Short rev: Wall-E

Well well, the hype around the "cute" robot Wall-E was too much for me to fight against it so I took myself a few free hours and went to the movies.

Here's my summary: The animations are great, I personally love the beginning most, where you can see those whole city full wit trash towers. The idea is nice and they found "cute" ways to let the robots show emotions. But basically I found the story a bit too ... long. Actually it went a bit boring in the middle of the movie. But still, if you are a fan of good animated stuff, then this IS for you. Oh and dont miss to watch the credits, I found it nearly the best part of the movie!

Stories of lost souls - Hollywood in 7 episodes

7 different short stories out of people's lifes, people who are lost in their own feelings, stuck in situations. A nice idea for a DVD, also a great cast. We got James Gandolfini in the episode "A whole new day", we got Josh Harnett in "The same", we got Jeff Goldblum, Cate Blanchett, Keira Knightley, Daryl Hannah, Hugh Jackman and a few more, actually more Top Hollywood cast than you could usually get into a movie.

The story endings are surprising and sometimes even the story ideas are. A midget who's in love and stalking his tall, great looking neighbour; a man who gambles about his car if the stranger finds out how he lost all his money this very evening; Illeana Douglas working in a supermarket and starting a theatre show there spontaniously with a collegue; a man waking up in his flat in the morning when it seems like his wife has left him with the kids and all his furniture.

I highly recommend you this DVD if you don't wait for action, romances, much drama and deeply philosophical thoughts. If you just wanna watch a nice collection of Hollywood shortfilms this is totally for you!

Featured shortfilm: Art'n Acte Production

Christophe Valet is a young film director and screenwriter seeking success by showing his scripts around to production companies. He is great in what he does - and that may be his problem ...

Art'n Acte Production
by FaridDMSDEBAH

We present you this awardwinning shortfilm by our talented compatriot Farid Dms Debah as a feature to let you take a look on the international shortfilm scene and because we kinda like it and so did the juries of the Larissa Mediterrean Festival of New Filmmakers and the Sarlat International Cinema Festival.

If you like it, you may wanna have a look on the imdb-page of this shortfilm and share your oppinion!

Storm of the century - one of King's good ones

Don't throw stones at me - or rotten tomatoes. I love Stephen King's books, all of them and I read 75% of them yet - but most of his movies are just ... boring! "It" could have been such a good one but it made me laugh more than being scared and "Cujo" was nearly cute. But I got a few favourites. This is one of them. (The other ones are "Nightmares & Dreamscapes" "Needful things" and "Dreamcatcher")



Okay to cut the story short:

A stranger called Andre Linoge comes to Little Tall Island (yes, thats the name) in the middle of a storm to get himself a child to raise for he is hundereds, maybe thousands of years old and to die soon (what in his case mean another hundered or thousand years). The community wouldnt be willing to take him serious so he starts controlling them and lets them kill themselfs and others with some help from his wolf-headed cane.

If you now think "Hm short story, nice" you are a bit mistaken. "Storm of the century" was brought to TV in 4 parts, each movie lenght - you are looking at a 240 minutes production here!

But what remains when you are done with watching the movie is mostly the guy who stared as "Linoge" - and two other side roles - an actor called Colm Feore. The funny thing about this guy is that you may be thinking that you know him from looots of other movies. At least it happened to me. Okay you could have noticed him in "City of angels" or "Face off" but at least I havent. When I watched this movie first, I thought "Hey, isnt that the guy from "Fallen"?" Nope it isnt, that is Elias Koteas and he doesnt really look like him.

Okay enough about my personal problems in the "who is who" of today's actors. Still, you gonna remember the guy but probably forget about the whole lot of cast in this movie because his performance is just one of the most evil performances I know so far and believe me I've seen alot of "evil" movies.

It's really one of King's good productions, you shouldnt miss watching it!

(Here's my fav Linoge Fan video from Youtube, the only one with acceptable matching music ;) I think about doing my own just to put "Sympathy for the devil" on it )

Trash as trash can be - 3 monster B-movies tested

It was a quiet afternoon when I thought "Let's go and watch some obviously bad movies". I looked around between DVDs and found 3 B-monster movies that looked exactly like what I was searching for. I grabbed "Bug" (1975) "Angiralus - It rips you in pieces" (aka "Razortooth")(2006) and "Mammoth" (also 2006). The last two promissed to be full of B - 3D effects and B - action which was what I wanted to see that afternoon.

I started up with "Mammoth".

Here's the story: Some scientists found a frozen mammoth. When they try to analyze what it died at and so on, they somehow touch an alien activating spot (?) and some meteor crashes down, reviving the frozen thing. From that second on an alien invaded zombie mammoth hunts people to pump off their life energy.

It sounds crappy already and hell yea, it is! I laughed my ass off when some scientist shouted "What a wooly beauty" and the cam turns, you see that bad animated zombie thing and guess what, it doesnt have a hair on his body, due to the bad animation! Also a running around human zombie hand is involved in this movie and yes it is quite fun to watch if you don't try to take it serious and just see it as some kind of comedy trash!

On a trash entertainment scale from 1 to 10 I shall give "Mammoth" a 7!

The second one I watched was "Angiralus".

Somewhere down in the swamp lands a scientist is breeding mutated eals. Last time he checked, his specimen was 2 months old and 2 meters long and of course they are hungry. That was two months ago and you guess it, the thing is now 4 meters long and hunting humans. And it is diabetic.

Well, I must say, the story is kinda nice but the animation at some points reaches a critical trash level. The eal looks like a huge eal and those half eaten people look a bit creepy (even if that repeats itself a bit often - eal attacks, half eats someone and the other half is layin around still shouting or walkin ...) but the eal changes its colour within the movie scenes. Nearly black, dark green, brown ... choose your favorite.

I give it 6.5 for the horror factor and the kept promisse "It rips you in pieces".

The last one was "Bug" which is completely different from the other movie same title, I reviewed earlier.

"Bug" is about some bugs comin out of some vulcanic fault. They are intelligent and still learning but also a bit dumb because they just explode from time to time. They kill their prey by burning it, nice trick and not so uncommon in today's fauna.

The funny fact in this movie is, that the bugs in the movie are supposed to be "special" but someone just took some hissing cockroaches, a nice pet by the way, and didnt even mind that they were snarling around the whole movie. If they wouldnt glow from time to time you wouldnt really get the point what shall make them dangerous but hey for a 70s movie it isnt soooo bad.

Anyway I just give it a 5 for the idea that cockroaches can form letters at the wall.

I must confess I loooove trash movies because you dont have to think so much about the story. You just lean back and expect the best you can get in a B- or C-movie! If you like them, too, you probably shouldnt miss those 3 films!

Short rev : Superhero movie

Okay let's put it this way: If you are a really big big big fan of Leslie Nielsen movies, if "You don't mess with the Zohan" was not tasteless to you and if you enjoy watching clips on the internet where kiddies on skateboards run against trees then you gonna love this movie!To everyone else random jokes about celebrities such as Tom Cruise, Cardinal Ratzinger, The Dalai Lama and not to forget Stephen Hawking - may be stupid, tasteless and unfunny.

The story could have been something because Superhero movie is a parody on every single superhero ever and some scenes weren't even so bad but Stephen Hawking flying from his chair crashing into a bee-hive is not funny, also some guy shouting to Nelson Mandela "I was in prison once, too" isn't really funny. Don't tell me I got no sense of humor, I really do - but that movie is just bad!

Johnny Mnemonic - A milestone in cyberpunk history

In near future, data smugglers tranfer and transport critic or illegal data through a wire system inside their brain for their costumers. Johnny is one of them and makes good money with it, paying his lifestyle in expensive hotels and with even more expensive whores. But this time his job is a bit too much. He has to tranfer over 300GB while his updated brain capacity is about 150GB. He decides to do the job anyway and instead deletes his childhood memories. How could he know that he is smuggeling the cure for "the black shake", a technology sickness, that could cure the whole world.

From the first second on he took the job, he is followed by a few different interest groups such as the Yakuza, the huge company Pharmacon and a robot priest who's hired by them. But somehow he makes it through with some help - but how to get the data off his brain without the security code?

"Johnny Mnemonic" was released in 1995 shot after a shortstory published a few years before. It was one of the first cyber topic related movies ever and also one of the most memorable and best. Keanu Reeves does the main character and is so much better fitting into the role than in Matrix or other movies. Also you get the feeling you watch a comic based movie after some time which makes it even better. My favorite part at the whole movie is "Jones" the former navy dolphin, half robot, half animal.

Great stuff, totally catchy, massively entertaining, highly recommended. One of my personal Top10!