UP - The sky's the limit for the best film this year (so far)

Wow, what a movie. So rarely do I get speechless at the end of a film nowadays and UP did it for me.

Up (the new Pixar masterpiece) tells the story of and lonely, elderly gentleman named Carl, who decides to fulfill his and his late wife's dream of going to Paradise Falls in South America, he does so by tying thousand of balloons to his house and up and away he goes to adventure. Tagging along is a young boy scout Russell.

This review is going to stay short, this film is perfect, superb story, characters, an amazing score, the 3D did annoy me slightly but the movie was so good that i wasn't particularly bothered, if you can see it in normal theatres, do so, you're not missing out.

Not one frame of this movie was wasted, not one iota at all, perfect dialogue, rich with subtext and humor, it had me nearly balling my eyes out in the first 10 minutes and i was held right till the very end. If there is one film you see this first half of the year, make it UP, pure and simple.

Complete and utter perfection, one of the best films I have seen in a long time - 10/10

(my first 10/10 this year!!!!!!)

District 9 - Overrated film of the year

This debut movie by director Neil Blomkamp is being hailed as "the best movie of the year" I however beg to differ. The story follows 20 years after the arrival of aliens in Johannesburg who were quickly moved to a camp of sorts called District 9, a Government organization operative who was originally given the job of evicting all the "prawns" to a new place, finds himself on the other end of the barrel when he is infected with alien genes. Though this is definitely not the worst movie of the year, it is the most overrated yet, it was alright, but it was just that...alright.

To begin with there were far too many plot holes, I had my sister asking me questions throughout the movie and she never normally talks in films. It was a short film stretched way too far and this stretching has created many, many holes. For spoilers sake I will not discuss them here but one major one is the ship, supposedly it crash landed, on earth and had no fuel, yet somehow is still able to levitate what, how many tonnes for 20 years!!!!

Structurally it was faulty too the film rested on it's exposition for three quarters then the third act only then started to move forward I thought it would get good but then it just turned into generic sci-fi action nonsense corny lines and all. This is not to mention some characterization was awful, the wife of the main character (when he gets infected) says she can't love him anymore, but then she does, but then she doesn't, then she does, it get's confusing. And on top of this throughout the entire film the protagonist is a genuinely unlikeable character (a good performance by the actor though) and the real villains are incredibly 2 dimensional with bad lines to boot.

But the thing that annoyed me most about this movie is how subconcoiusly racist this filmmaking is, for an Apartheid allegory (or so they say) For the native people of darker skin, everything they said In English was subtitled, even though it was crystal clear. But when white people with accents, or Kiwis (as Johannesburg is apparently a city in New Zealand) speak, no subtitles are required.
And then when Native people speak their own language, the subtitling happens to have bad grammar....

But the special effects!! for only 30 million the effects in this film were amazing so props for that.

I went in expecting Hot stuff and got mild chili instead.
5/10 - the special effects were the only thing that really dazzled me.