fresh movie reviews for a socially distanced world

dir: James “It’s my world, but you can live on it” Cameron

2009

For a flick that cost over 300 million Earth dollars to make, I’m not sure that the investment is always visible on the big screen, be it 3D, IMAX or otherwise. Sure, this flick is already the second most successful (in unadjusted dollars) flick of all time just behind some other obscure flick James Cameron made fifteen years ago. But I can’t really see whether it was worth all the fuss.

For three hundred million dollars, or closer to five, if you believe the sceptics who were hoping Cameron’s hubris would be repaid with failure (who now console themselves by screaming “it’s shit!” instead of “it’s going to bomb!”), you’d think there’d be scenes of Scarlett Johannson, Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz passionately getting it on in the altogether on the top of a diamond encrusted, plutonium powered aircraft carrier from which Cristal-sipping live killer whales covered in mink coats and platinum bling are catapulted into the sun.

You’d, or perhaps I’d, expect scenes where Johnny Depp dressed up like Imelda Marcos gets to punch Tony Blair in the face hard enough to knock teeth out, and shotgun-armed blows off the heads of the recently reanimated corpses of Charles De Gaulle, Ronald Reagan and Baroness Margaret Thatcher. I know that Maggie, as of this date (12/1/10), ain’t dead yet, but it’s hard to tell sometimes. At the very least, she hopefully doesn’t have long to go.

Sure, so none of that really could be expected to occur for real in a film costing nearly half a billion dollars to make and market. The thing is, though, for all that money, this flick provides scant justification for its decadent budgetary excesses.

All that money went to feed the Mexican prostitutes, maids and nannies of the CGI programmers who animate probably the least live action – live action flick to have that designation thus far. The humans are pretty much the only real stuff on display, with CGI being used in virtually every single one of this 2 and a half hours plus flick. And, sure, it’s in stereoscopic ultra dynamic Technicolor 3D at selected cinemas near you.

And yes, most of the time it looks impressive. Thing is, though, these kinds of flicks look impressive until the next all-CGI extravaganza comes out. Then they look clunky, no matter how many billions were spent. Within a few years they seem as forced and as stiff as a 90-year-old guy with a Viagra-induced erection.

dir: Ruben Fleischer

2009

You might not have noticed, but there’s been this plague outbreak recently. It didn’t all happen at once. It’s been a gradual progression, until more recently where it seems like it’s overwhelming everything and everyone.

It’s a plague of zombie movies, visited upon the planet as a prelude presumably to the actual apocalypse. It’s a benevolent but capricious God’s way of getting us ready for when the dead finally do walk the earth.

Either that, or there’s just no original ideas under the sun anymore.

Still, if you’re going to do something unoriginal, at least do it well and make it entertaining. You don’t even have to put that much of a spin on it: just make us smile.

Someone came up with the bright idea (many times, in many different forms, from World War Z to Shaun of the Dead to Pride & Prejudice & Zombies) that if you don’t take it seriously, a zombie plague could be pretty funny. What if you make your main character a college age kid who’s a bit of a dick and a nebbish, and actually have your characters enjoy themselves along the way?

Jesse Eisenberg has carved out a little niche for himself as this kind of compulsive/obsessive nerdy young Woody Allen type guy who’s smart but ill-suited to the social complexities of the big bad world. In that sense, he’s probably more of a Jewish Michael Cera. He’s also terrified of clowns, and germs, probably. Some genius decided taking this nice young chap and dropping him into an America overrun by unholy hordes, paired up with Woody Harrelson at his redneck-y best, would be a winning combination.

They’re probably right. I didn’t think the flick was anywhere near as funny as had been claimed by rapturous audiences and delirious critics, but I did find it entertaining enough. It’s no Shaun of the Dead, but then what is, apart from the legions of imitators that mention Shaun of the Dead in their marketing?

Columbus (Eisenberg), named after his hometown in Ohio, since most everyone in the flick is referred to by their point of origin rather than their actual name, is not only our protagonist but the perpetual fly in our ear, buzzing out a whole bunch of narration for your presumed benefit. Usually this much narration is a sign of a lack of confidence in your own movie, meaning you think people aren’t going to think it’s funny enough without someone else talking over a scene or some footage punching up the overall funniness. Columbus’s voiceovers are important, I guess, in the sense that without them we wouldn’t understand what was going on. I mean, these zombie flicks can get pretty complicated.

dir: Spike Jonze

2009

Where the Wild Things Are is a beautiful film. It’s touching and sweet, scary but deeply felt, but I don’t really think it’s for children. I don’t even think most kids under the age of ten would really get that the Maurice Sendak book, of twenty or so pages, really connects with this film apart from the similarity in the merchandising. Sure, the imagery is the same, but the story has been greatly transformed by Spike Jonze, David Eggers and the forests and beaches of Victoria.

I have happily read the book to my daughter a stack of times, and so I know how profoundly expanded the story is in the movie. As to whether it’s true in spirit and intent to the book, you’d have to ask noted and thoroughly aged curmudgeon Maurice Sendak, who’s still alive, who wrote and drew the book nearly fifty years ago, and who I’m sure is happy to collect cheques for the film rights. I suspect deep down Sendak would hate this film if he ever sat through it, that’s just my gut instinct.

My instincts are often wrong, I have to admit. What I don’t think I’m wrong about is that this really couldn’t connect with kids for fairly serious and pervasive reasons, self-same reasons that would make it appeal perhaps to their elders.

There’s something simultaneously intellectual, inspired and childish about Spike Jonze and the flicks he’s been responsible for. He has tremendous control of the visual medium that he earns his crust from, but he’s more than happy to aim those skills at the ‘kid’ inside adults rather than the kid in kids.

My only real evidence for this is that his rendering of Where The Wild Things Are is completely lacking in treacle or schmaltzy saccharine, but is not averse to being incredibly twee and cutesy, and so goddamn hip that it hurts. But even more than that, the flick is suffused with such keen melancholy, and such a golden, halcyon longing for the freedom and joy of childhood that of course it would have to look strange to the kiddies.

dir: Peter Docter

2009

Yes, so Pixar have yet another film out. Hooray. And it’s the usual synthesis of state of the art computer animation and interesting story telling with decent characters.

You know what? They’re spoiling us, and we don’t appreciate their stuff anymore.

Like a kid you give new toys to every other day, at first they might be appreciative and surprised, independently of how great they are. Eventually this feel of being entitled and owed kicks in, and new baubles and trinkets are greeted mostly with a shrug.

It’s shameful to admit that I often feel that way with each new Pixar release. With only one exception that I can really think of, each of their flicks has given me great pleasure, especially with repeat viewings. And, as anyone with kids will tell you, a solid kid’s flick is one you can play for the millionth time without wanting to frisbee that copy of Finding Nemo into the stratosphere.

Pixar do have the touch, despite now being a fully fledged vassal state of the Disney empire. The quality of their flicks and their storytelling has not yet diminished.

Last year’s Pixar entry, being the tremendous WALL-E, I liked upon first viewing, and downright adore after the tenth or so. Sure, my kid might wander away after half an hour or so, but each time I get to see it, I marvel at the whole wordless opening, and the ability of the makers to give such an incredible amount of soulfulness to a little robot.

I’ve only watched Up once thus far, so I can’t say where in the Pixar pantheon it’s likely to reside, but mostly what I feel to this point is relief. Sweet, sweet relief. It’s as good as their usual stories, still light years ahead of the Ice Age and Shrek-like crap being pumped out by Dreamworks, still pushing the envelope of computer-led animation, and yet still holding onto to those quiet moments that elevate their stuff above most live action stuff with allegedly real people in the lead roles.

A little boy watches a newsreel way back in the day, back in, I dunno, the 40s? The 30s? He is besotted with the news stories about intrepid explorer Charles Muntz, who intrepidly travels around the world, delighting children with tales of derring-do and adventure. His ginormous airship, the aptly named Spirit of Adventure, being more than a phallic overcompensation, inspires children with their own dreams of travelling to South America and seeing the great sights and creatures the world has to offer.

dir: Michael Mann

2009

John Dillinger is not really one of those names that lights up the night sky or the imagination, at least anywhere apart from the US. I’m sure he’s Robin Hood and Ayn Rand all rolled into one in the States, but to the rest of the world, if we know anything about him, it’s that he was alive at some point in the past, and is now dead.

And in the immortal words of Homer Simpson, “If he’s so smart, why is he dead?”

Well, Johnny Depp, the dapper gent himself, and Michael Mann, the cop and crim obsessed-director, thought it was time to resurrect the tale of the Depression era populist ‘hero’, and his subsequent demise. Mann puts his particularly Mannish spin on things by emphasising the cool professionalism with which Dillinger and his crew conducted themselves. And, of course, the professionalism of Dillinger’s main opponents, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), also have to act as a parallel counterbalance.

Of course, all of this occurs independent of, and, in most cases, in direct contradiction to the established history of these events.

But, let’s be serious about this, does it really matter? Do I really care that the real Melvin Purvis was nowhere near Dillinger when he kicked the bucket, or that they never met in reality in order to have one of those “we’re so similar despite being on opposite sides of the law, I could almost respect you, but I’ll kill you given half a chance” moments that Mann has loved having in his films since Heat?

No, I don’t. I don’t want this to be a documentary. I couldn’t care less about the facts regarding Dillinger’s life previous to watching this flick, and I care even less now. I wanted to be entertained. And I was, for a good long while. The problem is that this flick, for no discernible reason, goes for two and a half long hours. I can honestly and accurately say that I was entertained for its first 90 minutes. I can’t say that about the rest of it.

The flick pulls a neat trick over on the audience initially. It makes the life of Dillinger and his cohorts seem exciting and interesting, at first. It’s all hookers and cocaine when things are going right. It could be the first time this idea has been represented in film, I’m not sure. These hardcore crims are nasty pieces of work, even back in the 30s, way before a form of music existed which would have allowed them to boast aloud about how badass they all were. Instead, a repetitive electric banjo has to tell us that something fun yet murderous is going down.

Dillinger and his crew, mostly, operate with ruthless efficiency. At least, that’s how Michael Mann wants us to see them. Sure, Dillinger was famous for getting in and out of banks with a speed that made the ladies look at him funny, but trust Mann to put far more effort into setting up the robberies, the shootouts and the getaways than any other aspect of the flick. The film also has not one but two jail breaks as well, in fact starts with a sterling one at that.

Truth is, these are the best bits of the flick. Any time where someone isn’t breaking out of jail or shooting at cops with Tommy guns, interest flags almost to the point of feeling guilty about wishing more people would get killed.

It’s just that, really, Dillinger wasn’t apparently that interesting a character.

dir: Duncan Jones

2009

Moon is an absolute throwback, to a kinder, gentler, colder era of cinematic science fiction, and it wasn’t until this flick came along that we knew we needed it so much. I won’t go so far as to say this is an utterly brilliant flick, because there aren’t really any elements of tremendous originality or mind-blowing complexity at play. But it is, all the same, a tremendously good flick. Really, really good flick.

Of course, it will bore the hell out of you if you’re expecting explosions, gunfights or aliens bursting out of people’s chests.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole occupant and operator of a mining facility some time in the future. This facility, surprisingly enough, happens to be on the moon. Earth’s moon. The world’s energy needs are being taken care of by this facility, which uses harvesters to extract helium-3 from the surface of the moon, which Sam sends them back at regular intervals. He does general maintenance, fix-it jobs the robots and automated parts of the facility can’t take care of, and drives out with a buggy to the harvesters to fix things that have gone wrong.

Sam is getting towards the end of his three-year contract with Lunar Industries, the friendly monolithic transnational and in fact now transplanetary corporation for whom he works. He fills his days with exercise, with model building, and with conversations with an artificial intelligence called GERTY (voiced perfectly by Kevin Spacey, who doesn’t overact for once). GERTY, whom I shall henceforth refer to as Gerty, just to save on capitals, is not some malevolent supercomputer intent on killing all humans, just like every other AI that appears in every science fiction flick (despite the clear homage to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey), and isn’t an omnipotent, omniscient entity either. It just speaks in this almost sly but unaffected voice, and even has a little screen intended to represent expressions and emotions. Its role in the story is… ambiguous at best.

dir: Lone Scherfig

2009

If I was to tell you that this flick is the coming-of-age tale of a private schoolgirl seduced by an older, sophisticated man, then you’d tell me that this is clearly a porno or at the very least a remake of Rochelle, Rochelle, an young girl’s erotic journey from Milan to Minsk.

If I was then to tell you that it is nothing of the sort, and if I apologised profusely for having made a Seinfeld reference in one of my reviews, then you’d probably still not be interested in what is otherwise quite a charming little flick set in the early part of the 1960s.

Based on the memoirs of journalist Lynn Barber, with a screenplay written by Nick Hornby (of High Fidelity and About a Boy fame), An Education is set in 1961, and looks at what goes on in the life of an intelligent but unworldly girl called Jenny (Carey Mulligan), who comes across the path of a charming and sophisticated (from her limited perspective) older man called David (Peter Sarsgaard).

See, you could only get away with setting a flick like this in the 60s. Back in those halcyon days, the creepy setup looks a little less creepy. Back then you are meant to see it a little bit more as people being a product of their times, and acting accordingly. It's still creepy, but, y'know...

It makes it sound like it’s all about one thing, and it’s not. Sure, a seduction lies at the heart of the tale of woe, but it is more the seduction of an otherwise sensible young girl by a lifestyle she could only ever imagine before, let alone approach.

It’s specifically because Jenny has had so little exposure to the city, and the things that might go on there, and so little experience of anything outside her overbearing father (Alfred Molina), her cello classes and her studies, that David and his friends seem like such decadent aristocratic stars.

The thing is, it’s only to a teenage girl that these people could be what they appear to be, because to the viewer, they are anything but the sophisticates she desperately needs them to be.

dir: Todd Phillips

2009

This flick, being a comedy, being set in Vegas, is by its nature the laziest goddamn movie you could possibly imagine. Studios love setting comedies in Vegas because all the work is already done for them. They don’t have to think up anything creative, new or original, at all.

I mean, why would you want to? Thinking is just sooooo tiring. It smacks of effort.

If you haven’t seen this, even you can probably guess most of the settings and most of the things that happen, without watching it. Try it out, see how you go. Maybe your version will be slightly more interesting than the actual version.

It was massively successful though, so what the hell do I know. This movie spoke to millions of people. Presumably males, but millions of them all the same.

Really, though, I’m struggling to remember anything that was funny about it at all. There’s scene after scene that approaches perhaps the level of being amusing, and then fades away before satisfying even basic needs.

But then, it is exactly what it claims to be. It never pretended to be anything more than a lowbrow comedy centring around a bachelor party in Las Vegas, where a bunch of dicks act dickish and try to get back to their town in one piece. It’s pretty much an American rite of passage, right up there with losing your virginity and shooting a gun for the first time, preferably at the same time.

The truly original part of this story is that it’s about a bunch of guys who end up having a crazy Bachelor Party kind of night, but they can’t remember it and they lose the groom, in a Dude, Where’s My Car kind of fashion. So they have to follow a trail of vomited-on bread crumbs to find their stuff and the groom, who, for all they know, has been sold into white slavery and is now the chattel of some odious sheik. Dance, pretty white boy, he’ll say, dance for me or it’s the chop for you.

dir: Dennis Illiades

2009

The original horror flick does have a nasty reputation, which is certainly well-earned. Since everything is getting remade, from the Friday the 13th flicks, to Halloween, to Gone with the Wind, so naturally, Last House on the Left has to, nay, must be, remade too. On the most part, I would contend that the flick doesn’t do too bad a job for what it is. The ending, though, shows just how worthless the whole setup really was, and how it’s ultimately a lazy entry in both the revenge and nice white middle class people under siege in their own homes genres of quality filmmaking.

The original is a nasty, exploitative, vile flick. It truly is. This certainly isn’t, and for most of its running time actually seems like a highly charged drama more than an out-and-out horror flick. Of course it relies way too often on “someone comes out of nowhere to either attack or save a person that looks like they’re about to die”, but it’s virtually impossible for hacks to make these films otherwise.

A family, consisting of a doctor (Tony Goldwyn), tightly-wound mother (Monica Potter) and their teenage daughter Mari (Sara Paxton), go on holiday to their lovely house by the lake. The house is so lovely, it even has a guest house right next to it. And that guest house has a guest house, onwards to infinity like an unending sequence of Russian dolls.

No, that’s not entirely accurate. But they do have the lovely lakeside mansion, the rich bastards.

dir: Tony Scott

2009

Ridley Scott’s less talented brother keeps getting work, which is okay, I guess. I don’t know the personal circumstances of Tony Scott’s life, but I imagine he has people to support, children, wives and mistresses and such, or rentboys, blackmailers and dominatrixes. Who knows. The point is, even after the atrocity to the eyes and ears that was Domino, he still gets work.

Here, in a remake of a pretty good flick originally, Scott mostly tones down the irritating editing and filming techniques that have made his more recent flicks virtually unwatchable. Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw assayed the roles the first time round, and they did an okay job. Denzel’s up for the job of playing a craggy-faced blue-colour working man ‘hero’, but they really could have gotten someone better for the Robert Shaw role.

Why? Well, all that John Travolta brings to this particular role is the way his voice goes really high-pitched and whiny when he gets angry, and that he says “motherfucker” at virtually the end of every sentence. I don’t have a problem with language, in fact I love that kind of language. It makes my heart go all aflutter.

dir: Rian Johnson

2009

Rian Johnson’s first film, Brick, was a noir crime drama worthy of the pen of Raymond Chandler, set in a high school. The dialogue sounded strange in the mouths of actors playing children, but it had style, and a commitment to its set-up that never wavered, perhaps to the flick’s detriment, but no matter.

When I heard that he was making a film about two con artist brothers, I was pleased. Pleased was an understatement. I was ecstatic. For reasons that make no sense, I felt glad that a guy who struggled, fought and agonised over making a flick with no budget (which is what happened with Brick) was getting the chance to move up in the moviemaking hierarchy, and was getting to make more flicks.

I’m still glad he’s making movies, watching Brothers Bloom hasn’t diminished that, but I realise he’s got a fair way to go as a director as long as his films require actors.

Listen to me, offering unsolicited advice to a director who’s achieved stuff I’ve never dreamed of and will never get close to creatively and professionally. How generous of me to criticise him and offer tidbits of wisdom.

Still, that doesn’t change the fact that the performances in this flick are what let the film down, which otherwise is a sporadically amusing, wry kind of romantic comedy, for lack of a better term. The script is okay, the dialogue is okay, I guess, the plot is okay, but the performances were just awkward and seemed to come from actors who just couldn’t settle into a groove with each other. For all that it looks like a quirky Wes Anderson-esque flick, replete with affectations and uniforms, the acting doesn’t match the story.

dir: two shmucks called Neveldine & Taylor

2009

There really isn’t any point reviewing a film like this. Notice that I’m still writing. There’s no point because it’s like reviewing a headache, a baseball bat to the groin, an epileptic seizure, a finger amputation, and a bag of strychnine-laced crystal methamphetamine all jumbled together and shredded through an industrial sized rusty blender.

It exists less as an actual movie and more as a collage of violent imagery sped up mightily, completely uncaring as to whether an audience can even comprehend most of the shit it is viewing. Sure, we’re supposed to parse it through the obvious lens of a live action version of a computer game, so much so that sections play out like sequences from Grand Theft Auto and its myriad knockoffs.

But even beyond there it’s the making of something that makes no fucking sense at all, and doesn’t care, making up for the complete lack of coherence only by trying to keep the crazy momentum up and the visuals experimental and vivid.

Viewers who caught the first entry in this insane series might be perplexed as to how Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) could still be around in order to be the lead in this film as well, and the thing is, there’s no real explanation, and it hardly matters. The first flick was all about a professional hitman poisoned by some obscure triad drug which turned him into the bus from Speed: if his adrenalin fell too low, he’d die. So the lead loon spends the film trying to stay as hyper as possible whilst tracking down the people responsible. He also gets to shag his girlfriend in public, with half of Chinatown looking on in obvious delight.

dir: Stephen Sommers

2009

Watching Transformers 2 and this here G.I. Joe flick in close proximity to each other brought something to the forefront of my mind. It wasn’t just the strange knowledge that both movies arise from a product, being toys, being Hasbro toys at that. It was the sad reality that, at least for American audiences, film is what they now have to make up for a lack of a cultural mythology.

Sure, the US has a long and proud history, with all sorts of tall tales and Delaware Crossings, Fort Sumpters, Alamos, Granadas, Last Stands and Flags raised on Iwo Jima, but it’s not the same thing compared to the ancient myths and legends of other cultures, which, the more pretentious throughout history, whether writers or philosophers or people with real jobs, will tell you represent a deep cultural connection to the subconscious.

Instead what we now all have are films that basically explain or reinvent the origins of toys. The toys aren’t the adjunct, the alternative marketing stream, the subsidiary merchandising as such. They ARE the product, the emblem, the totem, and the films essentially pretend to market the toys themselves.

So if you wondered as to why The Baroness is called The Baroness, or why Cobra is called Cobra, or who Snake Eyes is, or who or what a Destro is, then you can watch the film, and then buy the toys, or even go home and marvel at the rich and impressive backstory that the toys you already possess have.

Aren’t you grateful to have had the veil of ignorance torn away from your eyes?

dir: Michael Bay

Michael Bay may be the director most movie reviewers and commenters on the tubes of the internets ridicule and belabour with the hate, but he is extremely successful, and thus virtually untouchable. He is like a shiny metallic titan from one of his movies: towering like a Colossus, legs splayed over the entirety of Hollywood, all his withered critics mewling and mouldering in his gargantuan shadow. The worst reviews, the lowest opinions of thousands, if not millions of people, are nought but ants at the feet of Alexander the Great. We cannot mark, let alone harm him.

If you were to run an algorithm or some kind of search on a review aggregator to find out what words are used most commonly by the majority of film reviewers who tackle his monstrous products, the list would run something like this: “visually spastic” or “incoherent”, “all shiny surfaces with no substance”, “nonsensical plot”, “aggressively violent”, “assault on the senses”, “women looking like glossy pornstars”, “way too long”, “painful, stupid dialogue”, “overedited”, “two dimensional characters”, and “breasts bouncing around in slow motion”.

In fact, that’s it, that’s the review, not only of this flick, but every flick he’s ever made. As entrancing as it may have been to watch Megan Fox’s breasts bouncing around as she and Shia LeBeouf ran across the sand in the latter stages of the movie (which takes up about an hour or so, out of two and a half of them), I couldn’t help but wonder as to the logistics of it. They seemed to jiggle around in such a particular way that I had to wonder whether Michael Bay devoted an entire production unit to achieving his desired level of consistent movement. Specialist gaffers, key grips, engineer costumers and tape experts devoted to structuring Fox’s “performance” in just the required fashion. Millions of dollars devoted solely to the momentum achieved in a woman’s rack.

I honestly wouldn’t put it past Bay. He is renowned for being something of a perfectionist, and he has virtually limitless budgets. What I can’t really figure out is why, since he devotes so much time and resources to achieving his ideal shots with no constraints upon his desires, why he then feeds all of these postcard shots through an editing woodchipper. Ninety per cent of the time, despite having focussed attention and no distractions, I could barely figure out what was going on at any given time by comparing the current scene with what occurred immediately before it.

That being said, part of me, perhaps a more immature part of me, still enjoyed this movie, as much as anyone can enjoy anything made by the premier hack director of his generation. Yes, Shia’s performance is even worse than anything else I’ve seen him in, and yes, almost all of the dialogue throughout this long-ass movie is purest nonsense. Yes the plot is deeply, deeply retarded, and yes, the movie is as shiny and vacant as Megan Fox’s expressionless face.

dir: Quentin Tarantino

2009

Look, it’s a Tarantino film. If you don’t know by now what that means, then you should probably skip this review, and this film.

Otherwise, be prepared to wallow in the geek hipsterism and pedantic cinephilia of a man-child who made the jump from obsessive fan to filmmaker to our collective eternal delight / regret. Tarantino has only ever made films about films, and this is no different.

Inglourious Basterds is not a remake of the shoddy Italian flick of similar name, nor is it the Dirty Dozen rip-off I’d heard so much about. In fact, you’d think from the trailers and promos that this was a rip-roaring action flick about a team of Jewish American soldiers striking fear into the hearts and scalps of the Nazis during World War II.

It’s nothing like that. The Basterds and their exploits take up a miniscule amount of screen time in a film that is certainly not a war film. This flick is far more about the thrill of revenge and the power of cinema.

It’s no coincidence that Leni Reifenstahl is namedropped so many times, nor the exodus of Jewish-German directors from the Fatherland over to Hollywood prior to the war, or the fact that a cinema plays such a key role in the story, or that Goebbels, the Reich’s Minister for Propaganda, gets so much screen time. Nor is it coincidental that silver nitrate film stock burns 3 times faster than paper, and that it is mentioned early in the film. Foreshadowing, or geeky displays of trivial pursuit? Which do you think, knowledgeable patron of the cinematic arts?

It’s a flick without a main character, and without a clear through-line connecting the narratives, but it certainly has a destination in mind. A destination that stretches the definitions of historical revisionism to new levels. It probably doesn’t even fit the definition of revisionism, perhaps alternate history would be closer to the deutsche mark.

In other words, it’s not what happened, it’s what should/could have happened if only the movies of the era could have been allowed to be more powerful.

dir: Paul McGuigan

2009

I love Hong Kong, I really do. That doesn’t mean I’m going to like any film just because it’s set there. But I really do love the place, visually speaking at least. It’s not because I have any personal experience of the place, or because of my heritage, or because of any deep-seeded identification I have with the former British colony. I just like it, is all, and have watched around a thousand flicks set there.

This film Push has a lot of great cityscape footage of Hong Kong, truly it does. It mixes the high art cityscape stuff with postcard shots and, most importantly for me, the shots revealing the commonplace squalor of some areas, with the hustle and bustle of places like Mongkok, Wanchai, Kowloon Bay and all the rest, whether tourist destinations or not, whether ‘pretty’, grungy or not.

Beautiful, beautiful images of a real city that looks almost like what Ridley Scott was going for with Blade Runner, except that it’s real, and it’s a place even more thriving, alive, chintzy and garish than you can imagine, with the quicksilver of commerce, greed and violence running through the city’s veins, in the abstract perhaps more than in fact. All of this I could see and think about as I watched this amazing city depicted in this film.

As I watched and enjoyed all these images and locations, the problem for me was that there were often these people’s heads and bodies popping up and blocking my view of the scenery. They would also talk quite often, and there’d be this annoying music playing which would also distract me from what I was looking at. I didn’t like that at all.

Didn’t like it one bit. And then, when I started focusing more on what the annoying talking people were saying, and I started being dragged into a plot retarded even by the standards of the average retardation of your average retarded action-y slightly sci-fi movie, I really started wishing that there were less people interrupting my view.

It’s safe to say that, in my opinion, this would have been a masterpiece if you could edit the actors out of it.

It wasn’t exactly a “get off my lawn” experience, but I was a bit disappointed by this convoluted and, in the end, fruitless endeavour. I am the prospective demographic for just these kinds of flicks, and even I thought it was nonsense.

dir: David Fincher

2008

David Fincher almost gets a lifetime pass from me for Fight Club. It’s a film so goddamn good that it elevates him into the lofty heights of directors whom I’ll defend even if they make twenty shitty films compared to their one or two masterpieces. Brad Pitt has no such pass from me, lifetime or otherwise. I have such a deep antipathy for his brand of actoring that he is usually the weakest link (for me) even in the strongest of films.

This flick, right off the bat, I enjoyed, very much so, despite the fact that there is less going on here than meets the eye. The premise sounds like it’s high concept enough, but it’s used more for its ironic sense than anything else. A F. Scott Fitzgerald short story is the origin of the film’s screenplay, but it has been fleshed out and elaborated upon in order to make it a serious, prestige Oscarbait contender, instead of the Twilight Zone half-hour that it probably warranted instead.

In the early part of the 20th Century, a clockmaker grieves over the death of his son in the Great War. He constructs a clock for a train station that runs backwards instead of forwards, with the (poetic, not literal) hope that such a clock going backwards would reverse time and resurrect the many sons who died needlessly, bringing them home to their devastated families.

It is, without doubt, the most touching moment of the movie. It occurs in the first few minutes, and, truth be told, the flick never matches or exceeds those moments from there onwards. It does, however, remain interesting.

As the war ends, a baby is born to a woman who dies in childbirth. The aggrieved father, hoity toity Mr Button (Jason Flemyng) is angry at the newborn before he even sees it. Despite promising to his dying wife that he will not abandon the child, he dumps Benjamin on the back doorstep of an old folk’s home.

The baby looks aged and wizened, and suffers from ailments most often associated with the ancient and nearly dead. The merciful Queenie (Taraji P. Nelson), the African-American woman who runs the old folk’s home, takes pity on the poor child, and elects to look after him for as long as he’s got. No-one expects the little mutant to live for long.

dir: Neill Blomkamp

2009

It seems like a brilliant idea on paper. It even seemed like a brilliant idea in the promos and trailers and such. Truth be told it was the first genuine-seeming actual science fiction movie to pique my interest in a long time.

As the film begins, the premise is set out for us very quickly and easily. Twenty years ago, a huge alien vessel appeared above the skies of Johannesburg, South Africa. The aliens, for which we are never given a better title than prawns, are settled into a ghetto / township, all million plus of them.

The ghetto is cordoned off, and twenty years later, as an impetus to the current story we’re supposed to be watching, the organisation tasked with corralling the prawns decides it needs to move the prawns 200 kilometres away because of tensions with the locals. Mostly because South Africans, white or black, don’t want them there. They are seen, despite their hideous appearance, as really being nothing more annoying or dangerous than refugees.

The prawns live in squalor and filth, and though they are reasonably intelligent and can communicate via some kind of clicking - grunting language, they can’t seem to do anything more complicated than rip open a can of cat food and gorge on it. This leads commentators to believe that the stranded aliens are some low order of drone within some insect-like hierarchy species.

dir: John Woo

2008

I’m a bit confused. There’s a film called Red Cliffs that’s playing in the cinemas at the moment, which is meant to be an amalgam of two movies John Woo finished last year. But I don’t know if what I watched is what cinemagoers got to see, since I saw something around five hours long.

Now, there are films that are epic in length, others epic in scope, and still others are epic in terms of the boredom they inspire in audiences. ‘Epic’, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily synonymous with ‘good’. Some things are great the bigger they are, and I’ll leave it up to your personal preferences to imagine which ones, but tumours, debts, jail sentences and divorce settlements don’t necessarily improve with increased length, width or girth.

Yet it was viewed at my leisure, at least I can say that. What I saw is what Asian audiences saw staggered over two releases last year when this/these films made more money than Titanic. Only in Asia though. The rest of the world could care less, and rightly so.

John Woo hasn’t made a decent flick in twenty years, so just contemplate for a moment that it has taken him twenty fucking years to make a decent film again despite so many opportunities. To call it a return to form is an understatement.

Sure, he’s been working, there’s no doubt about that. You’ve got to keep busy. But mostly it’s just been painful hackwork whose only purpose seems to be the attempt to obscure the fact that he only ever had one decent film in him. Everything else has been empty water-treading ever since and he knows it.

Thing is, though, as action films go, Hard Boiled is pretty much the Mt Everest of achievements, so it’s no wonder that he hasn’t come close since then.

Adapting Red Cliffs into a feature was probably a safe bet, since it’s a classic part of the Chinese history the Chinese Communists still acknowledge as having happened. It tells the tale of an epic battle between rival warlords thousands of years ago where the odds were tremendously against the eventual victors and the imperial ambitions of an usurper were thwarted by noble and attractive opponents. Such a tale is malleable in the right hands, and since it’s a classic war tale (it’s kind of like the Chinese equivalent of the Battle of Thermopylae - 300 without the homoeroticism -Waterloo, Agincourt, Battle of Hastings and Helm’s Deep all rolled up into one), presumably has an in-built audience for Chinese people who want to watch lots of CGI soldiers live and die in spurts of CGI blood on the battlefield.

dir: Alex Proyas

2009

I’m not usually in two minds about any movie I’ve watched. And, truth be told, I’m not in two minds about this flick either. This is, in a lot of ways, a terrible film. The plot is terrible, the stupid things that happen are the opposite of good, and having a ham of Nicolas Cage’s magnitude in it doesn’t help either. For once, though, he is not to blame. At least, not the primary blame.

And it having been filmed in Melbourne doesn’t help either. I feel so biased and conflicted.

There is, still, something compelling not about why something big happens in this film, but what ultimately happens. I’m going to try to avoid saying what ultimately happens, because it’s a pretty big spoiler, as big as spoilers get, really.

Back in 1959, a little girl hears these mysterious whispers. They compel her to scrawl maniacally a sequence of numbers that don’t mean anything, and then the sheet of paper is coincidentally locked up inside a time capsule that is to be opened 50 years hence.

Now in 2009, a drunken astronomer (Cage) speaks to a class about whether determinism governs the universe, or whether it’s all random chaos that exemplifies what happens, down to the death of the drunken astronomer’s wife. The drunken astronomer has a depressed son (Chandler Canterbury) who hears whispering too.

The son goes to the same school where the time capsule was buried, which is unleashed upon the world in all its glory on this very day when everything comes together in a neat little package. Whispers induce him to pick up the envelope, the scary music seals the deal. He takes the list home so that his father can spill whisky onto the sheet of numbers and become intrigued by them, for no reason.

For no reason: let me repeat – for absolutely no reason, drunken astronomer guy starts circling numbers, and putting them into a search engine in order to find out that, shock horror, the sheet of paper contained a list of catastrophes around the world for the last 50 years, including the greatest, most worstest catastrophe in remembered American memory, being 9 / 11. Have no doubts about this: it is one of the worst plot devices or maguffins I ever seen in any film, and that includes the use of pheromones in Megashark Versus Giant Octopus.

dir: Ron Howard

2009

They must be taking the piss, right?

It’s impossible to believe that intelligent people, which includes all the people involved in this production except for Dan Brown (let’s give them the benefit of the doubt but not him), could make this film and be treating it as a serious endeavour. It is one of the only films I can think of in recent memory that would benefit greatly from the inclusion of a rabid, nitrous oxide suffused laugh track. Taken on face value, that this wasn’t intended as some kind of parody or black comedy, is almost incomprehensible.

The two words that come most readily to mind about anything to do with Dan Brown in general and this film specifically are ‘absurd’ and ‘unconvincing’. I’m sure there are plenty of other words, but these are the cleanest and most accurate I can think of right now. I’m not going to ramble on about The DaVinci Code, because I reviewed it when that stinking, lumbering turd of a film first stank up the cinemas a few year’s ago.

They are however peas in a pod. Shitty peas in a stinky pod. The one singular virtue this latest film possesses over its predecessor is that it is nowhere near as long, thank Satan.

It also shares this fundamental approach to Catholicism that it is, to its very essence, a secretive, occult, mysterious and murderous offshoot of Christianity as it's meant to be practiced by normal Protestants, normal American Protestants, presumably.

I’m not a defender of the Faith. I’m not even a remotely religious person. But even I find this retarded action / mystery plot set in the Vatican offensive.

What offends my intellect the most is not just the pointless convolutions of the plot, not the horribly flat acting Tom Hanks perpetrates here, or the even worse leaden exposition that keeps getting dropped repeatedly on the audience’s brain like a boring anvil, or even that the Professor Robert Langdon character is one of the least believable fictional characters every created and committed to page or celluloid. What offends me is that it is all predicated on a fear of Catholics in general and the Vatican specifically.

dir: Warwick Thornton

2009

Samson and Delilah is unlike any other film, Australian or otherwise, in its depiction of Aboriginal characters or an Australian story. It is unflinching, and brutal, and beautiful. It might take its name from the biblical story, but this tale is far more real, current, tragic and yet hopeful in its ultimate realisation.

It is not a romantic flick, mostly. There isn’t much dialogue. It’s as meticulously crafted as any work of art you’re likely to ever see, but its purpose isn’t to entertain. Though there is occasional humour to leaven the grim circumstances of these lives, it remains true to the characters and the reality of their situation. A situation not exclusive to the characters in this film.

It’s not easy going, not by any stretch. But then, why should it be?

In an isolated community in the Northern Territory, Samson (Rowan McNamara) wakes up, sniffs petrol for a while, rubs his head then gets up and wanders around. He has nothing to do all day. The isolated community is so small that it probably consists of about 5 shacks, a shack church and a shop. Heat vibrates off everything. A communal phone rings and rings, but no-one answers it.

Music is what wakes Samson up each morning. His brother (Matthew Gibson) and his terrible band play the same song all day long. They play it all day long every goddamn day. The repetition, like the oppressive heat, is maddening but reassuring in its permanence. The phone keeps ringing unanswered.

Delilah (Marissa Gibson) wakes up each day, pushing aside the towels and textiles that serve as blankets, and then wakes up her nanna, whom she feeds medicine to. Delilah is young, Nanna is very old. They have, like Samson, their daily ritual too. They spend half their day producing art, the other half with Nanna praying in the chapel.

Samson doesn’t do much, but he does do a bit to annoy Delilah and get her attention. He never speaks, but he communicates constantly. Then he goes to sleep after some deep sniffs from the petrol tin.

The next day repeats, with minor variations. The day after repeats again, with minor variations. Then everything changes forever.

It’s tempting to joke about the opening half hour of the film as being some kind of aboriginal take on Groundhog Day, but it serves a greater purpose without having to do anything with that film at all. They live grim, stunted lives where every day is like every other until terrible things happen to jar the wheels from their tracks.