End of Watch

SF: After all the hype I had high hopes for this film. In many ways it was very satisfying, the acting is spot on and the setting seems to work, a good mix of serious, gritty, humour and at times disturbing. There are three particular moments that really surprised me (I'll let you guess which moments these are). I liked that the whole story didn't take place in one day or week but over a staged period of time. However there were just a few things that stopped this from being a great movie and left merely a good movie. Which is a shame as it had a lot of potential. Firstly the use of found footage as a medium, this is fine at times but if you are going to do this then you must stick to it relentlessly. Secondly not enough character depth and lastly not enough tension in the finale. 6.5/10

50Eggs: n/a

DonkeyB: It's an entertaining cop buddy movie. These guys see some truly horrific and depressing things, and do some downright stupid and undeniably brave things, which makes me think that maybe the film was trying to be gritty. My problem with it is it seemed too one dimensional, without ruining it ***SPOILER ALERT***, cops good, bad guys bad.

The other thing that film makers have to stop doing now is the found footage thing. It was getting old for me by the end of The Blair Witch Project but now it is seriously boring as a concept. It also fairly seriously undermines the story telling in this film, right from the start, I was thinking, 'ok so if Brian got that shot, who filmed that?' Why are the street gang filming what they do? What becomes of Brian's film project? Was he just making that up because he liked to film his life? He doesn't seem like that sort of character in the film.

We are surely not far away from the time when some bright spark film maker just out of film school makes a play within a play, with made up 'real found footage'. i.e. they shoot fake real footage to make a found footage film, but then use different actors who look a bit like the first set of fake real people to make the bits in between, so they can fake pretend that it is really a found footage film they have padded out with dramatisations and alternative angles.

I understood that concept I'm not sure anyone else will, which is good because that means they can't steal my up-its-own-arse-pretentious-film-school-project I'll never make.

6.5/10

Overall: 6.5/10