The World's End

Synopsis The World's End

Gary King (Simon Pegg), a middle-aged alcoholic, resolves to track down his estranged friends and complete the "Golden Mile", a pub crawlencompassing 12 pubs in their hometown of Newton Haven. The group attempted the crawl as teenagers over 20 years earlier, but failed to reach the final pub, The World's End. Gary persuades Peter Page (Eddie Marsan), Oliver "O-Man" Chamberlain (Martin Freeman), Steven Prince (Paddy Considine), and Andy Knightley (Nick Frost) to join him in Newton Haven. While his friends have adult lives and responsibilities, Gary has changed little since 1990, remaining untrustworthy and impulsive.

The group and their mission are not met with the hero's welcome Gary expects, and Gary relearns that he had been barred for life from one of the pubs. The group are briefly joined by Oliver's sister Sam (Rosamund Pike), over whose affections who Gary and Steven were rivals at school. In the toilets of the fourth pub on the crawl, Gary gets into a fight with a surprisingly strong and agile local teenager. Gary accidentally knocks the teen's head off, exposing him as a robot. Gary's friends join him and fight more robot youths, after which Andy abandons his teetotal ways and drinks an order of shots meant for the whole group. Unsure how many robots there may be, the group decide to continue the pub crawl as "just five friends, on a night out, having a good time", so as to avoid attracting suspicion.

Several pubs later, the group runs into Sam again and Gary warns her of the robot invasion. Though skeptical of the news at first, Sam is convinced after Gary saves her from twin robots impersonating her friends. At The Mermaid, robots attempt to seduce the men and steal their DNA. When Sam's childhood crush Adrian appears, she panics and drags the others from the pub, explaining that Adrian had died in a motorcycle crash years previously. When they reach the next pub, Guy Shepherd (Pierce Brosnan), a teacher from the group's secondary school, encourages them to accept their fate and be replaced by robots. Noticing the reappearance of a surgically removed birthmark on Oliver's head, Andy realises that he has been replaced with a robot, and crushes his head with a barstool. A fight breaks out, during which Gary insists on drinking a pint for the sake of the pub crawl's integrity. Overwhelmed, the group scatter and Gary takes Sam to her car, urging her to leave Newton Haven.

Once reunited, the friends accuse each other of having been replaced by robots. Steven, Peter and Andy prove their humanity with scars from their past, and Andy reveals that his resentment of Gary stems from an accident that occurred as he was trying to save Gary after a drug overdose. Gary refuses to roll his sleeves up to reveal a scar on his elbow, and instead repeatedly head-butts a pillar to prove that his skull is tougher than those of the robots. The robots close in on the group and capture Peter. Despite this, Gary is determined to finish the pub crawl and runs towards the final one on their list, The World's End. Abandoning Steven, Andy chases Gary through the streets, fighting robots along the way and encountering a large robot previously concealed as a sculpture.

At The World's End, Andy confronts Gary. During an ensuing quarrel, Andy notices that Gary's wrists are bandaged and marked with a hospital armband, indicating that Gary had been sectionedfor a suicide attempt. Andy questions whether Gary can distinguish between his drunkenness and sobriety anymore. Gary tearfully tells him that his adult life has been a failure, and that finishing the Golden Mile is the only thing he has left. He is jealous of Andy for having an ideal life, but Andy reveals that his marriage is falling apart, and pleads with Gary to give up the crawl and get help. Gary ignores him and tries to draw his final pint. The tap lever instead lowers the bar into a hidden chamber, where the two are reunited with Steven. A disembodied entity called "The Network" (voiced by Bill Nighy) reveals that the robot invasion of the town is one of 2,000 "penetration points" on Earth, as part of a "civilizing" process for humanity's own good, and that it had been responsible for all of humanity's advances in telecommunications in recent decades. The Network offers the men eternal youth should they choose to become robots, but the three friends decline, belligerently arguing that humans should be allowed to be free. Concluding that humanity is more trouble than it's worth, The Network abruptly ceases communication and abandons the invasion. Sam arrives to drive the trio to relative safety as the town begins to self-destruct.

Some time later, Andy recounts this story around a campfire in the ruins of London, explaining how the destruction of Newton Haven was accompanied by a worldwide electro-magnetic pulse that wiped out modern technology and set humanity back to the Dark Ages. The remaining robots have reactivated and are regarded with understandable mistrust by surviving humans. Andy's marriage has recovered, Steven is in a relationship with Sam, and robot versions of Peter and Oliver have returned to a semblance of their former lives. In the ruins of Newton Haven, the now-sober Gary enters a pub with a group of robot companions and orders five glasses of water, reprising his speech from the start of the Golden Mile. When the bartender refuses to serve any robots, Gary draws a sword and leads his robot friends into a brawl.

Read More

Mekong Hotel

Synopsis Mekong Hotel

Shifting between fact and fiction in a hotel situated along the Mekong River, a filmmaker rehearses a movie expressing the bonds between a vampire-like mother and daughter

Read More

Monsters University

Synopsis Monsters University

After visiting Monsters Inc.—Monstropolis' most profitable and best-known scaring company—on a school field trip, a young monster named Michael "Mike" Wazowski dreams of being a scarer when he grows up. Eleven years later, Mike is a scare major at Monsters University, where he meets his new roommate, Randall "Randy" Boggs, and a large, blue, furry monster named James P. "Sulley" Sullivan.
Mike studies hard, while the privileged Sulley—who comes from a talented family of scarers—relies on his natural scaring ability and begins to falter. At the final exam, Mike and Sulley's rivalry makes Dean Hardscrabble fail them both and drop them from the program, prompting Roar Omega Roar to remove Sulley from their team. Mike decides to prove himself by entering the Scare Games, but Oozma Kappa—the only fraternity that was removed from the program—is denied entry as they are one team member short. Seeing the competition as his ticket back into the scare program, Sulley joins and Mike reluctantly accepts.
Oozma Kappa fails the first challenge, an obstacle course where the contestants dodge harmful, glowing "urchins," but miraculously advances when another team is disqualified for using protection gel, which violates the Scare Games' rules. The contestants attend Roar Omega Roar's party where the other competitors humiliate and discourage Oozma Kappa. Mike arranges a secret visit to Monsters, Inc. to lift their spirits, but Sulley still doubts that Mike can be a true scarer. Oozma Kappa places second in the following events. In the final round, they pull off a close victory cemented by a final decisive scare by Mike. Afterwards, Mike discovers that Sulley cheated to improve Mike's score. Determined to prove he is capable of becoming a scarer, Mike breaks into the school's door lab and enters a door to the human world, but the door leads to a summer camp and he is unable to scare a cabin full of children.
Back at the university, Sulley confesses to Hardscrabble that he cheated, just as she is notified of the break-in. Realizing what happened, Sulley enters the door to look for Mike. After finding and reconciling with him, they try to return but they find they are trapped in the human world because Hardscrabble has deactivated the door while waiting for the authorities to arrive. Mike realizes that the only way to get back into the monster world is to generate enough scream energy to power the door from their side. Working together, Sulley and Mike terrify the adults, generating an overwhelming amount of scream energy and allowing them to return to the lab.

Their actions lead to their expulsion from the university, but the other members of Oozma Kappa are accepted into the scare program the next semester because Hardscrabble is impressed with their performance in the games. They share goodbyes and as Sulley and Mike leave, Hardscrabble tells them they are the first to have surprised her and wishes them luck for the future. Mike and Sulley begin work at Monsters, Inc. in the company mailroom under the mailroom manager, the Abominable Snowman. Working their way up through the company, the two eventually become part of the Scarer Team, thus setting the events of Monsters, Inc. in motion.

Read More

Labor Day

Synopsis Labor Day

Depressed single mom Adele and her son Henry offer a wounded, fearsome man a ride. As police search town for the escaped convict, the mother and son gradually learn his true story as their options become increasingly limited.

Read More

Nebraska

Synopsis Nebraska

After the glossy and faintly implausible Oscar-bait picture, The Descendants, director Alexander Payne has returned to a more natural and personal movie language for his new film in the Cannes competition.Nebraska is a bittersweet road movie starring Bruce Dern and Will Forte as Woody and David, an elderly father and middle-aged son taking an uncomfortable road trip together. Their story is laced with pathos, comedy and regret, recalling the classic indie cinema of Hal Ashby and Bob Rafelson. It is shot, with almost Amish austerity in monochrome, which gives a wintry, end-of-the-world drear to that homely roadside Americana that Payne loves to pick out with his camera.

Nebraska may not be startlingly new, and sometimes we can see the epiphanies looming up over the distant horizon; the tone is, moreover, lighter and more lenient than in earlier pictures like Sideways. But it is always funny and smart, and what is unexpected is the cracking performance from June Squibb as Woody's cantankerous wife, Kate. Squibb, who played Jack Nicholson's wife in About Schmidt, could now be in line for a best actress award with this far juicier role, challenging Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos from Blue is the Warmest Colour. It's also a lovely first-timer script from former TV writer Bob Nelson, for whom this has probably been a long-nurtured project.

Dern's Woody, a white-haired, bad tempered old guy living in retirement in Billings, Montana, is withdrawing into a confused and melancholy state. The poor old fellow has received a junk-mail flyer appearing to promise him a lottery payout of a million dollars, on condition that he collects it in person from an office in Lincoln, Nebraska. To the exasperation and fury of his wife and grownup children, Woody is obsessed with making the journey, on foot if necessary, because his car is out of action. Everyone is increasingly aware that this kind of flight is a symptom of incipient dementia, but – to humour him, exorcise this crazy idea, and spend a little time with his dad – his son David (Forte) offers to drive him. They make a stopover in their former hometown of Hawthorne, meeting up with elderly brothers, relations and neighbours who themselves start believing in Woody's crackpot millionaire claim; as a result, some painful family secrets are exhumed.

Read More

Outside Satan

Synopsis Outside Satan

Rob Nelson of Variety called Outside Satan "Another 'WTF?' film from Gallic writer-director Bruno Dumont", and went on: "Like Dumont's Twentynine Palms and Life of Jesus (give or take the Cannes Grand Prix-winning L'Humanité), Outside Satan flirts with all-out absurdity, as if managing to keep it at bay will be the director's own miracle, highly subject to interpretation. Less debatable are the film's technical merits, with d.p. Yves Cape delivering naturalistic beauty on a wide canvas, and the on-location sound work capturing every minute nuance of bird-chirps, cock-crows, and blasts of both wind and, uh, shotgun."

British film critic Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film 4 out of 5 stars, saying that "Bruno Dumont's film-making is just so fluent, unnerving, gripping; he is entirely unique". Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly granted the film a B+ and called it an "austerely wild, religiously amoral drama... set in untamed northern coastal France," adding, "Dumont's rigorous, serious attention to the mysteries of good, evil, and faith rewards those willing to be confounded.

Read More

The Grandmaster

Synopsis The GrandMaster

The film chronicles the life of the Wing Chun grandmaster Ip Man from the 1930s in Foshan, his flight to Hong Kong after the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the events leading to his death.

The movie begins with Ip Man reflecting on martial arts, and then cuts to a scene of a fight under the rain between Ip and a dozen combatants. Ip Man wins, and experiences flashbacks of his life, from his early training at the age of seven to his induction into martial arts by his master Chan Wah-shun, and his marriage to his wife Cheung Wing-sing.

Ip Man's peaceful existence is threatened by the arrival of Gong Yutian, a martial arts master from northern China, who announces that he has already retired and has appointed Ma San as his heir in the North. He then concedes that the South should have its own heir. A flurry of discussions and fights erupt as various masters attempt to challenge Gong, but they are all barred by Ma San. As the Southern masters are deliberating on a representative, Gong Yutian's daughter Gong Er arrives and she tries to convince her father not to continue the fight, as she feels they are all unworthy. Meanwhile, the Southern masters decide on Ip Man to represent them, and Ip proceeds to be tested by three Southern masters before he challenges Gong Yutian. However, the "fight" between Ip and Gong turns out to be actually an exchange of philosophical ideas. Gong declares Ip the winner and returns to northern China. However, Gong Er sets out to regain her family's honour by challenging Ip Man, and they agree that (if anything breaks, Ip loses. "Kung Fu is about precision.") whoever breaks a piece of furniture during the fight will be the loser. An intense fight breaks out between Ip Man and Gong Er, which concludes with victory for Gong because Ip broke a step at the very end. Ip and Gong then part on friendly terms, with Ip saying he wants a rematch.

Ip Man and Gong Er keep in contact after parting ways by exchanging letters, and Ip intends to bring his family with him to northern China, but his plans are disrupted by the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1938. During the war, Ip Man and his family descend into poverty and he loses his two daughters due to starvation. In the meantime, in northern China, Ma San becomes a hanjian and ends up killing Gong Yutian. When Gong Er returns, she confronts her elders for forsaking her father but they tell her that her father's final wish was for her to be happy and not to seek vengeance. Gong Er refuses to accept that, and she vows to never teach, marry or have children her entire life, in order to choose the path of vengeance.

Ip Man moves to Hong Kong in the hope of starting a career as a martial arts teacher, but ends up facing all sorts of challenges because there were also numerous other martial arts masters. He defeats them soundly and earns a reputation. He meets Gong Er again on Chinese New Year's Eve 1950 and asks her for a contest one more time while implying that she should start rebuilding her martial art school. But Gong Er refuses, stating that many martial arts disappeared in the course of history; and that hers would not be the only one. A flashback 10 years earlier shows a confrontation between Gong Er and Ma San at a train station on Chinese New Year's Eve 1940, and Gong defeats Ma after a brutal and intense fight. However, Gong herself is heavily injured and loses her desire to use martial art.

The film then fast-forwards to 1952, when Ip Man and Gong Er meet each other for the last time. Gong confesses to Ip that she has had romantic feelings for him right from the beginning. She dies shortly after. Ip explains in a voice over that in the fight with Ma San, Gong was injured so badly she turned to opium for the pain and this was her downfall. The final scenes offer a visual montage as Ip Man's school flourishes, including a statement that Ip made Wing Chun popular worldwide and his most famous student was Bruce Lee. Off screen, it is stated that Ip Man died in 1972.

Read More

Ender's Game

Synopsis Ender's Game

Sometime in the near future, humanity began to explore the solar system and master interplanetary spaceflight. In doing so, they encountered an alien race known as the Formics, derogatorily dubbed "buggers" due to their insect-like appearance, scouting the system and establishing a forward base in the asteroid Eros. The Formics attacked the humans and the two races entered into two drawn-out wars. Despite political conflict on Earth between three ruling parties, the Hegemon, Polemarch, and Strategos, a peace was established and an International Fleet (IF) formed to combat the Formics. In preparation for the Formics' inevitable return (dubbed the "third invasion") the IF created the Battle School, a program designed to find children of the best and brightest tactical minds and to subject them to rigorous training so as to defeat the Formic threat once and for all.

Six-year old Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is the youngest child in the Wiggin family, and part of an Earth program to produce brilliant officers; despite this, Ender is teased as a "third" under Earth's two-child policy. He has a close bond with his sister Valentine, but fears his brother Peter, a highly intelligent sociopath who delights in manipulating and tormenting him. After the IF removes Ender's monitoring device, presumably ending his chances of getting into Command School, he gets into a fight with a fellow student, Stilson. Though the smaller and weaker of the two, Ender manages to fatally wound Stilson (though Ender is unaware of this and believes he merely injured the other boy). When explaining his actions to IF Colonel Hyrum Graff, Ender states his belief that, by showing superiority now, he will have prevented further fights in the future.

Graff, on hearing of this, promptly offers Ender a place in the Battle School, situated in Earth's orbit. Ender initially believes Graff is a friend and ally, but Graff quickly isolates Ender from the other cadets by highlighting his intelligence. Between being ostracized by his fellow cadets and having troubling dreams about Formics, Ender is soon ready to quit the school, but Graff encourages him to continue through communications sent from Valentine.

The cadets participate in competitive small unit based war simulations in zero-gravity arenas. Ender quickly devises new tactics that disrupt the current ways these games are played, often involving sacrificing himself. Graff promotes Ender to a new army composed of the newest and youngest cadets, but Ender is able to gain their trust, and against more ruthless competition, continues to invent new strategies to lead his army to the top of the school. Ender is forced to fight Bonzo Madrid, a jealous commander of another army, outside of the simulation; Ender manages to gain the upper hand and defeat him, but is unaware that he killed Bonzo. As a result of Ender's leadership and bravery, several of his current and former squad members form Ender's Jeesh that remain loyal to him.

Back on Earth, Peter has used a global communication system to post political essays under the pseudonym "Locke", hoping to establish himself as a respected orator (which he believes will shortly lead him to political power despite his youth). Valentine, while not trusting Peter, believes that his methods are sound for affecting world politics in a positive manner. She becomes complicit in Peter's actions by posting works alongside his as "Demosthenes". Their essays which they initially develop in tandem are soon taken seriously by people at the highest positions of power in the government. Though Graff is told their true identities, he recommends that it be kept a secret believing the knowledge might one day prove useful and because their writings are politically useful.

Read More

Battle of the Year - Teleblog Film

Synopsis Battle of the Year

The movie follows Dante and Derrek as they try to put together a B-boy team that will win the upcoming Battle of the Year under the belief that proper coaching can take any team to victory.

Full Movie

Read More