Chamber Film Reviews: Movie Reviews to Annoy and Infuriate 2015 (Chamber Film Reviews, #5) (ePub)

This is a collection of film reviews.  A sample:

The Martian (2015)

An astronaut is stranded alone on Mars with limited supplies, and it will be four years before the next mission to Mars when he might be rescued.  I read the book two and half years ago and loved it.  I haven't read a better work of fiction since.  To me it was a remarkable novel, and it was obvious ready-made material for a summer Hollywood blockbuster with a massive star in the lead role.  So I've waited two and a half years for the movie version.  I went in with middling expectations.  It was pretty much the perfect adaptation.  They added nothing new and made no stupid additions or alterations (the short opening and closing scenes might be new but they were good).  They kept closely to the novel and removed the right stuff.  As far as I can tell it's the same characters, dialogue, scenes and situations from the novel.  It's an accurate, faithful adaption.  I didn't notice anything significant missing.  At least I personally didn't miss anything.  If I wanted it in the movie version then it made it into the movie.  The stuff they did remove was non-essential and made logical sense.  The long journey at the end for example was an obvious place where it could get draggy and bogged down with stuff audiences by this point weren't interested in.  Sure enough they skipped over this with a one minute montage and a few choice lines of dialogue.  Smart decisions like this are made all along the line.  I missed one line about technically colonising Mars, but it turned up later in the movie (apparently it's in the same place as it is in the book).  I really have no complaints with the movie.  It is the book.  That is a good thing.  I struggle to imagine how they could have done it better.  It's well cast, directed and written.  There are no weak links.  It is more or less the perfect adaption.  The biggest complaint I can come up with?  It wasn't particularly funny.  There was room for more humour, but that's not to say the film didn't have a few small laughs in it.  Visually I was concerned because the publicity images didn't match the pictures I had in my mind.  Not once during the movie did I question the look of the movie.  It swamped my own ideas and rendered my own pictures redundant.  If you haven't read the novel I think some people might complain the film's a bit bland.  The novel dwells more on the survival aspect of the story, but it's perfectly fair that the film couldn't devote as much attention to that.

10 out of 10

Lost River (2014)

A single mother goes to work at a weird club to pay off debts to keep her house, while her oldest son scavenges for copper in abandoned properties.  Oh fucking dear.  This was abysmal.  On the evidence provided here Ryan Gosling clearly has zero talent for writing or directing.  He has no idea what a story is, or how to tell it.  He sets some stuff up.  Then almost literally nothing happens.  Then it ends after some deeply unsatisfying, slowly drawn-out non-events take place that have little rhyme, rhythm or reason.  There is so little reason behind each moment.  He relies heavily on artily shot camerawork.  As it signifies nothing it's just pointless artiness without a purpose.  Clearly whole moments exists simply because Gosling came up with a cool image (the bank manager dancing at the end for example).  Sadly there is no substance behind these images.  Every scene feels unfinished.  He loved the trick of having...