12 Rounds (2009)

Renny Harlin is one of the most well known Finnish movie directors outside Finland. There is of course the more critically acclaimed Aki Kaurismäki who has got credit with many of his films in especially European film festivals, but Harlin is the one who is making bigger budget movies for larger audiences. And as a fellow Finn I respect Harlin's hard work, and I have liked a lot his action packed Long kiss goodnight starring Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson as well as Die Hard 2.

12 Rounds feels as if it was Harlin's Die Hard 3. The story is almost the same as in John McTiernan's action sequel: detective Danny Fisher (WWE Champion John Cena) makes a crime lord Miles Jackson (Aidan Gillen) angry and he creates Danny a 12-step-game he must solve in a given time frame. If he does not manage, Miles will kill his kidnapped girlfriend Molly (Ashley Scott).

Danny is not given much time to think and he must act constantly. If 21 Rounds does not give much time for the lead actor to breathe, it does not do that even to the viewer. The action is very fast, and it keeps the adrenaline levels high up. Sometimes this works, but in this case not.

I personally was burdened with the Die Hard 3-load - addidentally seen it on blu-ray the night before seeing 12 Rounds in theatre. I did not know the synopsis of 12 Rounds beforehand, and it stroke me by surprise how similar these two stories were. And how different in the way they were composed: Die Hard 3 has a lot of breathtaking action but the action is compensated with the witty, dark humour Bruce Willis is so capable of, and that makes it such a great entertainment for action lovers. In 12 Rounds the humour is all gone and the action and the story overall are trying to be so very serious that it gets boring in the end.

Harlin is using a lot what seems like a hand held camera and really fast cuts. Normally the shaking camera does not bother me (I had no problems in watching Cloverfield for example), but in this case I was having serious trouble in being able to actually watch the movie because of the fast movement.

No matter how much I wanted to like this movie, no matter that Harlin was again using his trademark of showing something Finnish in his movies, no matter how much I love action movies... I did not like 12 Rounds and unfortunately it made it's way to the worst movie experience of this year in my list so far. I'm sorry fellow Finn Harlin.



Directed by Renny Harlin
Written by Daniel Kunka
Cast John Cena, Aidan Gillen, Ashley Scott, Steve Harris
IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1160368/

Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009) - Movie Review

Confessions of a Shopaholic is based on two different Sophie Kinsella books (Confessions of a Shopaholic and The Shopaholic takes Manhattan), and the name just tells you all. This is an ironic story about a young college graduate Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher) who happens to live in New York City and happens to have a bit of a problem. The fastly growing pile of credit card bills and the urge to shop beautiful things whenever possible, is giving her a headache of a lifetime. She just doesn't seem to be able to resist the beautiful mannequins on the display windows and is drawn into the luxurious, definitely over her budget stores, time after time, despite the unpaid bills she has.

After a funny girls night out and a little mix-up with mailing two letters, she soon finds herself working for a financial magazine (how funny is that!) writing a column by the name: The Girl in The Green Scarf, even though she dreams of doing something else, writing for a Fashion Magazine Alette. But here she is, giving advice on how to save money and use it wisely at the same time as she herself is in a pretty bad shape financially. And as you may guess, all this will end up being revealed and her boss Luke (Hugh Dancy) is not that crazy about all this, especially when her financial crisis comes to public in a TV show where they both are guests, talking about their magazine and Rebecca's amazingly popular column.

At the end she finds out that her true dream is actually not to work for Alette and she even decides to auction most of her clothes away to get the money to pay off all the credit card bills. She also realizes that she and her boss Luke might have a future together. So yes, happy ending after all this nonsense.

Rebecca Bloomwood is such a naive young woman, obsessed with high quality shoes, purses, scarfs, basically anything that you can name. She seems to face all the possible obstacles that you can face in the "cruel" world of materialism in the Big Apple. For some reason she reminds me of Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, but just like a cheap copycat compared to her. For me she was a bit goofy and her big, innocent Bambie looking-eyes made me want to laugh. I understand that there are thousands and thousands of women who can relate to her and feel for her, but still something was seriously wrong and lacking here.

The story gave nothing new, except one new trick to prevent me from using my credit card too often. Freezing it! But what a meaningless movie this is. It just goes on and on and on about her shopping, and the end, it was just ridiculously predictable and all those talking mannequins at the very end were like the icing on the cupcake expired days ago.

This is just one of those movies where you go empty headed and where you come from as empty headed as you went in. Or worst case scenario, you may find yourself at the closest Macy's and shop till you drop, or until your credit cards get overheated... Or who knows if the mannequins start talking to you? Spoo-ky!



Directed by P. J. Hogan
Written by Tracey Jackson, Tim Firth and Kayla Albert (screenplay), Sophie Kinsella (books)
Cast Isla Fisher, Hugh Dancy, Krysten Ritter, Joan Cusack, John Goodman, John Lithgow, Kristin Scott Thomas
IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1093908/

Superhero movie (2007) - dvd review

Riding on the success of last years' superhero movies Superhero movie is an embarrassing act of comedy. Making parody mainly of Spider-man and X-men, Superhero movie failed to tickle my humour nerves and just made me yawn.

While dreaming of the cute blonde (Sara Baxton) in his neighbour, Rick (Drake Bell) gets bitten by a gene-manipulated dragonfly on a school trip. This gives him superpowers and he turns to be a superhero called Dragonfly. When a supervillain Hourglass (Christopher McDonald) threatens to slaughter the whole city, Dragonfly comes to help.

Craig Mazin (the writer of a couple of Scary Movies) uses the same proven-to-be-successful concept again, but jokes seen more than once don't convince anymore. The story is directly from Spider-man, with some additional fart jokes and bumping into things. Comedy veteran Leslie Nielsen is cast as Rick's uncle and Pamela Anderson as an Invisible Girl, mainly invisible.



Director Craig Mazin
Written by Craig Mazin
Cast Drake Bell, Sara Paxton, Christopher McDonald, Leslie Nielsen, Marion Ross
IMDb http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0426592/