SYRUP

SYRUP is a tonally uneven, unfunny but provocative satirical romance starring Amber Heard (THE RUM DIARIES) and Shiloh Fernandez (EVIL DEAD) as two media obsessed  advertising execs who fall for each other despite their inability to lead authentic lives.  Fernandez plays Scat - a slacker who has one good idea - to great an energy drink called Fukk. It doesn't care what it tastes like. The taste is not the point. And of course it's a runaway success. In the midst of all this he falls for the marketing exec Six, oh yes, complete with ludicrous back story of how she came up with that name. Because Amber Heard, dressing way above her age and clearly angling for the remake of BASIC INSTINCT, is so wrapped up in creating the perfect image of herself, she doesn't actually know how to express her own name and back story.  Corporate shenanigans ensue.  In the cut-throat capitalist world every great marketing scheme runs the risk of a social media backfire and when both characters hit the buffers real feelings start to be revealed, insofar as they can be.

As rom-coms go the movie has few laughs and the characters aren't that engaging. The irritatingly smug straight to camera exposition is, well, irritating, in the same manner as Don Cheadle in the TV show House of Cards. But somewhere amidst the rather soupy and predictable romance there's a telling satire on marketing and mass hype which piqued my interest. It may not have satisfied it, but elevated this film from being utterly unmemorable.

SYRUP has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is available on streaming services.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN - PART 2

Bella's journey from whiny reactive teen to Ripleyesque super-mum.

And so the fantastically successful commercial juggernaut that is Twiglet drifts to a close, with this polished, camp but ultimately rather silly final film.  The movie picks up in media res, with our previously whiny, reactive, pathetic heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) opening her colour-enhanced, fake-eyelashed eyes as a sparkly vampire, all her spider-senses tingling.  The first forty-minutes of the flick see her hop skip and jump through a new world of heightened colour and smell, astonishingly controlling her urge to feed off humans, and coming to terms with the fact that her child, Renesmee, survived because her old flirt-friend and werewolf (Taylor Lautner) "imprinted" on her.  And where's Bella's husband in all this?  Looking on smugly as his "new-born" wife kicks ass and looks hotter than ever.

In the movie's second act, Bella's in-laws, The Cullens, gather up a brood of global vampires to testify to the fact that Renesmee isn't an  out-of-control, dangerous child vampire, but actually a half-human cute little moppet.  Their aim is to reason with the Vampire world's equivalent to the Papacy, led by Michael Sheen's hilariously camp Aro, that Renesmee shouldn't be killed, and failing that, to do battle.  This leads us to the final act of the film, which seeks to give fans of the almost absurdly bloodless novels a humdinger of an action sequence, while also remaining faithful to the more talky, banal denouement of the book. Suffice to say that, as one would expect in this world of emasculated, proto Christian revival vampires, all ends happily for the good guys, and even for the bad guys, because basically the entire plot motivation of this movie has been a gross misunderstanding. 

There's a lot to like in this instalment of the series. Production values are top notch.  Guillermo Navarro's photography of Bella's newly heightened world is beautiful; the bleach blonde dye jobs on the Cullens are less cheap; the CGI wolves are superb; and the Volturi superbly over-the-top.  The acting is just fine, with the exception of Stewart who really does sell it well. Michael Sheen is, of course, stunning, and Dakota Fanning seems to share in his sense of mischief.  I can honestly say I had a fun time watching this movie.

Of course, it doesn't really hang together.  Aro's speech to pre-emptively kill the unknown quantity that is Renesmee kept cracking me up as a caricature of Tony Blair's pro Iraqi war campaign.  The knowing homo-eroticism of Lautner stripping off for Charlie (Billy Burke) broke any seriousness this movie might have had.  And, as with the X-MEN movies, I'm always struck by the disparity and ill-use of the super-powers handed out to the different characters.  Bella has self- control and a defensive shield. Awesome. But this other guy can CONTROL THE ELEMENTS!!! I mean, isn't that game over for the Volturi right there? And as for Alice's power to see the future, so crucial in allowing the screenwriters to have their cake and eat it, if she can see various potential outcomes, doesn't that rather confuse which  of her prophesies to believe in?

Ah well, I guess this isn't a movie we should think about too deeply.  In today's recessionary climate it seems like a nostalgic throw-back to the boom years in which it was written - when beautiful people drove beautiful cars, and a virginal young girl who waited till  marriage would be gifted a beautiful cottage stocked with pretty handbags and shoes. I mean, who needs an education anyway? And let's not even get into the sheer creepiness of poor Renesmee being promised, in utero, to a guy who's already gone through puberty.  To all those pop-culture commentators praising Bella as a modern heroine I say, no no and again no.

But like I said, better not to overthink it.   Better to enjoy the camp hilarity of Sheen's maniacal laugh and Gap ad models ripping each other's heads off. 

BREAKING DAWN PART 2 is on release pretty much everywhere except Armenia, Cambodia, Germany, Singapore and India where it opens next week; Hong Kong where it opens on December 20th and Japan where it opens on December 28th. 

iPad Round-Up 5 - IMMORTALS

Tarsem Singh's last film, the visually stunning, whimsical, deeply emotionally affecting THE FALL, is one of my favourite films of the past decade. In my mind's eye I can see vivid imagery - breathtakingly framed action sequences, wondrous costumes and locations - but I can also feel how heartbroken I was in a pivotal scene where a sweet little girl is bertrayed by the injured man she is trying to help.  It's a movie that has so much heart - such a simple story, when all is said and done - that it compensates for the distancing effect of the highly-stylised visuals and the baroque story-telling style.

Tragically, IMMORTALS is a movie in which there is style, too much style, too many artfully staged, framed and HD-colour-timed visuals, and too little narrative or emotional clarity.  The resulting film is dull (literally - not sure what was up with my iPad download but it was so dark in places I could barely see the action) and then simply unwatchable.  In theory, the movie is about the Greek myth of Perseus, the Clash of the Titans, and the Minotaur.  I studied these myths in school in depth.  But even I didn't have a clue what was happening, or care why.  The actors do the best they can, I suppose, but they're swamped by the visual effects and no-one comes out of it with any credit.  I also suspect that Mickey Rourke, as Hyperion, was simply mis-cast.

Avoid at all costs.  

IMMORTALS was released in November 2011. It is available to rent and own.

TWILIGHT: ECLIPSE - a world of bad hair colour and worse CGI

So, in an evening of girlie bonding my early twenties cousin and I went to see the third installment of the immensely popular Twilight series, ECLIPSE. Not that either of us could be called fan-girls. I’ve read the first book and seen the first two films: my cousin had only seen the first film. We proclaim no membership of either Team Jacob or Team Edward. But, along we went, open-minded, and if nothing else, happy to be in the lovely big Extreme screens in the Vue Westfield. Two hours later we emerged from a world of bad hair-dye, bad CGI effects and hammy dialogue. For this, my friends, is not a movie of high quality trying to appeal to the neutral movie-goer. Rather, ECLIPSE takes its audience’s buy-in for granted and delivers a workman-like condensed version of the novel, with the cheapest visual effects and wigs it can find. Seriously – the wolves bounce through the forests with little heft, much like Ang Lee’s HULK – and the crimes against hair colour perpetrated by Emmett Cullen and Rosalie Hale disgrace a big-budget film.

As the movie opens, we see our heroine Bella Swan torn between the two boys who love. The first is Edward Cullen – ancient vampire in the body of teen heart-throb – who won’t deflower her until they’re married, and for whom she would have to become a vampire. The second candidate is Jacob Black – ridiculously buff teen werewolf – who is happy to keep Bella warm (sadly, this saga being ludicrously chaste, we can read no double-entendre here) and offer her a romantic life that doesn’t involve dying. So follow two hours of hackneyed dialogue as each boy declares his love for Bella, and Bella looks sulky in response. At the end of which, she declares that the decision was never really about who she loved more but about who she wanted to be. This struck me as a rather unconvincing last minute attempt to give movie that is basically about a chick being dependent on two guys for her physical safety (evil mean red-headed vampire wants to kill her with her “new-born” vampire army) some kind of feminist cred. It would’ve bought into it more if during the course of the film, Bella had talked about this journey to self-realisation with her dad or her friends, or the two boys in her life. Overall then, I remain unconvinced by the whole Twilight phenomenon. The heroine is sulky: the vampires are unsexy: the werewolves on steroids: the CGI sucks: and basically very very little happens indeed. For the life of me I can’t figure out why David Slade, director of edgy indie hit HARD CANDY, would want to helm such a mainstream, banal movie, other than, of course, for the paycheque.

Additional tags: Taylor Lautner, Anna Kendrick, Ashley Greene, Elizabeth Reaser

TWILIGHT: ECLIPSE is on global release.

TWILIGHT - sugar-free gum

Where to begin? Maybe with the commercially successfully but critically more equivocally received teen novels from Stephenie Meyer. TWILIGHT is the first in a series of novels that spice up the typical SWEET VALLEY HIGH obsessions of teen dating and who's going to take who to the Prom with a hint of vampiricism. And boy is it merely a hint. Instead of lashings of sex and death and sexy death and death-inducing sex, we get a lot of holding hands and big declarations of love but precious little rumpy-pumpy. Frankly, instead of all the narcissistic angst I would've far preferred the heroes to go and have some healthy sex and get over themselves. But that, my friends, kills the goose that laid the golden royalty cheques.

Then we get to the movie. Now, I suspect that the movie will be super-popular with the target demographic because it stays very faithful to the book. (And yes, I did read the novel. It's slight - takes around 3 hours - not well-written - but it's fairly engaging. Most disturbing, every one of my tween nieces had a copy.) Our heroine Bella Swan moves from sunny Phoenix to gloomy Forks to stay with her dad when her mum remarries. Soon all the local boys are asking her out, but she only has eyes for a moody but dazzlingly good-looking boy called Edward Cullen - a member of a family of vampires who choose not to hunt humans and fight against their monstrous nature.  The book spends a while going through the "does he like me or doesn't he" angst but the film admirably compresses this material. On the plus side we get right to the action, wherein some less enlightened vampire trackers decide to devour Bella and incite Edward into the mother of all fights, but a big negative is that we miss/skip over one of the nicest scenes in the book, where Edward tests how far he can be intimate with Bella and not be overcome by his desire to suck out her blood. If anything there is less intimacy in the film than in the book! 

Arguing the merits of the film to the fanbase is quite simply a waste of time, judging by the oohs and aaghs than greeted the title card! But for the parental units suckered into a viewing (I was designated driver for eight hormonally charged tweens) what hope is there? Not much I have to say. The direction, from Catherine Hardwicke, is pretty ham-fisted, closer to the abysmal THE NATIVITY STORY than the brilliantly scabrous THIRTEEN. She clearly can't direct action, her camera swoops where it should be still, and the CGI effects - notably Edward's dazzling skin in sunlight and the rapid running - are all very low-rent. The acting is similarly clunky. The lead actors are devoid of charisma and depict angst as constipation. Hardwicke does herself no favours by casting natural brunettes and then bleaching them to within an inch of their lives - it just looks cheap and unnatural. And, frankly, the vampire family are meant to look stunningly beautiful, and these actors don't. IMDB says the role of Edward was originally going to Henry Cavill till he was deemed too old. True, but at least he has the requisite classical beauty. 

Other than the problems with the individual nuts and bolts, my big problem remains that this is a vampire movie that lacks any passion. And so, you're just left with a really dull movie about self-obsessed moody teens. It left me hankering for the vampire movies of my youth - movies with passion, comedy and peril - movies like THE LOST BOYS. Apparently I wasn't the only one. The DVD store next to the movie theatre was sold out, having had a run on copies and requests for more from disgruntled olds!

TWILIGHT is on release in the US, Canada, Italy, Mexico, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, the Philippines, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Malaysia, the UAE, Estonia, Latvia, Thailand, Indonesia, the UK, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Portugal, Iceland, Poland, Spain, South Korea, Australia, Russia, Lithuania, Taiwan, Vietnam, Finland, Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore, Brazil, the UK and Venezuela. It opens next week in Croatia and New Zealand. It opens on New Years Day in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Finland, Romania and South Africa. It opens on January 8th in France, Switzerland, Greece, Norway and Poland. It opens on January 15th in Germany, Slovakia, Austria and Bulgaria. It opens on January 5th in Turkey, Denmark and Ecuador and on April 4th in Japan.