LAND OF THE LOST

2009

DIRECTOR: Brad Silberling

NOT A PART OF MY COLLECTION

Will we be adding this to our collection? YES

May Contain Spoilers!

Land Of The Lost was a little known Saturday morning kids TV series in this country, so as with film such as McGruber, a McGyver parody, and Get Smart,  it was always going to be  tough sell over here. Besides seeing the trailers at the time, it all but by passed me. So when I finally saw this on a Saturday afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised by my positive feelings. This is fun, pure and simple. It’s a vehicle for Will Farrell, not my favourite comedian by a long shot, but he defiantly made this work with his brand of humour.

The plot is just too preposterous to explain here and there’s little else of interest in the film in terms of narrative so I won’t spoil what there is but this is a much funnier and amusing take of this kind of adventure subject than you might think.

It’s escapist comedy adventure but not the more plausible type of Indiana Jones, but more in the vain of Journey To The Center Of The 3D but even more tongue in cheek. The comedy is also more adult, with several drug references and a large number of jokes revolving around an apparent eating disorder, but it was well-played, with some fun action and simple plotting.

Just sit back, ignore the critics, and trust me, there are a lot of them for this, and enjoy the ride. You might just be in for a pleasant surprise… Or not.

THE HAPPENING

2008

DIRECTOR: M. Night Shyamalan

NOT A PART OF MY COLLECTION

Will we be adding this to our collection? NO

May Contain Spoilers!

Back in 2009, when I first saw this, I wrote a review on Flixter which read “Simple question: What the hell was Happening???? More to the point… What was the point???? This movie was so diabolically pointless, self-serving and self-indulgent that words could never do it justice. Such a fall from grace from the man who brought us The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable…”

In many ways, that sums this film up perfectly. On a second viewing, an almost three years later, I feel that I have just a little more to say, but none of which is particularly good, except for the fact that I have increased my original one star/candle review to three out the maximum of ten! Shyamalan was a rising talent and now he has fallen far from grace, especially after the flop that was The Last Airbender. In this film he managed, whether by some misguided design or just by poor direction, to get some of the most amateurish performances out his cast imaginable.

I mean, I know that I’m hardly Mark Wahlberg’s greatest advocate but he’s still miles better than this, as is his counterpart, Zooey Deschanel, who both put in embarrassingly poor performances, but not just bad, but something that I would expect to see in a church hall! This was amateur all the way, with the only saving grace being the otherwise precise Shyamalan direction. But that’s not to say that it wasn’t boring or that he was directing a pointless narrative. The concept was slightly interesting but handled in such a ridiculously cack-handed and misjudged manner that I doubt anyone would dare suggest this idea again, let alone finance of film it.

I won’t give away the “Twist”, if you would call it that, but it is original, I grant you that, but interesting enough to support a movie? No way. Nor was anything else about this film.

STARSHIP TROOPERS 3: MARAUDER

2008

DIRECTOR: Edward Neumeier

NOT A PART OF MY COLLECTION

Will we be adding this to our collection? NO

May Contain Spoilers!

Back in 1998, I LOVED Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers; The savvy Sci-Fi metaphor about fascism and an excuse to have loads of gross out bug action and slaughter. But as the its sequels were straight to DVD efforts, I wasn’t keen to have the greatness of the original tarnished.

So I caught this on TV earlier this week, and I was happier with this one in principle that I expected, because at least it returned Casper Van Dien to the leading role spot, though I’m not a fan of him in particular, it was just nice to have some of the original cast back. They needn’t have bothered. He is a TOTAL waste of time as an actor. But, this was a poor sequel as well.

It played out more like a bog standard Sci-Fi channel movie, with sledgehammer metaphors and no fun or epic scale, compared to the original. The bugs didn’t do or appear half as much as they should and Star Trek: Enterprise’s, Jolene Blalock also proves her lack of range, playing a caricatured female soldier, whilst several if the key characters sing hymns in an effort to show how religion taking over the fascist Federation.

This reminded me much more of the 1952 classic Quo Vadis, which is in a complete different league to this! The idea I suppose is to tie the federation to the Roman Empire, which was critically effected by the growth of Christianity, with eventual transformation into the Rome which all know today.

Al in all, this was nothing more than a disposable Sci-Fi trifle, who’s only redeeming feature is its consistency in effects and the look of the graphics, such as the Fed Net, though even that was light and vacuous compared, again the original.

Please, PLEASE! No more!

THE TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE

2009

DIRECTOR: Robert Schwentke

NOT A PART OF MY COLLECTION

Will we be adding this to our collection? NO

May Contain Spoilers!

The pitch: Man displaced in time meets his future wife in the past and grooms the little and vulnerable girl to love him in her future until he eventually dies and frees her from this living hell! Or was that just my take in it?

Overall this was an intriguing idea of a man who as a child, survived a car crash which killed his mother and found that his was no longer able to stay in one time. As he grew up, he travelled, often against his will, within his own lifetime and as I’ve already covered, cultivated a relationship with his future wife.

This was an adaptation of the novel and maybe, not having read it, the novel was able to convey more than the film, but there’s very little to this. There is a lot of events, a lot of predictability and a lot of sloppy and unrealistic explorations of the bizarre relationship between these two temporal lovers, but whilst its bizarre in one respect, it’s played very traditionally in an other.

The performances are nothing to write home about, with simple work a day portrayals of at times, two barely two-dimensional characters, but that’s not to say the Eric Bana & Rachel McAdams were miss cast or bad. No, they did a reasonable job with misjudged material. This needed to be  more of an exploration of the complexities of time travel and the effects this may have on their lives and psyches. It could also have drawn from more traditional examples of disjointed relationships, which keep going in spite the fact that one member is often away of disappearing. But instead it ops for a bog standard American marriage between two people who love each other and seem to be ignoring the incredible obstacles placed before them.

In short, it had an ambitious narrative but nowhere as much ambition in the adaptation or the direction. I just didn’t believe in these two lead characters nor the ensemble with surrounded them.