JUPITER ASCENDING

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



I can't work out whether JUPITER ASCENDING is a cunning satire on early twenty-first century capitalism and Hollywood's obsession with youth or just a steaming mess.  

The Wachowski Siblings have created a world in which in human beings are just a commodity, harvested by oligarchs to create a serum for eternal youth.  The market-leaders in this harvesting business are three siblings of the Abrasax family.  The elder is Balem played by Eddie Redmayne in a performance so camp it goes beyond parody and into plain bad.  His rivals are his sister Kalique (Tuppence Middleton) and playboy brother Titus (Douglas Booth).  Humans are playthings for these future gods, until they discover that Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), an earthling cleaning lady, has the exact same DNA as their murdered mother.  Clearly all three siblings now have an incentive to find Jupiter, register her as their mother reincarnated, get her to claim title to the corporation they inherited, and run the world through her.  I say clearly because none of the above is clear or makes any sense.  And that's before I get to the space police staffed with cross-bred human-animal combos with angelic wings (Channing Tatum and Sean Bean).

Remember when you were a kid and you drank too much cheap cherry cola too fast? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you SPEED RACER

From the makers of THE MATRIX comes a new feature length adaptation of the classic Japanese TV kids cartoon SPEED RACER. It's a technically brilliant movie that beautifully renders the futuristic-kitsch of the speed racer world. The costumes and sets are all acid-bright colours, '50s americana and the shooting style is high-octane in every sense. Camera angles swoop and glide around the racing track and the editing is out-standing. Talking heads rotate as background shots cut in and out - kids' daydreams become gonzo animated - and even the narrative cuts in and out of the past and present with hold-on-to-your-hats speed.

Take, for example, the bravura opening sequence. Over the course of a car race, we are shown the back story of the characters. Rex Racer, is a champion racing driver, idolised by is kid brother Speed. But Rex decides to leave Pops Racer and sign with a corporate sponsor. Soon, he's using dirty tricks, bringing shame on the family. Finally, he's killed in a motor accident. Years later, his kid brother, Speed Racer is also a champion racer, idolised by his kid brother Sprittle, and on the verge of signing with a big corporate sponsor, Royalton Industries. The film picks up at the point where a spurned Royalton is trying to squeeze the Racers out of the industry. Speed teams up with the enigmatic(!) Rx to bring down the corrupt cartel that controls racing, by driving in the hazardous cross-country race, The Crucible.

So far so peachy. The movie is clearly technically amazing. I also loved the self-conscious home-spun wisdom and earnestness of the Little Guy versus The Man message. And there are some very funny moments, usually involving Paulie Litt. He steals the show as Spritle, getting into scrapes, hopped up on sugar, with his pet chimp.

But the movie has a problem. It has no heart. For all the day-glo visual brilliance, and the earnest dead-pan performances from all the actors, the CGI overwhelms emotion. I found it desperately hard to get into the film - to sympathise with Speed's dilemma - to be excited about the true identity of Rx Racer. And if you don't care, all the CGI doesn't mean a damn.

SPEED RACER is on release in the US, UK, the Netherlands, Argentina, Germany, Greece, Germany, Hong Kong, Kuwait, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Italy, Spain and Venezuala. It opens later in May in Hungary, Estonia, Turkey, Egypt and Russia. SPEED RACER opens in June in Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Poland, Australia, Belgium, France, Israel and Norway. It opens in Japan on July 5th.

V for VERY SILLY but still some good whistles and bangs

Reactions to V for VENDETTA seem poles apart: in general, the respected critics hated it but movie-goers are loving it. I guess I fall somewhere between the two poles. My first reaction was huge disappointment. In an Orwellian future, the UK is controlled by a fascist government, headed up a Big Brother-like Chancellor played by the marvellous British actor John Hurt.* Hugo Weaving plays "V", a terrorist who blows up Government buildings. V saves a young girl called Evey, played by Natalie Portman, (the stripper in CLOSER and Queen Amidala in Star Wars I thru III) and she eventually joins his cause. So far, so fantastically interesting. You have to love any movie that sends up an authoritarian "Chancellor", and attacks a fascist government that infringes upon our civil liberties. I never thought that a Hollywood that cannot quite bring itself to give a gay movie the Best Picture Oscar would make a movie that portrays terrorists as heroes! I'm loving the controversy and the honest exploration of the duties that fall on a citizen in the face of a repressive society.

However, the depression kicks in when you realise that the convoluted plot has more holes in it than Rab C Nesbitt's string vest. In addition, the film is populated by a bunch of high-class British character actors. Now, this is, of course, a good thing for international audiences. But for us Brits it can jar when we are expected to accept establishment boffin Stephen Fry as an instrument of sedition. He hosts the BAFTAs!

Anyways, I watched this movie again yesterday with altered expectations and realised that I had been way too harsh. If you just want a large dollop of popcorn-style trashy entertainment, you could do worse than see V. It has all the requisite whistles and bangs, as you would expect from a movie written by the guys who gave us The Matrix and the directed by the First AD on The Matrix and Star Wars II. In addition, the whole thing is wonderfully camp, and teeters on the brink of BATMAN AND ROBIN kitsch-tastic status. I can't take it remotely seriously, but then I do not think I am meant to. (Unlike Syriana, which wanted to be taken seriously but was still hillariously twee in its rendering of the Middle-East conflict.)

V for VENDETTA was shown at Berlin 2005 and is now on release in the US, UK, Germany and Austria. It hits France on April 19th 2006. *Amusing that Winston Smith has been resurrected as Big Brother. Kind of like when the People's Republic of Sheffield's David Blunkett turned up twenty years later as the most repressive Home Secretary in post-war British history.