The Five-Year Engagement.

You snooze, you lose...Emily Blunt and Jason Segel..The Five-Year Engagement.

This ridiculously overlong romantic comedy is a massive letdown. "From the producer of Bridesmaids" is plastered across the top of the poster, one of the reasons I saw this film is because I loved Bridesmaids so much, sadly I was sorely misled. The Five-Year Engagement sees what looks like an odd couple, Emily Blunt and Jason Segel put together. Segel is Tom, a sous chef at an up-market restaurant in San Francisco while Blunt is Violet, a PhD graduate in psychology on the verge of getting a post-doctorate. The pair fall deeply in love at a New Years' Eve party where she is Princess Diana and he is 'Super-Bunny.' When Violet gets accepted to do the post-doctorate, things go up for her and things go down for him. The pair postpone the wedding and head for Michigan where Violet is going to be working. The thing this film looks at is that men can also be the ones who have to sit around and do nothing when woman go out and work. The usual stereotype is that woman sit around, as Violet says she doesn't want to sit around and cook and clean and make apple pies and tend to babies. Tom gets depressed and ends up hunting deer and growing side-burns. The pair are visited by Violet's sister, Suzie (Alison Brie) and Suzie's husband, Tom's idiotic friend, Alex (Chris Pratt.) Rhys Ifans has an unsatisfying role as Winton Childs, a professor at the university, Violet works for and who has a soft side for Violet. It drags on far too long and you get rather fidgety. The chemistry between Jason Segel and Emily Blunt works somehow and it's an intelligent romcom, something that only comes around once in a blue moon.


3/5

Jaws.

Shark tale.....Jaws.

The re-release of the 1975 classic, Jaws, shows it is still got the same charm as it did 37 years ago. It revolves around the vicious great white shark targeting the innocent holiday resort island, Amity. To solve the shark problem the corrupt mayor (Murray Hamilton) turns to his part-time police chief, Martin Brody (Roy Sheider). Vowing to kill the shark and save the community from it's psychotic plague, Brody calls in marine biologist, Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss.) The pair get salty sea-dog Quint (Robert Shaw) and they set out to kill the creature, intriguing camera angles and John Williams' magnificent orchestral theme telling us when Jaws is present. Jaws is long and slightly drawn out with only three people dying under Jaws' wrath in the whole film - I like a bit of bloodshed. The scenes set on Quint's boat,   Orca are interesting but the initial chase of the serial killer-esque shark just goes round in circles until a too quick climax. Jaws has charm but it isn't a great movie, although it is a good shark film and puts more recent 'killer shark' films like Shark Night 3D to shame. The series is exhausted producing four movies of the same idea, it's time Jaws was put to bed.


3.5/5

The Angels' Share.

A bit more comic...Jasmin Riggins, Wiliam Ruane, Paul Brannigan and Gary Maitland.

Ken Loach is notable for not having the cheeriest of film topics, The Angels' Share is one of his more lighter offerings than previous films. It received the Cannes Jury Prize, a very prestigious award. Obviously Loach has been inspired by Ealing comedy, Whisky Galore! It's a innocent comedy caper about a young Glaswegian criminal named Robbie, played by newcomer Paul Brannigan. After narrowly avoiding a harsh jail sentence and with the birth of his son, Robbie forces himself to leave his lawbreaking life to focus on his girlfriend, Leonie, the most unconvincing character in the whole film played by Siobhan Reilly. His sentence is community pay-back so he gets to work with a bunch other wrongdoers - Rhino (William Ruane), Albert (Gary Maitland) and Mo (Jasmin Riggins.) Their supervisor is the kind-hearted Harry (John Henshaw) who has a passion for whisky. He takes the four to a distillery where a new life is shown. One of the biggest names in the film is Roger Allam who plays a whisky collector that happens to come across Robbie. Its very light-hearted and the characters are played very well. 




4/5