BOOK OF ELI

So this is Joel Silver’s take on The Road. 

Here we are, thirty years after The Flash, the war that led to the end of the world and down that road, through the scorched desert wilderness, walks a man called Eli.  A man on a mission.  Denzel Washington is using that confident, rolling stride of his to walk across America, heading always West.  Has been ever since the war.

Hang on?  Thirty years walking in a straight line?  A quick bit of maths:  If he wanders along at two miles an hour for, say, eight hours a day, has weekends off, gives himself four weeks holiday a year for good behaviour and keeps that up for thirty years … that’s a hair over 115,000 miles.  In a straight line.  Just how big do Americans think their country is?

Anyway.  Interestingly, it seems that the war was fought over religion and, immediately after it, religious books like The Bible were gathered together and burned.  He carries something very precious, therefore: the last surviving Bible.  He knows it’s the last one because, presumably, God told him.

He certainly claims that God told him where to find it and that he has to take it West where, one day, he will find somewhere were he and it will be safe. Until he gets there, he must read it every day.  Until he gets there, he must kill everyone who tries to take it from him. Until he gets there, he will be protected by it.

Well, that part seems to be born-out by experience because, whenever he encounters violent resistance (invariably in the form of half-a-dozen or more people arranged in a circle around him) he successfully manages to take them all out with his very impressive high-speed kung-fu.

Washington’s kung-fu is so good he can escape from a locked room without anyone noticing and he can produce a bow and arrow from nowhere at will.  His kung-fu is so good bullets just pass harmlessly through him (Hm.  Maybe he’s The One … oh, sorry, wrong Joel Silver film).  Indeed, during one ludicrous sequence, machine-guns, a mini-gun and a rocket-launcher all fail to touch him.

This is a useful skill to have because, when he wanders into a ramshackle border town to get his ipod re-charged (yes, really), he finds it is run by Carnegie who is played by Gary Oldman in full-on furniture-chewing mode and you know there aren’t many ways that can be a good thing.

Indeed it can’t.  Carnegie is one of the few literate men left in the world and he has a passion for books – but he desires one book in particular.  Can you guess which one?  Can you?  That’s right.  Dumb luck, a contrived script or God’s inscrutable plan have brought the only man with a Bible into the precincts of the only other man who wants it bad enough to kill for it.

As he quickly runs short of henchmen, Carnegie demonstrates that he will quite literally sacrifice anything to possess the book.  But Washington doesn’t want to play.  He continues heading in one direction, Oldman following close behind in a convoy of cars he mysteriously has the fuel for.  His few remaining henchmen bristling with all varieties of machine-guns which he, equally mysteriously, has ammo for.

Unfortunately, by this time, my disbelief would need wings to stay suspended.  Why?  Well, partly because Denzel briefly holes-up with a couple of dotty old homesteaders, played by Frances De La Tour and Michael Gambon – who both have a riotous time taking the piss mercilessly out of these poor, dumb Americans.  They both have ‘the shakes’ which, Washington sagely informs us, is brought on by eating too much human meat.   Yes, you did read that correctly: Dumbledore is a cannibal!  How could I take the film seriously after that?

There are some excellent cinematic flourishes here … not least in the staging of the thrilling fight-scenes, one of which is acted out entirely in silhouette under a bridge.  Also, the assault on the old folks’ home is filmed with a sweeping camera which moves in and out and around with no apparent edits.  Both sequences remind one of the visual virtuosity of The Hughes Brothers’ Dead Presidents (1995).

But, overall, the film demands too much forgiveness.  And here’s where I’m going to spoil the film for those who haven’t seen it.

Read no further if you have any interest in seeing this film.

Seriously.

Okay, have they gone?

Good. 

So … exactly how far are we prepared to forgive the Hugheses their trespasses?

 

Are we prepared to forgive them for ram-raiding Mad Max 2 (1981)?  Yes, I suppose so.  How about Fahrenheit 451 (book 1953, film 1966).  Hmm … at a push.  Will we forgive them for being the latest in a long line of movies to semi-demolished The Golden Gate Bridge?  Well, of course.  It wouldn’t be an end-of-the-world movie without old reliable.

But what about the more serious sins of incredible plotting, the blame for which would seem to lie firmly at the door of first-time script-writer Gary Whitta?  Well, Whitta’s background includes designing video games wherein one can pick up and put down weapons at will without carrying them and where re-spawning when dead is common-place.  Okay, so that can explain some of Washington’s kung-fu powers. But … and here’s the big one … can we forgive him the conceit of having a blind man successfully demonstrating none of the behaviour of a man with no sight?

There is a heritage of blind fighters in Eastern cinema (Zatoichi, for example) so we can, I suppose, let that slide.  If absolutely pushed, I might begrudgingly acknowledge that he can have a sense of direction and therefore know when he’s heading West.  But to walk so confidently with no fear of encountering an obstruction in the road, not even a pot-hole?  To be woken up every morning by the sun?  To know there is a house in the middle of an otherwise deserted plain?  To jump when opening a door and finding a hanging body?

I’m sorry but, unless he has Daredevil’s radar I really can’t buy that he never gives even the slightest hint of his blindness to anyone, even another blind person.

Fair enough, as surprise endings go, you’ll no more have seen this one coming than Eli would himself … but that’s because you’ll be expecting a twist that is both clever and possible.  However elegant the last few moments of the movie may seem, they just don’t bear thinking about too much.

The one saving grace of this denouement, is the fate reserved for the book once delivered.  It is put on a shelf, next to the last existing copy of The Koran and there, presumably, it will remain; like Indy’s Ark of the Covenant: filed out of harm’s way … until God tells someone else where to find it.

Dirs: Albert and Allan Hughes

Stars: Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, Ray Stevenson.

Dur: 118 mins

Cert: 15

Images © Entertainment Film Distributors

THE ROAD

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As I write this, I’m listening to Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ soundtrack on The Spotify.  Its atonal scrapings and wheezings are helping me evoke my feelings and order my thoughts about the film.  I’ve been chewing over this review for some days.  It’s about time to spit it out.

If you’ve read the book, you’ll know.  You’ll know the bleak, icicle-sharp precision of Cormac McCarthy’s vision.  You’ll know that the world he envisions for the future is more metaphysical poetry than a serious attempt at science-fiction prediction.  You’ll know that it is the story of a man’s love for his child and how, even if the rest of the world went away, that would endure.  You’ll know how tense you were reading the book, teetering permanently on the brink of an explosion of emotions you couldn’t bear to feel.  You’ll know.

If, however, you come to the film innocent, you’ll have to learn. 

The book won the Pulitzer Prize.  I have yet to find a review of it that is anything other than awe-struck and reverential in its praise.  The last time a Pulitzer winner was so universally adored and then adapted into a film was, I think, To Kill A Mockingbird (book 1960, film 1962).  That’s a lot to live up to … which is why, after just one viewing, my thoughts on John Hillcoat’s film adaptation of McCarthy’s novel tend to focus on the differences, which irritated me at first like grit on the tongue, but I am now coming to terms with them. 

As I watch the film again and again, as I surely shall, the memory of these irritations will fade and I will be able to see the film as a work unto itself.  Yes, it is different, because that is what a process of adaptation necessitates, but is it better?  No, of course not.  Such notions are irrelevant when you are dealing with a work as subtle and layered as this.  Is it, then, worthy?  Is it a suitable counterpoint to the book, a fitting interpretation and representation of the themes?  Will it break your heart? Yes, yes and avowedly, yes.

McCarthy’s vision is more nightmarish than Hillcoat’s, sketched in charcoal tones, imperfect and indistinct and all the more chilling for it.  Two unnamed pilgrims, a father and son, slowly trudge through the ash and snow and dead leaves of a dead land, also nameless, heading vaguely South … trying to stay ahead of the ever-worsening perpetual winter in which the world is suspended, timeless, unmoving.  Evolution has come to an end, all that is left is the inevitable devolution and decay.

Those who have read the book may be relieved to know that the most grotesque, most inhuman moments in the book (or the most human, depending on your perspective), the starkest realisations of the depths to which civilisation has so completely sunk, the ones that burrow into your imagination and revisit you long after you’ve put the book back on the shelf, are mostly missing.  They would seem too prurient on the big screen, I imagine. 

But, of course, what works on the page and in the mind’s eye cannot always be relied upon on the screen.  The book has the chaotic atmosphere of a Bosch painting … take, for example, the description of a passing caravan:

“They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys … Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harnesses … and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each …” 

If the film had included this image, it would have pushed our memories in the direction of Mad Max 2 (1981), a very differently-purposed vision of civilisation’s afterlife.  As it is, during the film’s few urban scenes, we see vistas of grey tumbledown buildings stretching into the distance, which tweaked my memories of old-fashioned matte paintings of ruined cities from the likes of The Time Machine (1960), Logan’s Run (1976), Damnation Alley (1977) and the Twilight Zone episode Time Enough, At Last (1959) to name but a few.  You see, this sort of thing is common coin in movies and Hillcoat had to take care not to let his road lead him into too many clichés.

Hillcoat’s vision doesn’t have the timeless, placeless quality of the novel and, therefore, the tragic waste is more specifically American and less universal.  I wondered about this, I couldn’t pick out quite what made this so, then I realised … It’s the baseball caps.  The few people they encounter on the road, are usually wearing baseball caps.  In the book the fashion is for rags.  You get descriptions like “Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators” and “He looked like a pile of rags fallen off a cart”.  In one scene in the film, a colourfully-dressed mother and child are chased across a field by a band of cannibals and it is, for all the world, a moment lifted from any one of a dozen zombie movies.  This film needs the unearthliness Hillcoat brought to The Proposition (2005) but, instead, it gets an occasional unwelcome whiff of Romero pastiche.  The recognisably modern, recognisably American clothes in the film have limited the vision of the book to a specific where and when.

Ironically, the world in the book is blessed with limited vision.  Because of the constant haze of falling ash and grey clouds of pollution the travellers get only rare glimpses of the full scope of the hellish landscape, more familiar are lines like “ … he could see the shape of a house and barn … Shrouded in the carbon fog.”  Often the boy’s young eyes see things older, tired eyes will miss.  But this myopia serves a narrative, tonal and metaphorical purpose: “He looked at the sky.  As if there were anything there to be seen”.

This perpetual haze, too, is missing from the film, but that may have been a visual decision forced upon Hillcoat by the producers, keen to avoid making the film look like Darabont’s The Mist (2007) which was excellent, but died on its arse at the box office.  Never-the-less, we still get an impressionistic world of greys and browns, of bare, broken, dead trees.  We see the tree-line burning in a subtly Biblical way, and the flash-backs to the unstated apocalypse are lit from without by the burning of the world.

The film has a little more narrative drive than the novel and a barely perceptible vein of irony has been added to the film’s last moments (which I won’t discuss, in case you haven’t read or seen them).  Previous to this, one or two things are stated that, in the book, were implied.  The reason why it is important to have two bullets in their gun, for example.

Further, the film displays more overt emotion.  The role of the mother (here played by Charlize Theron) has been greatly expanded, partly, I imagine, for marketing reasons, but also to ground the man in his memories.  The culmination of these flashbacks is the realisation of just how immensely strong the man has been to weather this endless storm, of how Sisyphean a labour his protection of his son is and, therefore, how complete the failure of the mother. 

In the book, the man is stoical under the weight of this responsibility, he is numb, he has suffered so much he can suffer no more.  This is why he has no place left in his heart for memories.  In the film, he is haunted constantly by his memories.  In the book, he leaves all his memories in the middle of the road and walks way from them.   That had a stark, awful, simple poetry.  In the film, he drops them from a nose-bleedingly tall road-bridge, and this gives the gesture a grandiosity it doesn’t need.

By pointing out these differences, I am not denigrating the film.  I’m sure I will come to love it for its differences as much as its similarities to the book.  It is a different take on a tale which deserves to be told to as many people as possible.  A grown-up, heartfelt, pure tale which tells us more about the power of love than a thousand simpering rom-coms or a year’s supply of silly love songs.

The only sustained dialogue scene in the book to involve anyone other than the man and his son is here brought to life by Robert Duvall, whose rough-hewn, time-worn tones can deliver McCarthy’s lines with the doomy, elusive, terrifying honesty they require.  A perfect piece of casting, there.

And Viggo Mortensen, a man who typically looks as though he bears the weight of the world on his shoulders, is undoubtedly the person I would trust to carry The Fire – the love that binds man and boy together.  McCarthy made him nameless because he is Everyman. Viggo Mortensen is not every man, but looking at the steadfast dread etched in his drawn face, every man must marvel at his fortitude and quietly fear that, one day, we might be so tested and be found wanting. 

The boy, Everyboy, doesn’t carry the baggage of a fallen world.  He was born during the fires and therefore has no memory of the before.   He cannot know that life was once plentiful and cheap, to him all life is precious.  His father thinks that his son is The Word of God, but his son thinks that of all souls.  

The boy is the heart and the hope of both the film and the book.  McCarthy, of course, wrote the book because he became a father surprisingly late in life and wanted to celebrate the fact.  Yes, he chose an odd way to show his love, by depicting it tested beyond endurance.  But then, what other love is there between a parent and child?  As played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, the boy’s mix of deep wisdom and beautiful innocence is far more moving, I felt, on screen than on the page.

For me, the book belonged to the man.  The film belongs equally to them both and, through the film, I realised, that the man belongs to the boy.

If you know the book, you know the end of the road.  If you don’t, you need to know that it will break your heart, but leave you with a newer, fuller heart than before.  For that is McCarthy’s point … if you have a heart to break then you, too, are that rare and precious thing in which his boy believes with fierce, unshakeable faith: You are someone who carries The Fire.  You are a heart filled with love and a soul worth saving!

Dir: John Hillcoat

Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall

Dur: 111 mins

Cert: 15

Images © Icon / Dimension

BLU-RAY: FUNNY PEOPLE

The Film:

I can’t believe I’m doing this.  I’m about to review an Adam Sandler film. 

Adam Sandler: The man who did for comedy what Benito Mussolini did for … flower arranging. 

Adam Sandler:  A man who (along with The Farrelly Brothers) drove the American feature-film comedy vehicle down  an intellectual dead end, parked it there, let the tyres down and threw away the keys. 

Adam Sandler:  Without whom, there would have been no rise of adult morons  acting like children, no American Pie atrocities, no Freddie Got Fingered abomination.  No Harold and fucking Kumar.

Adam Sandler: he of the whiney, nasal voice and blank, vacuous face that I would never tire of punching.

Adam Sandler: in a film that is about comedy, rather than a failed attempt at being a comedy.

Thing is, I didn’t bother with this before because, well, it’s a God-damn Adam Sandler film.  But I love films about comedians. Lenny (1974), Man On The Moon (1999), Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedian (2002), The Aristocrats (2005); can’t resist them.  So, eventually, I gave in.

What appealed to me was Funny People’s parentage.  Writer/Director Judd Apatow and Sandler were room-mates twenty years ago when they both arrived in LA.  So they have a lot of history.  Seth Rogen’s Ira Wright is essentially Apatow then, just starting out as a stand-up.  Sandler essentially plays himself now, household name movie star George Simmons who, on the rare occasion he does sand-up, needs someone else to write his jokes.  The only difference is, George has been diagnosed with a rare form of leukaemia.

He hires Ira ostensibly to write those gags, but really just to keep him company.  You see, Simmons is that tragic American hero, the impossibly wealthy, ludicrously famous man living alone in his palatial mansion.  The Charles Foster Kane of comedy.

We’ve all seen the pity-the-lonely-millionaire Hollywood biopic before.  Does this film add anything to the form?  No.  Does Sandler shine any great insightful light into the psychology of the modern comedian.  No.  Do we really care whether George dies and whether Ira learns any life lessons? No.  See, the problem is that Sandler can only act broad emotions, he can’t do subtle, he’s never had to.  Unlike a Jim Carrey or a Will Smith, Sandler does not come across as a likeable, sympathetic straight character and he is incapable of imbuing Simmons with any real depth because, let’s face it, he’s built his career creating characters who have no depth.  Unfortunately, because Apatow is his friend, he apparently can’t see this.

As for Rogen, I struggle to see what his function is in the film.  I understand that his stumbling, unfocussed style is meant to reflect the way we all are in real life, but real life tends to be a rambling mess.  Unfortunately, so is this film.

The film has the feel of Boogie Nights (1997) helped, in no small part, by Janusz Kaminski’s exquisite seventies throwback photography, but Apatow doesn’t have the ability of Paul Thomas Anderson.  Having established his cast of wise-cracking characters, Apatow then forgets all about them for the second half of the film, which seems divorced from the first half, concerning, as it does, Simmons’ attempts to rekindle the relationship he ruined with the love of his life, Laura, played very effectively by Apatow’s real-life wife Leslie Mann.  During this extended aside, Ira becomes a passenger, standing in the background a lot, or playing with the children while the adults go off and have sex.

The film which is already over-indulgent at two hours twenty-odd, is also available on this Blu-Ray as an extended version with an extra seven minutes.  Woo.

The saddest thing about this film is that, however satirical it tries to be about Sandler’s alleged comedies, you just know that, with his producer’s hat on, Apatow is prepping to earn big money by actually making Re-Do, featuring Sandler’s head and the lame remnants of his New York accent on a chubby babies body.  Oh, the horror, the horror.

So, Funny People is a mixed bag of half-formed moments and half-drawn characters.  The main reason for watching it is to prepare you for watching the far superior Funny People Diaries documentary that accompanies it on this disc.

The Disc:

Funny People Diaries – 75 mins

This documentary is as much about Apatow as the main feature is but, unfiltered by fiction, it succeeds in being both more revealing and more entertaining.  Apatow’s opening comment to camera is quite telling, he knows this is the only chance he’ll ever have to make a film this self-indulgent, so he’s going to go for it shamelessly.

The process of making the film began with assembling his cast and forcing them to write then perform stand-up routines to, let’s be honest, sympathetic LA audiences.  This comedy boot camp clearly helped put everyone in the proverbial zone, though I must admit it was revealing to see the brain-storming sessions where they only seemed capable of creating dick jokes.

This process set the tone for the whole production, which included improvisational rehearsals which reveal that one of the film’s best moments, Eric Bana’s skin-crawlingly embarrassing routine about Cameron Diaz, sprang from his improv.

It transpires that Bana, who has never played comedy on film, was originally a stand-up in his native Australia.  It’s also interesting, in other scenes, to see that Sandler is quite useful with a guitar and has a lovely singing voice.   So, in some alternate universe, he’s a pop-star and the alternate me doesn’t hate him so much.

One of the delights of this documentary is the inclusion of much more footage of the cavalcade of comedians appearing and playing themselves.  Unlike the characters in the film, these are established, confident comedians who are comfortable enough to actually laugh at each other’s jokes.

This documentary tells you far more about the brutality of a life in stand-up comedy and the anxieties suffered by its practitioners, than the main movie does.  It is worth the price of admission in its own right!

We are also told that the first cut of the film ran to three and a quarter hours yet, oddly, with so much material having been hacked out, the disc doesn’t contain any deleted scenes.

What it does have is:

Line-o-Rama – 8 mins

A series of alternative one-liners, as Apatow continued the improv process even during shooting, often shouting suggestions to his actors from behind the camera.  The diamond in here is Eminem railing at Ray Romano.  A riot!

Gag Reels – 10 mins

The inevitable montage of mistakes and corpses that you would expect to have on a set where lines are being added and improvised in an ongoing basis.

Writer/Director: Judd Apatow

Stars: Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann, Eric Bana

Dur: 146 / 153 mins

Cert: 15

Images © Columbia / Universal

DAYBREAKERS

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Okay, it’s a rubbish title.  Let’s get that out of the way to start with.  A bad, horrible, clumsy, committee-approved title.  Daybreak?  Nice.  Break of Day?  Classy.  Daybreakers?  Pah.  Gack.  Spit.  That’s the name of a duff straight-to-video action pot-boiler from the early nineties.  Starring Jeff Fahey or Wings Hauser.  So offensive is the clumsiness of this title it almost stopped me watching the film.  Only the presence of Willem Dafoe tempted me.  He’s usually very reliable.  Even if this were one of those rare films he did just for the money … it must have some value, surely it can’t be another Mr Bean’s Holiday (2007) or XXX2 (2005) … can it?

No, it can’t.  What it can be is another Gattaca (1997) mixed with more than a dash of the first Blade (1998) and just a hint of the ubiquitous Matrix (1999).  Not a bad gene pool from which to draw inspiration. 

The film is set ten years in the future and the world is entirely vampire.  It takes the vision we see in, say, Alan Ball’s True Blood TV series (and the Charlaine Harris books on which it is based) and extends that into a logical future where humans are a minority, grown in factory farms and bled for food.  The vampire world is trundling along very successfully, having completely replaced our society with a dark mirror-image of it.  Almost everyone seems happy with their immortality.  Almost everyone.

Cue Ethan Hawke – who doesn’t make nearly enough films – as Edward, Chief Haematologist of the Bromley Marks corporation which provides the vampire world with all the blood it needs – now refined as a supplement to add into coffee in place of milk.  Hawke is very good at looking worried and Edward is very worried.  Worried about the shortage of living humans and their blood, worried about the failure of his experiments to refine an artificial blood substitute but, above all, worried about the morality of reducing humans to food animals.  His boss, played with practiced ease by the always malevolent Sam Neill, has no such qualms. 

The Grendel at their gates is the effects of starvation.  If a vampire goes without blood for long enough, he becomes ‘a sub-sider’, a bestial creature with little remaining intelligence and a powerful, overwhelming thirst.  I would make a joke about the film being made in Australia here, but I can’t think of one.

Inevitably, then, there will be a human resistance movement which Edward stumbles across, as you do, and finds himself adopted by them.  They are led by Willem Dafoe who has a secret, the key to unlocking the problem that both the vampires and the last remaining humans face.

Visually, the film has a very classy, noirish feel to it, with some particularly striking images – such as the queue of vampire commuters standing on the tube station, all in silhouette, their eyes reflecting like cats.  Even though this film cloaks itself in the guise of science fiction, it is undeniably horror – with enough moments of explosive blood-splattered violence to keep most gore-hounds happy.

The work that writers/directors The Spierig Brothers have done in conceiving and then executing a modern world designed for vampiric convenience is very clever indeed.  If you can’t go out in daylight, then the preferred mode of public transport will be the subway.  Obvious. The only problem I had with all of this is that ten years just doesn’t seem long enough for almost everyone in the world to adjust to such a massive change.  Civilisation seems to have fallen then risen again with astonishing speed.

The dénouement manages to be satisfyingly cunning while addressing a fundamental flaw in Dafoe and Hawke’s plan (that I can’t discuss without giving too much away) and gives vent to some spectacularly explosive blood-letting, all-the-while leaving the way open for a sequel.

All-in-all Daybreakers is a refreshing and enjoyable take on a clapped-out old sub-genre which reminds us that, however prettily and romantically vampires may have been re-packaged for selling to a naïve teen audience,  they are, essentially, parasites that see humans as food.  Relationships with them will, given time, always devolve to the relationship a butcher has with his cow.

Writer/Dir: Michael and Peter Spierig

Stars: Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill,  Isabel Lucas

Dur: 98 mins

Cert: 15 (six seconds were cut from the film in order to secure this certificate, you can find information about that at the BBFC website here.

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Image © Lionsgate

PLANET 51

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Alien is relative. When the big silver spaceships land in the Arizona desert, they’re the aliens. But, when our spindly little space-craft precariously touch down in the deserts of other planets, we’re the aliens.

It’s a simple idea, which Ray Bradbury explored very fruitfully in The Silver Locusts (aka The Martian Chronicles) and which Planet 51 now dallies with.

Capt. Chuck Baker’s spindly little space-craft lands on Planet 51 in a pleasant suburb during the little green version of the 1950s. As with our 1950s, the period is one of extremes: the naïve innocence of the populace contrasting with the hair-trigger paranoia of the authorities.

Chuck has to go into hiding, in the bedroom of the easy-going Lem. What develops, then, is a sort-of E.T. in reverse as Lem tries to keep Chuck secret from his siblings, his parents and the authorities. Obviously, there wouldn’t be much of a film if he succeeded with any of this, so it’s only a matter of time before the streets are teeming with troops and tanks.

Of course, their fear of alien invasion has been inspired by years of our probes landing on their planet. Their movies and comics are full of stories of ‘humaniac’ invasion.

There are a couple of well-devised stabs at merchandising, with the cute Geiger Alien ‘puppy’ and the Mars Rover who thinks he’s a dog. Yes he looks, sounds and behaves very much like Wall-E, but we can forgive the film this as he serves a good solid narratological function … and he’s sooooooo cute!!

The film is peppered with fairly obvious movie references (mostly from Alien – 1979 - and E.T. – 1982 - but with a few additional nods to such stalwarts as 2001: A Space Odyssey – 1968 - and The Day The Earth Stood Still – 1951 - among others) which it doesn’t need, but such inter-textual references are so common-place in films like this, it would almost feel incomplete without them.

Okay, so this film doesn’t really do much that Monsters vs Aliens didn’t do last year, and it certainly isn’t as laugh-outloud funny, but what it does do – is hang together better as a story, all wrapped up in a design aesthetic which has been beautifully thought through.

All of their design is based around circles, and this feeds through everything we see in the film in a consistent and consistently beautiful way. Houses are round, cars are round, even their comic-books have rounded corners.

All of which makes for a well-rounded (ahem), good-looking, good-fun movie with no pretensions to grandeur.

When the credits began to roll, I was surprised to see a stream of Hispanic names so did a little digging and found that the film is produced by Ilion Animation, based in Madrid. The film has unambiguously been made with an eye on the American rather than Spanish market, but invading America makes perfect business sense. When animation is this captivating, it doesn’t really matter where it comes from. After all, alien is relative.

Dirs: Jorge Blanco, Javier Abad
Stars: Dwayne (Don’t Call Him ‘The Rock’) Johnson, Justin Long, Gary Oldman, John Cleese
Dur: 91 mins
Cert: U

Image © Entertainment

2009's Most Pirated Movie

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Let's start the new decade with a look back at an issue which has, in one form or another, rumbled on as a controversy since the invention of the domestic VCR: Piracy.

I recall my first pirate video was in 1982.  It was E.T.  It was a fuzzy nth generation copy of a tele-cine transfer, so degraded the colour had been leeched out of it and so badly recorded the dialogue was barely audible.   That was back in the day when people really did take video cameras into cinemas and record the movie.  One also heard stories of cinema managers being held hostage by gangsters intent on getting hold of some precious print of a movie.  Hmm … now there’s a premise for a Bruce Willis movie!

A whole generation and several thousand bootlegs later, video piracy has changed beyond recognition.  Gone are the dodgy dealers in smoky pub corners, even the car-boot cowboys seem to be a thing of the past.  It’s all web-based now and the majority of the films seem to be leaked by the companies making them, or are mastered from a preview DVD issued somewhere in the world.

The ease and speed of distribution has increased exponentially as has, generally speaking, the quality of the sound and picture.  Surely, then, this should be sounding the death-knell for legitimate mainstream movies, shouldn’t it?  The empty cinemas should be echey and dark.  Blockbusters should be pulling down the shutters and laying off their staff.  Unemployed movie-stars should be sitting on street corners offering autographs and catch-phrases for food.  But it doesn’t seem to happening that way.  Instead we seem to be getting more ‘event’ movies than ever before.  There appear to be queues in the cinemas and clusters of new DVDs and Blu-Rays hitting the shelves each and every week.

How can this be?

Well, is it possible that allegations about the profits of video piracy funding terrorists are a bit over-blown?  After all, a transaction where films are uploaded for free and downloaded for free, copied for free and shared for free doesn’t strike me as the kind of transaction from which there will be an awful lot of profit to fund the afore-mentioned terrorists.

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Is it also possible that the timely release of certain bootlegs help create the awareness and buzz that a film needs to get that all important bonanza opening weekend?  Last year’s Wolverine controversy would seem to be a workable test-case, given all of the adverse publicity that threw up.  The delightfully insightful yet deceptively entitled Den of Geek looked at that in detail here.

And now, additional grist to this particular mill has arrived in a report about J.J. Abram’s Star Trek, which has the dubious honour of being 2009’s most pirated film.  Not quite sure how they would measure that.  Did you tell anyone you’d downloaded it? I certainly didn’t … or wouldn’t have, if I had downloaded it, which I haven’t … obviously.  Anyway, this report looks at the effect this piracy has had on the film’s profits and then goes further to discuss the general state the movie industry is in.

I think it makes interesting reading, hence why I’m sharing it.

Lemme know what you think.

THE NATION'S FAVOURITE FILMS OF THE DECADE

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So, I decided it was a tad self-indulgent of me to simply foist MY favourite films on you without an organised right of reply.  Time, therefore, to publish a survey.

Obviously, as with any survey, it is a self-selecting process.  One cannot force people to tick a box (imagine the quality of politicians we’d have if you could) so the people who told me their favourites were the people who wanted to.

I polled people at my place of work, in my (for want of a more accurate term) social circle and through Facebook.  This ensured as wide a range of responses as possible.

By the way, all these charts are embiggenable.  Just click on them for a closer look.

Age Range:

As you’ll see,  I’ve tried to cover an inclusive range of ages, the youngest respondent being 13, the oldest 74.  This doesn’t reflect the socio-economic demographic Hollywood targets its movies at, but then I didn’t just want Hollywood movies to be represented.

As with all the charts here, the numbers are a percentage so, for example, in this chart the share of the respondents in the 20 – 40 age-group is 44%.

Geodemographics:

Ah, how we all love poncey management jargon.  Since I live and work in the Grimsby / Hull area, it’s fairly obvious that a sizeable proportion of my respondents would too, but I have friends that, wisely, like to keep me at arm’s length.  Although it is worth noting that everyone who responded lives in mainland Britain.  So, the – ahem – geodemographics of my survey goes something like this:

Gender:

Now, the allegation has already been made to me that this survey will mostly be made up of blokes.  Whilst it is true that men are, at least in my experience, more likely to be interested in comparing opinions about movies, they don’t have an exclusive claim over the medium so, without too much arm twisting, 26% of my respondents were female.

So, enough foreplay, let’s get to the point of this post.

It's over to the Returning Officer for the results of the only poll that mattered in 2009:

For this survey, I simply asked people to give me their ten favourite films of the decade.  I specifically didn’t ask them to rank them in order of preference, because experience has taught me that that is usually fairly mercurial, one’s favourite film one week is one’s second favourite the next … but the choice of absolute favourites is usually made from a fairly small and consistent field.  So the number one might change, but the top ten doesn’t so much.

The results, therefore, do not take into account which of these films are a respondents absolute favourite.  My results simply record how many people included a certain film in among their shortlist of favourites.  In amongst a fascinating range of different movies, there was a surprising uniformity among certain choices, even though the lists were all compiled in isolation and I have kept the developing picture completely secret.  The two front-runners very quickly emerged, constantly jostling for pole position.

Firstly, so they don’t feel left out, the films that didn’t quite make it into the top ten.  They each received  6% or 8% of the votes:

Aaaaaaand finally … the moment absolutely no-one has been waiting for … the results of my nation-wide survey, conducted under strict laboratory conditions!

The ten favourite films of the century so far, as voted for by you the great British public.  As before, the values on the vertical axis are percentages.

Enjoy:

Interesting?

Surprising?

Feel free to leave a comment below.

Also, just a point of order, I counted trilogies and the like as single films - so Lord of the Rings is a single film, as is Pirates of the Caribbean, the Bourne trilogy and the Harry Potter whateverology. You get the idea. 

And, finally, for the cynics who think I asked the half dozen members of my family and turned the results into percentages to hide this fact, I actually asked 50 people.  I stopped at fifty because that made the maths of turning the results into percentages something even my poor brain could cope with. 

I know, 50 doesn’t sound like much of a population for a survey, but national TV adverts make extravagant claims based on little more, so, if it’s good enough for the likes of L’Oreal, it’s good enough for me.
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