Well there are spoilers and SPOILERS

I just read a review of the Green Lantern movie that started by saying that it contained "some spoilers". Fortunately I had seen the film this afternoon because what it meant by "some spoilers" was that it would spend a dozen paragraphs giving what amounted to a scene by scene description of the film followed by a fifty word review.

Glad I didn't read it before I'd seen the film.

So, here we go.

WARNING: ALTHOUGH NOT CONTAINING PLOT SPOILERS WHAT FOLLOWS CONTAINS MY OPINION OF THE FILM. IF YOU WOULD PREFER NOT TO KNOW MY OPINION STOP READING NOW!

As I say I saw it this afternoon. Unlike Thor the bits intended for 3D weren't so in your face that they bothered me. I hardly even  noticed them. So that's a plus. Sadly it's one of the few pluses I could find. The CGI effects were well enough done. So that's another. If I think of a third I'll let you know.

The movie is inescapably and undeniably dull. It's about as uninvolving a movie as I've seen for a very long time. I'd say that the plot has holes but it's more a case of there being so many holes that it's hard to locate the plot at all. There are frequent bits that look as if they might have made sense in earlier drafts of the script but make little or no sense in what reached the screen. Even the CGI sequences lack any sense of drama and the bits that fill the gaps between the CGI are trite, cliched and unconvincing.

Nobody actually turns in a bad performance but then again nobody turns in a brilliant performance either and it would take a staggering performance to overcome the shortcomings of the script. I'm always suspicious of movies that do great wads of exposition in the form of a voice over or as characters delivering lectures rather than dialogue and this one does both.

So, a major disappointment all round.

I'll go off now and re-watch the famous faux-trailer on You Tube. 

Now that would have been a great movie.

A Thor Point

Look, alright, I know it's a terrible pun but I couldn't resist it, and it is pertinent.

As a long time comic book reader this is definitely my Summer. Coming soon we have films of Green Lantern, X-Men:First Class and Captain America but first out of the traps is Thor which I saw yesterday. It certainly has the look of the comics. As adaptations go it could hardly be faulted. The Asgardian scenes are huge and epic, the Earth scenes are contrastingly small and human and clearly designed to set it all firmly in the Marvel Films Universe. The story is also pretty damned good, merging Norse myths almost seamlessly with the modern world.

So why the terrible pun?

In a word, no, in a letter and a number - 3D.

I watched in in glorious 2D because 3D gives me a headache but 3D is stamped all over the production. And stamped is very close to the right word. Perhaps "3D tramples all over the production" would be a better way to put it. The CGI Asgard is magnificently realised but the constant swooping, diving, tracking, panning, in-your-face motion of the point of view just makes you dizzy and makes it almost impossible to focus on any single element of the shot. The battle scenes are relentlessly cut/thrust/poke/slash towards the viewer. Even a scene where an angry Thor dashes all the food from the banquet table has him upsetting the table towards the viewer with the food bouncing and rolling into the camera.

Every single shot in the movie seems to have composed with dramatic impact playing a distinct second fiddle to the potential for 3D effects and this means that when watching it in 2D the way that this is so much at odds with conventional ideas of dramatic staging is startlingly clear.

I had hoped that this 3D fad would, as it has been in the past, be a passing thing but more and more films seem to be being released in both 2 and 3 dimensional versions so it looks as if it's here to stay. All I can hope for now is that directors stop pandering to the perceived need for everything in 3D being into or out of the screen and return to letting the narrative and the drama determine the framing of the action.

I won't hold my breath though.

Movies so bad they're...well bad actually.

There are, I think everyone would agree, a lot of very bad films. Who could forget Plan 9 From Outer Space or Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, for example?

Well I've just watched a contender for the worst movie ever made accolade, it's certainly in the top few worst ones that I've ever seen. It's part of a triple bill on a DVD I paid a whole pound for last week and it's unbelievably bad. It's Roger Corman's Creature From The Haunted Sea.

What's wrong with it? Just about everything actually. It's probably a bit unfair to criticise the dialogue of what is supposed to be a Horror/Comedy. I have to mention the classic " It was dusk: I could tell because the sun was going down" though.

The best thing is the monster. It looks like a ball of wool with two tennis balls for eyes. Oh, that's more or less what it was.

Can't wait for the other two on the disc - Bela Lugosi in "The Devil Bat" and Lionel Atwill in "Vampire Bat". After that, also for the magnificent sum of one pound I have a triple bill of Bela Lugosi films: Invisible Ghost, Scared To Death and White Zombie. I'm tempted to sit here for the next eight hours or so and watch them all in one go.

Great stuff.

Something I DO like about Alice

At last, something I can be unequivocally positive about with regard to the new Alice in Wonderland. I today received my CD of Danny Elfman's score for the movie and it's a remarkably well rounded piece of work. It doesn't play like a film soundtrack, it plays like a suite of music written entirely independently and works very well as such. Here and there it may be a touch episodic but overall it flows almost symphonically. Danny Elfman, as testified by such previous scores as Beteljuice and Batman writes with tremendous dramatic flair and while, in parts, this may be reminiscent of those - and other - Elfman film scores, it remains nonetheless a splendid piece of work on its own terms. The recurring Alice main theme solidly underpins all of it with the choral passages threading through it as a constant counterpoint to the frequently menacing foreground.
As Alice says in Looking Glass when she reads the poem Jabberwocky, "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't exactly know what they are!"
Fortunately the ideas and images that it fills my head with are shaped by my own previous knowledge of the books, by my own imagination of how Wonderland should be and not by Tim Burton's movie.
If only everything about the film had been as good as the soundtrack it would have been a mighty piece of work indeed.

Wonderland: A 3-in-1 Review

Warning: May contain spoilers

Three reviews for the price of one.

The 3D

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is the first of the new generation of 3D movies that I've seen and I decided to see it to its best advantage at the local IMAX cinema. Now I know that the live action was shot in 2D and then digitally enhanced to match the full digital rendering of the animated world in which it takes place. What I don't know is whether this accounts for the failings of the presentation. Some bits of the 3D are stunning. The panoramic shots as we race through or soar over Wonderland are terrific and some of the set pieces - falling down the hole, battling the Jabberwocky - are extremely well done. The trouble is that when it's good it's very, very good but when it's bad it's terrible. There are two major things and one minor thing wrong. The minor thing was completely predictable. Time after time action takes place into or out of the screen which would be easier to follow and dramatically better across the screen. It's the use of 3D just because it's there. The other problems are more basic and relate to the actual technique. The digital rendering of the live shots frequently leaves the actual actors looking like 2D figures in a 3D background, where there are multiple depths of action the overall effect is akin to the cardboard cutout Alice puppet theatre that I have in my collection. The final problem, also especially noticeable in the bookend "real world" sections, is that part of the process has been to sharpen the focus of the bit of screen you are supposed to be looking at and blur the focus in any other plane so that you get a foreground of out-of-focus bushes, a hyper-sharp middleground of two people talking and another out-of-focus background of fuzzy, unidentifiable figures. Flickering your eyes to another part of the screen is like looking through a frosted glass window.
So overall, while sections of the 3D are stunning, I can't help thinking it will be better when I get to watch it in good old flat screen 2D.

The film

But is it a good film? Well I will say this, it's quite remarkable how one man's virtue is another vice. Tim Burton has been doing the interview round promoting the film and has said, over and over, that all the previous versions suffer from a lack of narrative, that Alice wanders from one random encounter to the next without any rhyme or reason. He, of course has "put this right" by adding a narrative base to the story. He might actually have got away with it too if the narrative he'd chosen wasn't so familiar and trite that cliché is too inadequate a word. It's a standard good versus evil story with a climactic battle that could just as easily be from Narnia as Wonderland. Bolting on a narrative could only ever have worked if it was something as unusual and quirky as Wonderland itself.
It isn't all bad news though. Against all my expectations everyone puts in a good performance - even Matt Lucas as the Tweedles. The wealth of excellent characterisations culminates in Johnny Depp's brilliantly bonkers Mad Hatter - a character full of wild madness but with moments of great pathos. The ensemble as a whole almost manages to save the film from the weight of it's dull plot and the screenplay's ponderous "be true to yourself" moralising.
Almost but not quite.

The adaptation of the book

It is of course, as Burton keeps endlessly pointing out, not an adaptation of the book. It uses elements of the book to create a sequel of sorts, albeit a sequel to a version of the book that doesn't actually exist. In some respects it is truly excellent. Visually it may be dark but it's certainly in tune with my vision of Lewis Carroll's world. The characters are deliberately not based on previous renderings, showing instead all of the trademark Burton quirkiness which is completely suitable. I loved the look of the film. The problem is that while Burton is good at psychotic quirkiness he doesn't here pull off the whimsy that is required for Carroll. The use of a kind of gibberish German to name Wonderland items - upelkuchen for the cake that makes you grow, fairfarren for "safe journey" and so on - is contrived rather than whimsical. The humour is unforgivably clunky and Carroll's devious and cunning wordplay is entirely absent. Considered as an adaptation it misses the point by a country mile.

So the overall verdict isn't all that favourable. The movie has its good points but the bad points more than balance them out. I enjoyed it but not a much as I should have. The definitive version of Alice still remains to be made.

One last thing

Dear Mister Burton, can you tell Linda Woolverton, the screenwriter, that it's not "borogroves", it's "borogoves".

It was a favour after all

In a way the decision of the chains to go head to head with Disney over Alice in Wonderland has done me a favour. I know that Cineworld has now backed down and said they will show it but it's too late, I've decided that as there is an IMAX cinema about fifteen minutes walk from my work I will go to the opening day showing at three O'clock - I finish early on Fridays. I've booked my ticket and I shall be there at least an hour before it starts to try to get a good seat.
This will be the first of this latest generation of 3D films that I've seen, though a long time ago I saw an IMAX presentation of an underwater documentary.

Curiouser and curiouser

The adaptations of Alice keep on coming.
Today I bought the DVD of Malice In Wonderland, a film starring Danny Dyer and Maggie Grace.
It's quite a difficult one to describe but I'd have to say it's among the more off-the-wall adaptations. From the box I was expecting a gangster flick connected loosely, perhaps in the manner of a homage, to the Alice story. What I got was an out-and-out adaptation, a dark and surreal adaptation, to be sure,but it's far more Alice than crime thriller.
The story is filled with weird and rather sleazy characters, all variants on the familiar Wonderland cast. The outside world, non-wonderland, story makes little sense but not as little as the inside world Wonderland makes. It manages to be both dark and gloomy and colourful at the same time - like an abandoned fairground at night, with all the rides running but no customers: a scene which is in fact partially mirrored by one in the movie.
It's rather difficult to decide on who exactly the target audience for this film is, though. It's too weird and too incoherent for a mainstream audience, far too adult (with it's drug use and fetishism) for a general audience, far too far from it's source material for most fans of the book.
It's unlikely to have any kind of widespread appeal. I'm not even sure if I liked it or not.
I'm going to have to watch it again to even try to decide.

The future wears spandex

On the plus side all of the following are now listed as being "In Production".

Iron Man II
Green Lantern (sadly not the one with that awesome faux trailer)
Captain America
The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn
Jonah Hex
Spider-Man 4
Thor
The Avengers
a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

and the following are all possible projects

a new version of The Crow
Doctor Strange
The Flash
a new version of Flash Gordon
two more Tintin movies
Green Arrow
Nick Fury
two more SIn City movies (God help us!)
another revamp of the Superman franchise
Wonder Woman
no less than four new X-Men franchise movies

and many more. Buy the magazine and read all about them.

Holy Discrepancies, Batman!!!

It's quite remarkable really.
Yesterday I bought a special edition of the science fiction magazine SFX that focuses entirely on cinema and television adaptations of comics. The bulk of it is taken up with an A to Z of such adaptations with reviews. What is quite remarkable about it is how many of those reviews have reached the exact opposite conclusion to mine. Some films that I like, they hate. Some films that I hate, they like. It isn't universal, and it's more marked for the films that they disparage, but it's noticeable enough.We do have some common ground on the middling stuff.

To just pull a few examples (not quite) at random.

Let's start with Blade:The Series. They are pretty disparaging about it in comparison to the first and second Blade movies (although, to be fair, they are even more disparaging about the third movie) but it's a decent enough piece of work. As with something like Robocop (not part of this sub-genre) the levels of violence that are in the films were never going to be shown on television but it does handle itself pretty well. They also don't like the way that the focus is often off Blade himself and on the other characters but then rather confusingly add that when it focusses on those characters it's actually better.
By contrast they quite like, though not whole-heartedly, Sin City - a movie that I found so totally devoid of heart and soul that it was almost unwatchable. It may be a visual treat but on screen it shows up the total lack of sympathy of the source material. Scoring a similar half-hearted plus in their review is Constantine which, though it's so heavily adapted that it bears almost no resemblence to it's source material, I really liked. And for a Keanu Reeves movie that's rare enough to merit mention in itself.
It's sequels that they most often go to town on. The Crow, a movie that they mostly like (though not as much as I like it) spawned three sequels. In the case of City of Angels, they give it the thorough slating that it deserves but for entirely the wrong reasons. It is, they claim, no more than an inferior re-run of the first movie. I beg to differ. Given the set up the basic plot outline of any Crow movie has to be similar but what City of Angels does is add a level of unpeasant fetishism to the procedings that is totally at odds with its setting. The two remaining movies Salvation and Wicked Prayer they like even less and this is just plain wrong-headed. Sure they all have similar plots. Certainly the budgets and stylised set pieces from the first film are missing but so what? The films are well enough played and a damned sight better than City of Angels.
Moving on Elektra they really dislike but I think it's a competent - though by no means wonderful - and entertaining flick. Flash Gordon (the Sam Jones version) gets a good review and the reasons listed are all the things I don't like about the film - its arch campness, its ridiculous action sequences, its inconsistent special effects, Brian Blessed: to name just a few.
We are however almost in agreement about Hellboy which has to date produced two terrific films. They prefer the second one to the first which is, in my view, back-to-front but its six of one, half a dozen of the other really. On the same page they give the customary one star to Howard the Duck but once I got past the terrible duck suit, I thought it was enjoyably daft.
It goes on and on. The TV movie of the Justice League is a weird blend of Superheroes and Friends but it's OK, though SFX disagrees.
They actually give the same, indifferent three stars to Ang Lee's Hulk and to Louis Leterrier's The Incredible Hulk though the former deserves no stars and the latter four stars.
Judge Dredd they hate though it deserves a couple of stars just for the look of the film and another for how many of the comic book elements they managed to shoe-horn into a confusing plot. Doctor Strange, which I have recommended for years as really having the spirit of the original they call "woeful". The Mask they love but I see it as being just more of Jim Carey's irritating schtick.

I could go on (and I'm aware that I already have) but all any of this goes to show is that a) nobody really agrees about this stuff anyway and b) you should never pay too much attention to reviews.

Even mine.

Marketing? A particularly poor example

Sometimes you have to wonder at what goes through the heads of the marketing boys. In the shop today I saw the four disc edition of Hellboy 1 and 2. Now I happen to think they are both very good movies, even if the second one does veer a bit too much towards "Neverending Story". I have already bought the two disc edition of the first film but the price was low enough to tempt me to buy the full package, just a couple of quid dearer than the second movie alone. So, I picked up the box from the shelf to find out what extras were included.
To my astonishment the only information on the box was that both Hellboy and Hellboy II were "included". Nothing else. Not a single item of information. And it was sealed so it couldn't be opened to check the inside details. I'm guessing that it contains exactly the same extras as the two individual purchases would but I don't know that for sure. What's the point of producing a four disc package but not telling anyone what's in it?
My search of the internet to get the information has also been a failure beyond finding quite a few other people making the same complaint.
I've decided to save a couple of quid and buy the Hellboy II disc on its own. The marketing strategy seems to be to actively discourage purchase of the more expensive version. How very odd.

Sounds an interesting movie.

The title of an email advertising a well-known site that sells DVDs.

Sale final weekend; plus NEW Lesbian Vampire Killers and Harry Potter.