Reviews

In the vein of so-bad-they're-good movies like The Room and Plan 9 from Outer Space we now have this treat, available on Amazon for free. I'm glad they didn't try charging for it as it would somewhat spoil the joke. IMDb has its budget listed as exactly $1,000 and I don't doubt it. On the plus side, every penny is up there on screen.

Space Boobs from Outer Space is a collection of bizarre short films from Andrew Shearer and his Gonzorrific Productions studio. (By 'studio' I mean 'camcorder.') They are told in the format of a talk show / behind the scenes footage of the main "Space Boobs" segment which is definitely the best produced one. There's at least three different locations, and one actress is wearing a spangly space helmet. Sadly, the budget didn't stretch to ensuring that all the aliens have the same shade of purple hair. I guess they had to make do with whatever Halloween decorations they had lying around.

You'll know from the title if this movie is for you. If you like an anarchic, rule-breaking, slightly porn-like B movie vibe with busty women wobbling around in ridiculous costumes fighting vampires and aliens, then this will be right up your alley. If you thought that Three Billboards was too commercial, then please steer clear. Personally, I enjoyed the heck out of it.

We are currently seeing a vogue for movies about famous sporting rivalries. I think this was kicked off by the excellent Senna (2010), which could have been a fact-of-the-matter biography of Senna but ended up (wisely) focusing on the rivalry between Senna and Prost, which brought an unintended emotional richness to the story. This was followed up by the almost-as-good Rush (2013) which goes back a decade to tell the story of dashing gentlemen racer James Hunt versus the cold, calculating Nikki Lauder. Now, a Swedish-led production effort is telling the story of one of the great tennis matches of all time: four-time champion Bjorn Borg versus the fiery tempered young John McEnroe at the Wimbledon men's final of 1980.

As a strange pre-note: I watched Borg vs McEnroe in a completely empty theatre. Clearly, this movie is not getting the attention it deserves. I think it definitely affected my viewing experience; I was able to completely shut off and see it my own way. Which is good, as this film has a real psychological edge.

In short, it was an excellent movie. Surprisingly so, in fact. It got to the point where I forgot I was watching a film and really seemed to be inside the heads of the two leads, right there with them, through every match, every up, every down, every argument, every triumph. This is quite the achievement for a film based in historical fact that can't take too many liberties with the story.

Within the first couple of scenes, I could tell this was going to be my kind of movie: a real character study. We see a day in the life of global heart-throb mega-star Bjorn Borg, who is beginning to tire of the trappings of fame. I noticed the filmmaking technique of filming Borg in tight, claustrophobic interiors with shadowy men in suits hanging around in the background. It suggests that his life is beyond his control, is being lived for him, and maybe he wants out ... but doesn't know how to do that. All he knows is tennis, and winning.

Enter the young and fiery John McEnroe, who is a major blip on Bjorn 'Ice'-Borg's radar. If Borg was the ABBA of tennis, McEnroe was the Sex Pistols. Known for ranting at umpires and crowds, he had whipped London's easily baited tabloid newspapers into a frenzy, they could smell blood in the water, and as McEnroe battled his way into the final with a combination of luck, talent and verve, a fairytale match (and perhaps a major upset) was being set up.

Borg is unquestionably the main character of this film. I think we get about a 70:30 time share between the title characters. This is something of a shame, as I thought that McEnroe was perhaps the more interesting character. How does a New York wiseguy from a good family and lots of opportunities end up pushing himself into becoming a tennis world No. 1? The movie never really tries to answer this question. It focuses much more on Bjorg's backstory as a trouble kid who was recruited - some might say brainwashed - into channelling all his anger into his tennis. In perhaps the movie's best scene, McEnroe makes the link between them clear, and spots that Bjorg may seem like an iceberg but really he's a volcano waiting to go off.

Shia LeBeouf was an inspired choice to play McEnroe. LeBeouf has always faced fierce criticism of his acting, his suitability for the kind of roles he wins, and has run the tabloid gamut lately with a string of bizarre stories about his life and behaviour. In scenes where McEnroe rants at the press, you feel LeBeouf is really getting something off his chest here. Also excellent is Stellan Skarsgard, who plays a tennis coach with just the right amount of highly questionable morality in pushing youngsters as hard as it takes to produce a champion.

My one criticism of the film was the cheesy title cards, which spell out explicitly what's supposed to be happening in the movie with things like "The rivalry would affect the players for the rest of their lives." Show, don't tell, is the first rule of filmmaking. However, the movie's technical excellence - the tennis sequences were utterly spellbinding - and surprising emotional heft and depth make this a wholehearted "Yes - see it" recommendation from me.

I'm writing this review in the week that Netflix's stock surged by 10% as they beat market predictions, moving away from their 'rent-a- DVD' model to concentrate on original, quality content. Normally, this one would have slipped under my radar, but I saw it was picked up by distribution by Netflix and thought: let's give it a go.

I would describe this movie as being a sort of cross between Clerks and Superbad. It's a day in the life of two low-achieving shelf stackers at a Wholesome Foods (definitely not 'Whole Foods') store somewhere in the urban sprawl of LA. Their goal is to obtain tickets for a sold out concert, and they are not short on schemes to do so: be it ripping off a drug dealer, stealing cash from their boss, counter-ripping off a ticket forging older brother, and so on.

This movie's great strength - its random, weird, unpredictable nature - is also its greatest weakness. When watching any one scene, you have no idea what is going to happen. However, it also means the film struggles to find a consistent tone. Some characters (mostly the freeloading Chris) are very wacky and cartoonish. Others, like the conflicted Chester are more maudlin, and it doesn't work very well together. The movie's best and most consistent performance is without doubt the psychotic drug dealer Jay, played by Chester Tam, who was also the movie's writer and director. Every time he's on screen, he's like a force of nature. I was strangely reminded of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, if he was a 6'5" tattooed Korean.

Oddly, the moments that worked the best were the more dramatic ones. The comedy sort of fell flat in a lot of places, probably due to the aforementioned problem of the film not really having a clear idea of how many feet it wanted to keep in reality. A scene where two guys dodge incoming bullets driving down the freeway in a battered Corvette does not play well with a scene where the same two guys have a serious and frank discussion about where their friendship and lives are going.

In summary, Take The 10 will probably play well for the late-night comedy (read: 'stoner') crowd, but never guns any higher than that. Bonus points for a cameo role from Andy Samberg ('The Lonely Island') who proves he can make just about anything funny.

As if crusades, plagues, famine and mud weren't enough, the poor people of medieval Europe now have to deal with one of sci-fi's most chillingly endearing creations: a near-invisible Rastafarian alien warrior who hunts worthy prey for sport. A posse of knights and warriors is hastily assembled to deal with this menace, but they are going to have to learn to trust each other first. This 30 minute Kickstarter-funded fan film drew me in with its technical excellence, surprised me by packing a sincere and coherent emotional punch, and left me eager to see the movie expanded onto the big screen.

I should probably disclose that I am a huge fan of the first Predator (1987) which I think is one of the best films ever made in terms of its ability to transition seamlessly between genres and take the best parts from each one. It started as a gung-ho action flick, turned unexpectedly into a paranoid, nerve-shredding Vietnam war movie, and ended up as a highly effective sci-fi horror film. Predator 2 (1990) was a worthy addition to the series, although it was noticeably lighter in tone than the first film, and towards the end I felt that it was almost being played for laughs. Alien vs Predator is not worth mentioning. Predators (2010) was better than I had expected, but perhaps suffered from too many new ideas, like having multiple Predator races.

From the first minute through to the last, Dark Ages felt professional through and through. The medieval setting was a good move, and worked well with the limited budget (can you imagine trying to create a futuristic setting with the same money?) It also surprised me by consistently hitting the same emotional notes that the first Predator managed to hit. Camaraderie, brotherhood, fear, horror, and facing one's death with honour.

Using Alan Silvestri's original soundtrack - one of the best and most original scores ever made - as a basis to start composing the music was a very good decision, and helped establish a similar feel to the first Predator.

The movie continues playing to the strengths of the first Predator by creating approximate equivalents to its most memorable characters. Obviously, the main knight, Thomas (Adrian Bouchet) is the Arnie stand-in. More interesting is the Moorish sidekick Sied (Amed Hashimi) who has a difficult job to do as nobody trusts him, but he has vital information about the beast that they are hunting. In this sense, he has to do the jobs of both the characters of Dillon and Anna in the original. Not only that, but as the "new guy" to the team, combined with his diminutive stature and inexperience in combat, he becomes the audience surrogate as well. By the film's conclusion, he's become the unlikely hero. As an actor, Hashimi had a lot to pull off here, and I look forward to seeing him in action again.

Also notable is the elf-like archer Freya (Sabine Crossen) who is a great screen presence with her cold, steely, detached demeanour and a refreshing lack of dependence on male characters to let her kick ass in her own style.

Dark Ages wisely follows the format established by guy-friendly films such as the original Predator and 300 by not wasting time setting up characters with long, complex backstories. Strong, simple characterisations are used, and we can tell a surprising amount about each player by simple things like how they stand, walk and speak. The quality of the film's storyboarding, framing and editing really shines here.

Moving the action to medieval Europe made a surprising amount of sense in the context of a Predator movie. They hunt for sport, after all, they enjoy putting themselves on an equal footing to their quarry to make it a challenge, and it follows that battling foes armed with swords, shields and some rudimentary bows and arrows makes for an entertainingly balanced brawl. The referencing of the various real wars and factions of the medieval era helped to establish the world, and make the characters and their motivations much more realistic.

The action was very well done too. The director and fight choreographers show skill way above what we would expect in terms of helping the audience see who is swinging what at who. And yet it never feels too overly-balletic either, a trap that the later Star Wars and Matrix films fell into.

In conclusion, this was a very entertaining movie in of itself, and also made a coherent and self-evident case that this could easily be developed into a full Hollywood movie. In today's heavily franchise- based world, execs must surely be looking for a way to update the Predator universe, and this could be the best way to do it.

I went to the cinema to see "Chappie", missed the showing, and ended up seeing this instead. This is a surprisingly effective thriller, and deserves to be making more waves than it is. Marketing it as a "Taken" clone was a mistake. Within the first ten minutes I could tell that this was a very different kind of movie indeed. It's closer in tone to the raw, sombre "Out Of The Furnace", which I also saw at the cinema this year, only Run All Night works much better. It admirably blends grittier, more realistic elements - you really felt like you were in cold, rainy, claustrophobic New York urban sprawl - with more stylish, fun elements, with some top notch action scenes and memorable shootouts.

Jimmy Conlon (Liam Neeson) used to be a fearsome Mob hit-man, to the point where the papers called him Jimmy the Gravedigger. Now, he's an alcoholic, washed up joke, who probably would have disappeared off the face of the earth if it were not for the sympathy and friendship of his old boss Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris). When a dispute between their sons turns deadly, battle lines are suddenly drawn. Knowing he is outnumbered and outgunned, this becomes Jimmy's quest to see if he can take a few old demons down with him tonight.

Liam Neeson is very watchable as Jimmy Conlon. I was expecting him to recycle his character from Taken, but the two could not be more different. He makes Conlon believable as a man two steps away from the gutter. Equally, I was expecting Ed Harris to recycle his steely, distanced Mafioso character from "A History Of Violence" but instead he makes Maguire into a charismatic, effortlessly practiced and conceited Mob boss who can genuinely make you believe he is a family man running a legitimate business for the good of the community. And if a few bodies have to end up in cement, no big deal.

Believability is one thing this movie gets right all the way through. Everything that everybody does would feel ridiculous in the hands of less skilled filmmakers, but the script takes a step back to think about things like motivation and avoids plot holes. Action movie clichés are kept to a minimum and everything feels fresh and inventive. The shootout in the apartment block was done especially well - with the camera virtually backed into the drywall, you really felt like you were there, dodging bullets with the characters. It's worth taking a moment to reflect on how far films have changed and evolved since fare like "Cop Land" (1995), which was also a Mob thriller set in New Jersey.

I think I liked Run All Night because it so deftly handled it composition as something between a slick parkour-like action movie, angsty retribution movie, and revenge thriller. Never did I think that the production had let anything slide, or that the big names were phoning it in. The background details were terrific. Apartments felt like real scummy low rent places, not just Hollywood sets. Scenes in bars felt like you could touch the sticky, beery wooden tables. Bad guys didn't wear pastel suits and stylish goatees - they were sweaty brooders in cheap leather jackets, and they felt very intimidating and very very real.

The one minor thing that lets this movie down is the editing. Editing, for my money, is the toughest job in filmmaking. When you've done it right, nobody notices you've done anything at all. When you do it wrong, scenes can feel choppy and disjointed, like they were clearly different takes. Especially in the family scenes, I just wanted to grab the guy and say "slow down. We don't need six cuts here in three seconds."

In summary, Run All Night was an unexpected surprise and well worth a viewing. I will be following the career of director Jaume Collet-Serra, who I think has at least one truly great movie in him.

Let me preface this by stating that I am a big Christopher Nolan fan. Following the success of his "Dark Knight" trilogy, plus standalone movies "Inception" and "The Prestige", we have something of a one-man franchise. Warner Bros signed off on the biggest pre-approved budget in movie history to make "Interstellar" without even seeing a script.

Going into the movie, I knew that with this kind of creative freedom, there were always going to be a couple of self-indulgent bits and perhaps a few ideas and sequences that the producers would have viciously vetoed with a less powerful director at the helm. But I didn't mind. In today's remake and reboot happy Hollywood, I sat back to enjoy what might be the last movie in a quite a while with an A-list director, completely original story, and a money-no-object budget.

Which is why I'm sorry to report that this movie just didn't work for me at all. The problem is that it's not really a movie. It's about three different kinds of movie mixed together, into one very complex but rather indigestible dish. This same approach worked for "The Dark Knight", where Nolan threw everything but the kitchen sink into the screenplay and somehow made it all work. Unfortunately, lightning hasn't struck twice for Interstellar. Nolan's intergalactic juggernaut struggles to get off the ground, and when it's finally up there, doesn't really know what to do with itself. Sort of similar to the real space programme.

The film opens fairly slowly, mostly in a dusty Midwestern farming community. No problem, in theory - "Star Wars" and "Superman" both openedlike this, and both were great movies. Then lots of talking heads pop up, like in a documentary. Then, they vanish, and we find ourselves in the middle of what feels like a Depression-era movie with a single father struggling to raise two wayward children on his own.

We get a little background on this dystopian world. Big food shortages have created wars, crises, and the government can't afford frivolities such as a space program. Apparently, the Earth is dying, with the atmosphere rapidly becoming unbreathable. Also, there is a drone aircraft flying around - from India, of all places.

Then, a ghost, which is actually gravity, communicates with Cooper's daughter by speaking to her by arranging books into barcodes and tells them to go to a secret (fully funded and operational) NASA base which has been hidden from society for decades behind a wire fence in a cornfield. I guess that must be some wire. Space wire. NASA wire.

If none of this sounds like it makes any sense, it's because it doesn't. Without a clear direction, Interstellar falls apart. It continues to throw the most disjointed, jarring plot elements lifted from every epoch of space movie our way for the next two and a half hours in what could loosely be called a 'story'. There are bits that feel like "Gravity" with super-realistic spaceflight sequences. There are bits that feel like 1960s Star Trek where the famously doomed "redshirts" are sent down to random planets to die in slightly comical accidents. If you're detecting a bit of a clash of tone here, then congratulations: Nolan didn't. The unexpectedly mad, undisciplined screenplay continues to ricochet around until the very end, which plays like a cross between "Inception" and "2001: A Space Odyssey."

It's not just the plot which has developed mild schizophrenia either: the feeling extends to the characters. Brand (Anne Hathaway) is introduced as a scientific, hard-nosed foil to Coopers' wild, seat-of- the pants pilot. The movie has a nasty habit of forgetting about her, and she wanders in and out of proceedings to no avail. Then it's revealed that she's in love with an offscreen character who we have never met.

All throughout this, we are flicking back and forth between equally weird and random plot developments on Earth. Cooper has left a son and daughter behind. We spend quite a lot of time with the younger daughter (Mackenzie Foy) but then she grows up, becomes a quantum physicist - not bad for a farm hand - and is basically a completely different character, which means all the time the movie spent on the young version is ultimately wasted. Cooper seems to completely forget he has a son as well - we only see him pining for the daughter.

It's very important for a film to do is establish its tone and what kind of movie it is within its first ten minutes. Interstellar couldn't do this for two hours. It could have ended in a musical number and it wouldn't have made any more or less sense.

I also found myself wondering what they managed to spend the enormous budget on. Take away the A-list actors and there's no reason that this couldn't have been done for $30m. Some of the effects (example: when Mann tries to dock with the Endurance) are actually pretty flimsy. They didn't look or move like real spacecraft at all.

For me, the ultimate irony with Insterstellar is that it had two or three ideas which could have been developed into good movies on their own: for example, the idea of an former astronaut having to convince skeptical authorities on an impoverished future Earth that their only chance of survival is a wildly risky space expedition. For better or worse, there is no way Inception would ever have been made without Nolan's involvement. This is the great two-edged sword of creative freedom. I just hope Nolan doesn't become the last ever director to wield it.