Insurgent

Posted on August 18, 2015 by jaycluitt

In a nonsense dystopia where people are separated into groups based on their personalities, four people are on the run as fugitives from the state, after rebelling in the previous film. These people are Tris (Shailene Woodley), her love interest Four (Theo James), her brother Caleb (Ansel Engort) and a dick called Peter (Miles Teller). They’ve been hiding out amongst the forgiving and generally pleasant Amity faction, but when Peter sells out the others, Caleb heads back to his home in Erudite, leaving Tris and Four to go on the run, passing from faction to faction in an attempt to raise an army against the evil Erudite, led by Jeanine (Kate Winslet) and her army of Dauntless, led by Eric (Jai Courtney) and Max (Mekhi Phifer). Continue reading →

El Topo

Posted on August 17, 2015 by jaycluitt

A black-clad gunslinger travelling with a naked seven year old boy comes across a slaughtered village, and seeks out the perpetrators, intending to enact vengeance on behalf of the victims. Upon finding the men responsible, the man deals out some justice before moving on, swapping the kid for an adult women, who promises to love him if he can defeat the four great masters living in the desert. Later, he finds himself trying to dig a tunnel into a cavern, but first must earn money by performing street comedy.
maxresdefault Continue reading →

Robot Overlords

Posted on August 12, 2015 by jaycluitt

This review was originally written for Blueprint: Review.

After robots from space have taken over the Earth, the surviving humans are forced to remain inside their homes indefinitely, being monitored by flashing implants behind their ear. If they go outside, they are killed. However, four kids accidentally find a way to turn off their implants, and see it as an opportunity to firstly find one of their number’s missing father, and possibly end the robo-tyranny forever.
Continue reading →

Do The Right Thing

Posted on July 23, 2015 by jaycluitt

This review was originally written for French Toast Sunday as part of my USA Road Trip series. It was also nominated for me to watch by Ryan McNeil of The Matinee, and is my submission for August for his Blind Spot series.

Brooklyn, 1989. On a particularly sweltering summer’s day, racial tensions simmer amongst the everyday lives of the inhabitants of a single street. Central to everything is Mookie (Spike Lee), a young, black, pizza deliveryman, working for the Italian-American Sal’s Pizzeria, run by Sal (Danny Aiello). As the day progresses and the temperature increases, everything threatens to boil over, and does so in a life-changing way for all involved. bugginout Continue reading →

Close-Up

Posted on July 19, 2015 by jaycluitt

Hossain Farazmand is a journalist who has heard wind of a potentially great story. A man has been pretending to be Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and has convinced a family that if they help him out they will be in his next film. Farazmand plans to make this story a life-changing event in his career, and heads to cover the man’s arrest and trial.
Continue reading →

The Kid with a Bike

Posted on July 12, 2015 by jaycluitt

Cyril Catoul (Thomas Doret) is a kid, who wants his bike. He left it at his father’s apartment, but no-one has heard from his Dad in a month. Cyril lives in an orphanage most of the time, but regularly escapes and goes searching for his father. On one such venture, when he goes to his father’s home and finds it empty and unrented, Cyril tries to gain protection from the kind people who run the orphanage by clutching onto a woman, Samantha (Cécile de France), who agrees to look after Cyril on weekends. She also tracks down his bike, from a man to whom Cyril’s father apparently sold it, but Cyril says this must be a lie, his Dad would never sell his bike, and even refuses to believe it even after he has found an advert his father posted selling the bicycle. Samantha tracks down Cyril’s father at a restaurant where he works, but he wants nothing to do with his son. Without a strong male role model, Cyril soon becomes embroiled in a small gang, led by Wes (Egon di Mateo).
Continue reading →

Burying the Ex

Posted on June 23, 2015 by jaycluitt

This review was originally written for Blueprint: Review.

Max (Yelchin) is not happy with his life. He works a demeaning job, his half-brother Travis (Cooper) uses Max’s apartment as a bachelor pad, and Max’s girlfriend Evelyn (Greene) is an eco-obsessed control freak, keen to dominate every aspect of Max’s life. He’d have broken up with her by now if they weren’t constantly having sex. One day, however, Max finally works up the courage to dump Evelyn, only for her to die just before he is able to. Problem solved, right? Nope, because Evelyn comes back from the dead, with plans on turning Max into a zombie too, so they can live together, forever. Max is, understandably, less than keen on the idea, especially seeing as he’s just met the perfect girl for him, hipster ice cream parlour owner Olivia (Daddario).
Burying2 Continue reading →

The Tree of Life

Posted on June 17, 2015 by jaycluitt

This film was nominated for me to watch by Mette Kowalski of French Toast Sunday and the Across the Universe podcast. Some day I may forgive here for this.

When I put the call out for people to recommend films for me to review this year, I did so expecting to have differing opinions with some of the people who suggested the films. I know there’s a lot of people out there who don’t necessarily think the same way I do, which is what makes the world an endlessly wonderful/frustrating place to live in. Mette suggested two films for me, and they both came with warnings. The other suggestion (2000’s In the Mood For Love) arrived in disc form today, so I’ll be covering that soon, and apparently I’ll suffer through it, whereas The Tree of Life came with the claim that I’d either love it or hate it, but that I shouldn’t dare hate it. Sorry Mette, I’m feeling rather daring today.
Tree-of-Life-021 Continue reading →

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Posted on June 15, 2015 by jaycluitt

It’s never a good sign when I begin my notes to a film with an exclamation of my distaste at what I’m seeing on screen, so the fact that the first scrawling for Tetsuo is “Gah!” should be viewed as a sign for bad things to come. This expression of shock and mild gagging was to a man, who apparently is named the Metal Fetishist (Shin’ya Tsukamoto, who also wrote and directed this), cutting a gouge down his leg and inserting a metal rod into it, parallel to the bone. Bear in mind last week I suffered a mild leg injury via bicycle accident (slamming on my brakes when a car turned without indicating led me to rake my leg down the metal grip-studs on my pedal, leaving me looking like I’ve survived a mild velociraptor attack), this visual did not go down well with me. Nor did the wound being filled with maggots. Delightful. The man who inserted the bar into his leg – which by no means impedes his ability to walk or run on it – seems to be turning into a man made entirely of scrap metal. Whether he is intending to or it is happening beyond his control is just one of the many questions Tetsuo throws up that I’m more than OK not receiving an answer to.
Continue reading →

The Wolf of Wall Street

Posted on June 10, 2015 by jaycluitt

Back in 1987, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) was an ambitious up-and-coming stock broker on Wall Street but, on the day he received his broker’s license, h also lost his job to the infamous Black Monday. Starting from the bottom, he discovered the wonder of penny stocks, which were much cheaper but garnered the broker a far larger share of the profits, allowing Jordan to quickly create his own company – later named Stratton Oakmont – and rise up the ranks to becoming a ludicrously wealthy hedonist with a penchant for every kind of narcotic available, and many that aren’t. However, Jordan’s wealth and the corrupt manners in which it has been accrued soon come to the attention of the FBI.
midget Continue reading →