REEL IMPORTANT

SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS

2012-01-27T03:39:00.001Z

Guy Ritchie’s follow up to 2009’s, hugely enjoyable Holmes escapade, is timed interestingly (coincidentally?) to arrive at almost exactly the same time as the BBC’s second series of Sherlock. Both movie and TV series are resoundingly enjoyable, both fun and interesting in their different interpretations; and this second outing for the Downey Jr / Law partnership is well worth a look.

Downey Jr’s Holmes is a Victorian action hero. If you read that on paper you would think it conceptually brainless, yet it carries itself with enough charm, panache and haughty swagger that you get fully on board with it.

This time around Holmes is tasked with facing off against his greatest adversary. A man whom in the intervening period since the last movie, Holmes has discovered is the focal point for virtually every dastardly crime going. Played by Mad Men’s Jared Harris, Professor James Moriarty is a magnificent bastard. In a superbly villainous turn, the greatest crime on show is his threat to run off with the movie. Some further inspired casting sees Stephen Fry appearing as Mycroft Holmes, providing comic relief and starched shirt pomposity in equal measure.

As the adventure takes them from a train bound for Brighton (woo!), to dense German forests, to the Swiss Alp finale, Robert Downey Jr and Jude law instill enough fun chemistry in it to make a jolly fun ride. Ritchie too, handles it all well despite threatening to overegg the slo-mo at times. It follows on well from the first movie and overall it’s a good, fun caper.

IMDB: Sherlock Holmes : A Game of Shadows

REVIEW OF 2011

2012-01-04T06:52:00.002Z

Ok so it’s time for the old annual review of the year here at Reel Important. The following thirteen films are my favourites from 2011. I couldn’t narrow it down to a Top 10, and the rough order of preference is likely to fluctuate at any given moment. Anyhow, these here are this year’s best to my reckoning. A couple of these have not had reviews on the blog yet, but are likely to follow.

1.    Super
2.    Submarine
3.    True Grit
4.    13 Assassins (a.k.a. Jûsan-nin no shikaku)
5.    Tucker & Dale Vs Evil
6.    Melancholia
7.    Super 8
8.    Beginners
9.    X-Men: First Class
10.    The Trip
11.    Attack The Block
12.    Captain America
13.    Thor

1. Super

James Gunn’s fantastically violent and hilarious vigilante / superhero movie. Left me grinning like an idiot and wanting to watch it all over again the minute I stepped outside the cinema.

2. Submarine

Richard Ayoade’s sublime directorial debut. A hugely enjoyable and funny coming of age story, set in 1980’s Wales. Wonderful stuff.

3. True Grit

Although technically a 2010 release, the Coen Brothers stunning western hit Australian shores in January so qualifies for the 2011 list. A mesmerising central performance from Hailee Steinfeld either side of the excellent Jeff Bridges and the outstanding Matt Damon made this absolutely riveting stuff. It is nigh-on perfection.

4. 13 Assassins (a.k.a. Jûsan-nin no shikaku)
Takashi Miike’s awesome samurai scrap sees the eponymous 13 Assassins sent on a suicide mission to kill a brutal feudal warlord. Thrillingly exciting and joyously violent, Mr Miike considers it a ‘family film’. Despite what he says, don’t take your Nan to see it.

5. Tucker & Dale Vs Evil

Fantastic, funny twist on the college-kids-attacked-by-hillbillies genre. Slipped under the radar of most, yet deserves to be seen by all. Review to follow.

6. Melancholia

Lars Von Trier’s polarising, 2 hour-plus study of a woman with chronic depression, set against the backdrop of catastrophic global annihilation. Dunst, Gainsbourg and Sutherland were all incredible in this movie and I loved it. Review to follow, hopefully.

7. Super 8

JJ Abrams and Steven Spielberg channel Stand By Me, Close Encounters and E.T. and come up with a charming, heartfelt coming of age/creature feature medley.

8. Beginners

Endearing comedic drama following Ewan McGregor embarking on a new relationship in the aftermath of his father’s recent death. Warmed the cockles and tugged the heartstrings without being too saccharine.

9. X-Men: First Class

Rollicking good fun origin story; shifting the excitement meter back into territory last seen in X-Men 2, and helping aid the suppression of X-Men 3 and Wolverine memories.
(I still have a review of this that’s only about ¼ completed. I hope it sees the light of day in 2012)

10. The Trip

BBC TV series pared down to feature length. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon traverse the Lake District in a 4x4, eating in posh restaurants and trying to outdo each other’s Michael Caine impressions (sounds like an Alan Partridge TV pitch!). Gently hilarious. It made me miss the U.K.

11. Attack The Block

Joe Cornish of Adam & Joe fame directs his debut movie, as a bunch of London kids defend their estate from alien attack. Played out as more serious sci-fi than broad comedy, and with a set of principal characters that are largely hard to like, it defied some expectations and garnered some not undeserved comparisons to early John Carpenter.

12. Captain America

Marvel geared itself up for the Avengers with a nifty, Red Skull smashing, WWII winning, origin story spectacle that laid off any distasteful patriotism in favour submarine punching heroics and 1940’s ‘derring-do’!

13. Thor

Flash Gordon-lite as Hemsworth, Hopkins, Skarsgard and Portman make a fine fist of one of Marvel’s less appealing heroes. It’s no Iron Man, but it is another splendidly entertaining entry in the Marvel canon. (Another half finished review lurks, unpublished, on this blog.)

Honourable mentions:

I enjoyed the slow burn adaptation of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood; Snowtown, although very good indeed, just failed to make my list on account of the fact it is so grim I can’t imagine when I would want to sit down and watch it again; Natalie Portman going berserk in Darren Aranovsky’s Black Swan was certainly of note; The Inbetweeners Movie was a fitting swansong, although let’s be quite clear that the whole thing has run its course now; and Rise of the Planet of the Apes soothed away the pain of Tim Burton’s ill conceived remake.

Other films I enjoyed from 2010, too late to make it on to last year's list, included Alexandre Aja’s grisly Piranha reboot; Emma Stone comedy vehicle Easy A, replete with Stanley Tucci scene-stealing; and Sally Hawkins proving that it is flat out impossible for her to make bad film, with the warmly enjoyable Made In Dagenham.

Worst: The Future

I’m not sure that I can properly convey, within the confines of the English language, just quite how much I despised The Future. Having been utterly revolted by it at M.I.F.F. this year, the reviews upon its general release seemed to be largely positive, thereby proving beyond any doubt that people have absolutely no taste whatsoever. It is the nuclear bomb of cinema – humanity wishes it could be uninvented because we are stuck with it and it’s ruining lives. A strong, strong contender for being quite possibly the worst film I have ever seen (bearing in mind that I HAVE seen Crash).

SUSPIRIA / ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS (aka ZOMBIE aka ZOMBI 2)

2011-12-06T05:15:00.001Z

A couple of weeks ago I went to the movies to see a double bill of Suspiria and Zombie Flesh Eaters (aka Zombie aka Zombi 2) at one of my favourite places in Melbourne – the awesome Astor Theatre. I hadn't seen either movie so it was pretty cool to go see both on the big screen, and too good of a double bill to pass up.

First up was horror maestro (and his being Italian I feel that it’s an appropriate use of the word) Dario Argento’s most renowned work, Suspiria. Telling the story of Suzy Bannion, who goes to study at a prestigious German dance academy, only to soon discover the school is run by a coven of occult practicing witches. Although looking a bit dated and a bit odd in places, Suspiria was generally successful in creating a rather unsettling mood. The famous Goblin soundtrack and Argento’s use of bizarre sets in vivid colours, lent an uneasy vibe to the proceedings. The effects and shocks hold up very well and it executed (pun intended) a corking set piece within the first 5 or 10 minutes or so. Addressing its criticisms, it certainly WAS a bit slow and muddled in places and some dodgy acting/dubbing and clunky dialogue mean it wasn't perfect - I'm still not sure I quite 'get' all the uber love for Argento either, but it was certainly an enjoyable watch. The set pieces were very well done and the disturbing Goblin soundtrack was well worthy of its reputation and played a huge part in creating the disconcerting mood of the film. Its general all round creepiness wins out in the end for me though.

Lucio Fulci’s notorious Zombie Flesh Eaters was up next and was generally a lot of fun. Banned in the UK throughout the 80’s as a ‘video nasty’ (alongside the utterly peerless The Evil Dead and the dismal Driller Killer to name but a couple) it ain't winning any plaudits for its acting or bad dubbing (again) but it is an enjoyably hammy gorefest that’s mostly worthy of its fandom. Although large parts of it involved a lot of wandering about and terrible expository dialogue in order to pad out the movie around 3 or 4 action scenes. The scene in the airport departure lounge where they discuss the length of their flight(!!) was, for example, totally unnecessary! So although it felt at times like they were filling space around the set pieces - what set pieces they were!

The story involves the discovery of a zombie on board an abandoned yacht in New York and the subsequent search by the yacht owners daughter and a British journalist, for her father’s whereabouts. Their search takes them to a mysterious Caribbean island. Needless to say the island is discovered to be in the grip of a zombie epidemic and chaos ensues.

In contrast to the rest of the film the major action scenes were handled with an invention and sophistication that was unfortunately lacking elsewhere. The famous zombie vs shark sequence was surprisingly well handled and not at all cheap looking as I had feared. The infamous eyeball v splinter interface was a grisly delight. TOTALLY gross, but REALLY well done; and the zombies climbing from the earth, smothered in worms, featuring zombie POV shots as the soil slides from view were highly entertaining. It also featured a pretty good atmospheric soundtrack during the zombie sequences. Overall it was a heap of gory pleasure and well worth seeing if like me, you’ve never had the chance to see it before.

So to conclude, both Suspiria and Zombie were very enjoyable if not quite up to the measure of their respective reputations. Nonetheless both were good, and there are certainly worse ways to spend a Monday evening than educating yourself on classic Italian horror.

Cool Zombie Flesh Eaters posters by Jock, via Mondo (again!)

TOTAL RECALL

2011-11-03T08:28:00.001Z

I recently came across this footage of the mighty Noothgrush playing in front of a ‘Kuato Lives’ banner, and it reminded me that I had not seen Paul Verhoeven’s ultraviolent Mars-terpiece in a long time. It was due a rewatch. It really does hold up magnificently for a film that is now 20 years old but I really can’t go into this review the way I want to without it being pretty spoiler-y. So if you’ve not seen Total Recall please drop what you’re doing and go see it immediately, and THEN come back and read this.

Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Douglas Quaid, an everyday workaday Joe who has an overwhelming fascination with Mars. The Mars of this future is a dystopian mining colony ruled over with an iron fist by corporate moneybags Vilos Cohaagen (Ronny Cox); fighting a brutal war of attrition against an underground resistance movement lead by the mysterious Kuato. Quaid is nonetheless fascinated by its barren red landscape and rumours of alien technology, so when his wife Lori (Sharon Stone) puts the kibosh on his plans to travel there, he opts for the next best thing in getting some fabricated memories of a Mars trip from the Rekall company. He opts for an adventure package where he plays a spy on a mission to the red planet. Unfortunately the implant process goes wrong and it is discovered that Quaid has already had fake memories implanted. This leads him on a dangerous journey to Mars to recover his own identity and help overthrow the ruthless Cohaagen. But is this all reality or the product of a botched memory implant? The movie plays it uncertain all the way through.

Schwarzenegger is great in his last real hard action role (Terminator 2 was ahead of him still, but this was the last of the real senselessly violent action movies that built his early career – Commando, Predator, Red Heat et al). Ronny Cox plays another corporate bastard villain, just like his menacing turn as Dick Jones in Robocop. He’s a great actor and shares bad guy duties with chief henchman, Richter, played by Michael Ironside who chews the scenery with a seething intensity, and gets his comeuppance in the most memorable scene of the movie. I also noticed, fact fans, that the cast includes Dean Norris a.k.a. Walt’s brother in law Hank from Breaking Bad, playing mutant resistance fighter Tony!

The dvd commentary with Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger is a lot of fun. I confess at this stage I have not sat through all of it, but I put it on for some key scenes as I was intrigued to get their take on what was going on. The film is deliberately ambiguous, but on the talk track Verhoeven states outright that although he purposely filmed the movie to be interpreted either way, he intended for it to all be a dream after Quaid first goes to Rekall. He spells it out - “from this moment on it’s all a dream” - and it’s great to hear them both discuss their experiences and theories on what is a very entertaining commentary. By addressing the ambiguity of the storyline in the commentary it feels like Verhoeven is letting you in on a secret. The dream aspect is not overt in the movie but the filmmaker’s intent is explicit in the commentary. He talks about the scene with Dr Edgemar from Rekall – even admitting the audience will be wanting the story to be ‘real’ and rooting for Arnie. But it’s not! I guess that highlights why the film is great. Verhoeven knows what he’s doing, knows what the film is about, knows what it is that the audience will be thinking and what they want from the film, and he subverts that. He knows we will be rooting for Arnie as the hero of a conventional action flick, and he gives us that; but at the same time if you look closely the clues are all there to show it is merely a delusion playing itself out in Quaid’s mind. But even if you decide to take Total Recall at face value (admittedly a few of the commentary explanations for it being a dream fall a little flat) then that’s ok too by Verhoeven. He’s not too pompous to allow the audience to take it as a straight up action film and provides plenty of good reasons for you to do so.

It is graphically violent. When people get shot the bullets pulp them; Martian police officers get lifted off their feet by gun fire; Arnie skewers a guy in the face with a metal pole; civilians get used as human shields; and the piece de resistance is Richter’s grim elevator demise. If Arnie tussles with a group of bad guys, then every fight scene ends with a visceral aerial shot of the thugs lying in a grisly pool of blood.

For the most part, all of its tech is either perfectly believable or actually starting to appear. Looking at it now the only things that seem outdated are the size of the viewscreens and use of keyboards in the shopping mall scene – who in 1980’s Hollywood could have envisaged flat screens, touch screens and iPads?

Some of the effects, such as the landscapes and spaceships are starting to look a little bit dated, but considering the age of the movie, are really not too bad at all. Most of the other effects – disguises and gore and mutants - still look fantastic in 2011. Rob Bottin (The Thing)’s work strongly putting that young upstart CGI in its place.

Verhoeven used a lot of the same crew that he used on Robocop, a movie that would make for a perfect double bill with Total Recall, and at the risk of sounding like an old fart, they just don’t make ‘em like this anymore. Nowadays it seems all futuristic sci fi has to be explained and their universes have to be put in context by being compared to ours in some way. Whereas in the 70s and 80s you would be just presented with some bizarro future world which the filmmaker just plonked you right in the middle of, and you just had to accept it and discover it as the movie goes along. Total Recall is successful with this and its future is not too far off our own so we don’t have to make too big of a leap.

I would love to see Verhoeven back in Hollywood making movies like this again. After helming such fantastically violent sci-fi as Total Recall, Robocop and Starship Troopers, it’s a proper shame that he hasn’t made a film of its like in years. I want to see more intelligent, violent and above all else ENTERTAINING science fiction from this man (although, let’s not mention Hollow Man at this stage, because that laboured clunker ruins my whole point!).

In conclusion, Total Recall is the last of its kind. A gratuitously brutal 80’s action flick (that technically came out in the 90s) and sci-fi mindfuck all rolled into one. One of Arnie’s last hurrahs before turning his hand to shitty family comedy, dubious right wing politics and tabloid disgrace. It brims with invention and excitement, from story to effects to direction and it just flat out rules. Hard.

IMDB: Total Recall

supercool Mondo poster from 2009 (above) by Tyler Stout.

CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE.

2011-10-17T09:00:00.001+01:00

Cal Weaver (Steve Carell) gets and unexpected surprise at dinner with his wife, and finds himself suddenly in the midst of divorce. Whilst drowning his sorrows in a local bar, ladies man Jacob (Ryan Gosling) takes pity on him and teaches him some tricks of the trade in order to build up his confidence and get him back on the horse, as it were.

Cal does well, but despite it all, is determined to win back his wife, both for himself and to prove to his son, Robbie, that soulmates exist. If it sounds pretty corny… well, it is! But it is nevertheless still a decent two hours at the movies. It pretty much did exactly what I expected of it and its success rests entirely on its cast. With a different set of actors in place it would more than likely have been a duffer. But charismatic performances from Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling, aided and abetted by the ubiquitous Emma Stone, Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, Marisa Tomei and many others make for a flick that starts to exceed the sum of its parts.

It’s not going to change your life, and it is most definitely overlong. But there are some funny moments along the way and it is an enjoyable if thoroughly undemanding 2 hours. (NOTE: from here on in, there are some mild spoilers!)

However, there are some minus points earned. The ending, for starters, is dreadful! Make no mistake, it is turgid, saccharine, vomit inducing dreck. I’m not averse to a happy ending in the slightest, but the horrible graduation ceremony finale of this movie was just completely and utterly cringeworthy.

Additionally I really am not sure what sort of message it was trying to convey when it essentially boils down to approval of some very creepy stalker behaviour. By making Robbie a hopeless romantic, persistent in the face of total discouragement, and the declaration that he is making the object of his affection uncomfortable, it seems to be treading on some very very thin ice in regards to the meaning of the word “No”. You might think that such a light and breezy film as this should not be scrutinised by cold hard reality, and perhaps that is true; but this is a mainstream Hollywood film and by having Jessica (Analeigh Tipton) reward Robbie at the end with some racy pictures, it seems that the filmmakers are flat out condoning some exceedingly unsavoury behaviour.

More often than not, that ought to be enough to direct this film straight to the bin. But overall this film wins through on the strength of its principle cast. There are some great moments - Cal’s awkward first encounter with Marisa Tomei’s unhinged primary school teacher; Gosling’s tutoring of his protégé, a couple of genuinely funny one liners and a really rather well executed and unpredictable story twist. At the end of it, although there were certainly elements that I strongly disliked, I mostly walked away having had a decently enjoyable couple of hours in the movies. It’s Saturday night date fodder, and that’s not such a bad thing sometimes.

IMDB: Crazy Stupid Love

THE TOUGHEST MAN IN THE WORLD

2011-09-30T08:20:00.000+01:00

Mr T’s 1984 made for TV vehicle holds some very fond childhood memories for me, so when chancing upon it for five Australian dollar-y-doos in cult video shop, I really had no choice but to shell out and see if it held up to my rose tinted, halcyon day, jumpers for goalposts memories of youth.

The grim reality of these things is that once again it seems like I paid good money to give my childhood a right pasting. Much like watching repeats of Knight Rider or MacGuyver – you suddenly realise that they were pretty ruddy awful and so long as there are a few explosions and a dumbass one liner, you could pretty much please any kid in the 1980’s….actually scratch that - those are the things I’m STILL looking for in a movie, but it’s the preachy moralising that my brain seemed to have erased from history’s annals. MacGuyver in particular, has not weathered well in the storms of age. His overt mullet-y moralising is too much to bear at 8am when I’m eating my toast and trying to come to terms with the world before me. There are of course a few exceptions to the rule. The real stone cold classics of 1980’s television still stand tall over their peers. The A Team and Magnum P.I. for example, both hold up magnificently

As an aside I am still outright, genuinely OFFENDED that some shitty make up advert used the Magnum P.I. theme to advertise their nonsense. It should be a criminal offense. It’s almost as bad as when the 118 telephone company used the A Team theme on their adverts. I was coming home from work on the bus one day and some ignorant pre pubescent lout referred to the A Team theme as ‘the 118 music’. And did his parents correct him of this artless, ill informed gaffe? No they did not; And therefore it must have been a conscious effort on their part, to raise their child as a cretin; and that ladies and gentlemen is the World that you and I are living in at this very moment. Please feel free to take a second to wallow in the abject horror of that thought.

Now… on to The Toughest Man In The World. Mr T stars as the fantastically named Bruise Brubaker. Ex Vietman Vet, Security Guard and Youth Worker. He helps kids at a local youth club, carries a torch for a hot young lawyer and tries to hide his secret shame of adult illiteracy. It soon transpires that the local Youth Club is to be shut down, and the only way to raise the funds to save it is for Bruise to win the Toughest Man In The World competition. Cue a bunch of Rocky rip –off training montages as Bruise trains hard in order to compete and beat the reigning champion, and villain of the piece, the stupendously named Tanker Weams!! Now my aged memory was clearly playing tricks on me when I sat down to watch this, as about half way through when Bruise competes in the Toughest man HEATS (note: not the actual finals), there is a triumphant sequence that I would have SWORN was the finale of the movie! Ah well they do say the mind is the first thing to go, and rather that than the bladder.

The Toughest Man competition itself is a weird sort of weightlifting and obstacle course combo that looks quite generic to the sophisticated, new millennium, post-Krypton Factor and Gladiators sensibilities of the likes of you and I; but back in those heady days of 1984 it must have looked like the ultimate of all tests. Anyway Bruise wins and therefore has the right to take on the aforementioned Tanker Weams. The movie then descends into some gangster shenanigans as Bruise tries to extricate one of the youth clubs bad (but good at heart) kids from the clutches of the local mob. It all ends with a big warehouse fight where Bruise defeats Tanker. But surely, this being a warehouse fight and all, this defeat would be unofficial. Bruise would not win the prize money for duffing up Tanker in a dodgy Chicago warehouse. Not unless TheToughest Man In The World contest wanted its public to lose all respect for it as in institution. I mean what about ticket sales and merchandising for a start. Imagine all the excited kids who turn up to the arena on the day, only to be told that unbeknownst to them Bruise had already won the title in an unscheduled downtown smackdown. I really don’t think they thought this through properly!

In any case, as you may be able to tell, this movie is not without its charm. Some fond memories did indeed flood back, and for an unashamed A Team and Mr T fan, this is worth a watch. Let’s face it, it was probably better left to my memories, and it clearly is not the movie I remembered it to be. The A Team, and Mr T in particular, was my ABSOLUTE favourite as a kid. And frankly I’m still as big of a Mr T fan now as I was when I was 8 years old so I’m gonna let all that slide!

IMDB – The Toughest Man In The World

SUPER (M.I.F.F.)

2011-09-06T08:55:00.000+01:00

My final film seen at this years M.I.F.F. festival turned out to be the pick of the bunch. Super is 96 minutes of 100% joy. James Gunn’s violent, funny, blackly comic affair delivers on all counts and then some.

Super is the story of Frank (Rainn Wilson), a mildly depressed diner chef, who loses his wife (a recovering addict, played by Liv Tyler) to a shady drug dealing strip club owner (Kevin Bacon). In order to save her and in the midst of his depression Frank decides, with the help of his friend Libby, to become a masked Superhero vigilante. The premise will of course draw comparisons to Kick Ass, but let me assure you that right off the bat, Super is the vastly superior movie. The World it inhabits is our reality. There is no fantasy Gotham-like world here. This is the World outside your door right now. When the Crimson Bolt hits somebody in the face with a pipe wrench, you know that they feel it! The movie is flat out hilarious, and punctuated by bouts of sudden and brutal violence; so it is by turn riotously funny and grimly violent. It has it all, basically.

From the moment it kicks off with a GLORIOUS, kinetic, animated credits sequence, you know that you’re in for a wild ride. It never lets up and left me striding out of the cinema with a grin a mile wide and blabbering like an excited kid.

Super was written and directed by James Gunn, who made the criminally underrated Slither. Slither was for all intents and purposes a fairly shameless ‘homage’ to Night of the Creeps, as alien space slugs invaded the Earth and took control of its inhabitants; but it worked in much the same way as Super does by delivering on both the horror and comedy aspects and managing the tone so it didn’t veer too heavily in one direction.

Cast wise, it couldn’t get any better. Quality all round. Rainn Wilson, who most will know as Dwight from The Office, is superb. Ellen Page as Libby/Boltie is incredible. Together they lynchpin this movie into complete awesomeness. Kevin Bacon turns in a suitably slimey performance as the villan, Jock. Bubbles from The Wire is in it! Nathan Fillion shows up as God bothering television superhero, The Holy Avenger (and is fantastic as always); and Michael Rooker plays an intimidating henchman, as only Michael Rooker can (I wonder if Michael Rooker is that intimidating in real life? Something about his movies always makes me think that he must be!)

I really don’t want to say too much more about what happens in this film, lest it diminish some of the outright DELIGHT this film dishes out. Super never really lapses into genre predictability and there are some real unpredictable surprises in store for those of you that get on board with it. Suffice to say the sight of a man in a home made costume, delivering vigilante justice, one brutal pipe wrench beating at a time is a joy to behold.

Super is the kind of movie that makes you want to rush out and tell everyone how great it was. And if they let me decide the Oscar winners this year, Super will win everything (I’ll even find a way to give it best documentary and best foreign film!).

It would be an absolute fucking epic tragedy if this film ends up living in the shadow of Kick Ass or falling into underrated obscurity like Slither. Go see this film, then make your friends go watch it, and then make THEIR friends go watch it.

On the MIFF rating system I attempted to give this film 10 stars out of 5, but mathematical convention prevented me from doing so. Therefore I had to rate it 5 stars out of 5.

IMDB: Super

THE FUTURE (M.I.F.F.)

2011-08-06T08:14:00.000+01:00

Miranda July’s follow up to the delightful ‘Me You and Everyone We Know’, turned out to be a wretchedly irritating glimpse into the first world problems of a complete dickhead.

As fair warning, I’m not going to have any qualms about spoilers in this review, on account of the fact you can’t spoil a turd, and I’ll be doing you favour by saving you the anguish of having to sit through it.

Pending their imminent adoption of a cat and thus signalling, you know, adult responsibility and shit, Sophie (Miranda July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) start having a mid 30’s crisis and decide to both quit their jobs and stop going on facebook for 5 minutes so they can spend their days doing awkward, pretentious dance routines and go do volunteer work selling trees respectively. Then, somewhere along the line, out of the blue Sophie decides to start an affair with a bloke she met over the phone. She moves in with him, yet continues to be the most pretentiously annoying human being on Planet Earth. There follows a downright bizarre set of sequences where, amongst other things and for no discernible reason, the man’s daughter buries herself up to her neck in a hole she dug in the garden (!!); and then later on Sophie climbs inside an oversized t-shirt and proceeds to prat about doing a stupid dance. Oh and did I mention that the whole thing is narrated by the cat they were due to adopt? Childishly voiced by Miranda July, it’s cloying, saccharine monologues will likely cause the viewer to exhibit feelings of annoyance and irritated rage.

Miranda July’s whole ‘I’m a wacky and unusual creative’ schtick wears real thin, real fast, and her character is just a deeply dislikeable arsehole. I am still unsure as to whether the audience is supposed to be rooting for her character or not, but I really can’t see any reasoning as to why they should. By the time ending trundled into site I was beyond caring about anyone in this movie and was more annoyed with the fact I just wasted 20 bucks on watching such monumental drivel.

So just to be clear, I flat out DESPISED this film.

On the MIFF rating system I gave this film 1 star out of 5, but I would have given it zero if I had been able to.

IMDB: The Future

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN (M.I.F.F.)

2011-08-05T04:45:00.000+01:00

Despite it’s superb premise, and the presence of the frankly wonderful Rutger Hauer in the lead role, Hobo With A Shotgun failed to deliver. The ‘high concept’ storyline revolves around Rutger Hauer’s Hobo of the title, exacting bloody revenge on the lawless criminals of the city and underworld boss The Drake.

Unfortunately Hobo With A Shotgun just didn’t work. Not even as being an enjoyable piece of nonsense. Rutger Hauer has many entrants in his back catalogue that qualify as enjoyable trash – not least the SUPERB Blind Fury, and the entertaining Salute of the Jugger – but Hobo just couldn’t manage it. It looked good; like 80’s video trash. Reminiscent of Street Trash for example, in both acting ability and aesthetic. Some nice touches were in there – I can’t help but feel when the villains put manhole covers around the necks of their victims, it was a cheeky nod to Rutger Hauer’s 90’s action classic, Wedlock – and there was a spirited 5 or 10 minutes in the middle where the Hobo takes up his vigilante crusade and it seemed like things might fall into place.

But despite the gore and the look of the movie, it felt mean spirited. It was nasty, and perhaps that was the intent, but it ended up meaning that there really was no fun at all to be had here.

It felt contrived. Like the dialogue was intentionally terrible. One part in particular, where the Hobo is talking about bears, was excruciating. The script felt like it had been written precisely for hipsters with terrible moustaches and oversized brogues to laugh at ironically.

Most unforgivably of all, it was toweringly unfunny. I’ve nothing against crude or juvenile humour. In fact I positively celebrate it. But just being crude or juvenile does not necessarily make you funny; and that’s the case here. It was a total laugh vacuum.

On the MIFF rating system I gave this film 1 star out of 5. Hobo with a SHITgun.

IMDB: Hobo With A Shotgun

NORWEGIAN WOOD (M.I.F.F.)

2011-08-03T10:19:00.000+01:00

A soulful, beautifully filmed, slow burn, based on the Haruki Murakami’s acclaimed novel. Norwegian Wood tells the story of Watanabe and his love for two girls. One, Naoko, a troubled, fragile spirit from his youth; back in his life and still unable to come to terms with a tragedy that haunts them both; and the other, Midori, an intriguing new love.

It has indeed been a very long time since I read the book, so comparison was hard. What I can say was that the film was excellent. Fully transporting you back to the 60’s, with gorgeous scenery in the Japanese countryside, and it’s captivating storyline, it paints a tragic portrait of grief and love. Nonetheless, I found myself riveted as the story is unfurled.

Sad but ultimately rewarding.

On the MIFF rating system I gave this film 4 stars out of 5.

IMDB: Norwegian Wood

SUBMARINE (M.I.F.F.)

2011-08-02T03:43:00.001+01:00

This was the first Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) movie of the season for me. Having been rejected for their film blog reviews project courtesy of a rather patronising email that misspelled the word 'calibre', I had considered not mentioning MIFF in this review. You might even say that I was a bit... ahem... 'MIFFed' about it! Nonetheless, as you can see from my opening gambit here, I have opted to be the bigger man. Chalk one up for personal growth.

Submarine is the tale of Oliver growing up in a small town in Wales, charting his forays into first love, and his attempts to scupper his mother’s plans to meet up with an old flame. Sounds like a barrel of laughs right? Well it is in fact extremely funny. Beautifully shot and very well made by The IT Crowd's Richard Ayoade (his first feature as a director), it successfully juggles both the comedic and serious tone of the film to get the right balance between humour and melodrama. Similar in a way to how Bunny and the Bull managed to be simultaneously side achingly funny yet also rather touching.

Submarine is narrated from the perspective of central character Oliver, oftentimes with his opinion that his life is a movie. This device had the potential to be a bit trite if mishandled, but this film is so well made and charming across the board that it succeeds triumphantly. Also, unless I am much mistaken, it is a pretty common adolescent fantasy to believe your life is actually a movie. But please all the psychiatrists who read this blog, feel free to correct me.*

The cast is excellent all round, with charisma and likeability in spades. Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige in the lead roles, turn in charming and hugely entertaining performances. Paddy Considine’s character verged on being a bit too silly, but got away with it by virtue of his great comedic turn and the colossal goodwill that this movie conjures.

Noah Taylor was superb. The perfect study of mild mannered melancholy. The sequence about his former job as an Open University TV presenter (“he was an uncomfortable screen presence”) had me bellowing with laughter. And Sally Hawkins was fantastic as Oliver's highly strung mother, Jill.

I LOVED the shit out of this movie. Submarine is a fantastically enjoyable movie all round. This could quite conceivably be the film of the festival, if not the year, for me.

On the MIFF rating system I gave this film 5 stars out of 5.

IMDB: Submarine

* Incidentally I would imagine there are many psychiatrists who would use this blog in a professional capacity in order to study the long term effects of Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull induced trauma. How can a normal, well adjusted man in his early 30’s, 3 years after the fact, still suffer cold sweats, despondency and crippling Indiana Jones related nightmares? The only peace coming in those 2 to 3 seconds after one wakes up in the morning and having the firm conviction that the fourth movie was all a dream. It was another bad dream – Indiana Jones didn’t fight aliens; it was another bad dream – Indiana Jones didn’t survive a nuclear blast; it was another bad dream – they didn’t use Sean Connery’s IMDB headshot as a family portrait when discussing his death; it was another bad dream – Mutt didn’t swordfight a badly accented Cate Blanchett on top of a FUCKING CGI JEEP!. Excuse me, I need to go have a lie down.

TRANSFORMERS : DARK OF THE MOON

2011-07-08T05:00:00.000+01:00

Look here it is, Michael Bay somehow manages to simultaneously represent both the worst and best of cinema with his movies. When he gets it wrong you get lumbered with miserable arse gravy like Armageddon. When he gets it right you get presented with rousing, over the top, bombastic nonsense like The Rock that’s just impossible to dislike. When he’s on form he makes cinema fun. He makes the kind of films that multiplex’s love, and the kind of movies that those who consider their taste to be more refined, love to hate (but secretly love also, and try and make themselves feel a bit better by calling them ‘guilty pleasures’). The first two Transformers movies are total ‘guilty pleasures’ for me! You know what you’re getting with his movies though. Explosions, slo-mo military fetishization and plot holes you could drive a Hum Vee through (provided that Hum Vee is racing at 100mph down a hill in San Franciso, smashing up traffic and destroying trams). Therefore it seems a bit lame to lambast one of his films for being poorly acted, having a shit plot and not providing you with a single likeable character. But damnit that’s what ended up bugging me about Transformers : Dark Of The Moon.

Before we go any further let’s start with the plot, such as it is. A crashed Autobot ship is discovered on the moon and it turns out the moon landings were a cover up for an investigation of the crash site. Soon enough the Decepticons show up and all hell breaks loose as they try to use a ‘space bridge’ to bring Cybertron into Earth’s orbit. Meanwhile Sam Witwicky is living in Washington with a new girlfriend and trying to find a job. So in essence, it’s just a load of old ‘make it up as we go along’ shit; inventing one endless Autobot plot device / ‘mcguffin’ after the other, to try and paper over the cracks and ghastly chasms in continuity between the 3 movies.

Is it unfair to expect a bit more from a film like this? Is it stupid to want a bit of characterisation and decent acting? Or should I just sit back and just enjoy the robot fighting?

Now I know there’s a lot of folk gots issue with Shia LaBoeuf, but I have to say I have always found him to be perfectly likable and fine. Playing the ‘everyman’ seems to be his stock in trade and it suits him. Hell, I didn’t even dislike him in Indiana Jones and Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (car top sword fighting and ‘Tarzan’ swinging aside) and at least he had the stones enough to apologise for it. But man, is he ever dislikeable in this movie. The first half of it is gruelling. Sam Witwicky is just totally whiny and unlikeable and a bit of an all around cunt. I mainly just wanted him to get killed!

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley plays Sam’s new girlfriend Carly. How bad do you think a dim, plummy, English, model turned actress making her debut in a Michael Bay film is going to be? Yes, you’re right. She is THAT bad! She hardly defies expectation but she is still simply bloody awful. She makes Megan Fox look like Oscar material.

Other cast members fare no better. I once read an interview with John Turturro where he talked about turning down a part in The Sopranos, as he looked down his nose at it and spoke as if was beneath him. But just LOOK at what he’s doing now! He returns once again, with his sole undertaking being to stink the movie up! He’s not the only fine actor to have fallen from grace here either. Remember when John Malkovich being in a film used to be a sign of quality? No, me neither. It was sooo long ago. He appears here as Sam’s orange-tanned boss, play fighting with Autobots for comedy pratfalls. The man chronically embarrasses himself. It’s a real shame, is what it is.

Frances McDormand, of all people, shows up as the head of the NSA. McDormand couldn’t turn in a bad performance if she tried. It is simply impossible for her to be anything other than awesome. Leonard Nimoy appears too as the voice of Sentinal Prime and I can’t bring myself to say a bad word about him either. He could have done the whole thing reciting his ‘Ballad of Bilbo Baggins’ and I would still love him.

Alan Tyduk turns up for a bit as Turturro’s bodyguard, and yet another good actor is wasted in a dumbfuck comedy sidekick role, as the whole thing threatens to go completely off the rails and go belly up in a big fat bloated mess.

But then the Decepticons attack Chicago! And Boy Howdy, Bay delivers on the set pieces. In 3D, Bay has slowed down the action, so you have Autobots and Decepticons and flying shrapnel floating tantalisingly above your head in the cinema. It allows you to finally comprehend what the bloody hell is going on in his massively complex robot scraps. And it works so much better for it. There’s a great sequence where Sam is riding in Bumblebee, and Bumblebee transforms from robot, to car, and back to robot while Sam is inside! The fighting has a great clarity when it is slowed down and the assault on the Chicago cityscape is thrilling in its grandiose destruction.

It was fantastic also, to see the appearance of Shockwave! Now when I was but a young lad I used to read Transformers comic rabidly, and on one life defining day I opened the new issue whilst standing in Salmon’s Newsagent, to discover they had printed a letter I had written to them! My enquiring 8 year old mind had written demanding to know how Shockwave could have beaten Megatron in a fight for leadership of the Decepticons, if Megatron was the acknowledged ‘strongest Decepticon’. The answer, of course, was that Megatron had at the time been poisoned by Shockwave with a corrosive fuel allowing Shockwave to narrowly win the fight (this, incidentally, is why Transformers BELONGS TO ME, and not Michael Bay!). Thusly when I first clapped eyes on the mighty Shockwave in this movie there was a total party in my pants. He was awesome.

The action was exactly what you want from this. Total Bay-hem. The building attack sequence with a gigantic Decepticon worm, and the giddy, flight suit set piece were a lot of fun. There is enjoyment to be had here, especially in the second half. Overall though I feel Transformers 3 was decent, but the worst of the three. It had better action, but worse acting. The slow-mo 3D robot beat downs were rather grand in towering Imax 3D, but still, the law of diminishing returns always applies.

IMDB: Transformers : Dark Of The Moon

SUPER 8

2011-06-26T01:51:00.002+01:00

JJ Abrams and Steven Spielberg's Super 8 has been touted around as Stand by Me meets The Goonies meets E.T. via everything else in between, and whilst those movies would seem to be disparate poles apart on the face of it, the reality is that this mash up works really rather well indeed. Super 8 is a great fun adventure ride with a soft, sympathetic centre.

I'll be frank straight off the bat though, I'm no fan of JJ Abrams whatsoever. Cloverfield was fun I admit, but he didn't direct it. His Mission Impossible 3 was boring, I couldn't give a rat's ass about dismal shit like Lost, and his Star Trek reboot (although I have warmed to it on secondary viewings) was a Star Trek movie made for people that don't like Star Trek (i.e. bad to the point of being offensive). Spielberg on the other hand is a different kettle of fish. He’s very easy to knock and take pot shots at, but the geezer knows his onions, and the day I badmouth the man responsible for Raiders of the Lost Ark is the day them pigs start flying! So yes the creative forces behind this have many varying, different degrees of quality between them.

After a poignant opening, we meet Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), son of a small town policeman trying to deal with the premature death of his mother in a tragic work accident. 4 months on from the tragedy and he's being recruited by his movie obsessed best buddy Charles (Riley Griffiths) to help him complete a Super 8 zombie movie over the school holidays in order to eventually enter it in a competition; getting all their mates on board including new friend Alice (Elle Fanning). Alice is the daughter of the man Joe's father holds responsible for his wife's death and so both father's are dead set against their friendship. The kids set to work making their movie anyway, filming after school and in the evenings. One evening they all head off to the train tracks to film a new scene and it at this point the film diverges from one genre to the other. I'd be lying if I didn't say I wasn't curious to see this film without the extraterrestrial aspects. On it's own as a coming of age tale this could indeed have been very interesting and is clearly where all the Stand By Me comparisons are coming from. Nonetheless the alien element is cracking fun and the film is not diminished by it. It's just different, and takes the film off on quite a tangent.

At the train track filming the kids witness a spectacular train crash. In a stunning set piece, carriages are flung far and wide, things explode, and ultimately a rather aggressive alien is unleashed. In the aftermath of the crash they find their school science teacher has a long held secret regarding some top secret government work, and gradually strange things start happening in town. Generators and microwaves and car engines are all stolen and every single dog in the area runs away!

Now from this point on the film is not perfect, but it is above all else a lot of fun. In particular the design of the alien is very uninspired. Looking like a mix of something from Men In Black, and a Transformer it's poorly rendered cgi means the creature leaves little to no impression on the viewer. The anchor of the film is left to be the kids and their friendship, and fortunately this gets us through! That's not to give the impression that everything involving the alien is bad though. There are some cracking set pieces, from the train crash to a bus attack to a suburban war zone; and once the alien was unleashed we feel more like we're in a Spielberg film. There's some classic Spielberg-ian show and tell going on. Show you everything but tell you nothing. A cherry picker scene amongst the tree tops (with an unseen force the other side of the trees being very reminiscent of some Jurassic Park velociraptor interfaces); or the gas station incident with the local sheriff, both straight out of Spielberg’s big book of classics.

There is much fun to be had with Super 8. I saw it on a grim, wintery Friday afternoon. At a loose end with the afternoon off work, Super 8 was the perfect way to spend the time.

Super 8? More like Super Great!

IMDB: Super 8

SNOWTOWN

2011-06-05T01:09:00.001+01:00

Snowtown is the story of notorious Australian serial killer John Bunting and his accomplices, who in the 1990’s murdered 11 people in and around Adelaide, dumping their remains in the eponymous town of the title. It is a brutal and tough film to watch. A grim ordeal in places, but worthwhile overall if you can stomach being in the company of some callous and wretched specimens of humanity.

The film as been accused of being lacking in judgement of its abhorrent central characters, but their actions speak for themselves in some pretty harrowing scenes of torture and murder. While it’s true that the film does have a certain air of detachment, it is not manipulative in the way a Hollywood serial killer movie might be. The filmmakers take up a distanced vantage point for sure, but there won’t be a single person watching this who could take away anything other than revulsion from Bunting’s deeds. The film’s skill is in this detachment. You are complicit in a way - forced to witness the crimes in the same way that Jamie Vlassakis initially is, as he is drawn in to Bunting’s deluded and sickening world.

Make no mistake though, this film does not ask you to sympathise with any of these people. Instead it attempts to show how these crimes could occur. John Bunting is portrayed as a charismatic ‘bloke next door’, popular in the neighbourhood and a father figure to Jamie Vlassakis (excellently played by Lucas Pittaway in his debut role) and his brothers. It’s a chilling turn by Daniel Henshall, who deserves all the plaudits he’s is currently receiving. But even so this charisma masks the true nature of a violent killer, as a warped sense of vigilante justice paves the way for evermore disturbing and escalating homicides.

There is very little by way of expository dialogue. There are no characters rattling off unrealistic summaries of events, and this further lends itself to the feeling of the viewer as eyewitness. Whilst this is an interesting and admirable approach, it is also where Snowtown does falter. Whilst I do always appreciate a filmmaker crediting his/her audience with enough intelligence not to have to spell everything out, Snowtown’s sparseness of exposition leads to some confusing and often muddled elements. As a non-Australian, largely unfamiliar with the crimes of John Bunting and his accomplices, I did lose my way on more than one occasion particularly surrounding the identities of some of the peripheral characters.

Nevertheless, it is resoundingly worth watching, if wholly unpleasant as an experience. It has a seedy, washed out look that helps drag you into the claustrophobic confines of the murder scenes, and the unpleasant mire of the protagonists. As you observe the depths to which human beings can sink, you’re not asked to like it, merely to witness it. While Snowtown is an excellently made and beautifully shot movie, it is not likely to be one that welcomes repeated viewings.

IMDB: Snowtown

THE ART OF DREW STRUZAN

2011-05-04T23:57:00.002+01:00

Ok, here’s a bit of change for this review. It’s not a film this time around, but instead it’s a book. A book about the art of the colossally talented Drew Struzan. A man whose work is so indelibly a part of classics such as Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back To The Future etc, that it would have just been downright wrong if I had not reviewed it. You may think that you don’t know who Drew Struzan is, but let’s rest assured you almost certainly do! You will have seen his work adorning the posters of many of your favourite (and least favourite – Police Academy 4 anyone?!) movies over the years whether you’ve realised it or not.

It would be fair to say that I have been a big fan for many years, and that running the risk of being a gushing fan boy is a bit of a danger with this review. I don’t have enough superlatives to throw at it. I remember vividly, as a kid, STARING at my poster for Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade which hung above my bed and trying to work out if the picture was a photo or a painting. On close examination I noticed the small signature and upon the realisation that this had been PAINTED by a human being my mind was blown!

So here we have in one lovingly presented tome, a collection of Drew Struzan’s masterworks. Running the gamut of a rich and interesting career - in fact, it was only through reading this that I learned he has recently retired. The book is a treat. It is crucially also a great READ! Each piece of work selected for the book has an interesting tale to go along with it. It’s fun indeed to learn that Steve Guttenburg is a big Drew Struzan fan and collector of his work, or that Michael J Fox was thrilled to meet him when they worked on the Back to The Future trilogy. No surprise to learn that Guillermo Del Toro is a fan but nonetheless great to read about how he has the painting for Hellboy hanging in his house.

It kicks off in fine style with an introduction by Struzan’s friend and colleague, the esteemed Frank Darabont. It is fantastic. Darabont pulls no punches when it comes to his assessment of the decline in movie poster quality. It is a cantankerous, profanity laden foreword and benefits hugely from a large dose of the truth and a liberal useage of the word ‘douchebag’. Darabont laments the loss of artists like Struzan. He gives a good piece of his mind as to why movie posters these days are pathetic and, as he puts it, little more than a bunch of floating heads.

The book is presented chronologically and as the years pass, more and more of the passages reflect the fact that Drew’s stunning artwork was used less and less. It’s sad to read, but presents a fascinating, if demoralising insight into the processes of both artist and studio. There is some truly awe inspiring artwork in the latter passages of the book which barely ever saw the light of day. Take for example, the amazing poster for Hellboy. I always ALWAYS wondered why Drew Struzan’s art was never used. Particularly since the Region 1 dvd teases you by using it on the inside booklet. It is magnificent. The greater shame is that the actual poster ‘art’ in the UK (and I hesitate to call it art after reading Frank Darabont’s introduction) was just downright wretched. For my money the poster they used to promote Hellboy ranks as one of the worst movie posters I’ve ever seen. Apparently it was completely a studio marketing decision and not even Guillermo Del Toro, who as a fan of Struzan had commissioned him in the first place, could get the final say on using his painting!

A shame then also, that despite a sweet anecdote about how George Lucas was awed to meet Drew Struzan and was a huge fan, that the covers for all of the most recent Star Wars releases have eschewed Drew’s monumental artwork in favour of yet more photoshopped heads! At least Lucas (or more likely Spielberg) used his artwork for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. At the end of it all, Struzan’s poster was the only worthwhile thing to come out of that whole enterprise. The actual reading of this book therefore, is bittersweet. It’s full of many many fun stories but also, latterly, the charting of his disillusionment and disappointment with the industry, and what it seems was ultimately the reason behind his retirement.

It remains best to focus on the positives, of which there are many. For any fan of Drew Struzan, or any fan of the iconic movies to which he has lent his name this book is an absolute must. For any kid that stared at one of his movie posters trying to get his brain to comprehend if he was looking at a painting or a photo. For anyone with even a passing interest in the art of the movie poster or movies in general, the book is joy. Sit back and just marvel at what an extraordinary talent this man is.

http://www.drewstruzan.com/

SKYLINE

2011-03-30T13:08:00.000+01:00

I first noted Skyline, because I read that the effects house had ditched Battle:Los Angeles in favour of working on this. It got my interest, and so I sought it out. Directed by the Brothers Strause, Skyline is much like their previous movie Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem – it is hugely flawed, but not irredeemably so.

The story revolves around Jarrod and Elaine who arrive in Los Angles to visit old friend Terry on his birthday (Turk from Scrubs, playing Turk from Scrubs). At around 4am these brightly blue, luminescent rays descend from the skies and strike LA at various points over the city. The protagonists swiftly realise it is the beginning of an alien invasion, and have to find a way out of their predicament. With little success, they find themselves confined in their apartment building by the horrors outside.

The problem with Skyline is in its complete and utter lack of any originality. Clearly, unique thought was at a premium in the scripwriter’s house as it plays like a shopping list of derivative sci fi. From The Mist to The Matrix, by way of Independence Day, Cloverfield and District 9, there’s a lot of other people’s ideas on show.

Additionally, one thing I really hate about bad creature features and horror movies is when the villain or monster stops doing whatever it is that makes them fearsome in the first place (there is mild spoiler ahead). For example, they set the aliens up from the start as being able to kill people very easily – with either their mind control rays or fearsome tentacles – so how is it then that a human being is able to wail on one with his bare fists in a big alien vs person punch up? Why doesn’t it just shoot a tentacle at him and kill him? Lame.

However as I mentioned above, although flawed it is not without merit. The effects are great and there are a couple of really cracking set pieces. A chase through the building courtyard and an E.B.E. assault atop the roof provide robust thrills aplenty.

Additionally the alien design MUST have been drawing inspiration (pun intended) from Mike Mignola and John Arcudi’s B.P.R.D. series, in particular the apocalyptic scenes from the Black Flame storyline, as they look to be riffing heavily on the frog design (see picture). This is however a compliment as they look grubbily realistic. The extraterrestrials look great and the effects are largely impressive and cool.

Actor wise, we have the likeable Donald Faison, as mentioned. As well as Eric Balfour who is better known as being the weasel-y guy from Six Feet Under and one of the people who thought that remaking the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a good idea (note: it WASN’T).

Another of the main four is played by Brittany Daniel - one half of the Sweet Valley High tv series twins, of yore. The kind of Californian aryan surfette that you heretofore probably thought existed only in Charlie Sheen’s mind. She was actually pretty good and one of the better actors in this thing.

Ultimately though, the film is marred by the wretchedly abysmal ending that rips off District 9 so badly they ought to be ASHAMED. At the very least they ought to give Neill Blomkamp a writing credit! There is no explanation for what happens at the finale AT ALL, feeling like the movie finished without a proper end and leaving you wondering aloud about what the fuck just happened. It’s lazy and cheap and kind of insulting. What a drag.

What really makes it all a big fat shame is that Skyline was self financed by the Strause Brothers. It’s an admirable approach and sounds much like the way in which the criminally underrated Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow was conceived. But whereas Sky Captain was a lovingly seasoned homage to the likes of the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon movie serials, Skyline scoffs too much off the plate of its forbears. To go to such great lengths and means of making the film in this way should be applauded, but I just wish that the story had been there to back it up.

Despite all this, and some dodgy acting, the effects are top notch and mean that it does remain mostly watchable. Even while it’s shameless pilfering of better sci-fi is brazenly shoved in front of you, it has just enough enjoyable moments in it to make it worth a watch. And given time, it could even become a guilty pleasure.

IMDB: Skyline

BLACK SWAN

2011-03-23T12:10:00.000Z

When I initially walked out of the cinema, I really wasn’t sure what to make of this. There were aspects of this bleak ride that I loved, coupled with a less tangible element that didn’t sit right for some reason. However the movie definitely stayed with me over the proceeding days and the more I think back on it and ponder it, the more I think it really was rather good.

The story focuses on ballet dancer Nina Sayers. Technically gifted yet emotionally stunted, she lives at home with her domineering mother and dedicates every waking hour to perfecting her craft. Her mother’s suffocating presence is revealed to be the result of both her vicarious desire for Nina’s career and Nina’s own troubled, self harming past. After years of dedication, she finally gets her big break as the lead in the company’s newest production of Swan Lake, but as she struggles with the part of the eponymous Black Swan the pressure begins to mount on her already brittle psyche.

I am still unsure about Aronovsky as a director (thankfully his Robocop reboot has been shelved), and the beginnings of the movie did nothing dissuade my misgivings. It was all shaky cam and ridiculously hard close-ups, which I hope was employed to signify Nina’s edgy, ill at ease personality, rather than as a stylistic choice. If the former, then I think I can eventually get on board with it; but if the latter, then it was just flat out annoying.

There were moments where the dialogue was risible - Thomas’s homework instruction to Nina, that she go home and engage in a spot of onanism felt like it came straight out of a Shannon Tweed movie. Although in fairness I would say that was a blip, because for the most part the acting was uniformly excellent. To be honest if Vincent Cassell and Natalie Portman have ever been anything less than great, then I’ve yet to see it. In the light of it’s Oscar glory, whatever else you might say about this film, you can’t deny that Natalie Portman is sensational, making Nina’s fragility utterly sympathetic and centring the movie with a crucial believability.

Mila Kunis, quite aside from being totally swoonsville, was also excellent as Nina’s friend/rival Lily. You’re never meant to be quite sure of her motives or if she is genuine or not. And at it’s core it’s this ambiguity throughout the main body of the film that makes Black Swan an interesting watch.

It's dark and tormented, and ultimately that's what won through for me.

IMDB: Black Swan

SHIT PASS

2011-03-08T13:03:00.000Z

Ok, well first of all my feelings of shame at having sat through this tofurkey, make me feel like I need to justify why I went to see this in the first place! Basically it was playing at a Drive-In and we were caught up in the excitement of the Drive-In movie experience. We wanted a light hearted flick that we wouldn’t have to concentrate on too much. And boy did we ever get that.

Additionally it had allegedly been reviewed in a local paper as moving beyond its clichéd premise. And it is at this point that I should point out that the story was as utterly hackneyed as is possible to get. At no point whatsoever did it even dare to suggest it might move away from its thoroughly leaden and predictable direction

I should point out also, that I am a fan of the Farrelly Brothers masterpiece – Dumb and Dumber. I am also fond of There’s Something About Mary. But their early promise has curdled in the intervening years and here we are left with this wretched affront to cinema.

The plot – such as it is – involves Owen Wilson and his odious best friend receiving a ‘week off’ from their respective marriages in order to try and seduce women and supposedly get all of their letching out of their system. Cue two tedious hours of shittery, with lots of awful ‘the difference between men and women’ type humour, the likes of which you would ordinarily see spewing from the fat mouth of the worst kind of ‘Saturday-night-on-ITV’ comedian. The kind of lowest common denominator mirth that appeals to divs because ‘hey my wife/girlfriend/husband/boyfriend does that too! It’s so true”. You get the picture. Then, after the movie is done insulting you with the worst kind of Michael McIntyre jokes, it devolves into some utterly saccharine ‘we love our wives after all’ bullshit and you sit there feeling nauseous because you just wasted 10 dollars and a valuable part of your 30’s, that are just whizzing by at light speed, and can ill afford to be wasted on dreck like this.

In the spirit of full disclosure I should admit that it was not entirely unfunny. There were one or two amusing moments – such as Owen Wilson’s cack handed attempt at a chat-up line. The movie also ends with a superb Stephen Merchant sequence which I won’t say anything about lest I spoil the only pleasure this movie has to offer. My advice, if you MUST go see this, is just pop in at the end and watch the last 2 minutes.

Talking of Stephen Merchant, whilst it is indeed nice to see him getting some recognition, he is well and truly slumming it here. And what’s more, he’s not the only one. Owen Wilson co-wrote Rushmore for goodness sake! The same man who is partly responsible for the peerless The Royal Tenenbaums also starred in this piece of shit. Just let your brain process that one for a second, and try not to implode.

Also worthy of note is the presence of Leon from Curb Your Enthusiasm, which on the face of it, ought to be dynamite having him in a Farrelly Brothers movie. Disappointingly he is given nothing to do and after a while you just plain forget he’s in it.

Finally we come to Jason Sudeikis as the sidekick/best friend character. I have no idea who he is. Never seen him in anything before, but IMDB reliably informs me that he was in 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live. Frankly he is a disaster. He simply does not have the charisma to pull it off. Where he should be at least slightly sympathetic in order to get you board for his crude gags, he is merely obnoxious. One hundred percent dislikeable and he never gets back on track.

You can tell how appalling it is going to be by the movie poster. In Drew Struzan’s book (which I hope to review here imminently) he laments the loss of the movie poster as a piece of artwork, replaced as it has been, by a series of floating heads put together by a suit with Photoshop. The poster to Hall Pass is the embodiment of this argument. I mean just LOOK at it! Look at how little effort or thought has been put into this poster. I mean it is just absolute fucking NOTHING. And lo, so is the movie.

Ultimately I don’t suppose you can criticise a film for doing pretty much what you expect of it. But you can certainly criticise all the jerkweeds who conspired to have it made in the first place. The fact that this film can be made at all boggles the mind and if you’ve ever seen Idiocracy then you will know the World has just moved one step closer to seeing ‘Ass’ actually get made!

IMDB: Hall Pass

STREET TRASH

2011-02-09T01:52:00.000Z

Another slice of 80’s trash horror that I was very keen to see. I mean what’s not to like about the premise: liquor store owner discovers box of cheap booze called Viper in the basement, sells it to tramps, tramps drink it, tramps melt. On top of all that, check out the fantastic t-shirt design (from Fright Rags), below.

All signs point to awesome.

How had I not seen this before? Well as child there was many a coveted movie staring down at me from the shelves of Flickers video store that I was unable to rent due to overly responsible parenting. C.H.U.D. springs to mind immediately (and is next on my list of 80’s horror to watch!), and at the time of Street Trash’s release in 1987 I would have been 11 years old. I doubt I would have been allowed to watch it, bearing in mind I was not allowed to see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when it came out at the cinema because of the bit where Mola Ram pulls a geezer's heart out of his chest. I had to go see popular-youth-fad-cash-in flick BMX Bandits instead (which incidentally was rather good, and my brother actually watched it every single day for an entire year when we had it on video). But I digress, I was refused rental of Die Hard 2: Die Harder when I was but mere months shy of my 15th birthday and it would therefore have been a complete no hoper attempting to rent this.

So here we are. The year is 2011. How will Street Trash hold up when viewed through my cynical new millennial eyeballs? The answer, unfortunately, as is often the case with these things, was that it was a bit of a disappointment.

For starters, the main problem is that not many people actually melt! Which is a bit of drag considering that’s the main draw of the film. Don’t get me wrong, when folk do actually come a cropper at the end of a bottle of Viper, it’s undoubtedly a lot of gloopy fun. The yuppie who walks under a fire escape and meets a sticky end via a faceful of liquidised tramp, is a particular highlight of the movie. But because the main meltings are left to bookend the story, we are left with a very limp middle. In fact it’s just plain boring. Focussing on unsympathetic main characters, an annoying cop and a bizarre villain in the shape of homeless Vietnam vet, Bronson.

It is without a doubt, exceptionally badly acted across the board, which in and of itself is not always so bad. Often with a movie like this it is the nature of the beast. However Street Trash suffers with it because the middle part of the film doesn’t have much of any interest going on, drifting on more than one occasion into general incoherence. In the same way that many movies today have every single minute plot detail SPELLED OUT for the thickos, it seems a fair few 80's flicks were the polar opposite in their need for a tad more exposition.

The thing that really spoils Street Trash though is that it sports a disturbing line in casual misogyny. Be it the supposedly ‘humorous’ sexual bullying from a fat man, or some necrophilia in the aftermath of a rape/murder, played for comedic effect (no lie!) and telegraphed by some jaunty bassoon music!!! It’s very dodgy indeed, and what I’m sure was probably intended as some sort of bad taste, boundary pushing outrage/humour manages to fail on just about every level, leaving a pretty sour taste and coming across as generally nasty which is tonally out of whack with the rest of the film.

As for the good points, well it started well, and excluding the points made above, it ended well also. There were some great, fun, melting effects and the final scenes with Bronson actually showcased some skill, imagination and ability on behalf of the film makers!

I think the other thing to bear in mind when revisiting or (re)discovering these movies is what I am going to call ‘Reanimator Syndrome’. There is likely to be nothing to top Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna masterpiece of black humour and sensational gore. Reanimator is pure glorious excess. The nadir of the genre, and the benchmark against which all splatter and gore must, in my opinion, be judged. You may say Braindead, and I would strongly argue that it is not a patch on Reanimator, and you might say The Evil Dead, and I would have to concede you have a point and that is also a worthy yardstick. But the point I am making is that if Reanimator is a majestic, throbbing boner of a movie, then Street Trash is pure erectile dysfunction.

File under: 'glad I've seen but would not watch again'.

IMDB: Street Trash

PIRANHA

2011-01-21T02:35:00.000Z

Ok so Alexandre Aja’s take on Joe Dante’s 1978 ‘classic’ Piranha arrived in glorious 3 Dimensions, with a sterling cast, but after the disappointment of Aja’s last directorial outing, Mirrors, the question was “does it deliver?”. And the answer is “Yes…in spades”

Casting ones mind back to my very first introductory post to this blog, in October 2009, one might notice my comment bestowing a high approval rating on Alexandre Aja, ranking him alongside other such luminaries as Carpenter and Raimi. An upstart for sure, with only a handful of films under his belt, but what films they are, sir. For my money Alexandre Aja is a properly exciting horror filmmaker. Enthusiastic in the way that all great nerds-come filmmakers need to be, and possessed of the ability to make some truly brutal and shocking cinema. The scares in his movies are not cheap, loud, noisy whizbangs, but skilfully crafted moments of tension punctuated by sudden and graphic violence. Switchblade Romance was an eye opener. A gruelling assault on the viewer, with its international title - High Tension (a.k.a.Haute Tension) - being thoroughly apt. The Hills Have Eyes laughed in the face of the principle that all horror remakes and sequels suffer from the law of diminishing returns. It was a truly worthwhile remake. Unfairly pigeonholed alongside such total and unmitigated shit like Hostel, and all that ‘torture porn’ nonsense, it could easily be overlooked were it not for the fact it is an uncompromisingly brutal, violent and scary horror film. So yes, despite the slight misstep with the aforementioned Mirrors, it would be safe to say I am big fan of Monsieur Aja.

But Piranha was a bit of an unknown quantity. I confess that despite also being a big fan of Joe Dante, I have never seen the original Piranha in its entirety. Coupled with the fact that the Piranha effects in the trailer looked far from the finished article, and I admit there was some scepticism creeping in before I sat down and watched this.

I should not, however, have worried. Piranha is just total glorious trash in the best possible sense of it all. I am a big, big fan of the 'creature runs amok' genre, be it Lake Placid, Alligator, Jaws, the Godzilla movies, Digby The Biggest Dog in the World or even Cloverfield. That stuff is like catnip to me. I cannot resist. And Piranha is thusly a worthy addition to the oeuvre. The plot is slight – earthquake awakens prehistoric Piranhas. Piranhas eat tourists. Local cop must stop them. But frankly who cares about the plot? This is a chance to see every horror movie excess taken up to eleven. Be it nudity or gore, it’s all here and it’s all gloriously O.T.T.

Fun cameos abound from Richard Dreyfuss, Eli Roth (whom I despise, yet it’s undeniably fun seeing him get his comeuppance), and CHRISTOPHER LLOYD - hamming it up and channelling the spirit of Doc Brown in a manic turn as a local pet shop owner. To clarify, Christopher Lloyd can do no wrong in my eyes. But where has he been? I’ve not seen him in a movie for ages and it is another of Piranha’s many plus points to have him lending his kinetic, hyperactive presence to the proceedings.

There is also a great irony, which I only realised after the movie had ended, where Richard Dreyfuss’ character more or less recreates a famous scene he was in from Jaws, but in reverse!

I also do not believe that there is another actor working today who can play an utter douchebag as well as Jerry O’Connell. The man just oozes fuckwittery, and has the kind of face that must act like a magnet for punches. He is every American Jock and British Reebok wearing, up-for-a-fight town centre Saturday night pisshead you’ve ever seen in your life, all rolled up into one oily cunt of a human being. It is almost unthinkable to reconcile the fact that he once plied his trade as the fat kid in Stand By Me or as the goody two shoes Quinn Mallory in the excellent, but underrated sci fi series Sliders, with the fact his bread and butter nowadays is playing a shitheel.

Some weight is lent to the yarn by having a bit of quality in there. Elizabeth Shue and Ving Rhames are on board as the hero cops and both are great. Nobody in the film plays it like it’s beneath them, or that they are slumming it, and bit parts are filled out with quality b-movie actors like Dina Meyer; And perhaps most shockingly of all, beyond even any of the gory set pieces Aja can set up, is that Kelly Brook is NOT terrible!

The movie succeeds on all fronts. The set pieces and the gore are grisly and the special effects hold up even in 2D. It’s a movie designed as exploitation – exploitation of nudity and gore, and also of technology. It exists to take advantage of the 3D and show it off in the most base and tasteless ways possible. In case you’re mistaking that oxymoron for a criticism, then rest heartily assured that it is not. It is solid gold trash! Low brow fun of the HIGHEST order. My only regret is that I did not catch this in 3D at the movies. If there is any possibility for you to see this flick in 3D then I would highly recommend it, because as good as it was, in 3D it would have been amazing.

IMDB: Piranha

REVIEW OF 2010

2011-01-14T01:55:00.001Z

Ok ok, so with the end of another year it’s time to take stock and evaluate (apparently). So here goes with my list of the best (and worst) films from the past year. Some of these beauties are reviewed elsewhere on here, some are likely to be forthcoming, and others were just too darn good for words/awful to speak of (translation: I can’t be arsed to review them).

I should definitely have written a review for Boy, because it is a fantastic movie and I utterly loved it. To have not reviewed yet, does not sit well, as it’s defeating the point of the blog to have not written about a film I enjoyed that much. Monsters too should have got a write up after I saw it during the Melbourne International Film Festival (M.I.F.F), but I plum ran out of time. Red Hill is on my reviews agenda.

Anyway onward and upward. 2010 was a good yield overall. I couldn’t pare the list down to 10 so I’ve gone with my top 14 for 2010 in, more or less, descending order (subject to random changes of mind and/or alterations on a whim).

1.    Scott Pilgrim Vs The World
2.    Tron: Legacy
3.    Iron Man 2
4.    Red Hill
5.    Bunny and the Bull (didn’t come out until 2010 in Australia, so I’m including it)
6.    Boy
7.    Monsters
8.    Lemmy
9.    Avatar (late 2009 so I’m including it)
10.    Machete
11.    Animal Kingdom
12.    The American
13.    Four Lions
14.    Predators

Honourable mentions for the movies that just missed out on the top list by a gnat’s cock are:
Hot Tub Time Machine,
The Road,
The Concert.

The disappointments (enjoyable, but not as good as they should have been):
Extract (As a HUGE Mike Judge fan, this left me very cold),
The Expendables and
Kickass.

The shit worst:
The A Team. Displaying a COLOSSAL lack of respect for the original series – from Liam Neeson bad mouthing it in interviews, to lack of theme tune. It missed the point wholesale on just about everything that made The A Team great. Sharlto Copley was admittedly a great Murdock, but otherwise, fuck this movie.

And finally…
Those not included, because I still need to see them:
Piranha,
Easy A,
Winter’s Bone,
Toy Story 3,
Inception,
The Infidel a.k.a. The Reluctant Infidel

SOLOMON KANE

2011-01-12T04:13:00.004Z

I had wanted to see Solomon Kane because I read that it was a bit like Krull!; and true enough I could see some similarities in a bunch of no-mark British actors stomping through a fairly predictable sword and sorcery plot against some black pupil-ed villans! Although that makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy it, when in actual fact it was rather entertaining. Drawing inspiration from Hammer Horror, set in a frosty, pea soup England and starring James Purefoy in the title role of repentant devil Solomon Kane - looking more than a little bit like a limey Hugh Jackman from Van Helsing, as he stomps around with long hippy hair, jet black cape and a wide brimmed hat.

Based on Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan The Barbarian – thank you very much Wikipedia!) ’s pulp novels, Solomon Kane is a formerly violent and evil man, seeking redemption for his sins having discovered his soul – promised to the Devil – is damned. Choosing a non violent path to penitence, Solomon is befriended by an emigrating family, but slowly drawn back to his violent days of old as Meredith, the daughter of the family is kidnapped by the forces of the evil Sauroman-lite sorcerer Malachi!

Solomon Kane is a pretty well made, enjoyable fantasy movie with some nice special effects and a cracking opening sequence in medieval North Africa. Despite a fairly generic plot it remained heartily entertaining and served up one or two unexpectedly pleasing moments of darkness.

In the minor complaint dept. I felt the hunting montage as Solomon goes after Malachi’s forces was a little cack handed. It was a little too muddled and didn’t give the feeling of passing time. One of the Devils Creatures was also a little to close in design to LOTR’s Balrog mixed with the Golden Army from Hellboy 2. Additionally after Solomon tooled up and hit the road I was left wondering where he got his pair of pistols from?!

Performance wise it featured the ever reliable Pete Postlethwaite, of whom I have been a big fan of ever since his sterling turn as the slimy Obadiah in the Sharpe series! He played the father of the emigrating family who take in Solomon, and he is great value as always.

Max Von Sydow elevates the proceedings with a small-ish role as Solomon’s father, and for fellow Star Trek nerds like me it was cool to see Borg Queen Alice Krige playing the mother of the family.

The denouement was pretty much as predictable as they come and easily guessed, but that’s not such a bad thing in a flick like this. On the plus side I found it very entertaining to be watching a largely British fantasy movie, set in a World of demons and magic, doing its own thing; and it felt like perhaps Krull isn’t too bad of a comparison. I also thought it nodded its stove pipe hat toward Lord Of The Rings and maybe even Willow on occasion!

There’s overtly a bit of Hammer Horror in there and although it’s not perfect – a little light in the plot department, and I felt perhaps Solomon Kane was a little bereft of the necessary gravitas – it was a largely enjoyable watch, and as far as recent movies in this genre go, it was waaaaay better than the Clash Of The Titans remake! Let’s have a sequel please!

IMDB: Solomon Kane

Subsequent to my writing this review (which I penned back in December), the sad news arrived regarding the passing away of Pete Postlethwaite. As noted above, I was a fan, and so it would be remiss not mention how great of an actor he was. Whether he was Sharpe’s arch nemesis, playing The Usual Suspects for saps, hunting dinosaurs in The Lost World, or slumming it in Clash Of The Titans he was always a reliably great presence. One of my favourite roles, like many folk I’m sure, was in Brassed Off – a wonderful film and no mistake. One other thing is resolutely certain – cinema is far, far poorer without Pete Postlethwaite. R.I.P.

TRON : LEGACY

2010-12-23T02:31:00.002Z

Ok then, allow me – if I may – to set my stall out right from the start. I am unashamedly a Tron fan. This movie and I go waaaay back. This is another meaningful part of my childhood right here. When I was but a young lad in short trousers I owned a Tron duvet cover that was scientifically calibrated to be ‘100% awesome’. It had a picture of Tron on the duvet and lightcycles on the pillowcase. I wish I still had it. My friend, Nick Osbourne, had a fantastic LED Tron game. It played 3 different games on it which was high tech for them days! You could play a lightcycle race, the disc game and finally attempt to defeat the Master Control Program. It was the height of coolness (Nick also had a ‘Snoopy Tennis’ game which likewise very cool but that’s a story for another time). I also purchased the hardcover TRON storybook from Salmon’s Newsagent, and although I am currently unsure of its precise whereabouts, I must faithfully assume it is still somewhere in my parent’s house on account of the fact I have never authorised it for release to either charity shop nor car boot sale. It depicted the movie in storybook form complete with half page and full page stills from the film. In those heady days before the internet and dvd those movie storybooks were the next best thing and I loved them.

Anyway, having been irreparably harmed by The Phantom Menace, and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (it’s been two years but I’m still not over it. The pain is still raw) I was excited, yet subconsciously prepared for another such childhood ruining incident. I am therefore incredibly pleased to report that Tron: Legacy was GREAT!!! It was, in the words of Kevin Flynn, "Bio Electric Jazz". It was a party in my EYES and everyone was invited!

In 1989 Kevin Flynn disappears on his way to work. Leap to the present day and his son, Sam Flynn, now the absentee CEO of ENCOM, answers a mysterious page from his father’s office. Investigating the source he finds himself beamed into ‘The Grid’ where he must try to survive and bring home his trapped Father.

I have read differing reports since this came out. Most of the negative criticism revolving around the plot (or lack thereof), but I really don’t know what people were expecting. Reading the inanities of some fool on Aint It Cool News complaining that Jeff Bridges was too Lebowski-like, or missing the point of the cameo/in joke that was Cillian Murphy/Edward Dillinger, I came to realise the review really was just a big fat waste of the internet. Some people are destined to never be happy and completely miss the point of things. Perhaps Tron: Legacy will follow the path of the much maligned, yet criminally underrated Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow. Another stunningly beautiful film that makes up for minor plot flimsiness with a wealth of style, attractiveness and downright coolness that most other films can only ever pine after like a kicked dog.

I confess though, I was seduced by the visuals. But isn’t that the POINT of Tron, to a degree? I thought the design and the effects were jaw dropping, yet I relished the little details too, like the slightly distorted computer-y vocal effects, or Clu’s sidekick who looked like a cross between Lobot and one of the baddies from The Last Starfighter.

Jeff Bridges was great as always. Kevin Flynn is an idealistic old hippy and therefore you can't fail to think of The Dude. I admit when he faced off against Clu I was half expecting him to say "Well, yeah that's just like, your opinion, man"!! The CGI generated, fresh faced Jeff Bridges also worked remarkably well as Clu. Seeing as how Clu was a computer generated character within The Grid, the slightly unnatural look to him worked nicely. Garret Hedlund was solid as Sam Flynn, and Olivia Wilde mooned around for 2 hours with big doe eyes and an angular haircut and made every Tron nerd’s heart and brain explode simultaneously. Michael Sheen was superb as the Bowie-like Castor/Zuse. Stealing every scene he was in, and clearly having as much fun making the film as I had watching it.

Seeing Tron: Legacy in 3D IMAX, you really get the full benefit of how utterly STUNNING this movie looks. It made me feel a bit like the pretentious kid from American Beauty watching a plastic bag swoop around a car park on the wind. Just stop for a second and appreciate how incredible this film looks! Seeing Gem (Beau Garrett)’s mesmerising, spandex clad bum, on a screen that was seven storey’s high (the 3rd largest in the World, no less) makes you realise what a wonderful World we live in. As the boffins toiled away for many moons (no pun intended) to develop the 3D technology, I wonder if they could ever have envisioned how it would have been put to such perfect a use as this. I’m sure you will join me next year in putting forward the names of those scientists for a Nobel Prize nomination. Humanity as a whole benefits from this.

From the moment the titles rolled, I was down with this movie. When the Lightcycles appeared for the first time I was grinning from ear to ear like a lunatic. The Daft Punk score is killer. Perfect almost. They put in a cameo at Castor’s sexy computer party, and channel the long lost mojo of John Carpenter. If there is any doubt from you at this point, let me spell it out: this is an exceedingly wonderful thing!

(As an aside I like to think that perhaps John Carpenter lost his movie mojo after going for a swim. Having completed his last great work, They Live, he popped into the local council swimming baths on the way home to do a few lengths. Having towelled off, dried his wavy 80’s lion hair, and sculpted his Fu Manchu moustache into its proper glory, I conceive that he got up to leave taking the wrong bag home with him! Instead of the bag containing his movie mojo, he returned home with someone’s wet swimming trunks and has, for the last 20 odd years, been making movies with a pair of damp speedos in the stead of his own raging cinematic genius. It would explain a great many things. Quite how this happened however, we can never be 100% certain. I like to think he picked up a similar looking, but incorrect bag. Perhaps it was the type of standard issue waterproof duffel bag we were issued in primary school. Perhaps it had a picture of a footballer on the front in order to make it more exciting. Whatever actually happened, it means John Carpenter’s mojo may still be in that municipal pool. Perhaps chucked on top of a locker by a school bully, or resting peacefully at the bottom of the changing room urinal alongside a solitary, moulded stud, Gola football boot.)

Finally I liked how it was titled Tron: Legacy and not something dreadfully unimaginative like Tron 2. Whenever there is a dismal numerical sequel title (hello ‘Die Hard 4.0’), all I can ever think about is Saul Rubinek’s quote from True Romance: “I have more taste in my penis”!

The title also helped the movie feel, not like a sequel, but like an extension of the story. The whole thing looked top to bottom phenomenal, and as a sequel, even though the story wasn't the strongest, it WORKED in the context of the first and didn't feel cheap! It was refreshing to see some last vestige of my childhood movie love not shit upon for a change, as well as being thoroughly enjoyable all round.

IMDB: Tron : Legacy

BUNNY AND THE BULL

2010-12-10T11:28:00.002Z

This is a real gem of a film from director Paul King, whose work on the Mighty Boosh seems to have served, rather unfairly, as the main marketing point for this movie. There’s some Boosh styled silliness for sure and Noel Fielding and Julian Barrett provide laughs in some excellent supporting roles, but any comparisons would be misleading because the film is a warm, funny, inspired vision that is equal parts as amusing as it is poignant; and it should be judged very much on it’s own inventive merits.

It’s a tale told in flashback by Stephen, a lonely shut-in, recounting his travels around Europe with best mate Bunny, and Eloisa the fiery Spanish waitress they meet along the way. Essentially the film is a journey around Stephen’s mind with fantastic flourishes of imagination – a seafood restaurant is quite literally sketched out behind them, a horse race rendered in Captain Pugwash styled animation, or the fearsome bull of the title depicted as a stomping, snorting, stop-motion amalgamation of cogs and scissors. This is a visually stunning movie with a great heart, and it’s a story well told.

It is also, crucially, very funny. Some great cameos abound, from Noel Fielding’s Spanish bullfighter to Julian Barrett’s disturbing canine obsessed hobo. With Richard Ayoade’s fantastically mundane Shoe Museum guide being the real standout.

There’s a nod to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as we traverse Simon’s memories and as a comparison, Eternal Sunshine stands as good one. Both movies blend the laughs and tears of the downtrodden hero to good effect.

In trying not to give away too much, it becomes hard to give away anything at all. Although the movie is best approached that way, it may explain why it was a hard sell. Bunny and the Bull is a film that defies categorisation – is it a comedy? Is it a tragedy? The answer is both. It moves effortlessly between being deliriously funny and genuinely touching poignancy. But the most important thing to take from it is joy at a film basking in inventiveness and creativity. They have crafted a beautiful, humorous tale without straying into either weak humour nor maudlin heart-string tugging. We have a film setting out to be original and unique and largely succeeding on all counts.

This film is warm, funny and inspired and deserves to be seen by anyone craving an example of film with boundless humour and imagination. For my money, it’s one of the films of the year. Wonderful.

IMDB: Bunny And The Bull

THE AMERICAN

2010-11-16T07:49:00.000Z

Directed by Anton Corbijn (who made the excellent Joy Division biopic Control) and starring George Clooney. The American is a very slow burn take on a conventional assassin-tries-to-leave-life-of-crime-behind movie.

It’s a slow, tense and arresting movie. After a stunning opening sequence, from which you feel like almost ANYTHING could happen, we follow Clooney’s ‘American’ into hiding in a small Italian town. The slowness of the film works very nicely from here on in, ratcheting up and grinding out the tension toward the movie’s inevitable finale.

In parts it is reminiscent of The Day of the Jackal, as Jack/Edward (Clooney) slowly constructs and tests the weapon he is building. His assassin’s life is one of meticulous solitude, and Corbijn makes the construction of this fearsome bespoke weapon look like beautiful craftsmanship in the hands of a master artisan.

Clooney’s character is a total blank. By the end of the movie we know virtually nothing more about him than we did at the start, other than a few (mostly implied) base facts. We learn early on that he is a solitary man, who will make the necessary hard decisions in order to keep things that way. However as he whiles away the days in the sleepy Italian town, his final job seeing him fashion a weapon in isolated seclusion, against his better judgement he finds himself with not only a friend, in the shape of the portly local priest; but also a super hot Italian sexpot girlfriend (Violante Placido) who lives her life with a typically Euro ‘clothes optional’ outlook.

Anton Corbijn has, unsurprisingly, a great eye for the visual. Whether the camera is lingering on Clooney’s impressive exercise regimen, peering through a car windshield at a motorway tunnel for a striking credit sequence, or taking in a bird’s eye view of the stunning Italian landscapes - like a feature film version of the ‘Earth From Above’ book – the film is quite often fantastic to look at. If the story itself is perhaps a tad generic – hitman trying to leave ‘the life’ – then it is done with a panache that renders any genre staples as merely minor concerns.

Some berk in the cinema loudly denounced it as ‘shit’ the minute the credits rolled, but the more I think back on this movie, the more I like it. It’s almost like an art house action movie! For all of it’s slow pace, the attention never wanders, and at the end of it we are left with an enigmatic, stylish take on the hit man movie.

IMDB: The American

SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD

2010-10-07T13:29:00.000+01:00

Let us be clear from the start. George A. Romero can rightfully lay claim to the status of ‘legendary’. His peerless, stunning, horror-classic triple whammy of Night Of The Living Dead, Dawn Of The Dead and Day Of The Dead have him rightfully revered across the globe. Those films are every bit as good as their reputation would have you believe and he should rake in the plaudits for the rest of his natural life and beyond.

Something, however, is rotten in Denmark. Land Of The Dead was a towering disappointment. Diary Of The Dead was one of the most turgid pieces of crapulence I’ve ever had the misfortune to suffer through, and now here we have Survival Of The Dead, which I am sorry to say continues Mr Romero on his downward trajectory.

A gang of faux military survivors find themselves headed toward an island in order to take refuge from the zombie hordes. The island is essentially controlled by two feuding family men and the survivors find themselves caught up in the middle of it all.

At times Survival Of The Dead dared to suggest it might end up being halfway decent. Unfortunately it got quickly bogged down in a mess of appalling stereotypes, shit C.G.I., lame 'big noise scares' (come on George you're better than that), and a totally dumbfuck plot. The lowest ebb occurs when you think a main character has been killed, only to discover that they have, I shit you not, an identical twin!!!!

On the plus side it wasn't as bad as Diary of the Dead, but then neither are 99.9% of all the films ever made in the history of the Universe.

I really don’t know what to make of Mr George A. Romero these days. I had compared his recent career to George Lucas, and his own one man mission to destroy every bit of goodwill that people still harbour for him. But at least George Romero isn’t going back and tinkering with his own movies, or kicking a fond childhood memory square in the ballbag. So comparisons to the devil George Lucas are still a ways off. George Romero is still at least TRYING to recapture what made him great in the first place. And I appreciate that, I really do. At the risk of mixing my metaphors, if George Lucas is the Emperor, then George A. Romero is Darth Vader – I sense there is still good left in him.

Nevertheless Romero does seem to be following the ‘John Carpenter 2 Point Career Progression Plan’:

1) Make stunning, genre defining films of complete unparalleled awesomeness.
2) Suddenly and without warning, go completely shit.

It may be best for all concerned if Mr George A. Romero were to drift gracefully into retirement. He doesn’t have to get a ‘real job’. No one wants that. But based on his early works, here is a man who should never have to buy another drink or steak dinner for the rest of his life. Combine that with a couple of conventions a year and he’d be all set.

It must be noted that Survival Of The Dead is at least watchable, which is more than can be said for Diary Of The Dead, but when you compare it to Romero’s back catalogue it’s just not cutting the mustard.

IMDB: Survival Of The Dead

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

2010-09-19T00:16:00.000+01:00

To sum it up this film is one long, 2 hour-odd shouty argument, made to feel as if it lasts for about 15 billion years! Two married arseholes, hector back and forth at each other about their first world problems until you just can't take any more of it. It's full of 'emoting' and the sort of bellowed monologue that is like catnip to the serious actor. No doubt when the script came through both Winslet and DiCaprio probably thought it had 'Oscar' written through it like a stick of rock. Unfortunately the dialogue is the kind of preachy eulogising that nobody in reality actually ever speaks like, and whilst I concede the time period was far more rigid regarding the roles of men and women in society, with two central characters who care nothing for each other, it begs the question of why the fuck should the audience? Tedious.

IMDB: Revolutionary Road

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD

2010-09-14T13:40:00.002+01:00

Based on a comic book series which uncharacteristically, I have NOT read, Edgar Wright’s third movie is the simple story of the titular Mr Pilgrim – local indie band member, ringer-T wearing, fluffy hairdo’ed hipster – who must defeat the 7 Evil Exes of his current squeeze, Ramona Flowers, if he wants to continue to woo her.

Going into this movie, I was indeed wondering if Edgar Wright could work outside of his comfort zone of a Pegg/Frost comedy vehicle? And the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. Scott Pilgrim Vs The World is HUGELY enjoyable. It rolls more like a video game than a comic book movie, with defeated villains that turn into coins, power up’s and end of level bosses. It’s wildly imaginative and wrings every ounce of inspiration into what essentially boils down to a series of fights between Michael Cera and his various nemeses.

Displaying the usual Edgar Wright jump cut flourishes, but acknowledging it as almost a trademark of his and mucking around with it somewhat (NOTE: rewatching HOT FUZZ recently, whilst a lot more enjoyable on second view, it is a bit too kinetic and OTT with it’s jump cut montages and so on, making it hard to watch in certain places. Still overall it benefits from a second view with lower expectations), the movie is a visual party with all sorts of smart, entertaining editing and graphic devices to help get us on board with Scott and his mission.

Even as an aloof, cheating, indie hipster, Michael Cera is still essentially playing Michael Cera / George-Michael Bluth / Paulie Bleeker with a slight edge to him. I can see this is beginning to wear quite thin with a lot of folk and I can certainly understand it, but in all honesty it still works for me. I like him.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, as Ramona Flowers, the object of Scott’s affections most certainly qualifies for the adjective ‘super hot’ and it’s good to see her in a decent role for once instead of being underused like in DIE HARD 4.0 and DEATH PROOF.

Jason Schwartzman, as the villan Gideon Graves, is spot on. Although he was undeniably great in RUSHMORE, Schwartzman bugs me. I find him to be kind of smarmy. He exhibits that kind of smug twattishness that he’s exuded in everything else ever since. But it’s perfect in this instance, for a playing a smug twat!!

One of the highlights for me was Brandon Routh as the vegan Evil Ex Todd Ingram. Bestowed with super telekinetic powers by virtue of his self righteous vegan-ness. The best line in the whole movie falls to him:
“You know how you only use 10% of your brain? That’s cause the other 90% is filled up with curds and whey”

Topping things off, there is an excellent small cameo from the totally underrated Thomas Jane (of The Mist, Punisher and Hung fame), as one of the vegan police officers!

Another of the many plus points about this film is that Scott Pilgrim’s band, Sex Bob-Omb are actually pretty good! But it should be pointed out at this juncture that any ‘try-hard’ band that goes out and ACTUALLY calls itself Sex Bob-Omb deserves to have their junk repeatedly slammed in successively heavy car doors, ‘fore it would be a vomitously disgusting name choice.

Still, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World is undoubtedly just one big entertaining riot of a movie. The best computer game movie, not based on a computer game. I did not expect to enjoy this half as much as I did and I honestly thought it was utterly fantastic. LOVED it. Go see.

IMDB: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

PREDATORS

2010-07-21T04:44:00.002+01:00

It’s been 23 years since Arnie, Jesse Ventura and Carl Weathers et al went bush in the Central American jungle to do battle with a vicious hunter from another world, and 20 years since Danny Glover and Bill Paxton mixed it up with another Predator on the streets of LA. In the intervening years the Alien Vs Predator movies sullied the great names of two of the best sci fi monsters in history. So a proper Predator sequel was long overdue in order to restore the family name as it were. The good news is that PREDATORS delivers. It serves up exactly what you want from a Predator movie. A gang of selected mercenaries, criminals and general badasses find themselves in an alien jungle on an alien world, pitted against an unholy triumvirate of salivating Predators out to hunt them for sport. Without deviating a great deal from the original plotline PREDATORS manages to be a lot of fun without being mindblowing. It’s respectful to the original in a way in which the idiotic ‘versus’ movies were most definitely not. It captures the feel of the original and stands tall as a nice continuation of the Predator lineage. Adrien Brody is convincing as a hardboiled mercenary, and the likes of Danny Trejo and Laurence Fishburne are always good value. It's not reinventing the wheel, but then what’s wrong with the wheel? No-one has had a problem with the wheel for thousands of years. PREDATORS serves up exactly what you expect from a Predator sequel and is no less enjoyable for it. It’s good, fun sci-fi action.

IMDB: Predators

NOTE: This review is shorter, and a departure from the usual style because I wrote it as a 250-300 word entry for a competition to win passes to the Melbourne International Film Festival. So instead of my usual long winded ramble, enjoy some brevity for a change!

KICK ASS

2010-06-16T11:09:00.004+01:00

Kick Ass is the story of wannabe superhero Dave Lizewski, a comic book obsessed nerd, who when faced with the question of ‘why don’t people become Superheroes?’ cannot think of a single good enough reason not to nut up and give it a go himself. Not even a near death beating at the hands of some thugs and severe hospitalisation can stack up enough in the ‘negative column’, and so he dons a dark green wetsuit and claims the moniker ‘Kick Ass’.

After his second foray into the world of masked vigilantism, a bystander records his exploits, uploads it to the internet and before he knows it Kick Ass is a phenomenon. But fame also brings infamy, and the attentions of the local mafia boss Frank D’Amico, who doesn’t want costumed heroes horning in on his racket. Added to this mix are a brutal daughter/father crime fighting team known as Hit Girl and Big Daddy, and a mysterious and equally popular masked hero by the name of Red Mist.

This is of course the movie the Daily Mail threw one of its trademark ‘ban this sick filth’ hissyfits about courtesy of a 10 year old girl getting shot, slicing up bad guys with a ninja sword, and uttering the word ‘cunt’. Watching director Matthew Vaughn sit incredulously on The One Show sofa while Adrian Chiles and that bland woman jabbered on about how it seemed like an amoral film despite only one of them having actually seen it (and admitting to finding it funny to boot), was yet another stunning indictment that the World is heading inescapably toward a reality previously only seen in Mike Judge’s IDIOCRACY.

Kick Ass is additionally, and far more interestingly, based on a toweringly superior comic book. Yes, the movie is fun. Great fun, in point of fact. You simply can’t go wrong with a 10 year old massacring bad guys to the tune of The Dickies ‘Banana Splits’, or Nicholas Cage battering the hell out of a massive cadre of mobsters in one single-take epic beatdown. However, the thing that was most disappointing about the Kick Ass movie is that when you read the comic you can see what it COULD have been. And whilst the movie is good, it could have been so much more! Despite all its coolness the movie struggles to climb out of generic superhero territory. All the brilliant aspects of the comic that took it away from standard origin fare, infusing a healthy dose of reality and elevating it above the obvious or the predictable seem to have been excised from the script.

I really try to roll spoiler free on this blog wherever possible, but there’s no way to make my point about the movie versus the comic here without giving the game away. So before you click the little box below, I urge you strongly to see the film and read the book. But if you’re not one for good advice, then fairly warned be thee, says I - there lie spoilers ahead:

Spoilers:

To a degree it almost feels like the filmmakers completely missed the point as to what made the comic great. There was nothing they omitted from the book that could not have worked on the screen, and so therefore I can’t really think of any reason for them to have made those choices other than incomprehension of the source material. And knowing what they had to work with in terms of the book, I felt there was quite a large bit of room for improvement.

Nevertheless, and don’t get me wrong, this film is a lot of fun. Enjoyable, and one of the better movies of 2010 so far. Nicholas Cage, Mark Strong and Chloe Moretz are all riotously good. So in conclusion, it’s funny, violent and entertaining, which are the majority of your bases covered. Despite its flaws Kick Ass still comes recommended and is definitely worth a watch.

IMDB: Kick Ass

IRON MAN 2

2010-06-10T12:19:00.003+01:00

It’s fair comment, to say that I was a HUGE fan of the first IRON MAN, is quite the understatement. I utterly LOVED that movie. As a background I like comics, I used to read Marvel as a young lad, I have enjoyed mostly all of the recent spate of comic book movies (EVEN Daredevil and Ghostrider!), and it was totally and completely ‘my cup of tea’. As far as the Marvel adaptations go, in fact as far as the Superhero comic book movies go, the first IRON MAN was the STAR WARS of the genre. The cream of the crop, the bees knees, the icing on the cake. I loved it, you dig?

So on then to IRON MAN 2 which is basically more of the same, and in my book that is a very very very good thing. Now you can wax lyrical about important films, and moving films, and socio political films and as well you should. Cinema should be about that. It should be challenging and should ask questions of you and treat you with intelligence. There are of course other times when cinema should be FUN. And IRON MAN and IRON MAN 2 are just a pure masterclass in enjoyable cinema. It does exactly what you want from an IRON MAN film. It’s no good coming away from this movie and criticising its politics or for being too gung-ho, as I saw one ridiculous local paper do, because you’re missing the point entirely. It’s about a superhero in a metal suit. It delivers in spades what summer blockbuster after summer blockbuster just cannot seem to manage. It’s cool and it’s fun and it rules. Hard.

The story picks up immediately after the end of the first movie and concerns a three pronged attack on Tony Stark/Iron Man. Firstly the military trying to commandeer his Iron Man technology, secondly the ruthless Ivan Vanko seeking vengeance on the Stark family, and thirdly the fact that the Arc Reactor that keeps Tony Stark alive and powers the Iron Man suit is very slowly poisoning him.

Tony Stark is as narcissistic as ever. Still a rich dick, but this time motivated by trying to help humanity as a whole. He will still bask in the glory of enforcing World peace though, and is enjoying his IRON MAN fame as if he were a rock star. There are hints of his recklessness, and nods perhaps toward the famous alcoholism of the comic. But for the time being this Tony Stark is still just about in control.

I had never really been that fond of Robert Downey Jr in the past. Stemming mainly from his performance in the abjectly wretched NATURAL BORN KILLERS. But with IRON MAN he is a revelation. He IS Tony Stark, and once again he is fantastic in this second film. Likewise Scarlett Johansson’s ubiquity has often left me cold. Whilst I liked her in Ghost World, Lost In Translation and Vicky Christina Barcelona, it often feels like you can’t open a magazine or turn on the telly or even pass a bus shelter without her blank expression vacating out at you from an advertisement for perfume or one of the billion films she’s made – she must work 365 days a year!! That said, I thought she was good in IRON MAN 2, and her fighting was especially convincing.

Don Cheadle was great as Rhodey/Warmachine. Barring his useless English accent in Oceans 11, he is never anything less than excellent and should frankly have been the first choice from the get go. Gwyneth Paltrow was also excellent again as Pepper Potts, and John Favreau gives himself more screen time this time around and it was more enjoyable for it.

For the villans, Mickey Rourke was good, but upstaged by Sam Rockwell who at times could have walked off with the movie. If Rockwell has ever been in a bad film then I’m yet to see it. His addition to the IRON MAN cast was a triumph. If you like nothing else in this film you have got to love his weapons speech – “if this thing was any smarter it would write a book... and then it would read it to you”. Brilliant.

If there is a minor gripe, it’s that both films have essentially relied on a villain in a similarly powered super suit to fight Iron Man at the end. I think a third instalment would benefit from some variety there. But it really is a small gripe. IRON MAN 2 is as thoroughly enjoyable as the first one, and as far as cool, enjoyable, downright entertaining cinema goes, the IRON MAN movies are peerless.

IMDB: IRON MAN 2

Also, check out these incredible posters for IRON MAN 2. The first of which is by the super awesome Tyler Stout (and I wish I had been able to get this before it sold out at light speed) and the second is by the equally awesome Mike Saputo (which I did manage to get my grubby mitts on!)

THE DARJEELING LIMITED

2010-02-08T17:19:00.002Z

Now this was a strange one. I went to see this at the movies when it came out, full of fanboy exuberance, and really did not care for it much at all. I re-watched it on dvd and it was like watching a different movie. I utterly loved it!

I can’t really explain the drastic differences in my opinion from first watch to second, other than assuming certain mitigating factors coloured my judgement the first time around.

For starters I am a big Wes Anderson fan. Rushmore sits in or around my top 10 of all time, and The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic were both complete and utter joy. As a 33 year old I have never grown out of that Christmas Day Syndrome, whereby I build up something I’m looking forward to, to the point of overexcitement – be it a band (Framtid) or movie (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). Then either rabid enthusiasm or crushing disappointment ensues.

Secondly, my enjoyment the first time around was dulled by cinema idiots. The kind of art house douche that is at pains to illustrate how much they ‘get’ the film more than anyone else. The ‘fake art-house laugh’™ is almost as nerve grating as the drink slurping, sweet rustling multiplex cattle. In this instance a middle aged hippy woman, sat next to me, drinking a herbal tea and laughing out loud at a light switch being turned on! That’s not a ‘joke’. Laughing at something no one else is laughing at doesn’t mean you’re understanding the movie on a deeper level, it means you’re a cretin.

Anyway, Wes Anderson’s fifth movie concerns 3 brothers, reunited in India, a year after the death of their father. Taking a journey on the eponymous train, the goal is to connect again as brothers and (like all good backpackers in India) ‘find themselves’.

The movie kicks off with a self contained ‘part one’ – Hotel Chevalier. This focuses on Jason Schwartzman and his ex-girlfriend Natalie Portman. There’s a large amount of mystery over precisely what happened/is happening between them. What makes it cool is that the full back story is clearly there – but as the audience you’re only a party to a portion of it. It doesn’t feel like its ambiguity is contrived, or that it was written with the intent to confuse or simply for the sake of being enigmatic. Moreover, watching it feels like you’re scratching the surface of a fleshed out relationship between the two characters, but you only need this snippet of their typical interaction in order to better understand the events in ‘part 2’.

The movie (and train) moves ahead, charting their story in a typically styled Wes Anderson universe. The story and its little touches excel, like the camera exploring the train in much the same way as the boat was investigated in The Life Aquatic. The soundtrack, as much a part of the movie as it would be in a Scorsese or Tarantino flick. A cameo from an Anderson favourite. And the successful mix of genuinely funny humour and pathos.

Watching the Darjeeling Limited again, bereft of all baggage (unlike the brothers and their matching luggage) I enjoyed it thoroughly. Superb.

IMBD: THE DARJEELING LIMITED

AVATAR

2010-01-27T17:21:00.003Z

Righto, let’s see what all the fuss about Avatar is then. I felt I had to go see this thing in 3D, which naturally requires a trip to the movie house. Of late I have come to despise the larger cinemas, because the presence of the incessant talking, crunching, noise making, head-hurtingly selfish ‘Great’ British public, soils the enjoyment of the film with the taste of caustic bile. Thusly a cold Tuesday night at the cinema furthest out of town was deemed to be the best time and place to attend. And it largely worked. There were no real problems to sully the experience; not counting the stupid layout of the cinema which posits each seat directly behind the one in front - instead of the more logical shift to the side so one can see between the gap in the seats - in case one is unfortunately seated behind a basketball player or a child with a ‘virtual planetoid’ perched on top of their neck.

Much hoo-ha has been made by Mr James Cameron about his groundbreaking 3D technology, but off the bat I should mention that as a child, on a family holiday to Walt Disney World MGM studios I did happen to see an excellent Muppet feature which employed PRECISELY the same 3D technology as evidenced in Avatar. Empire magazine mentioned Cameron’s Terminator 3D ride as being the genesis for Avatar’s groundbreaking effects, but that in itself was clearly just carrying on the work from Muppets 3D. Hell, even Michael Jackson got in on this 3D lark decades ago with Captain Eo, so it’s not like this is brand new or anything. (Incidentally I’m sure I saw on the news (ok, ok Newsround) that they were resurrecting Captain Eo in light of Michael Jackson’s demise? Which is interesting considering no one would touch him (pun intended) when they thought he was a sex pest.)

Anyway, onward to this Avatar review. I would say most of what has been already said and written about it is accurate. The plot is thin and predictable. It could have been bashed out in five minutes on the back of a napkin. Crippled marine Jake Sully travels in his brothers stead, to the densely forested planet of Pandora to participate in the Avatar programme, and help to secure mining rights for the ravaged Earth he has left behind. He soon finds himself indentifying more with the natives than his own ‘Sky People’, as they attempt to take Pandora by force.

There were some great, interesting aspects of the mythology. I loved how the Na’vi bonded with the creatures and the forest itself through these sort of strands connected to their bodies. They could feel and understand the animals and forest. It was a nice idea and very well conveyed. The idea and execution of the Avatars themselves was nice too. The intriguing idea of being able to inhabit another body, played out very well against the opposing backdrops of a military stronghold and a tribal village in the jungle.

There were times when, at first, it seemed derivative – for example huge human mech walkers which initially brought to mind the Matrix – until it dawns upon you that Cameron pretty much invented that for the movies with the ‘loaders’ in ALIENS, and the Matrix was ripping off HIM! The Aliens theme continued in the form of Giovanni Ribisi’s character, who was basically Carter Burke from Aliens. He was even called Parker which made the glaring similarities to Paul Reiser’s character shine through like a white dwarf.

Further on the downside, the central plot concerned some wildly naff ‘noble savage’ / earth worshipping stuff that would make even the most new age of hippies blush into his tie dye and shrink into his Birkenstocks.

But for all the things that didn’t work, there was some truly seamless CGI scenery and exciting action, that you just can’t discount in terms of the thrill and vision of it all. The Na’vi bonding and riding with the Banshees produced some genuinely vertigo-inducing flight sequences. Swooping through the canopy and above the mountains at a dizzying speed. Whilst in the tiny details the movie relishes the imaginatively conjured botany and ecosystem of Pandora.

Initially I did not really know what to make of Avatar. There’s much to love, and likewise much that left me cold. But there’s no denying it was an entertaining watch. Nowhere near Camerons best work, but it’s impossible not enjoy the sheer spectacle of it.

IMDB: AVATAR

WATCHMEN

2009-12-04T17:07:00.010Z

The first thing to say about Watchmen, is that if you have not already done so, I would beg you to read the book first. Your first experience of Watchmen should without a doubt be the book. Then approach the film without pre-judging it.

A few years ago, when Paul Greengrass’s Watchmen movie had just been kyboshed, and it seemed destined to never happen, I met Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons at a comic convention. Having bided my time, whilst sweaty ebay enthusiasts got him to autograph every single comic book they could conceivably carry, I got him to sign my well thumbed copy of Watchmen, and as he did so I asked him what his opinions on a Watchmen movie were. He said he was fine with it, because at the end of the day the book is the book. That is the work. So if it was great he could enjoy it, and if it was rubbish it still would not tarnish Watchmen in his eyes. I thought this was a good attitude, and a much more open minded one than fusty old Alan Moore's (although in fairness to Alan Moore, the previous cinematic treatment of his work gives him more than reason enough to tell Hollywood to go fuck itself). Incidentally, not only did Dave Gibbons good naturedly sign everything put in front of him, but he sketched a quick version of Rorschach in my book! It remains one of my most prized possessions to this day.

So on to the Watchmen movie then. I am reviewing the theatrical cut as we Euros are still awaiting a release of a non blu ray directors cut (and now Ultimate Edition) that Region One got a fair few months ago. In the first instance I think the movie is very good. Whilst it is flawed by some measures, it is also spot on perfect in others. I understand that the Directors Cut is to address some of the problems, and as such when I finally get to see it I will expand upon this review accordingly.

During a cracking opening sequence we are treated to an alternate history of the World where masked superheroes/vigilantes exist and fight crime. Set up in an alternate 1985, against the backdrop of a USA where Nixon never lost office, and in turn escalated the Cold War as he played nuclear brinkmanship with his opposite number in the (still existent) Soviet Union.

With masked vigilantism now outlawed, the many threaded plot begins with the investigations into the murder of former crime fighter The Comedian (who’s blood stained smiley badge gives both book and film it’s most iconic image), and it’s trail of clues leading to a much bigger and overwhelming threat. We follow the gone to seed Night Owl, the new Silk Spectre, the self made rich and powerful Ozymandias, the godlike and truly superpowered Dr Manhatten, and the dangerously unstable and unremittingly violent Rorschach.

The point of Watchmen is that they aren’t really superheroes in the conventional sense. Apart from Dr Manhatten, they are all just costumed vigilantes. So it kind of lends a ‘reality’ to the superhero genre. As reaction to the marvel and DC superhero books it’s more along the lines of what it would actually be like if these people existed. They’re in the Batman side of things. Tough and hard, but not superpowered.

As far as the things that didn’t work go, in part I don't know if that's because they weren't properly handled, or if it was just a symptom of the fact I knew what was coming. But for starters, I felt there wasn’t much of sense of peril or nuclear fear. This would have been far better conveyed from showing the man on the street – newspaper seller and young kid from the book – rather than Nixon and his cronies.

Conversely, and on the plus side, they made Night Owl and the Owl ship seem a lot cooler than in the comic, and much of the film is devotedly faithful to the source material.

Ultimately what makes and saves the movie for me is Rorschach. He was so perfect it blew my mind. Jackie Earle Hayley even LOOKS like Dave Gibbons drawing! I can forgive most of the things that weren't right about this film simply because he was so utterly fantastic.

To the uninitiated the presence of a nude Dr Manhatten, with his blue dork dangling all over the shop, was the source of titillation and amusement. But what it gives more of an indication of is Zak Snyder's dogged pursuit of putting every authentic detail up on the screen.

Spoilers:

But it is this determination to be so faithful that initially makes the direction of the ending so alarming. To those who know and love the book it is indeed a shock. I certainly felt indignant to start off with. How could they do this?

But after a while, with the time to reflect and to actually think about it, I felt it really wasn't too bad. With the film weighing in at 2 1/2 hours already, a further subplot about the squid and its invention would have just bogged it down. And hey, Bubastis was still in it!

The end provokes more thought in you as to who and what Dr Manhatten is. He is the only person in the whole film with superpowers. Rendered omnipotent by a Hulk styled laboratory accident. Unlike Superman who was empowered not only by the Earth's yellow sun, but also by an unwavering desire to help, Manhatten doesn't want to help. He doesn't care. The convention of the benevolent superhero bestowed with fabulous powers, working to save humanity, is flipped on its head. Unlike Spiderman's mantra of "with great power comes great responsibility", for Manhatten, with great power comes no responsibility. He is the complete opposite of the conventional superhero. Humanity is of no consequence to him any more. He has such power that the human race has become insignificant. Although Dr Manhatten had no part in engineering Veidts masterplan, he was wholly complicit in perpetuating its lies. For the greater good or not, Manhatten could as much be considered a supervillain as he could a superhero. His loss of compassion and humanity would make him a monster in any other story. You almost wonder why Veidt simply did not ask him to do it in the first place.

For all intents and purposes the Dr Manhatten ending was the same as the book. As humanity is united against a common enemy, all their previous conflicts pale in comparison. Petty and inconsequential in the cold blue light of this new threat. For all the complaints, the spirit and objective is the same. It is the one thing in this movie that has taken a liberty with the book. And it IS a big liberty. But it’s not a disaster by any means. I think it works.

At the end of the day Dave Gibbons was right. The book is the book, and the film is the film, but it's a pretty great one at that.

IMDB: WATCHMEN

THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE

2009-11-17T16:58:00.004Z

Going into this film I was, as I suspect a lot of people will be, more familiar with Bettie Page the icon than Bettie Page the person. I was largely unaware of her interesting life story and I would assume that was the reason this film was made. It’s an interesting and enjoyable biopic of a person whose iconic image looms larger than life!

The film charts the story from Betties early days in Nashville, through to her move to New York, burgeoning modelling career and subsequent retirement following a governmental crackdown on lusty material!

On occasion I felt it could have done with a ted more exposition. For example, I was unclear as to whether the times she was in Miami were all a flashback, or took place in the timeframe of the film where she was becoming well known. I also felt that tonally, some of the incidents in her early life (including some disturbing sexual abuse), did not sit well within the context of a film aiming for the same light-hearted naïveté that Bettie herself seemed to possess. Still, this was not to the detriment of the film overall.

Gretchen Mol was totally convincing as Bettie, and it was also good to see the excellent Chris Bauer (aka Frank Sobotka from The Wire) and dependably brilliant Lilli Taylor playing Betty’s employers / photography entrepreneurs.

Shot in black and white, but flicking back and forth with colour, it was an entertaining, well made biopic. It was interesting to see the outrage that Betties pictures caused at the time in the light of their relative tameness by today’s standards. But of course it would be ridiculous to judge it by today’s values.

This film is worth checking out.

IMDB: THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE

TEETH

2009-11-02T23:48:00.002Z

Saturday was Halloween. For some unknown reason, I decided it would be a good idea to abandon my plan to watch THE THING (one of the greatest movies of all time, and a worthy All Hallows Eve alternative to Carpenter’s Halloween which is always on telly). I favoured instead, to watch a movie I had not already seen, and thus I found myself watching Teeth.

The premise is interesting. A God fearing, celibate teen discovers she happens to have a second set of gnashers inconveniently located in her genitalia! Unfortunately this is where the term ‘interesting’ begins and ends as far as this movie is concerned. It’s badly acted, and criminally boring. There are a couple of amusing set pieces in the middle of the film, but it’s mostly just a tedious bloody chore.

The first hour or so is boring and annoying. Even when the ‘action’ starts up, the plot clumsily jerks to the end of the film with no real coherence or sanity. A sub plot with a policeman abruptly crops up and looks like it might actually go somewhere, but then disappears never to be seen again. It gives the impression that they came up with a good idea, a couple of set pieces, and then realised they had to build a film around it. They did not do a good job.

The metal dude older brother character is especially nauseating. Every word uttered is almost drowned out by an irritating Nu Metal soundtrack. As if some 18 year old kerrang reader is in the next room trying to drown the telly out with his latest Slipknot CD. As an aside, an easy way to avoid watching a shitty horror movie is just to look at the soundtrack. Any horror film that opts for an over reliance of Nu Metal is going to be shit because clearly the director is completely missing the point of metal, and thusly will miss the point of the horror genre in precisely the same way. This is an almost solid gold rule!

So yeah this film is a total waste of time. It says nothing and it does nothing other than irritate the piss out of me. It baffles me how an entire film can be made solely on a mildly interesting premise and nothing else. It wouldn’t surprise me if somebody somewhere is watching that shitty Simpsons episode with Kim Basinger and Ron Howard, and is about to rip off the idea of a film about a talking pie.

There is nothing of any merit here. Teeth is toothless.

IMDB: TEETH

[REC]

2009-10-27T19:01:00.002Z

I had been wanting to see REC ever since it was on the cinema, but courtesy of an annoyingly limited run I didn’t get the chance. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of home deev, it lived up to my expectations as a tense, exciting, fast paced horror movie.

Set in Barcelona (judging by the fire-fighters jackets) it follows via hand held cameras, a magazine show news reporter and her cameraman, filming a neighbourhood interest piece on the night shift at the local fire station. It is here we are introduced to two fire-fighters, Manu and Alex.

After sitting round twiddling their thumbs for most of the night, a seemingly mundane call comes in, and they set off on a routine job of breaking into a flat in which a woman is trapped. From the moment the hammer breaks the door the movie takes off at a lightning fast pace. We discover the inhabitants of the building have become infected with an unknown disease, turning them into rage fuelled 'zombies', similar to what happened in 28 days later actually.

Filmed handheld, it obviously conjures up comparisons to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, which is no problem as both rely on almost unbearable levels of tension and stumbling through the dark with no idea of what is stalking them. However the pace is relentless, and it serves up some great, genuine scares! The start was brilliant and there are some truly startling set pieces. The tension is wound up snare tight, and it pretty much scared the bejeezuz out of me on a Sunday afternoon, so if watched late at night I'd have probably leapt out of my skin!

There are a couple of sticking points. Such as why the infection rate is so much quicker as the film goes on? And disappointingly, it does cull somewhat too heavily from The Blair Witch in places. For a film that is pretty damn inventive and scary within the ridiculously stagnant Zombie genre, it was a shame they didn't quite manage to keep it up until the end.

Still, this is all small potatoes really, as overall I thought this film was REC-cellent!

IMDB: REC

DOOMSDAY

2009-10-20T23:30:00.001+01:00

Doomsday is the third film from Neil Marshall, who has previously served up the rather good DESCENT, and the rather overrated DOG SOLDIERS. Doomsday was not so hot. The plot being that England has erected a kind of futuristic Hadrian’s Wall in order to keep the rabid Scotch at bay, having become infected with a deadly plague. It’s essentially stealing ideas left, right and centre from 28 Days Later.

The first half an hour or so was excellent fun. No lie. Really hokey, violent, badly acted sci fi. But in a good way. Owed a HUGE debt to ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK - the heroine even had an EYEPATCH for Christ’s sake – in my book, if you’re gonna rip something off you can’t get much better than Escape From New York.

Speaking of Escape From New York, the upcoming remake is frankly an idea based upon gargantuan idiocy. What are they hoping to achieve? With their very best, most superhuman effort, they may be able to manage a movie ON PAR with the original. But it is impossible to surpass it. In fact, if it is as bad as I suspect, I shall have to travel to the Americas with the express purpose of kicking John Carpenter in the junk.

But I digress back to DOOMSDAY. Even Bob Hoskins playing Mr Cockney Stereotype couldn’t foul up the start. The only thing missing from his portrayal was a suit covered in buttons and a comment about how the ‘Krays sorted out London’. Otherwise every cockney box was ticked.

Unfortunately after such a promising start it couldn’t decide what film it was trying to be, and rapidly went downhill after it decided to go a bit primitive and medieval, only to later change its mind AGAIN and backtrack into cod Mad Max territory. NOTE: First two Mad Max films are perfect. If you try and rip them off you’re just going to end up looking like a right plum. This film is a case in point.

Also both principal hero and villain didn’t really have the chops for it. Rhona Mitra, whilst happening to be more beautiful than God, was something of the charisma vacuum. If she was a colour, she would be beige. Nobody gets offended by beige, yet it makes no impact either. Beige is the colour you choose in order to please the most number of people, despite the fact you would be hard pushed to find anyone who actively likes it or rates it as a favourite. There’s no beige crayon is there?

It doesn’t stop there either. The main villain looked like a member of an Exploited tribute band. This is an exceedingly bad thing. Having no menace or presence at all is a bit of a stumbling block when it’s your raison d'être in a film like this, to exude both. For comparisons sake, Escape From New York had Isaac fucking Hayes as it’s main villain for crying out loud!

Conversely it had the ruddy brilliant Alexander Siddig in it, and underused him to the point of criminality. Hardly seen him in anything since Deep Space Nine, except from getting blowed up in an early episode of Spooks, and being the only reason to sit through 3 tedious hours of Kingdom Of Heaven. He should get more work. What on Earth is his agent up to?

Finally it had the WORST song and dance number (yes, you read that correctly – SONG & DANCE NUMBER!) in the history of moving pictures. It makes that awful bit in the second Matrix movie look like Singing In The Rain. It is so criminally awful that Neil Marshall ought to have served actual jail time for devising it. If John Logie Baird had forseen what horror this dance number would provide, he would surely have hurled his new fangled television machine into a ravine, content to let humankind lumber forward without accessible moving picture technology. And who amongst us could blame him?

To conclude my long winded rumination: it whiled away 2 hours, but after the first half hour or so, it’s pretty much bollocks!

IMDB: DOOMSDAY

VACANCY

2009-10-12T17:37:00.002+01:00

Vacancy is a great thriller/horror which I really enjoyed. The fairly average reviews it got upon release did it a great disservice, as it was a far, far better film than they would have you believe.

The premise is that couple (Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale) get lost off the interstate, break down, and have to spend the night in a grotty run down motel in the middle of nowhere. In Hills Have Eyes style, it turns out they are out of cell phone range too. They bed down in their motel room, watching the tv to distract from having to converse with each other, when it suddenly becomes apparent that the horror film they are watching on tv is in actual fact an extremely real snuff movie that has taken place in their very room!

From that point on, the tension rachets up to unbearable levels, providing some genuine scares, with the fear coming from what would ordinarily be the mundane - phone ringing, door knocking, face at the window and so on. Director Nimrod Antal (soon to be directing Rodriguez’s new PREDATORS movie apparently) stated in the dvd extras that he was going for more of a Hitchcockian thriller than a horror movie, and I think he certainly nailed it for the most part. He sets his stall out with an excellent Hitchcock style title sequence with lots of discombobulating text. The story itself, with its creepy motel setting, obviously yanks the old memory chords in favour of PSYCHO.

It works because when the couple are trapped in the room, it is terrifying because of both the ludicrousness of the situation and the fact it remains very believable. It’s not giving too much away to say when they leave the room, and start running around the complex the scares are less effective because it becomes more of a chase / pursuit slasher flick.

My minor quibble is with the snuff films. I think they were a little too disturbing for the tone of the film. They were unpleasant to watch - even on the screen within a screen – and they ended up making the film stray too close to the kind of dreck Eli Roth excretes, and which this movie coasts loftily above. On the other hand they certainly helped invoke the fear of the couple trapped in the room. I just think I could have stood to have seen less of the footage. The wisdom of including them as dvd extras is most definitely lost on me though!

The other thing that sort of amused me was that one of the villans masks made him look like a grey William H. Macy!

I suppose, some parts of Vacancy were pretty predictable, but there's nothing wrong with predictability if done well, and this movie is a comfortably better than average horror thriller. It’s a good fun scare that will probably, undeservedly, slip under most peoples radar. Wilson and Beckinsale were both great and I would say this is perfect viewing for upcoming Halloween movie fests!

IMDB: VACANCY

RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION

2009-10-06T18:13:00.002+01:00

Having previously liked neither the Resident Evil films nor ANYTHING uber chump Paul WS Anderson has ever done, EVER. In his entire life (thankfully he only produced this one). I went to this solely cause I was intrigued by the ‘zombies in the desert’ concept.

I gotta say it was rather enjoyable all round. It stole a tad from Day Of The Dead (military stronghold surrounded by zombies, plus attempts to domesticate the fiends) and also Slither (in it’s monster design), and had an almost identical end-of-level-boss style ending to the other two films. However the villan was a great b-movie English ‘basterd’ and it was surprisingly good - a lot of post apocalyptic fun! Far better than recent zombie garbage like Diary Of The Dead, and it was directed by Russell Mulcahy who is responsible for RAZORBACK, and is therefore a winner in my book.

IMDB: RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION

TAKEN

2009-10-06T17:19:00.015+01:00

Liam Neeson plays a character crossed between Jack Bauer, Jason Bourne and Horatio off CSI Miami. It is morally and politically suspect – one huge, throbbing right wing boner of a movie, but it turned out to be something of a guilty pleasure.

Neeson has to track down his kidnapped daughter using as much ultraviolence as possible. Essentially the plot (wafer thin as it is) was pretty much lifted wholesale from Commando except without the jokes. It should have been filmed on a much lesser budget and turned up on Channel Five on a Friday night in about a years time. In fact I can’t help but think that Liam Neeson must live on the same street as Steven Seagal and that a rookie postman delivered the script to the wrong house. This resulted in Neeson stomping around Paris being exceptionally po faced, and kicking all kinds of miscellaneous euro ass. Whilst perhaps in return, Steven Seagal will turn up soon in a tense political thriller?

For a film so utterly preposterous it takes itself WAAAAY too seriously. So all signs point toward this being terrible, and by rights it should be. But as I say, it’s quite the guilty pleasure, and if you don’t enjoy Neeson calmly telling a terrorist about his ‘certain set of skills’, then you just can’t enjoy anything!

IMDB: TAKEN

DØD SNØ (DEAD SNOW)

2009-10-04T22:10:00.002+01:00

On paper this should have been excellent. All you need to say to a horror nerd is "Nazi Zombies" and their eyes light up. Combine that with a tagline of such unbeatable genius as - "Ein, Zwei, Die" - and how can you go wrong?

A group of friends on a ski trip generally muck about, quote Indiana Jones and go on a beano to the hut from The Evil Dead. They then encounter a bunch of rather nasty undead with a bent for national socialism.

The trailer for DEAD SNOW made it look brilliant, and that's where the films problems lie. The trailer made it look TOO good, and the film itself does not have the chops to live up to that promise. Don't get me wrong, it's decent enough. Fun, even. But unfortunately it nods its head, tips its hat and wryly winks toward such classic flicks as The Evil Dead and Dawn Of The Dead so much, that it forgets to do anything original for itself. The difference between affectionate homage and being completely derivative is a fine line. It's doesn't plumb the depths of such dismal, rehashed dreck like DEAD SET, but it can't quite live up to the idea of what it SHOULD have been.

IMDB: DØD SNØ (DEAD SNOW)

INTRODUCTORY POST

2009-10-04T18:27:00.000+01:00

So this is my introductory post! I have pondered doing this blog for while now, as I enjoyed reviewing a bunch of films I’d seen and posting them up on the various messageboards I seem to find myself frequenting. The logical conclusion seemed to be to turn this pass-time into a blog – and lo and behold here it is. If you’ve ever read my fanzine REMAINS OF A CAVEMAN then you will know what to expect. Reviews will take 2 forms:

1) The rage filled rant, whereby I get personally insulted by how bad a particular film is, AND

2) The superlative laden, fanboy obsessed love-in.

So with that in mind, over the next few days I intend to upload my existing recent reviews, and then once that is done I shall review whatever I see fit, as and when I watch it. It will pretty much follow whatever I decide would be good to watch – hence the subtitle ‘my life in movies’.

Hope you enjoy it – but if not, don’t sweat it. This is mostly for my own benefit anyhow.

THE RULES

The Indiana Jones movies exist as a trilogy. We do not recognise the existence of a fourth movie.

This blog bestows a high approval rating for early John Carpenter, the Coen Brothers, Raimi, Alexandre Aja, Mike Judge, Wes Anderson.

George Lucas is a dick.