Shoot Em Up

Precious little worth watching at the cinema, so I thought I'd watch something
I didn't get round to watching last year.

This is an offensively stupid film. By which I mean, it's frickin' awesome. The
plot, such as it is, is that some bad guys want to kill a baby, and a down-on-
his-luck good guy happens to be in the way, and decides he's not going to let
them. But that's by the by. It's an excuse for an extended sequence of
gunfights, each more implausible than the last. And that's ok, because they're
plainly meant to be implausible.

So, this film is aimed at people who find stupid, bloody gunfights funny.
That'd be me then. And they are stupid, they are bloody, and they are very
funny.

Interspersed between the gunfights, the good guy and the bad guy crack bad
jokes at each other, and there's a romantic plot involving Monica Belluci.
That's mostly an excuse to have a gunfight that's also a sex scene, though,
which is funny.

I don't know who this Michael Davis guy is who wrote and directed it is, but
he's obviously a huge fan of Robert Rodriguez, and a lot of it owes obvious
debts to both Sin City and Desperado. He obviously had a real fun time making
it, and good luck to him on that. I had a lot of fun watching it too.

Son Of Rambow

So, you wait years for a slightly surreal film about amateur film-making then
a bunch come along at once. And it its way, this is sort of a British Be Kind
Rewind.

It's the eighties, rural Hertfordshire. There's a kid, who's a bit of a
tearaway, who's got his hands on his brother's video camera, and has decided
he's going to make a film and submit it to Screen Test's Young Filmmaker of the
Year award. He also uses it to sneak into cinemas and pirate films. He ropes
this other unworldly kid whose family are Plymouth Bretheren, into being his
stuntman. Over time, after the pair of them watch First Blood, the project
evolves into a sort of sequel, which is surprising similar in plot to Rambo,
given that neither kid has seen the film, and it hasn't even been made yet. But
hey.

Meanwhile, their school is host to a bunch of French exchange students, and
everyone is in awe of this (allegedly) cool French kid. This kid finds out
about the film, decides it's cool, and wants to be in it, and because he thinks
it's cool, the whole rest of the school does too. Power struggles for control
of the creative process ensue.

It's an amusing take on film-making and Hollywood, with the whole struggle
serving as an allegory for creative control and integrity being compromised
when stars and the studio system get involved.

It's not perfect, and some of the children's acting is pretty stagey, in a
"early Harry Potter movie" kind of way. It is highly amusing, if not laugh out
loud funny, and if you grew up in the eighties, and ever watched a dodgy pirate
copy of First Blood, the film will spark off a lot of happy memories.