Paranormal Activity

Paranormal Activity was apparently so scary that Steven Spielberg thought it was haunted. After seeing it, I have come to the following conclusion – Spielberg is a wuss. I’ll concede I didn’t enjoy watching the film at all – I was in a constant state of petrified fear. But it all amounted to nothing. One bad thing happens each night and then they give you half an hour to recover. There are some creepy moments but there so spaced out there’s no sustained tension. ALSO: the guy is such a douchebag I started rooting for the demon. The end is a total cheap shot, and left me going, oh, there I was all scared but nothing actually happened. As the lights came up, my friend looked at me, made a pffft noise and a wanking gesture with his hand. That entirely encapsulates my thoughts on this film.

Fantastic Mr Fox

As someone whose imagination was reared by Roald Dahl, I was delighted by this adaptation. It really brought his story to life, but with the director putting his own artistic flourish on it. Don’t be fooled, it’s not a kid’s film. It’s dialogue heavy, swear words are ingeniously replaced by “cuss” and is dominated by the theme of alienation from an erratic father. So it’s basically like Wes Anderson animated one of his usual films. The animation is a delight, and the voice acting is absolutely perfect. It was thoroughly enjoyable.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

The franchise is reaping the benefits of putting the final stages of the story in the hands of a single creative direction. What is one of the more tedious and arduous books is turned into one of the most entertaining films with the understanding that to convert a book to a film you don’t have to put ever single thing into it. The characters are given depth and fleshed into actual people far more than in any of the films so far. It also for the first time manages to make the Potter universe genuinely scary. Far and away the best Potter film since Prisoner of Azkaban, and dare I say it, the best one yet.

Bruno

After Ali G, I thought Bruno was the best of Baron-Cohen’s characters. Bruno is outrageous as Borat, but it feels like an opportunity missed. Bruno is far more reliant on celebrities than Borat, but the success of the aforementioned means he can’t get away with that (and he tries – I feel the film’s opening is maybe showing the film they tried to make). It’s still painfully funny in places, but it just doesn’t quite hit the mark, some of it feels a bit forced and the revealed homophobia leans sometimes to just pointing and laughing at poor people. It’s hilarious, but it could’ve been magnificent.

Year One

I was confused – loads of places gave this film a bad review. It was a comedy, it made me laugh. It fulfilled its function. It’s a good concept – working its way through Bible stories, that then gets bogged down a bit towards the end. Usually Jack Black kind of annoys me, but he’s on good form here, and Michael Cera is Michael Cera. It doesn’t set the world alight, but it’s a good laugh I thought.

Sorry

I realise that I’m massively behind. My New Year’s Resolution to to get up to date and to take it a bit more seriously!

To whit, a few films I saw at the end of 2009 will have shorter summary reviews, and I’ll give fuller pieces to the films that rocked my world.

Also, I’ve realised I’ve missed loads of films. I always welcome guest content. Get in touch

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Due to my lacklustre reviewing strategy, I’ve had months to ruminate on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and I still don’t really know what to make of it.

I honestly couldn’t make out what was happening most of the time

There were two robots that were such lazy, borderline racist caricatures of black people I was waiting for them to eat fried chicken and engage in petty street theft

One transformer turns into a woman. Which begs the question- WHY DON’T THEY ALL TURN INTO PEOPLE INSTEAD OF ALFA ROMEOS? Also, she appears to have some kind of tail weapon come out of her chuff.

Shia LaBellend is the most objectionable person in cinema today.

The transformers take several years to transform

Even when fighting evil space robot creatures, the US military still manages to fuck over the Middle East

Seriously, I couldn’t tell what was going on. This film could induce epilepsy

So there we have it. It could be utter, utter trash. Or it could be the most expensive art film made this year. I’ll leave you to guess which one I think it is

Terminator: Salvation

I’m generally always suspicious of films that have a colon in their title, as they are almost unilaterally crap sequels, or new additions to franchises that peaked 20 years previously. And Terminator: Salvation very much falls into the latter. But, I’ll give them some leeway here. Even if it is directed by McG (I have no idea who he is, but by calling himself that I can’t help but visualise him as wearing skinny jeans, a beanie and sunglasses in a dark pub somewhere in Shoreditch), who didn’t want to see the future war from Terminator? I mean that bit at the start of Judgement Day that sets the scene – it looks AWESOME!

Sadly, this delivery of the future war isn’t quite what I was expecting. Instead of the all conquering SkyNet ruling all of Christendom and a few ragged humans clubbing together to try to survive, SkyNet seems to be very comfortable in just San Francisco, nuked out cities are suddenly habitable again, and our plucky humans have helicopters, nuclear weapons and a travelling headquarters on a submarine. I half wanted to cheer for the robots.

Sequels like this also have a bit of a problem – in that in the previous two films it took one bloke a whole film to destroy one robot, and then it took the robot from the first film to destroy the second and third ones. And then here our hero is wading deep in dead cyborgs. But then, we need a big finale, so our Terminator becomes indestructible again.

I guess the problem is their version of the apocalypse doesn’t even seem half as bad as the recession.

I mean, it’s not terrible – the action sequences are exciting enough. But the plot feels really laboured. The saviour of humanity John Conor is barely in it, and when he is Bale does a generic shouty turn. Most of the story follows on Sam Worthington and the future Kyle Reese, but given you know Reese’s story he never seems to be in any real peril and they make it SO painfully obvious that Worthington is a robot, and drag out it out so much it’s insulting to your intelligence It’s so obvious I wouldn’t even call that remark a spoiler.

Then of course there is the Arnie CGI cameo, which was worth the entrance fee on its own (although obvs, I have a cineworld card). I nearly stood up and bellowed “HOLY SHIT!” But it’s over pretty quickly, and the set piece ending is just an amalgam of the two endings of the first films. There’s dramatic irony and then there is actually trying to sell my shirt to me while I’m still wearing it.

T:S isn’t a bad film, it’s an ok action film. The problem is that it comes from two films that are absolute classics and made action into art. A few days after seeing it I saw T2 on the telly, and my estimation of Salvation dropped massively. That film is utter perfection, and having a spin off is almost like taking a character from, say, Friends, and giving them their own show that doesn’t reference or capture the magic of the original. Oh, wait.

Drag Me To Hell

Horror is a genre that I struggle to get along with. I think it’s to do with the fact that being scared is inherently a bad thing. Fear is one of your body’s defence systems to make you avoid trouble. Being scared means you should AVOID things.

So even if I want to be scared, too many films fail to deliver it these days. Horror has been blighted by the curse of “torture porn”. It seems you can only get funding for a horror film these days if it contains pointless, gratuitous violence. Not that I’m against violence in films, but when you’re watching a bloke just have his leg stripped of flesh and eaten you have to wonder about yourself if that’s what you consider entertainment. But then the psychological horror slant is still suffering from the impact of the Sixth Sense. Oh, it’s a ghost and they were dead all along AGAIN.

And the above is why I thoroughly enjoyed Drag Me To Hell. Because no one makes horror films any more. Films that make you confused as to whether you should be terrified or laughing your arse off. And what else should we expect from Sam Raimi, the man who gave us the Evil Dead series.

Drag Me To Hell does exactly what it says on the tin – a woman ends up with a gypsy curse that means that a devil is coming to take her soul down to the lower levels of Dante’s Inferno. She enlists the help of some exorcists (one who was wronged by the Beast earlier in her life in a thrilling opening) to help her out. Sound ridiculous? That’s because it is. And it doesn’t matter one jot.

The story proceeds at break neck speed, and at the end you feel like you could’ve watched 20 minutes more, which is always a good feeling – too many film makes find the need to bore us with excessively long films. The scares are cheap – music crescendo, silence ARGH! Jump – but who cares when they’re executed as masterfully as this, by the master of cheap thrills. The violence is genuinely hilarious – one particular scene involving a witch, an ice skating boot and an anvil had me in tears of laughter.

It’s scary, it’s unsettling, but there is a corrupt humour at its core that makes it an absolute riot of a film. Hopefully the success of this film will make the horror community look at itself and remember it’s duty is to entertain, not just mutilate. Oh, and hurry up making World War Z you bastards.

Star Trek

Star Trek is awesome. I would wager that I have seen every single episode of every iteration of the show. Except Enterprise, that was gash, worse than Voyager and that was a struggle enough. The only problem with Star Trek is that it’s a bit, well, wet. Travelling round the universe in a space ship armed to the fucking teeth and doing science lesson, and trying their best to negotiate their way out of trouble.

But it wasn’t always so. Back in the day, Captain Kirk rampaged around the galaxy like a immoral bastard blasting the fuck out of Klingons (who back then were just black people rather than black people with Cornish pasties on their heads) and shagging every alien in sight like a repressed dog. So why not revisit that era then. After all, the Next Generation films were pretty shoddy, and I would openly weep if they made a Voyager film.

Enter JJ Abrams to do for Trek what Nolan did for Batman. And do you know what? It’s one of the most enjoyable blockbusters to have come out in a long, long time. After a moving prologue with an epilepsy-inducing action sequence (Trust, if you’re going to the IMAX, don’t sit in the front row), and discovering that the Beastie Boys are still big in the future, we track Kirk’s journey to become captain of the Enterprise, along with the story of Spock.

The story line is all about time travel, is weighted to perfection and unravels beautifully. The actors have a tough job because they’re essentially playing actors playing characters, but it’s all part of the fun. Spock and Bones in particular are joyous to watch, and Simon Pegg as Scotty doesn’t manage to completely ruin it by jizzing all over the set carrying out his childhood dream.

There’s a potent mix of action and humour, incredible effects, and an mind bogglingly brilliant cameo by Leonard Nimod. It leaves you thinking “Why can’t all blockbusters be this stylish and this damn enjoyable?”. I loved it so much I saw it twice. So there.