Cinema 2011 #38: Your Highness

Comedy is hard. There’s no denying it, really. What one person finds funny another finds banal. Or excruciating. Or boring. It’s easy to be dramatic, to scare and to thrill. But raising a chuckle, well easier said than done. 2011 hasn’t been a year of belly laughs, and while we’re only a third through this season’s cinematic selection, the likes of Love & Other Drugs and Gulliver’s Travels have been seriously lacking in lols, while the pedigree heritage of Paul failed to make it best-in-show. If anything, the computer-animated movie is fast becoming the de facto funny, but has yet to cater to a specifically adult audience. To that end comes Your Highness, the latest offering from the creative team behind such bawdy blockbusters as Pineapple Express and Superbad, and has its sights set on lampooning the 80s fantasy movie. With drugs. And boobies. And paedophiles. And I wanted it to be so much better.

This time round, the story revolves around prodigal prince Thaddeus, played by Danny McBride. He’s the younger brother to the far superior Fabious, which is a rather fitting name for James Franco, the (and I’m quoting directly the back-page blurb of his recent collection of short stories, Palo Alto) modern-day Renaissance Man. Anyway, Fabious bags a babe (a very fun Zooey Deschanel), but she’s kidnapped by villainous Leezar, and the two brothers embark upon a quest for Fabious to find his one true love, and for Thaddeus to find himself. Natalie Portman shows up as a Xena-esque warrior maiden, there are McGuffins to find and baddies to best. And lots of puns and innuendo to boot.

Nice job, Sky Movies...

A simple idea, brilliantly executed.

Cinema 2011 #37: Tomorrow, When the War Began

You know how it is, you and your teenage mates head off for a spot of camping in the rural outback, nibbling on Tim Tams and spooning Vegemite into your gob, telling each other you’ll be friends forever and to never change. Then, just as you’re growing weary of the bogans at the billabong and are ready to return home, an unspecified pan-Asian aggressor comes swooping in, rounds everyone up and usurps the nation’s sovereignty in a colonising coup d’état. Struth. Such is the perilous situation facing our seven beleaguered youths, as they’re forced to enter guerilla warfare in this directorial debut of Aussie screenwriter Stuart Beattie.

Based on the series of teen-lit novels by John Marsden, there is a strong sense of this being somewhat of a Red Dawn down under, and on the balance of adolescent action movies, Tomorrow, when the War Began is a considerably better film than its American cousin. Hardly surprising, given that Beattie is the scribe behind some of the top-grossing films of the last ten years, having lent his talents to the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Collateral and the forthcoming Halo transition from Xbox to silver screen. The film sounds like a typical school-holidays’ cinematic junket, but rises above this, never taking itself too seriously. Certainly, it does not neglect its, or Marsden’s series’, core audience, but it doesn’t entirely pander to every teenybopper trope either. To that, there are jokes about sex, gossip and cannabis, but peppered throughout with violence and death, morality and survivalism.

How I nearly died for this blog... (some hyperbole may apply)

Dear Reader,

you will not be aware of this, but on Saturday last, on a beautiful sunny day in Dublin town, I nearly died. And it's all your fault.

Yes, there I was, sitting down in the relative comfort of the modern picture house, finding comfort in the midday dusk of Screen 13. Given that it was my 37th visit to this hallowed temple this year, you can imagine that nothing seemed out of the ordinary, and indeed the reels started reeling, the seat cushions suppressed silent farts, and the stench of popcorn filled the air. "I am home", I thought, settling in for some antipodean adventure with Tomorrow, When the War Began.

The review of this film will follow quickly, but in case you've never heard of it, it's basically Red Dawn meets the Southern Cross, and about 20 minutes in, there's a scene where the frolicking teens fall asleep while a number of planes fly overhead, signaling the beginning of an invasion by foreign agitators.

And right at this moment, with no dialogue, rather some soulful shots of snoozing sweet sixteeners, a voice began to announce in passionless and unthreateningly calm British tones:

Attention, attention please. This is an emergency, please leave the cinema and find the nearest exit.

This continued, as those soaring planes filled the Aussie skies with impending danger of all out war, yet no lights turned on, and the film kept playing. "What a bold choice this director has made," I thought, "Adding this ironic voice-over to lend this standard fare a sense of bitter realism. So clever, so daring, so interesting...". 

And I wasn't the only one. It was a further five minutes before we naïve audience members realised that this was not a drill, that an engulfing inferno had instead overtaken the popcorn concession stand of Cineworld, Parnell St. Lead to the exit by power-mad ushers who finally had something to do, ours was the last screen to evacuate the building, amid stares of concern, but more stares of patronising incredulity that we had ignored the alarm for so long.

Anyway, so the inferno turned out to be a rather insignificant number of flames spewing from the popcorn machine. And no one was injured, and the cinema didn't even have to close for the rest of the day.

But still... I have felt death's icy grip tingling my spine, and were it not for the dulcet tones of the British fire alarm...

Cinema 2011 #36: Rio

If you’re willing to lower your expectations, Rio offers the chance to get swept up in bubble-gum family fun, charming you with its bright colours, manic energy and samba beats. Featuring a star vocal cast (Jesse Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, Jamie Foxx, will.i.am, and many, many more), this animated feature has its heart firmly in place, but its lack of highbrow humour leaves it wallowing, albeit beautifully rendered, on the jungle floor.

Telling the story of a neurotic Macaw named Blu, whose fledgling frolics in the Brazilian rainforest are cut short by poachers, the film kicks off with a lavish musical set piece, setting out the beautifully bright animation and zesty soundtrack. Finding himself in Mooselake, Minnesota, Blu (voiced with jittery zeal by Eisenberg, whose wavering pubescent tones lend themselves perfectly to the precious pet), Blu’s taken in and grows up living a sheltered life with his definition bookish (geeky, big glasses, ginger, sells books) companion, Linda. Then he’s whisked off to Rio by a birdbrained scientist with the hope of getting him to mate with Jewel, the last of his kind. If this all sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because Pixar was going to make a better version of it, but instead the mantle falls on director Carlos Saldanha to bring these two lovebirds together.

Cinema 2011 #35: Source Code

So there’s this guy on a train, and he’s caught in a time loop, endlessly reliving the last eight minutes of someone else’s life in order to solve a mystery. It’s funny though, he looks an awful lot like that other guy who was caught in a time-shift paradox, you know the one, with the creepy bunny that was counting down to the end of the world. Only this time, he’s deliberately toing and froing on the tracks time-slip, being sent back by some covert army types, again and again. And he keeps getting blown up. Again and again. See, he’s got a bomber to catch, amid all the mise en abyme coffee spilling and ticket punching, and armed only with his wits, he’ll crack the code, and find the source.

So there’s this guy on a train, and he’s caught in a time loop, endlessly reliving the last eight minutes of someone else’s life in order to solve a mystery. It’s funny though, he looks an awful lot like that other guy who was caught in a time-shift paradox, you know the one, the Iranian cockney who likes to jump around the place with the gaudy letter opener. Only this time, he’s falling for a girl, the one who keeps telling him she took his advice. Except, it’s not his advice, rather that of the tweed’n’leather-patches wearing teacher in which our guy finds himself whenever he catches his reflection. And the clock keeps ticking down, and the army types are getting shiftier, and the bomb goes off, again. But he’s wising up, and piecing together the facts of this sophisticated whodunit, and things are different, but still the same.

Cinema 2011 #34: Sucker Punch

In the 90s, all dressed up in OshKosh B’gosh, off my face on the effervescent dust found crumbling inside a Refresher, and thinking that the highest form of wit was repeatedly making statements, followed by an audibly mid-Atlantic Not, I used to break the 10th commandment. Yes, forgive me lord, for I have sinned. I coveted my neighbour’s goods – I wanted Streets of Rage to be mine. It’s difficult these days, to see just why this game, a 32-bit Sega Megadrive linear-beat-‘em-up, held such a thrall over me, and why I’d long to play, bashing buttons and baddies, to the point of inducing a rose-tinted burning in my thumbs. But I generally only got to watch, as my neighbor would endlessly punch, kick, die, continue, win, lose, and fall off the side of the lift in level 7.

Watching Sucker Punch, the latest CGI opus from 300-director Zack Snyder, sent me back to that living room, with its chintz chairs, yellowing doilies and browning Granny Smith slices. There I was, watching a video-game, with characters equipped with massive machine guns and chop-socky martial arts skills, battling giant ninjas, tik-tok zombie Germans in World War I, a horde of knights and their hot-tempered dragon and bullet train full of zealous robots on Saturn in the springtime. And yet again, I didn’t get to play.

And that’s where it all went wrong for me, in this, the most self-indulgent film of 2011. Looking like a mash up of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Moulin Rouge, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and every Saturday morning cartoon you’ve ever seen, it’s a stylised mess, the equivalent of a CGI Mardi Gras, with cinematographic affectation and unforgivably 2D characters. For mash get smash, and that’s just what Sucker Punch does, smashing together a plot with Inception like dreamscapes with mind-boggling action sequences that look like they’ve been edited by a Ritalin deprived 14 year-old on crack.

Cinema 2011 #33: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

On December 18th, 1994, a group of French cave-explorers made one of the most significant discoveries in the history of art and culture of mankind. Following a stray pocket of air, they stumbled upon a cave system, named the Chauvet Cave, cut off by a rockslide from prying eyes and unfavourable conditions for over 27,000 years, insulating and perfectly hiding a large number of Paleolithic cave paintings. These incredibly detailed red ochre and charcoal pictures, looking so fresh that their very existence was at first thought to be an elaborate hoax, are the oldest known artworks on the planet, and form the focus of eccentric German director Werner Herzog’s latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. That this idiosyncratic filmmaker should choose stone age paintings as his first foray into 3D is typically atypical of a documentarian who’s previously been filmed eating his own shoe.

The film is engrossing from the very beginning, with Herzog outlining the numerous steps that have been put in place to ensure the integrity of the cave’s internal environment. Having been given extremely rare access to Chauvet – the cave has never been open to the public, and is in fact only open to scientific researchers for a few hours per day, over a period of a few months per year – the film crew was limited to four people, carrying basic equipment and lighting that produced no excess heat. Not to mention only being allowed to film from a 2ft. wide walkway running the length of Chauvet, and dealing with the near-toxic levels of radon and CO2.

Despite these stringent conditions, Herzog has managed to capture one of the most beautiful films ever rendered in 3D, with the basic lighting and third dimension adding an elegant depth to the shots, as his digital camera captures every shaded line trailing into niches and nooks of the cave wall. Every stalactite and rippling calcite curtain sparkles with crystals, and the cave, a representation of timelessness itself, seems fragile, with the paintings taking on a near religious importance in the development of our, indeed all, culture.

Cinema 2011 #32: The Eagle

What happens when you strap two strapping young stars into a couple of tunics and togas, give them some swords and sandals, drop them in rural Scotland and add a 12A certificate? The Eagle – the latest Roman romp to tell the tale of the legendary Ninth Spanish Legion, who, along with their famed bronze standard, supposedly disappeared without a trace north of Hadrian’s Wall in 117AD. Coming mercurially hot on the manly leather skirt-tails of 2010’s Centurion, The Eagle is loosely based on the 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff, something of a perennial boys’ own adventure and already adapted by the BBC. This time around, we follow soldier Marcus Flavius Aquila and his Briton slave Esca, as they cross the northern border, leaving the security of the Roman Empire for the treacherous unknown, hunting for the titular emblem to reclaim Rome’s lost glory and the Aquila family name. Legions and legends, battles and Daddy-issues, GI Joe and Billy Elliot, will this Eagle fly high or leave you running for the nearest vomitorium?

It actually starts very well, with Channing Tatum’s Marcus starting a new career as the cautious commander of the dodgiest outpost south of the wall. He’s bearing the brunt of his family’s name, his company all stage-whispering his general father’s infamous loss of the Ninth, while he prays to the gods he won’t bring further shame to bear. However, after a hasty display of tactical prowess and derring-do when a frenzied surprise attack descends upon the settlement, he’s earned his men’s respect, and a wince-worthy knee injury. While on respite in uncle Donald Sutherland’s villa, Marcus persuades the crowd to save the life of captured Pict Esca, played by Jamie Bell, who in turn becomes enslaved by honour to the injured Roman. When Marcus hears rumours of the bronze standard’s northern whereabouts, the real story begins, as the role of master and slave swaps around, both warriors becoming reliant on each other for survival, as they faceoff with some Gaelic-garbling goons known as the – I kid you not – Seal People. Led by A Prophet’s Tahar Rahim, who frankly needs to listen to his “Leigh anois go curamach, ar do scruid phaipear, na teoracha agus na ceisteanna, a gabhann le cuid A” a bit better, these baddies are nameless and very expendable, which is just as well when all hell breaks loose.