Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Review: Live Free Or Die Hard
By Neal Schreier
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There is an increasingly pervasive trend among today’s film reviewers to compare summer blockbusters to video games. I can understand why; the video game is the latest media movement to explode into a multi-billion dollar industry that is no longer strictly a territory belonging to the 10-16 year old demographic. Your six year old plays, your wife plays, even your grandfather plays. Everyone knows what the stereotypical “video game” entails: non-stop action, loud noises, explosions, an almost non-existent plot, and cheesy dialogue.
For the reviewer, or anyone else for that matter, this provides a somewhat lazy but efficient way of getting across to others that the film recently witnessed was an eardrum destroying, obnoxious, CGI-laden crapfest with no story to speak of. This new label is not always a fair description; a lot of movies in the summer blockbuster category have always been overly bombastic spectacles, long before video games faded into the public consciousness. I wouldn’t say that the filmmakers of today’s blockbusters are necessarily trying to emulate a game, but their movies instead are just trying to out-perform the spectacles that came before them, with an increasing array of toys and tools to do the job, which more and more, are the same powerful tools game developers are using. In other words, I don’t think the rise of the gaming industry is driving the ever-expanding absurdity of the summer event pictures yet--but it’s getting there.
In the case of Live Free or Die Hard, however, the “video game” label is completely justified. This movie, I shit you not, has Boss Battles. At least four of them. Like a typical platform shooter, Die Hard 4 features five stages of punishing action for our hero, punctuated by a an end-stage no-holds-barred fight with a Big Bad Guy, or in one case, Girl. The entire structure of this movie is based on Metal Slug and/or Rush’n Attack. Will he jump at the right moment? Will his life-meter reach 0? Will he run out of bullets? I think you already know the answer to that one.
Speaking of life-meters, McClane’s seems to be infinite. This is not the John McClane we know and love from the original Die Hard. He was a regular guy in a bad situation back then, taking some hits, barely surviving, but accomplishing nothing too spectacular to make us think he’s a superhero. But somebody decided to cheat, because he’s in God Mode now, and has been since Die Hard 2. The man has lived through the most ridiculous of situations over the course of three movies. This latest installment takes these odds to a whole new level of preposterousness. Len Wiseman doesn’t want you to merely suspend your disbelief; he wants you to staple it to the damn ceiling.
There is, however, a piece of the old McClane that remains. He still talks to himself under stress, laughs maniacally, gleefully renders out skull-crushing pain, and retains that strange misogynistic streak. But the vulnerable side of him is gone. There is never a question, no matter how high the stakes, no matter how explosive the situation, that John “Yippy-Kiyay-MUTHAFFF--” McClane will come out on top with merely another bruise or two. I don’t care how much bloody make-up you splatter on that shiny cue ball of his, or how many times he holds his shoulder and grits his teeth in pain, it’s not going to make me think “gee, I wonder if he’ll get through this alive?”
Therein lies the rub. About halfway through this film (Stage 3 if you’re counting) the boredom sets in. When you realize that there is no real danger, neither for McClane nor his sidekick, nor his daughter, the excitement evaporates. Even at the point when it’s MCCLANE vs. FIGHTER JET (the 4th Stage Boss… I think), you know who’s gonna win that showdown. This realization may come sooner for others. There are a myriad of moments where you have to make a choice: can you keep going along with the outrageousness, or say fuck off to the whole thing? After Stage 4, I think ran out of quarters. I stared at the screen in a disconnected haze through the last fifteen minutes. Honestly, once you see a semi and a fighter jet face off (and get ready, that showdown is coming again in a week, in a more interesting way, I reckon), guys popping caps at each other just can’t compete. In the end, this movie is simply a concussive bore. Maybe there was a message about America somewhere in there, perhaps there was some commentary about the tough guys of the 80’s vs. the whiny, squishy man-children of the 21st century. Frankly, I can’t be bothered to dredge through the lazy, techno-garbled script for such subtleties.
A final note -- this is not a PG-13 film. It is R, through and through. I don’t know who was paid off to ensure a PG-13 rating, but somebody had to have been. Live Free or Die Hard clearly illustrates the complete bankruptcy of the MPAA ratings system. The blood flows freely and the death is dealt spectacularly; only the nudity and cursing are restrained, however unfortunate. Even the quintessential McClane tagline is clipped before it gets naughty. Really, why even bother? I tell you what, don’t bother, stay home and play with your Wii instead.
4.5 out of 10
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Labels: Bruce Willis, Die Hard, Reviews
Continue reading Review: Live Free Or Die HardMonday, May 28, 2007
Review: Knocked Up
Judd Apatow should win an Oscar.
No, wait, something better than an Oscar. Give him something bigger. He deserves something more. Pulitzer, MacArthur Genius, Nobel Prize, whatever. The man has earned it.
He deserves it for his television shows, for The 40 Year-Old Virgin, and now, and especially, for his new film Knocked Up, a film which bravely tackles the challenges of being a comedy about unwanted pregnancy, and being over two hours long. Both of those challenges end up being nothing that Apatow and his crew can't handle.
The premise here is that Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), a sub-par Mr. Skin wannabe (one who's also never heard of Mr. Skin), who spends his days looking for actress' tit shots in films, goes out one night and meets Allison Scott (Katherine Heigl), a girl who's just beginning to move up in her television career. It's a meeting of a stoner-slacker going nowhere and a woman who's beginning to see a very bright future for herself. But of course, the movie is called Knocked Up for a reason, and that's because Ben and Allison hook up one night, and don't see each other again until Allison calls Ben up to let him know the news. This is all in the trailers for the film, and all of it is played hilariously, but the moments after that (and by that, I mean the last two-thirds of the film), are what turn this into one of the very best comedies in recent memory.
I hardly want to address any of the comedy in this review, because to even allude to it would dampen some of the jokes, and that would be a shame. But suffice it to say, this film breezes by on its comedic strokes. It's a masterwork in keeping the funny flowing, and you don't feel a minute of its run-time sag at all. Part of this comes from the rapid-fire jokes, always on display, always absolutely hilarious; but a bigger part is that the film has a huge investment in its story, and the payoff for that is what makes this film an instant classic.
As far as I can tell, this is the best film I've seen about pregnancy, let alone an unwanted one. The tone that this film establishes isn't right, it shouldn't be this fun to watch people honestly deal with the life-changing ramifications that pregnancy holds, especially for people in their mid-20s trying to establish careers. It should be a rather melancholic film, and if not, then it should probably make the issue as lite as possible. But Knocked Up doesn't. It fairly honestly shows these people making extremely important decisions about this extraordinarily difficult time in their lives, and it still maintains its hilarity.
It's an absolutely incredible achievement, and credit needs to be given to the cast. Rogen and Heigl are incredible here, that much is clear, with Rogen playing his comedy pitch-perfectly to Heigl's relative normalcy. It's in her that the emotional honesty of the film is carried, and she succeeds at that job while being a comedic force herself in the film.
But two actors don't make a film, and thankfully, the supporting cast here delivers in a phenomenal way. Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann are the perfect suburbanite couple and their interactions work wonderfully as an image for Allison to strive for in her life, but the two of them maintain a hysterically passive-aggressive attitude towards each other.
Ben's roommates might just be the thing that makes this film work so well. Jonah Hill, Martin Starr, and Jason Segel are just comedy machines that don't stop until the last uproarious segment of the film (a segment where I found myself unable to breathe I was laughing so hard, something that I can't remember happening all too recently). It's an incredible ensemble, and for every second that they play as hilariously goofball people, they play as mostly honest characters, pathetic as they may be.
All in all, this film is a powerhouse of a comedy. In an age where it seems that films are getting too long and bloated, it seems strange and almost appropriate that a comedy would come along and be the film that shows you how two-plus hours can breeze by in a theatre. Thank god it did.
9/10
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Labels: Knocked Up, Reviews
Continue reading Review: Knocked UpSaturday, May 05, 2007
Review: Spider-Man 3 (Andrew's Take)
An outsider is alienated from the world by his powers, but uses them at great personal cost to save a humanity that doesn't understand him. I'm not talking about Spider-man here, but Optimus Prime, star of upcoming toy commercial Transformers and a character most are happy to dismiss as empty. He has the same basic set up as Spider-man. If you want to get picky about ordinary, relatable humans and giant alien robots, compare Optimus to Super(-? No? Well fuck you)man. They're the same, yet are treated very differently. Does this blatant geek-baiting have anything to do with reviewing Spider-Man 3? Kind of. Read on!
Now we're at the third entry in the franchise, we're very much into 'villain of the week' territory. This is shown by having a load of unrelated scenes shoved together in the first act. How does a scene with Peter Parker being hopelessly in love with Mary Jane relate to a scene about a petty crook visiting his sick daughter? It doesn't. The underlying grammar of the scene change is 'here's this week's bad guy, so let's give him a motivation'. It is intertextual film grammar, based on the audience knowing what is going to happen in these sorts of films. They know that the unrelated crook is going to turn into a supervillain and fight Spidey, so all these scenes make perfect sense. Without that outside knowledge of the formula most of the first act, which consists of endless unrelated scenes of set-up and exposition, is horribly bitty and disjointed.
We're dealing with a standard superhero movie here, whereas Spider-Man 2, with only a small amount of reaching on my part, could be regarded as a real movie, with a story, theme, character arcs and everything, that just happened to be about a superhero. A good test for whether this will be a problem for a viewer's enjoyment is the introduction of an alien symbiote goo monster. It is introduced by simply landing on earth near to Peter Parker. That's it. If that seems too coincidental, too abrupt or too random for you, this movie is going to annoy the hell out of you. If you can accept it, and think 'woah, and alien symbiote goo monster! I wonder how that's going to cause trouble for good old Spidey!' (and let's just assume for a moment that we don't all know the various histories of Venom from Secret Wars/the 90's cartoon/The Ultimate line of comics etc...), then you're pretty much good to go.
Because this movie is cut from very much the same cloth as the first two Spider-man films. Massively energetic fight scenes that are always given strong emotional motivations linked to the current crisis in Peter Parker's life, interspersed with very simply shot scenes of relationship drama and a couple of wacky fun bits, usually involving JJ Jameson. It was a very deliberate approach by director Sam Raimi to alternate the fantastic with the mundane and, while I personally got a little bored by the talky scenes, they were integral to the success of the films. On the whole, the individual scenes, taken by themselves, are as good, if not better, than anything in the first two movies. Here's the problem though:
In the first two movies, in which there is only one villain, the relationship scenes inform the fight scenes and vice versa, so even when their pacing (especially in number 2) grinds to halt with long, slightly cheesy speechifying by Aunt May or moping by Peter, the overall momentum is kept up by a unity of purpose and theme. The magic came in how the slow and the fast fed off each other. In this film we have Harry as a new Green Goblin, a rival photographer, The Sandman, an alien symbiote and Peter getting into arguments with Mary Jane. Each storyline has a relatively intersting arc, but each one is picked up and dropped every five minutes with very little connection between them until the last act so that balance between slow and quiet scenes and flash bang wallop scenes is destroyed. The film has the same building blocks as the first two but, and let's keep this Lego metaphor, all the different colours make for a very messy wall.
All criticisms revolving around the pacing being off, the film being over-stuffed, too short, too long, boring, too hyperkinetic, random, meaningless and so on all come from this fast/slow waltz around one theme formula from the 2nd movie in a film that has at least three themes.
As a 'villain of the week' movie, these criticisms don't hold too much weight as the movie mostly pops along at a fair old whack and gives us plenty of nifty fighty action and otherwise entertaining scenes at regular intervals. Fans of good, stand-alone movies, or those who think Spider-man is a character of some depth (see first paragraph), will be left wanting.
Let's add some more criticisms while we're at it. The central crisis between Peter and Mary Jame is set up very badly. You see Peter is supposed to be acting very selfishly, ignoring MJ's pain at the loss of an acting gig so he can talk about his own life as Spider-man. Unfortunately, Peter remains one of the most gormlessly unselfish characters in all of movies ever and MJ simply comes over as a pouting, self-obsessed teenager. 'Who cares if you are saving the world, someone said I couldn't sing very well!'. Peter is never portrayed in the first act as anything other than trying to help. So the crisis is actually completely the opposite to what the movie thinks it is plus Peter's self-obsession is what leads to the symbiote having power over him, so that stumble over setting up that aspect of him doesn't do any favours for the symbiote story line. So, that bit is demonstrably bad.
Equally demonstrably bad is the final act fight. If we can accept that this is just a 'villain of the week' movie, the narrative shenanigans needed to reach the two-on-two battle are fair enough, but the fight itself not only recycles beats from previous fights but doesn't feature all that much two-on-two action. Sandman is rooted to the spot for most of it and Venom and the Green Goblin seem to appear and disappear from the fight with alarming convenience.
Back on the 'good stand-alone movie' tack, it also commits the sin of just being a punch up. Despite all those pacing flaws, all the other fights in the movie still manage to be motivated by Peter's emotional state, giving them meaning and heft. The final one is reduced to 'save the girl by punching the bad guy a lot'. Spectacular for the most part so it's hard to complain, but less involving then the others and, when the emotions and thematic stuff finally turn up, they feel corny and shoe-horned in.
So: a worthy enough third part but shows a franchise rapidly descending into, albeit excellently made, superhero gruel. I'll give it a seven, if we're counting, as I'm feeling generous and not yet worn out by a summer's worth of hyper-edited explosions.
Before I go though, I'd like to bring up the criticism of the evil-Peter dance scene. It's always a joy to read through the various reviews on the geek websites for films like this as the things they tend to get annoyed at give us a nice perspective on why we, as a group, are a very silly lot.
The dance scene is embarrassing, shameful, totally out of place, horribly made and kills the movie. Apparently. That all of the movies mix humour with straight faced heroics and slightly lumpen melodrama is ignored. That all of the scenes, be they fighty or weepy, are over the top, on the nose and cheesy is also ignored. The joy of the Spider-man films is that the over-the-topness is always grounded by Peter's emotional state. The scenes that work always start with Peter, in this case distraught over losing MJ and overcoming it through braggadocio and general acting-like-a-dickness, and then layer the entertainment over the top as needed, and the evil-Peter scenes are no different. It is also the companion piece to the 'Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head' sequence in Spider-Man 2, which everyone loves.
I would suggest that those who hate the dance scene are simply those think web-slinging superheroes are more realistic than a dance scene, think dance is a bit gay, and are only a couple of steps away from thinking Batman should be a hard-R. Danger!
As readers of The Fake Life are all blessed with great intelligence and snake-like hips, I'm confident that you all love the dance scene.
7 out of 10
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Labels: Reviews, Spider-Man
Continue reading Review: Spider-Man 3 (Andrew's Take)Friday, May 04, 2007
Review: Spider-Man 3 (Charlie's Take)
SPOILERS AHOY!
3 is a hard number to reach without something going wrong somewhere. When you get to a third film, trilogy or not, you start to wonder whether it’ll keep matching up, or whether this is when it’ll all fall down, especially with the demands of the modern audience who like every sequel to be bigger and more expensive than the last. Will this be the moment when the seams rip? Or will it be business as usual?
Spider-Man 3 has a lot of plot threads, so much so that I’m having trouble writing a synopsis. Maybe I’ll try listing the characters:
Peter/Spidey – Wants to marry Mary Jane, the city loves him, but he comes upon a black goo that makes him wear eyeliner and listen to My Chemical Romance.
Mary Jane – Terrible actress (the character, ahem), kicked off Broadway, thinks Peter doesn’t have any idea what she’s going through.
Aunt May – Old and Yoda-esque.
Flint Marko/The Sandman – Daughter is ill, he robs banks to get the money to make her better. Loves stripy T-shirts.
Eddie Brock/Venom – Competing photographer for the Daily Bugle. Doesn’t like Peter. LOVES the symbiote.
Harry Osborn – Still hates Spidey. Is running around in his dad’s gear. Loves doing James Dean impressions.
I think you get the picture. So we’re finally on part 3 of the Spidey saga, with Sam Raimi again taking the reigns, and also co-writing the script with part-time screenwriter/part-time emergency surgeon, brother Ivan Raimi, as well as Alvin Sargent who wrote Spider-Man 2. So it’s a Raimi picture through and through, and it shows. But that isn’t always a good thing.
Let’s talk about the good. Once again, the double talents of Tobey Maguire and Sam Raimi are at the forefront. Maguire is as good as ever, and pulls off some pretty awkward dialogue with true aplomb. Raimi’s direction is – as usual – very assured, showing he really has kept his creative side, and especially his love for odd decisons (I speak mainly of the Black Goo POV shot) that shouldn’t come off but do.
The action is unbelievable. This is real breathtaking stuff, and it’s easily the most accomplished of the three films, especially when it comes to the final showdown. The animation work is sensational, and that leads me into my next point: Venom. While I’d like to have seen a bit more of him, he was just a joy to behold. The creature design, the attitude, everything just came together brilliantly, and he’s probably my fondest memory of the picture.
More plaudits go to the Sandman, or at least Thomas Haden Church’s performance and the effects. There was a certain comic purity about the way he was created – I can’t remember if it was like the comics – and the beauty at seeing him jump a fence that had a sign saying “WARNING: PARTICLE TESTING FACILITY” attached to it warmed my heart. The effects, well I don’t want to waffle on cause it’s really fucking boring, they were great. Harry, as well, was great. I wasn’t sure at first with the whole extreme snowboarder/ninja look, but that storyline turned out really well. Franco is a fine actor, and probably should’ve been Anakin Skywalker.
But this is where it starts to turn for me. I see where they were going, that they wanted to make this the big final fight for Peter’s soul and the final emphasis on revenge and ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ but it’s just so fucking overwrought. And when it should be getting more serious, there are some utterly misplaced scenes of comedy that just tear you out of the picture and make you bellow ‘WTF’ at the screen. Peter’s vengeance storyline was well-created, but then everything got so much that by the end it felt like a bad piece of meat sitting in your stomach unable to be digested, but finally moved only by the sweet dessert of the final rumble.
It just seemed, well, so inconsistent. The whole section where Peter walks through the streets doing his comedy James Brown routine made me scream with frustration. It was just ludicrous. And then the Anchorman scene in the Jazz Bar, which led to the one great point in that scene, where Peter schizos out on MJ.
MJ herself, well I’ve gone through this with so many people. The role seems terribly written, Dunst seems completely wrong for it and it hurts it because I cannot see how Peter can fall for her. On the flipside, Bryce Dallas Howard’s Gwen Stacy, like her comic book incarnation, didn’t really do much but still came out smokin’ hot. Funny how that is.
I’m in two minds on the whole Flint Marko backstory. The end scene between Flint and Peter is the best acted scene in the film, and brilliantly done. Yet a part of me wonders if it was really necessary to have the whole ill-daughter stuff, because perhaps it would have made Peter’s forgiveness a little more powerful? Have Flint still feel bad, have Peter forgive him and then turn him over to the cops and maybe have Doc Conners hook up some sand-containment prison thing. I dunno, I just sometimes like my villains to be bad for the sake of being bad. I think that’s why I like Venom, because he’s bad and makes no apologies for it.
It just seems like the flick needed some restraint, or at least a clear view of where it was going. I think it had the makings of a stunning film, but somewhere in the translation something got lost, and I never really felt much emotion which has always been one of the biggest successes of the films previously, maybe because it did seem so dragged out and so patently in your face.
Technically, the film was fine. I don’t know how long it was (two hours fifteen maybe?) but it breezed along, and I had a lot of fun watching it. The music was pretty bad, like Chris Young was doing Danny Elfman just fine until he needed new themes and suddenly everything went topsy-turvy. But I did enjoy watching it, especially the ending, which is as close as we’ll get to Spidey and his Amazing Friends on the big screen. But when I stepped out of the theater, I felt very little, only this middling little feeling in the pit of my stomach. And it makes me sad, because it could have been truly great. But it’s a fun silly popcorn flick, I dunno, maybe it’s my fault for wanting more? Answers on a postcard...
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Labels: Reviews, Spider-Man
Continue reading Review: Spider-Man 3 (Charlie's Take)Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Review: Spider-Man 3 (Luca's Take)
By Luca Saitta
As a pretty huge Spidey nerd, there was little doubt as to whether or not I’d enjoy this outing. After all, this was from the same creative team as the flawed first and supreme second, right? I am happy to say this fucker does not disappoint. Raimi is a filmmaker at the top of his game, and it shows. Action scenes are kinetic, energetic, hyyyydromatic. They’re just short of greased lightning. The melodrama hits every dirty switch in the book, and it works gloriously.
Maguire is in his element once more as the misunderstood wall-crawler, although the “misunderstood” does not really come into full swing as much as in the second film this time. You could even say that this film is to MJ what Spider-Man 2 was for Spidey himself (if that makes any sense). This makes Dunst less of a dead weight than in the previous films, simply because she actually has something to do in this film besides being arguably pretty and an object for Peter to pine over. Aunt May is preachy as ever, but I liked her in the previous films. There needs to be a moral center, dammit, and this woman and her ghostly spouse fulfill that role with gusto. The Stacys aren’t in this film much at all, but Gwen is pretty and the captain is strict-looking. So there.
Villains, you say? James Franco ups the psycho-ante with his New Goblin, smirking delightfully throughout most of his scenes. Thomas Haden Church is an epically tragic anti-hero. His strangely poetic origin scene and climactic duo-battle with Spidey and some… others... are among the film’s many highlights. His “sick daughter” motivation is melodramatic as balls, but the man sells it. It certainly helps that Church carries his scenes so well, to the point that I totally bought the “real uncle Ben killer” retcon. Like Cillian Murphy in Batman Begins, Topher Grace is creepy before he ever approaches supervillain status. His freaky photographer (alliterations are cool in comic books, okay?) is a welcome change from the misguided Jekyll-and-Hyde types populating the previous two films. As he himself puts it, “I like being bad, Parker. It… makes me happy.”
Some scenes are sure to divide audiences. While the JJJ/Ted Raimi/Campbell bits worked like gangbusters, I heard more than a few groans during Peter’s dance sequence and his admittedly pretty long Tony Manero-style strut. Personally, I really dug these bits. Like 2’s “Raindrops” montage, they show Raimi’s style as much as the Evil Dead-reminiscent Symbiote-Sam-O-Cam shots, and elevate these Spidey flicks above the generic action blockbuster pap audiences are spoon-fed today.
This movie is far from perfect, though. It sometimes relies on some groan-inducing plot devices – especially concerning Harry – to keep the story going where Raimi wants it to go. The plot strands certainly make the film feel very episodic until about halfway through. They’re fun strands, but there’s still a fuckload of them. The film may very well drag near the end for younger viewers, as I saw a lot of them not quite managing to keep quiet after the final fight. Imagine if someone threw the kitchen sink at you, but he was nice enough to glue a bunch of nude pictures of Scarlett Johansson to it. It’s too much, but you can’t really dislike it.
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Labels: Reviews, Spider-Man
Continue reading Review: Spider-Man 3 (Luca's Take)Friday, April 13, 2007
Review: Sunshine
Well, we’re not dead yet, not quite, and we do believe The Fake Life can be a home for some fun content, so I’ll be writing a few articles about my adventures in film land over the next week or so and I hope my fellow Fakers will join me. If any of you sexy, enlightened souls reading this have an idea for an article you’d like our message boarders to discuss for five posts before making a joke about MODOK please get in contact with us. Honestly, even if you’re a troll.
In the meantime: here’s a review for Danny Boyle’s latest, Sunshine: it’s good!
The Sun is dying in the future, possibly from watching Solar Crisis on a Friday night in. A crack team of pretty astronauts have been given the mission of flying a very big bomb into the star so as to re-ignite it. Things go wrong. And that’s the plot.
The central concept is daft pseudo-science nonsense, and the narrative set up is hackneyed and predictable but, to be honest, it doesn’t entirely matter. The point of this movie is to create a series of sequences that build up to emotional climaxes, often starting with the tension and fear of a rescue or repair mission and then shifting towards a more transcendent, spiritual space as characters come face to face with their mortality, the infinite, and stuff. Think of that bit in Boyle’s previous film, 28 Days Later, when the main character wanders around a deserted, post apocalyptic London as the music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor rises to a thundering sustained crescendo of intense post-rock awesomeness. It’s like that, but with a few more Spielberg-esque close-ups of people staring beatifically off screen.
And it really works. But only, I feel, if you see it at the cinema. It has the structure of dance music, being entirely devoted to those regular crescendos and, if you are in an immersive atmosphere like a cinema or a club, in the darkness with a massive sound system and part of a crowd sharing the same experience, the effect is overwhelming. This is a sci-fi movie for the rave generation.
Listen to the same tune on your radio the next day, however, and it will be repetitive, predictable and a bit dull.
You’ll notice that same central dinner table around which a crew bickers you’ve seen dozens of times since Alien. You’ll notice that you’ve seen the repair mission outside the ship from 2001 to Star Trek: First Contact. You’ll notice that, for a bunch of highly trained elite astronauts, they all crack up and act like babies at the first sign of stress. You’ll notice that the attempt to introduce a specific antagonist in the third act is a sop to standard Hollywood plotting and never amounts to much more than a distraction from the main action.
And all those things are true, but when you are caught up in the moment, the effect is equally inarguable.
The actors, including Cillian Murphy, the dude that plays The Human Torch and the woman from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon who wasn’t Zhang Ziyi, all acquit themselves well, creating characters and solid screen presences mostly through behaviour while intelligently reciting the mostly techy and expositiony script. Cillian Murphy, who has a face mixing such sharp angularity with such puffy lips he wobbles on the line between utter beauty and terrifying deformity, is particularly suited to staring beatifically off screen.
The script isn’t offensively dumb. The events mostly move quickly. It looks great. Both the threat of space and the ever increasing threat of the Sun’s heat as they approach it are viscerally evoked, and the sense of scale and isolation are only beaten by 2001. And maybe Silent Running.
It’s good then, but very much a film to be experienced rather than coldly observed, which is great for film-lovers, bad for the sorts of sci-fi fans who want to know how light-sabers work.
8 out of 10
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Friday, February 16, 2007
Review: Hot Fuzz
Hot Fuzz is the new film from the makers of Shaun of the Dead. This time out Simon Pegg plays a very serious big-city cop assigned to a sleepy English village where nothing ever happens. Hot Fuzz isn't as good as Shaun of the Dead. Bugger.
Now, every other movie geek website has raved over it, and most of the mainstream press have followed suit. There are half a dozen gags a minute, the plot, when it kicks in, actually works, there's not a dull or empty corner in the film and the performances are spot on and extremely lovable. All the things you could ask from the follow up to Shaun are there, so there's no question of this being a failure. The problem comes from Hot Fuzz being a much more ambitious film and that it, for all the good will in the world, doesn't achieve those higher goals.
You see: The plot sees the big city attitudes being shoved against a country village attitudes for its drama and its comedy. These are the poles of the conflict, between which the characters will move. In Shaun you had Pegg's slacker character slowly starting to take responsibility for his life and grow up, with a zombie invasion just happening to be the catalyst for change. The movement is clear and the resolution satisfying. The zombies fit perfectly into suburban London.
But in Hot Fuzz we also have Nick Frost's Constable Butterman who is obsessed with American buddy cop actioners like Point Break and Bad Boys 2 and idolises Pegg's character because he thinks his life is really like those movies. So now we have a distinction between American and English depictions of the law too. Then bodies start turning up, the victims of a horror-movie style boogeyman wearing a Grim Reaper style cloak, and the film turns into a slasher-style horror movie set in the tea-and-biscuits English countryside. Finally it all goes action movie as Pegg's character shoves on the sunglasses and loads up on guns to take out the bad guy.
How does becoming an American movie cliche resolve the big city vs village issue? It doesn't. What does playing with the horror genre have to do with Pegg's character development? Not much, to be honest. The ease with which Shaun married the genre-play with its character arcs is replaced with a slightly frantic mash-up.
There's enough stuff here for at least two films and the rushing between action movie, buddy cop movie, horror movie, whudunnit and an episode of Last of the Summer Wine, only with jokes, proves that maybe they should have made two or more films with the material.
The surprisingly large police force in the village is mostly comprised of one note characters. It's usually a good note, but the attempts to keep them all in play results in them popping up, giving their one joke, then popping off again. It gets repetitive and it doesn't make us give a shit about them when they have to make an important decision in the third act. Equally, giving time to these side characters gives us less time with the important ones.
Now, you know those two shots in Shaun when Pegg groggily walks out of his house to the corner shop to pick up a Coke and a Cornetto and then back again? Those shots give us a sense of place and of the characters behaving naturally within it. It settles the audience in and lets them feel that they know where they are, which in turn gives the moment when things start to change for the worse more impact. There is nothing like this in Hot Fuzz. So busy are the film-makers about packing things in that we have no time to settle in to the village - relying on that machine-gun style editing they used in Shaun (when he brushed his teeth and went to the loo) to move us along. You need the quiet bits to help the audience feel the noisy bits, especially as the film is supposed to be dealing with the difference between the quiet of village life and the noise of the city.
Another problem is that Pegg's character - the obsessed, by the rules cop - isn't actually funny. He's a serious character - a straight-man - yet he's not really the butt of too many jokes once they get to the village as the time is spent mocking the yokeley locals. His over-seriousness is his main character flaw, it is that which he must overcome and, as such, is a comedy vacuum for the first half of the film.
Equally there's no relatable, or 'normal' character here, with everyone being either being daft villager or obsessed cop. Such a character may not be essential for comedy but it bloody well helps, and Shaun had a great one. Good for Pegg to play a different character but, I'm afraid, bad for the movie.
Because when he does lighten up in the second half the film opens up. He's never less than likable when he's all serious, but when he gets drunk he's absolutely lovable.
And that seems like a good description of the movie. The more ambitious ideas in this film do not hold together, but when it just resorts to having fun, its hilarious. When they're diving through the air with two pistols a la John Woo or drop-kicking old ladies the film couldn't be more enjoyable. Equally, when they are just doing straight slasher scenes, the obvious delight they took in setting up the kills comes through clear as day. Maybe it doesn't all hook up thematically, but when the film-makers say 'fuck it, shoot-out!' it is impossible to resist the glee with which they throw themselves into it. For all its ambitions to be a real character piece or a deconstruction of genre (and for all my bitching about quoting movies), Hot Fuzz is at its best when doing cop movie cliches, only a bit silly.
I could nitpick further, or give spoiler filled descriptions of the bits I actually liked, but I shall leave it there. It is does not disgrace Shaun of the Dead, but it does not match it, despite all those involved having noticeably improved their craft. It is scuppered by an over-enthusiastic but slightly confused desire to shove a few too many of their favourite things on screen at the same time. It's hardly the worst cinematic crime, though and I should make this clear - this film is worth seeing just for one of the truly awesome, and awesomely bloody, kills. Everything else is gravy.
7 out of 10
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Labels: Hot Fuzz, Reviews, Shaun of the Dead
Continue reading Review: Hot Fuzz
