Now this was a documentary I was really looking forward to (I named it in my 24 hours of movie watching post). This documentary is focussed on the chimpanzee Nim, who was the subject of an important experiment to find out whether or not primates could learn language when it was raised as a normal child. Continue reading
I might be repeating myself, but as you know I love Korean movies. What I love most is how unpredictable they are. This movie seemed like a war movie, but it turned out to be much more than that. Continue reading
Sometimes you must not believe everything you read. I try to read as little as I can about any movie I want to see, but I did catch some things about 50/50. Everywhere I read about this movie it was described as “a comedy about cancer”. I can imagine a lot of people being shocked about that. How can you make fun of something so serious and I was interested to find out how it was handled. Last year I wouldn’t have believed that a comedy about terrorism would be, but Four Lions showed that you can make anything funny. So what’s the verdict on 50/50? Continue reading
A while ago I had a conversation about Korean movies on Twitter and it sparked my love for them again. It had been a while since I watched any so I wanted to watch one again and chose a good old gangster movie. Continue reading
I love going into a movie knowing as little as I can about it. It’s not always possible to at least have a general idea, but movies usually surprise me. Point Blank is a French movie someone recommended to me which I didn’t know anything about and that in this case was great as I wasn’t prepared for the rollercoaster it took me on. If you don’t like to know anything at all about this movie just go check it out (it’s good) and else continue reading after the jump. Continue reading
For me Disney movies were a big part of growing up. Of course you watched a lot of other cartoons, but those long movies were fun to watch. I can remember watching Robin Hood at school or collecting stickers from The Great Mouse Detective. As a kid you felt the magic these movies had and couldn’t get enough of them. I’m still a big fan of them now (although I don’t watch them as much any more), but there was a time when the animation studios had a lot of trouble. The quality of their movies was getting worse and there were talks of a takeover and splitting up the company. Something needed to be done to get everything on the rails again. Sleeping Beauty shows what was done between 1984 and 1994, a period in which Disney managed to get back on top with movies like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. Continue reading
Recently Empire magazine did an article on The Last Action Hero, which apparently was a big flop when it was released. It had an estimated budget of $85 million and didn’t make back the money after it’s run in the US. Of course its worldwide release made sure it made more than that, but it didn’t perform as the studio was expecting. I remember seeing it when it came out in the cinema and actually really liked it. Of course I was much younger then, so it was time for a revisit. Continue reading
Sometimes an opening scene of a movie manages to paint a clear picture of what a movie is about in just seconds. The Guard is an example of a film which manages to do so in an exquisite way (small spoiler coming up). A car with a couple of young men who are speeding, crashes at the exact spot where sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) is already waiting in his police car. He frisks one of the unconscious (or dead) men who has been thrown out of the car, finds some drugs, throws half of them away and takes an XTC-pill that’s part of the package. It’s immediately obvious that this is not the most normal cop and that The Guard is a very dark enjoyable comedy. Continue reading
Everyone can remember the news stories about lone kids going on a killing spree in their schools. Stories about Columbine, Cal Tech or a recent one in a shopping mall in my own country shock. It’s incomprehensible why someone would do something like that. What we often forget is that these people have parents and that it’s hard to understand what they are going through. Are they to blame for what has happened, didn’t they raise their kid the right way? These are the questions that this movie explores. Does it manage to do so successfully? Continue reading
A one-room school in rural France is the setting for this documentary made by Nicolas Philibert. He travelled through the countryside for months trying to find the perfect location to show the hard work that is done in these schools and the importance for their communities. Continue reading