1 Movie Review - Grandma's Boy - Sat 5 Mar 2011

Grandma's Boy (2006)


My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Grandma's Boy, a comedy from Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions, follows Alex (Allen Covert) a 35 year old game tester, who is evicted from his rental home after his room-mate spends all the rent money on "exotic massage therapists".


After staying at a friend's house and disgracing himself, Alex realises he'll have to stay with his Grandma Lily (played by Everybody Loves Raymond's Doris Roberts), a lovely old woman with two kooky room-mates.


Things start to get difficult when the deadline for testing "Eternal Death Slayer 3" looms and Alex's new room-mates keep him from working by giving him innumerable chores and hogging the only television set in the house.


Joel David Moore gives a fantastic performance as J.P., a prodigy game designer with a penchant for pleather and aspirations of becoming a robot. Coincidentally, you can find Moore in another game-referencing movie, playing Norm Spellman in James Cameron's 2009 blockbuster Avatar.


There are also cool cameo performances by Jonah Hill (best known for his roles in Superbad and Knocked Up)  and Nick Swardson (Jon Heder's stalker in Blades of Glory), who plays Alex's boyish friend Jeff. There's even a couple of blink-and-you'll-miss-it scenes with Rob Schneider playing a Russian landlord and David Spade as a short-tempered vegan waiter named Shiloh.


Covert is likeable as the hard-done-by protagonist Alex, and his group of co-workers are all good fun, even if they are a little stereotyped. My favourite scenes include Alex beating the other testers at "Frog Bog" and Jeff meeting his "Silver Fox".


I really enjoyed this film with its fictional gaming references and gamer in-jokes, and if I weren't a Librarian, I'd LOVE to work at Brainasium! 


If you love gaming, love a good laugh and you're not easily offended by drug-fuelled toilet humour, then Grandma's Boy is the film for you.


Still not convinced? Here's the YouTube trailer:

1 Movie Review - Gamer - Thu 6 Jan 2011

Movie Review - Gamer (2009)


My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Gamer is set in a world where you can either be the player or the played - where real people are used as avatars in two real-life video games - Society and Slayers.


Society is much like the real "game" Second Life, where you control an avatar, making them go anywhere in the game and do anything you please. The difference here is that Society’s avatars are real human beings - usually people down on their luck, who have agreed to be “played” as a way of earning money.


Slayers is much darker. The avatars in Slayers are death-row inmates that have opted to become a part of the game in the hope that they may actually survive and not be put to death. If they are able to make it alive through 30 games, they are pardoned and set free. Suffice to say, it has never happened.


Enter John Tillman a.k.a Kable (played by the handsome Gerard Butler), who has made it successfully through 27 games, and is looking to be the first avatar ever to be set free. Kable has become a global celebrity, with almost everyone wanting him to make it through, except for Ken Castle, the creator of Slayers (played by TV’s Dexter, Michael C. Hall), who has other things in mind.


I love the concept of this film. It is both original and imaginative, and really makes you think about the ethics of life, death and self-control, but alas, it is poorly executed. The plot is too erratic, and to match this, the cinematography is so frenetic it could send a healthy person into seizures. All at once, it’s colourful and noisy before going dark and quiet, and so many blink-and-you’ll-miss-it images are flashed at you over and over again that it’s hard to work out what is actually happening.


Butler is handsome, but that’s about it. He’s a cardboard cutout with a heartbeat. I guess that’s to be expected given the nature of his role, which is a character being controlled by a 17 year old boy.


The movie’s saving grace is the performance of exquisitely evil Michael C. Hall, who does psychotic oh so well. He is both likeable and detestable - managing to reel you in quickly with comedy before suddenly pushing you away with his sub-human indifference. My favourite scene would have to be Hall’s choreographed rendition of “I’ve got you under my skin”. Given that it’s towards the end, it makes having watched that much of the movie seem almost worth it. 


This film could quite possibly appeal to Gen Y viewers who supposedly love the frenetic - but for me, it was just too surreal.

Here's the movie trailer on Youtube (if you work where I do, you won't be able to see the embedded video below, but you can check it out at home):