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2012

The Avengers

dir: Joss Whedon
Too much ego in too little spaceToo much ego in too little space
You know what this needed? More superheroes.

Not enough superheroes. Also, more scenes of Scarlett Johansson’s character Black Widow elaborating upon her back story. Because the masses needed to know.

Also, it needed more shots of Samuel L. Jackson flipping the tails of his long leather coat outwards in an ever so attractive manner.

Other than that, it’s about as good as we could have hoped for.

Despite the idea that this is a discrete ‘let’s get the band together’ supergroup combination, it’s really the sixth instalment in a series that started with Iron Man. All of the flicks I’m talking about had different directors, but the link between them all is that comic book titans Marvel set up Marvel Studios specifically to make the movies for their own properties. No longer would they have to rely on other studios to bring their stable of heroes to the big screen.

No longer would they have to share as much of the profits, either. As the sixth instalment (if you count the Hulk flick with Ed Norton, which we probably don’t have to), or fifth sequel, or whatever you want to call it, the groundwork has already been laid for all these characters, and for the promise (or threat) that they would eventually be brought together in an all-star cast match-up/mash-up. There were teases dropped in post credits on most of those flicks, or outright explicit references to getting the Avengers together for whatever reason.

And here are the fruits of their labours.

There's a lot of set up all the same, the only difference between that and the usual origin story stuff is that the set up is specific to the plot here, and not the individual sagas explaining how these chaps became the superheroic clods they've become.

Safe

dir: Boaz Yakin
Don't point that thing at meDon't point that thing at me
Jason Statham playing a character who kills lots of people? That’s a radical turn up for the books.

In the eternal pub argument of Caveman versus Astronaut, Ninja versus Pirate and Pussycat Doll versus Spice Girl, there’s the unfortunate real world competition of which is worse: Russian gangsters or Chinese triads? This film makes the same comparison, but posits it by asking: which is tougher? The answer is, of course, Jason Statham.

Or at least the thinly veiled stand-in character for himself, some guy called Luke Wright. You know, because he’s always Right! He gets on the bad side of the Russians, and they not only ruin his life by murdering his family, they intend to keep his life in a heightened state of ruination in an ongoing fashion. It’s a curious state, because I can’t imagine Russian gangsters having the follow-through long term to keep hassling someone like they do the main character here, and not just killing him as an example to all the other noble loners out there. They tell him, as he walks the earth in the time remaining to him, that any person with whom he shares even a single human moment with, they’ll be there to kill them.

It’s not going to do wonderful things for your state of mind, I imagine. Misery upon misery, he sees the only obvious way out, but demurs at the very last moment, because he sees a girl in trouble. Thank gods there was a girl in trouble, because otherwise: short film.

This girl, Mei (Catherine Chan) is a prime asset prized by the triads, and much sought after by the same Russians who despoiled Luke’s life. What an odd convergence of paths, eh? I wonder if Luke will endeavour to redeem himself by protecting the girl at all costs?

Why is eleven-year-old Mei so sought after? Why are the triads prepared to kill hundreds of innocent bystanders to either get her back or kill her themselves? Why are the Russians prepared to give up their own firstborns in order to get their vodka-soaked, borsht-smeared hands on her?

She’s good with numbers. Really good with numbers. And plus, she’s really good at tax returns. You should see how she finds deductibles and rebates.

Red Tails

dir: Anthony Hemingway
Star Wars Episode 7: The Tuskegee Airmen Strike BackStar Wars Episode 7: The Tuskegee Airmen Strike Back
It’s a story that’s been told a few times, but one that bears repeating, and that is clearly deserving of a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Also, the story of the Tuskegee Airmen deserves all the attention George Lucas, his money, and his film technology can bring to the experience, surely.

After all, don’t African American actors deserve, at long last, to repeat all the corn, cheese and clichés of the Hollywood war movies of yesteryear they were so unfairly segregated from? Aren’t they due their dues by now, at long last, in this enlightened age?

Red Tails, in case you didn’t know and probably don’t care, is a story about African American pilots during World War II. It is a story George Lucas wanted to tell for decades, apparently, because of his deep connection to the subject matter(?) Look, I don’t know his real reasons, because who knows why he really does half of the stuff he does, as opposed to his publicly stated reasons. Does anyone on the planet really understand why it meant so much to him that Han Solo shooting Greedo first had to be expunged from the official record, despite the fact that we all saw it happen?

No, we don’t. When you’re that powerful, have more money than Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, and can make whatever you want, other people don’t have to understand your desire to shape reality to your whims, they just have to cut you a check and say “Yes, George.”

I remember seeing Lucas on The Daily Show talking about this film, and about how he had great difficulty getting studios to pony up cash for it, because they couldn’t imagine audiences wanting to see a film with so many African American actors in it. So he funded it himself. I don’t know if that’s true or not, because you can never tell with George, but if that was the reason it took so long to come to fruition, well, George got his wish in the end, and he also got to make a flick with aircraft getting into dogfights and blowing shit up without requiring Anakin Skywalker getting in on the act and fucking things up.

21 Jump Street

dirs: Phil Lord and Chris Miller
The thin blue stupid line of the lawThe thin blue stupid line of the law
File this under “should not have worked, but somehow did.” If such a file exists. Which it probably doesn’t.

In truth they could have just called this flick A Couple of Dicks Go Back to School and had exactly the same story without any of the Jump Street references or cameos, and it probably would have succeeded just as well, though it probably wouldn’t have made as much money.

I freely admit I was a fan of the show as a kid, and watched its first four years religiously, as in, always on the Sabbath. Loved the show, loved how moralising and try-hard it was, loved especially the various depictions of the teen experience forced through the filter of episodic police procedural television, with its “I learned something today” consistency. It was very of its time, dealing with the horrors of white kids using drugs, the rise of AIDS, the eternal tensions between parents, teachers and kids, and funky hairstyles. At least, at first, it was one of the only bright spots in that dark age known as the 1980s.

Nothing except eternity lasts forever, and even that the quantum physicists are always trying to fuck with, so Jump Street came and went, all the other actors went back to the obscurity they so richly deserved, and Johnny Depp went on to become the most powerful and highest paid actor in human history.

Time passed, and the kind of shit-eating creativity-free movie producers who think anything that exists should only exist as an amalgam of something else, “It’s like Schindler’s List meets the Pussycat Dolls” or “It’s like Pulp Fiction crossed with Spongebob Squarepants!”, decided this needed to be remade. Good for us, I guess.

Instead of following the template of the tv show, it mocks it entirely, creates its own dynamic between two leads completely unlike any of the characters from the show, and goes off on its own course, without a hint of seriousness or faux gravitas.

What’s strangest is that the two leads, Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) don’t just seem like young adults returning to school, they act, for our benefit in the audience, like two people who were cryogenically frozen for a few decades in order to seem like naifs in a contemporary American high school.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

dir: Neveldine/Taylor
I've had hangovers like this. Not recently though. Like Nic Cage's acting ability, they're a thing of the pastI've had hangovers like this. Not recently though. Like Nic Cage's acting ability, they're a thing of the past
You can make a horrible thing worse. It’s true. It’s very obviously possible. And here we have further evidence of this sad fact as the cinema births a new monstrosity aimed at our limpid eyes.

Who takes something horrible and makes it worse on purpose? An evil fairy godmother? A ticket inspector? Dentists? And why would you?

The first Ghost Rider movie, inexplicably shot in Melbourne, was terrible in ways even dedicated viewers of Nic Cage’s films were surprised by. This second flick in this godawful franchise is worse in some expected ways, and terrible in ways that are new but should in no way be confused with inspirational entertainment.

Considering the ‘talent’ on offer here, well, I guess it could have been even worse, but it doesn’t seem likely. They could have strapped cameras to a pack of rabid dogs. They could have told Cage ‘act even crazier, the kids will love it’. They could have made the character an alien who crash-landed on Earth wanting nothing more than to understand this emotion we humans call ‘love’.

Actually, no, it really couldn’t have been worse. The unholy directorial team of Neveldine/Taylor, responsible for such films as those Crank ones, and such shit films as pretty much everything else they’ve ever touched or been associated with, don’t even seem to give enough of a fuck to make a deliberately bad film. It just kinda happened anyway in their rush to finish this exciting new instalment in a stillborn series that should never have been bothered with in the first place.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits

dir: Peter Lord and Jeff Newitt
Well buckle my swash and shiver me timbersWell buckle my swash and shiver me timbers
Ah, finally, a film with Pirates that doesn’t have Johnny Depp in it.

No-one told the lovely people at Aardman Animation that the rest of us in this non-Claymation world are sick to fucking death of pirates, pirate-related stories and even the word ‘pirate’. They just went ahead and ploughed through, adapting a book in order to generate some hilarity and some box office. I can’t imagine this flick is going to do this well, what with the school holidays being over and all by now, but it was quite entertaining for a ‘kids’ movie.

Yes, I took my daughter along, and yes, she and I both thought it was a wonderful way to spend an hour and twenty minutes in a cinema strewn with beanbags. But don’t go in expecting it to be comparable to Pixar, or for any deep environmental messages or heartfelt heartstring-pulling mawkish sentiment-fests. It’s just meant to be clever but goofy fun, and it entirely succeeds.

Although, when I tell you that two of the villains in the piece are Charles Darwin and Queen Victoria, you’ll think that I’ve been sucked in and duped by a flick produced by creationists and anti-monarchist nutbags, which would be a strange alliance indeed.

I have loved the Aardman animated movies, ‘specially the Wallace and Grommet stuff, for a donkey’s age, but I still find their continued existence in this high falutin' day and age somewhat surprising. Surprising in a good way, but I just find that stop-motion animation something that contemporary kids, who have rarely if ever seen that stuff, would find it too ye olde worldy.

There's a charm to it, a physical charm, an expressiveness that is illusive and probably really difficult to achieve, that they do, nonetheless. And it's refreshing to see, after all the goddamn CGI 1s and 0s I've been subjecting myself and my heir to lately.

Having said all that, what I found most enjoyable about the flick were the visual gags (as in the opening seconds, where a title card explaining the time and place is revealed to be being held up by a confused looking chap), the strange Science! based story, and especially the character of the Pirate Captain voiced by Hugh Grant.

Even in our current age where pirate-weariness is at an all-time high, the underlying 'dumb' premise of the story, being the Pirate Captain's fervent wish to win the coveted Pirate of the Year award, leads to a perplexing adventure as the Captain and the crew try to safeguard the most exceptional member of said crew, being Polly. Polly's called a parrot at first, but Polly is actually a dodo, thought extinct for a long while. When they cross paths with Charles Darwin, who reveals himself to be something of a rum cove with a crush on a Queen, it appears the crew have a more fearsome opponent on their hands than just the potential shame of losing.

The Hunger Games

dir: Gary Ross
Needs more flamesNeeds more flames
For readers of the book the only question is whether Jennifer Lawrence is a credible Katniss Everdeen. For people who haven’t read the books, it would surprise me if they care at all, and surprises me even more that they went in such droves to watch this film, which they have. It’s the biggest film of the year, thus far, which is pretty surprising in itself, and also gratifying.

In my mind at least, the success of The Hunger Games trilogy has always been a statement of quality against that other titan of the teen – young adult genre, being the Twilight series of abominations. Katniss is the anti-Bella Swan, in that she’s a decent and enjoyable female character to follow, who has agency and makes tough decisions concerning her fate and the fates of others. In contrast, Bella is a blank who has two hot supernatural boys fight over her.

There’s no need to fight over her, boys, she’s definitely not worth it.

But Katniss, Katniss Everdeen… It was like Suzanne Collins was saying ‘this kinda thing can be done right’. And so even if the story comes across as a melange of Battle Royale, Running Man, Predator, Nineteen-Eighty-Four and every reality television cliche of the last ten years, it's still the product of a worthy endeavour.

Let me say up front that I loved the books, have read them all, so I'm fairly conversant with the source material. In the interests of being a semi-responsible reviewer, I will set aside that so I can try to talk about it purely as a film.

Nah, can't do it. It's impossible. I can’t pretend to not know what’s coming, or what’s left out.

Right off the bat I’ll say that it’s a reasonable adaptation of a book that’s not that complex. The problem in adapting it is that the book’s narrated in the first person, and a lot of that narration colours what Katniss does and why. Without that insight into why she’s doing things, it’s hard to differentiate (for those who don’t know) between what she seems to be doing, and what she’s actually doing. Some of this was communicated non-verbally, to good effect, but a lot of the time it looks like Katniss is behaving wildly out of character.

It took me a long while to warm to Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. She doesn’t match the Katniss I carry around in my head from the books, though that’s not to say she doesn’t do a good job. She does the best she can, and after the halfway point, it no longer matters.

The film is equally split, exactly on the hour, into the pre-Hunger Games section and the Games themselves, so there’s a fairly long set up. Some people I’ve spoken to prefer the first half, but I have to say that it didn’t really click with me until the second half.

The story is set in some distant Cowardly New World that Aldous Huxley himself would spit on in terror if he ever beheld it. The United States we love and cherish is no more. It is now called Panem, and is loosely modelled on both an Orwellian depiction of a totalitarian state and the worst elements of the Roman Empire. There’s the Capital, where everyone dresses like Nicki Minaj (if you don’t know who that is, she generally looks like a combination between a sugary dessert and a child’s toy), and there are twelve districts where the majority of the population live in misery and starvation.

John Carter of Mars

dir: Andrew Stanton
Kitties need their nibblesKitties need their nibbles
‘Old-school science fiction’ is one of those phrases that seems like it’s too oxymoronic to be allowable to be used in common parlance and polite company. Even if it’s meaningless semantically, I’m still going to use it because I think it’s totally applicable. And what do I mean by such a phrase?

Tarzan in space.

Maybe Flash Gordon is a better example of where it’s coming from. At the very least, it’s not robots and star ships and ethical dilemmas about helping lichens on distant planetoids.

It’s just about a guy, called Herman Merman, no, sorry, he’s called John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), and he was on the losing side of the Civil War. The American one, not the one in England, or Liberia. In the pursuit of a cave full of gold, he mysteriously appears somewhere else. Somewhere very much else.

Without him knowing it, he’s turned up on Mars, which the locals call Barsoom. And on Barsoom, there are really tall green four-armed Martians, some other reddish looking ‘white’ human types, and some shapeshifting shitstirrers, who look like whoever they want. It’s too difficult to unpack the racial implications of much of this stuff, so it’s easier to just drop it on the ground, and back away quietly.

At the very least it’s not as obviously retrograde as that other paragon of science fiction, being Dances with Avatars.

John Carter notices something strange about the planet, being the fact that he seems to treat it like one great big trampoline. Someone else comes along and explains to him later that it possibly has something to do with his body being accustomed to the higher gravity of Earth, which means that he’s like some kind of goddamn superhero on Barsoom, jumping like a hypercaffeinated monkey all over the place.

The green many-armed Martians, or Barsoomians, I guess, at first marvel at him, then they want to kill him, then they want to kill him more, then they love him and want to have his babies. Which brings me to another point: their parenting skills leave much to be desired. Sure, I know they’ve got a completely different physiology and such, but their brutal approach to selecting which hatchlings live and which die makes our culture of helicopter parenting and co-sleeping seem positively precious in comparison.

John Carter, of Virginia, doesn’t give a tinker’s dam about the Barsoomian issues going on, being some villain (Dominic West) trying to take over the city of Helium by hook and by crook, because all he wants is to get back to his cave of gold. But once he spots a Princess, in fact a Princess of Mars called Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), he gets all patriotic and concerned as to what happens to this red planet. Yes, pussy clearly makes the universe go round, and so it should.

The Lorax

dir: Chris Renaud
Nag Nag NagNag Nag Nag
I love Dr Seuss books. I didn’t know that until a couple of years ago, when I started reading them to my daughter. I don’t really remember them from my first go-round, as a kid, but this time, I delight in the rhyming nonsense and the stern moralising underpinning everything that Theodore Geisel thought up and brought out onto the page.

I don’t think they’re necessarily brilliant, or childhood defining, or fundamental to our understanding of society the way that a comprehensive understanding of Greek mythology or Jersey Shore is, but they’re all right as entertainment. Transmuting them in the crucible of Hollywood to animated movies is a relatively pointless endeavour except from the perspective of earning big cash pay offs.

And there's nothing wrong with earning heaps of big money in ethical and environmentally sustainable manners as far as I'm concerned, so hurray for more flicks based on Dr Seuss books! They can only, surely, make the world a better place.

The Lorax is possibly the least subtle and most colourful anti-rampant consumerism big budget animated movie you'll ever see that isn't WALL-E. Unlike WALL-E, however, which was never that subtle to begin with, this flick is aiming determinedly lower. This will never be confused with something put out by Pixar.

That hardly matters, because does anyone really expect a piece of consumerist product to change people's minds, especially about their materialism and, uh, unrestrained consumerism?

Fuck no, that’s never going to happen, and the cognitive dissonance at play, of marketing and merchandising something that seems to be saying marketing and merchandising is bad doesn’t bother anyone except pretentious fucks who wank on about this kind of bullshit in movie reviews posted all over the tubes of the internets.

A Few Best Men

dir: Stephan Elliot
Get back to England, you ten pound PomsGet back to England, you ten pound Poms
I am a simple man. Anyone who’s ever met me or read these here reviews will probably have figured that out for themselves by now. So if I watch a comedy whose sole purpose is to make me laugh, presumably, then I consider that comedy to be a success if I laugh.

In that light, to put it very simplistically, this movie made me laugh, it is a comedy, so therefore I give it my highest honour possible, being “eh, it wasn’t too bad.”

That’s not to say that it’s a good film, by any definition other than the one I just offered. It’s clumsy, it’s poorly acted, it’s erratically edited, it’s got actors in it who shouldn’t be in it, or in films in general and specifically, and it’s got a lot of crude, stupid humour.

Shit like that, though, literally and figuratively, makes me laugh sometimes, and I laughed a handful of times while watching this trenchant and probing examination of marriage in the current milieu.

Being a simple man doesn’t stop me from over-complicating things endlessly, though. The main reason for that is this: I’m a simple man who’s also intensely neurotic. So allow me to offer apologies and explanations for this here review and this here flick.

I thought this was an Australian flick made for domestic consumption, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. It became pretty obvious after a while that there was a thoroughly misguided attempt to make this flick in Australia aimed at a British audience.

Most of the flick transpires at a stately country manner perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Blue Mountains, possibly one of the most beautiful parts of the entire world. Every time the flick used a certain shot where the big sky appeared in the background, I would filter out the humans in shot, and whatever the hell they were saying, and just sigh at the beauty of that vista, of that panorama, of that exquisite vision splendid.

Then I’d be rudely dragged back into a very contrived and very clumsy story relating to a bunch of Brits acting like total fuckwits in Australia.

Friends With Kids

dir: Jennifer Westfeldt
You're smiling, but none of you are funny in thisYou're smiling, but none of you are funny in this
Look, those of you who don’t have kids and who have friends with kids: I know that those of us with them can be pretty annoying, but you don’t have to try to punish us by making films about it. Honestly, most of us aren’t that horrible. Some of us are, but not most, I hope.

Some friends who have kids, sure, are worse than fifty Hitlers, and are completely self-obsessed and self-focussed, and are constantly telling you how little they’re sleeping and how hard they’re doing it, and what saints they goddamn are for doing something no-one forced them to do and that billions of other people seemed to have managed without turning it into such a goddamn saga, but that’s not the fault of the kids.

Let’s be honest, they were probably annoying fuckers to begin with. As a wise man once said: Look into your hearts. You know it to be true.

This flick might have arisen from the simple observation of some people, being Jennifer Westfeldt, that some of her friends became arseholes when they became parents. Maybe it wasn’t a general observation, maybe it was a specific one, maybe Jennifer and her husband’s friends did all turn into horrible, sniping, perpetually angry arseholes. Maybe they’re exaggerating a little bit to justify making a movie about it. Perhaps some viewers will see some similarities between these gorgons and zombies onscreen and their own friends; perhaps it will resonate with millions of angry, dejected people who mourn the loss of their friendships with Friends who now have Kids.

At the very least I would hope that a fair number of viewers would see this flick, if they bother to, and think, “Goddamn, your friends, Jennifer, totally suck, because my friends, on the other hand, seem to do okay as parents, didn’t transform like werewolves once their kids dropped out of their fecund wombs, don’t pressure me/us horribly on a daily basis to breed as well, and still retain some of the qualities I enjoyed about them before they became ‘dreaded’ parents.”

I hope that holds true for some people, because if this flick is any accurate portrayal of what everyone everywhere is like (it isn’t), then we parents have a lot to answer for, possibly at the Hague in front of a war crimes tribunal.

People certainly can become a bit boring once they become parents, but that hardly justifies a whole romantic comedy about it. Romantic comedies, like the death penalty, should only be used in the most extreme and untenable of circumstances. Anything less than that, and you risk throwing the whole moral structure of human civilisation out of whack.

Underworld: Awakening

dir: Mans Marlind, Bjorn Stein
Awaken the Underworld, today!Awaken the Underworld, today!
A fourth Underworld flick? Who clamoured for that? The first three didn’t bring enough shiteness into the world?

In writing this review, I'm probably going to reveal slightly more about myself than I should. Any long time reader would have to know already, considering the sheer quantity of reviews contained herein, that I'm both compulsive and not that bright. To see the Self-Prosecution’s Exhibit A of damning evidence of this, I present to you this shameful admission: I've watched all of the Underworld vampire/werewolf flicks in the cinema.

Why? Not as in, why am I admitting this, since I'm obviously doing so because I think it's got some mysterious relevance to the flick being reviewed right here. Why have I watched all of these flicks in the cinema, despite the fact that the first one was terrible and deeply leotarded to a degree previously unfathomed, and the others haven't been much better? Why, since I can't stand Kate Beckinsale, and think she's the acting equivalent of a tranquilizer smeared all over beige wallpaper? Why, when too many stupid vampire/werewolf movies and series have permanently poisoned the well, to the point where the whole genre should be off-limits for me?

I dunno. I just don't know. I'm just compulsive about some things, and I have no excuse. Maybe not watching them is impossible, conflicting as it does with my obvious obssessive/compulsive disorder. Or maybe I'm just a bigger fuckhead than I previously ever dreamed. Either way, it reflects poorly upon me, for which I wish I could blame Society. That's it, Society is to blame, not me. Or maybe drinking, who knows

I remember the first Underworld flick, which, apart from having a convoluted and interminable plot, cheap approximations of effects pioneered by The Matrix, and a central performance contributed by a mannequin with scoliosis called Kate Beckinsale, was not something I enjoyed. At all. On any level. It was too boring to be appreciated on a 'so-bad-it's-good' level, and too teeth-grindingly acted to be any kind of guilty pleasure.

The Grey

dir: Joe Carnahan
The wolves don't stand a chance. Well, not much of a chance.The wolves don't stand a chance. Well, not much of a chance.
Bleak, brutal, beautiful.

But enough about my previous relationship…

The Grey is one of the bleakest things I’ve seen since The Road, which was that horrifying post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy adaptation, which was the bleakest thing I’d read since Blood Meridian, which was the bleakest thing since my previous relationship. Plus, it’s got wolves, just like my previously relationship.

Yes, enough about ruthless predators that won't be satisfied until your bones are scattered, limb from limb, across a desolate landscape…

But how could there ever be enough? The Grey is not really the film that it seems to be, at least, the film that they are marketing it as.

Yes, it seems similar to films like Alive (where a Uruguayan rugby team survive a plane crash in the Andes Mountains, get over their squeamishness and learn to love cannibalism), or Flight of the Phoenix (bunch of guys survive a plane crash in the desert, only to face death from the sun and guys on horses with guns). No, this is totally different.

In The Grey, a bunch of guys crash in Alaska, and face harsh conditions and wolves, and struggle to survive in a place where survival is unlikely.

Completely different.

The difference, the profound difference is, this isn't a survival story. It's a story about the struggle itself to survive: what is it, do we all have it in varying amounts, what's the point of it; the usual drill.

Actually, it's a very unusual drill. There is a difference, This flick has variously been described as a macho resurgence in cinema (it's not, it's always been dunderheadedly macho), a celebration of alpha dog masculinity (well, kinda), a recruitment poster for the NRA (bullshit), a celebration of animal cruelty (bullshit), or a flick trumpeting Man's victory over nature (nup, not by a long shot). There’s also a bunch of people saying there’s a strong spiritual component to the flick (there is), and that the flick can be seen as a celebration of faith in the Christian God.

If so, I wonder what holy incense these crazed and hallucinatory dullards are mixing in with their pious milkshakes to achieve such visions, since the flick seems to be the opposite, if nothing else, it’s arguing that God, like Nature, doesn’t give a fuck about us.

Safe House

dir: Daniel Espinosa
They're not safe from you, that's for sure you smug bastardThey're not safe from you, that's for sure you smug bastard
Who doesn’t want to watch Denzel being tortured?

Not me, for one, since he’s a National Treasure. And so dreamy.

But not all of his flicks are a safe bet, these days, ever since, oh, I don’t know, he won the Oscar for Training Day and lost all sense and reason and started believing he was the badass he was portraying onscreen, and that he could keep playing that same badass no matter how good or bad the flick he’s currently in.

In a few years, he might even be picking up the flicks Nicolas Cage considers are beneath him.

Safe House is not a great movie, it’s not even a particularly bad movie, but it’s okay. It’s okay for what it is. It doesn’t really exist or linger past the actual watching of it, and it has a thoroughly pointless ending that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I did not hate it as I was watching it. I could easily hate it now, but there’s not much percentage in that.

I actually remember enjoying whole parts of it. Denzel plays a rogue CIA agent called Tobin Frost, which is a name I don’t think any African American has had in the history of African-Americans. He’s been off the grid for nine years, and surfaces in South Africa. A young(ish) and cowardly CIA agent called Matt (Ryan Reynolds) ends up babysitting the guy, and then some stuff happens to them.

And then the flick ends. A lot of lazy, glib comments have been made that this flick comes across and looks like a ripoff of the Bourne films, except with Denzel, a man in his fifties, stepping in to Matt Damon’s petite shoes. This is a ridiculous assertion. This isn’t a cheap knock-off, it’s a direct copy, since the thing all four films (this and the 3 Bournes) share in common is the same cinematographer, being Oliver Wood.

Chronicle

dir: Josh Trank
Murky morally and visuallyMurky morally and visually
With great power comes great responsibility, as well as a great opportunity to get back at everyone who ever did us wrong, right?

Chronicle is a pretty keen take on the superhero genre, told through the non-narrative construct of handheld camera / found footage telling us the story. For that to work, it means that the person filming, at least initially, has to have some reason other than what’s about to happen for filming themselves. At least in theory.

That person is Andrew (Dane DeHaan), a pale and isolated jerk in high school, as are all Andrews, really. Has he got a decent reason for being a loner jerk who films himself with a camera? Well, maybe. The first instance we see worthy of immortalisation, which opens the flick, is him filming himself and his bedroom door, because his violent drunken jerk of a father (Michael Kelly) is threatening him through that door.

We also find out that Andrew’s mother is dying, very slowly, so things aren’t going that well for any of them. And at school, naturally, the other teenage scum sense his vulnerability, and bully the heck out of him. He does have, at least, a cousin who’s on friendly terms with him, which makes him seem like the only person in the world who gives a damn. Matt (Alex Russell) seems like a kid too tall and popular to give a damn about a scrawny skeleton like Andrew, but care he does, all the same. Inexplicably.

Perhaps in efforts to decrease his own burden, Matt insists that Andrew come to a rave with him, so he can get out there and alienate a whole new bunch of people. At that rave, which seems oh so 1990s, Matt, Andrew and another student called Steve (Michael B. Jordan) find some strange rock / crystalline thing down a hole which changes them profoundly.

No, it’s not a metaphor for hot guy-on-guy sex. Wait, maybe it is.

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