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Science > Prophecies-Of-Nostradamus |
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"The Last 1935 Days....HOOROO !" |
| Date: |
03 Sep 2007 08:44:09 PM |
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UNCLE WALLY 'S MOVIE REVIEWS.......Dr PLONK, THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD |
Dr Plonk [ Review by Luke Buckmaster ]
Uncle Wally 's Rating [ 6/10 ] - Average -- but I liked the end of the
world in 2008 bit !!
HOOROO
UNCLE WALLY
http://www.infilm.com.au/reviews/drplonk.html
Silent-era comedies as good as Buster Keaton's The General lose
nothing as the years roll forward. Timelessness is a word associated
more with black holes than movies, but a spunky laugh fest like The
General reminds audiences that the golden rules of comedy - especially
slapstick - never really change.
Aussie director Rolf de Heer's Dr. Plonk is a contemporary film, set
in 1907 and fashioned so it looks and sounds like a dead ringer for a
silent-era feature. De Heer duplicates with great authenticity the
look, sound and texture of a dusty eighteen frames a second comedy.
For extra verity he used old damaged stock instead of new film, and
shot on a camera fitted to a retro, wrist-tiring, hand-cranking
mechanism.
Sounds like a bit of a time warp? There's more. The film's kooky
protagonist Dr. Plonk (Nigel Lunghi) believes the world is going to
end in 2008, and to prove it Plonk invents a time machine that shoots
him forward one hundred years - to a future of concrete jungles, mean
policeman, inaccessible parliament and zombified, TV-baked families.
The film maintains its silent era emulation while the characters
explore a contemporary landscape, thus de Heer tweaks pasty old
techniques with a bit of post-modern chic.
It's a feat of inspired lunacy. Dr. Plonk taps into the marvel of a
bygone era and reworks it for a modern crowd in celebratory rather
than self-effacing or overtly self-conscious terms. As Magna
Szubanski told me a week or so after I saw the film, "it doesn't have
a sarcastic bone in its body." Dr. Plonk revels in the simple
benevolence of making people laugh, and adds to the mix the bent
appeal of anachronism and anamorphosis. It is a true fish out of water
comedy; that term rarely applies to characters and aesthetics. All de
Heer's films are one-offs (seen anything like Ten Canoes or Bad Boy
Bubby?) and faithful to that tradition Dr. Plonk carries the
inimitable charm of a true rarity.
Plonk, famous scientist and inventor, spends most of his time buzzing
about in his laboratory. His favourite pastimes include grappling
with life's trickiest equations and connecting his shoe to the behind
of assistant Paulus (Paul Blackwell). Paulus is deaf and mute,
meaning that (like the audience) things must be relayed to him in
purely visual terms. Mrs. Plonk (Magda Szubankski) and their dog
Tiberius (Reg, a Jack Russel) further distract the good doctor from
his work.
On one fateful day Plonk calculates that the world will end in 101
years, but nobody takes him seriously - his colleagues seem more
concerned with falling over in various amusing ways. Every once in a
while the screen shows us Plonk's words of wisdom in fanciful, silent
film style captions, and one such caption reads "if you can't take the
proof to the person, take the person to the proof." Lateral thinker
that he is, Plonk decides to build a time machine and the rest - so
they say - is history.
De Heer feasts on the kind of comedic purity guys like Keaton and
Chaplin defined. Good slapstick transcends cultures and languages,
and suddenly the simplest of things become funny again: people falling
over, chasing each other around a table, sliding on a park bench,
running into a pole. This kind of comedy requires supreme confidence
because bad slapstick looks awfully contrived and awfully clumsy, and
because of the sheer physicality of it a great deal of the onus falls
onto the heads of the performers.
Nigel Lunghi, a street performer by trade, is a perfect fit as Plonk.
Lunnghi has no other acting experience but the chops of his trade show
up very clearly and very impressively on the big screen, and a typical
bona fide movie comedian is almost certainly incapable of this kind of
work. Blackwell and Szubankski are similarly fetching - every
performance falls under the film's spell - but the real scene stealer
is Reg the dog, whose performance mixes physical prowess with a
cunning portrait of obsession (with all things spherical) and love (of
all things spherical).
Dr. Plonk could easily have been the kind of feature that should never
have ran past short film format, but the unfolding of plot in this
archaic visual language builds a tremendously entertaining rhythm.
Chase scenes between Plonk and modern authorities are among the film's
moments of comedic brilliance. The story's time travel shtick lends
Dr. Plonk contemporary relevance, which De Heer also uses it to pry
open elbow room for subtle socio-political commentaries. They take on
a beguiling, image-based resonance, as far away from polemics as
possible. This irresistibly insane excursion to cinematic la-la land
offers a mishmash of old and new delights, and also happens to be one
of the most consistently enjoyable time travel movies out there. Dr.
Plonk is giddy, convivially deranged fun that takes great advantage of
a wickedly pandemonic premise: the characters go forward in time as
the audience (and in one way or another, the cinema itself) go
backwards.
-------------------------------------------------
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM (2007)
Wasn't a big fan of the first two movies, but in this one, Matt
Damon fully redeems himself !!!!!
UNCLE WALLY 'S RATING [ 9/10 ] -- MOST EXCELLENT
http://www.moviesonline.ca/movie_review_detail.php?id=7914
HOOROO
UNCLE WALLY
------------------------------------------------
LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD (2007)
UNCLE WALLY 'S RATING [ 8/10 ] -- Pretty Good, Worth seeing,
but just can't beat the original Die Hard (1988) with Alan Rickman in
it -- one of my all time favoritist terrorist movies !!!
http://au.wireless.ign.com/articles/800/800383p1.html
Live Free or Die Hard Review
You just can't stop this guy.
by Levi Buchanan
US, June 28, 2007 - Bruce Willis. Clever bad guys. Improbable stunts.
One-liners. The formula for the "Die Hard" movies is pretty much
chiseled in stone, like a ten commandments for action filmmaking.
Gameloft collects all of these necessary ingredients for their mobile
game based on the fourth "Die Hard" flick, "Live Free or Die Hard,"
unsurprisingly placing them in the successful-but-familiar framework
of past hits, like Splinter Cell and Mission: Impossible III. The
resulting game will feel like a mildly enjoyable bit of deja vu for
mobile gamers that have jammed on Gameloft's side-scrolling actioners
for the last two years, but newcomers that are wading into mobile for
the first time should be pleasantly surprised at Detective John
McClane's itty-bitty antics.
Live Free or Die Hard stars John McClane (without actor likeness
rights, the hero is only Bruce Willis-esque) as a detective out to
stop a genius hacker and save his daughter. He has enlisted the help
of another computer geek, a wimpy brainiac that has the mental toolset
for stopping the villainous hacker from bringing down America's
digital infrastructure. McClane is more of a hands-on kinda guy, so he
uses his fists, guns, and wisecracks to get his half of the job done.
The majority of the game is a side-scrolling action game not entirely
unlike the movie-games of the 16-bit era -- but with better focus. You
must fight your way through stage after stage of hired guns determined
to stop McClane from reaching the boss. Clane has a series of hot
moves, like dropping over railing to stomp enemies from above or
rolling through tunnels to surprise bad guys before below. Using only
the 5 button, you can either unload a clip into enemies from a
distance or run up for some close-quarters combat that features nice
animation work.
After killing a certain number of bad guys, McClane loses his cool.
This "rage mode," set off by pressing 0 when his anger meter is full,
turns McClane into a one-man army. He slo-mo jumps back with gun a-
blazin', only to finish off all on-screen enemies with a bazooka he
pulls out of nowhere. (I shudder to think of where he hides it.) The
rage attack is a nice flourish, but McClane's regular attacks are
usually good enough that I would occasionally finish a stage without
ever needing it.
The driving sequences are pretty cool, as you steer a cop car and
truck around Washington DC, avoiding traffic and shooting obstacles
before you accidentally collide with them. These frantic chases
through the city and into tunnels are straight out of the movie. For
example, as seen in the trailer, you must run the car through a tunnel
-- avoiding damage so you can launch it into the air and "kill a
helicopter," as seen in the trailer. The driving controls can prove a
little confusing at first, as you steer with all of the number keys,
save for 5. But the orientation of the control change as your vehicle
changes direction -- in one early sequence, you box several blocks and
must constantly re-think the directionality of the controls.
Finally, there are some puzzle mini-games that have more to do with
the hacking part of the story. You must diffuse bombs by clipping
numbered wires or redirect lasers through a system of mirrors.
Gameloft has "cool" action down very well. The way McClane can kick
pressurized gas canisters into enemies and fill the screen with flames
or reach up and throw a bad guy off a ledge just looks very slick.
There's no doubt that Gameloft is the best developer in mobile for
making cinematic animations and scenes that invoke a smile from the
player. They know how to set a scene, too, such as the walk through
the darkened facility where you can only see as far as the tip of your
nose while hunting enemies. Live Free or Die Hard looks exceptional
from one end to the other.
My big complaint about Live Free or Die Hard is that it reminded me so
much of last summer's very cool Mission: Impossible III that I
wondered just how much of the development cycle was spent replacing
assets. You know, swapping out tiny Ethan Hunt for tiny John McClane.
I mentioned earlier that a newcomer won't notice any of this, but if
you've been relying on Gameloft for side-scrolling action for some
time (and you should have been), you'll really start seeing the same
cogs and levers that make up the machinery that powers this formula.
At least I never saw McClane wall-run...
Closing Comments
Live Free or Die Hard is a solid action game with some pretty cool
moments, such as the first time you see McClane uppercut a punk or
hurl a Molotov over a ruined old baby grand. But I've played this game
before -- many times -- and it's losing its luster for me. While I
will always be impressed by Gameloft's attention to detail and ability
to fashion some exciting scenes, I'm suffering from fatigue,
especially coming so soon after Pirates of the Seven Seas. These
action games are starting to blur together -- and after yesterday's
review of Sony's excellent God of War, it's hard to get too
enthusiastic about a re-heated formula.
============================
hooroo
uncle wally
--00--
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