The Mad Prophet

THE DESCENDANTS- Review

2012-02-01T09:00:00.002Z

Last week, The Descendants scooped five Oscar nominations, so it's another of a number of films I've talked about this week, whose filmmakers are hoping to grab the gold next month. In a way, I've almost left this review too late, because on Monday night, I got to see The Grey, and it was so damn good that I barely want to talk about anything else for the rest of 2012. But like the other nominees in what is collectively the weakest selection of Best Picture contenders in years, it's not that it's bad- it's good, but perhaps not great.

From Alexander Payne, the writer-director who has earned admiration for making biting and witty dramas like Election and Sideways, The Descendants is altogether softer. But as land magnate Matt King protests at the beginning of the movie, about his living in Hawaii, there's no reason to assume that its characters' heartaches are any less pauinful as a result. Matt's wife, Elizabeth, is involved in a jet-skiing accident, to begin with, and a bump on the head leaves her in a coma. Matt is therefore left to try and reconnect with his two boisterous daughters, Alexandra and Scottie, and work through the difficult realisation that Elizabeth was planning to leave him, before her accident.

When the film begins, it seems like it's going to be something of a slog. In the first ten minutes, Matt narrates the set-up, basically telling us what he does and why he's doing it, rather than showing it to us. I also worried that the aforementioned monologue about living in Hawaii as citizens and members of the community, rather than holidaymakers, had marked it as a first-world problems movie. Happily, the film's inciting incident, which I'm not going to divulge, gets the film out of this rut rather nicely, and the script soars away from the drudgery of the unexpectedly clumsy setup.

For a film that is softer than Payne's previous works, it's no less funny, or moving, and the strength of the characters really comes through. It's no surprise that George Clooney is the frontrunner to win the Oscar for Best Actor this year, because his role as Matt places him further than his comfort zone than he has ever been. It's a real exercise of his not-unconsiderable acting abilities. As we've discussed before, he tends to oscillate between playing suave and cunning gents (his default position), or wily and charming dopes, and Matt is neither. He's instantly sympathetic as he tentatively interacts with his daughters, who are also very well played, by Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller, and alternatively expresses one-sided rage, grief and sadness at his comatose wife, in her hospital bed.

The film still has sharper moments too, largely centred around Alexandra's idiot boyfriend, Sid, played by Joel Krause. An early scene between the tactless stoner and Elizabeth's distraught father, played briefly but memorably by Robert Forster, made me laugh much harder than anything in many of the comedies I've seen in recent months, even though Krause's performance almost seems to feed the gag to Forster's outraged dignity. But the strength of the chemistry between Clooney and the superb Woodley makes the build-up to the film's penultimate confrontation very compelling, and its final movement almost heartbreaking.

I don't know that I would list it amongst the best movies of the year, but then there are few contenders in this award season about which I can say otherwise. Certainly, there are little oversights throughout the film, that I would like to have seen addressed. It feels almost like we see Alexandra and Scottie exclusively in relation to their dynamic with Matt. Issues about Alexandra being an alcoholic and former drug addict, and Scottie's difficulty in coming to terms with her mother's condition, are raised, sure. But they're never satisfactorily resolved, in a film that ultimately has to show why what's left of this family works well together.

Whatever its tonal difference from his previous works, The Descendants is another strong work from Alexander Payne. Its script, co-written with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, (or Dean Pelton, to you Greendale human beings) might be softer, but it's no less zingy. The audience in the screening I saw largely comprised older viewers, and I would suggest that it's best enjoyed as the kind of film you can see with your parents, or grandparents. The overall experience is such that you can relax into it, and while few may consider it to be Payne's best work, there are far worse ways to make a more mainstream film, than this.

The Descendants is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Descendants, why not share your comments below? Which film would I give Best Picture to, you ask? The Grey, says I. Full review coming on Friday...

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

MONEYBALL, and Other Awards Season Beasts

2012-01-30T09:00:00.000Z

I've spent much of the last few months writing 6,000 words about Doctor Who and political satire, in partial fulfilment of my university degree, so that's why posts have been a little more infrequent than some of you might have grown to expect. I'm still seeing plenty of movies, I've just had less time to write about them afterwards. But enough of my busy schedule, cos it's time to catch up and talk about some films I haven't yet mentioned.

When the Oscar nominations were announced last Tuesday, there was quite a bit of love for Moneyball, which received six nods, including acting nominations for its stars Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, and one of the nine Best Picture slots. I'll be reviewing that first, but I'm also going to look over a couple of overlooked films from this year's awards scramble- Take Shelter and J. Edgar- and spend a minimal amount of time grousing about how the subjectivity of the Academy doesn't match with my own.

Moneyball is a movie about baseball, and very determinedly not a baseball movie. On the surface of it, this true story essentially takes all of the excitement out of the sport, by chronicling the collaboration between Billy Beane and Peter Brand, during their time working behind the scenes for the Oakland Athletics team. It owes more to The Social Network, which Aaron Sorkin also wrote, in privileging the intellectual attitude to progress over the emotional or irrational norms. Sorkin does this better than any American screenwriter, but he also does it more frequently. Happily, Steven Zaillan's co-writing credit seems to temper the more familiar aspects of Sorkin's writing, and the script as a whole is much better than Zaillan's recent tangle with Swedish who-dunnits.

The acting nominations don't come as too much of a surprise- Brad Pitt is the kind of smart, witty hero that we like to see in Sorkin's works, while Jonah Hill takes precisely the kind of apt supporting role for which supporting nods are wholly intended. For Hill, it's a departure that's worthy of notice, but I'm not sure that Pitt was really better than Michael Fassbender in Shame, or Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 50/50, or Michael Shannon in Take Shelter (see below). It takes no trouble to explain baseball for the uninitiated, but its sports procedural elements are as easy to understand as all that nerdy stuff in The Social Network. Moneyball is the kind of solidly written, male-driven drama that is lapped up around this time of year, and for a film that shouldn't really have much of "the magic of baseball", I was surprised that it still got away with having it both ways.

It's unfortunate, but not unfair, that Clint Eastwood's biopic of J. Edgar Hoover was more easily forgotten in the nominations. J. Edgar, in telling the story of a divisive political figure's storming career and enfeebled dotage, falls into some of the same traps as The Iron Lady. On the plus side, Eastwood is neither as spineless, nor as vague as Phyllida Lloyd- he's not afraid to show us a protagonist that we won't like, and luckily, the framing device of Hoover in his later years does not overshadow the rest of the film, in the way that The Iron Lady became a melodramatic and sentimental ghost story, starring an affably sinister Jim Broadbent.

Eastwood is more historically informed, refusing to sit on the fence. Hoover may have been behind for inexpressibly important developments in law enforcement technology, but Eastwood, and Leonardo DiCaprio, stress how his ego made him envious of the men who actually strode into action before him. Much has been made of the aging make-up effects, which weren't nominated for an Oscar in the end. I feel that this is because the work on Hoover, elevated by DiCaprio's excellent performance, is leaps and bounds ahead of the Halloween mask they got for the aged version of poor Armie Hammer, who struggles a lot more. J. Edgar is an average film by a great director, and as biopics go, it's worth a watch, warts and all.

Also overlooked, perhaps more surprisingly, was another of last year's apocalyptic indie movies, Take Shelter, in which Michael Shannon plays Curtis, a young husband and father whose visions of Armageddon have him racing around, trying to build a shelter for his family. Shannon is on blistering form here, tortured by his potentially prophetic nightmares, and trying to convince his disbelieving family and neighbours that he's not going crazy. Jessica Chastain is also superb, as usual- only she and Fassbender are this prolific without ever wearing thin- and she plays Curtis' confused and frightened wife, Samantha, with great courage and presence.

Curtis and Samantha have a deaf daughter, which feeds into the film's primacy of the senses. To that end, the sound design and sound editing are also superb, but it's the nightmare sequences that really stand out. They're relentlessly trippy and creepy, and the use of special effects is tasteful and clever. Last year really proved once and for all that you can do the apocalypse on a budget, nullifying brainlessly expensive schlock like 2012 and giving way to consistent, ideas-led dramas like this one. Take Shelter takes its sweet time, but accelerates into 5-star brilliance in the last half hour. It's hugely atmospheric, and definitely worth seeking out.

J. Edgar is still showing in selected cinemas nationwide. Moneyball and Take Shelter are both released on DVD and Blu-ray on 19th March 2012
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If you've seen any of these films, or want to chime in with your awards season thoughts, why not share your comments below? I'm going to review The Descendants on Wednesday, by the way.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

CORIOLANUS- Review

2012-01-27T09:00:00.001Z

I don't exactly rate Ralph Fiennes as one of the greatest actors in the world, and I find the measure of his best roles are the ones where he least reminds me of Leonard Rossiter. But he does make interesting projects, and ahead of his hobo Voldemort reprisal as Hades in Wrath of the Titans, he's come out with his directorial debut, Coriolanus, updating a less celebrated Shakespeare play to contemporary eastern Europe- "a place calling itself Rome."

Fiennes plays Caius Martius, a fierce and decorated soldier who is loathed by the people for his infractions of civil liberties and his general lack of the common touch. After a victory against rebels from Antium, and his hated rival, Aufidius, he returns to Rome triumphant, and is coralled into a political career by his mother. But his campaign for the esteemed role of Consul goes disastrously wrong, to the point where Martius is banished from his own country.

There's more to the plot than that, but I found that the real edge of Coriolanus, aside from the brutal intelligence that it affects, overall, was in not knowing how it was going to unfold. Hamlet and Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet are pretty much spoiler-proof- those plots, by the most celebrated writer of all time, are his best known. And once Fiennes' version gets going, it's completely riveting, even though it's not so much updated, as transplanted into the modern media culture, dialogue and all.

In some ways, it feels like a stage production writ large. Theatrical versions of Shakespeare's works haven't always preserved the setting, as much as the prose, but the film still feels cinematic, by virtue of the incredible cinematography from Barry Ackroyd, and Fiennes' surprisingly accomplished direction. This allows the cast to let loose a menagerie of big, stagey performances that are largely fantastic. Fiennes never seems overstretched by his double duty on the film, even if the shaved head and sneering superiority of his character is once again a little reminiscent of Lord Voldemort. Martius remains a complicated character, not above villainy, but always motivated by his dangerous pride in a way that makes him compulsively watchable.

Both Gerard Butler and James Nesbitt are surprisingly good, with Butler absolutely nailing his delivery of the Shakespearean dialogue. Maybe this is his calling, after all. Brian Cox and Jessica Chastain are reliably supportive, although I think Chastain's character is ultimately underserved, but there can be no doubt that the most valuable player is Vanessa Redgrave, as Martius' proud and domineering mother. Her performance is above and beyond; a shockingly powerful turn which is enough to make you quake and tremble. I'm really astonished she hasn't had more awards recognition, but the fact that her talent is all up there on screen is tribut enough, without the arbitrary gongs.

Coriolanus isn't what the trailer makes out- it's not so much a Shakespearean action movie, a la Arnie's Hamlet in Last Action Hero, but a timely rumination on politics, corruption and war. John Logan's script cleverly and faithfully updates Shakespeare's text, and the production value elevates it above what could easily have been a personal vanity project for Fiennes. I think it's a brave, clever experiment, not too fixated on commercial crossover, and successful by the virtue of its terrific cast, and Vanessa Redgrave's astonishing performance.

Coriolanus is now showing in selected cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Coriolanus, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING- Review

2012-01-23T09:00:00.000Z

Underworld: Awakening is interesting, in just one respect. Somewhere in the last ten years or so, long-running film franchises have tended towards large arcing continuity over a succession of standalone features, like the James Bond series or the myriad sequels to A Nightmare on Elm Street. The Harry Potter saga concluded last summer, and before that, the Saw soap opera drew to a close. And that seems to be the problem with horror franchises that attempt this world-building narrative- they become like soap operas.

Read my full review of this shit-heap over at Movie Reviews...

HAYWIRE- Review

2012-01-20T13:00:00.002Z

Coming just a couple of months after his viral paranoid drama Contagion, Steven Soderbergh directs Haywire, a nuts-and-bolts action movie that stars MMA fighter Gina Carano as Mallory Kane, a deadly covert operative who beats the shit out of A-list actors. Soderbergh is clearly as diverse as he is prolific, but the two films do bear some similarity, in their respective debts to B-movie cinema.

At the beginning of the movie, Mallory arrives in a diner in upstate New York, only to be confronted by a colleague, Aaron. They throw down, and a concerned teen, Scott, tries to break up the fight. Mallory quickly dispatches Aaron without his help, but recruits Scott, and borrows his car, to help her escape the men who are looking for her. She tells Scott the tale of how her employer, Kenneth, betrayed her during a mission and left her stranded overseas. Now that she's back in the States, it seems the plan is to find everyone involved in the sting and punch their faces.

The opening of the film, now widely available online as part of the promotion for the film, is pretty terrific. Soderbergh wastes no time elaborating upon what is essentially a film with a singular premise- it looks really cool when Gina Carano hits somebody. The conceit comes from the kind of exploitation films that inspired Tarantino to make Kill Bill, and Haywire's representation of a strong, arse-kicking female lead is closer to that of Beatrix Kiddo than more waifish but mean-faced heroines like, say, Cataleya or Evelyn Salt. Mallory takes a fair bit of punishment in the film's brutal fight scenes, but she gives as good as she gets, and easily comes out on top.

The field of MMA has yet to give us an Oscar-calibre sportsperson-turned-actor, and Carano doesn't buck the trend. Soderbergh is a real actor's director though, so she manages well enough. I think it's that the character of Mallory lacks charisma, more than Carano herself. She tangles with emotional scenes less powerfully than when she's in a fight, but then the film plays to her strengths. Soderbergh's direction, cinematography and editing is fantastic, and it really reclaims the apparently lost art of hand-to-hand combat on the big screen. The lack of music in all of the fight scenes give each individual blow a cringe-inducing impact, which makes the film relentlessly watchable.

Elevating the film above its B-movie leanings is the A-list cast, which lines up Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas in front of Mallory's fists of fury. Each of them, to some extent or another, represents a paragon of masculinity that is toppled when it dares to confront Mallory. After his turn as Sean Connery, Nazi hunter in X-Men: First Class, Fassbender gives another audition piece that assures he'll be considered as the next James Bond, when Daniel Craig puts his blue trunks away. If any proof of Soderbergh's capability with actors were needed, Tatum actually gives his best performance to date- his acting is far from exquisite on his best day, so perhaps that's not saying much, but he acquits himself very well.

The unusual structure of the film will disorientate some audiences, and outright annoy others, and I have to admit that I didn't think ending in media res was as clever an idea as opening that way. At the same time, I recognise the film as a stripped-down and sinewy action flick that didn't exactly open up huge and intellectual questions to be left unanswered in any case. When people say that the plot of action films don't have to be up to much, I wish they'd say it about stuff like this, where the film itself is engaging and competent enough to overcome a lack of substance, rather than the kind of hyper-masculine direct-to-DVD dross that some of the dinosaurs of the genre continue to churn out.

Haywire comes with a displaced structure and the kind of overwhelming coolness that made Drive so popular, but it is, in essence, a self-assured yet functional action movie. It doesn't deal in delayed gratification so much as quick fixes of Gina Carano choking someone out and punching them into submission, and that's fun to watch. Soderbergh seems to move along quickly, and he's still talking about his intention to retire from filmmaking soon, which probably dashes any hopes of a potential Mallory Kane franchise. But all the same, the film sets up a credible action heroine in the form of Carano, and we can only hope that she's deployed as well in the future.

Haywire is now showing in selected cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Haywire, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

WAR HORSE- Review

2012-01-18T08:00:00.000Z

The Searchers is reputedly one of Steven Spielberg's favourite films, and one of the films he revisits before each of his directorial efforts. With this in mind, I've been waiting for some time, to see if Spielberg would make a Western, and it sort of puzzles me, that he hasn't. He's one of the great American filmmakers, and yet his only real involvement in the great American genre has been in his producing duties on the Coen brothers' version of True Grit and Cowboys & Aliens.

For that reason, I don't believe I'm reading too much into War Horse, which is based on the children's book by Michael Morpurgo, to say that its epic journey is very much influenced by Westerns, and The Searchers. The obvious differences are that it doesn't take place in the Old West, but in the West Country, and latterly the Western front, and Ethan's quest is replaced by the odyssey of a horse called Joey. This horse is pretty much the loveliest and most resilient beast that ever lived, but the spectre of the First World War divides him from his trainer and, I say it without irony, his friend, Albert. Survival becomes an adventure to Joey, in a tale that spans the whole length of the war.

Bob Moss, who occasionally contributes to our Double Take show, said something to me just before Christmas about animals in movies, and how they're often more sympathetic than people. It struck a chord when it came to the end of the year, because that's arguably the reason why Rise of the Planet of the Apes is such a success, as a reboot of an exploitation B-movie franchise that can now be taken completely seriously. For that reason, I was very interested to see how Spielberg would handle War Horse, seeing as how Morpurgo's book takes place from the horse's perspective.

Because we're watching Joey change hands and even switch sides throughout the course of the First World War, the human cast is also pretty changeable. The first act centres around establishing the close relationship between Joey and Jeremy Irvine's Albert, but after that, the film turns into what feels like a series of vignettes, barely giving Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch the time to establish themselves before they make way for the tale of two young German soldiers, frightened of dying in battle. The criss-crossing from one side of the war to the other is unusual, and a brave move for a historical genre that tends to land on one side or the other. It's a cinematic milestone, for Germany, that Spielberg finally portrays some of their countrymen as... well, not evil.

As much as I stick to my guns with "animals are more sympathetic than people", the only reason the slightly episodic structure really works is because all of the cast bring their A-game, to a film that is principally about the First World War. Hiddleston and Cumberbatch might not be in the movie a lot, but they make a hell of an impression. If you were following a man through the war, there'd be something to latch onto in terms of a leading performance, but for an animal, Joey is so remarkably characterised that I never missed Irvine during his long absences as the human protagonist. If you're not an animal lover, War Horse very clearly isn't for you, but even so, Spielberg weaves the emotional throughline in such a way that he can still make a hell of a good war movie.

As with Tintin last year, Spielberg gets away with quite a lot and still keeps things relatively suitable for the family audience. He's capable of dealing out effective and sincere emotional blows while still flinching away from actual violence. I think that the people who are calling it manipulative have prepared themselves, in many ways, to not be moved. In the same way as you won't jump in a horror movie or laugh at a comedy movie, if you're really braced against those things, there's no point in closing yourself off to an emotional response to any film. In many parts of War Horse, the things that moved me were actually quite funny, like the relationship between the characters of Niels Arestrup and newcomer Celine Buckens.

The script comes from Billy Elliott writer Lee Hall and romcom maestro Richard Curtis, and its best scene comes quite late on in the film, bridging the gap between the Allies and the Germans in a way that could so easily have been risible. Instead, the dialogue between Toby Kebbell as a Geordie soldier, and Hinnerk Schönemann as one of his disarmingly helpful adversaries, makes the scene as memorable as any I've seen in a long time. It relies, like much of the film, upon the audience buying into Joey's unique appeal to all who encounter him, and particularly Albert, who marches to war with the aim of recovering his pal. But in that particular scene, Joey barely figures- it's about the meeting of the two men. So, even if you don't buy that this is a special horse, the film still succeeds because the war is what happens to the horse, and the war is what the film is really about.

You're welcome to sneer at the combination of Hall and Curtis, with a filmmaker as precisely sentimental as Spielberg, topped off with a typically evocative score by John Williams, but War Horse remains a mature and moving adaptation of a children's book, which tries to entertain everybody and largely succeeds. Tintin was a film with adult nostalgia behind it, that was primarily aimed at kids, and Spielberg's latest works similarly, as a children's film that will have extra resonance with adults. It's another war movie, but it's also a life-affirming, globe-trotting Western- superficial, yes, but big-hearted and stirring.

War Horse is now showing in selected cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen War Horse, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

The Final Problem- SHERLOCK vs. A GAME OF SHADOWS

2012-01-16T09:00:00.007Z

Last night saw the second series of BBC One's much-acclaimed Sherlock come to a close, after another three weeks of feature-length adventures. Unlike the first series, which aired in 2010, this series aired at the same time as the bombastic Hollywood version of Conan Doyle's detective was still playing in cinemas, in Guy Ritchie's sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Obviously, I have to compare them, and so from here on out, there will be spoilers for both the new film and the whole of Sherlock Series 2, but especially last night's finale.

I don't often cover TV reviews on this blog, simply because I've either not had time, or not been bothered to write down my thoughts because I felt they were being echoed elsewhere- hence no review of the superb Black Mirror, which had a similar feature-length format to Sherlock. However, the significance of The Final Problem to both A Game of Shadows and Sherlock's finale, The Reichenbach Fall has inspired me to articulate what I've been thinking for a few weeks, and compare the respective adaptations. The Final Problem is the short story in which Conan Doyle killed off Holmes by pitting him against Professor James Moriarty, in a battle of wits that eventually pitches the two rivals off of the Reichenbach falls in Switzerland, with each apparently meeting their demise.

It would be fair to say that, after The Hound of the Baskervilles, this is one of the more famous stories for those who don't have a huge knowledge of the canon, due to the ubiquity of the whole relationship between binary opposites, which is arguably based on the equally matched relationship between Holmes and Moriarty in the first place. Even Disney's Basil the Great Mouse Detective tips its deerstalker to the famous fall. But both of the adapted versions of Holmes have tackled this story relatively early, and also within a month of one another, hence my interest in comparing them, and sharing my opinions on each. Whatever I eventually decide will be as subjective as any judgement on this blog, but I feel bound to rationalise my most controversial of recent opinions- I much prefer the big screen version to its excellent small screen counterpart.

I thought Ritchie's first Sherlock Holmes was reasonable, if slightly fixated on franchise building, but the sequel really paid off on that, and I count it amongst my favourite films of last year. Conversely, I loved the first series of Sherlock, written by Doctor Who writers Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss and Steve Thompson, precisely because it was much more clever than Ritchie's version, but found a certain amount of disappointment in the first outing of the second series, which we'll get to in a bit. I figure that the best way to do this is to break the different versions of the Final Problem into their constituent elements and directly measure them against one another. Like so--

The Great Detective- Robert Downey Jr. vs. Benedict Cumberbatch

Cumberbatch wins. I'll give Downey more quarter than to simply say that and move onto Moriarty, but come on, Benedict Cumberbatch seems born for this role. As I've said before, the big-screen Sherlock Holmes franchise is like any purist's nightmare version of Hollywood-ised Holmes, and the impressive thing is in how that doesn't get in the way of it being very, very good. And so, Downey's performance is bang-on, elevating what is basically a post-Jack Sparrow version of the detective. You barely need me to tell you why Cumberbatch is the better version, because you just have to look at him in action, all prickly and superior.

When it comes to the fall, A Game of Shadows uses another of its enjoyable spins on Holmes' fighting smarts, to show how his intellectual equal is no slacker in the art of strategic face-punching either, but his decision to sacrifice himself and Moriarty doesn't have much impact, past the film's typically cheeky resolution. In The Reichenbach Fall, it means so much more because of Cumberbatch's performance, coming after Sherlock's intellectual superiority has been utterly destroyed. However much he protests that he doesn't care what people think, his dilemma, atop of St. Bart's Hospital, is the culmination of his defeat at the hands of his greatest adversary- he doesn't have the bounce-back-ability of Downey's more impish smartarse.

The Napoleon of Crime- Jared Harris vs. Andrew Scott

The other major player in the final battle, Professor James Moriarty, is one of the most famous villains in literary history, reinterpreted almost as many times as the titular sleuth. Of A Game of Shadows, I heard some people remark that he was "Sherlock's Joker". The Joker is far from Batman's intellectual equal, so there's no way you could even tenuously call the Joker "Batman's Moriarty". It's understandable, because I'm sure that the franchise model at Warner Bros. is based in some way on Nolan's Batman movies, but I think it's Sherlock's Moriarty that bears more similarity to Heath Ledger's Joker, and others.

Certainly, it wouldn't be difficult to draw a line between the anarchistic leanings of the Joker, and the scene in which Harris' Moriarty turns Holmes' admonitions back onto human nature. He seems terribly bored of existence, and able to entertain himself by manipulating and profiteering from the opportunities he foresees. Unsurprisingly, coming from the writers of Doctor Who, Sherlock's Moriarty relates more closely to the Master, the villain who was originally conceived as an equal Time Lord opposite to the Doctor. The danger with that, as with other characters in Sherlock, is that it's a third-generation version of that character.

Want to know why I wasn't a big fan of the series opener, A Scandal in Belgravia? Because as soon as I heard Moffat was doing Irene Adler, I expected a version of River Song. If the Master is the Doctor's Moriarty, River is his version of "The Woman" and, by extension, Moffat's version. Coming after River, it feels like Irene is based on a character that was based on her anyway. Not that I prefer the film's version of Irene, who, despite Rachel McAdams' charms, is really barely there, but hopefully you see what I mean. I don't remember Moriarty ever wanting to actively destroy Holmes, except to solve that final problem of being an unstoppable force, meeting his immovable object- I think this Moriarty owes that more to the Master.

Still, I'm always up for reinterpretation, and both versions are pretty spectacular. I had determinedly reserved judgement on what little we'd seen of Scott, up until last night's episode, and he won me over completely, once he became the centre of attention. The highlight of each fall is in the conversation that precedes it, between Downey and Harris; Cumberbatch and Scott. Ultimately, although both are great, I prefer Jared Harris in these scenes. The villain's narcissism and high-faluting "respect" for Holmes makes him much more interesting to me than Jim's suicidal determination to confound Sherlock. Frankly, I don't see that he's meant to be Sherlock's Joker.

The Good Doctor- Jude Law vs. Martin Freeman

Even though I don't particularly like Law, he's never better, in my view, than when he's starring alongside Downey's Holmes. The difficulty with this showdown is that Freeman is also a superb John Watson. The difference is that Law's interplay and chemistry with Downey is often the most enjoyable part of the movies, while Freeman probably gets on better when he's not sharing the screen with Cumberbatch. At times, I feel like the movie Watson gives as good as he gets, but the TV Watson is a little more like an exasperated everyman.

However, to compare the character's roles in the two falls, I think it's the TV version wins out again. Sherlock still has the structural advantage, but it also does a better job of making the consequences feel far-reaching, and not like they'll be forgotten within a few minutes of the next adventure. Freeman gives his best performance to date, so subdued and sad, as a military man who's always kept his vulnerability quiet, suddenly left with a gaping hole in his life where his best friend should be. It would take a stony heart, to not be moved by this Watson's graveside plea- "Don't be dead."

"The best and the wisest man whom I have ever known"- The Writing

Both scripts use Watson's final line, from Conan Doyle's story, and as I've suggested, I think that each script manages to make the story fit within their own interpretations of the character, without necessarily using it to close the book. Michele and Kieran Mulroney's adaptation is particularly impressive, for being very faithful to the specifics while still being breezy, and for the superb writing of the chess scene that precedes the final tussle. There's no crappy "is he or isn't he?" cliffhanger either, and the film remains tonally intact by resolving the fall before the credits roll.

Steve Thompson's script for The Reichenbach Fall easily exceeds his previous effort, on Series 1's The Blind Banker. The Moffat protege even exceeded his mentor's effort for this season, with a compulsively forward narrative that tied up most of its loose ends and kept going for the full 90 minutes, rather than changing tack and meandering in the middle. Moffat wrote the romance, Gatiss wrote the horror, in last week's The Hounds of Baskerville, and now Thompson has shown an aptitude for the intimate epic.

The thing about The Reichenbach Fall is the way in which it seems like they were building to this all along. In a modern context, they're never going to actually plunge from a bloody great waterfall, and so the fall becomes more figurative. But the pieces have been there since the first episode, with Sherlock's dismissive treatment of the supporting cast, particularly the police, contributing to his eventual downfall. In terms of writing, Sherlock wins for making the fall something intimate and personal to the sleuth, rather than a practical solution to Moriarty's villainy, and so on points, The Reichenbach Fall surpasses A Game of Shadows.

You could have told me this all along, I imagine, but didn't I say that this would be subjective? Compared to the second series as a whole, I'll take A Game of Shadows, any day. It's inventive within its own sphere, and funnily enough, feature filmmakers don't have as much difficulty filling a feature-length as Sherlock occasionally does. The series has the best Holmes and the best Watson, but not the best Holmes and Watson pairing, and their interplay and chemistry tends to enhance the characters on the big screen in a way that another Hollywood version might not.

Each has their own distinctive house-style (on-screen texts and deductions in Sherlock, slow-motion tactical smart-arsery in Sherlock Holmes) and their own qualities, and it would be tempting to declare the versions as equally matched, as is the theme of the Holmes-Moriarty rivalry. Certainly, their reinterpretations draw from other fictional heroes- Ritchie from Batman, Moffat and Gatiss from the Doctor. All in all, I enjoy the movie version more, partially because I think that Sherlock is occupying enough of Moffat's time that it's interfering with Doctor Who. Both series ended with the hero faking his death to put an end to his own myth, and Sherlock clearly did it better than Doctor Who. And frankly, that's just not allowed.

So, while both versions are good enough to serve different audiences and still have a crossover audience, co-existing with one another rather than competing, I generally prefer the movie versions. The BBC version has gotten a lot of mileage out of its format, and given us some truly great telly moments, but I can stand to wait for the announced third series, because now that Moriarty is definitely done with, I'm not sure that there's much further it can go. I'm still chomping at the bit for a third Sherlock Holmes movie, with or without Jared Harris.

Either way, isn't it great to compare two versions that are this good? Next week- Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century vs. that Asylum film with dinosaurs, dragons and robots....

BlogalongaBond- OCTOPUSSY Review

2012-01-14T09:00:00.001Z

Five minutes earlier, I thought "Something really stupid is about to happen..."

I saw most of the Bond movies for the first time during an ITV marathon in 2000. The ones I haven't seen, largely of the later Roger Moore canon, were missed because my dad, who then decided my bedtime and what channel would be on TV, decreed that they weren't worth watching. Octopussy was one of these overlooked titles, and ever since, I've had the misconception that it was going to be the nadir of BlogalongaBond. Instead, it's not even as bad as The Man With The Golden Gun.

This isn't to say that the plot holds any great surprises- it's still a Bond movie. The titular Octopussy (heh heh, titular) is the head of an exclusively female cult that also has a line in jewellery theft. Her agent in the field is Kamal Khan, an exiled Afghan prince who is mucking about with dodgy Fabergé eggs. After 009 is killed in the line of duty, delivering one of these eggs to the British ambassador, James Bond is assigned to untangle the confusion. He doesn't do a great job, but he is beguiled by his unknown connection to Octopussy, and presumably, by the assumption that she has eight of something.

Like the action in For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy really runs Bond ragged, which I always prefer to the usually unflappable antics of our super-spy hero. The difficulty is that Roger Moore is still in the role of Grandpa Bond, so "run ragged" is pretty much his starting position too. For the second film in a row, the producers sought to recast Bond, but opted for the established star when Warner Bros. announced their rival Bond film for 1983, a remake of the execrable Thunderball. In fairness to the then-56-year-old Moore, the continued casting was probably the least of the evils committed by Never Say Never Again, which somehow managed to be not better, not worse, but equally as bad as Connery's first run at that film.

So, once again, this one seems to have all the nuts and bolts of a series reboot, with more of the jumping and running and punching that typifies Bond at its best. The now predictable outbursts of awful comic relief would seem, therefore, to have been added in at the last moment. If James Brolin had taken the role, as planned, I don't believe that Eon could have countenanced dressing him up as a clown, or a gorilla, or getting him to swing on vines to the wailing of Johnny Weismuller's Tarzan. Even the usual surfeit of quips seems like an afterthought, with a lame gag in which Moore tells a snake to "Hiss off" seeming to show that he couldn't stop doing comedy bits if his life depended on it.

These gags often soil the otherwise terrific action setpieces too. The Rajasthan chase scene is almost completely comical, but look at the scenes towards the end of the film. The train-hopping fight scene is adrenalised Bond at its best, and really puts the character, and Moore, through his paces, but when he's pitched off of it, he's embarrassingly foiled in his attempts to rejoin the chase, by a number of comedy locals. This from an action sequence that would have been good enough to end the film, but instead segues into a further thirty minutes of buffoonery.

The film's Indian flavour is a far cry from the travelogue segments of previous outings. If You Only Live Twice turned out as quite a risible and accidentally racist depiction of Japanese culture, Octopussy holds a consciously caricatured version of India, which even seems too obvious for this series. Khan and Gobinda are a particularly ineffectual, ethnically repurposed rehash of Goldfinger and Blofeld, despite the best efforts of Louis Jourdan and Kabir Bedi. Khan tells Gobinda to kill Bond, and Bond wriggles out of the big lug's grasp- lather, rinse, and repeat until Khan attempts to land on the wrong bit of a cliff and explodes on impact.

Swinging back to the relative plus sides, (without the Weismuller wail, thank you very much) Maud Adams is much better in her second run at the vaunted Bond girl role. Perhaps in conciliation for her role as a helpful punchbag in The Man With The Golden Gun, Octopussy is another of those characters whose strong femininity is undercut by a ridiculous double entendre of a name, but still manages to pack more of a wallop than her predecessors. With an army of similarly kick-ass women at her command, she fights the good fight at the film's conclusion, while Bond and Q fuck about in a big, patriotic hot-air balloon. See how the comedy ruins it? Besides which, bringing Q into the action actually serves to make Moore seem even more like Grandpa Bond- it's not a suave and able man with a curmudgeonly old bloke, as much as two old mates on a lark, each chowing down on Werther's Originals and laughing at nothing.

Octopussy actually surprised me, in the end, with some thumpingly enjoyable action sequences and a more energetic performance than we could reasonably have expected from Roger Moore at this point in his career as 007. Yes, the series was still long overdue a change of lead actor at this point, and the story is inscrutable bunkum, but I've heard defences of less enjoyable films from this series that trade on exactly the same points that I enjoyed about this one. If any Bond film could stand to lose half an hour, it's this one, but it bounces back from a number of bad mistakes in a way that shows a renewed energy in the stalwart production team. That said, I still don't hold high hopes for another of the unseen Moore outings- his swansong, A View To A Kill...

#13- "Octopussy" was just a cute nickname from her dead dad. This series is corrupting my mind.

For a full list of everyone's work on BlogalongaBond so far, click here.

The Mad Prophet Will Return, With A View To A Kill... in February.

THE ARTIST- My Thoughts

2012-01-13T18:00:00.004Z

As I keep telling you, the movie business is currently engaged in one of the most open awards seasons in recent memory, but that hasn't stopped a few favourites emerging. To give you an idea of how "meh" the last 12 months have been, in spite of having provided a host of good, if not awards-worthy pictures, one of the surprise candidates for Best Picture at next month's Oscars is Hugo. Good, yes. Best Picture good? Not really, and in some ways, the almost dead-cert winner of this year's Best Picture award, The Artist is comparable.

Created by Michel Hazanavicius, and the same team he worked with to bring the OSS 117 spy movie parodies to the screen, the main conceit of The Artist is that it's a vérité silent movie, operating with all the same rules and modes of address that were used in Hollywood's infancy. The story begins in 1927, and George Valentin is the movie star idol of a starstruck young woman, Peppy Miller. A chance meeting between the two gets Peppy a walk-on role in George's newest picture, with consequences that neither of them could have predicted. When talking pictures become the newest big thing in Hollywood, George's prideful dismissal of the technology threatens to tip him into oblivion, while Peppy becomes a stratospheric mega-star.

Let's be frank, from the very beginning- The Artist is pretty delightful. I really believe that only a contrarian could declare to have found it completely without joy, simply because if you like films, there's going to be something that you like in this one. In all that it sets out to do, it is practically perfect, as stars Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo perfectly capture the expressive "mugging" that typifies the craft of acting for a silent movie, and Ludovic Bource provides an old-fashioned yet energetic score to keep your eardrums occupied. It is a completely sincere expression of the purest form of cinema, and it even has a funny dog. There's a "but" coming, here.

The film obviously bears the weight of expectation very well, but I can't help but feel that it's lost something of its appeal, while propelled along by the juggernaut of hype. That it is the frontrunner for Best Picture says more about its competition, than it does about the film itself. I liked The Artist. I like it a lot, but I don't love it. It's strange to feel like this- to come out of a movie with hardly anything but praise, and yet still feel like I'm speaking in half-measures. All of the hype gave me an expectation from the film, and although the film is equal to the task of satisfying those expectations, it is no more than that.

At a certain point in the film, it's so vérité that you start to think about how this would be remembered if it had in fact been made in the silent movie era, and you kind of wonder if it would indeed be remembered. Like Hugo, its main business is the nostalgia for cinema. In Hugo, the plot was akin to a Lemony Snicket adventure-mystery story, but the movie was about cinema instead. The Artist owes a lot to A Star Is Born, and in that much, it never really surprised me. I'm not saying it was predictable, merely that, once again, my expectations were met and not surpassed.

To switch off my Mr. Grumpyface opinion bullshit for a moment, I should stress that there is no point on which I wouldn't recommend that you go to see the film. Should you see The Artist? Yes, it's charming and wonderful, like everybody says, and different enough that it's a hugely refreshing cinematic experience. But it did feel, to me, like some of the Oscar favourites that people have decried in the last few years. Will they still be seen as important in 20 years? Most likely not, in the same way as few people think that Driving Miss Daisy or Forrest Gump were the best films of their year. The Oscars hype spoiled the film for me, not in terms of the plot, but in giving me a correct expectation of exactly how it would turn out.

I'm certain enough that The Artist will be this year's Best Picture that I'm going to put money on it, which kind of shows how the real charm of the film has been divorced from the film as an award-winning artefact in all of the press surrounding it, including this very review. It is, like Hugo, an exercise in nostalgia rather than storytelling, but it's funny and moving to an extent that is above and beyond its central gimmick. When people say "It doesn't have to be Oscar-worthy" about mediocre blockbusters, I wish they would say it about films like The Artist, instead of shit films, because then we might get on the way to ignoring subjective judgements and hype, and actually appreciating a bit of pure entertainment like this.

The Artist is now showing in selected cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Artist, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

GOON- Review

2012-01-11T09:00:00.000Z

You'll have to forgive Goon's unfortunately awful marketing campaign, if you set any stock by my reviews, because it's a hell of a lot better than it looks. The film isn't due a US release until March, and this, along with the peculiarity-cred that comes with a Magnet production, is one of the indicators that the film isn't the haltingly unfunny disaster that might be suggested by sub-Dreamworks straplines like "Dumb As Puck." And truthfully, this hyper-violent but essentially sweet Canadian curiosity has more in common with Super than with Superbad.

It's a hockey movie, or, more aptly, a movie about competitive fighting, on ice. Nickel-headed doorman Doug Glatt is a kind-spirited lug, who violently defends his friend from an irate hockey player at a local league match. The team manager scouts out Doug for his enviable talents as a bruiser, and signs him up to play as a semi-pro enforcer, or goon- basically, a tough guy who doesn't play hockey so much as prevent his opposite number from damaging his team's properly talented players. He is prodigiously successful in this field, but his sweet nature is often mistaken for thuggery.

Goon relates back to Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story in some ways, but while Dodgeball trades on all the absurdity of its central sport, Goon is at least as good a sports movie as it is a comedy. It's straightforwardly unorthodox, playing up the violence of ice hockey without giving any quarter to explaining the rules of the game. It's Canadian in flavour, and seems, to some extent, to have been made with Canadians in mind. There's something honest and enjoyable about that, and the crossover appeal comes from both its humour, and the surprisingly strong central performance.

To give credit where it's due, Seann William Scott is really Goon's trump card. Best known for the role of Stifler in American Pie, a role he'll reprise in a couple of months' time, Scott's performance here is basically as the straight man, to the surrounding film's good-natured ridiculousness. It's a role that he pulls off better than any of his previous work might have led you to expect, and as much as the film is a very tongue-in-cheek sports movie, it works better than many sports movies, just for the fact that you root for Doug. Crucially, there comes a point where you actually care about whether or not he gets hurt, rather than just wanting to see him continue to whack seven bells out of people.

As is the wont of sports movies, Doug's rise to fame coincides with the decline of the sport's most infamous goon, Ross Rhea, played by Liev Schreiber. It feels like we've been watching Schreiber sit uncomfortably in a number of different roles, while still doing a good job. For example, if you read Batman: The Long Halloween, the graphic novel that inspired parts of The Dark Knight, the book's image of Harvey Dent might as well be based on him. But that role was played by Aaron Eckhart, and Schreiber instead appeared in the execrable X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The role of Rhea feels like a good fit for him, and he clearly enjoys himself just as much as everyone else, as Goon's answer to the insurmountable monster-men that populate Rocky sequels.

I was less enamored of the character played by Jay Baruchel, who also co-wrote the movie with Seth Rogen's writing partner, Evan Goldberg. Baruchel's fingerprints are all over the film, even though his on-screen presence as Doug's buddy is a minor part. I'm no stickler for strong language, especially in a film as over-the-top violent as this one, but as I've said before, excessive swearing can actually wreck jokes by breaking up delivery and comic timing, and the film's script suffers for a few too many fucks. It's not really sanitised in any respect, with the amount of bloody hockey violence that goes on all the way through, but it is a lot more balanced in that aspect.

Goon is a sweetly violent sports comedy that's so easy to like, it's almost like the ad campaign was an exercise in making the job of promoting it a little harder. It's also pleasingly separate from the pacing of Judd Apatow comedies, and edited within an inch of its life. There are no baggy or unnecessary scenes to slow down the rapidfire salvo of comedy and violence. The MVP is clearly Seann William Scott, who builds and maintains chemistry with pretty much every actor who shares the screen with him. Moreover, the film is delightfully Canadian, with buckets of crossover appeal and a general oddball accessibility that's absent in some more mean-spirited comedies.

Goon is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Goon, why not share your comments below? Shit, I'd almost forgotten American Reunion was coming...

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

THE IRON LADY- Review

2012-01-09T09:00:00.000Z

This time last year, The King's Speech opened up the year in style. It lingered in the memory long enough to make my top 25 for 2011, and more notably, it went on to load Colin Firth's mantelpiece with plaudits, during the awards season. It was a far better film than this hanger-on, The Iron Lady, which also exploits that apparent fascination that Americans have with British history.

As per the film's shockingly uncanny poster, Meryl Streep plays Margaret Thatcher, in this slightly tenuous biopic of the much derided, and yet longest-serving British Prime Minister. Aged up, we first meet Streep's Maggie in her dotage, grieving her late husband, Denis, by conversing with his ghost and dreaming about past glories. It is from this present-day anchorage that we see the younger Margaret ascend to the top of the government with firmly held ideals about restoring the greatness of Britain, even if it means being unpopular with the electorate.

It's far too easy to judge the film on whether or not I agree with its stance on Thatcher, whose humanity, we are led to conclude, made her at least "not bad". We're constantly told, in the film itself and in reality, that she is one of the most divisive figures in British political history. Except where The Iron Lady's character portrayal actually impedes the coherence and effectiveness of the film, there's no point chatting about whether or not I agree with its standpoint on Thatcher.

According to director Phyllida Lloyd, asking if she agreed with Thatcher's policies is tantamount to asking if you agree with King Lear's ideology, so I suspected in advance that the representation would be a big problem. Having now seen the film, I think that was very telling indeed. Streep's astonishing performance, praised by all and sundry as an act of unnerving mimicry, is still just a character. If Lloyd views Thatcher as Lear, she views her as a character, and not a real figure. She's also written as such, by screenwriter Abi Morgan, trying to find the good in a less-than-stellar public image.

The result is an act of gross simplification- as it turns out, Margaret just wasn't liked in her time because of nasty, bullying, sexist men. This conception protests marginalisation, while also dismissing the complaints of the troubled workforce that Thatcher devastated, by relegating protesters to gruesome montages and background noise. The film is far clumsier in its attempts to align us with the protagonist's point-of-view than Lynne Ramsey's We Need To Talk About Kevin, resorting to Peep Show-style shots of Thatcher's view, which feels more like forced perspective, and never approaches any kind of meaningful empathy.

Elsewhere, the film also grants us an early contender for this year's Best Unintentional LOL, when Jim Broadbent's Denis emerges from the debris of the Brighton hotel bombing, in slow motion. Resplendent in pyjamas, wailing as he clutches his exploded shoes, it would take a Herculean effort to keep a straight face, and I failed to prevent myself from howling. I like Broadbent just as much as everyone else, but he's underused here, and when he is present, his haunting of Margaret is actually more sinister than sweet. He even made me jump once or twice, with his sudden appearances to his now-enfeebled wife- at least his sporadic appearances keep the proceedings lively, whether for levity or Black Swan-style hallucinogenic melodrama.

It's one of the last projects OK'd by the now defunct UK Film Council, and so it's disappointing that it is rife with whimpering endorsements of a utilitarian Conservative government, that even pays lip service to that noted "smoothie", David Cameron. It's plenty British, but with one eye firmly on international marketability- at one point, Thatcher, who Americans might best remember as an acolyte of President Reagan, compares the Falklands war to the attacks on Pearl Harbor, with the apparent goal of squaring a pointless and expensive exercise of jingoism for audiences who don't know any better. This cross-eyed perspective sees right past Thatcher's other aberrations, like her condemnation of Nelson Mandela, and her homophobic Section 28 legislation.

Meryl Streep is not enough to elevate The Iron Lady all by herself, because the film is so non-judgemental, it borders on weightlessness. There is no nuance or perspective about the film to which her performance is attached, and so its insight would be no less profound if she was played by that Spitting Image puppet. It's not a whitewash, and nor is it purely hagiographic, but it's unerringly non-judgemental, and very definitely a post-King's Speech conception of a much more complicated figure. It's interesting to represent a divisive figure in a sympathetic light, but unfortunately, this film is far more challenged than it is challenging.

The Iron Lady is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Iron Lady, why not share your comments below? It's not Maggie's worst film- she was still in For Your Eyes Only...

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

The Mad Prophet's Top 25 Films Of 2011- #10-1

2012-01-01T16:30:00.001Z

2011's done and dusted, but will Animal Kingdom top my list?

We've run through the worst of the worst from 2011, and 15 of the films I really, really liked last year too, so now it's time to count down my favourite movies of last year. You can watch the now-traditional video countdown after the jump, or scroll through my picks if that's more convenient.

Let's clear up, as ever, these are the films I consider to be the best of the year, but they're tempered by my personal favouritism as well. If you can see many appreciable flaws in, let's say, The Adjustment Bureau, that I haven't mentioned, it doesn't mean I didn't notice them, just that I liked the film irrespective of any reasons why you didn't like it, especially with the number 1 film. And anyway, snark about my choices when YOU'VE watched 150 films. I even watched Something fucking Borrowed!

Here's the video- sorry if the voiceover doesn't sound hugely energetic, but it's largely because the festivities of New Year have taken it out of me a bit...

Now then, more commentary--

#10 The Adjustment Bureau (dir. George Nolfi)
I only decided that this one deserved to be on the top ten list very late in the day, but it fits the criteria by being a film I very much enjoyed, and have revisited multiple times since seeing it in the cinema. The best of a number of creative and not overly expensive science fiction films from last year, Matt Damon and Emily Blunt's unforgettable chemistry makes for a film that perfectly toes the line between romantic comedy and paranoid sci-fi parable.

#9 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (dir. David Yates)
Outside of the obvious implications of the saga finally ending, for a fully paid-up Potterhead like myself, there was clearly no bigger event film in cinemas last year, than this bittersweet finale. Where Yates excels is in his single-minded assault on Hogwarts, turning the final chapter into a thrilling action extravaganza with relatable characters from the past seven movies, and the stakes raised higher than ever before. Plus, it boasts the single most dramatic action scene of the year, as Harry, Ron and Hermione race through their devastated alma mater, past fallen friends and pissed-off monsters.

#8 Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (dir. Eli Craig)
Like most other people, I'm sick of seeing "the best horror comedy since Shaun of the Dead" being bandied around by reviewers, so you should know that I really mean it when I say it about this film. With a premise so good that it seems impossible to think it hasn't been done already, Eli Craig and Morgan Jurgenson's smart script overturns the tired formula of camping horror movies at every possible opportunity. They take the horror and the comedy equally seriously, which means the horror is darkly funny and the comedy is slightly scary. The lead performances by Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine are very likeable, and the actors playing the college kids are all very self-aware parodies of similar characters in more risible gore flicks.

#7 The Guard (dir. John Michael McDonagh)
Sergeant Gerry Boyle is truly an iconic character, and Brendan Gleeson's performance is one of the best I saw all year. He's so good that I kind of want them to bring this character back for sequels, like a grumpier, more Irish version of Harry Callaghan. Essentially a Gaelic western, McDonagh's film is ribald and philosophical. It doesn't bear any resemblance to In Bruges, which was made by McDonagh's brother, Martin, but instead stands on its own merits as one of the funniest comedies of 2011.

#6 Rise of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Rupert Wyatt)
One of the two biggest surprises of last summer was this truly excellent reboot of the Planet of the Apes franchise, and the fully-formed arrival of Wyatt as a superb blockbuster director. Wyatt uses the excellent special effects to take the film in two unexpected directions- focusing on the emotional connection between Caesar the chimpanzee and his human family, and a prison break in an inhumane primate facility- before completely paying off what everyone wanted to see from a film called Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and setting events in motion that will lead to the end of human civilisation by angry monkeys.

#5 Never Let Me Go (dir. Mark Romanek)
Don't ever mistake the passive narrative of this film for any sort of emotional coldness, because this heartbreaking alternative-reality tale just doesn't gel with any such criticism. Based on Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, this film sees a cast of established and upcoming actors at the peak of their powers- Keira Knightley has never been better, Andrew Garfield bears extraordinary pathos and Sally Hawkins is so good that if she appeared for any longer, she might steal the show. It's a sci-fi drama in the classic sense, showing how the human condition relates to a huge scientific development. The students of Hailsham might not be as uppity as Caesar and the apes, but that is what makes them such effective and tragic characters.

#4 Attack the Block (dir. Joe Cornish)
With unparalleled ambition, Dr. Cornballs' directorial debut injects British cinema with a shot of adrenaline, and always lets its prickly social conscience be its guide. By opening with five kids who mug an unarmed woman at knifepoint, Cornish puts his trust in the cast, who do a brilliant job of winning viewers back over the course of the film, and the audience, with the faith that they won't dismiss the characters because they're not as clean-cut as, say, the kids from Super 8. Also, the film's creature design is unique, and its fidelity to both the characters and to sci-fi action intertextuality is remarkable.

#3 Red State (dir. Kevin Smith)
Smith has made a lot of noise about his film, and the publicity fiasco around this and his previous film, Cop Out, turned many amongst the film press against the likeable writer-director who created Jay and Silent Bob. Happily, Red State is much more interesting than any of that, sustaining seismic tonal shifts for its duration and deploying a terrific ensemble cast, led by a sinister Michael Parks and a craggy John Goodman. It's far less serious than it appears, because Smith quite deliberately and mischievously confounds the audience throughout this genuinely unpredictable and dramatic horror film.

#2 Animal Kingdom (dir. David Michôd)
Another film that left me unsure about whether or not I actually liked it, but this is actually the film I watched the most times last year. Michôd plunges us into a despicable world, where a family of bank robbers and criminals come undone, and the gung-ho police force closes in. I think I found the film so compulsively terrifying because of how subdued it is. The characters played by Ben Mendelsohn and Jacki Weaver are particularly scary, and the film constantly becomes more and more intense, right up to its even more disquieting ending.

#1 Captain America- The First Avenger (dir. Joe Johnston)
It could easily have been quaint, or campy, but Marvel Studios' best film to date succeeds by completely committing to being a rollicking wartime romp in the vein of the Indiana Jones movies, and making a virtue of any perceived cheesiness. I think it speaks volumes of the film that everyone in the cast, from Chris Evans and Hayley Atwell, to Dominic Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones, is fantastic- even the smaller roles are given weight by the excellent ensemble cast. It's almost completely pitch-perfect, only slightly rumpled by the obligatory Avengers-related bookends, and it continues to get better and better all the way through. This was the biggest surprise of the year for me- the star-spangled man with the plan comes out on top, for 2011.

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There we have it then. To agree or disagree, or talk about my choices in general, leave a comment below! It's most likely that I won't be posting anything now until January 9th, when I review The Iron Lady or The Artist. However you celebrated New Year's, I hope you had a good time. Let's do this again next year and see if The Dark Knight Rises can live up to the list-topping form of its predecessor...

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

The Mad Prophet's Top 25 Films Of 2011- #25-11

2011-12-30T09:00:00.001Z

OK then, to hell with the rubbish I was chatting about yesterday. While this post will run down my 25 favourite films of the year, up until the #11 spot, don't think of these as runners up for the top 10 (which will be posted tomorrow), if you can help it. 2011 held plenty of great films, and I wouldn't stretch to 25 favourites if I didn't think so.

As I've explained in the past, this is based on movies released in the UK in 2011- I don't count The King's Speech as a 2009 film, and The Artist (unfortunately) won't be released until 2012. More than that, this isn't an outright meritocratic Best Of list- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of the year's best films, but I didn't enjoy it enough to place it in my favourites of the year.

So, with the usual caveats that this list is purely based on my own opinions, which should really go without saying anyway, let's start counting down the top 25 movies that I saw in 2011.

#25 Midnight in Paris (dir. Woody Allen)

This has understandably been seen as a resurgence for Allen as a writer and director, after indulging in bilge like Match Point, of late. Creatively, this hearkens back to films like The Purple Rose of Cairo, but thematically, it's a clever rumination on the topic of nostalgia. Owen Wilson is Allen's modern avatar, and he's unusually likeable in that capacity too. The cast of historical characters really bring the setting to life, particularly Corey Storn, Marion Cotillard and the inspired cameo by Adrien Brody. It's funny, romantic and inventive- Allen firing on all cylinders once more.

#24 Thor (dir. Kenneth Branagh)

Bouncing back from the disappointment of Iron Man 2, Marvel Studios got its second wind on the way to The Avengers with this full-blooded fantasy film. It's essentially a fantasy-inflected fish-out-of-water comedy about Norse gods and their tragic family drama. But it's still got its eye on a young audience, who can enjoy seeing the big bloke smack things with a hammer, than many other more serious superhero movies of late, and for that it's raucously enjoyable.

#23 Mission: Impossible- Ghost Protocol (dir. Brad Bird)

One of two very recent additions to the list finds a great animation director bringing the larger-than-life sensibilities of The Incredibles to a live-action feature, and also invigorating Tom Cruise's long-running franchise. By putting Cruise in the centre of a team environment, he's actually much more watchable than in previous instalments. Less is more, as it turns out, except for in the superb scale of this action-packed sequel.

#22 Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (dir. Guy Ritchie)

Ooh look, the other very recent addition. I could take or leave Ritchie's first Holmes movie, but this sequel has me really hoping that a third instalment is forthcoming. The film delights in bouncing Robert Downey Jr. off of people, and he has solid chemistry with both his best bro, Jude Law, and his mortal enemy, Jared Harris. It's more smartarse than intellectual, but for a Hollywood version of Holmes, it is buckets of fun, and unabashedly entertaining.

#21 Warrior (dir. Gavin O'Connor)

Tom Hardy and Nick Nolte give stunning performances in this memorable yet underappreciated sports drama. It deserves the notice it's getting in top 10 lists, and with two underdogs for the price of one, it's surprising it hasn't had more recognition during awards season. Like David O. Russell's The Fighter, it puts just the right amount of weight on its emotional angle- enough to elicit manly tears, but not so far as to manipulate audiences. Plus, Hardy's character rips a door off a tank, which is fucking awesome.

#20 The King's Speech (dir. Tom Hooper)

Hey, I liked it before it was cool, OK? It's not the most memorable Best Picture winner ever, or even in recent years, but it is a hugely sympathetic treatment of King George VI's speech impediment, which is just as inspiring as the true story. With one of the year's great bromances, between Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush, this is a warm and funny film that withstands both the hype and the backlash, to stand out as a perfectly enjoyable film, above and beyond the subjective prestige of its Oscar wins.

#19 50/50 (dir. Jonathan Levine)

Based on the real experiences of screenwriter Will Reiser and co-star Seth Rogen, this film is about as sensitive and as tactful a representation of cancer as you could hope for. Rogen is on career-best form as a best buddy for Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Adam, and both actors are attuned to the film's almost paranormal balance between comedy and drama. It's completely disarming, to the point where you will laugh, and you will cry, and you will be bowled over by this sweet and thoughtful film.

#18 13 Assassins (dir. Takashi Miike)

The prolific director's latest limb-lopping opus is deceptively simple, in its structure. The first hour establishes our titular troupe of fighters, and their adversaries, before propelling them into a spectacular hour-long battle sequence. And the transition between the two halves is made by a herd of stampeding cows. Who are on fire. The film is anything but subtle, but it's innovatively shot and choreographed, and the overall effect is one of the most completely satisfying and fun movie experiences of the year- a modern classic of the samurai genre.

#17 We Need To Talk About Kevin (dir. Lynne Ramsey)

I'm always eager to praise innovative aspects of an adaptation, particularly with a film based on a book as popular as Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin. It's more unusual for me to praise an adaptation's perfect preservation of an original aspect of the source material, but in this case, the claustrophobic first-person-ish perspective of Lynne Ramsey's adaptation is one of its most compelling features. Throw in electrifying performances by Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller, and you're looking at a deeply unsettling film that won't leave your thoughts, or your nightmares, for days afterwards.

#16 Submarine (dir. Richard Ayoade)

Working with the first-person perspective in a vastly different way to Lynne Ramsey, Ayoade's directorial debut tells the tale of Oliver Tate, a thoughtful teenager who pines after an unreadable schoolmate, Jordanna, and tries to fix his parents' ailing marriage. Although it has roots in the French New Wave and more modern mumble-dramas, it is an achingly romantic and terrifically funny film, revolving around a very well-drawn and recognisable character who quibbles endearingly over his own self-importance.

#15 Rango (dir. Gore Verbinski)

Verbinski's first animated film is possibly his best ever, showing up Pixar in the year that they released a considerably less inventive effort, with Cars 2. It's also the first animated feature produced by the effects wizards at Industrial Light & Magic, which seems odd, especially when they're this good at it. With grotesquely inventive character design and a strong sense of the Western genre, this is a genuine curiosity, released under a studio banner, for your enjoyment and confusion.

#14 Super (dir. James Gunn)

This one initially left me confused as to whether or not I liked it. It's a grimy, lo-fi, high concept satire of superhero films, but that's not a bad thing, and it's grown on me throughout the year. Rainn Wilson is astonishingly good in it, with ample support from a demented Ellen Page and a hilariously laidback but utterly villainous turn by Kevin Bacon. But it has a heart of gold, and a very straightforward approach to the more sanitised exploits of big-screen vigilantes. It's not as much of a crowd-pleaser as its nearest analog, last year's Kick-Ass, but it's much more bonkers and unpredictable.

#13 Drive (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)

Making top 10 lists across the board, Drive could be described in many ways. The director says it's a superhero film, and its star Ryan Gosling reckons it's a blood-splattered John Hughes movie. My feeling is that effortlessly cool films such as this don't stand up to such scrutiny, so it helps that the film is also very, very good. From its joyously old-fashioned use of the superb soundtrack, to its shocking and sporadic bursts of violence, Drive is a self-assured and slick action picture that works equally well for both fanboys and thinking men.

#12 Julia's Eyes (dir. Guillem Morales)

In my experience, horror fans seem somewhat jaded when it comes to this excellent Spanish horror, which comes from the same school of storytelling as The Orphanage, and boasts another great performance from its star, Belén Rueda. What made this film so special, in my view, was that the horror plugged into emotional terror, rather than relying on visceral thrills or jump scares. It gets under your eyelids by properly exploring isolation as a theme, rather than as a situation in which something scary might get you. It's a great script, with great characters, and well worth checking out, now that it's available on DVD/Blu-ray.

#11 Another Earth (dir. Mike Cahill)

This blew me away in the same way that the Gareth Edwards film Monsters had everybody raving, this time last year. It is of a similar indie production model, but it also has a better script, and better central performances, from Brit Marling and William Mapother. I also found it much more engaging than Lars von Trier's similar but facetious film, Melancholia. In a year that had a number of these smaller sci-fi dramas, it's gratifying to see that world-changing sci-fi events are no longer the sole province of big dumb blockbusters. They also form a site in which heartfelt and haunting relationship stories, such as this, can shine through.
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The weekend will bring my top 10 films of 2011- spoiler alert, Breaking Dawn Part 1 does not feature. I'm hoping to have it done for tomorrow, so I can post it before the year is out, but you can definitely expect it by Monday.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

The Mad Prophet's Bottom 10 Films of 2011

2011-12-29T09:00:00.001Z

On balance, 2011 has been a good year for movies, with the average film generally being much better than in previous years. It's not to say that we've had many obviously deserving standouts for the next Oscars ceremony in February, because this is clearly the most open awards season in years. But certainly, there are many very good films, but I'll be posting those in the next few days. Today's order of business is the year's really sucky movies.

I've written up my bottom 10 list for Movie Reviews, and you can find that here, but I'll also give some more analysis and links to my original reviews, after the jump. So, with the Mayans having predicted the coming of the apocalypse within the next 12 months, I've picked out another ten films that might just make you think "You know what? If we survived that, we can survive anything."

#10 The Three Musketeers (dir. Paul W.S. Anderson)
#9 Transformers- Dark of the Moon (dir. Michael Bay)
#8 Zookeeper (dir. Frank Coraci)
#7 The Dilemma (dir. Ron Howard)
#6 Trespass (dir. Joel Schumacher)
#5 Sucker Punch (dir. Zack Snyder)
#4 Mother's Day (dir. Darren Lyn Bousman)
#3 Just Go with It (dir. Dennis Dugan)
#2 The Change-Up (dir. David Dobkin)
#1 Something Borrowed (dir. Nick Greenfield)

It wouldn't be a year with a Michael Bay film if he didn't make it onto my bottom 10, but it did seem like Dark of the Moon wasn't going to make the list, for a while. But it's around this time of year that I start pruning movies that disappointed, rather than annoyed or offended me. The bottom two are the absolute worst offenders for this, with The Change-Up bringing chauvinistic shit into the digital age and Something Borrowed dispensing completely reprehensible bullshit through unlikeable characters and a lampshaded rehash of romcom tropes. I get angry, just remembering either of them.

Tomorrow, I'll dig into my top 25 for the year, up to number 11, and I'll try to post the by-now annual top 10 video on Saturday, so that we're still technically in 2011 when it's all wrapped up. Looking forward to 2012, at the end of this retrospective, I can tell you that the films I'm least looking forward to, next year, are Jack & Jill, American Reunion and Battleship, but we must always keep an open mind. I'm probably just going to swerve seeing Jack & Jill, as part of my New Year's resolution to keep avoiding shit I don't need in my life.

I've been Mark the mad prophet, and until 2012, you can probably cross some of those bottom 10 movies off your list of films to catch up on this year.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO- Review

2011-12-28T09:00:00.000Z

Sometimes, there's a single aspect of a movie that you can imagine driving fans absolutely crazy. Although the particular aspect I want to pick out today has yet to get any significant backlash, at least as far as I've seen, it's an important one. And so, along with "surviving a nuclear explosion by climbing in a fridge", "the ebonics-speaking twin robots" and "a werewolf falling in love with a baby", we can reasonably add "Lisbeth Salander buying Happy Meals."

This is one small problem with David Fincher's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's novel, but it is part of a larger problem with this second version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The story is, as you might suspect, the same as in the Swedish-language version, but it's now spoken in English. It's still set in Sweden, however, as a scrupulous financial journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, has his reputation ruined by a very public libel lawsuit. The publicity around this gets Blomkvist involved in the affairs of Henrik Vanger, and his powerful industrialist family, and also brings him onto the same path as a troubled, but brilliant hacker, named Lisbeth Salander.

If you remember Let Me In, the perfectly serviceable but understandably forgettable English language version of Let The Right One In, you might remember how it largely stuck to the same beats as Tomas Alfredson's film, while transplanting the action to a darker version of an 80s Amblin movie, and thus floated itself just above being pointless or unnecessary. David Fincher's spin on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has a serious case of the Let-Me-Ins, because it doesn't even bother to relocate the story. It is unerringly faithful to Larsson's novel, even more so than the intentionally televisual Swedish version.

The problem, as I see it, comes down to Steven Zaillian's script. It's an extraordinarily lazy adaptation, and I don't use that word lightly. As I've said before, I know that screenwriting is hard, and it must be particularly difficult to translate a plot as labyrinthine as the first Millennium novel into a functional feature film script. But it doesn't suffice to simply transfer the book into Final Draft, especially in a book that isn't exactly celebrated for its structure, and especially when that book has already been adapted for the screen, very recently. I'm going to use the word again, because it's really very rarely that I feel strongly enough about a film's script to say so- it is lazy.

Fincher, for his part, directs the film as only he can, in the most cinematic way. It's textbook Fincher, in the way that textbook Fincher is still as exciting and visually engaging as most directors' very best efforts. He certainly gets spectacular performances out of Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig and Christopher Plummer, and the film is, on a superficial level, very trim and pacy. But it's also two and a half hours long, and the unwieldy length is not all to do with Zaillian's script. Furthermore, there are some unwelcome Americanisms that creep into the Swedish setting. While I realise how silly it sounds to infer this of Fincher, the man who directed Fight Club, the bigger budget of $90 million (to the earlier film's $13 million) must have had something to do with the curious placement of Coca Cola, McDonalds and Apple products throughout the film.

On a less commercial level, the film just feels too glossy. Fincher's version is best when dramatising Blomkvist's investigations, in much the same way as he made Facebook exciting in The Social Network, but he also opens up the film with a completely incongruous title sequence. It's very reminiscent of a Bond title sequence, and you wonder if it was conceived before or after Craig signed on for top billing. The only one who has completely the right idea is Mara, whose Lisbeth is just as good as, if not quite better than, that of the excellent Noomi Rapace. She completely commits to her role, and her submersion in the character is really quite stunning, and shockingly inscrutable.

Craig makes a more engaging and sympathetic Blomkvist than Michael Nyqvist was, and while I don't remember anything about the Henrik in the Swedish version, I really enjoyed Plummer's soft-spoken portrayal of the character here. But while the new version is more comparable to the book than the Swedish adaptation, it is more of a throwaway effort than either. I got the sense that Fincher must have some spectacular ideas for the two other Millennium movies that he intends to make, and that this one was just the necessary introduction to Lisbeth and Blomkvist, setting up for the meat of our heroine's backstory in part two. Goodness knows that he can't possibly get away with the repetitive and loyal adaptation he gives us here, especially as the Swedish versions went downhill after Niels Arden Oplev's Dragon Tattoo.

Even though it's very well-made and exceptionally performed, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo disappointed me greatly with its script. It doesn't spare us any of the brutality dished out by the source material, but it feels distinctively more pretentious for its combination of a leisurely pace, a gorgeous aesthetic, and troubling content. No film that puts this much effort into being hard work has any right to be this shiny, and finessed. The greatest strength of these stories is their lead characters, so at least Mara and Craig nail Lisbeth and Blomkvist. If Fincher follows through, and makes The Girl Who Played With Fire, I would hope that the script would be more polished and the film itself a little rougher around the edges, instead of the other way around.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, why not share your comments below? I'm especially interested in hearing from anybody else who has read the book, or watched the Swedish adaptations.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE- GHOST PROTOCOL- Review

2011-12-27T09:00:00.001Z

Ethan Hunt, as played by Tom Cruise, is effectively the closest thing that Americans have to a James Bond figure. 15 years on from his first run at the role, Mission: Impossible- Ghost Protocol takes more of a lead from the superior sequel, 2006's Mission: Impossible 3, by making the action even more ensemble-centric than before. With JJ Abrams working as a producer, and the handing of the directorial reins to animation legend Brad Bird, the series is no longer a vehicle for Cruise, but the Bond series equivalent it always had the potential to be.

We reunite with Ethan Hunt as he languishes in a Russian prison, charged with an unsanctioned hit on a group of Serbian nationals. In short order, the IMF breaks him out and assigns him a new mission, and a new team, comprising the vengeful Agent Carter and tech geek Benji Dunn. During their mission, Ethan's team then becomes the scapegoat for a terrorist attack against the Kremlin, and are concordantly disavowed by the US government. Together with Brandt, a prickly field analyst, they are all that remains of the IMF, and their mission is to clear their names and prevent a global nuclear war.

I didn't take to Brian DePalma's sleek reboot, and I outright loathed John Woo's embarrassing sequel, so it took quite a lot for Abrams to turn me around with the third instalment. While Mission: Impossible 3 put more focus on the team, it also continued in the line of some of the series' most repetitive tropes, more on which later. But what really makes Ghost Protocol so superb is the addition of Bird, directing live-action for the first time. You need only watch The Incredibles to see his credentials in spy movies, and his general fanboy approach to the genre. This is a Brad Bird film, not a Tom Cruise film.

That's not to say that Cruise is sidelined, having taken a paycut in order to get this film made with himself at the forefront, because he totally benefits from the more collaborative atmosphere about this instalment. With someone as talented and assured as Bird at the helm, Cruise cuts loose with the charisma. You can say that his constant running, and insistence on doing all of his own stunts, is the ultimate expression of short man syndrome, but I think that's somewhat unfair, to a man who is still probably the most compulsively watchable action hero in modern cinema.

While the previous instalments sometimes seemed like vanity projects, the real revelation of the new film is just how well he works with the characters in his team. Jeremy Renner's Brandt provides a good counter to Hunt, as a more anxious breed of badass, asking any questions the audience might be asking about our hero's adrenalised mayhem, out loud. Paula Patton is terrific in the role of Carter, and after multitudes of worthless comic relief characters in recent action films, Simon Pegg's inflated role as Q-surrogate Benji seems rapturous. In 132 minutes, we get to know many of the team members, who are usually eminently replaceable between films, better than we've known Ethan across four whole films.

Having done BlogalongaBond since January, the plot of Ghost Protocol seemed more than a little familiar, and that is probably its biggest failure. It uses the fallback plot of the James Bond franchise, in which an international criminal steals weapons from one side of a conflict, to attack the other, and hopes to incite a global conflict. This plot has thus far appeared in You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, with different villains in each. The villain in question usually does this for poorly drawn reasons, or just for shits and giggles, and it's unfortunate that Michael Nyqvist's character is no exception. He is so poorly developed that the film threatens to come undone, every time he's on screen.

Up until Ghost Protocol, there's hardly been a single antagonist who wasn't some kind of traitor within the IMF. Hunt never seemed to stop having to bring down his own people in order to save the day. This new instalment is more outward-looking, and at first seems to set up Hendricks with a motivation similar to Jared Harris' Moriarty in the recent Sherlock Holmes sequel. We don't see enough of him to properly flesh that out, and so when he turns out to have great fighting skills towards the end of the film we don't have much choice but to take his word for it. Every blow struck, throughout the film, has consequences, so it's a shame to forsake context at that last hurdle.

But make no mistake, the weight of the action is one of the best parts about the film. Ethan Hunt might still be somewhat superpowered, but he's not quite as invulnerable as he has seemed previously. He makes mistakes, sometimes even played for comedy value, and those mistakes always serve to increase the stakes. In one half hour sequence during the second act, clearly the most outstanding sequence put onto the big screen this year, the stakes increase in this manner to a point that is almost unbearable, but absolutely riveting at the same time. The film is so unpredictable in moments likes these, the missions actually seem impossible, for the first time in the series.

Mission: Impossible- Ghost Protocol is comfortably the best film of the series, as Brad Bird injects new life into Ethan Hunt with his paradoxically retro take on the franchise. Its unfortunate likeness to a much overused James Bond plot just happens to coincide with the series becoming a true American counterpart to the Bond series itself. In the traditional sense, it's actually doing Bond films better than Casino Royale or Quantum of Solace. While this has previously come at the expense of character development for Hunt, the team dynamic picks up the slack, and the overall effect is superb. You should see it, even if you haven't liked any of the previous instalments, because even with its minor flaws, it's one of the year's standout blockbusters.

Mission: Impossible- Ghost Protocol is now showing in cinemas, and on IMAX screens, nationwide.
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If you've seen Mission: Impossible- Ghost Protocol, why not share your comments below? I'm especially eager to see this one again, on an IMAX screen, so if you have already seen it there, let me know what it's like.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

The Zero Room #12- The Doctor, The Widow & The Wardrobe

2011-12-26T09:00:00.003Z

After the head-sploding, universe-mashing consequences of Series 6, this year's Doctor Who Christmas special, The Doctor, The Widow & The Wardrobe sees Steven Moffat hit more of the key, with a standalone story in which the timey-wimey unravelling of major plot obstacles is, for once, a bit more manageable. On the other hand, the story feels somewhat smaller, as well as simpler.

Reviews will contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen the episode yet, toddle over to the iPlayer, or watch BBC Three at some point in the next century's worth of repeats.

As with last year's A Christmas Carol, the episode nakedly borrows from a seminal bit of festive literature- C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe. That's what it looks like, but it's not the whole picture. During the Second World War, stoic mother and wife Madge Arwell ships out to the countryside with her two children, Cyril and Lily, having recently gotten word that their fighter pilot father, her husband, Reg, has recently gone missing in action over the English Channel. She hasn't had the heart to tell the kids, because of the implications of the season, hoping to give them the best Christmas they've ever had. Happily, she has the Doctor on-side, wishing to repay a debt that he owes her.

Steven Moffat recently spoke of his inclination towards "slutty titles and movie-poster plots", after his first two series of running Doctor Who. Where that will take the series when it returns, in autumn 2012, remains to be seen. But that has always been the main thrust of the series' Christmas specials, ever since Russell T. Davies' first festive outing, The Christmas Invasion. And look at subsequent titles- Voyage of the Damned, The Next Doctor, The End of Time Part One, and of course, A Christmas Carol. With The Doctor, The Widow & The Wardrobe, however, it's almost misleading.

Sure, there's the Doctor, a widow, and the TARDIS is labelled as a wardrobe, for the benefit of Lily. But the inference of Narnia is about 50% in the title alone, after the Doctor takes the family through to a wintry wonderland on another planet. From there, the story is much more ecologically conscious, about a forest that is due to be destroyed by harvesters from Androzani Major, played for laughs by Bill Bailey, Arabella Weir and Paul Bazely. For fans of the older series, that refers to The Caves of Androzani, in which industrial bastards basically destroyed themselves, without the Fifth Doctor having to do anything except be present. Similarly, Matt Smith takes a backseat in this adventure.

It's another of those episodes, like Planet of the Ood, where the Doctor isn't hugely pro-active in winning the day. Unlike either of those aforementioned stories, the festive mood generally puts the onus on humans being quite terrific. Particularly, it has a great and justified affection for mothers, which hasn't been as explicitly played up in other stories with mums as characters. Claire Skinner makes a smart and likeable matriarch as Madge, and, unusually for a one-off Christmas companion, spends a lot of time solving problems without the help of the Doctor. Knowing how Moffat's supporting characters have frequently returned at a later point, in some other plot, I'd have no problems with seeing more of the Arwells.

While you can be certain that brave Reg won't still be missing in action by the time the credits roll, the time-travel wangling to get to that conclusion isn't nearly as complex as usual. But in being simple, it kind of feels like it's a small plot. In Doctor Who, there are no small plots, but comparative to recent episodes, or, crucially, previous Christmas specials, it doesn't feel like as much of an event. I'm at my least critical when viewing these festive specials, because the only real barometer is Christmassy entertainment. For that much, Voyage of the Damned has never been surpassed as a barnstorming disaster movie of the type that get regular airing on Christmas afternoon telly.

Set on an outer-space recreation of the Titanic, and concluding with Kylie Minogue plunging the villain into Hell on a forklift truck, that episode was huge and bombastic. But as massive as it is, it's also incredibly simple, story-wise. The Doctor, The Widow & The Wardrobe is occasionally silly, but mostly just smaller, and thus, it isn't as raucously entertaining as I'd have liked. It kind of feels like the emotive Adventure of the Week format that I missed so much during the last series, but on Christmas night, I personally prefer the bigger, sillier adventures. Still, if the Doctor serves a function for film buffs at Christmas, who've already seen the day's big movie premieres (this year, Ratatouille and Monsters vs. Aliens), it's fulfilling the guarantee of something brand-new to watch, even if it has something old, borrowed and/or blue bubbling away underneath.

The Doctor, The Widow & The Wardrobe is a more light-hearted episode than the series has seen... well, since last year's Christmas special, but it manages to be funny, and fast, and emotive without being overly manipulative too. Separated from "slutty titles", we can presume that Moffat will continue to write thoughtful and entertaining sci-fi stories for a family audience. This was not the most memorable of the Christmas episodes, but then it's not attempting to be as much of a blockbuster as the title suggests. And all I'm asking, if we're not getting blockbusters, is why the writer of such episodes as Blink hasn't yet turned out something in the way of a spooky and Christmassy ghost story?

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I'm turning off the lights in the Zero Room now, until next autumn. Still, I'm writing my Media Studies dissertation, due on January 27th, on the topic of Doctor Who, so I'm sure I'll be keeping my head in the TARDIS in the meantime. Keep leaving comments on the series, or my reviews of it, until I get back!

Doctor Who will return to BBC One and BBC HD next year.

A VERY HAROLD & KUMAR 3D CHRISTMAS- Review

2011-12-23T09:00:00.003Z

If we look at the Doctor Who Christmas specials (review of The Doctor, The Widow And The Wardrobe coming on Monday), we can see that even in modern Christmas specials, we can throw out the usual standards and measure a film purely by how festive it was, and how much we enjoyed it. The Harold & Kumar films have consistently been the place where logic and coherence goes out of the window in favour of uproarious hijinks, so you can suppose that A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas goes the same way.

While the second movie picked up minutes after the first, this third instalment actually reunites our less than dynamic duo years after the hard-working Harold has upped sticks, married Maria and generally grown up. Meanwhile, Kumar is still getting high on his couch, while mourning his failed relationship and his expulsion from medical school. Typically, their chance reunion on Christmas Eve sees Kumar accidentally burning down a prized Christmas tree belonging to Harold's father-in-law. The pair must go on one more chaotic adventure to find a replacement and save Harold's family Christmas.

Harold & Kumar Get The Munchies, as it was called in territories where the fast food chain White Castle isn't part of the consumer lexicon, set the tone for this series right off the bat. It cannily subverted any racial stereotypes associated with its leading men, who are Korean and Indian, respectively, and didn't get so tangled up in mocking racism and bigotry that it forgot to be a raucous stoner comedy either. The sequel, Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay took an ill-advised swipe at the political climate of the country, and along the way, lost touch with the fact that you have to give jokes to stupid characters, like the Homeland Security nut played by Rob Corddry. Without actual jokes, stupid characters aren't funny, they're just stupid.

But things have changed just as much off-camera as in the actual story of A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas- John Cho had a great breakthrough role as Sulu in Star Trek, and Kal Penn got a job at the White House, which is referenced in the new film. Likewise, the gag of having Neil Patrick Harris make regular cameo appearances began when he was most famous for his bit role in Starship Trooper and having starred in Doogie Howser, M.D. Since then, he's become a household name, if not a national treasure of some kind.

Happily, the film keeps the same irreverent level of humour. Another recent 3D three-quel, Jackass 3D, was funnier than its predecessors, mostly because Johnny Knoxville et al were more mature than before, and although they were doing the same old shit, their new outlook on their work kept things fresh and funny. This instalment of the Harold & Kumar series enjoys similar benefits. By developing the characters and having split them up between films, to grow apart, the formula is refreshed. Cho and Penn are reliably likeable, and the series' reconciliation between the fictionalised NPH, apparently shot dead in the first sequel, and the real, family-friendly version is inventive and hilarious.

By now, writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg make no bones about the kind of equal opportunities offensiveness that has been perfected as an art form by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. While I'm fine with that in principle, I should probably defend my position on all those scenes in which an infant takes drugs. Having loathed The Change-Up for its unfunny infant endangerment scenes, can I really give Harold & Kumar a pass for its depiction of a baby that is variously introduced to marijuana, cocaine and ecstasy? Well... yes. I can give it a pass. The Change-Up was never funny, and this film isn't nearly as hopeless or even as mean-spirited.

And of course, a bit of lunacy is par for the course. The effect of drugs on the aforementioned baby is roughly proportionate to something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, and the nimble succession of comic setpieces carries the film nicely. By now, it's almost so nuts, it's normal. As mentioned, the character development makes our heroes into the likeable anchors within this crazy world. As usual, it's weighted more towards Harold- if your father-in-law was as batshit insane as the brilliantly cast Danny Trejo, you'd probably turn to narcotics too.

A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas keeps the consistent ratio of comedy and narrative established since the first film, and is at its best, predictably, when NPH turns up. The 3D looks pretty shoddy, possibly the result of a bad post-conversion, but the jokes about the gimmick of 3D are smart enough that the issue is lampshaded. It's not an instant Christmas classic, but it's packed to the brim with festive lunacy and guilty belly laughs, and it's definitely worth a look if you enjoyed the first two films.

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas is now showing in 3D (duh) at cinemas nationwide.
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If and when you see A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, why not leave a comment below? Merry Christmas to all readers!

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS- Review

2011-12-18T20:00:00.002Z

One of my bugbears with Guy Ritchie's enjoyably daft rendition of Sherlock Holmes, a couple of years back, was that it constantly seeded the arrival of Professor Moriarty in the then-unconfirmed sequel, with far less subtlety than the hat-tip to the Joker at the end of Batman Begins, and much more of Blofeld's incognito appearances in the early Bond movies. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows actually vindicates its predecessor in that regard, by being completely worth all of that foreshadowing.

At the beginning of this sequel, Sherlock Holmes is effectively working solo, as his het life-partner Dr. John Watson is betrothed to the lovely Mary, and his on-off paramour Irene Adler continues her affiliation with a dastardly criminal mastermind. Of course, the criminal in question is Professor James Moriarty, an academic who is connected to a number of peculiar industrial accidents. When he and Holmes lock horns, Watson is snatched away from his irked bride and whisked off on an adventure, as the two quarreling detectives try to prevent the eruption of a world war.

For a while there, it appeared that the big screen series might be upstaged, because since 2009, we've seen the debut of BBC One's Sherlock, a superb series of three 90-minute features, rebooted and modernised by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Having now seen A Game of Shadows, it's apparent that the two versions can co-exist. Benedict Cumberbatch's Holmes solves mysteries, replete with all the usual complexities you would expect in something Moffat had concocted, whereas his contemporary on the silver screen, played by Robert Downey Jr., has smart-arsed adventures.

You see, in essence, this version of Holmes is everything that a fan might dread in a Hollywood version of the character's adventures, right down to the detective using his smarts to fight people, because fighting people looks cooler than just observing things, right? But what makes this particular Hollywood version good is that it is still unashamedly and uncompromisingly entertaining. As intellectual blockbusters go, it's hardly Inception, but neither does it simplify the characters or the story in order to condescend to a mass audience. One "Rotten" review of this film over on Rotten Tomatoes asks how this movie can be clever and idiotic at the same time, but I don't see how that's not a compliment to the boisterous, no-holds-barred entertainment value that this series has provided thus far.

With Mark Strong's sinister Lord Blackwood having warmed up the opposite position to Sherlock in the first instalment, Jared Harris steps into the breach as a cold and methodical Moriarty. At one point, Brad Pitt was tipped to play this fiendish adversary, but Harris is above and beyond, and on particularly devillish form when pitted directly against Downey. The other major new addition to the cast is Stephen Fry, whose casting as Mycroft is simply perfect. His benevolent ribbing of his younger brother, nicknaming him Shirley and frowning upon his energetic pursuits, fits right in with the mild camp on which Ritchie's interpretation hinges.

Downey and Jude Law crystallise their terrific performances as Holmes and Watson, and their banter continues to keep the film aloft through its considerably slower pace. That said, it's disheartening that a studio film with this much bromantic bonhomie still sees fit to waste Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams on giving Sherlock a case of the not-gays, as they might call it on Red Letter Media. While this problem is held over from the first film, Ritchie finesses other flaws, such as the arduous repetition of Holmes' cognitive fighting, by shortening sequences with which we're already familiar, and otherwise finding new things to do with the character's newfound sense of violent ESP.

The reinvention of Guy Ritchie in these two films is nothing short of astounding, because what he brings to the table is a look and a style, which are completely distinctive from any other blockbuster series currently in operation. Pacing wise, there are few things in the 130 minute running time that might not be made quicker by a stringent editor, but the crucial thing that makes these films so good is that no matter how quickly or slowly it's moving, I'm enjoying every bit of it. I enjoy the audacious action scenes, I enjoy the banter between the characters, and I enjoy the fact that the plot turns on devices that are very obviously signposted, rather than on more deductive measures. That's not to say that I don't enjoy Cumberbatch's deductions, but that I also enjoy the more rollicking variety.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows picks up where the first one left off, and sets off running like it's never been away. That might seem paradoxical for a film that feels so slow, but behind that confidence to take it slowly is a boundless energy that is hugely infectious and entertaining. If Moffat's version, which returns to television on New Year's Day, is meant to be more intellectual, there's no reason why you shouldn't enjoy a more kinetic Sherlock as well. And when the credits roll on this assuredly superior sequel, there is not a single trace of fatigue about this new interpretation- I'm already dying to see part three.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

NEW YEAR'S EVE- Review

2011-12-16T10:00:00.001Z

Clocking in at seven minutes shorter than last year's abominable ensemble romcom Valentine's Day, New Year's Eve also proved to be considerably less damaging to my brain, senses and face than its thematic predecessor. Director Garry Marshall rounds up every star he knows for another round of une film de Happy Madison, where everybody's having fun, and more importantly, everybody's getting paid. Except for the audience, of course.

Moving away from the previous film's compulsive February 14th ramblings, this one takes place, as you might expect, on December 31st. In New York City, all eyes are on the ball in Times Square, awaiting a magical midnight moment that may never come, if a mechanical fault cannot be corrected before the clock strikes twelve. But inside and around this story, famous faces all over the city are rushing around and trying to make sure that they end 2011 on a high, including record company secretary Ingrid, who hires bicycle courier Paul to help her complete her New Year's resolutions from the year gone by, before time runs out.

The film is not, by many measures, any less sickly than Valentine's Day, but it does get some things right. You'll have heard rumblings about Will and Bill, the gay krill in Happy Feet Two, and the way in which those characters are so ancillary to the plot that it seems like they were devised for a movie of their own, before being packaged with the dancing penguins. Having not seen Happy Feet Two, I couldn't comment, but that's how I felt about the plot between Ingrid and Paul, played by Michelle Pfieffer and Zac Efron. It makes full use of the buckets of charisma that Efron brings to the table, and it's good to see Pfieffer back on screen, reprising her Selina Kyle from the first act of Batman Returns.

This plot is so nice and so sweet that I was genuinely sad that they managed to fuck it up anyway. It's far too cushioned by complicatedly uncomplicated interweaving plotlines to really register, especially once midnight rolls around and the myriad storylines begin to combust for a series of awkward and contrived conclusions. I could go into all of those subplots, but we haven't got all year. Instead, let's pick on the stories of the characters played by Hilary Swank and Robert De Niro. De Niro never even has to get out of bed, such is the lack of effort in his performance here, and the final convergence of these storylines make Swank's workaholic character appear to be the most unfeeling twat in the world.

Similarly to Valentine's Day, this collision of storylines is often intended to pull the rug out from under you. No, I didn't guess which of the film's female stars would wind up being the woman that Josh Duhamel is racing to meet, but the crucial difference is, there's no possible way to have guessed even if I had given two craps about this "twist". They go to extremes to make sure you don't guess these endings, to the point where it's unbelievable once it does unfold. At its most absurd, the script crowbars in a cloying nod to America's armed forces overseas that comes completely out of nowhere, and is never mentioned again.

I'm also really not sure why they didn't make this Christmas Eve instead, except for how it doesn't need to be any more obviously a rip-off of Love, Actually. But the problem with using New Year's Eve is that you can insist it's magical all you like- and believe me, they try- but these all feel like definitions forced by the film. There are many monologues quantifying the symbolism of one year ending and another beginning, none more annoying than their lovey-dovey counterparts in the previous film, but it's reaching, even for something this contrived. Shove Ashton Kutcher in a lift with Lea Michele, but I still can't and won't believe that New Year's cynics just need a little love in their lives, any more than I can believe that Kutcher is a cartoonist who can't get laid.

Given just how many of the cast Zac Efron turns out to be related to, in some way or another, it's all the more odd that New Year's Eve doesn't push his sweet subplot with Michelle Pfieffer to the forefront. This is another misjudged, WASPish ensemble romcom in precisely the same vein as Valentine's Day. There are those aforementioned strokes that make it more palatable than Marshall's previous sick-bucket of a movie, but largely, it's another contrived, overlong movie that pontificates far too much, and provokes far too little sympathy or entertainment.

New Year's Eve is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen New Year's Eve, why not share your comments below? Robert Downey Jr. should probably have been credited in this movie. The audacious plugging of Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows occurs so frequently that Downey appears in the movie more than De Niro.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

PUSS IN BOOTS- Review

2011-12-12T08:30:00.000Z

Would I be incorrect to credit the buzz of anticipation around Puss In Boots to the fact that it appears to be a film arriving seven years too late? 2004's Shrek 2, a film which looks better in retrospect for not having sunk as low as the sequels that followed, reinvented the character as a feline contract killer in the vein of Zorro, accordingly voiced by Antonio Banderas, and Puss was one of the comic highlights of the film. A spin-off film released shortly after would have been both timely and welcome, but as it turns out, it's predated by Shrek the Third and Shrek Forever After.

Furthermore, it's not only a spin-off, but a prequel, that most precarious of cinematic endeavours. In the case of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the origin story superfluously expanded upon the salient points made in X-Men 2. As no such backstory can be picked up from the Shrek films, Puss In Boots finds our hero as a wanted cat, travelling the land, and trying to clear his name in connection with a terrible crime against his home village. The egg who framed him, Humpty Dumpty, comes to him with a sultry feline associate, Kitty Softpaws, and a daring heist plan to raid the legendary giant's castle, via beanstalk, naturally.

The film carries some of the baggage that brought down the Shrek sequels, in as much as most of the iconic fairytale characters have been more or less covered by a series that even found time for Robin Hood and King Arthur. Any fifth Shrek film could only have lampooned Quasimodo or Hercules, considering how, by the time of Shrek Forever After, it became the Disneyfied commercial machine that it initially set out to parody. But Puss In Boots also reaps the benefits of being liberated from a character whose happy ending came three sequels before they decided to stop making movies about him.

As much as I've measured this film against Wolverine, this emancipation of Puss could also be related to the way in which the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film, in the way that Jack Sparrow is promoted to protagonist and the original leads are nowhere to be seen. For this purpose, an origin story is contrived, to take the pressure off of making it funny for the whole duration. The idea of a clothed, sword-fencing cat, like most fairytale concepts, is absurd, and it's always been particularly funny with the energetic portrayal of Banderas behind it. This annexe to the character shows the renewed confidence of DreamWorks' fantastical films of late, but also exposes the diminished confidence in their own sense of humour.

It's largely unjustified too, because while Puss In Boots is many things that it need not be, it is definitely not lacking in wit, or warmth. There are a number of great recurring gags, and those fairytale characters that are left, including Humpty, the golden goose and Jack and Jill, are generally re-conceptualised in a way that is more reminiscent of the first Shrek film than of the sequels. Though the confused portrayal and plotting of Humpty's character over-reaches at times, there's a quite risqué representation of Jack and Jill, voiced by Billy Bob Thornton and Amy Sedaris, as a redneck married couple whose character designs are unsettlingly similar. Almost familial, even. And then, they start chit-chatting about having babies together...

If the plot of Puss In Boots is contrived, it is, at least, less contrived than this summer's emancipation of Captain Jack, and this film as a whole is a lot more enjoyable. The forced merging of separate characters and motivations distracts more from the real charm of the production, and the plot is never as engaging as the comedy, or Banderas' charming vocal performance. Those moments are the best reason to see Puss In Boots, and DreamWorks, as much as I've appreciated their recent output, would do well to keep in touch with that sense of humour as their films are taken more seriously.

Puss In Boots is now showing, in 2D and 3D, at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Puss In Boots, why not share your comments below? Coming soon: "Madagascar 3- Europe's Most Wanted", the epic continuation of the Madagascar saga... urgh.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

When Worlds Collide! ANOTHER EARTH and MELANCHOLIA

2011-12-09T09:00:00.001Z

Today sees the release of a thoughtful little sci-fi drama called Another Earth, a film that came out of this year's Sundance with a justifiable buzz about it. It was duly snapped up by Fox Searchlight, and its release gives me the opportunity to recap a film I missed out on when it was originally released, but one which has generated quite enough of a response even before my delayed review.

For Melancholia is also a drama that hangs on a sci-fi twist, with a certain amount of indie cred and festival buzz. However, it happens to have been directed by Lars von Trier, which may lead you to expect that the film isn't as interesting as the media furore that surrounded it. And you'd probably be half right. It's not front-loading my reviews, to say that I much preferred Another Earth, but it remains that both are dramas with an existential slant, which each happen to involve the appearance of a fucking great planet in the sky.

It's only polite to get onto Melancholia first, given the lateness of the review. It would be maddeningly literal to say that it's a film of two halves, because the structure itself is just as literal. The first half is set at the wedding of a depressed young woman called Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, and the second plays out at the stately home of her long-suffering sister, Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. The unifying thread between both parts is a planet called Melancholia, which is, depending apparently on how rational you are, either going to orbit the Earth or collide with it.

The film wastes no time on any kind of suspense, by opening with a dream-like rendering of the final scenes, upon which the two planets collide and all of humanity is obliterated. Or at least, all of the characters we have been following in the film are, anyway. For a film that meanders as much as this one does in its first half, it's got quite a narrow focus, in the end. Part one takes place at Justine's wedding, and features a roll call of terrific actors, such as John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Sarsgaard and Udo Kier. All of their characters revolve around Justine, in a metaphor that becomes quite poignant in the less combustible setting of part two.

Kirsten Dunst's performance is revelatory, and her best work as an actress by a long chalk. Embodying the film's central thesis, that people suffering from depression are much more calm when faced with an apocalyptic crisis, because they already expect the worst to happen, Dunst's role is to be quite marvellously anti-social for much of part one. At the same time, she garners a peculiar kind of sympathy because you see that her family are trying to square her vicious cycle of depression, and that their sense of entitlement and grandeur might actually be more depressing.

Melancholia is pretty much about the inevitability of destruction within the premise that has been set up. It's not to say that von Trier himself has any paranoia about the world coming to an end, but he instead studies how this set of characters might react if faced with armageddon. All of that stuff, particularly Charlotte Gainsbourg's performance, is great, but let's face it- with its moneyed ensemble, and the imminent threat of the world ending, this might be the ultimate "first-world problems" movie.

On a relative scale, Another Earth is a little more upbeat, beginning with the discovery of an Earth-like planet that is visible in the sky. Astrophysics student Rhoda hears about this while driving under the influence, and while distracted, she crashes into a family of three. John is the only survivor, as his wife and son are killed in the collision. Flash forward four years, and Rhoda has just been released from jail. Disenfranchised by her time inside, she takes a job as a cleaner and applies to travel to "Earth Two" on the first space program. However, when she starts cleaning John's house, her chance at redemption might be closer to home than she believes.

Rounding out a year that has had no shortage of smart, modestly budgeted sci-fi movies, here's one that deserves to be mentioned amongst the best films of 2011. It also deserves better than the company of Gareth Edwards' movie, Monsters, by virtue of having a real script, sympathetic characters and better acting. Not to bash on Monsters too much, because it's still not a bad film, but it is a film that's more impressive as a production than as a story. Another Earth, by contrast, excels in putting the context of the story in the background of a character-driven indie drama about grief and guilt.

As much as this week's discovery of Kepler 22-b could even seem like viral marketing for this movie, the film really isn't about the other Earth, as much as it's about that vicarious feeling we've all had about the idea that there's a version of ourselves, somewhere out there, that didn't make that mistake that's been bugging us. It's about that suspicion that somewhere out there, there's a better version of ourselves, but with sci-fi trappings, that manifests itself as "Earth Two". It's a clever conceit, but rest assured that they actually pull it off, which means it's good, and not just clever.

Lead actress Brit Marling was a driving force in making the film, having also co-written the film with director Mike Cahill. Marling's closeness to the character of Rhoda makes for compelling viewing, to the point where you really couldn't imagine anybody else playing that character as well. Tom Cruise's cousin, William Mapother, is perhaps better known for playing the creepy Ethan Rom in Lost, but he elicits a great deal of sympathy as John, who has more or less become a hermit since his previous encounter with Rhoda. Although the actors have the right chemistry, the characters aren't really a solid match, with all of their history, and the relationship is absolutely at the forefront, eclipsing that whole business with the other planet, just as it should.

With striking visuals, a thoughtful premise and the most audaciously open ending since Inception, Another Earth makes the most of its thought-provoking premise without selling short either its characters or dramatic beats. Brit Marling deserves to be propelled into the upper echelons of indie stardom for her work here, and Mike Cahill's direction shows no outward signs of the mad amount of effort and exertion that must have gone into making a $200,000 movie look so fantastic. I hesitate to call it the last great movie of the year, because I'll be very happy indeed if the dying days of 2011 throws up another film as haunting and heartfelt as this superior sci-fi drama.

If we compare the two side by side and ask which is better, in Harry Hill fashion, then it would be Kirsten Dunst who would be left crying. But my preference of Another Earth speaks much more of my tastes as a film fan, rather than of any particular lack on the part of Melancholia. Both films take on galactic scale, traditionally the province of much bigger, dumber movies, and tell refreshingly thoughtful stories within those settings. It takes some doing to find restraint within the context of worlds colliding, but each film manages to do just that, even if one of them blasts Wagner over the (in)action at every opportunity.

Another Earth is now showing in selected cinemas nationwide. Melancholia comes to DVD and Blu-Ray on January 23rd 2012.
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If you've seen either of these movies, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

THE THING- Review

2011-12-07T09:00:00.002Z

One of the first reviews I remember doing for this blog, a couple of years ago, was Tony Scott's remake, The Taking of Pelham 123. Even aside from how it completely misses the point of the original film, and John Travolta's especially revolting performance, it's a pretty competently made film, which left some readers puzzled as to why I hated it so much. And their confusion is probably down to the fact that I don't know many other people who count the classic 1974 version amongst their favourite films.

So colour me unsympathetic, now that we're faced with The Thing, ostensibly a 21st century remake of John Carpenter's The Thing, which was itself a remake of 1951's The Thing From Another World. As becomes apparent throughout the 2011 version, however, it's actually in continuity with Carpenter's film, which prominently features a Antarctic base in the aftermath of an attack by the shape-shifting bastard of the title. So, the film opens with the discovery of a spacecraft, frozen underground, and palaeontology graduate Kate Lloyd is shipped out to Antarctica with a bunch of Norwegians, to investigate the discovery.

Coming from the producers of Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, you should have a pretty good idea of how this is going to pan out. If informed by a love of John Carpenter's version, you probably have your own issues as you go in, like an expectation that the CG effects will be less impressive than the practical effects seen in 1982, which hold up to this day, as some of the best creature effects ever seen in a movie. Nothing fruitful can come of this "anticipointment" (a fan sensation of expecting or looking forward to disappointment, according to Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts), especially when the Dawn of the Dead remake, which seems to have been embraced by as many people as those who derided it, is a more accurate gauge.

That said, I am by no means recommending that you check this film out in the cinema, if the original lingers in your mind. The ending of 2011's The Thing perfectly executes the function of a prequel, by making you want to go home and watch the Carpenter version right afterwards. But Rob Simpson, my co-host on the Double Take podcast, counts that film as his favourite of all time, on days when he doesn't prefer Enter the Dragon, and what I've heard of his response so far was what I expected- "It wasn't as bad as it could have been." It's hard to imagine many other die-hard Thing fans, however well-intentioned their attempts to watch the film without comparing to previous versions of the story, reacting with any more enthusiasm than that.

There are a number of cracking setpieces, but these are largely rehashed. This immediately invites the comparisons from which the film will suffer most- with detachment from what has gone before, the characters in The Thing are not stock characters, and nor are they unlikeable or boring to watch. John Carpenter's The Thing has exceptionally well-developed characters, so of course Joel Edgerton's Carter, arguably the film's Kurt Russell substitute, would not stand up to the same level of scrutiny. But the film's biggest loan from sci-fi horror doesn't even come from Carpenter's film, but from the Alien series, and she's also the best thing about the film.

By the measure of how she is treated by the men in the film, and her general accumulation of badass points as the film progresses, winsome American protagonist Kate Lloyd is basically the film's Ripley, the only other woman in an isolated situation. It's very nicely played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who has proven herself a resilient horror heroine in far worse films than this one, and she's consistently the most watchable thing about this prequel. If Carpenter was making a film about mistrust, in the environment of a uniquely tricksy gribbly, then Dutch director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. makes a brave stab at a film about mistrust based on misogyny. Unfortunately, this gives out too quickly, in favour of more jingoistic mistrust, an arena in which Americans must always be in the right.

At the very least, you can say that the source material has not been misunderstood. It may be a less finessed version of the salient points, but Eric Heisserer's film is not without humour or chills. Likewise, Marco Beltrami does a great job of picking up composing duties from Ennio Morricone's original score, without relying solely on his iconic cues. Those who feared the visual effects would pale in comparison would be vindicated by those shots where the CG resembles that seen in Van Helsing, more than a film made in 2011, but the use of VFX and prosthetics doesn't jar for the most part.

All in all, The Thing might have been more interesting as a clean break from the Carpenter film, because even at its most fan-pleasingest, it's not going to win over many purists of the original. Separate from the strictures of a prequel, it could have sank or swam on its own merits, instead of treading water. It's a serviceable update for more casual viewers, with a strong turn from Mary Elizabeth Winstead and enough spooky and gory moments to maintain interest. It was never going to be as memorable as its forebear, but there's no sense in ruling out altogether.

The Thing is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Thing, why not share your comments below? To hear me discuss the prequel/remake with the aforementioned Mr. Simpson, listen to Double Take on the online stream from 2-3pm GMT, or subscribe to the podcast to hear it afterwards.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

HUGO- Review

2011-12-05T08:00:00.000Z

The thing about Hugo is that it's one of those films that pivots on a great twist, midway through the film, which makes it difficult to review without giving away spoilers. I shan't give it away myself, but if you haven't yet seen Martin Scorsese's first film for children, a heartfelt ode to silent cinema that also happens to have the best use of Real-D 3D ever... then I'd say give it a chance without reading the rest of this review first. Go see it, and then come back. I'll wait.

So, from the director of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and The Departed, comes this U-certificate family movie, based on a popular children's novel by Brian Selznick. Hugo Cabret is an intelligent and technically-minded boy, who is orphaned after his father dies in a tragic museum-related accident. His drunken uncle, Claude, decides to skive off his job, winding the clocks in a Paris railway station, and put Hugo to work in his place. Hugo moves into the station, living in a hidden apartment and scavenging parts to try and repair his father's legacy- an old-timey automaton that they were restoring together.

It doesn't happen often, but when a director, principally known for his crime epics, suddenly decides to make a children's film, titled for the first name of the young protagonist, I'm involuntarily reminded of Francis Ford Coppola's Jack. Yes, he really did direct that- look it up. Happily, Scorsese dispels any doubts about his passion project within the first five minutes, a joyful introduction to the status quo of the train station, as young Hugo eludes the buffoon-ish station inspector, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, and leaves chaos in his wake. This might not be the Scorsese you know, but his skill as a filmmaker, built over decades of experience, is all up there on screen.

Scorsese's most recent film, Shutter Island, was one of my favourites of last year, and I think it was also something of an experiment. It was a B-movie at heart, albeit with the calibre of a Hitchcock melodrama, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. And now, his first foray into kids' movies, which takes the form of an accessible and diverting lecture on film preservation, and the early days of cinema. The director even employs an avatar, a film historian played by Michael Stuhlbarg, to ambitiously and effectively convey his passion to a new audience.

Speaking of avatars, if 3D is a bitter pill, it's not only that Scorsese uses it better than any other film to date, but also the potential of the then-new technology of cinema, within the story itself, that makes it easier to swallow. It feels like we've had hundreds of lazy, cash-grab post-conversions, but here's a film that really puts the medium through its paces. Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson gleefully get right in the audience's faces with the technology. Although they never say it, the 3D goes hand in hand with the story of the audiences who first saw the Lumiere brothers' Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, which is also directly referenced once the film delves into the beginning of cinema. It's like the train was really coming towards them...

The passion for cinema is effectively translated for a young audience, who are clearly being underestimated by those critics who say that this is merely a movie for adults and film fans. If kids have trouble with any of Hugo, I'd expect that it would be, contrary to the thrust of the advertising, the portions of the film that focus on Hugo and the automaton. Once it hits that twist I mentioned, the film becomes much more about early cinema than you had even realised from the silent passages and slapstick humour. And because that's the part about which the director is most passionate, all else seems less buoyant by comparison.

Still, it's never less than watchable, and there are a few constants keeping the film afloat on the way to the real meat of the plot. The carnivalesque cast of characters is led by Baron Cohen, in a terrifically physical run as the tragi-comic station inspector, but also includes Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour in an oddball romantic subplot, and Christopher Lee as the kindly owner of a bookshop. The star is arguably Ben Kingsley, continuing from Shutter Island with another cracking performance, increasingly important to the film as it carries on. In the lead kid roles, Asa Butterfield and Chloe Moretz are disappointingly average, but then their characters are more like ciphers than many of the others.

Hugo has rather cynically been marketed on the basis of the automaton, which is probably the least part of the actual plot. It's a shame that families would have to be hoodwinked into seeing this, especially as there's plenty to excite and enchant young and old audiences alike, once they give it a chance. And if the kids learn something about cinema history along the way, then all the better. With an unprecedented mastery of 3D, Martin Scorsese gives a dissertation on a subject close to his heart, by way of a Lemony Snicket adventure. While it's always gorgeous, it's not consistently exciting, but once it gets going, it's true cinematic magic.

Hugo is now showing, in 2D and 3D, at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Hugo, why not share your comments below? If you see it in 3D, tell me if you don't think it was worth it. Y'know, so I can tell you that you're wrong.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

BlogalongaBond- FOR YOUR EYES ONLY Review

2011-12-02T09:00:00.003Z

Wrap up warm, Grandpa Bond...

You can say what you like about Moonraker... and that, incidentally, is why I chose to say that it was insane, egregious, intergalactic bullshit. But while you can say what you like about Moonraker, at least it was committed in its laser-fighting, space-faring, pigeon-surprising shite. If the series had crashed and burned on its sequel's return from the outer space lunacy, that would have been far more interesting than the gentle thud made by For Your Eyes Only.

The problem, as I see it, is entirely to do with the fact that it's another reboot. All of the elements that remind you of a James Bond film are here, and it's a palate cleanser, after the previous instalment. However, an attempt to recast Bond didn't pan out, and so Roger Moore ambles on through another plot where some bastard or other twocks something from the Royal Navy, in this case, their submarine communication system, ATAC. Upon investigating the theft, Bond encounters Melina Havelock, blazing a trail of vengeance across Europe, after her parents were murdered in a fly-by shooting.

This marks a year of BlogalongaBond, and reviewing films once a month since January has brought me to this twelfth outing, past the halfway point. The inherent problem with resetting and repeating in this series is not even down to the fact that they're wearing thin now, but the fact that the Bond films doesn't have much of a rogues' gallery, to speak of. Jaws would be the exception from the last few films, and of course, Ernst Stavro Blofeld is the only real running villain in the series. He makes his less than triumphant return in this film, getting hilariously and unceremoniously dumped down a chimney. At least this asinine opening sequence remembers that Blofeld killed Tracy Bond, which is more than any of the previous five films have done.

But when your one recurring villain is as iconic as Blofeld, a character who is recognisable despite being played by different actors in practically every appearance, the arbitrary invention of villains, or their selection from the Fleming canon, just doesn't cut it. Julian Glover, who has played deliciously villainous or threatening characters in three of my favourite series- Harry Potter, Doctor Who and Indiana Jones- has nothing to work with as Aristotle Kristatos, who comes as part and parcel of the plot, airlifted from the otherwise unfilmed Risico. Michael Gothard is a distinctive looking henchman, but I honestly couldn't tell you his character's name without looking it up.

The other big problem with For Your Eyes Only is that Melina is so much more of an interesting protagonist than Moore's Bond. Carole Bouquet is fiery and intense, and Moore, who was 54 at the point this film was released, spends most of the film trying to calm her down, seemingly so he can keep up. For some reason, it's written as if James Bond takes issue with killing people. He keeps telling Melina not to seek revenge, basically vag-blocking her much more interesting subplot to the point where she doesn't get too cool to slip into bed with him at the end.. They're actually writing Moore as Grandpa Bond at this point, as evidenced by his excruciatingly embarrassing scenes with 23-year-old Lynn-Holly Johnson, as horny ice-skater Bibi.

As the first Bond film of the 1980s, you could suppose that the series was entering a new era at this stage, which would have been all the more reason to recast the lead role. The country from which this masculine, patriotic superhero originated was, at this point, run by Margaret Thatcher. As Bond observed of Dr. Goodhead in the previous film, "a woman", and the ending demonstrates an awareness of that by suggesting she could confuse a man's voice with a parrot's, the dopey cow! Despite his best efforts, he already feels emasculated, and sidelined. We're easily diverted by the character of Melina, the crucial importance of her pet parrot, and the redonkulous Tomorrow's World wonder of the Identigraph machine. OK, maybe not that last one. Worst. Gadget. Ever.

Aside from this, there are a few saving graces to be had. The action is better than it has been in much more warmly regarded Bond outings, at least in the building of tension, if not spectacular execution. For one thing, there's the gleefully unglamorous car chase, as Bond is forced to make his escape in a yellow Citroën. The film is full of standout sequences, such as the assassination attempt on Melina in the square, the chase on the bobsled track and the final assault on the mountaintop monastery in which Kristatos has, of course, decided to hole up. The tension is really ramped up in the preamble to that scene, in which one of those nameless henchmen, of the type that must surely be endangered by this point in the series, almost drops our hero to his death.

It's interesting that another of the film's highlights, in which Kristatos keel hauls Bond and Melina through shark-infested waters, was omitted from an earlier adaptation- Live And Let Die, to be exact. This one just feels so routine, more like a greatest hits package than any other entry in the series so far. Richard Maibaum, who was involved with pretty much every Bond script, apparently worked with a committee on this one, and shared credit for the writing with producer Michael G. Wilson. The scripts have seldom been inspired or world-beating in this series, but the writing just seems boring and bored, in this instalment. This brings down the more exciting sequences considerably.

Although the film is packed with exciting setpieces, For Your Eyes Only feels like a real slog. When it crosses the finish line, it hand-waves the plot away in such a way that is cavalier, even for a goddamn Bond film. As bad as Moonraker was- and golly, was it bad- at least it was a relentlessly watchable kind of bad. The goal was obviously to scale back the bonkers excess of previous films, but in not putting the entire world at stake, it barely gives us any stakes to worry about at all. Perhaps fresh blood could have helped that, but as it stands, the good intentions only shine through in brief, heady action sequences.

#12- This Christmas, a delicatessen of stainless steel is not the way to say "Sorry I Assassinated Your Wife On Your Wedding Day And Tried To Murder You With A Remote Control Helicopter."

For a full list of everyone's work on BlogalongaBond so far, click here.

The Mad Prophet Will Return In The New Year, With (shudder) Octopussy.

50/50- Review

2011-11-30T09:00:00.001Z

I've been doing enough comparisons of new movies to slightly less new movies in recent weeks, that I hope that such comparisons are lending context to a review. Why rely on my opinion? Isn't it better to tell you what it's kind of like, thus help you decide if you're going to enjoy it, without resorting to the almost always misjudged "See this if you liked..." pieces that populate cinema listings?

Where does this relate to 50/50? Basically, I found the film's humour and pathos to land somewhere between the previous works of its two stars, and not at all like Love And Other Drugs. (500) Days of Summer's Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Knocked Up's Seth Rogen are the stars of this movie, which finds a nice balance between each of those films' separate approaches, on a much more serious topic than either- cancer. During a supposedly routine doctor's visit, Levitt's character, Adam, is diagnosed with schwannoma, but it seems that the more imminent problem is how his disease changes the way that his loved ones treat him.

If there's one thing that "See if you liked..." rollcall of inferior films is good for, it was to remind me that Seth Rogen has been in this territory before, with Funny People, a film that showed what it would be like if Adam Sandler got cancer. If you're back there, thinking of Just Go With It and laughing, that probably shows you some of the problems with Funny People, which wasn't much about cancer anyway. In that film, Rogen was there to put the bro in the film's not entirely convincing bromance, which is a role he happens to serve here too. The difference is, his Kyle is possibly a career-best turn from him.

Appreciating that he's overshadowed by bigger performances in the movie, more on which later, Rogen serves his function very well. It's not an overpowering rendition of the goofy stoner character for which we know him, and surely he must have done as much to promote marijuana in movies as Harold and Kumar combined. Kyle is the product of an extraordinarily well-judged script, acted with due restraint by a more lovable Rogen than we've seen of late. It doesn't trade on illness for laughs, as Judd Apatow comedies have done in the past, instead proving to be a far more mature and sweet rumination upon living with cancer, based on writer Will Reiser's own experience.

Many moments of Reiser's script feel so truthful that it's completely clear that they have some basis in fact. Perhaps Rogen's performance was helped along by his own experience of being the best friend, who was there for Reiser before he was given the all-clear. But there have been films that played such things as naturalistic, that either bored or repelled, so Reiser also deserves kudos for having made his experiences feel cinematic, as well as personal. If there's only one drawback to this, it's that Anjelica Huston's role as Adam's mum doesn't get as much time as other supporting characters. But then, as much as it's about Adam's relationships, it's about Adam.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance is, at times, reminiscent of his character at certain points of (500) Days Of Summer, and perhaps never more so than in a joyously numb sequence where he traverses hospital corridors under the influence of medical weed. Being a relatively healthy young man, who exercises and avoids vices like smoking or drinking, the personal injustice of Adam's condition is so great that it doesn't immediately hit him. He works through his repressed angst in a number of great scenes with his therapist, played by the radiant Anna Kendrick. Levitt and Kendrick have fantastic comic chemistry, but each are good enough actors that the impact of their dramatic scenes is twice as hard.

The delicate balance between comedy and drama feels so neat, except for how messy it wound up when I saw the movie. 50/50 moved me to tears in its latter movements, before following up with one of its cracking one-liners. With eyes streaming and sinuses blocked, I snorted with laughter, and the snotty expulsion was roughly proportionate to that one scene near the end of The Blair Witch Project. Don't you judge me! I'm just giving you fair warning for when you see it, and I completely recommend that you do.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, and hopefully you'll appreciate the unostentatious nature of 50/50. It's very easy to imagine, in this season of hype and acclaim-driven baloney, a film about how people treat you differently when you have cancer, that is treated differently because it has a "hot topic" at its centre. This is far more self-assured, and far less cloying, and it manages to be sentimental without depressing anyone, or asking for any validation. Once again, I can't overstate how big an Anna Kendrick fan I am, when she's not slumming it in Twilight, but I was just as impressed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen, who make up the film's more subtle love story.

50/50 is now showing in cinemas nationwide. And is it just me, or does "unostentatious" sound ostentatious just by virtue of using that word to say "not showy"?
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If you've seen 50/50, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN- Review

2011-11-28T09:00:00.010Z

The most instant and obvious comparison to make, after viewing My Week With Marilyn, is with Richard Linklater's underviewed 2009 film, Me And Orson Welles. Like Welles, Simon Curtis' film uses a memoir as its starting point, setting up the protagonist as a plucky accomplice to a screen icon and taking the opportunity to wax cinematic about an institution. Linklater's film is an ode to the theatre, and this is a film that is in love with Marilyn Monroe.

Colin Clark is a young aspiring filmmaker who doggedly pursues a job working for Sir Lawrence Olivier on his new film, The Prince and the Showgirl. Colin becomes the third assistant director, and gains a unique insight into Olivier's leading lady, Marilyn Monroe. At the height of her popularity, Marilyn's arrival in England to film The Sleeping Prince, as it was then known, makes her adoring public ecstatic. But beneath the star's sultry exterior lies much greater vulnerability, as Colin discovers when he begins a dalliance with the world's most famous actress.

Will there be room for movies like this, or Me And Orson Welles, one or two decades from now? Each hearkens back to a time when the prodigious celebrity of their subject was something extraordinary. This one comes from the real Colin Clark's memoir, The Prince, The Showgirl & Me, but look at all the material about fame these days. This film, in 10 or 20 years, would be based on an OK! magazine feature, or a News of the World exposé. "My Wild Romp With Susan Boyle" would be more like it, and so the most immediately appealing thing about My Week With Marilyn lies in how its old-fashioned nature speaks much more to the glamour of fame, as opposed to the currently meaningless idea of celebrity.

Interestingly, Curtis and screenwriter Adrian Hodges completely take the original memoir at face value. The adaptation is a little clumsy at the beginning and at the end, with worthless narration and intertitles. The first thing you read in the film is that Marilyn Monroe made a film in England, before we watch a film about Marilyn Monroe making a film in England. Such superfluous touches seem unwieldy when they occur, but after a shaky start, the film was canny enough to completely enchant me in no time at all.

Like many awards season features, it's largely about the performances, perhaps unsurprisingly for a film that centres largely around actors, and around filmmaking. The film has a roster of British stars which would even make the teachers' common room at Hogwarts appear wanting, with particularly spectacular turns by Kenneth Branagh, whose perpetually frustrated Olivier is measurably this film's equivalent of Christian McKay's Welles, and Judi Dench, who plays a much warmer character than I can ever remember her playing, as generous thesp Dame Sybil Thorndike.

Even so, you could argue that it all hinges on Michelle Williams in the lead role, and happily, she metes out the unhinged behaviour along with the irresistible sex appeal. Her take on Marilyn is bipolar and tempestuous, but she's seldom any less than alluring. As the film, and presumably the book, would have it, Marilyn's star status leaves her adrift amongst her people's conflicting interests. She's treated with kid gloves by almost everyone, whether out of sympathy or fear of breaking her. Her friendship with Colin comes out of his unique position in all of this, with his ability to tell her the truth, straight, without spin, and to lend a sympathetic ear.

The central romance, however, is even more beguiling than Marilyn herself. Just because it isn't driven by lust, doesn't mean that there can ever be an awful lot more to this fling than friendship. And although Eddie Redmayne is likeable enough, and Williams is completely believable all the way through, it became clear that the stuff I really enjoyed involved the film production, and the characters involved with that. Branagh isn't in that middle passage of the film as much, Dench can only have been in the film for about ten minutes altogether, and Toby Jones completely disappears after the first 20 minutes. I think I ultimately liked all of them better than the pairing of Williams and Redmayne.

My Week With Marilyn isn't quite as good a film as Me And Orson Welles, but I found it just as enjoyable. Even though it is rooted in history, and in its autobiographical source, it is built upon a myth, and upon the glamour surrounding a bipolar woman who became the biggest movie star in the world. It's a hell of a myth, and few could embody it as well as Williams. Although I would have liked it to be just as much about classical filmmaking as Welles is about theatre, this isn't Welles. And what it actually is is good enough for me, with its superb cast and its old-fashioned affection for the long lost glamour of celebrity.

My Week With Marilyn is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen My Week With Marilyn, why not share your comments below? You can also add this one to the growing list of 2011 films where a Spot The Harry Potter Actor drinking game would make the infamous Withnail And I game look tame by comparison.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

TYRANNOSAUR- Review

2011-11-25T09:00:00.000Z

Depending on your point of view, I've either talked about two really depressing films this week, or just one. How better to round out the week, as we hurtle towards the general jollity of the nationally anointed Christmas movie month, than with a less-than-cheerful slice of British social realism, and the directorial debut from Paddy Considine, Tyrannosaur. To paraphrase the rear-view mirror from Jurassic Park, the film may contain less dinosaurs that it would appear.

While the metaphorical pre-historic beasty of the title is revealed in the dialogue, one could argue that it represents Joseph, a self-destructive grouch who lives alone and is constantly given to misdirected acts of rage and violence. After one such act, he meets Hannah, a kind but downtrodden Christian woman, while hiding behind a clothes rack in her charity shop. The expected clash of personalities is largely more of a meeting of hearts and minds, as Hannah tries to escape the realities of her abusive marriage.

My relationship with so-called kitchen-sink dramas on the big screen is not as polarised as the whole picture might seem. Personally, I enjoy social realism, provided that it's not realistic in a way that pertains to me. If Tyrannosaur were set in Middlesbrough, for example, I don't know that it would be enough of a counter-cultural experience for me to enjoy it as fully as someone who didn't live in my hometown. I can enjoy, or at least admire films that portray social reality, if not my own social reality, as escapist fare on some level or another. I don't consider the social realism picture to be the type of film I'd like to see every week at the cinema.

With this in mind, Tyrannosaur represents a good, irregular dose of counter-culture, which is just as compelling as it is disturbing. Having collaborated with Shane Meadows in the past, Paddy Considine has picked up certain things for his shift behind the camera, and as a director, he adds to the ever-increasing pile of stunning debut features from British directors in 2011. His script is equally as memorable, making no concessions to an audience who might be troubled by its content, or its characters' actions. The interviews he has given on the press tour really give context to just how this film is personal to him.

But that's for you to look up, and the business of this post is to talk about how the film stands upon viewing it. Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman are the film's most obvious assets, giving precisely the kind of performances that will be lauded at British awards ceremonies, but ignored at the Oscars. In particular, I would think that Colman not receiving Best Actress at the BAFTAs in February would be a major upset. Her performance near enough broke my heart.

I would even argue that the film is more about Colman's Hannah than about Mullan's Joseph. The film centres around Joseph, of course, and we ultimately come back to how the devout Hannah's contradictions affect him, but Colman's is one of those astonishing, attention-grabbing performances that steals a whole movie. That's quite a feat, considering how powerful Mullan is when he's on form. He's gruff and violent, but also desperately sad and oddly gentle, for a man who kicks his dog to death, the first time we see him.

But it's with Colman that our sympathies ultimately lie. If Joseph's introduction is shocking, the introduction of Hannah's husband, James, as he arrives home from work and pisses on her while she's asleep, is downright despicable. Marsan is becoming an old hand in roles like these, but James' abuse of Hannah really makes your skin crawl. So, as you can guess, moments of levity are few and far between, but Ned Dennehy and Sally Carman shine through, particularly in a scene that takes place at a wake. Only a film so forcefully unorthodox and unpredictable could find its brightest moments in the midst of grief.

Tyrannosaur is capital-H Harrowing, with a succession of great performances that make it worth taking the chance if you're really not sure that this is your kind of film. It succeeds in being cinematic on far more than merely representing difficult topics in such a way that wouldn't have a place on television, and it presents Considine as an already formidable filmmaker. Olivia Colman dispels all memories of "Sophie off Peep Show" and holds her own even against an actor as grizzled and fearsome as Peter Mullan. Their unconventional romance won't appeal to everyone, especially as it feels so honest and personal as to make you flinch away from some private matter, while still enthralling its audience.

Tyrannosaur is still showing in selected cinemas nationwide. The film will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray on February 6th 2012.
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If you've seen Tyrannosaur, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN- Review

2011-11-23T12:00:00.002Z

You have to hate any film title that gives people a legitimate excuse to use the most obvious pun that comes to mind, especially when discussion of We Need To Talk About Kevin is, by the nature of the film itself, a serious business. Still, as the film makes its way around the country, having somehow dodged wide distribution despite sold-out screenings in my local arthouse cinema, it's time for me to throw in my twopenn'orth as well.

The script, by Rory Kinnear and director Lynne Ramsey, takes great pains to work from the first-person focus of Lionel Shriver's novel, and so the film largely takes place around, and from the point-of-view of Eva Khatchadourian. She's stigmatised by society for the actions of her sociopath son, Kevin, and through seeing the various points in her life, it is clear that she has failed to connect with him, if not for lack of trying. Though her husband, Franklin, adores their son, the antagonism between Eva and Kevin can only come to a devastating conclusion.

The structure of the film is really something special. By taking it upon itself to recreate the perspective of the novel as closely as possible, the film becomes something very claustrophobic. At times, you're invited to see Eva as an unreliable narrator, but if you think one thing near the beginning of the film, you're likely to have changed your mind by the end. In terms of character rather than camera perspective, it's as close to a first-person movie as I've ever seen, and Tilda Swinton is stupefying in that all-important lead role.

When you think about the past, you don't remember it in a nice, orderly flashback fashion. Human memory is more disjointed than that, and so we might see a teenage Kevin in one reminiscence, and a baby Kevin in the next. All of the young actors who play Kevin are terrific, and many people have quite rightly praised Ezra Miller, who plays the teenager. Rock Duer and Jasper Newell play him through toddlerhood and childhood respectively, and they are equally as powerful, without being any kind of obvious play on Damien from The Omen. Instead, he's in a power struggle with his own mother, and the film always leaves the question of nature vs. nurture open to interpretation. Kevin couldn't have been born a sociopath, could he? Or could he?

The other effect of the non-linear narrative is to really ramp up the foreshadowing and foreboding. Knowing everything we know about Kevin at the first point that we see his younger sister, Celia, we're dismayed to see that she's wearing an eyepatch. This is quite early on in the film, and until you find out the cause of that injury, you can't help but speculate. Kevin teases his sister mercilessly, using a vaccuum cleaner at one point. Elsewhere, Kevin takes up archery. My own presumptions and attempts to pre-empt that sub-plot unsettled me deeply, and when the actual cause is revealed, there's no respite from the reveal.

Ramsey's direction isn't beholden to a linear narrative, but it's not just the structure that demands your uneqiuvocal attention. Much has been made of the film's heavy-handed use of the colour red, which links post-Kevin Eva to Lady Macbeth and the earlier scenes to a sense of impending danger and violence, but it is my opinion that the film is far more potent in its action than in its symbolism. The film has more shocks from scene to scene than your average horror film, and if anything, it's a social horror story, playing upon the dynamics of a troubled family relationship, and upon what society's grief inflicts upon Eva.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is a supremely disquieting horror drama that is as completely rooted in reality as a Mike Leigh film. With deference to the source material, it makes more sense to praise aspects of the adaptation, rather than the story and characters that Shriver created. Tilda Swinton gives possibly her best ever performance, and the various Kevins orbit around her, as unpredictable as the shark from Jaws. Lynne Ramsey's film is one of those that won't leave your thoughts for weeks after watching it, and so, even if it's admitting defeat to that obvious pun, I'd anticipate that you will need to talk about it.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is still showing in selected cinemas nationwide. The film will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray on February 13th 2012.
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If you've seen We Need To Talk About Kevin, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

BREAKING DAWN PART 1- Spoiler Review

2011-11-21T09:00:00.004Z

This review contains spoilers for all of the Twilight films. You can read my spoiler-free review of Breaking Dawn Part 1 on Movie Reviews.

It's quite annoying that the myth of the ongoing Twilight saga being utterly eventless and worthless has gathered so much steam, or so much hot air, as the case may be. It's annoying because I find myself pushing extra hard in the opposite direction for what is only the difference between a one-star film and a two-star film. But when the former is Transformers- Dark of the Moon, and the latter is Breaking Dawn- Part 1, it's only fair to discuss the relative merits of a fangirls' franchise.

Having languorously adapted the first three books in painstaking detail, with not an awful lot of character development along the way, Summit have gone the way of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with Stephanie Meyer's final novel in the series, and split it into two parts, with the second due in cinemas this time next year. In the first instalment, Bella and Edward finally consummate their dopey, mopey romance, by getting married. An explosive deflowering on their honeymoon leaves Bella with an inordinately powerful bun in the oven, and her pregnancy could pose as much of a danger to the world as it does to her own health.

The things that are wrong with this series are all present and correct, including the continuing reluctance to give Bella any personality or defining characteristics outside of her relationship with Edward. If this was meant to be a story about a lost young woman finding direction when she meets the love of her life, it's still coming off much more as the representation of women being worthless if they don't have super-powered paramours scrapping over them. And Bella's pregnancy brings a dogged anti-abortion stance in to supplant the long-running abstinence message.

Doesn't it suck that, after all that time spent extolling the sanctity of marriage, and how sex shouldn't be taken lightly, these two numpties forget to use contraception? Meyer, and in turn, long-serving screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, just couldn't let that go without even further muddling sex and emotional dynamics for their captive audience. The act of marrying Edward finally transforms Bella from a vacant anti-heroine to a passive object, over which a lovesick Jacob can argue with her husband.

And the film is anti-abortion, as opposed to pro-life. How could it be pro-life, with its complete lack of concern for Bella's life? Of course, every other character tells Bella to abort the pregnancy, but mostly because they're scared it's going to burst out of her chest like a face-hugger and kill them all. Edward is particularly dickish about it, further asserting the unintentional implication that he represents an abusive boyfriend, who just loves too hard for stupid, fragile Bella. And she, for her part, behaves precisely as Meyer apparently thinks women should- in utter peonage to everyone else around her.

But these are all problems that existed before Breaking Dawn Part 1, taken to their apex by the film's running jump into complete craziness. This is where I take issue with the apparent critical consensus that "nothing happens." I think it's so easy to sneer about a film like this that it's completely lazy to say that "nothing happens." Like the superior previous instalment, Eclipse, this film never bored me, and I even enjoyed watching it on a level that wasn't just down to its unintentional hilarity.

Yes, there's a scene where transformed werewolves talk to one another in the voices of their human counterparts, that was even more reminiscent of Charles Muntz's pooches in Up than Taylor Lautner's line delivery in New Moon. But the buttock-clenching sincerity of the series is almost endearing, and in the latter instalments in particular, I've found that more entertaining because it's interesting, than "so bad, it's good." Plus, to say that nothing happens ignores the shrieking hysteria of the final scenes.

Pushing the upper limits of the 12A certificate, the labour scene, in which the baby breaks Bella's spine, and Edward is made to deliver a C-section with his teeth, makes other grisly screen deliveries look like the stork delivery from Dumbo. It's really well shot, and in a series that's so producer-led as to make four films by four different directors appear completely uniform, I give kudos to Bill Condon for successfully mounting what must surely be the best scene of the entire series. He blows it when Jacob falls in love with the baby, five minutes later, but the labour scene was genuinely impressive and intense.

It's the general unity of direction that puts me off suggesting that David Cronenberg should have directed this instalment, because the early parts of the film, which correlate much more with the cod-romantic tone of previous entries, could have been done by Hardwicke, Weitz or Slade. I think that bringing back David Slade would have been a good move, but one could easily understand why he wouldn't want to be locked into another two movies based on rubbish source material, having done a totally passable job with Eclipse.

As I said, the film never bored me, even if it's slowly paced. The wedding takes up the first half hour of the film, but as a victory lap for the more enjoyable supporting elements of the series, such as Billy Burke and Anna Kendrick, I enjoyed watching it. It doesn't mean I liked it, but it's attention-grabbing in a way that the corresponding fanboy franchises so seldom muster. Even fans of the awful books don't like Breaking Dawn, so to make a film out of such aggressively hateful material might turn off some film fans who didn't see any of its weirder turns coming.

With everyone and their dads talking about how silly Twilight fans are, I would hope that its lapses into self-parody doesn't make those fans feel like the joke is on them. Teenage boys really don't need any more encouragement. And yet, as eventful as this film is, there's still one more film to go. Am I the only one who felt like this would be the best place to bow out? I know I said this about Eclipse too, but it feels much more like an ending than the first of a two-part story, and I struggle to think how the confrontation with Michael Sheen and his camp-ires is going to fill another two hour movie. It certainly can't top this one for being purely bonkers, but we'll see what happens next November.

Here's hoping that this review is enough to defend my stance on Breaking Dawn Part 1 from reductive readers in both camps. The fangirls will say "But it's not for you" and everyone else will say "Hurh, hurh, Twilight's gay." As I don't particularly have time for uber-serious people of either inclination, it remains to say that the film is at least out-there and interesting enough that I'm still thinking about it. Odds are, you don't need me to tell you whether or not to see it. No reality check is forthcoming for these characters, no sudden empathy for their motivations beyond what you already take in with you. A two-star film, it may be, but it's far too bizarre to ever be dismissed as fluff.

Breaking Dawn Part 1 is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Breaking Dawn Part 1, why not share your comments below? Imagine if Nick Fury had turned up during the credits, instead of Michael Sheen, and it turned out that Breaking Dawn Part 2 was The Avengers. "You think you're the only werewolf in the world who loves a baby?"

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

IMMORTALS- Review

2011-11-18T09:00:00.000Z

With a new Twilight movie in cinemas today (my review is coming on Monday), it's surprising to see that the studios keep trying to make mythological fantasy films into the correspondingly popular brand of erotic wish-fulfilment with young men. Ever since Zack Snyder orchestrated the campy action extravaganza of 300, we've had a number of varying attempts to capitalise on Greek mythology for different audiences, with varying success.

And now comes Immortals, another action movie in which grunty, shirtless men do battle for liberty, and the production design is just fabulous. Ahem. This latest contortion of Greek mythology is based around Theseus, who, in this version, is some sort of plucky lumberjack, living in a cliff-side village. His village is destroyed by Hyperion, a murderous tyrant who is looking for a bow that will allow him to unleash the titans and dethrone the gods. The gods, forbidden to interfere in the affairs of mortals, trust in Theseus to deliver mankind from destruction, relying on only his courage, the companionship of a hot prophet and... oh yeah, the magic bow.

As a McGuffin, the crucial Epirus Bow is particularly annoying to me. In form and function, it's no problem within the Greek mythological setting. But what the bow comes to represent is the characters' damn foolishness. It repeatedly changes hands out of complete carelessness, in such ways that you'd never know it was apparently the most important object in the mortal realm. Not unless that same script kept having the characters tell you how important it was, anyway. Immortals might be another style-over-substance art film from The Cell director Tarsem Singh, but annoyingly, it's the actual context of each individual element which lets it down massively.

For instance, you could argue that Tarsem's artistic composition of shots is unparalleled. I'd argue that he creates shots, rather than scenes, and that his particular brand of visual talent is better suited to video art or music videos than full-blown features like this. Eiko Ishioka's costume design is picking up good notices all over, for effectively pulling off the stylised and fetishised design that comes hand in hand with a Tarsem feature. But with no real context, the spangly golden attire of the gods, particularly Poseidon's Magikarp helmet, seem impractical in the extreme, especially when we finally see how immortals actually fight.

Even the cast is largely in fine form, for all the good it does. Future Superman Henry Cavill muscles through a cavalcade of brutal fight scenes, and he makes for a credible hero, if not a sympathetic one, while Frieda Pinto watches from the sidelines, and is at least matches the film for ludicrous gorgeousness. But the cast can't do anything with the way that the characters are led by the action. Luke Evans' Zeus proves to be particularly bi-polar, falling victim to the inconsistent whims of action movie structure. It's all the more annoying when the most over-powering and pro-active performance in the film, by Mickey Rourke, is also by far the worst.

Stubbornly grumbling through the film in precisely the way he always does, he seems to have completely forsaken the promise of a comeback and settled into big-salary supporting gigs in films like Iron Man 2, The Expendables and its ilk. His howlingly ridiculous villain, Hyperion, is the eye of the storm for Immortals' confused mush of visual wankery. At one point, his main henchman, a giant in a barbed-wire bull mask, takes up an oversized croquet mallet and more or less thwacks a traitor to the good guys. Don't ask me why- I don't even know why they have a guy in a barbed-wire mask standing in for an actual minotaur.

Charles and Vlas Parlapanides' script strives to be taken seriously, but the film winds up being yet another Hollywood feature that utterly divorces cause from effect, with an abundance of grand-looking action, but without any reason for the audience to care. And so the endless succession of crucial battle scenes between gods and titans come across as little more than Power Rangers- Greek Patrol, or something. Like Saban's long-running and colourful merchandising machine, many of the film's most sumptuous visuals are wasted on scenes that might as well be enacted by action figures.

If nothing else, Immortals looks gorgeous. But provided it gets a decent transfer, it will make a better test disc for your Blu-ray player, than a worthwhile cinema trip. There's an increasingly popular discourse that points to Tarsem as the arthouse analog to Michael Bay. On the dubious merits of this film's visual competence as opposed to any coherence or investment in the plot, that's not a bad shout. But aside from Rourke's performance, I couldn't point to any reason why it sucks so much outside of the by-numbers script. Yet another ultra-violent and fetishised addendum to Greek mythology.

Immortals is now showing, in 2D and 3D, at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Immortals, why not share your comments below? Also, anyone seen this trailer for Tarsem's upcoming Snow White movie, Mirror Mirror? Instinctively, I'm not ruling this one out just yet- I favour the idea of a pantomime version writ large, even if most people seem to be Team Snow White And The Huntsman.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

THE RUM DIARY- Review

2011-11-17T09:00:00.002Z

Even in the process of actively trying to avoid comparisons of The Rum Diary to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it feels like my feelings about the movie can only be articulated in relation to my similar disaffection with Terry Gilliam's film. It still seems like a reasonable comparison to make, as this film and Fear and Loathing would make a serviceable double bill, with each film featuring Johnny Depp performing as an alias of Hunter S. Thompson.

The Rum Diary, based on one of Thompson's early, originally unpublished books, essentially serves as Hunter S. Thompson Begins, in the parlance of the mainstream cinema with which it is more obviously trying to blend in. Depp plays Paul Kemp, a novelist who's struggling to find his voice at the height of Eisenhower's America. Puerto Rico is a big enough change of scene, and the local rag, The San Juan Star, signs him up as a reporter. But the assignments don't exactly grab him, and his increasing dependency on alcohol gets him into trouble, especially when the beguiling Chenault enters the equation.

You don't need to look into the production history of this one to tell that it's something of a vanity project. It feels like the first film he's made in a while that wasn't calculated and constructed to cash in on his worldwide stardom. There's something satisfying about the idea that this is gonna be a good film because he's doing it for the love of it, not the money. Sadly, that doesn't bear out. On the plus side, it should be said that as a prequel of sorts, a 48-year-old Depp playing a 20-something Kemp shouldn't work as well as it does, especially having playing the older character of Raoul Duke, when he was 35.

But oddly, his return to a Thompson-esque character seems bereft of a certain something, as young as he appears. Although he holds his own against an entirely too sexy performance by Amber Heard, the two don't really have much chemistry, because neither has much of a personality to share with the other. But it's not a bad performance, and the rest of the cast are up to their respective mantles too. Richard Jenkins is particularly enjoyable as Kemp's editor, and Michael Rispoli forms the largest distinguishing presence from the earlier Thompson film, as Kemp's colleague and friend, Bob Sala. He's a world away from Benicio del Toro's Dr. Gonzo, a vacancy that is more or less inhabited by Giovanni Ribisi's Moberg.

But really, the scorching hotness of Heard as Chenault really shows up the big contrast, as most of the film left me cold. I've said that any review of this film should also mention Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I stand by that. Although I understand Fear and Loathing's discombobulating structure makes it a perfect adaptation of that novel, its appeal has always gone over my head, in many ways. Likewise, The Rum Diary kind of washed over me, even though I completely understood it at all times, but I definitely feel like it's the lesser of the two films- somehow more commercially concerned, despite the fact that it was obviously a struggle to get the book onto the screen than say, The Hangover Part II.

Bruce Robinson, best known for Withnail & I, is the writer and director behind the latter film, and here's what I've always noticed about Withnail and Fear and Loathing. I have a friend who's a big fan of both films, and introduced me and the rest of our friends to them a few years back. It seemed like those who didn't get Withnail, loved Fear and Loathing and those who were left cold by Fear and Loathing, dug Withnail. All of which is to say that The Rum Diary, as a combination of source material from Thompson and the creative drive of Robinson, left me more uncertain as to whom I should recommend it, than any other film I've seen in recent memory.

The Rum Diary has plenty of madcap comedy, but despite all the effort that's gone into it, it felt oddly dispassionate to me. As a big fan of Withnail & I, I was disappointed that Bruce Robinson's script only gave me one big belly laugh, with a brilliant one-liner that almost made it all worthwhile. It feels divisive by nature, which I suppose would be in keeping with the general subversive tone of Thompson's works. When a film leaves me this perplexed, I can't help but compare with what I already know- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas left me perplexed too, but also more impressed than I was by the end of this one.

The Rum Diary is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Rum Diary, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

THE AWAKENING- Review

2011-11-15T09:00:00.001Z

While I hasten to join in with those reviewers that hope the BBC will pick up The Awakening and make six more episodes, post-haste, it's not to say that Nick Murphy's boarding school chiller is ever less than cinematic. The line has been blurred for some time, what with Sherlock comprising three feature-length episodes and the general production value of certain American shows putting Hollywood equivalents to shame.

The fact remains that Florence Cathcart, a no-nonsense paranormal investigator who exposes ghostly hoaxes, and her adventures in 1921 would be a fantastic springboard for a spooky BBC drama series. As it stands, it's also a very good film, which inevitably finds Florence confronted with evidence of real ghosts, in a creepy-looking rural boarding school. A boy appears to have died of fright, at the sight of the school's visitor, and a sceptical Florence is brought in to investigate.

Florence makes for one of the year's most magnetic protagonists, due in no small part to the excellent performance of Rebecca Hall. Hall has become a dependable supporting actress in recent years, but she shines in this lead role, as a damaged and yet fiercely intelligent spinster who is at odds with her own beliefs. She does a terrific job of fully bringing the character to life, as her professional career clashes with her own innermost desires, and her festering angst. We see her at her sharpest, as she furiously exposes the charlatans who live on exploiting others that want to believe, but she's not emotionally immune to a dressing-down from the disappointed marks.

Stephen Volk, who previously oversaw ITV's Afterlife, co-wrote the script with Murphy, and it's also a credit to the script that Florence is such a well-rounded character. The film's historical setting really gives weight to its particular brand of emotional horror, which is, in some ways, reminiscent of The Orphanage. However, the idea of World War I having torn a generation asunder has seldom been explored so well as it is here. With hindsight, most films seem to focus on the subsequent world war, and overlook the period in between.

The Awakening, by contrast, drinks in all of that historical context and tells a tale in which a generation whose nerves were already shot, after the war, is confronted by that from which many draw solace. Having lost so many, the idea of the afterlife could seldom have been more attractive. Even if the scares prove to be pretty by-the-book, utilising mirrors and slammed doors and whatnot, the setting alone provides context for great characters, such as those played by Dominic West and Shaun Dooley, and a gripping story.

Elsewhere, Imelda Staunton plays the school maid, Maud, and she might as well be wearing a badge that says "Knows More Than She's Letting On." If the film lapses into predictability at points, it is by its relationship to contemporary ghost movies. It feels almost like it began life at BBC drama, before being transferred to the filmmaking arm and expanded to 90 minutes. The first hour makes a serviceable pilot, setting up enigma codes and characters that would have stood a TV series in good stead. In a film, such things have to be resolved in less time, and thus with more immediacy than might satisfy most.

The upshot of The Awakening being a film, and not a TV pilot, is that it looks gorgeous and that it's well-served by the presence of a reliable screen actress like Rebecca Hall in the lead role. Parallels with The Orphanage seem inevitable, but I would liken it more to this year's Spanish horror outing, Julia's Eyes- a film that appreciates the emotional value of its audience's fear, and holds it as a privilege while still indulging in its share of jumps and jolts. It's a more flawed film, but it gets my whole-hearted recommendation on the basis of its thoughtful script and its absorbing atmosphere.

The Awakening is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

ARTHUR CHRISTMAS- Review

2011-11-14T09:00:00.002Z

Christmas movies peak and trough like most other sub-genres, and Arthur Christmas proves to be the most instantly rewatchable festive family fare since Elf. After voyages to the uncanny valley with Robert Zemeckis, in The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, this one comes from Aardman Animation, the geniuses behind Wallace & Gromit, and it probably arrives so early in cinemas in order to avoid the glut of markedly un-festive animated sequels and spin-offs next month.

Putting yet another spin on the question of how Santa Claus gets presents to all the houses around the world in just one night, we see the North Pole as the hub for a militarised gift-delivering operation on Christmas Eve. Santa has two sons who oversee the operation- heir apparent Steve, the lieutenant who runs Christmas from ground control, and Arthur, whose boundless enthusiasm for the festive season sees him relegated to answering chidren's letters. However, the high-tech operation suffers an infinitesimal margin of error when one child in Cornwall doesn't receive a present, and Arthur is determined to make things right.

The most impressive thing about Arthur Christmas is the way in which it gets going right away, with a dazzling opening sequence that sees Santa at work all over the world. In a massive camouflaged spaceship, elf commandos are deployed across cities, to deliver presents to sleeping children. Like the recent Tintin, all necessary exposition comes organically, but this one also proves that you don't need to make a huge pioneering advance in animation to pull off a well-designed action sequence, reminiscent of the elaborate inventions that Wallace and Gromit produce.

The major difference from Wallace & Gromit is, as with Flushed Away, that the film is rendered in CGI, rather than in the characteristic stop-motion animation. If that invites direct comparisons with Flushed Away, then Arthur Christmas is undoubtedly a less transatlantic production. Though not as Brit-centric as The Curse of the Wererabbit, all of the imagination and idiosyncracies of the studio remain present and correct, with intricate sight gags such as a can of "chimney lube" raising huge laughs for observant viewers.

The film also measures its Santa dynasty as an analogy of the royal family, whereby the only real antagonist is Steve, voiced by Hugh Laurie, who is practically ready to take on the big red suit, but not yet emotionally responsible. Arthur, as our protagonist, is more naive and bedazzled about Christmas, and yet too clumsy to do anything useful himself. Elsewhere, the current Santa, Malcolm, is voiced by Jim Broadbent, which automatically aligns itself with a more dopey and affable personality. And Grandsanta, clearly modelled on Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses and raucously voiced by Bill Nighy, is a retired Father Christmas- think of him as the film's Prince Phillip.

Aardman have covered Christmas before, with the Robbie the Reindeer TV specials, but while Arthur Christmas is more British, it's also got more of a timeless sense of humour. It's not only the cast and the production values that have been improved from those shorts, but also the script by Sarah Smith and Peter Baynham. It's not a better film than The Curse of the Wererabbit, nor is it a funnier film, but then I don't believe in looking at all of Aardman's work from the high watermark of Wallace & Gromit and marking down from there. And this studio certainly makes a better Christmas movie than many have.

Arthur Christmas has all of the charm and much of the humour that you expect from Aardman. Its bravura opening, which is akin to a kid jumping out of bed on Christmas morning to open their presents, is inevitably countered by what feels like an afternoon of eating and playing board games in the second act. But it's got more than enough imagination to muster a second wind and leave you with a smile on your face by the time the credits roll. It was good enough that I didn't mind seeing it in November at all, and I'll definitely revisit this enjoyable new spin on a much-pondered premise before the year is out.

Arthur Christmas is now showing, in 2D and 3D, at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Arthur Christmas, why not share your comments below? Also welcome- remembrances of those Robbie the Reindeer specials. Discounting the letdown of the third instalment, the first two are cracking Christmas specials.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

BlogalongaBond- MOONRAKER Review

2011-11-12T14:00:00.001Z

As you might imagine, there's no shortage of contenders for the dumbest moment in Moonraker. However, it's actually quite impressive to see that so many of them are actually dumber than "James Bond goes to space." As ridiculous as the final credits' insistence that the movie was shot on location in "OUTER SPACE!" really is, let's not forget the animal reaction shots, the platoon of space rangers, and Jaws' flipping girlfriend.

And so, Fleming's novel, in which the villainous Hugo Drax is a Nazi pretending to be an English gent, somehow transmorphs into Moonraker, with sci-fi, lasers and a metric fuckton of camp. It's also a pretty straight structural remake of You Only Live Twice, which was already rehashed in the previous, much superior adventure, The Spy Who Loved Me. Basically, Drax is an industrialist who provokes a diplomatic incident when he steals back one of his own Moonraker shuttles, while it's supposed to be under British control. Bond is dispatched to find out where the missing Moonraker got to, but instead finds a plot to create a new master race.

Seeing as how not all about Moonraker is nonsense, let's cover the good parts first and then get into the negatives, which are more fun to read and write about. The film just happens to have one of the better death scenes we've seen thus far, as one of Bond's helpful conquests, Corinne Dufour, is brutally set upon by Drax's dogs. Corinne Clery gives it much more than most of her predecessors, certainly much more than that one who was a human shield for Bond within seconds of meeting him, and Michael Lonsdale is never more ruthless. It's a scene that excels for being so down to Earth, which is ironic, considering where it goes from there.

The Oscar-nominated visual effects, created in-camera by Derek Meddings, are pretty advanced for 1979. The look of the film as a whole is more reminiscent of Thunderbirds, than Star Wars or 2001, but that's nothing against Meddings, who made his name on Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation series. Additionally, I enjoyed John Barry's cine-literate score, with cues from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Magnificent Seven and 2001, which is as close to an admission that Bond had just fallen into the groove of aping other popular films as you'd ever get.

For those who aren't keeping score, Live And Let Die borrowed from blaxploitation, The Man With The Golden Gun had an extended passage of martial-arts foolishness, and Jaws is obviously carried over from The Spy Who Loved Me to the sci-fi pastiche of this sequel. All that the Bond films already bring with them at this point is a constantly escalating glut of camp and attemped comedy. Bond traverses his world of ludicrous henchmen and audacious plots for global domination with such disaffection these days that he doesn't even seem incredulous when he travels into OUTER SPACE! Except, that is, for some stoic eyebrow movement from Sir Rog.

I developed a theory, in watching Dr. Holly Goodhead throughout Moonraker. Lois Chiles, (saddled with the most overtly bawdy character name since Plenty O'Toole) plays as a worldly and intelligent woman, albeit at the expense of any real personality, and she resists Bond for a good while. For the second film on the trot, the moment in which the girl finally softens to his charms is once he saves her from Jaws. Even in Dr. Goodhead's philosophy, something as rampantly fucked up as a metal-mouthed bastard trying to kill her on top of a cable car could not possibly exist. A relatively unfazed Bond is the first semblance of sanity in this brave new world of bullshit, and therein lies this incarnation's sex appeal.

Outside of this Bond's particular brand of seduction by bat-shit foolishness, love is in the air for Jaws. Richard Kiel's performance apparently seized the imagination of the younger viewers, who pestered the producers to make him a goody so that they could more easily root for him. We know that kids are stupid, but apparently, so were the producers, who give Jaws a love interest, the diminutive Dolly. Late on in the film, there's a throwaway line about how the two were rescued from the explosive space station climax by American astronauts. Fuck it, why try at this point? Why not just say that Jaws was an alien all along, and that he just took her home to meet his giant family?

We're 11 months into this marathon, and Moonraker is so unrecognisable from what I was watching in January, or February, or-- fuck, even September, that I feel completely lost. 007 takes a running jump out of the 1970s with a final farce that shows just how far the series has sunk over the course of the decade. It's almost like they started with one space gag, and were content to let us wallow in confusion for two hours while they got there. When it arrives, Desmond Llewelyn's Q delivers it. While I concede that "I think he's attempting re-entry, sir" is pretty much the greatest double entendre the series has ever concocted, was it worth everything that went before? Not really, no.

#11- The explosion of several dozen beautiful civilians goes unmourned, but to be fair, really ridiculously good-looking people die in freak gasoline-fight accidents every day.

For a full list of everyone's work on BlogalongaBond so far, click here.

The Mad Prophet Will Return, With For Your Eyes Only ... in December.

Four Of My Favourite Things About TRESPASS

2011-11-11T09:00:00.007Z

If you want a thought-out and reasoned analysis of Joel Schumacher's Trespass, starring Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman, you can read my review over at Movie Reviews now. If you're of the "tl;dr" browsing clan, then who am I to act contrary to the demand for easily digestible and visually friendly movie critiques, especially for a movie as awfully good as Trespass? I mean, it's shit, but there are a host of fun moments.

The plot, as far as it goes, finds a wealthy estate agent and his family under siege at their swanky and fortified mansion. Kyle Miller has recently signed for a million dollars' worth of diamonds, and armed men bust through his security to take him and his wife Sarah hostage. His daughter, Avery, becomes swept up in the hostage situation too, as secrets and lies are revealed, and the whole thing becomes terribly convoluted. Here are my four favourite things about the movie.

Nicolas Cage is actually present.

At the arse-end of 2011, we've seen Cage in two films thus far- Season of the Witch and Drive Angry, neither of which boasted his finest or even most explosively enjoyable work as an actor. The latter film was almost completely let down by the fact that he seemed bored, but at least William Fichtner picked up the slack there. Bizarrely, he's really trying in Trespass. We're talking about the kind of acting we haven't seen from Cage since his remake of The Wicker Man.

For a while, Trespass is enjoyable purely for his particularly bizarre line deliveries and flamboyant acting. If you put lines like "I am a cuckold! You invited them here with your filthy lust!" into his mouth when he's chewing the scenery with so much fervour, the display is going to be something pretty damn special. And let's not forget that it's a Joel Schumacher film, so flamboyance is in no small supply. For a while, it seems like Cage buoys the whole film, but eventually, it becomes more annoying.

Its twists are completely round-the-twist, certifiably fucking crazy.

Karl Gajdusek's script for Trespass frequently sounds like it was contrived during a round of Whose Line Is It Anyway? with its frantic doing and undoing of plot twists to keep the thriller aspect afloat. On the surface, it would seem like quite a simple plot- the Millers' electrician brings in his older criminal brother to rob his employers of a fortune. But with every escalating twist, you can almost hear Clive Anderson's buzzer sounding as the power struggle becomes more and more convoluted.

At its very worst, the criminals tell a baffled Kyle that they need to steal a kidney to transplant into their ailing mother. Then five minutes later-- oh wait, no, they're don't! Imagine a succession of such revelations, timed about five minutes apart for around 90 minutes, and you can imagine how the film drove me to the point of actually yelling out "Just fucking end, already!" Ah, the joys of watching a shitty movie in my own home.

Ben Mendelsohn's moustache looks peculiar.

Ben Mendelsohn, who was nothing short of phenomenal as the terrifying Pope Cody in Animal Kingdom, is considerably less impressive when deployed against Nicolas Cage. He already co-starred alongside the man with a thousand hairpieces in Knowing, which was even worse than Trespass. Most unusually though, Trespass finds him fatally afflicted with facial foliage.

Schumacher obviously felt strongly enough about this criminal type wearing facial hair that he even has the character wear a ski mask with a large enough mouth-hole to show off the moustache. And Mendelsohn spends a decent amount of time wearing that ski mask, which only makes his face look more peculiar. In a similar way to my evasion of mentioning Liana Liberato in this review, I like Ben Mendelsohn enough that I don't want to say it's a shit role and he's really not very good in it. The moustache makes a better scapegoat.

Nobody's going to watch it.

Ultimately, my favourite thing about Trespass is that it went straight-to-DVD in the States, and that it's getting a limited release in the UK. There's negligible buzz around it, and the only real reason I can think of, for a film that has two Oscar-winning actors front-and-centre, with a noted (or notorious) director at the helm, to get such treatment is that the producers know it's shit. And they're cutting their losses, rather than stacking a huge marketing and distribution campaign on it, to try and sell it anyway.

And believe me, it's shit. In the not-so-stellar field of home invasion thriller, this is a real stinker. There are enjoyably awful moments, but many more structural problems that are just plain awful. It's convoluted, illogical, loud, stupid rubbish, and symptomatic of the way that Nicolas Cage can feature in Kick-Ass one year and then appear in one of the year's worst just 12 months later. Stick this on the pile with The Wicker Man and Knowing, but whatever you do, don't seek it out.

Trespass is now showing in selected cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Trespass, why not share your comments below? Ooh look, 11/11/11- wouldn't you think they'd come up with a better international release strategy for a film whose title is that date? Still, Darren Bousman's films have a pretty quick expiry date, regardless.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

MACHINE GUN PREACHER- Review

2011-11-10T09:00:00.005Z

Despite my prejudice against screen biopics, I found a fair bit to admire in this adaptation of Sam Childers' memoirs, Another Man's War. Of course, it's amped up to the extent that Childers is played by Gerard Butler, who doesn't so much throw his arms around the world, as exercise his right to bear arms around the world. Most importantly though, its tone is dramatic first, and action-packed afterwards.

So, with the slightly less serviceable title of Machine Gun Preacher, Another Man's War is brought to the screen, beginning with Sam being released from prison. He's an alcoholic criminal who rides around on his motorbike, robbing places and neglecting his family. However, his wife Lynn has found Jesus while he was behind bars, and a pivotal event leads him to convert too. Sam's new-found conscience is prickled, when he learns of how civil war in the Sudan is affecting children, and he ships over there to join in with aid workers, and eventually winds up having a go in the war, too.

Director Marc Forster's previous film was the most recent James Bond film, the unfairly maligned Quantum of Solace, which admittedly had problems in the way that its action was shot and edited. Playing to his strengths, this is closer to Forster's previous form, on The Kite Runner. It's a film with a socio-political angle to it, but one in which Gerard Butler remains beholden to shooting people, blowing things up and shouting. But as I'm constantly saying about the better action cinema of today, isn't it so much better when the violence actually means something?

If Machine Gun Preacher only has one thing going for it, it's the focus on Sam Childers as a character, and the chance that this affords Butler, to act in a worthy role with a performance that is free of presumption. Butler evokes sympathy with the character, while also excelling as the short-tempered bumbag that Sam is at the outset of this story. The film shies away from certain dramatic opportunities, while inflating plot devices such as Michael Shannon's character, Donnie. As it turns out, the character is an amalgam of many different people in the real Childers' life, and that shows in the film, at least as much as to have made me think Donnie must be a fictional addition on first viewing.

It's not all missed opportunities, but I can't say that the opportunities that it does hit upon are resolved in a way that is entirely satisfactory, either. Needling quibbles with Sam's seemingly selfless humanitarianism are present throughout, but never really become prominent in the way they might if screenwriter Jason Keller were able to take more artistic licence with the story. For instance, the amount of time for which he abandons his family is only signified by a jarring change in the actress playing his daughter, from infancy to "Dad, can we get a limo for my formal?" This means that Sam goes from neglecting his family for a life of crime, to neglecting his family for the sake of war orphans. As I've said many times, the naturalistic way, in this case, leaving threads like those unfulfilled, isn't always the cinematic way.

As with The Help, it competently manages with the fact that it must portray great injustice without reaching any great final sense of gratification against the wrongdoers involved. Sam Childers did not single-handedly liberate Uganda, but the film ends in a place that is satisfactory for the character. In the things it does right, I also found it easy to forgive the potential hypocrisy, of a $30m Hollywood film that lampoons privileged people who won't give generously to help stop this injustice. It's neither wish-fulfilment for bleeding heart peace campaigners, nor a supposedly uplifting right-wing gore-gasm (such as Rambo.) Some will wonder then, how to classify it, but I don't think I was too perturbed by the fact that it isn't be pegged one way or the other.

Despite that title, Machine Gun Preacher is rarely exploitative, and serves as a well-reasoned if clumsily assembled action drama with a yearning socio-political conscience. It goes without saying that it features a career-best performance from Gerard Butler, even if that's to the detriment of almost everyone else in the supporting cast. The adaptation might lack courage in some parts, but its conviction was strong enough to overpower my cynicism. It's no crowd-pleaser, but it's sensitive and sincere its protagonist's motivation without lapsing into hero worship or jingoism.

Machine Gun Preacher is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Machine Gun Preacher, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

TOWER HEIST- Review

2011-11-07T09:00:00.000Z

Brett Ratner is one of those directors who is widely considered to be a hack filmmaker. If the studio likes someone that much, he must be bad, right? Aside from driving the X-Men franchise into the first of two successive brick walls when he took over from director Matthew Vaughn at the last minute, he's the mastermind behind the increasingly crap Rush Hour trilogy. In fact, he dropped out of remaking Ocean's Eleven back at the beginning of the Noughties, in order to make Rush Hour 2.

In Tower Heist, Ratner seems to have found a channel through which he can expend any Ocean's-related energy that may still be troubling him. Set in and around a high-rise apartment complex in New York City, Josh Kovacs is a building manager who is stung when the tower's wealthiest resident, Arthur Shaw, is implicated in a Ponzi scheme. Shaw was responsible for the staff's pension fund, which now seems to have disappeared without a trace. When they discover that Shaw keeps an as-yet unseized $20 million emergency fund in his apartment, Kovacs and his motley crew of outraged victims plot to get their own back.

Some seem to be throwing up the comparison to Ocean's Eleven in a derogatory way, as if to say this is the Asylum-brand knock-off equivalent of Steven Soderbergh's film, somehow released in cinemas, a decade late to the party. For me, it's actually an apt comparison because they have so much more in common than the presence of Casey Affleck amongst their starry ensemble casts. Ocean's Eleven is a very cool, but ultimately superficial film, and while I didn't dislike it, it was largely unmemorable, and pretty functional in the management of its large cast. Similarly, Tower Heist is what it is, and nothing more or less, but I'm not speaking out of diminished expectations when I say that's just fine.

The trailers would seem to brand the film as a very, very broad crime comedy movie, but we all know how trailers can be misleading. While the trailer gives away more of the ending of the plot than many of us would have liked, there's a fair bit that the marketing hasn't given away, in the scenes of our hapless heroes planning out their heist practically. It focuses more on the crime than on the comedy, which mustn't be mistaken for being unfunny. The film is far more chucklesome than laugh-out-loud hilarious, but neither is it going for the rapid-fire approach, and having many of the gags fail to land.

Similarly, the marketing has exaggerated the role of Eddie Murphy. His role as Slide isn't exactly his comeback film, but it signifies that he's going back towards the kind of character he played in the 1980s, sans fat-suits or any of that old bullshit. Trading Places, for instance, had a similarly damning view of Wall Street to Tower Heist. Eddie Murphy is Eddie Murphy though, so I think you know what to expect there, now that you've been warned that his role isn't what the trailers make it seem.

Ben Stiller, on the other hand, isn't merely Ben Stiller, or at least not in one of the two character types for which we know him- his tendency is to play meek and well-meaning, or egotistical and dumb. Kovacs is much closer to a real person than we usually see from Stiller, which helps the otherwise slim characterisation to be more relatable. But the highlights amongst the ensemble are Matthew Broderick, who gives a performance along the lines of his Leo Bloom and got the biggest laughs of the movie from me, and Alan Alda, playing Shaw as the delightful old grandpa we know him as, while saying and doing some pretty despicable things.

Its topical grumblings are neither as pointed nor as richly drawn as those of In Time, but it's a film that should benefit from getting out there at the same time as the ongoing Occupy Wall Street publicity. Ultimately though, that political undercurrent was never meant to subsume the plot or, more importantly, the ensemble. We're getting to the point where financial bods are becoming as much a shorthand for unconscionable evil as Nazis, or zombies. While Alda gives the villain a magnetic presence, don't doubt that Tower Heist is still operating in the same terms as Ratner's usual work, concerned with the occasional big setpiece to keep you diverted.

Tower Heist is neither as bad as you'd expect, nor as good as it could have been. Would I recommend seeing it in the cinema? Sure, if you fancy a bit of light, flufy escapism with a chewable topical edge and a cast you know and like. I certainly wouldn't recommend that you pay $60 to watch it on your telly at home but it's entirely diverting, and even though it's not an ambitious comedy in terms of joke volume, it's solidly plotted, taking more time to develop and relate to the characters than you might think. It's safe as houses in its execution, but it's at least more enjoyable than the Ocean's sequels, if not the film that Ratner missed out on making.

Tower Heist is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Tower Heist, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

ANONYMOUS- Review

2011-11-01T09:00:00.002Z

It's funny for a film about dubious authorship, that Anonymous so little resembles a film by disaster-movie hackmeister Roland Emmerich. It's almost suspicious, as if the act of watching the film invites you to wonder how it could possibly have come from Emmerich. Silly, isn't it? But not nearly as silly as this well-made academic pantomime, which adapts the Oxfordian theory of Shakespearean authorship into a bombastic period drama.

Anonymous is basically a hypothetical biopic of Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, as he seeks to have his plays performed by proxy. Noted playwright Ben Jonson refuses to become his pseudonym, but he leaves the Earl's manuscripts lying around to be claimed by an illiterate actor, Will Shakespeare. It is Edward's hope that the inflammatory satire in his works will allow him to influence the masses without being outwardly treasonous. In particular, he aims to unseat Queen Elizabeth's sinister advisers, William and Robert Cecil, with whom he has been in a pitched battle of wills for decades.

The film is bookended by Derek Jacobi, acting as the chorus in a Broadway theatre production with the same title as the film. Jacobi, usually an effusive Dickens fan, seems willing to stick the boot into Shakespeare for a paycheque on this film, and he sets the tone for the rest of the film. Following from the theory that the works credited to Shakespeare were not actually written by Shakespeare, Rafe Spall's boisterous version of the Bard figures less in the story than you might think. Indeed, Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff go to some lengths to make him little more than a cog in the grand scheme of an upper-class melodrama.

Emmerich seems to understand the life and times of the man we know as Shakespeare in the terms that one might understand a biopic of a musician. I've previously noted my disdain for musician biopics, but Emmerich's ever-present ADD filmmaking actually invests this film with those tropes, such as the significant title drop and the speculative scenes around key moments. Here, right, did you know that, like, Shakespeare wasn't really Shakespeare? And, like, he shagged Queen Elizabeth I, right? And, he invented crowd-surfing! And went into space! Well, perhaps Orloff's script doesn't go that far, but it might as well have.

As is typical for a production of this type, there's a strong cast, who actually do a fine job of bringing this bunkum to life. A powerful Rhys Ifans leads the charge as the calculating and charismatic Earl, who is manipulative and yet sensitive to the corruption of the age. It's easy to root for him, especially against the dastardly Cecils. David Thewlis is yet more manipulative as William, while Edward Hogg steals scenes left and right as the pathetic, hunchbacked figure of Robert. Kudos to the casting department too, for the obvious but no less clever coup of Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson as the elder and younger versions of Elizabeth.

Elsewhere, the "sets" display all of Emmerich's usual propensity for CGI, in an admittedly stunning reconstruction of Elizabethan London, and the production design as a whole is just spectacular. By the measure of our diminished expectations of Roland Emmerich, this is probably his best film in years, even though it comes from an elitist theory, with little evidence, exaggerated with all of the director's fondness for romping historical daftness. At the same time, it chucks every conspiracy theory it has up its sleeve, right into the mix, and it's certainly engaging enough to coast along on its overblown absurdity.

Anonymous is pretty to look at, but as a film about theatre and literature, it made me want to shout "Oh no, he didn't" at the points where it most felt like the audience was meant to be in on the joke. Emmerich deserves some credit for making a historical drama accessible to a multiplex crowd, but it's sensationalised and silly as a result. There's more insight into Shakespeare in Gnomeo and Juliet than there is here. It's certainly nowhere near as bad as it sounds, and it holds enough intrigue, bolstered by its stunning troupe of players, to recommend it to anyone who was already interested in seeing it.

Anonymous is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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On the other hand, if a conflation between a flimsy theory, Blackadder and the Aristocrats joke sounds like your cup of tea, this is the must-see film of the year. If you've seen Anonymous, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL- Review

2011-10-31T09:00:00.001Z

Happy Halloween! This time last year, I was advocating a frightful double bill of the Halloween anthology film Trick 'R' Treat and the bizarre, Snicket-infused scares of Burning Bright, and it's time once again for me to give a shout out to a film you can enjoy watching as October dwindles to a close. As with last year, it's more fun than frightening- a little film called Tucker and Dale vs. Evil.

In the vein of rubbishy mainstream horror films, this is a film in which a group of teens go camping in the woods, and meet grisly fates after encountering a pair of hillbillies in a rundown shack. However, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil actually takes place from the hillbillies' perspective. Tucker and Dale are renovating their holiday home in the woods, when they rescue an unconscious high school student, Allison, from drowning. This leads Chad, the prejudiced dickhead of the group, to mount a full-on rescue attempt, and our heroes are terrified by the sudden onslaught of seemingly suicidal kids.

Not since Shaun of the Dead have we seen a horror comedy as clever and as direct as this. Pretty much every horror comedy since Shaun strives for such praise, and usually suffers by comparison. This one doesn't, because it does for slasher movies what Pegg and Wright did for zombie movies. In its favour, it has identifiable characters, a wide genre literacy, and an unwillingness to forsake the scare value of the horror and the gore for the comedy. The horror is just as unflinching as the comedy is funny. And all the way through, it consistently up-ends your expectations of that old trapped-in-the-woods slasher flick- most obviously with its lead characters.

Tucker and Dale are unerringly sweet and decent guys, albeit with enough hillbilly sensibilities that they fit into certain expectations. Tyler Labine is the big, cuddly heart of the film as Dale, enamored of the blisteringly hot Allison and yet chronically shy. Tucker, played by Alan Tudyk, has made him so, whether intentionally or not, by his constant dominance in their friendship. I guess you'd call him the smart one, but for how his idea of a woodland dream home was decorated with newspaper cuttings about murder. This only gives weight to the outside perception of the pair, but their friendship is still touching and sympathetic.

And so, the more vicious character is Chad, played by Jesse Moss. Moss gives one of my favourite performances of the year, because it's such a pitch-perfect parody of the kind of character who uses the "evil" of his opponents as a licence to be an unmitigated arsehole in the course of his heroics. Or the "Shia LaBeouf", as I call it. Chad harbours a malice for hillbillies that is not totally irrational, and yet it still leads him and his fellow students into acts of fatal stupidity, to great comic effect.

The whole affair escalates into a farce of miscommunication, which Allison, gamely played by Katerina Bowden, tries to calm down. It's cold comfort to her friends, who repeatedly misunderstand innocent acts, like a screaming Tucker running through the forest with a chainsaw, and even less comfort to Tucker and Dale, who are terrified of what they believe to be a bunch of insane kids enacting a suicide pact on their property. The accidental death toll reaches heights so ridiculous as to be hilarious, but it's the believable reactions of the characters that maintain the precarious balance between horror and comedy.

You could do much worse than to take a look at Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, this Halloween. Instead of renting some terrible remake or other, or another horror film in which kids practically line up to die at the hands of some nihilistic characterless bastard with an axe, try a film that has tons of heart to go along with all of its expelled entrails. I can't say that it's as good all the way through as it is to begin with, but it gets the very best out of its high concept. It's an oddly humanist slasher flick, for the way in which it constantly subverts all of the stuff about horror that bores you, and instead brings forth the funny and the sweet.

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is now available to rent or buy, on DVD or Blu-ray
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If you've seen Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, why not share your comments below? And have a happy Halloween!

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

THE HELP- Review

2011-10-28T12:00:00.000+01:00

Looking at this week's new releases, Tintin doesn't really have any female characters, to speak of, and in The Ides of March, (review coming next week) Evan Rachel Wood is essentially the only woman involved, and she's a victim. So while it's nice to see a "women's picture" like The Help comes along, it's also nice to see that people have gotten over this year's bout of Bridesmaids syndrome, whereby films are good cos they have women with brains and stuff. Just because mainstream Hollywood is only just realising this, doesn't mean it's anything new. Then again, this film probably broaches race issues more prominently than gender issues.

Based on the bestselling novel by Kathryn Stockett, The Help begins with a budding writer, Skeeter, returning from college to her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. She's distressed to find that her family's maid, Constantine, has seemingly quit, and even more perturbed to find the white women of Jackson spearheading a movement to make separate toilet arrangements mandatory for black people. Skeeter decides to compile a book of the servants' stories, collaborating with maids Aibileen and Minny to gather interviews about their working conditions.

It's emphatically a story that takes place with the civil rights movement in the background, during a lengthy process of social change, in a place with prehistoric racial inequalities. It's got a 12A certificate, and despite going as far as to highlight the threat of violence to the black community if they step out of line, it's essentially a fluffy take on a thorny subject. It's a feel-good film, to some extent, and so it doesn't get too embroiled in the national civil rights movement, so as to correctly avoid the implication that a gorgeous, freckled white girl was the one who spurred black people to stand up for themselves.

Happily, Emma Stone's Skeeter is not the Great White Hope that she appears from a cursory glance at the plot. The main character of the piece is arguably Aibileen, who is played incredibly by Viola Davis. Although she's impressed in a number of supporting roles in the last few years, she takes centre-stage in The Help and brings a lot of warmth and stoicism to the long-suffering Aibileen. Despite playing the foil to a scene-stealing Octavia Spencer as Minny, hers is the performance that shines through.

As an actor's film, (or more specifically, an actress' film) it has a number of other great performances too. Particularly good is Bryce Dallas Howard, as a Stepford racist arch-bitch called Hilly Holbrook. Essentially the villain of the piece, she's simperingly poisonous in a manner that reminded me of Imelda Staunton in the Harry Potter films, all pink and hateful. Howard's character literally thinks her shit doesn't stink, as she lobbies for alternative toilet arrangements, but the cruelty of her character isn't only racially motivated. She's snobby towards pretty much everyone, and Howard does a bang-up job of creating an odious character.

And don't get me wrong, I wanted to see Hilly get her comeuppance as much as anyone. My problem is that the film is 146 minutes long, and that's an awful lot of time for her to get an awful lot of comeuppance. In fact, the more she's punished, the more you come to think that her nasty and blinkered outlook was built up even more, just so it didn't seem entirely disproportionate. And yet she is an odious character, who deserved it, so I really think that's more to do with the film being overlong than it is to do with the plot or characters. The film could comfortably have lost about 20 minutes in the edit.

I'm once again extrapolating here, without having read Stockett's book, but I would guess that it's a remarkably faithful adaptation. While it's certainly cinematic, and a likely favourite in the upcoming awards season, it takes its sweet time, and seems to find something for every character to do. But weirdly, it all seems to happen consecutively, rather than simultaneously. For instance, Skeeter's relationship issues are completely ancillary, but we divert from the more interesting stuff, every now and then. It's not often that you see a token white male character in a movie, and arguably, this one could have been better off without it.

The Help isn't a film about the civil rights movement, but a film that is informed by the period in which it is set. Viola Davis gives a stunning performance, matched tooth and claw by a ferociously horrid turn by Bryce Dallas Howard. This is not a film in which Emma Stone brings about racial equality, but one in which she compassionately lobbies for people to treat their slaves with a bit more respect. Rosa Parks, she ain't. And quite right too. The really hard edges have largely been filed off, but just because it's not miserable, doesn't mean it takes injustice any less seriously. It's uplifting stuff, but with a strong moral and historical compass.

The Help is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Help, why not share your comments below? Did anyone else realise that was Jessica Chastain while they were watching? Wowzers.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN- Tintin Review

2011-10-26T09:00:00.007+01:00

Not for nothing, but I feel it's worth mentioning once again that my favourite film of all time is Raiders of the Lost Ark. Back in 1981, Steven Spielberg discovered the works of Belgian author Hergé, while doing press duties for the first Indiana Jones film, and reading a review that favourably compared the two. Spielberg has been trying to bring Tintin to the big screen ever since, and the result is The Adventures of Tintin- The Secret of the Unicorn.

Like other Spielberg projects I could mention, from this year in particular, the project is a veritable melting pot of creative talents, and so the plot comes from merging three of Hergé's stories. Tintin is a renowned journalist (of indeterminate age) who stumbles into the midst of an ancient feud when he buys a model ship in a Parisian market. The ship is one of three identical models of the Unicorn, which lies on the ocean floor somewhere, packed with sunken treasure. Allying himself with a sozzled old sea-dog, Captain Haddock, Tintin and his dog Snowy are swept into a treasure hunt against the sinister Sakharine.

Earlier this year, Cowboys and Aliens was one of Spielberg's projects as an executive producer, arriving on screens after a long period in production, and yet with numerous brilliant filmmakers and actors brought along for the ride. If anything lowered my expectations for Tintin, which stars Jamie Bell, Daniel Craig, Andy Serkis, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and boasts a script from Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, and a new score by John Williams, and has Peter flipping Jackson as a second-unit director(!), it was my relative disappointment with Cowboys and Aliens.

And yet The Secret of the Unicorn suffers from none of the earlier film's problems. Part of what makes its personality so indelibly enjoyable is that everyone working on it seems to have something in common, and that's a great affection for the source material. It's a Boy's Own tale, certainly, but then it's quite a faithful adaptation of three consecutive Tintin stories, which weren't renowned for their female characters anyway. And yet it moves apace- there's about ten minutes of exposition in the whole thing, and the rest of the running time is assigned to "Big Funny Action-Adventure Mystery". And gosh, does it tick all of those boxes.

While falling over myself to praise every little thing about a brand-new full-blooded Spielberg adventure movie, it behooves me to first mention the script, because that's what really stands out. Moffat wrote it before agreeing to take over as head writer on Doctor Who, and the final product feels very much of Moffat's style. It's funny and unpredictable, its central mystery plot densely plotted but not contrived, and it feels enough like his that you can guess which bits were added by Wright and Cornish, and appreciate those bits too. There are a couple of sight gags that feel like pure Wright, and with Cornish having cut his teeth on Attack the Block, here's another hero who may be younger than he appears.

With the task of bringing Tintin and his adventures to a new audience, the film retains an old-fashioned sensibility. But if the medium is the message, then this 3D performance-capture animation is as modern a version of Tintin as you can imagine. Still, the aesthetic is far more charming than we've seen in the films that Robert Zemeckis has made with this technique. Nobody looks photo-real, but the character design offsets any unnerving qualities. And happily, it makes Snowy into a proper character, in much the same vein as Gromit or Muttley are dogs who interact with the human characters without needing to speak English. Arguably, it's taken this long to make the film because you couldn't do this story justice in live-action.

Andy Serkis practically leads the charge as Captain Haddock. As new as performance capture technology may be, he's practically an old hand by now, and he steals scenes all over the shop as the alcoholic sailor on whom Tintin relies. Jamie Bell plays our hero's agelessness rather well, with fresh-faced enthusiasm complementing his steely and resourceful determination. Daniel Craig is clearly having fun playing outside of himself as the villain of the piece, and although Simon Pegg and Nick Frost aren't present very often, you're engaged enough by their comic relief that you'll soon get over trying to figure out who is playing Thompson and who is playing Thomson.

But there are drawbacks to this technique. There's one brilliant comedic scene in which Tintin has to recover an item from a room of sleeping blaggards, on a ship that sways side to side and tilts them all over the place, without waking anyone up. The camerawork in the virtual environment, coupled with the deliberately animated look of the piece, makes it reminiscent of a video game cutscene. Likewise, the film's most memorable setpiece, a chase scene that takes place in one bravura take, which would obviously be impossible in live-action, is only dulled by that video game feel.

Truthfully though, the impressive thing about The Secret of the Unicorn is how it calls back to Indiana Jones in spirit, rather than making any obvious connections. It's certified PG, but Spielberg has always been able to get away with a hell of a lot, at PG level. Villains wield guns against our young hero, there are fist-fights aplenty, and the entire plot hinges upon Haddock's desperate alcoholism. As often as films are labelled "fun for the whole family", Spielberg's absolute mastery of that balance is inimitable. Perhaps Kingdom of the Crystal Skull's 12A certificate might appear to be the least of its problems, but that's still somewhere it went wrong. Not to worry though, he more than atones for his last film with his new one.

The Adventures of Tintin- The Secret of the Unicorn isn't a film that will convert performance-capture sceptics, but that's because, thankfully, it's a film first, and an industrial point second. Spielberg has always had a keen commercial instinct, and yet the fulfilment of his version of Tintin, as must have been floating around in his head for almost thirty years, is more purely enjoyable than that. It feels like a long time since we saw a good, old-fashioned, PG-rated family adventure in this mould, but to see one with a cracking script, brought to life with this much affection for its source and respect for its audience, is nothing short of rapturous.

The Adventures of Tintin- The Secret of the Unicorn is now showing, in 2D and 3D, at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Secret of the Unicorn, why not share your comments below? And I'm sure I'm not the first to point it out, but Jamie Bell is from my neck of the woods, meaning that we actually got a Teesside Tintin on the big screen...

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3- Spoiler Review

2011-10-24T08:30:00.000+01:00

This review contains SPOILERS. If you haven't seen Paranormal Activity 3 yet, you'll want to wait before reading this. In the meantime, my spoiler-free review can be found over at Movie Reviews.

Having really enjoyed Paranormal Activity 2 last Halloween, seeing Paranormal Activity 3 at the cinema, on opening night, was a must for me. But while I found the first two films in the series to be about equal in terms of quality, the advantage of the third instalment isn't merely the experience of seeing it with an audience- it's also really fucking good.

If you started out being scared shitless of the first film, then perhaps this series has a limited shelf-life. But if, like me, you saw room for improvement from the beginning, the imagination necessary to keep the ball rolling on this series is actually what makes the whole endeavour worthwhile. After the cliffhanger ending of part 2's parallel prequel, Paranormal Activity 3 is a fully-fledged flashback to the childhood of sisters Katie and Kristi, filling in backstory that enlightens the demonic activity previously seen. Specifically, it seems to centre around Kristi's imaginary friend, Toby...

As these films are typified by the experience of seeing them in the cinema, it makes sense to attach the One Mile Review I recorded after seeing the film, as a document of my immediate thoughts on watching it, before I apply hindsight. You can watch the One Mile Review below.

As I alluded in the video, many of the scenes in the film's trailers do not actually appear in the film. For once, this particularly tricksy bit of disingenuous marketing doesn't bother me. Given how the second instalment saw fit to play on audience expectations, built by the first film, in such a way that stretched the patience of many viewers, the supplementary material in the trailers plays with those expectations in a different way- hardly any of those bits that already creeped you out about the trailer are actually in the film. Any disappointment or annoyance is offset by the fact that the stuff that is in the film is way creepier.

The film's main innovation with the found-footage format, attaching a camera to an oscillating fan base, at first appears to be quite a cheap and gimmicky way of extending the verisimilitude that the audience surely must have seen through by now. But in context, the gimmick isn't exploited, and the oscillating camera actually gives way to my favourite scare of the series, and honestly, the best scene I've seen in a film all year- the disappearance and reappearance of everything in the family's kitchen. That scare is a goddamn work of art, and worth the price of admission alone.

I've already confessed that I take real guilty pleasure in watching ghost-train ride movies with a big audience, but the appeal of the Paranormal Activity series, to me, is more than that. The retroactive continuity, of embellishing a film that was always intended to be standalone, was always going to create plotholes, but the history of Katie and Kristi and their family's demon problem is more consistent than inconsistent. The necessary exposition is delivered in an entertaining fashion, alongside the kind of homespun terror that have so firmly captured the imagination of the filmgoing public.

Most importantly, this film has a sense of humour that the other films lacked. It doesn't suddenly tilt into Raimi-esque histrionics, (although certain scenes where Katie was brutalised by the demon reminded me of Drag Me To Hell), but it brings levity to the film in a way that only makes the next scare more tectonic. Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman are so assured in their tense construction that they can completely puncture the mood one moment, only to rebuild with a vengeance. I honestly haven't had this much fun with a movie all year.

Let's be honest- the film has just enjoyed the highest-grossing opening weekend ever, for a horror film, and so we'll know before Friday if Paranormal Activity 4 is coming next Halloween. Another thing that appeals to me about this series is that it's not misanthropic or gory, and so I have no problem with its appropriation of Saw's old spot on the movie calendar. Then again, we know that these films are relatively cheap to make, and that they make a big box-office return, and so, some day, Paramount will run this series into the ground.

But I think that my favourite part of Paranormal Activity 3 is how it could serve as an ending point for the series. It won't be the end, but it shows that the series is getting better and not worse. I think it has more longevity than many of those other franchises, even if I think the way forward from here would be to dispense with the found-footage angle, and tell stories within the mythology in a different fashion.

And whatever my problems with Catfish, I think directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman demonstrated enough imagination on part three to merit a callback on future instalments. Then again, the ending, along with their previous film, serves to prove that whatever you want to call the fear or hatred of older women, those guys have got it, and they've got it bad.

Up until Paranormal Activity 3, I had enjoyed seeing the films in the cinema with an audience, more than I enjoyed watching the films themselves. The third film isn't flawless, and it may stretch credulity for some viewers, but suddenly, I really feel like the series has captured me in the same way that cemented the success of the first film. Three films in, the scares must be inventive, and they must be unpredictable. Everyone involved ups their game, and so, this sequel successfully manages both. It's by far and away the best film of the series so far. If they won't go out on a high, I'm quite looking forward to next October all the same.

Paranormal Activity 3 is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Paranormal Activity 3, why not share your comments below? Also, let me know how you enjoyed the fact that it was a period piece, set in the 1980s, without succumbing to nostalgic obviousness.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.