First Thoughts on Dune part 1

 Hmm.

Spoilers follow, of course.

I walked out of the cinema moderately impressed, but then I often do. I’m a sucker for cinematic techniques, and anyway I’d seen it on IMAX and had just spent two hours being physically assaulted by Hans Zimmer’s score (which is definitely great). But the refrigerator logic hit before I’d even reached the refrigerator.

It looked impressive. The sets and scenery were epically vast. It reminded me of that historical theory about the end-state of all civilisations being stasis and architectural giganticism; every building and spaceship was ten times bigger than it needed to be. But then, equally, the movie itself could be taken as an art film which had succumbed to giganticism.

And dear god, I wish that Villeneuve could find a lighting cameraman or set designer with the guts to to tell him that murky fog isn’t big and isn’t clever. The murk was appropriate in Arrival, but neither Blade Runner nor this needed so much of it.

And then I was reminded of my personal response to some of the Harry Potter films. I should explain that I’ve never read the Harry Potter books, so I came out of the later movies especially thinking “well, there was clearly a story in there, but blowed if I know what it was” — but the people who went in knowing the story generally enjoyed it. Call me literal-minded, but I feel that an adaptation of a book should be more than a set of illustrations of scenes from that book.

And there was certainly a lot squeezed out from the book. Sometimes that’s necessary, but the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment when Thufir Hawat’s eyeballs turn white as he does some mental arithmetic suggest that mentats were supposed to be in there, but had ended up on the cutting room floor. Couldn’t they just have cut half an hour or so of Timothy Chalamet looking slightly angsty? Losing the idea of mentats just turned Hawat into an all-purpose bureaucrat, and also made Yueh’s attempted revenge and Leto’s death scene less interesting and plot-useful — because by killing the Harkonnen mentat, you set up Hawat’s move into his position for the second half of the plot (and grant Yueh some posthumous revenge).

(Losing the stuff about Yueh’s psychological conditioning also deprived the Harkonnens of some Evil Schemer points, and makes the Atreides look a bit incompetent in having defences that can be brought down by one undetected traitor. But then, “unbreakable conditioning” that could be broken by the baddies pulling the age old “we have your wife, bwah-hah-hah” tactic never made sense to me, so whatever.)

A lot of what felt off to me may be patched in part two. We’ll see. But that would make part two a very different film to part one, so I suspect we’ll mostly get murky fog and Timothy Chalamet looking vaguely angsty. Or maybe there’ll be a five hour director’s cut with all the Herbertian politics back in.

Time is Relative (I Guess)

Gosh, Christopher Nolan really, really wants to have made 2001: A Space Odyssey, doesn't he?

It's difficult to say much about Interstellar without either giving away large parts of the plot or going on at similar length to the two-and-three-quarter-hour movie, neither of which I'm much inclined to do here, but I'm not certain that there was one moment during that time when I wasn't asking myself which other movie this frame was borrowing from, and usually the answer was easy. (Okay. towards the end, there was a scene where I was just trying to remember which SF novel cover the image was based on.) And I'm really not a movie geek, at all. It wasn't always Kubrick's creation - actually, that point of reference didn't become blatant until some was into the movie - but Nolan's naked adoration for 2001 was clearly what made Interstellar happen. He then inflated the result into a love letter to a whole bunch of SF movies. However, he replaced Kubrick and Clarke's sometimes desperate scrabbling for the numinous with a lot of rather more Hollywood-conventional explanation, most of it unconvincing.

But I'll leave it to other people to break down the flaky astrophysics, highly dubious planetology, inexplicable spaceship design, and protracted sentimentality. The fact remains that "If you're going to steal, steal from the best" remains a pretty sound rule to live by. I don't know how much it helped that I saw this movie in a cinema with a 35mm projector - I'm really not a movie geek - and maybe IMAX would make it even better, but anyway, I'm not begrudging those three hours of my life. Sometimes, you just have to go along for the ride.

Much Ado About ... Murder

There's a problem with trying to play Much Ado About Nothing in modern dress; these just aren't quite modern people in a modern world. They can seem that way for long stretches, but then - Beatrice snaps, spits, or whispers "Kill Claudio", and it all goes a little strange. The standard solution, by my casual observation, seems to be to set it no later than the Edwardian period - the last time that the combination of an honour culture and assumed aristocratic privilege makes this sort of thing, along with warfare as an extension of family squabbles, reasonably plausible.

Joss Whedon's cheerfully hastily assembled black-and-white movie treatment tackles such problems largely by ignoring them, bulling straight through the script as a reading by some people who happen to be highly competent actors in modern dress. Where modern equivalences can be found for details in the story, they're used; where they can't, never mind. There are occasional oddities; Beatrice and Benedick get a modern-style sexual history, whereas Hero and Claudio preserve their proper sense and assumptions of virginal purity - but even that can be seen as setting up a contrast between the worldly (and mutually suited) lead couple and the more idealistic (and flawed) secondary pairing.

However, there are hints of a darker modernity. These people in smart suits and big limos, fighting killing wars with their own family? The local cops, a bunch of bumbling dolts totally under the thumbs of the patronising rich folk? The reverence for Catholicism, in the person of a smoothly obliging priest? The improvised cable tie handcuffs and polished personal handguns? You know, it's just possible that these characters are actually a bunch of Mafiosi. They're terribly polite about it, of course - they wouldn't dream of talking business in front of the womenfolk (apart from Conrade, who's been sex-changed into a cold-eyed moll and honorary guy) - but the story ends up with a chilly edge if you look at it this way. The problem isn't that anyone contemplates killing anyone else, it's that they do so when everyone was supposed to be kicking back and taking a break from business.

(Like Whedon was, actually...)

But that's just a possibility; Whedon hasn't touched Shakespeare's words, so we just have to fit our assumptions to what ends up on the screen. And it's not like the analogy doesn't work quite well with Elizabethan aristocrats.

Amy Acker gives great Beatrice, by the way - more unhappy and betrayed than aggressive or dangerous, but well able to handle slapstick, love scenes, vengefulness, and Shakespearean prose. She's already got a decent TV career, but one suspects that a few big-movie casting directors will be calling her agent after this one.

Marvel Avengers Assemble

(Yes, that's what it's officially called in the UK.)

One newspaper reviewer referred to this as a Greatest Hits compilation of all the preceding  Marvel movies from the same studio, which is a little unfair to the film, but not entirely unfair to the Avengers the comic-book hero team, whose only reason for existing is really to be a bunch of popular characters, all together! The Fantastic Four are a family; the X-Men are a shared experience of prejudice, but the Avengers are ... Earth's Mightiest Heroes. Except when the rotating membership list takes the mightiest ones out and cycles some second-stringers in.

But the movie, starting fresh, was able to include a goodly collection of mighty fan favourites, while quietly avoiding the comics-founder-member but probably-nigh-unfilmable (on grounds of silliness) Ant Man and Wasp. Then it added Hawkeye, to up the human-identification and cool-gadgets factors, and Black Widow, to provide eye candy and avoid, as Joss Whedon apparently had to point out to the studio, having the whole thing look like a gay cruise. I'm not sure that Scarlett Johansson in a black catsuit lowered the testosterone level of the movie very far, but she probably ensured that Whedon could be brought aboard, which was the important thing.

("Yes, okay Joss, you can reenact the Buffy-Angel thing with Black Widow and Hawkeye.")

Because, if we're going to have compendiums of good bits and character grace notes and cliches from other movies, some in completely different genres, some of them cliches so new that Michael Bay has barely finished inventing them, then this the way it should be done. Whedon seems to be the Hollywood-acceptable name best suited to constructing these superlatively choreographed action scenes and intervening character angst-fests. Heck, he even manages to construct a justification of sorts for the team name, which is more than Marvel have ever managed in fifty years of publishing the title. (The fact that personal vengeance, while much beloved of Hollywood and Hong Kong action movies, is a rather sleazy motive for heroes, is neither here nor there.) And there's little arguing with the audience numbers, which say that we are going to get more of this sort of thing, whatever.

Meanwhile, Tom Hiddleston, basically unknown in Hollywood before Kenneth Branagh spotted his potential for Thor, makes sure of his options for a very profitable secondary career playing Hollywood villains with English accents. In this movie, Loki gets to engage in more spring-heeled physical violence than I ever remember him bothering with in the comics - where he's a generic smug super-mage - and more blue-eyed spitting villainy, and Hiddleston strolls it. Whatever happens with Marvel comics-based movies, I think that we have a worthy successor to Alan Rickman. Which I guess is a win.

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!

It must be nice to be an Aardman casting director - to know that, when you're making a silly little fun movie about a bunch of plasticine pirates fighting a plasticine Queen Victoria, you can not only get Hugh Grant and David Tennant for lead roles ("you should wind the Scottish accent back for this one, David, you're playing Charles Darwin"), you can get Salma Hayek to do a cameo alongside Lenny Henry, just because. (Of course, you've also got to schedule the recording of the Pirate King's scene for when Brian Blessed is free, as it'd be illegal to cast anyone else there.) Mind you, this being an Aardman film, you have to remember that it'll all be stolen by a wordless nonhuman character; Darwin's chimpanzee butler is no Gromit, but he does his best.

Anyway, being an Aardman movie, this is definitely enough fun to catch in the cinema, although you may also want to purchase the DVD, not for the Primer reason of having to work out what the hell was going on, but for the simple pleasure of freezing every frame to catch all the little visual jokes that the makers overdo at every opportunity. Whether there's more to it than that may be an open question. It is very silly, and laden with anachronisms of all sorts, mostly no doubt derived from its source material in children's fiction.

Like a lot of pirate movies, it has small pretensions to be about the end of an age of romance in the face of the onset of the modern industrial world - here symbolised by the contrast between the pirates' ship (a proper pocket galleon) and Queen Victoria's yacht (a rather magnificent steampunk creation incorporating the domes from the Royal Pavilion). But that doesn't really fly; the heroes' secondary foes are pirates who are even more old-school than themselves, they ally with Charles Darwin, and they make good use of an airship.

As I said, it's fun. I'm not sure that it's quite up there with Nick Park's best work for the company - perhaps the anachronisms, or the touches of outright visual surrealism, or the slightly plonking use of familiar songs on the soundtrack, jarred with me too much - but it had some good jokes and excellent visuals, and the celebrity voice cast were used well without dominating things too much. Clay and CGI are quite deftly merged, too. Just don't ask me what the ham obsession is all about.

Thor

The superhero movie fashion continues...

Cranking through the list of their major characters as a preparation for the Avengers movie (with lesser Avengers popping up to fan service effect - here, "Agent Barton" spends a couple of minutes on-screen with a bow, just to confuse the non-geeks) and just because, the Marvel films people run head-first into the difficult one. Most superhero movies can be presented as slightly over-exuberant technothrillers, but, well, what the heck can you do with Thor?

Throw a posh British Shakespearean director at it, maybe? Just for Odin's sake don't try to make the original '60s costume work on screen. Which is presumably how Walt and Louise Simonson earn themselves credit mentions alongside the '60s Marvel names, having given the (Marvel) God of Thunder his vaguely plausible suit of armour and his beard. Still, it's all about dropping a clunky modern-fantasy reading of Norse myth into the modern world, and there's only so much anyone can do with that - the script tries a bit of waffle about magic being sufficiently advanced science, but that really doesn't survive a moment's scrutiny - this is sufficiently advanced science that can generate immovable objects, execute conditional operations based on moral judgements made from beyond line of sight, and operate at the mutter of a patriarchal guy in an eye-patch several light-years away. Oh well, at least they didn't try any mumbles about nanotech.

And let's be fair, from a geeky point of view - the visual realisation of a lot of stuff from the comics is really pretty good. The movie also moves fast enough to stop anyone worrying about the obvious glaring logical holes so long as it lasts. (What language do the Asgardians speak? Does Bifrost have a Tardis translation circuit? How old are Thor and Loki? How did they get into human myth if they were born after regular contact between the Nine Worlds ended?) The Casket of Ancient Winters is reduced to a canister of pure distilled Maguffin, though, doing nothing except sit there glowing blue and being important for as long as it's needed; one wonders if early script drafts did more with it, but I wouldn't even bet on that. The visual design for much of Asgard is certainly fun, especially in 3-D - a garish high-fantasy cityscape, rendered with a bit of budget. Bifrost, though, looks like a bad '80s home computer visual effect given unwarranted solidity

The cast is over-qualified, of course, even given that it has some relative newcomers - Chris Hemsworth has fully adequate charm and charisma as well as the body for the lead role, and Tom Hiddleston brings ice-blue eyes and icy elegance to Loki, aided by good direction and costume design which recalls his horned helmet from the comics without getting goofy. (The film has a relatively complex treatment of that character, actually, even if the psychology is a bit Hollywood-routine.) Anthony Hopkins does dignified, Natalie Portman does her best with the career-upgraded Jane Foster, and Idris Elba gives Heimdall plenty of deific dignity. They're fun to watch, but they can never quite suppress the impression that this film exists because the comic exists, and not because it has any great claims to interest in its own right. Still, we get that fight scene between Thor and Loki...

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

(Another old post finally being finished...)

To begin with a confession, I suppose - I haven't seen The Mummy, or some of the Indiana Jones movies, or any of the Tomb Raider films, and nor have I read the French bandes dessinées on which this film is based - so I'm probably even less entitled to comment on it than usual. But this blog is only supposed to be about personal reactions anyway, so here we are.

Actually, I think it's the last omission which probably ought to count against me most. I can see why reviewers have been invoking those English-language reference points, but really, this isn't much of a Hollywood-style action movie. Luc Besson may have had some influence in Hollywood over the years, but he's always been a bit too Frenchly odd, and with its lack of a proper villain and focus on a style-soaked female lead, this is very much a Besson movie. More to the point, with its peculiar sense of partial detachment from any sort of reality, its weird dialogue and disregard for much in the way of psychological reality, it's extremely reminiscent of any number of BDs that I have seen, so I suspect it's pretty faithful to its source.

In case you were wondering, Adèle Blanc-Sec, played by the inevitably winsome Louise Bourgoin, is an Edwardian-period adventuress who is, as it turns out, looking for the mummy of an ancient Egyptian doctor so that she can get it resurrected by a loopy academic psychic, because she knows that the ancient Egyptians had the medical knowledge she needs to cure her sister, who is in a coma with a hat-pin through her skull. Unfortunately, though, the psychic has already resurrected an ancient pterodactyl egg, and the pterodactyl is terrorising Paris. Not that Adèle cares about Paris or anyone else much, it seems - family comes first, and Adèle sets out to deal with her own concerns before anything else, leaving a trail of chaos and one or two accidental deaths in her wake...

It's all rather self-consciously French, too, what with the politicians having affairs with cancan dancers and the gendarmes who insist that they are wine connoisseurs and the Eiffel Tower. Yeah, I guess it could even be called charming. Or at least, charmant. Not without its interest, even. More a curiosity than a masterpiece, though.

Source Code

((Many thanks to the people who sent me copies of this article, after I failed to keep one and Google lost it.))

(More catching up on posts I should have made a month ago. I can just about remember what I meant to say...)

Obvious note; the problem with commenting on this movie is that it's hard to do so without spoilers. And it's honestly good enough not to deserve that.

But, okay, the reviews and trailers have (unavoidably) given away a bit. Not everything, though; a certain amount of layered revelation is part of this film's charm. It's widely described as a time travel story, but what emerges fairly early is that this isn't quite true - or perhaps it is, as it turns out. Choose your own definitions. More annoyingly, a lot of comments seem to describe it as complicated or hard to follow, which suggests to me that too many people's brains just shut down when they're confronted with skiffy ideas about time or any kind of game with causality, because I really didn't see much complexity at all. The explanation of how things seemed to work, and eventually of the film's conclusive twist, struck me as very straightforward, even linear, even if the protagonist did replay the same few minutes of apparent time repeatedly as he went along. Nor was the film quite as rigorous as comments suggested; several of the eight-minute replays that were necessary to the plot would have been too repetitive for any audience, and so were skimmed over.

(Anyone who finds this film unpleasantly hard to follow really, really needs to avoid Primer, by the way.)

In fact, the relatively rigorous approach to plot logic made this a true science fiction story (as opposed to "heroic fantasy in space" or "action thriller with extreme special effects", which is what Hollywood tends to mean by "science fiction" these days), and with Source Code following on Moon, it seems that director Duncan Jones has a genuine and fairly unusual interest in the genre. This isn't hard SF, mind; the core idea of the plot is handwaved fairly frantically, involving as it does multiple scientific and technological jumps far beyond anything that could be made to look hard-SF plausible in the modern-day setting.. In the end, it's using the word "quantum" a lot to justify a fairly arbitrary story with a large dose of wish-fulfilment, even if one could argue that what it does is opt for the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics without being so crass as to say so (or to even mention Schrodinger's cat).

Nor is the plotting entirely immaculate; looking back over the film, one can identify significant unanswered questions of both logic and morality. (What could one say about the fate of the original occupant of the body which the hero borrows, for a start?) Still, it is a film about an idea, even if that idea is a bit shaky.

The cast, by the way, are good, and the leads are given enough to get their teeth into. Jake Gyllenhaal makes an effective hero, confused and stressed, far from infallible but ultimately capable enough; Michelle Monaghan is an attractive overt object of desire; Vera Farmiga really carries the film, balancing professionalism with sympathy. Only Jeffrey Wright really has a problem - not that the actor isn't fine, but his character seems unfairly treated. He's vain and unsympathetic, to be sure, but I couldn't help feeling that a man who invented such mind-bending technology would have the right to a very large dose of vanity indeed, and even if that is his main motive for employing it and exploiting the hero, he is actually trying to save thousands or millions of lives in the process. Making the scientist into something of a villain, with silly physical preening to match his intellectual hubris, was the one place where this turned into cheap, bad Hollywood SF.

But if that's the one place, well, we can't complain too much, can we? This isn't the film of the year - probably not even the SF film of the year - but it's a film that I could wish a lot more films were like.

Trailer Trash (in 3-D)

Went to see Thor on Saturday, about which I may blog more properly in due course. However, because I went to see the 3-D version, I also got to see a bunch of 3-D trailers.

Oh, dear.

As I may have demonstrated here in the past, I do have a certain horribly naive fondness for this technology, although I'd some time since begun to notice that it worked best in computer-animated movies which were designed that way from the beginning, and which could make amiable jokes about the subject. Thor, incidentally, uses 3-D fairly well, or at least harmlessly - there's a vague sense at times that one has a lava lamp exploding in one's face, and it probably makes the big early fight scene even less comprehensible than it would be in 2-D, but on the other side, there's a pleasing sense of grandiose fantasy art coming to LIFE, kerrpow!

Anyway, from the trailers, well, the 3-D in Kung-Fu Panda 2 is probably likely going to be mostly tolerable, because it's another computer animation - I may well go see it (and yes, I have just expressed moderately keen anticipation for a film called Kung-Fu Panda 2.) But the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides made me utterly determined that, if I go see it in a cinema, it'll only ever be in 2-D.

The problem is clearly the post-processing of a live-action film, shot in 2-D, into the third dimension. This doesn't have to be done too badly, to go by other films, but the visual effect in this case was quite horrible and a bit surreal. It was like watching full-colour cut-out pictures of Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz being slid around a toy theatre lined with similarly flat background pictures.

Priest, by the way, appears from its trailer to be a bad joke.

Rango

It is a well-known fact that, because of the insane amounts of money involved in making a Hollywood movie, the companies are terrified of taking chances on anything at all unlike that which has made money in the past. Which explains why the dull predictability of so much Hollywood output.

However, every once in a while, a director with a record of financial success can slip something odd past all those filters. And animation is partly immune to the problem because the money people don't understand it yet and anyway they expect it to be a bit weird...

"It's a post-modernist surrealist western, set in the modern day, with Johnny Depp as a delusional chameleon on a vision quest."

"Okay."

I mean, the @$*#?

It's also utterly beautiful, by the way, with truly astonishing creature designs and the most gorgeous landscapes I've ever seen in a computer-animated movie (which is saying something for a field which has let quite so many skilled artists have quite so much fun in the last ten years). It seemed that, every time the plot started becoming predictable or conventional (which it does from time to time), the animators were instructed to make the pictures on the screen even more breath-taking. And it's frequently utterly hilarious. I'm just glad that I didn't have to explain it to a ten-year-old being taken along to see a funny-animals movie on a wet Saturday afternoon.

Gone Postal

Going Postal, the third of Sky's adaptations of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels (recently released on DVD), is the first that really seems to work quite right. The first two (Hogfather and The Colour of Magic) had their virtues, but the problem with genre fantasy on screen is that it's hard to avoid it looking silly, in a bad-'80s-Conan-clone sort of way - all those robes and swords and medieval towns are hard to make convincing, and "It's meant to be a joke!" doesn't save things the way it does on the page. With a recent Discworld novel like this one, however, the style of the setting has moved forward through history very significantly, and the production design could go for something much more Victorian than cod-medieval - which looks fine, even cool, without being unduly distracting. This in turn means that, for example, the cast could be as ludicrously good as in the earlier movies, while looking like a bunch of good actors who've been cast for their suitability for the roles, rather than a bunch of famous thesps doing panto. They were clearly able to get their heads around their lines and deliver them with some conviction, rather than seeming to wonder what they were doing here.

The two leads - Richard Coyle as Moist von Lipwig and Claire Foy as Adora Belle Dearheart - weren't the most famous of these people, of course (that would probably be Charles Dance, completely walking it with casual ease as the Patrician), but both managed very well indeed. Special mention, though, has to go to the perfectly chosen Tamsin Greig as Sacharissa Cripslock - a piece of casting that makes me dream of a prequel production of The Truth, just to see Greig playing  Sacharissa as a developing character rather than a cameo/plot device.


Of course, compressing a full novel into three hours of film requires a certain amount of brutal surgery, which was mostly executed quite well here, leaving a film that worked on its own terms - although the psychic power of the undelivered letters ended up seeming less subtle, and the big emotional thrust of the book - Moist's redemption and discovery of his own conscience - certainly became a much cruder process, being largely forced on him by visions inflicted by the letters (rather nicely depicted in the form of black-and-white silent movies, but still). Likewise, Adora Belle seemed slightly softened - she was still a dangerous character, but her hardness was depicted entirely as a reaction to family tragedy; likewise, perhaps inevitably these days, her cigarette addiction was shown as coming from the same source and as something she really needs to discard, rather than being an integral feature of her character which Moist's emerging masochistic side could find attractive. Less crucially, but rather sadly perhaps, there was no room for Anghammarad the Golem, while Moist's visit to Unseen University was gone, its expository role being filled by a visit from Archchancellor Ridcully - giving us the joy of Timothy West in that particular role, but should the Archchancellor show up in the Post Office at the beck and call of a golem?

But that's quibbling - and a really successful screen adaptation of a Discworld novel is too good a thing to deserve excessive quibbles. If Sky are going to continue doing these adaptations once a year, I hope that this one sets a pattern.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Going to see this was in large part an exercise in trying to get the hang of what the kids like these days. I knew in advance that it would really require a working knowledge of things like video games (which I don't have) to get most of the jokes, and I gathered that the whole thing was probably largely about the experience of being young (which I'm not). However, I write and edit roleplaying games material for a living (of sorts), and this is clearly the geek thing of the moment, so I feel a certain obligation to keep up with some of the references.

Plus, I can't help but feel a certain admiration for the work of Edgar Wright, going back to (and still largely focused on) the classic TV Spaced, so I was curious about this movie.

And, yes, it was genuinely entertaining, even if I didn't happen to know exactly which video games involve those particular martial arts movies, or defeated opponents disintegrating into coins, or whatever. (And, okay, no, I haven't read the Scott Pilgrim comics either, mea culpa.) Like Spaced, this film finds the essential, universal comedy in a specific and personal situation - and doesn't bother denying the essential comic gormlessness of the archetypal slacker-geek - so one doesn't need to get every reference to get enough of the jokes. I laughed, I might have cheered a bit, I didn't feel that I'd wasted my time.

The only thing that I would say is that the plot suffered slightly from the standard problem of slacker-romantic-comedies; with a male lead who's a bit of a clueless loser, it's hard to see what the self-assured, assertive love object was supposed to see in him. Admittedly, in this case, said object of desire had her own problems - the standard reading of the plot seems to be that it's really all about helping her to get over her hang-ups and to get rid of the ghosts of her past - but at least those are adult sorts of problem; compared to somebody who'd moved from city to city, learned to at least recognise her own emotional failings, and acquired some kind of proper paying job (making her "kinda hardcore"), Scott Pilgrim is just a child. Compare and contrast, say, Spaced, in which most of the characters have some kind of viable employment while all being at approximately the same level of psychological incompetence.

But, heck, the visual gags and stylistic tics were quite funny (see the aggressive female character who's perforce acquired the ability to generate her own verbal censorship effects) and occasionally clever, as were some of the one-liners (such as their drummer's introductions to Sex Bob Bomb's various performances). And I spotted the Princess Bride reference. If we're going to have stylistically flashy slacker-rom-coms for the video game generations, this will do for a start.

Toy Story 3

First, the easy bit. This film is brilliant. Funny, fast-paced, ironical - people have talked about Wall-E or Up being among the major films of their years, but to my mind, this is the big-time computer animation that really has a claim for that sort of standing; notably, when it tries to be moving, it usually does so without being too blatantly manipulative.

However, it also left me glad that I don't have children, because that means that I didn't have to try and explain this film to them. Aside from the fact that the whole thing is about maturity and loss and the prospect of death, there are the three-eyed green blobs with their religious obsessions and eventual apotheosis, or Buzz's Spanish alternate persona and its curious appeal for Jessie. One also imagines generations of children growing up into their first encounters with the prison movie and PoW film genres, and suddenly realising what much of this thing was all about - and that's not just the minor cliches, it's also big-ish things about the corruptions of petty power. The film's direction also repeatedly employs the semantics of the horror genre, with the blank-eyed zombie Big Baby and the culminating plunge towards a hellish pit. And, of course, there's Ken, concerning whom one might choose to explain subtle concepts like metrosexuality and '70s disco fashion to the sprogs, if one wanted to get more complicated than just saying that he's evidently gay. All this is much of the point of the movie, mind, and I think that it's in more danger of befuddling kids than of seriously traumatising them, but it really does feel like a film about a box full of toys, written for a non-child audience - something that may confuse some parents as well as their offspring.

I saw it in 3-D, incidentally, and that proved unintrusive without being at all necessary in this case. Which I guess could be taken as the sign of maturity in the technology, or just money wasted.

Inception

"His subconscious has been militarised!"

Indeed.

The genius of this film is its solution to a deep-seated Hollywood problem; how to reconcile the Therapy Model of Plot (the idea that the only real point of the stuff that happens to a protagonist in a movie must be to solve some deep-seated emotional problem) with the demands of the action genre (which doesn't leave time for that nonsense if it's being done right). Past solutions have involved carefully paced talky intermissions between the explosions, kids needing rescuing, villains who represent (or just plain are) The Father, and so on. Inception skips all that in favour of something much more literal; it sets out to explore the subconscious - somebody's subconscious, anyone's subconscious - and promptly discovers that it's made up entirely of gunfights, explosions, car chases, and at the deepest level, a rather nifty, slightly grimy post-Bondian alpine villain base, complete with skiing guards.

And it does it gorgeously. Christopher Nolan lives up to the old Welles line about a movie set being the best train set any boy could have, and adds on the best computer game level designer kit that boy might want today. One tip; go see this movie on a reasonably large screen with a proper sound system - I doubt that it'll be anything like the same without wall-to-wall visuals and a seismic bass undertone. Admittedly, nothing later in the movie quite lives up to the early, fabulous poster-moment when Paris folds back on itself like so much well-designed cardboard packaging, although a late, bleakly exquisite landscape of abandoned mega-skyscrapers tries hard. But as his Batman movies showed, Nolan loves his cityscapes with an infectious passion, and can shoot a decent action sequence too; given the chance to combine the two, he's in his element.

Here, he shifts the scene to Mombasa for a while for no real reason other than that it lets him do a street chase scene with a new aesthetic edge (okay, maybe owing something to Casino Royale).That's during the early part, when the movie is still running through a highly traditional "assembling the team" phase, which reminds me; the movie also shows Nolan's knack for casting. The leads all do their best with often slightly thin characters, even Ellen Page, who spends the first third of her screen time being on the receiving end of some mandatory exposition, and the rest being the empathetic girl genius, manages to make something of her part. However, the plot is all about Leonardo DiCaprio's character, who's a damaged soul... This isn't a character movie.

What it is, is the action movie re-imagined as a Chinese philosophical parable, Freud with big guns in a cyberpunk world. The soul of the thing may be a little flimsy to justify the scale of the structure built to support it, but that's Hollywood movie dreams for you - and it is a big-budget SF movie with the sort of serious ambitions we've mostly come to associate with smaller-budget SF movies in recent years. The two-and-a-bit hours certainly went by for me in a glow of admiration.

High and Low

Hmm, no, I don't seem to have been saying much here lately. I've been a bit busy. There's a couple of things I will just make a note of, though.

For one, on the 28th of June, we got to the British Museum for the "Fra Angelico to Leonardo" Italian Renaissance Drawings exhibition. (Well, there was a lot of stuff you'd otherwise have to get to the Uffizi in Florence to see.) This turned out to be a very technical sort of exhibition - there were explanations of the various techniques used, samples of paper and parchment one could actually touch, and comparisons of some of the drawings that were actually preparatory works for paintings with images of the finished paintings themselves. And for the first stretch, it maybe felt a bit too technical; the drawings from the early years of the Renaissance weren't bad, but they weren't exciting either, and were often formalistic copies of standard designs. And I'm still no fan of late medieval art, with all its stiff religiosity, even though looking at drawings rather than paintings saves one from the usual surfeit of gold halos.

But then, well, the exhibition kind of proved that art evolved for the better in the Renaissance, and after the path through had hit the Leonardos around the mid-point, well, I was sucked in. Stunning stuff, some of this, and all of it certainly never less than technically interesting.

And on 11th of July, we got to see Shrek Forever After at the Cambridge Arts. We previously saw the first couple of Shrek films, but we missed the third, so this was a fairly casual interest, but we enjoyed the movie; it had the usual density of reference to both fairy-tales and other sources (amazingly for an American series, the Shrek movies hadn't thrown in anything from the Wizard of Oz until this final episode, so far as I recall), the usual grossly over-qualified cast (I missed noticing the presence of the wonderful Jane Lynch until the final credits), and the usual torrent of good jokes. The 3-D, while effective enough, was pretty much an irrelevance here - a few hurtling broomstick-mounted witches are nothing compared to, say, Monsters vs. Aliens' games with scale - and the movie as a whole was nothing like as sophisticated as, say, The Incredibles. Whereas in that movie, the hero is aware from the first of the ambiguities in his discontent with family life, and the solution to the problem is a complex process which requires adaption by all the parties involved, Shrek is just an understandably put-upon-feeling husband, father, and citizen, who gets a chance to see what the bachelor life would be like, enjoys it for a short while, and then gets hit over the head with the Hollywood presumption in favour of domesticity. It's an unearned moral, mere moralising.

One shouldn't think too hard about the alternate history plot structuring, either. Technically, it creates a whole universe full of people with their own lives and troubles and hard-won triumphs, and then obliterates them with a kiss, in a casual act of cosmic genocide. Although it was the even more casual death of the Gingerbread Man that might actually worry more viewers. Also, I was probably too taken with Rumpelstiltskin's palace - a gilded Versailles-for-dark-lords - and his wigs - all wiped out by the plot's tide of narrative Tipex. Still, yeah, don't think too hard and it's certainly huge amounts of fun.

Iron Man 2

If anyone hadn't heard, Marvel Films are currently engaged in a speculative project; they make a set of movies featuring most of the original members of the Avengers, and assuming that these work well enough, at some point in the future, they make an actual Avengers movie. Well, Jon Favreau has evidently bought into this idea; Iron Man 2 is set in something much more like the "Marvel universe" than previous Marvel superhero movies, and not just because of the teaser scene after the end titles. Early on, someone tells Tony Stark that he can't continue operating as a lone gunslinger, that he should accept the help that his friends offer him; by the end, we're in Marvel Team-Up territory, with Iron Man and War Machine facing off against a horde of robots while Black Widow infiltrates the enemy HQ.

Yes, Favreau clearly loves him his superheroes, and he's been given the resources to express that love. The fights in this film could come straight out a comic - not just the noisy, dazzling high-tech power armour dogfights, but also Black Widow's deft and hyperkinetic demolition of a whole team of security guards. (Not that Scarlet Johansson's character is ever referenced by that name, and frankly she's pretty superfluous to the plot, except that she defines its parameters while giving us lots of high-speed judo in a catsuit, which is good enough for me.) He also seeds the film with stuff for the geeks; not only does it assume that viewers will have seen the first in the series (fair enough), it assumes that they'll have sat through to the end of the credits on that one, so that when Samuel L. Jackson wanders on set half-way through, he's not given anything as superfluous as an introduction. For that matter, I'm pretty sure that Tony Stark's father was carefully cast and made up to resemble Tony Stark in '60s-era comics.

But lots of directors can do decent super-fights. Where Favreau jumps ahead of the pack is, as in the first film, in the engineering. (Both films seem practically designed to make engineers into very happy bunnies. The heavy product placement of Audi cars fits very, very well indeed; Audi are a marque with huge engineer appeal.) Admittedly, the script tips ever further into comic-book goofiness here, as Stark synthesises a brand new element (gurggh) by improvising a particle accelerator in his lab, aligning it with a spirit level and what appears to be Captain America's shield (yes, really), and then hand-aiming it - but Favreau evidently reckons that, if you're going to do comics, you gotta do goofiness. And the actual physical action of those scenes, as Stark throws himself around his workshop, alternately playing with holographic models and tearing up the floor with a pneumatic drill, reinvents the cinematic mad scientist lab for the 21st century. Anyone planning a movie about a super-genius inventor will need to watch this one first from now on; I just hope that the makers of Doctor Who[?] are paying attention.

But all this narrative density (plus the obligatory tedious Hollywood father-issues sub-plot, damnit) has to have a cost, and what this film has lost that made the first so interesting is a sense of a relationship with real-world politics. At times, Iron Man threatened to say something almost significant about American foreign policy and the "War on Terror"; Iron Man 2 assumes that Stark is doing something worthwhile about these issues at the start, and then looks at what might follow for him personally - which is moderately interesting, but not something that binds so well to the newspaper headlines of our own world. That jump into a full-on "superhero universe" maybe leaves too much behind. Though one might see Stark as symbolising America this time round - ingenious, charismatic, solipsistic, obsessed with independence and free enterprise, terribly opened to attack from all sides when weaker opponents show that he's not actually invulnerable, subject to the demands of a military-industrial complex that cares only for profit...

And because it's still about just Iron Man, the film has problems finding interesting opponents for him; most of his fights are with other people or robots in suits of armour much like his own, which could get quite boring quite fast. (Mickey Rourke's "Ivan Vanko" - briefly referred to as "Whiplash" in the credits, but comics geeks will see him as owing rather more to the Crimson Dynamo - shows his face in his first appearance, but never quite explains how he can be so robust with that much bare flesh showing, and eventually dons proper armour.) The comics solve this by throwing much more colourful, less armoured gadget-users at Iron Man and then ducking the question of how they survive in a stand-up fight against him; this isn't likely to work on film. Meanwhile, Justin Hammer is the story's weak link, an incompetent twit who's somehow become CEO of a major weapons manufacturer - nothing like the suave Cushing-esque Hammer of the comics, and just a pale shadow of the first film's Obadiah Stane.

So, overall - not as good as the first film, no, and probably too specifically aimed at the geek market in the virtues it does retain. But it's still a film about a guy in super-powered armour, with good FX and fight scenes and a few good jokes, that also asks a few questions in passing about responsibility and power.It's probably as good as we deserve.

Alice in Wonderland

First off, a digression. When one is introducing a new technology, it is wise to (a) think through the small practical details of the system so as to minimise inconvenience for your customers, and (b) make sure that the people you employ are completely familiar with the details of the new system and can perform basic maintenance and make simple adjustments with no fuss.

So, for example, with regard to (a) - if you're installing modern 3D technology at your cinema, and you decide that your customers should buy the required polarised glasses at your refreshments stand, you need to tell them so, with large, clear notices in the foyer and on your Web site and so on. You do not let them climb up two floors to the screen area, and only then have a harassed usherette tell them that they've got to go back down and queue up for the bloody things as the clock ticks. (Especially not when you're pushing a new electronic ticketing system that means they won't necessarily have spoken to any of your staff before that point.) And with regard to (b) - if there's a momentary power cut in the projector room, sure, the showing will dip out. There's no help for that sort of thing, we understand. But then you should pause the film showing, get the sound and the picture working again properly, and then rewind to the point where things stopped and start again at that point, not a minute later. You should not carry on showing the film without sound for several minutes, so that the audience misses five or ten minutes of plot (including cameos by half the British acting profession, in this case).

Stupid, stupid Cambridge Arts Cinema. Amiable amateurishness is not the name of the game.

Anyway, the movie...

I'm not, I confess, particularly a Tim Burton fan. I've got nothing against his brand of gothic whimsy, you understand, and I've greatly enjoyed several of his films; I just don't worship at the shrine. Likewise, I don't regard Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books as sacred texts. I recognise that they've become foundational myths for the modern age, mind you - distillations of surreal mathematician's logic for the age of relativity and quantum mechanics, amiable flights from reason for a world that finds reason a source of stress, anthologies of superb imagery with no excessive baggage of meaning. However, it's all too clear to even a casual observer that this film compromises both Burton's artistry and Carroll's vision in pursuit of the safe financial return that made it possible in the first place. The multiple star appearances and vocal contributions could well class as good casting (rather than stunt casting) and a sign of Burton's prestige in the business, and the decision to make this actually a "return to Wonderland" story with a 19-year-old Alice could be considered to represent Burton doing exploratory things with the myth, even if it does give us a heroine in a gauzy blue dress who can appeal equally well to small girls with a Disney-princess fixation and to their fathers. (Though it must be said that the way that Alice's dress refuses to change size when she and her underwear do could be interpreted as sleazy,  assuming it's not just a symbol of her rejection of the role into which society is forcing blah blah blah.) But the Avril Lavigne song over the end credits is just too crashingly misplaced.

And honestly, the plot is just too bloody Hollywood wrong. Carroll's small girl is on a holiday from the confusingly rational adult world through a landscape of puns and surreal symbolism; this film determinedly transforms her into a teenage victim of social expectations, achieving anachronistic levels of self-actualisation (or something) by discovering her role as the Prophesied Hero of a cut-price knock-off War of the Ring (which ends very quickly when the literal and metaphorical Dragon from yet another Carroll source dies and the arch-villain's troops all promptly switch sides - gods, was Burton seeing how many TV Tropes entries and general iffy fantasy cliches which the Alice stories don't evoke or use he could drag in?); said War, by the way, is a struggle between playing cards and chess pieces with the chess pieces as the good guys, (which I guess is appropriately Victorian), and has evidently been on hold until Alice shows up; still, it seems to have transformed several of Carroll's innocent characters into expert sword-fighters. Then, in the end, Alice escapes marriage (this is technically a spoiler, but I doubt anyone will be surprised) into the world of commerce - and proposes to set to work opening China up to British trade.

Yes, problems of dating aside, this film suggests that Alice grew up to become an architect of the Opium Wars. Thanks, Tim, but are you sure that you've thought this through?

The ludicrously over-qualified cast do their best with this farrago, although Anne Hathaway for one is clearly struggling with the silliness of her part, and Johnny Depp, given the job of second lead (because this is a Tim Burton film), adopts a Scottish accent at random intervals. Oh, and yes, this is the latest big production to explore the possibilities of 3D technology. Unfortunately, the realistic sections end up suffering from a dolls-house artificiality, and the luridly coloured dreamscape-landscapes of Wonderland (renamed Underland when the script remembers) jumped into my face a bit too assertively.

Ho hum. I actually came out of this movie quite amused by the carnival flamboyance of it, almost willing to forgive the cinema their technical cock-ups, even. But it's too easy to see the problems even while you're watching it, let alone in retrospect. If some films suffer from logic holes - refrigerator logic - this one suffers from refrigerator surrealism. I'm prepared to give Burton the benefit of the doubt and assume that the problems arise from him taking the Disney shilling, but I really hope that he doesn't repeat the mistake.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

This is a movie about a man with the ability to give people access to the inside of his own imagination (or perhaps more their own imaginations - on this, as on other matters, it's a bit vague). That's slightly ironic, as the best reason to go see it is the chance to spend a couple of hours on the inside of Terry Gilliam's visual imagination.

It's a Gilliam film which reminds one of other Gilliam films, especially Time Bandits but also The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and others - his most visually fantastical efforts, perhaps. However, it's a bit skimpier on actual content even than those, let alone than some of his more serious creations. There's a plot and structure of sorts on offer, involving the power of story (actually questioned quite harshly here, unlike in many fantasy films in our current Gaimanian era, which makes a change) and a deal or two with a rather half-hearted devil, but I was left feeling that any time Gilliam felt that he might sacrifice some clarity in favour of another fancy CGI-assisted set-piece, he took the deal gladly.

The cast is very good, but they've been given a bunch of non-characters to play, with damn all in the way of consistency, a tendency to disappear when no longer needed, and back stories that are at best left largely to our imaginations - and in some cases, notably Verne Troyer's, any hint of an explanation has presumably ended up on the digital cutting-room floor (unless we get a hint at the end that Troyer is some kind of cut-rate guardian angel, which feels like a stretch). Christopher Plummer sticks to doing world-weary like the old trouper he is, while Lily Cole looks amazing, static or in motion (and can act, too), but she and Heath Ledger (and the latter's stand-ins where required) are, well, stuck with the script.

But, but, but... Terry Gilliam. Visual design. CGI aside, the margins and fringes of London have never looked more shabbily gothic (what would film-makers do without Battersea Power Station?), and the way that a faded carnival show can so easily and swiftly expand into a visual wonderland stands as a symbol of, well, something. Time spent here isn't wasted, at all. But it's strange experience to find yourself missing the satirical bite of Time Bandits or a Monty Python sketch.

Up

As the leading exponents of a new media technology, Pixar make it their business to impress. Toy Story was a strong beginning; Monsters, Inc. demonstrated that they could show every hair on a furry creature; Ratatouille not only showed every hair on a rat, but showed every hair on a wet rat that had been struck by lightning; Wall-E featured grand vistas...

Up shows a photorealistic waterfall plunging off a Lost World plateau, a pack of semi-realistic dogs, and worn-out tennis balls covered in slime - all in immaculate 3D, if you go to the right screen. The humans are still more like plastic puppets, but I'd guess that Pixar won't try to change that until they can get to the far side of the uncanny valley in one titanic leap. Still, things are now getting to the stage that the cartoonish action sequences are looking markedly less plausible than anything else on the screen; increasingly realistic beings obeying unrealistic physics could become a problem. Though audiences used to modern action movies may not have too much trouble with this.

But that still leaves the question of the uses to which this synthetic realism is being put, which is becoming quite strange. Some critics have suggested that the protagonist of Up is a highly unlikely cartoon hero - a squat, grumpy geriatric. Actually, I suspect that "a cranky old man" would have seemed a perfectly reasonably lead character for, say, some of the classic Warner cartoons; it's only Pixar's connections with Disney that make it seem quite so strange, and heck, even Disney were noted for salting their emotional mix with the odd touch of sadness. But no, I don't think that any of the Golden Age Hollywood cartoon studios would have turned one of their movies into a wrenching meditation on aging, mortality, and the loss of dreams. (Not even if the tone shifted into something a little bit more conventional after half an hour or so.) But Up pushes its luck with the conventional cartoon audience fully that far; having the juvenile second lead turn out to come from a broken home, and then having the lead's lifelong hero prove to have been transformed by bitterness into a small-time Bond villain, end up looking like downright conventional touches. Another twist is to have the movie's talking animals - the dog pack - logically explained, and then to get a lot of good comedy from their pretty authentic canine psychology. (Mind you, after we've seen a whole furnished house wafted from North to South America under a cluster of party balloons, having anyone express surprise at a talking dog seems a bit of a cheek.)

Anyway, oh, yes, I nearly forgot - this is a good comedy, showing Pixar's customary eye for multiple details, with nary a clanking pop culture reference. The dogs get to provide most of the jokes, while also providing much of the practical menace; the leads are too busy being tragic. And Pixar do have some sympathy for the feelings of their younger audience members; on at least two occasions, some of the dogs should plunge to their dooms, but are granted soft landings instead. It's not a brutal film - just an oddly thoughtful one.

But where the heck are Pixar going to go next? Is the anglepoise lamp going to play King Lear?

District 9

First, this being a fairly major film at a commercial-chain cinema, there are the trailers for various upcoming SF-ish blockbusters. These always make me feel old and cranky these days, and I assume that anyone with flicker-sensitive epilepsy just no longer goes to the cinema. Even the moderately interesting-looking Surrogates gets flattened down to the level of the rest. After a while, they all run together - explosion, dark corridor, explosion, flickering light giving glimpse of threat, explosion... oh, grow up.

(SF fans are forever whingeing about ignorant mainstream writers who deny that their stories venturing into the topics of time travel or genetic engineering are science fiction. But remember; this is what "science fiction" means these days.)

But after a while, we did get District 9. This has a few explosions and even some flickering lights, especially in the later sections which - as every critic and blogger has noted - shift into conventional action movie shoot-out mode - but the aesthetic is mostly a bit more sophisticated than all that. It's also amazing squalid. For years, SF film-makers have been working on the principle that, if they make their imagined futures a bit shabby and scruffy, they'll look more plausible, but here, things tip right over the edge. District 9, the South African slum where a giant spaceship's load of mostly idiotic aliens has been deposited, is basically an inhabited rubbish dump. The segments taking place in human society gleam by comparison, although they're mostly set in chaotic offices, scruffy burger bars, and fading domestic housing; anyway, they're heavily punctuated with gross incidents drawing on the traditions of body-horror movies.

This shabbiness is part of the film's half-hearted attempt at a verite style; early on, and at times later, it pretends to be a documentary about events in the recent past of its alternative history, including footage originally filmed for a documentary about the company responsible for relocating those aliens from their slum to a camp up country. But that conceit simply doesn't hold; to tell its story, the movie keeps switching to scenes which no one could have filmed, and which don't have the quality of "dramatic reconstruction". It's also been described as a modern treatment of the classic B-movie form, presumably because of some of its themes - alien incursion on Earth, horrific transformation suffered by the protagonist - but this doesn't hold either; actually, the film owes more overall to the modern popcorn-movie form, with its run-and-shoot thriller scenes, extensive use of special effects, extremely rubbery and arbitrary "science", significant convenient plot holes, and use of a totally amoral and high-tech-weapon-obsessed corporation as its primary villain.

But it's definitely a highly eccentric sort of modern SF thriller, pushing itself forward as an indictment of man's inhumanity to prawn while not letting anybody off the hook - almost all of the humans present, of all races and nationalities, are bastards of one stripe or another, and most of the aliens are violent morons. There have been some discomforted debates about the extent to which the movie's refusal to grant any group unambiguous heroic status is really Swiftian satiric savagery, and how much it's just unrestrained prejudice; well, I dunno, but all I can say is that if any Nigerians are really concerned about their nation's image, they can leave this film alone for now and start by doing something about all those scam e-mails oozing out of Lagos. And anyone paying attention at the end will note that one fairly major character who proves something of a hero (and who seems to be facing punishment for it) is in fact black.

Yeah, District 9 is an oddity, probably completely unique, schlepping in devices, themes, and techniques from all over genre movie-making and reality in order to raise questions - and then running away in the ensuing chaos, leaving its surviving victims with a face full of something worrying, unidentified, and just possibly transformative. Not my favourite film of the year, personally, but possibly the most interesting thing we'll see in a twelvemonth.