Transformers: Whatever The Hell The Rest Of The Title Is.

A number of errors led me to see this film today. The cinema's website claimed
that Looking For Eric was on at 2pm. This was the first error. When I got to
the cinema, I quickly bought a ticket from the machine, not noticing it was a
ticket for a Monday showing. That was the second error. The girl in the cinema
tore the ticket and sent me to the screen indicated without realising it was
the wrong day. That was the next error. When I got into the cinema, I was
presented with Hanna Montana: The Movie, so I left, and traded the ticket in
for a later showing of Transformers. This may also have been an error.

There's nothing to like about this movie. The humans in the movie are uniformly
badly written, badly acted and completely without redeeming interest. Whenever
something with pulse is on the screen, that moment is a waste of your time.

But so what, right? It's giant robot explodo movie. But I've got so many
issues with that aspect too. First, design. When we were kids, Transformers
were cooler if the robot in question looked like cool robots built out of cars
when they were robots. The robots in transformers have this appalling busy
design, they just don't look good, they look messy. Second, action. Michael Bay
seems to think that all he needs to do to make robot fights cool is to just
slap tons of motion blur on everything so you can't actually see what's going
on.

So, the whole thing is just a huge, inelegant mess from start to finish. A real
steaming turd of a movie.

3/10 - There's a few effects shots that are quite nice, but really, don't waste
your time.

The Hangover

So... four guys go on a stag night in Las Vegas and get utterly hammered.
Mayhem ensues. They wake the following morning, none of them can remember what
happened, and the groom's missing. His friends must therefore track him down
before the wedding.

So far, so "Dude, Where's My Car." It's a staggeringly unoriginal plot. If you
were to show me a 1920s silent movie with this plot, I wouldn't be at all
surprised.

The quality, then, has to be in the execution, and it's actually pretty darned
funny, really. It's pretty much an even split between black comedy and
slapstick. If you're likely to be amused by seeing a baby belted in the face
with a car door, this is certainly the movie for you. I'd say the whole film
sits on the comedy spectrum somewhere between Old School and a Kevin Smith
movie. Which I intend as a recommendation.

Terminator Salvation

Or, "If the machines want to take out humanity, they'd better be sure they kill
Batman first."

It would be an insult to everyone on Mono to suggest that they need a synopsis
of the plot. John Connor, in the future, fighting Skynet. Seriously, you do the
math.

The battle details one of Connor's earlier battles with Skynet, no more, no
less. Lots of hardware made of pigiron goes boom. We see a few cool new breeds
of terminator, and - hey look! Michael Ironside is a hardass! Nice to see you
again Michael! Top bloke.

The real question is, is it any good? The problem with judging that is that no
film will ever be as good as Terminator or Terminator 2, including Terminator
and Terminator 2. Seriously, I watched Terminator 2 last night, and it's just
about pretty good, but 20 years haven't been kind to it. The effects stand up,
but the plot's pretty dumb, and I will never know how we tolerated Edward
Furlong at the time. So, given that, I guess this is an acceptable, but less
good sequel. It's a bit of a mess, and the ending is pretty dumb, but it
rattles along entertainingly enough, and it looks pretty cool.

One thing that this film does *not* really do is take the franchise in any
interesting new directions. The brief is to film a bit of what we know
happened, and make it exciting. No real risks are taken, and so I suppose it
succeeds in not failing, it fails in not succeeding too.


7/10. Capable enough Explodo.

Synecdoche, New York

Caden Cotard is a relatively successful theatre director, married to a
successful artist, with a young daughter. His health's not all that it might
be, and his marriage is a bit dead in the water. His life begins to spiral way
out of control, as he attempts to create a massively complex autobiographical
theatre piece, with a cast of thousands, recreating his entire life and
everyone that connects with him in a warehouse set.

Now, this is a film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, writer of Being
John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, so it should be no
surprise that things take a rapid turn for the incredibly bizarre, dreamlike
and hallucinatory very quickly. Uncompromisingly so, in fact; not much that
happens in the second half makes a lick of sense, even though, ultimately, it's
quite justified. It's a deliberately confusing and occasionally disturbing bit
of cinema, but I would say completely worthwhile. Like some sort of odd cross
between Michel Gondry and David Lynch.

Obviously, when a film is largely dream sequence, it's all to easy for it to
disappear up its own arse. Synecdoche avoids this by being frequently highly
amusing, as things take absurd and whimsical turns all over the place, as
dreams are wont to do. So it's surreally amusing, surreally disturbing,
surreally melancholy... basically, all flavours of surreal in one big
surreality selection box. Very nice.

Still don't know how to pronounce it. Apparently it's not done that well at the
box office, and I wonder if, in part, that's because people have gone "I'll
have a ticket for sneck... sink.. sind... Wolverine please."

The Curious Origins Of Mr James "Wolverine" Logan Esq.

It seems that once in the mid nineteenth century there was a wee boy named
James Logan, and his half brother Victor Creed. One fateful night, they
discover they have Special Animal Powers, and then the credits happen. When the
credits end, it's the Vietnam War Or Something, and they get recruited into a
black-ops super-team.

And then things go pretty much by the numbers for a film in which there's a
black-ops team that does Very Bad Things, people grow consciences, fail to
grow consciences, betray each other, swear vengeance on each other, and stuff.

So, what it is, is a pretty slick and cool action revenge type flick, with
added shiny superpowers. Rather than, I would say, a dark gritty superhero
movie. Which means it's good stuff. Obviously, it's more of a thrill ride than
a story with depth, but judged as a thrill ride, it's absolutely worth the
price of admission.


8/10 - Doesn't do anything surprising, but what it does, it does well. Doesn't
really push for anything above or beyond what was expected of it.

Star Trek

Ooh. Eh. Hmmm.

The first thing we have to do is decide what this is. Then we have to work out
how good a one it is.

Is it a sci-fi movie? Is this a story about a starship in an interstellar
peacekeeping federation? No. No it's not. It's an unashamed 124 minute fangasm.
This is a film made for people who like the original series. The intent seems
clear, to roll back the years, and remake the ludicrosity of the Shatner era.
We are having no truck with the TNG and subsequent series, where the
inhabitants of an interstellar cruise liner go places and be diplomatic at
people. This is phasers and fistfights.

As it goes, it's pretty successful. In that without the Star Trek marque on it,
this would all be pretty lame-ass stuff, but somehow, since it *is* Star Trek,
cheesy stupidity is part of the franchise, and they do a reasonable job of
capturing the formula - in a way that, for instance, 'Enterprise' really
didn't.

The plot is pretty standard Trek stuff; a bunch of Romulans from the future
have come back in time in order to trash the Vulcans and the Federation in
general, using their Way Superior Technology to cream the opposition. The only
notable thing about this is that in doing so they change Trek history, their
actions altering the characters at pretty formative points of their history,
thus ensuring that they can take a fresh take, rather than feel like they have
to copy.

It's also a superhero origins movie, in that it details how Kirk comes to
command the Enterprise, and assemble the classic crew. I don't think it'll come
as any great surprise to anyone that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

I have one real issue with the film, and that's that they don't give Kirk a
whole lot of manly heroics. He gets beat up a lot. His primary ability seems to
be to soak up a beating until someone else arrives to save his ass. He's Kirk.
He ought to be able to beat up any five guys in a fistfight, with a trademark
overhead double hand blow. Everyone else, I like. I actually *like* Chris Pine
as Kirk. I just wish they'd managed to write him succeeding by more than basic
blind luck.

Encounters At The End Of The World

Filmmaker Werner Herzog went to Antarctica, and he filmed the people there.

That much, was a really good idea. In that Antarctica is a really weird and
amazing place, and the people who live there are really weird and amazing
people. There's a lot of cool science going on down there, hippy dropout
travellers seem to wash up there, it's a whole other world.

Unfortunately, Herzog also felt that he needed to narrate and score this film.
So a lot of the time, all you hear is Herzog's frankly droning and insight-free
reflections on the place and the people. There are times when there are
actually really interesting people talking, and Herzog dubs over them, drowning
them out, telling us what they are saying. The ego required for that is
*astounding*. And irritating.

The rest of the time, there is a really, *really* loud music soundtrack, which
comes in two flavours - tuneless ethereal choral music, and tuneless spiritual
string ensemble that sounds like a building creaking in the wind. I'd like to
emphasise how *really* loud it was. Loud and *constant*. So (while Herzog isn't
talking over them) you have all these residents of Antarctica telling us how
really silent Antarctica is, and then when we're actually trying to look at
antarctica, and experience that, there's this intrusive and inappropriate
racket going on. I genuinely nearly walked out near the end because I was sick
of it.

I'd love to see a documentary on this subject. I'd love to see Attenborough do
it. I'd love to see Louis Theroux do it. I'd like to see *this* one with the
music and director's commentary stripped off. This, however, was rendered and
irritating and frustrating mess.