INSIDE OUT - film

The latest animated flick from the Pixar crew, this one doesn't disappoint.

11 year old Riley moves to a new town with her parents and the main characters in the film are the feelings in Riley's subconscious as she deals with the move; Joy, Anger, Sadness, Disgust and Fear. Amy Poehler is the voice of their ringleader Joy and just bring so much, well, joy to the role.

As you could imagine, when an 11 year old moves to a new town it's not all smooth sailing. Sadness especially keeps creeping in and even Joy struggles to maintain the joy sometimes. I confess I shed a few tears. It's just lovely.

I think kids will love this and the parents who go with them will like it too. Like I said, not all joy, but the 'lessons', if you could call them that, aren't phoney or lame, just real-world emotion processing going on.

It's getting rave reviews and I can only add my voice to the chorus. Paul Byrnes from Sydney Morning Herald says in his review that it's an "astonishingly good movie, not just a great animation".

Trailer here.

ALOHA - film

It's not a good sign when a film director is getting publicity for apologising for his film. Oh dear, Cameron Crowe.

He says it's "misunderstood", I say it's "crap".

It's pretty hard to get past the fact that Emma Stone (above left) who is very much not either Hawaiian or Chinese plays a woman who is supposedly a quarter Hawaiian and a quarter Chinese. And it's actually part of the story. She talks about that heritage. It's ridiculous, you guys.

I thought about how to explain the convoluted plot to you in a 'cut to the chase' style but you know what, given my message is to stay well away from this one, I'm not going to bother.

Just take my word for it and give it a miss. Happily I didn't have to pay to see it but if I'd dropped down a lobster to see this I'd be disappointed, to put it mildly.

The one saving grace for me personally is that it also stars Bradley Cooper who has the most beautiful face I have EVER seen. I could stare at him for days.

If you want to read more about the film check out this review in Variety. To give you the flavour of it, it opens with "Unbalanced, unwieldy, and at times nearly unintelligible..."

If you want to read about Cameron Crowe's defence of the film, check out this Fairfax article.

Trailer here.

ENTOURAGE - film

A spin-off from a the very popular TV show of the same name, this film follows movie star Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) and his 'entourage' made up of hopeless and not-nearly-as-attractive-as-Vince brother Drama and childhood friends E and Turtle.

This film has had some pretty stinking reviews so I went in with fairly low expectations. They were exceeded! I laughed a lot mainly thanks to the cutting humour of Vince's one time manager, now movie studio head, Ari Gold played by Jeremy Piven.

If you enjoyed the TV show, I reckon this will give you what you want in the main. It's still Vince, E, Drama and Turtle being the same old guys kicking around Hollywood trying to make it big. In the film, Vince is having his first run as a film director which plays out fairly predictably but not in an unpleasant way.

My only significant criticism of it is that I HATED the ending. I don't want to spoil it but I will say this - you can't spend eight seasons of a TV show making us believe a character is a complete loser and then expect us to suddenly believe he's a winner.

Two star review from the Sydney Morning Herald here if you want to hear what a proper critic thinks and/or know more about the story.

Trailer here.