Underdog Movie Review

Dear God, did Jason Lee get an enormous tax bill or something? First he ‘stars’ in the abomination that was Alvin and The Chipmunks, and now he’s voicing a canine superhero in this dog of a movie. What happened, Brodie?

Underdog is the story of a small and rather rubbish beagle (Lee) who is part of the bomb squad. (I’m not sure why, as all the rest of the sniffer dogs are Alsatians. Maybe it was part of some sort of diversity initiative.) Anyway, after causing havoc one too many times, Underdog runs away, and is captured by a mad scientist, Dr Simon Barsinister (Dinklage) and, in true superhero style, gains special powers after an accident. He is taken home by ex-cop turned security guard Dan Unger (Belushi) as a gift for his son Jack (Neuberger); the two have been estranged since the death of Dan’s wife, and he hopes that the dog will cheer Jack up.

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Tags: Movie Reviews-UK

Heather Huntington

ReelzChannel.com, February 01, 2008

As neither a’ tween-aged girl nor the possessor of one, I went into the Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour movie blissfully ignorant of the whole Hannah Montana craze—other than that it was one, of course.

After having seen the movie, however, I am still woefully uninformed of many relevant details.

As the name implies, Best of Both Worlds is a concert tour movie, almost to the purest extent of the phrase. That is to say, it is basically a filmed version of her concert and therefore basically innocuous.

To the hardcore Hannah fans, it will probably be a chance to either relive the hottest concert of last year (if you went) or a chance to experience it (if you didn’t). The movie is in 3-D, and the effects are used primarily to make you feel like you are one of the concert-goers—luckily one with a very good seat—with waving hands with glow-sticks, confetti and guitar picks all appearing to be in the theater with you. As much as I hated having to wear the awful 3-D glasses the whole time, that part will probably seem very cool to Hannah’s ardent fans.

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Tags: Movie Reviews-UK

St Trinian’s (2007)

Time Out rating

Synopsis

St Trinian’s is the school for young ladies and it is once again facing dire financial crisis with the bank threatening closure. Headmistress Camilla Fritton is also in the firing line from the Education Minister as she espouses an unorthodox doctrine of self-empowerment and free expression. In order to save the school, the St Trinian’s girls decide to put their differences aside and hatch a plan to come up with cash. The leaders of the gang, Kelly (Gemma Arterton) and Annabelle (Talulah Riley) decide that a heist is the only way forward, and so decide to steal Vermeer’s ‘Girl with the Pearl Earring’ painting from the National Gallery.

Movie review

From Time Out London

This ultra-glossy, twenty-first-century update of the original series of films about the anarchic student body of the titular ‘ladies school’ comes bounding off the screen like a feature-length ad for Top Shop. Out go any radical notions of female social upheaval and in come clumsy drug jokes, broad stereotypes and reams-upon-reams of thudding pop music. The lead performances from the young cast are generally weak (apart from an excellent Jodie Whittaker) and the script is a tiresome mulch of self-conscious cultural references. Not even a camp-as-Christmas turn from Rupert Everett as effete headmistress Camilla Fritton is enough to salvage this mess, which drifts aimlessly towards a tawdry heist finale that will only make sense to those with the ability to bump their own brain-patterns to the level of sub-moronic torpor. The one-dimensional, any-excuse-for-a-musical-montage direction does, admittedly, inject some much-needed zip into the proceedings, but in terms of a cultural legacy, this is one to file next to ‘Spiceworld: The Movie’.

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Tags: Movie Reviews-UK

Miramax Films presents a film written and directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. Running time: 123 minutes. Rated R (for strong graphic violence and language). Opening today at Landmark Century, AMC River East and Century Evanston.

By Roger Ebert

The movie opens with the flat, confiding voice of Tommy Lee Jones. He describes a teenage killer he once sent to the chair. The boy had killed his 14-year-old girlfriend. The papers described it as a crime of passion, “but he tolt me there weren’t nothin’ passionate about it. Said he’d been fixin’ to kill someone for as long as he could remember. Said if I let him out of there, he’d kill somebody again. Said he was goin’ to hell. Reckoned he’d be there in about 15 minutes.”

These words sounded verbatim to me from No Country for Old Men, the novel by Cormac McCarthy, but I find they are not quite. And their impact has been improved upon in the delivery. When I get the DVD of this film, I will listen to that stretch of narration several times; Jones delivers it with a vocal precision and contained emotion that is extraordinary, and it sets up the entire film, which regards a completely evil man with wonderment, as if astonished that that such a merciless creature could exist.

The man is named Anton Chigurh. No, I don’t know how his last name is pronounced. Like many of the words McCarthy uses, particularly in his masterpiece Suttree, I think it is employed like an architectural detail: The point is not how it sounds or what it means, but the brushstroke it adds to the sentence. Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is a tall, slouching man with lank, black hair and a terrifying smile, who travels through Texas carrying a tank of compressed air and killing people with a cattle stungun. It propels a cylinder into their heads and whips it back again.

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Tags: Movie Reviews-UK

P.S. I Love You (2007)

Synopsis:

Two-time Oscar winner Hillary Swank tries her hand at romantic comedy in this touching film based on the bestselling Irish novel. Holly Kennedy (Swank) and her charming Irish husband Gerry (Gerard Butler) are a young couple struggling to get by in New York City. Their marriage is 10 years strong, and they are madly in love, but the fates soon step in, when Gerry develops cancer and dies. Holly is completely devastated, and her friends Denise (Lisa Kudrow) and Sharon (Gina Gershon) do their best to console her. Her mother (Kathy Bates) and sister, Rose (Nellie Mckay), also offer their support, but it seems nothing can pull Holly out of her grief. Then one day, she begins to receive love letters Gerry penned before his death. The letters are filled with various stories and instructions, and one of them even contains a plan that sends her and her friends on a trip to Ireland.

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Tags: Movie Reviews-UK