Movies

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.

Renaissance is a black and white animation set in a future Paris, as the title implies. The thing that hit me first is that animation; it’s delightful to look at, and drew me in; the style of the visuals makes me think of the French comic artists I’ve seen through Heavy Metal.

Unfortunately therein lies the problem. After being captured by the visuals I notice the voice acting, which is good, and then the story… well, the story is not so good. I mentioned Heavy Metal, which was long held to be a great introduction to serious (Continental) comics for English speakers, who spent most of the period from the 1950s to the 1990s cursed with lightweight superhero melodrama as the idea of what comics could be; on mainland Europe comics were treated as being a more capable art form. The problem with all the Heavy Metal I’ve seen is that it tends to be good and sophisticated by the standards of comic books, and really, not even by the standards of the Vertigo era comics. Maus or Stuck Rubber Baby, by way of contrast, are sophisticated by any standard; Heavy Metal’s stuff tends to be sophisticated only in as much as it ackowleges people have sex, or offers nods to literary or philosophical thinking.

Renaissance reminds me of that; a mish-mash of fairly stock standard film noir and sci-fi elements which aren’t even blended especially expertly and it suffers from weak exposition: Renaissance is interesting, and visually intriguing, but ultimately left me dissatisfied. It was worth borrowing and watching, but I don’t think I’d bother buying it.

I enjoyed this. Nicely woven plot, albeit with a few overly obvious twists and turns, with a few good “surprise!” moments.

This is the London of Canary Wharf and the post-Thatcher era of common-as-muck moneymakers in nice suits and old clubs; director Matthew Vaughn noted in the Q&A session added to the Region 1 disc that he wanted a step away from the lower class grubby pubs of the two Guy Ritchie films he’d produced (Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch), and one that would showcase a more beautiful London.

Violence tends toward the nasty, brutish, and short variety, rather than slo-mo-porno choreography.

Good, tough, smart crime film with minimal comedy, well acted, recommended. I can see why Sony wanted Craig for Bond with this on his resume.

Very cool. Easier to watch than explain.

Slevin is a mystery; the scene is set with a literal and figurative twist by Bruce Willis’s Mr. Goodkat that sets the scene for the file: there’s a lot of “What the hell is going on?”, a lot of nice camera work, and some pleasingly ruthless characters.

Discussing this film beyond said very nice cinematography, and saying I think it’s worth a watch is pretty much an exercise in spoilers; you have been warned.

So it turns out when Borat claims to be speaking the language of Kazakhstan, he’s actually speaking Hebrew.

That’s just too amusing.

Stylish. Some nice moments. But, overall, one of the dumbest films I’ve seen in a while. Not, say, Matrix II and III dumb. It’s also fun, which I can’t say for the Matrix movies.

But dumb. Real dumb.