Retired and Extremely Dangerous

A few years ago I had an idea for one of those films you know will never get made, and it revolved around a retirement home for Hollywood’s finest, featuring people like Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, all playing stereotyped versions of themselves, Nicholson the laid back ladies man, Eastwood the grumpy hard-ass and so on, and the whole place was run by 80’s everywhere man Steven Guttenberg, who had to get a proper job once the 80’s finished and he stopped making movies, like Last of the Summer Wine with laughs.

The plot, though I never really got that far, would have run along the lines between The Dream Team (1989) where four psychiatric patients, including Michael Keaton and Christopher Lloyd, are left unsupervised during a field trip, and Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) in which Bruce Campbell plays and elderly Elvis. Presley bored of fame, had himself replaced with an impersonator, who then later dies, leaving old man Elvis in a nursing home. A bizarre concept already, but you ain’t heard nothing yet, the nursing home is being stalked by Bubba Ho-Tep a mummy whos stealing the souls of the residents, Elvis then teams up with Jack (Ossie Davis) and elderly Blackman, who thinks he's John F. Kennedy, believing that after the assassination he was patched up, dyed black, as he puts it the perfect disguise, and hidden in a care home.

Told you it got more bizarre, bizarre but brilliant. Anyway the point wasn’t to tell you about two films your likely never to have heard of, and one imaginary one, one day Hollywood one day, but in a round about way tell you about Red, a film about Retired secret service agents featuring the potential cast list from my imaginary movie, Bruce Willis, he’d have be an orderly, as he doesn’t look old enough , John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, Richard Dreyfuss, Ernest Borgnine and Brian Cox. I think Ernest Borgnine would have to be the grand sage, the one the others would go to for advice, a cross between Mr. Miyagi and Gandalf.

After that imaginary detour, we come back to Red, Bruce Willis at his cool and causal best, plays a retired CIA black-ops agent, who’s forced out of said retirement when his home is assaulted by a hit squad, for his part in a 30 year old operation in Guatemala. He then teams up with ex-colleague and Paranoid John Malkovich, ex-KGB agent Brian Cox, Ex-MI6 agent Helen Mirren and ex-CIA agent Morgan Freeman, to uncover why he and everyone else involved with the operation are being bumped off.

This is the kind of film The Expendables could have been, where The Expendables brought together the cream of action movies past and present, and throw them at a generic straight to DVD plot, with some awful dialogue, lets be honest that was all irrelevant, the only reason anyone wanted to see it was for the cast, box ticked. Red however has started with the story, radical thinking I know, then cast cinema greats in the various roles, even minor roles.

Red’s based on a three issue comic from DC, and this fact is evident in the direction and storytelling, the story moves along at a rapid pace, without seeming rushed, and every shot seems to have been lifted straight of the page. Its got James Bond cool, without the misogyny, its sleek and sexy, like a designer gowned starlet on Oscar night touting a Uzi, its light hearted without being flippant, both contemporary and old school. Lets be honest Red won’t ever win an academy award for best picture, its not about self discovery, schizophrenic mathematicians or stuttering monarchs, but then the best picture doesn’t always win the best picture, Shakespeare in Love beat The Thin Red Line, and The Hurt Locker beat everything.

My three favourite moments from the film, which, I think all appear in the trailer, are as followed, Bruce Willis kicking Karl Urban through a glass Table, Helen Mirren wielding a machine gun, and John Malkovich running down the street shouting menacingly , while strapped with explosives. Malkovich’s turn here also makes up for his half-hearted appearance in Jonah Hex, I‘ve written all about that disappointment already so I won‘t get into it again, but….

Red trailer

The Dream Team trailer

Bubba Ho-Tep trailer

The Adventures of Pegg & Frost

When you think about classic British comedies, you think of Dad’s Army, The Good Life and Porridge, and when you think of a modern classic you think of Red Dwarf, Black Books and Spaced. Spaced was first broadcast 12 years ago, in the prehistoric world of 1999, written by Jessica Hynes, previously Stevenson, best know for her role as Cheryl in The Royal Family and Simon Pegg. The series follows Tim and Daisy (played by Hynes & Pegg) two randomers who after flat hunting meet and decide its much easier to rent as a couple. They manage to rent a ground floor flat from Marsha the 40 something drunk who lives upstairs, and who also has a thing for Brian, the socially awkward conceptual artist living the basement flat.

 

The series was highly praised, an rightly so, and marked, though they had all worked with each other previously, the first major collaboration between Simon Pegg, Nick Frost (who played Tim‘s best friend gun nut Mike) & Edgar Wright (who directed the series)

Skip forward a couple of years, and we arrive neatly, almost as if this ramble was planned, conspiracy? with the trio’s first foray into movie world with, as Pegg has put it, the worlds first zom-rom-com (that’s Zombie romantic comedy) Shaun of the Dead. Its fairly traditional rom-com territory, Boy loves Girl, Girl Loves Boy, but thinks she deserves more, dumps Boy, Boy goes on voyage of self-discovery, attempts and succeeds to win back the heart of Girl, it just happens voyage of discovery sails through the country known only as Zombie Apocalypse..

This was followed up with Hot Fuzz, which took a different tacked than Shaun of the Dead, where that film had smashed two well sourced genres together like a Saturday night reveller hurling their phone at a wall after a drunken argument, Hot Fuzz took another well known genre, the buddy cop movie, taking it out of the traditional big city setting, and moving the it to a sleepy village in Gloucestershire.

Both films were written by Pegg & Wright, starred Pegg & Frost, while being directed by Wright

Recently the trio have gone in different directions, Wright took all the genre fusion lessons he had learnt from Spaced, Shaun of the Dead & Hot Fuzz, and applied them to the frankly brilliant Scot Pilgrim vs. the World, an adaptation of a comic book, based on a made up videogame. While Pegg & Frost have made Paul, written by and starring the pair.

Paul follows two Brit geeks, who after attending the Nerdopia, known only as Comic-Con, rent a campervan and embark on a road trip across America visiting the country’s most famous alien related land marks, such as the site of the Roswell crash, its during their adventure, a car speeds past them, going off road and crashing, while investigating, the pair meet Area 51 escapee Paul, the original Roswell crasher. After being imprisoned for 50 some years, Paul has managed to get a message to his people to come and pick him up, and is off to the rendezvous when he meets the duo.

Theres a moment in the film where Frost’s character Clive says he’s wanted to meet an alien ever since he saw Mac & Me, an 80's film which most people will never have heard of, but which I used to love. Mac and Me is about a wheelchair bound boy who befriends an alien who has escaped from NASA, and goes on a road trip with said alien to reunite him with his family, whom they eventually find living in a cave, everything works out for the best and the family become American citizens, much like Jonny 5 did in Short Circuit 2, despite the alien family having no means of which to support themselves, becoming four more mouths for the welfare system to feed.

Okay so I diverted slightly there, but I needed to tell the uneducated the basic premise of that film, to show you how much of a clear influence Mac and Me is on Paul, Pauls what happens when an alien is discovered by two grown men, rather than a young boy, it’s the same story, with added dick and fart jokes, and it feels like an eighties movie, a ridiculous adventure like the Goonies, or rather a ridiculous adventure the Goonies would be having in middle age.

One of the things that makes the film work is the character of Paul, your stereotypical grey alien, voiced by Seth Rogan (The Green Hornet, Knocked Up) and near perfectly realised in CGI, its this realisation that makes the film work, if it was a rubber suited dwarf running around or CGI of I Am Legend quality this would have been laughable for all the wrong reasons.

Shaun Of The Dead Trailer

Paul trailer

Mac and Me Trailer

Buried

For some people its their worst nightmare, for Uma Thurman it was opportunity to use those martial arts skills you’d learnt but never thought you’d use. For Ryan Reynolds it was 17 days filming the impossible film.

Buried is a very simple concept, one man buried alive, with not much more than a Zippo and a mobile phone, and his bid for freedom, and that’s it. So I know what your thinking, A: How is he going to write about a film where someone's trapped in the smallest apartment known to man, and B: how the fuck are they going to stretch it out to eighty odd minutes, let alone make it interesting. Well I don’t know about A, but hopefully through explaining B, A will take care of itself.

Imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, he retreats to Iraqi underground, surviving as a solider of fortune… go that’s The A-Team, I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Not so much imprisoned, as entombed, Reynolds aka Paul Conroy, an American truck driver working in Iraq, is happily trucking along in a convey when said convey is ambushed, and Paul then wakes up 6ft under.

Part of the reason I wanted to see this film was out of sheer curiosity, I, like you may now be, was intrigue, how can one man carry an entire film, pretty much on his own, especially when that man is Ryan Reynolds. A man best known for romantic comedies and the odd comic book movie, but this film, coupled with upcoming superhero movie The Green Lantern, on the proviso it turns out to be any good, and by the trailer it looks likely, should propel Reynolds to level of stardom every honest actor fights for. Yes Buried is that good.

Well it seems so far that A maybe winning out, as its not only difficult to right about a film about a man in a box, that’s a lie I properly could, but I don’t want to tell you what happens because it’ll ruin it, and to ruin a film of this calibre would be a crime against cinema.

Usually I’d included the trailer at the bottom of my ramblings, but even at 68 seconds it gives to much away, just trust me.So instead I’ll just give you who are not that into the comics a lesson in lantern, who’s trailer does follow.

The first thing you need to know, need's a strong word, is there are thousands of Green Lanterns, they’re like an intergalactic force for justice in the cosmos, each member has been carefully selected. The selected individual is given a ring which gives them great power, and the film follows Hal Jordon, the first Human to be selected for The Green Lantern Corps, queue intergalactic adventure, and potential franchise, those sneaky movie types, its almost as if they’ve seen this cash cow, with udders so big they can milk that cow till its dried out steak. And the reason they can ring these udders dry is that the comics, over time, feature a number of different human lanterns, so, much like much like Dr. Who when ever an actor feels its time to move on, alacazam, regeneration, on in the the lanterns case new recruit, and with a new actor in the title role it can go indefinitely, or least until it stops making money, and it does work, Dr. Who has had eleven different actors in the title role, and that started in 1963.

Possibly the most incoherent review yet, well done me.

Green Lantern Trailer