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andidektor
Reviews
Good Vibrations (2012)
This is a soundtrack, not a film.
This is a soundtrack, not a film. It doesn't ask any questions, lay out any arguments, or challenge any taboos. It's got a stonking lead performance and it looks period correct when not depending on stock imagery. It's got loads of minor pop music - a good mixtape, the sort of themed selection you'd find cover mounted on Uncut or Mojo magazine. It could have been a blast. Or, with some genuine insight to the personal relationships only vaguely sketched in the script, it could have been a more substantial drama.
But it's a cheap shot to prop up Terri Hooley's self hype with endless stock footage of the troubles - especially the Miami showband material. As if the scene where Terri and his little band of gullible, fame seeking youths being stopped by the Brits and discovered to be the true cross-community ideal was somehow related (what an awkward scene that was).
Truth is, punk didn't do much in or for Northern Ireland and after its brief bubble burst, Hooley never found another "wave" to incompetently exploit - except perhaps the trendy "hagiography of failures in popular culture" that passes for biography in too many recent films. (Next: The Gary Glitter Story...?).
Where it really struggles to even entertain is in constantly trying to raise the minimal narrative above a basic "let's put on a show in the barn" story, by co-opting historical sectarian division and political oppositions as contextual justification for a bunch of people who were essentially running away, rather than confronting it.
The fawning climax, a clumsy collage of wet eyed forgiveness and self-justification during a concert in the Ulster Hall ("It holds 2000 people!") is downright creepy.
And if PUNK meant anything, anywhere, then surely Hooley's apocryphal shout "New York has the hair, London has the trousers, but Belfast has the reason." is its betrayal.
Nazis at the Center of the Earth (2012)
What makes it still worthwhile to watch movies in spite of summer blockbusters
I should say up front that I am in no way related to the producers of this film.
There is nothing not to like here.
Clunky acting, clunky special effects, a huge wrong-way-round swastika, holocaust referencing gang rape, mad scientists, gratuitous nudity - the list is endless, it keeps on coming.
And, just when it couldn't get any more entertaining, TERMINATOR Hitler ON A RAMPAGE. Heaven.
This merits 10 on the "what makes it still worthwhile to watch movies in spite of summer blockbusters" scale. Really.
Cemetery Junction (2010)
Inconsequential twaddle
This film isn't funny. It's just not. And without the excuse of comedy, it's simply lame. In the September issue of The Word, Andrew Harrison, discussing the way popular culture eats itself, describes yesterday's cutting edge as "...impossibly tame and in fact cloyingly wholesome, the components of Heartbeat."
And that's exactly this movie. Bland nostalgia, the trappings of kitchen sink reality and none of its truth. Twee love wins out and the lovers eventually escape the deadening boredom of their hometown existence (which isn't so bad really, so their ambitions are fuzzy and vague). Nothing we haven't seen before, and no drama to make it interesting.
Cemetery Junction is just an episode of Heartbeat - the easy view, rose-tinted version of a bygone era churned out in inoffensive weekly installments for a family audience who want reassurance rather than insight.
A few laughs would have made it bearable. Pity that Gervais and Merchant should squander their opportunities on inconsequential twaddle like this.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
Just makes me wonder....
Who are these people? do they exist anywhere? What are they for? What do they live on? why is anyone who actually works for a living depicted as a schmuck? Who talks like this? What purpose is there in making a film about them? How can a purportedly intelligent filmmaker reference Spanish identity and yet present the country (especially Barcelona) as a series of banal tourist postcards and cultural clichés? Does Woody Allen now live totally in his imagination? What's the intended audience for this unreal farrago? When are talented actors going to realise that adding a modern Woody Allen film to their CV is a negative? When am I going to stop watching Woody Allen films in the hope that he'll rediscover a relevant muse - or even the ability to entertain?
Fifty Dead Men Walking (2008)
Rubbish
Fifty Dead Men Walking milks every stereotype, repeats every newsreel image of "the troubles" we've ever seen, grafts in a miscast Ben Kingsley and the ludicrous Rose McGowan for a bit of international appeal (McGowan's first appearance would raise an embarrassed snigger in an episode of Prison Break - and not too many girls in the 1970's seduced the boys by calling them "cute"...), and layers it all with maudlin melodrama and TV-movie plotting.
The NI tourist board brochure has provided the locations - the supposedly clandestine meetings have well known landmarks looming in the background, which places the action in some of the most conspicuous locations in Ireland.
Visually it's a trendy, de-saturated muddle that seems to suck out the dramatic point of many scenes - but then so does the constant play for emotional undertones in scenes that are so flatly played and presented that it's impossible to empathise. The silly comic book reduction of "the troubles" is visually reminiscent of the facile UK Government anti-terrorist propaganda TV advertising of the 1980's and 1990's - but the drama is so b-movie formulaic that it loads a bucket load of clichés into a refuse skip that's already full of them. Kingsley shooting from the back of an ambulance at the IRA baddies in hot pursuit? Stand-up sexual encounters against the neon sign atop the Europa Hotel? A street encounter with a soldier that escalates in moments from banter to confrontation to fight to arrest to full-blown-Bloody-Sunday-style riot - complete with the miraculous appearance of THE DISTRAUGHT MOTHER shouting "He's my son!"...? Bad, amateurish, cartoon nonsense.
There's plenty of comment about the crude use of music in other IMDb entries, so I won't labour that criticism. It's a blunt, manipulative strategy that indicates the shallowness of the film. An early example of a similar slackness in the overall production design is the inclusion of slick, modern graffiti in the background of some driving scenes. Interesting to see that Belfast graffiti pre-dated the rest of the world in street style by about twenty years... I suppose the director thought that the nice colours and stylised lettering of today's street graffiti would fit in with the slick surface stylings of her masterpiece. That's about as deep as it goes.
This movie is an insult to anyone who lived through "the troubles". It's even an insult to more serious films about NI's past, because it perpetuates convenient stereotypes and distorts facts as it pleases.
Watch Hunger.
w Delta z (2007)
More Lynch than Finch(er)
I was expecting a much more violent movie and was grimly surprised that WAZ mainly uses mood and tone to take us to a very dark place indeed. Admittedly, the last act is straight out of the torture porn manual (in setting if not graphic detail), but up to then WAZ creates a surreal, edgy world that evokes David Lynch much more than David Fincher. It's a bizarre police procedural by any measure, much more a descent into chaos, with all the normal points of reference for an audience falling away piece by piece.
The perpetrator is revealed almost matter-of-factly. The one suspect - creepy Paul Kaye - seems to exist only to move the narrative another step away from the familiar; and the denouement, a messed up triumph for Stellan Skarsgård's sullied passion, is as dirty and dark as the city he prowls by eternal night.
Skarsgård carries a heavy, existential weight throughout. His tough, seedy detective rasps unintelligibly at times, but he's magnetic and never definable. That he would rather finish it forever than betray his seemingly worthless and lonely passion is probably the most far-fetched twist in Clive Bradley's script, but Skarsgård pulls it off. Selma Blair is truly scary (justifiably so, according to the unpleasant rape flashback); and Tom Hardy gives sleazy support and context to the extremes of Skarsgård's character he's pretty close to the precipice, but he's not the only one. Melissa George, with permanently gaping lips and a fixed, bewildered frown is the weakest element in the mix. She doesn't really make the journey with Skarsgård, retaining her irritating pout no matter what.
The dark, empty cityscape may in part have been the necessary product of a very low budget, but Tom Shankland makes of it a no-man's land close to hell, where bad things happen and keep on happening. The mood is oppressive, unremitting and although sometimes it shows a digital sheen, Morten Søborg's expressionistic cinematography is superb throughout.
Sometimes the lack of budget shows in the production design. Too often there is one "American" item in view that attracts much more of the action than it should (nice icebox, let's talk here); do all addicts and hoods really hang sheets of plastic up in their crack dens?; and does every police precinct building in NY have its own in-house morgue (or did I blink and miss something?). Also, if I was NYPD, I'd definitely interview the graffiti artist who has left his signature scribble at almost every location.
Tom Shankland, his production team and a mostly excellent cast have managed to craft a genuinely unsettling film here. Making a virtue of very limited resources is obviously the way to overcome them, and to rise above the expectations of the procedural format to create a mood piece as effective as this bodes well for Shankland's next genre outing, "The Day".
Tristan + Isolde (2006)
Dull. Nice scenery.
Tristan and Isolde. I just got the impression that this was dull, dirty and dour. James Franco as Tristan is bland, Sophia Miles as Isolde is pretty but far too modern for the role of a medieval princess. Bronagh Gallagher acts her socks off, but her protective nanny/handmaid is such a cliché
The Irish speak in cod Ulster and Scots(?) accents - well I think that's what David O'Hara was mostly speaking
Some of the cast may in fact have been American
One moment it's almost down and dirty, earthy and violent. The next it's lyrical and pretty, playing out it's Romeo and Juliet romance drenched in high key back-light. It does a good job of showing the smallness of battles, the cramped spectacle of the tournament held in what is more like a courtyard than an amphitheatre (where the associated Scott brothers would probably have preferred it to happen). But there isn't much to sustain interest in a setting like that, especially as the contest is reduced to a sequence of short, repetitive bouts (a bit like sumo wrestling blink and you miss it).
Mostly it's all too complicated, but just when it touches on complex themes of loyalty and love and tribal politics, it loses confidence and lurches into convoluted action sequences that twist and turn in ways that you don't care about. I lost interest in which stone paired up with which other stone representing the adversaries in the tournament, or what thick headed surprise strategies were employed to outwit the arrogant monsters that the Irish were made out to be (nothing new there eh?).
In the end it goes twee and miserable by turns, laying on the sentiment but failing to engage.
Dead Long Enough (2006)
Harmless
Dead Long Enough doesn't do it all by numbers and it looks very pleasant with its Irish and Welsh settings, and an attractive cast who bring warmth to a rather slight story.
It's about two brothers with distinctly different personalities, an old flame who's had a child by one or the other of them, and some guns buried on a beach.
Douglas Henshall is very good, Michael Sheen and Jason Hughes do an entertaining double act and everyone else manages to survive some potentially twee light comedy.
It's not satirical, it's not particularly exciting, and it has about as much cinematic ambition as an episode of Only Fools and Horses – but it tells its story competently, it's well performed and the low budget production makes the best of the scenery.
There are a number of elements that smack of not-having-thought-it-through. Some of the dialogue is surreal – I have no idea what the Welsh secretary was talking about for instance (you'll know it when you see it) and Joe Pasquale is out of place, yet oddly endearing as a gay soldier on border patrol
Also, there are some very strange chapter titles that don't add much to anything
and the climactic chase is a bit naff.
But it doesn't fail because it doesn't hang itself on over-ambition. It could be a whole lot worse.
Johnny Was (2006)
One Star for Reggae.
If you had to cast a tragic hero, a tough guy haunted by a violent past, driven by circumstances to redemption in the midst of moral emptiness and criminal depravity would you choose Vinnie Jones? No, me neither
As Johnny Doyle, Vinnie manages three states: 1. bewildered (whether it's required by the script or not), 2. blank (notably in moments of intended emotional engagement) and 3. angry (this could also be referred to as "the grimace").
Lennox Lewis as "DJ Ras", top Rastafarian, has even less range - one state only. He shares Vinnie's number 2. It's numbing to watch.
And if you employ a fine actor like Eriq La Salle to play Julius, a sleazy, brutal, murdering, drug dealing low-life yardie, living in a derelict crack den in the only graffiti-blitzed house in a suburban terrace somewhere in "Brixton" would you sabotage his performance by dressing him like a middle management executive? Admittedly he has some bling around his neck and fingers, but his general presentation is just about right for the club house at his local golf club.
La Salle does bring moments of real menace and a sense of depth to Julius, but it's never sustained by the script. At one point La Salle's character is so evil that he withholds a bag of heroin from his junkie girlfriend Rita, (Samantha Mumba), until she is forced to (wait for it
)
kiss him on the lips, her humiliation witnessed passionlessly by Johnny (Vinnie, state 2). Where would Tarantino have taken a scene like that? Ah well.
Rita, the fittest, plumpest, healthiest junkie I've ever seen, sleepwalks from one encounter with Johnnie to the next. She's meant to have a heart of gold, because she used to be a nurse and she's nice to wounded people, but it's hard to tell because most of the time she looks bored. What a spiv like Julius sees in her is just one more mystery in a narrative that is very short on motivation for all but Patrick Bergin's unrepentant terrorist "Flynn".
As Flynn, Bergin shovels on his back-story in an OTT parody of a Northern Irish hard man, his acting as arch as his dialogue. He bludgeons his way through every scene he's in. Sometimes Vinnie shouts back at him - which is not a good idea - it seems to encourage new levels of sneering and eye-rolling.
Lost in the underwritten background of "Johnny Was" is an ill-at-ease Roger Daltrey cameo which is meant to be "hard" but isn't; an insignificant young sidekick for the escaped terrorist who's uselessly around for the duration; and the odd stereotypical good mate, thug or low-life, all by-the-numbers and forgettable.
The plot depends on meaningless deceits, incredible twists and gullible people. Characters appear and disappear just to help the exposition of a scene, or to inject some arbitrary plot point. People suddenly have guns or knives, or bombs. The action (mostly shooting) just
happens. It's all played in a monotone. Even the photography is flat, neither stylised or natural. It would all be fun if there was a tongue in a cheek somewhere, or a modicum of style, but there isn't.
And then there's the ending. Oh dear.
What I can't understand is, what makes this a "movie" at all? The cast of C-list celebrities? An average episode of The Sweeney (or even current fluff like BBC's "Hustle") has better writing, production, direction and personality.