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Non-Review Review: Rampart

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Darren

Rampart features a powerhouse central performance from Woody Harrelson as corrupt Los Angeles Police Officer Dave Brown. Harrelson manages to take a character who should be (and is) reprehensible, and yet manages to imbue him with the faintest sense of tragedy. However, the problem is the movie that takes place around Brown. Brown’s story is an inherently tragic one, a relic of a by-gone era trapped in his own self-destructive pattern. He’s not dynamic or proactive, and so reacts to the world around him. While director Oren Moverman populates the film with any number of iconic and recognisable character actors, the film can’t help but feel a lot too sterile, a little too inert. We’ve seen this story before, and while Harrelson’s performance is compelling, the film around him is not.

He’s got this police thing working gangbusters for him…

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Non-Review Review: Red Lights

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Darren

With Buried, Rodrigo Cortés demonstrated a skill for executing a Hitchcock-esque high concept. While it wasn’t an entirely successful experiment, it demonstrated that Cortés was a talent to watch. His follow-up, Red Lights, affirms that potential, though it also fails to entirely deliver on its fascinating high concept. Cortés shows a real talent for the technical craft of direction – for framing his shots, use of colour and light and space, pacing and even editing. Writing, directing and editing this film, he demonstrates skill with big ideas and high concepts, as well as skill on a frame-to-frame basis. However, he’s still missing some connection between the two – some intangible skill at developing big ideas into dramatic story beats to fit his own style of film-making. That’s not to say that Red Lights isn’t a fascinating a well-crafted film, just to explain that there are some fundamental flaws.

Do you believe?

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Non-Review: Alien Resurrection (Theatrical Cut)

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Darren

To celebrate the release of Prometheus this week, we’ll be taking a look at the other movies in the Alien franchise.

I always feel a little hint of trepidation when I return to a movie that I know I didn’t like the first time. Part of me is reluctant to watch it again, even for the purposes of examining what exactly went awry during production, while some small part of me holds out hope that the film might be redeemed – that I might somehow magically get it the second time around. So, completing a marathon rewatch of Ridley Scott’s Alien and the sequels it spawned, I left Alien: Resurrection until last.

Unfortunately, it was just as flawed and messy as I remember it.

Reflecting on his behaviour…

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On Second Thought: Alien³ (The Assembly Cut)

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Darren

To celebrate the release of Prometheus this week, we’ll be taking a look at the other movies in the Alien franchise.

Alien and Aliens are, quite rightly, considered classics of the science-fiction horror subgenre, superbly constructed examinations of the monsters lurking in the darkness. Unfortunately, the two sequels, Alien³ and Alien Resurrection are not so highly regarded. One would imagine that producing a film about a monster in the future really wouldn’t be that difficult, but the films were both dogged by their own pre-production turmoil. In particular, this third film went through several painful iterations before reaching the big screen – and, even then, there was a sense that nobody was especially happy with the result.

However, this series of films has also benefited from a great deal of affection, attention and examination from both creators and fans. As such, it isn’t really a surprise that even the creators have returned to help patch them up from time to time, lovingly repairing and restoring and updating the installments in this landmark franchise. While Alien³: The Assembly Cut is not a literal Director’s Cut, it does afford the viewer a rare insight into what David Fincher’s version of the film might have looked like.

Back against the wall…

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Non-Review Review: Aliens (Theatrical Cut)

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Darren

To celebrate the release of Prometheus this week, we’ll be taking a look at the other movies in the Alien franchise.

I think Aliens might be my favourite James Cameron movie. Of course, the guy has any number of iconic movies vying for that position - The Terminator and Terminator 2 both come to mind, for example – but I can’t help but admire how efficiently the director constructed his first big budget motion picture. Regardless of its place within an iconic science-fiction franchise, Aliens is practically a guidebook on how to effectively construct a movie, from writing the script to directing the action and absolutely everything in between. It’s hard to look at Aliens as anything less than a complete triumph, no matter which angle you examine the film from.

Queen bee…

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On Second Thought: Alien (Director’s Cut)

Posted on May 28, 2012 by Darren

To celebrate the release of Prometheus this week, we’ll be taking a look at the other movies in the Alien franchise.

Alien: The Director’s Cut is a curious beast. It’s more of an alternate cut than a director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s iconic Alien. It actually runs a few seconds shorter than the original theatrical cut of the film, although it contains more than five minutes of different footage. While five minutes of footage can have a significant impact on the final cut of a film, I’d be hard-pressed to argue that they add considerable depth to Scott’s science-fiction masterpiece. Aliens: The Special Edition re-inserted scenes that expanded and developed the themes of Cameron’s sequel, while Alien³: The Assembly Cut offers a glimpse of a movie far different from the one released. In contrast, Alien: The Director’s Cut… doesn’t really do much of anything. It’s just an alternative to the theatrical edition.

Ship shape?

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X-Men by Jim Lee and Chris Claremont (and Marc Silvestri) Omnibus, Vol. 1 (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Darren

With our month looking at Avengers comics officially over, we thought it might be fun to dig into that other iconic Marvel property, the X-Men. Join us for a month of X-Men related reviews and discussion.

If the nineties could be said to belong to any particular comic book franchise, they belonged to the X-Men. Marvel has done a great job collecting classic X-Men storylines in oversized hardcover, already having more than half of Chris Claremont’s very long run available in the format. Reading his work collected here, I find myself frequently conflicted – I can’t decide whether the writer was one of the best long-form storytellers in the medium, or whether he was writing by the seat of his pants. A lot of the threads he ties together might not wrap up satisfactory, but his overarching stories suggest an incredible amount of planning. As the author led the Uncanny X-Men into the nineties, the title seems almost in chaos, but the most carefully organised chaos imaginable.

We all have our crosses to bear…

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Non-Review Review: Half Moon Street

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Darren

I do feel a little pang of sorrow that Half Moon Street opens with the “RKO” branding. RKO was the studio that gave us Citizen Kane and King Kong, so it’s just a bit disheartening to see the studio branding a half-hearted thriller that seems to exist only to show as much of Sigourney Weaver naked as humanly possible. Don’t get me wrong, of course, I’m not a prude. I have no problem with the notion of an “erotic thriller”, were it well handled. However, Half Moon Street is just a disjointed poorly-conceived mess featuring two leads who seem to give up on the movie about half-way through. It’s not as if there isn’t fertile ground for a gripping espionage thriller here, it’s more that the script by Edward Behr and Bob Swaim is so lifeless (and Bob Swaim’s direction so lethargic) that there’s absolutely no reason to care at all about anything that unfolds throughout the series of insanely massive coincidences that drive the plot.

“Okay… try to look inconspicuous…”

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Non-Review Review: Cedar Rapids

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Darren

Cedar Rapids is a charming little film, even if it seems to struggle a bit blending its drama and its comedy. Despite unfolding at an insurance corporate conference, there’s a lot of very sincere and very earnest observations contained in the film, as we watch small-town insurance salesman Tim Lippe expand his world view. (Not just figuratively, but literally – the film features the character’s first trip on an airplane, for example.) While the movie’s sincerity and respect for the naive small-town operator lends the movie a bit of weight, the film struggles to balance that earnestness with a very immature sense of humour. The resulting cocktail isn’t always smooth, but it’s always fascinating, and director Miguel Arteta populates the film with a talented cast who help keep it all together.

It never really embraces its drama or its comedy...

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Is Avatar a Revisionist Take on Aliens?

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Darren

I know this isn’t exactly a new idea, but it’s one I’ve been mulling over quite a bit lately – especially since my aunt picked up the Alien Anthology on blu ray for Christmas. It’s been fairly frequently remarked, on-line and in-print that James Cameron’s Avatar bears remarkable similarities to his Aliens. However, it’s not the similarities that interest me, it’s the differences which reveal quite a bit. Most fascinating – at least to me – is the idea that Avatar represents an attempt to revise Cameron’s work on Aliens.

Killer queen...

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