Category Archives: New Releases

Come As You Are

New Releases, ,

By Emma Street

come 1

Imagine a remake of The Inbetweeners Movie. In Dutch! Where the guys have never been on holiday without their parents before and decide to visit a brothel in Spain! Only – get this – Will is blind. And Simon has terminal cancer and is confined to a wheelchair. And Neil (or possibly Jay) is paralysed from the neck down. And they’re being driven around in van by Nessa from Gavin and Stacey. Who’s Belgian!

This almost certainly wasn’t the original pitch for Geoffrey Enthoven’s Come As You Are, which is released in the UK today. I did keep finding myself making comparisons between the characters in the two films while I was watching it though. It’s particularly true of Philip, the Jay/Neil character. He is gawky and belligerent and doesn’t let his quadriplegia get in the way of occasionally acting like a total wanker.

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Byzantium

Genre, New Releases, , , ,

Sam Osborn watches Neil Jordan’s new film.

Byzantium

Byzantium is a vampire movie.  Another one?  I hear a collective sigh. After all, we have been inundated with movies of this genre lately, especially with Stephanie Meyer’s kind contribution to the cause ruining the genre for generations to come.  Anyway, I feel I am straying off point here a little.  In director Neil Jordan’s last vampire outing (Interview with the Vampire) we met Lestat and Louis, one a murderous, animalistic killer and the other a tormented soul.  In Byzantium, based on the Moira Buffini play A Vampire Story, we meet Clara and Eleanor who bear a striking resemblance to their male counterparts.  Byzantium focuses on the relationship between the mother and daughter vampire duo and their struggle for their very survival.

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Wedding Hells

Comedy, New Releases, , , ,

Gareth Negus gets drunk at weddings.

Abandon hope.
Abandon hope.

Maybe it’s the fault of Bridesmaids. Maybe it goes back further, to Four Weddings and a Funeral.  My Big Fat Greek Wedding should probably take some of the blame. Either way, there has been a plague of wedding-based comedies at the cinema over the past 12 months or so, and they all have one thing in common: they’re crap.

There’s nothing wrong with the basic idea.  Weddings have lots of attractions for a comedy writer: they’re universal (most people have been to at least one, if only as a guest), there is ample opportunity for humorous mix ups and exaggerated characters, both of which can plausibly be fuelled by drink. Add the in-built happy ending (assuming the happy couple manage to sort out their differences at the last minute), something we all need more than ever in These Difficult Times, and it’s easy to see why there are so many of things being made.  If only they weren’t so terrible.

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Engine Notes on Camp*

New Releases

Indy Datta reviews Fast & Furious 6

A Ford Escort, you guys? Seriously?
A Ford Escort, you guys? Seriously?

The Fast and the Furious, the flaccid 2001 Point Break ripoff directed, sort of,  by Rob Cohen (with hot rod street racing taking the place of surfing in the Bigelow film; and why don’t I know of more movies that just copy Point Break but with a different minority sport? Where is the Point Break of Ultimate Frisbee, or  LARPing? You can have those for free, Hollywood, you’re welcome) was mainly notable for gravely miscalculating the magnitude of Paul Walker’s screen charisma. About the only thing to be said for it was that it handily bettered Dominic Sena’s flashier, pricier petrolhead actioner of the previous year,  Gone in 60 Seconds (the honey-toned Bruckheimer A-pic to TF&TF’s scrappy B), which could not even be saved by the inclusion of Vinnie Jones playing a man called “Sphinx”.

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It takes two to make an accident

New Releases,

Laura Morgan is in two minds about Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby.

Party scene from The Great Gatsby
Ridiculous.

I have always liked Baz Luhrmann and his big, shiny, stupid films. I like the gauche, comic-book way he puts shots together, and I like how frenetic and noisy his movies are, and how awkwardly beautiful he makes people look. But he seemed an odd choice for a new adaptation of Gatsby, as did making it in 3D: why would you choose the most superficial of directors and the most superficial of mediums – I use the word descriptively, not pejoratively – to tell a story which is all about what’s hidden beneath the surface?

The trailer heightened my anxiety: it just didn’t look like a film I wanted to watch. But in the service of MostlyFilm I nobly overcame my misgivings and ventured out to a first-night screening, and I am pleased to be able to tell you that it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be.

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Why you need to watch Fast & Furious 6 this weekend

Future Releases, Genre, New Releases,

By Fogger

fast_and_furious_six_ver7_xlg

It had to happen eventually. Hollywood, or more accurately the half-dozen or so studios that make up the majority of its output, has seemingly realized that there might, just might, be more to life than turning every comic book that’s ever been doodled into a vacuous, overwrought blockbuster. The sixth installment of the Fast & Furious franchise is out this week. It will be a vacuous, overwrought blockbuster, too – but the right kind. And it could represent the rebirth of action cinema.

I say ‘could’, because it needs to make a giant pile of money first – and that’s why you need to go and watch it. Don’t go begrudgingly, though. If it’s anything like its predecessor, it promises to be an awesome, hair-raising mixture of preposterous car stunts, oiled muscly bodies and random bouts of artillery fire. And for some of us, that’s what cinema is all about.

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The Look of Love

New Releases, , ,

By Gareth Negus

Steve Coogan as Paul Raymond
Steve Coogan as Paul Raymond

Paul Raymond was London’s King of Soho, an entrepreneur and publisher who made a fortune out of what he called erotica, and plenty of others called pornography.  Raymond was an astute businessman who worked his way up to a fortune, and something of a pioneer in his own field; there are plenty of stories to tell about a man like that. Michael Winterbottom’s new film, The Look of Love, opts for one: a tragedy about a man who had everything, yet lost what was most important to him.

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Evil Dead

Cult Movies, Genre, New Releases

By Sam Osborn

You're asking for trouble, making claims like that.
You’re asking for trouble, making claims like that.

It was inevitable that a remake of The Evil Dead would open itself up to criticism and comparisons from fans of Sam Raimi’s cult 1981 original.  Did we really need to be worried?  As it turns out the answer is no. The feature debut of Fede Alavarez, who was chosen for the task by Sam Raimi, the new film is simply titled Evil Dead.

As in the original, the story focuses on five college-aged friends who travel to a secluded cabin in the woods. However in this new adaptation, the isolated location has been chosen to support Mia’s attempts to detox.  The cabin is owned by the parents of siblings David and Mia and, although now dilapidated, contains lots of warm and comforting memories for Mia.  Or so it seems…  Fairly early on, after the discovery of something untoward in the basement along with a strange item, The Book of the Dead, it becomes apparent that things are not all that they seem – and that there is worse to come.

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Vulgaria

Asian Cinema, New Releases, , ,

By Spank The Monkey

VulgariaMules

You may be familiar with the cinema technology known as D-Box – a small number of screens in the UK have already been fitted with it. It’s one more way of reducing the film experience to a theme park ride: a cinema rigged with motion control seats that shake, tilt and vibrate in ways defined by the movement on screen. Generally, it’s used to add realism to action movies, wobbling the viewer as things crash and explode in front of them.

Later this year, a Hong Kong studio is set to release the first 3D pornographic film using the D-Box process. This should tell you everything you need to know about the territory’s attitude to sex on screen. Even more so when you discover that the film in question is 4D Sex & Zen, the latest entry in a franchise previously discussed in these pages. As I suggested back then, you get the feeling that erotic film in Hong Kong hasn’t really grown up yet. So when you discover that one of the biggest local hits of the past few years has been a bawdy comedy called Vulgaria (just released on home video in the UK), you begin to fear the worst. But you shouldn’t.  Continue reading Vulgaria →