Easy Rider - Opening Credits

Just a quick one today to finish February off on a lazy Friday afternoon, the opening credits of Easy Rider, including the Steppenwolf classic Born to be Wild.



My mini American road trip of 2 years ago wasn't enough.  I need to go back and do a big one.

Robocop - The old one

With the release of the remake of the 1980s blood-fest Robocop upon us, there have been a few reviews knocking around in which I have seen various people telling me how much they love and respect the original movie.  Robocop is a film I saw as a teenager, probably at too young an age as several of the brutally violent scenes have stuck in my mind ever since.  It's a film that I never had any great affinity for, but since seeing so many people who's views I usually respect talking it up I decided to watch it again.  With nothing to do a few Friday evenings ago (Valentines Day) I fired up Netflix in the hope of finding Robocop and yes, there it was.  Time to watch it again for the first time in over 20 years.

It was almost immediately obvious from the opening scenes that the satire of Robocop had totally passed me by as a young teenager.  We are treated to a series of farcical news reports and adverts set in a corporate dominated near-future.  Here, the US city of Detroit has been condemned to rot under the heel of ruthless criminals, while the police officers who are supposed to fight them are reduced to cannon fodder in a war the corporation is funding both sides of.

Robocop is very similar to Starship Troopers.  Both are films that present a hyper-real nightmare vision of a near future in which the corporation / fascist government is set upon erasing all traces of humanity that don't fit into their plan.  Of course these films both have the same director, so the comparison is obvious.  Inside the first 5 minutes we are treated to the infamous ED-209 scene (youtube clip not available) in which an over-the-top military grade android is presented as the solution to Detroit's crime problems.  The droid comes complete with automatic machine guns, which are for some reason fully-loaded for the boardroom demonstration that goes wrong in elaborately gory fashion after ED-209 decides that one of the board members is a threat that needs to be 'neutralised'.  All the rest of the boardroom seem to care about is that there's now one less person trying to climb the greasy pole.  It's a scene that sets the tone for the rest of the film as a hyper-violent parody of the militarisation of the police and the seedy effect that corporate influence can have over society.

The acting is very hammy in places and the film revels in clichés (angry black police sergeant, evil corporate boss and their toady stooges) but the point is made in spite of this.  Even by modern standards it's an incredibly violent film.  It harks back to an age before digital effects when fake blood was used on set rather than being digitally added in post-production.  The two crucial scenes at the start of the film when ED-209 kills the boardroom toadie and then Officer Murphy is murdered in cold blood each go on for much longer than strictly necessary.  There is a lot of focus on the injury and harm being done, with the final bullet through Murphy's head being shown in close-up as it creates a hole through his skull.  For these reasons I expect that even as a contemporary film it would be an 18.

If the new version of Robocop does nothing else, then at the very least it has given me an excuse to go and seek out the original for the first time in what must be 20 years.  It's a film that deserves a lot more credit than I had been prepared to give it, and with grown-up eyes it's clearly much more than just a cheesily-acted slice of ultra-violence.  What films did you watch as a kid and have never seen since?  Perhaps it's time to go back and give some of them another go.

Rush - F1 on the big screen

Caught up on another of last summer's blockbuster releases over the weekend; Rush is the Ron Howard-directed film that dramatises the events of the 1976 Formula One World Championship, in which Nikki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl) and James Hunt (Chris Hemmsworth) battled for the title.  The season was particularly notorious for the crash at the Nürburgring where Nikki Lauda was permanently disfigured as a raging fire engulfed his car.  Lauda returned to racing after only a month out of the sport recovering, and the battle for the championship went right to the final race.

Rush focusses on the personal rivalry between the two drivers.  Hunt was a notorious playboy while Lauda was a perfectionist.  Each came from wealthy backgrounds and effectively bought their way into Formula One.  They quickly moved up the ranks and Lauda became the champion in 1975 as a Ferrari driver.  Though the difference in approach by each driver made them natural enemies, they were in fact remarkably similar in their determination and focus to become the champion.  As is traditional for stories like this, each of the two men eventually learn something from each other and form a grudging respect.

The best thing in this film is definitely the recreation of the Formula One races.  You're right in there with the drivers as they bounce along the asphalt in the ludicrously unsafe cars of the 1970s.  The sounds of the engines and tyres are brilliantly recreated and there is at least one nice touch for Formula One aficionados to spot (the famous 6-wheeled Tyrrell is shown in the background in the grid, I assume there are more for those paying attention).  I assume that the sound team on the film went to real races to record actual sounds of engines and those iconic F1 gear changes.  It makes sense that Rush just won the BAFTA for best editing; these sequences inside the F1 cockpit are outstanding.  Should have won best sound too, but then I've not seen Gravity yet so maybe that deserves it.

In terms of downsides; apart from being mildly miffed that they couldn't find an English man to play the iconic Englishman Hunt, the film only disappointed me in its final scene by providing a spoon-fed morality that explained what everyone was thinking.  I guess it might be that they wanted to provide the still-alive Nikki Lauda with a platform from which to tell the audience his real views on the now-dead James Hunt, but I think that the film itself was enough to get that across.

Rush is a film that fares very badly on the Bechdel test.  Female characters are reduced to objects of affection for either Hunt or Lauda who sit helplessly worrying when their husbands are putting their lives on the line to win races.  Natalie Dormer makes a brief appearance at the start of the film as a nurse who falls for Hunt while he's in his Formula 3 phase.  Is she under contractual obligation to get her boobs out in everything she's in?  At least we get to see Alexandra Maria Lara again, first time I've seen her in anything since she played Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge in Downfall.  But this is very much a story told from the point of view of two highly-strung male petrol heads trying to kill themselves to go slightly faster.  I think we can forgive a certain level of anonymity in its female characters.

Notwithstanding these small negative things, Rush is a very enjoyable if formulaic film with excellent visual effects and sound.  It successfully brings Formula One racing to life for both the casual viewer and the avid fan.

Made of Stone - Waterfall

So I know that I never got around to reviewing Made of Stone last year.  Seems a little odd now I look back on it given that I put the documentary in my top 5 films of 2013, but I don't really have a lot to say about it.  It's an indulgence film by Shane Meadows, who is a gigantic fan of the Stone Roses.  For him it's enough to simply film them at work and at play, edit the thing together and bang it up there on screen without any need to invent a narrative.  And to be honest, I agree with him.

I don't really have much to say about this scene in particular, apart from the fact that I absolutely loved watching the Stone Roses practising by playing one of their all-time classic tunes:



Brilliant.  The end of the film is probably meant to be the apex of it all, as the band come together through their difficulties and play an extended version of Fools Gold to tens of thousands of fans at a packed Heaton Park.  But I preferred this.  Rock on!

Now You See Me - No, I won't

Now you see me, a film that promises its audience a magic trick and just like a magic trick ends up being pretty unsatisfying when you work out how it's done.  I went into watching this with mediocre expectations.  The reviews last year were middling-to-ok and so I was hoping for an exciting ride with a bit of flair and misdirection that ended with a mind-bending twist.  Something like The Prestige would have been nice.  And with a number of big names in the cast (Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman no less in supporting roles), I thought there was a chance.  Nope.

So let's get the plot bit out of the way.  4 magicians who have never met (well, two of them are ex-lovers - and if that were expanded upon in any way during the film that might have been a nice bit of character development, but it wasn't) are brought together by a mysterious benefactor to attempt a series of daring magic tricks.  They name themselves the Four Horsemen and pull off tricks so outlandish that they attract the attentions of the FBI and interpol.  They claim to have robbed a bank in Paris by teleporting there from Las Vegas.  How are they able to pull off these amazing feats?  Is this robbery their actual goal or are they simply misdirecting their audience before they pull off something even bigger?  Is there perhaps real magic involved? Just who is the mysterious benefactor and what does he want?

This would have been better film if at the end of everything it turned out that magic was real - at least that would have sewn up the plot holes that appear once the script starts to misdirect the audience by telling us 'what really happened'.  Even before that point things don't make sense though.  Michael Caine plays a millionaire who appears to be backing the Four Horsemen, but then they betray him.  So he wasn't the original benefactor then?  Why was he backing them in the first place?  After he is betrayed where are they getting their money from to carry on their ludicrous effects-laden magic shows?  These are shows that would take a team of specialist stunt-men and effects experts months to organise, but for some reason the Four Horsemen are able to pull this shit off by themselves, in secret.

Even this would be ok if Now you see me paid a bit more attention to developing its characters.  There's some very minor bantz (I have to provide a link to this as my Dad isn't going to understand what this means otherwise) going on but nothing that is anything more than at a superficial level.  Do any of these people care for each other?  We don't know.  Are they mates or just work colleagues?  No idea either.  Will there be a bit of a love-triangle between 3 of them?  Probably not.  Is one of them going to betray the others?  Doubtful.  Perhaps one of them is the big bad behind it all a la Usual Suspects?  Maybe?  Something; anything!?  Just some ideas I'm throwing out there as things that might have made for a better film.  But then I'm not a screen-writer.  So I guess I don't know what I'm on about.

I've had enough of the idea of a twist for the sake of a twist.  The twist in The Mousetrap works because - well I don't want to spoil The Mousetrap so I won't tell you, but if you've seen The Mousetrap then that's sort of what happens here too.  Here it doesn't make any sense because the protagonists aren't trapped in an isolated house at night with no access to a phone or people in the outside world who can do basic fact-checks.  So in conclusion, Now you see me is very much less than the sum of its parts.  It's a swirling mess of half-decent performances, effects for the sake of it and conflicting plot-lines that ends in a twist for no other reason than that's what we're promised at the start.  On the plus side though, Isla Fisher does have very nice legs.