Movies like Bachelorette, The Hangover and Bridesmaids make me feel like getting married is a complete lapse of judgement that will end with you in some kind of physical or emotional pain on what is touted as the best day of your life. I also am beginning to think that I have a very rare thing in my life: friends who are not assholes. Is it really that hard not to be an asshole? Bachelorette says: apparently it is very hard.
Becky (Rebel Wilson) tells her dear friend Regan (Kirsten Dunst) that she is engaged to her high school sweetheart, Dale (Hayes MacArthur). Despite this piece of apparent good news, Regan calls their mutual friends Katie (Isla Fisher) and Gena (Lizzy Kaplan, who also starred in a previous mean girl movie called Mean Girls) to immediately anguish over the fact her boyfriend hasn’t proposed to her (because in Hollywood, relationships aren’t real unless you’re married), and why does Becky deserve a decent husband anyway?
Then the movie fast forwards to the day before the wedding. Regan, as maid of honour, has declared herself in charge of the wedding and is cruel to the help. Katie assists by bringing a vast amount of cocaine. Gena is pouting because her ex Clyde (Adam Scott) will be there and she has Unfinished Angst about him. Together, the girls ruin Becky’s bachelorette party with an obnoxious stripper, get told by Becky to grow up, and proceed to Become Mature People by laughing about how they can fit two people in Becky’s wedding dress, which they then tear. Can they fix it in time to not ruin Becky’s wedding? Will they encounter handsome men? Will they all die at the end in a fiery explosion? WE CAN ONLY HOPE SO.
Bachelorette fails because the cast is so vehemently unlikeable. Regan does nothing but shout, and when she whines about not getting proposed to, you assume it’s because she’s a monster. Katie is painted as the ditz and really is so ridiculously stupid, which she exacerbates by being almost constantly high, that she is entirely unrelatable. Gena is the one I think the audience is supposed to bond with, and harbours a fairly grim secret with Clyde which adds some romantic tension in a sea of pricks (see: Dale’s friend Trevor, played with jerky abandon by James Franco) and needs to move on with her life and perhaps not be so horrible. But lord, you just don’t care about what happens to them. You wish for them to succeed because Becky seems like a nice person who suffered through high school and who clearly isn’t great at picking acquaintances, but otherwise, just...sigh. Many of the characters (Regan, Katie to an extent, most of the men) don’t get enough backstory to connect with the viewer, and some of the lessons—like, bulimia saves lives!—will make you shake your head.
There are some great lines, Adam Scott is totally a babe who does one of the best wedding speeches you’ll ever hear, it passes the Bechdel Test easily and I’m super pleased Rebel Wilson is getting famous. Also, she kills with the line: “People think I’m too fat for Dale.” Regan’s response is good, but Becky is right. Her friends are horrible. That is the only lesson to take away from this.
I give it three out of six bridesmaids. And even those three bridesmaids are wearing dresses that they will never wear again.
Have you heard of the sandwich way of criticism? It’s when you need to say something bad about someone who you’re trying to encourage, or who you like, or who will roll up their manuscript/screenplay/comic and beat you about the head with it if you are mean. (I am this person.) You sandwich the bad criticism between good criticism.
Like, for instance, Kath & Kimderella.
I enjoyed the first season of Kath & Kim (I bought it on VHS, in case you were curious about how long ago it started). Kath & Kimderella is possibly the worst movie to ever grace the big screen. But Woodley was very funny.
See? A nice gentle criticism sandwich.
Kath (Jane Turner) and Kim (Gina Riley) are both angsting about the missing sparkle (or “vajazzle”, as Kath would and does say) in their relationships when plot encouragement occurs for them as Kath wins a competition at her local chemist for a trip to the Spanish outpost of Pampilloma, located in the south of Italy. Upon their arrival they discover that the whole place has gone bankrupt and their hotel has shut down, but after a tour of the local castle the king (Rob Sitch with luscious hair) misinterprets their knockoff label clothes as the real thing, assumes they’re rich and attempts to seduce Kath for her apparent wealth. His son, hiding his features behind a mask, falls for Kim after seeing her with a t-shirt that says PRINCESS on it in sparkles. Hijinks ensue. Sigh.
The central conceit isn’t really a problem—give me enough jokes and any plot is fine. But crucially, Kath & Kimderella is not funny. It’s not funny when Kath, Kim and Sharon (Magda Szubanski, along for the ride) go outlet shopping and the girls run around sped up like a Benny Hill skit. The same sped-up schtick is also not funny when Kath uses what she thinks is the castle’s gym but is in fact their dungeon (LOL HAHA except that it is actually totally a gym). It’s not funny when Kath and King Javier go for a ride on their Vespa against some green screen so obvious that it could almost be a joke, but just looks bizarrely cheap against the rest of the movie’s actually decent backdrops. It’s not funny when the plot stagnates halfway through, and it’s not funny that all the twists are completely obvious from the moment the characters appear on the screen.
It’s also confusing when the poor men, left at home to watch telly in their Snuggies, decide to go fight the royals for their women. Kath’s husband Kel (Glenn Robbins) commits an act on an airplane that would surely get him banished from all flights forever, but then turns up mysteriously in Europe five minutes later to save the day. And, even more mysteriously, arrives before Kim’s own husband Brett (Peter Rowsthorn), who was on either the same flight or an earlier one. Uh, spoiler alert. Also, Gina Riley looks amazing and while I certainly can’t rock a midriff top, I’m a bit over the whole “ugh, look at her in an outfit that’s too small lulz” thing. Wear what you want and get over it.
Oh hey, It wasn’t entirely awful. Kim’s cutting little digs were occasionally funny, and the cinema popcorn was nice, and the bit where the king and Kath address a crowd and Frank Woodley signs for the hearing impaired made me shake with laughter. This hasn’t made me dislike Turner and Riley, whom I admire greatly for making me laugh numerous times over the years, but I really did not enjoy this. Though I did just see a review on IMDb by summerblink that stated “To everyone who didn't find it amusing - there's so much of Australian culture you do understand. If you call yourself an Aussie, you should be ashamed.” And I’m glad people like it, honestly, but here I am in shame, saying I give it 9 out of 86 minutes.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
I’ve professed my love for Mark Wahlberg here before. Part of it was a kind of sympathy for the physical condition he had that prevented him from smiling; another part was appreciation for how many pictures there are of him with his kit off; finally, there was a hint of nostalgia for the halcyon days of my youth when he was part of New Kids on the Block, and rapping away as Marky Mark. Anyway, you can imagine my surprise when, during my viewing of The Other Guys, Mark Wahlberg came up with this big toothy smile. I think I fainted for a little while, and my illusions were shattered.*
In New York City, the entire police department is in awe of two men: PK Highsmith (Samuel L Jackson) and Christopher Danson (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). These men are all the brawn and posturing that is required from high-profile detectives, from mid-chase wisecracks (“Did someone call 9-1-holy shit?”) to causing massive explosions and widespread property damage. And then there are the other guys: Allen Gamble (Will Ferrell) and Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg), two men stuck doing paper-pushing due respectively to a fear of risks and the accidental shooting of pro baseballer Derek Jeter. While everyone’s out doing the serious busts, Gamble and Hoitz have a scaffolding violation to deal with—which then turns into something much larger than they expected. Without the force on their side, and with Gamble only sporting a wooden gun after having his real one confiscated, will they be able to take control without continuing to be the mockery of the NYC police?
This is one of the most ridiculous movies I’ve ever seen. I don’t mean that in a bad way—I’m just totally surprised by how many times I turned to Chris, mid-hysterical laughter, and asked him, “What the hell?” Everything about it is patented Will Ferrell insane, though perhaps even more so. If you took the scene in Talladega Nights where Ricky Bobby and Cal professed their love for baby Jesus, and then the one where Ricky Bobby thought he was on fire, then stretched it over two hours—then you get The Other Guys, where weird shit happens pretty much every moment: there’s a violent car chase in a hybrid car with the sweet voices of the Mamas and the Papas as the soundtrack; Gamble and Hoitz’s nemesis police officers, Fosse and Martin, called into a bust while discussing careers at an elementary school invite one lucky schoolgirl along with them on a bust; police captain Gene Mauch (Michael Keaton) has a second job at Bed Bath and Beyond.
Allen Gamble is gentle, kind, gullible, and drives a Prius. (The horror, etc.) Terry Hoitz is on edge, constantly yelling and throwing things, swearing and doling out insults. The two of them are unsurprisingly an odd couple, though each of them helps the team out with unexpected knowledge—Gamble’s driving techniques (thanks to Grand Theft Auto), Hoitz’s expert and beautiful ballet dancing (which he learned to make fun of the “queer kid” up the street who was a dancer.) Will Ferrell movies often involve movie clichés that have a running commentary, and that theme continues in this movie. An explosion ends with them writhing on the ground in pain and shouting about how unrealistic it is that in movies heroes walk away from them without flinching; they are offered courtside tickets by the man they are chasing and are on the court enjoying the game before Gamble says, “Wait, this feels like a bribe!” It’s obvious humour, but hey, I’m not always in the mood for subtle. Sometimes it’s just funnier to see a helicopter taken down by golf balls, or a policeman misinterpret “good cop, bad cop” as “bad cop, bad cop” and whale on Steve Coogan (who annoys me.)
The plot is very thin, really just enough to hang a bunch of jokes on. Still, I did need a key end scene explained to me, and am still a bit baffled in regards to it. When there wasn’t immediate comedy, the movie slowed right down. The idea of the police captain telling them to back off an obviously dramatic case was as frustrating as it always is, and not made fun of. And while these movies are never really offering social commentary, the role of women in this and all other related films remains the same: be pretty, slightly insane, inexplicably attracted to a jerk, and as per the Bechdel test, don’t talk to each other about anything but the men. (If at all.) There’s a running joke where the average-looking Gamble is attractive to outstandingly beautiful women, from his wife Sheila (Eva Mendes in tight dresses) to Brooke Shields (and screenwriter Chris Henchy’s wife) at a basketball game, which is almost great, because looks aren’t everything. Except that every single woman is drop-dead gorgeous. But I guess there’s only so much you can hope for in an over-the-top comedy that opens with a cop driving his car through a double-decker bus.
Beyond that trek into actual thoughtfulness, I had excellent fun watching this movie. The entire cinema was screaming with laughter at some scenes, and I actually rocked in my chair and almost cried, which caused the girl next to me to look at me funny. (Though she answered her damn mobile phone during the movie so she’s lucky I didn’t dunk her iPhone into my frozen coke.)
In summary: Meets Expectations (which were: stupid and funny and a blast)
And finally, payoff: stick around until after the credits. There’s some interesting facts while they roll, and a joke at the end.
*Do not read on if you hate finding out depressing things about the real life of actors you like, but I found out with my ninja Wikipedia skills that he used to be a racist little punk kid who threw rocks at African American kids in a bus, broke a neighbour’s jaw and left a Vietnamese man blind in one eye. He says he now regrets what he did and he “certainly paid for [his] mistakes”, and while I’m a big fan of rehabilitation and so on I really can’t come to the party on the idea that becoming a rich movie star with a gorgeous family and only serving 45 days in prison for attempted murder can be counted as paying for mistakes. As the jerky police guys warned a classroom of children in The Other Guys: “And remember, always try your hardest not to be black or Hispanic.”
So I’ve read and loved all the Scott Pilgrim comics, and I’ve seen and loved Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, which means that when I heard this excellent, hilarious comic series was being made into a film by SotD’s excellent, hilarious director Edgar Wright, I just about tore apart my copy of Empire magazine with squeaking excitement. And since I heard about it, I’ve been waiting anxiously for August 12 to just goddamn hurry up already so I could watch it. (Though it turns out the film was showing at MIFF, knowledge of which eluded me despite my degree in Googlology.)
Scott Pilgrim is twenty-three years old, and a lazy, fairly useless but also amusing member of society who plays bass in a band called Sex Bob-omb. He is also dating a high-school girl named Knives Chau, and everyone is scandalised. (As drummer Kim Pine says, “If your life had a face, I’d punch you in it.”) Everything is going wonderfully for our Mr Pilgrim until one day he is sleeping and a girl with purple hair rollerskates through his dreams. And to Scott’s surprise, she’s real, and at a party he’s also attending—she’s Ramona Flowers, amazon.ca delivery girl and the woman he is now in love with. Problem is, to win the right to date Ramona, he has to battle her seven evil exes. Which is pretty dramatic. Chris only had four I had to defeat.
Wright held remarkably true to the feel of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comics; he kept its video-game roots, bubbly bursts into song and pop-culture asides. As is often true with comic adaptations, some panels were used as storyboards on many occasions, with scenes portrayed exactly to the pose. Everyone’s hair and clothes were the same as they were supposed to be, the sets matching, the jokes the same—kudos, seriously, to Wright, who obviously loved the source material and wanted to share it with the world. The fights are full of action, with people flying into the sky and through walls in delightfully over-the-top smackdowns.
The problem for me (because I’m whiny, and there’s always a problem) lies in the fact that I’ve read the comics. With Wright cracking the same jokes I’d read again just a few weeks before, nothing really surprised me. Whenever someone made a non-comic joke, I laughed and spilled my popcorn, but when they made one I’d heard, well, I thought, “It was funnier in the tone I heard in my head.” And it is funny. Seriously, I can’t tell you how much Scott Pilgrim hits all my favourite chortle buttons. Scott himself is hilarious, in that he is a bit of an asshole yet strangely appealing, mostly because he’s funny and a bit dense (he asks roommate Wallace Wells at one point, “What’s the website for amazon.ca?”). All the characters have cracking one-liners, or fantastically awkward comebacks like normal people do. It’s lit-up and doesn’t take itself seriously and stars my secret boyfriend, Chris Evans.
But it tries to fit six comic paperbacks’ worth of material into less than two hours, and it shows. While Wright did a good job of making it clear what was happening, and shifted some things around to get all the fights in and all the relationship dramas, the fact was you were never given enough time to particularly care about anyone. I’d read and enjoyed the comics but still didn’t care about Scott or Ramona in their Michael Cera/Mary Elizabeth Winstead personas. Cera’s the new awkward It-boy, but it doesn’t make him instantly perfect for every role that involves stumbling your lines. I just don’t think he was right as Scott Pilgrim. Winstead was serviceable as Ramona, but is undoubtedly beautiful in a role destined for someone who looks more—I don’t know—quirky? Funny People’s Aubrey Plaza, who plays the monstrously vitriolic Julie in this film, looked the part and was very close to being fine, but delivered her lines in such a dreary tone of voice that I hated her, not in the pleasurably spite-filled way I had in the comic but in the standard annoyed sense. Actually, apart from a couple of people—Alison Pill is great as Kim Pine, Mae Whitman is as confusing and nutso as evil ex Roxy Richter should be, and Chris Evans does Attractive Asshole just as enjoyably as he did in Not Another Teen Movie—most of the casting felt off, but I’m not sure if Wright’s direction was at fault for getting good actors to, well, be less good. Even the superb Jason Schwartzmann was kind of dulled down as ultimate ex, the evil Gideon Graves.
Everyone spoke so fast, trying to get all the best lines into the film, that it felt like Wright had just done what he could to cram as much into the movie as possible, while still keeping to a respectable running time. Fights dragged out longer than necessary in some cases or just plain sucked—Scott fighting the Katayanagi twins was a standout of pained effects—and ate into time better spent working on everyone’s relationships, like Scott’s and Kim’s.
I brought up with Chris whether it was kid-friendly, as it’s bloodless, fairly swear-free and the one rude scene starts in underpants and cumulates in not having sex, but as he says, it’s also a movie without repercussions. Being an ass like Scott just means you get to date gorgeous girls like Knives and Ramona, even if you cheat on them with each other. Killing someone ends with them exploding into a pile of coins. Stealing your friend’s boyfriend—I’m looking at you, Wallace Wells—ends in nothing but a sigh. Sure, it’s a hyped-up, gaming-related reality where if you’re an evil enough ex you can conjure up a team of flying hipster demon girls to help you, but still. I was let down and thus will bang my fists on the keyboard and proclaim, “If I’d been the one to direct this, well, it would have been a masterpiece of modern theatre.”
Still, Edgar Wright did a good job of filming Scott Pilgrim. If you haven’t read the comics, you’ll probably adore it. If you have, maybe you still will. To an extent, I didn’t, though I fell far short of actively disliking it. Stick enough pixels and cartoonish boxes in anything and I’ll have affection for it, but that’s because my home kind of looks like that. But I won’t be buying this on DVD—though I’ll happily reread the comics again, and you should too. Because I am just as awkwardly heroic as Scott Pilgrim is to you, right?
A comedy of epic proportions, this parody of teenage angst is the second movie (in what will probably be a series of four) in the Twilight series, a franchise that uses poorly rendered computer animation, amateur makeup and terrible acting to show how mean, selfish teenagers get the traumatic lives they deserve.
Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is an bitter, unsmiling teenager with a stalker boyfriend, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson, otherwise known as RPattz ’round the internets), who watches her sleep, tries to control her life, and is, incidentally, a vampire. Her life is pretty cruisy at the start of the movie, as she pals around with her characterless friends, rolls her eyes at her well-meaning and bushily moustached father Charlie, and watches Edward walk around in slow motion looking pale, pouty and syphillic.
Then Edward’s family make the mistake of inviting her over to celebrate her birthday and give her presents, which she never thanks them for and sulks about the whole time. She gets her riotous comeuppance when she cuts her finger opening her present and the vampire family go rabid and all want to eat her. The Cullen family robot, Jasper, flings himself at her—possibly a discourse on how robots will never pass for humans and we’re ridiculous for thinking so?—and Edward has to fight him off while Bella stands around and looks bored. After the stoush is over, Edward admits that he’s a horrible human being who manipulates Bella and that even though he is a creepy stalker, he is going to leave her to try and lead a normal life. So he and his entire family pack up and leave Bella, who, without a man in her life to tell her what to do, does what any normal teenage girl does after a breakup with someone who wears glitter body lotion. She falls out of humanity for three whole months.
When Charlie finally points out that she might be overreacting, and that burning an effigy of Edward and then snorting the ashes would be a much healthier response to the split, she decides haltingly to have another go at interacting with humans. Her laugh-a-minute self-absorption comes to a head when she goes out to see a movie with bubbly Jessica, ignores her completely, then, after taking a small risk and hallucinating that Edward is there warning her, abandons her friend on a dark city street to go and ride motorbikes with the men who were going to rape her in the previous movie, Twilight. It’s a hilarious, exaggerated look at the stupidity of teenagers, and leads to Bella’s new life plan of doing dangerous things so she can hallucinate her boyfriend back into her life. (She really should just get a cardboard cut-out of Edward like every other normal teenage girl.)
The rest of the movie is spent witnessing Bella get up to more and more dangerous hijinks, and spending some chemistry-free time being cranky and demanding around her old friend/pet dog, Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who helps her build a motorbike and also occasionally turns into a blurry and poorly animated werewolf. (The movie’s budget is rumoured to only be $4.20 after the cast was paid.) Will Bella kill herself doing these stupid things? Will she and Edward ever be together again to practise their Olympic-level Synchronised Brooding?
It’s a shamelessly comical film, with droll cliché-mocking moments like Bella descending a staircase in a pretty dress but looking depressed, and the buff Jacob tending to Bella’s extraordinarily minor head wound by taking off his t-shirt and dabbing her head gently with it so he can be shirtless and she can swoon. Making a lead heroine so fantastically unlikeable is no mean feat, but director Chris Weitz has done a great job of it. All the other actors do an equally good job of mocking themselves and the script.
Long drawn-out scene after long drawn-out scene illustrates the tediousness and narcissim inherent of the youth culture it is lampooning. Good for drinking games and laughing until you get a stitch, New Moon is comedy caper like no other. At least until the release of Eclipse next month. Hopefully I’ll have stopped giggling by then.
Recently, I’ve been hiring “classic” movies that I never saw in my youth for one reason or another. A few weeks ago, Poltergeist. (Actually pretty good; special effects alas did not stand test of time.) The day before I saw Hot Tub Time Machine, I hired Back to the Future. I’ve never seen any of the trilogy, but felt I had because the films are referenced all the time. And none more so than Hot Tub Time Machine, alarmingly making it two mid-eighties-based time-travel films starring Crispin Glover I had seen in the space of sixteen hours.
Hot Tub Time Machine has one of those titles that has the plus of being fairly self-explanatory along with the negative of sending a portion of the population into pained sighs as soon as the title is uttered. Another time travel movie? Another buddy movie? It is both of those, and so much less.
Three friends—Adam, Nick, and Lou—are reunited after an accident, appearing to be a suicide attempt, sends Lou to hospital. In an attempt to make him feel better, his old pals take him, along with Adam’s socially awkward nephew Jacob, back to the holiday destination of their youth: the ski resort of Kodiak Falls. It isn’t the same as it was in their 1986 heyday, however, and everything is rundown, leaving them desolate until they pile into their room’s hot tub, get completely trashed and, as you do, time travel back twenty-four years.
I almost feel like this movie should have been made four years ago. With 80s retro fashion tearing its way through the city streets, Alf repeats on channel 99 and Spandau Ballet touring two weeks ago, I don’t think that if I was in that situation I’d make the connection that I’d time travelled unless I brought up a conversation about the Melbourne Storm drama and everyone asked me who the hell I was talking about. Now, with everyone digging big hair and leggings, the hilarity of everyone’s outfits is actually pretty mild. Frankly, it looks more like a 2010 interpretation of the eighties than a convincing eighties set. The four guys don’t pick up on it for a while either, and when they do, they realise they have to replay everything the same as they did that time twenty-four years ago, to sustain their future lives, and that of Jacob, yet to be born and already flickering in and out of reality a la Michael J Fox’s siblings in Back to the Future. Adam has to break up again with the beautiful Jennie, despite just splitting with his modern-day girlfriend; Lou has to suffer an ass-kicking; Nick has to sleep with one of his faltering band’s groupies despite his undying love for modern-day wife Courtney. Appearing, conveniently, as their 1986 selves to everyone but each other (and us, unless they’re looking in the mirror), can they repeat all of these acts, knowing how crappy life ended up afterwards?
Unsurprisingly for anyone who has read the title, this film isn’t great. The time travel premise is handled poorly, and every scene that revolved around the hot tub and the concept behind travel made me want to cringe. Time travel is a difficult concept to buy at the best of times, but with Chevy Chase turning up as possibly some kind of time machine mechanic or possibly someone just there to spout nonsense and be representative of mid-eighties movies, it leaves a lot to be desired. I’m aware it’s the kind of ridiculous buddy movie where the brain should be left at the counter, but I still couldn’t buy it, especially when it begins with a scene in the hot tub where our heroes are joined by a strange cast of characters that are unexplained and rarely seen again. Ignoring that, it was otherwise one of those comedies that meandered along in that kind of relaxed, passable way that mainstream comedies have. It wasn’t terrible, but it sure wasn’t original; less a Back to the Future homage and more straight rip-off. There was a fair whack of gross-out humour, mostly from Rob Corddry as general failure Lou, though he also supplies some of the movie’s most hilarious scenes, if you can get past all his aggressively offensive ones. What he yells out during his unromantic sex scene is priceless. I guess, as he is the one yelling most often, there had to be some hits along with the misses.
As far as the movie’s heart goes, the friendship between them isn’t really discussed. Where did they meet? What is this Cincinnati stuff they talk about? Why did their friendship fall apart? Am I emotionally invested in any of them? The little background we get on them is, to be honest, not enough. If they had all died in a fiery explosion I probably wouldn’t have really cared, as long as it was funny. John Cusack is Adam, insurance salesman and a legitimate star of the eighties who, after the horror of 2012, is an okay dude, but mostly still coasting on previous acting goodwill. Rob Corddry is perfect as Lou, but still mostly an asshole. Craig Robinson, buddy-movie veteran from the likes of Knocked Up et al, is sappy Nick, whose final lesson regarding surnames struck a misogynistic chord. Clark Duke is Jacob, Adam’s nephew and pretty much playing the exact same character he was in Kick-Ass, and with the same hair. Also hailing from Kick-Ass’ cast is big-haired Jennie, played with a terrifying amount of bounce by Lyndsy Fonseca (Katie from the previous movie). Throwing out the timeline is April, Mean Girls’ Lizzy Kaplan, there to steal Adam’s heart but only participating in nonsense conversations where Adam comes across as a deluded and frantic moron. Perhaps that was the cool thing to be in the eighties; I forget.
There aren’t enough eighties/future jokes, and some of them feel forced. Jacob is in a frenzy trying to locate everyone at one point, and then we cut to him seconds later having a relaxed conversation with a girl about how to contact her. “Can I text you? What’s your email?” When she is confused, he says, “How will I find you?” and she replies, “Come find me!” to which he says, “But that just sounds...exhausting.” Funny, and true, but shoehorned in for the gag.
Am I taking this too seriously? It appears so. I’m someone who can abandon reality for a movie that is witty enough, but this wasn’t one of them. It’s not that bad, but it’s not excellent. I could say it would be funnier for those partying in 1986 (I was four at the time), but I’m not sure of that either, and I don’t know if many 80s teens will be seeing it anyway as we were in the very small proportion of the over-eighteens in the cinema. All I can say is: don’t see it too soon after a rewatch of Back to the Future, otherwise you’ll notice nothing but similarities, like how both Marty McFly and Adam are even wearing the same outfits—puffer vests—for the duration. Though Marty’s pants are tighter.
The Grenade, by Australian playwright Tony McNamara, has catapulted up the internationally-renowned chart of Fiona’s Favourite MTC plays to be equal number one with Grace. Grace made me weep. The Grenade made me have an embarrassing coughing fit because I was laughing so hard. So in the lesser-known but equally lauded chart of Fiona’s Favourite MTC Comedies, this is an absolute number one.
Political advisor Busby McTavish comes home to his beloved family one night and finds a live grenade on his lounge room floor. Who would do something like this? When you’re in politics, it could be anyone—or perhaps it’s an enemy of his teenage daughter Lola, because all teenagers have enemies. Or is it someone closer to home? Could something like this twist your trust in your family? Busby takes charge, turns his house into a fortress, and watches his family’s every move. And somehow, it’s hilarious.
After all these plays it still takes me a while to warm to seeing people physically in front of me acting and to let myself get involved in the world of theatre after being so used to cinema, where, because it’s onscreen with elaborate sets, you can abandon yourself to that “reality” much easier. But happily this didn’t take long, distracting me with jokes straight away—and the flawless set helped. A rotating stage held four different scenes, some malleable, all perfect, though most of the play was set in the McTavish’s plush lounge room and kitchen. The faultless lighting turned the rooms into night and days so realistic I was almost surprised to find it dark outside when I left. The sound seemed a bit low at the start (or I have been listening to my iPod with the sound up too loud again, a probable alternative), but then became pitch-perfect, with fitting dramatic musical interludes as the set revolved to the next scene. So, top-notch production, meaning that at the end when the actors gesture to the crew of the play I was clapping just as hard.
Garry McDonald surprised me by cutting quite a dashing figure, trim in his nice suits and still looking the same (from the upper level of the Playhouse, anyway) as he did twenty years ago. Busby’s wife, ex-nun Sally, is played with beauty and naive humour along with the fraught panic of a new mother by Belinda Bromilow; Neighbours starlet Eloise Mignon shines as the high-pitched Mensa-genius daughter, openly attempting rebellion. Wheat, the oddity love interest of Lola played by Gig Clarke, gives a persuasive and esoteric performance; Jolyon James channels Fabio as open-minded erotic novelist Randy Savage, commissioned along with romance novelist Sally to write a new genre of novel (“erotomance”, or “romagasm”), and there to upstage Busby in every possible way and send women into a frenzy with just a touch. Genevieve Picot is Busby’s ex-wife Kerry, a woman unafraid of admitting her faults (Busby shouts at her, “You shagged two of my co-workers!” and she says, “You said to mingle!” to which he replies, “I didn’t mean juices!”). Rounding out the cast is Mitchell Butel, as Whitman, McTavish’s energetic and amoral co-worker.
Busby is occasionally a bit of a prick, and has a job that celebrates such a character trait, but ultimately he is redeemed by the adoration he has for his family. Characters like Wheat, who arrives for his first meeting with Lola’s father wearing a balaclava, and Randy, whose heroic acts toe the line of the unlikely, are so bizarre and unrealistic that they veer right back into strangely human. They’re an idiosyncratic bunch, frankly, especially six-month-old Michael, Sally and Busby’s son, whose astonishing exploits have his family convinced that he is a demon.
Look, it’s not as perfect as I’m making it out to be. If there’s one thing I never find funny, it’s men whining about how women never have enough sex with them, a gag that is as painfully overdone in this play as it is in reality. The actually fairly horrific subplot about Busby’s current work situation is handled far too lightly. But on the whole, it was hilarious, and I would completely recommend it. The fact that it’s an Australian script doesn’t hurt either; you can get all choked up with patriotic pride in our abilities as a nation, too. Nowhere else could a joke about Julia Gillard’s tongue ring make any sense.
