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What Film (Movie) Have You Just Watched?


The_Munchmaster
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Fast and Furious 7 - such crap that I'll let someone else do the review on this:

 

Furious 7 is utter rubbish, and here's why

 

KARL QUINN

 

The latest installment of the Fast & Furious franchise is out now.

 

At the risk of being the guy who farts at Paul Walker's wake, I'm just going to come right out and say it. Furious 7 is rubbish.

 

Sorry, that's not quite right. This film is a stinking pile of crap.

 

Now, I know there are loads of people out there who think differently, and they'll point as one to the 800 million reasons I'm wrong (that being the gross in US dollars at the time of writing), but if we can focus for a second on something other than money and call an end to the minute's critical silence we've all observed in honour of Paul Walker, I'd like to point to a few reasons why Fast and Furious 7 – or as I prefer to think of it, Fatuous and Spurious 7 – is so bad.

 

It's a Road Runner cartoon masquerading as a movie.

 

Cars crash off mountainsides. Cars smash through not one but three skyscrapers, and keep going. Cars get riddled with bullets fired at high speed from point-blank range. Cars get crushed by collapsing multi-storey car-parks.

 

And what happens to the drivers of these cars? They get out, brush themselves off, grunt something barely intelligible and move on to the next moment of mindless mayhem. In another car.

 

Not since Wile E. Coyote last dusted himself off at the bottom of a canyon, only for a boulder to land on his head and pulverise him (only for him re-emerge seconds later with an ACME missile in hand), has a non-superhero screen character survived such a litany of unsurvivable moments.

 

Of course the fans will say that's all part of its charm. Magic charm, more like. It's utterly ridiculous hogwash and I simply will not stand for it (and not only because the rev-heads in the seats behind me look like they might get furious, fast, if I don't sit down).

 

It doesn't make sense. At all

 

It opens with raised-from-the dead Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) struggling with the prospect of getting behind the wheel of a car again; seconds later she's drag racing a guy in front of thousands of people, red-lining her car, timing her run perfectly so his motor explodes just before the finishing line.

 

So that's how you treat PTSD. Simple, really.

 

Paul Walker dangles from a bus that will soon hit the bottom of a cliff. Miraculously, no one will be hurt.

 

An Arab billionaire keeps a $3.4 million Lykan HyperSport - one of only seven ever built - in a penthouse 50-odd storeys above the streets of Abu Dhabi. How did he get it there? How does he get it downstairs when he needs to pop to the shops for a litre of milk? How does he make sure it doesn't drip oil on the Axminster?

 

None of these questions is answered, but more to the point, why is he sticking a second-hand computer drive into his $3.4 million car, when he has no idea what's on it or where it has been?

 

Do people really mod-chip a $3.4 million car anyway? I don't think so.

 

Vin Diesel can't act, can barely speak

 

Let's face it. The guy who has inherited the mantle of star of this franchise can't act for peanuts. Hell, he can barely even speak (at least not without sounding like he's got a mouthful of peanuts).

 

There have been few things as funny on screen in recent years as the sight of Diesel's Dominic getting, ahem, "emotional" over saying goodbye to his mate Brian (Paul Walker) or reconnecting with his on-again/off-again/dead-again/alive-again girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez).

 

Wooden? This guy is solid teak.

 

There is one good thing about Diesel's acting, though. It makes the Rock look like Marlon Brando by comparison.

 

The music. 'Nuff said

 

Which came first, the movie or the soundtrack? It's hard to tell but it often feels like the storytelling in Furious 7 is less important than the music selling.

 

And what music it is. It's awful. It's insistent. It's overbearing. It's rap with a capital C.

 

I know this kind of urban stuff is so successful because it appeals across demographics, genders, ethnicities and nationalities, and I'm all for diversity. But does it really have to sound this bad?

 

It may never end because (almost) everyone is immortal

 

There's a cruel irony in the fact that this film has become a de facto tribute to Paul Walker (and let's spare a second for his mate Roger Rodas, who was also killed in that high-speed single-vehicle crash in November 2013). Because on screen, only the most villainous or minor characters ever die.

 

Here we have Jason Statham as a villain who can take more punishment than Arnie's Terminator, up against Dwayne Johnson's Hobbs and Vin Diesel's Dominic, men for whom an iron bar to the head is about as troubling as a mosquito buzzing in the ear for the rest of us.

 

Statham's Deckard Shaw is a former soldier turned criminal out for revenge against the guys who put his brother in a coma … or something. But everyone has played both sides of the law in this series, so we'll probably see him join the good guys (is that what they are? It's so hard to tell) before it's all done and dusted.

 

And yes, there will be more films. Universal, the studio that has already milked more than $4 billion from this empty-headed series, has suggested it could stretch to at least 10 titles.

 

Please, somebody, wave the chequered flag and bring this drone to an end. It's nothing but a crashing bore.

 

- Sydney Morning Herald

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I saw "Lucy" a while back.

 

It is one of those films you will either love or hate. If you try to make SENSE out of it, you will hate it. If you see what the director was driving at, it will hit you very hard and very deep. The director is asking three questions: What does it mean to be human, what does it mean to be MORE human, and what does it mean to be more THAN human? Contrast "Lucy" with "Limitless", for two very different takes on a somewhat similar idea.

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The Sapphires - a mostly accurate Bio Pic of a group of notable Aboriginal Australian women who sang and went to Vietnam to entertain the troops and if the movie is anything to go by, could sing like angels. The movie itself is OK, but the music is excellent, chills up the spine stuff.

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Love Actually 2003 - A chic flick - my excuse for watching this, was that there's been an unseasonable Antarctic blast here recently and MLG wanted a girl movie. Actually quite good, with some good performances from a wide range of notables. worth a watch

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