Change Your Image
sonoftrev
Reviews
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
Technically brilliant slow crawl to nowhere
OK first things first, there is no doubting the skill of David Fincher in creating what is a visually stunning spectacle; the acting is top notch, especially Brad Pitt, but the movie is sooo long and based on a premise that is innately ridiculous. Are we really expected to feel anything other than revulsion when old man Button falls in love with 12 year old Daisy? It's just not right. Thankfully we are spared any sexual congress until our romantic heroes meet half way through their respective lives and get down and dirty without the audience needing to reach for the sick bag.
The movie is scripted by Forest Gump scribe Eric Roth and the similarities are clear, long journey through life learning valuable lessons along the way from an assortment of eccentric characters and situations yadayadayada. But whereas Gump was filled with a poignant entourage of fabulous characters and thrilling set pieces, Button crawls along through a turgid treacle thick layer of cloying and banal over-sentimentality that alienates rather than captivates the viewer.
A raft of wonderful acting talent is wasted on characters with which it is very difficult to empathise. Tilda Swinton plays a pointless and irritating rich English woman who conducts a brief affair with Benjamin. Yet she is so shallow and egocentric it is difficult to grasp exactly what life affirming pearl of wisdom Benjamin and the audience are supposed to take from the episode.
There are also several plot points that beggar belief. Are we really supposed to believe Daisy waited 40 years before asking her daughter to read Benjamin's diary to her as she lay on her death bed? Why is the Benjamin character allowed to drift into semi-vagrancy by those who love him as he gets older and more childlike? Wouldn't the social services who found him and read the diary believing him to be a child, find it worthy of investigation that he reports having sex with a 40 year old woman, least of all leave him in her care? I accept that as a fantasy, some level of belief suspension is necessary but as a plot conceit it just fails, it is just too much like hard work excusing the story's ridiculousness and as such the film fails. I am reminded of Tim Burton's far superior Big Fish. A film that took outlandish fantasy elements and a story retold from the death bed, but still managed to weave them into a touching, believable and ultimately satisfying fable. Over long, over earnest and over hyped, and will probably over achieve at the Oscars at the expense of the worthier Slumdog Millionaire.
Three and Out (2008)
How did this get made?
Well first things first. As this movie is marketed as a comedy I would like to point out all the biting and incisive wit within that us Brits are so famous for. Except I can't, because there isn't any! It shows the depths to which studios have plumbed that they actually thought this movie was a marketable commodity.
Mackenize Crook sleepwalks his way through a banal and frankly insulting script, as Paul Callow. A Dostoyevsky reading tube train driver, with aspirations to be a writer, who has killed 2 passengers in a matter of weeks and needs just one more to receive a pay off and early retirement. Oh the hilarity as he approaches an old man outside a retirement home and asks him to oblige. Our detestable and unsympathetic hero settles on Colm Meaney's Tommy Cassidy, a tramp with a terminal illness. I know my sides are splitting too! Frankly, that an actor as gifted as Meaney and the wonderful Imelda Staunton, who plays Meaney's wife, have to struggle with this rubbish is embarrassing.
It gets worse. Any director that imagines giving the awful fat gob on legs, Kerry Katona, a cameo in his film is going to lend some kind of populist gloss to his trite ideas really should throw himself under the next train to oblivion. Which is where first time director Johnathan Gershfield is surely heading after this abomination. Oh, and don't get me started on future Bond girl Gemma Arterton, she is so wooden she must vomit sawdust!
Weak script, weak acting, appalling direction and worst of all an incredibly patronising attempt to tack a pointless feel good moment of self discovery onto the loathsome main character at the end. He can write! He's cleaned his flat! I nearly puked! If you spend good money to watch this rubbish you probably will too. The most poignant moment of the whole film is when Mackenzie Crook looks out of the window of his flat, and on the sill is a copy of Joseph Heller's novel Catch 22. Now thats funny black comedy! This, excuse the pun, is a trainwreck of a movie. Avoid.
Pineapple Express (2008)
Violent stoner action comedy anyone?
Do we really need another stoner comedy? With Dude Where's My Car? Harold and Kumar's various adventures, not to mention the Cheech and Chong movies already out there, surely Pineapple Express is a bong movie too far? Well fear not because this latest vehicle for the ubiquitous Seth Rogen is a likable and funny addition to the stoner buddy comedy canon.
Seth plays Dale Denton, a process server with a penchant for pot, who witnesses a murder. Unfortunately for Dale, in his panic to flee the scene he discards a joint made from Pineaple Express, a drug so pure and exclusive, only one dealer possesses it, the bad guys are soon after him and said dealer (James Franco). Franco is great as Saul Silver, laid back and poetic purveyor of illegal substances, his character is a million miles from the stuffy, stiff and wooden Harry Osborn he plays in the Spiderman movies.
The chemistry between Rogen's antsy chatter and Franco's addled musings is pitched just right, in a tight Rogen Goldberg script (Superbad) that throws in some sparkling dialogue for our heroes. Indeed, the script only really falters with the weak subplot involving an Asian gang muscling in on gangster boss Ted Jones'(Gary Cole) drug empire.
There are some great supporting characters, Danny R McBride's haplessly indestructible Red is a scream and has the best line in the film, "You just got killed by a Daewoo Lanos, motherf****r!" The bickering hit men Budlofsky and Matheson, played by Kevin Corrigan and an hilariously childish and camp Craig Robinson respectively, nag their way through the movie like an old demented married couple.
Throw in a hilarious car chase, which wonderfully subverts the machismo of more serious action movies, shoot outs, explosions, fist fights and not forgetting the greatest pot ever devised, Pineapple Express, that according to Saul is so good "it's like God's vagina!" And what you have are the ingredients for the world's first and best violent stoner action comedy.
The Great McGonagall (1975)
The Insane Genius of Spike Milligan
Sadly neglected and forgotten gem of a movie showcasing the incredible and anarchic humour of legend Spike Milligan. Spike plays the eponymous hero of the movie, the Great Mcgonagall, the worlds worst poet who "gave up his job as an unemployed weaver to follow the muse." The gloriously inventive non-structure of the movie eschews any sense of order and usurps all accepted movie conventions. The action taking place, for the most part, in a rambling old theatre. Indeed, the whole production has a stagey feel and the viewer almost feels as if they are part of an insane scatter gun rehearsal filled with ad libbing and uncorrected mistakes. In one scene Spike and the wonderful Victor Spinetti, who appears in numerous roles, do several takes much to the annoyance of very real director Joseph McGrath.
There's awful poetry, a cross dressing Peter Sellers as Queen Victoria (favourite quote, "shit, we are not amused!"), Prince Albert replete with Nazi uniform and Hitler Moustache, and gags galore. Spike's comedic genius was sadly neglected in cinema which is a travesty when one considers the hilarious calibre of original jokes here, delivered with a malicious and surreal glee. For further proof of Spike's incredible talent hunt down a copy of The Bed-sitting Room.
Zavet (2007)
Not Kusturica's best, but not all bad either
This film seems to be getting an awful lot of stick which is quite unfounded. Sure, all the usual Kusturican elements are present, but its these ideas that make his films so special. The colourful barrage of heady surrealism barrels along at an incredible pace but without detracting from the energy of the movie.
The plot follows Tsane as he is sent to the big city, by his Grandfather, to sell the family's cow and return with a wife before Grandpa shuffles off this mortal coil. Of course, life is not that simple and in a sparkling series of ribald vignettes that defy the laws of physics, Kusturica gives the audience murder, prostitution, gangsters, castration and a whole raft of bizarre characters and situations.
However, at the heart of the movie is a quest for love and affirmation against the difficulties posed by the chaos of the region. In a gloriously anarchic ending, a double wedding is conducted in the midst of a gun battle, with the band playing on and all under the baleful gaze of a gravity defying human cannonball.
This is a fun movie and yes, maybe not all of Kusturica's ideas pay off, but we should all be thankful that he has the imagination, the verve and the bravery to experiment with these ideas in his films. I would take one average Kusturica movie over a thousand dull, turgid and pointless Hollywood blockbusters.