Sunday 27 March 2011

The Ten Commandments of 'Faster'



Thou shalt privilege style over content.

Thou shalt shoot first, and never think to ask questions.

Thou shalt herald the return of Dwayne Johnson to where he doth belong.

Thou shalt feature the best work Billy Bob Thornton’s done for years.

Thou shalt condemn Carla Gugino to being an expository third wheel.

Thou shalt devote undue time to off-kilter yet oddly sober sub-plots.

Thou shalt not, despite advertising strongly suggesting the contrary, feature a car chase worth mentioning.

Thou shalt make unto thee a graven image of all generic precursors.

Thou shalt covet religious solemnity.

Thou shalt reap congenial entertainment from unpromising material.


Sunday 20 March 2011

'Hawaii Five-0' Checklist and Drinking Game

Drinking takes away the pain.

Obligatory surfing scene [shot of vodka]

Women in bikinis on a beach [shot of dark rum]

Alex O'Loughlin's torso displayed unnecessarily [shot of white rum]

A comment is made about the unnecessary displaying of Alex O'Loughlin's torso [shot of whisky]

Scott Caan says something irreverent in an irritable way (possibly about Alex O'Loughlin's torso) [shot of tequila]

Daniel Dae Kim says 'bro' [shot of gin]

Touchscreen computer technology used for simple task [shot of sambuca]

Helicopter shots used for no discernible reason [pint of lager (downed)]

Our protagonists have homoerotic argument while driving [pint of Guinness (downed)]

The Five-0 squad investigate the murder of a close friend/mentor/family member [yard of ale]

Product Placement [one Jägerbomb per example of any of the following]
  • Chevrolet
  • Hawaii Airlines
  • Hawaii Tourist Board
  • Bing

You forget that the show isn't called CSI: Honolulu [the full “ginning”]

The suspicion that it will soon be cancelled becomes impossible to ignore [strong cup of coffee]

Book 'em, Danno [cyanide pill]

Tuesday 8 March 2011

Forget-Me-Not: A Review of 'Unknown'


‘We Germans are experts at forgetting,’ states Bruno Ganz’s private detective when he is approached by Liam Neeson’s befuddled Dr Martin Harris, a man whose first trip to Berlin began with lost luggage at the airport and – several taxi crashes, spousal shunnings and murder attempts later – has only got worse.  So what looked from the trailers like a re-heated version of Neeson’s unfortunate 2008 action splurge Taken is actually an amnesia-thriller in the Bourne mold.  Unknown, at the very least, knows from what cinematic cloth it is cut, but it is at its best when it dabbles in more unexpected material.
While Jason Bourne had no idea who he was and had to earn himself a moral compass – not to mention the approval of demur colleagues, matriarchal CIA directors, and grouchy Parisian mini-owners (women all) – in Unknown it is everyone around Dr Harris who seems to have suffered anamnesis adjustment, yet without any concurrent trauma.  His wife looks just as lovely as she did four days and one coma earlier, only now she claims not to know who our hero is, and is even clutching the arm of a doppleganger who, she assures, is actually Dr Martin Harris.
Given that his wife is played by walking shard of frosted ice January Jones, and the seemingly usurping paramour by an effectively similar Aiden Quinn (if only the budget, and his ego, would have stretched to casting Harrison Ford for this role, an actor many reviews have compared Neeson too here, then the face-offs between these two characters would have sparked with a flinty meta-intensity), it is briefly conceivable that Mrs. Harris just simply hasn’t noticed the change.  Yet that’s not it, and either she’s complicit in some nefarious plot, or the good Dr Harris (that is, the good Dr Harris) is losing his mind.
The introduction of Mr. Ganz only adds to the confusion (what is an actor like him doing in trash like this?), but when his character begins to talk of the bad old pre-unification days, and later uses Stasi informants to aid Harris’s search for existential security, we realize that he’s here because there really are meat on these bones.  Then there’s Diane Kruger’s cab driver, forced to work overtime in an Arab café and in no way willing to help out.  Another dead-end and more crumpled euro notes spent.  It is now when we might start to realize the depth of the film’s depiction of Berlin, a world city as much as London, but with a gaping absence that twenty years of glass and steel architecture and Checkpoint Charlie souvenirs cannot efface.  This is a city hostile towards embarrassment and insecurity even as it breeds ambiguity and chilly uncertainty: just ask Bourne, who had to overcome the chaos of rush hour Alexanderplatz to get his way, or Jodie Foster’s Kyle Pratt in Flightplan, whose grief-ridden plummet into possible insanity began at the same metro station Dr Harris spies someone following him.  Or does he?
Certainly, there is no getting away from the fact that there’s a hulking great car chase in the middle of the film, and even if it is an effective set-piece (and it is really rather good), it still bears witness to the stamp of producer Joel Silver and the need for blockbuster action cred.  Yet you’ll never catch Neeson with a gun in hand, and while pedestrians might be expendable, minor characters are not.  There is a subtly nuanced (and possibly unintended) naming and mourning of an early victim, while subsequent collateral damage is decried in a scene that would normally exist only between jump-cuts.
All of which makes the inevitable slide (and it is inevitable, and it is a slide) all the more regrettable, even if the mechanics of the revelation are handled somewhat smoother than those in the aforementioned Flightplan.  Even so, among the nonsense that riddles the final reel there are some nice details (I’ve never seen a Hitchcock blonde treated quite like that before), and the finale should not scrub the positive qualities of the rest of the film from your mind – even if it is precisely this logic which Unknown itself frustratingly advocates by way of conclusion.  It is a resourceful piece of entertainment, derivative and simple-minded on the surface, but while the twists may be under-developed, it is in the margins that the film is able to pleasantly surprise.  This alone makes it at the very least memorable.

Tuesday 1 March 2011

22 Things I Learned From 'Drive Angry 3D'


1. Satanic cults have a high rate of attrition.

2. Hard asses take their coffee black, with lots of sugar.

3. No one caresses a handbrake like Amber Heard.

4. The US mid-west has been abandoned by all rational people and colonised by laconic, diner-visiting demons (see also Legion, which I can only assume is better, if only because it’s four minutes shorter).

5. Calling a slightly overweight person “fat” is a funny enough joke to sustain five minutes of screen time.

6. Real men ask for a shotgun the same way the rest of us order an espresso.

7. The sheet at the back of the garage always conceals an immaculate classic American car.

8. Hell has a poorly protected armoury (which is running low on stock – three bullets?!), and a disintegrating drawbridge of some kind.  No, really.

9. Louisiana police captains have a very relaxed dress code (and poor taste in t-shirts).

10. There’s always an old friend that lives nearby.

11. There’s always a flirty waitress (or several).

12. Never trust the FBI.

13. Women don’t bruise.

14. Nicolas Cage seems to be interested in little else these days than a self-directed retroactive career assassination.

15. David Morse has given up on life, or at the very least on cinema. (You’re not the only one, David, you’re not the only one).

16. If this film was aiming for the vibe of an apocalyptic Johnny Cash ditty then it failed, and only succeeded in making me wish it were as brief and succinct as an apocalyptic Johnny Cash ditty.

17. That this was written, edited, and directed by the same person indicates that that person should seek help.

18. A perverse, slightly intriguing performance by William Fichtner as a diabolical bounty hunter can look like a stunning exercise of comic genius when surrounded by utter, utter dreck.

19. Drive Angry 3D.  The three Ds are driving, demons, and despondency.

20. When even Nicolas Cage looks bored, you know you’re close to witnessing the very atomic structure of boredom.

21. Grindhouse this ain’t.  Shucks, this wasn’t even Machete.

22. Hell is another Nicolas Cage film.