Taken

The tagline on the poster pretty much sums the film up. They took his daughter.
He will hunt them. He will find them. And he will kill them. And that, in
essence, is the whole movie. Liam Neeson is this ex-CIA guy whose daughter is
kidnapped by human traffickers on holiday in Paris. He therefore goes over to
Paris and kills everyone remotely involved until he gets her back.

Liam Neeson is his usual warm, lovely sympathetic self with big soulful eyes,
as he carves a trail of mayhem and destruction through this human trafficking
operation. It's not a big anger and revenge thing, so much as a father's brutal
ruthlessness in the face of an estimate that if he doesn't locate her in four
days, he never will. Thus the good guy is unimpeachably good - he's a concerned
father fighting for his innocent daughter's life, and the bad guys are
irredeemably bad - these are scumbags who kidnap young women travelling alone,
and sell them into lives of enforced prostitution. Thus, there is absolutely no
act on Neeson's part that you couldn't condone, and boy howdy does he use that
latitude. The action runs from gunplay, snap-the-neck martial arts to offroad
vehicular homicide.

Essentially the whole thing is an cathartic justicegasm from start to finish. A
real manly man's movie. Doesn't make a lick of sense of course, but hey, it's a
Luc Besson screenplay, and since when did it matter whether he made sense? It's
a case of sit back, relax, and enjoy watching Liam Neeson break the necks of a
series of very unpleasant men. An especially satisfying film if you're getting
on in years, and want reassurance that you can be an older man, and still
badass.

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

Brief Synopsis: A young boy's father is appointed commandant of a work camp in
Nazi Germany. The boy befriends another boy, an internee in the camp, and
slowly comes to realise the gulf between what he believes to be true, and the
harsh reality, with tragic results.

We often hear that the story of the Holocaust must be retold, that we shouldn't
be allowed to forget. I completely agree with that, and for that reason alone,
this is a worthy film, which I would encourage people to see. The reality of
that stance, however, is that not every film on the subject is going to be a
masterpiece; The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas is no Schindler's List.

It does have an interesting angle; the Germans in the film have very English
accents, and are portrayed, by and large, as classic period English people. We
are being encouraged to think of the Germans as just like us, to not see it as
something *they* did, but as something we might all have been swept up in.

Likewise, everyone in the film is a victim of the Third Reich to some extent.
Clearly, the plight of the Jews is paramount, and certainly not downplayed, but
too, there is the suffering of a mother unable to interfere as her children are
indoctrinated; a young girl swept up in Nazi propaganda because she has a crush
on a young officer; the commandant himself is clearly a good man who has sold
his soul to ensure a future for his family.

The ending, which I shan't go into detail about seems like hyperbole, making a
bad thing worse to make a point, and adding a false note to a point in the film
where truth is most important.

As a film, it's a bit slow to get going, with the ending arriving in a big
rush. The performances are universally good, I think, but there's really not
enough meat there. The majority of the power of the film, I think, comes from
what you already know going in to the film.

I'd give the film 8/10, but also say that I think films on this subject need to
be judged to a higher standard, where 8/10 maybe isn't good enough.

Pineapple Express

Vague plot: Stoner witnesses murder, runs and hides at his dealer's place,
causing them both to go on the run. They attempt to evade their pursuers, the
pursuers attempt to catch them, both sides amusingly hampered by their own
ineptitude.

It's actually pretty funny. In a way, I'd say it was a cross between your
classic Cheech and Chong movie and a Coen brothers film like Fargo. In that
it's rather funnier and classier. Some great oddball performances, and a
realisation that merely getting stoned and fucking things up isn't funny in and
of itself, and a good script helps too. If you're making a film for stoners,
it's easy to be lazy, because they'll laugh at anything. This is a rather
cleverer thing.

It gets progressively wild and woolly towards the end, with a really violent
slapstick finale which is possibly over the top, but pretty hilarious for all
that.

Rocknrolla

So, Guy Ritchie's made his film again. We're back in the seedy, and clearly
non-existent world of East-End villains, enmeshed in capers at cross-purposes,
with every thread coincidentally tying up at the end. Is that a bad thing? I
don't think so. How many Hitchcock films are basically the same plot? I'm not
saying that Ritchie's as good as Hitchcock, but I am saying that it's no basis
to criticise him. Likewise, while Ritchie's East End may have no more basis in
fact that Middle Earth, it's similarly irrelevant to the question of whether
the film's any good. I say this because I am sick to the hind teeth of film
critics who appear to be putting the boot into Ritchie for no better reason
than he married Madonna, which annoys them for some reason.

As it goes, it's a bit messy and chaotic, but it's very amusing, exciting in
all the right places, sort of a dumbed down version of The Long Good Friday
with jokes in it. Everything's a bit contrived and coincidental, but not so
much that it bothers you.

Babylon AD

Imagine you've seen Children of Men. And you liked the post apocalyptic
setting, and you liked the idea of this washed up, morally ambiguous man
protecting this pregnant girl, and getting her from point A to point B. But you
couldn't help thinking it was all a bit wussy. It needs more guns, you think.
It needs explosions. It needs extreme sports. It needs martial arts. It needs
car chases. What do you do?

You call Vin Diesel, of course!

So, what this is, is your standard schlocky post-Cyberpunk thriller. Dodgy
geezer is hired to do dodgy job, by dodgy people, and unexpectedly grows a
conscience somewhere along the line, and rebels at the end at the standard
"give me the baby to eat and I will let you live and give you a million
dollars" moment.

It's not a bad one, it's grim, gritty, nicely actiony, heartlessly cruel in the
right places. It's not very intelligent, and pulls the "if we don't explain the
end, it makes us look cleverer, and saves us having to think up an ending"
trick. Beyond that problem, not so bad.