The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey; The Game

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I enjoyed all three of Peter Jacksons Lord of the Rings films, despite the twee moments and length, but something about the first instalment of his Hobbit adaptation just didn’t do it for me.
Yes, the story was originally aimed more at children and wasn’t as much showcase for Tolkein’s passion for language and myth, but still it feels pretty simplistic and shallow.

Thorin seems a little one dimensional, Aidan Turner’s Kili oddly seems the only actor who make-up forgot to dwarf-up, most of the rest of the dwarven cast develop little personality beyond their look, Barry Humphries as the Goblin King took me away from the character, there’s the irritating singing and bumbling of the party sequence at Bags End and the final shot of Smaug awakening beneath his treasure pit has some abysmal CGI.

Having said that, Martin Freeman shines as the set-in-his-ways Bilbo who eventually grows into and adventurer, some of the action sequences are well made – the encounter with trolls and the escape from the goblins particularly, it’s always a pleasure seeing Ian McKellan, Sylvester McCoy is surprisingly good as Radagast and his sequences hinting at darker things are good, and finally Bilbo’s riddling with Gollum works, pulling out a feel of threat despite the short, skinny frame of the wasted hobbit.

Ultimately, this first part of the tale can’t quite match the grandeur of that first trilogy, and suffers from the lack of opportunity to flesh out some of the party without deviating from the original text. It’s enjoyable but just has little heft, though I am interested to see how the wizard side of things is developed in the next two parts.

The Game

The revelation I had after first watching the Game after its cinema release in 1997 was how could the plot make sense? How could this company put together such an elaborate set of events that seem so realistic – and then I realised, everything in the film was fake, was made up by a huge team of people coming together to create something believable, and the team within the film was no different (apart from everything having to work on ‘take one’ with a very specific audience of one).

Whilst the story is neat but shallow, dealing as it does with the world of the amazingly rich and their tribulations, the meat is in the telling, the twisting of main character Nicholas Van Orton’s perceptions and ramping paranoia, the setting and framing and shooting of the thing.
The fact that Fincher tended to work with different cinematographers for his first few films suggests that it was his vision that brought the colour washes that Soderbergh was also using - present in Alien 3, Seven and Fight Club, in The Game you still get sickly yellows and cool blues pulling the mood of a scene in the way that some directors/editors would need to have music to rely on.

The telling is still a little straighter than Fincher’s critically acclaimed classics, this feeling more of a straight studio thriller than his other films up until Benjamin Button, but Michael Douglas manages to get by on his star charm, playing a similar high-powered man to his turn in Wall Street, but without the passion, instead the film is draped around his blankness and lack, his routine showing how his power and wealth brings no great satisfaction.
The shallowness I noted earlier is in the re-hashing that money doesn’t buy happiness, instead having rich experiences and meeting people help you better value your life, though here that idea seems to be simultaneously repressed by immense wealth and facilitated by it.

This mixed message doesn’t stop the film entertaining as you try and second guess how far down the rabbit hole the plot will go and how real what seems to be happening actually is, but ultimately despite being better than the average slick Hollywood thriller it inevitably pales compared to Fincher’s work either side of the millennium.

All Quiet On The Western Front; Elysium

All Quiet On The Western Front

All Quiet On the Western Front (AQOTWF) is practically a template for most modern takes on war, with many sequences used over and over again, proving that either war rarely changes or the cinematic depiction of it can’t be bettered.

As opposed to the patriotic WW2 movies of the 40s and 50s, AQOTWF is the prototype of the anti-war film depicting war as hell.

A number of sequences are fully formed that can still be found today - the first clash with authority in the barracks as the shouty sergeant whips the new blood into shape; the humiliation and repetition of training; the bullying and violence in training before the soldiers even get to the front (though here it’s directed at pompous authority rather than in-fighting between recruits); the idealism of the new recruits versus the old-hand vets; the realities of war at the front and the distillation of importance to food and shelter; the shock and horror of death as it takes people you know, as you take others lives; the psychological breakdown of men by war, either completely, or into killers.

It’s easy to see how the film was banned by many countries preparing for the build up to the next war - the anti-war sentiment is overt, both in the way the war affects the schoolboys we follow from their classroom to the front, and in the speech given by central character Paul at the end.

A number of points are drilled home throughout the film, including the futility of war as the soldiers go over the top of the trenches with numerous of deaths on both signs but no ground gained, conversations highlighting how the soldiers involved aren’t even sure why they are at war and the more obvious affects of deaths and dismemberment as lives are shattered.

Some of the film is a little clunky, with the acting in particular a little overwrought, although this is likely to be a hangover of the move from silent movies to talkies, and the numerous east coast American accents are very hard to reconcile with the German uniforms, though I imagine those very accents could have been intentional in order to acclimatise an American audience and emphasise that ‘they’ are just like ‘us’.  But other sequences such as the trench fighting and no man’s land advances are still unnerving. Due to the quirk of old cinema where action is comparatively sped up, the hand-to-hand trench fighting feels particularly vicious, and the scenes of the soldiers cowering in their fox hole as bombardment goes on seemingly without end helps you sympathise with the men driven to shrieking madness.

Ultimately AQOTWF doesn’t quite stand up to the sophistication (and emulation) of war films that have come since then, but as an example of what was being made over 80 years ago it’s a stark reminder to question the jingoistic and patriotic urges to send the young into war.

Elysium

After the success of District 9, Neil Blomkamp’s sci-fi critique on racism in South Africa, it’s easy to see the same slums though on a much larger scale in the sets of Elysium. Los Angeles of the future is a giant mega-city, but rather than the crumbling towers of 2000AD, Blomkamp’s vision is of dusty shanty-towns, very reminiscent of those occupied by the ‘prawns’ of District 9.

Elysium isn’t particularly original for a sci-fi tale, but neither was District 9 whose closest ancestor was 1988’s Alien Nation. In the same way that film took an old idea and ran with it, making it fresh and exciting, Elysium updates one of the oldest tales in cinema, that of Metropolis and the Time Machine, of Huxley’s Brave New World and myriad other dystopias involving a downtrodden underclass serving a ruling class.

Whilst the Morlocks were underground in the Time Machine, the ruling class of Elysium are above their servile underlings in another way, orbiting Earth in a ring-world space station with its own atmosphere.

Although the Elysium station is a typical sci-fi creation, all efficient robots, clean air and sharp lines, the main point of difference is the near-magical medical stations which automatically cure all ills. Healthcare back on Earth is lacking, and whilst people are desperate to board rickety shuttles just to try and stay on the heavenly Elysium station, the main driving force is illness and those seeking to cure it. This all leads to a lump in the throat ending as the Elysium computer system is told all Earth’s population are now citizens and it sends out medical ships to the surface to cure everyone in some sort of socialist wet-dream.

This worldview also comes out in the ‘worker’s struggle’ vein as our anti-hero, Matt Damon’s Max, is an ex-gang banger turned honest worker who gets screwed over by the boss on a robot production line, receiving a fatal dose of radiation for his efforts.

With the help of underworld contacts he’s assigned the task of kidnapping the CEO of his ex-employers company for his brain-implanted ID details, with the aid of an exo-skeleton grafted to his body. Thus begins his struggle against adversity and ultimately a tale of self-sacrifice.

There’s also a childhood friend and potential love interest, another cipher for cliche as she encompasses being a single mother and a nurse as well as a focus for Max’s efforts.

This back-story serves as a stable basis to weave a tale based on effects and set pieces, with a rather fetishised view of military hardware and a number of gory moments.

Matt Damon continues his run of star turns in the Bruce Willis role of the everyday shmoe in extraordinary circumstances who racks up a list of injuries, Alice Braga does well in the inevitably sketchy love interest part and Jodie Foster delivers an atypical performance as the ruthless politician/military type, but the stand out performance here is Sharlto Copley, back working with Blomkamp after his star turn in District 9.

In the role of Kruger (what a bad guy name!) he shines, in a dirty, brutal way, given that the character is that of a sleeper unit mercenary, part of a larger South African team who are called on to do Elysium’s dirty work. It’s in the confrontation between this crew and Max that most of the weapon idolisation takes place as we are treated to the effects of future guns and grenades.

Both action and story complement each other and push each other forward in a satisfying (if expected) way.

It’s good to see sci-fi based on ideas again, even if those ideas are recycled.

Audition; Insidious; Insidious: Chapter 2

 Audition

Benefiting from the introduction of modern Japanese horror with Hideo Nakata’s Ring films, Audition was the first of Takashi Miike’s huge catalogue of films to secure a UK theatrical release.

Subtle and understated compared to some of his more infamous films, the low-key domestic scenes of the first two thirds feel very much like a melodrama. The story concerns a middle-aged man seeking a May-to-December relationship following the death of his wife, but after some ethically murky film casting sessions to find a girlfriend (the titular Audition), the film swiftly descends into the whacked-out horror and gore that some Miike fans enjoy.

The very slow set-up and stark contrast of the familiar first two acts with the pre torture-porn torture of the last is what helps the film stand out, as well as the evident confidence of Miike’s direction for what was his 30th film (though only the 9th that wasn’t straight-to-video).

However, it doesn’t really bear repeat viewing, with foreknowledge draining the film of most of the dread and tension. The scenes of torture still feel pretty strong, even though the 14 years since Audition’s 1999 release have seen a mini-revival of gore for gore’s sake in some sectors of the horror genre.

Worth a watch but not quite the classic of J-horror.

Insidious

James Wan’s Saw dealt more with the psychological horror of being trapped, and having to commit to performing nasty acts of violence on yourself and others to escape, as it did with the gory results - a fact easily forgotten as you look at how the series has progressed.

The same writer/director team of Wan and write Leigh Whannel sees Insidious backed up with some excellent pacing, building tension alongside the odd jump, and aided by some great turns from Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson as the parents of Dalton, a boy who can astral project and whose body is the target of ghosts and demons, as well as some brilliant lighting and framing.

Whilst the story itself is similar to a number of haunted house entries, Insidious takes the route of psychological chills with a comparative lack of violence or bloodshed over an extended build-up.

Comic relief is offered later on with the introduction of a ghost hunting double act, though Wan still manages to keep the tension heightened even while offering brief openings of relief through humour.

In a second viewing at the cinema I found Insidious as good as I remembered it the first time round - despite knowing when and how the scares were coming it still succeeded in raising the hairs on the back of my neck - creepy is an apt term, and in keeping with the name ‘Insidious’ itself. One of the better examples of new millennium horror so far.

Insidious: Chapter 2

Chapter 2 starts off on the back foot immediately due to a decision to overdub a younger actress playing ghosthunter/psychic Elise with Lin Shaye’s current voice. Whilst the original voice helps link the character for fans without too much exposition beyond a flash of “1986” as the character climbs the stairs to a creepy house, the timbre is wrong and jars you out of the film, taking you out of the crucial suspension of disbelief you need.

Overall Chapter 2 is a disappointment, though this is not to say it’s a bad film - intentionally funnier than the original and clever in the way it links elements of the first film with its narrative - at one point rewatching the first Insidious I found myself wondering why the apparitions give the unfortunate humans such a run around, only to have spookier elements of self-opening doors and such explained in the second.

A number of genre tropes are ticked off in a seemingly list-building manner, with creepy kids toys, an abandoned hospital, a main character murderously possessed, body failure represented by teeth falling out and a ghost hunter’s spooky souvenir room all making an appearance, and a number of these have their tension drained as the film splits its narrative. One group of characters find themselves in direct danger from the now possessed Josh (Patrick Wilson) whilst another spend much of the film uncovering the back story to both chapters. The twist of the first film’s astral projection is now known, and in its place the idea that the old ghostly bride taking Josh’s body is actually the spirit of a male murderer with gender and mother issues finds itself less shocking five decades after Psycho.

Alongside the humour the cast remain strong, with Barbara Hershey as Josh’s mother Lorraine and Lin Shaye as Elise given more to do, as well as Lin’s assistants Specs and Tucker (writer Whannel and Angus Sampson respectively). As well as these and Wilson and Byrne also as good as in the first, Jocelin Donahue is a good pick for the younger Lorraine, both for looking like Hershey and recent horror heritage as the lead in the wonderful 70's horror homage, House of the Devil..

One for completists, not as satisfying as the original and definitely not a stand alone watch.

Frances Ha; The Conjuring; The Hunger

 Frances Ha

After the mirth-free zones that are The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding and Greenberg, you could be forgiven for thinking that Noel Baumbach’s latest directorial credit would be another take on the middle class ennui of the privileged yet unhappy Americans that arthouse audiences seek out for a classier dose of Schadenfreude. And yet, Frances Ha is full of warmth and joy.

The ingredients are still there - starving artist struggling in the big city but with a relatively wealthy parental safety net, reaching that point of adulthood where a lack of direction moves from malaise to panic. But instead of the naked confusion and anger, there is joy at finding friends and celebrating what the city has to offer, up alongside the awkwardness of breaks in communication and the difficulty in balancing practical survival and fulfilment.

As the co-writer, star Greta Gerwig undoubtedly has a huge influence and tempers some of Baumbach’s more sombre excesses. Crucially Frances Ha presents a loose knit group of people who are all likeable, flaws and all, and the female lead doesn’t pin her existence around a male relationship.

The Black and White photography suits New York well, giving the film more of a timeless feel as it could comfortably slot in amongst other NYC cinema of the last 3 or 4 decades.

Having just watched 2 seasons of Lena Dunham’s Girls, the similarities are undeniable, but the underlying themes of female friendship and educated, directionless women in their 20's scratching a living in New York are larger than that series and this film. This is both a great little character study and a loving, honest look at a particular generation.

The Conjuring

Setting itself up as yet another classic ‘period’ horror, taking place in 1971 and trumpeting about the ‘true story’ origins, The Conjuring finds itself too sharp to convince when compared to originals such as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or recent homages like The House of the Devil. Its cinematography is more in keeping with the likes of director James Wan’s previous horror offering Insidious, though this isn’t such a bad thing, for instance when the digital clarity of the photography picks out the eerie skews of shade in the basement.

Speaking of the basement, The Conjuring is rammed with some of the most obvious of all horror clichés.

• family arrives at big old house in middle of nowhere
• house with ghoulish past
• bricked-up rooms
• youngest kid soon making imaginary friend/s
• bumps in the night
• doors opening/closing by themselves
• crew of exorcist/ghost investigator types
• an exorcism
• creepy doll
• apparitions glimpsed in mirrors/windows
• creepy music box
• reverse Hansel and Gretel - the apparition guides people to the optimum haunty bit of the house by making noises and moving things

But The Conjuring doesn’t just steal from the old classics, as a number of riffs from Paranormal Activity are adopted wholesale, mainly the grabbing of the sleeping leg variety.

The cast are superior, with Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga good as the open-minded ghost hunters, and Lili Taylor great as usual, here playing the mother of the family targeted by the other-wordly.

Still, however polished it is there is nothing original here, and again unlike House of the Devil it’s not enough of a loving retro-production to compensate for that same-old same-old feeling, nor is it good enough to compete with the likes of the Exorcist.

The Hunger

Tony Scott’s début feature set the tone for much of his future work - stylish and a little empty.

The Hunger isn't the first attempt to bring the vampire myth up to date and it won’t be the last, but it doesn't avoid the issue of cementing itself fully in its time. The film is so 80's it hurts, from the goth club opening to the endless smoking of the first half and maze of rooms full of billowing net curtains and doves in the second, the film was already a museum piece once released.

Early on the film feels a little like a music video aiming for French chic, as Catherine Deneuve and Bowie smoulder from behind sunglasses and plumes of smoke, the editing cutting quickly as various unnatural light filters wash everything in moody hues, but once Susan Sarandon pops up it feels that the lack of dialogue  in the earlier scenes is more to do with the acting chops on offer up to that point than a stylistic choice.

Sarandon sticks out as an intense focal point in the second half, both in her passion for her new romantic interest in Deneuve’s vampire, and in the addiction/withdrawal scenes as she battles with her change, her blood losing the fight with ‘inhuman’ blood. Also the idea of a room full of boxed-up former lovers, suffering through their immortality in dessicated bodies is a little bit more chilling than the average crappy fang-flick, but the lack of engagement with most of the characters blunts the true horror you should be feeling because of it.

Pre-echoes of Scott’s later 80's flicks Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop 2 are there to see, particularly BHC2 with the opportunity for showcasing Hollywood opulence and Brigitte Nielsen’s glacial vamp, cold stares from within her severe suit and shaded eyes, but like those films The Hunger is all surface.

Jurassic Park 3; South West 9

Jurassic Park 3

It’s nice to see the return of Sam Neil and Laura Dern along with that iconic score, but William H Macy and Tea Leoni also fare well as slightly caricatured exes, searching for their lost son on one of the endless string of islands that John Hammond seems to have seeded with dino-clones. Alessandro Nivola is also good as the younger, hungrier version of Neil’s archaeologist showing off some 3D printing at the start which becomes a key plot point, but what’s happened to him? Seemed to have such potential…

Action stations kicks off after about 20 minutes of set-up and barely lets up as the cast are chased around the island by reptilian predators. Good to see continued mix of CGI and animatronics making the dinosaurs seem more realistic - the Spinosaur isn’t too cheesy as the inevitable step-up from the threat of the T-Rex (though some scenes attempting to ape the tension of the original’s stand-out encounter inevitably fail), Raptors have a nice update with feathers and vocal communication even if this is at odds with those in the first film, and the Pteradons are very creepy in their fog-filled aviary, a tingling sense of the alien with their huge heads, beaks and beady eyes.

I had memories of really enjoying this at the cinema when it was released in July 2001, and it’s good to see that it hasn’t aged in the last 12 years, particularly if you see it as the schlocky B picture it is.

South West 9

A time capsule piece that seems to occupy a strange middle ground, too big to be a TV special but too small to be a proper movie. Somehow doesn’t feel very cinematic despite some high speed/ slo-mo, cross-fade and other trickery, but does feature some clips of archival protest footage which cement the characters, culture and time.

Director Richard Parry was clearly fond and knowledgeable of the counter-culture scene of London from the late Nineties to the turn of the Millennium with all the crusties, raves and pill-popping that entails, but it does sometimes feel a bit fabley or adult fairy-tale, at odds with the gritty realism of the war-torn news footage he shot from the mid-nineties, included on the DVD as an extra.

I get the impression that the original intentions may have been a little loftier than the eventual result - it’s got drugs, sex and a gun so it was probably easier to fund in the aftermath of the UK gangster geezer explosion that spewed out after ‘Lock, Stock’ became a hit.

Unfortunately the only equivalents I have that spring to mind when thinking of ensemble pieces looking at underground culture are the likes of Soderbergh’s Traffic, an unenviable rival however different in tone (the voice-over threading the flash-back & forward narrative points toward a serious intent, however gaudy some of the visuals, action and characters).

A scrappy love letter to a snapshot in London’s life, South West 9 is good in parts but is scuppered by its own aim of identifying so closely with its subject - it becomes something of a museum piece rather than a film that continues to live.

Pacific Rim

I knew the basics before going in, and I know the ancestry, but I'd avoided a lot of the preview titbits out there and came to the film lukewarm, if not cold. So although my expectations weren't heightened and I was aware that everything about Pacific Rim screams BIG. DUMB. BLOCKBUSTER. I couldn't help but be disappointed.

The film is awash with vague stereotyping, from the corn-fed beefcake hunk central role to the 80s stylings of the Russian robot team to the crazed mugging of the science-nerd comic relief roles - the stiff-legged English eccentric and the NHS specs and tats neo-nerd chic geek. The bland characterisation brings unfortunate comparisons with the mess of the Transformers films, and although the effects are impressive, with a lot of massive robot fetishisation and wrestling moves on a macro scale, it sometimes feels like the foley editing is trying to bear the weight of conveying the scale of the clashes as it pummels your ears with bombastic intensity, every connection of robot fist into monster face is rammed home via your eardrums.

Still, if you're making the action the main focus and barely bothering to breathe life into the characters (besides a nice Ron Perlman cameo) why make what screams to be a 90 minute picture stretch out further than 2 hours?

Knowing it's unashamedly a blockbuster helps ignore any quibbles with the details (why robots rather than sub-orbital weapons platforms? Why have pilots physically in the machines at all when drones are a present-day reality?), but it is hard to ignore the genre past - Japan has been churning out massive robot tales for decades, both in live action and animated forms, in the spheres of TV and movies, and in doing so they've managed to get a bit more interest and subtlety out of building sized robots hitting monsters than Pacific Rim ever bothers trying.
The fact that it touches on so little after so long a running time renders it boring, a charge that so far hasn't been levelled at anything Del Toro has directed, however flawed.
I also hear much is made of the monster design, but you only have to look back through Del Toro's past work to find a lot more invention.

It wasn't completely awful, though, Perlman is enjoyable as ever, Idris Elba does well and is happily allowed to be English, the opening exposition sequence is quite good and reminded me of similar elements in Monsters and District 9.

But not good, no. Oh, and the 3D seemed completely pointless.

New beginnings!

After more than 2 years of neglect it's time to come back - the blog isn't the abject failure I often feel it is, peripherally, niggling at the edges of my mind. After all, even though I didn't manage to get up a post of every film I saw in 2010, I blogged every month consistently, 46 posts mostly covering a number of films - an achievement with hindsight.

Now that I've just turned 35 and am due to become a dad, it's probably realistic to be able to cover everything - I watch films less frequently as it is, so there's likely to be less to cover on the horizon in between dealing with mewling pink cuteness. Here goes...

New aim - review every film I see while I am 35.

Please Give; Leaving

 Please Give

As a character study of New Yorkers in Brownstone apartment blocks Please Give has the potential to be too clever for its own good and lose much of the audience by indulging in over analysis. Thankfully the film turns out to be a warm and well observed drama with believable roles fleshed out by some decent indie talent.
Catherine Keener plays Kate, a painfully insecure about her well-off status when some fellow New Yorkers are forced to sleep on the streets, but her attempts at help are blinded by her own guilt, so much so that she suffers embarrassment by trying to push handouts on to people who aren’t homeless and her attempt at volunteer work does more harm than good when she breaks down at the sight of disabled people playing sports in a community centre. She works in a retro furniture shop, buying pieces from the relatives of the recently deceased to sell on at inflated prices. The murky morality of this bothers her but not her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) with whom she runs the business, and they have bought the neighbouring apartment from an elderly woman still living there; once she dies they gain ownership. The woman’s granddaughter Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) visits her daily to do chores, whilst the perma-tanned and narcissistic Mary (Amanda Peet) vocally can’t wait to see her die and Kate and Alex’s teenage daughter Abby is going through the usual teen crises, exacerbated by her mother giving bums more money than her.
All the characters have their flaws but there is a definite feeling that the film is rooting for them; you can’t help but sympathise with these people and hope for things to work out. Seldom do films gain release that simply focus on everyday interactions without some sort of contrivance; Please Give is a genuinely mature film, happy to trust the audience without any spoon feeding and sadly a rarity in the release schedules.

Leaving

If you only want to see one continental European drama in 2010 about a wife and mother played by an English actress having an affair with a man slightly more earthy and rugged than her own well-off husband, risking her place in an expensive household for the more rustic charms of a run down pile in an idyllic mountainous countryside then you should watch I Am Love. If you’ve already seen that then you’re left with Leaving.

Such a comparison is less a reflection on Leaving’s weaknesses than it is of I Am Love’s strengths, but Leaving does tell a more familiar tale. Kristin Scott-Thomas is magnetic as Suzanne, nailing the feel of a woman unexpectedly finding herself falling in love in middle age and left as giddy as a teenager, desperate to spend every moment with her new love despite having a husband and two children. It is hard to sympathise with her however, as her husband seems fine and in no way at fault, though once her infidelity comes to light his actions hint at important differences between the two men in her life - he does his best to make things impossible and block her attempts at building a new life, often in a colder, more matter-of-fact way, whilst her lover seems more impulsive - making the initial pass at her, rushing to stop her car rolling away at one point and getting injured in the attempt, an injury he subsequently ignores so that he can return to Spain for a weekend to see his daughter. We learn that he has recently been released from prison, further revealing a more passionate side, though there are never any explicit comparisons between the two men during the film.
Though far more formulaic and pedestrian than I Am Love, Leaving highlights the fact that while people have a definite choice over the act of infidelity itself, they may have considerably less influence over the love that may fuel it.

PTU; Garden State

 PTU

Johnny To’s PTU has a man streak.
After a run-in with a street gang at a restaurant, sergeant Lo is left unconscious in a back alley, minus his police issue side-arm. Back at the restaurant, gang head Ponytail is stabbed and dies just before reaching hospital.
After being found by a patrol unit he realises that his gun is missing and calls in a favour from patrolman Mike (To favourite Simon Yam) to give him until dawn to locate the weapon before calling it in. mike heads Police Tactical Unit B2 and agrees to help, leading to a long night of chance encounters and twists of fate that will change things on Hong Kong’s streets.

The set-up could have been any number of Hong Kong crime thrillers but To’s version of police procedure involves a lot of torture, Mike beating people for information as the PTU officers look on, stony faced; the CID, called in to investigate Ponytail’s murder, seem just as bad despite the sharp black suits they wear in contrast to the military uniforms of the PTU. Amidst all this Lo stumbles through his search with a bloody face and bandaged head, accosted by both sides of Hong Kong’s criminal underworld as Ponytail’s murder sends ripples through the city.
The misconduct of Mike’s PTU is clearly meant to be disturbing rather than crims “getting what they deserve” and in this sense PTU is similar in theme to To’s later Election films, highlighting the nastier side of Triad gangs without being overly gratuitous. His art style is similar to later work too, set exclusively at night To gets to explore the palette of neon and shadow in the deserted streets of Tsim Shat Tsui that he favours. The soundtrack, however, doesn’t reach the heights of Exiled’s guitar-based score, instead awash with the whiney guitar solos of some horrific 80s soft rock, consistently working against the muted tones of the film and pulling the audience out of it.
The cast are all good, Lam Suet and Simon Yam now To regulars, as well as Eddy Ko as mob boss Eyeball; Yam in particular is used well as his quiet, measured performance here is somewhat removed from the Category 3 films like Naked Killer (Hong Kong’s extreme certificate) he seemed destined to languish in, and you can see what inspired To to begin using him as a lead from then on.
PTU doesn’t match the brilliance of To’s later works Election, Exiled and Mad Detective, or even the lighter Sparrow, but it alludes to enough of To’s talents to show that this isn’t just your average Hong Kong genre director.

Garden State

Films on the unconventional end of the romcom spectrum tend to have kooky girls and dysfunctional boys as leads, and Garden State is no different. Natalie Portman plays a character more hyperactive and enthusiastic than a dozen toddlers, seemingly without social inhibition, and cute as a button to boot. Zach Braff’s lead Largeman by contrast is numb from a decade and a half of medication and therapy instigated by family tragedy. It’s the death of his mother which lead to his return from LA and his unsuccessful career as an actor/writer, back home to New Jersey where he catches up with old faces, has odd experiences and finds out just who he is.
For a plot this laden with genre conviction and with two leads pushed comically beyond either end of a realistic personality scale it’s hard not to watch without trepidation. I last saw the film on release in 2003, and though I remembered enjoying it I was sure that my memories had a rose tint to them. However, Braff’s directorial debut ends up being charming and infectious, Largeman’s wide-eyed numbness including the right levels of vulnerability and sarcastic commentary on the small-town mentality back home with a number of deadpan scenes (see the funeral song) demonstrating that the comedy isn’t trying to hit you over the head. Portman’s charm manages to overcome any tweeness that her character would suffer in the hands of others, and Peter Sarsgaard as Largeman’s hometown best friend is excellent support, grounding the film as a character believable in his acceptance of his lot as a grave digger who likes to party, his face perfect to convey the sorrow without regret tat seems to define him.
With its cool indie soundtrack Garden State threatens to be a movie packaged to hit a certain slightly off-mainstream teen/twenties demographic, but Braff’s direction and writing injects the movie with personality, along with some able performances resulting in a romcom that’s not hard to stomach.

Predators; Twilight: Eclipse

 
Predators

Right from the off Predators shows promise. Adrian Brody gains consciousness in freefall, his ‘chute automatically ejecting thanks to what looks like, at a glance, a predator tech altometer. Once on the ground in thick jungle, the familiar jungle-drum theme from the original plays softly as the camera pans across the tree canopy from below. For the rest of the film the score evokes orchestral pieces from 80s classics in a way that works, rather than simply a display of nostalgia for the sake of it. The full first half hour of the film doesn’t involve any action, instead concentrating on the disparate warriors, warily uniting and trying to fathom how they all came to be dropped from the sky into unending jungle.
The characters themselves are mainly thinly sketched stereotypes - Danny Trejo as a Mexican gang enforcer, a Chechnyan soldier, a quiet, enigmatic yakuza, a death-squad soldier from Sierra Leone, a mouthy death row con with a shiv, an Israeli Defence Force sniper, an incongruous doctor and indie darling Adrian Brody as the hero.
The premise is contained within the trailer, these people have been pulled together to be hunted and as the movie progresses they are picked off one by one; the group are all hunters of people back on Earth and so make for challenging prey.
A film about a group being hunted inevitably makes Predators a chase movie, but the situations that crop up as the predators wheel out a variety of traps and an encounter with another survivor (a scene stealing cameo by Laurence Fishburne) are more than enough to keep you hooked. Though the stereotypical characters are only one of a number of genre tropes to be found, Predators makes use of them in all the right ways. Any criticisms that can be made at the sophistication may be confusing the franchise with the ‘hard’ sci-fi horror of Alien - Predator, lest we forget, featured a cigar chomping wrestler alongside Arnie in one-man-army mode and use of the word “motherfucker” being a key recurring feature.
Though the characters are on the stock side the personality clashes, double-crosses and betrayals do enough to have you caring about at least some of them, and they are sometimes used well - when the yakuza finds a samurai sword, it’s enough to provoke a roll of the eyes, but a one-on-one blade fight with a predator ends in a scene almost poetic, its wind-blown grass echoing classics samurai movies.
It’s hardly going to win any awards and sci-fi action films have been done better, but Predators is not only a decent genre offering but a glimpse at the possibilities of relaunching fallen franchises, they don’t have to go the way of Aliens vs. Predator.

Twilight: Eclipse

I’m certainly not in the target market for the Twilight franchise; despite the promise of a vampire/werewolf tussle (the Underworld films already demonstrate how this isn’t an automatic winning formula) but it was the promise of this clash that almost had me looking forward to this third installment. The trailer mixed up the usual earnest smouldering between the three corners of the supernatural love triangle, Bella, Edward and Jacob with hints of a vampire army on the march to Alaska, facing the wibbly alliance of the Cullen vampire clan and Native American werewolves. What we actually get is mixed.
There’s plenty of rivalry between the boys as they begrudgingly work together to protect Bella, and while the end of New Moon seemed to see her choose Edward pretty resolutely as her love, here it’s as if Jake’s dogged insistence that she feels something for him actually conjures those feelings into existence. This time however the central plot has little to offer those who don’t totally believe in it. New Moon offered plenty of laughs, however unintentional, but Eclipse’s slightly moodier tone somehow dampens any hysterical aspects and deadens the impact of camp.
Unfortunately the sideshow of the big fight fails to deliver. We are told that newly created vampires, newborns, are stronger and faster than normal thanks to their sudden bloodlust, though they can be beaten with skill and strategy. Much was made in New Moon of the difficulty vampires have in dying; as the sun creates glitter rather than flames in its interpretation, it was only the Voltari, the ridiculously camp vampire aristocracy, could bring a vampire’s immortality to an abrupt end. However, it seems that vampires are actually made out of glass or crystals and can be smashed to bits fairly easily, perhaps because they’re ‘new’. Whatever the reason it seems to deflate a key plot point in New Moon. Another moment which hampers immersion is Bryce Dallas Howard in the role of Victoria. There’s nothing wrong with her aside from the fact that the character was previously played by Rachelle Lefevre - it’s not a big issue but still jars.
After being pleasantly surprised by the first installment and having enough to enjoy from the second from the overwrought depictions of Bella’s mopiness, Jake’s shirt-losing abilities and Michael Sheen’s daft costume, I found Eclipse to be a let down with the action too short and infrequent and the main struggle for Bella’s affections stretched a little thin after three movies of it.
Still much better than a tale of obsessed teen romance has any right to be, the third part is nevertheless somewhat of a dip. Hopefully the fourth in the series will see the story branch out somewhat.