nixsight

Hello, all. I left the Monday post till tonight to do, so unfortunately I need to get this one done before bedtime. I’m going to try to do all four films I saw in forty five minutes. As you know, me and brevity = arch-enemies.

Luckily they weren’t particularly complicated films…

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters

“Aqua Teen Hunger Force” is one of those cartoons that you’re either going to love, or you’re not going to get a kick out of at all, and I imagine the movie has a similar divisive element to it.

Personally, I love it – but the rosetta stone to the show is all about the Master Shake. My favourite character is the super-sweet, retarded and street-cool Meatwad, but the lynchpin to the show is Shake’s self-serving and loud-mouthed ignorance, and his unwillingness or inability to acknowledge said traits. If you don’t know some or all of those traits in someone else, or can’t see them in yourself, almost none of the humour in the show will work for you.

It’s not unlike “South Park” in that sense, or even “The Simpsons”. Without that way into the show, and it’s deliberately overstylised look and overclocked melodrama, it’s just another poorly animated cartoon where the characters are too whiny and shouty to understand properly, and just hurt each other constantly.

The film makes no concessions to a potentially wider audience, but that isn’t unusual, when you consider the examples of either “South Park” or “The Simpsons”, both of which, despite having more to potentially lose, went with more over the top and more contentious subject matter than the shows that spawned them. It also struggles to piece together a narrative over it’s running time – the show has short-short episodes of just over ten minutes, and that suits the hectic and surreal discontinuity of the plots down to the ground, but sustaining the awesome over 86 minutes strains the concept.

Having said that, unlike “The Simpsons Movie”, which battled with the same issue, ATHFCMFFT manages to overcome the problem to a certain extent by being almost consistently funny throughout.

There’s still an argument that it’s too much of a good thing – and the strongest moments all occur before the story-proper has started, with the merciless and hilarious concession-stand song as an opener, and a pitch perfect “origin” sequence immediately afterwards. But if you liked the series, this movie should be a welcome coda to it.

Silent Hill

I don’t know the games that spawned this film all that well – I get the impression that they’re halfway between survival-horror and mood-horror, like “Resident Evil” without a “run” toggle, or “Ringu” but with a whole bunch of ghosts.

As such, I come to the film with hardly any baggage, and I have to say, it isn’t awful. A not bad cast, headed by a bewildered Radha Mitchell, but not let down by some solid support from a cold-faced Alice Krige, a reliable Kim Coates, and an excellent child performer in Jodelle Ferland – who pulls off a dual-role that requires sympathetic innocence and malevolent evil in equal measure.

Visually, the film is absolutely terrific, as well, with a unique production design that runs consistently through some beautiful cinematography – the contrast between the existential and isolated horror of the abandoned town, a misty snow of coal-dust ever falling, and the loud and fast and raging blackness of the same locations when the darkness falls, are impressive throughout.

There are points, I’d say, where it almost feels like Christophe Gans is a much more accomplished director than his resume might give you reason to believe.

The creature designs and moments of horror as well are truly horrific, evoking once again those brooding haunted Asian cult movies like “Ringu” and “Ju On”, but amping up the scale a lot, and infusing the film with a sense of panic. Patrick Tatopoulos, who has in recent years become one of those creature effects guys whose names come up a lot, like Stan Winston’s before him, puts some solid work into translating the monstrosities from the game, making their shambling shapes both grounded in real human shapes, and totally “other” at the same time. If horror is often the genre of transgression and the angst of emotional and body identity, there are plenty of purely horrific moments in this movie.

However, the dialogue lets the film down badly – a relatively complex and sophisticated story, full of allegory and plotted so that the story unfolds without seeming too forced – though there are some very computer game like clues and macguffins that I think are an artifact of the adaptation process that could have been excluded. But seriously, for all that complexity, half of the movie ends up with Radha Mitchell running around, screaming her child’s name – a line that she actually starts the movie with, and repeats a ludicrous amount.

And the other incidental dialogue is so full of cliches that you forget that it’s all moving the story along, and find yourself irritated with it. It’s difficult to see the film being shorter than it’s quite long running time of just over two hours, but the script makes the film seem dumber, and as such makes it feel like it runs a lot longer, and like the performances are a lot dumber than they are.

Resident Evil: Extinction

This is how my brain works, when it comes to a “Resident Evil” movie.

“It’s going to be awful.”

“Yeah, but, Milla Jovovich.”

“But, seriously, dude… it’s going to be dreadful. Don’t you remember the first one? Or even worse, the second one.”

“Milla Jovovich. She might be naked in it.”

“Come ON! It’s Paul W.S. Anderson!”

“It’s Milla Jovovich. Did I say that she may be naked?”

I will readily admit that when it comes to the divine Ms Jovovich, I have no critical faculties. I don’t even really understand why – her kind of look, so clearly “of the supermodel”, doesn’t normally appeal to me at all. But for some reason, she hit a chord with me some time ago, and it hasn’t ever stopped thrumming.

So, yeah, Milla Jovovich.

The film starts off slickly enough, and stays slick throughout. Some of the post-apocalyptic shooting locations look a little cut-budget, but otherwise it doesn’t feel like a cheap movie, so much as a thrifty one.

Story wise, it’s a bit disjointed, but there are some damn good action sequences, with zombie attacks, creature effects, and packs of undead being allowed to chew through a steadily decreasing convoy of survivors mercilessly throughout. The point at which the convoy is attacked by infected crows is pretty vicious, and gives way to a pretty nice bit of unexpected special effects and visual composition cuteness.

The final monster battle is a little bit blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, and it’s hard to see what the point of building up Ali Larter’s Claire as a natural leader was, beyond fan-service – she doesn’t do all that much. And there’s a bit of “one of our team is infected” nonsense that really is unacceptably bad writing, especially coming from a writer like Anderson who has done these movies before. It’s frankly insulting to the audience to assume that they will still be surprised by the same shit that has been happening in zombie flicks since Romero first did them.

In fact, everything that’s good about the film seems to have come from Russ Mulcahy as director – a few guilty pleasures of mine have benefitted from the veteran director’s sure hand when it comes to framing and covering an action sequence – and like “Silent Hill”, the movie’s biggest flaw it it’s crappy script and dialogue.

Pineapple Express

I love Seth Rogen, and “Superbad” was one of my favourite comedies of the last couple of years, so was quite looking forward to “Pineapple Express”.

I liked the film, but I’ll be honest – it wasn’t without it’s issues.

First thing’s first, I think it was probably unfairly trailed as a comedy, and while it’s understandable that the desire was to try and link it to the success of other Rogen films, this was a bit of an error. Though it is a comedy, it isn’t one that shoots for laughs – if anything, the jokes are almost delivered as afterthoughts or character moments, while the often ridiculous but quite nerve-wracking drama unfolds.

More than a comedy, it’s a true stoner movie – though there’s humour in many of the situations, the main driving force of the movie isn’t delivering jokes, so much as giving quite a reasonable account of what might happen if two hapless stoners stumbled into a crime action movie.

But actually, no, it’s obviously supposed to be a comedy. There’s a disjointed but often funny performance by Gary Cole as a homicidal drug dealer, though his scenes with the worrying Rosie Perez feel almost ad-libbed and awkward, and Craig Robinson, of “The Office” has a cool turn as one half of a co-dependant pair of thugs. Seth Rogen plays a very different character from his performances in “Superbad” and “Knocked Up”, though there are moments of obvious crossover, and James Franco is winning as the eager, pleasant natured and loyal Saul, apparently based on Brad Pitt’s stoner in “True Romance”. He doesn’t get many laughs, but he is the emotional centre of the movie.

There’s a lot of violence and action in the final act of the film, which feels almost disorienting, because of it’s complete contrast to the rest of the movie, but the seeds have been sown for this sort of ultraviolence with a few shocking moments earlier on, so it’s all good. There’s maybe a little bit too much panicked shouting in the movie… there were a few scenes where it felt like everyone had been shouting for hours, which wasn’t as funny as it might have seemed when they had hours of footage, before cutting it down to it’s finished sequence of arguments and panic attacks.

Another thing that makes this a stoner movie in it’s purest form is the free-roaming emotional and random tempo of the film – unlike the “Harold And Kumar” movies, or even Rogen’s other films, both written by himself or by Judd Apatow, this isn’t a tight piece of cinema. And it’s difficult, because ordinarily I’d say that it was just badly conceived and written in an amateurish way, but part of me thinks that they were deliberately going for this pseudo-drug-trip aesthetic.

If they were, it’s a brave experiment, but ultimately I think it fails, because it doesn’t make it’s intentions clear enough early on, and you end up feeling a little uncomfortable and guilty that you’re not laughing. However, the final scene in the diner is just inspired, and I can’t understand why nobody had thought to do it before.