Tag Archives: 43

This is Where I Leave You  (2014)    43/100

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Rating :   43/100                                                                     103 Min        15

The most notable disaster per capita of famous actor since ‘The Big Wedding‘, this close up look at a large family, brought together by the passing of the father, each of whom all have their problems and secrets suffers primarily from the fact it is enormously difficult to like any of them, this, coupled with their individual and co-operative inability to generate any comedy at all, renders the film all but pointless. Jonathan Tropper wrote the screenplay based on his own novel of the same name and Shawn Levy directs – who has a very varied back catalogue, including the likes of ‘The Internship‘, ‘Real Steel’ (11), ‘Night at the Museum’ (06) and ‘Cheaper by the Dozen’ (03), but this most certainly falls into his duds category, bruising by way of collateral damage Jason Bateman, Adam Driver, Jane Fonda, Tina Fey, Rose Byrne and Timothy Olyphant. The title comes from the reasonably central event that sees Bateman’s character at the beginning of the film walk in on his wife cheating on him with his boss, and he then tries to process this fairly major setback to happily ever after – but the problem is he reacts in such a non-emotional way, with a sort of cold inevitability, and his character is the same one he always plays now, the ‘calm and sensible one’ surrounded by more headstrong or carefree family members/friends, and of course the young local hottie (Byrne) will naturally take sympathy on him, groan. It’s all as unrealistic and stoic as his character is.

Hector and the Search for Happiness  (2014)    43/100

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Rating :   43/100                                                                     120 Min        15

A crummy, sentimental, almost boorishly stilted ‘life affirming’ film centred on yet another bumbling and repressed central geek character from Simon Pegg and one which will deliver no surprises whatsoever in terms of its resolution, although having said that the ending was quite nice – indeed that, a wonderful albeit too brief cameo from Christopher Plummer, and Rosamund Pike slapping her ass on Skype are the only things that saved this from incineration.

This is basically Britain’s take on ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty‘, with Pegg living out the same daily routine with his smoking hot girlfriend (Pike) and going through the motions with the patients at his psychiatric clinic. Essentially having a boredom induced mid life crisis he decides to go travelling, partly due to a boyhood obsession with Tintin (ironic, as Pegg also starred in ‘Tintin : The Secret of the Unicorn‘ and it was also terrible). This obsession fits the story well as it uses many racial stereotypes that wouldn’t be out of place within the pages of the comic (Tintin was one of the most popular comics of the Twentieth century for those unfamiliar with the Belgian boy detective, but initially it contained various caricatures that would never make it into print today), most notably when he goes to ‘Africa’, not a country within the continent mind, just ‘Africa’. Reason being his destination is shown to be run by drug barons and random people with guns who seem to have been educated at Cambridge and speak the Queen’s despite none of their goons knowing a word in English.

Seems a bit strange, travelling to but a single destination in Africa and yet picking one that is completely unstable and commonly plays host to Western abductions. The fudge to facilitate this is Pegg’s old uni buddy who seems to have been there the whole time and naturally as a white Westerner is the only thing stopping all of ‘Africa’ dying from disease or gunfire as the lions prowl quite literally ten yards away from the outdoor operating table, then, in a two pronged attack, this friend painfully creeps his arm around his black bodyguard revealing that he is also the man’s gay lover and that he has stayed as it’s the only place where he feels accepted as himself, despite the fact that the West has very effective and largely victorious gay rights movements and he clearly felt the need to run away and hide as far away as possible from everyone he knew to live out his repressed colonial fantasy of bumming an armed black man and was at great pains to keep this relationship hidden from everyone in the region until they and Pegg were in the middle of nowhere by themselves – I mean, that is both a politically correct and incorrect sandwich gone completely berserk, I’m surprised he didn’t have an offshore dolphin retreat for feminists recovering from troll bashing that doubled as the continent’s first pro bono transgender surgery.

Pegg’s other destinations are Shanghai, where he gets it on with a prostitute who then claims he used her which I still don’t understand, a monastery in an undisclosed location, and …. Los Angeles, that top destination to visit when you are searching your soul for a higher meaning and keeping a journal, as he is, of what makes different people happy. Alas he doesn’t ask any gangbangers, but whilst in ‘Africa’ he does get kidnapped, which at least brought a level of consideration into things, but then he gets out of it via another hopeless fudge.

Although the ending was done quite well for what it is, the fact that the girlfriend he leaves in limbo whilst travelling is both a nice person and very beautiful means there was only ever going to be one outcome to his ill conceived meanderings and one inevitable conclusion to what it means to be happy – sex with Rosamund Pike, and a considerable amount of money that allows you to live in posh splendour in London meaning you never, ever have to think about the hellholes you foolishly decided to travel to and get kidnapped in and where you can quickly turn a blind eye to the problems in the rest of the world as your near death experience has finally convinced your lady to accompany you whilst you engage in your hobby of flying remote controlled planes. Watch ‘Mitty’ instead.

Paranormal Activity : The Marked Ones  (2014)    43/100

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Rating :   43/100                                                                       84 Min        15

Grooooooan. Yet another stale and regurgitated horror film from Blum Productions in the Paranormal Activity series, this time swapping surveillance cameras for handheld ones and revolving around the story arc of certain people being chosen for demonic possession by a coven of Satan worshippers and dark magic practitioners. The cameras are held by three friends, one of whom has been chosen to have his brain turned to mush by a demon, but not before he subjects us to terrible camera work and predictable jump moments. There’s a semblance of a story, but not much else going on here.

Walking with Dinosaurs 3D  (2013)    43/100

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Rating :   43/100                                                                       87 Min        U

A big budget animation based on the BBC documentary series ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ which aired in the late nineties. This was financed by both the BBC and independent investors in the states and so all the main characters have American accents, with Justin Long being the biggest name to lend his talents to the voiceover work. We follow the adventures of two young brother dinosaurs, two Pachyrhinosaurus to be exact, as they mature from following the herd to leading it. The animated work is very good and everything looks slick and realistic enough, with Alaska and New Zealand providing visually splendorous backdrops (in fact the same mountain that can be seen in the Desolation of Smaug review also features here), but the story is simply terrible. Early on the two bros witness their father being torn to shreds, and then an instant later they’ve forgotten about it and they continue on regardless – in fact they assume their mother has met a similar fate, they don’t actually bother to try and find out.

They become part of a particularly lame love triangle which attempts to be both part of the animal kingdom and also relate to human relationships, with the potential conclusion being that the alpha male will get the woman who will bow down to him even though she thinks he’s a moron, and the way to counter this is to attempt to beat him to a pulp – and if that fails wait until hopefully someone else does it for you. It does tell you the name of each of the species that they encounter and what the name means which is nice – the bad guys are the gorgosaurus, which translates as ‘fierce lizard’, and also lends more depth to Lena Headey’s sexy queen Gorgo in ‘300’ (06).