Change Your Image
daneaston
Reviews
Russell Grant's Postcards (1998)
Quite unbelievable
I happened to catch this and within 30 seconds was completely hooked. Russell Grant has always put his name to pointless, tacky programmes, but this one tops the lot and I needed to find out just how pointless, tacky and amateurish it was.
And it didn't disappoint.
Directed by the rotund man himself, it is by far the worst example of television I have ever seen. No part of it is done correctly. It is not interesting or entertaining; the sound was shockingly bad; the camera work was done, without doubt, by an amateur and the editing (what little there was of it) was probably done by Russell on his home computer. This would not even have a place on YouTube, let alone Channel 5.
What is most shocking, perhaps, is that Channel 5 have dug it out again seven years later and are repeating them.
Grizzly Man (2005)
A lazy and badly made documentary.
The story of Timothy Treadwell is a fascinating one and, after hearing about the story on a daytime chat show, I was excited to see the final film.
What a disappointment.
Werner Herzog could not have made a more boring and badly edited movie. There was no imagination and no originality in his film-making and the whole story was summed-up in the first few minutes, leaving me wondering why I should bother watching the rest of the movie. No effort was made to hide cuts during interviews and the parts he had staged to assist in telling the story were wooden and embarrassing to watch. To add to this, the sound dub was terrible and I found myself constantly turning the volume up and down.
This documentary would have been lovely as a 30-45min TV piece - but why a 2hr film? And a TV documentary maker would have put some imagination into it.
An amazing and heart-rendering story badly told and turned into a movie by someone who I can't believe has ever directed before. Such a disappointment.
A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)
Style over substance - disappointing
This film looks wonderful - the sets are amazing, the costumes are fantastic and I hope the production designer got paid handsomely.
However, I feel that such enormous effort was put into the design to hide what is, in my opinion, a weak script. The story is very linear with no sub-plots and little back-story. The humour works on one level and isn't actually very funny at all.
Perhaps it is another example of all the hype causing me to have impossibly high expectations, or perhaps it is because the last film I saw was "The Incredibles" (near impossible to beat!), but for me, I found Lemony Snicket really quite boring. The story never lifted off and there was nothing to really make me care about seeing to the end (although, after paying £8, I was going to!).
Having now seen it, I wish I had waited until its DVD release. I'm not really sure if I enjoyed it or not. For me, it's a hard-pushed 6/10 and the majority of that is for the production design. I think the 'behind the scenes' featurette will probably be better than the film itself.
Elephant (2003)
Shockingly terrible
OK, so it is based on true events. OK, so the Steadicam shots are quite well done. OK, so everyone in it in amazingly good looking. But none of that can make up for what is essentially a very boring movie. It's slow, dull and just frustrating. The entire movie is just a case of waiting for the final screen. There is very little story, almost no dialogue and Gus Van Sant should not be able to call himself a director. It was like watching a Crimewatch reconstruction. And a very slow, badly made one at that. If you watch it - good luck. If you enjoy it, you're a bigger man than I. I'm now just typing because, for reasons best known to the superb website that is IMDb, I have to write at least 10 lines. However, I really don't have that much to say about this appalling excuse for a film.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Rubbish
Forgetting all the hype and the film's age and looking at the film simply for what it is, it's simply a load of rubbish.
Badly shot, badly lit, bad sound, very thin plot and each scene lasting several times longer than is necessary, I found it very tedious. And the sheer amount of screaming just got on my tits.
But that's only my opinion...
Nothing to Lose (1997)
A bit of mindless fun, maybe.
It's okay. Not excellent, but not THAT bad. If it's on TV and you fancy a giggle, grab a beer and stay in, but don't rent it on DVD (region 2 anyway) because the compression is really bad and makes for annoying viewing.