MOONRISE KINGDOM- Review

I realise that I'm in the minority on Wes Anderson's previous film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, whose script I  despised for its self-indulgent disregard of Roald Dahl's sense of humour in favour of the auteur's own hipster-ish vision. I'm retroactively even more angry at what appears to be a total misunderstanding of the young audience, after watching Anderson's latest, Moonrise Kingdom, which shows a consummate understanding with children.

It's one of only a few movies I can think of that centres around boy scouts, and Anderson's central conceit is to show the young scouts acting surprisingly maturely, for their age, while the adults in the movie are flustered into a frenzy by their behaviour. Our hero is 12-year-old Sam, (Jared Gilman) an unpopular Eagle Scout who affects a corncob pipe and a coonskin cap.

Read the rest of my review, over at Movie Reviews >>

Moonrise Kingdom is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

MEN IN BLACK 3- Review

There's a telling moment in Men in Black when Will Smith's J asserts that people are smart enough to be told about the existence of aliens, and Tommy Lee Jones' K grouchily corrects him. "A person is smart", he drawls, "People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." It's a line that sums up the funny, cynical world that the film established, and shows just how lacking Men in Black II was, as a film that seemed made by committee.

Ten years later, after a whole bunch of production horror stories and what seems like a near-constant rotation of the first two films on terrestrial telly, we have Men in Black 3, a film that is still, to a large extent, missing that spark that made the first film so special. At least there's a better villain than in the first sequel, in the shape of Boris the Animal, a psychopathic Boglodite who languishes in MIB's lunar prison after being arrested by K. He and his partner J are still policing alien activity on Earth when Boris escapes prison, travels back in time and kills a younger K, leaving J with 24 hours to correct the course of history and save his partner.

IRON SKY- Review

Early on in Iron Sky, there's a scene that is either utterly ingenious, or the Finnish equivalent of Friedberg and Seltzer's unfunny, plagiarising parodies. If you've been using the Internet for longer than a week, the chances are that you're familiar with the Downfall meme, which uses a single scene from the film about Hitler's final days, and manipulates the subtitles to make it appear that he's whinging about current affairs and fanboy niggles. I'm choosing to look at this as a watershed moment in Iron Sky.

The re-staging of the famous scene is based around imperious publicist Vivian Wagner (Peta Sergeant), who's in charge of US President Sarah Palin's 2018 re-election campaign. If, at this point, you get the gag and go along with it, then Iron Sky is a film you're going to enjoy. If you don't like this moment, it's possible that the film isn't all that you thought it would be, from the ingenious logline; “In 1945, the Nazis went to the moon. In 2018, they're coming back.”

Read the rest of my review, over at Movie Reviews >>

Iron Sky is released on DVD and Blu-ray this Monday.

BlogalongaBond- GOLDENEYE Review

Martin Campbell has been at the helm for the last two James Bond reboots, and having loved Casino Royale, I found the experience of revisiting GoldenEye to be a disappointing one. With Licence to Kill having flopped at the box office, Eon ran into legal troubles that held up a proposed third outing for Timothy Dalton for a whole six years, and he quit before he could resume being a magnificent bastard.

Enter Pierce Brosnan, who might never have had to remember his tour-de-force performance in Taffin if this role hadn't propelled him to stardom. He gets off the blocks quite quickly, when he gets into some bother with Russians, completely forsaking the international bromance established in the Moore era. A crime syndicate, ran by the mysterious Janus, then hijacks the Russians' GoldenEye satellite- a secret weapon that fires an EMP discharge capable of wiping out electrical equipment all over the world.

THE RAID- Review

I've generally resolved not to mention American language remakes in reviews of popular world cinema releases, because it's beside the point of actually reviewing the original. I'm flouting that rule in the first sentence of this review, because the already-announced remake of The Raid is even more pointless than most Hollywood chunder of its kind. Why remake a film which is primarily lauded for its action scenes? The most you can do with the material is attempt to recreate it shot-for-shot, or clumsily try and fail to better the choreography of the first time around.

Essentially a showcase for the explosive big screen potential of silat, a martial art which appears to be based around punch-kicking and kick-punching absolutely everything that crosses into your eyeline, The Raid's script is minimal in the overall proceedings. There is a story, which involves an Indonesian SWAT team raiding a tower block full of violent, criminal martial artists, but Welsh writer/director Gareth Evans has chosen to largely tell this story through action sequences, and otherwise in Indonesian, rather than the English language. See how pointless the remake will be?