literally geeking: Short Review of Films

It was suggested that I do an opinion piece on my favourite film from 2011 so now without further ado here is my tribute to Justin Bieber: Never Say Never in FRICKIN 3D.

YEA YEA YEA YEAH...I assume

Fortunately I’m kidding or I’d be as crazy as Martin Rigg’s at Christmas time, but if we’re being honest about the calibre of films from the last year I think we can all agree that something was left to be desired and believe me, I’ve scanned the entire Wikipedia entry on 2011 films looking for anything passable that wasn’t based on a comic and even then, only one of the comic ones was.

I liked all the pretty colours

I had high hopes for the sci-fi ‘Another Earth’ but was hugely disappointed when the other Earth was just a backdrop to yet another low budget film about loss, guilt and depression (Hell we can all do that at home). I mean, there’s another Earth with duplicates of all of us, there’s a lot of good science and fiction to work with there and fantastic themes to push the boundaries of and instead I had to force myself to stay awake to watch the same old copy and paste tortured relationships. William Mapother looked just as lost as he was in ‘LOST’.

They volunteered after learning the alternative was watching Another Earth

Don’t get me wrong, relationships are an important part of any story but at some point you’ve established your characters and it’s time to focus on what you think is so important that you named the film after it. I might have enjoyed ‘Another Earth’ for what it actually was if it hadn’t of been masquerading as a Sci-Fi, but I have to admit as marketing tactics go...they got me.

At the other end of the spectrum was Warrior. It started off with some great focus on relationships against the backdrop of an MMA tournament but they didn’t get bogged down with them when the action started. People came to see fighting and they got it, unless Tommy was fighting in which case they yelled “OH...wow did you see that!!” and then sat down. The title of the film blended into the action as we rooted for Brendan the underdog, who had what 2010 called True Grit and what 1999 called Kung Fu.

Tank punch = Agent

My only qualm with Warrior is that for the first hour we didn’t know which brother to root for, and I liked it that way as they both had compelling cases for winning the tournament, but then the director chose to focus solely on Brendan and make Tommy look crazy to violently shove our opinions into Brendans camp. I’m left to wonder if Brendan won simply because we believe he’d take care of his brothers ‘family’ too or because Americans really don’t want Latino families to have $5 million and are quite happy to drop bombs on their own troops. It really could go either way with those guys.