Seriously Josh! I can’t believe that anyone could actually give Pain & Gain a positive review. It’s seriously one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. Have you ever seen a film where women were objectified more? Marky Mark gives The Rock his woman as a gift! Every female character is incredibly dumb except maybe Rebel Wilson, who’s just being Rebel Wilson. How about Marky Mark’s rant about how terrible China is? Or the obligatory scene with a little person? Or the priest coming on to The Rock and him beating the priest up for comic effect? One of the most offensive films I’ve ever seen!

Just had a chance to catch up with Spring Breakers this weekend as it got its UK release and I was very impressed. We can all agree that Franco was excellent although until you guys said it on Filmspotting I hadn’t really thought about it, but yes this has to be his best performance yet. Alien could so easily be caricature. Where we differ, Josh, is in what happens when the film becomes increasingly divorced from reality. Crucially I did not think that the film became flimsy. I thought that it carried through Korine’s argument that people who worship money and crave more and more possessions (“Look at my shit!”) are headed down a bad path.

Hardly revolutionary, but when the two girls go after Alien’s rival at the end what do we hear on the soundtrack? I believe it is Faith’s call to her mother about how great spring break is and how spiritual the whole experience has been. The contrast with what is happening on screen is something. I had a very different reading of the ending. What about their phone calls telling their mothers they’re going to be the best they can be, that they’re going to be good? I didn’t get the sense that they were going to prey on middle America, but in fact they were finally escaping spring break to return to reality.

I’m a huge fan of the Die Hard series – ridiculous explosions, witty banter and remember the brilliant pairing of McClane and Sammy J in the third installment? The best of the series has always had themes and dialogue that allowed smarter-than-average audiences to allow themselves to enjoy over-the-top explosions and cars set flying into helicopters. But A Good Day to Die Hard only showed audiences that it’s time to let McClane die.

The plot did not engage  – I felt like I had no reason to root for McClane, who was not defending his country, but rather causing chaos in someone else’s. And where in the heck did the son come from? While Die Hard fans all have vague memories of daughter Lucy, who played a prominent role in Live Free or Die Hard, I felt no connection to Jack whatsoever. After watching A Good Day, my fiancé and I had to go back through and re-watch the original to spot a picture of young Jack on his mother’s desk at her doomed office building, at which point, my reaction was, “I GUESS he had a son, but who cares?” (McClane seemed to have a stronger affinity for the pretentious, asthmatic I’m-a-Mac kid in Live Free.)

And I could have gotten over the weak plot had the writers included some high-quality dialogue and decent one-liners, but even the hallmark “yippie-cay-yay mother****er” landed flat after an unremarkable anti-climactic series of explosions that made me seriously question whether the writer had tossed it in as an afterthought.

In fact, throughout A Good Day, I wondered whether the screenplay had originally been a generic action script later poorly repurposed for the Die Hard series, because I left the theater not feeling like I’d seen another great Die Hard movie, but rather just another uninspired action movie.

Josh, I can’t believe how disappointed I am with you! I have agreed with you 90% of the time on your reviews, and the other ten percent of the time I usually find truth to what you say. I am on your side nearly point for point when it comes to Argo and The Impossible. Cedar Rapids IS brilliant comedy and well deserving of your praise and I actually did enjoy (though not as much as you did) Casa De Mi Padre. But your review of Oz, The Great and Powerful nearly made me lose faith in you.

You liked this? Seriously? The CG was so superimposed that you could nearly feel the treadmill under the actor’s feet. There was absolutely no spacial connection between the characters and the scenery. Mila Kunis was not her usually delightful self and delivered her lines with the quality of a high school play performance. Franco was intolerable. Structurally the film was a mess with nearly two first acts, a pathetic ordeal, with a very clunky and anti climatic second act climax. I wasn’t expecting another Wizard of Oz, but I wanted to be swept away and feel the magic, yet all I could see were the very clunky, stubby hands of Sam Raimi.