Quick Review: Sherlock Holmes and Zombieland

We are starting off a new feature called Quick Review. Generally a review would be several hundreds of words long and delve deep into the movie. But not all movies merit such deep analysis or maybe we just dont have much to say. For all such movies where we have an opinion but not an opinion so huge we have quick reviews! Read on!

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

If you havent read Sherlock Holmes you should! He was the definitive character mould for the 20th century. A 100 years later characters like that began to seep into mainstream cinema. Now this Sherlock Holmes essayed by the fantastic Robert Downey Jr is a comic one with knack of showcasing his plot before he actually performing it, be it at trivial one to put the opponent in a boxing ring down or catch the villain. Besides distributing his immense capacity for love between lady love Morstan and man crush Watson he has a cheeky tongue which is delightful and racy making the most uncharacteristic remarks which would make even a progressive Victorian like the real Sherlock Holmes himself widen his eyes.

Sherlock Holmes is as much fun as the movies can get with a decent plot and strong characterization. It is a fun, on your toes ride much like the usual superhero movies; only the hero here is a 19th cent. detective. But the action sequences and the chases though fun are nothing new, Mark Strong was wasted playing the maniacal villain who was the weak link of the movie.

Rating:

 Good

p.s: This movie is actually like Iron Man in lot of its ways. The wasted hero, with a guiding light in form of his assistant, who is self obsessed beyond norm and so sunk in his work that he can perceive little else. But he comes around in the end to save the day. Also they both have a nice little pad of their own where they perform experiments and are in captive for certain periods.

Zombieland (2009)

There have been ah so many zombie movies and though I have not seen many(classic case of you have seen one, you seen em all feeling) I know how it is going to pan out like. Zombies arent inventive! They are dumb almost dead people and can do nothing but try feed of the normal ones. So in every zombie movie onus falls on the real people who live and weave around them fighting for survival. They set the movie's pace and tone. Be morose and heroic like in I am Legend or poke fun and run for your lives with tongue in cheek fear like in Shaun of the Dead. Zombieland is of the latter category. It entertains superbly mixing in all that you need for a fun and timepass movie; a geeky boy, a macho dude, a sexy chic, cute child and some hot wheels with some great cuts and funny jokes. 

Woody Harrelson gave a really good performance as the hack happy cowboy. Jesse Eisenberg who was being his usual fidgety self fit in really well. What really makes this film a must watch is the small but smart things. The rules appearing in and out are a riot and being contextual and active too just ads to the fun. The slow motion sequences with some great background score are a delight. This movies lives in its moments and does them all well.

Rating  

Very Good

Best of Decade - Top 50 movies of the 2000's

It has been a great decade. Life in one decade is quite different from another but the 00's or noughties as some would like to say it. It goes with movies too. The decade which just ended had a huge diversity in the way it unfolded. The word blockbuster was redefined and the BO expectations were re adjusted to a level way up north. A major part of this was the re emergence of the superhero movies. Superheroes never really had it good outside the comics and on kids' channels but the emergence and success of Spiderman paved way for a decade full of heroes. Then there were the animation flicks which laughed their way to box office and critical success at the expense of all those people who thought they were just for kids. They have an amazing potential and next decade will be even better. And finally I should also call upon the Independent film circuit to honour them for being so brave and resilient in the face of the studio moguls spending hundreds of millions on every other flick. As like in any other decade it is the independent small budget (comparably) ones which actually deliver on the potential of cinema but this time round they had help from digital technology which has become affordable and thrown the fencing between producers and consumers in to the recycle bin. The youtube generation can deliver the punch as well as the studios. You have heard of

Paranormal Activity, haven't you? 15000$ budget & 100 million$+ gross. It was good film making coupled with brilliant marketing. This is just the beginning to all such breakout movies.

We do not know how next decade is going to pan out. What will the movie watching experience be? Will theaters still hold their pull or are we going to just be addicted to Netflix? Will Avatar truly revolutionize the industry and will 3D reach our homes and be a part of it as they predict? But we do know how the last one has panned out for movies. Here in this article I try and capture the 50 best movies of the last decade ie 2000 to 2009. These lists are tough, especially when they spread across such a long time and across the world. So

though inherently flawed I try my best to keep a level head and chalk out the decade's finest.

(update: highlighting and minor sentence and position changes)
 How did I make this list? After perusal of extensive ratings on my vote history on IMDB, reading of various lists all over the web, I took into consideration the quality of film making, my personal favourites, cultural and overall impact of the movies. Then the movies were microscopically weighed against each other and rankings in this list were determined. Ask me after a couple of years and it might be different. Such is the case with all lists.

There are more blockbusters than I expected. Of course there might be many more movies out there definitely deserving a place in this but I havent seen them yet. Sure will do someday and maybe a decade down the line I can make this list really, really comprehensive.

50. Love Actually(2003)

This is a tie between two very different romantic movies. One is an outrageous mix of several stories, some sweet, some bitter but all wonderful. One of the best ensembles cast of the decade.

Once(2006)
 Undoubtedly the contender for the sweetest movies of the decade. The latter is quaint independent movie capturing the life of two lost musicians who aren't exactly romancing each other. This movie took the industry by storm showcasing the power of the small movie.

49. Persepolis (2007)

Marjane Satrapi's digs into her own life and puts out a bildungsroman graphic novel of a young girl from Iran. The movie is unabashed story telling which has compelling visuals which seem pretty straight and simple.

Too Much Cinema Movie Ratings: What do they mean?

Be warned! This is a very self indulgent post where I try to standardize the  movie ratings I give. This is to not only give an idea to the readers but  to maintain consistency in how I rate movies. I believe all movies of a certain ratings (say 6) should be superior to those with lower one(like 5 and below)

Everyone who watches movies rates them in their own way. Some may just rate them simply good or bad while others may call them Great, good , ok, poor and horrible or in similar other notations, to each his own. It gets complicated when you write about movies and you want to give a rating. Ratings are quite important for any audience cos they give a quick idea of how good the product is. There are ratings all over, right from electrical appliances to censor board ratings to chess player or cricket team ratings. Movies are no different. 

The ratings make life simpler for the reviewer/critic and the reader/audience in the same way. When one watches or read about  hundreds of movies every year an easy way to categorize them and recall for recommendations or any other purpose is by giving it a rating. For example I could make a list like 'my movies in 2009' because I rated them all in imdb and archived them in an excel sheet. Call me a geek but without doing so it would be virtually impossible to track the couple of hundred movies I saw last year.

When I started loving movies, writing about them and rating them seemed the logical next step. Since then(almost 6 years now) I have been trying to find the perfect rating system. Each and every critics have their own. Ebert and Siskel used the thumbs up/down method, while Ebert gives a 4 star rating. Lots of publications especially the newspapers use a 5 pointer or 5 star system. Even some podcasts I know like filmspotting uses the latter. Some sites like Yahoo, AV club give an alphabetical grading system. Aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic use a 100 point score. However the one I always chose was the 1-10 ratings system as you find in IMDB. Each of the selections made sense to the reviewer or publication because of the way they approached the rating.

My 2009 in Movies

The year has been ordinary one in terms of movies. Some of the best ones were sci fi and that is the only consolation. However I am not going to make a best of 2009 list quite simply because unlike the professional critics at Uncle Sam’s place I havent been able to watch all the movies that have been released yet and anyhow in a month or so we will be counting down to the Oscars and doing a list then is best. By then most movies will be available for consumption. Since the Oscars are so prestigious, we movie people should simply give up calendar years and do our lists around it. The movies featured during Oscars often get forgotten and end up in neither lists not this year and not the year before. So i am going to take a different path. We critics are innocent folk with everyone living in their own glass doors. We can  celebrate Christmas whenever we feel like.

When it comes to me personally this hasnt been a stellar year like the year before where I could clock 240 movies (inspite of the TV shows). This year I could only clock 192 but its ok ‘cos life has changed in many ways and TV shows like Mad Men and Friends (yep it was my first time) made life richer in their own ways. The first two months were spent watching and writing about the Oscar nominees of 2009 and I was exposed to some really fine movies like Rachel Getting Married, Waltz with Bashir etc. There were a lot of classics, foreign language films and rom coms. There were a lot of indie films too. This was also the year I fell in love with Spanish movies and this was partly aided by the Spanish Film festival which happened in Hyderabad. So really as a movie buff what matters to me more than the best I have seen of this year is the best I have seen in this year. So I have compiled a list of must watch films I have seen for the first time this year and believe you too should sometime. So something like a 3rd time of Casablanca or Wall E wont count. There wasnt a single 10 this year I could see. Star Wars was the last one in October 2008. The 9’s were rare too but there were a plenty of 8’s. Here it goes!

Best films I have seen in 2009

The 9/10 ‘s

1. Waltz with Bashir

2. La Vita E Bella ie Life is Beautiful

3. Star Trek (2009)

4. In the Mood for Love

5. The Blues Brothers

The 10 most anticipated movies of 2010.

2009 has been a pathetic year in terms of quality and variety of movies. Most of the big budget ones were crappy and the best were some independent or very low budget movies like In the Loop, Moon and 500 Days of Summer. These are surprise packages and tough to predict. So like always I look at the Multi hundred million dollar, Super Star Studded, Auteur helmed movies to show us the path. Here are my top 10 most anticipated movies of 2010.

10. The Rum Diary: Johnny Depp is back serving Hunter S Thomson in another of his works after the dizzily brilliant fare: Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. Well we will take anything with Johnny Boy. Just hoping it won’t make the Public Enemies.

9. Jonah Hex: A wild Wild West where bounty hunters and Voodo practitioners are involved. Based upon a comic book with a terribly scarred anti hero it throws me back to the good ol’ days. Dont tell me Megan Fox in hot Victorian lingerie wont delight you! 

8. Arrested Development: Everyone loved the TV show. Much to the delight of the fans it’s back in the form a movie. Sex and the City worked, The X files didn’t. But I am pretty sure with its fantastic humour Arrested Development wont disappoint the fans.

7. Shutter Island: This Martin Scorcese-Leonardo Di Caprio period thriller was supposed to release in 2009 but got pushed back. We cant wait to see what Marty has to follow up to his Oscar winning Departed. Something better I hope.

6. Robinhood: Another quintessential pair, ie of Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe is back. They try to repair the joke that was the last Robinhood movie was 20 years ago. Right up in Gladiator’s alley Scott must have put heart and soul into this after the performance of his last 2 movies.

5. Kickass: This might end up being the surprise package of the year. Matthew Vaughn, who also directed Layer Cake and Star Dust makes a movie in which a teenager just decides to be a superhero though he has no powers, training or meaningful reason to do so.

Feature: Summer 2009 Roundup, Part 2

The Summer in question here starts in may and ends by mid September with the beginning of fall which brought out releases like Surrogates and Inglourious Basterds. So this roundup does come almost a month late but this situation is due to the place I live in most movies including some big ones like Up and Star Trek come several months late. There are some others like District 9, Sam Raimi's Drag me to Hell, 500 Days of Summer, Cloudy with Chance of Meatballs, Bruno, Time Traveler's Wife etc I couldnt get to see at all. Maybe I soon will when they are out on DVD's. Sometimes I feel like moving away to greener(read where movies release the earliest) pastures. Also I have intentionally skipped talking about movie like Aliens in the Attic, I love you Beth Cooper etc which have been said to be ranging from uncomfortable, nauseating to vomit inducing. So here are the rest of the movies which I got to see and are worth talking about. For here in 'Too Much Cinema' good cinema is everything.

So continuing the serial reviews from the last post:

8. The Proposal

This is the best 'chick-flick' or romantic comedy if you wish of this year. It stars Ryan Reynolds who has a knack of picking simple small budgeted yet refreshing films and Sandra Bullock who I havent seen act so well in a long long time. Well I have never seen her act well before. This movie has the usual romantic plot and twists but it has refreshingly new and bold (read adult) stuff in the comedy department. Just like The Hangover you are entertained through out the movie with one liners and sketches. By doing so this movie ends up pleasing the views who are non chalant to the chic-flicks, which is quite a big thing for such films. It has paid off well too by landing the 10th spot in the highest grossers of the year so far.

9. The Ugly Truth