The Disappearance of Alice Creed

This film started off well but it ended with five anti-climaxes that wear thin. At the start, you see the various stages in a professional kidnapping and it feels almost like a DIY Kidnapping video. This builds up a lot of tension, as you think that these bad guys mean business. Alice seems scared out of her mind and some bondage enthusiasts will love these scenes.

There is a big twist when it turns out that one of the kidnappers, who had not been speaking around Alice much, was actually her friend (presumably ex-boyfriend, although this is never entirely clear). Danny goes from scarey kidnapper to bumbling idiot. He lets Alice free one time when his more ruthless friend, Vic, has bobbed out. Alice manages to break free, seduce Vic and turn the tables on him, but then she is unable to escape and an attempt to locate the door keys leads to her being almost strangled by Danny, who returns to his ruthless character for a few minutes.

Another twist is when it is revealed that Vic and Danny are in a gay relationship. I'm not sure why this was put in, as it was not a pivotal detail in the plot and they don't seem very emotionally engaged in most scenes of the film.

The ending is too drawn-out. Vic's last action before death is to throw the keys to Alice (perhaps this is the equivalent of repenting on your death bed). Alice escapes, finds Danny dead in a car, and drives away with all the money. At least it's good to see the victim triumph.

I give it 6/10 overall. It was a good idea and the detail of the early scenes was impressive, but there are too many twists in the second half of the film and some of these are just twisting it back to what the story line had been before an earlier twist.

Paranormal Activity 2

I liked number one: it scared you without using a lot of gore, which is not easily done. The human possession element was the most scarey part.

Number two involves human possession, but doesn't bring it in until near the end. The first three-quarters of the film are boring. Most of the action consists of doors slamming and things going bump in the night. Also, it's never really explained why this family are recording everything that happens in their property through several different cameras, with which everybody (including the teenage daughter) is perfectly comfortable. In the first one, there was only one camera and there was some dialogue to show that the girlfriend did not approve of the boyfriend's filming obsession.

The last fifth of the film is where it gets interesting and you wonder whether the good guys will triumph. The calling of the housekeeper who they had sacked for her unusual rituals reminded me of the Exorcist's being called to save Megan, but it was nowhere near as interesting. There is a part where some fighting takes place off-screen. It's not clear what happened, as the only character to not appear afterwards is the superstitious housekeeper, and she had not entered the cellar where the fight took place. Those few minutes could have been excluded without any harm to the plot.

I think the ending was supposed to be funny. It struck me as unimaginative.

You can tell that I wasn't impressed: 3/10.

Toy Story 3

I saw this on the plane back from Dubai. On the way to Dubai, I saw The Shawshank Redemption and Casablanca, but I'd seen both of those beforehand. Toy Story 3 was new.

I saw the original when I was young and have not seen the second one. It's amazing how the basic story had stuck in my head. This shows that what an effective film it was. It was nice to pretend that your toys had personalities, sensitivities, goals, etc.

This pulls at the heartstrings by showing the toys' being neglected. Andy must decide what to do with them, now that he's going to university. He decides to put them in the attic, but his mum accidentally throws them out. They escape and end up in a daycare centre, where the toys are ruled by a dictator named Lotso. He is the only entirely bad character in the film. There are others who work for him at times, but see the errors of their ways eventually.

It's fast-paced and has a number of twists. There are a few times when it seems as if the toys are either sentenced to a life of misery or to destruction, but it all ends well. I noticed one or two references for adults and/or film buffs to notice. The part when Big Baby throws Lotso in the bin is reminiscent of when Darf Vader throws the Emperor off the bridge. Barbie is given an intelligent line.

Judged by an IMDB discussion, a lot of adults cried towards the end of this film: perhaps more adults cried than children. That is probably a result of the film's message that things we once loved get forgotten about and neglected. Everything changes in this world and loyalty must be rationed. Time goes by and we don't have enough time in our lives to keep hold of everything we've ever loved.

This gets 9/10 from me. It's not often that a kids' film can keep adults entertained as well. It is a well-crafted film that makes you pay attention and care about the outcome.

Saw 3D

This is an interesting use of 3D. It's mostly used to shoot body organs in your direction and to give dimension to women's breasts.

It does what you expect. Inventive torture and death scenes. Many of the victims are bad people themselves, and you sometimes feel as if justice is being done (and overdone). This is the end of the series, and it has a good ending at the end. I don't think many will see its coming.

Not much more to say. It's not much use giving a rating to a film like this. You either like gore or you don't. I like it.

The Social Network

A film about Facebook. It surprised me by how good it was. I didn't know any of this stuff about Facebook except for one detail at the start, when Mark Zuckerberg creates a website that compares college girls on the basis of looks.

The main triumph of this is Jesse Eisenberg's ability to play a bad geek. I've seen him play nice geeks before, but that is a cliched role. The Mark Zuckerberg who coded Facebook is portrayed as ruthless, lonesome, ambitious and extremely intelligent. He makes Facebook into a rapid success by making all the right moves, including a partnership with Sean Parker. There is a lot of humour directed at Harvard and its mythical societies. One scene involves some young Harvard scholars answering questions about Harvard's secrets in the freezing cold.

You get an insight into how powerful computer programmers/scientists are in this IT-focussed economy and into the status-obsessed social life of top universities. It's good to learn something from a film. It's succeeded when you feel as if you're in the environment that's being depicted. The Social Network wins on this front.

I'll give this yet another 8/10. I know that I've given a lot of 8s, but that's just the way it is. It gets marked down because I feel that parts of it were too harsh on Zuckerberg. (Also Sean Parker is portrayed as having paedophilic tendencies. I've no idea if this is true. When I searched Google, I could only find scruffy websites and videos promoting this.) Eduardo is portrayed as a nice guy whose good nature was exploited by Zuckerberg. He was involved in the film's making, which makes me suspicious that they biased it towards him. The Winklevoss brothers and their friend Divya are stereotyped as privileged and being used to getting their own way, but are also gentlemen and are likeable characters overall. The film ends with Zuckerberg's hoping that his ex-girlfriend will accept his offer of Facebook friendship, which suggests that he is unhappy with life. The film focusses on Zuckerberg a bit too much. To have got a 9 or a 10, the other characters needed to be developed more.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

The first thing to say is that the original Wall Street is a 9/10. I knock a mark off only because Daryl Hannah was so poor in it. It's funny that Michael Douglas won an Academy Award for Wall Street and Daryl Hannah won a Razzie.

This sequel gets 7/10: it's good but not as good as the original. There is a decent plotline with a lot going on. You see a human side of Gordon Gecko at times, but he's still a manipulative man. There are references to the economic crisis and the bailing-out of the banks. The film begins in a similar way to the origin - by demonstrating how brutal and bitchy the world of stockbroking can be. I was amused by the brief appearances by Bud Fox and the estate agent from the original, and the use of the original theme at the end. However, it's a very different film overall and I'm glad of that. Jake Moore is more established in his career than Bud Fox was, and there's no "good guy" equivalent of the trade-unionist father. It's clever how the informal conversatons between Jake and Gordon are actually trades - favours for favours - as made explicit by Gordon about half-way through.

I say that it's not as good as the original because it doesn't have the catchy one-liners and does not have the same satisfying climax. Oddly enough, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps has a happy ending in which everyone gets what they want. I've read on Metacritic that several critics consider the plot too complicated. I thought it was less complicated than the original. When I saw Wall Street first, I didn't understand how Bud Fox had managed to pull one over on Gordon Gecko. I didn't even know what "insider trading" meant before I'd seen it, although it's easy enough to work out. There are one or two threads in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps that might be cut to save time: the thread with Jake's reckless mother was probably put in so that we understand Jake's background, but I think there could've been better and briefer ways of doing this.

I'm glad they made it as I always wanted to know what happened to Bud Fox and Gordon Gecko at their trials. Now I know!

Blazing Saddles

It's strange what you can find lying around your house. I was told that it was an early spoof film recently and vowed to watch it, without realising that one of my brothers owned it.

I've watched this having already seen the Scary Movie films, the Naked Guns films, Family Guy, American Dad, etc. Shouldn't it seem very tame in comparison to those? I think it stands up well. Also it was interesting to see how laughing at small-minded racism has been around since 1974. The "meta humour" whereby the film jokes at itself and the actors break character must've been a first of its sort. There is a good Hitler joke towards the end.

The film is not as fast-paced as modern spoofs are, and I don't think is a bad thing. It has a chilled-out feel and you don't need to be paying attention to get every joke that's cracked as you do in some 30 Rock episodes. It references a few other films but not that many (IMDB shows that it has in turn been referenced a lot). Some spoof films jump around too much with the references so that you can't build up any sense of the characters. The Scary Movie films fall into the category in which the characters are just means of referencing other films; Blazing Saddles has memorable, funny characters in it.

I'll give this 8/10. It makes you laugh, which is mission accomplished. It broke new ground. It's still worth watching 36 years later.