Well hello there!! You’d forgotten all about me hadn’t you? Well I hadn’t forgotten about you, my computer has been out of action for the best part of two months, this has been both a blessing and a curse, its meant I haven’t had my time sucked into the black hole that is social networking, and have instead spent it far more constructively...watching more movies. So with that in mind, I thought I’d run through a few highs and lows of my cine-fuelled internet sabbatical.
Sharktopus
A quick one to start, I bought Sharktopus for the title alone, a film produced by B-movie legend Roger Corman about a genetically engineered creature. Half octopus, have shark, on a killing spree, who could go wrong? Well it appears I did, I’d like to say it was brilliant rubbish, but I can’t, the novelty wears off after about the first 30 minutes, unfortunately its goes on for another hour.
The A-Team
When I first heard about a possible film version of pretty much the only non-animated show I watched as a child, I was both excited and dubious, excited by the thought of big screen adventures of the world’s favourite friendly neighbourhood mercenaries, and somewhat nervous that it might end up a grade A fuck up. This however was about twelve years ago, when Mel Gibson almost stepped into the shoes of the cigar chewing George Peppard, but the rumours died and so did the prospect of this plan coming together.
Then about three years ago, the rumours not dead, but hibernating, awoke and rubbed the sleep from their eyes, and started work once more at the mill. As the wheels of the mill began to turn, more and more sacks of truth were produced, and in turn these sacks of truth were sent to the Hollywood bakery. I love it when a flan comes together.
Okay so I’m a bit late with any kind of review, but I’ve only just gotten round to seeing it, so it’s all new to me.
The film takes place before the team of A became the ‘soldiers of fortune’ seeing them attempt to clear their name ‘for the crime they didn’t commit’. The four leads have a brilliant chemistry, but there’s a distinct lack of the love/hate relationship of the TV series, there’s all a little too much ego stroking and ball cupping for my liking.
Also there’s not nearly enough of the elements that made the show the icon of 80’s cool that it is and was, such as cars flipping through the air, B.A. squaring up to the equally sized nameless henchman, getting punched in the face, giving said henchman the patented Mr.T ‘you don’t who you just fucked with' glare, before throwing nameless over a nearby bar/counter, and finally constructing armoured vehicles of death star like proportions with nothing more than a rabbit and a toaster. Basically thefilm boils down to an average action movie, and much like Sharktopus is a bit of a let down.
Summer Wars
From Mamoru Hosoda, man behind The Girl Who Leapt through Time, and hailed as the next Miyazaki (which to those who aren’t overly familiar with anime, thats like calling him the next Disney) comes a strange and compelling story.
High school student and mathematical genius Kenji is invited by Natsuki to her family gathering, in celebration of her great-grandmother’s 90th birthday, and asked to pose as her fiancé. While at the gathering Kenji receives an e-mail with a mathematical problem, which he quickly solves. The problem is this e-mail was sent by an artificial intelligence currently running riot through cyberspace, and the problem Kenji solved was in fact the access code for Oz, a massive computer simulated virtual reality world, used by most of the developed world, and encompasses everything from banking, shopping, gaming, social networking, as well as being used by many of the worlds governments and their agencies. As the A.I. begins to take control of millions of accounts, causing untold havoc, Kenji, with the help of the Shinohara family attempt to take down the cyber gremlin.
The film has two main themes running through it the importance of family, both how they forgive us our trespasses and how they pull together under crisis, and secondly are increasing reliance as a species on technology, more specifically computers and communications.
This is by far the best anime I’ve seen in a long time, possibly since Spirited Away, and definitely one of the best films I’ve seen this year.
