Do we recall The Hangover? Well, they did it again.
In what is such a rerun of a sequel that it's practically a remake, we follow the same bunch of idiots who get so blotto on a stag night that they wake in the morning with no idea what happened last night, and with one of their number missing. A few details are changed; a different one of them is getting married, the stag night is in Bangkok not Vegas, and the missing person is the bride's brother, not the groom. All else is the same. And that's not absolutely the wrong thing to do; in Die Hard 2, John McClane couldn't believe the same kind of crap could happen to him twice, and he had a point. With this, if you give the same bunch of idiots alcohol, it's not inconceivable that they'll wake up in dire straits again. It's a repeatable experiment.
Not quite the same, of course. In that this movie is out to trump its earlier incarnation in many respects. So, the humour is broader, blacker, crasser, and more insensitive. Which might sound like a criticism, and if you've no tolerance of that kind of mularkey, it is a criticism. However, if you're interested in a film about three idiots going off the rails on a stag night, Crass Up or Go Home, I say. The only way to make it funny twice is to push it harder.
Taking a look at my portable laughometer, which I take with me to all films*, I can see that I laughed about 75%-80% as often as I did with The Hangover, that on average, these laughs were only about 10% less hard than the laughs for the original, but analysis of the timbre of the laughs suggests that the laughs were about 10-15% more evil this time.
In an odd way, I am minded of the film Saw, and its sequels. The original was a grisly bit of torture porn, but mostly held up as a movie that normal people could like, because of the interesting gameplaying proposition play scenario. The sequel, however, was less broad ranging in appeal, and appeals mostly to those who were fans of the first, and attempts to give them more. And of course, by film six of the franchise, we're reduced to just the sick fucks who like watching mutilations. Well, I imagine the Hangover franchise like that. The first has a broad appeal as a buddy movie, for all it's black slapstick, the second will appear more to people who specifically enjoy black slapstick. If it goes any further along these lines, it really will only appeal to fans of Dirty Sanchez, but we're still early enough in the sequence to appeal to people with only borderline personality disorders**.
* - lie
** - that is, me.
Views, Reviews, and Inflammatory Comments on the subject of Cinema.
Sunday 19 June 2011
Green Lantern
The Basics. One of the oldest civilisations in the galaxy is a bunch of blue dudes who call themselves The Guardians of the Universe. Seriously, that's what they call themselves. They live on a planet called Oa near the center of the Universe, from where they essentially dictate that there must be law and order in the universe. Essentially, they're Time Lords, only they specialise in Weapons of Mass Destruction rather than time travel.
Anyhoo, after a brief, disastrous flirtation with imposing order on the cosmos with an army of android killing machines (not mentioned in the film, but they totally did it. The Guardians are a bunch of reckless assholes, for all of their sitting on big rocks pretending to be Yoda), they came to realise that it was maybe a better idea to allow the peoples of the universe to police themselves, maybe. So they split the universe into 3600 sectors and appointed one suitable individual from each sector to police that sector. These individuals are given Power Rings, which are weapons of immense power and versatility, capable of interstellar flight, firing big bolts of energy, and creating constructs of green energy. All this stuff is powered by the combined willpower of the universe, channeled by the willpower of the user. So if you can think it, you can create it, and the harder you can think it, the more powerful it is.
These guys have nice green uniforms, are called Green Lanterns, and form the Green Lantern Corps. They're this weird combination of 60's optimism, the corps consisting of the most multicultural mix of aliens conceivable (including a sentient planet, a sentient virus, and a sentient mathematical equation), but also a pretty authoritarian stance (the Guardians impose their chosen Lantern on a sector, and you don't get a vote. At least one Lantern in the past has been discovered imposing order on his sector through fascist dictatorship, and this went on for years without the Guardians taking an interest.)
Anyway, the Lantern for our sector, Abin Sur, a purple humanoid bloke, is fatally wounded fighting a being of pure Fear called Parallax, and crash lands on Earth. He instructs the ring to go find a suitable candidate, and it finds Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a hotshot test pilot, who at least initially is not as full of willpower and lacking in fear as a Green Lantern ought to be. However, the fear creature thing is about to devour the Earth, so it behooves him to become so pretty quick.
As a film, it's really quite good, I thought. I had very low expectations, having heard some dreadful reviews, but I don't think they're all that fair. It's pretty much your standard Joseph Campbell "Hero with a Thousand Faces" monomyth, and in not deviating much from that template, it's a pretty satisfying structure, if not the most original. I've seen some criticism of the film lacking a proper bad guy, the big conflict being against an amorphous cloud of fear and evil. In my view, though, this is where Green Lantern should be. The Green Lantern ring is practically an Ultimate Weapon. If a Lantern isn't up against a big World Eating Monstrosity, then it's a bit overkill. It's all about scale, and scale is delivered.
I would say, however, the film suffers in comparison with Thor. In that the two characters have a similar sort of storyline, and power level, but Thor just being quite a bit better and more fun. Overall, though, not a bad superhero flick, and so what if you're the season's Second Best Superhero movie?
Anyhoo, after a brief, disastrous flirtation with imposing order on the cosmos with an army of android killing machines (not mentioned in the film, but they totally did it. The Guardians are a bunch of reckless assholes, for all of their sitting on big rocks pretending to be Yoda), they came to realise that it was maybe a better idea to allow the peoples of the universe to police themselves, maybe. So they split the universe into 3600 sectors and appointed one suitable individual from each sector to police that sector. These individuals are given Power Rings, which are weapons of immense power and versatility, capable of interstellar flight, firing big bolts of energy, and creating constructs of green energy. All this stuff is powered by the combined willpower of the universe, channeled by the willpower of the user. So if you can think it, you can create it, and the harder you can think it, the more powerful it is.
These guys have nice green uniforms, are called Green Lanterns, and form the Green Lantern Corps. They're this weird combination of 60's optimism, the corps consisting of the most multicultural mix of aliens conceivable (including a sentient planet, a sentient virus, and a sentient mathematical equation), but also a pretty authoritarian stance (the Guardians impose their chosen Lantern on a sector, and you don't get a vote. At least one Lantern in the past has been discovered imposing order on his sector through fascist dictatorship, and this went on for years without the Guardians taking an interest.)
Anyway, the Lantern for our sector, Abin Sur, a purple humanoid bloke, is fatally wounded fighting a being of pure Fear called Parallax, and crash lands on Earth. He instructs the ring to go find a suitable candidate, and it finds Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a hotshot test pilot, who at least initially is not as full of willpower and lacking in fear as a Green Lantern ought to be. However, the fear creature thing is about to devour the Earth, so it behooves him to become so pretty quick.
As a film, it's really quite good, I thought. I had very low expectations, having heard some dreadful reviews, but I don't think they're all that fair. It's pretty much your standard Joseph Campbell "Hero with a Thousand Faces" monomyth, and in not deviating much from that template, it's a pretty satisfying structure, if not the most original. I've seen some criticism of the film lacking a proper bad guy, the big conflict being against an amorphous cloud of fear and evil. In my view, though, this is where Green Lantern should be. The Green Lantern ring is practically an Ultimate Weapon. If a Lantern isn't up against a big World Eating Monstrosity, then it's a bit overkill. It's all about scale, and scale is delivered.
I would say, however, the film suffers in comparison with Thor. In that the two characters have a similar sort of storyline, and power level, but Thor just being quite a bit better and more fun. Overall, though, not a bad superhero flick, and so what if you're the season's Second Best Superhero movie?
Thursday 9 June 2011
Senna
I wouldn't normally be too worried about posting spoilers about a documentary. One does not spoiler The World At War by telling people that the Nazis lose and Hitler dies in the end. However, this is a different kettle of fish, because this feels much more like a movie. Imagine you yourself were to plan a film of your life. You would weave a narrative including all you greatest achievements and most crushing defeats, and you'd then have to work out how to film those scenes, because, of course, when they happened to you, nobody was filming. However, in Ayrton Senna's case, that's simply not true. Everything he's famous for was captured on film, either by race cameras, TV sports cameras, or the voracious lens of the TV interview after the fact. At least on the sporting side of his life, it seems like his life could scarcely be better documented, and there's some sense that as he lived for the sport, no other side is necessary.
So, as the footage is actually available, the director Asif Kapadia has seemingly taken on the task of sifting through the - probably in total - years of film of Senna's life, and assembled two hours of it into a narrative. There's not a moment on screen that's not film from the time that's being portrayed - no modern returns to old scenes, no talking head interviews, with much of the voice over being taken from contemporary interviews and commentary. Hence, it's very "in the moment", and I was at times catapulted into the nostalgia of my youth, and the cigarette branded cars, Marlboros racing against John Player Specials.
Once we get into the main body of the film, the real story is the rivalry between Alain Prost and Senna. I'm not sure how fairly this is portrayed; Senna's this paragon of pure racing for the sake of racing, whereas Prost is this conniving, calculating prick who does what he has to do to win, like some moustache twirling Dick Dastardly, only with a healthy slathering of French arrogance on top. I don't think that was fair at all, as the whole Renault Williams episode shows. Prost starts driving for Renault Williams, who are pioneering traction control, which seemingly makes Prost unbeatable, and then there's this interview with Senna complaining about how all this electronics is unfair and any idiot could win in that car. Yet, when Prost retires, who's driving for Renault Williams the following year? Mmmm-hmm...
And if this was a documentary, pure and simple, I'd be booing and throwing eggs at such plainly partisan filmmaking. However, it's not, It's Only A Movie, and as such, we've picked our hero and our villain, and judicious editing shows them in that light. I'd be surprised if Prost isn't at least a little peeved by the final cut.
The film itself is thus a little odd to watch. In that if you watch it as a movie, you occasionally have to remind yourself that this is real contemporary footage, and thus there were no retakes, and no reshoots if the film quality was a bit poor. There are moments, however, that I think no action movie can remotely approach for thrills. In particular, we get car camera footage from Senna's drive in the 1984 Monaco Grand Prix, and watching that, I swear that he must have been superhuman or insane. Pod Racing in Phantom Menace is a game for five year olds in comparison.
So, is this a good documentary? No. It's too partisan. Is this the most hair raising racing movie ever made? Certainly. Especially when you consider the stakes involved.
So, as the footage is actually available, the director Asif Kapadia has seemingly taken on the task of sifting through the - probably in total - years of film of Senna's life, and assembled two hours of it into a narrative. There's not a moment on screen that's not film from the time that's being portrayed - no modern returns to old scenes, no talking head interviews, with much of the voice over being taken from contemporary interviews and commentary. Hence, it's very "in the moment", and I was at times catapulted into the nostalgia of my youth, and the cigarette branded cars, Marlboros racing against John Player Specials.
Once we get into the main body of the film, the real story is the rivalry between Alain Prost and Senna. I'm not sure how fairly this is portrayed; Senna's this paragon of pure racing for the sake of racing, whereas Prost is this conniving, calculating prick who does what he has to do to win, like some moustache twirling Dick Dastardly, only with a healthy slathering of French arrogance on top. I don't think that was fair at all, as the whole Renault Williams episode shows. Prost starts driving for Renault Williams, who are pioneering traction control, which seemingly makes Prost unbeatable, and then there's this interview with Senna complaining about how all this electronics is unfair and any idiot could win in that car. Yet, when Prost retires, who's driving for Renault Williams the following year? Mmmm-hmm...
And if this was a documentary, pure and simple, I'd be booing and throwing eggs at such plainly partisan filmmaking. However, it's not, It's Only A Movie, and as such, we've picked our hero and our villain, and judicious editing shows them in that light. I'd be surprised if Prost isn't at least a little peeved by the final cut.
The film itself is thus a little odd to watch. In that if you watch it as a movie, you occasionally have to remind yourself that this is real contemporary footage, and thus there were no retakes, and no reshoots if the film quality was a bit poor. There are moments, however, that I think no action movie can remotely approach for thrills. In particular, we get car camera footage from Senna's drive in the 1984 Monaco Grand Prix, and watching that, I swear that he must have been superhuman or insane. Pod Racing in Phantom Menace is a game for five year olds in comparison.
So, is this a good documentary? No. It's too partisan. Is this the most hair raising racing movie ever made? Certainly. Especially when you consider the stakes involved.
Sunday 5 June 2011
X-Men - First Class*
* - not a review
I expect we've all been waiting for a film which establishes why Professor X and Magneto are at odds with each other, despite once have been friends. No? Oh, you were quite happy to accept the few lines of exposition, and self-evident conflict of ideas between the two men? So you feel this movie's a bit superfluous then? Oh well. Here it is anyway. Seemingly unable to break away from the formula of the Superhero Origin Movie, this is the prequel origin movie to the original X-Men origin movie, which establishes the origins of Professor X, Magneto, Mystique, and a few others who don't actually appear in the subsequent continuity, and Beast, who is missing for two of the movies then pops up in the third without so much as a sicknote to explain his absence from the previous two.
So, the setup. We saw Erik Lehnsherr, who's going to be Magneto some day, in the first X-Men movie use his magnetic powers to attempt to open the gates of a concentration camp, until he was subdued by guards. It seems that this was witnessed by Sebastian Shaw, a mutant who was then working with the Nazis in a Mengele-like capacity, with his own agenda of creating a mutant master race. He takes young Erik as a protege/experimental subject, and attempts to unlock his powers by essentially inflicting physical and emotional pain on him. We then cut to twenty years later, the war is over, and Erik Lehnsherr has become an absolutely kick-ass Nazi hunter, obsessed with hunting Shaw down.
Shaw himself has been busy in the interim, forming a group of mutants called the Hellfire Club, with whom he is attempting to influence the US and Russian militaries regarding strategic placement of nuclear missiles. The CIA are interested in him, and he's being investigated by CIA Agent Moira McTaggart, who discovers he's some kind of genetic mutant thing, and so seeks the advice of world expert on the subject, the newly qualified Prof. Charles Xavier of Oxford University.
This leads to the formation of a mutant group under CIA auspices to hunt down Shaw, and soon they cross paths with, and recruit Erik. Together they recruit more mutants, with Charles' idealist and Erik's suspicion of authority working well to moderate each other. And the hunt for Shaw is on in earnest.
Now, despite my reservations that this is an origin movie, it's actually a pretty good one. Significant liberties are taken with the Marvel Comics continuity, but that's all to the good in my eyes. In the comics, the Hellfire Club were a bunch of self-sabotaging pillocks who dressed in fake 18th Century costumes, and who were basically a ripoff of that one episode of The Avengers than Chris Claremont saw once. Here, instead, we have Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) as a properly psycho Bond villain with all the trappings; secret base under a go-go-dancing nightclub, big yacht which doubles as a submarine, he's got the lot. His Hellfire club, then, rather than the bunch of squabbling doofuses you find in the comics, are a more or less random assortment of mutant henchmen, most of whom have the sense to shut the fuck up and let Shaw do the talking. The only bit of miscasting there, and I think of it as Near-Miss casting is January Jones from Mad Men as Emma Frost. Now fair enough, she looks the part, and should have no more trouble inspiring the kind of nocturnal tributes from comic geeks than previous versions of Emma Frost, but she's also supposed to be really witty and urbane, which isn't working here. However, had they just looked one name further in the Mad Men cast list, they'd have seen Christina Hendricks, who would have been perfect. Ah well, near miss.
The will-be X-Men are pretty good. Michael Fassbender's awesome as Erik, playing him as a basically decent man who's never going to put up with the slightest oppression from anyone, ever again. McAvoy's good, playing Xavier as a naive idealist whose cushy background causes him to have an almost condescending misunderstanding of the situations other mutants have found themselves on. There's excellent support from Nicolas Hoult as Beast, and Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique; a pair of really classy performances which really fill the movie out, and prevent it being all about the headlining characters.
Ultimately, though, the script prevents this being a really good film, as it's no more than the usual tick-box list of plot points that prequels have to establish before the end, and that doesn't actually amount to a story.
I expect we've all been waiting for a film which establishes why Professor X and Magneto are at odds with each other, despite once have been friends. No? Oh, you were quite happy to accept the few lines of exposition, and self-evident conflict of ideas between the two men? So you feel this movie's a bit superfluous then? Oh well. Here it is anyway. Seemingly unable to break away from the formula of the Superhero Origin Movie, this is the prequel origin movie to the original X-Men origin movie, which establishes the origins of Professor X, Magneto, Mystique, and a few others who don't actually appear in the subsequent continuity, and Beast, who is missing for two of the movies then pops up in the third without so much as a sicknote to explain his absence from the previous two.
So, the setup. We saw Erik Lehnsherr, who's going to be Magneto some day, in the first X-Men movie use his magnetic powers to attempt to open the gates of a concentration camp, until he was subdued by guards. It seems that this was witnessed by Sebastian Shaw, a mutant who was then working with the Nazis in a Mengele-like capacity, with his own agenda of creating a mutant master race. He takes young Erik as a protege/experimental subject, and attempts to unlock his powers by essentially inflicting physical and emotional pain on him. We then cut to twenty years later, the war is over, and Erik Lehnsherr has become an absolutely kick-ass Nazi hunter, obsessed with hunting Shaw down.
Shaw himself has been busy in the interim, forming a group of mutants called the Hellfire Club, with whom he is attempting to influence the US and Russian militaries regarding strategic placement of nuclear missiles. The CIA are interested in him, and he's being investigated by CIA Agent Moira McTaggart, who discovers he's some kind of genetic mutant thing, and so seeks the advice of world expert on the subject, the newly qualified Prof. Charles Xavier of Oxford University.
This leads to the formation of a mutant group under CIA auspices to hunt down Shaw, and soon they cross paths with, and recruit Erik. Together they recruit more mutants, with Charles' idealist and Erik's suspicion of authority working well to moderate each other. And the hunt for Shaw is on in earnest.
Now, despite my reservations that this is an origin movie, it's actually a pretty good one. Significant liberties are taken with the Marvel Comics continuity, but that's all to the good in my eyes. In the comics, the Hellfire Club were a bunch of self-sabotaging pillocks who dressed in fake 18th Century costumes, and who were basically a ripoff of that one episode of The Avengers than Chris Claremont saw once. Here, instead, we have Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) as a properly psycho Bond villain with all the trappings; secret base under a go-go-dancing nightclub, big yacht which doubles as a submarine, he's got the lot. His Hellfire club, then, rather than the bunch of squabbling doofuses you find in the comics, are a more or less random assortment of mutant henchmen, most of whom have the sense to shut the fuck up and let Shaw do the talking. The only bit of miscasting there, and I think of it as Near-Miss casting is January Jones from Mad Men as Emma Frost. Now fair enough, she looks the part, and should have no more trouble inspiring the kind of nocturnal tributes from comic geeks than previous versions of Emma Frost, but she's also supposed to be really witty and urbane, which isn't working here. However, had they just looked one name further in the Mad Men cast list, they'd have seen Christina Hendricks, who would have been perfect. Ah well, near miss.
The will-be X-Men are pretty good. Michael Fassbender's awesome as Erik, playing him as a basically decent man who's never going to put up with the slightest oppression from anyone, ever again. McAvoy's good, playing Xavier as a naive idealist whose cushy background causes him to have an almost condescending misunderstanding of the situations other mutants have found themselves on. There's excellent support from Nicolas Hoult as Beast, and Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique; a pair of really classy performances which really fill the movie out, and prevent it being all about the headlining characters.
Ultimately, though, the script prevents this being a really good film, as it's no more than the usual tick-box list of plot points that prequels have to establish before the end, and that doesn't actually amount to a story.
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