Movie reviews (spoilers herein) - Wall-e, the Dark Knight, Mama Mia!

Kidlets are home - and I’ve seen several movies this week - so if you’re really not into mild (or not so mild) spoilers, I’d really skip this post. Herein lies reviews of Wall-E, The Dark Knight and Mama Mia.

Wall-E is hilarously good. A bit sanctimonious in places, but at the same time, really important for children to see - both from the environmental and health perspective. If you never exercise, you’re going to get fat, basically.
The humour, like I’ve already said, is deeply funny - some visual, some audible, mostly 110% good clean fun. It’s also, ultimately, both feel good and a bit disheartening. It’s great that they (the protagonists) are going to make it work - it’s still hard to see how the one little plant really is all they’d hoped for.
All in all - 4/5.

The Dark Knight - my beloved and I went to the IMAX on Thursday, to go see the Dark Knight. I’d say it’s worth it, down the last half an hour. At that point, I think the movie could have been cut, and saved for the next movie. Heath Ledger was incredible as the Joker - I thought that his performance was brillaint, scary, mad, painful, demented - oscarworthy. The other actors weren’t quite *as* good, but I liked Harvey Dent. Alfred rocked. The Mayor was blah. I thought Gary Oldman was very good too, though I thought some of the twists in there were fairly trite. I would however, HIGHLY recommend it to anyone looking for a good movie. There are very few points you have to suspend much disbelief - it’s not difficult to see scenarios in today’s world where Batman could actually exsist.
My one gripe was that the location sucked. Might sound a bit odd, but Chicago didn’t have the ‘Gotham city’ feel. It was too light, too airy, and to be honest, too pretty to be Gotham. Having said that, I really liked that we’re back to the Mikael Keaton kind of Batman - the slightly crazy, all vigilante kind of Batman who was more interested in how to take down the bad guys than he was in posing.

Mama Mia
I’d like to say, for the record, that I’m really not an Abba fan. I like music in general, but Abba doesn’t actually ring any bells for me.
And I’m going to handle this review slightly differently, because, I don’t want to make it sound like I didn’t enjoy myself. I think that enjoying myself and ‘liking the movie’ overall, need to be seperated.
So Mama mia, as a pastiche of scenes, was great. As a fluffy piece of utter nonsense - again, it hits all the right spots.
As an actual movie that makes sense, has a good plot, has an interesting and credible plot.
No. I’m sorry to say that there’s no way that some of that would have flown.
But to be honest, I didn’t care. I laughed my butt off, and though I wasn’t impressed with Pierce Brosnan’s singing, I thought Merryl Streep was amazing, and to be honest, his slightly off key enthusiastic belting out was kinda funny.
I think, though Julie Walters, Colin Firth (at the end at least), and Christine Baranski (though, to be honest, I was expecting Cybill to charge round the corner any minute) really stole the show. The humour was incredibly risque, for a PG, but I’m not sure if it really *is* too close to the bone or I’ve just got an incredibly dirty mind for that sort of thing.
As a feel good movie though, it really can’t go wrong.

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