13 Assassins

Assassin-8 plus 5

13 Assassins Japan/UK 2010

Directed by Takashi Miike

Playing at cinemas now.

Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins is a very surprising film, primarily for two reasons.

One, it is a relatively bloodless outing for a typical entry into the traditional Japanese chambara... at least in comparison to a lot of these kinds of movies released internationally since Kurosawa filmed that first extended gout of over the top arterial spray at the end of his Yojimbo sequel Sanjuro (if he’d have know the trend he was inadvertently setting, even in terms of international influence reaching up through the generations to be parodied by the likes of Tarantino in Kill Bill, would he have gone ahead and shot that final stand off between Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai in the same way, one wonders). Even though the movie starts off with a grim and determined display of the traditional form of seppuku, incorporating both the horizontal cut and the second vertical cut which opens up a persons belly, the scene is shot in tight close up with only the actors expressions and the sounds indicating the actual honouring of this ritualistic form of suicide portrayed on screen. A birds eye view pretty much shows a very subdued aftermath with only a small puddle of unobstrusive blood spilled on the ground. And then that’s it for the blood content up until about half way through the final battle scene.

Now it’s not realy like me for being one to concentrate on the goriness or bloodshed quota of a movie but on this particular movie it almost made the film lose credibility with me. This is because we see a fair few people killed and hundreds in the final battle, but the majority of this is without showing any blood whatsoever and, franky, when you kill a person with a sharpened object such as a samurai sword it tends to make a mess (this is something I have come to believe due to common sense backed up with many years of watching various gentlemen slicing each other up on screen in a celebration of this traditional style of story). There is always some fair to middling blood flow and not really any such thing as a tidy death, especially when one is in the heat of battle. So all the way through the movie I was wondering just what the censors were playing at. I would have expected the full quota of, admittedly mind numbing on occasions, squirting fountains of arterial spray splashing against the camera lens at frequent intervals. This film, in some places, felt like watching an episode of The A Team in respect to its treatment of the expected Japanes penchant for the after effects of slicing and dicing. Also, I knew from previous experience of this prolific and often wonderfully sublime director that Miike’s usual modus operandi is to push the gore content beyond where any of his contemporaries are willing to go to, creating a more surreal artform with the realisation of the absurdity of situations such demonstrations of enthusiatic bloodshed often herald.

The other reason that this is a quite surprising film for a Miike movie is that this is such a traditionally put together form of chambara, including many genre cliches, most of them harkening back to either Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai or the kinds of chambara Toho and Daie were putting out through the sixties and seventies such as the Zatoichi or Lone Wolf and Cub (Babycart) movies... some of the characters and situations could have almost walked straight out of these movies and into this one. This is a strange way of working for Miike, or at least it seems that way to me for a director who almost prides himself in assembling movies which are chaotic and genre-bending in their basic make-up at best. Mostly this movie follows a path from A to B, stays on course and within time period and genre with all the characters... and then finishes with a certain sense of resoution, none of which is by any means a given in a Takashi Miike movie. There is one little slight little tweak towards the end which I think might have been Miike’s little reminder to people watching out that he’s not “sold out and gone all Hollywood” so to speak... but I’ll leave that little bit to the end of this review.

The movie is surprisingly similar in structure to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, perhaps a little too close for comfort but then again, this kind of arrogance would be expected of someone like Miike so in some ways it’s almost a comfort that he’s daring to take on Kurosawa at his own game a little... at least in the basic direction this film takes. Starting off with a suicide and a background into the political turmoil Edo period Japan would find itself in if a very important official is not soon killed to prevent the crazy cruelty of his actions scandalising the Japanese people instead of the village raided by bandits which lies at the heart of Seven Samurai, the film then starts to follow that template very closesly in style as a widowed samurai puts together a team of samurai assassins to help him accomplish his deadly mission to rid Japan of this menace... giving number checks as people join, just like in Seven Samurai and its famous Western genre remake The Magnificent Seven. We then get the journey to, in this case, a village to which they reroute their enemy... a village which they buy out and then begin to fortify with defences (just like in Seven Samurai) and traps to help even the odds a little... after all, they believe the thirteen of them are going up against only about seventy people.

En route to the village they pick up a non-samurai, arrogant thief/farmer who is very much the Toshiro Mifune character in Seven Samurai in spirit and also rather blatantly even in posture. The "lovable rogue" is openly critical of samurai but he can cut heads and split bodies like a trooper with the rest of them... and so another genre cliché comes to pass.

The final battle when it comes is quite ferocious and, for the first part of it, almost entirely bloodless... although halfway through the sequence the blood begins to flow as it probably shoud. It doesn’t spray like a fountain from severed limbs or jump up and do violent sommersaults in the most surreal arterial-airbrush demonstrations ever... but it is at least present and therefore a sense of reality is somewhat restored to these scenes. It’s quite a long battle scene due to the fact that some miscalculations in strategy on the part of our unlucky heroes means there are actually over 200 soldiers accompanying their target but it never really drags down into tedium when it threatens that this could happen and is certainly reminiscent in some ways of the final denouements to be found in the aforementioned Lone Wolf and Cub movies, where our hero would single handedly take on (and win) against entire armies on his own (with the occasional little bit of help from his 4 or 5 year old son).

I’m not going to give anything away as to how many survivors are left at the end of this pseudo-blood bath, or even whether the 13 Assassins accomplish their mission or not... but what I will say is that it’s at this point where that “little gesture of Miike” comes to light...

Now, I don’t know if you’ve seen his Dead or Alive trilogy but the second and third films in this trilogy are absolutely amazing with some very entertaining touches and some perplexing moments such as the characters in the third film (who are played by two actors who play the male leads, but totally different characters in the previous two films) inhereiting from the actors who play them an almost shared race memory of the characters in the previous installments... admittedly before they merge and transform themselves into a giant mechanical penis which flys through the air to exact revenge on their enemy. The very first film in the series, however, is almost (and I stress the almost) just a dull and plodding cop versus yakuza movie which can’t maintain or live up to the absolutely frenetic pace of it’s first five minutes... but the punchline of the joke of the film lies within the last minute or so of that particular movie and, truth be told, if it didn’t have such a “what the f*ck just happened” kind of ending to it... then I would have never bothered with the second and third movies in the series and that would be a shame because the second one’s quite moving and the third one is... well let’s just say, if you like Blade Runner you’ll find Dead or Alive: Final an interesting movie at the very least.

At the end of the first Dead or Alive movie... something happens. I’m not saying what but it’s a real poke in the face and my best interpretation of it would be that it’s Takashi Miike saying, “You’re not really taking this yakuza stuff seriously like it’s anything to do with real life are you? Leave it out... cinema has moved on. Watch out or you’ll fall behind.”

Similarly, at the end of 13 Assassins, a character who you’ve already seen pretty much killed suddenly returns, none the worse for wear and muttering something along the lines of, “Pah! I’ve had worse wounds... that was just a scratch.” Now if you’ve not been paying close attention (which is easy to do when you’ve been watching leaping figures enthusiastically jumping around and slicing each other up in close quarters for over half an hour of screen time) then you may just believe him... but there’s that little part of me that’s a bit more familiar with Miike’s penchant for iconoclastically destroying genre preconceptions and it’s almost like this scene is a feint echo, in tone but not in content, to that earleir end sequence in Dead or Alive... it’s almost like Miike is saying, “You know this guy can’t get up and walk away again, let alone bound about and tell jokes like this... so come on, time to stop taking these old chambara movies seriously and move onto something new.” I can just imagine him wagging his finger at the camera now.

So there you have it. 13 Assassins is very much a genre throwback to the cliche ridden but absolutely crackling and watchable chambara of days gone by. A brilliant homage which very much keeps the genre alive, despite my interpretation of the ending... after all, intent is not result and at the end of the day, Miike has delivered a vastly entertaining take on a classic template deriving from Kurosawa and his ilk. If you like samurai movies then this one is definitely not one to miss!

And all who sail in her...

Doctor Who: The Doctor’s Wife

Airdate: May 14th 2011. UK. BBC1

Warning: Here be spoilers... so if you’re Steven Moffet, definitely don’t read anymore of this.

Well that was quite a bit better than a kick in the Krynoids!

This weeks episode was written by a stalwart of the fantasy genre, Neil Gaiman, possibly best known for his 75 issue comic series for DC/Vertigo... The Sandman. And best loved by me for the creation of one of my favourite comic-book characters Death (Oh come on! Who can’t resist a cheery young lady in black... even if she has come to take you to your final resting place?).

Now I’ll have to admit I was sceptical when I heard Gaiman was writing an episode of the good Doctor’s travels because, frankly, I’m not sure his writing necessarily translates well on the screen... he writes with a very deft touch and you need a director, actors and a whole bunch of other people to work some similarly subtle magic to bring his words and concepts to life without them falling flat and... well... um... falling flat. :-o

The past couple of weeks of the show have not done anything to reassure me that the production crew were able to match that kind of subtlety. I knew the principal actors could and so I wasn’t too concerned about them... but I was unsure about whether the tone and editing would be able to match what I expected to be an incredibly subtle script.

Well I’m more than happy to say that I this case I was proved dead wrong. Thank Rassilon’s teeth for that then. Phew. This is probably the most refreshing and watchable episode of Doctor Who I’ve seen since... hmmmm... maybe The Lodger. Oh well, hang on there that wasn’t all that long ago I’m sure I can do better than that. Scratches head... thinks a bit more... no The Lodger was about right. There were some definite hits as well as the molasses of misses last season and fair is fair.

So anyway... this episode is special because you get to see the TARDIS’ soul transplanted into a human shell and The Doctor is trapped with her in a junkyard on the edge of the universe while Amy and Rory are trapped in the shell of The Doctor’s TARDIS who is having deadly fun with them, running them around corridors and playing mind games. However, the real spirit of the TARDIS is housed in a rapidly failing humanoid host and it’s a race against time to somehow catch up with the old Type 40 shell... which has gone off gallivanting around our universe in search of other TARDIS' to feed from... and replace the soul of the TARDIS, rescue Amy and Rory from both the malevolent force inside the TARDIS and a rampant Ood (Ood have thought that we’d be seeing a villainous Ood again, ay?) before time leaves our heroes high and dry and dead. And dead is not much good I’m afraid... have TARDIS, will travel.

And that’s all I want to say about specific plot details this time around (but really, isn’t it more than enough).

I was a bit disappointed at the start of the episode as a distress beacon cube which came a knocking on the Doctor’s TARDIS door was, frankly, a terrible looking cheap effect and I thought that could have been done a lot better... maybe it was a little reference to the good old days of the BBC in the 80s (when the special effects seemed to get even more pedestrian than the not so brilliant effects work in the 60s and 70s) but once this little sequence was out of the way it was “all systems are go” for the special effects and the story they were there to support was a really nice addition to the Doctor Who episodes of the show that will probably be really affectionately remembered in years to come. Like Blink, The Girl In The Fireplace, The Mind Robber, Tomb of the Cybermen and The Talons of Weng-Chiang (to name a few of my favourites).

There are some very touching moments where The Doctor and the living personification of his TARDIS are conversing in the junkyard and it really adds a new spin on the old, almost used up idea of The Doctor stealing the TARDIS. The TARDIS apparently chose him and stole him, leaving herself unlocked so she could shanghai the willing timelord and see the universe. Nice concept... I like it. Some may say that this kind of revisionism smacks of "Greedo shooting first" but, what the heck! It was delivered with such sentiment and feeling that I was really sold on the concept. Well done Mr. Gaiman (or possibly Mr. Moffet, depending on whose idea that was)... that really worked out rather well.

And as an antidote to that, the mind games played on the TARDIS with an old, hateful and vengeful Rory and the writing on the TARDIS walls (which one can only presume was an homage to The Shining) was almost as chilling and foreboding as an episode of The Deadly Assassin. Well no, alright, not quite then... but as close as we’re probably going to get in this era of over-censored, dumbed down television.

So all in all I was completely bowled over this week. Really great episode. It’s a shorter review this week due to there being nothing much for me to grumble about I guess? That’s okay, less typing for me and now there’s nothing to do but go over to Hypnogoria’s and Flaysomewench’s blogs and read their latest Doctor Who reviews... because their insights are always different from mine and always house a little touch of genius. Check them out as soon as you can... they’re well worth a look.

Insidious

The Insidious Zone

Insidious US 2011

Directed by James Wan

Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: There are some spoilers in this one.

Okay then. And now on to Insidious.

After married couple Josh and Renai move from their new home because of a series of hauntings which seems to put one of their two young sons in a coma; the hauntings continue at their new dwelling and an expert in the paranormal (and her hilariously dead-pan assistants) advise the parents that it’s not the house that’s haunted but their comatose young son... who has gone off onto another astral plane and is being kept from returning to his body by various beings (including a demonic entity) who are trying to use his body to cross over into our dimension.

Hmmm.... if this sounds familiar then... well let’s call a spade a spade, it is. Take away the astral projection part of this little set up (with which you can leave the little boy in a physical form in our reality to give a slant to the old story) and you have what amounts to almost a remake in structure of Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist... and when I say a remake of Poltergeist, of course, I mean a remake of the original episode of The Twilight Zone, Little Girl Lost, which Poltergeist seems to have blatantly ripped off (in my humble opinion, okay?).

Little Girl Lost featured a daughter who slipped through a dimensional portal in her bedroom and her father has to go in to the portal attached to a life line, find her in the other world and then pull her out. And this is essentially what happens in Insidious because, when the husband Josh’s past catches up to him, it’s realised that he is the only one qualified to enter this “higher” plane of existence and rescue his son from the hostile and demonic entities that dwell in the dark recesses of this dimension... so a bit like Doctor Strange for amateurs then.

Insidious starts off really well and it’s got enough understanding of the way in which the scares in a horror film can be played and milked from the audience to actually deliver those scares and jumps that this kind of genre thrives on... despite this director’s directing and writing credits on the Saw franchise, this is not a gory movie concerned with body shock style disgust tactics, this is a genuine bona fide horror movie dealing with the cold hand of fear hovering just above your shoulder and then waiting until your guard is lowered before it taps you on that same shoulder and frightens you out of your skin.

In this respect... Insidious is a really good little horror movie.

It’s weaknesses, however, lay in the second half of the movie where the obvious premise is highlighted as being the root cause of the problem... that is to say, you’re already way ahead of the characters in the film as to what’s really going on and you can see the so-called final-twist of the movie a good half an hour or more before it comes to fruition... this is not good writing. But, to be fair to it, it does still maintain the kind of suspense and terror-grips-your-heart sense of dread through even this last half an hour and it’s the expertise in which the execution of a less than challenging story is handled that make Insidious worth watching on some level. I’m even going to forgive it the flash cut to the title of the movie which it delivers with an overblown, cheesy and atonal 1950s B-movie “sting” in the music... not once but twice in the movie.

Insidious is a quite good but extremely obvious horror movie which is worth seeing if you like the kind of lurking dread filled atmospheres that such bleak treasures can sometimes deliver and don’t mind ratcheting down your IQ a hundred or so notches and are prepared to ignore the familiarity of the storyline. It’s an enjoyable little horror flick, nothing more or less so... if, like me, you have a taste for this kind of cinematic dessert... catch it now while you can still see it with a large audience and watch them squeal and jump at the on-screen antics of a family under attack by supernatural forces.

If you're not a fan of the genre then this movie certainly won't cause you to become one, however. So if horror is not especially your bag, maybe don't bother with it.

Hanna

Hanna, Solo

Hanna US 2011

Directed by Joe Wright

Playing at cinemas now.

Caution: There are NO real spoilers on this one but I should probably warn you up front that... if you don’t like the current trend for filming absolutely everything in shades of blue and orange, you might want to give this movie a miss... I’d advise you not to though... it’s really excellent.

Hanna tells the story of a sixteen year old girl called... um... Hanna (played absolutely impeccably by Saoirse Ronan) who has been living in the snowy wilderness with her guardian, Erik (thoughtfully played by Eric Bana), for the majority of her life. She has been leading a life of hardship and lacking in the normal luxuries that you and I take for granted (like the beauty of music) and Erik has been training her in all the essential skills of survival and combat for the day when she becomes, like Erik, A Jason Bourne-like killing machine in order to invade the civilised world and kill Marissa (the always wonderful Cate Blanchett) who was the woman who killed Hanna’s mother when she was just a little girl.

That’s your basic set up and that’s as much as I’m going to tell you about specific elements of the story. There’s not a lot you won’t see coming but that doesn’t really matter on this particular piece of action-thriller celluloid. It’s more about the journey of one person and the peripheral damage created by her passing through the lives of others. Friends and foes alike do tend to get pretty f*cked up in her wake... often without her even noticing this unfortunate trend.

You might say that this movie is a patchwork quilt of Nikita and The Bourne Identity and there are certainly elements of those movies to be found in Hanna. Cate Blanchett is very much a more “hands on” version of the Brian Cox character in those movies and if she comes across as a little bit of a broad villain, much as she did in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I think she can be forgiven this since the genre elements used to tell the story almost beg for the kind of larger-than-life characterisation that she chooses to inject into this character. The coldness behind her eyes is almost freezing.

And coldness is almost a key motif for the movie as a whole. The film starts off in a sequence in the snow with Hanna hunting a deer and the rest of the film seems to take this sequence as a template of sorts with absolutely beautiful and very cleanly composed cinematography (it looks like something directed by either Kieslowski or Hartley) which mostly uses frosty shades of blue or cooled down oranges or a combination of both on screen sometimes... such as when Hanna is escaping her captors/pursuers through an almost maze like building in dull, neutralised colours but wearing cool orange clothing which, although quite toned down in itself, makes for a nice contrast with her immediate environment without warming the shots up too much and retaining that theme of frostiness throughout the whole movie. Even when, in some sequences, some greens and reds and yellows are brought into the general mix to “rock the palette” as it were, the overall effect is still mostly one of stark neutrality and this is also echoed in the attitudes of the main characters throughout the course of the movie.

I’ve talked about Cate Blanchett’s steely, cold exterior which she uses to highlight the professional ruthlessness of her character... this also is to be found in Eric Bana’s character in a lot of the sequences and he only really warms up when he’s sharing screen-time with the title character.

The real contrast in tone is, perhaps, Hannah herself, who is forced to fly solo and make her own way in the world... she too has a very frosty exterior but it clearly holds a very warm, beating heart and it becomes apparent as Hanna “makes friends” that the ice and frost in her killing-machine exterior is as much about the realities of her hermit like existence and detachment from a social milieu more than anything else. And there are some beautiful sequences which highlight the chaos, confusion and adrenalin filled underside of her character, one which involves her freaking out over the abundance of electrically powered consumer items and another as she is escaping her would be captors/killers... where the camerawork and editing style just go completely mad... as though the camera-eye is just giving up for a moment on the cleanliness and coolness of the mise-en-scene and just throwing its hands up in the air to give the viewer a crazy collage of aggressively shifting visual psychedelic riffs on the films environment... with the camera actually spiralling about 360º in one instance. This is a actually a very dynamic film where the tension and release nature of the atmosphere is very much controlled but can also “get rowdy” on the viewer very quickly if it needs to push an emotional point.

The tension and suspense is wrought from every shot, ably supported by a likeable score composed by some people called The Chemical Brothers (?), but these sequences of tension are regularly released by the odd burst of broad humour or an orgy of violent action cinema not dissimilar to anything Besson has been producing over the last few years. This is a film which will pull you in and not let you go until it’s created a smorgasbord of emotional highs and lows by pitching the intensly grim plot of the movie against a sense of playfulness and beauty... whether you like this film or not, you’re certainly unlikely to be bored by it.

And then there’s the ending. This film has one of those perfect endings that rarely come up. Without giving anything away there’s a beautiful symmetry to this film which is derived from the set up in a way that means you will know, roughly 3 or 4 minutes before it happens, what both the last line and the last “shot” of this film will be. There’s a poetic quality to the end sequence and a haunting premonition of events in a tangible form which informs the audience of the metaphor it’s about to witness... the film just has to end this way... and it does.

I’m not going to say anymore on this one right now except that if you like cinema in general then Hanna kind of has the feel of a French action thriller filtered through a Polish camera lens and an American Independent sensibility while still, I suspect, playing for a mass audience. And that’s probably not a bad thing to aim for really... all things considered.

Thor

Thor blimey! Norse Code!

Thor US 2011

Directed by Kenneth Branagh

Playing at cinemas now.

I’ve mentioned this in reviews before but it’s relevant to this particular movie so I’ll summarise it again...

Marvel comics were a little harder to read than DC comics when I was a kid. I cut my teeth and taught myself how to read with comics like Superman before quickly honing my reading skills on titles such as Batman, Worlds Finest, Shazam and Casper The Friendly Ghost. Although I absolutely loved Spider-Man too, I found most of the Marvel comics of the time a little harder to get into at the age of two or three because the narratives were just not as straightforward or as linear as their DC counterparts. That’s not a criticism, by the way, and I’m sure there are many (myself included nowadays) who would much rather embrace the narrative complexity of a Marvel comic... which would start off a little way into the story and have some scene of conflict (and for conflict I mean the title character and some super-villain punching the crap out of each other and destroying half of their surrounding neighbourhood in the process) and then flash back to the start of the story to tell you how our friendly neighbourhood “whatever”-slinger came to be in this predicament of a punch-fest in the first place!

Hey, what can I say? I was young and low on concentration span and never in the Marvel brand of comics got as far as about page four to realise that the start of the story was coming. I always just assumed it was the second or third part of a story continuing from a previous issue I’d never seen.

Still, I persevered and was soon reading the Marvels almost as much as my DC, Charlton, Gold Key and Harvey comics like a trooper (before 2000AD came out and blew them all away) but one of the Marvel characters I just couldn’t get into was The Mighty Thor. I had one of those big Treasury large format editions they used to do of that particular title featuring the traditional Jack Kirby artwork but Thor was never really my thing. He always seemed a bit arrogant and he was a Norse God and he “talked funny” even though he lived in a mythical, magical world of Gods and monsters. He would also quite happily “hob nob” with other Marvel characters in supergroups such as The Avengers and I always found this strange because it didn’t sit comfortably with me that such a character would inhabit the same universe as a group of adventurers whose powers and weapons were based on cold, hard, rational science (and in some cases, such as The Hulk, in gi-normous accidents caused by the “stretching” of science to fit in with a fictional destination point). Surely they’d just use their science to prove this guy can’t exist and send him back to the fictional well of ideas from whence he sprang?

But for everyone else on our planet it seems, I have to say, that Thor worked fine in the comics and the mythological background of the character didn’t seem to be terribly off-putting for most people. This helmeted, hammer spinning, gotterdammerung personified has been genuinely accepted and loved by generations of readers since his first appearance in the Marvel Comic Journey Into Mystery at the tail end of 1962. His close working relationship with his collegues in The Avengers started in the first appearance of that superteam a year later, which has a nice symmetry when you realise that the movie incarnation of Thor makes his second big screen appearance in next years movie version of The Avengers.

Marvel’s movie of Thor is yet another of the recent spate of Mighty Marvel Movies that have been developed and produced by Marvel themselves (like the recent Iron Man movies and The Incredible Hulk) which really hit the mark and delivers the goods when it comes to making entertaining films from their characters (unlike some of the films based on their characters produced by other studios such as the hit and miss Spiderman and X-Men franchises). I really shouldn’t be surprised at their track record with these things either, I guess. After all, it’s Marvel adapting big screen versions of characters and situations that they’ve been working well with for almost fifty years now. They understand the basic dynamics of their characters but, what’s more important and is becoming increasingly apparent in their current product, is that they know just where they can push the differences and boundaries of the make-up of their superheroes without straying too far from the spirit in which they were created. And this is important when handling characters who are, by their very definition, far more exaggerated and elaborate than most normal characters would be... they have to be handled “just right” or they lose credibility with the audience. It’s a very fine line and Marvel do seem to have been proving quite deft at working on a larger canvass just recently.

Marvel’s latest smart move with Thor is to select a director who will be confident with the background and idiosyncracies of the speech of such a high-born, nobleman as everyone’s favourite Norse God personified and they’ve landed Kenneth Branagh to helm the movie version, a classic Shakespearian performer and director who should be fairly confident at pitching Thor's particular mythical make-up against a modern setting and running with it and not looking back.

And he doesn’t dissapoint. The magic of “the Gods” and the science as personified by S.H.I.E.L.D fit quite snuggly with each other, slipped past the audience with dialogue that at once highlights their differences and validates these differences by calling attention to their similarities. But, thankfully, Branagh doesn’t let this get in the way of telling an entertaining yarn at a cracking pace and Thor (brilliantly played by Chris Hemsworth who was also good as his brief turn as Captain Kirks ill-fated father in the recent Star Trek movie) and his buddies seem to derive more from Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood in their attitude than any Shakesperian influences... although I have to say that this is probably because I’m almost entirely unfamiliar with the works of the English Bard myself rather than there not actually being any parallels. There’s even a familiar “routine” from Arthurian legend in it in which the God of Marvel Comics himself, Stan Lee, makes a memorable cameo appearance.

Another thing which Branagh does, which hardly any of the Marvel movies have been doing recently, is to take that basic hurl-you-into-the-excitement-first-and-then-flashback-to-the-set-up style of telling stories in “the MIghty Marvel Manner” which I talked about earlier. This movie does start off quite a ways into the plot with Thor’s “arrival” on earth and the introduction of Natalie Portman as the poster girl for science and reason and, of course, our heroes new love interest. It then, however, flashes back to set up the world of Gods from which Thor harkens and we see the beginnings of the insidious, twisted plot of his step-brother Loki and the stripping of Thor’s powers by Odin, played with much fire and brimstone by Anthony Hopkins. Once the storyline has caught up with the opening sequence again, the thing crackles along at a fair old pace and makes good on the post-end credits sequence from Iron Man 2 with Agent Coulson once again representing S.H.I.E.L.D as Thor tries to reclaim his hammer and his power and a mechanical destroyer that seems to be based on Gort from the original film The Day The Earth Stood Still (and probably was, if it derives from the comics) is sent to despatch Thor and his chums who have illegally travelled to earth to rescue him.

So some cracking special effects (which even look half-good in 3D on the cinema release), good plotting and scripting, and some great acting by the likes of the leads bolstered by the always fine acting talents of Stellan Skarsgård (who is a much more respected actor now that everyone’s forgotten his stints in movies such as Anita: The Shocking Account Of A Young Nymphomaniac opposite soft-porn queen Christina Lindberg) and the charismatic presence of a young actress called Kat Dennings. There’s even an un-named cameo appearance by another member of The Avengers, Hawkeye (out of costume)... so I’m assuming he’ll be in the new movie next year?

And, of course, stay around after the final credits have played out to see Stellan Skarsgård and yet another post-credits cameo by Samuel Jackson (as Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D) to lead us in to The Avengers movie. Also, it’s worth staying around for this sequence to see the return of one of the other characters from this movie... I’m not saying which one as naming him will kind of give the game away a little if you’ve not seen Thor yet.

All this and a great score by regular Brannagh composer Partrick Doyle which, if not as Korngoldian as I would have liked considering the attitude of many of the characters in this movie, is certainly not fumbling any balls and gives a good, supporting sound to the proceedings.

All in all then, a good night out at the movies. By Odins beard, see it before it vanishes.

Doctor Who: The Curse of the Black Spot

Under The Spotlight

Doctor Who: The Curse of the Black Spot

Airdate: May 7th 2011. UK. BBC1

Warning: Avast there me lovelies. There be spoilers laying in these uncharted waters! I mean it... the "twists" were so obvious that I need to highlight them to criticise them. Sorry!

Okay... that wasn’t too terrible. A bit obvious and full of holes but certainly not a bad episode. And I think the edges of Moffet’s game plan are just beginning to sail into view in this episode.

So okay, we have a disappearing or possibly dead pirate who has been taken by “the demon” in the pre-credits section which culminates with The Doctor, Amy and Rory ascending from the bowels of the ship and facing the remaining pirate crew of a vessel that has been stranded in a still ocean for many days with a "demonic" entity which has been slowly picking off the crew. “Yo ho ho!” says The Doctor... “Or do pirates not really say that” (or some such, I can’t remember the exact line and I can’t be bothered to consult the modern oracle of miss it and it’s gone truth and knowledge known as the i-player - so sue me!). Anyway... what I’m trying to say here is... not a bad opening and so cue the music and credits (wish they’d get rid of those awful lightning strikes and the dumb ass re-arrangement of the intro to the Ron Grainer theme though).

This is actually quite a classic piece of Doctor Who storytelling as people are picked off one by one while The Doctor is figuring out how to put things right. I’m thinking of stories like The Moonbase now (novelised as Doctor Who and the Cybermen) which have common themes of plague hiding a malevolent force which, in the case of tonights story, is actually benign... but if you’d have been paying attention to the early parts of the episode you would already know that.

That is to say...

When the first pirate marked for death alongside Rory by being “plagued” with a black spot went to the “demonic” singing siren (played by Lily Cole who was so wonderful in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) and was instantly vapourised, supposedly, I reckon at least half the audience (and certainly me) was thinking “oh... nothing left behind... some kind of teleportation device then?" And of course, that’s exactly what this turned out to be... The pirates interpretation of events was that when one of them was even slightly cut, a demon could smell the blood and take them away. But the explanation - oh wait! Please! Don’t be reading any further if you havent seen it yet... watch the damn thing and work it out for yourself, it’s not exactly a hard one this week... but please come back and read the rest of this review.

Now where was I? Oh, yeah. In reality this was nothing but a lonely equivalent of the holographic sick-bay doctor from Star Trek Voyager from a similarly stranded (crewless... they all died) ship occupying the exact same place in a different dimension and teleporting any injured crewmen to the other ship for treatment. Now the teleportation and lack of hostility on the part of the “siren” in this episode were all easily worked out in the first 10 minutes or so... so that’s not good.

But I tell you what was good! Amy Pond in pirate coat and hat swinging a cutlass and swinging from a rope. That was cool. Nice to see some good old buckling of the swashes in a regular, modern TV show for once.., even if it was quite brief. And come to think of it... I don’t remember having seen any old timey non-space style pirates in Doctor Who before... I’m sure there must have been occurrences, I just can’t remember any off hand... I’m sure somebody on Twitter will let me know about it though.

And did I mention that we’re beginning to see more of Moffet’s plan coming to fruition? Well I think what’s going on here, structurally at any rate, is that... well, as you may or may not know, this years series of Doctor Who is being split into two parts to give it... um... more exposure over the year. Now the cynic in me says that this is just part one of the BBC game plan to ultimately reduce the number of Doctor Who episodes per year to six or seven due to... well... not wanting to pay so much for it. At the first sniff of that I’m sure a gazillion fans will forcefully voice their displeasure at that outcome. I still haven’t forgiven them for the final year of Tennant’s reign as The Doctor being cut to five specials... especially when those last two episodes were pretty much the weakest episodes of the previous five years. Quick note to the BBC... if you want to increase the exposure of Doctor Who and not have the “fans” wait so long between series breaks... make each series 24 episodes long! You know... like in the old days?

I can’t help but notice they’re releasing a boxed set of just the first half of the season this year... hmmm.... it’s almost like they want to jack up the price slightly and make us buy the new series in two halfs for much more money. No... that can’t be right... I’m way too cynical here methinks.

Anyway, where was I... again? Oh yeah... so look, Moffet knows he’s producing a season of two halves now so what we’ve actually got now is two different recurring story threads coming in to haunt us... and that’s not including (or very well and probably is including, actually) the River Song stuff.

So we have The Doctors death which is alluded to very blatantly and on numerous times in this episode... that’s one thread. And we have that “dreamlike” woman with the eyepatch checking in on Amy again and then winking back out of existence who I predicted would be back from last week's review... it’s like the whole series is taking place in Amy’s head and none of it is real (or is real but now she’s in a coma reliving it)... I hope not because that really would be a letdown, Anyway... so we’ve got these two threads and they’re possibly linked but we have two season finales that I can see... so I’m wondering now if one of these threads will be resolved in four weeks time (or seem to be) and the other part will be picked up as a final solution endgame which will link in both these little dangling carrots and possibly tie in River Song’s past at the same time. Quite possible... in fact highly probable... but I know I’m kinda getting a little tired of this kind of plotting now. It’s like the writers are trying to pander to the expectations stoked from last years series by summoning up the same kind of, admittedly effective, ingredients again like modern Hollywood sequels to successful films tend to do. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it is a noble mentality to have... but possibly not when that same approach straight-jackets you in to a particular type of storytelling and creativity goes out the window a little bit.

Another bad thing was a terrible mistake in the continuity... or so it seems anyway. At one point a little boy cuts a pirate and leaves him open to “The Curse of the Black Spot”. The Doctor and the pirate captain then go off to have their own little adventure (where they kind of lose the TARDIS) and when they reunite with the others the specific pirate seems to have dropped out of continuity completely. Just winked out of existence without any help from the siren/surgeon who is inadvertently terrorising the crew of the ship. Now I’d like to think that this wasn’t a terrible continuity blunder that the producers and director created by cutting out an explanatory scene and which they hoped the audience wouldn’t notice. Maybe these continuity blunders are going to be a regular thing, say, and the extra people are “visitors” to Amy’s brain while she lays in some sort of coma? But I worry about that because, honestly, I think they just may be absolutely shoddy continuity errors on the part of a time cut or, worse, a censorship issue. Time will tell I guess.

Now this may seem like a very critical review of this episode but, honestly, it’s really not meant to be. It’s actually quite a fun and entertaining episode and, despite any possible faults, was a lot of an easier and relaxing watch than, say, last weeks episode. And with more delights to look forward too by all accounts. I believe next weeks episode has been penned by the great fantasy writer Neil Gaiman... so I’m looking forward to that one quite a bit, I must say. I’m expecting it to be quite fairytale-like but, you know, fairly dark... which is not a bad thing to aspire to when you’re writing one of the great British Science Fiction characters of all time I guess. There are worse approaches you can take... I just hope we don’t see some of them occurring this season.

Fingers crossed, eh?

The Green Slime

Ooze Next?

The Green Slime USA/Japan/Australia 1968

Directed by Kinji Fukasaku

Warner Archives Region 1

I have mixed feelings when it comes to these new “on-demand” DVD labels like Warner Archives.

On the one hand, since I can assume they're fairly small runs by definition and bare bones releases with presumably less chasing around to do, then these things should be fairly cheap and quick to produce... and that saving should surely be passed along to the poor, long suffering customer? But no, DVDs from these kinds of labels are costing us several dollars more than a standard DVD! Note to companies who are releasing these things... “You’re not the Criterion Collection” (and with Criterion, you more than get back what you payed for). So that’s a big minus for these releases.

On the other hand... because of these releases I now have a version of Doc Savage (aka one of the greatest movies ever made) in its original widescreen format like it was when I saw it in the cinema back in ‘75. So that’s pretty cool. That’s a big plus for these archive editions right there. Have no fear, the Man of Bronze is here... right here... on my DVD shelf!

Back on the one hand, however... Damn! Now I’ll never get a boxed 10 disc edition of Doc Savage with 100 hours of extra bonus materials, isolated score, posters, souvenir booklets and lobby card facsimiles. Why the hell not? It is one of the greatest movies ever made, after all! That’s another big minus just there.

When all is said and done, however, Warner Archives and other labels of that nature have us, the paying customer, over a barrel because this is the only way to get some of the films we want right now... which sucks because even though I already had two bootlegs of Doc Savage of varying quality (and it has to be said, better extras and better designed menus than the official Warners Archive version) the Warner’s one is the only way you can get that in its original aspect ratio.

But this post is not about Doc Savage... surprisingly... if you’ve made it this far in. This is about another movie I’ve wanted to see for a long time and haven’t been able to acquire until Warners released the longer, American cut of this movie (as opposed to the shorter Japanese cut... which is an unusual twist in itself)... The Green Slime.

I love dodgy science fiction and this movie is as old as I am (I was literally born the same year this movie was released in Japan). I’ve been after this for a while... mainly for two reasons. Reason number one is that it’s directed by Kinji Fukasaku (who went on in later life to direct the fantastic Battle Royale) and reason number two is because I expected it to be a wacky, neon-toned Toho-style kaiju eiga like Invasion of the Astro Monsters or Matango! Attack of the Mushroom People or Frankenstein Conquers the World.

Well, in the first instance at least, I was right, although I didn’t realise it was made in conjunction with the USA/Australia with a cast of Americans/Australians and, therefore, I’d really be surprised if there wasn’t some hefty intervention somewhere along the line when it came to the look and feel of production... although the countries who had stakes in this would presumably be going to Japan because they liked the product which was coming out of there at the time.

Secondly, the monsters in this movie (which seem to be predominantly red once they’ve spawned from the green slime and not green like you see on the posters) are about the only thing that’s actually fun about this movie. This is not a movie I’d necessarily put on to have a good time. In fact, it’s not a movie I’d possibly put on to watch ever again to be honest... but let me not get ahead of myself here.

The Green Slime teams up two space jockeys who formerly fell out over a woman, who is played by the attractively gorgeous Luciana Paluzzi (one of the stunning Bond girls of Thunderball) in a wasted opportunity to sex up the film. She is engaged to marry one of them in a few days but first she must assist them in her capacity as doctor of the Gamma Space Station while they attempt, with their crew, to blow up an asteroid which is heading for a collision course with earth. There’s definitely a love triangle here and also some kind of male-bonding - "I’ll lay down my life for you but don’t tell me what to do or I’ll fight you to the death" - thing going on here too. Both elements are unnecessary and badly handled by all involved in a pedestrian acting job which might well be a direct result of attempting to perform with a ham-fisted script.

Mission is accomplished during a fairly lumbering first half an hour but, unbeknown to the spaced-up crew, a splash of living space slime has been brought back to the space station by accident and it doesn’t take long for it to spawn a red child-or-small-person-in-suit creature with a single eyeball and a couple of tentacles which make it look a little like a... well... a Cthulhu plushie I guess. It’s kinda cute but it does have a tendency to electrocute people while feeding off of the power in the space station in order to spawn more green slime and, soon after, more red pseudo-Cthulhu playmates. The film then becomes an exercise in warding off said monsters and trying to lead them collectively into various traps... peppered with male posturing and lots of shouting between our two lead, male protagonists... not as great as it sounds in the case of this movie I’m afraid.

The film has a few good things such as some okay miniatures and the aforementioned monsters and their squeaky-dog-toy style vocalisations... and speaking of vocalisations, the opening title song, The Green Slime is an outrageous pleasure too. All in all though, out of all the kaiju eiga I’ve seen over the years, this is probably the worst I’ve seen. I’m glad I’ve seen it but I can’t say I’m really any better off for having done so... other than having that particular itch scratched.

I think in summing up, I’d have to use a bit of marketing cleverness from a new release movie called Rubber (which I reviewed here) which has the tagline... “The best killer tyre movie you’ll ever see”, just to hammer home the point of that movie having a particularly unique plot line. Well if I was asked to apply similar logic to The Green Slime then I’d have to go on record as pointing out the this was not the best killer green slime movie I’ve ever seen... that little nugget would have to go out with another, much more impressive Japanese monster movie I saw a year or so ago, The H-Man. Check that one out (it "out blobs" The Blob) and leave this one alone. There’s plenty of good slime to go around.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

Blanc-Sec Statements

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

France 2010

Directed by Luc Besson

Playing at cinemas across the UK now.

You know, I first saw the trailer for this movie over a year ago... and since that time I’ve been absolutely ravenous to see it. I like Luc Besson even at the worst of times (I have fond memories of going to the old Lumiere cinema as it was then in St. Martin’s Lane back in 1990 five weekends in a row just to watch Nikita over and over again). I’m quite used to both the brilliance of Besson and, to be fair, the way in which he tends to, for the most part, gloss over the characters and concentrate more on the slick surface details of a story in a graceful tribute to the triumph of style over content. Perhaps not the best modus operandi but one which Besson can usually make very credible and acceptable. His films have mostly, with the possible exceptions of the aforementioned Nikita and also The Big Blue, been about the crash bang wallop of the incidents which define his characters, rather than an exploration of the characters themselves (and even in Nikita and The Big Blue these characters are still quite broadly written in UPPER CASE letters in case you are in danger of seeing something more subtle).

The one possible exception of recent years I can think of might be Angel-A, but I’ve only seen that one the once at the cinema so will need to catch that again before I can firmly make that claim.

Now the trailer for The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec is fantastic. Based on a comic book originating from Belgium/France, it highlights a series of exploits with the title character, a no-nonsense, no shilly-shallying adventuress of a woman as she encounters Egyptian mummies and a troublesome Pterodactyl. Right up my street and anyone who knows me would instantly know that this is the kind of movie I would be gagging to see.

However, alarm bells began ringing shortly after because, well... it’s now taken over a year since its French cinema release to reach these shores and that can often be the sign of a terrible movie where interested film companies are umming and ahhing as to whether to bother releasing it in other territories or not. On the other hand, it could just mean that any of the companies in question have no idea how to market the movie and it’s a gem of a masterpiece waiting to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public.

Having now seen this movie, it gives me no real pleasure to report that, although this is a far cry from a terrible movie... it’s also no gem. The story hangs together well enough but it often seems quite anti-climactic... which I think is no mean achievement when you have some quite humorous reanimated mummies and a flying dinosaur added in to the mix. The characters are, again, very broad and the style becomes almost slapstick in some scenes. I’ve never read the comics (I believe they’re being translated into English for a release in a few months time, presumably to coincide with the DVD release) and I realise that the problems of the characters may well be due to a dogged determination to stick to the style of the original material on Besson’s part. If so... well done Mr. Besson.

There are some nice action scenes in this movie, something Besson always does well, but they are tempered with an over cuteness or twee-ness which tends to nullify, at least for this viewer, any investment in the characters. Don’t get me wrong, Adele herself is adorable but the other characters, for the most part, seem thrown in the shade when compared to her... with the exception of one of the reanimated mummies who is actually quite funny and companionable and gives the film some much needed lift for the last half hour or so.

Louise Bourgoin is absolutely brilliant as Adele and I’m amazed that we got some nice moments of nudity with her too, in a movie which only carries a 12 rating over here... are our censors finally calming down a little? However, I could have really done without the constant “woman of many disguises” rescue attempts as she tries to get her friend out of jail... it’s like the worst elements of the first (and otherwise totally brilliant, shame about the sequel) Fletch movie... only done in French. I just hope that comes straight out of the comic or I will be very annoyed that Mr. Besson saw fit to inflict those scenes on his poor audience.

But there are some nice things too... the tomb raiding scene in Egypt may bring back memories of the brilliant opening sequence of Besson’s The Fifth Element to some... although it doesn’t have those cool, mechanically guised lumbering aliens which that movie had. However, I must just comment here that, if you liked The Fifth Element then you should have absolutely no problem whatsoever with enjoying The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec which is vastly superior to the former film because, unlike said movie, it doesn’t make the tremendously huge mistake of putting Chris Tucker in it to completely kill off and bleed anything of any entertainment value out of the movie. This is a good thing. If Luc Besson has learnt anything in the intervening years it’s this... do not put Chris Tucker in your movie!

Another nice thing about this movie is that it sees the return of the great collaboration between Besson and his once regular composer Eric Serra. Finally a new Eric Serra score for a Luc Besson movie... if there’s anything worth trumpeting about this film it’s that. And it’s a nice little score too with some interesting pseudo-Egyptian techno-Serra noodlings which make for a very interesting listen... especially on the nicely designed, side scrolling Egyptianesque credits. Good work Eric!

Ultimately this is a film which doesn’t really quite work... but who cares because there’s a sense of fun, even in its worst misfires, which will help lift the duldrums from your mood... even if it is froth which is quick to dissappear. This is still going to be a definite DVD purchase for me when it comes out and so even though I was a trifle disappointed with it, I’m still happy to repeat watch this thing.

And if further recommendation is needed to all you old school Besson fans out there to dip your toes in the fascinating world of Adèle Blanc-Sec... I’ll repeat this now so you can view it safe in this knowledge... Chris Tucker does not turn up in this movie!

Rubber

Tyre Straits

Rubber

France 2011

Directed by Quentin Dupieux

Optimum Region 2

A warning of sorts: Rubber is not the kind of movie you can talk about without giving some things away. If you need to go in completely blind then please ignore this post for now... and then come back here, read it and leave a comment after ;-)

I’d been waiting for Rubber to hit UK cinemas ever since I’d heard of its existence some months ago but, alas, it seems to have gone straight-to-DVD over here. This is a pity because I really wanted to watch this one with an audience to gauge their reaction to it... but still, if DVD is the only way I can get to see it over here...

This is how Rubber starts off...

Shots of chairs in a desert and then a guy holding a fistful of binoculars is seen waiting at one end of what seems to be a scattered row of chairs. A car pulls up and slowly and surely manages to knock over every chair... the trunk of the car opens and a man wearing a police uniform gets out, dumps his glasses, grabs a glass of water and starts talking to the camera... “In the Stephen Spielberg movie ET, why is the alien brown? No reason.” This is the start of a 3 minute ranting diatribe against the dogged expectation of meaning in everyday life (using lots of neat movie examples covering all kinds of movies from Love Story to Polanski’s The Pianist) and a mantra for the cult of “No reason.” After which the policeman pours the undrunk water onto the ground (Why did he do that? No reason, is my guess).

Well... an insistence on a philosophy that champions a lack of the coherence of minutia is actually a pretty good way of starting off a movie where a rubber tyre from a car pulls itself up from where it’s been half buried in the sand of the desert and becomes self aware... no reason to provide any hows or whys in this particular show after hearing that little soliloquy.

Binoculars are then issued to a group of people who are a metaphor for our camera eye and with these binoculars they will watch the events of the movie play out and then... the tyre awakes. This is interesting because the audience on screen is doubling as the viewer of the movie at the cinema or at home on DVD and this means that you’ve already got some kind of “them or us” bond going with this particular group of spectators... and this audience will dwindle in number as the movie progresses. And dwindle is perhaps a bit of an understatement considering what happens to them.

After seeing the trailer of Rubber a few months ago and becoming familiar with the concept of a tyre waking up and going on a killing spree (it can blow up things with its psychokinetic abilities... such as birds, bunnies and most definitely people) I expected Rubber to be a quirky, one joke wonder which was probably worth watching once but... surely... the joke (like the tread on the films main protagonist, Robert the tyre) will wear thin after a while. But no... I was surprised, delighted and impressed to find that this movie is both quirky and sincere enough to engage the viewer for the full length of its running time... and seriously, it could even have been a little longer.

Rubber is not just the story of the tire though... a tire which develops a crush on a girl, follows her, takes a shower, watches TV and kills people. Oh, no... at least as important is the metatextual elaboration on the content of the movie by an audience (and soon a starving audience) and the responding commentary from the policeman character (and his little helper) within the main text as he observes and, quite terminally, manipulates that audience in a kind of backwards and forwards as text and subtext kind of battle for supremacy and you try to work out which, if any, is this movies representation of a shared reality.

This has the potential to get boring very quickly but it never does... the acting is engaging, the characters are quirky and are happy to play in a world which is neither owned or created by any illusion of a consistent reality and which has no creator other than, presumably, the guy who wrote the script in the first place. This film also has lots of gore (lots of exploding heads in this one) and an observed plot which just gets sillier and sillier as the film progresses. There’s really not much not to like in this movie unless you’re cursed with one of those heads that doesn’t easily accept deviations from a linear narrative. This film does have an ending (of sorts) but it doesn’t necessarily follow any logical or rational set up from within what I shall hesitantly call the main storyline... for want of a better term.

The soundtrack is quite quirky too and pitches against some of the dialogue punctuation like an homage to early Hal Hartley features in some respects but which is at its most memorable when casually aping John Carpenters early scores. But in no way does it try to bolster the emotional content of the movie like the majority of scores try to do these days... it doesn’t at any time collapse under its own weight. It’s quite light and buoyant and this does help maintain the surreal absurdity of the events depicted therein.

And that’s all I can really say about this movie without spoiling it too much I guess. It’s witty, quite dark, vague in its intentions (apart from maybe the ending which is very much a metaphor for a call to arms for the rise of independent film against the big studios) and honestly about as entertaining as it can possibly get with a bonkers premise like this.

Fans of cinema should love this movie. Fans of directors like Bunuel, Jodorosky, Lynch and Svankmajer should love it even more.

But you... yeah you reading this here article. Why should you go and watch this movie?

Oh... you know... no reason.