Monthly Archives: June 2013

After Earth  (2013)    20/100

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Rating :   20/100                                                                     100 Min        12A

A ridiculous story matched by ridiculous acting. Planned as a trilogy that will now most certainly not be happening, this film never really gets past the main problem of knowing that Will Smith has cast his real life fourteen year old son to play the son of his central character onscreen and, although I do feel a degree of pity for Jaden Smith’s situation here, his son’s acting ability simply isn’t where it needs to be for a huge blockbuster like this. This issue is compounded by Will Smith himself actually having come up with the story (though not the screenplay), and it’s hopelessly contrived to allow the character his son plays to conquer his fears and in effect become a man. His heart was likely in the right place, and it has the feel of Mr Smith senior trying to pass the acting gauntlet onto Mr Smith junior, but it absolutely needed a better script.

Set in the future after we’ve destroyed our planet by abusing its resources, although this is actually nonsense as the two central characters end up on a crash landed ship (wherein the entirety of the ship’s crew have conveniently otherwise perished) that warps back to Earth (this is not a spoiler by the way), and it is displayed as abundantly full of vegetation and megafauna. There’s a volcano, if that is supposed to denote global warming, but we do actually have volcanoes at the moment Mr Smith (admittedly, it is set one thousand years after we left for pastures new, but hardly enough time for every species on Earth to more than double in size, especially in their supposedly resources limited environment).

Anyway, Will’s legs are also conveniently broken, or as his character puts it ‘Both my legs are broken. One of them really badly.’, hmm yes, which thus forces his young mini me to go on a trip through the perilous forest to find the tail of the crashed vessel with the emergency distress beacon. And therein an enormous problem with the story rears its ugly head – since there are only two of them it is abundantly obvious that young Mr Smith is in fact not going to be annihilated by the several things that he encounters which will, of course, try to annihilate him. Though he does pretty much ask for it by smacking a baboon in the face with a rock for no apparent reason. Fortunately, he is so super fit, despite Earth’s gravity being stronger than on his home planet, he is able to outrun an entire pack of angry baboons in their native forest. Did. Not. See. That. Coming. Sarcasm.

O there’s an alien bad guy that may or may not have survived the crash too, see the above line, all that being said, some of the visuals and cinematography are quite good. Indeed, the production design on the spaceship is interesting, with an aesthetic that appears to be a hybrid of an old sailing ship and a beehive/organic structure on the interior, and a more Star Trek esque hull on the outside. With the start of the final credits and the revelation that the director is M. Night Shyamalan (his name was removed from trailers after they performed badly) there was a moment of, ‘O, of course, it all makes sense now’, as there was one part when our young hero looked as if he were going to try to outrun the weather as well as the baboons, and one couldn’t help but think of Shyamalan’s ‘The Happening’ (08) when Mark Wahlberg and co did actually try to outrun the wind and the airborne evil that came with it, and here we find similar veins of trashy nonsense throughout the story. There are a lot of good films out at the moment, don’t waste your time and money on this.

Populaire  (2012)    66/100

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Rating :   66/100                                                                     111 Min        12A

A fairly decent French language film set in the late 1950’s that very much apes the feel of Audrey Hepburn’s ‘Funny Face’ (57) but which isn’t quite as enjoyable as that classic musical number, in fact it’s almost too light and fluffy for its own good, but with a warm heart that ultimately just wins out over predictability and comedy that never really does more than tickle lightly. It stars Romain Duris as insurance salesman Louis Échard looking for a new secretary – enter Déborah François as the young and very beautiful small town ingenue Rose Pamphyle who will fill the position after demonstrating excessively rapid typing skills, to the extent that Louis feels compelled to enter her into regional speed typing tournaments, and to train her to realise her full typewriting championship potential.

It’s immediately obvious that a romance can hardly fail to develop, and Duris’ character fills the boots of the ‘douche bag guy who will inevitably come good in the end’, but whilst Duris’ performance nor his character are particularly convincing, Déborah François is what really sells the picture, giving a strong and very affable portrayal of the clumsy and yet determined Rose, and surprisingly the fairly dull sounding competition of speed typing becomes reasonably interesting – they even manage to fit in a ‘Rocky’ style training montage at one point.

Bérénice Bejo plays a supporting character that aids in no small way the budding romance, but also teaches Rose to play piano – ostensibly to aid her digital adroitness, but also nodding to the most famous roles of both lead actors to date; ‘The Page Turner’ (06) for François, and ‘The Beat that my Heart Skipped’ (05) for Duris, in which he also played an angry twat who somehow gets the girl by shouting at her in a fit of rage at one point, if memory serves. Indeed, in one scene here Rose gives him a good slap, and he’s just as quick to give her a good one right back – it’s very French, but also perhaps another nod to a moment in ‘Funny Face’ with a Parisian couple sitting outside a nightclub, the female member of which is angrily shouting at her male partner, who, naturally, slaps her across the face, and she promptly responds by hugging and kissing him passionately. ‘Populaire’ takes its name from the brand of typewriter Rose uses, and marks the feature film debut of Régis Roinsard.

The Purge  (2013)    60/100

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Rating :   60/100                                                                       85 Min        15

A film that ironically purges itself of any real satire or commentary, despite its promising setting. Opening in the near future in America, the country’s crime rate has dropped to almost zero due to an ongoing successful social experiment whereby, for one day of the year, any and all crime is legalised, with no emergency services available for the twelve hour period concerned, and no repercussions of any kind allowed to follow activities undertaken during the anarchic period. The exceptions to this rule are a weapons grade restriction, and immunity for political figures who have a ranking of ‘ten’ or above, for reasons of national security of course, not because they don’t want to be targets for rape, murder and mutilation. Also, restricting their own illegal activities to just one day in the year may have been a little far fetched even for the film.

It’s from Blumhouse productions, the studio behind the ‘Paranormal Activity’ franchise whose last output, ‘Dark Skies’, did leave Red Dragon wondering what direction they would take their work hence, in order that it survive the endless repetition of their trademark techniques. So, the beginning of this attempt certainly had a lot of promise, a sanctioned explosion and indulgence in anything the human psyche could conceive, one even publicly encouraged by society’s leaders and law makers, suggesting everyone revel in order to ‘purge’ themselves of natural primitive desires – especially intriguing with the billing of lead actors Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey, who is an actor that certainly doesn’t shy away from twisted character portrayals, as evinced by her work on ‘Game of Thrones’ and as lead villain Ma-Ma in last year’s ‘Dredd’ (which was really good incidentally, even though no one went to see it).

Unfortunately, what unfolds is yet another ‘family under peril in their own home’ scenario, exactly like all of Jason Blum’s previous films. It even still features more overuse of security cameras, with the young boy in the house operating a remote controlled one in several scenes, to very little effect in terms of the tension. Everything pans out very, very predictably as it devolves into a simple action movie with the family trying to survive. Some of the action is very pointedly set up at the beginning with one of the neighbours complaining that the new extension to Hawke and Headey’s house has effectively been paid for by the rest of the neighbourhood, them all having bought security systems from the family’s business, and that a lot of them are not happy about it. It’s completely ridiculous, as if they only sold security to that one street, or everyone else in their enormous houses are so poor they can’t afford to do the same thing, or that they were even forced to buy from them for that matter – it’s not like the basic principles of business have changed in this jointly dystopian and utopian future.

It is successful in creating a certain amount of dark atmosphere, and the initial story was a great place to start, but everything else is pretty disappointing, and it still features main characters doing ridiculous things sure to endanger everyone, in true horror film style. Michael Bay is also listed as one of the producers (he co-owns the production company Platinum Dunes which predominantly works on horror films), and it is difficult to say how much overall influence Blumhouse had over the final cut, but given the end product, and the fact they make a big deal of marketing ‘from the producers of Paranormal Activity’, it’s probably fair to assume they had the lion’s share of influence on the film. They certainly found a writer/director with a suitable name to tie in with their image – James DeMonaco, for whom this is his second time behind the camera, though he has notable previous writing credits with ‘The Negotiator’(98) and ‘Assault on Precinct 13’(05).

Byzantium  (2012)    52/100

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Rating :   52/100                                                                     118 Min        15

Easily the two best things in this film are Gemma Arterton’s breasts jumping gallantly around for most of the film, occasionally winking out of their hopeful constraints toward us like two giant, mischievous mountains, whilst lesser beings gravitate around them and, as soon as they prove to be no visual challenge to Arterton’s alluring curves, are promptly killed. This is because the lady in question plays a vampire, Clara, quite fully endowed to helm the film solo she is nevertheless enjoined by her moody vampire daughter Eleanor, played by Saoirse Ronan. The two both began as human and despite both being around two hundred years old, Eleanor picks this particular moment to enter her teenage rebellious phase, queue lots of staring meaningfully into the distance, capriciousness and melancholy pangs of no one else understanding her, and pops at her mother’s guardianship and choice of vocation.

This is one of the many faults of the film, but the list is rather a long one. Said mother’s vocation, for example, is harlotry. Now, given we’re told they never forget anything and have been around for two centuries it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to consider she could have come up with something better to do than offer shaft maintenance at fifty pounds a go. In fact, since we also find out her and her daughter, who does not turn tricks incidentally (at least, not so far as we are aware), are the only female vampires in existence, she must effectively be the best prostitute the world has ever known. I mean, her pelvic floor muscles must be so damn powerful that she can prevent ejaculation at all times, maintain erections indefinitely, and she’s immune to disease. Together with her eternal beauty, she should be sleeping with world premiers not moaning and mumping about how she’s so hard up and she’s simply doing what she can to support her family, as if she’s some washed up dockland missy with broken teeth, whose closest friends are crawling around in her undergarments. She blatantly enjoys what she does, why can’t the writer (Moira Buffini, based on her play) just be honest with her characters?

Eleanor promptly finds a young male to chow over teenage angst ridden romance with, and naturally she is torn by whether or not she should tell him she’s dead, although she’s already decided she will of course, she just wants to dramatise the wait as much as possible, and frankly the male character she chooses is way creepier than any of the vampires are. As the only female vamps, they are being pursued by some of the ruling male hierarchy who wish to ‘have words’ with them. Among their number is Sam Riley playing Darvell, and he is pretty convincing in the role, until he starts to do his gravelly voice thing that he used to such bad effect in ‘On the Road’. For goodness sake, you are a vampire, your character does not need to pretend to be hard.

A vampire film daring to be released into the saturated market nowadays really has to have something original and compelling about it – this doesn’t. It doesn’t make any sense, the characters are unreal in more ways than one, I sort of got into the back story that’s told throughout the film but even that is done in a very awkward and disjointed manner. Indeed, with Ronan’s character there are shades of her last release, ‘The Host’, and the final film is just as lackluster – a major disappointment from director Neil Jordan, amongst whose past credits lies the very fine indeed ‘Interview with the Vampire’ (94). Incidentally, the title comes primarily from the name of the guest house Clara sets up business in, though there is a brief reference to the city – Byzantium was of course the precursor of what would later become Constantinople, and then, later still, Istanbul in modern day Turkey.