Claire's blog

VIDEO: MOVIES: REVIEW: Sightseers (2012)

Clio: 2.3/5 stars, 4.4/10.
Carolyn: 2.0/5 stars, 4.4/10.
Native ratings: 3.4/5 stars Netflix, 6.6/10 IMDB.

Bonnie & Clyde meets Dumb & Dumber? If I’d known this was British, I might have [correctly] decided to skip this one. British comedies are rarely as funny. Awkward, subtle, dry humor is indeed hilarious, but overt, in-your-face, ridiculous humor is more hilarious.

This movie wasn’t that good.  We thought it would be funnier, but it was mostly just awkward and creepy.  None of the characters were likeable or relateable — which is okay — but the characters were one of many aspects of the movie that just didn’t do anything for us.  It was slightly interesting at times, but mostly pointless.

Girl meets boy. Roadtrip. Girl finds out boy is serial killer. Girl accepts boy.  That’s the whole movie. Well, there’s some interesting aspects I’m not sharing — and some slight twists that you wouldn’t expect… But for the most part, this is not a comedy. This is just a set of fucked up circumstances that conclude with no more message or afterthought than nihilism itself.

Directed by Ben Wheatley. Written by Steve Oram and Alice Lowe.
Starring the movie’s own writers: Alice Lowe (Hot Fuzz) as Tina and Steve Oram (1 ep of Life’s Too Short, 1 ep of The Increasingly Poor Decisions Of Todd Margaret) as Chris.
Jonathan Aris (Gulliver’s Travels, 1 ep of Bob & Margaret–how weird) as Ian.

LINK URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2023690/combined

VIDEO: MOVIES: CARTOONS: SHOWS: REVIEW: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)

Clio: 3.6/5 stars, 7/10.
Carolyn: 3.6/5 stars, 7/10.
Native ratings: 3.5/5 stars Netflix, 5.6/10 IMDB.

We forgot to watch the pilot movie to The Clone Wars cartoon series! For the uninformed, Clone Wars is the the CGI animated TV series that’s been airing since 2008. It chronicles the period of time between Episode 2 and Episode 3 of the Star Wars movies. We recently finished the last season of Clone Wars, and decided to go ahead and watch the introductory movie — since apparently we are doing things backwards. (And no, we haven’t seen the Clone Wars animated shorts by Dexter’s Lab/Samurai Jack animator Genndy Tartakovsky, which precede this movie that precedes the series we watched. Maybe we’ll do that next.)

This was a great introduction to the show. This seemed better than the 1st season of the actual show. We didn’t really like the first season all that much, and the “roger roger” droids were really annoying and juvenile. We barely slogged through the 2nd season. By the 3rd season we were begrudgingly admitting this series’s awesomeness, but we still were into it at a lower level than most other shows, procrastinating so much that when we watched Season 4, season 5 started a mere week after we finished. But here’s the kicker: We watched Season 4 in like a week. A season at a time, this series goes down MUCH better. It got totally worth it. The ending of season 5 is a shocker. We’ve also gotten to enjoy many side episodes, for example an episode about only the droids. There are some pretty epic lightsabre battles in the series, like watching Dooku go toe to toe with Darth Maul.

As bad as the first season is, I strongly recommend any Star Wars fan to slog through and watch all 5 seasons of The Clone Wars — plus the remaining bits that are still to be released. (New animation has stopped, but they’re still going to release some stuff to wrap it all up.)

But perhaps, unlike us, you should watch this movie/pilot first.

Starring Matt Lanter (Harry Osborn in Ultimate Spider-Man, Brody Mitchum in Heroes) as Anakin Skywalker (voice).
Ashley Eckstein (8 episodes of That’s So Raven) as Ahsoka Tano (voice).
James Arnold Taylor (Wooldoor Sockbat in Drawn Together, Green Arrow in Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1, 4 eps of Young Justice) as Obi-Wan Kenobi / 4-A7 / Medical Droid (voice).
Dee Bradley Baker (The new Thundercats, Adventure Time, Avatar The Last Airbender, Ultimate Spider-Man, Waddles the pig in Gravity Falls, and many more) as Clone Troopers / Captain Rex / Cody / Fox (voice).
Tom Kane (Professor Utonium in The Powerpuff Girls, Magneto in Wolverine And The X-Men, and much more) as Yoda / Narrator / Admiral Yularen (voice).
Ian Abercrombie (Mr. Pitt in Seinfeld, Green Lantern-TAS) as Chancellor Palpatine / Darth Sidious (voice).
Kevin Michael Richardson as Jabba the Hutt (voice).
Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury in the Marvel movies, Django Unchained, Snakes On A Plane) as Mace Windu (voice).
Christopher Lee (Saruman in the Lord Of The Rings movies, Death in The Color Of Magic, The Golden Compass) as Count Dooku (voice).

LINK URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1185834/combined

VIDEO: MOVIES: REVIEW: Upstream Color (2013)

Clio: 1.4/5 stars, 3.6/10.
Carolyn: 1.6/5 stars, 4/10.
Native ratings: 3.4/5 stars Netflix, 6.8/10 IMDB.

Written, directed, and starring Shane Carruth, the brilliant director of Primer. And that’s why we watched this.

And damn, what a shock. Primer may be the most confusing time-travel movie of all time, but this movie is way less coherent, and way more confusing!

I sum it up as: “That movie was awful and I have no idea what it was really about.” Carolyn agrees.

Basically, this movie jumps between 4 different substories a LOT. It’s similar to Cloud Atlas in that style, except lacking the coherence of Cloud Atlas (which continually jumped between 6 different stories in 6 different time periods).

It’s actually somewhat skillfully crafted. This image illustrates the concepts in this movie, and how the scenes fed into each other. And in retrospect, it all makes sense: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30585110@N04/8700138325/in/photostream/

…But when it’s so obtuse that the two of us couldn’t even piece that together… That makes it less enjoyable. Carolyn pieced together maybe 25% of it, but Clio pieced together close to 0% of it.

It helps if you are aware of worm charming (wiki that). I wasn’t.

Carolyn’s thoughts:

This movie was pretty bad. It did not compare to Primer. It started out interesting enough, but it got confusing pretty quick. Halfway through, we almost aborted, but then it seemed to get more interesting (with the shared memories between the two characters.) So we kept going, and then it STILL didn’t get good. Eventually, we put it at 1.5X, then 2.0X speed, and we didn’t feel like we missed much by speeding through the ending. IT WAS STILL SLOW, even at double-speed. Unsatisfyingly slow. It just left me unsatisfied.

Clio sent me this this morning: http://briansfinas.com/review-of-shane-carruths-upstream-color/ That review says I’m too dumb to enjoy this movie. Thanks, reviewer, that makes me feel wonderful. Anyway, based on those 2 paragraphs of summary of what happened, I had gotten all that, but there are pieces in between that are still missing.

It didn’t make any sense to me how they were able to find the pig guy so they can free the pigs. (This review says they were able to track him down because they were listening to his music…. That still doesn’t make sense to me.) I mean, it didn’t make any sense how she even went to the pig guy to have the worm extracted in the first place… it was just so confusing, drawn out… there were interesting moments (such as the shared childhood memories), but nothing really solid that this movie could stand on.

Also, I guess you don’t need real actors when there is hardly any dialogue.

Written & directed by Shane Carruth (Primer)

Starring Amy Seimetz (she’s in a lot of stuff, but we’ve only seen Wristcutters: A Love Story) as Kris.
Shane Carruth (the writer & director, and Aaron in Primer) as Jeff.
Andrew Sensenig (also in a bunch of stuff we haven’t seen) as The Sampler.
Thiago Martins (some nobody who has only been in 2 movies (including this one) and 1 ep of a TV show) as Thief.
Kathy Carruth (a caterer for the movie Primer, and other than that, this and Primer are her only movies. And she did craft service in this movie) as Orchid Mother.
Meredith Burke (she’s a co-producer in 3 movies, and this is her only acting gig) as Orchid Daughter.
Andreon Watson (absolutely nothing except for this movie) as Peter.

LINK URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2084989/combined