I've had a bunch of reviews waiting to be posted, so I'm shoving them online nice and quickly while there's a lull in proceedings. Hope everyone has a great evening and I wish you all a much improved 2015!
What We Do In The Shadows (2014)
Similar style to the Flight Of The Conchords series. A group of housemates (who are vampires) work through their differences. It's a very different style of comedy from that we've seen in horror-comedies before (even from other mockumentaries) and I was laughing more and more as it went on.
It seems to be the accepted thing, to praise horror-comedies by calling them "the next Shaun Of The Dead" (even though, as a big Edgar Wright fan, I think there are a hell of a lot of horror-comedies better than SOTD). So fair enough, this is the vampire equivalent of Shaun Of The Dead and it should, by all rights, receive a similar level of praise.
As with any comedy there are some less funny bits. The fashion show they do wasn't quite as good as the rest (so there's my obligatory criticism). One of my favourite parts is where some police officers come to visit and things don't play out how you'd expect.
Great fun!
A+
The Pyramid (2014)
I was expecting a mummy and *mild spoiler* there isn't one. By the end we get something much much better.
Sadly in building up to the awesome finale a lot of the film feels like padding. The characters are flat and the one guy from the Inbetweeeners is pretty irritating. (I've never seen The Inbetweeeners and yet I could sort of tell. He's definitely not playing against type.)
Even though I really liked the final section of the film, and while there's a pretty awesomely sadistic moment part way through, overall the film was unnecessarily stupid and incredibly poorly paced.
I was expecting better from the directorial debut of Gregory Levasseur (regular co-writer with Alexandre Aja on projects like the Maniac remake, the Hills Have Eyes remake and Mirrors). Still there was a neat twist on the genre here, so perhaps Greg'll get better in the future?
C+
Break of Dawn (2002)
It's not always the case that the way a film is written can clearly outshine the way it is performed. It is more common for good writing to be buried in a quagmire of bad production decisions, presuming the writing even remains intact.
Bizarrely this film continues to clearly refer to the characters as French even though they clearly have American accents and consistently speak in English. Initially I thought perhaps the film was dubbed, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
While there's quite a gripping plot here, the direction and performances really let it down. When your protagonist says "I've got cancer in my blood." That should not be amusing to the audience.
Our cancer-suffering protagonist is offered a job which will lead to his death, but which will pay out a lot of money to his family. But the job isn't all it's meant to be. It was an intriguing mystery and ought to have been an exciting action film. But the execution left a lot to be desired. Joaquim de Almeida was pretty great in spite of everything.
(Some may recognise him as Bucho from "Desperado".)
C-
Like Father Like Son (2013)
I saw a number of people recommending "Like Father Like Son" and was expecting great things until I recognised that the director was also responsible for "Still Walking". My problem with this previous outing was that while it was perfectly well performed, absolutely nothing actually happened.
This time around there was at least some drama. However, the protagonist struck me as comically villainous.
When a father discovers that the child they have raised is not their biological son, due to a mixup in the hospital, you might expect them to be upset. But you wouldn't expect them to exclaim "that explains everything" and to then presume the biological child brought up in another household will have more in common with them. You particularly wouldn't expect them to try to pay the other family in order to keep both children.
Certainly I'm happy to follow unconscionable protagonists, but the filming style does nothing to play on the drama coming across like a whimsical story or a fly on the wall documentary. No judgements are made.on this obnoxious father figure and the film seems all too quick to forgive.
D-