Words on pictures

2008 | Christopher Nolan | 152 mins | 12

I’ve been waiting to see this film ever since my screening of Batman Begins ended back in 2005, so obviously i’ve been following the press and reading previews and reviews and anything else I could get my hands on. Then came the release in the US, calls for Ledger to get an Oscar and the film shooting to no. 1 on IMDb’s top 250 (after a brief stint in number 4) which of course lead to a backlash from certain moviegoers (”how can a film about a man in a bat mask be better than The Godfather!?!??!”). All of this only wetted my appetite even more. However, nothing - nothing, could have prepared me for what I saw last night, this film is fantastic and is worthy of all the praise it’s getting. All of the performances, Ledger’s especially (try taking your eyes off him when he’s on screen, almost impossible) but not exclusively were spectacular, spot on from everyone, from the leading cast to the supporting roles to background players. The story moved at a near perfect pace and had everything it needed to keep your bum on that seat from start to finish (I needed the toilet about an hour in but didn’t dare leave the screen in case I missed something).

I consider myself to be rather lucky, having been a kid when the original Batman films came out, wih their quirky, funny, light hearted stories and over the top villains (”You’re not sending ME to the COOLER!”) it was perfect and now I can watch them nostalgically, and now as an adult this new franchise has come along and started Batman over, the way it probably should have always been but I wouldn’t have fully appreciated. With TDK Nolan has created the best comic book adaptation to date and leaves only one question - how does he top it for part 3?

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2008 | Andrew Stanton| 98 mins | U

While I enjoyed Pixar’s last offering, Ratatouille, I didn’t love it and would only buy it if it were gonna get me a multi-buy offer, WALL·E however will be being pre-ordered. The film is probably in my opinion, Pixar’s best for years, if not their best yet. Everything about it is pretty much perfect, from WALL·E’s humorous interactions with his surroundings to the way he instantly falls in love with EVE and attempts to begin a relationship, even though all she wants to do is carry out her “directive”. The film really picks up once they board the Axiom spaceship and WALL·E begins meeting new robots, such as the fabulous cleaner robot who spends most of the movie cleaning up WALL·E’s dirty tracks.

The story is probably Pixar’s most heartfelt to date, and as usual will relate both to kids and adults alike (when I saw this at the cinema there were more adults in the audience on their own than with kids)

As ever there is a short before the film, this time it is the tale of a magician attempting to do the age old “rabbit out of the hat trick” however the rabbit doesn’t want to play until he gets his carrot, what ensues is a hilarious mix of each trying
to get one over on one other while the magician tries to keep control of the situation in front of the crowd. A truly brilliant short.

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2006 | Andrew Currie | 91 mins | 15

I’m quite the fan of zombie films, but other than Romero’s/the Evil Deads and Shaun of the Dead little has really entertained men, which is why i’m happy to report than Andrew Currie’s Fido is a great watch. The film is set a few years after the “zombie war”, caused by a radioactive meteor passing earth which reanimated all of the recently deceased, after a while a doctor found that by destroying the head the zombie dies, which helped mankind defeat the zombies, however there was still radiation left, meaning that anybody that dies from then on becomes a zombie. The same doctor then found a way of domesticating the zombies with a hi-tech collar strapped round the zombies neck his/her instinct to kill is removed meaning that human and zombie can live side by side, generally with the zombies acting as servants. All of this zombie taming is taken care of by a company called ‘Zomcom’, whose head of security Mr. Bottoms (Henry Czerny) has just moved in next door to our protagonist Timmy Robinson (K’Sun Ray) and his parents.

Timmy is a lonely kid with no friends and is often picked on by the 2 local bullies, his mum (Carrie-Anne Moss in another small, quirky film much like 2005’s Chumscrubber) is more concerned about how the town view them than anything else (”Did anyone see you like this?” is her reply when Timmy tells her he was beaten up at school) and his father (Dylan Baker) is petrified of zombies ever since his re-animated father tried to eat him, in turn he has become quite detached from family life, he and his wife even sleep in separate single beds in their room. Taking all this into account it is no wonder that when he is picked on by the local bullies and is saved by the Robinson’s zombie (Billy Connolly in a role that reminds me much of fan favourite Bub from Day of the Dead) (purchased by Timmy’s mum to impress the neighbours) he befriends him and names him Fido, all is going well until Fido’s collar malfunctions and Fido kills Mrs. Henderson from across the road.

From herein Timmy must protect Fido not just from the public were they to find out about how Mrs. Henderson’s death, but also his dad who is pretty unhappy about just how close both his son and his wife are becoming to Fido. It’s a truly funny and often heartwarming film. Think Shaun of the Dead meets American Beauty meets Lassie.

I did however have a few gripes with the film. Firstly it can’t seem to decide what message it wants to get across, it cuts back and forth from issues relating to how society interacts with each other, such as Timmy’s mother’s constant fear of what the town think of them, to slavery, to issues of prejudice. Additionally there were a few loose ends or areas of the film that weren’t fully explored, for instance one of the opening scenes is of Timmy admiring Mr. Bottom’s daughter Cindy as she shoots targets during “outside education” at school while Lee Silver’s “Ninety nine pounds of dynamite” plays thus we are to believe a forbidden love story may develop, however this is never explored again.

One final thing I’d like to comment on is the colour of the film, it’s extremely rich and is displayed on the DVD magnificently despite being a small release, it really added a lot of depth to the film.

Despite it’s flaws Fido is a great film with solid performances from all and enough black comedy and satire to please fans of films like Shaun of the Dead and enough gore one could expect from a 15 rated zombie film. I can’t reccommend it highly enough, see Fido.
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It has recently been reported on several websites that Terry Gilliam isn’t happy with the way Warner Bros. are acting surrounding Heath Ledger’s death and the release of The Dark Knight, accusing them of using his death as a way to promote the film. On the issue of Ledger’s possible Oscar nomination for his portrayal of The Joker (which has been put forward by several critics as well as co-stars Cristian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Maggie Gylenhall) Gilliam is quoted as saying

“That’s what Warner Brothers are saying, but they’ll do anything to publicise their film. That’s just what they do and you can’t get upset because it’s bulls**t … They’re like a great white shark which devours whatever it can.”

Wow. This doesn’t sound like the same man who movie magazines and websites have been interviewing and reporting on since Ledger’s tragic death in January. At the time Ledger was working on Gilliam’s upcoming fantasy film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (due for release next year), filming had not yet finished and Ledger still had a number of scenes left. His death threw the film’s future into uncertainty but thanks to some script re-writing it has been possible, due to the nature of the film involving other realities, to use other actors (namely Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell) for Ledger’s character when not in the “real world”, which all scenes had been filmed for.

Until now I’ve had the utmost respect for how Gilliam has been handling the whole situation, I can only imagine how he must have felt when Ledger passed away, not only losing a friend (they had previously worked on Gilliam’s 2005 film The Brothers Grimm) but also possibly his picture but then he had his stroke of genius and has worked a way for Ledger’s final performance to be seen by the public. But now with this attack on Warner Bros. and TDK I am slightly less impressed. To me it seems that Gilliam is jealous. No-one is paying his film, the one with Ledger’s final performance, any attention while TDK, Ledger’s final completed performance gets all the headlines. But why would they? Gilliam is hardly a mainstream player these days, his last film, Tideland, about a girl who gets stuck in a fantasy land after the deaths of her parents was an extremely bizarre affair and other than The Brothers Grimm or things Pyton related that’s all he’s really done in the last 10 years since Fear and Loathing. Even if Ledger was still with us people would be talking TDK and Ledger’s performance and not The Imaginarium…, therefore the only person that appears to be using Ledger’s death is in fact Gilliam. Please, finish the film, it sounds very interesting, just don’t get caught up in some tasteless point scoring over Ledger in the process.

2005 | Guy Ritchie | 115 min | 15

I’ve been on a bit of a gangster binge the last week or so, watching Layer Cake, Snatch and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the first I had seen several times before, the other 2 I had never seen - shock horror I know - I had just never got round to seeing them despite knowing how great they were meant to be. Well, they were, i’d easily give them both 4 stars, so the other night I thought I’d give Ritchie’s oft-panned film Revolver a go. I wish I hadn’t. To be fair I enjoyed most of it, it started off with pretty strong and the story was flowing pretty well, I’d already guessed who Avi and Zach were long before it was revealed to us but never mind (by the time it got to the twist I had pretty much lost interest anyway), it was towards the end where it lost it’s way. Jake’s getting revenge on Macha, Macha’s looking for his powder and killing all of Lord John’s men while they are doing the same with Macha and all the while everyone’s going on about Mr. Gold, all spliced with shots of Ray Liotta and Jason Statham screaming at the camera. I’m sorry Guy, you lost me. Stick to what you know and are good at. Stick to London. Here’s hoping RocknRolla is a return to form.

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This is the film they should have made, there wouldn’t have been any need for any gimmicky 3D effects either.

2008 | Andy Fickman | 110 min | U

While this isn’t the sort of film I often watch it is the latest film I saw on DVD so I may as well start my blog off here. The Game Plan is the latest film to star ex-WWF/E superstar Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson (and is apparently the last film in which his credit will include ‘The Rock’), it’s a pretty different affair to the last film I saw him in - Richard Kelly’s baffling Southland Tales, a film that, when it ended, I couldn’t decide whether I had actually enjoyed it or not, but I digress.

The Game Plan has Johnson playing star quaterback Joe Kingman who is still looking for that elusive trophy ring late on in his career, so he obviously needs to stay focused, which will be pretty difficult when all of a sudden an 8 year old girl shows up at his door claiming that she is his daughter and that her mum has gone off to help Sudanese kids for a month, so she has to stay with him. Of course up until this point in Joe’s life he’s never had to worry about anything apart from football, himself and his ego, so cue clashes of personality (he needs rock music while working out, she needs classical while practicing ballet etc etc), his greedy agent constantly trying to get rid of the kid and plenty of predictable jokes stemming from the fact that Joe is a “mans man” having to raise a kid and helping her practice ballet.

However, don’t think for one minute I didn’t enjoy the film for there are plenty of jokes that an adult will find amusing, and obviously enough love, happiness and rainbows as can be expected from a Disney film for kids, on top of that Johnson is finally starting to look like a credible actor, no Oscars are to be expected any time soon but you can start to forget that he was most famous for raising an eyebrow and dropping an elbow only a few years ago. I do feel there could have been some more on screen character development (for instance that of Johnson’s and Sanchez’s characters), but that is a problem I doubt the main audience of this film will have a care about, especially if it meant there was more screen time devoted to Spike the dog in a pink tutu. As I said the film was fun and I was never expecting a thought provoking or life changing piece of cinema, I knew what I was getting into when I popped the DVD in the player and while I’m in no rush to see it again the creators must be congratulated for making a film that it’s target audience will find thoroughly enjoyable, but that adults could quite happily watch too.

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