RANGO- Review

After three Pirates of the Caribbean films, you could be forgiven for feeling all Gore Verbinski-ed out. It's the surreal tendences of At World's End, which were totally out of place in that film, that the director leans towards with much greater success in his new animated spaghetti Western, Rango. He reunites with Johnny Depp to do... well, something strange.

Our hero is a domesticated chameleon who spends most of his time acting out melodramas in his tank, and winds up lost in the Mojave desert. He then sets off across the desert and finds himself in a town full of critters, called Dirt, which is suffering from a water shortage. The chameleon then adopts the name Rango and ingratiates himself as the sheriff of Dirt, little realising that anyone calling himself sheriff in this town can't be long for this world...

Verbinski has gone as far from the high seas as it's possible to get, and in the process, created his best film since The Curse of the Black Pearl. He can't take all the credit, because Rango is the union of many different fantastical collaborators. For starters, it's the first animated film by the special effects wizards at Industrial Light and Magic, scored by Hans Zimmer, and shot by Roger Deakins. I shit you not- Roger Deakins is the DP on that Nickelodeon lizard film you've been seeing adverts for all over the place.

I suppose this is the trade-off, for a studio like Paramount to greenlight something as unfriendly and weird as this film. They're marketing it the only way they can, because if the screaming and frightened young kids in the screening I saw are any indicator, word of mouth is going to kill this film amongst the family audience. Pay heed to the PG certificate, because this is absolutely not a film for very young children. Although I can imagine kids over 8 years old enjoying it is absolutely a film that can only be completely appreciated by an older audience.

I'm aware of the elephant in the room, so I'm going to address it directly- Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox still sucks, in my opinion. Yes, it's another film that pitches above the heads of the young audience, but the essential difference is that it's not based upon beloved source material from an author who does have a younger target audience. Roald Dahl might not have been afraid to create ugly characters to entertain children, but this film is something else. This is a film that features a toad with tits, and the character design is just as unique for every other misshapen critter we see.

In contrast to the ugliness of the characters, the animation itself is astonishingly good. It's all the better for not being a 3D presentation, and it seems bewildering to think that ILM have never come out with an animated film before now, when this one looks so good. The crown jewel is a glorious action setpiece set to a strigiform mariachi band's rendition of Ride of the Valkyries- without exaggeration or rhetoric, I can honestly say my jaw dropped. And happily, it's not merely the visuals that are jaw-dropping.

Around 10 minutes in, you get a hint of what you're in for with an astonishing non-sequitur that references one of Johnny Depp's most iconic roles. Even braver, the thrust of the narrative is a homage to Chinatown, with the ongoing intrigue over the water shortage in Dirt. But on the whole, it's a spaghetti Western, and it's influenced by Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah while equally sticking with Verbinski's own vision.

It doesn't always pay off- Depp playing a dork works much better in animation than it did in The Tourist, but it's a slippery performance nonetheless, and Verbinski isn't known for reining Depp in during their collaborations on the Pirates films. Also, let's not forget that the main character arc essentially mirrors that of Gulliver's Travels and many other kids movies like it- the protagonist pretends to be something he's not, but learns something about himself in the process. Yawn. For the most part though, it's such a unique and unexpected joy that I was swept up in it for the duration.

Rango is so different that it astonishes me to know it even exists under a studio banner. Paramount might have played a little dirty in marketing the film for younger kids, who have surely been confused and frightened by this film all weekend, but the film plays dirty too. It's a film that takes risks despite sticking with the established tropes of its genre, representing characters who are distinctively un-cute and ramping up the death toll to levels that would even have Pixar tearing their hair out. It's certainly a strange little curiosity, but this perverted cheese-dream will hopefully find an audience as appreciative as I was.

Rango is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Rango, why not share your comments below?

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

TRUE GRIT- Review

The last of the big over-delayed Oscar contenders finally arrived in the UK on Friday, and it's the one I've been most eagerly anticipating. There seems to be something of a weird backlash against modern Coen brothers films, but I personally think No Country For Old Men and A Serious Man are great films. I also enjoy Westerns, so True Grit would seem ideal for my tastes.

When Frank Ross is murdered in cold blood over a gambling dispute, his daughter Mattie wants retribution. The killer, Tom Chaney, has long since skipped town. Nobody seems particularly keen to pursue Chaney, so Mattie hires a hard-bitten US Marshall, Rooster Cogburn, to hunt him down. Also in pursuit of the killer is a Texas Ranger called LaBoeuf, and he accompanies Mattie and Cogburn as they head out on the frontier in search of justice.

The overwhelming impression that True Grit left me with was that it had gone by too soon. It's 110 minutes long and it feels much shorter. Multiple viewings of this thing may be needed just to fully take everything in, but let's be frank from the beginning- outings with the Coen brothers tend to end abruptly. We remember how things wound up at the close of those films I named above, and without spoiling anything, there's a similar grinding halt to the action here, followed by a quite disparate postscript. Maybe it's something I need to leave to grow on me, but I really didn't enjoy the ending of this one. A shame really, because the rest of it is excellent.

As a film, it's possibly the most conventional thing Joel and Ethan Coen have ever done. It feels like a part of the classical tradition of Westerns, doing less new stuff with the genre than No Country for Old Men did a few years ago but still managing to utterly submerge me all the way through. The Coens' gallows humour serves the story well, rousing much laughter throughout but also lending itself to brutal moments of violence, as in so much of their oeuvre.

Surprisingly, to me at least, the main character turns out to be Mattie Ross. While Oscar might have nominated Hailee Steinfeld in the Best Supporting Actress category, she is undoubtedly the protagonist here, and Steinfeld is the standout in a cast of very good and much more experienced actors. A line can be drawn from her performance to that of Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network, showing the same obstinacy and intelligence that Mark Zuckerburg is imbued with in a film set over a century later. And Steinfeld is only 14 years old.

The rest of the cast are just as important, mind. Jeff Bridges is a little mumbly, but reliably magnetic as Rooster Cogburn. The Dude quickly dispels whatever notions you might have of the Duke in that role, at least for as long as you're submerged in this new rendition. Matt Damon is also very impressive as the prideful LaBoeuf, making an indecisive character very engaging at the same time, and holding his own in exchanges of machismo with Bridges. And while Josh Brolin and Barry Pepper are held back until late in the proceedings, their respective roles should not be understated- at the very least, Brolin does a much better job with a weird voice in the old West than he did last time around.

The surreal touches of the Coens' previous work are more sparse this time around, but they're still there- witness the man who speaks only in barnyard noises, or the image of a bear riding a horse. The look of the film is consistent with their previous stuff though, largely due to the presence of their erstwhile cinematographer Roger Deakins. The films he's worked on always look gorgeous, and if anyone needs to win an Oscar this month, it's him- True Grit marks his ninth nomination for Best Cinematography, and yet he's never won. Actually, mark the film in for Best Sound Design and/or Editing too- if you actually notice a film's sound design and editing as I did with this one, you know someone's doing something special.

After accidentally getting a clutch of Oscar nominations last year with A Serious Man, their most personal project ever, the Coens go for something a little more conventional in True Grit. "Conventional" should not scan as "typical" though, because the film still stands out, even after the barrage of awards contenders we've had recently. The cast and the standard of the production are fantastic, and only the very ending could be called dissatisfying. I can't speak for how it measures up to the original (it's on my to-watch pile, honest), but I can tell you that the brevity of pace and the sheer boisterous entertainment value of this adaptation left me yearning to revisit it at the nearest possible opportunity.

True Grit is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen True Grit, why not share your comments below?

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

Ninjas. Damn! - THE WARRIOR'S WAY Review

We've been here before, last year with Blood: The Last Vampire, at the beginning of this year with Ninja Assassin, and now Hollywood once again takes a flying kick at integrating all that is awesome about martial arts cinema with The Warrior's Way. On the plus side, it's a Western!

Yang is our single Oriental protagonist this time around- a swordsman arriving in a derelict frontier town that used to be a successful circus. He carries a baby girl with him, the last survivor of an enemy clan that Yang otherwise slaughtered. Taking mercy on the child, he's hiding out in America, but his Sad Flute clan isn't best pleased that he has defied and deserted him. On top of everything else, the sadistic Colonel is coming back to the circus he destroyed several years prior, and a confrontation of epic proportions looks all but certain.

To be fair, The Warrior's Way is a better film that either of those mentioned above. It's a Western, so that's a given. It's especially coming from the perspective of a writer and director who is not American, Sngmoo Lee. This means his influences are Sergio Leone, and he brings a decent ladling of surrealism into that too. The trouble is that the Hong Kong sensibility of martial arts cinema is like a jigsaw piece that won't fit into American movies, no matter how hard Hollywood presses down on it.

This leaves much of the surreal promise unfulfilled, falling back on clichés from both the east and the west rather than surprising anyone. For starters, the single best line of the film, delivered by Geoffrey Rush's alcoholic gunslinger as ninja sentinels position themselves on every building in the rundown town, ready to rain hell down on everyone else, isn't even in the film. His pitch-perfect intonation of "Ninjas. Damn!" was the only thing that sold me on this film, and it wasn't even in there.

Rush is probably the high point in a cast that consists of Dong-gun Jang being about as expressive as a sleeping Keanu Reeves, Kate Bosworth doing a less capable impression of Jessie from the Toy Story films as a vengeful knife-flinging cowgirl and Tony Cox as a sideshow midget. And it's not really played for laughs. The nadir is Danny Huston as the Colonel. It's no wonder that most of the backgrounds are CGI, with the scenery presumably left chewed beyond repair at the rehearsal stage. His pantomime villain turn is a low point in his career, and this is someone who was in Wolverine.

There's no real tension in having a character who is "The Greatest Swordsman In The History Of Mankind Ever", as the film terms it with some of that unfulfilled oddness, being hunted by people we know are his inferiors. It makes it all the more dissatisfying when this one ends in a very similar fashion to those other two movies- with copious extraneous flashback sequences breaking up a master-apprentice confrontation into even less satisfying chunks.

In a year that also saw the Horse with No Name make his directing debut on the gloriously inept Western Jonah Hex, The Warrior's Way can only look better by comparison, with all of its gumption and cinematic literacy. Howver, just like Yang as he trains knife-throwing Lynne in the way of the sword, it feels like it's holding back- as though something better is being formulated off-screen. It might have involved the line "Ninjas. Damn!" It can be appreciated as a Western, but if I were you, I'd really wait for True Grit in the New Year.

The Warrior's Way is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Warrior's Way, why not share your comments below? If you remember Ninja Assassin being as little fun as I remember it, stay well away.

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

The Horse With No Name- JONAH HEX Review

Here's what plot remains in the studio hack-job that is Jonah Hex- the eponymous Hex is a Confederate soldier turned bounty hunter who can commune with the dead after being left for dead himself by his radicalised comrades. Then the man who killed his wife and child, Quentin Turnbull, re-announces himself after faking his demise, on the eve of a plot to destroy the United States of America, and he sets out for revenge.

You all surely know how big a deal it is when Clint Eastwood directs a Western. He was the iconic Man With No Name in the Dollars trilogy, and behind the camera, he's been responsible for greats like High Plains Drifter and Unforgiven. In Jonah Hex, we have a film I believe to have been made by the Horse With No Name.

That, to me, is the only rational explanation. Whoever put together the film as we see it in cinemas obviously had some ostensible understanding of the genre, and of the DC Comics source material, but no understanding whatsoever of human communication, or of what entertains or appeals to audiences. So why not a particularly experienced equine actor? This seems like the film you'd make if you wanted to get away from being sat on by Clint Eastwood.

The credited director is former Pixar animator Jimmy Hayward, and the screenplay is attributed to Crank creators Neveldine/Taylor. The pair were tagged to direct until they departed due to “creative differences”, and the sheer amount of studio mandated reshoots and schedule changes makes authorship a moot point with this. The horse is merely my scapegoat, as it behooves us to disassociate Pixar from the drop-dead worst film of 2010 so far.

Neveldine/Taylor don't escape blame though- the script, even though the scenes have clearly all been muddled up, is terrible. The plot centres around the dumbest kind of historical allegory involving an anachronistic WMD and the sight of bandits wrapped in dynamite stepping in for suicide bombers. The dialogue is awful too- at one point, we have John Malkovich delivering the line “We will show them that we will do that which we have most assuredly come here to do.” In a terrible Southern accent.

There is no way I'm going easy on this just because the studio went to town on the final cut. There's already enough wrong with it that I'm sceptical this mess of footage was ever salvageable. It feels too long. Even with the whole origin story largely condensed into a poorly rendered motion comic in the first five minutes, it feels too long. Even though it's not asking anything of its audience, it feels too long. Even though it's 81 minutes long, including nine minutes of credits, it feels too fucking long.

Oh, but here's the one really positive thing to come out of Jonah Hex- it feels so long that you'll be checking your watch. And when you check, you'll notice the big hand pass over Megan Fox's 15th minute of fame, spent playing Lila the hooker in this piece of trash. Even for her, it's a thankless role, and without the adolescent goodwill garnered by her semi-annual Transformers appearances, her career's going nowhere but down from here.

I already mentioned Malkovich, but the rest of the cast don't really acquit themselves either. Josh Brolin is fine and craggy as Hex, but he really doesn't have enough to work with to make any kind of impression. I found Michael Fassbender's fleeting appearance more memorable, but that's because he's an actor who makes the most of every role, good or bad, and also because, unlike Brolin, he wasn't unintelligible due to facial prosthetics.

Watching Jonah Hex, I found it really all too easy to imagine a horse demolishing an editing suite, his hooves destroying a keyboard as he tries to edit a love scene between Hex and Lila. He knows what he wants to evoke. He wants to signify why we should care about these characters, and why their relationship is worth a damn. Ultimately, we shouldn't and it isn't. And he's too witless, too unfocused and too utterly inept to make even a tenth of an enjoyable film out of this hash of an adaptation.

The comic has its fans, who've naturally renounced this film version, so there's no blaming the source material. Besides, we know from the example of High Plains Drifter and others that a supernatural film that deploys the codes and conventions of a Western could be awesome. What we get here is a worse version of Wild Wild West. Jonah Hex is not merely bad. It's “I really think a horse might have directed this film” bad.

Jonah Hex is now playing in select cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Jonah Hex, why not leave a comment on the film and/or my review? If you were hoping for a review of The Last Exorcism, come back on Wednesday- I wanted a repeat viewing today before I gave my review. In a nutshell though, go see that film instead of this one.

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