The Box Watches

King Kong

2005-12-22T07:21:00.000-08:00

Starring: Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody
Director: Peter Jackson

We know this one.
Boy meets girl. Falls helplessly in love, would die for her.
Only boy is an ape.
A big ass ape.
Now rope in that guy who did the Lord of The Rings movies.
Now let's break it down.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong doesn’t stray too much from the original: Visionary/Lunatic director Carl Denham (Jack Black) shanghai writer Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) and starving actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) into following him to the mythical Skull Island on what turns out to be the most ill-fated location shoot in the history.

The first act, the journey to the island, is merely time for us to discover that character has lives and dreams and personalities and stuff. Frankly, it's dreary stuff. Thank God there's the island.

Time on the island is one long escape scene as our party land and are beset upon by murderous savages, stampeding dinosaurs, giant bugs and a certain 25-storey tall ape. All that experience on Rings (long breathless fight scenes, hordes of CG creatures) frees Jackson's hand as he unleashes the full arsenal of Skull Island's winged, fanged and generally hungry inhabitants on his actors.

And here is where irony enters stage left.

Getting Brody and Watts, good as they are, isn't necessary given how little their characters do - or mean. Kong is by far the most able performer (Andy 'Gollum' Serkis, cornering the motion capture market), with the WETA wizards crafting the most expressive non-speaking CG creature ever created.
Kong also looks a little too much like the Lord of The Rings movies. Everything on the island, the creatures, the cameras angles, have a twin in the Rings movies. Even the savages are human counterparts to the Uruk-Hai.
Though Jackson takes great pains to establish the kinship between Kong and Ann, the parts of the movie that work best are actually the ones devoid of plot i.e. Kong trying to smash T-Rexes, rocks, planes etc. The scenes between Kong and Ann are draggy and consist mostly of longing, doe-eyed stares in slow mo, bloating the movie's running time to a bum-numbing 3 hours. And since so much is invested in the romance between the roaring ape and his screaming blonde, the human love interest is reduced to a prop.
We don't know why Kong and Ann love each other. We don't know why the island savages gave him sacrifices. We only know that he didn't eat them. And everything becomes so laboured, we ultimately don’t give a shit. (One possible reason for the female offerings is hinted at via a slightly worrying but familiar hand-motion, but we can – won't – get into that.)

So is it all crap?
Well, no.

Jack Black’s Carl Denham makes for some interesting viewing. His ambition devolves to desperation and then rutlessness as he tries to salvage something, anything, for his movie as things go spectacularly apeshit. Pity Jack doesn’t quite have the range to make the most of his character’s transformation.

And there is Kong. And the moment he bursts onto screen, every time he beats something to a pulp (the T-Rex battle is one of the most violent, but satisfying fights ever put on screen), this much is obvious: A lot of love went into him.
He is a living, breathing, acting creature.
And every scene he was in, he stole.

Wolf Creek

2005-11-07T00:34:00.000-08:00

Starring: Cassandra Magrath, Kestie Morassi, Nathan Phillips
Director: Greg McLean

There are very few good horror flicks these days.
Even the big budget remakes like Dark Water and The Grudge invariably resort to cheap scare tactics like things suddenly popping up round the corner and the volume cranked up to ear-splitting levels.
And then you don’t want to watch it again cos you know all the gags.
Know this then: you will most likely only want to watch Wolf Creek once.
But not cos it was cheap.

Apparently based on true events (I know, but stay with me) the plot revolves around three backpackers who go on a road trip into the Aussie outback to visit Wolf Creek, a large meteor crater. Surprise, surprise, the hapless trio get stranded.

Thus begins a series of ass-fuckings like you wouldn’t believe. Like you wouldn’t wish on a group of loud-mouthed, obnoxious teens any more than you’d want to have been one of those poor sods had the Blair Witch Project actually been real.

No vagrants left for dead returning to exact revenge. No creatures hiding at the bottom of the lake who’ve been deprived of its diet of human food far too long. Just people. People who want to do bad things to you because they can.

Wolf Creek isn’t just violent. It’s vicious.
Director Greg McLean does wonders with his no-name cast, torturing them – and us – not with fear of the unknown, but the naked terror of certainty. This is a knife, it is sharp and cruel, and it is going to be in you.
He drags out every sadistic act and simple scenes become infinite moments of torture so by the time it happens, you’re pleading for mercy along with the characters.

But most of all, McLean is also unsympathetic. There are no mistakes, there is no stopping the onslaught that befalls the backpackers. Any relief is temporary, and any hope introduced is a cruel joke.
For this is the face of true evil:
When you meet a thing that doesn’t need to show you mercy, why would it stop?

And this gradually becomes the show’s downfall. The violence is so unforgiving, so unrelenting that you flinch too often, making the show physically draining. It’s hard-hitting stuff and you’re beaten into submission.

Eyes open or shut, you’re not likely to watch this again.
But you won’t forget that you did.

Paradise Now

2005-11-06T23:46:00.000-08:00

Starring: Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman, Lubna Azabal
Director: Hany Abu-Assad

Post 9/11, almost every take on terrorism has fallen into two stereotypes: the extremists or the sympathisers. This is the first movie I’ve seen told from the viewpoint of the terrorists themselves.

Paradise Now tells the story of the last 48 hours of two young Palestinian men, childhood friends Saïd (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman). Working dead-end jobs as auto mechanics and barely keeping above the poverty line, the two are informed by a point man for an unnamed Palestinian organization who informs them they have been chosen for a suicide mission to carry out a strike in Tel Aviv. This isn’t 24, so there’s no race to stop them or webs of deceit to unravel. No big setback befalls the two, merely a mix-up in timing and a period of separation when the two are no longer there to reassure each other they’re doing the right thing.

It’s this simple examination of motives – both personal and political – that is the movie’s greatest achievement. No real analysis or conclusion. Just a pause so you can ask yourself “Is this really worth it?”

Hollywood’s grasp on political subjects has always been shaky, first with the Irish, and post 9/11 with the fast and loose interpretation of (invariably) Middle Eastern conflicts. But there’s no posturing here. Saïd and Khaled aren’t religious zealots who’ve been indoctrinated since childhood (Khaled has to read his martyr’s message from a script which he reads in stutters to a video camera).

The film’s clever bit is actually Suha (Lubna Azabal) whose romantic interest in Saïd is a neat way for her to want to stop him going through with the mission. She digs him, so she doesn’t want him to blow himself up so you can buy the stuff she says more easily then if she were some moral idealist with a ‘love all, serve all’ ideology.

The three ultimately represent the full range of viewpoints:
Suha, that there are other alternatives to violence.
Khaled, that uncertainty is not always weakness.
And Saïd, that we all want to believe our lives have some kind of purpose, particularly when we’re called on to give it up.

It’s a simple story in the end.
It’s not that the characters suddenly find morality or remorse.
Merely that everyone wants to live.
It’s all fine and good for someone to die for what he believes in.
Until that someone is you.

Flightplan

2005-09-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

Starring: Jodie Foster, Peter Saarsgard, Sean Bean
In the background: Erika Christensen, Greta Scacchi (lady you have been missing for a while)
Director: Robert Schwentke

Post 9/11, airline security has been obsessed with identifying Red Flags.
The little things that say ‘something’s not right with this picture.’
The signals that say ‘this could be a problem.’

And I just ignored them.
They were there, but I really wanted to believe everything was gonna be ok.

Red Flag #1: The plot
‘Panic Room in the sky’ was the pitch on many of the magazine articles and websites.
If you gotta market one movie by referring to another one, well, it's rarely a great start. Again, my fault. Nobody forced me to go. And it was such cruel, cruel irony that the lady that made the orginal Panic Room good, made this knock-off bad. And I’d never have thunk it. I mean camaaaan, it’s Jodie Foster!

Red Flag #2: The main character
Jodie Foster helped design the super airliner the movie is set in.
Movies where the main character gets trapped in the plane/building/whatever they helped build is usually a bad idea. I’m not gonna go into details, but doesn’t it just fucking worry you that the most well-designed plane in the world has so many trapdoors leading to rather important function like…AVIONICS?!

Red Flag #3: The supporting characters
Let’s see:
Bitchy skeptical flight attendants.
Stoic alright-everybody-there’s-no-need-to-panic British captain.
Stereotypical Middle Eastern dudes who look like they’re gonna hijack the plane.
Stereotypical middle America hicks who hate said Middle Eastern dudes.
Now, I despise politically correctness myself but the last two were bordering on racist. I mean, they put them there making them look dangerous (glaring, skulking, bad goatees) and then try and guilt/blame the audience for thinking they’re bad guys! What the fuck?!

Red Flag #4: The slow mo camera shots
There are all these scenes of Jodie Foster, Peter Saarsgard, hail, everybody running into the camera, face contorted into some horrible I’m-trying-to-run-with-determintaion-towards-the-camera-so-you-can-see-how-determined-I-am grimace.
There are all sortsa ways – good ways – to do slow mo shots.
This is WWF-piledriver slow mo.
This is fucking Six Million Dollar Man slow mo.

They’ve got Sean Bean.
They’ve got Peter Saarsgard.
Jesus Christ they’ve got JODIE FOSTER!

And it still crash and burned.

Red Eye

2005-08-29T06:28:00.000-07:00

Starring: Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy
Director: Wes Craven

This is prolly the shortest review I've written.

Girl is a hotel manager.
Girl takes the last flight out - the Red Eye – and meets interesting dude.
Romance possibly afoot.
Turns out interesting dude is actually sinister-type-with-hidden-agenda-specifically-involving-hotel-manager-girl dude.

Ten minutes in, it's looking good.
I'm thinking hey, it's Panic Room, but on a plane. (Related aside: Panic Room star Jodie Foster is starring in Flight Plan which is about a woman looking for her kid who goes missing on a plane).
Nice, inventive touches. Lotsa scenes that prove my long-held belief that a resourceful person under duress (or a good writer) can turn anything – anything – can be used as a weapon. I mean, a fucking band aid could be used as a weapon. We're just not thinking hard enough.

Anyway.
It's all very exciting.
Then the plane lands.

This is prolly what happened in the writer's Malibu beach house as he typed away at his 17" G4 Powerbook :

"Shit. It's not a closed space anymore. There's no more time-critical event. Whadda we do now?"

Yup.
You could go through what I did (which wasn't unpleasant).
Or you could save ten bucks.
Your call.

In an attempt to provide added value to my three loyal readers:

Wes Craven created some of the most memorable horror icons of our time: Freddy Kreuger and the Ghost Face murderer from the Scream Trilogy. He's also written a book named The Fountain Society which I regret buying.
Cillian Murphy was last seen in Batman Begins as Dr Jonathan Crane aka The Scarecrow. My Art Director hates him. HATES.
Rachel McAdams starred in Mean Girls with Lindsay Lohan. Girlfriend can really run in high heels.

Stealth

2005-07-29T23:50:00.000-07:00

Starring: Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx
Director: Rob Cohen

How many times have we heard this one?
Lightning / power surge / coffee makes already scarily intelligent, quasi-sentient machine….ALIVE!

Stealth ain’t the first, it won’t be the last, and if they all make ‘em like this I say more power to them. This was way fun.

Rob Cohen pulls out all his training on The Fast And The Furious and takes it to 35,000 feet. When it works, don’t fuck with the formula:

Originality is overrated. This is 2001: Space Odyssey with stealth bombers. HAL is now EDI (pronounced Eddy for Extreme…something something). EDI is a UCAV ( Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle). He speaks, he flies like a pro, he downloads illegal MP3s and he kills his fellow wingmen. Lucas, Biel and a pre-Oscar Foxx are the 3 ace pilots in the Talon program – hypersonic jet fighters (they go up to Mach 5 or something) to be used on the WAR AGAINST TERROR WHICH WE STILL HAVEN’T WON. Naturally, it all goes to hell in a hand basket when EDI gets zapped, decides taking orders is for losers, and goes on a heat-seeking missile murder spree. Sound familiar? He even sounds like HAL. “Good morning, (insert polite but murderous comment here)”

Blow lotsa shit up. Rob Cohen recycles – and this is a good thing – his moves from The Fast And The Furious. A pilot fires a missile and we get a tour of the whole launch mechanism before the rocket lets loose. And really, hats off to the guys at Digital Domain – the aircraft effects are very real. Some very nifty camera work too. It really does feel like a rollercoaster: you fly across the ocean, in between fighters, up the rear thrusters with the jet wash shaking and frying the lens, then you zoom into the cockpit to hear the pilot spout some macho bullshit. And the explosions. Whoa. Dude. Two stick in my mind – a ring of fire at 30,000 ft and a multi-truck detonation that actually as people getting caught in every loving slo-mo second.

Show Jessica Biel. A lot. Like in the waterfall in a bikini. Like crawling around in the mud wearing her low-rise, hipster flight suit (what the?). I believe you can totally save a crap show with Jessica Biel. Hell, Jessica Biel might’ve saved King Arthur. Or The Punisher. Anybody who saw Blade Trinity will agree.

This was really good. Characters are cardboard, lines are cheesy, politics are all over the place (Sam Shepard sniggers “North Korea? We have no diplomatic ties with that country”). And because of all this, it is pitch perfect. EDI’s exit was a bit of a letdown, but every other criticism you have will need to be thought about and recalled. And in the end, you won’t mind one bit. Nu-uh.

The Island

2005-07-23T03:06:00.000-07:00

Starring: (mostly) Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, (occasionally) Sean Bean, Djimon Hounsou, (briefly) Michael Clarke Duncan, Steve Buscemi, (surprisingly) Ethan Phillips a.k.a. Neelix from Star Trek: Voyager.
Director: Michael Bay

Briefly: It’s the year 20something-something (2019? 2027? Who cares?). Lincoln-Sex-Echo and Jordan-Two-Delta are two of the prettiest people on the planet. They all live in a pristine facility where they wear white figure-hugging jumpsuits, eat computer-monitored-and-optimized diets, work on assembly lines and go clubbing (no, really). And once a week, one of them wins a trip to The Island. The last natural land mass free from a never-explained ‘Contamination’ event.

Naturally, all’s not hunky dory for the happy couple.

And this is all fair and good. If you were forced to dress in white all day, not allowed to fall in love or for fuck’s sake eat bacon, well, there’s clearly evil shenanigans afoot.

The Island begins quite well. It’s a movie about cloning, but wisely, the writers don’t get all Michael Crichton and start explaining the scientific bits. The set designs, the way the clones are birthed, do the job of laying out the situation. Michael Bay’s breaks out his favourite moves: ultra-slo-mo shots, super-wide angles, flash editing, and a sudden jolt of action. This jolt sump-starts the movie’s heart and The Island just runs and runs and (yaaaaaawn) runs. It’s exciting but after a while, it just gets tiring as you get strung along – dragged - from one big action piece to the next. Each trying to top the one before it, and not quite succeeding.

The nice bits are in the little things:

The side characters’ conversations: complaining bitterly about how some of them never win the lottery; their little crackpot theories as to how selection takes place; misspelling ‘Dude’ as ‘Dood.’

How sterile their environment is: a computer tests your urine when you take a piss to decides if you should eat more bananas; if you have a bad dream, you have to go to the doctor.

Brands we recognize from our time: futuristic versions of MSN, Nokia, Xbox, Puma, Lexus – scary that the blatant product placement is actually the one thing that helps improve the reality of it (“Hey, Xbox!”)

Subtle treatment of the cloning technology: no science lesson, just camera pans showing bodies in various stages of development; all the clones talk like 15-years old, so limited is their experience of the real world

It’s this stuff, not the actors that are The Island’s texture. The actors – we’ve seen how capable they are in other shows – do nothing for the movie. It could be anyone, so I won’t go into it here. I won’t even talk about Scarlett Johansson with her almost pneumatically-perfect bosom.

It’s a lot of flash, with no real bang.
And that ending.
I won’t spoil it for you, mostly because I can’t.

Appendix:
Listen, I really wanted this one to be good. And I feel bit bad that it wasn’t so I’ll give you a list of movies you can see if you didn’t like the Island.

Gattaca – Not cloning per se, but genetic perfection. Beautifully written, directed, hell everything.
Bad Boys – Still Michael Bay’s best movie to my mind. Bad Boys 2, if you want to see a present day version of The Island’s highway chase scene (like a mirror!)
Back To The Future 2 – The future, time travel, popular culture, laughs.
Shallow Grave – The first time I saw Ewan McGregor, and the first movie Danny Boyle made. Wicked plot, and Ewan’s great in it.
Eight Legged Freaks – Giant spiders attack town and Scarlett Johansson runs around in a top that I’d like to believe is not a special effect. Oh my.

Battlestar Galactica Season 2 begins

2005-07-17T11:23:00.000-07:00

Midway through BSG Season 1, Episode 4 (I forget the title, but Starbuck captures the Cylon raider) I say to myself, no, I fucking pray to the Lords of Kobol, “Please, please let it stay this good.” I can’t remember the last time I wished that for a TV series.

Then they started with the whole Cylon gods thingie, and God’s purpose and I went “Oh fuuuuck…” Even before Season 2 premiered, I had a whole bunch of stuff I wish they’d keep/change/try. Michelle Pessoa has an excellent Season 2 wish list which pretty much mirrors the one I have in my head.

So when BSG Season 2 finally premiered, I was a little nervous.

IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN SEASON 2 YET, YOU SHOULD STOP READING NOW

What I liked:

They didn’t open with the whole Cylon god mumbo jumbo. Episode 1 opens with an FTL jump screw-up where they lose the entire fleet; the Raptor crew that crash-landed on Kobol last season are fired upon pretty much immediately.

The camera work is getting better in the outer-space scenes. They retain the hand-held style, but the framing’s better and they're trying new things. When Galactica misplaces the entire fleet, the way they pull out to emphasise how alone the ship is, is quite well done. They also have some neat bits where cameras are mounted on the sides of engines to show the viper’s speed and maneuverability,

New reveals with the Cylon raiders, without giving away too much. Showing the way they’re launched - like a shark shedding teeth - is a nice touch. And there’s that new model of raider we saw briefly in one of the episodes last season.

What I didn’t:

The character flaws are too obvious. Yes, Crashdown’s not a good leader, but didja have to make him such an asshole? Yes, Ellen Tigh’s a manipulative bitch, but she was more subtle, more under-the-radar with her scheming last season.

They’re starting to repeat the effects shots. The hard landings, the cannon fire, are all being recycled.

The Caprica story arc is shown just to re-establish. There’s no progress, no moving forward. Yes, Sharon’s a Cylon. Yes, she’s pregnant. Move on.

They cut out the title sneak peak. Now, I wasn’t sure myself when I first saw it. But the material and the editing was so strong, showing the scenes before the episode didn’t spoil or reveal anything. Set against the drums, the sneaks energized the episode. Why did they cut it out?

But hey, it’s still early days yet.
And despite all my nit-picking, I am glad it’s back.

War Of The Worlds

2005-07-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins
Real stars: ILM's fantastic Tripods

Not since Orson Welles scared the shit out of suburban America with his broadcast version of H.G. Wells' 107-year novel has there been a truly scary sci-fi invasion story. It's the idea of aliens I suppose. They are fantastical by nature, so our treatment of them tends to be comic, and whatever destruction visited upon us is merely a setup of how clever, how enduring we all really are as a species. You can bring your flying saucers and your zap guns. But we will open up a can of whup-ass for ya.

So Spielberg and screenwriter David Keopp decide to give us something new by giving us something old: returning to Wells’ original material and staying true to his theme: that there is no defense against an marauding alien force. It is a holocaust, an act of genocide, and viewed through the lens of our September 12 eyes, it is a terrorist attack on a planetary scale.

In this new version, no time is wasted. Cruise's Ray Ferrier is quickly established (crane operator, divorced, maybe a bit of an asshole) and the storm begins. The Tripods arrive, ripping the city to shreds by cutting a death ray swath through the city. And so begins what feels like an unbroken half-hour run for dear life as the Ferriers try to escape not just the Tripods but frenzied, desperate citizens reduced to mobs.

The movie is told through Ray's eyes, with no cutaways. We discover the devastation and learn about the invaders only as he discovers them – through TV reports, peeks through windows and terrified backward glances. But this first-person claustrophobia which kept the tension so high in the movie's first act becomes the movie's undoing.

We only see Ray's city, and the extent of this global ethnic cleansing - so expertly implied through the news coverage - is never fully explored. The carnage we see follows strictly the Ferriers' flight through their town. The inevitable military response is not shown, a missed opportunity to play out the spectacle of our impotent weapons against the Tripod's impressive force. What we were promised, a planet under attack, soon becomes a more localised event.

There are of course shiny bits. The madness that follows the initial shock is unnerving. In one scene a man attempts to widen a hole in the windshield to gain entry into the Ferriers’ car oblivious to the glass cutting into his hands. An attack on a ferry is the Titanic revisited. And there's the Tripods. Holy fuck, the Tripods. Possibly ILM’s best work, so different from the showy whiz-bang of Star Wars, ILM’s machines are so believably menacing because they are matter-of-fact. All steel and brute force and horrible, horrible sounds.

Human performances however, fall short. Dakota Fanning can do the screaming, crying child with her eyes closed. Ray’s son Robbie has no purpose except perhaps to irritate his father (not too different from Kim Bauer in 24). And what is perhaps Tom’s most different role – blue collar, not a prodigy in his field, a bit of a fuck-up – is one he cannot play.

The movie is very faithful to the book. During that first assault, when the characters are caught off guard, so are we. This is not a sci-fi film. It's a war movie. It is Saving Private Ryan and people are being oh Christ people are being slaughtered. But old habits are hard to break and instead of keeping it real and harsh, Steven derails his juggernaut with sentimentality. WOTW ends (literally) with rays of sunshine and hope and looks and oh shiat, closure.

The first 80% of the movie is incredible. That first half hour is very real, so fucking real in fact you don’t hear the word ‘Martian’ in the entire script. But when the Tripods finally fall, it's anti-climactic, and it feels like they had to end it quickly so they did. We were being chased, we were running for our lives only to discover quite suddenly, we are no longer being pursued. This can’t be all, we think. But it is.

Primer

2005-07-02T22:55:00.000-07:00

Director: Shane Carruth (who wrote, directed, acted in and scored the music for the movie. Good on him. It won something at Sundance.)
Starring: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan

One of the things director Shane Carruth says on the commentary of the Primer DVD is he didn’t intend to make a sci-fi movie. He wanted to make a movie about the trust between people.

But Shane Carruth is an engineer by training so, there you have it.

Primer centers on two best friends, Aaron and Abe, who make error-checking devices in their garage (I know, I went “Huh?” too). In their spare time, they geek around hoping to come up with the Next Big Thing.

At this point, you gotta ask yourself:

If you and friend invented the Next Big Thing, how long could you keep it to yourself?
If the price of getting everything you ever wanted was merely doing something over and over again until you died, would you be able to do it? Or would you suddenly want to change things?
If there was more than one you, would you feel you’re the ‘original’ one? Who gets to decide?

Primer is about these things.

Aaron and Abe invent something by accident, and though they realise how easily things can fuck up from here on out, they cannot stop themselves from finding out just how far this thing can go.

A lotta science fiction movies are about one thing that changes the world or the very fabric of the universe / space-time continuum. This is just about two friends, and the consequences their invention visits upon them unravels the only universe that really matters – theirs.

I found it very interesting.
I even found it disturbing and creepy in places.
And it’s been a while since that happened.

Come to it the way I did.
Watch the trailer.

I won tickets to see Battlestar Galactica!

2005-06-28T02:35:00.000-07:00

I apologise to my regular readers (yes, all four of you) but this post is:
a) Extremely geek-like
b) Meant more for fans of the new Battlestar Galactica.

I know it's poor consolation, but I promise not to make it a geek convention type thing.
But I did say I wanted to talk about TV more, and I reckon this might be a good way to start this off.

Or not.

Anyway.
The Lords of Kobol be praised.

I won some tickets to a free screening of the new Battlestar Galactica at my local cinema. It was a contest to promote the series, which is being screened in Asia for the first time. If you’re ancient – like me – then you might remember the cheesy toaster oven Cylons and Egyptian-motif Viper pilots from the original series. But Ron Moore (who wrote Star Trek: First Contact) has done an amazing job of re-vamping the entire series. There are a lot of sites out there that cover how good it is and it scary detail so I won’t go into it here.

I think it’s good Cinemax is bringing the series in. I liked watching it on the big screen (even though the show was formatted for TV). That said, I don’t think everyone can tolerate a 3-hour screening of what was to their minds, still a TV show. And I think your TV mode is different from your movie mode. One couple walked out during the disc changeover (prolly a DVD) but the rest were ok.

It’s still a very nice show to watch though. But then again, I’m a fan.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

2005-06-24T23:47:00.000-07:00

Director: Garth Jennings (music video director. Have you seen Blur’s Good Song or Coffee & TV? That’s him).
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Martin Freeman

Very quickly: Just before Earth is blown up (people just hate us don’t they?), loser Arthur Dent is saved by his friend Ford Prefect who it turns out is a travel writer for a kind of Intergalactic Lonely Planet.

So easy to fuck up, this one.

The books were just hilarious and the stuff that made it so was Douglas Adam’s ingenious (and frequent use) of what I call the VCR effect of books. You know, when a nuclear reactor’s about to go critical and you press the mental pause button so you can explain how the scientific process works. Hitchhiker’s was funny cos Adam’s would write 2 pages of rather unrelated nonsense and then something explodes/dies/jumps into hyperspace.

Well, the clever clogs at Shynola (they do loads of music videos and TV commercials) solve most of that stuff with cutaways showing animated cartoon sequences of the Guide explaining say, what a Vogon is or how a Babelfish translates.

Visually, the movie’s quite nice. Jim Henson’s creature fellows did a smashing job with the Vogons (see, you can have a nice movie without CGI) and Marvin is the anti-C3P0. In fact, the human characters seem pretty much incidental. Nobody really turns in a notable performance; Martin Freeman’s a good Arthur Dent, but ain’t straining since he plays pretty much the same character in The Office, lotsa people said “Why Mos Def?” I say, didn’t make a damn difference i.e. no harm done, Sam Rockwell has lotsa fun though with his rock star-like President of the Universe.

And now I get all selfish and talk about the extremely cute Zooey Deschanel. Whom I never noticed before but will now. That tracksuit thingie she was wearing was very 80s Buck Rogers but hey, who the fuck cares? She’s hot. Damn.

Ahem. Right. Moving on.

Movie’s alright. Mostly flat. They do some interesting things (musicals, mixed medium stuff including one weird ass sequence where the movie becomes into a stop-motion sock puppet film). An dthe bit where they show the factory floor of Magrathea where they manufacture planets is very nice. But mostly, a smirk every now and again with no real nice feeling at the end. The end incidentally, probably isn’t because you smell 'sequel' long before the credits roll.

Zooey Deschanel however is very, very cute.

Batman Begins

2005-06-20T09:34:00.000-07:00

Starring: Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, Michael Kane, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman, Ken Watanabe
Director: Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia)

By now, everyone knows the story.
Rich kid gets orphaned by armed robber in alley.
Has aversion to winged rodents.
Never actually gets over it and dresses in tights beating up on crooks.

And yet this is the second time in the series they tell us how Bruce Wayne becomes Batman. I'm sure there's a marketing reason for this (connecting with a new audience etc) but the reason it got made at all is because there's a built in fan base. I mean, it's Batman.

Action-wise, it's the best Batman yet. That Batmobile is badass. The previous ones were all stylish but couldn't do squat except rocket down conveniently straight alleys (one movie actually has it rocket up a fucking building). But this. This is the only Batmobile, the only Batman movie for that matter to have actual chase scenes. Crashing-into-things-live-footage-from-the-news-crew-on-a-helicopter type chase scenes. It's like World's Craziest Police Videos with a ma-fuckin' tank.

Look wise, it's also the least cheesy looking Batman. Gotham's nicely decaying and corrupt and the villains are actually villainous for once, not some Halloween rubber rejects (nice work with the Scarecrow, guys).

Now for the bad bits.

The whole becoming Batman phase feels like the first third of the show. It was way draggy. And too much on the Bats. Ok! They're scary! So he becomes a bat! We geddit!

Christian Bale starts raging and changing his voice every time he gets in a crook's face. Batman is supposed to be cynical. Sneaky. Suspicious. Calculating. Calm.

And this part to me, is tough to forgive. Bats gets his weapons from Morgan Freeman? Doesn't that mean anyone with enough moolah can be Batman? C'mon, Batman makes his own stuff!

Big name guys with no big roles. Liam Neeson doing the mentor thing. Morgan Freeman doing the mentor thing, doing Q in James Bond. Gary Oldman as a cop who doesn’t do much. And Ken Watanabe’s character isn’t even a role – it’s a cameo.

The right look, the right players, the right gadgets, just not the right combination.

But I’m going out and buying me one of those Batmobiles. I’m sure Hasbro makes them. That thing is badass.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

2005-06-18T11:26:00.000-07:00

Starring: Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt
Director: Doug Liman (the guy who directed The Bourne Identity)

There’s actually very little reason not to see this one. Plot’s dead simple: two assassins marry, and they get hired to take each other out. Angelina and Brad look good together, there’s chemistry and there’s lotsa action to be had.

It’s a story of a loveless marriage taken to comic book extremes. The dialogue’s pretty nice (that opening sequence where they’re at the marriage counselor is hilarious) and Brad’s as close as you can get to Hugh Grant funny without actually being well, Hugh Grant. It hadn’t hit me before, but Jolie’s actually the only bankable female action hero in a very long time. I mean, Sigourney Weaver was bad ass as Ripley, and Linda Hamilton looked like she could fuck up you up some but they weren’t really action heroes. They weren’t cool.

And there’s enough cool to go around. You got your 007-like gadgetry, your Alias-like ops teams who help you set everything up and so you can just fly somewhere with your shampoo-perfect hair and shoot people with a laser-sighted rifle. So yeah, it’s not revolutionary, but it’s fun. There’s a nice freeway chase, bullets, car crashes all while Brad and Angelina start fessing up about the lies they’ve told each other (“I was married once,” says Brad before the Mrs bitch slaps him).

I liked it.

Let me just say that that scene where some bad guy’s getting his fetishistic ass whipped by a riding crop? The man’s not acting. I’m sure of this.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith

2005-06-17T21:46:00.000-07:00

Director: George Lucas
Starring: Hayden Christensen, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman

It is the last in the saga.
It has not one, but two prequels to atone for.
And regardless of your opinions, everyone wants to see how it all ends.

Long before its release, Lucas made it clear that this would be the darkest Star Wars ever. And it couldn’t be any other way. Anakin’s fall from grace is the tipping point, like Lucifer deciding he’d rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. But before he could turn, something had to break him. With all that on its shoulders, Revenge Of The Sith had a lot to deliver.

But Sith doesn’t do that. Not even close.

The Emperor / Palapatine’s seduction of Anakin is clumsy and transparent, as is the Chosen One’s uncertainty before deciding to betray his Jedi brethren. It didn’t have to be gradual – men have turned faster, and for lesser reasons – but it had to be compelling. Nobody – not the Jedi Council who ignores him, nor the manipulative Emperor - betrays Anakin sufficiently for his corruption, his hatred to be so complete.

When Anakin is sent forth to implement genocide he seems more like a young punk with a light sabre out to bust some heads – he is literally, a boy in a hood. Not the general Obi Wan spoke of to young Skywalker who “helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi knights.” The Jedi are slaughtered, but it is not the ethnic cleansing-style massacre we envisioned for years, and disappointingly, it is not led by Anakin.

Sith doesn’t lack for impressive set pieces: A blistering opening sequence where Obi Wan and Anakin rescue Chancellor Palpatine is perhaps the most exciting of all six movies; three major light saber battles (one between Obi Wan and a multi-limbed General Grevious is a vintage chinese sword fight given a Jedi spin); and full-scale war on the wookie planet. All of which fail to save how hollow Sith feels. Though Lucas wisely tones down the heavy-handed Bollywood romance of Clones, the script still makes you cringe in too many places. Forget cheesy lines. Some of the dialogue is downright lazy and at many points the movie turns into an ILM animator’s show reel / wet dream – ironically, a lesser evil. Not to mention a misguided attempt to be topical with Anakin echoing Bush’s own edict in his war on terror: “If you’re not with me, you’re against me.”

The movie’s one solid character is Obi Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor still having fun, and still can’t wipe the smirk off his face during fight scenes). Obi Wan is the only one who seems to have matured through the prequels bringing him closer to Alec Guinness’ version than any Anakin to the Big Black we know and love in Episodes IV-VI. It is Obi Wan who feels the sting of Anakin’s subversion, who has to marshall the resolve to kill his student and friend, and the one who has to endure a life of exile while watching over the infant Luke. Not enough though. Natalie Portman is given nothing to do except cry; Samuel L. Jackson is well, Samuel L. Jackson; and while Vader was one badass motherfucker, Anakin merely acts like a spoilt brat whining about how he’s being disrespected and ignored. Hardly the stuff that turns a Jedi prodigy into the Dark Lord who has kept a tight grip on our consciousness.

It all ends in tears, but only because we mourn the loss of a childhood dream. When Anakin rises as Lord Vader for the first time, it might as well be the Frankenstein monster (you’ll see). The circle is now complete. And we will have to live with it.

Old Boy

2005-06-17T21:45:00.000-07:00

Director: Park Chan-Wook
Starring: Choi Min-Sik, Yu Ji-Tae, Kang Hye-Jeong

Guy calls family to say he's coming home.
Gets knocked out.
Wakes up in a room and is held hostage but kept alive. For 15 years.
Then, he's released and given help by his kidnappers to discover the reasons.
They want him to know. But not all at once.

With this scenario setting up Old Boy, the audience and main character Dae Su (Choi Min-Sik), become one.
This is the movie's main device. You are strapped in with Dae Su. You only know as much as he does, with none of the "meanwhile...in the next room" cut-aways you get in normal movies. The clues he gets are the ones you get. And if he doesn't understand it, you'll never figure it out on your own.

On the way, he meets a waitress who becomes his sidekick after nursing him back to health after a bad Korean kimchi episode (know this: that octopus was alive, and it was real). The sequence of events that unfold from then on are sadistic and graphic. One fight scene in the hallway is a one-take-no-cut 4 minute tracking shot of a slaughter with its slow, maddening security camera style pan. But as excessive as it seems to get so many points (dentist's chair, pliers, you make the connection) it is also madly economic story-telling. You only know enough to get to the next scene and if you feel you don't know where it's going, that it's all gonna end in fucking tears, it's because it is. And it does.

Not since David Fincher's Se7en has a movie's ending been so downbeat, so downright cruel yet so well conceived. Even ask you look in horror and ask "How could this be?", your gut tells you "How could it not?"

Kingdom Of Heaven

2005-06-17T21:38:00.000-07:00

Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Orlando Bloom, Eva Green, Liam Neeson, Ghassan Massoud
Time: 145mins

Try as he might - and he does try - Bloom is still Legolas. Fortunately, Ridley Scott's tale of King Saladin's historic siege on Jerusalem overcomes this, with Scott wisely shifting the focus to events rather than a main character as he did in Gladiator.

Bloom plays Balian, a blacksmith who soon discovers he's the son of Godfrey, Lord of Ibelin. Balian follows his father Godfrey (Liam Neeson, playing master jedi Qui-Gon Jinn all over again) to Jerusalem where he hopes to find salvation for his deceased wife and child, the former condemned to hell because she committed suicide. Newly knighted, Balian quickly finds himself caught in all manner of camel doo: hatred from resident bastard Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas), lust from his wife Sibylla (Eva Green) and respect from the king himself (an uncredited and unrecognizable Edward Norton).

After a failed truce and a battle led by Guy turns into a massacre, Balian finds himself leading a small vassal of soldiers, defending the holy city against King Saladin (a scene-stealing Ghassan Massoud) and oh, just about 200,000 Muslim crusaders.

Scott's comfort with epics is evident and the scale of it all - the sprawling towns, hordes advancing across the desert - comes through in every frame. But Kingdom seems like a patchwork of things we've seen. The fight in the forest and Balian's first time in the city echoes Scott's own Gladiator, and the scene when Saladin's forces assault Jerusalem is a daylight version of Saruman's orcs laying siege to Helm's Deep.

Kingdom's theme is one of tolerance. And though its sentiments are post 9/11 (Saladin and Balian both deride the use of God's name to sanction slaughter), its imagery is pure Gulf War. The nighttime sequence where Saladin's catapults launch flaming projectiles at Jerusalem triggers memories of those ghostly images broadcast by CNN of Scud missiles and tracer fire as Baghdad was bombarded back in Gulf War I.

Scott keeps the pace relentless and almost claustrophobic so you hardly feel the 2 1/2 hour running time. But Kingdom's resolution is too sudden, too abrupt, feeling more like a white-flagged surrender rather than the stalemate of two unwavering causes.

Kingdom of Heaven is a spectacle, no doubt. But it falls far short of the legend Scott surely intended it to be.