Truth counts in a relationship!

Title: Beautiful Lies

Year: 2010

Emilie (Audrey Tautou) runs a busy hairdressing salon, one day she receives an anonymous love letter, which she forwards on to her lonely mother Maddy (Nathalie Baye) thinking it will cheer her up. However, the sender is her maintenance-man Jean (Sami Bouajila), who sees Emilie screw up the letter and throw it away. Unbeknown to him, Emilie continues to write to her mother under the guise of an anonymous lover.

By the third letter it becomes known that Jean is in-fact a very intelligent linguist, and suddenly self concious, Emilie finds it almost impossible to be around him. Desperate to get him out of the salon for a while, she sends him to the mail. Sticking stamps on the letters he realises he's out of stamps with one letter left to post, Maddy's love letter. So he goes to post it by hand. Maddy, who is waiting with baited breath in her garden for the post snatches the letter, and follows Jean all the way back to the salon.

Emilie realises her 'good deed' has backfired, and so a line of well-meant lies are spun to avoid heartache. All the while Emilie has no idea that Jean is the sender of the original letter.

I won't spoil the ending, as I urge everyone to watch this film. In the first few scenes I was convinced it was going to be almost identical to Amelie, I mean you couldn't get two more similar names if you tried! And anyone who knows me, knows how much I love Amelie. Perhaps then it could be said I even wanted the two films to be similar. And yes, in a way they are, but Amelie and Emilie are two entirely different characters, and as usual Tautou lends herself perfectly to her role.

There were only two things that I picked up that drew me out of the action, one misspelled subtitle (sop instead of stop) and a silly shot where it looked like the camera man forgot to pan with Maddy's feet. Pedantic? Yes, undoubtedly, but that's what being on a film course does to you. It destroys the pleasure of watching a film and taking it at face value. Otherwise I felt completely rapt and immersed in the story, it had a carefree feel to it, like it was set in a blazing French summer in the 80's.

The title is very much the feel of the film, lots of lies between several very beautiful people. From the boyish femininity of Tautou (does that make any sense?) to the olive, dappled skin of Jean, and even Maddy possessed a certain mature beauty it is so easy to fall in love with this film. It has easily escalated to the top of my favourites list along with Amelie, Priceless and Angel-A. But then I've always been a fan of foreign films, and there's something to be said for the French language, it flows, a lot like Welsh, but if you'd have set this film in Cardiff and in Welsh it certainly wouldn't have the same feeling!

Another great thing about this film, is that it isn't soppy and it isn't completely far-fetched like a lot of love stories. A sign of a good film, to me at least, is the feeling of being a part of the story, an onlooker and forgetting that what you're watching has a bunch of equipment, a script and several people running around with coffee and props just yards away from the action on screen. This has as much to do with good acting as it does with a great story. It's only at the end, or during a desperate run to the bathroom that you remember you're sitting on a sofa, or in a dark room with lots of other people!

Fantastic film, a definite recommendation for any film lover. That is if you can put up with the subtitles! 10/10.

Apollo 1.....Zzzzzzz *snort* *jump* oh, sorry was I asleep?

Title: Apollo 18

Year: 2011
Synopsis: Crap.

I remember seeing the trailers for this way back when I was last at the cinema. During a trip down south just after Christmas I was in heaven....I mean HMV when Chris pointed it out. I'm a little iffy with some kinds of horrors, and I managed to miss seeing it in the cinema. THANK CHRIST! I rue anyone who had to spend the extortinate price of a cinema ticket on this piece of cinematic UBERTRASH.

Ok, so the cover is all 'based on real footage' and to be honest I was a little scared. The idea of being trapped somewhere in space where any number of things could go wrong and you would die a very lonely death is quite scary to me Anyway, I digress. There are these three blokes, I've forgotten their names but for ease I'll call them Bob, Achmed and Jib. They kiss their families goodbye for a mission they're not allowed to tell anyone they're actually going on. Cue alarm bells.

Achmed and Jib are destined for the moon while Bob keeps his beady eyes on them from the comfort of a shuttle orbiting the moon. Their mission is to collect some specimens (I think) of rock (whoooopydo!). Jib and Achmed make it to the moon fine, and around here it's ok to sleep for abour 43 minutes while shite all goes on.

Achmed and Jib have a few cameras and snazzy VHS tapes to record every tiny detail, presumably so they can show their mates back on earth and get all the renown for being giant cocks. Which they are. Anyway, they have their oh-so-important rocks all good to go when something goes wrong on take off back to the shuttle.

So, you're in space, and there's something wrong with your spacepod thingy. What do you do? Well, in real life you'd probably be half way home to earth, but in a 'horror' film one of you goes outside to investigate without a torch or any kind of weapon and it spells disaster. And oh-dear-god is it disastrous! Achmed the fool, goes outside and while Jib is pretending to be intelligent you hear screams of pain and anguish coming from outside.

'It'sinmysuit!!!!!' is all you hear for a few seconds while Achmed looks like he's wrestling an invisible crocodile. Oh! What was that!?!?!

A spider runs across his face........................................................................................................................................................................................................urght

sorry I fell asleep just remembering it.

Yes, a spider. Anyway, Jib makes some kind of heroic movements in Achmed's direction and drags him back inside. Like a traumatised infant, Achmed is convinced nothing happened till Jib realises he's pointing his camera at the ceiling and says.

'Buuuuuuuuut Aaaaaaachmeeeed yoooooooouuuuu'reeeeeeee bleeeeeeeeding!' In a derpy voice. Some impromptu surgery later, and Jib pulls out a shard of spacerock from Achmed's chest. He deteriorates quickly, muttering to himself, getting all bloodshot eyes and for some reason stands above Jib filming him while he sleeps. Weird.

During a moment of calm prior to the spider incident, Jib and Achmed go on a lovely walk over some moon-dunes and find another spaceship. A Russian one. I guess they wanted a lovely moon tea-party but were somewhat disappointed to find a fresh corpse lying near to the spaceship. Uhoh, there are those alarm bells again. Achmed and Jib hotfoot it back to their pod and demand to know if Houston knew about the Russians.

'Us? Nope we know nothing about the Russian spaceship that was sent to the moon and never came back because both cosmonaughts got eaten alive by space spiders. And no, this really isn't a suicide mission for your guys, which also has nothing to do with why you weren't allowed to tell your loved ones where you were going.'

A lot of face-palming and derps later, Achmed is losing the plot and Jib is running out of oxygen, when their moon buggy crashes and Achmed throws himself down a hole at the mother spider Jib makes a run for it to the Russian space craft in the hope of escape. By this point neither Houston nor Bob have made contact with Achmed and Jib.

Jib makes it to the Russian craft and manages to make it work, he reaches Bob who instructs him to try and take off and get near the shuttle to do a little space-walk to safety. Just then, Achmed turns up looking a little worse for wear and tries to break his way in with a hammer. Jesus Achmed, all you had to do was knock, but sadly, the spiders eat his face, he must not taste very nice though, as lots of blood ends up on the window.

I thought for a moment he'd make it, but as Jib takes off, those pesky rocks float up, and well, he gets eaten alive by hungry and apparently very territorial spiders. It's ok though, cause you see the tell-tale blood shot eyes and he's infected. Houston gets wind of their plans and tells Bob to abort or else!

Bob does not abort but Jib can't stop the pod from crashing into the shuttle. So they all die.

It pretty much ends there, apart from a few little lines about how Houston told their families they died in training exercises. Gah.

There is someone out there who is responsible for the trailer to this film. That person either needs a medal for piecing together the only coherent parts of the film, or shooting for being part of the biggest film cover-up in history. I remain undecided.

Today's lesson is: never pay full price for a new dvd. It just isn't worth it. Never again please.

-6.9/10

Horrible Bosses

Happy new year! It has been an awful long time since I posted anything but I've been quite busy with uni, Xmas, New Year and getting a puppy!

Horrible Bosses is a film I've been wanting to catch for a while. It looked good from the trailers and since Anison is one of my favourite actresses (yes, I know she's hardly Hopkins but I've liked her since Friends so shhhh :P)

There isn't much to say about this film, it was enjoyable and had a few funny moments, a couple were laugh-out-loud moments too. Three friends are plagued by their awful bosses, one is a tyrant who likes nothing more than belittling his staff, the other is a coke-head hell bent on squeezing every cent out of his late father's chemical company and the third (Aniston) is a complete nympho who crossed the line of sexual harassment long, long ago.

Fed up with their jobs and unable to find another position they drunkenly decide that hiring a hitman and killing them is their only option. Sober, the idea evolves to see them entering a shady bar in the rough end of town and meeting 'motherf*cker Jones' (so called as he stole money from his mother - just to clarify!) who diddles them for $5k to become their 'murder consultant'.

During plans to commit the murders themselves (by each murdering someone else's boss) they get caught in a tangled web of silly mistakes which eventually ends up working in their favour without anyone killing anyone else...much.

Hardly an edge of the seat experience, but those are rare for me these days at the best of times. I'd definitely recommend it for Sunday afternoon viewing as it suits most (bar young children of course).

6.9/10