"Suspension of Disbelief" (Metro 19/07/13)

Suspension of Disbelief (15) 112 mins **

This jazzy doodle is on one level a conventional murder-mystery, with Sebastian Koch (The Lives of Others) as a screenwriter spooked when the twin sister of his recently deceased lover (Lotte Verbeek, times two) shows up on his North London doorstep. Yet director Mike Figgis keeps throwing hefty quotation marks around what we’re watching, whether by cutting away to the storytelling classes Koch is teaching, flashing up textbook headings (“CHARACTER IS PLOT”) at key intervals, or folding in scenes from the autobiographical drama the writer is involved with. The result doesn’t so much flirt with pretension as hole up with it in a cheap motel for two hours, where Figgis’s typically bold imagemaking and amusing poison-pen portraits of industry hangers-on have to be set against uncomfortable-looking leads and an insistently academic air. It’s less a movie than a series of seminar notes.

Suspension of Disbelief opens in selected cinemas from today.

From the archive: "Hot Fuzz"

With the hit comedy Shaun of the Dead, the team behind TV's Spaced - writer/director Edgar Wright, writer/star Simon Pegg and the latter's regular sidekick Nick Frost - made a serious bid to dislodge Aardman as the most fondly regarded creative team presently working within the British film industry - and Wright's films aren't made out of plasticine. In their generally amusing follow-up Hot Fuzz, Pegg plays Nicholas Angel, a big-city top cop whose arrest record is such he gets relocated to the countryside because he's making his superiors look bad. Winding up in the quiet Gloucestershire village of Sandford, this driven, humourless over-achiever is partnered with the tubby, dim bobby Danny Butterman (Frost), a drooling, wide-eyed lump all too easily dazzled by the Chuck Norris films available in a DVD bargain bin. Butterman's philosophy - "nothing's going on" - is countered by Angel's insistence that "something's always going on", and never more so than when a spate of bloody murders suddenly disrupts the general air of calm, the early suspicion falling on a suave supermarket manager (Timothy Dalton) whose prices, at least, are criminal.

What strikes you first about Hot Fuzz is how it gets right everything that last week's Epic Movie got spectacularly wrong. There are references to other films here - to Point Break and Bad Boys II (which Butterman, naturally, prefers to the original) and even beyond action movies to the likes of The Shining and even 80s cartoon He-Man - but they're integrated in ways that don't preclude story, a mystery to get caught up in, or characters you come to like. Pegg and Wright have clearly watched these films closely - they're very much of the DVD generation, skipping and pausing to get a detail just so - and this manifests itself here in an am-dram version of Romeo and Juliet so carefully modelled on the Baz Luhrmann film that its leading lady struggles to pull off Claire Danes's angel wings and it ends with a Cockney knees-up arrangement of The Cardigans' "Lovefool". Held over from Shaun is a gorehound streak that leads to a nasty, Omen-like squelching in a graveyard, and a running joke about Cornettos that must be a great way for the filmmakers to get their hands on free ice cream. 

As a director, Wright appears to have been schooled in using whatever comes to hand, more often than not inventively: there's a shoot-out in a Somerfield, an instance where product-placement is endearing rather than annoying. (It could have been another bloody Tesco.) To wear my grumpy critic's hat for a minute, Wright's trademark whipcrack editing style has become something of a cliche surprisingly early in his directorial career, there's not much room for women in this world, and - though it doesn't hurt the laugh rate especially - Pegg isn't allowed to be funny for much of the movie, though Angel's relationship with his unlikely new partner is established in such a way as for their subsequent tiffs and betrayals to matter more than they might elsewhere. Narratively, we might also wonder why suspicion for the murders doesn't fall on Nicholas Angel himself. But every other line is a winner, every other face a hero of British comedy or drama, and the result manages to satirise middle England in much the same manner as last year's The Hills Have Eyes redo had things to say about redneck America. Shaun of the Dead observed how terribly awkward it would be if zombies took over North London, but Hot Fuzz recognises there's a fine line between cleaning up the streets and what a crossword clue planted early on in the film identifies as fascism. If only Midsomer Murders were this sharp...

(February 2007)

Hot Fuzz is available on DVD through Universal Pictures Video. A third film in this collaboration, The World's End, opens in cinemas nationwide from tomorrow, and is reviewed here.

From the archive: "Shaun of the Dead"

With Shaun of the Dead, a self-styled "romantic comedy with zombies", the team behind TV's Spaced have made a very enjoyable big-screen debut. Electrical retailer Shaun (Simon Pegg) and his flatmate Ed (Nick Frost) are slackers on the verge of turning thirty who, while working out petty squabbles and girlfriend trouble, somehow fail to notice a mounting global crisis until it encroaches upon their own backyard; even then, they just suppose the stumbling, murmuring representative of the undead they're confronted with is a listless drunk making unseemly advances towards them.

Director Edgar Wright's whipcrack style was always going to be too kinetic to be contained by television - he made his cinema debut back in 1995, aged just 20, with the super-cheap spaghetti western spoof A Fistful of Fingers - and here charts a credible descent into zombiedom with undeniable pace and more than a little flair. An opening joke has commuters shuffling along like reanimated corpses, yawning and obsessively checking their mobiles, even before the worst happens and a GM crop virus spreads across North London, leaving Shaun and Ed to fend off the infected with the former's vinyl record collection. "The Stone Roses?," Ed suggests. "Nah," Shaun insists. ""The Second Coming?" "I like it," comes the defensive response.

Wright and Pegg's script has a way with recurring detail and dialogue ("You've got red on you"), even as it continues Spaced's project of squirrelling away pop-cultural references that feel organic rather than forced or overly showy. Just as it's claimed some football fans wear their team's shirts to the ground each Saturday in the vain hope they'll get pulled from the sidelines should a player become injured, Shaun of the Dead should provide encouragement of sorts for all those twentysomething slackers currently inseparable from their next-generation consoles, secretly preparing for the day the dead walk the earth and they're forced to put down their joypads and pick up actual shotguns and shovels.

There are some terrific gags along the way. At the heart of the film is a scene in which, lost in North London suburbia, Shaun and his motley band of survivors - Ed, Shaun's girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield), her flatmates David and Di (Dylan Moran and Lucy Davis) and Shaun's mother Barbara (Penelope Wilton) - encounter another, almost identically dressed gang of six heading in the exact opposite direction. It's a funny encounter in itself, but even more so when you clock the actors in this second gang - Jessica Stevenson, Martin Freeman, Reece Shearsmith, Tamsin Greig, Matt Lucas - and realise that the screen at this moment contains at least one representative from pretty much every British TV comedy of note since the turn of the millennium. Very few British big-screen comedies establish one convincing reality to pursue, let alone a second - the possibility of a different film, with a different, but no less skilled, set of performers - going off somewhere else.

Wright and Pegg have managed not just a funny idea, with funny jokes, but they even manage a very funny punchline: extending the underlying assumption that we are all now zombified to some extent to an acknowledgement that the entertainment industry's default tendency to make or keep us that way would result in any zombie invasion meaning business as usual in certain sectors. Most American films in this subgenre posit how terrible and terrifying it would be should events like this come to pass, but Wright and Pegg adopt a typically English tack, and suggest how terribly embarrassing and inconvenient it would be if, say, you were forced to beat your stepdad's brains in with a cricket bat. In this world, the heroes gather their armoury in a washbasket and relax with Cornettos, and their local pub, with its lock-ins, Breville sandwich toaster and generous supply of alcoholic beverages, becomes seemingly the safest of all possible havens.

(March 2004)

Shaun of the Dead is available on DVD through Universal Pictures UK.

Flunkin': "Monsters University"

If there was any pressing creative reason for a follow-up to 2001's Monsters, Inc., it would surely have emerged earlier than it has. After all, it took Pixar only four years to progress from Toy Story to Toy Story 2, which seemed long at a time when the company was bursting with ideas and energy, but perhaps processor chips weren't running as fast back then as they do today. It's taken twelve years to get from Monsters, Inc. to Monsters University, and here we find the series actually going backwards - into prequel territory - to the extent that its closing scenes seem specifically designed to send very young audiences out of the auditorium pestering their parents and keepers to buy them the DVD of the first movie. Previous Pixar films were born of the company playroom; this one - like Cars 2 before it, and most likely the upcoming Nemo sequel Finding Dory - comes right out of the boardroom. The company has grown up, and comprehensively lost its innocence.

The main narrative business here concerns how walking eyeball Mike (again voiced by Billy Crystal) and furry Sully (John Goodman) first met, at the eponymous institution: the former then a nerdy outcast with braces, the latter, a very big man on campus, trading with increasing desperation on an apparently illustrious family name. (Neither Crystal nor Goodman bother to pitch their voices an octave or two higher to fit the characters' youthfulness, but New Pixar presumes we won't care about such details.) Yet where the original created a world and came up with an occasionally affecting story to work through, MU trades lazily on its target audience's desire to pal around with these characters again, committing only to the kind of skitty, riffy set-pieces you see in every other animated feature these days.

The university's participation in the annual Scare Games cues more 3D-"enhanced" running about, and the film promptly rushes past its own better ideas. Where MI knew it could spend its entire third act within its own lovingly sketched universe of bedroom doors, MU shows us a maze from above, then skitters off in another direction entirely, hoping attention-deficient cinemagoers will follow. Throughout, director Dan Scanlon and his co-writers studiously avoid anything that might resemble the human touch that could be discerned in the work of their illustrious predecessors Lasseter, Stanton, Docter and Bird, deferring wherever possible to the algorithm and the core processor: everything has been formulated and sped through, the better to cram in more screenings per day.

The degree to which these digimations have saturated the marketplace and started treading on one another's tails is apparent from an early joke involving a late-running snail: it's a nice try, but it's already been spoiled by the trailer for DreamWorks' upcoming mollusc-centred Turbo, currently playing before Monsters University. That gag isn't the only thing here to have been stamped on, corrupted or otherwise devalued. Back in 2001, the casting of Crystal and Goodman as a wisecracking double-act could still be considered a coup; since then, Crystal has been reduced to the likes of Parental Guidance, while Goodman has taken on so many anything-goes gigs (Flight, The Hangover Part III, The Internship) that it's become difficult to discern which ones his heart is genuinely in.

There remain signs in Monsters University that if Pixar tried - if they were really pushed by a marketplace (and an audience) that didn't automatically turn every last heavily marketed animation into a billion-dollar megahit - they could still scrape together something worthwhile from their dwindling creative reserves. I liked certain notes in the characterisation (Helen Mirren as a dragonfly dean going under the inspired name of Hardscrabble, a many-eyed soccer mom who reveals her passion for death metal in the one joke here worthy of Old Pixar), and the busy, textured recreation of a college football stadium, its crowds, and the turf. But these are less objects of rapture than happy accidents, straws you cling to within what's most often an indistinct and nondescript blur of colour and movement with less to amuse accompanying adults than the only moderately witty Despicable Me 2.

I was never completely sold on Monsters, Inc. - in either its 2D or retrofitted 3D incarnations - a state of affairs that might have had something to do with its subtext extolling the joys of the factory line. This far along the conveyor belt, Mike and Sully really have become monsters, corporate avatars touting their cuddliness in order to deprive parents of hard-earned leisure time and whatever money they might have left after paying the bills, and in so doing helping to turn our dreams and nightmares into the stuff of grim contractual obligation. Their reteaming has been positioned very professionally - on the side of every bus, and at the very heart of pop culture - as the pre-eminent multiplex option for killing a couple of hours of your offspring's summer holiday. But might we not ask for more from our children's entertainments than to be this obviously mercenary?

Monsters University is in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office       
for the weekend of July 5-7, 2013: 
                    
1 (1) Despicable Me 2 (U) ***
2 (new) Now You See Me (12A)
3 (new) The Internship (12A)  
4 (3) World War Z (12A) **
5 (2) Man of Steel (12A) ***
6 (4) This is the End (15) ***
7 (new) The Bling Ring (15) ***
8 (new) Lootera (12A) ****
9 (new) Singam 2 (12A)
10 (6) Behind the Candelabra (15) ***
 
(source: Guardian.co.uk)

My top five:                      
1. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks
2. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
3. Lootera
4. Paradise: Faith
5. Akira
   
 
Top Ten DVD rentals: 
   
1 (new) Life of Pi (12) ***  
2 (4) Django Unchained (18) **  
3 (new) Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (15)  
4 (1) The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (12) ***   
5 (3) Flight (15) **   
6 (2) Argo (15) ***  
7 (new) Oz the Great and Powerful (PG) **  
8 (new) Broken City (15) **  
9 (6) Wreck-It Ralph (PG) ***   
10 (new) Warm Bodies (12) ***     
 
(source: lovefilm.com)
                     
My top five:                      
1. Arbitrage
2. Robot & Frank
3. Village at the End of the World
4. Cloud Atlas
5. Broken

 
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:                 
1. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure [above] (Saturday, ITV1, 2.25pm)
2. Gladiator (Friday, ITV1, 10.35pm)
3. Dirty Pretty Things (Tuesday, BBC1, 11.35pm)
4. Enemy of the State (Saturday, BBC1, 10.50pm)
5. Hot Fuzz (Saturday, ITV1, 10.50pm)

"Trap for Cinderella" (Metro 12/07/13)

Trap for Cinderella (15) 100 mins ***

Writer-director Iain Softley’s run of agreeably pulpy entertainments – remember Hackers? The Skeleton Key? – continues with this slowburn mystery-thriller, adapted from Sébastien Japrisot’s novel. Socialite Micky (Tuppence Middleton) emerges from an explosion days before she’s due to inherit her late aunt’s fashion empire with urgent questions about the whereabouts of Do (Alexandra Roach), her lovelorn BFF-turned-put-upon PA. Some forceful female characterisation is undermined by the attempt to get Tuppence’s thrupennies into every other shot, but it’s a small miracle that, operating just a few notches north of British cinema’s poverty line, Softley can still turn in something moderately stylish and more than partly watchable. The semi-absurd premise cloaks a barbed take – more Girl Model than The Devil Wears Prada – on the beauty regime, and the lengths it’ll go to to ensure business as usual.

Trap for Cinderella is in selected cinemas nationwide.

"Pacific Rim" (The Scotsman 13/07/13)

Pacific Rim (12A) **

Directed by: Guillermo del Toro 
Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi

Guillermo del Toro’s most distinctive visions (Cronos, Pan’s Labyrinth) have always emerged from darkness and silence – so why has he given into making the same loud noises as everybody else? The trailer pegged Pacific Rim as Godzilla-vs.-Transformers; what makes the film the summer’s biggest disappointment yet is that it’s equally indistinguishable from, say, Real Steel meets Battleship. Here, human-piloted robots clash with sea monsters: our bereaved pilot hero (Hunnam) re-enters battle alongside a female partner (Kikuchi), whose presence presumably makes the subsequent bangs and crashes more appealing to the Asian market.

There are fun footnotes – cities get clogged with monster dung – but any nuance or emotion gets squashed amid rusty plot thrusts and splurgey effects. The actors come cheap and uninteresting: we’re meant to be stirred by Elba’s rewording of Bill Pullman’s Independence Day peptalk, though it’s hard to cheer Hunnam’s squadron of sandy-haired Paul Walker wannabes. Marginally better-natured than every other spot of dollar-chasing out there, it’ll nevertheless stand as del Toro’s most anonymous, safest bet to date: if you’ve seen any of the films mentioned above, there’s barely a surprise to be sprung from it.

Pacific Rim is in cinemas nationwide.