Wall Shadows

Exciting Update

2011-05-26T23:53:00.001+01:00

Anybody who is, or has enjoyed this blog may be excited to know I now present a movie and DVD podcast with my friends at 3m3.posterous.com

See you there.

AVATAR (Aka AVTR)

2009-12-21T21:49:00.004Z

3/10

I'm not in the business of giving bonus marks out of ten for technological prowess and pushing the digital envelope, because frankly it's not something that interests me very much. Many people are intensely fascinated by the minutiae of film making, the blow by blows, the bit transfer rates and mo cap suits that make up the so called heart of Avatar.

But lets address this issue, which Fox's News International buddies are pushing as its USP for reasons that will, I hope, become apparent.

For this movie all new frontiers of digital film making have been discovered and conquered, real emotional performances elicited from the digital puppets and in "the volume" we actually have a controllable environment that can be made to be anything, achieve virtually limitless variety and feed that back to the actors immediately so the whole performance is rewarding for them in a way that digital performance can never be.

So let me be clear - on a purely technical level, James Cameron's Avatar is a colossal, barn storming, eye wateringly complete and total triumph.

Here's the thing -

Why is the whole marketing campaign for Avatar based around its technical creativity and its 3D?

Simple. On absolutely every other level, it is a horrific, bloated, trite, patronising, vacuous, heartless failure.

Avatar, and none of the vested interest journos will say this, is rubbish.

And not in a subtle, hard to spot way. Oh no.

Every character is so underdeveloped they spout dialogue like characters from the bad age of early of narrative console gaming while being crowbarred into supplying the back story in such obvious terms they practically start each sentence with "This is the plot, OK?..."

Case in point: a scientist, played by Sigourney Weaver, who has been intimately involved in events suddenly gets reminded of "why we're all here" in pretty much those terms by Giovanni Ribisi's phoned in cliché of a project manager (he even plays GOLF in the office while laughing at the savages who are standing in the way of progress).

It's as if the scriptwriter of woeful US TV dud Flash Forward, which often flashes back to things that happened THAT EPISODE in case you're confused, has been roped in to write a script in an afternoon and was then asked to make things clearer. Avatar doesn't have any flashbacks, but it repeats itself and its childish message constantly.

I've seen some of the worst dialogue ever written (Plan 9 From Outer Space, for instance) but Avatar consistently surprises with just how far it pushes the boundaries of predictability, awkwardness and cliché. It also boasts one of the poorest voice over performances since Harrison Ford's legendary "If I do this badly they won't use it" VO for the studio raped version of Blade Runner.

Sam Worthington's marine Jake Sully doesn't sound in awe or like a man changed.

He.
Sounds.
Bored.

Perhaps he'd seen Avatar.

It's obviously going for an epic coming of age and self discovery film like, say, Lord Of The Rings or Dances With Wolves and to an extent you do get the sense that there is a huge story to be told about this world - but this, crucially, is not it.

If you are going to make a vastly long film it is necessary in my rulebook (which I must write, incidentally) that at some point, any point, the audience identify or perhaps even sympathise with anyone.

ANYONE!

Instead virtually everyone is stupid, self obsessed and dull. The only slight bit of fun comes from the frankly crazy Marine chief - who is played with the dial set to "Extra Ham" throughout. But at least you connect with him on the level of humour.

Let's put the entire book on bad characterisation aside though, since you want to know about this amazing world they created, yeah?

Playing Devil's advocate for a mo, with a big brainless blockbuster the experience that's important, not the plot and characters?

Firstly, when did "brainless" and "preachy" become bedfellows?

Oh yeah... it's a FOX production.

And whoah boy is Avatar preachy.

Guess what, humanity? You're all scum. Real scum. These aliens know what's what. They're in touch with their planet and you're not. You absolute filth.

Great, meaningful, original stuff. Yeah. Sarcasm doesn't really come over on the web.

So lets look at this perfect world, that James Cameron described as "like nothing you've ever seen" (I may be paraphrasing, don't have a team of researchers)

It's Native Americans living in the jungle.

That's it.

There's nothing even remotely original or unexpected. These guys have two arms, two legs, ride horses and coexist with a lot of critters in the jungle (cats, rhinos etc) due to a very real physical link with every other thing on the planet. Oh, the horses have extra limbs and everything seems to have gills, but there's an Earth equivalent of everything except that link.

Actually, the link is the one thing that captured my imagination a bit, but it isn't remotely explored to the degree it deserves since we have to get to the next whooshy explody bit to justify the expense of 3D.

Actually, for a film set on a distant unfamiliar inhospitable planet I found the whole thing slightly racist. In an Earth sense, I mean. Diversity seems to be something the corporation in question doesn't really do. The few ethnic minority actors are an Asian scientist (how original) and Michelle Rodriguez playing that ballsy Michelle Rodriguez character you write in your movie because you want to meet Michelle Rodriguez. Pretty much all of Hollywood's non-white acting talent is in the motion capture suits playing natives.

How progressive. How patronising. How pathetic.

The alien race are 10 feet tall, incidentally, though the filmmakers, in a rare outbreak of budget logic, do their best to limit direct interaction between humans and them since I guess the Mo Cap environment would have trouble letting them do so.

Know what I'd do? Tell the story of this planet and not have any humans there at all. Think of all the options that gives you! This is not just a failure, it has come at the expense of god knows how many great potential films - you could, for example, make Paranormal Activity roughly 50,000 times for the cost of one dud like Avatar. I know which represents the better artistic return on investment for me.

Of course I'm all too aware of the simple economic models of film making and how they will ALWAYS trump artistic considerations. Doesn't mean I have to like it.

So - Avatar is not just bad, it's OBVIOUSLY bad. So obvious for the first time I am seeing the wheels of Hollywood marketing machine turning.

It seems owning not only the film, but many of the news outlets that are telling people whether it is good as well, will be the paradigm for a long time. Expect many more soulless gilded turkeys in the future folks.

I'd rather see The Phantom Menace again, frankly.

If that isn't intensely depressing, I don't know what is.

A

There. I just saved you nearly three hours of your life. And many of you will be seeing your computer screen in 3D. Maybe someone will give me a 5 Star review for this.

Review: Paranormal Activity

2009-12-03T21:15:00.003Z

7/10

Quick Plot: A man buys a camera to film the events that have been disturbing his wife's sleep just as the events start to escalate.

That's all I'm prepared to write at this point plot wise, since I don't want people being annoyed I spoiled any surprises for them.

I saw it on my own in an almost empty cinema, knowing next to nothing about it. I recommend you do the same.

Don't read any further if you want to keep your experience pure.

How I wish a movie like Paranormal Activity had existed when I was 14 or 15 and trying to get girls interested in a spot of cuddling.

Back then I don't really remember any truly scary or creepy films with a 15 certificate all that stuff ended up with an 18 rating because, frankly, it were a different world then, chick. The kids of today will have girls jumping at them during this. So long as they're not expecting gore...

In this age of lazy gore filled, 18 rated torture fests I hadn't really expected something like Paranormal Activity to be successful unless it could keep its word of mouth large and its reviews good. I'm happy to be part of the group of reviewers who liked it.

I gather it cost next to nothing to make. A mere $15,000 if reports are to be believed. And has made over $100 Mill. Proof that there is a market out there for films that are just plain good.

Compared to the return on investment (artistic or monetary) of an expensive film like, say, Twilight, or even more acutely, an incredibly expensive film like 2012, the importance of that fact cannot, in my view be overstated.

Suffice to say it achieves a lot with very little and while not destined to set the world on fire, it gets the job done fantastically well. I'll probably write about its strengths and weaknesses in a couple of weeks once my mates have all seen it.

Will you like it as much as I did? It's tough to say.

Your enjoyment will almost certainly be proportional to how much you can get into the spirit of the thing and accept its premise. After the end there was a genuine moment of camaraderie between the six or seven people who were in the cinema at 14:40 on a Thursday to see it - we'd shared an almost interactive experience since you have to bring a lot to this film with you to fill in the scares and I was glad I'd seen it alone (like I did The Blair Witch Project, Ringu etc).

It's a very cool movie, and I was very impressed.

A

P.S. I have one very minor spoiler.... so don't read below unless you're prepared to know something!!! DON'T!!!

The very last moment (by which I mean the last second, not the last sequence) is a bit shit and not needed, but it's not a dealbreaker.

Review: 2012

2009-12-03T20:28:00.003Z

5/10

There's a lot of flash bang in Roland Emmerich's latest "look at the USA being destroyed" movie, but it simply doesn't deliver enough of that to be a truly memorable spectacle, nor enough heart to be truly involving.

All this movie's problems are summed up in the choice of last line.

If you recall your Deep Impact, that film ends with a dignified yet rousing speech from Morgan Freeman's President character and we go away thinking mankind is battered but unbowed by the events of that film. 2012 by way of contrast ends on the note "Well, billions of people are dead, but at least a little girl has stopped wetting the bed!"

What a wonderful message of hope.

Spoilers start below.

You know, it's a sad day when the best performance in a film is from Woody Harrelson playing a batshit crazy pseudo-religious conspiracy theorist disk jockey. John Cusack is walking through the movie playing the Tom Cruise role from War Of The Worlds - I think Spielberg's central broken family from his version WOTW has been copied almost verbatim here, by the way. The boy & girl kids, the boy disliking his father more than the girl does. The quest to prove himself to his ex. All that.

The kids are OK, Amanda Peet plays that Amanda Peet role and no awards will be on the shelf for acting, come the season.

But you don't call Emmerich in when you want Oscars for acting!

Nah - his bag is blowing stuff up, and having obviously done Wind and Water in his last apocalypse (the Dennis Quaid / Jake Gyllenhall starring The Day After Tomorrow), he moves on to Earth and Fire in 2012, thus completing his "Elements Cycle". I just made that up. He didn't think it through that much. Especially since there's a whole bunch of Tsunamis here as well...

Right, quick plot. In 2009 a nice scientist called Adrian finds out that the world's core is heating up and will essentially melt the earth from below, meaning the thin crust will just move about freely, with catastrophic results for the people and buildings on top of it, who had really banked on the ground staying in one place.

Now - two things I like about the central concept:

It's no-one's fault.
There's absolutely nothing anyone can do to stop it.

Usually one of those factors is fudged (as in lame ass turkey The Core) so props to Mr E for keeping to his concept and following through.

The downside is, where the destruction of the human world as we know it is something you'd think was a large scale event we see it mainly through the eyes of one or two characters, one of whom simply potters about a bit before going off to safety and the other becomes an action hero immediately, jumping about and becoming an expert underwater swimmer at will.

While the former of these two is peppered through the movie to hammer home the political decisions and morality issues that, for example, deciding which 400,000 people will be rescued from certain death bring up (answer - if they're rich, they're in) the other storyline is more linear and is basically a chase movie where the thing chasing you is in fact Armageddon.

I've got nothing against the fact that a film like this simplifies and dumbs down a lot of things. It doesn't try and solve the moral dilemma (in fact Oliver Platt's character points out that the rescue wouldn't happen without the ticket money from the rich) or maintain a reality outside what is necessary to get the heroes to where they need to be.

Actually, it often makes outrageous manoeuvres to keep the heroes alive, moving an entire continent just enough at one point.

A couple more examples will illustrate that this movie has a real tendency to "do something cool" where it's not really necessary, which discards any sense of gritty realism from view.

It's not enough that the White House is destroyed by a tsunami. It has to have the aircraft carrier USS John F Kennedy land right on it.
Similarly, if a bit of debris needs to hit the rescue ship at just the wrong moment - why bloody not make that bit of debris Air Force One?
I counted about 6 times that vehicles clearly incapable of jumping (like stretch limos and Camper Vans) got some mad air because at just the right moment the ground shifted to form a perfect ramp.

I could go on, but I'd be listing 50 things or more. You get the idea.

So realism isn't part of the deal.

I did like some things in the film - the destruction is well shown, if a little callous since in one shot at least 500,000 people are dying but we're only made to care at all about three of them.

"Wow look at all those people falling out of buildings! Isn't it terrible that this little girl has to see that?"

Effects like the whole of Las Vegas collapsing are fairly exciting and silly - probably hitting a good balance between the sort of visceral smashing of landmarks we adults enjoy and the fairly bloodless nature needed to avoid traumatising your kids.

The most annoying thing though is the treatment of poor old Gordon - the estranged wife's new fella. Not only does he miraculously become an ace pilot instantly despite claiming to only have two hours in the cockpit or something (he manages to fly a giant multi engine jet between two collapsing buildings for God's sake!) but as soon as the plot wants Cusack and Peet to get back together (hardly a spoiler since it's telegraphed pretty much straight away) he's chucked to a ghastly death and is immediately forgotten. Poor sod.

So, should you go out of your way to see this?

Check the rating guys. No.

It's better than The Day After Tomorrow, but that ain't saying an awful lot. That being said, it's not one to avoid like the plague either. If your date or family member is dragging you to see it, you won't need therapy afterwards.

Unless you like Gordon, that is.

I welcome your comments below - and please spread the word to your friends. Wall Shadows is back baby!

A

A note on re-organisation

2009-12-02T23:34:00.003Z

Hi folks and welcome back to Wall Shadows!

It's been too long, believe me.

Just a quick note to say over on the right hand side of your screen I've alphabetised every single film I have ever rated (even if I've not reviewed them).

Those that have accompanying reviews can be reached by clicking the links provided. There are lots so please let me know if you have any particular favourites.

I am taking suggestions and volunteers to teach me how to improve the site, but I rely on your word of mouth to get people reading and enjoying it - so if you like a review feel free to retweet it or whatever you want. Just don't try to pass it off as your own.

Thanks for your patience to those who have been waiting - and welcome to any new readers who may have stumbled into my blog. Nice to have you here.

A

Review: Twilight

2009-12-02T22:17:00.005Z

3/10

First things first, welcome back to good old Wall Shadows! It's been a long time and a lot's been happening with me, but for all that boring personal stuff, you can head over to sister site Wall Scratchings and read any of that you want. I appreciate that my writing style may be shot to pieces and this may be a total random set of disconnected paragraphs but bear with me and I'm sure I'll be reviewing coherently in no time.

Now then, Twilight. Obviously being a 28 year old male I'm hardly in this film's target audience. Clearly the large quantity of pubescent teenage girls (and their unfortunate boyfriends) who have already made it a franchise don't give a flying monkey's right buttcheek what I think.

But I only ever write reviews as I see em, and Twilight is an ideal place to start since it is so mind numbingly, hilariously dull and awful that it's a veritable feast for the fingers of a cantankerous, war weary movie soldier like myself.

Spoilers abound below, people!

So - vampire movies have been around for almost as long as movies themselves. From the legendary Shreck or melodramatic Lugosi Draculas to the piss poor Richard Roxburgh, the weird little vampire has seen countless iterations, many quite good, like Scars Of Dracula; some weird, like Shadow of the Vampire and some retarded, like the laughable John Carpenter's Vampires.

We know, from these, the rules of vampires. Well, those that haven't been rewritten (how many times has Dracula been resurrected now?)

They're so sexy women collapse in front of them with their... ahem... necks... out for all to see.
They can't go out in daylight. It's fatal.
You can kill em with a stake to the heart.
They're not fond of crosses or garlic. A cross made of garlic, while stinky, would be a good defence.
They drink blood. Oh yes.
They tend not to die. Unless some do gooding chump with a spiky bit of wood gets involved.

Twilight is too cool to do what it's told. It's not going to be told what to do by the vampire rules. The rules aren't its real dad anyway. IT HATES YOU, IT HATES YOU.

You see, some brainless loser decided that Vampires needed a makeover.

Sorry, I was being a really annoying, whiny teenager there. Get used to that if you're planning to watch this.

So, if you really think Vampires are cool, but a little too sexy and violent for you, you've got to do something about the rules that predate these books. And Miss Meyer has done so with aplomb.

If Twilight was a proper vampire movie, this would be the plot.

Bella Swann, a teenage girl, moves to a small town to live with her estranged father. A few days later she is dead and her father vows to discover her killer - whoever, or whatever, it may be...

See? Sounds good eh? Unfortunately, here's the plot for Twilight;

Bella Swann, a teenage girl, is such a wonderful person and loves her mother so much she's prepared to go live with her estranged dad so her mum can go off round the country with her new boyfriend. Immediately accepted at school into the in-crowd because she's from somewhere else (?) she meets Edward Cullen, who is a violently angry, strange looking, pale skinned, moody freak who never goes out in direct sunlight and lives with a "family" in a secluded house no-one goes to. Edward is inexplicably attracted to Bella since she's so wonderful and she catches him stalking her. But since he's dreamy she gets involved in his life anyway and for fifteen minutes at the end there's a bit with bad vampires... zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

There is so much wrong here. The outsider from a different state is IMMEDIATELY POPULAR? Did the author even go to school at any point? Seriously, I changed schools a couple of times and it takes at least three days to stop them pouring urine on your head, let alone sitting with you at lunch and pointing out the hotties.

And Edward himself is a real let down, as is his family. Perpetually filmed in slow motion, young Robert Pattinson seems to be following the Richard Gere Method - "look at the floor, then - without moving your head - look at the other person.... in slow motion!".

Everything scary about vampires has been expunged. The only thing left is that they're all really attractive, I guess. Since they're all heavily made up and the girls have curled their hair I guess we'll follow the movie shorthand and go with "Sexy". Oh, and they do drink blood. Just.

And they're nice vampires, you know. They only kill animals.

Sadly, they're also almost totally pathetic.

They WHINE.. they bitch and moan and are so mind meltingly insufferable you're almost wishing for Christopher Lee to show up and overact a bit to liven things up. Turns out the biggest danger in a Vampire's house here is walking into a screen door.

Oh, and these guys can go outside in the daytime, so long as it's misty or foggy or rainy or anything else that looks good in slow motion. The reason why they can't? I'm glad you asked. Let me explain....

Centuries ago, a small invisible goblin called Daubney, discovered the secret of mixing glue with shiny things to make... you've guessed it... glitter glue. The gods rewarded him with the power to stop time, which he gratefully accepted. But he was deceived by the gods, who in fact only made him able to stop time when a vampire was in direct sunlight - and forced him to paint the glitter glue messily all over their pasty faces and hairless torsos. It is a life of sad torment for the Goblin, who is now remembered only in the verb he coined: "To Daub".

So when the vampires go out in the direct sun they glitter a bit rubbishly. That's it.

WHAT?

THEY FRICKING GLITTER? BADLY?

I found that so upsetting I invented a story about a fricking Goblin to stop me having to type it for a while.

The only even vague semblance of an actual plot outside the obvious "oh he's so dreamy" antics (which have no structure - they simply love each other immediately) is introduced and dealt with in about a total of 15 minutes of screen time at the end, much of which is spent changing the dynamic from "oh I love you, but I don't want to use you" to "I love you and I will protect you and not use you"

Oh wow, how modern. How "new". How mind crushingly boring.

And in the end, that is Twilight's greatest crime. Forget the fact it's not scary. In fact, don't.
It is the opposite of scary. It is just plain boring. I just can't get past that.

Add to this the sad fact that the effects are laughable, despite Daubney's best efforts. The vampires can run fast. Fine, that's a pretty cool power - but not when their leg movements are totally unconnected from the way they're moving - it's almost as if they're on a track and running on the spot, Wile E Coyote style! Rubbish.

And add to THIS that the whole production value seems to be firmly planted in "TV pilot" territory and we have a real stinker on our hands. It wasn't even funny for long.

Dire, drab, pitifully acted and fatally boring. Please, let me take from this experience the knowledge that my suffering has spared just one other person. One sad, lonely person who might think "sod it, it can't be all that bad - I'll just watch it to check".

Please don't.

Comments are welcome and encouraged below. Thanks for reading.

A

Quick Movie Review: Eagle Eye

2009-08-15T13:49:00.003+01:00

5/10

Let me do the Novelisation of this film for you now.

Whine... moan.. whine...

BOOOM!!! BOOM!!! BANG!!!!! SMASH!!!! BOOM!!!! SCREEEEECH!!!!

Run! Run! Run!

BOOM! BOOM! KABOOM!

(isn't that the field with pylons in it from Se7en?)

NEEEEEEOOOOOOOOWWWWWW!!!!! SCREEEEEECH....

BOOM!

BANG!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

With that out of the way, I'll just say that this movie has a lot of bang and flash, and is an amusing movie of the sort that twenty years ago would star Bruce Willis, but has a couple of ridiculous ideas, a villain with all the credibility of a cheese toastie and an oddly quaint paranoid world view.

It made me giggle and was fun, in the same way anything with massive bangs and whooshes is, but there is nothing even approaching depth. Probably qualifies for a look if you're not paying much for it.

A

Movie Review: Franklyn

2009-08-15T13:31:00.003+01:00

6/10

Welcome back!

This movie is predictable, pseudo-psychological sort of fare.

It is set in two places, one is the sprawling, sickly, sci fi metropolis of "Meanwhile City" and the other is familiar London.

In Meanwhile city, a masked vigilante who is the sole non-religious person in the world, tries to save the life of a girl who has been kidnapped by a mysterious organisation and its leader, known only as "The Individual".

Back in the prosaic world, a man's wedding is cancelled and he begins to see glimpses of his childhood sweetheart around the place, while Bernard Hill's divorced father is informed that his son is finally allowed a home visit after a long time away.

And while this is going on we also meet Eva Green's selfish, damaged artist whose latest art project is a series of suicide attempts (after calling the ambulance first, of course) either as a punishment for herself or to punish her mother, or both.

As the film goes on... well... actually about five minutes later, you begin to realise that things really are as simple to explain as they appear - the way to reconcile the two worlds becomes apparent within the first half an hour, and once that's out of the way, the question becomes what the film is trying to say.

And unfortunately this question is never really answered. It's a fable of a sort about the risks of self destruction and self deception and their consequences for your life, even that life you haven't experienced yet. But beyond that rather simple thought, it doesn't really justify its pretensions - the world invented for Meanwhile City is probably interesting enough to have justified a story on its own without the anchoring in reality, and the vigilante is reather too obviously based on Rorschach from Watchmen.

All in all it was an enjoyable enough way to spend a surprisingly reasonable amount of time (90 minutes) but it misses a few key opportunities to expand upon an interesting mythology of its own in the real world (Sally and the hospital janitor for instance) that may have given it a bit more meatiness.

But I enjoyed it.

It's good to be back - see you very soon!

A

Quick Movie Review: Garden State

2009-06-30T15:20:00.003+01:00

3/10

Imagine a pubescent teenager reads a psychology textbook, gets a word processor and has a rich dad. This is the sort of film that would plummet out of his scarcely formed brain cells.

It's a sort of pseudo-intellectual misery porno with Zach Braff playing the oh so tortured ex TV star reduced to working in a restaurant (oh the horror of employment!) and with daddy issues to boot, heading home for a few days to attend his mother's funeral.

While there he bumps into his old school chums, meets a girl and "gets a new shot at life". It really is as yawn inducing as that sounds.

All his friends are hateful, his father is traumatised, he gets attracted to a compulsive liar who is played by Natalie Portman. NATALIE PORTMAN! Seriously, is there any role she has ever done that someone else couldn't be an immeasurably better in? This one is almost written for Maggie Gyllenhall, though she may well have turned it down.

This is a perfect storm for me - horridly trite and wilfully earnest, it skirts the boundary between dull and hateful very well, only sliding over into genuinely hateful on the occasions where Braff's attempts to elicit my sympathy for his character are undermined by his miserably predictable depressive behaviour.

I like Braff for the most part, he's a goofy, likable screen presence in Scrubs on TV, but here he's just a black hole of self important dullness.

Suffice to say, I was not keen on this film.

A

Quick Movie Review: Night At The Museum

2009-06-08T22:25:00.003+01:00

5/10

I thought since the sequel to this film is number one at the box office right now I'd take a punt at the original since it was on.

Kids films are a little tough on writers and directors; you want thenm to be exciting and occasionally sad in an unthreatening way but you also need to put some slapstick and laughs in too. Far too often the balance is fluffed totally and you either get an over-earnest preachy turn off or even worse a shallow, pies in faces waste of time.

Past masters at this balance are the nice folks at Pixar, but Night at The Museum has enough of everything to remain inoffensively entertaining and a decent message for young kids too - that history can be wonderful, and they'd better get the hell down to their local museum before the nice divorcee loses his job!

Seriously, why are so many families divorced in films now? It used to be just in Spielberg films that every family is broken up and miserable.

Anyway, I'd put this one slightly higher in my estimation than Jumanji since it manages to be as fun as it is action based - Jumanji had a few too many creepy "hunter hunting people" bits for my taste.

I wouldn't say it's going to get any oscars though. Or did it?

A

Quick Review: 12 Rounds

2009-06-08T22:10:00.003+01:00

4/10

Have you seen Die Hard With A Vengeance? You've seen 12 Rounds.

The main thing of interest is whether John Cena, wrestler turned actor "du jour" has any future at all in the acting game; I would say a qualified yes - as an action hero he is far to 80s/90s for the modern world, next to normal sized modern heroes like uber-torturer Jack Bauer and nicey-nicey Jason Bourne, a hulking Arnie type action man blowing stuff up with impunity, all the while looking as earnest as a cow during a bowel movement, is dated and simultaneously quite endearing.

His niche may well be as a sort of lower rent Arnie - tough guys and superheros maybe, but ordinary cop? Not likely. Perhpas I'm being generous and a burgeoning career in motion capture awaits the guy. He's a likable screen presence, but you'll be in no danger of thinking he's the new Bruce Willis.

As for the rest of the cast, the only notable member is Aiden Gillen - who turns in a wonderfully cheque cashing performance as the villain.

As obvious retreads go, it is inoffensive but pointless, and appeals sometimes to the very lowest IQs - notably in the final fight between the leads where Cena's wife explains the action beats as we go ("He's got a gun!" comes two seconds AFTER Gillen fires at Cena).

The evil plan is so tortuous that it makes absolutely no sense - and some of the solutions don't either (e.g. assuming cutting the power to a tram will stop it dead when it is heading downhill).

So it's not a terrible film, but its existence won't send even the merest ripple across the still pond of American Film-Making.

A

Movie Review: Drag Me To Hell

2009-06-08T14:01:00.004+01:00

8/10

A lot of horror films these days are very self conscious and precious, relying on some gimmick or sick over the top murders, torture and gore to pull in the world's jaded genre lovers. Failing that, they ink into a pathetically adolescent mire of nihilistic hopelessness.

Of course, horror films have always contained a certain level of comedy too - one of our most common defences against fear is laughter, and commonly we respond to the terrible with a nervous chuckle or laugh. We also love to be scared anyway - what other species would willingly put its life at risk on a bit of metal shooting around at 90mph through loops and bends and sheer drops? It's exciting, and excitment is one of the benefits conscious life gives us.

Despite these facts, broad obvious comedy and horror don't really work together; that is to say, comedy with jokes is terrible. Comedy arising from genuinely horrible events is how the most successful genre movies succeed - particularly in Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, where none of the humour is played anything other than straight, and we enjoy a huge laugh at the expense of the hapless and put upon anti-hero that is Bruce Campbell's legendary "Ash" as things go from bad to worse. And then get worser. And then get worserer.

Raimi is back to doing the same trick in Drag Me To Hell, only Bruce Campbell's geek turned psycho has been replaced with Alison Lohmann's cute as a button Loans manager. In fact the major disappointemnt here is that Campbell is not present at all, even in a miniscule form like Ted Raimi's "blink and you'll miss the back of his shoulder" cameo.

What makes this film better than 99% of the current trendy torture-porn or lazy remake set is that it is utterly focussed, relentless and true to its admittedly hokey subject. No character ever breaks the fourth wall and starts expounding on how ridiculous everything is from a post modern oh so clever standpoint. Noone is killed purely for pointless shock value, and what shocks there are, are highly crafted and timed to perfection, relying on an icky "ewwww" factor more than a gory "vomit" factor. This means that the certifcate can be a market maximising 15, without cutting back on the actual effectiveness of the movie.

And sure, some of the figures are clichéd and obvious - the domineering mother, the evil gypsy, the so nice it's embarrassing boyfriend, but what the film is actually about is entertainment. There's no beat or manouevre made that isn't purely to build up to the next part of the ride; never before has Raimi's Ghost House production studio actually lived up to its name.

Another factor in your involvement here is how UNFAIR the whole situation is - Lohmann's Christine Brown hasn't really done anything wrong at all; as someone who has worked in collections I can assert that the fault for non payment of Mrs Ganush's mortgage lies, in the end with Mrs Ganush (or the jackass that gave her a sub-prime mortgage) so the whole way through you are rooting for Christine to right this wrong.

It is exciting, unpretentious, memorable and funny.

Plus there's a talking goat. Awesome.

Highly recommended for fans of the genre and especially fans of Sam Raimi's early work. It's not as good as Evil Dead or its sequel (both would get a 9/10 from me) but it is the best horror movie I have seen in years.

(The Orphanage, while an incredible achievement, doesn't count, since anyone who describes that as horror missed the point entirely)

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A day of movies

2009-06-03T00:31:00.005+01:00

I don't get out much, me.

What with being hopelessly poor and unemployed (not for lack of trying) I don't get to the cinema as much as I'd like - the cost in London is at least £8 per movie, and seeing as how I can't afford the £16.50 a month for an unlimited pass - I'm on cereal at lunch time as it is - it is a rare thing indeed when I get to see so many films as I did this Sunday.

Major props need to go to my buddies Dave & Dave (genuinely), who helped me out with the prices of the tickets so I could see three new movies in an afternoon, which is near enough to my idea of heaven.

Appropriate then, that the one that was any good was Drag Me To Hell - Sam Raimi's morality tale about greed and consequences.

And the importance of taking your mother off speakerphone.

The others, Tormented and 12 Rounds were not so good, the former being lame and uninteresting, the latter being a remake of Die Hard With A Vengeance (sans any acknowledgement, natch.) with a wrestler in the lead role and, predictably, less charisma.

Reviews of the movies will be up in a bit - but I was really pleased to get back to the cinema . I love the whole experience; from ignorant queue jumpers who ask to see the "Beyoncé movie" (I believe it's called, Obsession) to shaking your head at the frankly balls out rip off that is £3.15 for a watered down cup of SodaStream.

So, forget that two of the three movies were lame - the company was good, the seats were good, and the whole experience brings a warm feeling to my heart.

So reignited was my passion for films that when I got home I watched two more - the kids film Night At The Museum (a nice way to spend Sunday evening) and later on, I introduced Mrs Algo to the joy and wonder that is Bride Of Frankenstein.

The downside - really weird dreams combining elements of all five films. A reanimated dinosaur with Frankenstein shouting "Rexy's Alive" who then kills a bunch of irritating schoolkids before kidnapping John Cena's wife and getting cursed by the freakiest lady ever.

(John Stewart impression) -

"Hello... Hollywood? I've got this great idea for a film...

What's it called? I'll tell you what it's called....

Drag the 12 Brides Of Frankenstein to the Tormented Museum of Hell.

Yes I'll Hold........."

The upside?

The name "Darren Mullet" will now be a signal for all rubbish slasher movie villains. And lazy shorthand is what got this country where it is today.

Here endeth the lesson.

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Movie Review: Tormented

2009-06-02T18:23:00.003+01:00

3/10

Goodness me... what have we come to, when this thing gets to the cinema, rather than straight to video as it deserves.

A group of bullies are followed after a schoolchild takes his own life, receiving nasty text messages from, and threatening glimpses of the deceased (a rather embarrassingly monickered "Darren Mullet"). One by one those responsible for his maltreatment are picked off in extremely predictable style, as old as the very first of this genre (Black Christmas, we believe).

In fact, so odd is this film that only about forty five minutes in does it become clear the makers intended this to be a comedy. In no other genre would portentous shots of a grossly obese young man who frequently puffs on his asthma inhaler despite being dead, first seen in full when he "bombs" onto a girl in the swimming pool.

The film is far from scary - in fact, its predictability is its greatest weakness - as is a sketchy approach to motiviations and characters.

Every character is an archetype, almost comically stereotyped - presumably to induce the least possible effort from the films viewers - and this leads to some hilarious moments; not least the fact that none of the schoolchildren appear to have parents at all, no explanation whatsoever given for their absences.

The ending too is outrageously simplistic and stupid, requiring a leap of logic of gargantuan proportions on the part of the police force - though since every single adult in the film is so moronic and hateful we are barely surprised.

This falls squarely into the "don't bother" camp - so don't.

A

Quick Movie Review: 24:REDEMPTION

2009-06-02T18:07:00.002+01:00

6/10

This extended TV episode (I can't call it a movie) follows everyone's favourite War criminal, Jack Bauer, as he attempts to save the lives of some nice kids from the presumably fictional African state of Sangara, as the revolution (or coup, depending on to whom you speak) in that country gathers pace.
Robert Carlyle provides ample support and much needed adult company for Keifer Sutherland, who has disappointingly put a stop to the 24 drinking game (drink every time he says "damn it" or tortures someone) with a new post-Abu Ghraib sensibility. It's a perfectly decent little story, but acts as little more than an interlude between series, and far more excitement is found in the 15 minutes worth of season 7 included on this disc as bonus material.
24 is always the better for its long build ups. In this shorter form events appear and disappear with frequency - and the sections set in Washington hold little interest outside anticipation for the next season.

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Quick Movie Review: The Black Cat

2009-06-02T17:59:00.002+01:00

6/10

Supposedly a major event, this first and possibly only collaboration as equals between Karloff and Lugosi is in fact a stylish, yet vacuous tale. While Karloff's central performance is striking, there is little of the depth or interest that he garnered as the Monster. Lugosi is campy and ridiculous, and the supporting characters are the worst sort of "dahling" clichés. The saving grace is very much the set design and cinematography, which cloaks the paltry plot in a creepy and noirish atmosphere. As a curiosity it is worth seeing, but it is far from classic status.

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Movie Review: War Of The Worlds (2005)

2009-05-30T19:10:00.004+01:00

6/10

In all honesty, when this remake was first announced, I really thought it would be much more of a train wreck than it actually is.

Granted, silliness wins over horror and Cruise is never anything less than punchable, but during this film there is genuine excitement at times.

Spoilers follow.

The initial reveal of the alien craft is well done (if a little too reminiscent of Independence Day) and the decision to bury the tripods benefits from never being explained; presumably the aliens awaited the rise of a species they could harvest for the weed's benefit, but there is no point on the family's journey where they would know this so we're not either.

There's also a, by now clichéd use of Morgan Freeman as the narrator at the start and end - laughing all the way to the bank since there's no reason it couldn't just use anyone - even Burton's voice from Jeff Wayne's musical version must be cheaper than an A-List Hollywood actor!

Spielberg always has a screwed up family if he can, and he's to be applauded here for following through with his premise and making Cruise's character an utterly atrocious father, selfish, dim, petty and impatient.

However, the film shortcuts on a couple of vital points.

First his son is clearly killed in a gigantic explosion and resurrected in time for an emotional ending without any explanation (not even a flashback of him hiding in a hole or something?) which reduces credibility from that thread of the tale.

Second, while this globe spanning conflict goes on, destroying cities, killing thousands, Cruise's wife and her parents just sit about at her mum and dads - apparently unmolested and with no structural damage caused to the building at all.

It's as if they all just sat about and had a cup of tea while waiting for the kids to arrive.

SO with these things undermining the film at the end, it's hard to be satisfied with the good things, like the panicky attempt to catch the ferry or the manic presence of Tim Robbins as a delusional ex cop (and his eventual fate is incredibly brave storytelling), leaving you remembering the films faults rather than its strengths. It's not a patch on the original - but that could be the motto of this blog, couldn't it?

'til next time, folks.

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Movie Review: The Devil Wears Prada

2009-05-30T18:55:00.003+01:00

5/10

Now, a little explanation as to what a straight man like myself was doing watching this through choice - it goes something like this.

I was on set recently with a young lady who, to my incredulity described this film as "(Her) Favourite Film" and further explained that it was more than just your typical run of the mill romantic comedy meets cheap knock off of Wall St.

Ah... let me explain that Wall St reference. In Wall Street a guy compromises his ideals in the hunt for success. After a while he realises the error of his ways and decides to be "true to himself".

Sadly, The Devil Wears Prada is a cheap knock off of the Wall St formula. Only without half its balls.

Take this as an example of how toothless this film is - supposedly the world of fashion is shallow, crass and cut throat. Our heroine (Perfectly fine performance by Anne Hathaway) is dragged into it and actually has one of those dream makeover sequences where she becomes a gorgeous fashionista. Rather than depict this as an, if you like, indoctrination, it's actually shown as life affirming and lovely.

This is later followed by some casual cheating on her boyfriend, being used as a slave for a bit, but in the end it's all been a wonderful experience and helps out her future as a serious journalist.

Gah! It's infuriating.

Supposedly the makers had trouble getting real fashion folk to take part in this film because it offended some high ups in the magazine trade - I really don't see how unless they're supremely thin skinned simpletons who... oh.

Thanks, woman on set - you wasted some of my life.

If I ever see her again, I'm telling her she HAS to see The Strangers. I'll do it, I'm THAT angry!

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Movie Review: Rashomon

2009-05-30T18:29:00.002+01:00

8/10

Hello again faithful reader, today lets look at why Kurosawa's Rashomon got a worse mark than Seven Samurai.

Of course, it's a subject scary enough to scare any reviewer into a fortnight's procrastination - after all, there's no questioning that Rashomon is an extremely accomplished piece of work - sort of a prototype for all fractured narratives yet to come.

It tells the tale of a trial, held in the immediate past, of a bandit (played by the ever watchable Mifune) in which none of the witness testimonies agree and of two participants' disillusionment with the nature of truth and the honesty of humanity as a result.

I'll discuss my views below, but beware of spoilers, hence why I break here - follow the link for the full review.

My main problem here is that the stories are so incompatible that no reconciliation or indeed "eureka" moment is possible. It's not quite the parallel I need, but remember how wonderful it was in Usual Suspects when all the unanswered questions suddenly revealed themselves? How you realised where and when you ahd been tricked - only to watch again immediately and see that, yes, you were taken in but the evidence was there.#

The similar revelation dragged out of the witnesss at the end of this film has no such effect. No such answers are given. We know no more about events than we did - merely that the story the last witness told is a lie. We don't know who killed the samurai, or the true reaction of the wife.

In fact, we know precisely nothing about anything. Since none of the stories are compatible, they are useless to construct your own opinion, even a prejudiced one; surely the aim of the piece.

Not too much of a problem from the point of view of this film on its own, but I would have preffered something approaching an opinion in my head of what really happened.

This left me a little unsatisfied as a result.

Probably the greater problem is the lack of a single likable character in the whole tale. No matter what version of the tale is told, the woman is hateful, either manipulative and spiteful (understandably annoyed - I would be) or just plain strange.

The Bandit, played by Toshiro Mifune is irritating, arrogant and detestably garrolous (again, understandable since he's a rapist). I love Mifune, but here he's actually annoying, especially since his performance is frequently punctuated by a particularly false sounding pantomime laugh.

Even the samurai and the witnesses are self absorbed, selfish and cold.

These factors do not reduce the film's accomplishments in style and atmosphere, particularly in the medium's section where she conjures up the spirit of the samurai husband to testify (surely that would never stand up in court?) and manages to be utterly terrifying as well as sad and moving in parts.

SO the film is a success, but a qualified one, since unlike the later film its story failed to connect with me on a deep level. It was still quite a ride, though.

A

Movie Review: Hound Of The Baskervilles (Hammer Version)

2009-05-19T15:37:00.002+01:00

4/10

Ah, the wonderful Hammer studios, equally at home botching any form of film or any story.

I love my B-Movies, and in Hammer's Dracula series of movies I have occasionally escaped the pressures of watching stuff that's suposed to be good, and in some cases been pleasantly surprised by their quality (as in the excellent Scars Of Dracula) or horrified by their crazy decisions (The Kung Fu meets Dracula meet Van Helsing brainmelt of Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires).

But Hammer made lots of other stuff, seemingly without any desire to stick to the plots or characters depending on who they cast. Their first Dracula veers away from the original book almost immediately and this version of Sherlock Holmes' most famous case takes similar liberties with the material.

That's not always going to be a bad thing, but for anyone knowing this story so well, the decision to change Henry Baskerville (a man from the states) to Christopher Lee, whose Henry lives in Johannesburg presumably so that Lee doesn't have to do an accent, smacks of "hell, we've got to cast Chris in this!"

Of course, it also requires the audience to believe in Christopher Lee as a romantic lead - a task at which he fails utterly probably due to the half century of typecasting he has suffered as much as his inherently stiff acting style.

The worse crime is the alteration of Stapleton from the odd but friendly butterfly collector of the original text into a surly poacher and his "wife" into his daughter, presumably to titillate the audience with someone young enough to recall the young ladies from the horror movies.

This changes the whole relationship of the characters to Stapleton and his daughter and unlike in the original story suspicion immediately falls on the rude angry poacher and his smoking hot daughter since they're acting so strangely.

Cushing's Holmes is a bit more interesting, best described as "chippy", impatient and grumpy with all the obfuscation on the part of the inhabitants of the hall and its surrounds. But his period spent away from the action is explained in sudden bursts of speech after he reappears ("ah yes, Seldon said...") which does not really solve the central problem of this story, which is that it is not particularly celluloid friendly when your hero sods off for the middle third and then has to explain everything that happened while he was away.

Rather than do this in flashback they rely on the worse approach of having Holmes explain how he knew about things after it no longer matters, taking the audience's participation out of the equation since they are not party to enough information to judge who is guilty (except the fact the culprit is depicted as scum from the first time you meet them).

Well, this is one the weaker versions of one of the weaker Holmes tales, and can be avoided without any major effects.

A

Movie Review: Flight Of The Phoenix (2004)

2009-05-16T14:46:00.002+01:00

5/10

I must admit, I've not seen the original movie on which this is based, but I can't help wondering if it was really this slight.

The crew of a failed Oil Rig are picked up in a plane to be demobbed; they include a suspiciously well balanced cross section of humanity. A bolshy woman (Miranda Otto) a hispanic guy, african americans, a middle eastern guy and even an Englishman (Hugh Laurie doing his best stuffed shirt impression).

In fact, the only general grouping not represented fully are those from the "far east", a strange fact since they're in the Mongolian part of the Gobi desert and later just inside the Chinese border. Weird.

Oh, and the two leads are Dennis Quaid doing his best Kevin Costner impression as well as Giovanni Ribisi transcending the pedestrian material as he always does.

It's tough to describe a film that has the ending described in its title, and its story being so simple to be described as "they build a plane".

In fact, since the plot is so slight, the makers insist on creating false tension, be it through making folk behave entirely irrationally and walking off into the desert alone, or by introducing a troupe of nomads, who wait until the most ridiculous moment to charge the heroes and hence provide little more than a moment of confusion at that crucial stage.

Now, supposedly the story then becomes about the interactions between the characters, but these are reduced to little more than forced sections of camaraderie (complete with terrorist fist bumps galore) and people arguing about what to do, when their position is so desperate as to force the only possible option, one that incidentally almost no crash victims get.

So it was a reasonably amusing way to spend some time - not clever, not exciting and with more than a little half hearted manipulation (ooh someone we don't give a crap about just died) and some extremely irritating editing.

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Quick Movie Review: The Day The World Ended

2009-05-16T14:35:00.002+01:00

3/10

Lame.

Clea Duvall is about the only terrible thing missing from this diabolically scripted, acted and directed waste of time.

I think it may well be from the same stable as the truly atrocious How To Make A Monster, as it is a remake of an old B-Movie.

My concerns about the point of remaking B-Movies has not changed; I don't think there is one. Certainly not if they lack imagination, ideas and decent casts as this one does.

It concerns the events following the arrival of a big city psychologist in a small town (sigh) where she discovers a young boy who has a certain dark past and believes his father is an alien who imbued him with psychic powers.

That's really as good as it gets.

The psychologist is played by Natassya Kinski, acting in the style of a woman who has all her lines written on the co-stars' foreheads, constantly wearing a peering expression of confusion akin to a dog whose food has been taken away mid meal. She is barely supported at all by Randy Quaid, Stephen Toblowsky (for whom quality control is a myth) and that guy who played the mayor in season two of Buffy - all of whom bear the expressions and give the performances of those who are purely cheque fetching.

Fair enough, but for goodness sakes don't waste your time on this one. I mean it.

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Quick Movie Review: The Da Vinci Code

2009-05-13T15:24:00.003+01:00

5/10

So, when a film elicits little response other than "ho hum" you know there's something wrong.

The Dan Brown book on which this is based is a reasonably entertaining conspiracy story in which multiple characters talk on and on about the central idea - the alternative identity of the holy grail, a theory previously posited by the writers of "The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail".

Thing is, I don't know what's in this movie for anyone.

Fans of the book will be disappointed because of the lack of depth and the pace at which things are quickly passed over.

People who haven't read the book will be bored because the story, as in the book, consists mostly of people sitting about having a chat, and the occasional bursts of action are punctuated frequently with crammed in dialogue - notably in their flight from Teabing's mansion when they continue their conversation even while being chased - running for their lives.

Silly.

The book must be cheaper than the DvD, so get that if you're interested (and aren't one of the millions of folks who already read it) - don't waste your time on this one.

A

Movie Review: Star Trek

2009-05-10T23:20:00.004+01:00

7/10

It is traditional that every review of this film starts with the writer's history with Star Trek, so here's mine.

I've always been a Trek fan, though nowhere near the obsessive level - many of the original episodes are exercises in kitsch - saying more about the sixties than they do about the future, and the later series, while technically superior were always slightly more political than exciting and verged on camp excess at the best of times.

Still, as a fun way to spend an hour as a child I loved it - starting with The Next Generation, which I watched in its entirety, and the later spin off Deep Space Nine which upped the politics at the expense of space battles. And there were always the original episodes repeated occasionally.

So you could say I know my subject to some extent, having a casual fan's experience, and after the hideous examples made by the most recent movies under the old "canon" (like Star Trek: Insurrection)the idea of a reboot (a very popular move since Batman Begins) came as a pleasant surprise.

Oh and for the true die hard fans, my favourite Star Trek Movie is VI: The Undiscovered Country, in case you're wanting to know. And it still is.

Maybe, for those not poisoned by the Trek bug, I should explain the word "canon" here, because we'll be talking about it later. It's simply the word used to cover the "official" timeline of events through all the shows and movies, adhered to reasonably well and protected by legions of fans who will scream at any new material violating the precious central throughlines (preventing, say, Kirk being a twin or something).

Sometimes in movie franchises (I'm looking at you, George Lucas) this can get a little confused and is subject to what is known as "retrospective continuity"; like Han Solo shooting first, or all the different versions of Bruce Wayne's family getting killed. These are done retrospectively to serve the new, updated, purposes of the filmmakers.

When done badly it really grates with folk - my personal favourite gripe is with Lucas' rejigging of Return Of The Jedi, so the Anakin we see is Hayden Christiansen rather than the old guy originally seen. The problem with that being that Hayden Christiansen is the same age he was in Episode III, raising more questions than we supposedly answered.

Anyhow, suffice to say that any Trek movie that alters the "canon" would be viewed very badly in the eyes of the series' fans. In fact, the fan effect could poison all the other pre-existing franchises if done really badly (those Trekkies/Trekkers can bite!)

Now, onto the order of the day - the new movie. It is directed by one J.J. Abrams, the world ruling creator of LOST, a series that is now onto its umptweenth mind bending season and the producer/brains behind Cloverfield - the neo monster movie from a coupla years back.

It concerns the early years at Starfleet for James T. Kirk, Spock and all the rest as they fly their very first mission aboard the new flagship Enterprise.

So the first thing that hits you when you see such a thing announced is the casting - Zachary Quinto as Spock is perfect, hitting the right note of barely concealed emotion while equally having a cocky, aloof bearing caused by his perceived superiority over the more emotional species.

Uhura is less so, being a little two dimensional despite the obvious burden of being the only meaningful female character present. Suffering, no doubt, from the fallout of the strange blind spot Trek has when it comes to the equality of gender. I will paraphrase my good friend Dave here, since he puts it well - while the federation is supposed to stand for equality amongst all race, creeds and species, it still forces its female officers to wear minidresses (especially the nurses uniforms!) and reduces them to little more than set dressing for Kirk to gawk at.

Ah yes, Kirk. Now, The Shat (that's William Shatner) is not an acting giant. In fact, his range is roughly the same of a water pistol filled with golden syrup, but he has something you cannot buy - that's charisma. My jury is very much out on his replacement, Chris Pine, who is reminiscent of nothing so much as the frat boy who thinks drinking is the pinnacle of civilisation - even after he's cleaned up a bit.

In fact, while Scotty's presence is a godsend and while he is played by one of my favourite comedy actors (the great Simon Pegg) the really great bit of castingis that of McCoy, for whom Karl Urban - Eomer in Lord Of The Rings and a massive Trek fan - really gets to show off an impression.

But the film isn't, and shouldn't be all about recreating the original series in mind numbing detail. What this film is about, is totally restarting everything from scratch - and it does so in a more impressive and final way than you could ever imagine, unless like me you take great pleasure in imagining the plots that could most upset the true obsessives. And this one is a fine example of that!

Now, that's a little unfair perhaps, since noone is trying to upset anyone here, but the destruction of a certain, shall we say crucial, planet is such a bold move it had to be applauded and drives home the very important message;

We are starting with a blank slate.

With this in mind, from the very first moment of the movie it is clear that history is being rewritten, and in such a way that the new canon fits the old one fine. This timeline can coexist with the pre-existing ones without either taking damage.

An audacious and successful move!

OK, so far so good, but is the experience any fun? Well, yes, frankly. In the past few weeks, those funny chaps at the Onion released THIS little gem on their site. It's a funny fake news story, but the central theme holds true - this film is "fun (and) watchable".

The CGI is excellently done and battles are exhilarating and played out in believable fashion. It helps that The Enterprise herself is a gorgeous design concept, still managing to look modern despite the passing of time since its design. What they are up against is very unfavourable odds, given where (and when) their opposition originated and I liked the way they had to avoid confrontation as much as possible.

Technobabble, always a curse of the series, has been reduced to a minimum except that required for the occasional joke or major plot development - Star Trek has always been the industry leader in Deus Ex Machina plot devices and this is no different.

In-jokes i am less comfortable with since they are in the "pandering to fans" bracket, but I had a chuckle at the arrival of a "redshirt" and his inevitable fate - I smiled at "I'm a doctor, not a physicist" and "I'm giving all she's got Captain" with the rest of 'em.

I just found myself wishing, screaming, for a single female character. Uhura being just an object (come on, there's extended scenes of her undressing, for god's sake!) in this one and being crowbarred into a bizarre out of nowhere relationship which for the sake of obsessive Trek fan and occasionally disturbing twitterer "Mrs Picard" I will describe in these terms: U/S WTF OMG!!!

Other than her we've just got the Spock's mum, played by Winona Ryder - perfectly servicable character but hardly the sort of "strong female" we really require here. Plus her aging appearsto have been done wth a CGI algorithym that constantly shifts about, causing wrinkles and lines to both appear and disappear as her face moves - a most distracting state of affairs.

Oh, and I must mention Captain Pike - played here by Bruce Greenwood. He is the original captain of The Enterprise and a cult figure amonst Trek fans (he was really in just one episode - the unaired pilot or the later one using footage from it) so it was great to see him here and with such a fine actor in place to play him.

I think this film is going to do what it set out to. The series will be rebooted successfully (and a sequel is already in pre-production) and they have probably won many new fans who have never seen any Star Trek or given it a moments thought before.

That being said, I don't think people who have tried Trek out and disliked it will be converted - while it adds several new ideas and tears up many old ones it is still Star Trek, and as such will still leave many cold. Fair play, not every movie is for everyone.

For me, I really enjoyed it - though it suffers undoubtedly from "first in a series" syndrome, and the Kirk driving a car as a kid bit was appallingly trite. Other problems include the usual plot shortcuts in all Sci-Fi (chiefly why did they drop Kirk off at exactly the most useful planet) and some very much "trying too hard" moralising from the bad guy, who incidentally could be any villain from any film ever, so dull is he.

Still, I think it's worth seeing, and has enough spectacle and backstory for the new, while scratching the itches of many old fans, me included.

Worth seeing then, is all.

A

Movie Review: Appaloosa

2009-05-10T22:49:00.002+01:00

6/10

This is a not at all revisionist western directed by its star, Ed Harris (of all people).

It follows the tale of two peace marshals played by Harris and the ever enjoyable Viggo Mortensen who are hired by a small town (the titular Appaloosa) to overcome the local rent-a-baddie who has been causing no end of trouble in a sort of predictable outlaw fashion, mainly disrespecting the law etc.

Our villain is played by Jeremy Irons, who from his accent appears to be from everywhere. We are intrduced to him as he shoots dead a marshal and his men in cold blood.

In fact, all of Appaloosa is populated by people of no fixed accent - notably the ever present town elders, including a notably mercurial vocal styling from Timothy Spall. It's the most jarring part of the movie, as all these noted and finer actors wrestle with their casting and in the case of the town elders, appear to be from a totally different film, a broad comedy perhaps, in which the gritty scenes are punctuated by pratfalls and song and dance numbers.

Appaloosa is not that film - it's a very much sub Unforgiven effort, where no cliche is left unturned - the outlaws holding someone hostage, the woman who breaks a hero's heart, the unspoken vaguely homoerotic relationship between male leads as well as a couple of gunfights.

There's plenty to enjoy, though, since with familiarity comes a certain warm sense of appreciation for the few moments we genuinely transcend the tired clichés of the genre - a gunfight that is over so quick one of theparticipants is himself surprised; at least one relationship that's genuinely affectionate and satisfyingly little depressing soul searching from the, for the most part, very quiet and almost monosyllabic leads.

While Harris looks like he's played this character many times before and doubtless has, he brings an easy charm and almost feline calm to his experienced and tired Virgil Cole.

Mortensen, seems to be viewing this tale as a competition in silence with Harris, almost apologetically interrupting the silence at times seems to be a major loss for their team. But as with all Mortensen performances he is never less than compelling, and easily, as in their previous outing together (History Of Violence, since you ask), Harris' equal if not his better.

The rest of the cast is less good - Lance Henriksen plays a blinder as a rival gunslinger but as the villain Jeremy Irons has too little authority or menace to impress. Renee Zellwegger too, never one of my favourite screen companions, has a slightly interesting part considering the history of women in Westerns, but again just doesn't convince as someone to utterly and immediately fall in love with, to the point of rethinking your whole life - and her chemistry with Harris is non existent.

That the film is still enjoyable is entirely thanks to the efforts of the lead duo of Harris and Mortensen, and I reckon if you're a fan of Westerns this will do you nicely. It's not Unforgiven, but it isn't Back To The Future III either.

A decent effort.

A

A short apology

2009-05-08T18:03:00.002+01:00

For those who are familiar with me, it may be surprising that it has been two weeks or more since my last movie review was posted here, or anything at the sister site, Wall Scratchings, where I now intend to post all non-movie related material so folks don't have to wade through things they might not want.

Well, frankly I must simply say, "Sorry".

Allow me to explain.

Over the past nine weeks myself and my lovely wife have been fostering a family of cats (Mum, big sister and three kittens, all boys).

What with learning on the go, as it were, as well as the pre-existing problems of job seeking and home maintenance (as well as occasionally getting a day's work on sets over London) I simply haven't had time - not only to post here, but to watch movies at all.

In fact , the most recent movie I saw was Ed Harris' fairly derivative western, Appaloosa; the review of which will be up in the next 24 hours. But that was two weeks ago.

But do not despair!

On Sunday I will be making a rare, remortgaged trip to the cinema to view what is either a Canon destroying horror show, or a much needed reboot for, Star Trek, so for once you'll get a review of something new, probably on Sunday evening, since I have an advert to lurk in the background of on Monday.

Let's hope I get back into it soon - sorry to keep you waiting.

A

Quick Movie Review: King Of Comedy

2009-04-29T12:16:00.003+01:00

9/10

I want to belittle all of Martin Scorsese's work - believe me. Anyone responsible for Gangs Of New York, a self indulgent, bizarre and overlong waste of time, should get a bit of a beating at every opportunity, but today I'm reduced to merely referencing that later film obliquely, since all you can do is stand and applaud King Of Comedy, a film that is just plain darn good.

Damn that guy.

This one is an opportunity for Robert De Niro to act outside his usual casting and get his teeth into a rare "loser" role. He plays Rupert Pupkin, a guy obsessed with getting famous and those with fame, most particularly Jerry Lewis' Letterman/Leno alike.

Also in the mix is Sandra Bernhard as a particularly creepy and obsessed fan who has a more "base" ambition.

The sheer amount of damage these people display, and which is superbly acted, is quite breathtaking. We are in the presence of two or three great acting performances while watching this film.

In fact, De Niro has never been better - astonishing as you'd imagine in such a tough role.

The journety of this film is the main thing, so I'm not going to spoil any of it, but take my word for it - it should be on your "to see" list.

This is a quick review since Mark Kermode mentioned it earlier, and I don't want to seem like a bandwagoner!

A

Movie Review: Crank

2009-04-27T14:28:00.002+01:00

5/10A

You know, again it is the case that this particular example of mental film-making is so aware of its limitations, so glories in its excesses and so exceeds all conceivable limits of tasteful understatement it is hard to give it anything other than a cautious endorsement.

Lets be clear from the start - this is not a mature film. It is not one that you will walk away from feeling your time was well spent in a culturally bettering way or with a better understanding of the human condition.

It follows the fabulously monickered Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) who wakes up to find that he has been poisoned, and he decides to go out and get revenge on his killer before the venom finishes him off.

This is vaguely reminiscent of an old movie I recall, made in the fifties or sixties called, I believe, DOA, in which a man comes to police station in a similarly terminal condition and tries to lead the police to his killers before he expires.

Crank is nowhere near so civically or legally minded.

To stave off the effects of the drug, Chelios is forced to keep his heart rate up, doing this through the effects of hard drugs, destructive and ridiculous car chases, punch ups and in one memorable instance, sex with his doped up girlfriend in the middle of a public square in Chinatown.

For this reason it is hard to really sympathise with the crazy self destruction of Statham's character, and "The Stath" is hardly the most sympathetic of actors anyway, coming over more like one of the carcasses of meat Rocky used to punch, rather than Balboa himself.

Still, it's an enjoyable thrill ride in the same vein as the likewise plot-deficient Shoot-Em-Up, and while I preferred the latter film mainly because of its cast (Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti) that knocks the socks off this one.

It's still an enjoyable way to spend some time, and follows through with its plot to the logical conclusion.

A

Quick Movie Review: Clueless

2009-04-23T17:01:00.002+01:00

5/10

An enjoyable romp loosely based on Jane Austen's Emma, Clueless was watched by me purely because it has Paul Rudd in it and some outrageously short skirts.

Boasting committed comedy performances and with a reasonably honest sense of its own intelligence I enjoyed it, without being too overwhelmed by any particular sequence or character. Not to be avoided like the plague, just don't feel too excited to see it.

Now that IS a quick review.

A

Quick Movie Review: Bounce

2009-04-21T02:02:00.003+01:00

5/10

I'm going to be cautiously kind to Bounce.

I switched off Ghosts of Mars and there was Henstridge again, though acting for real - and after the earlier film anything was going to look good.

It's the sort of movie you can pretty much sleep through and not miss any major plot points, but I have a certain degree of good will towards it for at least making an overture to breaking the centuries old chains of Romantic Comedy criteria.

Ben Affleck's high fling ad-exec decides to give his air ticket away in order to spend a night with Natasha Henstridge; the beneficiary being recently a humiliated playwright who wants to get home to sell Christmas trees with his son and see his family.

The plane crashes, and Affleck's character is all but destroyed by survivors' guilt - descending into alcoholism and despair, before finally being admitted to rehab after a disastrous performance at an awards dinner.

As part of Alcoholics Anonymous (which, incidentally, I didn't realise was quite so God-oriented) the members are encouraged to seek out those they have "wronged" and apologise. Not really caring that the whole thing is not really is fault, Affleck seeks out the family of the playwright only to find that he was married to the ever-perky Gwyneth Paltrow.

From the very moment he doesn't tell her the truth immediately, the film is seemingly on rails - with one major difference. The ending is not a universally, unquestionably happy one, though redemption is sought and maybe achieved.

Affleck and Paltrow are not two of my favourite actors, but after the horrors of Ghosts Of Mars, I was glad to see something that does the job as required, even if not being particularly special in the process.

As such, a classic 5/10 contender and vastly superior to the similarly plane crash premised Random Hearts, a lousy Harrison Ford snoozefest from many years ago.

A

Movie Review: Ghosts Of Mars

2009-04-21T01:22:00.004+01:00

2/10

It is something of a running joke with me that three words in particular can send me running in terror from any theatre, those I saw on a Cornwall theatre box office noticeboard.

Those three terrifying words are;

A

New

Musical.

Now I can say that the movie based equivalent of this rule of thumb is "John Carpenter's" - if ever there was a man whose very name was a testament to absent minded, brainless mediocrity it must be the erstwhile film-maker behind the classic Halloween and its first sequel, as well as more lovable than they are good romps like Escape From New York or Big Trouble In Little China.

It seems that at a point somewhere around 1990 Carpenter's mercurial talent finally dribbled away and led to such embarrassing, stillborn monuments to wasted budgets as "John Carpenter's Vampires" or this outrageous misfire.

For me, the title "Ghosts Of Mars" (originally "John Carpenter's Ghosts Of Mars", of course) conjures up a fascinating movie - a study, perhaps of mankind coming to terms with the guilt of violating the stasis of a dead world, perhaps making wondrous discoveries and seeking out a new meaning to their existence as they spread to the stars.

But then, of course, you read the cast list - Ice Cube, Natasha Henstridge, Pam Grier, Clea Duvall & Jason Statham are not the cast for a meaningful look into our souls.

In fact, I'm not sure any of them are capable of a meaningful look if their next straight to video release depended on it.

Let's get the story out of the way first. In the sort of move sci fi films take when exposition would be too much effort, we are front loaded with a lot of information regarding a colony set up on Mars - that "terraforming" is not yet finished (for non geeks, the practice of "terraforming" is the practice of rendering an uninhabitable planet, habitable) and that for no discernible reason, the society is Martiachal in nature, perhaps because of a surfeit of female actors being available, possibly to try and make a point. Whatever point they may have been trying to make, though, is hindered by the classic decision to have lots of homosexual female characters, and make poor old Statham randy as all hell - because naturally in a male-dominated society many authority figures are aggressively gay and women are always trying to talk men into having sex with them while working. Yeah.

In this world, a strange force has been unleashed that possesses the minds of people, turning them into savage, warlike maniacs - for the look, think Duran Duran's "Wild Boys" video with more blood - who chop off non-possessed people's heads and burn up the colonies of the "invaders".

So here's what the film is saying.

Er... nothing.

While it may become humanity to have a little respect and say "we're not the first people to have lived on this planet", why bother when you can have gunfights instead? You take a concept as lofty as "Ghosts Of Mars" and reduce it to a four set gunfight with lousy acting and hackneyed plot devices. The leads have little to no chemistry and the supporting cast are here for paycheques only.

Only Jason Statham, playing to type, comes out with any kind of credit, if only for sticking to his role faithfully and not being too hateful. Henstridge displays all of the emotional and dramatic range you would expect from the woman whose greatest role was as a sex obsessed alien in Species.

As for the action sequences, Bond in the 60s looked better - the grenade explosions here are depicted almost indentically to the classic "a bit of a bang and a guy bouncing off a trampoline" formula.

Plus it has Clea Duvall in it! She was in How To Make A Monster for christ's sake! And she's in most of this one! What the hell?

Many bad movies are destined to become cult classics. This is not one of them. If I can teach you anything, dear reader - it is to put this list in your "never watch" file.

Ouch. Anyone's career would take a hit if responsible for this - and John Carpenter has Vampires on his conscience too - maybe it's time to hang up the viewfinder, Johnno.

A

Quick Movie Review: Zombies: Wicked Little Things

2009-04-16T20:38:00.003+01:00

3/10

The story is, a mum and her two daughters move to a creepy old house because they are broke after the death of the kids' dad - and he left them the home in the will.

There are lots of problems with this movie, but I won't waste your time making you read all of them - I'll stick to the highlights.

First of all, it is not a "zombie movie" per se. Of course, it concerns the return of some dead, wronged children from a mine shaft where they were left to die by a very bad person many years before, but they don't really follow any of the traditions or conventions of the Zombie movie (they talk, for example, as well as carrying weapons...)

Second, while all the acting is, to put it nicely, reasonable, no characters are likable or sympathetic - the mother is a terrible parent, leaving her young daughter alone for long periods only to be surprised when she is not there any more when she returns home - this happens at least three times. The youngest daughter is close to sympathetic, but is barely present, presumably due to school commitments (a high budget is not one of the film makers problems) so we get very little - the older daughter is as hackneyed an older teen as you could imagine, concerned with coolness, boys and a bit of reefer (guaranteed death to anyone caught smoking it and enjoying it, btw). Yawn.

Characters are introduced and killed off just as fast, the "zombies"' make up makes them resemble nothing as much as depressed Clowns and there is absolutely, definitively, no depth.

In fact, the only reasonably effective sequence is at the very end, where the bad man gets his comeuppance (actually it's the bad man's grandson or something - bad luck, Junior!) and our leads get drenched in his blood from the loft where he's hiding. No - it's not that good a sequence, but I'm clutching at straws.

The real tragedy is, unlike The Strangers or Alone In The Dark, it is just not a film worthy of a hideously negative review - it is too well made to be mocked or entertaining through sheer incompetence, but too bad to enjoy.

There is no reason to see this, so don't. I don't know how much clearer your faithful reviewer can be.

A

Movie Review: Beyond Re-animator

2009-04-16T20:00:00.003+01:00

5/10A

Oh dear - if you don't want to read about how silly and hilarious this outrageous tongue in cheek horror movie is or some of the more nasty bits, don't read this review.

The origins of Re-Animator lie with that well adjusted H.P. Lovecraft fellow, who wrote the original tale ("Herbert West - Re-Animator") as a satire on Frankenstein and the like, playing up the melodrama to comedic levels while still obtaining creepiness from the premise and his usual way with words.

The original film dispensed with much of what little subtlety there was and went down the broader, more comedy horror angle.

Comedy horror is a weird genre and it is best done with absolute conviction. Those of us unfortunate enough to have seen Scary Movie know that playing it with open mockery just won't work.

To this end, Re-Animator's great strength was in its utter conviction to seeing its logic through in grisly and horrible fashion - the most legendary sequence is a severed head performing cunnilingus on a captive victim - probably the nastiest idea in what is already a pretty icky movie. Its next major strength was its lead, Jeffrey Combs - who many will recall from The Frighteners where he played another strange oddball character. An absolute master at delivering utter nonsense with Shakespearian conviction (Nanoplasm and re-animating the dead are hard sells for even the most talented of actors.) he is the giant of a planet around which all the subsequent nonsense revolves, and it's hard to imagine anyone else carrying this film.

As for the story itself, the pretext exists purely to allow the now incarcerated Herbert West to get up to his old tricks and use his "formula" to bring the dead back to life. In this picture he has an accomplice in the form of a traumatised young doctor, obsessed with the idea of returning people from the dead since his sister was killed by one of West's creations.

And the whole thing takes place in a prison, presumably (if not intentionally) in Mexico, since the entire crew, most of the cast and several of the ADR folk are clearly from south of the border where, coincidentally, films are cheaper to make. (wink)

It's an odd prison, overseen by a warden who, once you've realised he resembles nothing as much as the lost Chuckle brother, it's all you can think about (we were shouting "not Chico Chuckle!" every couple of minutes). It also features a single female staff member, a nurse, who wears nothing beneath her smock but underwear, since that's policy, clearly, in an all male prison(!)

Naturally, when West and his little buddy start bringing folk back from the dead, the same old problems arise - the newly undead are just mindless monsters, good for nothing but violence. West believes he has a solution in the form of "Nanoplasm", a sort of life force or soul substitute that he has been harvesting from the recently killed, so starts experimenting with using this - with unintended consequences, not at all surprisingly.

From this point on the film is pretty much on rails, and nothing really unexpected happens in the plot (ie: it all goes to hell) but there are moments of crazed brilliance - the young doctor is beaten up by the reanimated corpse of his love, who all the while is begging him to kill her - the warden becomes crossed with a rat, and the sequence during the credits when a rat is fighting with a reanimated, er.... gentleman's privates was one of the most incredible laugh out loud moments I've seen in ages.

Poorly acted by all but the lead, badly directed - it's sole saving grace is in the physical effects (the usual get out clause for makers of horror films). They are breathtaking in their audacity, and even when played for laughs they still have a satisfying "ewww!" factor.

It's not big, it's not clever, and it's so far from sophistication it makes Little Chef look Michelin starred, but it was funny, and silly, and hit just the right note when I saw it.

A

Quick Movie Review: I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK

2009-04-14T13:17:00.004+01:00

5/10

Park Chan-Wook, maker of Oldboy, Lady Vengeance and Sympathy For Mr Vengeance, three excellent movies, if of questionable morals, makes a bit of a mis-step with this odd movie.

It concerns a young lady who, upon being traumatised by her Granny's commital to an asylum becomes comvinced she is a cybertnetic organism - a cyborg.

Cue a trip to an asylum herself at the behest of her daft and prejudiced (if not mad herself) mother.

There she meets all manner of crazy folk including a boy in a cardboard mask who steals things, a liar, a man convinced he has to apologise for everything etc etc

Unfortunately that is about it - of course she gets entangled romantically, and goes through ups and downs, but the whole thing resembles nothing so much as One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest with all the fun and plot removed. It has little message, few jokes, and stilted performances notable in their difference fromt hose in his earlier films.

I laughed at a couple of bits, and her fantasies of acting out her cybernetic powers were ok, but I also yawned twice and wasn't really sorry to see it end.

So, a classic 5/10 then.

A

Movie Review: Victim

2009-04-03T18:58:00.003+01:00

7/10

This is an exceptional movie, in the literal sense.

Made in 1961 , it tells a moral tale about what was known as "The Blackmailer's Charter", or the aged, christianity inspired anti-homosexuality laws that existed at the time.

According to imdb, it is the first english language film to use the word "Homosexual" at all!

Dirk Bogarde plays the barrister Melville Farr (outrageously decadent name!) presented with a problem when his lover commits suicide while being questioned about missing funds. The police suspect he was being blackmailed, and finding copious amounts of material concerning Farr the police are pretty sure what's going on. Thing is ; does Farr copme out and help trap the blackmailers - ruining his reputation and marriage in the process? Or should he maintain his reputation and burgeoning career by keeping silent?

While many others refused to play parts in the film because of the subject matter, Bogarde is intense and excellent as the central character although everyone else bar his wife is fairly two dimensional, in the style so prevalent at the time. As the wife, Sylvia Sym is excellent as the woman who loves a man who cannot love her back - capturing her torment and conflict perfectly.

As for the film's message, it's entirely anti-status-quo. While people's views are mixed from homophobic and archaic to more liberal, the coda and final speeches make it clear that these laws caused needless suffering and gave licence to hundreds of people to profit from what is in the end, hardly a choice on the victim's parts.

Now, as for the filmmaking itself, it's your typical kitchen sink drama level, no particular flashy camera moves or innovations in filmmaking, but solid as a rock.

I can recommend this to you purely for its originality in story. It's an importasnt, while not essential, part of film history.

I enjoyed it very much.

A

Movie Review: The 40 Year Old Virgin

2009-04-02T00:39:00.002+01:00

8/10

There's so many ways this movie could be appalling.

It could have gone for the main character as spotty greasy nerd with no social skills, but instead imbues is lead with a genuinely believable likability.

His quest to get the girl could have been uniformly crude, obvious and graphic, but instead it is more enjoyable and even, at the very end, strangely touching.

It might have had all the laugh-free gross out qualities of lame fare like Scary Movie, or in fact any film with a title in the " (noun) movie" format. In fact its humour comes from unexpected quarters, not the protagonists obvious ignorance in lovemaking, but from his relationships with those around him - and their journeys are as interesting as that taken by Andy (Steve Carell)

The supporting cast could have been obvious, selfish, two-dimensional or wooden. They are anything but. We have one of the most accomplished casts in modern comedy - Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, Seth Rogen (admittedly playing that Seth Rogen character) and Jane Lynch all add such skill to smallish parts that they lift the film up to next level.

Jane Lynch in particular as Andy's amorous boss is an absolute dream. Since Lynch is capable of reading a eulogy and making it funny she has outrageous fun with with her uber-creepy dialogue - at one point delivering a short piece of dialogue so perfectly I woke up the baby next door with my laughing (don't tell the dad, please, it took an hour to calm her down).

The dialogue in question, for those who have seen the film, was the "I'm very discreet" section culminating in some nasal acting... genuinely laugh out loud funny.

Catherine Keener is also excellent in what is on the face of it an unforgiving, unfunny part (the woman of his dreams? YAWN!) lending a sense of fragility and ridiculousness to the character while still making her believable as someone you might fall in love with.

Paul Rudd, too excels in the role of dumped lover, totally in denial about the failed romance that ended years ago.

But this is Carell's movie, and luckily we have the good side of Steve4 here - pathetic but sympathetic, slightly dopey yet likable, odd but believable. He has taken pains, clearly, to mould this character in the image of his standard fare. While this role doesn't take him out of his comfort zone, I do see him pulling a Robin Williams in a few years and adding to his performance in Little Miss Sunshine some more good dramatic roles.

As for the film, 40 Year Old Virgin manages to be silly without being condescending, funny without being overly crude, and touching without being mawkish. I loved it, in a silly way.

A

Movie Review: Diary Of The Dead

2009-03-25T08:48:00.000Z

3/10

Frankly, it's rubbish.

Sorry, wanted to get that out of the way early on in case you only read some of it and got the idea I didn't find it lazy, trite and predictable.

A little while ago I gave a reasonably positive review to excellent Spanish language Zombie horror quickie [REC]. In that film, a documentary crew get caught up in the moment as things get quickly out of hand in a high rise apartment block - it lasts 80 minutes, is unflinching in its plot and also more than often scary.

I mention this here because if you want to see a zombie movie in which a documentary crew get caught up in the tide rising dead then see [REC], don't bother watching the American remake (what's the point?) and certainly don't watch Diary Of The Dead.

Where [REC] is taught, efficient and scary, Diary is lazy, bloated and toothless.

We are immediately off on a bad one with the VO narration of what sounds like a stoned twenty-something lady - it resembles nothing so much as Harrison Ford's legendary "if I do it this bad they won't use it... or will they?" voice over in the original cut of Blade Runner. She's telling us how, unlike the Spanish film, she will be using all manner of interesting cuts and music cues to "scare" her supposedly terrified and ignorant worldwide audience.

You see, it's all very Zeitgeist - honest! The kidz is on da Yootoobz, innit? Sigh...

Since his two early Zombie movies, Night Of The Living Dead and Dawn Of The Dead (the latter of which I consider the definitive Zombie movie) George A Romero has lost his way. Sorry if you're a huge fan but Day Of The Dead is too nihilistic for my tastes, Land Of The Dead is too Gung Ho and Diary.. well, it's just silly.

It's meant to be, I think, a satire on the desire of the YouTube generation(TM) to make themselves heard on all subjects, no matter if they know what they are on about or not.

What he has made is a movie with no teeth. Ironic really. Even "Land" had some amusingly satirical bits; I recall particularly Dennis Hopper's George W. Bush allegory screaming "You Have No Right!" at the horde of invading undead, as if somehow trying to appeal to their sense of inferiority.

In "Diary" Romero simply chooses to make every single character as hateful as humanly possible - Jay, the director, is a personality-free jerk with one character beat (I MUST make this film) his girlfriend, who doubles as our narrator, is a frosty aloof Polaroid of a proper character. Everyone else is an archetype to the point of parody - you have the angry New Yorker, The nerd, The Christian Girl, The pretty and big boobed Texan girl, her shallow as a residue boyfriend and, in a spectacular misjudgement, a weird Englishman - their lecturer, who is obviously a drunk and refers to guns as "too easy to use". He is a character from broad farce, shoehorned in for no apparent reason - plus he's great with a bow and arrow because of his history at Eton.

Odd.

What gore there is, is reasonably well done, but if you're that sort of horror movie watcher who enjoys the odd memorable death (I'm only human) you're in for slim pickings here - though one standout moment involves a character's spectacular method of dispatching himself and a zombie at the same time using a farm implement. That's almost the only thing that remains lucid in your mind after the hour forty or so of this film.

By the time the young survivors have reached the mansion where their friend lives, all interest had vanished as far as I was concerned, and the cheap joke at the expense of the monster movie they'd originally been making registered barely as much as my need to clean the Cat's bowls.

You'll notice I've spent rather a lot of time talking about other films in this review - it's because I truly feel that any (yes, any) of the other films I have mentioned in this post are vastly superior to this latest effort from Romero - the acting is lame, the plot is dull, the set pieces are, barring the strangely postmodern humour of the deaf Amish farmer sequence, unmemorable.

Avoid this unless, like me, you are a Romero completist.

A major disappointment - exactly the opposite of [REC]

See that instead. It really is rather good.

A

P.S. The deaf Amish Farmer is the only thing saving this from a mind numbing 2/10.

Movie Review: Pom Poko

2009-03-22T13:03:00.005Z

8/10

Odd. Very odd.

Studio Ghibli have made several absolute classic pieces of animation featuring humans as its leads (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbour Totoro) but here's something a little more strange - a story about a colony of Tanuki (Raccoon Dogs) whose home is being destroyed to make way for the "Tama Hills Project", a new development of housing outside Tokyo.

In one of those mad folk stories the Japanese like exploiting so much; Tanukis (translated confusingly as Raccoons), foxes and "some cats" are able to transform at will into almost anything (ever wondered how that fox you just saw seemed to vanish into thin air?), and this makes for some excellent sequences such as an early battle in which the Tanukis switch from being normal four legged creatures into two legged ones akin to Winnie The Pooh and when defeated become kind of squishy, abstract children's drawings. For a while it's extremely disorienting but soon becomes second nature as each character is ingeniously designed to be recognisable in most of their forms, even when changing to a human being out of desperation.

If Studio Ghibli do one thing well, it's their animation. However strange or alien the stories become, the visual feast is compelling and moreish. In each sequence invention and skill combine with a sense of humour and non-mawkish cuteness to be lovely to watch. The upside of using traditional animation is that the transformations are all seamless and natural progressions, rather than having the chemical sheen of CGI or the ickiness of live action technical methods.

However - I wouldn't say Pom Poko is an absolute must for your kids or young folk to see unless they can accept the conclusion. It's not a particularly uplifting film, since the odds the Tanukis have to face are overwhelming and things look bleak for them - but it is plenty of fun, and if you can overcome the very distracting presence of oversized nutsacks on all of the males, and prominent breasts on the females there's a lot of entertainment to be had.

It's not a tragedy; just don't expect everything to turn out OK. If you are thinking of showing it to your kids do have a watch of it yourself first just to make sure they'll cope with some of the issues and events.

Of course, the obvious political overtones are useful for children to see - cute animals get harmed by human expansion. A reasonably strong and well delivered message is contained herein - especially since the film is unflinching in its consequences (in one sequence the Tanukis protesting pranks kill three humans) and the views of its characters, which range from the "kill all humans" approach of Gonta, to the more peaceful ghost haunting ideas of Shoukichi - which present obvious parallels to political and philosophical viewpoints. Even the elders, usually presented in fiction as wise and wonderful, are not equal to the task set for them - instead all pretending to be asleep when a mission is to be handed out, or being distracted by thoughts of food (mainly Tempura) from the task at hand.

It is a far more intelligent film, and gives the younger audience a lot more credit, than most made for children nonsense being made in the West. It is also fairly philosophical in its approach, rather than simply being a nice woodland creatures romp through the pretty drawn countryside.

In terms of its peers at Studio Ghibli I am still of the opinion that the best film for kids they've made is My Neighbour Totoro, a lovely little film indeed. My favourite of the more mature work they've done is probably still Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke - all fine films, but Pom Poko stands up fine despite being made by a different part of the business.

I think it's worth you seeing if Japanese animation is your thing - it's neither twee nor condescending.

A

Movie Review: How To Make A Monster

2009-03-15T14:38:00.002Z

1/10

Since I can't face describing this atrocious failure of a movie - have the fruits of my bored twittering throughout.

Creature Features is apparently a set of films attempting to an attempt to recapture B-Movie values for the modern (90s) age. It fails utterly.

The best B Movies are good movies with low budgets, like for example Blair Witch or Evil Dead.

This is just a bad movie with terrible acting, millions of plotholes, lousy production and no fun bits. B-Movies are often bad, but why anyone would intentionally deliver something so one dimensional, cliché ridden and lame as this is beyond me.

Avoid it if you can!

21:23 2nghts movie's Creature Features' "How To Make A Monster" -will be bad,but knowingly so. Like idea of homages 2 BMovies but ty hrdly eva wrk. #

21:24 Movie - alreeady is bad - computer game designers trying to make scary game... I bet I know where this is going #

21:25 ridiculous over clichéd geek charaxcter called "bug" spotty greasy with glasses. Sad. #

21:26 Tyler Mane playing a character called "Hardcore". He was a wrestler. Tyler Mane that is #

21:26 Best line so far: "It's a dump. I love dumps" #

21:27 This five minutes in and I've already tweeted four times. "They're cookies, not hemlock - you paranoid sociopath!" #

21:28 ???? Computer company owner lady has weird young boy voice... #

21:30 I think my eyes have started bleeding - this film is SOOOO bad! #

21:31 "Scary is, as scary does!" - Hardcore #

21:32 OK - think I'm getting the picture, it's meant to be a comedy... #

21:32 but not in a particularly funny way. #

21:35 "I won't be an intern forever..." #

21:39 "Pussy - you fight like a lesbian biker b___ch" - Hardcore. I'm thinking this may be a lost David Mamet screenplay #

21:46 seriously considering turning this piece of rubbish off - it's that bad. And not even funny. #

21:50 Oh my dear god. Weird Dominatrix they brought in for Mocap is topless and bouncing... Lightning strikes... inexplicably since they are s ... #

21:51 OH! And lightning strike! Let me guess... #

21:52 whoa! first f word... #

21:56 dear god. the game they've designed is hilariously bad #

21:59 Ah yes, the intern has a world changing dotcom startup idea that's about charity. #

22:01 ARGH! Meaningful chat - "you either become a monster, or a victim" ouch #

22:03 Ah yes - "Hello?" and then going to investigate a strange noise - how original... #

22:07 this is horrible... just horrible. I am starting to feel ill #

22:09 "Failure's the worst prison there is... noone gives a s__t about you - not even the interns" #

22:11 Every actor in this film was just outperformed by a tray of brownies. #

22:14 ah yes... and the phones are out naturally #

22:16 oh dear - the mocap sutit is alive. what a genius twist. It seems to be able to vanish at will, too #

22:20 At least there's some gore now.AND HOW DOES A MOCAP SUIT GROW VINE LIKE WIRES THAT GRAB BODY PARTS AND ATTACH THEM TO ITSELF???#

22:21 A mocap suit... is this the worst monster ever? #

22:25 It's a really bad thing when your main reaction to monster movie is to yawn #

22:35 aaaand Bug sacrifices himself.... almost certainly with no reason. #

22:38 The only way to win is if a woman can beat the computer game- where's Scribsy when you need her? #

22:49 So - you're making a movie about a computer game that comes alive - is it important to know anything about hw computers wrk? You'd have thought #

22:53 Oh dear: This film's moral is - to be successful you must become a monster. In a really hackneyed way. At least its over now. #

22:54 Can you beat a souped up MoCap suit to the "worst monster ever crown"? Send me a tweet folks! Signing off for a while #

Quick Movie Review: The X Files (Fight The Future)

2009-03-13T21:17:00.002Z

7/10

The X Files! What a show that was 5 series of mostly genius, capped off with a movie event that tied up some loose ends and kicked off the next set of storylines.

Of course, your enjoyment of the movie will be directly related to your enjoyment of the series - if you hate the show this is never going to change your mind.

Basically it's more of the same; the big conspiracy was built up over years and almost immediately jumped the shark after the start of season 6 so this is the best bit as far as the "big" storyline goes - the unsatisfying final seasons that would have done better for a clean break with Mulder and Scully era (rather than hanging on to Scully fo rdear life when she clearly doesn't want to be there) are still a long way off at this point.

But enough about its place in the show.

It's a really rather decent ride - I'll never forget the early section where Mulder finds a bomb in a vending machine and the response of his boss to the find is great cinema. The story itself is a bit of enjoyable hokum, revealing the rather odd plot of the "Elders" such as the Cigarette Smoking Man and The Englishman in its strange entirety, and getting a glimpse of the aliens - never a good move in my book.

About halfway through it gets a little too silly but frankly if you like the series it gets a 7/10. If you don't like the show I'd guess at 5/10, but it's not like you'd watch the film if you'd resisted the charms of aliens and the Lone Gunmen (here for about a second).

A

Quick Movie Review: The Killing

2009-03-09T20:45:00.004Z

6/10

A reasonable heist movie from director Stanley Kubrick early in his career that concerns an ex-con's plans for one last big score at a race course, and the consequences of it.

The Kubrick style shines through on a couple of occasions (with interesting first person perspective shots, most effectively at the very end) and his dry wit and sardonic sense of humour pervades the film, not least in the dopey George's marriage to his wife who I am certain is played by a relative of Alison Janney, so alike is the performance and attitude to that towering amazon of The West Wing.

That being said, there is little here that raises the film above average thriller stakes - the multi-timelines are well done, but the way in which they are explained is through voiceover not in the person of any of the characters, but in a style reminiscent of nothing more than the old Dragnet one. All strident seriousess.

Sterling Hayden is best value fort money as the tired and worldly wise ex-con and the nefarious plan is interesting and depicted with tension and flair, but I just didn't get that into the rest of the picture.

I think any fan of Kubrick should see all his films, but I don't think you'll be coming back to The Killing over and over again, though I did find it markedly superior to Killer's Kiss, the other early black and white Kubrick film I have seen recently.

Good but not great.

A

Movie Review: Watchmen

2009-03-08T13:20:00.004Z

6/10

Ack... the sheer difficulty of translating Watchmen to the screen deserves some sympathy. A classic graphic novel that told about seven interweaving stories and with tonnes of background information, it was a project that sat for decades in development hell.

Don't let the review score put you off seeing it if you were going - the tale is still exciting and well told, though there is no way for me to see the movie as if through the eyes of someone not familiar with the book.

The tale is of a parallel America, buoyed in its sense of self-importance by the presence of Dr Manhattan - a genuine superhero who has godlike powers. At the same time, several vigilantes have taken up the habit of wearing masks to take on the gangs and criminals they can't take down by legal means. At its heart it's a study of what would really happen if the tales of Batman, Superman et al were literally true.

Particularly interesting is the exploration, through Dr Manhattan, of how someone superhuman could possibly identify, sympathise or even live with ordinary humanity at all. The answer is clearly "not very well".

To bring it to the screen,Zack Snyder has cut much of the historical flashbacks and detail focussing on the main plot, concerning the murder of a masked vigilante called The Comedian (who is excellent in this film) - why this happened and what its consequences are.

I do want to make it clear though, that the less than perfect score is not because of any poorness of the adaptation, in fact it's a reasonably faithful rendition of the original tale, with several cuts for brevity's sake (ha!) - the problems with this film are actually all film-making ones.

First, and most jarring, is the issue of the soundtrack. I am a very musical person, and like many cinema goers am very badly affected by bad music choices. The music cues in Watchmen are laughably trite choices, marked by a credulous sense of cleverness that the triteness really makes laughable.

Examples in the form of questions:
1. What piece of classical music is playing under the Vietnam sequence?
2. What is the most overused piece of music in movies and is used here during a hallelujah moment?
3. If you want to show the passage of time and use an appropriate piece of music to underpin it what folk singer's song would you use?

These stupidly obvious choices raised laughs - and I don't think they work as satirical comedy choices even if that was the intention as they just appeared to be ones that the makers considered clever....

Answers at the end.

Other choices are just weird - despite the America of this parallel universe being staunchly anti-communist one scene is quite oddly underscored by "99 Luftballons" a song about communist revolution, but this scene is just of a Silk Spectre walking into a restaurant, not a political scene at all! And no-one in this America would play a communist song openly, so it's not a case of that's what is playing in the diner... odd.

Second major complaint is with Malin Akkerman. She is atrocious as Laurie, the Silk Spectre. Seemingly a student of the Richard Gere school of "sighing as acting", and her longer speeches are horrific object lessons in endurance film-watching.

The Watchmen tale that they have created through their creative choices revolves for much of its length around her (not a problem since the story of her relationships is crucial to the plot) and the poor performance means that the centre of the film is poisoned, causing major problems with emotional investment, tension and pay off.

===MINOR SPOILER - SKIP IF CONCERNED===
Third big problem is that they have changed the books ending somewhat - not a bad thing given the controversial nature of the books ending (which veers a little into silliness) but the issue is that their replacement ending makes even LESS sense. I can't really talk about it, but unlike the books ending, in which the intended outcome is achieved by use of outside threats, the one used in the film is achieved through something with a national affiliation, pooh-poohing the idea it could have a uniting consequence - quite the opposite.
=============================

Also, it is very violent. I don't mind so much given the circumstances (and it is deservedly an 18 rated movie) plus its desire to show what would really happen if a very strong vigilante attacked a load of weaker people with extreme prejudice. I do have a problem with the laughable sex scene (even if it had better music) because it is overlong, poorly acted and unintentionally hilarious.

I want to talk about the best thing about the film now to cheer myself up.

In Rorschach, Alan Moore invented one of the best characters in the genre, a hyper-moral, ultra conservative, super violent sociopath who is, nevertheless, the unquestionable anti-hero of the piece. While his origin (and that of his "face") is lost in the movie adaptation, we still get a great sense of the person this is. And he is a force of nature! The performance is superb, even down to the voice over where you can almost hear his bile rising as he describes the city he hates and yet feels a drive to stalk.

Every bit of the film that is good involves him - it just feels a bit flat when he's not involved. If I'd been in charge I would have taken his story as the main focus and ran with it. Guess that's why I'm not in movies.

Other than that the film's real strengths are the novel's strengths; the moral questions and totally amoral approach to the American dream that really make the story something more than the typical "masked hero saves city" stories that typify the genre.

I do think it's worth seeing, but some of its excesses (wire work? Sudden Slow motion? Dumb exposition dialogue) may stem from its director being Zack "300" Snyder instead of the many directors (Terry Gilliam, Paul Greengrass and others) that have been attached to the project over the years of development. Well done to them on getting it done, but it isn't perfect by any measure.

'til next time!
A

1. Ride Of The Valkyries
2. Hallelujah (again)
3. The Times They Are A'Changing

Lets Talk Cats (not movies)

2009-03-06T23:26:00.007Z

You may be wondering where I've been all week and why the movies have dried up and here's your answer; cats. We've also been concentrating more on Deadwood and The Wire than films, but I'm hoping to see Watchmen this weekend...

OK, I'm not famous for my tolerant nature - many things get me angry, but get this little tale - it's especially galling.

Imagine you're a lovely black cat, whose owners couldn't face paying to get you spayed.

When your owners have a baby, one of them (presumably Mum) develops an allergy and the lovely people kick you and your daughter (who's about 6 months old) into the back garden.

Thing is - remember your owners couldn't be arsed to get you spayed? Well guess what happens to an unspayed cat who is left outside for weeks? Yup - you get pregnant. Let's not judge - you're not a person, and its pretty much hardwired into you to get pregnant if you can.

Your owners do anything about it?

How about no?

How about they leave you to give birth in an old rotten Rabbit hutch? Yeah, that'll work.

And then why don't they call the local cat trust up and give them an ultimatum - If they don't come pick you up, they'll leave you in the cold to die. Nice owners you had there.

Wankers.

Things look grim for cats who are unwanted in the U.K. - twat owners like these ones refuse to get the poor things spayed or neutered and this leads to a whole lot of unwanted kittens and cats and there just anren't enough willing homes to take them in - certainly not a mum, young daughter and three newborn kittens at once. There isa great fallacy around spaying apparently and thats that a cat is healthier if they've already had a litter before spaying.

Let me make this clear, everyone in the cat arena has told me the same thing:

THERE IS NO BENEFIT LETTING YOUR CAT HAVE A LITTER BEFORE SPAYING. IN FACT YOU DO MORE HARM BRINGING UNWANTED, UNHOMED KITTENS INTO THE WORLD.
THE BELIEF IN ANY SUCH BENEFIT IS, LIKE SO MANY OTHERS, TOTAL BOLLOCKS.

For families like this one, there's a very stretched to the limit system of fostering in place - families or couples (or individuals) prepared to take in a mum and kittens in this situation and give their time and love to socialise and develop these guys. This is so they will hopefully grow into viable pets having the best possible chance of rehoming. Time and love are all you need - the trust provide food, litter and moral supportr and boy do I need moral support sometimes!

Make no mistake - there are two outcomes available to many unwanted cats - rehoming or death. It is impossible for any trust to look after all the cats that need looking after - many are feral or traumatised in the first place and don't adapt well to being looked after.

To get to the point, Mrs Algo and I have taken in the unwanted family described above.

The mum is about two years old and already has has one litter about 6 months agao (and yet wasn't neutered afterwards by her dumb f__ing owners) - the older daughter, who we've renamed since the given name was retarded, is the only one from the earlier litter still present and these two are fairly inseparable.

(Quick aside: I won't be giving the older twos' names on this blog to protect us from the owners beating me up - for calling them wankers. They are still wankers, though.)

Mumsy arrived tired but open to contact, and we've been happy with how she's settling. the older daughter is not so well socialised (partly due to the young age of her mother) and is having trouble overcoming her wariness - don't blame her, given her prior human contact.

However, today we've had the breakthrough we wanted with Odie (as in O.D. - older daughter) - she's been out of the pen (which was provided for us like everything else) and fussed a bit. With mum, treats got her out, but things were more difficult with Odie; she sniffs and lick treats but won't eat them not sure why but maybe she doesn't like fish flavoured ones - we'll get her in the end. Odie spent the last two hours of this evening hiding under our cheapass sofa but at least she's got out and about a little.

I guess I should say, if you think there may be room in your heart to help out a local trust and look after some cats please, please, please give it real thought (i.e. don't think you'll be ok then backpedal) and if you reckon you can help call them up and see what you can do.

These people do a wonderful job with very little support and staggering odds stacked against them. Any help you could give would be wonderful.

As for what happens later? After 6 to 8 weeks these cats will be rehomed - we may keep two of the kittens as our own (let's face it, we probably will) but the others need rehoming - you won't be forced to keep all 5-8 of them forever. The key thing to do is talk to the trust and see what they advise.

Oh - did I mention I knew nothing about cats until I got attached to the cat that nearly was a few weeks ago? Needless to say I am learning on the fly.

Since I won't post pictures of the old'uns for security purposes, tomorrow or sometime soon I'll probably introduce you to the kittens we've called (for now) Bootsy, Smokey and The Bandit.

Yes. The Bandit. Really.

We won't be keeping that name. But you have to call them something for reference! The Bandit is the runt, so gets called Tiny, sometimes.

Only Bootsy's name is probably permanent (for the real Bootsy go here).

A (going soft in my old age)

Quick Movie Review: Starter For Ten

2009-03-02T00:58:00.003Z

4/10

Far be it from me to presume to throw a spanner in the works of the James McAvoy star maker machine, but why is it this film is just not very good? Another thing - this proves is that the British film industry must try harder than simply relocated the same plots from other films to Bristol if it wants to make any sustained progress in the long term viability stakes.

Well, my prevailing theory at the moment is that Starter For Ten represents the lowest amount of effort put into making a film on the subject matter. The romances follow the same tired old clichéd beats - initial romance is flaky and shallow, the real girl he should be with is obvious to us but passed over by the hero because, well, the film demands it. He even has the same old conversation with his mate who says - "we're never going to make anything of ourselves but you can, and it's insulting to us if you waste that chance" which I'm certain I remember from elsewhere but it is late and the film eludes me. Even his big mistake at the Challenge itself isn't really that tremendously exciting since the only consequences to him appear to be that he gets into the Smiths and looks depressed for a few minutes (any Uni student's been through that).

There are a couple of funny beats - the botched headbutt, for example, and the stoned confrontation with Alice's naked parents, but the sheer obviousness of the story never goes away and for me the film never overcame this issue.

Many people really like Starter For Ten. I don't. By all means make up your own minds. BBC films will be grateful for the cash.

A

Quick Movie Review: Jumanji

2009-03-02T00:50:00.002Z

5/10

Having finally seen Jumanji, a good 14 years after it would have been cool, I'm not sure I am that gutted I never saw it before.

The effects have not worn particularly well, neither has the plot, which exists purely as a way of introducing countless effects sequences and while supposedly dealing with the danger of missed opportunities and not being afraid of growing up is in fact all about monkeys driving police cars.

Nothing wrong with that - significant comedy mileage to be had from monkeys driving police cars.

Meh. It just didn't grab me, plus the kids deserve all they get for playing a 2 dimensional roll and move game like Jumanji. Where's the auction mechanic? The multiple paths to victory? (I am joking)

Maybe I was in the wrong mood, and sure it was a bit of fluffy fun for an afternoon with your virus checker but I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it to others, so it gets an almost definitive 5/10.

A

Movie Review: Ran

2009-03-02T00:13:00.003Z

8/10

OK, I'll be up front. I know the play King Lear quite well, so a large part of the surprise and tension of a plot that essentially is identical with a couple of recastings is lost on me.

For those who come to Kurosawa's Ran with no knowledge of the play or plot I'll give the fivepence summary;

Hidetora, an old and venerated leader of men realises he is getting old and cedes control of his kingdom to his oldest son, with castles and lands given to his other two. While he will do this, he will keep his title of "great leader", all his privileges and a retinue of 30.

Now, any student of feudal politics will see the flaw in his logic here. I'm not one, and I did.

Naturally this is a recipe for strife between the brothers as they will vie for power and since two other factions border the land, it may destroy the whole kingdom that Hidetora created in 50 years of bloodshed.

Only one of his sons, Saburo, has the courage to point this out to the old man, and in a rage at his insolence, the Great Leader has Saburo banished, along with one of his own Vassals, Tango (feel free to snicker - did) who makes the same argument.

Saburo is taken in by one of the bordering families and married to their daughter and essentially stands by for the majority of the picture as the family tears itself apart, only returning to retrieve the old man who, rejected and by now quite mad with guilt and horror, wanders the plains of his old kingdom with only his jester for company.

So, obviously folks, for those of you in the know, it's King Lear.

The main switches are for Lear's daughters to morph into Hidetora's three sons and for the introduction of what is essentially a Lady MacBeth character, who works behind the scenes to control matters toward her own end. Minor changes include the Kent/Tango character having less to do and the Gloucester character being reimagined as a victim of Hidetora's past crimes - a blind ghost of his past, if you will.

Right - this debt to Shakespeare is not a problem, many movies are influenced by the great man's work and this one has no pretentions of originality in that regard.

What it does fantastically is tell the story in a striking and emotional way, and in fact the change in setting to feudal Japan works wonders in explaining some of the less rational character choices in Shakespeare since the rigid moral codes here account for much of the false code of European honour propounded by the bard.

Kurosawa was always a wonderful director, both of sweeping vistas and intimate settings - here he doesn't exceed his earlier work such as Seven Samurai in skill and craft. The black and white vistas and images of that film are replaced by modern technicolour, but the colour palette is used to full effect as the three houses differentiate by colour and the vivid blood red stains during the battle scenes attest.

Even more effective is the colour changes surrounding Hidetora himself, who as the film goes on he goes from his starting position on a sunny green hilltop to the grey desert, all the while becoming more ghoulish in appearance to the point of death himself.

The introduction of Lady Kaede, as the manipulative power behind the throne, is another masterstroke - she provides another side to the story, and while the obvious reading of her character is of a crazed villainess, a moments contemplation shows a very different picture.

The battle scenes themselves are epic, confused and deadly, with none being depicted as glorious or victorious in any sense (since we are shown both victor and loser in every case) - the blood itself, of which there is lots, is of the Hammer Horror bright red variety, which is a disappointment though I am unclear as to whether this was an enforcement of rules by the production or not.

It is precisely this way of depicting the seriousness of war that marks Kurosawa as a true genius - many lesser men would introduce some editorialising at these points, or tip their hands as to which side you should be rooting for, but none of the battles end in this way. The defining scene in the whole movie is the shot of Hidetora, betrayed and defeated, unable even to take his own life after breaking his sword, simply wanders out of his tower and through the remnants of the battlefield - and the attacking soldiers part ranks to let him go!

It's an outstanding film, and one that justifies its hefty length with great character work, acting, shooting and effects - I would definitely recommend it not only to anyone who enjoyed Seven Samurai, but also to fans of Shakespeare, who will see how the great man's works translate across the world to another culture entirely.

It's not perfect and it is definitely Seven Samurai's inferior but do see it if you can.

A

Quick Movie Review: Get Over It

2009-03-01T16:43:00.003Z

5/10

Why on Earth did I watch this?

Short answer; I was doing some minor level, boring filing type job and had the film on in the background. It didn't really gain much of my attention throughout.

It's basically a teen movie (which makes me, at 27, feel a bit creepy) about a boy whose gifrlfriend dumps him and he decides to join up with the schools terrible Midsummer Night's Dream musical to try and win her back.

I was going to turn it off, but it then brought on Martin Short (who I claimed made his last decent movie in the shape of Three Amigos!) and things picked up - he says such lines as "Shakespeare was a great poet, but Burt Bacharach he ain't", and has frequent manic episodes which really made many of his scenes a watchable experience.

Other than Short, the main characters parents, who in their leniency are definitely the worst parents ever, add some more much needed comic relief but nothing much else really jumps out.

A fairly enjoyable hour and a half, but nothing more than that.

A

Movie Review: In The Spider's Web

2009-02-26T15:52:00.004Z

0/10

Wow... I mean... wow!

Imagine, if you will, the most outrageously incompetent film you can, take away about five more percent competence and you have In The Spider's Web, a steaming turd of a film, a suspiciously malodorous patch of stain on the face of film making.

Now... the fact I viewed this movie was not an accidental event - me and Mrs Algo had caught a breathtaking five minutes of it on Sky Three while skipping through channels and knew we had to record it ready for our game weekend we were having (a weekend with friends where we play lots of games and watch films, usually terrible films, for comedy value)

The last movie at such an event was the lame Fear City, but even this was nowhere the sheer mouth open aghast madness inducing, wincingly excruciating embarrassment that is presented by In The Spiders Web. This isn't even an old 50s B-movie. It's a recent full colour effort from 2007.

If you ever see it, just try and get your head around the fact it was made in 2007. Go on. Try it.

I'll try and do justice to the plot...

A group of friends is walking through a studio based jungle when they notice there's a lot of spiders webs about... so they decided to set up camp under a bunch of them (I know, I know...)

Naturally one of them is bitten (well, duh!) and they are forced to seek help at a local village where an inexplicably creepy doctor (played by the frequently unreliable Lance Henriksen) who sports a creepy long fingernailed set of hands, and spouts gibberish about why there's Bolivian spiders in India.

In case he wasn't suspicious enough, his "brother" wanders around in a sack mask due a bone disease. The mere chance that anyone wouldn't run for the safety of town is laughable - and we are instead forced to sit through mad decisions (lets go into the creepy cave full of spiders!), crazy foreign tribesmen (look! they're eating plastic spiders!) and shifting distances (it took us 5 seconds to run down this passage, but the crazy sword wielding guy and his mates who are chasing us, NEVER arrive)

It loses coherence (!) after this and by the half hour point resembles nothing so much as a made for children tv show with a budget of about £50 and an editor who understands nothing about editing.

Several shots are reused a couple of times (at different speeds, no less) and the scripts madder moments are worsened by the editor's juxtaposition of nonsense dialogue with unrelated bits of action. It also manages to contradict itself on a couple of occasions, and to hit virtually every cliche in the book.

For no reason characters take crazy decisions, their supposed guide knows nothing about anything and its intended suspenseful moments bear more resemblance to lousy trick or treat costumes.

Never mind the fact that the extras casting appears to use the rule; "they look a bit foreign" without any regard for place or time. The Indian police force boast what look like the Frenchmen, Spanish and Africans amongst their number, and the villagers are pulled from every asian ethnic group there is.

This... I hesistate to call it this, but.... film... is a prime example of what is wrong with the movie world - it's under budgeted, scripted by those million monkeys, over edited and atrociously acted, with no sense of its own silliness and a failure to grasp even the barest, tiniest rules of filmmaking.

Lastly, if your movie relies on terrifying spiders they'd better be scary.

These aren't... the CGI spiders are atrocious, resembling the quality of ships present in the first Babylon 5 series chucked onto the film, other spiders are clay models that look painted by 5 olds and, the icing on the cake, some are just plastic models hung from fishing line.

You think I'm joking about the plastic spiders, don't you.

I'm not.

Avoid Avoid Avoid.

A

Movie Review: Close Encounters Of The Third Kind

2009-02-24T21:59:00.003Z

7/10

I can't tell you how upsetting to me that 7/10 is.

In my mind's eye, Close Encounters sits there staring at me like a puppy I just kicked and spat on.

Here's the thing, by my own rules it can't get a higher score. It just can't.

Why do I care about that anyway? Well, to me Close Encounters was always a fond experience I recalled from my childhood. The central tale of a man faced with something so simply profound he loses touch with the "ordinary world", costing him his wife and his old life in the process, was just awesome.

I love the design of the ships, the way the little ones seem like playful children - "Toys" as Barry describes them. This little boy is an excellent performance from the young lad Cary Guffy - actually responding to the toys given as bribes to get him to do the scene!

To get to my point, there is a superb scene in Barry's mom's kitchen, as he finds the fridge open and food all over the floor. He then is startled by two aliens.

Here's why the scene is great - it focuses on the young boy and more importantly his reactions to the new arrivals. But since he's a kid he's not at all afraid (the actor was responding to crew in masks!) and after the initial surprise he is enchanted and excited.

That's how you do aliens. Remember when Signs, a fairly effective tension movie, went bad? Close Encounters has the same problem:

IT SHOWS THE ALIENS!

Dear god. If you exist please wipe the final twenty minutes of this movie and replace it with him just walking into the spaceship and never seeing the aliens. Please?

It's almost enough to turn me to prayer.

This horrible, horrible, misstep costs the film dearly - a single shot of the appalling drawn on eyes on a lame plastic mask sticks with me more than anything now.

It's still a great movie, and the alien symphony at the end is still a wonderful bit of film-making and genuinely magical - Richard Dreyfuss, Bob Balaban and Francois Truffaut are all excellent. i just can't get the plasticy faced children in alien costumes out of my head now.

A

Quick Movie Review: Bowfinger

2009-02-24T21:47:00.003Z

5/10

So average I don't really want to waste much time on, it this is actually in all probability the best comedy Steve Martin or Eddie Murphy has been in for years, telling the story of a supposedly lovable charlatan, a nobody film maker (who, as a poster in the background describes, made "The Yugo Story".

He has one last chance to hit it big, and decides to cast as his leading man the biggest star in Hollywood in the form of Kit Ramsey - Eddie Murphy being a really irritating Tom Cruise alike who is blatantly insane, hearing voices and spending time at the scientology stand-in "MindHead".

That's about as funny as it gets. Malcom MacDowell's in it, with the kind of wandering accent he is great at, Heather Graham flounces about as a small town girl just arrived in Hollywood who is a bit more worldly wise than you'd think.

The problem I have with this film is that as a critique of Hollywood it just has no guts. Where Sunset Boulevard smacked the silver screen dead centre, Bowfinger pulls its punches. All the characters are resolved at the end and even Robert Downey Jr.'s high level Hollywood agent is nothing more than a jerk in a suit offering little more than clumsy "agents are scum" clichés.

I laughed a couple of times, at the way a character is forced to run across a busy motorway for a shot and at the dog walking in high heels but those show this films genuine level - it is immature, dumb and toothless.

At best its a mildly amusing timewaster, at its worst its just a waste of time.

Meh.

A

Quick Movie Review: Sunset Boulevard

2009-02-23T13:57:00.002Z

9/10

One of cinemas great grotesques is Norma Desmond, unhinged, lonely central figure in Billy Wilder's acidic 50s Hollywood deconstruction.

It's a story about how Hollywood's central mechanism is people, using people. Of course, the main character believes he is using Norma to make some money and avoid his creditors - she believes she is using him for something even more scary.

There are a couple of astonishing pieces of filmmaking - the famous opening shot, the terrifying and soul wrenching final moments as Desmond's plane comes crashing down in flames (metaphorically, of course) and the invention/one of the first uses of a classic device (think American Beauty).

It's so tough to say something interesting and original about a film that pretty much everyone knows is a great movie, so lets compare it to the other classics in Wilder's past. Obviously, my favourite of Wilder's films is The Apartment, a quite awesome and sweet piece of comedy. This couldn't be more different from that - where The Apartment is as lovable and cute as a moth eaten cuddly dog, Sunset Boulevard is a razor edged, howling monster of a film.

It is brilliant. See it if you haven't yet.

A

Oscars: Oh whatever...

2009-02-23T13:31:00.003Z

Firstly, no posts for the last week for two reasons:

Firstly, I've been helping my friend Paul with his Board Game Website (which I won't name here for reasons of keeping identities separate), writing several articles on board gaming and board games.

Secondly, I spent this weekend with my buddies at home, playing games, watching an atrocious film (In The Spiders Web - review upcoming) and generally having fun. Sorry if you've missed reading my disingenuous Twitter Posts or Blog Posts for the last week.

But I'm back! And today is the day that the film industry pats its favourite folks' backs.

There are two major themes to their award givings...

The Crowe Effect - Compensation. Martin Scorsese got an Oscar for Gangs Of New York and The Departed. GANGS OF NEW YORK? This was purely because he'd never had one before.
The Forrest Gump Effect - Surprise. Actor shows off their skills by playing either against type, or mentally ill. Obviously, this includes loads of performances - the classics are Tom Hanks, Charlize Theron etc.

At least one major award every year fits these rules. It doesn't take a genius to fit Kate Winslet into the first category and Sean Penn into the second.

For many people, Bollywood will have become interesting thanks to Slumdog Millionaire. Once again, your loyal film correspondent (i.e. me) was ahead of the game - follow this link, or this link for the two Bollywood films I fit in last year.

Other than these regular moans I have every year, I haven't seen any of the films that won major awards due to unemployment apart from The Dark Knight.

Fellow regular blogger Gary questions whether Heath Ledger would have won his Oscar for this movie if he was still alive. I am of the opinion that, no, he would not. He would, however, have won one if he had stayed alive - the performances in Monsters Ball and Brokeback mountain are, by repute. good enough to see he would have been a hugely successful actor.

So this feels to my like a preemptive Crowe Effect - they won't get another chance to reward his talents so they had to now. Meh - I'm not that bothered, really.

A

TV Review: Dollhouse

2009-02-17T22:50:00.003Z

Two "ahead of the game"s in one day? What is the world coming to.

I'm sure Charlie Brooker will get round to seeing this eventually, but for those of you who can't wait I will endeavour to fill in the time for you.

What is Dollhouse? Well, it's the new show from Joss Whedon, who was the creator of the classic Buffy The Vampire Slayer (and Angel) as well as being responsible for the far superior (and far more cancelled) Firefly and its movie spin off, Serenity. We saw the pilot of this new venture in advance of its UK premiere through a mixture of luck and design.

It is also a "star vehicle" for Eliza Dushku, Arnie's kid in True Lies (yeah yeah, and Faith from buffy, and Tru Calling woman etc) as she gets to show of her acting chops.

This is going to be massively spoilerific for those of you who like your first pilot viewing to be blind so let me summarise: it is not, unfortunately, very exciting viewing.

This is primarily a problem with the way Whedon's shows work - he likes to develop plot and character slowly over large arcs and many seasons and this is why his big fans (like us) love his shows so much. Is there any crime greater than the one that killed Firefly off? Not in my book.

Dollhouse is, like all of Whedon's shows, based on a very interesting premise.

=======SPOILERS START HERE========
We are introduced to "Caroline", played by Eliza Dushku - who is very concerned about soemthing that has gone wrong. She is offered a way out by a strange lady who says she must serve out a "five year contract".

Interesting. The next shot is of Eliza on a motorbike, racing and flirting with a handsome guy - only to leave the party they go to early, so she can have a "treatment".

This is where the plot finally starts to make sense. This "treatment" is in fact a full brain wipe. The physical body of "Echo" (as her character is now known) is being used as the vessel for any number of different personalities, which are grafted on in your typical Rekall memory implant apparatus (fans of Total Recall take note). This means that in any episode Dushku can be wildly different characters, with different skills and personalities depending on what the sinister agency (known as the Dollhouse, obviously) is hired to provide. These programmed dolls (between missions they are much like emotionless automata) are know as "actives".

Obviously, in the first task, she is hired as a "date" for the guy in question.

It's the second mission (or, "engagement", as the owner prefers to call them) with which the pilot mainly concerns itself. It regards the kidnapping of a little girl, whose father pays a lot of money for an "active" to be assigned to the task. He is told that as far as the active is concerned they are a real person, with a full history and memories so he should not refer to the Dollhouse at all.

Echo is programmed with the personality and history of a highly driven hostage negotiator - passionate but collected. Perfect for the task at hand.

Or so, as is predictable, they think.

The typical engineer type who runs the wipes and reprogrammings explains that while these exact people never existed, the personalities downloaded are amalgams of many separate real people, hence why Echo needs glasses as the negotiator (and she has asthma...). With the good side comes the bad side.

Of course, there is a major complication with this engagement and a real moral question arises (and the show gained a lot of interest from me for it) - one of the kidnappers who has taken the little girl is the same one who abused the negotiator in the past and she loses composure at a vital moment, failing to rescue the girl in the process! Setting aside the likelihood of the conceit for a while, the show makes the Dollhouse organisation make a choice - do they continue to go after the girl even though it may put them in a dangerously open position?

Well, no prizes for guessing the outcome.

=====END OF MAJOR SPOILERS=====
(though minors ones may remain - you've been warned)

Look, I don't want to get on the show's back straight away, but here's my two cents.

Firstly, if the pilot is designed to do anything, it must get people to watch the next episode. It should have a WOW! factor and pull people right in.

While it is clever and interesting to me, the beginning is far too slow to grab a majority casual viewers and many Americans, I am sure, will have switched off after fifteen minutes (which is the kiss of DEATH to any new show).

Secondly, the plot demands a versatile and skilled actress (as this one does) and I'm just not sure (never have been) about Eliza Dushku's range. She's a perfectly good actress at certain types of role (Vamp, Petulance), but this part will be quite outrageously demanding - I notice she is listed as a producer on the show... I will leave it at that. I hope she surprises me. (I'd have cast Summer Glau, myself)

The only performance that really stood out in terms of acting was that of the engineer, and there are a couple of interesting touches (the physio's face is covered with scars, for example) that point toward interesting future plot developments.

I enjoyed it to a certain extent, and I am sure that given time it will develop into a good show. I will certainly be watching the upcoming episodes (if we can get our mitts on them) to see if it picks up in true Joss style.

BUT unfortunately I have a bad feeling it is already in the list to get canned due to bad ratings (I blame the slow pilot start), and poor old Joss will have another one season wonder on his hands.

Finally, look, if he has enough caché now to get new shows made...

WHY NOT FIREFLY SEASON TWO? I'M DYING HERE!
IT'S NOT LIKE FILLION IS NOW A MASSIVE MOVIE STAR, IS IT?

A
(heady with all the excitement of seeing something early!)

For once I am ahead of the game!

2009-02-17T13:50:00.002Z

While his established style requires him to hate everything, my favourite young curmudgeon Charlie Brooker has written an article on, shock horror, the Walkers Crisps "voting" process.

Well, I was ahead of him this time - so in your face, Brooker!

If you like a bit of moaning you can find his summation at http://tinyurl.com/co8sr9

You can also have fun reading the comments at the bottom from frustrated bloggers and internet obsessed losers, who resent anyone who is paid for blogging and spend their time picking holes in articles written by successful people.

I don't subscribe to this, obviously. If you're a good writer you should be rewarded, and noone forces these people to read an article.

But anyway - in your face Brooker! Read my Crisps posts and despair!

Movie Review: Back To The Future Parts 1-3

2009-02-16T15:46:00.004Z

9/10, 7/10, 7/10

There are many reasons why I married the lady I did; her baking skills, the quality of her company, the fact I've been keeping her drugged....

But for an object lesson in good marriages, take a look at what we spent Valentines Day evening doing - watching the entire Back To The Future trilogy in one sitting, following our extremely tasty valentines dinner (thanks for the cheapish nosh, M&S)!

Many women would file for divorce instantly, but not Mrs Algo. Oh no. We had great fun.

For many fans, Part 3 is the weakest film, seemingly from a different planet to its prequels, in which for giggles we transplant the main characters to the Old West in order to have them root round in the clichés of that period - they have a gun fight! a lynching! a hoe down! woohoo!

There are a couple of issues I have before I go any further. First of all, this film isn't as bad as all that. It's great fun - and a cut above most other movies from that period in its commitment to detail and its story arc. It also works considerably better as the conclusion to an epic story rather than as a film in its own right - I'm not saying the whole six hour marathon should be the only time you watch part 3, but just that you'll enjoy it a lot more that way. You feel that the makers have "earned" this denouement to their crazy tale.

The second issue is that this and the second part were filmed pretty much back to back and so we get one of the most consistent film to film connections you could wish for which is a welcome change from the massive reshoot for the start of Part 2.

One thing I didn't like (and this is proper fanboy stuff) - in the old west, Seamus McFly's wife (Marty's Great Great Grandmother or something) is played by the same actress who plays Marty's mum. This is a bit of joke casting to show parallels I know, but I couldn't help the image that he's a "slacker" because the family is so inbred. Also, while Fox's irish accent is all litle people stereotyped, Lea Thompson's is all over the fricking place, and while at best it sounded like Mrs Doyle's in Father Ted at worst it sounds faintly Austrian.

The mother's looks are similar to the joke, in the second part, that Marty's kids are both played by Michael J. Fox (as if clones rather than kids) it's amusing, but a little weird...

And about that reshoot in the second film, it looks a lot worse when you put the first and second movies together since, like us, you can play the "new shot", "old shot" game. Elizabeth Shue is also not much cop in the part - it's a silly, throwaway part anyway, but I subscribe to Wayne Campbell's "I know it's a small part, but...." philosophy.

She's barely in part 3 anyway, sleeping on a bench in 1985 while our heroes mess about on horseback (where did Marty learn to ride, anyway?) and go toe to toe with Buford Tannen.

Ah yes.... the Tannen family. I like this kind of long term hatred they have for the McFlys ("No McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley") and this bears out over the course of the films.

Biff, Griff, Buford etc are all played by the hilarious Thomas F. Wilson, who manages to do cantankerous old man, bionic nutter, school jock bully and mad dog western cowboy equaly well. All the parts, as with all of the films' characters, are fairly broadly drawn and do little in the way of development throughout the pictures length. What they do is provide comic relief for the most part, and drive the plot along.

It is future Griff who is the lamest. The whole future segment is a little silly for my tastes (especially since it supposedly takes place in 2015 - duh!) and as I say, I can't get used to the kids looking exactly like their dad.... (shudder). So I'll be controversial and say this is the section that gets the lowest marks from me.

Also, the sequels introduce what is the worst plot device in the whole story - one word:

"CHICKEN?"

I mean, if he's that auto-responsive it says "mental illness" to me, rather than being afraid of people thinking he's a coward. Especially since it appears to have been passed down the family (along with the genes for looking identical to your ancestors). I suggest that anyone suffering from this kind of automatic response to goading needs therapy, preferably the kind available in this time period.

The blue screen work to have two Martys and two Biffs in the 1955 section of part 2 is looking fairly ropy these days, as is some of the eyelines between them (excusable since these days it's all done with computers and directors can get immediate feedback from their monitors and say... "look a little more to your left, Mike!" rather than getting into the editing suite before you can see they're a bit off.

Part 2 and 3 are marked by a level of ambition both technically and storyly (heh...) that means the plots intertwine well and all is kept together despite the films' shortcomings to make the two sequels a fine way to spend your time.

They cannot live up to, however, the sheer exuberant genius of the original movie. Where the sequels are loose and ambitious, the first movie is deceptively simple and tight. We're not in the business of stunt casting Marty as his own father so the genius of Crispin Glover, who deserves easily as many plaudits as anyone involved, gets to shine through. Equally at home as the bullied or the success - he's the real star of the show here.

Almost as good is Lea Thompson as Lorraine - props to her for working hard on both young and old Lorraine equally, meaning the whole plot works better - since she is the absolute centre of the story, with anything less than a great performance here, the whole shebang could have fallen apart.

Of course, Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd get to have all the fun, but Lloyds mania occasionally goes to far (a straight to the camera "Back... TO THE FUTURE!") and Fox's age is just hilariously wrong ("see you in thirty years.. I guess I'll be... 47..." - yeah right).

Of course, these are but minor smudges on the glass case housing the Mona Lisa, and this is going to be one of those films that retains its fans for many, many years.

It's tough to know what else to add that isn't just plot rehash or technical issues arising from its date of release. I'm just going to leave it at this:

Back To The Future is one of the best movies made in the 80s. It may well be the most fun. And next time you watch it, consider watching the six hour version - its a lot of fun!

Til next time folks, I am as ever...

A

P.S. I am now on Twitter, if that's your bag - algo81

Quick Movie Review: Total Recall

2009-02-15T15:26:00.003Z

6/10

Paul Verhoeven. What a guy.

In the pantheon of Philip K. Dick adaptations (such as Screamers, follow link for review) this is actually one of the more faithful offerings in its plot and events, though Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the least appropriate bits of casting ever, since Dick's protagonists were usually ordinary schmoes and office furniture rather than aryan supermen.

Never mind - the story rockets along at a fair old pace and stays true to its internal logic, its intelligence shown best by the fact that it never commits to one version of events over any other in exactly the Dickian manner - sure we could be seeing real events, but only a small drop of sweat gives us any indication that this is not all in Quaid's head.

On the performances level it is your typical 80s action fare, i.e. nothing special, but the sheer exuberance of its excesses and the commitment to its twisted plot mean that it is easily the best Arnie movie of the 80s in which he is a human being.

A

The Return Of The First Lines Quiz!

2009-02-12T19:08:00.004Z

To my email subscribers, please come to the site at Wall Shadows to make your guesses on the comment form - thanks!

Guess the 20 random songs from my collection by recognising the first line below;

I lived alone... my mind was blank.... I needed time to think - to get the memories from my mind...
I was working at the club in 1995, Sunday was the night when the Gay crowd came alive...
Ooo Ooo... While the sun hangs in the sky and the desert has sand - while the waves crash in the sea and meet the land...
Laying on the bathroom floor... kitty licks my cheek once more...
AAAhhhhh Crazy blowing over with ideas, thousand ways to move a lover so sincere...
Slip Inside The Eye Of Your Mind....
Think of London - A small city. But dark - dark in the daytime. People sleep - sleep in the daytime. If they want to. If they want to.
I could paint a picture with a pin, but a song would only scratch the skin...
I recommend getting your heart trampled on to anyone, I recommend walking around naked in your living room...
Papa I know you're going to be upset cos I was always your little girl...
Here I go out to sea again, the sunshine fills my hair and dreams hang in the air...
Everybody's restless and they've got no place to go. Someone's always trying to tell them something they already know...
Children, behave - that's what they say when we're together.
If you listen you can hear it - it's the laughter in the street. It's the motion and the music...
Salty leave.... Salty Leave.... tell me the one about the friend you knew and the last good night that we toasted to...
What do you get when you fall in love?
There's a man I meet, lives up our street. He's a worker the council. Has been twenty years...
She says there's ants in the carpets, dirty little monsters....
There is lambs wool under my naked feet. The wool is soft and warm - gives off some kind of heat...
I could feel at the time there was no way of knowing - fallen leaves in the night, who can say where they're blowing.... as free as the wind...

Guesses on the comment form below - honour and glory awaits the brave musical traveller.

And I promise there's none from Labyrinth this time.

A

Movie Review: V For Vendetta

2009-02-10T15:26:00.004Z

6/10

Ever feel you got your double bill round the wrong way?

The central message of V For Vendetta (the film) is one that doesn't really come as a surprise to most British folk - that standing up to authority is not just inportant, it is absolutely crucial to a happy society. In the original book, I believe the V character is an Anarchist rather than a revolutionary.

I'm not sure this message will be heard particularly loudly in America where it is clearly meant to hit home hardest against what at the time at least was a rise of Neo-Conservative hyper national feeling.

The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, if you're trying to get the USA on your side best not to do it by playing up the heroism of mad, serial killing bombers however appropriate the parallels with Guy Fawkes (assuming, of course, you sympathise with Fawkes in the first place). Secondly, because they have set it in the UK.

I appreciate the desire to set it overseas comes from the original graphic novel, but their messages suffer the same.

The British are one of the least trusting countries when it comes to their governments - this comes partly from our laughable pseudo-monarchy in which our nominal head of state has less power than a string of limp spaghetti and partly from a long history of secularism in government that means we do not imbue our leaders with anything like the automatic respect that any American President gets.

The Prime Minister (whoever it is) is just a gloified bank manager to most and it isn't viewed as "UnBritish" to refer to him as anything you like, within the confines of legality that apply to all British citizens.

For this reason I find it a big leap of belief to see anyone as mental as John Hurt's chancellor taking over the UK and turning it into a police state. What is interesting about this particular governement to me is that, unlike the Nazism it is clearly meant to resemble, it is heavily faith-based. This is of course central to their intense hatred of homosexuals, immigrants and deviants displayed in the film.

Taking the film at face value though, it is a perfectly servicable romp with bangs and flashes and the occasional good performance (despite a slightly wandering accent, Stephen Rea impresses as the doubting Thomas).

It suffers from the old problem of pretention though - never better depicted than in the final moments, when all the dead characters return for one last look at the world. That's just a cheesy and dumb decision.

Natlie Portman... sigh. She has been good on occasion (Leon, bits of Closer) but here she is two dimensional and dull until a good three quarters of the movie have passed by, at which point she seems to wake up and perform to her best. Hugo Weaving as the central character is daft as a brush, and fairly good physically - though some of the shots are actually of his predecessor in the part, James Purefoy (with redubbing, obviously).

An enjoyable movie, then. But it not half as profound as it thinks it is, and the less than enthusiastic response I remember it receiving may well be justified given its strange message and odd morals.

A

Movie Review: Network

2009-02-10T15:09:00.002Z

9/10

A searing indictment of TV culture from Sidney Lumet today. It is the last Movie to have had Oscar noms in all four acting categories and as of this moment (though I very much doubt this will be the case in two weeks time) features the only actor to have recieved a posthumous oscar, in the form of devastatingly superb Peter Finch, who plays the central role of Howard Beale.

Howard is a news anchor - he used to be a big name and a huge success but recently his ratings have been slipping and the network chiefs decide to fire him, giving two weeks notice. Problem is, Howard starts to slip into a breakdown from which he will never recover, initially threatening to commit suicide live on air and later ranting and swearing during a broadcast.

All very sad, but not the point. THe point is, Howard's schizophrenic outbursts and crazed behaviour start to pull in audiences and suddenly he is a hit again - exploited by both his division (represented by an excellent Faye Dunaway) and the company that owns it (represented by an extremely believable Robert Duvall).

As a satire it is almost comically appropriate to our times, as instead of treating the problems Howard is having, the world encourages them for its own entertainment. This is set against a parallel plot in which Faye Dunaway's upwardly mobile, deeply damaged programme director decides to start a show using the aid of a terrorist organisation to pull in even more viewers.

The moral centre of the piece is Howard's long time friend Max (played with measured calm by William Holden) who despite complications remains honest and open throughout.

The ending of the piece is never really in doubt once things go beyond a certain point, but the satire is that despite the inherent selfishness and madness of the ideas put forward, noone sees them as such - ratings are king and everything else comes second. That they create a monster that isn't entirely under their control is not anticipated until it's almost too late to do anything about it.

I can hardly recommend this movie enough - it is cutting while still being darkly humorous, affecting while being enraging and masterfully acted while containing no likable characters.

In parts it feels a little stagy due to a lot of talking heads and monologues, but this is not a bad thing, merely a function of the script. It does mean, though, that a stage production would be possible, which I'll chuck out as a challenge to any budding adapters out there. It would be an actor's dream since even incidental characters have flesh and bones - and there's at least one show stopping monologue from every major character to get your teeth into.

An immensely enjoyable experience.

A

Movie Review: Touch Of Evil

2009-02-09T14:42:00.003Z

8/10

Chuck and Orson.... weren't they two of the characters in Animaniacs?

Anyhoo, here we have a classic piece of cinema from everyone's favourite Jupiter-sized, sweaty genius advert voiceover guy, Orson Welles. It tells the story of a destructive clash of heads between two policemen with wildly different outlooks on the world and their jobs.

One, newly married Mexican big cheese Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) is keen on sticking to the book, as he has shown recently in the anti-gang bust he pulled off against the Grandè family in Mexico City.

The other; rotund, ex-lush American maverick Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) is a hunch-driven, flawed, legend - so powerful he has all the American cops hanging on his every word, they flock round him like starving children around the one hunk of meat they have.

The film opens with a typically bravura piece of filmmaking from Welles, as the camera tracks across most of a frontier town in a legendary single shot tracing the path of a car that we know has a bomb in the boot (one that was referenced stylistically and in dialogue in Robert Altman's The Player).

This is only the beginning of the problems though, since because the bomb was planted in Mexico, but exploded in America, both Vargas and Quinlan have legitimate claims to the case.

I've never been a big Heston fan personally, since I frequently find him one dimensional and dull. Here he does nothing to overcome my prior opinion - despite the dark make up he has not any trace of a Mexican accent and never convinces in the part.

This is a shame, because it undermines Welles' bigoted performance since for example; while it feels while he clearly detests young Sanchez, a suspect, because of his race, his dislike of Vargas is more to do with police procedure than anything else. This is the gut feeling I got, knowing full well in my head its a racial thing too, but the miscasting of Heston destroyed the illusion.

So it would have been far preferable to cast an actual Mexican actor in the role of Vargas, but clearly this was not viable at the time for whatever reason.

As we follow Quinlan down the path of darkness things get worse and worse for Vargas and his sole ally, Al Schwartz (perhaps to show some Jewish solidarity against all bigotry) as his wife becomes a victim of a nefarious plot by the Grandè family to discredit Vargas before he can prosecute the one he has in custody.

Janet Leigh is good as ever in this part, though it affords little in the way of depth or development, much like the rest of the supporting cast's parts don't.

Oh hell no, this is Welles' movie - his is the only character to get much in the way of backstory or development. We are given tantalising glimpses of his past - either through the stories told by his closest pal and partner, Menzies, or by the hints given by Marlene Dietrich's character (this is a cameo performance demanding little more than soft focus close ups).

Welles conveys perfectly the sense that this is a colossus of a man - a herculean figure, but one who has become poisoned by expectations and his own personal demons to become a terrible mockery of the man he once clearly was. At turns savage, childish, lost and shrewd - it is not at all difficult to appreciate the power this larger than life presence has on those who fall under his spell.

For the sheer power and skill of this performance alone this film deserves its place in any list of essential Noir - Welles' direction as well is a cut above almost any contemporary you care to name, shaping outstanding set pieces throughout (like the final "chase" sequence) or discomfiting close ups to pull you right into the action.

Worth seeing for anyone, but Welles' better work (Kane) and most eye catching performance (Third Man) are found elsewhere. Plus I truly feel Chuck is miscast badly, and this significantly damages the movie's impact. That I still gvie an 8/10 shows just how good the other factors are.

Oh, and Zsa Zsa Gabor has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo too. I mention that since you may think I wasn't paying attention.

A

The end of the packet....

2009-02-09T14:30:00.002Z

I've finished my odyssey into Walkers Crisps new flavours, and its pseudo-democratic voting process is well under way.

My choice is obviously the underdog... or the undersquirrel. Here's my order.

Cajun Squirrel
Chilli & Chocolate
Crispy Duck & Hoi Sin
Fish and Chips
Onion Bhaji
Builders Breakfast

Sadly, I now have no desire to eat any crisps for another six months... ah well.

I hope you feel inspired to try some and make up your own mind.

A

Movie Review: Underworld: Evolution

2009-02-08T11:51:00.003Z

3/10

In this movie's case, it is good to be able to comment on its plot while simultaneously summarising your review.

I would lock this movie in a sealed coffin in a locked vault under a ruined fortress AND MELT THE SODDING KEY SO NO-ONE CAN RELEASE THE FILM LATER!

Sometimes it's good to feel you can provide a service to the betterment of mankind.

In the case of this review I hope it saves you two hours of your life.

Probably not enough to make up for watching the whole of The Assassination Of Jesse James on my recommendation (it was film of 2008) and feeling I had wasted your time, but goes a little way to repaying that debt. (sorry, Gary)

This particular impotent, cinematic dead end is the second movie in this disastrous pantheon (which inexplicably also includes the original and the new prequel, Rise Of The Lycans).

The original Underworld, while nonsensical, unfocused and containing little or no internal logic was excused in part by its clear concept as a rather obvious, erm, if you'll excuse the term, "wanktape" for its director Len Wiseman, who is the husband of the undeniably rather delicious star (in this film out of love, no doubt) Kate Beckinsale and on that level it achieved its goals with thousands of shots of his missus in outrageously tight PVC and vampire fangs cavorting about and shooting stuff in slow motion, occasionally pausing to look gorgeous in the dark blue lighting aesthetic that accompanies all low rent horror movies trying to look expensive, as well as many Goth-Rock music videos. I bet the kleenex company shares jumped after this film came out as thousands of pubescent teenagers
(and its director) started down the road to blindness.

It was excusable if incoherent - plus Bill Nighy and Michael Sheen are OK in it. To be fair, Michael Sheen is usually good - here it is despite the movie, not because of it.

All bets are off, however, when he inflicts more of this drivel upon the world. Underworld: Evolution is so hideously unlovable it upsets me that there's no justification for a lower score.

It's crimes are legion, but chief amongst these is sheer lack of cohesion or sense. Sure, there's a back story and "mythos" here, but it reveals itself only after a lot of work on the viewers part - not least because in parts this movie contradicts its predecessor.

Characters, buildings and plot devices come and go with little but a two line introduction, Derek Jacobi turns up (a performance as solid and phoned in as his irrelevant turn in The Golden Compass) only to be shortly dispatched in a totally cursory manner.

The plot is pathetically simple, yet has a self indulgent obsession with its own pseudo-epic quality, every hackneyed "twist" met with over serious expressions and a clear attempt at earth shattering effect that the preambles have not earned in the slightest degree.

Look - this is the plot - scary vamp wants to do bad thing. Nice vamp and her simpering hybrid boytoy must stop him. OK? I have respect for films that accept their simplicity and go all out for staying true to their internal logic - a perfect example is the bonkers Shoot-Em-Up, or even more silly is Planet Terror - sadly, Underworld: Evolution is no more intelligent or innovative than these but has a pretension to intelligence and innovation that I can't bear.

It has a period set flashback prelude! A wise, doomed yet morally questionable plot mover-alonger! Incredibly important sounding events noone has taken the time to establish! A couple of glimpses of breasts!

The quality of the acting is hilariously bad - emotions range from Silent to Loud, the major characters are the worst kind of two-dimensional computer game avatars and the romance between the leads is reduced to little more than a lighting change.

The movie as it continues, frequently contradicts itself or refuses to explain what it is on about - in one scene a major character returns to life for no other reason than that it is useful to the story at that point. That's not to say his resurrection is impossible under the story, there is certainly no reason that by the film's logic he couldn't come back to life earlier on - it's just that they wanted you to feel bad about him for a bit and create some false tension.

Hell, I don't care about spoilers - look - it's her boy toy who cops it but she refuses to leave him behind at the boat he was killed on and instead takes his lifeless corpse to the final battle FOR NO OTHER REASON THAN ENSURING HE'S THERE LATER!

You will know by now that I despise lazy and clumsy film making above most other sins of the silver screen and this "rebirth" is just one example of where this film fails to rise above even the poorest of competitors.

To sum up In U:E's case, it is an undoubtedly stylish film, but like with women, good looks can hide a multitude of sins - in this case beneath the PVC bodysuit this film has absolutely nothing to offer, and less to say.

Look, I realise there is almost certainly a very dedicated fanboy/girl community out there who look on these movies as their Star Wars or at least their Serenity, but come on! The whole thing resembles nothing so much as a particularly pretentious and obscure Power Ballad video with about as much plot.

Even having said all this, I must admit that even the most unlovable of films may still have been genuinely excusable if I have one iota of fun out of the experience (intended by the makers or not), or cared even the slightest about its story or characters.

In the case of Underworld: Evolution, suffice to say that I did not.

A

Crispy crispy crispy....

2009-02-08T11:42:00.000Z

Todays crisps are Hoi Sin Crispy Duck and are very good. A good taste on the hoi sin side with a little hint of meatiness. They are far superior to the lame ass Fish and Chips flavour that is basically Salt and Vinegar with some suspicious odour in he background.

However good Hoi Sin Duck is (isn't it alreadya Sensations flavour anyway?) It pales into insignificance next to the undisputed champion that is Cajun Squirrel.

You voted for it yet?

Just Chilli and Chocolate left - saved the weirdest til last!

With regards to Cajun Squirrel, just one day showed the response on my Facebook status (in which I extolled the virtues of such) that "I know theres no real Squirrel but I can't bear to eat them" I'm paraphrasing a bit, but that's the gist.

Listen, as dear old Gary says - it's one thing to dislike the taste or idea of real food, but if it's just the imitated taste of something that, while seemingly cute, is really justa big tailed rat I have to cal the men in white coats.

THIS IS YOUR FLAVOUR - Vote accordingly folks!

A

Todays crisps: I gave in and ate two bags... sorry, waistline!

2009-02-07T02:22:00.000Z

Builders Breakfast tastes of bacon and tomato mostly, but is a little weak in flavour.

Cajun Squirrel is AWESOME! I insist on everyone trying it and voting for it, since it has absolutely no chance without word of mouth behind it. Please pass this along, fellow bloggers or persons unknown - we can do this, and be proud that the British have the weirdest flavour of crisps on the planet. Maybe.

So Cajun Squirrel has my vote. So far at least.

Who's with me?

A

Movie Review: Hellzapoppin!

2009-02-07T01:15:00.004Z

7/10A

Myself and the inestimable Mrs Algo have taken it upon ourselves to try and fill gaps in our classic movie viewing histories along with the help of Empire's Top 500 movies, and our subscription to a DVD rental website (who don't pay me so why should I advertise?).

Ahem, all gaps except French films from the 1960s. I've seen a couple and they made me want to gnaw out my brain. I admit this is a prejudice and many people view French cinema as wonderful. I am not one of them.

The exclusion of French film means more time to see things a little more obscure and less cool (see Danger: Diabolik! for another example), and I was immediately intrigued by Empire's description of this film (and its place - 178 is a good 140 places higher than Airplane!) which I will quote here to back up why I was caught up in it.

"One of the darnedest films ever made, and a template for the who-cares-if-it- makes-sense-so-long-as- it's-funny? mode of comedy."

It's tough sometimes, as it was with seminal serious works like Seven Samurai and Citizen Kane, to make the important distinction between beats and cinematic moves which may feel like cliché now, but of which these were the first examples. The use of the word "template" was my clue (not "darnedest", not sure I know what that means anyhow).

Hellzapoppin' is not Citizen Kane. Not by a long shot. What it is, is a blueprint of future subversive anti-cinematic comedies like Blazing Saddles, Naked Gun and Airplane!

Amazing thing is, it was made thirty years before these, way back in 1942 during the war. It invites the audience to escape not only from the harsh reality of that world, but also from the dull repetition of formula movies - much as those more modern examples did for cowboys & indians, police procedurals and disaster movies, respectively.

Like those examples it takes as optional most of the conventions of movie making - Groucho Marx may have addressed monologues and jokes to the audience, but I'm pretty sure he never told the projectionist to rewind the film so he could see something again - and got his wish. Even if he did, I doubt it was in response to a dwarf exploding a taxicab.

At every stage the fourth wall is consistently broken and, in a very innovative move, other movies occasionally break into this one - sound familiar yet?

The comedy duo at the centre of this comedic melting pot are Olsen and Johnson (eagle eyed or elephant memoried readers will immediately note the Blazing Saddles connection) who, like a less successful Abbot and Costello pretty much sail through the middle of a dumb story while making the most of any opportunity for slapstick and wordplay ("A coat of arms!").

However - unlike those more mainstream comedies, the very movie itself is deconstructed too.

Here's how that works - the film opens in hell (obviously), and Olsen and Johnson are delivered there in a taxi...
(line - "the first cab driver who went straight where I told him to")
...and have a little fun making jokes as surreal events happen all around them, until the director of the movie stops everything and takes them to see a scriptwriter because you can't make a movie without a story. The scriptwriter chucks them into a romantic comedy with a plot described stupid by everyone involved - even the characters in it.

Getting the idea yet? This is a fantastically crazy, frequently headache inducing piece of cinema that I, for one, never anticipate seeing the like of. In my modernocentric, arrogant way I guess I had always assumed that many of the gags, surreal running jokes and setpieces here were simply too "modern" to be in a 67 year old wartime comedy. I am glad to be wrong.

Add in several outstanding comedy performances (the main duo, their Bronxian lady companion, the fake prince who isn't really fake etc) and a Lindy Hop dance sequence that starts out with the audience fearing a sort of mildly racist "black music" jazz sequence but morphs into the most extraordinary, celebratory and energetic dance section I have seen in a long, long time. Thought it should be noted that the African American contingent are all servants and quickly vanish out of the picture - it isn't THAT subversive.

The film is almost worth seeing just for this scene alone, but I have to highly recommend it to all comedy fans for its sheer exuberant subversiveness, anyway.

I cannot bring myself to give it a higher score for two reasons - first, while the romantic story is universally ridiculed and distracted from at all times, and obviously it is a satire on the formula pictures of its time, the two or three love songs are hideously mawkish, and the lovers (particularly the male one) are so immensely punchable it reduced my enjoyment a little more than it was supposed to.

The second reason I cannot score Hellzapoppin' higher is that despite its fast and furious gag rate about a third of the jokes just miss the mark - the innovation of others makes up for this in part, but particularly in the character of the private detective, felt a little dated and obvious in contrast to the rest of the general craziness on display.

It is for this exact reason I invented the blue A so take this as a totally fun, if not very cerebral, movie experience.

A fine example of something I didn't know existed - it comes highly recommended, so long as you don't expect anythign approaching sense or sanity.

'Til Next Time Folks!

A

Christian Bale goes nuts on set... so what?

2009-02-05T22:59:00.002Z

Many folks will have heard this already, but do an interwebz search to find it and hear why you should listen to the AD's instructions.

He basically goes postal on a lighting engineer who walks on set during a take.

Internet "buzz" is that he's been a total jerk and a lot of folks are saying they won't watch his films any more.

Why?

Are those people really assuming that all other movie stars are more sanguine and reasonable?

Also, there is a tradition on sets of people sharing negative rumours about stars since this makes them appear "in the know" and superior - this is much the same thing, people love telling the negative stories more than the good ones since they have better punchlines.

Seriously, how many people would care if you met Robert Downey Jr and he was "quite nice"?

Nah, you'll hear soemthing more "juicy" like he "seemed OK, but was totally up himself
(this means busy doing his job rather than listening to extras asking dumb quesitons and trying to be chummy - ed)
and I think he was on drugs!"
(this means he was happier and had more energy after lunch than at 6am. Duh!)"

You know whjich one will get people thinking you spent more time with him, though both are probably uninformed nonsense told in an attempt to rise above the mire of "moving clotheshanger" status.

As for me, I look at it this way - imagine that you got little sleep due to a late finish the night before, perhaps you have had a row with your other half - have a really hard scene to do today that you have had some trouble with and are just starting to get right when some fool walks in and spoils the shot meaning that all your preparation has to be started again.

OK, I don't know that's the situation, but it's just as likely as the - "the guy was minding his own business and Christian Bale just went mental" ideas that some people have had. Thing is, all the days that anyone works with nothing like this happening are never reported on - but every actor has their "moments".

I hope it doesn't cause him too much trouble, but you KNOW it will.

A

Cajun Squirrel?

2009-02-05T17:09:00.003Z

Last year myself and about 200 others participated in an excruciatingly long and tortuous day of filming at Charlton football club to advertise Walker's Crisps "Do Us A Flavour" campaign. Well, since the campaign was over by the time they paid us (grr...) they've really taken their sweet time choosing their flavours for voting.

But now, Walkers have finally decided on their six flavours for us to vote on this year to add another flavour to the age old set of Salt and Vinegar, Cheese and Onion, Prawn Cocktail, Roast Chicken and the original Ready Salted (I can't recall if Marmite and Worcester Sauce flavours are limited editions or not).

Here's what the folks at Walkers have chosen:

Builder's Breakfast
Fish and Chips
Onion Bhaji (I have tried them and they're weak flavoured and rubbish)
Crispy Duck and Hoisin
Chilli and Chocolate
Cajun Squirrel

I say they have chosen, because I have little doubt that the winner will be number 1 or 2, since these are certainly the ones that will be cheapest to imitate (except Onion, but these are rubbish) - and you can discount the 5 and 6 since however nice they are, I can't see too many people getting up the courage to try them.

Fish And Chips is SUCH A DULL FLAVOUR. Honestly. I hope I'm wrong though, since I anticipate this being the winner. We'll see.

I have bought all 6 and will let you know whether they suck or not. However, in the interests of my waistline (which is already too large) I will only have one pack a day.

Onion Bhaji is a bit insipid for my taste - and lets face it, all it is, is the curried onion flavour (since the flour bit comes from the potatoes). I think it's not really powerful enough to become a winner.

A

I must've been working the ropes when your hand slipped from mine....

2009-02-04T00:51:00.002Z

If anyone in the UK is yet to see the frankly transcendent performance by Elbow, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Chantage Choir on the BBC's own red button service I can't recommend it highly enough.

They perform the whole of last years Mercury Prize winning album, The Seldom Seen Kid.

I can't claim to know a lot about Elbow, and I've not heard much of their earlier albums (which I will now be seeking out as cash allows I'm sure) except for the single Fugitive Motel, of course.

They're a slow burner and a long term success story - something incredibly rare these days and since they seem like such genuine and grateful successes it is impossible to begrudge them much (though I do try). Please watch and enjoy.

A

Movie Review: WALL-E

2009-02-03T15:04:00.003Z

9/10

Regular readers (both of them) will be well aware that I am solidly of the opinion that Pixar are incapable of making a bad movie. A couple (Bug's Life, Cars) didn't float my boat as much, but are still fine examples of modern family entertainment. With the viewing of WALL-E I believe I have seen all their work and can make this statement with some authority:

When they are on form they are almost unassailably good.

In previous offerings, most notably Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille they managed to tread the line that almost noone else can, between kid friendly and yet rewarding to adult viewers with so much skill it looked effortless.

With WALL-E even by their own high standards they have scored big.

It tells the tale of the eponymous little robot who has been left on Earth to tidy up all the garbage choking it to death, while mankind goes off on a cruise.

His existence is fairly repetitive, though in years of solitude he has developed a personality and collects little bits of junk that capture his imagination. His soitude is interrupted, however, one day when EVE lands on earth, a sleek iPod styled robot who seems to be searching for something.

That's the whole premise, and in the first half we are shown, virtually dialogue free, an enchanting portrait of our leads - the dinky little robot and his sleeker companion. It encompasses romance, beautiful scerey and slapstick in a high point, if not only of animated cinema, but also cinema more generally.

It is inevitable then that the following section (some would say - "the plot") is not as perfectly realised and some missteps are made.

For example - I love Fred Willard. Genius - Best In Show, Spinal Tap? Great. He's also very good and very funny here as the President of the Company/Governemt who got Earth in trouble, but, and this is the key - it's ACTUALLY Fred Willard. Not his voice, not a MoCap facsimile like in Beowulf - it is actually him. On film.

This isn't a problem while WALL-E and Eve are on Earth with no comparison piece around, but as soon as you see the human race the use of actual film footage of Willard jars. Why, if he is real, are the humans CGI? And if (as is preferable), the humans are CGI why is he real? Sigh...

I also have reservations about the manipulative "oh no!" moment at the end (post repair - you'll know when you see it) which is hastily done away with for no more logical reason than we need a happy ending and just rang a tad trite considering the film's mature earlier approach.

But these are more minor problems than the time I am giving them reflects so I'll stop now.

Ben Burtt (he of R2-D2 and tie fighter sound fame) supplies the major character voices and all the sound design and he does a marvelous job, designing bloops, beeps and squawks that, as in the classic R2 style convey a whole range of emotions without ever completing anything approaching a sentence.

Earth is magnificently realised as a post urban decay nightmare, a nadir of littering and depopulation - it is testament to Pixar's commitment to their tale that they have no problem showing the robotic equivalent of a banch of rotting corpses (all exact replicas of our hero) being used for spare parts - something a more squeamish studio would have taken out at the pre-screenings phase.

The all too short space journey too is magical as it is a welcome change of pace. As with the story, the human spaceship is just not as interesting as Earth, but the bar is, by this point, set so high it is nigh on impossible to jump.

I have no hesitation in recommending it to your viewing pleasure. Enjoy. The first forty minutes are peerless in the field.

A

P.S. The DvD copy I had featured two "shorts" by Pixar Studios. One of which, BURN-E was a Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead type thing where it takes place parallel to the main movie as a little robot attempts to make a minor repair while at each step the main film's characters get in the way and cause more damage. It's OK, but not particularly inspiring. The other one, Presto, was exceptional, telling the tale of a Rabbit who causes his magician friend all sorts of Magic Hat related trouble because the guy won't feed the poor bunny. It's pure slapstick and just five to ten minutes of pure fun.

Snow Day

2009-02-03T13:37:00.002Z

Argh!

What's with the way the country's locked up completely thanks to Snow?

This is obviously as symptom of the New Labour pro-snow bias that is grinding this once great blah blah blah blah blah...

Seriously, five inches fell in Mum and Dad's back garden while I was watching the Superbowl (the only game of American Football I watch each year). That is a serious amount, and clearly causes problems of a very real kind that stop people being able to get to work and do what they normally do every day.

Of course, if companies allowed people more scope to work at home or on the move, they wouldn't be quite so crippled by a sudden change in weather (since the workforce could send in their work anyway from a different location).

I wonder if any will look at lost value from yesterdays snow day and think to themselves that a flexible attitude to worker locations may be worth the investment?

A

Keeping my hand in....

2009-01-29T23:31:00.002Z

I've been lazy so far this year and only posted occasionally.

Today you get Barack Obama anagrams.

Barack Hussein Obama....

....Has Samurai Backbone

(or Samurai Kebab Nachos)

A

Board Game Review: Android

2009-01-28T01:34:00.002Z

Since I put so much work into this, I thought I'd repost it here in case anyone (hah!) would like to read it.

It's a review of a very large and complicated board game by a large and very successful company called Fantasy Flight Games. This game is called Android and sees the players take the roles of detectives investigating a conspiracy and murder against the background of a dystopian future (think Blade Runner meets Space 1999).

The game takes place over two "weeks" (of six turns each, making 12 turns in total)

In these two weeks players assign guilt, uncover the conspiracy all the while playing cards to help themselves and hinder their opponents.

Much of this is spent moving to certain places seeking out leads, which you can assign to the conspiracy or murder suspects.

The conspiracy is discovered in the form of a rather ingenious puzzle that shows a maze of connections, where the links show which persons are involved.

I include it here more for the quality of the writing than trying to get anyone to play with me.

Click the link for the whole thing

===================================================================

I hope I can convey in this review what a game of Android is like and how it works. I also wanted to show you, from experience, how each game can be affected fundamentally by its most ingenious feature - the conspiracy puzzle.

My lofty aim is that this review can be followed and understood not only by those thinking of buying this game who have already done some research but also by those they intend to play it with (who may know nothing). I hope I can achieve this in general enough terms that we avoid a rulebook rehash,

Also, I am bolding certain sections of the post to show the "highlights"

I'm now up to 4 games played of Android and am loving it!

CAVEAT: I would recommend, from experience, that you don't try and teach four players at once! At least not while trying to play as well.

What I am currently liking a lot is how the different investigators are forced, due to their strengths and weaknesses, to take sometimes very different approaches to winning. Though I have never won

I was also impressed (as you'll see) by how despite the killing of one of their suspects in two consecutive games, the (same) winner still adapted and came out on top.

To people who don't know much about the game, I will explain its structure in very general terms. This next section is partially adapted from an email I sent to someone to see if they wanted to play.

================The Game itself - what is it?==================

Android is a game that, like many others, uses the universally accepted all-purpose nebulous currency of Victory Points (VPs).

The winner of the game is the player with the most VPs at the end of the game. (well, duh!)

The trouble is, every turn you have a very limited amount of time to do things - usually allowing for a total of 6 "time" points. The task you have is to use your time well enough to score many points, while fighting off other players traps and roadblocks.

Your characters have a lot of personal stuff to use and think about - a guilty and an innocent hunch to prove, their own stories you live through during the game, and two decks of cards, one that helps them, and one that hurts them.

The detail of the plots, cards and how they work is unnecessary for a review like this, but I think it's worth taking a look at how you can get those all important victory points.

There are three points scoring methods;

1. endings to plots (between -10pts and 14pts),
2. having the right hunches (0pts if unsuccessful to 25pts if both guilty and innocent is correct),
3. picking up tokens from three places (Haas and Jinteki token 3vp each, conspiracy line completions 4vp each).

Aside from scoring for completed lines (horizontal, vertical and diagonal sets of five) the conspiracy puzzle does something even more crucial - it can modify any or all the other points scoring methods by anything from 1vp extra up to potentially (though a not practical or likely outcome) a massive 16vp extra. It can also make things that are worthless except in exchange (the favours) crucial to victory.

=======So this puzzle is the key to everything?======

Not always, but perhaps.... the cool thing about the puzzle is you can only do it if you forgo your right (and time) to do something else important (namely work toward your hunches) - Android is a game where you have very limited time resources to do everything.

You can't afford to ignore the conspiracy though.

FWIW, I think the puzzle can easily be underestimated as a force in the game. Even if you don't want to spend time on it, rest assured that it will affect the outcome of the game significantly if someone else does.

To show this fully, take a look at how it affected our last two games.

=========================Last Weekend==========================

The conspiracy puzzle was defining in both games this last weekend, but in very different ways - take a look and see why.

In the game I played Saturday the conspiracy was complete by turn 4 - everyone wanted some of those crucial 4VP tokens - and the outcome of the conspiracy ended up benefitting the eventual winner most - who crucially had his Guilty Hunch killed off in the process.

The way the conspiracy does this well is that depending on the connections different things become important in different games. In this game it was Street favours - where else could you gain 3VP a turn for just 2 time? Nowhere! They soon ran out.

The other fascinating fact here was that thanks to all those connections, the Innocent hunches came out worth a full 11pts each, as opposed to the 5 they usually are.

Since Guilty Hunches were only worth 17, the conspiracy drastically reduced the points swing between guilty and innocent hunches (there's usually a ten point gap), leading to higher scores and a closer run result (1st Position had 56, 2nd 55 and third 53 - fourth btw had 45. Less said about 5th the better (-7!!!!)) I was third (behind my brother AND my wife, which shows the accessibility of this since Mrs Algo is only an occasional gamer) despite having the guilty hunch!

How did I only come third when I had the highest scoring thing, Guilty hunch, in the game - you may ask? It wasn't because I'm incompetent! Honest!

This was because my innocent hunch was the guy who had been killed (D'OH!), meaning I had lost those 11 points (though bro would still have won if he'd managed to keep him alive and guilty)

By contrast, in the second game I played, with three detectives on Sunday, with some of the same players (mum and bro) the conspiracy was virtually "pointless" though it led to the killing off of the eventual winners innocent hunch, and only Jinteki tokens had four extra points. What Raymond (me) was able to do, was bluff people into chasing Political favours (worth four each for most of the game) and on the last turn, turned the relevant conspiracy piece around and blocked off the relevant link meanign that their hard earned political favours were now worthless! I also totally monopolised the 4vp tokens by leaving no legal placement spaces for pieces very early on (about turn four).

I appreciate that without reading all the cards one won't know this last move could happen, and no-one knew it was coming, but it serves to underline the effect the conspiracy can have on final scoring. (1st place 35pts, 2nd 31pts, 3rd 16pts)

(another cool thing that happened in this game was that an event reduced our "time points per turn" by one for most of the second week. This meant our plans had to be changed on the fly)

=====Get to the point now, Algo!=====

The fact I still came second in the second game despite totally controlling the puzzle shows the flexibility and multiplicity of paths to victory in this great game - and the three player game came in at under three hours. I think this will see more play than TI:3 in terms of gaming hours!

Oh, and about that -7 score in the first game. That was my mum's score (and is a sad indictment of my teaching) BUT she still enjoyed the game enough that it was her suggestion we play again on Sunday. That game she got 16 (and would have had 28 save for my last turn butchery of her points with the conspiracy). I put this down to the fact that Rachel Beckmann appears to be a very tough character to play with rather than any particular poorness on mum's part. This detective seems to have it rough at virtually everything and her money vps didn't make up for it.

On the whole, I was very please I managed to teach the game to four people at once (on Saturday) with mostly success (sorry mum) and this was a hugely fun weekend, with games of Shadows Over Camelot, Princes Of Florence and BSG as well. Just a great, great weekend.

AND I got a Curry one night as well. Does life get any better?

==========Alright, alright. But is the game any good?=========

It REALLY deserves a look. I appreciate many will find themselves unhappy with some of its mechanisms and its harshness with "take that" methods of winning, but if you let it, it can become a fantastic way to spend your time.

Plus, it feels to me like, while playing Android, you are actually playing three or four games (a card game, a race to complete the puzzle, evidence placement and plots) all of which are interconnected. The three to four hour running time doesn't really hurt that much given this fact. Sure, you could play four to six games of Shadows over Camelot in the same time as a five player game of Android - my advice would always be DO BOTH!

Then I think about how you have 5 murders (or, minor rule changes to give it the boring explanation) to try out and five very different characters to play as.

While games are even more expensive than ever, and the economy is so bad I think this big box has ALREADY given me value for money at £8 a game or so, since a movie costs about that much.

=========Hmm, interesting, but it sounds complicated========

My advice to new players is not to get hung up on winning the first game so much. There's so much going on you'll get a headache and won't enjoy it.

I've never been too hung up on winning anyway (lucky, really!)) and I don't think anyone who views games as a social and fun activity can get too upset if their first game is a little unsuccessful points-wise (like mum!))

Take it easy and it'll all become clear, on average, about turn four. If you are really insistently unhappy at the disadvantage your mates may let the game be restarted and you can really go for it then.

If not - don't worry, just have fun. It's a fairly forgiving system so long as you keep an eye on your baggage (and remember draws are bad, just like in SoC).

================Wrap it up, half the audience are asleep!============

I'm very impressed with Android - I think everyone should give it a go, it is clear it does not work for everyone and that's fine, but everyone I have tried it with had a good time and got something out of it.

On a personal level, I am pleased with the variety, the value for money side and replay value.

I highly recommend it.

A

P.S. Thanks for reading and I hope whatever your views on Android or my review, your games are always as fun and memorable as this has clearly been for me. All the best!

The cat that nearly was...

2009-01-26T17:22:00.003Z

A plea for sympathy here, me and Mrs Algo took in an utterly gorgeous long haired marmalade coloured cat on Saturday.

Our neighbour found it in a deserted car park (it had no ID collar) and we grew a little fond of it over the weekend since the vets were closed til Monday.

I took it in today to check for a microchip.

Unfortunately (for us, not the cat) it did have a microchip in it and is even now back in the home of its loving family. Lucky sods.

Hooray! Good karma for us!

It's just that the place seems really empty now.

So we are spending the evening on Mario Kart and Shadows Over Camelot. At least my board game pieces are safe again!

Sigh... the moral of this tale is: don't get attached to the pet before you check the chip!

And the other moral is - always chip your cats!

So... anyone got words of sympathy or similar stories?

Or any jokes to make me laugh?

A

P.S. Oh, and Mrs Algo and I will be getting a cat soon anyway (that's why the neighbour thought of us), so its not the end of the world, but these things are painful at the time.

I'm free! Yay! Yay! Yay!

2009-01-24T10:02:00.001Z

Hurrah for Algo!

I am finally up to date with my film reviews and can get back to mixing them up with the occasional rant and thoughts on political issues of the day.

Don't groan and shake your heads! I saw that!

A sour taste - a measured response to Obama

2009-01-24T01:04:00.002Z

I want to sound a note of caution here.

There's nothing wrong with Barack Hussein Obama, and his ascension to the highest office in his land is nothing short of a fantastic gesture that shows how far equality has come in America since, as he himself said, his father's time - when said gentleman couldn't get served in many places.

But you know all this - it's all we hear on the news and read in the papers (or in my case on the BBC's excellent website)

I remain concerned however, by the proximity of religion to the office of President. I wrote last year about how disappointed I was that despite everything Obama is supposed to represent...

not by himself, but by the world's starry eyed media - except Fox of course

...The USA will have had both an African-American president and probably a female president before it has an atheist president. Actually, let me rephrase that - an openly atheist president.

Many of the world's most intelligent powerful people must have significant doubts about their supposed religions and I have no doubt that Obama is amongst them. An intelligent educated person must at least have some major questions about the sort of God that allows a whole town or a whole country to be drowned or allows women and children to be bombed for weeks because of a few militant nutters.

That is, unless they subscribe to the argument that New Orleans was flooded because of gays being tolerated there. Although if that's the case, given San Fransisco's proximity to the San Andreas fault I'm surprised it hasn't been dropped into the sea already by this twisted psychopathic logic.

This is beside the point, however.

All I wanted to say was that if a man must outwardly display religion to be voted President of The United States, what sort of separation of church and state is that?

I am hopeful, as most people are, that this new regime will not fall into the trap of equating religon with "right" and secular arguments as "wrong". That's no way to go forward.

A

Movie Review: The Seven Samurai

2009-01-24T00:39:00.003Z

10/10

Oh hell.

Well, you tell me.

What possible other score can be given to one of the most influential, intriguing and beautiful films ever made?

This, above many others, was the crowning pinnacle of the list of films I had never seen - I am pleased to say I was not in the least bit disappointed.

It is not an exaggeration to say that despite its mental running time of 210 minutes, not a single moment is wasted by the actors or filmmakers.

It can happen sometimes that these great classics can be a little tarred with age but with this masterpiece, like with the Apartment, age has neither rendered its powers irrelevant nor has it dimished the quality of the central performances.

For those who come into this review knowing little about the movie, if there are any left I will briefly explain why the first thing you do tomorrow (or right now) is add this to your shopping basket, LOVEFiLM rental list or wishlist.

It is violent, wistful, painful, funny, romantic (in the literal sense), hyper-real, epic yet focused, character driven while retaining scope and utterly unforgettable.

Many of the events, twists, supporting cast and sequences seem reminiscent to the point of cliché at times, but this is because of the influence of this movie, not its reliance on other people's ideas.

The central performance is frequently to be considered to be that of Toshiro Mifune as the child like yet unflinching Kikuchiyo, but the film belongs mainly to the incredible Takashi Shimura, who plays the lead Samurai, Kambei. He is morally unquestionable, noble of stature and yet human and humorous with it. It is an outstanding performance and it serves as the backbone of the movie. Success without his involvement is impossible - with him on "our" side, it seems possible, even likely.

It is, in essence, a siege movie, like The Alamo, or The Return Of The King's Minas Tirith section, but exceeds the former in style, and the latter in genuine impact. The impact is achieved mainly because of the build up, crucial to all siege stories in which we are introduced to just how bad things are for the villagers and how desperate they are get help.

I don't want to rehash the plot or the millions of positive reviews this film has already had, suffice to say that probably for the first time I had absolutely NO hesitation in adding it to the Wall Shadows "10 Club", in which there are, to day only FOUR FILMS.

(The Dark Knight, The Apartment, Metropolis and Seven Samurai if you've not been counting - very different films, all perfect examples of their genre)

A

P.S. I anticipate being made to regret the "what other possible score" rhetorical question.....

Quick Movie Review: The Count Of Monte Cristo

2009-01-24T00:27:00.002Z

5/10

I'm not sure what I was expecting here, really. The great classics have seen a very average set of movies based on them in the last thirty or so years - Man In The Iron Mask, Three Musketeers (with Keifer Sutherland and Chris O'Donnell!) etc etc. The best looking modern one (Terry Gilliam's ill fated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote) was never even made, though perhaps it will escape development hell eventually.

This is based on Alexandre Dumas' classic tale of betrayal and revenge.

A night where we didn't really have enough time to watch Seven Samurai and this turns up on TV, I decided to watch it and was pleasantly surprised - a fairly standard tale of repentance and vengeance, only rendered slightly silly that as in most good tales, all the French speak English with an English accent, except a woman who doesn't (because the actress is actually French) and all the Italians, Spanish and English. Who also speak English with an English accent but occasionally break into other languages to show they're foreign. Except the English who don't have the choice.

This problem may be due to the fact that directing this piece of period tosh is none other than "the" Kevin Reynolds who is responsible for Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, which has entered into legend as the ultimate in silly accents, geographical errors and historical misconceptions.

Dumb accent nonsense aside, I had a reasonably good time with the movie - scenes came and went without particular impact, a reasonably long "cameo" from the late great Richard Harris and a decent central performance from Jesus himself, Jim Caviezel.

Everybody else is neither here nor there really, Guy Pearce plays a possible Spaniard with occasional Aussie inflections with sneering gusto, but is far from convincing.

All in all a reasonable way to spend a couple of hours, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see it again.

A

Quick Movie Review: American Psycho

2009-01-23T19:54:00.004Z

7/10

An imperfect adaptation of a REALLY weird book it may be, but Christian Bale is superb as the worlds least stable trader. Actually, I'm not sure about that. After all, he doesn't do a lot of trading in this film, though if memory serves he did a bit in the book.

What he does is sit about listening to some of the most godawful music, spouting pseudo intellectual reviews of low rent pop albums as if they're great works of art.

This is pretty much the point - Patrick Bateman has no life (or opinions) of his own - the pinnacle of the world for him is to have a better business card than his colleagues. In fact, the only opinion he displays is popular opinion, hence his mantra like music reviews (I even get the impression they are verbatim repeating of reviews he has read).

And his mania is truly clear when he calls "Duke" the best Genesis album. If that doesn't show he's a menace to society, I don't know what would.

I have to tread carefully past his actual acts of violence for two reasons - one will become apparent as you get to the end of the film, the other is that they're really not that important. Sorry, but that's just the way it is - the film is about the compromising of your soul in the pursuit of wealth and accepted "success".

Thing is, Bateman has lost any ounce of humanity he once had and is, by his own admission, an empty suit - a facsimile of a businessmen, but wihout anything close to normal human emotions or feelings. He spends the time his Fiancée is talking about the wedding listening to Robert Palmer for goodness sake!

If all the performances seem caricatures this is because that is what they have become - the process of success has turned them into these barely human creatures.

What Bateman can't accept is that he is, on the face of it, incredibly successful - but STILL gains no respect from his peers and decides to take it out on those below him.

Of course, it's not quite that simple, but what is, really?

A

P.S. IMHO, the best Genesis album is Foxtrot. Watcher Of The Skies, Can-Utility, Get Em Out by Friday and Supper's Ready? Easy choice.

Movie Review: Danger: Diabolik!

2009-01-20T13:38:00.003Z

4/10A

Now then. If this film was marked for cmoic book accuracy and style alone it would get a much higher score.

It's based on an Italian comic book (or, "fumetti") about the escapades of a master criminal, the eponymous Diabolik. He's a sort of masked nutter with mental eyebrows and a supervillain's laugh, whom we first meet stealing ten million quid from a rolls royce. By stealing the Rolls Royce.

He quickly returns to his lair, a crazy sci fi masterpiece of kitsch.

Oh, not to forget. He has a REALLY REALLY gorgeous girlfriend. I mean, it's absurd how beautiful she is. There's a lot of female flesh on show really, from gangsters' molls in bikinis to society ladies in gowns. Despite all the lovelies populating the world Diabolik's relationship remains entirely monogamous throughout the tale and this is refreshing and kind of sweet.

Of course, sweet in the loose sense since these two are randy as rabbits in spring, and spend the first ten minutes of the film shagging on the ten million quid.

This is the sort of use that Diabolik puts his winnings to - he has little interest in spending his money and is more interested in the craziest and more difficult scams. At one point he decides to steal a gigantic 25 tonne gold ingot that is welded into solid steel. If that ain't a useless bauble I don't know what is.

The film is mental - the acting extreme, and occasionally bad, the effects, while inventive are incredibly cheap (at one point, an aeroplane is created using a 2d drawing and what looks like a stepladder for the boarding steps) and this means that despite this film being a superior work of story and filmmaking than the far more campy and intentionally funny Batman movie from a couple of years previous, it doesn'ty really achieve anything more than moderate success.

It's apparently a massive cult movie and I can see why, it's immensly and purely CULT - I think it's worth seeing for anyone who's into superheroes and supervillains, 60 movies, or even just pretty ladies.

So in summary, it's not a great film, but I greatly enjoyed it, that gets it an A.

A

Movie Review: All The President's Men

2009-01-19T21:22:00.003Z

8/10

Damn lack of cash prevented us from double billing this with its spiritual sequel, Frost/Nixon, but it seemed appropriate since this week sees the end of the reign of what will almost certainly be remembered as the worst president bar Nixon (who was corrupt, but at least apparently competent).

This is, of course, the story of the reporters who chased down the leads and told the story of what would become known as the Watergate scandal (giving birth to the irritating habit of ending controversial things with "-gate" eg Pizzagate, Sachsgate, Stargate.. well maybe not the last one).

Annoying journalist clichés aside and looking at the film we have a true story on our hands, and one in which there will not be a satisfying payoff to enjoy, since all of us know that Nixon was never charged for his involvement.

It is to the film's credit that despite being hampered by a need to relate true events sensibly, the tale is told with tension and interest. This is partly due to the story being a fairly incredible one in real life, and partly to do with the strength of the cast.

Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman are excellent as Woodward and Bernstein (or collectively, "Woodstein") the leads and anchors for the tale. The supporting cast is also particularly good, with the evr dependable Jason Robards is superb as the idealistic yet realistic editor in chief (he won an oscar for the performance.

It's all shot in excellent film-noir style, with atmosphere in spades especially during the sequences where Woodward meets his key contact, Deep Throat (hur hur) and the fear that develops as the journalists go deeper and find out the true extent of the conspiracy.

That a true story so well known and covered can be exciting and interesting nevertheless is all due to thehard work made by the cast and crew. Unfortunatley I can't help but think the film came slightly too soon for things to wrap up nicely, the end when it comes is all too sudden and there's little in the way of emotional or moral climax as a result. Everyone is also very earnest and well meaning in their performances and noone looks like they are having fun in their roles, possibly due to the proximity of the events and the protagonists in the tale are mostly still alive (if not at liberty).

The film while it lasts is very good, I can't help feeling with a little more breathing room it may have been a classic.

A

Quick Movie Review: Killers Kiss

2009-01-19T21:08:00.003Z

5/10

It's an odd beast this, a fairly obvious and interest free plot with no fine performances and little going for it in the controversy stakes.

So not the most auspicious first line for a review! Even having said that, there are many things to enjoy in this movie. Why? The x-factor is that of its director, one Stanley Kubrick.

It's his first big picture (waaay back in 1955) and even then his mind melting talent for shot composition and subverting the unwritten rules of filmmaking mean that the film looks incredible and way ahead of its time.

Unfortunately this is the best thing that can be said for it, as it failed to pull me in, and only occasionally rose above average status.

A

Movie Review: The Apartment

2009-01-19T20:43:00.003Z

10/10

Let's face it, how many comedies have an attempted suicide in? With this obvious classic from 1960, director Billy Wilder saw fit to darken his palette even further, with a tale of moral bankruptcy, greed and sexism.

In the course of the first ten minutes, as with its illustrious predecessor Some Like It Hot, it is clear this is not your usual screwball comedy. Cary Grant would have been a high powered lawyer, Jimmy Stewart would have been a politician, but Jack Lemmon is perfectly suited to the role of.... insurance clerk. And not a high powered one either! This is a man who is at the bottom rung of his organisation - a guy at a numbered desk who has one asset - his apartment.

In return for consideration and favours from the office bigwigs, he lets them use it for secret trysts with their mistresses (and they ALL have one) so often he has to keep a diary and take bookings. He stays at work and can only go home after they're...er... "done".

The film's depth is obvious when it becomes clear that the protagonist is not being forced to do these things, but is using them to climb the corporate ladder, and possibly to impress the charming lift girl with whom he becomes besotted. It is all his idea.

His choice is between the accepted norm of "furthering your career" and that of being true to who is really is.It becomes clear both through the story and Lemmon's performance that while he gains success throught the use of the apartment it leaves him thoroughly alone and thoroughly miserable.

The casting of Shirley MacClaine is another of the films Aces in the hole. She is so lovely, so sweet and so likable you can't help but almost fall for her yourself, and her piteous situation is all the more affecting because of it. I may be biased, since it is very possible she has bewitched me with her bright eyes and happy smile.... (sigh) but her performance is as pitch perfect as it is dark.

I don't really want to eulogise about the films every plot point, or its integrity (it never compromises itself with indulgence or self mockery) so I will simply say this: see it! see it! see it!

In my opinion it is superior in most ways to Some Like It Hot.
It really is that good.
In fact, I believe it's bloody perfect.

Flame On!

A

Movie Review: A History Of Violence

2009-01-19T20:26:00.003Z

7/10

A fine example of less is more filmmaking this, from a past master at chucking all sorts of unnecessary gore about, David Cronenberg. Unlike some of his other work (The Fly is reviewed elsewhere on the Blog) this is a measured, thoughtful adaptation of the original story, from a comic book, sorry - a GRAPHIC NOVEL.

The difference between a comic book and a graphic novel is a useful tool to describe how this movie is different from many others. If we look at, say, SAW as an example of comic book movie making, all bangs and flashes, then the graphic novel approach is immeasurably more mature and sensible. If you've read something like Batman: Year One or Watchmen then you'll know that while both are ridiculous in premise as ever, but show a maturity and grit missing from the original campy superheros. Even men in tights can be improved greatly by the Graphic Novel approach. Many other artists and writers have told more down to earth stories in graphic novel form, and this is one of them.

Should say though, there aren't any superheros in this one - this is a very sensible movie about a fairly ridiculous situation - Viggo Mortensen is reliable as ever as a man who inadvertently attracts all sorts of attention after killing two would be robbers in his diner. None of it is particularly welcome, but the arrival of a group of gangsters who claim to know him from years ago, and who harbour a grudge, is definitely the least welcome of it all.

All the acting, from Mortensen to Harris is absolutely fine and dandy, and the story is intriguing too - though I was expecting a bigger twist than that which eventually comes, and the direction is sane, yet nuflinching, focussing on sudden acts of violence which seem fairly realistic, though the final confrontation with William Hurt's character veers a little too close to comedy for some people to stomach, I'll wager.

Overall I had a great time, I'm not totally sure this is for everyone though, since its morals are a little ambiguous - and the realistic but fairly open ending may irritate rather than excite.

A

Quick Movie Review: Black Christmas

2009-01-14T14:38:00.003Z

7/10

I admit a mistake. I always thought the original "slasher" movie was John Carpenter's 1978classic Halloween. I was wrong, apparently. The original nutter witha knife picture appears to be 1974's Black Christmas, a by now hackneyed story of a deeply troubled young man who scares the women in a house silly before picking them off one by one.

Having pointed this out in advance, it's understandable that its hard to approach this film without the oodles of thrity year old baggage telling you this is an obvious and innovation free genre.

To be fair, there's nothing here that hasn't been done again since, from the indecisive cops to running upstairs instead of out the front door. There is one caveat, since this is the originator any fan of the genre should check it out in the same way that sci fi fans should see Forbidden Planet or Metropolis so you can see the blueprints for the future films you enjoy.

Go on!

A

Movie Review: The Proposition

2009-01-14T13:46:00.004Z

8/10

I'm a western fan. Not all of them leave a good taste in the mouth but many are epic and majestic in scale while being very focussed on the message they want to put over and the characters in them.

This particular film is not a Western in the literal sense but in the stylistic sense there is nothing else it could be. It's actually set in Australia, during the period in which the land was being settled and "civilised" by the British and turned into a viable colony.

We are introduced to all our main protagonists immediately, Guy Pearce plays a hardened criminal, Charlie Burns, who left his brothers gang after a recent atrocity, taking their youngest brother with him. Problem is they've been caught by the local law, in the guise of Ray Winstone's troubled cop, Captain Stanley. He offers them a "proposition", namely that he won't hang the youngest brother if Guy Pearce is prepared to go kill his older brother, who is responsible for the atrocity we hear of at the start.

We basically go on from there, as Winstone tries to hold down the fort at home, while Pearce heads off to find his brohter, who is hiding in the outback with the remaining gang.

I really enjoyed this film in fact, though I was concerned as its scriptwriter is Nick Cave of all people - and some of his harsher, blackly comic outlook has clearly made it through the filmmaking process to affect the final result.

Acting is all excellent, though the real standout performances are those of Winstone as Stanley and that of his wife, Martha, played by Emily Watson. Their relationship is a rare one, in that it is solid as a rock from start to finish - even when they have the major set to their arcs requires, you always feel that love remains strong between them.

It's not perfect, naturally, while the concentration of a larger part of the movie than usual on the Winstone character is refreshing it does mean that Charlie Burns and his journey feels absurdly quick. With one short altercation with Joh Hurt (who clearly relishes his part) his trek is over, and we are at that point just waiting for him to come to a decision.

But really, this is a complaint for the purists to have. This story is far more concerned with the other part - back at the town - and how the township's desire for vengeance turns them into monsters, perhaps momentarily but undeniably.

The soundtrack is a bit odd too, occasionally so strange that the mood is quite defined by how you reconcile the music with the action. This may be annoying for some people, I thought it was innovative and quite refreshing.

I liked this film considerably, you may not, but its in the television merry-go-round now, so won't cost you anything to see next time. Check it out.

A

Wall-Shadows review score distribution

2009-01-09T17:21:00.003Z

I must admit, good old Gary got me thinking, so here is the distribution of scores so far.

Unfortunately, me and OpenOffice are having a little domestic so I couldn;t get the X-Axis labelling right.

To get the score then, subtract 2 from the row name underneath the bar.

Scores start at "Row 2" with 0 and end at "row 12" with 10.

As I expected it displays a skewed distribution (since the selection of movies to watch is not random) but it still shows the classic shape just peaking at 7 instead of 5.

With this in mind I find that I am happy with the first 10 months reviewage and will continue on the path I tread now.

A

Thin ice, but you'll get my point.

2009-01-09T02:08:00.005Z

Over the Christmas period myself and my lovely wife watched a film of Richard Pryor's standup.

It was very funny.

A portion of his show is dedicated to the differences between black people and white people, along the lines of White people being a bit uptight and black people being not so uptight.

Now, this is all fine (and very, very funny) but how many white performers would get away with similar humour? Someone like Jimmy Carr is happy to have bash at jokes about religion, politics or taboos like incest but how many does he really tell about race?

It has its roots in something very "white". SHAME.

Classic Shame material is The Black And White Minstrel Show - here's something shameful:

Look at this! A guy colouring himself as a different race and performing demeaning and pathetic stereotyped behaviours of that race in order to get cheap laughs. Sick and wrong.

But look at this:

How is this any different? This film grossed more than 8o million dollars and is JUST as racist as the Black And White Minstrel Show. Was that even an issue? Nah.

It's also total arse as movie go, but even if it was genius on Blazing Saddles or Airplane! levels it would still be just as racist.

But why don't we moan about it?

Oh yeah - SHAME!

We "white folk" did things that were as bad once, true. That doesn't mean other races have the right to be annoyed about them AND THEN DO THE SAME THINGS!

If you do the same thing then you lose any moral high ground you had on the issue!

I mean, if someone I love is killed in a car accident, that doesn't give me the right to come and run over the son of the other driver because they did it first!

Sigh. Rant over.

A

Would you say that I had a PLETHORA of reviews?

2009-01-09T01:56:00.003Z

Oh yes.... you have a plethora!

I promised you'd be seeing reviews appear and golly here they are!

I'm still a little behind but I'm back on track and should be right up to date in the next couple of days.

To explain the shortness of many of them; I originally wrote one post and wrote them all in it, but thought I may as well separate them out for linking purposes. I hope you enjoy them. the only one that has content you need to click through to read is that for Fear City.

You may also notice (especially Gary over at musings cafe, who hates me doing this) that I have already awarded the first 10/10 of 2009. Simply put we have saved some real all time classics from our LoveFilm list for after the Christmas period (tomorrows movie is Kurosawa's Seven Samurai) and I have little hesitation in saying that The Apartment (which I have never seen before) truly deserves such lofty praise.

Full review to follow.

A

Quick Movie Review: Battle Royale II

2009-01-09T01:49:00.001Z

5/10

I really liked the first one. This one is stylish and exciting, but makes no sense. The characters are no longer desperate and believable, they are absurd in contrast to the schoolteacher played with such genius by Takeshi Kitano in the original, we have another who just left the panto stage by the looks of it. The plot is simple, the references obvious (The Alamo/Butch and Sundance much?) but its message is unclear - are we, in this day and age, really meant to be siding with terrorists? I mean, things aren't always blacka nd white, but this seems distasteful especially since the shot which opens the movie is these terrorists levelling 7 or 8 city skyscrapers full of people.

I am undecided as yet as to whether this weird message is hateful or not, but at the moment it gets a "meh".

Movie Review: Fear City

2009-01-09T01:45:00.004Z

2/10

It's harsh to bash a film you know is going to be awful, but this was my Christmas present from my old buddy Chris (who I incidentally bought Tobe Hooper's Crocodile for his birthday, so I deserved this). We are connoisseurs of the crap film, having especial love for the triumvurate of Tom Berenger, Billy Zane, and Arnold Vosloo. Of these three, this film only featured Tom Berenger but gave us the bonus rubbishness of Melanie Griffith and Billy Dee Williams.

It is gloriously terrible, though not in the fun way many of our movie choices are, and about halfway in I found the comedy gave way to a seeping depression. What's the movie about? Wel, some freak is killing strippers and other "scum" on the streets of the city. Our heroes run a talent agency for strippers and Tom himself is a retired boxer (he killed a guy in the ring, btw) and they eventually decide to try and stop the killer themselves.

It makes many horrific and hilarious movie errors, one is that it allows a whole sentence of dialogue to be slowed down in the boxing flashback ("yoooooooouuuuu! whhhhhhhyyyyyyyyy diiiiiiiiidn'tttt yoooooooouuuuuu stooooooooop theeeeeeeee fiiiiiiiiiiiiighhhhhht?), the bad guy is played by a martial artist who can't act so his dialogue is limited to a voiceover that seems to have been written by a teenager and it equates hand waving with character development.

But what of our stars? You may well ask, Berenger is not known for his range, and even this role is too much for him. Melanie Griffith gets her tits out a lot but is not prepared to kiss her (female) lover since that would be distasteful (!) and Billy Dee WIlliams clearly doesn;t want to be there. I mean that literally, his dialogue is delivered in a style only describable as "early finish". It is the most phoned in performance I've seen for ages.

And there are a lot of breasts. It's as if the director just shot a load of footage of the strippers (poor choice of words there, for which I apologise) and then had to justify it to his wife by including as much of it as possible. Like all seedy little movies of its kind, the women's strips don't come over as sexy, more grotesque and depressing.

These films survive to be watched due to a form of ridiculousness that renders them sort of "cult" - surely noone looks at the box for this, or for that matter Crocodile and thinks they are going to be good? Especially when you consider that for the price of three of these bad movies I got a copy of 2001: A Space Oddessy (at least, when I bought it that was the price).

Nevertheless even for connoisseurs such as myself and Chris, you're better off with something else.

Very Quick Movie Review: Carry On Screaming

2009-01-09T01:45:00.001Z

6/10

The best Carry On for me barring Cleo. Dated as hell, but worth watching just for the joy of spending time with Fenella Fielding, who is literally smoking hot in this movie. And that's a correct use of "literally" by the way. For trivia fans, I looked up the guy who sang the theme song and it turns out he's a famous poet too (actually, it's Ray Pilgrim singing it).

Quick Movie Review: Airplane!

2009-01-09T01:44:00.000Z

9/10

Simply put the best of its kind, if a joke doesn't make you laugh never mind, there'll be five along in the next two minutes. Solely responsible for the comedy career of Leslie Nielsen, it makes a genius move of mainly casting people who were "serious" actors up to that point, which gives them the ability to deliver lines as silly as the old...

"They've got to get to a hospital as soon as possible"
"To the Hospital? What is it?"
"It's a big building full of sick people, but that's not important right now"

...with a straight face, rendering them a lot sillier. Everytime I watch it I experience something new or forgotten, like listening to the tannoy announcers have a domestic at the beginning, or the pilot who has to talk the plane down stepping through his mirror.

Genius.

Quick Movie Review: Lucky Number Slevin

2009-01-09T01:43:00.002Z

6/10

Not half as clever as it thinks it is, this is a fairly enjoyable post usual suspects romp in whcih a man is mistaken for an indebted mob crony. All ridiculous from start to finish but studded with a fine if limited performance from Bruce Willis (didn't know he was capable!) and a good one from Lucy Liu. The baddies are silly, the plot is obvious, the twists inevitable. Nevertheless, I at no stage felt particularly bored.

TV Review: The Box Of Delights

2009-01-09T01:43:00.001Z

7/10

Strictly it's a TV serial, but we watched it as a three hour movie, and it's ok in this format. It's traditional to watch it every year (Mrs Algo gets the shakes if we don't) so its score, like that of Three Amigos! is a little questionable, but it retains its magic despite some of the most dated effects I saw all year (and I'm a Blakes 7 fan!). The cast is great, as ever the lead is irritating and nowhere near as talented as half the reast of the kids. Robert Stephens shines as the villain,a nd Patrick Troughton who I love in everything is pure fantasy genius. The last episode is a bit of a letdown though, especially the "and it was all a dream" finale.

Quick Movie Review: Sinbad

2009-01-09T01:42:00.000Z

5/10

Dreamworks. Poor old Dreamworks. You try and try but no matter what you do people can't stop talking about that Pixar bunch. Well, maybe you need to take a leaf out of their book and invest in better scripts since this obvious moral message movie has little of the charm of Toy Story, or even Cars. It's well animated, and the voice cast is more than game, but it's nothing special. And come on! If you're doing Sinbad you need stop motion. It's the law.

Quick Movie Review: Scrooged

2009-01-09T01:41:00.000Z

7/10

Bill Murray has always been one talented guy, and here he makes a fairly silly retread of the old Christmas Carol story rise above the pitfalls of bad fashions, mullets and general 80s evil money grabbing scum. Karen Allen is perky and lovable as his lost love and the Ghost Of Christmas Present gains a lot from her reimagining as a borderline psychotic with a penchant for punching. In the age of greed it was probably an ideal time to tell this story again, and cheesy as it is it's one of the better movies made for the Christmas market.

Movie Review: The Golden Compass

2009-01-09T00:02:00.003Z

3/10

Oh bloody hell.

If you like the books by Philip Pullman much of this movie's runtime will have been spent in incredulous dismay, wondering where on earth the plot, place and excitement went.

Possibly it was squeezed out of the movie in the process of emasculating its atheist, or at least anti church, message.

If you are entirely unacquainted with the very reasonably sized and priced set of books that is the omniously titled "His Dark Materials" trilogy I will attempt to explain the central problems I have with Hollywood's wholesale rape of these without ruining the books for any yet to experience the genius of the first two (and a fair portion of the third).

Do read them though. They are very good. This film, however, is not.

The pretext and context is an acceptance of the "many universes" theory in modern physics, that is to say that there is a potentially infinite number of potential universes, differing in anything from giant amounts to very little. In this particular universe the population are accompanied at all times by animal "familiars" called for whatever reason, Daemons.

Other than that this reality is also a sort of "steampunk" alternate Britain and Europe where enormous zeppelins travel from city to city, and a Cowboy rides a Balloon, rather than a horse.

In the book these are all described in detail and in effervescent realism - so why it was impossible to capture any of Pullman's magic world in the cinema is beyond me. All the technology, while pretty, feels as solid as the CGI that makes it up.

The actors, big names and otherwise, are all trying very hard to tread a fine line between throwing themselves into things wholeheartedly and retaining just enough aloofness to distance themselves from any actual emotion or involvement. The main culprits are of course Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman, both playing their stock characters (aloof brit, aloof brit) with about as much conviction as cardboard plays bricks. The child actors do their best, of course, with some success but our leading young lady is clearly a posh lass doing her best "common" voice and this gets in the way of her performance like all bad accent work does. I don't want to get on the poor lady's back though, since this is the beginning of what may be a fine career - so long as she is allowed to play to her strengths in future.

With a movie based on as complex source material as this is made, there is a danger lurking in the background.

There are a lot of characters and a lot going on at any one time.

Lord Of The Rings, in order to manage its movie makeover, cut swathes of events from the story and remains focussed on a central journey in order to avoid a load of disparate events just sitting next to each other like unconnected scenes from different films. The actors spent ages together building up real bonds of friendship, of fellowhip, that really come across on the screen.

The original book here (Northern Lights, or the Golden Compass depending on editions) is nowhere near this level of complexity and yet still the movie fails to avoid this major pitfall. Scenes come and go at a furious pace, many of which serve little purpose - most obvious in the Magisterium (more on them later) scenes, we gain no feeling (as we did in TLOTR) that any of the characters have any idea who the others are. At no time do we believe Derek Jacobi even knows Nicole Kidman is cast as Mrs Coulter in the movie, so little do his scenes flow from the prior ones. Christopher Lee's two second cameo as a nameless, faceless cardboard cut out is virtually worthless; responding to dialogue he probably only read two minutes before he was filmed speaking it.

And this is a good time to assess our evil enemy, The Magisterium. In the book, this is obviously the Catholic Church in parallel world format. In the movie, it's some weird evil government - the equivalent of the faceless paranoia feeding governments in, say the ghastly Fortress or Running Man.

The decision to remove the overt religion from The Golden Compass' villains destroys the sense of the story's central conflict; between the religious conception of what innocence and freedom should be and genuine innocence and freedom.

Of course, they haven't taken all the references out, since the story really wouldn't hold together at all, but is expressed in such a watered down form (someone did something bad and dust came into the world) that the actions of the Magisterium make absolutely no sense at all. Only something as insidiously self righteous as religion can explain the willingness of anyone to carry out this inexcusable plan to "cure" the children of the world of sin.

Only one character comes through the lemon squeezer safe - that of Sam Elliot's Lee Scorseby, though I reckon this is only because the character is basically Sam Elliot in the first place.

There is no character development, replaced with a series of setpiece fights and effects laden sequences that owe little to Pullman and more to Hollywood marketing. The giant fighting bears are well imagined and executed, for sure but they are not convincing as characters, the whole background of their honour system seems to have been distilled into little more than the guidance notes they asked the casting director to follow with the voice actors. Ian McKellen brings, however, much needed gravitas to the role of a giant drunk bear - a character which voiced by, say, Ben Stiller would be a joke in Ice Age 4.

Add to the panoply of dreadful errors of judgement the decision to cut the story short of its hideous conclusion, when a perceived hero shows their true colours and muddies the moral waters considerably, and this film begins to feel like a real stinker.

It did not do well at the box office, people either avoiding it because they are offended by the books controversial reputation or, if not, seeing through its hollow shell. Needless to say the series that would probably have arisen out of this movie if sucessful is not being made, so if you did really enjoy the film (I'm sure many did), in order to get the real story you'll need to read the books anyway.

Unlike the movies of Lord Of The Rings, which felt like a worthy companion to and retelling of the highlights of what is one of the 20th century's greatest works of fiction, The Golden Compass is an object lesson in exactly how to mess the same thing up. Devoid of any of the books depth, either in feeling or character it is impossible to recommend unless you really are bored.

The books (at least the first two) are superb. Read them instead.

Til next time folks, I am as ever...

A

Very Very Quick Movie Review: Wallace And Gromit: Curse Of The Were Rabbit

2009-01-08T23:57:00.004Z

9/10

A near faultless tale with everything you could possibly want, from references to famous horror films (I was particularly impressed with the reimagined scene from Frankenstein with the police inspector) to a blossoming romantic love all with Aardman's usual wit and attention to detail.

Love it! Love it! Love it!

A

P.S. Told you it was quick

Quick Movie Review: Three Amigos!

2009-01-07T19:05:00.002Z

7/10

When I was young this was the film we watched on birthdays every single year.

We watched it this year as part of a highly enjoyable evening of Mexican fun, with a large buffet and margherita selection on offer, and as a result Three Amigos is seen through a haze somewhat of chilli and tequila, but still bears up.

It marked the end of the credible (imho of course) careers of three giants of 80s comedy, namely Martin Short, Steve Martin and Chevy Chase.

It features a frequently told tale of ordinary guys becoming heroes and the like, but also throws in some dumb slapstick too.

It's no classic for sure, but it will always have a special place in my heart, from the singing bush, the invisible swordsman and all to the outrageously attractive leading lady. From the ridiculous outfits worn by the amigos to the unexpected solution to their troubles ("sewing!").

I won't go into huge detail since the love of this film is pretty much a personal matter, and maybe if I saw it for the first time now I'd find it trite and predictable - I hope you saw it when you could still find it funny.

A

Movie Review: Beowulf

2009-01-07T18:32:00.004Z

4/10

There aren't many films where your review reading will be associated almost entirely with the technical side of things, since I don't usually care much, but since this film is all technique and little heart I am forced to mention some of the things I'd usually avoid.

As you may well know, the film is made using a motion capture technique similar to the one used to such great effect with Smeagol/Gollum in the Lord Of The Rings films. This renders the movement of each of the characters more realistic than traditional animation and presumably a bit quicker to animate (since the actors do that for you) so more time can be spent on the process of rendering and wireframes etc meaning that the look of the film is fantastic - lush colours and vast wildernesses are created and remain totally in the control of the filmmakers.

Now, I'll be positive first and say that in many ways this technique is sucessful - the film looks great for the most part, and certainly the digital nature of the "camera" means that impossible tracking shots and action photography are possible, with none of the green screening or bad mapping that can characterise such sequences in composite work.

Much advantage is gained from this, so that the fights that bookend the film are some of the most impressive you will see and have a massive scope.

Unfortunately as with so much digital stuff it is the emotion of people's performances that just doesn't come through the process. While the classic "dead eyes" problem that has dogged most computer games (which this resembles more than anything else) is for the most part avoided with dancing firlight and reflections the participants don't resemble much more than animatronic puppets, and there is less emotion or range in their performances in my opinion than we get from Aardman's Gromit - and he doesn't even speak!

Also, the slight changes to people's appearance, noticable in the face of Anthony Hopkin's Hrothgar but most of all in Ray Winstone's Beowulf; rather than being clever is just distracting - they look very similar to their real life counterparts but just differ enough to really distract you. Add to this the bizarre fact that Grendel's mother appears to have high heeled FEET and the character design is just plain odd.

Ah yes, Grendel needs some respect, for two reasons - first he is truly grotesque and the art direction is fantastic for his twisted form plus he is performed brilliantly by the always reliable Crispin Glover (Marty McFly's dad!!!) so its a shame that the story requires his removal so early on. Other performances are fine, particularly Hopkin's jaded king Hrothgar but none are really exceptional, being buried under so many gigabytes of information - plus I still question how good a performance can really be in a blue room with no set props or art design to work with.

The certificate of this film also leads to a strange emasculation of the tale's violence, which while still present is not particularly bloody or convincing - and the sequence where he fights Grendel in the Great Hall resembles nothing so much as the old Austin Powers sequence (when he walks around naked and various things cover his wedding tackle "hilariously") so it raised too many laughs from me to affect in the way it was attempting.

The other problem I have is with foley.

In case, like Mrs Algo, you didn't know what foley is, it's the recording of sound effects you wouldn't normally notice, such as the rustle of clothes, the jangle of jewellery or swords etc or maybe someones footsteps crunching through the snow. Almost universally these effects are absent, as is the wind frequently noticable by its abscence, this may not be a big issue for some of you, but for me it drew me right out of the idea that this was some kind of "realistic" CGI and put the film right back into the cartoon pigeonhole. The absolute apeothesis of this is the scene with the queen and the young woman on the battlements... no wind, no rustling clothes, no nothing. Just dialogue. For me it's a big problem.

It's a shame since maybe with a 15 certificate (or even better an 18) and some foley work I'd probably like this film even more, but maybe I've penalised it based on missed opportunities.

Nevertheless, it gets a lowly 4/10 for its crimes.

Til Next Time!

A