Movies

The fact the writer and director combo for The Eagle of the Ninth is the same as for The Last King of Scotland, and that the writer gave us Her Majesty, Mrs Brown, gives me some cause for optimism that it could be rather good.

Whatever Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe do with Robin Hood cannot-cannot-be worst than Kevin Kostner’s butchery.

This time out: Starlight and Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey.

Don’t bother reading further if you’re looking to see what I’m like when saying lots of nice things about films.

In which I examine Layer Cake, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, and V for Vendetta.

I watched Lipstick on Your Collar when it was on TV; I think it may be the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen on TV. Time has, if anything, made it even more so, especially given where the actors have popped up since then.

I would not believe Baz Luhrmann hadn’t seen the first of these clips before doing his version of Like a Virgin.

One of those classics of the Eighties I never got around to see at the time, I whipped this out for the semi-regular dinner-and-a-movie-with-Amy.

First impression: the muzak is awful. Really, really awful. Getting Alan Parsons to do the soundtrack may have seemed like a good idea in 1985, but it wasn’t.

Once I got over that, I liked it. Granted, I couldn’t resist making fun of the bit where Rutger Hauer takes out Michelle Pfeiffer’s dress and is nuzzling it, because at that point, if I was Matthew Broderick, I’d be thinking worried thoughts about how the knight who saved me might be into a whole world of swapping black leather for nice silks and being known as Rutgina, but anyway…

The special effects haven’t aged well, but the cast members all turn in decent enough performances, there’s a suprising lack of cringe inducing lines, and Matthew Broderick makes his little theif pretty amusing; the Evil Bishop is nicely done. An enjoyable little swords and sorcery/love story film.

OK, it fades a little after a strong start, but I still love 300 getting the treatment it begs for.

Thanks to Pearl.

This was… awful. The comic was a mixed bag; Frank Millar’s love of one of the nastier societies of the ancient world (does anyone reading this really need it explained to them that the Spartans were not exactly representative of the best of ancient Greece? I mean, when your treatment of slaves is crap compared to ancient Athens, you’re pretty shit) and incredible gaffes (Athens are boylovers, hurf, durf. You can write all the defences of that line you like, Frank, but it’s monumentally stupid in the context of Spartan and ancient Greece generally) was balanced by his usual good art.

The movie has no real redeeming features.

The heavy metal soundtrack and sub-Gladiator fight sequences, the painfully unnecessary slow, lingering shots of nothing in particular, the mediocre acting (can Leonidas keep a consistent accent? I think not!); all these things combine to make it one of the worse films I’ve seen in a while.

Not the short story; instead, a 2005 exercise in retro film making. This is a silent black-and-white gem of a movie. A faithful adaptation, it’s wonderfully lit, has a fine soundtrack, and was actually pretty gripping for all 47 minutes.

The retro special effects are surprisingly effective; the ‘non-Euclidian geometry’ so beloved of Lovecraft makes some novel appearances toward the end. Thoroughly recommended.

Plane Dead is one of those movies that must have started life as a bull session. Eventually the evening got to the point where someone was giggling about how cool Airplane and the 70s airplane disaster flicks that inspired it were, someone else was ruminating on the success of Snakes on a Plane, and someone else mentioned how much they were looking forward to 28 Weeks Later.

Then, as one, “Zombies on a Motherfucking Plane!”

Well, maybe it wasn’t quite like that. But if it wasn’t, it should have been.

It’s a fun production; it starts out touching on all the 70s airplane disaster movie conventions: the captain who’s about to retire, the sports star, the nun, a criminal being escorted by a cop, randy stewardesses, you name it. The Bad Guys have a secret package with an armed guard down in the cargo hold (dum dum dum!), and the plane flies into a huge storm (dum dum dum!), complete with retro exterior shots of the plane lit by lightning.

With plenty of foreboding, then the action is unleashed.

Spoilers follow.

The storm, of course, triggers the release of the secret cargo, a _28 Days Later_ style fast zombie created by medical researchers trying to create super-soldiers. At this stage the pace is still pretty measured; people go to check on the cargo, get zombified, and then all hell starts breaking loose, which brings me to beef one with the movie: I don’t think fast zombies really work that well in a plane. They rampage through it way to quickly because, well, it’s a plane, and they’re ferociously quick and lethal. Rupping through bulkheads and so on, they’re unstoppable. It could have had more tension, less turkey-shoot with slow, classic zombies.

Eventually, qiuckly, we’re down to a few survivors. The Evil Scientists get theirs, of course, survivors are rescued only to zombify, there is self-sacrifice and so on. The criminal turns out to be the only one who can land the plane (the pilots having come down with a bad case of zombie) while being pursued by fighter jets with oders to blow them out of the sky.

Beef the second: when one zombie went through the jet engine after being sucked out of a missile-created hole in the side of the plane I was waiting for the zombie spray to infect the pilot behind, or rain down on a city Return of the Living Dead style, or for the jet to actually be blown out of the sky, both of which would have been way cool endings in classic zombie movie style. Didn’t happen. Le sigh.

Of course, landing the plane leaves us with zombie sequel possibilities, as previously ejected zombies drop from the sky into the same desert plane where the survivors are seen marching off into the sunset.

Various cast members from The Mummy are hamming it up here, and there’s some decent acting given the overall silliness of lines (“I made a promise, and I keep my promises!”) and plot (zombies on a motherfucking plane!); the criminal is done especially enjoyably. Good fun overall, but I’d have liked it a bit better with a slightly grimmer ending and the aforementioned Romero slow zombies.

I’m a sucker for the better French action films: La Femme Nikita, The Professional (shot in English, but as Gallic as Provence), The Brotherhood of the Wolf…

Now sure, part of the reason is that these are the better films that make it out of the French-speaking world; I’m sure there are plenty of crappy French action flicks that no-one bothers to subtitle and market to us Anglophones; but it’s not as though I’m comparing them to, say, the execerable Robot Jox or other bottom-of-the-barrel efforts shat out of the lowest-hanging sphincters in Hollywood; I’m thinking of the mainstream Hollywood actioneers that I grew up with, and have fed into the contemporary idea of what an action movie is.

But there is a difference, I think, and it’s one that comes from thinking about one of the best Hollywood action movies I’ve enjoyed in the last decade: Ronin. Ronin isn’t a French movie, but it shares some of the sensibilities of the French action movies I enjoy—a certain deliberate motion about the characters, a feeling of the movie as being as much a character study as an action film.

Character makes a big difference.

Again, there are exceptions: going back in history to the 60s Hollywood action movies, particular war movies like The Dirty Dozen or The Great Escape there’s more effort put into sketching out characters.