read, watch, listen

chronicle

2012-02-03T11:24:00.003+11:00

Before I’d even seen this movie, I’d seen enough previews for it that I’d planned the review in my head. I was going to draw a comic which had three stick figures and went something like: THREE GUYS HAVE A WEIRD THING HAPPEN (picture of figures next to whatever gave them powers), GET POWERS (picture of them freaking out, waving their little stick arms), EVERYTHING IS FUN (picture of them doing fun thing), OH NO IT ALL WENT HORRIBLY WRONG WHAT A SHOCK (picture of them all dead with crosses for eyes). And look, my prediction wasn’t far off, because I have been to movies more than three times in my life and I know how these things go. But instead of cursing you all with my awful drawing skills, I’m actually going to give this a proper review, because it deserves one.

Chronicle opens with high school senior Andrew (Dane DeHaan, appropriately sulky and gawky) setting up his new video camera to record his life: his physically abusive, alcoholic father; his dying mother, strapped to machines in her bed; his school life, where bullies torment him mercilessly and the only person who gives him any time is his philosophical-stoner cousin, Matt (Alex Russell). Andrew doesn’t do himself any favours by bringing a video camera to school and creeping everyone out—in fact, he’s generally unlikeable, but wholly sympathetic regardless—but it comes in handy when, at a warehouse party, he’s summoned by Matt and the school’s gosh-darn endearing Mr Popularity Steve (Michael B Jordan) to a strange hole in the ground. They go underground, the camera gets fuzzy, things are weird, then bam: they are back in the sunlight and suddenly the three of them have developed telekinetic powers. All right! Awesome! This could never go wrong!

The movie succeeds because the three do exactly what you (well, I) would do if you had telekinetic powers. There’s a nod to the Lego video game franchise as they build things with their mind; they skim rocks over rivers; they use a leaf blower to blow up the skirts of the pretty girls. (Hey, I didn’t say they were mature about it.) They start small as they learn to control their powers, and the three develop a close bond—but it doesn’t take long before a harmless prank gets dangerously close to a fatality and the three lay down some ground rules, including the most important: don’t use the powers when you’re angry. However, teenagers do angry really well, and when things go wrong, it happens on an epic scale.

The movie centres around Andrew, as the one with the camera, but all three characters feel convincing: they dress and act like normal people, are occasionally jerks and frequently humane. Matt’s squirm-worthy attempts to prove to a girl that he’s, like, cool, but, like, above being like popular and stuff are painfully endearing; Steve’s determination to be a good politician see him take on Andrew as a challenge, where they use their powers to gain him popularity in the most wholesome way possible. Even Andrew’s jerk of a father has some depth: you hate him, but you have some understanding of him. This, all told in what is essentially a found-footage film (though both Chris and I had thought of the phrase “lost-footage”, as the movie uses footage from cameras that are destroyed, CCTV footage, people’s iPads and so on) is very impressive; it even dodges the problem of Andrew never being on camera when he gets the idea to control it with his mind so it is always looking at the scene from a short distance. The special effects are faultless, which makes the movie’s many tricks—small or large—great fun. The boys never break from character, and Chronicle tracks in an hour and a half the path to villainy that George Lucas barely achieved in the first (second?) three Star Wars movies.

Chronicle doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test—there are women, but they never talk to each other—and you do occasionally want to take Andrew by the ear and get him to the counsellor’s office for a thorough discussion about emotional control and dealing with turmoil at home (and finding somewhere new to live—or a way to get his father in jail.) But on the whole, Chronicle is a surprisingly excellent film that doesn’t bother too much with the why of getting superpowers (because really, who cares?) as much as what kind of person you are, and how you deal with them when you have them.

I give it four out of five car rides to school.

the skin i live in

2012-01-16T23:32:00.002+11:00

Like the birthday kid at a swimming party, you’re thrown in in the deep end of this head-scratching psychological thriller and left to flail about helplessly for about the first half hour before someone throws you a flotation device, but even then, it’s maybe the equivalent of three ping-pong balls rather than a lifejacket. What this does have at the start is a brylcreemed Robert Ledgard (Antionio Banderas), craniofacial plastic surgeon extraordinaire who lives in a sprawling Spanish estate; Vera Cruz (Elena Anaya), a beautiful woman who wanders around a sparsely furnished room wearing nothing but a body stocking; and a house full of servants who seem totally at ease with the fact that Robert has a woman locked in a room in his house. Why she is there, why Robert has video cameras in her room that feed into his wall-sized television and why Marilia (Marisa Paredes)—his longtime housekeeper—is so complicit in the captivity so badly is the soul of the story, told back and forth in time from the death of Robert’s wife up to the present (actually the future, as it’s set in February 2012.)

I wouldn’t dare spoiler anything for you, but be assured the horror of the story—and you will be horrified—has little to do with the new, resilient skin that Robert is experimenting with and more to do with the horrendous acts people commit. If you aren’t in a position to deal with sexual assault on film, stay far away from this one. Not only are the scenes convincingly awful, as the experience must be, but the confusion surrounding them can make for an uncomfortable viewing. I’m loathe to say more and ruin the movie, which held countless surprises, but there you have it. It touches on a few sex/gender issues as well, which Pedro Almodovar has done in the past. Having a director out there game to try some new stuff is great, but I guess I feel a little out of my depth in commenting too much on it.

So, onto things I know! I know I generally love Antonio but found him completely alarming in this film; I know that the acting was amazing from everyone. Almodovar is adept at getting nuances out of actors who get offered Western roles that aren’t quite as meaty (Penelope Cruz, for example, is excellent in Volver but more popular in the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, where everyone is required to be melodramatic) so seeing Banderas in a role where he wasn’t likeable was hard—because usually he’s so lovely in them—but also impressive. The choppy narrative style was an interesting route to take and, luckily, fell on the side of compelling instead of annoying (though I probably annoyed everyone around me by whispering my confusion at Chris every five minutes.) It was a very narrowly landscaped film—we get a feel for Ledgard’s home but not the environment around it, and only a few other settings, which means it doesn’t feel particularly Spanish (apart from the fact that it’s in Spanish and subtitled) and instead feels appropriately claustrophobic.

It’s a confronting, engaging, revenge-driven flick filled with relationships you’re continually unsure of. Who do you hate? Where does the right of revenge end? Why do people ask rhetorical questions anyway? Well, perhaps I’ll stop and just rate it something high like eight out of ten tiger stripes.

As requested by the lovely Afsana

hugo

2012-01-09T17:27:00.002+11:00

The ten-minute introduction to the movie Hugo, before the title card even reminds you what you’re at the cinema to see, is an absolute popcorn-gobbling delight of special effects. As we follow the titular hero through the labyrinthine pathways that make up the landscape of his home—living behind the walls at a Parisian train station—we pass through cogs and pendulums and down slides and up rickety stairs, all merging seamlessly together to create an entirely new and beautiful world. Seeing this in 3D is even more incredible, and is an immediate way to engage your audience so that they’re staring slack-jawed with glee within moments.

The world of young boy Hugo (Asa Butterfield) himself is not so lovely. It’s 1931, and, orphaned after the death of his clockmaker father (Jude Law) in a museum fire and sent to live with his alcoholic uncle, his life goes from quiet contentment to ruination. Unable to go to school, running the station’s clocks is his only job, but one he must do perfectly in case anyone notices that as the movie begins, he is now alone, his uncle having abandoned him. Apart from the clocks, Hugo spends his time tending to a broken automaton his father found in a museum, trying to find parts for it—or to steal them from the station’s toymaker, Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley) out of view of the orphan-catching Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). After an altercation with Georges that sees him lose his father’s notebook, a precious memento that also holds the clues to fixing the writing-robot that is his father’s only legacy, he thinks all is doomed. But wait! Because it’s an adventure story (and a self-referential one at that), an effervescent girl named Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz, adorable) is waiting in the wings to befriend him, even though her guardian is Georges himself. And between them, they may just hold the not entirely metaphorical key to everyone’s angst—Hugo’s emotional and mechanical problems, and the secret her godfather has been keeping for years.

Hugo is a love letter to cinema itself: not only in its visuals, but in the subject matter and in the characters themselves. Hugo’s father adored cinema and took his son to films, whereas Georges has never let Isabelle see a movie in her life. There is a glorious line to make all movie-lovers sigh, as Hugo tells Isabelle about the first time his father had seen a movie: “He said it was like seeing his dreams in the middle of the day.” The history of film is touched on as well, as the first one shown—a train pulling into a station—causes the entire audience to shriek and run as the train barrels towards the camera. Connected to it all is cinematic genius Georges Melies, whom you might remember from a particularly referenced and adored film scene where the moon cops a rocket to the eye. Any movie about movies is one that floats my boat, and this is lovingly rendered in every way, where the recreations of hundred-year-old special effects still have the power to amaze, and the loss of film can cause the loss of much more personally.

Quirky French touches abound, as the station’s other occupants—flower-seller Lisette (Emily Mortimer), the object of the Station Inspector’s awkward affections; cafe owner Madame Emile (Frances de la Tour, one of three Harry Potter actors in the film—she played the French giantess); and newspaperman Monsieur Frick (Richard Griffiths, second Potter-person, Uncle Vernon) dance around each other and create a lightness and sweetness that the movie’s occasionally sad moments need. Moretz is a delight as an enthusiastic counterpart to Butterfield’s quiet grimness, and Cohen does a wonderful job making the initially dastardly Inspector a sympathetic character (it does take a while to warm to the man, though. What kind of jerk throws orphans in a cage?)

However I couldn’t really bond with Hugo himself, a character with a genuinely sorrowful backstory but who in Butterfield was unable to sell me on any of his emotions or the reasoning behind some of his actions. Sadly, this made him one of the least interesting characters in the movie for me. Papa Georges’ backstory, while interesting and visually entrancing, is not quite enough payoff for the build-up surrounding it—so I enjoyed the movie but still left the theatre feeling slightly unfulfilled. I do recall feeling the same way when I read the book as well: that I was hoping for a dramatic reveal and was underwhelmed. Characters frequently did the frustrating trope where they don’t explain their actions, choosing silence over logical discussion and making the movie stretch out into devastation when it could have been remedied by a nice chat over a cup of tea.

But it’s still a fun film, and kudos to director Martin Scorsese for doing to 3D what the mechanically brilliant young Hugo does to a mechanical mouse—injecting it with something new and wonderful. I give it eight out of twelve o’clock.

In Australia, Hugo is released January 12.

the girl with the dragon tattoo

2012-01-02T11:52:00.006+11:00

David Fincher: he’s great, isn’t he? The Social Network was one of my favourite movies of recent years and he also made this little-known flick called Fight Club that you can’t mention in a sentence without everyone in the vicinity falling over themselves to sputter out their adoration of. He’s a talented director who knows how to craft addictive movies with an original edge.

So why, oh lord why, did he choose to remake Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish film that was perfectly capable of telling the story already? Why did he waste months and years of his precious filmmaker time to give everyone a third outing of the Millennium Trilogy? 30 million people worldwide have read the books; the first film made over a hundred million smackers. This is not some obscure gem that needed a fresh facelift: it’s all tremendously modern and already available in literary and film formats. So the question is: what did Fincher hope to achieve with his version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and did he succeed? He claims that it is a completely different film from the Swedish version, but it’s not, of course. When they both work off the same source material, a dense brick of a novel with elaborate backgrounds for each character and incident, they are going to hit the same beats. Yes, it is different, because someone different directed it and the actors are different. Yes, it’s different because everyone speaks in English with Swedish accents (though they read Swedish-language newspapers.) But honestly, apart from a small change in the ending, it is the same film told the same way, and you’ll feel exactly the same by the end as you would at the end of the Swedish version. (That is: paranoid about government agencies, horrified by all men and never able to have sex again.)

It’s hard to see past that to judge the film on its own merits. Of course, it’s wonderfully cast: Rooney Mara captured the damaged (and thin) look wonderfully to be computer hacker/ward of the state Lisbeth Salander; Daniel Craig is the perfect age to be disgraced but excellent investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist; and Christopher Plummer is expansively patriarchal as Henrik Vanger, the wealthy industrialist who inadvertently brings the two together to solve a forty-year-old crime: the loss of his beloved niece. It’s not all Agatha Christie innocence, however: you will be disturbed, by the outcome and also by many scenes disturbing in both sexual and non-sexual gore (Lisbeth’s relationship with her new guardian Bjurman—Yorick van Wageningen—is especially something you’ll want to cover your eyes for.) The growing friendship between youthful Salander and craggy Blomkvist is convincing and enjoyable to witness; the peripheral characters are portrayed just about as you’d imagine them. On a visual level, Fincher perhaps overtakes Oplev purely because where Oplev sees the place he lives and conveys it in a natural way, Fincher sees it from our non-Swedish perspective, revealing the white, icy beauty and Ikea-white angles of homes and buildings. His intro, also, is quite mind-blowing, as a soft, tender tinkly piano barrels into a tar and sweat-soaked Karen O intro as Mara and Craig sex things up in an edgy, oiled-up way along with an eagle, a snake, and some raunchy flowers. Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor score the whole flick with requisite rage and gentleness.

Lisbeth’s use of Google and Wikipedia to track someone down seems to undermine her enormous talent in the hacking field; the Swedish accents sometimes slip; I felt that despite the epic running time—nearly three hours—Lisbeth’s storyline was not given enough time; during a Eureka moment for Blomkvist he makes such a ridiculous show of taking off his glasses in mute shock it seemed like a cliché in what is otherwise a very cliché-free movie; and in frustratingly Hollywood way of thinking, female Rooney is given countless crotch shots and appears fully naked frequently while male Blomkvist (who is polyamorous and hardly a prude) reveals his chest and the barest hint of butt-crack.

Still, these facts don’t at all ruin the film. Fincher’s use of actors in their natural, often makeup-free state is commendable (and something I enjoyed about the first movie trilogy); the long running time doesn’t mean the movie drags—it’s enthralling from start to finish; Mara’s Salander, like Noomi Rapace in the Swedish version, is an absolute treat of a character, scarred from a lifetime of people screwing her over but with a raspy charm all her own: wearing a t-shirt saying “Fuck you you fucking fuck”, explaining Blomkvist’s background to the man who has hired her: “Sometimes he performs cunnilingus. Not often enough in my opinion”—she really is amazing and is the new style of heroine everyone says she is. It passes the Bechdel Test (barely) and, in Sweden, is called Men who Hate Women, so the women are smart and not underwritten.

By all means, go see it if you’re unable to see the Swedish version—it’s a well-crafted film telling a wholly interesting and grotesque family crime story. But without it showing me anything new about the story (which admittedly, I have possibly overdosed on), it is still a vaguely pointless exercise. Because of this, and my clear ragey bias about it, I’m not going to give this movie a rating. See it for yourselves and let me know what you think.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is out January 12.

attack the block

2011-12-05T15:12:00.002+11:00

Attack the Block begins with a bunch of teenage miscreants mugging a young woman named Sam (Jodie Whittaker) at knifepoint in the a London street. During the altercations, an alien shoots from the sky, whereupon the kids beat the thing to death then parade it around on a stick. At this point, you’re pretty much thinking, great, I hope this alien’s friends fly down and kick the shit out of all these kids and claim the tall flats they live in as their base. I, for one, welcomed our new alien overlords.

But then you end up following these kids through their incompetent attempts to defeat the sudden influx of aliens and, dammit, after a while you don’t want them to die after all. Led by moodily attractive teenager Moses (John Boyega), the gang come across as quite threatening to begin with until you realise that actually they are all pretty incompetent because they are, well, yoof. It’s Guy Fawkes Night, and they were out to create havoc and striving to be part of the gang led by the block’s main criminal mastermind, Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter). Just as they finally strike it lucky enough to actually be on their path to, well, jail, more aliens rain down on them and everything changes, seeing the gang on the wrong side of everyone, from the police to Hi-Hatz to an irate Sam.

Having kids be the protagonists for a horror/sci-fi movie is pretty interesting, especially when director Joe Cornish chooses to be open about the facts that not all accidental alien-hunters are going to be as skilled as the team from Predators. These are kids who don’t have guns or fighting skills, but instead heed the call to arms with baseball bats, firecrackers, kitchen knives and false bravado. When shit gets real and they finally twig that they’re out of their depth, they can’t call for help because they’ve all run out of mobile phone credit; when they speed down staircases on their pushbikes they inevitably crash into the ground because they are not bicycle parkour enthusiasts. Despite the fact that the majority live quite standard home lives, getting told off by their mothers or told to keep out of trouble by their nannas, they’re all too desperately rough to turn to the grown-ups when being chased by deadly critters. And that’s the other thing, with them being kids: even though the movie is kind of funny, it’s not a balls-out comedy which makes it all the more surprising when you realise that not all of the teenagers are going to live out the film.

The film briefly touches on the state of British youth, when Moses speculates that the aliens have been sent by the Feds to kill the African-British because “we’re not killing each other fast enough”. It’s a nice try, but the fact that the kids, apart from Moses himself, seem to have fairly happy upbringings and some kind of self-awareness of what they’re getting into, means the movie doesn’t go far enough down that path, and you’re not even sure if any of the gang have learned a lesson by the end of it.

Nice touches are the aliens themselves: neon-fanged black holes of colour with no depth, like an orang-utan shagged a yeti in a dark cupboard using a glow-in-the-dark condom with a hole in it. The idea that colour shading would be different on a different hadn’t occurred to me and I thought it was really interesting, to be honest; it makes them shadowy and creepy even when they’re in a brightly-lit flat. It isn’t laugh-a-minute funny (which, as it’s from the writer of Hot Fuzz and stars Nick Frost, I was expecting), but it’s pretty amusing and the dialogue between the kids (who are also great actors) can be pretty hilarious at times. The two nine-year-old boys looking up to the gang are probably the comedy relief, flinging around tough phrases in high-pitched voices. It passes the Bechdel Test and the women in it—Sam, an elderly neighbour, and the girls the gang are all interested in—are pretty kick-ass, either physically or verbally.

Nick Frost’s high billing probably has to do with his star power more than his subdued role as a stoner in the only “safe house” in the building, though he and befringed try-hard Brewis (Luke Treadaway) smoke their way through some fairly funny moments. It was a fun movie that somehow missed a vital point with me, though I can’t think exactly what; I’d recommend it happily, even though it wasn’t quite cranked up all the way on either the funny, poignant, sci-fi or horror dials.

I give Attack the Block seven out of ten rows of glowing teeth. Because rows of teeth are SCARY.

the ides of march

2011-11-28T14:29:00.003+11:00

Despite my general lack of knowledge about the intricacies of politics, I don’t mind watching movies with a political bent. After I wrote that sentence, I had a think about political movies and realised that they’re mostly satires (and I do love a good opportunity to say “Oooohhh, sick presidential burn”) or thrillers (“No, Mr President! There’s a bomb on Air Force One!”) and political dramas are not that common. Perhaps it’s because it’s a very limited point of view—to discuss politics in depth you often have to know how one particular country’s system works—or maybe because it gets played out on the news every damn day and you need something much more interesting to make people want to pay to see those in power tell lies and wear power suits. The Ides of March succeeded, I’ll hazard a guess, by populating the movie with actors that everyone admires: George Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman. These are people who attach their names to things that are generally great, so even if the dramatic ad campaign for The Ides of March didn’t give much away—treachery! shouting! manipulation!—we all knew it would be worthwhile.

And that it is. Sometimes I feel with movies that are a bit out of my reach of knowledge that I will say they’re good just so I don’t appear to have missed the point (not in reviews, dear readers, you know I don’t lie to you—but in conversation); American politics are not my forte, but even so, I felt I had enough of a grasp of what was happening to follow it. And that it a very good thing indeed. George Clooney (who also directed) plays Governor Mike Morris, a Democrat who is not only handsome and charismatic but would clearly never be elected to any kind of office because he holds dear all those things that politicians should—tax the rich, be pro-choice—but never do because they would lose all funding and the conservative vote. It all adds up to someone it’s easy to get behind for the sake of the movie, anyway. It’s the primaries—which means his current battle is against another Democrat, Senator Pullman (Michael Mantell) to see who will win the right to go for the position of president. This whole enemy-within-your-own-party thing is a little strange and something not all countries do, but hey, for the purposes of the movie all you need to know is that Clooney wants to beat that other guy and rule the world, so even if you don’t know what primaries are, it doesn’t really matter. Assisting our beloved George on his campaign trail are his team of media-savvy folk, headed by Paul Zara (Hoffman) and Paul’s 2IC, the boy wonder Stephen Meyers (Oh-My-Gosling.) They do their best to get Morris saying the right things to the right people and round up the team of interns (including the lovely Molly Stearns, played by a very pale Evan Rachel Wood) to lead the way. Elsewhere, journalist Ida (Marisa Tomei, playing a normal person for once) is out for a scoop; Senator Pullman’s own campaign manager, Tom Duffy (Giamatti), has his eye on Steve; and Senator Thompson (Jeffrey Wright) holds all the cards for those who will pay. It all builds up to what seems like it will be a more overarching political drama until a particular scandal comes to light and changes everything, for everyone, for better or for worse.

The acting is unsurprisingly excellent, though Gosling (who is my favourite actor of the moment) can lapse into a pretty vacant stare sometimes which I find unnerving. The cinematography and Alexandre Desplat’s soundtrack make for very intimate drama—you feel unexpectedly involved in Steve’s life, despite knowing nothing about what he does outside of politics (probably nothing) or anything about his past (apart from that he’s possibly mad at his dad). The moment it is in danger of becoming, well, not slow but possibly mired in political heaviness, the tight script then takes the movie down a different path and reinvigorates everything. Sometimes you feel almost emotionally blank towards particular events, and then one seemingly throwaway comment will bring everything back to being quite personal and real. It really is an amazingly well-crafted movie, much like Clooney’s previous directorial effort Good Night and Good Luck.

Alas, it fails the Bechdel Test pretty solidly; there are women in it—Molly, Ida, Governor Morris’s wife Cindy (Jennifer Ehle)—but they are too busy being vampy, traitorous or motherly to have any time to talk to each other. After a quick check of the Bechdel Test website, someone even points out that there is a moment when Molly talks to a female doctor or nurse, but the scene is completely without sound. It seemed poignant at the time, but upon reflection, well, no. Women are not given enough to do in this movie, and it’s disappointing, to be honest.

I give it seven and a staircase out of ten levels of the top levels of the United Nations (and that, my friends, is a reference in the film that I did not understand at all.)

the first grader

2011-11-20T22:36:00.002+11:00

Kenya, 2004: the government has just announced that school is now free for everyone, and kids everywhere launch themselves at high speed—I’m not even joking—at the nearest classroom. Woefully undersupplied and with only 50 desks for the 200 kids there, one particular school is doing it tough. And one more student is determined to attend: 84-year-old Kimani N’gan’ga Maruge (Oliver Litondo), survivor of a brutal uprising fifty years earlier, desperate to get the education he never did, and learn to read so he can understand an important letter he has received in the mail.

The story of Maruge’s taken-from-real-life trials, from the past to the film’s present, are in turns uplifting and devastating, the whole film perfectly pitched for the M rating it has in Australia but far too heartbreaking and reality-based for me to really try and be funny about. The children, singing, getting up to shenanigans and being generally adorable, lighten the tone, as does Maruge himself, who is clearly a man of hope. This is further strengthened when the viewer is pulled into his past, an unfathomable place of violence and horror where your toes and your children will be taken without a thought. Witnessing these scenes is nothing short of horrible and I was openly weeping in the theatre during them. You probably will too, and you’ll know what I’m talking about when it happens. The movie tugs at heartstrings in small ways and large, from moments as dramatic as the spilling of blood or as poignant as watching Maruge’s desperate plight to get into the school in the first place—told he can’t be there without the proper uniform, he uses part of his meagre savings to buy pants and turns them into shorts himself, then turns up in black shoes, long striped socks, shorts, a shirt and a blue jumper. His spirit is what buoys the film; his, and his teacher’s. Jane Obinchu (Naomie Harris) is determined to see him get taught despite the risks both professional and physical she brings upon herself by doing so.

There are moments of obvious exposition at the start, with Maruge remembering his wife and children as he moves about his home, and Jane on the porch with her husband as he tries to convince her to live in Nairobi with him and make babies while she tells him clearly that she wants to help the school. Despite radio announcements about Maruge’s schooling and journalists from the likes of the BBC shoving microphones in his face, you never really get a feel for the scope of Maruge’s influence locally or worldwide on a personal level. Rumours start about people being angry but it’s unconvincing; none of the parents ever come up to the school and give any valid reason why, and one permanently sour-looking father does a lot of glaring and is dangerously proactive about it, then fades into the background instantly afterwards. These aren’t huge gripes, however; you know me, I can’t like anything without pointing at some things and barking, “But if I was director, that would be different! Also there would be smell-o-vision and more Danny Trejo.”

Something as moving and hopeful as The First Grader needs to be seen to be believed, and you should see it. There are virtually no white people, and, thank the movie gods, none who come to save the day; it passes the Bechdel Test; Litondo’s acting is so expressive that he can make you want to cry just by staring into the distance; the enthusiasm of the kids for learning is infectious; the history lesson unforgettable; the message one we can all stand by: Learn. And don’t be an asshole. (I’m paraphrasing.)

I give it seven out of the ten tissues you’ll have to take with you.

don't be afraid of the dark

2011-11-07T09:44:00.002+11:00

It may be a remake of a 1973 film, but it’s a good title, isn’t it? Of course we’re afraid of the dark; most scary movies would be nothing without shadows for bad guys to jump out of. And these bad guys are smaller than the ones you’re probably used to being scared of: tiny, withered monsters, freed from the grate of a basement. (These movies always make me glad that I’ve never been in a house with a basement, surely why Australia constantly tops “Liveable Country” Lists.) To be honest, this is pitched more at a younger market so most adults won’t be scared to go to the car in the dark after seeing the movie, but there’s a few scenes of genuine terror that might scare your kidlet out of losing the nightlight for, oh, fifteen years or so.

The central character of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’s all-round excellent cast is headed up by Bailee Madison as Sally, a young girl shipped from her mother’s possibly-over-medicating arms to her architect father Alex (Guy Pearce, not quirky for once), who is working on restoring an enormous mansion in Rhode Island. She’s instantly miserable, especially when she realises that her mother got rid of her indefinitely rather than briefly and that Alex’s girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes, mostly dressed in sacks) is going to be sticking around. Just when living in a gigantic, beautiful mansion with two people who love you and a maid who makes apple pie seems like it couldn’t get any worse, the family uncover a basement hidden under the house, and unleash a tribe of stabby little gremlin-type monsters who love to feast on people. Well, specifically, people-bones. But will anyone believe a kid with a history of hardcore sulking? I mean, what would you believe if your clothes were found cut up: that it was your angry stepdaughter, or monsters that eat teeth?

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is getting some pretty bad press but it’s not really a terrible movie. Like virtually all recent horror flicks, it has a lot of flaws, but you could do worse than seeing this at the movies one night when you’re bored. The set design is amazing, the house’s landscape beautiful (with touches of Pan’s Labyrinth, thanks to the obvious touches from producer Guillermo del Toro) but unfortunately under-utilised. The actors, mostly Australian, are top-notch (and include, peripherally, Garry McDonald, apparently finally broken by his Mother & Son matriarch; Nicholas Bell as a greying therapist; Jack Thompson as the cranky but wise gardener), including Madison, who is an absolute treasure, delivering glares like a seasoned child-of-a-divorce but who ultimately just wants to be loved. (Aw.) A grotesque opening prologue delivers some serious cover-your-eyes squick straight away, and, as with all these types of films, it is endlessly frustrating yet understandable when people—especially adults—won’t believe you when you tell them there’s monsters out to get you. And these monsters are pretty damn icky, perfectly rendered special effects-wise with not a moment when they don’t seem physically there. They are revealed early and come out in dim enough light to be seen pretty clearly; they hold up in the light but as with many monster-flicks lose something in the reveal. The ending, as well, is a shock when you are hoping for the happy-la-la ending of many teen-aimed horror films. One thing absolutely worth mentioning is that it passes the Bechdel Test repeatedly, with women talking a lot about a variety of things, and that I was unexpectedly thrilled to see that when the family got around in a car, Kim did all the driving and Alex sat in the passenger seat.

On the downside, the tension isn’t directed all that well; you’ll be nervous, but not scared. The creatures can take on a grown, ragey man but when confronted with a sobbing nine-year-old swipe at her without making contact just long enough for her to be saved. When people fall, it’s always right on their head so they get knocked out. (Why is this? Do they not know that if they stay unconscious more than a few seconds it usually means some serious brain damage? Pretty much everyone gets tripped/falls and bonks their head instead of breaking their outstretched arm like a normal person.) Not enough is made of Sally’s mental state; she turns up to the house on Adderall and a comment is made on her past, but instead of making this an interesting discussion about child mental illness they brush it away, assume the medication isn’t necessary and even after a violent incident, suspicion doesn’t fall on her (or anyone, even when the particular incident is clearly not self-inflicted. It’s actually really frustrating.) Kim comes across as pretty selfish at the start, which makes her hard to relate to; also, she and Alex have inappropriate conversations that Sally overhears at more than one different moment, the repetition of which which cheapens Sally’s initial hurt through the amazing power of cliché. Important moments become plot holes—why does Sally not point out the twitching critter arm to a crowd after she victoriously squashes one? Why do critters that like to eat children’s teeth NOT ONCE get referred to as Tooth Fairies? And to top it off, the survivors’ underwhelming reaction to the horrific ending left me full of a rage I dare not elaborate upon, because, well, spoilers.

It’s not excellent but not appalling, well produced and quite a pretty film. I wouldn’t take anyone younger than, say, twelve to see it, but it might really hit the mark for a youthful audience. Don’t avoid it, and don’t be afraid of it. I give it eleven out of twenty baby teeth.

in time

2011-10-30T23:09:00.002+11:00

In Time has a good idea behind it: everyone’s now genetically engineered to age only until 25, when they then have one more year of life they can add to only through hard work (or robbery or theft). The poor, like Will Salas (Justin Timberlake, shorn) live in a ghetto in one timezone, scrimping for every minute and trying not to be robbed by gangsters like Fortis (Alex Pettyfer, rough) and supporting his mother (Olivia Wilde, are you kidding? So hard to get behind this idea.) However, just over in another timezone, you have people with more time than they know what to do with, including businessman Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser, perfect) and his daughter Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried, not blonde.) What happens if someone like young Will gets pissy enough—and lucky enough, thanks to an unexpectedly timely (haha oh god there are many time puns to be had here) donation, to try and level the playing field?

It’s an interesting concept ruined once you try to think about it longer than thirty seconds. It’s an allegory for the power money has over people: after all, if you can’t afford shelter, food, or medical care, what hope do you have? And in this current economic climate, it’s true that few people hold most of the money just because they’re horrible examples of humanity. And it’s a pretty fun movie on a very base level, with a man hell-bent on revenge, a beautiful young woman who can’t help but be attracted to a man from the wrong side of the tracks with superior morals, an oily bad guy, some horrible thieves with cultured accents and a (time)cop who just wants to uphold the law, no matter who’s breaking it. But ultimately, it fails, because:
1) They never explain why society evolved like it did. I’m happy to take leaps of faith, but you have to give me something.
2) There are so many corny time/money jokes, it’s like someone as cheesy as me wrote the damn thing.
3) Why does everyone stop aging at 25?
4) Who would agree to have their child implanted with an under-the-skin digital clock that has a timer?
5) Cillian Murphy, while awesome, cannot pass as twenty-five.
6) Why does a civilisation advanced enough to be able to pass time through skin contact not have any other technological advances apart from a CCTV system that conveniently follows no one but important characters?
7) Why does everyone drive 70s-noir muscle cars like they’re in Mad Max?
8) Honestly, it is just really, really impossible to ever believe that a society would turn out this way, even being as pessimistic as I can muster.
9) You only ever see one evil fat cat in Kartheiser’s Philippe—does no one actually rule this world, or the countries, or the timezones? Is no one actually in charge?
10) And seriously, why the hell is everyone in this world skinny? This just makes no sense at all.
11) The future doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test.
12) How does it all WORK??

On the upside, there’s some good casting (Alex Pettyfer and Vincent Kartheiser are stand-outs), it trundles along nicely, and the Robin Hood aspect of Will and Sylvia’s criminal spree is something you can really get behind. It really has to be said that having everyone’s timers on the verge of running out half every second scene makes for some seriously intense viewing: anyone can die, at any time.

In Time isn’t the worst thing you could spend your afternoon watching, but if you really want something juicy this week, go see Drive.

I give it twelve out of twenty-five years.

the thing

2011-10-21T22:58:00.002+11:00

Back in the best year of all, 1982 (three guesses when I was born, folks), a movie came out known as The Thing. With the release of 2011’s The Thing, 1982’s The Thing has been referred to frequently (well, by me at least) as The Original The Thing, though people have been saying there’s an Even More Original The Thing that came out in 1951. But that was called The Thing From Another World, so I’m going to continue by calling John Carpenter’s smack-down-great movie The Original The Thing and Matthijs van Heijningen Jr’s new actually-pretty-good-prequel The New The Thing. Though it’s set before Carpenter’s. Ahem.

For those who have seen The Original The Thing, you’ll know it starts with two Norwegians in a helicopter chasing a dog at the South Pole, and the subsequent shitstorm that follows, because aliens. The New The Thing tells the story of how things got to that point, and luckily, it’s not really a spoiler to know the beginning of The Original The Thing.

The Norwegian base camp at the South Pole has made a discovery: there is an alien structure beneath the ice, one dated from a very, very long time ago. And alongside this structure, something else is found: the inhabitant. It’s the most important discovery in science, and the Norwegians need to assemble a team to make sure everything goes according to plan. [insert scoff here].

The worry of creating a subtitled Norwegian blockbuster is neatly sidestepped by hauling in a bunch of Americans to help solve the problem, and then making everyone speak English about 80% of the time. It’s corny, but better than hiring A-list actors to pretend to be a certain culture and then failing miserably (I’m looking at you, Scottish lead of 300.) Norwegian scientist Dr Sander Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen) brings his research assistant, Adam Goodman (Eric Christian Olsen, one of my favourite people: he played both Vaughn in Community and Austin “Jakey Jakey about to make a big...mistakey” in Not Another Teen Movie) who then suggests his friend, palaeontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who will forever be known to me as Ramona from Scott Pilgrim). Helicoptered over to the South Pole by able pilot Sam (Joel Edgerton), tensions arise early between sensible Kate and Sander, who is making rash decisions out of excitement. Her cautiousness is proved right when the alien, brought in a block of ice to their base, thaws out and instead of sitting down for a cup of tea and a chat about interplanetary politics, goes on a murderous, stabby, regenerative rampage—because it’s a creature who can take on the form and nature of those it imbibes.

It’s the are-they-aren’t-they tensions that make these movies so fun: who has become The Thing and is hiding it behind their poker face, and how can the others figure it out? Scenes in The Original The Thing involved an excellent tense moment when blood was tested, and because that scene is so grand I’m pleased they didn’t recreate it, and instead went for a punchier version, opined by Kate, whose know-how and level-headedness almost instantly sees her grab control of the situation. This upsets some—namely Sander, who clearly has issues—and mutiny is afoot, like they don’t already have enough damn problems.

The New The Thing is a good prequel to The Original The Thing because it could have easily been terrible—many, including myself, adore John Carpenter’s version and were hesitant to like anything new. But it’s got a cracking pace, good effects, hair-chewing tension, and a woman with a flamethrower. It also passes the Bechdel Test, admirable considering there wasn’t a single female in The Original The Thing. Kate is the Ripley of this piece, taking charge and rightly so and saving cowering menfolk from getting dead. It’s quite inspiring.

Alas, there really isn’t enough character development in this—to have enough characters to be able to (not really a spoiler) kill a bunch of them off, you’ve got to care somewhat for everyone, which you do, at the expense of caring particularly hard for anyone. There’s a hint of a romance between Kate and Sam, and some clear friendship lines that, when broken, make you sad, but that’s about all they give you. There aren’t any of the mindblowing set monster pieces from The Original The Thing—walking head, anyone?—but it more than adequately steps up to the monster plate with some pretty gross stuff. Otherwise, my only real issues were a pixelated spaceship drive that does not at all look like it’s there, and the 1980s costuming that is basically nonexistent—not a mullet or a teased fringe in sight, and Adam dresses about the same as a 1980s scientist as he does a 2011 hippy, though with, sadly, less nipples showing.

I give it five out of eight disgusting stumpy limbs.

drive

2011-10-18T16:32:00.002+11:00

To the sound of retro-eighties musical styling and lashings of bubblegum-pink opening credits we are let into the world of The Kid: straight-faced Ryan Gosling, pulling on his driving gloves and preparing for a stint as a getaway car driver. The following driving scene, while breathtaking, isn’t quite the chase scene we’re used to—it’s more tactical driving than 6 Fast 6 Furious or whatever car movies the kids are watching nowadays—and it’s also one of only two real chase set pieces in the film. Don’t let that fact dissuade you, as Drive is a brilliant film, and Gosling just proves that he can do anything. But mostly he can out-smirk anyone.

The Kid is a getaway driver by night and a Hollywood stunt driver by day, spending his other waking hours as a mechanic working for ideas man Shannon (Bryan Cranston). He also appears to be indescribably lonely, never seeing anyone outside of those he drives around, Shannon himself, and his shyly smiling neighbour, Irene. It’s an eventual encounter with Irene in the car park that leads to the relationship that—while beautifully touching—changes the life of everyone in the film. As the friendship between The Kid, Irene, and Irene’s young son Benicio develops (and you’re never entirely sure what it develops into; it’s mostly told through five long silences, three big smiles and some hand-holding), their lives are disrupted when Irene’s husband Standard (Oscar Isaac, and, yes, a “deluxe” joke is made) returns from prison. Nothing does noir better than a plotline that involves one last job before everyone lives happily ever after (and involves someone called Blanche—Christina Hendricks, who is dressed down and wonderful but not worthy of her top billing); nothing makes movie like a situation going wrong in spectacular, bloodthirsty fashion.

Drive keeps up a cracking pace despite the fact that you get no hint of the violence to come for quite some time, until the Kid is at a bar and encounters someone he’s driven previously. There are moments of such tension that I gripped the seat handles and closed my eyes; there are moments I wanted to last forever. It’s a world so ridiculous that you can’t tell if it’s realistic, or if it’s just that the Kid is so wrapped up in his own world that he believes he’s in a movie. The crimes he assists in seem victimless and he helps people to do good, then gets revenge when people are bad.

The choices of direction are interesting; the car chases are often told via the expressions on those inside rather than panning shots of the outside of the car; the Kid’s calm enthralling against the panic of others. Moments of violence you expect the camera to pan away from actually stick around for more splattering than you thought you could bear. Small touches—the cleaning of a prized knife after it’s been used by a character to kill a friend; the sun-dappled family moment by the river; a shark-like murder by the sea—they’re all perfectly handled and indicative of an excellent movie.

Rounding out the flawless cast is Hellboy, aka Ron Perlman as a bad guy whose best moment is laughing uproariously in front of a bored blonde (and who has more lower face than any other actor but it makes him completely irresistible, to be honest) and Albert Brooks, Shannon’s benefactor and one of the few characters to show genuine emotion. The movie on the whole is an unexpected delight—I say unexpected because I included this smaller-than-usual movie poster to show that the Australian poster looks all WHOO DRIVING MOVIE VROOM VROOOOOOM when really, that leads you totally astray, and I recommend going off this next one.

I give it nine out of ten stomps to the head. I might even give it ten out of ten but I haven’t done a perfect score yet and am not sure if I’ll ever be able to bring myself to do it. Also, even when they’re appropriate, long silences and people enigmatically not replying to questions just makes me want to tear my hair out.

real steel

2011-10-07T19:58:00.002+11:00

When I first saw the preview for this Hugh Jackman robot fighting movie I was so underwhelmed that it was possible for a while I was covered in all the whelming in the world. But as good films are still thin on the ground at the moment, and the last thing I’d seen was massively depressing The Whistleblower (pro tip: do not see a movie about Bosnian sex trafficking as your anniversary date) so I was ready for something stupid. The big surprise was, however, that Real Steel isn’t actually that stupid, and when you readjust your preconceptions of the film, it’s actually quite smart and a hell of a good time.

It’s 2020 and robot fighting has superseded human boxing (hooray! I knew the future would be good for something), and Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman, unexpectedly jerky) is a total asshole who wrangles said robots for a living. He isn’t actually that good at it, and owes money to boxing promoters all over America, and is on the run from yet another one—the film’s cowboy-hatted villain Ricky (Kevin Durand, slimy)—when he gets a life-altering piece of news: his ex-girlfriend is dead, and their son Max (Dakota Goyo, awesome), who he abandoned years before, is now is his care. While trawling for robot parts, Max—after a heartstopping accident—finds an retro (read: 2014-era) sparring bot named Atom in the mud and digs it out with his bare hands, and is then determined to put him in the ring and show his dad that he has the nous to win. Will Charlie be able to stop being an asshole long enough to turn his life around? Will he stop ruining the lives of those who care for him, including old pal and robot mechanic/boxing gym owner Bailey (Evangeline Lilly, wise and hot)? It seems obvious, but actually Charlie is such a horrible person for the first half of the film that you really doubt it, and don’t even want him to get custody over Max’s rich aunt Debra (Hope Davis).

The movie is basically a kids’ fantasy: robots, fighting, a dad who takes you on the road to grungy underground fights, lots of money, hamburgers for dinner. So when I went in thinking it was a typical blockbuster, it did seem a little cheesy in parts, until Chris whispered, “This is basically a kids’ movie.” And it’s true. Like the equally fun Super 8, it’s the story of the kid’s troubles almost more than the adult’s—it’s devastating as Max tries desperately to forge an emotional bond with the robot that he is lacking in his own life—and follows a plotline where the kid is pretty much smarter and more savvy than all the adults at just about anything, including building a championship-quality robot out of dumpster parts. Real Steel, however, succeeds because of these childlike touches rather than in spite of them, and means you’re much more willing to dismiss plot holes and strange moments (why are more people not using these old robots if they are so damn excellent? Why does literally no one else ever turn up at Bailey’s gym? Also, isn’t it totally creepy when Charlie sneaks into Bailey’s bedroom at night? etc etc), because kids don’t always care about such stuff, and maybe adults shouldn’t either. At the risk of sounding like a prude, it’s actually nice to see a film where someone drives 1200 miles just for a kiss, women can be smart instead of nude and where blood is actually a very rare sight. It means you could take your twelve-year-old nephew as well as your eighty-year-old grandpa and everyone would have fun, though the word “shit” is said maybe three times if that’s something you’re concerned about.

The acting is top-notch—Jackman is a truly horrible person but still appealing because he’s basically the world’s favourite person; Dakota Goyo is someone you may literally cheer for (I sure as hell did) and Evangeline Lilly is a bit weepy, as women typically are in movies (but as a habitual weeper I can totally relate—I mean, I cried in a hospital ad showing before the movie today), but is also tough and smart. The special effects are great, the robots utterly convincing in the presence of the humans; the sets are huge and fun—glitzy arenas, jungle-based underground fights populated by future-punks (still wearing Ramones t-shirts), rodeo-style Texas fights with a bull. The last of those was the only thing I can really say I didn’t enjoy—of course the bull was CGI in most parts (assuming bulls aren’t good at dealing with green-screen acting) but pitting an animal against a hunk of metal still made me uncomfortable and it was horrible when it got thrown around. (Vague spoiler: the bull wins that fight, but still.) The dance scene where Atom shadows Max’s moves should suck but is actually quite hilarious. The robotic rival/final boss Zeus is huge, terrifying and smashes lesser robots instantly, all while being commanded by enigmatic maker Tak Mashido (Karl Yune, moody) and icy owner Farra Lemkova (Olga Fonda, tight ponytailed). It doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test, but the movie’s full of women who are perfectly capable of doing their own thing, even including a bunch of little girls at the start who give Charlie attitude when he richly deserves it.

Top effort to director Shawn Levy for making me care about robots without actually giving them any personality. It probably has to do with Atom representing all of the Kanters’ hopes and dreams, and all behind a sad little stitched-together mesh face and in a future that looks pretty much exactly the same as right now. I don’t want them to make a sequel, but if they do, I’d see it. I give Real Steel four out of five punches in the nuts.

crazy, stupid, love

2011-09-27T16:01:00.002+10:00

I’m going to rename this Crazy, Stupid, Advertising because pitching a preview screening as a “Girls Night In” event—offering free drinks upon arrival and giving you a goodie bag at the end filled with such gender-neutral awesomeness as Libra pads—was a huge mistake. Even the title is pretty ridiculous, because make no mistake: this flick is about the guys, namely middle-aged schlub Cal (Steve Carrell), who’s just been asked for a divorce by his bored wife Emily (Julianne Moore), and serial smoocher Jacob (Ryan Gosling), who picks up more women than he picks up peanuts at the bar both men now frequent. When Jacob sees Cal muttering to himself in (gasp, apparently) New Balance trainers, he takes it upon himself to give Cal a makeover and turn his life around. But does Cal want to shag attractive women like Kate (Marisa Tomei, slightly batshit as per usual), or does he want his old life back? Is Jacob really happy in his life as a man bedding attractive women on a regular basis? Will it take the movie’s other sassy redhead, Hannah (Emma Stone), to make him see the horror that is his life as a rich man who is also charming and accompanied by a sensual bass track and a camera that wants to have sex with him every time he’s on screen?

Crazy, Stupid, Advertising is actually a pretty fun movie; there are a lot of laughs, and some really touching moments too. The set pieces make this film what it is: the gentle, sexy humour of Jacob and Hannah’s first “date”; the flat-out hilarious slapstick scene when all our characters finally meet; a quietly poignant moment when Cal, secretly weeding his family’s backyard at night, sees Emily fake a phone call to him just to talk. Add to that the glorious cast, all who ping off each other wonderfully, and who include Hannah’s equally-sassy best friend Liz (Liza Lapera); Cal’s rival for Emily’s affections, David Lindhagen (Kevin Bacon) Cal and Emily’s lovelorn teenage son Robbie (Jonah Bobo), who can’t hide his adoration for his gangly babysitter Jess (Analeigh Tipton), while she is nurturing love for Cal himself. It’s basically an ingredient list for a recipe that can’t go wrong, like toasted cheese sandwiches. Comforting, funny, and a good night spent at the flicks, it doesn’t have the perfect Hollywood cookie-cutter ending but definitely won’t leave you wanting to impale yourself with a Coke straw.

It’s debatable due to forgetfulness whether it passes the Bechdel Test (Chris claims there was a tickle fight between Jess and Robbie’s younger sister Molly where they didn’t talk about boys, and also an initial scene between Hannah and Liz which possibly began discussing jobs before it derailed into boy-talk, but I don’t remember for sure—and even so, that’s pitiful if I have to dredge memories to clarify) and there is a scene that tries to be cute in the movie’s graudation finale that would be actually a bit halp-call-the-police if the genders were reversed; also, women just seem like objects waiting for Ryan Gosling to hit on them (which, let’s face it, is mostly true) and then vanish from the movie, never to get emotionally involved again. Also, what does Jacob do for a living? Why did Cal and Emily even break up if they’re going to spend the rest of the movie staring wistfully after each other? (It’s the movies, haven’t these people heard of therapy?) But hey, dramedies are rarely perfect and if you feel like love is possible at the end they’ve pretty much done their job, and I’m still happy to give Crazy, Stupid, Advertising the following rating: three and a half out of five pairs of jeans not bought at The Gap. (Chris, surprising everyone, gave it five out of five putts at a mini golf course.)

final destination 5

2011-09-05T10:29:00.002+10:00

What better film to return to blogging after an unplanned (and mostly inexcusable apart from my distractingly entertaining pregnancy) hiatus than something less needing of a review than Final Destination 5? If there’s any film franchise that is as steadily predictable and passable as the FD series, I don’t know it. But with everything else out this week—The Help, One Day—being a bit too schmaltzy for my tastes, it was really all I could do. And it’s in 3D. How was I supposed to resist?

As per the other movies in the series, Final Destination 5 starts with a set piece in which all the major characters are killed off swiftly and bloodily—in this, our main characters are on a bus on the way to a work retreat, when the suspension bridge they are crossing collapses. As they escape the bus, they meet their ends in a variety of ways you wouldn’t even know were possible. Then it turns out the collapse isn’t real at all, just a vision of our main character Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto), who then manages to flee the bus before the bridge actually collapses and saves a bunch of his co-workers in the process. As is to be expected, the invisible hand of Death isn’t happy that this pack of one-note characters didn’t die as planned, and picks them off one by one thereafter in tense and theatrical ways.

3D is used to such effect in this movie I feel like it should only be used in schlocky horror films from now on. Intestines fly at the screen; blood coats the camera; bones stick out through skin right in your face. It’s glorious. The very first death in the film, as the camera follows a body as it falls towards the water but then encounters an unexpected obstruction, was so violent and bloodthirsty and surprising that the entire cinema audience fell apart with shock and glee, thereby setting the tone for the movie. The outlandish premise is enough to have you enjoy the film without ever thinking it’s real enough to get upset about. And the way all the deaths are set up—with the camera panning over every dangerous device in the room, which it turns out, is basically everything—makes for such exquisite tension as to what is actually going to cause the upcoming carnage that I occasionally had to close my eyes and pretend I was somewhere else so my heart didn’t burst out of my chest or I didn’t go into spontaneous early labour.

It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but luckily, the cast themselves do. Played by a bunch of up-and-comers who frequently look a lot like someone more famous, they are given all of their development time at the start of the film as they meet up to get on the bus for their trip. Sam (D’Agosto, looking like a sibling of Andrew Garfield) is a friendly office worker who really wants to be a chef; his girlfriend Molly (Emma Bell, from the excellent creepy movie Frozen) has reconsidered their relationship; Peter (Miles Fisher and quite possibly the love child of Christian Bale and Tom Cruise) is the high-flying crisply-suited hard-worker; his girlfriend Candice (Ellen Wroe, with a cutesy Ginnifer Goodwin vibe) is the peaches-and-cream gymnast with a slightly nasty personality; Olivia (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood, a blend of Megan Fox raunch and Jennifer Keyte primness) is the punk-rocker quick with a curse word and struggling with her eyesight; Nathan (Arlen Escarpeta, familiar from bit-parts on countless television shows) is the recently-promoted man trying to prove his worth to the factory workers who don’t like change; Isaac (PJ Byrne, similarly snivelly in Horrible Bosses) is the self-absorbed stalker-type creepy enough to be the one guy you actively hope dies; and their boss, Dennis (perfectly-balding David Koechner, from just about everything, most recently Paul) is satisfyingly passive-aggressive and full of his own self-importance. Rounding out the cast is the deep talking wise man coroner Bludworth (Tony Todd, who played the man-of-my-teenage-nightmares Candyman) and the policeman on the case Jim Block (Law and Order stalwart Courtney B Vance).

The two-dimensional aspect of the characters is a flaw in the film, but barely a concern in the scheme of such fun, especially when you consider the extra dimension they are otherwise seen in. The only real problem I had was that when characters started to die, the first people on the scene, called by police or our heroes themselves, seemed to be our friends the co-workers—what, no parents, no siblings, just call the office and get everyone to come over? The lack of the other people was unrealistic, but adding them would probably have detracted from the lightness of the film and made you feel emotional towards the families when really you didn’t have the time or inclination to actually care.

Happily, Final Destination 5 ends with not quite a twist, but a surprise for sure—especially when you consider the others don’t finish with anything like that at all. It’s an ultimately thrilling finale that makes you reflect on the whole film differently, but probably not enough to have to suffer through the death of Candice again (by far the one that scarred me the most) to see if it’s actually obvious and we just completely missed it.

I give Final Destination 5 four out of five poles through the head.

cowboys and aliens

2011-08-21T23:37:00.002+10:00

Much like Snakes on a Plane, it is physically impossible to stay away from a movie with a title so tempting. Cowboys? And aliens? In the one movie? Grab the smelling salts, I’m feeling woozy. How could a movie called Cowboys and Aliens not be ridiculous fun?

Well, apparently the equation to make it not ridiculously fun is this: Jon Favreau + Daniel Craig + Harrison Ford = No. Which is surprising, as Favreau directed the stellar Iron Man (though is tarnished by Iron Man 2), Daniel Craig made an excellent Bond, and Harrison Ford is [insert your favourite character of his here]. And clearly the people in the cinema who applauded at the end of the film thought it was great. I did not. Actually, by the end, I was so busy crossing my arms and sighing theatrically that I can’t believe I wasn’t punched in the face by an audience member.

The movie begins in dusty silence as Jake Lonergan (Craig) wakes up in some dirt and has no idea who he is, or why he has a mysterious metallic wristband on. After an altercation with some no-good-criminals he winds up in a single-road town with the vital elements (saloon, jail, porches to lean against) and gets into an altercation with a bratty kid called Percy Dolarhyde (Paul Dano), who holds the town in fear as his father Woodrow (Ford) is the only reason the town still survives. After another altercation with wide-eyed Ella (Olivia Wilde), Lonergan is about to get smacked down by protective father Woodrow when aliens come and ruin what could have been an interesting Western and steal half the townsfolk. Banding together despite their differences, Lonergan and Dolarhyde Snr. go to rescue everyone, followed by town doctor Doc (Sam Rockwell), preacher Meacham (Clancy Brown), Dolarhyde’s Native American sidekick Nat (Adam Beach), Ella, a kid, a dog, and some other people who are totally irrelevant. Fighting with aliens ensues, as does fighting with some bad cowboys and a band of Native Americans. Somehow, it’s still not interesting.

I have a lot of problems with this movie; so many, I can’t even really think of good parts. Wait, I know: I jumped twice at surprise alien appearances. It did a good job of feeling very 1873. (I assume.) That’s about all I can say on the positive side though. The score was nonexistent; sure, great movies don’t need false soundtracks to move them along, but this isn’t a great movie. It needed a crescendo for victorious moments to bring some emotion to the piece. The lighting, while accurate, meant that scenes shot at night (ie when the aliens most love to attack) were almost impossible to see and gave me a headache within about fifteen minutes. (Said headache may have contributed to my eventual grumpiness.)

As far as gender politics go, the movie doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test, and the three women actually in the movie are either a) a whore b) naked or c) kidnapped. As far as political correctness goes, our major interaction with a Native American community has them initially appearing as terrifying savages happy to throw a now-deceased main character into a fire; shortly afterwards, they become mystical and wise healers. It dehumanises the culture and makes you think they must be bored when they don’t have white people to attack; it just made me want to cringe.

The cast, while serviceable, were not stretched in the least—Harrison Ford is old and cranky, along with being a racist, violent asshole who lets a whole town suffer for his financial gain; Daniel Craig is as reserved, quietly violent and shirtless as he is as Bond; Paul Dano is another annoying Western caricature (though his turn in There Will Be Blood is, of course, brilliant); Olivia Wilde is as wide-eyed and other-ish as she was in Tron. Actually, Olivia Wilde’s character Ella annoyed me most in this film, I think: she stood around being frustratingly cryptic when it was clear she knew something. Instead of saying, “Right, guys, here’s what I know,” she just hung around being obtuse until the moment came—post many loved characters dying—when she felt like sharing her story.

The script was dull and predictable; no one was fun or funny, bar Rockwell’s Doc who made one flimsy joke that fell flat even on my accompanying Saturday night drunk crowd; the directing wasn’t even that great, noted by both the ridiculous pacing of the ending (with accompanying pretend danger) and one scene full of every character’s inital reaction shot to the aliens showed. Which is another point—there wasn’t nearly enough discussion about what the hell was happening, from a world where aliens were so far removed that not even ET had screened on television yet. The lack of discussion about aliens was about as surprising as the lack of horror of everyone who had just had a loved one snatched by demons. Were there no emotions in the past? Was sadness not mined until the 1890s?

The trouble is that a movie called Cowboys and Aliens calls to mind something much more fun than what was ultimately made. It takes itself far too seriously without having any stand-out parts to make it work as a serious film. It’s bleak, dark, completely boring and full of characters so horrible you honestly couldn’t care if aliens killed everyone but the kid and the dog.

I give it one out of four gross alien arms.

tucker & dale vs evil

2011-08-15T17:08:00.002+10:00

It’s not often you see a schlocky horror movie and think to yourself, “Those poor murderers, they’re so gentle and misunderstood.” But after seeing Shaun-of-the-Dead-esque Tucker & Dale vs Evil—a movie with a lot of gore that is still a comedy—you may see all horror movies from now on and think “but is the devil really possessing this person to torture them? Is the backwards head and biting just an attempt to say ‘hello’ and reach out to humanity?”

Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine) are two men—mostly referred to in the film as hillbillies, which makes me feel bad but does give you an idea of the truck-drivin’ overall-wearin’ folk they are—are going to Tucker’s newly purchased vacation home to do it up into the holiday house he’s always wanted. At the same time, a group of attractive college kids have taken a parents’ van to the same destination, where they plan to camp, eat, skinny-dip, and do whatever else kids of today do when they camp. (Play Cut the Rope on their iPhones?)

From the moment they pass each other on the road to their first contact at a gas station, the college kids have Dale and Tucker pegged as backwoods creeps. But Tucker’s a charmer and Dale is a man with low self-esteem who instantly sees one of the college girls, Ally (Christine Taylor lookalike Katrina Bowden), and wants to go say hi. Tucker convinces him that he’s not as horrible as he thinks, and Dale approaches the kids—with six-foot scythe in tow—and terrifies them immediately. It’s a bad start to the holiday, but they head to Tucker’s run-down, dangerous, possibly-previously-owned-by-a-murderer cabin in the woods by a lake.

When Dale and Tucker save Ally from drowning in the lake and take her to their cabin to heal, they start a chain of hilarious and gruesome accidents that lead the kids to believe Dale and Tucker are serial killers, and D&T themselves to think that the college kids are embarking on a suicide pact. While our heroes do their best to protect Ally and save themselves, the kids, at the behest of crazed jock Chad (Jesse Moss) take it on themselves to rescue Ally, refusing to listen to the voice of reason that is Mitch (I think—the kids all looked equally floppy-haired and I got confused.)

T&DvE is actually super entertaining, with your cynicism towards annoying fucking twenty-somethings who get murdered relentlessly on film being finally justified. Not all the kids are evil—they’re mostly sheep following Chad—but they are flat-out stupid and the accidents that befall them are really just kind of funny no matter how gross they get (and don’t worry, if you’re looking for some flat-out horror, they seriously do get gross.) Dale is ridiculously endearing, a font of useless (though occasionally handy) information, and trying only to make friends and be nice to everyone—a great example is the scene where Ally wakes from her accident and screams when Dale comes in with pancakes, where he automatically assumes she’s yelling because she hates pancakes and goes to make her bacon and eggs instead. Tucker is the alpha male in their relationship, jealous of Dale and Ally’s growing friendship and aware of how the continuing accidents would look to police. Katrina Bowden does an excellent job of making Ally convincingly amicable, a girl who makes the best of her situation and tries to reason with a whole bunch of people with preconceived notions. It’s pretty much flat-out hilarious; the music is great, adding violin-string-tension to moments that aren’t actually scary to remind you that in other films, the moment could be alarming; Chad uses his asthma inhaler like a cigarette and blows the smoke out of his nostrils to be cool; the phrase “you’re half hillbilly!” may be laughed over forever.

T&DvE does not pass the Bechdel Test, though Ally is at least a fairly empowered character. In a satire like this, it’s hard to tell whether some tropes—blonde girl gets her cans out, black male makes declarations like “damn” “shit” and “that is whack!” (okay, so I’m paraphrasing here)—are actually deliberately there to make a point. I’ll presume yes because it’s a spoof, but it’s worth mentioning just in case it’s not. The dubbing was out in the second half when I saw the film; not the movie’s fault, but it annoyed me a little. I would also have liked a touch more of Dale and Tucker’s background—are they work friends? Do they work? Where do they live?—but I can’t bring myself to care that much, because it’s just funny and entertaining and I would heartily recommend it to anyone who can stomach someone going head-first into a woodchipper.

Four out of five amputated fingers.

rise of the planet of the apes

2011-07-30T12:28:00.003+10:00

While I was stoked to get invited to an advance screening of the new Apes movie, and was jumping around like a kid at the zoo waiting to see it this afternoon, we really have to get past the most pointed flaw in this movie, don’t we? I mean, seriously, repetition doesn’t have a place in the titles of well-crafted big-budget movies. Using “of the” twice in one title is overkill. I understand it gets to the point—everyone knows exactly where this movie is going—but really, they couldn’t spare a few thousand dollars of the budget to get a bunch of eight-year-olds to think up a cooler simian title? It could have been called something like MONKEYS ARE EXCELLENT or AN ACTION MOVIE WITH AN AWESOME LACK OF KISSING SCENES or APES R BETTER THAN BEN 10 ARE NOT ARE TOO or something equally lengthy that doesn’t become boring halfway through saying it.

Beyond the title, which I should probably shut up about, is a well-crafted movie that—like all prequels—has an ending you know is coming as long as you know there’s a movie out there called Planet of the Apes. Still ~~despite you knowing the Titanic is going to sink~~ it remains a relentlessly tense and thrilling action movie. Young neurologist Will (James Franco) is desperate to find a cure for the Alzheimer’s that his father Charles (John Lithgow) suffers from, and has a breakthrough with the drugs he is working on at the lab. One mistake leads to all the chimps that have been experimented on to be put down, bar one tiny baby chimp Will takes home and names Caesar (Andy Serkis with some help from the SFX team). Caesar, after inheriting his mother’s altered genes from the powerful drug, grows big and smart, until he becomes too damn big and smart for his own good and is banished to an animal sanctuary, where he finally has a meet and greet with some other simians.

This movie is a four-star ape movie and a two-and-a-half-star human movie, making it meet somewhere in the middle and be average-to-good. The ape scenes, especially when Caesar winds up in the animal sanctuary to be tormented by Dodge (an aptly-named and stereotyped Tom Felton, aka Harry Potter’s Malfoy), are fantastic in scope: with the limits of no dialogue, director Rupert Wyatt still makes you understand the dynamics of the relationships. While the humans also have their emotions—Will’s care and distress for his father is honest but necessarily short—his blossoming relationship with zoo doctor Caroline (Freida Pinto) has very little drama and his arguments with boss Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo) over the development of the drug are fairly superficial.

Apes is Serkis’s—or Caesar’s—movie, and he glows every time he is on-screen. I did feel that he was often accompanied by dramatic music that wasn’t always necessary but left me in a state of heightened anxiety. Not knowing his own strength, or that he is different from the humans he is desperate to play with, he is frequently in danger or putting others in danger and I was so tense that I often let out little shrieks and spend half the movie with my hand over my mouth like a perfect little emotive audience member. This strain did mean that the payoff—namely a certain scene with a recognisable phrase and the perfect response—was downright exhilarating, to the point where the audience let out cheers and applause and even I joined in, though I usually think that’s a bit corny. It was sweet release, and changed the tone of the movie to the point of no return.

From an animal rights perspective, it’s a painful and depressing movie to watch. The reactions of virtually all the humans to the conditions of the apes is disappointing and there is never a moment where they fall to their knees moaning “Why did we treat such beautiful animals like this?” While Will is painted as the humanoid hero, he still keeps Caesar in his own home for his own selfish reasons, and never bats an eye at the other apes who are locked in sterile glass cages at his workplace. It makes for a strange juxtaposition when the animal sanctuary, where Dodge actively harms the animals, still seem much more fun, because at least Caesar is able to make some new pals and jump around on a tree, and none are experimented on.

Altogether, it makes for a frustrating though understandable viewpoint where you’re not sure who to root for. The humans mostly seem like a pack of selfish brats, except for the sadly declining Charles, and Caroline, who does not have much to say until she says of Charles’s illness, “Some things aren’t meant to be changed”, though I doubt many people in the audience feel that the cure for Alzheimer’s is worthless. But it’s also tricky to be on the side of the apes and their monkey associates, who are strong, kind of scary and a touch violent even despite Caesar’s best efforts to reign them in, and, well, become fascist slave-drivers. By the end, all you can definitively hope for is that the car park won’t be too full on the way out.

The effects are fantastic but not perfect—a few scenes are flawed, but I could count them on one hand, and that’s not bad for a movie where humans and special effects are interacting so frequently. It of course helped that the apes were played by people (it also made me feel better as a super-vegetarian to know no animals were harmed in the making of this movie), which meant they were physically present—the flaws were mostly in fully-digitised scenes, but aren’t noticeable unless you’re horribly critical like I am and trying to disassociate from such an ultimately depressing movie.

It is hard to remove my own strong emotions about animal care from the movie itself, and the fact that no human wanted to campaign for general increased ape care left me feeling a bit cold towards them. It means that my opinion of the film is clouded by this, and if I was a better reviewer I would cast them aside and be a erased blackboard of emotions. But it’s a grim movie. Apes’ very infrequent moments of humour are so vastly spaced that it almost seemed redundant to have them; more generally humorous but actually quite devastating is the idea of Will’s poor neighbour being the unluckiest man in the world.

I do sound critical of what is really a very good blockbuster movie with all the right elements—cracking pace, heart-attack-worthy action, some mindless city destruction, a hilarious orang-utan. The material ultimately made it hard for me to enjoy because I spent so much time being sad. There are some cheesy plot-points, like death scenes at the most coincidentally poignant of times (and one character surviving a fiery blast long enough to sigh, unsinged, and die in someone’s arms); there are red herring moments never explored; the above mindless destruction is a tad unwarranted and the human damage goes unmentioned. But with the scenes at the animal sanctuary so amazing, it almost doesn’t matter.

Go see The Rise of The Etc and let me know what you think. I am especially interested to hear if anyone else agrees it’s the prequel not only to Planet of the Apes but also to 12 Monkeys, depending on what mood you’re in for a movie marathon that day. Also, while there’s no curse words and limited blood, I spent so much of the movie clutching at Chris’s hand that I still wouldn’t recommend it for kids, unless you want them to have monkey-based nightmares for eternity. And hey, if you’re that type of parent, more power to you.

Today’s arbitrary score: two out of three bananas.

submarine

2011-07-26T12:59:00.003+10:00

Thanks to the lovely folk at MIFF, I scored a few free tickets to the films of my choice, the first of which was always going to be Submarine. (I’m also seeing Norwegian film Troll Hunter, and forked out myself to go see Miranda July’s The Future, and am still tempted by others—Hobo with a Shotgun, who could resist?) Submarine was high on my list for many reasons: it’s directed by Richard Ayoade, otherwise known as Moss from the almost-perfect television show The IT Crowd; it’s getting great reviews; and, most importantly, I’d read the book as a brightly-illustrated reading copy when it first came out and just about fell to pieces reading it. It was ridiculously, unfairly funny and brilliant, and—better yet—when I wrote some fanmail to author Joe Dunthorne about it via facebook (thanks, social media), he even replied. I won’t tell you what I wrote to him, because looking back three years later it is actually incredibly cringeworthy, but just know it involved the story that I read the book with my hand over my mouth on the tram so no one could see my permanent smirky grin. His reply was short, sweet, and very kind, and thus I am a diehard Submarine fan 4eva, and you should all go read it immediately.

Onto the movie itself: relentlessly funny from the first scene, Submarine is pitch-perfect from cast to script, a joyous few hours punctuated by serious moments but always teetering on the edge of comedy. Fifteen-year-old Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts, also in the current Fassbender-filled Jane Eyre) is a high-school kid smarter than your average adolescent, who searches the dictionary for new words to learn, tries not to get involved in his gangly friend Chips’ (Darren Evans) schoolboy shenanigans, but who is willing to do anything to impress the girl of his dreams, the realistically crushable Jordana (Yasmin Paige). Back at home, the relationship between his parents (Happy-Go-Lucky’s Sally Hawkins and our very own Noah Taylor) is stagnating, as they mope around the house in neutral colours having awkward conversations. Oliver’s perfect world would be made up of Jordana as his girlfriend and lover—so he can lose his virginity before he turns sixteen—and his parents also back to the saucy days of yore when the dimmer switch in their bedroom would be set to half instead of full. Damaging his chances are his own personality—the scene where he tries to seduce a cynical Jordana is fall-on-the-floor hilarious—and the arrival of an old love interest of his mother’s, the mulleted and spiritually alight Graham (Paddy Considine).

Every scene is injected with humour, even the most serious. Somehow this doesn’t make the movie’s darker moments superficial, but just realistic: the ridiculousness of life doesn’t stop just because things are going horribly wrong. Oliver’s narration of the story makes the whole film very self-aware but his naivety is more endearing than painful. When, at the beginning, he imagines his death and the mourning of everyone he knows—up to and including the entire country of Wales—a television announcer declares “We are witnessing unprecedented scenes of quiet devastation”, and we know we are in the mind of a typically atypical teenager, worried about his place in the world and the lack of control he has within it.

The music and sound is wonderful, indie-quirky while still convincing you that you’re in the eighties setting of the film. Music is cut off abruptly for dramatic effect and the crescendo of sound at important moments, like Oliver and Jordana’s first blackmail-induced smooch underneath a railway bridge, packs just as much punch as your first kiss probably did. I am going to investigate the soundtrack further. The muted colours of Oliver’s home life contrast perfectly with the splash of red that is Jordana and her favourite coat, and the mystical colour explosion that is Graham. It is a well put-together film, nothing detracting from what is essentially a character piece where all the characters are agreeably quirky and slightly horrible.

The high level of quirkiness, the independent vibe, and the lovestruck teen are things you may have encountered before in film; Chris compared it to Rushmore, but I couldn’t help but compare it to the book. Anything it does differently from the book makes perfect sense cinematically, but still, changes in the original intellectual property can’t help but grate when you loved the original as much as I did. It is probably better to see this without having read the book, so everyone’s zany little moments are shining new. Which doesn’t mean I didn’t love it—Submarine is one of the best comedies of the year, and when it (hopefully) makes general release, please go see it. And tell Joe Dunthorne I sent you. (No, don’t.)

Really, how I have written such a serious review for such a funny movie is beyond me. Maybe I have given up in the face of clearly superior talent. Ayoade and Dunthorne, I salute and love you and if need be am available for marriage and/or a short affair in the back of your van.

mr popper's penguins

2011-07-18T11:25:00.002+10:00

Just as I was old enough to go to the movies without my folks, Jim Carrey and his rubbery face were in the most quotable movies around: Mask, Ace Ventura. “Smokin’.” “Somebody stop me.” “All righty then”. (And don’t pretend you haven’t said those out loud, readership.) Shortly after those films came Liar Liar, starring Carrey as Fletcher Reede, a man who, as a lawyer, lies for a living, and as a man, has disappointed his estranged wife and fluffy-haired by numerous lies. The disappointed son, angry at his father, one day wishes that his dad could never tell a lie. And it comes true, Fletcher can’t lie, an hour and a half later we’ve all learned a lesson about being a good person and father and how even in the workplace honesty is the best policy and so on.

In Mr Popper’s Penguins, Carrey plays Tom Popper, a man who manipulates people into selling real estate, and who has disappointed his estranged wife and two children by being a PG-level schmuck. After the death of his father, he finds himself in ownership of six penguins, and lies to his son about being able to keep them. Thus, he has to deal with six wacky penguins, and an hour and a half later we’ve all learned a lesson about being a good person and father and how even in the workplace honesty is the best policy and so on.

But hey, I liked Liar Liar, and I enjoyed Mr Popper’s Penguins. It’s exactly what you’d expect from the poster. Popper’s life is turned upside-down by taking care of these penguins, little special-effects stars he starts off hating but inevitably becomes attached to. His precise and perfect home becomes an icy palace. His kids, who previously found him boring, want to hang out. His wife sees a new side to him. But his work life suffers, especially when he’s inches from a promotion and all he needs to do is get a certain piece of property owned by the shrewd Mrs Van Gundy (Angela Lansbury). Helping his career is his assistant, Pippi (Ophelia Lovibond), who speaks alliteratively in Ps throughout the entire movie, which is somehow positively precious instead of painful.

It’s a pretty ridiculous movie, not helped by the fact that the villain is a man who works at the zoo and has the entirely reasonable view that penguins would be safer and better cared for by professionals in a penguin enclosure than a businessman in a high-rise apartment. While it makes sense in a kids movie—someone wants to take away the hero’s illegal pets that he loves!—as an adult it’s ridiculous that he even gets himself in this situation in the first place by keeping them more than one day, and that his spouse Amanda (Carla Gugino) encourages it, unless she does it to be vindictive.

Despite all that, and all the poop/fart jokes, it was an entertaining hour and a half and I didn’t regret my time in the cinema at all. The stacks of kids in the theatre were very well behaved and took their cues well (“uh oh” said the girl behind me at one pertinent moment) and, you know what, Carrey is still very funny, even when he is being more Carrey than the character (doing a slow-motion run into the final scene, for example.) There were some good lines, I laughed, I had fun, I would take kids there—especially when there is never any violent danger, just the wholesome kidnapping kind. There’s lots of slipping and falling and Carrey gets hit in the nuts with a soccer ball. It’s not mature. But it’s not supposed to be. And it’s perfectly serviceable fare for all involved.

the tree of life

2011-07-07T15:55:00.003+10:00

I’m going to do my best not to spoil any part of this movie for you but I feel that more people should be prepared for what happens in Tree of Life. Because I wasn’t prepared, and I spent far too much of this movie sputtering in confusion when I probably should have been sighing melodramatically, or continuously weeping like the lady in the row front of us.

So. First of all you get some kind of very beautiful wafting thing, which I thought might be a womb, but was probably God, or something. Whatever it is, it puts you in the state you should adhere to for the rest of the film, i.e. meaningful silence and awkwardness when it comes to crunching on food/sucking on your Coke straw. Then you get a sad scene where a mother (the very beautiful Jessica Chastain) finds out some bad news and tells her spouse (a terrifying bespectacled and Brylcreemed Brad Pitt), and then suddenly you are in the middle of a thirty-minute documentary about the Big Bang and Earth’s most amazing visual moments. I mean, I started laughing a bit because it came out of left field, but without the element of surprise, it really is just worth sitting back and appreciating the hands-down beautiful scenes in front of you, occasionally accompanied by some overly emotive opera. Then, eventually, just as you get to the part in Earth’s formation where the dinosaurs are wiped out (yes, you will see dinosaurs, may as well brace yourself for that too), you are catapulted back into the present, where a man named Jack (Sean Penn, basically pointless) sulks around the place thinking about a family tragedy and is accompanied by a slew of visually dramatic moments that are like being hit in the face with a poignancy bat (like a cricket bat, but harder). Finally, you are taken back through Jack’s memories and hang out with him in the 50s (though with Sean Penn only 40something himself it really should have been set in the 70s to make any chronological sense) as adolescent Jack deals with the loss of childhood innocence with his family, including his folks, the aforementioned Chastain/Pitt pairing. Then you end on what is either the crew wrap party or some emotional and spiritual finale. It was boring, anyway.

The trouble is, Tree of Life isn’t an altogether terrible movie. It’s just that it’s too many types of movies. I will say in all honesty it’s one of the most beautiful movies I’ve seen in a long time: the cinematography is magical, the scenes all heavy with pathos, and atmosphere—both in emotion and temperature—is almost perfectly conveyed. The problem is that director Terrence Malick is so proud of his undeniable talent that I imagine he must have wandered around the set in a suit made of solid gold yelling, “More! MORE METAPHORS! THE AUDIENCE IS NOT SAD ENOUGH!” because god damn if I wasn’t just sick of being emotionally manipulated by the end of it. The camera lingers on pools of water. It lingers on dinosaurs showing empathy. It lingers on everyone’s faces and clothes and grass. This is why the movie goes for two and a half hours. It malingers.

Not to mention the movie takes forever to even become a movie: the first half-hour or so is spent in jerking, poignant moments in time, edited like a trailer and never quite focussing on anyone in particular: just their shadow, or the backs of their heads, or an inch of their skin. It’s an interesting cinematic technique, no doubt, but it goes on longer than such an approach should and becomes tedious.

What is even more frustrating—and probably doesn’t come through at all in this sulky review—is that it could have been edited and adjusted into a four-star movie. The scenes in Jack’s memory as he interacts with his family are wonderful. Anyone who has had a parent, spouse, sibling or child would be able to relate to some of the moments, cliché though they are: running under a sprinkler, chasing your mother around the house with a lizard, doing shadow puppets with your hands using a torch and a sheet. Even if those moments were never yours, they still shimmer with childhood beauty and ruin, and feel universal.

In case Tree of Life is not layered enough already, it’s also lesson in Freudian psychology. The boys’ mother, Mrs O’Brien, is a perfect angel, there for her children in touch and care, but subservient to her husband. Mr O’Brien is an aggressor who teaches the boys that fighting is A-OK but smiling at the dinner table is certainly not. He is rough with them every time he touches them, while she is gentle. There’s even a disturbing Oedipal moment or two and a part where Jack yells at his father “You want to kill me!” To be honest, the family moments are not particularly original—you’ll have seen kids shoot cap guns and a loved-up couple smile at each other on a picnic blanket in about ten thousand other movies—but despite that, I really enjoyed the scenes, even though there is a certain amount of tension lost in the fact you know in advance how their story ends.

Really, there is a lot to ridicule in Tree of Life. Sean Penn, as the grown Jack, is completely redundant—if someone can tell me the point of him then I’d love to hear it. The religious aspect is tiring by the end. But there’s a lot to love, too: the 50s are rendered perfectly and Jessica Chastain’s wardrobe would cause me to roll her if I ran into her down at Ringwood Station. It is measured and understated at times. And then at others it’s so exhaustingly overbearing I just wanted to groan, if I was game to make a sound.

I don’t know if this review makes any sense. It’s hard when the movie itself is so confused about what it’s trying to say. I’ll probably read this tomorrow and wish I had just shut up, or done something Twitter-length like: “#treeoflife is a slice of life of human existence that is devoid entirely of humour, an almost impressive feat. Buy the dvd and FF through the crap bits to make a great short film.” But oh well. I’m not known for my ability to shut up.

cars 2

2011-06-27T13:15:00.003+10:00

Pixar, let’s face it, are wonderful. I dare you to find a better superhero movie than The Incredibles, or a more moving ten minutes of film than the intro to Up, or a better and braver hero than Wall-E. Then I double dare you to think of the first Cars movie as the best of anything. Maybe the best at making Pixar’s board a huge merchandising fortune so they can fill their Lightning McQueen-shaped swimming pool with Cristal or whatever it is rich people drink. Probably imported Dr Pepper.

I went to see Cars 2 when the Rotten Tomatoes rating had been going downhill faster than a relevant racing pun. I’ll see anything, though, and as I’ve seen everything Pixar has done (including Ratatouille, which is the first movie I’ve fallen asleep during) there was no way I could stop myself. Armed with 3D glasses and enough popcorn to float a shipwreck, I bravely went to see the first Pixar movie the masses appeared to be dreading.

And they shouldn’t be. Actually, Cars 2 is pretty good.

Perhaps it was my low expectations. I’m not interested in racing or in arrogant race cars voiced by Owen Wilson. (Though I am interested in Owen Wilson when he plays humans.) I own a bunch of movie paraphernalia but cars aren’t my thing. For me, Cars 2 was lifted from horror by ditching the races—there are only three, and the last one you only see for about five seconds—and instead following an adventurous spy thriller storyline when Lightning McQueen’s best pal, country bumpkin tow-truck Tow Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), accidentally happens upon some highly secretive information in a Japanese bathroom. (Yes, there is a scene in one of those convoluted Japanese toilets. Yes, it’s funny. Yes, I wish I also had buttons on my otherwise dull toilet at home.) Mater then becomes the target of the bad guys—headed by a monocle-side-mirror-wearing car who answers to a faceless villain I picked from miles away—but is thankfully found first by British Intelligence officers Holley (Emily Mortimer) and the moustachioed Bond car Finn McMissile (Michael Caine, totally and utterly excellent.) A misinterpretation of events leads Holley and Finn to believe Mater is a spy under deep, stupid cover, and together they must save the day.

Interestingly, the plotline McQueen follows is about a competition started by Sir Miles Axelrod (Eddie Izzard) to best show off the new alternative fuel source he has come up with. While it’s a topic that is currently quite relevant, it’s not elaborated upon too much (fair enough too, the target market really couldn’t give a toss about petrol prices no matter how much we moan about them) but was a pretty interesting angle to take. It’s discovered during the first races that the cars running on the new fuel are prone to go boom, and Axelrod’s new fuel and race appear to be the end of his career.

Along with that drama, McQueen and Mater have a falling out, basically because Mater is stupid and annoying and ruins everything. Which is what stops Cars 2 from attaining the heights of Pixar’s excellence. While Lightning McQueen is smarmy and arrogant, Tow Mater is not street-smart, doesn’t listen, and makes terrible puns. (Okay. And some good ones which should be terrible, like when someone says, “tout suite!” and he says, “I’ll have two sweets too!”) You can forgive him a lot, because he’s never really left his quiet hometown of Radiator Springs before, but the incident that gets him out of favour with Lightning during the first race is actually appalling behaviour on his part as both a friend and a team member. So while I appreciated getting away from McQueen, Mater is still a very imperfect character. You get so little of everyone else that I don’t know who I’d prefer it to be about. Maybe Finn McMissile.

Cars 2 is a beautiful looking movie, which is hardly a surprise. The action is thrilling, Finn McMissile is an amazing addition—he’s a car! He’s on skis! He’s a submarine! He’s got guns! Etc!—and there are a lot of little jokes you could miss if you weren’t paying attention, like that there’s a Popemobile that has its own Popemobile, and the ads on the side of the racetrack that say “Lassetire”. For Australian audiences, V8 Supercar driver Mark Winterbottom voices a car in one scene; in other countries, the paint job and voice is changed. Some jokes are flat-out hilarious. Some will induce a smile. It’s a movie you shouldn’t mind taking your niece to go see.

One flaw that bothered me was the excessive use of stereotypes. It starts with the cringeworthy hillbilly that is the bucktoothed Tow Mater, goes off to Japan where all the female cars appear to be geishas (in my three week experience of Japan, I did not see a single geisha anywhere), then heads over to Italy where everyone is making out and McQueen is told he needs to be fattened up. The only “non-white” characters in Radiator Springs are Flo (Jenifer Lewis), who speaks fluent sass, and her panelbeater husband Ramone (Cheech Marin). My problem is that these kind of stereotypes should be avoided, and pushing them on kids when they’re young and impressionable—“it’s okay to think that other countries are made of a homogenous people!”—is something I’d wish my kids would avoid seeing.

Also, while I’m totally okay with the fact that cars talk in these films, it absolutely pushes my credibility when you see what they have built. HOW DO THEY DO THIS? THEY DO NOT HAVE HANDS. A scene with an army of miniature robots would fix this. Or, you know, I could get over it. After all, there’s one scene in this where the a bunch of cars play guitar in an Italian plaza. HOW DO THEY STRING THE GUITARS THOUGH? I cannot buy it. Also, while I can be okay with teeth (I can buy that they’re actually grills, or whatever), why do cars have tongues? WHYYYYY

So it exceeded my expectations, made me laugh, and I had a good time. And, thrillingly, there’s a Toy Story short before it called Hawaiian Vacation that rocked my socks. There are worse movies out there to see this holiday season, like Kung Fu Panda 2 (which I may review later). And if anyone asks you if it’s better than Cars 1, you can even quote it: “Is the Popemobile Catholic?”

h j harper, star league #1 lights, camera, action

2011-06-17T16:22:00.002+10:00

There’s something about initials in kids books. When I was a kidlet, all the best books were by people hiding behind initials – along with Point Horror writers Caroline B Cooney and D E Athkins, R L Stine is of course a good example, and I was so in love with him and his initialled compatriots that for a while all of my (numerous and terrible) stories were mostly me thinking up dramatic titles, writing the name F E Hardy in bold, then running immediately out of ideas. The trend continues with the Zac Power books, written by H I Larry, a pen name for a variety of excellent authors who have contributed to the series. H J Harper is no pseudonym, but an actual (and quite lovely) person named Holly, and her new Star League series starts as much fun.

Book one opens with movie star Jay Casey heroically stopping some bank robbers in a commercial for the drink Fizz Force. As the filming wraps up, we learn more about Jay: he does his own stunts, swinging down from the ceiling and kicking a burglar’s legs out from underneath him; he’s kind, showing concern for the actors he’s just beaten up; and he’s a lonely kid, orphaned and with only his uncle/agent Jefferson as a friend. Then Jay finds out he’s up for an audition with the famous director Ben Beaumont—but it’s not an audition for a movie, but to join a new bunch of kids with the ability to save the world. There’s robot S.A.M., animancer Leigh, zombie Roger (full name Roger Romero, which is why I love Holly right there), werewolf Connor and ninja Asuka, and the first book shows the team meeting for the first time, and thrown right in the deep end with a dramatic kidnapping as the evil and awesomely named Professor Pestilence tries to use Jay’s fame to his advantage.

I like early reader chapter books because I can knock them out in a short period of time and feel like a Successful Bookseller. It’s also great when I like them and then have some proper advice to offer those who want to buy a book for the eightish-plusish market. (Younger kids will probably like having it read to them and older kids, like for example twenty-nine-year-old ones, might also like to snare themselves a copy.)

Having male, female and androgynous-robot characters means that all types of kids can see that anyone can be powerful and courageous, and makes the series good for kids who think reading about the opposite sex is gross/smelly/weird/boring or the parents that assume their kids think that way. Though to be honest, in many ways the children’s book industry mops the floor with adult books, sexism-wise, because there are female spies and agents and adventurers all over the place in the kids section but not as much in the adult fiction section. Hopefully kids who grow up reading books like Star League: Lights, Camera, Action Hero will end up writing books like Star League: Equal Pay, Equal Badassness. Or perhaps they’ll think of better titles. Probably.

Lights, Camera, Action Hero is fun, adventurous, a bit different, and manages to tackle the serious issues of being ostracised and feeling lonely while throwing in terrifying evil professors, killbots (my favourite kind of bot!) and jokes. Basically, it’s all you could want in a kids adventure book, with the added bonus of originality and warmth. Nahum Ziersch’s manga-ish illustrations are excellent, energetic, edgy and other e-words too: it makes for a good-looking read to go with the clear but not patronising language. And if you/your kid/your grandma likes it, there’s five more books in the series. You know what, you should probably just go buy them all at once.

super 8

2011-06-14T11:57:00.002+10:00

While I can only remember spending my school summer holidays watching Spaceballs on repeat and eating peanut butter out of the jar, in Super 8 a bunch of clearly more motivated kids decide to spend their summer holidays shooting a zombie movie. Among them is Joe Lamb (an excellent Joel Courtney), in charge of makeup effects, who lost his mother in an industrial accident four months earlier. He and his father’s relationship has suffered heavily, most heartbreakingly displayed in a moment when dad Jackson (Kyle Chandler) sells him on the idea of spending summer at a baseball camp by saying “it’s best for both of us”. Before the idea takes hold, the group of friends sneak out late one night to film a midnight scene by a train line. Accompanying them is the only person with access to a car—Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning), whose first scene is amazingly snippy but who Joe is besotted with regardless. As they start filming, a train comes along in the background, and all hell breaks loose.

The train crash scene was incredible. I love a good smashy disaster spectacle on film—only pretend ones, though—and this blows most other such scenes out of the water. Carriages go flying, debris everywhere, fireballs—you name it, it happens. And it keeps happening. It takes your ability to believe in the physics of a crash and stretches it as thin as possible. It is one of the most entertaining ten minutes I’ve ever had in cinema, and though the movie had been fine up until that point, that was when the audience gasped at each other in shock and I blustered about it happily in my seat. In the aftermath of the crash, the story proper is set up: something mysterious and alive was in one of those carriages, and the Spielberg/Abrams camp is happy to scare the pants off you from here on in.

As the town deals with the crash and the subsequent drama of both the army’s arrival and the fallout from the accident, Joe and his friends have their own problems—jealousy, grief, blossoming friendship and the need of movie director Charles (Riley Griffiths, shouty and excellent) to finish the film. Shit gets real pretty quickly, and our characters are in actual danger, making it a tense and gripping film that has typical Spielberg humour to lighten the mood. And I don’t begrudge him that for a second; it’s bloodier and the kids swear like troopers, but otherwise, it’s got a real Goonies feel to it; fun, scary, everything a kid could want—though I’d be hesitant recommending it to anyone under the age of twelve or so.

The acting is perfect, and the kids—some of who have never acted in film before—will make you weep for them and laugh with them. The film-within-a-film’s lead actor Martin (Gabriel Basso) barfs at any level of distress; explosion effects master Carey (Ryan Lee) is a slightly alarming little pyromaniac; Preston (Zach Mills) designs sets and is a terrible extra. You’ll love them all—apart from Alice’s guilt-ridden father Louis (Ron Eldard), none of the humans are really a grey area as far as how you want them to see out the movie. The army is made up of jerks. The townspeople are good. And with a mysterious creature on the loose, someone’s going to get attacked.

The scares were so neatly placed that I never expected them; one particular bus scene had me so surprised that I knocked Chris’s Pepsi over in my terrified flail. One guy behind me screamed in an earlier moment of shock. With these moments of alarm coupled with jokey characters and a pace that never stops being affecting in some way, Super 8 is almost a perfect movie.

It isn’t, though: the creature itself is a grey area emotionally and has a frustrating ending; Alice’s dad Louis seems to have more backstory with Joe’s family than is properly exposed; a particularly magnetic (this is a terrible pun) scene at the end is laboured and pointless; a joke about a kid listening to this new thing called a “Walkman” is forced and elicited nothing but groans from the audience. But no movie is flawless, and it was such a fantastic movie overall that a few people even applauded as the credits rolled. And you should, of course, stay for the credits.

Super 8 is a wonderful, instant-classic type movie; it gives me hope for J J Abrams (because let’s face it, Cloverfield was pretty average) and reminded me why Steven Spielberg is the kind of guy who you want to hug and thank for making childhood seem much more fun than it actually is. For the first time in a long time, I am contemplating seeing a movie at the cinema twice. This time I’ll make sure we take drinks that have screw-top lids so no one needs to find themselves covered in ice just because I can’t control my arms.

remote viewing episode 15

2011-06-01T11:20:00.005+10:00

So me and my pals Elroy and Matt do a weekly podcast on movies that you should probably listen to obsessively. We review what we’ve seen, discuss movie news (at least one news item a week is about the Akira movie going horribly wrong in some way), choose a topic to go into more depth about—this week we went all meta and discussed reviews and reviewers—and inform our Faithful Listeners about movie release dates, then chat about feedback. To check it out, you can go to the Remote Viewing website, follow us excitedly on Twitter, or, best yet, subscribe on iTunes, where we’ve been in the New & Notable category for a few weeks because we’re pretty much the most awesome thing on iTunes. Yeah Beyonce, you heard me.

the hangover, part ii

2011-05-31T10:57:00.003+10:00

I can’t remember what I thought of the first Hangover movie—I think it was something like “not worth the hype, but passable”—but this time I have the power of blog to remind me in case I draw a similar blank when The Hangover, Part III comes out (which it inevitably will.) So, future Fiona: DON’T GO OH GOD JUST STAY AT HOME AND CREATE YOUR OWN HANGOVER, I KNOW YOU DON’T REALLY DRINK BUT START INSTEAD OF SEEING THIS.

Basically, Stu (Ed Helms, mopey) is getting married to Lauren (Jamie Chung, the only likeable person in the film, making up somewhat for Sucker Punch) in her parents’ home country of Thailand. Along for the wedding is Phil (Bradley Cooper, all alpha male, all arrogant, mostly annoying), Doug (Justin Bartha, again barely in it and probably offended at that fact), and, unfortunately, Alan (Zach Galifianakis, reprehensible in just about every way.) Despite Stu’s best hope for a single, quiet drink at the beach, the three original Hangoverers end up in a seedy hotel in Bangkok the next morning, missing their fourth guest: Lauren’s younger brother Teddy. When last time around they lost Doug, you were all, “Aw, poor guys,” this time all you can think is, “These are bad people and should feel bad. Seriously, twice?” And that’s the problem—it’s basically like someone gluing random pages of the Wikipedia entry for Bangkok to the novelisation of the last movie and submitting it as a new script as a joke. It doesn’t do anything new—just replaces tropes from the old movie (ie. baby) with slightly altered ones (ie. monkey that smokes).

I can barely come up with anything good about this movie. I basically forced my spouse into seeing it with me, and now I owe him. Even the audience behind us—a target-market-packed cinema full of teenage-to-middle-aged men—didn’t really laugh, or react. There was some stilted awkwardness as Zach made racist and inappropriate remarks that were probably surprising and new the first time (“wow, people really still talk like that? How awful being stuck with him”) now being tired and just rude and offensive (“why the fuck did they let this guy back in their lives?”) Maybe three jokes were funny, like when Alan says sadly to his new pal, “I wish monkeys could Skype.” But it’s not a comedy, even though it seems to be billed as one. It’s maybe a melodrama. It’s definitely not good.

The problem with The Hangover Part II is that all the action takes place in the past. So Stu wakes up with a tattoo on the side of his face. Remember the post-big-night-tattoo scene in Dude, Where’s My Car? when Ashton and Seann’s characters scream, “Dude, what does mine say?” “Sweet, what about mine?” for like ten minutes? Yeah, don’t expect that level of funny, but go YouTube that and laugh like it’s 1999, then thank me later. We don’t experience the hilarity and boundless energy of the night before, but have to listen to Stu wailing about how his life is doomed (which it probably is, and rightfully so), Phil sighing and trying to fix things, and Alan being the most crass person in existence. It’s far too much like reading about your overly dramatic friends on your facebook wall, except you’re stuck listening for two hours instead of being able to open up a new tab and read Cracked.com.

There are gaping plot holes and underdeveloped scenes. Paul Giamatti turns up briefly and steals the scene with a buzzing, ominous terror. Animals are used in the movie, something I’m becoming much less cool with over time—it is never necessary to put them in movies. As far as I can tell, everyone involved seems to be pretty cool in interviews/real life, but they are not cool in this. And despite my usual wailing about dicks in movies, there are dicks in this one—lots—but somehow the way they’re used rankles instead of pleases, not because of who they belong to, but that they seem to be making fun of those who own them. Or, you know, short version: transphobia isn’t cool, folks, and you can’t pretend it is.

In summary: Below Expectations, and may make you want to go and get smashed afterwards so that when you reflect upon it, all you can feel is a dull thrum of amnesia. Thailand is beautiful and, despite them trying to make Bangkok seem terrifying, is the only thing that you may go away feeling affection for. If you are desperate to watch a whiny pack of assholes on screen for hours, just tune into the AFL instead. At least some of them get punched in the face.

insidious

2011-05-20T12:08:00.002+10:00

One of the first things you’ll notice about Insidious is the DRAMATIC VIOLINS that accompany the title, where the word INSIDIOUS is in POINTED CAPITALS that are somewhat ON FIRE. It’s a melodramatic beginning but makes you think yes, I am in for some down-home scares in this film, and people will scream. And both of these things are true. But what this film also has is Australian comedians and terrible makeup and a ghost dancing a jig. It is both a scary movie and a parody of a scary movie, but not like Scary Movie or even like Scream, but like if the movie’s makers—Australians-behind-Saw Leigh Whannell and James Wan—were writing a genuinely scary script, stopped halfway through to watch some Comedy Central, then forgot what the first half of the script was about. Which, you know, I’ve been guilty of before in my writing, but that’s why I haven’t made any movies yet. Because I hear movies are hard to produce when all you have in your pockets is $3.80 and five hair ties.

Musician Renai (Rose Byrne) and schoolteacher Josh (Patrick Wilson) are a young and attractive couple moving into a new house with their three young children to try out a different scene after some nameless stress plagued them beforehand. The house is lovely and big, but has an attic, which really, people in horror movies should think twice before acquiring. After an accident in said attic leaves their son Dalton in a coma that doctors can’t explain, things in the house start to move, creepy voices are heard on the baby’s walkie-talkie, and then, there are ghosts.

There are some seat-jumping moments, with faces appearing one moment and gone the next, an atmospheric house full of doors and creaks, and a sound engineer who knew how to make you tense. But after the introduction of Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson as Specs and Tucker, two paranormal investigators who work for wise medium Elise (Lin Shaye), then whole film turned into a quirky comedy, where Elise works using gas masks and ridiculous contraptions that look like they were bought at Toys r Us’ baby section, and Tucker and Specs constantly bickering in the background. They were genuinely funny and the idea of comic relief at that time was welcomed, but it never really regained serious momentum afterwards. I stopped giving a crap whether anyone lived or died because it stopped being serious and dangerous, and I failed to be scared in any scene from then on because of that.

The ghosts themselves were chilling when they were just glimpses here and there, but then it wasn’t long until they became real, corporeal things and also lost their scariness because of that. One scene that actually started out amazing, with someone walking past Renai’s window then suddenly appearing in her room in a scream-inducing way, ended with the stringy hair and pancake makeup of the monster/ghost/demon completely removing me from the movie despite the fact he actually physically attacked Renai and I should have been legitimately scared for her. When you got close-up looks at the demons they all had too much makeup on and not enough RAWR I ARE DEMON, and that, coupled with the rollercoaster tone of the movie made it impossible to regain chills. The one creature they bothered to add special effects to—creepy fingers and the ability to climb walls—looked exactly like Darth Maul, thereby looking like a cosplayer who stumbled into the auditions on his way to a sci-fi convention.

One good thing: while the husband (it’s always the woman who sees the monsters and weeps, isn’t it? Jesus) doesn’t believe wifey that there are monsters in their house, when she says she wants to move he does it to make her happy. While there’s a few avenues they didn’t take (why doesn’t he suggest a therapist, too? I mean, we know the demons are real but he doesn’t at that point) it’s a relief that for once the non-scared partner just goes along with requests instead of insisting that the clearly upset partner suck it up. Still, his late nights at work are annoying. What a jerk.

In summary: Below Expectations. There are scares and you’ll scream and the guy sitting next to Chris jumped even at the end when I spent most of the movie rolling my eyes. Maybe you won’t be as cynical as me, but if you are, you’ll be let down by the bad guys being too physically present, too powdery of face (even in the part when it’s purposefully done, which was a confusing scene anyway) and not doing enough hiding behind curtains. Too much of a change from serious to ridiculous caused a rift in the character investment. Despite all this, it’s still better than Scream 4, so if you’re at the cinema and have to make the choice...go see Thor.

paul

2011-05-06T09:33:00.002+10:00

There really aren’t enough movies about aliens coming to earth that aren’t nightmarish scenarios, like everything bar Hollywood getting destroyed in Battle: Los Angeles, or Keanu Reeves having to be emotional in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Of course, all the nice-alien ones are all comedies, because it’s tricky to take seriously, right? And hey, I’m no scientist—for all I know, electricity is still made by catching lightning with your kites—but my opinion is that it’s a bit self-absorbed to think that we’re the only living critters on this great expanse called the Universe. And I’ll always be happy thinking that any close encounters would be more likely to produce laughs than terror.

In Paul, nerdy British pals Graeme and Clive (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, stretching their abilities) take off on a UFO-themed road trip across America, hiring an RV and stopping at all the premier sites—the Black Mailbox, Area 51, Roswell, and so on. Despite their open minds, it still comes as a bit of a surprise when they happen upon Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen, so casually he possibly recorded his voice sitting in a beanbag in front of his tv), a green, big-headed alien driving poorly and at speed to get away from the people who are trying to kill him—and who is aiming to get back home. With his car smashed, Paul hitches a ride with our heroes, and they belt away from agent Zoil (Jason Bateman, coolly terrifying) and his bumbling subordinates, Haggard and O’Reilly (Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio, respectively), and even manage to pick up a pretty lady when they rent RV space from religious zealot Ruth (Kristen Wiig) and then kind of kidnap her.

As a proud owner of Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz on DVD, I did a little dance when I heard about Paul. Comedies are something I’m shamelessly and vocally thrilled about watching and I was sad that I missed its opening weekend by being overseas. (I know, I know. You feel terrible for me, don’t you?) I finally made it on the weekend, prepared and happy, but honestly—I was disappointed. It wasn’t as consistently funny as their other films, and getting from point A to B did occasionally cause the movie to suffer from dead time. The addition of certain people for the sake of cameos—Jane Lynch’s waitress for one—seemed to serve no other purpose than to have everyone in the audience hiss “Glee!” at each other. Graeme and Clive make some dick moves, like crashing into people’s cars and kidnapping an unconscious woman; they also didn’t have much of a background to work with apart from Clive being an aspiring author and Graeme drawing pictures. What are their home lives like? Are they in the US because they’re skipping child support or murder charges back in England? Despite being infatuated with Pegg and Frost personally, I couldn’t quite bring myself to get attached to them in Paul. Moments of tension arise, like when Clive confesses the reasons behind his anger to Paul, but then everything is defused and the movie goes back to its slow burn.

Of course it is a comedy, and they are talented writers, so I’d be wrong to imply there weren’t some pretty great laughs in Paul. While Seth Rogen’s weed-soaked slacker schtick is a bit tired, Paul himself is such an amicable dude you’re invested in seeing him return home. The realisation of the extent of Paul’s fame—the reason he looks like all the alien pictures around is because they look like him—is good fun, including an amusing phone call conversation with a certain famous director. Ruth’s turnaround from hardcore Christian to wide-eyed believer involves her getting up to all the things she missed before, including cursing at everyone in sight. And like in their other movies, Pegg and Frost do inspire a kind of cosy, comforting hilarity because they’re such everyday flawed and entertaining people who keep getting into comedic scrapes that happen to get caught on camera. Discovering who Paul’s nemesis The Big Guy is, and the final scenes of the movie, are both clichéd and unpredictable, cheesy and perfect. And as Clive, Frost, who can sometimes in these movies be that kind of pain in the arse friend that’s good for an occasional laugh but you wouldn’t actually want to introduce to that attractive potential spouse, steps up and makes the two heroes finally on par when it comes to likeability. Wouldn’t mind seeing Nick Frost be the one who gets the girl for once, though.

In summary: go in with less fangirl hope than I did, and it would Meet or possibly Exceed Expectations, but as it stands, it’s Below Expectations. That still makes it a good movie, because I was aiming high, but it can be slow in points. While I can’t fault Greg Mottola’s directing, I can’t help but wonder if usual Pegg/Frost cohort Edgar Wright would have added that hyperactive excitement and extra edge that those boys deserve. Extra points go to Frost’s long hair, but points are taken off for Pegg’s. And one star extra for making an alien movie—because, frankly, there should be more, and now I’m compelled to go have a Mac and Me/Explorers movie night and sigh theatrically about my childhood.

source code

2011-04-29T15:18:00.002+10:00

So if you’ve noticed a lack of shouting from me on your Google Reader feed lately, it’s because I’ve been away – to Vancouver, Yellowknife (it’s in Northern Canada, far enough that I got to see the Northern Lights), New York City and Toronto. It was a blast, and yes, I’d love to be on holiday for eternity, but I’m pretty happy with my life (and that includes you, faithful reader) so I’m just as stoked to be home. And you’ll be pleased to know that I didn’t forget my sworn oath to bleat about movies to the sighing masses, and I watched some movies on the plane (Yes Man: perfectly adequate and Zooey Deschanel is a doll; Gulliver’s Travels: funnier than expected though seriously Jack Black is always so reprehensible, am I right?; The Tourist: not actually the worst movie ever, but I picked the twist and Johnny Depp looks like he has a tiny little face next to Angelina) and I even went to see a flick in NYC. Before I go on about the film, let me say that the cinematic experience itself was a bit of a surprise: while I could still have the popcorn there (alert: buttered popcorn never has actual butter) the floor sloped up, not down, which was a bit distracting, and the aisle was in the middle instead of along the sides, which meant instead of sitting in the middle of the row, aka the whole POINT, I had to sit TWO CHAIRS TO THE SIDE. I know, I know. America, right? Totally backwards.

Source Code is the newest movie directed by Duncan Jones, the genius behind mind-bend Moon. In it, Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal, apparently pronounced Jill-en-hall for those who, like me, are perpetually worried about saying it wrong) wakes up on a train to find a beautiful girl named Christina (Michelle Monaghan) having a conversation with him that he doesn’t understand. After stumbling about, angry and confused, the train explodes and he wakes up again—this time strapped in a chamber and understandably freaking out. He is a military pilot, trying to figure out what happened to the crew he last remembers flying with, but Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), the rushed officer on the other end of his audio feed, is in a hurry to get him back on that train. Because someone blew it up, and there is going to be yet another attack, and the only way to fix it is to get into the mind of someone who died on that train, and figure out who planted the bomb. The Source Code is a system that will let you back into the last eight minutes of someone’s life, and Colter is the right person for the job, and now under command to figure out what happened. But as the minutes tick over and he keeps getting blown up and becomes distracted, by Christina’s loveliness, from his arguably more important task of saving an entire city, he wonders if there’s a way he can change not only the future, but the past, too.

Source Code is just as flat-out great as Moon; it’s the kind of movie you’ll leave feeling glad you’ve been at the cinema. It’s well-shot, beautifully acted, perfectly paced, and an interesting idea, even if you’re like me and your eyes glaze over as soon as science harder than Mentos + Diet Coke = BAM is involved. Despite the fact that Colter has only about fifteen total minutes of conversation with Christina, you want them to shack up. The tension is high not only because the fate of Chicago is in Colter’s hands, but because we—and Colter himself—are kept in the dark about certain aspects of this investigation, so in a panic are the military hoping to catch the bomber in time. Goodwin, and the limping Dr Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright), don’t have time for elaborate exposition, so just as something is unveiled, we’re back on a train with eight minutes left. And finding a bomber on a train full of suspicious people and jerks is just about as hard as you’d imagine.

Now I’d be cautious of reading many reviews for this movie, not just because my opinion is the only important one (which it totally is) but because I actually had a fairly crucial plot point spoilered for me a few weeks ago, which they (I can’t quite remember who) threw so casually into the review I assumed it was known from the start, but it really was not at all. The movie can get quite mind-bending at times, too, as is to be expected once quantum physics get involved, so I could be partially grateful for having that one thing ruined so I knew what was going on for once instead of being too confused to finish my popcorn (a dire situation.) And look, you do have to have a certain level of faith in a movie that doesn’t really explain how you can really get into someone’s mind eight minutes before they die. I understand the concept of parallel universes with different outcomes, but at the end, you may have a few questions the movie didn’t quite answer. But then, you might have not been an English student like me who spent all of Science drawing penises in the margins of her textbook, and maybe it will all be clear. Along with the more physics-based quandaries I had, I also wondered why there was no mention of, you know, actual police work involved in finding out about the bomber. Was this really the only plan the government had? Was no one checking security footage? And the ending needed more sirens. Etc etc. It’s okay though; most movies give me questions that really are only asked by pedantic people like myself, and Source Code left me with a general feel of goodwill so I can’t really criticise it.

Gyllenhaal does a fine job channelling a more Jarhead role than a Prince of Persia one, and Monaghan, despite trying to pass as twenty-eight in this film (she looks amazing, but thirty-five), is as sweet and funny as you could want. The small amount of peripheral characters on the train (college students, comedians, nurses, all who have interactions with Colter over the course of the movie that range from scary to funny) and outside (the military, and Colter’s estranged father) give the movie some extra emotion: more people whose outcomes you care about. Whatever Duncan Jones does next, I’m sure whoever his father is will be proud.

In summary: Exceeds Expectations. A great film, much fun to be had, kind of smart enough to make you feel like your brain is working while blockbustery enough to just be entertaining. I mean, avoid seeing it in America if you possibly can (I personally recommend Hoyts Victoria Gardens, but that’s just me.) It’s so good you should tell your other parallel selves to see it too. Then you can all leave yourself emails discussing it, right? Augh, I broke my brain again.

comedy festival: capital punishment

2011-04-03T02:38:00.003+11:00

When you’re a bit sneezy and sniffly and have perhaps slept a bit too much on a bright clear Saturday, the best thing would be to maybe go for a brisk walk, or make some kind of refreshing salad, or snort coffee, or whatever else it is that normal people do. But of course the best solution to sulky illness is always the same: comedy. A good laugh will cure all ills. There, I just saved you a trip to hospital about that bleeding head injury. But I’m about to cost you twenty dollars per person anyway.

Saturday night at 10:45 saw Chris and I at the Town Hall to see Capital Punishment for the second year running. They’re a group of current/former Canberra locals who spread five acts over one hour and are kind of like when you get the Five Flavours Lifesavers from the milk bar and you’re super excited to get pineapple, raspberry, watermelon and orange, and you think you’ll get the gross cherry one, but then suddenly it’s another watermelon, and you’re all “YES!” and cheer and everyone in the street judges you on your unbridled enthusiasm. Rafe Morris bookends the show, playing an intro song we sadly only caught the audience reaction to through the door (lesson: just pay for parking in the city during the Comedy Festival, because there really is nowhere to put your car apart from on top of those pedestrians who walk out in front of you drunk) and finishing the gig with a trio of love songs that will pull at your heart strings and then cause some sniggering when you realise who he’s really in love with and that perhaps some of his soulful yearnings are more criminal in nature. He’s actually an amazing musician, which did have me sometimes doing that thing during songs where I’m too busy going, “Oooohh, isn’t this lovely-sounding” to actually pay attention to lyrics, which is of course my own fault, and why I can’t sing along to any songs and should be banned from trying.

Emo Parsonson hails from the bush and is happy to hark back to his childhood for gags, recounting his father’s slightly unkind views towards women, his own current parenting style, and my own personal favourite part, where he compares his new cushy city office job’s OH&S (Occupational Healthy & Safety for the uninitiated) acronym compared to the country, where, as he points out, it stands for “OH....Shit!” (I probably think this is hilarious because I like punning on it too, like yelling “NoH&S!” whenever someone at work picks up too many books or climbs a ladder awkwardly.) Emo has a relaxed, laid-back style, is great at audience interaction, commendable after being hollered at by the woman next to Chris, and despite the causal demeanour occasionally dissolves into fast-paced rants that cause the audience to get a bit unbalanced on their (frighteningly high) seats.

Greg Kimball’s tales of the pressures to have kids once you’re in your thirties (I’m shocked to hear this, I thought it was once you’d had a partner for longer than three months that everyone was on your back about it), and his own experiences as a childcare worker, totally killed me: declaring he took a group of kids to see Toy Story “or something, I don’t know, I was drunk” and then following it up with a kid’s adventure with her folding cinema seat. It was also good to see someone wrapping up a comedy skit with an educational lesson in health involving fresh chillies and what not to do after using them; there needs to be more attention paid to these important things.

Kale Bogdanovs had arguably the best joke of the night, one that I’ll try hard not to ruin for you but involved a particular Hasbro board game I’ve always adored. I think he lost about two minutes of his show’s run-time because the audience couldn’t stop giggling for long enough to let him say anything else. Otherwise, he’s an amazingly articulate comedian, not a misplaced word or an “um” in sight (my own public speaking exercises sometimes contain only the word “um”), and his observations of movie ugly ducklings are so astute I almost let out a “hell yeah!” except that there was already someone shouting at all the acts in my aisle and I didn’t want to make everyone evict us.

For something completely different, Dayne Rathbone’s stilted man-child act is so well-perfected that everyone was quietly snickering before he’d even really said anything, his comic timing and beaming awkwardness building the performance in such a way that is caused the kind of laughing that’s so all-encompassing it almost causes you physical pain. As he reads his self-penned book, “A Boy and His Dad”, including a scene acted out with an audience member laughing so hard she could barely read her lines, each page has such an unexpected concept stuck in the middle of an everyday, flatly read sentence that I was afraid I kept spitting on the poor audience member in front of me because I kept sputtering just as I thought I’d composed myself again. Because I don’t learn lessons like “he was funny just then, perhaps he’ll be funny again?”

In Summary: Exceeds Expectations, because even though it was funny last year, I’d forgotten how funny. There were occasional flat moments—I mean, find me a comedian that doesn’t—but within another minute you were chortling/snorting/screeching/whatever-your-laughter-style away again. It’s pretty blue, too, so don’t go taking your eight-year-old to see it, or your eighty-year-old parents, unless you want to spend another night with them shaking their head at you and saying, “I don’t know what I did wrong.” Go buy your tickets here, or send them nude pictures here.

luke pearson, hildafolk

2011-03-31T23:29:00.005+11:00

At work we just got in a stack of new titles from a company called Nobrow Press. I hadn’t heard of them before, because I am mostly wandering around in a forest of book-related information feeling lost and overwhelmed, but let me tell you internets, they make a damn attractive book. We made a display just for the collection, because they are visually appealing, and we all kept wandering over to sniff the glorious, fresh-and-well-bound-book smell and discreetly flick through them and then eventually just buy. Seriously, I don’t know why we even bothered to make a display, it’s half-empty already just from employees with no self-restraint.

Anyway, the title I couldn’t resist was Hildafolk, by Luke Pearson. Nobrow has a graphic short story project called 17x23 and Hildafolk is one of the titles. It’s beautiful, and not very long, which is appealing to someone like me who has a short attention span. So I picked it up and took it home and read it and fell completely in love.

It’s hard to summarise something that has less words in it than the review I’ll end up writing (probably), but a young girl called Hilda lives with her mother, reads books on trolls, has an antlered-fox-type-companion-animal called Twig, and loves to draw and sleep in a tent when it rains. One morning, she goes out drawing, and, well, as she says at the end, “What a noteworthy day.” She learned a lesson about tolerance, made me do these alarming short barks of laughter, and then I sniffed the pages some more in a vaguely creepy manner and sighed at the end. It really is a perfect little story.

Luke Pearson’s big-eyed, stick-legged people and gorgeously coloured mountainous landscape are just the right level of cute and immersive. The snow and wind and Hilda’s fear of trolls are equally as clear and vibrant on the page, Pearson’s lines drawn as clear and smooth with the changing weather as they are with Hilda’s big, happy face. The terrain is familiar, but the critters within are not, trolls and giants as normal as snow and rain. Once I’d checked out other stuff on his site, I realised that his style, with clean lines like a Chris Ware tale but with movement (not to criticise Ware, who is amazing), if maybe Ware had an artistically-inclined baby with Charley Harper, is actually just my favourite style to look at. When it rains in Hilda’s tent, the PT PT PT of the downpour is evocative, and the earth-toned colours are so well-chosen that texture was rendered completely unnecessary. I mean, look, the whole thing has made me do entire sentences comprised entirely of fawning and without any terrible jokes. Surely that is something to be celebrated.

In summary: Exceeds Expectations, and about the most perfect way to spend ten minutes. It’s great, and you should read it. The only downside is the price here in Australia; while it’s a full-colour book with sturdy pages, it’s still only about twenty-four pages long and at twenty dollars, compared to around six dollars for a typical comic single issue, it’s a bit much. Still, it’s actually completely worth it, as both an art piece and as a comic, and you should all read it anyway and agree with me that the world created for Hilda should be the default setting for life. And then you should buy it. Or at least go and visit him over here, and tell him I sent you so he can be all, “What?”

griff the invisible

2011-03-29T12:06:00.004+11:00

Forever in my mind as Vinnie the hapless husband from the halcyon days of high school when my mother and I obsessively watched Home and Away after dinner, Ryan Kwanten has done what only a handful of ex-H&A-types have and is now gleefully in the middle of an awesome local and international career. And you can see why—in Griff the Invisible as the titular Griff, he is so far removed from the world of Jason Stackhouse both literally—Griff is an Australian film—and emotionally, as he doesn’t exude the confident ridiculousness of Jason but instead is so put upon and quirky you just want to give him a hug. Or an AFI. Maybe both.

In the dark of night, when crime is creeping up on unsuspecting civilians, the person to save them is Griff: clad in a yellow-and-black suit, strong and brave, he will defend the citizens of his town the best he can. With an amazing security system and cameras all over his neighbourhood, he knows where to go and when to help. But when daytime rolls around, he struggles in normal society. Bullied at work by the mean-spirited Tony, he stammers and blushes his way through social interactions and only slight loosens up around his own brother, Tim. It’s Tim himself who first reveals, holding up a poster of a poorly-drawn representation of the costumed Griff that are plastered around the neighbourhood saying DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?, that this is not new, and that Griff has been in trouble for this before. And before long, you are left questioning: is he a superhero? Does he have superpowers and a line straight to the unnamed commissioner?

There are a lot of everyday-superhero movies out at the moment, from the recentish Kick-Ass to the very recent Rainn Wilson vehicle Super, and it has become such a genre of its own that I couldn’t even convince my spouse to see it with me, so bored was he of the idea. But the limited scope of Griff—you never go out of the neighbourhoods he works and lives in—means it becomes much more personal and involving, less about action and fight sequences and more about the mental state of its main characters. Along with the painfully shy Griff, there is Melody (Maeve Dermody), Tim’s new love interest and a scientist who believes she should be able to walk through walls. And while it’s Tim who finds Melody at a Chinese takeaway restaurant, it’s she and Griff together, realising almost instantly that they have found a kindred spirit in each other, that make the film so wonderful: they are cuteness personified, laden with quirk and attractive without the overly made-up perfection of Hollywood movies. Despite the superhero plotline, it’s a movie that smacks of familiarity, and can I just say, it is so nice to see an Australian movie that’s not about a) bogans, b) death, or c) bogans dying. There are suitably Australian turns of phrase but with none of the cultural cringe that movies like Sanctum make you suffer from. (The phrase “yum yum chook’s bum” is uttered, but it’s contextually appropriate and kind of funny.) It’s the kind of Australian film you wouldn’t be embarrassed sending to your overseas pals on DVD if not for those pesky regions.

It’s a gorgeous-looking film, with the reveals of Griff’s surroundings over time heartbreaking and simplistic. The camera loves the beautiful Melody, and it’s well-shot even within the confines of the limited areas and spaces used. The soundtrack is good enough to make me go to work and whine that we don’t have it in yet, and the sound design also zippy. The film, however, does drag on a bit, despite its short running time, and goes through so much happy! sad! together! apart! that you’re a bit done with it by the end. There’s also a couple of fun things, like Griff’s fights with steampunkers in alleys, and Melody’s habitual clumsiness, that happen at the start and then vanish towards the end, leaving you feel cheated of the things that made you feel so warm towards it in the first place. But really, it’s the characters that make Griff the Invisible so great, with Tony someone you’d really like to see blasted into space by a cannon (spoiler: this doesn’t happen), Tim someone well-meaning but ultimately painful to talk to (“Anyhooo, we better goooo,” he will say awkwardly), Melody’s concerned but adoring parents (Heather Mitchell and the always utterly utterly fabulous Marshall Napier), and Griff and Melody themselves, superheroes, super weird and a couple to be held in high esteem by outsiders everywhere.

In Summary: Meets Expectations. I couldn’t say it’s the greatest movie of our time, but it is absolutely a sweet little movie to spend an afternoon watching, and then you could go out afterwards and take Melody’s advice: protest a protest, or Google Google. Or go punch a bad guy in the street. Whatever floats your boat.

limitless

2011-03-21T15:42:00.003+11:00

At the beginning of Rango, a few owls kicking around in mariachi gear and wielding instruments start singing laments to our lizardy hero, who, they declare, will inevitably die. It’s a bit confronting for a kids movie, and just to go off on a small and not really movie-ruining spoiler, isn’t true: by the end, they confess they meant it in the we’ll-all-die-eventually kind of way. At the beginning of Limitless, Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) is standing in a dapper suit on the edge of a building’s balcony about to fling himself off and pondering what happened to get him to this point. And then we go back to the start of the story and, in a small but not really movie-ruining spoiler, when we get back to him on the edge of his balcony, he changes his mind—it’s not the end of the movie at that point and there’s still plenty of danger to follow, in case you were wondering. But honestly, what is it with movies at the moment where they feel the need to signpost the fact that there is a threat to the main character? Of course there is going to be some kind of drama, that is the whole point of films. But all these flicks where we’re supposed to assume the main character dies, only to have them not actually be dead—it’s frustrating. No, of course I didn’t want Rango to die. (Note I am less vehement about Bradley Cooper.) But just stop it, film industry, okay? We’re perfectly capable of sitting through the start of a movie knowing there’s action to come, and we don’t need it pointed out. That’s what ads are for and frankly, we’ve already paid for our tickets at that point, haven’t we?

With that rant over, now to get into Limitless proper. If you’ve ever heard the old trope about how we only use 20% of our brain and the other 80% is just lying around letting us knock over glasses of water because we’re uncoordinated, this plotline may be of interest. Struggling writer Eddie is moping about with no motivation and a ponytail (that’s how you know he’s downtrodden, apaprently), and has been dumped by his straightlaced girlfriend Lindy (soon to be Sucker Punched Abbie Cornish). At this low point, he meets up with his ex-brother-in-law Vernon (Johnny Whitworth), who used to deal drugs in his past and has now come up in the world, so to speak—the drugs he now peddles are worth $800 a pop. Against his better judgement, he accepts a single pill from Vernon—and suddenly that other 80% of his brain is firing on all cylinders. And one pill—you’ll be shocked at this—just ain’t enough. Despite the minor blip in the radar that is Vernon turning up in the next scene with a bullet to the head, Eddie secures a stack of pills and then becomes a kind of SuperEddie, all-round genius, social networker, lady puller and stockmarket genius—all of which happens, obviously, only after he loses the ponytail and gets a nice suave haircut. But such a fabulous drug doesn’t come without its consequences, and along with a loan shark and a creepy stalker, the awesome solution starts to screw with his sanity.

Limitless is actually pretty good. What couldn’t be entertaining about seeing someone know everything, learn languages in hours, take over the stockmarket and have photographic recall of everything in his past that he has ever seen, even briefly? It taps into everyone’s dream of what you could achieve if all your brainspace wasn’t taken up by useless facts like Hey There’s That Guy From The Bourne Supremacy etc.

Bradley Cooper, king of Alpha Male roles, barely convinces at the start when Eddie is a slouchy deadbeat, but (gasp) does wonderfully as a smooth operator when high, and then alarms completely with his third haircut. Abbie Cornish is fairly restrained as Eddie’s staid love interest, but it makes for a convincing and interesting scene later on when she refuses the drug despite knowing what it could do for her. Robert De Niro turns up as finance wrangler Carl Van Loon, keen on Eddie’s newfound stock knowledge and his insight on a merger with another company. Rounding out the major players is professional lowered brow Andrew Howard as Gennady, the man who lent Eddie a hundred grand when he was starting out and now wants in on the altered reality.

It’s exciting, every new situation doused in a hearty amount of pop culture—see Eddie’s fight scene, his talents gathered from television and Bruce Lee flicks—and pretty non-stop entertainment-wise. As the scope of the drug’s hold becomes clear, and the unnerving problems arise, you are nervous for Eddie and his tenuous grip on reality. Good sound, great action, cool idea—it’s what action movies are supposed to be.

In summary: Meets Expectations. It doesn’t exceed them because it is the right kind of entertainment from a blockbuster action film, but still has its flaws—the finance stuff does dull the excitement maybe a touch, even though you see why he’s doing it. The movie then has the monetary concerns of Inside Job plus the skewed-reality thrills of The Adjustment Bureau, a fact that maybe only I see because they’re two of the more recent movies I’ve seen. Actually, coupled with the similar intro of Rango, maybe there are just no new movie ideas. Anyway, there is also a frustratingly unsolved crime and a sense at the end that you’re not sure whether Eddie is a poor schmuck caught up in things beyond his control or an A-grade asshole straight out of The Hangover, which, god forbid, is about to spout a sequel. Still, there are some genuinely nifty moments in it, one involving a pool of blood that made the whole audience squirm (you’ll know it when you see it), and it sure holds you in thrall. Anyway, everyone should have to go see a film directed by a guy called Neil Burger, just to stick it to the people who probably bullied him at school.

rango

2011-03-18T09:58:00.002+11:00

Ah, Rango. The movie posters up at a bus stop near you have a chameleon in a Hawaiian shirt clutching a wind-up fish toy and staring anxiously out. What message about the story does this convey? First, that we’re in a world where animals wear people clothes—and yes, they all do, but we never encounter any humans having a reaction to it—and secondly, that Rango and his pet wind-up fish are going to get up to all sorts of adventures. But alas, the poster lies, and those of you who are fans of wind-up fish toys in their movies are going to be sorely disappointed when he is cast aside within three minutes.

Of course the Wind-Up Fish Fan Club has a pretty small following but honestly, the advertising campaign for this movie has it all wrong. I went to see Rango because I’ll go see virtually anything that is animated (though the godawful trailer for Mars Needs Moms will nix that particular movie) but I wasn’t expecting much, just the silliness provided by the ad and a vacant-eyed fish that for all I know would end up talking a la Gnomeo & Juliet/Toy Story 3. I’m also a bit sick of Johnny Depp parading around in his current only roles as Ham In A Silly Hat, and as he voiced Rango, I expected Ham Via Voice Only. Instead of all that, Rango is actually totally incredible, from its flawless animation to the western/Hunter S Thompson in-jokes to the not-for-toddlers drama and violence. It is an amazingly funny movie, Johnny Depp is restrained—and unless you’ve got an ear for such things, you won’t recognise any of the other famous actors either—and it is so much fun you should barrel right over there to see it now. Quick, open another tab on your computer, see where Village is showing it near you (they have better popcorn, though Hoyts have a good point system. Join up and Palace is cheapest, however. Anyway do what I do and join them all. Memberships make me feel important.)

Depp is Rango, a chameleon cast accidentally out of his happy tank life on a trip through the desert. (That scene, of Rango flying along the ground on a piece of shattered glass, is one of the first visually magical moments in the film; there are at least a hundred more.) During his quest for water in a place so hot liquid evaporates on the ground upon contact, Rango happens upon a lizard named Beans (Isla Fisher, unrecognisably twangy), who alarmingly has bosoms, wears a prudish Southern dress, and freezes completely when alarmed. She leads him to her home village of Dirt, a desolate desert town where all the buildings are animal-sized (and all the animals sized the same as each other, but hey, it’s not like everything else is realistic here until that point) and the people all in desperate need of water. But something sneaky is happening to the water, and Rango, the newcomer who uses his theatrical skills to pretend he is tough when in fact he’s a city slicker like you probably are (and I certainly am) is declared the salvation the town is waiting for.

This is Industrial Light and Magic’s first foray into entirely animated film, and I will throw down and say it’s the best-animated movie I’ve ever seen. We’ve all seen talking animals before, but all these animals are so gloriously convincing, full of expression and texture, that it will blow your mind. Seeing it on the big screen was really something else. Other than that (because really, half of my notes on the film were things like “it looks fucking amazing”, but you probably get the hint by now) I’d like to first express that it’s not really a film for the littlies, with nightmarish dream sequences and an armadillo squashed on the road in the first five minutes with a tyre print along his now-flat belly. (He’s actually fine—or at least a talking ghost, who knows—but I did hear a little whimpering and even some little gasps from the adults, and possibly me.) Another amusing scene ends up with a squished villain, which is funny, and a relief, but still pretty violent.

Cutting insults include “Missing your mommy’s mangoes?” and “If I see your face in this town again, I’m going to slice it off and use it to wipe my unmentionables”, and also confusing to small children would be this line: “We’re experiencing a paradigm shift.” (My favourite noted line was “I’m gonna strip away this mystery and expose its private parts.”) The start is pretty existential, though amusing all the same. And in case you didn’t already get a Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas vibe from Johnny Depp and his alarming shirt, an actual cameo from Duke and Dr Gonzo careening past in their car will get the point across.

My only issue with Rango was that it petered out a bit at the end once it started following a predictable storyline when Rango’s lies catch up with him—it’s a story we’ve seen before, and up until that point it had been so fabulously original I was sad to see it happen. It remained completely hilarious and entertaining, though, so I don’t really mind. And if this is ILM’s first outing, I am desperate to see their second.

In summary: Exceeds Expectations. An all-round wonderful movie and yet another lesson, started with KFC’s Colonel, that anyone wearing white in the dusty South is up to no good.

Image via movieposterdb.com

unknown

2011-03-08T11:57:00.002+11:00

Unknown was pretty average and thus, after a few false starts, gets only a short amount of my mental energy expended on it.

Liam Neeson is on a plane with his hot wife and her improbable hair. Upon landing in Berlin, where he’s about to give a speech on bio-who-cares, he gets in a taxi which swerves to avoid a fridge and then lands in the river. When he gets out of hospital and barrels towards his hotel, no one knows who he is—his wife doesn’t recognise him, and someone else is standing in his place, with his name tag on. Was he never who he thought he was? If he is, what is happening? And why didn’t he get a haircut before the movie started so it wouldn’t flop everywhere and distract the viewer?

This movie had a lot of potential—Neeson is a solid actor, the idea is pretty interesting, and the actual outcome not at all flat. But it’s stuck with some overly ridiculous car chase scenes—not one but two separate incidents with cars driving down pedestrian paths (once backwards!) with no honking, and all you can do is think: is this one person’s life/sanity worth the potential death of everyone who decided daringly to walk on the footpath today? And while on the carnage discussion, why does pretty much everyone involved, or barely involved, have to die? I just stopped being concerned about people because I assumed they would be eventually shot in the head, and never was invested enough in the characters in the first place to care.

In Summary: Below Expectations. There’s probably a worse movie out there at the moment (I’m making brash assumptions here about Disney’s Handy Manny Motorcycle Adventure, which is unfair of me) but it couldn’t be more middle of the road if it were that machine what paints stripes in the middle of roads.

the adjustment bureau

2011-03-06T20:49:00.003+11:00

Despite initial reservations, about fifteen minutes into this movie I turned to Chris and said, “I am enjoying this movie.”

Half an hour later I whispered to him, “No, I’m really enjoying this movie.”

And by the end, a big happy smile on my face, I declared to everyone within yelling distance: “WHAT A GREAT MOVIE!” and then attacked the poor cinema attendant with my full-force Good Movie Beam and actually, cheesily, thanked him.

The Adjustment Bureau. The Bourne-type posters, with ex-Bourne Matt Damon hanging onto Emily Blunt’s hand as they are mid-run, make you think it’s going to be some sock-em smackdown movie. Instead, it has much less bloodthirsty action than you’d expect and more talking and romance, yet despite that midly depressing description, still manages to be completely entertaining. Damon is David Norris, running for the New York senate, and about to blitz the election with a huge lead. After a picture is leaked of him after an unfortunate mooning incident, he is in a bathroom preparing his losing speech when he discovers a beautiful young ballet dancer, Elise Sellas (Blunt), hiding from security in one of the toilets. One hypercharged conversation later, they are making out on the sinks and thus their relationship begins.

Fate seems to have brought them together, especially when he meets her on a bus again the next day, but in reality fate is a team of guys in hats who do their best to keep the world on the correct path. This is the Adjustment Bureau, who know that Elise and David must be kept apart and do everything in their power to manipulate their relationship. While they sneak mysteriously around in their fancy headgear, freezing time and fixing people’s thoughts, our two heroes want nothing more than each other.

This movie works so well because of Damon and Blunt: their chemistry is stronger than a year eight science lab accident. If you weren’t emotionally invested in their relationship the film would fall completely flat, but right from their first chat you are cheering the two of them on. Damon makes a speech about how his team hired a seven thousand dollar consultant to determine how scuffed a politician’s shoes should be; Blunt dunks his phone in his coffee when it rings too much; they are, honestly, completely hilarious. Their angst at being apart becomes your angst. David’s anger at the Adjustment Bureau is justified and it’s all you can do not to boo them when they appear on-screen with the books they each hold, dictating the future of the world. When one of the Bureau takes pity on the beleaguered couple, you are delighted.

In stark contrast to recent action flick Unknown’s constant fighting, this has a very satisfying lack of danger to the public on the whole, with few car chases and limited strangers getting pushed over and no one getting shot by the bad guys, whose power remains solely in their hats. Not to say it doesn’t have an edge—one particular crash jolted me right out of my mellow complacency—but I have lost a little faith in action movies after Unknown and it was good to see something that still held the excitement level of a thriller without having to watch some pointless carnage. And this is from someone who likes pretend carnage: Machete is still my favourite movie of 2010, and possibly of all time.

With Terrence Stamp grey and ominous as Bureau member Thompson, and rather attractive Anthony Mackie as Bureau turncoat Harry Mitchell—not to mention the cameo appearances by the likes of Jesse Jackson and David’s amusing interview with Jon Stewart—the casting choices round out nicely. The cinematography does the movie wonders, following the characters at pace and making the fun action—the Bureau members can go into a door in one place and careen out of a door on the other side of town—easy to follow and super enjoyable. The only bone I have to pick is with the soundtrack: unnecessary twee in places and invasive in others, it became something noticeable rather than a backdrop to what was really happening on screen. Still, not enough for me to do anything more than note; I won’t be writing a strongly worded letter to director/screenwriter George Nolfi or to the estate of Philip K Dick, whose short story “Adjustment Team” this was based on.

In summary: Exceeds Expectations, is a total blast, and you’ll secretly wish for Damon and Blunt to ditch their respective partners and hook the hell up. It is much better than the other ballet-related flick of 2011 (*cough*BlackSwanwasstupid*cough*). Also, anyone who walks past you wearing a hat will be in immediate danger of getting crash-tackled to the ground with you yelling, “I AM A MASTER OF MY OWN FATE!”

Or that could just be me. Sorry, general public.

the girl who kicked the hornets' nest

2011-02-25T14:26:00.002+11:00

So I had a completely smug moment when I went up to pay for our tickets and said, “Two adults for The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, thanks,” and the cinema person said, “You know, you’re the only person who’s managed to say the title correctly.” Little did she know I’d sold five billion of the book, read it in a frenzy the day it came out, and attacked all customers who bought it afterwards with “I finished this yesterday/last week/a year ago! It is SO GOOD.” Anyway, while the title makes sense, especially within the context of the whole Millennium trilogy (deep breath): number one, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, followed by The Girl who Played with Fire, then ending on The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, it’s still true. Long titles are difficult to remember, like the book The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (aka “The Potato...Jersey...book” to customers) and A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian (“Uh, The Story of Tanks in Brazil?”). So while they’re quirky, publishers shouldn’t do it. And while we’re on the topic of things that are ridiculously long, the film The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, at more than two and a half hours, is ridiculously long. It’s mostly worth it, but you’ll be too distracted by the need to pee to pay attention to the last half hour.

In the third and probably final title in the Millennium Trilogy—there are rumours kicking around of a fourth that is mostly written, and that late author Stieg Larsson was intending to write ten—we pick up from where The Girl who Played with Fire ended. Feisty heroine Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace, now ridiculously and deservedly famous) is in the emergency room in hospital after being shot in the head and hip and shoulder, her completely vile father Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov) is down the hall in a room with a Salander-inflicted axe wound to the head, and Lisbeth’s half-brother Ronald Niedermann (Micke Spreitz)—the “blonde giant”, and someone who can’t feel pain—is on the run. Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), journalist at Millennium magazine and champion of Salander’s cause, is doing the very best he can to save Lisbeth from the media storm worked up by the frenzied attacks at Zalachenko’s house, and the residual hype around her from the murders she was accused of in the second movie. Now she is accused of the attempted murder of her father, as well, an accusation aided by her attempted murder of him years earlier as a twelve-year-old defending her abused mother, and supported by master bastard doctor Peter Teleborian (Anders Ahlbom). Yes, it’s all very dramatic. And when it involves politicians from the very highest parts of Swedish society, it’s about as dramatic as you can get. And it makes the ending all the more delicious.

Most of Salander’s screentime is spent with her locked up—first in a hospital room, aided by her hot and all-round fantastic doctor Anders Jonasson (Aksel Morisse); then, in a jail cell; and finally, in a courtroom, assisted by Blomkvist’s pregnant lawyer sister Annika (Annika Giannini). We also follow Blomkvist, and the rest of the Millennium team, as they try to find links between Zalachenko and parliament, despite numerous death threats and Blomkvist’s single-minded approach. Along with the police, aided by Blomkvist, and the bad guys themselves, who basically sit around shitting their pants, we also have the displeasure of watching Niedermann’s grotesque escape route, as he kidnaps and harms everyone in his path.

I have a lot of goodwill for the books, and the brilliantly cast movies. And I enjoyed The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, and it was fabulous to see virtually everything wrapped up. You can’t help but get completely involved with Lisbeth Salander and want desperately to see her free from the horrific life she’s had to live through since she was a child. The movie has a very satisfying black-and-white way of looking at the world, where all the good people are wonderful (though Blomkvist makes some bad decisions, it is ultimately for a greater good) and all the bad people are snivelling monsters who deserve all they get.

Still, this movie was not without its flaws. The police force came across as completely incompetent—too slow-moving to defend against the lumbering Niedermann, unable to figure anything out without the help of a journo, and in one eye-bleedingly cheesy scene, driving along a pavement and almost hitting a woman wheeling a pram (a pram! Wasn’t that trope done and dusted after the bit in Speed where Sandra Bullock hits a pram and it’s full of cans?) Despite the time lapse between the start of the movie and the end—Lisbeth has brain surgery, grows her hair out, becomes stronger—Annika remains just as heavily pregnant throughout the entire film with no actual mention made of the fact that such an integral part of the team may burst into labour on the courtroom floor. If you haven’t seen the two previous movie, it’s really not worth seeing this one, as you’d spend most of it trying to remember what the hell is going on, what happened in the past, and who that middle-aged guy on screen is. Hell, I’ve read all the books and seen the movie and I still had trouble cottoning on sometimes. The courtroom aspect ends neatly but leaves you thinking, “Wait, what was the crime being discussed, and why, despite what just happened, was this the outcome?” It felt that often one little sentence was all that was needed to make a confusing aspect make sense. But they didn’t happen, and so I sometimes sat there with a perplexed look on my face dribbling my Pepsi out the side of my mouth. And seriously, I cannot state this enough: it’s too long.

I’ve mentioned this with the previous movies but it bears repeating: one of my favourite parts of these films is the casting, not just because they’re talented actors (they are), but because all the people are just so damn normal. Blomkvist is handsome—and I adore him—and has a mid-life belly and a rough-skinned face. Erika, his blonde and beautiful editor, wears the same clothes over all the movies and has wrinkles and fuzzy hair. Salander punks up for her courtroom scene in more silver jewellery than a Kmart full of teenagers, and doesn’t really make it sexy deliberately, even though she’s gorgeous. Everyone is just wonderful in their everyday way and it makes movies so much more believable when they are. Of course, they’re all speaking Swedish which just reminds you that American/Australian/British movies have a long way to come in this regard.

In Summary: Meets Expectations. A fine thriller with a dash of politics, a sprinkle of action, one and a half teaspoons of schadenfreude, and sixteen cups of length. It missed out on some parts of the books I was hoping for—the relationship between police officer Monica Figuerola and polyamorist Blomkvist, for one—but did a fairly good job of containing the important parts. May have made a better television series—ten episodes per book or something—and apparently were actually filmed as telemovies in Sweden anyway.

GIVEAWAY! Want to see this, but not sure enough to fork out full price on it? Well I have a handful of two-for-one passes for The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest valid Australia-wide, so if you’re keen, comment here about what you think the fourth book should be called, and if you’re lucky (chances are supremely high) I’ll send you one out!

gnomeo & juliet

2011-02-21T19:02:00.005+11:00

I don’t know when it happened—or if it has always been so—but kids movies always have to have a singing and dancing scene. Inevitably, the fuddy-duddy-est of the characters will do the silliest dance and all the under-fives will fall over themselves laughing. I for one am waiting for the one kids movie that doesn’t require a song or a dance to get its point across. After all, life doesn’t work that way, and apparently I am a miserly old cynic who wants to strip all young children of fun in their flicks so that I don’t have to cross my arms and sigh pointedly when everyone bursts into song. So it’s probably not a surprise to you that there’s singing and dancing in Gnomeo & Juliet. Worse still, it’s Elton John—and while he’s a multi-kazillionaire and well-loved, I don’t actually enjoy his music at all. It’s fun enough for a kids movie, and the glitziness that goes alongside his work helps too (you will see glitter sunglasses, fear not), but he is executive producer and thus it seems like a blatant bit of self-promotion. If I liked Sir Elton perhaps I wouldn’t be so ranty right now—and one of my co-watchers loves him and had a dirty great smile on her face whenever his songs came on—but I don’t.

In happier news, I did quite like Gnomeo & Juliet. Aimed squarely at the kidlet market, though still pretty endearing for the old folks (read: twelve-plus), it’s a story we’ve all heard before, but perhaps not in this style. Gnomeo (James McAvoy) is a rough-n-tumble ceramic garden gnome from the blue Montague house, a bit of a larrikin with a podgy gnome belly. Juliet (Emily Blunt) is held literally on a pedestal by her father over the fence in the red Capulet house. Along with the crotchety home owners, the red and the blue gnomes have been enemies for as long as anyone can remember, but when Gnomeo and Juliet bump into each other in another property across the alley, they spark a forbidden romance that causes much drama as their relationship accidentally brings neighbourhood tensions to the fore. Will it follow the same storyline, with a double suicide at the end? I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say “no”, not when it’s a kids movie, though the smirking statue of Shakespeare (voiced by Patrick Stewart) at the gnomes’ local park insisted with a smirk it would end as he originally wrote it.

Frankly, gnomes just take a while to get used to. We know via the Toy Story trilogy that we can fall totally in love with otherwise inanimate objects, but watching gnomes clunk around the place, tending to their garden, repeatedly fishing for one bored fish, and so on—it’s tricky to connect with them, but you really do. The sound design is wonderful in this film, with the ceramic clacking of gnomes against themselves, each other and the environment completely spot-on and natural. They are less fragile than you’d expect but still can’t fall from great heights, and they will freeze as soon as a human is nearby into all manner of hilarious positions. I’m not sure how sold I was until Gnomeo and Juliet meet at a disused glasshouse where Juliet is hunting for the perfect flower, and the introduction of the two characters is one of the sweetest and most entertaining I have seen as the two—both in disguise—swing around the greenhouse in a nifty little action sequence. Once they fall into a pond and discover—to their mutual horror—that they are from opposing houses, their attraction doesn’t wane but things get a bit trickier when it comes to meeting up.

As in all good kids flicks, the main characters’ pals count for a lot. Gnomeo’s main man is actually a clay mushroom that, despite having no face (seriously, it’s just a mushroom) sniffs around the place like a dog and somehow makes barking noises. (What, THIS is what I can’t suspend disbelief for?) Juliet has an Irish pond frog as her helper, one who spurts jets of water out of the hose in her mouth and is happy to leap about singing, “Doooooomed!” after she discovers the dangerous romance. The most emotionally devastating character is, bizarrely, a plastic pink flamingo named Featherstone that Gnomeo and Juliet accidentally let out of a shed, who attacks everyone with love, knows no boundaries, has a strange Latin accent and, after recounting what led to him being trapped in a shed for twenty years, will make you want to bawl your eyes out and ruin your 3D glasses. (Not to mention, he’s voiced by Jim Cummings, who had a similarly devastating storyline in the substandard The Princess and the Frog. I hope his human life is much happier.) Add to that a bad guy in arrogant red gnome Tybalt—voiced, awesomely, by Jason Statham—and the ultra-competitive lawnmower fights the two groups of gnomes get into, and you’ve got yourself total entertainment.

It’s a bit cheesy, the ending is wrapped up far too quickly and with a bit of a vague hand-wave to some loose ends. There is a big stupid dance finale, if you’re bothered by such things. The 3D is absolutely fine—but underused. While it’s a good-looking movie, it’s restricted to two backyards, one neighbouring lot, and a brief foray into a park. It’s nothing that couldn’t have been done with live action, or puppets—there’s no sweeping panoramic shots, and limited action scenes, mostly lawnmower-related. I understand that the gnomes live a sheltered life, and that I’m overthinking this movie, but I’m not sure why they bothered sticking in a third dimension while keeping it so limited.

However, it’s super cute, pretty funny, and there’s lots of bright colours to keep the kids entertained. It’s not too childish for adults, and grown-ups get to play find-the-Shakespeare-in-joke—the houses are on Verona Drive, and when Juliet tries to stop a huge, drooling dog from entering her yard, she pushes a door against him yelling, “Out! Out! Damned Spot.” The computer having a banana as its logo was also a funny (though done before) touch.

In Summary: Meets Expectations. It’s all you could want from a kid’s movie—laughter, tears, and genuine desire for the couple to get together and live happily ever after with purple babies. (NB: This does not happen in the movie, but if I’d written it I would have made it happen. Maybe when I pitch my sequel to Elton at our next coffee meeting.) Gnomeo & Juliet is just plain good standard animation fare.

127 hours

2011-02-16T12:08:00.003+11:00

One thing that is always the kicker when it comes to seeing a movie based on a true story is that often I know how it ends. No one went into Titanic expecting to see the plucky engineers turning the boat in time, missing the iceberg and changing the movie into The Love Boat; no one thought Gallipoli was going to be a gentle travel narrative. So going into 127 Hours, I knew exactly what happened to Aron Ralston during his climbing accident in Utah. If you’ve been paying attention to the movie’s publicity, you’ll know that the film’s based on Ralston’s autobiography, so you know he survives. Because I work in a bookstore, and I can’t ever refrain from flicking through pictures in autobiographies (it’s my protip on the shortest way to understand the entire plot if I get asked questions by customers), I know how it happened. So did Danny Boyle sustain my interest in an entire movie set around one guy stuck between a rock and a hard place (I’m not being corny, that’s the name of the book) and with an ending I knew clearly? We all know I love to answer my own questions, so here: Oh My, Yes.

127 Hours is amazing. I can’t recommend it enough. I also can’t stress enough how much you shouldn’t bring your small children to see this, like the family I saw with a stack of kids so little they needed booster seats—not only is the fourth word of the opening song “fuck”, but there are some scenes so visceral that there are warning signs all over the movie theatre alerting viewers to the danger of seizures. Okay, so maybe I’m a prude, but it’s rated MA15+, so The Man agrees with me.

Aron Ralston is a happy-go-lucky outdoorsman, in his element when thrashing around America’s expansive countryside. One Friday night he drives to Utah’s rocky desert, sleeps in his car, then wakes up fresh and peppy to make his way to Blue John Canyon. On his way he encounters two lost and conveniently pretty girls, and he sets them back on their path, but not before taking them on a nifty little side tour, revealing his ultimate desire to be an outback guide. They part ways, the girls inviting him to a party of theirs locatable by the giant inflatable Scooby Doo, and Aron continues bouncing around the place. Then, while making his way down a crevasse, a solid-looking rock falls and Aron tumbles along with it. When Aron and the rock come to rest, his arm is lodged firmly between the canyon wall and the rock itself.

Movies about people trapped in small spaces have to work hard to keep you from getting bored, and of all directors, the ever-inventive Danny Boyle is absolutely the one to nail the genre. While all moments spent in the enclosed space with the camera lodged in Aron’s face are still compelling, he does give the viewer the relief of flashbacks and elaborate hallucinations, but they are not so extended they remove you from the ultimate claustrophobia of being stuck to a stone. The beauty of his surroundings are lost on neither us nor Aron himself, angling his foot out to catch the fifteen minutes of sunshine he gets a day, or setting his clock by the raven that flies ahead in the morning. He’s in his element, but has made a fatal error: no one knows where he was going, or when he was intending to return. So if the movie has a moral, it’s that. Leave a note, kids. Or take up a low-impact sport like Extreme Toastmaking.

The movie opens with loud intense music, and a three-way splitscreen that takes you between sports, cheering crowds, and the energetic Aron planning his trip to the canyon. The splitscreen continues as Aron bikes his way through the rocky terrain—even spectacularly crashing, the kind of fall that would send me into a whimpering mess and unable to walk for weeks but just makes Aron laugh heartily at his clumsiness and get right back on—and adds to the kind of on-edge hyper-realistic tone of the film. The scenes of Aron taking his new lady friends to a gorgeous blue pool you can get to only by a dangerous and concealed plunge into nothing is breathtaking, and the atmosphere until Aron is trapped absolutely makes the viewer understand the allure of his lifestyle, even for someone like me whose outdoor activities mostly comprise of running only late at night when no one can point and laugh.

Watching Aron use all of his knowledge to survive and try to escape is enlightening—from making an outfit out of rope during the cold nights, conserving his pee to drink later (and you really believe it, too, and feel a bit ill watching it), and attempting to set up a pulley system to get the rock off. As his physical and mental functions start to fail, we see him exhausted, and hallucinating the inflatable Scooby Doo in the recesses of the cavern. (And you will be legitimately spooked, too.) More heartbreaking is Aron’s realisation that he put himself in this position, alienating those that love him—family (including his sister, played by Lizzy Caplan), friends, and lovers (including Harry Potter’s Clemence Poesy as the beautiful wispy partner he pushed away)—causing no one to know he would be gone. His determination to start again eventually drives him to commit the act he is known for—and if you’ve never seen Aron Ralston and know nothing of the story, skip this next paragraph, okay?

So you’re all wondering about the arm scene, aren’t you? Of course you are, you creepazoids. You’ll know the seizure moment when it arrives—more in the form of noise that compounds the tension—and while it doesn’t take the full amount of time it took Ralston himself, it still doesn’t feel like it holds back. Ralston filmed the process at the time, and let Boyle and Franco watch it (apparently his mother did too, and undoubtedly wished she hadn’t), and it does feel real, look gruesome, and make everyone in the cinema cover their eyes and squirm and squeal. Don’t be ashamed. Everyone else is doing it too.

But all of that means that the Sigur Ros-fuelled final moments of the film had me literally clutching my heart and weeping. I’ve never clutched my heart in a movie before, so that was a new thing for me, and a bit embarrassing and histrionic. But I did it, and you might do it too.

In summary: Exceeds Expectations, almost to the point of the ridiculous. It is an incredible film. The only thing that was underplayed was how much pain Franco was in—sure, he looked anguished at the start as he stares at his trapped arm, the wall above flecked with chunks of skin and blood, but then he seems to take a deep breath and never look in pain again. Even if he’d just said at one point, “Well, this hurts a bit, but what can you do?” I would have felt better. But that’s what happens when Danny Boyle doesn’t get me to read over the script.

wanda jackson, the party ain't over

2011-02-07T17:38:00.005+11:00

Produced and performed on by no-longer-a-White-Stripe Jack White (who is thanked in the liner notes for “having the faith in me that I could still ‘rock out’”), Wanda Jackson—music’s hottest septuagenarian—has returned with a new hot-pink rockabilly album for me to dance (some would term it “flail”) to in my car. Right from the start, with the awesome drums and brass burst of “Shakin’ All Over”, the album immediately changes the mood of a room and whoever is fortunate enough to be within listening distance. Her voice just still has so much power and brashness that she sounds like she could still be the teenager belting out tunes back in the fifties.

That first track, along with her sassy version of “Rum and Coca-Cola” (aka the only song in the world that my eighty-year-old father and I both like), constitute most of my listening, but the whole shebang is really just the most rockin thing you’ll listen to so far this year. As she sings plaintively yet with such zest about being broke in “Busted”, you’ll want to send her money (don’t, she’s doing just fine and I think she just spends it all on sequins and fringed materials). Peppered with sharp little Jack White licks, Her more country-like ballads don’t float my boat as much as the more upbeat/fast-paced tracks do—the energy of those are exactly what I love about rockabilly—but she really doesn’t actually make a bad song, because she’s the Queen of Rockabilly (or First Lady, apparently, which must depend on whether you’re a Monarchist or not) and she is just that great. The digital “shaking” of her voice in the chorus of “Shakin All Over” bothers me a little, making her sound watery and ruining the voice that I adore so vehemently. But I’ll blame Jack for that, because I am biased towards the lovely Wanda. And how couldn’t you be? She’s adorable, and she dated Elvis Presley.

If you haven’t had an opportunity to hear Wanda Jackson before, I discovered her via her song “Funnel of Love”, which was on the (sadly never released) But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack. I never found that specific version, but go find the version she did with the Cramps—it’s a knockout, and one of the songs I’ve listened to the most over the years.

In summary: Exceeds Expectations, because if I’m not listening to her, I forget just how fun her music is. And as I went to shelve the CD I noticed I have three other albums of hers that I’d forgotten about (hidden by the cat due to overplaying?) Time for a saucy dress, some flicky eyeliner and a Wanda Jackson marathon, I think.

sanctum

2011-02-05T20:12:00.003+11:00

I wonder how it comes about that you become so tremendously wealthy and famous that people stop saying “no” to you. I mean, when you’re a normal person, you’ll spend a fair amount of time verbalising things you don’t want, like fitness without having to run in the rain, or a new television when you’re scraping the barrel just to pay your electricity bill, or a family that doesn’t spend its time moaning about When Will You Supply Me With Grandchildren. Then suddenly, you’re a hotshot director or writer, and you’ve got so much fame and money you’ve made a Scrooge McDuck-type room furnished with a diving board and a swimming pool full of two-dollar coins. When you’re that rich, you hire a personal trainer to do the getting fit for you (or get liposuction), you put a wing on the house with its own movie theatre, and you hire a hitman to take out your family. And there is no such thing as no, which is great and all if you’re the person with the wealth, but if you’re the unsuspecting audience who originally forked out and made that person famous, suddenly you become lumped with creative output that no one has dared to stand up against. You’ll go and see something like Sanctum, and by the end of it, you will be holding your head in horror and wondering why someone didn’t roll the script into a tube and bat James Cameron on the nose with it, saying in their sternest tone of voice, “NO.”

Based loosely on a true story, a team of cave divers are splashing about in a huge deep Papua New Guinean sinkhole, hoping to discover new cave systems, when a cyclone approaches at high speed and traps them underground. In order to survive, they must make their way through unchartered territory, underwater and with great danger. Will they all live through the journey? God no, but I won’t tell you who does and doesn’t. Suffice it to say it is much less of the docudrama it appears on the ads and more a gorefest by the time the credits roll.

The bulk of the movie is spent following a small band of survivors: gruff old bastard Frank (Richard Roxburgh), son Josh (Rhys Wakefield) who is currently on Frank’s “shit list”, arrogant boss Carl (Ioan Gruffudd), Carl’s mountaineering girlfriend Victoria (Alice Parkinson), old hand and resident Nice Guy George (Dan Wyllie), and local guide Luko (Cramer Cain). They are all decent actors doing the best they possibly could with such a godawful script. Australians are defined by the fact that they say things like “This whole place will be flooded like a blocked dunny!”, Americans by their terrible accents and unconditional arrogance, and Papua New Guineans by their quiet wisdom and heroics. None of them characters are particularly fleshed out, leaving you mostly indifferent as they are picked off by the cave and/or water.

Full of so many plot holes, discrepancies, and under-explained situations that even my usually generous mother rattled off a list of problems she had with it, Sanctum is painful enough to make you snort at inappropriate places and so riddled with clichés even the guys behind us were laughing and yelling out, “Let Josh do the climb, Frank, it’s your son’s time to shine!” during the most moving of scenes. Every plot turn is mapped out so far in advance you felt like Josh’s whinge about his father giving him a boar’s tooth necklace that he’d turned into a torch was basically him holding it up saying, “Look at this plot device my father gave me, expect this to be handy later.” The characters’ bad decisions bit them on the arse just exactly how you expect them to, some comeuppances swifter than others. Some appear to be painfully stuck in—like Victoria’s rejection of wearing a “dead woman’s wetsuit”—so they could shortly thereafter have a scene of her stripping naked to battle hypothermia and we could all get an eyeful of a hot woman in her undergarments. After all, none of the men end up naked but for Speedos.

Not only does Sanctum dismally fail the Bechdel Test, but the women are hysterical and irrational. Victoria—who met Carl while climbing Mount Everest—somehow later needs some lessons to climb up a short ladder, though she could theoretically be the best climber of all of them. She is inexperienced in caves and holds them back, which is frustrating because she’s also the only woman at that point and really, the girl being the helpless one is such an overdone movie trope that James Cameron should be sent angrily to his kennel followed with another angry “NO.” Along with that, the one joke in the whole film (“That’s not a wizard”) is preceded by The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen doing a gross mimicry of an Asian accent when greeting the party at the above-ground base of operations. I don’t often mention the political incorrectness of movies in this blog—others do it much better than me—but really, like Cameron’s Avatar, this was a movie where the White Man saved the day, and women and locals did not.

Sanctum was not actually the worst thing I’ve ever seen. (Maybe second worst.) Despite my lack of concern for the characters, as they died or were injured the scenes were amazingly crafted and heart-wrenching, but only for what they portrayed, not who they were. Seeing a character “put out of their misery” when injured too badly to continue is hard to watch and was handled well. This, peppered with some suspenseful scenes as the team fight through underwater tunnels, and a poignant moment with Frank in a decompression bubble looking bleak as a drowned body is suspended outside in the water, give it points. The actual surrounds are amazing, from the breathtaking huge hole in the ground as Josh, Carl and Victoria arrive by helicopter, and the caves themselves are as beautiful as they are claustrophobic and terrifying. Much has been made of the cinematography, but with about two-thirds of the flick being green-screen, the special effects team deserve more recognition. Unfortunately, unlike Avatar, the effects alone aren’t enough to make Sanctum a worthwhile trip to the cinema; just don’t go. If you want to see a cave movie, watch The Descent and bring a spare pair of pants. If you want a father-son reconciliation, watch The Simpsons (that happens in about every third episode.) If you want some lush visuals, take a bus to the country with the fifty bucks you’ll save forking out for 3D tickets, then send me your change in thanks.

In summary: so far Below Expectations it is practically underground. I mean, really. The use of the decompression bubble was confusing—sometimes needed, then sometimes not an issue, or one that could have been explained away in a short sentence. For those of us not cave diving with our spare time, its use seemed arbitrary. Also, why is Josh even there on the trip if he hates cave diving so much and thinks caves are stupid? And who the fuck wrote the line “[this tunnel is] tighter than a nun’s nasty”? Or coached Welsh and Australian actors Gruffudd and Parkinson in their forced American accents? Or thought that “You need to go easy on him” and “He’s a good kid, Frank” weren’t the second and third Most Uttered Lines in movies after “Behind you!” BAD JAMES CAMERON. BAD. GO TO YOUR ROOM.

catfish

2011-01-29T00:12:00.004+11:00

It’s a very little known disease in the medical community, but it is a true fact that I am allergic to spoilers. When I come in contact with one, I break out into ALL CAPS RAGE. So please know that I will not ruin the ending of Catfish for you, because despite the fact it’s hardly Sixth-Sense-twist-worthy, the world at large has done such a marvellous job of shutting up about it I wouldn’t dare say anything in case my allergy is contagious via words. (Laugh all you like, I saw Pontypool and know that it can happen.)

Catfish is a little-known documentary that is referred to by news outlets who like zippy headlines as “the other facebook movie”. The Social Network was better, but with Fincher attached and a budget of $40 million, it had a lot more to support it than Catfish did. Made by New Yorkian directors Ariel (Rel) Schulman and Henry Joost and their hand-held cameras, they detect a potentially exciting story when Rel’s photographer brother Yaniv (Nev) strikes up an unusual friendship. When a picture of Nev’s makes it into a newspaper an eight-year-old art prodigy from rural Michigan named Abby paints it and mails her work to Nev, with the blessing of her family. Over time, Nev sends more pictures to Abby, who paints them; Nev, via facebook, becomes friends with her long-haired mother, Angela; Angela’s husband Vince; and their other children, including the unfairly attractive nineteen-year-old Megan Faccio. As the months roll by, Nev and Megan’s relationship turns into something much more intimate and steamy than expected (as revealed in a hilarious scene when Nev, fitted out with his retainer, reads out the text messages the two sent to each other; by the end, when heaving bosoms are involved, he is hiding under the doona in embarrassment.) After the three boys take a trip across the country for work, they decide to spring a visit on Abby and her family to see if they are who they say they are.

There has been debate over whether this documentary is real or not, citing the fact that there was too much perfect timing of the cameras picking up the dramatic scenes. With Joost and the Schulmans hotly declaring otherwise (I may be using “hotly” in this context to imply that they are actually all pretty hot, but you decide whether I’m that shallow) we will never know, but in my totally professional opinion, I think it is real. I loved the movie, so this next part is hard to explain, but I feel that if the movie was a fake they would have made it more interesting—a few more explosions, or what have you—as it is, the movie is wonderful, but also realistic in its lack of drama. I do feel that the boys themselves, prior to or after their visit, may have reshot some scenes of their own to perhaps summarise a month’s worth of excitement into one five-minute take, or to make themselves look sensitive, or to seem cool. Some scenes seemed a little forced, but then, maybe the awkwardness of being in front of camera at all caused that. I don’t have a camera following me around on a daily basis (shocking, I know) so I couldn’t really tell you.

It is an amazingly crafted, edgy film. The handheld camera work is grainy but not shoddy, and gives the movie an intimate and involved feel. A second, better camera is used for some scenes—often Henry and Rel have a camera each and film each other—but the movie’s zany excellence resides in the use of the magic that is the internets. Characters are introduced and named by hovering a mouse over a photograph, revealing a little box with their name, a gesture that those of you who have encountered facebook know well. House shots are stills from Google Street View; locations are pinpointed by a satellite zoom on Google Maps; one great driving scene is accompanied by frame after frame of Street View looking down the road. It seems like an awkward flip book but is an amazing little montage of footage, and a good reveal of how the internet can seemingly hide nothing.

In summary: Exceeds Expectations. Look, I’m not sure why the twist is such a big secret, but I did get a little thrill of nervousness as the three men roll up the driveway towards Megan’s farm, not knowing what was going to happen. Catfish touches on some sensitive issues, and there is a lot I haven’t been able to discuss because I don’t want to ruin anything. Shoot me a comment if you’ve seen it—we can chat about scandalous spoilers in the comments, right? ~~That way no one will be surprised by the news that Abby and her family are all catfish.~~ (I AM JOKING.)

true grit

2011-01-27T11:26:00.002+11:00

If you have ever been under the misapprehension that you are tough because you can scull a two-litre bottle of Solo without going into cardiac arrest, or because you once totally smacked down some strangers on the internet, then you should see True Grit. In it, fourteen-year-old girl named Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfield, otherwise known as My New Hero) takes control of the situation after her father is murdered by outlaw Tom Cheney (Josh Brolin, much less sexy than I like in my Brolin). Needing to see him brought to justice in a town where daddy Ross’s death is the least of the law’s problems, Mattie hires the meanest, grittiest State Marshal in town—one-eyed drunkard Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges, unintelligible). Accompanied by Texas Marshal La Boeuf (in this flick pronounced “la beef”, if you’re curious, and played with great moustache by Matt Damon), they endeavour to track Cheney down.

Hailee Steinfield is a revelation, with Mattie being one of the toughest, smartest fourteen-year-olds you’ll ever meet, especially compared to the row full of fourteen-year-olds behind us who popped gum and talked throughout the whole movie. Had Mattie been in the theatre there with us, she would have intimidated them into silence, much like how she browbeats a trader in town into taking back the ponies her father just bought and paying her for her father’s horse, which Cheney had stolen but which had been on the trader’s property at the time. Mattie’s smarts and fearlessness see her sleeping at an undertaker’s amongst dead bodies and knocking out a sailor with an apple so she can storm her horse into a river and chase after Rooster—and that’s just the start. She’s fantastic, and has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, which is great and all except that she’s the bloody lead, what the hell Academy Awards. (When I am King, I will fix this, Hailee. It’ll be the second thing I do after making a new law involving five years in jail for those who disclose spoilers. Some of my decrees may even be unrelated to movies. But probably not.)

Rooster Cogburn, after too many cigarettes and too much whiskey and a large amount of missing teeth due to fighting, barely shuts up during the whole movie but is almost impossible to understand. This is probably due in part to unfamiliarity with old-timey westernspeak, but even when Mattie was at her most verbose (read: always) at least I could understand what she was saying. Despite this, he is tough, noble, and a crack shot even from 300 feet, or—in one memorable scene—while drunk off three bottles of booze and shooting cornbread in a field. While Rooster mumbles amicably, La Boeuf spends his time swaggering, his boots dripping with spurs and chains, his distrust of Mattie palpable until her display of true grit (I’ll attempt to say this as much as I can just to annoy you) wins him over. La Boeuf’s first few scenes with Mattie strike a very uncomfortable chord, but they come to nothing and are virtually forgotten by the end, much to my relief. Tom Cheney is an almost mythical figure for most of the movie, with the three doing their best to hunt for the man always slightly out of reach; Josh Brolin lends him quiet terror and some almost amusing trust issues, as he joins “Lucky” Ned Pepper (played by—no joke—Barry Pepper) and his band of merry/batshit men. It really is just a wonderful chase movie, with the folk they meet along the way an intriguing mix of crazy, or, well, dead.

Even as people are shot and cut up and blood flies all over the place, True Grit will make you bust out a couple of smiles too, with the rapport between Mattie, Cogburn and La Boeuf the source of constant amusement. Throughout, however, is the serious undercurrent of death and how cheap life was in the past (and still can be, for some), and it’s gripping from start to finish—though at an hour and forty minutes it’s fairly short for a Western—and completely enthralling. Quietly beautiful to look at, the scenery is as cold and unforgiving as it is untouched and gorgeous. The Coen brothers don’t even mind slotting in cliched Western shots, like when Rooster and Mattie ride on a horse across the horizon as the sun sets behind them, but make them feel well-placed and not cheesy; this is a Western done with a nod to the style but without falling into parody or imitation. The opening scene is pitch-perfect, as Mattie narrates the tale of her father’s death while we watch snow fall on her father’s deserted body and Cheney ride his horse away. Right from that moment, the film won me over; nothing could ruin it for me.

Though, seriously, for a bunch of smart and/or experienced trackers, you’d expect them to know that you can’t knock a bad guy out without him coming back at inopportune times. Seriously, old-timey people, have you never seen an action movie?

In summary: Exceeds Expectations. Apart from a downbeat final few minutes, I adored this film, and it’s reminding me why people love Westerns. Despite my growling against them, maybe I will too. And maybe I’ll even read the Charles Portis book, or see the John Wayne original—though I recently saw Rio Bravo (fantastic) and don’t want to imagine Wayne as anyone else, especially as he usually comes across as so goddamn grumpy. What, like life was so hard in the 1800s? Pshaw. One more thing: as was probably the way in the wild west, horses aren’t always treated very well, and they get shot and hurt. Fake or not, I covered my eyes—you might have to as well.

black swan

2011-01-17T12:06:00.003+11:00

Ballet is generally known to those stupid in the ways of dance (see: your faithful reviewer) as something quite lovely and delicate. Black Swan turns ballet into something much more ominous and terrifying than I ever expected, a feat achieved by both Natalie Portman’s dancing (and her long-shot stunt double) and the film itself: the sound design and camera work when she is dancing as Swan Lake’s black swan is amazing, and everything people say dance can be. However, you’ll still never convince me to go to the ballet, classical music still makes me snore, and I found Black Swan a bit boring in parts. So, I have no culture. At least I have movies like Machete to keep me warm at night.

Nina (Natalie Portman) is a ballet dancer with a narrow view of the world: unless she is forced outside by events out of her control, she only spends time with the prestigious dance company she works for, headed by the demanding and frankly creepy Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel); and in her little-girl room with her mother (Barbara Hershey), who gave up her ballet career to give birth to Nina and who now lives vicariously through her daughter. With the involuntary retirement of principal ballerina Beth (Winona Ryder), Nina is given the opportunity to dance the lead in the little-known production Swan Lake by some dude called Tchaikovsky. Threatening her newfound fortune is newcomer Lily (Mila Kunis), whose charm and talent unbalance Nina’s already delicate sense of self-worth. Much like the critically acclaimed and read, watch, listen-criticised Inception, Black Swan plays with what is real and what isn’t, and at the end you may still be unsure.

The acting is wonderful; Portman is heartbreaking as the unstable Nina, her anguish at the world clear on her face and her almost constantly distress-shaped eyebrows. Hershey is alarming as her mother, someone so dedicated to her daughter’s career she clings to her in a wholly unhealthy manner. Mila Kunis is lovely and affable as Lily, the uptight Nina’s antithesis, a woman game enough—and racy enough—to be the seductive black swan that Nina struggles to play properly, so dedicated is she to her confined and virginal white swan lifestyle. (You can tell Lily is the naughty to Nina’s nice because Lily has tattoos and wears black eyeliner, and Nina is surrounded by an excess of pink. And good girls don’t get tattoos, as movies have taught me and I, along with tens of millions of other good people, have studiously ignored.)

Shot in an interesting, intimate style, the smooth lines of the dancers compete with the disjointed, handheld camera movements. Many of Nina’s scenes as she moves from one place to another are shot from behind her head, like you are in some kind of Black Swan video game with the over-the-shoulder view switched on. (If it was a game, I would totally play it and kick Leroy square in the nuts with a flying ballet leap. It would be awesome.) Scenes are often shot through mirrors, playing with perspective and with Nina’s image of herself. It is a beautifully constructed movie, scored perfectly and delicately, and I can’t find any fault with the editing between Natalie Portman as Nina and her double, who only danced in the long shots. (Portman has danced in the past and has kept her dancer’s physique, as can be seen in all its bruised and ribbed glory in the short film before The Darjeeling Limited.)

Ostensibly a movie about the psychological pressures placed on those at the top of their game—and where it shares minor similarities with director Darren Aronofsky’s recentish The Wrestler—it could be a movie made about any competitive activity. Stick Portman in a tennis outfit instead, or maybe as a professional runner, and the movie could follow a similar track. Ballet’s obsession with beauty plays a not insignificant part, though it’s tricky to tell in movies because everyone in them is beautiful anyway and you almost forget how lovely people look when everyone who surrounds them is also beautiful. (Maybe this is an insight into the movie industry as well? Probably.) Visions of Nina throwing up, or smiling as the costume designer tells her “you’ve lost weight!” play into the beauty aspect, as does the predictably sleazy Leroy, happy to seduce and reduce Nina to her sexuality and creating some truly uncomfortable scenes. In that, Cassel is probably a fabulous actor, because I hated him.

The general dislike I had for everyone was part of why, despite all this, I didn’t enjoy the movie as much as I had hoped. Nina is absolutely a sympathetic character, made destructive by her environment: driven by her desperate mother to perfection and by her teacher into becoming someone she is not for the sake of a part. But she is so uptight and ill-humoured that I didn’t actually like her. By the end of the film I didn’t like a single person in it, and ballet came across as an exhausting, depressing, misogynistic vocation that can ruin your body and your brain just so some rich people can pay to see people give themselves lifelong physical ailments by jumping about on their toes. So yes, that wasn’t particularly unexpected, then.

As I’ve said in this blog before, unlikeable characters don’t necessarily make or break a film*, but my indifference towards her did not help when teamed with the other issues I had. Also like Inception, I sometimes found it boring, checking the time or shifting in my seat and looking pointedly around hoping to catch the eye of someone else bored. (I didn’t. And some people applauded at the end of the film. So you may love this.) I couldn’t tell you which scenes bored me; I just know that I was waiting for something and it was taking too long. I also found myself unsurprised by the events that unfolded. It wasn’t actually predictable in that I could tell which scenes were coming, but with every dramatic moment I never really felt shocked by what happened, bar one scene in Beth’s hospital room that almost produced a squeal. Aronofsky did create amazing tension, building up every character to the point where they could break, or break Nina, but some scenes that the sound design indicated were supposed to make me start in shock just had no effect at all, like a B-grade horror movie that has monsters jumping out of closets every time you need to get your coat.

Well, this is getting long, and there’s more I’d love to whine about, but I should shut up and summarise: Below Expectations. I love Aronofsky, I think Natalie Portman is great if you pretend she never smooched Anakin Skywalker, and I wanted to like a movie about ballet so I could seem like totally smart and stuff. But I didn’t like it, not really. It didn’t amaze or astound, and while Aronofsky was honest about the lack of glamour in ballet—as the bleak grey bricks in the studio can attest—I just don’t like it. The fact that Ms Portman is now engaged and pregnant to co-star and choreographer Benjamin Millepied made me feel a little better though—I love a good romance (even in a movie that’s not about one), and I love that his name sounds like millipede. Because I’m not cultured. But I’m okay with that.

*Neither does my dislike of the sport involved; I also hate wrestling, but I thought The Wrestler was a great movie.

tangled

2011-01-13T12:31:00.001+11:00

After the last Disney animated film, The Princess and the Frog, did such a good job of putting me off Disney Princesses forever, I had low expectations for Tangled—the studio’s update of the Rapunzel story and its 50th animated feature. Would it be as horrible as what they did to Tiana, giving her hopes and dreams, making her a hard worker, and then surrounding her with a cast of characters who spend the film shouting at her to throw it all away for love? Uh, well, maybe a little, but Tangled surpassed this, along with my expectations, and was roundly excellent.

Hanging out in the top five of Quentin Tarantino’s twenty best movies of 2010, Tangled tells the story of a lovely blonde-haired green-eyed princess named Rapunzel who has about a fifty metres of glowing magical hair that can heal if you sing the right words to it. Kidnapped as a baby by an old woman determined to use Rapunzel’s hair to keep herself young and pretty, the girl grows up stuck in a tall tower, frightened out of escaping by the woman’s mixed affections—touting herself as a mild caring mother protecting her magical sprog from the horrors of the world, but full of rage when the subject of leaving the tower comes up. Seemingly trapped forever with only charming chameleon Pascal for a friend, it takes handsome young thief—Flynn Rider—climbing into her tower to hide from the authorities to change her life.

In that respect, it does take a man to save the princess—but only after she coshes him on the head repeatedly with a frying pan and strikes a deal for him to help her go outside, and you could just as easily see her do this with a woman. The journey of the rogue, helping Rapunzel only for monetary gain, and the young woman, conflicted between escaping her prison and going against the word of her mother, is utterly entertaining, and a love story that felt very fairytale and Disney but had enough quirks and gorgeous characters to elevate to a worthy movie for the infamous Disney Vault.

Assisting Rapunzel and Flynn are Pascal and palace horse Max, both so ridiculously wonderful that I wanted immediately to own toy versions of them (in life size if possible, thanks Disney if you want to send me some for this glowing review). Max seems to be part human, part dog, and part dragon— pulling levers, wagging his tail when Rapunzel scratches him under the chin, flaring his nostrils in rage. Every time they are on screen it is a delight, as they support our heroine, trip up bad guys and punch arrogant thieves—like our hero Flynn—in the chest. Along with these are the utterly entertaining and gruff tavern-goers, terrifying Rapunzel and cinema-goers at first before breaking into song and listing their most dearly held dreams—from being a concert pianist to collecting ceramic unicorns.

To segue smoothly, the songs do let Tangled down just a touch. While the tavern song is righteous fun, all of the other sappy songs involving Rapunzel wailing about love and dreams sound half-Disney, half-eeuugghh. With Mandy Moore voicing Rapunzel, she has the pipes to carry it off, but the songs are dull, top-forty pop, and sometimes completely destroyed the movie’s ambience. In one beautiful scene where Rapunzel and Flynn are in a rowboat in the water, watching the evening sky as lanterns fall around them, a Miley Cyrus-type ballad just detracted from the moment and I was left disappointed.

The 3D was used to full effect and the film itself is beautiful; the scenery is immersive, the characters themselves animated in an agreeably flat style that worked because the characterisation shone through. I cried, surprising no one, and became totally desperate for Rapunzel’s well-being. She did a lot of saving, bopping people with pans and swinging around the place with her hair—really, she was quite tough and admirable, especially for someone who had been hidden away from everyone else for nearly twenty years. My only real gripe, apart from the sound, and this is ridiculous in a movie where I am fine with someone having magical hair, were the distances people were able to fall yet recover from immediately. I also worry about Flynn’s change of heart, from thief to hero, and whether it was purely because the amount of head injuries sustained at Rapunzel’s hands had given him some cerebral damage.

In summary: Above Expectations—this is a great kids movie, fun enough for the grown-ups, a toymaker’s delight and I kind of want to see it again.

blue valentine

2011-01-02T22:24:00.004+11:00

If you take anything away from the following review, please take these two things: 1) Go see Blue Valentine, seriously, and b) take at least one full box of tissues, so you aren’t left snivelling into the sleeve of your cardigan like some people who cannot be named due to legal embarrassment. My one comforting thought was that I wasn’t the only one in the cinema crying and sniffing; it came from all directions, like they’d put pollen in the air vents. I asked Chris afterwards if he cried and he said no, but that he did get emotional. That’s okay, I do more than enough weeping for the both of us, so much so that I should really start bringing Gatorade to relationship movies to replenish my tears so I have enough spare for watching ads for said movie later on.

Like the hit-and-miss (500) Days of Summer, Blue Valentine charts the love of two people, bouncing back and forth from the giddy early days to the later dissolution of the relationship. Unlike (500) Days of Summer, which still had Hollywood shine and was too finely-tuned and glitzy to be honest, Blue Valentine feels so unmistakably real that by the end of the film you are so emotionally invested in now-humourless Cindy (Michelle Williams) and now-drunk Dean (Ryan Gosling) that it feels as raw as watching the breakup of your two best friends.

Set over two days in the present and sparked by the family labrador going missing, Cindy, Dean and five-year-old daughter Frankie bicker and hug and work and live in a world that seems immediately fractious. In an attempt to bring them together while Frankie is having a sleepover at her grandfather’s, Dean books the pair into a love hotel’s future-themed room and there, despite the humour in the room—no windows, rotating bed—the damage to their bond becomes clear. Smoothly revisiting key moments in the early months of their relationship that tie in visually or topically with the present, the trajectory of their life together may be doomed, but as youth they are filled with such hope and excitement it is nothing but heartbreaking.

The cinematic technique of a scattered version of events can often be a pain in the ass to watch, a cheap trick used to make the film seem more Totally Deep and Stuff than it actually is. Blue Valentine shoots down detractors of the technique (possibly just me, however), and will reveal over time how awkward arguments make complete sense, or how a justified reaction becomes too harsh. By the end, the viewer has a whole new perspective on everyone’s actions. Every scene is important, but never feels forced or contrived. At the end of it all, while both Cindy and Dean both act in ways that you may not agree with, neither are horrible people, but rather, just people.

The script hit so close to home in so many scenes that it was impossible not to feel like my life and fears had been catalogued and filmed. The arguments they have spring from the kind of petty comments that I’m liable to make when I’m tired or cranky; their reactions to each other so true to how I get when I’m pissy. (Not a lot, but I’ve just been through Christmas in a Retail Management Capacity so I have possibly been a bit tetchy in high-stakes situations like Oh God the Peanut Butter Has Run Out, or Why Did You Wash Those Jeans I Wanted to Wear Them, You Are the Worst Boyfriend in the History of Forever.) It didn’t make me second-guess my own relationship, as we’ve been together for more than a decade and we don’t suffer from the same ailments—actually none, really, apart from fighting about movies—but the moments of tired resignation or rejected affection in Blue Valentine are maginified versions of moments that every relationship suffers through. Moments of tenderness and love made me cry just as hard as the painful scenes of their fights and one particularly devastating and convincing scene in a hospital that will probably lead to me giving Michelle Williams a sympathetic hug in the street should I ever see her.

In Summary: Exceeds expectations completely. An almost perfect movie, but I’d advise against it if you’re feeling down. It’s not all depression and sadness, and I didn’t leave the movie cursing our fickle emotions, but it’s a fairly melancholy tale of how love can just end. If worried, remember that Williams and Gosling co-produced, so they must be pals in reality, right? Right.

(And in case anyone is wondering, the Tom Waits song Blue Valentine is not in the soundtrack, which is written by the incredible Grizzly Bear.)

somewhere

2010-12-31T02:03:00.002+11:00

Somewhere out there, there are celebrities and CEOs and other famous, bored people who go see Sofia Coppola’s new movie and think to themselves, oh, OH, thank the lord someone has finally made a movie about how hard it is to be ridiculously wealthy. I’m not saying that being rich will buy you happiness—poor mental health transcends class, undoubtedly—but if you want me to watch a film about the sorrows of being able to fly anywhere, bonk anyone, and have everyone love you, then you better make it interesting. And Sofia, while you look like a nice person and I loved The Virgin Suicides and adored Lost in Translation (and as you are an ex-partner of Quentin Tarantino I will forever hold you in high esteem), I found Somewhere to be self-indulgent and dull. Sorry.

In LA’s Chateau Marmont, hotel to the famous and the place to do stupid things that end up on TMZ, famous actor Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is holed up waiting for the upcoming media junket for his new action flick and recuperating after a staircase-induced arm injury. He also drives a luxury sports car, as the five-minute opening sequence of him circling a racetrack in it will attest. In other news, his daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) comes to stay for an indefinite period of time, dropped off by her mother. During this there is lots of brooding, no real talking for the first fifteen minutes, and no actual, long proper conversation for the entire length of the film, which is about an hour and a half, maybe less. So, the fact it’s short is a plus. Another point in the movie’s favour are the actors themselves—Stephen Dorff is quite likeable, Elle Fanning is great as Cleo, and the only other actor in it for any period of time, Jackass alumni Chris Pontius and his luxurious hair, is perfectly agreeable as Johnny’s best friend. Coppola herself turns up in a party scene, in case we hadn’t already thought that the life of a kid following her famous dad around hotels had any kind of autobiographical elements.

The movie is a series of vignettes about Marco’s existence over a few weeks, each scene carefully thought out and executed to perfection. We see him watch two awkward pole-dancing shows in his room (and in case you were worried it was too subtle, he falls asleep during the first one); look morose at his own party; sunbathe with his daughter; receive anonymous text messages calling him names; order room-service gelato with Cleo in an Italian hotel room; do a lot of driving; and have sex with everyone who makes eye contact with him. There is a startling dearth of speaking, and much like those scenes in Family Guy when Peter trips over and hisses over his hurt knee for five straight minutes, each moment is stretched out as long as is possible, then for, say, four minutes more. Thus poignancy turns tedious, and we physically feel the pain and torment of life as a star. It’ll make you want to donate to an ennui-based charity.

The juxtaposition of scenes seems important and telling, like when one of the pole-dancing scenes is followed by an uncomfortable viewing of eleven-year-old Cleo’s ice-skating routine. Hers is not a raunchy routine, nor is it perfect, and it gains the attention of Johnny like the dancers could not, but seeing her skimpy, glittery costume so soon after other skimpy, sexualised costumes is most definitely disconcerting. I don’t quite know what the message was. Dancing and metal props don’t mix?

Johnny and Cleo’s relationship doesn’t seem to be the point, as it follows a straight, drama-free trajectory. Johnny’s interactions with everyone are fairly mundane or friendly, his affairs only temporarily distracting. His hedonistic tendencies are on show, but still do not make him an unappealing character, meaning he lacks any real depth. When he calls one of his lovers to ask for company and she says no, he cries in despair, but with none of his past on display or many of his emotions or motivations revealed, I just couldn’t understand or care.

An enjoyable moment with a masseuse and affable characters, along with fine acting, lifts the movie out of the bin and possibly above the horror that was Tron: Legacy. The soundtrack has been much lauded but went largely unnoticed by me—which is not necessarily a bad thing, however, especially as I can’t stand Phoenix, who had a hand in it. It looks gritty and indie, and raw and true. But I still looked at my watch a lot, and wished Johnny would brush his hair just once, honestly.

In summary: Below Expectations. I feel she was striving for beauty and emotion, and instead got beauty and nothing else underneath, like when you’re walking through the Basement at Myer and think you see some well-dressed dude sitting down until you come to the devastating realisation that it’s a stragetically placed mannequin and will probably not appreciate your well-thought-out pickup line. And nothing will ever pull you out of a movie more than seeing the boom appear at the top of the screen not once, but twice. For shame. I’m shaking my head at my laptop now in pointed despair, Sofia.

tron: legacy

2010-12-22T12:02:00.001+11:00

If Tron: Legacy has taught me anything, it’s that we are now entirely spoiled when it comes to special effects. For all of Avatar’s faults, it showed just what CGI can do—and that’s pretty much everything, and with an extra dimension just to show off. So when you sit down to watch T:L, armed with your popcorn and the stupid happy smile you have on when you know you’re going to see a splashy neon actioner scored by Daft Punk, it is pretty much impossible to not be disappointed. Not by the action—the special effects in those were plenty amazing—but from the first moment Jeff Bridges rocks up, in a sappy prologue set a few years after the original Tron, you lay eyes on his youthfully digitised face and it’s all you can do to not storm off in disgust, throwing your popcorn at the projectionist and harrumphing right out of the cinema to lecture whoever was unfortunate enough to be working the candy bar at the same time.

Sam Flynn is a twentysomething brat, heir to his father’s huge tech corporation and a habitual prankster, driven to destroy the very company that pays for his bizarre car-garage home next to the river and forks out for his bail whenever he gets up to mischief. One day, a strange page (as in, those technological whatsits that no one uses now that there’s mobile phones) sends Sam to his father’s old arcade, where he stumbles upon ancient, eighties-era technology that does what it did to his father nearly thirty years ago and sucks him into a digital world. (Frankly, looking at dot matrix printers and clunky hardware and thinking that it created anything more elaborate than Tetris is a bit of a stretch, but that’s because I’m naive.) Captured almost immediately by the digital police squad, he is thrown unexpectedly into the fight of his life—and his father’s life, too.

Tron: Legacy has some stunning action scenes and despite my indifference to dance music in general, Daft Punk’s soundtrack is incredible and I am suffering some serious internal struggle over whether to download a couple of the songs or quit whining and just buy the whole album. The lightcycle fight, reminiscent of the original 8-bit Tron game, was great fun. Garrett Hedlund, as Sam, looks a little like Christian Bale but actually did a pretty good job despite being barely on my radar before right now. Olivia Wilde, as the older Flynn’s mysterious sidekick Quorra, has great makeup and sufficiently otherworldly eyes. And everything else about this movie is terrible.

Maybe I would have been able to overlook the slab of ham otherwise known as Michael Sheen’s ridiculously overdone club owner Zuse, the improbable fight victories, the heavily foreshadowed helmeted-foe twist and the forced, biblical plotline (Man creates world! Oh look, everything’s gone to shit. Better not do anything about it then, unless of course my son’s involved). Maybe I could have forgiven all of that if it wasn’t for one thing: Young Jeff Bridges. His digitally altered face is one of the worst things I have seen in cinematic history. As both the flashback Kevin Flynn, relating the story of the original Tron to his young son using figurines of himself and his cohorts, and as CLU, Kevin’s digital counterpart who—as doppelgangers always seem to do—has turned evil, he is a uninsured trip into the Uncanny Valley, his face devoid of texture and life, all the pixels of which seem to have been sent straight to his constantly moving hair. If he was in a video game, you’d consider him a great likeness, but this is a real movie, populated otherwise by real people, and as soon as he is next to them he looks completely fucking ridiculous. Maybe if they’d budgeted for an extra million dollars and made him spot-on realistic in the opening scene, you could buy the idea that he looks weird in the digital world for some digital reason, though no one else suffers from this ailment but him. The filmmakers could have made up some technological term to explain it away and I would have totally bought it. But I couldn’t. And basically, that poor effects work—especially when coupled with the rest of the film’s seamless CGI—ruined the entire movie, hands down.

The whole story is a bit ridiculous, and the action and plot so far-fetched, that sometimes I felt like Garrett Hedlund looked like he had fallen out of another, more serious movie, in which he played the straight man, and into this barrage of Bizzaro-Disney neon. He does his best, but is ultimately let down by poor scripting and awkward conversations with CLU, who appears to have suffered the ill-effects of a Botox jab. The movie probably would have been much better had they marketed it as a lengthy video clip for Daft Punk’s new album, and that way I would have completely excused any shoddy effects.

In summary: Below Expectations, in that I expect that a movie made in this day and age will look great, especially when that guy made Monsters in his bedroom and it looked a zillion times better.

winter's bone

2010-12-20T16:43:00.004+11:00

In a world as familiar as the suburbs and as alien as a sci-fi movie, seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly is put in a terrible position. As the caretaker of her younger siblings now that her mother has lapsed into a speechless depression, she finds out that if her absent father does not turn up for his court date in a week, she will lose the family’s house and land—which he put up for bond. Trouble is, she doesn’t know where her crack-dealing pappy is, and the frightening inhabitants of her rural Missouri town take any requests for information as a personal threat. But with the wellbeing of her beloved family at stake, Ree is prepared to face whoever and whatever she needs to help them. While Ree’s younger brother and sister adore her and are good kids, they’re too young to look after themselves, and Ree has very few people to turn to. Teardrop—her missing father’s brother—is a scary, violent man, haggard and brutal, and aware of the code of honour within the society they live in. Her friend Gail is stuck at home with a baby and her unwilling, angry-looking spouse, unable to offer Ree the help she needs in her search. As a determined Ree asks questions of everyone within her realm of knowledge, the bleak landscape and the community do their best to stop her.

Chris pondered aloud if the camera could have caught a flash of green grass or clear skies if only it had moved a bit either way; as it was, Winter’s Bone’s cinematography catches a place that is universally grim. Everything is cold, and worn, and old, and the world I am familiar with—happiness, smiles, friendliness—seems so impossible to get to that it is hard to believe cushy American movies are filmed on the same continent (and that my dear friend Lilli was in the same state recently having a total blast.) The gardens and houses show a world where perhaps in the past life was brighter: toys may have been new, machinery free of rust, houses freshly built. Drugs have choked the town, with its inhabitants mostly made up of crystal meth dealers and users, leaving everyone drawn and with the alarming look of someone high, or waiting for the next high. So chilling are the cast that Teardrop, constantly snorting from his little baggie, terrified me until I IMDb’d him in the car on the way home and realised he was actually John Hawkes, recently the cause of my adoration as the will-they-won’t-they father in Miranda July’s excellent Me and You and Everyone We Know. It was such a brilliant turn and I was so completely fooled that it reminded me just how plain talented actors can be. Jennifer Lawrence, as the savvy Ree, is also amazing, stopping at nothing—no matter what the threat—to save her family.

The movie manages to put a few interesting twists into the characters, turning two cinematically-hated tropes, including an army recruiter, into basically the kindest people in the film. As Ree hopes to join the army, asking when the promised $40,000 would arrive, the recruitment officer tells her gently that it wouldn’t be for a few months, and that she really needs to rethink joining the army if money is her sole motivation, and that caring for her family is a much more important job. Their heartfelt discussion is, frankly, shattering, as it was the only time I had thought: join the army! Get some money! This really is your only choice! Instead of: run away! Army bad!

Winter’s Bone is probably going to take over the Oscars, and it should. It really is a marvellous film: knock-you-down devastating, depressing and pearl-clutching, with a lake scene so viscerally horrible near the end that will have you wanting to hug Jennifer Lawrence should you ever see her in the street shopping for groceries. There is, in Ree and her siblings and the home of her father’s lover, little sparks of hope that make the movie beautiful through its cheerless exterior. In this, it shares similarities with John Hillcoat’s The Road, though Winter’s Bone conveyed a world that Hillcoat (well, Cormac McCarthy) needed an apocalypse to create. Why so dramatic, when there is such horror in the world we already have?

In summary: Above Expectations. This is a tremendous film, never tedious, and with characters you feel are desperately real and whose determination you cheer (or whose downfall you secretly wish for.) The only fault, for me, was the addition of a tree-felling dream sequence. I don’t believe a good dream sequence has even been filmed (or written.) Feel free to shoot me if you wish. (And hush, Alice in Wonderland is not counted.)

richelle mead, last sacrifice

2010-12-13T14:00:00.002+11:00

As someone who rarely reads books that are part of an ongoing series—apart from Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid and Stephenie Meyer’s satirical Twilight series, I can’t think of anything since Harry Potter—making it to the sixth book in a row is a real effort and means that something must be right. While this is true—the Vampire Academy series is great fun—there is also a lot wrong with this book.

To rain down spoilers from the first five books in the series, Last Sacrifice opens with our heroine, Rose Hathaway, locked away in jail accused of the murder of Tatiana, queen of the Moroi. Rose and Tatiana didn’t particularly get along—Tatiana had recently passed a law lowering the age that guardians graduate and become fighters. As Rose is a guardian herself, trained to protect the Moroi—the good, consensual-bitey vampires—from Strigoi—the bad, murdery kind of vampire—she is not well pleased with the decision, but not enough to kill Tatiana. After a previous court outburst and some shifty bribing, Rose has been framed for the crime—but by who? As she is stuck in her cell, her friends and family do all they can to help her, from trying to find the real perpetrator to using a dramatic diversion to bust Rose out of the big house.

The Vampire Academy novels rely highly on throwing twists and shocks in every chapter, so I’ll try not to say much more. Suffice it to say the series relies heavily on action and drama, neither of which really can happen in a jail cell, so Rose is out and about breaking hearts and staking vicariously shortly into the book, making new friends and new enemies and smooching—well, who? Longtime readers will be either Team Dimitri (Rose’s first boyfriend, guardian trainer and someone who was turned Strigoi then brought back by Rose’s best friend, Lissa) or Team Adrian (when Dimitri became evil then broke up with Rose, in that order, Adrian was there to pick up the pieces and smoke heavily in the background.)

As Rose blusters her way around the countryside, her best friend Lissa, who brought Rose back to life during a car accident years before, is coping with her own dramas back at court, where she is thrown into much bigger turmoil than expected. The series is written through Rose’s dramatic, biased point of view, but due to her resurrection she shares a bond with Lissa that means she can see from the other girl’s point of view. Doing this means Rose is free to keep tabs on what’s happening in court even while getting up to more hasty crimes in the American backwoods.

It remains good, action-packed fun, sufficiently dramatic, a bit sexy (but not too much for the innocent eyes of teen readers—most dalliances get interrupted at inopportune times) and full of the characters you’ve enjoyed meeting in the past. Rose is flawed, has a quick temper, but is pretty funny and does what she thinks is best, which means she is mostly likeable.

But lord, sometimes you want to just stake her in the heart. Sometimes she is so stupid, or brash, or insensitive, that you really wonder if it would be so bad if she got executed for treason after all. Rose is a pain in the ass, and if it wasn’t for the fact that she is tall, fit, gorgeous, and could beat up anyone who looked at you funny, would she ever get as many marriage proposals and men willing to do anything for her? Her decisions are frequently annoying, and her reasoning behind the eventual relationship choice she makes feels very pasted on and does not compute with how the gentleman in question has appeared in the past.

The book could have done with a good dose of editing and the removal of one chapter ending early in the book that put my teeth on edge far too soon. The bond between Lissa and Rose has been a large part of the whole series, so when chapter two ends with Rose waking up, panicked, and the last lines being:

“What I found was...nothing.
The bond was gone.”

it’s serious business, you know? So when chapter three starts like this:

“Well, not gone exactly.
Muted.”

you feel like you’ve been cheated out of your emotions. I actually ended up marking a lot of pages in the book with scraps of paper if I came across questionable writing or plotting, but half of them fell out when I was flicking through just now to get to chapter two, so you might have to take my word on that. (One seemingly petty marked page found that someone knocked on Rose’s door in a “discrete” manner.) While I’m sure author Richelle Mead has had the series planned out in her head for some time, the eventual unveiling of who really killed Tatiana is actually kind of mean and annoying rather than a lightbulb moment where you think “of course!”. Some characters seem like red herrings, or just introduced to fawn over Rose, and some questions are still left unanswered. While the series will be continuing on with another Vampire Academy series forthcoming, one that won’t follow Rose—but apparently she will be around, so it won’t quite be the last we see of her—perhaps some of the loose ends will be tied up, but I don’t think I can be bothered reading any further now that this story has essentially reached its end point. I’ll just harass some poor teenage girl into reading them and telling me what happens to Rose in the future. “Does she get married? Does she have cute babies? Does she ever get the cute but inappropriate clothes she often finds herself wearing caught in any machinery and killed? TELL ME!!”

In summary: Below Expectations. I had hyped myself up into thinking the series was much more well-written than it is. It was still enjoyable enough, and with so many surprise moments it’s a page-turner, but I won’t read anything else by Mead because I am sick of all these improbably attractive people and their fantastical castle-related lifestyles. I really just don’t care any more.

lebanon

2010-12-06T10:06:00.002+11:00

It took filmmaker Samuel Moab almost thirty years to tell his story. It has been that long since the first day of the Lebanon war—June 6, 1982—when he was just twenty years old, and I was a few days off being born. As I was rolling around in the comfort of my mother’s womb, Moab sweated and shook behind the trigger of a tank cannon, tasked with the job of shooting anything that moved. It’s a thankless job: don’t shoot, and you may put all your comrades in danger; shoot, and you might kill an innocent civilian. Moab attempted to make this film years before, but couldn’t, the horrors of his experience too raw to recount. Finally, he was able to finish the script and make the movie he needed to. On a tight budget, and shot entirely within the confines of a tank—bar the brief opening and closing scenes—what he produced has won him accolades worldwide.

I will do everything in my power to not see war movies, generally. It seems awful and shallow to avoid what is a grim reality for a huge part of both history and present, but I usually find the machismo and bloodshed just too sickening. You’re much more likely to find me at a 3D kids’ flick laughing at a fart joke than in an arthouse cinema stroking my beard about the poignancy of camera angles. Still, when a movie receives as much attention as Lebanon it seems a good reason to get over my dislike and watch something so worthwhile.

Shmulik is a gunner, dropped into the belly of an Israeli Defence Force tank with loader Hertzel, driver Yigul, and officer Assi. They meet and shake hands, then are mobilised immediately to get to a road and wait for further instructions. When a car approaches, they are given their task: shoot to their left, then to their right, and if they don’t move, shoot out their engine. As someone who has previously “only ever shot barrels”, Shmulik freezes, endangering everyone around him; from that moment, the stage is set as real people—not Rambo-type heroes with oversized muscles and bandannas—are shown fighting with their emotions and each other as they struggle to survive the first day of the Lebanon War. Outside, the unit’s commander and his soldiers are face-to-face with the horror, with hostage-takers and the dead or injured, and trying with the tank to clear a freshly razed town. As the situation worsens, those in charge must deal with changes of plan, lack of backup and the subversiveness of inexperienced and frightened soldiers.

After seeing Buried and Devil I worried that 2010 was overdoing the claustrophobia* movie, but this felt much different. It is still an oppressive atmosphere, crowded into a tank with four men whose only view to the outside world is through crosshairs, but at least there are other people to see. With the faces of those destroyed by the war in sharp relief, however, it is not a beautiful world, but a devastating one. As one man stares down the sight, sharing a table in a town with a friend lying dead and bloody opposite, the trauma of the experience for everyone involved is made clear.

Immersive from the moment Shmulik lowers himself into the tank, Lebanon is a gripping and awful movie, with only one real moment of levity during a tale of an ill-placed hard-on in front of a teacher tasked to accompany a teenage Shmulik home after the death of his father. It’s hard to crack a smile during the story anyway, told as it is to improve the mood of the men in the tank, feeling alone and desperate in their dirty, aged, shelled tank with the walls covered in post-attack oil and soup croutons.

The sound design is ominous and alarming, the cinematography amazing when you consider the limited space. It is not a comfortable movie, soaked in blood and tension, but with tender moments as soldiers try to reach out with humanity during even the worst times in war. The devastation and tension of the first ten minutes does have the detrimental effect of causing the rest of the movie to feel slower and (mildly) less traumatising.

In summary: Meets Expectations, which were high after the glowing reviews. Lebanon is an important and devastating movie, and I am full of admiration for Samuel Moab in making such a personal film.

*Chris told me I wasn’t allowed to use the c-word word in my review because “everyone else has”, but that’s like not saying the word “tank” in this movie. If you suffer from claustrophobia, you probably shouldn’t see it, unless you’re at the Open Air Cinema and you’re driving home afterwards in a convertible.

monsters

2010-11-29T13:19:00.003+11:00

If you hadn’t seen the posters or read about the plot, a movie with a name as subtle as Monsters could be understandably visualised as some kind of schlock horror film that may be either taking the piss out of horror (a la Scary Movie) or perhaps actually just some big, stupid monster flick about aliens that no one will go and see (except that mantle has been taken by Skyline at the moment.) Having read about Monsters’ guerrilla shooting style, the minimal budget, the frisson of excitement surrounding it in Empire magazine and the fact that the lead couple are, in reality, married, I was interested to see how the film would go. So, on a Saturday night in a movie theatre filled with twelve-year-old boys who were undoubtedly disappointed in the lack of boobies, we went to the flicks to see what would happen.

The film has a nicely original starting point where we are not witnessing the Attack of the Monsters, or How America Beat the Monsters with One Guy and a Well Placed Bullet, but how society is going seven years after octopus-like aliens have landed on Earth via a space probe that broke up in Central America. That area has been cordoned off as the Infected Zone, and with great big walls erected on both the Mexican and US sides of the zone, the creatures are kept isolated. There are occasional attacks outside the zone, and the film begins with the destruction of a hotel in Mexico and the unexpected pairing of attack survivor Sam (Whitney Able) with Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), a photojournalist pressured by his boss—Sam’s father—into helping her get home to safety. The course of a monster movie escape never runs smooth, however, and the seemingly quick journey home becomes an unnerving trip right through the Zone itself.

Monsters is not really about monsters, though you will see them and be scared. Monsters is allegorical and sentimental in equal parts. Mexico and the United States have erected enormous walls on either side of the Infected Zone, but that hasn’t stopped the aliens from breaching the defences and getting all up in society’s face. The high walls themselves are a perfect vision of terror, and supply some of what was, for me, the most chilling moments in the film. Seeing Mexico’s giant wire fence was genuinely spooky, like when I was eleven and watching Jurassic Park and waiting for the T-Rex to sidle up to his giant electric fence and eat his goaty breakfast. You kind of wanted one of the aliens to come up to the fence, all tentacles and spiky legs, tentatively touch the fence, get zapped and then run off, yelping, just to dissipate the fear of that giant structure. The reality of walls between societies is not lost on anyone, with the horrors of war made clear. Kaulder points out to Sam—who is appalled by his photography at inappropriate times—that her father pays fifty thousand dollars for a picture of a kid killed by an alien and nothing at all for a picture of a happy child.

The sentiment lies in the relationship between Sam and Kaulder, one that is by turns spiky, playful, and tender. It is easy to forget the pair are a real couple despite the chemistry they share; they seem genuinely annoyed by each other at times and then newly excited in others. It is quite sweet watching them get closer, as the slightly jerky but amiable Kaulder does his best to impress engaged rich-girl Sam, and all done with only a vague script and a large amount of ad-libbing. When Kaulder makes Sam laugh it is uplifting, and when they huddle together in fear you hope desperately that they survive. A cheesy moment in a hotel room, where a David Attenborough-type documentary on mating plays in the background while Sam and Kaulder are trying to work out where their relationship stands, was a little forced, but the rest of their scenes felt uninhibited by constraints.

It really is a movie about adapting: watching people adapt to new people and experiences, no matter how shocking or horrific; watching the world adapt to these new alpha critters on the food chain; adapting enough to a new life to be able to appreciate the beauty of the monsters themselves. The casual, documentary feel to the camera work lends itself to lots of close-ups of faces and brings the raw emotion of the characters to the fore. It also enables lots of soft-focus and outright fuzziness, especially when it comes to gore; most of the worst scenes are tempered by photographic haze. It makes the scenes both awful in what they don’t show but also more palatable for the teen market (and there was a six-year-old in the cinema, which was pretty unnerving, though he seemed more bored than scared and mostly sang to himself in the corner and ate chips.)

The music is lovely, and the scenery is mind-blowing at times and eerie in others; lush forests, amazing landscapes, hidden treasures amongst the trees, destruction, husks of buildings, rusting planes. What is most amazing is that this entirely professional-looking movie was made on a budget of only $200,000, which, well, isn’t an amount to sniff at, (grumble about housing prices) but in film terms, it can be the cost of a single explosion. Few of the cast are actors, just given an outline of the scene and filmed from there. It makes the film so much more natural and believable, a down-home gritty reality instead of a shiny surreal world that $500,000,000 will get you. (Yes Avatar, I’m looking right at you and shaking my head, sighing.) Director Gareth Edwards also wrote the story, was the cinematographer, and did the special effects himself—an A+ effort when you see them. The critters themselves are possibly not as perfectly lit as they could have been if another zero had been whacked onto the budget, but are still believable, completely incredible and, as they occasionally make their own light source, forgivable.

Less forgiving is the one irritating monster movie flaw that Jurassic Park 3 started with that stupid dinosaur that ate the mobile phone: creatures sneaking up silently behind someone to deliver a shock but spending every other moment walking around the land causing the earth to shake and bone-chilling thuds to be heard from miles away. Hundred-metre-high octopi are not the same as the bad guy in Scream. They cannot sneak. They do not need to sneak. They have the upper hand. Eight of them, even. (Boom-tish.)

In summary: Exceeds Expectations. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great three-and-a-half star movie that is touching while still being scary enough to be a proper, pacy monster movie.

songs for nobodies

2010-11-26T00:49:00.003+11:00

Regular readers of this blog will have heard me frequently sigh over my secret boyfriends including, but not limited to: David Tennant, Antonio Banderas, Rupert Grint, and Robert Rodriguez. One thing I have not had until today has been a secret girlfriend. Bernadette Robinson has completely changed that and is now a contender for my heart.

Songs for Nobodies was the final play for our final Melbourne Theatre Company subscription, as the prices for subs when you’re thirty or older become far too expensive. (I hold Chris entirely to blame; I don’t turn thirty for another year, but refuse to see plays by myself because then who will I be able to whisper “they were on the telly!” to?) Fittingly, we saw our first and last plays in the same theatre—the Fairfax, in the Arts Centre—and we were also running late, as we were for our first play. Here I should mention how lovely MTC staff are when you turn up late, wracked with guilt and apologetic—they tell you how long until you can enter, set you up in a chair, and turn on a television that fuzzily broadcasts the play as it is performed. The people we had to clamber in front of were less excited, but hey guys, YOU try turning right in our car at the moment: it’s a fine and stupid art.

Songs for Nobodies follows the story of five separate women: the first, a woman who meets Judy Garland (this is the bit we arrived late for, so I am not as clear as I wish I was); an American usher glowing after her experience with Patsy Cline; an New Yawk journalist setting up an interview with Billie Holiday; an English librarian recounting how Edith Piaf saved her father’s life; a young Irish woman working on a cruise ship packed with temperamental celebrities, including Maria Callas. In each story, the most notable tunes by those singers will also be performed along with a band and—while many of the tunes are not particularly high on my list of favourites because I have heard them so much during my life—listening to them performed six feet in front of you by an artist who gets them all absolutely pitch-perfect was one of the most amazing theatrical experiences I’ve had.

Without a performer of the calibre of Bernadette Robinson, this play would be nothing. But listening to her get every accent right, all while wearing the same sharp outfit, utilising the minimalist, slightly art-deco set, and becoming five completely different people—she is incredible. As the librarian, she looks austere, walks with her head held high and speaks in a clipped accent that is nothing less than convincing. As the Irish teenager, fresh out of a relationship with an “evil bastard...no, he isn’t a bastard, but he is evil”, she is all sass and and lopes around the stage, recounting her tale with delicious drama. And when she sings—oh—you’ve never heard anything like it. Or you have, because she sounds so much like the singers she’s emulating that the hairs raised up on my arms and I leaned forward in my chair, beaming at this woman who, moments before, had been an aspiring journalist nicknamed Too Junior Jones, and then suddenly became Billie Holiday, singing the always moving Strange Fruit. It really is something.

The play isn’t all singing, though, and the little snippets of existence we get from the women are of equal interest. They are funny, and smart, and appealing. When the librarian makes a crass joke with her beautiful voice you can’t help but giggle; when the usher accidentally walks in on Patsy Cline you are excited for her, meeting her idol. Bernadette Robinson is an absolute revelation—to me, anyway, as she is a well-known performer. Joanna Murray-Smith wrote the play for Bernadette, and it is hard to imagine anyone else in these roles, able to sing as five loved stars, and to act as five anonymous women whose lives were changed by them.

I didn’t even make any jokes in this review. That’s how blown away I was by this play. It took away my propensity to be ridiculous and filled that part of my brain with awe.

In summary: Exceeds Expectations and the perfect end to our subscription. I also want to know who styled Bernadette’s hair, because it was great. If I could complain about anything, it would be that it started on time so we missed the beginning. Damn efficient MTC.

The Songs for Nobodies season runs from November 5 to January 15, already having been extended, probably due to an excess of awesome.

the loved ones

2010-11-22T14:54:00.002+11:00

If there’s one thing Australia can do well, it is: be scary. International folk think we’re a hotbed of spiders, snakes and drop bears, and that we’re liable to get kicked in the face by a kangaroo as soon as we walk out our front doors. What The Loved Ones shows is that it’s not the wildlife we should be afraid of, but also teenage girls who like to wear pink. Though I could have told you that years ago.

Teenager Brent (the preppily named Xavier Samuel, who was vampire ringleader Riley in Eclipse) is living a typical schoolkid existence: he motorboats his girlfriend Holly (Victoria Thaine) in her Volkswagen Beetle, listens to hard rock, and fights with his mum. What is less typical is that he’s trying to cope with the car accident that took his father’s life six months before, and in that respect, he resorts to cutting, and spends his afternoons either in the darkness of his room, or searching for release in the dangers of the Australian landscape. When he is asked to the school dance by the slightly awkward Lola (Robin McLeavy), he turns her down; he’s kind enough, but it wasn’t the answer she wanted. And as Brent listens to his iPod and broods in the bush with his dog, Lola’s dedicated dad (John Brumpton) does what any father of a slighted girl does: he knocks Brent out, chucks him in the back of his ute, and hoofs it back to his place so Lola, decked out in a pink frock and matching shoes, can get the night she wanted so badly. And while Brent’s best friend Jamie (Richard Wilson) enjoys a typical dance with the hottest black-wearing girl in school—the glum Mia (Jessica McNamee)—by smoking a buttload of pot and embarrassing himself trying to impress her, Brent himself is dealing with drills, knives, hammers and the very real chance of a lobotomy, all underneath a disco ball in the kitchen of one of the creepiest families you’ll ever see on film.

It’s an authentically Australian movie without being throw-another-shrimp-on-the-barbie ocker. The landscape is that kind of local country you could find just at the end of the train lines; the house interiors could be any of your friends’ homes; when in the school grounds, the lockers could be yours from year eleven, all scratched up from your combination lock grating against it. I am obviously biased in this sense, being from Victoria where this was shot, and possibly even in the neighbourhood—the end credits thank the Whitehorse City Council (where I live now) and the Yarra Valley City Council (where I used to as a kid.) Heck, when the credits rolled, I realised I actually knew two people in the crew as well. The Loved Ones portrays Australian life convincingly without being cheesy or overdone. (Though when Lola’s father hammers one message home to Brent, he does snarl, “That’s for the Kingswood.”)

Half of the movie is spent in Lola’s kitchen, claustrophobically trapped by her and her father, surrounded by glitter and sparkle, and with Brent attached to a chair and wearing a snappy suit. Those scenes are truly, utterly scary. The two, and a very quiet third house guest, are so completely unnerving with their insanity that they’ll undoubtedly be haunting my dreams. Lola, brought up by a father whose is clearly unhinged, has no moral issues with what she is doing. Her father is doing everything in his power to keep her daughter happy. There is a deeply disturbing undercurrent (actually, maybe just a current) of attraction between the father and his “Princess”, which will keep you just as squicked out as the mild torture-porn they inflict on poor emo Brent.

The other half of the movie takes you out of the devastation of the home and into the lives of others: Brent’s mother, as she waits for news of her son; Holly, as she waits in her party dress for her beau to come home; Jamie, as he bumbles his way through the night of his dreams. Jamie is really just there to alleviate the mood; one of the hardest scenes for me to watch was immediately followed by a riotous bit of slapstick comedy from the clumsy Jamie that literally had the audience coughing on their popcorn and laughing well into the next (probably inappropriate) scene. Rather than detracting from the tone of the film, it made it a much more enjoyable movie. There was a lot of humour for a horror movie, with Lola’s tantrums and glee overdone to the point of hilarity, while still—admirably—remaining scary. As the film goes into a glowing slo-mo play of Lola being crowned the queen of the dance with a pink paper hat from a cracker, it is an amusing yet chilling look into the headspace of poor deranged Princess.

The acting is top-notch, with the everyday teenagers spectacularly natural even as they are damaged; Brent bears his torture with the appropriate amount of screaming; Princess is bonkers but had you feeling sorry for her at the start of the movie, and survived her many close-ups looking perfectly like a five-year-old who didn’t get a lollipop at the supermarket; her father, flitting between proud, overprotective, eager to please and Candyman-scale terrifying, will have you scared of meeting any potential in-laws for decades to come. The sound engineering was so convincing in parts I wanted to cover my ears and run out screaming; composer Ollie Olsen’s metal soundtrack was also a perfect backdrop to the piece.

In summary: Meets Expectations, because I’d read a whole pile of glowing reviews and expected it to be good. It really is. The only things I didn’t like about it were that Princess looks alarmingly like the girl who does my eyebrows, and that everyone who was playing high school kids were all the same age as me, though I was completely convinced they were seventeen. But that’s just wrinkle-induced jealousy.

jeff kinney, the ugly truth #5 diary of a wimpy kid

2010-11-19T16:56:00.003+11:00

When the fifth Wimpy Kid book came out, I was a bad representation of its readership. The day is was released I skipped into work, made a beeline for the kids’ section, then asked my nearest co-worker: “Where’s The Ugly Truth?” “Not here yet,” said they, “but maybe on its way from the warehouse.” When the first delivery from the warehouse came, I almost leapt onto the trolley being pushed, yelling, “Is it in here? Is it in one of these boxes?” Then I tore them open, couldn’t find it, and sulked. HARD.

Finally I opened a box and there was a flash of purple. There they were, Jeff Kinney’s newest Wimpy Kid. And there was me, with hours left at work. I thought long and hard about leaving work early, or just hiding myself out in a quiet corner upstairs to read it, hoping no one would notice I was there. Instead I did the slightly more mature thing: I worked diligently the rest of the day, and shrieked about how excited I was to read the book to anyone who provoked me into conversation with something like “Hi, I’ll take this history book please.”

The Ugly Truth starts with our hero Greg about to start back at school but lamenting a fight with his best friend, Rowley. Greg is a little jerk to Rowley at the best of times, so you can’t help but feel glad Rowley has escaped—and has started hanging out with parent-hired mentor types to be a good influence on him. But Greg needs to find a new best friend, and no one’s quite up for the job. (For example: “Tyson is nice enough, and we like the same video games. But he pulls his pants all the way down when he uses the urinal, and I don’t know if I can ever get past that.”)

And Greg really needs a friend right now, because he is starting to grow up. There’s boy/girl parties to be had, instructional videos to watch at school (“Rowley didn’t even make it through the whole video. He passed out at the two-minute mark when they said the word ‘perspiration’.”) and awkward conversations with his family to avoid. So Greg does his best to reclaim his childhood by wanting to go to the pediatric dentist (slogan: “We cater to cowards!”)and trying out for ice cream ads only small children are required for, while simultaneously trying hard to come across as mature to the cool kids and pretty girls at school. Basically, it’s hard hitting puberty, especially when your ex-best friend still thinks it’s contagious and avoids older kids because of it.

The Ugly Truth is just as hilarious as you’d expect, but without Rowley for Greg to torment, and a surprise lack of Greg’s father around to do embarrassing things, it maybe wasn’t as good as last book Dog Days. It’s still better than a lot of other books I’ve read—grown-up ones included—and the pictures (at least one on each page) remain a perfect accompaniment to the text. It’s a great read for kids who are overwhelmed by a lot of writing but still like the idea of books, and it’s such a laugh that you’d be hard pushed finding a kid that doesn’t love it. The characters are all great—from Greg’s Gammie who quietly pranks her unloving family, to his uncle Gary whose fourth wedding Greg finds himself the “assistant” flower boy for. While there’s heaps of jokes that made me giggle uncontrollably, there also is a mildly discomfiting subplot involving a maid named Isabella who doesn’t do any work, too.

In summary: Meets Expectations, but almost Below, because I thought it would Exceed. Here, have a page from it to smile about goofily.

machete

2010-11-15T17:38:00.002+11:00

Only a few reviews ago I was raving about The Social Network being the best movie of the year. In retrospect, that was a ridiculous thing to say when there was a new Robert Rodriguez movie released within weeks. The Social Network is great, sure, but Machete takes that movie, shoots it in the face, straps a bomb to it, and then sets it on fire.

You know how in relationships, you always end up having the discussion about who the one famous person is you are allowed to have an affair with if the possibility ever arises? Chris usually picks Sarah Chalke, who plays Elliott in Scrubs, and while I’ve discussed my secret boyfriends in the past on this blog, I’m pretty confident that my number one affair-inducer is Robert Rodriguez. I am a fan of him in every shape and form. He is cute, wears a bandanna, directs, writes, edits, composes, and gets his family and friends involved in pretty much every movie that he makes. And they are some of the best movies I’ve seen. I don’t know what it is about his films that I love so much, but he absolutely hits every button with me. Embarrassing as it is, there got to a certain point during Machete where I was enjoying it so much—not laughing, just smiling—that I actually shed a tear. I did. I cried with excitement over a schlock action film. AND I WILL DO IT AGAIN.

Machete began as just a glimmer in Rodriguez’s eye years ago, then properly as a fake preview in Rodriguez’s ill-fated (but brilliant) Grindhouse collaboration with Quentin Tarantino. With Danny Trejo decked out in an array of machetes and knives, he shoots, stabs, gets shot, bonks pretty ladies and comes flying through the air out of an explosion on his motorbike. It received such love from the crowds that Rodriguez turned it into a feature length movie, and we are all the better as a world because of it.

Machete (Trejo) is an ex-Federale, working illegally as a day labourer in the Texas after a series of unpleasant events involving crossing drug lord Torrez (Steven Seagal), watching his wife be killed, and being stabbed and left for dead in a fire. A lot is going on in Texas: Senator John McLaughlin (Robert DeNiro) is launching a campaign targeted at getting rid of immigrants—he calls them “parasites”—while The Network, run by the elusive Shé, is doing what they can to help those crossing the border. When Machete is hired to assassinate McLaughlin, ostensibly to stop him from taking away the cheap labour Texas needs to survive, he finds himself part of an even bigger plot that goes all the way back to Mexico and to the man he hates the most.

From the opening scene with Machete crushing a police two-way radio in his bare hand, what follows is excessive amounts of gore, blood, and nudity—if you wanted to see Jessica Alba (as immigration official Sartana Rivera) in the shower, or Lindsay Lohan (as wayward daughter April) naked in a pool but for a huge blonde wig, this is the film for you. Michelle Rodriguez keeps her kit on but is amazing as Network leader Luz, saving the world from her taco van. The casting is always incredible in these films, and also usually share a few of the same actors: Cheech Marin returns as Machete’s padre brother, meaning Rodriguez can have his usual church shoot-em-up (“I absolve you of all your sins, now get the fuck out”); blue-eyed Jeff Fahey is Michael Booth, political aide and the conniving schemer behind the hit; Tom Savini—he of the glorious groin-gun in From Dusk Til Dawn—plays Osiris, hired by Booth to kill Machete. This movie also “introduces” Don Johnson as border vigilante Von Jackson. Seagal is utterly excellent and looks about eleven feet tall next to Trejo (who isn’t a tiny man), and as ominous, unmoving and square as a detention centre in his Kim Jong-Il outfit.

Things get blown up. Limbs and heads go flying. Everything is ridiculous and overdone. Sartana kills someone armed only with her red stiletto shoes. A particular self-induced death scene is the most calm and memorable you’ll ever see. Booth walks through a house shooting everyone there is without breaking a sweat. In my favourite scene by far, Machete jumps out of a hospital window using still-attached intestines as a rope. It’s absolutely silly, fun and cartoonish. While this blog is okay with differences of opinion, and if you hate schlock movies then that’s fine, but the reviews I’ve read that dislike this seem to be taking it far too seriously. I mean, honestly. At one point Sartana yells at Machete for not contacting or texting her and Machete says, monotone, “Machete don’t text.” It’s brilliant. Even despite its silliness, Sartana’s speech at the end as she rallies the immigrant workers of Texas, saying: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” made chills run up my spine. I think I am the Target Market here.

Rodriguez makes the most out of close-ups, not holding back from the actors’ flaws. His cinematography has always been wonderful, at the right place at the right time, and totally immersive. The sound is predictably wonderful, loud and chaotic and full of zest.

In summary: Exceeds Expectations, and is the greatest movie ever. Apparently, an even more violent director’s cut will be on the DVD release, leaving me searching wildly for a time machine that can shoot me into next January to buy it.

ETA: After extensive fawning over Wikipedia, I have discovered that Robert Rodriguez has broken up with Rose McGowan. Bye all, I’m off to Texas.

red

2010-11-12T14:36:00.002+11:00

Some actors can pull off any film you stick them in. I’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t like Bruce Willis (even after Surrogates), Helen Mirren (who looks hotter in a red bikini than I ever will), Morgan Freeman (whose voice weakens knees) and John Malkovich (mostly evil, always cool). Make the four of them ex-CIA agents, trying to keep themselves alive after a case from their past comes to light, and you get action-packed quality that could boast the stupidest script ever and you’d still watch it. Luckily, it’s not the stupidest script ever either.

Adapted from Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner’s comic, Red opens with retired agent Frank Moses (Willis) waking up and moving around the house to the kind of jaunty soundtrack that opens an indie character piece. He gets on the phone to Sarah Ross (Mary-Louise Parker), who deals with his pension cheques and who shares with Frank a shy, fledgling phone-relationship. Then, in one incredibly destructive scene—why use a wrecking ball to destroy a house when enough people with machine guns could do the same?—Frank is forced to escape, get help, and assist the girl he has a crush on—and who he has been endangering just by talking to her.

Moses rustles up old friends and foe, from nursing-home-bound rascal Joe Matheson (Freeman) to the bonkers Marvin Boggs (Malkovich), living alone on an island, hiding in trees and paranoid only in the sense that occasionally he is wrong that people are out to get him. Add to the mix the elegant Victoria (Mirren) and Russian agent Ivan (Manhunter’s Lector-playing Brian Cox, who has amusingly been in a previous movie called Red), and you have one of the most elderly death squads since the other day when I went to see The Expendables. Except that instead of oversized biceps and hilarious hair, it was more oversized talent and hilarious jokes. Well, corny jokes.

The story itself was not quite as twisty as expected, being a fairly straight action movie with all the requisite one-liners and romance. The audience around laughed so hard and loud at the most obvious jokes (and a lot were signposted) that I was beginning to wonder if I’d stumbled into an audience of people that had never actually seen a film before, and then I thought I was a bit of a monster for analysing why a crowd would laugh at a joke. If this movie had been filmed with up-and-coming actors, it would have barely made it to theatre—not to say it’s terrible plot-wise, but really, this is a movie to see for the acting alone.

Bruce Willis plays exactly what you imagine of him—a tough guy, but a bit old (though he doesn’t really look it) and gone all soft for Parker’s Sarah, who he kidnaps to save her. Parker does a wonderful job of actually doing her best to escape from a guy she had previously been into but who now appears to be a criminal, but then starts to enjoy the ride he’s taken her on—though it never seems contrived (well, in an entirely contrived movie, but she still does a convincing job of it.) Malkovich is only a year or two older than Willis, but with a proper amount of crazy white hair he looks sufficiently old and batshit, and is absolute fun as Boggs, jumpy and watchful and who was the subject of LSD experiments in his past. Morgan Freeman doesn’t get enough time on screen, but as a sneakily dignified gent, fools everyone. Much has been said of Helen Mirren shooting people with a machine gun and how awesome that is, and let me tell you internets, it is. She was the Queen of England, and now she’s shooting CIA agents and you’re cheering her on. On the youth front, Karl Urban, current CIA agent and the man who doesn’t have the full story but is trying to stop Frank from killing everyone, works nicely from a fairly bland beginning to a much more emotive ending, though he does get the shit kicked out of him at one point but then appears the next day with barely a scratch on his previously swollen and bloody face. His motivations are also tricky to decipher, but oh, who cares. It’s an action comedy. And he’s pretty cute.

In summary: Meets Expectations. Predictable and silly, but great fun.

the social network

2010-11-05T18:07:00.003+11:00

Hype! I hate it. It’s all up in your media, telling you something’s going to be the next big thing or a godawful disaster, and then causing nothing to ever be as awesome/terrible as you expect. But then sometimes hype is actually right. I guess it’s just statistically inaccurate to assume they would always be wrong.

In the case of the new David Fincher movie, The Social Network, the hype is right. This movie is killer. It’s great. It rocks. It’s everything you could want in a movie. It is beautiful and entertaining and it is interesting and it should win all of the awards for available, even Best Musical because there was music playing in the background sometimes. I loved it. I have lost my brain a bit about it—even when I think about its failings I am like one of those people who defends their friend who is a jerk. “It’s just how they are,” they say, and you hate them. I am like that about The Social Network. Blinded by how cool it is. Just like Sean Parker does to Mark Zuckerberg—yes, maybe this is an indication I should get to the plot.

Based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, The Social Network is the fictionalised but vaguely true account of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), founder of obscure website facebook and the world’s youngest billionaire (billionaire! I’m excited to be a thousandaire half the time.) The film opens with Harvard computer student Mark and girlfriend Erica in a bar, getting into a fight as Mark is revealed to be an arrogant and basically unbearable person to be around. Erica leaves him, and he takes out his anger by creating a website called FaceMash, where pictures of women from the university are shown side by side with the ability to vote on who is “hotter”. This crashes the Harvard server, lands Zuckerberg in trouble with the school, and brings him to the attention of three people: all-American identical twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (Armie Hammer, as both) and their business pal Divya Narendra (Max Minghella). These fine folks are looking to create a social networking site for the university, and they recruit Zuckerberg to write their code. Instead, he takes their idea and creates facebook, landing him popularity, fame, and ridiculous amounts of money—and leaving the “Winklevii” and Narendra with their idea plundered. As Zuckerberg chases his dream of getting facebook to the masses, he starts to lose his own friends, namely best pal Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), whose eventual lawsuit—along with the Winklevoss/Narendra case—plays out in the background to the rise and rise of facebook itself.

The acting is top notch. Jesse Eisenberg was awkward and loveable in Zombieland, and is awkward and a pain in the ass in this, making Mark the kind of arrogant know-it-all with jealousy issues that you can hate but understand on a human level. There is an amazing turn by Armie Hammer as both Winklevoss twins: blonde, sculpted, rowing champions, entitled and utterly enjoyable to watch, especially as they are shot down by the university dean for bringing their problems to his attention. Eduardo is the one good guy in a big pile of jackasses, and he was represented endearingly by Andrew Garfield, who is soon to don the Spider-man suit and release us all from the curse that was the other Spider-man movies. (Insert theatrical gagging here.) Another character of note is Sean Parker, the brains behind Napster, who gloms onto Zuckerberg, offers advice and becomes a business partner, coming across as a man of much blustery charm, little in the way of morals and basically as the villain of the piece. He is played with tight blonde curls by my nemesis Justin Timberlake (rant to follow).

The music, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is incredible, from tender and moving to go get ’em inspirational-moment beats to brain-knocking party tunes. The cinematography is amazing, with every shot tight and perfect, and some—like the twins’ regatta in England—shot in such a way that the scenery and the race looked like miniatures, perhaps (and we all know I rarely go in for symbolism here) to illustrate how small they have become in the scheme of the plan, or how small-minded they are as they make fun of Prince Albert—who they have just met, as you do. David Fincher continues to be the kind of director that gets people flapping their arms about when they hear that he’s bringing a new film out. Well, me, anyway.

Women are not fabulously portrayed in this film, apart from the five or so minutes we spend with the strong and admirable Erica (Rooney Mara, who will be Lisbeth Salander in the American remakes of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo etc, and who I am reserving judgement on until I see that trilogy.) Women are shipped in by bus to a frat party where they dance on tables and kiss each other madly; they get high in the lounge of the house Eduardo helps pay for as tech boys frantically write code in other rooms; they snort cocaine off each other’s bellies; they fuck the famous; they are batshit crazy girlfriends who set things on fire; they are beautiful but never part of a living, breathing plotline. I assume this is more a pointed look at the college boy view of women, but it still feels a little gross. Women: only here to party, or break Mark’s heart. We get the instructions for those two tasks when we are born.

Also well-portrayed but hard to swallow is the whole Ivy League classism and fraternity/finals club wankery, where which club you belong to can change your entire life due to knowing the right people, but which can often only be achieved by knowing the right people (or having enough money) in the first place. Australia isn’t immune to classism, but with the universities not having frat houses or as many boys wandering around with sweaters tied around their shoulders, it’s always something that’s come across as almost comical and ridiculous. People actually act like that? What dicks. But that’s why America is such enjoyable fodder in films like these, where they milk it for all its worth, as Eduardo is picked for a finals club and Zuckerberg spitefully says it’s only because they’re filling their minority quota. Not only that, but everyone in the film appears to be from money, apart from Zuckerberg, who appears to be from outer space as his family is never mentioned and he is really weird.

Despite the bad attitude towards women and the nauseating sense of entitlement suffered by everyone involved, I would give this five stars or ten out of ten but for one thing. Justin Timberlake. I don’t even know what he’s like as an actor, though I do know he plays the person who is basically the villain of the piece. I just hate him so, so much. It’s not his awful music, or his flat head, or his celebrity relationships. It’s the fact that he not only thought that he brought sexy back, but that it ever went away to begin with, and that emulating Michael Jackson was the way to reintroduce sexy to society. JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE. YOU ARE WRONG. I cannot see past my emotions here. Therefore:

In summary: Exceeds Expectations, in the way that rockets exceed the local school zone speed limit. But only 9.5/10 until you strap Justin Timberlake to one of those rockets.

tripod vs the dragon

2010-11-01T15:20:00.003+11:00

I am sceptical of musical theatre in any form. I think my feelings are somewhere along the lines of: if you can sing it, why don’t you just say it, and if you think your singing’s so good, why don’t you just join a band? I’ve been to a few musicals, and sure, some of them have been beautiful, elaborate productions, funny or moving, so on and so forth. But once you’ve heard the chorus of a song, where they sing the point of the scene (“Lisa it’s your birthday”, and other much more high-class examples) then I get the point. You don’t have to sing it again. But you will, because it’s musical theatre, and it’s there to repeat the same line until you throw up your hands and say, “Fine, I get it. It’s Lisa’s birthday. I understand.”

Musical comedy is a little trickier to judge. I like to laugh. (A strange quirk, I know, but there you are—one of my most embarrassing and intimate secrets revealed to all.) But I don’t like musicals. A quandary! But when the suggestion came up from lovely co-worker D to accompany her to see Tripod’s new show Tripod vs the Dragon, on the day it was getting filmed for DVD, I said a firm hell yes. Because comedy is funny, and I’d never actually seen a full Tripod show—only skits on those epic musical all-nighters they show on TV when the comedy festivals come out. Now was the time to branch out, so I practised my ridiculous laugh so that I could be heard clearly when I purchased the DVD later. But that was only 76% of my reasoning to go.

Tripod vs the Dragon is the musical tale of a game of Dungeons and Dragons, with our three Tripod heroes, Scod (Scott Edgar), Yon (Simon Hall) and Gatesy (Steven Gates), chancing upon a map that has a mysterious missing area. They decide to explore, but will they listen to warnings about a dragon in the area? Of course not, because it’s called Tripod vs the Dragon. This differs from other Tripod performances by the addition of jazz songstress Elana Stone, who really should have caused the renaming of the troupe to Quadpod, as she was quite a useful (and vocally as well as visually gorgeous) member of the group. As game master and an important part of the story, she stole the heart of poor goofy Gatesy, and the audience too.

It was hilarious. Some jokes made me feel deep, lasting regret that I had not gone to the bathroom before the show. Tripod was pleasantly sweary, and they bang out a good tune. They harmonise beautifully, and are clearly talented musicians. They’ve got fantastic chemistry and have clearly been honing the skill of being scathing to each other for years. Elana had great comedic timing, and fit in just fine. Some of the story was told through shadow puppetry, purposefully simplistic and thus fantastic, and those were my favourite parts. What can I say? I love a good cardboard cut-out.

It didn’t really alter my opinion of musicals being one of my least favourite types of comedy, but it’s definitely my favourite kind of musical theatre. It was fun and funny, I had a blast, and the fact that they were filming a DVD means that this could be my big break into the film industry. Well, maybe if we hadn’t been in the second row from the back. The actual DVD recording aspect was quite entertaining, with them explaining to us what was going on, cameras all over the place, and an understandable blanket ban on toilet breaks during the show. When they had to repeat a skit at the end to make sure the sound was right, it was like we were old pals and they were asking us a favour. They also left the theatre just after everyone else and will happily stand around and chat. Because they’re cool.

In summary: Meets Expectations. I thought they’d be funny, and they were; I thought the songs might occasionally be repetitive, and they were. But it’s okay; it’s still a million times better than listening to the Top 40. (I say this, but as I seem to be only listening to the new albums at work, I don’t really know. For all I know Justin Bieber and his ilk might actually be quite talented.)

twitter

2010-10-28T12:31:00.003+11:00

So it occurred to me that even though I prattle on here on a vaguely regular basis, there are actually more things that I read, watch and hear that I don’t write up into a smartassy 1000-word essay. Sometimes it’s because they’re older things and you all know about them (“just watched some movie called The Blues Brothers and turns out it’s pretty cool”) or because I go to write a blog post and end up staring vacantly at the screen unable to process my feelings towards whatever I’ve read (“~~The newest~~ ~~The most recent~~ ~~The author of~~ AUGH I HATE BOOKS”). But I feel I could write about them in less than 140 characters, and this will also give me the opportunity to spread some salacious bookstore gossip, and tweet about exciting things like the weather as well. (“Melbourne has erratic weather? Who knew?”)

So if you would like to, please follow me at readwatchtweet (someone had already nicked readwatchlisten, dammit) as if I get some followers I might actually tweet some stuff, unlike my last Twitter account which has had two tweets in the past nine months, both about male nudity in the media. (I maintain it’s important, but I should try and have some other opinions too.)

Nails alas not mine, but found here. I also promise there won’t be as many brackets on Twitter, mostly because they have character limits. (Bah.)

carrie fisher, wishful drinking

2010-10-24T01:17:00.003+11:00

So, for some people, Carrie Fisher is known only as one thing: Princess Leia from Star Wars. Now, don’t be embarrassed: I only also knew her as the batshit ex-fiancée from The Blues Brothers and the author of a book (Surrender the Pink) I once bought second-hand because the first paragraph was so great but forgot to actually read and then sold at a market stall last month (stupid past self.) Luckily for those of us with little knowledge of Fisher’s wider work (script doctor, actress-in-other-flicks, screenwriter, mother, comedian, Pez dispenser) she knows this all too well and doesn’t mind catering to those of us with a narrow view of the most famous woman to ever be chained half-naked to a giant earthworm. In her one-woman stage show, Wishful Drinking, she tells the audience everything they wanted to know—and, of course, much more than they wanted to know, too. Seriously, when she said the word “pussy” I felt the collective blush of the entire audience.

Carrie Fisher is funny. Hilarious. Hysterical. She has an excellent turn of phrase, she quips like it’s an Olympic sport, and charmed the pants off everyone in the Athenaeum Theatre. And, after she opens the show singing on the stage (set like a comfortable living room dotted with R2D2 plush toys, photographs, quirky decorations and a giant projector screen) she flings glitter all over the audience and then declares we’re going back to 1956, when she was born to two of Hollywood’s sweethearts: singer Eddie Fisher (who passed away just a month ago, and was renowned for “Oh My Papa”, or, in her own favourite lyrical mashup, “Oh My Faux Pas”) and actress Debbie Reynolds (on her mother’s beauty: “She looked like a Christmas morning.”) To explain the dramatic tentacles of Hollywood relationships after her parents’ divorce, a blackboard drops from the ceiling with a complicated bunch of pictures that try to decipher if Carrie’s own daughter, Billie, is in any way related to her new flame, who happens to be Elizabeth Taylor’s grandson. Eddie Fisher did marry Ms. Taylor, briefly, but after much laughter and pointing at the board with a stick, she establishes that they are related only “by scandal!” Hollywood really is just as deliciously trashy as you’d imagine, and though it must have hurt Carrie and her brother Todd as children to watch the train wrecks that were marriage after marriage of their parents, she does now find it all funny and made it seem like the height of farce for her audience.

There is so much more to Carrie than her parents’ scandals and even more than Star Wars (gasp, I know!) She talks about celebrity, how her likeness is owned by one George Lucas, her relationships, and, of course, her bipolar diagnosis and addictions. She didn’t shy away from any topics, and her discussion of her mental state was frank and admirable, and her explanation of what bipolar is for her led to quite a moving time in the show as everyone went utterly quiet and was swept up in her heartbreaking description towards the end of the show, including how electroconvulsive therapy affects her memory.

And what memories she has, and she will floor you with her perspective and devastating one-liners. Her marriage to Paul Simon (who, when I was four, wrote the first song I ever loved, “You Can Call Me Al”) started off with them feeling like they were the only two people who understood each other but at the end, “things were getting worse faster than we could lower our standards.” That relationship was followed by one with Bryan Lourd, with whom she had her daughter “[who was] dragged out of me like I was a burning building”, and who also accused her of turning him gay due to her use of codeine. Then there was her clothes in Star Wars—on donning the white dress for the set, George told her she couldn’t wear a bra. When Carrie asked why, George replied: “There’s no underwear in space.” And her parents, from her widow-stealing father to her mother, who suggested Carrie carry Debbie’s new husband’s baby so that it would have “great eyes”. All this, interjected with political jokes and constant references to her mental state—it’s really a completely wonderful show. Carrie is charming, devastating, and honest, and if you’re in her line of sight, you might get dragged on stage, kissed on the cheek, and made to hit on the cement life-sized sex doll of Princess Leia. (And before you ask, no, I wasn’t, we were seated upstairs.)

In summary: Exceeds Expectations—we scored some very lucky free passes and I hadn’t really known what to expect, but it was a blast. There’s an intermission, so you’ll have the opportunity to go and cash in some shares to afford a bottle of water and a packet of potato chips if you need half-time sustenance.

isbells, s/t

2010-10-20T00:19:00.002+11:00

There was a time when I thought of of folk music as the favourite only of hippies and horribly optimistic people, and scowled and listened to the tough hardcore music I loved, like Crowded House. Now, I pat my past self on the head patronisingly for thinking like that, and admit bravely that most of the new music I’ve bought has been folk. It puts me in this lovely springtime mood, thinking of long drives to the beach and sepia-toned picnics in the park (full disclosure: I’ve had maybe one park-based picnic in the past six years.) I love folk. The Fleet Foxes and their ethics and beards almost completely took over my life. Iron and Wine as well. (Stick a beard on a man and give him a guitar and watch me swoon. Alas Chris prefers to be clean-shaven, though he does happily bash about on his guitar making up songs about how the cat smells terrible or how we stay up late writing songs about staying up late when we should be getting a sensible night’s sleep.)

One of my lovely co-workers pushed me in the direction of Isbells, saying that they were going to be the new work favourite. (Past favourites, played until we were sick of them, include: The Morning Benders, Broken Bells, Mountain Man, Laura Marling.) And you know what, they are. Just as tender and beautiful as Fleet Foxes, and similar in a way, it’s an album that takes a few voices, two guitars, and creates something that lights up your house and reminds you, like folk does best, of all the little things in life that are so important. A lot of folk seems to put me in this strange clucky mood, all its talk of family life—Feist’s Mushaboom being an example that always gets me sighing—and this album is no different, like with track Maybe’s lines:

I don’t know who you are/you don’t know who I am/maybe you will be mine/and we’ll have a beautiful child/a house and a dog and travel a lot/but the moment’s gone so maybe not

Couple that with a wistful tune and I get all misty-eyed in regards to children. Sometimes I think that if it wasn’t for sappy family songs like Animal Collective’s My Girls I wouldn’t even want to have kids and would continue to be happy living my self-involved life of vanilla cake and ten-hour stretches on the couch reading nonsense on the internet, single-handedly saving the world from overpopulation.

Isbells’ self-titled album is a gorgeous little collection of tunes both melancholy and upbeat, moving and fun. I say “little” because it’s currently at the lovely EP-type price of $14.95, though at ten tracks and forty minutes long it outruns (and outmusics) a lot of other albums I’ve paid more for.

Because I always find something to complain about, I’ll say two things here: that it is quite similar to other folksy music out there, and that these lyrics from first song As Long As It Takes would have been heard by my past self and mocked roundly:

What have you done/To the earth we all love/where do we go from here/who’s responsible/look at the mirror on the wall/what do I tell my child/its future’s gone for life

HIPPIES.

In summary: Meets Expectations, which, because I share many musical tastes with the person who recommended the album to me, were high.

steve holden, somebody to love

2010-10-18T01:01:00.005+11:00

On paper, Somebody to Love was My Kind of Book. I love reading about relationships and reality, about the everyday, but with something a little different to lift it. I loved The Lonely Polygamist because it was about relationships—one man and his four wives, which, of course, is a normal life for some people. And Somebody to Love was about a transsexual mortician in Tasmania; as I’m quietly a bit morbid, the mortician aspect appealed to me, as did the fact that I’d be reading about sex and gender issues that a lot of us could stand to know more about. And when I got my hands on a copy, I swooned at the cover: it’s a beautiful-looking book.

Our heroine, the mortician, is in her family’s funeral home, preparing three bodies for burial: the Esterhazen girl, the Kremmer boy, and Mr Phillips, a man who entrances her even in death. As she readies these cadavers for their final rest, she reflects on the life she’s led. From the family that taught her the trade to her journey to changing her body to reflect how she is, every cut and touch of makeup is the product of the years before her.

It really is an exercise in language. And like James Joyce’s similarly verbose Ulysses, it’s not really my bag. It’s a bit hypocritical for me to say so when the fiction I write is just as tangential and plotless as they come, which means I count a lot on my use of language, but I am possibly biased and clearly see myself as some kind of Fabulous Exception to the Rule. The mortician thinks in the kind of distinguished language that, if conversing in real life, would immediately put me on edge and feel I was being condescended to. One does not use the word “I” if “one” can be used to refer to oneself instead; indeed, the word indeed turns up at the start of a sentence so often I considered getting out a highlighter and counting, except I was worried my highlighter would run out of neon. Sure, the main character doesn’t have to be someone immediately likeable to be an interesting person to follow—like in A Confederacy of Dunces—but in this case, I found it far too frustrating. She is an unreliable narrator—seemingly paranoid of other people’s reactions to her, but without supplying enough information to know if she has a basis for it or not. Like so:

‘I see,’ she said, turning quickly, her eyes glinting, I believe, with malice. Mrs K, it is a known fact, is a vicious woman, sudden to anger, ready to wound, and in that moment she meant, undoubtedly, ‘I have your measure, I will punish you for this.’

(I do, however, feel I have met a kindred spirit in someone who like the comma as much as I do.)

In some cases, things were not explained enough; other subjects were banged on about repeatedly. It’s also something I wouldn’t recommend for anyone with a prudish constitution (necrophilia by page two—a new record!) and if you’ve recently experienced a bereavement, the graphic explanations will not make you feel better, though the care that the mortician puts into it is at least mildly comforting.

It is, in an understated but visceral way, one of the most violent and dark books I have read. Beauty is stripped to dark, and everyone within the book’s pages has their secrets—the funeral industry included. Some of the violence will happen with such smoothness, clouded by gorgeous words, that you will barely notice it happening. It has some beautiful moments of realised horror, delicately atmospheric and engaging. Every word, item and action is in its place. Some turns of phrase struck me as a bit odd, like the following:

There is, at the top end of the cemetery, a fence of trees laced with a passionfruit vine. It was a most welcome place to shelter on account of the warm afternoon, curtained by the fringe of fruit that hung grimly like testicles, hard and green, against the sunburned iron heat.

Now I understand her own male genitals were a source of concern for her, but testicles are not hard and green. If so, see your doctor. Just some advice from your friendly neighbourhood bookseller.

Frankly, the elegant language made it a difficult undertaking, and I had to reread sentences to try and understand what was happening; sometimes I just gave up and moved on. The plot jumped back and forth in time and often I had no idea where I was or at what point in the chronology of the story. It was kind of like when you’re stuck on a train next to the window, surrounded by a stack of third-year uni students who are loudly retelling the story of the Nihilist Party they threw on the weekend and trying their best to impress each other with their Word-of-the-Day-Calendar knowledge, but are all slightly too drunk to remember the order of events clearly.

There are a lot of books out there that have given me a similar reaction that have gone on to win ridiculously well-paying prizes and the accolades of millions. I’m the first to admit that just because I didn’t like something it doesn’t mean it’s not worthy, or that it won’t make your Top Ten Desert Island Reads. But this is not in mine.

In summary: Below Expectations. The past two books I’ve read by Tasmanian authors have been linguistically challenging for me (the other being Anna Dusk’s Inhuman) and I am now wary of crossing Bass Strait in case all the signs are in fancytalk or covered in werewolf blood.

buried

2010-10-14T11:15:00.002+11:00

Remember how you always secretly thought about how cool it would be if you could get a Ryan Reynolds in a box? How you could keep him in the cupboard and bring him out for, uh, special occasions? Well, think again. It turns out that Ryan Reynolds in a box is not sexy and mischievous at all, but in fact wrong and dirty and kind of depressing. And I know this for a fact because I have seen Buried.

Buried is a movie about a man in a coffin. The entire movie is set in this coffin. It’s like when that movie Phone Booth came out, and everyone wondered if it was possible to sustain a whole film with just Colin Firth in a phone booth, but then they showed things happening outside and there was a cast of hundreds around his phone booth, including Radha Mitchell and Katie Holmes. In Buried, it’s a man in a coffin, buried underground. It is reminiscent of the scene in Kill Bill 2 where Uma Thurman is buried underground, except if you didn’t have any training by a frustrating Pai Mei and were therefore just stuck in a box without the ability to beat your way out of it with your mighty Uma Thurman knuckles. In Buried, you will not see any other faces. And, for a not insignificant amount of time as the movie starts, there’s no light, just some breathing. It got to the point where someone in the audience sighed dramatically and said, “Well, that was a good movie” and we all laughed and looked around awkwardly waiting for something to happen. Which, after a few sharp intakes of breath and the fumbling for a lighter, it does, and then things start to get interesting.

It takes a while for things to get clear, for both us and for Ryan Reynolds’ Paul Conroy. Why is he in a box in the ground? Who put him there? Where in the world is he? Can he be helped? While Ryan Reynolds is alarmingly attractive, is he interesting enough to hold an entire movie with few props and not much in the way of movement? I will only answer the last question for you, because spoilers are for jerks. Yes, he is, and the movie is good. But it’s not excellent. Because dramatic tension, great acting and the realism of the situation doesn’t stop one thing: watching someone in a box for two hours is still kind of boring. Because if something else isn’t immediately happening, there’s nothing new to look at. Just the box. And Ryan Reynolds.

But things do happen to Paul Conroy. We do hear him talk, and panic, all of his reactions completely realistic and covering all bases that a panicked person in a box would do. He does get a certain visitor, one that caused the poor man in the row behind me (who had been doing some manly swearing while the previews were on) to start moaning in horror to the point where I worried he would be sick on my hair. It is also a politically interesting film, though a little bit of a downer on that front. The things that can happen in a coffin in two hours are pretty high in number, depending on what you have in there with you. The movie relies entirely on this very small set—we don’t have any convenient visual flashbacks to Conroy’s past. The cinematography—which feels like an enormous word for what was done here—is amazing, considering the small area the film was made in. It’s a very claustrophobic feeling, and the camera will look through holes in the dirt or the wood towards him occasionally, but you are always very aware of the restrictions and frankly, being able to make such a small scope of film as interesting as it was is an incredible feat.

I found with Buried that I actually enjoyed it more once it was over than I actually did at the time. I occasionally got bored with it, and cranky at the complete and utter morons Paul deals with at a couple of key moments. It got to a point where I wondered why every human being was such a stupid jerk and what was achieved by making everyone so awful, apart from to make me feel even more depressed than I already was. Once I was removed from the cinematic experience, I could think about the movie and appreciate it; but in all honesty, at the time, I found it a bit tedious. The post-cinematic experience is much better.

Disregarding the fact I know nothing about what it’s really like to be buried, I had one small gripe with what he could hear at one point, and what he was unable to hear at a vital point at the end, which should have been obvious. I don’t want to say much more than that, but it’s a small bit of continuity in a film that otherwise felt very honest. I am also full of doubt that he couldn’t escape; after all, Buffy the Vampire Slayer dug herself out of a grave, and vampires themselves do it all the time. Surely it can’t be that hard.

In summary: Meets Expectations, which were: Ryan Reynolds in a box.

anh do, the happiest refugee

2010-10-07T10:18:00.002+11:00

The world is full of great people. Sometimes when I watch the news I forget that, and when I’ve had a bad day with customers at work I think that everyone is out to be a bully. And then sometimes you meet someone like Anh Do, and they beam at you, shake your hand with enthusiasm and it’s all you can do not to hug them just because they’re ace. And then sometimes they write books, and their general good cheer falls off the pages and into your lap, and that’s why The Happiest Refugee is a great book and everyone should own it.

You may recognise Anh Do, Australian comedian extraordinaire, either from his standup or from stints on shows like Thank God You’re Here. He’s always there with a smile and ready to make you laugh. It’s basically impossible to keep a straight face around this man. With the release of his autobiography, The Happiest Refugee, he will make you laugh—but I found it wasn’t the continually hysterical book I was expecting. Not because Anh isn’t funny—he is—but because his life hasn’t necessarily always been the most wonderful.

At age two and a half, Anh travelled from Vietnam as a refugee with much of his extended family in an overcrowded boat. They were attacked by pirates—twice—and barely survived the trip that left them in Malaysia. When they were eventually sent to Australia, life remained difficult as Anh’s parents struggled with limited resources in every way but one—family. The strength of The Happiest Refugee for me lay in the fact that Anh’s story is such a universal and inspirational one, where determination and love was how this boy who almost died in the sea became so completely awesome.

Anh has this wonderful casual writing style that kind of makes you feel like you’re having a chat with a pal rather than reading a book. Without trying to sound insulting, it’s a simple and straightforward read, but that is also part of what makes it so entertaining. It’s relaxed and friendly. You probably by now get the hint that it’s cruisy and I liked it. Moving on.

There’s a lot to be heartbroken about in here. When Anh’s aunt is almost taken, naked and horrified, by the pirates. When his uncle’s dead body is found by the water in Vietnam. When his parents, such a strong and loving influence, split apart as his father leaves, and his mother has to struggle to raise her family on her own. When he finally is able to contact his father again, years later, only to find he is seriously unwell.

But within all this is such hope and wonder, and Anh’s family so wonderful and supportive, that it’s the kind of book that makes you want to go out and have a thousand kids because they’ll all end up as great as Anh and his siblings. Right? Right. Even his father, not a great example all the time, has his own heroism: saving his wife’s brothers from a concentration camp by borrowing a communist officer’s uniform and boldly walking into the camp and declaring that he needed to take those two men with him. It’s a moving story, and knowing the horrors of the life he led gives some insight into how Anh’s father may have reached a point of anguish where he thought there was nothing to do but leave. The sacrifices that Anh’s parents make for their families is truly something to behold.

One thing I loved about this was just how familiar the existence of the family was once they hit Australian shores. There was embarrassment—Anh’s brother Khoa had been given lovely lacy girl’s clothes by St Vincent de Paul’s kindly nuns—and there was the everyday life they led. From watching MacGyver, to keeping budgies (we had an aviary in our backyard), to wearing knockoff runners to school (I had a kid crawl under the table and yell out to the class that I was wearing Traxx shoes from Target instead of the pump-up Nikes everyone else was), it was great to just read about the early life of what was really many Australian kids and be reminded of my own. As an adult, Anh was a fantastic entrepreneur, coming up with countless fantastic moneymaking ideas, not least the idea of studying law. And just as he was applying for numerous, well-paying, fabulously corporate jobs, he had a better idea: to become a comedian. And thus we have Anh today, making us laugh on television and writing great books. But I’m sure he would have been a great lawyer. I can tell because I have proof that he is a very smart man.

Takes one to know one, I guess.

In summary: Exceeds Expectations. I’m going to recommend the hell out of this for Christmas presents, because it’s a hard book not to like.

john ajvide lindqvist, harbour

2010-10-04T16:27:00.002+11:00

I like to be spooked. I’m really pretty cynical in reality—I’m an atheist, I’m not spiritual, and I don’t believe in ghosts. (The jury’s still out on aliens, but I don’t think they’re here, anyway.) But damn if I can’t leave all those feelings at the door when I’m watching a movie or reading a book, and scare myself silly waiting for monsters to jump out of my closet. I find demons and hauntings much more chilling than serial killers, maybe because I can properly disconnect from reality with them. I can happily squeal and turn the lights on halfway through movies and put books down and back slowly away from them. And so on. Which is why I like John Ajvide Lindqvist, who has so far written about vampires (Let the Right One In), zombies (Handling the Undead) and, now, with recent release Harbour, the chilling, supernatural power of the Swedish sea.

A young family—Anders, Cecilia and their daughter Maja—are on the Swedish island of Domarö for a winter holiday. They ski across the icebound snow to the lighthouse island of Gåvasten for a picnic. Thinking their daughter is safe with nothing but snow surrounding them, they let her out of their sight. And that is the last anyone sees of her.

Two years later, Anders returns to the island, bringing with him an alcohol addiction and, after the breakdown of his relationship, almost no hope. It is then that he realises some questions were never answered about Maja’s disappearance, and that other questions were never asked in the first place. And that perhaps the beautiful summer vacation island of Domarö is hiding an awful secret that threads through the community’s past and out into the sea itself.

Like just about everyone who saw it, I adored the Swedish film version of Let the Right One In, and it led me to read Lindqvist’s last novel, Handling the Undead. Harbour is a much better book. It follows the same desperation felt by an adult who loses a child that Handling had, where amongst other family stories a grandfather was desperate to hold onto the child who had just come back from the dead, but who was not in any way well (because he was, well, dead and underground for some time). But with Harbour, the isolation of the book’s setting was a great improvement. Instead of covering the lives of many and the dead people they are heartbroken to let go of, Harbour stays with Anders’ family and their inescapable history on Domarö.

Harbour is a haunting story, the kind that delivers genuine chills, immersion in the characters’ lives, and possibly a slight fear of the ocean. Seriously, don’t read this at the beach, unless you want to never go swimming again. (Team it with Jaws to really ruin your holiday.) The narrative dips into the past, a device that can sometimes make me angry that the plot is being deliberately forestalled, and ruin a novel’s flow but, in Harbour, it just pulls the reader deeper into the story and creates a full background for everything that happens.

And it is an exciting, unflinching, evocative story of how isolation can change the game plan. Like Stephen King on a good day, Lindqvist taps into the surreal but not to the point of the ridiculous; just enough to test your nerves. And win.

In summary: Above Expectations (because I didn’t really like Handling the Undead, even though I desperately wanted to.)

the girl who played with fire

2010-09-29T12:41:00.002+10:00

I am having trouble writing this title without changing the word “played” to “plaid”, even though I know full well that it’s a completely different word. So this is me apologising in advance for any typos.

For those not aware of the Steig Larsson juggernaut, this movie is the film adaptation of the second installment of the Millennium Trilogy, a series of books set in Sweden and concerning Lisbeth Salander (computer hacker, tough, persecuted, and all like tattooed n stuff) and Mikael Blomkvist (investigative journalist, determined, roughly handsome, defender of Lisbeth) who team up together off and on to solve crimes. Except they are much more than that, too. Lisbeth has many personal issues to sort out, and is an expert researcher with a lot of resources at her hands; Blomkvist is in a polyamorous relationship with his co-worker Erika (in the book, anyway, as this isn’t touched on in the films) and cares deeply for Salander. The crimes they solve are multi-layered, often far-reaching into Swedish politics, and involve men who hate women—the latter phrase being the original Swedish title of the first book, The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo.

The Girl who Played with Fire begins about a year after the last movie ended, with Lisbeth returning to Sweden after months of overseas travel. She is checking up on Nils Bjurmann, the guardian who abused her in the first film, but her interaction with him causes her to be accused of the murder of two aspiring journalists—who were working for Blomkvist’s magazine. Lisbeth goes into hiding and investigates why she has been set up, and Blomkvist, who doesn’t believe the allegations against her, does the same. He is unable to contact her, but she is watching him and he knows it. Separately and together, they discover that this crime goes much deeper than they expected, and will affect their closest friends and family.

This film has had mixed reviews; I even read one that gave it that nasty little dog symbol. (Especially strange, because dogs are cool, aren’t they?) I can’t understand that at all—I really enjoyed it. Because I’m a fan of the books, for me, it’s like when you want to reread a favourite book but don’t quite have the time, so you kind of skim through to the most important scenes and just read those. Watching these movies is like that. The film miss some seemingly important aspects of the book, but I do think they do a good job of condensing long books into two hours of film.

As with the first film, the strength lies in the casting and the honesty of the actors. Unlike in Hollywood, the actors don’t feel quite as plastic. Lisbeth Salander is supposed to be boyish and skinny, and Noomi Rapace is exactly that; she is hardly unattractive, but she is whippet-thin, bereft of curves, and leaves her underarms unshaven. Mikael Blomkvist is played with rugged allure by Michael Nyqvist; he is soft around the belly and his skin bears marks of acne, but he is one of the most appealing men in cinema because of it. Lena Endre is Blomkvist’s love interest, Erika Berger, and she also is as beautiful as the book says she is, while still rocking wrinkles and a curving belly. I wish more films were shot like this, with gorgeous actors that aren’t built by surgery and Botox but through talent.

Night scenes are hauntingly beautiful, shot as if in black and white with a hint of colour. While The Girl who Played with Fire misses the lovely snowbound feel of the first film, the city of Stockholm does sparkle in this one. Because I had the knowledge of the books behind me, I understood the movie well and enjoyed it very much, despite the subject matter—violence against women, political manipulation of the system to the detriment of Lisbeth—being tremendously unpleasant. It was well paced, interesting, exciting, and doesn’t hold back on the ugliness of violence and people. There is a wonderfully shot love scene between Lisbeth and her girlfriend Miriam Wu, as they make love in the dark and the elderly gentleman in the row behind me cleared his throat repeatedly. It didn’t feel gratuitous and I felt again embarrassed about American and Australian movies lagging behind in the world of film.

I do feel—and heard from Chris—that if you hadn’t read the books, it could be difficult to follow, to understand all the connections, and to get involved with some of the peripheral characters that are heavily introduced in the book but skipped over in the film. There are also some oddities in the movie: Blomkvist is unable to open an envelope by himself and demands a knife from a waitress at the cafe he is in; Millennium doesn’t seem to have any other articles on the go during the film, making the employees seem a bit lazy; there are some deaths that have very sappy signposting; people don’t call the police when they witness violence, instead taking retribution into their own hands.

Altogether it remained, for me, a touching film, filled with brutality. It shows how Blomkvist and Salander can remain friends after being lovers, and does well at recreating the main characters and their world. It’s unable to do the impossible task of getting everything right, but tries very hard and it shows.

In summary: Meets Expectations (which were high.)

easy a

2010-09-24T00:16:00.002+10:00

Gosh, being a teenager is hard, isn’t it? Like it’s not difficult enough to try and study hard enough to get the grades you need for the course you want to get into, and negotiate a few fun times with your strict parents, and work part time so you can go to a movie occasionally. Then there’s the added problem of your reputation. Because everyone kind of has one: you could be “funny”, or perhaps “quiet”, or “nerdy”, or “good for a lift to the station”. And a reputation is hard to shake, especially when it’s something much worse, like “slut”.

If you’ve ever been called a slut, you’ll know it’s not great fun. One of the times, I had some fellow student scream it at me while I was on the bus and I went home and wept. Back then I thought it was unjustified, and now the word just annoys me. Who cares if you want to have sex with lots of people? Why was it ever an issue, or anyone else’s business or problem? How do I use the terms in this review? Anyway, I can’t go back in time and give my sixteen-year-old self a pat on the shoulder and an explanation about reclaiming words and whatnot, so I’ll stop going on about it and get off my rant soapbox and onto my review soapbox. They’re located very close together and sometimes I get them mixed up.

Starring just about every It Person in the history of Right Now In Film/Television, Easy A follows Olive Penderghast (Zombieland’s Emma Stone) as she goes from being an invisible member of the school’s population to the resident “tart”. It all starts with an innocent enough lie, as she tells her potty-mouthed friend Rhiannon (Hellcats’ Aly Michalka) a lie about where she spent her weekend—at a party, with a boy—to get out of going camping with Rhi’s hippy-nudist family. Rhi accuses Olive of losing her virginity and hiding the fact, and after being harangued about it Olive eventually caves and tells Rhi she slept with this made-up boy just to shut her up. Alas, they are overheard by Marianne (Amanda Bynes), resident religious enthusiast and a nasty piece of work, who calls Olive a sinner and then tattles to the entire student body. With everyone whispering about her, Olive finally snaps and is sent to detention, where she makes a new friend in Brandon (Cougar Town’s Dan Byrd) and then is confronted with a strange request by him: will she pretend to sleep with him to allay (true) rumours about his sexuality?

At first horrified, Olive sees how miserable Brandon is and they stage an elaborate pretend sex session at a party. While Brandon is happy, Olive is shunned by everyone and labelled a “slut”. When some of Brandon’s friends find out what happened, they ask if they too can get in on the pretend action, and they’re willing to pay for it. So Olive sets up a scheme where the school’s misfits are able to boost their reputations, and Olive gets gift vouchers for her favourite store. Sounds, er, strange, but it’s almost a sound business idea until Olive starts to feel the wrath of the entire school as she is abandoned by her friends, and a campaign is begun by Marianne to have her removed from the school.

I have a lot of goodwill for this movie, because I like Emma Stone, the idea was interesting and I went with two of my newest pals so it had that kind of accompanying thrill that a date with someone lovely has. It was also pretty funny and all the actors are great. But I have come to the conclusion that, much like high school, Easy A is annoying.

For one, we’re supposed to start the movie believing this person when she tells us she is invisible at school.

Look at her. She is ridiculously attractive. Not only that, but she’s funny, and she’s smart. I’m not convinced that any school could be blind to these facts. And it’s not as if the school is populated by only the hottest people in Hollywood. The casting agent did a good job of getting a convincing ensemble of high school students, all shapes and sizes, and then made the two “average-looking” students (Olive and Rhi) Emma Stone and Alyson Michalka. The school’s cool kids have nothing on the level of hotness of these girls, and it’s ridiculous.

The worst aspect for me is that, apart from a very small scope of people consisting of Olive and her family, her English teacher Mr Griffith (Thomas Haden Church, who has probably done other things but will forever be known as “Ned from Ned & Stacey”), and affable hottie “Woodchuck” Todd (Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley) the characters in Easy A are just awful people. Seriously, what a cast of assholes. Rhiannon is a pain in the butt who turns on Olive and calls her a skank; the Christian group are a pack of bitchy hypocrites; guidance counsellor Mrs Griffith (Lisa Kudrow) is almost completely reprehensible. There is one awful scene where a male student asks Olive to pretend they slept together; when she tells him no, he tells her he could just spread the rumour anyway and everyone would believe him. It’s a terrible thing to say, and Olive tells him off; but then this guy goes all sadface and says he’s too hideous to get a date. So Olive relents. Why? The guy’s a bad man! Olive herself makes some other pretty stupid decisions, can be occasionally mean and comes across as a bit of a smartass, though she is still someone I could get behind. (Also, while I’m ranting, she pronounces the word “twat” like “twot”, leading to a scene I felt confused by because I had no idea why everyone was so offended by a word I’d never even heard.)

For a more biased interpretation, I was surprised to see a high school where, after a girl slept with one person, the entire student body was whispering about it. While I understand that a reputation is easy to get, false or not, at my high school no one really cared about the sex life of others, especially after just one time and/or person. I mean, there were enough mean girls at my school to make life occasionally miserable, but no one was into gossiping about people who’d had sex. I was honestly surprised with that aspect of the film and, while I guess it could be true in other schools, it wasn’t for mine, so it meant I couldn’t buy into the idea straight away. Even if someone at my school had been suspected of sleeping with half the boys/girls, my fellow students certainly wouldn’t be out the front picketing to get them kicked out. What kind of motivation do the writers think teenagers actually have?

Look, Easy A is not a bad movie. Olive’s family is a riot, and Woodchuck Todd is pretty cute. But with everyone else being so stupid or painful, I didn’t really like it. The ending made me cringe, with Olive suddenly bursting into a musical number (so she can sing as well? But is INVISIBLE? You can see this might have bothered me) and don’t bother staying until after the credits.

In summary: Below Expectations, but not by much.