Life of Pi

I have to say, Life of Pi was better than I expected it to be. I expected to really dislike it, but I actually quite enjoyed it.

I never read the book. It was recommended to me many, many times but I had taken an instant dislike to it. I read how its premise was taken more or less wholesale from a Brazilian novel about a boy stuck on a dingy with a jaguar. I read how it was rather artificially hanging on the Booker-baiting trend of an Indian setting with magical realism elements, especially when everyone has an oh-so-quirky history, like the main boy who is named after a swimming pool. I read how the boy and the tiger end up coexisting and end up on a fictional island of meerkats, and decided it would be trite and awful and try much too hard.

Nor was I enthusiastic about the film, initially linked to the director who has probably fallen furthest from grace of any I can think of beside Michael Bay – M. Night Shyamalan. He was then removed from it, and though directors I like such as Alfonso Cuarón and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and by the time years had dragged on an Ang Lee finally committed, I felt it was in ‘troubled project’ waters and likely wouldn’t come out of it well, especially as Lee is rather uneven, especially with more populist work.

Still, the film was finally made – and the trailer duly arrived, showcasing some rather lovely CG and annoying me with a motif of words matched with drumbeats. If I had missed it, I wouldn’t have been duly worried, but I caught it.

And yes, I should have given it more of a chance. It asked you to believe a lot less than I thought it would and it allowed for an acknowledged cynicism. There are some fanciful moments with the tiger, but you are never expected to believe it is anything but a wild animal. The island is indeed one of the parts that really stretches credulity, but a plot point was made of that. And though the framing device – about a visiting Canadian writer looking for a story – is lazy, but it also provides a much-needed alternate story. And yes, there is enough beauty in the oceans, as well as hallucinogenic fantasies of the oceans, that there’s a real visual spectacle.

It’s still a concept lifted wholesale from elsewhere, even if the devil is in the details here. Speaking of matters spiritual, I was not keen on the treatment of different religions, made into a quirk that comes over very differently when you remember it’s from Yann Martel rather than from a generalised, rather patronising Western idea of superior spirituality in India. It also still gets quite dull at times. But it is still lovely to look at – especially in 3D – tells a fun tall tale, centres on a likeable character with a likeable fierce tiger companion, and well worth the time to watch in the cinema, even if you can’t persuade me it would be worth the hours it takes to read a book. 

The Hobbit part 1: An Unexpected Journey

While both were fixtures of my childhood, I read The Hobbit rather more. Well, Lord of the Rings was a commitment of all your reading time for weeks, even months, whereas The Hobbit could be read in a few days. But it was a lot more inconsequential and I even came to view it as babyish, especially beside its big brother. The Hobbit makes Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in their little club sharing ideas make much more sense. It is in every way more child-appropriate, simplistic and indeed, superficial. I never really felt Bilbo was in any danger, unlike the members of the Fellowship. The dwarfs were silly griping fellows and for all their roots in Norse mythology, they had silly names and their quest seemed rather abstract and fuelled by gold. The trading of riddles, so iconic now, always struck me as a very unlikely scenario and I resented Bilbo for cheating, even if he did so inadvertently. The ring, meanwhile, even though Tolkien actually rewrote the passages featuring it once he knew how important it was going to be, seemed so trivial, as Bilbo slips it on and off as he pleases – though of course it takes time.

Well, I haven’t read the Hobbit since I was a preteen, but still remember much of it, largely because of family discussions. So I know just how much was added to this film, how much padding and embellishment there was – but that’s quite understandable in an effort to make a rather small quest story epic, and expand it to no less than three full films, which I can’t say I think entirely necessary when they could be getting on with The Silmarillion. The padding hasn’t just stretched the content to three films, though – it’s stretched this film to a full three hours, which is really too long. The first act in particular, when a mass of characters we can barely distinguish from one another are introduced, is long-winded and I am very sure that the main criticism The Hobbit will suffer is that it was dull. I had a very good time of it, recognising hints and references, but I was also aware that had I known nothing of mythology, deviations from the text or what was to come, I may have been bored.

However, bored I was not. A little surprised by sudden changes of scene once or twice, but very soon delighting in the new chapter. More or less all of the additions I loved, especially giving Radagast not only a role but a great and endearing eccentricity, with a very obvious visual clue to how little he cares for the impression he gives others. I was puzzling over who the actor was for a good few minutes, having forgotten the prior announcements but knowing he was terribly familiar, but when I realised it was the Doctor I remember seeing on Saturday evenings, I couldn’t have been more pleased. I hope this leads to Sylvester McCoy having a career renaissance, and his interactions with Gandalf were priceless. Though now I will no longer get to be quite so snobby about actually knowing who Radagast is – until now it was a bit of a bit of geeky esoteria.

The film squeezes in a prologue of sorts with Frodo and the older Ian Holm directly before the opening of Lord of the Rings, which is a lovely nod to the films these quite clearly build from. We are then shown the younger Bilbo, and Martin Freeman does an absolutely excellent job in his usual slightly baffled Englishman role. I may not care much for Sherlock or The Office, but he’s certainly one of the best things in either, and provides a nice Hitchhiker’s Guide link with yesterday’s film, Seven Psychopaths. As Bilbo tumbles into the quest, he gains confidence, and it will be great to see him grow further in the next installations. As well as the familiar encounter with the mountain trolls, the stop at Rivendell, the encounter with the goblins and Bilbo meeting Gollum and finding his ring, the film gives itself more of a structure by introducing a baddy only mentioned in the book as part of the story of Thorin getting his full name Oakenshield. This allows for some pretty heavy action scenes, and gives the film the artificial climax it needs. We also get Radagast encountering Sauron in an early form, and having a rather confusing episode with what will become a Nazgul, here apparently a summoned spirit and not a man who can only be killed by a woman. There are also added appearances from Saruman and Galadriel as well as Elrond, which is great – seeing those familiar faces and getting Christopher Lee another screen credit is never a bad thing. Also present is Stephen Fry – his voice, at least – unexpectedly as a goblin king with a huge wobbling chin I’m sure insecure Stephen will quietly fret over. The eloquence of this hideous creature and his sublimely awful singing make for an excellent casting choice, turning what could have been a highly forgettable character into a very memorable one.

The dwarves are more memorable than they might have been, too. Though some are little more than ‘the fat one’ or ‘the daft one with a slingshot’, others get distinguished well, though of course it’s Thorin that does the most growing – and comes over as far more formidable than in the book. James Nesbitt’s one scene shows his great talent at seeming like a lovely guy in just a few words, and the guy from Desperate Romantics as the one bizarre good-looking and non-squat dwarf gets to stand out as a character as well as a face with his naivety and careless tongue.

It was long and in summary, doesn’t feel that action packed, but it was in fact very enjoyable and I’m looking forward to seeing Beorn, hearing Smaug and cringing at the spiders in glorious 3D – and yes, the 3D was exemplary here.

I may well go and see The Hobbit again, too. After all, I saw it in 24fps, which I had no complaints about, and was happy I saw first, but I am curious about the controversial 48fps. I remember when making a film for my master’s course, we were far happier with the lower framerate, the higher looking too amateurish, but I do want to know if it looks different large-scale. Perhaps I will see. I can’t see it being a more dramatic transition than that from film to digital, and we barely noticed that.

I’m also glad Jackson returned. I adore Del Toro, but…this just wasn’t the project for him.   

Seven Psychopaths

Seven Psychopaths just by the skin of its teeth manages to pull off its concept and be a lot of fun, and that’s because it’s a comedy. If this had been presented without all the jokes, it would have been the sort of film I really dislike – trendy-trendy Tarrantino derivatives with the tired, deeply deeply lazy conceit of being about a screenwriter trying to write a film. I hate screenplays about screenwriters writing, possibly making allowances for Charlie Kaufmann doing it but in general finding it highly irritating – and it’s the centre of the plot here. Possibly I’d give the same leeway to Martin McDonagh if I’d seen In Bruges, but I didn’t catch it, so this was my first impression of him. The meta concept is supposed to give a sense of credence, much like books that pretend they’re written by the main character, but in film it only has a distancing effect.

Alcoholic Irish screenwriter Marty needs inspiration for his screenplay, Seven Psychopaths, as he just gets drunk all the time and rips off his friend Billy’s ideas. Billy is involved with a ridiculous scam led by an older Polish gentleman called Hans, in which the two of them kidnap dogs for a few days, answer the ads and collect the reward. To help Marty along, Billy puts an ad in the paper asking for psychopaths to get in touch to share their stories, and while that leads to a disturbing encounter, they have much bigger problems because one of the kidnapped dogs belongs to a mafia boss who wants it back at any costs.

The set-up isn’t terrible, but much of the early development is. It’s painfully obvious who the psychopath with the jack of diamonds calling card is, and it doesn’t make sense that he’s two of the titular seven. The line between comedy and drama is deftly toed everywhere but with the mafia guys, who are too cartoony. And honestly, it’s just not very interesting, with vague ideas about psychopaths thrown around and occasionally enacted – there’s one idea about a Vietnamese guy who’s going to take revenge for war atrocities, and another stolen from Billy about a quaker who stalks his daughter’s killer, which of course neatly gets referred to again later.

The film rests, though, on two brilliant asides and a strong ending that mixes anticlimax, dryness and traditional action payoffs very nicely. The first aside is with Tom Waits’ character Zachariah, who goes everywhere carrying a white rabbit, telling the story of himself and his lover travelling the country as serial killers who hunt down and kill serial killers. When Tom Waits’ character is too horrified by the burning to death of the Zodiac Killer, they part, and he’s been searching for her ever since. The time and place the character reappears can be seen coming a mile off, but it is still quite brilliant, Waits’ inimical voice relates the tale perfectly and his presence here is worth the price of admission alone.

The second aside is Billy’s concept of how the film should be, an incredibly stupid shoot-out in a graveyard full of melodrama and absurdity. What makes it work is that it’s all filmed, done with a great seriousness by the actors, with every stupid twist enacted and every ridiculously violent moment realized. It’s easily one of the funniest scenes in any film I’ve ever seen, and is all the better for the contrast with the understated, wry humour elsewhere.

At the end, the neat way the ends are tied up is very nice. I was cynical about the Vietnamese man’s story, and it really only works because of how it’s delivered, but it does work, in the end. Hans’ stand-off with the mobsters, where he undercuts their schtick with wonderful deadpan responses, couldn’t have worked better. Loved it.

And no review of this film could be complete without mention of its fantastic cast. This ensemble is absolutely sublime, and Tom Waits is really the icing on an exceedingly tasty cake. Colin Farrell does bewildered and hapless yet likeable far better than expected, and Christopher Walken brings such measured gravitas to what is after all a role that oscillates between awesome and pathetic, and embodies a man so very different from his usual characters sublimely. Sam Rockwell, who despite loving him in Moon and enjoying in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy I had hitherto paid little attention to, certainly distinguished himself this time, with a bravura performance balancing madness and goofy simplicity in a compelling, fascinating and rather unsettling way without ever being unbelievable – just the sort of role someone like him needs to stand out. And then there’s Woody Harrelson, whose character is simple on the surface but probably the hardest of any of them to make work in the film, being at once logical and precise, unhinged and unpredictable and also motivated by a rather daft love of his doggie. They all spark off each other, and it’s fascinating to watch it all work.

Arguably it shouldn’t work. It should annoy me. But largely thanks to the cast, it doesn’t. They are very enjoyable to watch. 

Twilight: Breaking Dawn part 2

I don’t think I really need to complain about the various glaring plot problems in this latest – and hopefully last – Twilight film. About the fact that the film is basically about the Volturi walking across half the world rather than getting a plane, and then just walking back. About what a lazy plot device Alice is. About how Alice could have just shared her plan from the start and prevented several deaths, plus the slaughter of a number of innocents in the vicinity of Forks as a group of vampires gather to protect super-special Bella. About how very annoying Bella is with her perfection and her super powers and yet how she just completely ignores her baby to have some sex for a few days. About how the series ends with the Volturi still in power, still doing whatever they like in Italy including slaughtering what ought to be a notably huge number of people. How Jacob is going to have sex with Renesmee when she’s seven and ‘fully grown’. But again, Dan Bergstein over at Sparknotes has already done all of that in his brilliantly funny readings of the books, and done the suffering for me.

I have to say, having read his summary of the books chapter by chapter, I’m very very glad that he did it so I didn’t have to, and presented it in such an enjoyable way. Plus once again I can find out about the stupider parts of the books – the absurd last-minute change where it turns out werewolves aren’t really werewolves. Marcus’ hilarious power of seeing relationships. The way she tries to write a bit of action at the end, and has some mist buffet against a love bubble and some snow, with the result that everyone is then convinced Bella was the one who won the ‘war’ for them.

So since I don’t feel the need to talk about that, I only feel the need to talk about the big climax, the one scene that makes the film enjoyable, the one scene that isn’t even in the goddamn books – a huge, gristly battle sequence. To be fair, not to have it there would make this an incredibly dull film, almost as dull as Breaking Dawn part 1. Again because the film was padded out to make enough material for two, this one is drawn out to great length, with only a scene with Bella’s father feeling like it brought any depth to any of the characters. But the fact is that the filmmakers put in a long, bloody battle between superpowered vampires, with some huge werewolves thrown in there. And it’s quite satisfying – annoying Cullens are dispatched, wolves rip off the heads of smug vampires and of course, there at the centre of it is Martin Sheen, always the best thing about these films, having a brilliant time with one of the campest roles it’s possible to have and looking both absurd and awesome doing it. It’s basically a comic book film at this point, not the turgid romance it was before, and it’s fantastic. And yes, like most of the parts of Twilight that are actually good, it’s not in the books.

I’ve now seen every one of these films, and I’m pretty saddened by the fact that such awful, awful books were actually enjoyed by a target demographic that – and I don’t care what an intellectual snob I am to say this – have to be morons to actually think is good plotting or romantic in any way. I don’t mind things I think are crap but have the bare minimum of decent writing make it big – like Harry Potter – but for this to sell so very much is quite distressing. That said, the expensive films were with a couple of exceptions at least amusing, fun and I quite genuinely liked the first one, in an ‘it’s not good but it’s nowhere near terrible’ sort of way – I even preferred it to the Harry Potter films. But that was imagining something better had to happen after the first film…and it didn’t. It got worse and worse and oh so much worse. 

Conclusion: Meyer is teeeerrrrrrible but Hollywood can indeed polish turds - to some extent. 

Skyfall

With every new Daniel Craig film, we get told that it’s a brand new Bond in a gritty post-Bourne world, where modern sensibilities abound and the cartooniness is gone. Well, it’s not. Daniel Craig isn’t a wise-cracking Brosnan with perfect teeth, that’s for sure, but it’s still the same cartoony silliness – and that’s what I liked about Skyfall.

We have Bond surviving things that will kill anyone without even an explanation. We have lots of ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ moments, with computers doing things like launching trains at people and hiding maps in daft 3D rendered mushes of strings. Bad guys come flying in helicopters blaring out ‘Boom Boom’ by John Lee Hooker, but neglect to buy, y’know, missiles for it, which would have wound up his problems right away (though I suppose it can be justified by his desire to look his victim in the eye…though his tactics anyway could have made that impossible quite easily). Of course, we also get the baddie dithering and speechifying when he could have outright completed all his goals if he just got on with it.

But these things are part of Bond, and part of what makes watching Bond fun.

There are attempts to maintain the veneer of having the franchise grow up. Characters talk about pain and tortured pasts, and the whole thing revolves around MI6 being flawed and accountable rather than able to get away with anything. Bond himself is still portrayed as a bit past-it and out of touch. We get a few examples of having cake and eating it – the new Q dismisses silly old gadgets, but we get the retro fun of the old car with machine guns under its headlights; a little aside about Bond not knowing what the rush hour commute is like hints at a desire for him to be more socially conscious, but he really shines swanning about absurdly plush casinos in Macau; the new Moneypenny gives as good as she gets and teases Bond, but she’s still far from a progressive figure.

But expecting a Bond film to suddenly become a lefty fantasy of equality and progress is to wish for a different film altogether. And a good Bond film is a uniquely tasty occasional treat. The last couple had their moments but really missed their marks, especially the extremely forgettable Quantum of Solace. So for all its rebirth theme, this film subtly asserts that sometimes doing it the old way is best, and comes off much better for it.

Oh, and the intro sequence was fantastic, even if I don’t like Adelle undercutting her big notes in that way she does…

Silent Hill 2

The first film wasn’t exactly brilliant, but this one has been even more cruelly panned. Which is fair – this version had its moments, but its main flaw was that it was very, very boring. It dragged and dragged, and when it finally got interesting, it got disappointing.

The way the Silent Hill worlds work means just about anything can happen. Any monstrosity can appear and creep after you. You can find the world shifting to something truly horrific. The first film had some pretty harrowing scenes, like the one in the bathroom, but this one unfortunately gets past the silly jump-scare phase and straight into stupidity. Whose decision it was to make the first significant monster a dumb waxwork dummy-making spider thing that screamed at the screen in daft attempts to use 3D effects was sorely misled on what was going to be scary.

And the trouble is that there just aren’t enough monstrous creatures here. There’s the silly wobbly thing with no arms, that spider, the nurses – whose bit makes them look good but is very ill-conceived – the main baddie and Pyramid Head, who they really awkwardly try to make some kind of antihero. Bunnies with blood on their mouths aren’t terrifying. Silly heads under the grills of the floor aren’t terrifying. Nothing here is terrifying, though Malcolm McDowell gets close a couple of times before he’s turned into a daft monster whose mortal weakness is that someone can daintily remove a magic artefact from a gaping hole in his body. Eventually the main girl gets to the chamber where the final showdown will happen and various Game of Thrones actors are strewn around helplessly, and then basically it turns out that nothing mattered after Malcolm McDowell’s scene, because the same ending would have happened if the girl went there directly.

Short on scares, short on humanity and crucially short on any sort of action or tension that could have kept things interesting, this was a definite dud. 

Insidious

Today’s horror film was recent, promising and full of jumps, but as it developed got increasingly silly by making the crucial mistake of showing its monsters too clearly and too often. 

Candyman

I must say, watching a film that you found enjoyable, modern and creepy in the 90s probably isn’t going to have stood up as well as you expected. I remembered a much more chilling, atmospheric and scary film. Ah well. Still worth revisiting! 

Paranormal Activity 4

Rather like the Saw films, the Paranormal Activity series is the result of taking a very simple first film made on a low budget but with a compelling idea, and spinning it out into more and more films with a more and more convoluted premise. And like the Saw films, even though the sequels all totally lose the vision of that first grim story, some might actually be decent narratives in their own rights. But crucially, where I thought the first Saw was clever in its visceral, realistic and fundamentally quite feasible set-up, Paranormal Activity was a protracted set-up to a single jump, making it ultimately quite dull.

The second film I skipped, which meant I was a little ill-prepared for the backstory here featuring Hunter, though it seems a lot of blanks weren’t filled in anyway. The third was a flashback, and so absurd I found it primarily dull – bereft of atmosphere and good scares – and then at the end absolutely hilarious with its random old ladies in a shed.

This one was another sequel, and actually told a neat little scare story, a kind of modern Poltergeist with the usual gimmick of being recorded by the characters themselves still lingering on and letting the filmmakers save a fortune. Not a lot happens and if you hope the series’ mythology will be advanced, you’re going to be disappointed, but there are some good creepy moments and as ever, it all kicks off at the end, this time in a more effective way than its predecessor. It’s not a good film by any means, but its young leads are likeable, there are moments of good tension – especially with the knife, though I don’t think most of the audience even remembered it was there in the scene it fell – and the usual good cheap jump moments, some of which, like the one with the cat, made for some very funny surprised sounds from the audience.

Other than that, though, I have to say I found myself getting quite annoyed by a lot of people in the theatre. It’s my view that if you have to chatter, joke, shout and groan through the still moments of a horror film meant to build suspense, you’re a big wuss because those are all techniques to build up tension. And however else this film failed, it succeeded at those long, slow moments that get the audience on edge before a scare or a fake-out. But the theatre was full of wusses today, trying to show they weren’t scared in the one way that most clearly signals that they are – the release of their nervous tension by making a lot of comforting noise. The trouble is, the film would have been far, far more enjoyable had they let themselves get worked up and then let it out after the scares. I suppose that doesn’t give the veneer of indifference, which equates to bravery. But of course, it doesn’t. It actually very obviously equates to wanting to distance yourself from the fictional world because you’re finding it too difficult to engage with it. And that was what seemed like half the crowd. Ah well! Such is the experience of seeing a horror film. Most people are wussy!

A throwaway film, then, bringing nothing new to the fold, but doing most of what it did very well. And I loved the Kinect motion dots. 

The Perks of Being a Wallflower – film adaptation

I’m not sure it’s ever been done before. A film where I wish to punch every single speaking character in the whole piece. Or at the very least watch them fail dismally and have their smug illusions shattered.

When I read the book in 2002 or 2003, I hated it. So it was no surprise that I was going to dislike this adaptation, coming in the wake of hipsters becoming a ‘thing’. But I expected to find it enjoyably bad, with its cute cast members trying really, really hard and coming over as adorably useless. In fact, their strong performances were the best thing here – but that only meant the sheer horror of the dialogue and plot came through.

I’m just going to make a list of things that got under my skin. First, the use of mental issues as a tacked-on, glamorous substitute for actual character depth or likeability. Second, the tokenism in the portrayal of the openly gay character, who is an insufferable and insulting caricature. Third, the way a film supposedly about being a calm observer has at a key moment violence solving problems without the obvious US high school consequences. Fourth, the way none of the kids recognised one of Bowie’s most well-known songs, and the prevalence of that most false of posers Morrisey. Fifth, the presentation of the most obvious, godawful books as worthy literature someone of superior taste would enjoy – notably On the Road and Catcher in the Rye. Sixth, making light of serious eating disorders to show edginess. Seventh, also using child abuse, death in the family and homosexuality as further substitutes for character development, and even suggesting them to be glamorous for they make for an appealing fucked-up character. Eighth, drugs making people likeable and silly, and the oh-so-daring juxtaposition of Holy Communion and dropping a tab. Ninth, Emma Watson’s dodgy accent. Tenth, the endless, endless smugness – we’re so alternative; we’re so individualistic even though we do all these clichéd things; we’re going to top universities because we’re effortlessly smart; we’re into all this stuff you’ve probably never heard of even though it all feeds into a stereotype.

Even the things I liked in the book are gone. I recall the observations on Mary Elizabeth as wry, subtle and cutting. Here she is an absurd comedy figure that looks like an apologist inclusion for the people sickened by the left-wing fantasies. Gone was the scene where Charlie actually gets called on how his submissive behaviour is harming those around him who are in vulnerable situations. And of course there can be no attempts at literary pastiche.

I remember the slight shock to the system when I joined bands with this sort of person in it, and realized that I was deluded to think myself left-wing as I was actually only moderately left of centre. And I remember how when it came down to it, these people didn’t lead charmed lives where people notice their awesome qualities and rely on them in their troubled times – they were mostly lonely, unhappy souls who craved a dramatic life and never got it. So they complained, and sought attention, and purposely got into abusive relationships. Or wrote about it. And one in a billion of them managed to get published and even asked to direct film adaptations. Why oh why this resonates with anyone and gets critically acclaimed I cannot comprehend.  

Resident Evil Retribution

Resident Evil seems to have completely lost its way. I don’t just mean these incredibly iffy movie adaptations – I mean the games as well. I played the first one when it was the only one out – importing the NTSC version because PAL regions got a version with big borders and censored cutscenes (though I don’t think eve the US one had the proper zombie introduction CG movie). It was a creepy, atmospheric game with shuffling zombies, claustrophobic fixed cameras and jump-scares, building to an action climax involving a rocket launcher. Now it seems to be running around mowing down hundreds of screaming zombies and ever-more-goofy mutant enemies – all-out action with nothing in the way of horror atmospherics.

And the Hollywood movies are even further removed. I’ve missed…probably 3 of them, from what I can remember, but I don’t think continuity means anything here. In an absurdly silly plot, Milla Jovovich’s Alice character gets captured by Umbrella, and they imprison her in a daft containment facility deep under Siberian ice, in what looks like a recycled Inception set. In a ploy to market their virus as a weapon, Umbrella have recreated Moscow, Tokyo, Shanghai and suburban American in order to simulate what their biohazards can do. Absurdly, they create and use artificial humans based on people like Alice for this, leading to the team picking up a little girl for Ripley-and-Newt-derived substitutions for character motives.

The film is terrible, and knows it. It barely even tries, and for that – it becomes enjoyable. It’s terrible, but it’s good fun to laugh along. Introducing Ada Wong allows for the film’s one interesting development, but poor ole Barry gets the shaft again, and what part of ‘Leon is a prettyboy’ translated to the casting of someone one in our party charitably said looked like Woody Harrelson in The Hunger Games but in my eyes looked like Gary Busey I really don’t know. Jill Valentine being brainwashed is absurd, the cast of The Curse of Fenric dealing with a super-pumped-up adversary was absurd and the final sequence was mainly joyous because I’d been teasing a friend about Wesker all day and whispered ‘Wesker’s the President!!’ moments before he came on and was indeed effectively the president – which I feel no compunction whatsoever about spoiling for anyone who may be reading because it was so very stupid. Fun, yes, but only because it was so stupid.  

Looper – minor spoilers

Looper asks a lot of its audience. It asks them to accept its strong central premise – that in the future, a machine is invented to send things back in time, but outlawed and used only by criminals to send back men they want murdered, which becomes the job of ‘loopers’ in a gritty near-future. It then asks them to believe that someone in that future thinks it’s a good idea to make loopers execute themselves to ‘close the loop’ rather than, y’know, sending them to one of numerous other loopers to do the job as any sensible person would. It then sneaks in the idea of telekinetic mutants, which is a good bit harder to swallow, and by the end presents us with a very muddled sense of time travel, where you have to accept elements of both linear and multi-world possibilities, Back To The Future-style ways for actions in the present to affect a person from the future, and a mind-boggling final scenario in which the only way the mysterious Rainmaker comes into being is if main character Joe goes back in time, but his going back in time sets into motion events that mean there will be no Rainmaker. Part of this is the conception of a time-traveller faced with contradictions from his past self having his memories gradually reshaped – which means that at the end of the film, when Joe has the revelation he does, really there should have been no need to do what he did, and everyone should have just dropped their guns and maybe initiated the awesome adventure of going around in a crime-fighting gang making sure the kid was brought up right. That would definitely have made for a better film that what we got, which was largely two people with a fascinating relationship staying very far away from one another.

Looper isn’t really for picking apart the intricacies of the timelines, though. It’s mostly for enjoying as an action flick, and in that, it mostly works – other than one very far-fetched scene where Bruce Willis takes out an entire crime syndicate by shooting through a doorway at something offscreen – amongst the worst such action shots I’ve ever seen. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is likeable even though his character is so unappealing, which makes the film work, and it’s astonishing that it becomes believable that little Tommy Solomon could grow up to be Bruce Willis. Some moments have Levitt look very odd, like his eyebrows have been badly darkened, but others – especially when he is being interrogated by his boss, or face-to-face with him in the diner – have him look uncannily like Willis. The former may be all angles, hair and the way he holds his face, but the latter looks like some digital manipulation of noses and chins has gone on. Either way, it works far better than I expected.

On a final tangential note, the D-Box moving chairs are hilarious to sit behind. The little synchronised wobbles were funny, but when a series of explosions happened, the chairs did a brilliantly funny synchronised dance together. Distracting but fun!

Dredd

Judge Dredd comics are very hard things to translate to another medium. The overall bleak, nihilistic and yet blackly humorous ‘Ho-hum, let’s just get on with it despite all this violence’ tone needs a lot of contextualising. The previous attempt with Stallone didn’t work at all, but had a campy charm. On the other hand, this one, while it may not have had the horrible matter-of-fact shots of dead bodies going into recyc machines that have endured with me since early childhood, it managed to maintain the tone of bleak hopelessness and casual violence while introducing a perfect little humanising element – the young, sensitive rookie being taken out with Dredd for her first day. It gives the audience someone to empathise with while letting Dredd maintain his icy cool attitude.

The plot, written by The Beach and The Tesseract author Alex Garland, who seems to have given up on novels in favour of scriptwriting, was actually very simple, to the point it felt to me like a half-hour episode of a TV series fleshed out rather than a large-scale movie plot, and honestly I wasn’t at all impressed by the idea at the end, where a device has to transmit a signal rather than what it triggered simply happening when the signal stops, which is what anyone in Mama’s situation would have opted for. Still, the small scale was clearly intentional, to allow for the world to soak in. But I think a bit more of a chance could have been taken expanding the storyline outside its location, perhaps to the justice headquarters or some narcotics refinery outside, just to give more of a sense of scale, even if it meant sacrificing that neat conclusion.

The result is that the film is entertaining and satisfying – and of course very gory – but ultimately doesn’t feel like it’s o much of a scale and thus feels a long way from memorable, which is its main fault. Still, if I’ll remember anything from the film, it’s the beautiful ultra-slow-motion scenes of water droplets – and the chilling ideas the gang members have for using the drug that induces a feeling of time passing incredibly slowly…

The Expendables, then, which was our film for the sort-of party yesterday. I wanted to put on The Expendables in particlar because (a) we could largely ignore it and I knew nothing we put on was going to get watched seriously, and (b) I kinda wanna see the silly sequel so needed to watch the silly first film. No need for a decent review – basically, a bunch of huge names of 80s and 90s action films get together, then Sylvester Stallone, Jet Li, Dolf Lundgren, Jason Statham and Terry Crews (whose ridiculous ‘muscle music’ video for Old Spice I recently had hysterics over) go and overthrow a South American dictatorship with only Stone Cold Steve Austin to stand in their way. Mickey Rourke also turns up as the behind-the-scenes man. They essentially blow a lot of stuff up, fight a lot, have a car chase and win in the end. What more do you need from this action piece?

I was only a little sad it wasn’t the ensemble piece it was set up to be. Stallone was the only big, nostalgic name to be featured throughout. Jet Li was an action star but doesn’t have the stature of the big names that made the project appealing, Statham and Crews are really new to being called ‘stars’ and Dolph Lundgren was always a step below the big, big names. Of those biggest names, it unfortunately turned out that Willis and Schwarzenegger only had the smallest of cameos and even then in a scene with Stallone where they were conspicuously never all sharing the same shot, making me doubt all three were even in the same room at any point. Doing a little Googling, this seems too have been a common observation.

But hey. It’s dumb fun and taken in that context was hilarious. ‘Porn for action fans’ is probably right. It was never meant to be anything but silly and enjoyable, and that’s exactly what it was. And the sequel includes  Van Damme and the remarkably old Chuck Norris. Sign me up!

The Rutles: All You Need is Cash

At last, I got around to watching the original band documentary parody film, the precursor to This is Spinal Tap and another step along the way of reminiscing about The Bonzos. In 1975, Eric Idle of Monty Python and Neil Innes of the Bonzos got together for a sketch parodying the Beatles. The skits made the transitions to Idle’s appearances on Saturday Night Live, and then in 1978 this feature film followed, and despite an iffy start has endured as a bit of a cult classic – though of course, Spinal Tap does pretty much everything this does, but better: by parodying a whole movement rather than an individual band, it’s more affectionate and gets laughs because you know there will be people who actually believe it, and it’s just got bigger laughs. 

All You Need is Cash starts awkwardly, with Eric Idle’s usual trying-too-hard way of trying to inject laughs into straight exposition casting away all possibility of veracity without actually being very funny. The parody of the early Beatles are obvious and predictable, though the music – aping a general style rather than individual songs – are clever. Fortunately, it gets a lot better as it goes on, with big laughs in the reporter’s trip to New Orleans, Dirk’s highly awkward marriage and the brilliant scene where George Harrison (as an interviewer) asks Michael Palin (as the Rutle Corp.’s spokesperson) about problems with people stealing things while an increasingly outlandish succession of items is wheeled out behind them. There are brilliant moments in the interviews with Mick Jagger and great little cameos from Ron Wood, Roger McGough and the biggest names from SNL – Aykroyd, Belushi and Murray. It also has a brilliant parody of the Yellow Submarine animation and expertly skewers the Maharishi in a surreal way. I also had a fit of giggles to the ‘Ouch!’ video, even though it was the lowest and most politically incorrect form of humour. Neil Innes’ Lennon impression also develops into a thing of great brilliance, both in his spoken impression (like the shower sit-in) and especially in the music – ‘Cheese and Onions’ is a marvel of pinpoint accuracy.

While it’s great that it was released early enough that John Lennon could appreciate it and fixed on what were relatively recent events, I had to cringe at how it treated Brian Epstein, no matter how vilified he has been. I know over a decade is much too long to cry ‘too soon!’ but the humour aimed at him went from gentle teasing – the awkward interview where it was suggested all he liked about the Beatles was how tight their trousers were – to jibes at his being Jewish (his book here being ‘A Cellar Full of Goys’), but mostly I didn’t like the humour extracted from the Rutles’ awkward reaction to his death (or, here, his moving to Australia). It all seemed too cruel to be amusing.

Overall, though, I feel like All You Need is Cash is under-appreciated. It’s not as good as Spinal Tap, but almost everyone who loves that film would really enjoy this one, too. But it seems to me it doesn’t get much of a look in. And that’s a shame. 

Batman: The Dark Knight Rises

Though it never reaches the same heights as the first two films in Nolan’s reimagined Batman series, overall it was a more cohesive film, with fewer negative points as well – it was never as impressive as the first film’s delivery of a new, grittier flavour, nor as thrillingly strange as the second, but it was also solid and entertaining throughout, despite a slow start.

What’s really remarkable is that despite the costumes and exaggerated combat, this isn’t really a comic book film like Thor or the new Superman. It’s actually much more like an exaggerated spy film about terrorists, one of the recent Bond flicks or a Bourne film, which despite the lack of masks have similar action and exaggerated combat despite the ostensible realism.

But indeed, while one of the best things about the re-envisioned Joker of the second film was that he used Guerrilla tactics, here what made Bane’s story so fascinating was that it was set up like a large-scale bit of terrorism: this Bane isn’t a Venom-pumped, leotard-wearing merc in a mask that recalls Mexican wrestlers, but a formidable leader of an extremist faction quite willing to die for him, using the media to his advantage and spouting anarchic ideals – though lying about them.

And then the emotional heart of the film – working somewhat less well – is Bruce Wayne’s struggle to find meaning in his life without Batman, which is ultimately fruitless. What does ensue, however, is some very memorable imagery about rehabilitation and climbing out of a desperate prison, some incredible scenes of street combat and a clash between Batman and a huge but eloquent, persuasive and supremely confident man.

The film throws up a huge number of questions, none of which it cares to answer – which I rather liked. Is it a critique of anarchy? Are the disgusting, corrupt businessmen in the right here or the violent criminals who overthrow them – or are both repulsive? Is fear really what makes you strong? Is the hidden antagonist really dead? Is the little parting stinger with Joseph Gordon-Levitt – hooray for a superb career trajectory for cute lil’ Tommy – going to signify anything more (I doubt it, as this is a very neat end to a trilogy, but it would be nice, and I feel silly for forgetting the possibility has occurred to me in the trailers, only to forget it until Batman’s line about a mask, very shortly before the reveal)? Is too much technology always going to be weaponised for terror? And should thieves, vigilantes, lying officials and the super-rich always be applauded as long as they end up sacrificing themselves for what is good?

And does the fact that really, the only way Batman could have got out of that last predicament was with the help of Superman hint at a Justice League film to mirror the Avengers success? Haha – no hope of that!

There was much else to smile about in this film – an excellent new Catwoman, some superb scenes with Michael Caine, visceral action scenes and an amusing oblique reference to Killer Croc – though in truth it just lacked enough iconic imagery to really endure. Still, it’s part of what may be the great apex of superhero films, and I’d rather see it again than the lauded The Avengers, even if the new Spiderman was more entertaining and heartfelt than either.

If anything, what I hope for now is more DC properties to be tapped. Superman gets his new film next year, which may or may not be gritty and severe, but it’s really the wider universe I’d like to see tapped. Not necessarily The Flash, arguably the obvious choice, or Dr Strange, who apparently is likely to get the big screen treatment soon, but ones less often seen onscreen.

Actually, the truth is I’d love to see a Captain Marvel film with Freddie and lots of Elvis references. Unlikely, I know, but hey – if Ant Man can get a big-screen adaptation, The Big Red Cheese certainly should be able to! 

Batman Begins: http://adzfilm.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/batman-begins.html

The Dark Knight: http://adzfilm.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/batman-dark-knight.html

The Amazing Spider-Man

Watched The Amazing Spider-Man, the franchise’s reboot with Andrew Garfield instead of Tobey Maguire. It’s been criticised as unnecessary, but reboots are fashionable and it was certainly a different enough angle from the other series to work. It was also by far the best of the bunch, and Garfield is a far, far better Parker than Maguire, if a little too old to play him as a teen. He’s likeable even when he’s making terrible choices or being a jerk, can pull off both the vulnerable geeky Parker and the wise-cracking Spiderman, and fills out that costume very nicely with his skinny but muscular frame. All can agree he’s cute.

This version of the story has Parker very much searching for the truth about his father despite how lovely Uncle Ben and Aunt May are. It actually makes for a much neater storyline, because it means that the superhero’s rise and the appearance of the supervillain are linked rather than coincidental. The main story opens with that familiar staple of Western culture: how utterly horrific the American high school experience must be, with good ole Flash in bully mode again. The radioactive spider bite comes from Oscorp labs, where Peter is looking for information about his father, which is better than just going on a school trip. The radioactive spiders are also the source of his webbing, which is another way the story is neatened.

Spider Man doesn’t yet love Mary Jane, so here we get Gwen Stacy instead (no ‘oh snap’ jokes, please). George Stacy is given an interesting role as a father who is at first combative and scary, but is won over and eventually provides some of the most significant emotional points of the film after what happens to Uncle Ben – also meaning there is no need for a JJJ yet. Meanwhile, the antagonist is Curt Connors, here given an extra link to Parker’s past, and a potentially goofy villain made mostly believable and compelling. Everything has just been written in a much tighter and slicker way – Parker has just the right balance of being a selfish teenage jerk at the start (forgetting his obligations, disobeying teachers, picking fights) and being full of remorse later on, as well as revelling in being behind a mask. The plot is generally very tight, with only one real objection from me (Connors comes up with a master plan, but decides to go after Parker at his school first, allowing him the lead he needs to find him and clues to his plan), and Garfield’s charm really helps with a character difficult to get just right.

I’m glad The Social Network seems to have propelled him to major stardom. I’m actually looking forward to the sequels more than to any continuation of the Avengers storylines except perhaps Iron Man. Who was the shadowy figure in the stinger?

Men in Black 3

It seemed a pretty odd idea to finish this trilogy after a gap of ten years – 15 since the original. Apart from marvelling at how little Will Smith has aged, it mostly made fans and newcomers alike think…what’s the point? Why now, rather than in 2006?

This third part in many ways felt superfluous and certainly never reaches the heights of the original film, but it was entertaining, well-crafted and had some really amusing moments as well as fine performances.

When a formidable criminal Boglodyte known as Boris the Animal escapes from his lunar prison, he has one aim in sight – go back in time, kill Agent K and thus stop the chain of events that leads him to being locked away. He accomplishes this, but only Agent J remembers the true timeline, and as plot contrivance teaches us is inevitable, Boris never having been locked up means he can lead an invasion fleet to Earth which just so happens to arrive at the time a few hours after he went back to change things, so Agent J has to go back to prevent this future from ever happening.

Off he goes, to 1969, leading to lots of amusing jokes about how much worse racial discrimination was then, and how the crazy pop culture of the time was influenced by aliens – and undercover agents. Though the Warhol gag would have worked better without the feeling of repetition having seen Lady Gaga listed as an alien earlier. He finds the younger K, brilliantly played by Josh Brolin (who I’d seen before as the bad guy in True Grit but didn’t recognise), so further amusing hijinks happen as a man from the future tries to make his story believable. They set out investigating, finally finding the psychic alien Griffin, played in a sweet, winsome way by Michael Stuhlbarg, who I knew I had seen in something before but never would have been able to recall was the kindly, Jewish-looking film historian in Hugo. Griffin’s ability to see myriad possible futures, as well as being in possession of an important anti-invasion device, make him a bit of a cheap plot device, but he moves things along and soon Boris and the Agents meet for a showdown – with a very iconic event as backdrop.

Meanwhile, we can find out a bit more about Agent K, giving him a bit more humanity with the love interest of Agent O (older version played with just the right amount of staid eccentricity by Emma Thompson), and even about Agent J’s past through a rather contrived and mawkish twist.

The film feels mostly pretty inconsequential, and suffers from how Rip Torn’s character’s being written out and the non-appearance of the talking pug feel like actors just refusing to reprise their roles, but it is still perfectly entertaining, and the cast, old and new, look like they’re having an extremely good time. Boris, played by one of the Flight of the Concord guys in a way that makes him seem much older and larger, is exuberant, the Agent Ks are believably the same people, and crucially despite being an old, very rich Scientologist who has pushed his kids into the limelight and who didn’t even provide one of his cheesy raps for this film, Will Smith remains very likeable indeed.

Nobody ought to expect a masterpiece from this film. Don’t even expect something that matches up to the first film (though it’s as good as the very forgettable MIBII). But catch it if you can – I’m glad I did, even if only days from the end of its run.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Like so many of these very silly ideas, this was a fun concept and had some big laughs towards the beginning, but then had to actually string it out into a full feature with a satisfying ending and actually got rather dull towards the end.

The title is brilliant, and it’s certainly what it says on the tin. After kicking off in very obviously comic book style, dispensing with details like his sister and his step-mother, we see Lincoln seeking revenge for his mother’s death with a pistol. The firearm goes wrong, but eventually the young Lincoln manages to make it go off and bewilderingly the pellet both lodges in the other man’s eye and kills him – maybe it ricocheted back from the back of his skull! Such things do not need to be overthought.

The man of course comes back to life and Lincoln is saved only by another man – a man who hunts vampires. Lincoln learns his craft, starting from an incredibly comic book scene where he channels his anger through his axe-blows, and soon the future president is a supernaturally gifted vampire hunter.

Balancing living an anonymous life hunting the dead in the southern States with the beginnings of a political career, Lincoln also finds love. However, when he finally takes out the vampire he wanted revenge upon, he provokes the ire of the head vampire, and things must inevitably come to a head – against the background of the confederates taking up arms and the American Civil War beginning.

Don’t look here for a politically correct film. It’s not. It won’t pass feminist tests about whether women speak to one another. It’s horribly insensitive about race, with the slaves literally treated as food, plenty of tokenism and – even if spoken by the antagonist – lines equating slavery of human beings to other, more trivial forms of slavery that nobody argues against. It’s certainly disrespectful to the dead, who after all died less than two hundred years ago, especially when it came to portraying those fighting for the South as being allied with bloodsucking vampires. But it’s all a ridiculous film about Lincoln hunting vampires with an axe, so who cares?

The problem is that it doesn’t fully embrace its daftness. This needed to go into camp excess, to be a 300 or a Sin City. It needed absurd amounts of style and silliness. Instead, it plays it as a straight comic book horror film, and so by the time there’s a big confrontation on a train, it’s much too serious – and even the amusing way it makes a fork an image of great importance can’t save it from getting dull enough I almost nodded off.

Strong performances from Benjamin Walker, the ubiquitous Dominic Cooper (here doing a simple, cool performance, which suits him best) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead – the girl from Scott Pilgrim – help carry things along, but ultimately it needed a stronger script and more style. Or at least even more silliness. Because the last thing I expected this to be was dull.

The second misfire with Tim Burton’s name attached (even if not as director) in the last couple of months. Still, it’s piqued my interest for Spielberg’s Lincoln. 

Prometheus

Though there was always a tiny glimmer of doubt, nobody I knew really went into Prometheus thinking it was anything other than an Alien prequel. We’d seen that the story of the so-called ‘Space Jockey’ would finally get filled in – as a long-time fan of the franchise, I’ve long been aware of the weirdness of that one scene in Alien where a huge fossilised humanoid sits in a navigation chair, long dead, but is never mentioned again. Essentially its presence was one of the larger HR Giger fingerprints on the property – he drew the Space Jockey as one of the pieces of concept art he supplied for the first film, and it was duly realised. But the continuation of the Alien story didn’t need any more information about the dead extra-terrestrial; he was left a mystery and his people occasionally showed up in the extended non-canon universe as elephant-headed things. And that was where Prometheus came in. Set only a couple of decades before Alien and only at the end of this century, it tells the story of the space explorers who follow the signs left in ancient artworks to find a buried alien ship. Where, of course, they set loose something they soon wish they hadn’t.

There’s a purposeful simplicity here, as the story very much follows the Alien template, a template that isn’t exactly exclusive to Ridley Scott films. A crew full of broad, recognisable characters goes to investigate the mysterious artefacts, awaken unpleasant things and end up getting killed first in scenes full of suspense and then later in heart-racing action sequences. It’s simple, predictable and expedient. But it works just fine. The film is a good, satisfying sci-fi horror story and has an interesting enough cast (headed by the young Magneto from the newest X-Men film as an awesome artificial human who only falls a little short of being as cool as Bishop and the girl from Sherlock Holmes as the newest Ripley): it’s fun to watch and ticks the right ‘scary’ boxes too.

It has two glaring faults, though. Firstly, there is absolutely no way that Guy Pearce should have played the old man, because he doesn’t look like an old man. He looks like a young man in heavy makeup. Even if you choose to believe Ridley Scott was subverting expectations by making his audience believe Pearce would have his youth restored, that doesn’t stop it being a terrible decision – it always jerks the viewer out of the suspension of disbelief and will make the film look dated much sooner than it ought to. Secondly, there are just too many different types of aliens, and ways aliens could affect people: in the original, you have the perfectly reasonable life-cycle of egg, face-hugger, chest-bursting parasite, full-grown alien. It’s all believably one creature. Arguably you can add the Space Jockey to that. This film has the alien of the final reveal, the Space Jockey race, a black liquid that is apparently alive and when drunk turns into an eye-worm and then makes a person into a space zombie, a squiggly worm with acid blood that spontaneously appears from the black liquid in larger quantities/is made from it - and a monster octopus-foetus precursor of the face-hugger. Apart from the Space Jockey guys, they all appear as a result of the weaponised liquid cargo – but the qualities are just too disparate and unrelated for this to work well. The Space Jockeys are also rather hard to understand here, with a bewildering opening sequence in which one of them drinks a black liquid that is presumably different from that of the weaponised cargo, which breaks him down to a molecular level – and it’s not clear whether this is (a) on Earth, kick-starting the human race as is hinted – which leads to us asking why the jockey sacrificed himself for that end and why they stayed in close contact with humanity for millennia in order to appear in cave paintings but then disappeared and turned hostile, or (b) on another planet, possibly setting loose the weapon and causing an exodus/bringing the Xenomorphs into being. Prometheus makes it clear it needs direct sequels.

There is also quite a bit of awkwardness in the last act when most of the cast needs to be culled. One pilot would be quite enough; two of them going ‘You’ll need all the help you can get’ seemed pretty unlikely. And as for the girl who spent a good minute running around only to get squished, failing to just roll sideways, that was truly lame and she could easily have been dispatched in the next few minutes if it was really considered necessary.

For all these flaws, though, the film overall was very entertaining, had great 3D (especially on the huge Sky Screen) and good performances. Well worth a watch – if not up there with the first two films in the franchise. 

The Dictator

I was of the opinion that Sasha Baron Cohen’s glory days were over and that he was going to settle into a long, happy career doing eccentric bit-parts like those in Sweeney Todd and Hugo. But no, he still has the oomph to carry a film on his own, and it’s considerably better than Ali G in da House. He may have got progressively less original since the days of The Eleven O’Clock Show, but he’s still a very funny man. I had my doubts when I saw the posters of this film and read the plot summary, but the trailers made me think it would actually be worth seeing.

And it was. It was very, very funny. It may not have been very fresh, and the whiff of South Park and Team America was all over it – from the throwaway gags pushing the boundaries of taste to the moment where the whole film is glibly made to look like a sweeping political statement on America – but I still watch South Park and huge originality isn’t exactly necessary for something to be incredibly funny.

Baron-Cohen skewers everyone here, not just absurd dictatorships. Much of the comedy is fish-out-of-water humour about the dictator going unrecognised in New York, which allows not only extremist states to be a target of comedy, but silly idealist lefties. There are some brilliant comedy moments, not all of which were given away by the trailers, and the script sensibly allows for a human element, pathos and love – even if only to subvert it.

The bottom line is that Baron-Cohen remains funny. He may become less so soon – but for now he remains well worth the price of admission. 

Dark Shadows

I was not particularly looking forward to seeing this film. The concept seemed trite and the humour in the trailer was painfully unfunny. I have never seen the cult soap opera, which apparently didn’t introduce any supernatural elements for the first six months of its run, so came without any nostalgic feelings there, and had even forgotten about its existence until friends suggested we went to see it.

So I had low expectations – and it’s likely for that reason I didn’t find the film too abhorrent. I would not say it was good, but it was nowhere near as terrible as many have made out – it was mediocre to adequate, worth a single watch, but never made it to the territory of ‘good’. It was very much like late-80s Burton, but without the idiosyncratic spark. In short, it felt like an inadequate attempt to emulate rather than what it could have been – quintessential Burton.

The basic plot is that a rich young man named Barnabus Collins is cursed by a jealous witch to be a vampire. When she still cannot win his love after murdering his lover (funny that), she locks him in a coffin for almost 200 years, until he is finally dug up in the 70s. Emerging as the classic blood-sucking, pale, undying, burning-in-sunlight, pointy-toothed vampire, he joins his descendants without fitting in. He doesn’t have the winsome, awkward charm of an Edward Scissorhands, though, rather taking charge of the family business and trying to improve the lives of the children. Of course, the rival company who has forced the Collins into near-ruin is run by the witch, and things soon come to a head. Throw in every woman in the piece falling for Barnabus, additional complications from vampires and ghosts and a gig by Alice Cooper and you have a very, very campy vampire story. If the set-up of a very strange supernatural personality forcing his way in amongst a family sounds very Beetlejuice, though, it’s unfortunately never as crazy nor as funny – though the humour is certainly a lot better than it looked to be in the trailer: with context, the jokes are much more amusing and less obvious.

The two main strengths of the film are its aesthetic – genuinely beautiful most of the time, and hilariously schlocky most of the rest – and its cast. Of course Depp and Bonham-Carter are present and correct, doing their usual job of overacting in the right place, but there are more interesting choices: Michelle Pfeiffer’s transition from beauty to matriarch is to be taken more seriously after this, and Eva Green from The Golden Compass was compelling in the over-the-top role. Misfires, though, were Christopher Lee in a vampire film cameo that felt very lazy indeed (especially as he didn’t even use an American accent) and the girl from Kick-Ass and Hugo as a two-dimensional grumpy teen. That said, her presence led to some of the film’s bigger laughs. Her final reveal would have been better left out of the script, though, especially as it was part of a particularly soulless CG-fest that made me long for the more inventive effects of Beetlejuice.

The humour can only go so far, though, and the end all gets wrapped up a bit too glibly – so after admitting to his numerous murders, what can Barnubus do now with his new partner for all time? But this film is a superficial and silly one, and works best considered that way. The trouble is that a Tim Burton film used to mean campy, silly, supernatural – but also fantastic. Sadly, that hasn’t quite been the case for a long while. I haven’t wholeheartedly enjoyed a Tim Burton film since Big Fish, and even that was no critical darling. I think it’s time for him to do another Ed Wood. Another clever and intimate film to make him respected again. That or get Neil Gaiman to write him a script.

The Avengers / Marvel’s Avengers Assemble

Happily, this is the only thing Joss Whedon has done that I've really enjoyed. Well, except for that one episode of Firefly where Jayne is seen as done sort of God. Despite an unnecessarily slow first two acts, the payoff was well with it, and though it was really the bare minimum I'd expect from an Avengers feature,

The key is probably that Whedon only directed rather than writing the full script – he tweaked, but he didn’t come up with the concept or the larger part of the dialogue. So we don’t have to put up with his trademark smugness, largely consisting of him using genre tropes and then sneering at them or nudge-nudge-wink-wink laughing at them as if beneath him – and calling it irony. Instead we get his genuinely funny glib one-liners deflating action scenes in just the right way, and a respectful treatment of a property he clearly loves. 

The story is basic, which is necessary for the complex task of bringing so many characters who already have full-movie backstories together. The Avengers featured in the film are showcased – Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye and Black Widow. We also see the antagonist, and his simplistic comic book plan – Thor’s brother Loki means to use the Tesseract to bring a huge army of aliens to Earth and conquer all, the idea being that they will then crown him. So Nick Fury has to get all the prickly superheroes together in one place – gathering them and having them all learn to cooperate forms the bulk of the fairly dull first two thirds of the film. Then Loki fools the lot of them, puts them in disarray and takes the tesseract. From then on, things get fun – the Avengers work together to stop a full-blown alien invasion, including fun flying dragon-eel-turtle things on a massive scale. Iron Man has a moment to prove his mettle – do ho ho! – and then we get a typical teaser for the next film.

Much to my surprise, given that he’s my least favourite member of the team most of the time, and despite the fact it’s inadequately explained why he decides the rest are his allies, the real star emerges as The Hulk. I had never seen the guy they cast as Banner before but he was perfect, much more so than I imagine Ed Norton would have been, and ultimately, having him onscreen with Thor allows for Whedon’s humour to shine through, as an Asgardian god is one of the few characters you can believably have engaged in slapstick scenes with The Hulk without being reduced to a red smear on the ground. And his scene very close to the end was one of the best in cinema history, no doubt about it.

Thin on plot and slow to start with, it was nonetheless what an Avengers film should have been. The personalities were well-balanced, with straight-laced Cap and swaggering Stark sparking off one another brilliantly without getting to dominate, the Black Widow far from a peripheral extra, each character being admirably human – and SHIELD giving the kiddies the lesson that they ought to question authority figures at all times, it may not have blown away my expectations, but it certain exceeded them. 

Cabin in the Woods

I didn’t know anything about this film before I went to see it, apart from that it was horror. My companion told me as we went in that it was also meant to be funny, which I thought to be no bad thing. If I’d known beforehand, though, that it a new work from Joss Whedon and one of his Buffy writing partners, I would have hesitated. That said, Drew Goddard’s writing on Cloverfield hadn’t overly annoyed me, and there were episodes of Firefly that…I didn’t mind.

And this film had all the fingerprints of Buffy on it. That same smugness, the attitude of ‘look, here’s a lame cliché, ugh, we’re so above it – we’re postmodern now, and we show you the conventions of this genre in an ironic way, you know… though ultimately we just end up totally relying on them anyway’. I really can’t stand it – it made me dislike Buffy, dislike Angel, dislike Runaways and worry about The Avengers. And it made me dislike the bulk of this film – until the last 20 minutes, where all hell breaks loose and the rest is gratuitous silliness and fun with lots of references to other horror films – my favourite being Hellraiser.

The rest of the film, though, was very reminiscent of Buffy, only with more ‘ironic’ blood and boobs and tired stoner jokes. Watch for the last twenty minutes of fun, by all means, but if you have the same attitude to Whedon and co as I do, steer clear. 

The Hunger Games

When I saw Battle Royale some ten years ago, I remember thinking it was a bit brainless and unoriginal, but still compelling. Perhaps a part of it was seeing The Running Man when I was still small enough to have a babysitter – I remember that because he was the one who brought the tape, with Fatal Attraction right after it, and for whatever reason the cartoony ultraviolence of The Running Man was deemed appropriate to show six-year-old me, while bunnies getting boiled was not. And then The Hunger Games came out, and one of the most common comments soon became that it was a rip-off of one or the other of these properties. A popular image going around the net right now is a riff on a line from Pulp Fiction: ‘What do they call The Hunger Games in Europe?’ ‘Battle Royale with Cheese’.

And the premise is the same: a bunch of kids are against their will sent to a wilderness, given weapons and told they must all kill one another until only one person remains. The backstory is different: in The Hunger Games it’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi, in which an oppressive state demands the fighting happens so that smaller societies who once rose in rebellion remember their place, while Battle Royale has a more satirical note, being based on the question of how to discipline children who are losing their respect for authority. This is the slight difference in the dynamic – the kids of The Hunger Games are blameless and innocent, but perhaps less identifiable as they’re from an imagined society. Those of Battle Royale are supposed to be responsible for their own fates because of delinquent behaviour – although of course innocents are involved there as well, so much of the same impact through indignation can be found.

That the story has been told before is not a big issue for me, though. I don’t mind seeing the same story in a different way. A lot of the media I consume is very derivative, and that’s fine – more important are characters, settings, relationships and the philosophical questions raised. And the fact is that the reason I disliked The Hunger Games boiled down to these.

Firstly, the film was very protracted and dull. The games themselves don’t start until what must have been well over an hour into the film. Up until that point, there’s a little tension as participants are chosen, as they get to make their first impressions and as they check out the opposition, but all of it could have been just as effective at half the length. Then the games start and while there’s quite a bit of action, what follows is disappointment after disappointment. Every single time, without fail, that there is a chance for an interesting scenario, the writing takes the easy way out. Catniss is developing maternal feelings for a young girl who saved her life? Great – what will happen when they’re the last ones left? Nope, no dilemma needs to happen because some random kills the girl. How will she survive now that she’s badly wounded? Oh, here comes a magic potion that heals her – something pretty much none of the other characters are seen getting. She’s been saved by one guy – what will happen when she meets him again? Oh, he’s been savaged by CG beasts. The rules have changed so that two winners can be declared? Oh, they’re bound to rescind that – oh, but now they have, there’s an absurd way to force an ending. At no point does it feel like characters are genuinely in fear for their lives and there’s always a cartoon solution to Catniss’ problems, and the way she pretty much never kills anyone but they manage to get killed by something peripheral so that her hands are kept clean gets really, really far-fetched.

The details are clumsy, too. There’s a tense moment where she thinks her partner has been killed, but it’s someone else, so why hasn’t her face appeared up in the sky like everyone else’s did when they died? If the trained killer boy has the element of surprise, why on earth doesn’t he carefully kill his rivals at the end? Oh, because he’s gone a bit nutty, of course. It all feels lazy and I didn’t care about a single one of the characters, except for basic ‘awww’ protective urges about the small kid for the few minutes she was onscreen. In general, Battle Royale presents far more interesting psychological dilemmas and gives a more believable version of what would happen when young people think it’s kill or be killed.

And the filmmaking was horrible, too. The one chapter of the book I read (and I no longer feel any need to read any more) had the prose style annoy me – it seemed to be drawing attention to itself by trying to be clever and elegant but failing, by trying to make its character perceptive and formidable but only making her seem arrogant and detached. While I didn’t dislike the Catniss of the film nearly so much as the book’s narrator, it seemed to me the horribly annoying filmmaking techniques were a brilliant way of mirroring the bad writing: every time there was action, the camera shook in the most absurd way, and even worse, anything vaguely creepy, unsettling or requiring a bit of anxiety had to be reflected by extreme close-ups, very tight framing and fast cuts. It all had a very Brechtian distancing effect, making it impossible to forget this was just a film and generally making the whole thing seem even more shallow than it was.

It seems a successful franchise and I don’t doubt there will be more. It makes me very, very sad that this film will likely be a successful series where His Dark Materials floundered and failed after its first film, though…

The Iron Lady

The consensus, from the reviews I’ve read, seems to be that The Iron Lady is a mediocre film with a stunning performance at its centre from Meryl Streep. I’d say that was fair – though to be honest, I don’t think the plot could ever please everyone. If it condemned Thatcher, it would be called a leftist fantasy and a distortion. If it painted her as saintly, it would get torn apart by all those who recall just how divisive Thatcher was. And sitting in the middle as it does, focusing on her Alzheimer’s and trying to project a balanced view, it gets decried for fence-sitting and having nothing to say.

I’m just about old enough to remember Thatcherite Britain, though more of my childhood memories come from the period when John Major was in power. My parents were comfortably middle-class and reaped some of the benefits of Thatcherism, so my early childhood was comfortable, brightly-coloured and joyful, one I will consider a kind of ideal just before the age of the Internet forever changed what it was like to be a kid, and which I hope I’ll live long enough to see painted as a kind of Utopia in films. But while we were comfortable in the 80s boom, my Dad was always left-leaning, had purposely chosen to work in an area with little wealth so that he was in low-income houses every day and was originally from a working-class background. While we had a strict – and pretty early – bedtime, one thing we were allowed to watch as a family despite all the vulgarity and swearing was Spitting Image, the satirical puppet show. So I grew up knowing at least through the lens of satire who the people in this film were – Thatcher herself, and Hurd and Heseltine and Howe. Thatcher was to me what she was on Spitting Image – a schoolmarm tightly controlling a cabinet of unintelligent man-children, who relieved herself in a urinal, heard the advice of Hitler in hiding and thought his ideas quite brilliant and of course, in that famous sketch that according to Ian Hislop now gets repeated by ex-cabinet members as though it really happened, answered the waiter’s ‘What about the vegetables?’ with ‘Oh, they’ll have the same as me.’

Here, though, is something of a humanised Thatcher. The most interesting part, sadly all but skipped through, is how she went from being laughed at as a woman in a man’s world with no hope of election to being elected as an MP, rising up to become education secretary and finally Prime Minister. This is a fascinating success story that sadly, while represented, is a disjointed series of flashbacks, which seems to me a wasted opportunity. Four major elements of Thatcher’s tenure follow: the contrast between increased wealth for the UK while unemployment also skyrocketed; the breaking of the unions; the conflict in the Falklands with Thatcher’s excellent counter to why we should go to war over land most in the country don’t even care about and which is thousands of miles away – that on those grounds it is just like Hawaii for the US; and the poll tax, perhaps Thatcher’s biggest mistake and here shows as almost a direct cause for her party turning against her.

The very idea of a film about Thatcher struck me as absurd, but the more I thought about it, the more curious I became, and when Streep won the Golden Globe and is now hotly tipped for an Oscar, I knew that it would be a film worth seeing. Personally, I neither loathe Thatcher nor worship her. She was a strong leader at a time the country needed one. The Unions may not have needed breaking, but big changes had to happen and it’s uncertain whether or not they could be implemented any other way. The Falklands were justifiable but certainly more could have been done diplomatically – though it’s very likely without military response Argentina would not have budged. And the poll tax was always utterly absurd.

But Thatcherism is where Britain totally changed, including in the backlash against Britain. As the first scene with Thatcher buying some milk covertly makes plain, Britain today is almost nothing like the Britain Thatcher grew up in, and it’s only the coming decades that can show us whether or not that is for good or ill. Had Thatcher been in power longer, would we have almost no industry today outside pharmaceuticals? Without her, would we have far better exports today and not rely so much on banking? Would immigration and the EU be different? We don’t ask these questions of John Major.

Because I wanted neither an evisceration nor a deification, I don’t mind the presentation of Thatcher’s life. But what I did not like was the bulk of the film being given over to Alzheimer’s – the part that will likely win Streep the Oscar. It’s pure pandering to the Academy and the shadow of Iris is everywhere – after all, Dench really ought to have won the Oscar Halle Berry got in what I still feel was uncomfortably tokenism, and Jim Broadbent, playing a similar role to the one he plays here, won Best Supporting Actor for it. It seems cruel to portray a woman still alive as hallucinating her dead husband all the time, and seemed to me a very simple-minded portrayal of Alzheimer’s. It allowed for strong performances, yes, but for me the balance was all off and I couldn’t help thinking of all those satirical ‘how to win the Oscar’ comics and cartoons.

So yes, I agree with the verdict that this is a mediocre film centred on a strong performance – but perhaps my reasons for finding it mediocre are different from others’. Oh, and I don’t know why Anthony Head seemed to be impersonating not Geoffrey Howe but my Uncle Ray, but it really tickled me.