Nanny Mcphee Returns.....Straight from the Land of Poo!!

errrrr...... well....... Don't bother watching this unless it’s a frustrating Tuesday afternoon, it’s raining, it’s half term and that little voice in your head kids are screaming "I’m bored". They will enjoy it, but the potential for the adults to enjoy it goes out of the window after you have seen all the actors enter. It just doesn't have any real depth, plot or point to it. One of the biggest gripes with this, is the cast is excellent, so it annoys me to see Rhys Ifans, Ewan McGregor, Bill Bailey, Maggie Smith, Katy Brand and obviously Emma Thompson all just looking like they have turned up for some pocket money, or something to do for a couple of weeks. I mean that cast is superb and better than some of the huge block-busters that are out. But when the story is just plain dull, the saying comes to mind that you can’t make a "xxxx" beautiful. LOL

Personally I actually didn't mind the first film (As I'm more of a thriller/horror kind of guy) because it had a point to it. I just thought the movie was very drab and boring .The storyline was very predictable as well. Basically it's just the first movie with a different set of characters. It seemed to be very short as well, but I don't know if that was because of the fact that I was texting through most of it.

The first Nanny Mcphee had a single father looking after 7 children who are running wild and scaring off every nanny that he hires. So McPhee enters and saves the day. But this latest one didn't have a point. It just had a family affected by the war, where the father is away all the time, so the children have to, and seemed keen enough to, help out around the farm. I mean looking into it they seemed happy enough, and did more work and appreciated family values than most kids in the world today. The mother leaves them at home every day to go work at a local shop, so they completely run the whole farm by themselves. So just because some city children turn up and they have a bit of a fight with them, that means that they need good ol’ Nanny McPhee to sort them out. UH?? A good slap and early bed I say. DONE!! No need for the film. (P.S I don't condone violence to children).

Overall I thought the SFX was weak and the second half of the film lacked much of Nanny Mcphee's character, yeah she was there but didn't say or do much.
I am actually really surprised that the IMDb rating for this is so high. I thought this movie was a waste of time and pretty much awful.

The nauseatingly corny and clichéd excuse for a climax is the icing on the cake of Susanna White's horribly naive direction, which unfortunately – together with Thompson's rather sloppy script – represses her and the rest of the remarkably adept cast, tragically capping their potential.

The only good thing this film offers, is the swimming pigs. But that’s about as much magic and fun there is in this film. I feel that kids’ films should appeal, or at least create some entertainment for the adults (who pay for the tickets in the first place). I think most kids will enjoy this film but it’s no epic. If Nanny McPhee was a TV series, then this would be the rubbish one where she fixes a family who don't really need fixing. Oh and also there isn't a BIG BANG!!!!!

Eat Pray.....Puke!!

If you've kept up with my reviews (let’s pretend you have), you are going to find that the genre I touch most seldom is romance. They are by nature a contagious quagmire of failed puns, roads repaved with familiar plots, and their stars have signed with the devil. Enter Julia Roberts, queen of the romcom. No doubt a talented actress, if not the most famous of her generation, Julia has played a big role in cashing in on the average woman's dream.

In her latest effort Julia plays Liz Gilbert in the autobiographical book turned movie Eat Pray Love. Liz is a writer visiting Bali in search of a wise/toothless medicine man. He reads the palm of her hand and she takes everything to gospel. Leaving behind husband Stephen (Billy Crudup), Liz seeks out new adventure in the form of exotic cuisine, Eastern religion, and male suitors.

Eat Pray Love is directed by Ryan Murphy. Murphy is best known as the creator of Glee, last year's breakout TV show about misfits who triumph through songs. With his name in the mix people are going to be disappointed that Julia and friends don't break out into songs and dance. Even if you consider that Murphy could have interests outside of musicals, you'd expect some sassy dialog exchanges like those seen on the show between the characters Will Schuester and Sue Sylvester. Hate to disappoint you but that's not going to happen either.

This is a story about a self indulged woman who has a great life; loving husband, great job that allows her to travel, is interested in going back to school and she decides it's not enough.

Completely out of the blue she divorces her husband (for no good reason) and she decides she needs to find herself and bitch about a terrible life that 90% of people can only aspire too. Julia Roberts comes off as a daddy's girl who has always gotten what she has wanted and now that daddy's out of the picture she decides she needs to be doted on like a princess, but she comes off as a spoiled bitch whose antics infuriates her friends and doesn't deserve anything she gets.

This was made into a movie because of Oprah who decided to put this book in her book club, which means every house wife in America read this pile of trash and all of them seem to think that it is some great find, it's not. This movie reminds me of a good travel guide documentary that explores the beauty of the world only instead of a smart host who knows when to step aside and just let you enjoy the background and immerse them in the beauty of everything that surrounds them, we get a woman that needs to be center of attention and enough is never enough.

That being said some of the shots are truly beautiful and the food they show in Italy is stunning and makes me want to eat pasta for weeks, but I can get that from the discovery channel so why do I fork out money for something I can get for free at seven in the evening? Julia Roberts does try and save her character with her trademark charm but by that point it's too late and nothing can save this powerfully bad movie.

Apparently this book suffered from "right place, right time" syndrome which lead to it being picked up by Oprah, the movie on the other hand suffers from "endorsed by Oprah, guaranteed audience" syndrome.

I gotta say that the description of this movie didn't appeal to me, and I only saw it because I got a free ticket to a preview.

I gave it a 2 instead of a 1 because a few of the supporting characters sometimes call out Liz (Julia Roberts) on her self-absorbed superficial antics. I liked them (the characters, not the antics).

The movie is too long, but Italy, India, and Bali are showcased nicely (if superficially). I bet Julia Roberts signed on because filming this must have basically been a paid vacation.

The script is pretty bad. Liz complains that one character always seems to talk in bumper stickers, but she should look at her own speech patterns.

The movie is also too long.It felt like watching those John Wayne movie marathons on AMC.

I imagine that this movie will be enjoyed by real life casualties of love who believe that they are owed love and fulfillment as an inalienable right. It is a movie that teaches us nothing, provides a warped view of what love and relationships really are and leaves no lasting impressions, save the sweet sounds of fingernails on a blackboard that will leave most movie goers yearning for relief. Read the book and skip the movie.

Final Statement:Eat Pray and Run, as fast as you can away from this movie.

Charlie St...........Blow Me!!

Charlie St. Cloud Review: A young teenager's younger brother is killed in a car accident and when running away from his funeral, he finds his brother’s ghost and they play catch. But of course, Charlie (Efron) meets a girl and now he has to choose between the girl and the stupid kid. Amazingly terrible story that makes no logical sense what so ever. Put a lot of effort into making us think and feel that his younger brother was a ghost. Not. It was just awful acting to and it was really over-done and over-rated. I don't know what this film was trying to achieve but it’s just going to go down from here. Charlie St. Cloud is terrible! Do not see, you will have wasted your money!

It's entirely possible that Zac Efron can really act. We may never know. He always plays the same character: a good-looking, sensitive, semi-credibly athletic, Boy Scouty high-school kid with Clairol-model floppy hair. He could do it in his sleep. He could do it on speed. He could do it on Ritalin. He may be able to do it after he's dead, and they just prop him up and let his corpse go through the motions!

Efron will never have a career as great as Brad Pitt’s and although he already has been booked for several movies, his career is already in danger. Very bad actors, as Bruce Willis is, have had a great career only because they are very good at choosing what to do. Orlando Bloom destroyed his career acting in "Elisabethville" with Kirsten Dunst. Dunst and Bloom are actors without personality and started their careers just being in Blockbuster Movies (Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean (Bloom) & Spiderman (Dunst). Now they have been already burned while acting in Elisabethville, whose destiny was an obvious flop from the beginning. Jennifer Aniston is a star because she has been in Friends and married and lost Brad Pitt, becoming a constant presence in gossip magazine, but her movies don't cash, why? Because they are ugly and she is not able to choose the good ones.

Now on the movie itself; first, Efron's character talks to dead people. I was like "What the heck? He needs to go to a psychiatric institute!" It is not believable. And the punch of the story is just ridiculous. At the end, I was still thinking that Efron's character needed to go to an institute. And for good. And the whole story is based on a relationship that we do not even know well. The brotherhood between Charlie and his brother did not seem that strong... Nothing works in this movie. The whole story sucks. That was the problem. I don't even want to read the book, life is too short. I was very disappointed and after seeing this movie, I was like "I should have seen Inception for a second time. At least this film is more realistic." It gives you an idea.

Ray Liotta (one of my favorite actors of all time) has a tiny, tiny part which should have been developed much more fully. Kim Basinger is totally forgettable. Efron's love interest, Amanda Crew, is very hard to like. The film hardly explores her character and I found myself responding to her supposedly dramatic scenes very negatively. The young actor who plays Sam does an okay job. He tries to be the awe-struck younger brother but Efron doesn't give him enough to work with.

There are a few additional wrinkles that you can pick up by actually sitting through the whole movie. One is that this game of catch has been going on for an hour a day for over 1800 days now, and even after all that time neither kid can throw a baseball worth a damn. Another tidbit is that Charlie is able to talk to other dead people besides Sam. Also, he's artistic. And really, really sensitive. (Did I mention that already?)

The only good thing in this film? The song "Airplanes" in the trailer. That's all.

So that leaves us with the only real dilemma posed by this low-wattage would-be tear- jerker: mawkish or maudlin, mawkish or maudlin?