Guess who's back?

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 90^th 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.

Sharktopus Trailer

The A-Team Trailer

Summer Wars Trailer

Punching above his Weight?

Zack Snyder has made a career out of bringing other peoples ideas to the big screen, first there was his 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s zombie classic Dawn of the Dead, okay so that was someone else’s idea, that they had already brought to the screen, but its still a relevant starting point for the Snyder trend.

Secondly we were presented with the excellent 300, an adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name by comic book legend Frank Miller, the man responsible for the Sin City series, and Batman: Year One which formed a large part of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, and who also sat in the director's chair for The Spirit.

300 follows the fictionalized retelling of the battle of Thermopylae, where in reality an alliance of Greek city states lead by the Spartans took on the might of the Persian Empire during their second invasion of Greece, a battle which lasted three bloody days, but in comic/movieland pitches 300 Spartans against the Persian Hordes.

Then Snyder brought us the film of the unfilmable, an adaptation of the Citizen Kane of comic books Watchmen, written by Alan Moore, creator of V for Vendetta, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Watchmen takes place in an alternative history version of 1985, a history in which Nixon never resigned, where his successors Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter & Ronald Reagan never become Presidents, and where Nixon is still Commander in Chief. A history where a group of mostly retired masked vigilantes investigate a conspiracy against them, after one of their number is murdered and end up uncovering something far bigger and more sinister than they could have possible imagined. 

This was followed with his first move into the realm of family, the CGI owl orgy that is Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (..and the worst title award goes to..), which apparently comprises the first three novels of a series by Kathryn Laskey, but frankly it looked so rubbish, that even with my love of animation, I couldn’t bring myself to watch it, and have tried to block its existence from my psyche, so as not to ruin what was an impressive run.

Speaking of my love for animation I recently watched The Illusionist, a beautiful piece, which like the first half of Wall-E features almost no dialogue at all, an not one CGI penguin, or wide eyed Japanese fighting squirrel. A possible future blog...maybe...if your lucky.

Anyway back to Snyder and his first piece of original cinema, Sucker Punch. A film, which in the two brief reviews I’ve seen have completely panned it. Which for the man who’s about to reboot the Superman franchise doesn’t bode well, but that will also be someone else’s reinvented imaginings, so who knows?

Okay I’ve seen Sucker Punch, and frankly it was disappointing , the main problem seems to be that Snyder during the early stages of planning started to brainstorm, he drew a little spider diagram, with cool in the centre. From that centre he drew the various legs, naming each one, zombies, robots, samurai, guns and so on. Then he made a second spider, this one called cool genres and other stuff wot I like, and this time the legs were called war, anime, fantasy, adventure, sci-fi. When these two word arachnids were fully formed, Snyder held them out one in each hand, looking at them both with wonderment, then in one swift movement slammed his hands together, rubbing them with glee, mincing innocent diagrams together until they were nothing more than black jam and twisted legs. And that’s how Zack Snyder came up with Sucker punch.

Don’t get me wrong Sucker Punch has all the visual brilliance of his previous work, if you took a screen shot of pretty much any point of the film I can guarantee it would look amazing, as evident with the screenshot below, unfortunately there’s an awful lot of style over substance.

The film begins with Emily Browning being sent to an asylum, where in 5 days time she’s going to be lobotomised, she befriends several other patients and convinces them to make a break for it. Which might have been a good movie, like a cross between One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Girl, Interrupted.

Upon her arrival Browning is shown around by Jena Malone (Donnie Darko, Saved) and this is where the first of Browning’s fantasises begin, the dark and subdued world of the asylum, turns into somewhere between a burlesque joint and a bordello, an odd and somewhat pointless fantasy given that every time Browning’s character has to dance she steps into a further fantasy, and this is were Snyder’s spider mush is smeared over the screen. The first of four fantasy within fantasy moments see’s Browning visiting a temple and sage who informs Browning of the items she will need to escape the bordello/asylum/anime Japan, he also gives her weapons to aid her in this quest/task/homework assignment. Following her armourment , she steps outside to be confronted by three giant demon samurai, fantasy smack down ensues, Browning flung to the ground , ripping through it like a grounded meteor or a combatant from Dragonball Z.

The quest fantasy sequences are by far the best parts of the movie, but by the time you get to the fourth scenario your bored of that too, because there doesn't seem to be any real danger. As I mentioned earlier the asylum escape story could have been great, the story of a group of girls forced to dance and fuck by an oppressive showmen pimp could have been good, and an all out fantasy quest, possibly animated, could have been brilliant, instead you kinda wished you’d been lobotomised.

Sucker Punch Trailer

The Illusionist Trailer