#1 - DISASTER MOVIE
Stars - Matt Lanter, Vanessa Minnillo, Gary Johnson, Nicole Parker, Crista Flanagan, Ike Barinholtz
Director - Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer
Memorable Quote - ... n/a
Review - Dear lord, do they actually make franchises out of this crap? I'll admit I only decided to watch this because I was ill and wanted to laugh at something stupid, but I barely managed that. Some parts of this were stupid, yes; the problem lies in the fact that the parts that weren't stupid were ridiculously stupid. Probably the only funny part was the insult-off involving the Prince, with his posh accent. Half of the impressions made little sense (Amy Winehouse with fangs?), and half of the movies they spoofed weren't even disaster movies. One of the main characters was Juno, for goodness' sake! One of the cuts was the wrong way round in such an obvious way that we saw character reaction before the event... and I could go on. It's a shame because the actors involved, particularly Lanter, Parker, and Flanagan, have real skill and could probably go far with the right material. I could easily see Lanter in the kind of teen disaster movie they were parodying here; though if I was a casting director, this is the kind of thing that could put enough of a black mark on a resume to make me hire someone else. Such a shame that talented people put their effort into such a worthless piece of film. 2/5
#2 - IRONCLAD
Stars - James Purefoy, Brian Cox, Kate Mara, Derek Jacobi, Paul Giamatti, Mackenzie Crook
Director - Johnathan English
Memorable Quote - 'You are no more a king than the boil on my arse!'
Review - Oh, dear. What a shame! This could have been one of the best of its genre. It had all of the ingredients: a heavily embellished medieval war story, an underdog element to rival '300' except they actually win, a great British cast, even a love story... and yet. Something, somewhere along the line falls slightly flat. The effects are visceral, but perhaps a little too much effort was put into producing horrific wounds and deaths that should have been spent elsewhere; some of the mise en scene is fantastic, but the wider graphics tend to fall a little short; the elements of the plot are all there, but not enough time is invested into really exploring them. How does the young woman really feel about her husband and his death? Does Purefoy's character resent her advances or welcome them? Does he feel guilt for breaking his vows? I'm also dissatisfied with the "happy ending", in which the two of them ride away penniless, probably to be shunned by all and sundry as a woman who abandoned her Lord and a man who broke his vows. Not to mention the fact that the people were already antagonistic towards him earlier in the film, I hate to imagine just how the two of them would have spent the rest of their days. Oh, and of course nothing in the film actually happened in this way in reality. 3/5
#3 - AGE OF HEROES
Stars - Sean Bean, Danny Dyer, James D'Arcy, Izabella Miko, John Dalgleish
Director - Adrian Vitoria
Memorable Quote - 'Let's have a family photo.'
Review - The title may not convey it, but this is in fact the story of how Danny Dyer was a bit of a geezer but his heart was in the right place, but he got put in army jail anyway. Then Sean Bean whisked him off to be a commando in the hills and eventually they went to fight Nazis in Norway, whilst making sure that Alfie from 'Lark Rise' doesn't get captured. Almost every fact in the entire thing is fabricated, of course, and quite frankly if that was the first commando mission I would have disbanded the commandos for being patently rubbish. The Nazis were on their tracks for the whole movie, managed to work out that they would return to the farm, captured one of them, and they even took a civilian back with them, which they weren't really supposed to do. James D'Arcy has a pretty much unnecessary role as Fleming, but I'm not complaining because, hey, it's D'Arcy. All in all a bit odd, but a slightly interesting watch when you've nothing better to do. 3/5
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