The Star eCentral: Movie Reviews
The Star eCentral: Movie Reviews |
| Posted: The Smurfs 2 THE first Smurfs movie got really bad reviews, averaging 25% on film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. However, audiences loved it, allowing it to gross over US$560mil (RM1.82bil) at the box office. I get the feeling that this sequel is going to get the same reaction. The Smurfs 2 basically explores Smurfette's (voiced by Katy Perry) origins as a creation of the evil wizard Gargamel (Hank Azaria), and her conflicted emotions about that fact. Gargamel, now a celebrity magician in our world, gets his new creations, Naughties Vexy (Christina Ricci) and Hackus (JB Smoove), to kidnap and tempt Smurfette over to the dark side, in the hopes of getting her to reveal the secret formula that transformed her into a real Smurf. Papa Smurf (Jonathan Winters) promptly leads a rescue team back to New York to rescue her, enlisting old friends Patrick (Neil Patrick Harris) and Grace Winslow (Jayma Mays) along the way. Patrick himself is also facing daddy issues with stepfather Victor (Brendan Gleeson), who tags along. The word "smurf" is again overused, the gags rate a smile rather than a laugh, and the moral of the story breeds contempt through its familiarity. But the young ones will probably enjoy the action, and the scenes of Paris are shot really beautifully. This one's for the kiddies. – Tan Shiow Chin (2/5 stars) Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters WHAT Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief managed to deliver to the audience was not played out well in the sequel, Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters. Two things missing from the movie are laughter and surprises. This is a movie where Percy, adapting to his identity as Poseidon's son, now has a prophecy to fulfil.  Lead with the pointy end: Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) may need more than his sword to get out of this fiery situation. The "saving-the-world" plot is nothing new, and the adventure where the heroes tangle with all kinds of scary-looking creatures may be rather freaky for younger viewers. As for the title, the Sea of Monsters should probably be renamed "Sea of Monster" because it's just one giant sea monster they are up against. What is interesting is the odd-couple pairing of Percy and Tyson, his newly discovered half-brother. There is obviously more to Tyson's character than meets the ... eye. As for the usual teenage relationships and conflicts, Sea Of Monsters could easily pass off as an episode of a TV series rather than a movie; and the villain, a demigod, seems insignificant. Just don't expect this to live up to its predecessor and you'll still enjoy it. – Jane Tan (3/5 stars) The Wolverine HUGH Jackman is the reason why you would want to catch this movie. As always, his performance as Wolverine/Logan is excellent, from his guilt-stricken angst over killing Jean Grey/Phoenix to his snarly Wolverine-in-the-bath, complete with disgusted elderly Japanese women scrubbing him with brooms, and of course, his sheer brute stubbornness (watch out for what I call his arrow hedgehog impression) and powerful fighting abilities. If you are an anime fan, then Rila Fukushima's portrayal of Yukio, who is yet another anime heroine stereotype brought to life, is also worth catching. Unlike Pacific Rim's Mako Mori, Yukio does a pretty good job of playing the tough chick and standing on her own against Wolverine. According to the fanboys, the movie's story adheres quite faithfully to the Chris Claremont and Frank Miller limited series that it is based on. Judging the movie solely on its own merits, however, the plot did irritate me somewhat with its lack of logical character motivation and deviation from Japanese honour. Watchable and entertaining? Yes. Brilliant and logical? No. But, it might actually be worth sitting through just for the mid-credits scene alone. – TSC (3/5 stars) R.I.P.D. SO, if you can stop from comparing this movie to Men In Black, this is actually an entertaining watch. We've got recently deceased cop Nick Walker (Ryan Reynolds), who is offered a position with the Rest In Peace Department (RIPD) after his murder. In exchange for postponing his Judgement, Walker gets to spend 100 years tracking down Deados – dead people who managed to stay on Earth, passing for the living. He is partnered with 18th-century US Marshal Rocephus "Roy" Pulsipher (Jeff Bridges), who really doesn't want to be saddled with a newbie. The relationship between the two just screams bromance, in a good way. Bridges gets the best lines, and his Pulsipher plays off perfectly against the more morose and comically frustrated Walker. Lots of the fun also comes from watching the intercutting shots of Walker and Pulsipher's avatars among the living – an elderly Chinese man (James Hong) and a hot Russian woman (Marisa Miller) respectively, while still staying in character as the detectives. A big shoutout as well to Kevin Bacon, who plays dirty cop Bobby Hayes, with relish. Definitely recommended for laughs and action. Also worth watching in 3D, although the runtime's a bit short. – TSC (4/5 stars) |
| Posted: Elysium – Director Neill Blomkamp (District 9) once again looks at social disintegration in a dystopian future. In the year 2154, the rich live on a man-made space station named Elysium, while everyone else lives on a ruined Earth. When an Everyman (Matt Damon) on Earth falls terminally ill, he must get to Elysium if he wants proper treatment. Co-starring Sharlto Copley and Jodie Foster. The Frozen Ground – John Cusack plays a serial killer who is being hunted by an Alaskan State Trooper (Nicolas Cage). Apparently this story is based on actual events. The Mortal Instruments: City Of Bones – Clary Fray (Lily Collins) is no ordinary teenager, a fact she discovers after her mother is attacked and taken from their home by a demon. That's when she learns that she is destined for so much more than shopping and going out on dates. The Purge – One night every year, criminal activities are allowed for 12 hours, and families that don't want any part in it lock up their houses and stay inside. One year, this process – the purge – goes terribly wrong for one family. Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey star. Madras Café – A political thriller set against the backdrop of the Sri Lankan Civil War in the 1980s, and the events that led to the assassination of a key Indian leader. Starring Nargis Fakhri, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Rashi Khanna, Siddharth Basu and Agnello Dias. |
| Posted: Actress with a talent for conveying characters' rich and troubled inner lives. The New Hollywood movement was primarily a male, auteur-led phenomenon. But the contribution of performers as adventurous and vital as Karen Black, who has died aged 74 from complications from cancer, should not be overlooked. Black was electrified as well as electrifying: her tornado of hair, her fearless physicality and those indelible feline eyes combined to create a woozy and unapologetic sexual energy. She looked offbeat, and she knew how to use that. "I couldn't have been an actress in the 1930s," she said, reflecting on her role as a movie extra in The Day Of The Locust (1975). "My face moves around too much." It was in the late 1960s and 70s that she became one of the great character actors of US cinema in a series of performances in key New Hollywood works. Partly it was that she exhibited qualities outside the skill set of a conventional female lead – she could play volatile and nerve-jangled, or maligned and wounded, without ever approaching caricature, and suddenly these talents came to be much in demand from countercultural film-makers. Her career overlapped with several key figures of New Hollywood: she made her screen debut in Francis Ford Coppola's own first film, You're A Big Boy Now (1966) and collaborated more than once with Jack Nicholson, who cast Black in his 1971 directorial debut, Drive, He Said, after co-starring with her in Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970). She was also a favourite of Robert Altman, who directed her in Nashville (1975), for which she and many of the cast wrote and performed their own songs, and Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982). (Playing herself in Altman's 1992 The Player, she was one of many such celebrity guest stars in that overpopulated satire to be left on the cutting-room floor.) These parts were strikingly different from one another, but they had in common Black's knack for conveying her characters' rich and troubled inner lives, their cramped or thwarted dreams. The consummate example could be found in her Oscar-nominated performance as Rayette, the Tammy Wynette-loving girlfriend to Nicholson's discontented antihero Bobby Dupea, in Five Easy Pieces. There was a comical but achingly sad intellectual gap between the two. Bobby resented her. Crucially, the audience never did. "I dig [Rayette], she's not dumb, she's just not into thinking," said Black in 1970. "I didn't have to know anybody like her to play her. I mean, I'm like her, in ways. Rayette enjoys things as she sees them, she doesn't have to add significances. She can just love the dog, love the cat. See? There are many things she does not know, but that's cool; she doesn't intrude on anybody else's trip. And she's going to survive." She was born Karen Blanche Ziegler in Park Ridge, Illinois, daughter of Norman and Elsie Ziegler, the latter a children's novelist. She studied at Northwestern University in Illinois from the age of 15, then moved to New York at 17 and took odd jobs and off-Broadway roles. In 1960 she married Charles Black. She was nominated for best actress in the Drama Circle Critics awards for playing the lead in The Play Room (1965); Coppola, who was in the audience, cast her in You're A Big Boy Now. From there, she met Henry Jaglom and Dennis Hopper, both of whom were, like Coppola, part of the coterie of up-and-coming film-makers and actors benefiting from the patronage of Roger Corman. Hopper cast her in Easy Rider as a prostitute who has a bad acid trip in a New Orleans cemetery; Jaglom, who was brought in to help edit the film, insisted that improvised scenes of Black which had been cut should be put back in. Jaglom would continue to help her career as late as 1983 when he gave her the lead in his underrated romantic comedy Can She Bake A Cherry Pie? She attracted attention for those groundbreaking films with Hopper and Nicholson, and for numerous other fascinating oddities including Cisco Pike (1972), with Kris Kristofferson as a musician-turned-dealer; a 1972 adaptation of Philip Roth's comic novel Portnoy's Complaint; and a foolhardy film version of Ionesco's absurdist Rhinoceros (1974), with Zero Mostel. But she was not averse to the mainstream. She played the doomed Myrtle in the Coppola-scripted adaptation of The Great Gatsby (1974); she was the flight attendant who must land a plane single-handed in the efficient but much-parodied disaster movie Airport 1975 (1974); and she played a kidnapper in Alfred Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot (1976). She also became a darling of the horror genre after taking on three roles in the television anthology Trilogy Of Terror (1975) and starring in movies such as Burnt Offerings (1976), Invaders From Mars (1986) and House Of 1,000 Corpses (2003). Pickings became steadily slimmer in the 1980s, though her dynamic turn as a post-operative male-to-female transsexual in Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean was singled out by Pauline Kael of the New Yorker as Black's finest work. Kael highlighted her "spectacular tawdry world-weariness" and commended her for "keep[ing] the mawkishness from splashing all over the set. I think this isn't just the best performance she has given on screen – it's a different kind of acting from what she usually does. It's subdued, controlled, quiet – but not parched." Black worked continuously until becoming ill in 2009. She had a small role in George Sluizer's Dark Blood, best known now as the film River Phoenix was making when he died in 1993. Black is survived by her fourth husband, Stephen Eckelberry, whom she married in 1987; and by a son, Hunter, and two daughters, Celine and Diane. Hunter is her son by her third husband, LM Kit Carson, who wrote Paris, Texas, which was filmed with Hunter, then nine years old, playing the main character's son, also named Hunter. – Guardian News & Media Related story:Karen Black's five most memorable movies |
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