Like the Last Film You Watched thread, but specifically for films released this year, as a way of staying topical.

127 Hours is Danny Boyle's first film since his Slumdog Millionaire swept the Oscars. In it, James Franco plays Aron Ralston, the real-life rock-climber whose book, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, this is adapted from by Boyle and fellow Slumdog script-writer Simon Beaufoy. In May 2003, Ralston set out alone in the remote Bluejohn Canyon, Utah, when he unexpectedly fell and had his right arm trapped by an immovable rock. Quick to realise the situation he found himself in, Ralston used his limited resources to survive for over five days before finally deciding to break his trapped arm so as to severe it with a blade and cut himself free.

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The Movie was awesome. The surgery scene was terrifying

From its opening images of a microphone and the respect with which it is treated by someone preparing it, Tom Hooper's The King's Speech announces itself as a film all about the importance of performance, of being perceived as strong and worthy even, perhaps, when you're not.

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THE GREEN HORNET is undoubtedly a mess, this movie really behaves like a closet homosexual. That is it's apparently Michael Gondry making a deconstruction, pisser of the American gung-ho superhero comic book fantasy, a much better one at that than the obnoxious and hypocritical KICK ASS.

At least when it works, and I must admit, I had many laughs at the partnership between the gung-ho if fucking useless sorta-racist asshole Seth Rogen and his "sidekick" Jay Chou who effectively does all the butt-whooping work yet still follows Rogen subserviently for no good solid reason. A commentary on the inherent racism of the original Green Hornet radio series, and the fact that everybody remembers mother fucking Bruce Lee played Kato but nobody remembers the guy who played the title character, or gives a shit really? And why would you?

Or just an excuse to make an obvious joke, I can't tell.

Yet in denial of the obvious, good portions of the movie and its heavy mainstream marketing maintain (no believes) the illusion that its an action-comedy cape adventure ala IRON MAN. When really its actually a comedy well acknowledged of the source medium like Mario Bava's DIABOLIK! or even the Adam West BATMAN if less slapstick and more inward mocking. This set of misplaced expectations by the studio, audiences, and critics is maybe why HORNET is (sorta) wrongly getting ripped a new asshole.

Thus while we go through the (boring) motions with the genre proceduralism: The uninspired origin story, roughing up the bad guys montage, Christoph Waltz blowing his first post-BASTERDS paycheck as a routine villain, Edward James Olmos mere background curtains, the potential love interest (people still hire Cameron Diaz?), and genuinely surprised that Edward Furlong is still alive.

Waltz especially was a disapointment for most of HORNET, the repeated jokes about his convoluted foreign name fall flat. Not even James Franco (both arms intact) in his cameo can make that gag work. But then sometime in the 3rd act, Waltz goes into his mid-life crisis, colorful supervillainy career change and finally he becomes interesting and even...a little fun.

Which really is a good parallel to GREEN HORNET, interchangeable good inspired humor and dull formula worship.Push comes to shove, I say its worth seeing at least once. Budget theatre, and correct mindset.

Three and half fugly unshaven Seth Rogens out of Five.

(P.S. Hollywood - If you give Gondry $100+ million to make a superhero movie, he aint gonna go far below his skills and ambitions like Mike Newell, or even modify them like Christopher Nolan to appeal to advertizers. He's gonna produce a $100+ million Michael Gondry picture. Don't be a bitch because you didn't see the obvious coming like Universal did after hiring Ang Lee for HULK.)

I'm really hoping Seth Rogen's fifteen minutes are up. He's just too hard to look at.

As a comic book and cartoon fan, I really wish Hollywood would stop butchering classic works of art. I loved Underdog as a kid (especially the gangster dog Riff Raff) and that movie they put out a couple of years ago was pitiful! Stop the insanity!

De Niro's back with a new one in March
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfiFZG_RdI0

As I wrote elsewhere, Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine is about a husband and wife who spend a night at a hotel to reignite their relationship; meanwhile, we see how they got together in the first place...

A twin-narrative in which cold, digitally shot close-ups denote the short time-frame in which a relationship finally reaches breaking point if not its end, and wider shots in 16mm denote the more fragmented episodes leading up to the relationship proper beginning. That this latter strand isn't connected to the plot via character flashback gives the work an observational frankness that helps resist nostalgia, so that the break-up becomes less hysteric than matter-of-fact. Because the film concerns itself with the very end and the very beginning of a relationship without investigating any of the in-between, the central point becomes that banal, universal mystery: How Do Things Ever Get Like This? Seemingly, considering the material we're shown, perhaps the answer always lies in the fundamentals that bring two people together - the mismatch of characters themselves, and the film does well in this respect to treat character as a product of certain social circumstance. If it's in the particular details that these characters are accounted for, more than anything else, this captures very effectively the complexity and multitude of emotions involved in any relationship breakdown.

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is good, but it is rarely great. After 2008's The Wrestler, it is the second feature that the film-maker hasn't scripted, and continues to show his strength as a director of more straightforward narrative films. Here, ballet dancer Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) scores the lead role in a new performance of 'Swan Lake', but though she has the discipline and technique to make a great White Swan, she lacks the natural sensuality of the Black Swan. Instructed by impresario Thomas (Vincent Cassell) to get in touch with her "dark side", Nina, by way of befriending her more outgoing colleague Lily (Mila Kunis), begins to imagine she is taking on the traits of the Black Swan.

Read my further thoughts.

Biutiful is González Iñárritu's first film following what is now a trilogy of sorts, comprising the non-linear ensemble pieces Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006), each of which were scripted by Guillermo Arriaga; the latest work, co-scripted by González Iñárritu with debutantes Armando Bo and Nicolás Giacobone, might be a more linear and straightforward drama than its predecessors, but it continues its director's progression into fashionable miserablism.

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Rowan Joffe's Brighton Rock opens with an immediately atmospheric night scene that declares the film's intentions as a noir. It's also quite violent, and there's a lot of swearing. Hereafter, most of the film takes place during daylight, so as to make the most of its local setting in visual terms; from the outset, it's a very self-conscious film.

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There's a moment quite early on in writer-director David Michôd's debut feature Animal Kingdom that is not only unexpected, but completely wrongfoots the viewer and announces a shift in tone for the rest of the film, from intriguing if routine crime drama to a taut, sustained and impressive examination of the decline and fall of a matriarchal family based in suburban Melbourne.

Read more: http://tinyurl.com/4njdfo2

True Grit, the Coen Brothers' latest film, is an unremarkable effort. An adaptation of Charles Portis's 1968 novel - which was made into a film by Henry Hawathaway the following year - it is in many respects their most straightforward film, a 'genre homage' without the self-conscious stamp that marked films like The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) or Miller's Crossing (1990); but if the usual technicalities are well polished and the film is typically no less than solid, it also happens to be their least distinctive work to date.

Read more: http://tinyurl.com/5tr92gx

Really recommend this to fans of crime drama, it's terrific.

Lilo, check this out if it comes near you.

Never Let Me Go, directed by Mark Romanek and adapted by Alex Garland from Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, is a wonderfully controlled film that, in telling an otherwise emotionally plausible story against real locations utilised as a period setting and/or alternate reality, follows similarly genre-twisting films such as 28 Days Later... (also scripted by Garland in 2002), Children of Men (2006) and last year's Monsters.

Read more: http://tinyurl.com/6bo4jkw

John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole has going against it several problems: adapted by David Lindsay-Abaire from his own play, the script, with its focus in every scene on a married couple grieving the loss of their young son, is the stuff of soap opera; not only this, but even for a film of this kind, not very much happens, or at least, everything that does happen is 'internal'; perhaps even more fundamental than either of these, though, is the subject matter itself - as a film about something as uniquely traumatic as child loss, it's either your thing or it isn't. Indeed, as the underwhelming trailers for the film showed, there's very little the makers could do here to entice people into the film.

Read more: http://tinyurl.com/5rbg2vc

1. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
2. Melancholia
3. True Legend
4. Transformers: Dark Of The Moon
5. X-Men: First Class best film in 2011........

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