Angels and Demons

Pipped At The Pope!

Angels and Demons US 2009

Directed by Ron Hoard

Columbia Region 1

I remember that when The Da Vinci Code came out in the cinemas I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to see this movie. I’d... well not exactly read the book... but I had listened to the “talking books” style CD of the novel being read to me in the car on the way to a holiday destination one year and, quite honestly, couldn’t see what the fuss was about. I remembered buying my mother the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail for a birthday present when I was about 11 years old and I thought to myself, as I listened to Dan Brown’s huge bestseller being read to me, that this was all just the same old Knights Templar stuff rehashed all over again... and that as a rule I found the Blind Dead movies a lot more fun.

But the main thing which stuck out to me about the novel was how uncinematic it was. I knew, by this point, that they were making a movie out of it and my impressions of the novel were that there was far too much exposition and people standing around in the same rooms talking for lengthy periods of time to make a decent visual narrative. So I was more than a little wary when I was dragged along to see the first movie, grudgingly letting myself be lead along to see it because Audrey Tautou and Jean Reno were in it. However, it has to be said that The DaVinci Code, all in all, made for a dull movie even with the presence of these two icons of cinema and, of course, the presence of the consummate professional Tom Hanks as the main protagonist, symbologist Robert Langdon.

My girlfriend at the time was besotted with the score and I certainly didn’t mind it, but I was not as much into Zimmer as I am now... I think the work he’s been doing since then is a vast improvement. But it wasn’t exactly a terrible score either and it was absolutely appropriate for the movie it was supporting.

The other thing I remember thinking was... well, why the heck were they adapting the second book in the series first? I’d not read the original first book in the series, Angels and Demons, but doing a movie adaptation of The DaVinci Code first seemed to me to make about as much sense as starting off the Bond series of movies with Dr. No. That is to say, totally illogical.

So, as you can imagine, when the sequel (and it is treated as a sequel rather than a prequel in the movie, with references to the first movie thrown in although the fictionalised events in that movie actually took place after the events in the sequel) came out I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to see it. Especially after finding that the BBFC had got it sliced for various sequences (the first movie also suffers from serious censorship issues in this country, with the sound being dialled down in certain areas to reduce the intensity of events on screen).

However I remember being completely bowled over by this one so I finally git around to tracking down the US extended edition of the movie (so I could see it totally uncut this time) and I have to say the sheer watchability of the film is not in any way diminished on subsequent viewings (I think I saw that one twice at the cinema anyway as I recall).

Angels and Demons is a totally different animal to the previous movie and while there are certainly moments of protracted exposition within the film, it rushes along at a heady pace and that’s quite a necessary response to the timeline of events in the novel (even though, as I confessed earlier, I haven’t read this one) as those events all take place within the space of just a few hours. Langdon has been called in by the Vatican police to help work out where the antimatter "God Particle" created by the Large Hadron Collider, but then stolen, has been put before it goes off after four kidnapped candidates to be the Pope are summarily executed, one hour after each other, by the Illuminati (gosh, it’s been a while since The Eye In The Pyramid!). As part of the ritualistic trappings of the killing, the assassin is having to leave cryptic clues about where the next death will take place and its these clues which Robert Langdon can puzzle out, and then hopefully dash to where things are about to happen and save lives.

What this means in practice is you get a kick ass movie which resembles nothing other than one of those old 70s cop TV shows where, inevitably, you will have an episode where the main protagonist has to run around the city from phone booth to phone booth by a certain time limit in order to stop a bomb going off somewhere. The last time I saw this plot approached in a fairly modern movie was when the villain used it as a distraction for the police in the third Die Hard movie, Die Hard With A Vengeance.

Here the plot is pretty much played straight, though, but coupled with some pseudo-religious trappings, some shoot-outs and daring escapes and two large dollops of intrigue and humour (in equal measure), you end up with something which is actually quite gripping and intriguing... and all with an absolute masterpiece of a score by the aforementioned Zimmer, which includes some of his most exciting compositions to date (you should all go listen to the track 160 BPM).

True, the few twists and turns there are in this movie are ones which you will see coming a mile off, but there’s really no substitute, is there, for a really well made, action thriller, and that’s exactly what Angels and Demons is. Of course, it also has some great actors in it with the likes of Ewan McGregor and Stellan Skarsgard lending their formidable talents to the proceedings. Also, as you would perhaps expect from a director who used to be Opie Taylor in The Andy Griffith Show and then Richie Cunningham in Happy Days (that is to say, someone who’s been around long enough to know the difference), the framing of the beautifully lit shots and the editing all make for a movie which makes the sum of its parts add up to a marvellously quasi-ancient atmosphere filled package... this is a classy action movie if ever there was one.

This one is certainly recommended for a viewing and all I can say to those of you who, like me, were spectacularly unimpressed with the previous movie in the series, is to not judge this movie by its predecessor and take a look at this one. You might just find your faith rewarded with a great little future DVD for your shelf.

My 300th Blog Post - Faces of Caroline Munro

Faces of Caroline Munro

Well that's just under a year and a half's blogging and I've now done three hundred of these things so I thought I'd do another celebratory post to commemorate it. Regular readers will no doubt know how fond I am of The First Lady of Fantasy Caroline Munro so I thought I'd do a little NUTS4R2 minifigure tribute to her and some of the roles she's been in through the years. Click the image "embiggen"! I hope you all like!

Super 8

Super Numerary

Super 8 2011 USA

Directed by J. J. Abrams (produced by Steven Spielberg)

Screening at UK cinemas

Surprised myself by having no spoilers in this review. Consider yourself unwarned!

Okay... I just got back from watching Super 8 at my local movie house (flea pit) and I know I’m probably going to have trouble assembling my thoughts into some kind of order for this review so, just so I don’t get my messages mixed here, I’m going to say this right up front... Super 8 is by no means a terrible movie. In fact, it’s not even close to being a bad movie... it is in fact, a brilliantly crafted amalgamation of parlour tricks strung together intelligently and is to be highly recommended to most people who love the art of film.

That being said, and having got that out of the way, I think I have to recognise here that, although I am probably the intended target audience for this movie as much as the young audience the producers will be relying on to repeat view and keep the box office up... somehow this movie isn’t quite for me. I grew up with movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extra Terrestrial but I deliberately chose not to go see movies like The Goonies and Explorers and I’ve never really looked back on that decision (or ever seen them).

Super 8 is produced by Spielberg and directed by J. J. Abrams but it’s very much a homage to the kinds of films Spielberg was churning out in the late 70s and early 80s... big, family friendly blockbusters of tales broadly drawn and giving a big feel good factor to the mass audiences in the hopes that this general feeling will last long enough to be converted into hard cash again when the merchandise options arrive. Perhaps that’s a little cynical of me but there are worse things to spend your money on and I’m delighted to say that Super 8 feels as much like it’s spawned from the mind of someone like Joe Dante as it does from the more obvious influences. Kinda like the 50s Invaders From Mars but filtered through an 80s sensibility.

The child protagonists are all nicely cynical and not the innocent, starry eyed kids of a gazillion Disney movies and the film acknowledges the little truths that we all know such as... kids like watching horror movies the censors don’t want them to see! And yes, there are classic Aurora Monster Model kits in this movie... you just knew there would be, didn’t you?

The movie has some fine performances from all its actors (especially the young leads) and Abrams is an absolute master at catching those odd little Spielbergian moments that make those kinds of movies just a little bit more savvy than their contemporaries were at the time. And if you don’t particularly like those kinds of movies then, tough luck, because Super 8 is very much a film that wears its influences on its sleeve, leaves them raw and untouched in terms of retro-nostalgia and is quite blatant in its refusal to let you forget its lineage. And yes, it does get cloying and sentimental in some places but I’m willing to let that go because even in the way those scenes are filmed, it refuses to let a veneer of self-consciousness permeate the proceedings. And also because the movie is pretty much technically brilliant.

The real negative in all of this though is, because you are familiar with these influences to a certain extent, there’s no real surprises in store for you in this movie. You’re going to know everything which happens way before it happens, including the ending to the movie... but it really doesn’t matter that much because it’s so expertly done that it almost comes as a relief when everything falls into place the way you expected it to.

The music, of course, supports the picture beautifully. Michael Giacchino is a great composer in his own right but I’ve always said that he’s also a good composer to call if you want someone to do a parody of someone else’s scoring style (check out his "Barry does Bond" parodying in The Incredibles). So what you get here, of course, is a less than subtle but pitch perfect caricature of a Johnny Williams score and, since their are so many little riffs on those early 80s movies, these musical moments too, become a little predictable. There’s a couple of shots right after a train wreck, for example, involving running and flashlights, that are going to remind viewers of a similar sequence in E.T. The Extra Terrestrial... Giacchino kicks in with a direct parody of the music from this sequence, which I’m sure is something a lot of people are going to pick up on. There’s a good Johhny Williams score living in this movie... it was just composed by somebody else is all.

At the end of the day, my verdict on this movie is that, while I won’t be picking it up on DVD and can quite happily live my life without ever seeing it again, I think it’s well worth watching once because the art and craft of film-making on this one is really beautiful and people, especially those with more love of the influences than I, are really going to get a lot out of this movie. It does, in some ways, feel like an unnecessary super numerary appendage to those earlier works but I think it’s going to make an incredible amount of money for the studio and, like I said earlier on in the article... there are worse things to spend your money on. Give it a go but don’t expect it to do anything other than what’s on the side of the tin.

NUTS4R2’s Astonishing Trivia Treats: I thought this movie was set in contemporary America until about half an hour into the movie when one of the characters mentioned his “brand new” Sony walkman... so I figured the period of the movie must date to the early 80s since the Walkman wasn’t around until then... but then I found out the movie is actually set in 1979. So the Walkman is an anachronism... and also a silly mistake I suspect.

Torchwood - Miracle Day Series 4 Episode 4: Escape To LA

LA Quartet

Torchwood - Miracle Day Series 4

Episode 4: Escape To LA

Airdate: August 4th 2011. UK. BBC1

Ok... this is probably going to be a short but not so sweet review of the latest Torchwood because, frankly, this is the worst episode we’ve had so far this season and I’m beginning to understand the problems with the new format I think.

First up, the cinematography in this episode seemed quite pedestrian compared to some of the more dynamic stuff we’ve had so far. Yes, I was complaining about the over-use of handheld, catch things “as they happen” style of camera work last week but this, more statically shot episode (apart from some nice camera work in one of the outside location sequences near the start) didn’t really match the visual style of the story telling (that I’ve been aware of) of previous episodes and so it just felt like it didn’t tie in as well.

The pacing of the episode was also slow and dull and, for the most part, didn’t keep me half as gripped as the tease of some of the dialogue toward the end of the show did either. And that was just due to the content of the dialogue in terms of the advancement of the story, as opposed to any real wit or sparkle or emotional pull from the dialogue itself. Thought the writing on this one was fairly poor.

Don’t get me wrong. There were some nice sequences here also and the occasional, enjoyable one-liner, but overall I just was so unenthused by this episode... unlike last weeks brilliant offering. Episode highlights from this one would have to be the opening location work in LA and the enemy infiltration and subsequent “showdown” with a gone-rogue-and-independent-at-the-drop-of-a-hat assassin. Standout of the episode was the wonderful Vera Miles as Gwen, all dolled up and looking like she stepped out of a Modesty Blaise comic-strip... in fact, I’ve just realised what a good Modesty Vera Miles would make... somebody needs to jump on that quick.

I’ve got problems with the storyline now. The villains are being kept deliberately sinister and this is normally kept up to maintain mystery if the audience already knows who the villains are from a previous adventure... but I don’t see how that can really be happening on this “reboot”. I’d seriously love it to be The Silence and tie in with the second half of the latest Doctor Who season... but I just don’t think something like that will happen in the shows inaugural US produced series. I’m guessing humans are being harvested and whatever they are being harvested for (meat for food or whatever), the consumers need their “stock” to be still alive. Maybe... maybe not. It’s a theory. Unfortunately I’m just not that worried about it at the moment.

Also, does anyone else think Oswald Danes is going to be thoroughly despicable right up until the last five minutes of the final episode... when he suddenly realises what’s at stake and saves the day in some self-sacrificing way? is that character’s set up really going to be that obvious?

I think the problems of having a show like Torchwood which is... in this case, a single story ark, is that having a different writer and director plugging in to various episodes may be seen as fresh, and is indeed a regular practice on non-serialised stories, but it just leads to a lack of generally feeling like a whole show in the case of a serial format like Torchwood. It feels and looks fractured in style and this stylistically disjointed atmosphere is not necessarily the best breeding ground for this kind of story to gestate in and flourish from.

Next weeks episode looks like it’s going to be a lot darker and more intense but the whole Eva Myles, talking head into a camera to spell out how much trouble mankind is in and how nothing can be done to stop it is something which, while effective, has been done before... just in the last series of the show, in fact. So nothing new there.

Okay, so I’ve probably been a tad harsh on this one but only because I really care about this show and was hoping it might have the power to survive for a fifth series (although that seems to be looking increasingly unlikely from what I’m reading). I’m sure this was just one less than stellar episode in a more interesting “whole”... at least that’s what I’m going to keep telling myself in a house where the other two regular viewers of this show are just about ready to give up on it. I’m going to hang on in there until the bitter end though... I kinda like Torchwood!

A Town Called Panic

Panic Symbols

A Town Called Panic 2009

Belgium/Luxembourg/France

Directed by Stéphane Aubier & Vincent Patar

Region 2 DVD

Don't Panic... only slight spoilers!

It’s not often one gets the chance these days to legitimately use the term “madcap” when describing a film... but that’s just what Aubier and Patar’s movie, A Town Called Panic, turned out to be... a reckless, impulsive and lively potpourri of inventive ideas inspired by their TV show of the same name.

The movie focusses on the adventures of a toy Cowboy (called Cowboy) and toy Indian (called Indian) who live with their friend Horse, in Horse’s house... until they accidentally destroy it due to an accidental over-ordering of 50 million bricks when they try to build Horse a barbecue for his birthday. The animation style employed is crude and ragged to depict our three heroes and their friends in the town/village but, since the inhabitants “panic” by nature just in the course of their everyday situations, the pace speeds along at a mile a minute and the movie hurtles along on its own collision course to a conclusion of some sort. The combination of speed and crudity very soon becomes addictive.

Everything holds together really well in terms of the actual “world” of the characters and this is quite strange because there are many things that contradict logic. Why, for example, are there sudden leaps in scale? Most of what the inhabitants of A Town Called Panic use in their everyday lives is scaled down to their size but when it comes to breakfast, the slice of bread and coffee cup are full-scale sized and dwarfs the characters. I especially liked the way one of the characters drank his cup of coffe by diving through and smashing a hole in one side of his mug and then immediately rushing back out through the other side. Little moments like this give the film some real lift.

The story continues to develop as Cowboy, Indian and Horse (who is cultivating a love interest with a sexy, piano teaching horse) build a new house... but it gets stolen in the night. The same thing happens the next night and so the three stake out their newly built house waiting to see who has been stealing the walls they’ve been building during the days. From then on the movie just gets even more surreal as our three brave heroes find themselves embroiled in strange adventures which involve undersea people (whose world is somehow linked with the duck pond in Steven the farmer’s garden, using it as a gateway/portal to their undersea kingdom), a long drop to the centre of the earth and a giant, snowball throwing, mechanical penguin powered by tough-guy, beat ‘em up, rock ‘em sock ‘em scientists who enslave our hereoes to make their tea and do their washing as they amuse themselves hurling giant snowballs at unsuspecting and undeserving victims (and it’s hilarious seeing Cowboy, Indian, Horse and their undersea acquaintance thrown around and beaten up by some old scientists).

There’s even a scene involving Horse and his “future girlfriend” dancing in a similar manner to a specific (and relatively obscure, given its famous source) dance sequence from Singin’ In The Rain. It’s this kind of warm, heart beating beneath the surface of the story that infuses the tiny plastic figures with a dose of emotion and identity that ultimately stops any of the jokes wearing thin in this one. It’s an absolute joy to watch and the noisy, “panic” stricken and, yes, madcap antics of the towns inhabitants will keep any kids and adult kids alike quiet... well there’d be little point in trying to make any kind of a fuss over all that loud hullababloo on the screen. Certainly I enjoyed this movie more than any Pixar creations of late and the tightrope of uneven sensibilities which live in harmony in this particular movie are a tribute to the talents who wrote and directed, not just this film, but the preceeding TV show of the same name (the existence of which I was completely oblivious to, when I saw this movie).

A very definite and wholehearted recommendation from me on this movie, as it's a darn sight more entertaining than the majority of other animated products on show at the time. Watch this one as soon as possible.

Captain America: The First Avenger

The Man With No Namor

Captain America: The First Avenger 2011 USA

Directed by Joe Johnston

Screening at UK cinemas

Warning: Star spangled spoilers are slight but they are being played.

“When Captain America throws his mighty shield... all those that dare to oppose his shield must yield.”

Woah! I really am just not sure where to start on this movie review. On the one hand it’s a brilliant looking movie, more than competently handled with some really nice “tips-of-the-hat” to the long history of this character... which I’m not a huge fan of, I hasten to add, although I do have all the old seventies issues of The Invaders, so I’m a little familiar with the character (or would be if I could remember much about them now in the 15 or more years since I last read them). On the other hand... this film didn’t keep me entertained much and I did feel things were dragging towards what turned out to be an unsatisfying denouement when they should have been cracking along at the fun pace of a 1940s republic serial.

Mind you, having said that, I’ve seen the Republic serial of Captain America from 1944 and I have to say this movie is certainly a lot better than that... and yes, I love old movie serials but that particular title is one of the worst I’ve seen.

Okay... where to begin on this one then.

The first half an hour to three quarters of an hour is tremendous. It doesn’t suffer from one of my long-standing complaints about superhero movies, that of not being set in period, and evokes a lovely this-is-us-now-looking-back sense of atmosphere which subtly permeates the proceedings until... well until things go a bit pear shaped in the second half of the movie. The pacing on these sequences is fantastic and the puny, Steve Rogers’ character is well spelled out, although the Bucky Barnes character is just so not Bucky Barnes it’s untrue. What happened to the teen/kid sidekick who was pretty much based on Batman's Robin?

There are loads of nice references for fans of the comics, which actually did not start off in the hands of Marvel Comics when first released in 1941... in fact Marvel as we know it today didn’t revive Captain America until an early issue of The Avengers in the 60s, following on from their revival of Namor (The Sub Mariner) in an early issue of Fantastic Four after Stan Lee bought the characters (did he buy them or did the rights get inherited by Marvel via Timely).

Now I missed the sly reference to the original Human Torch in this movie (damn, can I wait until the DVD to spot it or shall I go see it in 3D again... nah, I think I’ll pass) but I was quite annoyed by the absence of the aforementioned Sub Mariner, especially since this movie is done in the right period. I guess you could say these characters formed The Invaders with Cap and Bucky during one of the battle montages in the movie but you’d be hard pushed to do it... although saying that, there’s a reference to The Invaders character Union Jack in the movie. Like Bucky Barnes, this character is never seen in costume and so I didn’t catch the reference myself (you can tell I’ve been doing a modicum of research for this one, can’t you?) but there are so many other distractions that there’s a point when the hodge podge of little fanboy quirks begin to grate. Especially when they contradict things quite badly. Why the heck have we got the characters that made up the team from Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandoes in it... if NIck Fury isn’t leading them himself. Yeah that’s right... Nick Fury fought in World War Two... so put it in the movie and have him frozen alongside the main character perhaps? Do you think?

I think I’ve just covered most of the negative references in this movie.

The positive ones are... well for starters, the inclusion, in a big way, of Howard Stark (yeah, Iron Man’s dad) although this does give rise to a continuity error... how come he’s got Cap’s shield in Iron Man 2 which is, you know, the only one of it’s kind made with a special metal, if Roger’s gets frozen and goes into suspended animation with it at the end of the movie. That question needs to be answered please people!

Another great thing about this movie is that, despite all the pre-publicity for the film, we do actually get to see Captain America in his proper, original costume from the 40s with his big, floppy wing ears, his red, turn up boots and his old-style pointy shield. That’s a great rush (even though it’s played for laughs) and to top it off the writers even found a way to include a little tribute to the famous cover of the first issue of Captain America, the one where he’s seen socking Hitler on the jaw, as part of... well okay, I don’t want to give too much away... but they even manage to include facsimilies of that comic in the movie itself... however, footage of a fictional Captan America movie did not match any footage from the 1944 serial... actually this movie footage looks like everything that movie serial needed to be, to be honest with you. Although I’ve got a nagging feeling in my head that I should go and watch that serial again now.

Lots of great things then, but this movie really falls flat a little before all those sequences... character development almost dissappears once Steve Rogers takes his super-serum but there are still enough “little moments” to hold your interest, even if the pacing isn’t as "singing along" as it was before. Tommy Lee Jones is absolutely excellent in it, bringing his comedy timing which we know him for from movies like Men In Black... and Chris Evans is, well, absolutely perfect. It’s a shame they didn’t have the original Human Torch in this movie with him... he could have played both roles since he did such a good job with the silver age version of the character in the Fantastic Four movies. It’s also a shame since the one thing it tells me loud and clear is... The Vision won’t be in The Avengers movie next summer (The Vision was an android member of the team haunted by amnesia of not knowing who he was and why he was created... years later it was revealed that he was a revived version of the original Human Torch... well actually it got a bit more complicated than that but that's the essence of it).

Actually that’s a major gripe with this movie for me. We’re rushing towards a movie version of The Avengers and this means they have to get Captain America frozen in time and then thawed out in time for next summer’s event movie... they even begin the process at the opening of this movie (as opposed to surprising non-comics readers at the end). This is a great shame because, frankly, I would have liked to have seen another Captain America movie (or two) set back in the 40s and this time have The Invaders join in. That would be cool.

The other gripes I had with this film were the fact that the good Captain is not going up against the Nazis but Hydra... and this production does everything it can to make it very clear that these bad guys are not Nazis... different logos, different salutes and, the thing which really kills this move for me, the introduction of disintegrating ray guns which takes things firmly out of the World War 2 feel and into B-movie science fiction... nothing wrong with B-movie science fiction, it’s just that they’d done such a good job on the film up until these things came along and ruined it.

So that and, yeah, the pacing felt off in the second half of the film. The climactic fight scene was something I was expecting to build to and be spectacular... then I’d realised we’d just had it... it was nowhere near as good as the stuff we’d seen in the battle montages and this really felt like a big anticlimax to the movie... in much the same way that Optimus Prime in Transformers 2 rose up from the dead and... gave the other robot a few punches and finished him, The End.

What more can I say about this movie. I’m really conflicted because it is really well made, other than on these points... and I would love to see a proper direct sequel... set in period. But it doesn’t look like we’re going to get that as The Avengers is obviously something that the studios are expecting to make more-money-than-humanly-possible with. I wish them luck and I’ll be first in line... but I just wish Captain America, a character who is not even one of my favourites, could have been treated with a little more thoughtfulness in regards to his context in the rest of the Marvel Universe on screen. As it is, I think this movie ranks six or seventh in my top ten list of successful Marvel adaptations... but please don’t let that put you off going to see it. I think it’s very successful on an artistic level and, while I prefer Johnstons own The Rocketeer as a good period movie (stymied from being a good adaptation by copyright issues, I guess), this is certainly a movie where that World War Two atmosphere of patriotism is done right. So it’s definitely worth a look and, for once, the 3D on this movie really isn’t bad.

Torchwood - Miracle Day Series 4 Episode 3: Dead of Night

Love At First Night

Torchwood - Miracle Day Series 4

Episode 3: Dead of Night

Airdate: July 28th 2011. UK. BBC1

Okay, so here we are at week three of the new Torchwood reboot and it's just beginning to look like it's a proper piece of sci-fi storytelling again as opposed to a series of set-pieces cobbled together with some loose threads. Not to say that their aren’t some really obvious “event sequences” thrown in for good measure, but the tone of this one was pretty level and despite the obvious loose cannon of Rex (who I’m sure will be dead by the end of the series anyway, if the new Torchwood team are successful?), the team seem to be working together as a whole and even Rex returns to the fold once he is reminded of the gravity of the situation.

So what have we got here then? Well, for one thing we have the slow, cross-cut plot details emerging like a photographer might develop a photographic print... and that print, in this case, is of a story with a lot of texture and detail in its telling. The various points coming across are beginning to seem that they were written for a modern comic book rather than a movie... and by that I mean to praise Torchwood, not bury it. It’s long been my belief, based on the evidence of comic books in the last 25 years, that the comic book medium is the place, of all the “visual based” media, where a writer will get the opportunities to tell richer and more adult minded tales... and by that I don’t mean “adult” as in “porn” or “violence” (I personally find the “adult” euphemism to be a curious contradiction when used in regards to the actual childish sensibilities on display in a lot of gory/sexy movies) but “adult” in terms of tackling less juvenile issues with a healthy attitude and a structural template which will allow these issues to be explored and re-examined over an appropriate period of time.

This week's Torchwood certainly lived up to these lofty aims with some very densely textured details and questions being aired as the mystery girl who is the link between Oswald Danes freed child killer and good gal Doctor Juarez leads us into one section of the story which will, inevitably and ultimately, bring these pieces into a direct crash trajectory with Torchwood.

Now there is someone who is making money off the plight of “the human race that can’t die” and this, in turn, makes you wonder about the assumed “alien nature” of the new human condition, with Torchwood assuming an extra-terrestrial cause to the woes of mankind. But by the same token, it’s hard to imagine what, if anything, could have brought about this new condition other than alien intervention. Now, if I was an optimistic type and believed in artistic synchronicity between different aspects of an artistic property with no worries about the time factor, I would by now be thinking that the Owen character from the first two series of Torchwood was about to make a Lazarus-like appearance and be the obvious point of solution for the team... “oh, living-dead boy Owen has managed to resurrect himself from radiation meltdown after all... yay. Oops, he accidentally did the same for the rest of the planet in the process... oh well.” Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s that either so I’m pleased to say that three episodes in, I’m still in the dark. I don’t expect to stay that way for very long, but for now I’m happy.

This week’s set piece was the intercutting of two unnecessary sex scenes into the mix... not that I’m not a big fan of unnecessary sex scenes (who isn't), it’s just that these weren’t much fun, to be honest. That’s one of the few negatives on the show right now. Less sex and more nudity please!

The differences of English and American culture are dutifully pointed out by the new Esther character, who I’ve realised has been included just to point out these semi-amusing quirks of cultural divide and also to be the person the others can explain things to so the "whole" audience have no excuse not to know what's going on. Yep, Esther wins my “exposition gal of the month” award... or would if I had such a thing.

I’ve started to notice the camera work a little more now and they’ve gone for that thing they do a lot in Firefly and Battlestar Galactica with a constant, though mostly unobtrusive, hand held style which just follows the action and reacts to characters as they say or do something by honing in on them. Kind of like a cinematographic version of musical "Mickey Mousing" on a soundtrack... it will catch every slight action and nuance and that’s its job. Not very inspiring perhaps but mostly effective although, I have to say, I’m getting just a little bit fed up with it. Not very fair of me, I know, since its obviously a valuable item in the moving image toolbox. I’d rather see a little more smoothly paced and perfectly framed action I think, but confess I am kinda getting on a bit now.

So far, so good though and I am much more encouraged that this is going to be a good series on the whole... although the ratings seem to be going down accordingly and apparently there’s no guarantee (or even much likelihood if I’m reading the news stories correctly) that there will be a fifth series of the show. Which is unfortunate as I’m still waiting to see how Captain Jack ends up as a disembodied head in a jar for countless millennia! Maybe I’ll never know.

Mr Moto in Danger Island

Motosterious Island

Mr Moto in Danger Island 1939 USA

Directed by Herbert I. Leeds

20th Century Fox Region 1

Yeah, that’s right. Although the grammatically challenged title has been altered to something a little bit more palatable in the Internet Movie Database, the box, poster and finally the print transfered to the DVD definitely state that our intrepid hero Kentaro Moto, as played by Peter Lorre, is definitely in the said island and not on it. Rest assured though, regular Moto fans will not have to see their beloved character swallowed up by a raging lump of sand from the ocean in this one.

This is a pretty standard Moto film with most of the elements of Moto’s strong character on display although he doesn’t actually act as judge, jury and executioner on his lonesome as he did in some of his earlier adventures. I wonder if, by this point, the studio were attempting to soften the character down a little by paring back on the character’s vigilante brand of justice?

Certainly, though, the rough and tumble element is ever present. The film starts off in a cruise ship with Mr. Moto and a young lady watching a wrestling match on deck. One of the wrestlers, played by a young and uncredited Ward Bond, is distracted by Moto’s explanations of the art of wrestling to his lady friend and consequently loses the match. Of course this means it’s time to pull Moto into the ring so the wrestler can give Moto a chance to show off his judo throws to the paying public at the cinema. The wrestler's real opponent takes a shine to Moto’s technique and good nature and, from this opening sequence until the end of the movie, this second wrestler (named Twister McGurk) acts both as Moto’s right hand man for the duration of the adventure and also as the quite likable, fairly effective, comic relief character.

This is a pleasant enough film and Moto even repeats his trick of “going fugitive” in an attempt to gain the confidence of the criminal element in the film... although this doesn’t really work this time around and Moto and McGurk find themselves in a sticky situation. All's well in the end though and the movie climaxes on a boat chase before reverting to a sequence where Mr. Moto demonstrates his judo throws on McGurk one more time... he’s actually been doing this at McGurk’s request all throughout the movie but it really doesn’t get too irritating by this point... maybe just a little.

As usual the film is packed with regular character actors doing their thing, each one looking more suspicious than the last, but for the life of me I couldn’t actually identify any of them this time around. I knew all their faces though.

But perhaps the face that sticks out the most on this one is Moto himself... who seems to be wearing some ridiculous, dark complexion. Lorre’s make up looks really weird on this one and I hope that this is the one and only time that the studio tried this effect out. He certainly stands out form the crowd but certainly not in the best way.

All in all though, this is another cracking Mr. Moto adventure which packs diamond smuggling, swamp lurking, kidnapping and lots of randomly placed judo throwing demonstrations into its short running time. If you’re a fan of these kinds of movies then you surely won’t be disappointed in this one.

The Happening

What just happened?

The Happening USA/India/France 2008

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

20th Century Fox Region 2

Warning: There be spoilers happening for this and other Shyamalan films in this article!

I think I’ve talked about M. Night Shyamalan on my blog a few times before. He’s a very talented director and writer who, mostly I feel, just slightly misses the mark when it comes to delivering on the set ups of his movies. Plus he’s really not very good at hiding the obvious conclusions that can lead you to the ending of the film, sometimes within just a couple of shots at the start of the movie (case in point on that was The Village, a movie which telegraphs its ending on shot number two by the way it’s put together).

Shyamalan first came to my attention when I went and saw The Sixth Sense at the cinema... this was an okay and scary film but pretty much within the first 15 minutes you can figure out that the lead character is pretty much dead... what other explanation would there be for the nature of the performances and the pretty blatant sleight of hand within the camera work.

Unbreakable was a more satisfying film because the writer/director kept you concentrating so much on the question as to whether the central character is or isn’t a superhero, that the real twist in the movie kinda leaps at you in the last couple of minutes... that was the only time I’d been impressed with the ending of a Shyamalan movie but it really doesn’t matter in some ways because, even though the camera kind of gives things away in his movies, the end result is usually entertaining whether you got there before the characters in the movie or not.

However, Shyamalan’s big problem was that, by the success of those two movies, his reputation has been kind of cemented as a guy who makes big budget Twilight Zone style stories and because of that, the audience is expecting a clever (oh, okay, maybe not so clever) twist at the end and so, when he tries to make a movie without a twist, everything about the brilliance of some of the way these movies are put together gets thrown out the window by an angry audience who are out for blood. Signs had exactly that effect on me because... well it’s a Shyamalan film so it must have a twist ending, right? So there I am watching an interesting movie about a possible alien invasion and all I’m thinking all the way through is... “no Shyamalan’s gonna be smarter than this, this isn’t aliens, this is something clever and brilliant which I haven’t quite figured out yet but I’m sure the revelation will be absolutely awesome and we’ll all kick ourselves for not seeing it earlier”... and then it turns out to be aliens. Seriously? What the f-? That kinda let me down big time with Shyamalan’s work (and don’t even get me started on The Village properly ‘cause I’ll tear it to pieces).

The Happening is another case in point in the problem with having a reputation of dealing twists and then not delivering on them... which is a shame because this movie has such an intriguing set up that it’s impossible not to want to find out what’s going on in it. And, like Signs, that’s the major downfall of this movie.

The films starts brilliantly with loads of people in a large park and other areas of a suburban city freezing for a few seconds and all but a few of them succumbing to “something” which makes them all kill themselves in the most hideous (sometimes) but convenient ways. There’s a brilliant sequence where dozens of builders walk off scaffolding to their collective demise. A national emergency is called and our hero Marky Mark Wahlberg and his wife and his friend and his friend's gooey, cutesy daughter go on a road trip to try to escape the epidemic of suicides that is happening all over the country.

Early on Shyamalan cleverly puts what I thought was a red herring in your mind... Marky Mark is a teacher and “nature’s defence mechanisms” are discussed. Then, later on in the story he further builds on this ridiculous premise by having a guy who owns a nursery suggest that the plants on the planet have had enough and are spreading a pollen which causes mankind to somehow kill itself (yeah, right). Unfortunately, for anyone watching this film, it turns out that in the end of the story what has been happening is that “the plants on the planet have had enough and are spreading a pollen which causes mankind to somehow kill itself”... wow! Deja vu!

Seriously, this isn’t really good enough. Okay, so the guy may have written himself into a corner with a brilliant set up which he then couldn’t explain... or it might have been his intention all along... but to keep dumbing down to the lowest common denominator and giving the audience a blatant commentary all the way through about what’s causing the problems is a terrible idea. It would have been better if those sequences had just been cut and the plant thing was a big reveal at the end... except he couldn’t have done that because by about three quarters of the way through the movie, the dwindling supply of survivors are using that explanation to stay away from trouble... so maybe an approach would have been to categorically state that this was the explanation in some way so that audiences didn’t get their hopes up for a better ending... that way the response may have been a lot more positive I would expect.

The trouble with this approach is, like all of Shyamalan’s films, the movie itself is absolutely brilliantly made and riveting to watch... right up to the end where it all caves in on itself. This guy does not end well is my opinion. But, if you’re the kind of person who can see past the weakness of one section of a movie and appreciate the rest for what it is, then you’ll see that Shyamalan’s actually a subtle blend of the celluloid sensibilities of Hitchcock and Spielberg and that he is an artist worth keeping an eye on.

As always in his films, his greatest collaborator here is composer James Newton Howard who, for some reason, always manages to deliver an absolutely top notch, knock it out of the park masterpiece of a score for Shyamalan (where he often doesn’t do that for other directors) and this one is no exception. There is a scene in this movie where our “survivors” go past a car with a parking alert sound on and I believe that same sound is the basis for this score as it is echoed, deliberately or not, in the bricks and mortar of the notes that comprise the main title. The standalone CDs of these things are always worth picking up because Howard’s true musical genius comes to the foreground on these projects.

And that’s really all I can say about The Happening. It’s very simple... if you’re the kind of person who cares about the ending of the movie and this overshadows everything else you’ve seen getting there, then The Happening is probably not for you. If, on the other hand, the ending is not going to wreck it for you and you can happily watch an interesting study in the art of cinematic suspense, then The Happening is definitely worth a look as Shyamalan usually handles the semiotics of shot flow and edit like a real auteur. And listen out for that beautiful score which creeps up on you like a ghost... it's all good stuff.

Wake Wood

The Waking Dead

Wake Wood 2011

Ireland/UK

Directed by David Keating

Hammer Films Region 2 DVD

Warning: Yes, there are big spoilers here for those of you who have not seen it.

While I generally like a fair few of “old school” Hammer Films, I’ve been pretty disappointed with their recent releases as a rule. Their return to the big screen with Let Me In was, by far, inferior to the original Swedish movie (although both movies took substantial liberties with the original source material) and their recent movie, The Resident, suffered from disappointing second and third acts which didn’t really take advantage of the set up... at least that’s the way I saw it.

I find it strange, then, that this third “modern Hammer” movie was not released at the cinema and gets a straight-to-DVD release as, frankly, it’s actually quite watchable and entertaining and I would certainly had liked to have seen this one on the big screen where it belongs.

That being said, there’s not an awful lot that’s “too” special in Wake Wood... it’s pretty much taken the famous short horror story The Monkey’s Paw as its starting point, but it does add a couple of little twists to it that are kinda neat... although not exactly mind blowing.

The film starts out with shots of a troubled couple's car journey to the village of Wake Wood, which is intercut with the couple's backstory as their young 7 or 8 year old daughter is killed by a dog and the journey is all underscored with a piece of music that can best be described as a rustic version of a John Carpenter power theme. The father is a veterinarian with a boss played by consummate professional Timothy Spall, while the wife is the owner (?) of the local pharmacy in Wake Wood. It’s in her capacity here that she finds out about the sinister and knowing underbelly of Wake Wood which is something akin to the closed communities in the original The Wicker Man or an episode of the original TV series of The Prisoner, although it’s depicted here in very quick and broad strokes and so loses a little of the weight and intensity it might have found if the film had ben allowed to wander at a more leisurely pace.

So saying, though, the pace is somewhat blistering (you won’t get bored on this one) as the couple find that they can have their little girl back for “three days only” as long as they obey the rules... a) she doesn’t cross the boundary lines (which would destroy her it turns out) and b) she has to have been dead for no longer than a specific amount of time (think it was a year).

The couple agree and they borrow somebody else’s fresh corpse (part of the procedure) and the village community rebirths their little girl in a fiery ritual worthy of a Dennis Wheatley bestseller. As it happens, however, there’s something a bit wrong with this young girl and she acts a little differently from other regular rebirths the village indulges in... and when I say “acts a little differently” I mean she goes around murdering assorted village locals who want to send her back from whence she came.

After a while it all comes out that the couple had broken the rules and she’s ben dead longer than the prescribed time... when they eventually find the trail of corpses left by their little angel they join in the manhunt (err... dead girl hunt) and the mother tricks her undead young ‘un back into the ground... but there’s a catch and once the initial story is finished, there’s an interesting little coda set a while later which I won’t spoil here, suffice it to say that the husband's skill at cutting open cows so they can birth their young is a skill which is about to come in very handy to him after the credits have rolled. The worst is yet to come... although I don’t expect we’ll ever get to see a sequel and, to be honest, it doesn’t really need one.

Wake Wood is a nice, little atmospheric horror film and, the thought struck me as I was watching this, it would really not look out of place as an episode of the original TV show Hammer House of Horror... it has that kind of vibe to it. Personally I could have done with the movie being about a quarter of an hour longer so they could slowly build on the feeling of having such a close-knit community in the village, but I guess the powers that be were thinking of the MTV generation audiences again... slow and delightfully ponderous is not back in fashion again yet, it seems. If you like old-style, early seventies horror movies though, even if this one is not exactly scary, you’ll certainly want to take Wake Wood out for a spin. It’s certainly the only one of the recent batch of releases from Hammer that certainly would not look out of place with their rich back catalogue. Worth a look!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 3D

Hallows Goodbye

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 3D 2011 UK/USA

Directed by David Yates

Screening at UK cinemas

Warning: There are going to be some spoilers in this one.

Ok... so if you read my review from earlier in the year of the first part of this final Harry Potter adventure (right here), then you’ll already know my fairly passive relationship with this particular film franchise... but just in case you didn’t read that one... here’s how I stand on the series so far...

Haven’t read the novels. Seen all the movies once at the cinema and not unimpressed with them but less than overwhelmed with them and not that fussed about them... until we came to the last movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One, which I really liked.

Ok, end of recap of this blogger's Harry Potter reviewing credentials... let’s get down to business.

I’ve been putting off writing this review for a while because I was quite disappointed by it... and I know less than stellar views of hugely popular movies do sometimes tend to attract some negative comments from those film's respective fan bases. I think I probably wouldn’t have been feeling so let down on this one if it wasn’t for the fact that the last one was just so good. Also, for once in a Harry Potter flick, I actually found myself a little lost in terms of just what the heck was going on in this one (for once in this series).

I think that last conclusion is because of my unfamiliarity with both the books and the movies. That's because I don’t repeat view these ones... I tend to see them only once, although I have to admit to now feeling tempted to rewatch the whole lot on DVD (time to raid my parents DVD collection). Two things I have to say about that though, because I am not taking the rap for my lack of interest in the previous movies as being a cause for not bonding emotionally with the source material.

One... it didn’t have a recap at the start! Golly people! Even the old Flash Gordon serials used to have a recap at the start of each episode. Pardon me, Mr. Studio Executive, if I wasn’t fanatical enough about your original product to go out and buy the DVD and obsessively repeat watch it until every last detail of every last frame was ingrained in my memory so I could catch up on your money-spinning franchise. I went in there assuming there’d be one at the start but, instead of that, it just picked off from where it left off and expected you to remember that Harry was linked in his mind to the chief bad guy and that he and his spell casting young friends are trying to destroy camouflaged objects called horcruxes (or some such) which sap away the soul of the prime villain of the series. A recap would have been really useful.

Two... this movie turns into the wizarding equivalent of the second half of Return Of The Jedi about two thirds of the way through. The dark forces are aligned and an army of bad dudes is descending on Hogwarts School, to destroy Potter, and a big battle royale between the forces of darkness and light turn Hogwarts into a ruin of a school as Harry’s pals and colleagues die like flies on the field of battle... trouble is, I didn’t know or remember who any of them were. The names and faces meant next to nothing to me. I’m sure people who are heavily emotionally invested in the series or those who have read (and reread) the books would have had a really big reaction to the deaths on screen as they happened... but honestly, there was one scene where everyone was crying around a corpse and they flashed you a quick image of the dead person’s face and I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman who had been killed, let alone who the character actually was (they didn’t seem to clarify further later on in the film and I’m still yet to find out who the heck died there. Someone please tell me already!).

I reread my review of the last one just now and have to say that I was at least right about two things... Snape wasn’t exactly the bad guy and the last horcrux was actually inside a living person... although I hadn’t actually twigged that this particular person would turn out to be Harry himself (but honestly, if I’d have been on top of my game and watched these movies again I would surely have figured it out before the end game in this installment).

So that’s why I was mainly disappointed with this one... I got kinda bored with it quite a lot and I just didn’t think that it was as cool and dark as the last part (it was the same director... really?) although I know most fans of the series would disagree because of their favourite characters dropping dead left, right and centre.

And then the kicker was, when all is done and dusted, we have a little end sequence which is set 19 years after the events of this one... the main characters are all made up to look a little older... except that the make-up doesn’t really make them look older in any way, shape or form and you end up wondering how these teenage heroes (yeah, I know but teenage in terms of characters they are playing, okay?) can have offspring who are almost as old as they are.

The other folly of this film is that the 3D is awful (it’s a transfer over and not shot in 3D I suspect, right?) and completely unnecessary when you do happen to spot something that looks like it might have entered that eerie third dimension. I’m sick of 3D now... let’s give a big, warm welcome to the return of 2D please.

So there you have it... not the best verdict on the film I could have given perhaps but I still hold a vast admiration for the overall competency and general appeal of the series in general. These are not badly made films people (even this one is still pretty good... despite my complaints) and I’m sure these films will be remembered for a very long time... or at least until Warners decide they want to remake them again... um... purely for artistic reasons, right?

Either way, it doesn’t really matter because Harry Potter fans are going to have a good time with this movie regardless. So if you’re one of them and you still haven’t seen it yet... what are you waiting for?

Torchwood - Miracle Day Series 4 Episode 2: Rendition

What Condition My Rendition Is In

Torchwood - Miracle Day Series 4 Episode 2: Rendition

Airdate: July 21st 2011. UK. BBC1

Now that’s what I’m talking about. This episode was much, much better and it was "all over" the spirit of Torchwood, even in the lengthy scenes away from the two surviving members Captain Jack and Gwen Cooper. The three new series regulars Rex, Esther and Doctor Juarez were all sensational and I expect we’re supposed to be thinking now that these three will be joining the Torchwood team for any future series', should they get made. However, I suspect at least one of these three characters will be killed off before the end of the series... after all, one of them is technically dead now already and given the mortality rate for regular characters in Torchwood, anything can happen.

I guess they’ll need to start making that point to the larger audience they are expecting sometime soon so I’m expecting at least one of these characters to drop out early in the game... but I sincerely hope not because all three of them are beginning to grow on me already.

Carrying on exactly where it left off last week, this episode sees Gwen torn from the side of her husband and child and flown with Jack to the US, prisoners of the CIA... however, there are conspiracies afoot in the CIA and the rot starts with Esther’s boss, played by the “Ahh, Ahh, Ahh!” guy from Jurassic Park (wow, how lazy at research am I? Ah, leave it. Everyone knows who I mean when I say “Ahh, Ahh, Ahh!” guy. He was even on the pinball machine). A faction of the CIA are already gunning for Torchwood and now it’s been properly clarified that, while the world has turned immortal, so Captain Jack has become mere mortal, which means we’re probably going to see a lot of “Jack in peril” type situations over the coming weeks (even though we know he can’t die because we’ve seen that happen already in an episode of Doctor Who, set in the far future of Jack’s timeline).

This weeks assassination attempt came in the form of a poisoning with a cure which was, to be fair, a little more protracted and milked than a similar scene in The Girl Who Was Death episode of the original series of The Prisoner, but perhaps not “quite” as much fun. However, this sequence where Gwen Cooper is strong-arming her captors as she orders them to strip the plane of ingredients for the antidote cocktail she is making on the instructions of Doctor Juarez is both comedy gold and Torchwood writing at its best. It also shows the ballsy character of Gwen again, played with absolute perfection as always by series regular Eve Myles. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if her performance in this show sees her heading back to the US sometime soon for some stateside roles. People are bound to sit up and take notice.

It was good to see the very bleak Torchwood humour was back with a vengeance, best seen after Rex snaps the neck of the CIA agent who tried to poison Jack. Since nobody can die in the world depicted in this story, said CIA lady stumbles after our escaping heroes but proves ineffective and, it has to be said, highly comical. The look that passes between Jack and Gwen is comment enough on this turn of events.

The pacing in this weeks show was fantastic as we are quickly made aware of unforseen developments to the trouble mankind is in because it can’t die out anymore. Never mind the population explosion, another worrying threat is that the antibiotics given to horrendously injured but undying people will just, over the course of time, allow various diseases to build up resistances to various medicines and disease will be rife within the human race. Since the prospect of intervention at a massive scale seems probable (divine or otherwise) then this could be a set up to turn the ability to die back to the "on" position and let humanity die of its own lack of resistance to numerous illnesses.

Of course this is all very bleak stuff and, so far, we’re being lead to believe that this is all a symptom of something to do with Jack’s ability to die and not heal himself... but here’s the thing. Jack would inadvertently heal himself every time he took any kind of side swipe or mortal wound... but the people of earth in this story really aren’t doing that. They’re all left in various states of dying or perpetual living death so there’s a good chance, I reckon, that they’re not exactly suffering from what ails Jack. So in this instance that might well be a red herring from the writers. It will be interesting to see if the end explanation for all this turned up, “our goes up to eleven” existence is written as being extra-terrestrial in origin or is a symptom of “man meddling in things he can’t understand." My best guess right now is that it’ll be a little of both.

As this episode ends our band of flung together “regulars” are on the run from the law (Rex and Esther having been set up by cloak and daggery faction of the CIA) and we have the introduction of a new character who is currently selling herself to her customers as a PR woman... those customers being Doctor Juarez and the executed-but-not-died-and-free-to-roam-legally killer pedophile, played marvellously against type by Hollywood actor Bill Pullman... who I’ve liked ever since seeing him as a young actor in Kasdan’s big screen adaptation of Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist. I think this PR woman is going to turn out to be a lot more than what it says on the tin so I wouldn’t be surprised if her role starts growing now in leaps and bounds from week to week.

All I can say at this point is what I know... and that is that if this episode is anything to go by (as opposed to last weeks misfire) then this is going to be one intense TV show. It’s left me wanting more of the same next week and that’s quite a turnaround because I’d all but lost interest in the show after the first episode. I hope it doesn’t all come down to who’s writing the show because, and I find this surprising for a serialised story that follows a single arc, their are a few different writers on different episodes... so I’m kinda hoping the quality doesn’t drop down again next week.

Keeping my fingers and toes crossed that this second episode is the start of something good.