THE HUNGER GAMES - eheu o me miserum!

HUNGER GAMES plays like a po-faced, de-fanged version of RUNNING MAN and BATTLE ROYALE. In a dystopian American future, the tyrannical 1 percent demand each district volunteer two kids to fight to the death in a gladiatorial reality TV show. Predictably, the two kids from the poorest district work together to game the system and survive - the only spin being that they become as manipulative as the game they are in to succeed - feigning teen love (or are they?! - who cares) to win public sympathy.  Clearly, the franchise, based on a trilogy by Suzanne Collins', is gearing up for a finale in which the triumph of the 99th percentile inspires a revolution of the Plebs. Which begs the question why, with all their technology, cash, and cunning, the 1% allows them to survive so long. Frankly, any ruling elite so utterly incompetent deserves to die by dingleberries. Dr No, sorry, Snow, is giving us a bad name. 

Anyways, what can we say about this film. It has less pretty lead actors (Josh Hutcherson, Jennifer Lawrence)than the Twiglet series but equally pitiful dye jobs.  (Picture the Celebrity Death Match between Josh Hutcherson's blonde highlights and Twiglet's Nikki Reed!) The acting is better in THE HUNGER GAMES, basically because Jennifer Lawrence can communicate so much nuanced and conflicting emotion without saying a word. But this is offset by some truly shitty production and costume design - so over-the-top, so absurd, that it looks cheap and trashy and completely undermines the attempt at portraying earnest emotion. The worst victim of this is poor Elizabeth Banks in what one can only call the Parker Posey Memorial Role, as inspired by Helena Bonham Carter. By contrast, Lenny Kravitz hardly looks like he's trying at all, and one can imagine an hilarious conversation between the rock musician and the make-up department where he just refuses to go with it. Finally, the direction (Gary Ross - THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX) is also pretty pedestrian.

But my real problem with the whole show was its hackneyed premise coupled with a pretty superficial use of Roman names and concepts.  The world really just doesn't need a desaturated RUNNING MAN. It's like the whole problem with Twiglet: vampires who don't have sex are about as compelling as a Death Match where studio economics require a PG-13 certificate, so that all violence happens off-screen. Apparently the books are more savage, which is great, but then again, Suzanne Collins does try to palm us off with a kind of lo-rent tipping-of-the-hat to Rome.  Clever, clever to call a food deprived land "Panem", and to keep the plebs happy with circuses, but you just can't call major characters Cinna and Caesar without following through. It all felt highly disrespectful coming from a woman who purports to have serious influences. Moreover, where's the subtle satire on reality TV? Where's the subversive politics? The film seems to pick up so many interesting, dangerous concepts, but doesn't seem to have the balls to follow them through.  Oh, and one final thing.  Why give your heroine a name that sounds like "catnip"?

THE HUNGER GAMES is on release pretty much everywhere except Chile and Vietnam, where it opens on March 30th; South Korea and Lithuania, where it opens on April 6th; South Africa, where it opens on April 13th; Spain where it opens on April 20th and Italy, where it opens on May 1st.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN - PART 1 - Cronenberg meets Christian fundamentalists

THE TWILIGHT SAGA, based on Stephenie Meyer's turgid novels, and starring the pretty R-Patz, gay icon Taylor Lautner, and professionally bored Kristen Stewart, is critic proof. It will rake in millions upon millions at the box office from hysterical hordes of narcissistic and insecure teenage girls, who dream of being fought over by not one, but two dishy boys - but all, let us not forget, in the safest possible manner.  Because these are films and novels about the wisdom of abstinence until there's a ring on your finger. The result in a saga that have been, up until this instalment, utterly anaemic - foregoing a potent gothic mix of subversive sex and death for the bland trite stylings of Sweet Valley High.  

It comes, then, as something of a relief, to find mopy Bella (Stewart) finally tying the knot with rich cool vampire Edward (Pattinson).  To be sure, in order for her to cope with his powerful vampiric sex drive he's going to have to turn her into a vampire too, and this clearly pisses off Edward's hot-blooded werewolf rival Jacob (Lautner) although apparently not Bella's mum and dad.  For reasons I never really understand, though, Bella decides not to be turned before her honeymoon, and so go at it with gay abandon, but after her honeymoon. The implications of this are that she - beaten and bruised by her vampiric husband - still begs him for sex (sex, that we never see mind you, despite waiting for eons of boring abstemious cinema time) - and then falls pregnant with a half-breed child that kills her as he grows inside of her.  Of course, she won't consider an abortion, this being a book penned by a writer with a specific moral agenda, and the denouement of the film is a kind of explicit body horror that comes straight from the cinema of Cronenberg.

The resulting film is both severely tedious, embarrassingly low-rent, but also provocative. The first hour is a drippy super-romantic marriage sequence that feels like an endless montage and advert for interior decorating.  The honeymoon is similarly out of Conde Nast traveller, and annoyingly coy.  The acting is sub-par. The dialogue stilted.  The second hour of the film then trips into all out body horror that was satisfyingly gory - brilliant FX turning Stewart into an emaciated victim of internal vampiricism - followed by a birthing scene that will turn anyone celibate.  How to reconcile the two?  How to sit still through the boring first hour and twenty minutes before you get to the gore?  By pondering the provocative messages we are sending our teenage girls by giving them a popular culture that combines the famous-for-being-slutty Paris Hilton and Snooky and the equally extreme abstemiousness of the Twilight Saga.  How on earth are they meant to have a healthy attitude toward sex and toward their own physical health? What messages are they getting from seeing a battered Bella beg for sex? I mean, for fuck's sake, shouldn't we be telling them that when a guy leaves you battered, you leave? 

The whole thing is frankly at once highly silly and camp, and yet at the same time, deeply deeply disturbing.  Let's just get Part 2 over with.

BREAKING DAWN PART 1 is on global release.

iPad Round-Up 6 - EASY A

In the wake of the critical acclaim for THE HELP, it is perhaps too easy for reviewers to see EASY A as the movie in which Emma Stone - the star of both - first made an impression, and perhaps to transfer their admiration of that film to this.  To  my mind, while Stone does have a kind of winning likeability and sass so often missing from today's bland young teen stars, EASY A is far from a compelling film. It doesn't have the dark humour and danger of a film like HEATHERS. It doesn't create a modern vernacular in the way that JUNO attempted to do. And it certainly doesn't treat its literary other, Hawthorne's Scarlett Letter, with the intelligence and respect that CLUELESS treated Pride and Prejudice.  Rather, director Will Gluck (FIRED UP) and writer Bert V Royal, create a movie that attempts to be clever, contemporary, and dangerous, but ends up looking like a movie that occasionally lands a comedic punch, but as often mis-fires.  I'm also pretty tired of seeing cheap shots taken at super-religious nutters.

Stone plays Olive, a girl who masquerades as a slut to gain credibility and cash, but is really a good-hearted virgin. Her parents (Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson) are completely unbelievable in their willingness to go along with this ruse.  Events spiral out of control as they are wont to do in such films - largely when a nasty school counsellor (Lisa Kudrow) uses Olive to cover up an affair with a student. But all's well that end's well, in a movie that is far more conservative than it wants you to think it is.  Essentially, this is a fluffy, patchy affair, worth a DVD rental at best.

EASY A played Toronto 2010 and was released last winter. It is available to rent and own.

iPad 5 Round-Up - 4.3.2.1.

From the laughs, authenticity and social relevance of ATTACK THE BLOCK to the turgid, sexually exploitative own-goal that is 4.3.2.1.  Tragic that promising young writer-director-actor Noel Clarke, who started off with material like KIDULTHOOD that was a serious look at modern British youth culture, should descend into directing a piss-poor genre flick.  Because 4.3.2.1. is essentially a derivative caper movie, complete with MacGuffin (bag of crisps stuffed full of diamonds), and a "high concept" that sees the same day replayed through the point of view of four above-average pretty and under-dressed young girls.  The movie wants to have the tight pace and clever interlocking plot of a Guy Ritchie flick, itself derivative of Tarantino, but ends up looking brash, weak and ordinary.  Not helped by fairly anonymous performance from the four lead girls (Emma Roberts, Ophelia Lovibond, Tamsin Egerton and Shannika Warren-Markland).   Still, I pity them the leering lads mag treatment they get from Clarke, unhappily veering away from what he knows about to a sort of teen boy fantasy of guns, girls and heists, that is an embarrassment to all involved, including, inexplicably, Kevin Smith.

4.3.2.1. was released in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and Greece in 2010 and in Kazakhstan and Russia in February 2011. It is available to rent and own, but why bother?

London Film Fest 2011 Day 2 - DRAGONSLAYER

Tristan Patterson's award-winning debut documentary feature does not live up to expectations. To be sure, Patterson and cinematographer Eric Koretz shoot landscape beautifully, and even set up some stylish chiaroscuro shots. And the soundtrack (Dave Golden, T. Griffin) is superlative. I even like the quirky organisational device of splitting the short 80 minute doc into 11 segments, counting down to zero. 

The problem is the way Patterson treats his subject matter, pro skate-boarder Josh "Skreech" Sandoval. Patterson chooses to let Sandoval tell his own story, and to capture his present, in a naturalistic, almost naive, cinema vérité style. So we see a one-time apparently committed pro-skater, on the come-back from depression, doing pretty much anything but skate - he drinks, smokes, does pills, and hangs out. And that makes for pretty dull viewing. There's no narrative progression - no emotional arc - nothing. Just a dispiriting display of a young man pissing his life away. I'm sure this is partly Patterson's idea - presumably he wanted to show us the gritty reality behind the "rad" image most kids would have of the life of a pro-skater. It's less about scoring free merchandise than scoring a place to stay when you're homeless. 

To be sure, there is value in debunking the myth. But this documentary could've been so much more interesting if Patterson had really engaged with his subject rather than simply observing - if he'd dared to explore Skreech's childhood and depression further. To that end, DRAGONSLAYER struck me as rather similar to LAWRENCE OF BELGRAVIA - also showing at this year's festival. Both documentaries look at marginally successful showmen and hints that their self-destructive relationship with drugs has its origins in childhood trauma - but neither take us beyond that superficial description to the heart of the matter. As a result, both documentaries suffer from the same problem - they never get beyond the initial interest of meeting a new character. They simply don't progress. The upshot is that you end up totally reliant on whether you like the character enough to find the film compelling - probably yes in the case of LAWRENCE - probably no for DRAGONSLAYER - and when the central character isn't compelling I'm not sure how far the wonderful visual stylings can fill that hole. 

DRAGONSLAYER played SXSW and Hot Docs where it won awards for Best Documentary Feature and Best International Documentary respectively. It will be released in the US on November 4th.

Random-DVD Round-Up 4 - FRED: THE MOVIE

FRED: THE MOVIE is the infinitely irritating feature-length flick starring self-appointed YouTube sensation "Fred" aka teenager Lucas Cruikshank. Cruikshank's character is an infantile teen with a passion for day-glo clothes, who speaks in a speeded-up Chipmunk voice and has a two-year-old temper tantrum whenever things don't go his way. This might have been charming in the YouTube short-form but it is absolutely unbearable for 90 minutes. Shame on teen pop star Pixie Lott for jumping on its hopefully short-lived PR bandwagon. As for the movie - the colours are Day-Glo, the direction pedestrian, and the basic plot the same as any other teen comedy: the nerdy protagonist has to triumph over the neighbourhood bully to get the prettiest girl in high school. Frankly, I watched 20 minutes before switching off. Admittedly if the movie had taken a right-turn into a slasher flick wherein the main cast get nastily ripped limb from limb, it might have improved. I will never know. 

FRED: THE MOVIE was released as a TV movie in the US in September 2010 and was inexplicably given a theatrical release in the UK and Ireland in December. It is now available to rent and own.

RED RIDING HOOD - sexless

With her self-consciously naive re-telling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairytale, TWILIGHT director Catherine Hardwicke undoes all the good work of Angela Carter in bringing Charles Perrault's original story up to date with modern sexual mores. For, as she revealed in her brilliant short story, which was itself made into the film, THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, Red Riding Hood is really a story about a young virgin fearful of the bestial sexual appetites of men. In the original fairytale, the young girl is taught to stay well clear of men, lest she be raped and murdered. But in Angela Carter's retelling, the young girl takes control of her fate, fucks the wolf and lives happily ever after. Unfortunately, in this strange new world of teen cinema, where teenagers fall in love as if their lives depended on it, but no-one actually has sex, there is little room to explore the themes of The Little Red Riding Hood story. The resulting film is strangely neuter - strangely childish - a lot of fuss about nothing.

In this film Amanda Seyfield (MAMMA MIA!) plays Valerie aka LRRH as a drippy emo teenage girl, desperate to get it on with her dishy boyfriend Peter (Shiloh Fernandez - a poor man's Ed Westwick) but affianced to the similarly dishy Henry (Max Irons - a poor man's Robert Pattinson). She nearly fucks Peter, and flirts a little with Henry, but the potential for anyone with brown eyes to be the Big Bad Wolf obviously puts a dampener on things. Is it Peter? Is it Henry? Is it Julie Christie's gothic-loopy Grandmother? Who knows? Who cares? The movie grinds through its hokey whodunnit plot and the big reveal turns out to be dull and sexually uninteresting.

Amanda Seyfried is, I suppose, passable as the drippy teen, but both Max Irons and Shiloh Fernandez are wooden. Virginia Madsen as the mother and Gary Oldman as the sinister inquisitor are wasted and Julie Christie is in hammer-horror territory. The soundtrack, with music by Fever Ray, is suitably atmospheric, and Mandy Walker's photography is suitably moody, but she is let down by Thomas E Sanders' (Coppola's DRACULA) too shiny, too over-designed Alpine village set. I particularly hated screenwriter David Leslie Johnson's attempt to critique the use of torture in a war on terror (I kid you not!) and as I said before, his refusal to deal with the sexual subtext is just bizarre.

Overall, RED RIDING HOOD is just absolutely zero. A movie with no soul, no heart, no sex, no tension and no resolution worth its name. The only possible reason to watch it is for the comedy gold moment when you realise that the Reeve is Colonel Tigh!

RED RIDING HOOD was released in March in the USA, Singapore, Canada, Iceland, the Philippines, the USA, Kazakhstan, Russia, Bulgaria and Denmark. It was released earlier in April in Turkey, Armenia, Australia, Kuwait, Finland, Norway, Belgium, Portugal, Slovenia, Colombia, Spain and the UK. It opens next week in France, Sweden, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Italy and Venezuela. It opens on April 28th in Greece, Hungary and Estonia. It opens on June 10th in Japan, and on June 24th in Poland.

London Film Fest 2010 - Day 16 - KABOOM

KABOOM is a bizarre little movie set in a surreal day-glo version of a So-Cal college campus. Said campus is populated by horny, promiscuous teens who spend all their time fucking, SMS-ing and...er...getting sucked into the machinations of an evil cult that's trying to bring about the end of the world.

Writer-director Gregg Araki's is exploring similar territory as in his previous work - teenage sexual shenanigans, gay, straight and everything in-between. But instead of the gritty, raw emotion of MYSTERIOUS SKIN, we get day-glo colour, 1980s kitsch stylings and a plot that seems like the spoof love-child of ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE. The resulting movie is basically a colourful, inconsequential mess. I didn't care about any of the characters, I didn't find the trying-too-hard-to-be-witty dialogue funny, I wasn't impressed by the sexual candour, and I didn't buy into the spoof-horror plot. This movie just isn't as well-written or as finely balanced as, say, DONNIE DARKO, and it certainly isn't as funny as it needs to be. Pretty much the only person who comes out of it with their reputation in tact is actress Juno Temple. Still, I guess, in the age of banal mainstream movies, you at least have to give Araki props for trying.

KABOOM played Cannes, Berlin and Toronto 2010. It was released earlier this year in the USA and France.

TWILIGHT: ECLIPSE - a world of bad hair colour and worse CGI

So, in an evening of girlie bonding my early twenties cousin and I went to see the third installment of the immensely popular Twilight series, ECLIPSE. Not that either of us could be called fan-girls. I’ve read the first book and seen the first two films: my cousin had only seen the first film. We proclaim no membership of either Team Jacob or Team Edward. But, along we went, open-minded, and if nothing else, happy to be in the lovely big Extreme screens in the Vue Westfield. Two hours later we emerged from a world of bad hair-dye, bad CGI effects and hammy dialogue. For this, my friends, is not a movie of high quality trying to appeal to the neutral movie-goer. Rather, ECLIPSE takes its audience’s buy-in for granted and delivers a workman-like condensed version of the novel, with the cheapest visual effects and wigs it can find. Seriously – the wolves bounce through the forests with little heft, much like Ang Lee’s HULK – and the crimes against hair colour perpetrated by Emmett Cullen and Rosalie Hale disgrace a big-budget film.

As the movie opens, we see our heroine Bella Swan torn between the two boys who love. The first is Edward Cullen – ancient vampire in the body of teen heart-throb – who won’t deflower her until they’re married, and for whom she would have to become a vampire. The second candidate is Jacob Black – ridiculously buff teen werewolf – who is happy to keep Bella warm (sadly, this saga being ludicrously chaste, we can read no double-entendre here) and offer her a romantic life that doesn’t involve dying. So follow two hours of hackneyed dialogue as each boy declares his love for Bella, and Bella looks sulky in response. At the end of which, she declares that the decision was never really about who she loved more but about who she wanted to be. This struck me as a rather unconvincing last minute attempt to give movie that is basically about a chick being dependent on two guys for her physical safety (evil mean red-headed vampire wants to kill her with her “new-born” vampire army) some kind of feminist cred. It would’ve bought into it more if during the course of the film, Bella had talked about this journey to self-realisation with her dad or her friends, or the two boys in her life. Overall then, I remain unconvinced by the whole Twilight phenomenon. The heroine is sulky: the vampires are unsexy: the werewolves on steroids: the CGI sucks: and basically very very little happens indeed. For the life of me I can’t figure out why David Slade, director of edgy indie hit HARD CANDY, would want to helm such a mainstream, banal movie, other than, of course, for the paycheque.

Additional tags: Taylor Lautner, Anna Kendrick, Ashley Greene, Elizabeth Reaser

TWILIGHT: ECLIPSE is on global release.

Justifiably overlooked DVD of the month - I LOVE YOU, BETH COOPER

Truly execrable vehicle for HEROES' Hayden Panettiere in which High School nerd Denis confesses his love for hottie Beth Cooper in his valedictorian speech. As a direct result, Beth Cooper turns up at his house that night and the polar opposites end up spending time together. This movie is meant to be like THE BREAKFAST CLUB or CAN'T HARDLY WAIT - where disparate schoolkids ends up realising that there is more to each other than they thought before returning to life as normal. Problem is that the dialogue seems forced, the situation is by necessity contrived, there is very little humour beyond jokes about being nude, or getting an erection. There's none of the depiction of genuine insecurity and vulnerability that characterised the masterful works of John Hughes, and that leavened the crass humour in AMERICAN PIE. Avoid at all costs.

Additional tags: Hayden Panettiere, Paul Rust, Jack T Carpenter,

I LOVE YOU, BETH COOPER was released in summer 2009 and is available on DVD, though why you'd want to watch it, I don't know.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON - chiz moan groan

I have two problems with the TWILIGHT saga. In my review of the first flick, I summed up the first: "Instead of lashings of sex and death and sexy death and death-inducing sex, we get a lot of holding hands and big declarations of love but precious little rumpy-pumpy. Frankly, instead of all the narcissistic angst I would've far preferred the heroes to go and have some healthy sex and get over themselves. But that, my friends, kills the goose that laid the golden royalty cheques."

My second fundamental problem with the TWILIGHT saga is that it's completely dishonest. It's meant to be about pure love and abstinence but at the same time it makes no bones about showing buff guys stripped to the waist. Far from being about spiritual, emotional love, it's as much about the objectifying lust-objects as Baywatch. The only PC touch is that it's the men rather than the women who get their kit off.

These twin problems result in books and films that are as constrained as their characters: teens who want to jump each others bones but can't. And that leads to frustration on the part of the characters and the viewers.

NEW MOON opens with teen vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) abandoning his human girlfriend Bella Swann (Kristen Stewart) because he fears he can't keep her safe. So follows about ninety minutes of Bella going being depressed and boring. The only time she breaks off from this emo behaviour is to say something assinine to the newly buff teen were-wolf Jacob Black (newly buff Taylor Lautner). "You've gotten...um...really buff" etc. Unfortuntely (ironically?) given the lack of on-screen chemistry between Bella-Edward or Bella-Jacob the whole love triangle thing never gets off the ground. In the final half hour we get something that looks like narrative momentum. Edward's sister has had a vision of Bella committing suicide, which has prompted Edward to do the same, Romeo & Juliet stylee. Aforementioned sister and Bella thus rush to Italy (for no other reason than that it looks picturesque) to prevent Edward from inciting some powerful vampires from killing him. All this might have been quite dramatic were it not for the fact that Michael Sheen is evidently taking the piss and hamming up his performance as the super-powerful Vampire king or whatever he is meant to be.

All in all, a movie that is dull, assinine, dull, picturesque, camp, dull.

And there are how many more of these to go?

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON is on global release.

SORORITY ROW - cinematic pot noodle

SORORITY ROW is cheap and nasty. Still, once in a while, typically after a few drinks when there's nothing else in the house and you need to carb up, it's just what you need. It is, in short, a guilty pleasure.

So when I tell you that I had a surprisingly good time watching SORORITY ROW, you'll see where I'm coming from. This movie is pure trash - full of gratuitous tit shots; a risible plot; unscary scary scenes.... It's a slasher movie so bad, it has to be deliberate. But, in the spirit of honesty, it's only fare to 'fess up and say that I laughed hard and long watching SORORITY ROW and positively bounced out of the cinema. And no, before you ask, it had nothing to do with the large gin and tonic at The Imperial beforehand.

The plot is simple. At the start of the university year, a practical joke goes badly wrong and a bunch of sorority sisters hush up the death of their friend, dumping her body rather than call in the cops and getting bounced out of school. Fast forward to graduation day and someone is killing anyone who knows the secret. Is Megan back from the dead? Is her little sister seeking vengeance?

Production values are pretty decent. Indeed, there's an impressive tracking shot that takes us through the sorority house during the opening night party. The acting is also fairly decent, given how hard it is to say so-bad-it's-good lines with a straight face. Perhaps most surprising is that Rumer Willis (daughter of Bruce and Demi) is fine - although she pretty much only has to whimper for the whole film. Best of all, we have Carrie Fisher in a cameo as the House Mother in full on psycho-bitch mode. Genius. As you can imagine, it's the willingness of the movie to spoof its own target demographic that makes it a success. Basically, it's an exercise in depicting - nay lavishing in - the Daily Express' vision of hell: promiscuous teenagers, high on booze and drugs, with too much money, too few scruples, and high-speed internet connections.

We've seen the future, and it's wearing a crystal lip-gloss, a mini-dress, and driving daddy's Porsche Cayenne over a troublesome ex-.

SORORITY ROW is on release in the UK, Australia, Canada and the USA. It opens in two weeks time in Brazil. It opens on October 8th in the Czech Republic and Singapore; October 15th in Argentina; October 22nd in the Netherlands and Venezuela; November 5th in Russia; and November 19th in Portugal.