The Five Year Engagement, Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter and Red Lights

I had seen the trailer for The Five Year Engagement and it seemed to promise a reasonable romantic drama, with a bit of comedy thrown in. It turned out to be all these things, nothing special but a passable, if overlong, relationship movie. The interesting concept of starting where other like movies finish soon wears thin, and it is left to Emily Blunt (terrific) and Jason Segel (should have stuck to the writing with Nicholas Stoller and hired a better actor) to carry the story through. Stoller directs with a certain syle and fortunately this is not a gross out romcom. The plot flags and before halfway it just does not ring true. But the dialogue is OK, and certainly adds warmth and charm to what is a pleasant couple of hours.

I am always attracted to a vampire movie, having seen everything Hammer films had to offer in the sixties. And this time the reviews of Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter had been quite favourable. Yes, it is all pretty absurd, but hey, this is a vampire movie. What we have is a witty story and some attractively filmed scenes with beautiful costumes and pulsating action. This is mainly due to the direction of Timur Bekmambedov and the screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith adapted from his own novel. Benjamin Walker as a young Abraham Lincoln, Dominic Cooper and Rufus Sewell interact very well. However, the film is much better in the first two thirds before we jump forward in time to an older Lincoln and the Civil War. But all in all, a good fun movie.

I ended up going to see Red Lights more because the showing time in High Wycombe suited me, again nothing I wanted to see in Aylesbury! It ended up being a moderate thriller where Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy go about exposing frauds with psychic powers. Top man in this field is Robert De Niro as Simon Silver, who comes out of retirement to earn a fortune. The movie has it's merits, despite a clunky script, and there are some semi-scary moments and a twist at the end. Rodrigo Cortes (whose movie Buried was a surprise hit) wrote the screenplay and directed, and it was good to see something original, even though it was pretty unmemorable.