Pedromonkey's review of the 00's Part 1

So here we are 2010, a brand new decade, one that promises to be better than the previous ten years, even thought we'll all be dead come January 1st 2013. But im not gonna look at what's to come in the next ten years but im gonna take a look back over the last ten. A Look at some of the best and worst movies to have graced our screens. So movie men and movie maidens, here is my....

LOOK BACK AT THE NOUGHTIES...

Okay here we go...2000.

first we have

The film that brought martial arts cinema back to western audiances. Directed by Ang Lee the film featured Action superstars Chow Yn Fat and Michelle Yeoh and rising actress Ziyi Zhang.
Not only is the film wonderfully acted but is brilliantly shot by Peter Pau and effortly directed by Ang Lee. The fight scenes including the now famous Tree top battle were staged and choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, who was also responisible for The Matrix and Tarantino's Kill Bill movies. The film became a massive world wide success and went on to win 4 Oscars including best foreign language movie and 6 nominations as well as winning a further 73 awards and 91 nominations worldwide. It paved the way for more comercially successful chinese movies like Hero and House of Flying Daggers. The films is a beauty to be held and one that i don't think will ever be surpassed.

Next up is...
Ghost Dog is essentially an Art house movie played as a gangster movies. The film is Influenced by Japanese samurai lore and has the main character following the code of the samurai. so far so what? well, the main character is a Black loner who works as a hitman for a local crime boss played by genre fave Henry Silva (The secret Invasion). When things turn sour, Ghost Dog finds that the mafia have put a hit out on him so he decides to take them out one by one, finally reaching the Boss. Along the way he's helped out by a french speaking ice cream man and a child who he introduces the book Rashomon too. The film is directed by Indie helmer Jim Jarmusch and the film contains a healty dose of dark humor and a fusion of Samurai Lore and Hip Hop culture. The soundtrack was produced by rapper and Kung Fu enthusiast RZA from hip hop group the Wu-Tang Clan. The music mixes well the story and give it a sort of urban tinge to japanese music. The Performance are very good, mostly the performance of oscar winner Forest Whitaker as the titular Ghost Dog who brings a very emotional and Loner like qaulity to the silent assassin role. Another mention to John Tormey as Ghost Dogs handler. The direction is very crisp and the script by Jarmusch is very tight. All in all this a gangster movie with a twist that looks out of place but somehow feel right. A highly recommended nights viewing if you ask me.

The worst Film of 2000...this has to go to....


What can i say about Battlefield Earth, not much really, Bad Performances, Bad direction, Bad Script, Bad special Fx, a complete missfire of a chance to make a truely epic sci-fi picture, Travolta im looking in your direction, This was Vanity Project for Travolta and i guarantee that he is probably ashamed of this by now.

Another year and where on 2001


For me Donnie Darko is an odd one, For starters the first time i saw this film i absolutely hated it, i didn't get it, what the hell was it about. That was 9 years ago. Now i can see the film the way it was supposed to be seen, and why many many people love and cherish this film, Donnie Darko is a Masterpiece of Film making and Storytelling. A film that has so many layers that one viewing will not surfice. The film is basically about second chances. Im probably wrong here but i think that everything in Donnie Darko is a figment of his own imagination. But thats just my theory. Onto the film it's self. Director Richard Kelly, Here making his feature film debut shot it in only 28 days, 28 days is also a theme that runs through the film. It is a very well shot film with some good special FX and a complex script. It also has a good cast with the likes of Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mary Mcdonnell and the Late Patrick Swayze. If with this film you diliked it the first time you saw it watch it again, believe me you'll like it a whole lot more the second time around.

Next up....


Newzealand Goremeister Peter Jackson managed to pull off a complete U-turn in his Career as a film maker with The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy. After almost 15 years of making gore soaked Splatter movies, He managed to aquire the rights to J.R.R Tolkien's Massivley Popular rings books. It's quite surprising that any studio would give him the money to make the films when you look at his previous efforts, Heavenly Creatures Not counting, But when New Line Pictures turned round and gave hime the money, they must have though 'oh no, what have we done', but they needn't have feared because Jackson delivered three of the most profitable films in the history of cinema. Nobody saw that coming. After the Fellowship took in 66 million dollars on it's opening weekend, Jackson was propelled to the A list faster that you can say Yo mtv raps. This set up Jackson for life, but it wasn't untill 2003's Return of the king that he truely got the recognition from the Academy, Return of the King took home 11 oscars. All together the trilogy took a combined total of 17 Oscars. No film/Trilogy has ever won that many. The Fellowship was done right, it was done how the fans would have liked to have seen it, it had an incredibly strong cast and Jackson's Direction was near Faultless. The screenplay buy Jackson and Fran Walsh was as though the dialog was lifted straight from the book. Jackson Continued this through the second and third films. The Popularity of the Rings films lead Jackson to being allowed to make whatever he wanted and in 2005 He returned with a remake/New adaptation of KING KONG. He is now though of as a master and is spoken about when talking Lucas, Spielberg and Scorcese.

And 2001's worst film goes to...


Mariah Carey + Max Beasly = shite

That's all i can really say about this horrendous
excuse for a film.

On to 2002


Spider-man started off as a comic book character, created by Marvel Supremo Stan Lee in the late 60s early 70s, He became immensly popular with kids and adults because protaganist was a normal 16 year old high school kid, a bit of a nerd who lived with grandparents who one day get's bitten by a radioative spider and starts to develop strange spider like trates. He went from being nerdy Peter Parker to your Friendly Neighbourhood Spiderman. Many attempts to bing the character to the screen failed, such as the awful 70s Spiderman Tv show and even a Japanese version called Japanese Spiderman. It wasn't until 2001 when Evil Dead director Sam Raimi signed up for a movie version that we finaly got to see spidey swing into action the way the comic books showed. With advances in technology we were able to witness Spidey swinging through the city of New York, Fight the evil Green Goblin and almost get the girl. This was something fans had been waiting to see most of their lives and it paid off too, Spiderman became one of the most successful films of that year. The cast was also pretty spectacular with Toby Maguire playing Spidey, Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane, The criminally underated James Franco as Harry Osbourn and the awesome Willem Defoe as the Green Goblin. The cast work very well together and Maguire plays Parker very well. The script by David Koepp (Jurassic Park) encompasses about 20 different editions of The comic into one 2 hour movie and this is done very well. We get an origin story of how Parker becomes Spidey and how Defoe becomes the Goblin. Raimi's direction is nice, Not since 1990's Darkman has Raimi made a truely epic action film, although he hasn't changed his style that much, there are still touches of Evil dead in the film, The hyperkinetic fight scenes, Raimi's Olds mobile, and The chin himself Bruce Campbell makes an appearance, in 2004 Raimi returned for Spiderman 2 which became a case of the sequal surpassing the original when Spiderman 2 became a smah hit, he returned again for Spiderman 3 which unfortuately ran into studio interference and because of this was panned by critics. It still made Healthy Box office though.

DOG SOLDIERS

Every once in a while the U.K will though out an exceptionally good horror movie, 2002 was no exception, but this year they gave us 2, 28 Days Later and this, Dog Soldiers. Ive chosen his because because i find it the more enjoyable of the two, anyway onto the film. The film was the feature debut of Geordie Genre fan Neil Marshall, who decided that there weren't enough Werewolf movies out there, and quite rightly 2. What Marshall gave us was quintisentially British gorefest with a very dark sense of humor to boot, The film became the sleeper hit of 2002 and launched Marshall as a director to watch. Dog Soldiers concerns a squad of soldiers sent to scotland on training manouvers only to get thrust into a battle with local Werewolf pack. They then find out that a special forces unit are using them as bait to hunt the wolves. The film comes down to a battle between humans and lycans in an old farmhouse. The Best thing about the film is not the gore or the action but the script, The dialog the characters spout, with lines like 'if little red ridinghood shows up with bazooka and bad attitude, i expect you to chin the bitch'. For all the dialog there are some very good nods to genre films in ther like An American Werewolf in London and The Matrix. The success of Dog Soldiers allowed Marshall to make his next film, The Descent, a dark serious Claustraphobic horror that gained critical praise and his Mad Max meets Escape From New York mash up DoomsDay that didn't do aswell. His next film is a violent roman Epic entitled Centurion that shoud be out this year.

and my worst film of 2002 is....

ROLLERBALL

John 'Die Hard' McTiernan's abysmal remake of the 1975 James Caan original makes my worst film because it is so badly made that it makes Ed Wood look like Hitchcock. Not only did they kiddy-fi the story, the second half of the film is shot in ****ing night vision, so you can barely see anything that happening. The cast is a strange one too. With the likes of Jean Reno acting against Shockingly bad Chris Klein, hell Chris O'Donnell would have made a better choice and he ****ed up Robin. This is just a mess of a movie and should never have seen the light of day. Truly truly awful.

Well Labbers that's it for Part one, join me next week for part 2. So until then like i always say....Keep watcing the screens...Peace Out.