The Lord of Darkness (an unrecognisable Tim Curry) sends a goblin to kill the last two remaining unicorns in the world and steal their horns, so that light and sunshine will be destroyed forever. His plans are discovered by a forest child Jack (Tom Cruise) and Princess Lily (Mia Sara), who after accidentally leading the goblins to the unicorns in an enchanted forest, make it their mission to save the world.

Tim Curry is the star of the show as The Lord of Darkness. With the help of amazing costume and make-up, he is an overwhelming  screen presence and commands every scene he’s in . The film would benefit from more of him, but unfortunately he doesn’t appear until the last half hour.

Despite Legend‘s flaws, it is not a film without merit.  The make-up and costumes still look impressive and have a hard-hitting impact. The central theme of good versus evil is simple but entertaining, and the fantasy elements, including: goblins, unicorns, elves, and fairies make for fun viewing. It could be a classic family film, but because of the inclusion of terrifying characters, such as a green slimy witch and the satanic looking The Lord of Darkness,  it might actually not be suitable for small children. The lack of a clear audience is probably why it failed to do well on its initial release and has been largely forgotten about since.

Dir: Ridley Scott

Starring: Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, Tim Curry

The Hunger Games

Set in a future where North America has been divided into a wealthy Capitol and 12 poverty stricken districts that are controlled by the Capitol, the Hunger Games are an annual event held in the Capitol where a boy and girl from each of the districts between the ages of 12 and 18 fight to the death in a televised event for the entertainment of the Capitol’s population. The District we focus on originally is District 12 and that is where we are introduced to Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), a poor 16 year old who hunts illegally outside the district border in order to feed her younger sister and mother. When her sister’s name is pulled out of the raffle to be the district’s representative for The Hunger Games, Katniss volunteers herself as her sister’s replacement. She and the reluctant male representative, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) head to the Capitol for training and to prepare themselves for this battle to the death.

Aside from Katniss and Peeta, the audience don’t really get to know any of the other contestants of The Hunger Games, which might have helped make their inevitable deaths more hard hitting. Instead, when the game begins we see some totally unfamiliar faces being quickly slaughtered by the stronger contestants and it’s difficult to feel anything.

There is also not enough focus on the training scenes, which could have been thrilling action packed scenes of weaponry and skill. Most of the training shots are just of the contestants standing around watching eachother and looking a bit anxious. It seems like a bit of a waste of screen time.

The plot has an odd romance storyline between Katniss and Peeta which begins when he announces live on tele he has a crush on her but knows it is doomed, since only one of them can come out of the games alive. The romance plots escalates during The Hunger Games as the pair seek comfort in one another and a bit of unlikely hugging and kissing takes place. It’s not very convincing really since Katniss has left a much more attractive and charismatic lad back in District 12, and you can’t help but feel sorry for him.

There are a lot of holes in the plot. Except for a couple of brief title cards at the start of the film, it is never really made clear how the future we are watching came to be. The audience are expected to just accept this set-up without questioning. Unfortunately the film was not quite good enough for me to forgive the lack of clarity and I did want to know more about the background to this world.

It is also unclear why the population of the Capitol dress eccentrically in a Kelly Osbourne punk fashion. They are obviously all wealthy and live in luxury, but this doesn’t explain why they all have multi coloured hair and ridiculous make-up and clothes. Frankly, the costumes are just ridiculous and distracting and defy logic even in a dystopian future setting.

The Hunger Games isn’t a bad movie, but it could have been a great one.  It focused more on kissing than killing and did not live up to expectations. Instead of making a quality futuristic adventure film and focusing on the most exciting elements of the plot, The Hunger Games focuses more on the relationship between the two contestants from the same district, Katniss and Peeta, and strays more into the chick flick genre.

Dir: Gary Ross

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Woody Harrelson

Japanese TV-comedian Matsumoto Hitoshi established himself on the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2008, with his riotous 2007 film début Big Man Japan (Dainipponjin), a movie best described as ‘a funny existential superhero-flick’. Yes, I know…

In 2010 Matsumoto was back at the IFFR with Symbol, and if you are wondering why exactly it has taken me so long to come up with a review, it’s because I am still not sure I have words available for the experience. Anybody who’s already seen Symbol will probably agree with me.

This presents me with a dilemma (as this review is likely to show). As a writer I want to produce a consistent and clear piece. As a reviewer I want to tell you all I can about Symbol so as many people as possible will view the film. As a movie lover I want to tell you as little as possible, so the silken gut punch cum tickle that Symbol offers can hit you to full effect. Suffice it to say that I will not achieve any of these goals in this review. Not only because they conflict too much, but because the nature of Symbol makes all these approaches impossible. So please, dear reader, forgive me for the fuzziness of this slice of text. It’s in a good cause.

Unfortunately there is no (English) subtitled DVD/Blu Ray of Symbol available yet. In order to see the film you should check your local (art house) cinema for the occasional screening. Although I personally regret not having the opportunity to re-watch Symbol at home, the film is best experienced on the big screen, where your expectations will most likely receive their most spectacular ass-kicking ever. Symbol’s surrealism, slapstick and melancholy may very well work their way into your heart and into your top three of favourite films (Don’t look Now is still at the top of my list, but it’s pretty close).

I witnessed people coming out of the cinema feeling confused, elated, glum, happy, giddy with laughter, moved, and weirded-out all at the same time. Symbol mixes emotional flavours you didn’t think would go together to make a satisfying and tasty repast. Also, you’ll probably never look at a renaissance cherub in quite the same way again.

Matsumoto (who also plays the lead) has made a film that is both typically Japanese and entirely universal. Compared to Dainipponjin, Symbol is more balanced and less flaky. It is a mature film, even when it wholeheartedly embraces silliness. As a filmmaker Matsumoto knows exactly what he is doing, taking the viewer by the hand and leading them through melancholy, phantasmagoria and absurdity to bring his message across.

For there is a powerful message to Symbol. Also, despite this review possibly leading you to believe the contrary, there is a plot. Everything happening in the film is connected, and by the time you find out how (trust me when I say you won’t see it coming), you will probably have peed your pants from laughing (I strongly recommend wearing an incontinence diaper when seeing this movie). Finally, Symbol offers one hell of a punchline that I will not mention any further lest I spoil it. Suffice it to say that it is almost guaranteed to have you go from “I’m gonna need a diaper” to “‘I’m gonna need a tissue” in a matter of moments.

And as it turns out, I needn’t have bothered with this review. In a comment under a YouTube clip for Symbol, somebody wrote: “This movie is funny, weird, and deep”. Which says it all, really. So the best advice I can give you for this intoxicating film is to adopt the attitude of a surfer. Dive in. Paddle for a while. And ride the magnificent wave when and where it takes you.

Matt not only has to come to terms with his wife’s condition, but he also has to deal with the discovery that his wife was unfaithful and planning to leave him. He becomes fixated with the idea of confronting the man his wife was sleeping with (played by a mature Matthew Lillard), who he finds out is a real estate agent called Brian Speer. He finds out Brian is on vacation, so follows him out there and takes his daughters along for the ride. Matt’s journey to find Brian Speer becomes a journey of self-discovery, as he re-connects with his daughters and deals with his grief.

The focus of the film is the relationship between Matt and his daughters, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara Miller), making The Descendants largely a film about fatherhood. After years of being the less involved back-up parent, Matt finds himself in the position of single  father of two daughters and has to adapt his life to deal with their issues and their grief.

We only see his wife in functioning capacity for about ten seconds at the start of the film, as Matt narrates the circumstances of her accident. With such a limited introduction to her character, it’s impossible for us to really care about what happens to her. It’s her family we are meant to care about, and it’s a testament to the strong performancey of clooney, Woodsley (Alexandra) and Miller (Scottie) that we do find ourselves caring about them and their loss.

There is also a sup-plot in The Descendants involving a large piece of land on a nearby island to Hawaii that Matt and his cousins inherited from their ancestors. They are in the process of trying to find a buyer for this land so they can finally divide the profits. As the sole trustee, it is Matt that has the final say in the matter and his new circumstances change his outlook and his views on the importance of retaining his family’s inheritance and history.

The film is full of funny moments which ensure the tragic elements do not become too depressing. Sometimes the comedy comes out of the tragedy, such as when Elizabeth’s father thumps Alexandra’s slightly dim friend Sid in the face for laughing at his wife’s alzheimer’s condition. Another humorous moment is when Matt runs to his friend’s house in his flip flops in order to confront them about hiding his wife’s infidelity from him. Matt proves it’s impossible to run normally whilst wearing flip flops.

It’s difficult to be funny and tragic at the same time, but Alexander Payne manages it in The Descendants, with the help of an excellent cast and screenplay. The performances are raw and two young girls  are equally worthy of awards praise.  It’s an intimate film about second chances and self discovery that connects with the audience. The final scene is almost uncomfortably intimate, as the family sit on a couch watching tele and are staring directly us without saying anything. Just like we’ve been in their personal space for the course of the movie, they are now encroaching on ours.

Dir: Alexander Payne

Starring:  George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller

Meek’s Cutoff

The group is made up of three families and their wagons and their guide and mountain man Stephen Meek (an unrecognisable Bruce Greenwood).  Meek claims to know the way to a better place where they will be welcomed and given a chance to live the american dream and make their fortune. As the journey progresses and water starts to run low, the group begin to lose faith in Meek and his land finding abilities. As it becomes clear Meek does not know where he is taking them, a power struggle takes place as a new leader emerges.

The film ends unexpectedly when Meek  finally concedes that he doesn’t know the way to a better destination and can no longer lead them. As the film’s title states, he reaches his ‘cut-off’ point. Meek’s cutoff open ending leaves the viewer feeling slightly cheated as they never find out if this group of travellers reach their destination or if instead they perish in the plains. It’a a slow but interesting Western about  trust and struggling to survive in unfamiliar territory.

Dir: Kelly Reichardt

Starring: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Shirley Henderson, Paul Dano

Anonymous

This worry is unnecessary, as Anonymous is presented entirely as fiction. It even opens in a theatre setting, with Derek Jacobi reading a prologue to the audience and announcing that what they are about to witness offers an alternative story about the creation of some of the world most famous and celebrated plays by William Shakespeare. It  ‘offers’ another story in a theatrical setting, it never claims to be fact.

Anonymous  presents a theory that has been believed by a number of scholars for many years, which is that the real author of Shakespeare’s plays was Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans), the 17th Earl of Oxford. This does not lie with historical fact, since Edward de Vere actually died before several of Shakespeare’s most famous plays were performed, but since Anonymous never claims to be historically accurate, this can be forgiven.  Anonymous also disputes what many belive about Queen Elizabeth the 1st, that she was a virgin Queen. In this film, not only is she not portrayed as a virgin, she is actually presented as a bit of a slut, with a multitude of illegitimate children distributed all around London.

Set in Elizabethan England, Anonymous shows the court corruption and politics of the time.  Edward de Vere is a writer at heart, but because he is also the Earl of Oxford, he is advised by his guardian William Cecil, the Queen’s advisor, to give up writing and pursue a career in politics. After a scandal at court, Edward is blackmailed by Cecil into giving up writing entirely. He does not stop writing but instead hides the authorship of his writings by signing them ‘anonymous’. When his plays start  to be viewed more widely and audiences become impatient to see the playwright responsible, local actor and scoundrel William Shakespeare seizes this money making opportunity and claims them as his own.

The costumes and make-up of the film look authentic. In contrast to films such as Shakespeare in Love, where the characters always look clean and immaculate, Anonymous shows the characters with ruddy complexions and dirty fingernails, which is a much more honest portrayal of the time, when little was known about hygiene. Queen Elizabeth’s stained rotting teeth are quite shocking when you see them for the first time.

People should not be getting so outraged about this movie, as although it does propose the theory that Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him, it does not do it very convincingly. If anything, it actually left me more convinced that Shakespeare was the real author of his plays, since the alternative idea offered did not add up or seem probable.

Dir: Roland Emmerich

Starring: Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, David Thewlis

Of the countless adaptations there have been, the one that sticks out for me is the BBC’s recent stunning TV version of Jane Eyre, which I reviewed only last year. Having given the BBC’s adaptation a five star rating, it was inevitable that I was going to make comparisons between that and this new adaptation. Whereas the BBC version had about four hours to make use of the novel material, this film had to condense the story into around ninety minutes, so it was never going to able to show as much. As expected, I found myself constantly finding fault with the new film because it didn’t deal with elements of the plot as well as the other adaptation had done.

Instead of going straight into criticisms though, i’ll start with the few positives of this Jane Eyre adaptation. If you don’t know the story, Jane Eyre is a plain looking girl who has never experienced much kindness, but is stong willed and knows her own mind. When she takes up the post of governess at Thornfield Hall, she finds herself a subject of interest to the master of the house, Mr Rochester. He unexpectedly sees an equal in her to himself, though they are of  different classes and he finds she challenges him and his beliefs. Mia Wasikowska does portray Jane accurately, even on the aesthetic level. The make-up team did a good job of making the pretty actress appear plain and ordinary in order to make a more convincing Jane. Michael Fassbender is also rightly cast as Mr Rochester, successfully capturing the character’s dark humour and wit. Looks wise, he’s definitely rugged enough to draw in female viewers. I heard one fellow cinemagoer say “he’s so hot he set the bed on fire”, referring to a particular scene.

What’s lacking in the film is the chemistry between the two actors. The passion between Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester is just not convincing, and that for me is essential to my enjoyment of the story. You have to understand how strong the link between the characters is in order to grasp and understand the agony they both go through when they are torn apart from each other by circumstances. The lack of chemistry between Fassbender and Wasikowsa made the central relationship seem farcical and unreal in places where it should have been powerfully moving. This was not helped by the screenplay either. During vital scenes, the screenwriter seems to have taken great liberties with original novel’s material and added entirely new dialogue to make the lines sound cheesy and less authentic. I found myself rolling my eyes at some of the lines, which is never a good sign.

This Jane Eyre is a credible effort but it’s not even close to being the best adaptation of the novel around. If you’ve never read the novel though and are able to judge the movie entirely on its own merits, then you’re much more likely to enjoy this film. It’s a great love story with tragic elements and dark twists that keep you gripped and stop the story straying into cliché .

Dir: Cary Fukunaga

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Mia Wasikowska, Judi Dench, Jamie Bell

A couple of days ago, I saw Super 8. Beforehand, I’d read about how this movie was made as an hommage to 70s and 80s scifi movies, like Spielberg’s ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Like those movies, and unlike the majority of modern scifi movies, Super 8 kinda works as a drama. It’s a bit overly sentimental, but at least it has actual characters, not just explosions and action. But at the same time it fails miserably at being a scifi movie.

Ingredients

I guess that any good movie has two essential ingredients. First, there has to be action. Not (necessarily) fights, explosions and such, but something has to happen. Whether that means the protagonists have to escape from the clutches of an alien monster or find the love of their life doesn’t really matter. As long as there’s an objective to achieve. With most science fiction movies, at least part of the objective is to explore, to find out more about the (alien) world they encounter.

The second ingredient is character development. The audience has to care about the characters, and really want them to succeed. Only then will they get emotionally involved in the story. If you care about the young space adventurer exploring an alien planet, the monsters lurking in the dark will seem all the more scary. And if you too have a temporary infatuation with the adorable girl he’s after, you’ll want them to get together.

Mixing it all up

Most of the scifi movies I’ve seen in the last decade focused heavily on the first ingredient. They pulled out all the stops in terms of special effects, and created spectacular aliens to escape from. But at the same time, I couldn’t care less about the fate of the people trying to do so. And with an essential ingredient missing, those movies simply didn’t work.

Super 8 however, does quite the opposite. It focuses heavily on the dramatic parts. The main character is a boy who’s recently lost his mother, and who barely connects with his dad. He’s also falling in love for the first time, so there’s plenty of drama there. And somewhere in the back, barely noticable with all the emotional close-ups, there’s a FRICKING ALIEN MONSTER!

Backdrop

While Close Encounters explored the magnitude of a real alien “first contact” situation, Super 8 manages to make it look completely insignificant. The main characters will literally turn away from a spectacular alien phenomenon to deal with their personal issues. Like I said in my Signs review back when that movie was released, you simply cannot have an alien invasion as a backdrop. To anything. Such and invasion would be the single most important event in human history.

And yet, Super 8 manages to treat it like an insignificant secondary storyline. One that’s utterly unsatisfying from a scifi standpoint. None of the essential questions are answered. Where’s the alien from? Are there more? Will their race be back to wipe us out? Can we borrow their technology please? Aside from the basic fact that the antagonist in this story is an alien, there’s nothing scifi about Super 8.

Too bad really, because what you end up with is as fundamentally flawed as the all-action scifi movies it was trying to surpass. Lacking that other essential ingredient, Super 8 turned out to not be very “super” at all.

Julia, Dave, and Bobby (Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell) are the horrible bosses making the lives of their employees hell. Nick, Dale, and Kurt (Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis) are the trod-upon employees. As they are friends, they regularly meet for drinks to complain about each of their bosses. As time goes by and their bosses get worse, they drunkenly decide to group together and hatch a plan to kill their bosses and make it look like an accident.

Most people can probably relate to the ‘hating your boss’ idea that this film plays upon, but hopefully not many have gone so far as to consider killing them, so your sympathy for the characters stops when the murder talk starts. It all very quickly gets too far fetched as (plot spoiler ahead) they witness one boss commit a murder and then come after them with a gun, resulting in high speed car chases and police questioning.

Unsurprisingly, the best scenes are the ones involving the bosses at their most horrible. Although their appalling behaviour, including: sexual harassment, office bullying, and bringing prostitutes to the office, does cross the realms of plausibilty, it is at least a little bit funny.

In conclusion, Horrible Bosses is not as funny as it should be. The only reason to see it is to witness Jennifer Aniston playing a character that is not a nice fluffy version of herself. She is actually rather good at playing a total cow. Fingers crossed this performance paves the way for future meatier roles.

Dir: Seth Gordon

Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey, Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day

Red

Red revolves around ex-assassin Frank Moses. On the Retired and Extremely Dangerous list, Frank finds himself being fired upon by a hit squad one evening. After killing them all with minimal effort, he then goes to Kansas City and kidnaps his telephone friend Sarah Ross, fearing that her life may be in danger too.  Sarah provides the love interest for Red, but this wholekidnap sub-plot never really rings true since they are basically complete strangers. It is hardly plausible that she would fall her abductor in such a short space of time, even if he does have Bruce Willis’s face and charisma. Having kidnapped Sarah, Frank then teams up with his fellow retired ex-assassin friends to find out why they have become targets.

The film loses all credibility when John Malkovich appears as Marvin. Marvin is a completely ridiculous character. He is obsessed with conspiracy theories and has built his house in his car. Perhaps with a better script, his character might have generated amusement, but unfortunately he is just annoying and takes up screen time that would have been better served developing the other characters.

The jokes are not funny, the plot is nonsensical, and even for an action movie, the action is way too far-fetched and unrealistic. The last half hour of the film is basically just loud flying bullets, and even with Helen Mirren firing, this becomes a bit tiresome.

Dir: Robert Schwentke

Starring: Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Brian Cox