Giraffe Versus Unicorn

Ryan Reynolds Cast As DC's Green Lantern

2009-07-11T15:39:00.003+01:00

Following reports that Justin Timberlake (Alpha Dog, Black Snake Moan) was screen testing for the part of Hal Jordan, and rumors that the studio, producer Donald De Line and director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) all had different favorites for the role, you'd be forgiven for thinking that we were still a long way off from a casting announcement.

However, THR yesterday broke the news that Ryan Reynolds is the final choice for the part, with the deal to be concluded sometime soon. Reynolds is certainly no stranger to the world of comic book movies, having appeared in Blade: Trinity and also in the woeful X-Men Origins: Wolverine, in which he played Deadpool - a character with a spin-off movie currently in development. Will Reynolds become the first actor to star in movies for both Marvel and DC Comics?

Previously slated for a December 2010 release, Green Lantern is now set to hit theaters June 17th, 2011.

Deadgirl: A Review

2009-07-05T14:19:00.002+01:00

Given the schlock of some recent horror/zombie films, once hearing of the plot for Deadgirl, or seeing the trailer, you'd be forgiven for writing this one off. But it's not the repulsive mess that you'd expect it to be.

The plot is rather simple and perhaps typical of the genre - Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan), bored of another day at school, decide to skip class and explore an abandoned mental hospital. Wherein they find a dead girl (Jenny Spain, in her first acting role), covered in a plastic sheet and seemingly chained to a table. For the next hour and twenty minutes we explore the relationship between Rickie and JT as their morals lead them down different paths. Fernandez and Segan are perfectly capable in their roles, with Segan excelling as his character becomes ever-increasingly erratic. Jenny Spain, without a single line of dialogue manages to invoke so much purely through a combination of whimpers, growls and longing looks into the lens of the camera.

It's not the acting or the plot that lets the film down, nor is it the camerawork on show - by the second act, Deadgirl's editing becomes just as gratingly offensive as the premise itself could be seen as. The same transitional overlays are used so much that scenes start to blur into one another completely, leaving you with a feeling that you're watching nothing more than a bizarre filmic experiment. You might be offended by the zombie coitus if you could tell that thats what it actually is - the problem being that another actor's half-transparent face is resting over the top of the picture.

And it's a shame, because this is a film that, while not quite turning the genre on its head, it does offer something greatly different. Horror blends with coming of age and while the central premise was always going to be the 'dead' girl chained to a table, we spend a lot of time watching the rapidly decaying relationship between the two lead characters as they struggle with the morality of the situation.

It's low-budget and it does come equipped with its sleaziness - the camera persists to linger on the naked body of our titular character for far too long in places - but decent performances and a slightly more intelligent take on the subject matter than you'd expect, set this apart from the ever-growing batch of half-assed horror movies that have come off the conveyor belt in recent years.

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen: A Review

2009-06-24T20:43:00.003+01:00

Unbearably long, barely acted and filled with more sweeping camera shots than any other Michael Bay-directed movie before it, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is a terrible, lumbering behemoth of a film. When it's not an explosions-filled action movie, it's an awful teen comedy, teetering on the brink of being farcical.

Beginning with overlong backstory that nobody really understands or cares about, it's a while before we're reunited with the film's protagonist, Sam Witwicky (Shia Labeouf), as he prepares to set off for a normal life at college, fully intending to leave his transforming car, Bumblebee, behind. Unfortunately, along with Sam we're also reunited with his parents, Ron (Kevin Dunn) and Judy (Julie White) who resemble a Laurel & Hardy-esque slapstick double act throughout the entire film. Laughs are played for witlessly in every scene they're in, which is far too many, including humping dogs (Twice! And in stupidly quick succession!) and the accidental ingestion of drugs. The enormous length of the film could have been trimmed drastically by leaving the majority of this stuff on the cutting room floor.

Following these two clods is the reintroduction of Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox), conveniently sat astride a motorcycle. "Hey guys, remember in Transformers when she was leaning over that car? Well this time, she's sitting on a bike. And she's wearing denim shorts!" If Shia's performance here is one-note then Megan Fox doesn't even manage that. With a permanent pout throughout the entire two hour thirty minute run-time, she might be the film's chief irritant, an award that could very well have gone to just about anyone or anything featured here.

Revenge Of The Fallen was never going to be built on anything resembling logic, but it's cast aside completely in a scene where characters enter the front doors of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC and step out of the back door straight into a dusty field in Arizona. Add to all of this another cringe-worthy aspect - Bay's own revolting self-service. A Bad Boys 2 poster on a dorm room wall commands more screen time than some of the characters themselves (I'm looking at you, Tyrese Gibson) and a sweeping (Really?) shot of Megatron and Starscream atop a skyscraper harkens back to Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett, from that very same film.

And the problems never stop mounting up, like Michael Bay is rolling a festering Katamari through a field filled with bad movie tropes and cliches, making sure not to miss a single thing along the way. One of the many things it picks up is Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman's script, which completely fails to deliver on any front. The plot is devoid of any kind of comprehension with characters and robots alike being brought in solely to further the excuse for a story along before being shunted aside, or in one case, ejected from the back of an aeroplane. And why try to cram in so much story and exposition in a film that should be ninety minutes of CGI robots kicking chunks off one another? The set pieces involving robots that we do get can at times be completely jarring as metal limbs flail across the entire screen. Outside of CGI the action is paint-by-numbers Bay, military porn and massive explosions all filmed by cameras that swoop from left to right across the battlefield and then back again.

Explosions and gunfire fail to perforate the paper-thin story and cheap laughs that Revenge Of The Fallen is built upon. Is this the future of summer blockbusters - leaving your brain at the door?

Chris Hemsworth Cast As Thor

2009-05-16T22:21:00.003+01:00

Relatively unknown Chris Hemsworth (Star Trek) has been cast as the title character in Thor, which is slated for a June 2011 release, and additionally in Marvel's 2012 movie The Avengers.

Frequent Australian visitors to this blog, of which there are none, will recognize Hemsworth predominantly from his work on Home & Away, a soap opera in which he appeared in just over 170 episodes. Other visitors may just recognize Hemsworth from his role in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek, in which he played George Kirk, drawing scorn from many critics in the process.

Is this a good choice?

'The Orphanage' Director & Screenwriter To Return

2009-05-16T11:43:00.004+01:00

A Variety article reports that The Orphanage director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio Sanchez will team up once again for what looks likely to be Bayona's second film. Scheduled to shoot in the spring of 2010, a first-draft screenplay will be presented at this month's Cannes Film Festival. One of the film's producers describes the film as a "powerful story, based on true facts, which poses large technical challenges."

Bayona, previously linked with the third Twilight film, is also still attached to direct the big screen version of David Moody's novel Hater, which is set to be produced by Guillermo Del Toro and Mark Johnson.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World - Video Blog #5

2009-05-16T11:23:00.002+01:00

The fifth video blog for the upcoming big-screen adaptation of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is now online. Director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) talks about how faithful the transition between page to screen will be, while the author/creator of Scott Pilgrim, Bryan Lee O'Malley, looks at some of the real world locations that were featured in the books.

If you've missed out on any of the previous four video blogs, then you can find them all over at the official movie site.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: A Review

2009-05-04T10:35:00.004+01:00

It is without question that Batman Begins and more so The Dark Knight have changed the way in which comic books are brought to the big screen. Gritty and dark in tone, the reverberations that they have created in the industry are only now beginning to seep down the chain, as we can see here with the completely unnecessary re-telling of Wolverine's origin story. Already told in a series of flashbacks and cuts throughout the original X-Men movie, Origins: Wolverine aims to expand on this in a story riddled with ridiculous plot-holes and dumbassery.

We're introduced to our main characters, Hugh Jackman's Wolverine and Liev Schreiber's Sabertooth as children in 1845. A quick death which we're not given enough time to care about later and we're in the rather fantastic opening credit montage, which sees the two fight their way through history's major wars, beginning with the American Civil War and ending in Vietnam. Very reminiscent of Watchmen's excellent opening credits. It's never explained why either character ages from childhood and then conveniently stops when they reach their 'Hugh Jackman' and 'Liev Schreiber' years, but who are we to dwell on points such as this?

The movie plods along at an acceptable pace, but thanks to a barebones plot with a myriad of holes, you find yourself wondering if the writers ever actually watched the other X-Men movies that they should have been working in conjunction with. Schreiber's cunning and cerebral turn as Sabertooth makes you wonder how we accepted the freakishly strong and freakishly stupid version that we were given in the X-Men trilogy? What happened to him between the events in this movie and the first X-Men movie that turned him into such a brutish idiot?

Once we brush aside all of this, not even the action segments and the CGI are up to carrying the film across a finish line that we can deem as acceptable. Considering the hammering that internet bloggers gave a leaked work print of the film in terms of CGI, you'd expect that the finished product would be something to shout about. If anything, it's the complete opposite. One scene in particular, in which Wolverine plays with his new adamantium claws in front of a mirror looks glaringly false.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is saved by a handful of performances by actors doing the best with what they're given. Jackman is reliable in his role as always and Schreiber is a great fit for the character of Sabertooth. Glimpses of Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool show bundles of promise, but whether the character will go anywhere is questionable given the events of this film. Not quite the train-wreck of X-Men: The Last Stand, but a needless and poorly-told tale of events nonetheless.

Rachel Getting Married: A Review

2009-02-10T14:36:00.002Z

Rachel Getting Married takes a family wedding and turns it on it's head with the arrival of Kym, the titular character's younger sibling, who comes equipped with a luggage-load of problems.

Oscar nominated Anne Hathaway revels in the role of Kym, who begins the movie by ending a nine month stint in rehab for drug addiction, an addiction which has left her with a traumatic secret. During the beginning act of the film, she comes across as a vaguely unpleasant character, one who is quick to throw out quips and one-liners, at times to disguise her true feelings. If Juno were less pregnant and more of an asshole, this could possibly be the result.

However, it speaks volumes of Hathaway's acting ability that she takes this seemingly unlikeable, narcissistic and attention-seeking character and begs and pleads the audience for every last scrap of sympathy. And it works. As more of Kym's backstory comes to light, set in scenes around the wedding's buildup, we see the reasons for why she acts the way she does, and although it doesn't allow us to feel forgivness for her harrowing secret, we can still feel sympathetic.

The movie carries a very 'indy' feel throughout, with 'live music' (being played around the family home by the wedding musicians) providing the score for certain scenes. Although, if I'm nitpicking, the final act of the wedding goes a little too overboard with its attempt at musical and cultural eclecticism as mishmashes are thrown at us for what seems like an age.

Brilliant Altman-esque camerawork throughout the movie's familial clashes and togetherness really captures the smallest looks and moments of emotion, which when added with Demme's refusal to resort to clichés and standards, really makes for a great film.

4

Sunshine: A Review

2009-02-03T22:59:00.003Z

Danny Boyle's Sunshine is a gorgeous psychological thriller set in the confines of the Icarus II space station, as it makes its way towards the sun to deliver a bomb that will reignite the dieing star.

The eight-strong crew of the Icarus II are instructed to carry out their goal as follows: the ship will fly within reach of the sun and fire its payload of nuclear material, 'equal in mass to Manhattan Island', into its very heart, while propelling themselves away within a four minute deadline. Only, they're met with a myriad of problems along the way.

When they receive a distress beacon from the crew of the Icarus I, the first attempt at such a huge mission, the decision to chance docking with the other ship or continuing with the task at hand is left to Cillian Murphy's Capa, the ship's physics expert and the only person capable of delivering the payload.

Events take a turn for the worse and the movie broadens its outlook as it enters the final act, as it throws in a physical presence (without giving too much away) to add to the overload of tension. The film falters here, at the final hurdle, with a tacked on addition that just doesn't feel needed.

Sunshine gives sometimes unsubtle nods to previous science fiction movies, evoking the paranoia and claustrophobia of Alien and borrowing slithers of ideas from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It also plays, at one point, on the harsh cuts and scrapes of shots from Event Horizon, as the crew board the previous Icarus ship. Pictures and memories of the ship's former crew are interspersed between shots, building a sinister atmosphere.

Stunning visuals throughout the film match a well-crafted story which dabbles in and touches on isolation, depravation and selflessness, and on a bigger scale, religion, global warming and man's intent to take one final shot and risk burning out rather than fading away.

4

Lost In Translation: A Review

2009-01-25T20:34:00.000Z

In Sofia Coppola's second outing as a feature film director, Lost In Translation has her overseeing Scarlet Johansson and Bill Murray in a film which plays to both's strengths wonderfully. Murray plays Bob Harris, a former movie star who is in Tokyo to shoot a series of whiskey advertisements, while Johansson takes on the role of Charlotte, who has traveled to Tokyo with her husband John, a photographer who is on a work assignment in the city.

Murray turns in an understated performance, possibly the finest of his career, whether it be during the comedic moments such as his sheer bewilderment during the shooting of a whiskey commercial or when his character is falling for the charms of the genuine and giggly Charlotte.

Questions of fidelity are asked strongly throughout, as the disillusionment of both the main characters is portrayed expertly on screen. Charlotte is at a turning point in her life, having not long graduated, she has no idea what she wants to do or be and is questioning her marriage.

After exchanging glances in a lift, the two characters are united in a hotel bar and their friendship begins. The two fill different roles in each other's lives, Charlotte needs the attention that Bob provides, while Charlotte seemingly reminds Bob of how much he adores his wife and children. The title of the film hearkens to the obvious aspects of being in a foreign country, but also the stages in life that both characters have drifted into.

Weaved in and out of Bob and Charlotte's relationship are gorgeous shots of the city of Tokyo which do more to show the beauty of the place than any travel brochure ever could. This is an at times, mesmerizing movie which floats along at a dream-like pace and can truly call itself a modern day classic.

5