(Alan Taylor, 2013)
The success of the Marvel project - a vast, overarching series of interlinked blockbusters starring the companies most famous characters (with the exception of the X-Men and Spider-Man, owned by rival studios) has begun to sink into the films themselves. The Avengers was such an enormous success that there is a winning feeling of confidence flowing through the two post-Avengers Marvel movies; Iron Man 3 and now Thor: The Dark World. If Kenneth Branagh's original film had the difficult job of introducing a fiddly concept to the general public, Taylor's film dives headlong into the complex mythology of the character and his world, presuming that they will already like and know the character enough to go with it.
So this film is a fast-paced romp through the sci-fi, fantasy and super-hero genres; tremendously assured in its world-building, layering detail onto our understanding of Asgard and the nine realms while awkwardly positioning a familiar plot involving the death of the universe due to an ultimate weapon into place. Christopher Eccleston, largely wasted, plays Dark Elf Malekith, very much a Star Trek villain in the wrong universe, seeking the Aether, an ancient substance that can transform matter into dark matter. This brings him into contact with his old enemies on Asgard, where Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and his Warriors Three have been striving to bring peace to the nine realms after the actions of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in the first film and The Avengers. Then there is Thor's love interest from the first film, Jane Foster (Nathalie Portman) still lovesick for the Asgardian in London, where she stumbles across a strange red substance...
While the spectacle is a given, what works well in the two Thor films is the humour, twinkling away at the ridiculousness of the concepts, but never making fun of them. This is a big part of the appeal of Hemsworth's performance - he is charismatic, but funny about it, charmingly aware of himself - but also of the film itself. The way Foster is introduced - on an awkward date with Chris O'Dowd, asking about her "guy trouble" and nicely oblivious to the fact that the guy is a Demi-God - is a good example of this. Thor crumpling himself into a car and jealously asking about this rival (Fosters response: "Seriously?") extends the joke, and the lightly "realistic" response of many smaller characters to the outsized events occurring around them frames the action in a pleasingly ironic light.
Yet it still works very nicely as pulp. The fight scenes are plentiful and pleasurable, the design and effects making this version of Asgard even more expansive than the one we saw in the original film. The smaller Asgardian characters - Rene Russo's Frigga and Idris Elba's Heimdall, particularly - are given great action beats, while Hiddleston's Loki gets to strut his stuff. He and Hemsworth have great chemistry, and the decision to team them up is a solid one, giving the film a very different dynamic.
Of course it all comes down to the usual super-hero bullshit: destruction of property, a one vs one fight involving huge punches, and a final powerful effort. But it's always staged well, and that Marvel confidence sells it.
Showing posts with label Fantasy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fantasy. Show all posts
Wednesday, 13 November 2013
Wednesday, 29 May 2013
EPIC
(Chris Wedge, 2013)
Epic feels almost randomly generated. Taking a bunch of predictably appealing elements from various sources in its adaptation of a William Joyce book and applying the formula which has by this point come to absolutely dominate American Animated cinema, it succeeds in being utterly mediocre in more or less every regard.
A young girl (voiced by Amanda Seyfried), mourning the loss of her mother, comes to live in the country with her semi-estranged, work-obsessed father. His work involves attempting to prove that his theory - that the natural world is home to a society of miniature beings - is correct, and this gives him little time for parenting. Their reunion goes badly, and just as she is about to leave she is miniaturised and finds herself in that society of tiny beings, who, it turns out, ride upon birds, talk to insects and are at war with a race of lizard-like beings named Boggins. The Boggins spread decay while the Leafmen, led by Ronin (voiced by Colin Farrell) battle them mainly using the power of their Queen (Beyonce Knowles) who can spread and control plant life. So the girl becomes involved in their battle, and learns the ways of the Leafmen, in the process flirting with the cocky and irresponsible young warrior Nod (Josh Hutcherson), bantering with a stock comic relief slug and snail double act (Aziz Ansari and Chris O'Dowd) and - of course - coming to realise what is truly important in life. This is interspersed with a series of variable action set pieces involving aerial battles, fearsome field mice and generic martial arts, a few attempts at visual poetry (a ride upon the antlers of a deer), and some telegraphed messages about responsibility and family.
While it's never bad, it's never particularly good, either; too much of it seems familiar, too much of it formulaic. For all that the animation is brilliant, that really isn't enough anymore. Pixar and Studio Ghibli have set the bar far too high for animation in the last decade or two for something like Epic to be seen as anything more than solid.
Epic feels almost randomly generated. Taking a bunch of predictably appealing elements from various sources in its adaptation of a William Joyce book and applying the formula which has by this point come to absolutely dominate American Animated cinema, it succeeds in being utterly mediocre in more or less every regard.
A young girl (voiced by Amanda Seyfried), mourning the loss of her mother, comes to live in the country with her semi-estranged, work-obsessed father. His work involves attempting to prove that his theory - that the natural world is home to a society of miniature beings - is correct, and this gives him little time for parenting. Their reunion goes badly, and just as she is about to leave she is miniaturised and finds herself in that society of tiny beings, who, it turns out, ride upon birds, talk to insects and are at war with a race of lizard-like beings named Boggins. The Boggins spread decay while the Leafmen, led by Ronin (voiced by Colin Farrell) battle them mainly using the power of their Queen (Beyonce Knowles) who can spread and control plant life. So the girl becomes involved in their battle, and learns the ways of the Leafmen, in the process flirting with the cocky and irresponsible young warrior Nod (Josh Hutcherson), bantering with a stock comic relief slug and snail double act (Aziz Ansari and Chris O'Dowd) and - of course - coming to realise what is truly important in life. This is interspersed with a series of variable action set pieces involving aerial battles, fearsome field mice and generic martial arts, a few attempts at visual poetry (a ride upon the antlers of a deer), and some telegraphed messages about responsibility and family.
While it's never bad, it's never particularly good, either; too much of it seems familiar, too much of it formulaic. For all that the animation is brilliant, that really isn't enough anymore. Pixar and Studio Ghibli have set the bar far too high for animation in the last decade or two for something like Epic to be seen as anything more than solid.
Saturday, 27 April 2013
THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY
(Peter Jackson, 2012)
There's a particular sort of shot that Peter Jackson mastered with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Its a sweeping view of an epic action sequence, the camera looping and perhaps turning too as it approaches the heroes - generally in a group, in motion - and they move through a space, the geography of which is established by the vertiginous action of the camera. Theres a lot of cgi involved in these shots. Cgi figures throng, and the landscape - the mines of Moria, the tunnels inside a Goblin stronghold, an ancient Elvish citadel, whatever - is generally mostly created inside a computer too.
In the first and best Lord of the Rings film, The Fellowship of the Ring, there are only a couple of these shots. Jackson was working, then, with restrictions. The film had not yet become the critical and commercial smash it eventually was. It was still a huge risk for New Line, the studio financing it. But after that, Jackson could do what he wanted, really. With success, his vision bloated and expanded. The films swelled on dvd with extra scenes and longer episodes. The Hobbit, a story which could make a good three hour film, has been cut into three episodes of over two hours each, and the result, in this opening episode, at least, is almost unbelievably tedious and mannered.
The story is set decades before the events of The Lord of the Rings and follows Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), the titular hobbit with an unusual thirst for adventure, after he joins a band of dwarves on a long journey back to their ancestral lands in order to recover gold from the dragon Smaug. They are accompanied by the Wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and after an extremely slow, talky opening hour or so, encounter a series of creatures and perilous situations, including Orcs, Goblins, trolls, Wargs and Elves. This all feels thoroughly samey - reams of CGI, familiar creature design and the usual dynamics governing the set-pieces ensure that these are sequences resembling many other sequences in other such movies beyond Jackson's own.
Aside from that, it is strangely unengaging. The characters are that peculiar Tolkein mix of tweeness and pomposity, the comedy is excrutiatingly unfunny, and the pacing is so leisurely it feels almost insultingly padded out. The cast do their best with these strange collections of tics they are playing; Freeman is a winning lead, McKellen is solid and Richard Armitage is charismatic in the Viggo Mortenson role as Thorin, leader of the dwarves, but the whole thing only feels like its anything more than an exercise in stalling with the arrival in the last act of Andy Serkis (by way of CGI) as Gollum.
His scenes with Freeman in the caves beneath a mountain are by a long way the most compelling in what is otherwise a pointless, even painful, affair, so bloated and obsessed with its own mythology it feels like it represents much of what is wrong with modern blockbuster cinema.
Oh, and those swooping shots I mentioned earlier? The Hobbit is full of them. Only where they were once exciting, even thrilling, now they just feel like Jackson repeating himself, like another set of failures of the imagination in a film stuffed with failures of the imagination.
There's a particular sort of shot that Peter Jackson mastered with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Its a sweeping view of an epic action sequence, the camera looping and perhaps turning too as it approaches the heroes - generally in a group, in motion - and they move through a space, the geography of which is established by the vertiginous action of the camera. Theres a lot of cgi involved in these shots. Cgi figures throng, and the landscape - the mines of Moria, the tunnels inside a Goblin stronghold, an ancient Elvish citadel, whatever - is generally mostly created inside a computer too.
In the first and best Lord of the Rings film, The Fellowship of the Ring, there are only a couple of these shots. Jackson was working, then, with restrictions. The film had not yet become the critical and commercial smash it eventually was. It was still a huge risk for New Line, the studio financing it. But after that, Jackson could do what he wanted, really. With success, his vision bloated and expanded. The films swelled on dvd with extra scenes and longer episodes. The Hobbit, a story which could make a good three hour film, has been cut into three episodes of over two hours each, and the result, in this opening episode, at least, is almost unbelievably tedious and mannered.
The story is set decades before the events of The Lord of the Rings and follows Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), the titular hobbit with an unusual thirst for adventure, after he joins a band of dwarves on a long journey back to their ancestral lands in order to recover gold from the dragon Smaug. They are accompanied by the Wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and after an extremely slow, talky opening hour or so, encounter a series of creatures and perilous situations, including Orcs, Goblins, trolls, Wargs and Elves. This all feels thoroughly samey - reams of CGI, familiar creature design and the usual dynamics governing the set-pieces ensure that these are sequences resembling many other sequences in other such movies beyond Jackson's own.
Aside from that, it is strangely unengaging. The characters are that peculiar Tolkein mix of tweeness and pomposity, the comedy is excrutiatingly unfunny, and the pacing is so leisurely it feels almost insultingly padded out. The cast do their best with these strange collections of tics they are playing; Freeman is a winning lead, McKellen is solid and Richard Armitage is charismatic in the Viggo Mortenson role as Thorin, leader of the dwarves, but the whole thing only feels like its anything more than an exercise in stalling with the arrival in the last act of Andy Serkis (by way of CGI) as Gollum.
His scenes with Freeman in the caves beneath a mountain are by a long way the most compelling in what is otherwise a pointless, even painful, affair, so bloated and obsessed with its own mythology it feels like it represents much of what is wrong with modern blockbuster cinema.
Oh, and those swooping shots I mentioned earlier? The Hobbit is full of them. Only where they were once exciting, even thrilling, now they just feel like Jackson repeating himself, like another set of failures of the imagination in a film stuffed with failures of the imagination.
Sunday, 31 March 2013
JACK THE GIANT SLAYER
(Bryan Singer, 2013)
Perhaps the most irritating and pointless vogue in current cinema is the adaptation of fairytales into updated forms. Goth romances, horror stories, and worst of all; wannabe epic fantasy Lord of the Rings rips-offs.
Thats where we find Jack The Giant Slayer; turning Jack and the Beanstalk into a film full of battles and sieges and swords and rolling landscapes. As such, it's hard to say why it doesn't work. The script doesn't help; the characters are familiarly cliched types we've seen all too often, the situations mostly stale and similar to others from better films. The tone is odd - lying somewhere in that zone between family film and gritty adventure film but never quite sure of which it really wants to be, this is a film where giants bite human heads off, but we never see any blood. The humour is juvenile, ensuring we know these giants are flatulent snot-eating slobs, yet the emotional arcs are adolescent, with a hero and heroine (Nicholas Hoult and Eleanor Tomlinson, both pretty and utterly boring) who virtually fall in love at first sight, both yearning for escape and adventure, neither evincing much personality.
The effects are impressive, with most of the Giant sequences suitably frightening and awesome, and I can well believe that Singer wanted to make this film just so he could put together scenes like the one where we first glimpse a giant or the one where they rampage across a plain towards a city. Its well designed - if, again, a little too familiar in conception with its gritty grimy medieval look - and well-made, with nice photography by the reliable Newton Thomas Siegel, and the story rattles along.
But its really not enough.
It fades from the mind almost as you watch it, and it makes you wonder why Singer's career has started to drift in quite the way it has.
Perhaps the most irritating and pointless vogue in current cinema is the adaptation of fairytales into updated forms. Goth romances, horror stories, and worst of all; wannabe epic fantasy Lord of the Rings rips-offs.
Thats where we find Jack The Giant Slayer; turning Jack and the Beanstalk into a film full of battles and sieges and swords and rolling landscapes. As such, it's hard to say why it doesn't work. The script doesn't help; the characters are familiarly cliched types we've seen all too often, the situations mostly stale and similar to others from better films. The tone is odd - lying somewhere in that zone between family film and gritty adventure film but never quite sure of which it really wants to be, this is a film where giants bite human heads off, but we never see any blood. The humour is juvenile, ensuring we know these giants are flatulent snot-eating slobs, yet the emotional arcs are adolescent, with a hero and heroine (Nicholas Hoult and Eleanor Tomlinson, both pretty and utterly boring) who virtually fall in love at first sight, both yearning for escape and adventure, neither evincing much personality.
The effects are impressive, with most of the Giant sequences suitably frightening and awesome, and I can well believe that Singer wanted to make this film just so he could put together scenes like the one where we first glimpse a giant or the one where they rampage across a plain towards a city. Its well designed - if, again, a little too familiar in conception with its gritty grimy medieval look - and well-made, with nice photography by the reliable Newton Thomas Siegel, and the story rattles along.
But its really not enough.
It fades from the mind almost as you watch it, and it makes you wonder why Singer's career has started to drift in quite the way it has.
Friday, 8 March 2013
THE SORCERERS APPRENTICE
(Jon Turteltaub, 2010)
The makers of The Sorcerers Apprentice don't seem to know quite what they want it to be.
It's a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Summer Blockbuster, but despite the tens of Millions of dollars lavished upon the many special effects sequences and the location shooting in New York City, somehow it never quite feels like one. It is a kid-friendly action-fantasy, but it has a strange setting, seemingly borrowed from Spider-Man comics. It's hero Dave (Jay Baruchal, whose wonky charm works surprisingly well surrounded by so much nonsense) is a geeky Science whizz at a Manhattan University, with no girlfriend or social life. That all goes back to the traumatic episode in his childhood when he encountered Balthazar (Nicolas Cage, in relatively restrained mode) a powerful, ancient sorcerer, who revealed that Dave is himself destined to be a powerful sorcerer before the appearance of Horvath (Alfred Molina doing his stock villain routine) led to a destructive magical battle and Dave's humiliation before his entire school class, including a girl he liked.
The plot resumes a decade later, with Dave engaged in mad scientist experiments (channelling his sorcery into science, you see), that girl from school, now revealed as pretty Becky (Teresa Palmer) reappearing in his life, and Horvath and Balthazar suddenly freed from the urn in which they have been sealed together for the last ten years. They both seek a Russian Doll which imprisons Morgan Le Fay, Horvath to free her and destroy the world, Balthazar to ensure she remains trapped, and Dave, of course, gets caught in the middle while Balthazar tries to teach him how to become the sorcerer he is destined to be.
That makes it sort-of-a-superhero film, since it deals with the origin of a young hero with supernatural abilities, but despite all the magical battles in the streets and skies of New York, it has no iconography, no costumes, no secret identities. Baruchal and Toby Kebbell (as Horvath's apprentice, a celebrity Magician who lives like a Rock star) both seem to play much of it for laughs, but Cage is, well, Cage, all loony intensity and odd delivery, and the tone is all over the place.
Turteltaub is an odd director, a successful hack who has made romcoms, big family blockbusters, and semi-serious dramas, all without ever evincing any particular personality or great talent beyond efficiency, and he might be the problem with the Sorcerers Apprentice. Despite a nice cast (also including Monica Bellucci and Alice Krige as Sorceresses), some interesting elements, particularly some of the clever ways magic in the modern world is manifested, and several good moments, it all feels quite anonymous and tired and the last act is a bit of a trudge to the inevitable ending.
The makers of The Sorcerers Apprentice don't seem to know quite what they want it to be.
It's a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Summer Blockbuster, but despite the tens of Millions of dollars lavished upon the many special effects sequences and the location shooting in New York City, somehow it never quite feels like one. It is a kid-friendly action-fantasy, but it has a strange setting, seemingly borrowed from Spider-Man comics. It's hero Dave (Jay Baruchal, whose wonky charm works surprisingly well surrounded by so much nonsense) is a geeky Science whizz at a Manhattan University, with no girlfriend or social life. That all goes back to the traumatic episode in his childhood when he encountered Balthazar (Nicolas Cage, in relatively restrained mode) a powerful, ancient sorcerer, who revealed that Dave is himself destined to be a powerful sorcerer before the appearance of Horvath (Alfred Molina doing his stock villain routine) led to a destructive magical battle and Dave's humiliation before his entire school class, including a girl he liked.
The plot resumes a decade later, with Dave engaged in mad scientist experiments (channelling his sorcery into science, you see), that girl from school, now revealed as pretty Becky (Teresa Palmer) reappearing in his life, and Horvath and Balthazar suddenly freed from the urn in which they have been sealed together for the last ten years. They both seek a Russian Doll which imprisons Morgan Le Fay, Horvath to free her and destroy the world, Balthazar to ensure she remains trapped, and Dave, of course, gets caught in the middle while Balthazar tries to teach him how to become the sorcerer he is destined to be.
That makes it sort-of-a-superhero film, since it deals with the origin of a young hero with supernatural abilities, but despite all the magical battles in the streets and skies of New York, it has no iconography, no costumes, no secret identities. Baruchal and Toby Kebbell (as Horvath's apprentice, a celebrity Magician who lives like a Rock star) both seem to play much of it for laughs, but Cage is, well, Cage, all loony intensity and odd delivery, and the tone is all over the place.
Turteltaub is an odd director, a successful hack who has made romcoms, big family blockbusters, and semi-serious dramas, all without ever evincing any particular personality or great talent beyond efficiency, and he might be the problem with the Sorcerers Apprentice. Despite a nice cast (also including Monica Bellucci and Alice Krige as Sorceresses), some interesting elements, particularly some of the clever ways magic in the modern world is manifested, and several good moments, it all feels quite anonymous and tired and the last act is a bit of a trudge to the inevitable ending.
Monday, 5 November 2012
BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD
(Benh Zeitlin, 2012)
There are things here to like. Young Quevenshane Wallis is magnetic and likeable as our narrator-heroine, Hush Puppy, and the majority of the others in the non-professional cast are fresh and believable in this world. Zeitlin's camera picks out a few stunning images, mainly of the Louisiana coast in all its astonishing, often desolate beauty. Some of the production design of the ramshackle structures in "the Bathtub", where Hush Puppy lives with her ailing, cranky father Link, is imaginatively, funkily visualised. And there is an unmistakeable, and powerful - if slightly cheap - pathos to that father-daughter relationship that carries the film through its more annoying later stretches.
And yet. This post-Katrina fantasy of a lovingly eccentric (fictional) community felt entirely fake to me, a piece of designer tourism with the aesthetics of a Levis advert, a contrived narrative and characters so cutesily eccentric they were at best silly, and at worst infuriating. This village lies on the wet side of a Louisiana levee, and when a great, Katrina-esque storm comes and the waters rise, the few remaining residents band together for survival.
This is all seen through Hush Puppy's eyes and overlaid with her naive, poetic, utterly overwritten musings about life and nature and meaning. They play like a bad attempt at Terrence Malick, and are compounded by Zeitlin's decision to depict the prehistoric Aurochs imagined (or are they..?) by Hush Puppy, thawed out by the melting of the ice caps and on the loose in the flooded Bathtub.
On top of that is a strangely bombastic, euphoric, awfully familiar indie-sounding score by Zeitlin and Dan Romer. The story ricochets across tones and registers - from seemingly realist drama to coming of age story to epic adventure - but never loses its essential tweeness, which becomes especially problematic when it attempts to address the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in its portrayal of the Bathtub family forcibly evacuated and blandified by a government who try to tame our heroine by putting her in a dress. This is a film which superficially seems joyous and simple, yet actually feels cynical and a touch laboured in its motives and stylistic tropes. It should be charming, but instead its charmless.
There are things here to like. Young Quevenshane Wallis is magnetic and likeable as our narrator-heroine, Hush Puppy, and the majority of the others in the non-professional cast are fresh and believable in this world. Zeitlin's camera picks out a few stunning images, mainly of the Louisiana coast in all its astonishing, often desolate beauty. Some of the production design of the ramshackle structures in "the Bathtub", where Hush Puppy lives with her ailing, cranky father Link, is imaginatively, funkily visualised. And there is an unmistakeable, and powerful - if slightly cheap - pathos to that father-daughter relationship that carries the film through its more annoying later stretches.
And yet. This post-Katrina fantasy of a lovingly eccentric (fictional) community felt entirely fake to me, a piece of designer tourism with the aesthetics of a Levis advert, a contrived narrative and characters so cutesily eccentric they were at best silly, and at worst infuriating. This village lies on the wet side of a Louisiana levee, and when a great, Katrina-esque storm comes and the waters rise, the few remaining residents band together for survival.
This is all seen through Hush Puppy's eyes and overlaid with her naive, poetic, utterly overwritten musings about life and nature and meaning. They play like a bad attempt at Terrence Malick, and are compounded by Zeitlin's decision to depict the prehistoric Aurochs imagined (or are they..?) by Hush Puppy, thawed out by the melting of the ice caps and on the loose in the flooded Bathtub.
On top of that is a strangely bombastic, euphoric, awfully familiar indie-sounding score by Zeitlin and Dan Romer. The story ricochets across tones and registers - from seemingly realist drama to coming of age story to epic adventure - but never loses its essential tweeness, which becomes especially problematic when it attempts to address the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in its portrayal of the Bathtub family forcibly evacuated and blandified by a government who try to tame our heroine by putting her in a dress. This is a film which superficially seems joyous and simple, yet actually feels cynical and a touch laboured in its motives and stylistic tropes. It should be charming, but instead its charmless.
Friday, 9 September 2011
YOUR HIGHNESS
(David Gordon Green, 2011)
How on earth did David Gordon Green, whose first two films - George Washington and All the Real Girls - were both sensitive, poetic, undeniably arty portrayals of the small-town South in America, how did he travel the distance to being director of Your Highness?
For here is a strange concoction; a quite brilliantly exact pastiche of the fantasy and sword & sorcery films of the 1980s, which skewers the tonal and narrative conventions of that genre and then yokes them to a stoner comedy - even the title is a weak joke - full of dick jokes. I mean that literally; the film makes much of the fact that one of the heroes wears a Minotaur penis around his neck for much of the climax. Some of the comic material is very funny, much of it is shockingly tasteless - the Jim Henson-style puppet who is a pedophile and molested Franco's hero as a child is one major lapse - and all of it is crude and obvious.
Most of the cast play it totally straight, allowing Danny McBride the majority of the big laughs as he gives yet another rendition of his usual inadequate, idiotic braggart persona. Even then, there is a limit to the number of times McBride saying "Shit" in a bad English accent is funny, and there are various spins on that gag throughout; Justin Theroux as a curiously underwritten and unfunny villain says "Motherfucker" as comedy-punctuation at the end of a stock villain speech.
It all ends in a big, generally straight action scene. Greens direction is competent and artfully recalls the 80s films which inspired this script, but all trace of the young genius with a unique sensibility and way of shooting the world has gone, and for all that Your Highness is sporadically amusing, that's a shame.
How on earth did David Gordon Green, whose first two films - George Washington and All the Real Girls - were both sensitive, poetic, undeniably arty portrayals of the small-town South in America, how did he travel the distance to being director of Your Highness?
For here is a strange concoction; a quite brilliantly exact pastiche of the fantasy and sword & sorcery films of the 1980s, which skewers the tonal and narrative conventions of that genre and then yokes them to a stoner comedy - even the title is a weak joke - full of dick jokes. I mean that literally; the film makes much of the fact that one of the heroes wears a Minotaur penis around his neck for much of the climax. Some of the comic material is very funny, much of it is shockingly tasteless - the Jim Henson-style puppet who is a pedophile and molested Franco's hero as a child is one major lapse - and all of it is crude and obvious.
Most of the cast play it totally straight, allowing Danny McBride the majority of the big laughs as he gives yet another rendition of his usual inadequate, idiotic braggart persona. Even then, there is a limit to the number of times McBride saying "Shit" in a bad English accent is funny, and there are various spins on that gag throughout; Justin Theroux as a curiously underwritten and unfunny villain says "Motherfucker" as comedy-punctuation at the end of a stock villain speech.
It all ends in a big, generally straight action scene. Greens direction is competent and artfully recalls the 80s films which inspired this script, but all trace of the young genius with a unique sensibility and way of shooting the world has gone, and for all that Your Highness is sporadically amusing, that's a shame.
Monday, 29 August 2011
CONAN THE BARBARIAN
(Marcus Nispel, 2011)
It begins with Morgan Freeman, of all people, delivering what should be a portentious, even magisterial voiceover. This is the voice of a "chronicler", more storyteller than historian. But Freeman has his eyes fixed firmly on the paycheck, and he sounds as warm and laid back as he always does. Its as if hes reciting a shopping list, and its a good indicator of the problems which run through this film.
Utterly lacking in any of the Epic grandeur or philosophical and political subtext of John Milius' 1982 take on the character, Nispel's Conan the Barbarian is much more unambiguously a B-Movie. That is no bad thing, indeed, it suits this genre and this character. But the problem is: it is not a great B-Movie.
It gets some things just right. Jason Momoa looks the part as Conan, meaning he can ride a horse wearing only boots, a loincloth and a sword on his back without looking utterly ridiculous. He is physically charismatic and believably destructive in the action scenes, more Robert E Howard's fast, powerful animal fighting machine than Schwarzenegger ever was. But his emotional range is limited to glowering fury and glowering desire with a couple of instances of loutish contentment in-between, and he always seems just slightly too American for the part.
Stephen Lang gives it his all as the villain - Rose McGowan is probably the best thing in the film as his steel-clawed Sorceress of a Daughter - and his intensity makes him watchable throughout.
The prologue, featuring the ever-dependable Ron Perlman (seemingly born to play Barbarian Warriors) as Conan's father, is the best section of the film, establishing Conan's "origin" and personality, and setting off the plot in a spare, enjoyable fifteen minutes or so. The story then, should feel like a major cornerstone in the heroes life, but instead it feels like the middle film in a long-running franchise, as if we've missed out on a series of more interesting, more exotic adventures.
It features a couple of good action sequences, but for the most part Nispel directs them for maximum visceral impact - the influence of "chaos cinema" obvious in his shot and editing choices - so that they are choppy and barely-coherent. The look of the film is also grim; a dirty palette looks like it was filmed through a filter of excrement, and the score isbull and forgettable.
What it does capture is some of Robert E Howard's feverish intensity, the sheer energy and passion of his pulp storytelling. Here that is manifested in a slightly demented quality; the violence is gory and hyper-exaggerated, the sorcery creepy, the wenches beautiful, the combat joyous. Conan cleaves off heads, tortures an enemy by sticking fingers into the hole in his face where his nose used to be, and generally pulverises anything that gets in his way. And believe it or not, that feels like Conan, as he should be.
It begins with Morgan Freeman, of all people, delivering what should be a portentious, even magisterial voiceover. This is the voice of a "chronicler", more storyteller than historian. But Freeman has his eyes fixed firmly on the paycheck, and he sounds as warm and laid back as he always does. Its as if hes reciting a shopping list, and its a good indicator of the problems which run through this film.
Utterly lacking in any of the Epic grandeur or philosophical and political subtext of John Milius' 1982 take on the character, Nispel's Conan the Barbarian is much more unambiguously a B-Movie. That is no bad thing, indeed, it suits this genre and this character. But the problem is: it is not a great B-Movie.
It gets some things just right. Jason Momoa looks the part as Conan, meaning he can ride a horse wearing only boots, a loincloth and a sword on his back without looking utterly ridiculous. He is physically charismatic and believably destructive in the action scenes, more Robert E Howard's fast, powerful animal fighting machine than Schwarzenegger ever was. But his emotional range is limited to glowering fury and glowering desire with a couple of instances of loutish contentment in-between, and he always seems just slightly too American for the part.
Stephen Lang gives it his all as the villain - Rose McGowan is probably the best thing in the film as his steel-clawed Sorceress of a Daughter - and his intensity makes him watchable throughout.
The prologue, featuring the ever-dependable Ron Perlman (seemingly born to play Barbarian Warriors) as Conan's father, is the best section of the film, establishing Conan's "origin" and personality, and setting off the plot in a spare, enjoyable fifteen minutes or so. The story then, should feel like a major cornerstone in the heroes life, but instead it feels like the middle film in a long-running franchise, as if we've missed out on a series of more interesting, more exotic adventures.
It features a couple of good action sequences, but for the most part Nispel directs them for maximum visceral impact - the influence of "chaos cinema" obvious in his shot and editing choices - so that they are choppy and barely-coherent. The look of the film is also grim; a dirty palette looks like it was filmed through a filter of excrement, and the score isbull and forgettable.
What it does capture is some of Robert E Howard's feverish intensity, the sheer energy and passion of his pulp storytelling. Here that is manifested in a slightly demented quality; the violence is gory and hyper-exaggerated, the sorcery creepy, the wenches beautiful, the combat joyous. Conan cleaves off heads, tortures an enemy by sticking fingers into the hole in his face where his nose used to be, and generally pulverises anything that gets in his way. And believe it or not, that feels like Conan, as he should be.
Sunday, 1 May 2011
THOR
(Kenneth Branagh, 2011)
Thor seems a tricky Super-Hero property to adapt to cinema. The mix of cod-Shakespearean Epic Sci-fi and fantasy myth with more generic earthbound Super-Hero stories is an awkward one, and even Jack Kirby, the character's legendary creator, struggled with comfortably balancing both in his comics. Which is what makes Kenneth Branagh's Thor such a pleasant surprise.
It confidently addresses the Asgardian material straightaway, zipping through some dense but crucial exposition with the aid of a voiceover from Anthony Hopkins - who makes this messy mix of myth and various genres sound epic and suitably grandiose - and some strong, vividly imagined production design. The principal characters are established early on, the emotional conflicts that underpin the narrative clear and primally effective. The antagonists here are warring brothers, and Branagh never really loses sight of that. Such a strong dramatic through-line allows the film to take all sorts of tangents, introduce a few too many characters and even flirt with other genres - most obviously a decidedly 80s-style fish-out-of-water comedy - but maintain some emotional impact.
The scenes on Earth are nicely-grounded by limited ambition, all being set in or around a small New Mexico town, and play Thor's responses to his new circumstances and companions well, even if Natalie Portman is wasted here in a role that only demands she be beautiful.
Chris Hemsworth is a massive element of the film's success; funny and charismatic, he possesses a sort of twinkly old-school masculinity seemingly available only to Australian leading men right now. His work suggests a young Russell Crowe in that he is entirely credible in both the action and dramatic scenes, and Thor's journey from arrogance and hot-tempered impulsiveness to a more mature and considered feeling for his world and responsibilities is believable and effectively played. Hiddleston is just as good, making Loki a very modern villian, damaged, insecure and complex. They are supported by a host of capable - and mainly British, in the Asgard scenes - character actors.
The Super-Hero stuff, when it does come, is solidly done, although the best action scene comes when Thor is a mere mortal fighting his way through soldiers in the rain, shorn as it is of the inconsistent CGI which mars some of the rest of the film.
Reminiscent to some extent of both Richard Donner's Superman the Movie and Gary Goddard's dreadful 1987 Masters of the Universe, Thor is surprisingly warm and funny for such a big, anonymous Studio production. Its visuals - Branagh's seeming obsession with Dutch angles aside - are generally slick and occasionally impressive, its pacing superb, and above all it never forgets to be fun, as any movie about a man with a magic hammer must be.
Thor seems a tricky Super-Hero property to adapt to cinema. The mix of cod-Shakespearean Epic Sci-fi and fantasy myth with more generic earthbound Super-Hero stories is an awkward one, and even Jack Kirby, the character's legendary creator, struggled with comfortably balancing both in his comics. Which is what makes Kenneth Branagh's Thor such a pleasant surprise.
It confidently addresses the Asgardian material straightaway, zipping through some dense but crucial exposition with the aid of a voiceover from Anthony Hopkins - who makes this messy mix of myth and various genres sound epic and suitably grandiose - and some strong, vividly imagined production design. The principal characters are established early on, the emotional conflicts that underpin the narrative clear and primally effective. The antagonists here are warring brothers, and Branagh never really loses sight of that. Such a strong dramatic through-line allows the film to take all sorts of tangents, introduce a few too many characters and even flirt with other genres - most obviously a decidedly 80s-style fish-out-of-water comedy - but maintain some emotional impact.
The scenes on Earth are nicely-grounded by limited ambition, all being set in or around a small New Mexico town, and play Thor's responses to his new circumstances and companions well, even if Natalie Portman is wasted here in a role that only demands she be beautiful.
Chris Hemsworth is a massive element of the film's success; funny and charismatic, he possesses a sort of twinkly old-school masculinity seemingly available only to Australian leading men right now. His work suggests a young Russell Crowe in that he is entirely credible in both the action and dramatic scenes, and Thor's journey from arrogance and hot-tempered impulsiveness to a more mature and considered feeling for his world and responsibilities is believable and effectively played. Hiddleston is just as good, making Loki a very modern villian, damaged, insecure and complex. They are supported by a host of capable - and mainly British, in the Asgard scenes - character actors.
The Super-Hero stuff, when it does come, is solidly done, although the best action scene comes when Thor is a mere mortal fighting his way through soldiers in the rain, shorn as it is of the inconsistent CGI which mars some of the rest of the film.
Reminiscent to some extent of both Richard Donner's Superman the Movie and Gary Goddard's dreadful 1987 Masters of the Universe, Thor is surprisingly warm and funny for such a big, anonymous Studio production. Its visuals - Branagh's seeming obsession with Dutch angles aside - are generally slick and occasionally impressive, its pacing superb, and above all it never forgets to be fun, as any movie about a man with a magic hammer must be.
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