Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan

Or Mongol: The Unremittingly Unpleasant Childhood of Genghis Khan, in some
territories.

Basically, we follow the early life of Genghis Khan as he is serially captured,
enslaved, betrayed, has his wife kidnapped, betrayed again, enslaved again,
etc, etc. All of which seems to come to a head at the point where he realises
just how much it sucks to be a mongol, and decides to take over the entire
country and impose some laws. Which he does, in the last five minutes, in
spectacularly little detail. One minute he's one lone man saying "goodbye wife
I'm going to go unite the Mongols" and the next he's at the head of a thousands
strong army. Essentially, if you're interested in the early campaigns of
Genghis Khan, or how he united the tribes into a shiny big horde, you're out of
luck. The film is basically not about that, it's about the crap in his life
that led him to believe that was necessary.

So, how's that side of the film? Well, it's pretty good. It's very well shot -
beautifully so. If you've got any interest in seeing someone ride a horse
across the strange, varied and beautiful landscape of the steppes, then you're
in luck, because there's a lot of that. The leads, playing Temudjin, his wife,
his father, his brother, all give very powerful performances. It's very well
written; when all these betrayals come in, it's very sympathetic; no-one's seen
as particularly evil, it's just how life is when you live in primitive society
of lawless warriors.

There's a big "but", however, and that is, I am afraid to say, that the life of
a Mongol is not that interesting. They didn't have a lot of culture to speak
of, so really, we see a lot of sitting in yurts drinking out of wooden bowls.
That's what they did. That and riding horses around and nicking stuff off each
other. Whilst Temudjin's early life was undoubtedly tumultuous, it wasn't
actually very varied. His life isn't a story with a beginning, middle and end,
it's more a series of unfortunate events, where he's regularly knocked back
down into the mud.

So, in all, beautiful, well-performed, but not a little repetitious, and often
lacking in drama.

Speed Racer

Ok, it's a live action remake of an old cartoon from Japan, that a lot of
Americans appear to have grown up on, and which we've barely heard of. So
they're all up in arms about their childhoods being desecrated, while we don't
give a toss and can just enjoy it for what it is.

So there's this family whose second name is Racer, who call their kid Speed. No
prizes for guessing that he's not going into chartered accountancy then. His
dad, whose name is Pops apparently, builds cars, and his sons race them for
him. Oldest son dies in a crash, so obviously Number 2 son is next up. The
third son is largely ignored and given to a chimpanzee to raise, because as a
kid with no obvious racing talent, his family clearly view him as an oxygen
thief, and hope he'll die. By the end of the movie, you will too. In fact,
let's not be coy about it, the moment you clap eyes on him, you'll hope he
catches something fatal from the doubtless copious amounts of chimpanzee shit
there must be lying around the Racer house.

So, everyone else in racing is Evil and Corrupt. Speed and his family are Good.
Game on. Basically, it's Mario Kart To The Death. OK, that's not fair. It's
F-Zero To The Death. It's a cross between Ben Hur and Charlie And The Chocolate
Factory.

Does it work? Yeah, it does actually, for basically the same reasons F-Zero
works. Driving brightly coloured cars at 500 miles an hour until all but one of
them has exploded is fun. Added into the mix is Racer X who is the mysterious
badass guy that all anime must have, and basically he and Speed belt the shit
out of everyone else until Good Prevails.

I really liked it, because it's everything *I* think car racing should be about
- i.e. driving the other bastard off the track and down a cliff. Everyone
cheats, to the point of equipping their cars with bloody great big maces and
catapults that fire beehives at their foes.

There are some crappy bits, mostly the bits where one or other of Speed's
parents buttonhole him and tell him, at length, how proud they are of him, how
much they love him, et fucking cetera. Yeah, yeah, mom. More smashy.

Christina Ricci, incidentally, is way too old to be Speed's girlfriend. But
hey, you're making a manga, the first casting consideration is REALLY REALLY
HUGE EYES.

All in all, I think this may be one of those films that kids watching it today
will still give a fuck about ten years from now. As I sat watching the credits,
a couple of kids ran past me wearing popcorn buckets for helmets going "vroom
vroom". That pretty much says it all.

Indiana Jones And The Order Of The Phoenix

Or whatever it was called.

Imagine this. You bump into an old friend somewhere, and you're glad to see
them. So you arrange to go out for a drink with them. And you do. And you
reminisce, and you catch up, and you have a perfectly pleasant time. And then
at the end of the evening, you both say "we really must do this again", and
then neither of you ever bothers calling the other one again.

This film is like that kind of evening. Essentially, we have a perfectly
pleasant couple of hours going over all the times we've had with Indy in the
past, catching up with what he's been up to since we last saw him, have a few
laughs, and then we're done.

This is pretty much Indy by the numbers. Essentially, there's a lot of people
getting thrown out of lorries, mysterious artifacts you don't want to be in the
same room as when they go off, Nazis (albeit actually much less satisfying to
shoot commies these days) and some of the greatest pre-industrial engineering
ever made, mostly involving stone slabs and counterbalances.

It's practically a remake of Raiders, with very little indeed added or
subtracted from the formula. Spielburg and Lucas clearly thought that if it
ain't broke, don't fix it, which I must say is a refreshing departure for
Lucas. What it doesn't do is advance or even change the plot at all. As such, I
just don't see the need for it.

In defence of the movie, as effectively an adequate re-run of Raiders of the
Lost Ark, it's a pretty diverting use of two hours, and it really is nice to
see Indy back in action again. Not too much is made of the fact he's got older,
and rather than doing the creaky "ooh, I'm not as young as I used to be" crap
all the time, we're given the impression that he's just getting better at
kicking the shit out of people and throwing them out of trucks as time goes on.
Kind of like Cohen the Barbarian in the Discworld novels.

Ultimately, it's an idle pleasure, a pointless diversion, albeit quite an
entertaining one.

In Bruges

Marvellous film.

Clever little film, indeed. If you've seen the trailers, you'll have seen that
it's a jet-black comedy about two hitmen exiled to Bruges after a botched job.
And that much is true. Half the time. The other half, it's this desperately sad
study of guilt, loneliness, depression, loyalty, consequences, and I don't know
what else. And quite cleverly, it turns the comedy on and off, so one moment
you're chuckling, the next you're really quite melancholy. I had no idea that
Colin Farrell was *any* good, never mind this good. Brendan Gleeson's also a
lot better than his Harry Potter panto turns suggest, and the two of them play
off each other brilliantly. Fellow Potter-alumnus Ralph Fiennes turns up at the
end and has a go at stealing the show as their demented East-end gangster boss,
and very nearly pulls it off, switching neatly between a scary-as-you-like
villain, and a parody of same.

Go see it, you'll laugh, you'll cry.

Iron Man

I've always loved Iron Man. He has a purity of design about him. Whereas Bruce
Wayne decided he needed to teach criminals a lesson, and spent years training
himself to physical perfection, then seeking a method to strike fear into the
hearts of the superstitious, dresses as a bat, Tony Stark sees a shortcut.
Instead, he just builds himself a humanoid engine of carnage and destruction,
which takes care of both the beating people up angle, and the fear angle. Thus,
he can do all that cool superhero stuff, and still drink martinis and date
supermodels. You've got to hand it to him.

So, I was pretty damned pleased when I heard Jon Favereau was in charge, and
Robert Downey Jr was starring. These are men who know their martinis and
supermodels.

So, the plot.

Tony Stark is captured by evil Middle-Eastern types and forced to make WMDs.
Instead, he makes a suit of powered armor, kicks their asses, and escapes.
Later, having learned the hard way that being an arms dealer is wrong, he seeks
to improve the suit, become a hero, and help out the people who he's been
putting in harm's way.

Meanwhile, unrepentantly bad elements in his company get hold of his Mark I
suit, design a competing one for military use, and generally try to screw him
over. Eventually, it comes down to a duel between the super-suits.

It's good. I very much enjoyed it. Cool effects, nice performances, and in
general, satisfying for a fan to see up on the big screen, and enough
explosions and mayhem to wow the newcomer.

Downsides... well, there are three as far as I can see. First, Tony Stark is a
loner. So while he's with his supporting cast, he's a fun guy, and the
dialogue's great. He spends a lot of time in his basement talking to himself,
though. Hence, it can seem a bit sterile at times. Second, it's First
Installment Of A Superhero Franchise time. We're barely out of the genesis of
the character, and it's That's All Folks! Same problem as with X-Men 1. X-Men 2
was a much better film because the players were in place. Third - well, it
sticks its oar into the murky waters of international arms trade, and trouble
in the Middle East, but really, the whole thing seems a bit trite. Our middle
Eastern warlord is all "muhahaha, with this I can take over the world, like
Alexander the Great before me", and you kind of feel that it's all a bit cheap.
This kind of crap was getting old back in the eighties.

But taking into account that this is a) a superhero movie intended for kids and
b) we've really not got more time, then these shortcomings are forgivable.
Hopefully, we'll be getting a sequel real soon now that'll be as good as X-Men
2. The groundwork is certainly there.

7.5/10, but please, have another go.

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.