I've been terribly busy lately and haven't been able to make many reviews, and as a result of my lack of posts it seems the popularity of the blog has sky-rocketed, and we're now on the brink of quadruple figures. So in an attempt to save the servers from crippling under the traffic caused by my absence, I bring you this post.

I like to think of myself as a cultured yet objective film reviewer, but in actuality I'm probably just a snob, so it's both painful and cathartic to bring you this list of my top 5 guilty pleasures.

5. Harold and Kumar Get The Munchies

Harold and Kumar Get The Munchies is a film about an Indian-American and a Chinese-American who get high, get hungry, and get burgers. It's a ridiculous film but it's good for a cheap laugh, with lots of stoner jokes and Neil Patrick Harris. I think I enjoy it even more now that Kal Penn (Kumar) works for the US government. Maybe he's Obama's jester?


4. Logan's Run


Logan's Run is one of the first science fiction films ever made that I can think of, and they're still clearly working out the kinks of the genre. Everyone lives inside an enclosed world, and once you hit 30, you get to ride the carousel. The carousel murders you. But one "old" man and a pretty young girl escape into the outside world and I forget the rest but they meet a really old man and a robot and they get naked for no reason in an ice cave.

3. Zack and Miri Make A Porno

I'm pretty sure the only reason I like this film is because it's by Kevin Smith and it's an improvement on Jersey Girl. Zack and Miri is a film about two poor friends who decide to make some porn to make some money. It's pretty funny, full of sex, and is really fucking crude (see, it's infectious!(the crudeness, not the sex)).

2. American Pie 2


I actually love this film. It's got a brilliant cast, brilliant story, and some hilariously funny set-pieces. I tend to watch this when I need cheering up. Lesbians cheer me up. And Stifler. He cheers me up too. In a different way. His face cheers me up. It's like when he smiles his cheeks wrap around the back of his head. But I digress. I enjoy this film.

1. Dude, Where's My Car?


During the compiling of this guilty pleasures list, it's become apparent that I quite enjoy Seann William Scott. I'm fine with that.

Dude, Where's My Car is another stupid stoner film, but it makes me laugh to no end. It's like Airplane but justifies the silliness with marijuana. This film has it all: stoner dog, Chinese foooooooood, super hot giant alien, Jeff. You name it.

Donnie Darko is a film about abstract things that neither I, nor the people who made the film, could get their head around.

Starring a very young Jake Gyllenhaal as a disturbed lad, it explores themes like time travel and fate and mental illness, and seems to find itself at a dead end in every case. The film begins with Donnie waking up in the middle of a road, and when he gets home he finds that a plane engine came out of nowhere and fell through his bedroom. His parents don't seem that bothered when he shows up in the morning considering they surely must have thought he was dead, but his parents don't seem very deep characters anyway. His mum just looks worried all the time and his dad laughs at inappropriate things. That's literally their only defining traits.

It really goes out of its way to hammer home that Donnie has mental problems during the first 15 minutes of the film to make sure there's some ambiguity, and then we get introduced to Frank; A giant freaky rabbit that tells him to do illegal things and says he's from the future. You can always tell when Frank is around because Donnie puts on his rape face. Anyway, Frank arrives and tells Donnie that the world will end in 28 days, and Donnie decides to do nothing with that information until like the last 2 hours. Must have slipped his mind.

Some freaky stuff happens when Frank is around, like mirrors reacting to touch like water, and weird trails coming off people predicting where they're about to go, and the film does it's best to make it obscure as to if this is actually happening or if Donnie is hallucinating it.

Quite a lot of the story is based around Donnie's school and the people in there, and they all seem really over-the-top and comical. These contrast quite well against the darker bits where Donnie is with Frank. It's like The Breakfast Club with schizophrenia.

Drew Barrymore's character is supposed to be the wacky, alternative teacher who really understands the kids better than anyone, but she just comes across as pretentious and adds nothing to the story. Most of her classes are discussing things that are far beyond what the pupils would actually be talking about at that age, and it's only really there so that it can drop lots of lines and quotes in that reference what's happening in the film in a not-so-subtle way.

Partick Swayze teaches a class about fear which is just stupid, and is again an example of the film littering itself with metaphors that really don't add anything to the story and just make it seem smug.

Donnie goes to talk to a teacher about time travel, and I found this pointless as it was very expositional and removed most of the mysticism of the story. It's like the film-makers thought they were being too clever for the audience, so they'd best just make what's going on blatant. YOU SEE WHAT WE DID THAR??

There's an old lady who, from the confused look on her face and the crazy stood-on-end hair, I'm going to assume was attacked by a balloon. She's supposed to be significant but she's really not. This film has a tendency to build things up and make them seem significant when they aren't.

Donnie falls for a girl called Grechen, but again she doesn't really do anything in the story except give Donnie a reason to want to go back in time at the end, and her death and the scene where Donnie decides to go back are done far too quickly to have any real impact.

The film uses a lot of time lapse and slow motion, obviously because it's a film that deals with the nature of time, and these look good, though I'm still to figure out the significance of the trampoline that keeps showing up. Time is bouncy? No shoes on the time?

For me, the film seems like it set out to be ambiguous and ended up being confusing. You're supposed to not be able to work out if it's fate and time travel or mental illness, but there are bits that contradict each of those options, so you're left with scenes that don't make sense in either case. For example, if it's about time travel, Donnie should have died at the start because time travel would cause a paradoxical loop, but if it's about mental illness, how did Donnie hallucinate a wound exactly where the bullet would hit Frank when he shoots him? There's no way he's that accurate with a gun. Not with the limited vision rape face offers.

I also didn't like how smug the film was. There are far too many lines that are just there because they sound good and reference what's going on. It's in this effort to try and make everything connect to something else, no matter how strenuous those connections are, that made the film feel very pretentious to me. You're trying to be clever. We get it. Now pull your head out of your worm-hole and figure out what's going on.

If Donnie Darko was a dot-to-dot drawing, you'd have to draw a line from the number 1 dot to the number 2 dot. And the number 5 dot. And the number 12 dot in the previous picture. And the staple in the middle of the book.

Pearl Harbor is a film about a truly pathetic love triangle. And nothing else. If you like soppy, on-the-nose dialogue being given a false sense of significance thanks to a near constant orchestral soundtrack and tight camera angles, go kill yourself. But coincidentally, that's what this film is full of.

The film is about two best friends who are also pilots in the army during World War II, and they both love the same girl. One of them falls in love with the girl, then dies, and then other one jumps into bed with her, but then it turns out the other one isn't dead. And while this story is playing out, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor.

The cringe-fest starts when Ben Affleck goes for an eye test and gets friendly with the nurse. And by friendly I mean he stalks her. He meets her outside somewhere with a bottle of champaign and when he opens it the cork hits him in the nose and it starts to bleed. She tilts his head back (good nursing) and he says his nose hurts and that she's beautiful. Then he says that his heart hurts and they have a smooch. I'm going to have to try that one. "Nurse, my heart hurts. Can we kiss?". I'd get defibrillatored into next week.

The film is very American (as you would expect). In the film, England is just a manor house with some planes and grubby looking men on the lawn. One of the British soldiers even says "Good luck to anyone who goes to war with America." I was almost sick.

The film is littered with cheesy lines pre-empting the attack. At one point a nurse is talking about how many men are on board the ships. It's so blatant she might as well have said "Wouldn't it be a shame if they all got blown up in a few minutes."

Josh Hartnett plays the other man in the film. After Affleck dies, he falls in love with the woman. The trouble is that there's no slow progression of them falling for each other. You'd think there'd be a real struggle of morals versus heart, but you'd be wrong. All he does is pop round to her house, then take her flying in a plane, then take her for a shag in the most inappropriately stored parachutes ever. Harnett uses some smooth talking to seal the deal on the relationship, saying that he saw a sunset so that means they should be together. He could use that for anything. "I saw a sunset so you should make me a sandwich." I don't understand why it's so easy for those two to get it on with each other though, considering she supposedly loved Affleck so much, and Hartnett has a major bromance going on with him. They were fucking each other before he was even cold.

The big climax of the film is the attack on Pearl Harbor, and for me it got boring quickly. It's just uninspired shots of explosions for half an hour. It's pretty much just in the film so that the two men have a reason to go away together. And, of course, Americans would lap it up.

I also didn't like how it carried on cutting to the Japanese planning the attack, as it took away the element of surprise. I feel it would have carried a lot more punch if it genuinely did come as a surprise.

There's a silly bit where Affleck and Hartnet are on an airfield. Affleck tells all the men to stay down and not move while the Japanese planes are over head, as though in doing this, the Japanese wouldn't realise it was an airfield.

Roosevelt makes a heartfelt speech about how the US needs to make a counter attack, and to convince everyone he stands up out of his wheelchair. Because no-one is going to tell a disabled person they're wrong. Even if it means lots of people will die. No-one wants to be that guy.

Alec Baldwin plays the general, and he's full of sentimental bullshit. He has a very clichéd delivery. "You're a crazy bastard!! But I like it." "You put everyone in the company at risk!! But it was the right thing to do." "You didn't knock on the door before you came in!! Luckily I had my pants on." It gets old fast.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor (yes, it carries on for a whole hour after that), Baldwin puts together a crack team of pilots for a secret mission to Japan. This involves learning to take off from a short distance, and this is achieved easily by having lots of shots of men standing around looking cool in leather jackets.

Once they've done the Japan shooting bit, Hartnett crashes his plane and somehow survives. Affleck goes over to do one of the soppiest "Don't die!" speeches ever. He mentions that Hartnett is going to be a father, in a pathetic attempt to get our sympathy. The thing is, the whole pregnancy thing is hardly mentioned in the film so it doesn't really hit home. If they aren't going to establish something before they try and use it to work our emotions, he might as well have said "You can't die! Who's going to sing the special song you wrote for the Somalian quadruple amputee you adopted so that she can get a precious few minutes of sleep and escape her horrific existence of constant flash-backs to the 7 years of rape and abuse she was subjected to by her schizophrenic father." Gets me every time.

The girl in the film is just not likeable to the point of bitch. All she does when Affleck comes back into her life is wait for one of them to die so she doesn't have to make a decision.

The trouble with this film is, at its root, that it's shit. The first hour and a half is setting up a soppy, badly written love story; then the attack on Pearl Harbor comes and the romantic story is forgotten about. Then afterwards it picks it back up again to finish it off. It's like they had an interlude for some explosions. You never get back into the love story in the way you're supposed to after the attack either, because firstly, you've kind of forgotten about it, and secondly, you feel like the film should have ended after the attack. The counter attack on Japan only exists so that it could badly wrap up the love story, and so that America didn't come out of the film looking too helpless. The film isn't concerned with Pearl Harbor at all; it's just a framing device for the love triangle.

The whole film is very bad and unoriginal. It's like Titanic meets Saving Private Ryan.
In a dark alley.
And Michael Bay is there with a bat.

Spirited Away is a very highly acclaimed film from the much renowned Studio Ghibli. It's also one of the most flawed films I have ever seen.

The trouble I find with most anime is that they tend to rely on wild leaps of the imagination to push the story forward. I'm not sure if this is down to bad translation or just differing attitudes to story, but I tend to like to know why things are happening, especially if they are essential to the story.

A prime example of this in Spirited Away, and two examples of some of the most on-the-nose, expositional dialogue I've ever heard, would be when the evil witch is giving the girl a job. She says "That stupid oath I took to give work to anyone who asks." Right.

Who would make you take that kind of oath?
Who did you make this oath to when you seem to be the big boss around here?
And if you made that oath, why did it take so long for this poor girl to get a job?

It's just horrible writing to plug a hole in the story.

The other example is right at the end of the film when the girl is riding on the back of the boy in dragon form. Out of the blue she goes "I've just remembered something. When I was a kid I fell in a river called Kohaku, so your real name is Kohaku." And she's right.

WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!

Seriously, I have no idea how this Miyazaki guy got to be so big when he's writing shit like that. I actually stopped the film and skipped back a minute to make sure I hadn't missed something when that line came out of her mouth. And then I paused it for a few minutes to self-harm after I had the horrific confirmation.

The film seems to rely on happy coincidences and unexplained events far too much. There's the No Face monster that comes out of nowhere and decides to help the girl. Then eats people and chases the girl. Then gets on a train with the girl. Then does some knitting. And that's the last we see of it. There was absolutely no pay off to that plot thread.

There's also something about the witch giving you a fake name, and if you forget your real name you can't go home, but this is never explained. If I forgot my name, my mum wouldn't lock me out. She'd take me to the hospital.

All the creatures in this world seem to hate humans at the start, and this is also never explained and doesn't make any sense at all because the majority of the work force are human, and they seem to forget that the little girl is human as soon as she gets a job.

This big dragon flies into her house at one point, and she assumes it's the little boy Haku. Based on nothing. And then carries on calling it Haku until it turns out it actually is Haku. Can I get this girl to pick some lottery numbers?

There's a scene where this big turd monster comes in for a bath, and then it turns out that it isn't a turd monster, it's some dragon that we've seen a glimpse of before and never see again. And that dragon leaves a little turd for the girl to pick up, which she then spends the rest of the film feeding to anything with an open mouth. How she knows it would solve all their aliments I will never know. Is dragon shit an everyday remedy in Japan?

The ending of this film was just terrible. After investing 2 hours, I wanted a bit more than "You guessed right. Off you go." It's also very selfish, because she doesn't get rid of the evil witch and save the world, she just frees her parents and herself and goes home, leaving all those people and creatures that helped her to an eternity of slavery.

Overall, the film was very pretty to look at, and I did enjoy some of the quirks, but for me it was ruined by the sheer amount of plot holes. Coincidence is not good story telling, and I'm actually stunned that this film gets the praise it does when it doesn't make any sense.