LoveFilm Capsule Reviews

These are the things I have rented from LoveFilm.

Lawless - Never got around to watching it. I suspect it will be good, but I wasn't in the mood.
Taken - I've been to Paris; it wasn't like this.
Dredd - Exploding bodyparts FTW, but we felt uncomfortable watching with the baby in the room.
Looper - Nonsense, when you get down to it, but sufficiently compelling nonsense to let it go.
9 - High-concept, mostly successful.
John Carter - So much fun.
Surrogates - I struggled to get past 'surrogate Bruce Willis is creepy'.
50/50 - Possibly the most fun you'll have watching a film about chemotherapy.
Monsters vs. Aliens - My PhD is in dance!
Monsters - Wow. That was... What was that?
Prince of Persia - Is anyone in this film Persian?
The Walking Dead - Very good; not much fun.
Falling Skies - More please!
Pathfinder - Vikings vs. Native Americans. Karl Urban wins.
Ghost Rider - Spirit of Vengeance - Keeping Christopher Lambert in wine.
The Cabin in the Woods - Rarely have the tropes of horror been so effectively followed and critiqued at the same time.
GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra - The Baroness is not a brainwashed goodie! She's evil, damnit! Look at her outfit.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol - After four installments, the MI reboot finally realises how silly it is, and becomes awesome.
Underworld - Awakening - I want this time back.
Conan the Barbarian - I'm actually not sure I didn't just imagine this film based on bits of other films.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice - Has a certain something, but fails to be epic.
Alice in Wonderland - Much better than I expected.
Ironclad - History is something that happens to other people, apparently.
Solomon Kane - Much sillier than it knows.
Castle - Good, lighthearted murder-fun.
Green Lantern - Worst film with green in the title ever.
Green Hornet - Benefits from the above.
How to Train Your Dragon - DR-Rag-ON!
The Last Airbender - Rather epic.
Drive Angry - Funny as hell.
Season of the Witch - We're going to need more holy water.
Tron: Legacy - Shiny.
Kung Fu Panda 2 - Awesome. And attractive.
Kolchak: The Night Stalker - Like a very low key X-Files in a bad hat.
Inkheart - Not as good as I had hoped.
The Expendables - Self-awaredly cretinous fun.
Iron Sky - Some good moments.
Drive - Very good; very nasty.
Predators - Much, much better than I had expected.
The Secret of the Unicorn - Thrilling adventures in the uncanny valley.
Game of Thrones - Proper epic.

Jack the Giant Slayer

"Fee fi fo fumm, 

Ask not whence the thunder comes. 

Ask not where the herds have gone, 

Or why the birds have ceased their song. 

When coming home, don't take too long, 

For monsters roam in Albion."

This was my daughter's first cinema trip, at the age of three weeks, in the Wakefield Cineworld.

We open with a father and son and a mother and daughter, cross-cutting between poor Jack and princess Isabelle being told the story of the giants who once terrorised the kingdom after dark magic created the seeds which joined Earth to the giant kingdom of Gantua, and before darker magic forged a magical crown which allowed the king to command the giants and send them back.

Flash forward and now-orphaned Jack is sent to sell his uncle's horse and cart, and a moment of chivalry and a stranger's plea catapult him into the political machinations of the capital. Chancellor Roderick Soclearly-Evil plots to bring back the giants and use the crown to control them as his weapons and become king of the world, but the seeds fall into Jack's hands and later trigger the release of a beanstalk bridge, bringing the two worlds together and the gigantomachy back to Albion. Isabelle, seeking a life of adventure rather than marriage to a smug chancellor, runs away and is caught up in it all, with Jack and Sir Elmont, the Captain of the King's Guardians, leading the rescue mission.

Ian McShane and Ewan McGregor are having a blast as the King and Elmont, and in general the cast look to be having fun, which is kind of important. It is a bit of a sausagefest - apparently the director balked at having women killed on screen, so just kept them off screen - and Isabelle is plucky, but not actually all that useful, with Jack even wearing the crown at the end to send the giants home. Overall, it was a lot of fun, however, and I especially liked the montage of the crown being concealed in the crown of St Edward, while a voice montage showed the transformation of the 'history' of the film into the modern fairy tale, ending with a kid who looked disturbingly like Stanley Tucci plotting to steal the Crown Jewels and rule the world.

Star Trek Movie Musings - The Final Frontier

It promises so much, doesn't it? Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. You couldn't be more iconic than that in naming a Star Trek film. It is ironic then that this is the film that, more than any other, fucks around with the characters and back story in a pointless and unnecessary fashion.

A Vulcan dissident who believes that emotion is the path to enlightenment kidnaps a group of diplomats assigned to a crappy, half-arsed ongoing peace initiative between the Romulans, Klingons and Federation in order to lure a rescue ship and provide passage to the centre of the galaxy, there to breach the walls of heaven and look upon the face of God.

No, really, that's the plot.

On top of this, we have Scotty used as broad comic relief, Spock's half-brother, an Enterprise riddled with more technical faults than the Millennium Falcon and Uhura doing a fan dance. The last of these is probably the worst, not because of Nichele Nichols' age - I hope I have legs that good when I'm forty, never mind sixty - but because this veteran crew should be able to infiltrate a compound full of loved-up, ill-disciplined dissidents without having to require a senior command officer to strip off and shake her booty. Again, borrowing a strand from Linkara, this was plan A?

Thinking about it, it's a scene that belongs in a Lethal Weapon movie. It's out of place here, but would fit perfectly in a typical 80s/90s action movie, since its purpose is to have the dance in the film, rather than to advance the plot or character (indeed, it rather regresses the latter).

Sybok, the aforementioned dissident half-brother is referred to as the son of a Vulcan princess (first mention of a Vulcan monarchy) and the plot ignores the fact that Vulcan emotions are supposed to be a raging cauldron, hence the need for their code of logic and self-discipline in the first place. His means of converting people to his cause also assumes that the entire crew of the Enterprise - apart from Kirk - are self-deluded and riddled with mommy (or daddy) issues, which is a pretty insulting bit of psycho-twaddle to hit the heroes of our franchise with.

In fact, that's the film's problem in a nutshell. Kirk is elevated from lead to lone hero at the cost of the other characters taking a competence drop. Scotty knocks himself unconscious walking into a low beam; Scotty, whose primary character trait is his love for and almost mystical attunement to his ship. Uhura does a sexy dance that makes the harp and voice bits with Spock in ToS seem dignified, not to mention demeaning the first African-American woman to appear in a position of authority on US TV. I can't see Martin Luther King Jr. writing an encouraging letter after that scene. And everyone falls for Sybock's bullshit except Kirk, even Spock and McCoy (who otherwise does very little for the entire film).

And then they fly off to see God and it's really the devil, or something, and the 'Great Barrier' is a prison and Spock shoots the devil in the face.

Make no mistake, this one is bad. Leonard Nimoy having shown a deft hand on the tiller as a director, William Shatner now shows that not every actor can make that transition. It's as if he fundamentally fails to get the appeal of the show or the nature of the characters, producing a big old ego piece with everyone else reduced to their most rudimentary traits. It's almost like parody, but without the self-awareness or affection.

Next up, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

Oblivion

Yesterday evening, Hannah and Andy and I took Arya-Rose (see Ersatz Dad) to the cinema to see Oblivion. Well, we took her to the cinema and Oblivion was what we saw; we weren't specifically seeking to introduce her to the oeuvre of Tom Cruise, but that's a matter for a different blog. This one is about the movie.

So, first a few obvious points: 1) It's loud, and 2) it's beautiful. It was based on an unpublished comic book, and it shows; the visual aesthetic of the film is its strongest point, creating the vast and bleakly beautiful post-post-apocalyptic world in which the last two humans on Earth monitor and repair drones, menaced by the remains of an alien army in the aftermath of an interplanetary war. The clear demarcation between the ruin of the Earth and the shining whiteness of Jack and Victoria's sky house, bubblecraft (a nifty little flying machine), drones and other tech is superbly realised.

The landscapes are big, and so are the soundscapes. The drones boom like enraged bears and the bubblecrafts' engines cry like eagles, while every gunshot hammers at the senses like thunder. Hannah had a hand over Arya's ear for much of the film, but the noise never phases her, nor to do her hearing any harm.

Tom Cruise is on pretty good form, with his smirking well in hand, and Morgan Freeman is solid support in a glorified cameo. Nikolaj Coster-Woldau left me asking 'is that Jaime Lannister?' halfway through the film, but cemented his chops for playing good-looking hardarses. This leaves the female leads, and to discuss those I kind of have to go into spoiler mode, beginning the paragraph after next.

Andrea Riseborough plays Victoria, Jack's partner, in all senses, although he is distracted from that by his memories; apparently of a woman on Earth before the war, before he was born. Olga Kurylenko is the other woman, Julia, who falls out of the sky about halfway through the film and thus sets off the rising action.

It emerges, signposted earlier in the film by the inconsistencies in Jack's history and the fact of his erased memory, that Jack and Victoria are clones, unwittingly doing the work of the aliens, with the original Jack's memories breaking through, but Victoria holding to her 'programme'. Victoria is cool, almost mechanical; even her quiet passion for Jack is more about their team bonding than romance (indeed, she rejects his spontaneous gestures). She is 'unreal', while Jack is clone, but becoming real, and Julia is human all the way through. Unfortunately, Kurylenko is not the actor that Riseborough is; indeed, neither is Cruise, which undercuts the themes of the film somewhat as the characters show depth of emotion in inverse proportion to their ascribed 'soulfulness'.

All in all, I can safely say that I enjoyed the film. It wasn't perfect, but I'm prepared to cut it some slack just for not being a sequel or a remake. I would also be interested to see the comic, which if it matches the visuals of the film would be something akin to the awesomely beautiful and frustratingly occasional Gone With the Blastwave.

Star Trek Movie Musings - The Voyage Home

Ah, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, aka the one with the Time Travel and the whales and the swearing.

I like The Voyage Home. It's got a lot of charm, and I think that the handling of the lighter moments without compromising the drama, especially compared to Star Trek V, really highlights how much stronger a director Leonard Nimoy is than William Shatner.

The film as a whole isn't the single, coherent masterwork that Wrath of Khan is; rather it is a collection of moments, many of which are, in and of themselves, brilliant. Chekov asking after 'nuclear wessels', the social consequences of Spock's inability to lie within a 20th century context, and pretty much everything with McCoy in the state-of-the-art 1980s hospital stand out, but there are a lot of them.

It's not all good, of course, and the 20th century 'liaison', and in particular most of her interactions with Kirk, play uncomfortably to me. Still and all, it's a film I happily go back to.

Next up, Star Trek V; perhaps the worst Star Trek film of all.

Star Trek Movie Musings - The Search for Spock

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock had a tough act to follow. The Wrath of Khan was one of the greatest science fiction films of all time (although I am not sure it was such an immediate success), but it had set up the possibility of a sequel by closing on an image of the photon tube soft landed on the surface of the Genesis planet which formed from the Mutara Nebula. Given that impetus, could the third film be even better?

Well, no; but it's not bad. It is widely held to be the best of the odd numbers, and that's probably fair.

It has the advantage of being very different. The Enterprise is crewed solely by the main cast, and in the films central space battle is at a massive disadvantage as a result. Broad comedy is mingled with tragedy, as Kirk is left helpless to prevent the loss of his son and his ship, and indeed is obliged to participate in the destruction of the Enterprise. This is also the film that does most of the legwork for the personal relationships between the crew.

Perhaps the toughest act to follow is for Christopher Lloyd, who has to fill Ricardo Montalban's shoes as Kruge, the Klingon villain of the piece. It's a lot to do, but Lloyd nails it, turning in a barnstorming performance as a noble and magnificent bastard, and essentially defining the Klingon race for the remainder of the OS film run.

Is it awesome? No. Is it terrible? Lord, no. Just wait and see what we're going to get with number five.