DVD review: My Neighbour Totoro

Two young girls move to an old house in the country where they’ll meet ancient spirits.

Totoro is possibly the most famous creation of studio Ghibli. His success certainly was the factor that transformed Ghibli, and Miyazaki, in a power house.

Strangely I never had the chance to see it, even if I wanted to for the better part of a decade, so now I started seeing it with incredibly high expectations and I must say that they weren’t really all fulfilled. Maybe it was inevitable, what you imagine as a masterpiece it’s bound to be inferior to what you actually see, another reason why hyping something too much is never a good thing.

Anyway Totoro is still an enchanting piece of storytelling. Maybe the animations are not as refined as in “Spirited away” and certainly they are not as rich as subsequent Ghibli outings but they remain nothing short of spectacular.

It’s noteworthy that in this movie there is no dramatic confrontation. There is some background tension because the mother of our two protagonists is sick but that’s really all. It’s a rare movie the one that manages to deliver so much without a bad guy driving the plot.

Totoro himself is an amazing character, decades before Wall-E he communicates perfectly without speaking a single world. His design is a masterpiece and, with his fellow spirits, he communicates the ecological message behind the movie perfectly. This is another thing that Studio Ghibli does incredibly well, they communicate their theme naturally, trough the movie itself, without any need for explanations or some other morality stuff.

A must see experience but I don’t think there was ever any doubt with a Miyazaki movie.

Videogame review: Motorstorm Apocalypse

The crazy drivers from Motorstorm are back and this time they are racing trough a natural disaster of apocalyptic proportions.

The Motorstorm franchise has always been based on a very daft but extremely enjoyable game play. Various vehicles (cars, bikes, monster trucks etc.) racing trough improbable but very scenic places. It always had a very cinematic quality, particularly with the famous slow motion crash sequences.

Apocalypse is the natural evolution of that. The tracks are crazier than ever, a couple of times you get to race on top of various buildings, jumping from one to the other. The cataclysmatic setting permits alteration to the track in real time, during the race. For example a building can fall on your car, part of the road can explode, a whirlwind can invade the track.

This is all really as awesome as it sounds. The races assume a cinematic quality typical of movies and they are all so much tighter. From an hardcore point of view this means that they are also harder to perfect. You can’t simply learn the optimal path and then repeat it for every lap, now you have to learn the optimal path for each different lap because it changes all the time. Probably knowing this the difficulty of the normal arcade mode as been much lowered so it’s realy only a problem for the completists who want to do the game on a higher difficulty setting.

There is an overall back story, played trough the game with same animated comics. It’s a really really stupid one, when it tries for dramatic it is terrible but most of the times it’s there just to have a laugh and rest the joypad. They even show a retro version of an hypothetical 80s version of the game!

Overall the game is much more streamlined. You don’t have to do a race over and over the get a ticket for the next event like in pacific rift but if you want you can perfect yourself to get tickets for special event and various stuff. This way it neatly divides to casual from the hardcore.

If you own a PS3 this is a must get, maybe the funnies game in the franchise so far.

DVD review: Brooklyn's finest

The intertwining stories of three policemen in a rough New York district.

Antoine Fuqua was once a name to watch. “Training Day” was wonderful and “King Arthur” was at least fun but after that he’s been free fall for him. I imagine that his reasoning was to go back to his root and so try to replicate his early success but this policemen over the edge story is no “Training Day”, doesn’t even came close.

Partly to blame are the actors.  The biggest name here, Richard Gere, is on autopilot, the normally very good Don Cheadle doesn’t escape the prison of cliché Only Ethan Hawke manages something, but clearly he received the best material. I wonder if maybe all the awesomeness of “Training Day” was due to Denzel Washington, clearly you need a special kind of talent to be able to elevate beyond your part.

Anyway the movie is a rehearsal of stuff that we already saw. Those policemen do a crappy job, they don’t get enough money, etc. Pick a random episode of “The wire” and you’ll see something much, much better. It’s mildly interesting to see how the various plot threads intersect but in the end the story completely fails to hold our attention. I admire that they didn’t put any overarching bad guy or stuff like that but you need much stronger material to pull it off, as it is it’s just a depressing movie about some unlucky people.

Not even worth renting.

DVD review: The Thomas Crown Affair

A wealthy tycoon, Thomas Crown, out of boredom organizes the theft of a painting. The beautiful insurance investigator, Catherine Banning, tries to recover the stolen goods.

This 1999 movie is a remake of the 1968 movie of the same name. The director, John McTiernan, is famous for his action capers, he did “The hunt for red October”, “Predator” and “Die Hard” among others, but here he manages to excel in a slightly more sophisticated genre.

This is movie belongs to the Cat and Mouse with added erotic innuendos tradition. We know that Pierce Brosnan is the thief from the very beginning, even the law officers are practically sure about it after ten minutes. The problem is that they need to prove it, and find the painting. So the insurance investigator starts an elaborate investigation cum seduction where, as it always happens in these movies, real feelings start to intrude.

It’s all very glamorous, beautiful sets in beautiful locations, nowadays only 007 does it and it’s a shame. Cinema is supposed to be a form of escapism and when there is economic trouble I’m certainly not offended by a rich set, I actually enjoy it more because it’s more poignant.

Without detracting from Rene Russo, she is simply stunning in the movie and deftly hold her own in a role that’s not easy, but this is Pierce Brosnan show and, as Empire suggested last year, Thomas Crown is his ultimate performance. Maybe in other occasions he had to stretch more but with Thomas Crown he carries his on screen persona to a point where nothing more can be added.

Like the other movies of this genre “The Thomas Crown affair” is full of improbabilities but it manages to be that rare beast that deftly combines action beats with romance and therefore appeases both sides of the couch.

Definitively recommended.

Dvd review: Winter's bone

A young girl, to avoid her house being repossessed, needs to find her missing father.

This is an hard, unflinching, movie. The setting is the Ozarks, a mountainous region between Missouri and Arkansas. Already a very hard place to live the meth diffusion in the area, the protagonist father is a meth cooker, makes it literally unforgiving.

This movie is essentially all about the odyssey of this young girl, she’s only 17, who have to confront a patriarchal culture to save her house and her family. Nothing to gory happens on screen but the violence, first threatened and then overtly expressed, is ever present. It’s a literal round trip through hell.

 It’s all anchored on the determination of the protagonist and Jennifer Lawrence, who got a deserved Oscar nomination out of it, manages to be the rock hard mountain girl who shows just enough for us to be sympathetic with her.

The direction is assured and precise, it doesn’t escape from the more violent aspects of this culture but at the same time it doesn’t relish those either. It’s mainly interested in telling a good, tough story.

In the end I know that it doesn’t sounds like the fell good movie of the year but the pure spunk of our heroine carries us trough, we never feel desperation because she is always striving for something better, even against insurmountable odds. That’s the reason this movie never falls in the trap of the “Angst-ploitation” movie a la “Precious” that are more interested in the issues that they want to raise compared to the eventual story.

An excellent drama, recommended viewing.

Dvd review: Cars 2

Lighting Mcqueen and his friends are back, this time with added espionage.

The sequel that apparently nobody wanted. At the time Cars was widely considered the worst Pixar movie. Of course this is all really relative, being the worst there still means that you are better than the average but of course coming from Pixar people tend to expect a masterpiece every single time.

To add more angst to the fire it is noted that actually Cars sold an incredible amount of related merchandise, mostly toy cars I imagine, so here is a movie green lighted purely to make more money by the same people who complained that Up was to original and so less profitable.

But we shouldn’t exaggerate, commercial considerations are obviously important and considering that it actually earned more than his immediate predecessor, 559 millions, it’s clear that somebody went to watch this movie so it can’t be that bad.

In the end this is a competent kiddie movie. It’s a shame that there is no subtext that we adult can enjoy, neither some stunning and innovative animation, but even in this age of Shreck and Toy Story we can argue that there should be a space for kiddie movie that are purely for those, the kids.

Not being the target audience then, I’m more than 12 years old, It’s difficult for me to judge properly. There are some nice gags but nothing too ground breaking, with a fairly limited story. The world of cars still baffles me, I can’t help but wonder who builds all those cars and most importantly, how.

In the end it’s a retread to a form of storytelling that now looks dated but it still manages to entertain. For fans and kids only.

Dvd review: Repo men

In the near future you can get synthetic organs with good credit and regular payments but if you fall behind the repo men will come and repossess those very organs.

The basic concept is really not that interesting, I imagine they were aiming for topicality with the mortgage crisis and everything else but in the end they fail to explore it in any meaningful way.

The protagonist, played by Jude Law, is one of the more unsympathetic characters I have ever seen. He starts as a real bastard and it’s mildly fun to see him going around and repossessing organs in various gory ways but his eventual redemption is contrived and unconvincing.

The direction is pedestrian, only a couple of fight scenes are somewhat interesting, and even Jude Law fails to deliver a good performance.

The twist ending is the final nail in the coffin, not only there is no one to root for, the movie itself is really a depressing experience.

Not even a Jude Law fan should sit through this.

Dvd review: Agorà

The life and death of Hypatia, one of the last classical philosophers.

Alejandro Amenabar is a master of his trade and so technically Agorà is superb. Beautifully shot, with strong performances from practically everybody involved and a deep emotional core this is without doubt an engrossing experience.

A lot of Christian fundamentalist took exception with the subject of the film. For those not in the known Hypatia, of whom we don’t know a lot about, is an unofficial patron saint of Atheism. I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty details of what’s happened, suffice to say that Christians don’t look particularly good in this movie.

Now with all their inflamed rhetorics the fundamentalist played right into Amenabar lap. Because the movie is actually very well researched and even if we don’t know a lot of details about Hypatia life what’s in the movie is at least plausible and the Christians at that time and place were really an unruly mob. Now on the other side this is clearly a movie with an agenda, the director is a declared atheist and he clearly made this movie to prove a point but by pointing the finger at fundamentalists more than at Christians he clearly sidestepped any possible meaningful critique.

Going back to the movie in itself that same agenda is what stops the movie short of being really good. The overarching battle between the new religion and the old values is so all encompassing that the various characters are often nothing more than mere shadows. Also the overall picture that is painted by the movie is really too grim even from an historical point of view, some of the classical culture was saved, actually by the very priests that are the main bad guys here.

In the end kudos for making philosophical discussion actually engrossing but with more nuanced characters this story would have been much more interesting. As it is it’s worth a viewing only for fans of the genre.

Videogame review: Assassin's Creed II Downloadable content

The lost memories of Ezio Auditore da Firenze.

The two downloadable expansion of Assassin’s Creed II caused quite a stir in the internet at the time. The point of contention was that this content was already present on the game disk and that what we were downloading was just an unlocking code.

Now while I honestly can understand why it did upset many people in hindsight is this that bad? With multimillion productions like this one the game companies of course plan their downloadable expansions quite in advance; they certainly don’t start them after the game is shipped! The only difference here is that Ubisoft has been upfront about it and simply put everything on the disk.

Now on to the games itself they are a nice, if not really that exciting, addiction to the game world. They are basically more of the same, which is certainly what you expect with an expansion.

My only gripe is the overreliance, mainly in “The battle of Forli” on fight sequences. I’m sure that somewhere there is somebody who plays Assassin’s Creed for the swordfights but the rest of us are here for the stealth killing and the parkour style roof hooping.

In the end they are a nice addiction to the main game but not really indispensable.

Videogame review: Beyond good and evil

A young girl, Jade, tries to protect her orphanage from an alien conspiracy.

It’s really a shame that this game was such a commercial failure. Originally released in 2003 it bombed depriving us of the planned sequels, now it’s been remastered in High Definition for the latest console generation.

The game play clearly comes from a different era. It’s an action/adventure game where we control our main character, Jade, from a third person prospective. We can interact in various ways with the game world to solve puzzles and access different areas. There are various sidekick controlled by the computer, who help in our quest. Every now and then the exploring and puzzle solving is interrupted by fairly easy fight sequences.

What really impress me about this game is how the experience as a whole is organically coherent. Before and after this we had others game world that were free to explore but rarely they’ve been so interesting. Not only the anime inspired artwork is really good, they are really interesting places per se. They not only feel real, they are filled with a thousand tiny interesting details.

A segment of the internet, the “Hardcore” crowd, tends to measure the depth of a game to the amount of stuff that there is to do. They get really excited when a game like “Daggerfall” boast sa game world the size of Great Britain. Now a thousand of the procedurally generated dungeons of that game can’t hold a candle to the five lovingly crafted main missions of “Beyond good and evil”.

Book review: Pirate latitude

A group of pirates against an impregnable fortress.

This novel was recovered posthumously from Michael Crichton laptop and so we don’t know for how much time he’s been working on it and why it didn’t publish it in his lifetime. It is a remarkably finished for a work that wasn’t shown to anyone, this is not a rough draft finished by an author for hire, this is pure unadulterated Crichton.

My personal theory is that we are just reading half of the eventual finished novel and that he eventually intended to add a segment of treasure hunting in a contemporary setting.

Anyway regarding the novel this is a classic “men on a mission” situation. Captain Hunter recruits a disparate gang of pirates for an impossible mission with incredible rewards, imagine the magnificent seven but with pirates.

The novel starts very strong but it kinda loses itself in the last bit with many subplots not really well developed. Crichton writing is still crisp and engaging, he is one of the few authors that can make pure science compelling.

Crichton perfectly understands the narrative possibilities offered by naval warfare. He creates fascinating battles of wits between rival ships that are a joy to read and easy to understand.

A very good page turner.

Book review: life expectancy

The peculiar life of James Tock who was predicted five terrible days at his birth.

Dean Koonts can often be repetitive and tiring, a case can be made that he always write the same book just changing the names of the characters, but when he leave his inspiration flowing he can deliver something special.

Nothing otherworldly happen in this book, the main antagonist, a killer clown, is several order of magnitude more sedate that any stock villain of the genre, but it instills the tale with a love for the randomly bizarre that makes it an engrossing experience.

There is a love for the quirkiness of life, for all the strange details that makes every family unique, which elevates this book above the rest of Koontz production.

Moreover stuff happens here, much more than in the rest of Koontz production. Normally a Koontz book is all a prolonged face off with some bizarre incarnation of evil but in this case we have five days and so we have five events, five challenges, with different adversaries and different problems. Once they even have to talk their way out of a situation, without shooting anybody, incredible!

Definitively a must read.

Cinema review: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Ethan Hunt and his friends in another “Mission Impossible”, this time with a much taller building to climb.

Like his predecessors Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is a fun ride that is still missing some vital element to make it a really great movie.

The action is certainly fun even if at times pointless. On the plus side there is a stunning sequence where Tom Cruise himself, no stuntmen were involved, climb the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. However the other action sequences are all a little bit corny, I couldn’t escape the feeling that somewhere the Hollywood Blockbuster machine dictated the exact number and position of the fight sequences and who cares if they don’t really fit in.

Speaking of action Ethan Hunt is officially a super hero. His fight abilities and overall capacities now are so over the top that is difficult to take him seriously. Well at least we got a returning Simon Pegg who is almost promoted from comedic sidekick to main action guy, with of all guys Jeremy Renner replacing him as the comedic relief who doesn’t do a lot. The group is rounded up by the token female, Paula Patton, who doesn’t really manage to make something out of her role but certainly is good eye candy.

Back are the wacky gizmos that are the trademark of this serial. There is a vague attempt of “this time we’ll go back to the basics” and so within half an hour our heroes have to go rouge, yet again, without resources but in the end they bring so much stuff with them that I can’t imagine what happens when they have all the assets of the agency at their disposal.

The director is Brad Bird, one of the Pixar wonder boys, and while I must concede that he did a competent job he didn’t manage to bring the magic of “The incredibles”  to a live action environment. We’ll see this summer with “John Carter”, which is directed by another Pixar alumnus, Andrew Stanton, if it’s really the environment that stifles creativity so much.

In the end a nice popcorn movie, with the biggest action star of the planet, it deliver what’s on the tin, nothing more and nothing less.

Cinema review: Sherlock Holmes: a game of shadows

Sherlock Holmes versus professor Moriarty.

It’s really impossible not to love Robert Downey Junior. He manages to instill a certain quirkiness, an unfathomable charm, in every role that he takes and his Sherlock Holmes is no exception. A case could be made that is very hard to distinguish between his various characters, that in the end he is just a one note actor but really who cares when he plays that role so wonderfully?

Also Jude Law is back as a very action oriented Watson and the easy chemistry between the two leads is still as good as the last time, maybe even better. No Rachel McAdams sadly, only a cameo for her with the token female role taken by an underutilized Noomi Rapace.

What really falls flat is the plot. It is all about the nefarious plans of professor Moriarty, played perfectly by Jared Harris of Mad Men fame, but while we are told all the time that he is incredibly intelligent, the equal on the opposite side of Holmes, we don’t really see it. The writers fell in a very old logical trap which is: When you’re trying to depict something as very smart you can make it very intelligent and complicated but then you risk leaving the audience confused, or you can pretend that it’s all extremely complicated and then make it dumb. You can guess what the filmmaker’s choice was.

But then a smart plot is not really that important in a big blockbuster, you can even go without a plot at all (I’m looking at you Transformers!), and here Ritchie manages to make it work thanks to his gift for snappy dialogues, with some help from Downey Junior I’m sure, crazy action, Sherlock vision is back, and good framing.

I got one last gripe though. I understand that there is an homosexual subtext in Holmes and Watson partnership and that even if it wasn’t such a big deal in Doyle time it is now but really Ritchie and co. are concentrating too much on it. The whole relationship drama between the two starts because Watson leaves Holmes for a woman, OK it’s fine, but then we have Holmes in drag practically hugging Watson after throwing said women out of a running train and in the end we even have Holmes asking Watson out for a dance. Now nothing against a relationship like this, of course, just saying that it’s possible to be a little bit more subtle, that’s way they call it subtext.

Anyway very fun stuff, a must see.

TV review: Spaced

The adventures of Tim and Daisy who have to pretend to be a couple to get a flat.

Among the fandom Spaced is incredibly famous, Tarantino is a big fan for example, but like a lot of similar things it doesn’t have to same mind space among the general public and that is really a shame.

From the same team that would go on to make “Shaun of the dead” and “Hot fuzz” we get a quirky and surreal sit-com where is easy to see the seeds of those great movie. We have the same style of humor and, broadly speaking, the same concepts. Staples of American cinema are translated and transformed in to a low key British setting. The protagonists are also genre savvy, they often realize that they are living something straight out of Hollywood and react accordingly.

If there is one problem it’s that maybe it’s not the easiest thing to get it. On one side it’s all very British and so it doesn’t translate smoothly to other cultures. On the other side you get the most out of it if you are a geek, if your level of fandom is not really that advanced you are bound to lose many of the references. It’s obvious for us that Tim get really angry when somebody speaks about Jar Jar Binks but outside our little world it can certainly be puzzling.

Having said that it remains a very funny sitcom with the first outings together of Pegg and Frost, directed by Edgar Wright, so in my book it’s still a must see, even if you are not a geek. Eventually you need to start with something so why not start with something really funny and interesting?

Dvd review: district 13

In the near future a suburb of Paris is so rife with criminals that the authorities decide to simply wall everybody in. After a while a nuclear bomb is lost there and is up to our heroes to recover it.

It’s incredible that it took so long for the first “Parkour” movie.

Parkour is an incredibly cinematic discipline that, broadly speaking, teaches how to move in an urban environment in the most rational and harmonious way. You should really check the video, this stuff is so crazy that you have to see it to really believe it.

Anyway, as it’s always happening lately, we had to wait for the French, and in particular Luc Besson who wrote and produced it. The plot is dumb but it’s the right type of dumb and anyway when you tune in for Parkour the movie you really don’t need a bad actor trying to convey his feelings, you need relentless action and this is exactly what you get here.

The two protagonists are portrayed by two stuntmen, one of them is actually David Belle himself, the founder of the Parkour, and they are really perfect for the part.

This movie came out in 2004 and it’s really a shame that didn’t have a very broad success because as an old school action movie this is really good. Of course if you prefer talking heads stay clear of this one but for everybody else this is quite a ride.