Girls Don't Play Electric Guitars- THE RUNAWAYS Review

My lamentations on the musician biopic genre are well documented on this very blog, but here's The Runaways, another one that pulls tropes out of its hat like a feeble children's entertainer expecting surprise and wonderment from those that behold it. But meh, it's not all that bad.

It's basically condensing down the stories of Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, who became the main players in the formation of The Runaways, an all-girl punk rock band that at one stage could've taken the world by storm. But in the tradition of all these biopics, fame and success is always bad, and only addiction, division and ill health can follow.

Is there a lot to mark The Runaways apart from all those other biopics? The performances are largely excellent, it has to be said. Kristen Stewart vindicates every bit of praise her fans (including me) have given her when she makes a film like this in between lowering herself with crap like Twilight. It's great to see her mixing it up with Joan Jett's glowering glamour when she's sadly much more recognisable as The Amazing Baked Potato Woman, Bella Swan.

Likewise, Michael Shannon makes a formidable sleazy record producer. It's difficult to imagine many others invigorating the sheer leering quality of Kim Fowley in the way that Shannon does, feeding the ladies in his care a line about independence and feminism while simultaneously manipulating them terribly and reducing them to sex objects. But yeah, this is a film where Dakota Fanning is a sex object.

I doubt many casual film fans will be familiar with Hounddog because approximately no one ever saw it. I understand that it was Fanning's first foray into more grown-up roles and that it involved her character being raped. This collossal misjudgement of her audience and talents probably had something to do with the film being roundly slated. Quite aside from failing to convince with Cherie Currie's sex appeal, she just never convinced me here, full stop. Her previous work as a child actor loomed large over this one, for me.

Other than the performances, it's full of what you'd expect. Namely, those "Anakin Skywalker, meet Obi Wan Kenobi" lines that pop up in every one of these biopics from Walk the Line to Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. Also, a consequence of Walk Hard- The Dewey Cox Story being so under-appreciated is that I'm the only one who laughs every time a track title is clumsily inserted into the dialogue.

Everything is abridged, but the period the film covers, from the band's formation to Currie's departure, wasn't that long anyway. I'd rather have seen a full-blown Joan Jett biopic starring Stewart. This almost amounts to a non-story- real events compressed into the structure of this narrative type in the same way as the band was compressed into Fowley's mould. It all wraps up so fast that all the substance abuse we saw has no consequence at all, except for a laughably bad scene where Dakota Fanning pretends to be drunk in a supermarket.

The Runaways isn't bad, but for a film in which a record producer tries to cash in on something new because he's tired of the same old bullshit from angry young bands, there isn't much of an attempt to innovate accordingly. The only real attraction is the acting by Stewart and Shannon and getting to hear some good music on a cinema sound system. The subject is interchangeable from film to film with these biopics. There's no real insight or consequence, and I for one am fed up with music biopics.

The Runaways is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Runaways, why not leave a comment on the film and/or my review? If you haven't seen Walk Hard though, go and watch that instead- seriously, I'd expected it to have earned the same cult appreciation as Anchorman by now...

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

Don't Look Directly At It- ECLIPSE Review

As something of a regular disclaimer, it's only my opinion here- others are available. While I won't be going out of my way to spoil deliberately, there will be more SPOILERS herein than usual. it's only minor stuff, but if you don't want to see the film without knowing anything about it, don't read this review until after you've seen it. You have been warned.

If you're not caught up with the Twilight series at this stage, or my thoughts on it, you might like to go back and read my reviews of Twilight and New Moon. If you're still with me, you probably know where we stand with Eclipse. As graduation approaches for Bella Swan, she sets a date for her vampiric beau Edward to turn her into a vampire. But as a bunch of serial killings by newborn vampires reveal a sinister plot, an old enemy threatens to tear Bella and Edward's family apart.

You're here for one thing if you know my previous form on this series, and that's to see me take the piss out of this film. There are certain expectations of my reviews that are all too easy to meet in a series like this. For starters, if Bella was a codependent mess in New Moon, she's a manipulative attention whore in this one. The love triangle from New Moon, seemingly resolved when she chose Edward the vampire's sparkling over Jacob the werewolf's robust and puppy-like devotion, spills over here simply by her prolonging it.

You can bandy around epithets like "prick-tease" and sound like you hate women, but it's just a matter of hating Bella. Moreover, she's still so selfish and introspective that she can't account for any of her more normal loved ones beyond saying "I'll think of something" when asked how they'll deal with her new lifestyle. There's a scene when one of her fellow students gives a speech about kids being asked what they want to be when they grow up and saying things like "rock-star" or "princess".

Bella sits uncomfortably in that scene because it's like everyone knows that the character has just graduated from high school but she's still jumping up and down, clapping her hands and going "I wanna be a vampire and get married!" over and over. To Kristen Stewart's credit, she still hasn't been sunk by this dead weight character, but she's still slumming it in this role. Leave scripts like these to Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, who can't really make characters sympathetic either.

If this is Eclipse's biggest problem, then it doesn't bring the film down nearly as much as it did in the previous instalments. This is clearly down to a handover in direction to horror director David Slade, who ramps up the horrific elements as much as he can within the strictures of capturing the teen audience who lap this shit up. There's a palpable tension that was missing in either one of the previous Twilight films, and he finally makes a couple of moments that are dreamy rather than dreary. Hats off also to cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, for making everything look wonderful from rain-soaked city streets to snow-capped mountains, via a lot of sunlit meadows.

That last bit almost sounded positive, so I think the game is up. Bottom line is, I didn't like Eclipse, but I did think it was a much better film than I or anyone else of a sound mind had expected. It never bored me like Twilight did, and it never made me despair for humanity like New Moon. At its heart, there's still a bad story by a worse author, but Slade salvages everything he can from it to make it a more entertaining prospect than Summit has given us in the last three years. He brings tertiary characters to the fore with some interesting flashbacks that less enterprising directors might have traded up for multiple lascivious shots of Taylor Lautner's torso, and finally overcomes the hilariously bad speedy-vampire effects with a much more sensible model.

Sadly, for all of his good work, it's all too easy to believe the rumours that he was locked out of the editing suite late in production. For me, this is most obvious from the soundtrack. Record companies shift huge numbers of the soundtrack album CD and download just by virtue of the Twilight brand, but more than ever before, the selected songs are totally discordant with the action. This would benefit massively from a proper score, by a composer- you don't need John Williams, just something more tailored to the action than Florence + The Machine or Muse. The effect here is like Spielberg signing over Schindler's List to the Village People for the final sound mix.

Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner are still piss-poor actors, and the real talent like Anna Kendrick and Billy Burke are still in thankless roles, but the thrust of Eclipse is very much towards something different. The message-driven plotting of the series isn't ever going to allow sex scenes, even though fellow Kevin Smith fans would probably agree that the Chasing Amy solution would solve everyone's problems in that tent scene with the three leads. And even with Melissa Rosenberg, a scribe who actually does emoticons in her scripts, still on writing duties, the work put into this one is evident.

Is it still giving a damaging message to young women? Probably, but there's at least less of Bella being subservient to a guy who could go nuts and kill her, that unintended domestic abuse parallel that made New Moon so fucking interminable. What does get ramped up is Edward and Jacob being over-protective of Bella, at which point many of the females in the audience need to wake up and think about this. Without any allegations of being shallow, if you ever encountered this level of interference from any boyfriend in real life, you'd want to get the fuck out of that relationship. It only further reinforces Bella as a blank surrogate for female readers or viewers rather than a likable character.

Chiefly, I think I took to Eclipse because it feels like an ending. With red-headed Victoria seemingly having ran so much that she morphed into Bryce Dallas Howard, that subplot is finally brought to a conclusion. I don't need to see some of the frankly bat-shit insane stuff that happens in Stephanie Meyer's final book, and I wish they'd ended on a relative high with this one. Instead, they're proving that anything Harry Potter can do, Twilight can do worse, by splitting Breaking Dawn into two films instead of taking the chance to cut some of the crazier shit out of the 800-page book.

The problems with the so-called Twilight saga are on-going, but Eclipse manages to leave its predecessors in the shade as a much more bearable adaptation than you'd expect. If Summit had given Slade free rein and adapted the source material a little more radically, this might have been the Prisoner of Azkaban moment of the series. They didn't, so it's difficult to know who to recommend it to. It's not good enough to get skeptics to go back and endure the first two, and the fans will be going to see this one anyway. For what it is, it's a lot more ambitious than it needs to be, and there's little doubt in my mind that this will be seen as the best of the series when it finally ends.

Eclipse is showing in cinemas nationwide from July 9th.
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If and when you see Eclipse, why not share your comments on the film and/or my review below? If you think a semi-positive review is justification to go back and check out the first two films, it's really not.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

Bored Shirtless

There isn't an awful lot of commenting going on on this blog anyway, but in advance, here are some popular rebuttals I won't be accepting about today's post.

1. You're not the target audience.
2. By slating a film I and millions of others like, you're stifling my individuality.
3. You're jealous of the manly abs on show.

Point 3 is particularly amusing- like saying I must hate the Super Mario Brothers because they can jump higher than I can. But as you may have garnered, I've been to see New Moon, the second film in the apparent "Twilight Saga". As something of a regular disclaimer, it's only my opinion on here- others are available. As ever, mild spoilers may occur in the process of reviewing, but never so far as to spoil any major plot developments.


So this film being everywhere at the moment, you probably know the story. Bella Swan is a high-school girl who's dating the practically-neutered vampire, Edward Cullen. At the beginning of New Moon, an altercation with Edward's brother falling off the wagon leaves Edward fearing he can't protect Bella from his blood-sucking brethren anymore. He subsequently leaves Bella in a prolific sulk and he and his family move on. Enter the newly... how do you describe someone becoming more wild? Oh, that's a good word- enter the newly bewildered Jacob Black, Bella's best friend, who's gained a supernatural hang-up of his own since becoming more integrated with his Quileute tribe of Native American werewolves. That the film takes about an hour and a half to get to this most elementary level of plot may lead you to suspect that the film ain't that great.

The truth is, I can't hate the films just because of the hype. Twilight was nowhere near as bad as the worst films of last year and New Moon isn't nearly as bad as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It's curious that it's so easy to make that comparison, given how this series has proportionately the same effect on the female filmgoer as Transformers has on the male filmgoer, and both are really nothing to write home about. And thus it would be easier to magnify the flaws of this film just to rail against it. While I'm not entirely willing to take that route, it is fairly clear that this is not the film that its more militant fans are claiming. The Mormon agenda of sexual abstinence remains at the fore throughout the film, but this is not a film that sends a good message to young women. The aforementioned sulk comes out of Bella feeling that she is worthless without a supernatural beau. Although she attends high school, she has no clear plans for the future except for going where her bloke goes. I'm no manner of feminist but that, to me, seems pretty bad.


So the next thing Bella does is go out and become an adrenaline junkie, undertaking reckless activities because they give her hallucinations of her departed ex, staring blankly and warning her to stop. I'm not a doctor either, but that also seems bad. I'm actually pretty sure that counts as some kind of schizophrenia. In the course of that, she grows closer to Jacob, which I presume has nothing to do with the fact that Taylor Lautner has spent most of his time since the last film in the gym, and not enough learning to act. While Kristen Stewart is a very capable actress with limited material, Lautner's idea of intensity, coupled with his canine nature, put me in mind of Dug the talking dog from Up. He could feasibly have pounced Bella at any moment and said "I have just met you, and I love you!" Even more goofy is the necessary adoption of Stephanie Meyer's self-masturbatory notion that these buff young men must wander around shirtless and wearing jean-shorts, making the tribe look like a werewolf boy-band. I hear they do a mean cover of "Bad Moon Rising".

With all this shirtless nonsense going on, there's little screentime for the female audience's pale and wooden idol Robert Pattinson. Edward's going-away is the impetus for the whole plot, so we're mercifully spared most of the Hayden Christensen School of Acting. He was an unproven actor before this, and he remains unproven. And worse, he occasionally does this tic when he's acting like he's in pain that's more akin to someone spontaneously ejaculating- where was Andy Samberg in this film? That's not to drub all of the cast- as I've said many times, Kristen Stewart is a remarkable actress who makes the best of what paltry amount of character development she's given. She's more watchable than any character as two-dimensional as Bella has any real right to be, carrying the film through much of its stultifying running time. Things only really kick into gear in the last half an hour, much like the first film, but with much more promising results.


For the last half hour is when the Volturi show up. The Volturi are vampire royalty based in Italy, and they're headed by Michael Sheen! Michael Sheen! Brilliant actor, and utterly brilliant in this as Aro, a kind of vampiric Tony Blair with no regard for human life. And he's in the film for... all of ten minutes. That, for me, was New Moon's biggest crime. For all of the angst and aimless wandering, there was nothing worse than seeing this character and this performance wasted in the way it was. Similarly, Dakota Fanning turns in her only performance to date that didn't make me cringe as a young but scarily powerful vampire charged with enforcing the family's will. The worst thing about their negligible screentime is that I'll actually look forward to more Volturi in the two films that are left to go, and I suspect they'll receive little prominence. Still, you can't judge these things sight unseen, and that was enough to get me in the cinema to see New Moon.

I've already said I didn't hate the film, but neither is it very good. While its predecessor was an indie film, Twilight also paid for most of Summit Entertainment's output for the next two years, and the glossy blockbuster look and marketing campaign for New Moon jars slightly. It's not an action film, nor should it be. Director Chris Weitz does bring more CGI eye-candy to proceedings than Catherine Hardwicke did, and the fight scenes that are included are a marked improvement upon what has come before. But that can't justify the film as what it seems to have become. It's a fantasy romance and it didn't seem comfortable as a low-budget indie film, nor does it entirely fit into the blockbuster mould. David Slade is taking the helm for the next film, due out in July, and with his credits I can imagine the film changing again, taking more of a horror slant. This kind of inconsistency can't really be good for a series that has weak source material to begin with, especially as screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg has resolutely plowed through two helm changes without changing her approach by one iota- "I'm not some car you can fix up, I'm never gonna run right" sounds more like a bad song lyric than a credible piece of dialogue.


The acting is largely wooden, the writing is vanilla and uninspired, and they still haven't got the tone down, but New Moon isn't any worse than its predecessor. It's definitely not going to convert anyone who doesn't like the series, to whom this will still be the film about the werewolf boy-band and their mortal enemies, the sparkly vampires. But I can honestly say I was expecting a lot worse. The fans of the books seem to enjoy the films, and fair play to them, but they could really hope for something better. The film's ending best summarises the polarising nature of this series- it's a cliffhanger that made several people in the cinema squeal in delight and everyone else rush for the exit. It's not out-and-out bad, but we're halfway through the planned four films and it looks doubtful this series will leave any lasting impression after it's over.

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I certainly feel I've given much harsher reviews than that, but the day the Twilight series really gets me to sit up and pay attention will be the day it takes the central love affair a lot less seriously. I wish half the people who go to see New Moon would go to see An Education, a film that deals with the intensity of first love, and the loss of that love, with much more aptitude than Stephanie Meyer could ever muster. Still, if you've seen the film, and want to share your thoughts without telling me I'm out-and-out wrong, why not comment below?

Next up, it's coming up to Christmas, so I'll finally be taking a look at Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol and giving that a critique, as well as talking about various other festive films.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

Games Games Games

In the last week, I've been to see two new films in cinemas and otherwise found myself engrossed in the DVDs of Batman: The Animated Series. There's something of a post-summer lull going on at the moment, and it seems like the only other films that are really showing on my radar at the moment are either not coming to cinemas until December or is otherwise a 3D re-release of Toy Story. It's a film that's been out for almost 15 years now, but that won't stop me doing a lovely celebratory post on here once I see it on the big-screen again.

In the meantime, we've got two films that happen to deal with games- as an occupation in Adventureland, and as the very apex of human achievement in Gamer, so it's needless to say which was the more thought-provoking. In spite of this somewhat premature drubbing, you can safely assume as ever that while minor plot spoilers may occur, I'm not going to spoil any major developments in either film in the course of the reviews.

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Adventureland is the new film from Superbad director, Greg Mottola, and it's a much more personal film than his first feature. It's based on his own time spent working in a big and slightly shoddy amusement park in the late 1980s, and follows James, the kind of sweet, awkward character that Michael Cera plays in... well, every single film that Michael Cera is in. So Mottola gains points right away by casting young up and comer Jesse Eisenberg in the lead instead as the unfortunate James, whose plans to travel Europe after his high-school graduation fall through, forcing him to take a minimum wage job at the titular amusement park and learn some lessons about real life that he wasn't particularly prepared for.


Essentially the antithesis of Superbad, this is a film that seems totally honest about the troubles of teenage life. Yes, I enjoyed Superbad, and found it very funny, but where Adventureland succeeds is in creating much more well-drawn characters than Seth and Evan in the earlier film. It's not as jam-packed with jokes as the earlier film, but as I said about Judd Apatow and Funny People, this is probably Greg Mottola's best film, though not necessarily his funniest. The comedy is there, but it's secondary to the story, which feels honest and natural throughout. Its subtleties mark it as a very different beast to the type of teen comedy that's come about since American Pie, which is, for my money, the most overrated comedy since A Midsummer Night's Dream. No, not an adaptation, I mean Shakespeare's original. And for a comedy "inspired" by Pie, it has to register on one of two levels for me to enjoy it- it has to be either really really funny (see Sex Drive, an unfortunately titled but surprisingly funny comedy) or otherwise feature great performances and a well-drawn story, and this film fits comfortably into the latter.

Jesse Eisenberg's performance may be cut from the same cloth as the typecast Michael Cera, but is immediately elevated because he's not Michael Cera, and thus he's a lot easier to empathise with. Eisenberg's co-star is Kristen Stewart- yes, she of Twilight fame. I've noted before that the character Bella Swan has all the charisma and common sense of a baked potato, and that Stewart was the most bearable part of the first Twilight film. Having watched her performance in this film, as James' love interest Em, I actually feel I did her a disservice with such faint praise. She's an actress I hope will make more films outside of That Franchise, because she's extremely capable and endearing when given the right material. Beyond that, there's a fairly phoned-in performance from Ryan Reynolds as the park's handyman, Connell, and the only other highlight is Bill Hader trying to steal the show once again as Bobby, the manically committed David Brent-esque manager of the park, who occasionally wields a baseball bat against litterbugs and cheaters, with Kristen Wiig playing his indulgent wife. So the film largely centres around James and Em, and is all the better for it.

And the best part of this is that they're given equal focus. It's all too often the case in modern romantic comedies that the audience is shown the main character's love interest solely through the eyes of the main character- this was one of the biggest oversights in (500) Days of Summer, for instance. Here we're not solely restricted to James' POV, as we see Connell's extra-marital affair with Em at various junctures. As none of the other characters yet know about it, Em is a much deeper character than most love interests, and the insights into her love life and family life never seem exposition-laden, nor do they distract from James' character arc. It is a little light on laughs for a romantic comedy, but the dramatic elements of Adventureland sit well with the film as a whole, and as coming-of-age films go, it's certainly worth a watch.

On the opposite end of the scale, we have Gamer, a higher-budget and more plot-burdened feature than Crank directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor are accustomed to. Gerard Butler continues in his quest to destroy the reputation created by his breakthrough film 300 by starring as Kable, the star of a computer game called Slayers. In the world of the film, Slayers is the ultimate gaming experience- players can take control of an actual human being in a fully immersive combat environment. The actual human beings in question are Death Row inmates, who will be set free if they can survive 40 sessions of the game. So far, so Death Race, but Kable is just a few missions away from freedom when the game's creator, Castle, takes steps to ensure he will not survive. Kable breaks loose and goes on a rampage to find his wife and child.

As recorded on this blog before, I like Crank. It had a certain harmlessness to its mindless violence, video game logic and use of 80s action movie tropes. I liked Crank 2: High Voltage slightly less because it took on a more misogynistic and jingoistic edge that made it more unpleasant to watch, but the video game logic was still enjoyable. Now that "Neveldine/Taylor" (as they're always credited) have actually created a film about a video game though, something has gone badly wrong. The game that Kable is trapped in is the product of a culture where Sims/Second Life culture has been taken to extremes, which we're told will come into reality "not too long from this very moment". It's an interesting enough idea, but somewhere between script and screen, the film became utterly bland. Gerard Butler is consistently unable to match King Leonidas from 300 in the succession of staid action films and horrible romantic comedies that have followed that performance, and Gamer is no return to form. That said, Neveldine/Taylor have never really been renowned for their character work.

That's not to say there aren't memorable moments and performances- in films as excessive as Neveldine/Taylor's output, there always are. Michael C. Hall is naturally the highlight of the whole thing- having set the small screen alight in Dexter these last few years, his cinematic debut as Castle takes an underwritten role and turns it into a nuanced and extremely enjoyable villain performance. I can guarantee this will not be the highlight of his cinematic career once it's done, but he's clearly having a whale of a time. Other memorable moments include Milo Ventimiglia in a bizarre cameo as a PVC-clad man whore called Rick Rape... yes, I'm being serious... and Terry Crews singing a creepy rendition of I've Got No Strings from Pinocchio, but that's all Gamer really amounts to- a few enjoyable moments of ridiculously over-the-top excess, caked in a bland sub-Seagal action plot.

Gamer was never going to be more than a guilty pleasure- that is what the Crank films are, after all. It was never going to make any real commentary on Second Life culture, beyond the uncomfortable and gruesome shots of a morbidly obese player in his underwear, masturbating at the sight of Kable beating on the aforementioned Rick Rape. Instead, the film is typical of Neveldine/Taylor's video-game sensibilities, but if that fat, naked pervert is what they think of the demographic a film like this could appeal to, it's hard to see how anyone can enjoy it. Not to mention the more offensive overtones of High Voltage making an unwelcome return here in the film's attitude to women. By the inclusion of a tangible plot, Gamer is taking itself more seriously than Crank, and thus it disqualifies itself as brainless entertainment. It's trash, like Crank, but this time it's utterly disposable.

So to conclude, Adventureland is an enjoyable watch and, I suspect, a good date film, but if you take a date to see Gamer, the odds are that that relationship isn't going to last. Unless your date is male, but even then he might be put off by your taste in films. Hell, don't take anyone to see it and just wait for the DVD if you must.

If you've seen either of the films reviewed, please comment on this post and let me know what you thought! The next post will most likely comprise Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and the much-delayed review of District 9.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, make sure you don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.