nixsight

It’s been a heavy couple of months for movie watching, and I’ve been utterly naff at posting here – the problem with getting a bit behind on stuff like this is that the longer you leave it, the harder it gets to get back into it, so I’m going to try and break the back of these as painlessly as possible for everyone concerned!

This Is Spinal Tap

Girl One and a couple of our friends had never seen this classic movie, so we watched it again a few weeks back.

It’s still an absolute classic. One thing that you really notice when something is made in such a pure and finely crafted way, rather than to fit a trend or something, is how well it ages.

Despite the fact that the mockumentary style of this movie has often been copied, and how much it has influenced so many other shows and films, Spinal Tap is still just wonderful. The pacing – as reflected in shows like “The Office” – spreads the jokes pretty thin, and allows the characters to become more than just caricatures. I don’t think I’d realised, before this most recent viewing, quite how oddly talented and thoughtful the members of the band actually are, as members of a band, despite their irrelevance and haplessness.

I’m also always surprised by the quite loving relationship between Tufnel and St. Hubbins – though I guess the band’s trials may be analogous with an actual rock or metal band of the era that I’m ignorant of, I can’t help thinking of Lennon and Mcartney.

Nick And Norah’s Infinite Playlist

Most of the people I know will probably loathe this movie, because it is unashamedly adoring of American hipster teens, and doesn’t offer many great new insights into the world of the cool teen coming of age genre.

The music, which the movie makes a lot of, is harmless enough – though ultimately just a one-note dilution of the music that we all thought was so deep and heavy back in the early 90s, it’s fairly typical of the indie-rock playlists that one imagines the young Americans not obsessed with pop would listen to.

Nick is a fairly typical Michael Cera role. That he tends to play similar characters is a complaint that is often levelled at Cera, and it’s, I think, an unfair one – in the history of film, there have been very few actors who pull off a full-on transformation with every role, and sometimes it can even seem a little too forced when an actor does make a point of heading for all of the worthy career hotspots – soldier, gay, disabled, gangster etc etc.

As it stands, at this point Cera looks and sounds like a slightly effete and quirky teen, and I don’t have any problem with him cutting his teeth doing this stuff.

Kat Dennings, as Norah, is just actually alarmingly cute, but does a good job of pulling off her character’s disbelief that she might be.

It’s a straight-up love story dressed up as a music and youth culture obsessed movie, and it also treads very safe ground throughout – there’s never any real doubt that the titular characters are meant for or will end up with each other, and despite their chaotic shambling through nocturnal NYC, and a few risque and oddly frank sexual tropes, the whole thing gives a strange feeling of being as squeaky clean and sensible as the two straight-edge heroes.

But despite the smugness of the movie’s inhabitants, almost everyone in it ends up likeable, and the lack of any sharp edges, rather than making it seem shapeless, actually make it quite endearing, in an aspirational way. Like the more comedic but equally good-natured “Can’t Hardly Wait”, it’s a teen movie that is smart enough that you don’t have to feel too embarassed for liking, while still just generally self-consciously sweet enough that I kinda wish I’d had films like this to drag me up, instead of having to pick through the nihilism, anger and unfairness of “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty In Pink” to get to the unadulterated perkiness of “Ferris Bueller”.

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

Probably everything’s been said about this that possibly could be.

To add to the apparent consensus, this is beautifully filmed, with some great acting – especially the as always total and impressive transformation of Cate Blanchett, and a touching performance from Juliet Binoche – but the script, despite it’s clear similarities to the as portentious but more breezy “Forrest Gump” severely hobbles this, reducing it to overworked pap.

Unlike “Gump” – which at least tried for quirky narrative to the extent that it at times almost reached for Coen brothers levels of self-awareness – “Button” tries so hard to be “meaningful” that literally every scene tries to deliver some homespun or wise piece of thoughtful insight, without even bothering to hide that meaning in metaphor or allow the viewer to work it out for themselves.

Each scene plays out like this: Benjamin tells you that something happened. Then you see the something happen, in drawn-out and explicit detail. And then Benjamin narrates what happened in such a way that you can’t possibly be mistaken as to what has just happened. And then he tells you what conclusion you’re supposed to draw from it.

And then the next scene happens.

It makes the film oddly schizophrenic. Fincher is a great filmmaker, and Pitt is a great lead actor, and both seem to be trying to make something artistic here, but it ends up being one of the most intelligence insulting movies of the last few years. Furthermore, the screenwriter’s efforts to infuse the film with integrity and meaning, while, it seems, only really having the one thing to say – “You never know how life is going to turn out, so you might as well just, y’know, get on with it” – ends up filling the film with what feel like non-sequitirs, or motifs and extended metaphors that end up going nowhere, like the hummingbird, or the lightning strikes, or Hurricane Katrina – yes, seriously.

It’s not an awful film, but people who came looking for the guy who made “Zodiac”, “Fight Club” or “Se7en” must have been pretty dissappointed to find a movie by the dude who made “Panic Room” instead.

Dying Breed

A down and dirty, deeply grimy Australian survival horror movie, “Dying Breed” is a fairly standard “city folk get picked off in the wilderness” movie. In search of the Tasmanian Tiger, two couples head into the Tasmanian woods. Then, well, perhaps unsurprisingly, bad things happen.

The story is a bit different, though, and adds an edge to proceedings. The last people they see before going into the wild are the disturbingly odd local folk, who may or may not be descended from an old and dangerous cannibalistic convict. There’s a car-crash of two different threats, here – the possibly inbred and creepy human threat, and the cryptozooligical threat of the tiger, which appears in an almost mystical role throughout.

There’s also a psychological edge, which puts it in a similar ballpark to “The Descent”. This isn’t quite as good a movie as that one, but the director does a beautiful job with his locations, a decent job with his actors and his horror, and the whole thing is a pleasingly creepy and confident package.

Killer Movie

This is a really odd thing – a movie that thinks it’s clever enough to satirise “Scream”, without being clever enough to realise that “Scream” was already a satire.

You’d think, reading the plot, that this was intended to occupy the same space as the “Scary Movie” series, but it isn’t – it’s played a lot straighter than that franchise. Though there are obvious attempts at comedy flourishes, with, y’know, jokes and stuff, the quite typical slasher movie plotlines seem to be aiming for the same sort of actual tension that Craven’s movies did, rather than straight-up slapstick.

However, they just aren’t scary.

The comedy in the movie seems intended to spill out of the meta-textual addition of “reality TV” style interviews with the characters in the movie. However, despite a couple of nice turns – I’m thinking mainly of “Lost” enigma Nestor Carbonell as an oily and quixotic agent/manager – this flourish isn’t handled consistently or competently enough to add much except confusion to proceedings.

I don’t recommend seeing “Killer Movie”. Still, there’s a good chance that if I hadn’t mentioned it, you wouldn’t even have heard of it, so I’m probably part of the problem here, rather than the solution.

The Unborn

A fairly decent crack by writer/director David Goyer – who I trust to at least spin an okay yarn, after a few damn good movies – at creating an original Asian-style Hollywood horror movie, this.

With a creepy – if ultimately quite familiar – narrative based around an evocative piece of Jewish spirituality, this movie ticks a lot of the boxes that make for a good malevolent haunting – “Ring” or “Grudge” style – spooky kids and voices, and a gorgeous and capable young female lead, this is exactly what you’d expect if Michael Bay had decided to produce a David Goyer attempt at an Asian cult horror.

Which is exactly what it is. There are some very sexy and slick visuals, perfectly good performances, a lot of flash and “eww” and sudden transitions, and a healthy chunk of mirror and kid fear.

There’s some slightly sketchy pacing and editing, especially in the final act, but it’s a very watchable cast – with beautiful youngsters balanced out against an understated Gary Oldman performance, a likeable Idris Elba – reminscent of his character in “The Reaping”, which dealt with some similar themes – and reliable if brief turns from Carla Gugino and James Remar.

Bolt

We loved “Bolt”, though it suffers from having the same beautiful animation that one would normally expect from a Pixar Studio movie, which heightens one’s expectations of the content, which is fairly standard Disney.

There are some brave decisions made with the character designs, considering it’s a Disney. The street cat character is suitably mangy and sickly, the hamster is outright creepy looking, and the pigeons actually look and behave in as deranged a manner as you’d expect them to.

The animation is a step ahead – as I said, Pixar just gets better and better, and I guess they’re sharing their expertise with the main Disney studio, because this is better than anything out of the Dreamworks stable.

The story is roughly what you’d expect – a very cute dog, deluded by it’s upbringing – goes on a very long journey to find his very cute owner – and along the way has the typical knocks to his confidence, and learns a little bit about being a dog!

If the movie is flawed, it isn’t in the voice-acting or script, which all work well together, with emotional moments and jokes alike delivered perfectly – it’s that the key plot point at the movie’s core is flawed.

Pixar movies, as outlandish as they often are, have a fierce internal logic to them – the monsters in “Monsters Inc” live very different lives to us, but there’s a sense to why things in their world work the way they do. The same goes with “Toy Story” and “Wall-E”.

But “Bolt” makes a lot of effort – despite the obvious cartooney-ness of the talking animal thing – to reflect the way TV is made, and the effect that a fake environment can have on someone – some dog.

The problem is, Bolt’s life doesn’t make any sense. Though one gets wrapped up in his situation, and fully believes the character’s predicament as he acts it out, throughout the movie there’s that niggling feeling that, well – no TV company would bother faking up an expensive and effects/action laden TV show so that the dog-actor at the show’s core would deliver a “realistic performance”.

To a viewer, a trained dog and a dog that genuinely believes that it has super-powers will appear exactly the same. It’s not like “The Truman Show”, where the point of the show is entirely that Truman doesn’t know his life is a lie – in the case of “Bolt”, he’s not the only character, and it’s supposed to be a fictional show.

Maybe I’m being unreasonaby pedantic, here. As I said before, if it wasn’t for the so totally perfectly realised worlds presented in Pixar movies, I wouldn’t expect this much from my children’s films.

Futurama – Bender’s Game
Futurama – Into The Wild Green Yonder

The previous Futurama made-for-DVD movie – “The Beast With A Billion Backs” – was an okay excursion in a universe that I was already in love with, and was a lot of fun, if perhaps only containing as much story as the show would normally have presented in a standard episode.

(I still haven’t seen “Bender’s Big Score”, for some reason.)

While having some decent laughs, “Bender’s Game” is a massive step in the wrong direction for the franchise. Watching it felt a little like watching any series of “Red Dwarf” after the first – in that show’s case, it went from being a smart comedy that was all about the situation, to being an alright comedy that happened to be set in a particular situation. Jokes that would previously have come out of the peculiar nature of the characters or their predicament became jokes that clearly had just occured to the writers in their current environment, that were shoehorned into the mouths of whichever character best suited it, and the science-fiction element of the show became little more than a “monster of the week” set up.

“Bender’s Game” took the same peculiar tack with the humour, with the writers taking material that had obviously seemed funny in the writing room, and applied it without working out whether it fit this particular show. What ends up happening is that a lot of the show seems anachronistic and odd, and there are a lot of “Peter Griffin” style concoctions, with gags coming out of non-sequitir rather than the humour of the situation.

At the same time, a lot of the movie  is given over to running Dungeons And Dragons scenarios, and an extended fantasy sequence that may or may not be entirely imagined, placing various of the characters in sword-and-sorcery scenarios. Now, it’s all a bit of fun, and it wouldn’t be unexpected over a long running “real world” series like “The Simpsons” or “South Park” to see some of the running time given over to a riff like this, but I couldn’t help feeling with “Futurama” that it was a waste of valuable space on a series already on reprieve. As well, the show is already a sideways look at one far-flung genre so it’s a bit odd – I fidgetted a lot, wanting to shout “Come on! You’ve picked your genre, stick to it!”.

Because the point of “Futurama” is that it’s the creators of “The Simpsons” having an opportunity to indulge their love of science-fiction, and though the satirical nature of the show allows for other commentary or genre burps to seep in, the bits in this movie are more like fantasy indigestion.

There’s also a laboured and sadly pivotal attempt at making a statement about current fuel prices, which feels at odds with some of the few facts that have been established about this future universe, and gives the whole thing yet another target-missing plotline to agitate the viewer.

All in all, “Bender’s Game” feels like a long way to go for a few second hand and out of character gags, and an overlong tribute to Gary Gygax, and it made me worry about the next movie in the series.

However, “Into The Wild Green Yonder” put paid to my concerns. It’s not as good as “Futurama” at it’s peak, but it’s the best of the movies, and though it doesn’t completely ignore any of the nonsense continuity screwing that the previous movie put into play, it does seem a lot more it’s own thing than that odd hotch-potch of fan-pleasing joke-generating.

The film also has a nice line in the cosmic – it remembers that “Futurama” is essentially a series where anything can happen, scale-wise, and that it’s essentially a science-fiction series. There are some lovely “Big Ideas”, with the sort of high-concepts that are a lot more 1970s hippy-chic or Star Trek than the hover-boot veneer that “Bender’s Game” had slapped on it. There’s also the traditional Groening sideways swipes at modern thinking, but this time out it doesn’t come off as an attempt to be topical like the fuel shortage plotline in the earlier outing, with a much more frontal-attack but at the same time insightful attack on both protest culture and the thoughtless consumption that it protests against.

The movie flows a lot better than the other “Futurama” movies, and the different storylines weave in and out of each other in a pleasing way, building toward an ultimately satisfying and thoughtful conclusion. If this is the end of the line for the cast in this show, “… Wild Green Yonder” is a fairly poignant and not unsatisfying finale.

Though it’s difficult to know how I would have taken it, had “Bender’s Game” not been so “meh”.