"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows" (Guardian 30/05/16)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows *

Dir: Dave Green. With: Megan Fox, Will Arnett, Tyler Perry, Laura Linney. 112 mins. Cert: 12A

With 2014’s live-action/CGI hybrid Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, mega-producer Michael Bay refashioned deathless reptilian merchandise in his preferred image. Bay’s Turtles were high-fiving meatheads buffed to a fine digital sheen, thus broadly interchangeable with the steroidal heroes of 2013’s Pain & Gain and last year’s 13 Hours. Sequel Out of the Shadows reintroduces this foursome via onscreen graphics that label Donatello as “Donnie” and Michelangelo as “Mikey”. Accompanying adults are thereby spared from having to explain why these guys have such funny, non-American names, but the touch also betrays how far we now are from anything as lofty as art.

Approached as commerce – as any 3D Ninja Turtles movie should be – it’s soon clear that OOTS follows the model of Bay’s Transformers sequels. Longer, louder and boasting even more hardware, it does everything to generate the illusion of bleeding-edge bang-per-buck, while cribbing shamelessly from 1991’s Secret of the Ooze: the Turtles must again stave off Shredder (Brian Tee), who’s escaped custody and rearmed with scientist Tyler Perry’s world-conquering serum. Bay’s subtexts remain questionable: here we’re asked to cheer heavily weaponised pizza guzzlers against a cabal of non-Caucasians, in a way that altogether uncomfortably aligns turtle power with its white equivalent.

That may make for good business; for human interest, not so much. These über-turtles – joshing pixelated clumps – remain incredibly dull company, their flesh-and-blood sidekicks little better: Will Arnett replaying his glib-jerk schtick without the material that makes it funny, Megan Fox handed disguises that run the gamut from “sexy nerd” to “minxy schoolgirl”. The heart flatlines upon the arrival of multiple Golden Globe-winner Laura Linney, stuck with the one understandably disbelieving expression as New York’s police chief; her presence suggests some Tina Fey parody of Bay’s cinema, only with laughter replaced by sadness at such an egregious example of thespwaste.

OOTS is assembled with consummate slickness, nominal director Dave Green – following up 2014’s semi-heartfelt Earth to Echo – approving many of the right effects shots. Yet only Bay could conceive of blowing this much time and cash upon identifying the exact spot at which zesty, subversive trash (as the Turtles might once have been) sours into ugly, empty junk, assembled solely to school our young in brute market forces and indiscriminate consumption. Our former heroes in a half-shell have become hulking, cold-bloodied bullies, demanding our pocket money and offering nothing in return – save a joyless, two-hour noogie such as this.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

From the archive: "The Prestige"

"The prestige," as Michael Caine's ingenieur Cutter explains in The Prestige's opening sequence, is the third act of a magic trick - the moment an audience cheers at the reappearance of a person or object the magician has previously made disappear. Christopher Nolan's tale of rival magicians in turn-of-the-20th-century London hasn't come out of nowhere itself - it's based on a novel by Christopher Priest - but it is a very skilful work of cinematic conjuring, on a par with this filmmaker's backwards-thriller Memento. You'll need your brain switched on, and your eyes at their sharpest: the action takes place as a series of flashbacks and flashbacks-within-flashbacks, held together by narration sourced from notebooks written by authors deliberately intending to mislead the reader/viewer. Amazingly, it all makes a kind of sense, although multiple viewings may be required to establish how much exactly.

At its centre are down-to-earth Cockney family man Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), a grafter on the theatrical circuit, and aristocratic American showman Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman). Attempting to one-up each other by performing the greatest tricks the world has seen, the two soon become deadly rivals: the Magic Circle's own Salieri and Mozart, its Danton and Robespierre. (Angier even performs under the stagename "the Great Danton".) In terms of Nolan's filmography, these two would appear to be period archetypes of the cop and killer in Insomnia, and the stalker and stalkee in Following; the presence of Bale even reminds us of the duality he expressed in his role as the protagonist of last year's Batman Begins.

We're in altogether tricksier territory here, though: the entire film appears to have been constructed as an extended, even extravagant pun on the homonym illusions/allusions. The misdirection includes repeatedly putting Scarlett Johansson in corsets as the magicians' glamorous assistant; asking both leads to assume more than one role, or to play against themselves in certain scenes; casting Caine in a supporting part that refers back to Sleuth as much as it does Batman Begins; and an entire subplot involving the reclusive scientist Nikola Tesla, played by a very famous rock star - anything, one suspects, to throw viewers off the scent of what's really going on between its antagonists. 

Even if one does lose one's way, though, it's a fun film to get lost within, unfolding in a universe both convincing and compelling, full of secrets, shadows and slights-of-hand. Nolan has a real feel for the work of the theatrical conjurer, and just how their tricks were thought up, staged and perfected; the film might just as effectively be called Practical Magic, were that title not already claimed. Clever staging (on Nolan's part, if not his character's) leaves Angier in the bowels of the theatre, unable to receive his standing ovation upon completing his most accomplished illusion halfway through the film - a smart bit of motivating action. And in an audacious, creepy sequence shortly thereafter, Borden hijacks Angier's trick (and applause), leaving his rival suspended as a comic stooge, somewhere up in the rafters.

Yet Nolan's just as interested in the cinema as a magic trick: when Angier employs a double (an out-of-work sot, also played by Jackman) to help him pull off one vanishing act, the director initially seems content to keep the two Jackmans in separate frames, until an encounter that brings them face-to-face, thanks more to digitalisation than prestidigitation. The flashback structure requires close attention, and even then keeps us guessing; and even all the vaguely extraneous business about electricity as an emergent social force seems to tie in with the understanding that old-hat conjurers like Angier and Borden were soon to be rendered obsolete by the moving image, struck down by the shock of the new. The greatest surprise, as Nolan's film knows very well, is the one you don't see coming until it's way too late.

(November 2006)

The Prestige screens on BBC2 tonight at 11pm. 

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office   

for the weekend of May 20-22, 2016:
   

1 (new) X-Men: Apocalypse (12A)
2 (2) The Angry Birds Movie (U)
3 (3) The Jungle Book (PG) **
4 (1) Captain America: Civil War (12A)
5 (4) Bad Neighbours 2 (15)
6 (new) A Hologram for the King (12A)
7 (5) Florence Foster Jenkins (PG)
8 (6) Our Kind of Traitor (15) ***
9 (8) Secret Cinema: 28 Days Later... (18) ****
10 (new) Thomas & Friends: The Great Race (U)

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five:   

1. Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Director's Cut
2. A Beautiful Planet
3. Streetdance Family
4. Sing Street
5. Chicken


Top Ten DVD rentals:  

   

1 (1) Star Wars: The Force Awakens (12) **
2 (2) The Hateful Eight (18) **
3 (new) Spotlight (15) ***
4 (new) Bridge of Spies (12) *****
5 (3) SPECTRE (12) ***
6 (5) Room (15) ****
7 (new) Dirty Grandpa (15)
8 (6) The Martian (12) ****
9 (7) The Lady in the Van (12) ***
10 (9) The Intern (12)

(source: lovefilm.com)

                                   

My top five:  

1. The Club
2. Creed
3. Lawrence of Belgravia
4. Room
5. Rams


Top Ten Streaming:

1 (new) Spotlight (15) *** 
2 (1) The Propaganda Game (15) ***
3 (new) The Assassin (15) ***
4 (3) Like You Mean It (15)
5 (re) Black Mountain Poets (15) ***
6 (6) Hitchcock/Truffaut (12) ****
7 (new) The Wind That Shakes the Barley (15) ***
8 (2) A War (15) ***
9 (new) Rams (15) ***
10 (new) The Lobster (15) ***

(source: BFI)

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:   

1. Grosse Pointe Blank [above] (Sunday, BBC1, 11.40pm)
2. Withnail and I (Friday, C4, 2.05am)
3. The Prestige (Saturday, BBC2, 11pm)
4. The Two Faces of January (Sunday, C4, 12.30am)
5. Back to the Future Part II (Friday, ITV1, 10.40pm)

"A Beautiful Planet" (Guardian 27/05/16)

A Beautiful Planet ****

Dir: Toni Myers. With: Terry Virts, and the voice of Jennifer Lawrence. 43 mins. Cert: U

With such IMAX credits as Mission to Mir and Hubble 3D to her name, Toni Myers is doing as much as any director to map the galaxy’s outer reaches. Her latest large-format eye-widener achieves a breathtaking new perspective on earthly life by floating cameras to astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Tim Peake’s Twitter feed: mere dilettantism. What’s beamed back here combines a snapshot of ISS routine – zero-gravity haircare; terrifying external repairs – with an overview of landmasses subject to vivid natural and man-made phenomena: thunderstorms exploding under cloud cover, pollution clogging veiny rivers, a telling darkness north of the 38^th Parallel. Jennifer Lawrence’s narration gets so earnest you might wish she’d sunk at least one rum-and-coke beforehand, but elsewhere dry, rational science is mixed with piquant detail and playful soundtrack choices. The result is the best kind of spectacle: that which encourages us to look up and beyond ourselves – and does so using only organic special effects.

A Beautiful Planet opens in IMAX cinemas nationwide today. 

"Streetdance Family" (Guardian 27/05/16)

Streetdance Family ***

Dirs: Debbie Shuter, Adam Tysoe. With: Entity Allstars. 87 mins. Cert: 12A

Not strictly affiliated to the established British urban franchise, this cheery documentary nevertheless rotates in similar circles, tracking U-16 dance crew Entity from their Barking clubhouse to the world champs in Bochum. Directors Debbie Shuter and Adam Tysoe shake up the usual contest-doc choreography by remaining open to the element of surprise. While the kids bust spectacular moves, the mums get tiddly on the sidelines, and the UK’s Streetdance Ambassador is revealed as a greying Greg Davies-alike named Derek. Objectivity is soon abandoned – the filmmakers’ son Ethan is in this troupe, so onscreen graphics deploy the first person plural – yet that’s a small sacrifice set against the heartening community spirit evoked either side of the camera: here are people working against the odds, with presumably limited resources, to give these youngsters a rare sense of achievement. More so than any BGT montage, it makes backflips and voguing seem an urgent, possibly even life-altering concern.

Streetdance Family opens in Odeon cinemas nationwide from today; for details on venues and ticket availability, click here.

From the archive: "Close Encounters of the Third Kind - The Director's Cut"

For some reason, the special edition of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind was the version in regular circulation growing up, and I had nothing to compare it to: it was what it was, and that was that. Now, thanks to Columbia TriStar, we have the director's cut, which arrives at a particularly interesting point in this director's career, just after the release of War of the Worlds (again: watch the skies). Revisiting CE, a contemporary viewer is bound to be struck by the quiet eerieness of its opening stretch; it's very different to the unrelenting bombast of Spielberg-doing-Wells, which kept having to insist something of thunderous import - A Major Motion Picture Event - was about to take place before our very eyes. 

Rather than noise and fury, the earlier film is powered along by that beautifully crisp, no-nonsense form of 1970s editing - you'll have witnessed enough of it in The Conversation and All the President's Men for it to qualify as a style in its own right - which maintains that just when a scene is on the verge of a crescendo, the most effective choice is to cut to silence, or something approximating it. (Would that 21st century blockbusters were so understated: the new normal is to try and sustain that crescendo for as long as technologically possible, at risk of monotony and/or tinnitus.) My father walked into the room just as Richard Dreyfuss's Roy Neary was commencing work on his mashed potato mountain, and - not unjustly - wondered whether I was watching with the sound off.

In the modern blockbuster, built on equal parts chutzpah and insecurity, everything has to be front and centre - partly so the audience can be reassured we're getting exactly the right amount of bang for our bucks. But the Spielberg of Close Encounters keeps throwing in background jokes that very nearly go unseen: the lights that first appear in the rear windscreen of Neary's electrical repair truck, the TV coverage that gives away what the hero's obsessive-compulsive mountain-making has been geared towards. Were audiences really this much sharper back then? Or have we just got dumber, and lazier? War of the Worlds, for one, assumed its viewers were drooling morons who'd miss stuff - the hero's Everymannish nature, a 9/11 allusion, complex CG effects - were it not dangled in their faces.

If there is movement and madness in Close Encounters, it's both recognisable and, in the main, realistic: the clutter of an all-American household, with toys lining the floor and kids creeping about with first-wave video cameras. This is at once further confirmation of why Spielberg (and in particular his early work) was and is so popular in the West: that he had broadly the same childhood so many of us were lucky enough to have had. The same backyards and brand names; the same shows, interrupted by the same adverts. More of that bedrock of innocence was preserved in him than in his fellow 70s moviebrats, who surely eroded much of theirs - while gaining other, harsher life-insights - with every shot of bourbon and each nostril of coke.

Still, for all the film's reassuring familiarity, there remains a lot of weirdness, and a lot of displacement here - ships in the desert, an opening sequence that has much in common with The Exorcist, one shot late on of a soldier crouching among helicopters that prefigures Apocalypse Now - all of which perhaps explains why, however blockbusting, the film didn't quite post E.T. numbers. (As a child touched by otherworldly forces, the spooky Cary Guffey doesn't have the Reece's Pieces sweetness of Drew Barrymore and Henry Thomas; when playing the five-note musical motif on the xylophone, he appears genuinely possessed.) Nonetheless, Spielberg cleaves to the wondrous point-of-view of a child to see us through, which is why Guffey's first response to the aliens' flashing lights is not to duck for cover but scream for ice cream; and why, perhaps, Dreyfuss has to pitch this extraterrestrial intervention to his offspring as "better than goofy golf". Almost, Roy Neary; almost.

(April 2006)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind - The Director's Cut returns to selected cinemas from Friday.

Summer Arts Agenda: Film (ST 22/05/16)

Twenty titles to keep an eye on this summer, for the annual Sunday Telegraph Top 100:

The Nice Guys (June 3)

Snark merchant Shane Black (Iron Man 3) pairs Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe as disreputable detectives driving the Mob from 1970s L.A. in this knockabout actioner. Expect trashy Friday-night fun, and frankly terrible menswear.

Fire at Sea (June 10)

Cinema’s recent run of exceptional travellers’ tales continues: our own Tim Robey described this close-up documentary study of migrants circling Lampedusa as “shattering” at this year’s Berlin festival, where it won the Golden Bear.

Gods of Egypt (Jun 17)

Hollywood turns to CGI in an attempt to revitalise the old-school epic. Alex Proyas’s film sparked “whitewash” controversy after casting Caucasian actors as Arabs: bellower-in-chief Gerard Butler aims to drown out the lukewarm buzz.

Independence Day: Resurgence (Jun 23)

Twenty years on, and with Hollywood running out of fantasy franchises to rejig, the aliens return to Earth. President Bill Pullman and nerd-for-hire Jeff Goldblum return; original breakout star Will Smith, conspicuously, does not.   

Elvis & Nixon (Jun 24)

Liza Johnson’s film offers a light-comic take on the 1970 incident when Elvis pitched up on the White House lawn. Michael Shannon, a performer in peak form, dons the rhinestone jumpsuit; Kevin Spacey is Nixon.

The Secret Life of Pets (Jun 24)

Despicable Me’s animation powerhouse Chris Renaud ponders what animals do once their keepers go to bed: butt-sniffing and death metal, the trailer suggests. A fine comedic voice cast (Jenny Slate, Louis CK, Albert Brooks) assists him in his research.

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (Jul 1)

Big-screen Britcoms face a make-or-break summer (cf: Aug 19). Jo and Jen’s perma-pickled Patsy and Edina here acquire a showcase accessorised with front-row fashion faces; let’s hope the jokes aren’t so last century.

Maggie’s Plan (Jul 8)

A textbook “Sundance sensation”, Rebecca Miller’s indie comedy sets up a love triangle examining the impact a hot-to-trot Greta Gerwig has on happily married Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore. Early reviews have been glowing.

The Neon Demon (Jul 8)

Few modern filmmakers have arrived at images as boldly gaudy as those Nicolas Winding Refn did in Drive and Only God Forgives: the world of high fashion, setting for his latest, Cannes-applauded freakout, would appear a perfect, sheeny fit.

Ghostbusters (Jul 15) [above]

To the chagrin of fanboys, they’ve redone 1984’s supernatural extravaganza with – eww – girls. The less virginal can but savour a considerable comedy pedigree: Bridesmaids’ Paul Feig directs Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig alongside SNL alumna Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon.

Ice Age: Collision Course (Jul 15)

Yes, we know: somewhat amazingly, there have been five of these now. The latest picks up where last year’s (rather good) short Cosmic Scrat-tastrophe left off, with heroes Sid, Diego and Manny facing a new threat from the heavens. 

The BFG (Jul 22)

Pre-eminent storytellers power this live-action/animation hybrid: Roald Dahl’s book has been adapted by the late Melissa Mathison (E.T.) for Steven Spielberg to direct. Early reviews suggest a generally whizzpopping experience; Penelope Wilton plays the Queen.

Chevalier (Jul 22)

Leftfield counterprogramming: Attenberg’s Athina Rachel Tsangari floats another absurdist comedy, this time about six men in a boat engaging in increasingly ridiculous competitions – because, well, men. Tackle will be measured; ribs tickled; heads scratched. Everyone’s a winner.

Jason Bourne (Jul 28)

After 2012’s sidestepping The Bourne Legacy, the millennium’s premium action franchise gets back on track: director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon both return as a now-ageing JB remembers what he came in the room for. Or something.

Finding Dory (Jul 29)

2003’s Finding Nemo remains a high animated watermark; expectations for this sequel are no less elevated. With Pixar buoyant after last year’s Inside Out, fins crossed it’s more Toy Story 2 than Cars 2.

Suicide Squad (Aug 5)

Heaven forbid summer should be a comics-free zone: D.C. follow March’s ill-received Batman vs. Superman with this raucous/noisy-looking mash-up, in which motley supervillains – including Jared Leto’s Joker – are enlisted to do America’s dirty work.

David Brent: Life on the Road (Aug 19)

After Derek and Special Correspondents, Ricky Gervais could do with renewed momentum: here, his best-loved creation leaves the paper behind to pursue his first love, music. Capable comedy faces lend support.

Swallows and Amazons (Aug 19)

Arthur Ransome’s classic of kidlit – filmed in 1974 as Saturday matinee material – receives a 21^st century scrub-up from Call the Midwife’s Philippa Lowthorpe. In an age of digital delights, will it still hold water?

Ben-Hur (Aug 26)

Lew Wallace’s Biblical doorstop gets whipped into lean, globalised multiplex shape, with Russian Timur Bekmambetov at the directorial reins, Brit Jack Huston as Hur, and Brazil’s Rodrigo Santoro as Christ. A 3D chariot race awaits us.

Julieta (Aug 26)

Fresh from Cannes, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest stems from that sincere interest in mother-daughter pairings that previously powered 1995’s The Flower of My Secret and 2006’s Volver. After 2013’s limp farce I’m So Excited!, that sounds muy bueno.