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jgc2006
Reviews
Family Guy: Brian Does Hollywood (2001)
Good Episode, Incredibly Stupid and Offensive Joke
This is a good episode, Brian directing porn is a great premise and all in all it's pretty funny. The joke about Sharon Tate is absolutely shameful however and should never have been written, produced, televised or released on DVD.
There are a couple of stupid, offensive jokes in season 3 - the one about Jonbenet Ramsey is also woeful - but this joke almost ruins the entire season, even the entire series for me. Doesn't Seth Macfarlane have a conscience? Doesn't he monitor the writing in his own show? That joke should never have made it out of the writing room. Family Guy has always been inconsistent but jokes like this don't sit with the style, wit and humour the show is loved for.
Three Amigos! (1986)
Needed More Jokes
Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short team up for a screwball comedy but it's as though they think their presence alone will make the film funny. The Three Amigos is seriously lacking in jokes, and suffers from the clichéd curse of a comedy being more about action than humour. I kept hoping for the moment when one of the three would step up and steal the show but they're all equally bland.
The pieces were all there, it's a great idea for a comedy, but the three principles were wasted. Too much emphasis was placed on getting them together and not enough on the script. It needed another few drafts before it was ready to shoot.
5/10
Mad Men (2007)
This show's missing something
People kept telling me that they loved this show so I ended up getting the DVDs of the first season. I watched the entire series, hoping it would grow on me. I have to say though that I was bored at the beginning and I was bored at the end.
I kept hoping for it to get more interesting but really when you base a show on a bland character what do you expect? You get a bland show. The producers seemed unwilling to take the show anywhere daring, relying on the period far too heavily to hold interest and just staying stuck in first gear. It's not what I expected from the creator of The Sopranos. That show was certainly not afraid to go to new places, at least when it first started.
Silent Hill (2006)
Crane shot bonanza!
Let's start with the bad things: Sean Bean's terrible American accent, bad acting all round (with the exception of Radha Mitchell). The good: good special effects and a butch female motorbike cop. Plus there's more crane shots than you can poke a stick at. I'm not sure where to put this... It didn't save the film, but it did make me nauseous. And that took my mind off things a bit. I doubt Roger Avary foresaw so many crane shots when he wrote the script - "crane goes up, crane goes down, crane goes sideways, crane does the shimmy shimmy shake..." Maybe if Radha Mitchell and the butch cop had got it on... I like to think they wanted to, they just didn't feel it was the right time. Shame, it would have been the first sex scene shot entirely by crane.
5 out of 10.
Casino Royale (2006)
Bond by name only
Having seen the Bond franchise become little more than an action blockbuster machine, first in the Timothy Dalton era and then seeing a steady decline from there with Pierce Brosnan, I was duped into thinking that things would be different this time around. This time the special effects had been stripped back, there was less gadgetry and perhaps most importantly, a new Bond. I had also filled in a few blanks myself; this Bond movie would have more style, more COOL!
Of course, had I given it any serious thought and not been caught up in the hype, I would have realized that without a new director (and probably a completely new crew) what we were going to get from Martin Campbell would be more of the same, just with a different Bond. After all, this is the director who is responsible for The Mask of Zorro films. I made a big mistake.
Casino Royale is an action blockbuster without enough action. A spy thriller without intrigue or espionage or any of the cool stuff that made Bond so great in the 60s and 70s. It's a James Bond film by name only. Change the main character's name and you have a very average action film that could easily star Bruce Willis or, dare I say it, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I have no problem with Daniel Craig as Bond, but a good actor can't save a bad film. I won't even go into the glaring plot holes which are, quite frankly, insulting.
What amazes me is how Martin Campbell and his team could not look back at the old Bond movies and at least try to get some ideas from them. They are in the perfect position to emulate stylistically some of the best films of the genre and put their own modern spin on it. I'm all for updating, but leave the good stuff in!