Sunday 21 August 2011

Planet of The Apes - Tim Burton

It is the year 2029: Astronaut Leo Davidson boards a pod cruiser on a Space Station for a "routine" reconnaissance mission. But an abrupt detour through a space time wormhole lands him on a strange planet where talking apes rule over the human race. With the help of a sympathetic chimpanzee activist named Ari and a small band of human rebels, Leo leads the effort to evade the advancing Gorilla Army led by General Thade and his most trusted warrior Attar. Now the race is on to reach a sacred temple within the planet's Forbidden Zone to discover the shocking secrets of mankind's past - and the key to its future.

Monday 15 August 2011

The Illusionist - Sylvain Chomet


I think the best description of the film is as follows “An 80-minute, hand-drawn animated French film without dialogue and with one of the most depressing finale acts ever committed to celluloid: this is The Illusionist. It’s also some sort of divine masterpiece.”

Set initially in Paris, through London, Scotland and eventually settling in Edinburgh this film follows the life of a magician and his dying art. No one is interested in his work and as he travels he finds that less and less people are coming to his shows. Along the way his magic entices a young girl, bored of her humdrum life, naïvely she latches onto him and being unworldly does not quite understand the value of money, the magician does nothing to discourage that, and produces gifts and treasures as if by magic, working extra hard to keep the illusion up.