Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

I never liked the Turtles much as a kid, though I watched the show. I couldn’t stand their catchphrases and annoying cocky attitudes. But then, teenagers were a lot older than I was – pretty much adults – and I didn’t see that they were meant to be goofy. I just saw them as overconfident and irritating.

The first live-action films were also pretty bad, but that’s mostly to do with the fact that they were just outright poorly-made, poorly-written and poorly-acted. So what about this one? With the big ugly new designs and attempts to make the concept a little more serious and gritty for the Dark Knight generation?

Well, actually, it works. Of course, it’s a stupid, stupid film, but then, it’s a stupid, stupid concept and that’s part of the charm of it. It’s the story of four pizza-loving ninja turtles living in a sewer with a giant rat fighting a weird samurai guy in New York. It’s inherently stupid. But this film actually does something quite impressive, which is to embrace that stupidity, include lots of pop-culture references and comedy and dumbness, and yet deliver it seriously and sincerely. Thus, while of course it remains a stupid, brainless popcorn action flick, it’s a likeable and enjoyable one.

The film tells the story in a slightly new way, tying things up in a way that goes a little beyond coincidence. When New York is terrorised by the Foot Gang, headed by Shredder, puff-piece news reporter April O’Neil discovers that some vigilantes have been fighting back. Investigating them further, she discovers that they are the Ninja Turtles, and after a little more investigation, realises that by sheer coincidence, they are the very turtles her own father had created before he died in suspicious circumstances. She goes to her father’s old lab partner to confirm her suspicions, now a rich and powerful man, but of course he is not to be trusted. Though it has taken some ridiculous coincidences to get this far, the rest unfolds quite neatly, with April’s revelation having set the rest of the film’s action into motion, and after Shredder’s attack on the turtles’ lair establishes the ticking bomb, the Turtles have to spring to action to rescue the city, with the help of April and her creepy but somewhat amusing cameraman. It kinda works, though the bad guy’s motive to get more rich stumbles over itself in an attempt to have a clever, modern false flag twist, which doesn’t work because...well, the guy’s already super-rich.

The turtles are not detestable. Perhaps they never were. They are actually effectively characterized as a bunch of kids, quite out-of-keeping with their hulking forms. Michelangelo has always been goofy, but here has enough self-effacing and idiotic humour for things to work, Donatello is a bit more of a geek but also a bit more of a rounded character, Raphael is the powerhouse of the team but has a weak, vulnerable side, and Leonardo is the boring leader as usual. Shredder is actually formidable this time – though it was a mistake to cast an American-born Japanese actor instead of an actual Japanese one, because his accent speaking Japanese is really bad. I know that their being huge and scary-looking has put a lot of people off, and maybe gets in the way of them coming over as teenagers, but the writing is actually pretty good.

Overall, bad film, but fun, and better than expected. If someone can explain why Splinter has an accent, I’d like to know!

Dracula Untold

The original plan was to see the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, but since one of our party couldn’t make it we decided to leave that for next time and see something else. There were no convenient showings of The Maze Runner, so we opted for this. Went in expecting cheesy dreck, and that’s what we got, so no complaints here.

Dracula Untold is basically taking the now-familiar premise of Wicked and Maleficent and applying it to a gothic horror character rather than a fairy tale bad guy. We see Dracula’s origin story, and why he’s not such a bad sort after all. The main problems with this is that in going back to Stoker’s origin for his name, the film goes for the rather more problematic option of attempting to rehabilitate Vlad the Impaler, and disappointingly totally ignores the Victorian setting of the novel.

So we get a story set in the time of Vlad Tepes, mid 15^th-century Wallachia. Historical accuracy is dispensed with: Vlad’s brother disappears, as do all the warlords’ various allies and armies, so that essentially Romania is one fortified city and a monastery. The nasty bullying Turks of the Ottoman Empire hold uncontested dominion over the region, but when Vlad was a child, his father gave him up to be trained into a mindless killing machine, a fanciful version of the political hostage situation of history. Vlad became a nasty killer, murdering a whole village, but has now settled down to become a likeable family man – but here is the first big problem of the film. It wants us to just shrug off Vlad brutally killing a whole village of innocents because he thinks it probably saved ten times the number he killed thanks to making him fearsome. And we’re supposed to accept that and like him because we don’t really get any human perspective on his mass murder. Huh.

Well, the nasty Sultan comes to take more of the kingdom’s boys, including Vlad’s son, so he starts a war he can’t win. Unless, of course, he goes into the mysterious cave on the mountain where a cursed being lives and sells his soul...

The rest is pretty predictable. Lots of battles and the chance for Vlad to save his soul, which he gives up for his loved ones. There’s a lot of bad writing...we’re supposed to accept that he has incredible powers of observation, able to hear the spiders on their webs over the rush of the river, but he fails to notice the Sultan hiding or that his wife is about to fall from a cliff. Silver is presented as a kind of kyrptonite for vampires, but Vlad chooses to have a fight surrounded by it instead of, y’know, exiting the tent and using his ‘strength of ten men’ and super-hearing to just spear his opponent.

The casting is also amusing, coming across like a strange Game of Thrones alternate universe fanfiction. The original vampire is Charles Dance, having fun hamming things up with a mouthful of false teeth, while the son is Rickon Stark and Thoros of Myr shows up as a monk. Meanwhile, the Sultan Mehmed is amusingly played by Dominic Cooper exactly as he played Uday Hussein. Vlad himself has been in the Hobbit films, making for an amusing mish-mash of familiar faces.

But ultimately I don’t want to be too harsh on Dracula Untold, because I never expected it to be any better than it was, because the costumes are gorgeous and because the actors are actually being very sincere. 

Gone Girl (spoilers)

Politically, Gone Girl is a little curious. I was a little taken about how it was MRA Horror Stories the Movie – that is, the kind of thing Men’s Rights Activists love to highlight as the evil things women do and why men are the real victims of inequality. Which of course isn’t exactly a popular, mainstream view, and feminist groups online often get into mud-slinging matches with them. Where these men congregate, they very frequently disseminate (true) stories of women playing the system, usually with false rape claims. Well, there are false rape claims in this story, but the film is primarily about taking that and writing it larger – to a false murder claim.

Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike play the central couple here, Nick and Amy. They had a fairytale romance when they both managed to convince one another they were better than everyone around them, but after they lost their jobs and moved out of the Big City, things stagnated and they grew to resent one another. We don’t know it at the start, but Nick is cheating on Amy, and Amy has very severe issues from her childhood that lead to her hatching a plot to stage her own murder, then slip away, trying her best to get her husband wrongly convicted for her murder with various tip-offs and plotting to kill herself to seal the deal if it doesn’t get to that point without her needing to. The most satisfying part about this set-up is that the main characters are presented at first as though we’re supposed to like them, even though they’re intensely irritating. But that is all intentional – they’re not perfect, not even close, and nor was their relationship even at the start. On the other hand, what that means is that we end up with a film with no characters we like, except maybe Nick’s sis.

When things start to go wrong for her - incidentally just as it starts to look likely that Nick can win any case against him – she goes even further into psycho bitch territory, looking up an old lover who still holds a flame for her, making him think he’s the really creepy bastard, only for her to trump him, then go home, manipulate Nick with pregnancy, and win the day. The evil woman wins! The MRA were right! Call Wizardchan!

Fortunately, politics aside, and forgetting how the only thing I knew about this film going into it was that Ben Affleck’s penis made an appearance (the merest flash, less than you see of Neil Patrick Harris’...yay?), the fact is that it’s successful because it’s actually an enjoyable film. The twists keep the pace going and the various elements of cat and mouse are very compelling. Fincher’s trademark dark yet clinical style makes things uncomfortable in just the right way, and where the plot is very cartoonish, the matter-of-fact style carries it through.

In many ways, this is lazy execution, story-wise. There’s really no satisfying ending, and the way things progress feel a bit half-baked. The main central plot never seems like it would really stand up in court: cryptic final letter, diary that ends on such a convenient line and didn’t actually get burnt, the idea that Nick would try to burn the murder weapon in his house and just leave it there slightly scorched – it wasn’t a perfect plan. And then the fact that there’s no investigation into her killing her stalker guy despite getting hold of a box cutter because dem useless Feds took over the case (and are of course useless at investigating things). It all works out a little too conveniently, especially for the ending it goes for.

Perhaps there’ll be a sequel where the sister sorts everything out with a cleverer plan. But that would just be overkill, really. The film decided it didn’t want to tie up its loose ends for a creepier ending. Personally, it left me feeling a little hollow.