Total Recall - now with Colin Farrell

The new 'exciting' science fiction film of the moment is Total Recall, or Total Remake if you like. This is the Colin Farrell-led remake of the 1990 Paul Verhoeven cult classic starring Arnold Swartzeneggar, which in turn was a screenplay based upon a Phillip K Dick novel. The idea is that an ordinary factory worker at some point in a distopian post-apocalyptic future decides to buy himself some new memories to spice his life up. The company 'Rekall' will implant memories into your mind to make you think you've had all sorts of exciting experiences in your past. The catch is that the implanted memories can't conflict with anything you've actually done for real. So when Douglas Quaid (aka Farrell / Arnie) decides to get a false memory of being a secret agent everything quickly goes wrong because - and here's the fun part - Quiad really is a secret agent! Quiad's entire life is a fruad, his 'wife' (Kate Beckinsale) is an agent assigned to watch over him and in fact he has only been living this life for the last 6 weeks, since his mind was reprogrammed to make him forget his old life. This all happens in the first 20 minutes, then there's running and shooting and fighting and action aplenty.

Fair enough you might say, and indeed I would too. Trouble is that the film takes gigantic liberties with logic and science that leave big holes in the plot. And once you start picking at these holes, you start seeing holes all over the place. A central idea in the film is that there are only 2 places on Earth safe to live, Britain (where the upper class live) and Australia (where the working classes live), and that travel between them is facilitated by a lift (called The Fall) that travels through the Earth's core. This is a journey that takes 17 minutes and in the middle has a 'gravity inversion' where everyone becomes weightless and stuff turns upside down. Those with less education in physics in the audience might be happy to accept this, but as soon as this was stated my mind started trying to calculate the practicalities of operating such a system. And once you start doing that to any film, it's a lost cause.

Leaving aside the engineering absurdities of constructing a lift shaft through the centre of the Earth, the idea that such a journey could take just 17 minutes is literally stupid. The Earth is 12500km in diameter. So if you assume that the journey on The Fall accelerates constantly from the surface to the centre of the Earth, then decelerates at the same constant rate from the centre to the other side, it would have to be accelerating at approximately 5g for the entire journey. At such accelerations, people would be passing out during the trip - hardly able to conduct karate fights or have a nice conversation while reading a book. If The Fall were to simply do what it says on the tin, and 'fall' from the crust of the Earth to the centre then back out the other side, a crude calculation shows that this journey would take approximately 40 minutes to complete. But even like this everyone would be in free fall for the entire journey, not just in the 'Earth core' like in the film. The following diagram (brought to you by the Highways Agency) will illustrate:

And that's not even accounting for wind resistance.

Like I said, once your mind starts wandering and doing these calculations in the middle of a film - the film's sort of lost. Further plot holes and stupidities start to raise their heads, such as Mrs Quaid's continuing Bond-villain style attempts to kill Mr Quaid. Just put a bullet between his eyes woman! Or how when they travel to the 'no go area' where everyone has to wear gas masks to sheild them from the fall out from the chemical holocaust, they go there on the London underground - i.e. less than 10 miles from the centre of London where it's a paradise and perfectly safe to breath. Or how the messages that old Quaid leaves new Quaid could only have been set if he knew he was going to have his mind re-programmed, so if he knew it was going to happen why not take steps to do something about it in the first place. Or why there's a black 'uber android' at the end with better combat skills than the other androids. Or why the president of the whole Federation has to personally lead his androids into battle and have a fist-fight with Quaid. Or why they have Bill Nighy for such a small role? Or why everyone who's bad has a British accent, Beckinsale even puts on an American accent while she's pretending to be Quaid's wife, then reverts to her British as soon as her cover's blown!

Pause for breath...

Having said all this though, this remake of Total Recall is a very good action film. It was over 90 minutes before I looked at the clock. Kate Beckinsale is extremely well-cast as the action antagonist. I can see why she keeps going back and making more Underworld films - stick enough dark eye-liner on her, brush her hair in front of her eyes and she makes for a wicked badass. She's head and shoulders above Sharon Stone from the original film.  The problem is that the film forgets its source material and only makes a passing attempt to 'do an Inception' and question the nature of reality. Instead we get retarded plot devices, too many special effects and all too often an over-cluttered screen that just makes things confusing.

The original Total Recall is not a great film, but it's cheesey at the right moments and Arnie gets his one-liner. It's much better than this.

Tyrannosaur - if you weren't depressed before...

I think I picked the wrong film to watch on Thursday last week when I was feeling a bit low after my free trip to Rome to referee in the European Junior Championships qualifying tournament fell through. I should have been flying to Rome today, but instead here I sit in a glass building pretending to Create the Future of Transport. Bah.

Tyrannosaur is the first time that cult Midlands actor Paddy Considine has got behind the camera rather than been in front of it. He's not an actor with a huge profile, but he achieved cult status in my mind when in stared in 'Dead Man's Shoes' as an ex-squaddie who returns to his home town and immediately starts terrorising the local thugs who have been intimidating his brother - a film that he also wrote. He wrote and directed Tyrannosaur, a film that opens with a scene in which a man gets thrown out of a pub and then kicks his dog to death. Immediately it's clear we're not in a happy world.

This man is Joseph - played by Peter Mullan and shown in the image above - and the film tells the story of a couple of weeks in his life when all the pressure that have building inside him since the death of his wife finally spill over. He fights a verbal and then increasingly physical battle with his semi-psychotic neighbour and his attack dog, doing everything in his power to wind him up. He starts a brawl with local kids in a bar and screams at the heavens when no-one's listening. In an act of desperation he runs into a local charity shop run by Hannah (Olivia Coleman) to hide and find solace. Hannah has her own problems, her husband (the always-superb Eddie Marsan) has a twisted love-hate view of her, and the two find solace in each others company.

It's certainly haunting and I'm sure people in the right frame of mind will tell you it's also a brave depiction of depression and social decay.  Just look at the screen cap of the film above - talk about depression. It's also a little bit about killing dogs. I just wasn't in the mood the other night, so I wont be recommending it.

Hunky Dory - Better than High School Musical

If anyone who has seen Hunky Dory can think of a better word than delightful to describe this film, then please let me know. 'Hunky Dory' is a story set in the wilds of rural Wales in the hot summer of 1976. As anyone who lived through that year will confirm, 76 was the hottest British summer anyone could remember for a long time and it's long lazy days lounging around trying to stay cool are lovingly recreated here.
Minnie Driver plays Viv, the local girl who went away to university and came back as a teacher blessed with a desire to give children one last opportunity to express themselves artistically before being thrown into the alienation of working class work. To this end, Viv is putting on a modern musical production of William Shakespeare's The Tempest - using modern music. The film opens at a rehearsal 2 weeks before the play is due to be realised with a wonderful rendition of David Bowie's Life on Mars. If you're not sold by that then you might as well stop watching right away because there's plenty more where that came from.

There are people of a certain age who will be unable not to fall in love with this film for no reason other than the music. But there's a simplicity to the plot that has some appeal too. Nominally the plot is nothing more than a 2 week window into the lives of a small group of school kids who are living through an idyllic summer, a summer they'll spend the rest of their lives looking back upon with loving nostalgia. Leading lad Davey loves Stella, who in turn is infatuated by a mysterious young black lad who becomes the target of racial abuse by Kenny and his friends. Kenny is a confused lad though who isn't sure where his loyalties and future lie, he seems to have become a skin-head simply to fit in. Davey and Stella's friends form a tapestry of life that every teenager feels as their school days come to an end. That moment we all feel when the relief of knowing you never have to go back to school is tempered by the realisation that you're now less free than ever. All the while that this teenage drama plays out, Viv battles the age old enemies of artistic expression - the forces of conservatism within the school who see such expression as something to be stamped on. Where she sees an opportunity to give the kids one last harrah, there are others in the school who see only dissent and anarchy.

Wonderfully well-intentioned though this is, if it wasn't for the music I think the film would have got a bit tiresome. After all it isn't that much fun to watch teenagers mope artistically around in the stifling heat worrying about their sexuality. The film is made by the music, the musical performances by the young actors and actresses and Driver (who does a very good Welsh accent). If you don't at least enjoy the music then you've got a very hard heart, and once you're enjoying the music the rest of the film is more than passable.

Hunky Dory has to be a 'must see' if you were a teenager in the 70s and like David Bowie. For the rest of us - it's a bit of good fun.  At least it's better than High School Musical.