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dir: Brad Bird
Look at poor Simon Pegg, way way back in the distance. He looks lonely
Sweet Zombie Jesus, if you’re going to make more of these monstrous Mission Impossible flicks, then continue getting Brad Bird to direct, because this one’s pretty amazing. From a pure action point of view, this is probably the best action flick I’ve seen in a long while, and I watch a lot of violent action flicks. Sure, a lot of them involve Chipmunks or are on the Nickelodeon channel, but my point still stands.

These lapdog American retreads of the James Bond espionage action genre have peaked right here, and it would probably be best if they just put it aside and backed away from the franchise. But they won’t, like we all know. Success breeds laziness, so Tom Cruise will probably be making these when he’s in his 80s and still puttering around looking like a 40-year-old thanks to foetal grindings and other secret Scientological super serums. I still find Cruise somewhat scary at the best and worst of times, but I can’t fault him for his work here. This flick exemplifies its own formula, excelling with the stuff that it’s known for, which is a bunch of incredibly orchestrated heists / break-ins, high-tech trickery, complicated impersonations, and saving the world at the very last second after travelling around it first.

The travelogue this time around requires visits to Russia, Dubai and finally Mumbai for their globe-trotting fix, before returning to that wretched den of scum and villainy, known as San Francisco. This isn’t some Eat Pray Love-type journey of self-discovery where they see the world, eat rich food for the first time in their lives and sleep with gorgeous Spanish men with bedroom eyes and washboard abs. They’re out to save the world from nuclear destruction, you sighing, overly romantic ninnies!

Brad Bird is probably best known for directing one of the best of a good bunch of films; they being Pixar films, and it being The Incredibles. This is his first non-animated flick, and he handles it very well. It’s pretty emotionally spare, it just flies along and doesn’t get bogged down by anything. It waits for no man or woman to catch up, and just keeps powering ahead whether you want it to or not. It’s not going to be mistaken for one of the Bourne flicks, but nor would you want it to be.

The team in question, being the team of agents? Operatives? Supergeniuses? I dunno, but they have to break someone out of a Russian prison. That’s our starting point. Although, when you start watching a flick that you know has Tom Cruise in it, and you don’t see him within the first five minutes, you start to get nervous. Where is he, when will he appear, is he okay, that sort of thing. And you also know that it would have to be him that they’re trying to rescue. Or else our minds will be blown.

There’s high tech guy Benji (Simon Pegg), and attractive agent Carter (Paula Patton), and that’s it. Sure, some guy died in Budapest, but I’m sure that had nothing to do with the rest of the story we’ll be watching unfold in Mother Russia.

Why would they do something so unkind to Ethan Hunt (Cruise)? I mean, that’s where the guy wants to be, in a Russian prison, having Russian things done to him. As some kind of punishment, I guess, they end up getting him out, and some other Russian guy as well. Two for the price of one.

dir: Joe Cornish
If children are our future, we're doomed
Did you ever wonder what all those British youthful scumbags were doing before they started rioting through the streets of London?

Apparently, they were saving us from the alien scum of the universe.

Someone had the idea recently of ‘what if aliens invaded the Wild, Wild West?’ That movie was made, and was known as Cowboys and Aliens. Someone else had the idea ‘what if aliens invaded people’s arses?’ And that masterpiece was made. It was called Dreamcatcher. And now some dickhead thought to himself or herself ‘what if aliens invaded a British public housing estate?’

And lo and behold, Attack the Block was made.

It’s impossible to set a flick in or around a council estate, or housing commission flats, or the projects, or the Parisian banlieu or any form of public housing, without much of the underlying story being about the social commentary opportunities the location throws up. Having said that, this flick uses it as an opportunity to comment more on the actions of the protagonists, who live in these places, rather than the supposed ethics of the people or the system that places them there.

What this really means for us, the viewers, is that our protagonists, unless we share extended sympathies with them out of experience or through, what’s that term again, oh yeah, liberal guilt, is that our protagonists are fucking brats we ourselves wish we could punch in the face, let along watch an alien rip their throat out. The film has to, you’d think, if it matters to you, manage and manage well the transition from hating them to actually caring if they survive or not.

dir: Joe Johnston
Carved from granite, and acts like it too
This makes up for enduring Green Lantern, but not by too much.

Captain America, despite being Captain America, was enjoyable enough. The film, especially the back end, doesn’t entirely satisfy, but it was so much more enjoyable an experience, and not as actively irritating as the aforementioned shitheap masquerading as just another franchise, that it could not help but look better.

I am aware that Captain America is a relatively ancient comic book property, dating back to the World War II era, famous for a cover that showed Cap punching out Hitler. The fact that this was drawn and published during the war makes it all the more important that, thankfully, Cap’s origin story (which most of the flick is) occurs during that vital time.

So, for me, the film is of two halves; halves not of duration, but of what ‘works’ and what doesn’t. The half that looks after the evolution of Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) from scrawny Brooklyn kid so feeble he couldn’t even peel potatoes for the Navy, to super soldier, works. The bit that governs the detailing of a supervillain’s plans for world domination, that villain being Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), doesn’t work as well, for me. For my money the flick made something of a mistake by shielding us from some very obvious aspects required when you set something like this during the war. I’m ignoring the stuff they do to keep the rating down (making people disappear in puffs of smoke due to convenient made-up technology is more about getting a PG-13 rating than it is about looking ‘cool’, which it doesn’t).

I know that the Red Skull is the primary villain for Cap. I just think it was a bad idea for this flick, to give this particular villain such complete prominence. The main reason is this: um, correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t there already a set of potential bad guys running around the world wrecking up the place and exterminating peoples willy-nilly?

dir: James Gunn
Look out, crime, he's got access to a colour printer
It’s almost time enough to get sick of all these goddamn superhero flicks. One’s coming out every week or so. I’m also starting to tire of the slightly sarcastic flicks that comment on those flicks by having some doofus with no powers, skills or abilities, decide to mimic the best and worst of Marvel and DC et al, by donning a costume and fighting crime on their own terms.

I didn’t like Kick-Ass that much. I also don’t think much of Super is that brilliant, which similarly has some mentally ill subhuman dress up and ‘fight’ crime. It’s probably a better flick than Kick-Ass, mostly because it wasn’t such a shallow wish-fulfilment pandering piece of shit. Of course Super’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t have an unhinged Nic Cage performance in it.

In his place is Ellen Page, bringing the crazy in an entirely different way. She’s not the main character, though. She’s just the demented sidekick.

Our main character is Frank (Rainn Wilson), who has both the air of the sadsack and the schizophrenic about him. Through circumstances too fantastical to contemplate, he got married to a woman that looks like and is played by Liv Tyler. To partially explain how such a circumstance could arise, her character, called Sarah, is an addict in recovery, who latches on to Frank because her judgement is severely impaired, and because Frank is the first guy in a while who treats her kindly.

Such a fairy tale can’t last forever, and there comes a time when Sarah leaves him for the local crime boss, inexplicably played by Kevin Bacon, who looks inexplicably sleazy as well. Sarah ends up back on the needle and presumably on the pole as well, and this fills Frank with an inchoate rage.

dir: Michael Bay
Big Robot, Nice Robot
Michael Bay returns to fuck the proverbial metallic donkey again for fun and profit…

The last time I reviewed a Michael Bay – Transformers film, I made the point that Michael Bay is a donkeyfucker of long standing, who delivers exactly what he promises: 2 and a half hours of shiny, shiny donkeyfucking. As such, considering the vitriol his directorial abominations garner, I was simply stating the obvious that, whatever Bay’s actual intentions, pretentions and beliefs regarding the quality of the donkeyfucking he delivers on demand, he delivers exactly what he promises to the great unwashed texting, tweeting masses.

No-one expects either the Spanish Inquisition or decent acting performances from anyone in these flicks. No-one especially expects Shia La Fucking Beouf to act any better than he’s ever managed to in the past, because he’s always been terrible, and will always be terrible, unless they somehow mutate him in a lab or a meteorite crashes into his hideous head.

So what do people expect from a Transformers / Michael Bay donkeyfuckfest (I promise this will be the second-last time I use that phrase)? They expect a stupid plot that a child would feel insulted by, they expect an unnecessarily-elongated running time, and they expect big shiny robots transforming into other stuff, and then transforming back into robots in order to fuck shit up. And explosions, lots of explosions.

And he delivers exactly that level of prophesised crap. Nuns shouldn’t go to brothels in order to be shocked, SHOCKED at what happens there. You don’t voluntarily go to a sex show in Tijuana and turn around apoplectic with incredulity at the ripe piece of donkeyfucking you’ve just seen unfold before your disbelieving but slightly aroused eyes.

All you can do is complain about technique, style and duration, not about your abject surprise as to the content.

In this third unbelievable instalment in this mega-successful franchise that’s earned billions and billions of dollars, Michael Bay has his way with our precious human eyes and history the way the recent X-Men flick had its way with our 20th Century history. Instead of implying that the Cuban Missile Crisis was caused by and solved by good and evil mutants, this flick implies that the reason the moon landing even occurred was because of something that happened as part of the war on Cybertron, the planet where Giant Robots come from. So, sixty years ago or so, a robot spaceship crashed on the dark of the moon. Not the Dark Side of the Moon, but, as the title indicates, the Dark of the Moon.

Is that the only instance of profound leotardedness this movie is going to offer? Heavens to Betsy, No!

dir: Kenneth Branagh
You think you're Thor, I can hardly walk!
More comic book movies. More Marvel comic book movies! See, the waddling Comic Book Guys of the world don’t have enough to entertain themselves with and bitch about across the vast expanse of the tubes of the internets already.

There weren’t enough goddamn Spider-Men, Supermen, X-Men, Iron Men, Batmen, Hulk Men, Man Men flicks out there stinking up the joint as it was?

Of course it’s never going to end because the golden age continues. They make billions of dollars, and they convince grown adults to buy merchandise for themselves to put on their desks at work, without the least amount of shame or reluctance. That’s a fucking money spinner, that is. Comic book franchises make money rain from the skies, so it makes sense that the Microsoft of the comics world, being Marvel, invested a shitload of money setting up their own studio to make these delightful and delicious flicks themselves with greater regularity and with more direct profits to themselves.

And thus, Marvel Studios brings us The Mighty Thor!

As tempted as I am to keep ripping the shit out of them and this flick just for the mere fact of their lazy existence, I’m not going to. Mostly, I’m not going to because I actually enjoyed Thor, ridiculous as that seems. Embarrassing as it might be.

dir: Jason Eisener
No, it's not from thirty years ago. It's fresh and rotten
We see a lot of films that were filmed in Canada. It’s cheaper for nearly every single goddamn American tv series and movie to be filmed there. We don’t see that many Canadian films, though. They’re rare. Rare as teeth in Saskatoon.

What are even rarer are Canadian films from Halifax, Nova Scotia. When was the last time you heard of a flick filmed in Halifax or Dartmouth?

Never, that’s when. And from the looks of this film, there’s a very good reason for it.

At first I thought the setting of the flick was some post-apocalyptic wasteland. Then I realised that that’s what Halifax must look like all the time.

In the flick it’s called Hope Town, but, in a stunning example of irony, there’s barely any hope at all for the good citizens of Hope Town. Ruled as they are by a strange man who calls himself The Drake who seems not to do much apart from kill people randomly in the streets, their town has degenerated into an ugly cesspool. Or, alternatively, it is raising itself up to the status of an ugly cesspool.

He has two annoying sons called Slick and Ivan, actors so bad I refuse to look their names up, who yell every line of dialogue they have, and who also kill random people in the street. The police, for reasons never really explained, not only turn a blind eye to the excesses of these morons, they actively help them in their endeavours, because, I guess, they’re deranged morons as well.

One of the sons kills a busload of children with a flamethrower, which, somehow, is used as a pretext to inspire the citizens of Hope Town to rise up and kill the homeless in their fair city.

Does it sound far-fetched to you? It’s supposed to, since it’s called Hobo with a Shotgun, and stars Rutger Hauer as the Hobo with said shotgun.

He stumbles into town, bleary eyed on hobo wine, not wanting anything more than a lawnmower. It’s not a lot to ask, is it, even in Halifax? I mean, sure, there doesn’t seem to be a single blade of grass in the entire blasted landscape, but we’re meant to understand the Hobo’s yearning for a 1950s picket fence and normalcy, something he clearly has never had. Or had, and then lost when he hit the road.

dir: Simon West
If Jason Statham wants to do ballet in the middle of an action flick who is going to argue with him?
There are remakes and then there are remakes. In theory, and it’s a very Hollywood-based theory, anything remade that puts Jason Statham in the lead role is going to be inherently better than the original, and will make lots of dollars because everyone loves Jason Statham.

Surely, he’s a household name? Your mum even knows who he is, clucking her tongue at his violent onscreen antics, but finding him a charming man all the same. Although she probably doesn’t remember his name.

As strange as it sounds to assert, Jason Statham would have to be the biggest action star in Hollywood currently. Who else has been in as many arse-kicking, explosions and tits movie recently? He’s the king, and he’s uncontested, for now.

Though I can’t really figure out why.

Sure, he looks like he’s carved from granite, and acts like it, and can glower with the best of them, but surely someone needs something more than that to climb to the lofty heights of action moviedom?

Apparently not. This is a remake of a Charles Bronson flick from 1972, which I remember mostly for the long stretches forgoing dialogue, and the relatively slow pace for a flick of its kind. Also, Chuck Bronson is a god, and was always the best thing about any of the great or crap flicks he was in. It posited the idea of a contract killer meticulous and patient in his actions and planning, who, at his best, killed people without it even being known that they’d been assassinated.

Now, of course, the idea is commonplace in these kinds of hitman-for-hire flicks, because it makes it look like these characters are geniuses. You know, admirable intellects and cultural aesthetes and total badasses.

They’re not geniuses. They’re usually morons. A cursory glance at the legacy of the Melbourne Underworld murders immortalised in the Underbelly series is that none of these thugs-for-hire who murdered for money or kicks could have finished a Sudoku puzzle without help, let alone planned something to kill their targets and avoid detection completely.

dir: Robert Schwentke
RED - Really Extreme Dubiousness
Old people. What to do with them. This movie’s entire purpose seems to be just to remind the rest of us not to turn our backs on these wrinkly potential badasses.

Because, you know, just ‘cause they’re old, doesn’t mean they can’t kill you three ways from Wednesday.

I’m not entirely sure how Bruce Willis gets to swan around with decent older actors and pretend they’re contemporaries, but then, if that’s the least plausible part of this flick, it would be a doddle to accept. As it is, this is a total fucking cartoon that makes James Bond flicks look like documentaries.

This flick is such a cartoon that it makes computer generated owl and toy films look like actual reality instead of animation. In this flick called Red, or RED, or R.E.D, a bunch of people mostly in their late 50s and beyond, all the way up to Morgan Freeman’s tender 70s, show the young ‘uns that they can still kick arse like it’s 1989.

The title is an acronym standing for Retired – Extremely Dangerous, or, to put it differently, there ain’t no school like the old school. It is a premise so tired and so tiring that just typing it out makes me feel a tad sleepy. None of these main actors: Willis, Freeman, Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich, Helen Mirren or Richard Dreyfuss are exactly wanting for work. They aren’t sitting forlorn by the phone on Saturday nights desperate for some casting agent to call. So the premise, mockingly linked with Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys as an example of this superannuated genre, doesn’t really bleed into the real world. Though it’s likely that the dubious audience hook was meant to be some kind of older audience-goer bait, to make them think, “Get off my lawn, and, I really would like to see some old people besting some young people in gunplay and fisticuffs”, it seems pretty obvious that the quirk of having old people ‘act’ all young and stuff was meant to be universally appealing.

You know, just like when we appreciate it when grannies rap or oldies ride skateboards and play guitars while drinking the latest iteration of Spazzie Cola.

Maybe it’s an American take on the old people problem. Longer life spans, better health care thanks to a certain president, all this means is that older people will be lingering longer and stinking the joint up for the rest of us. So instead of shuffling off this mortal coil with dignity and making room for the rest of us to spend their inheritances on jet skis and bigger TVs, now they want to be gainfully employed into and past their dotage. The nerve of the fuckers…

dir: Edgar Wright
Do you think Michael Cera ever gets sick of being Michael Cera?
Oh, Michael Cera. If you didn’t already exist, they would have had to construct you from the corpses of several painfully thin hipster douchebags, held together with wet papier mache from indie street newspapers, deliberately ironic hipster unwashed t-shirts and neurotic tics so pervasive even Woody Allen would give you a wide berth.

And they would have constructed you too, so that you could play Scott Pilgrim. There probably isn’t a person on the planet better suited to playing this supremely annoying character. You were handpicked by fate, by the universe, by all the random possibilities that lead to an almost supernaturally predetermined result.

For that I congratulate you. And, also, for becoming this generation’s white Urkell.

The weird thing is I actually like Michael Cera. He only ever plays one kind of character, and, as Scott Pilgrim, he’s the weakest and whiniest version of that Michael Cera character (except when he’s fighting). I like him even when I find him annoying, which is a remarkable trait to possess. As Scott Pilgrim, it’s ultimately irrelevant how he plays it, because it’s almost like Bryan Lee O’Malley wrote the comic book with him in mind, which he clearly could not have, having never met him.

It’s not as if the flick is pretending to be any more significant that it seems. It’s its very nature to be a hodgepodge of comic, game and music references, brimming over with pop cultural in-jokes to an almost painful degree. Painful even for those of us, like myself, who are pretty much entrenched in this world, this sad, beautiful and neurotic world.

(Kataude mashin garu)
Fear girls with prosthetics
dir: Noboru Iguchi

I’m starting to get the knack of this current crop of Japanese violence-fests. It’s not a complicated equation: Ham acting, cheap effects, both physical and computer-generated, and thousands and thousands of litres of fake blood.

I’ve watched a bunch of these flicks lately, and they really look like what they are: cheap movies made by special effects guys who know more about how to put together a prosthetic body they’re planning on cutting into multiple pieces with blood spraying out of it every which way, rather than coming up with a script that makes any sense.

Not that it matters.

I’m getting to the stage where I’m starting to be able to enjoy them. I’m not sure if I’ve figured out whether they’re action flicks, comedies or horror flicks, or a curiously Japanese blend of the three. Whatever the actual genre is, is irrelevant, I guess. All that matters is whether I’m entertained or not.

And I was entertained by this flick, significantly so, compared to the last Fever Dream production that I saw, being Tokyo Gore Police. Or maybe what’s happening is that I’m becoming desensitised to the level of gore, the sheer crazy magnitude of gore on display.

I don’t think so, though. When these flicks are done right (no matter how cheaply or shoddily), they get the tone right, which makes it at least tolerable, at best enjoyable. Some people are not going to be able to accept a flick where two high school kids are bullied to death, but if you can’t laugh at the mother of one of the bullies attacking our heroine Ami (Minase Yashiro) and trying to turn her arm into tempura with a maniacal glint in her eye, then I can’t help you much.

dir: Paul Greengrass
My mouth being open means this is intense, don't you know?
Mocking things is easy. Real easy.

Fun, too.

It’s also lazy. The easiest and laziest goddamn thing any reviewer had to say about this flick was that, given the participation of the director, shaky-cam cinematographer and lead actor, it’s essentially a Bourne flick without the Jason Bourne character.

These reviews just write themselves, don’t they?

It’s not an insult that carried a lot of weight, because this was in truth more of a fictionalised rendering of actual events, being the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the lies, damned lies and statistics used as the casus belli, or justification for the war itself.

The problem is that a) what they’re referring to, with such seriousness, no-one really gives a fuck about any more, and b) it’s attached to a plot so implausible and uninteresting that I’m not sure if it really justifies its existence independent of the premise.