Hummingbird - Jason Stafam plays a hard case

Another instalment of the 'films I didn't see in the cinema cos I was being even more geeky than normal' series - Hummingbird.  It's a film which was meant to break the mould of Jason Statham's career to date, he plays a well hard geezer of possible London origin who is a bit of psychotic sometimes but has a heart of gold if only a kind-souled woman could coax it out of him.  Indeed.

The Stathe plays Joey, an ex-army soldier who is now living on the streets of London destitute with his friend Isobel after absconding from the army following some kind of terrible incident in Afghanistan.  After a short encounter with a couple of hoodlums on the street that result in Isobel being murdered, Joey stumbles into the house of a man who is out of the country for the best part of a year.  Joey decides to steal his money, clothes and identity and uses them to be a different man, using his army training as a hard-case enforcer for a Chinese human trafficker in London's underground crime network.  Hardly becoming a new man is it?  But anyway, Joey befriends a young Polish nun Christina who is working in a food kitchen.  He gives most of his money to them, but what he really wants is to take revenge against the people who killed Isobel.  Will he get his revenge on the London criminal underclass?  Or will Christina's kind heart convince him to get his revenge in a roundabout way, by helping London's street-sleepers like she does?

It's fairly derivative stuff that isn't told that well.  It presents a picture of homelessness on London's streets and post-traumatic stress in the army without really offering any ideas or solutions, rather they're an excuse to give The Stathe some crims to punch.  The opening half hour of the film is slow-burning but largely wasted, presenting us with Joey's character and hardly telling us anything about him.  Scene to scene we swing between The Stathe doing his hard man thing and crying his heart out at the humanity of it all.  It's all a tiny bit forced, as if these scenes had different writers who weren't paying enough attention to the overall arc of the film.

To be fair to Hummingbird, I've seen plenty of action movies that have a lot less heart than this.  Most Jason Statham movies fit into that category quite easily.  What Hummingbird tries to do is give you a bit of everything, but although it's sort of ok it's never really that good at any of it.  I think the film wants The Stathe's character to be sympathetic, but at the end of the film when you find out what happened in Afghanistan it kind of makes that impossible.  The film wants to be about redemption, but there isn't really any redemption and the use of a nun as a character who instigates that redemption is a bit too literal for my tastes.  The film also wants to say something about how people can change, but that gets mishandled towards the end too when it turns out The Stathe hasn't really changed at all.  Oddest of all is the character of Christina, who reveals a history of abuse at the hands of an overpowering man - yet for some reason opens up to The Stathe, yet another alpha male who's throwing ill-gotten money around.  Perhaps the idea is that she's also being redeemed from her self-imposed chastity as a nun by seeing men as people rather than beasts.  But given Joey's character I'm not really convinced that's too realistic.

Maybe I'm reading a little too much into the symbolism of this, after all Jason Statham films are supposed to be about The Stathe rushing around hitting things.  But Hummingbird is clearly trying to be something more than the average Jason Statham film so I'm going to give it a little more thought than some of his other films warrant.  Hummingbird is a good watch, but tries too hard and too unsuccessfully to be a lot more than it is.  If you were a fan of The Stathe then you should definitely check this out to see what he's doing with his career.  If you're not a fan of his, then you need to get off your high horse and check out Crank - I dare you to tell me it's not so silly it's awesome.

World War Z - 3 films for the price of 1

Slowly working my way through many of the films of 2013 as they come out on DVD at the moment.  Last week I watched Brad Pitt's latest movie World War Z - in which Brad plays some sort of ex-UN special adviser guy who the military have to keep safe and then send on a daring mission to mince around the world until he stumbles upon a way of ending the zombie apocalypse.

The film starts in a way that will be strange to anyone who has ever spent much time in Glasgow, as I am reliably informed that the open scenes of zombie carnage are filmed across one of Glasgow's main squares - a city that's meant to be Philadelphia in the USA.  We see Brad Pitt with his all too perfect family stuck in traffic, then something a bit weird happens, then something very weird happens and before you know it we're in a full-on zombie chase across Glasgow / Philadelphia.

What happens next would be fairly typical for a zombie film, were it not that the film seems to be self conscious of the fact its a zombie film.  We have a scene in which Brad Pitt gets some zombie blood in his mouth, so he has to wait on the verge of killing himself in case he turns into a zombie. It's almost as if the character Brad Pitt plays has seen one too many zombie films himself, or was in a zombie apocalypse in the past and it waiting to see which 'type' of zombie apocalypse this is.  Are we in 28 Days Later or Night of the Living Dead?  It feels like the makers of the film are far too aware of the fact that they're making a zombie movie and feel the need to identify World War Z in the spectrum of zombie genre movies, establishing early on that these are fast zombies and that they have to bite you to transmit the virus (it's a virus btw).

With that opening the film starts promisingly but immediately stops you suspending your own disbelief by reminding you about all the other zombie movies you might have seen.  The second act begins with Brad Pitt and his family being whisked off on to a US warship and sent on a mission to save the world from the zombie apocalypse.  Quite why he's qualified to do this is never made clear, people make a lot of statements about how he used to be some sort of special adviser with the UN - but little more.  With this information in hand the film settles down into its mincing around phase, plenty of fluff and action sequences but nothing actually advancing the plot.  The mince involves Brad Pitt going to Korea, then Israel and then trying to go to India vaguely on the trail of a cure, but at no point during any of the journey actually doing anything to find a cure.

When Brad Pitt fails to get to India, he ends up in South Wales and we move on to part 3.  This is where the film becomes most baffling of all and it was little surprise to discover that this final act was in fact created as part of a re-shoot after the film was originally finished.  The action moves to a research facility where Malcolm Tucker is working on a cure and then Brad Pitt comes up with an idea to make that cure work.  Although at the start of the film the zombies are brutally fast whirling dervishes of death they are now shambolic Romeroesque semi-individuals who carefully check Brad Pitt out before deciding if they should eat him or not.  Mostly baffling of all is perhaps the film's dramatic change in pace from action slasher to CSI-lite drama in which no one gets killed and Brad Pitt works out how to get the MacGuffin to save his family / whole world.

This is making a film by committee at its worst.  It looks like there were three entirely different writer / director partnerships in charge of each of the three acts of World War Z.  Despite this being a pretty major criticism, scene-to-scene  World War Z is a rather enjoyable watch.  There are some good action sequences, especially when the zombie shit hits the fan in several different locations around the world, and the early-film zombies are pretty scary at times.  Plus there's loads of explosions and zombies scrambling over each other to get to people - all that good zombie movie stuff.  In the end I don't think World War Z will be remembered much long after this year's summer blockbusters have come and gone.  I suspect the film was originally conceived with good intentions that got lost when the money men and test screenings got involved.  Watch it if you like, but apart from the effects there's very little to recommend.

More Goodfellas

My housemate suggested to me at the weekend that we need to watch Goodfellas again.  This seems unlikely given the number of times that I've seen that film, but it's possible there might be some scenes I've not yet remembered off-by-heart.  Better watch it again to check.  While I'm thinking about it here's another scene to enjoy:



"Go get your fuckin' shine box!".  Brilliant, terrifying, Joe Pesci.

At some point I'm going to do some work today...

Suspiria - Utterly Mental

People often tell me that I'm a film buff.  I feel far from it given that I constantly find out about films I've never even heard of before.  One of those films is Susperia, mentioned by Mark Kermode in his review of Black Swan a couple of years ago and in his list of the 10 greatest gothic films in last month's Observer.  Kermode said that fans of Suspiria would see Black Swan as a rip-off, his opinion being that Suspiria one of the great films of the horror genre.  That's more than enough recommendation for me, so with the intention of eventually becoming the film buff people keep telling me I am - last Thursday evening I watched Susperia.

The first thing to establish about Suspiria is that it's utterly mental.  Jessica Parker plays Suzy Bannion, an American dancer who comes to a famous German dance school to start her ballet training.  The first time we see her is walking out of the airport terminal into a dark and stormy night, talking to a taxi driver intent on ignoring her and then arriving at the gaudily pink dance school just as a girl is fleeing in apparent hysteria.  Before the night is over, this girl will be dead, stabbed horribly and hanged by an unseen force that appears through her apartment window.  The next day Suzy begins her training at the dance school.  As the weird events and dead bodies begin to pile up, Suzy is soon drawn to the possibility that something otherworldly is going on, that the people who run the school are not all they appear.

As one reviewer on IMDB has perfectly summed Suspiria up - it's like watching a bad dream.  It's set in a world where lights and colours on walls change from shot to shot, where the laws of physics are mutable, where people stare madly out of the corners of their eyes and where sounds and incidental music are a cacophony of discordant noises.  In short - a nightmare made celluloid.  Our heroine is trapped in a world from which she cannot escape, drawn ever-closer to dark truth that every bone in her body is screaming for her to run away from.  But in this world the logic of dreams takes over, a logic that makes the horrible truth of the dance school as inevitable as Suzy's next breath.

The film starts with a murder of horrific violence that focuses on a girl being stabbed and them brutally impaled on glass.  After this we move into slightly more sedate horror territory, with the film being happy to allow its mood, sound and general weirdness to generate a sense of unease and panic in its protagonist and viewer alike.  The last 15 minutes of Suspiria is all the more shocking then as the sub-Evil Dead make up and animatronics are brought out for the final denouement.  In the end it's a film that's strangely effectively in providing scares in several different ways.  As a wannabe film buff with a penchant for the horror genre, I feel a little silly to have never even heard of Suspiria until only a few years ago.  Other horror film fans out there in the same situation as me would do well to seek it out.

Hunger Games 2 - Catching Fire

It is over 18 months since the original Hunger Games film was released, and in he meantime a lot has happened to Jennifer Lawrence.  Having achieved global stardom almost overnight after being cast as Katniss Everdeen, she starred alongside Bradley Cooper in the outstanding Silver Linings Playbook and walked away with an Oscar for best actress.  Rather than get carried away with her new superstar status, she is an actress with her feet firmly on the ground and she returns to reprise her role as the young heroine of District 12 in the second part of the Hunger Games series - Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

The film continues the story of the first by fast-forwarding one year.  Katniss and Peeta are now celebrities and are being wheeled out by the powers that be to tour the 12 Districts and play nice for the crowds.  But when both of them find it impossible to maintain the twin charades of being madly in love and supporting the president's (Donald Sutherland) regime, the powers that be come to realise that they're more dangerous than they're worth.  When the new Hunger Games are announced for this year, Katniss and Peeta soon discover that they will have to fight for their lives once more.

Once again I found this to be a very powerful film and an even more powerful story.  It's a story about a character of great strength and nobility who has become a symbol of hope for ordinary people.  In spite of this, Katniss is determined to reject what she has become, but finds it impossible to reject what she means to the people around her.  All she wants to do is the right thing, and it's that dedication to righteousness that gives her strength.  She never went into the Hunger Games with any intention to change the world or lead a revolution, just to sacrifice herself so that her little sister could live.  The simple act of being noble, righteous and incorruptible on a national stage is enough to upset the apple cart of a totalitarian dictatorship, the act of defiance and refusal to be bought out by the man is what the state fears the most.

A good hour at the end of the film is taken up by the new Hunger Games event.  It's the least interesting part of the film as even though its a different set up and different things happen, a lot of it is very similar to the first film.  It's the stuff towards the start of the film that I enjoyed the best, where we see what is going on in the provinces as people look to Katniss as a paragon of hope.  She gives a speech to the residents of District 11 on the sadness she felt when their daughter died in her arms a year ago, it's a speech that starts a riot that's brutally put down by faceless guards.  It's a scene that put tears in my eyes, showing how people will respond on an emotional level to each other regardless of their differences, and that the things that lead to revolution can never be predicted.

Again there are some nice science fiction touches and good special effects.  The crazy monkeys might be a bit much, but the burning dresses are impressive.  Burning dress, 'girl on fire', are these intentional nods towards Joan of arc?  The metaphors for what Katniss' character represents are one thing, but it would be over-simplifying the story to say that it's all about her.  It's all about what she inspires others to do.  It's about showing teenage girls an image of themselves that isn't defined by body image and boys, rather defined by nobility, quiet strength and moral courage.

Unfortunately the film's ending was even more flat than the last one.  Things just sort of stop when they look like they're building to a crescendo.  I guess that's typical 'middle film' syndrome, and I'm afraid there's going to be more of that with the final booking being distilled into two parts.  I just hope that the story doesn't lose itself trying to turn Katniss into some sort of badass warrior type.  Given the look in her eye in the film's final shot I'm worried that might happen: "Katniss Everdeen is here to kick ass and chew gum - and she's all outa gum..."  Hopefully not.

Hunger Games: Catching Fire isn't the greatest film in the world, it's not even the best film in this franchise.  But as a series these films mean so much more.  They act as a counter-point to the Twlight series (shame on Mark Kermode by the way for continuing to insist that Hunger Games could only exist because of some sort of trail that was blazed by Twlight - utter bollocks), one that young girls and boys can enjoy just as much as a fast-approaching-35-years-old grumpy amateur film reviewer.  Don't believe me?  Well believe the large group of boisterous teenage lads who sat behind us in the cinema last night.  Even they shut up through the emotionally charged bits.  Now that's power.

Alien - my favourite scene

With little to do last night aside from sit in the house and finish writing my contribution to the BAFRA annual exam, I decided to watch Alien again.  I've stated many times on this blog that Alien is my favourite film.  So this time I want to discuss out my favourite scenes from the movie.  Though the film's most iconic and memorable moment is the notorious chest-buster scene (I expect this video link will fail to work at some point - the Ridley Scott copyright police are fairly hot on this), my favourite part of the film is the opening sequence in which we are introduced to the ship and the horror of what might unfold is foreshadowed.

The film opens with a shot that pans across space and an unknown planet.  After the film's title disappears from the screen we see the now infamous ship - the Nostromo - drifting through the endless cold indifference of interstellar space.  If anything were to go wrong out here, there's no one to help.  We cut inside the ship, observe its empty, cramped spaces and are invited into the main cockpit where we see a fragment of an unknown transmission being received by the ship's computer.  As the transmission ends we cut quickly to black.  When the picture comes back in we are in a darkened corridor with the lights just turning on.  Almost as if it had been waiting there for months for just this moment, the camera pauses for a second before slowly edging towards the door ahead of it where the crew are awaking from their slumber.

This is the visual language of cinema at work and operating at its finest.  The scene tells us about the premise of the film, sets up the aesthetic, hints at the horrors to come and generates a foreboding atmosphere of the terror of isolation in space - all from a few shots before we see a single person or hear a single line.  The idea that the camera has been waiting for the crew to awake if the bit that sends the biggest tingle down my spine.  It's as if the ship's computer has been waiting for this moment, stealthily hiding in the pitch black corridor for endless time until it's able to wake its crew and send them to their doom with a disconnected indifference that's only possible for a machine - or perhaps a corporation - to express.

I don't know why I'm watching Alien again now that my Lovefilm subscription is providing me with an endless films supply of films.  Maybe because it's bloody brilliant.

Rambo - the new one

Not entirely sure why my housemate decided it would be a good idea to watch Rambo (the 2008 version) a few evenings back, but as the film got underway I had no idea quite how much material it was likely to provide for this blog.

Rambo is the story of John Rambo (known in the film mostly as 'Boatman'), a Vietnam war veteran played by Sylvester Stallone who goes into the jungle to shoot baddies, rescue helpless people and generally raise hell.  Here he goes to the Burmese jungle for some reason, and ends up joining with a bunch of other Western military types to try to rescue a bunch of hapless and wimpy charity workers.  This involves shooting, stabbing, bayoneting and blowing up as many Burmese military personnel as he can before the credits roll and anyone who's still alive can live happily ever after.  This is a Rambo film - what did you expect?

I always imagined that Rambo would be something like The A-Team in its style - this could hardly be further from the truth.  In actual fact Rambo looks a lot more like Saving Private Ryan, with its visceral depiction of violence and death.  People who get shot have their arms and limbs blown off.  People getting shot in the chest have clear holes blown clean through them.  A man who is shot at point blank range with a .50 calibre machine gun is reduced to a pile of red mush in seconds - from several camera angles.  Whereas in Saving Private Ryan these moments of horrifically bloody violence are used sparingly to underscore the terror of war, here in Rambo they're used all the time.  And I do mean all the time.  The official body count for the film is 239, which tallies in at 2.59 per minute.  That's an entire company of soldiers for fuck sake!  The majority of these deaths are shown in ludicrously gory detail.  By overdoing the realism the film loses any power it could of had.  By removing any concept of the terror of warfare and replacing it with video game cut-scene style visuals, the film undermines itself.

To be honest though I can't imagine the makers of Rambo were really thinking about making a film that puts the viewer though the psychological grinder.  Instead they wanted to make a film where Rambo shoots a Burmese militiaman in the neck with and arrow, then that militiaman falls on to a mine and explodes.  And to be fair to them, that's exactly the film they've made.  If you're looking for a popcorn film that kills 2 hours of time and shows you nearly 250 people being killed in a variety of stupid ways, then this ticks every box.  Citizen Kane it is not.

Lovefilm Update

Regular visitors to this blog will be aware that I have a subscription to Lovefilm.  I recently discovered that my subscription has been changed without me being made aware of it.  Normally when this sort of thing happens you would assume that you're about to get screwed over by the man, but in this instance the change has been quite beneficial.

Up until last month I have had the same plan on Lovefilm since I first signed up to Amazon's DVD-by-post scheme 8 years ago - 4 DVDs a month, 2 at a time.  From this month onwards my subscription has been changed to an unlimited number of DVDs per month (still only 2 at a time though).  Previously this was a slightly more expensive package, but I never went with it as I didn't think I would have much chance of getting through more than 4 films each month.  Now Lovefilm have upgraded my account to have this new package without charging any more money - great!  I'm already reaping the benefit as I've got my 5th DVD of November coming my way as I type.

The question of why this has happened and why now has sloshed around in my brain for a few days, and I've concluded that there are probably a series of reasons, but one major of those reasons is the biggest of all.  Two minor reasons for this happening are likely that a) Amazon have recently re-acquired Lovefilm and are looking to do something different with the business and b) Lovefilm no longer offer 4 DVDs a month to new customers and so to cut down on admin they're moving all existing customers on to new packages.  The big reason for this though is surely the thing that's staring down the barrel at the entire home entertainment industry at the moment - streaming and catch-up TV.

The future of home entertainment looks to be inextricably linked to the internet, smart TVs and services like I-Tunes and I-Player.  As more and more film and TV are available on demand via services such as Netflix, what will happen to the more traditional film rental industries?  Only this week Blockbuster announced that almost all its video rental stores are due to close after years of haemorrhaging money.  Is Lovefilm worried that its own business is heading in the same direction?  Perhaps the heads of Lovefilm are trying to re-invigorate the DVD rental market by giving all their customers a free upgrade?

It's impossible to know the real motives behind what Lovefilm are doing, but what I do know is that while coverage of the internet remains sporadic in parts of the UK and non-existent across much of the world there will still be a market for by-post rental services.  The future will no-doubt be in online streaming services, but as Microsoft discovered recently when they tried to force the games industry to accept that the new Xbox One will only operate with an active internet connection, most people aren't quite yet ready for a world in which you have to be connected to the web in order to exist.  Only when access to the internet starts to be treated more like a utility than a luxury commodity will that future start to materialise.

Captain Phillips

Every time I go to the cinema these days I get to thinking how I go less and less.  Last week especially it feels like months since I went.  With my new mobile phone in hand but still on the Orange network I made immediate use of the Orange Wednesday offer by sending my first text message with the new handset to get a free ticket.  One wonders how much longer this offer will persist now that EE have stopped the Orange Wednesday adverts before films in cinemas.  I guess while EE are still spamming out their Kevin Bacon adverts before films though they're still contractually bound to keep this offer in place, so I'm going to keep on using it.

The film that moved me to actually go to the big screen for once was Captain Phillips, Paul Greengrass's latest drama / action film that tells the story of an American-owned cargo ship that was hijacked by Somali pirates in 2009.  Tom Hanks plays the eponymous captain of the ship, who faces off against the unknown Barkhad Abdi who plays Muse - the leader of the small band of Somalis driven by some kind of local feudal lord into taking to the high seas in search of people to rob.  The film is an outstanding depiction of what happened; the director effortlessly generates tension and empathy as we follow the ship's journey around the horn of Africa, flight from potential hijackers, eventual hijacking, cat and mouse games between crew and hijackers on board the ship and lastly the psychological warfare that breaks out when the US navy arrives on the scene.

In addition to this though, this is a film that's about much more than simply one hijacking off of Africa's eastern coast.  It's about the sadness of what some people are driven to, about the facelessness of governments and economic systems when it comes to dealing with people, and how that contrasts against the care and empathy that normal people feel for each other regardless of their backgrounds.  The Somali chief who forces Muse to go out on to the open seas to look for cargo ships to hijack doesn't give a shit about him, he just wants his pay day and doesn't care if Muse dies in the process.  Similarly the captain of the US warship that arrives on scene has it made very clear to him that Captain Phillips is not to be allowed to set foot in Somalia - even if that means blowing him up along with his Somali hijackers.  We are left in little doubt that the American military might is not really here to save one man from kidnapping, rather to send a message to future hijackers to not fuck with Uncle Sam.  Contrast this to how Captain Phillips acts towards one of his teenage kidnappers, or the way that the medical orderly cares for him in the film's final scene.

The final scene is one that's so touching and emotionally powerful one wonders why more directors don't just copy what Paul Greengrass is doing.  The director seems to do so easily what all great dramatisations of real life should do, which is to present events in a way that are as even-handed as possibly, while at the same time forcing you to confront things you never really wanted to think about.  He's telling us that the world is far more complex than the black-and-white picture often presented in mainstream news, and to cap it all he's doing it with an awesomely-paced psychological thriller.  Captain Phillips is excellent, a film that once again confirms Paul Greengrass as one of the best directors around just now.

Carnage - famous people in a flat

Watched Roman Polanski's middle class rage-romp Carnage the other week before I went on holiday.  Just after I started watching the film my housemate Andy came in, saw the cast and quickly joined in after getting a synopsis of the first 5 minutes from me.  I think that this nicely sums up the reaction that I had to this film when I first saw it advertised.  I can't really imagine a situation in which a film starring Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, John C Reilly and Christoph Waltz would be bad, or even a bit indifferent.  Let's see shall we...

The premise of Carnage is that there are 4 people stuck in a flat, they all want out of it for a variety of reasons but somehow are unable to escape.  These 2 couples are brought together because the son of Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz has hit the son of John C Reilly and Jodie Foster with a stick - and they come together to work out some sort of reparation between them.  We see these boys very briefly in a long shot at the start and end of the film, but apart from that the film focuses entirely on the two middle class couples arguing their way around what has happened.

Because of the premise, this is a film that is naturally quite stagey.  Christoph Waltz is the mostly uncaring doctor who spends more time on his mobile phone than looking after patients, Kate Winslet is his highly strung wife who barely hides her contempt for his 'dedication' to his profession.  Jodie Foster is the wannabe liberal who hates the fact she lives in a city with any Republicans, John C Reilly her alcohol & cigar-loving husband who keeps his true opinions to himself - mostly.  Into this melting pot of modern angst is poured monetary tensions, some off-food, plenty of booze, a bit of vomit and a hell of a lot of people finally telling some home truths.  It's entertaining stuff on the surface, but when you think about what really happens over the course of 75 minutes and the cast at the disposal of the director, it's all comes out looking a bit empty.

By the end I was sort of engaged by it, but at the same time a little bit thinking "that's it?".  It makes sense that the script for the film derives from a play that was a minor hit on Broadway, given that it's all set in one place.  By all means give this film a go because of the stellar cast - the performances are very good after all; but try not to be too upset if you end up wondering why you bothered.

Iron Man 3 - none of this makes sense

As with a lot of the films I end up blogging about on here, I sometimes wonder why I bothered watching them.  Iron Man 3 came out in May this year and was definitely one of those films I had no intention of paying nearly £10 to see.  The character of Iron Man is on the surface a very interesting one.  The man underneath the suit is Tony Stark, a one-time weapons mogul who got kidnapped by enemies of America and managed to escape after forging a powerful suit from bits left lying around their cave - a bit like MacGyver I guess.  When he realises that a war wound threatening to critically damage his heart can be kept at bay by a device that also powers his suit, man and machine merge to create Iron Man.  He subsequently decides that his time as an arms dealer has only been a force for evil and chaos in the world, and resolves to reform.

That's what happens in the first film anyway.  By the time the second one comes around Iron Man has to hit Mickey Rourke a lot of times because he has the audacity to declare that the Iron Man suit has created an end to war.  But what they were really doing was setting up Avengers Assemble by introducing Scarlet Johansson and Samue L Jackson as yet more characters in the Marvel universe.  With Iron Man 3 though the film looks like it isn't even setting up a sequel.  It's a film that feels like it only has half a script with characters that are hardly fleshed out.  Avengers Assemble has come and gone and I'm left wondering why they made the film.  Apart from money of course.

The plot holes are rife in Iron Man 3.  There is very little reason for anything in the film to occur.  Tony Stark ends up going after the 'big bad' Mandarin, but he only does it because his slightly douchey security guard accidentally gets himself involved in an explosion.  But that's just the start.  The film spends ages referencing things that happened in Avengers Assemble rather than actually telling a new story.  It carries on as if the memory of Martians invading New York in that film has only caused an incurable psychological rift in Tony Stark's mind as opposed to the collective mind of the whole of Humanity.

The one saving grace at all in the film is Ben Kingsley's exceptionally entertaining performance at the Mandarin.  It's a good job he's in there chewing the scenery up as Guy Pearce is utterly terrible in his role as the arms dealer who's trying too hard to be like Tony Stark used to be, plus Rebecca Hall is totally wasted - all she does is stand around being doe-eyed for most of the film before getting rather unfairly shot out of hand.

Now I'm not a Marvel fanboy, and so I don't know if Marvel fanboys love all this stuff.  What I do know is that I don't care about Marvel building a massive universe in which to spam out endless bland franchise movies about their characters.  If this is what Marvel suerhero movies are going to turn into in the near future then I'm afraid I'm going to lose interest pretty quickly.  Thankfully the resolution to this film indicates that we might not be seeing much more of Iron Man in the future.  And if you're worried that's a spoiler - don't be.  I've probably just saved you from watching a pointless car crash of a movie.

Byzantium - British vampires are best

Man I love the modern age of film releasing.  I remember first seeing films in cinemas in the mid 1980s, where if you missed it on the big screen you would have to wait years to see the thing later on a fading VHS at my Nan's house (she had a video player - we didn't).  Not so these days; and so after feeling disappointed to miss out on seeing Byzantium in cinemas in the spring I had to wait out only the summer months before being able to catch up.  Billed in some places as the thinking viewer's alternative to the Twilight saga, Byzantium is a vampire story in which Clara (Gemma Arterton) and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) play so-called Sucreants.  They live off human blood and have lived for more than 200 years each.  As we are introduced to them, we see them having to leave town quickly after a vampiric order they appear to be on the run from catches up with them.  Clara ruthlessly murders her vampiric pursuer before telling Eleanor to get her things and hitching a ride on to the first truck out of town.  Why are they on the run?  Well that's something that gets revealed slowly as the film unfolds.

While looking for an image to post in this review I stumbled across quite a few pictures of Gemma Arterton's heaving bosom on Google.  There's a lot of that in this film, but there's even more blood, pain and soul searching.  While Clara is happy to live a life of lies and deceit to stay one step of the order and keep her head and body in one piece, Eleanor is tired of living on the run and longs to tell her truth.  She writes her story into a diary and then throws the pages to the wind before anyone can read them.  The idea of vampirism is presented here as something of a sentence to endless purgatory, rather than a glamorous ticket to instant cool.  Clara survives the only way she knows how, which is to sell her body.  Eleanor preys on the aged, drinking the blood of men and women who are close to death and agree to her ending their suffering. When Clara takes advantage of a potential customer and shacks up in his dead mother's house, she sets up a brothel to make ends meet.  Meanwhile, a chance encounter between Eleanor and a local boy gives her an emotional outlet she has never had.

There are a couple of plot points that don't seem to make much sense.  Such as why Clara and Eleanor return to the town of Clara's upbringing if they're on the run?  Perhaps it was such a long time ago that it hardly seems to matter to them.  Then there is Eleanor's constant run-ins with local boy Frank.  She seems to conveniently bump into him all over the place.  Perhaps we can put that down to some sort of superior vampire sense that draws her to him?  Or something like that.  But the main one is why Eleanor is only getting bored by the ennui of being a sucreant now, why not 50 or 100 years ago?  Perhaps it's because they've returned to their home town?  Maybe.  The thing the film does well with its plot points is not to get bogged down in the whys and hows of vampirism.  When one of the vampires discovers that they've drunk the blood of someone with Leukaemia there is literally no hint that this might turn into a plot point, other than to identify a character who because of his cancer feels close to death and therefore drawn to vampirism.

So what I'm saying is that plot points aren't really what Byzantium is about.  It's a story about two women trying to independently survive in a world that doesn't want them while being pursued by a deeply misogynistic order obsessed with killing them.  It's a film that asks questions about the lies people tell and then have to live with in order to survive.  It's also a film that presents vampire mythology as it might appear in the real world, in which to become a vampire you have to run a terrifying trial of blood and then to maintain your secrecy you sometimes have to kill in cold blood.  Impressive then that the film succeeds in presenting both Eleanor and Clara as sympathetic characters, despite Clara acting out of desperate callousness on more than one occasion.

Byzantium is a very slow film, but it's an intense character drama with a smattering of extreme violence that does the things a vampire film should do - the film likely gets its 15 rating as much from its language and sex as its violence.  I can't understand why the film did so badly at UK cinemas.  I guess it was marketed at the Twilight crowd who were expecting something a little more light-hearted rather than a horror / thriller crowd who were happy to allow its slow-burning drama to play out.  I am recommending Byzantium.

In the Fog - Do not watch when depressed

Jesus Christ has anyone ever made a film before this that stares for so long and so deeply into the abyss humanity's dark side?  In the Fog is an unrelenting trudge through the muddied plains of Eastern Europe, marching without emotion towards the conclusion that at its heart human civilisation is nothing but a brief respite from our selfish and warlike nature.  But that doesn't necessarily make the film a bad one, as we shall see.

In the Fog is set at a non-specific point during the Second World War on the Eastern Front.  Given that the action is set somewhere in Belarus and the power of the German occupiers seems all-encompassing, we can probably assume mid-1942.  The film opens with an execution by hanging that happens out of shot.  A group of local men are hanged for some unknown crime and the onlooking crowd are warned of the perils of messing with their German overlords.  Cut to two men traipsing through a forest.  It soon becomes clear that these men are Soviet resistance fighters on their way to find a man from the village named Sushenya.  As the dialogue progresses we come to learn that Sushenya was not hanged with the others, rather he was released and the resistance fighters want to know why.  If the Germans didn't hang him then he must be a collaborator - mustn't he?  If he's a collaborator then he should be shot - shouldn't he?

There are plenty of films that use time and space to allow depth to form in their story.  In The Fog does this and then some.  Here we follow our resistance fighters walking through a forest, crossing a stream, and then partaking in a perfunctory conversation with Sushenya's wife about onions - even though they all know why they've come for Sushenya.  It all serves to emphasise the normality of these people and tedium of their lives, juxtaposed against the world-encompassing events sweeping up everyone around them.  The reality of being a Soviet resistance fighter is hardly heroic, rather it's a boring job much like any other.  As the truth about what really happened is slowly revealed in flashback, Sushenya becomes a sympathetic representation of human civilisation as a whole, trying to do its best to the right thing while people around him take advantage of the opportunities the chaos of the war has presented them.

After about 90 minutes Sushenya makes a speech to no one in particular about how he can't understand how the people in his village have become savages so quickly.  He wonders how everyone who knew and trusted him implicitly just 12 months ago is now hunting him as a traitor.  Is it because they can't comprehend that he wouldn't sell out to the Germans to save his own hide?  Is the reason they can't comprehend it because they know they would also defect under the same circumstances?  If so then why are they so quick to condemn him and hunt him down?  After all, it might be one of them who next has to choose between death and collaboration.  He wonders where all the good in the village has gone, and how quickly the veneer of civilisation is washed away.  This is the heart of the film, it's an thought-provoking message that the film-makers clearly wanted to deliver to the world.

As the film's final scene plays out, there is a brief moment where you think things might be left hanging on an ambiguous thread that dangles the slim possibility of future hope.  But a single sound tears that away in an instant.  Overall In the Fog is an exceptional film to watch.  It stares long and hard into the depths of human souls and finds frightening things there.  Good though it is, it's a film that you shouldn't watch if you're in anything less than an entirely coherent emotional state - because it's depressing as hell.

Mud - another good Matthew McConaughey film

The second film I watched on my flight to Chicago last month is the last one I'm going to write about from that trip.  Matthew McConaughey is an actor about whom I knew very little until a few years ago.  I don't think I can remember seeing him in anything at all before I saw Killer Joe last year, and looking through his IMDB resume I think the only film of note on the list is Contact (maybe Tropic Thunder too).  So it's hardly a surprise that he never appeared much on my film radar.  Anyway, something has changed now and in the course of a couple of years he has suddenly become and actor who stars in very interesting films - films like Mud.

Here Matthew McConaughey plays the eponymous Mud - a mysterious loner who appears on a deserted island in the middle of a swamp in rural Arkansas.  Two local boys discover Mud hiding out in a grounded boat beached on the island when exploring the swamp in their normal way.  They recognise Mud as potentially dangerous, but at the same time mysterious and intriguing.  When Mud offers to trade them a gun for their help in fixing up the beached boat help they quickly agree.  When he tells them about his girlfriend Juniper in the town, and how he is unable to go and get in contact with her, they naively agree to pass on messages to help him out - dreams of young love drowning out any warning signs of what they might be about to get involved in.

Mud is a very good film that tells a story about family, loyalty and betrayal in which the naivities of youth are tested against the desperate realities of the real world.  When the main young lad Ellis looks at Mud and Juniper he sees only star-crossed lovers rather than two people locked in a painful and possibly abusive relationship.  When Ellis falls in love with an older local girl he immediately declares her his girlfriend - causing her amusement and his rejection.  The main question the film asks though is which will win out, Mud's cynicism or Ellis' idealism.  When 'something bad' happens to Ellis, what will Mud risk to save the lad?

The film might be a little cheesy in its depiction of Reese Witherspoon's Juniper as the classic damsel in distress, but its heart is in the right place as it shows two impressionable young lads trying to think the best of the adults around them and asking if those adults will respond in kind.  Plus there's Matthew McConaughey's acting, which is really good.  He may have come to it late in his career, but it seems like he is intent on becoming a serious actor.  Good for him, and good for us.

Robin Hood Prince of Thieves - Back-filling my pop culture knowledge

As anyone who follows me on Facebook will know, I watched Robin Hood Prince of Thieves on Friday night last week.  I would say that the reasons for this are too long to go into here, but I'm not paying anyone for my column inches so I might as well tell you.  Until last Friday I had never seen this particular slice of early-90s pop fiction, and when I chanced upon a DVD of it on my shelf while I was hunting for something more substantial to watch last Friday I decided it was time to fill this particular hole in my pop culture knowledge.  I vaguely recalled a friend lending me the DVD ages ago along with her copy of The Sound of Music as part of a kind of cultural exchange.  I watched The Sound of Music right away, but Robin Hood had sat on the shelf untouched for years.

I know that reams of print have been written about the terribleness of Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, the mind-bending abuse of English geography (Apparently Nottingham is one day's walk from Dover, going via Northumbria) and fantastic pantomime performance by Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham.  There's not a lot I can add to any of that, save to say that I agree with everything everyone seems to think about the film.  It's a terrible film littered with bad acting, plot contrivances, derisory characterisation of woman as either damsels in distress or aged crones and ethnic minorities as scimitar-wielding wise men and - worst of all surely - under-uses Brian Blessed (though he does shout - once).  Every battle scene fails to tread the line between being perilous enough to make the action seem dramatic and comic enough to make the film passable by the censors for a audience of children; whenever the action is ramped up it looks out of place, whenever things are toned down they look cheesy.

To be honest though, I can hardly complain.  It's not like anyone ever recommended it - I knew exactly what I was getting myself into when I put the DVD in the PS3.  The film's one saving grace (everyone seems to agree on this) is the scenery-obliterating performance by Alan Rickman, who gurns his way through an endless string of ridiculously over-the-top lines while exuding the sweaty bug-eyed look of a demented serial killer.  It's a performance any pantomime bad guy would sell his soul for, and the one highlight of the entire experience.

So with this out of the way that's another pop culture classic off the list.  I guess the next target's going to be Titanic.  That's right folks - I've never seen Titanic.  And at 3 hours long I'm not sure I'll ever get around to bothering.  Let me know if I'm wrong!

Beasts of the Southern Wild - interesting but aimless

This film caught the attention of many (including myself) earlier this year when its young star Quvenzhané Wallis was nominated for the prize of best actress as the Oscars.  She was in the end well-beaten by Jennifer Lawrence, but the impressive fact is that Wallis was the youngest ever person to be nominated in that category.  The nomination is perhaps even more exceptional when you realise Wallis's background, that she was effectively pulled off the streets and lied about her age to play a character who was supposed to be much older.  It's a story that makes Beasts of the Southern Wild an interesting prospect.

The film is about a young girl (named Hushpuppy - played with ability far in advance of her age by Wallis) who lives on an island called Bathtub that sits off the southern coast of Louisiana.  Hushpuppy lives with her father, a man who suffers from violent outbursts which serve to harden Hushpuppy against the realities of the natural world around her.  The denizens of Bathtub see themselves as connected closely with the natural world, living as they do on both the social and physical outskirts of the modern USA they hardly connect with modern America at all.  When a great storm passes through Bathtub many people are killed and the others are forced to live on a series of rafts while the wait for the waters to recede.  All the while we are shown images of glaciers cracking and large beasts rumbling their way across the world - metaphors perhaps of nature's intention to clear humanity off the Earth like so many species before us?

After watching the film I stumbled across a number of heated debates going on in and around the IMDB discussion forums.  Whereas some people thought the film to be a tear-jerking look at innocence and the fragility of humanity, a vocal minority are expressing the view that the film is hopelessly racist, chock full of Victorian era stereotypes and references to the 'noble savage' trope.  Posters on IMDB seem to have missed that many of the inhabitants of Bathtub are in fact white, and that to equate Hushpuppy's apparent connection to the natural world with the 'noble savage' concept isn't really fair.  After all the people of Bathtub aren't really portrayed as an idealistic tribe a la Pocahontas, rather they are people who happen to live on the front line of a natural disaster.  If anything they hark back to traditional ideas of US expansionism of the colonial era, where self-sufficiency outside of government control was the holy grail for the intrepid souls trekking their way into the wild west.

I felt that the people who had made this film were trying to aim very high, but without really finding a target.  They start off with a lot of imagery that's all about humanity's connection to the natural world.  Hushpuppy's teacher tells her about evolution, how things are destined to change and how we need to adapt along with them or die.  It all seems like it's going to mean something.  Hushpuppy then goes in search of her mother and finds something which may or may not be what she was looking for.  Then when the beasts finally arrive at Bathtub (yep - it's not a metaphor, they're real apparently) nothing really happens.  Then it's over.  I wonder if the people on IMBD who are shouting racism are doing so before they're trying to find the meaning, but when they come up with a blank they're lashing out and accusing the film of being evil - rather than just a bit aimless.

Kick Ass 2 - filmed at TRL

Despite somewhat indifferent reviews in various parts of the press, me and a small group of my fellow TRL employees took a trip into Reading last week on Saturday afternoon to watch Kick Ass 2 at the Vue.  Aside from the interest we had in seeing the follow up to the surprisingly subversive Kick Ass, the film held special interest to us because a film crew spent time on the TRL test track last year filming something for the movie.  These things never get officially announced at TRL, but when fluorescent signs directing people to KA2 crop up around the site - people quickly start asking questions and spreading information on the grapevine.

For me, the thing that made Kick Ass such an exciting movie was the way that it shocked, the way that it took a bunch of conventions and shat on them while telling you all about the composition of the shit it had just produced.  It used Nicholas Cage's acting skills effectively (how often can anyone say that?) and gave the world a new future star in Chloe Grace Moretz - who's filth-laden taunting led the audience in the cinema I saw the film to literally gasp in shock that a 11 year old girl could say such things.  The big problem with making a sequel to such a film is that you can't really be shocking any more, since that's what everyone's expecting.

Kick Ass 2 picks up the story a few years after the first.  Mindy (aka Hit Girl) is trying to be a normal 16 year old girl, Dave (aka Kick Ass) is trying to convince her to be Hit Girl again by re-igniting the crime-fighting fires.  It's about as straight a story as a post-modern super-hero spoof can be.  Mindy doesn't want to be Hit Girl any more - or does she?  Her guardian certainly doesn't want her to take after her father, so she does her best to try to fit in with the other kids at school and leave her PVC-wearing crime-fighting days behind her.  But with Kick Ass back in action beating up with a bunch of other super hero wannabes, Hit Girl's probably going to have to come and save them.

People who say that swearing isn't clever clearly haven't seen The Thick of It.  Kick Ass 2 doesn't get as colourful as Armando Ianucci's classic, but they give a good go of it as Mindy mouths off appropriately at her high school.  Some of these scenes feel a little odd - mainly one in which Mindy and her new mates come over all dreamy-eyed watching a boy band video - but the dirty humour and poo gags are generally done better than most of the frat boy stuff that normally comes out of the Vince Vaughn / Seth Rogen.

When the scenes finally arrived in which TRL's test track is clearly visible, the 4th wall was totally broken for me as I spent the entire sequence looking at the background to see our track and trying to work out if Chloe Grace Moretz was ever at TRL or in fact they used a stunt double for the whole thing.  It looks like every shot where the background is visible you can only see the back of Hit Girl's head, while all the shots of Moretz's face are in close up or look suspiciously green-screened.  I guess that means that all the stuff at TRL was done by the 2nd unit, and that no big stars were ever here.  Not this time anyway.

Kick Ass 2 isn't as good as Kick Ass, mainly for the reason that shock-value only works once.  It's still a fun film though as long as you're happy to watch crudity, foul-mouthed banter and stylised ultra-violence.  The film may be called Kick Ass - but the real star is Hit Girl.  Given the amount of time that Chloe Grace Moretz spends not actually playing Hit Girl in the film, I think only a fool would bet against Hit Girl - the movie coming to a screen near you eventually.

The Bling Ring - materialism gone even madder

The second film I saw on the way to Chicago last month was The Bling Ring.  Based on a true story, it tells of a small group of Southern Californian teenagers who systematically broke into the houses and stole from a variety of well-known celebrity figures.  Far from any showing devious criminal intent, these teenagers appear to be stealing from their idols because they adore them - almost as if the celebrities who have been chosen to have their possessions stolen are being honoured.  The Bling Ring depicts this small band of teenagers (led by Rebecca - played by Katie Chang) as being obsessed with the cult of celebrity, shows their desire to bask in the shadow of the idols and emulate them in any way they can - including by owning what they own by any means possible.

The Bling Ring is a strangely interesting film to actually watch, given what it actually consists of.  The film goes into a lot of detail in depicting the upper middle class teenage gang breaking into the houses of the rich and the famous, and even more detail as we watch them try on their clothes and gape in awe at the riches before them.  Expensive watches, row after row of shoes, boxes of fine jewellery - all toys that we watch these young criminals gawk in awe at, try on and steal for themselves.  We then get to see the aftermath, as the young gang go around to each others' houses to wear the stolen clothes, brag about their antics on Facebook and go out to exclusive clubs to photograph themselves prancing about in their material gains.  All the while our ears are assaulted by a barrage of Southern Californian 'valley girl' drawl - the dialect of the English language that showed us how the phrase "I was like..." is a synonym for "I said..."

But the film isn't really about these people, it's about why these people are able to exist.  Given the focus that the film puts upon the lives of Rebecca and her growing band of followers, and their obsession with the material gains of celebrity culture, it's clear that The Bling Ring is trying to be an indictment of vacuous materialism.  Witness the way that the characters in the film see worth only in things, possessions, looks, fame and stardom.  Director / writer / producer Sofia Coppola is making a statement about a generation of young Americans who are risking getting lost in a brand of hollow celebrity culture that rewards nothing but fame for fame's sake and values nothing above consumerism.  These are people who see value only in being famous, and if you can get famous by stealing from the famous - what's wrong with that?  The film ends on an interview with co-criminal Nicki (Emma Watson) that sums things up nicely.  Why should she have any compunction about what she's done?  She has her 15 minutes of fame now - and that's all that matters!

Parental influence is a strong theme in the film, it shows how bad parenting can reflect terribly on a child and their upbringing.  Nicki's mother is depicted as subservient to her children, interested only in the reflected fame that Nicki's notoriety will bring her.  Most of all though the film is a warning about what can happen if a society allows a cult of consumerism and 'might is right' to become endemic at all levels.  The only difference between what is depicted here and the riots that happened in the summer of 2011 in Britain is the social class of the people taking part.  Both stem from the same problem, which is that society has sleep-walked to a place where we idolise material possessions and fame - with an understanding that if you can get away with it then no-one should ask why or how you have them.  That's a dangerous place for us to be.  The Bling Ring tackles that head-on, and as such I think it's a film well worth watching.

Oblivion - Moon-lite

The first film that I watched on my flight to Chicago two weeks ago was Oblivion.  This appears to be the latest attempt to re-invigorate Tom Cruise's up-and-down career, this time by giving him another sci-fi action role in which he gets to look tough and caring while having not only one but two love interests each young enough to be his daughter.  Seriously - Andrea Riseborough and Olga Kurylenko are 19 and 17 years younger than him respectively.  More evidence that you're not allowed to grow old and be female in Hollywood, aka the "What happened to Meg Ryan" effect.

Oblivion opens with a background story to a future gone wrong, a future in which Earth was attacked by aliens known as the Scavs.  It was a war that humanity eventually won, but at great cos to the Earth and its population.  The remains of humanity live off the surface now, on a great pyramid called the Tet that orbits the Earth and from which engineers struggle to make use of Earth's remaining meagre resources.  Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough play two such engineers, a crack team who live on a floating platform above the surface of the Earth and act as custodians to several huge fusion reactors and the flying drones that act as mobile defences against the remaining Scavs.  The perils of the mission in front of them is offset by a strong loving bond between them, as such they seem ideally-placed to carry out this long mission isolated from the rest of humanity.

After a close encounter with a group of Scavs, and after discovering a building that seems to be triggering dormant memories, Jack (Cruise's character) starts to ask a questions about the true purpose of their mission on Earth.  When an ancient relic of the war between the humans and the Scavs crashes nearby and he thinks he recognises one of the survivors, he resolves to get to the bottom of the nagging doubts gnawing away at his brain.

Oblivion is a very good science fiction film.  It has beautiful sets, a genuinely futuristic aesthetic, an excellent concept and nice little science fiction touches such as the deadly menace given off by the hovering drones.  Andrea Riseborough in particular gives an outstanding performance as a woman torn between loyalty to a person and loyalty to a mission.  The comparisons with Moon are undeniable though (though to actually compare them in detail would involve too many spoilers), and though it definitely isn't anywhere near being a rip-off it gets very close to it in many ways.

In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that Moon is such a spectacularly brilliant film I'm sure I would be rating Oblivion a lot higher.  The biggest downside to the film is that it feels a little bit like a committee of Hollywood execs saw Moon and decided that they fancied a slice of that pie for themselves.  So they got someone to write a similar-ish story but with more guns, action and attractive women but fewer disturbing smiley-faced androids.  There are some people out there who will see that as an upgrade, personally see it as bordering on copyright infringement.  A smaller let-down is that the film is billed as starring Morgan Freeman, and when he doesn't appear for 30 minutes a wandering mind might start to wonder where he is.  From there is isn't too hard to start guessing the plot twists.

Overall I want to end the review on a positive point, because I definitely enjoyed Oblivion.  It has the right blend of action, hard science fiction, future tech and humanity to keep everyone happy.  It mixes those things up well and tells an engaging story with a number of twisty bits which is only really damped when comparing to one of the best science fiction films of recent years.  The makers of Elysium should watch and learn.

Elysium - Universal Health Care gone mad

I have a lot of films to review since flying to Chicago and back from New York recently.  On the plane over to the States I watched The Bling Ring, Oblivion and Mud.  On the way back the flight was quite short and the entertainment system a bit more limited, so I re-watched Snatch - nothing new there, still funny as ever.  I'm going to start things off with a film that I went to see at the Chicago AMC, the brand new science fiction action film starring Matt Damon - Elysium.

Here's the plot part of the review.  In a future littered with standard science fiction depictions of society gone wrong, the haves live in a techno wet dream paradise that orbits the Earth named Elysium while the have-nots live on the surface of the planet.  Elysium is an idyllic palace populated by poshos talking in well-received English and the occasional French.  Earth is an extended refuse tip where people scratch out the barest of livings, speaking a mix of street English and Spanish.  Matt Damon plays an every-man who has some unspecified connection to a local crime-lord and once was 'the best' at something, but is now 'out of the game'.  Whatever that is.  After Damon's character Max suffers a near fatal injury at work because of his heartless employers on Elysium, he decides to suit up and steal his way to Elysium to get himself healed up.  Because on Elysium technology means that basically no disease exists, everything is curable, whereas on Earth to get or injured means incapacitation and a life of the scrap heap before a likely early grave.

This is the sort of thing that good science fiction is meant to do.  The problem with Elysium is that it's full of lazy characterisation and even lazier storytelling.  There are the haves, who clearly need to be able to speak French, while the have-nots must speak Mexican-Spanish.  Jodie Foster as the leader of the haves is tediously one-dimensional in her brand of evil, Matt Damon as the every-man we should root for is introduced with such a thin background that the only reason we know he is the hero is because the film tells us he is the hero.  Then there's the South African bounty hunter Kruger (admittedly played with a gleeful nastiness by Shalo Copley), who just runs around killing stuff for no apparent reward and gets to punch and be punched by Matt Damon in the film's numblingly inevitable final fistfight.

Plot holes are littered throughout Elysium.  Why is transporting information in people's brains more secure than standard wireless transmission if it's that easy to kidnap people and download the data?  What is the 'death' fail-safe thing that the information mule guy uses to transport his data?  Is that standard practice?  Wouldn't they use an expendable data mule for that purpose rather than using the chairman of the company if they're going to do that?  Can anyone think of a more obvious target for potential data interceptors?  Also the end makes no sense either, but I don't want to give away any more spoilers.

It doesn't take too much thinking to work out that Elysium is a poorly-disguised essay on the benefits of Universal Health Care.  Given the political shit-storm that has engulfed US politics since Obama's attempts to introduce even the smallest amount of universal healthcare provision in that nation, it is no surprise that a film like this should exist.  No surprise either that the film stars Matt Damon, well known for his liberal political activism.  As a confirmed socialist myself, I am fiercely in favour of universal healthcare and I believe it would do America a lot of good to have something like the NHS to replace their divisive private healthcare system.  But this film isn't going to do a lot of convince the naysayers otherwise.  It's unsubtle in the extreme, full of bad characters, mis-stepping plot lines, unimaginative uses of science fiction tropes and reduces itself to an over-reliance on punching and stabbing to resolve its story-line.  Some good special effects cannot save Elysium, it's a big disappointment.

Only God Forgives - but is it art?

I've waited all weekend before trying to put my thoughts about Only God Forgives down into the Blogosphere.  I saw the film on Friday evening last week.  I had been hoping to see one of the final showings of Pacific Rim, but due to poor takings that seems to have vanished off screens early.  Instead this new and very moody-looking film was offered up as a replacement.  The trailers for Only God Forgives make it look stylised and hint at a violently brutal storyline.

It turns out that the trailers did a very good job, because to call Only God Forgives stylised is to hugely understate what this film is.  It is one of the most heavily-stylised pieces of film-as-art I've seen in a long time.  If you thought Stoker was stylised, you aint seen nothing yet.  Not a single shot of Only God Forgives goes by without the director lovingly ensuring that the light from nearby street lamp falls in exactly the right place over a character's face, everything has been sculpted to an impossible level of perfection.

Ryan Gosling plays Julian, son to criminal Matriarch Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) and brother to a man murdered in vengeance for raping and killing a local girl prostitute.  Julian is a big time drug dealer in Bangkok, and when Crystal arrives in town to demand that Julian find and kill her son's murderer, Julian tells her that he has already found the man, but decided to let him go.  After all, he did rape and kill the man's daughter.  Crystal flies into a rage at this, and hires her own killers to do the job she thinks Julian wasn't man enough for.  All well and good, except for the local police chief Chang, the man who was responsible for telling the girl's father about her murder and effectively goading him into killing Julian's brother in revenge.  Crystal decides that he too is responsible for her son's death, and so resolves to kill him too.

It is around this conflict that the film then revolves.  For Chang is not the sort of person anyone should be messing with.  Chang is portrayed as a deliberately slow-mannered man.  He is a man who sings karaoke to a room full of police officers silently appreciating him, a man who walks as if carried on a cloud and hands out justice in the manner he sees fit with the pointy end of a sword.  He is a character that the film portrays as an almost other-worldly force, an entity that exists out of the realm of normality silently passing judgement on the filth of society in a variety of excruciatingly violent ways that more than justify an 18 rating.

The title of the film implies a connection to the Judeo-Christian concept of god.  The implication being that either Julian or Chang represent god, or that they perhaps each represent two halves of the god presented in the bible.  Julian perhaps is the god of the new testament, turning the other cheek to the killer of his brother; Chang perhaps is the god of the old testament, breathing fire and brimstone and bringing righteous vengeance upon anyone stupid enough to challenge him.  Perhaps instead Chang is the devil and Julian is god, Chang the bringer of vengeance and death, Julian using his inner strength to bring peace?

All of this is fine of course, except that the film itself is mostly over-stylised gibberish and miles too slow even for its short 90 minute run time.  It's art masquerading as cinema.  Director Nicholas Winding Refn clearly had a vision for what he wanted to do on screen and it's all up there without much in the way of script editing by anyone else.  There are too many scenes of Ryan Gosling staring at his knuckles or having visions of Chang or sitting in rooms with prostitutes milling / sitting around artistically (can anyone tell me why this is in the movie?).  No one needs more than one scene of Chang standing in front of his police underlings singing karaoke - here was have 3.

When I left the cinema on Friday I was astonished that someone would be willing to put such a film together, let alone show it in cinemas and claim it was a movie.  I was amazed that a movie exec somewhere hadn't vetoed what was going on before it became a mainstream release.  With the calm reflection of 5 days behind me though, I'm happy to give Only God Forgives a little more leeway and declare it at the least interesting.  If you thought Drive was too slow then you will hate this.  But if you're happy to sit through 90 minutes of slow-burning violence you might find something of interest here.  Have a go if you've got the time, but don't blame me if you hate it.

The World's End - the final Cornetto

Friday a week ago I went to the Showcase in Winnersh to once again worship at the fanboy altar and revel in the glory of a Pegg / Frost / Wright production, the first since Hot Fuzz and the closing chapter of the hitherto magnificent Cornetto Trilogy.  The World's End follows Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead into a world in which the tropes of Holywood cinema are transported into the mundane humdrum of Englishness - where everything will be OK so long as we can find a pub and a decent cup of tea.  Chuck in a heap of cultural references, some frenetic camera work and a shed load of genius one-liners and you've got yourselves a couple of genuinely hilarious cult classics.  Given my adoration for Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead you can imagine my anticipation of this film, and my slight fear when the trailers came out and they weren't that good.  The jokes looked a bit tired, the format looked jaded and it seemed to lack a bit of the sparkle of earlier Pegg / Frost / Wright collaborations.  Things did not look good.

Sadly having actually watched The World's End I think I sort of got the right impression from the trailer.  In it Simon Pegg plays Gary King, a man who never let go of his youth, who still wears the same t-shirts he did at the end of high school and fantasises over the greatest night of his life when he nearly completed a famous 12 stop pub-crawl in his home village - 20 years ago.  Gary gets the old gang (who have all most definitely grown up) back together to return home and go on the same pub crawl once more.  However he discovers that things are not quite the way he remembers them, and that the creeping standardisation that has affected so many of Britain's high streets as also infected his village.  Not only this though, but the neutralisation of culture appears to be the work of an alien influence, here to apparently save us from ourselves.

Edgar Wright has said in interviews that the aliens in the film are meant to represent some sort of pan-galactic Starbucks, here to pacify tensions and ease people into a quiet happy numbness where all needs are provided for and all conflict is quelled.  Of course the metaphor is a neat one.  The film presents two opposing forces and contrasts the failings of each.  Gary King, with his old band t-shirts and devotion to Primal Scream, represents the old school, the crazy recklessness of youth, optimism and nostalgia.  The aliens are the corporate, the conservative force of conformity; they represent the idea that for society to work people must somehow suppress their own individuality to conform to an idealised norm.  Should we root for Gary or the Aliens?  Or perhaps neither?

I had less fun watching this than I did watching either Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz; a lot less fun.  Now I don't know if this experience makes it a worse film than those, or if it has something to do with my over-inflated expectations of the Pegg / Wright output, but it was a fact none-the-less that I left the cinema underwhelmed by what I had seen.  Perhaps it was the character of Gary King that left me cold.  King is a dislikeable guy who doesn't really get any redemption or change, hardly a Shaun or Nicholas Angel for the audience to root for.

As Wright has indicated in interviews, it might be that the real enemy presented by the film is in fact nostalgia itself.  Could it be that with this final part of a trilogy that once re-defined British cinema, that Pegg, Wright and Frost are in fact trolling their own audience?  Does Gary King represent the vocal minority of Spaced fans still calling for a third series?  Maybe he even represents fans such as me, the people harking back to Shaun of the Dead and lamenting Simon Pegg's ongoing move into the American mainstream?  Perhaps Pegg and Wright are telling us that it is time to move on, to not end up being a Gary King living your life in a glorious past that existed so very briefly?

However you choose to look at it, and regardless of the fact that I felt it was a let-down, The World's End is still funny.  It's a pleasant antidote to the endless churn of Holywood action blockbusters slugging it out for audiences this summer.  I'm trying to heed the lessons of The World's End and not get too nostalgic here, but I think Simon Pegg's best work has always been rooted in a deep understanding of Englishness, nerd culture and the hilarity of the mundane.  I hope that he, Frost and Wright all keep their feet on the ground and not get too carried away by their increasingly elevated statuses amongst the Holywood literati.  I'm sure they've got a lot more to give to the cinema-going world; and I would like to see them making films together for a few more years yet.

Spiderman - another one!

Accidentally watched Spiderman the other day after I got the DVD through the post.  That happened because I forgot to re-order my LoveFilm list after I sent a better film back last week.  Well I guess I put the thing on my list so it's nobody's fault but mine it happened.

This review has got off to a bad start, probably because I didn't enjoy myself a great deal watching this reboot of yet another Marvel superhero they're rinsing to death for all the money they can.  This time around we have Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker, a young lad who geekily stumbles his way through high-school before for some reason going into the big city, getting bitten by a spider, getting superpowers, making a red and blur suit before finally turning into The Amazing Spiderman.

Andrew Garfield is a fine actor, Rhys Ifans plays a good bad guy and I have a bit of a crush on Emma Stone - so you would think that with the cast alone there would be plenty of scope to make this a decent superhero movie.  It's not too bad, but I took something of a dislike to it as I've definitely had my fill of this kind of Marvel origins film where a nobody becomes a superhero and then has to have a fistfight with someone at the end to satisfy the fanboys.  Ifans plays your typical Marvel scientist who creates something he can't control and it drives him mad, a madness that can only be cured by Spiderman punching win a whole heap of times.  It's the same old story that's been done tonnes of times in the past and needs to be a little more imaginative if it's going to keep me interested.

I guess this is the sort of thing that pleases the vocal majority of Marvel fans out there as the film is rocking a respectable 7.1 on imdb and has a lot of glowing reviews.  Green Lantern was a low point in this genre of film and to an extent Iron Man also sits in that spectrum.  Let's not forget Captain America, but that was such a terrible film anyway it hardly warrants comment.  This version of Spiderman is hardly the worst of the bunch, but it's getting flak from me because I'm getting sick of the constant reboots.  There's a sequel pencilled in for next year so we'll have to wait to see what they do with the format.  Hopefully they'll try something interesting and make a slightly less-tedious movie.

Flight - Denzil Washington doesn't make bad movies

Denzel Washington seems to always make good films.  I'm not talking about masterpieces here or claiming that he's always a huge box-office draw, but whenever Denzel Washington is in a film I immediately expect the it to be at least passable or better.  I don't think I've ever seen a Denzel Washington film that was genuinely bad.  Case in point was Unstoppable a few years back.  It's a film that should have been terrible, but turned out to be pretty good.  Solid film from a solid actor who has consistently delivered solid performances for years.

And so we come to Flight, the Denzel Washington film of 2012 in which he plays an alcoholic airline pilot named Whip who saves a doomed plane from crashing out of the sky by performing an incredible maneuver that involves flying his passenger airline upside-down.  Disregarding the physics of this maneuver for a second (though a quick google search indicates that the plausibility of the feat is greater than I had originally assumed), it's a dramatic event that confirms Whip as a hero.  Until the investigators find out that he had alcohol and drugs swimming around his system at the time of the crash.  Whip awakes in hospital to find that only 6 people died in the crash - including the air hostess with whom he had spent the previous night.  The media are hailing him a hero, but the crash investigation team and his lawyers know that his secret cannot stay hidden for long.

Flight is a film about redemption and saving people both literally and spiritually.  Religion plays an important part in the film.  Whip's co-pilot Ken is an ardent Christian who sees his survival in the crash as a message from god to change, when in hospital Whip meets Nicole - an alcoholic in rehab who makes it her mission to try to save him from himself.  Whip of course is responsible for the saving of nearly 100 lives when he successfully brings the plane to the ground - but is he capable of saving himself?  As Whip is encouraged to better himself and clean his act up to survive the inquiry into the crash he struggles to cope without booze, is he better trying to change himself or simply being the man he really is?  At several points in the film Whip looks to the heavens as planes meander by, whether he's looking to the sky for salvation or lamenting his ostracisation from the life that brought him fame and joy is unclear.  What is clear is that he knows his life has to change, but has no idea how to do it.

Flight is a film that has a bit of action, a bit of wit, a bit of courtroom drama, a bit of spirituality and quite a bit of nudity in its opening scene.  As we see Whip for the first time waking up in his hotel room he takes a phone call as air hostess Katerina prances around in the buff behind him for several minutes - for no apparent reason.  As far as I can tell this is one of the only things in the movie that ensures the film has a 15 rating, it's almost as if the scene's there to ensure the film gets the 15 rating.  Though Whip's near-continual use of cocaine in the film is probably worthy of the 15 rating too.  Probably.

In conclusion, Flight is a surprisingly good film.  For a film that tries to be a little bit action, a little bit silly (Jon Goodman hamming it to the max) and a little spiritual - it mixes them up quite well.  Though as I said at the top of the review, Denzel Washington doesn't do bad movies - so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at all.