AFTER THE SCREAMING STOPS - BFI London Film Festival 2018 Preview

Confessions of a cine-blogger - I once was a Brosette!  This may mean nothing to millennials but back in the late 80s Bros was a massively successful teen boy band with an army of fans who all wore the same clothes called Brosettes. The band contained twin brothers Matt and Luke Goss - singer and drummer respectively - and a chap called Craig Logan.  At the height of their fame they were like Wham! was in the early 80s - but after three albums it all fell apart. Craig got ME and had to quit (although a bit of googling reveals he went on to have a successful career as a record exec and talent manager - hooray!) and then the twins fell out and the band was over. What this fantastic documentary does is show just how intense and crazy that sudden rise to fame is, and just how devastating it is when it's yanked away from you.  Luke describes how there just wasn't any money because it had all been tied up in the band, and how he had to ask his fiancee for her engagement ring back. It's a familiar story from many a teen band that collapsed and a story that I feel will be of interest to people who hadn't heard of the band before watching the film.

Once the band collapsed, Luke went on to work in film, featuring in Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy movies, and both continued to pursue music. The framing device of this film is to show the twins preparing for a reunion gig at the O2 - one of London's largest and highest profile venues. We see them in the rehearsal room with the pressure clearly getting to them - erupting into deeply bitter and personal attacks on each other. There's occasional humour in some of the pressure they put on themselves and the grandiose terms in which they frame their comeback, but the film never crosses the line of laughing AT them.  Instead, there's a deep vein of humanity of these two brothers, struggling to patch up their emotional relationship as much as their careers.  It's really fascinating stuff.

AFTER THE SCREAMING STOPS has a running time of 98 minutes. The movie will be released in cinemas on 9th Nov and to own on DVD/download on 12th Nov. There are still tickets available for 2 out of the 3 performances at this year's BFI London Film Festival. 

HELLBOY II - THE GOLDEN ARMY - hands (of doom) down the best of the summer blockbusters

HELLBOY II - THE GOLDEN ARMY is by far the most satisfying of the summer blockbusters in terms of sureness of purpose; visual flair; emotional engagement; and sheer balls-out entertainment. It leaves the HULK and IRON MAN trailing in its wake, and while THE DARK KNIGHT may have been more ambitious and seditious, it teased more than satisfied: HELLBOY II, by contrast, shows a film-maker in full control of his medium and his subject matter.

The story is simple but captivating, rooted in myth and legend. Man has encroached upon the territory of monsters, and Prince Nuada will lead a mechanical golden army to reclaim that territory. His twin sister, Princess Nuala wants to maintan the peace and unites with Hellboy and his fellow paranormal investigators at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. So, "Red" goes into battle once more, defendng the very humans who call him a freak, turning against his own kind. On top of which, he's got relationship problems with is pyrokinetic girlfriend Liz Sherman; he's being ragged by his new boss, an ethereal officious pyschic called Johann Krauss; and his best friend, a merman called Abe Sapien has gone goofy for the Princess. What's a demon to do but slap on the Barry Manilow, drink more beer and kick the crap out of the other guy?!

Guillermo del Toro's plotting is admirably neat and linear, and that allows him to spend all his time, care and energy on some of the most wonderful visuals to be seen in a summer blockbuster. Art-house fans will see the same sort of organic, authentic fantasy creatures from PAN'S LABRYNTH on a far bigger canvas. The genius od del Toro is to harness the power of CGI without making his creatures look too fake, sleek and automated. His world is grimy, grungy, living and breathing, mythic and beautiful. The "cantina" scene in the Troll Market already has me desperate to see the movie again and wallow ithe richness of the imagination on show. And the internal mechanisms of the Golden Army are intricate and breath-taking.

The rich visuals are complemented by a script and performances that manage to walk the line between genuine emotional engagement and laugh-out-loud comedy. It says a lot for Anna Walton and Seth "Family Guy" MacFarlane that we fall for a love story between two characters played from behind serious make-up and prosthetics - the most unlikely romantic couple in cinema. And Ron Perlman has cause to feel overlooked in all the hype about Heath Ledger. He's consistently one of the most charismatic and engagic actors working. He manages to pull of deeply romantic scenes with Liz (Selma Blair), moments of soul-searching, and slapstick comedy in fights with Krauss and drunken male bonding with Abe.

Many summer blockbusters try to capture the heady mix of action, romance, comedy and myth that made the original STAR WARS flick and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK so enjoyable and memorable. Few have succeeded. But HELLBOY II is firmly in that genre, and is one of the very few CGI movies to be a master of its technology rather than a slave to it.

HELLBOY II - THE GOLDEN ARMY was released earlier this year in Singapore, Thailand, Mexico, Panama, the US, Iceland, Italy, Israel and Russia. It opens on Agust 14th in Russia; on August 15th in Turkey; on August 20th in the UK; on August 21st in Hungary, the Netherlands and Portugal; on August 22nd in Norway; on August 28th in Australia and on August 29th in Spain. It opens on September 5th in Slovakia, Brazil, Denmark, Estonia and Finland and later in September in Poland and Sweden. It opens in October in Argentina, Greece, Venezuela, Germany, Belgium, Egypt and France.

THE MAN - what a waste of talent

THE MAN is a formulaic and only occasionally funny cop-buddy movie. The set up is that Samuel L Jackson, Bad-ass and Jedi, is a hard-as-nails cop. His partner has just gone down for corruption, so that Jackson is under suspicion. His mission is to take out a big-time dealer by pretending that he is also a corrupt cop. Unfortunately, the villain of the piece - played with a surprisingly large dollop of credibility by former British boy-band member, Luke Goss - mistakes Eugene Levy for the corrupt cop. Now, Eugene Levy is best known to all of us as the sweet dad in American Pie or as the sweet put-upon husband in a string of mockumentaries like BEST IN SHOW or A MIGHTY WIND. In order to make it credible that the villain would actually believe Levy is a criminal, the script-writers work had on the incidental and frankly, ridiculous, plot details. But you know - any of these odd-couple mistaken-identity movies rely on you buying into the absurd plot set-up. Whether the film still works depends on whether there is genuine chemistry between the two leads and whether the gags are actually funny. Unfortunately for this movie, I found the relationship between Jackson and Levy unfunny and abusive. How many more times do we have to see a wise-cracking hard-ass black guy take the piss out of a geeky white guy? This stuff is tired. Worse still, it generates bad cinema - anyone who doesn't believe me after seeing THE MAN should check out that horribly Queen Latifah-Jimmy Fallon flick TAXI. So, please Hollywood, let's bury this genre or at least get in better funny-men to do the script.


THE MAN goes on release in the UK and US today and hits France on January 11th 2006.