The Weekly Roundup

This Week's Watches

Working Girl (1988)

Starring: Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford & Sigourney Weaver

Directed by Robert Benton
Rating: ★★★

Lots of people have recommended this film to me, and I have heard many other film fans and critics talk about it, so I decided to see it for myself. And I did like it. I liked the fact that it showed a realistic depiction of a hardworking woman trying to get ahead, and the challenges she had to face. Of course this puts the film firmly in ‘chick flick’ territory, which is kind of a shame that just because a woman is the main character of a drama, and has a relationship with a man, it automatically becomes a film for ‘women’. Anyway, how can a working woman in the 80s possibly get ahead without using her body? Unfortunately, the way she gets ahead is by using her body (if she wasn’t so damn attractive then Harrison Ford wouldn’t have worked with her), so you can throw the feminist rule book out of the window. But for what it is, the film is interesting and fun to watch, but is definitely a slow burner, but in a good way. The three main cast all give strong performances, especially Sigourney Weaver, who plays a character that I can see women hating more than men as she is the ultimate ‘bitch’. I’m not sure I entirely bought into the love story sub plot, but the main plot about Tess (Griffith) trying to get ahead and use her brains to be promoted is really involving, mainly because you want her to succeed so much. I absolutely loved the ending when she turns up at a new office and talks to her new ‘boss’. I thought it was a really strong and powerful finale. There are plenty of cameos of people before they were famous, including Joan Cusack, Oliver Platt and even Kevin Spacey as a coke snorting letch. Working Girl is an enjoyable and engrossing film, and it has Indiana Jones in it, so you know it has to be good, but I’m not sure it did too much to change the plight of the working woman.

After. Life (2009)

Starring: Christina Ricci, Liam Neeson & Justin Long

Directed by Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo
Rating: 0 stars

Wow. Another completely f*cked up film. This film is so horrifically disturbing, and not in a good way at all. It’s a shame really because it starts off well, with a woman waking up on a morgue slab, and a creepy atmosphere is created, but then a shoddy plot and some terrible writing soon makes the film fall into the depths of Hell. I wish I could actually scrub it from my memory with a Brillo pad: that’s how nasty it was. I mean, I like dark and disturbing, but this film took it to the next level, and mainly because I don’t think it really understood what it was trying to get at. The plot was very confusing and the ending was ambiguous in the worse sense possible (but I’m no fan of an ambiguous ending anyway), and because of this it left a very bitter aftertaste that repulsed me to my core. People don’t like dealing with death, and this film dealt with it in the most unrespectable way possible. I really wish that the director knew if she wanted it to be a supernatural film, or a horror film, because leaving it open ruined the whole thing: it destroyed any tension and atmosphere that the beginning built up. They probably thought it was an amazing twist or something and that the audience would be blown away by it, but as I said before, the only thing I wish they could change about the movie is that they never even made it at all. It’s a shame, because Neason gives a horrifically disturbing performance, but it has now affected the way I see him forever (I will never think of Aslan the same way again). Why did he agree to make this piece of crap? Why did anyone allow this film to get made? It just doesn’t make any sense!! Why don’t people read a script and think “this script is awful and has real problems, maybe we should fix those before we green light the movie”? So to summarise, I detested this piece of filth, and I wish I could un-see it.

Devil (2010)

Starring: Chris Messina, Logan Marshall-Green & Bokeem Woodbine

Directed by John Erick Dowdle

Rating: ★★

Five people trapped in a lift with one of them being the Devil sounds like an interesting premise (it does to me anyway) but Devil just didn’t pull it off. Granted, it has some very good moments in the lift, but the ‘plot’ is very loosely strung together by an opening and closing narration, because apparently we are supposed to believe that when someone commits suicide the Devil is allowed to gather horrible people together and kill them off one by one as punishment. Why would he even bother? The main problem with this idea (which is clearly not based on any religious theory) is that if Satan was capable of doing this, wouldn’t he just allow the lift to plunge and kill them all in one go? Or wouldn’t he find another way of torturing people so that they couldn’t actually escape? Maybe I was thinking too hard about the theological problems the film presented, so if you switch off your brain and don’t think to much about the plausibility of the whole thing, it is quite enjoyable to watch, unfortunately though the ‘PG-13’ rating strikes and we don’t really see any of the gore (which makes me think: what is the point of making a film about picking people off one by one and not showing it graphically happen??). So yes the film has some terrible problems, but for what it was, it was mildly enjoyable. Although I think that the screenwriter realised its own shortcomings, as the film is a meagre hour and ten minutes long, and even at that length it was still pushing the idea to its absolute limit.

Pick Of The Week

Fanboys (2008)

Starring: Sam Huntington, Jay Baruchel, Dan Fogler, Chris Marquette & Kristen Bell

Directed by Kyle Newman

Rating: ★★★

Kristen Bell always appeals...

I’m no Star Wars fan, so I feel that a lot of this film was lost on me, but it was still a quirky, original and funny movie that I really enjoyed. Set in 1998, the plot involves four friends who want to drive across America to California so that they can break into George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch and steal the first copy of the new Star Wars film, The Phantom Menace. The film is essentially a road movie with cameos from Star Wars actors (including Carrie Fisher) and unfortunately Seth Rogen. If one part wasn’t enough, he gets three different roles, and for someone like me who really can’t stand him, watching him struggling to act in multiple parts is painful to watch, but luckily he isn’t in the movie enough to really notice. The main cast give strong performances (especially Baruchel and Fogler) and although the plot is thin, you really want them to succeed in their plight. Fanboys really is for fanboys, because there is a lot in this movie about Star Wars and Star Trek, including many fights between the fans of both, which is clearly lost on someone like me who doesn’t care for either. I think that if you were a Star Wars fan then you would really love this movie, especially the bit when they actually manage to see some of George Lucas’ memorabilia. Fanboys is my pick of the week because it is funny, heart warming without being too cheesy, and original. And it has Kristen Bell in it, and who doesn’t love her?!?