DVD review: Warrior

Two estranged brothers compete in a MMATournament.

MMA, Mixed Martial Arts, has been on the rise lately. More spectacular than boxing, which very few people properly understand anyway, also more violent than boxing, at least in how it is perceived, MMA was just waiting for somebody to come and do a movie about it.

Warrior is a Rocky style movie where instead of following just one individual we follow two. This may sound banal but in reality is something akin to a Copernican revolution for the genre because it creates a degree of uncertainty normally absent from this kind of fares.

The two “Heroes” couldn’t be more different. One is played by Tom Hardy in physically perfect form. He is a gifted actor but here he got a very steep obstacle to overcome. His character is so unsympathetic, so merciless, that even when we know what actually shaped him it is very difficult to relate. Some sparks of humanity are sorely missing.

Joel Edgerton is a less unusual hero. A relatable family man who always tries to do the right thing.

Here lies the main problem of the movie, instead of two equally relatable characters we got a decent person going against an adversary defined only by anger and fury.

But then we got to the tournament and it’s really awesome. I know that it’s rocky all over again but the various fights are perfectly choreographed. We feel the intensity of the action, the ripping muscles, the sweat. Tom Hardy in the ring is really scary.

Conclusion: An intense story that will grip most movie fans.

Cinema Review: Safe

A little Chinese girl holds an important secret, many wants her but she is under the protection of one unstoppable man.

And so Jason Statham continues is endless streak of good action movies. It’s becoming so long that I have trouble remembering to last bad one that he did, maybe “War” 5 years ago?

This is not a masterpiece in any shape or form but, as an action movie, is competent and engaging. Jason Statham plays the patented Jason Statham character, they are all the same and we really don’t care because they all look very good while kicking ass.

There is plot, quite a lot of it for a movie of this kind. They move from place to place, they scheme, stuff is revealed about the villain’s plot and our hero’s past and everything is tied up nicely in the end.

This doesn’t sound like a lot but for an action movie this is like pure Shakespeare.

Of course if you expect some character development and or some deep emotional relationship you will be surely deluded. But, honestly speaking, if you were expecting those why are you watching a Jason Statham film?

The action, the ultimate selling point of a movie like this, is good, inventive and plentiful. There are a lot of witty one liners and the camera, directed by Boaz Yakin an old hand in the action genre, lingers enough on what’s going on making it all very easy to follow.

Conclusion: Action fans will love it.

DVD review: John Adams

The life of John Adams, one of the founding fathers of the United States.

Directed by Tom Hopper, who then went to make the wonderful and amazing “The King Speech”, universally acclaimed with 4 Globes and 13 Emmys this miniseries in 7 parts should have been practically perfect.

After watching all 7 parts I can say that no, it’s really not that perfect, in reality is terrible tv, some of the worst stuff I’ve seen in a while.

The main problem lies in the plot. The founding fathers are to America what the saints are to Christianity. Practically perfect human beings who for entirely selfless reasons gave freedom to their country. Now this is neither the place nor the time to debate the veracity of this, suffice to say that what is perfect to build a national myth upon becomes incredibly boring when translated to the screen.

Of course I’m not saying that they should have invented something outrageous, we got the Assassin’s Creed series for that. Just that the John Adams that I saw on the screen is an insufferable character, even more boring than some of those Vatican sponsored lives of saints. At least many of them had a period of fun and debauchery before finding God, or a bloody martyrdom.

He never evolves, he is incredibly selfless and motivated from the first minute, all rousing speeches and inflamed rhetoric. It’s only flaw? He is too motivated and so he alienates those lazy bastards around him! It’s something that you normally see on CV. “What’s my defect future employer? I work too hard”. Terrible.

Not only John Adams himself, the whole miniseries is an incredibly long celebration of how awesome were the founding fathers and the whole revolutionary period. While the rest of the world is invariably lazy and sleazy.

Maybe Americans will find it nice, but for me one sided rhetoric never works.

I never got the impression that I was watching real people, they were all like cardboard figures from a bad history book.

The last episode then is the Piece De Resistance. Instead of closing with the end of John Adams political career, which is the part of his life that we actually want to see, they give us one hour of John Adams getting older and older while the world continues without him. We see him writing letters, toiling the fields and be generally insufferable.

I really don’t understand what is this fixation with showing the later days of important people in these biopics. Everybody grows old, it’s not that big of a discovery. You don’t stay on top forever and there isn’t any special insight in watching somebody getting older and older till they die. It’s just depressing.

Conclusion: Really terrible.

Cinema review: Avengers Assemble

Earth’s Mightiest heroes.

The third highest gross of all time, more than a billion and a half in box office, it’s difficult to argue with such numbers, and I won’t even try, this movie deserved such a rich financial windfall. There’s an interesting argument on how some movies not only break out of the relatively small circles of genre fans, whatever the genre may be, but also to break out of the movie goers circle unto the general public conscience. I, being a comic book guy, started getting enquiries about this movie from extremely unsuspected parties, coworkers and the like that you’ll never imagine watching a comic book movie.

General considerations aside this movie is really that brilliant and virtually flawless.

Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and comic book fan, is largely responsible for it as the writer/director of the movie. First of all he perfectly understood what makes the Avengers, as a concept, work.

Broadly speaking the Avengers is the all star team of the Marvel superhero universe, the best of the best. The tricky part is that all these characters are normally the stars of their own shows so they must all shine individually, you can’t have a single superstar and all the rest filler, it just doesn’t work this way. Whedon manages this perfectly, every hero gets his chance to shine, repeatedly, over the whole movie. They are all concisely and perfectly characterized.

Then comes step two. The interaction. Sparkles should fly, there are all stars here so they can’t operate like a perfectly oiled team. The old comic book crossover tradition dictates that every time two superheroes meet they should start fighting over some kind of silly miserunderstanding. This of course stems from the age old question “Who’s stronger between xxxxx and xxxxx?” but in the end it highlights that this isn’t a stroll in the park, this is a super group.

Also on this Whedon get everything perfectly right. The infighting between the superheroes is so cool that you almost wish for the bad guys to stay home so that you can have more of that.

The casting is of course very good. Marvel made a lot of smart choices while casting his various heroes and we already knew that from the other movies. It’s kinda pointless the reiterate again how awesome Robert Downey Junior is as Tony Stark so let’s move on to the new guys.

Scarlett Johansson gets something more to do as the black widow, she gets some of the best bits of the action and it’s really good at it. Jeremy Renner got something of a short stick with Hawkeye, the part is not really that developed and I still have to see a convincing modern take on the super archer. None the less he is still enjoyable.

The show stealer is Mark Ruffalo as Hulk. The precedent iterations of the character all got their roots in the terribly depressing 80s movie serial and so they were all more or less exercises in unhappiness followed by some hulk smash.

Whedon and Ruffalo brought the fun back in the Hulk, it’s that simple.

Wait it’s not really that simple, there’s another ingredient. The hulk, by his very nature, as a character, works much better in a team. It’s like the penguins in Madagascar, amazing as part of an ensemble but imagine two hours straight of them.

The climatic ending battle is a relative let down. After so much build up you expect at least the destruction of a pair of cities but, in my opinion, even on this they made the smarter choice. A bigger ending, with a more menacing enemy, would have stolen the spotlight from the Avengers, and this is their movie. We can wait for something bigger for the inevitable sequel, in 3 years time.

Conclusion: A masterpiece. You haven’t seen yet? What you’re waiting for? Got and get it!

Anime review: Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge

The creatures of the night go along fighting each other.

Maybe some things should never be translated from one media to the other. Darkstalkers originally is a video game, a beat’em up alas a classic 2d fighting game where you control one character of your choice out of a selection of monster like creatures and try to defeat all the others.

In its time it was an innovative, if fairly obscure, franchise. It featured a gothic world unlike every other fighting game with colorful graphics and imaginative designs. I remember playing it at the time and it was really something good.

So how the conversion to a 4 part original animation could fail? It looks like it could fail really easily; you just need to port everything as it is from one media to the other.

A lot of videogames special moves look a little bit ridicule in their own home medium, imagine translating them to another. We don’t want to see the legs of one of the fighters transform randomly in a drill, we really don’t.  To adapt you need to betray.

Then there is the story which somehow is even worse than the native terrible fighting game stuff, I don’t know how it is possible either but they made it. It’s meandering, boring, magniloquent and stupid all at the same time.

Conclusion: Truly terrible.

DVD review: Conan the barbarian

Conan wants to avenge the massacre of his home village.

I really don’t understand it.

After languishing in development hell for two decades finally they manage to do another Conan movie but instead of using any of the original stories of Robert Howard or one of the acclaimed comic book ones by Roy Thomas they wrote a new one. And it’s so terrible.

This was so obvious that they felt the need to justify themselves. Apparently They like Howard stories but they won’t do because, and I quote, “They don’t have a proper three act structure”. This is stupid beyond belief.

So we got a proper Hollywood story. To make it proper they even start with Conan as a young boy. The whole first part of the movie is little Conan doing stuff and interacting with his dad, big Conan. Was there somebody clamoring for it? A soul so hopelessly confused that without seeing the origin story it wouldn’t understand what Conan is about?

Look, I can at least understand why they out origin stories with superheroes, even if I don’t agree with it some of those are complicated and their superpowers can be convoluted, but Conan! It’s very hard to get simpler than Conan. He is the archetypal barbarian, he goes around in fur underwear, with his chest exposed, slashing stuff with his sword and looking for riches. That’s it, there’s nothing else to know.

The movie looks and feels like one of those cheap fantasy movies from the early 80, you know “Hawk the slayer” and its ilk, just devoid of any sense of fun. They somehow spent 90 million dollars and got something that looks so cheap, enemies so unmenacing, monsters so undeveloped, maybe they spent it all in publicity…

At least Jason Momoa as the titular Conan looks the part. I know that he is a far cry from Arnie but Arnie never came back and now he is too old to play Conan, even if he could be a wonderful Conan dad. Jason Momoa may looks odd but looks and moves like a barbarian, we have to admit it. Actor wise is plain to see that he tries his best to sell the terrible lines that they feed him. He fails miserably but it’s not his fault, you need a very experienced and talented actor to elevate this kind of material.

Ron Perlman plays Conan dad and just manages to emerge unscathed, maybe his long experience in B movies gave his the right kind of delivery.

Rose McGowan, who almost played Red Sonja in an aborted project by Robert Rodriguez, finally gets to scratch her Hyborian hitch as one of the main villain. She gives a lot to the role but, again, the material simply isn’t there. She is not aided by some too bizarre prosthetics that seems to enhance her real life abuse of botox.

Conclusion: Stay clear of this movie, mostly if you are a Conan fan.

Cinema review: Wrath of the titans

Perseus in more mythological action.

This is the sequel to 2010 “Clash of the titans” which is the remake of the 1981 movie by the same name. The first movie was really terrible, in the filmmakers’ intention a darker, edgier version of the 1981. Symptomatic of their attitude a shoot out to the first movie with a cameo of Bubo the mechanical owl ended with “just leave it” and Bubo being thrown in the trash. Everybody loathed it but a hasty and atrocious 3D conversion job let them catch the first wind of the new 3D trend and so they made a lot of money.

Cue obligatory sequel.

The slightly different team, they changed director and screenwriters, has clearly been listening so here we get a little bit more respect for the original. The now obligatory cameo of Bubo is not an object of ridicule, even if it still not doing a lot, maybe next time. Perseus now got long hairs instead of the marine style buzz cut and he is a less annoying character.

I’m not saying that he is some kind of Hamlet, just that he is not insufferable and that he is now a good vehicle through which we can follow the action.

The overall plot is, I don’t know how it’s possible, even less coherent than the first one. I’m not being nerdy here; if you look at it for more than two seconds you’ll realize that it just makes no sense at all.

There are some vaguely defined character arcs but they are nothing more than hatchet jobs with the next step clearly signaled at least 20 minutes in advance.

But a movie like this doesn’t really need a plot right? It lives and dies on the set pieces and the special effects.

Here we kinda realize why the plot is so bonker. The movie has been clearly developed around the set pieces with the plot just as an excuse to move the characters from point A to point B.

Those set pieces, I have to admit, are better than the first one. Well constructed and fairly original, they clearly spent a lot of money on them. Still nothing groundbreaking, the action doesn’t flow nicely, they are all somewhat gimmick related, which is not a bad way to construct a set piece because they all look and feel different but you need to go over the gimmick if you want to create something great.

The CGI is certainly not aided by yet another 3D post conversion job, did they learn something the first time? Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, the director is Jonathan Lieberman, infamous for the terrible “Battle Los Angeles” the first movie in years that was so boring that I didn’t manage to finish it.

Sam Worthington is still good at being his gruff muscular on screen persona but he is certainly not aided when he is sharing screen time, and kick ass moments, with the oldies squad of Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes who bring more charisma in one of their big toe than Worthington and all the others in the whole movie.

Conclusion: Better than the first one but it wasn’t really that hard. An easily skippable movie.

DVD review: The social network

The creation of Facebook.

This movie inexplicably tops a lot of those infamous best movie listings for last year. It’s certainly well made, from David Fincher we expect nothing less, and fairly well written as far as dialogues go.

It’s just so very inconsistent.

Mark Zuckerberg, played very well by Jesse Eisenberg, is portrayed as some kind of stereotypical super nerd. I imagine that for a lot of people who had only access to IT geekdom trough movies or maybe trough the t shirt wearing guy who comes to fix their computer this was like a “secret look” into the realities of that world. An exciting insight into how they really behave and what they think.

Now I don’t want to say that I’m some kind of nerd expert, how could you get such a title by the way, but I’m a geek enough to know that most of the stuff that goes there is just fiction. Fiction that it’s not only badly researched, it’s inconsistent.

Zuckerberg in this movie is some kind of human robot hybrid, with just a rudimentary understanding of how human relationship work, that does a lot of bad stuff for no apparent reason. Or, if we have to point a reason, because he is a nerd and nerds behave badly with other people.

Having said that the movie is not really that bad. There is some interesting stuff about what is the meaning of creating something and to pros and cons of selling out. There are some interesting characters and all the actors do a very good job, most of all Eisenberg himself. It’s also very well shot, with a serrated editing that keeps the rhythm up for the whole movie.

Conclusion: An interesting drama that ultimately fails to address its subject matter but it’s still worth it trough the sheer force of its craft.

DVD review: Dragon Hunters

A group of dragon hunters goes against the biggest dragon of them all.

This movie is based on a French TV animated series. I never heard of that series before and didn’t watch a single episode of that, therefore I can testimony that it’s not really needed; you can easily enjoy this animated movie without any prior knowledge.

Plot wise this is kid stuff. I don’t mean it in a demeaning way, kid animation got its place, not everything can be as sophisticated as the Pixar’s stuff.

The story is simple and straightforward, the humor is broad and mainly physical but also quite effective. An adult watcher will not probably laugh out loud but will surely smile a lot. The ending, in particular the final boss of the whole movie, is interesting and deliver an “epic” quality that is often absent to more loaded productions.

What is impressive is the graphic. Instead of going for a straight conversion of those terrible TV graphics they amped everything up to 11 (Thank you spinal tap). It’s all really original and really good looking, a joy to the eyes.

Conclusion: If you are a die hard animation fan you’ll like it but for the normal movie goer this is too much kid fare.

Cinema review: The Pirates! In an adventure with Scientists

The title is really self explanatory.

This is another of those movies were everything is so very very good that I don’t know what to say.

This is stop motion animation. This means that they recreate every scene using puppets and to move them very slooowly, shooting one frame at a time. It’s an incredibly time consuming method but it gives result that are incredibly charming, more so in our modern age where CGI enhanced animations which all looks the same are churned regularly  everywhere.

To be honest they integrated the movie with some CGI enhanced backgrounds, mainly for the seas. But my point is not that CGI is bad, my point is that we use it too much and that, even when it’s used well, there is something in the hand crafted and hand drawn that it’s still unsurpassed and unreplicable.

 This is a product of Aardman Animations, famous for Wallace and Gromit, so if you saw something of their work you know what to expect.

For everybody else this is a crazy nonsensical adventure where the jokes meter is so high that it’s literally difficult to get it all with the first viewing. The backgrounds are full to the brim with awesome tiny details and hidden in jokes, all the while the main crew engage in double entendre and running gags like there’s no tomorrow.

There is no down moment, no stretching the plot because we don’t know what to do now but we need to get to an adequate running time while respecting the sacred three act structure moment. Yes there is that damn three act structure but you don’t care because it’s fun and it’s all done so well that it flows effortlessly from one situation to the next.

An unrecognizable Hugh Grant voices the pirate captain, aptly named pirate captain, you can’t get more “Nomen omen” than this. He really goes out of its box and actually suggested a lot of the gags that were later integrated in the movie.

Conclusion: A masterpiece, even if you don’t like animation you have to see this.

Cinema review: Mirror Mirror

Snow white and the seven dwarves, slightly remixed.

Being a spy in Hollywood must be so much fun. Finally we got to the first unconventional remix of Snow White that Hollywood gave us in the space of two months.

This is supposed to be the fun whimsical version so we got a lot of terrible gags and puns while the look is reminiscent of “The wizard of Oz”.

It’s fairly innocuous and entertaining stuff, nothing really bad. The problem is that every now and then we catch glimpses of the movie that could have been, and that one is so much better.

Case in point. The stated intention of the filmmakers was to somewhat convey the point of view of the evil queen, the director, Tarsem, even went on to say that she is not really evil, just insecure. This is all wonderful in theory but when she starts acting and moving like your usual movie villain it looks like somebody lost the memo or, puns aside, it looks like Hollywood can’t really put on screen a sympathetic antagonist.

This is really a shame because every now and then we see glimpses of this. There are some interesting monologues and, particularly at the beginning, we start to relate to her point of view, but then random villainess starts and we are back to Cruella De Vil.

On the other hand Julia Roberts is a splendid casting choice as the evil queen. She clearly has a lot of fun with the role and manages to connect it to that archetypical stepmother figure that is present in everybody’s life.

Speaking of the director Tarsem is a director with an extremely peculiar style. His other outings (The Cell, The Fall and Immortals) are all been panned by the critics for his visual histrionics. I can partially agree that its stuff while very pretty and extremely original is also too often disjointed and meandering here he sadly went into the opposite direction.

Every now and then we catch traces of the Tarsem of old, some incredible decoration, an absurd background, but on average he really reined himself too much. This is not a Tarsem movie anymore, this is standard genre fare with some touch of madness.

Special mention to the Mirror scenes. At least for one of the pivotal moments of any Snow White adaptations Tarsem gave himself free rein and created something stylistically unique.

Conclusion: A fun caper, in my opinion the best Snow White movie of that year or at least the more entertaining.

DVD review: Amelia

The life story of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart.

Amelia Earhart long held a fascination in many minds. I won’t spoil too much of her life to the uninitiated, suffice to say that apart from being a pioneer of aviation, a true aviatrix, she was an internationally renowned celebrity, highly influential person and that the mysterious circumstances of her death only contributed to her myth.

So, as a movie, how does it work? This is a surprisingly sedate affair. Probably we all imagine long distance flight as something eminently cinematic and awesome. Here is still awesome but in a more philosophical, introspective way. The director, the normally very talented Mira Nair, doesn’t manage to communicate to the viewer the skills and the endurance that were needed for those long distance flights.

It all still looks very pretty, the period features are all there and we can still feel the joy when every flight is completed, it just doesn’t feel like something special.

Alas the various flights occupy only a tiny portion of the movie. Most of it is Amelia life story. Now maybe if you are ah hardcore feminist you’ll find it wonderful but for the rest of us it’s really somewhat dull.

Practically the whole movie is Amelia as the proto feminist who goes and does things that a girl is not supposed to do while making rousing speeches about it. We are completely missing any sense of engagement, any peril and any sense of the story moving forward.

An inordinate amount of space is devoted to Amelia love life. I say inordinate because it’s all left so vague. There were many rumors about it at the time but instead of choosing a particular version and sticking to it they leave it all on the table. Every now and then the character mutter something cryptic, or glance at each other, but nothing is shown. It’s the cinematic equivalent of gossiping. We see but there is nothing there.

Hilary Swank gives a mimetic performance as Amelia. She looks like her, talks like her and moves like her. It’s very impressive. She is good at it that this becomes somewhat a detriment for the movie. Amelia herself is not a rousing character by modern standard and so what is gained in authenticity is lost cinematically.

Conclusion: Pretty flights and impressive performances can’t elevate a boring moving that follow too closely its subject matter. To make a good adaptation you should always betray to original.

DVD review: The Runaways

The rise and fall of 70s seminal all girl rock band, The Runaways.

A musical biopic about a subject that is fairly obscure. I think I’m knowledgeable about rock music and I never heard of The Runaways before this movie.

Of course I don’t want to imply that they aren’t important. Joan Jett, the bassist, went to do a lot of very famous stuff and represent the original prototype of the rock girl. Also Lita Ford, the guitarist, had a long somewhat less successful career after the band. The band itself didn’t enjoy a lot of success at the time, a part from Japan, but they were probably the first all girl rock group and so paved the way for many successful performers.

Anyway a biopic on unknown it’s not a problem per se. It just means that you have to sell the movie mainly on its strengths.

The direction and overall feeling of the movie is very good. The director is Floria Sigismondi, first time movie director but with a 20 years career in music video clips where she displayed a range and a visual flare that set her apart from the usual MTV friendly stuff.

The 70s atmosphere is nicely recreated, the period setting is pitch perfect with a clear focus on the punk music scene.

The plot, on the other hand, is so very predictable. First they are unknown, then the big break but with fame we get drugs and booze. It’s the basic blueprint of every musical biopic. I sometimes wish we could get a movie about a clear cut musician, one that remains a family man, they are bound to exist somewhere!

Dakota Fanning is the notional center of the movie as Cherie Currie, the underage lead singer. Kristen Stewart, in a very improbable wig, plays Joan Jett, a more grounded and interesting role. Both deliver their lines with conviction and do a fine job.

Conclusion: Even if it’s missing the spark that could elevate it to the next level this is a musical biopic that can engage also non musical people.

Book review: The Night's Dawn trilogy

In a very far and advanced future the spirits of the dead find a way to come back and possess the living.

This saga has been heralded by many as a masterpiece worth of a place alongside the seminal scifi works of such luminaries as Clarke or Banks. Personally I think that even admitting that these books have a lot of interesting concepts as a whole this is far too long.

We are talking about approximately 4000 divided in three doorstopper books. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to write good books with this length, George Martin does it routinely, but it’s a very hard thing to do and in this case you could have easily excised more than half from each book without losing anything important.

Stuff takes literally forever to happen. We aren’t even introduced to the main menace at the beginning; we have to wait a full third of the book before it happens. The saga is filled to the brim with a plethora of secondary characters, most of them missing real motivations or interesting personalities.

Entire plot lines of questionable interest go around forever before being abruptly dropped.

There are some interesting concepts, like Edenism or the voidhawks, and here we get to another problem. Hamilton introduces everything in medias res, this can be ok for normal narrative but here we are talking about the hardest of hard scifi, very complicated stuff that requires at least a couple of pages of explanations to wrap our head around. Instead we are presented to these things as they happen and we have to slog through pages and pages of incomprehensible jargon with only a vague idea of what’s happening and why.

Having said that I must also admit that the world created by Hamilton is extremely original. A lot of interesting stuff is hidden behind those walls of text and if you manage to get there it is certainly a very interesting place.

The core concept of the novel is the clash between this advanced future, with all his hard scifi stuff, and the forces of the undead. This makes these novels very peculiar. Alongside all the technical jargon a lot of extremely graphic and violent stuff happens. Suffice to say that there is Satanism in the future, a lot of Satanism and so, if you are somewhat weaker in the stomach, I suggest you go back to more ordinate places.

The ending, without spoiling it, doesn’t work at all and doesn’t manage to resolve properly the main plot thread. The overall impression is that Hamilton overreached himself.

Conclusion: A grandiose but in the end mediocre saga. Not really worth the immense effort to digest it.

DVD review: Me and Orson Wells

A teenager works with Orson Wells.

That’s a strange beast of a movie. Certainly interesting but in end vaguely unsatisfactory.

This is supposed to be one of those “coming of age” stories. Our “hero” doesn’t know what to do with his life but then get this incredible occasion, to work with Orson Wells, and so he becomes a man.

Here is the main problem. He becomes a man by being a moron and an all round stupid person. This, in Hollywood jargon, becomes building character but for all the people who would have killed to get a chance like the one he had its all very annoying.

He doesn’t really have a proper character arc. He goes around, he watches all the theater stuff going on, he likes the girls. The fact that he is played by the one and only Zac Efron doesn’t help. It’s not like he does a bad job, just that you need more than a pretty face to elevate the material.

Luckily for the movie Orson Wells fanatic in his first movie appearance Christian McKay is perfect as the great director. He does more than good acting, he brings Wells to life.

The period setting, the theatre setting in particular, is fascinating. Watching the making of the play, a very famous and influential one is extremely interesting. It all shows, in perfect details, how would it be to work alongside a person who can be at the same time incredibly brilliant but also terribly egocentric as Wells was.

Conclusion: A doughnut shaped movie with an hollow core but very rich stuff all over the place. 

DVD review: Catfish

A purported documentary about an online romance.

Smartly the creators of this independent movie realized that a mediocre story becomes something else, something significant, if they pretend that it all happened for real. Therefore they pretended that this fairly obvious online romance with hidden surprises it’s the real deal.

It’s fairly baffling how, to this day, there are people arguing online that it all somehow really happened. I won’t go into the details because of my No spoilers policy, suffice to say that if it all happened for real these filmmakers are the luckiest filmmakers ever. It all happened in front of the cameras, they got the juiciest story about online dating just by randomly picking some guy.

The movie itself is kinda boring. It takes forever to get somewhere and all the “revelations” are just the usual stuff that every sane person would think about online relationships.

The characters are also uninteresting and mildly annoying. I know that this is in theory a documentary but, as “The king of Kong” demonstrated, when you do a doc about real people they better be interesting persons to watch.

Conclusion: It’s a nice conversation starter but as a movie is really mediocre.

DVD review: Drunken Master

A young reckless fighter becomes the drunken master.

Jackie Chan has been there for such a long time that we tend to forget his beginnings and how much, of the stuff that he does, he practically created himself.

“Drunken master” is a 1978 movie and for many of us who knows Jackie Chan only from the stuff he made after his break trough in the west it’ll come as a huge surprise.

First of all young Jackie Chan is insanely ripped and incredibly athletic. The stuns from a random five minutes of this movie could be the centerpiece of any modern action feature. It’s really incredible how he causally does awesome stuff.

This movie is also somewhat more accessible than the rest of his Honk Kong production. The humor is all based on physicality so there is no language and cultural barrier. Speaking of the humor the movie is absolutely hilarious, it popularized the concept of the martial arts comedy, another Jackie Chan invention by the way, and it never misses a beat.

The fight and all the stuns are incredible. Most of them have never been surpassed and probably, in this age of increasing reliance on CGI, never will be.

Conclusion: Maybe it is a little bit too martial arts for somebody but if you got at least a funny bone in your body or enjoy some insane stuns this movie is the masterpiece you’ve been waiting for.

DVD review: fanboys

A group of Star Wars fans want to break into George Lucas ranch to see “The phantom menace” before everybody else.

This is the kind of movie that is very politically incorrect to criticize. Basically a celebration of all things Nerdish this movie starts those stereotypical basement dweller fan boys who tend to infest every corner of the internet. Their quest is probably the ultimate fan boy quest, to see an hyped product before everybody else. Of course we could question if that product, be it a new Star Wars movie or something else, somehow will become less cool if watched after a couple of week and that maybe, just maybe, it’s not really worth it to spend a night on the sidewalk waiting for the latest I gizmo but this simple questions are never addressed in the movie.

This is a movie by fans, for fans about fans. And this is of course is a big problem if you are not the kind of person who, if asked, wouldn’t hesitate to break into George Lucas ranch.

The humor doesn’t lift it up either. It’s all stuff for initiates or stereotypical road trip adventures that looks and feels like the kind of stuff that some comic convention goers could invent to impress another fan while waiting in line for an autograph.

It’s really a shame because I was ready to  like this one but, in all honesty, this movie is so self addressed that they completely lost me, and I am a part of that world so I can’t imagine what it would be for somebody external.

Conclusion: The Nerdish equivalent of “Sex and the city”, just with less hot chicks. Only for the ultimate fan.

DVD review: Frozen

Three skiers are stuck on a ski lift.

A new arrival in the peculiar horror subgenre of “We are stuck” this is basically “Open water” on the show.

The premise may sound incredible, and the writer director Adam Green certainly went to great length to establish that they are really really unlucky, but it actually happened and if you think about it, it can certainly be a mortal situation.

The problem is that the three protagonists aren’t very interesting types. This is very bad because when we are stuck in the same place with the camera on three talking heads you need some very interesting talk to keep a decent level of interest.

Another problem is that there are not a lot of ways to develop this situation. You need a genius like Danny Boyle to get a good movie out of something like this. Instead we are stuck in much less competent hands that start piling improbable stuff to stretch the idea a little bit further.

The movie is not that bad, for example it can be a great conversation opener… “What would you do if you got stuck on a ski lift?” is a fun game, it’s just too limited. If they were still making shorts this would be a perfect short movie.

Not really recommended to anyone, but decent enough to make some time go by.

Anime review: Gunbuster

Giant robots against space monsters!

Gainax is rightly famous for their very original approach to animation. For good and for worse they never leave a boring impression and their output is always stylistically impressive.

This is not to say that they produce only masterpieces, quite the opposite indeed, Gainax are infamous in the non fanatic side of the anime fandom for having invented the lost style incredibly interesting plot that literally goes nowhere more than a decade before lost.

So I approached Gunbuster with some trepidation, will I get awesome Gainax or absurd Gainax?

In the end we got a little bit of both.

The main story, a fearsome struggle against ever increasing odds where humanity is obliged to continually up the ante just to survive is really engaging and interesting.

This is intersected with the personal story of two young female giant robots pilots which is literally modeled onto another famous anime of the 70s. They even admitted it in the title, the Japanese Toppu o Nerae is clear reference to Ace o Nerae, Jenny the tennis player for the uninitiated. (If a serious anime fan wanders into this little blog I want to preventively apologize for any spelling error).

The obvious point is that this blatant implant of the whole human plot from another anime, in another genre, doesn0t really work and, as it often happens with Gainax, has his reason d’être mainly for the hardcore anime fans who can recognize it.

Visually is a little bit dated, is a series from 1988, one of the first efforts of Gainax and the debut of director Hideaki Anno of Evangelion fame. Probably, as a fairly hardcore scifi fan, the part that I find more interesting is the realistic treatment of how a war in space would really work.

This is not the masterpiece claimed by many but the struggle against the space monsters is interesting and original. Considering that it’s only six half hour episodes long it’s certainly worth a look.

DVD review: 127 hours

An hiker is trapped by a falling boulder in a narrow canyon.

Based on an incredible true story that you probably heard about, if you didn’t I won’t spoil it for you, suffice to say that this is a great story of human survival and that it all really happened.

What I have to spoil is that 90% of the movie takes place under that boulder. I know that the prospect sounds incredibly dull and I strongly suspect that the difficult of making a proper movie out of it was what prompted director Danny Boyle to create, write and direct this movie, but I assure you that Boyle couldn’t make a boring movie even if he tried.

Movie fans will get a particular pleasure watching it. Boyle displays an array of new interesting shoots that is noteworthy even for him. Suffice to say that, even for the studio filmed part, he didn’t put any removable part in the setting because he wanted to submit the camera to the same tribulations that Aaron Ralston, our protagonist, had to go through. Then we get to the extended shoot on location, in an incredibly forlorn place that can be reached only by foot and only if you are really a prepared hiker, or canyoneer as Wikipedia informs us.

But this is not just a movie for movie fans. The whole ordeal that happens to Ralston is extremely gripping, beautifully shoot, never ever boring. We follow Ralston various attempts to set himself free and, through the smart use of many artistic devices we also follow his mental and emotive state. This is a movie that will leave you drained in the end.

Of course we now that James Franco is more than a pretty face but with this movie he can certainly lay claim to the status of master in his craft. His performance is simply massive and he literally carries the whole movie on his own shoulders.

A masterpiece, recommended to fans of good stories.

Cinema review: John Carter

The adventures of John Carter on Mars.

The biggest box office failure of the year, and with such a beautiful movie. Then of course it can be relative considering that it grossed 282 million at  the theatres, so without counting eventual DVD sales, but considering that it cost around 300 and that they somehow managed to spend an incredible 100 millions in an advertising campaign that I didn’t see you can kinda get why it failed.

It’s still a shame because it’s been a long time since I had such unadulterated fun and sense of wonder in a movie. It really reminds me of Star Wars, and that could be the other problem.

See, while practically everybody who saw the movie likes it (There is research data about this somewhere on the internet), many didn’t go to see it because they perceived it as unoriginal. This is the most wrong accusation that you could possibly level on this movie.

The original stories of John Carter of Mars, written by Edgar Rice Burroughs known as the creator of Tarzan, are 95 years old and literally are the originator of many tropes in modern scifi cinema. Even accounting for the fact that some people don’t care about who came first there is the other important point. Star Wars style stuff maybe cliché but it’s been so many years since we had a good movie in that style, it’s not like we have a nice exotic romp every single month!

Having said that onto the movie itself, the plot is on the complicated side, with a lot of stuff happening, crossing and double crossing. Many parts, mainly at the beginning, could be tighter. Luckily the plot is not really that important, it’s just an excuse to go to exotic place and do awesome battles and in this the movie really excel.

Dejah Thoris, played by the beautiful, I can’t believe she doesn’t get more roles, Lynn Collins, not only is the archetype of the exotic princess, she is also much superior to the usual female heroine that we are getting nowadays. She is a fighter and a thinker, the lead scientist of her city, and display more personality than even the protagonist.

John Carter maybe is the only weak point of the movie. Not the interpretation by Taylor Kitsch but how it is written. He is so illogical and roundabout that many times I wanted to shake him, physically.

The CGI is excellent and the battles are very fun and creative. Indeed visually the whole movie is a joy to watch.

A scifi masterpiece unjustly relegated to box office failure, recommended to everybody, now is your chance to make things right so let’s go and rent it out!