Career Peak – The point in an actor, actress or director’s career when they have given their best performance, reaching a point they will probably never match again! The idea is to examine a person’s film or television career and … Continue reading What was their Career Peak? – Tim Burton
What If… is a self-indulgent look at how things could have been. I take an event or a rumour and let my imagination run wild. It’s rarely based on fact and completely based on guess-work and conjecture. Reboots rarely do … Continue reading What If… The Reboots/Remakes Came First?
The problem with big, science-fiction based ideas is that eventually, it becomes “silly.” Anything that starts based in fact but tries to do something extraordinary or unique will eventually have to border on the unbelievable to keep the concept interesting. Only a few … Continue reading Transcendence (2014) Review
The reason that the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels fail to impress is because the original Pirates film should never have been successful or even “worked” in the first place. It was a film idea that originated from a theme park ride. It was a film about Pirates, which until this film had come along, were camp, stereotypical and silly. It starred Johnny Depp pretending to be Keith Moon pretending to be a pirate. The film shouldn’t work! Except many of those reasons is why the film does work. Shockingly, Pirates was an original idea. It was based (loosely) on a … Continue reading Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) Re-View
Pirates of the Caribbean works best when it’s not about Jack Sparrow. I think most people would agree that since the first film, the Pirates of Caribbean franchise has never really managed to rekindle that magic and it is because of one character, Jack Sparrow. The problem Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer have is that after they made the first film, what they created was one of cinema’s greatest characters. Johnny Depp had embodied a brilliant, funny, devious, courageous, bad boy pirate who is fantastic to watch and brings excitement and sparkle to the screen. What this led to was Disney and Jerry doing what most … Continue reading Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) Review
Grease is the perfect musical. It has a simple story, generally a love story, that can be easily punctuated by catchy, musical set-pieces that range from huge, perfectly choreographed numbers to something much more solitary and intimate. It is full of songs that stand-alone and have in fact had chart success long after the film’s release. You ask anyone to name five songs from Grease and most people will do it without a second thought. Loads of musicals have this formula too. I’m not a huge musical’s fan. I have only seen a handful but those that I have enjoyed … Continue reading Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) Review
I love being surprised by a film. I stand by the fact that I will pretty much watch anything, regardless of director/actor/genre and with my girlfriend getting into films as much as I am now, that sometimes means sitting and watching something I usually wouldn’t. It is pretty hard to go into a film without any preconceived ideas. The perfect example of this will be Dark Knight Rises. I’ve written before why I think that my own ideas of how good this film should be will probably mean I don’t enjoy it as much as I should. It has worked … Continue reading 21 Jump Street (2012) Review
When is the last time you saw Johnny Depp play a “straight” or “normal” role. What I mean by this is when is the last time he wasn’t covered in make-up, acting goofy or part of a cast/movie which required him to play an eccentric. Don’t get me wrong, Depp is fantastic in those roles. There is no doubting that Pirates of the Caribbean would be nothing without him and that he was clearly the best thing in Charlie and Chocolate Factory (even if his take on Willy Wonka wasn’t how I’d have interpreted it). I saw the new trailer for Dark Shadows, the new … Continue reading The Tourist (2010) Review
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