The last movie you saw was . .

[fenris]

Feb 26, 2008 19:13:49 GMT fenris said:

Much better was W Delta Z, which I saw list night. Most critics have described it as belonging to the torture porn sub-genre, and admittedly the killer – pausing before hammering a jagged two inch nail underneath a bound victim’s fingernail - declares “There will be pain”, echoing Jigsaw’s promise of “There will be blood” in Saw II. But W Delta Z owes a much bigger debt to such cerebral serial killer thrillers as Se7en and Russell Mulcahy’s Resurrection.
Although set in New York, W Delta Z is actually a British movie, partly financed by National Lottery funding, and - apart from a few scenes featuring the Manhattan skyline that were shot on location - it was filmed in Belfast, convincingly standing-in for the Big Apple. New York is portrayed here as an unrelentingly bleak urban hell of filth-covered alleyways, stinking and muck encrusted crack houses, and blood-smeared stairwells. When bodies start turning up in pairs – one electrocuted, the other tortured – the case is handed to grizzled, jaded, ultra-cynical veteran detective Eddie Argo (Stellan Skarsgard) and his newly-acquired rookie partner Helen Westcott (Melissa George). They eventually discover the symbols craved into the victims’ flesh relate to The Price Equation, which argues that altruism and selflessness do not exist as part of animal or human nature. Westcott eventually realises that the killings are linked to an infamous rape/murder case from several years earlier, and the perpetrator is someone whom Argo betrayed in the worst way possible.
Skarsgard is a terrific actor whom Hollywood usually casts as either a villain or in supporting roles, so it’s great to see him headline a movie. He takes full advantage, fully inhabiting the role of Eddie Argo. George struggles to flesh out her extremely underwritten and non-descript character, and is only partly successful. Other noticeable faces amongst the cast are rising British actress Sally Hawkins (as a crack addicted single mother, turning tricks in front of her infant son) and Cape Wrath’s Tom Hardy. And although it’s Skarsgard’s film, Selma Blair tucks all her scenes under her arm and walks off with them, in a small but pivotal role.
The momentium established in the early scenes isn't sustained throughout the movie's entire running time, and the narrative does sag slightly at the midway point. And the scene in which we first see the killer is curiously underpowered. The killer's second appearance - unexpectedly and cleverly abducting a victim in the middle of the street, in front of unsuspecting bystanders - would have made a more effective introduction. But otherwise I enjoyed W Delta Z immensely, and it’s stands proudly as one of my favourite horror movies of the decade.

Starting yesterday (18/07/09), W Delta Z is being shown every night this week on the Sky Premiere movie channel. Here's a link to the film's trailer;
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa3ZFVXGvDE

[fenris]

I saw GI JOE: Rise of Cobra last week, and went without high expectations because it’s directed by Steve Sommers. Like Paul Anderson and Michael Bay, Sommers is a quandary: a clearly talented individual who churns out movies that are very well-made and highly commercial, but can usually be described as falling somewhere between ‘disappointing’ and ‘appalling’. Of his previous efforts, Deep Rising was workmanlike and unremarkable, while The Mummy was a promising tale of 1920s High Adventure – until the title character turned up, whereupon the movie descended into relentless CGI overkill. The sequel The Mummy Returns took everything that was wrong with the first film and multiplied it, and the result was a badly written, frantic CGI orgy with nothing to recommend it. Sommers followed it with another attempted revision of Universal’s monsters, Van Helsing, which despite some fine individual scenes and a few impressive sequences, was ultimately sunk by a truly appalling script and (unsurprisingly) an over-reliance on CGI.

GI JOE is the first Sommers film in which the action scenes are all about military hardware and human conflict as opposed to monsters and fantasy-based concepts, and this initially appears to have made him re-think his approach. The opening sequence, in which an armoured NATO convoy is taken apart by ambushers equipped with high-tech VTOL aircraft, advanced body armour and energy pulse weaponry, has an edge that was lacking from his previous movies. However, it can’t last and later sequences desperately needed someone to keep Sommers reined in. Yes, the centrepiece car chase through Paris is genuinely exciting, and if shot ‘old school’ like Ronin and the Bourne movies, it could have been truly spectacular. But Sommers can’t resist reverting to type and including unnecessary CGI elements, such a motorbike-riding Scarlet and two pursuers in ‘Accelerator Suits’. The latter gizmos are extremely silly, make little narrative sense (why do the JOEs use them unadvisedly in a public place full of civilians but not elsewhere in the film, in situations where they’d be more suitable?) and they belong in a superhero movie, not a spy/action film. Perhaps Sommers is keen to direct Marvel’s planned Avengers movie, and is using the Paris sequence as his audition tape.

Interestingly, while the GI JOE team in the original toy line, cartoon series and comic books was an all-American affair, it’s a multi-national organisation in the movie. I suspect this is purely because the studio understandably wants the film to do well across the world, and most overseas audiences would view a film about American military triumphism as extremely distasteful, following the Bush administration’s corporate land-grab – sorry – ‘liberation’ of Iraq. Unfortunately, the main JOEs are a particularly colourless and clichéd bunch: there’s The One With The Supposedly Tragic Past Who Broods a Lot, The One Who’s Good With Tech Stuff, The One Who’s Big and Strong, The One Who’s Female, The One Who’s Supposed To Be Funny, and The Gimp (speaking of which, as a newbie to the GI JOE mythos I thought Snake Eyes was very out-of-place, if only because it’s never explained why he permanently walks around in head-to-toe rubber instead of combat fatigues like everybody else). The JOEs’ blandness can be gauged by the fact that the only one to make an impression is Marlon Wayans, despite the fact that he’s just reprising his comic relief character from the first Dungeons & Dragons movie.

However, if the heroes are unmemorable, the same can’t be said about the villains. GI JOE’s poster ad-line was ‘Evil Has Never Looked So Good’, and the film delivers when it comes to that particular description. We’re used to seeing bad guys in action movies who are barely competent, being out-thought and out-fought by the heroes throughout. Not this time. The Neo-Viper henchmen may be the usual cannon folder, but Storm Shadow and the Baroness are both extremely efficient and highly formidable, and repeatedly run rings around the JOEs for most of the movie’s running time. Sienna Miller could have let her skin-tight leathers do her acting for her, but instead she gives a well-judged, understated and nicely nuanced performance, and she completely steals the film. There’s not many action movies in which you find yourselves rooting for the bad guys, but with GI JOE you can, and not feel even the slightest bit guilty.

The film falters towards the end, with too many soap opera-style revelations and cumbersome scenes that exist purely to set up a sequel. But on the positive side, while Sommers’ previous movies were riddled with ludicrous plotholes and logic-gaps, GI JOE fortunately only contains a couple - the most glaring being when Ripcord thinks aloud about who he believes is ultimately responsible for the theft of the film’s MacGuffin, and everybody immediately decides he’s right, despite the fact there’s no evidence to support his theory. Such annoyances aside, it’s still the best film that Sommers has made so far, though admittedly that’s not saying much.

[fenris]

Wasn't expecting much from Gamer and thought it would just be a dumb actioner, and that's pretty much how it starts out, with every scene edited to within an inch of it's life (the phrase 'sensory overload' could have been invented for this movie). But it gets surprisingly better as it goes along and eventually becomes a kinetic and imaginative melding of The Running Man, The Truman Show, and computer/on-line games such as The Simms and Second Life, complete with eye-catching production design, quirky supporting characters (bike-riding info-terrorist Trace is worthy of her own movie) and surprise cameos. In my opinion, 2009 has been a poor and disappointing year at the cinema, but Gamer is one of the best films I've seen this year.

[fenris]

Watched Midnight Movie on Zone Horror last night (30/10/09). It belongs to a relatively small sub-genre of films in which the production or screening of a slasher flick causes a celluloid killer to break through into the real world. Other examples include Popcorn, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, Cut and The Hills Run Red (the latter was released on Region 2 DVD last Monday, 26/10/09).

Unfortunately, after a strong and promising beginning, Midnight Movie settles for being a throughly routine slasher film, with unimaginative deaths and average direction - through the order in which the assorted characters are killed is admirably unpredictable.
It doesn't help the movie's cause that The Dark Beneath (the-film-within-the-film) is a dull Texas Chainsaw Massacre knock off, the killer an uninspired Jason clone who loves his mother, and his murder weapon of choice - a corkscrew-shaped knife - is a silly and slightly-desperate gimmick.

Midnight Movie does become quite interesting in it's final fifteen minutes, with an unexpected twist in which the story becomes even more meta-physical, but even this is soured by a too-abrupt ending.

[pollyanna03]

Kyle XY Seasons 1-3
mission impossible seasons 1-6
Scream Queens Seasons
Aqua Teen Hunger Forc Seasons 1-5
Angel Seasons 1-5
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
VIVA LA BAM Seasons 1-5

[fenris]

Saw Jennifer’s Body at the cinema yesterday evening. It was a surprise box office flop in America, but I confidently predict that it will find it’s audience on DVD and in a few years’ time have a healthy cult reputation. As the titular character, Megan Fox has been dismissed by many as a flavour-of-the-month sex symbol who can’t act and owes her career purely to her looks, but personally I thought she was fine in the role. It might not be a standout performance, but Fox delivers everything that the part requires. However, it’s Jennifer’s best friend ‘Needy’ who’s the true lead character, and as played by the talented Amanda Seyfried (who first caught my attention in Mean Girls) she provides the movie with it’s emotional centre. The script by former-stripper-turned-writer Diablo Cody (whose breakthrough hit Juno I confess I’ve not seen) is filled with witty, cutting edge teen-speak and clever, waspish put-downs, and while repeatedly quotable it occasionally strains too hard in it’s attempts to be cool.

If you’re looking for metaphors, in my opinion the movie is really about how the physical, emotional and psychological changes that we undergo in our teenage years alter us to the extent that within a few months or even weeks we can permanently drift away from childhood friends we’ve known for years and previously been extremely close to. The film also touches upon how the innocent, physically-expressed affection and love between young female friends can sometimes become borderline-sexual when teen hormones begin to kick in and – whether they’ve started to show an interest in boys or not – they try to make sense of their awakening sexuality. The Sapphic subtext between Jennifer and Needy is actually nicely underplayed and quite touching, despite the director not being able to resist playing to the gallery and filming a kiss between the two of them in extreme close-up.

No movie is perfect, and Jennifer’s Body loses a few points by resorting to the lazy cliché of having Needy wear glasses to signify that she’s a nerdy bookworm. And although it’s standard practice in Hollywood to have twenty-somethings play teenagers, Fox unfortunately stands out from the rest of the cast by looking precisely like what she is – a 23 year old pretending to be a high school student. It’s not her fault and as I’ve written above, she gives a solid and more-than-competent performance. She’s just miscast. The film also dodges the Carrie-style prom massacre climax that it’s clearly building towards, probably for budgetary reasons. But otherwise Jennifer’s Body is an accomplished effort and a pleasant surprise, much better than it’s U.S. failure would have you expect.

[fenris]

A friend bought me Highlander II: The Quickening on DVD for my birthday. It's a movie I've always had a soft spot for. Yes, it urinates all over the continuity of the first film (exiles from the planet Zeist?!), but so - to a lesser extent - did the spin-off TV series and the fourth and fifth Highlander movies, and fans of the franchise have had no problem embracing those.

If regarded as a self-contained film in it's own right, about alien warriors battling amongst themselves on a dying near-future Earth, then The Quickening is - in my opinion - an absolute blast. It's got amazing action set-pieces, great production design, Michael Ironside enjoying himself immensely as Katana, and a wonderful doom-laden atmosphere. Ripe for rediscovery.

[fenris]

Christmas is still a couple of weeks away, but one of the Movies 24 channels was temporarily renamed 'Christmas 24' at the beginning of December and has been showing back-to-back Xmas films ever since. And I've read on another forum that Sky have apparently done something similar with one of their many movie channels.

Not being a fan of the enforced happiness and rampant, naked commercialism of the Xmas period, for many years my favourite Christmas movie was National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, one of the few films that dares admit how truly awful family Christmases often are.
However, a few years ago Just Friends was released and promptly replaced Vacation as my holiday favourite. Despite being set at Xmas, Just Friends is almost an anti-Christmas movie. My favourite scene has Anna Faris (who's tremendous as trust fund socialite/wannabe pop singer Samantha James) kamikaze a car into a garden full of electrical Xmas decorations, rant at everyone, and proceed to cause even more devastation when she drives away.

[fenris]

As the Noughties draw to a close, looking back there have been lots of films I've enjoyed over these ten years, but two in particular stand out, and I easily consider them my two favourite movies of the decade: Equilibrium (2002) and Ultraviolet (2006), both written and directed by the same man - Kurt Wimmer.
In this age of dumbed-down, simplistic, don't-risk-confusing-anyone cinema, he's one of the few directors who treats the audience with intelligence, often revealing concepts mid-scene without any prior warning or explanation and simply assuming that the viewer is smart enough to work it out for themselves. Examples include the self-loading guns in Equilibrium, and Ultraviolet's nano-infused clothes and hair, flat-space technology, pocket dimensions, and gravity re-directors. These are hardcore sci-fi concepts that most film-makers would build an entire movie around, but Wimmer just uses them as background detail. And I've not even mentioned Gun-Kata, which is ultilised in both films and transforms gun-fighting into a combination of martial arts and a taught science based on mathematical statistical probabilities. It's perhaps the most original thing seen in action movies since John Woo's emergence in the late Eighties/early Nineties.

The producers lost faith in Ultraviolet and Wimmer found himself sacked halfway through post-production. The film was re-edited, an estimated half-hour of footage was ejected, and the special effects budget slashed, resulting in some ropy, half-finished CGI. Despite these setbacks the movie still works, purely because of Wimmer's original vision. In my humble opinion, Ultraviolet is the best action film of the decade.

[fenris]

I saw Avatar last night. No, not James Cameron's change-the-face-of-cinema-FOREVER blockbuster about ten-foot-tall smurfs that's currently playing in cinemas in headache-inducing 3D, but an earlier film with the same title.

The Avatar I'm talking about is a low budget independent movie shot in Singapore in 2004. I watched it on satellite channel Film24. The only recognisable cast-members were David Warner and Joan Chen (reunited after starring together in Twin Peaks fifteen years previously). Heavily influenced by the novels of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, Avatar (2004) is set in a near-future where 'the Cyberlink' - a next-generation version of the internet - dominates everything. People's DNA sequences are recorded onto the Cyberlink as soon as they're born, meaning that the system monitors where they are and what they're doing every second of every day for their entire lives. Money only exists electronically, linked to people's unique DNA profiles, so nobody carries cash or credit cards anymore - all transactions are conducted by swiping a hand over a scanner. All this means that crime is only possible if you possess a false identity, and therefore those who create, sell and buy such identities are cracked down on hard by the newly-formed Ident Police and private contractors. Amongst the latter group is female 'headhunter' Dash MacKenzie, who operates out of an Asian city-state. When she's employed by a major international corporation to find a missing person, the search eventually leads her to a worldwide conspiracy that affects all of humanity.

Avatar goes a highly effective job of introducing us to MacKenzie's complex, technology-heavy world, and the script is brimming over with clever ideas. I especially liked the trenchcoat with an in-built coolant system that Dash wears to cope with the city's sweltering heat, and the five-star hotel that is actually a rundown flea-pit hidden under a holographic makeover.

Unfortunately, after a strong first hour, Avatar descends during it's final thirty minutes into the kind of idiotic VR silliness that was common in the various Hollywood films that jumped on the Lawnmower Man bandwagon in the mid-Nineties. It's a real pity, as until it's messy and unimaginative last half-hour, Avatar was shaping up to be something very special indeed.

[fenris]

Several trailers have been released for the upcoming comic book adaptation Kick-arse, but this one's my favourite. Be warned it contains violence and adult language;

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjO7kBqTFqo&NR=1

[fenris]

Saw Solomon Kane last week. Although I was already aware of Kane as a pulp character, I confess I've not actually read any of Robert E. Howard's stories about the Puritan adventurer, so I can't comment on how much the movie deviates from the original material, though I do know that the film gives Kane a origin story, which Howard never bothered with. In fact, one of the movie's main weaknesses is that concentrates too much on Solomon's origin, complete with clumsy flashbacks to his childhood that are necessary in regards to the over-arcing plot, but which bring the narrative to a shuddering halt. And revealing that Kane is not only unwittingly linked to the schemes of arch-villain Malachi, but is also indirectly responsible for the evil sorcerer's rise to power in the first place, feels like a stretch too far. The backstory and motives given to the title character also make Solomon Kane a tad too similar to a number of other recent pop-culture genre movies: a hero trying to atone for his evil past? See The Shadow (1994). Fighting demons in an attempt to save his condemned soul? Check out Constantine (2005). Max von Sydow even appears in a role mirroring the one he played in Judge Dredd (1995), complete with a near-identical death bed confession.
The CGI demon that turns up as a final climatic opponent also feels un-necessary, especially as Kane's swordfight with Malachi's masked Vader-like enforcer is an exciting and perfectly acceptable setpiece with which to end the film.
However, these are minor setbacks, for despite being an independent production with - by Hollywood standards - a fairly moderate budget, Solomon Kane looks fantastic and is suitably bleak. In Kane's 17th century England, the ground is either frozen solid and covered in snow, or has been transformed into thick mud by the rain that pours down out of a permanently blackened sky onto a landscape littered with torched and abandoned villages, bodies hanging from trees, and churches reduced to rubble. One character laments that this is surely the End of Days, and it's hard to disagree.
James Purefoy gives an accomplished performance in the title role, never over-playing the brooding but instead balancing it wisely by giving Kane the quietly haunted air of a man whose personal demons are all too real. He also supplies some fine steely determination when events force Kane to abandon his vow of non-violence and go riding off to seize Evil by the scruff of the neck. The supporting cast of familiar & reliable character actors all acquit themselves well, with a special mention for doe-eyed actress Rachel Hurd-Wood, who was the best thing about last year's handsomely-produced but uninvolving Dorian Gray, and is equally good here as Meredith Crowthorn, who becomes Kane's redemption. I've read on-line that fans of the original pulp tales were worried that Solomon's Puritan beliefs would be ignored and he'd be given a romantic interest to satisfy modern audiences, but while it's made clear that the teenage Meredith is fascinated with Solomon and harbors a crush towards him, it's taken no further than a nicely underplayed scene where she secretly watches Kane as he washes shirtless by a river.
I currently don't know if Solomon Kane is being released into American cinemas, but I think it will struggle to make much impact in the all-important U.S. market. Our American cousins are famously blinkered and inward-looking in regards to movies (witness Hollywood having to remake numerous foreign films for their home audience, Tom Sawyer being crowbarred into the movie version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the successful capture of a German Enigma machine by the Royal Navy in WWII being credited to American commandos in U571), and Solomon Kane is set in England, with an English hero, and a nearly all-British cast. A hard sell, basically. Purefoy even plays Kane with a West Country accent, which will probably confuse the hell out of audiences in the States, who are only used to RADA English or mockney-Cockney. Ironically, it's that very Britishness that sets this movie apart from other recent fantasy efforts. It's the film that Hammer probably would have made in the late Sixties/early Seventies if they'd had access to a multi-million dollar budget and 21st century special effects technology. Except the Hammer version would have included lots of breasts.

[fenris]

The rather spiffing trailer for Solomon Kane. Didn't see this until after I'd actually seen the movie, and it does what it's supposed to: sells the film.

us.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi3774940185/

[fenris]

Saw a great documentary on Film Four last Saturday (10/04/10), entitled Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation. It examines how Australia didn't really have a movie industry to call it's own until the beginning of the Seventies, but once they got started the Aussies mostly bypassed making worthy and critically-respectable films, and instead embraced the various genres associated with low budget B movies, churning out sex comedies & skin flicks, horror films and action thrillers. The documentary contains clips and discussion on many Australian films that I've already seen or was aware of - Turkey Shoot, Sky Pirates, Snapshot, Razorback, Lost Weekend, Patrick, The Survivor, Road Games, Harlequin, etc (sadly the wannabe sci-fi epic The Time Guardian is only represented by a quick glimpse of it's poster) - and a few that I'd not previously heard of, but would now like to track down. Fair Game (1985) and The Man From Hong Kong both look as though they're an absolute blast.
There are dozens of interviewees, most of whom are surprisingly candid: Steve Railsback has nothing good to say about Turkey Shoot, and the movie's producer admits that due to lack of time and money, live rounds were fired close to actors during some of the action scenes. Jamie Lee Curtis remembers being subjected to a hate campaign while shooting Road Games, for allegedly taking work away from Australian actresses. Wendy Hughes recalls that after doing a topless scene in one film, most of the reviews discussed the shape of her breasts at length and didn't mention her performance. Everybody involved in Mad Dog Morgan tells of how Dennis Hopper spent the entire shoot out of his head on drugs (we see behind-the-scenes footage confirming this), and Hopper himself reveals that during production he was arrested for drunk driving and the police doctor told him that based on the amount of alcohol in his bloodstream, he was technically dead.
Not Quite Hollywood is a wonderful celebration of Australia's frequently ignored movie output, and is well worth watching. It's being repeated on Film Four this Friday (16/04/10) at 23:10.

[fenris]

My friends actually call me the Patron Saint of Unloved Films, due to all the movies I like which everybody else seems to hate. For as long as I can remember, everytime December rolls around I look back at the previous twelve months and as a general rule, the movies released that year which I enjoyed tend to be the ones that tanked at the box office, were written off by the critics, and torn apart by the on-line masses... while all the year's most popular, financial and critical successes are nearly always movies that I either disliked or felt indifferent about. Here are just a few examples of films I personally like, but which the vast majority of people openly sneer at;

The Avengers
Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever
House of the Dead
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Rollerball (the 2002 remake)
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Bloodrayne
Bloodrayne: Deliverance
Punisher (Dolph Lundgren version)
Punisher: War Zone
Under Siege 2
Blood: The Last Vampire
The Hitcher 2: I've Been Waiting (better than the first one, in my opinion)
Captain America
Universal Soldier: The Return (a true guilty pleasure - the script's awful, the dialogue's appalling, but the action scenes are top notch)
Daredevil
The Shadow
The Phantom
Radioland Murders
The Time Machine (the remake)
American Psycho 2
Urban Legend and both of the sequels
Gamer
Ultraviolet
Transmorphers
Man-Thing
Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons: The Elemental Might (aka Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God)
I Know Who Killed Me
Ghosts of Mars
Escape From LA
Doomsday
The Fantastic Four (the unreleased Roger Corman-produced version)
Mystery Men
Masters of the Universe
Dracula: Dead and Loving it
Barb Wire (if you can overlook Pamela Anderson's wooden performance, this is a highly enjoyable near-future action flick).