David Hughes

Mercenaries (Empire film review)

2012-01-30T08:10:00.000-08:00

If you and your mates rented a camera and the contents of an army surplus store, you could hardly fail to improvise a better grunts-with-guns flick than this humdrum effort, which has escaped its direct-to-petrol-station destiny, presumably thanks to the dazzling combined star power of chirpy Cockney Vas Blackwood and Titanic villain Billy Zane (sporting one of Bruce Willis’s discarded hair pieces). It’s not so much The Expendables as The Unemployables. After a military coup in Bosnia – hardly a location ripped from today’s headlines – the President sends in a squad of soldiers of fortune, armed with digital explosions and dangerous accents, to rescue the US ambassador and his aide. The combat scenes are authentic, but for all the shooting, swearing and scowling, it’s a pretty dull, bloodless and inconsequential affair. ★★

Cowboys and Aliens (DVD/Blu-ray Review)

2012-01-04T02:18:00.000-08:00

In 1997, long before the twitter meme where people replace one word in a movie title for comedy effect, comic book publisher Scott Mitchell Rosenberg came up with a funny title. Rather than turning the title into a comic book, to see if the idea had legs, Rosenberg sold the concept to Universal and DreamWorks, who (with Men in Black cleaning up in cinemas) saw its potential as a sci-fi-comedy-western. When sci-fi comedy-western Wild Wild West tanked at the box office, the studios swiftly put it back in a drawer, where it would have stayed, if only Jon Favreau hadn’t decided to cash in his golden ticket – that time in your life when you’ve directed two hits and you get to make Anything You Damn Well Please – to actually make it. (Did nobody tell him Spielberg followed Jaws and Close Encounters with 1941?) Sure, it looked good on paper: “What if we put Indiana Jones, James Bond and that hot tamale from Tron Legacy in a movie, get the Star Trek reboot guys to write it, the Iron Man guy to direct it and Steven Spielberg to produce it?” But when even the head of the studio describes one of his own films as “mediocre” “crappy” and “not good enough,” as Universal chief Ron Meyer did recently, you know you’ve made a turkey.

Yet Cowboys & Aliens isn’t a total loss. The initial set-up, in which amnesiac outlaw Jake Lonergan (Craig, scowling for England), wanted for crimes he doesn’t remember committing, strays into the path of a curmudgeonly cattleman (Ford), proves so promising, it’s almost a shame when the aliens show up. For a movie with such a toy-friendly title, it’s also refreshingly edgy, with an unflinching violence that’s a far cry from the Marvel movies. Much of the $163 million budget must have gone on salaries, however, as the film lacks the spectacle of a bona fide blockbuster, and even after ten years in development, the script feels unfinished. A missed opportunity, assuming it was ever an opportunity at all.

EXTRAS: The DVD offers Favreau’s commentary and two featurettes, Finding the Story (possible subtitle: Still Looking) and a location report from the massive New Mexico shoot, which the Blu-rays expand into a full five-part ‘making of’. They also collect Favreau’s superb series of online interviews with Craig, Ford, Wilde, Spielberg, Grazer, Howard and three of the umpteen screenwriters.

The Best Films of 2011

2012-01-02T09:56:00.000-08:00

Every year we all make a ‘Top Films’ list
Though dozens of worthy titles get missed
But lists are so boring, so I thought it was time
To make a ‘Year’s Best’ list entirely in rhyme

The year started poorly with Crowe’s Next Three Days
Though five in a cave with James Franco won praise
The King’s Speech was like a TV film done well
But worthy of Oscar’s Best Picture? Like hell!

Blue Valentine’s portrait of marriage was painful
Seth Rogen in Gondry’s Green Hornet? Disdainful
While Gasland taught us why ‘fracking’ is wrong
Natalie Portman excelled in Black Swan

She won the Best Actress Academy Award
But where was director Aronofsky’s reward?
Christian Bale proved he had real acting muscle
Best Actor in The Fighter by David O Russell

A new Brighton Rock? In the sixties? Don’t panic!
It beats The Stath’s remake of Bronson’s Mechanic
You thought Rabbit Hole was depressing? Quite so
Until you compared it to Never Let Me Go

The Coens’ True Grit helped to lighten the mood
Mostly thanks to Jeff Bridges, the original Dude
Speaking of dudes, Paul pretty much sucked
While Inside Job explained why our pensions are fucked

Australia’s Animal Kingdom was tough
Waste Land showed diamonds are found in the rough
Rango, CG animation goes West
Julie Taymor’s take on The Tempest impressed

Submarine surfaced, a worthy debut
(I also liked Limitless and Winnie the Pooh)
Meek’s Cutoff, a hardscrabble tale from the past
Diesel and Rock were both furious and fast

Closer to the Edge showed the thrills of TT
Pina made stunning new use of 3D
The Arthur remake was predictably lame
Pirates and Scream 4 were more of the same

Hanna kicked ass, and Thor was okay
But where are the comedies? It’s already May
Hangover II was just painful, unfunny
(Didn’t stop it making a shitload of money)

Thank goodness for Thor and X-Men: First Class
And the new Kung Fu Panda, with Po kicking ass
Hall Pass and Bad Teacher, is funny that hard?
Two make it look easy: Bridesmaids and The Guard

July and three decent films all start with T
Trust, Tree of Life and – yes – Transformers 3
Harry Potter’s adventures were finally done
And Cars 2 was, well, not as good as Cars 1

Speaking of cars, Senna was a sensation
Arrietty was cute with its cel animation
Countdown to Zero, now that film was scary
Perhaps they could nuke Mr Popper (Jim Carrey)?

Captain America had Marvel-ous japes
But had its ass kicked by the rise of the apes
Glee gave Beliebers a run for their money
But Horrible Bosses? It just wasn’t funny

Super 8 was okay, Project Nim fascinated
Cowboys and Aliens was deservedly hated
The Skin I Live In, how's Almodovar do it?
And Kill List: so creepy, I barely got through it

Troll Hunter wasn’t as good as its trailer
The cast was superb in the new Tinker Tailor
The Cold War was hard on the old MI5
But not as cool as Ryan Gosling in Drive

Melancholia, the end of the world was depressing
Perhaps von Trier was having us on (I’m just guessing)
Paranormal Activity 3 made us jump
Midnight in Paris broke Woody Allen’s slump

We Need to Talk About Kevin: essential
The Ides of March made Clooney look presidential
The Silence was better than TV’s The Killing
And Tintin’s adventures were certainly thrilling

After five years, Margaret finally appeared
Another Earth proved satisfyingly weird
There were second hand thrills in Sherlock Holmes 2
And Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Then Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Was arguably the most explosive of all
So how do you trade a new year for an old ‘un?
By watching The Artist. ‘Cause silence is golden.

So my 2011 Top Ten? Impossible: it has to be Twenty.

1. The Skin I Live In
2. Melancholia
3. The Artist
4. Drive
5. The Tree of Life
6. We Need to Talk About Kevin
7. Kill List
8. Senna
9. Blue Valentine
10. The Fighter
11. The Guard
12. Margaret
13. Animal Kingdom
14. Never Let Me Go
15. Black Swan
16. 127 Hours
17. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
18. True Grit
19. Rabbit Hole
20. The King's Speech

Puss in Boots "stinks like old shoes"

2011-11-14T08:44:00.000-08:00

Spin-offs are a tricky affair: for every Frasier, Mork and Mindy or Lou Grant there are a dozen efforts like Joey, Joanie Loves Chachie and W*A*L*T*E*R, an ill-fated pilot starring Gary Burghof as Walter ‘Radar’ O’Reilly from hit show M*A*S*H. Besides, if you asked any Shrek fan which character they’d most want to see in their own movie, they’d probably say wise-cracking, waffle-making Donkey, voiced by Eddie Murphy. After all, he’s funny, deluded, and wound up marrying a dragon, with whom he fathered a brood of flying, flame-breathing miniature donkeys. What’s not to love? Instead, DreamWorks Animation has opted for swashbuckling feline Puss in Boots (Anotnio Banderas), who first appeared as an ‘ogre assassin’ in Shrek 2 (as a ploy to increase the franchise’s Latin American fan base), before settling in to the sequels as Donkey’s rival for the role of “annoying talking animal,” and Shrek’s best friend.

Given that Puss’s principle characteristics are a Latino accent, Zorro-style swordplay, disarmingly dilated pupils and, uh, boots, the writers had their work cut out for them, having to invent a character from whole cloth. It’s a task that wouldn’t be a problem for, say, Rango writer John Logan, but proves beyond the capabilities of the four credited screenwriters tasked with turning a direct-to-video spin-off (its original inception, after Puss’s success as a Shrek 2 supporting act) into a potential blockbuster, and perhaps even a stand-alone franchise freshener. Between the four of them, they can’t even come up with a decent backstory for the boots. Worse still, the director whose risible threequel almost wrecked Shrek’s happy ever after, has been put in charge, demonstrating the general level of dunderheadedness from which the whole enterprise suffers.

Plot-wise, things begin predictably enough, as Puss, wanted by the authorities for a crime he was tricked into committing, sets out to clear his name. After a largely pointless chase – similarly staged to one in Kung Fu Panda 2, but lacking the wit, exuberance or 3D-savvy of that film’s set-pieces – we are introduced to two new characters, neither of whom have the means to make up for Puss’s inadequacies as a foreground figure. The first is Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek, lazily cast), so-called because she is an exceptionally light-fingered thief. The second, more resistible newcomer is Humpty Alexander Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis), a character from Puss’s past whose appearance prompts a twenty-minute flashback covering not only Puss’s backstory (the usual parent-free claptrap about being orphaned and left on a doorstep), but also his and Humpty’s early misadventures, which destroys any narrative momentum before it has had a chance to develop.

The film never recovers. By the time the plot kicks in, around the thirty-minute mark, Puss in Boots already feels like it’s struggling to pad itself out to feature length. Ignoring the origin story set forth in Charles Perrault’s original tale (“Le Maistre Chat, ou Le Chat Botté”, first published in 1697), the screenwriters plump for a laboured, unconvincing reworking of the Jack and the Beanstalk story, with Jack (Billy Bob Thornton) re-imagined as an overweight brute and merged with folklore’s other Jack, he of falling-down-and-breaking-his-crown fame. To be fair, the Shrek films aren’t renowned for the intricacies of their plotting, but even by the standards of its antecedents, Puss’s storyline is pretty threadbare.

Of course, that’s not to suggest that Puss in Boots is made for the same audience who enjoyed Banderas’ other 2011 star turn, in Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In – obviously it’s for ankle-biters, who turned out in droves Stateside just to the little kitty kat doff his hat and do the puppy-dog eye routine, and pause dramatically between the word ‘Puss’ and ‘in Boots.’ But even the little ones might expect a few decent jokes along the way, rather than the direct-to-DVD-level humour on display here. As the plot drags on, the one or two half-decent gags near the start – mostly cat-related comedy, like having Puss distracted, mid-fight, by a darting light – begin to look like flukes, and the humour and charm are gone long before the credits roll.

After the powerful one-two punch of How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss in Boots represents a qualitative step backwards for DreamWorks Animation. The studio may have struck box office gold with this cut-rate Shrek spin-off, but, creatively speaking, it’s laid an egg.

Will (Empire review)

2011-10-01T09:22:00.000-07:00

The spirit of the Children’s Television Workshop is alive, but not necessarily well, in this well-meaning but bungled tale of an 11-year-old Liverpool fan (Perry Eggleton, in an impressive debut) who runs away from his orphanage home and sets off across Europe to see his beloved team play in the 2005 Champions League final in Istanbul. Hoskins and Lewis are on the ball – and watch out for former ‘sinner from Pinner’ Jane March in a two-line cameo as a nun. But an undercooked script and uncertain direction, two own goals from first-timer Perry, turn a promising wish-fulfilment fantasy into a tragically squandered opportunity – like watching England’s club-footed efforts at the last World Cup. A third act sidetrack to Bosnia, in which a kid gets blown up by a landmine – you know, for kids! – adds to the distinctly oddball proceedings. By the final whistle, what might have been a wish fulfilment fantasy for pint-sized football fans looks like an England performance on penalties: painful to watch, and an embarrassment for all concerned.

Everything Must Go (Empire review)

2011-10-01T09:19:00.000-07:00

Fired from his sales job after falling off the wagon and allegedly sleeping with a colleague, Nick Porter (Ferrell) returns home to find his wife gone, the locks changed, and all his belongings in the front yard. With everything on the line – or, more accurately, on the lawn – where does Nick go from here?
“There was more to it, and she was trying to get it all talked out,” runs the penultimate line of Raymond Carver’s four-page short story “Why Don’t You Dance.” First time writer-director Dan Rush evidently felt there was, indeed, more to it, taking the Short Cuts author’s story fragment as the jumping-off point for a very timely tale of a man coming to terms with his own fuckups, and deciding what – if anything – to do about it. It’s the ‘if anything’ part that makes Everything Must Go intriguing and frustrating in equal measure.
In expanding the Rizla-thin story, Rush adds three new characters: a local kid (Christopher Jordan Wallace, Notorious B.I.G.’s son) seemingly modelled on Bad Santa’s Brett Kelly, a pregnant neighbour (Hall, insightful as ever), and a concerned cop buddy (an atypically uncertain turn from Peña), unsure whether to assist Nick or arrest him. One could also argue that he introduces a fourth: Nick himself (Ferrell), whose barely-there presence in the source story becomes a fully-rounded, flesh and blood character with all too many demonstrable human frailties.
Comedians often make good straight actors: they can memorise lines, are familiar with creating characters, and have excellent timing – all prerequisites for the business of portraying another person on film. Some, like Robin Williams and Jim Carrey, have a tendency to be ingratiating; Ferrell doesn’t bother – in that respect, he’s more like Ben Stiller in Greenberg. But where Greenberg wasn’t self-aware enough to know how much of a prick he was, Nick is only too cognisant of his own failings and fallibilities, copping to the regrettable, avoidable turn his life has taken. Faced with a frighteningly uncertain future, Nick can barely muster the necessary energy, much less enthusiasm, to use the crisis as an opportunity to turn his life around. Here, perhaps, is the film’s key weakness: Nick’s spirit is so damaged, teetering on the brink of self-pity, you may start begging for someone to slap him awake – or worse, slap you awake.
Ferrell plays it straighter than he did in Stranger than Fiction, and harder to like, but he’s an engaging, if frustrating presence in Rush’s solid but slight debut, greatly expanded from a story barely longer than this review.

The Beaver (Empire DVD review)

2011-10-01T09:17:00.000-07:00

Whatever you think of Mel Gibson, whose personal and professional life has imploded so swiftly and spectacularly of late, it’s hard not to feel sympathy for his character in The Beaver, Jodie Foster’s third film as director. The two-time Academy Award winner plays aptly-named toy company CEO Walter Black, whose clinical depression threatens to sink his firm and tear his family – wife Meredith (Foster, who’s also done the Oscar double) and two boys – apart. After two failed suicide attempts, a despairing Walter turns to a second-to-last resort: a beaver glove puppet, prescribed by one of his psychiatrists, through which chronically-withdrawn Walter can express himself (in, for reasons never explained, a Sydney/Cockney hybrid accent) to his family, colleagues – and, when the film is at its most picaresque, America in general.
Weaving together a little of Lars and the Real Girl, a dash of Danny Torrance, and even a modicum of mad-puppet movie Magic, screenwriter Kyle Killen and Foster prove adept at handling the more delicate material, never shying from the tough stuff, while keenly aware that a single false note will cause a catastrophic collapse. Less successful are their attempts to shoehorn in an American Beauty-style substrata, concerning Walter’s eldest son (Anton Yelchin) and his ‘cheerleader with issues’ girlfriend (Jennifer Lawrence), each scene of which stops the film dead in its tracks.
However hard one tries, it’s difficult not to see pre-beaver Walter as post-meltdown Mel: a pale, deeply lined shadow of his mugging, wisecracking ‘Mad Mel’ persona, who didn’t know what bottom looked like – even when Martin Riggs was sucking on his own gun. Whether or not this was Mel’s intention – a very public act of contrition – we may never know; what is certain is that The Beaver boasts one of his best, and certainly bravest performances of his 30-year career. And perhaps, more poignantly, his last.

Thor Blu-ray/DVD (Empire review)

2011-09-06T16:02:00.000-07:00

As the son and heir apparent of Odin, king of Asgard, Thor has never been accustomed to being the underdog. But with Marvel stable mates such as Spider-Man, Iron Man and the X-Men stealing his, uh, thunder, Thor suddenly seemed like afterthought, an also-ran – in short, someone fairly far down Hollywood’s A-list. Brit director Kenneth Branagh – whose nearest thing to a blockbuster was the uneven, Dracula-warmed-over Frankenstein – was therefore, in retrospect, a natural choice to direct his big-screen debut. Branagh attacked the mythic and comic source – a rare example of one of the Marvel pantheon being an actual god, rather than just godlike – with the enthusiasm of a starving peasant invited to an all-you-can-eat Asgard smorgasbord. Sure, Our was expected to take the mythic, Shakespearean grandeur and Gotterdammerung in his stride; what’s more surprising is his lightness of touch and sense of fun, despite the film’s Olympian scale. For make no mistake, this is no lesser Marvel adaptation. Thor is big. Really BIG. The astonishing Jack Kirby-esque architecture of Asgard looks a little more digital on the small screen, but there’s no denying its godlike epic-ness, even in the more down-to-earth scenes. On the human level, Chris Hemsworth makes an impressive god-who-fell-to-Earth, and it’s a testament to Branagh’s casting prowess that Oscar winner Natalie Portman is the weakest member of the supporting cast (Anthony Hopkins and Tom Hiddleston are especially golden). Overall, it’s a thrilling entry into the Marvel canon, which not only grossed nearly half a billion dollars worldwide, but successfully established Thor as a force to be reckoned with – just in time for his appearance alongside the household name heroes in The Avengers.

EXTRAS: If Kenneth Branagh seems to have had fun making Thor, he isn’t done yet: he clearly has a blast narrating it for his commentary, explaining how he distilled fifty years (and a few centuries) of source material into less than two hours, and offering such gems as describing Anthony Hopkins as “luxury casting,” (“If you’re going to cast someone to run the universe, he’s the guy you want”). Despite the yuks in the yack track, the few deleted scenes (with optional Branagh commentary), are perfunctory, while the Road to the Avengers featurette could more accurately be called the staircase to Comic-Con as, that’s about all it has to offer. The Blu-rays boast more (unseen at press time), including 7 behind-the-scenes featurettes, an Agent Coulson short, and a digital copy.

Trust (Empire review)

2011-08-30T03:31:00.000-07:00

If you were going to make a hard-hitting but sensitive drama about a 14-year-old girl (impressive newcomer Liana Liberato) groomed and raped by a chatroom paedophile, you wouldn’t necessarily hand it to the director of Run Fatboy Run. Nevertheless, David Schwimmer doesn’t fumble it, treading softly yet assuredly around the volatile subject matter, and drawing (mostly) strong performances from Clive Owen and Catherine Keener, as the victim’s parents.

3D Sex & Zen: Extreme Ecstasy (Empire review)

2011-08-30T03:28:00.000-07:00

A billing as “the world’s first erotic 3D film,” was enough to make this period sex comedy, loosely based on the same source as the original Sex and Zen (1991), open bigger than Avatar in its native Hong Kong. Eroticism, like beauty and comedy, is in the eye of the beholder – literally, in the case of the 3D breasts on display here – and all three get a fair shake during the amusing and/or arousing first half of Lee’s film, which takes place squarely in the realm of the senseless. As the film’s carnal capers lose impetus in the second half, Sex & Zen: Extreme Ecstasy strays from questionable taste to full-fledged misogyny (one woman is literally raped to death, another suffers genital mutilation), which ultimately obscures the ‘lust fades, love lasts’ message and leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Colombiana (Empire review)

2011-08-30T03:23:00.000-07:00

After witnessing her parents’ murder, nine-year-old Colombian Cataleya escapes to the United States in the care of her uncle Emilio (Curtis). Fifteen years later, Cataleya (Saldana) works for him as a hitman, while secretly plotting revenge against the gangsters who killed her parents.

Luc Besson, the sizable talent behind Nikita and Léon, has been spreading himself pretty thin since he started writing for other people. Stories and/or scripts for five Taxis, three Transporters, Bandidas, Kiss of the Dragon, District 13, Unleashed and the megahit Taken have all rolled off his typewriter since he directed The Fifth Element – with uneven results. In this, his latest script-for-hire, the opening salvos – the murder of the young protagnist’s parents, and a terrific set-piece in which the grown-up Catelaya kills a drug dealer in a holding cell – serve to demonstrate what Besson and regular co-writer Robert Mark Kamen were aiming for with Colmbiana: a 21st century take on the Nikita/Léon girl-assassin motifs, with Saldana, rail-thin star of the biggest box office hit in history, as the sexy, troubled assassin mixing equal parts of Batman (the offed parents) and Catwoman (the catlike agility). They could hardly have missed the target more spectacularly.

Saldana is not the problem: the title role fits the actress formerly known as Zoe Yadira Zaldaña Nazario almost as perfectly as the Whitney Houston bio-pic that surely lies somewhere in her future. The principal problem is the script, which not only suffers from a complete lack of logic – for instance, if Catelaya’s life was wrecked by heartless killers, why would she grow up to be one, with no care for consequences or collateral damage? – but is so full of coincidences, contrivances and conveniences that you can actually hear Besson and Kamen typing. The second, fatal flaw is that Transporter 3 director Olivier Megaton attacks the material with the subtlety his surname suggests, leading every scene (with that one frustrating exception) to thud to the floor like slabs of meat – sometimes overcooked, sometimes undercooked, always rotten.

As nonsensical characterisation piles on top of far-fetched plotting, the film begins to resemble a low-calibre cross between an episode of J.J. Abrams’ Alias (a sensation enhanced by the presence of Michael Vartan) and an ‘80s-era action movie, but with Rae Dawn Chong or Maria Conchita Alonso in the lead, instead Stallone or Schwarzenegger. It’s actually worse: a Transporter movie minus Jason Statham.

Even the talented Saldana can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, much less a dog’s dinner: one scene aside, the action falls completely flat, and even Vincent ‘Entourage’ Chase’s disastrous Medellin couldn’t have crammed in as many Colombian stereotypes.

Never Let Me Go (Empire Blu-ray / DVD review)

2011-07-30T04:55:00.000-07:00

On film, Kazuo Ishiguro’s agonising existential allegory, in which three school friends (Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley) are raised in a quietly horrifying alternate reality, becomes a melancholic master class in restraint, both profound and profoundly moving. Material this fragile could have broken in less sensitive hands than those of screenwriter Alex Garland – wisely repressing his love of science fiction, despite the nature of the material – and, particularly, Mark Romanek. In another universe, Never Let Me Go might have won Oscars for its script, cinematography, music, direction, and a triumvirate of exquisite performances from two of the finest actors of their generation, and Keira Knightley. It is difficult to imagine a more perfectly realised adaptation of a popular novel, joining the short list of compelling arguments for film’s ability to translate literature into lyricism via the medium of film.

EXTRAS: A well-made half-hour ‘making of’ delves deeply into how the filmmakers approached such delicate material, and there’s a Gallery of Tommy’s art and a montage of Romanek’s on-set photographs, each with isolated excerpts of Rachel Portman’s haunting music. Not bad, but this film is crying out for commentaries.

Villain (Akunin) (Empire review)

2011-07-30T04:51:00.000-07:00

Accused of the murder of a girl he met on a dating site, Yuichi (Satoshi Tsumabaki) goes on the run with his latest hookup, Mitsuyo (Eri Fukatsu), while the family of the dead girl struggle to put their lives back together, and make sense of the tragedy. (Twin Peaks was huge in Japan, remember.) The pervasive sense of social realism, so rare in Japanese cinema, may explain the lavish praise showered on Lee’s film, and the bestseller it was adapted from, in its native Japan. We in the west, where such naturalism is commonplace, may be left scratching our heads at the film’s occasional lapses into melodrama and histrionic overacting, while to describe the pace as glacial would be to insult the dizzying speeds of which continent-sized ice shelves are comparatively capable. Students on an Oriental Studies course will likely find Villain fascinating for the insight it gives into Japanese culture. The rest of us may just be bored.

Treacle Jr. (Empire review)

2011-07-30T04:50:00.001-07:00

If Mike Leigh’s Naked had been made by a less misanthrophic director, the results might look something like Thraves’ self-funded third film. For undisclosed reasons, Tom (Fisher) walks out on his family and heads to London, where he runs into the slow-witted but eternally optimistic Aidan (Gillen), whose unshakeable joie de vivre is difficult to resist. Gillen, who starred in Thraves’ similarly improvisational first feature The Low Down, shines so brightly as the effervescent Aidan, Fisher and Steele (as Aidan’s feisty flatmate) have trouble keeping up. But like Aidan, the film has a big heart, and a refreshingly uncondescending attitude to one of society’s misfits.

Mother's Day (Empire review)

2011-07-30T04:48:00.000-07:00

Original Hand That Rocks the Cradle psycho De Mornay, now 50 and ageing beautifully, plays the matriarch of a criminal family which, after a robbery goes south, holes up at the house they used to own – with the new owners and their friends as hostages. As the tension ratchets up, along with the threat level, the friends begin to turn on each other in a desperate effort to save themselves and those closest to them. Bousman, director of Saw II-IV, sticks the knife in and twists it slowly – with perhaps a couple of twists too many. Nevertheless, for those who like their horror with a little more character meat, this is a gory, effective chiller, with a dash of social satire (it could have used a dash more), and the faintest whiff of misogyny.

Just Do It (Empire review)

2011-07-30T04:45:00.000-07:00

The world of environmental direct action is, by necessity, a secretive and clandestine one, much maligned and misunderstood – not least because of unsympathetic media coverage. This insider’s view of such household name groups as Climate Camp and Plane Stupid is, therefore, extremely welcome. Crowd-funded, and constructed with a suitably home-brewed, anarchistic vibe, the film contextualizes various direct actions by activists, affinity groups and supporters, giving voice to the other side of a frequently misrepresented cause. Current enough to cover the unlawful death of Ian Tomlinson during the G8 protest – but not, sadly, revelations about infiltration by undercover police – the film features some scary footage of the state’s ‘bully boy’ tactics, and the protestors’ inspired strategies to flummox them, in order to make their point. Rousing stuff.

Donor Unknown (Empire review)

2011-07-30T04:44:00.001-07:00

What would happen if all of the children ‘fathered’ by a single sperm donor were to meet – and then meet the donor himself? It’s a mouth-watering premise, and Deep Water director Rothwell does his best to deliver on its promise, following a group of half-siblings as they search first for each other, and then for their biological father, revealed from the start as an ageing hippie living in a camper van in a parking lot on Venice Beach – hardly Mark Ruffalo in The Kids Are All Right. Of the unimaginably complex emotions involved, more are concealed than revealed by Rothwell’s objective style, requiring the viewer to draw their own conclusions about the many ethical and emotional questions raised.

The Flaw (Empire review)

2011-07-30T04:42:00.000-07:00

A game attempt to make sense of the global financial crisis, the latest film from British documentary maker Sington (In the Shadow of the Moon) takes its title from the understatement of the century: former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s admission to having “found a flaw” in his ‘deregulate to accumulate’ economic ideology, which fed US policy between Bush Jr.’s election in 2000 to the 2008 global meltdown. Like Greenspan as the banks toppled like monolithic dominoes, Sington seems out of his depth amid the complex machinations and deliberate obfuscations of the financial sector, and although it offers some intriguing statistics, the film lacks the focus, understanding and insight of Inside Job – or even, frankly, the end credits of The Other Guys.

Labyrinth Blu-ray (Empire review)

2011-07-20T01:04:00.000-07:00

A pubescent girl (15-year-old Jennifer Connelly) enters a darkly magical world to rescue her baby brother from the Goblin King (David Bowie) in Jim Henson’s smash hit fantasy, a heady mix of Carroll, Sendak and Baum co-scripted by Terry Jones. It’s no Princess Bride, and could do without the toe-curling musical numbers, but aside from a couple of dodgy composites, the crisp Blu-ray transfer does Henson proud.

EXTRAS: The original hour-long ‘making of’ shows the vast difference between the original print and the HD transfer, and includes some neat studio footage of Bowie at work on the film’s songs. This is complemented by two half-hour retrospectives, featuring producer George Lucas and Henson’s son Brian, covering all the bases. Also included: commentary by conceptual designer Brian Froud, and a ‘picture in picture’ feature with the puppeteers.

Love Like Poison (Empire review)

2011-05-23T03:28:00.000-07:00

Taking its French title from a Serge Gainsbourg song, the feature debut of Abidjan-born director Quillévéré is a beguiling, coming-of-age drama about a 14-year-old girl, Anna (Augarde), whose impending confirmation ceremony coincides with her parents’ separation, and an equally personal conflict between her Catholic faith and burgeoning sexuality. Setting up more subplots than it is possible to fully develop within the slender running time, Un Poison Violent sometimes feels like the pilot for a new television series, albeit one rather lacking in externalized drama. Nevertheless, it is beautifully made and superlatively performed – especially by newcomer Augarde, the serendipitous discovery of an open casting call – and exquisitely captures a critical, but fleeting, moment in adolescence.

Limitless (Empire review)

2011-05-22T10:48:00.000-07:00

Wannabe writer Eddie (Cooper) is heartbroken, broke and blocked, until a friend slips him an experimental smart drug, transforming him from scuzzy loser into Hello!-retouched genius. Yes, it’s a Faust for the pharmaceutical age – an uglified Anna Friel pops up as a burned-out former addict – and Eddie soon finds himself haunted by blackouts and hunted by bad guys. Burger (The Illusionist) and Cooper both have enormous fun with the daft material, and it’s good to see De Niro on form, as a billionaire on the trail of Eddie’s secret. With a touch of Scott Pilgrim’s enhanced visuals and tongue firmly in cheek, it’s smart, stylish and entertaining – like Fincher’s The Game on crack.

Pina (Empire review)

2011-05-22T10:47:00.000-07:00

Wenders’ film about the legendary choreographer Pina Bausch – whose best-known work, the haunting Café Müller, opens Almodovar’s Talk to Her – was nearly derailed by its subject’s sudden death, creating a seemingly unfillable void at the centre of his planned documentary. Instead of abandoning the idea of making a film about Bausch, Wenders has made a worthy tribute to her, inviting members of her extraordinary ensemble to express their feelings about their mentor, partly through words, but mostly through heartfelt performances, using 3D technology’s enhanced depth of field to capture the depth of feeling ever-present in Bausch’s work. It may not win any converts to the art form, but ‘mere’ movement has seldom been so moving.

Gorbaciof (Empire review)

2011-05-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

With fewer words than those comprising this review, hangdog-face actor Tony Servillo (Gomorra, Il Divo) manages to create one of Italian cinema’s most indelible characters: a nattily-dressed, quietly self-possessed Neapolitan, whose nickname derives from the prominent birthmark on his forehead, and whose only passions are gambling and Lila (newcomer Mi Yang), a beautiful Chinese girl. With no language in common, their blossoming romance is based on meaningful looks and gestures. It’s a conceit which enables writer-director Incerti to develop his narrative through actions rather than words, lending the film a European-Asian sensibility entirely in keeping with the affair at its heart. Ultimately, its lyrical nature may be too slight for some, but there’s no denying the depth of feeling beneath the surface of this unique, bittersweet love story.

The Veteran (Empire review)

2011-05-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

Up-and-coming actor Toby Kebbell, so magnificent as Paddy Considine’s mentally challenged brother in Dead Man’s Shoes, takes centre stage here as a soldier who returns from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, to find a gang war being fought on the London estate he calls home. Sensing an opportunity for redemption, he becomes obsessed with saving an innocent young girl (Bielski) caught up in the fray. With his second feature, Hope’s reach exceeds his grasp – but not by much. Kebbell is riveting even when the material flags, Brian Cox and Bashy bring gravitas and gritty authenticity respectively, and the ending packs a powerful punch. As sink-estate vigilantes go, Harry Brown’s got some competition.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (Empire DVD review)

2011-05-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

Never has so much top-drawer CG animation and voice talent – Geoffrey Rush, Hugo Weaving, and a flock of fellow Antipodean A-listers – been employed in the service of a story so full of clichéd characterisation and impenetrable mythology (ornithology?). Based on Kathryn Lasky’s animal fantasy novels, it’s a curious choice for director Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen) – although the genuinely breathtaking visuals bode well for Australia’s fledgling animation industry.

EXTRAS: A 15-minute educational owl service for kids, and a brand new Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoon courtesy of Looney Tunes.

Tigerland (Empire Blu-ray review)

2011-05-20T09:34:00.000-07:00

Joel Schumacher’s unlikely tour of duty in Vietnam (or, more accurately, a pre-‘Nam boot camp in Louisiana), based on Ross Klavan's memoir, is primarily remembered as the film that launched Colin Farrell’s career. It’s a pity, because by stripping down to the bare essentials – true story, cast of unknowns, handheld 16mm camera – Schumacher made a film to rival Full Metal Jacket and Platoon. Farrell, channelling Paul Newman in Hud, is dazzling; Matthew Libatique’s grey/green lighting looks fantastic in HD, too.

EXTRAS: Schumacher’s original commentary (excellent) is supplemented by newly-filmed HD interviews with he and writer Klavan, plus Farrell’s original screen tests.

The Fighter (Empire Blu-ray/DVD review)

2011-05-20T09:30:00.001-07:00

After a near-Kubrickian absence since his star-studded Marmite movie I [Heart] Huckabees, director David O. Russell returned to the brilliantly assured form of Three Kings with this critically-acclaimed drama, in which would-be champion ‘Irish’ Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) attempts to seize his moment in the sports world spotlight, while his half-brother Dickie Ecklund (Christian Bale) and hatchet-faced mother (Melissa Leo), as trainer and manager respectively, unwittingly do their best to scupper his chances. Like many a boxing movie, it’s less concerned with the business of boxing than relationships, and especially fights, outside the ring. (It ain’t called The Fighter for the boxing, folks.) Bale and Leo both took home Oscars, but it’s producer and project champion Wahlberg’s understated performance, the kind the Academy tends to overlook, which anchors their excesses. Come the awards, life imitated art-based-on-life as Wahlberg was overlooked for success and recognition while those around him fought over the spoils – in Leo’s case, taking out full page ‘Consider Me’ ads to lobby Academy members to vote for her. Wahlberg, meanwhile, got on with the business of being quietly brilliant – just as the film does. It may have lost on points in the Best Picture bout, but we’ll still be watching The Fighter long after The King’s Speech is a footnote in film history.

EXTRAS: Russell’s rapid-fire commentary is earnest, knowledgeable, precise – and rather boring. It’s no match, in other words, for the hour-long documentary The Warrior’s Code: Filming The Fighter. Shot, like the film, in the now-legendary Lowell, Massachusetts, and featuring many of the real-life characters – and characters they are! – around whom the film is built, it can only be described as precisely the ‘making of’ a fan of the film would want to see.

Scream 4 (Empire movie review)

2011-05-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

Having survived the original Woodsboro murders and the Hollywood horrors that followed, Sidney Prescott (Campbell) returns home to Woodsboro to promote her survivor-tale bestseller, only to find a new killer – or killers – terrorising the town, once again wearing the Ghost Face mask.

Fifteen years ago, irony man Kevin Williamson and veteran horror director Wes Craven rewrote the history of the splatter genre by knowingly embracing its rules – or, less kindly, it’s clichés – allowing filmmakers and audience to collaborate in a bloody, and bloody funny, exercise in pre-millennial post-modernism. The inevitable sequel – even the lamentable House had a Second Story – followed in 1997, allowing the Williamson and Craven to play on a movie-literate audience’s familiarity with the tropes of sequels, including the one about them never being as good (or, at least, as original) as the original. True to traditional genre form, the threequel (2000) arrived belatedly, wasn’t as good as its predecessors, but managed to wrap up the trilogy and leave the audience wanting – well, not quite less, exactly, but certainly not more. The same year, Scary Movie to put the last nail in Scream’s coffin.
And now there’s Scre4m, the ostensibly redundant, nobody-but-the-studio-was screaming-for-it fourth instalment, born less of a desire to satirise recent genre tropes such as done-to-death remakes, zombie flicks, handycam horror and torture porn, and more on the need to flog a few Scream box sets. For the comeback movie, it is customary to bring back the original cast and crew – although Craven’s old Nightmare on Elm Street series had notched up six instalments before his New Nightmare (1994) gave his post-modern muscles a pre-Scream workout – and die-hard genre fans will already have glanced at the credits to be sure the original gang (Campbell, Cox, Arquette, Williamson, Craven) is back to join the requisite newcomers (Hayden Panetierre, Emma Roberts), even as they brace themselves for the customary diminishing returns of a moribund franchise twitching back to life. Wisely so.

Scre4m tries hard to show us what a Scream movie might be like in the age of Facebook, iPhones and YouTube, and there’s sporadic fun to be had wondering who’s behind the killings, and why, and how many new Twitter followers the murders will get them. Today’s audiences, jaded and impatient, are likely to be way ahead of Williamson, making the outcome predictable or tiresome, or both. It’s not entirely witless, but after the imaginative contraption-killings of the Saw septology, watching multiple knife murders, however ironically intended, is about as thrilling as standing in line at the butcher’s – without a bag of sausages to make it worth your while.

A desire to Know What You Did Last Instalment is likely to be the biggest draw for Scream number four, but if this proves to be the last in the series, it’s a bloody shame it ended not with a Scream, but with a whimper.

Infamous Players by Peter Bart (Empire book review)

2011-05-20T08:40:00.000-07:00

The title of Bart’s latest is a play on Famous Players, the original name for Paramount Pictures. It’s a breezy memoir of his years as Robert Evans’ right-hand man at the studio circa 1967-1975, a golden age which produced such classics as The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, and which he describes as “a theme park ride with freaks and demons, crooks and visionaries popping up all over the place.” Alas, the book isn’t quite that, being rather a rehash of stories we’ve heard a dozen times already – something Bart would have frowned on in the Paramount years.

The Faber Book of French Cinema (Empire review)

2011-05-20T08:29:00.000-07:00

Faber and Faber was the world’s most prolific publisher of film-related books, until the arrival of DVD, with all its ‘making of’s and retrospective documentaries, severely curbed its output. It makes sense, therefore, for Faber to turn to more expansive volumes such as this scholarly, authoritative and accessible exploration of French filmmakers and their films.
Although Americans George Eastman and Thomas Edison were responsible for two critical components of cinema, namely cellular film and perforated edges, it was two Frenchmen, Auguste and Antoine Lumiere, who turned Edison’s novelty Kinetoscope into a mobile recording and public projection system, making possible the cinema we know today. America repaid the debt by taking France’s nascent artistic enterprise and turning it into a full-blown industrial cash cow, and has dominated the global movie market ever since, leaving the French largely to festivals and art houses. Drazin’s overview of the country’s output, from 1895 to 2010, is at its most vivid during the formative years, his enthusiasm making the work of its early pioneers seem as fresh and exciting as that of the impressionists and surrealists – arguably more so, given that they were present at the birth not merely of a new art form, but an entirely new medium.
Over 400 pages, Drazin proves to be a peerless guide through French cinema’s development, through futile efforts to compete with Hollywood in the interwar years, to the even greater struggle through the German occupation, and the emergent critics-turned-filmmakers of the nouvelle vague. Only when his story approaches the modern age does his interest seem to wane: the period spanning Bresson to Besson lasts just 10 pages, while a single chapter covers the past 25 years. In retrospect, it might have been preferable to let Drazin cover the first half century, leaving the country’s contemporary output to a more sympathetic guide. That aside, this is a superb primer for anyone interested in the origin and development French film, an evening class in book form which could perhaps only be bettered – commissioning editors, take note – by a six-part BBC4 series with Drazin himself as host.

The Tempest (Empire review)

2011-03-03T05:39:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare and Disney make strange bedfellows, notwithstanding its recent involvement with Gnomeo & Juliet. But when you’ve made an ailing Hollywood studio a billion dollars, as Taymor did by adapting The Lion King for the stage, you sometimes get a ‘golden ticket’ opportunity to do Whatever You Like (Within Reason, or rather under budget). Taymor, who followed her startlingly assured biopic of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo with an imaginative adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and oddball love story Across the Universe, uses her carte blanche to return to the source of her first theatrical production: Shakespeare’s tempestuous tale of shipwreck, sorcery, love and revenge – like Lost, but written by the Bard.

The absence of a definite article in the opening titles suggests that Taymor’s take is intended as interpretative rather than definitive, and so it proves: for a start, she switches the central role’s gender, so instead of Prospero the over-protective father, we have ‘Prospera’ (Mirren) the overbearing mother. It’s a brilliant conceit, the gender switch lending Prospera’s betrayal an agreeably apposite whiff of patriarchal sexism. And Mirren is on formidable form.

Bringing various Shakespeare texts to the screen between 1989 and 2006, Kenneth Branagh assembled eclectic casts and generally made them work; Taymor’s skill in this regard is populating her film with actors who, with one exception, give the impression that no other casting was possible. Russell Brand and Alfred Molina as the drunken double-act, Trinculo and Stephano? Djimon Hounsou as the bestial Caliban, and Perfume’s Ben Whishaw as an ethereal, androgynous Ariel? Chris Cooper as the serpentine Antonio? Yes, please! Only Reeve Carney, who plays Peter Parker in Taymor’s ill-starred Spider-Man musical Turn off the Dark, lets the ensemble down, unable to hold his own among such sterling company, or even in his scenes with Miranda (Jones).

Although marshalling 21st century special effects to depict what Shakespeare managed to conjure purely with language might be seen as gilding the lily, Taymor’s Tempest has just the right amount of visual pizzazz, from the imaginatively low-key effects work, to Sandy Powell’s spot-on costume design, to the landscape itself (privately-owned Hawaiian island Lana’i) – as arresting, diverse and wild unpredictable and as the text itself.

Taymor’s winningly cast, thrillingly imaginative take on Shakespeare’s final masterpiece passes the ultimate test of bringing the Bard to film, being accessible without compromising the text. It may also be the only PG-related Disney film to contain the word ‘Fuck’, as Molina drops the F-bomb after stumbling on a particularly craggy bit of island.

A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures (Empire review)

2011-03-03T05:35:00.001-08:00

The quality of animated features not just suitable for the very young, but aimed at them, tends not to be very high. So prepare to be shell-shocked by the Pixar-level perfectionism lavished on the 100% 3D visuals of this charming Belgian-born CG confection, in which the titular turtle hasn’t mutated, isn’t a teenager, and doesn’t know martial arts – but still manages to hold kids’ rapt attention for 86 minutes. Sammy’s story spans fifty years, imaginatively encompassing a wide variety of marine life and environmental strife, and if the Brit voice actors (the Americans have a different cast) hadn’t phoned in their roles, cit ould have been a turtle triumph. Nevertheless, expect sales of pet turtles to treble, even if they turn out to be a bit less exciting in real life.

Route Irish (Empire review)

2011-03-03T05:26:00.000-08:00

When his childhood friend and fellow private security contractor Frankie (Bishop) is blown up in Iraq, Fergus (Womack) launches an investigation into the events surrounding his friend’s death.

There is room for any number of allegorical treatises about the Iraq invasion and occupation, made by filmmakers with a social conscience. But sometimes you need someone just to step up and talk about the conflict, rather than hiding behind allegory, metaphor, or – worst of all – have-your-cake-and-eat-it action scenes, like the kind found in The Green Zone, Jarhead, The Kingdom, etc. Even the justly celebrated The Hurt Locker was, when the dust settled, a wholly uncritical celebration of American heroism in Iraq. So it’s good news that indomitable British director Ken Loach has chosen to follow Looking for Eric with a film that manages to bring the Iraq conflict home – both literally and figuratively. Imagine In the Valley of Elah, written by Alan Bleasdale and directed by Mike Leigh, and you’re on the right track.

Taking its name from squaddies’ nickname for the deadly stretch of rubble-strewn road linking Baghdad’s concrete-walled Green Zone with its international airport, Route Irish is an attempt s to make sense of yet another killing in an increasingly senseless conflict, now largely being run by private security contractors, the military action having moved to Afghanistan. At first, Fergus’ rejection of the official verdict looks like a by-product of grief. After all, as Frankie’s girlfriend Rachel (The Tudors’ Lowe) observes grimly, Fergus was closer to Frankie than she was. But the discovery of an Iraqi citizen’s mobile phone, recording the shooting of an innocent family, exposes a deep-rooted cover-up, turning the grieving pair into targets – and the film into a hard-hitting conspiracy thriller which, in its most thrilling moments, gives Bourne a run for his money.

Loach’s breakthrough film, Hidden Agenda, delved with considerable political acuity into murky goings-on in Northern Ireland, and Route Irish proves his finger is still on the pulse, and cinematographer Chris Menges, who took us to Iraq in Stop-Loss, does a terrific job of bringing Baghdad to Merseyside. But although the (semi-improvised) performances have an authenticity that goes beyond mere acting, Womack is a little too much of a tough guy to be truly sympathetic. Someone with a softer side – perhaps Paddy Considine, Michael Fassbender, or Loach favourite Ian Hart – might have helped the film engage not just the brain and the guts, but the heart as well.

As urgent and relevant as Hidden Agenda was two decades ago, Loach’s latest is an intelligent, insightful and quietly explosive thriller, so torn from today’s headlines it will leave newsprint on your hands.

The Dilemma (Empire review)

2011-02-07T04:01:00.000-08:00

The titular conundrum – if you caught your best friend’s wife cheating, should you tell them? – seems like a no-brainer: of course you would. A bigger dilemma was clearly how to sell this bittersweet comedy-drama, a return to territory which Oscar winner Howard hasn’t explored since Parenthood. As with Steve Martin in that film, the presence of Vaughn and James suggests comedic intent, yet the laughs are chiefly present to leaven the more dramatic stuff – like Howard doing Mike Leigh. Surprisingly, for such an assured director, Howard fumbles the material a bit, and the film ultimately bites off more than it can chew in less than two hours. But it’s always engaging, and there are fully-fledged comedies out there – many of them starring Vince Vaughn – with fewer genuine laughs than this.

The Black Hole (1979): Empire retrospective feature

2011-02-07T03:57:00.000-08:00

In the three years between the release of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes back, audiences were relatively starved for big-screen sci-fi, with only Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Trek: The Motion Picture the only films able to satisfy the new generation of sci-fi buffs spawned by Lucas’ space opera. Neither of those films, however, had Star Wars’ sense of adventure, and it was not until Christmas 1979 that kids got a sci-fi movie made just for them: Disney’s The Black Hole.

Set in the distant future, the story began as the space probe Palomino arrives at the edge of the titular phenomenon, where the crew – played by Anthony Perkins, Robert Forster, Joseph Bottoms, Yvette Mimieux and Ernest Borgnine – is shocked to discover the long-lost exploration ship Cygnus, abandoned twenty years earlier by all but one of its crew. Fascinated by the scientific possibilities of the black hole, the Cygnus’ captain, Dr Hans Reinhardt (Maximillian Schell), has chosen to remain on the ship, constructing an army of humanoid robots to serve as a makeshift crew, while he fine-tunes his plans to explore the black hole. The Palomino’s crew, meanwhile, is justifiably suspicious of Reinhardt’s true motives, not least because there is something a little too ‘human’ about his robot helpers.

Although The Black Hole would certainly not have been made if Star Wars had not been so successful, the film was conceived several years before Lucas’ game-changer. The story began life as a deep space disaster movie, Space Station-One, which Walt Disney Pictures purchased as a pitch in February 1974, from writers Bob Barbash and Richard H Landau, veterans of such TV staples as Maverick, The Wild Wild West and The Six Million Dollar Man. Inspired in equal parts by the real-life drama of Apollo 13, and the successful big-screen disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure, the story concerned the passengers and crew of a huge spacecraft in peril on the edge of a black hole. After numerous rewrites, pre-production began in July 1976 under the supervision of British director John Hough, who had steered Disney’s Escape to Witch Mountain to the screen the previous year. During this period, several screenwriters came and went (see sidebar), until Jeb Rosebrook came aboard in February 1977. “I was unlikely choice,” he says, “because I had just written Junior Bonner, a rodeo movie with Steve McQueen, for Sam Peckinpah, and it hadn’t been a commercial success. But my agent at CAA got me a meeting at Disney, and even though I told him I didn’t know the first thing about science fiction, he told me to shut up and go talk to them. I think the reason I was hired,” he adds, “was that most of my work was character driven, and the scripts were kind of flat in terms of character motivation.”

In addition to Rosebrook’s other changes, including the introduction of the evil red robot, Maximilian, and B.O.B., a broken-down service droid voiced by Slim Pickens, Rosebrook added ten pages of backstory and character motivation, which never made it into the final film, because the studio felt it would slow the action. Rosebrook delivered his first draft on July 7th, 1977, just two weeks after Star Wars’ opening. “Ron Miller was running the studio by then, Walt Disney having died a short while earlier, and he read my draft and said, ‘This isn’t any different than the ones I had before? Why should we go with this draft?’ And then Hough and I had an epiphany moment, and we both said at the same time, ‘What if they went through the black hole?’ And that was it: Miller said, ‘That’s a great idea, go do it.’”

By this time, Disney knew it had the potential for a Star Wrs-type hit on its hands, but that audiences would expect special effects of the highest caliber. With all of Star Wars’ key creatives already busy making The Empire Strikes Back, Disney coaxed one of its own effects pioneers, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea’s Peter Ellenshaw, out of retirement, to work on the effects sequences which had been inserted into the script, post-Star Wars, by seasoned TV scribe Gerry Day. Chief responsibility for the film’s early production designs fell to Robert T McCall, who worked closely with Douglas Trumbull on the ‘Spock fantasy trip’ sequence of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but was then best known as painter of the space station on the poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey. McCall spent six months creating nearly a hundred lavish and innovative illustrations for the Cygnus, the Palomino, and V.I.N.CENT., although few of them would ultimately resemble the designs for the final film. While Ellenshaw’s latticework construction of the Cygnus might be said to be an improvement over McCall’s NASA-like craft, the latter’s sleek concept for the Palomino – designed to suggest the twenty-year age gap between the two ships – was arguably more exciting than Ellenshaw’s, and his depiction of V.I.N.CENT. as a complex, multi-tasking robot was a far cry from Ellenshaw’s ‘cutesy’ conceptualisation. “I don’t care for his final design at all,” McCall commented upon seeing Ellenshaw’s V.I.N.CENT. (a clumsy acronym for Vital Information Necessary CENTralized). “I think he looks a little absurd with his painted eyes.” It was a view shared by all but the youngest of The Black Hole’s audience, who took the epigram-spouting robot, voiced by an uncredited Roddy McDowall, to their hearts.

Despite these occasional misjudgments, almost every other aspect of The Black Hole’s special effects was literally state of the art, building on advances made during the filming of Star Wars, and creating a new benchmark in science fiction cinema. No expense was spared creating the 125-foot Palomino model and Cygnus sets, complete with a separate command tower measuring 40 by 80 feet, and a living agricultural module containing thousands of shrubs and trees (an obvious steal from Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running). Around 150 mattes were painted, many of them by Ellenshaw’s son Peter, who had worked as a matte painter on Star Wars, while the cel-animated lasers and rocket exhausts utilised Disney’s considerable animation expertise to good effect.

Of all the film’s many visual effects, however, the most enduring and dramatic is the manifestation of the black hole itself, a seemingly omnipresent swirling vortex which, on the cinema screen, was often peripheral to the action, yet almost invariably drew the eye. Astonishingly, this effect was not only the first to be filmed, in May 1978, but also one of the simplest and cheapest to achieve: a transparent, 1,000-gallon Plexiglas tank was built to create a whirlpool of water, into which Ellenshaw himself poured various coloured pigments. The vortex was then backlit, photographed with a super-fast film stock, and finally slowed down before being inserted into blue screen sequences filmed, on occasions, an entire year later. The effect is seen at its best during the Cygnus’ climactic, cataclysmic destruction as it crosses the ‘event horizon’, and the ship descends into the bathos beyond the black hole.

“One of the relevant criticisms of the film was that the ending looked like it had been done in a boardroom,” says Rosebrook, “which is a shame, because I worked on a fantastic ending with Harrison Ellenshaw, and we came up with some really interesting ideas that would have challenged audiences. As it was,” he adds, “it was not a challenging ending.” Well, it was in one sense: the challenge of understanding what happened on the other side of the black hole, a traditional brightly lit ‘heaven’ for the good guys (and their friendly robot, V.I.N.CENT.), and an Inferno-like ‘hell’ for the evil Dr Reinhardt (and his ‘evil’ robot, Maximilian). Despite the disappointing ending, and the violence which many saw as a disturbing new direction for Disney movies in the aftermath of Walt’s death, those who saw the film on the big screen left with the knowledge that they had seen some of the best special effects cinema had to offer, and the film’s earnings – $36 million in pre-Reagan era dollars – was enough to out-gross Disney’s most recent animated effort, The Rescuers (1977), by some margin, and making it the 13th highest grossing film of the year. The film even garnered two Academy Award® nominations, for Best Visual Effects and Best Cinematography.

In the three decades since The Black Hole’s release, the film has not been treated as fondly as some of the era’s other sci-fi films. Indeed, as Rosebrook recalls meeting one sci-fi fan at a book signing, who gave it to him straight. “He asked me what films I had written, and I said, ‘I wrote what a lot of people call the worst science fiction movie ever made: The Black Hole.’ And he said, ‘You’re right!’” Nevertheless, The Black Hole was clearly an influence on Paul W.S. Anderson’s similarly-themed Event Horizon, in which the crew of a spaceship encounter an apparently derelict ship, powered by a black hole, with a mad scientist at the helm. Then, in 2009, Disney announced that it would produce a remake of The Black Hole, written by Clash of the Titans screenwriter Travis Beacham, and directed by Joe Kosinski, who would steer Tron: Legacy to box office set at the close of 2010. “This one will be a re-imagining,” Kosinski has said of the remake. “For me, it would be taking ideas and iconic elements that struck me as timeless and cool and preserving them, while weaving a new story around them that’s a little more 2001: A Space Odyssey. I saw The Black Hole as a little kid,” he adds, “and what sticks out most is the robot Maximilian. The blades and the vicious killing of Anthony Perkins freaked me out, and that’s definitely going to be an element that will be preserved.”

A BLACK HOLE TIMELINE

Feb 24 1974
Walt Disney purchases story entitled Space Station-One from writers Bob Barbash and Richard Landau. No black hole appears in the treatment.

Sep 19 1974
Barbash and Landau’s final outline mentions black hole for the first time.

May 1975
Barbash and Landau deliver final script, now entitled Probe-One.

June 16 1975
Writer William Wood (TV’s The Mod Squad) hired to polish script.

Feb 5 1976
Wood delivers re-draft.

July 21 1976
Pre-production begins as director John Hough is attached to project.

July 28 1976
Writer Sumner Arthur Long (Lassie) hired to rewrite script.

Oct 1976
Long delivers re-draft entitled Space Station-One. Writer Ed Coffey hired to rewrite.

Nov 1976
Hough leaves to direct Brass Target.

Jan 7 1977
Coffey delivers rewrite.

Feb 7 1977
Writer Jeb Rosebrook (Junior Bonner) hired to rewrite.

July 7 1977
Rosebrook delivers new draft, forming the basis of the final version.

Jan 16 1978
Gary Nelson (Freaky Friday) attached as director.

March 23 1978
Rosebrook delivers re-draft entitled Space Probe-One.

April 3 1978
Writer Geraldine ‘Gerry’ Day hired to incorporate new special effects into Rosebrook’s draft.

Oct 4 1978
Day delivers final draft, now entitled The Black Hole.

Oct 11 1978
Principal photography begins. Development cost to date: $3,620,310.

April 20 1979
Principal photography completed.

Dec 20 1979
The Black Hole opens in the US. Final declared cost: $20,000,000.

November 2009
On the 30th anniversary of the film’s release, a poster appears on a bedroom wall in Tron: Legacy, as Disney announces plans to remake The Black Hole, under the supervision of Tron: Legacy director Joe Kosinski.

Battlestar Galactica (1979): Empire retrospective feature

2011-02-07T03:54:00.000-08:00

When Star Wars opened in US cinemas on May 25th 1977, destroying global box office records with the deadly efficiency of a Death Star, science fiction suddenly had a future again. And since everyone in Hollywood likes to be first to do something for the second time, it was only a matter of time before the imitators arrived.

First out of the star gate was Battlestar Galactica, which wasn’t a movie at all, but an edited cutdown/blow-up of the three-hour pilot for a TV series, in which the eponymous spacecraft’s passengers and crew, the last survivors of mankind’s thousand-year war with evil chrome robots named Cylons, roam the galaxy looking for Earth. The series, the most expensive television production of its time, was the brainchild of writer-producer Glen A Larson, who had earned the nickname Glen Larceny by making a career out of riffing on – or, more accurately, ripping off – successful films in order to carve out a career: his TV western Alias Smith and Jones (1971), for example, had been a thinly-veiled copy of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), while tec-in-a-stetson drama McCloud (1970) was a small-screen take on Coogan’s Bluff (1968). According to Larson, the success of Star Wars prompted Universal-owned ABC Television to dust off a pilot script of Larson’ss entitled Adam’s Ark, which the studio had rejected in the late ‘60s. Heavily influenced by its author’s Mormon beliefs, and more directly Eric Von Daniken’s bestselling Chariots of the Gods series, Adam’s Ark told the story of a colony of ancient or future humans, searching the galaxy for a fabled ‘thirteenth colony’ named Earth. “It was sort of about the origins of mankind in the universe," explains Larson, “taking some of the biblical stories and moving them off into space.”

While Star Wars dominated the summer of ‘77, Larson toiled away on revisions to Adam’s Ark, ostensibly to make it “more current” – in other words, more like Star Wars. Thus, in the final script, dated August 30th, 1977 and re-titled “Saga of a Star World”, robots have become ‘droids’, the Ark is a ‘Battlestar’ (like a Death Star, only friendlier), and the hero is a young pilot named Skyler (not Skywalker, no sir!), who sports a roguish sidekick with a fondness for gambling and an eye for the ladies. Suddenly, Universal loved the concept it had rejected only a few years earlier. George Lucas, however, didn’t love it. Sent the script as a courtesy by the studio which had famously turned down Star Wars, Lucas asked them to make numerous changes, including the removal of ‘Star World’ from the title, references to “star warriors” and droids, and so on. “It was a problem for George,” says conceptual designer Ralph McQuarrie, the first Star Wars veteran whom Larson hired to work on his show, “because Galactica had an emperor, stormtroopers, rocket fighters – a lot of things that figured in Star Wars, and it was beginning to look like a Star Wars rip-off.” As Alan J Levi, who directed half of the Galactica pilot and several subsequent episodes of the series, recalls, “It was well known that Glen did have a reputation and love of stealing from the best, [and] t was widespread knowledge that after Glen read the original George Lucas’ Star Wars script, which Universal had turned down, he set out immediately to ‘beat the Star Wars concept to the audience. We were beating 20th Century Fox at their own game, and loving it. We were creators, and competitive ones to say the least.”

With pre-production underway, Larson cast a staple of Sunday night television, Bonanza star Lorne Greene, as the patriarchal Commander Adama, with heartthrobs Richard Hatch and future A-Team star Dirk Benedict as the show’s younger bucks, Captain Apollo and Lieutenant Starbuck. Knowing that audiences would not settle for anything less than state-of-the-art effects, Larson cheekily hired effects pioneers John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren, Ken Ralston and Joe Johnston, all of whom had found themselves out of work when George Lucas shut down Industrial Light and Magic after Star Wars wrapped. “All the people were still there,” Johnston recalls, “and Glen hired the entire group, including me, to design, build, and photograph all these visual effects.” Says Edlund, “We got ‘hornswoggled’ into doing Galactica.”

With so many Star Wars alumni on the show, it was small wonder that Galactica’s visual effects looked so familiar; “very derivative,” as Johnston puts it. Lucas and Fox agreed. On December 8th 1977, lawyers for Twentieth Century Fox, at Lucas’ behest, sent a letter to Universal’s parent company, MCA, asking them to halt production of Galactica on the basis of copyright infringement. “We all felt that Battlestar was a rip-off of Star Wars,” explained Lucas’ close collaborator Howard Kazanjian, who would go on to produce Return of the Jedi. “We immediately sued Universal because not only were they copying Star Wars, they were using ILM’s equipment.” Commented Lucas, “There’s a line between just doing something similar and doing something that is trying to copy it directly, especially when you move it to a different medium. People felt like Battlestar Galactica was a television version of Star Wars,” he added. “Not only does it upset me because I didn’t think the quality was very good, but also because, if I wanted to do a TV series of Star Wars, I couldn’t.”

MCA-Universal responded by counter-suing Fox, claiming numerous points of similarity between Star Wars and its own 1973 film, Silent Running, as well as the Buck Rogers serial of the 1930s. Larson, meanwhile, vehemently denied any wrongdoing. “Battlestar Galactica is quite different, when it comes to who are characters and what our story is,” he said at the time. “If you were trying to compare Shane to Gunfight At The OK Corral, you'd say, ‘Yes, they're both Westerns,’ but I doubt if you'd find many parallels beyond that.” Nevertheless, Fox’s lawsuit cited 83 points of similarity between Galactica and Star Wars. “One of the points was the battle scenes, the ship to ship gunnery,” says sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle, who was drafted in as an expert witness for the defence. “On that one, even Lucas said he drew much of that from 12 O’Clock High.” Even Edlund, who acknowledged Galactica’s debt to Star Wars, felt the lawsuit was unwarranted. “Glen Larson didn't shy away from plagiarism,” he admits. “He ‘borrowed’ wherever he could, as did George Lucas: C-3PO is a dead ringer for Maria in Metropolis.”

Undeterred by Lucas’ legal action, production continued under the supervision of director Richard A Colla, a veteran of McCloud and other Larson series.

. “Battlestar Galactica was a huge production,” recalls Richard ‘Apollo’ Hatch. “Shot on 35mm, with basically one camera and filmed almost like a movie. Unfortunately, we had little time to rehearse due to the size and challenges of filming a theatrical style movie for television. We ended up filming sixteen hour days, almost seven days a week, to make our airing dates.” With just days to go before the pilot wrapped, the pressure on set reached critical mass, leading to the abrupt departure of original director Richard A Colla. “Glen, I guess, felt that he needed more control than he had,” Colla explains. “I felt that many of the suggestions he made did not seem to be properly in keeping with what we were doing, and I guess I was vocal enough to tell him so. I told him he was an ungrateful bastard, because everybody was working so hard to pull his ass out of the fire, and now he's in there pretending like he's the one who has all the ideas.”

Colla’s replacement, Alan J Levi, was another TV veteran, having directed episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man, The Gemini Man and The Incredible Hulk. “Glen wanted to have me not only complete the original schedule,” he explains, “but undertake a large number of reshoots of scenes, which Colla had shot, but which he was unhappy with. I shot the remaining fifteen days of the original schedule, and an additional nine days of ‘reshoots’. bringing my total to 24 days of filming – slightly fewer than Richard’s 25.” No wonder Levi was aggrieved when the co-director credit Larson had promised him failed to materialise. “Glen accused me of ‘jumping ship’ and deserting him, after I went off to direct a miniseries for Universal,” he says. “He was so angry he refused to support my dual director credit with the Directors’ Guild of America, and therefore the DGA awarded the credit solely to Richard Colla. I never forgave Glen for that.” Levi did, however, get his revenge, as part of a baseball team fielded by Universal, which beat a 20th Century Fox team coached by one Glen A Larson. “The first time we played each other, we beat the hell out of his team,” laughs Levi. “I walked up to Glen after the game with a big smile on my face and just shook his hand.”

As filming continued at a staggering $1 million per episode, Universal decided to recoup some of its huge investment by re-cutting the pilot and releasing it at cinemas in Canada and parts of Europe, including the UK. Although Larson was unhappy with this turn of events, feeling that the show’s production schedule was being hurt by the demands of the big screen, audiences hungry for more Star Wars-style sci-fi action were delighted: within two minutes, a fanfare-like orchestral theme, and lengthy opening shot of a gigantic spaceship, put them firmly in mind of their favourite film. Nor did the similarities end there: the space battles kicked familiar-looking ass, Colonial Vipers looked as much like X-Wing clones as the Apollo and Starbuck were stand-ins for Skywalker and Solo, and the shiny silver Cylons were arguably even cooler and definitely scarier than stormtroopers – even if their ‘Imperious Leader’ was voiced by cuddly Avengers star Patrick Macnee. For little kids, furry robot ‘Muffet II‘ looked like the lovechild of R2-D2 and Chewbacca; while for older boys, Larson had the decency not to tape down the breasts of his leading lady, British beauty Jane Seymour. Small wonder that Battlestar Galactica became the biggest film of 1979 in some territories, even spawning a sequel, Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack, cobbled together from three more TV episodes, and released in cinemas later the same year.

Battlestar Galactica made its US TV debut in September 1978, with a staggering 65 million Americans tuning in for its three-hour debut. (It would not reach British TV screens until September 1980, by which time The Empire Strikes Back was busy cleaning up in UK cinemas.) Its small-screen success was short-lived, however, lasting a single season before Universal pulled the plug on its cripplingly expensive show in favour of a much cheaper sci-fi spectacle: Mork and Mindy. “It was frustrating that the networks and studios never realised what they had, or how a series that was only on for one year could reach and touch so many generations of people from all walks of life,” says Hatch. “The core story is about more than Starbuck or Apollo saving the day, or Adama’s courage and strength leading the fleet on an impossible journey, or how important family or the extended family of mankind is. It’s compelling, to me, because it relates to all of us, no matter what our age or background and challenges all of us to look into the mirror and see how honest we can be about what we would do in the same situation. What are we made of, can we forgive our frailties, would we be able to fall over and over again and still get up, and survive the impossible. If we lost our world, and were cast into space, we all would be tested in ways we cannot imagine and the question is would we survive?” Hatch wasn’t the only one disappointed: in 1979, a 15-year-old native of St Paul, Minnesota, killed himself upon learning his favourite show had been cancelled. A few months later, however, the show briefly returned to the screen in a new incarnation, Galactica 1980, set on Earth in the (cheap to film) present day. By then, however, The Empire Strikes Back had revived Star Wars mania, and Galactica 1980 lasted barely half a season before it, too, was summarily terminated.

Meanwhile, the Lucas vs Larson lawsuit rumbled on, with US District Judge Irving Hill finally throwing out Fox’s copyright-infingement case on August 22nd 1980. Seven months later, MCA-Universal’s counter-suit was thrown out – although in early 1983, the US Court of Appeals ruled that “the films do in fact raise genuine issues of material fact as to whether only the Star Wars idea or the expression of that idea was copied.” On November 18th of that year, with Return of the Jedi in cinemas and Galactica already consigned to the annals of sci-fi history, an Agreement for Settlement of Lawsuit and Release forced MCA to pay Fox $225,000 – barely enough to cover five years’ worth of legal fees in its protracted battle against Larson.

Little was heard of Battlestar Galactica until 1999, when Richard Hatch financed and produced a trailer for a brand new series, tentatively titled The Second Coming. “Sequels to many earlier hit series were being made all through the nineties, and it never made sense to me that Universal was not taking advantage of a series that not only garnered one of the largest audiences in sci-fi history in ’78-’79, but had become an icon in the sci-fi universe.” After several meetings with Universal executives, he recalls, “it became quite apparent that they were not supportive bringing back a series they claimed only lasted one year and therefore could not have much current fan support.” Despite this setback, Universal went on to produce a brand new series, beginning in 2003, under the stewardship of Star Trek: First Contact screenwriter Ronald D Moore and “consulting producer” Glen A Larson – who, in truth, had nothing to do with its reincarnation. The reboot was a critical and commercial success, lasting six seasons, and spawning two made-for-TV movies, Razor and The Plan, a (short-lived) spin-off series, Caprica, and some healthy DVD sales.

Rumours persist that a brand new feature film, unconnected to the recent TV reboot, may be released in 2012. “A new Battlestar Galactica movie, based on the original series from ’78, is in the planning stages,” confirms Hatch, who played a small role in the TV revival and hopes to secure a part in Singer’s version. “Glen Larson is writing it, with Bryan Singer directing. As far as I know it will not include any of the original actors,” he adds, “but will follow the original mythology and backstory of the original.”

Whatever the future holds for Battlestar Galactica, it has certainly outgrown its origins as a Star Wars knock-off, however well-meaning. Besides, Dennis Muren admits to having learned more doing Galactica than he did on Star Wars. “It wasn’t until Star Wars was over and I was working on Galactica that I fully appreciated the power of motion control,” he says. “It was something I could never have done on Star Wars, because the pace was just too fast. There, we got the elements together and followed George’s vision, kept our fingers crossed, and either it worked or it didn’t. But on Galactica, we got the opportunity to design shots ourselves and try different things – perspectives and graphic exchanges of objects coming toward you, and going away from you simultaneously. I brought that [knowledge] into The Empire Strikes Back.” Edlund notes that the effects required for a Galactica episode entitled “Gun on Ice Planet Zero” proved particularly useful when it came to shoot scenes in the Star Wars sequel set on Hoth. “We came up with some pretty neat ideas [for that episode] which bore fruit on The Empire Strikes Back,” he says. “[So] even though Galactica was a rip-off of Star Wars in many ways, it didn't hurt Star Wars that much.”

Michael Caine: The Elephant to Hollywood

2011-01-27T06:43:00.000-08:00

When the actor formerly known as Maurice Micklewhite wrote his first autobiography, What’s It All About?, in 1992, he thought his career was over. The star at the epicentre of the swinging sixties was by then in his sixties, and iconic roles in films like Alfie, The Italian Job and Get Carter were decades behind: ahead lay made-for-TV movies, Blue Ice, and a single hit, A Muppet Christmas Carol, in which he ceded top billing to a frog made of felt. Caine, the self-styled “best actor from The Elephant and Castle”, retired quietly to the Surrey countryside, celebrated his 25th wedding anniversary, and prepared for his latest role: as a grandfather. Then came his second Oscar, for The Cider House Rules. A knighthood. A series of commercial and/or critical hits (Miss Congeniality, Austin Powers in Goldmember, The Quiet American). And, just after his 70th birthday, a plum role in Batman Begins. Forty years after Alfie, a new generation would come to know Sir Michael Caine as Batman’s batman, Alfred.

Rather than picking up where What’s It All About? left off, Caine’s new volume re-tells his entire story, from conception to Inception, describing with easygoing charm, how he survived poverty, rickets, the Blitz, the Korean War, malaria, the Swinging Sixties, the Hollywood threshing machine, his friend Terence Stamp turning him into the old bill – and Jaws: The Revenge. Despite Caine’s reputation with the “birds”, he’s much too coyly gentlemanly to kiss and tell, but there is no shortage of star-studded anecdotes – enough to make you wish his editor hadn’t trimmed his manuscript from 1,000 to just over 400 pages. Along the way, south London’s finest shares his favourite films and recipes, offers cookery and gardening tips, and concludes by revealing what it’s really all about: not fame and fortune, but family.

Lacking the literary ambition of a David Niven or a Terence Stamp, Caine’s style is more like a fireside chat, his oft-imitated Cockneyish tones ringing out so strongly from his anecdote-packed autobiography, there’s no need to download the audio version.

The Mechanic (review of the 1972 original)

2011-01-27T06:40:00.000-08:00

Before Death Wish, British director Michael Winner and Charles Bronson collaborated on this effective slow-burner about a hitman with the unlikely name of Arthur, who grows a conscience – and adopts a young protégé (a pre-Airwolf Jan Michael Vincent) after being contracted to kill an old friend (Keenan Wynn). Bronson is an engaging, likable presence, and the film boasts a fairly classic old-timer/rookie relationship, with lots of ersatz wisdom imparted about killers, licensed and unlicensed. The action is surprisingly assured from a director better known for the hackwork of his later films – even if he’s a bit too free with the ‘crash zoom’ – and the film boasts a memorably quirky attempted-suicide scene, and a killer double-whammy of an ending. Rent it before you see the remake with The Stath – it won’t spoil it.

The Mechanic (Empire review)

2011-01-27T05:19:00.000-08:00

A remake of Michael Winner’s 1972 slow-burner, about a hitman who grows a conscience after being contracted to kill a friend, seems a logical step for The Stath, whose perma-frown is a natural successor to Bronson’s inscrutable screen persona – even if Simon ‘Con Air’ West’s take doesn’t have the guts to open with fifteen dialogue-free minutes. The action is a long time coming, and even then it’s pretty tame fare after the adrenaline rush of Crank. But with Ben Foster in the role of protégé (played in the original by future Airwolf star Jan Michael Vincent), a classy supporting turn from a wheelchair-bound Donald Sutherland, and some inspired plot twists, it’s a cut above the Eurotrashy Transporter sequels, and may offer Britain’s most surprising export since Cheryl Cole a promising new franchise.

Alpha and Omega (Empire review)

2010-10-31T07:18:00.000-07:00

Fifteen years after Toy Story, computer animation arguably reaches its omega with this derivative tale of two wolves kept apart by their pack’s rigid class system. Long is a likeable presence (he has previously voiced Alvin the chipmunk), but he and the rest of the cast are at the mercy of low-grade animation, helpfully blurred for its faux-3D incarnation, and a hopeless script – the poster tagline (‘Pack man’, with a picture of a wolf) is emblematic of the weakness of the writing. Very young children may forgive the flaws and enjoy the adventure, but frankly they’d be better off renting Balto. A howling disappointment.

Quadromanholidayphenia 2

2010-09-03T06:28:00.001-07:00

Quadromanholidayphenia 1

2010-09-03T06:25:00.000-07:00

Why There's (Almost) No Such Thing As A Bad Movie

2010-08-23T06:48:00.001-07:00

There’s an old joke about an Irish guy judging an ice skating contest, and who gives every single contestant a 10, or whatever the highest score is in an ice skating contest. And after the contest, the other judges ask him why he gives everyone a 10. And the Irish guy says, “It’s very slippy out there.” That’s how I am about movies. As a film critic of twenty years standing, I am generally well disposed towards films. That’s not to say I give every film a good review; it just makes me look for the good in films, like the curate in the famous cartoon who’s told his egg is rotten, only to respond, “Parts of it are excellent.”

So is there good to be found in every film? No. Some films are rotten to the core. Some, for sure, have no redeeming qualities. But the fact that I can’t think, off the top of my head, of a single film with no intrinsic value whatsoever speaks volumes about my general feeling towards to the medium. Does that make me an untrustworthy reviewer? Perhaps. Some might argue that I could find the silver lining in a mushroom cloud, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. But have you seen the list of credits on even the worst movie you’ve ever seen? Did five hundred or more people set out to make a bad movie? Did those tiny names on the credits conspire to waste two hours of your time, rubbing their hands with glee at the notion that thousands of suckers would be paying some cinema chain ten or even twenty bucks to watch a new low in so-called entertainment? Of course not. Nobody, at least nobody I’ve ever heard of, sets out to make a bad movie. You just don’t.

These days, making any movie it all is a miracle. It’s a trillion to one shot. Let’s do the math: for every thousand guys with an idea for a movie, one will actually start writing a script. (That’s a thousand to one, right there.) For every thousand guys (or girls, but let’s face it, 99% of screenplays are written by people with genitals on the outside of their bodies) who start a script, one will finish one. (That’s already a million to one.) For every thousand guys who finish a script, only one will get it read by someone with the power to get a movie made. (We’re already up to a billion to one, math fans, and we’re not even at a green light.) For every thousand scripts that get in front of a guy – or girl, but let’s face it, 99% of the people with the power to green light a script pee standing up – only one gets made. And while that doesn’t make every film that makes it from studio green light to the light of an actual projector not qute a trillion-to-one shot, one thousand billion to one is about as near to a trillion to one as makes no odds, so forgive me if I greet every film ever made with the same open-mindedness I greet every human being I’ve ever met: that being, ‘Hi, so what’s your deal? What have you got to offer the world? What did you set out to be? What do you have to say that no one’s ever said before? What is your purpose? In what way do you plan to enrich the world?’ Yes, I’m talking to you, Transformers 3.

Of course, just as there are irredeemable people, so there are irredeemable films. But I won’t judge either on hearsay. I’ll approach each with an open mind, an open heart, and a basic want to like. I want them to enrich my world, to offer me new insights, to teach me something new, even if it’s – as shallow as this may be – how to deal with snakes on a plane, or what might happen if the world is overrun by giant transforming robots, or if – god forbid – piranhas kill in 3D. I refuse to believe that, no matter how many “what if there was a talking dog?” studio executives throw their ridiculous opinions into the mix, there is no merit in even the worst film. Even bad films can teach us something, even if it’s just how to make better films.

That’s the reason I plan someday to write a book approaching the world’s most reputedly bad films with a completely open mind – step forward Battlefield Eart, Showgirls, Gigli, Pearl Harbor – with the self-righteous, sanctimonious and probably thoroughly misguided belief that there is merit in even the worst film; that, like that famously optimistic – or at least diplomatic – cleric, that parts of even the most rotten film may be excellent. In the meantime, I hope you’ll forgive my tendency, even when it seems absurd, or even disingenuous, to like films which appear to almost everyone else to have no redeeming features. Because, after ten years spent juggling screenwriting and film criticism, I can tell you, without fear of contradiction, one truth I have learned along the way: It’s slippy out there.

From my Archives (March 2007): Interview with Anthony Minghella

2010-08-08T15:10:00.000-07:00

Like many great films, Breaking and Entering is not an easy film to categorize. Set in present-day London, it stars Jude Law as an architect whose office is broken into, an event which draws him into an unexpected, passionate and forbidden affair that threatens to wreck the lives of everyone around him. Written and directed by Oscar winner Anthony Minghella, it’s a far cry from the lavish period settings of his previous films, including The Talented Mr Ripley, Cold Mountain and The English Patient, for which he won the Best Director Oscar. Yet Breaking and Entering has two elements in common with those previous films. Firstly, it has an exceptional cast – in this case Law, Oscar winner Juliette Binoche, Robin Wright Penn, Martin Freeman and Ray Winstone. Secondly, it has an extraordinarily strong sense of time and place – which, here, just happens to be London in the 21st century. And finally, like Minghella’s previous films, it’s actually about something. But what?

Anthony Minghella: I had an idea about fifteen years ago just after Truly Madly Deeply, about a couple who come back from a dinner party to find their house had been burgled, but instead of things being taken, they had been added, and the elements that had been added was kind of indicative of the problems in their relationship. I liked the idea very much and I couldn’t find any way of articulating it beyond the first couple of scenes. And while I was shooting Cold Mountain we were moving into an office in London, which became the victim of a series of petty crimes, break-ins, and so on, and it reminded me of this idea I’d had a long time earlier and from that grew the idea of a film.

DH: The burglary is really just the jumping-off point, though, for a story about people desperately trying to communicate somehow. All of the characters seem to have barriers between them, be they emotional, or linguistic, or cultural.

Anthony Minghella: Yes, and it’s full of things that intrigue me, not least because I’m from an immigrant family and I’m intrigued by the issue of migration and how it works in London, and how many languages and cultures and values co-exist -- all that seemed to be such fertile ground for exploration in the film. And I was fascinated by the fact that there were so many different kinds of life experience in the same corner of London, you could meet people whose language, values, belief systems, and experiences are diametrically opposed to each other, there’s absolutely no consensus whatsoever except a kind of tacit agreement except to leave people alone as much as possible. And it’s bizarre, and unnatural, and curious. You get ghettos be they social, tribal, philosophical, and so on… and everybody gravitates to them and stays there. So although you can celebrate the number of languages spoken, the culture’s fairly monochrome, there are just a lot of different cultures discreetly organized in the same road. And i wanted to try and look at that using the metaphor of a burglary, because that is the most common way in which two cultures collide, somebody taking something from somebody else, and having more than somebody else.

DH: As a film maker, you’ve become best known for book adaptations. How did it feel to be working on your first original screenplay since Truly Madly Deeply?

Anthony Minghella: I didn’t ever intend to be an adaptor of novels, I began as a playwright and always assumed I would write my own idas, but it didn’t work out that way. So after Cold Mountain I was very anxious to see what it might be like to write a story that I might see unfold out of the back window of my house, and not have this dislocation between my life and filmmaking. And I also wanted to make a film in London, a city I love, and a film that was about something. So writing it was a real pleasure. And I was shooting in London, on a much smaller scale than something like Cold Mountain, where there were often a thousand or fifteen hundred people on the set! I loved every day of shooting on the film. It was very loose, it felt very simple, in a way that I hadn’t experienced for many years, that sense of a genuine independent spirit. It’s very hard when you’re spending 80 or 90 million dollars to change your mind too many times, or not be conscious of the weight of the budget on your shoulders, and not make a film that will return the investment of the studio. I felt much more personal in this film, the style of filming is quirkier, and would love to work on that scale again.

DH: Ripley, The English Patient and Cold Mountain were all period films, whereas Breaking and Entering is very much a 21st century story.

Anthony Minghella: Yes, and in period filmmaking you’re very rarely able to look at what’s in front of you, so there’s a much more controlled element. Shooting present day, you’re not having to rearrange the world so much. So we could walk out into London’s King’s Cross and shoot what was there.

DH: Was that hard to do, given that you were working with someone as famous as Jude Law?

Anthony Minghella: It’s always hard to work with very well known actors in a public setting, but England is remarkably cool about celebrity. In fact there’s a sequence we shot on Primrose Hill for which we able to shoot quite an emotional scene between Jude and Juliette Binoche surrounded by people picnicking, who didn’t interfere or trespass into our shot, they were extremely cooperative.

DH: Let’s talk about the cast for a moment. You have Juliet Stevenson from Truly Madly Deeply, Ray Winstone from Cold Mountain, Juliette Binoche from The English Patient, and Jude Law from Ripley and Cold Mountain… It’s like the ‘Anthony Minghella Repertory Players’!

Anthony Minghella: I would like to work with those actors repeatedly. Why wouldn’t you want to work with Juliette Binoche in every movie? It was third time in a row with Jude, and he’d never let me down, and he’d always worked magnificently with me. And he’s a friend of mine, so it’s great to come to work with people you like.

DH: Why is Jude Law so underrated as an actor?

Anthony Minghella: I wish I knew! I remember reading some extremely pejorative piece about Alfie, a kind of rubbishing of his acting based on the fact that he’s so handsome. Because I know him and don’t think of him as anything other than an actor, I’m not quite caught up in how exquisite he is to look at, it seems very perverse to me that should be a way to adjudicate somebody’s work. But the great thing about Jude is that he’s got a great career ahead of him, and I think as his looks becomes less significant part of the package, our interest in him as an actor will rise rather than fall. Certainly Johnny Depp has come into his own now that’s got to a place where he’s a handsome guy rather than a creature of extraordinary beauty.

DH: Given that Breaking and Entering is partly about the clash of cultures and languages, it’s ironic that the film feels like something Pedro Almodovar or Krzysztof Kieslowski could have made.

Anthony Minghella: You’re not the first person to say that. And also, when I was thinking about making the film, I kept thinking about Kieslowski, and I admired his work so much, inevitably I ended up looking at the film as if it were a Kieslowski film because it doesn’t tell its story linearly, and it’s not necessarily biased towards one character -- it tries to forgive everybody. In the English and American cinema it’s very hard to have central characters who have moral shortcomings, whereas some of the European cinema you’re not looking for morally scrupulous protagonists, you’re enjoying their frailty. It’s a film that I’m enormously proud to have made, I love Jude’s work in the film, all the actors’ work, and it’s always frustrating when it doesn’t connect.

DH: Well now that the DVD is coming out, I think the film will really come into its own, as people start to discover it, and realize what an extraordinary piece of work it is.

Anthony Minghella: I hope so. In the last couple of months I’ve been getting an enormous amount of correspondence from people who’ve caught the film and been sympathetic to it, and it’s made me feel that perhaps it’s a movie that will take a little time to find the people who feel the same way about the issues of the film as I do.

Skeletons (Empire review)

2010-07-06T08:28:00.001-07:00

“Absurdist comedy” is a description which rarely inspires confidence, probably because it’s so difficult to get right. In adapting his series of short films, concerning a pair of ‘existential exorcists’ who literally remove the skeletons from their clients’ closets, writer-director Nick Whitfield almost pulls it off, assisted in no small part by his brother Simon’s beautifully integrated, gypsy-flavoured folk music. The leading roles would have suited a well-known TV double act – Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, say; instead, we get Ed Gaughan and Andrew Buckley (Extras’ thick northerner Gobbler), plus a generous supporting turn from Jason Isaacs. Their sympathetic performances lend credibility to the unashamedly out-there subject matter, and if the word “whimsical” doesn’t send you running for the hills, you may find Skeletons as strangely affecting as it is strange.

In the Land of the Free... (Empire Review)

2010-07-02T02:40:00.000-07:00

In this cookie-cutter documentary from Vadim Jean, Samuel L Jackson narrates the story of three prisoners, known as the ‘Angola 3’, who between them have spent almost 100 years in solitary confinement in America’s most notorious prison. The cause may be worthy, but Jean’s focus is blurred: it’s unclear whether he wants to question their original convictions (which, to be fair, have survived multiple appeals), free them on compassionate grounds, or argue that their sentence constitutes what the Bill of Rights calls “cruel and unusual punishment.” Whatever the film’s intentions, one can’t escape the feeling that the issues have been fed into a piece of documentary-making software, and played out with precisely the footage, font, music and tut-tut tone you’d expect.

The Last Song (Empire review)

2010-07-02T02:35:00.000-07:00

The combination of Nicholas Sparks’ ‘misery-lit lite’ and teenaged singer didn’t work too well in A Walk to Remember with Mandy Moore, but he fares adapting his own novel about a rebellious teenager (Cyrus, in a non-singing role) who spends a few months with her estranged father (Kinnear), has a chaste romance with a handsome (and usually shirtless) rich kid (ex-Neighbour Hemsworth), and – guess what? – “was never the same again after that summer.” Teen girls raised on Hannah Montana and Twilight may be blindsided by the film’s sheer ordinariness, not to mention its third-act emotional downturn, but the film is engaging and honest, and its target market will find Cyrus’ inchoate rebelliousness relatable.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Empire review)

2010-07-02T02:33:00.000-07:00

Ava Gardner gives her most magnetic performance as Pandora Reynolds, an American nightclub singer vacationing in 1930s Spain, to whom men swarm like bees to honey, and whose diffidence is easily mistaken for cruelty. Then, into Pandora’s elegantly wasted life sails a mysterious stranger (Mason), whose true identity – there’s a clue in the title – is slowly revealed, along with the grandly mythic premise: if only the death of the woman he loves can secure the doomed mariner’s salvation, is it too high a price to pay? In the hands of celebrated cinematographer Jack Cardiff, Albert Lewin’s deliriously romantic, richly woven tapestry becomes a Technicolor dream, fully deserving of this digitally restored re-release.

Good Hair (Empire review)

2010-07-02T02:18:00.000-07:00

There’s a terrific documentary to be made about the creepy, multi-billion-dollar industry that supplies real human hair, mostly from poor Russians and Indians, for the extensions and weaves worn by millions of women in the West. Sadly, this well-intentioned but weakly-executed effort, fronted by US comic Chris Rock, isn’t it. Rock was inspired to investigate after his five-year-old daughter asked him “How come I don’t have good hair?”, so it’s doubly surprising that his heart doesn’t seem to be in it. Despite dozens of interviews, from celebrity customers to Indian hair donors, Rock fails to pull the rug out from under the hair trade as effectively, or emotively, as singer Jamelia did in her 2008 TV effort Whose Hair Is It Anyway? Good, but not good enough.

Ondine (Empire Review)

2010-04-27T03:25:00.001-07:00

In his best film since The Crying Game, Neil Jordan spins a magical yarn for grown-ups, as trawlerman Syracuse (Farrell) fishes a beautiful, semi-naked stranger (Bachleda) out of his net. Has he rescued a drowning immigrant? Or is she, as his daughter suspects, a ‘selkie’ – a mythical sea creature able to assume form for short periods of time? Leagues away from the Hollywood gloss of Splash, Ondine is funny, whimsical, and as warming as a big bowl of Irish stew. Farrell’s natural accent and roguish charm make for a winning performance, while Polish actress-singer Bachleda is arguably the most beautiful, beguiling newcomer since Nastassja Kinski – and a much better actress. She’s Farrell’s real-life squeeze, but even he couldn’t love her as much as Jordan’s camera.

Cold Souls DVD (Empire Review)

2010-04-27T03:24:00.001-07:00

With a whole generation of screenwriters (and their teachers) working under the influenced of Charlie Kaufman, expect more films like this blackly comic, post-modern parable. Actor ‘Paul Giamatti’ (Paul Giamatti), struggling with emotional baggage, puts his soul in temporary cold storage, only to have it sold to a Russian ‘soul trader’, who implanted it in his actress wife in a bid to improve her acting. Giamatti is terrific, as ever, and if writer-director Sophie Barthes’ grasp exceeds her reach in her feature debut, it establishes her as a talent to watch.

In the Land of the Free... (Empire Review)

2010-04-27T03:23:00.000-07:00

Humpday DVD Review

2010-04-27T03:22:00.002-07:00

They must be running out of ideas for films. Indie darling Lynn Shelton’s latest lo-fi feature asks that age-old question, what happens when two best friends – both straight men, one of them married – decide to have sex with each other for an art project? And what will the married one’s wife think of it all? Sadly, with 90 minutes of foreplay and precious little payoff, Shelton fails to answer the more pertinent question: who will give a crap, when her film is wholly disingenuous, and dull as dishwater?

The Last Song (Empire Review)

2010-04-27T03:22:00.001-07:00

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Empire Review)

2010-04-27T03:20:00.000-07:00

Movie Mash-Up #2: Soylent Green Zone

2010-03-25T04:09:00.000-07:00

Movie Mash-Up #1: Marley & Me & Cujo

2010-03-17T08:46:00.000-07:00

The Time I... Wrote for Hello! Magazine

2010-03-17T08:37:00.000-07:00

Jennifer's Body Blu-ray review

2010-02-04T03:09:00.000-08:00

A high school horror flick from the Oscar-winning writer of Juno, starring the hottest (or hyped-est) so-called star in the universe (Megan Fox), and the girl-next-door from Mamma Mia! (Amanda Seyfried)? You have to admit, it looked good on paper. Sadly, it looked terrible in cinemas, and continues to suck ass in its extended DVD and Blu-ray afterlife. It’s an everyday story of girl eats boy as Seyfried suspects that her BFF, high school hottie Jennifer (Fox), is “evil, not just high school evil, actually evil.” Cody shoots for a horror twist on Heathers, but director Karyn Kusama (Girlfight) seems unsure whether to play it for laughs or shocks, and ends up getting neither. Like Juno, the dialogue is overwritten and peppered with pseudo-cool, wannabe-catchphrases, but an unironic line about Phil Collins being “seminal” is just... wrong. Jennifer’s Body? Jennifer’s shoddy more like.

EXTRAS: Judging by Cody’s post-flop comments in her column for Entertainment Weekly, her commentary would have been a lot of fun. Instead, we get 13 minutes of deleted scenes (five of which are already included in the extended cut), a digital copy, plus a Blu-ray exclusive gag reel only the crew would find amusing.

Talking Pictures with Lance and David Episode 1: The Road

2010-01-22T17:43:00.000-08:00

From my Archives: An Evening with Jon Stewart (live event review, 5th December 2005)

2010-01-18T02:14:00.001-08:00

An Evening with Jon Stewart
Prince Edward Theatre, Sunday

"Tonight the part of Mary Poppins will be played by a Jewish guy reading from a book," announces Jon Stewart, the improbably handsome host of Comedy Central / CNN-syndicated news satire The Daily Show, prior to taking the stage for a one-off London show. In Mary Poppins, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down: Stewart's take is that a healthy dose of satire helps to balance the mixture of polemic and propaganda which constitutes the vast majority of America's news output.

Tonight, Stewart and two of the show's co-writers have occupied the Prince Edward theatre to push Stewart's humorous hardcover America (The Book), and the likes of Salman Rushdie, Richard Dreyfus, Alan Rickman and Armando Ianucci have come to hear him. No doubt, they are expecting the kind of cosy political satire for which The Daily Show is renowned among America's liberal left wing, and his first joke -- something about making torture more palatable by renaming it 'freedom tickling' -- gets us off to a good start.

Unfortunately, it's mostly downhill from there as Stewart and his co-writers read aloud from a book which, it appears, almost all of the audience has already read. At the end of the 90-minute show's first half, Stewart brings on special guest Ricky Gervais, whose unscheduled appearance brings the house down. "I didn't get that kind of welcome and I flew 5,000 miles," Stewart complains testily, noting that Gervais "only walked from the Groucho Club," approximately 25 metres from the theatre. "I didn't walk," ad-libs Gervais with a sneer, winning the evening's biggest laugh. No wonder Stewart rushes Gervais off stage barely two minutes later.

Stewart throws the second half of the show over to an audience Q&A session, which proves an unwise decision: Stewart's background is in television writing rather than stand-up comedy, and his lame retorts to anything but the blandest questions show that his particular brand of comedy is the kind honed around tables filled with coffee and snacks, not in smoky clubs in front of hecklers and drunks. Equally unwise is the decision to respond to every criticism of American culture with a different spin on "Yeah, well, you Brits aren't much better." Even when the jokes hit home, they do so less like smart bombs than scattershot weapons aimed at soft targets. Overall, it's a deeply unsatisfying evening, especially for anyone expecting the kind of socially-conscious comedy for which two comics often spoken of in the same breath, Mark Thomas and Bill Maher, are lauded. Tonight, Stewart seems to be going so far out of his way not to offend anyone, it no longer seems like he's trying to win David Letterman's seat on The Late Show. It's more like he's running for government.

Tales from the Script: Exorcist: The Beginning

2010-01-02T10:54:00.000-08:00

As an experienced journalist and author, but only a fledgling screenwriter, I leapt at the opportunity to go in and pitch to the head of development at Morgan Creek, the company behind numerous good films, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The executive in question had read of of my scripts: an action-comedy about two teenagers who have to drive the world’s most valuable sports car, a 1962 250 GTO, 2,400 miles across America in 24 hours. To my surprise, this apparently qualified me to rewrite a prequel to one of the most respected, successful, controversial and genuinely terrifying horror films in history: The Exorcist.
At that time, Morgan Creek was wondering what to do with writer-director Paul Schrader’s Exorcist: The Beginning, which dealt with Father Merrin’s first encounter with evil. On paper, it had looked good: Schrader had written Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ, and directed several well-received films, notably Affliction. His script for the Exorcist prequel, set in the 1940s, sees Merrin fighting personal demons in Africa -- including a rejection of his faith brought on by a Nazi atrocity in which he was forced to participate -- when archaeologists unearth a long-buried Satanic church, unleashing the Devil, or a close relation. So far, so good. Best of all, Schrader had cast Stellan Skarsgard, a dead ringer for the original film’s Max Von Sydow, in the lead.
The trouble, according to the studio, was that Schrader had delivered a film with one major flaw which, while problematic for a regular horror film, was disastrous for an Exorcist movie: It wasn’t scary. What could be done? Well, they reasoned, Paul Schrader could be fired, for a start. (Check.) Director Renny Harlin -- best known for Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger, and whose contribution to the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise had its moments -- could be drafted in to direct re-shoots which would hopefully ‘bring the scary’. (Check.) You could then bring in an untried screenwriter with no experience of horror films except a lifelong obsession with them -- yours truly. (Check.) What they needed, they said, was a whole new ending -- and maybe a few small scenes to sprinkle throughout the film to crank up the fear. I sat down and began to read...
Roughly fifty pages into the hundred page script, the fear set in. Pages turned with increasing speed. Nails were bitten down. Sweat broke out on my forehead. Not because it was scary -- although, if directed and edited properly, it should have been -- but because it was good. What were they thinking, I wondered? How was I supposed to fix something that wasn’t broken? Then -- thank God -- I got to page 75, at which point the story fell apart so quickly it was as though the script had been passed through a shredder. Schrader had dropped the ball -- proving, yet again, that the best writers in the world are rubbish when it comes to endings. I immediately knew what to do. How to fix it. How to save it. How to, in essence, cast out its demons -- whatever had possessed Schrader to ruin his own film. By way of research, I rented The Exorcist (exceptional), Exorcist II: The Heretic (excrement) and Exorcist III (excellent), watched them back to back, and sat down to write my notes.
The script had posited the idea that the demonic church had been built in Derati, Africa, on the spot where Lucifer himself was rumoured to have landed when he was cast out of heaven. My idea was to take this a step further -- to have it not only the location of the Devil’s descent, but of his mortal remains: the bones of the very Devil himself! Not only would this explain the various manifestations and possessions which were occurring as the church was excavated, but would also tie in nicely to the prologue of The Exorcist, in which Merrin’s face grows ashen as he looks at a small idol carved in the image of the demon Pazuzu. We could, I suggested, add a line of dialogue explaining the African tradition (of my own devising) by which certain tribes carve idols from one of the bones of their dead, in order to keep the spirit of a lost love one closer to the tribe, setting up the idea that one of the Devil’s bones has been carved into an idol.
This would also serve to create a more powerful ending: in order to defeat the Devil, who has possessed Merrin’s lover, Sarah, he must not only regain his faith (as in Schrader’s draft), but also give Lucifer’s bones a proper Christian burial. This becomes the key element of the film’s climax, and puts Merrin firmly in the driving seat: not only must he perform an exorcism on Sarah while she is possessed, he must also perform a burial ceremony to consecrate the Devil’s mortal remains. Except, of course, that one of the bones is missing... This could, I reasoned, be discovered as he begins the burial ceremony, setting up a new ending whereby the Devil’s skeleton -- complete with vestigial tail bones and, of course, skeletal wings like those of a bat -- comes temporarily back to life, re-animating and screaming hideously as it first grows flesh and muscle and leathery skin -- and is ultimately destroyed, crumbling to dust as Merrin performs the last rites upon it. When the Devil’s bones are re-animated, Merrin will realise that there is a bone missing -- and we can presume he spent the next 24 years (between the events of Exorcist: The Beginning and The Exorcist) searching for the missing bone, which has been carved into the form of an idol. I knew the new ending would be expensive. But I also knew that Renny Harlin was looking for a kick-ass climax with plenty of action and special effects. What could be more climactic than a final showdown between Father Merrin and the Devil himself? But I also had a coup de theatre up my sleeve: a nifty coda which would serve to undercut the relatively “happy” ending.
After the putative ending, I suggested, we would fade to black for a few moments... but then fade up to an African dawn, much like the beginning of both The Exorcist and Exorcist: The Beginning. The audience would assume they were still in the past -- until a Hummer pulls into shot, stopping in the middle of what has now become an oil field. A big oil company man -- a Joe Don Baker type, I casually suggested, in a ten gallon hat -- gets out of the giant car, mad as hell because the drilling has been shut down. The oil man is told that this has occurred because workers have made a find of great archaeological and religious significance -- a church dating back to the 6th century, possibly older (as per the events of the film thus far). He curses, spits, and says, “Here we go again” -- presumably a reference to other occasions when his company’s oil exploration has been frustrated by one thing or another. But the audience would also know that the drilling has probably disturbed the Devil’s remains, and that the next sequel in the series will be set in the present day. Exorcist: the Next Generation anyone?
I had the weekend to work out the details: my follow-up meeting was on Monday morning. I pitched my notes to the same executive, who showed much enthusiasm for my ideas, thanked me for my efforts, and told me she would pass the ideas on to Mr Harlin. Although he, or they, ultimately passed on my ideas, they liked them enough to invite me to pitch on other projects, one of which was a supernatural thriller in the Exorcist vein. It was another year before Exorcist: The Beginning hit cinemas, shortly before the surprising announcement that Warner Bros would make the unprecedented move of releasing both versions of the film -- Schrader’s and Harlin’s -- to DVD simultaneously. Whether or not any of my ideas made it to the film -- or if they would have improved either version if they had -- I couldn’t say.
I still can’t bring myself to watch either of them.

Candy Blu-ray Review

2010-01-02T08:46:00.001-08:00

Further proof of the late Heath Ledger’s acting prowess comes with an unfussy Blu-ray transfer of this little-seen post-Brokeback gem from his native Australia, in which Ledger and fellow Aussie Abbie Cornish play lovers addicted to each other and heroin, not necessarily in that order. Candy is Cornish’s film, however – and some inevitable drug movie clichés aside, this is a heartbreaking wonder from Down Under.

EXTRAS: Press kit interviews with Ledger, Cornish and the director, plus an anemic ‘making of’.

Shaun of the Dead / Hot Fuzz Blu-ray Reviews

2010-01-02T08:43:00.001-08:00

Between 1994 and 2004, British comedy films had one thing in common: Richard Curtis. If he didn’t write the hits (Four Weddings, Notting Hill), he rewrote them (Bridget Jones’s Diary). Then, three chums (writer-actor Simon Pegg, writer-director Edgar Wright, and actor-muse-mascot Nick Frost), with a terrific, pop culture-savvy sitcom behind them (Spaced), convinced Working Title to make a “romantic comedy with zombies” or “rom-com-zom”, in which the titular loser (Pegg) strives to keep his relationship going, even as the world ends. Packed with ideas, references and more jokes than you could shake a cricket bat at, Shaun of the Dead was that rare beast: a comedy funny from beginning to end, and a massive hit to boot – as Frost would put it, “fried gold”. It was a hard act to follow, but three years later the trio were back, lampooning the buddy-cop genre in Hot Fuzz. As with its comedy-horror forebear, which was gory and funny enough to satisfy horror fans and comedy crowds, Hot Fuzz had its cake and ate it, combining proper Hollywood-style action with good gags and a Wicker Man-esque quality which was quintessentially English. Such was the care put into the original DVD releases that neither film benefits much from the Blu-ray treatment, although Hot Fuzz’s deliberately Michael Bay-esque third act is enriched by the HD mastering, and the sound makes your ears bleed.

EXTRAS: All of the extras from Shaun of the Dead (deleted and extended bits, TV skits, video diaries, multiple commentaries, pop-up trivia, storyboards, even a ‘zom com’ commentary by the zombies) and Hot Fuzz (not-so-hot deleted scenes, special effects featurettes, video blogs, trivia track, ‘making of’, four commentaries, including one by Wright and Quentin Tarantino) are here, but having them on a single disc hardly merits the upgrade.

Dawn of the Dead Blu-ray Review

2010-01-02T08:41:00.000-08:00

With such films as 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland proving, appropriately, that there’s life in the zombie movie yet, the release of George A Romero’s classic Dawn of the Dead, a sequel of sorts to his seminal Night of the Living Dead, is certainly timely. This cleverly-packaged 3-disc edition, comprising a best-ever Blu-ray transfer and two DVDs, offers three cuts of the film: an HD version of the theatrical release, plus the director’s cut and Dario Argento’s, allowing multiple visions of a horrific alternative future.

EXTRAS: Fold-out poster, several packaging options, a 16-page booklet, the original Document of the Dead featurette, Anchor Bay’s superb feature-length retrospective The Dead Will Walk, commentaries, and other goodies from the Ultimate Edition.

Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life Blu-ray Review

2010-01-02T08:40:00.000-08:00

Frank Capra’s timeless classic, anchored by a winning performance from James Stewart as everyman and unsung hero George Bailey, was designed to remind us why life is worth living, and will continue to do so for generations to come. But much as we might love the film, aren’t film purists supposed to hate the jaundice-faced studio colorization, with its painted-postcard hues? Maybe so, but the side-by-side comparison offered by this two-disc edition proves that the colorized version somehow suits Capra’s fable from a bygone era, when viewed next to the too-black, high contrast black and white version. Either way, the film deserves 5 stars.

EXTRAS: With a trivia track and trailer, it’s hardly a wonderful selection.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Blu-ray Review

2010-01-02T08:39:00.000-08:00

Given the motley colour palette of Mel Stuart’s phantasmagorical screen version of Roald Dahl’s classic tale, adapted by the author with a little help (and a memorable last line) from The Omen creator David Seltzer, you’d hope – even expect – the Blu-ray would hurt your eyes like a Wonka bar hurts your teeth. Alas, this looks like a straight transfer to HD from a standard-def source; hence this timeless, memorable and much-loved movie gets just [3stars]

EXTRAS: Kudos to Warner for including (in standard def) the 30-minute, 30th anniversary documentary from 2001 in which Gene Wilder, Stuart, Seltzer, and the grown-up Wonka kids (who also provide a memory-lane commentary) look back in wonder. Also included: singalong songs, an original 1971 featurette, and trailer.

Gladiator: Special Edition Blu-ray Review

2009-12-31T08:11:00.000-08:00

From The Duellists to Alien, Blade Runner to 1492: Conquest of Paradise, director Ridley Scott has often alternated the historical with the futuristic. But his most successful film, both commercially and critically, came by combining the two, using state-of-the-art special effects to recreate the glory of Rome for this, the first great film of the 21st century, and arguably the best. Now, a few months shy of its 10th birthday, the first Roman epic for thirty-odd years gets the Blu-ray treatment, and if, as Scott has said, high definition should be like looking through a window on a clear day, Gladiator in HD is like looking through a clear window onto the Roman Empire, circa 180 A.D. As with 2005’s 3-Disc Extended Special Edition, the BD includes the original theatrical release (155 mins, and technically the director’s cut) and extended edition (171 mins), which reinstates a few character-based scenes Scott originally left on the cutting room floor.

EXTRAS: You’d think it would be hard to improve upon the plethora of extras on the 3-disc Extended Special Edition, which included multiple ‘making ofs’, a cracking Scott/Crowe commentary, Scott’s inimitable ‘Ridleygrams’, abandoned/deleted sequences, and tons more. For the new edition, the original trivia track has been enhanced with Universal’s patented U-Control feature to access behind-the-scenes featurettes at relevant points, and a ‘topic marker’ allowing viewers to ‘tag’ moments of interest from the film, for further exploration on Disc Two. It’s a shame, however, that instead of padding the colossal 11 hours of extras, no one bothered to re-master the exhaustive, 200-minute ‘making of’ Strength and Honour in high definition. If you already own the 3-disc set, which was mastered in HD and will ‘up-res’ nicely via HDMI, this edition is probably not worth the upgrade. For everyone else, it’s a must buy.

The Big Blue Blu-ray Review

2009-12-31T08:10:00.000-08:00

Like Jerry Lewis, The Big Blue was unfathomably huge in writer-director Luc Besson’s native France; the rest of us may find it resistible – the big bleah. Enzo (Jean Reno) and Jacques (Jean-Marc Barr) are the spiritual brothers whose childhood fascination with the sea grows into an adult obsession, with attempts to break each other’s free-diving records. Jacques’ poorly-dubbed girlfriend (Rosanna Arquette) looks on helplessly as Jacques sleeps with the fishes – and not in a mafia kind of way. That said, the film’s many fans will be delighted at the shimmering spectacle of the haute definition transfer of both the original (132 mins) and extended editions (168 mins).

EXTRAS: Optimum dredges up the original feature-length ‘making of’, but the scratchy print looks like it’s been under water for the past two decades.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Diamond Edition Blu-ray Review

2009-12-31T08:06:00.000-08:00

Given the enormous success of America’s first animated feature, it’s hard to imagine that during its three-and-a-half-year development, the press dubbed it “Disney’s folly.” Despite the popularity of the studio’s cartoons featuring animals and fantasy characters, from Mickey Mouse to Donald Duck and Goofy, few believed audiences could be persuaded to sit through a feature-length animation, much less one with a human at its heart. Walt Disney himself was sceptical of his animators’ ability to render lifelike humans, choosing to employ the ‘Rotoscope’ technique, in which animators painted over live action footage of the human actors. Walt’s belief in the medium of animation to convey credible human emotions was unshakable, however, and his faith was rewarded when Snow White became a huge international success, the first true blockbuster of the sound age, and the first in colour – and, in terms of pioneering techniques, influence and the elevation of a medium into an art form, arguably animation’s Birth of a Nation.
Now, a decade and a half after Snow White’s first digital restoration, Walt Disney’s ground-breaking labour of love has been given an extraordinary new high-definition makeover, with colours richer than ever before, and an equally stunning, digitally restored 7.1 soundtrack. (For those watching in widescreen, there’s even an optional ‘DisneyView’ feature, by which painted panels fill in the black bars at the sides of the 4:3 image – it sounds awful, but works surprisingly well.) Every frame of its 86-minute running time pops with never-before-seen colour and detail, thanks to a restoration that somehow manages to both preserve and enhance its original brilliance. At the ripe age of 73, Snow White remains the fairest of them all.

EXTRAS: Anticipating the film’s 75th anniversary, the Diamond Edition is a 3-disc set comprising two Blu-rays packed with bonus material, and a handy DVD copy of the film, presumably for the kids’ room. Some of the extras, neatly guided by the magic mirror, are also aimed squarely at the kids: a brand new music video of “Some Day My Prince Will Come” by Sonny With A Chance’s Tiffany Thornton, a karaoke version of “Heigh Ho”, and several remote control-driven games. A more thorough exploration of the history and legacy of Snow White is provided by a series of enjoyable mini-featurettes covering such diverse topics as the history of Disney’s original Hyperion Studios, the actors behind the characters (including an archival interview with Snow White herself, Adriana Caseloti), a ‘what if?’ look at Snow White Returns, a newly-discovered putative sequel to Snow White, two lengthy deleted scenes rendered in original drawings with the original soundtrack in place, and Disney Through the Decades, a fascinating 40-minute documentary, hosted by an assortment of famous faces, establishing Snow White’s place in the studio’s history. Finally, there’s a cleverly-crafted audio commentary, intercutting scene-setting and fact-finding from animation historian John Canemaker with crystal-clear archival interviews with Uncle Walt himself. The entire enterprise exudes a love not just for Snow White, but for animation as an art form. If this is a sign of things to come from The Walt Disney Company under the stewardship of Pixar’s John Lasseter, it bodes extremely well for future releases.

2009-12-31T07:59:00.000-08:00

With the exception of Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s plays don’t translate terribly well to the screen, and Ed Zwick’s adaptation of Sexual Perversity in Chicago succeeds best when it departs from the text – incredibly, most of the best dialogue isn’t Mamet’s. St Elmo’s Fire alumni Rob Lowe and Demi Moore are joined by Jim Belushi and Elizabeth Perkins for an examination of the sex lives of Chicagoans in the ‘80s, built around a one night stand that turns into a relationship… and then turns sour. Sadly, Sony continues its habit of putting out substandard transfers in hi-def: the print may be clean, but there’s altogether too much grain.

EXTRAS: The original ‘making of’ featurette is complemented by a brand new, two-camera nostalgia-fest in which Zwick and Rob Lowe spend forty minutes reminiscing about About Last Night...

Good Night, And Good Luck Blu-ray Review

2009-12-31T07:57:00.001-08:00

Renaissance man George Clooney directs, co-writes, co-produces and co-stars in this surprisingly gripping look at legendary TV anchorman Edward R Murrow’s face-off with Communist-hating US Senator Joseph McCarthy. Shooting in glorious black and white, all the more ravishing in HD, Clooney paints a vivid picture of a 1950s TV studio, while drawing subtle parallels with a more recent challenge to civil liberties: substituting ‘Iraq war dissenter’ for ‘Communist’ crystallizes the film’s relevance. David Strathairn leads a superb ensemble cast, with Altmanesque overlapping dialogue and a pleasingly improvised feel giving the film the urgency of, appropriately, live television.

EXTRAS: There’s nothing new for the BD, but a 15-minute standard-def documentary about the real-life Murrow and amiable, self-effacing commentary by Clooney and co-writer/producer Grant Heslov prove to be more than adequate.

Let The Right One In (Lat Den Ratte Komma In) Blu-ray Review

2009-12-31T07:51:00.000-08:00

It’s hard to imagine a film surviving the kind of effusive praise lavished upon Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of John Avijde Lindqvist’s novel about a lonely pre-teen boy’s encounter with a young, ostensibly female vampire. It’s equally difficult to think of a film adaptation which so skilfully transcends its source material, whilst appearing more faithful than it actually is. (No Country for Old Men comes to mind).
A combination of marketing and reputation would have you believe that Let The Right One In is a horror film, and it certainly delivers its share of sophisticated chills. Yet the film’s most haunting aspect is arguably the tendresse of a pre-pubescent love story whose innocence is contrasted with the everyday horror of a vampire’s unholy existence. The young leads, Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson, make for compelling hosts, both for their unique physical characteristics, and their precocious acting skills: trained actors with decades more screen experience could learn from their uncanny ability to act with their entire bodies, right down to their fingertips and eyelashes.
High definition is a gift to Hoyte Van Hoytema’s exquisite cinematography, each shot of which as breathtaking as the last. You may well find yourself playing it on a loop with the sound turned down, just to appreciate its beauty.

EXTRAS: The English dub and iffy subtitles from the US Blu-ray are (mercifully) absent, but the DVD extras are all here: four brief deleted scenes, a photo gallery (artful enough to display in an actual gallery), and an English-language commentary by Alfredson and Ajvide, the tone of which is set by its opening salvo: “We tried to create the sound of snow falling, which was quite complicated because snow doesn’t make any sound when it falls, but inside your head it has a sound.”

St. Elmo's Fire Blu-ray Review

2009-08-07T04:09:00.000-07:00

You’ve graduated from college. Now what? That’s the question Joel Schumacher poses in this ramshackle, curiously sexless confection which, with an ‘80s teen dream of a cast – the original ‘Brat pack’, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Mare Winningham – feels like an unauthorized sequel to The Breakfast Club. Three decades on, it still contains a few truths about love, marriage, work and other traumas of early adulthood, and the ‘80s gloss and sheen is gloriously amplified in a winning HD transfer.

EXTRAS: Schumacher is on winning form in a commentary and retrospective interview sorely missing the cast members. Also included: deleted scenes, and the video for one of the best title songs ever, John Parr’s Man in Motion. The guiltiest of pleasures.

Highlander: Special Edition Blu-ray Review

2009-08-07T04:04:00.000-07:00

The Highlander franchise remains one of the more bizarre film phenomena, with numerous sequels and spin-offs lending it an appropriate level of near-immortality. This, the highly entertaining original features squinty-eyed Chistopher Lambert as one of a dwindling number of immortals, being hunted down by a barbarous scenery-chewer named Kurgan (Clancy Brown) – unless Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez (Sean Connery on enjoyably goofy form) can help it. An instant cult favourite, mostly among the kind of people who read books with maps in the front and dragons in the title, it gave way to a sequel – from the same director, Russell Mulcahy – so calamitously hamfisted it almost killed the franchise with a single blow. Like the immortals themselves, however, the series survived, spawning three further sequels and/or prequels – in such eon-spanning narratives, it can be difficult to tell – two television spin-offs, an animated series, novels, comic books and more. So much for “there can be only one.” Despite this remarkable display of endurance, Highlander’s official merchandise – ceremonial swords, sold “for display purposes only” – continues to generate more revenue than all its screen incarnations put together.

Perhaps the scales will tip in the film franchise’s favour now that the original Highlander has been reissued in a suitably Iron Age steel tin, with an immaculate transfer head and shoulders above earlier editions. Although Mulcahy’s visuals reveal his music video background, he never loses sight of the emotional content. Thus, Highlander’s mythic power endures: two decades on, it’s still a kind of magic.

EXTRAS: Not quite the prize it might have been, the special edition nonetheless provides a gathering of deleted scenes (in HD), retrospective interviews with Lambert (subtitled) and co-star Roxanne Hart, Mulcahy commentary, and mini-featurettes exploring the gestation of the script and the film’s production design.

Children of Men Blu-ray Review

2009-08-07T03:56:00.000-07:00

Britain in the year 2027 is hell on earth: with childbirth a thing of the past, and state-sanctioned ‘suicide kits’ all the rage, the human race seems doomed to extinction, unless a former activist (Clive Owen) can protect a young woman carrying the world’s only unborn child. This early HD-DVD release, now reissued on Blu-ray, flatters Alfonso Cuaron’s gripping adaptation of PD James’ dystopian thriller with a crisp transfer which preserves the grit and grime of the theatrical release. An On the Beach for our times, it looks increasingly destined to be a future classic.

EXTRAS: The copious extras from the HD-DVD and standard-def DVDs – intelligent behind-the-scenes documentaries, Slavoj Zizek essay, deleted scenes, Cuaron commentary, Owen and Moore interviews, and more – are all included, along with a picture-in-picture feature offering a multiplicity of possibilities.

The Time I... Got My Portrait Painted

2009-07-18T14:10:00.001-07:00

Midnight Express Blu-ray review

2009-07-09T04:49:00.000-07:00

The mostly-true story of William Hayes’ arrest and incarceration in a Turkish prison for drug smuggling makes for riveting drama, thanks largely to a young Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning script, Alan Parker’s assured direction, and a gutsy, heartfelt and entirely raw performance by the late Brad Davis. Despite Giorgio Moroder’s dated electronic score (which won the film’s other Oscar), it remains as powerful today as it was 30 years ago, with a crisp HD transfer which highlights Parker’s extraordinary visual sense.

EXTRAS: There’s no fancy editing, but the hour of mostly new, largely HD interviews – with Parker, Stone, John Hurt, producers Peter Guber, David Putnam and Alan Marshall, and Hayes himself – provide a book’s worth of anecdotal behind-the-scenes material, from story concept to smash hit release, rendering Parker’s audio commentary virtually redundant.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day Skynet Edition Blu-ray review

2009-07-09T04:48:00.002-07:00

A vast improvement over the previous ‘vanilla’ Blu-ray in terms of both picture and sound (6.1 DTS-HD), James Cameron’s sequel to his 1984 hit remains one of the all-time great action movies. Theatrical and extended versions are included.

EXTRAS: All of the extras from fully-loaded standard-def editions – commentaries by Cameron and 23 other cast and crew members, storyboards, deleted scenes, and much more – are crammed onto the single disc, viewable in every possible combination, and all in glorious HD. Master the complex menu system, and you can access picture-in-picture facilities with script pages, storyboards, commentaries and a superbly detailed trivia track, all at the same time: a multi-media overload which this brilliantly-conceived, masterfully executed, exceptionally intelligent blockbuster richly deserves. An essential buy – no matter how many previous versions you own.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Blu-ray review

2009-07-09T04:48:00.001-07:00

Yuen Wu Ping’s impressive choreography and wire work, some deftly-applied CG, and Peter Pau’s luminous cinematography proved an Oscar-winning, box-office conquering combination for Ang Lee’s hugely successful homage to Asian cinema, vividly realized in Blu-ray. At its heart, it’s a corny, cliché-ridden chopsocky flick for the masses, and it hasn’t aged well. Nevertheless, Lee and his remarkable cast – including Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh and the breathtaking Ziyi Zhang – elevate the material almost to the level of high (martial) art.

EXTRAS: The 20-minute ‘making of’ is no match for the thorough, and thoroughly entertaining commentary from Lee and writer-producer James Schamus, which is both informative and surprisingly funny. Other extras from the standard-def edition – a 14-minute Michelle Yeoh interview and photo-montage – are also included, along with an English dubbed version, handy for the kids.

Tell No One Blu-ray review

2009-07-09T04:47:00.003-07:00

A message purporting to be from Dr Alex Beck’s wife, who’s been missing for eight years, sets in motion a heart-pounding chain of events in Guillaume Canet’s assured adaptation of Harlan Coben’s bestseller. It’s arguably the best French thriller since Wages of Fear, and every bead of sweat is vividly captured in an equally impressive HD transfer.

EXTRAS: There’s a plethora of quality bonus material not found on the standard-def edition – a quirky hour-long ‘making of’ documentary, half an hour’s worth of deleted/extended scenes, out-takes, gag reel, brief interviews with Canet and Kristin Scott Thomas, plus Canet’s amuse-bouche short, I Can’t Sleep – so it’s a pity none of it is presented in HD. Also included: a couple of so-called ‘easter eggs’, helpfully labelled as such on the main menu.

The Silence of the Lambs Blu-ray review

2009-07-09T04:47:00.001-07:00

After a decade notable for its dearth of decent horror films, few could have expected a film as intentionally horrifying as Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’ bestseller to win the Best Picture Oscar, let alone become only the second film to win all five major awards, including Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay – not to mention becoming a worldwide smash hit, the most successful horror film of all time. Two decades, one sequel and two prequels along the line, Demme’s film retains its thrilling power, although Anthony Hopkins, on deliciously hammy form as Hannibal ‘The Cannibal’ Lecter, seems as likely to munch on the scenery as human organs. Although the print is an improvement over the duff DVD releases, Blu-ray is not especially kind to the film, yet none of its shortcomings diminish a remarkable, ground-breaking and supremely influential film, with one of the greatest screen villains in history.

EXTRAS: Although the Criterion Collection maintains its monopoly on its Demme/Foster/Hopkins audio commentary, this edition arguably betters it with an in-picture commentary featuring those three plus, among others, screenwriter Ted Tally, Scott Glenn (Jack Crawford) and Anthony Heald, who was unforgettably creepy Frederick Chilton. Among the best of the additional ‘making of’ material is ‘Inside the Labyrinth’, an hour-long 10th anniversary special which includes such revelations as the fact that the film was originally set to star Michelle Pfeiffer and Gene Hackman. Also included: the original 1991 ‘making of’, a somewhat tacky 40-minute ‘Page to Screen’ featurette covering the book’s screen adaptation, an Anthony Hopkins answerphone message, featurettes covering Howard Shore’s music score, an HD documentary about serial killers and the men who hunt them, a few comedy outtakes, and a rag-bag of deleted scenes, including an entire subplot in which Clarice Starling and Jack Crawford are suspended from duty.

Sin City: 2-Disc Re-Cut & Extended Edition Blu-ray review

2009-07-09T04:45:00.001-07:00

Robert Rodriguez’s virtuoso adaptation of Frank Miller’s dark-as-balls graphic novels is what Blu-ray was made for, and here you get the theatrical and the more satisfying extended/re-cut edition (in real terms, 7 minutes longer) which presents the stories as individual episodes.

EXTRAS: All bonus content from the standard-def edition are here, including commentaries by Rodriguez, Miller and ‘guest director’ Quentin Tarantino, a dozen featurettes, Rodriguez’s 15-Minute Film School and 10-Minute Cooking School, a live performance by Bruce Willis’ band (in HD) and extraordinary ‘all green screen’ version (the entire film without the effects). Plus a couple of Blu-ray exclusives: a picture-in-picture feature combining Rodriguez/Miller commentary, comic book panels and green screen effects, and a fun interactive comic book based on Kill ‘Em Good (the Mickey Rourke chapter). A must buy.

Fargo Blu-ray review

2009-07-09T04:44:00.002-07:00

The Coen brothers’ blackly comic yarn about a crime gone wrong, cheekily presented as a true story, feels like a dry run for No Country for Old Men. Frances McDormand won a Best Actress Oscar as the pregnant police chief on the trail of hapless kidnappers in snowbound Minnesota, but fellow nominee William H Macy and the rest of the cast are equally laudable, and the Oscar-winning script may be the Coens’ finest. And does Roger Deakins’ Oscar-nominated cinematography look “a hundert per cent” in HD? You betcha.

EXTRAS: The Coen brothers interview and Tim Bevan/Eric Fellner commentary from the standard-def Special Edition are mysteriously missing, but, heck, everything else is here: Deakins’ commentary, 30-minute retrospective ‘making of’, American Cinematography article, photo gallery, trailer and TV spots.

Star Trek: The Original Series, Season 1 Blu-ray review

2009-07-09T04:44:00.001-07:00

Boldly go where only HD-DVD has gone before, and see how it all really began, as all 29 first series episodes of ‘classic Trek’ get an extreme makeover. Picture and sound are re-engineered to near-perfection (you can actually see the Vaseline smeared on the camera on female close-ups), while special effects get a subtle, well-judged CG upgrade. Original versions with unenhanced effects and mono soundtracks are also included.

EXTRAS: The 8-disc set comes packed with more features than a tricorder, including new interactive data files on classic episodes such as “The Menagerie” and “Balance of Terror”, an Enterprise tour, home movies, featurettes, back stories, and a guide to the digital enhancements made for the series’ HD debut. Sure, it’s expensive: but this is God’s gift to Trekkers.

The Da Vinci Code: Extended Cut Blu-ray review

2009-07-09T04:43:00.001-07:00

If you like the film of the global bestseller – and few did – you’ll love the UK debut of the 174-minute extended cyt, which is 26 minutes longer, better paced than the original, but still talky almost to the point of inertia, like a radio play with pictures. It’s a darn good yarn, to be sure, though some unexpected blur on the HD transfer is surprising from such a key release on Sony’s own patented format.

EXTRAS: Director Ron Howard’s scene-specific commentary is largely concerned with locations and logistics. Happily, the picture-in-picture interactive commentary is, however, suitably exhaustive, and the 2-disc set includes all 17 behind-the-scenes featurettes from the standard-def edition (included Audrey Tatou’s screen test with Tom Hanks), plus an early scene from Angels and Demons.

Quantum of Solace Blu-ray review

2009-07-09T04:42:00.000-07:00

After Casino Royale’s all time high, it was perhaps inevitable that Daniel Craig’s second mission as 007 would be a disappointment – not that its shortcomings affected its box office takings. This time, the film seemed derivative of the Bourne films, rather than (positively) influenced by them, and one began to wish Marc Forster had spent as much time on the story as he did on the storyboards. Picture-wise, it’s everything you’d expect, but depending on your home cinema set-up, the stylized sound mix doesn’t necessarily translate. And what’s with that price tag?

EXTRAS: Even the bonus material – standard ‘making of’ featurettes, plus the Jack White/Alicia Keys music video – feel like an afterthought; although the film is less deserving of it, expect an extras-rich, Casino Royale-style Deluxe Edition some time next year.

Angels & Demons

2009-05-19T10:28:00.001-07:00

Set in a fictional Italy where everyone speaks English and the carabinieri are co-operative, Ron Howard's follow-up to Frost/Nixon - call it Angels/Demons - stars Tom Hanks' older, jowlier brother as Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor whose expertise in symbology is such that he can decipher the washing instructions on a top from Zara. The Pope is dead, and before you can say – or see - "Holy smoke", a member of the Illuminati has committed the cardinal sin of planting an anti-matter bomb in the Vatican. Never mind that "illuminati" means "enlightened ones" - it sounds enough like "eliminate-ee" to cast suspicions on the ancient sect. Langdon, a character so one-dimensional he would only appear two-dimensional in 3D, is on the case, accompanied, as in The Da Vinci Code, by a raven-haired Euro-hottie (Nigella Lawson), a scientist specialising in particle colliders and loose plot strands. Sample dialogue: "The illuminati symbol was the all-seeing eye in a triangle, the perfect Pythagorean structure. And what else is triangular? Pyramids...Toblerones...and Dairylea! It can only mean one thing: this story is pure cheese!" Yes, Professor Langdon, and before you are suffocated by your own sense of self-importance, that triangle/inverted triangle symbol you see is not a pentagram, it's the five-pointed pentangle of a one-star review.

Empire Blu-ray Special: War & Western

2009-04-22T06:52:00.000-07:00

How the West Was Won
The early 1950s saw the advent of a new cinema format, a gift for those for whom 70mm projection just wasn’t wide enough. The IMAX of its time, Cinerama was based on what seemed like a crackpot theory: what if you filmed something with stuck three cameras side by side, then laterally spliced the film together, to create one super-wide image? Remarkably, it worked, resulting in such landscape-scoped epic films like The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, World… and this epic western. John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, James Stewart and Debbie Reynolds were among the big screen stars roped in by the three larger-than-life directors (John Ford, George Marshall and Henry Hathaway) to tell the rabble-rousing tale of American pioneers in the old West. One might think that a film format designed to make standard cinema look like TV would translate poorly to the small screen, but one look at the Blu-ray proves otherwise. The film has undergone a full digital restoration, and the once-visible joins between the three film strips have been digitally erased, resulting not only in a flawless print, but the best possible demonstration of the film’s panoramic splendour. (A second version of the film, presented in a witty wrap-around format, arguably gives an even truer representation of the Cinerama experience, but you have to sit dangerously close to the screen.)
An equally wide variety of extras – commentaries, documentaries, interviews, and more – cover the making of the film and the story of Cinerama itself. For those not yet convinced that Blu-ray is the format of the future, this is how the argument will be won.

300
Before tilting at Watchmen, Zak Snyder turned Frank Miller’s graphic novel, about the Spartans who fought Xerxes’ Persians at the battle of Thermopylae, into such a rich visual feast, your eyes will be full for a week. Blu-ray delivers the deliberate grain and unique colour palette with relish, and the extras reveal some of the secrets behind the film.

Black Hawk Down
A gorgeous grain effect enhances the grittiness of Ridley Scott’s superbly cast and expertly staged story, which puts you in the middle of a disastrous US Army operation in Somalia in 1993. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer joins Scott for a commentary, and there’s another with US special forces veterans, plus making of material. Dynamite.

Band of Brothers
Steven Spielberg followed Saving Private Ryan with this Emmy and Golden Glove-winning television event, based on the true WWII exploits of the US Paratroopers’ legendary ‘Easy Company. The six discs, packaged in a cool tin box, offer ten hours of unforgettable drama in shimmering hi-def, and a kit bag full of in-depth extras. Unmissable.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Brad Pitt, as the turn of the century train robber, and Casey Affleck, the young James Gang member doomed to kill him, are equally impressive in Kiwi director Andrew Dominik’s elegaic, affecting exploration of celebrity and destiny. On Blu-ray, however, it’s Roger Deakins’ breathtaking photography you’ll return to again and again.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Aussie director Peter Weir embellished an already fascinating body of work with this adaptation of Patrick O’Brien’s seafaring Napoleonic novels, with Russell Crowe on fine form. In HD, the battle scenes are shipshape, and the attention to historical detail clearly borders on the obsessive. The extras show how the whole endeavour was launched.

The Proposition
Here’s another Blu-ray wonder from Down Under: John Hillcoat’s gut-wrenching tale, scripted by Nick Cave, of a British lawman (Ray Winstone) determined to capture a psychotic outlaw (Danny Huston). The brutality of the times is matched only by the harshness of the landscape, superbly captured by Benoit Delhomme’s iridescent cinematography.

Unforgiven
Deadwood fans will appreciate this revisionist Western, in which a retired gunslinger, long since sworn off violence, is forced to leave his family and take up arms once again. Clint Eastwood won his first Best Director Oscar, but the performances, not to mention the cinematography, make this a must buy Blu-ray.

Full Metal Jacket
The director’s cut of this ambitious sequel to Pitch Black, which introduced Vin Diesel as amoral anti-hero Riddick, is one of those films that Blu-ray’s startling visual clarity helps to elevate beyond its reputation. The extras are equally impressive, and with a new Riddick video game in the shops, it’s essential re-viewing.

Empire Blu-ray Special: Sci-Fi

2009-04-22T06:49:00.000-07:00

2001: A Space Odyssey
Unless you happen to have your own private screening room in which to watch Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus in 70mm, the astonishing Special Edition Blu-ray is the best possible way to experience it. From opening overture to mystifying climax, 2001: A Space Odyssey represents a magnificent achievement, lauded for its stunning effects, and renowned for the stunning effect it has on those seeing it for the first time. Setting out, in the early ‘60s, to make “the proverbial good science fiction film” and “a film of mythic grandeur”, Kubrick and his visionary collaborator, science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke, achieved both goals with a complex, confounding film, undiminished by repeat viewings, and as likely to inspire future cosmologists as filmmakers. (Of the latter, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron are among those interviewed for the bonus material.) The making of the film, extensively detailed in several hi-def documentaries created exclusively for this edition, took place as the drama of the space race was unfolding for real. Yet the tiny black-and-white televisions most people had in their living rooms in 1968 could not do justice to the space experience. Kubrick’s film could – and did. As Spielberg said, “He took you into space for the first time.” Back then, the year 2001 must have seemed as impossibly distant as Jupiter; that it has come and gone without diminishing the power of A Space Odyssey is a testament to the film’s enduring profundity and mysticism. Forty years on, it continues to provoke wonder and awe, and will surely continue to do so, for as long as cinema, or the human race, exists.

The Omega Man
Decades before Will Smith filmed Richard Matheson’s 1954 novella under its original title, I Am Legend, Charlton Heston followed Vincent Price’s turn as The Last Man on Earth with this cracking post-apocalyptic vampire thriller from 1971, lovingly restored in all its widescreen glory.

Men in Black
Barry Sonnenfeld’s successful meld of sci-fi and comedy has enough sight gags, memorable characters and witty dialogue to make up for a dearth of plot – and it’s never looked better. A dizzying array of extras includes the Will Smith music video and ‘silhouette commentary’ with Sonnenfeld and Tommy Lee Jones.

Starship Troopers
Paul Verhoeven’s bloody and brilliantly subversive adaptation of Robert A Heinlein’s satirical sci-fi novel, about human cannon fodder fighting alien bugs, gets a stunning transfer, highlighting the superb effects and absurdly attractive cast. Would you like to know more? Then check out the effects-minded ‘making of’ featurettes which add to the fun.

Planet of the Apes
Forget Tim Burton’s egregious “re-imagining” and get your stinkin’ paws on this superbly detailed hi-def transfer of the first, and best, of the five original Apes movies currently available on Blu-ray. It still packs a punch, both visually and thematically, and it’s crammed with all the extras from earlier editions, plus some impressive HD exclusives.

Sunshine
Ironically, it was unseasonably fine weather that killed Danny Boyle’s moody, melancholy meld of 2001, Alien and Solaris. It’s a pity, too, because it’s one of the most visually stunning films the UK has ever produced. With the success of Slumdog Millionaire, it’s ripe for rea-assessment – especially with the immaculate picture and sound on this Blu-ray.

Dark City: Director’s Cut
Fully-realized alternative worlds are one of the things science fiction film does best, and I, Robot director Alex Proyas’ sinister sleeping city, clearly a major Matrix influence, is one of the finest. The Blu-ray boasts an exquisite transfer of the theatrical and director’s cuts, plus commentaries, feature-length retrospective ‘making of’ and much more.

The Chronicles of Riddick
The director’s cut of this ambitious sequel to Pitch Black, which introduced Vin Diesel as amoral anti-hero Riddick, is one of those films that Blu-ray’s startling visual clarity helps to elevate beyond its reputation. The extras are equally impressive, and with a new Riddick video game in the shops, it’s essential re-viewing.

The X-Men Trilogy
With X-Men Origins: Wolverine in cinemas, there’s no better time to experience Bryan Singer’s extraordinary adaptation of the Marvel Comics favourite: viewed as a trilogy, even with Brett Ratner taking the reins for The Last Stand, it stands beside any comic book series for excitement. Razor sharp extras and exceptionally detailed extras.

Empire Blu-ray Special: Horror

2009-04-22T06:45:00.000-07:00

John Carpenter’s The Thing
It’s Steven Spielberg’s fault The Thing flopped. He didn’t do it deliberately, of course; it’s just that John Carpenter’s expertly crafted chiller was released barely two weeks after E.T., and the last thing audiences wanted in the summer of 1982 was a horrifying, shape-shifting parasite to sully their newly-minted image of aliens as cuddly, cheeky and childlike. It’s a pity, because The Thing was, and is, a superbly realized sci-fi horror, less a remake of Howard Hawks’ 1951 classic The Thing from Another World, than a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the 1938 short story which inspired them both, John W Campbell Jr’s “Who Goes There?”. A quarter century on, Carpenter’s best film has aged not a jot, largely due to the film’s remote setting – a bunch of grizzled, bearded scientists snowed in at an Antarctic outpost look much the same now as they did in 1982 – but also to Dean Cundey’s crisp photography, a gift to Blu-ray’s sharpness. The talented cinematographer wasn’t the only one working at the top of his game, however: Rob Bottin’s exceptionally accomplished practical effects successfully banished all memory of the frankly silly Thing from Hawks’ version; the script, by Burt Lancaster’s son Bill, made the most of the story’s paranoid possibilities, populating it with an all-male cast of memorable characters, each with a nice line in quotable dialogue; finally, composer Ennio Morricone somehow managed to build an almost unbearable sense of dread through the repetition of a solitary note. ‘Making of’ material is laudably plentiful, but the highlight is undoubtedly the classic commentary from Carpenter and his friend and frequent collaborator Kurt Russell.

The Fly
David Cronenberg’s imaginative remake of an even schlockier ‘50s fusion of sci-fi and horror remains has, improbably, a tragic love story at its heart, as Veronica (Geena Davis) watches in horror as her beloved brainbox Seth (Jeff Goldblum) become a monster. A pristine transfer and exhaustive extras round out a superb package.

Silent Hill
Describing Christophe Gans’ disturbing horror as the best adaptation of a videogame isn’t saying much. A more impressive achievement is that it so perfectly captures the sinister atmosphere, hideous denizens and memorable music of Japan’s classic ‘survival horror’, whilst drawing inspiration from a real-life US ghost town where underground fires burn to this day.

Underworld
Empire critics have been underwhelmed by Len Wiseman’s tale, now a trilogy, about vampires and werewolves at war. But who can resist Kate Beckinsale in leather, Frost/Nixon’s Michael Sheen as a werewolf, and Bill Nighy as a vampire lord? Fans will revel in the blacks and blues of the Blu-ray’s stygian colour palette – and the extensive extras.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula
For the HD release, Francis Ford Coppola fiddled with the colour and grade of his operatic update of the seminal vampire novel, arguably rendering the film even more lavish. Equally opulent are the special features, introduced by Coppola, including commentary, ‘making of’ and 30 minutes of deleted scenes.

The Omen
Reliving the sound and fury of Richard Donner’s 1976 horror classic with this HD transfer should help to expunge the memory of the pitiful 2006 remake. Then you can explore every facet of the anti-christ saga’s birth with exhaustive documentaries, commentaries, an isolated score track, deleted and extended scenes.

The Orphanage (El Orfanato)
The titular children’s refuge provides the perfect setting for J.A. Bayona’s spine-chilling, heartbreaking Spanish ghost story, produced and clearly influenced by the gifted Guillermo del Toro. Cinematographer Oscar Faura’s moody atmospherics are exquisitely captured in hi-def, while the copious extras include UK-based interviews with Bayona and del Toro.

Sweeney Todd
Tim Burton proved to be the perfect fit for a visionary film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s bloody musical, with Johnny Depp as the fabled ‘demon barber of Fleet Street’. A razor-sharp and deliciously dark transfer helps to transform the ridiculous to the sublime, and there are extras aplenty.

The Sixth Sense
Everyone remembers the twist of M Night Shyamalan’s cleverly crafted, justifiably successful ghost story, about a young boy is cursed with the ability to see “dead people”. Subsequent viewings, especially on Blu-ray, offer a reminder of the film’s less showy elements, such as the understated cinematography and quietly affecting performances.

Empire Blu-ray Special: Family

2009-04-22T06:41:00.000-07:00

Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy
Back in 2001, Disney was justifiably nervous about green-lighting the first of these movies, the $140 million adventure-comedy The Curse of the Black Pearl. And no wonder: the last pirate film, Cutthroat Island, had sunk so badly at the box office it took its makers, Carolco, down with it. An earlier film based on a Disneyworld attraction, The Country Bears, also flopped. And director Gore Verbinski… didn’t he make The Mexican? Perhaps a big star could stave off the Pirate curse. But The Lord of the Rings’ Orlando Bloom could barely open a door, much less a movie, Keira Knightley had only been seen trying to Bend it like Beckham, and Johnny Depp, while a highly respected actor, had only had one box office hit (Sleepy Hollow) to his name. Disney needn’t have worried. True to his pirate spirit, Depp stole the entire movie, despite a scenery-scoffing turn from Geoffrey Rush, and the kind of special effects which can only be appreciated on the big screen – or in high definition. The sequel, Dead Man’s Chest, wisely put Depp’s Jack Sparrow front and centre, and upped the effects quotient, for an overlong but undeniably enjoyably high seas yarn which roped in Bill Nighy for a memorable turn as squid-faced sea dog Davy Jones. Disney, Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer threw everything but the galley sink into the third instalment, At World’s End, to reductive effect – but the epic battle at the centre of a gigantic whirlpool known as the maelstrom is one of those Blu-ray showcase moments you’ll want to revisit before Jack Sparrow & Co. return before Part 4 sails into view in 2012.

The Nightmare Before Christmas
Halloween stages a hostile takeover of Christmas in Henry Selick’s stop-motion marvel, drawn from Tim Burton’s macabre and magical imagination. With a deep, dark digital restoration and sackloads of extras, it’s a Blu-ray for life, not just for Christmas.

Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
The first digital toon to hit Blu-ray, the HD transfer Fox’s mammoth sequel was a testament to Blue Sky Studios’ CG craftsmanship, with the fur and hair of Manny, Sid and Scrat as sharp as Diego’s teeth. Extras include the cracking No Time for Nuts short.

Wall*E
Pixar’s melancholy masterpiece, about the lonely life of a clean-up robot left behind on an abandoned Earth, takes CG animation beyond photo-realistic to a kind of hyper-reality which demands to be seen in HD. Adults and kids can spend hours picking through the extras, too.

Pinocchio: Platinum Edition
Disney outdoes itself with this magnificent restoration of the animation studio’s first truly timeless classic, achieving astonishing colour and clarity. Extras abound – and there’s even a bonus copy of the film on DVD, so the kids can watch it in their room.

Planet Earth: The Complete Series
Spanning five discs, nine hours and billions of years, the BBC’s epic nature series narrated by David Attenborough should come as standard with every Blu-ray player. Take a day off work, sit back and start exploring a stunning HD world – your own.

Ratatouille / Pixar Short Films Vol 1
A triumph of subtlety and artistry, Ratatouille (also available separately) has all the right ingredients for another Pixar classic. For a few extra pounds, you can add a baker’s dozen of the studio’s finest short works, from early classics (Lux Jr., Tin Toy) to recent delights (Mater and the Ghostlight).

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
The second outing of Marvel Comics’ favourite family is superior in every way to its cheap and cheerful predecessor, thanks to a bigger budget, superb special effects, a classic Stan Lee storyline – and the HD-friendly Surfer himself. Marvellous!

Speed Racer
Sure, the movie is flawed – but this is a ‘best of Blu-ray’ feature, and few films boast brighter colours, trippier effects or more kinetic action than the Wachowski brothers’ wacky take on the legendary ‘60s anime about a boy (a charmless Emile Hersch) who’s born to race in a neon-lit parallel world.

Empire Blu-ray Special: Drama

2009-04-22T06:39:00.000-07:00

A Clockwork Orange
‘How did they make a film of Lolita?’ teased the posters for Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 adaptation of Nabovov’s most famous novel. A more pertinent question might have been how Kubrick managed to bring Anthony Burgess’ picaresque satire to the screen – and certainly few films can boast, or bemoan, a more troubled history. Disowned by its author, pulled from release at the behest of its director, pilloried by the press, misunderstood by many, and lazily blamed whenever “a couple of nuns get raped in Berwick-upon-Tweed” (Burgess), A Clockwork Orange is now generally viewed as a bravura masterpiece of wild, daring audacity. (Luis Bunuel, no stranger to satirical intent, described as “the only movie about what the modern world really means.”) Having withdrawn the film from British circulation (it was only re-released after his death) following alleged death threats made against his family, even the notoriously pernickerty Kubrick would have been impressed by the extraordinary quality of the hi-def transfer which followed its eventual re-release, in March 2000. It’s astonishing to think that a film can still deliver shock and awe after almost 40 years, but A Clockwork Orange, once cinema’s most tantalising forbidden fruit, continues to pack a considerable, albeit satirical, punch. The fact that the issue at its core – the moral and social repugnance of state-sanctioned criminal rehibilitation by removing free will – is hardly ripped from today’s headlines does nothing to diminish its power, and Malcolm McDowell’s virtuoso performance remains one of the startling tours de force in screen history. McDowell is on similarly playful form in the audio commentary and many other supplemental features, most in HD, provided.

Raging Bull
Martin Scorsese's brutal drama about a boxer, real-life champ Rocky Marciano (Robert De Niro) battling his own demons, is a (mostly) monochromatic masterpiece in high definition, with shockingly crisp picture and sound to match. Equally impressive is the roster of extras, including commentaries from Scorsese, editor Thelma Schoonmaker - and Marciano himself.

Hidden (Caché)
Ridley Scott once said that high definition should be like looking through a clear window, and for all the murkiness of the cryptic narrative about guilt and accountability, Blu-ray gives Michael Haneke’s naturalistic photography a clarity rarely seen in Hollywood films. Extras-wise, a director’s Q&A, while detailed, gives nothing away.

Oldboy
Guilt and accountability are also at the heart of Korean director Park Chan-woo’s adaptation of the popular manga, arguably the greatest revenge (melo)dramas ever filmed. Anchored by an astonishing performance by Choi Min-sik and accompanied by a charming, incongruous score, Oldboy’s considerable visual style is superbly presented on an extras-loaded Blu-ray.

There Will Be Blood
A commanding performance by Daniel Day Lewis, as a black-hearted self-made oil man, towers over this timely, turn-of-the-century tale of an amoral capitalist who sacrifices everything – family, morality, humanity – for success. In Blu-ray however, cinematographer Roger Elswit burns equally brightly, and the score, by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood, is sublime.

The Shawshank Redemption
The period setting helped give Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s prison-set novella a timeless feel, but it has grown in stature over the past fifteen years to achieve the status of a true classic, in every popular vote. Roger Deakins’ work is typically exquisite, his light and colour superbly realized in hi-def.

Apocalypto
The best of the two gratuitously violent films, each in a dead language, made by maverick Mel Gibson, Apocalypto is a breathless, exhilarating chase movie set among the ancient Mayans, with jungle scenes so rich you’d think the living room had come alive. The fascinating behind-the-scenes extras show the mad genius at work, while his considered commentary is a testament to his passion and artistry.

Elegy
A testament to Blu-ray’s power to improve even the most intimate drama, the hi-def transfer of Isobel Coixet’s well-judged adaptation of Philip Roth’s novella brings even greater nuance and depth to the affair between an ageing lothario (Sir Ben Kingsley) and his strikingly beautiful lover (Penelope Cruz).

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
Famously the first film to win Oscars in all five categories, Milos Forman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s counterculture classic has dated little in 35 years, which is a testament either to Blu-ray’s power to refresh, or a lack of progress in the field of mental health care. Commentaries, deleted scenes and ‘making of’ materials are plentiful.

Empire Blu-ray Special: Crime

2009-04-22T06:37:00.000-07:00

The Godfather Trilogy
The inclusion of Part II on a single disc is just one of the reasons why The Coppola Restoration is likely to remain the definitive edition of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestselling crime saga, comprising two undisputed masterpieces and one belated, much maligned threequel. An immaculately conceived, immensely rich and intricately woven tapestry of family, morality, and tragedy of Shakespearean, if not Biblical profundity, The Godfather has arguably deposed Citizen Kane from its status as the greatest American film ever made, and certainly lends itself to endless repeat viewings. The first two films were restored to perfection for their HD debut. Restoration guru Robert A Harris and Coppola himself returning to the original negative to preserve, if not improve upon, the moody lighting and unique colour timing of the theatrical release, proving that Blu-ray can handle subtlety as deftly as clarity. The restoration process is covered in some detail in one of the many new HD features accompanying the copious extras included from earlier editions, including the original Coppola commentaries, ‘making of’ documentaries and deleted scenes. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, William Friedkin and Guillermo Del Toro join Coppola and producer Bob Evans in various supplementary features exploring the film’s difficult origins, troubled production and enduring legacy, showing the influence of American film’s first family of crime on everything from The Sopranos to The Simpsons and South Park. That a film so widely parodied and pillaged can look and feels as fresh today as it did when Nixon was president is yet another testament to Blu-ray’s brilliance.

Bonnie and Clyde
Equally influential – compare the killer couple’s bullet-riddled execution with Sonny’s bloody demise in The Godfather – Arthur Penn’s tragic true-crime caper, which made stars of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, richly deserves this glorious HD makeover, augmented by extras offering an in-depth exploration of the film and its real-life inspiration.

Natural Born Killers
Like Bonnie and Clyde on acid, the collision of Quentin Tarantino’s maverick invention with Oliver Stone’s attention-deficit disorder direction makes for a startling, audacious and absurdly violent grand guignol, presented in a dizzying array of film formats accompanied by an assaulting soundtrack, both of which Blu-ray delivers with relish.

The French Connection
Coppola’s contemporary, William Friedkin, used the hi-def release of his influential cop thriller as an excuse to digitally alter the colour palette, overseeing a gorgeous pastel-hued transfer while preserving the original grain. The extras, including some retro-fitted Blu-ray exclusives hosted by the boyishly enthusiastic septuagenarian, are equally definitive.

Zodiac
As if unsolved murders aren’t chilling enough, David Fincher channels Kubrick as he explores San Francisco’s notorious murder spree of the ‘70s, resulting in a compelling and disturbing anti-thriller. A flawless transfer (of the director’s cut) is augmented by Fincher’s typically exhaustive extras, including a documentary about the real-life Zodiac.

No Country for Old Men
Brilliantly written, masterfully performed and impeccably faithful to the source material: for example, neither the Coen brothers’ ‘80s-set crime thriller nor Cormac McCarthy’s novel have music. Yet it’s Roger Deakins’ luminous lighting that overwhelms on Blu-ray, whilst the absence of music gives the superb sound mix an extra kick.

A History of Violence
The clarity of David Cronenberg’s intellect is matched by the razor-sharp pictures of this morally arresting tale, which has important things to say about the nature of violence, and the possibilities for criminal redemption, while packing a narrative punch. Copious extras include a deleted HD dream sequence. Or should that be nightmare?

The Departed
The only remake to have won a Best Picture Oscar – hey, 2006 was a slow year – Martin Scorsese’s cops-and-robbers thriller demands a prize for sheer entertainment value, and shows how a master director can elevate relatively mundane source material to the near-classic status. A decent transfer is complemented by documentaries and deleted scenes.

Goodfellas
Arguably more deserving of the Best Picture Oscar than The Departed (or, for that matter, Dances With Wolves, which beat Goodfellas), Martin Scorsese’s true-life telling of wannabe gangster Henry Hill’s rise and fall is a tour de force, competently transferred to HD, with three documentaries and two commentaries – including one with Hill himself.

Empire Blu-ray Special: Action

2009-04-22T06:31:00.000-07:00

Casino Royale
The double threat of Austin Powers and Jason Bourne meant that the 40-year-old James Bond franchise needed a serious makeover if it was to survive into the 21st century, a herculean task given to two men: director Martin Campbell, who had helped revive 007 once before, with Goldeneye; and Daniel Craig, seemingly controversial casting for the suave secret agent, which proved to be a master stroke – though the contribution of Academy Award-winning screenwriter Paul Haggis should not be underestimated, for helping Bond regular Neal Purvis and Robert Wade expunge the memory of Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, David Niven et al. in Casino Royale’s 1967 namesake. A truly 21st century Bond called for a suitably forward-looking format, and high definition could hardly have come along at a better time: gritty it may have been, but Casino Royale’s 1080p full HD picture was as sharp as a Savile Row suit, giving Blu-ray its first must-own title. With the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD battle at its bloodiest, one might think the studio behind Blu-ray would use its biggest release as an excuse to showcase the format’s possibilities, especially on such a ground-breaking title. Instead, the content of the initial Blu-ray release – making of docus, newswraps, pop video, etc – was fairly standard fare for a Bond title, although most were presented in high-def. All that was solved by the appearance last year of the 2-disc Deluxe Edition, which polished the picture and sound to perfection, and boasted more additional features than Bond’s Aston Martin, including two Blu-ray exclusives: picture-in-picture commentary and an interactive quiz.

Speed
Jan De Bont’s kinetic action thriller not only perfected the Die Hard formula, it also showed off Blu-ray’s capacity to make older films look new again: thanks to its shiny HD makeover, even this extras-challenged edition made “The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down” feel like a brand new film.

Top Gun
For those with the need for a different kind of speed, Tony Scott’s story of fighter jets fuelled by pure testosterone remains terminally trapped in the ‘80s, a decade of high gloss sadly under-represented by hi-def transfers like this one. The disc comes fully loaded, too, its best feature being a lengthy retrospective documentary.

Iron Man
The other great comic book movie of 2008, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man was more playful, but no less impressive in hi-def, a ray of light to the dark knight’s shade. Extras abound – including The Onion’s unforgettable news item “Wildly Popular Iron Man Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full Length Film.”

Beowulf
Shorn of its third dimension, this imaginative update of the gruesome legend of Beowulf and Grendel – starring Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins and Sean Bea– ahem, Ray Winstone – is a superb showcase for Robert Zemeckis’ favoured style of motion-capture CG animation, and comes with plenty of how-do-they-do-that extras.

Kill Bill 1 & 2
It’s over-priced and woefully light on extras, but the colourful characters and masterful fight choreography of Quentin Tarantino’s indulgent, opulent epic are superbly realized in high definition. From The Bride’s yellow suit to the snowbound battle between Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu, Blu-ray’s impressive colour palette is pushed to the limit.

Mission Impossible 3
Blu-ray gives the perfect excuse to revisit the third and best of Tom Cruise’s action-packed outings as impossible mission specialist Ethan Hunt, with typically impressive stunts and set pieces, a memorable turn by Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, and J.J. Abrams at the helm. Packed with extras, too.

Swordfish
Equally worthy of a second look is this overlooked gem of an action thriller, starring John Travolta and X-Men alumni Hugh Jackman (sans claws) and Halle Barry (sans bikini top). With pin-sharp pictures and Paul Okenfold’s pounding score, Blu-ray gives the film a new lease of life – another of the format’s many gifts.

Transformers
Even if it sometimes looks like a toy ad, few could deny the sheer entertainment value of Michael Bay’s shape-shifting robots, and Shia LaBoeuf neatly humanises the battle. But it’s the spectacular effects you’ll return to on Blu-ray – freeze frame any image, look closely, and you can see a million dollars’ worth of rendering time.

The Dark Knight
With a transfer to die for, six IMAX® scenes preserved in their initial ratio, and copious extras, the bestselling Blu-ray of Christopher Nolan’s dark-as-balls masterpiece defines Batman and the hi-def format, making Burton’s Batman – and even Nicholson’s once-unassailable Joker – look almost as old-fashioned as the camp crusader of the ‘60s.

Spider-Man 3
A silly villain let down the (otherwise excellent) first film, the second part was the best… but Sam Raimi’s kid-friendly, go-for-broke threequel has the eye-grabbing special effects set pieces Blu-ray showcases are made of. It’s mastered to perfection – you can literally see every grain of Sandman – with spectacular sound, and packed with hi-def goodies.

Hancock
Unjustly overlooked on the big screen, yet there’s much to like about Will Smith’s performance as the indestructible yet incorrigable stupor hero – and when it comes to flying sequences, Hancock could give Spidey a run for his money. The bonus material is exhaustive, and there’s a bonus standard-def digital copy thrown in.

Quantum of Solace
Jason Bourne’s influence on Bond was most obvious in Daniel Craig’s back-to-basics second outing as 007, less a stand-alone Bond film than a sequel to Casino Royale (not necessarily a bad thing). Although light on humour (again, not a bad thing), there’s no shortage of action, and the outstanding transfer is to die for.

Wanted
This shamelessly entertaining comic book adaptation is unmistakably the work of Nightwatch director Timur Bekmambetov, and having Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman and James McEvoy for your first Hollywood film is no bad thing. Dazzling special effects, speaker-melting sound and plentiful extras – and a BD-Live feature where you can add your own commentary.

Die Hard
All three sequels have their strong points – and look terrific on Blu-ray – but for most, Bruce Willis’ first outing as wrong-guy-in-the-wrong-place John McClane will always be the favourite. Director John McTiernan’s commentary is fascinating, too – but it’s the HD transfer and DTS sound that will blow you away. Yippee-kay-ay!

First Blood
Whether or not John Rambo’s first outing was ever meant to look this sharp – for some, the gritty and grainier, the better – may be a moot point: no one wants fuzzy action films, and Sylvester Stallone’s decade-defining action flick is also available on standard-def DVD. The best manhunt movie ever made?

Goldfinger
‘Painstaking’ doesn’t begin to describe the restoration and remastering process the Bond films underwent for 2006’s Ultimate Editions, to say little of the abundance of extras on every release. Arguably the best of the older Bonds currently available on Blu-ray, Goldfinger’s pictures are so sharp you’d think the film was set in the ‘60s, rather than made in the ‘60s.

King Kong
Peter Jackson’s epic monster movie remake could have been made to show off Blu-ray’s possibilities. A flawless transfer (check out Kong’s fur!), earthquake-inducing sound (the dinosaur stampede!), and the inclusion of both the theatrical and extended versions of the film (the latter with Jackson’s commentary) make this a must buy.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army
The first Hellboy was cleverly cast, competently made and well-intentioned, but it was with Guillermo del Toro’s ambitious sequel that the world’s weirdest comic book hero really came into his own. Unlike so many blockbusters, the superb special effects serve the story and characters, rather than the other way round, and there are extras galore.

King Kong Blu-ray

2009-04-02T07:55:00.000-07:00

The earlier HD-DVD release of Peter Jackson’s unasked-for Kong remake proved to be a timely showcase for the format’s potential, even if the startling clarity of the transfer, replicated here, betrays the CG origins of some of the effects. As a viewing experience, Jackson’s labour of love is laborious yet lovable, and one could question the need to swell the three hour-plus running time by an extra 14 minutes. It’s too slow, and too long – but for sheer sound and fury, you can’t argue with Kong.

EXTRAS: The paucity of special features – only Jackson’s commentary, a gallery of production art, and picture-in-picture behind-the-scenes material make the leap to the new format – means that fans who already own the 3-disc special edition will want to hang on to it, rather than trade for the upgrade.

Little Miss Sunshine Blu-ray

2009-04-02T07:52:00.000-07:00

Screenwriter Michael Arndt’s Oscar-winning tale of a dysfunctional family, united by a little girl’s dream to compete in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant, is a true original, skilfully directed by first-timers Jonathan Dayton and wife Valerie Palis, and superbly performed by all. It’s also proof that hi-def can bring additional ‘warts and all’ reality to stories already imbued with depth and truth. One can only imagine what Arndt has in store for Toy Story 3.

EXTRAS: Adding to the directors’ commentary and alternative endings from the standard-def edition are numerous welcome Blu-ray exclusives: multiple deleted scenes (with optional directors’ commentary), a new screenwriter’s/directors’ commentary, a music featurette, a behind-the-scenes session with composers Mychael Danna and DeVotchKa, webisodes, single-scene gag reel, ‘making of’, plus featurettes on the characters, cast and music.

Gandhi Blu-ray

2009-04-02T07:48:00.000-07:00

Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-sweeping biopic of Indian spiritual leader Mohandas K Gandhi remains the very definition of ‘timeless classic’, its epic sweep matched only by the controlled explosion of then-unknown Ben Kingsley’s quietly affecting performance as the Mahatma. Given India’s rise from third world country to putative superpower in the quarter century since it was made – to say nothing of the success of Slumdog Millionaire – the film is arguably more relevant than ever, although one might expect more from the hi-def realisation of one of Britain’s last great epics, which remains shamefully grainy in parts.

EXTRAS: A new introduction by the director, an entertaining and informative pictorial fact-track, and Attenborough’s anecdote-laden commentary almost make up for the otherwise unforgivable absence of the tremendous extras from the 2-disc standard-def edition released in 2007.

Brief Encounter Blu-ray

2009-04-02T07:46:00.000-07:00

A chance meeting between two happily married strangers (Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson) leads to love in the fourth, final and finest collaboration between Noel Coward and David Lean. Justly celebrated as one of cinema’s greatest love stories, it may also be the most sublimely, unapologetically British film ever made. The recent restoration is admirably reproduced in high definition, although one could argue that the image has been sharpened a little too much – there are, after all, soft hearts among the stiff upper lips.

EXTRAS: It’s a pity no BFI boffin was brought in to commentate on this glorious slice of post-war cinema; instead, a half-hour retrospective offers a brief encounter with two surviving producers, one supporting cast member, Celia Johnson’s daughter and, oddly, John Sessions. A five-minute featurette on the restoration, however, barely scratches the surface.

Redbelt Blu-ray Review

2009-02-07T17:31:00.001-08:00

Writer-director David Mamet channels his long-time interest in martial arts and fondness for elaborate con games into an unusual contribution to the ‘fight film noir’ genre. Chiwetel Ejiofor, whom Mamet equates to the legendary Henry Fonda, is on scintillating form as an honourable jiu-jitsu instructor whose belief that “there’s always an escape” is tested when he becomes entrapped into fighting in a pay-per-view mixed martial arts competition. For once, Mamet’s reach seems to outdistance his grasp, and a failure to tie up all the loose ends lends an unsatisfying air to the denouement. The cast, however, is uniformly excellent, and typically eclectic – who else but Mamet would assemble Ejiofor, Tim Allen (as an over-the-hill action movie star), Ricky Jay, David Paymer, Emily Mortimer and Joe Mantegna for a martial arts movie – but the standout performance is Robert Elswit’s luminous widescreen cinematography, which is so superbly realised in 1080p, you’ll immediately want to rent everything else he ever shot.

EXTRAS: “In a play you don’t have any pictures, so you only wanna write what the actors say. In a movie, you want to tell the stories in pictures, so you write as little dialogue as possible.” Whether or not he practices what he preaches, it’s always good to hear Mamet exercise his intellectual muscle, as he does here in a lo-fi half-hour Q&A and the kind of commentary which turns any collection of Mamet DVDs into a virtual film school. Also included: a 20-minute ‘making of’, an interview with Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White, and mini-documentaries about the mixed martial arts phenomenon, and Japanese-American magician Cyril Takayama, who plays a small but pivotal part in the film. [The only BD Live feature active at press time was, helpfully, the trailer.]