Ted Review

When I first read about Ted some months back, probably in one of those ‘preview of the year’ features that crop up in the film magazines around December time, I thought it sounded like a pretty amusing concept. One Christmas a lonely young boy gets a teddy bear and wishes it to come to life. His wish comes true. Twenty-five years later, the young boy has grown up into Mark Wahlberg and the teddy bear is still very much alive, is voiced by writer-director Seth McFarlane and has developed a penchant for booze, bongs and bimbos. Their continued cohabitation threatens Wahlberg’s relationship with Mila Kunis, meaning the pair has to readdress their relationship.

Your fondness for Ted will depend very much on how much you like McFarlane’s previous work in general and Family Guyspecifically. Ted is very Family Guy in both its humour and tangential style. This is a bit of a double-edged sword – whilst many will find the Family Guy-ness of the film an attractive aspect, others will be disappointed that MacFarlane has felt the need to so doggedly ape the style of his cartoon. Ted proves that MacFarlane is a competent enough storyteller in this medium, so it’s a shame he hasn’t moved out of his comfort zone a little.

Unfortunately for a comedy, the jokes in the film can be a bit hit and miss. Whilst there are a clutch of very funny lines, some jokes already feel out-dated (Susan Boyle references? Really? And we’ll see how resonate that Jack and Jill quip is when the film hits DVD shelves), some punch lines are telegraphed from miles away and most gratingly, when the film goes for ‘offensive’ or ‘outrageous’, it more often comes across as ‘tedious’ and ‘predictable’. Of course the most important thing to get right is in any comedy is character. Anchorman is funny because a sexist seventies newsreader is funny. Zoolander is funny because an idiot male model is funny. Is a swearing teddy bear funny? I guess the answer, though only just, is yes; even if he does sound too much like Peter Griffin (a fact that the film acknowledges).

What is easy to like about the film is Mark Wahlberg, who is easily one of the most watchable actors around. His slightly dumb lunk of a character is lovable in all the ways his ursine co-star is most definitely not. Mila Kunis is also pretty game too, but she isn’t given a great deal to do in the film. There are a number of cameos in the film, most of which are surprisingly well-judged (who steals the show? Well, there can be only one).

Ultimately though, the film feels a little tired where it should feel fresh – Shaun of the Dead rather had the ‘slacker-best-friend threatens protagonist’s relationship’ angle sewn up years ago and that other Pegg-Frost vehicle, Paul, beat Ted to the punch in the cute yet sweary-druggy CGI sidekick stakes. There are also about 2,032 Judd Apatow bromance films which tread very similar ground. Ted then is a decent idea and boasts strong talent behind it, but it is lazily executed. It’s not bad for a few giggles, but is highly unlikely to knock the stuffing out of you.

Dark Horse Review

Dark Horse is a short, strange little film that’s likely to get swallowed up by the blockbusters of the summer. This is a shame as whilst far from a perfect picture, it’s well worth taking the time to bask in its peculiar glory. Brought to the screen by cult writer-director Todd Solondz, Dark Horsebegins with a brilliant opening scene in which a party of wedding guests dance joyously to some upbeat popular music. The camera pans around to a table where two invitees remain seated, at odds with the rest of the room. They are Abe and Miranda, a couple of strange, damaged people with whom we are about to spend eighty-five minutes.

Abe (Jordan Gelber) is a thirty-something who still lives with his parents, spends inordinate amounts of money on collectable figurines (well, toys), is prone to extreme mood swings and has all the social capabilities of a tranquilised horse. In his favour are hubristic levels of self-confidence and a doesn’t-know-when-to-quit mentality. After just about coaxing a date out of Miranda (Selma Blair), Abe proposes to her almost immediately. Being of less than entirely sound mind herself, Miranda does not immediately dismiss this out of hand and so begins perhaps the most perplexing romance lately captured on film.

When films go for quirkiness, they can often all too easily fall into eye-gouging twee-ness and simply be incredibly annoying. Wes Anderson flirts dangerously with this at times (as the inestimably innovative Mark Allen will tell you) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie is perhaps the ultimate example of wrong things can go. Solondz artfully sidesteps this pitfall and Dark Horse’s undeniable oddness feels organic rather than contrived. This is down to an excellent performance from Gelber who creates what feels like a real character, with a touch of pathos to match the peculiarities, rather than a gooberish caricature.

Gelber is supported by a full-blooded supporting cast including not only the aforementioned and on good form Blair, but Christopher Walken, Mia Farrow, Justin Bartha and Donna Murphy. Murphy is particularly great as the mysterious secretary who works with Abe at his father (Walken)’s real estate company. As the film progresses, the line between what is real and what is not blurs as Abe’s tenuous grip on reality weakens. This results in some amusing fantasy sequences that similarly play tricks with the viewer’s own beliefs about what is real.

At its heart, Dark Horse is a tragedy – beneath the veneer of cheap laughs of its surface lies a fairly disturbing and often heart-breaking depiction of a desperate man in personal calamity, that no amount of cheesy self-empowering pop ringtones can fix. We’re only given the merest glimpses of what went so wrong for Abe, but the film implies that America is fostering something of a lost generation, a national crisis of confidence, though gladly with none of the bluster that that implies.

As previously stated, it’s by no means perfect and Dark Horse may well frustrate and depress you. However, if you like your American filmmaking pitched somewhere between the everyday outrageousness of Bobcat Goldthwaite and the mumblecore of the Duplass Brothers, you ought to do yourself a favour and treat yourself to one of the most intriguing and unusual films you’re like to see this year.

Chernobyl Diaries Review

Being a big fan of Paranormal Activity and having an interest in nuclear disasters, I was rather looking forward to Chernobyl Diaries, which is written and produced by Oren Peli, the man behind the horror franchise (for the record, I have yet to subject myself to the far less warmly received sequels).Chernobyl Diaries follows a group of twenty-somethings who, in the name of ‘extreme tourism’, sign up for a guided tour of Prypiat, the city which was home to the workers of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and their families, which was abandoned in 1986 after the disaster. Unluckily, the group’s tour bus is damaged, leaving them stuck in the deserted city whereupon they are attacked by unknown entities. Who will survive and what will be left of them?

Let’s get the hard facts out of the way first: the damage done by the Chernobyl disaster is much less than you might think. Physicians and radiologists from the World Health Organisation estimate that the accident caused ‘just’ seventy-five deaths, rather than the tens of thousands reported by many news organisations. So not only is it highly unlikely but also pretty disrespectful to the people who lived in Prypiat to suggest that there remains a homicidal sect of gribblies looking to hunt and kill attractive American tourists. But that’s okay, this is a horror film; scientific accuracy and inoffensiveness are not necessarily prerequisites. Unfortunately, the film is disappointing on its own merits.

Firstly and most concerning, it’s really not scary enough. Sure, debutant director Bradley Parker conjures some moments of real tension, but that isn’t the same as a proper moment of pant-wetting terror. The jumps are telegraphed a mile off and anyone with more than a basic level of familiarity with the horror genre will probably not be too troubled by the film. Additionally, a lot of shaky cam, muffled screams and distorted noises aren’t scary, they’re just annoying.

Narratively the film is flawed too. It’s one thing to leave matters ambiguous, to show rather than tell, it’s another not to throw the audience the smallest bone as to why things are happening and why the characters have been motivated to behave in the ways that they do. As such, it’s difficult to care or empathise with them. Whereas the couple in Paranormal Activity had to go to bed every night and risk being terrorised by a mysterious force, this bunch of yahoos elect to get into to a bus with an ex-military type and surreptitiously visit an abandoned and contaminated city. The idiots.

There are things to like about the film. The use of location is great. It’s obvious to see why you’d want to stage a film in Prypiat (or a video game, as in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare); the eerie desolation, the starkness of the dilapidated buildings and that seemingly omnipresent Ferris wheel are unarguably cinematic and Parker captures these elements well. I also liked the way the film is shot, which is largely on roving handheld cameras, which looks like really well-shot found footage, but avoids having the narrative sticking point of why someone would choose to keep filming when all their friends are being eaten alive.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Chernobyl Diaries is a bad film; just a painfully average one. It’s disappointing that Peli has failed to produce something as engaging as his debut (though I’m still looking forward to seeing what his directorial follow-upArea 51 will be like), especially given the film’s fairly appealing set up and location. It’s something of a curio, then, which is probably going to struggle to find much of an audience as I don’t suppose the word of mouth on it will be particularly good. Perhaps the best it can hope for is to draw in Euro 2012 fans who want to see more of both the Ukraine and attacking forces ripping through puny defences.

Lay the Favourite Review

As a big Bruce Willis fan, I’m interested to see that he’s picking some slightly offbeat roles recently. Firstly in Wes Anderson’sMoonrise Kingdom (surely the equivalent to Arnold Schwarzenegger starring in a Coen Brothers film or Sylvester Stallone leading an Alexander Payne flick) and now in Stephen Frears’ Lay the Favourite, which shares its theme of the trials and tribulations of young woman maturing into adulthood with his previous feature, Tamara Drewe.

The film is led by an irrepressibly bubbly Rebecca Hall, who plays Beth Raymer, a vaguely idiot-savant character and private dancer who moves to Las Vegas to seek her fortune. There she falls under the wing of Willis’s charismatic bookmaker, Dink, who employs her based on her skills with numbers. They embark on a pseudo-romance that properly irks Dink’s emotionally fragile wife Tulip, boldly played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Despite Beth’s cool head and street smarts, things get out of hand for her when she becomes embroiled with Rosie (Vaughn), a slightly bananas fellow bookie operating illegally in New York.

The tale is based on the real Beth Raymer’s memoir. Given that the film seems to cram quite a lot into its relatively short runtime, I would guess that the book is probably quite an interesting read. I got the impression that quite a lot of stuff had happened to our hot panted-heroine prior to the beginning of the film and that more would follow after the credits rolled. It’s to Hall’s credit that her portrayal suggests this sense of history for her character. She gives a lovely, endearing performance; her Beth at first seems to be an adult that has never grown up past teen-hood. As the film progresses, her innate and shrewd intelligence reveals itself. I loved Hall in her supporting roles in the none-more-bleak Red Riding and in The Prestige, so it’s fantastic to see her given a leading role to show off her talents. Willis is also very good. On the strength of this performance, I’d hope he continues to plump for more dramatic roles, rather than phoning it in on the latest 50 Cent film or whatever.

For all its considerable charms though, Lay the Favourite is perhaps just that little bit too frothy and ultimately, somewhat forgettable. Though the world of gambling it portrays is ruthless, the film unfortunately lacks true grit. A more personal criticism would be that the film does little to explain the complex mechanics of professional gambling, which is one of the few arenas of life where my knowledge is considerably less than total (ahem). As such, I was often a bit lost as to what was actually happening; obviously I could tell when the stakes were high and when Good Things and Bad Things happened to the characters, but Frears could have done more to involve the audience in the mechanics of the action, that is if you can call lots of phone calls and digits changing on screens action. Though maybe I’m simply prejudiced against Frears, given how rude he was to me at the Tamara Drewe premiere.

Those criticisms aside though, Lay the Favourite is a wholly enjoyable film. Its main strength is its very decent cast. Even Vince Vaughn, who hasn’t been in a halfway decent film in at least five years, is pretty good. The characters are likable, the plot engaging enough and the script often impresses. Whilst it probably won’t set the multiplexes alight, Lay the Favourite is sure to find its audience on television or DVD in years to come. A light but likable film.

The Harsh Light of Day Review

If you’re making a movie should have at least one of the following: a) a decent script or b) decent actors. If you’ve got both, you’re laughing, if you’ve only got one of those two things, then if it’s good enough, it can make up for the failings of the other. If you have neither a well written script nor actors that can’t act, you’re in trouble.

Unfortunately, The Harsh Light of Day falls into this latter category. The film is a low-budget horror in which a writer is brutally attacked in his own home by video camera-wielding masked thugs. His wife is killed and he is left paralysed. A deal with a mysterious stranger, however, offers him the chance for revenge.

Another rule for filmmaking that I’m making up and applying to this film right now is that if you’re going to tackle a well-trodden genre, you should have at least have something interesting and/or vaguely original to show us. The Harsh Light of Day flagrantly disregards this long-standing rule I’ve just made up. It’s a film about a certain type of parasitic monster that popular culture has got itself all in a hot sweat about recently. It doesn’t explicitly name this monster, so neither have I, but believe you me, you’ve probably seen at least one film/read one book/watched one TV programme featuring the creature in the last couple of years and if you haven’t, I envy you. The Harsh Light of Day does nothing with this monster that we haven’t already seen seventeen times already.

Dan Richardson and Giles Alderson, who play the film’s lead roles are very wooden and spout some really weakly written lines, penned by director Oliver S Milburn. It may only be seventy-eight minutes long, but it felt like a drag. Clearly the filmmakers were struggling to stretch the plot over that brief a length of time, as there a more than couple of flashback/nightmare montages that add nothing more than a couple of minutes to the film’s duration. They are often laughably bad – at one point, our blurry, shaky camera zooms in dramatically… on a packet of bird feed! Shock, horror!

I believe that there’s always something to like in every film (there just has to be, right?). In The Harsh Light of Day, it’s a brief sequence towards the end seen through the video lens of one of the home invaders. Although the ‘found footage’ thing has been as done to undeath as the film’s monsters, this brief sequence was well constructed and even approached being a bit scary.

Apart from that, there is little to recommend the film. It doesn’t feel good to criticise a debutant director who clearly didn’t have a lot of money to splash around, but hopefully Milburn will return in the future to deliver on the glimmers of promise he shows in The Harsh Light of Day with something better written or with better actors and perhaps something original to say.

Prometheus Review

Those who remember their Ancient Greek legends will know that Prometheus was the name of the Titan that gave the gift of fire to humankind. This pissed off top-god Zeus, and for his troubles, Prometheus was chained up and an eagle ate out his liver, only for it to grow back ready to be eaten all over again every day forever. Those who like creation myths, stories about the relationship between strange beings and the human race and nasty things happening to people’s insides are probably going to thoroughly enjoy Ridley Scott’s long-awaited prequel to Alien.

As well as an unfortunate Titan and the film in question,Prometheus is also the name of the spaceship carrying Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, Charlize Theron and others to a far distant planet, led by instructions left by the ancient civilisations of earth. On this desolate planet, they discover the ancient remnants of the ‘Space Jockey’ race that Sigourney Weaver discovered in the first Alien film. Then Very Bad Things start to happen.

If we accept that the first Alien film is strictly speaking of the horror genre, Aliens is an action movie, Alien³ a prison film andAlien: Resurrection is a bit of a mess, then Prometheus is perhaps the closest the series has gotten yet to proper science fiction. Alien’s familiar themes of body-horror and Freudian psycho-sexuality are recalibrated through Rapace’s scientist’s search for answers in a universe that may or may not be godless. Whilst less wonderfully ponderous, Prometheus at times evokes the existentialism of 2001 or Sunshine, but with added splatter. Other filmic nods include the excellent and curiously impressionist opening sequence which reminded me a little ofThe Seventh Seal and the standout scene of the film (which to avoid spoiling, I’ll refer simply to ‘Rapace taking matters into her own hands’) made me think of Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession.

The look of the thing is excellent; the production design being marvellous and Scott’s direction proving both understated and impressive. Rapace and Fassbender give as great central performances as their remarkable previous work would suggest. Marc Streitenfeld’s score was stirring and as a big Lost fan, I was glad to see Damon Lindelof credited as a writer and I felt the script was pretty strong.

As you’ve probably ascertained, I really liked Prometheus. Unfortunately, my only real criticisms concern the final half hour or so of the film, which makes it kind of difficult to outline them without spoiling it. Chiefly, the thing goes a bit Return of the King on us and manages to fit in about seven different endings, or rather, places where it should have ended. In doing so (and perhaps we can extend this to some of the larger themes of the film too), it seems to raise more questions than it answers and not in a good way. I realise that’s not an especially coherent sentence, but I hope if you see the film, you’ll get what I mean. The pudding does seem to get over-egged at the film’s conclusion and one wonders if Scott was under any pressure to make it a bit more action-packed and reminiscent of the films that came before it.

However, a slightly convoluted ending is far from enough to make Prometheus anything less than a top-notch sci-fi flick and one that I wholly recommend. It’s got creeping horror, scenes of utter bonkers-ness, a few smarts and a stark, brutal kind of beauty to the whole thing. And all this from the bloke that directed Robin Hood.

Top Cat The Movie Review

I hope I’m not going to negate any of my assiduously collated street credibility, but when I was little I used to really like Top Cat. Looking back, I believe I’m correct in saying that it was a reasonably witty and funny programme and it’s not simply nostalgia that’s influencing these fond memories. I remember my sister and I used to watch a Top Cat VHS that we won in a competition run by Little Chef pretty much on loop some days. So when I was invited to attend the preview screening of TC’s big screen debut, I was cautiously excited about it. Obviously, the film is aimed very much at youngsters, but surely there’d be plenty for older viewers to enjoy too.

Top Cat: The Movie is a Mexican production, the programme still being popular enough in that country to justify the creation of a feature film. It’s animated in what first appears to be a quite interesting style – characters are 2D whilst the environments they inhabit are rather crude CGI creations. Add in the poorly implemented forced 3D perspective and what initially seemed like visually interesting style quickly becomes distracting and annoying. The 3D is particularly bad; at times characters appear to be interacting with bits of scenery three feet behind them.

Unfortunately the naffness of the film’s technical aspects extends to its narrative qualities too. The plot revolves around Top Cat’s battle of wits with a new police chief whose love of ‘technology’ sees him implementing CCTV cameras throughout New York, introducing a draconian rule of law and replacing the police with robots. The inclusion of hi-tech twenty-first century reference clashes with the original programme’s old school appeal making it difficult to really enjoy. The plot is also stupidly convoluted and whilst I am sure the kids in the audience could follow it, I’d surprised if they weren’t bored for some stretches. Crucially however, there were very few laughs from the audience. Kids can be pretty easily pleased, especially when given free sweets and a carton of Um Bongo and whilst they were at least quiet and fairly attentive, if I were Vertigo Films I would have been hoping to hear considerably more giggles from the young audience.

Top Cat: The Movie feels like a missed opportunity. TC remains popular enough in this country as well as Mexico – it’s still regularly aired on Cartoon Network – so why more effort wasn’t made to produce a decent film is unknown. As it is, I can’t seeTop Cat doing particularly well and it frankly doesn’t deserve to. Still, at least it’s not as bad as last year’s Yogi Bear, but as those who saw that film will know, that’s about the faintest praise one can damn with.