SUPERMAN (2025)***

Writer-director James Gunn (GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY) has jumped ship from Marvel to reboot the DC Universe, and the first film in this endeavour really suffers from setting up the chessboard.  It's a film that is overstuffed with ideas and characters and so many aliens that I couldn't give a shit about. There's also a scrappy dog called Krypto that is presumably adorable if you like scrappy dogs (I do not) and that's basically ripped off from Terry Pratchett's Luggage - a super-powerful, super-loyal chaos agent.  As a result, the real life human characters - whether Clark Kent's adoptive parents or his Daily Planet colleagues - are given way too little screen time.  Poor Wendel Pierce as Perry barely gets a line and even Rachel Brosnahan's Lois Lane feels sidelined.  All to make way for alien monsters, quirky robots (come on Alan Tudyk - do something new!)  and endless gonzo fight scenes.  This far into the Marvel universe it's just all so blah.  I would rather have seen Superman rescue a cat from a tree than yet another Big Bad ripping up Metropolis.

So for much of its running time I was basically quite bored by this film. I realised about two-thirds of the way through that I would probably rather just watch Nathan Fillion's Green Lantern doing his comedy schtick in his own film. I guess that's coming.

Part of the problem is that this film needs to pick a lane in its look and feel. Is it in a contemporary near-future in which evil mastermind Lex Luther (Nicholas Hoult) has super technology and sleek Marvel-style henchmen and headquarters? Or is it in a world where people actually care about newspapers, and take notes with a pencil and notepad, and record interviews on dictaphones rather than iPhones? The whole concept of the Daily Planet is basically anachronistic now and I don't think the film knows how to handle that. 

Thing is. Thing is.  By the denouement, despite all of its flaws. This film had me.  Because its core message is a good one. And a moving one. That to be kind and think the best of people and not be cynical is actually "punk rock".  And that to be human is to make your own choices and to make mistakes and to try to be better.  And that family is what you choose it to be. I want my Superman to be in day glow blue and red and to be earnest and kind.  I don't want moody post-modern dark Superman.  Superman has always been hokey and kitsch because that's what we need.  Onwards!

SUPERMAN is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 129 minutes and is on global release.

SKINCARE* - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Preview

SKINCARE is a film that doesn't know what it wants to be. Its star, Elizabeth Banks (CALL JANE), is playing it straight as an aesthetician being driven out of business by a stalker/corporate saboteur.  But Lewis Pullman is playing it like he's in a spoof or a social satire as her wannabe boyfriend slash life coach. Meanwhile the needle drops and lighting make it feel like the film wants to be a sleazy 80s thriller.  None of it hangs together.

Instead what we get is a frustrating film about someone we are meant to believe is a hustler businesswoman but who relies on men to get her out of difficulty.  Whether it's a newscaster who can give her promotional airtime on his channel (Nathan Fillion) or a local mechanic who can fix her slashed tires or the aforementioned life coach, our heroine responds to societal misogyny by being a helpless damsel in distress. And don't get me started on Pose's MJ Rodriguez, criminally wasted in the faithful friend sidekick role.

It's the kind of film with uninteresting female characters that one can only imagine being written by three men with little screenwriting experience. And so it comes as no surprise to discover that this is Austin Peters' fiction feature directorial debut based on a script co-written with debut feature screenwriters Sam Freilich and Derring Regan.

I am not sure what this film is doing in the festival. It's very weak.

SKINCARE has a running time of 96 minutes and is rated R. It was released in the USA in August and will play the BFI London Film Festival 2024.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Whedon expresses his admiration
of Nathan Fillion

Here's my latest podcast reviewing Joss Whedon's wonderfully pared down, intelligent, laugh-out loud funny version of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Filmed as a kind of palette cleanser between filming and editing AVENGERS ASSEMBLE, the movie has a kind of gonzo feel to it, and just goes to show that when you have world-class dialogue you don't need special effects to keep us hooked. I love the performances, the way Whedon privileges the text, and Nathan Fillion steals the show as the comic relief.  For more, take a listen.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING played Toronto 2012 and is currently on release in the USA, Canada, the UK and Ireland. It opens in Brazil on July 5th.

The film is rated PG 13 in the USA and has a running time of 109 minutes.

WAITRESS - bittersweet

WAITRESS is a beautifully imagined, bittersweet little movie that is likely appeal to fans of quirky humour and stylised photography - I'm thinking fans of NAPOLEON DYNAMITE and Wes Anderson flicks. Keri Russell plays a poor waitress called Jenna who is unhappily pregnant by her jealous, domineering husband. She resents her unborn child for throwing a spanner in the works of her plans to escape and enter a $25,000 Prize Pie Competition (she's an amazing pie-cook). So we see her work in a crappy old diner with a short-tempered manager and her two plucky, endearing best friends. The elder of these is married to a senile old fart and the younger is trying personal ads to find a husband. All three have to work out how to be happy.

Jenna finds an odd kind of companionship through an affair with her doctor (a surprisingly good, dead-pan performance from Nathan Fillion) and friendship with the old coot (Andy Griffith) that owns the diner. It's an admirably brave move on the part of Adrienne Shelly to have us empathise with a heroine who is, after all, an adulteress, and brutally honest about her lack of feeling toward her unborn child. But that's the real hook of this movie. Sure we have funny, quirky characters, but so do a lot of films in this genre. Similarly, a lot of these faux-naif movies have deliberate framing and stylised production design. But few have such a hard bitter edge and honesty to them.

The only real criticism I have is that the movie seems to lose this hard egde in the denouement. And while I like the fact that the heroine is emancipated from emotional dependence on men, it's still by virtue of a man that she is free. Still, WAITRESS remains a touching, genuinely funny, and genuinely fresh movie. It's tragic that we won't be able to see how Adrienne Shelly would have developed as a director.

WAITRESS played Sundance 2007 and went on release in the US in May. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Australia and New Zealand on August 30th. It opens in France and Belgium on September 5th; in Estonia and Italy on September 21st; in Hungary, Russia, and Norway on September 28th and in Japan on November 17th.

WHITE NOISE: THE LIGHT - low-rent, no thrills

Once upon a time there was a low-budget, vaguely SIXTH SENSE thriller starring Michael Keaton that made a comparatively large amount of money at the box office. Studios being what they are, it comes as no surprise to find another low-budget, vaguely SIXTH SENSE thriller following hot on its heels. However, people who liked the first flick should take note of the fact that Michael Keaton does not star in this follow-up - a signal of its weak script; poor production values; and lack of any real suspense; genuine jump-out-of-your-seat shocks; or all-pervasive spookiness. Instead, we get piss-poor CGI effects and a cast of anonymous unknowns with precious little acting talent. The only semi-big name - Nathan Fillion - is especially wooden. Just watch him NOT emote after his wife and child are shot in the pivotal opening sequence. British audiences will understand just how low the bar has been set for acting when I reveal that the bonkers murderer is none other than Dan Sullivan from Eastenders. If you want to watch a decent movie about how far we can escape our fate - whether if we know someone is about to die we can and should save them - check out DEJA VU instead.

WHITE NOISE: THE LIGHT is on release in the UK. It opens in Spain in April and in the Netherlands in May. No US release data, apparently, you lucky bastards.

SERENITY - sub-standard derivative sci-fi nonsense

My abiding impression of SERENITY is that it feels like a pilot for a TV show. It’s hard to say whether I was subconsciously influenced by the knowledge that the movie does indeed have its roots in a cancelled TV show, Firefly. I don’t think so. In fact, it is hard to think of a movie I have seen with fewer preconceptions. SERENITY was written and directed by Joss Whedon who also came up with Buff the Vampire Slayer. I’ve never seen an episode of Buffy or Firefly, and I didn’t recognise anyone in the cast-list of Serenity other than Chiwetel Ejiofor. As to the subject matter, I had a vague idea that it was set on a space-ship. Well, here’s the skinny for all non-fans of the TV show. SERENITY is set in a dystopian future where humans have colonised other planets. They are ruled by a benevolent dictatorship called The Alliance – the outcome of a civil war that is hinted at. Now, somewhat predictably, absolute power is corrupting The Alliance and the powers-that-be have messed with the mind of a 17-year old girl called River. She is psychic, traumatised and can turn into a lethal killing machine at the drop of a hat. Her brother, a mild-mannered doctor, sacrifices his career and cash to break her out and most of the movie is a series of chases as the authorities try to catch her again.

I have to say that pretty much the only thing I liked about this movie was the ever-brilliant Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performance as The Alliance’s assassin. Wielding a sword, some hard-core martial arts moves and a self-awareness that is chilling – Ejiofor made sub-standard schlock sci-fi material look credible. As for the rest, well, it’s best summed up with the word “sub-standard”. The world that Whedon has created is insufficiently detailed and lacks the instant authenticity of, say, Star Wars. Whedon’s cause isn’t helped by the obviously low-budget special effects or the clear rip-offs of Star Wars. The crew aboard Serenity seem to me to be a lazy conflation of the chaps in the Millennium Falcon, The Matrix movies and even more bizarrely, Young Guns. The crew-members all speak in an unconvincing pastiche of Wild West slang – itself a horrible pastiche! Worse still, I got the feeling that the actors, bar Ejiofor, were also sub-standard. The kind of people who get cast in day-time TV shows because they aren’t quite talented or pretty enough to make it in the movies. To cap it all off the use of the camera, editing and sound is entirely pedestrian. The movie is shot as if for TV, and every so often you hear an actor utter a line of dialogue against a crescendo of sound followed by a fade to black and you think, “This is where they should insert the ad break!”

To sum up, not only did I find this movie puerile, derivative and poorly made, it convinced me that I need never check out the TV series Firefly. I am, however, curious to check out Buffy, if only out of curiosity. Surely such a popular show cannot be as bad as this?

SERENITY is on release in the US and UK. It rolls into France on October 19th 2005 and into France & Austria on November 24th.