Didn’t see a thread for this one so I thought I’d start one. Apologies if this is a duplicate.
I saw Attack the Block today, and it was freaking amazing. Loved nearly every moment of it.
Have any of y’all seen it yet, and if so, what didya think? :-)
It was merely okay.
As I said on G+, I saw it over a month ago and it was just such a fun movie. Loved it. I really want to see it again, mostly because the wife didn’t go with me the last time and I think she’d like it too.
Thought it was a pretty awesome little movie. Did a lot of things I really liked, and not much I didn’t. I love watching movies like this in between blockbuster fare and award fare.
I would say this was a fun film.
It’s good. It moves fast, the actors are all pretty good despite being mostly kids, no real complaints. The story is the sort of thing I love, so I was predisposed to like it. I didn’t like the ending semi-reveal that much, but up to that point, it’s a fun ride.
Am I the only one that felt a bit weird watching this after the London riots? That made it a bit harder to take to a bunch of thuggish young protagonists who open the movie by mugging a woman. I would have rather seen Harry Brown dealing with the aliens. Still, I liked it better than Super 8 and Skyline.
For another example of foreign criminals in a tenement building dealing with a B-movie menace, see the French movie The Horde.
-Tom
I definitely enjoyed it. The character arcs of both the main thug (Moses) and the victimized woman were well done, and the beasts were plenty creepy for an indie budget. And the final shot of the movie was a worthy payoff.
Plenty of laughs, thrills, and characters I actually gave a shit about, in some cases despite myself: definitely worth seeing.
Went in with no expectations, and came out at long last glad I’d handed someone money to watch a movie. It’s a paint-by-numbers script executed almost flawlessly, especially considering the budget, and with very few (and forgivable) exceptions the characters don’t do incredibly stupid and contrived things.
If you can go in not knowing anything, all the better. This is to Super 8 what the Swedish version of Let Me In is to the crappy American remake.
I love this movie, a likable cast combined with a fast paced plot, topped off with the added flavor of being from the UK.
I didn’t have a problem with the characters being criminals. The Godfather, The Sopranos, Pulp Fiction- all tv/movies with lowlife criminals as the main characters and yet I enjoyed those too. The key is to humanize the characters so that the audience can relate to them in some way. I think Attack the Block did it very well, I was rooting for those guys.
Question (cuz I just saw this): the male (let’s say they are male) gorilla-dog-mother-fuckers could smell the pheromone left by the female GDMF, believe, but why were they all bent out of shape about the humans who bore the smell? Wouldn’t they just want to mate with whatever’s got the smell on them? Or is ripping necks out their way of mating?
My wife jumped so high off the couch when the kid opened the dumpster and the alien launched into the camera that the cat on her lap flew halfway across the room, whereupon, in the way of cats, it calmly licked one of its feet. Trust.
I’d say the female creature released an alarm pheromone, like a bee, and that’s what they got all over themselves instead of mating pheromones.
Good point.
I love Joe Cornish to the moon and really wanted this to be great but it was just fine. I agree with what Tom said about the protagonists being little shits. I just wish Cornish had sorted that problem out better in the ending because despite a lot of interesting set-up character-wise the conclusion felt uneven.
However I sincerely hope his next one is better.
What’s your favorite Joe Cornish movie, Rory?
Well Attack the Block obviously, I meant I was a fan of him as a well-known TV presenter/radio DJ/writer/actor in the UK where I live.
I didn’t know that this was his first film.
I thought this was really really great. Probably the most fun movie ive seen in a long time.
Though some people have complained about it, I thought the decision to open with the mugging was the strongest in the entire script— how many campy horror movies start with the same shorthand for “these are the bad guys” then give you the incredibly cheap thrill of watching these jerks “get what’s coming to them?”
Instead, it emotionally distanced you from the characters, only to force you to stick with them way past the archtype shorthand that’s usually the beginning and end of horror movie character development; way past the point where you expected these dicks to already be dead.
I thought it was a neat choice, and in a way, it engaged me more. Also, when it inevitably humanized/fleshed out the characters, it did so without being too forgiving or heavy handed. They’re not necessarily “good” people, but they are just scared kids, and they do care about each other.
Also, I love when art works to really capture the idiom of a sub-culture or area, even to the difficulty of the average viewer. I’m not sure if it was intended that way/played the same in england, but the density of the slang forced me to engage the movie earlier and more seriously than I’d expected from a gremlins update.
Again, I dont know if the argot used in the movie is Wire-authentic or if it’s just my ignorance of what’s actually generic british rap-talk, but the effect was the same: I sat down to watch a light gremlin’s style horror comedy, and it threw me in with the bad guys, all speaking in a foreign idiom, and said “yeah, this is pretty much how it’s gonna be, catch up.”
Sorry I think I misread your first post (with the assumption that you knew this was his debut) as a mild snark !
If you want to see what he’s best known for in the UK try and download the Adam and Joe podcast from itunes or youtube Adam and Joe on youtube. I dont know how well the TV stuff will hold up.
Thanks!