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Inception

July 28, 2010 by M. B. Barlow

After The Dark Knight became one of the top summer movies of all time, and one of my personal favorites, everyone’s focus went to Christopher Nolan and what he would do next. The man has certainly developed his own style and Inception, his latest, just cements his position as the most interesting director working today. Here is a director that can make a smart, powerful and entertaining summer blockbuster without making the audience feel like they’re being led by the hand through the whole story, which is a rare thing.
Inception is all about the mind and the dreams therein. Leo DiCaprio plays a man whose speciality is to infiltrate people’s minds and extract whatever vital information that’s there, in this case the head of an energy corporation, a man plagued by the death of his father and their torturous relationship that they had; Leo and his other partners’s are trying to plant an idea into his mind so that he will dissolve his company, in so making their rival the only true power in the energy business. This isn’t easy and involves going into his mind and trying to influence him while fighting off his own mental defenses, portrayed as goons with guns.
It’s intelligent and very, very interesting and for all it’s clever, thought-provoking ideas it still manages to have plenty of action and some brilliant set-pieces, including a scene where a train rolls down the middle of a road without any tracks and the money-maker, where a whole city folds itself in half. I was a little disappointed that Nolan went the shaky-cam route with this rather than his steady camerawork of the Batman films. I prefer to see what’s going on in a scene without the editing going past so fast that you can barely tell what’s going on; it’s a modern cinema thing and the sooner they kill it the better movies will be. Despite the shaky-cam these scenes are amazing and just goes to show that CGI has come to such a level that it no longer looks like CGI: it looks real, and when you can imagine whatever you want and have it appear on-screen straight from memory, that is incredible.
Every member of the cast is excellent in this film with DiCaprio professionally keeping it rock solid as the lead. He’s an actor who can really deliver a movie single-handed and even though he’s just a part of an ensemble cast he is the standout.
It is the best movie of the summer so go see it then try to remember your dreams that night.

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Blood, Sweat and Tea by Tom Reynolds

July 17, 2010 by M. B. Barlow

I downloaded this from the iBook store and read it on my iPhone, something that I didn’t think that I’d ever be able to do on such a relatively small screen, but I did and it was an excellent book, well-suited to the small screen. Tom Reynolds is the pseudonym of an inner London ambulance driver, a man who has written a blog about his daily life and the strange things that happen in said job. This book collects the blog entries into an agreeable collection. They each take just a few minutes to read and they’re perfect for those moments in the toilet where you just need something to read. It became quite addictive, where you just need to read one more–then just another…okay, maybe another and then that’s it. I spent quite a few hours just lying in bed (in the dark, which is really an advantage with a backlit screen like the iPhone’s) reading about all the strange occurences in this man’s job. It’s great fun and makes you learn about what these people actually do who work for the ambulance services and some of the crap that they have to put up with.
Both this book and it’s sequel, which I’m still to read, are available for free on the amazon kindle and the iBook store so check it out.

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Predators

July 16, 2010 by M. B. Barlow

I think Predator has always been in the shadow of the Alien Franchise, especially with the Versus movies where you know that Alien is always the better of the two in terms of actual films. You can’t argue with the greatness of the first two Alien movies–even if the last two are just so-so–but Predator was good, very good even, but that’s it. Predator 2 certainly wasn’t up to much with Danny Glover being a poor replacement for Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Versus movies, although not as terrible as the critics would have you believe, certainly weren’t up to the Sigourney Weaver quality. Now we have the self-professed sequel to Predator which conveniently ignores the actual sequel, Predator 2. This is back to the jungle, albeit lack Arnie.
A group of trained killers from all around Earth are parachuted into a jungle with no knowledge of what happened for them to get there and it doesn’t take long before they realize that they are on an alien planet being hunted for sport by the titular Predators. None of these characters are particularly bad but there isn’t exactly in-depth characterization going on. Every single one of them is a cliche: huge Russian with a mini-gun, token black guy who I was surprised to find wasn’t the first to die (he’s the second), a uzi-toting Mexican played by Danny Trejo, a man who must be in the front of the cue for all Mexican parts, a death-row inmate complete with orange jumpsuit, a Yakuza, a sniper-rifle toting female and Adrien Brody’s generic tough guy main character. The one interesting character is Topher Grace, an actor who seems to be making his name playing strange and twisted bad guys as he did in Spiderman 3, who is the odd one out of the bunch; he’s a doctor, not a soldier or any other kind of toughened hard-ass like all the rest of them. Of course, he’s not really just a doctor but you find that out eventually.
Predators acts as something of a tribute to the original and it works rather well. Adrien Brody is Arnie in all but name, even if he does still look a bit weedy despite obvious serious gym time and perfecting the sore-throat voice that all these kinds of characters seem to have, and some of the characters are shadows of what came before. There is no one that can match Arnie’s natural butchness or Jesse Ventura’s “god-damn sexual tyrannosaurus rex”. Neither is the script as fun as the original with far too many cliched lines coming from the cliched characters.
The predators themselves are fleshed out a bit from all the other movies, with talk of a blood feud between the predators that we know of and a larger, more viscous breed that has a completely brilliant design. There’s also other alien creatures on the planet and some details of alien plants that helps give it some sci-fi cred.
It’s fun and kind of throwaway, much like the first one, and even if it does repeat a lot of what the original did it still can stand on its on as the second best Predator movie.

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Iron Man 2

April 29, 2010 by M. B. Barlow

I was excited for this movie like no other in a while and maybe that’s what caused my slight disappoint in it. There wasn’t any huge problem that totally destroyed the movie, it had all the required elements to make a satisfactory summer blockbuster, but I couldn’t help but feel deflated. The first disappoint was the lack of AC/DC. When you release an album called Iron Man 2: AC/DC you would expect, I assume, there to be lots of AC/DC but there are only two tracks in the whole movie and when they are so suitable for the light and airy style of the movie this seems pointless to me. There are certain moments in the movie, especially the car scenes with Downey Jr. that shouted out for some AC/DC but instead you get some generic and bland rock stuff. It distracted me, although it probably didn’t help that I had listened to the album so many times that my mind had programmed itself to believe that I would be hearing constant AC/DC which just felt like a big tease.
Scarlett Johansson is just gorgeous. Every scene with her oozes sex appeal and she just classified herself as probably the biggest sex bomb in movies today. Downey Jr. is still effortlessly cool and funny but dripping those elements of alcoholism into the story, most likely leading up to the whole Genie in a Bottle story from the comics, felt out-of-place. It didn’t suit the whole lightness of the movie but, still, Downey does a great and very commendable job. Mickey Rourke, who just looks and acts like himself with an so-so accent, is fine as the baddie but not really used very much. When he loses his first battle to only end up in prison and then doesn’t do much else for the rest of the movie it felt like he didn’t really serve a purpose. This point in the movie also bookmarks the part where nothing of real interest happens. Although I like a good, slow drama as much as the next person the story was just not strong enough to make that hour in the middle of the movie that consists almost entirely of talking and plot exposition interesting enough to keep my attention. Dare I say it, I was actually a little bored. Although the actors do a fine job it just wasn’t suitable. It’s fine when it’s interspersed with some Iron Man fights but that didn’t happen. Iron Man barely features at all with the movie focusing entirely on Downey’s fall into alcoholism and the creation of new suits at Hammer Industries, with Rourke’s russian baddie heading the charge.
Sam Rockwell, an actor criminally ignored for far too long, gets to totally steal the show as a rival weapons dealer to Tony Stark but he feels like another character that is little used, with the just the feeling that this is just the set up for the next movie even saying in his last scene that we haven’t seen the last of him.
The whole movie just feels okay and, if anything, really just a big advert for the future Marvel movies, in particular The Avengers movie. There’s also a Captain America reference and a really good Thor one if you can be bothered to wait till after the lengthy credits sequence.
It’s good, could have been better though. Oh if you’re going to release a soundtrack for a movie please make that the soundtrack for the whole movie.

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Kick-Ass

April 12, 2010 by M. B. Barlow

There has been a stupid amount of controversy about Kick-Ass which I think is just a wee but unwarranted. First off, the whole point of the movie featuring an eleven-year girl who murders and swears; this is not a normal eleven-year old girl, she has been trained to kill since the age of five by her father who has been trying to get some payback on the man who sent him to jail on a false accusation. This girl has not had the normal upbringing so she doesn’t react in the normal way that young girls do so, obviously, she doesn’t act the way that you would expect. And, yes, she tells a room full of thugs that they are all cunts before murdering them all and stealing their drug money but it’s all done in the best taste.
Okay, maybe it’s not exactly the best taste; actually, it’s all in really bad taste but that’s the main appeal of a movie such as this. It’s all decidedly non-politically correct and that makes it very cool, especially for people who are in to comic books which this movie is a very large pastiche on but with a real-world element. What if normal people tried to become superheroes? I’m just after watching Unbreakable which covers much in the same sort of area but whereas that movie tackles the subject in a very serious and dark way with a man who has superman-like abilities, Kick-Ass goes the outlandish comedic route and does it superbly with normal people without powers.
I laughed throughout and the violence isn’t as extreme as many people have said, all of which happen in a very outlandish fashion with music to suit the cartoon-like action. Nicholas Cage especially deserves high praise. After being in so much crap for years, National Treasure movies aside as I actually rather enjoyed them, he finally gives a performance like the old days. Yeah the guy probably jumped at the opportunity to play a superhero being an obsessive who even named his son after Superman (Kal-El I believe he’s called) he really is good in this as is everyone else. From the guy playing Kick-Ass who gives just the right of meekness with bravery without totally ripping off Tobey Maguire’s Spider-man which his character follows the story-line of quite closely. The girl who plays Hit-Girl is superb in a role that would have been hard to pull of for most young actors. The idea of such a young little girl being a killing machine with a foul mouth would have looked ridiculous if played by the majority of the awful young actors in movies at the moment but this girl is just great and manages to act the innocent when it’s needed. Only problem I had was with Mark Strong: not that he was bad, it was the opposite really, but he seems to be turning up as the bad guy in every movie and I’m just started to get a sense of deja-vu. He plays a great bad guy, no doubt, but when I see him in the trailer for Robin Hood while waiting for this to start where he seems to be playing a bad guy again it would just be nice to see someone else in the role, that’s all.
It’s funny and very crass but that’s what makes it so brilliant. Go see it.

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