Dark Knight

Man, some sap buying this on the basis of the box art
was in for a shock.

Thanks to LoveFilm, I have been revisiting a part of my past lately, with sub-Herculean Anglo-Antipodean fantasy 'spectacular' Dark Knight, which aimed to do for Ivanhoe what Robin of Sherwood did for Robin Hood, but ends up doing what The Legend of William Tell* did for William Tell**.

The story follows Sir Ivanhoe of Rotherwood - because apparently the year 2000 wasn't going to go for a hero named Wilfred of Ivanhoe, even if he never used the Wilfred and despite the success of 1997's awesome BBC adaptation - who escapes from captivity in the Holy Land and returns to England to battle the forces of wicked King John and raise the ransom to have King Richard released. So far, so this is the story of Ivanhoe, except that John has a court necromancer, Ivanhoe is the 'chosen one' touched by some higher power (possibly God, possibly Diana, it's never really explored; just... assumed,) and radical Jewish female lead Rebecca of York is a flame-haired martial artist with nary a Semitic bone in her body.

Episode by episode, Ivanhoe confronts some bizarre mystical threat - in episodes where the enemy is purely mortal, this element is usually provided by comedy magician sidekick Odo screwing up a spell, or comedy early-science sidekick Friar Bacon meddling with forces that he ought not to wot of - while Mordour the necromancer tries to persuade John to get involved in some shenanigans which will ultimately benefit Mordour. The CGI is terrible - John's castle is not the worst example, but does show up in every episode - the fight choreography is basic, the plots are ludicrous and Ivanhoe often seeks advice from a druid named Fingal. Who lives in a cave.

Ben Pullen, Charlotte Comer and Peter Farrell as Ivanhoe,
Rebecca and Odo

How ludicrous are the plots? Well, in one episode Ivanhoe's identical semi-demonic half-brother, born of a liaison between Ivanhoe's father Cedric and a water-snake-witch in the guise of his mother, commits a double murder for which Ivanhoe is blamed. The brother of one of the victims comes after Ivanhoe for revenge. Now, Ivanhoe does have an alibi in this: At the time of the murder, he was sparring. Several miles away. With the vengeful brother. Yes, the person seeking revenge is the accused's alibi (and one of several, a fact which the 'tense' trial scene overlooks,) but apparently has decided that he is himself just lying to protect Ivanhoe.

The series is not without its saving graces, mind you. Veteran character player Jeffrey Thomas is a hoot as Mordour, and his counterpart John Bach as Queen Eleanor's scary, scar-faced bodyguard Du Bois is solid. Also, full disclosure: I'm pretty sure I only saw as much of this as I did when it was on TV because I had a massive crush on Charlotte Comer. On repeat viewing, while I'm a bit old for TV crushes now, I regret nothing. What can I say: I go for red-haired Jewish witches in a big way***.

Oh, and a special note for the score. It's... Basically, it's a really good orchestral score, but played on a mid-priced synthesiser. It's almost painful to listen to.

Dark Knight. Never look back.

* If you don't remember this one, then you probably weren't watching way too much crappy fantasy TV in the late 90s. Go you.
** Seriously, his crossbow was backwards. BACKWARDS.
*** Really; that very specific thing turns out to be my type.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Adam and Eve are quintessential 60s survivors; a musician and a devourer of literature still mired in a psychadelic haze. Yet they are not what they seem, for they are centuries older, two of a dwindling population of vampires battling to balance their need for blood with the lethal pollution of their food supply by humanity's folly. Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive follows the two over the course of about a week as their carefully ordered lives are disrupted by Eve's anarchic sister, threatening their very existence.

In many ways, Only Lovers Left Alive is a movie about drugs and music which happens to have vampires in it. Faced with a human population full of chemicals and environmental toxins, Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) feed only on 'the good stuff'; carefully sourced, decanted blood free from contamination which they acquire from their 'dealers', a Detroit doctor for Adam and 16th century poet Christopher Marlowe* (John Hurt) for Eve. They are disdainful of the destructive natures of the 'zombies' - and it is telling that only humans are ever referred to by a monstrous title - and Adam in particular is almost consumed by the tragic destruction of the scientists and musicians he has sponsored over the centuries.

As an essentially character driven piece, the film rides on the performances of Hiddleston and Swinton, who are both excellent. Hurt, Mia Wachowski as Eve's sister Ava and Anton Yelchin as Adam's human fixer Ian are also superb, and in the film's enclosed world, wrapped in Velvet Underground-esque jangling guitars and long, loving montages, that is enough.

If I had a quibble with the film it would be that the blood = drugs theme is too direct, the feeding scenes too reminiscent of Trainspotting, but it would be a minor quibble.

* There's a reference to his waistcoat which feels almost like a nod to Shakespeare in Love, but that seems odd from a hardcore indie like Jarmusch.

American Hustle

The hair! The clothes! The hair!

Irving Rosenfeld (Bale) is a jobbing conman who has worked his way up from the bottom of the pack after seeing his honest father ground down by bad people. He hits gold when he meets Sydney Prosser (Adams), a dancer whose turn as English aristocrat Lady Edith Greensly allows the pair to pull off increasingly high profile art and loan scams. Their life is complicated by Rosenfeld's estranged wife Rosalyn (Lawrence), who holds custody of their son over him, and then further when FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Cooper) catches them in a scam and ropes them in to help him get more arrests in exchange for immunity.

When the original operation offers the chance to net first Mayor Carmine Polito (Renner), then members of Congress and the Senate and a substantial mob operation represented by Victor Tellegio (Robert De Niro), Richie starts to lose control. Obsessed with his own glory as an agent, and with 'Lady Edith', his growing ambitions threaten to spiral the scam into something that can not survive its own weight. With Irving's growing admiration for and friendship with Polito and Rosalyn's relationship with a mobster, the stage is set for disaster, or for the con of the century.

American Hustle is loosely based on the real-life Abscam operation conducted by the FBI in the late 70s and early 80s, but that's mostly background. The dramatic core of the film is the relationships between the protagonists, both professional and personal, and the lies that they tell to each other and themselves. The lies in this movie are almost characters in their own right, in particular the big one, the scam that begins with an attempt to hook an art fraudster and grows into a monster than can not be tamed. "No more fake shit," Prosser pants in her entirely false English accent while deflecting DiMaso's advances in a nightclub toilet cubicle. That's the quintessence of the movie, right there; lies, sex and squalid glamour.

Renner's hair in this movie can only truly be appreciated in
profile.

The script and story are good, but the film really triumphs on the strength of its look and its cast. The faded glamour of the 70s/80s divide is everywhere. Bright clothes clash with a grimy backdrop, the collapsing promise of the American dream as elaborate and unconvincing a pretense as Rosenfeld's extraordinary comb-over. The cast put in note-perfect performances as slightly grotesque versions of the real figures involved in Abscam, and every aspect of the production design evokes the era as something extraordinary and almost alien to a modern eye.

American Hustle is not a tightly-plotted scam picture in the mould of The Sting or Ocean's Eleven; the Abscam plot is more of a bar on which to hang the personal drama, and while there are twists they are not the point. It's a film about lies and love and above all about what is fake and what - if anything - is real, and a damn good film at that.

John Dies at the End

I read the novel John Dies at the End just over a year ago. It's the weird, semi-stream of consciousness story of two slackers who accidentally contribute to the salvation of the universe as we know it, or are incurably insane, or both. The movie John Dies at the End is based on that novel and directed by Don Coscarelli, the creator of Phantasm, Bubba Ho Tep and The Beastmaster (the original one, not the one with time travel in).

In the nature of the beast, the process of adapting the book has meant that a little tightening up was needed, and when I say a little, I mean like the Wicked Queen tightened Snow White's corset*. The result misses a great deal of the anarchic nature of the original and pulls the rambling plot into a fairly coherent form which... feels like a bit of a shame to me. I get it, I just liked the original.

On its own terms, however, the film is a blast. The effects are discount - seriously though, a family killed by giant spiders are played by the costume lady and her family; that's where the budget is coming from - but the film eschews CGI and cheap practical effects are so much better than cheap CG that it just isn't funny, and the film still works with them. Chase Williamson (Dave) is a little wooden, but that can honestly be put down to the fact that Dave is pretty stoned throughout most of the film, especially given the quality of the rest of the cast. Paul Giamatti is the big name, but Rob Mayes carries the ludicrous glee of John, and Clancy Brown as Marconi is wonderfully weird (he was the fucking Kurgan; what the fuck?)

There are some slightly bizarre changes (the fact that the dog is called Bark Lee, not Molly, weirds me out, although apparently that's just because that's the dog actor's name and I guess it's easier to get it to respond to Bark Lee), but overall the film's story is pretty tight for something distilled from such craziness, without losing the craziness altogether.

It's also pretty funny, so yay!

* For those who don't know that version, before going the poisoned apple route, the Queen disguised herself to sell Snow White new corset laces and tightened them until Snow White choked.

Date Night

On a recommendation from a friend which I can only accurately describe as glowing, Hannah and I watched the 2010 Steve Carell and Tina Fey romcom Date Night last night (thanks, LoveFilm).

Carell and Fey (thankfully not repeating her accent from Muppets Most Wanted, which we'd rewatched on Sunday) play the Fosters, Phil and Claire, a married professional couple with two children. When their best friends (played by Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig, the first - but by no means the last - of many top flight actors who will be making a flying visit to this film) confide that they are separating due to the romance in their marriage deteriorating to the point that they are 'excellent room mates', the Fosters decide to be spontaneous and replace their usual movie and dinner date night with a trip to the city, where they steal an unclaimed reservation in order to eat at an exclusive restaurant.

This one act of dishonesty leads to a mistaken identity and a madcap chase across the city as corrupt cops and gangsters try to reclaim a flash drive that they believe the couple has stolen. At the same time, the Fosters rekindle their relationship and end up doing all the things they thought they'd left behind.

The story is unashamedly silly, and the film's life comes from the performances - mostly Carell and Fey, but also the unexpectedly prominent supporting cast, which includes Ray Liotta, Mark Wahlberg, James Franco and Mila Kunis, as well as a silent will.i.am as himself - and from a surprisingly adept action set piece featuring two cars joined at the front bumper. The gag reel in the credits reveals that a number of routines in the film were improvised by Carell and Fey from a broad premise, and the strength of the partnership tells in the end results.

All in all, Date Night was a lot of fun.

The Great Gatsby

Don't get blase; everything in the film looks this good.

It was a couple of years ago that I found out Baz Luhrman was making a new adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, all art deco style and anachronistic musical numbers, and I said 'sign me up'. Hannah was also keen, which makes it odd that neither of us managed to watch it until a couple of weeks ago.

So, this is a Baz Luhrman film, so if you don't like Baz Luhrman, it's not going to be for you. It is a gorgeously stylised film, evoking the period of the novel through sumptuous art deco set design and costumes. The actors all look the part, in fact the casting is near-perfect, and the dialogue is snappy, while the plot rattles along at a rapid pace.

Di Caprio has now emerged from his difficult hearthrob phase and, like Brad Pitt, is now cheerfully excelling in the kind of character roles once denied him on account of his boyish good looks. Maguire is a perfect ingenue, and the supporting players - from Mulligan's self-centred Daisy and Edgerton as her brutish husband - to lesser parts such as Fisher's brassy moll and Debicki's enthusiastic socialite. The interaction between the characters - in particular the central triad of Gatsby's optimism, Carraway's blinkered devotion and Daisy's brittle reserve - is note perfect.

It's not a film with a great deal of depth, but it's slick and beautiful, and was definitely worth the wait.

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.

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.

A Prairie Home Companion

One of the delights of the old BBC 7 - now Radio 4 Xtra - was The Garrison Keillor Radio Show, the international broadcast name for Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media's long-running (39 years and counting) radio variety show, A Prairie Home Companion. For those of you not familiar with the format, it's like The Muppet Show, if the Muppets were humans, on the radio, mildly sedated and really into country and American folk music. Garrison Keillor presents the show with the kind of warm milk delivery that lulls you into a sense of absolute comfort, and musical acts are interspersed with comedy skits and spoof advertisements for Powdermilk biscuits or the Professional Organisation of English Majors.

And then they made a movie of it.

To say that my mind was boggled would not be far from the truth. How, I wondered, could this be done?

Given the movie's limited release in the UK, it took me a while to find out. It was, in the end, the final movie directed by Robert Altman (The Player, Pret a Porter), and with an all-star cast portraying characters created by Keillor and the radio show's rep company (most of whom have cameo roles) it is a typically Altman ensemble piece, depicting the last broadcast of a fictionalised version of A Prairie Home Companion.

The action is limited to the stage and dressing rooms of the Fitzgerald Theatre (aside from a couple of scenes in Mickey's Diner). Kevin Kline narrates as Guy Noir, ex-Private Eye-turned-security guard, and the stories of the various characters - Keillor as himself, Woody Harrelson and C. Thomas Howell as singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty, Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep and Lindsey Lohan as members of a singing family - are threaded through by Asphodel (Virginia Madsen), an angel in a white trenchcoat come to escort someone to God. The camera moves from the stage to the backstage, from performance to 'reality', as the cast of the radio show face their impending cancellation with varying degrees of resignation and denial.

That's really all there is to it.

In a lot of ways, it's like the radio show. It isn't exactly daring, but it's not as bland and safe as it initially seems. There is not much plot and its humour is distinctly odd, but it knows it. At one stage, Asphodel actually discusses with Keillor a joke he once told (two penguins are standing on an ice floe. One turns to the other and says: "You look like you're wearing a tuxedo." The second penguin says: "How do you know I'm not?") and why it is, or isn't, funny ("It's funny because people laugh.") It is packed with great performers giving good performances, and if not exactly Altman's greatest work, it has much to recommend it if you're a fan of that sort of gentle, rambling experience.

The Eagle

Hannah and I decided to watch a DVD on Friday, and after considerable searching, we settled on The Matrix, simply because I don't own many DVDs that she was interested in. It's not that our tastes don't overlap, they do, I just don't own those DVDs. Thus, on Saturday we opted to pick up a cheap DVD in Asda for a future evening's entertainment (in the end, Sunday's).

After much careful consideration, we opted to spend £3 on a copy of The Eagle, with Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell, rather than Black Death, with Sean Bean.

Based on Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Eagle of the Ninth and referenced by James Holloway of the Gonzo History Project in his discussion of Picts who look like Native Americans, The Eagle is an odd-couple buddy movie, in which Marcus - son of the last Centurion of the lost 9th Hispania - seeks to restore the honour of his family by recovering the eagle standard of the legion, aided by his British slave, Esca.

This is one of those films where they distinguish nationality by accent, having the Romans chiefly played by Americans - or in one case, Mark Strong doing an accent, which is a bit odd - and the British by British actors. Marcus and Esca argue and talk about whether Rome is awesome or awful; they get captured by the Picts and Esca claims Marcus is his slave, then at the end of the film they basically swan into town hall, give a Tribune the finger and swan out again like they're in a cop movie and they just took down the mob.

It's kind of interesting to watch from that angle.

Robot and Frank

Frank (Frank Langella) is a bad-tempered, increasingly sentile retired former cat burglar with a stubborn attachment to his own independence; robot is a mechanical health-care aid with advanced motor and cognitive abilities. They commit crime.

That's pretty much the plot of this independent film. OIn the near future, our elderly ex-fellon is bought a robot helper by his son (James Marsden) and, when it suggests a 'project' to give him structure and help maintain his memory, he teaches it to pick locks so that they can commit burglaries together. Complications occur in the form of the librarian (Susan Sarandon) he has a crush on and a radical anti-robot daughter (Liv Tyler), as the unlikely partnership provides him with a new lease of life.

I'm not a great fan of either James Marsden or Liv Tyler, but they were both pretty decent in this, and Langella and Sarandon are serious class acts. It's an odd little film, but rather sweet and not a little sad in parts, being not just a sci-fi buddy comedy about a man an his robot stealing jewels, but also a touching exploration of the nature and importance of memory, and of its loss.

Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer

The Adventures of Captain Alatriste is a lengthy series of novels by Spanish author Arturo Perez Reverte. In Alatriste, director Augustin Diaz Yanes takes the sensible course of adapting only the first of these novels, introducing the character and his page/chronicle Inigo, their friends and enemies at court, and their involvement in the upper echelons of 17th century Spanish politics through Alatriste's unlikely rescue of the visiting Prince of Wales and Duke of Buckingham.

Oh, no; wait. what I should have said is that he shoves the central plots of the first five novels into a single, sumptuous two-hour-plus epic. At the very least, I can say that it never drags.

Make no mistake, this is a film that demands your attention and mocks you mercilessly if you let it slide. It's in Spanish, for starters, so if you're not a Spanish speaker, you'd better be watching the subtitles. The plot is also pretty Machiavellian, so try to keep up, and given that most of the characters are swarthy, mustachioed soldiers in the Spanish tercios, the casual viewer could easily get lost.

That said, it is a magnificently shot movie, with superb action sequences, and it never gets bogged down in all that politics. I suspect that I would have been in absolute throes of ecstasy over the cinematography if I knew more about Velasquez, and I was pretty impressed as it was.

Worth a watch, certainly, although it's two hours in which you won't really be chatting much.

Perspectives on Horror - Frailty and Red Riding Hood

 I strongly suspect that this is not going to be anyone's idea of an obvious movie double bill, but bear with me.

Frailty is actor Bill Paxton's directorial debut, a Texas-set paranormal thriller in which a young man (then mega-heartthrob Matthew McConaughey, looking disheveled and ragged) attempts to convince an FBI agent that his brother was a serial killer through a tale of their father's religious visions, while Red Riding Hood is a Twiclone based on the titular fairy tale, complete with a forced love-triangle and a heroine with largely self-inflicted problems.

Not, I confess, a logical pairing.

But...

Here's the thing. Neither film is exactly a horror film, but both draw a vein of horror from the manipulation of perception.

First up, spoiler-free reviews:

Frailty is a compelling drama, well-acted and directed, and by turns chilling and thought provoking. It is well-worth seeing.

Red Riding Hood wants to be Twilight, without being Twilight, and has far less to say than it thinks it does. It is still worth seeing, because it's fun, and being from the director of Twilight it is very, very pretty to look at.

If you absolutely had to choose, I would suggest choosing Frailty.

Beyond this point, I need to discuss particular plot points, so there will be spoilers.

Frailty opens with Fenton Mieks approaching the FBI Agent in charge of investigating the 'God's Hand' killer to announce that the killer is his brother Adam. He proceeds to tell a story of the two brothers and their father, a good man who one night announces that God has sent an angel to tell him that the end times have come and that he and his sons must hunt down and destroy demons in human form. Only they can see the demons and their sins, he explains, and Adam accepts this, even as Fenton sees his father's descent into madness and relentless pursuit of a random list of names.

And then the film turns everything on its head simply by shifting its perspective, with a twist that does the two things that a twist ought to do: It takes you by surprise, and then immediately convinces you that it shouldn't have done.

Red Riding Hood is told almost exclusively from the perspective of Valerie, soon to be given the eponymous cloak, a good girl in a village beset by a werewolf. After the wolf kills her sister, a professional hunter is summoned and the long 'truce' with the beast breaks down, with Valerie caught in the middle of it all.

Except... if viewed from anyone else's perspective, the story is somewhat different. Valerie isn't the innocent people think, or that even she views herself as. She is actually resented by her friends, bears some indirect guilt for her sister's death, and when pressed proves to be selfish, vicious and somewhat amoral. She scorns the village catch, Henry (rich, handsome, honest, sharply intelligent and devoted) for her long-time inappropriate squeeze, Peter (moody, surly, emo hair, although he is at least also loyal to a fault), but won't do so openly and is then willing to stab Peter on a hunch that he might be the wolf, but when he is infected, decides that he's so dreamy he gets a pass. At the end of the film, she is also immensely dismissive of people who, despite their own fears, envies and frailties, when push came to shove were willing to stand up for her against a monster, be that the wolf or the hunter.

It also has a twist, which again I didn't see coming, but I'm not sure that I should have done, which makes it a little less sound.

And there's a rave scene in the middle which is as jarring as the one in the first non-existent Matrix sequel, and even more anachronistic.

The Lion in Winter

Prince John: "He's got a knife!"
Queen Eleanor: "Of course he has a knife. He always has a knife. We all have knives. It's 1183 and we're barbarians.

Based on James Goldman's play (and, with Goldman writing the screenplay, preserving pretty much all of the dialogue), The Lion in Winter is a domestic comedy-romance transformed into grand tragedy by the fact that the family in question are the Plantagenets; Henry II (Peter O'Toole), his scorned wife Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn), his rebellious children, Richard (Anthony Hopkins), Geoffrey (John Castle) and John (Nigel Terry), his mistress Alais (Jane Merrow) and her brother, King Philip of France (Timothy Dalton). The play was not successful prior to the release of the film, but unusually it did very well afterwards, due in no small part to the strength of the script.

The cast, as you can see, is spectacular, and the production design is lavish, but it is Goldman's dialogue that sparkles, in particular in the many confrontations between the two leads. O'Toole as the mercurial Henry goes from playful to curmudgeonly to snarlingly overbearing with barely a pause and never the slightest warning, while Hepburn plays Eleanor with a sharp and brittle strength. The rest of the cast are no less worthy of note, many of them in very early film roles preceding long and distinguished careers. Hopkins' Richard is a picture of chivalric nobility, and in his moments of defeat has a truly affecting look of wounded pride. Castle's Geoffrey is overtly the weakest performance, so much so that its strength only shows when one realises that Geoffrey is supposed to be the forgettable - and forgotten - one. Terry, later to play Excalibur's Arthur, is here a weasely presence, appearing very much as a lesser analogue to Dalton's beautiful, reptilian Philip. Merrow is sort of the straight man of the piece, never really knocking heads with anyone, but plays Alais and her devotion to Henry with conviction.

The action of the film is limited to one castle and a few days over Christmas in 1183, with eldest son Henry, the Young King, recently dead and the older Henry yet to name another heir. Plot and counter plot fly back and forth, secrets are revealed and past cruelties raked over as Henry pushes John, Eleanor pushes Richard and Geoffrey pushes himself.

Tightly directed and superbly played, the film is a corker, well worth viewing, if it's new to you, or re-viewing if it isn't.

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.

Star Trek Movie Musings - The Wrath of Khan

Star Trek: The Motion Picture took the idea of a Star Trek episode and made it into a massive, bloated, over-ambitious movie too dependent on its - admittedly spectacular - effects to really stand the test of time. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a sequel to an episode of the Original Series (so much so that the film makes only sparse references to explain who and what Khan is) spun out into a genuine movie plot, and it is awesome.

Lewis Lovhaug, in his review of a less-than-stellar comic adaptation, ascribes the film's success to its containing no extraneous material, and he's pretty much there. The Wrath of Khan contains no padding whatsoever; no digressions, no over-extended effects shots, no tacked on love interests. It is as spare and precise a piece of film-making as you'll find anywhere, and not merely in SF. It foreshadows and pays off its foreshadowing; it conveys real emotion and depth, warmth and pain. It places its protagonists in real peril and gets them out of it convincingly and without contrivance. It has high stakes and lasting consequences for the characters.

It also created one of the most enduring concepts in speculative fiction: The Kobayashi Maru; a test that forces its participants to face a no-win situation.

I love this film. It remains my favourite Star Trek film, pending the release of Into Darkness, and I was somewhat disappointed to learn that Benedict Cumberbatch would not be bringing us his rendition of Khan Noonian Singh. On the other hand, the basic elements of Wrath seem to be present in Into Darkness, but reversed, with Kirk as the relentless pursuer, hounding an enemy even to his own destruction. The kind of did that with First Contact, but I'm interested to see how they manage with a more direct parallel.

Star Trek Movie Musings - Star Trek: the Motion Picture

So, with Star Trek Into Darkness out this year, I'm going to be posting some of my thoughts about the previous films, beginning with Star Trek: the Motion Picture

Having failed to launch a new Star Trek series, Gene Roddenberry got to make a film, and oh boy, what a film. It's huge, packed with special effects which still hold up pretty well and which, at the time, were clearly so good that they couldn't get enough of them, because while the film has some incredible moments, it also has some interminable quarter-hours while the camera pans around an effects shot to show us every imaginable detail and angle. You could lose an hour and not lose any story; possibly more, since this is essentially a hyper-extended version of an original series episode.

As an aside, it also features appearances by several members of the proposed cast of Star Trek: Phase 2, who all die, some in worse ways than others.

The story may be a little thin, but the visual effects are still almost worth the time lavished on them, and Jerry Goldsmith's score (including the theme tune originally intended for Phase 2 and later used for TNG, which also sounds a bit like the theme tune to The Vikings) is amazing. It also uses an instrument made out of magnets sliding around in a plastic tube, which is kind of awesome.

Man I love trivia about this film.

Looper

Warning: Contains spoilers

Looper is a film about time travel. And telekinesis. Sort of. And crime.

It has good and bad points in all of those categories.

Its time travel mechanic is one of variability. The future in Looper is in a state of constant flux, with past events affecting the course of post-history for those who travel back in time. The Bruce Willis version of the main character has a good description of the way it works: his memories between 'now' and the time he left from, he explains, are no longer memories; they are a haze of possibilities, the older the hazier, until the moment passes when they become clear again. This is as clear as the film gets, which is all to the good, as it is rarely helpful to go into too much detail unless the time travel is the point, and in Looper it isn't. Neither is the telekinesis, which makes it a little odd that it's in there, save to make a small child into a threat.

The point of the film is about sacrifice; what people are prepared to give up and for what. Young Joe starts off not wanting to give up his future comfort for a friend, while Older Joe will kill children to get his life and his wife back, but not to give her up to save her. By the end of the film, Joe gives up his life to give the future - and a child - a chance.

The performances are strong, with JGL and Willis presenting the two Joes with an balance which means neither comes off as 'right', or even significantly better than the other. Emily Blunt is always good, although special mention has to go to the kid, who is wicked creepy. On a technical note, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Bruce Willis make-up is a little creepy and I like the heavy use of practical effects.