Now You See Me

Four young magicians put on a show in Vegas wherein they apparently rob a bank in Paris. With two more shows advertised and the FBI hot on their heels, a battle of wits commences between the magicians, the lead FBI agent and his Interpol partner, a professional debunker and a ruthless multimillionaire.

Putting more synopsis in would kind of spoil things, as this is a film that relies heavily on its twists.

The set pieces of Now You See It are the three big magic acts - plus a couple of chase scenes - but the film understands that in a movie it isn't enough to show some tricks. After all, it's a movie; they can do all sorts of things with trick photography and we know that the live audience, including anyone who appears to be hypnotised, are just actors. Instead, in a lot of ways, the film itself is the real magic act. It draws you in, invites you to look so closely that you miss things, then pulls off a series of stunning reveals.

Like most good tricks, you can work it out if you try, and especially if you listen to what it's telling you instead of being blinded by what it shows you, but working it out doesn't spoil it; it just lets you look at the film from the other side. Like all good tricks, even when you know the secret you can still admire the art.

My thoughts on the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer.

So... this is kind of what a trailer should be; surprisingly so. Not too many spoilers, but enough action and humour to give us a taster of what to expect. It's actually rare to see such a perfect example of the form these days.

I am excited to see what the rest of the film has to offer.

Bad Movie Mecca II: This Time it's a Blog

After many years' hiatus, the Bad Movie Mecca - my aged review website - now has a blog of its own:

http://badmoviemecca.wordpress.com/

This blog will continue to house reviews, but anything especially terrible will be getting the full treatment over at the WordPress site. Having spent many happy years working on the original BMM, I am really psyched about starting up again.

Big Finish: Vienna

Vienna Salvatore belongs to a long tradition of slinky scifi bounty hunters and assassins, and in her first appearance was - I felt - rather uninspiring. Making her debut in the Doctor Who audio play The Shadow Heart, in the tried and tested role of 'antagonist who joins the Doctor in the end from necessity and survives in part to show that the Whoniverse has no intrinsic justice'. She was... so-so. She was well played by Star Trek veteran Chase Masterson, but nothing to write home about.

The writers at Big Finish apparently felt otherwise and she was given her own series, premiering with the pilot story The Memory Box last year. I wasn't much bothered, but I get a free CD with my annual subscription, and most of the qualifying titles I already had, so I figured what the hell.

The Memory Box is a mixture of police procedural and quintuple cross heist movie which establishes what became the core themes of the first series: Memory, perception and morality. Vienna Salvatore is one of the world's deadliest assassins, with a personal rule that no-one who hears her name gets to live. This doesn't set her up to be very likable, but unlike her appearance in The Shadow Heart, in The Memory Box it is quickly established that she keeps her name very close.

The titular memory box is a technology that locks memories away to avoid detection by brain scans. It is a recurring concept in the series which, along with the storage and deletion of memories from one's own mind, sets up an exploration of constructed identity which runs throughout the three stories of Series One.

In Dead Drop, Vienna is hired to assassinate a psychopathic psychic military commander, precipitating a collapse in the subordinates who are used to her mental abilities sustaining their self-perception, as well as a deep cover agent programmed to subconsciously screw up. Faith Stealer features Fraser Hines as a religious leader who reaps the faith from humble supplicants and injects it into celebrity benefactors as a fast tack to enlightenment. Finally, Deathworld sees Vienna confront a traumatic childhood experience which set her on the path to becoming an assassin, and seems to have been given to other assassins in order to motivate them.

All in all, Vienna was a surprise, and a pleasant one, and the tackiest thing about it is the picture of her in a slinky dress on the box. It's odd, because the Vienna in the audio itself would clearly never be caught dead in anything so impractical, let alone without a blaster to hand.

Premium Rush, Happy Feet Two, Mr Peabody and Sherman and The LEGO Movie

Quite a parade this time out, as I catch up on some things I've missed posting on.

Premium Rush is a small-scale action movie, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a New York bicycle messenger. Postgraduate law dropout Wiley lives for his work, dodging traffic around the city to deliver packages on his single-gear, brakeless steel bike. Hired to courier a receipt across town, he finds himself pursued by a corrupt cop and unwittingly embroiled in the world of Chinese hawala moneylenders and snakeheads.

JGL is an actor I have a lot of time for, especially since Brick and 50:50 showed that his younger performances (Third Rock from the Sun, 10 Things I Hate About You) were just the tip of his range. Here, he kind of takes second fiddle, not to the plot but to the deadly labyrinth of New York City traffic. The city is shot at a breakneck pace, only slowing down when it comes off the bikes, or to illustrate Wiley's navigational skills through slow-mo projected courses in a style similar to the fight planning scenes in Sherlock Holmes.

The action is small scale, our heroes tiny figures weaving between the lethal, anonymous mass of the traffic, the story simple, but the film successfully portrays this small conflict as being as real and meaningful as any world-saving quest.

Happy Feet Two is a very different affair, although it too has its depths, in particular a strong environmental message. Once again, it is about a penguin seeking for his own method of self-expression, although in this case Mumbles' son Eric can't dance or sing in the traditional style, only finding his voice in a very different genre.

It's a sweet little film, with a fine voice cast and a decent message about global warming not too heavily delivered. As with the original, it has some good songs, although not every one works perfectly.

Mr Peabody and Sherman is a reinvention of a pairing from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, for those of us who remember that; a hyper-intelligent dog and his human adopted son.

After years of living with Mr Peabody and taking regular field trips into the past via the Wayback, a time machine remarkably similar to the one in Free Birds, but not voiced by George Takei, Sherman starts at school with other humans, where he immediately gets into a fight with a spoiled little girl, provoking a rabid overreaction from the monstrous child services rep Ms Grunion.

The film has some cracking sequences. Mr Peabody is dry and sarcastic, with a ready line in puns that appeals to me, and the slightly awkward father and son chemistry with Sherman is delightful. Penny is a complete bitch, but grows on you as she softens, and the historical characters are wonderful parodies of their most famous distillation. Ms Grunion...

Okay, so, wow; this is a character that deeply, deeply disturbs me. Horrid, racist, overbearing, self-righteous and, above all, violent towards children, she is almost too much of a grotesque for me to deal with. Fortunately, her appearances in the film are minimal, and the rest is highly enjoyable.

Finally, The LEGO Movie, a hyperkinetic, technicolour romp through every pop cultural phenomenon with a LEGO franchise and then some. It's a pretty hardcore nerdfest, from the relentless stream of references to the fact that it is computer animated in the style of stop motion.

Emmett is a generic construction worker in a LEGO city, until the Piece of Resistance (I lolled) gets stuck to his back and throws him into an adventure beyond his understanding and outside the instructions. Working with the Master Builders - people capable of reconfiguring ordinary LEGO buildings and vehicles into anything they can envisage - he must confront the evil Lord Business and his plan to freeze the world in his quest for perfect order.

For the most part, it's a fun ride, but what lifts the film above an extended advert for LEGO is that its central message is not that you should buy lots of LEGO sets, but rather than each LEGO set can be anything you want it to be, not just what is in the instructions. As someone who used to have an enormous sack of mixed bricks, I can get behind that message.