PAUL

So, you’re going to see a Pegg/Frost movie!  You’ve seen their other two and, therefore, you know what to expect: good character development, a very British sense of sarcastic irony mixed with a very American love of geek-lore, all mixed-in with wit, originality and topped-off with some classic quotes.  Yes?  No.  Not so much.  Not this time.

The boys managed to catch lightning in a bottle twice, with Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007) (I mention the names purely for the benefit of those who’ve spent the last decade off-planet) so there was high expectation that this, their first American film, would be three for three. 

Apparently, when they were getting ready to shoot this, all the way back in 2009, Messers Frost and Pegg were saying it isn’t officially part of what Wikipedia is proud to ennoble ‘The Blood and Ice-Cream Trilogy’.  No, no, that will be The World’s End apparently.  So, this film, which is only now seeing the light of day nearly two years later, is a side project. 

Why?  Well, because Edgar Wright wasn’t involved.  Instead, Paul was directed by Greg Mottola who was responsible for those culture-expanding comedies Superbad (2007) and Adventureland (2009).  I don’t like Superbad and Adventureland.  I’m sorry, but I don’t.  I’m not sixteen.  To be fair, I didn’t find films like that funny when I was sixteen and they were called things like Porky’s and Last American Virgin (both 1982).  So, Mottola’s films are not aimed at me.  I get that.  But Frost and Pegg’s previous films were absolutely aimed at me.

So, where did it all go so … meh?  Well, it’s difficult to point to any one ingredient; the film just lacks the spark of creativity and vitality that marked their first two movies together.  One is forced to conclude that Wright did far more than just point the camera!



Pegg and Frost auditioning for The Hobbit



But, now I’ve sufficiently dampened-down your expectations, it’s time to mention that the film isn’t actually bad.  It’s still an entertaining and enjoyable watch, just not in the same league as … Well, you get the idea.  Can you, as one of my friends put it, sense the damned faintness of the upcoming praise?

Paul begins by establishing (re-establishing, if we’re honest) the geek credentials of the two protagonists as they visit ComiCon, then venture out into the wilds of America, failing entirely to communicate with the humans they meet.  They are geeks, after all … And English geeks at that!

They bump into your text-book grey alien, who tells them he is the titular Paul, and he hitches a lift with them.  To begin with there is a certain amount of friction between them but, of course, you know, by the end, they’ll all be best buds after sharing their transformative experience … This is a road movie, after all.  Along the way, they teach a devout Christian to swear, are pursued by a posse of rednecks, learn some important truths about the government’s UFO conspiracy and finally come out of their shells.

Rogen found the UFO Plan Diet was working a treat

Of course, a road movie needs a few chases, and chases need bad-guys:  Step-up Jason Bateman, on fine form as the steely-eyed Federal Agent, Zoil, who is hot on Paul’s heels.  He is abetted by the Laurel and Hardy of the Secret Service, played by Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio (both of whom arrived with Mottola).

Then, of course, there is Paul himself, voiced by another Mottola crony, Seth Rogen.  Rogen’s laid-back, foul-mouthed, little-grey-guy is consistently the funniest thing in the film; which is a problem because, as we know, Seth Rogen isn’t funny.

Where, I think, the biggest difference between Mottola and Wright’s styles can be seen is in that humour.  Here the steady stream of dick, ass and “we’re not gay” jokes is occasionally interrupted by a big slapstick moment, whether it be a punch or a pratfall.  Shaun and Fuzz both had their fair share of slapstick, but leavened that with a verbal dexterity and wit that this film simply lacks.

However, what it loses in belly-laughs, it gains in nice ideas – such as the notion that Paul has been scientific advisor to Hollywood’s science fiction films since the 50s.  With this in mind, Frost and Pegg have been very respectful of their source material, lifting entire scenes from CE3K (1977) and ET (1982) as well as Starman (1984) but only so these add to their own story.  They also pack in a few funny reversals in the film’s last few minutes, just to remind you that they can still surprise you!

Frost and Pegg, unashamedly making films for themselves.

Simon, Nick, I’m sorry … It’s not you, it’s me.  I’m sure it’s just my dysfunctional humour circuits.  Maybe Rogen really is a genius and I just can’t see it because of his proximity to the eclipsing mass of Adam Sandler.  I don’t know.

I do know that, while I felt the film was a pleasant diversion and will have fanboys reciting “Three tits … Awesome” for years to come, its greatest achievement was that it left me with a burning desire to dig out my BluRay of CE3K and watch it all over again.  So, y’know, that’s something.  Isn’t it?

Dir: Greg Mottola

Stars: Seth Rogen, Jason Bateman, Sigourney Weaver, oh, and those guys who wrote it.

Cert 15

Dur; 104 mins

ICE AGE: DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS.

. .
Digital is the way to go. I’ve been saying this ever since I saw Bee Movie and Blade Runner: The Final Cut on the same day at the all-digital Vue Cinema in Hull, in 2008. Odd double-bill you might think, and you’d be right, but they served to show the full range of possibilities made available to us by digital projection. The twenty-five year-old Blade Runner has never been sharper and the CGI Bee Movie had real sting. I’d never seen a clearer, richer, more detailed picture anywhere.

Here in Britain, we rarely get to see pristine prints of films. Even first-run films at big cinemas are often hurriedly mass-produced prints, or re-cycled ones from the States, so it’s rare to see a film at its absolute best, even on the big screen. Not a problem with digital. Every ‘print’ is as good as the original, no scratches, no cigarette-burns, no reel-ends missing. It’s exactly as the film-makers wanted it to be.

The only variables, then, are the quality of the venue you see it in and the aptitude of the person running the projectors. Ah, but there’s the rub. A custom-built system, calibrated and maintained to optimum levels and operated by a technician with experience and a real feel for his art (like at Hull's Vue), is as close to perfect as I ever expect to get in a cinema. However, a converted analogue screen, thrown-together simply to draw down some European funding and operated like some circus side-show by an incompetent orang-utan’s dumber, younger brother is, by contrast, only marginally less unpleasant than being force-fed crusty toe-nails by a grinning, gap-toothed chav with ferocious body-odour and a Mockney accent.

Which brings me back to Ice Age 3 (Or Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs to give it its full, non-sensical title). I didn't see this at a custom-built digital cinema. I saw this in the sadly more-common dodgy conversion.

The digital presentation I saw was flat and fuzzy and pallid in colour. It speaks volumes of the film that I managed to fight through this curtain of exhibitor-incompetence to actually enjoy it!

Our story kick’s off an elephant’s gestation period after the last film, we have Ellie and Manny the mammoths expecting the patter of, frankly, quite large feet, which makes Sid the surprisingly energetic Sloth just plain broody. He stumbles across a clutch of dinosaur eggs (dinosaurs … you know, those things which the first Ace Age (2002) correctly stated had died out millions of years before our mammal protagonists evolved) and, dubbing them Egbert, Shelly and Yoko, decides to adopt them.

Well, of course, the triplets’ real dino-mum arrives (and we all know how much we enjoy a CGI saurian, they were, after-all, CGI’s coming-of-age back in 1993), takes Sid along for the ride and leads the gang to a Pellucidar-type land of the lost where we meet this movie’s star-turn, a buckle-swashing one-eyed weasel called Buck. Voiced exuberantly by Simon Pegg, he is clearly this franchise’s attempt to cash-in on Puss In Boots from Dreamworks' other trilogy franchise: Shrek. He is their guide through the exotic flora and fauna of this subterranean world where pretty-much everything wants to kill you.

As with all of the sensible animations this year, the 3D here is used sparingly and with care, to give depth and detail to the landscape, to help create the magical, fantastical vistas the animators have dreamed up, with only the occasional cheap-thrill sequence designed to be turned into a ride or video-game, such as the spectacular pterodactyl dog-fight.

The slapstick humour is classic Looney Tunes tom-foolery, with the rat-a-tat one-liners reminding me of nothing so much as the Hope and Crosby Road films, while the musical score has all the scope and romance of a Korngold classic. I love the fact that today's animators draw inspiration from source-material so old that, in all likelihood, even the parents of the supposed target-audience kids won’t recognise it. All of which tells me that a good animated film’s roots are growing in soil far deeper and richer than that which spawns your typical, undemanding, lowest-common-dee-dum-dee-dum-dum kid flick. Seeing beyond the short-term demands of this year’s fashion is partly what gave John Lasseter’s Pixar its strength, and Katzenberger's Dreamworks has been wise to follow Lasseter’s lead, therefore it would have been the acme of foolishness if Blue Sky Studios (the makers of the Ice Age films and the backbone of Fox's animation division) had not followed suit.

So, is Ice Age 3 that rarest of things, an artistically successful and enjoyable sequel? Unequivocally yes! The film-makers know that bringing the dinosaurs back is nonsense (one character opines at one point “I preferred you when you were extinct”) but they are cartoon dinosaurs, in a cartoon world. After all, if we are untroubled by the notion that sabre-tooths (sabre-teeth?), woolly-mammoths et al can talk to each-other … in English … then having dinosaurs hidden away in a secret jungle shouldn’t cause us any problems.

If was good enough for Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Willis O’Brien … it’s good enough for me!
.
Directed by: Carlos Saldanha & Mike Thurmeier
Stars: Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Simon Pegg
Dur: 94 mins
Cert: U
.
Image © 20 Century Fox

STAR TREK

The Writer’s Cut (1,500 words):

Where’s Captain Kirk? Well, as this new Star Trek ‘prequel’ begins, he’s being born in, of course, the middle of an interstellar fire-fight.

The original Star Trek telly programme has always been a bit of an oddity. Almost uniquely among SF TV (at least until quite recently) it’s a show that has always attracted female fans. By which I don’t mean beer-swilling would-be-boys with breasts or timid, transparent teenagers with no friends … I mean women with lives and families and, presumably, lots of better things to do.

I’ve seen them at Star Trek conventions, dressed in Star Fleet uniforms, with their normal looking families in tow. I’ve been to many different types of cons … Eastercons, Comic Cons, Anime Cons, Dr Who cons, a Worldcon … and I’ve never seen noticeable numbers of families anywhere … except Star Trek cons.

In-keeping with that, the release of the new Star Trek movie has generated a palpable buzz of excitement among civilian women and among people who, ordinarily, don’t get excited about films. There’s just something about Star Trek that has got under the skin of normal, healthy, well-balanced people.

I suspect this isn’t because J.J. Abrams has promised to thoroughly ‘re-boot’ the franchise, it isn’t because they all went to see MI:III (2006) and so are expecting something equally kinetic, it isn’t because of the vast sums that Paramount has spent on marketing the movie … it’s purely because it’s Star Trek.

So, what has Jeff served up for us? Well, not inappropriately, Star Trek starts right at the beginning of something big … an anomaly is opening up, a giant multi-coloured storm-cloud in space. Now, you’d think Star Fleet would recognise a worm-hole when they see one, but no, and out of this gaping hole in space-time heaves a gigantic spaceship, one part V’Ger to two parts Babylon 5 Shadow Ship.

It seemingly doesn’t come in peace as there promptly ensues a lot of explosions and the sort of crash-zoom wobbly-camera-work that has been the signature of Battlestar Galactica’s space-born battles.

Meanwhile, as with any canny film-maker, Abrams contrasts this story of rending steel and flashing phasers with a human story. Within the spiralling innards of the USS Kelvin, George Kirk has to take command of the ship during its death-throes while his wife, Winona, is giving birth to their son who will, surprisingly, be named James. The adult Kirk is very much his son’s father, he makes the decision his son will make sixty-odd years in the future (at the beginning of the film Generations – 1994 - confused yet? I am. But then prequels do that to me …) he opts to put his navy’s interests before his own.

So, typically for protagonists in films like this, young James grows up without a father. We see this in just one scene – the one featured in the trailer with him stealing a car. An extraordinary moment, designed to give Star Trek ‘cred’ in its opening moments with high-octane editing all set to the pounding guitars of The Beastie Boys’ Sabotage.

Where Kirk’s mother is called Winona, half a universe away on Vulcan, Spock’s mother is played by Winona. Winona Ryder. An odd choice to play Spock’s mum since she is only six years older than Zachary Quinto. Not sure if that was just one of the in-jokes that pepper the film. The ones that definitely are in-jokes are all dealt with with a very light touch throughout the film. For example, when the crew of the Enterprise make planet-fall, the first person to die is wearing red. This isn’t dwelled upon, it’s just there for you to notice or not. And, if you don’t know why that’s a Trek in-joke, that’s fine, you don’t need to.

Then we fast-forward to grown-up Jim, aged twenty-two, played now by Chris Pine, picking a bar-fight (and losing it - the first of several he'll lose during the film - on his way to picking up the Rick Deckard belt for film's finest fumbling fist-fighter) and bumping in to Commander Pike who points out that his reckless, rudderless lifestyle is a waste of potential: “You like being the only genius-level repeat offender!” Pike then dares Kirk to join Star Fleet and be a better officer than his father was, knowing full well that, like his father, Jim couldn’t possibly refuse a dare. So he’s in.

Fast-forward again and, in his graduation year, Kirk divides his time between trying to seduce Uhura (Zoe Saldana), developing a real antipathy for Spock (who, as played by Quinto, can make the line “Live long and prosper” sound like a threat) and cheating on the Kobayashi Maru Test.

So, within fifteen or twenty minutes of screen-time, the Star Trek universe has been re-established on a slight kilter to what long-term fans already know; and the major players are being assembled, including a hypochondriac McCoy (Carl Urban), a barely legible Chekov (Anton Yelchin), a frankly arrogant Sulu (John Cho) and a played-just-for-laughs Scotty (Simon Pegg). All just in time to take their part in a cannon-altering adventure as the rebel Romulan, Nero (Eric Bana), reappears and wages war. Kirk goes from stowaway to first officer, Spock is made captain and the eyebrow raises … to just the right angle! Fascinating.

Ignoring the cheap, nasty product-placement. Ignoring the fact that the music eschews all the themes that we know and love in favour of a score which just rumbles along largely unnoticed. Ignoring the fact that no one thinks to ask “So where exactly has Nero been hiding for the last twenty-five years?” Ignoring the fact that Spock having Kirk ejected from the ship, rather than throwing him into the brig, is just flat-out illogical. Ignoring all that - this film barrels along at break-neck pace. Abrams burns through set-pieces, hurtling from incident to incident so fast that you can feel the g-force even as you sit there in your cinema seat.

The characters we know don’t need much introduction. The characters we don’t simply don’t get any. Nero is only loosely sketched out as a villain, so his obvious similarities to Khan Noonien Singh are never over-come. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the whole film is very much modelled on The Wrath of Khan (1982). Abrams has shaken up the Star Trek universe with the same wonderfully irreverent attitude that Nicholas Meyer brought to the director’s chair. Both film makers have shown that Trek is not, as many fans wrongly think, holy writ carved in stone, it is a robust and fascinating set of toys with which a good, ambitious, talented film-maker can have a lot of fun!

As can the audience. We get slapstick, snogging, melodrama, swearing, chaotic action sequences, over-lapping dialogue, loads of wobbly camerawork, tasteful lens-flare, terrible hair-cuts and no time to think about anything we’ve just seen.

The major action set-pieces are just barmy. There’s no other word for it. A parachute drop into a planet’s atmosphere segues into a simultaneous sword-fight and fist fight all inter-cut with earthquakes, explosions and rescues. And it all takes place in less time than this description took to type.

This hysterical sense of pace carries you through the experience with your disbelief duly suspended. Only in the plot-line involving a major figure from the past/future and a pretty sizeable bright red maguffin (which no one troubles to explain) does the film lose it’s way. But only for a few moments. Otherwise, what great Star Trek moments there are here to enjoy. My personal favourite being the Enterprise rising majestically out of Saturn’s rings … a moment that immediately took me back to The Mutara Nebula, James Horner’s screaming brass and Ricardo Montalban’s huge, shiny man-boobs. Absolute bliss. There is just something deeply, fundamentally satisfying in seeing that big, clumsy, stupid-looking spaceship dropping out of warp, all guns blazing.

There has been much debate among the fans, during the years of pre-release hype, about whether or not this film would conform to the ‘rules’ already known; whether it would, in other words, be cannon. Well, it isn’t. Not really. But the characters openly discuss the multi-verse theory and state that they appear to have branched off onto an alternate path. So this film is set up to launch a whole new alternative universe cannon wherein … well, literally anything goes! No foregone conclusions now, no sacred cows. It is a whole new Star Trek for a whole new generation and for that, Abrams has to be congratulated … he has taken on the big, unwieldy beast of Star Trek and boldly gone where blah-blah-blah, yacketty-schmacketty.

Dir: Jeffrey J. Abrams
Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Eric Bana, Simon Pegg.
Dur: 126 mins
Cert: 12A

The Short Cut (500 words):

Where’s Captain Kirk? Well, as this new Star Trek ‘prequel’ begins, he’s being born, in the middle of a fire-fight.

Fast-forward to grown-up Jim, aged twenty-two, played now by Chris Pine, picking a bar-fight (and losing it) and bumping in to Commander Pike who dares Kirk to join Star Fleet, knowing full well that he can’t possibly refuse a dare. So he’s in.

Fast-forward again and, in his graduation year, Kirk divides his time between trying to seduce Uhura (Zoe Saldana), developing a real antipathy for Spock (who, as played by Zachary Quinto can make the line “Live long and prosper” sound like a threat) and cheating on the Kobayashi Maru Test.

So, within fifteen or twenty minutes of screen-time, the Star Trek universe has been re-established on a slight kilter to what long-term fans already know; and the major players are being assembled, including a hypochondriac McCoy (Carl Urban), a barely legible Chekov (Anton Yelchin), a frankly arrogant Sulu (John Cho) and a played-just-for-laughs Scotty (Simon Pegg). All just in time to take their part in a cannon-altering adventure as the rebel Romulan, Nero (Eric Bana) wages war. Kirk goes from stowaway to first officer, Spock is made captain and the eyebrow raises … to just the right angle! Fascinating.

The characters we know don’t need much introduction. The characters we don’t simply don’t get any. Nero is only loosely sketched out as a villain, so his obvious similarities to Khan are never over-come. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the whole film is very much modelled on The Wrath of Khan (1982). Abrams has shaken up the Star Trek universe with the same wonderfully irreverent attitude that Nicholas Meyer brought to the director’s chair. Both film makers have shown that Trek is not, as many fans wrongly think, holy writ carved in stone, it is a robust and fascinating set of toys with which a good, ambitious, talented film-maker can have a lot of fun!

Abrams burns through set-pieces, hurtling from incident to incident so fast that you can feel the g-force even as you sit there in your cinema seat. The major action set-pieces here are just barmy. There’s no other word for it. A parachute drop into a planet’s atmosphere segues into a simultaneous sword-fight and fist fight and it all takes place in less time than this description took to type.

What great Star Trek moments there are here to enjoy. My personal favourite being the Enterprise rising majestically out of Saturn’s rings … a moment that immediately took me back to The Mutara Nebula, James Horner’s screaming brass and Ricardo Montalban’s huge, shiny man-boobs. Absolute bliss. There is just something deeply, fundamentally satisfying in seeing that big, clumsy, stupid-looking spaceship dropping out of warp, all guns blazing.

It is a whole new Star Trek for a whole new generation and for that, Abrams has to be congratulated … he has taken on the big, unwieldy beast of Star Trek and boldly gone where blah-blah-blah, yacketty-schmacketty.