Green Lantern - Action blah blah

Christ this film is so depressing I can barely even muster the strength to write a review. Only the fact that it's 4pm on a Friday afternoon and I've lost the will to even pretend that I'm working is getting me through this.

So, Green Lantern, part two of the brace of 'Green' films that came out last year. The other was the blatantly pointless comic book adaptation 'Green Hornet'. That bored me so much I was actively relieved when the DVD broke mid-film. Of course the films actually had nothing to do with each other, I'm just lumping them together cos they're rubbish and have the same colour in the title.

Well I'm wasting both our time with this rambling so we might as well press on with a review. Imagine if you will that Ryan Reynolds is an ace fighter pilot, surrounded by identikit Holywood hotties and with his personal nerdy mate who fixes and upgrades his planes. Ryan then randomly gets chosen to be a 'Green Lantern', a sort of pan-galactic policeman who can fly around outer space catching criminals and saving the fate of the universe. Can you imagine how much I hate this character?

Ryan as the Green Lantern has to go through some unimaginative training scenes with one of the other Lanterns, then immediately becomes the cop who doesn't play by the rules but gets results when he decides to fight the current big evil against the advice of his immortal advisers. So he saves a bunch of rich people at a party and forces the evil whatever (played by Peter Sarsgaard) into a final confrontation in which he defeats it obviously. The end.
This is a film that's so dull I can hardly bring myself to write anything substantive as to why. For one thing, it's truly divisive in its characterisation, the 'evil' character is ugly and becomes more and more mal-formed the eviler he gets. The 'good' character is iron-chested with rugged good looks and a dream life. The 'evil' character lusts helplessly over the girl while the 'good' character has her fall into his arms. Who writes this stuff? Someone who has only ever watched Thundercats I suspect.  Even the special effects aren't as good as a Holywood action film these days should aspire to have.

That's enough of that. I should be off to see The Avengers at some point soon, Joss Whedon hasn't let me down yet and better not start now!

The Awakening - an intelligent if unlikely thriller

And now a treat for my parents! I know they read this and since they've been bugging me for ages to see 'The Awakening' - it's time for a review!

For the uninitiated - the handful of other people who'll read this who aren't my Mum and Dad - my folks live in London and occasionally operate under the traditional London delusion that what goes for London goes for the rest of the UK. Cinema is one of the many areas of life for which this really doesn't work. Many smaller films that are released in London may never see the inside of a screening anywhere outside the west end, and when they do it's sometimes for a week only at an obscure cinema in Henley. 'The Awakening' is a case in point. Despite getting a heavy release across inner London locations, it was briefly available in some non-London cinemas - but not at a time when I was paying attention. So when my parents asked me if had I seen it, the answer was no - I'm not going to pay £13 and spend an hour on a train to London for one film.

Last week I was saved by the DVD and eventually able to watch this atmospheric thriller / ghost story set largely in a Cumbrian boarding school post WW1. Rebecca Hall plays Florence Cathcart, a ghost-hunter who doesn't believe in ghosts. We are introduced to her as she exposes a group of charlatans ripping people off and pretending to be able to speak to the dead. Each time she reveals a so-called medium to be a fraud though, she gets a little further from what she really wants. You see, Florence's sweetheart was killed in the trenches of the western front; so at the heart of everything she does Florence harbours a secret desire that the paranormal will be real and that she can speak one last time to her beloved. When she takes on the job to prove that the 'ghosts' at the Cumbrian boarding school are little more than naughty boys playing pranks, at first she finds no difference between this an other jobs she has taken. Soon though she finds herself drawn back to places and events in the school that she cannot explain. Perhaps there are ghosts here after all? Perhaps her dead sweetheart will finally be able to give her the final message she craves so much?

Before I get into the film's good points - some criticism. Is the main character in any way realistic? Did independent, intelligent, Cambridge-educated single women exist in the early 1920s? Wasn't this the age of the Suffragettes throwing themselves under the king's horse to get voting rights? By pretending that an inter-war Dana Scully could have existed, the film doesn't do any service to the memory of the women who fought to be accepted into a male-dominated world. Admittedly many of the characters who meet Florence express mild interest in her independent success, but no-one has outright incredulity. And it's not just the characters that make the film less believable, should a film really be able to get away with an opening caption that says basically: "The first world war just happened, so there are lots of dead people and therefore loads more ghosts - get over it." If you're going to have a ghost film then just get on with it, there's no need to conduct a dubious historical justification!

Despite these small points, 'The Awakening' is a film that does a fair job of juggling several ideas at the same time and maintaining a tension that goes right through to the end. A perennial problem with horror films is that it's difficult to generate tension after you reveal what's causing the horror, but that if you never actually show anyone anything it can get tedious. 'The Awakening' gets around a lot of these problems by creating a personal tension between the characters, and also having a lead in Florence who is in the unusual role of rejecting the concept of the paranormal while desperately hoping it's real (it's hard to get away from the Scully comparison isn't it?). Florence's vested interest in everything she does makes her simultaneously strong and fragile - she might have all the answers, but you feel she's permanently on the verge of cracking up.

'The Awakening' has a lot of nice touches, several scary moments and very disturbing dollhouse theme; but I was left at the end of the film thinking - does this really hold together? I still have a nagging doubt that there is a plot hole somewhere I'm not seeing, and that it would all unravel if I were unlucky enough to spot it. Despite the film's many good points, in the end I thought most of its plot reveals were too much of a convenience to be taken seriously. I also thought that the collateral damage of the big 'reveal' spoiled Florence's emotional journey and got in the way of her search for closure.  Disappointing that after investing so much in developing the characters, the writers felt happy to let their stories slide away at its conclusion.  This is a film that had a huge promise and was great for the most part, but ultimately I felt let down its viewers.

Hunger Games

Note - fairly obvious spoilers are coming up in this review. But then this film is the first in a series so why don't you take a wild guess as to how the main character gets on in gladiatorial battle to the death...

I feel like I'm the last person in Western Civilisation to see 'Hunger Games', but after being away from the cinema for several months I could hardly stay away any longer given the epic reviews this film has been hoovering up from across the media. Tales of box office records being broken are hardly novel in an age of inflating prices, but there does seem to be something different about this. With a relatively unknown story (except to teenagers apparently) and a relative newcomer in the lead role (Jennifer Lawrence was Mystique in the recent X-Men prequel), there was either something special to this or it's teen fanbase have been turning out in their droves.

I cycled up to an almost deserted Bracknell Odeon on Easter Sunday for the matinee showing knowing very little about the story. From what I had been told, I was in for a westernised version of Battle Royale. What I was presented with though was a much less gory yet hugely more subtle story of politics, deception and control versus emerging human spirit. Jennifer Lawrence plays Katniss - a girl from a mining town in the '12th district'. The 12 districts of the future USA are the areas of that nation that once rebelled against the union and have ever since been reminded of their place by being forced to annually supply 1 boy and 1 girl to the national 'Hunger Games'. The games are a fight to the death in which only one can emerge a winner, a winner who will be paraded through the nation as a hero, a winner who gives hope to the downtrodden peoples of the 12 districts. Through an act of immense selflessness, Katniss is selected as the participant for district 12. She is whisked off to the glamorous capital city where she and 23 other participants are turned into superstars and prepared for their encounter.

The first thing to say about 'Hunger Games' is that it is a hugely powerful story. Its main character Katniss becomes a powerful warrior, but her real strength lies in her empathy. Where she wins, she does so by building alliances, winning friends and only striking out when struck - not by projecting power. It's a story of how a downtrodden majority can be controlled by a cloistered elite, simply by providing them with enough entertainment and hope in the form of winning the Games. It presents an interpretation of the classic Brave New World view of civilisation's demise; in which a vapid culture can be built on a structure of brutality, propped up by a calming drug for the masses - entertainment.

Better still, the film doesn't have its head up in the clouds. I initially wanted more from the film's resolution, but since Sunday I've come to believe that the writers of the film understand realpolitik. Rather than Katniss emerging from the Hunger Games as a modern Robin Hood, she is advised to not stick it to the man, to claw back her rage against the system and bide her time lest the powers that be crush her.

What with all this politics going on it'd be easy to forget that there's some enjoyable science fiction in 'Hunger Games' too. It's set in a near future world complete with 3D virtual screens, miracle healing gels and genetically engineered wasps(!). Like all good dystopian science fiction it portrays the haves and the have-nots in this world, Katniss' friends and family in District 12 toil in terrible conditions while the people of the capital city are living in futuristic opulence. The haves harbour little compunction over the X-Factor style gladiatorial contest they insist the have-nots participate in for their satisfaction.

I can forgive the slightly flat ending to 'Hunger Games' on the basis that this is a series of books and they're going to want to make more. With the amount of money this has taken I can hardly see them failing to do so. I really hope that later books/films don't focus on the potential love triangle hinted at as the film reaches its final scenes, but that rather they emphasise the politics of what's going on. Two things are clear though, Jennifer Lawrence is destined to be a star and I have an early contender for my films of the year list.