The King of Kings review – Charles Dickens retelling of the Jesus story does a serviceable job

-
The famous author tells his son and their cat the story of Jesus in this mixed-bag family animation, voiced by an impressive cast This syrupy cartoon account of the life of Jesus (voiced by Oscar Isaac) is narrated, with consummate weirdness, by Charles Dickens (Kenneth Branagh). It’s in fact based on a story Dickens wrote for his children (and wasn’t published until 1934, decades after his death). The idea is that Dickens is telling the story of the New Testament to his young son Walter (Roman Griffin Davis) and Walter’s impish cat, explaining to the King Arthur-obsessed Walter how Jesus was the real King of Kings and all that. And so we see Walter and Charles, in their mid-19th-century garb, wandering through scenes of JC’s life nearly two thousand years earlier, from the nativity to the crucifixion – much like Scrooge and his spectral buddies in A Christmas Carol as they wander through past, present and future Christmases. It rather drags out what is already a pretty long running ...
Post a Comment

Project Wolf Hunting review – Korean horror brings Bruckheimer-esque bombast

-

Korea’s most wanted escape their handcuffs on a cargo ship back to the motherland but find they are not alone in bloody thriller

If you had a pound for every slashed jugular and staved-in cranium in this Korean horror-thriller, you would probably have more than the film’s entire budget. This seems to have been mostly spent on supplies of fake blood almost copious enough to run the sprinkler system on Frontier Titan, the 58,000-tonne cargo ship travelling between the Philippines and South Korea in Kim Hong-sun’s film.

Forget Con Air; this is Con Sea, with bruiser cop Seok-woo (Park Ho-san) in charge of escorting a dirty dozen or so fugitives back to the motherland. First among evils is Jong-doo (Seo In-guk), a rapist with boyband looks and tattoos up to his jawline, who earns an early beating from Seok-woo after threatening his daughter. It doesn’t take a doctorate in whup-ass studies to guess that the criminals don’t stay in handcuffs for long. But – unbeknown to all but the doctor who keeps sneaking down to the basement – they are not Frontier Titan’s only cargo. Suffice it to say that transporting this thing on the same ship as Korea’s most wanted is the action-movie equivalent of that meme about the nuclear power plant and the spider farm being next to each other.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/6Q0blyc
via IFTTT

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

-
A lot of Bollywood films have re-released off late but when it comes to Hollywood, a handful of classics have had a re-run in cinemas. Last month, Interstellar re-released and received a rocking response. However, it just had a one-week run. If you missed watching the cult film in cinemas, here’s a reason for you to rejoice. The film will be back on the big screen on March 14, that too in IMAX. Moreover, Warner Bros will also bring back Dune: Part Two on the same day in theatres. A source told Bollywood Hungama, “Interstellar has a huge demand as it’s a film worth watching in theatres, that too IMAX. However, it re-released on February 7 and had to discontinued from February 14 to accommodate the new releases, Chhaava and Captain America: Brand New World. Both these films got a release in IMAX as well.” The source continued, “Many were aware that Interstellar had just a one week run. Hence, it held very well in the weekdays, collecting Rs. 2 crore plus. Yet, there was a section of mo...
Read more

‘I lied to get the part’: Melvyn Hayes on his ‘angry young man’ beginnings – and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum

-
He was tipped to be the next Richard Burton – but ended up as crossdressing Gunner Gloria in the now controversial sitcom. As his breakthrough classic returns to the screen, Hayes looks back One day in 1957, Melvyn Hayes was on the set of a film called Woman in a Dressing Gown when a man sat down next to him. “I was getting paid £5 a day and I’d been on location for three days,” the actor recalls. “All I had to do was walk up to a house and put a newspaper through a letterbox. That was my part. Finished. I said to this bloke, ‘I can’t believe the waste of money on this film. Take me. You could have got a newspaper boy on £1 a day to do what I’m doing.’ Then I said, ‘What do you do then, you lazy bugger?’ And he said, ‘I’m the producer.’” Hayes, now 89, giggles at the memory of the cheek of himself at 23. Back then, £5 a day was a decent whack. His first job in showbiz, in the early 1950s, was as assistant to The Great Masoni, a magician who tasked Hayes with “disappearing twice daily...
Read more

The Portable Door review – Harry Potter-ish YA fantasy carried by hardworking cast

-
Jeffrey Walker’s adaptation of the young-adult fantasy novel retains its edge thanks to its performances, but gets stuck on the whole door thing Adapted from Tom Holt’s 2003 young-adult fantasy novel, this is a passable attempt at kickstarting a new Harry Potter-style franchise set in a fusty-quirky institution, dosed up with extra Gilliamesque grotesquery. Co-produced by the Jim Henson Company, the production design is poky and intense, and the cast – with Christoph Waltz and Sam Neill larking it up – give it their all. But amid all this clutter, it sometimes has trouble moving its story forward. The Portable Door has a nice conceit: the venerable London corporation of JW Wells & Co is responsible for engineering all the daily incidents of coincidence and serendipity that happen in urban life. Not that wet-behind-the-ears intern Paul Carpenter (Patrick Gibson), desperate for any gig, knows the company’s raison d’etre when he signs up. He appears to have no discernible talents wh...
Read more