Category: Film Review

Quick movie Blu-Ray review round-up..

Posted by Martyn Drake – August 22, 2010

Year One: avoid.

Monsters Vs Aliens: entertaining, well-animated and good voice acting.

Bruno: much better than I was expecting, and despite obvious stereotyping has a heart.

Battlestar Galactica – The Plan: superb! Fills in the gaps nicely and confirms that Dean Stockwell was the perfect choice to play Cavil.

Land of the Lost: Very silly, but good fun and some excellent visual effects and animatronics.

Men Who Stare At Goats: Very funny and bizarre film. Well worth watching. George Clooney on top form.

MicMacs: Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest and long awaited film after A Very Long Enagement is wonderfully French, surreal, funny, visually stunning and absolutely wonderful. Love it to bits!

Moon: Duncan Jones’ sci-fi masterpiece with Sam Rockwell in lead roles. Well crafted story, fantastic sets and gorgeous miniatures and visual effects. Love the soundtrack too!

Night at the Museum 2: Okay. Hank Azaria steals the show on this one, but otherwise it’s a bit like a slightly funnier version of The Mummy.

The Hangover: Very solid comedy. A few choice laughs.

Zombieland: Hated the trailers initially, but love the film. Features one of the best cameos – Bill Murray really getting into it good and proper. So the zombies run – it’s still a good film!

Scott Pilgrim versus Kick-Ass

Posted by Martyn Drake – June 13, 2010

As much as I loved and enjoyed the Vaughn/Goldman adaptation of Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass, one cannot help but wonder if another comic book adaptation, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is likely to kick Kick-Ass’ ass.

Scott Pilgrim has a lot going for it. It’s directed by Edgar Wright, whose work on Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz has guaranteed him to be the perfect choice as director for this movie (and is produced by Nira Park who has been involved in all of the above too). I’ve loved all of his previous work which is fresh, original and hugely entertaining. So SP should be a winner right from the start. It also has one of the craziest ideas I’ve ever encountered: boy meets girl and has to face seven of her ex-boyfriends in fights to order win her over – except these fight sequences are outrageous video-game style fights with people being sent flying, Asterix-on-magic-potion-like, into towers and walls – quite literally. So we’ve got some potential decent outlandish visual effects sequences to look forward to. I would probably say Scott Pilgrim is likely to be a better film, visually, than Kick-Ass.

Either way, only time will tell if Scott Pilgrim can kick Kick-Ass’ ass, but I’m putting money on it that it probably will. One company won’t mind too much – like Kick-Ass, Scott Pilgrim is being distributed by Universal Pictures.

Terminator Salvation is the Savlon of the Terminator franchise..

Posted by Martyn Drake – June 10, 2010

.. that is to say, it makes everything better after the dreadful Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!

Salvation is definitely a vast improvement despite handled by a director with just three letters to his name (I’m just kidding – McG does a fine job – yes, that statement may probably shock you, but I have nothing against the guy’s work at all). For starters the visual effects are excellent, but then again they should be given that it’s being handled by the world’s most expensive and sought after VFX house: ILM. They actually spend some money on physical terminator effects courtesy of the Stan Winston Studio and it looks great.

Where Salvation lets itself down is in the storyline. How the hell did Cyberdyne develop something technically superior back in the early 2000s that’s actually BETTER than the T-101 and T-800s that were sent back in time to try and eradicate Sarah Connor and Co.? They weren’t to know that Skynet was going to become self-aware, so they must have perfected Marcus’ infrastructure prior to this. Unless a bit of sneaky time travelling DID happen since Dr. Kogan, in Skynet form, clearly stated why he was created and that couldn’t have happened unless Kogan, back in human form (or WAS SHE?), came from the future.

I also fail to understand what Skynet would do once humans are completely eradicated. Would the Terminators become self-aware and start building themselves houses and have tea parties with the Hunter Killers? Seriously – what would it do? It’d be bored, that’s what. Essentially it’ll be talking only to itself (after all it controls *everything*) unless it made it’s army self-aware as well. Then it’d probably start a war with them itself just to pass the time.

Salvation is a entertaining film, and brings back a sense of grandeur and plot completely missing from T3 (which was just a recycling exercise in my opinion). Christian Bale is decent enough as John Connor and Sam Worthington is fine as Marcus Wright (before buggering off to Pandora to become a member of the Blue Men Group). Expect eye candy from the visual effects (including an early sequence which very much reminded me of the car hijacking from Children of Men – a “one take” masterpiece which I think works extremely well – hugely impressed) and just enough story to be engaging.

The Fantastic Fantastic Mr. Fox

Posted by Martyn Drake – April 22, 2010

Movie trailers are cheeky buggers. They’re there to entice you into watching the films they’re advertising. Yet they must be one of the most difficult aspects of any part of the movie making process because for me they can do quite the opposite even if it’s a film that I know I’m likely to enjoy.

This was the problem with Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox – his take on the Roald Dahl classic. The trailer revealed a stop animation process that was so far removed from the smoothness that the likes of Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas and Neil Gaiman’s Caroline) and Mark Johnson and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, the latter which was shot at Three Mills Studios (and MPC, for whom I was working for at the time, provided the visual effects). The thing seemed to lack depth. It short: it sucked.

It sucked until I started watching the entire film on Blu-Ray. It stopped sucking from the first frame. After 10 minutes I was enraptured by the style, the voice acting, the puppet acting. Everything. The animation is exceptional even though the style is simplistic and imperfect. In the accompanying documentary, Wes Anderson states that he is a fan of the original King Kong film, and in that of the animation revealed the animator’s presence as the fingers would press down on the fur during each and every frame. He *wanted* that imperfection for his own film. And we get it in abundance here as the puppets utilise proper hair rather than it being moulded from some synthetic substance. Damn it – it shouldn’t work – it’s imperfect. But it just DOES. As does the facial and lip sync – all working together in perfect harmony. These deliberately imperfect puppets come alive at the hands of the animators.

Then there are the voices of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Jason Schartzman, Michael Gambon and many others. All of them working together so well you’d hardly think that it’s performance from two beings – the voice actor and the animator. It all blends together so well. Clooney in particular is excellent.

I’m also surprised that this isn’t a film that’s aimed at kids. It’s actually very adult oriented in it’s approach, but both adults and (older) kids can enjoy this film. I especially liked that every single swear word utter is merely just “Cuss” (including graffiti on the town’s walls). I liked that this is a film that does not talk down to anybody.

This is by far one of the best animated films I’ve seen in a long while. It’s a pity that the trailer initially let it down for me, but so glad I forged ahead and saw the film. Oh, and kudos to my former colleagues (most of whom had worked or still work at Lip Sync Post) for the excellent visual effects work.

Daily Mail’s verdict on Kick-Ass: “Evil”

Posted by Martyn Drake – April 2, 2010

Some spoilers ahoy, so if you don’t want to be spoiled, go read the Daily Mail. Oh. Mind you, given the quality of the journalism in that rag, it’s all made up anyway..

Best review of the day, if not the last few years, has to be this complete load of trollop from the Daily Mail’s film critic, Christopher Tookey. In it, he says that:

“It deliberately sells a perniciously sexualised view of children and glorifies violence, especially knife and gun crime, in a way that makes it one of the most deeply cynical, shamelessly irresponsible films ever.”

Eh? It seels a perniciously sexualised view of children? Clearly Mr. Tookey and I have not been watching the same film! The only sexuality this film aligns itself to is that of mid-late teenagers who, at that age, are wanting girlfriends and wanting to look cool. This film is no different that many teenage comedies in that respect (American Pie, etc.). If he’s referring to Hit-Girl, I really cannot understand the comparison at all. Unless Tookey is harbouring dark and dangerous thoughts.

As for:

“The plot is an unimaginative clone of Spider-Man 2, and the screenplay – by director Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman, wife of comic-book enthusiast Jonathan Ross – conforms slavishly to the cliched norms of Hollywood action movies by working towards not one but two huge action set-pieces at its climax.”

Spider-man 2? Clone? Again, Mr. Tookey and I must watch different movies. Perhaps he refers to the end of the Kick-Ass which offers a similar but most definitely not a clone of son potentially avenging the death of his father. But that sort of thing has been going on in stories – including Shakespeare – for hundreds of years anyway. I can’t see how you can compare a single element in one movie to that of the entire plot of another.

“The movie’s writers want us to see Hit-Girl not only as cool, but also sexy, like an even younger version of the baby- faced Oriental assassin in Tarantino’s Kill Bill 1. Paedophiles are going to adore her.”

This is the real WTF moment and I fail to understand how the hell Tookey can derive at this thought. Again, this guy must really harbour some dark and terrible thoughts that I don’t even want to contemplate further. He goes on to quote child abuse figures and makes a big play for it when there is absolutely nothing in this movie that comes close to offer sexually suggestive imagery involving younger children. Hit-Girl dressed in a school uniform is there to trick the gangsters into feeling sorry for her (as she comes into the building crying). Once their confidence is gained, she shoots them. That’s all there is to it.

So there you are. A terrible review in more ways than one. But kudos to Millar, Vaughn and Goldman for attracting the wrath of the Daily Mail. A verdict of “evil” is fantastic, to be honest, and I hope they put that quote on the DVD and Blu-Ray when the film is released on those formats.

The thing about the Daily Mail and the Ross clan is that it’s a bit like a Roadrunner cartoon. The Daily Mail (or Paul Dacre) is essentially Wyle E. Coyote and Jonathan Ross is the Roadrunner. Whatever crazy antics that Wyle E. Coyote gets up to in attempting to capture Roadrunner always fails, leaving the Coyote injured, dead or embarrassed and the Roadrunner to bask in glory and live another day, unhindered.

Meep! Meep!

Kick-Ass is a Hit, Girl

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 26, 2010

Lame blog titles aside, I am going to be astonishingly brown-nosey on this post towards the team behind Kick-Ass because they’re created a HUGELY entertaining film that for two hours makes you laugh, cry, cower and (almost) clap. Mark Millar has done it again by creating an astonishingly diverse universe populated by interesting characters. Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn have taken Mark’s universe and expanded it to give it proper three dimensions (as opposed to 3D used by every bloody studio around at the moment in the hopes it’ll attract audience – well studios, pay attention to Vaughn and Goldman who can do three dimensions without cheap gimmickry – it’s called the STORY).

I’ll post a more in-depth review later, but my goodness I’ve not enjoyed a film more as I have done with Kick-Ass. Not as gruesome as I expected (a plus point – I was expecting something along the lines of Monty Python blood gushing), and much funnier too, Kick-Ass will delight and shock in equal measures. As the late, great Kenny Everett used to say, “It’s all done in the BEST possible taste!”.