube.
The 2nd problem is the acting, especially by the actor playing the main character. He is the writer of this movie and unfortunately for us he decided to play the lead role as well, a lead role where the character is the only character on screen for 95% of the movie. He can not act. I could give any of you reading this a copy of the script, on the day it was to be filmed, and I would expect that all of you could deliver your lines better than he could. I will be surprised if his acting career in the future entails anything more exciting than dressing up in a giant animal suit and playing Roger the giant Rabbit in a pantomime for preschoolers, even then he wouldn't be first choice for any director. But acting in a horror comedy film isn't that important, not when you have a witty script filled with humorous and/or dangerous situations for our characters to find themselves in........
...and that brings us to the last, and possibly the biggest problem with this comedy horror film. It just doesn't successfully deliver on the horror or the comedy. The comedy is school boyish at best, not what we have become used to from British films over the last few years. The first "funny" scene in the film is when the janitor, stuck in a stall in the ladies toilets, contemplates masturbating to two scantily clad women who walked in and decided to start making out with each other for no real reason after they had been talking about what men they liked. At least I think it was meant to be funny, either that or it was meant to be disturbing, if it was meant to be disturbing then the filmmakers succeeded. The comedy goes downhill after that with jokes and gags that just don't work. The horror on the other hand is non existent, it doesn't miss like the comedy does, it just isn't there, sure there are zombies and we see people get eaten, but there is no tension, no sense of claustrophobia (which is quite an achievement for a movie set inside a toilet cubicle),no panic, no urgency and absolutely zero fear shown by the leads. I can think of pretty much any horror comedy movie and all of them had more horror in them than this did, even the Scary Movie franchise, and for a movie that is meant to be a horror comedy but isn't funny and has no scares, that's a problem.
I'll leave now, I will admit that this movie left me thinking about it long after I had finished watching it, and that thought was "Is it irony that this movie is set entirely in a toilet and turned out to be a big steaming pile of sh...........?"
I give it 2 stars out of 10. One for the camera operator managing to keep the camera pointed in the right direction and another for the brilliant portrayal of a toilet played by a very talented toilet.
The Tree of Life (2011)
A failed masterpiece?
When I was 9 my parents took me to an art gallery to see some of the works by Pablo Picasso. Now, to me art was all about drawing something so that it looked like it did in real life, so I didn't understand when I looked at a painting titled 'Seated woman' and it looked nothing like a woman on a seat, or a woman at all, it challenged my ideals on what art was meant to be, and I didn't like it one bit.
This is my introduction to my The Tree Of Life review, because watching this film made me feel like that 9 year old kid looking at a confusing painting again.
I did not enjoy this film. I had an idea of what kind of movie it was from reading reviews and seeing clips of the movie on the net, and it looked interesting and I figured that the negative reviews were just from people whose idea of art in movies is when Bruce Willis did Sin City. How wrong I was.
Here is how the film goes. Someone says a statement/question like "Where are you?" then for the next 5 minutes we are bombarded with metaphorical imagery that is so obscure that you give up trying to work out what it means and just look at the pretty pictures instead, then another statement/question, then another 5 minutes of imagery.
Now the imagery is central to this film, and it looks stunning. But saying that, I have seen BBC nature shows that have the same amazing cinematography. Some people will say that every shot is a work of art. Kubrick did the same, but he also made movies that made sense and had more than one line of dialogue every 5 minutes. Slow burner movies with minimal dialogue are great to watch (Drive, 2001, Lost in Translation) but this is not one of them.
It is almost as if this movie - and the director - are too clever for themselves. Metaphorical imagery is fine in cinema, we as an audience are used to it. But it has to be clear what the metaphor is. A dinosaur stomping its foot twice on the head of another smaller dinosaur, then leaving it alive before running away, that is a metaphor for something, for what though, I do not know. I'm sure that it is clear to the director what the message of that scene was, but I know no one who has a clear idea what it meant. And that sums up the movie. No one knows what it means, every person interprets it differently.
Is it genius film making? I don't know.
Is it enjoyable to watch? Not really, the pictures are nice.
Did it tell a good story? I think it had a story hidden in amongst all the imagery and metaphors. If it was good or not, I don't know because I can't decide if it was there in the first place.
3/10 - If you are planning on watching this because it looks amazing, do yourself a favour and watch the BBC's Planet Earth instead, better story, and you'll enjoy it more.