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.

Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness

So, another Dungeons & Dragons movie; more mock heroics and dodgy dragons, and perhaps another chance to see Bruce Payne in purple lipstick chewing on the scenery.

Right?

Well... not exactly.

The third D&D movie takes its title and setting from the game line's controversial Evil Bastard's Manual, released amid much sound and fury as a 'mature readers only' product from the pen of Monte 'Monte Cook's World of Darkness' Cook, introducing rules for sex, drugs and rock and roll (well, drugs and bad magic rituals at least) and making Tracy 'All thieves must be evil unless they are racially inclined to kleptomania' Hickman cry.

We open with the last of the Knights of the New Sun, an ironically old and defunct holy order who once threw down an evil sorcerer (the opening narration tells us so; with animation) and were the guardians of peace for centuries, but are now an irrelevance in an age when every small town has a curtain wall and a magically-shielded trove of enchanted treasures. Newly anointed knight Grayson takes his vows of duty and chastity, like his father and grandfather before him (seriously, they forswear the pleasures of the flesh, but there's a whole line of them; I pity their poor wives), but the mystical light show fails to happen, as it has failed to happen for decades, and he is feeling a little blue when the order are attacked by barbarians and wiped out, save for Grayson - who is left for dead - and his father, who is captured.

"I'm totally evil and committed to power, and we will in no way end up having sex."

In pursuit of the barbarians, Grayson gets help from a friendly prostitute, as you do. She hooks him up with a magic item seller - a contact that is no doubt of immense use to a small-town whore - who sells him some black armour and a jaggedy sword so that he can disguise himself as a badass. The prostitute - judging by the credits she might be called Carlotta, but names are elusive things in this film, and none of the actors are recognisable enough to narrow it down -then points him towards Akordia, a ruthless witch who is recruiting sell-swords in the service of the barbarians' master, Shathrax the Mind Flayer.

He does not make the best showing at first, given that the posse of evil bastards are unconvinced by Grayson's manly swagger. However, by killing one of her existing goons, Grayson wins a place on team evil, alongside Seith the Libertarian Assassin, Bezz the Vermin Lord, and Vimak the enormous black guy with the immense sexual appetite (I think someone slipped and fell on a stereotype). In the hopes of being led to his father he goes with them on their mission for Shathrax, despite knowing that he may have to betray his vows to maintain his cover.

"I'm totally as evil as the guy behind me! Look at my broody
face!"
"We're still totally never having sex."

Honestly, it's amazing that this works at all, given how incredibly bland and wet our hero is. If you picture a cross between Johnny Depp and Karl Urban, with all the manly passion and charisma of Justin Beiber, you're about there.

Also, this happens, because all small towns also have lavish
bordellos apparently.

This Fearsome Five head out, slay a dragon, massacre a small town and generally behave badly. Sure, they occasionally stop to discuss philosophy (Seith believes that poor people just exist as somewhere to keep his knives), ambition (Vimak was exiled for being weak and wants to go back and kill everyone who knows about it, although apparently he mostly wants to sleep with a huge number of women simultaneously), to kill each other (even Grayson commits murder, then hides the body in a Bag of Holding), or just to afflict people with bug plagues for the sheer, unadulterated hell of it (Bezz the Vermin Lord digs insects; go figure), but mostly it's just one bad deed after another. Finally, with most of them dead of friendly fire, they retrieve the cover of the long-lost Book of Vile Darkness from its keeper.

Seriously, this is high octane nightmare fuel right here.

Said keeper, by the way, is a 'slaymate'; an undead child betrayed and abandoned by her guardians and now subsisting on cruelty and hate. It is very, very creepy. Being allergic to all touchy-feely feels, the Slaymate reveals that Akordia is in love with Grayson after (spoilers) he betrays one of his vows when they have creepy, Red Sonya-ish 'you saved my life so I must do you' suddenly-submissive-Amazon, post-dragon slaying sex, which is a phrase almost as uncomfortable to say as the scene of Akordia being all 'the witchy law says you may ravish me as you desire' is to watch.

"Hand over all the black leather in the town and nobody gets hurt."

Finally, we reach the castle of Shathrax, who turns out to be a guy with his mouth sewn shut who speaks through two women he keeps on chains, which is creepy, but so not a Mind Flayer. Grayson rescues his father, and when they are cornered his defiant hope kindles his paladin amulet into life (bizarrely in response to his declaring himself a blackguard, which in D&D is an anti-paladin rather than a bounder and a cad). Shock, horror! This turns out to be a trap, as the villains need 'liquid pain' extracted from a true knight using a machine clearly knocked off from Count Rugen's design in The Princess Bride to ink the new Book of Vile Darkness, but Akordia betrays the dark lord for love and light returns.

The end.

The Book of Vile Darkness is... bad, but not as bad as the first D&D movie and for different reasons. The attempt at grimdark is partially successful, but Grayson is painfully bland and Akordia not much better and the less said about the awkward stab at sexing up the franchise the better. Seith, Bezz and Vimak are the stars here, since they are clearly having fun, especially Bezz, whose presence seems to be as a reminder that not all evil is Lawful Evil. There are also some nice moments, with Grayson hiding a corpse by stuffing it into a bag of holding being a standout for me, and even some half-decent dialogue.

All in all, however, if you're not siting up into the wee small hours waiting for your laundry to finish, there are probably better choices available.

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.