I always try to make them as brief as possible, don’t I? It almost never works out like that, though.

(Note: It didn’t work out like that.)

As always, I’ve included links to many of these films at Amazon in the write-ups, and though it’s difficult for me to imagine that any of you don’t have either a LoveFilm style thing going on, or your own copy of “Lebowski”, if you do fancy giving any of them a try, it’d help me out if you picked them up via the links. All of the films I’ve mentioned are unnervingly cheap – especially “Fargo”, which is pretty much my favourite film of all time.

And actually, there’s a question – how useful are links to cheap DVD versions of films to you lot? Are most of you strictly Blu-Ray by now? Please do enlighten me in the comments!

The Big Lebowski

I realised midway through watching “The Big Lebowski” the other night, with three people who hadn’t seen it before, that despite knowing it really well, I think I’ve only seen it the once.

It’s an odd film, Lebowski. It’s a very deliberate, tight farce, but with the illusion of shambling chaos. It rolls by with a fairly definitive plot, but it feels like you’re watching an experiment in tone, a refining of the Coen brother’s peculiar approach to making you laugh and care without delivering jokes or sentiment.

And while I knew I enjoyed it, I’ve always been shocked by the pure adoration that the film has received from so many people that I know, above other Coen greats like “The Hudsucker Proxy” and my favourite, “Fargo”.

But I have to admit, watching it through again, with certain touchstones already in place so that I wasn’t coming to it oblivious, it is a truly great film.

Though the Coen’s vision can’t be underestimated in why the film is so successful, as both a comedy and a statement of the indomitability of the slacker’s credo, it’s really the performances that make it so great. Jeff Bridges takes a lot of the credit for that, largely because his character, The Dude, is the real anchor for the narrative and the soul of the movie, but without John Goodman’s frustrating and so-stubborn-he’s-dangerous Walter Sobchak, Steve Buscemi as the constantly stamped down Donny (though his role was smaller than I remembered), and Julianne Moore as the pretentious but oddly sympathetic Maude Lebowski are all perfectly pitched.

That’s without mentioning Philip Seymour Hoffman in a twitchy and ingratiating role, the ever-watchable Peter Stormare as one of the Nihilists, and John Turturro as Jesus the pederast.

It’s basically everything that makes Coen Brothers movies funny, with very little restraint to hamper it, and okay, now I get it a bit more.

May the quoting love-fest begin, down in the comments!

The Royal Tenenbaums

For some reason, I’ve never watched “The Royal Tenenbaums” before. In fact, it occurs to me that, apart from a late-night and incomplete dalliance with “Rushmore”, I haven’t actually seen any Wes Anderson movies.

I’m not sure why this is, though I suspect it’s something to do with the impression I’d got that he tends to make worthy and cerebral films that make you think more than they make you laugh, and while films like that have their place, I tend to have to get a bit of a certain sort of energy stockpiled before I’ll watch one.

At least based on this film, it looks like I’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Though the plight of Gene Hackman’s Royal is delivered in a precocious and bookish style, prone to a sort of cinematic whimsy that is one part Jean-Pierre Jeunet to two parts Coen brothers, this is not an art movie.

It acts and looks like an art film, but then reveals itself in the final act as a family comedy – which is to say, a comedy about families, not a comedy aimed at families. Which is to say the whole way through it cons you with aesthetics into thinking that it’s going to present an insightful and pragmatic view into how people become isolated from each other, and there are no easy answers, right up until it reveals the fact that every slight or mishap can be solved by the healing power of family.

The interesting thing is that by the time it does that, you’ve been so softened up by the charming direction and quite lovely, if muted performances – including a soothing Danny Glover, a crawling Gene Hackman, a quite lovely and eccentric Anjelica Huston, and a whole bunch of other actors who have the capacity to irritate the fuck out of me in most films, but that win me over totally here. In fact, if I keep seeing Gwyneth Paltrow in films where I find her oddly appealing, I may finally be able to forget about the whole Chris Martin thing.

And I have no idea how Bill Murray keeps managing to add particular nuances to his now well-trodden sad-faced clown persona that keep him fun and interesting to watch in each new movie.

I was pretty surprised to find that this movie fit so comfortably into the Judd Apatow/Todd Phillips/Ben Stiller axis of big-screen comedy that has emerged in the last few years, because that was not the impression I had got about it at all.

The Host

If “The Royal Tenenbaums” is a family comedy pretending to be an art movie, “The Host” is a Korean film that gets through the door as a monster movie, but really wants to be a blackly comic social/political commentary.

Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t do the job as a monster movie. The premise of the movie – a monster, apparently created in the polluted Han River in Seoul, emerges and attacks the citizenry, devastating a community. One particular family – the Parks – suffer a terrible loss when the monster takes their youngest member, and her father refuses to accept that she is actually dead.

The monster itself is suitably grotesque, and animated with character. SFX-wise, the movie is slick, even though it lacks the expensive polish that most US movies have, and very occasionally the CG monster is more obviously on a seperate plane than you’d expect.

There are moments of drama, but any horror is undercut by the irreverent tone that seems to be characteristic of Korean cinema – not that I’ve seen many to base this assumption on! – and there are times when the film runs the risk of devolving too far into this zany milieu. Ultimately, though, once you realise it’s not going to terrify you, the film settles into a nice steady rhythm, going from action to emotion with an addictive tempo.

But the real story here isn’t about the monster, so much as it is about how the authorities react to its appearance. This is where the film takes on a more sardonic edge, with the scope of the satire attacking both the Korean and Western governments, as well as blind bureaucracy and the tendency of a population to respond to hysteria. At points, the film reminded me a lot of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”.

Like the not nearly as good “Battle Royale 2”, “The Host” feels like it tells you as much about the national psyche of the culture that makes it as it does spin a damn good yarn – though it does that as well. It’ll be interesting to see how the inevitable localised remakes pan out, because this is a more politically opinionated film than most other Asian horrors.

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Rock N Rolla

I’ve got a soft spot for “Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels”, and I recall enjoying “Snatch”, though I’ve never felt the need to watch it again, but Guy Ritchie has become a bit of a figure of fun for the world at large in recent years, and that’s made it hard to see his particular ouvre of mockney gangster movies as having any authenticity any more, if they really had any to

begin with in the first place.

I guess that’s why I hadn’t rushed to see “Rock N Rolla” when it came out. I’d heard only bad things about “Revolver”, and can be suggestible about such things.

It’s a shame, really, because “Rock N Rolla” is quite fun. Granted, it’s got a similar convoluted caper plot to “Lock Stock…” and “Snatch”, and does about as much to realistically represent organised crime in London as “Oceans Eleven” does for career thieves. Or “Finding Nemo” did for sea life.

But the movie looks nice, and there are some lovely performances from a pretty high-caliber cast, with Gerard Butler and Idris Elba apparently having loads of fun, Tom Hardy and Thandie Newton giving able support, and Mark Strong providing a solid backbone to the whole affair. There’s a believable affability between many of the characters that really pulls together in the final scenes, and makes it all a bit more likeable than it perhaps deserves to be.

Guy Ritchie doesn’t really make good films, so much as an assortment of great scenes, and I don’t think he’s yet found the perfect formula for sorting those scenes into a working order for the perfect, tight movie. However, there are some scenes here – and I’m thinking particularly of the brilliant second heist – that are just ace.

As fun as this all is, it is still anot

her entry in the growing ranks of movies about British crime that feels more like a romp for RADA trained actors than an actual big-screen movie about British crime – albeit a slightly grimier one than we’ve seen in recent years – and I think there’s a gap in the market there, somewhere. It feels like the last British crooks I saw that I could actually buy  as crooks were in “Eastern Promises”, and that wasn’t strictly home grown. There always seems to be that element of detachment and panto to films like this, that isn’t visible in films like “Goodfellas”, or even “The Untouchables”.

Mind, maybe Ritchie wants to be more like Tarantino than Scorcese. Or maybe it’s just impossible to find a middle ground between kitchen-sink drama and music-video slickness if your characters have one of an assortment of broad and nerve-wracking regional British accents, instead of the more cinematic American ones.

“RockNRolla” is available at Amazon.

Shoot ‘Em Up

After a positive and exciteable adolescent reaction to the action-fizz of early trailers for “Shoot ‘Em Up”, I somehow managed to talk my way out of watching it when it actually came out. This was probably more due to a quite unenthusiastic response by other people to the movie than my own instincts… like I said, I can be pretty suggestible.

So anyway, we finally got around to watching it this week.

“Shoot ‘Em Up” is a pretty stupid movie. It’s got the purest of plots – an utterly linear sequence of events that thrusts its hero – unsurprisingly called Smith, and played with archness by Clive Owen – from one extreme action set-piece to the next.

But the thing is, that’s all it needs, and that’s all it intends, and this is a point that seems to have been missed by both the film’s defenders and its critics. Of which there are plenty.

It shouldn’t be a shock to anyone that when it comes to plot in action movies, I’m very much in the “less is more” school of thought – it feels like I spend an awful lot of time complaining about overcooked plots in movies that others have attacked for having none, or none that makes any sense.

What Michael Davis has done, here – and I suspect he’s done it more accidentally than the protectors of this film on IMDB and elsewhere would have you believe – is he’s pretty much made my perfect popcorn action movie. The story – uber-competent gunman-with-no-name stumbles into an assa

ssination plot in-progress, finds himself reluctantly protecting a newborn baby until he can extricate them both from the situation – never gets much more complicated than that, and is pretty much designed to have an endless supply of faceless hoodlums come in front of his twin guns.

It’s basically unbranded Max Payne, directed by Tony Scott – or minimalist-period Frank Miller filmed by a Hong Kong-based John Woo, and it is going to leave anyone who can’t appreciate a slick and totally unlikely piece of gun-ballet completely unmoved.

Paul Giamatti is winningly neurotic as the mildly autistic opposite number to Clive Owen’s unaffected hero, with Owen for the most part giving himself over to the high-concept of his character. Talent wise, Monica Bellucci probably brings a little bit too much gun to what is essentially a difficult to defend piece of bare-bones female character inclusion, but of course the same could be said for her role in the “Matrix” movies, and at least there’s something gloriously subversive about her role in this movie, even though she is basically just a whore with a heart of gold.

“Shoot ‘Em Up” has a little more drama and heart than the similarly positioned “Crank”, while cinematically being better framed, shot and edited than a lot of the other tongue-in-cheek bubble-gum action movies around, like “The Transporter” series.

The script could have gone through a couple more read-throughs – some of the cheesy one-liners might have been rewritten slightly if they’d heard Owen’s delivery of them – and maybe should have been more up-front about its purpose – because calling it “Shoot ‘Em Up” obviously didn’t give a clear enough indication of what tone it was going to have – but honestly? I can see it being one of those movies we stick on again and again. It’s just too much fun not to.

“Shoot ‘Em Up” is a fiver at Amazon, and worth every penny. But probably not worth much more than that.

Inglourious Basterds

At two and a half hours long, there’s an awful lot going on in Tarantino’s latest, and I think I’m still processing it.

That isn’t to say it’s a particularly wise or intellige

nt movie – though it’s one of Quentin’s most restrained and thoughtful – or a very polished or complex one – I’d say that as far as production, “Kill Bill” is still his most slick movie, and “Jackie Brown” has the most involved story. But it’s the first film we’ve seen from the man that hasn’t been contemporary, and when his other movies, most specifically their dialogue, have been so closely aligned with pop-culture, it’s difficult for me to parse this one with as much clarity as I’d like.

Overall, I have to say I really enjoyed it. I can see it being a must-have on DVD, though length and pacing mean it’ll probably not get as much replay as “Kill Bill” or “Reservoir Dogs”.

So, anyway, my thoughts are still a bit fractured on it. A few points:

The period setting of it was, I think surprisingly, remarkably well realised. Tarantino works well with his settings here, and as well as keeping his characters’ dialogue relevant to the time, he even seems to have adopted a visual style evocative of older movies set during the wars, with actors often framed in a very different way from his usual, quite staged, direction.

Tarantino’s trademark scripting style, though massively adapted for the time, is still present, but rather than sounding like the loquacious or articulate killers that populate his other work, the style has been applied to matters of etiquette and the preoccupations of individuals operating in occupied France, and here his characters are eloquent, charming and cautious.

The illusion that this isn’t “Tarantino as usual” only really falters for me during a scene in which Diane Kruger sounds like a sarcastic roughneck at a point when one would expect her to show vulnerability instead. She scans more like Thurman in “Pulp Fiction” or “Kill Bill” than a privilidged movie star in peril.

There’s a lot of humour in the movie, much of it coming out of Brad Pitt’s turn as Lt. Aldo Raine, leader of the Basterds and all round hard-ass. The director uses Pitt for his normal, broad approach to humour, but there’s a lot of wit in pretty much any scene with Christoph Waltz – whose Col. Hans Landa wins the movie for me, pretty much – and also a much gentler humour than we’re used to seeing from Tarantino in the scenes between Zoller and Dreyfuss.

Zoller is played by an actor that I hadn’t seen before, called Daniel Brühl, whose similarity to a young Christopher Reeves I actually found quite distracting.

The film’s pacing is all out of whack, and considering the long running time, there are quite a few odd omissions, not least the fact that although there are many incidental scenes in everybody else’s stories, the Basterds of the title aren’t given much “me” time at all. It’s difficult to know how to feel about this – ultimately, if Tarantino’s aim is to give a sense of it being “funny how things turn out”, it’s fitting that most of the best laid plans of his characters don’t quite work out, and the fact that there are a few stories interlocking here, as a side-effect of that intention, demands that the titular characters aren’t the only inglorious bastards on display.
On the other hand, it does make for some patchy pacing, and when it’s tough to see what could have been cut, or how else the story could have been presented, it does make for quite a pickle.

This film makes no attempts at realism or historical accuracy, and it’s almost hilarious (as opposed to the normal fury and frustration) to look at the IMDB commenters complaining about this. By the end of the film, it’s obvious that Tarantino wasn’t trying to make an accurate movie, so much as a kick-ass one, despite his concessions to gravity, and if it owes anything to any real version of World War 2, it’s the one presented in old war movies, and old pulp comics.

Actually, it’s interesting that Guy Ritchie is listed as director of an upcoming “Sgt Rock” movie. “Rock N Rolla” made me consider Ritchie’s role as an English version of Tarantino – either deliberately or by accident – and the fact that he’s involved with a movie version of such a seminal American war comic, while Tarantino is making as near-as-dammit a celluloid iteration of all of those classic old British war comics, is a fun coincidence. At least, I think it is.

The Mike Myers cameo is just totally distracting, and though he acquits himself relatively well, with no mugging to the camera, it’s impossible to ignore the English accent he tortures in his single scene.

As with my complaints about Guy Ritchie, when he’s allowed off the leash, Tarantino does much better with individual scenes than he does with pulling together a narrative across the length of a film. Though the story here does hold together, and there’s something quite delicious about the ways the disparate plots entangle but never quite cosily merge, the issues here aren’t with clear plotting so much as they are with pacing. Which is to say that sometimes the different stories, varied in tone as they are – the plans and experiences of the Basterds themselves are very different from the coldly tense and arguably more interesting Shosanna Dreyfuss story, and the charming and unnerving machinations of Hans Landa weaves in and out of each, but is much more fluid than either – rub up against each other in a way that isn’t entirely satisfying to the viewer. Once a scene is in full-flow, it’s easy to enjoy, but sometimes the shift from one to the other can be disarming.

All in all, though, Tarantino has shown more restraint in this movie than in any other since “Jackie Brown”, both in how violent or outrageous it gets, and how much of his own mannerisms and preoccupations seep into it. It’s a fun romp, is what it is, and at the same time it’s completely different from anything else around, from this director or any other, and as such is worth a go.

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What differentiates this film from “Point Break“, however, is that where that film is a big, daft action movie, made for ease of use rather than use of brain, this one is a much more solemn and intense affair. Set in Iraq, the film follows a squad of bomb disposal experts, as they do their best to keep the streets, if not exactly danger free, at least free of planted explosives.

The film opens as tragedy hits the team, and are joined by a new team leader – Sergeant First Class William James, played by Jeremy Renner, who brings a sardonic edge to the over-confident and super-competent bomb disposal expert.

We’re trained by movies to expect certain things at this point – conflict between him and his new team as his maverick attitude puts them in danger, high-octane action set-pieces, bonding moments, and ultimately resolution as he proves himself to team-mates and audience alike.

Bigelow’s movie totally subverts everything we expect from it, almost wilfully daring the viewer to bitch about their thwarted expectations. Which is kind of mean when you consider how much her earlier work has done to create the expected modes in the first place!

What we get instead is a naturalistic, political or social agenda-free movie that follows its characters around as they do their jobs, in admittedly emotionally heightened conditions, rather than have them explain their actions.

Which all sounds very worthy, put like that. At the very least, Bigelow and Mark Boal, who wrote the screenplay, should be applauded for taking such a brave stance on the movie, knowing how different it was from everything else out there.

It’s an impressive film that will demand repeated viewings, because the first impression is going to be largely one of anticipated pay-off. It looks and sounds and presents itself from the off as an action thriller, with a cold-open that establishes a sense of scale, of high production values but documentary aesthetics, and of drama, rather than the character piece it is eventually revealed as.

Even the most open-minded viewer is probably going to spend much of the film waiting for the director to break cover, as happened in “The Kingdom” – the 2007 movie whose similar setting and attempt to take a more cerebral look at the US military in the Middle East putters along smartly enough as a thriller before exploding into an action movie in the final twenty minutes.

The cast are brilliant, though Renner’s performance is so impressive that it does put most of the other characters in the shade somewhat.

If there’s a problem – and I’m still torn on this – it’s that where “Point Break” desperately wants you to like it, and to like even its bad guys, “The Hurt Locker” doesn’t just not give a fuck whether you enjoy it, or like the protagonists, it makes a point of telling you so as often as possible, in the way it’s delivered. While Hollywood spoon-feeds, this film goes almost too far in the opposite direction, way past David Simon’s journalistic ideals as presented in “The Wire” and “Generation Kill”, toward totally obscured moments of character introspection that it only even hints at trying to explain in the final five minutes.

It feels like the film is trying to shake the viewer off at times, and that means it’s probably only going to find a relatively limited audience among cinematic explosion and military fetishists, or masochists like me.

Oh, btw, here’s that pivotal Point Break moment, as a particular gift to you:

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We watched “Old School” based on the enthusiastic recommendations of our friends. These friends, it’s worth mentioning, are the ones who recommended “Euro Trip” all those months back, and despite the various movie triumphs we’ve had based on their suggestions since, the old wound runs deep!

“Old School” doesn’t clear up the scar tissue, but it at least alleviates the remnant pain a little.

Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughan shamble their way through a mildly raucous movie that isn’t quite shocking enough to be a screwball romp, but isn’t sharp enough to be an insightful relationship comedy.

There are a few pretty good laughs scattered through the movie, and Wilson and Ferrell give likeable performances… Even Vaughan’s totally amoral oiliness has it’s charm.

The film is a little all over the place, though, never sure which of its plot threads or elements are really the point, and as such it doesn’t hold together all that well as a movie – there are plenty of decent quotable moments, but the sketchy pacing makes the whole thing fall a little flat.

“The Hangover” features an almost identical character dynamic to “Old School” – and if we go back further I guess we’d find similar archetypes at play in Todd Phillips’ earlier “Road Trip” – but with the newer movie the writer and director have a clearer sense of where the movie’s strengths are than they did with “Old School”, and the rolling motion of the plot – the search for the impending groom through the fog of a devastating (read “awesome!”) stag party – gives it a pace and clarity lacking in the earlier one.

It also has frankly more impressive talent in the reluctant-straight-fall-guy and out-of-control man-child roles – Wilson and Ferrell do good work, but Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis shine in “The Hangover”. If doing a sterling job at playing a handicapped or mentally ill character can usually be considered a fast track to award recognition, it seems a shame that Galifianakis will probably not get consideration for his lovably perverse and broken odd-ball here. His performance is what makes the movie stand apart from other similar romps, giving it most of its shocks, as well as any pathos present.

Mind you, as fun as “The Hangover” is, it’s not a classic, and the above observation could easily be said of the brilliant Bobcat Goldthwait in the not so brilliant “Police Academy” movies.

“Old School” is available at Amazon on DVD for £4, or packaged with “Anchorman” for £5!

Knowing/Terminator: Salvation/Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince

“Knowing” is a meditation on determinism masquerading as a blockbuster movie and failing bravely at both. “Terminator: Salvation” is a blockbuster movie whose truly awesome action props will likely get overlooked because of an over-reliance on the convoluted metaphysical legacy of it’s franchise forebears for key story elements, while paradoxically refusing to address those same elements. In short, it’s a blockbuster built on the sandy foundation of a meditation on determinism.

Both movies feature awesome special-effects sequences, and some frenetic dramatic pacing that places them ahead of the herd of other Hollywood noise-generators, but both fail to make a cohesive argument for themselves by the end of their running time. This means that despite the gravity of the subject matter in each – “Knowing” ultimately concerns itself with an end-of-the-world scenario more devastating than anything seen in any of the disaster movies of the last few years, and “Terminator: Salvation” finally takes us into the terrible future that Sarah Connor has been trying to derail for twenty-some years, where the question of humanity’s near-extinction is no longer an imminent abstract but a fact of life – the credits roll in each case with the viewer intellectually aware of what they just watched, but finding it difficult to make an emotional connection with it.

The problem, in each case, isn’t with the individual scenes – each has plenty of good, and even great ones, including in “Knowing” two disaster sequences that are so intense that they are actually haunting, and in “Terminator: Salvation” some of the hands-down best giant robot sequences I’ve ever seen – it’s with the bridging bits between them.

“Knowing” feels like it’s trying to do too much with it’s minutes, with plot thread rubbing up against plot thread until you don’t know which details are supposed to be important. One minute it’s a family drama, the next it’s a thriller. The threat is supernatural – no, it’s scientific. It’s the numbers – but no, it’s the disasters. The director has tried to make a three-part mini-series type of story, but within the constraints of a three-act movie, whose structure fractures under the pressure. There’s too much content to the film, and not enough pragmatic work done at the script redrafting phase.

Also, Nicolas Cage does a great job of portraying his broken single dad professor at times, but because he does so well, it’s tough to buy it when he transitions from nihilism to proactivism.

“Terminator: Salvation”, too, has too much going on, and asks the audience to take too much on faith without giving them enough to work with. The film takes that final, inevitable leap, that was both unavoidable the longer the franchise continued, and utterly breaks the fundamental principle of it: It deals, aside from one pre-credit flashback, with the world after Judgement Day.

At a franchise level, this is both a brave step and besides the point. Though the continuity of the Terminator-verse relies very heavily on the broken future toward which the world is heading throughout, and John Connor’s place in it, in genre fiction broken futures are actually all too common. The hook of the Terminator franchise has always been the way that that future intrudes onto our present, and how the present day chooses to deal with it.

Seeing John Connor on the later stages of the road to his destiny is exciting for the people who, already far too invested in the series, thought it would “be totally fucking awesome!” to have every detail in a continuity filled out for them, but the sad fact is that once we pass the point in the timeline where Connor is a guy with a destiny in need of protecting from a future wanting to snuff him out before he’s a threat, we basically end up with a future war story about a guy who just happens to be a really good leader. The machines are still trying to kill him, but hell, you know, the machines are trying to kill everybody by now. Not a bad paradigm, but not “Terminator”, not really.

And the great question at the middle of the franchise – the one that the TV show was starting to do some really great work with, and that has been a prime mover in the first three movies: Is the future fixed? Or is there no fate but that which you make? – are all but redundant, now. We’re in the territory where there is almost only unpredicted future, and that makes questions of determinism redundant.

The film-makers try to adjust for this, but what we get instead is a new nascent hero in need of protection in the young Kyle Reese – now protected by Connor, his future son – and while the dramatic irony is enough to scratch ones head over and go “ah, clever…” for a couple of minutes, once that has passed, the whole plotline starts to draw attention to the uncomfortable elephant in the room that the other movies have tried not to point at all that much:

Knowing that the off-camera future John Connor is the one who sends his father back in time to conceive him is one thing – it’s a cute little tongue-twister that’s fun to ponder while it’s in the periphery. But when actual future John Connor is right there, actually manipulating the fate of his dad-to-be, it’s too distracting happening in the middle of an already quite eventful movie. That’s why James Cameron left it there, as a poignant coda to the end of the first movie – it’s the sort of idea that can hijack a story. And that story has already been filmed. It’s called “Back To The Future”.

The film isn’t actually bad – there’s a great performance put in by Sam Worthington, as a new and very different addition to the Terminator mythos, and a new kind of protector figure. And despite my going on about it as a negative, most of the best scenes come out of his relationship with Kyle Reese, and actually make the John Connor plots seem almost like an unwanted distraction.

But the inclusion of this new element into the story serves to further draw attention to the film’s narrative flaws – which I incidentally don’t think are down so much to McG as they are a symptom of the franchise’s difficult position. Up till now, any of the coincidence or prediction that has occurred in the series universe has been justified by the fact that the characters are acting on information that is actually from the future. And if young John and Sarah Connor end up somewhere that will later become important, this isn’t coincidence – the place becomes important because they interact with it, and the future comes to them. But this film – specifically the storyline about the protection of Kyle Reese – includes elements of prediction that should be beyond the defined parameters of the fiction. And in this new stage of the timeline, coincidences are just coincidences.

(I call this the “Minority Report” effect, though it can be seen all over the place, and could more accurately be called “Hollywood Determinism” – a character that has previously been able to predict things in one very specific way – they will get a flash on an individual scene that can be open to interpretation, say – will suddenly be able to predict things in an entirely different way when the plot demands it. It is as if one sort of psychic power is interchangeable with all others.)

Despite all this, both movies see you through the first act nearly flawlessly, before starting to judder apart at the seams – and each has enough going for it even after the first act that they are worth catching. Just not worth putting yourself out for.

“Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince” is included here because we saw it a couple of weeks back – with the most distractable cinema audience in Hampshire – and because there is one huge event that happens in the movie – a major death – that has any emotional punch taken out of it because it is a) telegraphed throughout the movie, b) the victim seems to already know, through means we are never really privy to, that it is going to happen and c) everybody seemed to have read the book where it happens already.

I think there’s a bit of narrative determinism here that – if the Harry Potter books play out as they’ve been described to me – ends up being mishandled, and as such I came to the climax of the movie pre-disappointed.

However, the cast – especially Alan Rickman, who is finally allowed to do some actual acting, Jim Broadbent, who does his trademark blustering as required through most of his scenes, but brings real regret forth when needed, and Emma Watson, who has grown out of her awkward delivery and gets a chance to upset with Hermione’s emotional torments – and the direction make it a fun enough adventure, even though the mystery in the title of the Half-Blood Prince is handled limply when it’s handled at all.

“Knowing” is out on DVD - Amazon have it for about £12, but you might want to wait for that to drop in price.

Untouchables/Goodfellas

After the uneasy experience of watching “Public Enemies” the other week, I found myself sickening for the comforts of some true story gangster action that I could trust, and because Girl One hadn’t seen either of these movies, it seemed like a good time to break out the classics.

Though both deal with the Mafia, these two films couldn’t be more different.

“The Untouchables” is a theatrical homage to all of the classic gangster movies, and in fact deals with a particular story the war between Elliot Ness and Al Capone – that has been told on the big and small screen before. The story itself by now almost has the quality of a fable – idealistic, super competent but green lawman tries to take down master criminal, but, finding himself thwarted by gangster wiliness and police corruption, has to assemble his own elite team, and learn a few lessons about how far he’s willing to go in the process.

Brian De Palma’s direction and David Mamet’s script reflect this, with extravagantly staged set-pieces, dramatic lighting and characters who always know the best way to state their position, and the end result is a solid, entertaining movie, a well-told story, and some brilliant and rightfully renowned sequences.

Thankfully, Robert De Niro – as Capone – isn’t on screen all that much, because his portrayal is so brutal and charismatic that it might threaten to completely swamp the rest of the movie, and that would be a shame, because that isn’t the point of this movie. It isn’t about gangsters, it’s about the men who try to catch them, so it’s right that they get pride of place. Ness himself is mildly hobbled in this regard by being played by Kevin Costner – one of Hollywood’s less charismatic leading men, though I have to say that I think this is one of his more interesting performances. But it’s really Sean Connery who steals the show here, as the cynical Irish beat cop Malone, who takes it upon himself to school the naive Ness. Andy Garcia does an impressive job, this early in his career, too.

If “The Untouchables” belongs to the cops, “Goodfellas” is very much about the robbers.

Also based on a true story, this time we get a look at a whole lifetime – that of professional go-to guy and weasel Henry Hill – a career watermark performance by Ray Liotta – as he starts out as a child runner for the local Mafia movers, and grows up in a world of instant gratification, familial obligation and violent, sudden retribution.

Henry himself keeps his hands relatively clean – though it’s ultimately because of the more craven aspects of his character – but it is when he and the audience meet Jimmy Conway and Tommy DeVito, played by De Niro and Joe Pesci respectively, that things start getting really bloody and interesting.

De Niro’s is a generous performance, here – though Jimmy is one of the more powerful characters on screen, De Niro delivers him with understatement – which allows the then-young Liotta a lot of brooding menace to play against, and gives Joe Pesci’s Tommy a chance to steal the show with over-zealous mayhem and a schizophrenic tendency to shift from an uncomfortably oily charm to a hyper neurotic psychosis.

Though there are a couple of flourishes that lend to the idea that this is a window onto a real story – Liotta’s voice-over alone only establishes a dramatic baseline, but the short sequences with narration by Henry’s wife break up expectations and give the film an almost documentary feel – Scorcese stamps his identity onto the narrative with flair. There’s a particularly lovely obsession with food throughout, that provides a touchstone when events get out of hand.

Where De Palma is writing a love-letter to cinema with his film, Scorcese has a point to make about the real world with his, and despite the carefully crafted direction and slickly witty script, and the charisma of the characters, that point is drummed home brutally from the first scene – the criminals might seem like good chaps on a good day, but not that far beneath the surface, they are violent, selfish and disloyal thugs who will hurt anyone to nourish or protect themselves.

Both films stand up excellently to the test of time, too! Absolute classics.

“The Untouchables” is available at Amazon, as is “GoodFellas”. Both are under a fiver, which is frankly ridiculously good value for such good movies.

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It was alright.

I’d like to be more enthusiastic about it – Mann is one of the best directors around, and while a lacklustre cinema experience might be understandable from most, from him it’s a terrible dissappointment.

The film boasts some great actors delivering good performances from a script with some nice flourishes but not much cohesion, and there’s something off about the structure of the film that means there are lots of odd little off-cut bits of plot or scenes hanging off in various places.

In fact, the film generally feels a little unfinished. The sound is often patchy – so often that you actually really notice when it comes together for the impressive gun-battle set-pieces. Editing and frame composition, too, are inconsistent, and these are factors over which Mann normally has complete and thrilling control. There are only a few bright and inspirational moments of cinematography, and too often they are wrecked by shaky camera work which doesn’t suit the scene.

Oddly, Mann has created a film that is more frenetic and disorienting in the moments that the viewer is supposed to be calm during than it is in the frantic moments of battle or passion.

It’s peculiar, in that there are many times during the film that it is obvious that this is a Michael Mann film – many signature touchstones are there, such as the loving detail paid to filming the varied firearms that the characters use, and the beautiful attention to detail during the sporadic heist sequences. But it feels like another step away from the perfectly formed, concise and gorgeous “Collateral” – it is as if that film was a focal point for the man’s particular vision, at which all of the elements were fine-tuned and worked together efficiently and perfectly, and since then his talent has started to wander afield more.

“Miami Vice” began the drift – the film had incredible aesthetic polish but lacked narrative clarity. And now “Public Enemies” continues the trend, with less polish, and even less coherent storytelling.

It’s possible that the emotional flatness of the film isn’t entirely down to the film-maker. I’ve talked before, when reviewing “Valkyrie”, about the difficulty in cinema of  fostering a connection between an audience and an ambiguously moral (or totally amoral) historical story, in which the outcome is known or obvious – when we already know with certainty who is going to live and who is going to die, many of the most common tricks available to a director lose a lot of their power. In “Valkyrie”, when characters emotionally try to tell the protagonist that his plan is doomed to failure, there is never any emotional weight to it for the viewer, because there is never any possibility that he will succeed. We aren’t as masochistic as we might think, and we’re unlikely to get all invested in someone that we know won’t win, at least at a subconscious level.

In “Public Enemies”, the same is true – the only emotional hook to the film is essentially that someone tells Dillinger that eventually he’ll get caught or die, then another person tells him if he carries on, he’ll die, then a woman he is wooing tells him she doesn’t want to get involved with someone who is definitely going to die but does anyway, and then he dies.

I feel the film might have more documentary value than it does as a movie experience – certainly, it feels like all historical angles are shown, if not covered in much depth, and a lot of work has been done to capture the era – but similar to Bryan Singer’s approach with “Valkyrie”, Mann’s flat and uncompromising approach to the viewer, and his unwillingness to spoon-feed them information – commendable in a more efficient film like “Collateral”, or a more sculpted narrative like “Heat” or “Miami Vice” – means that the audience doesn’t really get a satisfying historical insight into the events either.

Oddly, 2007′s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” doesn’t suffer from the same pitfalls for me, and I think that’s down to it’s idiosyncratic storytelling technique – the voice-over, as “voice of the film”, is laying everything out for you and giving it context as it happens, but the characters and events within the film have no consciousness of what is going to happen at any point, and as such it becomes easier for us as observers to relate to what is going on – the filmmakers have made perfect choices about what to decode for us, and what to let us feel for ourselves, and as such we feel the emotional weight of the inevitability of events shown, rather than feeling like we’re just waiting to get it over with.

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Oh, yeah, by the way you guys… I proposed to Girl One a couple of weekends away and she said “yes”! Since which everything has been quite hectic.

But anyway, right, “Star Trek”. Loads has probably been said about it already, much of which I’d just repeat if I went into too much detail – one of the problems with being the last to the party on such a blockbuster. If, by way of a review, I say that it was a pleasant surprise, and a fun and noisy cinematic confection of fairly universal appeal, you’ll get that we liked it, right?

There were just a few things I’d like to mention:

1 – I don’t know if the use of “Sabotage”, very loud and played almost in its entirety, was a comment on the timeless perfection of the Beastie Boys circa “Ill Communication“, or a reference to the apparently famous Shatner audio (included below). All I know is that it’s greatly appreciated.

2 – There are plenty of wonderful moments of light fan-service in the movie, that Abrams manages to thread unobtrusively into proceedings. Watching it as a light fan of Star Trek myself, I really enjoyed those bits.

3 – The film is totally accessible to mainstream audiences, regardless of whether or not the slightly shonky “science” pissed off hard-core science fiction fans. I know this because Girl One, who hasn’t seen a single episode of Trek – apparently all flavours, despite having a bit of a thing about Patrick Stewart – utterly loved it. To be honest, I’d wondered if the fan-service I mentioned wasn’t a bit excluding, but apparently not.

4 – The infamous lens flare, and the shaky cam, didn’t bother us at all, despite the relatively small screen and uncomfortable viewing angle that I tweeted about at the time – stupid Odeon – and in fact it wasn’t nearly as noticeable or disarming as the sheer amount of detail and activity going on in many scenes. In fact, the lens flare was ubiquitous, but in context it wasn’t often prominent – I only noticed it as much as I’d notice a particularly atypical or idiosyncratic film-stock or camera style, and its application actually took the edge off the CG that was obviously used, but blended in perfectly.

5 – I don’t know how badly offended original Trek fans have been by Abrams version, but I think the film was actually a clearer and more loving homage than was required, and if anything, the film’s successes – in my eyes I mean – show up the redundance of fans in most cases of cultural success.
By which I mean that though there are several narrative nods to previous Trek movies – some scenes, concepts, and I think one whole line of dialogue are clear lifts from “Star Trek 2 – The Wrath Of Khan“, and the first appearance of the key adversary craft in the new movie strongly evokes the vastness and wonder of V’Ger in “Star Trek – The Motion Picture” – the main thing that Abrams has taken from the franchise is the almost naive, cynicism free approach to the big concepts and character interactions that were a signature of the original series.
The tonal shifts from never deep but always consistent bickering main characters to near-Shakespearian levels of melodrama during battle are handled deftly to create what I suspect just happened naturally when making a science-fiction series in the sixties, but is pretty rare today – an angst-free, large-canvas exercise in imagination and the broadest of character conflicts, that doesn’t sweat the techno-babble.
That Abrams manages to maintain that mawk-light feel while still including the requisite Hollywood character back-stories – Kirk and Spock both, of course, have daddy issues that wouldn’t be alien in a character outline on “Lost” – might be a function of his inability as a director to fit too much pap in, rather than a deliberate strength on his part, but damn it works.
But this stuff, this straight-up likeability about the whole concept as originally presented and as delivered here, isn’t what makes the show popular with hardcore fans, who watch, rewatch, deconstruct and write fan-fiction about it – it’s what makes “Star Trek” popular for the wider audience, who are happy to sit and watch an episode of Shatner strong-arming a script, Koenig being all cute for the growing sixties teen-girl demographic, or Nimoy and Kelly bickering in a way almost entirely unbecoming of servicemen, if it happens to be on on cable. And to be honest, it’s those people in their masses who probably have more to do with why the show is still repeated on so many channels, in so many markets.

At least, that’s what I think.

Wow, I might as well have just written a review, huh?

Anyway, favourite other stuff:

Karl Urban totally rips up the screen as McCoy. This doesn’t actually make sense in any reality. Urban has previously been little more than slightly beefy and rough action fodder, and hasn’t distinguished himself as having all that much on-screen charisma, beyond the ability to make some women feel very wiggly. It’s peculiar but awesome that playing one of the few non-physical characters in this movie – and in fact playing the one danger-averse person in it – he finally becomes noteworthy. He reminded me a lot of the ever-charming-regardless-of-the-quality-of-a-movie Hugh Jackman.

John Cho motherfuckers!

Cameo!

In jokes!

Maguffins!

Applied phlebotinum!

And oh, much as I’m not a Trekker, or Trekkie, or whatever, the recreation of the signature theme and voiceover from the original series actually gave me chills. That were multiplying. I almost lost control.

(By the way, for a laugh or because you’re obsessive, once you’ve seen the film you should definitely check out the TV Tropes page for it: Star Trek – Television Tropes & Idioms. Observing a lot of these narrative tropes is old hat by now, but being reminded of the fact that Star Trek is one of the prime seams where a lot of these tropes were originally mined is always interesting…)

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I’ve almost definitely forgotten some, by the way. You will excuse the lack of bells and/or whistles, yes? As always, I’d love you to tell me what you think of these movies, or my assessment of them, in the comments!

Valkyrie

Tom Cruise is, despite being a bit barmy, almost always watchable in movies. His work in “Valkyrie” is no exception, despite offering him a lot of chances to be Very Serious Indeed.

His performance is bolstered by a great ensemble cast, though admittedly Bill Nighy’s wonderfully slippery performance stands out and puts Cruise in the shade. Bryan Singer does a super job of delivering the story as crisply as possible, managing to avoid many of the melodrama landmines left lying around by previous cinematic visitors to the subject matter.

One of the only real problems with the film is that, with Singer’s often clinical, detail driven approach to the story, the historical inevitability of the eventual plot outcomes don’t have the tragic emotional build you’d expect – like “Ice Age”, it’s difficult to engage with the characters because you already know that they’re dead, and the only lesson this particular story has for us to learn is that sometimes planning and ingenuity can be brought down violently by little more than dumb bad luck.

It’s a lovely piece of film-making, and a great story, but at times this makes it feel like the most expensively casted docu-drama ever made.

Valkyrie is available at Amazon here.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

By now, you know whether you like Judd Apatow films or not, and if you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you also know that I’ve got a soft-spot for these “loser comes good” movies, if only because the irreverent humour in them is normally pretty well aligned with my tastes.

Most of the recent Apatow movies we’ve seen have been a little disappointing, but “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” isn’t. This might be something to do with the gorgeous Kristen Bell, who makes the whole thing seem a little less shambolic than “Pineapple Express” as she seems to be actually working from a script, or it might be the fact that the story itself is particularly close to Jason Segel’s heart, and he wrote the movie.

Tiny Mila Kunis is full of character and cute enough, though as the fairly obvious fall-girl for Segel’s recovering heart, as the movie progresses she seems to be almost as problematic a mate as Bell’s control junkie superstar. Russell Brand, pretty much as Russell Brand, is curiously winning throughout – I don’t normally find his humour appealing, but here he’s a very generous actor, and the usual Apatow ensemble members are a less intrusive bunch here than in other movies, making things fun without being tiring.

If there’s a genius to the film, it’s that as bad as Bell’s Sarah Marshall gets, there’s a feeling that she isn’t really the problem, and that if Segel’s Peter is having trouble getting past his relationship with her, it’s as much his willful unwillingness to do so as it is any real deliberate hold she has over him.

At the moment, the movie is under £5 at Amazon. It’s well worth the budget price.

Push

“Push” is what happens when a half-decent director and cast decide to take a stab at remaking the appalling “Jumper”.

No, I’ll try that again – “Push” is what happens when the director of  “Lucky Number Slevin” decides to make a super-hero team movie, without bothering with any of that pesky licensing nonsense.

Like “…Slevin”, it’s a nicely made movie that narratively falls apart ever so slightly in the final act. The cast is likeable and carry off their roles well enough – typically, when it comes to Fanning, surprisingly where Evans is concerned.

Cinematically it looks like the “Bourne” movies by way of Ridley Scott’s 80s Tokyo fetish, with some gorgeous locations and beautifully designed set-pieces, with very slick action sequences brushing up against jump-cut auterism that wouldn’t be out of place in Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire”.

The whole story is about super-powered people running from shady organisations who would exploit and experiment on them, and as far as that goes it’s all well and good – there’s a colourful maguffin sitting in a briefcase of the sort that people see as a plot-hole in films like this, but a plot-device in films like “Pulp Fiction”, as well as plenty of opportunities for personality conflict, intrigue and wise-cracking while the world falls apart.

If the cohesion of the narrative goes to pieces in the final act, it’s only forgivably so – there’s a point where the movie-makers find themselves having to deal with precognition as a story element, and that hardly ever works out for Hollywood; of course they get themselves tangled up in too much plot.

There is shameless sequel baiting at the end, as well, but you know, I’d pay to see further installments, so I didn’t mind it all that much at all.

Push is out soon, and it’s pretty cheap at release, it seems.

Pathfinder

In “Pathfinder”, Karl Urban plays a young man, born to Vikings, who is lost and raised by native Americans. Never quite fitting in with the peaceful tribal culture, but having nightmares about the violence he saw in his forgotten childhood, Ghost – because of course, as a pale boy among redskins, that’s his name – is away hunting when his adopted village – and family – are torn apart by the returning Viking horde.

Escaping to the next village, and hungry for revenge, Ghost has to embrace his ancestry if he is to yadda yadda yadda…

Yes, so, okay, the film pretty much contains every “raised by wolves” cliche, “noble savage” stereotype and sexy dry-ice eighties music video forest-lighting trick known to man. It’s also got a serious hard-on for early Michael Mann movies.

But put another way – it’s a film where Karl Urban seeks revenge with a sword, and Clancy Brown rules the screen as the leader of a rampaging and suitably grotesque band of barbarians. Moon Bloodgood delivers pragmatic New World mysticism with a gorgeous pout as the obvious love interest. And it is way more graphically violent and slickly made than we were expecting.

The film is a self-contained love-affair with the “vengeful but honour-bound hero” genre typified by films like “Braveheart” and “Last Of The Mohicans”, but if you’ve got a soft spot for movies like that, like we do, you can’t go far wrong with this largely overlooked movie.

It’s worth every penny of the roughly £4 you can get it for. You can buy it here at Amazon, but most high-street outlets are budget pricing it just as much. If nothing else, there is limitless potential for drinking games in it.

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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.

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If you can imagine a film in which Liam Neeson, as a super-capable ex-spy and nervy estranged father of a teen girl, beats up everybody in Paris to try and rescue said daughter from human traffickers, you have just imagined “Taken”.

Try to picture all <waves hand in circle approximately in direction of that story> of that, written by Luc Besson. The film has an intriguing slow start that gives you a chance to establish the deep love he feels for his daughter, and regret at their lack of a relationship, and how very, very careful he normally is, so that when everything goes wrong and Neeson is forced along the French streets at the same pace that the film is, caution flying out of a smashed window, the audience is flung along in a state of panic, also.

Besson-conceived action-thrillers are not exactly thin on the ground since he took a back-seat from directing a decade ago, and I think it’s fair to say that his name on a film without his hand on the rudder is no sign of quality – his input seems to have been focussed on providing a high-concept:- Smokey & SuperTaxi, Parkour Bandits, Leon’s Daughter Jubilee and Jumped-Up-Angry-Cockney-Driver Vs Bad Dudes spring to mind – and leaving one of his various favoured crew members to do the heavy lifting.

“Taken” certainly fulfills the same criteria of being a straightforward pitch, but unlike many of those other films, it never sacrifices purity of narrative for heavily staged gimmick action set-pieces, and the direction – by Pierre Morel, who thus far has been involved in two of the other recent movies that Besson has written and produced that actually worked, “Banlieue 13″ and “Danny The Dog” – keeps things visually interesting and frenetic throughout. Those are traits that he brought to both of those earlier films. It’s worth noting that Besson’s stories have generally always been pretty straightforward – it’s always been his eye as a director and cinematographer that has elevated them above just being flat action movies. In Besson’s movies, maybe more than other filmmakers, the camera is an actor all of it’s own, and that approach seems to have rubbed off on Morel.

Thinking about it, the film seems to owe a lot to Roderick Thorpe’s book “Nothing Lasts Forever”, the novel used as the basis for “Die Hard”. “Die Hard” is a fair approximation of the novel, with only a couple of changes – the main character, Joe Leland, is actually a retired agent, caught out at the terrorist-afflicted building while visiting his estranged daughter. The book is much more focussed on Leland’s concerns about his daughter’s safety, and shows his struggle as a more desperate bid to rescue her than comes across in the film. At the same time, the novel is preoccupied with Leland fretting on his daughter’s lifestyle as an executive at the company as a corrupting influence, and one that he believes places her in the way of danger.

Neeson’s Bryan Mills has the same concerns, and his mission has the same desperate bent, of a man used to being in control but on the very edge of his capabilities. It’s a very linear story – a slides to b slips to c – that isn’t over-concerned with having a surplus of plot, but it’s probably clear by now that I think that action movies tend to work a lot better when that’s the case.

Burn After Reading

The Cohen brothers really are a quandary – their films, while always whip-smart, dialogue savvy and considered, seem to see-saw wildly between tight, definitive narratives, like “O Brother Where Art Thou”, “Raising Arizona” and “The Hudsucker Proxy”, and more expansive, abstract expressionism, where the film itself, rather than the story, is the point, like “No Country For Old Men”, “The Big Lebowski”, and “Burn After Reading”.

In the former type of movie, the yarn is the thing, and while there are often deeper messages coded into them, it’s the yarn you’re meant to take from it. In the latter, the brothers either seem to be making a point through the process of the story of film itself – in “…Old Men”, it’s that insanity and violence are almost random forces in and of themselves, that can’t be controlled – in “…Lebowski” it’s… you know, honestly, I don’t know what it is, I’m just sure there is one. Any ideas?

In “Burn After Reading” it’s that what the maguffin is in a movie is so ultimately unimportant that you can essentially make the same sort of a movie, but without the maguffin, and it will turn out roughly the same way. Or it’s that no matter what anyone thinks, nobody really knows what’s going on.

Or that self-importance is ultimately damaging.

Actually, the underlying point in most Cohen brothers movies seems to be that “…it’s funny how things work out.” and if I’m right about that, this movie perfectly adheres to that thesis.

(There’s an exception to that dual-formula idea, by the way, and that’s “Fargo”. That movie manages to be a yarn and a comment on human behaviour, and other crime movies, all in one. In some ways, it’s the perfect crystalline form of the Cohen brothers’ approach to movies. It is a beautiful thing.)

“Burn After Reading” is the brothers at their farcical best, and features some brilliant actors – many of whom are Cohen staples – doing awesome work. Though Frances Mcdormand is once again the stand-out actor in the piece, there is a delightfully horrid turn by Tilda Swinton, a creepily amusing George Clooney performance, and Brad Pitt further against recent type than I’ve seen in a while, as Mcdormand’s character’s lovable but foolish co-conspirator Chad. John Malkovich does well here too.

My favourite scenes take place within the CIA, and are dominated by the always wonderful JK Simmons, and fresh from “Sledge Hammer!” – at least as far as I’m concerned – David Rasche. When we’re used to seeing the CIA as either super-manipulators, ultra-evil, or the face of street-level government problem-solving, their bemused discussions are a beautifully humanising conceit, and frame the action perfectly.

Although the film covers a lot of similar thematic ground to “No Country For Old Men”, it’s tonally closer to the quirky realism of “Fargo” – the cosier characters of the latter are traded out with the relentlessly harsh reality of the former. It’s not as confidently paced as either of those movies, but it’s got a rhythmic feel to it, a cracking script, and a structure and approach that massages the brain to fresh consideration of, and meditation on, the thriller genre, which makes it well worth a watch.

In The Loop

I wanted to write up Armando Iannucci’s first big screen outing straight away, but after watching it in good company, and enjoying the hell out of it, I realised that I really didn’t know what I thought of it.

Obviously, I liked it. Obvious, because I just said it right there, in the last paragraph. You saw it, right? But I was having trouble parsing exactly why.

The main problem I was having was, I think, an over-familiarity with Iannucci’s voice. As much as I enjoyed the film, I realised while watching that it’s become difficult for me to be objective about his work. At the point when someone hasn’t done one thing in nearly twenty years that you haven’t found hilarious, it’s possible that you’re a deeply entrenched fan, and can’t be trusted.

This isn’t normally a problem, but in the case of “In The Loop”, I couldn’t find any one thing to get my teeth into – the dialogue and acting was superb, the not-strictly-gag-centric humour from the series “Thick Of It” was retained, and events cascading away from each other in a pleasing and authentic manner, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that, if I had to explain why it was a great film to someone who didn’t already want to see it, I wouldn’t know how to do it.

Luckily, everything I might, in my witless way, eventually have got around to articulating, has already been said in Sarah Ditum’s great review over at Paperhouse: http://sarahditum.com/2009/04/29/picturehouse-in-the-loop/

The thing she really crystallised for me was that feeling that “In The Loop” is so effective at capturing the nuances of human interaction, and the idea that those nuances are what really drive the political workings of the world.

It’s trite to try and make the point that governments don’t make decisions based on good or evil stances, now – we all probably know that it’s more complicated than that – but it takes a smart cookie to make a movie that goes one stage further than suggesting that agendas and special interests are running the show, and instead tries to make the point that first and foremost, policy makers are sadly typical, and in fact are driven by ego, stubbornness, and more than anything else the need to appear to take a stand, rather than the actual will to take one.

The reason Iannucci’s story here worked so well for me was that deep down, I secretly suspected that that was the case in real life… that there are no conspiracies or shadowy cabals running the show, just a bunch of persistent fuckwits who not only don’t have a clue, but are also wilful in their ignorance. In that sort of an environment, strength doesn’t come from having the most useful knowledge; it’s from appearing to have the most confidence in the knowledge you do have.

The only other thing I’d add to that, and to Ditum’s review, is that “Thick Of It” shared a wonderfully textured performance from David Rasche with “Burn After Reading”, and the other thing this film had in common with that one was that feeling that the events taking place here are just part of an ongoing continuum… the characters play their roles, and no matter how they try, they can only ever steer events, never really control them. Where most films take a proactive, sleeves-rolled-up approach to plot, the Cohen brothers and Iannucci have let their movies take a more pragmatic view

“In The Loop” can be taken to refer quite literally to the term – after all, being part of the process of government is more important to these characters than actually governing – being “in the room” often more important than actually saying anything of substance. But at the same time, you get the feeling that Iannucci sees the whole process of politics and war as an endless loop of barely varying iterations, and the structure of the film reflects that – in some ways where you get on and where you get off this ride isn’t as important as that you stick around to see one whole circuit.

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There are already another three movies in the pot waiting for me to write about them, so without further ado, we’ll jump into this post about cannibalistic plants, dysfunctional science operas, and chins that can kill:

Little Shop Of Horrors

I couldn’t actually believe that Girl One, with her love of musicals, hadn’t seen this classic movie. I had put it down to her fairly conservative roster of favourites, but when she enjoyed “Sweeney Todd” as much as I did, I spotted a thematic in-road.

In case you haven’t seen it, “Little Shop Of Horrors” is a movie musical – based on an off-off-Broadway musical version of an old Roger Corman movie – about a lowly shop-boy called Seymour, working in a Skid Row flower shop, who finds an incredibly strange talking plant, that lives on human blood.

It is exactly as awesome as that makes it sound! If you didn’t think that sounded awesome, than for you it is it is exactly several times more awesome than that makes it sound!

Many great things stand out about the movie.

The performances are superb, with Rick Moranis surprisingly holding his own on the musical numbers alongside the strong theatrical vocals of Ellen Greene as romantic interest Audrey, & the powerhouse resonance of Levi Stubbs as the sassy, and later sinister carnivorous plant, Audrey 2.

The script and songwriting crack along with a confident zing that recalls the fast-talking perkiness of 1950s/60s cinema, and the sets and set-pieces reflect perfectly the musical theater origins of the show, but with production values that do a good job of portraying the slum setting of Skid Row, where the film takes place.

There’s a cartoon realism that pervades throughout, which a lazy eye might scan as being Tim Burtonesque, but actually this probably has more to do with the influence of Frank Oz – who made the film – on Burton himself.

The story isn’t complex, but it is odd, and the characters and plot are delightfully subversive. In fact, I’d say the film takes a more guided and effective jab at established norms and cultural taboo than the more famous, but ultimately more showy and superficial “Rocky Horror Picture Show”.

In fact, by virtue of the directness of the plot, the whole thing is generally less scattershot & shambolic than “Rocky…”, and there is no cruft in this film. Add to that a brilliant cameo by Bill Murray, and an intense and dark turn by Steve Martin that forces you to recall a time when directors knew what to do with him, and it’s just grand.

Despite the use of puppetry to represent the most prominent character in the film – CGI hadn’t reared it’s head yet – or perhaps because of it, the film hasn’t really dated very much at all. In fact, it’s easy to forget that Audrey 2 is essentially a muppet, and that’s testament to the great puppeteers behind the plant, a charismatic vocal performance by Stubbs, and some very impressive sound editing. That Moranis can act against Audrey seemingly in-camera for many of their scenes makes it easier to parse in our back-brain than if the murderous pod was digitally rendered.

There’s only one effect that doesn’t quite work now, and that’s an explosion effect near the close of play.

So, anyway. I loved watching it again, after all these years. Girl One was kind of unmoved by it, though.

However, in the few weeks since, I’ve found her picking out a couple of the songs on her iPod, and we’ve been having a bit of a singalong, too, so maybe it’s infected her too.

Babylon AD

Though it’s by no means awful, “Babylon AD” is not the film that is going to convince anyone that Vin Diesel has massive star quality, or great acting talent. Luckily, the role he’s in here doesn’t really require him to have either thing.

In fact, as his character is a talented mercenary with a pragmatic but mostly grim world-view, it’s almost the perfect role for him to carry off. His nuance free but delightfully deep voice is all that’s needed for the delivery of Toorop’s lines, and one thing he has going for him is a physical presence that is convincingly solid, but almost feline when it comes to handling the more rigorous or frenetic action set-pieces in this movie.

The film – set in a dystopian-earth neo-cyberpunk melange – has an impressive scope, and some of the ideas – both textually and visually – are wild and eye-popping, but it’s difficult to explain exactly what it’s about.

This is because, though the mission – Toorops, and that of the two women he is employed to protect and transport – at the core of the film is simple and relatively linear, it is set in a wider narrative framework, that takes in political, religious and idealistic factions and social situations in the world it’s set in that give an impression of a much bigger story, that was meant to play out in a different format. This isn’t surprising – it’s based on a novel – though I wouldn’t have been surprised if it’s source material had been a long-form European comic series.

Apparently there were issues between the director, for whom the film was a labour of love, and the studio, which resulted in some widespread edits and a dysfunctional approach to establishing a direction for the film. The result of this for the viewer is the sense that the filmmakers were deeply in love with the world that they were creating, but distracted by a surplus of story elements to the extent that they have trouble picking one.

The general feeling is one of being told a potentially pretty cool story by a very expressive, but ADD afflicted, teenager. In broken English.

The film suffers from the same problems, but for different reasons, that Diesel’s other epic science-opera project, “Chronicles Of Riddick” did – you kind of wish throughout that the film was actually longer, or that it was actually two or three shorter, tighter movies.

Still, everyone on the production team works hard, as do the actors. Mélanie Thierry, the actress playing the “holy Grail” role, around which the story centers, is astonishing, and it’s always nice to see Gérard Depardieu, Michelle Yeoh and Mark Strong in stuff.

It’s hard to recommend the film, as it stands, but I already know that I will be revisiting it some time soon – it is just that visually impressive.

My Name Is Bruce

If you’re going to make a meta-textual film, you have to have a really clear idea of what you’re going to be getting at with it.

Spike Jonze’s “Adaptation” is a good example of this. Struggling to think of any others, actually – any ideas, anyone?

Anyway, “My Name Is Bruce” is a meta-textual film, but it doesn’t have a clear idea of what it wants to be at all, and that, and it’s poor-even-for-a-B-Movie production values, mean that it’s a bit of a confused mess.

One of the key problems seems to be that, while we’re obviously not supposed to take the film all that seriously, it’s quite difficult at points to see exactly how seriously we’re not supposed to take it. The main conceit of the film – that people in a small town harassed by a murderous demon spirit enlist the help of Bruce Campbell, the B-movie actor who they have mistakenly confused with his heroic(?) movie counterpart, to defeat the monster – is simple enough, and that Campbell himself thinks that the whole thing is an elaborate birthday hoax allows for some cute comedy moments.

However, the premise is let down by it’s confusing approach to where exactly on the metaphysical level of things the audience or the film is sitting. Though you’d expect Campbell to send himself up a little bit, we’re led to believe that what we’re looking at is an approximation of the real world, and there’s a lack of restraint to the slapstick sequences we see of him in his trailer that pushes us too far beyond that idea.

Other decisions that could have been made about the execution of this quite fun concept further bewilder. A little less detail in key places might make the sleight of hand of the farcical comedy of errors that lands him face to face with an actual demonic infestation actually work. Instead, we have scene after scene where it seems apparent that these backwoods hicks a) Aren’t complete retards, and b) Seem to have some awareness of Campbell as an actor.

These are the bits that writers leave out, in the hope that not concreting them will let the audience suspend disbelief – not draw attention to them with unneccessary detail. It’s the collaboration that both filmmaker and audience are complicit in, when dealing with off-the-wall material, because it’s not like the viewer isn’t smart enough to spot the issues themself. We make an unspoken agreement to ignore the bits that don’t make sense.

This movie seems to act in bad faith as relates to this agreement a few too many times for it to be particularly comfortable viewing.

(An example of this is the main thing that bugged me about the first “Scary Movie” – aside from the fact that an irreverent parody of a film that was already satirical provokes a vertigo reaction in me that prompts me to psychosis – was the scene early on when a man is stabbed in the head through a toilet stall wall by a penis.

I get the structure of the joke – “Ahaahahaha! In the original movie it was a knife! But we used a cock! Ahaha! Cocks are funny!” – but I couldn’t get past the fact that the juxtaposition was flawed at a practical level… you can’t stab a penis through a toilet stall wall, and into a person’s head, no matter how turned on the murderer is.

In fact, I’m pretty sure you can put one in a person’s ear and them be perfectly healthy afterward, barring unfortunate emissions.

Fine, include knob gags in your silly horror movie parody. And murder someone with a novelty sex-toy, if you want to. But make or pick a set of physics and metaphysics, and stick with them, or else it’s your own time you’re wasting.)

Ultimately, though, this film is a love letter written by Bruce Campbell to his fans, and while I think there’s nothing in that remit that requires it to actually be almost unwatchable, I think the sentiment behind it does shine through. There’s plenty of silly moments and nice touches – the incongruous singing duo that pop up throughout, and Ted Raimi’s various cameos, for two – that make up for that feeling you get while watching, that’s a bit like watching a friend making a hash of a joke in front of a mixed group of people that you don’t really know all that well, and not knowing whether you’re supposed to laugh or not afterwards.

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