ON STRANGER TIDES- Pirates 4 Review

There's a strong argument, mostly being made by myself, that Pirates of the Caribbean- On Stranger Tides is the sequel we always should have had to the 2003 swashbuckler that started it all. I don't mean that it's the best sequel possible, but that it's following the formula of the Indiana Jones films by bringing back one or two characters from previous instalments and telling a new adventure, rather than going for cod-epic storytelling.

It's not completely without ties to the impenetrable mush of At World's End, as it picks up with Captain Jack Sparrow having seemingly given up on his search for the Fountain of Youth, on which we left him sailing into the sunset. As he arrives in England, it's revealed that an impostor is posing as Jack, with plans to recruit a crew and mount a search for the Fountain themselves. Jack is soon drawn into a race for eternal life, between a Spanish Armada, his old foe Captain Barbossa and the legendary Captain Blackbeard.

It's after watching this latest instalment that I realise I have a strange affinity with the series. The first one is unabashedly enjoyable, but there tends to be more debate on the quality of the two sequels, and with good reason. Heard of "Six Characters in Search of an Author"? The first three Pirates of the Caribbean films serve as "Three Films in Search of a Trilogy", with the convoluted ties to the first film and over-plotted action outright ruining the series for some point.

As for my own affinity, I don't dislike the series as certain other reviewers do. I recognise that At World's End is a load of bullshit, concerned with such contrived devices as "the ninth Piece of Eight" or whatever the hell that film was about, and that Dead Man's Chest didn't so much end as trail the third instalment. But on their own merits, I found things to enjoy in each of those movies. And so I suspect that while the consensus will be against On Stranger Tides, I found more to enjoy here than in the previous sequels.

That said, it still doesn't hold itself very well. It's a good half an hour shorter than the previous instalment, but that still makes it 137 minutes, when there's a much more enjoyable 100 minute film sitting within, waiting for an editor to piece it together. The action takes about 45 minutes to get going, and when it does, there's no real drive or thrust to the plot. My earlier comparison to Indy earlier on works here, as the hunt for the Fountain of Youth resembles the plot of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at times, but while that film has one group of characters to root for, screenwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio plump for a sprawling cast. Again.

Another of the problems carried over from its immediate predecessors in the series is the lack of a villain. Geoffrey Rush is the best thing in this one, but his Captain Barbossa, so brilliant an antagonist on the first outing, has long since become more of an anti-hero. In this one, he's even a privateer for the English, albeit with ulterior motives. I suppose the de facto antagonist here is Blackbeard, played by an underused Ian McShane. As usual then, it resorts to having the characters argue a lot and double-cross one another.

Rob Marshall replaces Gore Verbinski in the director's chair, but it's Elliot and Rossio who need to be ushered out, because they just never seem to get to the point. For instance, there's a scene in which a character is forced to jump off a cliff, to an uncertain fate. Before that character eventually jumps, we have a refusal, some argument, emotional blackmail, a ridiculously redundant Russian Roulette set-up and a bit of hoodoo, before the character just jumps anyway. And don't get me started on Keith Richards.

They also seem to have no sense of timing, as writers. If you pay attention to the dialogue, you realise that the plot takes place over a fortnight. After a great opening sequence set in London, the progression of time is thus- one scene in daylight, and then an extended setpiece at night. Most of this movie takes place in the dark, which not only makes the sunny Caribbean settings pointless, but also probably makes for great viewing in super-dim 3D. I stuck with 2D, personally, though I concede I was sort of impressed by the 3D in the trailers for the film.

I enjoyed On Stranger Tides enough that I really want to say good things about it, so I shall. Johnny Depp shows no signs of getting bored in the lead role, and if you're not bored of him playing it either, he's still a lot of fun to watch as Captain Jack. Some of the action is a little repetitive, four films in, but there are two really good setpieces at the beginning and at the midpoint. I think I'd personally have opened the film on the latter, which is an excellently constructed scene that establishes the film's take on mermaids. Then again, I'd also have got it done in 100 minutes.

Pirates of the Caribbean- On Stranger Tides marks a partial return to the entertaining form of The Curse of the Black Pearl, but as with latter instalments, it is still slightly discordant. To refer to Pirandello again, it's like Six Subplots in Search of a Movie, because there's not much to the McGuffin that's supposed to actually unite the strands. I found it enjoyable, but it did string out my enjoyment across the laborious running time. For some, it will be a step too far, if your enjoyment has been strung out since the first film, but it's still a step in the right direction. Let's have a change in the writing department next time though.

Pirates of the Caribbean- On Stranger Tides is now showing in 2D and 3D at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Pirates of the Caribbean- On Stranger Tides, why not share your comments below?

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

RIO- Review

Can we change the name of Orange's "Gold Spot", in which a 20th Century Fox film gets some rampant phone-related plugging for about six months at a time before every single film in the multiplex? Thus far, we've had The A-Team and Gulliver's Travels there, so I was lobbying for the "Brown Spot". However, as annoying as the ads for Rio have been before every single film, it turns out they just indicate how shit Orange are at making cinema ads nowadays. Where did Mr. Dresden go anyhoo?

The film itself follows Blu, a rare blue macaw who lives in Minnesota with his owner Linda. It turns out he's so rare that he's actually the last male of his species, and he must go to sweltering Rio de Janeiro to mate with Jewel, the last female blue macaw. Unfortunately, the two birds barely even get on with one another, much less wanting to actually get it on, even to save their species.

This is a plot that was apparently central in last year's Alpha and Omega, but more prominently, Pixar were developing an almost identical film in Newt, which got cancelled last year. So Orange has been trailering the film for what feels like years, and it's also usurped whatever the genius minds at Pixar were getting up to. That was more than enough to lower my expectations to subterranean levels, so it's pleasing that Rio actually turned out to be quite entertaining.

Contrary to the poorly dubbed Gold Spot ads, there's some good voice acting to be had, which is always a good start for a CG animation. Jesse Eisenberg and Anne Hathaway effectively do Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in their vocal roles as Blu and Jewel. Eisenberg reprises his pre-Social Network nervy schtick rather than his cold and superior Mark Zuckerburg, but it's Hathaway who manages better with the musical numbers.

Yep, musical numbers. Happily, they're not like Dreamworks musical numbers, that just deploy whatever song is cleared for the soundtrack, but actually a fair few original numbers mixed in amongst the obligatory covers. The highlight is the great villain song, performed by Jemaine Clement's rather brilliantly voiced villain, a psychotic cockatoo called Nigel. As a fan of good villain songs, it worked for me as both a parody and an iteration of the old trope.

The story itself is not revolutionary, falling somewhere between the Buzz subplot in Toy Story and the relocation gubbins in Madagascar, but then what can you expect from a story that was independently thunk up by three different animation companies? I can tell you though it's sweetly executed though, with amusing characters and enjoyable visuals.

The cartoonish vistas of Blue Sky's Ice Age movies give way to slightly more realistic-looking forestry here, but there's still room for big colourful backdrops and nicely designed characters. That said, two lazily characterised supporting characters, voiced by Jamie Foxx and will.i.am, really grated on me, and there's a weird bit in the middle where we briefly get an army of Capuchin monkeys for reasons that don't particularly serve the plot. It's like the film lost all self-confidence for about 20 minutes and said "Hey, monkeys are funny, right?"

Let's always remember that studios compile trailers and marketing, not the filmmakers, and there are often films that are a lot better than their trailers would suggest. Rio is one of those films where all the stuff that looks bad about the trailer is, at the very least, more bearable when seen in context. It's no masterpiece, but it's colourful, it's vibrant, and it's simple, accessible animation, just in time for the Easter holidays.

Rio is now showing in 2D and 3D at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Rio, why not share your comments below?

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

The Cinema of Attraction

One of the pitfalls of reviewing movies is that even someone like Michael Bay or Allan Loeb can turn around and appear to dismiss any and all criticism of their awful shit by simply asking the reviewer if they've done any better. So Roger Ebert went and made Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and more recently, Mark Cousins gave us the documentary The First Movie.

Those guys are proper film critics, and I am decidedly not. If anything, I want to be a screenwriter myself one day, and hopefully avoid doing any of the rubbish things I've criticised in the time I've been reviewing films on this here blog. But it's still with some trepidation that I give you my first short film as a director, The Cinema of Attraction, which you can see after the jump.

While I admit the concept is a large one, The Cinema of Attraction is a short film I took from the idea to the finished product in just over a week, and on a budget of no more than £4.35. It's the story of James and Donna, whose relationship we follow over several days. Their relationship is constantly being reassessed and redefined by the development of cinema, meeting in a silent film with intertitles and the whole shebang, and continuing to develop through talkies, technicolour and the arrival of the multiplex cinema.

As you'd expect from a Mad Prophet production, there's a bit of a rant at its heart, but I'd like to think that it does have a heart. It's also got a fuckton of allegorical cinema stuff and occasionally quite overt references to classic romantic films, but it would be pretentious of me to talk about what they are and why you should like it. I'm not so arsey as to review my own film, but I'm not above promoting it to you, the good people who read this blog.

The Cinema of Attraction arose as another project for Writers' Block North East, that veritable hive of creative talent in Middlesbrough, and I managed to recruit two very good actors, Bonnie Hibbs and Tim Marshall, to star as Donna and James. They elevate the whole thing, of course, but there's not a lot more to talk about- it's better to just let you enjoy the film yourselves.

Next up, I'll be seeing if it wins the competition at Writers' Block in its truncated and admittedly slightly less interesting form, and submitting the full version for various short film screening events in the area. And after that, it'd be nice to make more films, frankly. Hope you enjoyed this one.

DRIVE ANGRY- Review

Last Friday, we figured out that there is no type of bad movie that I hate more than a bad comedy movie. And today, we rediscover the fact that there is nothing in cinema that disappoints me more than when Nicolas Cage just doesn't put the effort in. And in a trashy grindhouse flick like Drive Angry, when everyone else is doing their best, that's just sad.

Cage dons another of his famous wonky hairpieces to play Milton, a dearly departed soul who has broken out of Hell itself on a mission. Cult leader Jonah King and his followers murdered Milton's daughter, and plan to sacrifice her orphaned baby to Satan. So Milton arrives back in the mortal realm, recruits pissed-off waitress Piper and blazes a trail of destruction as he goes after King, for his granddaughter and for his revenge.

The plot is the kind of thing that usually makes for a better trailer than a whole feature film, as was the case with the recent Machete. And it's the kind of thing that really requires a crazy bastard like Nicolas Cage to actually invest in projecting something for the audience to enjoy. There's a case to be made that he's effortlessly cool. I don't know about you, but I found his turn in Drive Angry to be merely effortless.

Luckily, there's a guy on hand who is effortlessly cool, and frankly, he's everything you want Cage to be in this movie. He's William Fichtner, and he plays Satan's right hand man, the Accountant, who's sent after Milton after he breaks free from damnation. Fichtner is a long-serving fixture from various action movies over the years, and he's more than able to give it all he's got in a larger role like this one, elevating the film in times when it seems like Cage didn't really want to be there. He makes this movie

Likewise, I enjoyed Billy Burke's histrionics as Jonah King- if you're wondering where you might know Burke from after seeing him in the trailers, he's Bella's dad off of Twilight. He breaks out of that more well-known character very well as the over-the-top villain of the piece here. It would also be remiss of me to overlook Amber Heard, who's doing a great job with the least of roles. Piper is another of those strong females who you wish could break the fourth wall and kick the cameraman's arse, as any strong female would in reality, if a guy followed her around leching over her good parts with a camera.

We've been into this murky territory before with me bitching about the alleged appeal of Megan Fox in the Transformers movies, and it follows here that Piper is into cars in a big way. My contention here is that Heard is not only much more attractive, but doing a much better performance, giving it her all in a way that most objectified bimbos in action films can't muster. She's the biggest thing on the poster for Drive Angry, obscuring a bored Cage, so it's a shame that the filmmakers were happier to use her looks to market the film than to use her name. Hopefully, she'll get some fame out of this and get some better roles, but I don't think that's how Hollywood works.

Wow, that's more than I would ever have expected to write about the actors in a film called Drive Angry, but what else am I going to talk about? The 3D? In this instance, I suspect the cinema messed up the projection, because despite all of the marketing trumpeting the fact that the film was "Shot In 3D", it looked like the worst of conversions. Lots of ghosting, which got very annoying, and as I haven't heard these complaints anywhere else, I imagine it's the cinema's fault. It demonstrates that multiplexes are making a killing by charging a premium for shoddy 3D, but should it entirely reflect upon the film itself?

Director Patrick Lussier had one of the first Real-D 3D films out of the gate in 2009, with My Bloody Valentine, so he's developed a box of tricks that he uses to full effect here, continuously chucking things at the audience as he did in his previous film. It's a small shame that he dips into Shoot 'Em Up's toolbox too by ripping off that film's raucous sexfight. More pertinently however, he goes back to the same well as Rodriguez and Tarantino have done with their own grindhouse throwbacks, and doesn't end up with a bucket of shitwater. It does have a mild odour to it though- I'd recommend you boil it before drinking it down.

It's a requirement of viewing that you know what you're getting into with Drive Angry, not only in terms of the goofy and old-fashioned plot and the prehistoric attitude to women, but also so that you're not too disappointed when you see Nicolas Cage sleepwalking through it. Amber Heard struggles against the casual misogyny to prove herself as a likeable action heroine, and William Fichtner just owns the entire film whenever he steps on screen. There's already talk of a sequel to this film, but what we really need to see is a spin-off for his character. This one was enjoyable enough, but more of the same would try my patience.

Drive Angry is now showing in 3D at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Drive Angry, why not share your comments below?

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

YOGI BEAR- The Schrödinger's Bear Experiment

This is going to be a short one. Largely because there's very little to say about this film that hasn't already been said in my proper review for Den of Geek, but also because even before I wrote that other review, there's very little to say about this film that would surprise anyone.

Yogi Bear is shit. If that's all you need to know about the film, then come back tomorrow when I'll be talking about the Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston romcom vehicle Just Go With It. But if you'll have a little more patience, maybe we can talk cod quantum mechanics and get some interesting scientific discourse out of the turmoil.

Here's a video you might have already seen. Courtesy of YouTube user estefez, it's an unofficial alternate ending to Yogi Bear that plays out something like the death of Jesse James in Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. With nothing short of ridiculous optimism, I wondered if I could expect that ending into the actual film, in a Schrödinger's Cat style experiment.

So as long as I couldn't see the ending, it could be the death scene AND something much less interesting simultaneously. Up until the ending though, we all see the film as a closed box, looking a bit like this...

It's a talking bear pictured above, which is for some silly reason, the least of Yogi Bear's plot, which is more concerned with environmental messages and hackneyed "They're going to kill trees unless we stop Them!" gubbins. Given the carbon emissions that probably came from the production of this debacle, the closest it comes to being green is in recycling plots and gags that we've seen before in other films; other rubbish films, for that matter.

Its reluctance to bring in hip pop culture references to modernise the character is as close to charm the film ever gets, in between Dan Aykroyd's anybody-could-do-this impression of the title character and the predictable joyless mush that is the script. Justin Timberlake, Anna Faris and Stephen Daly might be trying harder than the rest of the cast, but there's only so much you can do with a script that looks for all the world like it was written with Crayolas.

It's not merely a case of over-analysing a film intended for children, because my issue with the film, and I think most children would agree, is that children are smarter than this film. These are children who flocked to see Toy Story 3 and How to Train Your Dragon in the last 12 months. You can't give kids Smarties and then go back to giving them radishes at snack time, just as you can't go from showing them proper family films to expecting them to just sit there and endure Yogi Bear.

Still, if it's that unpleasant, perhaps the fundamental misunderstanding that was my Schrödinger's Bear experiment could pay off. The 3D puts you right there in the film, right? Maybe if I expected that ending enough, it could transpire?

Alas, however much you expect this...

... you're still gonna end up with this.

The bottom line is, watching the title character tool around for any sustained period will make you wish for that ending instead of expecting it, and that's potentially where the theory falls down. My experiment was a failure, but then so is this film. Give it a miss, eh?

Yogi Bear is now showing in 2D and 3D at cinemas nationwide.
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

GNOMEO & JULIET- Review

As high concepts go, a retelling of a Shakespearean tragedy with garden ornaments is going to take the gold for this week's new releases. Still, with the next big 3D pop star pet project coming next week, I'd estimate that Elton John has done far better for his involvement in Gnomeo & Juliet than that fucking Bieber monster thing will do with his premature biopic.

The story, for the uninitiated, involves the romance of two starstruck lovers- in this case, the intrepid blue-hatted Gnomeo and the curious red-hatted Juliet, who live in adjoining gardens owned by a Mrs. Capulet and a Mr. Montague respectively. The two neighbours quarrel, and so the gnomes and ornaments in each garden follow suit, feuding over who has the best garden and indulging in the occasional high-speed lawnmower race. As a narrator gnome establishes in the opening scene, "this is a story that has been told before, many times, and we're going to tell it again, but different."

All of my problems with Dreamworks Animation lie within their inconsistency. The pop culture references could be a lot more bearable if focused on a recurring theme, as with the medieval branding in Shrek 2. Their soundtracks, usually sourced from wildly eclectic but still recognisable songs, might sell CDs but doesn't suit the tone of the movie. This is why Dreamworks' only truly good films since the first Shrek are How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda. In Gnomeo & Juliet, we have a no-brand animated film that keeps consistency in both its musical choices and its irreverent referencing, while carrying right on with being absolutely crackers.

In terms of the soundtrack, executive producer Elton John's back-catalogue accompanies much of the action, and yet doesn't stretch the film to the Herculean efforts of synchronising music as seen in Mamma Mia! and the like. And the visual references are largely Shakespearean, culminating in a fourth wall-crawling setpiece where the relative merits of a tragic ending are discussed in advance of this adaptation's ending. In the case of the references, it's the first indicator that the film is something more than I could have reasonably expected.

It's no masterpiece, and it's certainly not above borrowing certain story beats from other, more popular animated films. Most flagrantly, an apparently emotional sequence midway through the film has diminished impact when you remember a very similar and more memorable sequence from Toy Story 2. Also from Toy Story, we get the idea that these characters are inanimate objects that come to life.

That makes them very breakable, and this imbues the entire film with a bizarre sense of jeopardy that's lacking in certain other animated family films. You may assume that this won't end in the same way as the source material, but a niggling doubt may manifest itself as the film goes on. It's presumably this eccentricity, uniquely British, that attracted the starry cast of British talent. While James McAvoy and Emily Blunt are competent but fairly interchangeable with other bright young stars, there's some nice work from Michael Caine, Matt Lucas and Ashley Jensen. Oh, and Jason Statham playing a gnome is everything I ever hoped it would be.

Gnomeo & Juliet wound up being a lot more fun than I had expected- a cheerful little curiosity with more invention and imagination than you'd know from just glancing at it. I'm sure it will be overshadowed by Tangled and (God forbid) Yogi Bear during the half-term scramble by parents looking to keep their young'uns entertained, but it's worth a watch. It's camp and colourful, which makes it better suited to 2D than to the dimmed and darkened 3D, which just gets more boring with every successive release. It's not always predictable, and for the most part, it kept a smile on my face too.

Gnomeo & Juliet is now showing in 2D and 3D at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Gnomeo & Juliet, why not share your comments below?

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