nixsight

Dan In Real Life

Dan is a parenting advice columnist, a widower, and a single dad, struggling to bring up his three daughters alone, and seemingly on the edge of blowing his relationship with all three of them. That’s what this film is about. It’s a comedy-drama about parenting.Except, it turns out, it’s actually a drama-comedy about a man struggling to cope with the death of his wife, and the healing power of family. This becomes apparent as Dan takes his daughters to the family home in Rhode Island, and his nascent nervous breakdown gets absorbed into the bosom of a large and often anonymising extended family.

But actually, it isn’t. It’s a romantic comedy about a man who accidentally falls for his younger brother’s girl, who finds himself stuck in close quarters with the object of his affection.

And at the same time, it’s a kind of comedy with very few actual jokes.

None of that sounds like a particularly glowing review, and in fact makes it sound like a hideous Frankenstein’s monster of a film. And in some ways, that’s a fair assessment – the viewer spends the first twenty minutes of the film trying to work out exactly what it’s going to be about.

But ultimately a confident hand on the rudder, a script full of subtle characterisation, and a large and capable cast that delivers with warmth and understatement when others would act up, makes for a pretty cute experience.

Steve Carell takes his quiet screen persona, that I last saw in “Little Miss Sunshine“, out for a spin, here, and where it could have become a vehicle for him, or for that matter for Dane Cook, both of them submit to the ensemble, creating a warm and human sibling relationship that the audience totally buys into.

Juliette Binoche is as ever charming, Dianne Wiest and John Mahoney are lovely as the matriarch and patriarch, and it was good to see Amy Ryan again, though only briefly.

What the film isn’t is particularly funny, or original – tonally it’s similar to “Little Miss Sunshine”, and the core subject matter of a middle-aged man on the verge of a breakdown – something which, incidentally, Carell totally sells – isn’t all it has in common with “Sideways
“, but it doesn’t have either film’s dark humour or satirical bent.

Still, not every movie has to be a ground-breaker, and this one does leave you feeling warm and wishing for the family in the movie, and that’s not such a bad thing. It occupies a world where ultimately people are nice to each other, and when, for some reason, they aren’t, they always apologise afterwards, and for a bit, watching it made me feel like there was something in my chest other than this cold, hard piece of stone.

And feel glad that Robin Williams wasn’t cast in the lead.

Amazon has “Dan In Real Life” at around £4 at the moment.

Outpost

“Outpost” is a low budget horror movie starring Tires from “Spaced“.

Well, actually he’s only one of a squad of actors in the movie, but once I spotted him, I struggled to see him as anything else. But that’s no bad thing, I promise. Tires in “Spaced” is ace.

The story deals with a shady fellow who gets together a team of mercenaries to protect him while he searches for a mysterious object in Eastern Europe – I don’t think where exactly in Eastern Europe is ever explained, but there’s as much information as the viewer needs in that scenario – and perhaps down to the tiny budget, the locations, landscapes and cinematic pallete of the film are sufficiently austere and hostile looking that the setting is established quickly.

That isn’t all there is to the story, of course, though there is something appealing enough about the anticipation all audiences must feel now, when seeing a rag-tag group of individuals – different enough to be distinct, but familiar enough from other movies that we know the drill – trekking through an unfamiliar locale, “Deliverance” style, that would almost be worth watching all on it’s own.

Eventually, though, more plot has to show itself, and it does in the shape of an old abandoned Nazi bunker. As the shady fellow and his guns for hire start to explore, weird things start happening, and before long we’re stuck in an “old haunted house” movie, as the men get picked off one by one by strange soldiers see in silhouette in the distance.

The film is often derivative, and pacing wise it makes a clunky transition from first to second act that jiggers the whole thing a bit – though it reminded me a lot of “The Descent” in structure, and that movie seems to avoid the same problems. You don’t tend to care that much about the characters – and really, we’ve heard about every line of banter it’s possible for obnoxious squads of soldiers to share now, so that’s hardly surprising.

But at it’s heart it’s a really nifty little yarn, running to under an hour and a half, and though the film has been reported as a Nazi zombie movie, that’s only really half the story. What we actually have here is a weird exploration of the place where the violent aesthetic of both modern schlock and classic old-school horror and war comics intersects with both the Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits. The threat in this story has an ambiguous quality to it lacking in the zombie movie milieu, and with a real “mad science” bent.

It’s not a great film, by any stretch, but it’s enough of an oddity in some ways that it’s worth a look.

Outpost is available at Amazon for £5.

Sex Drive

My weakness for dumb comedies is by now pretty well-documented. Still, I’ve a knee-jerk response against them at point of release, and “Sex Drive” was no exception. The genre-typical posters didn’t help, despite a tag-line – “Virgin On Genius” – that tickled me from the off.

Because of that, and the now famous “Euro Trip” incident, we put off watching this one for a while, but we finally knuckled down the other week and watched this mother.

The plot is a familiar one – socially inept teen virgin decides, against his better judgement and egged on by his much more sexually confident friend, to travel across country to get laid. Throw in some unrequited lust/platonic female best friend sub-plots, so we’re firmly in comfortable territory, and it’s all about the execution.

The good news is that the movie is actually great fun. Movies like this often fail at the characterisation level, or falter when it comes to internal consistency, but “Sex Drive” features lively, likable characters throughout, and eschews cheap gags in place of some fairly solid plotting.

Course, that means that it doesn’t have a whole load of cheap gags. Like “American Pie“, the film approaches sex from a superficially horny-teen approach, but deep down has a fairly romantic, almost twee point of view, though it’s still pretty profane, and has some mildly transgressive moments that keep it on that risky edge on which such movies thrive.

Zuckerman and Duke do believable work as the odd couple at the centre of the movie, Amanda Crew is solid and cute as the reliable female lead, and James Marsden channels Seann William Scott throughout – though his obnoxious older brother owes a lot to Bill Paxton’s similar role in “Weird Science“.

I may be overstating how good the movie is, simply because it’s so nice to watch a romp movie with Seth Green in it that’s enjoyable throughout. Much as I love Green, his name on a cast list is no guarantee of quality, so when he does turn up in a fun role, it’s a bonus. His Amish mechanic here is wonderfully funny, and very subtly pitched, making a genius comic creation out of his application of sarcasm.

So, anyway, fun stuff, and worth a look. Amazon have it here: Sex Drive

Wolverine

The first of the solo X-Men movies gets more things right than it gets wrong, if only by a slim margin, but shakes out as a fun action movie – though it would have benefited from making it’s mistakes in the first or second rather than third acts.

I won’t go into too much detail – a lot has probably already been said elsewhere, and many of the problems I had with the film would class as fairly major spoilers, but in brief:

The action and violence were well handled, with only a few moments where the trade-off between narrative and bloodlessness was really jarring.

I’ve been told that there were a lot of dodgy CGI moments, but I didn’t notice them – though as slick as it all was, none of the film had the tidiness and visual prettiness of the opening credits sequence of Logan and Victor battling down through the wars, which really does look good.

There are a few too many plot concessions made in the final act, with the only apparent reasons being the shoe-horning in of vestigial and unneccesary extra X characters, and a needless bit of emotive noodling that takes away the real teeth of Liev Shrieber’s otherwise great Sabertooth.

Jackman and Shrieber both brought appropriate charisma to their roles – with Jackman continuing in his trend of being a solid enough actor but a terrific showman, and Shrieber having fun with his character.

Patrick Stewart should have a word with someone about the persistent urge by filmmakers to make him younger on film – I can’t be the only person who is a little creeped out by the CG facelift they’ve given him, here and in X3.

I personally think “X-Men 3: The Last Stand” is an unfairly maligned movie – it stands as a slightly above (if patchily paced) average action/blockbuster, and a fair representation of a few decades of comics that have been more often featured mediocre plotting but fun fight set-pieces than they have awesome writing – and this movie has more in common with the pace and glossiness of that film than the previous X movies.