Renaissance
One night a short while ago, I had a chat with a colleague who happened to mention that a particular horse in a particular horse race (6:10 at Newmarket) was the very image of good value. Coincidentally, I had just bought some cheapo French rail tickets. And when the good karma sunrays beam down into a man's life he must not cower in the shade. To this end, I invested £20 in said nag with the hope of paying for said rail tickets, and then took myself off to the pictures to watch Renaissance. It cost £9.50 to get into the Odeon Covent Garden, and when I emerged blinking into the sunlight at the end of the film, I scurried back home for news from the turf.
For some reason, when I checked the BBC website, the horse was not listed as the winner. There must be some mistake, I thought, and checked the Racing Post site instead. When I paged down to the race, I saw what had happened. My favoured steed had finished dead last. I had picked the one with three legs yet again. Bollocks.
However, I must admit that I felt that paying £9.50 to see Renaissance represented a far more disappointing loss, given that the film was actually a pile of
shit, and I never would have won £100 if it been good. I was seduced into seeing it because it looked like a French version of Sin City, but while it looked great, it had none of the offensive gusto of Robert Rodriguez's film. The plot is mongo-headed and obvious, the script is derivative, and all the voices are too posh - while I can accept a French bloke saying "I sleep with my secretary, I sleep with my wife, I even sleep with my sister-in-law, but I never sleep with my researchers", you simply can't believe that Jonathan Pryce would say such a thing.
But he does.Even if you are a particularly putty-brained comics fan I could not recommend it. Sorry. Maybe if you sniffed some glue before going to the cinema you could get yourself into the right frame of mind but I doubt it.
Land and Freedom
So some people have been a bit critical of Superman Returns for being a remake of Richard Donner's 1978 original. But Ken Loach's 1995 Spanish Civil War film is pretty much a remake of Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia, and none the worse for it. It's thoughtful and well acted, but the poor old anarchists get it in the end. It's a bit of a shame for them, in the film they are all nice but unfortunately they have the same feelings about holding onto power as you or I would have about a nice big freshly laid turd,
bam, right there in the middle of the pavement. Franco and Stalin never let that sort of thing worry them so they are always going to lose the argument but win the war.
The film doesn't actually say that much about anarchism, either. If you are interested, a bloke called Stuart Christie has written a fantastic book called
Granny Made me an Anarchist about going to Madrid in the 60s in order to blow up General Franco. I recommend you read that, if only to find out what a good laugh the nick is in Spain, I think I might go stay there on my next holiday.
Anyway, in the case of this film, it would be bourgeois of me to inflict my views upon you. So, comrade, why don't you watch it yourself, decide what you think, and then come back and have a vote about it. I think it is
good, anyway, 1-0.
Superman Returns
I remember loving the original Superman film, which is quite perturbing, because it came out in 1978, pretty much 30 years ago, bollocks, but anyway, I remember collecting the Superman cards and chewing the bubblegum that came with them and sticking it behind the left wing mirror of the Mini, even though I didn't like bubblegum, but you had to do something with it, I remember being round at Stephen Lovell's house, it was for his birthday I think, when I got the Last Card, Superman's left eye, and after that I became
completely disinterested in them (to the point of petulant ingratitude). I remember trying to draw Superman, which started off quite easy (primary colours & boots) but I never got the hang of the Superman symbol, because it's a weird cropped seriffy 'S' inside a bendy pentagon. And I remember thinking it was describing something that was real (unlike Star Wars, for instance) and if I concentrated hard enough soon I too would be able to do the Superman eye lasers.
Given that it didn't quite work out that way, the new movie is still really
good, and definitely worth going to see at the IMAX. It's quite talky and leisurely, like the 1978 version - to the extent that all the cast wear strange 1970s versions of 40s clothes, and apparently Bryan Singer made a computer-generated RoboBrando to do the Jor-El lines. But there are a few cracking action sequences too, and the new chap in the cape is a disturbingly good Christopher Reeve impersonator.
I do have a few issues with it, however, but these involve major major plot spoliers. So, if you don't want to know the scores, look away
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#1) There is no way that Superman could benchpress an entire continent,
made out of Kryptonite, out of the Earth's atmosphere. No frikkin way. That is against the rules, and it would never happen in real life. I can just about forgive this lapse.
#2) Superman makes it with Lois and she has a baby. However, considering that Superman is an alien, it is extremely improbable that they would have compatible DNA. Evolutionary biology dictates that a lobster, for instance, would be a much more recent Last Common Ancestor than Superman, and I really can't imagine Lois Lane wanting to get jiggy with the seafood platter. Furthermore, the resulting creature would be like what happens when a donkey goes out with a horse - you get a sterile hybrid like a mule, and no-one wants that.
This inconsistency is alright though, because the bits with the kid are pretty good. And it also means that Superman had a kid and then buggered off and got some other man to bring up is spawn, without paying no child support
or nothing.
District 13
If you take a
shit-boring film like
Hidden, and then add in a load of guns, drugs, kung fu and parkour, then you've got District 13, a much more interesting proposition. The plot is a load of guff about a cocaine baron living in a walled-off postcode, who gets hold of a nuclear weapon on a 24-hour countdown. And the only guy who can stop him is the local pk king, who is trying to save his tower block from the evil scourge of gak.
It
is ridiculous, and the whole time I was in the cinema I was busting for a piss, but I didn't dare go for fear of missing some brain-popping kung fu / vertical pk ballet - like Jackie Chan used to be, before he got too old and stopped being subtitled. I can imagine this film having a strong DVD afterlife, with pallid teenagers trying to copy the moves, shimmying between piles of dog turd in incandescant white trainers in the loading bay of their local Morrisons.
This film is
good, and it also appears to have influenced the recent Porsche-torching riot-spree in France, even to the extent of the film pleb-scum characters getting called
racaille by the film Minister for the Interior. But while District 13 has only just opened over here, it was made in 2004. So well done them. Unfortunately the highly trained kung fu parkour gendarmes have not yet materialised but I am sure it will only be a matter of time.
Matewan
An American miners' strike movie - which, like rom zom com Shaun of the Dead, is surely a film that defines its own genre. It was made by John Sayles in 1987, concerning itself with real-life events from 1921, in the town of Matewan, Central Deliverance State.
It's well acted, and perhaps because it was unfamiliar subject matter, I didn't know what was going to happen next. Some of the characterisation is too obvious, like James Earl Jones playing the heroic James Earl Jones character, and the evil warder from The Shawshank Redemption just changing his hat over. But the film has unexpected sympathies, like the way that the Sheriff is a good guy, or the way the wee preacher kid turns into a junior red. And I wish I knew more about cinematography, because it's shot beautifully by Haskell Wexler, with a variable exposure flicker to it - he also did One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
I don't think this movie is surprising enough to be a classic, but it's certainly interesting and enjoyable and it never flirts with the
shit rating.
Lego Potter
In a thoughtless comment on the latest Harry Potter film, I said that it would have been better if they had used Lego instead of real actors. Like one of those horribly loaded statements that never really go away ("you always steal my chips" / "blue makes your eyes look a bit fat") it has lingered in the air like toilet-fug in a curryhouse. Because, on further reflection, I think it's a great idea.
The main problem with the Harry Potter films is that they're in a big rush to make them before the cast either a) grow up, become ugly, and discover bad behaviour, or b) die. This results in them doing a shit job. However, with Lego, this would not be a problem, the film-makers could be as dilatory as they liked. Furthermore, the range of Lego already
exists, and while it is almost as expensive as plutonium, and therefore definitely more expensive than hiring a load of crinkly old british thesps and kids, I feel they could afford it.
Further benefits are: the Lego is definitely a better actor than the kid who plays Draco Malfoy. Because Lego is very wee you could build the sets out of Lego too, and then use CGI to take the knobblies out. If the Lego has a rubbish haircut you can just take it off and replace it with another one, or leave him as he is so he can play the role of Luthor in the forthcoming Lego adaptation of Superman. Lego Potter will never break his glasses, and the Lego version of Ralf Fiennes (pictured) is
fucking scary. It is easy to make mutants using Lego people, especially with a small saw blade and modelling glue, and Harry Potter would definitely be improved if it had mutants in it. And finally, you wouldn't need a Lego Robbie Coltrane to play Hagrid, you could just use a normal sized person and that would be about the correct scale.
In fact, I am so sure Lego Potter will happen, that I am a bit scared that it has started happening already and we just haven't noticed. If you watch carefully you'll see that Hermione's hair was looking a little rigid in that last film, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
Fearless
In one of my first
posts on this blog, I rather primly objected to the film Hero on the grounds that it was a might-is-right apologia for dictatorial fascism. Well, Fearless affirms the same politics, but the kung fu in it is miles better,
and more frequent, so I really enjoyed it, and I definitely thought it was
good.
Apparently Jet Li is retiring from kung fu movies now. However, as Fearless shows, he also has sweet swordfighting skills, so maybe he would consider being in a remake of Hamlet? I would like to see that, with Tony Leung as Claudius, Samo Hung as Laertes, and Gilbert and George as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Lovely.
One night a short while ago, I had a chat with a colleague who happened to mention that a particular horse in a particular horse race (6:10 at Newmarket) was the very image of good value. Coincidentally, I had just bought some cheapo French rail tickets. And when the good karma sunrays beam down into a man's life he must not cower in the shade. To this end, I invested £20 in said nag with the hope of paying for said rail tickets, and then took myself off to the pictures to watch Renaissance. It cost £9.50 to get into the Odeon Covent Garden, and when I emerged blinking into the sunlight at the end of the film, I scurried back home for news from the turf.
