JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM

This film is utterly without merit, joy, wonder or intelligence  It is a shameless cash-in on a tired franchise, without any of the majesty of the original.  Even worse, it teases us with memories of that film with an early cameo from Jeff Goldblum and a late cameo from BD Wong. Worst of all, it wastes the talents of arthouse director J A Bayona, who made the exceptional A MONSTER CALLS. 

In this new instalment, a few years after the dinos go bonkers on Isla Nubar, a volcano threatens to make them all extinct again. Goldblum's rational scientist argues for this but reformed park exec Bryce Dallas Howard now wants to rescue them as living creatures deserving of our help. In doing so she enlists the help of ex-lover and dino handler Chris Pratt, and is funded by James Cromwell's dying billionaire and ex partner of the park's original founder.  Of course, the moral of this series was always that the real monsters weren't the killer dinos but the evil capitalist bastards who sought to exploit them. And so it goes with this non-surprising plot-twist.

The whole thing is over-loud, over-long, emotionally involving and lacking in intelligence. Avoid.

JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM is rated 12A and has a running time of 128 minutes.

BIG HERO 6

You can listen to a podcast review of the film below or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes:



BIG HERO 6 is an animated super-hero origins story wherein a genius teenage boy called Hiro uses his late brother's sumo-shaped gentle robot Baymax to catch an evil scientist.  In doing so, Hiro teams up with his brother's friends, giving them superhero costumes and harnessing their scientific achievements, rather than relying on mutations or alien powers.   The movie is clearly in love with its own heritage - there are friendly nods to E.T. and anime, not to mention a nostalgic reference to those quirky VHS-vanquished video players of the early 1980s.  But it's far more in love with the concept of love - what it really means to grieve, forgive and move on.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 7 - THE ARTIST

Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo, the stars of
THE ARTIST, at the UK premiere at the
BFI London Film Festival 2011.

Michael Hazanavicius’ charming silent movie about the end of silent movie-making stars Bérénice Bejo and Jean Dujardin (of the recent secret-agent spoofs OSS 117) as actors Peppy Miller and George Valentin, who fall in love against the dreamy backdrop of an early golden-age Hollywood. When the talkies take off, George, the go-to man of the silent picture, finds himself outcast by a determined and winning Peppy, a role in which Bejo dazzles, and where THE ARTIST might have kept up with her singular energy it slows to the nostalgic time spent by George in relative poverty and obscurity. Nonetheless, Dujardin's performance remains a broad and irresistible focus, and there may be no modern leading man better suited to the demands of the silent movie genre. Rare in any case does it seem to enjoy watching actors watching themselves on screen.

THE ARTIST played Cannes, where Jean Dujardin won Best Actor; Toronto and London 2011. It is on release in France. It opens in the US on November 23rd; in Italy on December 9th; in Spain on December 16th; in Greece on December 22nd; in Germany on January 26th and in Hong Kong on February 9th.

SURROGATES - weakly plotted sci-fi thriller

There have been a couple of movies recently that tackle the issue of avatars and virtual relationships. In GAMER, an updated version of RUNNING MAN, the ability to pilot real-life chip-implanted humans brings out the worst in humanity. As with today’s plain vanilla internet, advanced IT is used most commonly to allow humans to indulge vices as old as time. You can disapprove of the nasty, misogynistic, bleak depiction of humanity at the core of GAMER, but sad to say, the numbers support it. By contrast, the new Bruce Willis sci-fi thriller SURROGATES, posits a world in which the ability to pilot robot avatars has resulted in a safer, if anodyne, world. Humans have retreated to their pyjamas and their lounges, steering robots through life instead. Of course, the robots are our younger, idealized selves, but the exploitation at the heart of GAMER is absent. Indeed, in a world full of robots, crime rates have dropped dramatically. There is, however, a resistance movement that wants humans to get back into actual contact with each other. The plot of the movie sees two cops (Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell) hunting for a new weapon that has been used to kill real people by killing their surrogates. The existence of such a weapon threatens the very point of having surrogates in the first place – cocooning people from harm. There are some shenanigans involving the resistance movement and the original creator of the surrogates (James Cromwell) - and stakes so high, and motivation so iillogical, as to be ludicrous. It's all as uninteresting as the premise of a crime-free robot-induced future is unbelievable. The only impressive thing about the film is the make-up. They really did a great job of creating the life-like but ever-so-slightly plastic look of the surrogates.

SURROGATES is on release in Australia, Hong Kong, Israel, Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada, Poland, Turkey, the UK and the US. It opens next week in Egypt, Hungary, singapore, South Korea, Bulgaria, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Itopens on October 9th in the Czech Republic, Brazil, Denmark and Estonia. It opens on October 15th in the Netherlands and Spain. It opens on October 22nd in New Zealand, Slovenia and the Ukraine. It opens on October 28th in Belgium, france, Argentina and Portugal. It opens on November 5th in Greece and Italy. It opens on January 5th in Italy; January 21st in Germany and January 22nd in Japan.

London Film Festival Day 10 - W.

W. is a frustrating movie. It features a strong central performance from Josh Brolin (NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN) as George W. Bush, but this biopic plays like an afternoon TV drama. Writer Stanley Weiser and director Oliver Stone have given us a conventional biopic wherein a bunch of stuff happens to W. He goes to Yale, he drinks a lot, he fails at a bunch of jobs, he gets born again, and somehow, just to prove he can, he gets elected, he takes us into Iraq....Nowhere do the film-makers show the kind of intelligence in shaping the material that Paolo Sorrentino lent to his Giuilio Andreotti biopic, IL DIVO. There are no big ideas. Okay - there's one big idea. That W. was always trying to prove his worth to his "poppy" H.W. But frankly, this is treated in such a ham-fisted, cursory manner it hardly passes for an over-riding theme. And the dream-sequence in a baseball stadium is so crude and so ill-pursued that it wouldn't look out of place in a rookie feature. Oliver Stone seems to be regressing from a work of labyrinthine brilliance and daring - JFK - to this superficial, paint-by-numbers narrative. Directorial clumsiness aside, biographers of W. have a problem, and it's not a problem that Oliver Stone resolves. You have to make a choice on how you view W. If you assume that he really is as dumb as he looks - that he can barely string a sentence together and that he's been manipulated by the neo-cons - then you reduce him to a buffoon. And if you reduce him to a buffoon, but you're dealing with serious issues like Iraq, then what the audience wants is actually a film about Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and how those guys got what they wanted. In other words, you want a movie in which W. is not the lead character. On the other hand, if you argue that W. was actually more intelligent and active than that - that it takes more than a famous name to become POTUS - then you have to work hard to argue your case and to make W. a nuanced and interesting character worthy of a biopic. Oliver Stone simply doesn't do this. He doesn't try to get underneath the skin of W. in the way that he got underneath the skin of Nixon. Stone goes for the easy laughs in mocking W. As a result, he undermines his own case for making the film. Accordingly, we get a sporadically entertaining but largely dull film that strings together famous phrases, a series of vignettes and some piss-poor caricatures of cabinet members. This film is not worthy of Oliver Stone. And it's certainly not worthy of an American president that took his country into a three-front war; tore down constitutional protections; and was at the helm at the start of an economic clusterfuck. 

W. played London 2008. It was released earlier this month in the US and opens next weekend in Belgium and France. W opens in the UK on November 7th, in Turkey on November 14th, in Sweden on December 5th, in Finland on January 2nd and in the Netherlands on January 8th.