Recently in Film Category

Went to see this at the IMAX in 3D last week (I went with some colleagues, one of whom told me that our job lets us write off going to the movie sas a tax deductable expense. Awesome.)

While the 3D technology has not yet been perfected, there were definitely a few 'wow' moments that made it worthwhile. And thank God really, because the story was a clunky, misogynstic shout-fest that was really only entertaining on the visual level (although the creepy zombie-eyes of the 'synthespians' detracted somewhat from the human characters).

See it in IMAX if you can, if not: I wouldn't bother.

Saw a preview for this last night, and it was really good. It's a funny film, in both senses of the word. It is frequently hilarious, often to the degree that the audience missed large chunks of dialogue due to their own laughter. But it's also a very strange film, and often feels like watching a series of homages to different films rather than a film complete unto itself. The film certainly makes no bones about the fact that it both parodies and pays respect to the many films it draws from, but by attempting to give nods to multiple genres, they end up producing several extremely jarring shifts in tone that often feel quite discordant. The film it will be compared to most is Wright and Pegg's previous collaboration, the excellent Shaun of the Dead. That film was also a parody, but by limiting it to one genre it kept a consistent tone, and Shaun's character arc had a clear direction and conclusion. This meant the film was satisfying on its own terms, rather than simply nodding to others. Hot Fuzz begins with a character arc for Pegg's lead Angel, a Police officer so dedicated to his job that it is destroying both his relationships and his career prospects when he is reassigned to the idyllic but strangely creepy village of Sandford. It starts off oddly reminiscent of The League of Gentlemen (itself a parody of The Wicker Man), then turns into Scream (itself a parody of the slasher genre), then finally ends up being quite unashamedly Bad Boys II (which isn't a parody but may as well be), but as it moves through each genre, any thought of characterization or indeed plot progression is lost in a wash of blood and bullets. It may have more laughs per minute than Shaun, but as a film it has more in common with Airplane, or more likely Kill Bill (in that it?s a series of homages rather than an actual narrative film)- and may be forgotten just as quickly as the latter was. However if you're looking for a laugh-out-loud cinema experience, this comes highly recommended, with the proviso that it might not be for you if you don't find shotgun-toting grannies getting kicked in the face a giggle- although really, who doesn't find that funny?

[Incidentally, Jeremy Clarkson was at the screening as well, so I went up and said hello. I wish I'd been ballsy enough to say: "I'm not a fan of the things you say, but sometimes I like the way you say them." but I wasn't.]

I watched, ah, 'Death of a President' last night. Probably the only time I've actually stopped what I was doing and made a special point to watch TV since the last episode of Battlestar Galactica. It was quite heavily hyped, so I knew it would be a part of pop culture, or water cooler talk, if you like, and plus I'd heard some intruiging things about it, so thought I should give it a look.

To be honest, it was a big disappointment. It started out quite well, ratcheting up the tension towards the assassination, and then the footage of the murder itself was very well done. As a convinving documentary it was extremely well done, the footage of real people and real places were virtually seamless with the fiction. There were one too many shots of cars driving by hospitals, but real documentaries have that, too.

But once the assassination had actually taken place, I think the filmmakers missed a really important opportunity to make something great. What they decided to focus on was who was the assassin- it turned into a sort of less-than-compelling episode of CSI, looking at fingerprints and going into the history of suspects and trying to figure out who the assassin was. Which wasn't really great TV. None of these people are real, do I really care who gets caught and punished? Much more interesting to me was what would happen to America if Bush was shot? If the assasssin was Syrian, would they invade Syria? If it was just prior to the Presidential elections, would those elections be suspended? Before 9/11, many would argue that the most significant day in modern American history was the day JFK was shot. This event would undoubtedly have equally massive implications. Did the film look at any of them? Hardly. It was too busy talking about eight points of similarity found on a fingerprint. Yawn. To be honest it was pretty disappointing. It could have been a really important, even prescient, document of how American power is perceived from within and abroad. As it turned out it was a second-rate murder mystery with a lamely predictable conclusion.

If you missed it, I wouldn't worry too much about catching the rerun.

I often have thoughts about things which I find hard to articulate. I know I think something about those things, but I'm not entirely sure what. One example that sticks out in my mind was a poster which had a London street, and everyone's heads had been replaced with security cameras. I think the slogan was something like: "Help your community by reporting suspicious activity." or something, but I found the poster very creepy. I wrote a blog about it but I wasn't able to articulate my thoughts completely so I abandoned it.

A similar poster which creeped me out was the series that had: NOT PAYING YOUR LICENSE FEE IS A CRIME. This was nicely parodied in the film Children of Men, except the slogans were: HARBORING IMMIGRANTS IS A CRIME and AVOIDING FERTILITY TESTS IS A CRIME. And I thought it was a cool parody, but I can't tell you why I thought it was cool, just that I somehow knew it. And I kind of like that ambiguously meaningful dialogue in films, where you're not entirely sure what is being said, but you're almost certain something is. I usually know if I like a piece of static art if it engenders that sort of feeling in me. The whole film is choc with little moments like that, from the over-the-counter suicide pill called 'Quietus' (ha!) to the Diana-like despair bought on by the death of the world's youngest person.

That's not to say that all the symbolism in the film is equally subtle- the film literally hammers home the point that 'children are the future', and goes a bit overboard when they spend a lot of the film trying to get the baby (who represents hope, see?) to a boat called 'Tomorrow' (which represents, uhm...tomorrow, geddit?).

But I'm jumping ahead of myself. The film is set in a dystopian Britain in 2027, in which the rest of the world has seemingly collapsed into chaos (there's a hilarious ad shown at one point which shows the rest of the world's major citites being devastated in various different ways, followed up with the slogan: "Only Britain soldiers on!"), due to the fact that no babies have been born for the last 18 years. The reason for this is never given, which I think is a wise choice- it's just part of the film's reality. The world is neatly and quickly established as an exaggeration of present day Britain. Immigrants are forced into town-sized prisons for deportation, crime is rampant, policing is brutal. Youth is worshipped, happiness is sold in pill form, cannibis is still illegal (heh).

It's not an uplifting film, in fact I think there's barely one moment of levity in the entire process. But it's beautifully well constructed- Alfonso Cuarón, who directed the two very beautiful films Y tu mamá también and Harry Potter 3, does a great job in creating the grim London of the future (there were several shots of places I recognized, and I've no idea how they managed to film them), and there is a running battle in Bexhill that is artfully choreographed and nicely vicious.

I wouldn't call this a great film, it's certainly depressing and the narrative seemed to lack a clear direction, but I've been pondering it on and off since I saw it, thinking about the ramifications of the conceit and how they were represented, and enjoying that vague feeling of not quite knowing what I thought. That's better than one of those films you just forget straight away, isn't it?

Ludicrous anecdote via half-a-movie review, I went and saw Hard Candy last night, which contains a certain infamous scene which some of you may have heard of and some of you may not have (I certainly had, so it's not like it was the suprise factor that got me).

I actually got through the scene okay. (annoyingly, I needed to go to the bathroom before the scene started, but I didn't want to give the impression I was running away from the scene, so I held on) There were some giggles from the girls in the audience at the pained expressions on all the men's faces, and I do believe I had a finger or two in my mouth as it was all going on, but the whole scene was implicit, they didn't show anything gross, and I didn't feel funny until after it was over. Then I felt a bit nauseous, and so I thought I'd stand up- maybe to get some air, maybe to go to the bathroom.

Then I fainted.

I don't remember standing up, or even falling down. It was actually highly disorienting, the first thing I remember was not knowing where I was or what time it was, I was just lying on the floor in the dark with lots of people crowding around me, and I felt very sick. As it turns out only a few seconds had passed, but I didn't realize it at the time so I was actually a bit frightened as I'd no idea what had happened.

Anyway I was ushered out of the theatre and after a minute of deep breaths and a cup of water I felt pretty much normal again- if a little embarrassed at passing out in a movie. The staff at the cinema were really nice about it, they refunded our tickets and were offering drinks and things (so big ups to Vue cinema in the West End), but I was a little annoyed because I never got to see what happened next, and now I don't know how the movie ends.

If anyone with a stronger stomach than me can outline how it all worked out in the comments, I'd really appreciate it.

I've posted about Channel 101 a couple of times in the Linklog but I really believe that they deserve more than that.

If you haven't experienced it yet (and you really must), 101 is a sort of playground for wannabe film-makers. How it works is:

• People send in a five minute 'pilot' for a new show.
  
• All the pilots are screened to a live audience of 400 at a cinema in LA
  
• The audience votes on which shows they like the best- the top five are considered 'Prime Time' and the creators are invited to make episode two of the show for the next screening- at which point they have to face the public vote again!
  

So it's sort of a 'survival of the fittest' short-film project, and the results, while occasionally extremely patchy, have created some incredible shows that make regular tv seem bloated and ridiculous.

Shows you really must check out are:

• Yacht Rock - So popular it has actually entered the vernacular as a new way to describe a musical genre, this serios follows the real-life (sort of) adventures of Michael McDonnell and Kenny Loggins as they penned hit after hit in the 70's and 80's.

• Laser Fart - Ludicrious title I know, and the show begins ludicrously as well, but somewhere along the line it morphs into a really quite serious look at grief and loss. Avoid episode ten- the first nine compose a tragic arc that is best watched as a single movie.

• The Wright Stuff - The adventures of the Wright Brothers! Watch in amazement as they use their flying machine to thwart evil-doers of all stripes.

• Ringwald & Molly - Not-really-animated show about a posh lizard and his scatalogical spider-dog. If you loved Terrahawks...
  

This is just a few of my favorites- there are literally dozens of shows that are all extremely amusing. As if that wasn't enough, there's also a NY-based 'sister' station, Channel 102. Swing by there and check out The Outer Limit, a wonderfully kooky science show, and Cakey! The Cake From Outer Space.

Anyway, I'm keen to submit a pilot. Can you act, film, edit? Check out a few shows to see what the hell I'm talking about and then get in touch!

I'd better tell you about this film Mirrormask quick smart, because it seems like the sort of film that'll drop out of its limited distribution in about two weeks- catch it while you can.

Mirrormask is, as anyone with even a scintilla of decent popculture knowledge will already know, the brainchild of Neil Gaiman and David McKean, both of Sandman fame. And that's basically all you need to know- the film is very much like what would happen to you if you fell into a copy of Sandman: The Collected Dust Covers and wandered around randomly for an hour (sometimes you could even see the paper it was drawn on). It'd be pretty amazing, but you'd have trouble explaining exactly what you saw to anyone after you got out.

If you come looking for a plot, well, there's no much here. A girl named Helena (who is quite appropriately named as she looks very much like a young Helena Bonham Carter) wakes up in an odd fantasy world (cleverly comprised of the drawings she makes on her bedroom wall) that she takes to be (and may well be) a dream. So far, so Alice in Wonderland. But what Helena slowly realizes is that she's merely traded places with her evil counterpart, who is living it up in the 'real' world (a beautifully shot Brighton) by, er, smoking cigarettes, making out with punks and fighting with her dad.

If this sounds like a bit of a plot to you, well, this is all hinted at, but the majority of the film is actually just Helena wandering around her dream world. The problem with the dream world, as incredibly well visualized as it is, is that everything that happens there seems artibrary and without consequence. They go from A to B to C (and at each pick up a new 'quest point', something Gaiman has railed against in the past), but there's no sense of any true connection outside an author's whimsy or an excuse to show one more imaginative setpiece.

And that's really all there is to this film: it's a long parade of really lovely images (it actually reminded me a lot of The Cell on that level). And on that basis I really enjoyed it and if you love the artistry of comics or surrealist art I think you'd find it a real kick on that level. If you're looking for substance, look elsewhere. You get the sense that there's some kind of allegory about teenage angst and growing away from your parents, but it's so lightly glossed over it seems almost an afterthought (it clearly aspires to be a modern-day Labyrinth, but unfortunately falls short in both the thematic and raw wonder departments). It's frustrating because you're not really sure who its aimed at. Kids will find it utterly confusing and adults see that behind the confusion there isn't any meaning. Maybe it was made for the ADD generation where all that matters is the moment, and a procession of cool images will suffice.

And I don't say all this as criticism- I think that the film is perfect for what it is- a jaunt through The Dream. If they ever do make a Sandman movie, this is how they should do it. But there are a lot of trips into dreamland that manage to have both plot and emotional resonance, and I think this...I think this taps into the new style of film-making, where anything you can imagine can now be created. But imagining cool stuff isn't enough to make a truly great film- for that you need a solid story, with consequences and characters you can connect with.

There's something very elemental in the idea of crawling into the back of a giant, fur-filled cupboard and finding it leads into a magical, timeless world. The sort of feeling, when you read it, that you kind of thought it up yourself when you were a kid, and someone else wrote it down for you. Which I think goes a pretty long way to explaining why a lot of people have a pretty strong connection with The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (I refuse to call it 'Narnia'). I certainly do, and have very fond memories of my dad reading it to me and my brothers, and of being quite traumatized, not by the death of Aslan, but by the humiliation of Aslan, the shaving of him. Seeing a great being bought low, and that he went willingly to his fate- that was the worst part, I think.

Anyway, I didn't have high hopes for the film, but actually came away feeling pretty happy- certainly if I was a kid I would have thought it one of the best films I'd ever seen. Disney are obviously still smarting from turning down The Lord of the Rings, and this films seems very badly to want to be 'LotR for kids', a role it fills in pretty nicely- after two hours of tooty grins and bloodless chase scenes it actually comes across as something of pleasant shock when in the final battle beasties get smashed by rocks, stabbed in the head with swords and bitten in the face by lions. The LotR impression is cemented by the kiwi landscape, kiwi effects design, kiwi costume design- in fact it seems to have been made by the old LotR crew, which is cool.

One thing I did find a bit odd after the WWII opening scene was Lucy's first meeting with Tumnus. He's his naked, hairy dude who invites her back to his house, where he drugs her and then starts crying saying: "I've done something terrible." Eek! Not quite the same effect it had when written in the 50's, I'm sure. Still, a valuable lesson to all little girls not to go home with strange, naked men.

The kids' acting is usually pretty patchy, but kids are pretty patchy in general so it kind of suited them. The white witch is creepy and cool (and who wouldn't betray their siblings in order to get wrapped up in a fur coat and eat Turkish Delight with her?), Aslan (and most of the creatures, I should say) looks great although I found Schindler's voice coming out of him a little distracting.

Overall- Narnia is a good time in a dark room. It's not exactly breaking new cinematic ground the way LotR did, but it's taking that new kind of 'anything is possible' film-making and using it to bring a great fairy tale to life, and I think that's a pretty good thing. I recommend it.

Did I never tell you the story of why I stopped reading Harry Potter? Oh, it's a humdinger, check it out:

So, being an Engrish teacher and very pleased that Harry Potter made reading 'cool' (and this was particularly odd in Taumarunui, where demonstrating any form of intelligence was usually rewarded with brutality), I decided that, in the interests of keeping my finger on the pulse of popular culture if nothing else, I should really crack on and read these Harry Potter books everyone was talking about. I thought the first one was very good, it had an extremely amused, Roal Dahl-ish narrative voice that I found very entertaining. The next three weren't so good, I think, like Lucas, the author started to believe her own hype, and they went from being an amiable fantasy to an overblown drama that took itself far too seriously- certainly the narrative voice has lost its postmodern charm. Still, I was enjoying the ride and looked forward to the fifth one.

Around rolls the release date to book five which was, you may recall, some two or three years ago, now. As it happens the day it was released (I remember it well because one of my flatmates was a Potter-nutter and went to the midnight opening to pick up a copy), I went to Greece to spend two weeks with my brother. Greece was awesome as you'd expect, and a great part of my holidays usually consists of, well, catching up with all my reading. After I'd churned through all my books and started bugging hJeremy for some more, he asked if I wanted to read the new Harry Potter, which he had on his Palm Pilot, and said he'd beam it to mine if I wanted it. I was like: "Wow, really, that's been ripped to Palm already? It only came out, like, the other day."

But he assured me that a copy had leaked to the web a week before the book release and, well, he DID have it on his Palm, after all, so I started reading the latest book (The Order of the Pheonix). And it was very good. It had secret cults and a Griffindor conspiracy and Quidditch and, y'know, all the excellent HP staples that everyone loves. However I do remember, whilst I was reading the first chapter, looking up at Jeremy and saying: "It's a bit racier than the last ones." This was because Harry was like, going through bodily changes and noticing Hermione's figure and a variety of other teenage tropes that the earlier books would have sidestepped. However I had read that ol' JK had been planning to make them more mature, so it all made sense at the time.

However, the seed of doubt had been planted. And it grew and grew as the book progressed. And the book was perfectly fine and good, very well written now that I come to think of it, but there was just something a little bit...wrong with it. Something not quite right. And it got less and less right, the deeper I read. And I remember sitting in the airport lounge about halfway into the book when the suspicion turned into a conviction. I looked up from the page I was on (in which Hermione was about to fellate Harry) and realized that, well, this surely couldn't be possible. It'd be all over the papers if JK Rowling had suddenly decided to write teenporn. It'd be the literary scandal of the new millennium. So I turned to the person next to me (everyone in the airport was reading the same book) and asked if I could please just read the first page of the new Harry Potter.

I didn't need to even read the first page. The chapter heading alone told me all I needed to know. I'd been reading...fan fiction! Some psychotic Potter fan with waaaaaaaay too much time on their hands had written this mammoth, FAKE version of Harry's fifth year at Hogwarts. And I'd been reading in, thinking it was the real thing! Someone had been fecal vomiting into my mind and I'd been a willing accomplice, spooning it up! I felt dirty. I still do.

I tried to read the real thing, God how I tried. I couldn't. I couldn't finish the fake version and I couldn't start the genuine article. Because the sad truth is...the fake Potter had character growth and consequences and it broke the mold and treated Harry like a real teenager with real teenage problems. The real one just repeated the same opening chapter as the previous four books, and I knew I couldn't believe in the world anymore- the fourth wall hadn't just been torn down, its ruins were covered in fornicating teenagers. I gave up on the world of Potter. Although word on the street is: Dumbledore? Dead.

Now, what was I saying? Oh yeah, the movie review. The first two movies were shit. Like, not even amiable, they were just confusing and messy. Chris Columbus couldn't find his way to the India of quality films (huh? huh?). Three was gorgeous. I mean, even if you take off points for the confusing time-travel plot, the film just looks amazing. It's actually an exemplar of how important a director is to a film, because this previously shitty franchise suddenly just looked so damned good. I loved three and thought that, all else aside, it was a brilliant fantasy film (and there aren't many).

Four is, well, it's certainly better than one and two, but I didn't think it was quite as good as three (although to its credit it is very, very close). I think it's a pretty healthy melange of the two extremes. It's a decent, often amusing, good-looking kids film that advances the overall plot and is a lot of fun, but also feels pretty rushed, despite being incredibly long- it's streamlined very cleverly given the massive size of book four, but still feels like it's cramming, and the first twenty minutes in particular are confusing and poorly edited.

Plus... I really miss the sex scenes.

Looking back over the films I've reviewed in this rapidly closing year (all 21 of them! That's like two a month. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?), I seriously wonder if any of them is as good as The Constant Gardener, which is uniformly excellent from beginning to end.

I can't really tell you much about the plot because the very first thing to happen in the film is an enormous spoiler that I really hope you haven't been told yet by some blabbermouth Guardian reviewer who doesn't know when to shut up. But that's okay, because I can rant about how much I liked other things.

For starters, it looks great. Not just the cinematography, but the locations are amazing. Kenya looks incredible, shot in a washed out, heavy grain. London, conversely, is shot in a dull, modern style, with heavily saturated blues and greys, and it looks beautiful. There's a scene where the walls of a conference room lift up and you realize you're looking out of the Tate down across the Thames- it was so wonderful it actually caught my breath. (aside: there's a lot of shaky-cam action, so it might pay to not sit directly in front of the screen, as I did)

The film itself is quite layered: For most of the time it is a high tension thriller, indeed many scenes have no overt threat in them, yet are filmed in such a way as to make them incredibly tense (which makes it all rather exhausting to watch). However as well as being a thriller it's also a touching, tragic love story, and also an important, informative political statement about the relationship between Africa and the West.

The acting is dynamite, a veritable who's who of British thesbs, with Ralph Fiennes standing out particularly as the title character.If anything, the movie is largely an homage to stereotypical British nebbishness, which is usually considered a source of mockery, but in this film reveals itself as a source of strength and resilience. There were at least three scenes where I was practically yelling: "Punch the bastard!" to the screen, yet he never does, which is perfectly in keeping with his character and goes to make him all the more memorable and worthy; as he makes his transition from a man who is completely in the dark about what is going on around him to someone who, as he says 'knows all of your secrets now'.

I could not recommend that you see this more strongly.