Sunday, December 25, 2005

The best and worst of 2005

my top 10 of 2004 was this:

1. Haute Tension - perfect in every way
2. School of Rock - a joy, pure fun
3. Ong Bak - action is back
4. Save the Green Planet - best korean film ever
5. Immortel - best comic book movie ever
6. Gozu - first class takashi miike
7. Undead - way better than the over-rated Shaun
8. Nothing - little-known vincenzo natali scifi/comedy
9. Dawn of the Dead - cool remake
10. The Village - under-rated, surprising twist

my top 10 of 2005 is this:

1. The Descent - surprisingly fine british film
2. Sin City - stylish, entertaining ride
3. Hellevator The Bottled Fools - cube-ish japanese scifi, wierd but fun
4. Night Watch - engrossing russian fantasy
5. Team America - funny & ingenious
6. Born To Fight - no Ong Bak, but it'll do
7. The Aristocrats - over-produced, but can't ruin that joke!
8. Kung Fu Hustle - has its moments, despite the tedium
9. Star Wars 3 - poor first half, stirring conclusion
10. Batman Begin - great first half, generic second half

... and most of these wouldn't even have got in the top 10 of 2004! a terrible year. the biggest turkeys: Darkness, Drowning Ghost, Land of the Dead, The Card Player (sorry folks it sucked!)..... and worst of all.... KING KONG.

Review: Joe Dante's Homecoming (Masters of Horror)

absolutely brilliant, this episode alone justifies the series, funny, touching, and with *a point* other than just "hey look sex & violence!".

the show is the first to really make use of its tv medium, with lots of mock news reports and studio footage, not trying to make a cinematic film on a tv budget, but this doesnt prevent some incredibly eery scenes, the sight of dead bodies stirring underneath american flags is highly creepy and effective. 2 fantastic performances from the "ann coulter"-style right-wing bitch, and the snide presidential advisor played by the star trek guy, raise this one to a level above previous efforts from argento and gordon, they bring extra depth to their characters other than what is written in the script. and did i mention its laugh-out-loud funny? the evangelist claiming the dead are a "blessing from heaven", then after they vote democrat, that they are "demons from hell" is priceless! equally hilarious: "why dont they just *do* something? munch someones brains or something?".

dante piles in the references to other films in his classic style ( graveyards marked "john gilling" etc) and hammers home the real-life current events parallelling the on-screen action in a way that is both thoughtful and stirring, and never condescending and preachy.

joe dante proves he still has the magic he last conjured up 15 years ago in gremlins 2. his episode blows aways gordon & argento's efforts, and its equally unlikely that carpenter or miike will be able to get anywhere near close.

Review: King Kong

I'm not happy that KING KONG has been a box-office bomb.... i'm ABSOLUTELY ECSTATIC!!!!

KING KONG is one of the worst things i've ever had to sit through in my entire life! a completely worthless, self-indulgent, bloated, empty cgi-crap-fest juvenilia that sucks 3 valuable hours from your life and leaves you with nothing. If some idiotic universal studios exec want to give Peter Jackson free reign to play his schoolboy fantasies thats fine, but don't torture the general public with it!

i know now exactly why nobody wants to see this turkey, its far too long, slow and boring for kids (i could easily chop an entire 90 minutes out of this film without losing anything entertaining or significant) and its too empty-headed, childish and pointless for adults.

Seriously, if you've seen any other incarnation of Kong you don't need to see this. if you've seen JURASSIC PARK you don't need to see this. hell, if you've seen VAN HELSING you don't need to see this (in fact i thought i was watching VAN HELSING when T-Rex, Kong and the gang are all swinging from vines defying gravity).

TURKEY OF THE YEAR. KING KONG = KING BOMB.

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Review: Land of the Dead

OK it only just opened in cinemas this week in the Czech Republic so here is the late review:

LAND OF THE DEAD is poor. Very poor. The film is only 90 minutes but i was checking my watch after 30 mins. Its pedestrian throughout, clunky, and sometimes cringeworthy. T
The first thing is the dialogue: people do not speak like that:

- "why do you call them flowers? they aint flowers in the ground kind, they be flowers in the sky, in heaven"

- "dont tell me your story! everybodys got a story, i dont want to hear it!"
- "whats your story?"

This sounds fine in script-form, but, to quote Harrison Ford, "you can write that shit but you can't say it".

Characters are total stock cliches:
(1) stoic, bland, competent man with "troubled past".
(2) sneaky unreliable minority gunslinger. he hates our hero, but they develop a mutual respect. (3) hooker with a heart of gold. she's feisty! look, she's using a gun!
(4) simple-minded sidekick. our hero looks after him (awww, how nice), but our hero needs him to!

Throw in assorted Evil Corporate Villains, Cute Girls In Military Positions Without Much Dialogue, Big Cuddly Meatheads, and you have a film that seems to be permanently stuck in the mid-1980s.

These are not characters you can grow to like, or to hate (the cast don't exactly do stellar work to help matters), so any sense of engagement in the central rich-dudes-in-ivory-tower oppressing the underclass "action-adventure" is nonexistent. Even if you could, the future world shown here is so poorly thought out you would soon lose any suspension of disbelief. The city and gated-community of Fiddlers Green are like rejected scripts from the already-poorly-thought-out post-apocalyptic world of MAD MAX 3. Romero jumps from scene to scene with little or no flow, interjecting zombie-gore at timed intervals, and overlaying an absolutely abysmal generic soundtrack. It feels like a poor relation in the recent zombie wave, there are no signs these films are from the guy that invented the genre in the first place.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Review: Madonna's "Hung Up"

Is Madonna officially out of touch? Seriously, the woman has made a career out of bringing underground trends to the mainstream: Like A Prayer, Vogue, Ray of Light, Music, all major single releases for major albums, all proved highly influential on the mainstream pop and dance music scenes. Now she unveils the first single from her first post-Mirwais album "Confessions on a Dance Floor". And its not good.

Has Madonna been living under a rock for the past five years? (International readers, "under a rock" is not a synonym for "England"). The video for Hung Up is terrible for a number of reasons:

(1) it features "crumping". Crumping is neither hip-and-happening, nor cutting-edge. Its already been featured in multiple Chemical Brothers video, hell there's even a feature-length documentary about it. Any street-cred to be gained from featuring it in music videos dried up at least 10 months ago.

(2) it features the "rolling barrel arms" dance movie. A move typically used by pre-teen manufactured pop groups when their producers want them to do a "retro-feel" song. See: S-Club Seven's 70s-themed video, amongst uncountable others. Is its use here an ironic commentary on the co-opting of retro-culture by clueless kids? No, its because Madonna wants to do a "retro-feel" song.

(3) it features people dancing on Dance Dance Revolution video games. Seriously, Dance Dance Revolution video games. You know, those dance pad games that were cool for a while a few years ago when the Japanese craze first travelled westwards, but soon got cleared out of arcades to make way for more House of the Dead, Time Crisis and Out Run 2 machines? Somebody still thinks they're the "latest thing" apparently. So the latter half of the video is filled with Madonna and anonymous drones jumping around on these things like no-one's ever seen it before! Note to Madonna: DDR is not vogueing. You dont have to find an obscure underground club in an obscure back-alley at 4am to find it. Its available in video game arcades in shopping malls. Mothers play it.

(4) never mind the video, the song samples Abba. Yes, Abba. Who could have possibly thought up such a genius scheme? After all, nobody has ever had the idea of sampling Abba as a backing beat for a new dance number have they? Well, nobody other than Erasure, Steps and a hundred other groups in the last 10 years.

Ladies and gentlement, the case for the prosecution rests. Madonna is out-of-touch. It should not be surprising, living as she is in a countryside retreat far from civilization, taking care of kids, being duped into following a hokey religion, with a failed film-director husband.... things are not going well in the personal life of Mrs Guy Richie. Why should it be a suprise that her professional output reflects her personal life? Well, only the fact that she has constantly been able to reinvent herself successfuly in the past no matter what her situation. That's not to deny that she's done some rubbish in the past (the "Sex" book anyone?). But she's never appeared totally out-of-touch before.

Could this be the end for Madonna? Its just one single, possibly a mistaken choice as first single, so there is time to recover. Time will tell.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Review: The Descent

Wow, a decent modern british film! Its a miracle! THE DESCENT is a very effective, if not original, girl-powered survival horror flick. It doesnt bear close analysis, but is a very entertaining theatrical cinema experience. Its closest recent companion (in style if not in content) would be HAUTE TENSION.

I havent seen director Neil Marshall's previous DOG SOLDIERS, but on the strength of this will seek it out. The cave scenes are beautifully shot, light is used very cleverly, and the sound design is fantastic. The first half of the film, which to all intents and purposes is a straight caving movie, really builds tension, and is incredibly claustraphobic. The second half, when the monsters are introduced, switches gear to standard survival horror mode, and ratchets up the "jump-scares", brutal monster attacks, and blood, to an amazing degree. There is rarely a moment to relax.

There are some notable problems: the 6 girls, while attempts are made to flesh them out and give them characterization, are very similar-looking and interchangeable. This is a problem in dark cave scenes where its difficult to make out who is doing what. Obviously they're all monster fodder anyway, but i can only remember the names of 2 of the girls, and the personalities of 2 more. i.e. 2 of the girls are completely anonymous.

Secondly, the "science" of the monsters is rather dubious: supposedly blind undergound dwellers who use ultrasound to locate their victims, they cannot hear somebody say "They're blind" directly behind them but can hear an alarm clock, they apparently cannot hear loud footfalls, apparently cannot even smell, and in fact are killed very easily, and yet we are expected to believe they have survived by going to the surface and hunting animals. Highly unlikely, but its a horror film so its excused.

Finally the motivations of the "final girl" are somewhat unclear: her actions at the end of the film seem unjustified and unfair, its difficult to understand why Marshall chose to present her as the (morally justified) "hero", I certainly had more sympathy for the "villain" of the piece.

But despite this, overall its an excellent film, its scary, has attractive leads, has some fun with the standard genre stereotypes, has a fantastic beginning, and a great, downbeat ending. What more could you ask?