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.
Thursday, 28 August 2008
Review - Mamma Mia!
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.
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
Review - Iron Man
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.
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.
Thursday, 3 April 2008
Review - The Cottage
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.
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.
Saturday, 23 February 2008
Review - There Will Be Blood
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.
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
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.
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.
Sunday, 10 February 2008
Review - No Country for Old Men
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)