The Greatest Trick

5 minutes. That’s all it took for us to switch this off in disgust. Not because what was on screen was repulsive visually, spiritually or any other -ly you can think of, but because the concept of a monster-slayer who works his way through the Universal horror classics (Frankenstein, Dracula, the Hunchback of Notre Dame) apparently gave the writers licence to mash up and spew out accepted versions of well-written horror stories and come up with something so vulgar that it wasn’t worth spending any more time on it. Lowest-common denominator film-making of the type that totally patronises its target audience rather than addressing them as human beings - “these 14-year-olds who are going to see it don’t have any concept of the original stories, so we can re-write them in whatever messy way we want.” Absolute horse manure. No star rating as we didn’t get to the end, but I doubt it would have got more than one.

Watched it to check before showing it to our son, and found that it was totally dull and standard fare about a young robot (Ewan McGregor - it’s a long way from The Pillow Book!) trying to make it in the big city. Not particularly offensive, but with some scary-ish visuals for the youngest film-viewers, so we sent it back on the grounds of it just not being good enough. Why is it that anyone making computer-animated movies apart from Pixar totally fail? Well, because Pixar have high standards and an incredible devotion to the stories rather than the merchandising, I guess. Call me a cynic, but there you go.

Sorry. I couldn’t get more than 20 minutes into this, which is why it has no star rating (not fair to rate something I haven’t watched to the end). The main reason was the screechy delivery of the Japanese dialogue (not a language I consider particularly beautiful to listen to), and the nature of the acting, which I guess was just a bit stylised. I know it’s held up as a classic, which is why it was on our list, but I was not enjoying it at all. The Magnificent Seven, however, which is based on this, was great fun. Shall have to see that again soon… Like I said, sorry.

I can’t tell you much about this film except that the first fifteen minutes were repulsive, and we didn’t want to go any further than that. In that short time we saw one of the most foul things I’ve ever encountered, and was horrified that someone could have thought it up in the first place. Knowing Quentin Tarantino’s style, he probably though it was funny to have a scene where a male nurse pimps his comatosed patients out to his redneck friends. The girl then wakes up and exacts her bloody revenge on the unsuspecting idiot. Violent, nasty and disturbing. And to think that QT made two of these!

Boring 2002 version of Stanislav Lem’s hardcore sci-fi novel, which is apparently more faithful than the first movie version made, 1972’s Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. We won’t be renting that one either then! When we read the novel in Jan/Feb time, both of us were quite freaked out by it in places, but there was no tension in the film we watched tonight at all. Major characters seemed either miscast or mis-directed, and the character development was actually too quick and therefore not believable. In the hour we watched, there was a fairly long sex scene and some partial nudity. It didn’t make the film any better, of course!