Exploding Celluloid Inevitable

Film review - The Iron Lady

2012-01-23T12:50:00.000-08:00

When I was between the ages of approximately five and seven, I idolised Mrs Thatcher. I’m not exactly sure why or how this happened. While my parents were not anti-Thatcher like everyone else’s seem to have been, I think it was mostly to do with my love of Spitting Image (she was the main character back then, you see). It certainly wasn’t based on a thorough examination of her policies – she was strong and had a distinctive voice and hair do. And I thought it was great that a woman was in charge.

Well, it seems that the makers of The Iron Lady share my seven-year-old’s view of Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep). Wasn’t she awesome? She didn’t give in, did she? She always stuck to her guns, whatever anybody said. And she was a woman living in a man’s world.

It’s a pity that the absolutely amazing performance by Streep has been somewhat wasted – this could have been the definitive Thatcher film, but it only scrapes the surface.

The film focuses mainly on Thatcher now, suffering from dementia. She remembers scenes from her past – working in her dad’s shop, becoming an MP, becoming PM – and talks to her dead husband (Jim Broadbent).

We see how her difficult early years in charge of the country (with soaring unemployment, riots and even an attempt on her life by the IRA) are all forgotten when she sticks to her guns and successfully takes back the Falklands from the Argentineans. After that, the 80s was all yuppies drinking Bollinger until she was rudely ousted by her own party in 1990.

Except, of course, that the Brighton Hotel bombing happened in 1984, two years after the Falklands War.

Trying to make a linear narrative out of a period in office (any Prime Minister’s period in office) can only result in gross oversimplification or confusion as we have here. I suppose you could say that the film sees events through her eyes, but as well as glossing over a lot of the bad stuff, the film completely misses out her success in the Cold War. Ronald Reagan isn’t even in it! Surely Maggie would think about Ronnie?

If the film isn’t good history, it is entertaining to a degree. Though a bit long, the performances make it worth seeing. Streep really transforms into Mrs Thatcher, so much so that it is slightly disturbing. The voice is absolutely perfect with no vowel out of place (something I have never heard from an American doing an English accent – it’s always a clanging vowel which gives them away). Broadbent plays Dennis extremely cuddly-y, Alexandra Roach is a wonderfully focused young Maggie, and Olivia Colman is a scream as Carol Thatcher.

The Iron Lady is a quite depressing look at ageing and a quite fun look at a very determined woman. But I think most people would feel there was more to say about Maggie than that she was determined and got old.

Film review - We Need To Talk About Kevin

2011-11-13T09:24:00.000-08:00

What with me not being very well read (particularly when it comes to contemporary fiction), I am rarely in the position of already knowing the source material when seeing a film. So it was a novelty for me to go into this screening with my own preconceived ideas about the story. It was also a blessing, as I don’t think I would have understood what was going on if I hadn’t already read the novel.

This adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s chilling bestseller follows Eva (Tilda Swinton) in the aftermath of a terrible event involving her teenage son Kevin (Ezra Miller). As Eva remembers her life since Kevin’s birth, it becomes clear that there was always something different about the boy which her husband (John C. Reilly) just refuses to see.

The film is dream-like to the point of meaninglessness. Whereas in the book, Eva (as narrator) explains everything in immense detail, here we are given only disjointed snapshots of events as we flit back and forth in the story. The resonance of each small moment – of all the insidious things Kevin does – is completely lost. The opening half an hour in particular is a mess, and barely held my attention. If I didn’t have previous experience of the story, I doubt it would have made any sense.

The film cuts out all of the background information about Eva and her husband, leaving them as blank characters with unclear motivations, going through a much simpler and less ambiguous story. Although Eva comes across as very cold in the book, she is extremely frosty here. Having Swinton (not the warm and fuzziest of actresses we can all agree) really adds to this.

British director Lynne Ramsey has taken an intelligent novel with mass appeal and turned it into the arty-est of art house films. While certainly a 'quality' picture with style, a creepy aesthetic and powerful performances, it is not a patch on the book.

Like Shame, I note that this is another British film set in America, again part-funded by the UK Film Council. I do find it strange that tax payers’ money is being spent on adaptations of American bestsellers, but there you go.

London Film Festival Review – Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place

2011-11-13T09:20:00.000-08:00

The Merry Pranksters’ journey across America in 1964 is the stuff of legend. Led by Ken Kesey, the respected author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and advocate for LSD, the group painted a school bus in rainbow colours, named it ‘Further’ and headed for New York. They aimed to change the world, and amazingly these misfits managed to. The counter culture of the 60s had begun.

Sure that what they were doing was seminal, they decided to film themselves. Unfortunately, they were tripping so much during their trip that they didn’t bother to learn how to use the camera or sound equipment, leaving the resulting footage unusable. This documentary is the result of years of painstaking work to correct their mistakes, sync up the sound and edit together something coherent. It’s a strange documentary – not quite the film they wanted to make at the time and not quite a full retrospective analysis of why the events were important.

Certainly it is very interesting to see the journey in colour, and hear from the people involved, even if most of it isn’t exactly riveting. The group were an odd bunch, the oddest by far being Neal Cassady, otherwise known as Dean Moriarty from On The Road. The whole enterprise was a homage to Kerouac, and having Neal on board was a living link to that past. As anyone who has read On The Road will testify, Cassady was never the most stable of souls. That the Pranksters let this speed freak drive the bus shows that they weren’t exactly in their right minds.

The film cuts back and forth across time, showing how the clean-cut college boy Kesey ended up leading the acid movement. In one of the most fascinating sequences, we hear the actual recording of his first ever acid trip, part of the CIA’s LSD experiments. We also see snapshots of life after the bus trip and his eventual disillusion with the movement he kick-started.

For those interested in the period, this is essential viewing. For those who are not in the know, this is likely to be a confusing watch.

N.B. A little niggle I had watching the film – why did they use the font Comic Sans for the subtitles? I’m sure it’s because they wanted to keep the film non-serious to match up with the footage, but it just looks very unprofessional.

London Film Festival Review - Sarah Palin: You Betcha!

2011-10-26T15:15:00.000-07:00

Nick Broomfield has explored the lives of many interesting people through his documentaries, most famously Eugene Terre’Blanche and Aileen Wuornos. In his latest film, he turns his camera towards Sarah Palin, the hockey mom that stormed onto the world stage in 2008 as John McCain’s running mate.

The documentary follows Bromfield as he explores Sarah’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, in the dead of winter, hoping to interview the lady herself. Although he spends much of his time slipping on the ice while holding a boom mike, he manages to meet lots of interesting people and finds out about her childhood and rise to power – first as Wasilla’s mayor, then as Alaskan Governor. As it turns out, few of the people who will talk to him are still on speaking terms with Palin. He does, however, meet her parents, who seem very nice. They are a little concerned that he might be making a “hit piece”, though.

They are right to be concerned, because of course Broomfield is not a supporter of Sarah. The film paints a picture of a vindictive, two-faced woman with bizarre religious views who uses people only to drop them like a hot potato once they’ve outlived their usefulness. Unsurprisingly, he never gets his interview with Palin.

While it is very interesting to see the people that have been left in the wake of the Palin Express, the point of this documentary may have been lost on me. I suppose the original idea was to expose her shortcomings so that her bid for the Republican nomination would be discredited. Unfortunately for the filmmakers (but fortunately for the world) she pulled out of the race shortly after the film was made, making this null and void. But even if she was still running it’s not like the crusading Nick Broomfield would have been a lone dissenting voice, or that anyone who supported her would have given two hoots about some British documentary.

What’s left is a portrait of Palin – a fascinating sociological phenomenon if ever there was one – and in that regard the film falls pretty short. For example, although it goes through her high school sports career in some detail, her relationship with her husband Todd is hardly mentioned. You don’t even find out when they got married, never mind the role he has played in her career (which is hinted at but never directly addressed). The most shocking omission, however, is that the strangest turn of events in Palin’s life isn’t explored – the sudden Republican Vice Presidential nomination in 2008. That error in judgement meant that what was Alaska’s problem became everyone’s problem. The only mention of it in the film reveals something very telling – that the usually long vetting process was cut down to just a few days by the GOP. Why on earth did they pick her?

The answer to that question is also the reason she is so fascinating, and therefore why Broomfield has made a documentary about her – because she is a woman, and a reasonably attractive one at that. The whole affair speaks volumes about America’s political climate, and her genuine popularity in some circles speaks volumes about America.

In hindsight, there was the opportunity here to film for slightly longer and do a real “rise and fall” piece, including all the good footage from Wasilla we see here. As it is, this is an out of date campaigning film, not detailed enough to give a deep exploration of the issues but jokey enough to be entertaining – even if it does take a lot of cheap shots to get a laugh.

London Film Festival review - Shame

2011-10-21T16:32:00.000-07:00

Steve McQueen’s second feature (following the critically acclaimed Hunger) is another bleak film. Shame follows Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a yuppie living in New York with a pristine, minimalist apartment and the world at his feet. Unfortunately, Brandon is a sex addict, and spends every spare moment watching porn on the internet, engaging prostitutes or pleasuring himself in his office toilet. You see, underneath the cool exterior, he isn’t a very happy bunny.

Into this cloud of self-loathing walks his little sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan), a fragile and slightly zany singer. Brandon is extremely shaken by her presence and the cracks in his carefully carved persona begin to show.

McQueen has crafted a film which completely complements its protagonist – beautiful to look at but sordid and ultimately empty inside. This is a mood piece rather than about story. Not very much happens, it’s not clear what that is, and it takes a long time to get there.

What you get on the way is some absolutely beautiful photography of a gritty and glamorous city. Shots are long, lingering and often not contextualised. The film is very “provocative”, but not dirty. Yes you do see a lot of Michael Fassbender naked, but the sex here is not about audience titillation – it’s about the emotional mess inside Brandon. The score by Harry Escott is wonderfully, sadly dark, and complemented by some great disco tracks which punctuate the story.

However exquisitely crafted, Shame does begin to drag by the end. The trouble is that the characters do not hold your attention. Brandon is a blank slate and Sissy is just annoying. Fassbender and Mulligan do give convincing performances, but there is little in the script to make you care about either of them.

Another concern I have with the film is that it is set in New York. The director is British, the screenwriters are British, the lead actress is British, and the funding is British (it was even partly financed by the UK Film Council). Why isn’t it set in London? Michael Fassbender could surely have played an Englishman as convincingly as he played an American (and they had to give Brandon an Irish back story to explain his slightly odd accent). Is it just to reach a wider audience? Perhaps our class system limits us to only accepting middle class versions of London through the eyes of Richard Curtis. Can “gritty” British films only be set on council estates? It would have been interesting to see London portrayed in a new way on screen, but that opportunity has been lost.

As it is, set in New York, Shame is a dark art film which asks few questions and gives even fewer answers. Depressing but not satisfyingly so.

London Film Festival review - 50/50

2011-10-17T02:28:00.000-07:00

Films about cancer aren’t usually much fun. And they are certainly never funny. 50/50 is something no-one ever expected to see and perhaps never wanted to – a cancer comedy. It’s also one of the best films of the year.

Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a health-conscious 27-year-old who suddenly receives a spinal cancer diagnosis. Everyone in his life reacts differently to the news. His best friend (Seth Rogan) urges him to use his newly found pity power to pick up chicks, his already emotionally distant girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard) becomes even more flaky, and his mother (Angelica Houston) desperately wants to take care of him. Adam himself is not sure how to deal with the situation, but knows that no-one’s strategy is helping. He is none-the-wiser after meeting with the hospital’s newest therapist (Anna Kendrick), a doctoral student who has read a lot of books but hasn’t quite got the knack of the therapeutic relationship.

Of course, as Adam goes through chemotherapy he starts to reassess his life and discovers what and who is important. This doesn’t happen in the usual sappy, soppy way we’re used to, but in a way that feels authentic. Humour is used as a defence mechanism just as in real life, and the surreal aspects of the disease, treatment and other people’s reactions produce some very funny moments. The authentic feel is not surprising – screenwriter Will Reiser based it on his own experiences of going through cancer with the help of his best friend Seth Rogan.

A great screenplay is elevated further by wonderful performances. Joseph Gordon Levitt plays Adam in a very understated way, and is quietly outstanding. Everything is going on inside the character but still shines through in a very naturalistic way. Seth Rogan is very funny as always, and Anna Kendrick, who so impressed in Up In the Air, gives an equally great performance here showing she can do comedy extremely well. Angelica Houston is excellent as the overbearing mother too.

The director Jonathan Levine has captured all this on film with a lovely little indie aesthetic. A rainy Seattle location and some perfectly chosen music really complement the story.

50/50 isn’t about someone bravely overcoming adversity, but about someone who suffers through some very scary times and learns a bit about other people and himself along the way. Treading the line between hilarious and heartbreaking beautifully, it is poignant but never sentimental.

Film review - Red State

2011-10-11T14:58:00.000-07:00

As a mega mental fan of Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse films, seeing Red State is a strange experience. It goes without saying that this is unlike any film he’s made before, but in many ways it is unlike any film anyone has made before.

The story begins with three desperate teenage boys answering an online ad by a woman willing to have a four-way. After some awkward small talk with the lady (Melissa Leo) and some drugged beers, they awake to find themselves held captive by a bizarre church which wants to punish them for their sins.

So far, so Hostel. But this isn’t another torture porn film per se, firstly because the violence isn’t the film’s raison d’être, and secondly because it soon becomes clear that no horror clichés will help you anticipate the plot. You see, this is a satirical message film about the loony Christian right, inspired by the kind of congregations that want to burn other people’s holy books just for the publicity – the kind of people who get followed around by Louis Theroux.

Melissa Leo enraptured

In this case, the church is led by Abin Cooper (Tarantino fave Michael Parks), a snarling, sneering, singing, sermon-ing (that should be a word) patriarch who has been holed up in the woods his whole life and doesn’t take kindly to our modern ways. He and his family believe we are reaching the end times. So when the Feds come calling (led by John Goodman), they are happy to pull a Waco and go to glory in a hail of bullets.

Red State’s genre shifting and strange plot trajectory make it an engrossing watch. The great performances help – Parks is a believable and charismatic monster, Leo is wonderfully stoic and creepy, and Goodman is at his deadpan best as a sad-sack ATF agent. Perhaps most impressive and surprising is Kerry Bishé as Cheyenne, the eldest of Abin’s grandchildren. Last seen in the ill-fated final series of Scrubs, Bishé is just radiant on screen. Confusion, fear and determination are alive in her eyes.

The violence is relentless but not over-the-top. Like the whole of the film, it is very 70s in aesthetic – lots of red blood on brown backgrounds. Photographed by long time collaborator David Klein, it really is Smith’s best looking film to date.

The writing confirms what all his fans know but which might have escaped some critics: Kevin Smith can be serious when he wants to be. But not for very long, as funny moments keep popping up Unsurprisingly the humour is a lot darker than in his other films – think The Wire rather than Walt Flanagan. Although there could have been some trimming (the sermon scene definitely goes on too long), this is interesting, thoughtful work.

Smith has stated that this will be his penultimate film, which is a shame. Worn down by the battering he received for Jersey Girl (a sweet film which was the victim of circumstance – though not a patch on the similarly themed Jack and Sarah) and Cop Out (which was just bad), he’s going to concentrate on his internet radio business and whatever else takes his fancy. With Red State he’s put these ghosts to bed and done himself proud, which I think was really the point.

Bad trailer alert - One Day

2011-07-31T15:19:00.000-07:00

Anne Hathaway sure does a great job with that accent, don't cha think?

Bad trailer alert - Fright Night

2011-07-31T15:13:00.000-07:00

Is this a comedy or a thriller? The marketing team can't make up its mind.

Film review - Super 8

2011-07-31T12:43:00.000-07:00

Super 8 travels the satisfying “life lessons through adventure” path of Stand By Me and The Goonies. And while it might not quite live up to those classics, it is still a great kids’ film which is a little too scary for kids.

Joe (Joel Courtney), a troubled boy living in a small town is spending the summer holidays helping his best friend (Riley Griffiths) make a zombie short on the titular film stock. One night while filming with major crush Alice (Elle Fanning), the gang witnesses a horrific accident which is a lot more sinister than it first seems. As the military takes over the town and people begin to disappear, it is up to the friends to piece together the mystery and save the day.

Like Stand By Me, the film is set around 30 years before present. While this journey into the past is unnecessary, 1979 is obviously a year dripping with nostalgia for writer/director J.J. Abrams just as 1956 was for Stephen King. The main character is also recently bereaved and is distant from his father, like Gordie before him.

If the set up isn’t unique, the execution mostly makes up for it. By combining Abram’s knack for giant creatures (see Cloverfield) and characterisation (see Star Trek, but not Lost, which was dire) we get a, dare I say it, rollercoaster ride as the children come to the rescue. The performances are also great, particularly from Fanning who is just luminous on screen.

Sweet, funny and exciting, Super 8 is a well-told adventure that just falls short of amazing.

Film review - Bridesmaids

2011-07-31T12:39:00.000-07:00

When I saw the trailer for Bridesmaids, I thought it was just producer Judd Apatow’s answer to the accusations of mysogeny that followed Knocked Up. “Look, I can’t hate women – I’ve made a film showing them being just as stupid and gross as the men in my films.” Well, it’s so much more than that. The creation of SNL regular Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, this is that rarest of things - a comedy about women that is genuinely hilarious and truthful.

The film follows Annie (Wiig), a single 30-something who is at a seriously low ebb. Her business has failed, she’s back to flat-sharing with randoms (including a strangely placed Matt Lucas), and she’s sleeping with a horrible hunk (the delicious Jon Hamm). When her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) announces that she is getting married and wants her to be the maid of honour, Annie is forced to organise the wedding with a rag-tag group of bridesmaids, including alpha bitch Helen (Rose Byrne).

As the wedding plans and Annie’s sanity crumble, we are treated to some great set-pieces, including some classic gross-out moments. But there are lots of little exchanges that obviously stem from Wiig and Rudolph’s improvisational background which are even better.

The friendship between the two provides the main emotional story and feels very real. Perhaps the film could have been improved slightly by focusing more on that. The romance between Annie and the Irish cop (Chris O’Dowd from the IT Crowd) is totally adorable but a little too good to be true. Likewise the character of Megan (Melissa McCarthy), the oddest of the bridesmaids, is funny but feels forced – she’s too obviously a stand in for Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover.

Despite the distractions, this is a sweet, funny, uplifting and partially disgusting film which can be appreciated by more than just girls.

Film review - Submarine

2011-04-03T05:49:00.000-07:00

All you need to know about the lovely Richard Ayoade’s debut feature is that if it had been American, the lead character would have been played by Michael Cera.

This coming of age film is mildly wacky, mildly funny, mildly moving, but extremely derivative. The only thing that differentiates it from 100 American indie films is that it is set in Wales.

Firstly, there’s Oliver (Craig Roberts) the main character – an intelligent but awkward teen trying to lose his virginity with a pretty, detached girl (Yasmin Paige). From this aspect the film reminds me most of 2009’s Youth in Revolt. As in that mess of a film, here the main character is extremely unlikeable.

Oliver spends most of his time staring wide-eyed at people, or in his room listening to French records and reading philosophy. This character is a fairly standard template in cinema, because lots of filmmakers liked listening to French records and reading philosophy in their teens, or at least like to think they did.

Oliver has an uncanny similarity to Bud Cort in the cult Harold and Maude, a film which taught Wes Anderson (and apparently in turn Ayoade) everything he knows. In Harold and Maude, the soundtrack was a collection of gently lilting songs made by Cat Stevens. In Submarine, Alex Turner from the hideous Arctic Monkeys picks up an acoustic guitar and has a go at being sensitive instead.

Of course, Oliver has troubles at home. His almost catatonic father (a mesmerising Noah Taylor) suffers from depression, and his mother (a much too young Sally Hawkins) has dowdy clothes and a bad haircut. Added to this, her old flame (Paddy Considine) has moved in next door. He’s a trendy twonk with a terrible mullet and a mid-Atlantic accent who works as a motivational speaker, offering people a chance to change their life through the power of light (so basically Patrick Swayze in Donnie Darko, then).

Just as coming of age films from the 70s were set in the 50s, so Submarine is set in the 80s. Not the real 80s, mind you, but the faux-80s of Napoleon Dynamite (basically today but without mobile phones). There aren’t any fun pop hits to set the scene, just a few odd outfits which wouldn’t seem out of place in any indie film set today. Annoyingly, one of the characters uses the phrase “it’s all good”, which would never have been said in Wales then.

Oliver walks around his depressing seaside town for most of the film – sometimes with the girl, sometimes thinking about the girl or his problem parents, but mostly thinking about himself. And maybe that’s the real problem. Oliver is selfish and doesn’t react how you would want him to react to the genuine dramas around him. If this was slightly wackier and played fully for laughs, maybe it would be ok, but it isn’t.

Submarine brings nothing new to the genre. It doesn’t innovate, and it certainly doesn’t impress. It’s nice that Ayoade was trying to make an interesting British film, but unfortunately he failed by simply copying the Americans.

Watch Harold and Maude instead.

Tearjerkers that don’t make me cry, but just make me angry

2011-03-21T13:54:00.000-07:00

I love a good weepie. I can also appreciate some quite bad ones (give me a disease of the week TV movie any day of the week). But sometimes a film that is supposed to be moving makes me so angry that I want to scream. Instead of screaming, I’m going to list my top five terrible tearjerkers.

WARNING: This article contains serious spoilers. Also, because I dislike these films intensely, I refuse to watch them again to write this. Therefore my views will be coloured by the inaccuracy of memory.

Million Dollar Baby (2004)

Yes, I realise this won best picture, director, actress and supporting actor Oscars, but it is an incredibly stupid film. Here are my problems:

1. Morgan Freeman’s narration
Why? Because it’s a movie law that every film has to be narrated by Morgan Freeman, otherwise it isn’t a “quality” film. He’s hardly in it and his philosophical musings add nothing.

2. The main character’s goal is pointless
There isn’t any money in female boxing so why would it change her life?

3 The random Irish fetishism
When Hilary Swank fights in London, the audience starts chanting “Mo Cuishle”. Why the hell would an English audience know what that means in Gaelic? Oh, and by the way Clint, tartan clad pipers are Scottish, not Irish. There’s a difference.

She’s wearing green because he likes Irish things.

4. Her parents
I know human beings are capable of immense cruelty, but really, are people that horrible to their own daughter? Even after such a terrible accident? Even if they are trailer trash? Don’t they have feelings? In my experience (watching Maury Povich) trailer trash folks have lots of feelings.

5. The final fight
In a championship fight, if your opponent throws an illegal punch, seriously injuring you, shouldn’t they be disqualified and you win by default? Yet she lies in the hospital bed angry that she never won anything.

6. The ending
Of course it is tragic, moving and upsetting, but it comes from nowhere. You might as well have the lead character in every film get paralysed from the neck down ten minutes before the end and then have to be euthanised by a paternal figure. Would that have made Pee-wee’s Big Adventure an artistic masterpiece?

21 Grams (2003)

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu likes to make films about lots of disparate characters all connected by a tragic event, and 21 Grams is no different. Here we have a woman whose family dies in a car crash (Naomi Watts), the man who killed them (Benicio Del Toro), and the man who receives a new heart from her dead husband (Sean Penn). Inarritu also likes to make films out of sequence, zipping back and forward in the timeline.

Cheer up, it might never happen. Oh yeah, it already did.

I love non-linear timelines as much as the next Tarantino fan, but is there any point when it is clear right from the beginning exactly what has happened and how these people relate to each other? There are exactly zero “ooooooo” moments in this film – no reveals, no surprises, just abject misery.

The whole thing seems to have been created to make the director and screenwriter feel clever. “Oh look,” they say, “I can cut up a story and rearrange it randomly even though it adds nothing to the audience experience.” Well done. You should feel proud.

All the characters are so dull that you don’t really care about how guilty they feel or whatever. But the truly terrible thing about this film is Charlotte Gainsbourg as the heart transplant recipient’s wife. I guess she’s supposed to be English, but as the actress is the product of the song Je t’aime, she has this bizarre, sing-songy mid-Channel accent that makes you want to slit your own throat.

For fans of nipples, there’s a lingering shot of Naomi Watts’s standing to attention, but otherwise this film has nothing to recommend it. Depressing, and not in a good way.

Dying Young (1991)

Firstly, this must have one of the worst titles in film history. It isn’t exactly dynamic, is it? You could at least expect it to be accurate, but no-one dies, young or old. You don’t even get the satisfaction of seeing the bastard with cancer snuff it.

This supposedly heart-warming tale centres on a spoilt brat with leukaemia (played with steely-eyed malice by Campbell Scott) and his “romance” with a beautiful girl from the wrong side of the tracks (a radiant Julia Roberts basking in post-Pretty Woman career glow). For “romance”, read “twisted, abusive relationship”. They meet when he puts an ad in the paper for a sexy nurse. Julia applies and gets the job because, although she has no experience, she has beautiful red locks and a hot bod.

As she cares for him through chemo, he proceeds to belittle her lack of culture by lecturing her on art history. He is studying the German expressionists, y’see, but shows her slides of works by Klimt and Rossetti – neither of whom were German nor expressionists – because they liked to paint naked redheads (I told you it was twisted).

Don’t do it Julia!

By putting her down and lying to her face, he somehow tricks her into falling in love with him and they then go away to a house by the sea. There Julia meets a lovely handyman (played by Vincent D’Onofrio) with whom she has lots in common. Campbell Scott doesn’t like this, so he throws a hissy fit and laughs in their faces about how they watched TV when growing up instead of doing cultural things like him (probably staring at more paintings of naked redheads).

For some reason, the screenwriter and director think you should like Scott’s character, though all he does is whine and be mean to Julia. When they decide to try and fight his disease together at the end, you really are disappointed. Originally he was supposed to die and she ended up with the handyman, but the test audiences hated it so it was changed.

Thanks, Hollywood. Thanks a lot.

Jerry Maguire (1996)

They lost me at “show me the money”.

I know, Tom. What does it mean? And why do you have to keep shouting it?

Rudy (1993)

Most English people will not have heard of Rudy. It is, however, on the official list of “films it is ok for American men to cry at” – a list which I believe also contains Brian’s Song and Field of Dreams. These are all about American sports, y’see, and crying isn’t gay if it’s about sport.

Anyway, Rudy tells the true story of Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger (Sean Astin – otherwise known as Samwise Gamgee), who has always dreamed of playing for Notre Dame (pronounced “noder dayme”) College’s football team. However, he’s short, not very good at football and doesn’t have the money or brains for college.

Rudy - he may be small but he dreams big.

Most people would leave it at that and get on with their lives, but not Rudy. He’s going to achieve his dream, no matter what it takes. So he goes to junior college and works really, really hard, improving his grades enough to go to Notre Dame for one final semester. All the while he volunteers to mow the grass and to be a “tackling dummy” for the football team – anything to be close to them.

After having to sleep in the locker room because he has nowhere else to go and badgering the coach for literally years, Rudy finally gets a chance to play.

For two minutes.

The film culminates in him playing right at the end of an actual game, and he manages one tackle. And that’s it. That’s what he’s wasted the prime years of his life for. He doesn’t even win the game for the team or anything, just does one tackle after the game’s already won!

Just because you have a dream, it doesn’t mean that it can, will or even should come true. There should be more films with that message, rather than lionising people who do things as pointless as Rudy Ruettiger.

Film review - The King's Speech

2011-03-02T12:10:00.000-08:00

This classy telling of a previously little-known story from royal history is a funny and moving film. Small scale, quick paced, yet conversation heavy, director Tom Hooper carries you to a very nice crescendo.

Colin Firth plays Bertie, Duke of York and future George VI – a man who truly had greatness thrust upon him. As his brother Edward sees more and more of Mrs Simpson, Bertie has to make more public appearances and the stutter that has plagued his life becomes an issue of national importance. Having seen every expert in London, his wife (Helena Bonham Carter) suggests he tries the unconventional speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush).

After some false starts and voice training montages, the therapy begins to work and we find out more about both Bertie and Lionel. This is where the film shines as Firth and Rush spar and then show their true feelings.

Although Firth bears little resemblance to the real Bertie, he’s got the double speech impediment of stutter and rhotacism down pat. The character is often rude and stubborn, but you always get the sense that he’s just hurting inside thanks to Firth’s sensitive performance. Geoffrey Rush is even better as Lionel. His methods may be slightly unconventional for the time, but he isn’t your normal wacky, inspirational teacher in the Robin Williams mould – he is calm and witty, eclipsing the prince with his dignified air despite his lowly upbringing.

The supporting cast is very good – Bonham Carter is curt and efficient as the future Queen Mum, Guy Pearce makes a cruel Edward VIII and it is lovely to see Ramona Marquez from Outnumbered as the young Princess Margaret. There’s a weird moment for fans of that wet shirt where Jennifery Ehle (playing Lionel’s wife) shares the screen with Firth – Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy are briefly reunited.

Real life is rarely very neat and doesn’t build to many moving crescendos, so obviously the screenwriter has taken liberties with the story. Also, the stakes really weren’t as high as is made out (imagine what would have happened if it was Churchill who had the speech problem). King George inspired people by the deed of staying in London during the Blitz more than through words even after a cure, so really this is about a personal victory.

The King’s Speech is a simple tale, well told, and is incredibly, incredibly nice. Not great, but definitely nice – and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Film review - Black Swan

2011-02-16T14:58:00.000-08:00

Darren Aronofsky’s follow up to The Wrestler is set in a very different world – we’ve moved from the amateur wrestling ring in Nowheresville to the New York City Ballet Company. Black Swan is another portrait of a troubled soul, though. A very, very troubled soul. A completely demented soul. This psychological thriller may be far too loopy, but it is gripping none the less.

Nina (Natalie Portman) is a sweet, quiet and dedicated member of the corps de ballet waiting for her chance to shine. The company’s director (Vincent Cassel) wants to cast someone new as the Swan Queen in his production of Swan Lake, but he tells Nina that she doesn’t have the darkness and nastiness needed to play this dual role of the white and black swan. After she shows him her feisty side, he gives her the part. However, things begin to unravel for Nina as the pressure and the need to express her dark side become too much.

The descent into madness is at first intriguing, then revolting, but ultimately laughable. Body horror is not my favourite thing, and there is much tearing of fingernails and ripping of skin here. One can’t help thinking that it would have been a better film had she been slightly less psychotic and things weren’t taken so far.

Aronofsky has chosen to film the whole thing as he did The Wrestler – in shaky cam style following the lead character around. On the one hand this seems a very odd choice for a film about a majestic art form like ballet (you don’t really get a true sense of the dancing because the shots are always so claustrophobic), but on the other hand it does mean you get to see a lot of what is best about the film – Natalie Portman. Not only is she vulnerable, childlike, hysterical and sensual by turns, she also does most of her own dancing. Her performance is a tour de force and deserves an Oscar.

Barbara Hershey is also excellent as Nina’s terrifying mother, Erica. There are few characters as nutty as Nina in film history, but Erica comes close, and is creepy as hell to boot. Mila Kunis displays her natural charm as Lily, a rival dancer seen as a threat by Nina. Only Winona Ryder seems out of place somehow as a principal dancer past her prime.

If the cinematography isn’t really to my tastes, then the set design made up for this. The liberal use of black and white in most scenes does labour the metaphor a bit (one that is also repeated in costume choices), but it gives the film an unusual and stylish look. Even in Nina’s über-pink bedroom there is a black swan soft toy among the pink fluffy bunnies.

Black Swan is an extremely dramatic film, and will not be to everyone’s tastes. If you let the drama transport you, you may be carried along to the finale. But if you stop to think, you may realise how silly it all is and exit stage left.

Review - The Tourist

2011-02-01T15:25:00.000-08:00

What do you call a thriller that isn’t thrilling?

The Tourist.

This remake of the French film Anthony Zimmer is meant to be frothy, star-filled fun with a bit of action thrown in, but instead it manages to make time move very slowly for everyone unfortunate enough to be watching.

Lingering shots of Angelina Jolie swanning around various European cities dressed in cream take up most of the screen time. She plays Elise, a femme fatale without a hint of danger or competence but with a dodgy English accent. Elise’s lover is some sort of master thief on the run, and the police have her staked out in case they meet up again.

After what feels like an hour, she picks mild-mannered American Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp) – a grieving non-entity with decidedly odd hair for a teacher from the Mid West – to be her decoy on the train to Venice. Frank is now in danger because everyone thinks he’s the master thief.

So far, so Hitchcock. But unlike North by Northwest, the film is all McGuffin and no meat. So what if Frank is in danger? The camera’s still focusing on Elise’s neat shift-dress-and-shawl ensemble. Where’s the tension? The laughs? The action? The only light point in the film is when the oh-so-demure Elise orders a scampi and champagne risotto in a posh restaurant, but it wasn’t meant to be a joke.

Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s last film was the awards magnet The Lives of Others, so it is both surprising that he’d work on this kind of material, and that he’d make such a hash of it.

Jolie and Depp are two of the biggest stars on the planet, but have no chemistry. It feels like Depp, in particular, is phoning in his performance – fair enough, the script gives him nothing to work with, but he how can the man who played Ed Wood have so little character and charisma? A largely British supporting cast is also wasted, including Paul Bettany and Rufus Sewell.

A Hollywood thriller-by-numbers which doesn’t add up, The Tourist is pretty moving wallpaper and a great cure for insomnia.

Film review - The Social Network

2010-11-21T15:32:00.000-08:00

The Social Network is a very exciting and funny film about computer programming. That may seem like an oxymoron, but when the programme in question is one of the most significant websites in history, one that changes people’s lives on a daily basis and is worth billions, it perhaps isn’t that surprising.

The film tells the (possibly quite apocryphal) story of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), the founder of Facebook, from the creation of the website until he settles the various lawsuits it in turn created. After his girlfriend dumps him, Mark gets drunk and creates a website in a night so that people can rate the hotness of female students. This gets him a lot of attention, including from the Winklevoss twins, giant blond rowers who have plans to build a dating website exclusively for Harvard students. Mark agrees to help them while at the same time building thefacebook.com. We all know which site came out on top.

It is quite unusual to have a main character of a film that is so unlikable. Mark is like Sheldon Cooper with a sex drive and without the charm – selfish, terrible in social situations and with a fragile ego. Eisenberg doesn’t try to make him sympathetic and turns out a very good performance. Mark may be the brains of the operation, but his business partner and best friend Eduardo Saverin is the heart. Played by the lovely Andrew Garfield (last seen in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), his betrayal is very sad to watch. Justin Timberlake also gives a fine performance as the founder of Napster. Refreshingly, he plays a prat rather than a cool guy.

The journey from college dorm room to Silicon Valley is fast-paced and hilarious, thanks mainly to the script by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. It’s full of lines perhaps even too clever to be spoken by a load of Harvard smart alecs. The direction by David Fincher is as cool, swish and grubby as you would expect.

Despite all the quality on screen, what perhaps is most striking about the film is how recent the events depicted are. Facebook was founded in early 2004 but a world without it already seems unthinkable for many. Perhaps it is too recent, both for the filmmakers to understand the impact of the website and for the real people portrayed in the film. However, it’s hard to quibble when seeing the film is such an enjoyable experience. Roll on Wikipedia: The Movie, I say.

London Film Festival Review - Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

2010-11-14T13:39:00.000-08:00

I’m half Finnish, and I’m always telling people that Father Christmas lives in Mount Korvatunturi in Finnish Lapland. No-one ever believes me! They think he lives at the North Pole. Like that’s even possible.

It was therefore exciting to see that a film confirming the real origins of Father Christmas was showing at the London Film Festival. Little did I know that I had a lot to learn about Santa Claus myself. You see, the cuddly figure we’ve been brought up with was just the creation of Coca Cola. In reality, he is deadly.

Rare Exports follows Pieteri, a little boy living in the shade of Korvatunturi with his father. An American mining company has been digging deep into the mountain looking for the real Father Christmas. When children start going missing, Pieteri begins to suspect that something evil has been unleashed.

On the surface this should be a children’s film – the main character is a classic lonely child who is not taken seriously by adults, and it’s about Santa Claus. However, it is much too scary for children. The monsters evoke a strong sense of menace and are just real enough to be believable. Though perhaps not an out-and-out horror, most adults should be at least creeped out by it. British and American parents may also feel that the more relaxed attitude to nakedness shown, though typical of the Nordic countries, is not suitable for their offspring.

Rare Exports is based on two short films made in 2003 and 2005 by director Jalmeri Helander. Like District 9 before it, one interesting idea has been successfully developed and expanded into a feature. Funny, shocking and sweet, this film is very different from your usual Hollywood holiday fare, and all the better for it. I don’t think I’m ever going to look at Father Christmas the same way again.

London Film Festival Review - The Parking Lot Movie

2010-11-01T17:35:00.001-07:00

I love slackers and slacker culture. I would like to be a slacker myself (I certainly watch enough television), but my work ethic and drive have always been just strong enough to get in the way. Spiritually, though, I am at one with these people. The Parking Lot Movie is a portrait of a slacker paradise that has been lovingly cultivated in Charlottesville, Virginia, for over 20 years. Like a documentary version of Clerks, it shows the titanic struggles and absurdities of the service industry through the eyes of these outsiders.

The Corner Parking Lot is a little car park situated opposite the University of Virginia owned by Chris Farina – a very relaxed guy who likes to wear shorts, and who also happens to be a documentary film maker himself. Chris only lets friends work in the car park, or friends of friends. This policy has meant that all his employees have been intelligent slackers – philosophy graduate students, musicians, dreamers. Director Meghan Eckman spent three years filming the goings on at the car park, and interviewing current and past attendants. The results are hilarious, moving and fascinating.

Working at the parking lot involves mostly just sitting alone in the ramshackle booth and taking money from customers. Eckman allows her subjects to go through the minutiae of all the tasks, the little rituals that have developed in this strange island of space-time. The job gives plenty of scope for these underachievers to analyse their lives, themselves, and the nature of the car park, producing many of the best lines. For example, one describes the role of the parking lot attendant as that of a “creator-destroyer god”.

Unfortunately the attendants’ philophising and mucking around has to be interrupted by those who want to use the car park. In the words of Randal Graves: “This job would be great if it wasn’t for the customers.” The interviewees do not prescribe to the maxim that “the customer is always right”. It’s more a case of “the customer is always a douche”. When you realise they deal with a lot of SUV-driving frat boys, it’s not surprising that they are cynical.

There is a sense of desolation running between the laughs, of course – no one dreams of being a car park attendant. However, for many it seems the job gave them time to find out what they wanted to do, and to grow as a human being while they did it.

Slacker culture held the Zeitgeist during the 90s, and so the The Parking Lot Movie seems to come from that decade – it’s so lo-fi that it should be soundtracked by Pavement. The low budget feel is charming, however, and doesn’t detract from the subject at all.

Eckman has found a wonderful bit of weirdness to focus her camera on, filled with droll and witty people. This documentary has everything from the sublime to the ridiculous, the mundane to the profound, the pitiful to the inspirational. And it has all been found in one little patch of concrete.

Film review - The Town

2010-10-27T15:24:00.000-07:00

When Gone Baby Gone was released, it became easy to say that Ben Affleck is a better director than actor – his directorial debut had an assured quality to it, and at that time the roles really weren’t coming his way. His follow up, The Town, is another serious look at working-class Boston, but this time he is directing and starring. It turns out he’s good at both.

The story follows Doug Macray (Affleck), a man from the Charlestown district of Boston who has followed his father into the profession of bank robbing. Apparently, this is not an uncommon line of work in Charlestown. After a successful job, Doug and his gang discover that the woman they took hostage (Rebecca Hall) lives in the area. Worried that she may be able to identify them, he decides to find out how much she knows.

Then things start to turn romantic, and his life spirals out of control.

Affleck has produced a very tense thriller from Chuck Hogan’s source novel, full of twists, suspense and drama. There’s a lot of action, with brutal robbery scenes and a good old-fashioned car chase. The love story is particularly well handled thanks to Hall’s performance. Her character feels very real – an understated young woman who’s been through trauma and finds comfort in Doug.

The rest of the performances are also excellent, and a special mention must go to Jeremy Renner (last seen in The Hurt Locker) as Doug’s partner in crime. It’s also lovely to see Jon Hamm as an FBI agent, but fans of Mad Men will find it strange to see him in the modern world (at one particularly disturbing point he mentions Skype).

The lead performance from Affleck is by no means stunning, but shows the natural charm that got him noticed by Hollywood in the first place (before it got him noticed by the paparazzi). His character is much like Will from Good Will Hunting: a guy who should be doing great things but sticks around his neighbourhood out of misplaced loyalty. This film shows that when given interesting parts, he isn’t so bad after all.

There are a few negatives to the film – the final shootout goes on a bit, and the criminal fraternity of Charlestown is not paricularly well defined (making the role of Pete Postlethwaite’s boss in the whole affair as hard to understand as the thick Bostonian accents everyone has).

It is likely that The Town will be compared to The Departed. While it seems run of the mill next to Scorsese’s stab at a Boston-set crime film, it is certainly an enjoyable ride and another quality film from Mr Affleck.

Film review - Toy Story 3

2010-10-10T13:18:00.000-07:00

Toy Story was the first computer-animated feature, and its second sequel may just be the best. This film about a group of toys is a heartbreaking study of change and loss, but also an accomplished prison escape movie. It’s a comedy, but will make you cry.

Woody, Buzz and the gang have resigned themselves to a quiet life in the attic when they see their owner Andy start packing for college. But when they accidently get donated to a daycare centre, they enter a toy’s paradise full of children to play with and new toys to befriend. However, all is not what it seems at Sunnyside daycare, and they realise they have to get back to Andy.

Every frame of Toy Story 3 is full of invention, and every character a delight (except Jessie, who is as annoying as ever). It is this attention to detail that lifts Pixar films above all others aimed at children. The tight plot is expertly crafted, using genre clichés from horror and thrillers that keep the adults’ attention too. A hilarious script is performed by a wonderful cast, but Ned Beatty needs a special mention for the voice of strawberry-scented Lotso, one of the great film villains of all time.

As well as all the excitement in the story, there is also a lot of sadness. Ultimately this is a tale about growing up and leaving your childhood behind, which means it will probably have more effect on adults than children – they won’t know what they’ve got until it's gone. Only Professor Coldheart wouldn’t be blubbing by the end.

Review - Four Lions

2010-07-04T11:15:00.000-07:00

Christopher Morris isn’t exactly a stranger to controversy. His red hot satire seems to have upset as many people as it has made laugh. The Daily Mail set were flabbergasted at Brass Eye as they were told it was making light of paedophiles. Actually, it was making fun of Daily Mail readers. His comedy has always veered between disturbing (like Jam) and supremely silly (The Day Today). Four Lions, his first feature film, deals with serious subjects but is actually one of his silliest pieces of work.

The film follows the most useless group of terrorists since the People’s Front of Judea. Omar (the excellent Riz Ahmed) is a young man who wants to make his mark on the world by blowing himself up. After a disasterous stint at a training camp in Pakistan with friend Waj (Kayvan Novak), Omar and his cell decide to go it alone and organise their own attack on London. Unfortunately for Omar, the idiocy of Waj, Barry (Nigel Lindsay), Hassan (Arsher Ali) and Fessal (Adeel Akhtar) complicate matters at every turn.

The earlier Monty Python reference is very apt, as there is something very Pythonesque about the humour here. The characters are extremely stupid, almost to a surreal level. Even Omar, the brains of the outfit, is stupid by definition – he has a nice life in the Britain with a beautiful wife and son, yet he wants to destroy it. This was Morris’s intention, to show how muddled your thinking must be believe being a suicide bomber is a good idea.

I suppose Daily Mail readers will say that the film is making light of terrorism, of showing suicide bombers being nice people. It is true that by using the template of a heist movie, Morris does make the audience (the real target of the bombs) root for the bombers at some points in the film. This is because the characters are engaging and, yes, not wholly evil. However, they aren’t brain washed – they are aware that what they are doing will lead to mass slaughter. The fact that these “normal” people could be capable of this is perhaps more terrifying than portraying them as classic baddies, and certainly more realistic.

This is a truly hilarious film, but the jokes do not detract from how upsetting much of it is or how tragic for all concerned. Morris has pitched the whole thing about as well as you could have hoped for, walking an extremely thin tightrope the whole way. Like his old mucker Armando Iannucci (co-writer of the In the Loop) he is making comedy that gets to the heart of matters.

Review - Sex and the City 2

2010-07-04T11:12:00.000-07:00

The first Sex and the City film was a big disappointment. Most of it was just fashion porn, with some truly hideous mawkish moments (more often than not starring poor Jennifer Hudson). A few genuinely touching bits were cancelled out by the extended wedding fashion shoot cringing.

Now that I have accepted that SATC on the big screen will always be a horrible version of the TV series, I could enjoy the second outing as a mildly amusing romp. The faux-seriousness of their supposed problems aside (you do have it tough, girls – having the children you so desperately craved, the love of your life that eluded you so long, or a demanding job), the film is an enjoyable trip with your four favourite girlfriends, even if they are bastardised versions of people you once loved.

The plot, as it goes, concerns Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte worrying about their lives and going on an all expenses paid trip to Abu Dhabi. Compared with the first film, fewer moments stuck in my proverbial craw. Those that did were:

The wedding. Given the history of the two characters it felt deeply wrong, even if the ceremony was fabulous.
Why did Penelope Cruz have a cameo? What did that bring to the film?
What was going on with the accent of Samantha’s “Danish” guy? He sounded like he was from Rotherham.
Many outfits were just ludicrous - taffeta and souks do not mix.

Kim Cattrall and Cynthia Nixon are great comedic actresses, outshining their co-stars in a way that wasn’t noticeable in the TV show. Working with a so-so script, they deliver some great lines. Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristin Davis’s characters are often just annoying.

Generally this is funnier and ten times stupider than the first film. Which means it is a hundred times stupider than the original series. Let it wash over you and, whatever you do, don’t analyse it.

Review - Hot Tub Time Machine

2010-06-15T15:16:00.000-07:00

This film follows three 40-somethings and a 20-something as they travel to the 80s in a magic hot tub at a skiing resort. Gritty realism isn’t really what the director Steve Pink is going for. Instead it is very, very stupid and very funny.

The three old friends (John Cusack, Craig Robinson and Rob Corddry) leap into their own teenage bodies and must relive an eventful weekend from their past. The results are very rude and crude, with lots of retro references and general making fun of the past. Everyone apparently had day-glo clothes and very bad hair back then.

This is obviously riding the coat tails of The Hangover, and it just isn’t up to that standard – because it isn’t as funny, but also because it doesn’t have a nugget of sweetness at its centre. It is also a bit smuttier than many “gross-out” comedies of late. As long as you aren’t a prude, it should give you an evening of laughs if nothing else.

Film review - Kick-Ass

2010-05-31T15:25:00.000-07:00

This film has predictably caused a tabloid frenzy, but really it is no more violent than many aimed at adults. The only difference is that a little girl takes part in said violence and swears a lot – which sensible people know is hilarious and awesome.

Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is a geeky high school student who decides to follow in the footsteps of Peter Parker and be a superhero. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been bitten by a handy radioactive spider, and so is just an ordinary teenager wearing a customised wetsuit. Even more unfortunately, the fake superhero gets mixed up with some real criminals.

Superficially, Kick-Ass deals with similar issues to Alan Moore’s Watchmen, but does not take seriously the question of what would happen if superheroes were real. This is more in the Mystery Men mould of films about stupid superheroes.

Johnson is too bland for the role – not nerdy enough to convincingly play the character or with enough spark to make you care very much. He is out-shone by the supporting players, particularly Christopher Mintz-Plasse as rival fake superhero, the Red Mist, and Nicolas Cage as the real deal, Big Daddy. But it is Chloe Moretz as Hit-Girl who really steals the show. Cute and with killer delivery, she is a little star in the making and what the film will be remembered for.

Written by Jane Goldman and the director Matthew Vaughn, the English roots can be seen in the casting (Dexter Fletcher!) and the liberal sprinkling of art from the YBAs in the rich baddie’s house. The film has pretensions of following Tarantino, but despite the Kill Bill-style violence they don’t quite pull off.

Instead they have crafted a violent thrill-ride which is light on plot, but heavy with laughs. It’s not big, and it’s not clever, but Kick-Ass is a whole lot of fun.

Film review - I Love You Phillip Morris

2010-05-31T09:30:00.000-07:00

They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and this certainly applies to the life and times of Steven Russell (here played by Jim Carrey). Once a happily married policeman, he came out and became a conman with a knack for escaping from prison.

His story is portrayed with a light, playful touch by writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who previously brought us Bad Santa (2003). There is something about the film which feels unoriginal – perhaps the wacky tone, hyper-real production design and Texas setting makes it too Coen Brothers-esque – but it is still a hilarious and fascinating tale.

Carrey is brilliant as the audacious protagonist, walking the thin line between his comic and serious acting personas. There are moments of pathos amongst the scams, which he pulls off with aplomb, but he is also happy to partake in a little slapstick. Ewan McGregor seems a little old to be playing Steven’s titular lover – the character is supposed to be an ingénue. However, he gives a very sweet performance.

It is unusual to have a gay romance portrayed in a mainstream film, but this is not a romantic comedy. The focus is on plot, and what a plot it is. See it and be amazed at what one guy got away with.

Film review - Green Zone

2010-05-31T07:41:00.000-07:00

It’s not surprising that a war film is depressing, but Green Zone isn’t depressing because of the loss of life on screen; our hero doesn’t have to comfort a dying friend or reflect on what it means to kill a man like usual. Instead what is depressing is the politics behind the war itself. The situations depicted here are exasperating and all too close to the truth for comfort.

Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) has the pointless task of searching Baghdad for weapons of mass destruction in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq invasion. When a CIA agent points out just how pointless it is, he starts to investigate the evidence for the war itself.

This is a taut, tense thriller, full of fast-paced intrigue. Paul Greengrass has combined his talents for message films with the Bourne side here, and it is an assured take on a difficult subject. Damon is impressive in the lead role, and it is lovely to see the Wire’s Amy Ryan on the big screen as a journalist. Greg Kinnear portrays the spineless suit charged with covering up the government’s tracks very well indeed.

As I’ve said, this is an enjoyable, pacey film about intelligence briefings – you should by now have smelled a rat. This is not All the President’s Men, but a fictionalised and much simplified version of what actually happened. Unsurprisingly, this retelling is also not particularly kind to the Americans. As an enjoyable night out at the cinema, Green Zone works really well. The danger is that people will think these events actually happened in this way. If only it were that simple.

Film review - Shutter Island

2010-05-31T06:20:00.000-07:00

This 50s-set thriller is a bit of a disappointment – especially as it comes from Martin Scorsese. US Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner (Mark Ruffalo) arrive on the 100-per-cent spooky titular island to find an escaped mental patient. As a storm hits, Daniels starts to believe that there is more going on at this hospital than there first seems.

It is obvious right from the get-go that Scorsese is paying homage to his favourite B-movies of the 40s and 50. In the opening scene the score is full of orchestral crashity-crashity boom-ba-boom, when all we’re looking at is Leo on a boat. The melodramatic score and ominous shots of the island as it comes into view seem totally over the top to a modern audience – instead of building tension it makes everything seem quite humorous.

There’s no let-up in the hokum when we reach the island – the mental institution is run by everyone’s favourite screen baddy (Ben Kingsley) and an archetypal creepy German (Max von Sydow), and of course “there’s only one way off the island”. Once the massive storm comes, there is no way off the island, and we follow Leo as he runs around the forest, soaked to the skin and desperately trying to find the truth.

In the end this is just a lot of noise and driving rain signifying very little. There’s nothing wrong with the performances – DiCaprio is fine in the leading role, Ruffalo gives a quality performance and Kingsley is everything you expect – and there are some creepy moments, but the slow pace and unintentionally hilarious flashbacks will leave most feeling cold. The film just doesn’t sweep you along like it should.

As a silly thriller, it works well enough. If you want some deeper meaning, it is best to look elsewhere.

Review - Up in the Air

2010-02-28T06:25:00.000-08:00

Jason Reitman’s follow-up to the much-loved Juno is another bittersweet film, but one much less arch and more true to life. Up in the Air tells the story of Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a man with one of the worst jobs you can imagine – he is hired by companies to fire people for them. Yet he loves his job because it allows him to travel across America, collecting airmiles and avoiding any meaningful relationships with others. When he finds his perfect mate (Vera Farmiga), and his own job is threatened by a fresh-faced graduate (Anna Kendrick) and her downsizing plans, Ryan starts to evaluate his life.

Clooney makes Ryan suave and sophisticated (let’s face it, it is hard for Clooney to be anything else), but at the same time he is one of the saddest characters to have ever been put on celluloid. Estranged from his family, he is someone with no home and no love who preaches this as a successful way to live at self-help conferences. It would have been easy for him to be incredibly unlikeable, like Tom Cruise in Magnolia, but the way he carries out his despicable job with such decency means you can see there’s a heart of gold in there somewhere.

Although Clooney’s performance is excellent, the two women are outstanding. Kendrick’s character is so realistic, and not the sort of female character you often see on screen. Bright and ambitious, her relentlessly business-like surface hides a naive young woman who is very hard on herself. Farmiga plays an older career woman who knows what she wants and goes out and gets it. The character’s relationship with Ryan feels very real, making this film anything but a fairytale romance. These are two star-making performances from actresses who haven’t been given a chance to shine before (they were last in the Twilight saga and The Orphan respectively).

The screenplay, based on the novel by Walter Kirn, is funny and touching in equal measure. This is perhaps the first movie to deal with the current recession, and one of the few to examine corporate America and business culture. Reitman uses real people who have lost their jobs to talk about what it feels like to be made redundant, which is heartbreaking and brings a universality to the film that would otherwise be missing. Up in the Air is a wonderful character study and truly a film for our times.

Review - Avatar

2010-01-09T17:11:00.000-08:00

I am very proud to say that I have never seen Titanic. I was 14 when it came out and everyone at school was obsessed, particularly with Leonardo DiCaprio. We went on a French exchange trip and the situation was even worse over there. Celine Dion echoed round the country and I vowed never to see the watery epic. I was therefore not particularly inclined to see another film by James Cameron, and helpfully he decided not to make any for ten years. But then I saw the trailer for Avatar, and knew I had to see the CGI in 3D even if it was put together by the bombastic self-proclaimed king of the world.

Avatar is set on a planet called Pandora, home to a tall, blue, humanoid species called the Na’vi that live in a lush forest at one with nature. Although the atmosphere is toxic to humans, we earthlings have travelled there to mine a valuable mineral called unobtanium (a groan-inducing name), putting us at war with the Na’vi over land. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a paraplegic ex-marine brought in to work on a special project in place of his dead twin brother. Sully’s brain is connected up to an ‘avatar’, a half-Na’vi, half-human creature grown especially for the purpose so that he can safely go amongst the Na’vi and negotiate. As he learns the way of the Na’vi and falls for a beautiful Na'vi called Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), he realises that what the humans are doing is wrong.

Cameron has created a story full of high-concept conceits, but that is still paper thin. The environmental and historical allegories involved stick out more obviously than any of the 3D graphics, and the message behind it is as deep as a puddle. It’s just FernGully: The Last Rainforest in space.

The situation is not helped by the choice of leading man. Worthington is hunky, but lacks charisma. And when James Cameron has defined your character only as ‘not as bright as your dead twin brother’, and ‘quite a good marine’, you need all the charisma you can get. Sigourney Weaver brings sparkle to the screen as a scientist, Zoe Saldana is appealing as Neytiri, and it is nice to see Giovanni Ribisi in an atypical role, but generally there is little space in the dumb plot for you to get involved with any characters.

Now that I have established that Avatar is a mediocre film, I can now discuss the reason why everyone will still see it: the CGI. Using new techniques specially developed for the film, the 3D computer graphics are the finest ever made. A sequence where Sully’s avatar is shown the forest at night by Neytiri is breathtaking in a way perhaps only comparable to the first sight of the diplodoci in Jurassic Park (even if it looks suspiciously like the early levels of Rayman). The Na’vi characters are rendered very well, with realistic facial expressions. Cameron’s intention was to get rid of the creepiness of CGI humanoids, and though creepiness remains it is at a far lower level than usual. The 3D is integrated and realistic, not gimmicky with things flying at your face.

Most people will feel that it is worth sitting through the slow opening act and drawn-out final battle for the truly cinematic experience of this middle section. But few will be moved by this technological marvel, something which Titanic (however much I detest everything it stands for) managed to do to millions.

Review - Paranormal Activity

2009-12-17T16:18:00.000-08:00

Most horror films are marketed as “the most terrifying movie ever made”, and Paranormal Activity is no exception. As is usually the case, this is a gross overestimation of the scariness level involved.

The film is another example of the The Blair Witch Project school of fake documentary, a technique most successfully used by Cloverfield. A young (and very annoying) couple are hearing bumps in the night, the same bumps that have been plaguing the girl (Katie Featherstone, a slightly dumpier and brunette version of Amy Adams) since childhood. The guy (Micah Sloat) decides to buy a video camera and start recording the goings on, even though a paranormal expert warns them not to antagonise the demon. The film is ostensibly the footage they shot.

Made extremely cheaply and with no effects you would class as “special”, the film is surprisingly effective for most of its running time. With the camera recording the couple as they sleep throughout the night, the audience must be very quiet to hear the paranormal activity, naturally producing tension and jumpiness. There are no big scares, though, and by the end your patience may have run out with both the demon and the couple.

The film is enjoyable if you are in the right mood. Otherwise you’ll realise you’re spending minutes of your finite life watching a bedsheet twitch.

Review - Das weisse Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon)

2009-12-17T05:05:00.000-08:00

Evil comes in many forms, and mindless cruelty seems to be Michael Haneke’s favourite. This engrossing and Palme d’Or-winning film examines the tensions that can simmer just below the surface of a seemingly ordered society. While certainly not a horror film or even a thriller, it will leave you feeling unsettled for days.

The setting is a German village in 1913 plagued by random acts of nastiness. Who is the culprit? Why are they doing it? We follow many different people as they try to go about their normal lives, from the local Baron to the lowly farmer. People are born, fall in love and die, and yet the mysterious happenings continue.

Filmed in digital black and white, everything about this film is exquisitely just-so. The pace is measured and the framing of each shot is somehow still and quiet, but never boring. The White Ribbon feels like the sort of film they haven’t made since the 70s: of a decidedly modern sensibility but with a respect for the audience that has been otherwise lost in the years since.

The full German title should give you a clue that there are some children involved in the story. Child acting is often pretty iffy, so that fact could raise alarm bells. Never fear, though, because Haneke has chosen wisely and all give wonderful performances. Two adorable little boys and a mildly terrifying older girl called Klara (Maria-Victoria Dragus) are particularly noteworthy. Amongst the adults, the sweetest scenes feature a geeky school teacher (Christian Friedel) and his burgeoning relationship with the Baron’s nanny (Leonie Benesch). Their innocence and goodness contrasts sharply with some of the other residents of the village.

The shadow of history hangs heavy here. But while the German setting is far from accidental, the film shouldn’t purely be seen as an allegory of Nazism. There is something more universal about the themes involved. Some will find the ending frustrating, but others will realise that it is more realistic than any neat solution would be. And when the journey to reach it is so fascinating, a little frustration may be worthwhile.

Review - Up

2009-12-14T15:59:00.000-08:00

It seems that Pixar is now well into its second phase of its development as a studio. In the first phase, you can imagine the origin of all the films starting with someone saying: “Let’s make a film about...” There was: “Let’s make a film about toys.” Then: “Let’s make a film about insects.” Followed by: “Let’s make a film about monsters/fish/superheroes/cars.” That’s not to say that the resulting movies weren’t all individually wonderful and bursting with ideas, it’s just that the basic set-ups didn’t need a huge amount of explanation to be understood by both adults and children before they saw them.

The second phase of Pixar has seen much stranger stories come to life on the big screen, ones that can’t be explained in one short phrase. These films feel like they are each the vision of one individual with the freedom to make the film they want to (even though we know that animation is the most collaborative medium). Ratatouille wasn’t just a film about rats, it was about a rat who becomes the best chef in the world through pulling the hair of a human. Wall-E wasn’t just about robots, it was about a robot left alone on Earth to clean up after humanity had left the planet. And now comes Up, a film about an old man who attaches thousands of balloons to the top of his house so that he can fly to South America to fulfil a promise, and about the boy scout who tags along for the ride.

Up is a beautiful film in more ways than one. The animation, as you would expect from Pixar, is stunning; the characters are designed in a charming ‘cartoony’ style, with no attempt to make them look creepy and realistic, and the palate is lively and colourful. I saw the film in 3D, and while it was nice, I wouldn’t say it was necessary at all (nothing flies at your face in a thrilling way or anything). It is the writing that is most beautiful, however. The story is extremely poignant, and will leave many 3D glasses stained with tears. It’s not all doom and gloom, though, as there are some very funny bits and silly animals that will keep the children happy.

The voice acting is excellent. The relationship between the old man and the little boy is really at the heart of the film, and they are portrayed brilliantly by Edward Asner and Jordan Nagai respectively. Christopher Plummer seems to be everywhere at the moment, and he is good here as a demented baddie. The score by Michael Giacchino has a lovely retro feel that adds a lot to the film as well.

It may be a slightly complex and unusual story for what is ostensibly a children’s film, but that is what makes Up such a wonderful piece of work for people of all ages. If this is the second phase of Pixar, I can’t wait to see what the third phase will bring.

Review - The Twilight Saga: New Moon

2009-11-26T15:17:00.000-08:00

When you’re young, you do like some almighty guff. Saved by the Bell: Hawaiian Style springs to mind as something that seemed very good at the time, but was in retrospect not exactly high art. The rise of the High School Musical franchise has shown that tween girls are a commercial force to be reckoned with. However, there is a limit to the crap they will take, and based on the audience reaction at the showing of New Moon I attended, the filmmakers are close to that limit. Many scenes were so cheesy that this very young audience just burst out laughing.

It doesn’t matter that New Moon has a terrible script, seriously iffy acting, and that the pacing is shot to hell, though; people will still watch it for two reasons. Firstly, it’s based on a tremendously popular series of books, like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, so people will be happy no matter how long and boring the films is, eager to see each beloved scene spring forth from their brain and onto the screen. Having a hit in this situation is fool proof, unless you cast Nicole Kidman, of course, in which case people will run away screaming (cf. The Golden Compass).

But they didn’t cast Nicole Kidman, they cast Robert Pattinson, the second reason it will be so popular. All he has to do (in fact, all he does do) is stand in the background and look moody, and the audience laps it up. That is until he takes off his top to reveal a pale torso and strange chest hair, when a collective ‘Ewwwww!’ was expressed from the crowd of 12-year-olds. Not the reaction I expected. Luckily New Moon has the added tween-girl-catnip of Taylor Lautner, a 17-year old who must have been stuffed full of protein shakes like a foie gras goose to produce his new rippled physique. His shirt is always off and the audience approved of his torso.

Following on from where Twilight left off, the film opens with Bella (Kristen Stewart) still madly in love with her vampire boyfriend Edward (Pattinson). But she is very worried because Edward is eternally young and she is ageing. Then Edward leaves her for a reason that is never explained, and she goes into a deep depression. Only her friend Jacob (Lautner) and his amazing abs can cheer up Bella, and he turns out to be a werewolf.

In a film with many problems, the main one is Bella. She is a whiny, characterless girl who when not moping is either bumping into things or putting herself in mortal danger. She has friends but doesn’t like them, no hobbies or interests and nothing to say for herself. Following her progress is like walking along a dark tunnel for a few hours with only a small light at the end of it, which turns out to be a rushed and very strange finale in Italy that wasn’t worth the trip.

The glimpses of Robert Pattinson’s eyes and Taylor Lautner’s fascinating new body are all the film has to recommend it. The Saved by the Bell summer special was really genius in comparison and about ten times more fun.

Review - Law Abiding Citizen

2009-11-17T14:36:00.000-08:00

My review of this film can be read on Catch a Vibe.

Review - The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

2009-11-15T15:47:00.000-08:00

This film has been very eagerly awaited, both because it includes the final performance by Heath Ledger, and because it was rumoured to be a return to form by Terry Gilliam. The positive buzz pre-release was that Lily Cole’s mesmerising and sensitive performance would launch a new star. In reality, the film is a confusing and heartless mess, a fantasy for fantasy’s sake with any deeper intended meaning lost in a sea of swirling CGI.

Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), a mystic of uncertain and ancient origin, travels through London in a decaying carriage cum sideshow stage with his band of misfits, including his beautiful daughter Valentina (Cole). They put on a show in which people go through a magic mirror to be confronted by a phantasmagorical landscape of their own minds (I think; the film is not very clear on this point). Unfortunately, it turns out that Parnassus is an inveterate gambler, and long ago he promised the soul of his daughter to the mysterious Mr Nick (Tom Waits), who we can only assume is the devil.

Into this messy situation drops Tony (Ledger), a man in a white suit who has lost his memory. It is very unfortunate that this had to be Heath’s last role, as any acting is completely drowned out by a terrible accent. Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell (who fill in the Tony-gaps left by Ledger’s death) are all so much better at doing an English accent (unsurprisingly in the case of Law) that it is slightly embarrassing to watch. Tony’s character and motivation are very unclear, but by the time the final big fantasy sequence arrives you really don’t care why everything is happening or how it concludes.

Cole is also very disappointing. Undeniably unusual looking and definitely intelligent, still at times her performance is very amateurish, with clunky phrasing and a faraway look in her eyes. Costumes do most of the work for her. On a positive side, Plummer is gruff and lovely as Parnassus, Verne Troyer gets a speaking part and is quite funny, and Andrew Garfield is exceptional as Tony’s rival for Valentina’s heart. I’ve only seen him in the dreadful Red Riding thing on telly, so it was nice to get a second chance to like him in this Puck-like role.

The best way to survive the film is to not think and just swim around in Gilliam’s mind for a bit. If you stop to consider what’s going on, you’ve had it, because there is not enough magic to sustain an inquiring interest. The use of CGI is the main culprit. Gilliam always had a rather DIY aesthetic, which made his work seem like that of a troubled Victorian. The lavish costumes and sets mostly convey this, but when people go through the magic mirror, they end up inside a level of Katamari Damacy and the charm disappears. Less computer involvement, a clearer story and real emotion (something which his masterpieces The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys and Brazil included) would have made all the difference.

London Film Festival review - Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo

2009-11-15T14:47:00.000-08:00

Oklahoma hasn’t entered into the collective consciousness much since the days of the Dust Bowl (the terrible bombing of 1995 being an unwelcome exception), but the state has been quietly building up one of the highest incarceration rates in America. Weirdly, it has about twice the average female incarceration rate. Who would have thought that this largely rural state would be locking up its women like there’s no tomorrow?

Also, who would have thought there was such a thing as a ‘prison rodeo’? The Oklahoma State Prison Rodeo has been running since 1940, and is one of only two left. In 2006 they let women prisoners compete for the first time, and this documentary from Bradley Beesley (director of the fabulous Flaming Lips film The Fearless Freaks) follows the girls (and one guy) taking part in 2007.

Like all the best documentaries, it will make you laugh, cry and feel like you’ve come away just that little bit more aware of the world and the amazing people in it. Added to the heartbreaking stories you’d expect of a film set in prison, you’ve got the unique spectacle of Bull Poker (which is just as sensible a sport as it sounds).

And the stories are heartbreaking. Most of the women are mothers, and the pain of separation from their children hangs heavily on their shoulders. Jamie, a murderer with a tiny little-girl voice, has had such a hard life, and Foxy hasn’t seen her family for 12 years. These are by all accounts beautiful young women, yet we know that they have done horrible things. Danny Liles, the only man featured, has taken part in 14 rodeos and has so far served over 20 years for murder. His philosophical musings make up some of the poignant moments.

Underlying the human stories is a deep uneasiness about the ‘war on drugs’, which has put most of the women in prison. But there is no moralising here. The thrill of watching bronco riding or people being gorged by bull horns in the film’s climax is secondary to the thrill of seeing hope for a better life in the future. A wonderful documentary.

London Film Festival review - La doppia ora (The Double Hour)

2009-10-25T16:21:00.000-07:00

This Italian thriller successfully combines two quite distinct genres: romance and horror. Sonia (Kseniya Rappoport), a lonely hotel cleaner newly arrived in Turin, tries speed dating and meets Guido, an equally-lonely ex-policeman. The two fall in love, but their dream is shattered when some very nasty things start happening, leaving Sonia to question her sanity.

The three screenwriters (Alessandro Fabbri, Ludovica Rampoldi and Stefano Sardo) have crafted a surprising and clever plot that manages to stay just the right side of hokey. First-time director Giuseppe Capotondi has filmed it as a serious noir picture with thoughtful cinematography and editing that really builds up tension.

What really lifts the film, though, are the performances of the two leads, which seem to belong in a gritty drama set on a council estate rather than a thriller. Rappoport (imagine a really pretty version of Juliet Stevenson) looks haunted and lost beautifully throughout, and Timi (a quintessential Italian stallion) mixes strength and subtle sadness in every scene. Both deservedly won awards at the Venice Film Festival.

Apparently La doppia ora may be remade in America, and one can only assume that Hollywood will ignore the moving psychological explorations in favour of plot, which will be a great loss; it is the spanning of so many genres that makes this film really worth seeing.

London Film Festival review - When You're Strange

2009-10-25T15:34:00.000-07:00

One’s likely enjoyment of a music documentary is proportional to one’s liking of the music in question, however good the documentary is. Therefore I love Fearless Freaks (the Flaming Lips documentary), but hate No Direction Home (even with Martin Scorsese directing, for me Bob Dylan is a jerk with a hideous singing voice). A film about the Doors was always going to appeal to me, even just as an excuse to listen to their music, but this retelling of the band’s story using only archive footage really is spell-binding.

When You’re Strange grew from an unlikely source: Dick Wolf’s production company. The creator of the (amazing) Law & Order franchise has had the rights to lots of never-before-seen footage of the Doors for a while, but didn’t know how best to use it. Tom DiCillo, the director of Johnny Suede and Living in Oblivion has managed to weave this together with other archive material to really get under the skin of Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore and Robby Krieger. Johnny Depp provides a laid back voiceover which is highly respectful of the subject matter. It is also full of surprising facts like that Light My Fire was the first song Krieger ever wrote and that at the height of Morrison’s fame, his estranged father was commanding a fleet in South East Asia.

When I watched the film, I was convinced that new footage had been made for it. A dream sequence interspersed throughout the film which appears to show Morrison driving through the desert after his death had to have been done with actors, I felt, and this annoyed me in its unnecessariness. In fact, these scenes are taken from Morrison’s film HWY: an American Pastoral (1969), and now that I know this I am retrospectively blown away by them. They look so fresh and so starkly beautiful, showing that Morrison’s time at film school was not wasted.

These clips are just some of the treats in this film for fans of the Doors. My only quibble is that with the focus so squarely on Jim, the other members of the band do get left out. This is not surprising as he was a fascinating character, and one that death made iconic. All in all this is a masterful exploration of one of the 60s’ truly great groups and their role in the end of the hippie dream.

Review - Made in Jamaica

2009-10-20T15:43:00.000-07:00

My review of Made in Jamaica can be read at Catch a Vibe.

London Film Festival Review - The Men Who Stare at Goats

2009-10-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

There aren’t many lightweight comedies about the psychological techniques employed by the American military in wartime, but in a way that is surprising. The Men Who Stare at Goats combines many of society’s favourite things: conspiracy theories, the paranormal, and the ancient conventions of the buddy road movie. Add to that George Clooney using his considerable comedic skills, and you’ve got a sure-fire hit.

This fictionalised account of true events follows a journalist (Ewan McGregor) trying to become embedded with troops at the beginning of the Iraq War and failing miserably. Then he meets Lyn Cassady (Clooney) a loopy salesman who says that he was part of a secret government programme to create soldiers with superpowers, so as to better beat the Russians. The two embark on a mission into Iraq.

Screenwriter Peter Straughan has done a wonderful job of creating a story out of Jon Ronson’s book, tying the whole thing up in a neat little bow. The farcical nature of the stranger-than-fiction truth is played up and the joke quotient is high, with a dash of slapstick thrown in for good measure. A serious message about recent military tactics slips by almost unnoticed. Both Straughan and Ronson are British, which you can tell from the use of Alright by Supergrass over the beginning titles.

It’s lovely to see Clooney getting to be funny in a non-Coen Brother’s film for once, and he plays crazy expertly (the moustache helps). Jeff Bridges reprises his delightful Dude persona as the strung-out founder of the psychic army, and Kevin Spacey hams it up as an evil psychic soldier who never fitted in with the others. Only McGregor fails to really sparkle in his straight man role. It is easy to see why he was cast (they get a lot of mileage from Jedi jokes), but his American accent isn’t really up to par.

At the beginning of the film a title card reads: “More of this is true than you would think.” By the end you will be googling to find out the real story behind this highly enjoyable exercise in silliness.

Review - Dorian Gray

2009-10-11T09:33:00.000-07:00

It is perhaps fitting that the only good thing about this adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is its beautiful shell. Bright and buxom costuming cannot disguise that it is a deeply tedious film with a running time of less than two hours that feels more like three and a half.

The concept of the story, if not its details, is well known. Dorian (Ben Barnes) is a handsome and innocent young man who sells his soul so that he will never age. Instead, his portrait grows old and ugly, showing how his many sins leave their marks on his soul.

Barnes has a pretty face, but a pretty face cannot lift such an uninteresting script. Not even the presence of Colin Firth and Ben Chaplin can raise the viewers’ spirits when confronted with the same scene of gothic debauchery repeated ad infinitum. It is hard work to make opium-infused orgies boring, but director Oliver Parker has managed it. Rebecca Hall (who seems to be in everything) turns up near the end as your typical feisty suffragette type, but by this point the audience has been anaesthetised into a cosy half-nap and will hardly notice as the slow narrative trundles on to its final destination.

Review - Sin Nombre

2009-10-05T14:48:00.000-07:00

This film follows a young girl, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), on the treacherous journey from Honduras, to Mexico and on to America, one of the thousands of illegal immigrants that sneak into Texas each year. It also offers an insight into the gangs that run the slums and prey on the immigrants. As you might expect, it isn’t exactly a laugh riot.

It is, however, extraordinarily gripping and tense. El Casper (Édgar Flores), a young gang member, knows that his whole life is one big catch 22. As his destiny mixes with Sayra’s, the only choices he can make are bad ones, and the audience is along for the ride on the ancient train heading for the border.

Writer and director Cary Fukunaga has obviously done his homework, and has rendered this violent and hopeless world beautifully. The gang, all full-face tattoos and homemade guns, feels particularly real. Cinematographer Adriano Goldman does a wonderful job, making yellows and oranges leap out of the screen as the camera passes through the landscape with the characters in a semi-documentary style. Low-key performances also add to the drama – Gaitan and Flores seem to show all the tragedy behind the statistics in their big brown eyes.

Slumdog Millionaire showed that films about poverty can be big hits, but only if the main character wins a gameshow at the end. Sin Nombre is by far the better film, but only offers its characters a ticket to live undercover in a Walmart- and Home Depot-laden wilderness for the rest of their lives. Depressing, then, but worth it.

Review - Inglourious Basterds

2009-10-03T15:00:00.000-07:00

As I may have already mentioned, I am the World’s Biggest Tarantino Fan (TM). I was very upset, therefore, when I saw the trailer for his latest film. It looked like a joke, and not a funny one. Brad Pitt with a comedy accent, Hitler having a tantrum, silly explosions – it was hideous. “Why?” I thought. “Why has this had to happen? What has got into my Quentin? It isn’t even cool. How could Tarantino make a film for which the trailer isn’t cool? You’re telling me you can’t cut together two cool minutes from the whole film?”

Well, whoever made that trailer did the film a disservice. No, it isn’t perfect. And yes, Brad Pitt and Hitler are ridiculous in it. But there are cool bits, tense bits and moving bits that certainly make it worth seeing, even if it still isn’t the sum of these good parts. I’m saying this now because I am going to be doing a lot of complaining in this review and I don’t want you to think I am just a ‘hater’, as they say in hip hop parlance. So I reiterate: do see it because you will enjoy it.

Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino’s first period piece, but as you would expect, it isn’t exactly Merchant Ivory. The Germans have occupied most of mainland Europe, and America has decided to send an elite killing squad of Jewish soldiers into enemy territory to wreak their revenge on the Nazis. They are led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a shouty redneck, and prove very successful at scalping Nazis. The band of misfits becomes involved in a joint British and American plan to assassinate Hitler. Parallel to this, the film follows Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a young Jewish woman living in Paris under an assumed name who also gets a chance to kill the Führer and end the war.

It seems silly to criticize the film for being historically inaccurate, as its premise and the outcome are obviously based on fantasy and not fact. However, Tarantino could have made a much better film by making the whole thing slightly more realistic. There are really two films here: one is serious, tense, moving and superbly acted (Shosanna’s story), and the other could be called Carry On Follow that Panzer.

Laurent has an inner strength and quiet beauty as Shosanna. Her unwanted love interest, a young German war hero, is played by the adorable Daniel Brühl, who gives a pitch-perfect little performance. The best part of her story, however, is of course Christoph Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa. His stunningly evil and multi-lingual performance as the Nazi ‘Jew Hunter’ deserves an Oscar. Creepy, clever and charismatic, he reminded me of an Austrian John Malkovitch. Waltz has created one of the all-time great film villains.

The story following Brad Pitt’s ‘bastards’ has its moments (special mention goes to Diane Kruger and Gedeon Burkhard) but all the truly awful bits happen in these passages. Firstly, Mike Myers’s cameo as a British general is so bad that it almost ruins the whole film. I know his parents are from Liverpool, but that doesn’t automatically mean he can do an upper-class English accent. His pronunciation of the word ‘basket’ is particularly painful. And the weird thing is that the part isn’t even written with any jokes in it, so it’s not like his comedy skills are required. Unfathomable.

Secondly, Eli Roth appears as one of the bastards and I really object to this. The guy can’t act. Here he is too scrawny for the part of ‘the Bear Jew’ and his whiny voice is annoying. I’m still upset that his incomprehensible speech at the bar in Death Proof ended up on the soundtrack album when it is the worst bit of that film. I’m sure he and Quentin are great friends, but how many brilliant bits of dialogue are spoken by women in that film and didn’t make it onto the album? Is he now going to be in every Tarantino film? Are they another Scorsese and DiCaprio pairing we will have to endure?

And now on to my third problem with this film: the music. There is no great Tarantino Music Moment here, and this is the first time this has happened in his career. Even Four Rooms had that scatty theme from Combustible Edison. This situation is truly disappointing, because along with that bit at the beginning of James Bond movies where he shoots the camera to John Barry’s score, when Tarantino uses a song correctly it is the coolest thing you can see in a cinema. But I have a bigger problem with the use of music in Inglourious Basterds than mere disappointment.

In the first flush of his career in the early nineties, Tarantino gave many interviews talking about his use of music, and in all of them he made the same point: when a movie uses a song, it owns it forever and it shouldn’t be used again. He always used the same example, that Dirty Dancing should not have used the Ronettes’s Be My Baby because the song already belonged to Scorsese’s Mean Streets. His use of old film scores in the Kill Bill films and Death Proof therefore riled me, but I’m a forgiving sort of girl and convinced myself that it was ok because the music he was using was from quite obscure films. Inglourious Basterd’s soundtrack is again mostly made up of old Ennio Morricone scores, but some of them were also reused in Kill Bill! His only (failed) attempt at a Tarantino Music Moment is with David Bowie’s Cat People (Putting Out the Fire), a song specially written for the quite well-known film Cat People! Tarantino has certainly gone against his own rules with this double-reusing and there is no excuse for such lazy behaviour for such meagre results. Why can’t he just employ a composer to write a score for him like a grown up?

Perhaps because he isn’t a grown up. This film could only have been made by someone who has been given free rein to do whatever he wants, because it really is quite mad. Tarantino shows that he can do great work (the opening scene is tremendous), but also that his ability to self-edit has shrunk with the growth of his ego over the years. Inglourious Basterds is certainly an interesting film with a well structured (if silly) story and some wonderful performances. It deserves to be seen and enjoyed for its many pleasures. However, some may find it easier to ignore its failings than others.

Review - District 9

2009-10-03T14:58:00.000-07:00

My review of District 9 can be seen at Catch a Vibe.

Review - Brüno

2009-07-20T14:44:00.000-07:00

This must be a worrying time for Sacha Baron Cohen. He has run out of characters. Here he revisits Brüno, the first of his triumvirate of creations that were followed by Ali G and Borat. Using the same format as 2006’s über-hilarious Borat, the film follows the gay, Austrian fashion journalist as he tries to become a superstar in America, freaking out the Bible Belt as he goes.

Turns out it is quite easy to shock the Bible Best by being very camp. Who knew? As with his other characters, Baron Cohen is playing on people’s stereotypes whilst putting them into embarrassing situations. He is an extremely intelligent and funny man, so of course these outrageous situations make you laugh, but a few of them go a bit too far and make you squirm (cf. the scene where Brüno comes on to Republican Congressman Ron Paul).

Sometimes he does highlight the huge amount of homophobia in society (he is actually attacked a few times), which has worth in and of itself, but equally gay people may be upset because a lot of the humour is really about Brüno’s unusual dress sense and sex life.

The trouble is, the original idea behind Brüno was not to make people feel uncomfortable about his sexuality, but to show how stupid people in fashion are. He used to go to fashion shows and make people say the most ridiculous, grandiose statements about the importance of their clothes and generally showed them to be awful human beings. The most successful bits of the film stick with this and deal with the crazy world of fashion and celebrity (the twin charity consultants spring to mind; what planet are they from?).

It may have been too big a leap to make such a stupid character from such a stupid world do something profound, but this film is still stupidly funny. Not as successful as Borat, then, but definitely worth seeing. The question is: what will Sacha do next?

Review - Telstar

2009-07-11T14:46:00.000-07:00

I should probably start this review by stating that Johnny Remember Me by John Leyton is one of my favourite songs. Music producer Joe Meek, the subject of this biopic and the British answer to Phil Spector, was undoubtedly a genius. But, like Spector, he was also crazy and a murderer. His story of hidden homosexuality, egomania and echo chambers takes place during the embryonic stages of the British music scene. Making a name for himself before the Beatles arrived (Telstar was the first British record to reach number one in America), he stubbornly continued to tread his own path and paid the price.

Based on the play by James Hicks, this film version of Meek’s life is quite a claustrophobic affair, taking place almost exclusively in the little house above a shop that he turned into his studio. I hope this is to show Meek’s growing isolation and paranoia, and not because they could only afford one set. Director Nick Moran (of Lock Stock fame) does a good job of handling a necessarily bitty storyline (real lives rarely fit the traditional three-act structure very well), keeping things interesting and funny.

Com O’Neill is terrific as Meek, reprising his stage role. He is scary, charming, damaged and has perfected the funny voice (Meek was from Gloucestershire) that made Meek hard to take seriously and all the more tragic. O’Neill works hard, running around the studio, twiddling with knobs and throwing tantrums. The effect is quite spellbinding.

The only problem is that this sort of production has become the bread and butter of BBC4. They seem to churn out high-quality, low-cost examinations of interesting British figures’ lives set against the backdrop of Swinging London. Having TV favourites Ralf Little and James Cordon in the cast does little to distance the film from this school of TV drama. The presence of Kevin Spacey as Meek’s business partner, though wholly unnecessary, does make it feel a bit more like a film, I suppose.

This is still a very interesting tale set in an interesting time and surrounded by great music that too few people know about. All in all, a well-told version of Meek’s tragic story with a wonderful central performance.

Review - The Hangover

2009-07-11T13:45:00.000-07:00

‘Stag party gone wrong’ isn’t exactly an original idea for a comedy. Even ‘stag party gone wrong in Las Vegas’ has been done before (the extraordinarily dark Very Bad Things). But what The Hangover lacks in originality of plot if makes up for in hilarity of execution.

Doug (Justin Bartha) goes on his stag weekend to the aforementioned Las Vegas with his two best friends Stu (Ed Helms) and Phil (Bradley Cooper), and his fiancé’s strange brother Alan (Zach Galifianakis). The guys wake up the next morning to find their hotel room in disarray and Doug missing.

The rest of the film follows Stu, Phil and Alan as they try and piece together what happened the night before, which was some night. Writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (who recently wrote Four Christmases) have filled the script with loads of belly laughs and bizarre set pieces. The director Todd Phillips is a master of these sorts of things (he also helmed Old School and Road Trip), so delivers in style.

The cast is made up of relative unknowns, but I doubt that will be the case for long. Galifianakis is sweet and weird as the loner trying to fit into the group, Helms gets the audience on his side quickly with his geeky and put-upon character, and Cooper makes a great ‘good looking and cool one’. Heather Graham has a lovely little role, showing her undoubted flair for comedy. The only slightly strange part comes from Ken Jeong as a camp mobster, which is perhaps a bit over the top.

This grown-up version of a frat comedy combines a great set up, great performances and great writing to make the funniest film of the year so far.

Review - Last Chance Harvey

2009-07-11T09:57:00.000-07:00

There are lots of films whose trailers are better than the actual feature. Last Chance Harvey is one of them. The ad is the perfect two-minute confection, an adorable romantic comedy with an adorable Dustin Hoffman and an adorable Emma Thompson falling in love in London. He buys her a dress, takes her to his daughter’s wedding and they teach each other how to let go and live again.

All this stuff does happen in the film, but the gaps between these events are long and depressing. Harvey Shine (Hoffman) is a jingle writer (why is jingle writing such a common profession in films and on television?) past his prime and about to lose his job. He travels to London to attend his daughter’s wedding, and finds out she’d rather her step-father give her away during the ceremony (what a bitch!). Hurt and alone, he goes back to Heathrow, but meets Kate Walker (Thompson) who works at the airport, someone else hurt and alone.

The drawn-out ‘meet cute’ and Harvey’s subsequent pursuit of Kate are quite sweet, but all the clichés are wheeled out before the film is through. Every landmark of London is wandered past as they talk (I must say, they take highly convoluted routes to get from A to B) and they talk a lot. This is not a film of action but of conversations, and unfortunately the script is not very funny and just doesn’t ring true.

That’s not to say that the performances aren’t authentic and truthful. No one plays crumpled and disappointed quite as well as Dustin Hoffman and this is really a role made for him. His smile is a little sudden and scary, though. Emma Thompson’s Kate seems like an intelligent and real woman who has just somehow ended up on her own and is therefore sad. Her smile is not scary at all.

This is the sort of film that just about manages to pass the time, but it could have been so much more if the writing had just been a little riskier. A good two minutes spread over one and a half hours makes for a thin gruel indeed.

Review - Drag Me to Hell

2009-06-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

Director Sam Raimi goes back to his horror roots after many successful years in the superhero genre with this rollicking comedy chiller. Christine (Alison Lohman) is a country girl who has moved to the big city and found a nice job at a bank and a nice professor boyfriend (Justin Long). One day she refuses an old lady’s plea and repossesses her house, so the old lady curses her. First she will be tormented by evil spirits, and after three days she will be swallowed up into the fiery pit of hell.

This is a horror film that harks back to both the 70s devilish horror films (The Exorcist and The Omen) and 80s tongue-in-cheek splatterfests, an age before Ringu brought the Japanese style of horror to the West, with its crawling, twisted emaciated spirits, washed out colours and haunted technology. The old gypsy lady (Lorna Raver) is a one-woman splatterfest herself, secreting all manner of nasty things into her handkerchief. The fight between her and Christine in a car is a brutal and hysterical highlight.

Another highlight is Lohman. Female leads in horror films are usually just there to wear tight clothes, and while I wouldn’t say her outfits were loose, Lohman has produced a real character. Christine does some desperate things to try to get rid of the curse, so isn’t all sweetness and screams as you may expect. She exerts a real charm, and seems to be a star in the making.

Raimi has managed to get the tone right throughout, creating a really creepy, funny and satisfying film that feels oven fresh after the stale likes of The Unborn. This is jolly good fun, but be warned: it may leave you with a fear of buttons.

Review - Night at the Museum 2

2009-06-08T15:11:00.001-07:00

The first Night at the Museum was probably a bigger hit than people expected, but no-one should ever underestimate how much children enjoy seeing inanimate objects coming to life, especially if they are dinosaur-shaped inanimate objects. The sequel sticks with what worked before, but moves the action from the American Museum of Natural History in New York to the Smithsonian in Washington. Here there are spaceships and paintings, as well as the usual dinosaurs and animals, to be enchanted by the Pharoah’s golden tablet.

Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) is now a successful inventor. When he visits the museum where he used to be a night watchmen, he finds the exhibits packed up ready to be shipped to the Smithsonian. As they arrive at their new home, the magic tablet brings to life an evil Pharoah who wants to take over the world using the tablet’s power. Larry Daley must stop him with the help of his old friends and some new ones, including spunky Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams).

The film is really a succession of cameo appearances, mostly from top notch comic actors. Adams shows the same brilliance with sincerity that she debuted in Enchanted, there is a very funny scene with Superbad’s Jonah Hill, and Hank Azaria is decidedly strange as the Pharoah, but in a good way. An appearance by Christopher Guest as Ivan the Terrible is a bit of a waste (it could really have been played by anyone to the same effect), and the reappearance of a dicky-bowed Ricky Gervais is unwelcome to say the least, but overall it is a assorted box of historical and pop cultural chocolates.

Adults will enjoy the clever references and inventive use of exhibits (the scenes in the National Gallery will be particularly fun for art fans) and children will love the wonder of it all and the silliness. Sure, the plot is fraying at the edges, but this is a film that successfully plays to the crowd. The question is, which museum will host part three?

Review - Star Trek

2009-06-07T15:58:00.000-07:00

Prequels to well-loved franchises are big business. By going ‘back to basics’ while simultaneously ‘sexing up’ the characters, new life is breathed into old product. Batman Begins and Casino Royale have been recent success stories for studios, so it was only a matter of time until the origin story of Star Trek, one of the most successful franchises of all time, was explored on the big screen.

Star Trek is not something that is cool to love, but I do. I wouldn’t say I’m a Trekkie, but I know how Captain Picard takes his tea, if you know what I mean (Earl Grey, hot). As for many fans, I’m sure, the prospect of this film was both exciting and troubling for me. Exploring the early life of the Enterprise crew has never been done before, and the thought of someone else playing Spock or Kirk was upsetting. Would they get it right? Would the chemistry be there?

The answer is yes. Star Trek is not, and never has been, only for geeks – the original series and the Next Generation were big hits because they had great characters and loads of interesting ideas. Director J.J. Abrams knows this and has made an exciting and well-paced blockbuster that should appeal to everyone, whether they’ve seen the source material or not. That’s not to say that the feelings of fans have been sidelined by the greed of Hollwood; there are plenty of references to make them feel at home. And if anyone does get angry, they will be sated by the knowledge that this is set in an alternative reality to the TV universe so needn’t impinge on anything that’s gone before. This also cleverly allows writers freedom for future sequels.

The story follows James T. Kirk as he decides to join Starfleet to follow in the steps of his father, who died a hero at the hands of a mysterious Romulan ship. When he realises that the ship and its crew have returned, he must convince Starfleet to stop it, even though he is only a cadet.

Seeing Chris Pine as Kirk took a bit of getting used to, but he actually fits the part very well. Jim is an over-confident idiot, and as a youngster would probably be insufferable. Pine plays him as cocksure dropout with an eye for the ladies. Zachary Quinto is perfect as Spock, and the relationship between Kirk and Karl Urban’s Dr McCoy feels right. The only slightly bum note was made by Simon Pegg as Scottie, here used as comic relief.

Luckily he’s only in a few scenes, and his presence doesn’t detract from an otherwise extremely well-polished film made with love. For some, the prospect of seeing a Vulcan high school will be worth the price of admission alone. Even if that holds no attraction for you, there is much to enjoy. Star Trek will surely be one of the brightest and most successful blockbusters of the summer.

Review - X-Men Origins: Wolverine

2009-05-18T10:18:00.000-07:00

Hugh Jackman was recently named People’s Sexiest Man Alive. I personally find him to be dull as dishwater, if nice and smiley with it. His Wolverine, though, is the coolest creature to wear a pair of jeans since James Dean (must be the sideburns). He was everyone’s favourite in the X-Men films, so a stand-alone adventure makes complete commercial sense. Whether it would make artistic sense was not so clear.

Luckily, I can report that this account of Wolverine’s life before taking residence in Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters stands up well against the modern Marvel pantheon of film adaptations: not as great as the first few Spider-Man or X-Men films, but it beats hands down the lower tier of Hulk, Ghost Rider and Electra.

Jackman is brilliant, wandering around like the cock of the walk. His romance with Lynn Collins is quite sweet, and Liev Schreiber is enjoyably jowly and moody as half-brother Sabretooth.

While this could have been improved with a bigger canvas and more ambition, you get what you need for a Wolverine film: a storyline that actually makes sense within its own universe, deadpan one liners, thrilling fights, and lots of adamantium claws. Job done.

Review - In the Loop

2009-05-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

Armando Iannucci is one of Britain’s comedy maestros. He first came to my attention presenting the satirical review The Friday Night Armistice, although I had already unwittingly experienced his writing with the sublime The Day Today. After the painfully funny I’m Alan Partridge, I followed his work with interest, enjoying the more experimental The Armando Iannucci Shows and Time Trumpet (the future versions of Jamie Oliver and June Sarpong being my favourites). Then came The Thick of It.

Widely considered the second best political comedy after Yes, Minister (that clip of John Redwood trying to sing along to the Welsh national anthem comes third in the rankings), it followed a bumbling minister (Chris Langham) attempting to build his career in Westminster, only to be foiled by his own stupidity and the tangled web of deceit and spin that encases our government. Although Langham was officially the main character, the real star of the show was Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker, the PM’s top communications advisor and the angriest man in Britain.

After Langham’s public fall from grace, they still managed two specials without his character, widening the purview of the programme to include the opposition and the press. In the Loop is almost a natural progression, this time looking at foreign policy instead of domestic. I say ‘almost’, because it doesn’t operate in the same universe as The Thick of It, but in an alternative dimension where all the same faces are there, but they have different names and work in different departments. Only the spin doctors Malcolm and Jamie stay untouched by this shift, which is just slightly strange for fans.

True to form, In the Loop is a bitingly accurate take on the lead up to a war not unlike the Iraq one. Junior Foreign Minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) becomes caught in the middle of the battle between hawks and doves in Washington as the Secretaries of State use him as a tiny and very confused pawn. Malcolm must keep him ‘on message’ and sort out the mess, as usual, but he is dealing with bigger fish than ever before.

Worryingly, it is likely that this is a very accurate take on recent events, as Iannucci has had lots of secret advisors from both sides of the Atlantic. It’s all here: 18-year-old interns running state departments, dodgy dossiers being made even dodgier and then being presented to the UN, everything.

As previously noted, the usual players are present, muttering intelligently. They are joined by an American contingent which includes James Gandolfini as a General (he looks very pleased to be dealing with a decent script again after leaving The Sopranos), Mimi Kennedy (Dharma’s mother from Dharma and Greg with very different hair) and Ann Chlumsky (the girl from My Girl!).

But it is the writing that really makes the film. The devastating put-downs and deep social embarrassment mark this out as part of a long British comic tradition. Of course, this is tragi-comedy – we know what happened next. Hilarious, but still quite depressing, this is a must-see piece of work.

Review - Observe and Report

2009-05-18T10:12:00.000-07:00

Seth Rogen is a major player in mainstream American comedy cinema. The writer of Superbad and star of Knocked Up, he seems to turn up in most films as a lovable stoner. And that’s what makes Observe and Report so confusing. This is not a film that fits into the mould of his previous films, although it gives every indication to the viewer that it does. It would be better to go in thinking of it as an indie film in the style of Juno or Napolean Dynamite, only less arch and idiosyncratic.

Rogen plays Ronnie Barnhardt, the chief security officer in a suburban mall that is plagued by a flasher. His delusions of grandeur lead him to believe he can bring the perp to justice single-handedly, without the help of the police (led by a very tanned Ray Liotta). He also believes he can win the heart of Anna Faris’s slutty make-up counter girl.

Ronnie appears to be the usual slobby underachiever played by Rogen, but some distance into the story it becomes clear that he is unstable. His mental illness isn’t used to poke fun at him, exactly, but this isn’t a serious examination of manic depression either. Jody Hill, the writer and director, must have been hoping to achieve something, but I’m not sure what that was.

Faris is wonderfully un-self-conscious as usual, puking and hitching up her skirt with aplomb, and Rogen plays a crazed innocent well. There are still plenty of jokes, funny lines and very silly situations, but the whole thing doesn’t quite gel. Probably best not to over-analyse this one, just enjoy the weirdness and silliness of it all.

Review - I Love You, Man

2009-05-07T05:08:00.000-07:00

There have been loads of reliably funny American comedies in recent years, mostly involving Seth Rogen. I Love You, Man does not, but it is another man-centred titter-fest with a load of familiar faces. Quite dirty, quite sweet, it’s everything you would expect if you think Superbad and Knocked Up – which is to say very good.

Paul Rudd plays Peter, a serious fellow who has always concentrated on his romantic relationships with women at the expense of his platonic ones with men. When he gets engaged to Zooey (Rashida Jones), he realises he has no-one to be his best man so he decides to find a friend. He meets Sydney (Jason Segel, the big dopey one from How I Met Your Mother and Forgetting Sarah Marshall), a slob with no responsibilities.

The first act is actually quite sad. The awkwardness of trying to make new friends is something that we can all relate to, and Rudd is the everyman who always seems to put his foot in it. Things brighten up when Sydney turns up, and the film’s pitch of ‘a guy learning how to be a guy’ starts.

It is a funny idea, and it is well played by the lovable Rudd and Segel. They have found themselves on the frat-comedy treadmill of late so are well-practiced. There’s a welcome role for Jaime Pressly as one of Zooey’s friends, and Jon Favreau plays against type by portraying a meanie.

All in all, this is another slightly-less-than-instantly forgettable comedy with plenty of laughs throughout.

Review - Dragonball Evolution

2009-05-07T05:06:00.000-07:00

I have been forced to play many Dragonball computer games over the years by my brother, so I have built-up an aversion to the brand. It was with trepidation, then, that I watched Dragonball Evolution. I needn’t have worried. The film has appalled fans for its simplified and bland Hollywood storyline, but I don’t mind. Because what it loses in depth, it gains by removing the original’s grotesque animation style. The characters may be played by rejects of High School Musical, but at least they aren’t body-building midgets with hair almost as tall as they are, as in the cartoons.

Goku is your average lonely teenager, spending his time going to school and mastering mystical martial arts with his grandfather. Little does he know that he is destined to save the world. Piccolo, an evil lord of some sort from the past, has returned and Goku and his rag-tag gang have to gather seven magic ‘dragonballs’ to defeat him.

Obviously this is a load of nonsense, but there are some decent martial arts thanks to Chow Yun-Fat, who also stars. The film is aimed at tweens and early teens (Emmy Rossum’s character dresses exactly how an 8-year-old thinks a bad girl would) and will satisfy them with thrills and giggles. The most interesting thing for a non-tween or early teen is the unusual world it presents, a Japano-American utopia (at least until Piccolo comes along) in the not-too-distant future. Otherwise, as long as you aren’t a fan, this is a harmless but low-quality diversion.

Review - Bronson

2009-03-26T16:41:00.000-07:00

Why would someone actively try to spend 30 years in solitary confinement? That is not something you will find out while watching Bronson, the biopic of Britain’s most violent prisoner. The director Nicolas Winding Refn has chosen to ignore the ‘why’ and focus on the ‘how’ of the situation in this highly stylised film. This is A Clockwork Orange with all that pesky parable removed.

The story of Charles Bronson (real name Michael Peterson) is a simple one. He went to prison at 22 and stayed there through his continual protests, beatings and hostage taking, all carried out for seemingly no reason. The film shows various scenes from these explosions of rage and weirdness. We follow Charles from prison, to a mental institution, to the outside world, and back to prison again.

Ultraviolence and contrivances take up the space left by this lack of narrative. The beatings are designed to look brutal but always cool, accompanied by achingly beautiful classical tracks (a rather obvious use of a device from Burgess and Kubrick’s work that is repeated too many times). This is one of those films where everyone speaks in a strange, stilted way, as if they’ve been heavily sedated or are Tony Blair. Naturalistic it ain’t.

Tom Hardy’s unnerving central performance just about makes it all work. He really goes for it, spending most of the film naked and writhing in dirt, or walking with mad eyes and the stiff gait of a Sergeant Major. Hardy is sure to be a star if he can keep getting the parts.

Bronson is relentlessly horrible and pointless. But that’s our Charlie! Not a great film, then, but perhaps a fitting one considering its subject matter.

Review - Watchmen

2009-03-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

First of all, I really love the graphic novel this film is based on. When I first read it, I was totally amazed at its depth and scope, the masterful way in which it recreates a whole world. There is no way that this long and dense story could be fully translated into one 2 hr 40 min movie. However, I believe that such an adaptation couldn’t get much better than this. However, for those who haven’t read the book, it could quite possibly be the maddest film they’ve ever seen.

To condense the story into a few pithy sentences would be an insult to Alan Moore, but I’m going to try it anyway. The film takes place in an alternative version of the Cold War in which superheroes existed and changed the course of history. It is 1985, and caped-crusader-dom has been banned, but it seems that someone is trying to kill off the ex-super people. The story shifts back and forth through time to build a picture of what led to this point.

As one would expect from the director of 300, the visuals are stunning. Dave Gibbons’ panels from the comic come to life in the noir-ish, grimy streets of pre-Giuliani New York, enlivened by touches of 80s neon. Whole swathes of dialogue are lifted straight from the comic as well – fans can be assured that the source material was revered. And then some.

My first minor bug-bear with the film concerns the soundtrack. Now, don’t get me wrong, I really love 60s music (my iTunes would testify to that effect, if an Apple application could take the stand), but sometimes it felt as if any old track from a ‘best of the 60s’ compilation was used. Nena’s 99 Luftballons, a suitably apocalyptic track, made a welcome appearance, however, and I loved the use of KC and the Sunshine Band in the 70s. I really don’t know what to make of the scene with Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. I can only assume it was a joke.

My second minor bug-bear concerns the casting. Using quasi-unknowns was a smart move, as it keeps costs down and helps the audience concentrate on the characters (imagine how awful it would have been to have Scarlett Johansson as the Silk Spectre). Jackie Earle Haley is perfect as Rorschach; his gravelly voice and unhinged demeanour accurately recreate this most popular of characters from the comic. Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian also really impresses with his supercool thug shtick, but he is the only actor who realistically ages; Patrick Wilson (who I recognised from Hard Candy) is very good as Nite Owl, but is a little young and trim to play an out-of-shape geek in his forties, and the Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) never looks a day over thirty. The real problem, however, is Ozymandias, who seems to be played by David Spade. Ozymandias (actually Matthew Goode) should be a square-jawed Ken of a man.

These points aside, Watchmen is an amazing cinematic experience, full of ultraviolence and style. While it is not as profound as the book, it is clearly drawn from the mind of someone full of crazy and brilliant ideas. I’m not sure if a person who has never read the comic would understand what was going on, but the cinema trip will be an interesting experience none the less. If you are a fan, languish in seeing what’s in your head come to life on screen, relaxed in the knowledge that there is a director’s cut coming with all the Tales of the Black Freighter bits filled in.

Review - American Teen

2009-03-09T16:56:00.000-07:00

American high school is one of the scariest concepts imaginable to people from Europe (and I believe to many Americans as well). The caste system, the humiliating lunch incidents, the horrors of the vote for homecoming queen, all of this is both reassuringly alien and frighteningly familiar to the generations brought up on American-dominated popular culture. And while the idea of attending one of these neurosis factories is repulsive, watching people doing just that is endlessly fascinating.

Everyone knows that The Breakfast Club is one of the best high school films ever and reveals deep truths about this shallow institution, as well as adolescence more generally. However, that doesn’t mean that all teenagers fit one of the archetypes featured in it (a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal). The director Nanette Burstein has decided to ignore this and make a documentary that chooses real people based on their resemblance to the characters in that film.

American Teen follows four students at Warsaw Community High School in Indiana in their senior year. There’s Megan the queen bee, Jake the nerd, Colin the jock and Hannah the misfit. Each one leads very separate lives filled with pressure, either from their parents or from themselves. There are smiles and tears as they decide their future and deal with all the issues you’d expect to see in an episode of Beverly Hills: 90210 or Saved by the Bell. Some of the storylines are so perfect and well filmed that it is difficult to believe there’s no script.

The people are engaging and their stories are compelling, but the film did not produce the emotion in me that I thought it would. The closest it gets is with Hannah, a pretty, funny and creative girl who becomes depressed. You just want to hug her and tell her that everything will be ok and that she isn’t worthless.

It is very interesting to see the reality of the high school experience up close and to find out where everyone ends up. I just wish that less was made of the The Breakfast Club connection in the marketing of the film. It annoys me that a relatively minor player in proceedings has been given a starring role in posters and the end credits just to fill in for Judd Nelson’s character. It lacks integrity, something that a documentaries normally have buckets of.

Review - The Unborn

2009-03-08T16:13:00.000-07:00

The Unborn is the first Kaballah horror film. A lot of people would have assumed that was Revolver, but they would have been wrong. Here they are: ghosts that fit into Madonna’s belief system. And what derivative, logic-less ghosts they are.

Casey (Odette Yustman) is a college girl who starts seeing creepy 7-year-old boys, dogs wearing human masks, and ominous turqoise gloves left on pavements. These unnerving visions escalate, and her eyes start turning blue. Then she finds out that she had a stillborn twin. It seems that he wants to be born again.

How and why is not made clear. Instead we have the usual shocks made up of wide-eyed children, insect lavae, and crawly, twisty, creaky old people. This is very much inspired by Japanese horror like Ju-On: The Grudge. Films like this never really make sense, but they can at least be frightening. Unfortunately, The Unborn is just silly.

Yustman successfully walks around in her underwear and is freaked out by what’s going on, the main gist of her character. She looks like a cross between Jessica Alba and Jennifer Connolly, both actresses who have appeared in similar roles. This gives the whole film a sense of deja vu. The lovely Gary Oldman and Idris Elba appear, but their formidale skills are not used in their brief time on screen.

This is a trying, silly horror, which has the bad taste to involve the Holocaust in its backstory. One to avoid.

Review - Confessions of a Shopaholic

2009-03-08T14:23:00.000-07:00

The romantic comedy has always been a bankable genre, but the success of the Sex and the City movie proved to studios that it is not just slushy love that appeals to a certain type of girl. Putting pretty clothes on screen can have the same money-making effect as an adorable couple breaking up and getting back together in a far-fetched way. Confessions of a Shopaholic is the predictable result: a poor woman’s Legally Blonde with a focus on the mechanics of purchasing accessories. It even uses Sex and the City’s stylist. In the end, the jewel colours of the outfits are about ten times brighter than the main character, and a hundred times more compelling than the story.

Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher) is a dizzy redhead who has somehow managed to hold down a job at a gardening magazine for four years, although I doubt she could call a spade a spade if she ever saw one. Her shopping habit has resulted in wardrobes full of loud separates and creditors banging on her door. When she loses her job, she stumbles into another one at a personal finance magazine. The girl who can’t live within her means for toffee now has to give money advice. The irony! She starts writing a column in which investments and tax-free savings are explained using clothing and shopping analogies. It causes a sensation, and everyone loves her.

Now, even forgiving the extremely offensive notion that women can only understand monetary concepts if they are framed using shoe metaphors, it is pretty far-fetched to think that a financial column would get any attention at all. Still, this is where Rebecca finds herself. But will she get her dream job at a fashion magazine? Will she get with her sexy boss (Hugh Dancy)?

Fisher is a natural comedienne, and does a lot with what she is given. The problem is, the jokes are not very funny. Her strange dance is perhaps the best bit, but it is also bizarre and unnerving. Dancy plays a character that is simply handsome and English, nothing more and nothing less. Sweet cameos by Joan Cusack and John Goodman as Rebecca’s parents cannot save this film from its own low expectations.

P.J. Hogan has directed two of the best and most poignant romantic comedies of all time, Muriel’s Wedding and My Best Friend’s Wedding, but hasn’t really had a hit since. Confessions of a Shopaholic will probably not change the string of bad luck. The credit crunch has worn away everyone’s patience towards characters like Rebecca. She is now just an annoying, whining bint who should buck up her ideas and do without that darling little scarf or cute pair of heels. It’s people like her who got us in this mess in the first place.

Review - The Wrestler

2009-02-10T12:49:00.001-08:00

The professional wrestling circuit is not something that overly interests me. My younger brother went through an unfortunate WWF (or WWE as it now must be called) stage which I weathered, and I’ve watched Louis Theroux have a go on one of his Weird Weekends, but otherwise I’ve steered well clear. The Wrestler confirmed my suspicion that the ‘sport’ is full of sad and lonely men pumped full of steroids, playing to a crowd of men stuck in adolescence.

Of course, sad and lonely men pumped full of steroids are fascinating to watch. Shot in a grainy, shaky style, this film looks exactly like one of the brilliant Storyville documentaries on BBC2 and BBC4. You know, those high-quality and horribly depressing looks at an individual’s strange existence.

This high-quality and horribly depressing fictional film follows Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a wrestler who achieved a certain level of fame in the late 80s and has been plugging away ever since, appearing at smaller and smaller venues until he is living alone in a trailer in New Jersey and working at the grimiest supermarket this side of the Iron Curtain. Estranged from his daughter and with his ravaged body failing, he tries to find his place in the real world away from spandex.

Randy is played by Mickey Rourke, whose own loss of fame and boxing career mirrors that of his character. He too was broken, forgotten about and disfigured, messing up his life with his own bloody-mindedness. Randy’s comeback is Rourke’s comeback, and both give it all they have.

Rourke’s is certainly a success. His performance is the film, as there isn’t much else here in this simple tale. The worry is that he won’t be able to follow it up, because he can only play washed up wrestlers or thugs drawn by Frank Miller. It’s a narrow niche.

Review - Seven Pounds

2009-02-10T12:00:00.000-08:00

Will Smith is everyone’s favourite Bel Air-dwelling, alien-killing, wise-cracking Man in Black. Seeing him down and sombre can be a very disconcerting experience for a viewer. In Seven Pounds, his character is not a happy bunny. He is moody, introverted, secretive and sometimes cruel. Add a languid pace and a blindingly obvious twist, and you have a recipe for an equally moody audience. Only fans of weepy dramas need apply.

Luckily, I do fall at least somewhat into that category and I found many things to like about this tale of grief, guilt and redemption. Ben Thomas (Smith) is a tax investigator with a secret plan to help seven strangers. The ‘how’ and ‘why’ parts of his plan are not made clear, leading to a very confusing opening act. Things should fall into place quite rapidly after that for most observant viewers.

The film’s focus then falls on his relationship with one of the strangers, Emily (Rosario Dawson). Whether or not you enjoy the rest of the film depends on whether you find her annoying or not. She is the stereotypical dying girl with a failing heart of gold, cute dog and quirky taste in music, but I somehow ended up caring about her plight. This is wholly down to Ms Dawson and her electric smile; she continues to impress me in every film I see her in.

Smith without his charisma is a hard sell, and Seven Pounds’ quietly moving moments may not be enough to counteract that. The bottom line: wait for the DVD and a night you feel a bit miserable and want to wallow in it.

Review - Milk

2009-01-28T16:24:00.000-08:00

There are some moments in history when social and geographical forces come together to produce a movement that fascinates long after it has past. I’m talking about the black Civil Rights Movement in the South or Swinging London. These are so fixed in our collective pop culture brain that the story of anyone caught up in events will usually make an interesting basis for a film. San Francisco had two of these moments in a row. In the 60s, the hippies flooded in and Haight-Ashbury became the world centre of being free. In the 70s, the gay community asserted itself and built a public identity in the Castro district.

Plenty of films have been made about the first moment (indeed, plenty were made at the time), but not many deal with the second one. Milk makes up for that by telling the story of the self-proclaimed ‘Mayor of Castro’ and the great hero of gay rights, Harvey Milk (Sean Penn). Charting his rise from 40-year-old drop out, to unsuccessful political candidate, to public office and to death, it gives a low-key but extremely poignant portrait of a man fighting for his cause despite the risks.

This almost documentary-style film paints a vivid and vibrant picture of life in the Castro, but also shows the level of prejudice surrounding its inhabitants. This is a community under siege from the police and politicians. It is amazing now to think of the laws that were passed across America in the 1970s legalising discrimination against gay people, and unbelievable that they were nearly passed in California. The danger feels very real, as we see the damage, both physical and mental, that living a lie can produce. The film is at its most effective when we see glimpses of those suffering in small towns, and it is these people that Milk wants to rescue.

Penn’s portrayal of Harvey is perfect, and he creates a living, breathing person. Lightly effeminate, funny (not something that seems to come naturally to the actor), angry, aching, it is about as far away from a caricature as you can get and certainly deserves its Oscar nomination. Milk is not simple hagiography, though. Harvey is not Ghandi or Martin Luther King; he fought back, happy to play the political game and scratch other people’s backs so his own could be scratched.

The people in the character’s orbit are all wonderfully played by people with singularly awful haircuts. As previously mentioned, every character featured here could make a good biopic. There’s activist Cleve Jones (a charismatic Emile Hirsch) who later founded the NAMES Aids quilt project, love of Harvey’s life Scott Smith (James Franco) and, of course, his bizarre murderer Dan White (an unsettling Josh Brolin).

The film does not overly tug at the heart strings, but rather the sadness and the hope seeps into you as you realise what one person can do, and how quickly bullets can stop everything. Milk is an inspirational insight into that one person, and into a part of history that few of us know about.

Review - My Bloody Valentine 3D

2009-01-27T13:56:00.000-08:00

Apparently, in the near future all horror films will be in 3D because digital technology has made it feasible and studios believe the method’s theme park thrills will get us to go to the cinema. Well, you better get used to feeling nauseous now.

My Bloody Valentine 3D is the first horror film to use the new ‘Real D’ technology, but is otherwise a run-of-the-mill slasher flick with the usual bad acting the genre attracts. A remake of a low-budget Canadian offering from 1981, the plot follows a deranged murderer stalking a town, ten years after he performed a similar massacre on Valentine’s Day and was killed for his trouble. The place is described as “a quiet, in-bred mining town”, but seems to be populated by beautiful babes and square-jawed lummoxes (I wouldn’t trust the local sheriff with the school hamster, never mind a decaying, blue-collar community).

Girls take off their tops and people get pick axes in their brains, which is reasonably fun but not remotely scary. The 3D is effective, especially with the depiction of dismembered bodies, making the film worth seeing for its novelty. You may have to rest your eyes every 20 minutes or so, but that’s the price of seeing the future.

Review - Role Models

2009-01-27T13:20:00.000-08:00

Apparently Christopher Mintz-Plasse, he who will forever be known as McLovin from Superbad, was reluctant to appear in this film because he didn’t want to be type cast as a geek. If this is the case, I say for shame! The world needs his nerd powers to make us happy, especially with all the bad stuff going on in the world. In Role Models he again manages to outshine everyone else by playing someone even more dorkish than McLovin.

The film follows miserablist Danny (Paul Rudd) and overgrown frat boy Wheeler (Seann William Scott) as they are sentenced to mentor two troubled children as part of their community service (or ‘community payback’ as the Labour Party has dubbed it) after Danny loses his temper with some tow truck drivers. Danny has to look after Augie (Mintz-Plasse), an introverted teenager who loves live action role playing (LARP) games in which you go into the woods and pretend to be a knight. Wheeler gets Ronnie (Bobb’e J. Thompson), a little boy who is big trouble.

The concept of the film (loser adults out of their depth when looking after kids) has been done to death, but there are genuinely funny moments throughout, dispelling any memories of Daddy Day Care and Three Men and a Baby. There are odd things in the mix – like Jane Lynch (who will always be the poodle owner in Best in Show to me) as the perky and foul-mouthed ex-addict who runs the volunteer programme, and the insight into the strange world of LARP – that keeps one’s interest up. Nothing earth-shattering, then. But there are 99 minutes of silly, McLovin-filled laughs up for grabs.

Review - Slumdog Millionaire

2009-01-24T16:50:00.000-08:00

The tube is currently plastered with posters declaring Slumdog Millionaire ‘the feel-good comedy of the year’. As I sat there watching the opening scene, in which the film’s hero is strung up and electrocuted by Bombay’s police department, I wondered how much Prozac someone must be taking to feel good through this. Mamma Mia it ain’t.

Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of Jamal, who is one question away from winning the Indian equivalent of £1 million on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (the film is made by Celador Films, the production company behind Millionaire). The police, however, do not see how a young man from the slums could possibly know the answers to all the questions. During interrogations, Jamal recounts his eventful life while explaining how he learnt each factoid required to win the game show.

The Dickensian living conditions and corruption, both monetary and moral, of modern India are the perfect backdrop for the Oliver Twist-like tale that our hero tells. Episodically flitting from scrape to scrape, Jamal and his brother live by their wits through tremendous odds. The whole thing is very upsetting (a boss of a child gang is featured who makes Fagin look like a Chuckle Brother), but the audience will always be cheering them on to succeed.

Danny Boyle directs with a lightness of touch and lack of trendiness that belies his wider filmography (which includes Trainspotting, Shallow Grave and the very disappointing Sunshine). While there are clues that this is a British film (all characters speak English after the age of 12, and the soundtrack features Radio 1 playlist fave MIA with her hit Paper Planes), the landscape and culture of India are the real stars here.

This puts the actors somewhat in the shade. The children are certainly adorable, and Dev Patel from Channel 4’s Skins has a quiet strength as the older Jamal and Freida Pinto, as love interest Latika, is the picture of girlish innocence. Unfortunately the characters they are playing are very one dimensional (Jamal is good, his brother Salim is a bad seed, Latika is beautiful). These are people reacting to their fate and creating a future despite of it, not tied up in introspection and angst.

At its heart, Slumdog Millionaire is a fairytale, and fairytales are often dark and scary places to be. The redemptive ending makes this, if not quite a ‘feel-good’ film, then maybe a ‘feel-slightly-buoyed-despite-your-knowledge-of-the-essentially-tragic-nature-of-life’ one. Which is something of an achievement.

Review - The Spirit

2009-01-18T15:38:00.000-08:00

I love comics, but, and it may be deeply unfashionable to say this, I’m not a big fan of Frank Miller. I have no emotional connection to the material when reading his stuff. When his work is adapted for the screen (as with Sin City and 300), it is visually audacious and astounding and I revel in its coolness, but it still seems impossible for me to love it.

The Spirit is Miller’s lone directorial debut (he co-directed Sin City with Robert Rodriguez), based on the seminal comics by Will Eisner that have been so influential to him. Despite his obvious love of the source material, he has come up with a very flat film. While the green screen-produced visuals are cool, they are just a bad replica of Sin City’s. The script is full of arch phrases and flowery rhetoric. It is supposed to be a post-modern take on 40s noir, but is just boring.

The story, as much as it is, follows the titular masked avenger as he battles a crime lord called The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) in a run-down city. This proto-Batman has a semi-mysterious background, but by the time you find out what it is, you will have ceased caring.

The Spirit is played by Gabriel Macht, who has the unfortunate trait of looking like a dozen other actors rather than looking like himself. He just doesn’t have the charisma to pull the film off. So often in superhero films a great villain can save the day for the audience, but Jackson’s bellowing, scene-chewing performance is just high camp, and not in a good way. Add in a cold and stilted Scarlett Johansson and you have a serious Hollywood misfire. Only Eva Mendes comes off unscathed with a super-sexy turn as The Spirit’s old flame, Sand Serif. She even manages to squeeze a bit of empathy and emotion into the role.

If you really enjoy seeing the world in black, white and red, then go and see it. If not, then The Spirit is best avoided.

Review - Inkheart

2009-01-07T15:49:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of Inkheart the narrator states that there are people called Silvertongues who have the power to draw out characters from a book into the real world, just by reading aloud. With all the amazing adventures that have been written in human history, it is surprising that a family fantasy based on this premise could be quite so dull.

Meggie (Eliza Bennett) has travelled from place to place with her father Mortimer (Brendan Fraser) since her mother’s disappearance some years ago. One day, mysterious strangers appear wanting to capture Mortimer and a rare book he has found called Inkheart. Meggie learns that her father is a Silvertongue, and characters he pulled from the book want to use his powers.

The primary problem with the film is that it is confusing, never fully realising its universe and the rules which govern it and leaving no room for a sense of magic. The secondary problem is that the book from which all these evil-doers have appeared, Inkheart, seems to be a third-rate fantasy for Renaissance Fair-goers. The tertiary problem is that the whole thing takes place in a Switzerland where no one speaks German, and an Italy where no one speaks Italian. A writer living in Italy with an Italian name turns out to be played by Jim Broadbent, with not even a hint of a Captain Bertorelli-style accent. Everyone in this Europe is cosily British, which is unfortunately not the case.

Brendan Fraser tries his best, but is let down by the material. Bennett plays Meggie as a nice and intelligent young lady, and does so convincingly but never sparkles. Even the lovely Helen Mirren, Paul Bettany and Super Hans off Peep Show cannot lift this piece. Young children may find it diverting and parents may appreciate its message that books are exciting, but otherwise this is a half-baked adventure.

Film Review - Four Christmases

2008-11-27T15:44:00.000-08:00

Christmas has long offered fertile material for film makers. Every year, Hollywood produces a raft of sleigh-belled, Santa-hatted fare for our delectation, and often the forced jollity of it all fails to entice us.

Last year’s disappointing Fred Claus was a case in point, so it is surprising that its star Vince Vaughn decided to go with another festive film so soon. Four Christmases, however, exceeds expectations by being that rare thing: a Christmas comedy that is genuinely funny.

Brad (Vaughn) and Kate (Reese Witherspoon) love each other very much, but hate to spend Christmas with their families (as Brad puts it, you can’t spell ‘families’ without ‘lies’). Every year since these yuppies met, they’ve gone on a fabulous holiday to avoid traipsing between the four households of their divorced parents. But when all flights are grounded on Christmas Day, they have to do their duty and visit their loved ones.

The couple progress from one parent to the next, each prone to causing major embarrassment and physical injuries to their offspring. There’s Brad’s redneck father and wrestling brothers, his hippy mother and her toy boy, and Kate’s born-again mum. Brad and Kate are confronted with everything they hate about their pasts, but end up seeing what they are missing from their future in a series of very sweet moments that intercut the slapstick.

What really lift this up from your usual romantic comedy mush are the performances. Vaughn and Witherspoon are very convincing as a couple, despite the height difference (they look like they’ve been drawn to different scales), and the parents are all played by Oscar winners (Jon Voight, Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek and Mary Steenburgen).

Much of the script was improvised by the actors, and this is where Vince Vaughn really excels, churning out pop culture references and barbs with his cuddly charm. Witherspoon shows the comic timing that gained her so many fans in Legally Blonde and delivers the more serious scenes beautifully.

The director, Seth Gordon, has only one other feature under his belt, the cult documentary King of Kong about obsessive video game players. Four Christmases seems like an odd follow up, but it does touch on a real and universal theme: our families might drive us crazy, but we need them.

We may also need this gentle and hilarious reminder when we are struggling to stay sane in December.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

2008-11-27T15:41:00.000-08:00

For Kevin Smith fans, Zack and Miri Make a Porno was a slightly worrying prospect. It’s not set in the same filmic universe as most of Kevin Smith’s films (you can tell this because it’s not set in New Jersey, and Jeff Anderson’s character isn’t called Randal). The only other film that he’s made without Jay and Silent Bob was Jersey Girl, an ok film struck down by the curse of Gigli. There is no need to fear, however, because from the very first scene it is clear that we are in classic Kevin Smith mode; the movie is chock-full of the filthy humour, endearing moments and lack of cinematographic flair that we have come to love.

Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) have been best friends since high school, and share a flat. Faced with major money troubles, they decide to get out of debt by making and starring in a porn film. They find that turning a platonic relationship into a sexual one has consequences.

The script is full of Smith’s trademark dirty discussions and some pretty gross moments. The scenes where the ragtag cast and crew make the film are very amusing and reminiscent of his debut, Clerks¸ shot in the shop where he worked outside of business hours. Porn is an innately funny genre, what with the ridiculous scripts and acting, and this film gets its money’s worth out of the concept.

The cast is eclectic, and all the better for it. It is always nice to see Smith regulars Jeff Anderson and Jason Mewes on screen, this time joined by real porn stars Traci Lords and Katie Morgan. Josh Rogen is cuddly and sweet as Zack (a character obviously based on Kevin Smith) and Elizabeth Banks is charming as Miri, if a little bland. She is definitely flavour of the month in Hollywood, but her face so closely resembles Parker Posey’s that I always have unrealistic expectations of her wackiness and comedic talent, leaving me slightly disappointed.

But it is Justin Long (last seen in Die Hard 4.0 and Ed) who steals the show in a single scene. Using an unnaturally low voice to play a gay porn star, he manages to be at once creepy, cool and hilarious. It is the highlight of a very funny film with a very sweet heart.

Review - Quantum of Solace

2008-11-16T16:08:00.000-08:00

I wasn’t as enthused as everyone else by Daniel Craig’s first outing as James Bond in Casino Royale. Although reasonably enjoyable, in my mind Bond does not have sandy hair and a face like a beefy Sid James, and it was all a bit too serious. Quantum of Solace continues in the same vein, as our hero grieves Vespa Lynd by moodily killing people all over the world.

Bond is on the trail of a new, and very secretive, terrorist organisation. One of its members is Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric, playing a slightly more evil version of Jools Holland), a supposed environmentalist who likes staging coups and ruining the lives of poor people. Bond’s determination to stop him, against the wishes of MI6, leaves him a target.

Craig is robotic and emotionless – Bond is still so upset about his girlfriend dying in the last film that he is not allowing himself to feel. It may be intentional, but his ice blue eyes are so cold that it is hard to sustain one’s interest. Judy Dench is suitably matriarchal as M, but I was upset by her incongruous use of a short ‘a’ sound in the word ‘bastard’; she may be from Yorkshire, but that’s not the RP she was taught at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

My main concern is that most of what made Bond films special has gone out the window. The villain, though creepy, is perhaps not quite evil enough, and the Bond girls (Olga Kurylenko and Gemma Arterton) don’t get much screen time or a chance to be glamorous. If it wasn’t ‘cool’ enough, maybe they shouldn’t make them at all. Hopefully, with Casino Royale an origin film and Quantum of Solace about getting over that origin, the next instalment will see Bond emerge as a confident, suave and slightly more cheery fellow.

The action scenes here are gritty, exciting and numerous, almost making up for the shortcomings; this Bond is not averse to getting into fist fights, and looks like he could handle himself. Overall this is solid action fare, with car chases, explosions and plenty of hanging off scaffolding to enjoy, but it will not be anyone’s favourite Bond film.

Review - Gomorrah

2008-11-10T14:33:00.000-08:00

As one watches the Godfather or Goodfellas, life in organised crime does look sort of glamorous – until the bullets start flying and the knives start slitting throats, of course. In Gomorrah, it doesn’t seem glamorous for even a second. This brutal Italian film examines the Camorra, Naples’ version of the Sicilian Mafia, and the damage it does. As you watch these men and boys go about their lives in crumbling concrete estates soaked in grey light, you would be forgiven for thinking you were watching a 1980s Mike Leigh film. This is certainly not the sun-drenched Italy of travel brochures, all blue seas and pasta.

Gomorrah follows the lives of disparate people involved with the Camorra, which the viewer learns has its finger in many pies (toxic waste dumping being the most upsetting for someone like me who was brought up on Captain Planet). Young Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese) is a new recruit who we see losing his innocence quite spectacularly. The fact that this boy does so in an England football shirt makes it all the more upsetting. Marco (Marco Macor, a dead ringer for a young Robert De Niro) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) are two bumbling wannabe gangsters taking on the local Don. Pasquale (Salvatore Contalupo) is a tailor creating haute couture gowns for the Camorra who attempts some very risky moonlighting for a rival, and Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) is a money collector trying to survive as a turf war rages around him. These are just some of the stories woven together to form a picture of a city living in fear of this organisation, and there are none more afraid than those working for it.

The film is based on a book by Roberto Saviano, who now lives under police protection because of the attention he has brought to this secret society. Shot in a grainy, semi-documentary style, everything feels extremely authentic. The lingering shots do slow the pace to a crawl at times and it is not always clear which sides some of the characters are on, but overall this is a bloody and eye-opening introduction to a way of life we don’t often hear about, and one which seems to be without end.

Review - W.

2008-10-31T18:02:00.000-07:00

It is perhaps indicative of the quality of this biopic that it is bookended by the most banal of President George W. Bush’s crises: the pretzel in the throat incident. When I heard that the notorious lefty Oliver Stone was going to film the story of the most hated President in living memory, I (like everyone else) expected a savage indictment of the man. In the end this film, like the partial choking, is mildly amusing but ultimately harmless.

The most puzzling thing about this movie is that it completely bypasses the interesting aspects of W.’s life and presidency: the draft dodging, the drinking, the religious epiphany, the wrangling of the 2000 election, September 11th. Instead, Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser have chosen to show a few snatches of Yale frat life, a bit of the ‘lost years’ doing various jobs, and then the decision making process leading to the invasion of Iraq. Stone was presumably trying to avoid the ‘controversial’ tag as much as possible by pulling his punches, using the pretence of concentrating on the inner workings of George. Of course, he doesn’t seem to have very interesting inner workings. All we learn is that he has a very good memory, a bad case of sibling rivalry and a rich Daddy who is disappointed in him.

That’s not to say that Stone has portrayed his subject positively. Infamous ‘Bushisms’ are awkwardly shoe-horned into the script to make him look ridiculous. He comes across as an idiot and a rich kid trying to be a good ole boy, but he also seems quite innocent. His advisors, particularly the shadowy figure of Karl Rove, are the ones manipulating his hot head to their advantage.

Josh Brolin plays the current President of the United States with an authentically inauthentic Texan drawl and just the right level of down-home, smirking confidence, and he does well with the material given to him. The rest of the Bush clan are also nicely played. Elizabeth Banks comes across as a very sweet Laura Bush, and James Cromwell is suitably domineering as the elder George. The real let down comes with W.’s inner circle, particularly Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice. These parts are just bad caricatures; the scenes in the Oval Office would resemble an SNL skit if the script was at all witty.

All in all, this is a slow, boring, incomprehensible film. I really do not know what Stone was trying to achieve by rushing out this film in time for the election. Perhaps it would have been understandable in 2004, but as there is no danger of W. getting another term, it doesn’t seem necessary to inflict this upon us. The subject of George W. Bush would be better explored by an out and out comedy or by a serious look at his life and motivations. He probably deserves both. As it is, this is a half-baked take on a few scenes from his life. Like the pretzel, it could have done some real damage, but instead is easily wiped from the memory.

London Film Festival review - Frost/Nixon

2008-10-22T15:45:00.000-07:00

Being young as I am, David Frost is the man I used to watch on a Sunday morning before I had Sky and had the power to flick to something interesting. Sitting there seriously in a suit interviewing the Shadow Transport Secretary, to my generation he is pretty indistinguishable from a David or Jonathan Dimbleby. There was Through the Keyhole, or course, which hinted at hidden depths (or should that be hidden shallows?), but he was just another journalist to us.

However, 30 or 40 years ago, Frost was a very big deal. The British satirical sketch show That Was the Week That Was he fronted actually transferred to America, something that nowadays would still be a bit of a coup, and he had chat shows in Britain, America and Australia. Then there are the Nixon interviews. The friend I took to see Frost/Nixon at the London Film Festival had never even heard of them, and I knew very little; Watergate is not the historic touchstone for us that it is to people glued to their television screens at the time. Nevertheless, we found this account of the meetings between Frost and the disgraced ex-President to be absolutely riveting.

Beginning with Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the films follows Frost (Michael Sheen) as he tries to arrange the interview everyone wants but no-one can get. Nixon (Frank Langella) has retired to his California beach house, making ends meet with low-end speaking engagements. He agrees to Frost’s request for an interview because he thinks he’ll be in for an easy ride. With the American television networks not interested, David must raise Nixon’s considerable fee himself. Finally, in 1977, they sit down to talk in front of the cameras.

The tension built up to this point is palpable. The director Ron Howard has managed to make the film as nerve-wracking as Apollo 13, one of his previous efforts. The years of preparation and study on both sides come down to a few hours of filming. This is a battle of wits, and only one person can emerge victorious.

Sheen and Langella are wonderful in their roles, both hitting the right balance between impersonation and characterisation. David Frost comes off as a bit of a berk, really. A man with ambitions bigger than his talents, he seems desperate for success but willing to work to achieve it. Richard Nixon appears to be very complex. Slippery as an eel and sharp as a pin, he also seems very lonely. Of course, his problems are self-inflicted, and the film doesn’t paint him as a victim.

The supporting cast is also excellent. Frost’s team of Oliver Platt, Matthew MacFadyen and Sam Rockwell are funny and charming. Kevin Bacon is quite terrifying as Nixon’s right hand man and Rebecca Hall is adorable in the role of Frost’s girlfriend.

The script they have to work with, based on the successful play, is hilarious, insightful and very, very clever. Everything, in fact, about the production screams 'quality'. This is a classy film about a fascinating subject that will leave you desperate to get home and look at those interviews again on YouTube. David Frost certainly wasn’t this exciting sitting on that sofa every Sunday morning on BBC1.

Review - Righteous Kill

2008-10-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

Many people will be excited at the prospect of seeing Al Pacino and Robert De Niro back on screen together. One would expect this dream combination, previously glimpsed only briefly in the over-rated Heat, to only come about when an outstanding project comes along that demands the two hard nuts reunite. It is hard to see how Righteous Kill appeared to be that outstanding project. Al and Bobby must have been paid some serious green to appear in this rather average thriller.

Detectives Turk (De Niro) and Rooster (Pacino) have been partners for a long time (if this was real life, they would surely have retired by now) working the mean streets of New York. While investigating a serial killer that targets scumbags who have escaped jail, suspicion begins to fall on Turk as the bodies pile up.

De Niro and Pacino are, of course, very good, but that doesn’t mean they’re trying particularly hard. An appearance from 50 Cent is passable, but it is perhaps only Carla Gugino as Turk’s experimental love interest who shines,

The film is very claustrophobic, with lots of close ups and tight shots on the characters. I suspect that’s to hide the meagre production values (which look about the same as a mid-level Law & Order episode) rather than for any artistic reason. The script has few memorable lines and the plot will not keep your interest up to the end. This is one to see on DVD rather than in the cinema.

Review - Then She Found Me

2008-10-20T15:47:00.000-07:00

Bette Midler is the Queen of the depressing chick flick (Beaches has left many women quivering wrecks, me included), and her latest role sticks to familiar territory. However, Then She Found Me is not some glossy melodrama, but a sensitive and quiet portrayal of relationships with a rough, low-budget edge that makes it feel very real indeed.

Helen Hunt’s directorial debut follows April Epner (played by Hunt herself), a religious, newlywed teacher in her late thirties. In a few short weeks her marriage falls apart, her adoptive mother dies, her birth mother (Midler) finds her, and she meets the delectable-but-troubled Frank (Colin Firth). This gives April and the audience a lot to deal with, but the slow pace allows for many heartbreakingly intimate moments to be played out on screen, allowing the film time to breathe.

The most striking thing about Then She Found Me is the character of April. She is not glamorous, she is not even particularly interesting on the surface, but she has inner strength and doesn’t require continuous approval from others. Everyone knows women like her, but they rarely appear in films. Her character is lovingly captured in details like her cloth shoulder bag and dodgy sandals, small things that build into a real person. Hunt plays her with a great deal of humility and grace.

Bette Midler is wonderful as her feisty and tricksy new mother, who finds her daughter not as welcoming as she’d hoped. Colin Firth is lovely as usual playing a single father who has been terribly hurt in the past, although his character is one of those who is adorable on screen but would be infuriating in real life (like Ally McBeal or Ross Geller).

Then She Found Me is a mature and thoughtful drama that deals with love, loss and family and it has a perfect little ending. It may not be likely to attract a large male following, but Helen Hunt has pulled off the rarest of feats: an intelligent chick flick.

Review - Tropic Thunder

2008-10-20T15:45:00.000-07:00

I am pretty obsessed by the Vietnam War, and particularly the films it spawned. I admit that they are not chuckle-fests, though. The Deer Hunter is not known for its one-liners. There is precious little slapstick in Platoon (although in my opinion, it could only have improved things) and Apocalypse Now is more ‘funny strange’ than ‘funny ha-ha’. Ben Stiller has used the innate seriousness of this genre to create the most hilarious film I’ve seen since Superbad.

The story follows a group of egotistical actors trying to make a movie based on the memoirs of a Vietnam vet (the wonderful Nick Nolte). Unfortunately, they end up struggling to survive in the jungle for real, surrounded by a new ‘Charlie’ trying to take them out with real bullets.

The characters are introduced in a series of fake trailers that are worth the price of admission alone: this is scalpel-sharp satire on the contemporary film business and gloriously silly to boot. Stiller is a Bruce Willis-lite action hero trying to be taken seriously, Robert Downey Jr. is a carbon-copy Russell Crowe, totally committed to his role, and Jack Black is a cross-between himself and Eddie Murphy.

Stiller and his writing partner Justin Theroux have left no cliché unturned in the quest for laughs, and they have delivered in spades. Silly situations, characters that ring true and wonderful performances make this one of the comedies of the year. It is a testament to how good it is that the appearance of Tom Cruise in a fat suit (with the fat mostly concentrated on his lower arms) is one of the least funny elements.

Review - Hellboy II: The Golden Army

2008-08-28T14:18:00.000-07:00

The first Hellboy film premiered in 2004, and made little impression on the mainstream audience. For an ostensible superhero movie, it had a strange central character, and it was helmed by a Mexican director best known for Blade 2. However, it became a favourite amongst aficionados of the genre, valued for its sense of fun and respect for its source material (a comic by Mike Mignola). Since then, its director Guillermo del Toro has achieved widespread acclaim for his Spanish-language films Pan’s Labyrinth and The Orphanage. His Hellboy sequel is therefore garnering a lot more attention than the original, and expectations are high. Those now following del Toro’s career will not be disappointed, as it delivers his trademarked mix of creepy monsters and loss in a fun package.

Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is a demon who fights supernatural forces for the US government with his girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair), who can control fire, and Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), a psychic and very polite fish man. In this film they must take on Prince Nuada, the rebellious son of the elf king who wants to restore his people’s kingdom on Earth using the Golden Army, a mechanical fighting force buried under Ireland.

This bonkers plot allows plenty of space for del Toro’s favourite creations: pale and clammy creatures with eyes in surprising places. The various elves, goblins and fairies that feature can be genuinely frightening or strangely beautiful (sometimes both at once). A stunning animated sequence at the start of the film places these strange beings in the fairytales of our childhood, showing how deeply they are engrained on our collective psyche. There are still plenty of laughs, though, as the relationships between the bizarre cast of characters play out like a domestic sitcom. The use of a Barry Manilow song is a particular highlight.

Ron Perlman’s decades spent as a character actor getting bit parts have finally paid off, with the lead role of Hellboy perfectly suited to his strangely shaped head. He really captures the character’s mixture of strength and softness. The biggest casting surprise was Luke Goss, wielding a sword and working a blond wig with graceful malevolence as Prince Nuada. After this and Charlie, perhaps it is time we stopped thinking of him as “that one out of Bros”.

It is Doug Jones who gives the most impressive performance, however. He is totally adorable as his character falls in love for the first time – the emotions shining through the layers of makeup. After playing Silver Surfer in the Fantastic Four sequel and the Faun and the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth with similar skill, perhaps it is time for him to be seen on screen without latex.

Hellboy II is certainly more fun and full of ideas than the doom-laden Dark Knight, and deserves to get as big an audience. It is clear this is a product of a director totally in love with his characters and the story. Hints dropped suggest more serious challenges ahead for Hellboy and his friends in the next instalment, but for now we can sit back and enjoy this twisted romp through fairyland.

Review - Mamma Mia!

2008-08-28T14:13:00.000-07:00

Since premiering in 1999, the Mamma Mia! stage show has broken box office records around the world. Unfortunately, it also started the trend for back catalogue musicals, spawning Ben Elton’s We Will Rock You and the grotesque gold Freddy Mercury, the Colossus of Tottenham Court Road, that accompanies it. The concept no one thought would work proved to be a huge (and repeatable) success, showing that when it comes to musical scores, familiarity breeds moolah. A screen adaptation of this Abba musical was inevitable, and the result is one of the silliest and most fun films of the year.

The plot concerns Donna Sheridan (Meryl Streep), an aging hippie who runs a guesthouse on a Greek island with her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried). Despite their idyllic life, Sophie has never felt whole because she doesn’t know who her father is. On the eve of her wedding, she secretly invites the three men who could potentially be her daddy, played by Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård. Much inevitable hilarity ensues, as the past is uncovered and relationships blossom under the Mediterranean sun.

A person’s reaction to this film is likely to be dependent on their feelings towards Abba, so central is their music to proceedings. The plot seems little more than a frame to hang the hits on at times, with songs somewhat shoehorned in. Working in Fernando, the sad lament to defeat in a civil war in Central America, thankfully proved a step too far for Catherine Johnson (the writer of the original play and this script) and it is left out.

Casting non-singers in a musical is always a risk, and here the results are mixed. Amanda Seyfried’s clear voice is the best of the bunch, and her adorable performance marks her as a star in the making. Brosnan, Firth and Skarsgård, on the other hand, are peculiarly awful. Still, their attempts at carrying tunes are amusing, and show that this is not a film meant to be taken seriously. The only other time I can recall seeing Meryl Streep burst into song is at the end of the Deer Hunter, and I am always crying so much that I have failed to register whether or not she can actually sing. It turns out she can; and whilst she may not be technically perfect, she more than makes up for it with her sincerity and conviction in the role.

Mamma Mia! is a ridiculous sun-drenched confection made enjoyable because of the exuberance of the performances and the pop brilliance of the songs. Whatever cruel things critics say about inane lyrics and sequined platform boots, Benny and Björn’s soaring melodies have become the soundtrack to people’s lives. This film gives us an opportunity to experience these songs again, making it a sure-fire hit. Now brace yourself We Will Rock You: The Movie.

Review - Iron Man

2008-06-11T15:56:00.000-07:00

One of the lesser-known Marvel superheroes, Iron Man has potentially one of the hardest origin stories to translate into the present day. In most of the other recent film adaptations, “genetic engineering” has been used in place of ‘radiation’ (the science buzzword of the 1960s when these characters were created) as the catch-all cause of superpowers. Iron Man, on the other hand, came into being trying to stop a warlord in Vietnam, and is definitely a product of Cold War concerns.

Under these circumstances, the writing team and director Jon Favreau have done a great job of translating the story to the modern day, although thanks must also go to the Bush administration for giving him another unwinnable guerrilla conflict to substitute for Southeast Asia.

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is an uber-wealthy international playboy and genius-level engineer who runs his family weapons company. While demonstrating his latest product to the army in Afghanistan, he is captured by rebels and ordered to make them one of his efficient killing machines. Tony instead builds a robotic suit of armour and escapes the rebels’ clutches, vowing to stop making guns and to start helping people by using his new creation.

Unusually for this genre, the tidy storyline makes complete sense (barring, of course, the technology involved), and allows plenty of time for the performances from Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow to shine through. He is charisma personified and brings warmth and pathos to the role. Paltrow’s Pepper Potts (Stark’s Miss Moneypenny) is upright, organised, strawberry blond and everything you’d want in a secretary.

The effects are excellent, with the Iron Man suit always looking real and never like it’s been stuck on in Photoshop. Action sequences here may not be as exciting as those in Spider-Man, but this is a function of Iron Man’s power being slightly less cool, rather than anything the film-makers have done wrong; fights between robots easily become swirling chunks of metal and can be confusing to follow, as previously seen in Transformers. The rest of the film more than makes up for this, however, satisfying with genuinely charming characters and loads of funny moments.

Review - The Cottage

2008-04-03T14:32:00.000-07:00

British film comedy at the moment owes a lot to Shaun of the Dead, which whisked away the cobwebs of soppy Richard Curtis rom-coms and allowed us to show the world that we too are part of the slacker generation and can be geeky and funny at once. The Cottage may not be quite as good as Shaun, but it is certainly up there with its successor Hot Fuzz when it comes to silly spoofery.

The simple plot follows two inept brothers who have kidnapped a rich girl and are holding her to ransom in the middle of nowhere. Andy Serkis (Gollum from Lord of the Rings, here without the motion capture suit) plays David, the hardened criminal mastermind of the pair who unfortunately puts his trust in Peter (Reece Shearsmith, the normal-looking one from the League of Gentleman, but confusingly the one with the least normal name), a snivelling, cowardly family man. After their plan goes wrong, things get very much worse very rapidly, as there is someone else out there in the woods.

Lots of gruesome fun ensues as the characters realise they have stepped straight into a Sussex Chainsaw Massacre. This film has obviously been made on a small budget, but they’ve kept cast and sets to a minimum and concentrated where it matters, on blood and guts. Serkis and Shearsmith make a good double act (although their accents make believing they are brothers difficult), and Jennifer Ellison is wonderful as Tracey, the crotch-kicking, mouthy Scouser who isn’t easy to hold captive. A nice little send up of the horror genre, The Cottage has enough sick belly laughs to leave you smiling on the way out of the cinema.

Review - There Will Be Blood

2008-02-23T17:55:00.000-08:00

I am not sure what to say about There Will Be Blood. On the one hand, it is a very beautiful, somewhat disturbing, and certainly epic film with a truly outstanding lead performance by Daniel Day Lewis. On the other, it left me confused, annoyed by that confusion, and having little idea what it was actually about.

Daniel Plainview (Day Lewis) is an oil prospector in the first years of the 20th Century, taking on the dangerous but necessary job of finding wells in California. An intense orator, he easily gets his way, buying up people’s land throughout the state. In one area, however, a young, and similarly intense, preacher called Eli (Paul Dano, the silent teenager in Little Miss Sunshine) makes his life difficult, and Plainview begins to lose his grip.

The scenes of digging for oil are electrifying. It is just so interesting to see it bubble up from ground like that, but the hideous, skull-smashing danger of the process means it is hard to even look at the screen. The film takes its time with such scenes, using long silences and Jonny Greenwood’s brooding, whirring score very effectively.

There is an immense sense of foreboding throughout the whole film, a fearfulness that stems from our fear of Plainview. Day Lewis is a boiling cauldron of violence and ferocity, producing a monumental performance that will surely go down as one of his best; he is an epic character creating an epic story around him from very little. Plainview’s son (Dillon Freasier) is an unnerving silent presence, and Dano’s Eli is an unnerving loud one.

Although I did enjoy my journey through the film, I was interrupted at various intervals as I realised I did not know what was going on. There is an issue surrounding Eli and his brother which, whilst I won’t go into it here so as not to give anything away, is very confusing, and I have still not resolved it in my own mind. It is galling because it is not really an important issue, and one that could have been easily remedied. The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, is obviously not careless, so I suppose this ambiguity must have been intentional, but the bewilderment it produced was very distracting, and I know I am not alone in feeling it.

I am also not sure about the meaning behind the film, apart from that Plainview was a bit of a loony and that greed is bad. Anderson’s previous works like Boogie Nights and Magnolia made instant emotional connections with audiences, but this film’s feelings are hidden behind a veil of both bombast and intense quiet. An outstanding mood-piece, There Will Be Blood is certainly masterful, if not quite a masterpiece.

Review - Cloverfield

2008-02-23T17:02:00.000-08:00

The Blair Witch Project was rubbish, and unfortunately for a horror film, it wasn’t even scary rubbish. The producer J.J Abrams took a risk, then, in reusing the ‘found videotape’ device for this film, although as the creator of Lost, he knows he can make low-brow, high-concept stuff work (at least for a while). The risk paid off, for Cloverfield is one of the most enjoyable films I have seen for a long time.

The story follows a group of young, beautiful yuppie-types as they video a leaving party for one of their number, who is moving from New York to Japan. The party is interrupted by a monster attack on the city, and they continue to tape the consequential running, screaming and toppling of buildings as they try to rescue a friend. When the attack begins, it definitely makes for uncomfortable viewing, as it seems eerily close to the events of 2001. Luckily, the monster element comes to the forefront, and the emotional and physical rollercoaster the characters are going through takes your mind off it. This is a genuinely scary film; the use of a hand-held camera throughout makes it seem very real for our YouTube-dominated culture, and means that the much is left unseen and unexplained. When you do see things, they are made using good CGI.

The only problems with it are the characters. Young, happy and successful Americans are very annoying; frat boys don’t suddenly become less heinous just because they get jobs. The only ugly person in this film (excluding the giant amphibious monster) was carefully placed behind the camera, out of sight. As is traditional for horror films, the cast is made up of unknowns. They do their best with what they are working with, but the bland glossiness of the people somewhat detracts from the rest of this otherwise ground-breaking monster movie. This is the same problem I have with Lost, but luckily this film lasts only 85 minutes, rather than years and years, so it’s hardly noticeable. A terrifying tale of survival that puts you right in the action, Cloverfield is a taut thriller that deserves to be seen on the big screen by every horror fan.

Review - No Country for Old Men

2008-02-10T12:36:00.000-08:00

This adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel contains the familiar Coen Brothers’ elements of quiet men and crimes gone wrong, but takes them to a much darker place than ever before; there are few of their trademark comic grotesques to offer relief in the unforgiving gloom of the film’s Texas landscape.

Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) disobeys Movie Rule Number One when he takes a suitcase of money that doesn’t belong to him. The resulting game of cat and mouse moves slowly, but is carried along by sudden bursts of violence. The Coens build squirm-inducing tension from the start, so it is a pity that the audience is betrayed by a low-key ending that means less than it thinks it does.

Uniformly excellent performances from the large cast make up for the few narrative faults, however. Brolin impresses as the principled-yet-greedy protagonist, and Scottish Kelly McDonald manages a flawless Texan drawl whilst sweetly playing his young wife, in what will surely be breakthrough roles for both. Tommy Lee Jones and Woody Harrelson ably fill parts made for them, but it is Javier Bardem who will live long in the memory as the psychopath on Brolin’s trail, with a terrifying method of killing his victims and an even scarier haircut.

Review - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

2007-11-13T15:47:00.000-08:00

This film tells true story of an event that became legendary in the annals of the Old West. It is 1881 and Jesse James (Brad Pitt), the brutal outlaw and folk hero, has become older, tired and paranoid. Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) has idolised him since he was a child, and desperately tries to join his gang. Director Andrew Dominik explores how fate intertwines these two men’s lives, producing a dream-like and haunting viewing experience.

Casey Affleck (who doesn’t look that much like his brother, but sounds so much like him that it freaks me out) is brilliant as the titular coward. Shifty, constantly mumbling and weasely, but also intelligent and hot-headed, the Robert Ford shown here was an ambitious misfit who yearned for fame, and unfortunately got what he wanted. Pitt’s Jesse James is a malevolent presence in every scene. Apparently bi-polar towards the end of his life, he is at once both charming and dangerously unpredictable. If one actually looks at photos of Jesse James, however, one will see that he actually looked a lot more like a weedy version of Affleck than Brad Pitt. I suppose it is inevitable that everyone is beefed-up to match the Hollywood aesthetic.

As a mood-piece this contemplative film works very well. The cinematography is wonderful; grand vistas, farmhouses, towns, everything is shown through a grey-brown haze (at one point, Ford states that both he and James have blue eyes, but you really can’t tell due to the colour cast). Everything takes place very slowly in this world (except gunshot deaths, of course), allowing us to be transported back to another time.

Given the space in this film for pause and reflection, it is surprising that the story is actually quite hard to follow. There are lots of mangy, foul-speaking men who bear grudges against Jesse James and vice versa, but it is rarely made clear who they are and why the friction exists between them. Everything is very vague and unspoken, which certainly adds to the barren beauty of the piece, but produces a confused audience enjoying a less than compelling experience. Nevertheless, this is a lovely piece of work to see on the big screen, with a dream-like atmosphere that will stay with you for days.

Review - Sicko

2007-11-12T15:41:00.000-08:00

Many people felt, like I did, that Michael Moore took a wrong turning with Fahrenheit 9/11; it all went a bit too far. The searing and sensitive examination of desolation in his home town in Roger & Me, and the masterful patchwork of Bowling for Columbine (which both mainly focused on the predicaments and foibles of ordinary Americans) seemed to be replaced with self-serving bombast. Although a persuasive and moving piece of work, Fahrenheit left a bad taste in my mouth, perhaps because Moore had left any pretence of balance and fairness behind when he stated that the purpose of the film was to get Bush out of the White House. It left an even worse taste when it failed.

With Sicko, his examination of the American medical system (or lack thereof), he has gone back to basics, producing another heartbreaking, heart-warming, and totally engrossing film. This is a subject he covered often in his TV series, TV Nation and The Awful Truth, but demands to be covered again. The stories he shows of people suffering and dying needlessly in the richest country in the World, all because of the greed of the insurance companies, are (excuse the pun) completely sickening. Now, Michael Moore may always approach a topic with an agenda, but his agenda here is to give poor people decent medical care. He may select facts carefully, but the fact that the denial of treatment is company policy in these organisations, and that this is sanctioned by the government, obliterates any arguments for keeping the status quo.

Sicko made me proud to be British (or, less specifically and more accurately, European), and so grateful for our National Health Service (NHS). Now, granted, it is a far from perfect system (hospital-borne infection rates and the treatment of the elderly are national scandals, and that’s just for starters), but for most of the people, most of the time it works at least adequately and it is free. It seems completely anathema to me, or to any European, to have to pay for treatment; we would see it as going against our human rights. We take it for granted that we can visit the GP if we get a sniffle, go to casualty if we cut ourselves, and that the cost of asthma medication won’t force us to keep working into our 80s. Moore shows ex-pat Americans crying with guilt about the ‘luxuries’ they receive, when their parents, who worked hard all their lives, have to struggle.

When it comes to the passionate polemic, the call to arms of downtrodden Americans, the highlighting of crippling unfairness, none can beat Moore; his work makes you laugh out loud one minute, and cry the next. Some may say he is a cynical manipulator of emotions, and even if that is the case, with Sicko his view is so morally correct that I applaud the manipulation, as it might make people angry enough to do something about it. I really believe that if Americans adopted socialised healthcare (as the rest of the Developed World has), then almost instantaneously they would never imagine going back to the old system: a system that dumps people without insurance outside homeless shelters in the dead of night. That refuses care to dying children. That bankrupts decent, hardworking families. That makes billions of dollars every year.

London Film Festival Review - Juno

2007-11-05T16:01:00.000-08:00

Juno is the story of the unusually-named Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page), a 16 year-old who finds herself pregnant. Automatically choosing an abortion at first, she changes her mind and decides to have the baby and give it away to a deserving couple. Hoping to find some cool artsy types in need of a child, or at least some lesbians, she finds an ad placed by Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and Mark (Jason Bateman) Loring, a yuppie couple in an immaculate house who are desperate for a baby. Will she give them the baby? Will she get back with its father? Will her parents forgive her?

I’m making this film sound like a dreadful issue-of-the-week melodrama, when really it is anything but. An offbeat comedy-drama, the easiest way to describe it would be ‘Enid from Ghost World gets pregnant’, but that would be a flippant oversimplification. Although ostensibly dealing with ‘issues’, the script (the first screenplay by Diablo Cody) offers no universal answers to the problems of the characters; these are people choosing the decisions that are right for them, and not judging anyone else for theirs. Juno is made up of small moments, some hilarious, some heartbreakingly poignant. Cody has an amazing and unusual turn of phrase. Using no ‘jokes’ as such, the film manages to be very funny through the use of some strange expressions and slang; I wish I was capable of talking as creatively as Juno.

Ellen Page, who impressed in Hard Candy, turns in another bravura performance in the title role. Acerbic and independent, Juno is a girl who knows what she wants (most of the time), and doesn’t care what other people think. She comes across as a real person, a person miles away from any high school stereotype. Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman put it lovely, nuanced performances as two wounded souls, and Bateman’s fellow Arrested Development alumnus Michael Cerra does his usual ‘nervous geek’ shtick with aplomb as Juno’s almost-boyfriend (I like to hope he has some range as an actor, but I have no evidence of this as yet).

The director, Jason Reitman (son of Ghost Busters’ director, Ivan Reitman) has made a thoughtful and entertaining film that takes the feelings of its characters seriously. Teenagers will enjoy seeing people like them being appreciated as fully-rounded humans with valid emotions, and anyone who likes something a little bit different should enjoy this low-key and unusual story. Juno is the perfect antidote to carbon-copy Hollywood fare.

London Film Festival Review - Planet Terror

2007-11-04T15:52:00.000-08:00

Planet Terror is the other half of Grindhouse, the Tarantino/Rodriguez double-feature that began with the supercool Death Proof. Concentrating on schlocky action and gore rather than dialogue and soundtrack, it is a much more conventional film than the first part, but still a gloriously fun ride with tongue firmly in cheek.

Set in a rather grimy Austin shortly after the first half of Death Proof (a bad few weeks to visit the city, by all accounts), the story follows the results of a chemical leak at a military base, and the escape of the survivors from the zombie-like creatures it created. The set-up is quite perfunctory, allowing all hell to break loose for most of the film as zombies splatter humans and vice versa.

Freddy Rodriguez (lovely Rico from wonderful Six Feet Under) and Rose McGowan lead the cast, and look like they are having such fun kicking zombie butt. Marley Shelton also stands out, appearing amazingly dazed yet determined throughout as Dr. Dakota Block (finally, the ‘Doc-tor Block’ scene in Death Proof makes sense now!), and there is a great little part for Bruce Willis. Quentin Tarantino actually acts well here! I think he is only good in things when playing a quiet psycho; when he plays a talkative person more like himself, he is strangely much less believable.

This is a very silly film, and whilst it is not as laugh-out-loud funny as the similarly-themed Shaun of the Dead (or as much of an out-and-out parody), it has its comedic moments, as well as some pretty grim gore. With a fake trailer at the beginning and a missing reel in the middle, this had more of the ‘fake grindhouse film’ elements than the individual version of Death Proof released in cinemas here, adding to the fun. I would say this was like a sequel to Rodriguez’s Tarantino-penned From Dusk Till Dawn, had that film already had two sequels (neither directed by Rodriguez). Those who enjoyed the end of that film, and fans of the zombie genre in general, are going to love the barmy set-pieces and stock characters on display here.

Review - Ratatouille

2007-11-03T17:04:00.000-07:00

Ratatouille continues the Pixar tradition of producing highly polished and lovable animated films that appeal to both children and adults. Their presentation begins with a short cartoon called Lifted, a nicely old-fashioned tale of alien abduction that could have been made by Chuck Jones during the golden age of animation, had he been given the technology through a rogue wormhole. The main feature is the story of a rat from rural France called Remy who has an unusually sensitive sense of smell. Taking a different life path from Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Perfume, he uses his gift to improve the taste of any dish a human makes, even those of the best chefs. Finding himself in Paris, he seeks out the restaurant of his idol, a recently deceased tv chef, and manages to show off his culinary skills with the help of a lowly kitchen boy called Linguini.

The quality of animation here is, as always with Pixar, outstanding, especially when it comes to the rats and the views of Paris. It is a relief to not have a cast list unnecessarily stuffed full with big names (something that was distracting with films like Happy Feet), and everyone performs well. Peter O’Toole really stands out as Anton Ego, a morose and ghostly restaurant critic, matching the voice to the character perfectly.

Remy’s tale of the underdog achieving against great odds (and these are very big odds, as it is extremely disturbing to see a rat cooking, even a cartoon one) is very appealing, especially since he is extremely adorable and furry-looking. There was one anomaly (apart from the obvious ‘rat being a chef’ thing), however, that annoyed me slightly: accents are not consistent. The story takes place in France, and the rats have American accents. This is ok, since they are speaking Rat, and maybe rats have American accents when you translate Rat to English, I don’t know. Humans spoke English with a French accent (again completely acceptable), except for Linguini, who again had an American accent. Is he speaking Rat? No! And all the other humans could understand him! Is he supposed to be French, American, or Italian as his name would suggest? This is never made clear, and troubles me greatly.

Apart from that, it was really good. There are lots of very funny jokes, and a nice message at the end, which is exactly what you want in a film like this.

World Premiere Review - Being Michael Madsen

2007-09-30T05:38:00.000-07:00

I was lucky enough to see the world premiere of this mockumentary at the Raindance Film Festival in London, with the titular Coolest Man on the Planet in attendance. A light satire on the paparazzi, entertainment industry and the self-righteousness of documentary film makers, this low-budget indie comedy is good for a few laughs.

Michael Madsen, playing himself, has been accused of killing an extra on one of his films by a slimeball paparazzo, Billy Dant (Jason Alan Smith). He sues Dant for slander, but when he loses, decides to teach him a lesson by sending a documentary film crew to stalk him and give him a taste of his own medicine. The plot reveals itself mostly through talking head interviews, and it takes a while for the film to warm up and for it to become clear what is going on. Once it gets going, though, it is quite funny and compelling.

Davis Mikaels, Kathy Searle and Doug Tompos are great as the film crew, each in the business for very different reasons, and all ringing true to life. The real draws, however, are the cameo talking heads by friends of Madsen, like David Carradine, Harry Dean Stanton, Daryl Hannah and his sister, Virginia Madsen, all making fun of themselves.

The film reminded me in places of a Christopher Guest one, and I certainly enjoyed it as much as For Your Consideration, which is on a similar subject (although also the least good of Guest’s films). For something that only took ten days to shoot, the film makers have done an amazing job. Unfortunately, it perhaps still doesn’t add up to enough for a cinema release. Being Michael Madsen should find its home on DVD or on something like HBO, where it will give fans of Mr. Madsen a treat, and everyone else a diverting hour and a half.

Review - Death Proof

2007-09-29T04:06:00.000-07:00

I am a huge Tarantino fan. And I mean huge. Not literally, of course, in reality I am quite petite, but I am huge in the loving-Quentin-Tarantino’s-films department. Obviously I was very excited about seeing Death Proof, as a new Tarantino release is a rare occurrence. But then I heard bad things about it, disappointed reviews from critics that professed to love Tarantino’s back catalogue, but just couldn’t get this. I began my first viewing with a heavy heart, but that didn’t last long. Although a slightly odd film, with passages that don’t quite scan on first viewing, Death Proof has lots of great dialogue and supercool moments that only Tarantino can do, which means it is worth a watch by everyone.

Death Proof was originally the second part of Grindhouse, a joint venture with Robert Rodriguez that did not go down well in America because people apparently couldn’t get the concept of a double feature. It may also have been because this project is really a minority pursuit; not everyone is interested in reliving the idiosyncrasies of bad 70s cinema, and perhaps they shouldn’t have expected a general young audience to get very enthused (stupid young people!). Harvey Weinstein has decided to split the film for its international release. As with the splitting in two of Kill Bill, this has allowed the addition of extra footage, and as with Kill Bill (specifically vol. 2) it may have been a better idea to keep it tighter as originally intended.

The story revolves around the actions of Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a stuntman with an unusual hobby: he enjoys driving his cool, black, reinforced car at speed into cars filled with beautiful young women, killing them instantly. We follow his victims on their night out in Austin Texas in the first half of the film, and then move on to Lebanon, Tennesse, where Stuntman Mike has decided to mess with the wrong girls.

The plot is quite thin, though compelling in a lurid way; what fills most of the screen time is the girls’ fast, sassy Tarantino-speak. Watching this you get an idea of how Tarantino would write an episode of Sex and the City, which makes it a pity that the series is over. For some, the pace may be a bit ponderous, but building up a relationship with these characters is important for when the inevitable happens. These are cool, clever women in control, a rare thing in movies; their presence shouldn’t be that surprising, as Tarantino’s female characters have always been strong and intelligent. Interestingly, the male characters are all wallies, wimps, or a psychopathic killer, almost playthings for the girls.

Russell gives a very charming and manacing performance when on screen, as most of the time he is just malevolent presence in the background. The girls are all great (although Jordan Ladd as Shanna is very annoying, I hope intentionally), with special mention to Vanessa Ferlito as Arlene for her astounding lap dance. I also really enjoyed Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thoms, a blonde Rose McGowan, and Sydney Tamaii Poitier as the rather frightening Jungle Julia, a six foot DJ. Zoë Bell (Uma Thurman’s stunt double on Kill Bill) plays herself, proving she must be certifiable with her death-defying stunts. As with all Tarantino films, one of the best characters is the soundtrack, and we are treated to some great and surprising choices that leave their mark on every scene.

This film is by its very nature choppy, split in two almost, and there are some moments that don’t seem to fit at first. But if you can get past those issues, then this is a very enjoyable ride, with many awesome moments and heaps of girl power.

Review - 1408

2007-09-04T13:23:00.000-07:00

This light horror, based on a short story by Stephen King, follows a man with a very unusual job. Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a washed-up novelist who now makes his living investigating claims of haunted hotels, graveyards and the like. Although he wants to believe, he has never seen anything remotely supernatural on his many fact-finding missions for his hokey books. When he hears about the ‘evil’ room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel, he decides to spend the night there, despite the protestations of the manager. The scene is set for a nightmarish evening in a very scary hotel room.

1408 is refreshingly short of blood and guts for a modern horror, but delivers chills rather than out-and-out terror. The neat set-up of the hotel room allows the director Mikael Håfström to build up the creepiness and weirdness, but it also makes this film a definite one man show (the lovely Tony Shalhoub and Samuel L. Jackson are relegated to one scene each). Luckily Cusack really commits to the role and gives a great performance. There are some problems, though. The ending feels very abrupt, and it all goes a bit Silent Hill on our collective asses with the appearance of a few unexplained dusty monsters that just don’t fit in. This is still an enjoyable film if you want a few scares, but perhaps aficionados of the horror genre will be a little disappointed.

Review - Superbad

2007-09-03T14:40:00.000-07:00

Teen Movies can be the crudest of things (think Porky’s), but they can also be the sweetest, capturing a confusing time truthfully and defining an era (think The Breakfast Club). Superbad manages to be both crude and sweet, as well as scream-out-loud funny. This is a must-see film for anyone who loves dick jokes and tales of friendship.

High School seniors Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cerra) have been friends since forever, and they have one long summer ahead of them before they go off to different colleges. Realising that the end of year bash is their last opportunity to sleep with the girls from their year, they hatch a plan to impress their potential mates by buying booze for the party (illegally, this being America). The patsy in this cunning plan is their hanger-on Fogell, played by the wonderful newcomer Christopher Mintz-Plasse (imagine Dustin Diamond’s younger, weedier brother), who has just got a totally unconvincing fake ID. Their quest to get the girls of their dreams leads them to a crazy night of robberies, useless cops, beatings and nutcases.

It’s lovely to see Cerra (George Michael from the much-missed Arrested Development) transfer deservedly to the big screen, and Hill is definitely a star in the making. Like the performances, the joke writing here is excellent, with a plethora of quotable lines. What really seals the deal, however, are the characters, based on the writers themselves when they were teenagers; this explains why the friendship between brash, confident outsider Seth and quiet geek Evan rings so true. Superbad takes a bit of time to warm up and establish itself, but it settles in to become one of the funniest films of the year, as well as a worthy successor to the John Hughes classics of teen love and friendship.

Review - Transformers

2007-08-07T16:06:00.000-07:00

The Transformers toys were such a craze in the 80s because they required your input, they were both cars and robots, and one turned into a cassette (what was that about?). The animated series that was created to sell them was surprisingly good too. And so we now have the inevitable and highly anticipated film adaptation by Michael Bay, king of the mindless blockbuster. It delivers just what you expect: lots of really cool robots fighting, lots of cars going really fast, and lots of in-jokes and references for fans. Unfortunately, since it’s a Michael Bay film, it also delivers the wafer-thin plots and ridiculous characters you expect.

Thousands of years ago the planet of Cybertron was devastated by the war between the Autobots (decent robots that can change their shape) and the Deceptacons (power-hungry, evil robots that can change their shape). This war is now spilling over into our world, as both sides try to find a mysterious and powerful cube that is somewhere on Earth. For reasons that are not unclear, but stupid, only a geeky teenager (Shia LaBeouf) can save the day – with the help of his new robot friends, of course.

The story also follows other people affected by the robot invasion, including a soldier, a politician, and a ridiculously pretty and made-up (just when does she find time to re-apply her lip-gloss?) computer geek, who is also inexplicably Australian. Everyone seems to be inexplicably Australian at the moment. Well, people in House and Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye are too, and I call that a pattern. It was weird for me to see Jon Voight (oh, Coming Home, how I love you so!) playing the Defence Secretary squaring up against a bunch of robots, but even weirder to see Barton Fink (John Turturro) playing a moody official.

The Transformers themselves are definitely the most interesting and the most realistic things in the film; the CGI is outstanding. Those Citroën adverts that everyone loves, with the silly burpy music, have been royally trumped by these robots. It is a little hard to follow the fight scenes, since they become clumps of moving, twisted metal, but Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Co. are never less than astonishing. The script is full of silly jokes, and the frenetic pace and schizophrenic editing mean that you could never be bored watching it, even if you really wanted to. The discerning art house cinema regular will want to, though, and will feel dirty after seeing it. But if you’re a fan of Transformers or silly Hollywood action films, then you will definitely have fun. All in all, a bit of a laugh, but not a film to analyse on the way home.

Review - Die Hard 4.0

2007-08-05T14:09:00.000-07:00

The fear with any successful series is that whilst you obviously eagerly await the next instalment, you are at the same time fearful of it sullying your happy memories of what came previously. The original Die Hard managed to at once create a new genre, and become the best example of it. Luckily the mix of audacious stunts, excitement, and one-liners remains in the fourth in the series, Die Hard 4.0 (or Live Free or Die Hard as it is called in America, where you can apparently stomach such a title without a significant dose of irony, given today’s political situation).

It’s another average day for John McClane (Bruce Willis), everyone’s favourite grouchy, sweaty maverick cop, until another megalomaniac (Timothy Oliphant) decides to ruin it, this time by crashing the world’s computer systems and therefore causing mayhem. McClane is the one man who can stop him, armed only with his sense of duty, lack of respect for Health and Safety, and a supergeek (Justin Long). What follows is a rollicking rollercoaster of a film, full of explosions, incredible stunts, and twisty turns.

Willis is of course excellent in the role that made his name in film. Long, who will always be Warren from Ed to me, is extremely funny as McClane’s antithesis, and it was wonderful to see Kevin Smith as an even super-er geek (his perfect part) adding even more comic fun to the mix. Oliphant is not as deliciously maniacal in a pantomime way as previous Die Hard villains, coming across as more of a spurned trust-fund baby rather than pure evil, but sneers well all the same. The set pieces are jaw-dropping in their chutzpah, and make this the perfect popcorn movie. Definitely the best of this summer’s blockbusters so far, Die Hard 4.0 maintains McClane’s standing as the king of the action film.

Review - 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer

2007-08-05T12:16:00.000-07:00

As previously mentioned, I’m a big Marvel fan, and the Fantastic Four happen to be one of my favourites. The first film in this serious was not a total success, but what it did very well was set up the squabbling dynamics of comics’ First Family. The sequel continues in this tradition, and successfully introduces another important member of the Marvel Universe. Unfortunately, it suffers from the first instalment’s problem with storyline and set pieces.

The film opens with Sue and Reed planning their wedding and their future life outside of super-heroics, much to the disappointment of their team mates Johnny and Ben. The ceremony is rudely interrupted by a mysterious silver figure on a surfboard causing mayhem in Manhattan. This is the Silver Surfer, the herald of Galactus: Devourer of Worlds, and not your ideal wedding guest. The Surfer’s arrival, you see, signifies that there are just a few days for Mr Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, The Human Torch, and The Thing to stop this world being devoured too.

The Surfer looks great; it’s such a relief to see a comic character remain unchanged in the journey from page to screen, but with the Silver Surfer, this is unsurprising. He is so cool-looking, and would be designed the same today as he was in the 60s. All the four main players fit their characters very well, taking the Mickey out of each other whilst still being adorable (apart from when Mr Fantastic is using his powers, which is just creepy). I do wish they’d left out Dr. Doom, though, a character that didn’t work in the first film; his presence here is unnecessary and not well explained. The physical appearance of Galactus was a bit of a disappointment, too. However, it is possible to just lie back and enjoy the nice jokes and special effects, and not analyse the plot too much. If one does that, then this move is a fun ride.

Review - Ocean's Thirteen

2007-08-05T11:29:00.000-07:00

I have never been more bored in a cinema than when watching Ocean’s Thirteen. Silent Hill was excruciating, but at least I was confused and mildly repulsed, sustaining my interest minutely. This film, on the other hand, is such a one-note affair, with no emotional content whatsoever, that it is hard to stay awake. For a film about a daring heist, this is quite an achievement.

The problem is that everyone is trying to be so suave that they turn into nothing more than cool robots: coolbots, if you will. These coolbots, with the faces of usually charming actors (Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Matt Damon et al.) wander around organising the comeuppance of a casino owner (an unusually subdued Al Pacino, considering he’s playing the baddy) for two long hours. Given the lousy, slow, unfunny build up, you’d have hoped for an exciting denouement when the actual heist occurs, but even that is boring. The trouble with really cool people is that they don’t care about anything; if the characters relished all this double-crossing and the thrill of the chase (if there was a thrill of the chase, even), this would have been a diverting movie. As it is, it’s Yawnsville.

The production design, on the other hand, is excellent. The sets are easily the most interesting bit of the film, so if you have to see this, keep your eyes on the background.

Review - Magicians

2007-07-26T15:07:00.000-07:00

Magicians has the same writers and cast as Peep Show, so I was very excited about seing it, as I love that sitcom. I quote it most days. In fact, I am basically Mark Corrigan. Unfortunately Magicians isn’t as good as Peep Show, but it still tickled my funny bone.

David Mitchell and Robert Webb (them off the British Mac adverts, if you are an idiot and don’t watch Peep Show) play a duo of successful magicians. After a particularly nasty incident, the two vow never to speak and go their separate ways, both ways leading to obscurity. Years later, they enter the same magic competition, intent to out-do the other.

The plot is perfectly adequate, and allows for lots of cameos and some nice romantic subplots. Jessica Hynes (née Stevenson, co-creator of Spaced, making me wish all over again that she was doing as well as Simon Pegg) was absolutely lovely as Mitchell’s love interest, and the great Peter Capaldi was as deliciously mean as ever in the role of the competition’s judge. The two leads play the same characters they always play, just a bit nicer (so, basically themselves, then). Unsurprisingly, they can do this well.

The writing is good, but judging by the rest of the audience’s reaction, I’m not sure that it’s to everyone’s taste. However, the work of the writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, laced with pop cultural references and great phrasing, is exactly what amuses me. If they hadn’t produced such great televisual work (which also includes The Thick of It), then this would be considered a good (but not great) comedy, but expectations were so high. The central device of Peep Show, having everything from the character’s perspective and hearing their inner-thoughts, is missing, and once gone you realise what a useful and important element it is. Without it we just have two quite nice magicians doing magic with some funny jokes. All in all, a missed opportunity.