Reviews

My first time penning a review on this for many years. This movie compelled me to change that and log into to state a true 10/10 for me.

Everything's just wonderful with Matilda the Musical. The acting, the cinematography, the music! The music, thanks to the genius of Tim Minchin and the dance scenes and choreography is just brilliant.

I won't go into the story much, beyond to say it sticks quite close to Dahl's original text. Suffice to say I had every emotion, including plenty of laughs and a few tears.

Pure cinema at its finest. I can see this becoming a Christmas classic for many years to come and it's so good to finally have a classic of the calibre that older times once brought us.

Please, more of this!!

Well I won't be getting this evening back.

After reading the reviews I expected this movie to be either disturbing , shocking or somehow something out of the ordinary, perhaps twists and turns or clever spin maybe. What I got instead, was a slow moving film with an obvious plot, that played out to its obvious ending.

It's one of those films, where you press the pause button to check how far you're in, to then see its a third of the way through and so say to yourself "oh c'mon do something, anything", yet it still continues to roll on with the same single tiered plot.

Looking at the cover, you may well have high expectations for this film..you see review snippets of .. "Masterful!", "Will shake you for days", "Mad Max, in the countryside". Seeing that Post Apocalyptic films are my favourite genre, I thought I might be about to watch something special.

It starts off very slow, but that's OK. You figure they are bringing you gently into the Brutal reality of the world in a curious unsuspecting way, but no. It just stays at a slow pace from there. We are introduced to the protagonists enemies on very rare occasion, which helped break the monotony a bit, but its fleeting, and do not expect anything like the visceral eye feast of Mad Max.

A disappointment really, and certainly a bad comparison to make it to Mad Max. I had high hopes of something akin to the UK feel of 28 days later, but this was quite a lack lustre of a film.

Have to say as well, there is some sort of weird erotic element to the film. The main actor is well endowed, as they say, and so the director seems to like showing this off in a few random scenes. So out of the blue, we see him walking around naked in his dreams or having a random masturbation session.

I went into this open minded and willing it to be a good movie. I heard it was a horror / science fiction film, and that the first 30 minutes are worth enduring. I expected it might not get off to a good start and would then find its groove.

It stayed awful.

The main characters are so clichéd and stereotypical, its actually nauseating. A group of guy / girl, good looking party kids head to a cabin in the woods (I know right?) to meet their all to obvious ending. You don't feel anything for these characters, they lack any depth. After ten minutes I looked forward to the aliens killing them off. Unfortunately the abductors took far to long to put the viewer and the said cast out of their misery. Its a cheap Hollywood process to typecast like this. It would have been so much more interesting if it had been a family, or a group of bird watchers, anything different. Why do they always have to go for the Hollywood molded pretty kids?

It does not get any better after that. I don't want to give out any spoilers, but the only glimmer of redemption is the last 30 minutes.

Unless you really have nothing else to do and your watching on DVR, I recommend you skip until the end and just watch the last 30 minutes. You might be led to believe it may have been a decent film up until that point, but trust me, its far from what you might expect.

Z nation, is as you would expect another attempt at portraying humans in a survival situation with all the typical nuances that come with the genre.

If you don't go into viewing Z Nation expecting anything classic like 28 days later or the walking dead, its an enjoyable enough viewing that gives you some zombie action without having to think to much.

Yes, it has the typical zombie plot lines and scenes. There really is nothing new or unique at all. The acting is quite bad, as others have said.

Having got the negative out of the way, if you go into this for some run of the mill unadulterated zombie abuse (head shots, customised baseball bats and lots of zombie snarling & biting), then is a fun 40 minutes.

I will likely watch the next one and see where it goes.

I heard about 'The Day' from a friend, came home and searched for it on IMDb. I was then disappointed to see it only had a 5.2 rating, so I went into watching the film with a low expectation.

What I learned was that IMDb often gets it wrong, or least a low review does not always denote a bad movie, the opposite in this case.

The Day is in fact a really decent film.

It is very well paced, beautifully shot and the ending left the movie on just the right note.

So if you like this sort genre, then really pay no mind to the negative reviews and low score. Watch it and I am sure you will enjoy it too.