Men Are Talking

As something of a regular disclaimer, it's only my opinion 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.



"It's called male bonding- haven't you even seen Wild Hogs?" shouts the obnoxious titamaboob in Hot Tub Time Machine. And funnily enough, there's been another film with similar themes in cinemas lately, in the form of Neil Marshall's muscular and gritty Ninth Legion film, Centurion. So which is better- stripping off to get sent back to 1986, or being stripped by angry natives and sent running through a snowy wasteland? The answer may surprise you!
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Boasting the most perfunctory title since Snakes on a Plane, the premise of Hot Tub Time Machine must be fairly obvious. Adam and Nick attempt to reinvigorate their friend Lou after he tries to commit suicide by booking a weekend away at the ski resort that the three of them went to as teenagers. With Adam's nephew Jacob along for the weekend, the resort has become dilapidated and boring. Taking a dip, the four are plunged back in time to the resort at its greatest. They resolve not to change anything for fear of ruining the present, but instead find themselves going all out and endangering Jacob's very existence.

Given how the characters variously compare their predicament to Terminator, The Butterfly Effect, Timecop et al, it's telling that no one mentions the most famous film in the time travel sub-genre. Let me take you through some of Hot Tub Time Machine. Jacob is in danger of never being born by events in the past. An asshole bully prevents the gang from getting home. Nick has to get up on stage to perform with his band at one point, and sneaks in a couple of songs that haven't been written in 1986. It has Crispin bloody Glover in it. It's Back to the Future! The trouble is, I liked it better when it was actually called Back to the Future- it was a lot funnier without the cum jokes, Noughties pop culture references and post-Hangover comedy formula.
Don't get me wrong, I did laugh a lot at Hot Tub Time Machine, but it falls over itself with plot. There's nothing as rigid as Doc Brown's rules of non-intervention- indeed, the film takes an even more cavalier approach to cause and effect than Bill and Ted. It's a comedy, so this would be fine if we didn't have Chevy Chase as a spectral hot tub repairman telling them that changing events would be disastrous, and then it blatantly isn't- couldn't we have dispensed with that altogether? In this and other areas, it's clear that someone really screwed up with the editing. While its intentions are halfway honourable and it does do a quite spectacular job of recreating the late 1980s, this is a film that reeks of reshoots and rewrites, probably undertaken while the film was actually in production.

I liked all of the cast immensely, with the exception of Rob Corddry as Lou, the aforementioned titamaboob. He's just too obnoxious to care about like you're supposed to, and I'd sooner have seen more of Clark Duke as Jacob, who's pretty much one of the best young comic actors around, even if he doesn't get to show it here. But on the whole, Hot Tub Time Machine was a film I really wanted to love. Instead, I only liked it, and it disappoints only so far as a film with title can. There are still a lot of laughs to be had before a schmaltzy and tacked-on ending, but the crossover element with the more successful film, The Hangover, pretty much actively prevents any chance of the film being as timeless as the likes of Back to the Future. Unless you really want to see this one, watch the older film again and this time, notice that Thomas F. Wilson is the best thing about the whole trilogy as various Biffs, and that's saying a lot.

On a different plane entirely, Centurion finds a bunch of very physically capable blokes running a lot. Set in the year 117AD, the Roman empire determines that their legions must press north and finally conquer all of Britain. The Ninth Legion comes up against a devastating attack by the native Picts, leaving nine soldiers to try and rescue their captured general deep behind enemy lines. They become fugitives from the deadly Etain, a mute Pict warrior woman whose keen instincts and ineffable determination make her unstoppable as a tracker.

History tells us that the Ninth Legion disappeared without trace, and this is Neil Marshall's interpretation of where the hell they got to. In a true invocation of that "The More Things Change..." trope, the Ninth are framed with the group dynamic of a bunch of squaddies. That makes the banter on offer quite reminiscent of Marshall's Dog Soldiers, and he gleefully places a group of very tough men against a menace that trumps them completely. While it's not derivative, Marshall doesn't exactly revolutionise the period drama except to make it more grisly and violent than most others. I've heard it put best by Simon Mayo- "insert tab A into slot B, but tab A is always a great big sword and slot B is the other person".
It never feels as routine as it actually is though- it's tremendously adrenalised and pacey. Moreover, it's buoyed by its performances. Marshall's stroke of genius here is The Magnificent Seven approach, casting great actors like Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, David Morrissey, Noel Clarke and Liam Cunningham in an ensemble, and only really brings Fassbender forward more than the others. That's probably because Fassbender is a great actor who's applying his talents outside of the traditional BAFTA fare of British film, making great appearances in Inglourious Basterds, Eden Lake and now this. More impressive though is Olga Kurylenko as Etain, giving a performance that's as nuanced as you can get when your character's tongue has been cut out and the full extent of your vocal performance is grunting and screaming bloody murder as you wipe out a bunch of soldiers.

Centurion is a satisfying historical action thriller that is probably Neil Marshall's most handsome film- it looks better than the other historical epic in cinemas, Clash of the Titans, and was undoubtedly made for a much lower budget. There's a great cast and a nice bit of historical speculation without ever selling the film as "the truth behind the legend" like so many other films of its type- more on Ridley Scott's Robin Hood at the end of the week. All I need to say about how the film engages its audience is that I was absolutely shattered before seeing a late screening of Centurion, and worried I'd end up falling asleep. I was rapt for all of its 97 minutes, and found it to be a rock solid action film that showcases some of the best of British talent.
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If you've seen Hot Tub Time Machine or Centurion, or you're just a manly man who can name many much manlier films than these because you're a man, why not comment below?

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

Roland Emmerich, Mad Profit

In this week's rather circularly titled post, I'm going to be taking a look at Roland Emmerich's 2012, his third disaster movie, starring John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton, amongst others. 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.

And lo, the prophet Roland Emmerich did deliver upon us a vision of great suffering in a time not too far away. A time when the peoples of the Earth are transformed into narrow character stereotypes as they elude the bangs, booms and wallops that herald the end of the world. And damned are the shady government types who hide this event from the people they are verily seen to be arseholes. Moreover, the prophet Emmerich's vision did ramble on for sometime, and the peoples of the Earth to whom it was related, grew restless and started scratching themselves and wondering what to do once he'd finished and they'd got home. For almost one tenth of their day had vanished once the prophet came out of his stupor, and everyone was sort of annoyed.


Alright, so it's a bit daft and puts about as much of the reasoning behind the next most imminent apocalypse theory into the film as you'd imagine, i.e. next to none. But this, from the director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow was always going to be more about profit than prophecy. The film went to number 1 with a bullet at the UK box office, success I am sure can only be curbed by this week's release of the lady-luring New Moon. No matter what I say to you about this, I can hardly convince you not to see it if you want to, so I'll just say this- wait for the Blu-ray. The time was that you'd have to go to the cinema to see special effects such as the ones on display here in the way they were meant to be seen, but this is one of those films that will look terrific in high-definition, so another six months won't kill you- we've apparently got three years until the world ends.

That's not a drubbing by the way, because I have to say that 2012 is one of the funniest films I've seen all year. The CGI looks very well done and polished, but what's actually properly appealing about the film is just how damn goofy it is. You're not entertained by the tidal wave, but by the hilarious cut to a close-up of a chicken reacting to it immediately before it strikes. And then of course there's the stereotypes and cliches on show, which are laughably bad for anyone who's seen more than one American film in their life. Deadbeat dad? Check. Cute little girl who keeps her head in a cataclysmic crisis? Check. Uber-brave President of the United States? Check. It's all there, and you will laugh riotously at it. That in itself is a statement to how the CGI deaths of what must surely be billions of people lack any real dramatic weight because you're too busy laughing. Then again, there are about 60 characters we're meant to be following, each given equal focus, a flaw that contributes largely to the film's unwieldy running time but also covers around 0.00000001 of the Earth's population. That goes some way to making up for the rest, who you really aren't arsed about.

So yes, the film suffers from the inverse ratio between the quality of the CGI and the quality of the script, and speaking of the latter, I have to wonder how many of the film's cast read it before signing on the dotted line of their contract. I look forward to John Cusack's film now that he's been in this, because he has freely admitted he makes an awful big budget film every once in a while so he has the financial security to star in more personal and well-produced film like Being John Malkovich or High Fidelity. On the other hand, Chiwetel Ejiofor's involvement is a sad symptom of how undervalued he is as an actor- since his breakout role in Dirty Pretty Things, he's been consistently good in films like Serenity and Children of Men, but here he's relegated to explaining the film's ludicrously unscientific impetus and being the moral compass to those arsey government types I mentioned. Woody Harrelson is the only one who really acquits himself, doing exactly what the script demands and being ape-shit crazy- for more, see Zombieland.

If you're aware of what 2012 is, you can probably surmise that it's not about the actors, it's about the CGI, and that makes it a B-movie on a huge budget. The science that Ejiofor is forced to spout involves "mutating neutrinos", an explanation that has already been decried as bullshit by this very blog's resident physicist and artist. You know who should have played John Cusack's role? Bruce Campbell. That alone would have elevated this film to a modern classic of entertainment, but the fact that the hilarity is unintentional is where it all falls down. Plus, the huge running time kind of sucks the fun out of what would have been a much shorter and more enjoyable film if they'd trimmed it down to an hour and a half. That said, it's around the same length as the film I hate most in the entire world, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and it's a hell of a lot more entertaining than that. It's just as cynical though- Cusack's protagonist may be quixotic and optimistic, but only for plot convenience, as Roland Emmerich is far more concerned with getting his audience to watch the world burn, melt and generally lose its shit.


In the end, it boils down to one simple flaw- 2012 is ADD filmmaking. In the press coverage surrounding the film's release, Emmerich declared: "I said to myself that I'll do one more disaster movie, but it has to end all disaster movies. So I packed everything in." And he means everything. The end result is a film you really shouldn't see in cinemas, simply because I fear its success would herald a bunch of films attempting to do the same thing, but less funny. Besides which, you can pause it when you're watching at home, the better to take a toilet break or otherwise just wonder why the characters are trying so desperately to survive the apocalypse, given the obvious drop-off in quality of life that would follow. If this warning comes to late and you've seen 2012 already, why not share your comments below.

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Next up will almost certainly be that New Moon thing, followed by my review of Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol to kick off a number of cinematic Christmas postings. The next post should be later this week, uni and work allowing.

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