Wreck-It Ralph

Walt Disney Animation Studios 52^nd feature and my personal favourite for nearly twenty years, Wreck-It Ralph is a love letter to the video game. Expertly combining cutting edge animation with 8-bit, 2D and classic arcade styles, the film is chock full of references and in jokes to the thirty or so years of the video games industry which it celebrates. The film tells the story of an arcade game villain who wants to be liked and leaves his own game, travelling to others in the hope of winning a medal. It’s this medal that he hopes will aid his inclusion with the good guys of his own game, Fix-It Felix, Jr. While outside this game, he enters the candy themed cart game Sugar Rush in which he meets a glitch who has struggles of her own.

Wreck-It Ralph is a sweet and funny film that rewards concentration and multiple watches but doesn’t alienate the casual viewer or gamer. As well as being targeted at those with specific game knowledge, it also features a surprisingly emotional plot and some likeable and well drawn characters. It cleverly appeals to both boys and girls with its combination of gender centric games and characters while mums and dads will get a lot of the references to gaming history that will go over the heads of younger audience members.

This Is the End

I was a little worried when I first saw trailers for This is the End as the premise seemed to be remarkably similar to the forthcoming conclusion of the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, The World’s End. Fortunately though, it appears that the films have very little in common. This is the End is an apocalyptic comedy film written and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The pair, who have collaborated in the past with the likes of Superbad and Pineapple Express here deliver a film in which some of the funniest names in Hollywood (and Danny McBride) play versions of themselves during an apocalyptic event.

Rogen meets old friend and actor Jay Baruchel at the airport for one of Jay’s infrequent visits to Tinsletown. Hoping to catch up, Jay instead finds himself at James Franco’s house-warming party where he feels uncomfortable and out of place with fellow actors and celebrities. As he nips out for some cigarettes, Jay bares witness to what at first appears to be an earthquake but soon becomes apparent to be something much more destructive. As the end of the world turns the Hollywood Hills to ash, a few actors are left holed up in James Franco’s house with nothing but a few beers, some drugs and a milky bar to sustain them.

The Five Year Engagement

"You ate the old doughnut"

Tom (Jason Segel) is a sous chef at a top end San Francisco restaurant but is forced to move to the mid west when his fiancée Violet (Emily Blunt) gets a post graduate position at the University of Michigan. This occurs shortly after the couple’s engagement and they decide to put their wedding on hold for a couple of years until they return to the West Coast. Their relationship is strained though when Tom fails to fit in or find a satisfying job while Violet’s career takes off and leaves Tom alone to ponder the career he left in San Francisco.

As soon as the film opens you are able to chart its plot pretty much to a tee but the journey to the finale is both funny and intelligent. The film is helped in no small way by two delightful characters played by two very watchable actors, Blunt and Segel. They appear to have great chemistry and Blunt in particular comes out of her shell and puts her comedic chops to great use.

No Strings Attached

This is yet another sex friends romantic comedy, a genre that has become far too popular in the last couple of years. Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Ashton Kutcher) keep bumping into one another over a period of fifteen years and eventually have sex. Emma is afraid of relationships and commitment etc so they decide to forgo any relationship and just have no strings attached sex. Predictably things don’t stay sweet for long and when Adam wants more from their relationship, Emma decided to break it off only to realise that she really does love him after all. Maybe I should have started this paragraph with ‘Spoiler Alert’ but anyone with an IQ higher than that of a Satsuma could guess how things are going to go.

After winning her Oscar for Black Swan it would appear that Portman is taking time off from acting by appearing in both this and Your Highness in the same year. I hope her sabbatical ends soon because she is wasted in these roles. Ashton Kutcher plays the Ashton Kutcher character, something he plays well but he is an annoying screen presence who sucks the life out of any movie he appears in. Some of the supporting cast are ok but there are far too many of them so no one character gets more than a few lines of dialogue. The character of Adam’s father, which was quite a large role, served no purpose and the father and son back story went nowhere.

Kutcher proving he can bench press 90lbs

The story is so unbelievably dull and predictable that my girlfriend (who made me watch the film) suggested turning it off half way though. I think it is trying to be clever by using the female character as the one who is afraid of commitment but this is hardly a new idea and the sex-friends angle has been done numerous times recently in films such as Love & Other Drugs (review here) and Friends with Benefits both of which are far sweeter and funnier.

The film did have one or two good lines and I laughed once and chucked a couple of times but it falls well short of the Kermode five-laughs-or-more-makes-a-comedy rule which I Adhere to. I also felt no compassion for Portman’s character who we are meant to feel sorry for when she realises she has made a mistake. It’s her own stupid fault.

This film should be avoided at all costs. If you really want to see a fuck buddies comedy then try one of the films mentioned above instead.

3/10