The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies
The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies |
| Posted: 02 Jan 2012 03:24 AM PST There are some movies that you would want to erase from your memory. SO many bad movies, so little space. This year's collection of stinkers proves Adam Sandler can be counted on to make at least one monumentally bad film, not all comic book movies are good and there are times when there's nothing funny about a comedy. Here's the worst of the worst for 2011. Jack And Jill: It should have been called "Dreck And Swill". Adam Sandler nailed down the worst actor award for 2011 with a performance so rancid it couldn't be contained by one character. Sandler plays a brother and sister who are the most torturous thing since waterboarding was invented. Director Dennis Dugan proves it's possible for a talentless hack to still get work in Hollywood. Green Hornet: Comic books fans expressed concern when it was announced that Seth Rogen was going to star in the film version of the comic book. Those worries weren't unfounded. Rogen bungles his way through a script that couldn't have been more inane had one of the Jersey Shore cast written it. The film was the biggest crime committed in Hollywood this year. Hall Pass: What do the careers of Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly have in common with an old woman in a TV commercial? Both have fallen and they can't get up. Old jokes and lame performances abound as Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis play two guys given a pass from their marriages for a week to do anything they want. They should buy disguises and leave the country. Arthur: This feeble remake is not just repugnant for its lack of humour, amateurish acting and lead-footed pacing, but it's also an insult to the memory of Dudley Moore, who starred in the 1981 version. Russell Brand firmly establishes himself as a contender for Adam Sandler's bad acting crown with a performance that is about as entertaining as sticking a ferret in your ear. No Strings Attached: Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher play bank robbers ... oops .. that's wrong. They merely steal the money they got paid for this film because they did no acting. They play a couple who agree to be intimate without obligations – and who manage to make sex look boring. Sanctum: There's no sense of time or tension. In between deaths, director Alister Grierson focuses his cameras on the actors walking or swimming from cave to cave. Ioan Gruffudd – cinemas' answer to tryptophan – headlines the film where bad acting, a predictable script and worthless 3D effects make this tale of the great cave escape a real speclunker. Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark: Just be afraid of this movie. This insult to moviemaking is a sadistic and vile film that tries to pass off the emotional and physical torture of a young girl as entertainment. Putting children in peril in horror films is one of the easiest ways to engage an audience. But there is a line between the entertainment value of seeing someone in danger and the sick depiction of abuse. This film obliterates that line. Just Go With It: It's a twin killing for Adam Sandler as another of his movies makes this year's hall of shame. When it comes to mindless comedies, you expect poop jokes. But this movie is relentless, including a scene where a young boy goes to the bathroom on an adult male's hand. There's just a point where the bathroom humour stinks. This smells like a diaper laundry service before washing day. Limitless: A drug makes a man smart. That same drug makes this movie stupid. The potential of Limitless was just that. It fails. Under Neil Burger's disjointed direction and Bradley Cooper's cold performance, the movie should be called "Hapless". Immortals: The Muse that was behind this script should be tossed off Mt Olympus. We will never know what it's like to live forever, but we can at least get a taste of what eternity feels like with Immortals. The last time something this big and bloated moved this slowly there was an Ice Age going on. Dishonourable mentions: Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, Something Borrowed, Happy Feet 2, Crazy, Stupid, Love and Bridesmaids. Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| Posted: 02 Jan 2012 12:47 AM PST The sighting of a child ghost in a boarding school brings about The Awakening. IN a 1921 post-war England where many of the bereaved seek solace in spiritualism, Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) is committed to debunking supernatural claims, using methodical and rational explanations. When she is asked to visit Rookwood, a boarding school in the countryside, to investigate the alleged sightings of a ghostly young boy, she feels compelled to take the job. Once at Rookwood, Cathcart sets out to place traps and gather scientific evidence. Gradually, secrets begin to unravel and the mystery surrounding the ghost turns out to be nothing more than a schoolboy prank ... or is it? The psychological chiller, The Awakening, came about when producer David M. Thompson (Billy Elliot, Eastern Promises, An Education) met with writer Stephen Volk (Octane, Afterlife) in the wake of the latter's spooky BBC television show Ghostwatch, which aired in the early 1990s. "Stephen came up with the idea for The Awakening and I thought the script was really strong," says Thompson, in the production notes. While the exteriors of Rookwood were filmed in Lyme Park in Cheshire, with the majority of the film unfolding in and around the school, the filmmakers opted for three different country houses on the Borders, in locations around Berwick-on-Tweed: Gosford House and grounds, Manderston and Marchmont House. When Nick Murphy joined the production, he re-worked the script, relocating a Victorian-era story to the early 20th Century, when the nation was reeling from the unprecedented loss of life in the trenches of World War I. "The story has always been the case that a girl goes to an old school to explain a phenomenon," Murphy says. "There was an increased sense of loss in 1921 – when over 1.5 million people had died in some way or another in the last five or six years from flu or from the First World War. "This sense of loss would contribute to the need to see ghosts," the writer-director continues. "I think that's something that underpins the whole film: that this is a nation grieving, a nation sick, and in the gaps come ghosts." – Compiled by June Lee Pui Yin The Awakening opens in local cinemas on Thursday. Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
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