Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Bad Santa



Really good, funny and believable. The film avoids getting sentimental but is still quite touching largely thanks to Billy Bob Thornton's charismatic performance. Terry Zwigoff, like Richard Linklater, deserves a wider audience than the art house/indie crowd his films normally attract.

IMDB

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Switchblade Romance



So the story is this: A student and her friend go to a her parents house to do some studying. In the night a creepy French guy in a boiler suit arrives (it's set in France by the way) and calmly and methodically begins to carve up the family. From the begining the film really lives up to its French title (Haute Tension) and is a solid homage to 70s slasher films. Whilst the killer is generic, from the Michael Myers/Leatherface lumbering and implacable school, the whole is stylishly shot, effective and uncomfortable viewing. Complementing this visual flair are some great perfomances espescially Cécile De France who owns just about every scene, not your typical horror Final Girl.

Unfortunately the film mis-fires in the final reel with a twist that's incredibly clumsy and shoots gaping holes in the plot. When you watch a film the whole thing is filtered though your memory of the last scenes, you can start poorly but no one's going to care if you finish on a high. If you mess up the finale there's no chance to redeem yourself and ultimately Switchblade romace dissapoints for this reason, leaving you going 'wha...?' instead of 'woah!'.

IMDB

Starter For 10



Starter for ZZzzz... more like. OK, that didn't really work. Suffice it to say that this film is the precise mid-point of the mediocrity in the middle of the, genreally failry mediocre anyway, British film industry. Actually some of it is bad though. The performances are OK (except for Rebeca Hall for whom I predict good things, or at least a role in a Richard Curtis film at some point. Oh, and Mark Gatiss' comedy Bamber Gascoigne is good too), though the lead is pretty unlikable. The story is faultlessly predicatable (guess what, the blonde one who wants to be famous is not the TRUE LOVE), the soundtrack is faultlessly nostalgic (in a kind of Q/Mojo/Uncut way), the cinematography, editing and direction are all competant. And that's about it for the mediocre.

For the bad: If you're going to set something in Bristol and film some of it there why don't you just film the rest of it there, why film some of it at UCL? Why film scenes of Manchester in Shepherds Bush? Why pretend you can drive from Bristol to Manchester in 2 hours? The tone of the film fluctuates queasily between gritty (well Brassed Off level gritty) scenes of THATCHERS BRITAIN and comedy clowning about. Also I have objections to do with the films ideas about the purpose of education that are too lengthy and dull to go into here and didn't really diminish my limited enjoyment of the film.

Basically whilst it's a decade out, the themes of coming of age, and negotiating British class structure are much better handled in last years TV adaptation The Rotters Club. A comparison that's impossible to avoid making because Alice Eve plays pretty much the same character in both (though the Starter For 10 version is a purely 2D version).

IMDB

Monday, November 27, 2006

Pan's Labyrinth



Brilliant, multilayered, beautiful.

This is right up there with Volver amongst my favourite films of this year, though I recon it'll age better. Anything that's wrong with it, and there are things wrong with it, pales into insignificance. It's a film that takes risks, when they don't pay off it's still interesting but when they do it shows how far you can take genre cinema. This is coming from the same place as Nightmare on Elm Street and Nightbreed and so on (the other thing that sprung to mind while watching the film was the Zelda games, child like exploration discovery aspects I guess) and the director knows exactly what conventions to keep and which to ditch to tell his story to maximum effect.

Did I mention how gorgeous the whole thing looks? How the villain is one of cinemas most villaenous? About a million other things? No? Well you'll just have to go and see it then.

The film I'm most looking forward to is whatever Del Toro does next.

IMDB
A Mark Kermode article about the film In Sight And Sound

Friday, November 24, 2006

Casino Royale



... or as it might have been called 'Bond Begins' (cos it's a bit like Batman Begins geddit?). Anyway, I'm a big fan of rebooting franchises in this way, which obviously Bond has been doing periodically for a while now. This time the selling points are 1. It's quite faithful to the book. 2. Daniel Craig is well 'ard. Both these sales pitches are fulfilled, you actually believe that Craig could have been a commander in the SBS, (unlike Brosnan who always came across as something between Brian Ferry and my uncle David) and Bonds character, an outsider, a cold blooded killer etc. seems much more faithful to my memory of the books.


So, whilst I'm not a big Bond fan (I have some affection for the early Connery films and quite enjoy Roger Moores clowning), this is my favourite Bond film. But therein lies the problem; this is a Bond film and if you don't want people to leave the cinema dissapointed then you have to do certain things: Firstly you have to have an overlong credits sequence in which a pompous theme song plays over a faintly psychadelic montage*. Secondly you have to have gadgets, so in a scene where for plot purposes a bit of vomitting and a shot of adreneline would have done nicely we have Bond using a defibrillator that's built into the dashboard of his Aston Martin. Which brings us neatly to the third thing that's expected from James Bond films, product placement. Right from the start Bond's been schilling products in his movies (Smirnoff and the aforementioned Aston Martin most famously) but in this film there are some seriously egregious examples: i) A completely purposeless shot of Bond driving a Ford. ii) At one point the plot and characters take a break to advertise a watch. iii) Baddies exclusively use top of the range Sony Ericson phones.


Oh yeah, also you need girls in bikinis and exploding things. Both present and correct.


So in the end the bagage of the franchise just little too much. The films will never match the freshness of The Bourne Identity/Supremacy because they have to do certain things so that hoards of breying twats in hired DJs at Henry J Bean's James Bond theme night** won't come out of the cinema saying 'yeah but it's just not Bond', this latest addition to the series already stretched the credulity and loyalty of this market by having (OMG) a blonde James Bond and by having him show emotional weakness (incidentally, the love section of the film is the bit they should cut (obviously, like pretty much every other film ever made, I thought this one was too long) not the casino scenes which are rather excellent and where the narrative seemed to me to move along most naturally. You can tell when a part of a films not working becasue they'll lean heavily on the soundtrack to tell the audience how they should be reacting, the vague echos of 'We have all the time in the world' during the love bits section kind of give the game away).


So not as successful a franchise reboot as Batman Begins was (esp. as Judy Dench jarringly appears in this hypertimeline, still at least they didn't bring back John Cleese) and not as sucessfull as a modern spy thriller as the Bourne films, but an entertaining and mindless way to spend a couple of hours.

*taken separately the intro sequence is very nice, recalling Shinola's video for Go With The Flow
**half price cocktails + hired roulette wheel + atlest 3 girls in white bikinis = ch-ching!

IMDB

Monday, November 13, 2006

The Host


Every so often mainstream critics in mainstream papers (i.e. not fangoria or whatever) will get all positive about a "genre" film i.e. horror, sci-fi etc. Typically this is when some foreigners make a genre film, thereby giving the whole enterprise a respectable broadsheet gloss. At this point the logic goes; 'cool, if someone who wouldn't normally like this kind of film likes this kind of film then I'm really going to love it'. So anyway, my expectations were high for The Host, and as everyone knows that's poison. For some reason I never learn.


It all starts out nicely (except the main character is the swollen faced guy from Sympathy For Mr Vengeance who I find it really hard to look at) setting things up for what would have been a totally AMAZING finale if proper genre conventions had been observed. But unfortunately genre conventions are not observed in Korean films (as anyone who has seen the quite brilliant Save the Green Planet will tell you) so we get a film that twists about all over the place showing off and surprising the audience, but it gets lost, and so it never really manages to deliver the required payoff; you know, the bit where Ripley says 'get away from her you bitch' or the bit in series three where Buffy blows up The Judge with a rocket launcher. Instead we get clever meta level jokes (HA HA the man is making a boring speech and all the characters are falling a sleep, no, that's not funny because the speech is still boring) and bizarre scenes where a family grieving the death of a child suddenly turns into clumsy slapstick.


Despite my gripeing though it was pretty good, they had the required clumsy political subtext and who doesn't love that? (Joe Dante, that's who doesn't ... er ... not love that) There's plenty of good monster eating people stuff, and there's some nice use of sound, you know, it all goes quiet and there's a low pass filter so it sounds like you've been deafened. (As usual the Curzon did their best to fuck that up by overdriving the speakers so they clipped when things exploded, seriously one time I went there and they played the wrong soundtrack for a film for about 10 minutes before they realised and started the whole film over again making me miss the last tube home. Also the twat at the ticket desk managed to ruin the end of the film before we even got in there by shouting to his mate at the cafe about what happens to the little girl at the end, come on, it's an easy job, sell tickets don't give away the end of the film. Hold on, where was I? Oh yeah I was summarising...) Ultimately, you're probably not going to be disapointed by this film unless you have unrealistically high expectations, though you will need a solid tolerance for scrappy plot logic and unnecessary sub plots to enjoy it as much as most critics seem to have.

IMDB

Monday, November 06, 2006

James And The Giant Peach



Tim Burton was the producer here, and his gothic visual sensibilities seem to have rubbed off on the animation style. Which is good. But even so, the screenplay doesn't live up to the source material. The need (presumably Disney's) to turn Roald Dahl's typically rather dark and surreal tale into a neat Hollywood package just doesn't work in favour of the story (incase you don't know: Orphaned boy escapes evil aunts, flies across the Atlantic in giant peach accompanied by friendly insects). Too concerned with tidying up loose ends, the film doesn't fully embrace the fabulous subject matter (in fact there's a rather heavy handed and totally unnecessary bit of metaphor building in the last part of the film, ah so it's all about James dealing with the death of his parents DO YOU SEE?).


Actually this may be a bit harsh. The film is certainly enjoyable, it's just that it's far from a classic children's film which it had the potential to be. Cutting the live action segments which book-end the animation might be a good place start. But hey, it's enjoyable for children I imagine, and they are, after all, the target audience.

IMDB

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Children Of Men



A film which I nearly didn’t go to see because the poster and the trailers were all so rubbish, but then I did go and see it and I was totally blown away. Attention Wachowski brothers, this is how you make a convincing and terrifying film about a near future British fascist state.

So it’s pretty bleak and occasionally seems depressingly close to where we are now, you can see how we get from here to there with just a couple of nudges eg. there are some pretty explicit references to Abu Ghraib in background of the refugee prison camp that the characters visit. On the down side, there’s the occasional clunky monologue but whilst these stand out they don't detract from the film. To me it felt like a return to the intelligent British sci-fi tradition of the 50's, 60's, 70's, sensibilities which were kind of lost post Star Wars but seem to be reasserting themselves with things like this and the new Doctor Who (esp that gas mask episode) and writers like Tricia Sullivan (who’s actually American but seems to me to fit in better with the John Wyndam, Brian Aldiss, JG Ballard continuum than the US pulp tradition). Also it’s a better action film than "V…" was.

IMDB

Friday, September 01, 2006

A Scanner Darkley



An alright film. The much hyped rotoscoping isn’t really that great though, and I'm not convinced it adds to the film. If anything it's a bit boring, something that PKD could never be accused of, and the acting is pretty lame a lot of the time. Story-wise it’s fairly faithful to the book (not that I care much about that) but despite all the surface weirdness it doesn’t really manage to tap into the unsettling core of the book. Basically don’t bother, or watch it on video on a Sunday morning or something.

IMDB

Volver



Brilliant.
Having been a fan of his early stuff I didn’t really like the last 2 issue heavy Almodovar films. This one dials back the 'maturity' in favour of more of the kitch melodrama of his earlier films without losing its emotional punch. OK so it lays some things on a bit thick (as you'd expect (esp. the bit where Penelope Cruz sings, I probably would have prefered a less perfect rendition esp. as she's supposed to be choking up, and where did all that echo come from?)) but still there aren’t many people who can make a film this good.

Also, it has one of my favourite posters of recent years (see above).

IMDB

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Slither



… or SLiTHER if we’re obeying the arbitrary typographical conventions of the film's branding.

Basically slugs from outer space get in through peoples mouths, attach to their brains and make them eat loads of rotting meat (and fresh meat actually, you know, whatever’s going to be more gross at the time) causing them get really big and explode in a shower of new slugs. It’s a solid genre movie, the genre being 70s/80s style body horror, think early Cronenberg and Brian Yuzna and people. It’s not particularly hardcore or nasty or anything but there’s some pretty icky blood and guts, predictably the rubber bits work best, the CG bits not so much. Tone-wise it’s more like the second action horror half on the Dawn of the Dead remake than the creepy/dark first half (same director by the way). Also it’s pretty funny in places, not like Evil Dead or Brain Dead though.

Anyway, the whole thing feels lovely and comfortable, I don’t know if it makes sense but I was thinking of it like a VHS film. The kind of thing you enjoy watching on grainy old video (sun bleached airbrush cover art) on a crap tele with the sun on the edge of the screen along with a batch of other B movies culled from the shelves of your local non Blockbuster video store during the summer holiday when you should really be outside being healthy and socializing and stuff.

Note worthy: The film stars Michael Rooker, the dad from Mall Rats, as the main bad guy and Nathan Fillion the captain from Serenity as the main good guy. Good casting!

IMDB