Monthly Archives: joulukuu 2014

Paranormal activity is a horror movie published in 2007 and directed by Oren Peli.

The plot of the movie is all about young couple Katie and Micah moving in together. Soon after moving into their new house Katie and Micah starts to witness unnatural events in their apartment, doors are closed all by themselves, furniture is missing and pictures are ruined etc. Katie claims that some supernatural being is haunting her so Micah sets up camera in their bedroom to record everything that happens in their room at nights. Katie also contacts a psychic and asks him about this evil presence and he tells that it’s a demon who is feeding off of katies negative energy.

At this point there was a poignant juxtaposition between the reaction of Katie and his husband who wasn’t worried at all. First at nights almost nothing happens but as the movie goes on more serious things are starting to occur. Katie is getting desperate and calls a demonologist but when he arrives he is just saying that he is only making things worse and making the demon more angry. After this at 20th night Katie is ripped off of her bed to downstairs by some invisible being and after Micah saves her he notices that Katie has bite marks. Next night Katie is turning into something inhuman, demonic, and she kills Micah.

This whole movie is filmed from Katies or Micahs point of view or from the camera which is in their bedroom. This makes the film even more terrifying because it feels like you are inside the movie. Because Paranormal activity was pretty much filmed with one camera it was possible to film it without greater costs and really fast. It is said that the whole footage of the movie were filmed in one week but yet many critic says that it’s perhaps the scariest movie they have ever seen. Paranormal activitys budget was only 15 000 $ and the profit was astounding 193 355 800 $.

I really enjoyed watching this movie, the plot was simple but interesting unlike in sequels where the plot goes little bit too complicated which makes them less interesting and scary.

The Dark Knight (2008) is an American action movie directed by Christopher Nolan. Nolan also directed the previous part Batman Begins (2005). These movies are based on comic character Batman which is created by Bob Kane. The Dark Knight was a huge success and it broke box-office Records.

Christian Bale plays the leading role as Batman. When he is not saving the world he is a millionaire Bruce Wayne. Bale is a British actor, born in 1974. In the other leading role there is Heath Ledger as Joker. Joker is Batman’s biggest enemy. Heath Ledger died before the film was released. His performance in this movie was praised everywhere and he won many prizes for example Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. In other key roles there are Aaron Eckhart (Harvey Dent), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Rachel Dawes), Morgan Freeman (Lucius Fox), Michael Caine (Alfred Pennyworth) and Gary Oldman (James Gordon).

In the movie Joker associates with local criminals and threats to kill somebody every day if Batman doesn’t reveal who he really is. Joker starts to kill people and Batman is about to tell the truth about himself. Joker gets caught but at the same time Rachel and Harvey are getting kidnapped. Joker tells where Rachel and Harvey are kept. They are in different places and Batman has only time to save one of them. He chooses to save Rachel but when Batman gets there he founds Harvey. Joker had told the wrong address. Harvey starts killing people who he thinks are guilty of Rachel’s death. In the end Harvey dies and Batman decides to retreat from his duties for a while.

There were many special effects in the movie. They were amazing, well done and felt real. Music was composed by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard and it fits like a glow for the film. The movie was really good and the actors managed well. I recommend it for everyone who likes action movies.

lähde: Wikipedia

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is the third installment of the multibillion trilogy based on The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again written by J.R.R. Tolkien. It is also the sixth movie based on Tolkien’s works and directed by Peter Jackson. The screenplay was written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro.

The Battle of The Five Armies (originally titled There and Back Again) is the Hobbit trilogy’s third movie, based on The Hobbit as well as short sections of other pieces of Tolkien’s works. In a nutshell, the movie follows the journey of Bilbo Baggins, who faces the harsh reality of war after following the thirteen dwarves to the Lonely Mountain, also known as Erebor. Needless to say, the mountain is more or less full of gold, and is therefore not only of interest to the dwarves but to the elves and the people of Lake Town as well as an army of orcs. The movie also brings to screen the struggles of Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans), a man facing the aftermath of the utter obliteration of his hometown and the upcoming threat of war.

Martin Freeman gives an excellent performance as the movie’s title character Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit. I found myself following Bilbo’s struggles even more intently than in the two previous movies, which only shows Freeman’s impressive acting abilities. Other talented actors in the movie include Richard Armitage who does a wonderful job in bringing to life the madness that takes over the king of Erebor, Thorin Oakenshield. Indeed the movie includes almost award-worthy performances by many known actors for example Benedict Cumberbatch as both the dragon Smaug and the evil Lord Sauron and Lee Pace as the ’Elvenking’ Thranduil. But what blew my mind away was (once again) the performance of the 75-year-old Sir Ian McKellen. His performance as Gandalf is extraordinary, especially when one takes in to consideration his age and the amount of action scenes that Gandalf has. And of course I should also mention Sir Christopher Lee (Saruman the White) who gets his fair share of action despite his considerable age of 92.

The Hobbit trilogy was the first to introduce the so called HFR to the wide public. HFR (which stands for ’high frame rate’) basically means that instead of showing 24 frames per second, a higher number – 48 in the Hobbit – is shown. The HFR combined with the 3D features and the movie’s enormous budget guarantee that there is never a shortage of things to marvel at. Despite the movie’s scenery (such as the halls and front of the mountain Erebor, Lake Town and later the city of Dale) being mostly made with computers the attention to detail is incredible. It’s almost too real. From time to time the 3D and the incredibly sharp picture were a little too much. Somehow I found it hard to look at certain things because my eyes were distracted by too many aspects. This happened whenever the Arkenstone, the legendary jewel the dwarves and their king Thorin in particular coveted, was shown. It was like an explosion of tiny particles which made it a little annoying to look at. But with Peter Jackson as the director you can’t really be sure if that was done on purpose.

The movie’s soundtrack was composed by Howard Shore who had previously worked on the Lord of the Rings trilogy with Peter Jackson. His music brings a feeling on continuity to the screen as film after film, one’s able to recognize the familiar tunes. Considering how Howard Shore won not only one but three Oscars for his music in the Lord of the Rings, I’m very surprised his works in The Hobbit have not won him any awards. Shore’s music in The Battle of the Five Armies was amazing and I especially enjoyed how every theme had it’s own music. The dwarves had their own tunes and the elves their own and when both were shown on screen the audience heard a genius mixture of the two.

All in all I enjoyed the film very much. Whether that was because I had read the book or because I’m somewhat unable to ever find flaws in works based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings, I do not know. I found the film’s title The Battle of The Five Armies very suiting as it did have very, very big battles. In fact the only small flaw in the movie was the fact that almost two hours of its 2h22min running time was fighting. But when you stretch one book of around 300 pages in to three movies you can’t expect them all to have two hours worth of incredibly well-designed emotional scenes. I am, however, a little sad. The ending of The Battle of the Five Armies marked, at least for me, an end to Tolkien on screen. Years ago, only the rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were sold. That means that Tolkien’s other, brilliant works might never see the inside of a movie theatre. As the rights to Silmarillion were never sold – and it seems that Tolkien’s estate isn’t going to sell them any time soon – it might well be that this was the kiss goodbye (or perhaps more suitably The Last Goodbye as sung by Billy Boyd during the credits) to Middle Earth. But then again, isn’t that what they said when the closing credits of the Lord of the Rings ended?

The main character of the movie was Malcolm Crowe, the child psychologist. He had worked as psychologist long time and he had had many patients. With his long experience he had become very appreciated and deserving in his job. In the movie was given conception of Malcolm that he works very passionately, even so that the job of the psychologist would be his mission in life.

The Hobbit-an unexpected journey(2012) is the first part of the Peter Jackson’s directed film trilogy. The trilogy is based on J.R.R Tolkien’s fantasy novel. This movie trilogy is about the time before The lord of the rings movies. The next parts of the trilogy are The desolation of Smaug and The battle of the five armies.

The movie starts when Gandalf (Ian McKellen) asks a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins(Martin Freeman) to join him on his adventure with 13 dwarfs. Their plan is to go through the Middle Earth to take back the Lonely Mountain from the dragon Smaug. The leader of their group is Thorin Oakenshield(Richard Armitage) whose grandfather Thorir used to be the dwarf king in the Lonely Mountain before the Smaug came so now Thorin wants to take back his legacy. In the beginning when Gandalf is trying to get Bilbo on the adventure he is throwing a party inviting all the 13 dwarfs to Bilbo’s home and Bilbo ins’t very exited about it but however changes his mind and decides to go on an adventure. In the beginning of their journey they had to fight against three trolls and found some swords from the troll’s cave. After that they met a wizard Radgast the Brown in the woods and the orcs attackted them with wargs. Radgast helped the group to escape from the orcs to Rivendell where the elf Lord Elrond helped them to read a map of the Lonely Mountain. Next the group continued their journey to Misty Mountains without Gandalf and got caught by goblins. The goblins took them to their leader the Great Goblin and Thorin founds out that an orc war-chief Azog who had killed his grandfather Thorir is alive even Thorin cut his other forearm in that battle outside of the dwarfs kindom of Moria and now his after their group. As the group got caught by the goblins Bilbo got separated from them and met Gollum. Gollum accidentally dropped his golden ring and Bilbo took it without Gollum noticing it. Later Gandalf came to rescue the group from the goblins and Bilbo rejoined the group. As they continued the journey they got ambushed by Azog and his orc army, Thorin attakced Azog and got knocked out. Bilbo rescued Thorin from Azog and the entire group was saved by the eagles.

From my opinion as a fantasy movie liker the movie was good and as good as The lord of the rings movies which I have seen many times before. But if you don’t like fantasy movies or The lord of the rings movies you probably would not like this movie and you may consider it boring because of it’s length. Only negative thing that I have to say about the movie is it’s simple plot but because its a trilogy I think it is okay cause the whole story actually ends in the final movie. So I would give the movie a school grade eight.

Meet Joe Black tells the story of death, the actual life ending death, falling in love with a mortal woman. Death (played by Brad Pitt) pretends to be an average Joe, more precisely Joe Black. Death wants to explore the human world before taking the life of a millionaire named Bill Parrish (played by Anthony Hopkins). However everything starts to get complicated when Black falls in love with the millionaires daughter, Susan (Claire Forlani).
The story was fluent and I wasn’t left confused at any point of the movie. It had a clear plot and it knew how to follow it without neither being boring nor having too much stuff going on all the time. Character development was made really well too, you could see Black slowly starting to understand things about the human world and old Parrish coming to terms with his death.
This of course is just my personal opinion but I absolutely love the casting of this movie. I had my doubts when I noticed Pitt playing death, as it might be a tricky character to get into, however he pulled it off wonderfully making death seem just like an innocent and curious human like creature. His co-star, Forlani, I had never seen before, that might make me uncultured or just plain ignorant, but I’ll have to accept my faith. Forlani however did her job really well and I’ll be definitely watching more movies from her. Hopkins was just as great as he always is, really great. Just seeing his name appear on the screen got my hopes up and I didn’t get disappointed. The side roles were cast well too, I can’t remember even once having to think ”They aren’t quite fit for the role”.
I consider every movie that lasts over three hours a long movie, this was one of them. However they might have had to cut important parts out in the attempt to make it shorter, and I appreciate how they didn’t do that. I don’t know much about directing a movie, so I don’t really know what to say about that. Again, that might make me even more uncultured and ignorant, but I cannot judge something I don’t know anything about. The same goes for many aspects of the movie.
Even though I might not be able to provide a perfectly insightful review on the directing, dressing, producing or things like that, I can recommend it to anyone who likes romantic movies. However if you want to see death as a hardcore emotionless killer, this is not the movie for you.

Remember me (2010) is a drama film directed by Allen Coulter. It tells about two young persons, Tyler Hawkins (Robert Pattinson) and Ally Craig (Emilie de Ravin) and their rough past and present.

The movie starts when young Ally is on the subway station and suddenly she is forced to witness her mother being murdered. Ten years later there is Tyler who is a ragged and rebellious 21-year-old man who has a complicated relationship with his father. One night he and his friend get in trouble and the police arrests him. Lately when Tyler has got out of jail he meets Ally, the daughter of the police who had arrested him earlier. Tyler’s friend wants to avenge to the police and persuades Tyler to meet Ally and then dump her. Tyler agrees but after spending time together they get to know each other and begin to fall in love.

I think that Robert Pattinson fit in the role very well and the character was believable. Tyler was gloomy and maybe little ironic but also very protective and loving big brother. But in my opinion especially Ruby Jerins’ role as Tyler’s sister Caroline was really good and surprised me in a positive way. Caroline was a young artist who is bullied at school. She was authentic and sincere and the role totally impressed me.

The end of the movie was really surprising and schoking. It turned everything upside down and gave the whole new point of view to the film and the name of it. It got to realize that everyone of us matter and we leave behind to our loved ones.

I’m not sure wheter I liked the movie or not. It is described as a romantic movie but I find it wasn’t so romantic that I thought it would have been. That side of the movie was kinda cliche. Boy meets a girl who acts elusive and first they don’t like each other but then fall in love and so on. But as a drama movie it was good and all in all worth watching.

Inside man is a realistic action movie, but however it manages to stun by it’s brilliant way to handle hard situations in the film.

This is a movie from a criminals point of view. It will manage to get the audience to take the criminals side, without making the police officers look bad. That is one of the things I admire in this movie. Movie tells a story about a man who plans a perfect bank robbery and on the side he reveals many bigger things about local politicians and big shots. For the whole time the movie is interesting and it wont leave cold anyone who is a friend of a good heist movie.

The fascinating thing I really love in this movie are the characters. Robbers call themselfs with a different variation of a name ”steve” like a steve-o or stevie. The good guys have many interesting characters, but one of them clearly makes it as a main character, he is a detective Keith Frazier. Detective is a slightly distracted, because at the time of the assingment he is facing corruption charges, so he doesn’t really have a change to fail.

The one thing that actually makes this movie above the average compared to other heist movies, is the plot. Viewer will be suprised as the movie goes on. I would definitely watch this movie all over again. Inside man won’t brag with insane violence instead it is a more of a thriller kind of mind game, which is played by traditional cops vs robbers positioning. In my opinion the best scene in this movie is placed inside a surrounded bank (spoiler alert). When the police launches assault the criminal mastermind hides inside the bank and leaves weeks later, when the situation has calmed down. I personally loved that scene, just the way how to deal with the situations without anykind of overkills with violence, it impresses me.

This is my rewiew about a movie ”Inside man” if i would give a traditional five star rewiew, I would say 4/5.

PLAY REVIEW

Director: Anne Mäkinen

Written by the working group of the project Tuulta purjeisiin

One free evening of mine I accidentally came across this play. For a long time I had been tempted to go and watch it. The idea of it was so interesting and I had heard so many praises about it that I knew I had to see it. Fortunately I did.

The basic idea is simple but brilliant: the script is written by a group of young people involved in this project, Tuulta purjeisiin. The project is for unemployed young adults who in some way or another need guiding in their lives (http://www.pori.fi/kulttuuri/tuultapurjeisiin-hanke.html). The script consists of stories from their own lives. The fascinating part is that an actor never performed in his own story.

Because of the extremely different kinds of stories in the play, the plot was not unambiguous. However there were some clear unifying factors between the scenes. There was some kind of a crisis in every story and all of them contained an attempt to criticize the society for the people’s unequal chances in succeeding in life which depend so strongly on the basis in which a person is born. I personally think they managed to share the thought very well. The crises in the stories varied between drug addictions, depressions, severe harassments and many other sad incidents.

Some stories stood out more than the others. The ones that got stuck in my head were Laura’s and Kaneli’s stories.

Laura was a sweet little girl whose parents got separated and her dear dad left her alone with her irresponsible mother. Six months later the dad was found dead lying under a tree. This story really touched me deeply because I couldn’t imagine losing my own dad in an accident. But this made me realise that world is a cruel place and these kinds of things can happen to anyone, anytime.

Kaneli, on the other hand, was a reckless rebel who just had a bad luck – and company. She had a habit of getting in strangers’ cars during a party night. Because of that habit, she unfortunately had to experience for instance a violent car crash and a ruthless rape. I think this was the most outrageous story of them all. I had a hard time trying to internalize that it is a true story, meaning that it actually happened to one of these amazing actors, these normal people with vulnerable minds.

Though the play was filled with sad storys, it had glimpses of humour here and there. I was especially delighted by the scene, where the actors were impersonating souls (but actually looked more like sperm cells!) in a programme called Soul of Finland. They were dealt different features like prizes even though they were something like ”drinking problem” and ”mentally ill parents”.

Focusing also on the technical aspect of the play, I noticed that the costumes of the actors were remarkably plain but effective. They were wearing only pure white clothes. This way they all seemed so innocent and equal. The lights were inventive and handled professionally. The set was almost nonexistent, but more would have been unnecessary. There was just the right amount of everything.

One thing that I realised as late as after the show was the fact, that the play consisted almost entirely of monologues. That sounds very boring, but I didn’t even notice it since the storyline was so intriguing all the time. It didn’t bother a bit.

The acting was suprisingly high quality considering the backgrounds of the actors and actresses. I know from experience that it isn’t easy in any way to express and empathise those kinds of heavy emotions, and that’s the thing I valued the most in this performance. It fealt real in my heart. It made me laugh and cry and fear many times. And most of all it made me think.

Lähteet:
http://www.pori.fi/kulttuuri/tuultapurjeisiin-hanke.html

The movie Frozen is an animated movie, loosely adapted from the tale ’The Snow Queen“ by Hans-Christian Andersen. With this movie, Walt Disney Pictures created a new great box office hit, directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee. As it is an animated movie, there are just synchron speakers, but with Kirsten Bell, Idina Menzel and Jonathan Groff it has a good cast anyway.

The movie tells the story about two princess orphans, Elsa, who has the power of conjuring ice, and Anna. Elsa can’t really control her power, so after a accident she excludes her sister and every other human except her parents, who drowned at a boat trip, from her life and at her crowning day she can’t hold herself back anymore, exposes her power and runs away. The movie differs from other animated, and especially other Disney Movies in that way, that one time, it’s not all about the big love which need to be found, it’s about the importance and strength of family, when Anna goes after her sister to bring her back home, while teaming up with the mountain man Kristof and taking a lot of risks. On her way, she meets speaking stones, a snow monster and snowman Olaf.

Considering the pressure that lays on a child movie to facilitate children the right values, Frozen was a comprehensive victory. With the snowman Olaf, who is on my opinion the real star of the movie, Disney brings along a lot of humour, and makes the movie a real success. But it also tells the story about betray and that you cannot trust everyone, even if he claims to be the big love of your life. Apart from the story, the whole animation and details are just stunning, for example, right on the beginning the workers on the ice or the sea storm scene, where the princesses parents are drowned, the kings town itself, the dresses, or the hairstyles, which are my favourite. The songs in this movie didn’t annoyed me, as it happens often when I watch child movies, I really wanted to join and sing with them. All in all, Frozen brings together important childhood lessons, emotional highs and a funny event for the whole family, in a light format where you can just have fun, no matter your age.