Jo's Haunted Eyeball

Changes

2011-12-07T12:11:00.000Z

After several years it's finally happened. I'm closing this blog and moving to wordpress, and then hopefully my own .com domain. I haven't been giving this blog the attention it deserved, I kept waiting for my intentions to sort themselves out, and frankly I didn't feel ready to write anything much while I was living in Cambridge. Things are better now we've moved back to Southampton.

I am now moving to these two new blog addresses, and will post updates here now and then:

http://joannakneilson.wordpress.com/
- A site dedicated to some serious writing and a place to link to all my published work

http://hauntedeyeball.wordpress.com/
- A place where I'll still be reviewing books, TV, film and art, and anything else that comes my way.

If anyone's out there, thank you for reading this blog, and please click away to find out more on.

'The Little Friend' by Donna Tartt

2011-03-05T13:27:00.000Z

A quick review here, as I’ve just completed the book which is, certainly, the most useful book for passing time whilst sat on the loo. I swear that that is a compliment – some books just don’t cut it, but this weighty tome has been readable and entertaining. The atmosphere is pervasive, trickling with hot Southern State menace as 12 year old Harriet tries to uncover the truth behind the murder of her little brother several years ago. Her sister sleeps all day, her aunts barely listen to her, and her best and only real friend is a boy called Hely. She draws him into her plans and things soon turn lethal.

SPOILERS AHOY

Harriet is a self-involved, imaginative and believably stubborn twelve year old girl, teetering on the cusp of that world-altering change known as puberty. While she resists this and drifts ever deeper into her own fantasy life, she decides that a n’er do well, part of a clan of worse and even crazier ne’er do wells, was behind the murder of her little brother and sets out to get revenge. The book dips in and out of different characters heads – although thankfully not in the same section break. While this gave a brilliant overview of the small town mentality that Harriet is swamped by, and the unpleasant family life of the man she decided is guilty, it also distracts from being with Harriet all the way through. Her perspective is increasingly deluded and this is diluted by the bobbing between brains that happens here. Without the extra thoughts it’s likely that the book would be considerably shorter, with the bonus of an unreliable narrator in the style of Catcher in the Rye.

The inner worlds of the other characters are brilliantly drawn, however, and add a sympathy for everyone’s private hell and I still found it a deeply involving book. But it’s odd that it doesn’t actually go anywhere. I’d have appreciated a pulpier ending, just for a real sense that something is wrapped up. Maybe I just don’t get ‘literature’, because no sci-fi plot would be caught pulped hanging like this. Criminally (er…) we are left without any resolution for the tragic murder at the start, and that it was actually a maguffin all along, driving the plot but being completely pointless at the last hurdle. We never learn who did it – then again, this isn’t the Hardy Boys! There still some important murders along the way, and these are well drawn and lead to a hugely tense scene. Also, I have to wonder if the Ratcliffe family are indestructible, given what they go through, too. Perhaps all of this was just a dream belonging to her sister, the ever-sleepy Allison, or the dying thoughts of their adorably named cat, Weenie. It’s a shame because it’s a great ride getting there. Perhaps we’re supposed to learn that resolution isn’t part of real life. This is a good slice of Southern Gothic, with snakes, red-necks and the white-heat of a long dreary summer. If you expect anything to be properly tied up, please keep clear.

Despite lacking a full conclusion, there’s still a lot to like. The Little Friend was an enthralling and atmospheric read and I will soon be checking out Donna Tartt’s first book, as it tends to garner stronger reviews than this has.

Doing without live telly - and loving it - Introduction

2011-03-02T13:30:00.000Z

Having successfully moved to a new location, from Winchester to Cambridge, UK, our household (me, boyfriend, cat) made the decision to scrap any of the live TV channels and use Virgin Media Broadband only. This fixed our Sky+ addiction at once, and the theory was that the media we consumed would consist of things we CHOSE to view, rather than letting the burping digital tide wash over us, smothering our willpower with endless flashy adverts, music videos of girls dancing in their knickers, and lots of comedy we'd seen before ten years ago, or didn't really care about. Of course we could have switched Sky off at any time. Yep, works in theory. But there's no end to it, even though, after about two years, we'd caught up on all the repeats of things we'd missed (I was delighted to rediscover Knightmare, the childrens’ sword & sorcery gameshow from the 1980s and early ‘90s, being broadcast on Challenge!) and a lot more guilty pleasures of this ilk soon followed. (Yes, I used the word ‘ilk’, it’s fab). It was fun while it lasted, and very, very bad for the brain.

This isn’t going to be a smug rant about how we gave up watching telly altogether, because frankly we haven’t! But, as even Channel 4 discovered, there's only so long you can repeat something (i.e. Friends) without it becoming a standing joke. There were only so many times even I could watch Sex and the City episodes on Comedy Central without becoming seriously blasé – and yet unable to look away! On Sky, having access to newish movies was a great thing to have, but were they worth the money? They would appear only long after the hype and even the DVD had been released, although this helped to take the film on its merits.

So I'm going to take a look at the alternative entertainment options on offer instead, as without the steady feed of live TV, it soon became clear that the more discerning we were, the more we got out of taking personal responsibility and wilfully choosing what appeared in front of us, rather than becoming hypnotised by flicking channels on the Sky screen. There's something very fulfilling about the media we consume becoming finite, and everything we do watch holds greater value this way. (It might even improve my attention-whatsit.)

On another note, even before we did this, we knew we barely watched the BBC and paid separately for Sky+, and yet the TV Licence continues to maintain its grip on the United Kingdom to a ridiculous extent. Another juicy blog argument, yet again, which is getting more ridiculous as the months and years roll by. It’s easy to deflect into a rant about this, and I’d like to debate that another time as well.
For now, I want to examine the alternatives to live tv (and the BBC) already out there – and yes, one or two of these come from the BBC, but this, I hasten to add, is mainly because they already have a grip on the market and they are certainly not the first choice when we look for something to watch.

Lost in-decision. Choosing where to start.

2010-11-20T17:50:00.000Z

“Then indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting o'er lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quotes

This blog has usually been about one specific film or TV show at a time, one great thing that caught my attention for the precious few minutes between being awake and being fast asleep having anxiety dreams about zombies, losing a wallet and flying to the Fantastic Planet, usually all happening in the SAME dream and starring actors who'd be charging double rates if they knew where they ended up. But, what to start talking about? Oh, it starts with good intentions - a Lost here (season finalé sucked, let's try and move on) a Halloween (birthday!) marathon there - but I get so caught up by what I SHOULD be writing about that my thought process rebels, and then - nothing gets written. Zip. Nada. Bugger all. And this TRULY sucks. Most writers will probably agree that not writing or being creative for too long leads to the dreaded 'blockage', and it's every bit as ugly and corrosive as something that requires a shedload of Cillit Bang (or dain-unblocker of your choice) and leads to a misery of the inner skull that is just a big whiny heap of nothing. Expunge! Empty! Spew out some prose!!

Yes, well, easy. Easy peasy. It's in there, int he head, rattling around. But there's also Real Life, the potential sucker of the soul. And we LET it do that. We let it trickle into our precious hours, sealing up the arteries of thought so that they shrink, wither, shrivel up and drop like neglected fruit. The only wine you get from this sort of thinking is sour and smells a bit like damp tights that a cat's thrown up on. A DRUNK cat with the runs.

So, to wander slightly away from the 'choice' part of this post, this is one of the reasons writers get depressed. We blame Real Life but in act, it's because we have a fantasy of getting every bit of Real Life sewn up nad in the bag because that' when we can lean back in our computer chair/Starbucks stool, crack our knuckles (always fascinated and repelled by those who can do that) and just Get. Some. Effing. Writing. Done.

But that's bollocks, and you know why?

Writers need Real Life. We need it to mess with us, to toss us around and soak our brains in its juices. Otherwise the writing is like the first draft of a reality TV star's memoir - and like the memoir, the majority of it should be pulped as soon as possible. Real Life provides salt and stock and....onions. Yes, onions. Even though it makes you cry, without it you don't have a decent base for a soup - you've got bits floating in water. So we're back to the vomit metaphor again.

So, I state that we need Real Life, and it fucks with us massively, but that doesn't mean we can't make great soup out of it. We also need to be able to choose what to take from life to MAKE this soup. There are terrible soups out there - and what would you rather have? A delicious, soul-warming broth created over time, with love, attention and or some warmed-up dishwater made in two minutes, which quickly loses its flavour and in the worst possible case, poisons everyone you love?

NOT choosing to write is far more painful than just sitting down and doing it. My head is bloated, cramped, spurting out ideas, characters and worlds, at the worst possible moment. Letting your brain open up and make great stories from the funked-up mixture in your brain - ripped from RL, or how you'd prefer that life to be, is pretty much the only way to stay sane. It's about making decisions. Getting there in the end. Conquering the fear of letting go, because otherwise, you get a lot of backed-up sludge before you can use those pipes again.

So, I CHOOSE to write. I choose NOW, here, to make sure I write. And not just a blog. Not JUST a few words noting my thoughts about the latest piece of pop culture, although that's a good way to write without fear, to let rip with opinion. I choose to make myself do it all, starting now. I CHOOSE to write a book, do an interview, to have something to show for all the good and bad of Real Life as it is so rich, interesting, inescapable and quite often upsetting and jaw-wrenchingly tedious. We might not get out of it alive, but as a writer I want to leave a small, nicely bound manuscript to mark that I was even here. Or, you know, a few hundred MB of text that someone, someday, might want to read again.

There's a long list of things to write about. I'll get going.

“Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quotes
(And the quote website is a piece of internet genius. Thank you!)

The Inbetweeners Series 3 (UK)

2010-10-23T23:11:00.000Z

Rude, lewd, and too true

The boys sign off on their final series

It's the third and final series of Channel 4's massive hit comedy show, following the last sixth-form year of brief-case nerd Will, hapless and lovesick Simon, shameless liar Jay and the endearingly dopey Neil. Things haven't changed much, although everyone now knows poor Will as 'that guy who shit himself in an exam' which, to be fair, he did in the last series to spectacular effect.

As embarrassing events go, series three almost manages to top the exam-poo within the first episode. Simon's wardrobe malfunction during a fashion show, in speedos, whilst wearing a top hat, is eye-watering and remains a high point of this unpredictable, tightly wound series. They continue to take the piss out of each other, set each other up and act in completely irresponsible ways - except for Will, who tends to bring it upon himself. In fact, each character is a comic work of genius.

Will reaches new levels of humiliation at the Fashion Show,

but he gets off quite lightly, considering what happens to Simon...

Will's naive idealism frequently gets punctured by the realities of modern suburban life - and his less-than perfect mates. Whenever he tries to do the right thing, it comes back to bite him hard - wonder what everyone takes away from that? Jay continues to be rude, mouthy and full of bullshit and bad advice (really, REALLY bad advice), but we completely understand why because his father is a bullying monster, though there's still no excuse for that haircut. Simon sports what is labelled a 'Statue of Liberty' haircut, and has mastered the bug-eyed look terror familiar in frustrated teenage boys everywhere. But at least he gets a girlfried, for a while, even if his one true love, Carli, remains out of reach. Lanky Neil bumbles along, still unable to spot either Jay's obvious lies or to understand a single piece of Will's insightful sarcasm. He's also the most sexually successful of the four, oblivious to the STD he picks up along the way.

Even though they're about to leave school forever,

they still have to be wary of the terrifying Mr Gilbert.

By the show's end things aren't going much better for any of the boys, but then again, they do have their whole lives ahead of them.

Foul-mouthed, shallow, self-obsessed little bastards? If you believe the Inbetweeners, being a teenage boy is mostly about taking the piss out of your mates, trying to buy alcohol and, most important of all, getting laid by any means necessary. However, as with the older cast in Peepshow, this show also has a little more going on under the surface and ends on an almost-sweet comment on the state of male friendship and growing up, with plenty of inventive insults and jokes about shagging Will's Mum inbetween.

Our heroes: (L-R) Simon, Jay, Will and Neil

Oh, and there's a film due set when they're on holiday together - so we haven't left Rudge Park Comprehensive quite yet. They appear to be going to all the way to Crete. Simon will probably be leaving the Speedos at home this time.Until then, there are three series of comedy gold to look back on and enjoy!

Camping and setting fire to Will's possessions is guaranteed to cheer everyone up

Seriously FAB - Thunderbirds 2010 Dir. Chris Thompson

2010-09-19T19:53:00.000Z

It's finally happened. After almost 45 years, there is finally an epic new Thunderbirds film out there. Admitedly it's just over 14 minutes long, but this is a vastly more impressive effort than the 2004 kid's film by ex-Star Trek Number 2 Jonathan Frakes. This, my friends and fellow FAB fans, is the real deal...

Well, mostly.

Yes, it's a fan film, albeit one fully approved by Fanderson. The quality that Chris Thompson and his team have achieved hangs fully on the obvious care, love and enthusiasm that went into it. It's also given a big grain of authenticity by bringing in Shane Rimmer, who provided vocals for the original pilot-extrordinaire Scott Tracy, as the narrator at the start and as the voice of Jeff Tracy near the end. He gives an appropriately epic reading that sends chills up the spine, introducing the new challenges for mankind at the cusp of an Anderson-esque 21st Century. International Rescue, we need you now!

This is a timely reminder, then, of how Thunderbirds could be made huge again by one decent movie. Once you get past the haircuts, TB2010 is actually a very accurate little realisation of the spirit of the original show, and it's hard not to be caught up in the drama and well-executed tension which flows through every frame. While the ever-escalating danger is present, they completely understand how close-ups on faces, the odd eye-roll and a little humour complete the nail-biting tension. It's a terrific effort and one that is clearly crying out for a sequel, and a bigger budget.

While the CGI could be criticised, it's also extremely competent and vital to the story. It also gives a far more expansive view of the International Rescue's incredible, futuristic world. Frankly, setting the rescue in a space station seems very ambitious to begin with, and they pulled it off with a great deal of style and some rather impressive sets for the live action shots.

So, someone out there, give Chris Thompson a massive budget and let's see what Thunderbirds can really do!

District 9 (2009) Dir. Neill Blomkamp

2010-09-19T09:50:00.000Z

Movies at the speed of Sky

Clever marketing is just one of District 9's many strengths

WARNING MILD SPOILERS DO NOT CROSS LINE....

When this popped up on Sky the other week, I was reminded of just how impressive a movie it is, especially when you take its comparatively tiny budget into account! Using the now much-imitated 'hand-held camera' and 'found footage' techniques, at least at first, it has a similar theme to Alien Nation and V, but uses the idea of 'aliens among us' to create something fresh and fiercely new. Best of all, there are no giant smurfs. This is a much harder, heartfelt slab of sci-fi straight out of the 1980s, but with far superior special effects.

It begins assuming we already know the situation, which draws us in and keeps us curious about the unfolding events. Opening on a jumble of interview excerpts with specialists and members of a team, we gradually learn that someone called Wikus has caused a lot of trouble for the authorities in Johannesburg, where an alien spaceship arrived in the early 1980s. The leaderless aliens inside it have been refugees in South Africa ever since they were found, eventually condemned to live in a walled-off shanty town, the eponymous 'District 9'.

Wikus (Sharlto Copely) is an employee of Multinational United (MNU) who are charged with guarding District 9. Wikus appears on more found-footage from some time back, as he explains there is a plan to move the aliens to a new District, whether they want to go or not. He's a cheerful, somewhat naive fella, and clearly a loving husband to his boss's daughter. But what has he done to upset so many people?

What unfolds is a strong contender for someone's worst day ever. Jack Bauer never had to cope with the kind of thing poor, hapless Wikus goes through, and he handles it like every hapless 80s hero would - by getting some truly impressive weaponry and using it on the soldiers who put him in this position. It's the reaction of a man pushed to extremes! The inhumanity of the military and the businessmen is pure Aliens, and it's fantastic to see a film get how that ensures that the alien 'prawns' in District 9 are much more sympathetic.

The aliens look fantastic, and surprisingly easy to tell apart considering how insectoid they appear. They seamlessly merge with the run down shanty town scenery, and here you're amongst the dirt and the squalor, soaking up the heat and stink while the homeless aliens try to live and not get eaten my the distinctly more predatory local gangs. Obviously this situation refers heavily to the evils visited on people living in real shanty towns, making the aliens the underdogs manipulated by humans on all sides.When Wikus joins these ranks, he has to re-evaluate his position concerning the aliens and his own fight for survival. Will he ever get back to his wife?

Made with obvious love and care, this is a remarkable movie that channels the best of the Verhoeven-esque, muscular 80s sci fi movies with a hard edge but a big heart. It is possible to cry at the end, just a little, and that means it's worked brilliantly.

Fantastic aliens, big guns and a poignant finish.
Will the aliens beat us up in the sequel? Can't wait to find out!

Kick Ass (2009) Dir. Mathew Vaughn

2010-09-18T22:37:00.000Z

A battier Batman, a whacked-out Watchmen,

Mathew Vaughn's Kick-Ass is a sweary shed-load of fun!

WARNING: SPOILERS WIELDING FISTS OF RIGHTEOUS COMIC BOOK FURY

Considering that the recent crop of comic book hero flicks have been dark, moody grump-fests or frothy, hi-tech quip-a-thons, it's truly super to find a film that gets the blend of both extreme, insane comic book violence, and the need for characters you can actually enjoy. Kick Ass is a perfectly pitched piece of self-aware super violence, and while not for kids, it's a long way from the bleakest aspects of the Dark Knight, or the tequila-swigging high-life of our beloved Tony Stark.

In fact, it seems to owe a larger part of its inspiration to both 2002's Spiderman and its spot-on spoof, Superhero Movie (2008). The hero, Dave (Aaron Johnson) is steeped in superhero self-awareness, inspired to be a superhero because he can't figure out why no one else would do it. He sucks, but a costume can work some serious magic, and as the callow youth works his way up to full kick-assery, sort of, he comes up against some seriously bad-ass enemies - and their enemies are even worse!

Mathew Vaughn brings a ballsy fresh take on the overused superhero origin story, and as he apparently paid for the whole thing following countless studio rejections, it's even more impressive that this looks and behaves as awesomely as it does. Yes, there's swearing - but it's hardly out of context and it's played for humour throughout. However violent it gets, it's certainly not a disturbing film. It's in the league of 300, where the violence is almost balletic and the baddies tend to deserve it. Watching it is a hyper-real sugar rush, the very best sort. As long as you aren't the kind of person who actually believes a ten-year old girl can go around beating the crap out of fully grown Mob guys, but totally enjoys seeing that happening on screen, then you'll have a blast.

The music is brilliant, as you'd expect from Layer Cake's director! Nice use of Gnarls Barkley, with the song that SHOULD have been in Watchmen, and a lot of love for the spiky bass of the Prodigy, and 28 Days' Later's chilling 'In a Heartbeat', among many others. There is no bad in his soundtrack choices, which are very important for a film as soaked in pop-culture as this one. There are a LOT of pop-culture references, although I think the only ones that will date are the film's obsession with Myspace pages, but that's nitpicking.

The strangest thing about Kick Ass, which separates it from the bulk of Sin City wanabees, is that it maintains a sweet, believable centre. Honest. And, while it's not totally realistic that a girl would forgive a guy for pretending to be gay (which she just assumed, to be fair) because he's also a costumed vigilante - and kinda cute - then jump him in bedroom where he snuck in on her....well, she kinda digs him, so that's OK, too!

David/Kick Ass's friends are also hilarious. The best/worst mates in the world. Plus, I dearly want to hang out in their comic book store cum coffee shop too.

Highly recommended, the best way to spend your designated beer and pizza evening (or fine brie and port, whatever...), and it stays interesting enough to quell the urge to talk all over the top of it. High praise indeed. Open your mind to Kick Ass, and discover a heap of OTT comic book fun that knows exactly where it came from and then does one better.

Kick Ass kicks arse!

That's a good thing.

Scott Pilgrim vs the World (2010) Dir. Edgar Wright

2010-09-09T22:28:00.002Z

The fanboys strike back

Spaced in Canada?

Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) has a problem. He's a twenty-something slacker who plays in a not-quite-crap band and lives in Toronto, and he's surrounded by sarcastic friends and family who all appear just as confused as he is. He's also started dating a seventeen year old schoolgirl called Knives (Ellen Wong), and while she's besotted with him and his band, Sex Bob-omb, he's less than enthusiastic about, well, anything.

Then he gets a vision of a roller-skating girl with bright pink hair, and when he actually meets her for real, his life takes a turn for the stranger. For a start, there's a 'League' of evil-exes between him and her, including former Superman Brandon Routh, and former Human Torch, Chris Evans. Only one thing left to do. Fight!

Apart from the fact that the girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers (former Miss Mclaine Mary Elizabeth Winstead) at first only seem to date him out of pity, there's quite a lot to like about their fledgling relationship. I still preferred to hang out with his friends, to be honest, but I think that was the point. The others get to be mean to our poor Scott, and he gets to be appropriately baffled whilst performing a role that feels written for a twelve-years-younger Simon Pegg. This is appropriate given the film's pedigree, spawned from the over-caffeinated mind of one Edgar Wright, who brought us the fabulous Spaced on UK's Channel 4, the rom-zom-com Shaun of the Dead (2004), and that Hot Fuzz thing from 2007.

While those films featured most of the cast of Spaced and a few very familiar British TV faces, Scott Pilgrim contains a forthright blend of huge Hollywood actors, mildly familiar faces and complete unknowns. Many of these people are also Canadians, but don't let that scare you. The cameos from the big names was occasionally distracting, but I could see the point of the evil exes being larger than life when pitched against tiny little indie-boy Michael Cera.

He half-heartedly battles his way through each evil ex, gradually getting better ts his trial, while his friends continue to make sarcastic quips. Bryan O'Mally's comic provides the basis for these mash-ups, and the film really is nothing like I imagined it would be. I'd thought I'd avoided a lot of the hype, except for the film's panel appearence at the San Diego Comic Con! After seeing most of the stars talk about Scott Pilgrim, I wanted to love this. There's plenty about it I should love. But it wasn't quite what I was expecting. The hype led me to hope for a ton of non-stop anime-speed, suger-rush fuelled action and adrenaline fuelled fighting. You know, like Crank.

I have high standards!

Scott Pilgrim was, in fact, a great deal slower and weirder with its dreamy, romantic pace offset by a burning bass vibe as Scott Pilgrim's heart is forced to beat harder. Events unfold in an off-kilter sort of way, making this more of a slow burner that occasionally blasts you with surreal, deep rock fuelled delights that rock the fabric of Scott's world. So that much is true. Much of it is very, very funny as well. But I wanted to like it far more - and I reckon that loving it will take a lot more watches on DVD/Blu Ray to truly appreciate just how cute, witty and far out Scott Pilgrim is actually meant to be.

I know there's a good movie in there and I intend to extract it on its eventual release. Until then, you can always watched Spaced again and see how it all began.

Evil exes are almost as dangerous as too-high expectations. Let's try again.

Four down, two to go - Lost marathon continues to Season 4!

2010-09-01T23:29:00.002Z

It continues to get better.

I am also truly amazed that so many people stuck with it.

SPOILERS FOR LOST, SEASONS 2-4
WRECK LOST REVELATIONS AT YOUR OWN RISK

After three more seasons, with one fortunately (for my patience) truncated by the 2008 writer's strike, I'm still consistently impressed by how well the sneaky bastards have pulled this off. I mean, it really shouldn't work. In each episode, a tiny piece of the overall puzzle gets unpacked, and another tiny bit gets put away, and we're still no nearer knowing the answer to the BIG questions, mainly, what the hell is the island and what the heck is the smoke monster?

In these seasons we've gradually learned some important character histories. Things like, Kate Austin, the fugitive, blew up her step father because he was beating her mom, only for her mom to turn her in. Like, Locke, the craggy faced walking miracle, who lost use of his legs because of a scam from his evil father. Perhaps I was most amazed, though that they solved the 'why Scottish Desmond calls everyone he meets ''brother"?' question. Apparently, he used to be a monk. Er, OK, that'll do. Sadly, they haven't yet explained why if you're a blonde woman hanging out on the island, your days are probably numbered.

So a lot of questions have been answered. Not enough though. They got around answering any of the big ones in the 4th season thanks to judicious use of flash-forwards instead of flashbacks. Very sneaky. We know they get off the island, or at least some of them do. And that they have to go back! We eventually learnwhy, and that at least part of it is because Jack decided to grow a seriously scary beard.

Incredibly, Alan Dale - AKA Jim from Neighbours for all you UK readers - is here as a major villain. Or IS he? Mwahaha, etc. Mr Dale has carved out a comfortable niche on popular American TV shows, playing dodgy authority-driven men in positions of power. Here is no exception, and he's not that bad at it, either!

There are too many characters to dwell on in this rapid a review. All I can say is, I love the show to pieces, it shows up the flat imagination of a great amount of films (perhaps Christopher Nolan should have taken a shot directing an episode?) and manages to keep the story compulsive and, thrillingly, very watchable. Still can't bear to be spoiled for this. And I would never have lasted if this was consumed one tedious week at a time!

Four down, two to go. Does J J Abrams have access to the meaning of life? After all these hours on the island, I bloody hope so....!

The Final Destination (2009) Dir David R Ellis

2010-08-29T17:38:00.002Z

Movies at the Speed of Sky.

Final film in the the Final Destination franchise? Naaaah....

CONTAINS SPOILERS - IN 3D!!!

I'll happily watch any glossy horror as long as there's no sign of either Malcolm MacDowell or UWE Boll. Thankfully those two haven't yet combined to perform an unpeakably powerful bad film, the suckage of which would probably end a small corner of the universe somewhere near Woking. This is the fourth film in the Final Destination franchise, and they're really making use of the new toy that all blockbusters are using at the moment.

Yep, this is IN 3D! Although, we didn't watch it in 3D, as it was showing on Sky, and so we started shouting out 'in 3D!' every time something came towards the camera for3D! This was funny exactly six times. After that, it got kinda dull. It's still perfect for watching with several people on a slow Saturday afternoon, due to the rather macabre joy of tryng to guess who'll die next and in exactly what way. It surprised us a couple of times, but I found the force of Death worked best when it chased the various obnoxious teens, in less obvious places. Basically, characters being killed inventively in a swimming pool (owchie, btw) or in a beatuy salon (loved the grumpy after hours employees!) make the scenarios more tense than setting it in a garage or anywhere industrial, or a gun shop. Unexpectedness is the key to making this doomed character scenario work. Full marks for use of the car wash!

So, everyone knows the story by now, surely? A group of teenagers are hanging out in a group at somewhere like a plane, a traffic jam, a Jonas Brother's concert (not so far, but my fingers are crossed) until one of them (the main character) gets a vivid premonition of the AWFUL EVENT which will painfully, and gleefully, kill them all in glorious, gory detail, with the main character, and their boy/girl fried, dying last. After this vision the panicked protagonist will make a scene that persuades his friends and several of the more attractive cast memebers, usually anyone who got a speaking role, to join them. They evacuate the potentially lethal situation and everyone calls the lead person an asshole right up until the place they vacated EXPLODES! Lucky, right? But they won't stay that way for very long. That's when the fun starts for the audience.

It's never made clear just who or what sends these visions to the main character, but something we'll just call 'Death' is clearly hacked off about their escape. This franchise is pure genius, as they've managed to get around the 'having a serial killer' aspects of the story and just get to be more and more inventive with the increasingly unlikely killings, which seem caused by Death, Fate, God or the Devil, trying to make sure the survivors start dying in the order originally intended. Great fun for us, at least, so sit back and watch the decapitations, stabbings and immolations commence - in 3D!

This fourth instalment wrings every possible in 3D moment out of its over-stretched plot. First, though, in a bizarre intro it gleeful in shows us the more memorable deaths from previous movies using X-Ray vision, which gives us a perfect look at the luckless characters being horribly maimed and slaughtered as their bones snap and eyes are gouged out. Weirdly it reminded me of a Bond intro, albeit via an old Chemical Brothers video. It's probably meant to wet our appetite for the carange to come, and it doesn't waste much time. In The Final Destination, the survivors have avoided disaster at what was surely one of the most poorly maintained Nascar stadiums in North America. It's a shame each character is about two inches deep, and that's being generous. While I don't expect to care all that much about victims in these horror films - but it never hurts if you actually do - I'm at a loss as to why there are two enormously racist characters in the film, who're there purely to die, thankfully, but even so...two?

Overall, the Final Destination franchise remains less depressing than the Saw movies, which are just 'grinding torture, over-involved Lost-bothering plot, screaming in a room lit entirely by green and yelow, and then repeat until nauseous'. The earlier Final Destination films are a little better at giving its victims some shot at escaping their fate, and it's getting a little old that there's always a lot of persuading involved. The main protagonist keep going 'look, we're definitely gonna die' and their friends keep going 'you're crazy, you're crayzeeeee' before being wiped out by a bus. In fact, the first film's bus death gets a nice homage, but just made me want to rewatch the original again.

It will pass the time, then, but don't expect anything too much and you'll be pleasantly diverted for just over an hour. Maybe it's better in 3D! Somehow I don't think we've seen the last of the invisible hand of fate killing people inventively, which is OK by me -but if you aren't watching this in 3D!, this is best viewed as a drinking game, so that every time there's an obvious 'in 3D' moment, you can make the movie a little better with '5% proof-o-Vision' vision instead. I'd keep the alcohol content low. Trust me.

You're going to get very, VERY drunk....

A nightmare come true - hooray! Darabont's Walking Dead arrives at Halloween

2010-08-27T21:02:00.001Z

It's nearly here! And we finally have an official trailer!

Wow.

I first picked up Robert Kirkman's ongoing survivial horror back in 2003, and it spoke to me and probably every horror and zombie fan out there. Here was someone who got why we liked the zombie apocalypse, and wanted to explore it's survival horror allure right along with us.

The trailer brings up every memorable image I remembered from the first volume of the comic. Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln, AKA Egg from 'This Life' and hapless teacher in Teachers!) is a sherrif, injured and sent into a coma during a shootout. In true John Wyndham (Triffids) style, the poor guy wakes up to find the world has literally gone to hell, and the dead are walking the earth. The good news is that at least they do it slowly. Any similarities to 28 Days Later are merely in the John Wyndham wake up scenes. For a start, these traditional, slow moving zombies mean you can dodge for a while until there are too many, and then they may well eat you - as delightfully shown in the final scenes of this awesome, promising trailer.

Rick heads into the scary new world to find his wife, Lori (Prison Break's Sarah Wayne Callies) but trust me, the pockets of surviving humans can be almost as deadly as the walking, mindless monsters.

This has so much going for it, and already it does what the best comic book and short story adaptations seem able to do (Midnight Meat Train and 300, for instance). It builds up on what you recognise, it gets the point at the core of the story, but at it adds to and improves (possibly) on its source to become something you haven't quite seen or read before.

This may well be me exploding with premature joy and the show itself could be just godawful. However, director Frank Darabont can excel at telling this sort of story, as one of the only directors able to 'get' how make a decent Stephen King movie, his adapation of the Mist was outstanding, as was Shawkshank Redemption. He doesn't shy away from showing humanity at its worst, but also at its best, and he'll need both to make a show about the last vestiges of humanity fighting to survive into a compelling, terrifying journey we'll want to stick with until...whenever the comic finishes. So, forever, basically.

A particularly pleasing thing about the Walking Dead in the involvement of the steely Gale Ann Hurd, who won my loyalty forever for producing not only Aliens and the Terminator - proving she can stand up to James Cameron when required - but also the sublime Tremors! I have a lot of faith in her too. Also it was filmed in Atlanta, on location, so it's authentic and came with a built in tax advantage, apparently.

It's thrilling to see this fantastic comic series getting recognised by the small screen at last, and let's hope Preacher finally gets the showcase it deserves. AMC - who also gave us the fantastic and equally gritty Breaking Bad - may well deliver the most accurate version of a (yeah, ok, it's totally fictional and impossible) zombie outbreak we've ever seen.

It's a drive into hell, and it's coming to America on Halloween, and reaches the FX channel, in the UK, a little after that. Guess where I'll be? Wishing my life away for the blu-ray box set release, hopefully!

Top Ten Birdhouse and memories of Clarks shoes....short one.

2010-08-22T21:47:00.001Z

This is a minuscule piece to round off the weekend, but I love the song Birdhouse in Your Soul by They Might Be Giants, and I think it's odd that this is just one of many TV ads to send a song swinging its way back into the iTunes top 100 singles.

Things have changed a lot since 'magic shoes', which I have particular fond memories of as I wore these as a bridesmaid to a wedding! I get vibes of Ridley Scott's Legend from this ad now.

But, let's hear the original Birdhouse and cheer for the fabulous 'They Might Be Giants'!

Normal posts, with words, will be resumed soon - had a lot of house hunting to do today.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) Dir. Michael-sodding-Bay.

2010-08-21T21:59:00.001Z

Movies at the speed of Sky.
Story so far....

Too stupid to watch to the end....?

I've sat through my share of shitty movies. There are plenty of completely ridiculous summer blockbusters that shouldn't really be worth sticking through to the finalé for, but you hold out to the end you might get a sense of a story completed, and to get an eyefall of the big dragon/explosion/epiphany. This isn't a bad thing, we need a little shiny in our lives. Besides, blockbusters are the barometer of the nation's mood, etc...blah blah blah....

In which case, we're screwed.

This is not a fair review, as I haven't made it to the very end of 'Transformers: Revenge-of-the-long-turd-of-a-title'. I can only review what I've seen up the point where, er...what did happen exactly? I think that the nice robots, the 'Autobots' have been hunting down the evil 'Decepticons', in order to sell more toys and beautiful muscle cars. There are also some vaguely racist 'Autobot' characters who appear first to provide the comic relief, solely by having black people voices and saying 'this is whack' a lot. Worrying.

There's also Megan Fox in a tiny pair of shorts and a seriously repressed Shia Le-whatsit. Both reprise their roles as the boy and girlfriend who thwarted the last film's evilest-bot of them all, Megatron (voiced by Frank Welker, notable as the voice of Slimer from The Real Ghostbusters!) in the last film. The last film was OK, actually. It was dumb, but not excruciatingly so. Not as noticeably as this.

What's wrong with it? Well, so far, I'm about 45 minutes in and am horrified to see there's still about 90 minutes left. I've seen a lot of big CGI pixels bashing each other around whilst not really having a clue who is who, or why. Apparently, the pretty yellow Bumblebee-bot is a bit like an overprotective pet dog that wants to help you get laid. Apparently, colleges are entirely filled with geeks who are super-hackers, and supermodels who want to shag all the said geeks. Except if one of the supermodels is a Terminator 2 ripoff. Which makes no sense given that the robots are supposed to 'transform' into vehicles, not bazooka-Barbies with tongue-chain weapons. Not kidding. There's a lot more blowing up. It's very, VERY hard to give the slightest crap, and I've made it through Bad Boys 2 and Con Air. As I said, I'm not immune totally immune to glossy blockbuster charm - Iron Man 2, anyone? There is no excuse for the state of Transformers, though. It's just a big, greasy mess.

Is it wrong not to watch to the end before reviewing? It's only a film - one that feels ugly underneath, with nothing to offer except vacant girls and big muscley robots. I've seen that before and I think I've seen enough. I think it's actually worse than Van Helsing, which despite being a poor video-game wannabe won a couple points for a frequently shirtless Hugh Jackman (I'm only human), and the sarcastic gadget-producing monk he hung out with. I'm pretty sure that it's worth skipping the final 90 minutes (how are there still 90 mins? HOW?) of Transformers: Revenge of the Moron. Perhaps, if I ever get around to watching the end, I'll be masively surprised and charmed and by it all and feel very, very silly that I ever doubted Michael Bay's awesome directing skillz.

Or...perhaps not.

I might even watch it all, one day, if I'm, like, really ill and bedridden, and all my other films have been destroyed in a house fire, and the telly is stuck on this, and my remote-control finger is broken. Until then, I'm off to be sarcastic about something else, but for now I think I've had a lucky escape.

Finally, the best summary of reasons not to bother is this abridged script, a small work of genius.

Michael Bay makes his biggest mess yet, mistaking vague for hot, and robots for personalities.

Observe and Report (2009) Dir. Jody Hill

2010-08-21T16:26:00.000Z

Ronnie Bernhardt (Seth Rogen) Hapless git of the highest order.

As an actor, Seth Rogen is hard to categorise. I can see why he's considered funny, and even is in some cases, but in many films he really comes across as an uber-defensive, entitled jerk. Then again, maybe that's the point. But too often, what should be laugh out loud funny gets played as mean spirited and doesn't give much reason to even snigger.

For example, here he plays Ronnie Barnhardt, a small time mall cop (there are obvious similarities to that other Mall Cop movie from 2009) who wants more out of life, despite being constantly frustrated by his bi-polar, passive-aggressive mental state. He comes across as misunderstood, but also a bit of a hapless git. His biggest challenge becomes trying to stop a repellant streaker from freaking out the mall customers and he bitterly resents what he sees as interference from the police in trying to catch the guy, and does all he can to mess up the investigation for Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta). He actually wants to be a cop, but he's clearly better off keeping away from real guns. While this part of his life fails to lift off, he gradually makes headway in dating the self-centred makeup counter girl, Brandi (Anna Faris) although it's clear he should be trusting the only nice girl in the whole mall, who works on a coffee counter and gets bullied by her evil boss (a miniscule role for Patton Oswalt). He goes some way to succeeding, but it's almost imposible to root for him.

He doesn't exactly go from zero to hero, either - he gradually evolves from someone you could almost get behind to someone you could cheerfully cross several streets to avoid. Things just seem to happen to him and he takes control in a worrying way that mainly involves beating the crap out of, and in the streaker's case, shooting, anyone who has at one time pissed him off. This fits with Seth Rogen's other roles, which really rely on everyone else being the bad guy who should be made to pay for making him feel a little bit bad about himself. In Observe and Protect there's no Kevin Smith writing to give him a sympathetic character edge, and the black comedy here delivers a bumpy, uncomfortable ride. It tries to be shocking without any real heart, for example the affectionate moments between him and his alcoholic mom are nice, but it's got a cold attitude at its centre and very little to love. I don't think you're meant to get increasingly depressed while you watch a comedy, but that's what happened here. Perhaps it would have worked as a worthy drama instead?!

Anyway, I'll never get those two hours back - and it might be responsible for me watching the other mall cop movie at some point. Or, perhaps, I'll keep away from both of those and go watch Mallrats again!

Don't shop here, run a mile....

Gamer (2009) Dir's Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor

2010-08-19T23:28:00.001Z

Use evil mind control on a sweaty Gerard Butler?

Oh, if you insist...

Some times you just can't trust reviewers.

Sure, this one you can - this review is awesome, naturally - but most reviewers just don't get it.

Take Gamer, for example, the result of giving the guys who made Crank and Crank 2 far too much money, and a camera. However, this doesn't mean they make crappy films, and UWE Boll should really take note. What these guys really excell at are fast-paced, speed-freakingly fun pieces of fierce film with a high-concept hook to reel you in. However bloody, silly and violent it appears on screen, it's always obvious how firmly their tongues have been wedged in their cheeks.

It's this cheekiness that sets Gamer apart from the kind of dross it gets landed next to in the big Blockbuster bargain bin. Yes, the film's big, loud and on the surface, very annoying. It's doubtful it will trouble the snot-nosed voters at the Oscars any time soon. But that's because Gamer's having a lot more fun down the pub with all its mates.

So, what's the story? It's simple.

In a near-future society, nano-tech mind control has been created and relentlessly exploited by the entertainment industry. Two 'games' dominate the scene. First there's 'Society', a Second Life sendup with real people being made to interact with each other in any sick and twisted way the blobby gamers can come up with. The other, messed up game is 'Slayers', basically every First Person Shooter video game in the world where the player runs around with a gun, shooting total strangers. Only it's blood-and-flesh reality where the game characters are live convicts, getting forced to blast each other apart by their remote players. The games have become a worldwide obsession, and the most famous survivour of Slayers is the touch-as-nails Kable (Gerard Butler, perhaps filling in for Jason Statham...). He's a convict who is forced to fight for his life every night, and his controller is a teenage boy who owns a very cool 3D computer, controlled by body motion. Naturally, Kable was wrongly convicted (shades of Fortress here) and there's a deeper conspiracy at work that links him to the evil, morally bankrupt Ken Castle (Michael C Hall) who owns both games and most of the world along with it. Only a small protest group known as 'Humanz' are trying to stop the tide of commercialised mind control, and the odds are stacked against them. Of course, Ken Castle has also kidnapped Kable's wife and daughter. So he's evil, ok? Let the battle commence!

While the story isn't remotely new, (it's Fortress, ok? Rebels and everything) the execution of it certainly is. Nothing looks quite like the films these guys make - it's kinetic and wakes you up faster than a bucket of mocha frappaccinos. The sugar rush never lets up. You might think this is a dumb, lowbrow shoot-em-up and at no point does it really try to be anything deeper. On the other hand, it's insightful, dumb fun with a little reminder about being human hidden amongst the gratuitous blood, gore and general sweariness. 'Getting it' depends entirely on how familiar you are with the virtual world they're very clearly sending up and the style in which they do it.Somewhere in here is a little question about how far you would go to play with other people. How healthy is our virtual world? etc. It illustrates this non-too subtley when a man and woman hook up in 'Society', whilst being controlled by two sterotypical fat, repulsive male gamers. It's a depressing look at the dark back-end of the online role play fantasies.

It's actually very similar to Surrogates, which I found fairly bland despite a similar human vs machine high concept. Gamers both effectively gets and shows the attraction of the fast-paced, ridiculous fantasies of online life. There are a few problems with the 'gamer' playing setup, mind you, such as how many death row convicts ready for slaughter are out there, exactly? Gaming has also become a bit of a spectator sport, as surely not everyone can get a go? As a result, it's more like pro-wrestling but, you know, real. Everyone bays for blood in time honored Gladiator tradition. That's the point, and it cheerily lampoons the techno obessions of our time. It's a modern B-movie, basically, and I note that academics love to pore over those like historical social documents summing up the times that the likes of 'Thing From Another World' were made in. Well, Gamer will reach this category in, by modern timing, about four years.

If you give Gamer a chance, it will reward you with unapologetically over the top car chases, a LOT of people being blown up, ladies being very, very naughty and Gerard Butler proving you don't have to be Jason Statham to kick people in the head. If you've spent any time online at all, you'll probably enjoy this. Just, don't take it to seriously. It's a teeny, tiny little bit smarter than it looks.

Beer. Pizza. Superviolence. Sorted.

The Proposal (2009) Dir. Anne Fletcher

2010-08-16T19:59:00.002Z

I propose staying the hell away from this piece of crap.

Ryan Reynolds should stick to fighting Wolverine & Blade

....Sandra Bullock's way meaner than those two

There's not much to say about this humdrum rom-com. It's a flaccid, joyless exercise in forced laughs with a plot that relies on two better-than-this actors trying like mad to dig any comedy at all from a scuzzy mish-mash of the 'Devil Wears Prada', 'Green Card' and, oh, gawd, 'Meet the Parents'.

The short version is: He's a put-upon PA working for tough, no-nonsense hard-ass bitch played by Sandra Bullock (doing her darndest to out-Meryl Ms Streep in 'Prada'). She's a Canadian working in New York publishing, and suddenly requires an even more personal service from Reynolds due to being dumb enough to go abroad whilst waiting for an American Visa. She announces that she and her PA are engaged, and blackmails him into agreeing by threatening to bulldoze his own dreams of being a book editor. So, he agrees and to prove to the non-entity immigration police guy that it's all true, she goes with Reynolds to the family home up in Alaska to celebrate his Grammy's birthday and...well...there's a cute dog in it and you nearly see Ryan Reynold's ass.

Nope, that's it - that's really it. There's so much cringeworthy crap in here that I don't really know how best to start. It's exactly as outlined above. Ryan Reynolds' character (does it MATTER what he's called? At all?) turns out to be a little rich kid who upsets the family applecart by wanting to publish instead of run the Alaskan version of Wallmart with his Daddy. So he upsets the Dad from Poltergeist and Mary Steenburgen from Back to the Future 3. There's a cute white dog that nearly gets eaten by an eagle. Sandra Bullock has some minor clothes-issues and forgets that she's a tough bitch from Canada (from where you think she could handle snow) and she goes all gooey when presented with Reynold's sickly sweet 'family' and their cute dog. Did I mention the cute dog? The fluffball is the main reason to watch this. There's also a grandparent who only PRETENDS to die, which is just manipulative, and rather disappointing given how annoying she is.

There's no real emotion here whatsoever, just bowel-motions.

Without a single moment of real joy in the whole thing, The Proposal lumbers along at the speed of sad and produces a lacklustre feeling of basic despair and a real regret I didn't just ignore everyone's protests and put Legally Blonde or Working Girl on again instead!

This is because I gave it a chance, and it failed to improve at any point.

I like some 'chick flicks' but 'rom-coms', such as they are, tend to suck. This does very little to change my mind. I don't 'propose' you miss this at all, I recommend you burn it, or better yet, don't ever, ever pay for this soggy waste of celluloid. I speak as someone who actually quite enjoyed 'PS I Love You', which just proves that at least with a book adaptation, you have someone to blame and some structure that can often help. Confessions of a Shopaholic is not in this category either, btw.

So....

Sandra Bullock strikes out, but I doubt she's too upset - this has earned something like $54million already....

Weird.

Lost: Season One (TV) 2004-2010

2010-08-15T15:16:00.003Z

What is all the fuss about Lost?

OK, so, we mised it when it first appeared on Channel 4. And when it was on Sky, when we got hold of Sky, about six months later.

When it first aired in the UK five years ago, other half and I had just returned home from a friend's house when we realised - the damn thing had already started - and IT WAS THE REPEAT!

Then a few weeks after this airdate, word filtered down that the show was all about the twists and turns, that no answers were ever given about their island-stuck-stituation, and that no bugger would explain a single thing about that damn polar bear people kept mentioning.

So, increasingly, it sounded as if Lost was either one great head-tease that messed with your sense of closure, or it was about the best thing out there that constantly defied expectations and surpassed everyday network telly by some margin.And it was all produced by that J J Abrams bloke who did the unashamedly out-there Alias, which hadn't held our attention since season two (basically, Sidney got way too many other people avoidably killed every single episode).

This meant that the show was on hiatus for us until:

a) It was quickly cancelled
b) It ran and ran, and got released on DVD, when we'd buy it only after hearing decent reviews.
c) We saw JJ Abrams' cool movie version of Star Trek, hugely enjoyed Cloverfield, heard good thing about his later show, Fringe, and then watched him hold his own against Joss Whedon at ComicCon 2010. Abrams is less keen on 3D, which among other things really impressed us.

Well, ok, so 'c' wasn't in the original game plan, but the combination of those both 'b' and 'c' persuaded us to give Lost a shot. Not the complete, £250 box set (it's since become a tad cheaper) but, you know, the cheap first season, on beautiful BLU-RAY!

And you know what?

I'm hooked.

How these characters get under your skin is one of the bigger mysteries, and how Jack (Matthew Fox) gets away with looking like a butch Adam Sandler is another question. There's a whole mess of questions, and even after a marathon weekend watching the first season, requiring immediate ordering of the second season ten episodes in, we're barely any clearer on WTF is going on on that little slice of screwed-up paradise. Seriously. What is going on? What???

NO SPOILERS - AND ANY SPOILERS GIVEN IN THE COMMENTS BELOW MAY RESULT IN A LITTLE PIECE OF ME DYING INSIDE. AND THEN BEING THROWN AT YOU...

On the other hand - we really, really don't want to know. I've absolutely no idea where all this is headed. The fact that there's five MORE season of this Russian doll plot baffles me. It's obvious that the show is riffing off old-school serials from the 1930s (hey Flash Gordon) with music that brings me back to original Star Trek, Lost in Space, and all the other goodies that kept ten year olds riveted during the early 1990s at middays, Sundays, on Channel 4. Lost is made with a modern sense of character and style, and continuity. However, it's this slowly unfolding story truly hooks you by using people you want to learn more about each time.

It gets away with its ludicrousness because it - and its characters - know full well that the situation IS ludicrous. But they keep going about daily weirdness anyway, because they need to survive. If it is a dream, none of us want them to wake up. If the island isn't on a spaceship, then what the hell does it all mean? No simple answer, ripped from the Twilight Zone, will ever be enough. So what could it be?

There are SO many mysteries to unlock in Lost it's completely compulsive - and we're already devouring the second season. So far it's remained satisfyingly frustrating with its teasing, slowly unfolding explanations, and I'm enjoying that hugely - and I think it's pretty clear what that says about me and the other millions of fans!

To masochist Lost fans who actually watched it in real, unpredictable, advert-splatter network time, I salute you! I sincerely hope it's worth the wait. I can't even put any pictures on this blog as I'm afraid that searching for things on Lost are going to bring up 'how it all ended' type snippets. Yes, I'm late to the party, but I'm determined to enjoy myself while I'm there and let it answer questions in its own time.

The most spoiler-safe question I have is, will Hurley ever lose weight on a diet of crab and mangos? Ever?? He might shrink like Peter Jackson did after the Lord of the Rings movies, and be less awesome as a result, just like PJ...

Enough, on with Season 2 - and hopefully a more regular blog roll will be resumed over the next few weeks despite this troubling addiction!

Paranormal Activity 2! Out 2010...

2010-06-30T23:20:00.000Z

CONTAINS SPOILER FOR FINALE OF PARANORMAL ACTIVITY!

Very excited, and terrified, check out the rocking chair and the child only appearing in the mirror at the end.

This could still be really lame. The first one was a slow burner, but it worked. Hopefully this won't do a Blair With 2 and chuck in a load of teenagers and some glossy photography. I think they're keeping to the demonic spirit of the original, though.

Cold Prey (2006) Dir. Roar Uthaug

2010-06-30T22:07:00.000Z

The Thing without, er, the Thing.
There's lots of snow and a some tense teenagers, anyway...

What two things work best in horror films? What are the tricks that these films very, very often forget? Well, let's try making the characters just a little likeable. It's a stretch I know, but perhaps make them less like a bunch of whiny brats, and just show us a bunch of nice kids who you're sorry to see go. Secondly, I think the biggest scares come in the anticipation - obscure our vision, keep the characters totally oblivious, and watch the terror roll in. Cold Prey excels in the two conditions above.

But, yes, there's a girl in her undies being terrified...it IS still a horror film

Of course, it depends what you're watching it for in the first place. If you want T&A and naked breasts and blood, then there's a plethora of films out there promising just that. Not all of those are keepers, though.

Making a refreshing change from the usual, then, this Norwegian horror is pretty slick. It seems to have a decent budget (although not according to wikipedia), and although it was very cheap to buy, I was pleasantly surprised at how effective Cold Prey was. It keeps us guessing for the first hour, then the unease creeps in, then the bloody horror follows. It understands the power of hiding what's around the corner, and keeping the reveal secret until the very end. It follows a few of the 'slasher in the wilderness' cliches, but the thick, unrelenting snow and the unusual setting - a Norwegian Overlook - is a good choice.

The snow-swept, incredibly isolated setting adds to the fear!

And it looks gorgeous, too.

I enjoyed it, the subtitles seemed to disappear after a while, and I think being realistically terrified translates well in any language. This is an excellent horror with a little more to it than normal, without being annoyingly pretentious or boring. And it's really not horribly gory. There's enough to make it terrifying without being totally gratuitous. The worst part is really the snowboarding injury that lands them in this mess to begin with. Costing barely a snip to buy, at least two good hours of terror await you!

Struggling to survive...

SPOILERS

I would have preferred to know more about what happened between the little boy going missing and the hotel being closed for so many years, and left with all its booze and power still attached. How does he survive out there? What happened? Perhaps these questions get answered in the sequel, which came with the first one in the boxset. I'll have to watch it very soon and find out!

Terrific Scandinavian horror with non-annoying characters and a fearsome opponent.
A nice change of pace - and nope, I'm never ever going into an old abandoned hotel...

The Killing Room (2009) Dir. Jonathan Liebesman

2010-06-29T23:25:00.000Z

Blending Saw & Cube with mixed up results

The tagline above is a little misleading. This doesn't really have the hook, the brutality or gutteral nastiness that seemed to guarantee Saw's success (and seven now? Really?) and it doesn't share the totally surreal horrors of the much-overlooked Cube. Instead, this feels like a budget-friendly version of both (and trust me, they were pretty cheap) with a little less imagination and an overinflated sense of its own relevance.

I'm trying to review this without endlessly comparing it to Cube, but I can't help feeling that it performed all this better. The premise is fairly straightforward. Four people turn up to a human testing facility inside a big, white tiled room, where they fill out a bunch of questionnaires. They're briefly joined by the amiable Dr Phillips (Prison Break's wonderful Peter Stormare), and everything seems perfectly straightforward until someone gets suddenly, violently shot in the face.

After this, all bets are off, and survival seems to depend on correctly guessing the answers to the world's most inane questions. So far, so Saw, except Jigsaw didn't work under black ops for the Government (that we know so far...) and this has far, far less gore and violence all over.

Now, I like my nearly bloodless, psychological horror at least as much as the horribly messy kind (and if torture's done too convincingly, it sort of spoils the ~~fun~~ experience anyway) but The Killing Room just falls into the 'not quite enough' category. Not quite enough grossness, not entirely enough tension. Another movie spoiled by whispering, actually. It relies on the growing conflict between the ever-shrinking group of test subjects, and also on the moral quandry faced by Ms Reilly (Chloe Sevigny) who's being interviewed at the testing range by the insane quack, Dr Phillips. He spends the film justifyig the experiments, as it soon becomes apparent that this is simply one of many 'killing rooms' inside a huge building in the middle of nowhere, where people are being manipulated in exactly the same way.

So I get deja-Cube here, only without Cube's magnificent, nihilistic angle of 'it was set up and left to run by itself'.

And, I admit that it's Killing Room, not the many trapped rooms of the above. But my problem with it overall is that the people we meet are completely and utterly trapped - they have no escape possible at all, that's obvious from the moment we learn it's all being staged under the control of the morally-bankrupt scientists, callously observing their struggles. Even Ms Reilly's wildcard interviewee fails to convince. Apart from her eventual decsion, there was still nobody who can possibly save them. This is one of the reasons it fails. The other is the reason for it all happening in the first place.

After soon realising all the characters we met had no chance at all, the only question left of any interest was 'why are they doing it?'. In Cube, there's honestly 'no reason at all' (avoid the sequels, though...) but here the process turns out to be a roundabout way of creating suicide bombers, as the Doctor aims to find people with the self sacrificial gene, those that give their lives for others (as in apotosis). As even Ms Reilly points out, there are better ways of going about this, and it probably isn't by mentally torturing someone until they bug out and try to shoot themselves.

At the end, the survivor gets put into the second phase of the programme, which indicates that brainwashing is now involved.WTF? Did none of these people watch the Manchurian Candidate? Surely that's where you start? It just felt very back to front.

While there's nothing particularly wrong with the movie, it's just not interesting enough for a 'people stuck in one box' concept. There are more interesting interpretations around. I intend to see Fermat's Room at some point, which is another mash of Cube, Saw and the whole claustrophobic, often mathematically obsessed end of the horror genre.

Worth a look, but don't expect the whispers and a sleepy performance from Peter Stormare to fully hold your attention.

Cube is awesome.

The Backwoods (2006) Dir Koldo Serra

2010-06-28T21:12:00.000Z

Straw Dogs reborn

The trailer's accurate, most of this is pretty good,

Gary Oldman and Paddy Considine star in this UK-French-Spanish effort

The 1970s produced an odd clutch of movies. The ones that Backwoods specifically refers to hark from the arty exploitation genre. These were low key, had decent actors and usually had one or two brutal elements that the infamous 'Grindhouse' scene would find most agreeable. Top of this list is Straw Dogs, the epitomy of 'city folk vs yokels' movies (up there with Deliverance and Southern Comfort). Backwoods appears to be a very good try at returning to the look and feel of these classic films.

LOOK OUT, SPOILERS AHEAD

This is a European take on the concept, setting it in somewhere almost as isolated as the middle of Cornwall - some woods deep in the Spanish countryside. Two couples return to an old family house for an extended holiday and they also hope to change their fortunes whilst they're there. Unavoidably, the locals are about as friendly as the clientéle of the Slaughtered Lamb, and alarm bells should start ringing when the local perverts start eyeing up the sexy, yet detached Lucy (Virginie Ledoyen). Things start to get really dangerous when the two men discover a young girl with a deformed hand locked up in a filthy barn, and when they bring her back to their house the locals aren't that far behind.

On the whole, the group's decisions seem fairly sensible at the time. They try to leave, they try to reach some authorities, they are repeatedly thwarted by the weather and technology. They are convincingly isolated - and as this is set in 1978, there's no BS about lack of a cell phone signal - they're lucky to find a phone at all! When it all goes to hell, the group just try to get the hell out of the village, right up until they reach the next one anyway. This is an interesting take on the themes from Straw Dogs , and the locals are actually made just a little more human than being just 'monstrous villagers', even if what they did with the girl is definitely, hideously wrong.

The addition of the feral, captive young girl unavoidably reminds one of recent real life cases with a similar moral void. The question here is, does taking action warrant the loss of life involved? Should we interfere? But the ending is ultimately too poorly expressed to feeling particularly satisfying; the events just come to a grinding halt, the tension peters out, and it's a shame, because up until then I'd been engrossed.

There's lots to recommend this - the 1970s look and costuming is dead on, and the two men use accents that feel strangely right, pulled straight from the 1970s, the kind used in sitcoms and realistic BBC dramas fo the decade. The two women's mismatched accents (French and Spanish) occasionally come across as monotonous, which is a shame, but they also give decent performances even if their characters don't do the sensile thing towards the end. Everyone seems to forget they're being chased - except for Paddy Considine's character. If they'd listened to him in the first place, they might have been able to have a nice, quiet break and made friends with the incestuous bunch of locals!

Perhaps the subtles of the English subtitles were what truly failed this movie, although it's honestly worth a look, but see what you make of the finalé as this seems to be its biggest failing.

Awesome recreation of the 1970s era of film, but too much is sadly lost in translation.

Paranormal Activity (2009) Dir Oren Peli

2010-06-27T12:53:00.002Z

Who ya gonna call? No one, it turns out...

Yes, the 'found footage' genre is pretty overused these days. It's cheap, it's 'realistic' and it takes about five minutes to see results. But, in the right hands it can be extremely effective. The trick seems to be not to overcomplicate things. And keep the cast small, and have a decent reason to have a video camera on all the time whilst awful things are happening - as even in Cloverfield it was pushing it.

Paranormal Activity uses all of these strengths to great advantage, and strongly hints that just filming the events has exacerbated the whole problem. It's a slick, streamlined piece of work with a decent pair of actors, who more or less carry the whole thing. Katie (Katie Featherstone) has been aware since childhood of a menacing presence that would stand over her at night. She lives with her boyfriend of three years, Micah (Micah Sloat) in their San Diego house, and he's keen to get the spookfest going. He buys a very expensive videocamera and sets it up to watch their bed at night. He also enjoys taunting whatever might be out there. Idiot.

Their initial footage is fairly boring, but gradually things get weirder, and the first time a VERY LOUD NOISE comes from their attic is extremely unsettling, and it just gets better and better from there. Also, you will want to knock some sense into Micah way before the end. He repeatedly calls out the increasingly threatening presence, daring it to show itself and only making things worse for Katie, and the thing's intentions gradually become horrendously clear.

Due to some slack download time on the PS3 - in HD - we ended up watching this in the middle of the night, when most of this film is set! This definitely helped with feeling the atmosphere, and we weren't brave enough to watch it with the lights out. After all the horror movies I've ever watched, it's still amazing how effective a deep reverby-bassline and a slamming door can be when the people onscreen are freaking out too. It's also a lot better than watching Yvette Fielding scream her head off in a shed in Norwich, too, as you start to really care about this hapless couple.

Highly recommended, as it does exactly what it's supposed to - just have a little patience, and be braver than we were and just TRY to watch this with the lights off! Prepare to be freaked out.

Never Cry Werewolf (2008) Dir Brenton Spencer

2010-06-26T22:27:00.000Z

Fright Night with Werewolves

I've seen Fright Night a grand total of once, but was no stranger to the concept. Think a less expensive Lost Boys with a classic British actor thrown in instead of two Frog Brothers. The plot basically runs that, local kid who watches a cheesy TV show about monster hunters realises that his neighbour is in fact one of the ghastly undead, and he must eventually get help from the washed-up TV star in order to defeat the monster next door. And of course, the authorities won't listen to them and the whole world thinks they're insane.

Now reimagine this in the style of Buffy. That's pretty much Never Cry Werewolf's angle, and the washed up actor this time is the ever-young Kevin Sorbo (Hercules) as a TV hunter who goes around shooting endangered wild animals. As you can tell, the film never takes itself very seriously, and the ceature effects are pretty good. Nina Sobrev is a gorgeous lead as Loren, easy to root for and tough enough to take on the most ferocious of maneating monsters. She also has the required goofy male best friend, who hilariously starts to turn into a wolf-bitch-thing...

The werewolf guy isn't perhaps as dangerously sexy scary as he probably should be, but he is pretty creepy all the same. See, he thinks Loren is the reincarnation of his long lost wife, and hopes to recreate his relationship by seducing and turning her. Gulp. So, basically at one point she ends up down to her sports bra. Luckily she also has a kickass crossbow - but I think these are less use than a really big knife in most movies!

Keeping all the charm of the 1980s classic version, but with better everything, it bumps along at a decent pace and it doesn't look too shabby, either. Comes highly recommended if you're after a piece of lighthearted lycanthrope action, in the spirit of all those cheesy 80s monster movies. And it is way, WAY better than the bloody Wolfman remake.

IT Crowd Season 4 (UK) 2010 Episode One

2010-06-26T21:28:00.001Z

Make mine Moss!

Episode One: Jen the Fredo

Not being much of a Big Brother fan ( I will run screaming from the room), I end up avoiding Channel 4 for most of the summer - which is why I nearly missed the return of one the channel's silliest, most loveable comedy shows. Moss, Roy and Jen are back at Reynham Industries, taking on the corporate world from the safety of their basement.

I was pleased to see that the basement still looks as though Forbidden Planet and Japan had exploded inside it. It's full of references to everything from V for Vendetta to Zelda. Pehaps Moss (Richard Ayoade), the show's uber-geek, is in charge of this scenery? Moss has always been the best part of the show, and is possibly the most deliciously awkward character on the planet, although he's a little underused in this episode. I think he's saving his geek powers for his appearence on Countdown next week.

Instead, the plot revolves around Jen (Katherine Parkinson), who wants a little more to her job than babysitting Moss and a lovelorn Roy (Chris O'Dowd) and applies for the position of Cultural Events Manager (the 'Fredo') at Reynham Industries. Everyone says it's not for her, and she soon discovers why - the businessmen aren't interested in seeing Mamma Mia, they had something a little less disturbing in mind. They want ladies to, er, 'dance' with. So, naturally, Jen turns them over to the care of Roy and Moss. An emotional evening of playing Dungeons and Dragons awaits!

This show still loves its geeks, and the healing power of Dungeons & Dragons bonds everyone very sweetly. Jen has turned into a full on pimp by the end of it, but I think she'll recover, even after she learned what happened to the Godfather's Fredo. Douglas Reynham also survives a visit from the feminist lobby, who awarded him a very unflattering statue, and has to use his charms on Miranda (Dolly Wells), which goes rathr better than expected.

The series has shown steady improvement over the last few years - but it's still very hit and miss. The last season relied heavily on its characters without really doing anything very interesting with them. It still does a good job of filtering topical ideas and making them into true sitcom situations, particuarly the one with the friendly German cannibal!

I felt this episode held together pretty strongly, with a sweet line in thwarted ambition and consequence free sexual harrassment. Of course it was obvious that D&D was going to be used to save the day, but I liked Jen's Fredo payoff right at the end. This is still the best show taking the piss out of the insanity of work since the Office, (UK version anyway), and delights in sending up those who squat at the top of the corporate ladder and those who crouch below it.

A great start to the new season, and you can watch it smoothly on youtube right here!

The Cycle (2009) (US title The Devil's Ground) - Dir. Michael Bafaro

2010-06-24T21:11:00.000Z

Indi-slice-sive slasher flick (sorry...)

Slasher movie killer with a shotgun? That's just cheating!

The Horror Channel in the UK has really picked up lately. I'm getting into all the small horror movies with surpirsingly good production values. Some of them are even on actual film, not fuzzy digital vision. Sadly, the Cycle (Devils Ground in the States) isn't one of those, but it started off pretty well.

Carrie (Daryl Hannah) is driving across North America, talking to a photo of a man who wants to go to 'Bangor or Bust'. Clearly a Stephen King fan. She's reached deep woodland and the road is dark. While she drives, a teenage girl runs crying and screaming through some woods. After a creepy run-in with a Yokel gas station attendant, Carrie continues on her way and almost hits the girl in the middle of the road. The girl, Amy Singer (Leah Gibson) is a little bloody and beaten up, clearly traumatised. Carrie tries to get her talking, and soon wishes she hadn't. See, we're about to get a very long flashback...punctuated only by many, many 'and then what happened?'

Several bloody spoilers

If you couldn't already piece it together, it's very simple. College kids trying to get extra credit went bumbling around in the woods to find proof of an Indian burial ground to protect the wildlife. They fit pretty much every horror character you could need - the slutty one, the mean one, the nice but shy one, and the definitely-gonna-survive it to the last reel girl. The flashback angle really isn't suited to a slasher movie, even if we already kinda know it'd be nice to pretend we didn't, or hope that the makers try doing something unusual with the setup.

What we mostly get is a straightforward run and gun - and by the way, giving the killer a shotgun is cheating. Any mook can chase people with a shotgun. Guns are boring, mundane, and only the survivors should ever get hold of one - and then the bullets should run out! Note - this does NOT apply to zombie movies, but even they acknowledge you shouldn't have too many bullets, or it stops being ~~fun~~ dangerous.

So the girl - Amy - describes her last two days and how her friends were brutally killed, although it does cut away from this. Then, as Carrie calls the police, she vanishes from the car, and Carrie learns she died two years ago. There are effective moments of spookiness, particularly where there's something moving around in a barn, but it doesn't seem to go anywhere. Turning Amy into a ghostly hitchiker also feels like a crappy version of a Supernatural episode, because that show did it better both of the times it played with this idea. Supernatural also has far fewer plotholes. The ghost turnaround, the who is really what, the fact that everyone Carrie met seems to be a brother of another one, the stupid shootout at the end that was barely seen. It just misses the mark.

That's why Cycle/The Devil's Ground just didn't work out. It had lots of strands, but no idea how to finish it. At the very end, just as Carrie finds her dead lover's car poorly hidden behind a gas station, and looks for an apparently crucial map that Amy left behind, and just as the killer's equally hulking twin brother tries to help her out, it all simply stops.

So maybe it's angling for a sequel, or a raise in budget. The Cycle in the title is that Amy's ghost leads potential victims to the crazy killer every year. But I'm really not convinced they link this properly to the Indian burial ground or the point of the crows that kept following everyone. With the forced mess of an ending, it comes down to a ghost, and...and some psychos, and some crows, and a toxic waste spill and...and look! Daryl Hannah screaming!

Never quite scary or gory enough, it was a good effort with some nice performances, but for a horror thriller really was a bit of a wet blanket.

And, frickin' shotguns? Really?

Tormented (2009) Dir Jon Wright

2010-06-23T20:54:00.001Z

One Missed Call meets Skins via the Inbetweeners...

British horror comedy films are easily spotted. They're generally low budget, incredibly gory and full of British actors you can't quite place - a bit like the Wire. Tormented is no different, but its staggering use of sweary insults has to be some sort of record. It's not bad, but I didn't really enjoy it, and I feel that's because I truly hope that Secondary schools aren't really like this. At all.

Whereas in fact, they're probably worse.

Tormented is a wish-fulfilment fable about the revenge of the bullied - they even throw in some Shakespeare 'Macbeth' analysis in the obligatory classroom scene to provide a little context, which suggests that Mullett, the tormented suicide victim of the title, has been summoned back by a mass attack of guilt, even if none of his classmates appear obviously sorry about what they did. He returns with some awesome bully-splatting powers. The rules of his undead powers aren't exactly explained, but the only person escaping his wrath is the virginial, goody-two-shoes head girl, Justine.

Mullet (Calvin Dean) takes revenge

As her classmates begin to die around her in increasingly inventive ways, Justine begins to realize that sometimes they do come back - and they might also have a crush on you. Can undead Darren Mullet be stopped? Do you really want him to stop? Aren't they all, basically, a load of hateable, yet highly attractive self-centred little bastards who have it coming? And, by the way, where the hell are their parents?

This really falls somewhere between Skins, without the warmth, the Inbetweeners with far more gore, and One Missed Call (USA), without being a great big pile of shit. It hums with funked up teenage hormones and witty, unpleasant insults spurt messily in all directions. While it's never, ever, remotely even the teeniest bit scary, it has fairly impressive death scenes and mutilations done with a huge tongue in the corner of its gob. While the horror is nicely taken care of, the comedy still depends on how funny you find really, really mean teenagers.

The pretty, yet totally deserving to die bunch of British schoolkids.

Pretty as the cast are, including Stormbreaker's Alex Pettyfer all grown up (and a legit hottie) their characters are as hateable as any dumb-ass co-ed in a Friday 13th movie, perhaps moreso because the performances are actually very good.

I didn't enjoy this as much as other reviewers seem to, in fact I hadn't even heard of this film until it popped up on Sky premiere movies last Friday. It was good enough to watch through until the end, and the epilogue just as the credits start is VERY funny, but I couldn't warm to it, even though its suggestion that the bullied eventually become much worse than their tormentors is a nice touch.

This isn't highly recommended, but a nice addition to the British horror comedy genre. I'd recommend The Cottage over this, which I found much funnier and far filthier in its own twisted way.

There aren't as many bitchy schoolgirls in tiny skirts though, so each to their own.

Two schoolgirls who deserve to diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie!

According to Tormented, then, school sucks, kids are mean, and everyone has it coming - especially the PE teachers.

Can't argue with that, although I find it very depressing...

Evil PE teacher Gordon Ramsey (yep) throws Mullet's best friend

Jason out of the memorial service.

The Descent 2 (2009) Dir. Jon Harris

2010-06-22T23:51:00.002Z

Legal Downloads

Going underground a second time?

Neil Marshall's 2005 horror smashed onto the screens in a very welcome splash of fresh gore, suspense and eye-ball squishing violence. It came into a market saturated by play-it-safe Westernised Japanese horror movies. Unfortunately it also came out almost to the week that some crazy bastards decided to bomb London. With horro a little too close to home, it may not have helped it very much on the big screen, although seeing it at my local cinema was incredible.

Sadly, I didn't get to see the sequel in similar style during its blink-and-miss-it big screen release last year. It seemed to have been about to arrive for ages. Then it went altogther. But, thanks to the PS3's HD download we were able to quickly get it in over the weekend, and pass judgement on a rather surprising second visit underground.

Given how the first one ended, a sequel was the last thing I was expecting.

HORRIFYING SPOILERS

The first Descent film ended with everyone dead, killed by horrible underground sub-humans, nicknamed 'Crawlers'. Only the traumatised Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) is left alive, and she's lost her mind, staring into the flames of a torch that burns away on the ledge, where it looks like she's trapped until the monsters get to her. She did have a hallucination about escaping shortly before this fate was revealed. In it, she climbed up a huge pile of bones to get back to the surface, and even got to their 4X4 and drove off, before a zombified Juno (Natlie Mendoza) reappeared to shock her back to her doom.

The reason the sequel exists, then, is thanks to the American cut of the film, which substitutes a true descent into madness for the final 'boo' ending. It stops where Sarah escapes. Hence, more monsters. However, the sequel doesn't quite match this set-up.

The sequel opens with a car driving along, stopped by a nonchalant deer standing in the road. The driver and the audience are then made to JUMP when Sarah, bloodied, shriekingly insane, bangs on the window. Later she says she was washed out to freedom by the underground river. But later still, the way out appears to be back in the boneyard from the first film, as we originally saw, so I'm still confused!

Sarah re-enters the caves of certain death, Ripley style.

(pics from here)

Sarah is catatonic and remembers nothing about the last two days. Her reappearence prompts a team of rescuers, and a tough police chief, to go back into the cave system to find the rest of the group. In the first film Juno had deliberately booked a fake 'flight plan' meant to tell potential rescuers where they were, but with Sarah's reappearence they use a sniffer dog which somehow finds a new entrance into the correct set of caves. Apparently this is under a creepy old hut, which leads to an old mine shaft. So...remind me again how Sarah got out? The rescue team take Sarah with them to help navigate the unmapped tunnels, and in true Aliens style, the Crawlers are soon all over over them.

Except, unlike Ripley in Aliens, Sarah is too catatonic for the bulk of the film to really tell them anything useful until it's far too late. And, ok, everyone ignored Ripley until it was too late, but here Sarah goes from catatonic, gibbering wreck to superwoman in the time it takes for her to get them all killed. Our sympathies are starting to dry up. The attention is really on the police woman, Elen Rios (Krysten Cummings), who is anxious to get back to her daughter - giving Sarah some reason to bother protecting Rios from the monsters.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

The Crawlers' appearence seems to have changed, too. Their faces are more batlike and sort of humanoid, instead of the white shrieking faces of pure horror from before. This may be due to the extra light in the caves which leeches much of the terror from events and creatures. The best scare is really when they first re-enter the caves and in the dark Sarah sees a piece of limestone that looks just like a Crawler - and then it turns its head! But overall, they don't recapture the first film's terrifying, dark and firelit atmosphere. The script is also less naturalistic, replacing the women's banter with more businesslike 'this is how you survive in a goddamn cave' kind of chatter.

I did appreciate one of the rescuers getting stuck in a tiny part of the tunnel after a big cave in, which definitely got the point, but then the rest of the caves suddenly appeared to have really high ceiling!

Mostly, the sense of urgency and threat isn't as well paced as in the first one. Once underground and under dire threat, the characters basically seemed to wander around, without making any concerted effort to get out. There IS a lot of monster-mashing, though, which kind of makes up for it. It was good to see Juno again, too! She and Sarah actually make up, and in the first film I'd wanted them to put the whole 'you had an affair with my husband bitch' hatred aside and actually escape togetherproperly . They attempt that this time, although the moment has passed - Sarah left Juno to die after stabbing her, for crying out loud! Juno gets over it, and really is superwoman, until a massive Crawler finishes her off in yet another big fight scene.

Sarah finishes going nuts.....

I'm glad that the made the sequel - you can never have too many movies about blind batlike underground monsters being bloodily hacked apart - but ultimately I think I was happiest with the original's stark treatment of survival, grief, jealousy and madness. This is a far shallower horror, and the mixed sex cast make it a more run-of-the-mill popcorn flick. Again, the brighter lighting misses much of the point. The dark underground tunnels are scary enough on their own, no matter what else might be lurking in them! While there's actually quite a lot to enjoy, the pacing is definitely off, and you will probably be left going 'WTF?' at the very end. It seems that the Crawlers have received some top-side help in getting a taste for human flesh. How and why immediately leaps to mind!

Unlike the first film, then, this really DOES beg for a followup.
There's nowhere left to go but down...
For old time's sake....
Aaaaaaaah.....

The Princess & the Frog (2009) Dir. Jon Musker & Ron Clements

2010-06-21T22:56:00.000Z

Disneyfied Grimmness

A frog, a princess, an alligator that plays the trumpet with real soul....

a classic fairytale!

This has cropped up because the DVD and Blu Ray (Bluuu Raaaay) discs were released this week, reminding me that it's been almost exactly six months since I saw this on holiday in Florida just before Christmas. I took notes while i was there, fully intending to blog about it way back then but, well, here I am. My excuse for seing it at all at the cinema is that there was a major storm coming to Orlando, and we'd already seen James' Cameron's Dances With Smurfs on Imax/3D/headache inducing vision. Time, we thought, for a return to safely 2D Disney - especially as we'd spent the day before hanging out at the Disney Florida Park, being brainwashed into seeing it by a trumpet playing alligator dancing on a riverboat.

That bloody trumpet playing Alligator....

The alligator turns up later in the story. Bascially, the 'Princess' isn't really a Princess at all. at first. She's a hard working New Orleans girl with big dreams and a dippy but rich blonde best friend with more father issues than Tiana herself. Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) is working and saving like crazy to open a chic restaurant decorated with cool art deco jazz designs where she can sell her Daddyy's special gumbo. But, before she can do that, she has to put on a big welcome meal for a foreign prince who's visiting the city. Before anyone can meet the music-loving prince, he runs afoul of the evil voodoo-loving Doctor Facilier (Keith David from the Thing and Coraline!) and gets cursed into the shape of....well, you can guess by this point! His pth crosses Tiana's after he mistakes her for a princess, and wacky adventures through the Bayou begin, complete with plenty of singing and dancing and, yes, the bloody trumpet playing alligators!

Tiana, the unusual Disney Princess...because she isn't one at the start!

But the girl can really carry off that tiara!

The songs are great, the animation didn't seem quite smooth or pretty enough, but it had lots of energy. I remember it as being colourful, inch-deep fun. I'm afraid my experience of it was somewhat marred as the projectionist kept failing to get the whole picture on the screen, which took them so long to correct I almost walked out. But I stuck with it and it didn't entirely disappoint. I think I was hoping for the Little Mermaid part 2. Well, safe to say it wasn't that. But this retelling of the famous fable, parodied by Shrek 2 and beyond, is a decent enough interpretation and has - OMG - a black Disney princess! Well, 30 Rock puts it best (sorry it's pretty quiet...):

Insightful un-PC jokes aside, I'd also like to point out that SPOILERS Tiana spends the majority of this film stuck in the shape of a frog. So, go figure. The standout character was actually the sweet little Cajun firefly, Ray (Jim Cummings) who's in love with the moon. He doesn't make it. Sniffle. While not the most fabulous tale Disney has ever told, the 2D was a nice change, and the songs were more interesting than most Disney music - although it reminds me how grateful I am to Pixar for NEVER having songs in their films. Ever. But overall, as a Disney film that doesn't suck, it rates pretty high.

Now, waiting for Toy Story 3....!

Lord of the Rings blu ray marathon - Return of the King (2003)

2010-06-20T22:09:00.001Z

The journey ends.

I'd started rewatching this great set of films with some intent of re-examining how I felt about the very last part. Of course I mean the overlong finalé, the multiple endings which turned a terrific, epic story into a less than impressive slog to an eventual finish. I honestly hoped that after all this time, I could deal with them, and the story to that point had been great fun, high fantasy cinema at its very best.

I rediscovered all the bits I loved. The fact that the first thing you see is a tiny worm wriggling in a dirty fist. The murderous Smeagol/Gollum being extra 'tricksy' and acting all affronted by Sam's suspicions as he leads the two hobbits to the cave of huge spider, Shelob. The little sad song that Pippin sings as the doomed riders make a desperate charge. The big, one-eyed, twisted teddy-bear orc with the club-hand, that only grudginly steps aside at the last minute when a ten-ton boulder is hurled at his army. Those very, very cool flying lizard things that the Nazgul (Black Riders) take into battle, and the Witch King's spikey helmet. Oversized, four-tusked elephants with armies on their backs. The translucent green, undead cursed army lurking beneath a mountain like a very cool Haunted Mansion ride. Everyone bows to the four hero-Hobbits at the very end. Good triumphs over evil. The big battle is over and Sauron's gone, nuked after Gollum inadvertantly saved Middle Earth. All is good.

But what was bad? Well, the question of the Eagles needs to be addressed. Really. The youtube video below is a PERFECT summary of what was wrong with the 'eagle rescue' from the volcano, especially as in the film the eagles seem more than capable of taking on Sauron's big cool flying lizards. Even a throwaway line would have helped.

Before we even got to there, the criminal exclusion of Christopher Lee's Saruman continues to sting. He was THE big bad in the last two films. He was the identifiable face of evil compared to Sauron's lidless, disembodied eye. This wizard would not have sat up in his tower, waiting for - what? What the hell does he do? Why is his seeing stone, the dangerous Palentir, dumped in the flood water? The cut scene is in the Special Edition expains this, but it's been a very long time since I've seen that, either. I know that in the book, he and the slimy Wormtongue take over the Shire and need kicking out. But here, they just use an overdubbed line where Gandalf mutters something about 'he has no power, let's take Merry and Pippin back down the road to Rohan'. Really?

So although there's no time for a wizard duel, or whatever, we still have - too many endings. On this rewatch, it was clear that almost any of the endings would have done, except for the final one used. The best, I think, was still the very first - after Aragorn is crowned King of Gondor and reunited with Arwen, the races of Middle Earth all bow respectfully to their very smallest allies, the Hobbits, and the picture fades smoothly to a map. This clicked it all nicely together. But it goes on.

Next there's the return to the Shire, and Hobbiton, and the four pint-sized adventurers try to pick up their lives where they left off, and Sam gets with Rosie, the bar-keeping Hobbit. And Frodo writes his book, and the screen pulls away from him sitting at his desk, framed by the circular doorway. This would also have rounded the trilogy off in a satisfying way.

But apparently, Frodo (and Peter Jackson) thinks there's "room for a little more".

What follows is a very awkward, cheap looking and overlong scene about sending Frodo and Bilbo Baggins off to the Grey Havens with the last of the Earth-deserting Elves. Everyone whispers and talks very sadly and slowly. The slowness, particularly, and the awful aging makeup for Ian Holm's ancient Bilbo, make me feel strongly that this part was never intended for the Theatrical version. It doesn't seem to match its look, when everything that came before it felt so gnarled, true and ancient. Perhaps they were going for a very stylized, fairytale-esq final shot. It looks more like a cutting edge cut scene from a 1990s PC game. Also, the characters exchange odd looks, especially Galadriel, as if they'd all met up again after a long gap, and had run out of things to talk about in front of the green screen on-set.

Even when this scene ends, there's yet another squeezed in - where Sam returns home to an idealised (Munchkin land-like) Hobbit hole. His wife and two cute Hobbit kids meet him. The film ultimately concludes on a lingering shot of his scrappily painted yellow door. The end. For real this time. By now, I'd nearly lost the will to live.

The adventure was amazing, the special effects transcendent, and most of it was well-acted and properly exuberant in its treatment of such a 'precious' book. Even if it occasionally suffered from chucking in a deus ex machina (undead green army, anyone?) it did match up and was always worth paying attention to. I only wish that Peter jackson had trusted the audience to be satisfied with a proper film ending, or at least the brief Epilogue ending at Bag End, and hadn't forced in the less-impressive last fifteen minutes, which underwhelmed and irritated vast swathes of casual cinemagoers and huge fans alike.

I'm glad I went back to Middle Earth. I have very fond memories of going there with different people over the years, and it's still a great ride and impossible to dislike. Blu Ray has kept those memories all the sharper, and when the blu ray Special Edition versions finally emerge (at a reasonable price, naturally) well, then I think I'll be going there again.

Lord of the Rings marathon part 2 - The Two Towers (2002)

2010-06-19T18:58:00.000Z

Last night didn't entirely turn into the marathon we were hoping, so we watched everythin but the last forty minutes last night, then gave up at 1am to continue today. Which we did.

Without a doubt, the high-def transfer of Two Towers knocks the Fellowship out of the ring. It's glorious to look at, with everything comng across as shinier and more detailed than before. We even spotted some rats skulking next to the weak point in Helms' Deep, which we'd never noticed before!

The movie itself remains the most satisfying. Two Towers is in the always happy middle part of the trilogy, so things can go wrong but don't wholly need resolving, and we can learn more about the characters, and there's a little more time and room for the script to tease out a few more details about the people, hobbits, elves and dwarves (drawrfs?) that we're spending 10-12 hours with.

We see far more of dwarf Gimli and elf-totty Legolas as they become interacial bantering companions, and hilarious battlefield rivals. Aragorn's love for Eowyn is tested, a bit, by a feisty shieldmaiden, and his love scenes provide the necessary halfway through toilet break yet again! Sam and Frodo trudge on to Mount Doom with unlikely help from insane ex-Ring-bearer, Gollum, whose CGI character evolves into something breathtakingly impressive every time he appears.Oh, and Gandalf gets a new look.

There's still lots to enjoy and I'm not quite as familiar with Two Towers as with Fellowship, given that I neve rhad to watch this one over and over for Dissertation research in 2004. But there's still plenty to giggle at - the King of Rohan (Bernard Hill) sniffing, "is this all you have, Saruman?" shortly before an orc loaded with a HUGE BOMB completely destroys the defensive wall, is a particular favourite. No one tempts fate like King Theoden. And thanks to Star Trek I have a new appreciation for Karl Urban, who before he was mcCoy played the exiled son of Theoden, who has a penchant for big hats with spare hair on the top.

At the very end it's hard not to feel a thrill of expectation, as Sam and Frodo continue on their way to the dangers of Mount Doom, led by the increasingly treacherous Gollum. It's sad to remember now that I first saw this eight long years ago, and we still didn't know how badly paced the final part of this epic was going to turn out!

But that's for next time. Probably tomorrow.

Lord of the Rings Blu-Ray marathon - Part One

2010-06-18T22:48:00.000Z

We received all the Lord of theRing's movies on Blu-Ray yesterday afternoon, and after a crappy, stressful week, what better way to unwind than with cognac and Middle Earth?

So, we start of with:

The Fellowship of the Ring

The rumours were true, the HD quality of this epic opening chapter is essentially no different to that of the DVD version. It's a good thing then this overwatched mastepiece remains awesome, and can survive all the various jokes, elf-bashing and criticisms we jaded viewers can throw at it. Over-familiarity breeds a more unkind sort of affection. I still adore this film, and love it all the more for its quirks - the lingering eye closeups, for example. The way all the evil black riders or 'ringwraiths' only ever attack in perfect synchronicity, and are always thwarted. That guy who played Agent Smith in the Matrix being essentially the same but with sillier hair. All these things both endear and annoy, but the I can't resist being enthralled by the visuals, the huge scope and heartfelt performances that ensure this stays top in my 'films to watch again before I'm killed by the metorite' list.

On, to the Two Towers.....tonight! See you at 2am....or tomorrow.

Cougar Town: Season One (2010) ends on Living UK

2010-06-17T23:45:00.000Z

Losing my evenings to...

abc's shiniest sitcom has just finished its 24 episode run on Living UK, and I'm going to miss the little show that became an important Wednesday night fixture on our Sky+ box. Time for a second series? Yes! Thank the gods of American TV scheduling. When? Not soon enough.

Starting out, I wasn't interested, at all. The show seemed to be all about Courteney Cox struggling with forty-something issues, which just seemed depressing. Then, during an exceptionally hungover Bank Holiday Sunday, the Cougar Town catch-up marathon on Living finally pulled me in. The first episode was surprisingly funny, so I taped it on Sky+, and after three episode, we were completely hooked. Twelve episodes and a large delivered pizza later, there was no turning back!

Barb, predatory Cougar

(Cougar = scarily well-preserved 40+ lady!)

Written by two former Scrubs (and Friends) scribes who teamed up with Courteney Cox for another comedy, Cougar Town is one of the few fluffy comedy shows that does exactly what it's supposed to. It quickly noticed the sell-by date on its age-related, 'can I get into clubs and still be hot?' melodrama, and fully embraced far sillier stories about the lives of a group of friends, spurred on by rapid fire dialogue delivered by actors at the top of their game. For a sitcom it felt fresh and new, and this made a perfectly moreish, bite size length of delicious telly goodness.

After leaving the toy-boys on the back bench, the only remaining nod to the show's title was the brilliant Barb character, purely left in to turn up and say something inappropriate each week. The focus stays on Jules, a recently divorced wife, mother and successful Real Estate dealer, which in Florida can't be too difficult (er....), and she likes to drink copious amounts of wine with her little group of friends. I particuarly like that she fills the huge glasses so full of wine that they all have to slurp it down before it's possible to lift them up!

Jules (Courteney Cox) remembers she should have ordered

a couple more vats of wine for the next season...

Jules lives next door to best friend Ellie, played by Christa Miller. The actress can now mostly move her face after serious botox issues (seen at its very worst in the remake of the Andromeda Strain a couple years ago). Ellie is an ex-lawyer with a devoted husband and a baby named Stan, and she spends most of her time being a housewife and being mean to, well, everyone! When she does it, it's very funny - but be very glad you're not in her line of fire. She saves her worst vitriol for Laurie (Busy Philipps), the trailer-trash-dun-good who works with Jules in Real Estate. Laurie has many tumultuous relationships involving tattoed men with knives, and is quite a bit younger than the other two women in the show.

Then there are the guys. Jules spends a baffling amount of time hanging out with Bobby (Brian Van Holt), the man she recently divorced and who now lives on a boat brilliantly named 'Jealous Much?', which is currently still marooned in a parking lot. This may be because Ellie's husband, Andy (Ian Gomez), has the world's biggest man-crush on the goofy guy. Then, naturally, there's a long-term potential love interest for Jules in the 'sexy neighbour across the street', Grayson Ellis (Josh Hopkins), although he spends most of the show shagging incredibly younger girls and, er, Sheryl Crow. Grayson always seemed a little creepy, but that could be because he plays a miniature guitar all the time.

Graduation ends in a big balloon chase for Travis,

his parents, and his 'adult' friends

But the crowning character has to be Jules' long-suffering son, Travis. Cardiganed before his time, he provides the vaguely more grown-up perspective to the unaposlogetic silliness of the 'adults'. Not as lame as it sounds, either. By the end of the season he graduates high school, and for a minute there I was afraid they'd lost their show's greatest asset - but of course, he's sticking around in Florida for Season 2!

Lauries hangs out at Grayson's bar with young-oldie Travis,

who still isn't old enough to drink yet!

Each episode is a microcosm of in-jokes, new in-jokes, and something a bit like Scrubs when it was awesome, only it's even more awesome, becaue it's just a bunch of people, living in Florida. Having gone to Florida, I am already jealous that they live there...

Alligators in the swimming pool notwithstanding....

There's something very sweet, insane, non-PC and loveable about every episode. It's crazy how some shows work so well, and others fall completely flat. This is the former. I have high hopes for Season 2 later this year, even if they change the name, as the wiki entry thinks they might! But its fans have already figured it out. Cougar Town isn't just a depressing one-noter about a very attractive forty-something woman trying to get laid. It's mostly about motherhood, silliness, and 'trying out wine for breakfast'.

Who wouldn't warm to that?

All together now - Pennycan!

Finally, for your enjoyment, here's a typical scene with plenty of Travis (Travis!!) and the ten second title sequence which I know a bit too well:

And until Courteney Cox and the cul-de-ca crew return, 30 Rock Season 4 will just have to do instead. Thank you, Liz Lemon....!

Also, one day, I will get back into equally perfect watch while eating huge breakfast at the weekend show, Psych....on about its 30th season by now?

Coraline (2009) Dir. Henry Selick

2010-06-16T22:21:00.000Z

Movies at the speed of Sky

The eponymous heroine poses outside the Pink Palace apartments

Nope, I didn't see it in 3D...

Being a kid can be very scary. No one takes you seriously, your parents are too busy to notice you, and it leaves you open to all kinds of weird fantasies that are almost too creepy for broadcast. Neil Gaiman (Sandman, Good Omens) excells in this sort of fairytale, which has been adapted by Henry Selick into a gorgeous peice of 'real' (puppet) animation which only seems to use CGI to enhance any weirdness. Selick also directed Nightmare Before Christmas, which was a Tim Burton extravaganza way back in the mid-1990s. It's safe to say he's surpassed that little guilty seasonal pleasure, as with Coraline he's cut down on the songs (although the music is still glorious) and developed Gaiman's eerie fable into something very special. To be honest, I'm amazed Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy) wasn't involved.

A FEW SPOILERS....

Coraline herself (voiced by Dakota Fanning) is a stubborn, much-ignored eleven year old girl, whose parents moved from Michigan to the Pink Palace apartment building in Oregon, to write up their plant catalogue. The don't seem to feed her much, and spend all their time on their computers while she wants to dig her garden in the rain. Coraline explored the new building out of boredom and comes across several eccentric neighbours and a small, locked door. Before you can say 'don't go in there!', she's dreamed her way through the brick wall where a tunnel takes her to a better, 'other' version of her new home, complete with more attentive and exciting parents. Every creature in the Other world (including the 'other' parents) have creepy black buttons for eyes, but apart from that it's all fabulous!

Other mother (creepy button eyes!)

and real mother (writes about mulch),

both perfectly voiced by Teri Hatcher!

After several nights of visiting the Other world, Coraline wants to stay on, but there's a big catch. There's always a catch. It involves a needle, thread, a spare pair of buttons and her eyeballs. She barely escapes, but now her Real Parents are missing, and she's being chased by a fearsome being called the beldam, which has needles for fingers and a taste for little kids' souls. Coraline needs to use all her ingenuity and bravery, and maybe a little help from a talking black cat (Keith David), to escape the monster and free her parents.This battle won't be easily won, as old monsters can be very tricky.

Part coming of age story, and a gateway both to and from childhood, I found Coraline a lot better than it appeared in the trailers. It's incredibly imaginative and very detailed. There's plenty for adults to soak up, too, and a staggering amount of naked puppet flesh appears when we meet the eccentric theatre ladies (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French)! Also listen out for Ian McShane putting on a bolshy Russian accent as Mr Bobinsky, a former athlete and the upstairs tennant, who claims to have a mouse circus in his room! Coraline's world never seems entirely safe, and things even get a little Silent Hill as the beldam's fantasy trap starts to unravel, and the walls of the house start rotting into nothing around her.

I haven't read the book, so I don't know exactly how much of this wonder is down toNeil Gaiman, but there's a fabulous collaboration taking place here and Gaiman easily surpasses Tim Burton's clunking Alice in Wonderland from this year. While there's no ignoring the Alice in Wonderland comparisons - there's even a cat that can cross between worlds and offers handy advice, fer crying out loud - it's much more like Labyrinth, as both feature a girl learning to grow up without quite forgetting the fantasies that made her who she is. The fantasies don't quite forget her, either. Neil Gaiman told a similar tale in the earlier, much-ignored Mirrormask; he seems fascinated by the power struggles between mothers and daughters. But I think that with the enthralling, dark and twisting tale of Coraline he gets his story absolutely right.

Unmissable and hugely imaginative, enter a fascinating fantasy world with Coraline and always, always remember to listen to your cat.

Monsters vs Aliens (2009) Dir. Conrad Vernon & Rod Letterman

2010-06-15T23:19:00.002Z

Movies at the speed of Sky

Just a buncha monsters

Stop me if you've heard this. Because you have. Because we all know the stories, the B-movies are in and around our imaginative experience, and if we haven't ever actually seen Attack ofthe 50-Foot Woman, or the Fly, or Creature from the Black Lagoon, we half-know the plot anyway. This is due in no small part to the efforts of 1980s fanboys/important movie directors, who went all out to make sure this movie genre wasn't lost forever. And Scooby-Doo, obviously. To a big extent, although this was successful, few of them bettered the iconic1950s originals.

In brief, THAT is why we now have Monsters vs Aliens, IN 3D! Except, as this is Sky and 3D tellies in every home are still a fair way off (and counting the minutes...), I only saw it in glorious 2D-o-Matic vision. If a film is restricted to 2D (oh no!) and let's face it, most of them will be, then it had better be able to stand up on the two dimensions it started with, with a likeable script, and the ability to hold my interest with some decent characters, or failing that with something I really haven't seen before. Please note that I felt James' Cameron's Dances With Smurfs severely failed on these counts, and third dimensionally too!

I was glad, then, that while not the deepest animated movie ever made, Monsters vs Aliens has a sugar-rush fuelled, goofy charm which sped it along at a fun, frothy pace. Invoking the goodwill from the old monster movies, it has an evil alien mastermind that the 1950s B-Movies would have sold Marilyn Monroe for, and a plot that sensibly doesn't try to overcomplicate things.

It opens on the wedding of uncertain bride Susan Murphy (Reese Witherspoon) who is about to marry a self-obsessed weatherman. He tells her they can't go to honeymoon in Paris as he has an interview in California, and the next minute she's hit by a meteorite that turns her into a fifty-foot tall Ginormica (see below). Luckily her wedding dress just about grows with her! This is a kid's film, fellas. There's probably an X-rated Italian version out there somewhere...

...has more of a ring to it than 'Susan'!

Anyway, the minute she transforms, destroying the church she was about to get married in, the army show up and whisk her away to an Area 51 type bunker, where other, mostly smaller monsters are also being held. Luckily for her these are also all voiced by famous film and TV stars. Each creature is a cheeky homage to the 1950s and 60s B-genre classics, from the Fly to the Blob!

Has the voice of Arrested Development's Will Arnett

The other monsters seem pretty content with their lot, but they jump at the chance to do some good when evil alien Gallaxhar (Raine Wilson) turns up with his unstoppable giant robot and comes looking for the very element that made Susan into a gigantress. Who will save San Francisco - and the world?!

What unfolds is never wholly unexpected, but still good fun and pretty enough to watch - it was never going to look like Dreamwork's other hit, Kung-Fu Panda, and the Incredibles remains pretty untouchable. The whole film is inherently silly, but that's really the point. Kiefer Sutherland is clearly having a ball as growly, shouty General W.R Monger (geddit?) the guy who babysits the monsters. Susan is nicely underplayed in accordance with her gigantic stature, but the friendly monsters she temas up with are especially good fun. It also knows its limits, and I'm happy to say it doesn't outstay its welcome. There's plenty to see and enjoy while it plays.

This can safely be called a colourful, good-spirited yarn, with a simple message:

'Don't marry that jerk, be a monster!'

The hiliariously monsterific Insectosarus!

Oh, and it's lots better than either Madagascar movie. Just thought that was worth adding. Like, LOTS and LOTS better. Like lots and lots and lots.....less whiny, put it that way. Now, go watch Ratatouille , please.

Sunshine Cleaning (2009) Dir. Christine Jeffs

2010-06-14T22:17:00.005Z

Movies at the Speed of Sky

Offbeat, downbeat, low-key, slow-burning. The list of euphemisms for 'cheap indie flick' go on. These are also frequently accompanied by words like 'massively dull' but I was looking forward to this one, despite missing it on the big screen. Sunshine Cleaning matches all of the above hyphenated-descriptions, only it bypasses 'dull' by a huge margin.

We follow the low-key (see?) lives of two sisters; Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams) is a single mother and an ex-cheerleader who now cleans houses for a living. Norah (Emily Blunt) is a drop-out who can't hold onto a single crappy job and who tells Rose's young son scary stories about the 'Lobster man' when she babysits (funnier than it should be!). They also live near their father, Joe (Alan Arkin), who appears to be a bit of a scam artist, trying to sell dodgy shrimp to restaurants and savoury sweets to candy stores. When Norah loses her waitressing job and the school kicks out Rose's son, it's time for the two sisters to join forces. Encouraged by the cop Rose is having a no-hope affair with, they start working as freelance crime scene cleaners.

They're pretty awful at it, too, and it's a very steep learning curve as this seems to require seriously specialist knowledge. I think most people would probably know not to dump biohazardous human waste in a skip, but apparently not everyone gets that straightaway! Cue embarrassing results.

Rose (Amy Adams) and Norah (Emily Blunt) in one of many arguments

In different hands this could have been a full on, wacky gross-out comedy, possibly starring Seth Rogen (it's only a matter of time, surely). Although there are some spectacularly gruesome parts - the very worst being when Norah accidentally rolls onto a mattress that once contained a very-very dead person - this also gently points out how frequently our lives are touched by death and the importance of the service that the girls provide. It also achieves this without being sickly about it, although the old lady coping with her husband's suicide is a particular heartbreaker. The movie strays into the darker side of death without losing you, or making you wish there'd be zombies, which is what I usually wish would happen when a 'heavy-drama' gets too 'drama-heavy'. Sunshine Cleaning elegantly skirts around this threat, frequently making a good point, but never overdoing it.

The Lorkowski family. L-R Oscar, Rose, Joe and Norah

Yes, that is a very cool Alien painting right behind them.

Another big(ish) reason to love this movie!

Much of this is helped by some spot-on casting. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt make believably anatagonistic sisters, who are constantly pushing at each other's nerves but get on with it all the same. Adams and Blunt possess terrific comic timing, ensuring that events and reactions stay knowing and just the right side of absurd. Alan Arkin has also perfected the role of doting, eccentric grandfather-figure, and the kid (Jason Spevack) is particuarly annoying, but in the way that young kids actually are, rather than the nauseating, Hollywood-cute annoying. A special shout out too for the permanently frowny Mary Lynn-Rajskub (Chloe from 24!) who unwittingly helps Norah to unlock a little more of her grief about their mother's tragic suicide.

This is after all a film about death, and it succeeds in showing the effect it has on people's lives all the time, without descending into sentimental BS or gut-wrenching misery. This is a huge strength, and I feel it's very hard to balance convincingly. It's never mawkish either, it's just sad at times, which is an important difference. I was never entirely sure what would happen to them next, and the lives of this small, screwed-up family unit really drew me in to the end. While there's no way the conclusion will make you punch the air and go 'yesss!' (this isn't Back to the Future...), each character gets to make the most of the hand they're dealt, and there's a smidgen of hope for each of their futures. Death might be an inevitable part of life, but Sunshine Cleaning succeeds in making it more pleasant for those of us left behind.

Worth giving a chance, this is a fun, low-key flick that's

anything but deathly-dull.

Sex and the City 2 (2010) Dir. Michael Patrick King

2010-06-13T12:30:00.003Z

Love it or hate it, see it on a big screen for the full effect.

SPOILER CENTRAL

Carrie Bradshaw returns to the big screen for the second time, bringing a tide of glamour, self-entitlement, a huge wardrobe and slosh of pink drinks and dumbass histrionics with her. She's joined as always by her three best friends, the red-headed Lawyer, the brunette Mom, and blonde Sex-Bomb. You probably already know all about Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha. Each of them is reaching a difficult point in their lives where tough decisions have to be made. Well, mostly. Miranda has a new boss who wants her to shut the hell up, Charlotte finds it tough to be a mother. Samantha is fighting the menopause with every pill and cream she can lay her mitts on. As for Carrie, she's learning that domestic bliss doesn't entirely match with her self-obsessive nature, or her desire for 'sparkle' with her husband after two years of marriage, "This isn't the relationship I signed up for!" she complains at one point. Her new book also gets a crappy review in the New Yorker. Somewhere a freakishly talented mouse is playing a very small violin...

I can see why people hated it. It's a little overlong, there's a lot of talking and it's shallow - unapologetically. This doesn't mean that they were right to hate all over it. I can just see completely why. This is a gleefully silly film, attempting to tackle 'issues' about the Middle East, of all things, in the fluffiest of ways, to the extent that even South Park seems PC. It's flashy, it's gleefully wrapped up in its fantasy world and you know what? I think it works. As long as you add several pinches of salt, naturally. It should come with a huge disclaimer that, at no point should men ever believe all women think this way, although on the surface it may appear so. It's certainly no worse a set of role models for 'girls' than, say, gangster movies are for men. It's about something, in its own way, just without any car chases and diappointingly few explosions. In some ways its treatment of the Middle East really is little different from the way Indiana Jones casually swings through the market place in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's also pleasantly humanist, and plays gently against expectations when Carrie leaves her passport in the souk, only to get it back with no trouble whatsoever from the nice shopkeeper. And she leaves money for the nice butler to go and see his wife, too. It does seem to hold back most of its judgement for the hypocrites among the rich Arabs themselves, and I think they can probably survive it.

Face it. You know what you've signed up for when Liza Minelli bursts on stage at the most unexpected gay wedding in the world. It's hard not to love her performing Beyonce's 'Put a ring on it' song and my god, she can move! Following the diva-laden intro, there are some tense little arguments between Carrie and her husband sparked by his desire to put a big flatscreen TV in the bedroom. I can see why - there's nothing less sexy than having the Deadliest Catch playing on the TV all the time, which they do here, a lot. As a sign of progress, Carrie at least talks to Big in this film, taking the time to ask him why he's annoyed, why he thought an idea of his was good, and how they both compromise one way or another. Although this is realistic, she also seems whiny, but my sympathies were with Big, who actually seems to work for a living. I'm still not entirely sure what Carrie does all day, except take ten minutes to scrawl an article every few weeks - even if it is for Vogue! Also, Kristen Davis has a heartbreaking moment when her cupcake-filled family life gets too much for her (although not wearing priceless white Valentino to bake in would make her life easier). Miranda also gets to make some positive changes by quitting her job and getting another with little trouble. If only it were that easy! I can appreciate the wish-fulfilment at play here. What else are movies for?

It's a shame, though, that their idea of championing women is so intensely connected to looking a certain way especially past a certain age. For all the show and the film's talk about how tough it is to be a mother, how hard marriage is, how awful the repression of women in Abu Dhabi behind Burkhas actually is, it all comes down to whether blokes think you're hot or not. They have to constantly prove this, especially Samantha. The effort they must take is sort of criticsed, but at no point is it suggested that there's any other choice. That is the message here, and it's every bit as odd as the hypocrisies of Abu Dhabi. (Incidentally, did someone pass a law that Omid Djalli MUST be the friendly, pushy Middle East guy every time that role is required? I like him, but even so, every single time?) this mars it a little. There are some moments when the characters come across as slightly subnormal, too, when it come to commen sense. Carrie seriously overreacts to both her bad review and how she handles an accidental kiss with old flame, Aidan. Things go a bit hysterical, and she becomes fully wrapped up in her own little drama. Then again, it's really the unreality that I turned up for. Perhaps this is best seen on a sunny Saturday, when the previous week can be blissfully left behind and you completely forget about the week to come for a few hours.

While this is still a fun, shiny piece of film, I think it will work its finest magic on the big screen, where the beautiful scenery, bigger-than life fashion, and the characters' personal battles can be propely blown out of all proportion. One of the biggest criticisms levelled at SATC2 was that it wasn't a more New York based movie, considering that the city was the show's biggest selling point. The sequel even opens on that Alicia Keys 'Empire State of Mind' song that's been everywhere this year with lots of loving shots of New York, but we're hardly there at all. I'm sure the show really does love New York, but like its characters, and perhaps just like us, it's good to have a rest from it all once in a while, and just enjoy the glitter until reality becomes a little more appealing.

This is a great escape, much more fun than the first movie and held together by a stronger story. I'm very glad I saw it, but won't be rushing out to get the DVDBlu-Ray at all.

Finally, please give the blokes a break and don't drag them in if they, honestly, can't stand the show or Sarah Jessica Parker. They'll only make mean jokes about her to their mates!

Movie day

2010-06-12T23:41:00.001Z

Ok, this is more of a trailer for the full thing, coming later today.

I've spent the whole of this gloriously sunny Saturday watching films - and this has been a good day for those both at my local cinema and at home. Yes, there was some sort of football match on today, apaprently England equalised 1:1 with the USA (shameful!) but who need that when you have Sky Anytime and a nearby fish & chip shop, and good friends and lovers around to enjoy this abundance with?

Today started out with Neil Gaiman's exqusitely creepy animation, Coraline, over breakfast.

Next, I met a good friend for a bite of the glittering Sex and the City 2: Revenge of the Shoe People (if only).

Finally, returning home for more colourful animted fun with Monsters vs Aliens, and finally the low-key but likeable Sunshine Cleaning.

As it's way past my bedtime, this will all be covered tomorrow/today/later/soon! So please, check back in the next 24 hours for the full report.

And in the meantime, I'm really looking forward to Inception by Christopher Nolan, and whatever Sky throws at us next week!

Wolfman (2010) Dir. Joe Johnston

2010-06-12T00:30:00.000Z

In a remake of the Universal Studios classic, and with nods to the 1960s remakes, Universal Studios resurrects an old favourite - the Wolfman - up to date. They bring back the Victorian era setting, where an actor, Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro) is told of the brutal death of his brother and returns to the sprawling, rotting family mansion nestled in the English countryside. His bear-like father (Anthony Hopkins) is covering something up, and Lawrence is soon (but not soon enough) coming face to face with his family demons and a rotten bloodline. It should be a fast paced, breathless ride that manages to be enthralling, gothic and scary - or at least impressive. Except, it really isn't.

OK, this still from the movie is kind of cool...

Maybe it was partly the XBOX's fault. We legally downloaded this, were very happy when it turned up on our TV, and we didn't go for the HD format, just regular. We ended up getting picture quality similar to overused VHS (the kind you get on inflight on aeroplanes). The Wolfman is a very darkly lit movie that relies on specific illumination at the right parts. Seeing nothing but grainy granules and blurry background faces did not improve our feelings towards it.

That said, there were still plenty of 1980s genre movies that didn't stink despite similar limitations.

Wolfman has no excuse, then, to be a total reeker. It's just not good. It isn't even fun, which even Van-bloody-Helsing managed at first (mainly due to the nebbish monk sidekick but still...). Wolfman entirely fails to draw you in.

Firstly, everyone talks in very low, meaningful voices, but you can't hear them, because the music mix is so bad you've turned it down, and you also soon figured out the characters had nothing interesting to say anyway.

Secondly, the plot sprawls everywhere, and it's mostly people standing still and talking quietly in dark rooms about the moon's power, or having meaningless flashbacks, or pondering very slowly about, like, werewolves or their dinner plans, or somthing.

Thirdly, I like to think that even those born in 1990 will have seen American Werewolf in London by now. Wolfman even has the same effects guy (mighty Rick Baker) as American Werewolf, for crying out loud. This puts it up against some pretty knowing viewers who just can't phsycially take po-faced exposition anymore. We've seen the Howling, Wolfen, Wolf, and, er, Underworld. Ok, Underworld was crap too, but the point is, this takes itself far too seriously to be enjoyable, and it's not scary enough, and certainly not smart enough, to get away with being an actual horror film.

Instead it's an empty-headed, turgid mess, which makes the Werewolf episode in season one of New Who seem incredibly grown up. It doesn't have to be bursting with gags or witty nine year-olds spouting obnoxious one-liners or anything, but the recent version of Sherlock Holmes proved that period drama can't use that stifled setting as an excuse to be boring. Pacing is important - and here most scenes meandered with no real purpose, and the dialogue wobbled flaccidly and the characters felt no deeper than their stuck-on Victorian moustaches.

Benicio del Toro, Emily Blunt and Anthony Hopkins

Even so, there are a few decent sequences, something that make fans of fresher minds who have, not patience, but the ability to only remember the best parts of this mess. Funnily enough, this only happens when we get to Victorian era London, where the hapless Wolfman is first tortured to 'restore' his sanity by the sinister asylum boss, and then escapes and runs rampant through the filthy city streets. This and a freaky dream sequence triggered by the torture was actually savagely effective. No zombie Nazis turned up, sadly, but you can't have everything...

It was also a lot gorier than I was expecting, with very little nudity to balance it out. Yes, I'm comparing it to American Werewolf again. But even I won't begrudge Wolf Man its top quality decapitation scenes!

Lawrence Talbot wakes up on the family estate after a bad night out...

It's just a shame the rest of it is so tepid, and a waste of should-be greater story and its cast. As the 'Puerto Rican werewolf in London' (yep, he is Puerto Rican, checked), Benicio Del Toro manages to look shockingly like the young and pretty Oliver Reed from the old Hammer Horror movies, but we learn far too little about his character to ever warm to him. He's very passive, too. Being one of the main culprits of talking very quietly and standing still syndrome didn't help. Anthony Hopkins also mumbles his way through his mental, yet deathly dull lines, and I think he's only here so he can challenge Malcolm MacDowell in an off-screen 'who has the whitest matching hair and beard' competition.(Anthony's winning, btw). Emily Blunt mainly gets to look sad, and worried, and has a tiny scene where she plays skimming stones with Talbot, and gets to do some running away near the end.

So, right after this, I had to watch American Werewolf in London again. Forget remaking the classics, studios, and do something semi-original again! Send in John Landis!

Or I'm sending in the zombie Nazis.....

The Uninvited (2009) Dir. The Guard Brothers (yes, really)

2010-06-10T23:22:00.003Z

Movies at the speed of Sky.

True, this is another remake of an Asian horror, but the movies American filmmakers are ~~ripping~~ riffing off these days tend to be Korean rather than Japanese. However, these are still often just films with a twist, and the test is really how hard you fall for it. Or how far you WANT to fall for it. The best kind of films in this genre can be like a Columbo episode, where even though you know something's up, and exactly who did it, there's no harm in seeing how it all unravels. This is even more important when it's a remake - and I had seen the original Two Sisters film a few years ago, but this looked like a well made effort and I gave it a chance.

BIG HONKING SPOILERS

It's definitely NOT as terrifying as the original, that's the first important point. The buttoned down repression in the original film, the smart outfits and the unspoken fear, and the alien culture that still mirrored a 1930s English-set period drama, combined to give me the creeps throughout. The Uninvited does pretty well, considering, and looks gorgeous. People underestimate the value of movies looking sumptuous. The two teenage leads - tall, tough Alex (Arielle Kebbel) and mousy, big-eyed Anna (Emily Browning) are convincing siblings, and Emily Browning quietly inhabits the screen as the vulnerable, slightly insane centre of the film. Her look matches the buttoned-down, cutely demure look that the Korean version also used to full advantage in their lead actress.

The story opens on Anna's release after ten months in a psychiatric unit. She's a damaged young girl with some traumatic events to work through, but her psychiatrist seems happy that she's all cured, despite her freaky dreams. Now she's allowed to return to her plush home to live with her father and sister, a huge seaside house that people only seem able to afford inhorror movies. We learn that her ailing mother died in a huge explosion in the boat house where she was being looked after. Now the sisters have to contend with blond, perky Rachel, a potentially evil stepmother. I was very pleased to see that she was played by Elizabeth Banks (Scrubs, Zack & Mirri Do A Porno) who really can play 'nice' with a very sharp centre.

Anna and Alex's suspicions about Rachel grow worse, reaching a crux when a boy who may hold the key to the night when her mother died turns up dead in the water. Anna appears to be getting psychic visions of what really happened to those who died around her. She must act to save herself and her sister before evil Rachel kills them both!

Except, Anna's totally, frog-jugglingly insane. Fans of the genre might have already picked up on this about ten minutes in - a good thing to watch out for is the 'person protagonist talks to, but everyone else avoids eye contact with' scene. So, think the 6th Sense. Sort of. Anna is working through her guilt, perhaps, but it eventually turns deadly and I think they sell this twist pretty well. This turnaround is also way more explosive and less convoluted than the original, but I liked this as it meant I really hadn't seen it before. In other movies, yes, but I wasn't sure word for word here. And OK, I'm kind of fond of films that pull off the 'unreliable witness' properly, and if you enjoy the ride there you won't be too disappointed. Trying to fit together exactly when she started to Norman Bates her brain may cause a mild headache, though.

If you're sick to death of twists, then you might still hate this, but I think this little American-flavoured wannabe actually does pretty well. However, I would still recommend you put on the night-light and watch the original, too. Maybe watch it first? I promise you, though, that the 'door opening in bedroom scene' is terrifying in either incarnation!

Overall, it's worth a look....

Dark Season Part 2 - Episodes 4-6

2010-06-09T22:56:00.013Z

School was never this exciting. Or as pastel coloured. This part is going to be more of a summary, as I think I covered a lot of my thoughts on the show in part one. The schoolkid's uniforms of pastel shades (ugh) stuck around for part two of Russell T Davis's BBC children's drama.We're back at ~~Sunnydale~~ the any-town UK comprehensive, where already evil is afoot. A mysterious lady (Blake 7's Jacqueline Pearce) with a fondness for jumpsuits and turbans tells her 'friend', Inga, that Behemoth is about to rise. So who or what is it?

Miss Pendragon and her assistant, Inga, look forward to raising Behemoth.

It's a Monday morning, and the 'adventuresome three' (as they were nearly called) are spying on the dig that's cropped up on their school grounds since Friday. Marcie explains she has a distrust of signs that say 'out of bounds' as "they never tell you why". True, it's not as clear as 'beware of the dog', I suppose.

The Marcie-gang (or not, okok) are suspicious of the dig on school grounds.

Marcie soon sniffs out that the wannabe Time Team are a bunch of phonies, and starts some digging of her own. Tom also points out they're all blond(e) haired, which spells out that they're all Nazis even before it's confirmed a while later. Marcie manages to sneak behind the scenes to overhear something underground calling out, just as the whole site starts to explode! "Wow" indeed.

Marcie listens in on Behemoth's bad dreams

The Adolf-loving Time Team cause an explosion on site!

The Nazis try to evacuate the site of school children but a young chap called Luke, who Pendragon is very creepily protective of, tumbles into the trench and breaks his arm. Pendragon screams at him for being stupid, and the poor lamb is hauled off to hospital by the only teacher who grudgingly listens to Marcie at all, the wonderful Miss Maitland (Brigit Forsyth). Reet (Kate Winslet) tags along to "ask good questions" and learns that the big dig is indeed a cover for something more sinister.

Meanwhile, Marcie and Tom investigate the site, and after a quick speech about keeping out of trouble and never drawing attention to yourself, Marcie darts into the trench, bringing Tom with her. Tom is less than thrilled at being stuck in a deep hole, being chased by angry Nazis. Then Tom fulfills the role that the hapless 'Luke' was meant to have filled (by being untouched, no broken bones and, er, other things like that) and opens the big, heavyily sealed door by simply putting his hands on it. Actually, why it's so important he's 'pure' is never fully explained. Going by how magnificently insane Miss Pendragon is, it's probably entirely aesthetical. Anyway, Tom and Marcie head on into the darkness he uncovered.

Marcie and Tom go deeper underground, chased by some pissed off Nazis

There's a nice gag about 'finding the light switch' as Marcie proves it isn't a Celtic Tomb at all, but a secret research labouratory! They follow a green tube, which the Nazis call the 'lifeline', but for what? Kate Winslet - Reet - and Miss Maitland sneak back onto the site as well. Maitland's worried about the supposed gas leak, but Reet points out the lack of any gas company personnel, or vans. She makes a valid point. Underground, the Nazis and Miss Pendragon have caught up with our heroes and Marcie "the brains" makes her escape into an air vent as they capture Tom. Marcie got her hands on some top secret paperwork before she legged it, and she at recognises she's a "cliché" as she hides in the vents and reads the plans by torchlight. Whatever is buried here is named as BHM - an AI machine. Well, it's a very angry TARDIS, anyway, as they uncover Behemoth itself!

Behemoth. Big, angry TARDIS, then. Cool set, though.

Miss Pendragon pontificates for a while, and Tom is appropriately sarcastic about it. Although he really pisses her off - and she finally notices his hair might just be dyed (naah, really?) she's still determined to unleash her mechanical monster of destruction by putting him in the driver's seat, because he's "the chosen one". He reacts by shoving her into the waiting chair, which promptly seals her in. It's a bit like Hansel and Gretel where the witch gets shoved into the oven!

Pendragon ends up in Behemoth's waiting arms

We have a moment to enjoy Jacqueline Pearce's awesomely red nail polish and then Behemoth starts to rise. Before it completely takes her over, Pendragon is exctied that the 'Leader' will soon see the sacrifice she has made. Who's this 'leader' then? Who else?

Eldritch returns!

The eeeeeevil Mr Eldritch returns, and he's bought himself some new sunglasses!

He arrives at the moment the Behemoth breaks out through the school stage, and it opens up, making me think of Hi-Fi's and mega sound systems on beaches. It's pretty huge, actually. Mrs Maitland is horrified and tries to release Pendragon, but this is a bad idea.

Poor Miss Maitland gets zapped by Behemoth.

As Eldritch gloats, Tom and Reet join forces underground and start to sabotage the Behemoth's wires, which just causes it's defence to come crashing down. This locks Reet behind a vacuum sealed door! Tom doesn't know what to do. As things go crazy, the Nazis extract Pendragon (she is NOT happy) but then Behemoth's lasers seal up doors, windows and, er, light switches. Turns out, Behemoth is a very confused Artificial Intelligence that's in control of half the world's deadliest weapons. Like a British Skynet.

Behemoth requests orders and says that either Eldritch or Marcie will instruct it. Cue a long, inolved agrument where Marcie uses her inner-Doctor Who logic to confound Eldritch! She convinces it, in a roundabout way, that free will is what matters and that Behemoth is too smart to kill the 'stupid people', who according to Eldritch really wanted their own destruction. Behemoth chooses not to destroy humanity and give him his 'Chaos!'. Disappointed, Eldritch elects to take it for himself.

This isn't really what Marcie had in mind. Eldritch's freaky mind appears to dominate Behemoth, and Marcie pleads with the computer to let down its defences and destroy itself rather than let Eldritch destroy mankind. It does as she says, opening its defences again with a noise that sounds like a scene from Alien (the bit where it gets Captain Dallas in the air vents!). This releases Reet, and she and Tom escape from the tunnels, but Mrs Maitland has been spurred into action and uses a digger to attack the dig site!

Mrs Maitland turns temporary anarchist!

Water and explosions seem to put a stop to Eldritch's ambitions, he soon disapears, although we don't actually see him go. Pendragon runs in and takes his place as Behemoth disappears back underground. There are more magnificent sci-fi sound effects as it descends back into its now deeply flooded tomb.

Pendragon sinks into the deep, finally one with her baby, Behemoth

So, the three children gather around the trench for the last time, intending to stay out of the way of the police. Marcie knows Behemoth killed itself and calls it a "good machine in a bad world". She also doesn't think they've seen the last of Eldritch, who she defines as "the worst of all bad men". But, for now, the three of them are simply "marvellous".

Tom, Reet and Marcy ponder the demise of the monstrous machine.

And it was mostly good fun, although again there were far too many speeches, rather than things really happening. It did have more of a point this time, and things made more sense, overall. The dialogue remains mostly witty, poor Kate Winslet is still stuck in the world's least flattering pair of lilac jeans, and the most appropriate place for evil to gather is still.....your school!

Road to L (2007) - Lovecraft flop

2010-06-08T22:54:00.001Z

With courier font, you always know it's 'keeping it real'

Keeping things 'real' on film is an overrated objective. Often, the result is shoddy camerawork, shaky and badly framed, creating a situation that's hard to watch and the combination of this plus haphazard sound and poor acting can turn it into something truly unbearable. The Blair Witch Project (1999) stands as the starting point for a lot of the 'real life' found-footage horror movies that have come since, although its mainly descended from the 1970s 'Cannibal Holocaust'. The premise is simple enough. Get a small bunch of young filmmakers together, each of varying degrees of obnoxiousness, and get them lost in a hostile landscape which they originally thought was beneath them or at least ordinary. Film every step and stand back to enjoy the results. The Road to L's decision to translate this to the H P Lovecraft Mythos caught my attention at once.

The setuo is typical of this little subgenre - the film crew have arrived in Italy to investigate rumour s that HP Lovecraft, who supposedly never left the United States, came to Italy in 1926 and was inspired by what he found to write his more notable scary stories. The concept seemed to be reaching, frankly, but the Italian angle made a nice twist on the usual Cthulhu tale setup, and the trailer on youtube honestly made the film appear to be worth a look.

The trailer wasn't so bad, though, but don't be fooled - they all deserve to die and there's no evidence they do. I miss 1980s special effects.

Well, I've looked. Stuart Gordon has very little to worry about. The guys behind Cloverfield should just, like, get on with a decent sequel already, And what are those Blair Witch guys doing now (or the Blair With herself, for that matter?) Where Road to L slips up is that we have no one we like, no one to follow, it's embarassingly amateur. It doesn't have the authentic punch of Blair Witch, where the actors were honestly scared out of their minds. Stuart Gordon gets Lovecraft whilst being deliciously irreverant, ensuring a modern kick to his films that keep them weird but amusing. Cloverfield made amateur look easy, with a realistic, colossal beast rampaging past screaming New Yorkers. To paraphrase Dolly Parton - it takes a lot of work to look that cheap. Or a helluva lot more work not to.

Road to L, unfortunately, is just a slog through some backwaters of Italy, and to give it its due, there are points where it started to get very creepy. This just makes it's failure more frustrating. There's a scene where the increasingly upset, confused and bored filmmakers wander around some abandoned buildings, and there's a HUGE argument about who goes into the building to find where the weird singing is coming from, and eventually 'Roberto' the whiny leader, wanders into it and then....nothing happens, they do something else, it's literally as though they skipped a scene. Similarly, an earlier sequence where all of them wander down into a tunnel where they find dead fish and hear a scuffling noise end with them running way and that's it. OK, is wasn't exactly expecting The Descent (OK, I totally was, it's a much better Lovecraftian-style film), but there's a sense of these great setups just being wasted, there's no build up, no wow factor, to any of it.

OMFG, is there something out there? Let's get there just seconds

too late to see anything interesting....

Cutting away from the nasty at the last minute works when reading Lovercraft because those were the times, and his writing is superbly chilling. It's also occasionally overwrought, but that's sort of the point. The reason this 'shy' approach generally fails in modern films is that we want to see SOMETHING when we're led towards it. This is not a hard and fast rule, but in this case - I was watching with no desire to see any of them survive, frankly - I think a little carnage towards the end might have helped enormously!

What we get, after an hour and twenty minutes of putting up with these morons, is this:

OK, it could easily be one of the fish-people that the film pretends inspired Lovecraft's writing. It appears at the very end in the video footage of a missing - presumed dead (or now a fish) student's videotape, and the film makers find it just as they're totally lost, isolated and woried they might never leave the Italian wetlands. But going 'OMFG, there really ARE fish people', which seemed pretty clear from the start, and hinting that there could be one out there....isn't enough. Not when the film is presented by the guy IN the film, for a starter, so he didn't die. Not when there's no footage of anything else happening. All threat and no fish men, and Buffy Did it Better in Go Fish, in 1998! And these ones just seem to want to be left in peace anyway!

So, the potential was there, and it has some very beautiful filmography. The Italian countryside looks incredible, desolate and isolated but oddly serene and sinister.

Sinister waters, some of it looks beautiful, the bulk of it does not.

Of course it's impossible to make Venice look bad (well, except for in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen adaptation, perhaps...) and the scenes in Venice at first made me think this was worth sticking with. I mean, at least it looks a damn sight better than Diary of the Dead, which sucked from the first minute. I'm annoyed, then, that Road to L had a lot of potential, but if you don't care, you don't care. And I really didn't. It tried, but you're better off re-reading Shadow over Innsmouth, or watching the magnificent 'Dagon', by Lovecraft adapatation genius Stuart Gordon, or playing 'Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth' which has the added bonus of being interactive and very fucking scary.

And HP Lovecraft was always, without a doubt, very fucking scary.

Cthulhu is awake! Look busy.

World without a Jack...sort of

2010-06-07T23:15:00.000Z

24 Day 8 - Final ever episode

HERE BE SPOILERS

So, this evening we watched the last ever episode of '24' .

Like so many finales of too many shows, I felt distinctly underwhelmed. Not sad, either, just grateful that the beast was put to sleep after three years beyond really caring. Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) lives, of course, and that was never an issue. It's a pity that by this point there was almost no one else left who mattered, and its staggering plot sank under its own weight and self-loathing. And now it's gone, and Jack waits for his fate in the twilight world between script approvals.

You'd be crazy to think Jack was ever in any danger. There's a movie coming, Dammit. But that's absolutely no excuse. After Jack Bauer's years of struggle, the character ended up with something similar to the final scenes of the Dark Knight. He's on the run from everyone again, but the President was kind enough to give him a small head start to escape through New York's streets, and he even gets to thank Chloe O'Brian, his loyal IT-nerd who is now inexplicably head of CTU, for her faith in him before he leaves. This was a thank you to us as well, the equally loyal viewers, although we've had a lot more cause to doubt the power of Bauer over the last eight 'days'.

Since 24's launch, Jack Bauer gradually altered into a different beast from the family man - albeit a fucking scary one if you crossed him - into a full-fledged 'do whatever it takes' kind of crazy. This included starting prison riots, biting a baddie's neck open with his teeth, and shooting his head of department (RIP Chapelle) in the head. He also had the uncanny knack of getting every cop, or passer by, or soldier he promises to 'protect' or 'get through this' killed before the end of an episode. Still, as Jack faced down threats to the United States of every description, in seasons past the many people he destroyed kind of deserved it. But by the end of Season 8, he truly goes off the deep end.

It began with a crucial peace conference and an unholy alliance between Made-Up-istan, Russia, and the United States is about to be signed off. Only problem is, it's more corrupt than the rotten meat serving as President Logan's brain. The Russian president is responsible for the snipering of Jack's Bauer's last shot at love, the poor, ill-fated Renee Walker (Anne Wersching). Even after a few hours of watching it, I feel the story should have worked, but it stretched events and characters to their thinnest. Show's weakness lay in its unhealthy dependence on barely explored, novelty plots, rather than truly character driven arcs, and this had become increasingly the case ever since Season 5. Which is a shame, because by the end, all we had to root for was Jack, and he had become the kind of person you should cross the street to avoid, then continue crossing the streets and perhaps ask for a policeman. Then Jack would stab the policeman and demand you tell him what you know, or he'll put a rope down your throat and rip out your stomach lining. True story. Eeep.

In the end it was harder to understand why the writers sonsidered Jack the good guy - do we want to root for a hero who has to perform such brutal acts to get the job done? Was it realistic, was it a warning? As Fox announced the show's cancellation at the end of Season 8, you could wonder (if you've time on your hands) - Have viewers become more squeamish? Is it the liberal-leaning Obama effect? Or had Fox just finally realised that the show needed to rest and become a less stressful (but hopefully as lucrative) film franchise instead? I think the latter is more likely and that many former fans breathed a sigh of relief. I had found watching it a strange duty, wanting to know what happened whilst simultaneously not caring very much at all. The Season 8 characters were, on the whole, unlikeable and as I watched Season One again at the same time, it was even clearer that 24 needed to ground its characters again. The last time it really managed this was in the brilliant Season Five plot finalé, where the recurring cast worked together with Jack to bring down the despicable President Logan, a character so evil that they actually had the sense to bring him back for a big chuink of Season 8. Then Jack was carted off to China for torture. Then they brought him back and, er, stuff carried on as normal.

While it lasted, though, 24 was serious appointment TV. Absorbed in huge chunks at a time, it was impossible to look away, and the pace - even at its worse - was never less than compelling. I'll be interested in the movie, although I may wait for the DVD. After all, 24 was born on the small screen and brought the popularity for DVD boxsets along with it. We have a lot to thank Jack Bauer for, in this case. Like the X-Files, 24 showed other shows how it's done, only to be surpassed by the likes of Prison Break (can't praise highly enough) and apparently Lost is quite good....(one day, oh yes, I'll actually see it)!

But for now, goodbye Jack. We'll always remember you and occasionally catch up with the old season box sets. And we'll always have the HUNDREDS of youtube parodies, and of all of them I like this one the best. For this, and for so many hours of OTT entertainment that was often so much better than it had any right to be, thank you, Jack Bauer!

Dark Season (BBC 1991) - Part One

2010-06-06T23:28:00.000Z

The early 1990s were a very odd time. The 1980s fashions had devolved into sickly pastel colours and shell-suits, personal computers looked stunted and had no colours, and the end of the millennium was something to fear and use as a launch-pad/excuse for thousands of dodgy sci-fi plots. It was a also a very good time for children’s drama, particularly on the BBC.

Out of all this emerged Dark Season, scripted by Russell T Davis. He would go on to rebirth Doctor Who more or less successfully, at least if you trust the viewing figures. Before this he created several children’s dramas with a keen sci-fi and fantasy bent, most of which I remember seeing while I was in my ‘formative’ first year at secondary (or high) school. The very first of these was Dark Season – a cultural collision of Doctor Who and Grange Hill (with more than a little precursor to Buffy about it). It’s also most notable for having Kate Winslet in a major role about six years before Titanic. Intended as a complete series, Dark Season nonetheless divides its six episode run into two very distinct storylines, which I remember seemed extremely odd even then.

In the first three episodes, a mysterious man named Mr Eldritch arrives at a school with a sinister plot involving lots of free computers. Look at his hair and sunglasses – he’s clearly evil!

The Evil Mr Eldritch, boss of Abyss Computers.

Even his car numberplate effectively says 'nemesis'. Evil!

First to sense that something is up is third year student, Marcie (Victoria Lambert), who is to all intents the ‘Doctor’ in the show. She’s very bossy but also extremely perceptive. This girl can sniff out the weird at thirty paces. If she went to Buffy’s Sunnydale it’s very possible she’d explode. She’s aided, mostly, by her loyal friends - red haired Reet (Kate Winslet no less!) and bleach-blond Tom (Ben Chandler) although she also persuades her teacher, Mrs Maitland, that there’s something very “rum”, about Eldritch’s generous gift of free computers for every pupil. He’s like a Satanic Steve Jobs, basically, and he soon sets about testing his evil computers on the smarmy school swot, Olivia. Olivia eagerly joins Eldritch over lunch because of her love for computers, where he performs the test. Marcie is the only one to get properly alarmed when Olivia reappears after the break glowing “like the sun” and breaking light bulbs with her mind’s EMP device. Yes. Her inner EMP device. Marcie and her small band of allies have to act fast before every child takes one of the mind-bending computers home with them.

Olivia goes nuclear after her meeting with Eldritch

& promptly blows up all the lights in the school

Repeat after me, "the lights exploded". Yikes.

It’s never quite clear what Eldritch intends to achieve with this brainwashing beyond ‘chaos’ (well, if it’s good enough for Nylarthotep…). The range of altered Olivia’s powers seem to involve her breaking mirrors, scowling a lot and intimidating First Year students. She’s also even creepier with milky screen-wiped eyes than she was with her huge round glasses. The costume department had some odd ideas, too. Olivia wears tight blue polo-necks and short pleated skirts, along with ill-advised white tights. Freaky.

In a way the odd costuming works. All the other children at the school are kitted out in pastel shades and it makes Eldritch’s dark, shadowy appearance that bit more dramatic. Our three heroes stand out too; Marcie’s frizzy hair and matching jacket, Reet’s bright red hair, Tom’s bleached barnett, give a them really separate identity. Marcie also carries a paddle with her because, she explains to her baffled teacher, you never know when you might be up the creek.

Tom and Reet borrow a computer and

learn a lot more than they bargained for

Eldritch would certainly like to drown her after the mess she makes of his plans, although ultimately it isn’t really Marcie, or her friends’ efforts that thwart him. I’ve noticed something here bugs me about the new Doctor Who very much – characters, especially baddies, mainly just rant about their awesome evil visions without really doing very much. There’s a little too much chat on morality in dark rooms and a heavy reliance on a last second countdown (yes, with big digital clock and everything) which forces the show to wrap everything up with some magic hand waving and button pressing; even if it was a clever switch of mistaken identity, the impact of the ending gets a little swallowed by the general histrionics. This is an unsatisfying ending, which could explain why I couldn’t remember what actually happened in the first story.

Eldritch arrives to give the pastel shaded schoolkids free computers,

and some urgently needed fashion tips.

So, the things I remembered best were the music, which is still awesome, and the argument about the origin of the yoghurt pot in the street, which Marcie uses to stimulate Reet and Tom’s imagination before she spots all the free computers. Actually, Eldritch was at least sensible enough not to give out free computers to a much dodgier school – they’re left lying around in the halls all day and I’m amazed more of them aren’t nicked during school hours as it was. The evil computer threat really feels watered down, today, in the age of Facebook and Norton Anti Virus, but Dark Season still a solid sci-fi romp with a fun script and plenty of explosions! Naturally, the baddie gets away….mainly because Marcie didn’t beat him to death with the canoe paddle. Well, she isn’t Jack Bauer, after all.

Marcie. Not Jack Bauer. Probably the Doctor, though.

The first story arc, episodes 1-3, ends with Marcie sure that there’ll be a “next time” to face Eldritch, and she isn’t wrong. I think she lives on a Hellmouth. Three more episodes follow, and I’ll cover those next time.

Public Enemies (2009) - less than enthralling

2010-06-05T22:53:00.001Z

As a rule, I don't like to review films I haven't watched all the way through, I hardly even like to give my full opinions on them. But, there are definitely some that aren't interesting enough to capture my interest at the specific point in time I tried to watch them, and although I'd been looking forward to seeing it at last, Public Enemies has become one of those 'watch later, if at all' flicks.

I stuck with it for about 45 minutes, but nothing about it really stuck with me. There's a perfectly clear story in there - John Dilligner (Johnny Depp) and some parts of his gang make a daring prison escape (eat your heart out Michael Scofield) and he's soon on the run from Melvin Purvis, Christan Bale's sharp-shooting lawman. Dillinger continues robbing banks and tries not to piss off the public, as he's hiding in plain sight amongst the finer restaruants of 1930s Chicago. He meets Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), a coat check girl, and she soon joins him on the run. And that's as far as I got. It was disjointed, events happened at a great distance and made it hard to give a damn what happened next. What I saw was very uninvolving. Maybe I'll try again later in the week, but there's far too much to read and do already.

So...

We eventually watched the 1999 Thomas Crown Affair instead. I hadn't seen this before either. It's a slick affair from the director of Die Hard; a twisting, steamy story of rich men and art forgeries, and the investigations of one determined woman (Renee Russo) who can't quite resist Pierce Brosnan at his James Bond peak. I actually prefer how Brosnan appears in the 2000s, now he's a little more weathered and allowed to cut loose more in his latest films. In TCA he's a sneakier, smugger version of Bond, albeit with some seriously good taste in art. Gorgeous paintings and sculptures litter the screen. Part love story, part Ocean's 11, it delivers its killer ending with serious panache. The worst thing about it was the terribly distracting soundtrack, which through no fault of the film has been massively devalued by some bad adverts.

Tomorrow, I took a long, hard look at the early 1990s children's BBC production of Dark Season on DVD.

It's too hot for TV - plus The Thing is still COOL

2010-06-04T22:42:00.001Z

Literally. The weather in England has become too hot for our telly and now the damn thing won't work, which deprives me of Sky and all the new movies - mainly Public Enemies - which I haven't seen yet, but kind of want to. This is because our Hitachi's little silver box has a loose wire, making it a moody SOB that needs some TLC. Soon, hopefully, as a sporadic TV is just no good - how can I veg out and be distracted by 30 Rock repeats otherwise?

Anyway, the flat is also almost too stuffy to write or even read in, and all I've been able to eat for the whole of today is ice cream and fish and chips. I think my stomach wants to be on holiday by the sea even more than I do! Also,my digestive system is at a crawl. zzzzz. Heat sucks. Need good old British raaaaain. But not a return to the snow of February this year. The snow that lasted longer than a week was a pain in the ass. Now I'd like just a little of it to take the heat out of the air. As this seems unlikely (until the inevitable thunderstorm/power cut followed by soggy spider invasion) I've made do with a very cool movie instead. And a bottle of Evian.

Last night I watched the Thing on glorious Blu Ray, via the PS3. which helped me to cope a little bit with the overheating. Yay, Kurt Russell's beard/shades and silly hat. It's a beautiful movie that John Carpenter swiped straight from the soul of H P Lovecraft - if you haven't seen it yet, I can't recommend it highly enough. The basic plot involves a small group of disparate scientists/stoners/50s throwbacks who are about to start their time of isolation in their frozen reasearch station, only for something otherworldly to come knocking and bodysnatching. The Arctic environment is as lethal as the shape-shifting monster that targets them, and the Blu Ray conversion's main strengths are the extra detail in the Thing's oozing, altering shapes, and the pinpricks of light now clearly visible in everybody's increasingly paranoid, bloodshot eyes. Flames also look incredibly good. The Thing is timeless, and it helps that the monster transformation effects aren't soulless early CGI but real physical effects that, by and large, still impress today because they're so goddamn weird. The snow is also, like, totally pretty in the conversion, just what I needed. The temperature plummets still further, even in the stuffiest of rooms thanks to Ennio Morricone's chilling score - even if at times it's strongly reminiscent of Alien, which I believe is partly due to John Carpenter scoring the rest of the movie after Morricone did its distinctive 'thud thud' parts.

That cooled me down yesterday. Tonight, though, we mainly watched Avatar: The Legend of Aang/The Last Airbender (depends on which Region DVD you watch) season one. Great show, too much fire for this weather, but I'll go into more detail about it later as a) we finally have all three season in UK format in the house and b) M Night Shylaman has made a movie of it - except that it's called 'The Last Airbender' because James Cameron was afraid that a decent cartoon's name would possibly effect his sales of his massive Dances with Smurfs flick, which has just crossed the $Billion marker for Blu Ray sales. Gee, thanks Mr Cameron, Sir.

Here's hoping it cool enough tomorrow to review Dark Season, otherwise you might only be getting a review of the multiple cool showers required to keep temperature at bearable levels, instead of a lengthy rundown (with screengrabs!) on early 1990s childrens drama. Lucky you!

The Road – phenomenon – WHY?

2010-06-03T18:19:00.002Z

The Road – phenomenon – WHY?

OK, what the hell is the point of the Road?

A man and boy walk through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, headed for the Southern Coast where it’s possible they might live a few years longer. In theory this is a decent story, but this tale seems seriously overrated.

It’s immensely pretentious, it’s depressing, it’s impersonal, it’s everything an apocalypse actually probably IS, which is why people tend to write vampires, insane bikers or zombies somewhere into the mix instead. Because, let’s face it, the truth really is that the end of the world WOULD SUCK. So, my reactions to the various versions of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road go like this:

SPOILERS

Book – Argh. Learn to punctuate. Give characters actual names. Beautiful desolation and endless despair is only interesting the first thirty times. We want a story, not a prize-winning whine fest! I have the distinct impression that this is loved by people who only read ‘literature’ and have therefore never even sniffed the cover of ‘I am Legend’. Every time there’s an interesting bit, it’s swallowed up by the ‘and then we walked some more and it was grey and we are hungry’ monotony. Yes, it’s prettily written but you only get to learn the tiniest of details about the unnamed characters, and nothing about the cause of apocalypse. The best sorts of apocalypse stories seem to have protagonists who actually seize the reins of their disasters and get on with solving, or improving their lot. There’s none of that here. Yes, I prefer zombies, but this is just deathly dull self-pity. Oh, and learn to bloody punctuate. Can’t stress that enough here.

Film – Yay! Viggo Mortenson’s naked butt! Yay! Cannibals and a chase scene! Boo, cop-out ending where nothing actually makes sense, and the kid doesn’t die, but Viggo does. At least that guy from Memento has turned up with a ready-made family, for some reason that seems distinctly unlikely. I liked Viggio being awesome and constantly threatening to shoot a small child in the head to spare him the misery of cannibal death. Sniffle. The world appears far more alive than it does in the book, and it looks beautiful. It’s shame that there’s not much background more built upon, especially why Charlize Theron offs herself despite them being quite comfy where they were, (there’s a threat of imminent death and rape that doesn’t seem immediately likely given how long they must have been hiding in their place). Why go on the Road at all? So sad. The end.

And yet, despite being appalled by the book, I watched the film, willingly – now why is that? I think I’m trying to compensate for the lack of anything actually happening, it’s a good stimulus to the imagination which then fills in the gaps. If you want to feel better about your lot, I suppose this is the one to watch (although Day of the Dead beats that, too)! A hopeless survival thriller is not particularly interesting, despite some excellent acting.

The ending still feels tacked on, though, and why on earth would they leave the food bunker of life (sic)? Dawn of the Dead (1970s) dealt with that idea a lot more effectively. I don’t want OTT upbeat, but I do want a storyline that goes somewhere, not down-down-unlikely-upbeat-ending-stop. Where’s the shock, the knife in your heart at its climax? Is the boy hallucinating the final family? Conjecture only gets you so far.

So, it leaves me irritated. That can’t be good but it does provide a talking point. The film is a great improvement on the book, but only just, and I think the film loses some of the ambiguity that made the novel a triumph of reader imagination over content. This can’t be the only post-apocalyptic novel out there worthy of note, and at the very least it has annoyed me enough to go and look for something better. Faint praise suitably applied, there. The film is worth a look at least, and thankfully the book’s an extremely short, easy read.

Mitchell and Webb pinpoint the real experience of living in a post-apocalyptic future!

Going Postal - Discworld on Sky

2010-06-02T22:53:00.000Z

L-R Characters:

City Patrician Vetinari, reporter Miss Cripslock, Moist von Lipwig,

Drumknott, Adora Dearheart and the friendly Golem Mr Pump.

I knew it was possible. Sky has actually produced a watchable Discworld film!

In all fairness, the Hogfather two years ago wasn’t entirely unwatchable, with a decent cast and spirit of Christmas allowing it some real goodwill. No, the adaptation that stunk to high heaven, and took me no less than fifteen attempts to get through, was the Colour Of Magic in 2009, which ensured that any future Sky produced Discworld action would have to be approached very carefully indeed.

My first concern was the way the advertising seemed to avoid all possible mention of the date it was actually being released. I think it only became confirmed as ‘29th May 2010’ about a week prior to release. It had been slightly oversold, I thought, having grown sick to death of the trailer promising it would be ‘delivered soon’. It seemed it could be fun, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up.

So this really was a triumph of low expectations. Going Postal, starring the likeable Richard Coyle, popped up at last on the second May Bank Holiday and succeeded in being not entirely awful.

All right, I’m damning with faint praise here. Actually I enjoyed it a great deal. I think I’m still bitter that David Jason was horrendously miscast as cowardly wizard, Rincewind, in the last effort. Ugh. Colour of Magic was turgid and dull, a lifeless incarnation of what’s meant to be a vivid, bustling and OTT fantasy world. I think they’ve learned a great deal from previous experience, and in Going Postal they might even be starting to get it. It could be the change in director, or the cheaper location shoot, but something starts working very well.

The first good sign is the casting of Richard Coyle, perhaps still best known to all of us a ‘that weird guy from Coupling’. Here’s he’s finally been given a role that fully unleashes his peculiar brand of manic charisma. He plays the uniquely named Moist von Lipwig, a no good conman who never strictly intends to do any harm with his forgeries and tricks, but who eventually learns he may have wrecked a lot more than his own life in the process. I’ve just realised that sounds like Iron Man’s Tony Stark – but it’s a great character arc! When we meet Moist he’s just been caught by Sgt (and werewolf) Angua (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) of the City Watch, and his chances look dim as he’s about to be hanged by the world’s nicest executioner.

However, the Machiavellian Patrician of Ankh-Morpok, has far worse fate in store for Mr Lipwig. He puts Moist in charge of the almost defunct Post Office! Although Lipwig initially attempts to escape from his new role, a single-minded golem for hire, called Mr Pump, hauls him back and Moist finally has to deal with rooms full of undelivered mail, the ancient and the insane remaining two-person work force, and the crossbow bolts of his possible beloved, the gothic, golem-dealing Adora Belle Dearheart. Oh, and the last four Postmasters all died in varying degrees of nastiness. Moist may need to use all his guile, and bluster, and luck, to survive.

Mr Pump keeps a glowing red eye on Moist von Lipwig

From this spills a highly enjoyable (and topical) romp, splattered with some priceless innuendo (the Pin Shop scene is a mini masterpiece) with plenty of silliness, but also great pace, some sly wit at its heart and the nerve to be more than a little bit relevant. Alluding to the state of the country’s finances, it brings what could be dismissed as fantasy nonsense right back to ‘reality’. Only this is lots more fun.

In Discworld the Post Office has been all-but wiped out by the competition from the Clacks, a medieval version of the internet. Huge towers broadcast messages in code back and forth across the Disc. However, the production doesn’t demonise the Clacks themselves for their success, instead it highlights the evils of any single communication company getting full monopoly – embodied by the vulture-like Reacher Gilt (David Suchet) who keeps a stranglehold on the increasingly inefficient Clacks service, whilst using murderous tricks to deny any customers the choice to go postal themselves. So basically he’s AOL. It’s the lack of choice that truly narks the city’s fearsome Patrician Vetinari, played with dry class, a dry wit and an even dryer hint of threat by Charles Dance. Vetinari wants a decent communication service so that he can play ‘Thud’, the Discworld equivalent of Chess, with his out-of-town friend. Clacks is coming up severely short and he needs a Postmaster who can survive the night.

So begin the trials of Mr Moist von Lipvig, and time flies like Lipvig’s prestigiously winged post office hat, as we enter a Discworld that dares to be a little less precious and a lot more irreverent about itself. This is a huge strength and any further adaptations would be smart take a similar approach. The cast were enormous fun, too. My particular favourite characters were Tolliver Groat (Andrew Sachs), the nonogarian postman and his pin-obsessed assistant, Stanley Howler (Ian Bonar). Stanley’s character is a delight, being a young man worryingly obsessive about collecting pins of every kind, and the less said when stamps are finally invented the better. Stanley has exactly the right amount of nervous nebbish about him, and he’s the perfect Discworld character. I’m also happy to see that Andrew Sachs has lost none of his ability to wring the last bit of humour from his role as a doddering, eccentrically dedicated postman.

The Brilliant pin-obsessive, Stanley!

While still not the most perfect version of a Discworld story, as I’m still waiting for the Aardman animation version of that, this is a brighter, smarter production that I reckon Terry Pratchett can be truly pleased with. Speaking for myself at least, this was a great deal of fun and highly recommended as a marvellous bit of intelligent nonsense.

Kicking the Hobbit

2010-06-01T20:52:00.002Z

Hopeful news

Kicking the Hobbit

Guillermo Del Toro is off The Hobbit.

Does this mean he’ll have time to do both the third Hellboy sequel and, even more excitingly for us Lovecraft ~~fanatics crazies~~ fans, he might now get to the production of Mountains of Madness, the long-awaited H P Lovecraft adaptation!

Although I’m very sorry he won’t get to do his unique spin on Middle Earth, I am also relieved that he will now be free to carry on with his own incredible vision. I wouldn’t want him tied for more than six years, either. Lord of the Rings has had three movies and gazillion dollars spent on it, and I enjoyed almost every minute of it (although 18 endings was pushing it...)

Rogue (2007) Dir. Greg MaClean

2010-05-31T21:54:00.004Z

Movies at the speed of Sky

You wait all this time for a decent Australian Killer Croc flick and then two turn up at once. Admittedly, there has been a bit of a delay between them on Sky. In 2009 they showed the very respectable Black Water. It was a highly effective, although low budget piece, where a small group of people go into the outback and end up stuck up a tree, trying to avoid being a gigantic croc’s latest meal. Black Water had a tiny cast and a rarely seen beast but built its appeal on some decent characters and very respectable acting talent. The beast wasn’t bad, either.

Now we have Rogue, from the director of the superlative Wolf Creek. This is a bigger budget deal delivering enough scares and plenty of tension to make it a pulp horror classic. Doing this effectively is not as easy as it looks and there are plenty of ways to screw up, but Greg Maclean has a fine handle on the balance of likeable characters, making the most of the awesome and deadly Outback scenery, and he has the added sense to barely show the croc until the last reel. There are a lot of crap CGI reptiles out there – way too many actually - but perhaps they’ve paved the way for the success of this one, which looks gloriously gnarly and convincing even at this scale, where it’s frequently in direct view of the camera. It’s big, and mean, and clearly pissed off.

And it has an attractive cast to try and chew on, although thankfully this avoids the usual slasher movie mix of perky teens. First, the lovely Rahda Mitchell fresh from surviving Silent Hill, plays the plucky tour guide, Kate Ryan, a woman who’s never left the Outback. Michael Vartan (the other hot guy from TV’s Alias) is Pete McKall, an enthusiastic travel writer. There’s also the novelty of seeing Sam Worthington two years before he became best known for playing a 10ft blue alien (Avatar, 2009) and a robot (Terminator: Salvation, 2009). Actually I still have no idea who he is, as to me he usually looks like an action man doll without the little scar to distinguish him. In Rogue he plays an obnoxious local who starts off intimidating the crocodile tourists. The rest of the luckless voyagers include a man with a sad little secret, a snobbish photographer, an uptight couple and an English family. I also have a soft spot for the ballsy Irish lady. Oh, and there’s a cute black and white dog called Kevin. Guess how long the puppy lasts?

So, this motley crew are put together for the long cruise upriver, watching the lethal crocodiles swim past from their boat which seems to ride far too low in the water. We’re shown just how far REAL crocs, let alone massive CGI ones, can leap out of the water when properly motivated. Terrifying. Then one of the tourists spots the tail end of a distress flare upriver, and Kate elects to go and check it out. They mosey into Sacred Ground, which as we all know is a byword for ‘keep the hell out or die horribly!’ Sure enough, they piss off the croc and things get messy.

Considering this comes from the director of the pants-wettingly scary Wolf Creek, a landmark, unflinchingly nasty horror flick, Rogue actually doesn’t get nearly as messy as I’d been expecting. Don’t let that fool you – there’s plenty of tension, heightened because he’s mean enough to give us decent characters with back stories and reasons to live. Don’t worry, there’s also blood, just not a whole lot. You may be pleasantly surprised at how it all unfolds. Mind you, the woman who plays the Mary Ellen character is a dead ringer for Miranda Richardson, which had me confused for the whole movie. I was very disappointed to see it wasn’t her after all!

A few questions, though. Has no one else ever entered the ‘sacred land which the giant croc protects? I suppose they wouldn’t have lasted long enough to warn people if they had, but you’d think someone would have picked up on it even if they do a great job of showing the sheer isolation of their predicament. Also, I really feel the ending needed just a little more of a twist. Sometimes these movies need the possibility of the dragon not being quite dead, if that makes sense. That was one (of several) reason that Creep failed to satisfy, too.

Finally, although comparisons can be made, there’s really no point calling this a Jaws rip-off. EVERYTHING in the ‘evil nature’ genre is a Jaws ripoff! Most ‘evil nature’ films can only be measured whether they’re almost as good, or nowhere near as good at that particular flick, and most overdo the CGI which doesn’t deliver any tension whatsoever. Rogue really borrows from the best, and this is a solid monster flick, which along with Black Water serves the ‘giant croc’ section of horror perfectly. I’d place Rogue slightly higher than Black Water because the Outback photography is gorgeous, truly stunning, and the creature is even more impressive.

Recommended as a fun monster romp that doesn’t disappoint.

The Stone Tape - 1972 (Dir Peter Sasdy) TV movie

2010-05-31T12:35:00.001Z

Wonders of YouTube

The Stone Tape (1972)

It must be because I’m reaching thirty this year. I've felt a real urge to revisit the films and TV shows which I watched when I was a kid. Now of course, there’s a service called YouTube which allows me to fully indulge. You may have heard of it.

It’s been eye opening. Some are still worth watching their entirety, although I soon found that even more are not. Some i might even buy now but the greatest thing about YouTube’s existence is getting to see shows and films that are now mostly deleted or impossible to purchase. Some can now only be found for truly extortionate prices. The unsettling 1972 classic, ‘Stone Tape’ is one of these. I’d heard about it over the years, and I recently tried to find it at the usual places online, but the amount it costs to get hold of it is ridiculous, almost £60 for a second hand DVD copy. So, I confess, I YouTubed, and watched all eleven sections of The Stone Tape in one sitting. I’ve concluded that it definitely would not have been worth spending £60 on, but I would more than happily have paid around £15 for the whole thing (not least because it’s far easier to get screen grabs from a DVD!)

So here’s my reaction to the Stone Tape experience:

SPOILERS

Even the name ‘Stone Tape’ conjures an uneasy conflict between the cold, heavy, solid and ancient stone and a device we consider exclusively modern. Essentially, this is exactly what happens. Ancient menace and modern arrogance, albeit from 1972, end up clashing in a disturbingly delivered way.

Ryan Electronics have recently set up offices and labs in a Victorian stately home called ‘Taskerlands’. Most of its interior has been converted into offices, but one room has been left looking very spooky with bare stone walls and an exposed stone staircase that would have ‘elf & safety’ up in arms. It’s immediately apparent that something odd is lurking in the room, and the builders won’t go in there either. If sci-fi and horror has taught us anything, it’s that all builders and locals have a sixth sense for these kinds of things. Ignore at your peril!

Right away we meet Jill Greely (Jane Asher). She’s a programmer, new to the Ryan team and very sensitive to the strange phenomena that begin almost immediately. In the first few moments of the programme, after the superbly eerie opening sequence, she’s nearly crushed between two huge Ryan Electronics lorries and she only escapes following what may have been a premonition.

Once Jill is inside the room for the first time she hears running footsteps and then the awful sound of a woman screaming in terror. It’s a truly awful noise, upsetting even today by its absolute fear. Then she sees the ghostly figure of a maid screaming at the top of the exposed staircase, and then falling to her death. Jill is very upset but determined to understand the mystery. It soon becomes clear that the stone of the walls themselves have captured this awful event and will replay it forever to those sensitive enough to see and hear it, making a sort of prehistoric recording experience. However, her boss, Peter Brock (Michael Bryant) sees an even greater opportunity – he’s keen to exploit this unconventionally taped image in order to beat the inevitable Japanese domination of world electronics. As you do. He sets about capturing the experience electronically with passionate conviction, and I loved the intricate dialogue as the team worked together and alternated between taking the piss and being scared out of their wits.

As the research team work frantically to get results, it gradually dawns on Brock that the recording come from inside your head and only affects certain people - one team member isn’t affected at all and I can only assume he watched everyone else’s reaction to it with real bafflement. After a harrowing night spent desperately trying to achieve this, listening to the woman’s endlessly repeated screaming, Brock is horrified to learn that the team has actually managed to wipe the ‘recording’ altogether. This completely screws up his dreams of corporate success and gets the research team replaced by his rival’s far more banal washing machine project. There’s an element of the ridiculous as baskets of dirty washing are taken from the sleek Ryan Electronics lorries and up into the grand house, past the now defunct stone tape researchers. But Jill remains obsessed by the stone tape and works hard on her own research, programming day and night until she comes up with a much more terrifying discovery.

There was something far older lurking just underneath the first recording.

She goes back to the room and the monstrous force that attacked the poor maid comes after her, too, portrayed as two eerie red lights that could be eyes, and a dreadful roaring noise that drives her up the same stairs. The maid’s fate is now hers, and her voice is also locked onto the stone tape as the evil comes full circle. Brock makes this horrifying realisation and appears to go mad himself, howling in despair as Jill’s echo screams for help using his name over and over.

This is a brilliantly creepy story, conducted with a great deal of style and decent production values. The great quality of the banter between the characters didn’t hurt either and it seems that cynicism is truly timeless (see also Casablanca and the original Thing movie!) and although the story arc relies on a certain amount of clichéd ‘female intuition’ and curiosity it certainly never reaches Dark Place levels of patronisation. Jill’s driven hunt to uncover the truth actually makes her very interesting, and her empathy for the maid is a sharp and much-needed contrast to the singe-minded, commercial exploitation that the rest of the scientists have in mind. At one point Jill truly hopes that the maid isn’t actually ‘there’, that she’s free despite the recording (meaning her soul and consciousness), and in the end we can only pray that Jill is also released, and not condemned to exist in those last moments of terror for evermore. Given how malevolent the force that killed her was, it’s hard to be very optimistic.

I certainly hope that The Stone Tape gets broadcast again at some point, hopefully at Christmas, like the first time it appeared! It was written by the late Nigel Kneale, who was also responsible for the Quatermass stories and appears to have refused to write for a whole host of important programmes and films (according to Wikipedia), to the extent that it’s hard to see what he actually did, apart from ITV’s Sharpe, following the Stone Tape. By all accounts he perfectly nailed the ‘supernatural meets sci fi’ setup, and the concept has had a lasting effect on everyone from John Carpenter to League of Gentleman’s Mark Gatiss. By all accounts, he was also very hard to impress. He had every right to be difficult to please considering the high quality on display here. What he’d make of the current Doctor Who, not to mention most of the SyFy channel’s product, doesn’t bear thinking about!

If you have even a little concentration span left, the Stone Tape is a true gem and worth seeking out. Just to help you, here is part one (of eleven) below:

A word on Breaking Bad AKA Ode to Hal

2008-11-10T22:10:00.001Z

Malcolm in the Middle finished its glorious run about a year and a half ago. Since then I’ve been very worried about one character in particular. Not any of the kids, not Frankie Muniz (Agent Cody Banks 9?), not even the indomitable Lois, who seems to have found her feet on some show or other (that haven’t caught yet). No, the character – the actor - who held my utmost concern was Hal. Hal the child-in-a-man’s-body. Hal the mildly crazy. Hal the fanatic and fantastical dreamer; who was always going into Stage 2 of his current obsessions with the kind of fervour most of us haven’t felt since we were 9.

And what was going to happen to him after Malcolm made him homeless? He’d already expressed a great gratitude for this opportunity that the show had presented. He WAS the son of Christopher Lloyd, to all intents and puposes – we believed in him thoroughly from his hang-dog face to the pockets of his useless beige ‘Hal Jacket’ – which neither kept him warm nor looked remotely pleasant to wear. He summed up all the broken chances in life. He epitomised all the potential that surely lurks beneath our sorry existence, if only we’d throw open our obsessive streak long enough to let it out. And just like us, Hal got bored and changed his ideas before it could fully express itself. Or, even more frequently, one of the products of his over-productive loins would stuff the idea altogether.

The actor playing Hal pulled this fantastic together with subtlety and just the right amount of middle-class crazy. As I said, after Malcolm ended, I was suddenly aware that he might be bereft, out in the cold, without paycheck or hideous coat to put over his shoulders. I wondered what might just be his next calling, or if he’d ever find anything to show off his talents with quite so much variety and interest. Surely, he was going to get a bit-part on Heroes and that would be it forever?

Well, I was very happy to see this great actor appear in Little Miss Sunshine, playing against type as a smarmy executive-type in a nice jacket! Then, about 6 months later, I gradually became aware of a new show getting advertised on the FX channel on our Sky box.

I had to see the ad fairly frequently, inbetween episodes of Season 5 Wire, and then only when we missed a split second forwarding frantically through the inexplicably LOUD ads. But gradually it sank in. THAT was Hal! Hal had returned!

Or rather, Bryan Cranston. To me he will always, always, be Hal from Malcolm. But Bryan has popped up in what must be one of the most interesting new shows around. Similar to Weeds, I guess, although I haven’t seen that show. Anyway, Breaking Bad promises to be the ultimate ‘one to watch’. (And he won an Emmy!!!!!)

In Breaking Bad, Cranston plays grade school Chemistry teacher Walter White. During the slick, indirect timeline of the first few episodes, we learn that he has a beautiful (and smart) wife, a partially disabled son and a new baby on the way – and that he’s been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. His family are so hardup that he’s working part time at a desk at a crappy car wash – where the boss keeps making him go out to clean the cars too. Walter seems gutless and just as beige as the jacket that he appears to have 86’d from the Malcolm set, to set up THIS character. (ah, who cares, it works…

So he goes to chemo and does as he’s told, right? Wouldn’t you??

However, this is TV Land. In TV Land, characters with HIS sort of news wake up and do something unexpected and decisive about their lives – and Walter White sure as heck doesn’t disappoint. The way it’s handled, however, is nothing short of divine and soon you’ll start to care a heck of a lot about Walter, his family, and the former-student-cum-drug dealer with whom Walter strikes up an unlikely plan.

Yes, Walter is going to show the scary druggy underbelly of New Mexico how you REALLY cook up some high-quality meth. He has leet chemistry skills, and frankly it’s about time he put them to good use. The joy of the show is in taking us through the minute practicalities of deciding to do this – particularly when it turns out that COOKING the meth is the easiest part of the business. The show handles this in a smart, level-headed way, playing it straight whilst allowing the newly alive Walter to hit out at things that we’d all like to do, were we also dying of cancer and wishing for a way to support our beloved families. This keeps things flying along, but there’s also a real, grounded thoughtfulness that gives it a satisfyingly adult flavour.

Breaking Bad also makes great use of its New Mexico location, always suggesting something just nudging towards the spiritual, whilst Walter deals scientifically and logically (sort of) with his mortality. The look it achieves is warm and distinctive, seriously making me consider my holiday plans for next year!

And let’s not let the supporting cast go unsung. First praise has to go to former Deadwood (wife of Seth Bullock!) Anna Gunn, as Walt’s pregnant wife, Skylar. She mostly manages to doge the ‘judgemental wife’ trap – or alternatively the ‘loony woman’ one – which is often just waiting for women in TV Land. Instead she’s a very believable partner for reliable Walter, forming a supportive unit of his family. RJ Mitte is also very impressive as Walter White Jnr, who has cerebal palsey. He’s a refreshing million miles from the boring angst-ridden teens that are sprayed over popular drama. He tries to buy beer underage, of course, but the angst is slop-free.

Best of all is Walt’s reluctant business partner, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). At first a no-hope drop-out with half-assed connections in New Mexico’s underground, he remains on the seedy side of things even as Walt’s influence starts to make him – not a BETTER person – but certainly a slightly smarter one. Sort of. Slowly.

Always surprising and gratifyingly smart, Breaking Bad comes highly recommended. Just like good ol’ Walt, there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. Frankly the VERY GOOD news is that it’s coming back for a 2^nd series in March 2009 (thank you Wikipedia). The BAD news? There are only 7 instalments of season 1 (no thanks to the writer’s strike). However, not a single one is wasted!

The 2^nd Season has a lot to live up to, but I wouldn’t worry. Like cooking a perfect baggie of clear crystal, the best things come to those with a little more patience. And Breaking Bad is probably just as addictive. Maybe. It’s good is all I’m saying.

Meth is Bad, M’kay? I know these things, I’ve seen the Wire…!