28 May, 2013 · 10:35 am

Scanners Trilogy (1981)

scanners“Scanners? Don’t make me laugh,” scoffs the Mayor (Dorothée Berryman) in the trashily enjoyable Scanners II: The New Order.

She has a point, especially when it comes to the preposterous Scanners III: The Takeover. David Cronenberg’s original 1981 cult classic remains serious sci-fi though, as reliant on ideas as cranium-bursting FX as it explores an underground war between persons of extraordinary psychic power (including unforgettable mind-assassin Michael Ironside).

But the director didn’t return for the follow-ups, and he’s similarly absent from the extras, a jovial series of cast and crew interviews. 3/5

Via Total Film

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· 10:33 am

Knightriders (1981)

knightriders“It’s a pretty bizarre little movie,” surmises Ed Harris in an interview included on this Knightriders restoration.

“It’s unlike anything George did or has done.” No kidding! Sandwiched between Dawn Of The Dead and Day Of The Dead (via Creepshow), George A. Romero’s medieval motorbike mash-up is a beguiling blend of two-wheelers and tantrums.

Harris is riveting as the king of a medieval re-enactment troupe whose disillusionment and fiery temper threaten to tear his kingdom apart.

At 145 minutes we’re firmly in epic territory, an ideas-stuffed dissection of society with added bike-duels for kicks. 3/5

Via Total Film

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· 10:31 am

Trouble With The Curve (2013)

trouble-with-the-curveConsider Clint Eastwood’s first acting gig in four years the anti-Moneyball.

Where Brad Pitt’s pic was all about modern tech, Trouble With The Curveargues that “anybody who uses computers doesn’t know a damn thing about this game”.

It’s sentiment over cynicism as Eastwood’s scout butts heads with daughter Mickey (Amy Adams) in a by-the-numbers drama that uses baseball as set-dressing.

Humdrum plotting aside, Robert Lorenz’s directorial debut shows that Eastwood’s still got it – a graveside sing-a-long guarantees sniffles – while Adams is a fiery Lois Lane in embryo. 3/5

Via Total Film

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· 10:28 am

Epic (2013)

epicIf The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey taught us anything, it’s that big adventures can come in small packages.

While Epic‘s neat little parcel contains considerably less singing (Beyoncé warbling over the end credits notwithstanding) and considerably more gastropod molluscs (or, y’know, slugs and snails), it aims for similar pint-sized thrills. Fitting, then, that this 3D jaunt is unlikely to win the heart of anyone over three feet tall.

Between its assault course of airborne action scenes and over-populated cast of characters (including Chris O’Dowd and Aziz Ansari on comic-relief duty as said snail and slug), it’s surprising that director Chris Wedge (Robots, Ice Age) finds room for any plot at all.

It’s there, sparingly, in the misadventures of Mary Katherine aka MK (voiced by Amanda Seyfried), who’s shrunk to a speck by Beyoncé’s green-fingered Queen Tara and then roped into the war between miniature leaf men and forest-trashing Boggans. Before anybody can groan “Honey, I shrunk the kids”, spears fly, swords clash and MK moons over leaf hunk Nod (Josh Hutcherson).

Despite a fun zinger late on involving giant electric shocks, few sparks fly between this insipid duo. The plot, meanwhile – based on a book by Rise Of The Guardians author William Joyce – seems to have taken narrative cues from the lyrics of Michael Jackson’s ‘Earth Song’.

There’s also a preoccupation with paternal problems that feels distinctly Spielberg-lite. (“I’m kind of on my own,” sighs MK; “No one’s ever on their own!” trumpets Colin Farrell’s warrior Ronin in a blatant lie.)

It’s almost a relief, then, that the action’s so relentless, distracting from the writing’s inadequacies with swoopy mid-flight skirmishes. Judicious use of 3D will have the nippers gripping their seat arms throughout. And there’s a bit with a mouse – the size of a bear in this teeny-tiny world – that brings the fear factor necessary to any fairy tale.

Verdict: By no means an epic fail, but lacking the spry wit of more adult-friendly animations, this is big on action and small on originality. Gorgeous visuals aside, Epic is resolutely kiddie fare. 3/5

Via Total Film

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Tagged as CGI Animation, Epic, film review

· 10:26 am

Simon Killer (2012)

simon_killerIn many films, music provides an escape. We’re talking about that wedding party scene in End of Watch, or Pulp Fiction’s Travolta-Thurman dance-off, both of which offered a reprieve from the darkness festering elsewhere in the narrative. Not so in Simon Killer. Despite its throbbing, indie-cool soundtrack, music in this Sundance hit is used to keep us continually off-balance, uneasy, trapped. There’s no escaping the darkness in Simon (Brady Corbet).

As abrasive and frustrating as the music cues are in Simon Killer– electro-pop tracks build to a crescendo before being abruptly silenced – it’s entirely fitting for Simon’s story. He’s a young man doing the tourist thing in Paris. Except he’s finding it a lonely experience, roaming the streets and bars in search of a connection and, in one moment of spot on comic tragedy, even has an awkward webcam rendezvous.

Things seem to pick up when Simon meets prostitute Victoria (Mati Diop), a fragile young woman who takes pity on him and lets him crash at her flat. It’s this relationship that begins to unravel Simon’s personality, and in the harshest, cruellest of situations, he’s revealed to be a little more than the naïve, backpacker boy-next-door we’ve been led to believe he is. Like the music, he’s fractured and conflicted.

An ambitious second feature from Afterschool director Antonio Campos, Simon Killer marks a definite evolution for the filmmaker. Stylistically, there are a lot of similar visual cues – elegant, slow pans, restrained framing – but Campos attempts to fuse his keen eye with an exploration of what is, essentially, a potentially dangerous sociopath.

Far from putting Simon under a microscope and dissecting him, though, Campos sets up a series of mysteries that may or may not hold the clues to his warped mind. Presented in snippets of dialogue, visual motifs and encounters with other characters, we’re left to come up with our own answers. Is Simon a predator? Or just slightly messed up? Most importantly, does he have the capacity to murder?

This emphasis on set-up with few answers is both Simon Killer’s biggest strength and its greatest weakness. It’s a beautifully-realised enigma, aesthetically faultless (the film was shot entirely on location in Paris using only natural light) and unashamedly provocative. Even the title is a puzzle, inviting certain expectations but then not entirely delivering on them.

“Can I just look at you?” breathes Simon whenever he gets within a few feet of a naked woman. Simon Killer invites us to do the same. It’s obsessed with perception, the power of looking (Laura Mulvey would have a field day), what it means to objectify and be objectified.

It should come as no surprise that Martha Marcy May Marlenedirector Sean Durkin produced Killer (Campos himself produced MMMM). The two films are like twin sides of the same scuzzed coin – one a portrait of a victim, the other of a victimiser. Both are haunting cinematic experiences and, at Killer’s centre, Corbet plays a wily game, slowly chipping away Simon’s veneer until we’re left with something genuinely disturbing. 4/5

Via Grolsch Film Works

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· 10:22 am

Mud (2013)

Mud filmA coming-of-age drama that dirties up genre conventions with surprisingly adult concerns, Mud is the third feature from Take Shelter director Jeff Nichols. It also contains the latest in a string of increasingly solid turns from Matthew McConaughey, who emerged from his rom-coma around 2011 and is finally fulfilling the promise of 1996’s A Time To Kill.

Though Mud is named after McConaughey’s character, a grubby loner living in self-imposed exile on a remote Arkansas island, it’s the fuse that Mud lights in 14-year-old Ellis (Tye Sheridan) that gives the film its impetus. The pair meet when Ellis and best bud Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) head to the island in search of a boat left in a tree by the last flood.

There, they find Mud. Superstitious, romantic, a teller of tall tales, he’s in the middle of hatching a desperate plan to get back his love, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), while evading the targets of vengeful bounty hunters. Resolving to help Mud out, Ellis and Neck become his willing aids. But could Mud be more dangerous than he’s letting on?

Told almost exclusively from Ellis’ point of view (there are only a handful of times that the audience is granted access to conversations that Ellis isn’t), Nichols’ take on the traditional coming-of-ager is an affecting, poetically-lensed exploration of how a teenager’s ideals don’t match those of a complex, contradictory adult world.

Example: Ellis’ certainty that Mud and Juniper belong together, which is both unquestioning and naive. “They love each other,” he tells neighbour Tom (Sam Shepard), and it’s no coincidence that Ellis’ own parents are on the brink of divorce. This idea of love and heartbreak beats through Mud, and it’s never more poignant than in Ellis’ puppy-dog affection for an older teen whose growing apathy he can’t understand.

For his part, Sheridan perfectly captures Ellis’ inner struggle, imbuing his thoroughly modern Huck Finn with pluck, warmth and not a little frailty. He’s as naturalistic as he was in The Tree of Life (Nichols himself shares that film’s love of gorgeous nature shots), and Sheridan’s relationship with Lofland’s comic-relief swear machine is just one of the many elements that keeps Mudrooted in a relatable reality.

As well as Huck Finn, there are also echoes of last year’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, another tale centred around a youngster’s attempts to understand a discombobulating world while living in ramshackle riverside humility. While Mud doesn’t stray into the same fantasy-hued terrain as Beasts, they’ll make for a fantastic double bill one day.

Really, there are few stumbles in Nichols’ film, which forgoes the all-out crazy of Take Shelter for something slower and more intimate. It’s a film about family and love; themes that McConaughey brilliantly encapsulates in his chip-toothed anti-hero. Baked hard by the sun, he’s as much of a kid as Ellis; the world’s chewed him up and spat him out again. He’s everything Ellis wants to be, and everything he shouldn’t be. It’s this clever gambit that Mud enjoys toying with, and the result is an immersive drama that skips ‘adult rite of passage’ cliché by striking a killer blow to the heart. 4/5

Via Grolsch Film Works

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Tagged as film review, Matthew McConaughey, Mud, Reese Witherspoon, Take Shelter

· 10:19 am

Byzantium (2013)

ByzantiumThe shadow of Twilight stretches inexorably over Byzantium, an otherwise handsome vampire drama that marks director Neil Jordan’s return to familiar bloody turf 17 years after he made Interview with the Vampire. Giving neck-chewers back a little bite, Byzantium’s seedy, moody, bloody opening salvo attempts to reclaim the fangified undead from the tween crowd. It just about succeeds.

In a neon-blasted strip club, Clara Webb (Gemma Arterton) performs a lap dance in fishnets and heels. Meanwhile, her daughter Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) encounters an old man on their estate and goes back to his house. Within minutes we’re treated to a thrilling foot chase, some frantic blood-sucking and a spectacularly-staged beheading as this mother and daughter are revealed to be vampires.

Ronan provides lyrical narration (“love confounded her”) while Arterton is engagingly forthright (she’s a vampire and a vamp, hoho). Their relationship is, unsurprisingly, somewhat fraught, especially given they look more like sisters. Things simmer down, though, when Clara and Eleanor head to a sleepy seaside town and take up residence in a rundown hotel. As Clara establishes a brothel to pay the bills, Eleanor struggles with their secret and drip-feeds us the duo’s centuries-spanning history.

More often than not, vampirism in movies is used to comment on everything except vampires – The Addiction used it as a metaphor for AIDS; Blade to tackle racism. Where Byzantiumtriumphs is in employing vampirism as a device that heightens a mother-daughter relationship. Much like the more cult-y Ginger Snaps, Byzantium’s script – by Moira Buffini, who adapts her play ‘A Vampire Story’ – uses neck-chewers to pick apart not only female sexuality, but also the power of the maternal bond and the effect that otherworldly forces have on human relationships.

Given this thematic richness, it comes as a surprise – and a disappointment – that Byzantium ultimately ends up favouring aTwilight-aping romance. While Clara and Eleanor’s fundamental differences are briefly investigated – Clara’s punishment of men who degrade women, Eleanor’s refusal to feed from anybody under 70 – a will-they-won’t-they dalliance between Eleanor and mortal boy Frank (Caleb Landry Jones) bleeds much of the narrative dry.

True, Ronan and Jones have great chemistry, and their romance does occasionally hit upon surprising poignancy, but Byzantiumoften zeroes in on this been-there-moped-that saga at the expensive of Clara and Eleanor’s story. Despite some intriguing early interplay, their scenes quickly devolve into snore-worthy slagging-off matches that belong in EastEnders.

With Jordan at the helm, though, Byzantium is frequently ravishing. Like Interview with the Vampire, this spiritual follow-up involves lush flashback sequences that have fun with vampire lore. And while the stroppy teenager angle is on the stale side,Byzantium is a resolutely adult horror story with interesting – if not revelatory – things to say. 3/5

Via Grolsch Film Works

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Tagged as Byzantium, film review, Gemma Arterton, horror, Mother daughter, Neil Jordan, Vampire movie