Sightseers
Coming in between Kill List and A Field In
England, Ben Wheatley’s murderous love letter to English eccentricity and
camping holidays shares a certain tone with his other films.
More black comedy than horror, Sightseers
still offers a fair helping of gore as sociopath Chris (Steve Oram) takes
girlfriend Tina (Alice Lowe) on a tour of England’s lesser-known camping spots
which mainly involves killing off people who get on his nerves.
The supporting characters are nicely
observed, with Tina’s overbearing mum and the middle-class couple they meet on
their journey being stand-outs, but the main cast is great, with Lowe perfect as
a slightly naïve shut-in thrilled to be shown the world by the confident Chris,
portrayed by Oram as a loner with particularly strong ideas about camping and
plastics.
It’s not just the dark tone that’s shared
with the director’s other films, with a visual style that often has a
dreamlike, ethereal quality, no doubt thanks to the director of photography who
has worked with Wheatley on all his films, Laurie Rose.
It’s hard to imagine a film so English to
its core taking off elsewhere, but hopefully it will find an audience away from
the curtain-twitchers of middle England over time.
Wreck It Ralph
It has to be said I had high hopes for
this. An animated film set in and around retro video games? Excite!
As it is Wreck It Ralph has a lot of
attention to detail and not a few little fan pleasing elements to spot, but the story
only ranks as okay.
Ralph is the baddy of a hit retro game in a
Donkey Kong style, and is fed up of living in a dump and getting no recognition
of making the game a success after the game characters come to life in their arcade, once the
gamers go home (in a Toy Story style).
After finding little help in a game
villain’s self-help group (oddly including Street Fighter’s Zangief) he sets off into other games to try and get his own medal.
However, if you aren’t back in your game
before the arcade re-opens, you run the risk of your game cabinet being shut
down as faulty, so when Ralph sneaks into Hero’s Duty (a generic first person
shooter aping everything from Call of Duty to Metroid), steals a medal and then
ends up in the kart racer Sugar Rush, he’s putting his own game in danger.
Aside: there’s a myth going round the arcade about a
character called Turbo who, upset at his game’s fall from favour, invaded
another and caused both to be shut down.
Whilst in Sugar Rush Ralph meets Vanelope
who’s a glitch, a character others shun as dangerous (due to said glitching) but who wants to race and
become a selectable character in her own right.
Thus Ralph learns that helping friends is
more important than helping himself, etc.
The visuals are great, lots of neat little
cameos including everyone from Sonic to Bowser and Pacman to Q*Bert, but the
obvious love that has been poured into the film doesn’t save it from being a
little flimsy plot wise.
It’s diverting and no doubt colourful and
eventful enough to keep most kids going, but no classic.
Jack Reacher
Functional and workmanlike as it is, Jack
Reacher nevertheless has some charm, as any film which presents a man as
capable, decisive and knowledgeable always will to some.
Reacher is an ex-army investigator who has
gone off-grid, but finds himself in a city after an ex-soldier he had
investigated in war time is accused as a suspect of a random sniping attack.
Whilst he has no love for the man, Reacher
sets about an investigation, and after a botched attempt to throw him off the
case he is even more resolved.
Tired of society and impatient of rules and
regulations, Reacher is dogged, determined and dangerous, easily defending
himself when attacked but also capable of bringing the fight to his enemies
when necessary. Basically a pitch-perfect fantasy of individual power and
freedom, Jack Reacher is designed to appeal to the American male, and is
scraping the outside edge of being just another one-man-army trope from the
80s, but what with the whole investigative/detective angle in order to root out
conspiracy, it has a little more going for it.
Werner Herzog pops up as a bizarrely
threatening ex-con of the Russian penal system, with scars to match, but seems
to have been drafted in mainly for his voice, and was presumably happy to pick
up the check to fund his next run of documentaries.
Cruise is Cruise, ever the heroic cypher
keen to be flattered, but he does a fairly decent job of fitting the role
rather than have it fit to him.
Sixteen Candles
Famous for his 80s teen movies, John Hughes
is responsible for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Pretty In
Pink, Weird Science and Some Kind Of Wonderful.
I’d heard good things about Sixteen Candles
but had not had the opportunity to catch it until recently.
Hughes’ directorial debut in 1984, but 6th
screenwriting credit, Sixteen Candles comes across as an early prototype of the ‘gross
out’ teen comedies of the late 90s and new millennium, which were arguably just
updates of 80s teen flicks.
Sam is glum as her family have forgotten
her 16th birthday due to her sister’s impending wedding (this idea of being forgotten and overshadowed will recur in what is arguably Hughes' biggest hit, Home Alone).
Through the course of
a day at school she shows herself to be slightly more oddball than the high
school mainstream, but also not off-puttingly different, and moons after the
school’s handsome jock whilst simultaneously avoiding the advances of short, geeky
Ted. There’s a high school dance and a house party, and by the end of the movie
our heroine learns what’s important and has a high school teen version of
happily ever after.
Aside from the formulaic template that so
many films would copy afterward, some elements of Sixteen Candles struck me as
bizarre. The grandparent’s exchange student Long Duk Dong strikes me as plainly racist,
what with the oriental gong strikes that accompany anyone saying his name, and
there are also some other problematic tones of sexual assault as the hunky Jake
tires of his drunken, cheerleader type girlfriend, and basically offers her
unconscious form to Ted to do whatever he wants with as long as Ted drives her
home for him.
It’s easy to see how many people hold this
in a special place in their hearts, as it clearly started a long tradition of
broad comedy films about over privileged American teens, but it seems like the
formula has been much improved on in the years since, if not perfected.
My Brother The Devil
A slightly new take on the recent run of
London underworld films that focus on the urban youth and their part in the
drug trade (rather than the semi-idolised gangster/geezer genre).
In this instance two brothers are the sons
of Egyptian immigrants living on an East London estate. The eldest, Rashid, is
already heavily involved in drug gangs, while the younger Mo is a schoolboy,
but anxious to join with the bigger boys he sees on the estate and with his
brother. After an encounter between gangs leaves Rashid’s best friend dead, he
seeks to distance himself from his old lifestyle even while Mo starts to get
involved.
The references to Islam and homosexuality
mark out the difference in approach to most of the urban gang kids films that
have come out in the last couple of decades, and it’s refreshing to see a
depiction of UK urban Muslims that has nothing to do with terrorism, instead
dealing with the pressures and temptations of any groups living on the poor
fringes of the UK’s urban centres.
Prometheus
A big disappointment on my first viewing, I
nevertheless felt that Prometheus deserved a revisit.
The flaws are the same - many of the
characters lack character, including Logan Marshall-Green and Noomi Rapace as
the leads. Noomi’s Elizabeth is unconvincing in her hazy faith represented in
having a cross, and her emotional breakdown at the mention of her father seems
unusual with Logan’s Charlie seeing as it’s implied that they have a fairly
established relationship, this is unlikely to be old ground between them.
Charlie himself seems very odd when
resorting to the bottle after they find their would-be creators dead, feeling
more like a method of opening him up to David’s exploitation, where there was
no obvious reason David couldn’t have been able to be more devious with a
fully sober Charlie.
Whilst an air of mystery is appreciated,
there’s nothing close to indicating an explanation as to why the ‘seeding’
aliens who spread their DNA on Earth were stockpiling a substance which
destroys them at a genetic level and drastically increases the evolution of
other organisms, in order to deliver it to Earth. Nor is there any hint as to
why the alien they find alive, for all his technology and knowledge, would feel
the need to just bludgeon everyone to death. It could be a result of what David
said to him, but it’s unlikely that David would risk his own termination.
The actions of Sean Harris’ be-mohawked
Fifield make little sense in the context of his role as geologist and mapper of
the structure they explore. It’s he who is shown to know how to use the mapping
technology, and even his bumbling biologist partner Millburn (Rafe Spall) is
able to give captain Janek (Idris Elba) their precise location at one point,
but somehow they get lost in the structure on the way out. This despite the
rest of the team becoming more spooked than them by what they find and
desperately rush out in advance of a storm - they seem to find their way out
with ease.
Additionally, despite being a trained
biologist Millburn seems quite happy to play nice with a newly discovered alien
organism which looks and acts like a smooth white cobra with a lamprey mouth -
sure signs of a predator or at least carnivore.
The fate of Fifield is a massive let down
in terms of sci-fi cliché - he returns to the ship in some sort of undead/rabid
form and proceeds to kill his crewmates with vast strength, seemingly with no
other aim or goal, implying that he has become altered by the goo or the
organisms and taken over, able to navigate back to the ship but not have much
intelligence beyond that.
Less plot/character related but perhaps
more idiotic: when the alien ship crashes back to the surface and rolls,
Elizabeth and Charlize Theron’s Meredith Vickers both run from it in a straight
line. The obvious plan would be to run at a 90 degree angle out of this path,
further emphasised by Elizabeth’s quick roll out of the way after she trips and
falls. I mean seriously, this is Looney Tunes stuff.
It’s not all a complete loss, however.
The design of the ship and structures is beautiful,but mainly Michael Fassbender's performance as the android David is pretty much a strong enough reason to watch the whole film, despite all it's faults. Every interaction, whether it be with other characters, plot-points or just the set, is laden with the feeling that his intelligence is something 'other', he is experiencing and thinking about things in a way that isn't human.
Deeply flawed, but some wonder there.
