Pete's Write

  Date Night   Some movies allow you to escape from the doldrums of daily life, have a good laugh and sit back for the duration of the show and forget about your troubles. Others can take you past that, and whilst you are laughing, you also appreciate a deeper meaning, where you can relate to the scenes portrayed and reflect on how your life parallels that. Whilst Date Night is no heavy duty blockbuster, it has enough gravity to hit home with a message and yet remain light and fluffy enough to take you away from your woes for just under 2 hours. With ticket prices half that in Singapore, and a 2 day lay up in KL, it makes watching this with friends a decent distraction, which actually worked out well.   The plot is simple and tested, two people who have been married for years go on their usual date night where they get time off from the kids to be by themselves and they have recently become a little jaded, and inside long fo...

Terminator II   This is one movie which defined all action movies in its decade and its legacy still lives on with 2 sequels after. It was the movie which define its main actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, sealing his reputation as The Action Star of the 90s. its CGI was Oscar winning and cutting edge and even today it still feels fresh. The marriage of good action enhanced rather than defined by mere CGI, plus an engaging storyline and the clever use of the villain turned hero, got us rooting for the underdog, and hoping it will beat the seemingly unstoppable T-1000.   Over the years, so many versions have been released that if you were a hard-core Home Theatre Hobbyist, you will have owned at least one version. Well, I have the THX Judgment Day version, the lossy DD Blu ray version, then the DTS-MA HD DVD and now the Ultimate Skynet edition on Blu Ray.   So how good is this latest version? If you have any of the older ones, should you part with more cash for th...

Definitely, Maybe   There have been a few classic romantic comedies which have impressed me over the years: 4 Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually, Harry Met Sally, You Got Mail. The essential plot is about how the man, after a circuitous journey usually plus some time falling in love with others, eventually ends up with the woman of his dreams. After all these rom-coms should end well, and leave you with a warm fuzzy feeling, regardless of whether real life is like that. How about a rom-com which is funny, warm and yet reflective, and give you more than a topic or two to talk about when the show ends? Will it work if it goes off the tried and test formulae a little?   So here is a movie, where from about the fifth minute you know the main actor, Ryan Reynolds, is divorced from the love of his life, and is on his way to pick up his precocious daughter who just had her first sex education lesson, and now knows she did not come from storks. The story is about how the ...

The recent brace of 3D movies has allowed the ugly head of GREED to rear its head, in a way which is more menacing than the hissing snakey head of Medusa.   Alice and Titans are clear examples of movies made in 2D, but due to greed from the studios has had post-production manipulation to squeeze some 3D out of a flat film and charge the paying public more.   Unlike Avatar or even Up, these films are not natively created in 3D and it shows with lacklustre depth and poor picture quality. If this is the future of subsequent 3D productions, the uptake of 3D flatscreen TVs, HDMI 1.4 players etc will be much lower and effectively show up the obvious, that 3D is a gimmick which is meant to enrich the coffers of the producers.

  3D movies are now coming out fast and furious and you know you are in for a nasty time when the most three-dimensional thing is the subtitles.   The plot has not changed much and follows much of the older movie, with 3D added post production presumably to cash in on this new craze. Well lets just say that the 3D effect is flatter than an airport runway, and instead, you get this faint halo effect or grainy enlargement of the character. The picture quality is also poor, were they trying to convince us this was an 80s production? The CGI was sporadic, with the scorpion scene nicely done, whilst Medusa looked worse than the Scorpion King animation which is almost 8 years old now.   Sam Worthington tries almost single-handedly to rescue this movie and the people who hired him got their money’s worth from him. He grimaces, growls and slashes his way through the movie pulling the others along and almost makes the movie watchable. There are a few laughs and s...