The Troll Hunter is one of the current infestation of found footage films, which started with Cannibal Holocaust and was made famous by The Blair Witch Project (which is not as good as the earlier The Last Broadcast). The Troll Hunter was written and filmed in Norway by André Øvredal in 2010. With the recent successes of films such as Paranormal Activity and the Twilight films, the ground was fertile and expectant for this gem. I caught the trailer several months ago and was genuinely looking forward to the cinematic release. I live in Kent, about 50 miles from London….
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Author’s Note: Indulge me for a moment as I introduce myself to this fine website and begin what I hope will be a semi-regular review series. As you may have been able to tell from my first article, I am not quite up to the minute. I have heard of “cutting edge”, and I am on nodding terms with “current”, but my best friend is “just a bit past it”. Small villages in the English countryside do not lend themselves to the bleeding edge; they’re more like a heavy bludgeoning instrument. Therefore, I have decided when reviewing to steer clear of…
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In the last couple of days, I’ve watched both Rubber and Paul on DVD. Both films brought to mind the concept of cult films in very different ways. I picked up my copy of The Rough Guide to Cult Movies and asked Google to define “cult” in order to bring my thoughts into coherence. Google gave me 20,400,000 possible definitions of cult, and The Rough Guide has a couple of pages of explanation. To my mind, cult means an obsessive or a powerfully held belief in something. What cult is not, clearly, is something that is simply different, or even…
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The art of making a successful comic book movie is one of fine balance. The movie must be able to appeal to the mainstream audience while adhering to enough canon to keep the comic fans happy; it must have the right amount of effects to make the movie look convincing, yet retain enough budget to cast decent actors and develop a quality script. Add the premise of an origin story and the filmmakers have to moderate the slow start of back-story with a plausible amount of action. Green Lantern is the latest comic book adaptation to take on this challenge,…
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I feel I need to preface this review by saying that I am not a fan of the Thor comic book franchise. That is not to say I dislike it, I am just unfamiliar with the characters and the backstory. I would say I am more familiar with the original mythology of Thor than his comic book counterpart. So as you read my review, please keep in mind that, while I have spent years reading various Marvel comics, Thor was never one of them. I feel I should also mention that I saw it in 2D since it was “filmed…
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Hanna is a film that flies in the face of modern Hollywood conventions. It’s an action film that has very little bloodshed, and more than that, it’s an action film which actually makes me care about the characters. Director Joe Wright, maker of 2009′s The Soloist and 2007′s Atonement, has created a tightly-constructed film brimming with heart and style. And you know what else? It’s a really good movie. The film opens on a solitary girl stalking a deer across a frozen wilderness. The audience has no idea who this person is, or why she thinks this deer needs to…
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2010 was a banner year for James Franco and Natalie Portman. Franco seemed to get his acting chops together and brought out both The Kids Are All Right and 127 Hours. Portman delivered an award-winning performance in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan after playing such genre characters like Padmé Amidala in the Star Wars prequels and Evey from V for Vendetta. So what’s the logical thing to do when you have two fantastic actors? Add Tropic Thunder and Eastbound and Down’s Danny McBride in a stoner spoof of high fantasy films and the fantasy genre. The movie follows a pair of royal…
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Recently, I caught a prescreener of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s newest film, Paul. In this, Frost and Pegg play two stereotypical nerds: Pegg is Graeme (pronounced ‘Graham’ here in the colonies) Willy, while Frost plays Author Clive Gollings who is looking for his inspiration to a follow-up to his 1992 book. Graeme and Clive are enjoying ComiCon, and swinging through Area 51 and other UFO hotspots, when the pair happen upon Paul, voiced by Seth Rogan. Paul is an alien who crashed in 1947 on a science mission. All Paul wants is to get back to his planet in one…
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Rango is an important movie. It’s Gore Verbinski’s latest directorial outing, his first foray into animated movies, and Industrial Light and Magic’s first animated feature. But is it, you know, good? The first thing that’s clear, within the first five minutes of the movie, is that this is a movie first, and an animated movie second. By that, I mean that it does not have the hallmarks that I expect when seeing an animated feature. Gone are the saturated blocks of colour. Gone are the wide-eyed cookie cutter character designs. Gone is the selling of the movie based on a…
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In 2009, independent filmmaker Mike Stoklasa released an unusually intelligent video review of a disappointing, ten-year-old big-budget sci-fi film, and became an overnight sensation across the Internet.  What Stoklasa did, like most successful things viewed in hindsight, seems pretty straightforward and basic.  Since the earliest days of the Internet, fans have used the digital soapbox to expound on their likes and dislikes in just about every medium, including film. The hyper-fast world of the Internet has forever altered both film appreciation and the industry of film production.  Every second of trailer footage is scrutinized and judged.  Every poster or piece…
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