Yo adrian! We Made It! Kinda!

Hey everyone (and by that I mean the two people who read the blog),

The reason that updates have been less frequent lately is that I managed to get myself a writing gig on a local newspaper, called (confusingly) The Local News. It's a decent paper, but having a day job has meant that I have a lot less time to post (the recent updates have been pieces from the entertainment page which I'm writing.)

I was thinking the other day (something I generally like to avoid), when I hit upon the idea of posting a few of putting up a few non-movie review posts. So, in the words of Kel Mitchell, here goes.

Alan.

High Fidelity Movie and DVD Review

High Fidelity

Movie and DVD Review

Remember when Nick Hornby used to write good books? I read a compendium containing Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About a Boy back in the early 2000's, and I was floored. The three novels display a remarkable sense of humour and inventiveness and are only second in comedic value per square pound to Roddy Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy compilation. Since then though, Hornby's output has encountered more of a cliff-top fall off than downhill turn and I gave up after 2005's exercise in mediocirty, A Long Way Down.

I think the only reason I went back to read the books was that I had recently watched the movie adaptation of High Fidelity for the first time, and wanted to check out the source material.

Released in 2000, High Fidelity is a film that seems to live exclusively on DVD in my mind, as I missed the original theatrical release. It was developed by John Cusack, with the same writing team he used on Grosse Pointe Blank (another DVD you should check out). Apart from changing the setting from London, Cusack left most of the book intact.

Rob Gordon (Cusack) is a music aficionado who, as the movie opens, has just broken up with his girlfriend, Laura (played by Danish actress Iben Hjejle, who learned her American accent for the part). He runs a record shop, Championship Vinyl, with his two employees Dick (Todd Louiso) and Barry (Jack Black in a career-launching role). He struggles to get Laura back whilst trying to discern why all his relationships end in misery.

Why is this film so good? A host of reasons, including a stellar script which tampers just enough with the novel, great direction from Frears (who coincidentally also helmed two-thirds of the aforementioned Barrytown trilogy), a brilliant soundtrack which introduced me to several new bands, a not-too-saggy second act and a bravura performance by Jack Black. All that packed into a movie which is probably located in the €4.99 rack in your local HMV. In fact, why are you still reading this review? Go out and own this piece of brilliance right now.

The extras on my one-disc copy contain some better-than-average deleted scenes, and conversations with Cusack and Frears. The lack of audio commentary is what holds the package as a whole back from a five-star rating.

High Fidelity is a movie which I will dig out of my collection every few years for the foreseeable future. The Stevie Wonder song which rounds out the film is so beautiful that you will want to watch the end credits all the way through.

8.5/10

The Men Who Stare at Goats Movie Review

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Movie Review

I am rarely tricked by trailers, which, apart from being the worst superhero power of all time, is also a handy money-saving device when deciding which films to go see. So, when I saw a snippet of The Men Who Stare at Goats about two months ago, I was quietly delighted, because it looked like it contained all the elements necessary to make a good film. Oh, how wrong I was. The trailer for this piece of foulness was my shiny green kryptonite.

I read Jon Ronson's book – on which the movie is based – a few years back, and really enjoyed it, although never did I think that it had any hope of becoming a feature property, mostly because of its documentary style. The book concerns Ronson's efforts to find out more about a section of the U.S. army which were in training to use highly specialised and exceedingly secret parapsychological skills, such as – I s&*% you not - invisibility and walking through walls. You can see where this is going; Ronson spent a great deal of The Men Who Stare at Goats presenting an army unit which was misguided at best, at worst insane. The title comes from what the soldiers – who call themselves Jedi warriors - did in an attempt to try to stop the hearts of what must have been some very confused animals.

The movie essentially steals the premise of the book and throws in a plotline in which a reporter (Ewan McGregor) goes to Kuwait during the Gulf War, where he bumps into a Jedi warrior (George Clooney), who takes him into occupied territory. And then hilarity ensues, right?

Not exactly. What unfolds over the course of the film's extremely long-feeling 90 minute runtime is a string of pratfalls, sight gags and verbal jokes so hackneyed and unfunny that they would make the orangutan from Dunston Checks In blush. This movie is a textbook case of stocking the trailer with all the best bits; blatently misleading advertising. God knows how the producers of this movie managed to convince stars like Kevin Spacey and George Clooney to sign on, but I wish that I had their powers of persuasion if nothing else.

On the cast; I don't know whether the director knew who Ewan McGregor was before, after, or during the film, but he had quite a prominent role in the prequels to a moderately successful franchise known as Star Wars. I couldn't work out whether the writers – by including frequent mentions of Jedi warriors - were just beating the joke to death, or if they just couldn't be bothered to change dialogue once McGregor became attached to the project. The first time Jedi was mentioned, there was a nice ripple of laughter in the audience, and I found myself grinning, but a joke like that grates so easily and by the fourth time around I began to anticipate it as much as nails on a black board.

Jeff Bridges also deserves dishonourable mention, playing Bill Django, founder of the New Earth army. His role is basically a badly written version of The Dude from The Big Lebowski, and I was quite hoping his eventual death would be a lot more graphic.

Do yourself a favour; use your powers of mental persuasion to convince yourself that this movie was never made. And if you want to see the American military being made fun of, watch Dr. Strangelove.

1.5/10

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Movie Review

Filmmakers are increasingly using animation to make adult-oriented movies. No, not pornography; these directors and writers are subverting a genre typically seen as exclusively pre-adolescent by inserting grown-up themes and humour. Pixar does it all the time, and kids lap it up because their computer-generated animation is well executed and cool things occur in abundance. The latest offering to exploit this “kids love shiny things” loophole is Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Mr. Fox (the wonderfully dry George Clooney) is enticed out of his profession – raiding local farms – by his wife's declaration that she is pregnant and becomes a writer for the local paper. But, after two years of family bliss Fox opts to move to a house – well, a tree to be more precise – overlooking the properties of three of the area's biggest farmers. A series of night time sorties follow, and eventually Fox – and his woodland neighbours – must deal with the consequences.

I wouldn't really describe Fantastic Mr. Fox as a return to form for Wes Anderson, since I really enjoyed both The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited; rather, the movie is a return to commercial viability for a director who needs a hit more badly than a strung-out junkie. Both of Anderson's last two features floundered at the box office, and if Fox goes the same way, there could some wilderness years ahead for the young auteur.

I get the very strong feeling that certain members of the cast were heavily “suggested” to Wes Anderson. The two leads – Clooney and Streep – are stars that can justify the $50 million budget, but neither is included for the sake of a big name. Clooney has grown a reputation as an actor that can deliver a nuanced performance which won't dissuade audiences from coming to see him, and brand Streep - revitalised following 2008's Mamma Mia – is character acting for the masses.

The script, penned in conjunction with The Squid And The Whale's Noah Baumbach, is dryly-humoured dynamite, but not quite fit for consumption by those yet to grow pubic hair. One particular scene, which I can only assume was written by Baumbach - whose Squid relates to the breakup of his parents – sees Mr. Fox admit to Mrs. Fox that he cannot not control his impulse to do an Ozzy Osbourne impression on farmyard chickens. Mrs. Fox's reply to this is that she knew this when they wed; her solution, they should never have married. The scene ends there, with no pratfall or fart noise to break the tension. We're in the land of animated reality here, people.

Speaking of which, the inert sets mirror Aardman's Wallace and Gromit constructions. Their stillness accentuates each character's movement, which was reportedly mimed for the animators by Wes Anderson. They are often filmed from distance too, adding to the sense of dreamy stillness.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox proves that you don't need Pixar computer trickery to produce a slick, funny, and above all fantastic, adult-family film.

9.5 out of 10

IFI Horrorthon Retrospective

IFI Horrorthon Retrospective

This blog is rapidly becoming a creature of the week feature. So, rather than have this piece relate entirely to films featuring the undead, I thought I would broaden its scope to include a retrospective of the IFI Horrorthon Film Festival.

This year's festival kicked off with a screening of the new Diablo Cody flick, Jennifer's Body. The film concerns her hotness, Megan Fox (scarily apt name, right?) and her attempts to – in the spirit of TV snooker show Big Break – kill as many men as she can within an alloted amount of screen time. I didn't attend the screening, and I have heard pretty lukewarm comments as far as reviews go, so I think this can wait until DVD.

However, I did attend Saturday's showing of the George A. Romero classic, Day of the Dead. The final movie in the initial ...of the Dead Trilogy, Day... depicts the remnants of a world largely overrun by zombie hordes. The band of survivors in this installment are a group consisting of army personnel, doctors, and a couple of standoffish civilians. Holed up in an underground bunker, the scientists seek a cure to what they see as a condition, while the soldiers, ostensibly protecting the others, engage in an ever deepening spiral of lunatic behaviour.

Romero needed to slash the budget for Day... in order to get it into production. The initial script, which envisioned the characters living overground, and battling an organised army of semi-sentient zombies was axed in favour of the underground setting, with a single self-aware corpse substituted for the undead throngs. What resulted was a more satisfactory, character-oriented piece, exploring the schism between mental and physical action and the shortcomings of the military-industrial complex. The unused ideas from the original Day... script were recycled into the mediocre Land of the Dead.

The screening which I attended boasted a little surprise extra; a guest appearance by Joe Pilato aka the manic, shouting, scenery-chewing Captain Rhodes. The slightly-too-ripped sixty year-old took to the stage before the film rolled, wearing a black string vest, Gordon Gecko braces, a suit jacket replete with a single red rose, and bedecked with more chains and medallions than a Spanish mobster. He then proceeded to reel off every quotable line of dialogue his on-screen character uttered, some more than once; I'm still not entirely sure what a pussf&%* is, even though I was referred to as such several times.

It was amusing, but slightly sad to see a man who once had a passable acting career, (and had worked – however briefly – with Quentin Tarantino) reduced to mugging for a bunch of hooting horror movie nerds. He told the crowd – no fooling – that genre fans were the most intelligent fans around, and that he would be signing autographs for his Irish fanbase – at a small fee – after the movie.

And then we were left alone with Romero's last great zombie opus. From ancient grudge, break to new mutiny, as it were. The movie opens with the survivors trying to contact other like-minded folk, without having chunks of their juicy flesh eaten in the process. They then decamp to the aforementioned underground lair, where the real fun begins.

Pilato's Captain Rhodes character – leader of the pack of army hyenas – is the true star of the show here. He screams his way through a plethora of so-over-the-top-they're-almost-funny lines, and screams his dialogue with such hatred for man and zombie alike, that his creation can't help but be addictive. His ultimate demise (sorry, hope I didn't ruin anything) is so gruesomely well conceived that it has acquired a place in cult horror history.

The rest of the non-military cast provide the relatively calm base upon which Rhodes and his men go apeshit. Lori Cardille - the strong female character which became a Romero staple post-Dawn - gives as good as she gets, openly challenging Rhodes' authority as well as that of her medical superior, Dr. Logan. Logan, nicknamed Frankenstein by the other inhabitants of the burrow, has been trying to control the undead, in order to restore them to polite society. It is the ultimate exposure of his mental frailties which initiates the kinetic finale, in all its baleful, bile-ful glory.

The session ended with a brief return from Pilato. He answered a handful of questions from his adoring public before retiring outside to sign autographs with all the grace that a man with an undead career can muster.

Zombieland Movie Review

Zombieland

Movie Review

By Alan Del Rio

George Romero has a lot to answer for. Over forty years after Night of the Living Dead reignited interest in a previously formulaic genre, the zombie horror film is still taking a bite out of global cinema box offices. Romero's 1968 film was subversive at the time – featuring a black hero who survives the zombies, but is killed by a redneck posse – and is still inspiring young filmmakers to have a go themselves. Zombieland is the latest take on the genre, and its about as fresh as a film featuring rotting corpses can be.

Set in a post-apocalyptic, zombie infested world, Zombieland follows a small group of survivors as they search for a small, safe patch of land to call their own. Pretty much par for the zombie owned, controlled and operated course so far, right? Well, what sets this film apart is the imaginative, hilarious script, a cast that extracts every last iota of humour, drama and action from same, and snappy direction from newcomer Ruben Fleischer.

I must admit that I had a hard time settling into the movie. The first five minutes, including credits, are more reminiscent of an eighties hair metal music video than a feature film. But, when the cast finally hit the screen, and lead character Columbus (all of the characters go by Pelham-like aliases – in this case their home town) outlines his rules for surviving a zombie holocaust, the movie begins to gain some momentum.

Zombieland is decidedly “new zombie”. It eschews Romero's shuffling, slow-moving undead in favour of the hyper-fast (and scarier) Zack Synder variety. The soundtrack is filled with the heaviest of metal, and all of the characters have adjusted to their decaying environment like the urban badasses they are. This last fact slightly undermines the menace which the zombies should possess, as mostly they are fodder for humourous set pieces, but the film never completely castrates their rotting unmentionables, and they play a key role in the unnerving finale.

The cast, only consisting of four main characters, and one unexpected, side-splitting, movie-stealing cameo, is immense. Woody Harrelson gives his funniest performance since White Men Can't Jump, as the tough but yielding Tallahassee, whose sole purpose is to find earth's last edible Twinkie. Jesse Eisenberg is fast developing a niche as the guy you get when Michael Cera is busy. He provides the everyman character to Harrelson's rampaging Tallahassee, and his rules form the linchpin of the movie.

Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin are terrific as the con artist sisters. Believable and above all funny, they add a welcome extra layer of conflict between the human characters. Now, how do I talk about the cameo without giving away that it's Bill Murray? Oops. Murray arrives at the midpoint, when the main characters stay in his house, and although he is only on screen briefly, he single-handedly drags the film through the usual second act slump. Best cameo I have seen since Will Ferrell in Wedding Crashers or Anthony Hopkins' brief appearance in Silence of the Lambs.

It's not all good news though. I was, at times, left wondering why certain creative choices were made, mostly because I was disappointed that a team which had gotten so much right had managed to drop the ball at all. For instance, Fleischer seems to adhere to the music video school direction, all décollage and slow motion action. And while this works well for the most part, it does occasionally draw attention to itself, which is a cardinal directing sin. Additionally, although the script is by far my favourite element of the movie, the semi-frequent voice overs are just plain lazy storytelling.

In an interesting (define interesting – ed.) aside for any movie trivia heads reading this, the reason for the breakdown of civilization in Zombieland is a form of human adapted mad cow disease. This form of infection is borrowed, whether intentionally or by coincidence, from the 2004 Irish zombie film Dead Meat, which is worth a closer look if you can find it on DVD. Yet again Irish ingenuity shapes the face of modern film making. That's why we're called “the Hollywood of Europe” (I'm pretty sure that's a lie - ed.).

Zombieland is funny, scary, savvy, tense, and above all ass-kickingly cool. All excellent reasons to go see it, but there is one thing above all else which makes me recommend this film; you've got to love a movie whose tag line is Nut Up or Shut Up.

4 out of 5 stars

District 9 Movie Review

District 9

Movie Review

Remember THAT scene in Alien? John Hurt laughs and enjoys a drink with his crew mates, little realising that he has taken part in the sci-fi world's answer to the Deliverance. Suddenly, a fetal alien bursts from his chest to wreak it's acid-soaked wrath upon the surviving inhabitants of the Nostromo. It's one of those cinematic images that melds itself to the frontal lobe, like the shower scene in Psycho or the Statue of Liberty reveal in Planet of the Apes; quite hard to forget. Now, cast your mind back to what Alien did for science fiction heading into the eighties, giving the old Star Wars paradigm a much needed hug in the facial department. Well, the naughties now have their own version of that genre busting whip-livener in the shape of District 9, a rending tale of alien xenophobia set in a post-apartheid South Africa.

The documentary-style narrative follows Wikus van de Merwe, an employee of MNU, which is a private contractor to the South African government. As the movie opens, he is celebrating a recent promotion, having been given control of an illegal alien camp relocation. This is where this version of earth's reality skews of from our own, as the aliens in this camp come from a little further afield than other African nations. They are intergalactic refugees, having been stranded when their mammoth spacecraft stalled over Johannesburg roughly twenty years before the events of the movie. There are no signs of intelligent life on board, and the working-class lifeforms inhabiting the ship need to be cut free and extricated.

Their less than hospitable hosts place the alien creatures in temporary accommodation which quickly becomes a run down slum. The life forms (“Prawns” as they are derisively called – you can see why from the above picture) don't do themselves any favours either. They're generally uncouth; eating raw meat and cat food, and stealing from the local population to fund their prodigious consumption of same.

Now, Wikus is a nice guy. He has a wife (who, honestly, is far too hot for him), and is a pretty happy go lucky chap. But he's under immense pressure to clear the camp from his father-in-law, who got him the job. Additionally, he seems to have little or no regard for the prawns, and treats them with a lack of humanity. All that begins to change though when he is sprayed by a strange liquid during a routine search of a prawn shack.

District 9 started life as a short film, developed by director Neil Blomkamp. He was in the process of developing his first feature film, an adaptation of the Halo video game series with [LOTR-link] guru Peter Jackson, when the project was shelved for lack of financing. Instead, they chose to develop the short, originally entitled Exile in Joburg, into a full length movie.

The film itself draws from different sci-fi and horror tenets. Part Blair Witch shockumentary, with a little David Cronenburg body horror mixed in, it uses small parts of these genres to quickly and compactly build its complex and engaging plot. The first two acts are spring loaded with so much exposition and action that it is a testament to the quality of the script to say that the pacing never feels ragged or jarring as they rapidly unwind.

Sharlto Copley is eminently engaging as Wikus. His initial gleeful mistreatment of the Prawns can be put down to negligent disregard rather than malicious intent, and his arc is perfectly judged, so that there is some real visceral emotion behind his eventual suffering and retaliation. It also doesn't hurt that he sounds like an inner-city Dubliner when he shouts FOOK - copiously - throughout the movie.

The production design and special effects seem to have been sourced in part from another video game, namely the Half-Life series. I would be interested to see what Weta Workshops list of inspirations was, especially for the Prawn battle suit, whose gravity weapon bears more than a passing resemblance to Half-Life 2's gravity gun.

I cannot fault a little cribbing though, because the effect of the Weta treatment is to add enormously to the scale of District 9. I walked out of the movie theatre estimating that the production, with all of it's explosions, alien creatures and giant floating spaceships must have cost in excess of $100 million dollars to make, when a paltry $30 million was the actual expenditure.

It is a sad truth that there will be no major Oscar wins for District 9. Science Fiction films don't tend to go home with many statues. The most it can hope for is a Best Special Effects and Best Original Screenplay nomination and maybe a nod in the Best Foreign Film category. Where this feature will ultimately stand or fall is in the money it makes (already $126 million at the global box office). But, on the evidence of what I have seen here, District 9 deserves to rake in more coin than Raymond Babbitt at a blackjack table.

9/10