Fans disappointed with The Hangover 2 storyline will be glad to hear that The Hangover 3 is nothing like its previous instalment, which wore the bachelor-party-gone-wrong story thin. This time, the plot’s much better and not at the expense of the laughs either.

The movie starts out in an exaggerated slow motion, where Chow makes his dramatic escape from a Thai prison, warming us up to the tone of the movie – pretty dark, yet inexplicably bringing us a huge laugh.

It’s been 2 years since the wolf pack last heard from Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong) who was captured in the previous Hangover. Meanwhile, Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms), Doug (Justin Bartha) and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) are glad for their humdrum lives, thinking that their surreal misadventures are behind them. That is, until they meet again at Alan’s father’s funeral.

When the guys discover that Alan stopped taking his ADHD medication, they try to persuade him to seek help before he goes berserk. En route to checking him into a rehab facility in Arizona- the foursome are rear-ended by a mob. Their leader, Marshall (John Goodman), was robbed of $21 million worth of gold and Chow was –expectedly- guilty as charged. Forced into action by the threat to Doug’s life, the group sets out on a manhunt for the elusive Chow.

The Hangover 3 isn’t only different in terms of its storyline. For starters, (brace yourselves) nobody’s close to being hungover. I vaguely remember myself thinking – the movie should really be called Sober 1. But despite the hilarity centering on the hung over antics of the confused men in the previous 2 movies, the cast manage to tickle your funny bones without having to pull a cork off any bottle.

The cast entertains us with 100 minutes worth of hilarious campy action where it all began, Las Vegas. As the saying goes, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

Part 3 has all eyes on Alan, our wacky bearded friend, who continues to amuse us with his awkward lack of societal norms, including unexpectedly taking a ‘selfie’ at his father’s funeral… but well, that’s Alan for you. A beautiful and elegant turn from Alan’s usually hyperactive behaviour, it was the sheer genius of Director Todd Phillips that Alan sang “Ave Maria” in a high register for the funeral.

Taking centre stage to Alan’s coming of age was Chow as he got sides splitting with his crude humour. Parachuting down the now the famous Caesars Palace singing “I Believe I Can Fly” with his thick Asian accent accompanied, he got the theatre choking on their laughter.

A new addition to the Hangover 3 is the outlandish character Cassie, played by Melissa McCarthy. In a creepy yet comical sharing of sharing a lollipop with each other, Cassie and Alan develop an almost disturbingly intense chemistry.

However not all humour was appreciated in The Hangover 3, especially not by animal lovers who were rather upset at the bad taste of abusing animals. No actual animals were harmed in the making of the film, but the violence against them to forcefully create comedy was aplenty.  Criticised for the decapitation of a giraffe, the suffocation of a chicken, and the killing two guard dogs, some audience members found it too morbid and distasteful.

Phillips was smart to end the franchise at its peak. Other than knowing that the characters couldn’t go any further, the movie itself was starting to lose popularity. Despite The Hangover 3 opening a day earlier to avoid a head-on collision with Fast & Furious 6, it sadly dropped to a distant second in the US box office. Hardcore fans of the franchise were, however, still supportive of the return of the third instalment.

And with this, the final part of The Hangover franchise wraps up with the wolf pack’s final walk down the hallway. Although The Hangover 3 fell short of its expectations, the finale was an emotional closure as it flashed back to scenes from the previous hangovers. Where they walked towards trouble before, this time, the four now walk towards a new beginning. Although most would say that the final part of The Hangover was a little short on laughs, it was an inevitable closure as it answered Alan’s question: Haven’t you learnt anything? And it seems like they have… that is, until you reach the end credits.

Despite the underwhelming response by critics for its lack of laughter and crude execution of comedy, the audience in Singapore were responsive and chuckled their way through the film.

Rating: 3.5/5

Release Date: May 30

Runtime: 1hr 40mins

Language: English

Censorship Rating: M18

Genre: Comedy

Director: Todd Phillips

Main Actors: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong

But where his story really starts is when he sees his former fling, Romina (played by his real life beau Eva Mendes), and finds out he fathered a child with her. In the meantime, Romina hasn’t been waiting for him to do his paternal duty. To support her child, she juggles school and a minimum wage job to support herself. She also has a live-in boyfriend, Kofi (Mahershala Ali), who can provide a stable life, something she doubts Luke can give to her.

Hard up for cash to prove his ability to provide, Luke quits the travelling troupe and turns to a life of crime. A few small bank robberies later, he meets rookie cop Avery (Bradley Cooper, Golden Globe and BAFTA award nominee). A straight-laced law graduate with an acute sense of justice, Avery’s named the town hero when he brings down the moto-bandit, Luke, who has been plaguing their little town of Schenectady, N.Y.

When Deluca (Ray Liotta), Avery’s superior pulls a fake bust on Romina’s house to appropriate for himself the money Luke stole, Avery’s idealism crumbles as he finds himself sucked deeper into what he’s realising is a corrupt institution.

Fast forward 15 years and Avery has brought down his corrupt seniors, and he’s even running for public office. Busy and important, he doesn’t have the time when his high school aged son, AJ (Emory Cohen) requests to live with him instead of his ex-wife.

An underachiever, AJ befriends Jason (Dane Dehaan), Luke’s son. While neither boy knows how their lives intertwine, Avery recognises Jason and forbids AJ from ever speaking to him again. Things spiral out of control when Jason finds out about his father.

With an outstanding cast and great supporting roles, Pines tells a story of 2 generations and how what goes around comes around. While all arches tell a thrilling story from parent to child, the first of the 3 arches was the most compelling story. It is Luke’s life, and his eventual death, that impacts and fuels the other two, making them less impactful although just as well played.

In Pines, Cooper still manages to live up to his performance in Silver Linings Playbook to give us a honest portrayal of his character. Matched with Gosling’s trademark well-meaning characters with emotional struggles, the film show us some truly good acting.

The film makes you think about how some things fall into place without planning, like how Romina never meant to have a child, or how AJ and Jason were almost fated to cross paths. It is also about how good people with good intentions can also make decisions that haunt them. With its muted colours and dark undertones, the cinematography brings out the raw edge of the film.

Director Derek Cianfrance brings back another character study. After his last movie on the decaying marriage between a young couple (Blue Valentine), Cianfrance once again puts on screen an unnerving show of people on the fringe. With this crime drama, you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop, whether it’s a fall off a bike, a punch to the face, or the firing of a gun. The film shows you the flaws in its characters and keeps you unsettled in the best way.

Rating: 4/5

Release Date: Apr 4

Runtime: 2 hrs 20 min

Language: English

Censorship rating: M18

Genre: Drama

Director: Derek Cianfrance

Main actors: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes

Best Actor

A lock down for Daniel Day-Lewis for one hell of a method role in Lincoln as the iconic President in his last few months where he waged on a closing civil war, grieved over the death of a son, and indulged in a Congressional gridlock of political wrangling, bargaining and arm twisting. Academy members will be up on their feet applauding the President, um, Day-Lewis. Asides: Joaquin Phoneix’s intense rage and inner demons trapped in a hunched frame in The Master deserves mention. Similar for Denzel Washington portraying a conflicted man ridden with guilt and seeking redemption from the bottles, who does not resort to over acting or shouting where a lesser actor would.

Best Actress

The buzz is focused on Jennifer Lawrence for her manic performance in Silver Linings Playbook and possible cat fight with another young actress Jessica Chastain for her cold and indifferent role as a CIA agent in Zero Dark Thirty. But my sentimental and intuitive feel is on Emmanuelle Riva as the tender other half of an old couple who chooses to live out her days by her own conviction and design in the heart-wrenching Amour, to win.

Best Supporting Actor

The category is too close to call with all 5 nominated actors of having pedigree and won Oscars before. But just like what Tommy Lee Jones‘ character Thaddeus Stevens in Lincoln would do, vote we must and Jones shall prevail, much like the 13th Amendment. Asides:  Christoph Waltz’s role as the sociopath mentor and bounty hunter in Django Unchained might create an upset here with such a riveting performance.

Best Supporting Actress

Nobody is stealing the Oscar away from Fantine in Les Misérables, or Anne Hathaway who has all but sealed the category up with her painful and heartbroken rendition of ‘I Dreamed A Dream’. Much has to be said about Helen Hunt in The Sessions, whose bold and special performance as a sex therapist brings softness and love to the harsh realities of a man with polio.

Best Director

Ben Affleck, who? Moving on from the snub, the Academy members will probably throw their weight around Steven Spielberg who deftly pulls off a masterpiece steeped in history and long discourses, two surmountable challenges in cinema today. But kudos to Ang Lee for taking on even far bigger challenges filming Life of Pi in the magical 3D coupled with the deep blue sea, an unknown actor, and a damn tiger. Lee to win by the skin of, what else, a tiger.

Best Picture

The voting patterns of the Academy are often inclusive and parochial, where the acting, directing and writing branches tend to vote for “one of their kind”. Argo is one of them. It’s more than just a thriller about the Iranian hostage crisis. It’s a movie that celebrates Hollywood and film-makers who boldly use the cinematic art form to re-imagine a plan to rescue fellow Americans. Remember the nail biting scene in the airport departure hall where one of the crew showed the Iranian guards storyboards of the ficticious Argo film? That had the audience hooked — including Hollywood. And the best part? Hollywood loves a comeback kid story, and Ben Affleck/Argo is the proverbial comeback kid now. After a snub in the directing category, the members are piling sympathy votes and award after award of late on the film, which isn’t a bad thing altogether if you ask me. Lincoln may surge as it resonates with the older members with a penchant for history (and Spielberg because that man has influence) but Argo might just pull another fast one on us, like how it did with the Iranian revolutionary guards.

And the rest of the Oscars goes to…

Original Screenplay: Zero Dark Thirty

Adapted Screenplay: Lincoln

Foreign Language Film: Amour

Animated Feature: Brave

Visual Effects: Life of Pi

Production Design: Les Misérables

Costume Design: Anna Karenina

Cinematography: Life of Pi

Makeup: Les Misérables

Film Editing: Argo

*I have omitted predicting Sound Editing and Mixing for the first time because for the death of me, I still can’t tell (or hear) the difference.

Nor do the mentally unstable protagonists bear any resemblance to most of the people who will catch this oddly-named movie. So why did it get nominated for 4 Golden Globe Awards including nods for the biggies such as Best Motion Picture, Actor, Actress and Screenplay?

Maybe it’s because Silver Linings Playbook has ditched all the predictable fluff and replaced it with a realistic look at love and life – something you almost don’t expect from Hollywood movies like 27 Dresses and No Strings Attached, with their fairytale-like storylines. And it does this without swinging to the other gloomy extreme, providing insight into people with depression, manic-depression or bipolar disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and showing how these conditions don’t stop people from being in love.

If anything, love, or rather love lost, seems to be the trigger for the first 2 psychiatric issues. Bradley Cooper plays Pat Solatano, a man who had lost all that men hold dear: his career, his marriage, his home and possibly his dignity too, when he lashed out violently at the man his then-wife, Nikki (Brea Bee), was allegedly having an affair with when he found them in the shower at his home together.

Even 22-year-old Jennifer Lawrence, fresh from her stint as the lead in The Hunger Games, gives a memorable turn as a stunning Tiffany,who fell into depression after the sudden death of her husband. She turns into the office nympho as a reaction to the shock and promptly gets fired. Not only did she handle her clinically depressed character well, but she also proved to be quite the comedian through her ironic humour like when she repeatedly ambushes Pat when he’s jogging, and boy – can she dance! There was a dance piece in the movie where Lawrence and Cooper had to perform a ballroom dance number.

Her 2011 Best Actress Oscar nomination for Winter’s Bone led to her clinching the lead role in box-office hit, The Hunger Games. It should come as no surprise if she were to land an Academy Award for Best Actress in Silver Linings Playbook.

Besides Cooper and Lawrence, we have Robert De Niro, Cooper’s co-star in Limitless, who has had his share of laugh-inducing roles in Stardust and the Meet The Parents series as well as hilarious motormouth Chris Tucker from Rush Hour who first appeared in the movie as a deluded mental patient who would pounce upon any chance to get out of the mental institution.

Back to the plot, Pat’s committed to a mental institution for his rage against his cheating wife and diagnosed as bipolar, with mood swings caused by stress. 8 months on, Pat’s mom, Dolores (Jacki Weaver), gets him discharged against the better judgement of the psychiatrists. The conditions are that Pat takes his medication, attends counseling with Dr Cliff Patel (Anupam Kher of Bend It Like Beckham) and abides by his restraining order – to keep at least 500 feet away from Nikki at all times.

Pat may be determined to win Nikki back and restore his life but clearly he wasn’t near normal when on the first night back in his parents’ home, he entered their room at 4am, waking up the entire neighbourhood, lamenting/raging about how cruel life is and how Hemmingway (which he was reading) should have written a happier ending. This was to be the first of many of Pat’s outbursts.

The fact that they were both grappling with new psychiatric illness and lost love probably cemented the friendship/relationship between Pat and Tiffany. They even made a deal, where Tiffany would help Pat send Nikki a letter if he’d be her partner for a dance competition. Surely you don’t need a movie to tell you that spending hours in the arms of someone can lead you to forget any previous romantic entanglements…

Silver Linings Playbook comes across as a bit of a shock to your system, as you put up with fairly constant anger and shouting, coarse language, ragged camera movement, with hurried zooming in to the actors. Well, reality can be gritty and slightly disorienting. Director David O Russell, who also directed The Fighter  and Three Kings, had his reasons: to reflect the film’s eccentric themes and tones. It was quite a gamble to take, but it was one worth taking.

Aside from the technicalities, Russell explored the various themes in the movie very well through a combination of dark humour, by injecting humour in instances relating to mental illnesses like when Pat and Tiffany exchanged notes on the medication they were on, and romance.

One huge takeaway from this movie is that happy-ever-afters can exist in real life too, but only if you accept your significant other for all that they are and embrace the lunacy and work around it instead of shunning it. And of course, if you have a sliver of hope, you might just find your silver lining.

•Movie name: Silver Linings Playbook

•Rating: 3.5/5

•Release Date: 10 Jan 2013

•Runtime: 122 minutes

•Language: English

•Censorship Rating: PG

•Genre: Romance/Comedy/Drama

•Director: David O. Russell

•Main actors: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Chris Tucker

Cinematography

Hugo

Art Direction

Hugo

Costume Design

The Artist

Makeup

The Iron Lady

Foreign Language Film

A Separation

Best Supporting Actress

Octavia Spencer, The Help

Film Editing

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Sound Editing

Hugo

Sound Mixing

Hugo

Documentary Feature

Undefeated

Animated Feature

Rango

Visual Effects

Hugo

Best Supporting Actor

Christopher Plummer, Beginners

Original Score

The Artist

Original Song

The Muppets

Adapted Screenplay

The Descendants

Original Screenplay

Midnight in Paris

Live Action Short Film

The Shore

Documentary Short

Saving Face

Animated Short Film

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

Director

Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist

Actor

Jean Dujardin, The Artist

Actress

Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady

Picture

 The Artist

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Meet Captain H.M. “Howling Mad” Murdock (Sharlto Copley), part of the Alpha Team or A-Team, an elite but slight insane group of soldiers. The others are Lieutenant Templeton “Faceman” Peck (Bradley Cooper), leader Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith (Liam Neeson) and Sergeant. B.A. “Bad Attitude” Baracus (Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson).

The A-Team is the remake of the popular 80’s television show of the same name. It has been updated for today’s audiences though – they are no longer Vietnam War veterans, but rather veterans of the Iraq War.

After 8 years as the go-to team for near-impossible missions, the guys who “specialise in the ridiculous” are framed for the theft of money-printing plates and are chucked into maximum-security prison.

Of course, that hardly holds them for long.

Especially when they have help from the CIA Agent Lynch (Patrick Wilson from Watchmen) is a creepy agent with no first name and no integrity. He breaks them out with the promise of full pardon if they get the plates back.

There’s also Jessica Biel as the quintessential love interest, Captain Carissa Sosa. A babe like her is hardly believable in the tough sandy environment of Iraq, but that’s the essence of the whole movie.

Director Joe Carnahan doesn’t try to root this movie in reality and it’s very apparent from the scenes of sinking container liners, shooting down planes from a tank in mid-air and flying upside-down in a helicopter (yes, the same helicopter that Murdock was hanging from).

It’s sheer fun.

[Murdock has dropped cargo crushing Baracus' van]
Sgt. Bosco ‘B.A.’ Baracus: You pancaked my van! I’m gonna kill you, fool!
Capt. ‘Howling Mad’ Murdock: You can’t park there, that’s a handicap zone.

The movie is basically a really long and well-made action sequence with tight editing and great sound effects.

It’s precisely because of that you should pay for that ticket because only then can you appreciate the coolness of Face sticking himself to the underside of a moving semi-truck or Hannibal freeing himself from handcuffs and vicious dogs with a firing pin from his gun.

While some may complain about the film not properly honouring the television show, you won’t get any comments because we’re too busy laughing at Murdock sprinkling gunpowder onto his steak.

Title: The A-Team
Opens: Jun 10
Duration: 120 minutes
Language: English
Rating: ★★★★☆
Genre: Action, Adventure, Comedy
Director: Joe Carnahan
Cast: Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Sharlto Copley, Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson