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I was undecided about this movie after watching it. I gave myself a week before reviewing it and I’m glad I did. My initial thoughts were not the best. After a while though I’ve realised the characters were interesting enough that I can’t seem to forget them and I even want to revisit them. Surely a testament to Dickens. I think I’ll read the novel rather than watch the film again.

Great Expectations is the poor (it’s all relative) adaptation of the masterpiece by Charles Dickens. It follows the story of a boy who becomes the benefactor to an unknown party. He is to receive a generous income and become a gentleman. A condition of his income is that he call himself Pip as he was known in his childhood years.

Early on young Pip is invited to the house of a weird old woman who is scorned by love. She wears her wedding gown of decades ago and does not leave the room in which her wedding cake still sits on a lavishly laid out table. Sure it’s old and mouldy but who is Pip to judge. The lady is bitter and resents all men as they are worthless and only know how to betray women. She has adopted a servant girl specifically so she can groom her to grow into a lovely lady who will break men’s hearts. Pip is to be one of these men. He all too quickly falls in love with her and spends too much time wondering when he’ll see her next. She on the other hand mistreats him but is honest about her intention to break his heart. Still, Pip can not say no to his heart and dreams of one day marrying her.

I’ll stop here so as not to spoil the movie. It’s not the best of productions but that is not to say it’s terrible. For its time it is fantastic and anyway, it’s all about the characters. I gave it a 7/10.

Great Expectations (1946)

What an impeccably strange movie. Random event follows random event. From party to party we skip along with the self-indulging world of the rich, famous and most certainly spoilt elite class. Marcello is right in the middle of all the parties and yet deep down he’s drawn to the simple life offered by his girlfriend who adores him to the point of being suicidal. He openly loathes the domestic life and seems to pity himself when indulging in the frivolous life of the social elite. It’s a no win situation for him and you pity him as much as adore his lifestyle.

One definitely for film fans only. I’m still undecided what to rate this movie so for the time being I’ll leave it at a too harsh 6/10.

La Dolce vita (1960)

The Italian Stallion. Mr Rocky Balboa. It’s been years since I’ve seen this movie and I enjoyed it today as much as I did when I was a young kid.

Sylvester Stallone plays an out of luck boxer who’s about to disappear into nothingness when the world champ offers him a crack at the title through circumstances that you just might believe can happen. But not really. It has nice character development paced slowly compared to the rest of the Rocky series. It’s an all round good movie that launched a very successful franchise for Stallone. Sure it reeks of a formula of underdog rises to the occasion but it’s fun and that’s what it’s all about.

I loved the setting and the performances on display were very believable and honest. An all round great movie and a must for any boxing fan. After much thought I gave it a 7/10.

Rocky (1976)

Ok so I understand that for its time this was an excellent movie with decent costumes and locations. Even so, it’s rubbish. The acting is absurdly poor and the camera work was noticeably distracting. Cheap zooms and silly pans. I’m certainly no expert on camera work but it was an enjoyment killer for me. Charlton Heston’s character was wrong. I haven’t read the book but would a captain seriously laugh at his crew for honouring their dead and then proceed to tease and ridicule them? I can see how they tried to portray him as a know it all ego driven above average man but Heston failed and deserves a kick in the nuts for that performance. While I’m bitching, what the hell were they thinking casting such an old crew? They just did not fit the proper age of astronauts. Those old greying baboons would have had a heart attack in the middle of launch.

I’m not even going to give you a summary for this one. It was poor and I think you ought to watch the 2001 remake or read the book. Either would be more entertaining. Poor acting, horrible and awkward action scenes and Heston combine for a 3/10.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

A while ago I discovered an add-on for Firefox called IMDb Preview. Each time you mouse over a link from IMDb it displays in a little pop up box a quick summary of a title or an actor. You can set parameters and size which is handy and the pop up box isn’t one of those annoying spam ones. It disappears as soon as you move your mouse away from the link. It saves you time when browsing the site as you don’t need to click into each page and it even works with IMDb links in third party sites. For example if you moused over one of my links on this blog you will see the box of info. Pretty neat.

Grab the add-on here.