I’d always thought that ours was a generation of pussies, that next to our parents, we’re a bunch of indulged wasters, with the intellectual teat of the internet killing our sense of wanderlust, encouraging us to expect everything on a plate. Not only did our parents not have the Internet or Sky+, they had shit like World Wars, rationing, the 3-day week and Mike Yarwood to deal with.

But now I’m not so sure. We’re actually living in the worst era many of us will know - dominated by the terror threat, our own Vietnam situation, aggressive unemployment cutbacks, Chris Moyles and a pronounced economic downturn. The way you judge the fibre of society during a crisis is to look at the art that’s produced - during the Great Depression, they regressed into the comfort of traditional folkiness and sought heroic saviours, which gave birth to the original DC superhero comics.

But what is the underlying theme that dominates our times? Even greater self-inflicted suffering: whether it’s torture porn (which even the artsy French joined in with) or the intellectual thumbscrews of Michael Haneke or Lars von Trier’s Anti-Christ, we’ve proven that we are truly robust on a deep level.

Case in point - a friend was once telling me (yeah, it’s always a friend) about the trend for uploading videos of people’s reactions to the gross-out porn clip Two Girls One Cup. Whose reaction indicated the weakest constitution? A granny’s. Case closed (ignoring any arguments about media saturation leading to increased desensitivity).

Which brings me to A Serious Man, in which the Coen Brothers join in this vogue for intolerable cruelty by unleashing a torrent of misery on poor, harmless Jewish teacher Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) in the name of entertainment - and god bless them for it, if this kind of power-cut black comedy is what we get as a result.

With his son Danny’s bar mitzvah weeks away, Larry suddenly finds his life turning to absolute shit - first his wife calmly springs a divorce on him, dumping him for the astoundingly loathsome Sy Ableman, his job at the college comes under threat, he’s kicked out of his house and driven to the brink of financial ruin, while death and misfortune dog his every turn. Seeking guidance from his faith is no use - a string of rabbis seek to instruct him, only to prove that they’re of no use either. The poor sod has just got to cope with it on his own.

After the mainstream grandstanding of No Country For Old Men and Burn After Reading, A Serious Man offers the chance for the Coens to reassert the indie credentials - shorn of a huge budget and A-listers, they’ve made a strikingly personal film, yet their sheer talent as film-makers means that this is still as great an achievement as many of their classics, and no less accessible.

It’s quite a simple, finely honed tale of a man questioning his fate and faith, but it’s executed with such majesty and brutality that you just have to bow down. Despite being steeped in Judaism and peppered with Hebrew, the legendary overriding dark Jewish humour makes A Serious Man a compulsive pleasure. One thing that the Coens do so well is convey comedic charm and depth of character by the merest of details - from the bow-legged teacher’s assistant to Danny’s pal’s rabid swearing and the playfully chewy dialogue you get such an immense feel for the characters.

Another of the Coens’ great traits is their ability to mess with the conventional ways of telling a story to make their work feel fresh: the classical narrative structure is to take a person, disrupt their life situation, allowing the film to become about them resolving that disruption and creating a new status quo before the end credits roll. Here, the boys totally go freestyle with that, spending the entire film disrupting Larry’s status quo, then scarcely even giving him the pleasure of a happy ending.

The casting is nigh on genius, too. Despite being packed with unknowns, they’re all perfect, from Fred Melaman’s luridly abominable Sy Ableman to the hapless rabbis struggling with the limitations of their teachings. Stuhlbarg holds it together with a turn of restraint that threatens to boil over at any moment. You can’t help but watch in admiration as the poor sod copes with all that’s thrown at him.

Related links:

• Competition - Want to win A Serious Man on Blu-ray?

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

A Serious Man - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Having won his place in the hearts of countless suburban multiplex-goers with such joyous spectacles as Weekend At Bernie's 4: Suffer The Consequences and the more recent Harry Potter & The Ceaseless Pain Of Eternal Damnation, funny-guy movie director Michael Haneke returns to regale us with this light-hearted Scooby-Doo period-piece mystery packed with youthful exuberance and high jinx.

All right, most of you will realise I’m swinging it a bit there. Haneke is not your go-to man for fluffy fare suitable for the casual cineaste. Quite the opposite. But as Pocket-lint is the home of the forward-thinking and the innovative, it seems only fair that we should make room for one of cinema’s most progressive film-makers, especially as only A Prophet stand between The White Ribbon and Oscar glory (at the time of writing), and his 2005 film Hidden is viewed by many as one the last decade’s finest works.

Those unfamiliar with Haneke need to know that they’re in for a taxing but compelling session. Set in an idyllic village in Germany ahead of the First World War, The White Ribbon recalls a string of suspicious and traumatic events that shattered the peace and upset the feudalist harmony: the doctor is badly injured after his horse is felled by a tripwire, a barn is set alight, a mill worker dies and children are abused.

At the centre of it all is a group of youngsters, unsettling little Aryan sods who seem to dispassionately view these events, no matter how shocking. Among these children are Martin and Klara, the offspring of the local pastor, a noble man who strives to ensure their purity and keep the community’s moral compass from going royally on the fritz. 

Haneke seems to be setting up a logical path; find out what the kids are up to, set up a bit of retribution and then home for cocoa – but Haneke doesn’t like to play by Hollywood’s rules. Is it really the kids? Are the victims entirely blameless? Do we get to find out what’s going on? Not exactly. While much of mainstream fare seems to hang its narrative on traditional genre points, with a built-in need for payoff, Austrian director Haneke inverts those notions. While films conventionally use certain cues to move us, be it gore in a horror film, CGI, action scenes or the actor’s delivery of an emotive line, Haneke is able to operate on a plane that rejects all of those.

Instead he works on a truly subconscious level – he can locate our deep fears and discomfort and present them to us with the merest effort. Though narrated in retrospect by the village teacher, we aren’t given the benefit of his perspective, instead we’re placed in the middle of it, given no insight beyond that of the villagers. We may feel we suspect what’s going on, but ultimately that’s of zero help. What this means is that our way of experiencing the film is unique – instead of the film validating or disproving our hunches, we’re forced to take it as it comes, meaning we’re far more emotionally tied in.

Haneke knows this and plays his trump card scenes to maximum impact. A passing reference to incest is handled with such restraint and subtlety that its impact becomes devastating when insinuated onscreen. It’s all filmed with such crisp precision and measured build up that your focus isn’t allowed to stray from the point.

It’s already been well noted that this is an allegory for the rise of the Nazi party – the children stand for Germany’s dark future, with neither religion or the republican authority of the local baron able to stem the tide. What makes The White Ribbon so textured and complex is that there is no easy answer – everybody has to shoulder part of the blame, but there’s conversely the sense that it was also unstoppable.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

The White Ribbon - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Even though we here at Pocket-lint are coaxed into gleeful states of frothy delirium whenever technological advancements come into our purview, what’s equally heart-warming is that, rather than rendered past inventions as obsolete, such creations actually tend to increase the love for the thing that they’ve outstripped.

Have the CD and MP3 not helped foster warmth towards vinyl? Does the Xbox not make the Megadrive a fond reminder of how far we’ve progressed? Granted, DVD, Blu-ray and hard disks pretty much screwed VHS, but there’ll always be an emotional attachment to the advent of home cinema.

So as James Cameron leers over the film industry with his 3D CGI innovation like he’s some 35mm Gene Simmons from Kiss, so other pockets of Hollywood have retrogressed into cruder, but arguably equally magical practices; Disney has trumpeted a return to hand-drawn animation with The Princess & The Frog after years of hiding in Pixar’s pixellated shadow, and here we have cult indie darling Wes Anderson turning to old-school stop-motion animation for his latest eccentric angst excursion.

Boasting a voice cast that would draw admiring glances if it were assembled for a charity fundraiser, FMF is a highly elastic adaptation - though utterly heartfelt if the extras are any indication - of Roald Dahl’s classic tale. Said Mr Fox (George Clooney) goes cold chicken after him and his wife are almost killed during a raid on a nearby farmer’s coop. After spending years of domestic middle-class tranquillity as a father and newspaper columnist rather than as a hunter, the lure of the nearby farmers’ produce becomes too strong to resist, and as our hero has a form of mid-life crisis, he begins to go on covert sorties to the larders of feared local farmers Bean, Boggis and Bunce.

Meanwhile, the Fox family is joined by sporting nephew Kristofferson, serving to highlight the distance between dad and misfit son Ash. As the raid on the farms become more audacious, so the ire of the ransacked farmers increases - which spells trouble for the Foxes and the local animal community, with the cuckolded cock-merchants busting out the arsenal to take down the rustlers.

Man and beast soon become locked in a game of cat and mouse, until the capture of Kristofferson sets-up a final face-off between Fox and his gang and the joint human forces of Bean, Boggins and Bunce.

Like Spike Jonze’s indifference-generator Where The Wild Things Are, this takes sizeable liberties with the source material, both with using the books as jump-off points into more adult territory, arguably at the expense of the younger audience. This shouldn’t be held against Fantastic Mr Fox, as it has enough quality about it to find its own audience.

Wes Anderson is always a sod for the minutiae of everyday existence and relationships, and you don’t get much more mundane than the need to put food on the table and provide for your family. There’s a perfect match there on a base level, which Anderson then follows through with the emphasis on the relationships between the characters and their own personal issues, rather than the thrill of the chase.

Clearly, he’s more at ease with this than he is with action sequences. Fun action scenes there are aplenty, but Anderson’s love of the quirky means that these are more comedic narrative set-pieces rather than adrenaline-pumping spots. This has the downside in that you find yourself oddly impassive in places, but that feeling is never allowed to swell to a problematic degree, as the sheer beauty of the thing is overwhelming and amply compensates for that.

The quality of the visual design is truly impressive, as is the animation itself, which is so wonderfully fluid and intricately realised that you almost cease to notice it. This fluidity is echoed by the cast - Clooney plays the standard suave Clooney part, but this is the modified kooky version that the Coens get, which is hard to be too down on, while Meryl Streep offers maternal authority, warmth and grace as his wife, and Bill Murray brings that louche reassurance that he seems to have a ceaseless supply of. The keenly observed Britishness provided in the form of Michael Gambon completes a scene that’s so perfectly rendered that, even if you’re not at one with Wes Anderson’s angular Royal Tenenbaums schtick, you’ll still find plenty to make you happy.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

Fantastic Mr Fox - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:00:00 +0000

It’s been a lively time for teen flicks in the past few years, from the multiplex-gobbling Twilight to the wry Superbad, and films like Juno and Adventureland have shown that there’s plenty of reasons for those of us who don’t look like members of the Skins cast to tuck in too. Boasting a script from much-feted scribbler Diablo Cody, on the back of her Oscar win for Juno, this vinegary horror is shaped up to be Twilight’s snarkier evil twin. 

After driving off into the night with a bunch of occult-dabbling emo rockers, following a suspicious fire at a bar that kills a number of local kids, high school queen bee Jennifer’s behaviour takes a mysterious turn for the worse, as bloodlust and intestine excavation is curiously added to her CV - much to the concern of long-term pal Needy.

As the body count slowly rises, so do Needy’s fears for her buddy, as she slowly suspects that some demonic shenanigans are afoot. With the prom fast approaching, Needy needs to take matters into her own hands to prevent the ball becoming an entrails buffet.
 
Jennifer’s Body could easily have been a predictable, mainstream slasher, but it merrily strives to be smarter than that. The basic idea is fine enough - take the classic hormonal teen bitch template and blow it up to a logical metaphorical conclusion - the change moody teenagers go through viewed as a form of possession; that’s fine, Ginger Snaps neatly pulled off summat similar with its time of the month/werewolf analogy.

Then you can factor in the catty vibe of films like Mean Girls and Clueless, which Cody has a decent stab at - the script is peppered with teen-speak snipes. Overall, there was ample fun to have been had, but there’s a sense that it doesn’t quite hit the right spots. Jennifer’s Body is keen to be smart-arse, but seems to struggle to get beyond the posturing; the script seems content to rest on neat turns of phrase that don’t add up to anything substantial, while Needy and boyfriend Chip drag the mental age down, with their simpering fecklessness.

Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell similarly used a sappy teen in the protagonist role, but this has none of the vitality that was present in that. Likewise, Raimi showed that a 15 certificate is no barrier for a decent, lively horror, a lesson Jennifer’s Body could have taken heed from, as much of the horror lacks any of the necessary visceral flourish. It could have been different if the crew had fun with the material - even the usually reliable JK Simmons, the oddball stalwart of recent Coens films, seems to find it hard to chomp his way through proceedings.
 
But you do have to give Megan Fox some degree of begrudging acknowledgement as the titular neck-scoffing cheerleader. Despite being the tasty morsel on the end of the film’s red-blooded-bloke-baiting fishing rod, she actually does a bang-up job - granted the role she’s given is a bit of an open goal, but she’s the right amount of sassy and bitchy, delivers an amply playful turn and is given far more scope to enjoy herself and put in a decent acting shift than she was in Transformers. It’s no award-winning performance, but is sound casting, and next to Amanda Seyfried’s Needy, she comes over pretty well.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

Jennifer’s Body - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:00:00 +0000

We could probably do this review in one short sentence: buy this DVD, schmucks.
 
But that would be unfair on you guys, plus my Editor may feel a bit short-changed. In truth, Up’s credentials are by now no secret or surprise, having hoovered up a vat load of Oscar nominations among other awards, and made itself comfy on many a critic’s end-of-year list.
 
Having already brushed aside well over 50 years of Disney domination to redefine the language of animation and ushered in advances in film technology, Pixar have seemingly outdone themselves in recent years, with Wall-E suggesting a creative force really at the top of its game. And so it proves with Up.

The Pixar pantheon of toys, robots, fish, cars and superheroes is joined by Carl Fredricksen, an arthritic curmudgeon with a voice like a gritting machine reversing over Bonnie Tyler’s throat. Now in his twilight years, Carl looks back on his life after the death of his wife Ellie, saddened by the way that their dreams of escaping to South America, inspired by the adventures of intrepid explorer Charles Muntz, were left unfulfilled.

Despite the best efforts of an enthusiastic adventure Scout named Russell, who’s keen to earn his Helping the Elderly badge, Carl is set to see out his years in bitter frustration. After an altercation with a bunch of developers who want to bulldoze his family home, Carl is faced with being sent out to pasture at an old folks’ home, but instead he attaches a shitload of helium balloons to his house and high-tails it to South America - before discovering that he has young Russell in tow.
 
Once in South America, a whole new world of exotic adventure unfolds, as the pair seek to fulfil Carl and Ellie’s long-held dream - unaware that the "trouble in paradise" cliché filter has been applied to the film, and that Muntz’s own journey into dotage has left him with a score to settle.
 
Funny, poignant, exciting and stylish, what’s most impressive about Up is how often it hits the spot. Not only is the story whimsical, it’s also able to handle moments of great sadness with gentleness and subtlety, never feeling the need to crowbar emotions out of the viewer. The much-lauded montage sequence sums it up perfectly, silently capturing Carl & Ellie’s life together, shifting from their blissful early days together to the painful traumas they also shared with a deftness and tenderness that is rarely matched.

The comic timing and judgement are impeccable too. While the Shrek series was latterly undone by its post-modernist smugness, feeling the need to play for cheap referential gags, Up draws its humour from its own well - the gags are there in the story and its situation, not based on reaching out to our knowledge of pop culture iconography - though, that said, the canine card school and Star Wars riffing are neat moments, it’s just they’re tiny asides rather than coarse knowing winks.

The characterisation is admirable too. In other films the urge to go all Al Gore would have made the developers into monstrous bad guys, but here they’re just here to push the plot on. Carl and Russell themselves manage to be human and cartoons at the same time, part caricature, but equally identifiable. It’s the fine balancing of the elements that keeps it on solid ground even when it takes flight. Groan.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

Up - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Success in the Hollywood mainstream is often pretty much all about the maths – "from the people who brought you X" + "starring Y" x "vogue for Z" = smash. Here we have bloke behind Superbad, plus the girl from Twilight and the boy from Zombieland. Should be solid enough, you'd hope. 

Gloriously, Adventureland is much more than solid. Funny, smart, cool and cannily observed, it manages to wear the often-unflattering coming-of-age genre suit and still turn it into something quite fetching. 

When his father is blessed with a lousy job relocation and a pay cut, college-bound James (Jesse Eisenberg) is forced to ditch his plans to get all decadent in Europe, and instead make do with a crappy summer job in an amusement park with his pal Frigo - a man whose key mode of expression is a punch to the balls.

Feeling a fish out of water, and with testicular bruising his constant companion, solace for James arrives in the form of troubled indie hipster Em (Kristen Stewart), and soon a shared love of Lou Reed and dope provides the romantic glue between the pair. But their fling only papers over the problems that remain in their families and the lack of any real future to look forward to beyond the summer holiday.

To describe Adventureland in such terms will in all likelihood make it sound incredibly tepid, but it manages to rise above that and gnaw away at the inside of your head, doing guitar solos on our shared teenage memories. Overall it's the feelings that it captures that are most striking. Never going for the overblown gesture, it superbly captures the uncertainties of being a teenager, along with the feeling of being an outsider, while also revelling in the joy of the freedom and stupidity there is at that age, and the tight bonds that grow when you're stuck in a shitty job.

It may be set in the 1980s, but ironically, that just makes it all the more perennial, when you factor in the now-ness of lead actors Eisenberg and Stewart, both of whom do bang-up jobs - both mixing cockiness with struggle for identity. The script, narrative and casting all work in perfect sync too - there are plenty of clichéd characters in there, from the Napoleon Dynamite to the hot chick, but there's always the sense that they're more than just personality shells.

We shouldn't really feel much sympathy with James, after all, he's a middle-class smart-ass who hasn't really got any problems when compared to the central character in the film Precious, but you get sucked into these characters' lives more than you do with Precious.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

Adventureland - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:00:00 +0000

God loves a trier, which is ironic when the trier in question is devout atheist Ricky Gervais. Never one to dwell on his achievements - both The Office and Extras refused to outstay their welcome - and after just a clutch of acting gigs stateside, his first real stab at steering a major Hollywood project has resulted in this curious portion of philosophical fluff.
 
Gervais takes the lead as Mark, an out-and-out loser, about to lose his job and get kicked out of his flat. The one thing he has to cling to is a date with Anna (Jennifer Garner), a beautiful specimen who has no reluctance to tell him how undesirable he is, or how low her expectations are for the date.

It’s not that she’s mean, it’s just because they both live in a world where nobody lies. Gervais gets great mileage out of this idea in a smartly scripted, if not so smartly directed or acted, opening section - brutal put-downs are exchanged at a dazzling rate, while the world of advertising is a gloriously different place than it is in our world.

On his fiscal uppers, Mark one day inadvertently tries it on at a bank. When they allow him to withdraw more than he has in his savings, a sizeable lightbulb flashes as Mark realises his luck is well and truly in. Eventually sussing how to get the best out of his new-found trick of not telling the truth, Mark reinvents himself, manoeuvring his way into Anna’s affections, though he also uses his gift to help others a bit while he’s at it.

Tragedy then strikes, as on his mother’s deathbed, he tells her there’s eternal bliss in the afterlife to ease her suffering. Word spreads rapidly about this heavenly realm and Mark is cast as a kind of prophet, leading to him getting all Moses and creating a set of Commandments with some Pizza Hut boxes. Which is all nice and that, but that causes its own set of problems, not least in that he’s still in a battle to overcome Anna’s maternal concerns over Mark’s fatboy genetics, made all the worse by the lurking presence of chiselled-jawed DNA-match arsehole Brad (Rob Lowe). Surely too, Mark must have some major uppance to come for his dastardly discovery?

Despite the mixed reaction it received and the uneven balance of comedy and drama, it’s hard to write it off totally. It’s pretty brave of Gervais to attempt to break the faith-loaded American mainstream by openly suggesting that religion is built on falsehood, and the underlying message is a pretty weighty satirical swipe that those familiar with his podcasts and stand-up will recognise.

Despite getting plenty of arfs out of the idea of a world where even the social nicety of lying is absent, and with an often snappy and cutting script, its premise is shot through with flaws - the lesser characters are far too one-note - maybe these people can’t lie, but conflicting emotions would surely have given them a a less-simpleton texture. This is all steeped in a Stepford Wives-esque delivery that is at times enjoyably idiosyncratic, at all other times infuriating.

Gervais himself makes for an odd central character. His Office and Extras shtick is reliant on the subtlety that exists beneath the broad arseholiness of his characters - they’re dicks, but you need the empathy he teases out the bland reality of many of the people around us. By having to make the comedy and delivery chunkier to fill the multiplexes, much of this is neutered.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

Invention of Lying - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Able to brush off plaudits like so much dandruff, French gangster opus Mesrine has already folk pointing at it, saying things like: "best crime flick since Scorsese, that is". The crime scene genre is hardly a field that’s starved of cinematic action, so that’s some claim. So, is Mesrine any cop?

Well, it’s sprawling, striking, intoxicating and one of the suavest films you’re likely to see, if that’s any help. Mesrine is a dexterous, expertly executed work that feels fresh and timeless, both at the same time. Broken into two parts here, covering the best part of 4 hours, it unravels the tale and exertions of Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel), the flamboyant criminal bete noire.

After serving in the Algerian war, he returns to France to discover that a life of increasingly unpetty crime is preferable to a job with a lacemaker. With a flair for breaking the law that’s matched by an uncompromising attitude, he’s taken in by crime boss Guido (Gerard Depardieu) before branching out as a one-man crimewave, with a penchant for bank-robbing and kidnapping.

Breaking out of prison and police custody is also a speciality, and it’s this quality, combined with a theatrical love of publicity, that gets the authorities’ backs up. Never without a dame on his arm or a brazen scheme afoot, Mesrine’s attention-seeking ways sow the seed of his inevitable finale.
 
Like Goodfellas, Donnie Brasco and Bronson, Mesrine is loosely based on a true story, but despite the initial disclaimer about its fictitious tone, this one has the most convincing tone by far. Director Jean-Francois Richet gives us a story that isn’t hermetically sealed – we drift in and out of Jacques’ life, as the editing implies that plenty more happens off-screen. It follows a broad narrative arc, but has no obligation to stick to that prettying convention. Despite his obvious bad-boy bent, we also see Mesrine as a family man who tries to go straight, but even when he drifts back, there’s no need to dramatise the shift – it’s just who he is and where he’s most comfortable.

The lack of formula may grate with some, but it implies a trust of the viewer, that we don’t need a spoon-feeding of plot points. Luckily, the presence of Vincent Cassel in the lead role smooths over any such creases - charming, monstrous, funny, genial, terrifying and arrogant, often at the same time, he’s utterly compelling and effortlessly larger than life. Mesrine grows from a dapper hoodlum to a deluded cartoon, convinced he’s a noble revolutionary, yet Cassel keeps it even. Like Tom Hardy’s Bronson, the need to be notorious makes them compelling and likeable, while ensuring that the dark side of their character is never too far from view - it’s a neat trick to pull off.  

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

Mesrine: Public Enemy No.1 - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:03:47 +0000

Having helped reclaim the teen comedy from the American Pie gross-out gang, 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up director Judd Apatow attempts to move into a smarter, more mature, but no less funny terrain with the over-reaching, yet still perfectly satisfactory Funny People.

Apatow teams up with Seth Rogan once again, who plays Ira Wright, a no-mark comic who’s having to watch pals Mark and Leo (Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman) make a better fist of making it on the comedy circuit. Ira’s miserable fortune switches when he warms up for George Simmons (Adam Sandler), a fading comedian who’s using stand-up as a way of resurrecting his own flailing career and dealing with a terminal illness.

Seeing a kernel of talent in Ira, Simmons asks him to write some material for him, and ultimately takes him on as a kind of personal assistant. His condition helping him realise that he’d been a long-term dick to his ex-girlfriend Laura (Leslie Mann). George tries to make amends, leading to the pair rediscovering their feelings for each other, despite her being married with kids. All the while, George helps Ira find his feet as a comedian, as Ira in return helps George through his darkest hour ­- until a bit of good news for George changes everything. 

Funny People is unsurprisingly rammed with some quality one-liners and some solid comedy performances. Rogan, Hill and Schwartzman work well together, and shoot the shit with convincing ease. It’s also a treat to watch Rogan and Hill onstage, and the stand-up footage is shot with a suave, loose intimacy that gives a great freshness to their performance - and offers a good measure of how funny the guys genuinely are.

But Funny People is ultimately far too uneven, as the perfect balance between comedy and drama that Apatow achieved with Knocked Up is out of kilter here. It appears that the director is keen to heighten both the comedy and the drama, but all that happens is the distance between the two becomes more pronounced, with the softness of the predecessor making way for mawkishness. Dirty gags jostle with daytime soapiness, as George jumps through morality hoops of little great invention.

The imbalance is never better illustrated than in the scene where George and Ira rip the piss out the doctor as he outlines the seriousness of George’s condition - while humour is obviously being used as a defence mechanism, it highlights a simplified and unnatural balancing of realism and artifice.

It’s likely that your enjoyment will hinge on your own attitude to Sandler. Like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, there are shades of Sandler’s own career in this - playing a comedian whose best days are behind him and who doesn’t actually seem that funny in his heyday, it requires serious dramatic acting chops to stir up major sympathy.

Sandler makes a brave attempt, but ultimately his turn helps leave the film mired in a middle ground of indifference. That said, Sandler’s not given much of a chance to shine, given that it’s hard to feel too sorry for a main character whose arc goes from being a dick to less of a dick to still a dick. 

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

Funny People - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:00:00 +0000

It’s suitably documented how Pavlov’s dog developed an innate response to repeated events, but did they stick around to see what happened when it got bored and sick of the sound of the bell? Was it ultimately able to fashion the "whatever" hand gesture with its paws?

I’m just wondering, as there have been some 60 years of celluloid alien invasions of Earth, responses to the threat of intergalactic occupation may peter out a bit. So I’m all a bit giddy, and fashioning large pointy foam fingers and celebratory bunting in honour of this smart and inventive film-making.

Turning the entire invasion angle on its head, District 9 finds a swarm of alien immigrants reluctantly pitching up in Johannesburg after their ship grinds to a halt. With the upper echelons of the society wiped out by a virus, only the poorer, less educated schmucks of the species remain, themselves weakened and malnourished.

Under global pressure, the South African government take the creatures in, housing them in a makeshift camp, which rapidly degenerates to a shanty town. With public hostility to the immigrants at a high, plans are made to relocate the aliens to a more remote area, segregated from an unwelcoming society. Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a jovial bureaucratic idiot, is instructed by a local authority to oversee the move, with the aliens’ rights seen as an obstruction that can be overlooked if necessary.

After accidentally getting infected during a search of an alien’s shack, Wikus finds himself having more in common with the aliens than he'd like, which in turn throws him unwittingly and painfully involved into the government's darker intentions towards their intergalactic guests.

From Blair Witch to Paranormal Activity via Cloverfield, the fake documentary genre has shown that rather than being a gimmick, it’s a format that will allow your film to flourish if you have a solid and imaginative premise. Smoothly working between retrospective interviews and the events of Wikus’ attempts at relocation, it cannily binds the events with the ensuing cover-up, as the shocking tactics of the authorities are laid bare.

Setting it in South Africa is a massive part of the story. Clearly, the underlying analogy with apartheid is unmissable, but it serves to add a further level of tension, rather than form the basis of a political tirade. This means that as the film swerves into a more conventional action film narrative, it doesn’t feel like the social critique is binned, it was only ever a framework for the events.

The location and kwaito soundtrack, both abundantly provincial and genuinely turbulent, also lend it a world cinema edge, making it a kind of City Of God for sci-fi heads. 

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

District 9 - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Should there come a time that a film is released starring Dame Judi Dench, George Clooney and Nick Griffin as action heroes in a 3D costume drama period piece documentary written by Harold Shipman and Danny Dyer and directed by James Cameron, Michael Bay and Spike Jonze, it still probably won't split audiences to the same extent as Lars von Trier's stunning and much harrumphed-about offend-a-thon, Antichrist.

Drawing plaudits and verbal nail-bombs in equal measure when it was first released, even now after the dust has settled, it's hard to fathom what the consensus opinion is. The arthouse community, whose place it would have been to stand up for it against the Daily Mail brigade, are still torn, with as many leaving it out of their top 10 list of 2009 as there were who included it. With its infamous cocktail of graphic sex and violence playing off against the poignant exploration of grief and suffering, it's hard to be indifferent to it.

Following the tragic death of their young son, presented in the prologue that feels like a painfully heartbreaking Marks & Spencer advert, a couple are left to cope with their grief. A psychotherapist himself, He (Willem Dafoe) attempts to treat her, and suggests they retreat to a cabin in the countryside - where She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) spent the last summer with her late son - and continue the therapy.

But his attempts to treat her depression are soon overwhelmed by her deep-seated personal problems and the oppressive nature of their environment, as her descent into mania reaches a brutal and eye-watering conclusion.

Antichrist isn't easy to digest and it's easy to see why many believe that Von Trier is merely seeking to aggravate his audience - the film ignores conventional structure, often plods aimlessly and offers some of the most uncomfortable imagery ever seen, all in the most aggressive manner possible. After the haunting, but showy intro, it settles into a beautifully filmed but ponderous exploration of the couple's anguish.

The pair are given no character traits beyond their mental condition, even their names are unknown, meaning their anguish is never out of focus. Never mind the torture porn that follows, there's plenty of mental torture porn here. The camera rarely lets them out of its sight, while the rest of the screen is often drenched in darkness, which suggests the chasm Von Trier is about to plunge us into.

The casting of Dafoe, here calming on the surface, yet eerie and unconvincing, merely boosts the unsettling tone. Despite the revulsion it inspired at Cannes, at the same festival Gainsbourg was feted for her part, and it's only due to her textured, naturalistic and harrowing turn that the film comes close to matching the fine cinematography.

After a talky section full of dark portent, the final third veers off narrative course as violently as it plays havoc with our retinas. After the arthouse psychodrama, Von Trier decides to do a sharp old-school meets new-school horror swerve on us, of a fashion - an isolated cabin in the woods, mysterious fog and suggestions of Satanism give way to some Saw-style body horror, culminating in the now legendary circumcision scene. Using those horror tropes, but with the pre-established emotional anguish replacing the usual slasher sentiment, it feels unsettling, odd and discordant at the same time. The incidents of violence are brief, but as Von Trier has married physical and mental horror, the effect is hard to ignore.

In many ways, you don't need Antichrist in your life. It's easier and maybe better to know it exists, rather than experiencing it, such is it heavy-going, obstructive and unrewarding nature. The accusation that Von Trier is merely setting out to shock is hard to deny, as there seems no willingness to prepare you for the brutality, and that's not even tackling the accusation of misogyny - personally I read that more as being tied in with her guilt-driven self-loathing. 

But it feels like there's a bigger picture to consider. Von Trier has suffered from depression for many years – Antichrist was made under the shadow of it, and making this is arguably a form of catharsis for him, especially in the way that he is conveys his distaste for cognitive therapy. It all seems to suggest that rather than a movie, Antichrist is an attempt to capture the black state of mind that he and other people go through. Symbolism runs through it, and the violent acts could be the metaphorical expression of the desperation and depths to which a person in that condition finds themself.

Visually, this seems to be the case, especially with the abstract cut-aways that suggest a mental haze throughout and the absence of real-world markers. Van Gogh followed a similar trajectory, his then-reviled style embodied his history of mental illness, especially his skewed view of the outside world and his self-portraits after he cut his own ear. Maybe in time mistrust of what Von Trier has attempted may shift towards understanding.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

Antichrist - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:35:13 +0000

Stag do, Vegas, booze, drugs, strippers, vomiting and the casting of Heather Graham - The Hangover boats a mighty number of signifiers that suggest that it was going for nothing nobler than the lowest common denominator. Which makes it all the more prop-worthy that it went on to become arguably the cult comedy hit of the year.

The Hangover gets off to a flier: we quickly discover that the wedding-day plans of Doug (Justin Bartha) and Tracey are looking royally screwed. Doug's friend Phil (Bradley Cooper) calls to tell her that he isn't going to make it to the ceremony - the stag do got out of hand and now the groom is missing somewhere in Vegas.

Picking up amidst the debris of the morning after, Phil, Stu (Ed Helms) and Doug's future brother-in-law, the stupendously maladjusted idiot Alan (Zach Galifianakis) need to find their buddy, and work out what the hell happened the night before.

With heads filled with the kind of fuzziness that comes from a serious night's caning and a collective black-out that means they have no memory of the night's shenanigans, the guys attempt to piece it all together from clues left in the wake of their carnage, including a lost baby, Mike Tyson's tiger, a stripper, a stolen police car and the campest, most bad-assest Chinese character ever committed to film. 

Despite setting up for the broadest, crassest, laddiest end of the market, The Hangover is a pretty smart, well-judged affair - by steering away from the raucous events of the night before and focusing instead on the painful void the lads deal with the next day and the hunt for Doug, it's less predictable - with it's switching timeframe it's kinda like Memento with a massive bar bill.

Without Galafiankis the film would have been a lot less fun, so give thanks that he is in. While the rest of the main characters have a bland everyman quality that lends a believable quality to the ridiculous scenario, his lowdown oddness and daisychain of bizarre one-liners dominate the laughs. He's not the sole source of mentalism, though - Ken Jeong's over-the-top fey mobster gloriously stomps all over proceedings in the final third, as Doug's whereabouts becomes clearer. 

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

The Hangover - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:00:00 +0000

After cashing in a few of his critical acclaim chips to spend a fair few years paying homage to scuzzy 42nd Street grindhouse scene, Quentin Tarantino turned to more viable genre territory with this stunning, textured and ballsy WW2 flick.

Inglourious Basterds is partly the adventures of the titular team, a band of US-Jewish and Hitler-hating German soldiers on a mission in Nazi-occupied France, led by Brad Pitt’s Aldo Rein, intent on causing as much carnage and humiliation as possible on the Nazis. Meanwhile, Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a Jewish girl who evaded capture by the Nazis, runs a cinema, which propaganda minister Josef Goebbels commandeers for the premiere of his latest film.

With the British tipped off that the Nazi top brass plan to attend, a scheme is formed for British agent Archie Hicox to join up the Basterds and launch an attack during the premiere, facilitated by German movie star-cum informant Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). But with the Nazi party on her turf, Shoshanna also spots a chance to avenge her murdered family and take revenge on the man who killed them – infamous Jew-hunter Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz).

As tense and emotive as it is shocking and funny, Inglourious possibly represents Tarantino’s biggest achievement. While Kill Bill and Death Proof saw him moving beyond the overly informal, easy-going hipster quality that he became known for, Inglorious shows a greater dramatic maturity, married to the vibrant dynamic delivery he was always known for.

Some scenes may feel drawn out, especially the opening sequence, but that draws out a deeper emotional resonance than we’ve been used to from QT, as the painfully nervous tension slowly builds. The blood and guts still fly, the snappy dialogue is still there, but it’s more natural-feeling, coming from the character rather than QT’s pen.

Waltz has rightly been given all the props for his portrayal as the exceptionally charming yet evil Landa – his performance is central to everything, both in terms of driving the events and putting a human face to the atrocities. Pitt’s Rein lacks any real depth - there’s no motivation beyond the sport of hunting Nazis, but given Shoshanna’s back story, that would have muddied the plot.
 
Inglourious is flawed – Tarantino’s film geek obsession with Goebbels’ love affair with cinema is given too much time and detail, with spotter badge minutiae about the German film industry clogging up minutes of screen time. He also refuses to let go of certain motifs, creating a certain repetition. There’s a striking camera shot through a door that’s lifted from John Ford, plus a distinctive piece of tension music that was used in KB1 that crops up again here. Usually a Tarantino strength, the soundtrack here doesn’t seem to work and jars stylistically – as the rest of the film offers a maturity, it might have been more effective to use a score.
 

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

Inglourious Basterds - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:00:00 +0000

When film was in its infancy at the fag end of the 19th century, the mere sight of a train pulling into a station would supposedly reduce cinema-goers to spasms of hysteria, fearful that the thing would leap from the screen. We can act all smug about it now and patronisingly pat our dumbass forefathers on the head, but in truth, we haven’t actually come that far.

The notion of cinema as a spectacle on a instinctive, sensory level seems to be far more pervasive than its intellectual counterpart - how else can we explain the success of films like grandstanding showpieces like 2012, roundly panelled by critics for failing to exist on any level deeper than its visual impact, yet it was lapped up gladly by the masses.
 
Which brings us to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. TRF took one of the biggest kickings in recent years from critics, yet out-sold every other movie released this year - only Twilight: New Moon looks like it may be able to come close to its takings. Directed by the high master of the big, dumb flashy, noisy vacuous carnage pic, Michael Bay, it’s fair to say that all the effort and budget went on making it a visual experience rather than a thoughtful one, clearly mindful of that timeless impulse.
 
After the events of the previous movie, the Dickensian-sounding Sam Witwicky (Shia Laboeuf) attempts to make a clean break from the Autobot Transformers - essentially tricked-up household appliances with kindly souls – and leaving behind his far-too-hot-for-him mechanic girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox) to start over at college, lacking the self-awareness of the tropes of a leading character in the midst of a Hollywood action franchise to realise that that’s never going to work.

Of course, it turns out badly - the eternal battle between the Autobots and the Deceptacons - bad-ass transformers whose only distinguishing feature appears to be an abundance of sharp edges - is still very much on, and that their long-held and previously thwarted scheme to trash the earth and reap its resources for their own sustenance is about to get another airing (one quick call to Galactus from the Fantastic Four comics could have saved them the time and effort - he’d seen an identical attempt at this fail back way in the 60s).

Having come into possession of an artefact of massive importance to both sides of the warring factions, Sam is thrust front and centre into the struggle, and with the Autobots failing to get the proper support from the US military they need to fend off the Deceptacons, Sam becomes key to humanity’s survival.
 
As repeatedly and emphatically stated by the film critic community, it’s a massive shouty bag of idiotic nonsense, fleshed out with a Pirelli calendar devotee’s sense of design and a ceaseless objectification of girls and guns. But you can’t diss Bay for not producing Schindler’s List: he has no interest in that. Instead you have to judge him on what he has set out to achieve.

If, as it appears to me, he has actually set out to produce the biggest, most absurd blockbuster ever, then Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is in fact a glorious monument to cinematic preposterousness. But, if you take it at face value, it’s a totally mesmerising one at that - while 2012 director Emmerich makes sweeping but predictable gestures, Bay drags every possible ounce of visual dynamism from his subject - whether it’s a CGI fight scene fought against a lavish backdrop or Megan Fox soaping up a bike, nothing is left in the locker. It’s free of any nuance or subtlety, but he’s simply well aware of the medium’s strength, and as a result he taps into that primal sensation that endures from the time of the cinema’s inception.
 
The whole movie is filtered through the golden hue of sunset, reinforcing the idealised, unrealistic approach, but giving it a luxurious patina none the less. If Bay is generic, it’s of a genre of his own making - his set-pieces have a incredibly well-constructed intensity, which though they get a bit too garnished for their own good, the battling robots often get lost in a blinding mesh of detail, there’s a frenzied desire to impress that makes sure that you don’t divert from the screen.
 
As techno-aesthetes, Pocket-lint regulars should at least admire Bay’s rabid exploration of how ridiculous CGI can get. 

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:00:00 +0000

While Governer A. Schwarzenegger summons up all his legendary might and braces himself for battle with feisty eco-warriors over his inability to protect California’s salmon stock, the fate of the Terminator franchise now lies in the hands of bolshy method man Christian Bale and excitably trashy director McG and their reboot of the legendary spectacle factory.

Moving the battleground from the present to the future, Terminator Salvation find the adult John Connor (Bale) seeking an end to the war between man and machine, while seeking to ensure the time-travelling events of the previous movies aren’t halted, thus throwing a spanner in his whole saviour-of-mankind routine.

Into the mix comes Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a condemned man who gave his body over to the Skynet Corporation while on death row. Part-man, part-cyborg, Marcus seems to hold the key to the resolution of the war and the fate of John Connor – but can he be trusted?

The Terminator movies have rightly achieved iconic status. While being symptomatic of the puffed-up grandeur of the 80s, they also helped to shape the modern event movie – Terminator 2 set a high watermark for CGI that others followed. But as movie-making technology has accelerated in recent years, has it ironically left no room for the daddy of techno-futurism?

With James Cameron away from the project, Charlie’s Angels director McG calls the shots. While other music video director-turned film directors have shown an imaginative flair for storytelling – think of Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine and Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich – McG sadly only appears to have a propensity for highly glossy, well-framed visuals that mask a lack of depth or character.

This isn’t helped here by the casting – Bale’s now-legendary meme-inducing antics during the filming of this paint him as an unlikeable individual in real life, and on-screen his performances all seem to hover around the blandly sullen mark – here he goes for blandly sullen with a gruff voice.

Such is his tepid turn that he increasingly becomes an irrelevance throughout the film, marginalised by a showing from Worthington that grows as the movie progresses – he redeems the film by neatly giving nuance and a sense of depth to the angst-ridden manborg trapped between the warring factions.

With a story that lacks any mental depth beyond the logic conundrums that underpinned the originals, Terminator Salvation is reliant on its set-pieces for impact – and even here it falls sadly short. There’s a lack of dynamism to the pyrotechnics – the sole defining feature of the SFX here is often the size of them, not the impact of them. As monumental terminators and ships come crashing down, there’s little in the way of invention to sell them, you’ve seen it all done better elsewhere, from the Matrix right up to Transformers – in short, jaws will stay firmly in the upright, non-dropped position.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

Terminator Salvation - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:00:00 +0000

The term reboot is one that’s becoming more and more familiar to film buffs, a frankly irritating high concept notion that implies Hollywood fat-cats seeking to wring the life out of franchises, rather than adhere to any noble creative impulse.

Only this month we see both Star Trek and Terminator following Batman and Bond down the ctrl-alt-delete path on DVD, while the promise of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes reinvention has fans of the risible reaching for the popcorn.

Amidst all this comes Moon, the debut picture from British director Duncan Jones. Rather than looking to reboot, Jones has tried the opposite – perform a system reinstall on the sci-fi genre. Jones has no time for the Red Bull-tinged pyrotechnics of modern sci-fi, instead he’s drawn on the timeless, thoughtful, brooding quality that marked films like 2001: A Space Odyssey out as genre classics. Smart, human, touching and expansive, Moon is every bit as impressive as the films that Jones so openly chose to pay homage to.

With moon-based mining now able to provide the earth with all the energy it needs, technician Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) mans the moon base alone and, aided by the Hal-like computer Gerty (suavely voiced by Kevin Spacey), manages the flow of raw material back to the planet.

Nearing the end of his 3-year contract and struggling with the isolation and his slowly failing health, Sam begins to look forward to returning home to his wife and child. After a routine check on the mines ends in disaster, Sam comes to in the infirmary, having seemingly been out cold for some time.

Returning to the site of the incident, Sam finds another person in the wreckage – which turns out to be him, or at perhaps a clone of himself. Having had only had Gerty to talk to for some time, socialising proves a problem, and the two Sams struggle to co-exist. But as the ice thaws, the pair slowly begin to uncover the sinister reasons behind their bizarre co-existence and the truth about their lunar tenure.

As mentioned, Jones doesn’t hide his love for films like 2001 – the set design and pacing are instantly recognisable, but rather than impose a template on the film, it puts you at a comfortable ease which allows the story to flourish. The boredom, isolation and antiseptic atmosphere create a mental space for Sam Rockwell to thrive, as the Sams go through a number of different stages of deterioration before ultimately coming to terms with the bizarre situation they find themselves in.

Despite often playing two parts at the same time, both he and director Jones make it seemless and an utterly natural relationship that carries the film to its conclusion. Moon succeeds as it walks the line between the reality and illusion, smartly flipping the perspective of both the characters and the viewer, weaving the sensory-deprived paranoia in with the blurred reality of the Sams’ miserable lives on the moon.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

Moon - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Damn you, Sports Interactive. We’d just about managed to wean ourselves off FM09 and re-emerge into civilised society, one that doesn’t care about how well our under-18s did in the Youth Cup or whether a 4-2-3-1 formation is the way forward, when along comes the latest update of the footy management classic to again make its needy demands on our personal lives.

As football has its fierce rivalries, so too does football gaming. With FIFA and PES just having had their annual cockfight for supremacy, this year saw the renewal of the management sim scrap, with Championship Manager moving back into the market after an absence of 3 years.

Without any competition during that time, the FM series coasted a bit, with the only upgrades feeling only cosmetic or tweaky; only with the introduction of the 3D game engine last year did there seem to be a truly weighty improvement that piqued any curiosity beyond wondering what the new stats for FM legends Carlos Vela were.

So with CM to contend with again, the onus is on Sports Interactive to stay on top of their game and keep the franchise fresh. Having already revamped the graphics on such a grand scale last year, any changes this time round could have inevitably seemed less impressive in comparison.

One thing we like about SI is that they tend to leave what works and tinker with anything that could improve the package. FM10 sees a major attempt to overhaul the interface, aiming for a more intuitive experience that improves the flow between the vast number of aspects, and the gameplay itself, adding new touches and expanding key ones.

The interface is now less reliant on breadcrumb icons, which could have been harder to navigate for newbies, and instead uses a more logical tab system that allows each page to branch of into a number of other sections. For example a player’s page now has clearly visible links to his training, transfer, contracts – though stylistically similar to previous years, visually it packs in more info and links.

Perhaps the sheer weight of customisable views is a tad overwhelming, but it doesn’t hamper the basics. One of the neater customisable aspects is the newsfeed – this can now filter out unwanted mail, after all, updates on the England squad are of little use when you’re toiling away in the Blue Square leagues.

The tactics have also had a going-over. There’s now a tactics wizard that’ll help you set-up how you play and players can now be assigned more specific roles – strikers can now be poachers, deep-lying forwards, among others, hell, keepers can even be sweeper keepers. This really does make it easier for those who have neither the time nor the inclination to get ball-deep into it and prefer a less demanding game. Possibly the suavest tactical addition is the touchline instructions, which allow you to pick a number of standard tactical instructions which can be done without stopping the match.

The geekier gamer will heart the new post-match analysis, which offers a thorough Opta-stlye breakdown of each player’s performance, allowing you to pinpoint weaknesses. The backroom staff advice, introduced in FM09, has been made more humanistic too – your coaching team offer up handy suggestions, from tactics to scouting, meaning that you don’t have to be mindful of the myriad of tactical aspects the game has to offer.

That’s the key success to this version of FM – they’ve added a bewildering degree of new depth to a number of parts of game, but have also matched that with an attempt to make it as user-friendly as possible. Even last year’s improvements have themselves been improved. Neat touches have been added to the 3D match graphics – the crowd responses are more lifelike, while the state of the pitch is rendered in greater detail. Nothing, it seems, has been to chance in the fight to remain market leader.

Tags: Gaming Sports games Sports Interactive Football Manager 2010 PC games Mac games Sega

Football Manager 2010 - Mac originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:22:29 +0000

Director Michael Mann, he of Heat and Collateral glory, return for yet more tough guy hilarity with this old-school tale of guns, gals and gangsters

The ever-reliable Johnny Depp ventures into a dark era of modern American history, playing John Dillinger, a notorious 1930s criminal who led a wave of headline-grabbing bank robberies during the Great Depression. Cocky, connected and seemingly unstoppable, his success and penchant for escaping from prisons stands as an affront and embarrassment to the authorities.

Keen to take Dillinger and his cronies down, FBI chief J Edgar Hoover declares a War on Crime, appointing hotshot cop Melvin Purves (Christian Bale) head of a crack unit, tasking him with the job of bringing Dillinger to justice. Employing modern crime-fighting techniques, the case offers the newly formed FBI the chance to become recognised as a national power, and for both Purves and Dillinger their success requires the downfall of the other.

Though a hard man to pin down, Dillinger does have one link to the real world, his girlfriend Billie (Marion Cotillard), a feisty sort who has little fear of her other half’s lifestyle. Left behind while he’s on the run, Billie holds the key to Public Enemy No.1’s capture. With Dilliinger looking for that one big bank job that’ll fund their escape route from America, the race is on for Purves and his boys.

As with all of Mann’s work, there’s a reliance on simmering tension punctuated by violence, yet here the balance feels out of whack. Usually, the characters carry off the film, but here it all feels like the outlines haven’t been filled in. Depp is his usual charming self, which gives Dillinger some appeal, but beyond a cheeky smile and a few soundbites there’s little of interest. Bale fares even worse, his G-Man being nothing more than starchy template, what doesn’t help matters is Bale’s default setting, a stern, unflinching façade that he tends to be sporting whichever role he takes.

More confusing is the film’s inability to decide what it wants to be – Public Enemies is supposedly based on a true story, and seems preoccupied with the historical details of the pursuit, yet plays it loose with actual events. The nature of his relationship with Billie deviates wildly from his real-life marriage – which is fair enough, but as it’s made a key aspect of the film it fudges the veracity.

Though hardly short on action, Public Enemies feels weirdly melodramatic - no matter where the plot turns, it always returns to the bond between the gangster and his moll, passing over the interest in crime-fighting methodology (with its subtext reference to the recent naughtiness of the US government) and the urban folklore the bank robbers inspired.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

Public Enemies - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

They say, well the non-biblical they, that the geeks shall inherit the earth – but it’s clear that the horror film directors among their number are already making serious headway. After making their name with their fanboy-chic low-budget horrors, former blood and guts junkies like Peter Jackson and Guilermo del Toro have gone on to dominate the mainstream, giving Hollywood a fresh shot of flair and imagination with the likes of the Hellboy and Lord of the Rings franchises.

Chief among their ranks must surely be Sam Raimi, who, after rising from the underground to give the establishment a near-coronary with the Evil Dead, achieved universal acclaim with his Spider-Man reboot. Drag Me To Hell finds Raimi returning to those grisly roots in full-on, yet utterly accessible style.

Fiendishly simple, yet devastatingly potent, Drag Me To Hell offers a welcome return to the creepier old school of shocks, away from the brutality of modern horror, yet without reducing the shock value. Meek loans officer Christine Brown is keen to prove to her boss that she has the tough streak needed to win the promotion to assistant manager, so she decides against cutting an elderly lady some slack on her mortgage payments.

Being of east European gypsy stock, the proud woman takes umbrage and busts out an ancient curse on her, and soon Christine’s job prospects become the least of her problems. After kicking off with a bout of impressively nasty geriatric catfight action with the gypsy in the confines of her car, Christine finds herself being relentlessly pursued by both the crone and a malevolent spirit who make her life a living hell, from rearranging her furniture and facial features with extreme prejudice and ruining dinner parties to introducing swarms of maggots and flies into her daily diet.

A bit put out by this, Christine goes with boyfriend Clay to see a medium, who has the tricky job of telling her she has 3 days to lift the curse before the spirit claims her soul and gives her a one-way ticket to the one hot place they’ve yet to make a strong enough sun-factor lotion for. Events take a frantic turn as she attempts to prevent her fire and brimstone destiny, as she is forced to compromise her placid nature in the hope of redemption.

Drag Me To Hell is a fun-packed shocker with a strong eye for striking visuals, all merrily soaked in director Raimi’s trademark sick tastes – bodily fluids are exchanged in the worst way imaginable, fists find homes where they rarely belong and stationery is put to bizarre and painful uses.

But curiously, it plays out like a strange cross between two of Raimi’s biggest successes – fusing the teeny melodrama of Spider-Man with the gross-out stunts of the Evil Dead films. The two play-off against each other with great glee; despite the demonic aggravation, Christine still has to try to win over Clay’s snooty parents and deal with a back-stabbing work colleague.

It’s this juxtaposition between the mundane and the outlandish that gives the film its drive. Christine and Clay are irritatingly bland, while she couldn’t be any less of a horror movie heroine, as Raimi pushes the idea of a what a normal person would do in that situation, rather than following the well-worn Hollywood path of heroic dynamism.

But mostly it’s Raimi’s abyss-dark humour that carries the picture. Twisted, playful and more than a touch reminiscent of Tex Avery cartoons, the viewer is repeatedly given a treat as Raimi works his magic to squeeze every ounce of intensity out of the stripped down set-up. 

Tags: Home Cinema DVD

Drag Me To Hell - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0100

Hugh Jackman busts out his fulsome sideys for a fourth time, as the X-Men creative team attempt to discover if three films in a series really is the cut-off point before the rot sets in. Focusing on the pedicure-phobic firebrand, XMO:W delves into Logan’s pre-trilogy past to explain how he became the much-loved cigar-chomping berzerker Wolverine.

It turns out that not only is he nigh-on indestructible, Father Time also has a hard time landing one on him, as it all kicks off back in the mid-1800s with a young Logan inadvertently killing his father with the aid of his trademark claws. Fleeing the crime scene with his equally mutanty brother Victor, the genetically gifted pair drift into military service, fighting for over a century thanks to their invulnerability.

Victor’s increasingly unruly nature eventually lands the pair in front of a firing squad - and when that fails to hit the spot, they’re enlisted by a General Stryker into a covert black ops team of fellow mutants. After one mission to locate a crashed meteorite in Africa leaves a bad taste in his mouth, Logan walks away, leaving Victor behind in favour of an idyllic life as a Canadian lumberjack with girlfriend Kyla.

Of course, there’s no place for an idyll in an action film, and Stryker tracks Logan down, claiming that Victor is killing off his former team-mates. After he refuses to help, Victor’s actions soon force his hand.

Stryker offers Logan assistance in his quest to get revenge on Victor by reinforcing his skeleton with the metal from the meteorite, but Stryker’s attempt to wipe his memory at the same time causes the newly pimped Wolverine to do a runner. After an attempt to take Wolverine down fails, the spiky-knuckled hero realises he needs to deal with Victor and Stryker – plus any other surprise packages the general has up his sleeve.

Less operatic than the X-Men trilogy, this outing feels more conventional action fare and a perfect jump-on point for newcomers. Hugh Jackman is reliably spot-on as the reluctant ass-kicker, capturing the more human, renegade anti-hero vibe that makes Wolverine closer to cinematic icons like Dirty Harry than spandex-packers like Spider-Man.

Packed with gorgeous Canadian scenery, it has a less intense, densely packed quality than the trilogy, which is both a good and bad thing. That sense of airiness reinforces the fact that for all its merits, this film is merely a sub-plot blown to feature length.

The origin story is an import from comics, usually used as either a filler between storylines or as a major exercise in character exploration – we’re unsure how much a fan will have got from this, so we feel inclined to the more exploitative former.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD X-Men Origins Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0100

I’m worried about Charlie Kaufman. His films show such an unwillingness to adhere to the crushing universal guidelines that we all live under, basics like the laws of physics and the tedious linear rigidity of time, that I wonder that he might decide that everyday existence is too bland and start eating power cables or trying to find portals to the future in a Staffordshire bull terrier’s arse.

As arguably the most forcefully imaginative mind working in modern cinema, Kaufman’s scripts for films like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have all refused to fall in with the accepted perception of reality, instead tinkering with the language and structure of film to create a universe that’s at the same time recognisable and wildly transformed.

Equally liberal in its relationship with everyday logic, Synecdoche is a vast, sprawling epic of personal crises. Given a prestigious cultural grant, New York theatre director Caden Cotard (a typically weighty turn from Phillip Seymour Hoffman) attempts to create a significant, meaningful and truthful play, and takes up residence in a massive warehouse space so as to develop his masterpiece.

Deserted by his wife Adele, a celebrated painter, and his daughter Olive, Caden struggles to fill the void with the play and with his relationships with box office girl Hazel (Samantha Morton) and leading lady Claire (Michelle Williams). As the play and cast expand, it fills the warehouse, becoming a world within a world, then a world within a world within a world.

In pursuit of the unforgiving truth, Caden casts actors as himself and those around him, re-enacting events. Divorced from the crumbling world outside, the play becomes its own reality, and the barrier between the characters and their actors vanishes as art begins to dictate reality. With Caden’s body in a continual state of decline, he slowly and painfully tries in vain to come to terms with his life and art, and attempts to resolve the differences with his family that fuel his turmoil.

Synecdoche, New York often feels like a slog – it’s dense, morose and wilfully obtuse, but it’s also stunning, breathtaking, passionate, innovative and genuinely moving. While Kaufman’s work with Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry had seen them marked out as a new school of visionaries, Synecdoche emphatically proves that it is Kaufman who is the true genius among them. Until now his scripts were interpreted by those directors, but this time Kaufman sees the job through, taking on the director’s role for the first time.

While both Jonze and Gondry have had much less of an impact without a Kaufman script behind them, Charlie more than holds his own when flying solo. One of the problems of the likes of Being John Malkovich was the overt eccentricity, an attention-seeking quality that amused and irked in equal amounts, but Kaufman has risen above that.

Synedoche is no less odd, but it’s tied to such a powerful human touch that it over-rides any potentially grating archness. Kaufman drenches every scene with such personal detail that it makes the unbelievable utterly resonant. So much care and attention has gone into Caden’s world, from the set to the seemingly throwaway clues in the script, that it doesn’t feel like it’s 2 hours long - instead it feels 2 hours long, but a lifetime wide.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD Synecdoche New York

Synecdoche, New York - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0100

Jason Statham, I owe you an apology. I snarkily sneered every time I heard you utter the phrase: “Remember, you are not a salmon” in those Kit-Kat adverts. I was non-plussed as you carved out a cushty niche for yourself as Guy Ritchie’s main geezer. And I turned a blind eye when you got over Kelly Brook dumpage by winning over Hollywood with the Transporter franchise. But then I saw Crank: High Voltage.

I’m not actually sure you can sum up this film adequately in words. Instead, try to picture the sound a cartoon dog would make when it discovers that its owner's penis tastes of doggy treats – a worrying mix of astonishment, delight, confusion and discomfort. Crank: High Voltage is less a movie, more a thing that can only be felt on a base sensory level, an experience that bypasses your rationale and targets your primal impulses against your better wishes.

To the plot. Not too much to report. Statham plays Chev Chelios, an unsurprisingly indestructible hard bastard, who in the first 5 minutes survives falling from a helicoptor, landing on a car and having his heart removed by the Triads.

This doesn’t stop him, just puts him in a strop, so off he jogs to get his heart back, on account of him being previously quite attached to it. But his replacement heart needs to be regularly charged, so his quest is punctuated by him doing all sorts to kick-start it, from getting Latino badasses to jump-start him to frotting a granny to rustle up some friction. Ang Lee, this isn’t.

To go into any greater depth would spoil things, though there isn’t actually much more to it. Granted, there’s Chev’s incredibly aerobic reunion with his girlfriend, who, under the impression he was dead, sought solace in stripping, plus some other latino gangsters who also want a piece of Chev.

At its most basic, it’s about a man with an unexotic hairline running around clouting people with funny accents, while an assortment of loose women take advantage of the good weather and allow the fruitier parts of their body to get some air. It’s puerile, lame, intellectually malnourished, badly acted – but it’s possibly the most jaw-dropping fun you’ll have for some time.

Dripping with crazed energy, it willingly sheds any pretension about being anything worthy and offers a Dionysian schlock parade that it’s hard not to be won over by. Anybody who’s ever got their kicks from Russ Meyer, Stephen Chow or the more loopier end of Takashi Miike’s output will feel right at home – it crackles with the same demented creativity.

There’s also a strong gaming undercurrent to it too, as Statham roams around committing random acts of violence in a first-person-shooter/GTA way, backed-up by the gloriously retro 8-bit opening credits.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD Crank High Voltage

Crank: High Voltage - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0100

The noble visitor to Pocket-lint, boasting a heightened awareness of the furtherment of technological accomplishment and a keen love of newness, may feel short-changed by me pushing a DVD of something that they may well have already watched for free, a DVD that fails to showcase the capabilities of their HDTV, but hear me out.

For those of you that missed it, SLCV was one of the TV highlights of the year, frequently astounding and always hilarious, a sharp, acerbic and thought-provoking one-man assault-come-dissection of modern society and its abundant failings.

Essentially 30 minutes of stand-up broken up by sketches, the show starts on soft targets like the vain brain-pourings of the celebrity autobiography, then works its way up to the bigger quarry of the Pope, organised religion and the economic crisis. Yet in this era of Grumpy Old Men, Lee’s beef isn’t fuelled by the resentment that comes with body parts slowly staring to seize up, but seemingly from a loftier dissatisfaction with how we’re progressing as a species.

Despite having the potential for condescension, Stewart Lee’s material is leagues away from his peers, able to play with their clichés without being affected by them. Like many before him, Lee muses on the demise of Woolworths and the legendary pick n mix, but rather than playing it for cheap laughs he weaves it into an elaborate riff that fails to be infected by any lameness that would have crept in with lesser comics.

It’s the way that he expertly slaloms through cliché and convention that makes it remarkable. Shot in a working men’s club, which gives it’s a weirdly traditional feel, it shows up Lee’s hypnotic delivery style.

Looking like Morrissey turning up to a fancy dress party as Stan Laurel, Lee rejects the post-Izzard love of frenzy and takes his sweet time about things, often breaking down his jokes to their raw elements, toying with failed or obscure material, making either making the mechanics of the gags failure part of the show.

But mostly it’s the intense preaching that makes it so distinctive. Personally, he reminds me most of the legendary Bill Hicks, who curiously Lee also appears to shoot down here. Both share the same evangelical drive, using comedy to raise awareness of how the mainstream has caused us to dumb down, but while venom was Hicks’ stock in trade, Lee calmly uses the moral high ground to pick off his targets, which he does with absolute expertise and ease.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle

Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0100

With sensible economic decisions being to the fore at the moment, actor Michael Sheen has got in on the act and offered us cineastes a two-for-one special offer.

As British cinema’s number one exponent of character studies, here he’s offering his second take on a major pop cultural icon, taking the role of eccentric and outspoken old school football manager Brian Clough, a fair follow-up to his vision of another 70s icon, chat-show host-cum-interrogator David Frost, as seen in Frost/Nixon.

Based on the lauded novel by David Peace, The Damned United fictionalises the brief and volatile period in 1974 when Clough took charge of league champions Leeds United, a culture clash of monstrous proportions, as he sought to straighten out a team of hardened cynical pros, whose success owed a great deal to a love of foul play that would make their modern Premier League counterparts soil themselves in fear.

Clough also had beef with their previous manager, Don Revie, a man for whom he had no kind words, only a wealth of bad ones. With his new charges fiercely loyal to Revie and clear in their hatred for Clough, Ol’ Big ‘Ead faces the job of his life to make a success of his new challenge.

Flitting between his torrid time at Leeds and the glory years and squabbles that led up to it, TDU captures the gloriously outspoken quote-machine as he stacks up trophies with his pal and assistant Peter Taylor (Tim Spall), while extravagantly shooting down anyone who fails to fall into line with his way of thinking.

While Peace’s novel pondered the dark thoughts that drove the man throughout the period, Hooper’s film feels a more historical recollection of events, and gives it more of a traditional British flick feel, a tale of a working class man battling the odds, reinforced by a cast of reliable, if predictably chosen, stalwarts like Spall and Broadbent.

Sheen has Clough off to a tee, both in mannerism and attitude. But the script fails to truly capture what made him and the Leeds debacle worthy of such a mythologising, aside from the man’s stream of soundbites. Curiously, while the book looks at his flawed genius, the film curiously weakens him, pumping-up the merits of both Revie and Taylor. Part of you wonders what the fuss is about.

Visually, TDU compensates for the flaws, boasting wonderful set design and beautifully rich photography that glows with the unnaturally saturated hues of old 70s photos. It feels spot-on as a period piece, helped by the disc’s extras, which lovingly look back at the people and era that spawned the film.

Oddly, TDU comes across not so much as a glimpse into the mind of a sporting legend and a curious phase of his career, but possibly the weirdest entry into the Bro-mance genre yet. At its core it’s a weird love triangle between three old duffers – Clough’s ultimately driven by his feelings towards Revie, while Taylor, the key man in his life, is taken for granted and abused, the fall-out resulting in much of the difficulties of those fateful 44 days Clough spent at Leeds.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD The Damned United

The Damned United - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:07:30 +0100

While Sacha Baron Cohen may currently be a global poster child for British comedy, In The Loop sees one of comedy’s unsung heroes trumping him and delivering one of the sharpest, funniest British films of recent years.

Armando Iannucci’s name has been on the credits for some of the most influential TV comedies, from The Day Today to Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, via the Thick Of It, becoming a byword (or byname?) for top quality sophisti-chuckles.

Spinning off from the hit political satire The Thick of It, In The Loop sees the series making the leap to the big screen, though with greater panache than Holiday On The Buses.

Feckless MP Simon Foster accidentally launches a shitstorm in Anglo-American relations when he deviates from the party line and makes an off-hand remark about the likelihood of there being a war, incurring the considerable and spectacular wrath of spin doctor and attack dog Malcolm Tucker.

After Foster’s bumbling attempts to back out of the controversy only make matters worse, he’s packed off to Washington out of harm’s way, where his US counterparts all seek to use him the their pro- and anti-war campaigns. All the while Tucker seeks to manage the situation, mainly by way of colourful threats of brutality.

In many ways, In The Loop feels like a perfect distillation of the best of modern comedy. Blisteringly satirical at its core, it benefits from the low-key observational characterisation and pacing of The Office, plus the loose improv vibe of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Throw in some scriptwriters from Peep Show and you have a solid 105 minutes that you’d be hard-pushed to find fault with.

What’s most impressive is how impressively packed it is – one-liners flow from the off, sending the screen into meltdown whenever the spectacularly and creatively offensive Tucker looms into view. This neatly plotted beauty rarely flags for pace as a result, and one of the real joys of it is the feeling that you’ve just dropped into a permanently ongoing situation, a world where these people will continue to be hilarious away from the camera’s gaze.

Tags: Home Cinema DVD In The Loop

In The Loop - DVD originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0100