This surreal science-fiction comedy is rich and strange, and the best film of the year, says Indy Datta.
Category Archives: Genre
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
It’s the second instalment of the Hunger Games franchise and everyone from the first film is back. Everyone who wasn’t brutally murdered, that is. Emma Street enjoys the scenery and wonders where it’s all going to end.
“I’ve never expected metal ships!”
Indy Datta takes a look at the top-notch new Blu-ray of Philip Kaufman’s remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, released by Arrow Video on Monday.
We’re all going to be together in the dark
by Mr Moth
I know you like it, Americans, but you do Hallowe’en all wrong. For a start, there’s the costumes. They’re supposed to be scary, you can’t just wear any old fancy dress. Going to a Hallowe’en party as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz is just not on, unless you’re basically admitting a deep-seated fear of gay icons. Trick or Treat? Well, that’s debatable and I don’t know who’s right or wrong but I can tell you now that ACTUALLY GOING THROUGH WITH THE TRICK IS BAD. Don’t do that. Changing your Twitter avatar to a spooky skull on the first of October? TOO SOON. The most egregious affront to Hallowe’en, however, has occurred only recently and in an unlikely spot – cable television.
You see, American Horror Story: Murder House was first broadcast on FX in the United States on the fifth of October. The second series, Asylum, premiered on the 17th of October. And Coven, the third series, began on the ninth of October. Is it too much to ask that a series so steeped in American (and, for that matter, European) horror tradition premieres on the 31st of October? Or at least as near as possible?
Aw Hell Gnaw!
By Ricky Young.
Things have changed. A bit.
When we last talked about AMC’s The Walking Dead on MostlyFilm, we spent most of the article agog at how a programme so filled with desperate and throbbing flaws could continue to be such a mega-hit.
Make no mistake – and broadsheet media-section column inches be damned – this is by far AMC’s biggest show. Yes, they have Mad Men, of course, watched by Mark Lawson, Mark Lawson’s cat, Mark Lawson’s commissioning editor and absolutely nobody else. They had Breaking Bad, which managed a degree of cultural significance by repackaging the good bits of The Shield half-a-decade later, and whose ludicrously hype-drenched finale was watched by a supposedly epic 10.3 million viewers.
Want to know something? Thirteen out of The Walking Dead’s sixteen third-season episodes beat the ass off that. More people regularly tuned in to watch Egg out of This Life get chased by golems again than could be bothered finding out what ended up happening to Walter White. (Spoiler: He returned to his own planet.)
People sure do love the heck out of zombies, it seems. But, like a creeping, tenacious infection, spreading from a single starting point and extending its influence into multiple parts of the whole, this year The Walking Dead showed signs of an extremely worrying and unexpected new symptom.
Competence.
Clock This!
Richard Curtis has a new film out and it’s very good. Yes, it is. Ron Swanson reports.
It’s nicely in keeping with Richard Curtis’ films’ apologetically stylised view of England that I’m tempted to start this positive review of his new movie, About Time, with an apology, or more accurately, a justification. It’s tempting to put my emotional reaction to his film down to the fact that I’m a sucker for this kind of thing, or that I was having a bad week, or that the idea of time travel has always made me want to cry. If I knew how to winsomely stutter in print, I would totally give it a go.
As it is, no justification is needed. It may seem like trifling praise indeed, to claim that About Time is Curtis’ best film, but I like Four Weddings, Notting Hill and Love, Actually quite a lot, and this absolutely soars past them. While it may benefit from the lowered expectations caused by the clusterfuck that was The Boat that Rocked and an insipid and oddly charmless trailer, this is a film that makes me hope there’s more to come from Curtis. Continue reading Clock This!
Riddick
by Indy Datta
The shower scene is when you know it’s all gone a bit wrong. About halfway into David Twohy and Vin Diesel’s agreeably disposable reboot of their SF microfranchise, Katee “Starbuck” Sackhoff’s lesbian bounty hunter character Dahl (which I heard as “Doll” right until the end credits rolled) strips to the waist to give herself a sponge bath, and to give the audience a gratuitous eyeful (sideboob, nipple). What gives? Until this point, Dahl has been portrayed as one of the most intelligent and capable characters in the film, as two rival bands of bounty hunters squabble over who gets to bring in the fugitive Richard B. Riddick, alive or dead. Her sexuality is dealt with by brusquely taking it off the table. “I don’t fuck guys. I fuck them up”, is all she says to the sleazy rival (Jordi Mollá) who pays her too much attention; and she’s his equal, so that’s all that needs to be said. But from this point on, the character is sidelined, told to wait here while the boys sort it out. When Riddick, captured and shackled by the bounty hunters shortly after this, predicts how the story ends, he finds the time to note that he intends to “go balls deep into” Dahl, “but only because you’re gonna ask me sweetly”. And; guess what happens at the end. Seriously, you guys? I was looking forward to this, and you’ve made me into a PC internet scold. Thanks a bunch.
Women on the Verge of a Mirthful Breakthrough
Laura Morgan went to Edinburgh and all she got was a load of female comedians.
Just as there’s no point seeing the headline acts at Glastonbury when you could be learning to breathe fire or dancing to The Proclaimers instead, there’s no point going to the Edinburgh Fringe and seeing comics you can watch performing on tour or mugging on TV panel shows all year round. The beauty of a festival is the ability to discover acts performing to crowds of half a dozen and giving it their heartfelt all: a voyage of glorious discovery made better, not worse, by the knowledge that you might end up the only audience member at a terrible show. (This happened to me once, at the Camden Fringe: I hoped for both our sakes that the comic in question would cancel the show, but he nobly went on and shouted the whole thing into my face. These are the sacrifices I make for art.)
There are thousands of performers at the Fringe, and since my time in Edinburgh was limited to three days I decided I needed a focus, so I made it my business to go and see some solo shows by women, partly because women are ace and partly in an attempt to discover why the top ten one-liners of the Fringe are almost always all by men. Are men better at one-liners? Is it that the judges only go to see shows by men? Are there simply fewer women doing stand-up (yes) and is that because Women Aren’t Funny? (no). (It also isn’t, incidentally, down to Women Aren’t Funny’s uglier sibling: Men Don’t Like Funny Women.) Continue reading Women on the Verge of a Mirthful Breakthrough
Sorted for Teens and Wizz
by Gareth Negus
There are different kinds of teen movie: the kind aimed at teenagers, and the kind that are about teenagers but aimed at adults. Then there’s the kind that fall somewhere between the two. The Way, Way Back is one of those.
The film stars Liam James as 14-year-old Duncan, reluctantly dragged on holiday for the summer with his mom (Toni Collette), his mom’s hectoring and unlikable new boyfriend Trent (Steve Carell), and Trent’s daughter. After spending some time moping around being miserable, Duncan chances across the Water Wizz amusement park, where the manager Owen (Sam Rockwell) takes him under his wing.
Miserable 14-year-olds are no fun to hang around with (even most miserable 14-year-olds would agree with that, if they ever spoke) and not much fun to watch on screen. So it takes a while to engage with the film’s protagonist, and the situation isn’t helped by the fact that we suspect we could be having more fun watching Collette, or Allison Janney who plays the oft-sozzled divorcee next door. Instead, we get to watch the adults through Duncan’s eyes, as they drink too much, and lie to themselves and each other – a narrative device also seen recently in What Maisie Knew. Fortunately, the film, like its lead, opens up and becomes somewhat less awkward once it spends more time at the Water Wizz with Rockwell, who naturally provides some helpful life lessons under his happy-go-lucky, man-child style of management. Naturally, this also helps him befriend the pretty girl next door (AnnaSophia Robb). Continue reading Sorted for Teens and Wizz
“You See That Sign Flashing There? It Says…Applesauce.”
There’s been a lot of talk recently of canned laughter. Surely no-one denies that canned laughter exists – the wonderfully spooky phrase “the laughter of the dead” refers specifically to laughter captured so long ago that the audience is no longer even with us – but clearly the idea of laughs on cue is taboo in modern comedy. Mention the phrase on Twitter, for example, and you’re as likely as not to find the size twelves of the local comedy constabulary on your neck, requesting that you re-think the phrase and maybe buy a DVD in penance. We here at MostlyFilm, however, are not subject to the laws of Tweet-land and can more freely question the idea that every laugh at every joke on the soundtrack to every comedy was recorded right at the moment the punchline dropped.
After the jump, Sarah Slade shares her memories of being in an audience for a comedy show that didn’t quite get the laughing part of their job right. It’s certainly enough to pose the reasonable question – if not canned, then what? Ethically sourced and packaged in a protective atmosphere for later use?
Continue reading “You See That Sign Flashing There? It Says…Applesauce.”
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