HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1***

I was surprised to find myself rather enjoying the first instalment of Kevin Costner's Horizon saga.  It came to our screens freighted with controversy.  Costner had apparently bilked out of the wildly popular Yellowstone TV show to make his passion project, enduring a messy divorce in the process.  Much like Frances Ford Coppola's MEGALOPOLIS, early feedback was that HORIZON was a bloated, boring, self-indulgent, intentionally regressive film.

To speak to the latter accusation, this film is indeed wilfully old-fashioned but in a way that I appreciate. It's a good old-fashioned Western where men are men (good or evil) and women are either loving home-makers or hookers with a heart of gold. This film is not interested in character nuance.  But it's not entirely without modern concerns: note that whether men are good or evil comes down to whether they have an accommodative or antagonistic attitude toward Native Americans.  And while there's probably a PHD to be written on how these issues are dealt with in Yellowstone and Horizon, I think Costner has probably benefited from exposure to the former. 

The problem with the film isn't so much its political attitude as its format. This isn't a film with a beginning middle and end so much as a three hour prequel that establishes character. Heck, the real baddie doesn't even show up except in a final montage sequence setting up the second instalment. All of which makes me believe that this multi-film cinema project would have played far better as a TV miniseries where a patient three-episode build-up would have been better tolerated. Instead, what Costner got was a box office failure that has condemned the second film to a streaming roll-out anyway.

And what of this instalment?  I very much liked Sienna Miller as the earnest widowed housewife who begins a romance with Sam Worthington's equally earnest military man.  That's strand one of the film, and the closest set of characters to the newly established town of Horizon. In the film's second strand Kevin Costner is in Montana, hooking up with Abbey Miller implausibly bleach blonde sex worker.  It was nice to see Jena Malone back on screen in this strand. In the final strand, it was also lovely to see Luke Wilson back on screen as the leader of a wagon train, also making its way to Horizon. In all three segments, the cinematography was lovely. I will indeed watch the sequel.There is an honest joy in seeing the landscapes of the Wild West so lovingly portrayed on screen.

HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1 is rated R, has a running time of 181 minutes, and is available to rent and own.

SELMA

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SELMA is a handsomely made, beautifully acted and devastatingly searing movie about the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.  It's also a movie about the difference between having a right in theory and having a right in practice, and as such, is a profoundly important and timely film.  What it isn't, and thank goodness for that, is a conventional hagio-biography in the Great Man does Great Things genre.  This isn't, and sorry to keep going on about it, as dumb as THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING.

The movie opens with Martin Luther King already a major political force. He has the ear of President Johnson and wins the Nobel Peace Prize. But despite the end of segregation by Federal Law, in Governor George Wallace's Alabama, African Americans are still subject to extreme racism.  In an elegant, swift and brutal opening triptych we are therefore given King's Nobel acceptance speech; the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing; and Annie Lee Cooper being denied her application to register to vote on the most spurious and humiliating of grounds. 

A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST

I'm not exactly sure why critics seem to pissing on a great height over Seth MacFarlane's new comedy, A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST.  The only legitimate criticism is that his highly concentrated humour, with visual and verbal hits coming at you at a rapid-fire pace, is hard to take for over two hours.  But other than that, what's not to like?  This film is funny, wry and has genuine heart and I honestly don't see what there is to criticise in the performances either.  

The movie works in the same way as MacFarlane's smash hit comedy, TED.  Take some outlandish premise and apply that extreme harsh MacFarlane humour. In this case, we're put in the Wild West, complete with shoot-em-outs, warehouses and corrupt oligarchs and asked to laugh at how absurd it is.  Hence the title of the film. The West isn't a place to romanticise but a filthy, disease-ridden misogynistic and racist era in which nature and man conspired to kill you.  So if you get the one person in the film, played by Seth MacFarlane, bitching about how absurd life is within the context of a spoofily all-happy Western, then that, to me, is really funny.

The plot is as follows. MacFarlane plays Albert Stark - a hapless sheep farmer who has been rejected by his sweetheart Louise (Amanda Seyfried) in favour of the rich moustache-bearing merchant Foy (Neil Patrick Harris). Albert then forms a friendship with Anna (Charlize Theron) who teaches him how to shoot properly so he can survive a duel with Foy. Little does he know that Anna is really the wife of an outlaw called Clinch (Liam Neeson.)

So what we have is the classic rom-com set-up where a guy tries to impress the one girl while really falling in love with the other.  We even have a song and dance number that is absolutely brilliant and probably the best thing Neil Patrick Harris has done since Dr Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog.   We also get a side plot that pokes a lot of fun at an earnest guy (Giovanni Ribisi) dating a whore (Sarah Silverman) who refuses to sleep with him until they are married.

Like I said, I loved TED and I loved this film. It was half an hour too long, for sure, but I found its analysis of the absurdity of the Western myth spot on and its casting superb.  

A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST has a running time of 116 minutes and is rated R. The movie is on global release.

GANGSTER SQUAD

GANGSTER SQUAD is a movie that's all style and no substance. The post WW2, Los Angeles crime thriller has beautiful people (Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, Josh Brolin) in beautiful costumes, trying to say cool things while in mortal danger.  But where Curtis Hanson/James Elroy's, LA CONFIDENTIAL,  was slippery and seductive and genuinely scary at times. Ruben Fleisher's GANGSTER SQUAD is about as cartoonish and risible as Warren Beatty's DICK TRACY.  Nowhere is that more obvious that in the hero and antihero.  Josh Brolin's fearless cop O'Mara is an earnest meat-head. Every decision he takes in hunting down Sean Penn's real-life gangster Mickey Cohen is plain dumb.  O'Mara blunders through this movie, all muscle and no irony, and we're left wondering why his marvellously clever wife (The Killing's Mireille Enos - the only heart-warming performance in the film) sticks with him.  As for Sean Penn as O'Mara's nemesis, this is his worst performance in some time, not helped by the fact that he's under so much make-up he looks like a parody on Mickey Rourke.

The plot, such as it is, sees the one clean senior cop bring together an off-the-books gangster squad of policeman, led by O'Mara, to kick Cohen's ass out of town. It's a band of misfits and clichés - a sharpshooter - a token African American, a token Latin American - a brain (Giovanni Ribisi, whose characteristic over-acting does not look out of place here) - and the Face man (Ryan Gosling).  Naturally the Face man falls for the gangster's moll (Emma Stone) leading to a hackneyed side-plot, but in a movie painted with this broad a brush are we really surprised that all basically ends well in the best of all worlds?

GANGSTER SQUAD was a great disappointment. I'd imagined great things from Ruben Fleisher after his genuinely witty and original ZOMBIELAND.  I partly blame Will Beall's plodding script full of mono-dimensional characters. But at the end of the day, it's the director who directs bland performances, decided to use anachronistic, cheap, Zack Snyder-y, vis effects, and generally drags down the tone of the production.  

GANGSTER SQUAD is on release in Belgium, Australia, Chile, Ireland, the Netherlands, Singapore, the UK, Canada, Estonia, India, Lithuania, Norway, Romania, Sweden, Taiwan and the USA. It opens on January 17th in Argentina, Denmark, Hong Kong and New Zealand; on January 24th in Germany, Greece, Kuwait, Russia and Iceland; on January 31st in Hungary, Slovenia, Brazil, Bulgaria and Turkey; on February  7th in France, Portugal and Spain; on February 21st in Italy; on March 1st in Finland and on May 3rd in Japan.

GANGSTER SQUAD is rated R in the USA, and has a running time of 113 minutes.

The Best of 2012 - GUILTY PLEASURES

Of the 139 movies I watched, some of the worst were the heavily hyped, high production value epics that fell flat. (PROMETHEUS, I'm looking at you.) By contrast, some of the best times I had at the cineplex were watching movies that were balls-out crazy, silly, goofy and spoofy.  These were movies without pretensions of greatness.  Movies without the budgets to look slick.  But they never forgot the real reason why most of us go to the cinema on a Friday night - to have a bunch of fun.

The year began with Michael Dowse's GOON, a film that totally surprised me with its big heart and big laughs.  The movie features Sean William Scott as a stupid, buff ice hockey player whose basic role is to beat people up during the match. He falls for a sassy chick played by Alison Pill before she betrayed the Sisterhood in HBO's piss-poor Newsroom.  GOON is gritty, grungy, chaotic and yet you really care about every single character, not least Liev Schrieber's ageing goon Ross Rhea - maybe the funniest, most moving cameo of the year.  Unjustifiably overlooked - you'd be a fool not to rent goon for DVD date night.

Next up was Baltasar Kormakur's remake of his own caper film, CONTRABAND. Starring Mark Wahlberg as the head of a crew stealing art and shipping them home on a freighter, the movie was fast-paced, very funny and centred on the totally believable camaraderie among the crew.  It's also notable for having another one of those eye-rollingly insane Giovanni Ribisi performances which have become the stuff of hilarity. If there's a sequel, I'm going to be first in line.  The movie also underlines just how talented Mark Wahlberg is, in that he can move between starring in the utterly earnest THE FIGHTER as this kind of anonymous, downtrodden kid brother, to being the mischievous, charismatic leader of a crew. Kudos.

In April, I laughed my ass off watching Phil Lord's loving spoof of 21 JUMP STREET, falling in love with the chemistry between Jonah Hill's  Schmidt and Channing Tatum's Jenko. Indeed, as much as we talk about the McConaughasence, this really was Tatum's year, with this star turn and his producer-writer-actor credit on break-out indie hit, MAGIC MIKE.   21 JUMP STREET "got it" in a way that many TV series reboots don't.  You need to spoof the genre with a generous heart, allowing the audience to fall in love with the central characters and conceit even as they laugh at it.  Also, I'm thinking that Johnny Depp had been waiting YEARS to exorcise his hatred of the teen TV soap with his hilarious piss-taking cameo at the end. 

In June, I had a bunch of fun watching Timo Vuorneslea's IRON SKY, a low-fi Finnish sci-fi spoof about Nazi Zombies.  Let me say it again. NAZI ZOMBIES. Do you need another reason to watch this film? Yes it's script is all over the place, and there as many hits as misses, but when it works it's really hilarious and you have to admire the amazing special effects on such a low budget.  Oh yeah, and NAZI ZOMBIES. 

Perhaps the movie I was most embarrassed to like was the Farrelly Brothers movie of THE THREE STOOGES starring Sean Hayes, Will Sassso and Chris Diamantopoulos.  This isn't a show that entered the British cultural psyche in the way that it did in the USA and I normally don't respond to slapstick humour and dayglow production design. But after a slow start, I really got into the movie, caring about the characters and responding to the light-hearted cultural teasing. Towit, one of the funniest moments of the year was watching the Stooges beat the crap out of the cast of Jersey Shore.  So don't listen to the haters, and watch it!

The penultimate film in this category is a movie that could have been designed for me: a comedy about a bunch of Aussie park cricketers who tour India.  Boyd Hicklin's SAVE YOUR LEGS! has heart, makes you laugh, and reminds you why you love the prince of sports.  Damon Gavreau gives one of the best comedic performances of the year as Stavros but it's the genuine camaraderie between the cast that makes you enjoy the movie.  And as much as there as certain jokes that really work for cricket fans, there's enough relatable material about growing up and getting new priorities to give this movie a wider audience. It's out in Australia on February 28th and I reallty hope it gets a UK release date, ideally during the summer Ashes series. 

Finally, let's hear it for everybody's rogue cop with a heart, Chulbul Pandey. Arbaaz Khan's follow up to the smash-hit, DABANGG 2 repeats the formula of the original almost slavishly but to great effect. Salman Khan is hilarious as the smalltown cop tough on crime and the causes of crime.  Every time he dances by tugging on his belt or puts his sunglasses on the back of his collar, you just have to smile.  And Katrina Kapoor gives us the best item number of the year with Fevicol Se.

All of these films were released in 2012 and are available to rent and own with the exception of SAVE YOUR LEGS! which will be released in 2013 and DABANNG 2 which is currently on theatrical release and has not yet been released on DVD.

TED - Less Subversive Than It Thinks It Is

Seth Macfarlane of Family Guy fame comes tothe big screen with an R-rated stoner movie that thinks it's radically subversive, but is really just another tired Judd Apatow-esque movie about infantile men wooing back their long-suffering mature girlfriends.  For the life of me I can't figure out why they fall for it.

Mark Wahlberg plays fit loser John Bennett who, as a bullied child wished upon a star and found that his Teddy Ruxspin had come to life.  Fast foward twenty-five years, and Ted is a washed-up former child-celebrity who drinks, does drugs, swears and treats women as cheap sex objects.  John has become a car rental agent and is implausibly dating successful businesswoman Lori (Mila Kunis) - that is until Ted invites round a hooker who shits on the floor of their apartment.  I kid you not. The rest of the film has two threads.  The first sees Ted get a job and move out to allow John to try and impress Lori with his new-found maturity.  The second sees Ted abducted by a psycho (Giovanni Ribisi - typecast), which of course allows a final act redemption as everyone realises just how much they love Ted after all.

It's not that Ted isn't funny.  There are a handful of laugh out loud scenes.  But as ridiculous non-PC subject matter goes, TED isn't in remotely the same league as, say, TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE, BAD SANTA or Armando Ianucci's The Thick Of It. And after a while the nostalgia for 1980s popculture - notably Flash Gordon - became a little tired.  Most of all, the movie just wasn't consistently funny enough for my taste, and when that happens you start questioning the endless gay jokes and crude talk.  Don't get me wrong, I love filthy humour more than most, but the only excuse for that kind of language is that the comedy hits the mark, and TED just didn't.

TED was released in June in Canada and the USA; and in July in Australia, Taiwan, New Zealand, Iceland, Croatia, Portugal, Estonia, Romania and Slovenia. It was released earlier this month in the UK, Czech Republic, Germany, Russia, Bulgaria, Israel Finland, Norway and Spain. It opens this weekend in Lithuania.  It opens next weekend in Greece, Hungary and South Africa. Ted opens on September 6th in Argentina, Denmark, Singapore and Poland; on September 14th in the Netherlands and Mexico; on September 21st in Brazil and Turkey; on September 28th in Hong Kong and Colombia; on October 4th in Sweden and Italy and on October 10th in Belgium and France. 

CONTRABAND

CONTRABAND is about as perfect as a caper movie gets - fast, fun, thrilling, intelligent.  To be sure, it's basic plot components are pretty conventional, but it has a tricksy enough story, and enough good humour to be the perfect Friday night-forget work-have some fun movie!

Mark Wahlberg plays a former smuggler turned straight, drawn back into "one last job" to save his idiot brother-in-law from the local drug dealer (a typically over-the-top Giovanni Ribisi).  He assembles a crew that's going to smuggle in forged currency from Panama in J K Simmons freighter. Of course, "one last job" movies are never simple.  And this one involves a double-cross back home; getting caught up in a Panamian armed robbery; an art heist; and a superbly choreographed fit-up job.  A few plot twists are predictable but there are enough genuine surprises, and I love that no plot thread is left untied.

The movie is directed by the Icelandic actor-writer-producer-director Baltasar Kormakur (JAR CITY) who wrote and starred in the original.  Together with DP Barry Ackroyd (GREEN ZONE) he directs the movie with real style and pace, and a surprisingly light touch!  There are many scenes and lines where it's clear that the smugglers are having a great time, despite or even because of the high stakes - more young kids up to some japes than Michael-Mann style existential angst.  I also really liked the casting (ex Ribisi) - being particularly impressed by Kate Beckinsale, of all people!, actually doing some proper acting as Wahlberg's wife. 

Flicking through the IMDB review page it becomes clear that CONTRABAND has taken a bad rap for being too genre-cliche-ridden.  Whatever. I had a bunch of fun watching it, and it's in my Best Of list for the year. Not every film has to be a heart-wrenching, life-changing Iranian art-house flick. There will always be room on this blog for good honest popcorn entertainment.

CONTRABAND is on release in the USA, Kazakhstan, Russia, Singapore, Bulgaria, Canada, Pakistan, Israel, Kuwait, Estonia, Iceland, Romania, the Philippines, India, Syria and Poland. It goes on release in Hong Kong on February 9th; in Australia and New Zealand on February 23rd; in Portugal on March 1st; in the Netherlands on March 8th and in Germany, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Turkey and the UK on March 16th. It opens on March 22nd in Belgium, Denmark and Hungary; on April 19th in Argentina; on April 27th in Brazil and Lithuania; on May 4th in Sweden and on May 16th in France and Italy.

AVATAR - you can have too much of a good thing

AVATAR is the much hyped new film from writer-director and special effects obsessive James Cameron - the man who brought us TITANIC, ALIENS and TERMINATOR. Let us say that James Cameron has consistently pushed forward the technology of film, and has produced consistently thoughtful sci-flicks. Indeed, I would argue that he deserves more kudos than Spielberg - creating fewer but more consistently entertaining and polished blockbusters. But let us also admit that Cameron is the master of hyping himself, and has saddled us both with Celine Dion and with a 130 minute movie of arse-numbing proportions.

First, the praise. AVATAR is a technical marvel. Not because it does anything new - rather, it pulls together all of the advances of the last five years and pushes them further and does them better than anyone else. The 3-D is immersive rather than trying to shock us. The CGI is photo realistic. The characters and animals have weight and heft. The natural science detailing on the plants and animals is breathtaking. Fantastic creatures seem real. It is easy to mock a director who goes to the lengths of actually inventing a new language for his fictional race, the Na'vi. But it works. Much like LORD OF THE RINGS, AVATAR works because it makes us believe in an alternate world, and through believing, we care about its future.

AVATAR is also tightly structured and directed so well that it maintains momentum throughout its runtime (which is not to say it couldn't have done with being a good forty minutes shorter). Cameron may be a master of CGI but he never forgets that story comes before technical wizardry. The movie plays a three-act drama. We are in a dystopian future where humans live on a dieing world, and have colonised a planet called Pandora, in order to mine a precious metal, whose main deposits lie underneath the "hometree" of the indigenous Na'vi people. In Act One, the audience invests its sympathy with the hero and heroine. A disabled jarhead pilots an avatar Na'vi body in order to infiltrate the tribe and negotiate a relocation by any means necessary. Problem is, he becomes fascinated by their respect for nature and falls for a Na'vi chick. In Act Two, the stakes are established. The army, impatient for profits, decimates the hometree, scattering the Na'vi people, and destroying their trust in the Jarhead. The science team establish that the whole ecosystem of the planet is connected and a powerful source of energy. In Act Three, we have the dramatic climax and resolution. The Na'vi regroup and with their human allies take on the colonials.

The strength of the AVATAR story is that James Cameron knows who to weave successful aspects of genre fiction into his more modern allegory of environmental degradation and ruthless military exploitation. We have a good old-fashioned romance between the jarhead and the Na'vi chick. We have a coming of age story, as the jarhead learns the rules of the new world. We have a buddy movie as the jarhead bonds with the science officer. And finally, we have a spiritual story of redemption. I love the fact that Cameron is willing to tackle both issues of science, politics and religion in the same film - to that end, it reminded me a lot of the better aspects of Ronald D Moore's BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.

Given all these positives, it isn't a surprise that I had a good time watching this flick, even though it did seem just too long to spend in a cinema for what should just be a bit of entertainment, albeit intelligent entertainment.

But there are negatives. AVATAR features some of the most hokey dialogue and two-dimensional characterisation seen on film since STAR WARS. And maybe that's no coincidence. Maybe when a writer-director is having to balance different genres, a large cast, action, technology and romance, it's just too much to ask to have good dialogue and nuanced characterisation too? But then again, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA did, by and large, pull that off. One of the strengths of that series was its ability to present conflicted characters who changed, evolved, and felt three-dimensional. By contrast, in AVATAR, you're either a righteous hippie earth-child or a cigar-chomping, profiteering rat-bastard. And characters say the stupidest things. Towit, jarhead to Na'vi chick: "why didn't you kill me?" Na'vi chick to jarhead: "Because you have a big heart." I mean, no-one, not enough imaginary aliens, speaks like this! There's also something slightly hypocritical in a movie that thinks nasty evil people who blow shit up are bad, but nevertheless wants us to be excited by a final act which is basically about people blowing shit up in more and more noisy ways.

Ultimately, AVATAR is such a feat of imagination that, like STAR WARS IV: A NEW HOPE, it survives the hammy dialogue and weak characterisation. It's nice to spend time in this world. It would've been even nicer to have been all done in two hours.

AVATAR is on global release.

PERFECT STRANGER was so weak, grown men were walking up to cops on street corners begging them to shoot.

PERFECT STRANGER is a slow-moving, over-acted, under-written thriller. An unnecessary prologue shows Halle Berry's character, Rowena, to be an investigative reporter whose expose of a gay Republican Senator is axed by The Man. It also establishes the fact that she is willing to play the game when necessary - notably by writing under a white male pseudonym. Once the story gets underway, we see Rowena investigate the gruesome murder of her childhood friend, apparently at the hands of a powerful advertising mogul called Harrison Hill - played with bored indifference and not an ounce of menace by Bruce Willis. She happily flaunts her figure and flirts in chatrooms to ensare the supposed killer, abetted by Giovanni Ribisi's egregiously over-acted IT wizard, Miles. Miles is geeky and creepy of course, so clearly he's either an over-obvious red herring or a potential killer. And what about the veangeful Mrs Hill? It all trundles along in a harmless manner. It's nicely shot and handsomely designed. But the shifts from Willis' monotone performance to Ribisi's ticks is jarring and Berry is simply a nonentity. It's amazing to think that she once gave an emotionally brave performance in a mature project. And it's sadder still to think that James Foley once directed GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS.

PERFECT STRANGER is on global release.

THE BIG WHITE - so bad, it went passed cult-status and back to bad

What did I do when I wasn't laughing at alleged black-comedy THE BIG WHITE? 1. I wondered how it could be that British director Mark Mylod could come up with such hysterical stuff for TV (Shameless, The Royle Family) but on the big screen had saddled us with cinematic stinkers such as ALI G IN DA HOUSE. 2. I applauded Robin Williams for trying to do something a bit left-field. 3. I wondered whether the Coen Brothers were going to sue script-writer Collin Friessen for biting their style so badly. Seriously, not only does he set this "comedy" in Fargo-like snow-drenched nowheres-ville, but he tries to replicate all those eccentric quirky characters. The casting director even managed to con Tim Blake Nelson and Holly Hunter into participating. 4. I wondered if Collin Friessen's directorial effort FARM SLUTS was available on DVD, and if so, whether or not it would be more entertaining that this shambolic enterprise. I actually looked up FARM SLUTS on the internet while I was waiting for England to win the Third Test match. The guidance warned that it contained "partial nudity, language and untimely random acts of perversion." I sadly have to report that FARM SLUTS was probably even less funny than THE BIG WHITE and certainly had no other entertainment-related merits. So, overall, the whole BIG WHITE experience was fairly disappointing.

THE BIG WHITE got an indicatively small release in the US at the fag-end of 2005 and is now on release in the UK. The Germans get the pox on April 20th 2006, and the Austrians on June 2nd 2006.