Discussions from the After Movie Diner

The After Movie Diner Podcast NOMINATED for TLA CULT AWARD!

2012-03-01T13:54:00.000-05:00

The After Movie Diner is extraordinarily proud to have been nominated for a TLA Cult Award!!
We can be found in the BEST WEBSITE/BLOG/PODCAST/WHATEVER category.
Please please go and vote! http://tlacult.com/tlacultawards2012
VOTE NOW! It would be amazing! Thank you!!

You do not have to vote in all categories if you don't want to
Voting is open to everyone. There is no limit on the number of votes you may cast!!
To vote scroll down the page till you see my category, click on my logo to highlight it with a yellow square around it and then scroll further down and hit VOTE
Do it MULTIPLE times please!!!!!

The AMD Alternative Oscar Nominations 2012

2012-02-16T00:12:00.001-05:00

Ok so here they are the various nominations for the After Movie Diner alternative Oscars!

Please read, pick your favourites, vote by either commenting on this blog or e-mailing aftermoviediner@gmail.com
and then don't forget to TUNE IN to the After Movie Diner Podcast on Monday 27th Feb to hear us discuss it and officially pick our winners for 2012!!!

If you want to be inculded:
DON'T FORGET TO VOTE!

Best Actor
Jason Statham (KE)
John Goodman, Michael Parkes(RS)
M Smiley (Kill List)
A Serkis (RPOTA)
Ryan Gosling, Ron Perlman (Drive)
William Fichtner (DA)
Banderas(Skin I live in)
Otto Jespersen (TH)
Robert Downey, Jr – Sherlock Holmes 2
Jason Statham – Killer Elite
Daniel Craig – Cowboys and Aliens
Patrick Wilson - Insidious

Best Supporting Actor
Andy Serkis – Rise of the Planet of the Apes
John Goodman – Red State

Best Actress
Mellisa Leo (RS)
Cary Mulligan (Drive)
MyAnna Buring (Kill List)
Zoe Saldana (Columbiana)
Elena Anaya (Skin I live in)
Saoirse Ronan – Hanna
Depressing and English, so no chance of an Oscar nod, but Olivia Coleman - Tyrannosaur

Best Supporting Actress
Mila Kunis – Friends with Benefits
Elle Fanning – Super 8
Melissa Leo – Red State

Best Screenplay

Kevin Smith(RS)

Ben Ripley(Source Code)

Matt Sherring(KE)

Wheatley/Jump(KillList)

Andrew Niccol – In Time

Best Director
Matthew Vaughan (X-men)
Jason Eisner (Hobo)
Kevin Smith (RS)
Ben Wheatly (KillList)
Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive)
Duncan Jones (Source Code)
Gary McKendry (Killer Elite)
Andre Ovredal (TH)
Kenneth Branagh – Thor
JJ. Abrams – Super 8
Neil Burger – Limitless
Jonathan Liebesman – Battle Los Angeles

Best actor, Director, Screenplay with no more than four words, Original score that isn’t entirely original
The Artist

Best adapted screenplay
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. If you want action, you need to read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold or similar. Fuck all happens in this one, very slowly. A bit like Drive, but with more actual driving.

Best foreign language film, Best Action, Best Use of Cows
13 Assassins

Best animated film
Kung Fu Panda 2 was fun, but Rango was genius, although kids probably sat there thinking ‘what the fuck is this about?’

Cinematography
For making beige look so good….Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Documentary feature
Senna – nuff said

BEST OF THE SAPPY MOVIES I HAD TO WATCH WITH MY WIFE
Crazy Stupid Love

Best Horror

Troll Hunter

Paranormal Activity 3

Rubber

Tucker & Dale vs Evil

Atrocious

Dream Home

Kill List

Best Overall Film

13 Assassins

Red State

Hobo with a Shotgun

Killer Elite

MI4

X-men

StakeLand

Source Code

Skin I Live in

Drive Angry

A Serbian Film

Rise of Planet Of The Apes

Fast Five

Limitless

In Time

Thor

You’ll disagree with me, but this was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I’d happily watch the directors cut with an extra hour of beige men sitting in smoky beige rooms. drinking tea. Then watch the outakes. Followed by the commentary

Most Disappointing Film

Drive – no acting (looking doleful doesn’t count), no tension, precious little driving.

Shame – what a terrible time you must have being quite well off and having lots of sex. Pull yourself together you divot.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. More Bergerac than Midsommer Murders for me, On an island and everyone is slightly posh apart from the obvious bit of rough. Maybe John Nettles is available if Craig doesn’t want to come back for more?

Bridesmaids

The Life Time Achievement for Most Underrated Films of All Time
Cobra
Escape from LA
Volunteers
Brain Candy
Fanboys
Blood in blood out
Rivers edge
Eagle vs shark
Tao of steve
Thrashin'
Run ronny run
Summer camp nightmare
Hawk the slayer
Grosse pointe blank

Crimes to cinema:

Pointless useless remakes

Conan
Straw Dogs
Footloose
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The best of what Moe 'Drunk On VHS' Porne watched in 2011
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn
Shock 'Em Dead
Hamburger: The Motion Picture
Class of 1999
Death Drug
Karate Cop
Body Rock
Las Vegas BloodBath

The Craziest
Birdemic: Shock and Terror! - Could actually be a contender for worst movie, but the experience of seeing the film with an audience and all the drunken craziness involved with the screening made for a really amazing experience. The Screening I went to featured the local chapter of the Jerry Owen Fan Club (Jerry is a character who appears in the film for maybe 3 minutes, but the kids love him)

The Absolute Worst!
Though probably not a huge surprise for anyone who follows the No Budget Nightmares Podcast hosted by Doug Tilley and myself, but my pick for worst movie watched in 2011 is quite easily

Hip Hop Locos - The story of 2 cholos looking to rob, steal, and kill their way into the music industry. Every line of this film ends with "ese" or "homes"...I think it actually may do a better job of setting back hispanic's rights than any chapter of the KKK could ever do!

AND LASTLY, From David De Moss
The AYTIWS Awards for 2011

Nothing unites the rising generation of film critics like contempt for the Academy Awards. So in the spirit of Judd Nelson telling the four-faced, hovering octopus monster that “I have nothing but contempt for this court,” allow me to present a slate of awards to the few films of 2011 I actually managed to see.

The Carl Gustav Jung Award for Archetypical Critical Darling
goes to “Drive,” for being a slow, plodding, staring contest of a predictable crime thriller punctuated by brief moments of violence sure to shock anyone who's doesn't watch low budget horror movies on a regular basis. i.e., professional critics, who are nothing if not creatures of habit. Read any one of them around about the second week of August and you'll see the signs of Summer Blockbuster burnout in full force. The biggest sign being their unreserved praise of the first passably-directed, pretentiously “smart” film they come across. Drive just so happened to be last years lottery winner: not bad, but genuinely overrated by virtue of the fact it stuck out like a sore thumb in the summer of Fast Five, Harry Potter 7.2 and Transformers: Darkside of My Ass.

The Snakes on a Plane Award for Biggest Disappointment
goes to “Captain America: The First Avenger” for being a thirty minute Captain America movie inexpertly stapled to a forty-five minute trailer for The Avengers, as its title helpfully warns. I would give this award to Thor but I've never cared about Thor and not even the combined powers of Natalie Portman and Kenneth Branagh could change that. I occasionally give a crap about Captain America but ours is a toxic relationship since the red white and blue bastards burned me for four movies running. I don't blame anyone involved: all three of 2011's Marvel movies had “Studio Interference” written all over them. But I wouldn't have been so disappointed if those first thirty minutes weren't so damn good. So step forward, Joe Johnston and know that The Rocketeer is still your best film.

The “I've Been Wondering, What Are Midichlorians?” Award for Franchise Murder
once again goes to Michael Bay and Producer-in-Name-Only Steve Speilberg for their Transformers franchise, of which Transformers 3 is but the latest vile emanation. While not as openly racist as its predecessors, Dark of the Moon still manages just as much of an onerous uphill slog through boredom, stupidity and incoherent visual noise. Except its even longer, so I'll say no more about it here, because there are worse things to discuss.

The Pizza Box Full of Dogshit Award for Worst Movie of the Year
(that I personally saw) goes to...(dramatic pause) Green Lantern. Bad enough it was a Top Gun rip-off that completely missed the point of Top Gun by recasting Iceman as a Chick (or a Pink-skinned alien, depending on your reading). Bad enough its director obviously did not give two shits about the material. Bad enough they chose to make the film about the most boring character to ever bear the name in the franchise's seventy year history. (So boring, in fact, that he's recently had his history re-written to be more of a Top Gun rip-off.) Bad enough they consigned one comic's largest and most visually-diverse casts of characters to the not-done-yet CGI background. They had to top all that stupidity off by hiring Ryan Reynolds, the rich man's Jason Lee. Because there's a hero for The People.

And there are my awards, honoring to the four films of last year that actively pissed me off. I'd put together a competing slate of awards for those few films I actually liked but, in an experience I'm sure you'll recognize, all of those turned out to be older releases, mostly from last century. And so it goes.

Don Dohler-Fest 2 coming to The After Movie Diner Podcast featuring Interview with GEORGE STOVER

2012-02-04T10:24:00.001-05:00

The is week on Monday February 6th

the After Movie Diner Podcast
is continuing its coverage of

Don Dohler films

with Galaxy Invader and Alien Factor 2

Trailer

Whole film!!

Trailer

and I haven't even got to the

MOST EXCITING PART

yet and that is that this week's episode features

AN INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE STOVER

Yes the actor who starred in ALL of Don's movies in one way or other comes on the show to tell us all about how he met and what it was like working with 'The Family Dohler' of crew and cast, his favourite of the roles and films and much much more!

Check it out MONDAY FEBRUARY 6th

Here: http://amdpodcast.blogspot.com

Here: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/110745

or subscribe on iTunes here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/podcast-from-after-movie-diner/id452996435

Alternative Oscars Competition

2012-01-27T12:01:00.000-05:00

This year the Oscars are a bloody shambles. A bunch of wishy washy, boring, uninspiring and incorrect nominations, although a fair reflection of just how there really weren't many good films in 2011.
Most were boring and bad.
or were they?

For my Feb 27th show on the After Movie Diner PODCAST I will be hosting the Alternative Oscars and I would like to put a shout out here and ask everyone to e-mail me their noms for 2011 that the academy wouldn't go near. The noms can be anything you like, go wild!
Best supporting actor in a titty flick
whatever you want

It just has to have been given some sort of first time release in 2011 (dvd included) and it can't be nominated for an Oscar and that's it.

All submissions to aftermoviediner@gmail.com by feb 6th please

I will then organise the nominations, work out my own categories and put it up on my site for a vote!
WATCH THIS SPACE

David Fincher's Girl With A Dragon Tattoo - 20th December 2012

2011-12-21T03:34:00.001-05:00

There he is, look at him there on the poster, the charisma-vaccuum himself, broody, pouty Daniel Craig and next to him a pierced pale goth chick you've never heard of.

What are they doing there I hear you cry?

Well they are there to bring you this generation's Silence of the Lambs and what I mean by that is an outrageous pulpy lot of old implausible and predictable nonsense tarted up with a good director and some amazing performances to convince you with its moody poster and bleak landscapes it's really a classic work of art.

Except that it isn't. It's Midsomer Murders with a graphic and disturbing rape scene. It's a 3hr nordic Inspector Morse. It's Poirot with tits.

That this received an R rating where the sight of Michael Fassbender's old chap in Shame has garnered an NC-17 is, quite frankly bewildering. While I have no intention with this piece on spoiling anything about the plot, I would say this is not a film for the sensitive.

I came out of the film an hour ago and as the credits rolled I loved it. I thought it to be perfectly made, very well acted, beautifully shot and a good story, simply told but with Fincher's usual subtle attention to detail. All the richness you required just tantalisingly out of reach. The trouble is, on the walk home I talked myself into seeing all of its flaws.

The subject matter, basically a hunt for a killer, is a well trodden path for Fincher and this does have some repetition from, what I consider to be his masterpiece, Zodiac, except with Daniel Craig leaning and posing in a straight-from-a-magazine-photo-shoot stylishly sparse Swedish cottage wearing the latest Banana Republic 'cosy thinking man's range'. It was, however, infinitely more watchable than that tedious fleck of arse beard picking that was the Social Network.

Although I haven't read the book, I get the feeling that most of the problems I have with the film stem from the book and if there's any criticism to throw at Fincher and the screenwriter it's that they followed the whole thing too slavishly and meticulously. So no surprise there then.

There were certain scenes in it that were staggeringly graphic and disturbing but actually, with hindsight, did little to inform you about the character in question (the titular girl with the named mythical creature doodle) beyond 'she's cleverer, more resourceful and disturbed than you thought isn't she and don't worry she'll be fine for money for the rest of the film' and I am sure there is a better way to inform me of all of that than what you did show me which was excessive and perverse seemingly just for the sake of it.
In fact the entire vague back story of our Girl with the Dragon Tattoo can be summoned up by the title of the film. We know what we know about her because of the simplistic yet attempting to be mysterious things we are told and shown.
She has a dragon tattoo, relevent no? dark and edgy? not in the slightest most 12 year olds probably have a tattoo at this point, sounds mysterious and possibly Asian for the cover of your novel? BINGO! Instant hit.

From all my experience of pierced, ever changing goth haired, bi-curious, blank eyed, pale skinned, mopey girls who wear t-shirts with the words fuck on them while carrying around $1500 Apple laptops in their army-surplus black rough-weave back packs is that they are excessively dull and uninteresting people who listen to dreary music and have predictable Daddy issues. I thought we'd all moved on but no, here comes this story and despite it being acted the hell out of in a very brave and gripping way by relative newcomer Rooney Mara, as a character she is a strutting cliche of what middle class white guys THINK is edgy and interesting but really she probably smells like a rusty tap water soaked bath once used for making meth and drowning rats.

It's just all a bit obvious as is the 'internet solves and knows everything' and 'computers are capable of everything in the blink of an eye' writing that passes for detective work. It's all pointless anyway anyone who knows anything will have spotted the villain in the first 10 minutes of meeting them.

The whole film is covert misdirection on Fincher's part to convince you that what you are watching is deep, twisty and turny, dark and edgy, adult and loaded with meaning when really it is a simple murder mystery in a stately home with a family full of secrets that you'll see every week you tune into Lewis (or pick your mopey detective of choice). Thinking back on it now and the overly graphic scenes really did exploit me and left me feeling cheated because they actually didn't inform the overall story at all. There were little to no consequences (for her) during the rest of the film at all.

It was fine, it was good, it never felt slow to me and the 3hrs passed ok.
There are slight pacing issues as it has the multiple ending syndrome that plagues over-reaching nonsense like this and a montage at the very end feels rushed and inartistically put together compared with the rest of the film but that was small potatoes when viewing it as a whole. When Fincher puts his mind to a set piece he can accomplish interesting things with editing, juxtaposition and tension like no other, he needs to move away from these shitty scripts and do something that matches his intelligent, diligent and detailed approach.

Also why are some people doing accents and others aren't? is this all explained in the second book?

It's got to be better than Bryan Singer taking on a big budget film of Jack and the fucking Beanstalk, right??

7 out of 10 predictable yet beautifully tossed salads

A FISTFUL OF DOHLERS

2011-12-08T20:18:00.003-05:00

It's HERE - to Listen to the show click the link below!

The After Movie Diner Podcast

PRESENTS

'A Fistful of Dohlers'

A look at the life & films of one Mr. Don Dohler

FEATURING

AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH JOHN KINHART DIRECTOR OF 'BLOOD BOOBS & BEASTS'
available on Hulu or to rent and buy from Amazon

Nick, Phil and Myself will look at 3 of Dohler's early Sci-Fi and Horror films
Alien Factor (1978)

Watch on YouTube

Fiend (1980)

Watch on YouTube

and
Blood Massacre (1991)

Only trailer currently available online

Those not familiar with Don Dohler he is a no-budget Baltimore based Horror and Sci-Fi director who, since watching the EXCELLENT documentary and 4 of his 5 early films, I have become hugely enamored with.

We discussed Nightbeast (another of his films) on an earlier podcast

I can't suggest him too highly for fans of B-Movies, schlock, creature features and horror.

Get ready because a FIST FULL OF DOHLERS is coming your way!

My Top 10 of the year so far - 26th October 2011

2011-10-26T13:18:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the wonderful fellas over at http://cinematicmethod.com I was inspired to do something I don't do very often: create a list, with a definite order, of films.
It's difficult to do it with favourites or even favourites within a genre but actually, considering 2011 has been so utterly dire in terms of film, it didn't take me long to run down a list of releases this year and out of the ones I have seen, produce a top 10 list of my favourite films of the year so far. So, purely for your idle entertainment here goes nothing:

1. Killer Elite
2. Red State
3. Source Code
4. Jane Eyre
5. Our Idiot Brother
6. Hobo with a Shotgun
7. 50/50
8. Super
9. The Mechanic
10. Contagion
Runner Up: Midnight in Paris
Worst movie of the year: The Thing Remake/Prequel

Drive - 17th September 2011

2011-09-18T01:16:00.002-04:00

Ok so I haven't written the blog in ages because, well quite frankly I have been busy and obsessed with the new After Movie Diner podcast amdpodcast.blogspot.com , also a lot of the films that I have seen recently haven't inspired me exactly to write anything about them. Don't worry, I will go back and cover them all eventually I am just not going to be a stickler on when, the date on the posts will still indicate when I saw the film, ok?

So for almost a year this blog has been updated in the order that I saw the films but from now on, it will be updated when I have something to say.

So this brings me to Drive, which I have just seen and has inspired me big time to put my thoughts down now. For those who either haven't seen it or haven't read up on it, Ryan Gosling plays a quiet, enigmatic stunt driver who works movies by day and by night, literally, moonlights as a getaway driver.
We never find out why, nor does the movie ever fully explain it because that would have forced the writer to actually pen some dialogue. When we do get even the remotest bit of back story about any of the characters it is presented by one character wandering up to another and in a neat, concise monologue telling the person and us, the audience, basically just enough so we get the picture. It's a slightly obvious, ham fisted way of doing things.
Gosling becomes enamoured with Carey Mulligan and her son who live next door by way of a montage and some electronika musak. When her husband is released from jail and some of his old cronies come calling, Gosling takes it upon himself to help, the plan fails, everything goes from bad to worse and it's up to him and only him to ensure Mulligan and the kid's safety.

Sounds exciting, right? well it is and it isn't. Here is what I wrote the moment I got home:

"While I certainly didn't hate the movie and would still recommend everyone to go and see it I am just not sure I wasn't having the wool pulled over my eyes.

It was either a phenomenal piece of stylistic and understated brilliance with subtlety taking the place of script while also featuring some extreme and intentionally over the top and almost manga/cartoonish ultra violence; sort of like David Lynch meets The Coen's (actually Barton Fink came to mind) via Scorsese (part of the plot and character was pure Taxi Driver without the voice over and Albert Brooks' presence sort of confirmed it for me).
OR
It was the longest, most pretentious, stylistic mess (veering oddly from moments of quiet, oblique, impenetrable confusing silence to loud slow mo John Woo via Tarantino violence) that I have ever had the misfortune to sit through.
It certainly had me swinging from one opinion to the other all the way home and part of me was deeply angered by the film but then again it also left me feeling still, happy and weirdly relaxed.

Oscar contender by the new Lynch/Coen/Scorsese/Tarantino hybrid we've been waiting for in the sea of mundane and banal cinematic offerings of late or does the emperor have a new car?
YOU decide - go watch it, any film that makes me think this much and feel conflicted HAS to be worth the price of admission."

What I will say is this, the supporting cast are brilliant. Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston and Ron Perlman all play their parts with as much relish as the non-existent script will allow.
Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, however, fall into the same category as the film, are their incredibly understated, blank, mumbly performances work of amazing, burgeoning young talents? or are they both expressionless, bland, doe eyed frauds?I honestly just don't know and couldn't tell you.

It might have all been a dream.

It was an utterly frustrating experience writing this review but I really had to put it down on paper (so to speak).

Either 2 out of 10 or 8 out of 10 - I can't decide.

UPDATE: Ok, so it's a few days later - Tues 20th Sept to be precise and the whole internet it seems is clamouring to, pardon my expression, suck this films dick. Everyone is going crazy over the praise they give it.
Well that's fine, it's great people saw something in the cinema that for them was exciting and engaging. I would never criticise them personally for thinking what they want but the more people go on about it the more I have thought back over the film to see if there was something I missed because a lot of these people are my friends and I trust and respect their opinion.
Well sadly no, in fact the more I think about it the worse the film gets.
I am just going to say it because before I sort of held back because I was trying to give the film its due but it needs to be said: The script was weak and lazy. The exposition was heavy handed and there wasn't enough of it and the long, drawn out and repetitive silences to replace character exposition got really annoying and had me shifting in my seat wanting to scream at the screen "for fucks sake say something you droopy faced bastard!"
The performances of Gosling and Mulligan don't convince me either, yes they did develop chemistry, of sorts, through their long protracted doe eyed silences but beyond that, it was unrealistic. Real relationships, the sort we are meant to believe they have because the whole film's plot basically hinges on it, require a conversation. Just one or two. A word here or there would surfice but no, nothing, just a whole lot of gazing and a nondescript child is enough to make any lone man risk his life and the life of his only friend, we are meant to believe and I think Mulligan and Gosling do just enough so that people can't accuse them of not acting and for some to think their performances are understated genius but, to be honest, anyone can mumble through a role and the few sparks of energy he did have were few and far between.

Ok, though, let's move away from those two points, let's accept all that as fine, let's say it was more like a grindhouse film, many people have used the word retro (why? I don't know but let's go with it), let's say that the flimsy obvious exposition was on purpose, it certainly fits with the excessive and cartoonishly rendered blood letting and underworld crime theme.
Great, as a grindhouse film it's too long, too slow and with overt artistic pretensions and you can't have a film called Drive, go on and on about what a great driver this guy is and then in the one scene where it really counts (the getaway) have another car there that is as good and almost gets the better of them when it's only meant to be driven by some generic hoods.
So is it an art film with grindhouse pretensions or a grindhouse film with artistic pretensions? I mean at least when Tarantino tried to do retro with Dogs and Pulp especially he put in enough interesting dialogue and jokes to cover up what were huge obvious homages to other things and in fact when he makes a purposeful grindhouse film years later and even Inglorious Basterds after that (which is based on a 70s grindhouse action flick) they are the worse two films of his career.

I still don't mean to be too down on the film, it really was ok but it's a reaction to people going on about how brilliant it was. I am sorry but it really wasn't brilliant. It was ok. Maybe it really just is that people either haven't watched a film like this in a while or that all the other films they have seen recently have been so bad that this one sticks out amongst the shit. I don't know but I also don't believe in falling for hype or praising things unduly. Praise where praise is due: Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman and Bryan Cranston.
The cinematography wasn't bad either but it was uneven in places and the editing, again, wasn't too shabby except where they disjointedly slipped in long shots of silent night driving over and over again to try and infuse Ryan's bland performance with some sort of tortured depth. I get it! the guy feels more comfortable behind the wheel of a car where he is in control than in his own skin where he is not! I get it! I got it an hour ago! stop dragging the film out!
Sorry I am ranting again but this film is forcing me to. I don't know why but when I don't understand why people think it's a masterpiece I have to offer my counter argument. Sorry

The Dilemma - 23rd June 2011

2011-09-01T01:41:00.001-04:00

I had heard all the criticisms: the negative use of the word gay, what the hell was Ron Howard doing slumming it with this week sauce comedy, it didn't know what genre it wanted to be, Queen Latifa acted like an idiot (although when she became the bench mark for high art I don't know - like to enlighten me?) and none of the characters were likable.

Well yes, ok, some of those are fair points, for example it does swing violently all over the place in terms of mood with one minute being a drama, one minute being a farce and next moment being some sort of ridiculous lads comedy but for anyone who saw Vince Vaughn's film The Break Up you'll know that the ones where he has input on the idea, mainly writing or producing, usually seem genuinely interested in the idea of relationships, not in the usual 'boy meets girl' but what happens once boy has met girl, got together and the real challenges start.

Financially, for Vaughn, these have been good waters to tread but, like we have learnt, a films take is no indication of actually how good the film is and when it comes to that he has had varying degrees of success with this concept over his past few films, from the very good (The Break Up) to the 'how did so many right people get something so horribly wrong' (Couples Retreat). He has dealt with break ups, how do couples who are great together privately deal with their dutso families, what happens when another couples mooted break up effects 3 other couples and now the Dilemma which can be boiled down to what happens when one member of two great couples finds out that his friends wife is cheating on him?

Well next to the Break Up this is the second best film of this type that Vaughn has attempted, there is quite a drop off but thankfully Four Christmases and Couples Retreat this is not. Yes some of the jokes and slapstick maybe a bit broad but so was a lot of The Break Up and I honestly always appreciate the attempt to do something more than just the generic rom-com.

Proving, if proof was ever needed, that Ron Howard has absolutely no style of directing what-so-ever, this film could have been directed by generic-blockbuster-comedy-director number 5 and you wouldn't know the difference and while I applaud Vaughn attempting to work with lots of different people each time I am not sure how well this cast gelled together. Individually they were all fine but I am not sure I can handle Winona Ryder anymore, she's just weird.

He may have the success rate of late era Woody Allen, with more misses than hits but I, for one, am willing to allow him to mine the concept of all the possibilities of 'what happens once you're with someone' for as long as he likes and with all the different cast/director combos he can think of because as almost all of The Break Up and parts of The Dilemma show somewhere in his rapid fire delivery is some really good ideas just waiting to be given some form and structure and you never know, it might happen again yet.

6 out of 10 bagels confused as doughnuts and the eater gets a slightly disappointing but not unpleasant experience.
Points from the Wife 6.5 out of 10

Best in Show - 20th June 2011

2011-08-12T03:44:00.000-04:00

12 years after Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean first coined the phrase 'Mockumentary' in the now legendarily funny "This is Spinal Tap", the aforementioned Mr.Chris Guest re-intvented the wheel and re-vitalised the formula with a series of similar styled films, all, mostly, starring the same regular group of actors.
Apart from an outline by Guest and SCTV alum and 80s comedic legend, Eugene Levy, the dialogue was improvised mostly in the form of talking heads interspersed with sketches and scenes, some which pushed the story forward and others merely to tell jokes.

Where Tap focussed on a big, famous and bombastic band on the downturn of their luck, the following four films would deal more with fringe groups of smaller minded people, in all but Best in Show, trying to create something artistic but on a much smaller or independent scale. Like Tap though, they all seemingly have delusions of grandeur.

In Best in Show, the second of the four films Guest and company have, so far, made together, the action centres around several couples bringing their prized pooch to compete in the national finals at the Mayflower dog tournament. You get the crazy, wound tight, new age yuppies, the seemingly happy go-lucky, middle aged, mild mannered, married couple where the wife has more than a few skeletons in her cupboard, the fairly flamboyant gay couple, the idiotic, blonde trophy wife to a seemingly ancient man with money and her go-getting, lesbian trainer and finally Guest himself, barely recognisable as always, as a soft spoken, mild southern gentleman who seemingly lives life by three things: fishing, naming nuts and his bloodhound dog.

Unlike Tap before it and a Mighty Wind that would follow, Best in Show, while it has it's over the top moments and it's silly bits, seems a lot more of a genuine subtle character study and at times, especially with the arguing couple and also with the wife of many lovers, an unusually dark piece full of pathos and awkward silences.
Not a lot of humour is derived from the idea of 'showing the dogs', if the point of a zombie film is that it's really the human's that are the monsters then it's the point of Best in Show that it's us humans who are crazy, stupid or both, with the dogs treated as serious and almost lazily confused by the whole thing.

The performances in this are, across the board, strong, nuanced, perfectly realised and in their attention to detail, utterly hilarious. Guest, Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock especially disappear in their roles and, actually, when you think of Guest in Tap, Princess Bride, A Few Good Men, Waiting for Guffman, this and others, he rivals Peter Sellers in his ability to seemingly become an entirely new, intricate and, often, totally unrecognisable character. While I know he has reached something of a god status amongst those in the know, it is criminal that we live in a society that praises actors who routinely and, very often, badly play themselves over and over again when amongst them, working away, with little fanfare, there is an incredible and talented chameleon like Christopher Guest.

Best in Show is not the funniest film of this type, when it comes to actual, obvious, laugh out loud jokes and of course nothing rivals the quote rate of Tap but there are some classic scenes in this, some lovely running jokes and as we reach the climax at the actual dog show we are treated to, the always fantastic and funny, Fred Willard as a spectacularly clueless announcer.

Nothing is made of the direction but I suppose as you don't notice it and it feels authentic throughout then it's a job well done. Guest certainly knows how to get the best out of these people and capture all that he needs.

Best in Show is probably the bravest, or at least most inventive of the four Guest/Levy collaborations because all his other topics: Small town amateur dramatics, music and movie making are easy targets to some extent, especially for people who are actors/musicians already, and while a dog show and dog trainers may initially feel like an easy target, like absurd beauty pageants or what have you, the way they have crafted the film, the stereotypes may not be what you expect and it actually surprises, also the dogs are not played for laughs, the humans are.

If you only see one post-Tap Guest movie then make it a Mighty Wind because it's just funnier in gag rate but if you see a second one or are in the mood for a slower, more nuanced character piece pick Best in Show. You'll see a new thing each time you go back and watch it, so why not go do that now!

7 out of 10 tasty dog biscuits
Points from the Wife - 7 out of 10

Tango & Cash - 12th June 2011

2011-08-11T23:50:00.002-04:00

Tango and Cash may just be one of the weirdest and therefor most subversive buddy cop action film you have ever seen.

It has wild shifts in tone that give it the appearance of an action heavy, mismatched buddy cop movie when really it teeters on the edge of being a spoof of that genre, with it's wise cracking, oddball array of secondary characters and, in one scene, cross dressing.

It has a paper thin set up that has plot holes a-plenty, no ending and darts from one scene to the next happily abandoning any pretense of structure or explanation, everything has to be taken on face value and everything, no matter how implausible is simply there to push us on to the next implausible thing. Basically it's one of those 'check your inner film snob at the door' type films, for this you should just sit back, laugh and enjoy.
Especially at some of the 'meta' or 'knowing' jokes that are in the film like Stallone, early on, saying "Rambo was a pussy".

It is for the reasons above that explaining the plot for this cheese-ball fest that ricochets from gags to garottings, is a bit like trying to explain the appeal of Kurt Russell's mullet. On him, it just works.
However, very quickly, it involves an underworld king pin played by Jack Palance who has an evil villain warehouse lair with a maze for his mice (evil mice presumably) in the top of his bar, a wall of televisions and red haired, pony tail wearing hard man with one of the worst British accents to appear on screen since The Van Dykester in that Poppins movie. Wouldn't you know that his elaborate drug smuggling plots are aways foiled by either the scruffy, fast talking, cowboy boot wearing and mullet sporting Gabriel Cash, who has a very nifty gun with a glaringly obvious laser site or by Raymond Tango, the Armani suit wearing, stocks and shares dealing, bespectacled tree-trunk of a cop who does the job purely for the thrills and not the cash.
Despite being able to orchestrate a fairly obvious, yet curiously successful, frame up of the two troublesome coppers and through, what must've been some fairly hefty string pulling, manage to get them into a prison for hardened criminals, most of whom they have put away, he still refuses, even when he has them in his grasp, to just, I don't know, shoot them in the face, for reasons neither I nor James Wong will ever understand.
Through an even more massive contrivance the two narrowly escape from prison, Cash hooks up with Tango's sister, while dressed as a woman (because he's that much of a man or maybe she is a bit bi-curious) and that leads to some hilarious indignant posturing from Tango. This goes on for a while until everyone decides to be friends, take a super truck thing from Cash's weird Q (from James Bond) like friend and storm the gates of the evil hideout and blow everything up. Which presumably, if they wanted to, they could've done this months ago and saved the tax payers the cost of an expensive trial.
Still, it all works out in the end, sort of.
Well it actually has an A-Team like ending but then just when you expect to see some postscript of maybe Tango and Cash strolling down the beach playing ball with a strangers dog while Terry Hatcher, Tango's sister, struts around laughing like an idiot in a bikini, instead you just get the credits with little to no idea whether these two on-the-lam cops will be sent back to prison or what. Let's assume, for argument's sake, that the entire city is now safe and they all have a lovely holiday in Rio for a month.

Maybe for all these reasons it's a bit of a lost gem. While you can hardly call yourself a fan of Stallone or Russell's without having seen it, I think, for the masses, it has been lost through the years under a pile of Die Hard's, Lethal Weapon's, Stallone's own franchises of Rocky and Rambo and even 48 Hours which seems to be more fondly remembered than messers Raymond Tango and Gabriel Cash.
It's a shame because it's pretty out there, pretty funny, well performed by both leads, atmospherically directed and one of the lucky few that bares the credit - Score by Harold Faltermeyer, no it's not going to win any Oscars or even points for good plotting from the Marlon Brando school for incomprehensible gibberish spouted by drunk bus drivers but if you disengage your brain and switch on your dopey man grin then you'll be in for a good 90 minutes of hilarity, bad hair and bonkers kick assery.

7 out of 10 slices of surreal man cake
Points from The Wife - 6 out of 10

You can hear me discuss Tango & Cash and more Stallone/Russell films on episode 2 & 3 of The Podcast from the After Movie Diner which can be downloaded from iTunes or http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/110745

or just listen to it here on the site using the Talkshoe player on your left
or go to http://amdpodcast.blogspot.com

Cave of Forgotten Dreams - 11th June 2011

2011-08-10T03:16:00.003-04:00

I saw this film at the IFC cinema in New York and it was a perfect, pristine 3D print of it.
I am still not sure, having not seen the 2D version, just how much the third dimension added to it but despite that it was a rich, intelligent, fascinating and detailed type of work the likes of which we rarely see anymore.

This is a documentary in the purest sense, as it is, quite simply, just a documentation of something. It just so happens that this 'something' is beyond valuable and utterly remarkable.
It has no axe to grind, no drum to beat, in typical Herzogin fashion, the Bavarian loony genius shows us something, offers up a couple of intriguing questions and moves on without long diatribes or half baked assumptions.

For those not in the know this is all about some 35,000 year old cave paintings in France and Herzog is the only person who has been allowed down there to film it for all to see and thank Zeus he has because I can't imagine anyone doing a better or slightly weirder job. From the people he chooses to interview to the questions he asks and the observations he makes, the whole thing is just a little off its axis in a charming, slightly nuts way.

The film throws up so many discussions your mind can barely contain them all and the more you think, the more you see the ramifications of these paintings. Questions of tribal behaviour being more observant and artistic than you'd expect, questions of religion, or at least some form of basic gathering/worship/celebration, questions on sex/gender and of course questions of evolution while the whole time it also balances the fact that the paintings shine a light on our self inflated sense of our own creativity and how, really, little we have creatively progressed in that vast chasm of time.

Herzog's use of simple cameras, a tiny crew and minimal lighting when he is down in the cave, is just hypnotic and don't worry he covers every inch he can with those cameras and towards the end of the film he does just let the images play out, utilising evocative music and simple but highly effective light play to transport you back 35,000 years with those questions still swirling in your head.

To hear me review this film in more depth, along with others, please listen to the third episode of my podcast:

Available to download now from http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/110745
and iTunes (just search 'after movie diner' in the podcasts section)

9 out of 10 Bavarian fruitcakes
Points from The Wife 9 out of 10

Friday 13th Part 4 'The Final Chapter' - 5th June 2011

2011-07-30T13:51:00.000-04:00

Never before has a title for a film been so horrendously far off the mark. Calling this the final chapter is like saying 'there can be only one' in Highlander.

Anyway

Many people credit Psycho with being the first slasher film, then Halloween established the set-up and rules of the modern day slasher but if you ever wanted to know where the template of teenagers, sex, nudity and doing something so common sense defying and horrendously stupid that the audience is screaming 'No turn around, put your clothes back on and fucking run!' was truly tested and then pushed to illogical and hilarious levels then look no further than The Friday The 13th Franchise.

Part 4 is particularly stupid in this regard. There are scenes in this film of such heroically idiotic ineptitude as to boggle the mind.

In one instance a girl leaves everyone else she knows in the warm safe glow of a rental house and wanders out into the dark woodland towards a lake, all the time shouting the name of her boyfriend and despite no reply, no evidence of him anywhere or no reason to believe he'd be out in the woods by himself in the small hours of the morning, she gets to the lake, removes all her clothes (you know as one does), calls his name a few more times and then swims to a semi inflated rubber dinghy in the middle of the lake. It is then and only then that she realises, you know what, he's probably not out here and I got all naked, wet and cold for nothing. It is these moments of clarity that happen seconds before some hockey wielding maniac leaps from the lake and kills you with a machete.

Featuring odd performances from such randoms as Crispin Glover and the creepy little boy role filled by none other than Corey Feldman, the film is the standard horror fair with a bunch of kids renting a house from a Mother, daughter and her son (Feldman), who despite being no older than 10 maybe, inexplicably has a hobby where he makes masks and make-ups for horror films (possibly a nod to Tom Savini who's make-up and special effects started the franchise) just down the road from where Jason hacked all those people to death in part 3. In fact the beginning of this film follows on exactly.
Not content, obviously, with the carnage and mayhem he brought about in the previous film, Jason staggers down to the next pack of stupid, alcohol swigging, fornicating teenagers and decides, for no apparent reason what so ever, to do them in as well.
As well as the bizarre addition of Feldman's character, which, at least, plays a relevant part in the final showdown, there is also a seemingly endless scene of one of the, quite frankly, nondescript and tedious teens watching a super 8 projector of 1920s burlesque dancers.
Which is what every sad male did in the 80s when all of his friends either hooked up or, unbeknownst to you, got hacked up. You break out the old whirring projector, string up a sheet and seemingly amuse yourself (but not abuse yourself) to a grainy black n white image of topless women from a bygone era. Standard Saturday night for most I would imagine.

This where the slasher horror genre became like porn, in the sense that you sit slack jawed in amazing boredom during the dialogue scenes waiting for the money shot, or in this case, deaths. Unfortunately the deaths are heralded about 5 minutes in advance so you know exactly what's going to happen and it's all over way too quickly. There are some good effects though, I guess and the odd inventive death, still it all gets a bit ridiculous when you see that Jason has had time to arrange some of the bodies, and in one case nail one of them up to a door frame, apparently in no time at all. Where got the hammer and nails from is anyone's guess!

However, you know, these are minor niggles at the end of the day, you either like silly slasher fair or you don't. I watched this in a cabin by a lake late at night and I loved it. I laughed, I clapped when one of the annoying ones got killed, shouted at the stupid people in disbelief as they made basic blunders and the ending, not unlike the ending of Halloween 4 that would come 4 years later, was genuinely affecting and a bit creepy, if for no other reason than a tiny Corey Feldman in a bald cap with a knife will always be affecting and a bit creepy.

Is it the best of the series? no but it's not the worst (say hello Jason takes Manhattan) and I had a ball watching it. If you like to laugh and you like your slasher films to have their fair share of nudity then this is one of the ones for you!

6 out of 10 blood oranges or something...

PODCAST ANNOUNCEMENT - 26th July 2011

2011-07-26T16:04:00.001-04:00

The After Movie Diner has finally gone audio with an AMD Podcast series! and while continuing to write reviews on here (and I promise I will continue to write reviews on here) I will also be attempting a fairly frequent podcast too with a series of guests.

The first episode is already up and can be heard and downloaded here, for iTunes users please click the iTunes button to download and subscribe that way:
http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/110745

and if you're already a blogger.com user and want to remain so, then the sister website which will also be hosting the podcast is here:

http://amdpodcast.blogspot.com/

Also I will have widget on this website that will allow you to listen to it here as well. Just look in the right hand column.

Thanks for all of your continuing support, please download, listen, enjoy, share and spread the word!
Thank you.

Trick 'r Treat - 4th June 2011

2011-07-23T16:07:00.000-04:00

Trick r Treat is a 'Creepshow', 'Tales from the Crypt' type anthology movie except that they have taken the 'multiple short stories in one film' concept to it's logical next step and intertwined all the stories by setting them in the same town on Halloween night and having the characters interact.

Like any of the aforementioned forerunners to this film it is heavily laden with a macabre sense of humour rather than being genuinely scary.
In fact the title sequence of this film is done like a comic book and that is very apt because the whole thing has a sort of comic-book feel, despite the graphic novel of the stories (originally meant to be a 4 issue run) wasn't published till after the film was made.

Also, like any of these films some parts inevitably work better than others and I would say that the beginning and end of the film is considerably better than the middle section. Still it is put together slickly, with a nice fun but frightening Halloween feel, good cinematography with a definite leaning into Tim Burton territory and features its fair share of semi-famous faces, no doubt enjoying themselves immensely.

If you are a hardcore horror fan looking to be scared I wouldn't suggest it but this sort of film works perfectly as an introduction to horror or just something to crank out every Halloween for a bit of a sick dark laugh.

7 out of 10 poisoned pumpkins
Points from the Wife 7 out of 10

Midnight in Paris - 30th May 2011

2011-07-17T01:04:00.001-04:00

There's a lot of crap talked about Woody Allen. Critics talk about his 'Early funny ones', his 'shaky recent out put' and his 'European period'. When reviewing a Woody Allen film apparently you have to either critique his 40+ years of work in one big impossible whole, line him up against other film makers, attempt to pigeon hole him or write him off completely. It's true that in the following review I do fall victim to some of those cliches because it's almost impossible not to but what I mean and what I actually attempt to do is, his films are hardly ever reviewed individually for what they are and this is either because the critic has nothing to say about the film they've actually just seen or they are too busy longing for a bygone time that they think no longer exists, which, funnily enough is rather apt in the case of Midnight in Paris.

We'll never know if this film was an attempt to make an early funny one with hints of dramedy stuff like Annie Hall and the lush period visuals of Bullets over Broadway whilst all the time secretly satirising and mocking the critics for not being able to live in the present. If it is then Woody may indeed be the genius he so frequently claims that he's not, if it isn't then it's a simple and charming film about the artistic and maybe just human condition that nobody wants to live in the present and every artist secretly yearns for rain drizzled Parisian streets.

Whatever it is or was meant to be, it has succeeded in being, just in box office terms the most successful Woody Allen movie of all time. I saw it a couple of weeks into its run and it is still playing at my local multiplex now, over a month later and when I went to see Horrible Bosses the other night there were still crowds of people exiting the Woody film and not just the bearded, corduroy wearing sociology professor you might expect but a broad cross section of the public. At one point the same theatre had dedicated 2 screens to it!

Just to put this in contrast when I went to see Whatever Works, which had the pull of being the first film Woody set in New York in 5 years, starring Larry David who is a highly successful writer and star now and the one actor everyone thought should've been working with Woody all along and was, for my money, the first actually really funny comedy he'd done since Deconstructing Harry, I managed to find one art house cinema that was screening it for maybe two weeks if that and the showing I was in I think the audience was about 3 people, maybe one old Dutch woman with a poodle as well, I can't be sure.

It doesn't really make any sense who goes to see what and why but it's just nice to know that, in this world of Transformers, vomiting bridesmaids and the excitement some people seemed to get from almost seeing Jennifer Aniston's nipple, a Woody Allen film not even starring his most starry of casts and set in a country most Americans (and to be fair most Brits also) despise, full of in jokes and references about authors, artists and musicians from over 70 years ago can be so, financially at least, successful.

So, what is the film actually like? I hear you cry. Well, it's not bad. I don't think it's a classic to be honest but it's not bad.

The cinematography is, as always, excellent and both modern Paris and the Paris of the past look stunningly beautiful.

The script is, if I am honest, a little contrived, obvious and devoid of subtlety. It's very funny, has a great little point to make and it makes it understandably and simply but there isn't the quick fire one liners and the dialogue that lets the human drama unfold and play out realistically. Everything is sign posted with a sledge hammer.

Owen Wilson is likable enough and doesn't attempt to get his Texas nasality around too much of a Woody impersonation, like a lot of other leading men have done in his position, he can, however, be a tad one-note in the part though and his character is not exactly convincingly drawn. He spends a lot of the film just doing enthusiasm or wide eyed wonder and not particularly convincing at that, I do not see prose that would impress Gertrude Stein coming out of that man.

Still he has more to work with than Rachel MacAdams who is not exactly given much to do and it does border almost on insulting how thinly written, flat-out annoying, shrill and stereotypical her character is, for the man who has always been applauded for writing female characters so well I was actually a bit surprised at the sitcom nature of the 'nagging fiance who has nothing in common with her hubby to be' character she was weakly forced to inhabit.

The only other person with a significant lead is Marion Cortillard who almost pulls a Penelope Cruz in Vicky Christina Barcelona here by being the token foreign actress who swoops in and shows up everyone else, unfortunately she doesn't get a grand amount of screen time in which to swoop.

Everyone else is a cameo and from Kurt Fuller as the hilariously republican soon-to-be father-in-law right down to the scene-everyone-is-talking-about featuring Adrian Brody as a batty, rhinoceros obsessed Salvador Dali they are all pretty splendid although I honestly felt each character could've had a lot more jokes attached to them.

There was an article recently about whether Woody Allen was a genius, where he sat in the long line of cinema auteurs like his beloved Bergman. Well Midnight in Paris suffers from the problem a lot of his work suffers from and what, I think, stops him earning the 'genius' tag completely and that is laziness.

Now you may think it's odd I say laziness as he is 76 and has a schedule where he still writes and directs one movie a year every year and has done for at least three and a half decades but what I mean is it feels like he's either not giving himself the time, or really can't be bothered to fully form an idea anymore or to maybe do a few re-writes or polishes of his scripts.

This maybe because he doesn't need to.

He gets enviable casts, support from his peers, has a dedicated fan base around the world, doesn't do atrociously with the critics and like he has said, the financing for his next film is already in place while he's working on the prior and so he doesn't really have to have standards or it maybe because he can't really keep the pace that he used to when it comes to churning out movies.

I understand that you'd have to be a fool to expect all of them to be great works of art and for all of them to compare with the earlier, more critically acclaimed part of his career but while I, personally, love that I don't have to wait long to see another Woody movie maybe he should slow down, make one movie every other year or something and take his time, primarily, re-writing the script.

Now this is not because I believe they would then be all classics, he would probably have about the same hit rate as he has now but because I believe that when a potential classic came along, like Midnight in Paris, it would be better, it would be polished, characters rough edges smoothed down a bit, jokes added and it may have had more thought put into it. His films are slowly resembling demo versions of films that could be.

These are all minor niggles though, Midnight in Paris was enjoyable, watchable, looked beautiful, had some very funny scenes and good, strong performances from most of the cast. It beat the fucking bloomers from his last effort 'You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger' or 'You will Wish You Had Never Been Born' as I called it, which was, quite possibly in the running for worst Woody Allen movie of ALL time. I couldn't get through much more than half of it and I sat through all of Cassandra's Dream and, apart from the lead's accents, rather enjoyed it.

To stop and play typical-critic for a moment, out of Woody's recent "European period" I actually rank Midnight in Paris equal with Scoop as my two favourites. This may surprise some but I thought the two which were the best received, Match Point and Vicky Christina Barcelona were absolutely terrible, except for Penelope Cruz's excellent turn in the latter.

In the end, whatever their genre, location or cast, Woody Allen still achieves more in a half-arsed annual film than most film makers achieve their entire career and who am I kidding, I love my yearly Woody movie.

7 out of 10 and there were surprisingly few baguettes

Points from The Wife 8 out of 10.

Breakdown - 29th May 2011

2011-07-16T19:15:00.002-04:00

Alright so after that exciting interlude where I posted about the Evil Dead remake and got my first negative comment from a guy who didn't really seem to understand what I was saying and who took some sort of vague offense for no obvious view point or reason. It was fun. My comment box was like an average day on an IMDB message board only with 1 idiot instead of millions.
Still back to playing catch up and reviewing the movies I have mostly had the pleasure to watch over the last month and a half.

We return with Breakdown which is a little remembered, predominantly road based, action thriller with the superb Kurt Russell going up against thieving murderous truckers headed up by the man who always relishes the chance to play evil, the late and most certainly great J.T. Walsh.

It has a simple set up, a hero you can root for a bad guy you love to hate, the action comes on thick and fast and it's a pretty fantastic viewing experience all round to be honest. The acting is top notch and the direction and production valuesare great and perfectly suited to the subject, which is odd because everything else Jonathan Mostow has done has been completely bilge.
Kurt blows the bland bad actor Chuck Norris, the Sluggish and lumbering Seagal and the incomprehensible and silly Van Damme out of the water in the action stakes. This film is very much in the same ball park as their outputs only better. Much better. It's the film all their films want to be.
Russell is not a kick boxer, he's not a martial artist, he's just an East Coast yuppie on his way out West pushed to extremes by some rednecks.

If you have ever been attacked (and I hope that you haven't) but after a couple of days of nursing bruises you start to picture what you would've done if only you had the guts or the opportunity, it's a very common scenario or if you have ever watched a horror or action movie and said 'now this is what I would do...' well this film lives out that wish fulfillment for you. That's its entire premise.

Forget these wannabe exploitation/retro/B-Movie action films of recent years that try so hard but 9 times out of 10 fail, Breakdown is the real thing, a simple action thriller that doesn't have to make everyone aware of it's 70s influences to be good, it just IS good. Now-a-days the only way to make a film like this again and for it to be any good is not to get Tarantino to do it but it would be to hire Jason Statham.

I would say this was the last great movie Russell has done, it happily stands alongside classics like Tombstone and Escape from New York for me, just obviously not as iconic but either way, well worth a watch.

9 out of 10 dusty road side cantina burgers
Points from the Wife 8 out of 10

Horror Remakes. The Case Against. Featuring the Evil Dead remake....

2011-07-14T13:51:00.004-04:00

I am going to do something a little different today and break with my regular format. I am taking time out of catching up with my movie reviews from the last month to tackle a topic that, especially for horror fans, has been a contentious, divisive and annoying one. I am talking, of course, about remakes.
This comes on the heels of the recent statement release from Ghost House Pictures and Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and Bruce Campbell that there is, finally and unfortunately going to be an Evil Dead remake. Read the press release here.

Now for regular readers of my blog you should know that I am a huge Evil Dead fan and a rabid Bruce Campbell fan. I may also have mentioned in the past that I hate 99.9% of most modern, recent, horror remakes and let me make this clear, before you all bring up The Thing or Scarface or something, that's what we are talking about here.
I will start with my feelings on the Evil Dead remake as it's the freshest in my mind and then I am going to re-post an updated remakes blog I wrote back in 2007 on MySpace (yes that relic of a bygone era! ha!)

If you didn't read the Press Release link yet, this is the message Sam, Rob and Bruce put out yesterday:
"We are committed to making this movie and are inspired by the enduring popularity and enthusiasm for the ‘Evil Dead’ series. We can't wait to scare a new generation of moviegoers using filmmaking techniques that were not available to us thirty years ago as well as Fede (the new director) bringing a fresh eye to the film’s original elements."
Almost everything about this statement annoys me! So much so that I have to break it down and analyse it line by line:

Scare a new generation of moviegoers?
Ok, now even if Sam and Rob are too busy descending into the sad corporate abyss, Bruce should know, as he has been to conventions and also frequently connects with the fans, that there are hardly any Evil Dead fans now who were even alive when the original came out, let alone old enough to see it! Could this possibly mean that the film is ALREADY "scaring new generations of moviegoers" ??! and I like to believe that those who were around and old enough to have seen the original when it came out are, like Star Wars fans, dedicated and definitely don't want a remake.

Using filmmaking techniques that were not available to us thirty years ago? - What does this even mean? REALLY think about it. CGI? 3D? Digital Cameras? what?? sure there are new gadgets, bells and whistles but basic film making technique hasn't changed in 50 years or more! How does The Evil Dead, a story about 5 kids who go to a cabin and get possessed by demons because they stupidly can't stop playing the same tape recording of readings from something called 'The Book of The Dead', benefit from the application of anything from the above list?
Also, the thing that MAKES the entire first film, the reason any of them have a career, is Raimi's technique. That's really all it is. Bruce is good in bits yes of course and there are extreme scenes, you don't believe you are watching, that can now whip an audience up into a delighted frenzy but it all hangs on Raimi's technique.
Creativity, inventiveness, imagination and intelligence don't need to be updated they continue to shine, they are the reason for its success.
If you disagree, name a modern horror film (or any genre for that matter) that is as good as or better than its 70s/80s counterpart or predecessor. Name a good modern film that rests entirely on its 'New Film-making Techniques'. This is not like The Thing where between the Howard Hawks original and John Carpenter's 80s version there was an enormously massive leap in what they were able to show, this is like picturing The Thing but instead of the incredibly innovative and creative practical special effects it's CGI and in 3D. Is that honestly any better? well they are, predictably and annoyingly, about to remake it so we shall see! (CHRIST can't they leave shit alone?!!!)

Fede bringing a fresh eye to the film’s original elements - Evil Dead doesn't need a fresh eye. It had Sam Raimi's eye. A fantastically inventive, guerrilla film maker at the time who achieved camera angles, special effects and all manner visual wizardry using sheer brains, determination and will power that no other first time, 20 something director has ever achieved before or since. Yes they have tried, imitated and failed but really, without Raimi directing and without Bruce starring, there is no FRESH eye to put on proceedings. Like I said, without them it's just a story about 5 kids who go to a cabin and get possessed, it's not like the story screams to be reinterpreted. Plus I think Eli Roth and about 100 other directors have already tried.
Raimi and co, drawing on influences wide and various from the past, practically invented a whole new form of shooting, editing and sound design that you could argue gave rise to the hyper kinetic, over the top style that studios apply heavy hand-idly and irritatingly to almost every flaccid turd of a movie they produce while also inspiring legions of film students everywhere to attempt the same thing (I know, I was one!)
The reason it is as popular today as it is and, in fact, grows in popularity every year is down to all of that. I firmly believe there is nothing a film maker could do to make it better, make it their own or even just compliment it. It survives and is cherished, like most of these original films, because of the time, the place but mostly because of the people involved. I don't want to see new people involved and I don't understand people who do.

This whole thing STINKS. They can't even come up with a decent excuse for a remake in their own press release!! Like all modern horror remakes, this is for the cash and cash alone as, creatively, the idea is bankrupt and that would be fine if the three of them were still struggle to forge out a career but Bruce is on a hit show going into it's 5th season, Tapert has produced a multitude of TV and Film including the highly lucrative Hercules, Xena and Sparticus: Blood and Sand and Sam made 3 Spiderman movies for fucks sake! Three of the biggest hits ever produced!
None of them need the money and as for this first time director if he really wants his first feature to be a remake of a film that was made by a handful of dedicated guys from Michigan slogging it out through endless muddy night shoots in the woods of Tennessee to eventually emerge months and months later with an original classic of horror, instead of something that he too can lovingly pour blood, sweat, tears and his life into then he isn't worth a damn in my book.

Also it has been revealed that Diablo Cody is doing a re-write.
Why the hell is this good news?!
Diablo Cody? Didn't she write a horror movie already that bombed harder than Halle Berry following up her Oscar with Catwoman? instead of the news being "Don't worry, it's going to be good, we have an Oscar Winning writer working on ED Remake" shouldn't it be - "I can't believe former Oscar Winner Cody is scraping the bottom of the writing barrel by helping to fix an already bad idea?"
If they already need a script re-write then that is a terrible sign. While I know this is a standard practice it could possibly mean the director is not the auteur of the piece, is not passionate about it or does not have faith in his ideas. I am not sure why a first time director wants to do a remake anyway, doesn't make much sense, doesn't he have his own stories to tell?

I am SO dissappointed. I thought the fans had squashed this idea when they first brought it up almost 10 years ago! I guess they just had to wait for the populus to become so appathetic and jaded they didn't care anymore.

The other reason I am so very disappointed, as a fan, is that they have dangled Evil Dead 4 in front of us like a carrot for years and years and years. Now I personally don't want an ED4, I want Raimi to take his Spiderman money and make an all new film with Bruce as the lead and with Rob producing, just like Rob Tapert SAID they were doing almost 10 years ago but I will take ED4 over a remake any day of the week. On the subject of ED4 Bruce said, as recently as the Philly Comic-Con (18th June 2011), that one of the reasons they have backed off the idea of doing it is that they would spend a year of their life making the thing, Bruce would go through the horrible and uncomfortable procedure of actually playing Ash post 50 and when it came out the fans would criticise it and compare it negatively with Army of Darkness etc.
Well I absolutely hate to say it because he's still my favourite actor but that's utter bullshit. If that's how you feel about the 4th one then why the hell do and endorse so positively, a remake? doesn't the same reaction, only potentially worse, still apply?

God the whole news is just too depressing, I had to get it all out of my system with a blog. Which I know makes me some whiny, loser fan boy frantically typing away under fake internet stars to an audience of none but it's cheaper than therapy and more fun than vomitting.

I honestly feel that they forget that while show business is, indeed and understandably, a business the SHOW part comes first. Remakes don't anger me so much for the present because I know the originals exist, I watch and own them and I boycott most of the remakes. However it's future generations who will either be confused, not know about the originals or not care... how will these classics survive? Well I for one will keep the original home (or in this case cabin) fires burning.

The End of Evil Dead Remake related rant.
______________________________________________________________
OLD REMAKE BLOG FROM 2007 -
This is a blog I did a while ago and as it's relevant, it may explain a few opinions and is still basically what I think I thought I would include it here.

Movie Remakes.

Everyone who cares about movies and probably even casual viewers have an opinion.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that everyone probably owns at least one movie that is counted as a remake.

probably Scarface or ..maybe Cape Fear and everyone has seen Dirty Rotten Scoundrels... right....

That's not a remake I hear you cry!

well it is... and it isn't....

It's actually a re-telling of the story of the film 'Bedtime Story' from 1964.

An Online encyclopedia defines a remake as -

"a remake is a newer version of a previously released film or a newer version of the source (play, novel, story, etc.) of a previously made film."

well with that definition we can throw Dirty Rotten Scoundrels into the mix but with my definition, you can't, my definition is this -

A Modern film remake is a film that bares the same name as its still very popular or cult predecessor, that takes a few iconic plot points, maybe a character or two on which to hang a weaker story and simply for the purpose of making some money.

Now with my definition, which I appreciate is specific and designed to attack a certain group of films, you could throw out Scarface, Cape Fear and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Why?

Scarface – despite being made by the late, great Howard Hawks in 1932, was the original so popular by 1983 that it didn't need a second telling? In fact the stories are fairly different (one being about bootleg alcohol in the prohibition era and the other being about cocaine) and if anything the 1983 version is still, today the one we remember and is a classic in its own right. Also, was it trading off the name to make money? Nope, not really, not much argument to back that up.

Cape Fear – this one is the closest to being shitcanned by my definition, there's only one thing that stops it and that is it is a true remake. It takes the exact character names, plot points, settings and almost script on occasions and just updates it – more gore, more sex, more suspense and that's it… at no point does it needlessly sully the original or try and 'better' it. It takes the story and just runs with it.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels – is the least like a remake, they changed almost everything, including, crucially, the title and no one remembers the original except maybe the film-makers widow….

So lets talk about what we REALLY are here to talk about –

MODERN FILM REMAKES

I am, of course referring to –

Dawn of the Dead

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The Omen

Alfie

The Italian Job

The Amityville Horror

Assault on Precinct 13

The Fog

Black Christmas

The Pink panther

Charlie & the Chocolate Factory

Cheaper by the Dozen

Fun with Dick and Jane

The Hills have eyes

And so on and so on and so on – too much SHITE to list

And they show NO sign of stopping-

the soon to be made –

Escape from new york

Halloween (2011 update: 2 have now been made)

Evil Dead (see above)

The Birds

Day of the dead (2011 update: this one too)

AGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I HATE absolutely HATE these remakes. (I was angry 4 years ago too apparently!)

I don't care if you liked some of these films, I don't care one bit. I will tell you right now not one of those films should be called what they are called and not one of those films is a patch on the original!

If the remake had never been made – would you EVER watch any of the originals and have the arrogance to say that it should be remade? No… would you watch the original and be able to come up with other stories in the same setting, or stories involving the same characters – of course! And that would be cool if those movies got made but CALLED something different.

It actually all comes down to perception and marketing – not film making or creativity.

What they do is they think - oh yeah Zombies - Shopping Mall - cool idea... but wait IF we do that AGAIN people will JUST say we are imitating Dawn of the Dead and they'll just get angry. So, how do we make a film that fans won't kill us for AND new audiences will go and see? Hmmmm I know we'll SAY it's a remake and somehow people will tolerate this. As long as we include the idea (zombies, shopping mall) we have a VERY thin and wonky frame on which to hang a whole new movie and it doesn't even have to stand up to the original because it's a remake, so people's defenses are lower they are not even necessarily expecting a good movie because it's a REMAKE.

So if a film doesn't ENTIRELY suck and throws some gore or tits or both into the mix – it gets called a 'good' remake…. Hence the unusual popularity of the Dawn of The Dead remake…. Which, had it had normal speed Zombies (uber-fast Zombies are FUCKING AWFUL), had one more pass at the script in a rewrite and been set in another building other than a shopping mall, I might have even liked it – as it is, AFTER Johnny Cash stops singing over the opening credits, the movie is a big pile of gash…. Real gash…

it is

– stop it

– stop saying you like it

– it is a big pile of gash

– get over it, watch it again

– Oh Look running zombies! they're shit.

– Oh look obtuse arrogant and badly written security guards!

– Oh look a zombie baby!

Oh yeah it's utter shite…. What was I thinking… oh look it's a lovely day outside… la la la la

This next bit sort of repeats what I said up top, sorry...

As for the proposed remakes of bonafide classics such as Halloween, Evil Dead and Escape movies the big problem is this - Those movies are made good and amazing because of THE PEOPLE INVOLVED IN THEM. Take Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert & Bruce Campbell away from Evil Dead and it's 5 teenagers go to a wood and get picked off by spirits - zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz snoresville...

and if you take John carpenter and ESPECIALLY Kurt Russell away from Escape from New York and you still have a fairly groovy plot but you loose the charisma and the character.

Both John C and Kurt R have spoken MANY times about how Snake Plisken is their statement about a certain time and place and a certain type of masculinity and politics. They have also said how it is kinda based on the two of them.

How, then, can you replace the people who gave life to the character? because anyone else, absolutely ANYONE! would either do their own thing and therefore not be Snake OR merely be imitating what Russell expertly did before because they wouldn't understand the character and play it with the depths that Kurt does.

Wouldn't you just watch the movie thinking "oh my god I miss Kurt Russell, even Captain Ron was better than this!"

And don't even get me started about the Halloween remake which is apparently a prequel of sorts…..

Right

I shall say this only once - IN THE FIRST MOVIE DONALD PLEASANCE EXPLAINS THAT BETWEEN BEING A BOY AND KILLING HIS FIRST SISTER AND BEING AN ADULT AND COMING AFTER JAMIE LEE CURTIS, THAT MICHAEL MYERS SPENT 15 YEARS COMATOSED IN A MENTAL INSTITUTION…..

Makes no sense does it!

Certain films belong to certain filmmakers, these remakes are fruitless, pointless HACK films.... made by weak pathetic scum and I hate them.

I am at war with remakes....

The battle will be fought on the streets, in the cinemas and up in the trees (mainly by ape creatures)

I urge EVERYONE to boycott these types of remakes NOW

I am serious

I am fucking furious

Enough is enough

As an update to this blog in 2011: The Halloween remake has been made, I didn't see it and have no idea if it was a prequel or whatever. This was based on internet chatter back in 2007. What I can tell you is they are doing a REMAKE of the THE THING but calling it a prequel by focusing on the Norwegian team who first discover the alien site. Neat way to get around the 'remake' tag right while still doing essentially a remake, right?

WRONG

If you have seen John Carpenter's THE THING we KNOW everything that happens to The Norwegian group. We know they ALL die and the alien is in the dog. We even know how they discover the spaceship because there is VIDEO footage of them doing it in John Carpenter's The Thing!!! It will be the most pointless film since Titanic!

So that's it then, my full rants on remakes. Basically almost everything I have ever had to say on the matter. Normal service will resume with the next blog but boy did that feel good to get out there. I welcome ALL comments and discussions on this topic. Thanks again for reading.

Jean Claude Van Damme in DERAILED - 28th May 2011

2011-07-14T02:56:00.007-04:00

Some may remember that last year I sort of stuck my foot into the murky puddle of ludicrous western b-tier action films and watched a whole handful of stuff before giving it a bit of a rest and resuming my standard genre hopping ways.

Well digging around in the $4.99 bin at my local video emporium I came across a Van Damme triple disc including three of the most ridiculous films ever scraped off the floor of a Bulgarian edit suite, wiped off with a wet rag and distributed on highly low budget DVD.
Sidenote: This is why video shops win out over the internet, you get to physically dig, delve, browse and rummage and there's nothing quite like it, you normally find something and it's normally ludicrous. In a good way. So please, support your local video seller before our high streets become one long line of mobile phone shops interspersed with fried food outlets run by hunched, greasy, denizens of the night.

I decided that we should watch this obvious 'Die Hard on a train' slice of incomprehensible Belgian drivel first.
Cheap doesn't even begin to describe it (although to our joy the producers did spring for a totally unwarranted yet hilarious 'Derailed' rap song to play over the credits) but if I attempted to describe it I may get so confused I would disappear up my own dirty tuba never to return. However, we arm chair reviewers are a hardy bunch, so here goes nothing:

The first bit is an utterly confusing mess of car chases, terrible CGI explosions and a leather jacket wearing JCVD generally being blander and more vacant than a beige coloured, doorless porta-potty. Imagine some Latvian students filming the opening of a spoof James Bond film using a camera made out of cardboard and yak's spit and you are getting close. Somewhere along the line he winds up on a spectacularly fake train trying to get a female thief and some vials of a biological weapon, not unlike small pox, to the good guys before the bad guys get her first. Then his wife and kids show up, think he's cheating, go to the dining car and then, yes, you guessed it, in swoop the bad guys.

The rest of the film is ineptly and predictably played out with all the energy and excitement of soup night at an old age pensioner's rest home and to say that, by this point, an over the hill Van Damme was going through the motions would be something of an understatement. It looks like the only motions he went through while working on the film were probably in the bowel region.

To criticise the acting, the script or the production of straight-to-DVD fare like this seems redundant as we only really watched it to have a good chuckle and hopefully see some A Grade arse kickage. Sadly it wasn't that funny and there wasn't a whole heap of respectable or well rendered fight scenes to get into, in fact the best time we had throughout the whole film was dancing along to the 'Derailed' rap as the credits rolled.

Two things though do bare mentioning.
1. Potential script writers take note - if your story is going to devolve into 'he was a one man army on a train trying to get the bio weapon off the evil sharply dressed ones' then don't overly complicate it by, firstly not explaining anything at all in the first 15 mins of the film (we don't know who JCVD is, who he is working for, why he is Belgian, where and when does this all take place, what the hell is he doing and where he bought his leather jacket!??) and the secondly filling the train full of characters with sub-plots and tangents that don't matter.
and
2. If you can't afford explosions, helicopters, a real train, passable CGI or sets then please don't make a film called Derailed that hinges on you being able to pull all those things off. The effects and especially the outdoor train action in this, I hasten to call it a movie are just annoyingly terrible, not even in an enjoyably shonky way, just in a 'why the hell did they bother' type deal.

Look, what was I expecting for $4.99 for 3 films?
I don't know? I personally would've been happy to watch JCVD wandering the streets of a nondescript European town asking the directions to the boulangerie and round house kicking anyone who tries to stop him. It didn't need to be a masterpiece, just something to pass the time and chuckle at and while there is much that is laughable in Derailed, the joke may end up being on you for watching it.

2 out of 10 limp and floppy baguettes
Points from The Wife - 2 out of 10.

Children of Men - 28th May 2011

2011-07-09T19:56:00.000-04:00

What does this film teach us?
Primarily that people have really really short term memories!

For a film this good to seemingly have been all but forgotten under the vast bottom cough smelling swamp that is modern "churn 'em up and vomit them out" movie making seems to be a bit of an unforgivable crime.

Clive Owen, in the middle of, what I like to call, his grubby trench coat period, stars in what is clearly his best film to date and launched him, to some extent, internationally as the most unlikely of British action heroes, till Liam Neeson took that title later with Taken.

If you don't know the story it is set in the not-too-distant dystopian future where Women are infertile and have been for 18 years, the rest of the world has crumbled and only Britain, just about, survives, although it's a pretty grim fucking place to be. Clive Owen is the sad-sack office employee who doesn't much care for the life he's leading, except for the occasional breaks in the countryside he takes, visiting his older pot-head, liberal friend played by Michael Caine. Then a blast from the past crops up in the form of Julianne Moore's underground revolutionary and he gets embroiled in an adventure where the whole future of human existence ends up resting in his hands.

The futuristic setting is rendered completely realistically with a stunningly grey and mundane colour palette. Utilising long and seemingly uninterrupted steady cam shots the drama, violence, action and stunning yet grimy visuals are balletic and beautiful and you just completely accept everything you're seeing like it's newsreel from the future.
I can only imagine the choreography or the effects work that went into achieving this result but I suspect it's probably a bit of both. You won't fully appreciate this till about the third time of watching it because the film, the plot, the characters, the acting, the style, the camerawork, everything is just so absorbing, interesting, intricate and exciting that you are picked up and swept along by the whole thing that you barely have time to take a breath and look around at what the editor or director is doing.

It is both a very modern way to approach film making but also seems to have an affinity with the British and European films of the past especially. In the sense that it is a fairly complex, intelligent thriller with realistic violence but a nice air of down to earth irony, spirit and even that very British trait of nonchalance. It also has touches of Terry Gilliam's work, it's like the set designer from Twelve Monkeys and the set designer of Brazil had a cinematic love child.

Now just in case you thought this was all style over substance, because I was banging on about the look of the piece, then don't fear this has all the weighty plot and the first class acting one could require from a film, all tinged with a very dark sense of humour. As it's never explained why the human race went infertile, the film is not really a specific allegory on any one thing and neither is it a cautionary tale, in that way it is sort of pure science fiction as you can read into it anything you want. Basically though, human beings are wasteful, aggressive, bureaucratic bastards and take themselves all way too seriously.

The cast are all brilliant but I am surprised Owen hasn't received some sort of Oscar for mumbling as he has, possibly, one of the most downtrodden and sometimes droney voices ever committed to celluloid but this does mean when he has moments of happiness or moments of emotion and his face and voice come alive, it's all the more powerful.

If you haven't seen it then please rush out, get hold of it and watch it now. Films like this that have a bit of everything in them and actually succeed are a rare breed and when they emerge, seemingly like a fluke, from some, actually talented, little corner of the universe we should make sure they are never forgotten and attain the classic status they so richly deserve.

10 out of 10 puffs of Strawberry Cough
Points from The Wife - 8 out of 10

Bridesmaids - 19th May 2011

2011-07-08T00:41:00.000-04:00

I am horribly aware how behind the times I am, not only with this review but with the blog as a whole and I really should get caught up and stay caught up but, you know, life, music and baseball have all got in the way of me not watching movies, I have watched tons but WRITING about them.

This is a situation I hope to again address with yet another mammoth catch up session over the next couple of weeks. Then, I promise, I am going to try and stay on top of this blog.

So, casting my mind back a month and a half, what did I think of Bridesmaids? Well, firstly let me say something:
There have been, since this film came out a whole heap of articles about 'can Women do raunchy comedy?' or 'Should Women do raunchy comedy?' all focussing on the feminist/sexist angle of gross-out/raunchy comedies. Well, the mere existence of these articles questioning anything to do with this film from a gender angle is ridiculous sexism. The only thing under debate about this film should be is it funny or not, does it work or not and is the acting any good. So that's what I am going to focus on, any comment about 'is this the women's Hangover' is about as relevant, after you've seen the film, as asking 'is the Hangover the Bachelor Party for the new millennium'.

Ok so with that out of the way... I have been waiting and may have even said in this blog once or twice, for Kristen Wiig to finally be in a good film. All these films I have been going to hoping for her to shine bright like she does on SNL and each time being woefully annoyed at how average all her roles have been, her excellent cameo in Knocked Up not withstanding. Well here is her own script shepherded to the screen, not as an SNL vehicle with Lorne Michaels at the wheel but by Mr. Movie Comedy New Wave himself, Judd Apatow.
On the plus side this means that it will be seen by a shed load of people and make lots of moola but on the downside it means we are treated to needlessly disgusting scenes of vomiting and deification, over the top sex scenes and repetitive gags surrounded by a handful of his favourite rom-com cliches that, at this point, make me yawn.

Bridesmaids starts brilliantly, some great subtle acting by Wiig and some spot on observational comedy along with the odd weird character and some beautifully awkward set ups.
This does continue throughout the film but unfortunately a great little clever, female perspective buddy comedy, character study of a story gets trampled all over by Apatow's less than fancy footwork. There is a great little film hiding behind all the see-it-coming-from-a-mile-off childish poo gags and irritatingly broad and unlikely characters having unrealistic conversations.
This 'throw everything and the kitchen sink' approach to reworking the original idea leads to one of the most annoying things in the film for me and that is the way that, after a sweet, funny and well performed beginning scene with the two friends, Maya Rudolph's character then switches gears completely to facilitate the introduction of her 'new' best friend and rival to Wiig simply to add yet another irritating comedy cliche (in this case also badly played by the actress in question) to this meal of a film that was slowly becoming a very messy stew.

Deep down this is a good solid and funny film about female friendship in the face of a marriage which leaves one of them alone, about trying to start your life again as a woman reaching her 40s and with a nice underlying farce of nothing going right for the maid of honour in the lead up to the nuptials. When these elements peak out from behind the hem of Apatow's shit stained apron I was interested in the film again.

Now before I get accused of being too highbrow and before someone just says 'well really you're against women doing raunchy or gross out comedy' let me be clear, I am saying these things about the film because it's what I observed, I saw the potential for what I would've thought was a better film, the film I think the original two writers intended, it's my particular taste and because the gross out stuff, and this is crucial, simply wasn't funny.
Had it been funny then that would've been completely fine but instead it goes from 'oh no please don't' cringe inducing predictable farce through graphic and embarrassing depiction's of regrettable bodily functions to the whole, now infamous, scene climaxing with Maya Rudolph, who I've always loved as an actress, acting out a scene where a soon to be married, normally happy woman is forced to soil the incredibly expensive wedding dress she is wearing in the middle of a busy road.
I, honestly, and call me overly sensitive, wasn't laughing, I just felt sorry for her.
Despite the enthusiastic howls that greeted the scene from the other patrons in the cinema.

I hate to even bring up the scene because apart from the gender angle it's all people are talking about it seems and that's A) a shame because the film is better than that and B) probably the whole point of having the scene in the film in the first place.
Like the male nudity in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Walk Hard (although the former was at least pertinent to the story - the reprise at the end, however, was not), or the dilating vagina scene in Knocked Up, it's a talking point, a hook for people to write about, a clever marketing ploy and also a chance to see just how far you can go in a mainstream comedy. Any of that sound funny to you?

I am not being down on Apatow for all his films, although I do think like his former leading man Seth Rogan he may have run his course with all this, I just think with Bridesmaids he should've maybe either left it well alone or tried to make something a bit more intelligent, touching, quirky and interesting because the framework and the talent was there.

So although this was close it was still a case of no cigar for me when it comes to Kristen Wiig who I think is good enough to either have a career as a female Peter Sellers, if the script was right, doing multiple funny and carefully drawn character parts or as a female Ricky Gervais with the everyday down trodden awkwardness, which is what she is aiming for, I think, with Bridesmaids.

Still they made their money so who cares right?

6 out of 10 unfortunately off Brazilian meals
Points from the Wife - 6 out of 10.

For Your Eyes Only - 18th May 2011

2011-07-02T12:57:00.001-04:00

So after the colossal mistake that was Moonraker with it's bizarre Jaws love story, ridiculous laser gun fights, it's amphibious gondola and, you know, Bond in space, the Bond producers wanted to bring the hero back down to earth. Which is something they do, I think, on average once every 5 movies after For Your Eyes Only.
It's anyone's guess then why they decided to A) have a ridiculous scene at the beginning where Bond disposes of Blofeld down a tall factory chimney in a very poorly executed opening action piece and B) include the image of Sheena Easton singing her moderately bland theme tune during the iconic titles. This is the first and last time this has happened, thank goodness as it makes the whole thing look like an irritating music video.
Luckily after these two misfires the film picks up quite a lot. Roger Moore relishing the chance to basically swan about some exotic locales, stand back while the stunt men do a lot of the hard work and chat up an array of women. Although even he was the first to admit that the ridiculously young and impressionable blonde skater character was too young and looked too creepy next to Moore who was, by the time this film rolled around, pushing 54.

The rest of the film is basically a good old romp with an evil mastermind, who has a craggy mountainous lair, a Bond woman with purpose who is trying to avenge her parents death, (just one of the scenes, along with Bond kicking a villain off the edge of a cliff in a car, that heralded a new, more realistic, harder Bond) and Topol joining in the fun at some point in traditional nasal flamboyant fashion.

The underwater scenes are excellent, beautiful and full of tension in some parts but the whole scene with the villain strapping Bond to the back of his boat and dragging him and the woman round and round in shark infested waters is utterly preposterous when anyone else would have just shot Bond in the face and as much as I am aware this is a cliche of the series, this doesn't come close or compare with Goldfinger's laser table.

For my money there are better Bond films out there but considering this is wedged between Moonraker and Octopussy, notoriously two of the worst of the series, it is the last seriously good film that Moore would do as the character (although I love View to a Kill but that is definitely more of a ridiculous comic, flabby, toupe wearing 'Carry On Bond' film.) This is, however, one of my wife's favourites because of the Greek locale and also because she saw it as a kid not knowing there was a series of films with this character and so it holds a special place in her heart.

007 out of 10
Points from the Wife - 10 out of 10 raised eyebrows

Escape from New York - 17th May 2011

2011-05-25T02:30:00.001-04:00

It's incredible to think that for 20 years from '76 with Assault from Precinct 13 to '96 and Escape from L.A. that John Carpenter's filmography is just one long list of either films you know, films you like or films you love.
For film snobs there maybe more duds than greats, but they rarely know what they're talking about, for the average viewer the quality may vary slightly but mostly I think they find them enjoyable and for the hardened fan, I would say that Carpenter barely put a foot wrong during this period.
Even if you like some of the films more than the others, it can't be denied that he has one of the most creatively interesting, diverse, artistic and fascinating resumes since Hitchcock.

Escape from New York is his second collaboration with Kurt Russell and both of them have spoken about how Snake Plissken is a character created by and very close to both of them, sharing their attitude, strength and political beliefs. Russell plays him like Clint Eastwood's futuristic 80s love baby with a chip on his shoulder. Every single one of his mannerisms is an education in purposeful cool. The one thing you can say about Snake is Russell is playing him as a hard man without a care rather than necessarily being a hard man without a care. It's almost a pastiche of a performance but I think that's maybe one of the in-jokes, especially considering everyone else in the film from Lee Van Cleef to Issac Hayes comes up to his level nothing feels out of place and the whole film plays like the greatest B-Picture ever made.
It's got the futuristic setting mixed with the decay of the past, it's got the lone gun man with an iconic look who rides into town to do a job he doesn't want to do but he has no choice, it's got ball busting militarised police, crazy sewer dwellers, a bad guy called The Duke, a strong, gutsy leading lady with a low cut dress, a cast that includes b-movie and genre icons Donald Pleasance, Harry Dean Stanton, Ernest Borgnine and it's all filmed with a slightly hyper-real comic book style where the fact that everyone is taking it so seriously is the biggest joke in the movie. It's often been imitated and never ever bettered.

As Carpenter's career moved forward so, often, did his role. Occasionally he was just a director for hire, other times he maybe wrote, maybe did the score and in the quintessential, pure Carpenter flicks he did all three. Well just as Escape maybe the best modern example of the B-Movie it may also be the most all round John Carpenter film of them all. From the cast and crew of friends to the oh so recognisable brilliant Carpenter synth score, Escape from New York is perfectly crafted, beautifully shot and interestingly written with intentionally cliche and familiar dialogue set against an original and creative plot.
The thing you realise watching it again is it gives itself time to breathe, it's pace is deliberately slower and more artistic, allowing you to create an eerie, unsettling mood and take in the incredible art direction and set design but maintains interest, intensity and drive by using the time-running-out element.
Nowadays this film would have 50 cuts a second, a charmless non-entity in the title role, utterly redundant action scenes and a hero who, deep down would really care. A modern day Escape from New York would suck big hairless balls.

Unfortunately John Carpenter's films were raided by studios unwilling to fund a Carpenter original and instead made atrociously shitty remakes from his staggering body of work. Why? nobody knows, it makes little to no sense. I could rant, kick and scream right now but I am too tired and I hope, now that the whole Gerald Butler *shudder* remake is not going ahead that they leave this one well alone because it is just brilliant, visually interesting, amusing and cliché while at the same time being seriously original and inventive.
Nothing about it needs to be remade, it looks incredible, yes it says the future is 1997 but that's part of its charm, we don't need to update things for children, they can understand the concept of a film from '81 considering '97 the future, what are we going to do, reprint all the covers and re-do the title sequence of Space 1999 to read Space 2099?

Plus just a little bit more on remakes because John Carpenter's films have been victim to this current irritating disease (as have friend and colleague George A Romero's) so it is sort of relevant. If you must remake films and I have no idea why you must, you creatively bankrupt bunch of childhood rapers, remake old bad films with good ideas that didn't have the money first time round to realise the idea don't realise established classics.
I, for one, will not be allowing my children, if I ever have any, to watch remakes. They will watch the originals as they were intended to be seen. So that there is someone left to spread the word, it's already depressing having to add either the date or the words 'the original' to a film now when you're discussing it, lets not let these remakes take over and re-write a whole history of amazing art for future generations.

There are three main exceptions to this rule: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 70s Don Sutherland version), John Carpenter's The Thing (because it draws mainly from the book and not the original film) and the Coen Brother's True Grit. The reason these ones are exempt from my wrath should be obvious.

Anyway, back to Escape From New York, it's a really great movie, one of my faves, one of Carpenter's best and one of Russell's best. With heaps of independent spirit, a great little politically charged twist ending and even a cameo from Tom Atkins, what more could anyone want? oh and I also like the sequel, haters of the sequel are stupid and have forgotten what it was like to be young and not so judgmental.

9 out of 10 snakes in a baguette
Points from the Wife 8 out of 10

Some Kind of Wonderful - 15th May 2011

2011-05-24T03:11:00.013-04:00

Well this blog is nothing if not eclectic. I really do watch a lot of weird movies in succession. It's even stranger because over the last three days I have been catching up on reviews, this marks my 16th catch up film review, and I have done pretty much a little bit of everything.
Some Kind of Wonderful, though, coming hot on the tail of immersing myself in the latter stages of the Halloween franchise is odd to say the least.

Ok, so first things first, could they not have at least tried to smile for the poster? I mean come on guys! Stoltz, I know I can't get you to smile you big ginger crazeball but Thompson, Masterson... come on! you're killin' me here!
Looking at this poster, well it looks like the most depressing 80s film ever made. It looks like a heroin addicts day-trip to the abattoir where they all sit around and read a lot of dense Norweigan literature about the meaning of death. So, right off the bat, you're not expecting dance numbers or balloons.

As a fan of John Hughes and his particular brand of high school observations growing up I wasn't opposed to watching this when the wife suggested it. It was not one of the ones that had crossed my path when I was younger, it was one of the later high school things he did after all. In fact by the time this came around I was probably more into his next film Planes, Trains & Automobiles.
Which may seem weird because obviously I was really a lot younger when these films actually came out in 1987 but, for whatever reason, I actually watched a lot of these films in order, starting of course with the Breakfast Club, just about 5-7 years later than when they first were made.
Anyway, Some Kind of Wonderful (really I can't get over how that does NOT apply to the poster) passed me by. I am, here and now, going to blame The Stoltz and why not.

The film itself isn't bad and is littered with Hughes' brand of witty humour and keen observations of stereotypes, with the obligatory annoying as all hell sister and precocious youngest child. It suffers a bit from the whole actors pushing 30 playing high school kid syndrome and from not having a distinct point or focus, so it's hardly a must see or one of his best, but it's ok.

Elias Koteas is brilliant in it, Craig Scheffer as the rich bully is so eminently punchable it is unbelievable and the two leading ladies do good work with their roles, even if Masterson's tom boy is a little too boyish and 80s for today's taste. I think she was probably too tom boy for 1987 really but anyway...
As for Stoltz... well Eric Stoltz, I don't know quite what it is about The Stoltz that I have such a hard time with. I know that I find his name one of the funniest names to say, not sure why, it's completely inexplicable but it just makes me chuckle, it's right up there with Lou Diamond Phillips and Louis Gosset Jnr, their names just represent a certain something in my brain that is humourous.
Apart from that I think it maybe that he takes himself just so seriously and tries to be all intense but he talks in a soft silly voice and looks ridiculous, the two images, the one he has tried to create and the one that is an actual reality are just so disparate it's hilarious. Can you really be intense with red hair, freckles and a chin like a bum?
He was known on set of this film, for example, as being very difficult and walking around demanding to be called by the name of the character and trying to be an aggressive tortured artist, like the character; Maybe that would be all very well for Brando in Apocalypse Now but he's Stoltz in Some Kind of Wonderful, he should've been a lot less pretentious and just done what the director told him to do.

Sadly he also doesn't have the acting chops or charisma to turn this film into a Say Anything, which is probably the film closest to this in subject matter but far superior, deeper and with a heap more charm and talent.

The only other problem I had with this otherwise, forgettable and harmless film is about the questionable ending.
Just as the Stoltz and Thompson date is ending, where he has shown her a picture he painted of her hung in a gallery, given her earrings bought with his entire college fund and kissed her romantically on the stage of the Hollywood bowl, all in front of a pining and upset Masterson, he comes out of the bully's house, realises in a split second, "doh! wait no I really love the boyish girl next door who dresses like an Australian Madonna impersonator" takes the earrings back from Thompson, runs after Masterson, they kiss, she takes the earrings, they joke and it all ends happily.

Now I understand everyone watching wanted them to get together but I am not sure any woman could really go for this after sitting through a night like that not unless they had no self esteem or were very stupid.
I guess, though, Hughes, as good as could be, was also responsible for the ending of The Breakfast Club. A film that is all about being an individual and respecting that, ending with the prom queen tarting up the nutcase with a bunch of make up and making all her problems go away...

6 out of 10 average tasting ginger biscuits soggy from being dunked in weak tea.

Halloween 4 & 5 - 13th May 2011

2011-05-24T01:58:00.000-04:00

If you hadn't guessed it yet from the blog, I am a pretty big fan of horror and pretty much all types of horror too, unless it's modern remakes. Modern horror remakes are like discarded used condoms, nobody should be picking that up.

You might also have guessed that Evil Dead was what really cemented the horror genre for me because in that trilogy there is so much diversity and innovation that it pretty much sets you up for anything.

My first love though, in a lot of ways, was the original Halloween and by extension, therefor, John Carpenter films. I would've been a teenager when I discovered a lot of this stuff and I can remember at least one halloween night where Halloween one and Carrie were a notable double bill.

I am also a big lover of franchises, anything where the original people try, in some way, to forward the story, develop the characters, increase the gore and create new and innovative kills. Apart from maybe action, horror seems to be the genre where franchises thrive and why not give the audience more of what they want, you can't have too much of a good thing in my opinion.
Now purists and cynics will scoff, say it waters down the original and the sequels are only done for the money but I say nonsense, the original remains for those who want it and the sequels are there for people who want to get into the mythology and detail of the characters.
The same argument can not be used for remakes, if I have to explain in a conversation again that I mean the ORIGINAL Dawn of the Dead or the ORIGINAL Halloween, I may seriously snap, run out into the street and set fire to the first group of arseholes who look at me funny.

Now for all those who know the Halloween franchise you know that it breaks down like this:
There's the Laurie Strode Trilogy - 1, 2 & 7
There's the Jamie Lloyd Trilogy - 4, 5 & 6
There's the one that has nothing to do with Michael Myers - 3, Season of the Witch
and There's the atrociously crap one that we don't speak about in my house - 8

As for the two Rob Zombie remakes, I haven't seen them, I won't ever see them and there is a very special place in my make-believe hell for Rob Zombie next to child molesters, the CEOs of drug companies, Republican talk show hosts and Simon Cowell.
In a small side note the actress who played Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4 & 5 then went on to be in the Rob Zombie remakes (Danielle Harris how could you!! You break my fucking heart...)

So with this blog we are dealing with parts 4 and 5 which take place 10 and 11 years respectively after the first night (parts 1&2 take place on the same night) and work from the premise that Laurie Strode and an unknown guy (someone LLoyd) had a child, Jamie, who was then fostered out into care when her parents were killed in a car accident.
Jamie now grows up in the Carruthers house hold, back in Haddonfield, where everyone is aware of who she is and, more importantly who her uncle is. Well done letting that one slip, whoever.
In the meantime Michael has been laying dormant on a gurney in the dark and spooky basement of a psychiatric hospital facility. I suppose it didn't cross anyone's mind that killing him, cutting his arms, legs and head off, sealing them in lead containers and burying them at the four corners of the globe, would have been a good idea then.
Then one dark and rainy night he is, of course, to be transported to another facility (when will bureaucrats learn!) in a rickety old ambulance where Michael, finds his moment, sits up, takes the opportunity to kill everyone and then heads off to Haddonfield to find and kill his niece.
Donald Pleasance as Dr. Sam Loomis then shows up, still scarred from the fire that you thought consumed him and Michael at the end of the second one, walking with a stick, wearing the same old raincoat and babbling like a lunatic about Michael not being human and predicting precisely where he'll go and what he'll do.
The rest of the film then plays out as an exciting and tense cat and mouse story between the whole of Haddonfield (this time the police and a gang of beer swilling, gun toting, lynch mob rednecks are in on the chase) and Michael Myers with predictable results (i.e. Michael kills almost everyone).

I personally really like Halloween 4 and I think real care was taken crafting something with a feel and mood of the first two, including a script which is peppered with very Carpenter sounding dialogue. Starting right away with the hospital orderly, who makes the most of a small role, rolling his eyes about like he's in an old Hammer horror and saying stuff about 'you never get used to their faces', through to the old preacher in the beat up pick up going on about hunting evil and of course in every single hokey warning that spews forth from Dr.Loomis' lips and which Donald Pleasance makes sound like effortless Shakespeare.
He is the reason I stick with the series, I could watch Dr.Loomis chase a plastic bag around in a garden for days as long as he kept muttering brilliant things about it being an inhuman plastic bag or possessed or something.

Other good things about the fourth part are:
The set up for the new family is nice, the interplay between the sisters works well and the little girl is not too annoying.
It's great how they bothered to explain Michael's attire of a boiler suit and a mask too, especially the latter allowing to have a neat little scare sequence in the costume dept. of a local drug store.
Lastly the idea of involving the police and the yahoos is a nice touch and feels quite authentic, even if when they do finally confront Myers, it is a little weak. Had that been the only ending I think it may have finished the franchise off right there but thankfully the proper ending, which harks back intentionally to the very beginning of the first one while setting up part 5 is absolutely brilliant and Pleasance's hammy cries of Noooooo! and the ludicrous slow motion are worthy of the price of the DVD alone.

The few downsides to this sequel are:
The pacing, there are some really slow bits in places; the acting, some of it is unforgivable in a relatively high profile film like this; the fact that they show way too much of Myers himself (although not as much as in future entries and at least there's some attempt to keep him in shadow) and yet some of the best kills are annoyingly off screen and, lastly, while the opening act has some very nice eerie feeling to it and a couple of good scares, the rest of it feels a little low on scares. These are minor quibbles, however, in the end it is a surprisingly good entry to the franchise and better than any part 4 has any right to be.

7 out of 10 pumpkins

I think after the set up at the end of part 4, part 5 needed to be something really special. Something gritty, gripping and a bit twisted. Unfortunately the only thing twisted about this entry is the French director's ludicrous ponytail and I think, therein lies the problem.
It's a real shame that the same team behind 4 didn't then go on to make 5 because they had it right, they had the Halloween mood and feeling down and they seemed to be good at putting a story together.
That's not to say that Halloween 5 is bad, it just doesn't quite live up to the promise of the ending of number 4.

Basically Jamie is in a children's psychiatric hospital, Haddenfield has one for all ages and all occasions apparently, and she can't speak. She has endless crazy nightmares where she can physically feel, see or sense what Michael is doing, which is basically killing everyone he sees in a variety of increasingly gruesome ways. When her sister and her rampantly annoying, highly 80s friend aren't visiting and being teeth gratingly murderable, jolly mad Uncle Loomis is hanging around waiting to see if he can use the child's visions to find and capture Michael.
Nothing much happens for a while until some numb skull decides to host a party and this gives Michael the perfect excuse to splatter some red on the barn walls while he waits for Jamie to decide to talk again and then break free from the hospital with her mentally challenged boy friend and hunt him down instead, I am still not sure why. Neither do I understand why it takes him so long to kill the dark haired, crazily, hideously annoying one either.
After much shenanigans, using Jamie as bait, Loomis plans to lure Michael to his old house where the cunning old raincoat fancier has strung up a big heavy net. After spending the whole movie wandering just what the hell Loomis is doing hanging round the old Myers place and what is his grand master plan, it amounts to nothing more than what you might do to stop a bear, a tranq gun and a big net. I personally think even being in the old Myer's place is probably irrelevant.
Also Michael seems to have been redecorating because up stairs he has gothically laid out some coffins and lit about 35 dozen candles.
The film ends with them not, as I said previously, just hacking the fucker up into tiny pieces and feeding him to the birds but putting him in prison where... oh yeah the weird 'man in black' who has been wandering around following Michael ominously but who is never really explained (how threatening can he really be he travels by Greyhound bus for christ sake), has ample opportunity to blow up the police station and make his escape with Michael thus setting up part 6.

Ok so the film is mundanely directed and at no point really scary, the plot is somewhat confusing because it seems to have been scripted and edited by a mad man, or possibly by the directors ponytail, there are way too many shots of Michael, hardly any moody lighting, annoying, needless and very french moments of surreality (can anyone tell me who the very old woman in the chair, looking weird, at the party was?) and the soundtrack is utter balls.
On the upside, however, it includes a lot more gore in the far more inventive death scenes, a fairly tense laundry shoot sequence that is well done, includes the edition of the 'thorn' symbol that will be relevant in later parts and, of course, lots more Donald Pleasance genius, including him roughing up small children in a highly unsuitable way and that fearsome ending battle with Michael.

While 8 will always stand as the weakest of the series for me, mainly because it completely destroys the perfect ending of H20, 5 is probably the second weakest entry in the franchise (if my memory of 6 serves, I will have to re-watch it and add it to this blog).
Still it's better than most part 5's of anything, that I can think of, and it's important if you want to follow the mythology of Myers.

5.5 out of 10 big cookies (watch the movie and guess the reference)

Good Night and Good Luck - 10th May 2011

2011-05-23T03:14:00.001-04:00

At some point George Clooney went from the guy who did a cameo in Return to Horror High to directing and starring in films about human rights, civil liberties and the nature of the media in our life. He also did it with good grace, a good sense of humour and a string of beautiful ladies on his arm.
For a second film as a director "Good Night and Good Luck" is an incredible achievement, hell I would be amazed if this was his tenth film!
Shot in glorious, crisp black and white, filled with fantastic actors and telling the true story of a battle of words, famous radio & TV journalist, Edward R Murrow had with Senator McCarthy at the height of the communist paranoia era in America, Good Night and Good Luck is a rich, fascinating, naturally paced, intelligent bit of film making we end up seeing all too rarely these days.

Based on actual transcripts from actual telecasts, recollections from various books by or about the people involved and watched closely, helped or filled in by surviving relatives, Clooney and his writing and producing partner, Grant Heslov, have taken careful steps to make the whole thing as factually accurate and as authentic as possible.

The action is framed by a speech Murrow made at an awards dinner, about the nature of the television, the media and its ability to be used as a source of genuine facts and learning, if only for a couple of hours a day. You, of course, only have to look at the utter puddle of effluent that modern television is today to see that nobody heeded his advice.

The genius is that this film was able to not only comment on the idea of government abandoning the laws and constitution for its own agenda, which, of course we have seen in the last decade and know all too well the ramifications of that, but also to criticise modern media's inability to hold them accountable, as they should, by simply using fact and carefully chosen words.
The thing that hits home, watching this film, is how intelligently and how precisely Murrow used his words, yes he believed that not every story had an equal side and in some cases people could just be wrong but he offered his editorial opinion using clear arguments, backable by hard facts. It must've been an absolutely captivating and riveting time to be alive.

Nowadays I can't even believe most newsreaders can spell the word fact let alone know how to carefully research one and use it correctly, it's disparaging and hopeless. I have watched clips of the real Edward R Murrow speak and it is just phenomenal that there used to be a world where journalists would speak calmly and eloquently, not talking down to or patronise their audience but assume they were as intelligent as them, even going so far as to casually quote Shakespeare to make their point and close their statements.
It just brings into glaring relief the fact that they now use freedom of the press to give credence to the utter mindless bilge spewed forth by gas bag morons like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly.

Other highlights of the film are the period authenticity and the range of interesting characters. Clooney obviously loves this golden age of television and has looked at it from both sides, the frivolous game show side in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which was great but a little stylised and muddled, and the serious, factual side in this, the superior film, Good Night and Good Luck.
Apart from the black and white and the occasional theatrical lighting, this film is not, at first glance, as showy or as flashy as Confessions and yet in telling a true story, as correctly as possible, with the utmost attention to detail, Clooney, backed up by the performances of his incredibly talented cast and the words of Edward r Murrow, has actually managed to create something very visually arresting, with layers, depth, style and substance.

He's not even preachy with it, you can take from it what you will because exactly like Murrow did with McCarthy and simply projected his own words for the audience to decide, so has Clooney and Haslov with Murrow. It's a masterful piece of film making.

Recently, because of the state of television news, internet news and the world in general I decided, because I was being driven quite mad by it all, to just concern myself with fiction. Not pure stupid entertainment but good fiction because in all honesty, nowadays, as Good Night and Good Luck proves, you can learn more from a creative and intelligent retelling of the past than you can from watching the news of the present.

10 out of 10

Rubber - 8th May 2011

2011-05-23T01:21:00.000-04:00

Possibly one of the strangest little movies I have ever seen but then it's immediately robbed of any kudos that title may give it because it so wants to be strange, it so wants to be different and it's just aching for people to ooh and aah at its zaniness. It's like the new kid at school who turns up wearing an extraordinarily loud shirt, with retro plastic 80s shades, carrying a stuffed mongoose. Weird for weirds sake doesn't make it interesting.
I am sure it tries to rock itself to sleep at night trying to convince itself it is bold, innovative and daring, that it ripped apart cinematic conventions and played with strands of narrative like they were the small, flaccid and unappealing member of a high court judge being wafted unenthusiastically through the glory hole in a downtown bathroom but I'm sorry Rubber, you didn't.

Ok, let me back up a bit and try and explain where all this is coming from. Last year Rubber was screening at the Cannes film festival and I heard something about it from a film journalist I like who blogged from there. Then a few months later, looking online, I came cross the trailer for this so-called 'killer tyre' movie.
Now it wasn't till I went back and watched the blogs again and realised this was the same thing that I thought, oh that looks right up my street, it could at least be interesting. A tyre that wonders the desert blowing peoples heads off, if nothing else it'll be fun to watch heads explode. Sometimes that's the way my mind works. Sometimes you just want to watch shit explode.

Imagine my surprise then when this film started with a desert landscape littered with chairs and a man standing before them holding a whole wedge of binoculars. Then a car turns the corner towards the camera and proceeds to swerve all over the place intentionally knocking over every last chair. It then comes to a stop, a cop gets out of the boot/trunk, is given a glass of water, which he then pours out all over the floor. He then looks directly into camera and proceeds to give a lengthy, nonsensical and incorrect, either purposefully or not who knows, speech about the nature of 'No Reason' in movies. Inane crap like 'why is ET brown' and so on. We then see that actually he is talking to a group of regular folk, I suppose they are meant to be us, each of whom are given a pair of binoculars, walk to the top of the hill and start to 'watch' the action from afar.

Right, I thought, that's a fairly pretentious and stupid way to open the film but ok, fine, you want to start your film in a quirky way to offset the fact we are about to sit back and watch a killer tyre movie, I can get behind that. It is ultimately irrelevant though because anyone with half a brain knows that by making it a killer tyre you are already commenting on the nature of stalk and slash films by saying that after all these years the killer may as well be a rubber tyre. I got that from the trailer but, whatever, let's continue.

We are then treated to the best sequence in the film where the personality and life of the tyre is actually born. We see it shift uneasy in the sand, struggle to move, then struggle to stand, the struggle to move forward etc. It is a great visual gag that allows us to personify the tyre in our minds and even maybe think of it as a baby, or a puppy, something cute and new. Then off the tyre trundles and slowly but surely we notice its destructive tendencies. From littered glass bottles to scorpions to finally a bunny rabbit, it destroys each one in its path.

Now we're off I thought, great! and yes you can read all sorts of crap into these actions, maybe it's saying that man is a destructive beast from the day we're born and the tyre is a way to turn a mirror on our own actions or maybe it's saying that our waste, like rubber tyres etc. are destroying the earth but ultimately, who gives a four fingered screw behind the woodshed, it's a bad ass tyre and it's out to kill all in its path. Annoyingly it has cut back to that crowd on the hill with the binos a couple of times and I had sort of hoped that they were just going to be a framing devise but ok, let's trudge on.

Very quickly then, the tyre kills a few people, heads off to a motel, peeks on someone in the shower, kills the maid and generally behaves like a serial killer, desert road psycho. I would be enjoying this if it didn't keep cutting back to these annoying bastards on the hill who keep commenting on what we're watching.
The next morning the police show up to examine the body of the maid and the folks on the hill wake up to find the guy with all the binos from the beginning coming up the hill. He hands them all a turkey which all but the wheel chair bound audience member, devour like a pack of ravenous wolves. It slowly drifts through my mind, "I don't care, why are these people still the focus of the film?"
It turns out the turkey is poisoned and all but the wheel chair bound guy die.
A) for some reason I saw that coming and B) why have this pointless set up, only to destroy it?
I guess, for no reason.
I suppose we are meant to remember the opening of the film where the cop talks about the nature of 'No Reason' in films and go 'aaaah how clever, yes, stop trying to fathom out why things are happening and just accept this because there's 'no reason' brilliant, yes brilliant... except, brainfart, if there's no reason then why do any of it? Why am I even watching it? or maybe that's the point, maybe that's why you killed the audience because you hate audiences and the way they ask too many questions, make demands on you like plot and characters and talk and eat through films. Maybe you think your audience is the girl who laughed at you in secondary school because your penis was too small and oddly coloured so this is all some big elaborate revenge!
None of it makes you clever by the way, it makes you an A grade, solid gold, highly polished twat. Anyone can do that, start a film with a big speech about 'No Reason' and then spend the rest of the film taking pictures of oddly shaped fruit, or combing a badger, or having a siamese twin hunchback play the accordian at a Dutchman's lobsters wedding anniversary! it doesn't make you a genius if that's all you have to offer. Without a story or at least something you care about, none of it has a point.

The film then continues think it's even more clever by having the police chief break down and say "right, we are all actors by the way, you can all go home. That maid is not really dead, this uniform is fake and this is all just made up for the benefit of those folks on the hill but they're all dead now so don't worry."
The trouble is they are not all dead, one is still watching, the tyre is essentially still alive and blowing peoples heads off, the maid seems to actually be dead and no one else but the police chief and the geeky guy with the binos knows this is all fake and part of some elaborate plan dreamt up by some elusive master, who we never see we just hear the guy talking to him on the phone.

Fuck me, we get it, you broke the 4th wall but only partly, you're trying to make a point but sadly you made the film too dull for the point to even matter and anyway, any minute now this is all going to get so 'meta' and 'knowing' and 'hip' that it's going to be sucked up your posterior like the feeble dribbly sputum it is.

It's such a shame too because contained within all this amateurishly surreal nonsense is some really good ideas, some funny jokes and the possibility to have made a great film about humans and their inept but comical attempts to capture or kill a serial killing rubber tyre called Robert. As it is they didn't have the strength of their convictions in the idea and instead filled it with all this half cocked, simplistic deconstruction on cinema.

Look, I like weird, I like funny, I am the guy wishing you actually HAD made a comedy horror movie about a serial killer tyre with a bunch of awesome B-movie conventions in it, like your trailer promised. I am the audience for that movie, I am also not a moron and I know that you had that whole 'no reason' bit so that if someone even remotely questioned or criticised your piece of shit film then the joke would be on them.
Well I am sure if you were ever to read this, which of course you never will, you are having a good old chuckle at my expense.
(nobody reads this, well they do but they sit on large boxes of specially harvested ostrich beaks high in the Andes playing a lime green tuba whilst wearing nothing but a copy of 'A Tale of Two Cities' strapped about their waste with the sticky and extended vocal chords of a one-eyed juggler boy)

In the end I had to ask myself the tough question: Why am I writing all this or hypothesising all this about a film I ultimately didn't like?

No reason.

4 out of 10 exploded rabbit sandwiches glazed with a hefty dollop of shut the fuck up!

Hobo with a Shotgun - 8th May 2011

2011-05-22T23:00:00.007-04:00

Oh Canada! Is this what happens when we leave you alone in the frozen north with your crazy ideas and nothing but time?

Hobo With A Shotgun started life as an independently made trailer for a competition run in conjunction with the release of the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse picture. It won the competition and when, for that limited time, Grindhouse was shown as one film, the way it was intended, Hobo proudly appeared before it.

Then later, much like Machete, it was turned into a feature length flick, only this time the film makers got a budget and completely re-shot and re-cast it.

This is nothing new, The Coen Brothers, following a little in the steps of Sam Raimi, used a trailer to secure financing for their first feature, Blood Simple.

When I sat down to watch this, despite being fascinated with the whole Grindhouse debacle at the time, I didn't know any of that.

I wasn't living in America back then, I didn't know there was a competition and I hadn't seen the original trailer.

I learnt about Hobo from a friend of mine in the UK who is a big Rutger Hauer fan and a fan of films that are so dark, sick and twisted that they become hilarious, for example he is a big fan of, the quite similar movie, Street Trash which is about sick melting tramps.

I think the people who don't really get exploitation or horror don't understand that attached to the gory, violent imagery is often a fantastically creative imagination, a great sense of humour and that life affirming feeling you get to make through one of these in one piece. It's a safe and enjoyable way to have an endurance test of wills to prove to the world, well if we're honest, mostly your friends, that you're not a pussy.

Well if ever there was a film that took a great title, the money and decades of previous exploitation offerings and attempted to over-do, out-gross and push the boundaries of b-movies in the most underground comic book, intentionally sick & grimy way then it's Hobo with a Shotgun. It's like an early Peter Jackson movie meets Death Wish. A live action Meet The Feebles or Dead Alive (Braindead to us Brits) meets Straw Dogs or a caucasian Foxy Brown. If there was more camp comedy in it and thank Christ there isn't, it would be a lot like a Troma film too.

Firstly the film looks great, the whole thing painted in bright vivid tones and neon hues and looks far more like an 80s exploitation B-Movie than I expected. They have got the whole tone of the film pitch perfect with good music, great set decoration and interesting and bizarre camera lenses and angles.

Secondly, throughout the whole grotesque, bloody and visceral film Rutger Hauer doesn't put a foot wrong in the title role. It felt very much like they had properly focused on and written his part well so he had plenty to do and his performance didn't disappoint.

Lastly I think the film was chock full of good, funny and disgusting ideas and most of them were realised well.

Where it falls down for me was in the plot, the writing of the other characters and especially the villains.

You see the whole city is over-run with crime and degradation. On every street corner there is something repugnant, sleazy or violent happening and this controlled anarchy is all the doing of one man, seemingly the only citizen of this land who knows where the dry cleaners is, and his two arsehole sons. They have the town in their back pocket, completely bought and paid for.

Well that concept is fine enough, even if it does open up more questions than it answers (like why would you do anything these weedy and obnoxious ring pieces say anyway?) but I think it would have been of huge benefit to the film if the actors chosen to play these roles were genuinely terrifying, or at least menacing in a sort of Gary Busey type way. I mean the two sons are quite the most annoying pair of squeeky voiced, whining, sickening turds you've ever witnessed and while, obviously, that works in the film's favour because you side instantly with the Hobo, who is equally lacking in moral fibre if we're honest here, it doesn't help that they look like the sort of pair who could be over powered by a particularly pungent fart rather than leaders of a rain of terror. Plus I think with Hauer in the lead you'd side with the grizzled son of a bitch anyway, you don't need to amp up the annoying factor on your villains.

As for the lead baddie 'The Drake' well I am sorry but he's the real lame duck. He's about 70 if he's a day and a tennis ball to the face would probably disorientate him long enough for you to steal all his clothes and kick him into next Friday! With these kind of adversaries you'd think the Hobo would have the streets cleaned by dinner.

Alas this is not the case and this malevolent leprechaun has the chance to not only use the TV to turn regular folks, if there are such things in this hellish wasteland, against the hobo but also to summon The Plague, a pair of possibly robotic, possibly demonic bikers to come finish off him and his new found prostitute friend Abby.

This is actually where it all starts to get good again and the climax piles on atrocious and gleeful gore upon gore. It's also where all pretense of normalcy, or at least even movie logic, has well and truly flown out of the window, especially with the briefest, random and surreal appearance of a giant octopus.

Look I know that to poke holes in Hobo with a Shotgun for its non existent plot, its crappy villains and its lazy writing is completely missing the point but personally I think the strength of the best kind of B-Movie is their ability to tell the stories and ideas that you can't in A pictures, not just to see if we can push the boundaries of taste to ludicrous levels. Ok so, plot wise, there is some mumbled nonsense about the Hobo's desire to run off with Abby and run a lawn mowing company but that only goes to emphasise the ridiculousness of the situation. He rode in on the rails, why doesn't he just ride out again when he sees what the city is like and that there is no money to be made here? If there are places you can go where lawn mowing is a lovely peaceful occupation, why isn't he there?

I also think that films are cult films when they are good enough to gather a following over time and because there's something about them we haven't seen before, there's just a part of me inside that dislikes the fact that this film was so obviously made specifically to be like that, it feels cynically manufactured almost.

Then there is another part of me who tells that part of me to shut the fuck up and enjoy the magnificent splatter fest for what it is. After all it does exactly what it says on the tin and it features plenty of things we haven't seen before.

I have seen my fair share of horror and exploitation films and where most films would draw the line, in terms of what they'd show, this one seems to start. The opening death is the sort of thing another film might end with and if they did, they certainly wouldn't show it in all it's red drenched splendor.

I can't go into all the ridiculously hilarious and jaw-droppingly, delicious and twisted moments in this film for fear of spoiling it.

All I would say is that if your idea of amusing is an upside down human piñata being beaten silly by three giggling topless women, which is then split open from balls to chin, much to their glee and the scene ends with them happily dancing in the unfortunate man's innards then I would give this film a watch at least once.

Also, for you fans of all things Canuk, look out for a few cameos by famous Canadians, those wacky sick funsters.

7 out of 10 - donkey balls in a bap drizzled with pervy Santa's semen.

Points from The Wife - 5 out of 10.

American: The Bill Hicks Story - 8th May 2011

2011-05-22T20:24:00.000-04:00

For those of you who don't know who Bill Hicks is, stop reading, go away, google Bill Hicks, buy his albums, watch his stand-up shows, come back and we can talk. Actually, for those of you who don't know anything about Bill Hicks, this documentary might be for you.
No, actually I was wrong to say that, go and watch this - Bill Hicks - Relentless, which is Bill Hicks live in Montreal in 1991 (you gotta love YouTube) and possibly one of the greatest stand-up shows of all time and then maybe watch this documentary.

You see the problem is that it's too in-depth to be an introduction piece and not in-depth enough, in certain areas, for die hard fans. Unfortunately and I hate to say this but it doesn't even work like one of those documentary's, like the US Vs. John Lennon, where we reflect on the past to comment on the future, socially and politically. Considering the time, energy and effort obviously put into this documentary, not just by the film makers but by all the friends and family of Bill's who show up to be interviewed and open their archives, it's a wonder that the subject matter chosen is so mundane.

Let me start from the beginning. I am a Bill Hicks fan and was a huge Bill Hicks fan. As a teenager and then a young man I collected all of his CDs and whatever video footage was available, I have also read his unofficial biography, his official biography and his book of shows and interviews 'Love All the People' so I can accept that it would've been hard for this documentary to really show me something new.
That said there were a couple of tantalising stories in there, where there was some new information, but I guess what frustrated me was that those seemed rushed and unevolved as ideas. Yet stories about his, well documented, drug use and alcohol abuse, never ending, unappreciated road tour of small towns in the States and the other, well documented, fact that he was performing in comedy clubs since he was a teenager, were given a large amount of the running time to play out but at no point really got under the skin of the man.

The technique used for all this, a sort of long running, almost pythonesque, photo montage and animation, illustrating the stories in the interviews being given, was a novel and entertaining enough way to get passed the 'talking head' structure of documentary's like this, where footage of the actual subject was scarce, but when I sat down to watch it I had no idea it lasted almost the whole length of the film and it got quite annoying trying to work out who was talking, when and why because, sometimes there was no indication. Also, while you could debate back and forth which clips should be played where and why, very often the clips that were shown were, really, in the vaguest of contexts and with no commentary on them afterwards at all.

There was little to no talk about his actual upbringing or religion. There were constant references to his philosophy but normally in the most round-about and unspecific terms. There was nothing about his personal, female relationships. There was nothing about his attacks on Jay Leno and only a passing comment about being censored from Letterman. Only very loose and confusing references made to his illness, in the lead up to his death and no attempt to put any of his, subsequent, frantic amassing of work into any sort of timeline and in fact the whole last 3 years of his life, where his career was taking off in England, he was reconnecting with his family and friends, he headed back to Texas to record extensively for future albums and they made several films was also completely rushed and glossed over in an almost bizarrely crude and annoying way.

This maybe one of those where you need to get the DVD which apparently comes with hours and hours of extra footage because there must be a better documentary in all the access and interviews they got, there must be. I am just not sure who their editor or researcher was because for the area of Hicks' life that they did cover (the road most travelled unfortunately) the Channel 4 talking-heads doc that appears on the Revelations VHS and DVD is far better. In fact just in researching this review I have found better things to watch on YouTube.

Yes it is great that people are keeping Hicks' flame alive and yes it's fantastic this documentary got a theatrical release and all the subsequent attention it got but ultimately, if you are just watching the theatrical cut of this and not all the DVD extras, this is, unfortunately, not a must-see for anyone with a passing knowledge of Hicks. Watch it if you like, it's entertaining enough, some of the clips and photos are relatively fascinating and it's always great to hear the guys routines but if it's information and depth you're after, you are still best doing your own research.

5 out of 10 waffle hut waffles (I am not proud of it, I was hungry)

Stranger Than Fiction - 3rd May 2011

2011-05-22T15:33:00.004-04:00

If I was a cynic and I guess I can be sometimes, I would say that this film is one of those films that occasionally gets through the formulaic cookie cutter Hollywood machine, almost so they can prove that what they do is still artistically viable, but in their own way these sorts of films are just as formulaic.
They call them smaller, independent or arty pictures but none of those are adequate descriptions. Big named actors, looking to do quirkier and different parts and, in the case of this one, comedians looking to stretch their range, line up to participate and they are usually written and directed with that slightly smug, knowing glance at the camera where everyone involved in the project is just itching to show everyone else just how intelligent they are.
The scripts all seem like they are written by first time film students (and I know what I mean, I was one) and in their own way are riddled with cliches.
Take Strange Than Fiction, for example:
- It has the old chestnut of a chain smoking, neurotic writer with writer's block,
- The 'not as clever as it thinks it is' voiceover,
- The personification of inanimate, somewhat mundane objects,
- A protagonist who is a quiet, methodical, unassuming pleasant man who would be ok if he could just meet someone and learn to live a bit,
- The love interest who is quirky, independent, verbal and aggressive but with a heart of gold, willing to abandon all that for a man playing a rare yet hip song badly on an old guitar,
- The know it all, barmy professor who is both a friend and a father figure
- and debates on the nature of death and art.
I guess I would put it in the same category as a Charlie Kaufman film with a bit of the Truman Show thrown in for good measure. What I am just not sure about is whether it is one of those films or trying desperately to be one of those films.
What I do know is, to enjoy it and there is much to enjoy about this film, you need to get passed all that, accept it all and move on.

If you can do that then what you get is a well acted, fairly well written and wonderfully directed film that has just enough humour, just enough heart and, even, a glimmer of originality to stop itself disappearing right up its own bottom.
Clear winners and scene stealers here are Dustin Hoffman and Maggie Gyllenhaal proving you could stick her next to a bag of rodent tails and she would find a way to have chemistry with it. That you buy the relationship between her anti-war, tattooed, feminist baker and Ferrell's button down, shy IRS auditor is mostly down to her but is also, of course, in part, thanks to Ferrell.
Here he takes the, not particularly, showy and the, not particularly, comical role of the everyman struggling to come to terms with his own existence and to give it meaning and he plays it perfectly. A lot of talk is given to comedians who go straight and I wouldn't exactly call Stranger than Fiction a serious film, as it is riddled with intentional jokes, but Will Ferrell is playing the straight man of the piece to some extent. What he achieves here is a subtle and rich performance that may have root in some of his SNL or movie man-child personas but resists the urge to use any of his usual over-the-top tricks, more like on his way to becoming a latter day Bill Murray and unlike, say, Jim Carrey in the Truman Show or Eternal Boredom of a Thoughtless Mind who can't help mugging and prancing around like a buffoon.
Ferrell anchors the film perfectly and what's rare for a comedian, allows everyone else around him to be the funny ones. His performance is, very often, purely reactionary.

There is one problem I have with the whole thing though that does, towards the end, threaten to derail the film for me.
Firstly I don't understand why killing her characters at the end of her books makes Karen Eiffel, played well and unselfconsciously by Emma Thompson, a great writer but let's say that it does then why, when confronted with the reality of Harold Crick, instead of freaking out and making the decision should he live or should he die, why doesn't she simply change the name of the character in the book to Bertram Crick or Harold Crock or something?
I understand it's all a metaphor for facing the reality of death, the fact that it will come at us whether we like it or not and we might as well die for something and that's fine, the film has its cake and eats it too because they do wrap it all up neatly in the end but why make the entire plot, metaphor or not, hang on the simple task of changing one single letter.
Also at a certain point the writer goes from narrating what is happening as it's happening to being able to make things happen, like the phone ring, by typing 'the phone rings a third time'.
These inevitable plot holes, in a script such as this, are only minor niggles and actually I really enjoyed watching it this time round and laughed all the way through it.

8 out of 10 pots of hip greek yoghurt sucked up by a scruffy yet brilliant literature professor
Points from The Wife - 7 out of 10

Howard The Duck - 1st May 2011

2011-05-22T05:58:00.003-04:00

Socrates, that old beardy weirdy, once said that the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

Well if this is the case then let us hope that, with hindsight, the audiences and critics of 1986 have realised their mistake and become amongst the smartest people in history because clearly when they made Howard the Duck a flop, they knew absolutely nothing.

I am not going to necessarily wax rhapsodic about how this is the greatest movie of all time but one of the worst? How can it be? Tyler Perry (or Ashton Kutcher) is nowhere to be seen!

This is just your basic fish out of water (or maybe that's duck out of water) story about an alien, who also happens to be an anthropomorphic duck, who comes to earth and ends up saving the planet from large, super-imposed, stop-motion beasties all for the love of a good, very large haired, rock chick.

What I fail to understand is how audiences but mostly critics seemed to have an inability to suspend disbelief. This is just a film, a fantasy kids film, featuring a wise cracking talking duck no less and yet it seems they reviewed it like it was meant to be 2001: A Space Odyssey or worst still like the film was so offensive it might well have featured Howard being anally raped by a nazi as he flips off the pope! Are they crazy? Did they all have their humor glands removed at birth?

It's also ridiculous that they now heap praise on the likes of Batman, Spiderman and XMen when, if we are all honest with ourselves, these modern comic adaptations offer about as much in the way of message or storyline. Tarting it up with a fancy score, ominous tracking shots, A-List actors and up-to-date CGI doesn't stop the fact you are making a film about a crazy person who wears a costume going up against a crazier person who wears a costume and hoping that you shift a few more units of the varied merchandise.

Now, is the film silly? Yes very and is it embarrassing watching Tim Robbins and Lea Thompson goof and flounder around like poorly paid, end of the pier, balloon animal making entertainers? of course but is it also a good old adventure film with some fairly impressive set pieces and it's tongue wedged firmly in its cheek? Yes it is and it's almost more enjoyable now as an adult than it was when I was a kid because now I get to marvel at all the hysterical yet completely inappropriate sexual humor.

In fact I would applaud the writer director for having the balls to try and make Howard the Duck a little edgier, a little adult whilst being able to move it along at such a pace you don't realise you've gone from a seedy dive bar brawl to a jolly cops versus Ultralight plane chase in broad daylight.

It also has all the sheen and professional quality of a George Lucas production so it looks and sounds great too.

The film also has one ace in its sleeve and that is Jeffrey Jones.

Now before I go on, I do know that, very sadly, he is currently on the sex offenders registry for taking pictures of a 14 year old boy back in 2002 and I in no way condone that, I talk now purely of the man's ability as an actor and with a body of work that contains Ferris Bueller, Amadeus, Without a Clue, Beetlejuice and Who's Harry Crumb? to name just a few, he has always been and remains one of my favourite performers.

His work in Howard the Duck is incredible going from a quizzical and mild mannered scientist to a Dark Overlord in gradual and more and more comically dark ways.

My favourite being a scene where he is driving a truck and comes to a traffic jam where he bumps into the cars to get them out of the way because he has to get to the laboratory in a hurry and a state trooper comes up and says "Hey! I need to see your license, Jack!"

and in full scary, deteriorating make-up, with an eerie croaky voice and with a dead straight face Jeffrey Jones says

"I have no license… and I am not… Jack."

A lot has been made of the implied love affair between Beverley, Lea Thompson's character and Howard (what with this, her own son in Back to the Future, Andrew Dice Clay in Casual Sex and Tom fucking Cruise in all the Right Moves, Thompson has had some unfortunate screen pairings!) but again, suspend disbelief, it's all part of the fun of the movie and for what it's worth, they have fantastic chemistry better than, dare I say it, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks for example.

So what if he sort of walks and talks like Danny DeVito and has the face of Macaulay Culkin, he's a better actor than Culkin and can play the guitar as mean as Michael J Fox, no wonder the woman loves herself some Duck!

As do I and I won't apologise for it.

7.5 out of 10 cheese and quackers

Points from the Wife - 7 out of 10

This review, I am very proud and happy to say, will be appearing, in an edited form, in the New York based film 'Zine 'I Love Bad Movies' issue #4 out in June 2011. You can buy it here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/ksen?ref=seller_info

Masters of the Universe - 1st May 2011

2011-05-22T05:39:00.008-04:00

Today's Hollywood recipe is as follows:

-Take a famous family friendly cartoon series with it's own line of lucrative toys

-Add a high budget from a company, Canon, that is actually unable to maintain it

-Then filter the whole disastrous affair through the patented 'Hollywood Fantasy Film Cliche Scriptwriter-o-matic 3000'

and you get the cheesy, fairly thick, yet fabulously nostalgic tasting, 1987 forgotten classic Masters of the Universe,

AKA there was a time when Dolph Lundgren was more famous than Courtney Cox.

For anyone growing up a kid in the late 70s and 80s, with hindsight, film-wise at least, we never had it so good. Cough and your saliva would hit a poster for the latest attempt to cash in on what Star Wars and ET had started: a highly camp fantasy craze.

Willow, Krull, The Beastmaster, Mac and Me, Labyrinth, the Never Ending Story, Flight of the Navigator etc. etc. The list is endless.

Now as an adult I have sort of had my fill of fantasy films, all of which basically contain bizarrely named people and/or creatures journeying either to or from some ridiculously named place to find something, retrieve something or destroy something or else their/are world would be decimated and/or over-run. Along the way there are tests, battles, laughs, love, prosthetics and some dated "special" effects.

However, you can sit a child in front of such things and it is all miraculous. Except, strangely, and I have noticed this in other 80s so-called kid's films, MOTU features swearing, quite a bit of gore and some genuinely scary/troubling scenes. Probably the reason I loved every neon drenched, ludicrous second of it.

Like all film adaptations of any thing, the Master of the Universe both contains elements of the original cartoon but also weaves a story and includes characters that bare no resemblance to it in any way. Adding to the utter joyous and laughable confusion you get watching it as an adult.

If you stop and think, even for a moment, then none of the film's mythology makes any sense what-so-ever. What is even more genius is at no point do they bother to explain it.

For example: Who is the Sorceress and why?

If He-Man is a prince, where's the royal family?

Why are the only good people on Eternia an old man who resembles an accountant (who might do war reenacting on the weekends and could slip a disk at any moment), his fairly useless yet tight buttocked daughter, a midget with a droopy face, who apparently has gills but also a nose, and this waxed, shiny adonis with a blonde mullet who wonders around in next to nothing. When the evil army, led by a man with a skull for a head, have some weird animal/human/monster half-breed killers and countless black armored goons waiting to get a face full of laser?

Also why are there lasers and swords but not guns?

I could go on like that for days. Like all good bad films, you just have to accept everything you see at face value and take the ride.

At least the script being utterly hilarious helps! At one point a human character (our wacky Eternians come to Earth you see) having found 'The Cosmic Key' (a cylindrical array of buttons, lights and twirling pointy things that resembles nothing at all) runs into a music store and claims to the owner "It must be one of those new Japanese synthesizers!" to which any normal person, when asking where they found it and finding out that they got it out of a spooky smoking crater in the graveyard, would say "It's probably an alien device for opening time portals, I would put it back where you found it."

The acting, thankfully, is mostly awful and hammy in the best possible way. The characters run the range of bland and unimportant to mildly interesting, weird looking folk who help, sort of, with some vague exposition. Dolph Lundgren fresh from Rocky gives the sort of performance where you get the impression that even the simple act of forming words makes his brain ache and as Skeletor, obviously taking his cues

from Max Von Sydow as Ming the Merciless, Frank Langella (that's highly respected thespian of stage and screen, Frank Langella) chews the scenery like a carnivorous and veracious dog. Spewing forth fantastically over-the-top, megalomaniacal shit like it was Shakespeare!

That is scenery which the rather disturbingly serious director's commentary confidently informs me was one of the largest sets ever constructed, utilizing two whole sound stages. Mind-boggling when you consider that they hardly use it. Must be where all that budget went, that and taking over the entire main street of a suburb of LA for months of night shoots when the whole thing looks like it was and could've been shot on the back lot from a Duran Duran video!

So with a dash of Flash Gordon, a pinch of Star Wars, a soupcon of Star Trek IV, a dab of Lord of the Rings, a morsel of Wizard of Oz and a healthy dollop of 'what in the name of Dolph Lundgren's loin cloth were you thinking/smoking last night?' this film manages to take a confused mess of light, colour, costume, effects and ridiculous hair, run it past you at such a speed and with just enough organisation that it might just be art.

Not bad for a first time director with, evidently, no sense of humor who honestly believed he was making and has made a classic.

It's all incredibly good fun however and well worth a watch if you fancy a good chuckle.

I am just not sure though, after all that, it's actually for kids.

6.5 out of 10 spaghetti hoops, bacon, fish fingers and toast - makes absolutely no sense but might just be tasty

Source Code - 30th April 2011

2011-05-22T05:19:00.008-04:00

There was a lot of talk last year, when Inception came out about it finally proving that you didn't have to be brain dead or a sequel to be a big Hollywood blockbuster.
Well, as I have said before, I am not sure Inception was quite as intelligent as everyone gave it credit for but in the first half of the year we have already had The Adjustment Bureau and now Source Code, both of which seem to come hot on Inception's tale dealing as they do with questions about what is real or not and alternate realities.
That is by no means to say that Source Code is an Inception clone or rip off, merely to imply that it is part of the first wave of more intelligent yet no less entertaining sci-fi thrillers to grace the silver screen since Inception's success.

Source Code's plot initially reads and actually plays like a really good Quantum Leap episode via Groundhog Day, but if Sam Beckett was played by someone with actual charisma or if Bill Murray had to stop lots of people from dying instead of convince Andie McDowell to love him.
It's about a soldier, Jake Gyllenhaal, who is part of some new technology which, just like Quantum Leap (complete with reflections in the mirror different to that of Gyllenhaal), allows him to be repeatedly dropped into the body of another man, for a small and set period of time, who is on a train, bound for Chicago, with a bomb on it. Gyllenhaal's task and he seems to have no choice in the matter whether he accepts it or not, is to, in this limited time period, find out where the bomb is and who planted it. The film then basically takes you through all the logical scenarios one might go through if actually in that situation and does so in such a way that, despite the repeated setting and conversations, it never gets tired.
It is also half way through the film when you suddenly realise the catch and the fact that the real mystery is where is Gyllenhaal's soldier really and what is actually going on.

The first thing I would say is how good Jake Gyllenhaal is in this movie. The last thing I saw him in was Love and Other Smugs and that was so bowel shatteringly awful I am not sure, with hindsight, how I made it through to the end without being sick but in Source Code he gives a believable, if occasionally overly earnest portrayal of exactly what you'd expect someone to go through if such a situation ever presented itself: disbelief, fear and, refreshingly, some humour.
Even the slightly unnecessary emotional journey that he goes on through the course of the film, to do with his father, is handled in a slightly more subtle way than usual and the whole film, pleasingly, has less heroics and more actual thought and detection in it. Which is odd because the marketing made it look like a stupid action film the likes of which Nic Cage would be better suited to, when in reality it is a proper, almost old fashioned slice of well realised science fiction.

So it was well written and very competently directed by Bowie Jnr, Duncan Jones, with nothing particularly flashy about any of it, just successfully performing the very difficult task of taking several strands of storyline, which take place over two very different and separate places in time, in what could of been a confusing and complex structure and making it all seem coherent, realistic, plausible and understandable. No mean feet, all things considered.

There were two aspects of the film that took a little bit of a Hollywood liberty and that had to do with the female leads in both sections of his story.
In the present world, Gyllenhaal is talked through his mission by a female military officer played by Vera Farmiga and, without giving too much away (MINOR SPOILER ALERT), it is a bit of a stretch of the imagination, that in the short time she has been working with him, he would be able to win over a trained soldier like her to put her job on the line for him like she does.
The same can be said for the Michelle Monaghan character in the past world, in the sense that, seeing as she only really gets to spend eight minutes total with the Gyllenhaal possessed version of her friend, that they end up where they do is a bit of a leap even if she was always leaning in that direction with her actual friend in the first place.
However, both the women perform their, little bit thankless, roles very well and sell, to the best of their abilities, the slightly tall order of the story.

A special mention goes to Jeffrey Wright who plays Dr.Rutledge, he is the head of and inventor of the project that is currently using Gyllenhaal, and he plays the part of a slightly fastidious, nerdy old man with a limp and slightly dubious morals with such relish that it is an absolute pleasure to watch.
It's rare these days that actors are asked or given the free reign to play parts a little slightly over the top, with maybe a funny voice or a quirky tic and when the best of them do, I could watch it all day.

It's difficult to discuss the film further without giving too much away, things like this really are better watched knowing as little as possible and I do urge you to go see it as I thought it was an engaging and enjoyable sci-fi romp with a little bit of naval gazing existentialism thrown in for good measure.
Out of the three so-called intelligent sci-fi thrillers that I spoke about at the beginning of the review, personally, I liked this one the best and would definitely watch it again.

8 out of 10

Rabies/Kalevet - 27th April 2011 - The After Movie Diner goes to the Tribeca Film Festival!

2011-05-22T02:46:00.001-04:00

Rabies, or in the original Hebrew, Kalevet is officially the first horror movie ever made in Israel. It's hardly surprising then, for anyone who knows even the tiniest amount about that countries birth and chequered history that it takes an American standard horror structure, complete with, initially stereotypical slasher horror characters and laces it liberally with political allegory and, apparently, according to the directors, a very Israeli sense of humour.

Basically, as far as I could figure it, the plot involved a brother trying to free his sister from a trap when she is kidnapped by a serial killer. At the same time a park ranger enters the woodland with his dog and I think, if I am remembering correctly, after his dog is killed by the psychopath, manages to tranquilise the killer and save the girl. Then the brother, not privy to all this information, is hit by a car containing your typical horror crew of four bickering, horny teenagers when he runs out in front of them in a blind panic trying to get help for his sister. Predictably enough the two boys follow him into the wood while the two girls stay behind until two policemen show up. It turns out that one of the policemen is having marital difficulties and is distracted leaving messages for his absent wife while the other is a sick, sexist crazy ready to feel up and possibly rape at least one of the girls while attacking the stronger, more mouthier one for being a lesbian. It is this second girl that grabs his gun, holds both cops at gun point before shooting off the sick ones fingers and running into the woods with the other girl, who is still, understandably, in shock. The sick cop then handcuffs the other cop to the steering wheel of the police car and follows into the woods behind them. Anyone who has now entered the woods, we find out, ends up coming to a creative but horrific end, mostly because they turn against each other in increasingly bizarre and violent ways.

It's at this point while it is treading, partly, a some-what well known path, albeit in a slightly odd and extreme fashion, that I suddenly began to question what I was watching.
For a start the threat of the serial killer, who you never really get to know or realise who he is, isn't there as he is asleep having been tranq'ed. Secondly the cops, who should be a force of good and safety turn out to be exactly the opposite, well one does at least. Thirdly, everyone starts dying in quick succession without much explanation or suspense and lastly no one has mentioned rabies or exhibited any of the symptoms during the whole damn film.
By this middle section I was quite confused by a lot of the random and drastic mood changes that I wasn't expecting, mainly because with a title like Rabies I thought it possibly could be a zombie film. So, I put my misreading of the film down to it being from a foreign culture I didn't understand or possibly that I had missed something in the quick passing, white subtitles, which very often were on a light or bleached out background and just sort of let it all wash over me thinking that I, at least, vaguely got what was going on (people were dying) and that would have to do.

Luckily I saw a screening of this at the Tribeca film festival, obviously, knowing little to nothing about it and so it was lovely, informative and entertaining to hear the directors speak afterwards. If anything it helped to add layers to the film that, for the reasons I explained, weren't always easy to read into it.
They talked a lot about the political significance of some of it, to them and how they were influenced greatly by the slasher and horror films from America in the late 70s and early 80s. It came as no surprise that one of the directors was a film student and the other a film studies lecturer because they delighted in pointing out both the cliches they had employed and then how they had subverted them. For example we are meant to realise and it's meant to be obvious that this is a slasher flick in which the killer doesn't murder anyone but a dog and that usually in these films no ones phone works and so they had everyone's phone work.
It left me thinking that I would give it another shot now that I understood it and see if it played better this time. What follows are merely my thoughts based on this initial viewing.

The good points first.
It had a really good look which very much harked back to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it looked like it was intentionally made on 16 millimeter with very bleached out colours and bright hazy whites. This gave it a very interesting and grainy look, so that artistically, at least, it was pleasing to the eye.
The death scenes were spectacularly realised and very gruesome. There was definitely no skimping on the claret.
The scene, amongst all this confusion, that worked very well and was very violent was when the stabbed and run over brother stumbles upon who he thinks is the killer outside a trailer and smacks him extremely hard and repeatedly with a large mallet around the jaw, only to discover later that it was the park warden and he was just getting some water for his sister who is just waking up inside. It's a scene that a horror audience loves because they know what is about to happen but are unsure if the protagonist is going to realise in time and when he doesn't you are left feeling really bad for all concerned but in a good way, if that makes sense, because it's how you're meant to feel.
It's mostly well acted too with the characters, at least, well written and defined so, despite the language barrier, I felt I understood who everyone was and their initial motivations even if my understanding of their actions later became muddied and confused.
The whole thing reminded me a great deal of the french film 'Haute Tension' (High Tension or Switchblade Romance if you live in the UK) in the sense that it looked great, there was some excellent bloodletting but overall, even with the explanations from the directors, it didn't make a whole lick of sense. Where High Tension succeeds over Rabies is that it has an excellent eerie and tense feel to it that is genuinely scary and that I was able to really get into, where as Rabies failed to grab me with anything more than a relentless series of grizzly deaths and a vague numbing confusion by the end.

The downside:
I was lucky enough to see the film with a fairly satisfying explanation, sort of, given by the two directors (even if they did make a very tenuous leap in saying that the dog they chose to get killed was intentionally a German shepherd because, well you know right? because of the war, you know, it's an in-joke because the dog is German) but I presume, unless you listen to the possible commentary on the DVD first, most western viewers will not see it like that. As much as I applaud them for attempting to make something that has some cultural and political implications, some art, humour, traditional entertainment and shock value, if it's all lost because no one has the first clue what they are watching and why anything is happening then what good is it?
Firstly they could've picked a better English language title. They called it Rabies apparently because it's a disease that attacks the nervous system or something but it was never really clear. Secondly they need to re-edit it with dark black lines around the subtitles and slow them down a bit, I am not stupid and I can read but if I am busy reading acres of text (the script is quite wordy) and trying to fathom out what they all mean rather than becoming embroiled in the mood and action of the piece then the point is somewhat lost in a horror movie.

It's all very well to subvert genre traits and do something a bit clever but make sure you are doing it for a reason that is relevant to the plot and not so that you can try and look clever in front of the class. By getting rid of the killer in the first act and establishing that anyone can attack and kill anyone for any reason, where is the tension? Like I said, the best scene in it is where we, the audience, know he's about to get the wrong person and hope he realises in time but the rest of the kills happen so quickly and with little to no reason that apart from being a spectacle there seems to be little to no point, no matter how well you film it and execute it.

Lastly, as great as it is that they have attempted to give the characters depth and a back story (again bucking the genre convention of simplistic stereotypes), for the short running time it is a lot to take in and as there are so many characters it is almost like too much is going on all at once. There is a reason why horror, especially, is simple and focussed more on mood, style and sometimes plot than it is on in-depth character studies. It doesn't help the development of the scare if you're thinking about who is sleeping with who, who is related to who and what all their dilemmas are that have to be resolved.

I liked that it was challenging and I am not dismissing that aspect, I just think there is a thin line between challenging an audience and confusing the hell out of them, to the point where they become a little turned off by it all.

All that said however I don't want to be too critical of what was not only a first attempt but what was clearly a well thought about film that tried to do something not only new to it's country of origin but to the genre as a whole.
I generally did enjoy it and now that I think I have it straight what exactly is going on, I would watch it again to get more involved in the emotion and to see if they also managed to create a mood and a cohesive film.
I am just not sure that most audiences would do the same, it is, I think, one of the few films I have ever watched where there were some obvious walk outs and before the house lights could even raise on the credits, half the audience up and left.
Had they stayed they would've seen two directors who were funny, humble and polite and who have, at least, done the clever thing and didn't wait around to see why nobody had made a horror film in Israel before, they just went ahead and did it. Ensuring that Rabies will always be first at something.

6 out of 10 nicely tenderised but slightly unfocussed, face meat steaks
Points from the Wife - 5.5 out of 10

Cobra - 25th April 2011

2011-05-21T22:49:00.001-04:00

If I had started writing this blog 6 years ago it may have been very different, in as much as my tastes have definitely changed.
The reason I mention this is that Cobra, the film I'm reviewing, I actually resisted buying back in the day. If I could go back in time I would find the younger version of myself and slap him round the chops quite hard, why on earth resist buying more films? especially one where the tagline is 'Crime is a disease. Meet the cure.'

That I saw this wondrously over-the-top, enjoyable and very 80s serial killer/cop/action movie at all was down to the persistence of my lovely and, at the time, far more knowledgable wife. You see, believe it or not but before I got married the only Stallone film I had any time for was Copland. In fact my action intake in general was fairly mainstream and obvious, as I think I have mentioned elsewhere in the blog.

Starting with Rambo:First Blood and Rocky, the bona fide classics of his career, my wife introduced me to Stallone. To my mind these were basically B-Movies, or at least had B-Movie sensibilities, which I mean as a good thing. They had simple, bordering on cliche'd, plots (maybe they started the cliche) and cartoonish characters (not in a bad way) but they were inventively written, well directed, had an engaging story and great set pieces.
Yes there was a lot of 'All-American' simplified message preaching and male ego chest thumping in there but not in a 'country and western ballad' type way and it was kept subtle enough so that if you embraced that as a staple of the genre and the man, rather than Britishly and cynically scoffing at it, then his films were just really a good, fun and exciting watch.
From growing up on mainly comedies, horrors and blockbusters I found another genre in Stallone's movies that I loved. I think of them as second tier pictures for some reason, although I know he's a big star, the films don't seem to have that horrible studio sheen to them, they seem more independently spirited to me and this may have something to do with the fact that Stallone often co-writes and directs his films too.

This brings us to Cobra which finally, after my wife's near inhuman patience with silly old me was stretched to breaking point, we picked up, watched and I, of course, ended up absolutely adoring every ridiculous, over blown, cheesy and excessively violent moment of.

Yes the morals of the piece are highly dubious. The idea that the only way to stop violent crime is to hit them back and hit them hard, killing, maiming or blowing up as many criminals as possible, without any due process or trial, seems as ludicrous as the concept of good and evil but that's the point, that's why it's so enjoyable!
It doesn't feel the need to be hampered by whining on about societies grey areas or making some big political statement, it's an action flick and no matter if it is the simpler eighties or the over thinking noughties, in the end, the lone, gun toting, man of few words (save for a few clever one liners) is going to either get his man or kill his man anyway, so why hold up or halt the process with a lot of naval gazing wank?! Just wind up the good guy, arm him to the teeth and set him loose.

As hard and as ruthless as Jack Bauer is, the makers of 24 could've learnt a lot from Cobra, stop the waffle and get the job done! I am adult enough and intelligent enough to realise this is not how things should be done in the real world, ok?

The action starts with a city in the grip of a crimewave. A crazy wacked out hairy guy with a green army jacket and a shot gun is terrorising a supermarket, we are never really sure why but it is something to do with anarchy and a new world order. Then, within seconds, the scene becomes an enormous police siege. After really what is only a few more seconds the decision has been made that it is all hopeless and the only way to stop this from escalating is to send in The Cobra.
What or who are they talking about? you'd be right to ask. Let me explain.
You see, when there's a situation that all of the police and swat teams couldn't possibly handle (like a single crazy with a shotgun in a supermarket) they use a special division of the police force called the zombie squad, headed up by the laughably named Marion Cobretti and his seemingly 75 year old hispanic friend Gonzales.

Stallone plays Marion 'The Cobra' Cobretti (like that's even a real last name) and he is a one man army against crime with a mean and righteous attitude, plenty of ready quips, some mirror shades, a pearl handled revolver and probably a whole heap of unresolved mummy and daddy issues tied to his silly name and he dispenses justice the only way he knows how, loudly and with maximum destruction. He lives in a shitty neighbourhood but drives a classic car and the moment he whiffs a pretty damsel in distress he is on the case and he doesn't care how loudly he has to shout or which desk he has to bang to make sure he stays on it.

The plot continues and as soon as Cobra has dispensed with the man in the market by cleverly using his carefully honed and highly trained detective skills to shoot him with a gun, he then exits, dismisses the press and their liberal, wet whining about human rights and drives off in his big black muscle car.
We then find out that a serial killer has been bumping people off all over the city and the police can't find a pattern so they don't know what to do or where to look. This is because actually it's a whole gang of nutjobs in a rented van, who in their spare time like to stand in darkened warehouses in front of giant fans blowing orange hued smoke everywhere, banging axes together like some sort of German death metal music video and they are hell bent on bringing anarchy, violence and fear to these murky, neon-tinged streets.
One night these muscley mentals mess up and leave a witness alive in the form of fashion model and professional tall blonde person, Bridgette Nielson. Instead of lying low and realising that the police have absolutely no other evidence other than an eye witness and, if they were caught, the case would be an easy winner, they decide to come out of the shadows and spend all their time and resources tracking down and killing this one woman.
After lots of arguments with his superiors, Marion Cobretti is on the case and he will stop at nothing to protect this young bit of tail even if he has to shoot or blow up everything from LA to San Francisco to do it, no matter how many innocent lives he endangers in the process and that's about it. I, for one, don't need any more than that.

Be honest, if you are reading this and you haven't seen the film, you want to watch it right now, yes?

Re-watching this film recently, for maybe the third time, I was struck with just how good and gruesome the first half of the film is. The bad guys, for all their stupidity, are genuinely vicious bastards and there is a good element of slasher horror film during the opening act. If you're more a fan of horror than you are of 80s action it is definitely worth checking out.
After that though the film basically becomes an all out action fest with an excellent car chase (not unlike the one in Blazing Magnum, untilising the bridges of Venice Beach to great effect), some shoot outs and all climaxing in a big battle with Cobra & Gonzales versus every anarchistic thug that team evil could muster, at a road side motel. Gonzales, because he's ancient and useless, is injured in the first 10 seconds and it's up to Stallone to take out everyone else.
This preposterous brilliance inexplicably ends with Stallone duking it out, mano a mano, with the head baddie in yet another orange hued warehouse.

So, is it the best film Stallone has ever made? no and is it the best action movie ever made? no, of course not but it is one of my favourites because it was a film, not unlike how I described Army of Darkness and The Expendables in previous blogs, that I finished watching and just wished there more films out there like this. Films where the hero says, in response to a villain wailing about 'blowing this fucking supermarket sky high', with a completely straight face, "I don't care, I don't shop here"
Brilliant, a guilty pleasure yes but absolutely brilliant.

9 out of 10 big fat, tall, all-American, hamburgers with all the trimmings
Points from The Wife - 10 out of 10

Spiderman 3 - 24th April 2011 - Part two of Superhero doublebill

2011-05-21T19:53:00.000-04:00

I don't need to go on at length about why this film is a mistake, it has already been written about almost everywhere.
There are too many villains, too much poor use of CGI, the script is all over the place, the philosophy is muddled, the acting weak, there is too much of the bits you don't like and too little of the bits you do from the other movies and alright already! I get it! you comic book fans hated the bit where Spiderman went 'dark' slicked his hair down and went maliciously ballroom dancing in front of his ex. Sheeesh!

As I explained in the previous blog I am not a comic book fan and therefor do not have a passionate attachment to the source material, I look at this as a movie, as a comic book movie and as a Sam Raimi movie. I watched it again because it was my first time watching it in a long time and I wanted to see if it really was as bad as everyone made out and I came to the conclusion that no it isn't.
Is it the worst film out of the Spiderman trilogy? possibly but I have a problems with each and everyone of them, is it the worst comic book movie ever made? not by a long shot! and then we come to something I do care passionately about, is it the worst Sam Raimi movie ever made? Well... I couldn't make it all the way through 'For The Love of the Game', I made it all the way through this and I like baseball, so it can't be but it's probably a close joint second along with Crimewave.

My main problem that I have with Spiderman 3 is that after Spiderman 1 proved to the studios that Sam was ready for the big time and 2, the most obvious Raimi movie out of the three, made all that money and was critically acclaimed by professionals and fans alike why on earth didn't the studio just leave him alone to do his own thing in the 3rd film?
Maybe they gave him just enough rope to hang himself though because they did let him and his brother write the script but considering they also penned Army of Darkness one of the greatest films of all time, I am going to continue to blame the studios.
Now I think if Raimi knew he was wrapping up his trilogy for good he would've done things differently but maybe he went along with all this crap because he thought he'd get his chance in part 4. I have no idea, this is all pure speculation by a Sam Raimi fan who pines for him to go back to his original sort of film making and who also hoped beyond hope that he would one day give Bruce Campbell more to do in a big Hollywood film.

The best thing about all three films are the Raimi touches, the humour, the camerawork, the casting of Bruce Campbell, Ted Raimi and J.K Simmons and that scene when Doc Ock wakes up in the hospital where Raimi finally gets to do his thing.
Now to that contentious montage in the 3rd film where Maguire Saturday-Night-Fever's it down to a stereotypical jazz bar and then tears the place up with some ludicrous hip swinging. This is clearly, for those who know the man's work, Raimi's invention, it is just his motives are unclear. Did he do it because he genuinely thought it was funny? or did he do it to stick it to the studio for forcing him to put the fucking awful venom plot line in there? we will never know but while it does jar with the rest of the film (which considering what the rest of the film is like isn't necessarily a bad thing) and while it is cringe-worthy hilarity that Maguire doesn't pull off completely as he is no Bruce Campbell when it comes to this stuff and while you could've made the point that scene makes in any number of far more suitable ways, I don't have as huge a problem with it as everyone else does because I don't hold Spiderman aloft as some sacred icon. I just can't take comic book movies seriously.

I think comic books are great art forms and great story telling devices, I entirely see why people get involved in the characters and the mythology and maybe one day they will leave a film maker alone long enough to tell a decent story with all of that but based on all the superhero movies I have seen and you can assume I have seen most of the main ones and their sequels, their plots and characters don't rise above the level of Australian soap operas at their worst and 80s saturday evening TV (The A Team, The Hulk, Knight rider) at their best. They are simple good vs. evil morality plays dressed up in funny costumes, surrounded by bright lights and explosions. To criticise Spiderman 3 because it doesn't manage to cover up the plot holes and messy structures of these things as skillfully as other ones seems a little redundant.

All of which makes me a complete and admitted hypocrite because if this was what Raimi gave us as Evil Dead 4 I would probably be depressed for months, so I do understand how fans of something could've been mad at this film but blame the studios for being wrong and blame Raimi for not having the balls to walk out once they tried to force things on him.

As Bruce Campbell once said all Hollywood films these days are B Movies. If someone gets bitten by a radioactive spider then it's a B picture!
Well I agree and people should watch it as such with all the cheesy dialogue, hokey plots, and 2 dimensional characters to be expected and indeed cherishing. So while I am in no way celebrating Spiderman 3, I can't condemn it totally either.
It wasn't painful to sit through, well maybe bits of James Franco's over acting and that bizarre British news woman at the end but basically it left me feeling numb to it all. What I take away from it is a big CGI induced headache and a shrug of the shoulders.

5.5 out of 10 blancmanges in the shape of a giant spider
Point from The Wife 8 out of 10

Batman Begins - 24th April 2011 - Part one of Superhero doublebill

2011-05-21T18:27:00.000-04:00

I was never a comic book geek and even through my period of reading comics, first when I was young and then when I was in my 20s, it was never superhero stuff, I just never really connected with it. I have a ton of friends who do read this stuff though so I honestly meant no disrespect using the word geek. I myself am a film geek and proud of it.

In films though, there have been a handful of comic book adaptations that I have enjoyed and maybe sometimes was able to enjoy more because I wasn't necessarily worried about the authenticity of the piece like I might have been if I had been a die hard fan of the source material.
I guess I connect with the action, the mystery element in some and aspects of the fantasy/sci-fi genre that these films inhabit.

One thing I would say is that I don't care one little bit for Hollywood attempting to make Batman (or any other familiar franchise for that matter) edgier, darker or more realistic because it's nonsense, in Hollywood terms I mean. At the end of the day it's about a man who dresses up as a bat and fights crime with improbably silly and bizarre villains. I don't care one iota about realism or their tortured souls, I want to see them kick some arse, chase some cars, destroy some stuff and make a few quips.
Hollywood doesn't really want to make anything too dark anyway because then the whole family can't see it and, mostly, their idea of dark and weird is Tim Burton, which tells you just about all you need to know.

I also think that origin stories tend to be the dullest part of a superhero franchise, which is odd when you consider the wealth of information you could put into them, but the reason is that most part 2s of superhero franchises are better than the first is that you can get passed the ponderous, simplistically philosophical reasons behind why they do what they do, you can by-pass the thin characters and the glaring plot-holes and just run with whatever good vs evil idea you want to.

With all that said and stated, when it comes to Batman Begins I think it stands up next to the Richard Donner Superman movie as a genuinely respectable attempt at an origin story that takes its time, tries to be layered, tries to make sense, features impeccable acting and looks stunning. The one thing it lacks, however is a sense of humour but maybe the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher versions of the character had too much and this one needed to compensate.
It does take itself very seriously though and I couldn't care less about Liam Neeson's endless droning about the nature of battle or Michael Caine's nonsense teachings either. Christian Bale is wearing a large rubber bat costume and talking like Clint Eastwood and Tom Waits had a baby that chewed broken glass and smoked 50 a day! you are not all being as intelligent as you think you are!
Only Morgan Freeman's character has the good grace to realise the absurdity of everything and says everything with the sort of sly smile that makes you think he is savouring the words much like one would savour a nice creamy toffee.

Don't get me wrong, I like the film, I loved it when it came out but over time these things do not stand up to repeat viewings and you begin to see what talky, wanky hokum all of these films are. I am sure it doesn't help that we have been bludgeoned into a floppy and apathetic submission by 100s of these comic book adaptations and along with horror remakes and the over use of CGI in everything, they are one of the types of films I am completely getting sick of.

On the positive side, like I have said, it looks stunning and is directed with Christopher Nolan's genuinely impressive grasp of scenery, the further he gets into the city and the CGI landscapes however things become too muddled, too fake, too orange and rainy which is something I am really glad he corrected in Dark Knight. The acting too is exemplary throughout although some of the cast seem to think they are performing shakespeare they are so rigid and po-faced, still I am glad they cast who they did and even Katie Holmes isn't as atrocious as she could be, although if anyone is the weak link, it's her. Another problem Nolan fixed in Dark Night, now if he could just do something about Bale's ridiculous, annoying and bordering on hilarious Batman voice, we would be fine.
It is Christian Bale I feel sorry for because he really has very little to do, acting wise. He has more to do in this first one but even then it's a lot of tortured souly stuff followed by a lot of action man stuff, there's no great range. He does sort of stand out a bit and still hasn't knocked Michael Keaton off his top spot or Adam West for sheer nostalgia.

The set pieces are all fine but there isn't really one that stands out and the overall plan, in the climax, to purge and kill off a city by filling the water supply full of hallucinogenic poison, that only has effect ingested through the lungs, and then evaporating the water so that the hallucinogen fills the air, infects the people and makes them tear each other apart with fear is pretty much one of the most complicated, ridiculous, hole-ridden plans ever devised in the history of plans and I know for a fact Hannibal Smith from the A Team once devised a plan to escape from prison by building hot air balloons using bin bags, hair dryers and picnic chairs, so I know of what I speak.

Nolan is adept at making us go with all this rubbish as if it was high art and if anything defines his Batman movies and Inception it is this, his ability to polish and dress up the ludicrous and the laughable so that people the world over proclaim his genius.
Here's hoping I can one day get past that and enjoy these movies for what they are again, which are beautifully looking, well acted tellings of very very silly stories.

7.5 out of 10 dishes at the $100 dollar a plate, spray can cheese restaurant.
Points from The Wife - 8 out of 10

Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe - 17th April 2011

2011-05-21T15:05:00.000-04:00

For those not in the know, or only just starting out on the road to Burn Notice or Bruce Campbell's career, Burn Notice is a Miami based TV Show about a burnt spy (cut off and thrown out) on the cable station USA that has managed to combine MacGuyver and The A-Team, maintained the boys own adventure and helping the less fortunate refrain of those shows, brought them up to date and done away with the high camp and bad hairstyles.
Bruce Campbell is essentially playing the Faceman role but in the body and attitude of an over-the-hill Navy Seal called Sam Axe. He is the womanising, heavy drinking, Hawaiian shirt wearing best friend of Michael Weston, the spy played by Jeffrey Donovan, who has the gift of the gab and is occasionally called upon to don a disguise and pretend to be someone else.

I don't want to give some big review or appraisal of the show in general but basically I started watching it for Bruce Campbell, obviously, and as it has gone on over the last 4 seasons, the rest of it has sort of grown on me. The flashy cutting and clips of Miami is a bit too CSI for my liking and it doesn't have the decent soundtrack it needs but apart from that it is good, fun, escapist television.

Now, clearly I wasn't the only person who tuned in purely for the be-chinned one but apparently the producers were a tad clueless about his fanbase because when they first went to Comic-Con two years ago they were actually surprised that their man Campbell was basically like the Elvis of the convention. Long before these Hollywood Superhero pretenders started cynically gracing San Diego with their presence and long after people are finally bored of crap, CGI heavy, men in tights movies, Bruce Campbell will be a fixture at, not just Comic-Con but, conventions everywhere.
Stupid producers for not realising this, you really think we tuned in for the intricate plotting, the relative unknown at the time and the slightly bland, Jeffrey Donovan or maybe for the too bony to be really sexy, highly tanned and slightly annoying Gabrielle Anwar? Now I am sure there were some who enjoyed watching ex-Cagney & Lacey star, the excellent, Sharon Gless as Michael's mother but who are we kidding, this show has legs because of Campbell, or at least that's my story and I am sticking to it.

Anyway it is down to that convention appearance that the producers green-lit an idea that the show creator, Matt Nix, had about a prequel film focussing on Sam Axe's last mission in South America.
It actually makes perfect sense because, as the star of the show, Michael's back story has to be allowed to unravel slowly so you can stretch the concept over more seasons and because Fiona (Anwar's character) and his mother are so closely linked to that storyline, Sam Axe is actually the character you can play with, I mean all we really know about him is he is ex-military, has connections everywhere, loves Mojitos and sugar mommas.

So, enough filling you non-iniated in, go watch Burn Notice and come back, if you haven't already.
The film itself, entitled The Fall of Sam Axe, centers around Commander Axe undergoing a stringent debriefing that borders on an actual court martial because of some questionable antics in Columbia and by framing the action that way it allows the writers to maintain one of the familiar traits of the show, the voice over. So as Sam tells his version of events we get to see them played out in chronological flashback sequences.
Basically, the plot is: he is caught cheating with his superior officers wife, which was unknown to him at the time as he has strict rules about that sort of thing, and as a result of this indiscretion he is sent to Columbia on a simple but annoying observe and report mission. After some twists and turns, Axe ends up siding and helping the so-called "terrorists" that he has been sent to observe, along with some 'doctors-without-borders' types and also finds time to piss off the CIA, which for all in the know, may bite him in the tuckus come season 5. Along the way there is the usual explosions, heroics, device building and the obligatory love interest.

Now all of this was done just fine, the supporting cast were good but bordered on average, the direction (by series star Donovan) was acceptable and the script as peppered with enough zingers that every few minutes you got to have a bit of a chuckle or even a cheer but I have to say, on first viewing, while being very happy that Campbell was in absolutely every scene and while I loved the obvious nods to his previous work, the whole thing was a little underwhelming and wasn't the Campbell does Rambo movie I was hoping for.

The film started off strongly with a lovely bit of comedy from Bruce and indeed, at this point, he can do this sort of stuff with his eyes closed. He has subtly rejuvenated the character 5 years not just by shedding some pounds and dying his hair but by playing him just a little less casually and relaxed than he is in the show but with the same sense of charm and loyalty we all know and love.
As always I can do nothing but sing his praises.
I just always feel after things like this and other TV Movies he has made (Tornado, Screaming Brain, Alien Apocalypse and Terminal Invasion) that more could have been done with him. There didn't seem to be enough Bruce based action or enough witty one liners.
In the TV show format and as simply one member out of a gang, I have grown to accept Campbell in the role of Sam Axe and understand he is not the one who will be doing the bulk of the heavy lifting in the action dept. and a friend of mine, who watched the film with me the second time, pointed out that what the prequel does is establish the character he is in the show, giving us reasons why a washed up old Navy Seal would even bother helping Michael out on his charity missions week in week out. My friend rationalised it saying that if Sam started to pull Michael style action moves it would've been out of character because what he is good at is talking or faking his way out of a tough situation and so that is what we get.

Watching the film or thinking about it with this in mind certainly does relax that nagging feeling, make it a much better watch and make a lot more sense but I am still not sure then why, as a writer, you would choose this setting and this plot. Why put so many action sequences in it then? Why make every other character around Sam Axe fairly inept at action? I would assume that if doing a film of this kind where he is forced to be a heroic leader, as the character is a trained Navy Seal who is actually forced to finish his career early and so isn't actually near retirement or anything, why not mix up the 'talking or improvising his way out of jams' schtick a little with just a bit, a bit of crowd pleasing fisticuffs.
I didn't expect him to be nimbly pouncing out of the bushes dispatching villains expertly with a hunting knife or mixed martial-arting them to death Bourne style but a little bit of braun wouldn't have gone a miss, is all I'm saying.

I guess I am always measuring these different projects against the likes of The Evil Dead trilogy or Bubba Ho-Tep which I know is wrong because they are different beasts with different budgets and so let's put this alongside his other forays into the genre of made-for-TV movie. Well it was better than Tornado, pretty much on a par with Screaming Brain and Alien Apocalypse and I actually thought Terminal Invasion was better.

Overall though I am, of course, incredibly happy that they made it at all, it had enough engaging, good and funny moments to completely justify its existence, the obvious hard work that had gone into it and anything to bridge the long and annoying gap between seasons is welcome.

7 out of 10 ice cold beers and a sweet mojito.
Points from The Wife - 7 out of 10

Wet Hot American Summer - 9th April 2011

2011-05-21T11:47:00.002-04:00

Wet Hot American Summer is a film all about the particularly American tradition of summer camps. It is also a film about the bizarre tradition of American movies made about summer camps as it is both a spoof of those films and a summer camp movie in its own right.
These types of films were mostly popular in the late 70s early 80s and then had a brief resurgence at the beginning of the 90s. They fall into three distinct genres: comedy, horror and nostalgic drama, the best example of these would be Meatballs, Sleepaway Camp and Indian Summer.

The interesting and unusual thing about Wet Hot American Summer is that it was made in 2001 but is set at the end of 1981. Unusual because this was the directorial debut of David Wain from 90s MTV comedy group 'The State' and stars many of the members of that group too and it's odd they would pick not only such a random genre but also that they would purposefully do, essentially, a period piece. That is until you watch it and realise that it's a stroke of genius actually. The setting is obvious for the weird, surreal, character based and slapstick comedy that The State specialise in and setting it when they did didn't exactly take a lot more than the clothing (how much have camps changed in the last 30 years?!) and it allowed them the ability to both feel authentic but also subtly pastiche the films that came before. To their credit there are not a lot of obvious and easy 80s music & hair based jokes, the costumes are just subtly ridiculous.

For those not in the know, this is one of those films that didn't do well with the critics on its initial release and gained a cult following on video. Watching it back now I can see why both is true because while I am a fan of The State and much of their work since (The Ten, Role Models, Wainy Days, Reno 911), this maybe isn't as funny or as satisfying, over all, as it could and should be. However, by the same token, the individual set pieces or sketches are memorable, odd and the sort of thing that if you were discovering surreal comedy for the first time would draw you in.

Any sketch comedy troupe that attempt the move to film are always going to be compared to Monty Python, or maybe on this side of the Atlantic, Kids in the Hall and WHAS certainly has both somewhere in the mix of influences however, for my personal taste, I find that this film just misses a beat somewhere and isn't as clever or sharp as it could be but that is maybe the point. A lot of the humour is derived from adults acting like stroppy or emotional kids either that or taking everything from drug use to gay sex to the graphical extreme. I think the uneven tone and unclear story leave the film unsure of what it actually is.

All that said, the performances are very strong by members of The State and other notables like Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, David Hyde Pierce, Janeane Garofalo, Molly Shannon, Amy Poehler and even a young Bradley Cooper but the person who easily steals the show is Christopher Meloni as the strung out vietnam vet chef. Considering his performance in this and other smaller roles I have seen him in, it's a wonder he is not a well renowned comedy character actor instead of playing a generic cop on some Law & Order spin off.

All in all then it's well worth an hour and a half of your time, especially if you are at all interested in where a lot of the current wave of non-SNL comedic performers, writers and directors come from. It's just, it's a bit sloppy in parts, they have all subsequently done better and it's not as strong as a Holy Grail or even a Brain Candy when it comes to the first films of sketch comedy troupes.
I would check out The State first too, either clips on YouTube or invest in the DVD box set. For fans of sketch comedy it's a must!

7 out of 10 talking cans of mixed vegetables

Army of Darkness - 8th April 2011

2011-05-14T17:09:00.002-04:00

Army of Darkness is responsible for this blog because Army of Darkness is responsible for me, in some way.

Yes, before it in my life there was Monty Python, the Muppet movies, Gene Wilder's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Indiana Jones, to name a few and yes, in their own way, they all had their affect but Army of Darkness, when I was but 13, started a genuine love affair with movies that has lasted 18 years and counting.

More importantly, that feeling you get after a certain type of film when you know, you've just seen something different. Something special.

I first came across the film at school where, when I think back, we used to rent all sorts of crazy films. Films like 'The Gods Must Be Crazy', 'Beastmaster' and 'Army of Darkness'.

What got me first, I remember, was the dialogue and the second thing was the animated skeleton effects. I was a fan from the very beginning. The thing was back then it was all VHS and not everything was immediately available in the UK, also, being a young teenager I was hardly flush with the old cashola and so, although memory is, obviously, a little vague, I went back to my original mission which was to collect every VHS that any member of Monty Python had ever appeared in ever. You know, as you do.

Then, in 1997, 98 maybe I wandered into my local movie/music shop and they were having a 3 for 12 offer on VHS, this was back when you could buy three of anything for 12 pounds, and they had Evil Dead 1, Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness (or The Medieval Dead as it is also titled in the UK) in the offer. Now, by then, I had certainly seen ED2 or parts of it on TV, I was at 6th form college studying film and so, through chats with people there, I was becoming more and more aware of the horror and b-movie genres (I remember one hilarious conversation round a pub table with my technician friends where they told me all about a film where someone was raped by a tree!) and I am almost certain that, weirdly, I had seen Maniac Cop by this stage too. So the pieces were slotting into place.
I purchased the three VHS, went home, watched all three and a new version of me was born. Everything about them I wanted more of, the camera angles, the cheesy yet inventive b-movie dialogue and, of course, Bruce Campbell.
So that, in a vague, mis-remembered ramble, is my story and how I came to be writing this blog years later.
Years later at a point in history, thanks mainly to my generation I would imagine, that horror, B-Movies, the Evil Dead trilogy, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell are firm fan favourites, with a following, almost common place and at a time when, as Bruce is known to say, Evil Dead is now available in Walmart.
The downside of all this is all the horrible remakes, bad hollywood horror and the fact that the joy of finding a rare Bruce VHS tucked away in the corner of some tiny video shop crammed to the gills with amazingly weird and dusty VHS has been replaced with easy to do 1-click shopping on Amazon.com or EBay but these, I feel, on my good days, are small prices to pay for being able to finally watch and get hold of all of Bruce's back catalogue, more or less, and for being able to make friends based on the one guy out of a hundred you might meet who knows who BC is.

Right, back to Army of Darkness:
Now, it might be worth mentioning at this point that there are five main versions of the film.
There is the American theatrical version which is the version I saw on the 8th of April at a midnight screening (completing my dream of seeing all three films of the trilogy on the big screen at a midnight screening) and that one is the shortest, has the most amount of studio interference and only features the 'Captain Supermarket' ending. There is also an American TV version of Army of Darkness which I haven't seen.

Then there is the Directors Cut 'Official Bootleg' edition which has now been released on DVD both sides of the pond and that features, basically, everything that was shot with varying degrees of quality. This has the full battle, the full windmill scene and the "I slept too long!" ending. The only trouble with this version is they changed where Henry the Red rides into battle at a point where, because there is a burning fuse, it is A) even more ridiculous than it was before and B) stops the flow of the whole ending battle. It seems like one big editing mistake that could've been easily fixed.

Then there is the International cut of the film which seems to blend the two. This is the one I own on VHS and has never been released on DVD, to my knowledge. The only DVD versions I can find currently available is the Directors Cut and the American Theatrical release.

Then, finally, there is the MGM Region 3 Hong Kong version of the film and this is an amalgam of all other versions, with the best sound and video quality, running at 96 minutes, same length as the director's cut. The VHS I have had the same cover, this was also the art work used to advertise it in UK cinemas, it was obviously designed to stand alone and appeal to fans of Conan and Beastmaster etc.

Why the recently financially screwed MGM decided to release the best version in this territory and not world wide is a mystery for the ages. Still at least now I have a new holy grail.

Right, so with all that established, I will attempt to give a fair review of the whole film. Firstly, it's faults, if it has any, are obviously due to editing and studio interference. If you couple that with the fact that they were obviously trying to achieve an absolute ton on the budget, which stretched its effects house to bursting point, exhausted its star and frustrated it's director, it may go a little way to explaining why the pacing can be a little off in places and none of it really makes any sense.
Once you accept these things, however, then the film is one of the most endlessly inventive, humourous, bizarre and re-watchable films the studio system has ever produced.

If its success, or rather lack of it on initial release, was based on the American Theatrical version then I am not entirely surprised because, being the shortest of all the versions, it makes the least amount of sense and races at an utterly breathless pace from the start to the finish. What the studio did by trimming it down and trying desperately to make it a straight stand alone action/adventure film was utterly miss the point. It lacks the beauty and clarity of Sam's direction and vision in some places, it wastes a lot of the fantastic sequences towards the end that they probably spent a lot of the budget on and it reduces some of the finer points of Bruce's character and acting so he is just, predominantly a buffoon.
The longer versions, however, give the images and more importantly the amazing Joe LoDuca score room to breathe.

AOD, whilst following on from Evil Dead 2 in plot, it doesn't follow on in tone at all. It is a play on the plot of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by way of a Warner Brother's cartoon performed by the Three Stooges and with the dialogue lampooning the quips of everyone from Errol Flynn to James Bond. It probably confused or even angered horror fans at the time because of it's departure from the gross out antics of the first two but this trilogy of films, if they're about anything then they are about Sam as a director and Bruce as an actor. The pair of them infuse every frame of each film with their considerable talents and while Evil Dead 2 might be the best film out of the trilogy, Army of Darkness is the best all out Bruce Campbell movie, maybe ever made.
It's where the longer versions again succeed as they seem to manage to contain Campbell's incredibly funny, frantic and dextrous performance better, although, to be fair, it's him and the character of Ash that win out in every single one of the edits.
Its continued success now, I would say, is based almost entirely on him, his ability to turn the mock-heroic dialogue into a sort of amazing poetry and the way that he makes us like and sympathise with this cowardly, idiotic braggart.
Everyone made a big hoot about Jim Carrey in The Mask two years later but I honestly feel that Campbell is a more capable, more complex and more adventurous actor and he did it all without the use of CGI.

Hollywood would most likely have softened and marginalised Campbell, much as it has Raimi, had he got the recognition for Army of Darkness and indeed, the Evil Deads, that he deserved. What it has given him, eventually, is a loyal fan base that has allowed him longevity and the chance, occasionally to do an interesting or quirky script the likes of which other actors may only dream of.

Another reason to watch Army of Darkness is that it sort of represents the last of Raimi as a truly innovative and creatively original director. Yes, The Quick and The Dead was covered in his trademark camera work but the performances in it are far too earnest and serious, Spiderman 2 had glimmers of his deft use of sound and video editing but the rest of the trilogy had so much money behind it that the sense of effort and innovation wasn't there and it's true to say that Drag Me To Hell returned Raimi to his gross out and mischievous roots but without a strong script or a Campbell, a lot of it looked like he was treading water.
In AOD though, he took studio money and a serious supporting cast and peppered it with absolutely everything he had ever learnt from the super 8 days onwards, filled it full of friends and family cameos, wrote in Stooges gag after Stooges gag, strapped cameras to everything he could think of, put Bruce's name above the title of the movie and utilised, not just every old technique he could find and muster from stop motion animation, prosthetics and puppetry but tried to incorporate the latest techniques that were being attempted at the time too, like the Introvision front-projection system.

AOD stands as one of the last movies to use all these fantastic, mostly entirely practical effects all in one spot. A year later Jurassic Park would come out, showing the world this new thing called CGI and sadly movies have been using it ever since. Occasionally it is used in an inventive and exciting way but mostly it is half-arsed, boring, repetitive, unimaginative and unrealistic. Give me talking skeletons animated through stop-motion techniques any day of the week.

It's true to say that while every version of the film is a bit of a shambolic mess for one reason or another and that may, indeed, be some of it's charm, it is obvious that everyone's time, energy, blood, sweat, tears and passion went into every single frame. There isn't a wasted moment, they thought big and then on a small budget, made big, as big as they could go.

The reason there aren't hundreds of films out there like this, the reason that this film leaves you with such a feeling of 'man I wish every movie was as good and as entertaining as that', the reason it has stood the test of time, grown into a cult, spawned comic books, toys, t-shirts and all manner of merchandise and the reason why the rumour of a fourth one will never die is because:
A) studios rarely give a chance like this to film-makers and they take it with such boundless creativity and enthusiasm and
B) I can't think of a film since, in this genre and with this style, that has even come close to rivaling the weirdness, the wildness, the laughter, the action, the adventure and the energy of Army of Darkness and if some have tried they have done it with that horrible 'we know we are being wacky, look at us being wacky' post-modern, winking at the camera crap that boils my blood and drains my soul.

Into the pit with them!

10 out of 10 a big fist full of hearty medieval, tasty, sweet and never sour grapes.
"First you want to kill me, now you want to kiss me... blow!"
Points from the Wife - 8 out of 10.

Icebreaker - 6th April 2011

2011-05-08T02:29:00.003-04:00

From the pitch meeting, which must've gone something like 'It's Die Hard... er... but on a ski slope... with Sean Astin' to the use of Beethoven's Ode to Joy over the opening credits you get the hint pretty early on that this is going to a be a fairly heavy rip off of almost every terrorist/action movie cliche in the book, only, of course, on a ski slope but that's ok because you only bought, rented or watched the damn thing because Bruce Campbell is in it, right?

At first, second and even third looks you might be scratching your head and saying to yourself, how in the name of Robert Davi's pock marks did this atrocious, hack D-list director manage to get Bruce Campbell, Sean Astin and Stacey Keach in this piece of ludicrous nonsense huh? You might also wonder how, considering this was pre-Lord of the Rings (but only just), Astin still comes away with top billing?
Well I don't know the answer to either of those questions any more than I know how you manage to get funding for a film like this in the first place, still there is precedent, at least for the main two actors. Campbell played a similar talky, arch villain in the instantly forgettable and utterly shonky 'Chase Moran: Assault on Dome 4' and Sean Astin had played a cocky yet dependable hero in the underestimated gem 'Toy Soldiers'.
The only thing Campbell has ever said on the subject is that he was offered the hero part but took the villain role as it got all the best lines, boy is that an understatement, poor Astin hardly gets any lines and does very little in the way of action too, unless you consider skiing action.

Ok, now let's play "Weird B Movie link ups", shall we?
The world of B-Movies, independent film and straight-to-video genre fair is a fairly incestuous world by all accounts, with the likes of Bruce Campbell, Jeffrey Combs, Andrew Divoff, Robert Davi, Joan Severance and Corbin Bernstein, to name a few, forging whole careers out of the second tier, often non-theatrical world.
Well, let's see how the cast of Icebreaker do then. Bruce Campbell starred in Brisco County Jnr with Sean Astin's Dad, Campbell would go on to star with Keach again in Man with a Screaming Brain and both Bruce and Suzanne Turner (the female lead of Icebreaker) had appeared as guest stars in Weird Science the TV Show. Admittedly that last one was a bit weak but, you know, it's fun to find this stuff out.

So the film itself is pretty awful and in parts thinks that it's funnier than it actually is, for example by having the highly effeminate ineffectual head of the slope first send holidaying normal folk into a blind panic, by announcing point blank at a press conference that their our terrorists about to blow up a mountain, and then later turning into a gun toting, quip making nutcase.
In fact you're not sure, watching the ridiculous performances of all concerned, whether the director was trying to make a straight faced normal movie but was plagued with hammy acting and a bad script or if he went out of his way to make a tongue in cheek pile of laughable dung and the hammy acting and bad script were intentional.
Seeing as all the name actors have been far better in other things I would maybe consider the latter but whatever the intentions that's definitely the way to watch this movie: Get a group of friends round, keep the alcohol flowing and laugh your way through this very flimsy excuse of a movie or watch it to see Bruce Campbell with a shaved head come very close to majorly embarrassing himself (no mean feat!) by seemingly strain to maintain seriousness in the face of some truly atrocious lines.
The third option, of course, is probably the best advice, unless you're a hardcore Bruce Campbell fan, don't watch it.

3 out of 10 still frozen salad drizzled in weak sauce.
Points from the Wife - 4 out of 10.

Paul - 27th March 2011

2011-04-12T02:50:00.002-04:00

This was a film I was really excited about until I heard the two leads and writers of the film, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost being interviewed on the press tour about it.
Lots of talk of compromise with the studio and mentions of going mainstream didn't sit right with me and not because I am a stubborn Hollywood studio basher but because this is Simon Pegg and Nick Frost writing and starring in a film about two Sci-Fi loving Brits, road tripping in America, who happen to pick up a real life Alien in New Mexico, because this is a film with a cast list that reads like a comedy nerd and a film geek's ultimate wish list (throw Bruce Campbell in there and you'd be completely set) and because these are the guys who made Shawn of the Dead and Hot Fuzz on their terms and were hugely successful with that, if they don't know exactly how to do this movie right then nobody does.

The idea that this film was in anyway tampered with so that some family of Reality TV fans from Butt-crack Idaho (no offense Idahoans, just picked a state at random!) would more understand the jokes or be less offended by the science vs. religion debate that re-occurs in the film makes me sick up a little in my mouth with pure fury because it means there is a good version of Paul out there, possibly, and instead what we got was this watered down, fairly amiable but predictable comedy that could've starred Eric Stoltz, Lou Diamond Phillips and a box on a stick for all that it mattered.

They made two statements as to the reasoning behind working within the studio system and one was they needed the money to realise Paul as a fully CG character, which is completely understandable and two was because they wanted to see if they could write and star in a mainstream Hollywood comedy.
Now this second part isn't understandable at all because firstly you'd write something a little more crowd pleasing than this, somewhat niche, idea and secondly, when you already have legions of loyal dedicated fans who love your work and will happily lap up any similarly interesting and inventive stories, why would you want to throw some of that away to get a passing glance from a regular schmo just trying to find something not very challenging to do on a Friday night in Sweaty Crevice, Nebraska? and yet it is apparently the goal of lots of other independent minded geek heros such as Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and even the director of Paul it seems, Greg Mottola. They all, seemingly, want to be Steven Spielberg, who, to my mind, while he has done plenty that I have liked, is one of the least exciting, creatively intelligent or challenging directors ever to work in film.
Simon Pegg too, especially, is attempting to be a cross between Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise rather than be content being himself and while I am in no place to judge and cannot possibly imagine the tempting offers these people get to helm great big movies or star in blockbusters, I just think it's a crushing shame we seem to get a shorter and shorter period of these unique voices doing what they are good at before they are swallowed whole and become just another mass-produced, supposedly crowd-pleasing sound bite.

I don't want to see Pegg in Star Trek 12 or Mission Impossible 4, neither do I want him attempting to forge a successful rom-com career in a series of bland, irrelevant farces and while I accept you can't make Spaced forever, just like that series ended too soon, so has the partnership between the three geniuses behind Shawn and Fuzz. The carrot they dangle in front of fans of a third film together is akin to the Evil Dead 4 rumour that Raimi won't shut up about. If any one of these, now successful, people actually wanted to make these films, they would. They would pursue them with passion and verve instead of, in the case of Raimi, scrabbling around to find a star for a Wizard of Oz prequel nobody wants! Christ on a 3 speed street cleaner it gets me so annoyed I could tear my own teeth out bare handed.

It is possible this is why I gravitate towards the works of Bruce Campbell, Kevin Smith, Terry Gilliam or Tom Waits because while each of them has certainly had brushes with big fame, their time in the spotlight, the opportunity to maybe follow that A-List path if they changed a little and compromised or in the case of Gilliam, Smith and even Campbell noticeable big failures with studio films, they have each forged careers that rely on their abilities, who they are, what their voice is and sticking true to what people love about them without, seemingly and in an overly vulgar way just chasing the almighty dollar.

Anyway, back to Paul and while it may seem like I have strayed from the point somewhat, it actually all factors in to why, for me certainly, Paul was a bit of a failure and a decidedly missed opportunity. Maybe my expectations were too high or maybe I misunderstood it all but it just wasn't engaging enough.

The main problems with Paul is that it's not very funny, there is no character development and the title stinks. Now this may very well be down to studio medalling, a bad editor or a freak occurrence in the space time continuum or it could also be down to the fact that they just didn't write a very good script but whatever the reason, it was a decidedly chuckle free affair with only a few scenes, most notably any time Jo Lo Truglio and Bill Hader are on the screen, worthy of a murmur of hilarity.
In the case of the two leads, Pegg and Frost, this duo, that usually have an enormous amount of screen chemistry because of their close friendship in real life and who are usually hilarious working together, were pretty shockingly boring if I am honest. Simon Pegg had stated that while it is true to say that Frost usually does the comedy and Pegg handles more serious lead man acting, in Paul the roles were reversed whereas actually what happened is neither appears to be the funny one. They don't have carefully defined characters, or much characters at all to be honest, Pegg still handles the bulk of the dialogue and has the romantic lead and the funniest thing Frost does all film is fall over and you saw that in the trailer.

It is just so knee crunchingly annoying that Edgar Wright made Scott bloody Pilgrim and didn't decide to come on board for this because I think after he had a more carefully structured go at the script and with a bit of his visual flair there was enough potential and story here to make a great fan favourite and not the inbetween, not quite one thing nor the other, flip-flopping mess it ended up being.

I am not a jumper on band wagons and I certainly like, watch and own some of the films he has been in but what is it about Seth Rogen that I am missing? He's not particularly a good actor, he has an annoying voice and is neither particularly witty nor gifted as a physical comedian and yet for the last few years he has been everywhere like a particularly pungent gassy emission. His best role was in Superbad as the crazy policeman and he was a little more expressive in the underrated Zack & Miri but I do not think his voice performance here fit the bill, maybe his voice is too recognisable or maybe he wasn't given a lot to work with but a lot of his supposed jokes fall flat and after a while the voice does just begin to grate. The CG creation of Paul though is spot on and he does seamlessly blend into the film without any of the problems that plague a Jar Jar Binks for example and considering his distain for the character in Spaced, it could be considered brave that Pegg would write a totally CG character like Paul.

Also one more bit on the acting and that is, inexplicably filling the film with famous funny people doesn't automatically mean you get a funny film, geek points or hard laughter of recognition and I don't know what's going on but why can't anyone give Kristen Wiig a decent role in a film? she is such a funny comedienne and seems capable of so much but every film she is in, except maybe Adventureland, she has absolutely nothing amusing to do. The running gag in Paul that she discovers swearing has a couple of moments but it would be nice to see that Pegg and Frost could come up with something funnier than finding different ways to say testicles and tiny bladder jokes.

The direction is pedestrian and average at best, which is also annoying as I like Mottola's other films but with Paul I guess he is fine with some of the more normal scenes but anything that required action or a little bit of speed and it was pretty woefully inept unfortunately.

Sci-Fi geek comedy has been done better and funnier both in Free Enterprise and Fanboys, which was also a road trip movie like Paul, and I think the reason for this was those two movies had very set characters that you cared about and didn't shy away from totally immersing themselves in the references and, of course, therefor are cult favourites with a fan base rather than opening across the country in multiplexes everywhere to a distinctly muted reaction and fairly poor box office. Why would a studio, presumably, say "we want to be in the Pegg & Frost business" and then try and tell Pegg & Frost what they can and can't do, it seems illogical to the extreme and absolutely mind boggling. In the press tour interviews I have seen the pair seem less happy and jokey than in the past, I wonder if this has to do with the film they had their arm twisted to produce.

I am so sorry to be so harsh on what is a fairly harmless road movie with a CGI alien, a half-arsed but appreciated attempt to bring up the 'aliens defy the idea of a single deity/religion' debate in something mainstream and some mildly amusing cursing but, for me it had all the ideas and possibility to be a great, great movie without ever actually, really delivering or committing to any of it.
I love the cast, love the plot, love the setting, love the references and I am an atheist, surely this film should've been 10 out of 10 but unfortunately, if it's fun and laughter you're after then I suggest you bypass the movie altogether and go straight to the behind the scenes vlogs they shot using Flipcams, which certainly prove the old adage that a film that is fun to make is hard to watch.

5 out of 10 re-animated dead bird sandwiches
Points from the Wife 6 out of 10

Jane Eyre - 26th March 2011

2011-04-11T03:03:00.002-04:00

I have a confession to make: I am not much of a reader.
I used to be, growing up I read a lot and now I will read biographies and the occasional novel but since I discovered movies I am afraid I am a watcher and a writer, not so much a reader.
So ask me to tell you the difference between Charlotte, Anne or Emily Bronte and I'd be stumped. I don't even know how I know their names, or know they wrote books, or know which books they wrote, I probably saw it in a movie once.

I am afraid my male Neanderthaloid mentality tends to throw your Pride & Prejudices, The Tess of the D'urbervilles of this world and the Jane Eyre's all into their own sack, much like now one might assume Twilight, The Vampire Diaries and The Sookie Stackhouse books are all the same and to some extent, if I am to be perfectly honest, to me they are but if we were talking about the well respected TV & film adaptations of the first three and the laughable and bemusing TV & film adaptations of the last three then I would be able to clearly see the sometimes obvious and sometimes subtle differences between the styles. It's just the way my mind is wired I guess.

So when the Misses said she wanted to go and see this, having seen the trailer I have to say I was sort of intrigued as it played up the darker, edgier sides of the story but also, like anyone who grew up and started dating in England post 'the Colin Firth Pride & Prejudice BBC adap' knows, as filled with dread as you might be to sit through hours of the costume drama abyss, if you want to keep your woman on your side and happy it is something you just have to do.

I have noticed since writing this blog that I am more likely to have my hopes dashed by a film I had high expectations for than I am likely to be disappointed by one I have no expectations for. This may sound obvious but what I mean is, when I either don't know what to expect, or when I am simply not expecting anything I very often have a much better time at the cinema. Such was the case here.
I will enjoy the experience of being at the cinema I thought, what happens on the screen I will enjoy for films sake if nothing else. Luckily this would be easy for two reasons: one, our cinema round the corner has a phenomenally good high def digital screen that you could project sick on to and it would look good (projectile vomit if you will) and two, Jane Eyre wasn't bad, wasn't bad at all.

I am assuming everyone but me knows the plot to Jane Eyre already but basically it's to do with this brighter than average girl who has a horrible upbringing, goes to a very harsh school, eventually grows up and wants more for herself, gets placed at the large house of a well-to-do business man, as the governess to a little french girl, meets rich man, falls for him, he falls for her but he has a dark secret that threatens to keep them apart for ever.

I haven't seen other adaptions but this one played up the misery, the abuse, the underlying mystery, the dark side of the story and also the creative and sexual repression of the time while highlighting the Jane Eyre's education, desire to break free from society's trappings and the quick witted nature of her and her master's exchanges.
What was very nice is that there seemed to be no attempt to tone down or slow done the antiquated yet eloquent speech patterns the character's conversed in and while it wasn't necessarily as dense and occasional impenetrable as something like Shakespeare might be for a modern, youthful or American audience ears, it was at time very quick fire and full of imagery that was beautiful to hear and refreshing that the writer, director and producers actually had faith in their crowd.

So the direction and shooting of the piece was just lovely and made me think over and over that really, recently, the films I have been watching have, for the most part been just stunningly beautiful. It's nice to know that the films that obviously compete with the 3D super hero movies do so by quite simply making their 2D images look absolutely incredible. Like I said, the screen I saw this on is fantastically crisp and so every bit of contrast, every colour palette, every bit of weather and every corner of the grounds of the castle and the castle itself were just an unbelievable treat for the eyes. Here's hoping tremendous cinematography is the way of the future and 3D goes the way of Vanilla Ice.

The acting was uniformly good too with the two leads building up pretty staggering chemistry and tension, both equally at home with the fizzing repartee that any woman wiser than her station and land owner who can't keep his eye off young bits of stuff, in these sorts of films, rattle off effortlessly and almost as everyday speech.
There was a sort of, almost confused or hurt to tears expression that Mia Wasikowska did in order to convey her disdain for being treated as an inferior, or her rebellious nature against him courting another woman etc. that started to get a bit on my nerves the 58th time she used it but basically she does a solid job and her English accent was pretty spot on too.
In the role of Rochester, easy, initially, I would imagine, to make Mr.Darcy clone, Fassbender, who just about resists this urge, wasn't bad either and did the desperately crazed and lovesick stuff pretty well. Jamie Bell needs to stop looking 12 in order to convince in the part as, despite a recognisably good turn, I didn't believe him at all in this character and finally Judi Dench who has it written into her contract and probably sewed into her rented BBC bloomers that she legally has to appear in these sorts of adaptations. The part here as head of the staff of the house was no great stretch or shakes for the seasoned professional stylings of The Dench and the odd humourous or motherly turns she has in this, are carried off seemingly effortlessly and totally flawlessly.

All in all then an enjoyable, quite pacey in places, adaptation of an old costume drama fan favourite with the twist being that not just fans will enjoy it. Don't move along, there is lots to see here!

7 out of 10 crusts of oaty bread and the thin soup servants get before the master falls for them and proposes. After that one gets whole pickled moose and swan on toast.
Points from The Wife 8 out of 10

How Do You Know - 24th March 2011

2011-04-11T01:13:00.001-04:00

How do you know the movie your watching is piles of 24 carat steaming horse droppings?
if 30 minutes into it you want to yank your own eyeballs out and eat them to save you from this sort of floundering mess in the future.

What is so completely shocking about this amateurish weak arse dribble of a film is that while Reese Witherspoon is never top of my list, she's not exactly atrocious and almost everyone else involved in this film has done much much better and will probably do much better again, we can only hope.

Yes once in a while Paul Rudd will stumble into a howler or two ("I could never be your woman" anyone?), Owen Wilson faltered his steady stream of watchable, enjoyable romps with Marley & Me and even the sheen has slightly faded on old Mr.Nicholson after The Bucket List (although his resume is still extraordinarily respectable and lacking the massive Blunders of pears De Niro and Pacino) and yet what were the chances that all four of these established Hollywood actors would show up in one almighty blunder? How would I know! I can only imagine that the usually reliable James L Brooks roofied them all, filmed them all engaging in lurid acts with a penguin and has it hanging over their heads.

The plot is utterly redundant, tedious and devoid of laughs. Basically Reese Witherspoon can no longer play softball or something and instead of just getting one of those sports-personality endorsement deals for a shoe or something, decides instead to shack up with air-headed, insensitive, womaniser Wilson and is then hideously shocked and surprised when it continually doesn't work out. One to many softballs in the face apparently.
On the other end of the banality spectrum there is Rudd and his father Nicholson. Rudd runs Nicholson's company, what that is we are never told or fully explained but the company is being investigated, again for what, no one really ever tells us that either. Rudd, being head of said company, is therefor in the firing line but we never really see this either, we are just told it and so he has plenty of time on his hands to wander about while Nicholson occasionally shows up to rain a little more on hapless Rudd's parade with little to no information other than it's bad news and Rudd should panic. Rudd is never once interviewed by the IRS or the Feds or anyone and the whole strand of the narrative seems unnecessarily sloppy, confusing and pointless. What is even more frustrating is the storyline is never entirely or satisfactorily concluded which makes you leave the cinema even more dumbfounded and gobsmacked that you sat through the whole sorry disaster to begin with.
Rudd and Witherspoon contrive to meet on the worst day both of them are having and in a very not-very-cute "meet-cute" Rudd decides he likes the gravestone chinned Witherspoon and rather than anything resembling hilarity or romance ensuing we spend the rest of the film knowing they'll get together but have to watch two hours of worthless and pitiful crap where the only obstacle to their groinal happiness is the never faithful and imbecilic Wilson and the fact that Witherspoon continues to claim they are boyfriend and girlfriend, despite her spending all her time with Rudd and hardly any with him!

The whole thing is comparable to being flogged with chicken wire while a dwarf anally batters you with a fence post and at least in that scenario the fence post has a point.

All of this twatting about would probably be bearable if the whole film didn't look like it was put together by the same team that put together the sets for televised puppet shows in the 50s. Considering the pedigree of it's director, Mr. James L Brooks, it looks like he is trying to take tips from the people who make daytime soaps in which evil twin brothers steal the ruby of eternal life from the nuns only to find out the girl he had a crush on in high school is really his aunt.

So slam bad writing and bad directing together with impossibly poor production values and a cast who all look like they could do with a long lie down, some strong drugs or a damn good talking to and you have this years worst romantic comedy so far, mainly because it's neither romantic nor at all funny in any way at all. The bit in the trailer about the lamp is the best bit in the film and it's funnier in the trailer.

Unfortunately a sad day for all involved, Witherspoon will take this in her stride, she's used to this sort of mindless, inconsequential project that's not unlike being forced to smell the flecks from big foot's arse hair but the rest of them, not unlike actors thinking that working with Woody Allen now is still something to be happy about, need to read the script closer in future, it's only worth doing if it's any good.

Next up Owen Wilson works with Woody Allen (I slap my head with despair).

2 out of 10 sneezes into a salad that's already glazed liberally with giraffe shit
Points from The Wife 2 out of 10