TheRetroCritic

Based on an ongoing manga from 2006, the anime series of Nichijou followed a group of high school students as well as a robot girl, a child scientist and a talking cat as they embarked on very small but very significant (to them, anyway) random situations which they handled, more often than not, rather strangely. Early on, I wasn't sure if Nichijou even had a story or an arc to it. The first few episodes of the series really prioritising slapstick goofiness and emphasising the over-the-top reactions of the characters to certain minor events like bumping into someone or dropping a tiny sausage. It feels like a very cartoonish comic strip, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The humour is a wacky mix of observational, sarcastic and OTT slapstick with the occasional mini slice-of-life "moment" breaking up the episode. Every so often, you get a quiet, detailed but blurry shot of a street as a breeze moves a drape or something like that, before they cut to the ne

And Dwayne Johnson does it again... It's looking like The Rock has not only made a comeback but he's decided to go around stealing franchises. To some extent that's what he did with The Scorpion King and Journey 2 but as of late, with Fast Five and now   G.I. Joe: Retaliation , it looks like we'll be seeing a whole lot of him in the near future. Sadly, no word on a Southland Tales spin-off yet... This sequel to the wildly ridiculous but strangely enjoyable first G.I. Joe film, The Rise Of Cobra , follows the story some time later, not right after. Yes Jonathan Pryce's evil twin is still the President, yes Channing Tatum is still around but Dwayne Johnson's now part of the gang, everyone's following the President's crazy orders, Cobra and Destro have been captured and are now kept in glass coffins in some impossible-to-reach location, Bruce Willis is... Joe? Basically this movie is one cast member and plot thread away from being a complete reb

Man the critics were rough on this one... Now I'm one of the first to bash whatever new tired kid-friendly animated flicks come out these days: Madagascar 3 , Ice Age 4 , The Lorax ... not for me. That said, there are the occasional ones that slip through the cracks and actually end up being pretty good ( ParaNorman , The Pirates ). Hotel Transylvania I found to be in-between. On the one hand you've got its gorgeous animation, its clever premise, its fun winks to old horror movies, its colorful characters and on the other you have... ...the singing. Actually you have an Adam Sandler Dracula RAP. I'll let that sink in. ... Theeeere it is. Ok, so that sounds like hell but trust me: Hotel Transylvania is worth a go. For one thing it's a lot of fun. It's pretty darn relentless and certainly never wastes any of its time: it's fast, punchy and nuts going for a Tex Avery-style random toon-craziness we haven't seen achieved quite this well sinc

More Bat-related genius from AxisOfOrnament . Click on the jacket-wearin' bat for more.

From Scooby-Doo Meets Batman . Review coming soon.

A long-time fan of Blake Edwards' iconic franchise, I grew up seeking out and watching every single Pink Panther film. Yes, even those wimpy Clouseau-less ones, that bizarre Roberto Benigni effort, the unofficial Alan Arkin spin-off and, more recently, the Steve Martin remakes... It's been a tough road, to say the least. Anyway, time to delve into my childhood's colon nice and deep to revisit one of my many cinematic obsessions. The first Pink Panther film was never my favourite. For one thing, Peter Sellers' dim-witted inspector was nothing more than a side character while a majority of the film was spent with David Niven's cat burglar The Phantom, Claudia Cardinal's gobby Princess and a young Robert Wagner as The Phantom's nephew... oh and Clouseau's scheming, two-timing wife. Too many main characters, you say? That's right. Really this is my main complaint with this first instalment. A lot of it is fun but every so often it's

Mad genius Stephen Chow has a ball in this send-up of cooking contests and turns Iron Chef into a live-action Tex Avery cartoon complete with "pissing beef balls", Shaolin monks and random spontaneous violence. Yes the story is pretty predictable: a Simon Cowell-style harsh TV critic/chef loses everything and goes back to basics to try and get back to being the titular god of cookery. That said, the film is self-aware and pokes fun at every rags-to-riches movie cliché any chance it gets. The humour is pretty childish throughout and the whole thing is undeniably very silly but it's the kind of silliness that's so out-there (think Jackie Chan meets Bugs Bunny) it's just too much fun to dislike. Visually, Chow throws everything at us from ingredients to...clothes (yes, clothes can self-combust in this film) and brings us a vast array of, shall we say, colourful characters? You've got a chubby brown-noser ready to defecate outside elevators at the drop of a

Back in the mid 90's, Jim Carrey redefined slapstick comedy with his own brand of cartoonish goofiness. Then in the mid 00's, we were given Carrey-free outings such as Dumb and Dumberer , Ace Ventura Jr (shudder) and Son of the Mask, mainly rubbish sequels aimed at the poor nostalgic fools suffering withdrawal symptoms from the old JC days. Jamie Kennedy (star of Dr Dolittle 2 and Malibu's Most Wanted ) takes on the Jim Carrey everyman role and Alan Cumming is thrown in because...one annoying dude making faces at the camera is never really enough. Hence why the Ernest movies were always so underwhelming (sarcasm). Oh and there's Bob Hoskins voicing Odin in an extended, pointless cameo, a CGI baby, a CGI dog and a CGI everything else. Comparing Son of the Mask with the original The Mask would probably take all day and the conclusion would be pretty anti-climactic. Lets just look at what this sequel does wrong, for starters. After a promising opening s

From the director of Invisible Dad and Invisible Mom comes a supernatural horror/comedy starring David Carradine, Dick Miller ( Gremlins ) and a whole bunch of porn stars and strippers. Truly this is recipe for cinematic success. As bums and boobs are thrown at us whenever there's a lull, what we get otherwise is an admittedly so-bad-it's-funny ride complete with some of the worst acting you're likely to witness and one fatal flaw: only ONE evil toon! I know that with all the rubbish a film like Evil Toons has to offer, lines like "Are you the guy with the phone?" for example, I shouldn't be picky about one thing in particular but... I'm sorry, I am. You've got something terrible and the only thing the poor, defenceless victims watching it are waiting for (besides breasts) are toons, evil ones! And all we get is some poorly animated raping demon dog thing for like 5 minutes? How dare you, sir! Worth a look only to see David Carradine c

Climbing back up the hill after cult classic cinematic catastrophe The Happening was always going to be a tough one. With The Last Airbender, Shyamalan takes a small step in the right direction but still falters on so many levels making this last effort better than his Mark Wahlberg turkey but just about. M Night Shyamalan's de-evolution as a filmmaker could be traced back to when he really became Shyamalan the "auteur" with Lady in the Water . The latter had its merits and was wrongfully underrated upon release but it was flawed, clunky and uneven like no other Shyamalan film had been before. Even a lesser effort like Signs felt focused and acutely paced and executed compared to it. One can only conclude that M Night is just not a good screenwriter. The naivity and annoyingly juvenile undertones of his ideas just fly through his script pages like concords cancelling all senses of danger, suspense or darkness from the finished material. A horror film like The Happeni