(Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, 2013)
Self-indulgent but largely in a good way, This Is The End takes a load of actors most famous for their work in comedy, asks them to play "themselves", then maroons them inside a designer-pretentious modern L.A. house while the End of Days happens outside.
Some of what follows is very, very funny.
It starts off a quite different movie. Jay Baruchel, Seth Rogen's old friend from Canada, arrives for a week staying with his friend in L.A. Baruchel plays the only "normal" character in the film, his responses recognisable and relatively convincing, and he is reluctant to go to the showbiz party at James Franco's fancy new house.
Seth drags him along, and there is a brilliant party scene filled with excrutiating scenes of awkwardness, broad comedy as a coked-up Michael Cera debauches himself, some skillfully integrated characterisation and a series of dazzling cameos.
Then beams of light crack open the sky and lift people into the heavens, an earthquake strikes, a massive hole opens up in the ground outside swallowing up most of the party-goers, fires consume Hollywood, and the group retreat to Franco's house to wait it out.
After that its a study of friendship under pressure, with these exaggerated personalities and their big egos clashing over how to divide up the food, who sleeps where, the nature of the situation and who goes out for supplies.
There are a few hilarious sequences - a conversation about not seeming "rapey" overheard by Emma Watson, for instance, pretty much every conversation involving Danny McBride, playing his usual boorish creep, and when the situation ventures into horror territory there is a surprising amount of comic mileage in scenes of the men running around screaming in terror. But it is about 40 minutes too long, many of the comic ideas fall flat, and there is an inevitable air of smugness to it all.
That however comes hand in hand with audacity and bravery - this is a crazy idea for a film, but it works, and is even occasionally inspired. Plus you get to see James Franco (as game as the entire cast) eaten by cannibals.
Showing posts with label Apocalypse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Apocalypse. Show all posts
Friday, 20 September 2013
Sunday, 14 April 2013
OBLIVION
(Joseph Kosinski, 2013)
At times, Oblivion feels as if it has been made entirely from bits of other movies. Here's some Wall-E, over here. There's a bit of The Matrix, over there. A little Independence Day (itself made up of other movies) over there too, beside a bit of Planet of the Apes, some Omega Man, a little Moon and numerous others too. They come to mind either because of an idea, a dramatic moment or an image, often something that feels familiar, though you can't quite recall where you've seen it before. And though it sounds like a bad thing, being derivative doesn't automatically have to be. It depends on just how well a filmmaker uses the ideas that influence them.
And Kosinski definitely has some talent. Just like his last film, Tron: Legacy, Oblivion is utterly breathtaking for long stretches. When his camera is sweeping across the ruined surface of a future earth devastated by war with an alien invader and M83's lush electronic score is loud enough to shake the cinema, it feels like a brilliant piece of sensual, visceral cinema.
Unfortunately, he is on far less sure ground with narrative. Not that Oblivion is bad. It works throughout, establishing its world with confidence and even boldness in a brief opening narration and montage. In this world, Jack Harper (Tom Cruise, as solidly movie star as ever) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough, doing well with a difficult role) are a "mop up crew", living together on a station in the clouds. Humanity has fled their ruined homeworld for Titan, Saturn's Largest moon, but Jack and Victoria are nearing the end of a long duty back on Earth, overseeing the huge machines generating energy from the oceans. Some of the alien invaders ("Skavs") remain on the surface, raiding at night, and Jack maintains the combat drones that keep them in check. But he has been having troubling dreams that resemble memories, and is unusually curious about the world before the war and the activities of the skavs. And then a ship falls from the sky, and its only survivor is human. More intriguing still, she (Olga Kurelyenko) is literally the woman from Jack's dreams.
Kosinski does seem to possess a fine sense of what genre ideas will work in a big spectacle, and his action scenes are integrated into the narrative with intelligence and economy. But Oblivion is still a bit too familiar, and never quite remarkable enough in its own right to surpass its many influences.
The good things about it are all the elements that make it so different from many current sci-fi blockbusters; for instance, it has an appealing strain of poetry running through it. Even if it is a little too awkward and leaden for that poetry to be truly comfortable, the attempt is interesting, and gives Oblivion a dimension denied many such movies.
It is also, despite the epic setting and storyline, quite an intimate piece, with few characters and intense emotions the focus of the story. The central relationships are unusual and compelling - Riseborough's performance is key to this - and they make the story work even when the material is at its most predictable and action-heavy. Truly great science fiction always revolves around an idea or two, and here Oblivion comes up short. It flirts with notions beyond the superficial matters of the narrative, but never develops anything beyond that flirtation, which is a bit of a shame.
But what most will take away from Oblivion is that cool, clear daylight photography of vast stretches of wilderness and M83's brilliant score.
At times, Oblivion feels as if it has been made entirely from bits of other movies. Here's some Wall-E, over here. There's a bit of The Matrix, over there. A little Independence Day (itself made up of other movies) over there too, beside a bit of Planet of the Apes, some Omega Man, a little Moon and numerous others too. They come to mind either because of an idea, a dramatic moment or an image, often something that feels familiar, though you can't quite recall where you've seen it before. And though it sounds like a bad thing, being derivative doesn't automatically have to be. It depends on just how well a filmmaker uses the ideas that influence them.
And Kosinski definitely has some talent. Just like his last film, Tron: Legacy, Oblivion is utterly breathtaking for long stretches. When his camera is sweeping across the ruined surface of a future earth devastated by war with an alien invader and M83's lush electronic score is loud enough to shake the cinema, it feels like a brilliant piece of sensual, visceral cinema.
Unfortunately, he is on far less sure ground with narrative. Not that Oblivion is bad. It works throughout, establishing its world with confidence and even boldness in a brief opening narration and montage. In this world, Jack Harper (Tom Cruise, as solidly movie star as ever) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough, doing well with a difficult role) are a "mop up crew", living together on a station in the clouds. Humanity has fled their ruined homeworld for Titan, Saturn's Largest moon, but Jack and Victoria are nearing the end of a long duty back on Earth, overseeing the huge machines generating energy from the oceans. Some of the alien invaders ("Skavs") remain on the surface, raiding at night, and Jack maintains the combat drones that keep them in check. But he has been having troubling dreams that resemble memories, and is unusually curious about the world before the war and the activities of the skavs. And then a ship falls from the sky, and its only survivor is human. More intriguing still, she (Olga Kurelyenko) is literally the woman from Jack's dreams.
Kosinski does seem to possess a fine sense of what genre ideas will work in a big spectacle, and his action scenes are integrated into the narrative with intelligence and economy. But Oblivion is still a bit too familiar, and never quite remarkable enough in its own right to surpass its many influences.
The good things about it are all the elements that make it so different from many current sci-fi blockbusters; for instance, it has an appealing strain of poetry running through it. Even if it is a little too awkward and leaden for that poetry to be truly comfortable, the attempt is interesting, and gives Oblivion a dimension denied many such movies.
It is also, despite the epic setting and storyline, quite an intimate piece, with few characters and intense emotions the focus of the story. The central relationships are unusual and compelling - Riseborough's performance is key to this - and they make the story work even when the material is at its most predictable and action-heavy. Truly great science fiction always revolves around an idea or two, and here Oblivion comes up short. It flirts with notions beyond the superficial matters of the narrative, but never develops anything beyond that flirtation, which is a bit of a shame.
But what most will take away from Oblivion is that cool, clear daylight photography of vast stretches of wilderness and M83's brilliant score.
Friday, 6 April 2012
VANISHING ON 7TH STREET
(Brad Anderson, 2010)
There's a pleasing shade of John Carpenter to director Brad Anderson's work in the horror genre. It's there in his clever visual economy, and in his use of the edges of the frame, and in the sustained tone of creeping, quiet dread he establishes.
Vanishing on 7th Street even has the sort of premise Carpenter would surely appreciate; an apocalyptic darkness falls upon the world for an instant, and when it lifts, almost everybody is gone. Small piles of clothes litter the ground. The shadows seem alive as the days shrink in length and the few survivors, brandishing flares and flashlights and fleeing the steadily encroaching dark, desperately seek escape. In a touch straight from Carpenter's love of Hawks' Rio Bravo, a few survivors hole up in a bar powered by a stuttering back-up generator.
That is all set up with confidence and aplomb and a fair degree of creepy imagery in the first twenty or so minutes. After that, the film is less successful, a bit talkier than it needs to be as it's players discuss their situation and reveal various emotional backstories, and - a common flaw in apocalyptic movies - settling for a small drama when it's opening had suggested the endlessly epic possibilities of this altered world.
So we settle in for an act at the bar, with Hayden Christenson efficient as the hero and Thandie Newton and John Leguizamo emoting and gurning much more in the character roles.
This is a neat enough B-movie; short, generally well-paced and full of creepy set-pieces, it is another reminder (after the superior Session 9) of Anderson's superb craftsmanship. It admirably refuses explanations - a peek at Leguizamo's book and it's chapter on Dark Matter together with his talk of Croatoan and the Lost Colony are as close as we get - and finds just the right tone for an ending which is pessimistic, but with a single optimistic note and a lovely final image; two children on horseback, riding out of the city.
Hopefully at some point Anderson will get the backing of a big studio and a big budget to make the great movie of which he is evidently capable.
There's a pleasing shade of John Carpenter to director Brad Anderson's work in the horror genre. It's there in his clever visual economy, and in his use of the edges of the frame, and in the sustained tone of creeping, quiet dread he establishes.
Vanishing on 7th Street even has the sort of premise Carpenter would surely appreciate; an apocalyptic darkness falls upon the world for an instant, and when it lifts, almost everybody is gone. Small piles of clothes litter the ground. The shadows seem alive as the days shrink in length and the few survivors, brandishing flares and flashlights and fleeing the steadily encroaching dark, desperately seek escape. In a touch straight from Carpenter's love of Hawks' Rio Bravo, a few survivors hole up in a bar powered by a stuttering back-up generator.
That is all set up with confidence and aplomb and a fair degree of creepy imagery in the first twenty or so minutes. After that, the film is less successful, a bit talkier than it needs to be as it's players discuss their situation and reveal various emotional backstories, and - a common flaw in apocalyptic movies - settling for a small drama when it's opening had suggested the endlessly epic possibilities of this altered world.
So we settle in for an act at the bar, with Hayden Christenson efficient as the hero and Thandie Newton and John Leguizamo emoting and gurning much more in the character roles.
This is a neat enough B-movie; short, generally well-paced and full of creepy set-pieces, it is another reminder (after the superior Session 9) of Anderson's superb craftsmanship. It admirably refuses explanations - a peek at Leguizamo's book and it's chapter on Dark Matter together with his talk of Croatoan and the Lost Colony are as close as we get - and finds just the right tone for an ending which is pessimistic, but with a single optimistic note and a lovely final image; two children on horseback, riding out of the city.
Hopefully at some point Anderson will get the backing of a big studio and a big budget to make the great movie of which he is evidently capable.
Tuesday, 18 October 2011
MELANCHOLIA
(Lars Von Trier, 2011)
Lars Von Trier is a truly dazzling talent. His facility with the cinematic medium is comparable with any director working today, and he pursues his individual interests - obsessions, really - across each film with an impressive focus and intensity. I just wish his obsessions were more interesting. Von Trier suffers from episodes of clinical depression and his last two films, this visually ravishing melodrama and the horror of Antichrist, are both attempts to explore and/or represent this condition in film. Its not that depression isn't interesting - although to those lucky enough never to have been afflicted, it isn't - but Von Trier has little to say about it, instead settling for an impressionistic portrayal of the state itself.
Melancholia is split in two. The first half is a quite brilliant account of a long Wedding reception which displays just how casually Von Trier's exceptional talent is deployed. There's an effortless quality to the way he lays out the players and traces the tensions and strains between them, which centre around Justine, played with a wounded, truthful sullenness by Kirsten Dunst. The bride, Justine cannot shake off the depression threatening to derail the entire celebration despite the efforts of her new groom (Alexander Sarsgaard), worried sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and assertive, confident brother-in-law John (Keifer Sutherland).
She wanders the halls and grounds of John's mansion, sleeping, having a bath, rejecting her new husband a few times, brutally insulting her Boss and having sex with his assistant on a golf course in-between interludes where she returns to the reception and attempts (badly) to play the happy bride. The probable foundations of her troubled character are all too evident in the personalities of her divorced parents, both present. In what may be the most terrifyingly wrinkled, gravel-voiced ex-couple in film history, John Hurt plays her fun-loving, possibly alcoholic father, while Charlotte Rampling is her destructively bitter mother. Neither offers her any comfort.
All this is lent a different cast by the prologue; a series of vividly captured slow-motion tableaux of apocalypse, most of them referencing the imagery of Northern European art and featuring some of the characters we are about to meet.
Von Trier encourages a sort of catatonic rhythm throughout the first part, reflecting Justine's view of the world in its peaks and fugues. She seems obsessed with gazing at the sky and notices the absence of a certain star which will become key.
This is the focus of the second half: Justine's sister Claire and her journey towards a state of grief and depression close to that of her sister. That absent star was hidden behind the planet Melancholia, which is approaching Earth, though scientists are certain it will pass by. While Claire frets about the possibility of impact, Justine reacts with a weary acceptance, having expected this all along. Some of Justine's dialogue may accurately reflect the experience of depression but it makes for almost silly viewing: meatloaf "tastes like ashes", Earth is "Evil".
Claire's growing hysteria is nicely played by Gainsbourg, who is well-suited to a role as one of Von Trier's brutalised heroines having already excelled as one in Antichrist, and her situation is more relatable to a general audience: her fear for her Son's future and battle to allow John to reassure her.
Of course we know all will end badly. We've already seen the world end, Earth swallowed in a collision with the immense Melancholia, but Von Trier is good enough to ensure we watch all this and hope that it was somehow wrong, a bad dream. His film is an involving, ambitious drama and a beautiful piece of cinema, stunningly shot and scored to the rapturous, portentous strains of Wagner's "Tristan & Isolde".
It may be about depression, but it's just too beautiful and full of the vitality and swarming detail of life and humanity to actually be depressing. That in itself is a sort of triumph.
Lars Von Trier is a truly dazzling talent. His facility with the cinematic medium is comparable with any director working today, and he pursues his individual interests - obsessions, really - across each film with an impressive focus and intensity. I just wish his obsessions were more interesting. Von Trier suffers from episodes of clinical depression and his last two films, this visually ravishing melodrama and the horror of Antichrist, are both attempts to explore and/or represent this condition in film. Its not that depression isn't interesting - although to those lucky enough never to have been afflicted, it isn't - but Von Trier has little to say about it, instead settling for an impressionistic portrayal of the state itself.
Melancholia is split in two. The first half is a quite brilliant account of a long Wedding reception which displays just how casually Von Trier's exceptional talent is deployed. There's an effortless quality to the way he lays out the players and traces the tensions and strains between them, which centre around Justine, played with a wounded, truthful sullenness by Kirsten Dunst. The bride, Justine cannot shake off the depression threatening to derail the entire celebration despite the efforts of her new groom (Alexander Sarsgaard), worried sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and assertive, confident brother-in-law John (Keifer Sutherland).
She wanders the halls and grounds of John's mansion, sleeping, having a bath, rejecting her new husband a few times, brutally insulting her Boss and having sex with his assistant on a golf course in-between interludes where she returns to the reception and attempts (badly) to play the happy bride. The probable foundations of her troubled character are all too evident in the personalities of her divorced parents, both present. In what may be the most terrifyingly wrinkled, gravel-voiced ex-couple in film history, John Hurt plays her fun-loving, possibly alcoholic father, while Charlotte Rampling is her destructively bitter mother. Neither offers her any comfort.
All this is lent a different cast by the prologue; a series of vividly captured slow-motion tableaux of apocalypse, most of them referencing the imagery of Northern European art and featuring some of the characters we are about to meet.
Von Trier encourages a sort of catatonic rhythm throughout the first part, reflecting Justine's view of the world in its peaks and fugues. She seems obsessed with gazing at the sky and notices the absence of a certain star which will become key.
This is the focus of the second half: Justine's sister Claire and her journey towards a state of grief and depression close to that of her sister. That absent star was hidden behind the planet Melancholia, which is approaching Earth, though scientists are certain it will pass by. While Claire frets about the possibility of impact, Justine reacts with a weary acceptance, having expected this all along. Some of Justine's dialogue may accurately reflect the experience of depression but it makes for almost silly viewing: meatloaf "tastes like ashes", Earth is "Evil".
Claire's growing hysteria is nicely played by Gainsbourg, who is well-suited to a role as one of Von Trier's brutalised heroines having already excelled as one in Antichrist, and her situation is more relatable to a general audience: her fear for her Son's future and battle to allow John to reassure her.
Of course we know all will end badly. We've already seen the world end, Earth swallowed in a collision with the immense Melancholia, but Von Trier is good enough to ensure we watch all this and hope that it was somehow wrong, a bad dream. His film is an involving, ambitious drama and a beautiful piece of cinema, stunningly shot and scored to the rapturous, portentous strains of Wagner's "Tristan & Isolde".
It may be about depression, but it's just too beautiful and full of the vitality and swarming detail of life and humanity to actually be depressing. That in itself is a sort of triumph.
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