'What Just Happened?' is a bit of an odd one. Tries to be a quirky exposé of the Hollywood shark-pool, comes across as a bit of a smug Hollywood in-joke. Bruce Willis typifies this, and reminds me of Charlie Sheen in 'Being John Malkovich': yeah, we know, you can laugh at yourself. What a good sport.
Another phoned-in performance by DeNiro who's shown us of late that, like Al Pacino, he'd play a ham sandwich if someone paid him enough and would still give the impression that he wasn't really trying.
When the film ended I didn't feel like I'd gained much from the experience really, or indeed been on much of a journey during it.
The soundtrack's nice though. Buck 65 and Nick Drake feature among others.
'Timecrimes' (or 'Los Cronocrímenes') is, without wanting to sound patronising, actually a fairly good achievement for what appears to be quite a low budget film - especially seeing as it's Science Fiction of a sort, dealing with time travel. You'll have to suspend your disbelief a bit here, as the characters do not react in a particularly natural way to a lot of the events, and sometimes the time-travel is used as a quite clumsy narrative device that at times becomes predictable - you're meant to think "ah, so that happened because he did x when he went back" but it's no great stunning revelation. All in all, there are worse ways of spending the hour and a half-ish that it takes to watch this movie.
'Fears of the Dark' ('Peurs du Noir') is a collection of black and white animated shorts of a Horror pursuasion that's not too bad at all. The first and last segments are definately the strongest, the latter in particular using the format's sense of light and dark most effectively. It was also nice to see (although not throughout) what looked like traditional, rather than CGI, animation. Of the three films I'd say this is the one I'd most recommend.FIN.
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