THE AIR I BREATHE - pretentious wank

"I always wondered, when a butterfly leaves the safety of its cocoon, does it realize how beautiful it has become? Or does it still just see itself as a caterpillar?"

Who writes such nonsense? Debut feature director Jieho Lee apparently. The ensuing film, THE AIR I BREATHE, is a deeply unhappy affair.The laborious structure sees four inter-twining stories each focusing on a character whose story, apparently, illustrates an Asian proverb that life is made up of Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow, and Love. This apparently gives Lee leave to include dialogue as banal as that quoted above. Forest Whitaker plays a naive low-level banker who loses a ton of money in an illicit gambling den and ends up robbing a bank to pay back Andy Garcia's rent-a-mobster. In an inter-related story, the mobster's cocky nephew (Emile Hirsh) is being shepherded through the night by a clairvoyant goon (Brendan Fraser). The goon will end up saving a teen popster (Sarah Michelle Gellar) from the mafiosi, and all the stories are linked when Kevin Bacon's doctor realises the popster has a rare blood type that can save the life of the woman he loves.

The performances fall into two broad camps. Garcia, Whitaker and Hirsch play to type, lazily. Fraser and Gellar are running as fast as they can from their typical screen personae. The script is banal and never matches up to its self-proclaimed profundity. The direction is gimmicky. Need I say more?

THE AIR I BREATHE was released in early 2008 and is available on DVD.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - SOUTHLAND TALES

SOUTHLAND TALES is Richard Kelly's satire on post 9-11 US society. It's a paranoid fantasy about a USA destroyed by the four things: terrorism; the government's anti-liberal response to it; the vulgarity of popular culture; and environment degradation. Sadly, Kelly isn't up to synthesising all these concerns into a definitive take on contemporary angst. Rather, he has created an ambitious, fleetingly interesting, but overwhelmingly baggy, messy and pretentious film.

The movie is a rag-bag of inter-twining stories all played out in Kelly's alternate USA in 2008. A terrorist nuclear attack has wiped out Texas and prompted the US government to turn the US into a police state. Meanwhile, the energy crisis has been solved by a company that harnesses wave power to produce energy, the side-effect of which is to slow down the rotation of the earth and cause a warp in the space-time continuum. Against this back-drop we focus on three characters. The Rock plays a Schwarzenegger-like actor suffering from amnesia, trying to make sense of it all. He's being exploited by a porn star turned cultural commentator, Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar). Meanwhile, Seann William Scott plays a police officer, on the trail of Marxist radicals and his alternate self. All these characters are being messed up warps in the space-time continuum caused by environmental degradation.

The resulting film is a mess. And not in the way that Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL is a mess, but touched by genius, and therefore a cult film. SOUTHLAND TALES is misconceived. "State of the nation" content is better suited to the format of the novel. Novels like THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES or VANITY FAIR can take their time and build up a coherent narrative. My proposition is that the feature film is fundamentally unsuited to this kind of artistic endeavour.

SOUTHLAND TALES played Cannes 2006 to a disastrous reception. It was then put on extremely limited release in the UK and US in winter 2007. It is available on DVD in the theatrical release cut.

TMNT - the franchise that dare not speak its name

One of the occupational hazzards of being the person in the family who is known to watch a bunch of films, is that you find yourself volunteered to chaperone a bunch of ankle-biters to movies that you would, in all prejudice, rather bite off your own ankle than watch. I can just about deal with the idea of a short cartoon about teenage mutant ninja turtles eating pizza, shouting "cowabunga" and prancing about on skyscrapers, but a full length movie was always going to be too long and too ridiculous even for me.

But TMNT - the franchise so eager to rebrand it's not even using its full name - is not a bad film. Director Kevin Munroe has deftly traversed the problem that grown men in latex suits look stupid by cunningly CGI-animating all the characters so that they all look stupid. Oh yes! in TMNT, not only are the turtles more buff, but the human characters are eerily elongated and distorted like a pastiche of manga. Fans will be happy, though, to see April, the turtles and Splinter back, although the villains are different. The plot, such as it is, involves the turtles being reunited to round up some evil beasties that are wandering the city causing havoc. Turns out an immortal Aztec warrior turned wall street tycoon (figures!) needs them to unlock a portal to another world and unleash hell on earth, Ghostbusters-stylee.....

The movie skips along at a furious pace, with not so much "cowabunga" as of old and a lot of fighting. Indeed, the whole movie is basically one loud, long, CGI fight scene with various armies of ninja-people, ninja-turtles, ninja-friends, April's house-mate in a hockey-mask, robo-ninjas, stone-ninjas, and a wolf-ninja for fun. I can't say it did much for me, but it was over soon enough and the kids seemed to get an adrenaline-rush and the desire to swing sticks at things. Which I gather is a good thing.

TMNT is on release in on release in Australia, Israel, Russia, Canada, Singapore, Turkey, the UK and the US. It opens in Belgium, the Philippines, Argentina, Greece, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Iceland, Norway, Spain and Venezuala next week. It opens in France, Germany and Austria on April 12th and in the Netherlands, Latvia and South Korea later in April. It opens in Finland on June 22nd.