The Adjustment Bureau

There are two types of ‘bad’ when it comes to films. There is ‘good bad’ and ‘bad bad’. A film that is ‘bad bad’ is rubbish, along with being boring, having a mediocre plot and so on. Basically, a film that thinks it is better than it is. A good example of this was The Green Hornet which promised much with its director but was unforgivable crap. ‘Good bad’ is when a film kind of knows it’s terrible and just sort of embraces it so we can at least have a little fun along the way, i.e Transformers (not the sequel though). I thought The Adjustment Bureau would be ‘good bad’ so the audience knows that we’re not supposed to take this whole ludicrous premise legitimately. Erm, maybe not.

 

127 Hours

Well, there goes my past criticism of James Franco.

Say what you want of Danny Boyle (and I do, Slumdog Millionaire was immeasurably overrated) he isn’t afraid to try new things. With each film he tries his talents at a different genre; Trainspotting was his ‘drug’ movie, 28 Days Later his horror and Slumdog his romance. Though he may not always succeed (Sunshine was very hit-and-miss) I’ve always stated I’d rather see a director branch out and experiment with avant-guarde ideas than settle into a rut. 127 Hours is probably as avant-guarde as Boyle will ever get. Having won the coveted Best Director and Best Picture with his last feature many cinephiles wondered what next for the British director? He wasted little or no time before announcing an adaptation of Aron Ralston’s gruelling book titled Between A Rock and a Hard Place. It told the true story of Ralston whose arm was crushed by a rock and was trapped for, yup you guessed it, 127 hours before he forces himself to cut it off and wander to safety.

 

Monsters

Before going into Monsters I had heard a great deal about the shoestring budget it was filmed on and (just yesterday) the announcement that director Gareth Edwards is set to helm the next adaptation of Godzilla on the strength of his debut feature. I hadn’t, however, heard anything about its plot or style (other than the face it involved aliens). With a budget of less than $500,000, a majority of the dialogue ad-libbed by unknowing extras who just happened to be in the location the 7-man crew was filming and little or no permission to film where they filmed it is amazing what Edwards has managed to achieve.

 

Rare Exports

Why does Santa have such a big sack? Because he only comes once a year.

That’s not the kind of joke you’d expect to find in a Christmas cracker, just as this film isn’t the kind of film you’d expect two weeks before you sit down next to Granny, offering her your shiny red one and asking for a quick tug.

And that’s what makes it so perfect. Well, almost perfect but we’ll get to that later.

 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

It saddens me that Warner Brothers settled on David Yates as the director of the twin finales of the Harry Potter franchise. The Prisoner of Azkaban director Alfonso Cuaron had expressed a desire to return but the production company saw the ticket sales of The Half-Blood Prince compared to Cuaron’s crack of the Potter-whip and chose the more popular, less revered director. They also split the film in two, meaning that The Deathly Hallows will now spread over a mammoth 5 hours; lest we forget Return of the King (a book with much more depth) was crammed into 3 and a half hours. And so Part 1 is two and a half hours but it feels like it could be 30 minutes shorter with the abject lack of pace.

 

Film News: Source Code given trailer

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it is trailer season and of all the new films we’ve been given a look at (Green Lantern and Cowboys & Aliens within the last few days) it is Source Code which gets me the most excited. From Duncan Jones, director of the acclaimed Moon comes Source Code, a sci-fi thriller that looks like an interesting cross between Groundhog Day and Twelve Monkeys.

 

Film News: DiCaprio set to begin Hoover biopic

The much mooted J. Edgar Hoover biopic is set to begin filming in January/February 2011 with Eastwood behind, and DiCaprio in front of, the lense. The film will focus on controversial figure J. Edgar Hoover who founded the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1930s and remained its director until his death nearly forty years later.

 

Harry Potter: A Wasted Opportunity

The first of the two-part finale of the Harry Potter saga is upon us and excitement has reached fever-pitch, so far though I am left lamenting what might have been. The 8 film, 7 book series has been a worldwide phenomenon, of that even I am in agreement with the teeming masses who queue for hours to see the latest film on release day, but I can’t help but feel that the series was capable of so much more than it eventually achieved. They will be a high-mark in terms of box-office gross (they now outgross both The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean) but are not high marks in terms of quality and enjoyment. Already the first 2, lauded by fans upon release, are looked upon sourly and give it a few years the whole series could easily be seen, sadly, as a wasted opportunity.

 

Film News: Cowboys & Aliens gets trailer

We are deep in trailer season now with all the 2011 summer blockbusters wanting to have trailers attached to the winter season films and so Jon Favreau’s Cowboy’s & Aliens gets a ‘teaser’ trailer a full 10 months before it’s shceduled for theatrical release which is August 2011. I use the term ‘teaser’ very lightly because teasers are generally 1 to 1 and a half minutes long. This badboy is 2 and a half minutes long which is as long as the final theatrical trailers. Thankfully we aren’t given too much plot and instead are given lots of intrigue and characterization.

 

Film News: Green Lantern gets a trailer

Call me a killjoy but I’m going to be one of the first to predict that The Green Lantern will flop. DC Comics have taken a huge risk putting a $150 million budget behind a super-hero whom even I hadn’t heard of. Yes, it has a director with considerable clout behind it but Martin Campbell, despite the success of GoldenEye and Casino Royale, is far from a household name so I imagine the marketing will make heavy use of ‘from the director of…’ rather than his name. It also has Ryan Reynolds in the titular role but bar a bit-part in the average X-Men Origins: Wolverine he hasn’t had any real super-hero, or even action, experience.