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Reviews
Ted (2012)
Watchability by anyone with a sense of humour more highly developed than a two-year old child = none
I strongly suspected I was making a mistake by deciding watch this film based solely on the fact that I enjoy Family Guy.
I wish I'd had the strength of my convictions. My only emotion on seeing this pathetic effort at humour through to its utterly predictable end was "Well, that's 90 minutes of my life I won't get back." The film's three jokes are:
1. A cute little teddy bear swears, smokes pot and likes sex. This is the main premise and is clearly such a masterpiece of original creative screen writing that it's strong enough to carry the entire film. For minute after minute after minute after minute after minute after... it just never gets old.
2. A prostitute defecates on a carpet, which has to be cleaned up by some people who, surprisingly, think cleaning up other peoples' fecal matter is disgusting. Watching them gurn and scream was nearly as funny as the fiftieth time the teddy bear swore (but only nearly).
3. A slightly odd guy dances in a camp way to Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now". We're privileged to be onlookers. We get to look at the funny man dance. Isn't that funny? Of course it is, so let's look some more.
Seriously Seth, don't give up the day job. And don't get rid of Family Guy's creative team either, because I now know what that show would look like stripped of originality, wit, satire and surrealism.
The Dinosaur Project (2012)
Surprisingly entertaining gem
For a low budget film in a genre that, if done poorly, is really painful to watch, The Dinosaur Project was a very pleasant surprise. I'm not really sure what I was expecting - Doug McLure with a British accent on shakycam perhaps - but once the cast got through their formulaic character introductions and into the helicopter I was thoroughly entertained for the next hour, which is more than I can say for many Hollywood blockbusters.
Although the film gives the impression that much of its character development was left on the cutting room floor (but then who needs complex characters in a creature feature, right?), and there are a few moments where you think "Wow, he got over that quickly", it also manages to turn one or two stereotypes on their head. Nice to see a Yank as the scheming villain for a change, and the first person to die (other than the helicopter pilot) was not who I thought it would be. The CGI is very convincing and the locations and photography first class, especially for a found-footage hand-held camera film. Even that element works fairly well and there's a logic and consistency to the format that better films don't always manage to achieve (District 9, for example, which gave up on the idea partway in).
Overall a bit of a gem and in no way deserving of the slating some early reviewers have given it on this site. The ending is a clear opening for a sequel; I, for one, will be looking out for that.
El páramo (2011)
Disappointing
Unfortunately The Squad fails to deliver on its interesting premise and promising first ten minutes. Competent camera work and a decent cast is unable to make up for a lack of plot, structure or coherent direction. I can appreciate what the director was attempting to do with lingering close-ups of grim, suffering faces, subtle sound cues and atmospheric lighting, but one can only rely on those techniques so long before delivering some kind of pay-off. For me the film completely failed to rack up any tension or arrive at a destination. I was more concerned with wondering why the characters - supposedly trained soldiers in a war zone - were behaving more like angsty teens who've fallen out with their parents.
The message that in a civil war everyone looks like the enemy could have been portrayed far more effectively without tacking on a poorly-realized supernatural element. The film-makers tried to do both and ended up with neither. I hate using the word, but 'boring' really is the only word that comes to mind.