Green Hornet - the first hour anyway

Did you ever watch a DVD that broke half way through, then you thought "At least now I have an excuse to not watch the rest of this"? Well that was me on Saturday evening. For some reason I had put 'Green Hornet' on my LoveFilm list and I had nothing else to do as Amazon hadn't delivered Skyrim yet. With home-made curry in hand and West Ham's 3-1 victory over Derby secure, I needed entertainment. DVD in PS3, press play, empty brain and try to enjoy...

... 1 hour later and it skips a full 20 minutes. Upon removing the DVD I discover a large crack on the outside of the disc. Ain't no amount of cleaning going to sort that out. Anyway, frankly I'd had more than enough of Seth Rogan shouting "Dude! That's - like - AWESOME!" every 5 seconds so I chalked it up to divine intervention and started playing some of the DLC I'd missed on Mass Effect 2 first time around. I'm going to send it back without telling them it's broken, just in case they try to send me the replacement DVD I could do without.

Since I didn't actually see Green Hornet all the way to the end I feel I can't provide a full review here. But unless something pretty bloody spectacular happens in the last 45 minutes I don't see how it can be turned around. The premise is that Seth Rogan is the son of a media mogul (Tom Wilkinson) who dies in the first scene. Any film that's prepared to waste Tom Wilkinson in a single scene isn't worth much (unless of course he isn't really dead and comes back at the end - which would make a lot of sense actually). Rogan's character then discovers that the guy who makes his coffee is some kind of superhero type, so they build lots of 'AWESOME DUDE!' cars and guns and go around fighting with criminals. Sigh.

Christoph Waltz is very entertaining as the massively arch bad guy. I guess it would have been nice to see how Waltz's character links in with Rogan's and Tom Wilkinson - but I really can't be arsed watching the rest.

The more I think about it the more I'm convinced Tom Wilkinson's character can't be dead and that there has to be some kind of twist. Anyway, I definitely don't care. Honest.

X-Men First Class

Despite spending almost 20 hours in planes over the last month I only managed to watch a single film. Partly due to a delay in the BA entertainment system coming on, partly due to me taking full advantage of the nearly empty flight back to sleep, but mainly due to there being a very poor selection of films available.

6 months ago I would never have watched an X-Men film. To my uneducated brain the X-Men was a rather silly fantasy cartoon in which a bunch of super heroes fly around trying to save / enslave (delete as appropriate) the world. I never really understood what's so interesting about watching people with 'powers' hit each other. Maybe it's nothing more than an escapist fantasy. I want more substance to my fantasy.

Turns out that X-Men actually has quite a lot of substance. I am indebted to my housemate Andy who explained to me that the X-Men comics were created as an allegory for the changing nature of society during the upheavals of the civil rights movement in the US in the 1960s. The mutants who make up the X-Men represent an emergent social force that the world has to recognise and deal with. Andy encouraged me to think of the two factions of the mutant X-men as representing the groups led by Martin Luther King (Professor X) and Malcolm X (Magneto). Both want the same thing, but where Professor X sees an opportunity to create a better world, Magneto sees only inevitable conflict.

'X-Men First Class' tells a re-imagined (from the original comics) story of the origins of these two characters. Professor X (aka Charles Xavier played by James McAvoy) is raised in an upper class American East coast family, Magneto (aka Erik Lehnsherr played by Michael Fassbender) survives the horrors of the Holocaust. These wildly different childhoods give each character a worldview that will define the rest of their lives. When former Nazi camp commander Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) tries to foment war between the US and Soviets by causing the Cuban missile crisis, Professor X's fledgling X-Men intervene. But where Professor X wants to foster peace between the warring parties, Magneto wants only revenge for Shaw's crimes.

It's a classic science fiction film, complete with metaphors for society and a neat reworking of history. There are some exceptional action sequences, nods to the existing X-Men films (a brief cameo by Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in particular) and a rousing finale. It's a story that could have become cheesy in the wrong hands, but Michael Fassbender injects enough pain and realism into his character that when he makes his choice to go down a path to the dark side it's hard not to sympathise. I felt like cheering when he pulls on his cape and announces to the world that he is now Magneto. More proof that Fassbender is the next big thing in acting.

Since I only saw my first X-Men film 3 months ago I was surprised by my own reaction to 'First Class'. I utterly bought into the story of how events can dramatically change people's lives, and how everyone has a choice to react positively or negatively to those events. Amazing how wrong I was about this series.

Oh, and another role for January Jones, another ice queen character (this time literally). Can someone please give her a movie role that lets her shine a-la Mad Men?

In Time

So I leave the country for 4 weeks and when I come back Justin Timberlake's a movie star. How'd that happen? OK so maybe he had a small role in 'The Social Network', but now a leading role in an interesting-looking Science fiction film? Well it's probably for the best that the world continues to surprise me.

'In Time' is one of those great little science fiction premises. The kind of thing you wonder how Phillip K Dick or one of his like didn't think of it. Imagine a world in which time literally is money. Everyone is genetically engineered to stop ageing at the age of 25. At that time you're awarded one more year to live. You're free to then spend this time as currency, earn more time by working and live your life as you wish. Most people struggle with debt and live day to day before they finally get unlucky and expire. A tiny minority are stupendously wealthy though, with millennia to their names.

What we have here is a neat metaphor for the type of hyper capitalism that's ripping the Earth to shreds in real life. Time literally is money, and for the rich to get richer people in the ghetto have to give up their time and die. Timberlake's character (William Salas) has a chance encounter with a wealthy businessman who has seen too much and wants to die, Salas is given 100 years of time - almost more than he can comprehend. He escapes the ghetto to the world of the wealthy, eager to "... take them for all they've got." Though precisely why he resolves to do this is a little unclear; probably cos his mum died, but I don't see how that equates to bringing down the system. Ham-fisted though this metaphor is, it's still the kind of thing that gets my bolshie brain excited. Make no mistake about just how unsubtle 'In Time' is though, but I suppose Marx's theories on wage slavery aren't going to be presented in any other way in a Hollywood action scifi romp.

While Salas isn't explaining the cruelty of capitalism to anyone who'll listen, the film mainly takes the form of a Robin Hood-meets-Bonnie and Clyde heist movie with a number of very recognisable actors from TV and film. Cillian Murphy once again uses his mad eyes to play a sort of Lawful Evil character keeping the Proles in their place, while Vincent Kartheiser - well I guess that's exactly what he does too. Then there's Amanda Seyfried, who has very alluring eyes and does exceptionally well to run around in 6 inch heels and a cocktail dress. Lots of eyes going on in this film.

It'd be remiss to totally gloss over the various plot holes in 'In Time'. There is little consistency between prices in the film. A coffee is quoted as costing 4 minutes, which if you assume £2 for a cuppa means a month is ~£20,000. One of the posh hotels is charging a month for one night - seriously? Also, how do you spend money when you're younger than 25? And why is security at every bank in the city so bad?

Overall it isn't a great film. It's the kind of thing that would have made for a good chin-strokey episode of The Twilight Zone and 100 minutes is stretching the possibilities of the plot. But then it does have an excellent anti-capitalist thread to it, which raises it above a lot of the brainless scifi action films that we get these days. If I was into giving ratings out of 10, this would probably score a solidly-above-average 6.

My American cinema trip

So while I was away in the States recently I went to a cinema to see a film (obviously to see a film, what else am I going to do in a cinema?). The AMC theatre at the Deerbrook Mall just north of Huston, Texas in the town of Humble boasts an impressive 24 screens and on Friday last week was - along with everyone else in the western world - showing the newly-opened 'Immortals'. A film whose main selling point appears to be its palindromic release date, it was not my choice. But my friends were adamant and I reasoned that experiencing the cinema in America would be something of a cultural eye-opener. Surely there had to be some differences to a UK cinema?

First up was the price. $9.50 for a standard adult ticket, which at current exchange rates is about £6 and certainly cheaper than anything you'd find at a large multiplex in the UK. The current exchange rate is historically (well, for the last 5 - 10 years anyway) unfavourable for British travellers to the States, so in theory it could have been even cheaper.

The film was due to begin at 5:40pm. We got into the theatre at 5:35pm to find that adverts were already playing. At 5:40 the adverts stopped and the trailers began. Again, utterly different from the UK where the listed 'start' time merely warns you of an impending bombardment of adverts into your face. Plus, there were loads more trailers than we ever get in England. So in the end I think there was just as much faff time between the 'start time' and the actual start of the film, but at least over there it's trailers.

The trailed films looked universally rubbish. Loads of stuff that'll hopefully never come out in the UK because we don't jump up and yell "Fuck Yeah!" every time someone squeezes a trigger. This for example.

The US citizens in the cinema certainly did a good job of living up to their national stereotype. Plenty of whoops and yeahs and a round of applause at the end. Pretty entertaining stuff, and while I think that the incessant yelling would get on my tits eventually, as a one-off my experience this was far superior to what we get in British multiplexes.

Oh, and Immortals is shite. A single idea, no plot, ultra violent, token female character, blood splattered bastardisation of Greek mythology. To call it a rehash of '300' is to give it small praise it's hardly worth of.

New Idea - Computer Games!

I've been thinking about diversifying my blog for some time now. I'd quite like to blog about some of the computer games I'm playing recently, but I know I expose myself to a narrow range of genres and so there'd be limited use in me dedicating an entire blog to the subject.

So I think I might allow myself the occasional post about what I'm playing at the moment. Unlike my film reviews, I'll seldom be writing about anything that I genuinely don't like. I'm quite picky about the games I play and often wait for several months after they come out before playing them (cos they're cheaper and you can read lots of reviews), so I generally know I'm going to enjoy what I'm playing.

Platform is the first big issue for any gamer. PC or console? Mouse and keyboard & controller? Personally I can't be bothered trying to keep up with advances in PC technology and so I play almost all my games on my Xbox 360. My first console was an N64, but I migrated to Xbox when it came out because a) I couldn't take the GameCube seriously and b) Halo. I do have a PC which was something of a mid-range spec 4 years ago. It's apparently capable of playing a surprising amount of what's coming out these days if you turn all the graphics settings down to minimum. These days the only gaming it sees is the occasional game of Civ 4. Thankfully I am going to be able to play The Old Republic when it's finally released in late December.

I have an Xbox 360 out of partial brand loyalty (I had an Xbox & Xbox Live accounts), but mainly because I don't get along with PlayStation controllers. There are very few games these days that aren't multi-platform - and so I rarely feel like I'm missing out.

To kick this new section of the blog off then, I thought I'd put my cards on the table and rattle off my favourite 10 computer games of all time. Not *the best* 10 games of all time (got to be Tetris), just the ones I've enjoyed the most. You can probably work out my age by reading through this list...

Civilisation 2

If I had decided to put these games in order, Civ 2 would easily have gone in at the top. I shudder to think about the amount of time I spent at university playing this absorbing turn-based strategy game. When I finally worked out how to beat the AI on Deity level I think I reached the height of my nerd nirvana.

Goldeneye

Though probably not the greatest FPS of all time, Goldeneye is up there with the most innovative of the genre. The first game in which enemies reacted differently if they'd been shot in the head or the foot, and one of the first in which it was entirely possible to complete a level by stealth or all guns blazing - Goldeneye blazes a trail. Plus all those drunken evenings playing multiplayer. There's a certain generation of people to whom the phrase 'one shot kill slaps' will trigger a fusillade of memories.

Knights of the Old Republic

With the greatest twist in the history (well at least my personal history) of computer gaming and the first of several games that overlaid the Star Wars universe onto a D&D rules set - KOTOR was a game I played from start to finish a number of times. This was Bioware getting it right.

Halo

The Xbox's killer app was a good 50% of the reason for me buying Microsoft's console 9 years ago. Endless LAN gaming (Blood Gulch has entered the gaming lexicon as a byword for classic & simple 'capture the flag' level design) and one of the best single player FPS games ever, it's a classic. The final level of the single player game is an astonishing countdown-to-zero car chase through alien hordes, I might go and play it this evening...

Mario Kart 64

Endless hours playing this with housemates at university (can you see a theme running through this list) mean it would be remiss of me not to include it here. I will concede that it probably wasn't as good as the SNES version, but I played this the most and so it gets the nod.

Mass Effect

The most modern game on my list, Mass Effect (parts 1 and 2) has taken the Role Playing genre to a new realm. By introducing cinematic dialogue for the player's character, Bioware have given players a whole new level of investment in their character's story. I can't remember being more emotionally attached to the plot of a computer game that when playing through the final battles of Mass Effect 2. It's probably worrying that I got such an endorphin rush out of
navigating Sheppard's team safety through their encounter with the Collectors. Roll on ME3!

Rock Band

I'm sure my housemates would attest that I would be lying if I left this off my list. The various incarnations of Rock Band have formed the basis of a number of social events and wasted evenings in mine and friends' houses.

Planescape Torment

Despite all that's come since, this isometric RPG remains unique in its dedication to character and philosophy as the driving force behind its story. The central premise is a character whom cannot be killed and his response to the question "What can change the nature of a man?". With pages of dialogue to work your way through, the D&D combat system often took a distant back seat as the 'Nameless One' wandered through the multiverse in search of his destiny. It was my first exposure to RPGs, still one of my favourite.

Shogun Total War

RTS battles + turn-based resource acquisition = brilliant game. The original might look dated now, but it's simple paper / scissors / stone battle system gives it something of a charm that I think the later versions have lost a little of.

John Tiller's Campiagn Series

Possibly the most obscure of my choices, this little-known hex-based platoon-level war simulation game from the late-90s has been something I've regularly gone back to over the years. You can play a variety of historically-accurate scenarios and campaigns from several theatres of the second world war. It helped keep me sane when I was working out in Botswana by myself 4 years ago.

So there you have it. Yet more evidence that I'm a huge nerd to add to the mounting pile.

Britain's two best actors...

This is a trailer for 'Shame', a new film directed by Steve McQueen (not him, him) starring Britain's two best actors of the moment*.

I'm excited, you should be too.

* I'm claiming Fassbender for Britain in case that wasn't clear btw.

Attack the Block

An incredibly silly piece of trash film straight out of the heart of the comedy horror genre, Joe Cornish's (that's Joe from the Adam and Joe show to you and me) 'Attack the Block' follows one South London estate's close encounter with an alien invasion. On a single night we see a gang of gangster-talkin' wannabe Avon Barksdales go from petty criminals to alien killers. After robbing their neighbour at knife-point, the gang chase down what they think is a dog - only to discover that they've stabbed something other-worldly.

'Attack the Block' is a cheeky film; part send up of the genre and part straight horror comedy, it makes a lot of mileage out of South London's rich street dialect and saves a lot of money on special effects. The aliens are not much more than black felt-tip pen scribbles on the screen, with green luminous teeth added to give them menace. One wonders if the original idea for the aliens was a budget-saving black patch, with the teeth being added after screen testing. Of particular enjoyment for me was the liberal use of South London's West Indian inflected street slang (though my housemate who is from South London was less responsive to it - he had to put up with it growing up).

Nick Frost is perhaps the most recognisable actor in the film (though Jodie Whittaker has been in a pile of stuff with small rolls). He plays a slacker dope dealer living on the top floor of the estate and lording over the block like some kind of scuzzy drug Baron. The other young actors are kind of OK, but I suspect not all of them will end up pursuing full time careers in Holywood. This is a film that isn't going to win any prizes for acting or directing - or script or effects or anything really. But there's no reason for that getting in the way of enjoying this smart comedy horror. I recommend it to one and all.