Archive for the ‘film’ Category

to live and die in LA

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

William Friedkin 1985

I bloody love Michael Mann-style neo-noir crime dramas. For some reason I actually thought To Live and Die in LA was a Michael Mann film, but it is in fact written and directed by William Friedkin (based on a novel by real life Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich). For the earlier sections of the film, the Miami Vice-style flashiness looks kind of dated, drenched in some really hackneyed cop-macho bullshit lines. But underneath the 80s glitz, Friedkin’s ’70s nihilism is lurking, especially in the risky “What just happened?!” ending. It’s also possibly the only crime thriller ever made with a contemporary dance sequence.

CSI’s William Petersen (having already appeared in Mann’s Thief) is cocksure, ego-driven obsessive Treasury Agent Richard Chance, determined to avenge the death of his partner at the hands of Willem Dafoe’s kinky counterfeiter Rick Masters. John Pankow turns in a realistically panicky performance as Petersen’s new partner John Vukovich, and I’d have liked to have seen more of him: apparently in a deleted scene he attempts to reconcile with his ex-wife, which would have added more weight to the ending.

We also get John Turturro as more of a tough than he usually plays, Frazier’s Jane Leeves as a lineless lesbian dancer, and Dean Stockwell as a conniving lawyer.

The film has dated badly in some ways. There are a lot of contemporary-feeling elements, like the technical exercise that is the counterfeiting sequence: we follows Masters’ funny money printing process in extreme detail, momentum building to the point that Wang Chung’s driving soundtrack is perfectly synchronised with the clanking of the printing press. It’s the sound of the 80s: drum machines and money and excess.

The opening credits, with their garish global hypercolour neon fonts, should look dated but actually add to the sense of place. It’s the dialogue and some of the early plot elements that look awful now: from the tacked-on, no-relation-to-the-rest-of-the-story opening sequence involving a suicide bomber and a reeeeally cheap explosion, to the impending retirement (and therefore grimly-inevitable murder) of the hero’s partner. With three days to go before he gets to spend his days fishing, Chance’s partner, mentor and best friend drives out into the desert to follow a lead. It’s not a spoiler to say the daft old bastard doesn’t come back. I had the same feeling as when I watched the pilot episode of Mann’s Miami Vice: that this was a slick, stylised new form of crime drama that hadn’t yet shaken off the plot clichés.

The film kicks into gear later, when Chance and Vukovich rob a fence to acquire front money to trap Masters. Needless to say, things go downhill from there. There’s a car chase that doesn’t have quite the visceral immediacy of the French Connection, but has obviously learnt some tricks from that film and in some of the camerawork may even be technically better. One shot in particular grabbed me, a stunning tracking dolly in which we follow Chance’s speeding car, then rise to an overpass to seamlessly meet the pursuers, before Chance screams back into shot and blasts off up a sidestreet.

I won’t say much about the ending, except to note that it almost comes from a different film than the beginning. The nearly-retired murdered partner is such a hackneyed cliché - surely even in 1985! - that I was considering turning the film off. But by the climax, To Live and Die in LA has raced into twisty noir territory and out the other side, into a bleakly brutal shock ending and a psychologically sophisticated final moment. You won’t see it coming.

the spirit

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

Frank Miller 2008

‘Comic book movie’ can mean two things: a movie based on a comic book, or a movie that follows the kind of broad entertainment value, gravity-free logic and near-slapstick violence most people associate with comics. Some movies, like Ghost World, A History of Violence or Road to Perdition, fall into the first category but not the second. Some fall into the second, like Con Air (or just about any action movie that involves people shooting oil drums to make them blow up, then walking away from the explosion in slow-motion) without any evidence that they’re working from a printed script, let alone a printed comic. Some movies, especially in the superhero genre, fall into both. The Spirit is both, and takes the concept of a comic book movie to the extreme.

We’re launched straight into the story of Central City’s masked crimefighter the Spirit (Gabriel Macht) as he takes on mad scientist and drug-peddling villain the Octopus (Samuel L Jackson). Our hero is Denny Colt, a rookie cop presumed dead but still capable of charming the ladies, including his boss’ daughter Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson) and old flame-turned master-thief Sand Seraf (Eva Mendes).

In the Spirit comic, Will Eisner pushed the boundaries of what was possible with the comic book form, and invented many sophisticated techniques still used today. Director Frank Miller shoots for this kind of invention, crafting the film from digital elements, his high-powered cast placed on a green-screen background and echoing many of the comic’s iconic shots.

It’s a bold approach, bringing the live-action film-making process of the comic book movie (the first kind) as close as possible to comic creation, where the only special effects budget is the creator’s imagination. Robert Rodriguez made it work in his shot-for-panel adaptation of Miller’s Sin City. Sadly, in this case it just doesn’t work.

The reason Sin City worked is because, per the title, the location was a character itself. The brick walls framed the chiselled granite toughness of the men, the stark chiaroscuro lighting echoed the beauty and darkness of the women, with everybody mixed up like cats in a sack in that crazy burg. It’s a trick honed from Eisner’s trailblazing use of the location as part of the framework of his comic, and vice versa. Where Sin City’s location and look defined the book and the film, The Spirit fails to repeat the trick. For all of the lead’s tortured voiceover about ‘his city’ we never get a sense of the place. Apart from generic (if exhilarating) rooftop-jumping, the backgrounds are often unclear and open. With greenscreen providing an option to place the characters anywhere that can be conceived, all too often the cast feel like they’re standing on a soundstage accompanied only by a smoke machine.

The film also takes the anti-logic of the comic book movie (the second kind) to extremes. Eisner’s Spirit was an ordinary joe, unlike Superman’s superpowered alien or Batman’s millionaire gadget-fetishist. Eisner’s Spirit’s only crime-fighting equipment were his fists, yet he seemed capable of taking regular beatings that should have seen him in a (second) early grave. Miller latches onto this, adding a superhuman element to the Spirit’s toughness, and making a plot point of the extended scraps between hero and similarly-endowed villain. Miller has thankfully toned down some of the excesses he apparently had in mind, and the conflict between Spirit and Octopus actually works well, with Sand Seraf’s subplot intertwining nicely.

But once again a lack of context hamstrings the story: we know the Octopus is a drug dealer from a throwaway line, rather than a visit to the seedy side of town that would have both established his villainy and given us a glimpse of the city’s character and texture. Miller seems more interested in giving the Octopus a series of non-sequitur costume changes, which are fun but overly long and talky, and ring hollow in the absence of context. Is the Octopus a Nazi? No, he just likes the uniform.

Macht does reasonably well with his square-jawed milk-and-cookies hero, his compulsive womanising staying the right side of innocence in his wide-eyed expression. Miller is willing to have fun with the character (”Somebody bring me a tie… and it better be red!“) but gives Jackson too much rope without any really killer lines to shout (instead barking tosh like “C’mon… Toilets are always funny!”). The highlight is another entrancing turn from Eva Mendes, whose ruthless yet smoulderingly fragile thief deserves her own movie.

denou-mental: movies with too many endings

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

Den of Geek has a list of movies that don’t have endings. Rather than trying to think of suggestions they might have missed, I started thinking about movies that have too many endings — and as such, spoilers abound — prompted by…

Air Force One

Air Force One
…because it was on last night. Russian dissidents hijack Vietnam vet Harrison Ford’s plane, and he fights back in his signature rumpled everyman style. Aside from having an astonishingly high number of innocent people getting wasted, there’s not much noteworthy about this Die Hard 2 clone (yes, it’s not even a Die Hard clone!) until we get to the end. There’s a final showdown in which a shifty Brass off of CSI shows he’s a patriot after all by throwing himself in front of a bullet destined for President Han Solo, complete with slow-motion roar. Then there’s another fight in which chief villain Gary Oldman is tossed out of the back with the last parachute by President Jack Ryan (”Get off my plane!”), but that’s not the end. There’s a MiGed-up dogfight which culminates in a random fighter jock shows he’s a patriot above all by throwing his plane in front of a missile destined for President Indy, complete with slow-motion roar — but that’s not the end either. The plane still has to be landed, and at least here the film sidesteps talking-down-the-inexperienced-pilot-from-the-tower cliché by knackering the plane’s engines. Instead we get a protracted sequence of characters ziplining to another plane, at which point a traitorous Secret Service agent reveals his hand, despite the fact that he’s totally escaped detection* and has no actual reason to kill President John Book. He shoots loveable William H Macy — another example of how callous this film is with its supporting cast — before President Richard Kimble beats him up and jumps out, leaving Air Force One to ditch in the sea. Which, with plenty of support on hand, may not actually have been the worst thing in the world. I wasn’t timing, but it seems like a good twenty minutes of faffing about after Gary Oldman’s scenery-chewing baddie is dispatched, and that’s just not on.

*although frankly, the mere fact that he’s Xander Berkely should have set alarm bells ringing in the Secret Service. On the form you have to fill in to get into the Secret Service, it should say at the top ‘Are you Xander Berkely? Yes/no’. Even above ‘name’. It should say ‘If you answered yes, get on your knees, interlace your fingers behind your head, and wait to be carted off to whichever third world country we’re currently carting wrong’uns off to. If you answered no, go to question 2′.

Con Air

Con Air
Now I think about it, this seems like a problem endemic to a certain brand of pre-Bourne action movies, which attempt to top the pyrotechnics of the first ninety minutes in the last twenty minutes. So after Speed’s repeating the bus bits on a subway train (”But I’m taller!”) we get perhaps the nadir of this trend: Con Air. After all the plane-related banging and crashing we get a messy landing right on the Las Vegas strip, from which John Malkovich, Ving Rhames and a big redneck escape in a fire engine. John Cusack and Nic Cage give chase, there’s an overblown but dull scrap, and the fire engine crashes into a bridge. My problem is the number of ways Malkovich is offed: he’s thrown through a glass bridge, electrocuted and finally has his fucking head flattened to a pulp by some kind of construction equipment that seems to have the sole purpose of sitting around waiting to squash somebody’s fucking head. And that’s not to mention the frankly insane ending where paedophile mass murderer Steve Buscemi just gets away!**

**Although it would have been totally awesome if Xander Berkely had just got away.

For fuck’s sake just get on the fucking boat already

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
The king of films that never fucking end, that is. Oh. My. Gollum. There’s a big battle. That’s got to be the end, right? Oh no, there’s like an hour of Sam and Frodo crying on each other as they try to deny that they’re totally hobbit-hot for each other’s hobbit bottoms. And then there’s the bit with Liv Tyler getting on a boat but wait she’s not getting on the boat aaaagghjesusmakeitstopineedafuckingppppiiiisssss!

Any more suggestions in the comments. But don’t go on too long.

tweetthousand&eight: rich_trenholm’s year on twitter

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

2008. Completed my first year at CNET UK, moved from Forest Hill to Clapham Common, did more travelling than in my entire life before, broke up with my girlfriend, and said things like this

CES Las Vegas

Facebook says Rich has just been choppered out to the Grand Canyon.

Rich had breakfast at Denny’s, Las Vegas Boulevard, and dinner at the chippie on Devonshire Road.


ATP! After a bloody tortuous journey, I’m in Butlins, I’ve got a beer in my hand, couldn’t be happier

They let us in&out with glasses, & our chalet is twenty yards away-are you thinking what I’m thinking?

Facebook says Rich is having an absolute fucking blast at ATfuckingP.

Saul Williams is a BizarroWorld Bowie, a glam-hop fly dog backed by psychotronic ‘frobots

it’s 50/50 between having a great day and just curling up into a ball and whimpering somewhere

Battles are kind of like Adam Ant being raped by Marilyn Manson - only 15x more fun

Southland Tales is Terry Gilliam and Warren Ellis’ Marx Bros porno in the City of Lost Children May be a jodorowskyesque gothoperapocalypse, but it does have a certain demented symmetry
Facebook says Rich has just got two free Crunchies from the vending machine for the price of one! Jackanackanory!
Rich salutes the Feast, king of choc-ices.

Facebook says Rich has run out of things to do on his day off. Another wank?

Rich is just nipping out to China. Back later.

Rich is towering 42 stories over Tokyo. Like Godzilla in brothel creepers.

There are upsides to being ill: any day without trousers can’t be all bad
Force Quit means Force Quit, like right now. Why does End Task mean keep acting the twat for another ten minutes?

Apparently, being Icelandic in May was pretty brilliant: http://bit.ly/1j0vae

Well I never: The Japanese invaded Alaska in 1942: http://bit.ly/I07cR

Wolverine healing factor? Mario mushrooms? Bollocks. Nothing beats the healing power of a Frank’s lasagna and chips carbopocalypse You know you’re reaching a certain age when the conversation can segue entirely seamlessly from hard drugs to soft furnishings

Apparently in the US they say “Liquor and beer/have no fear”. I’m getting this tattooed on my nutsack

Today I have used the phrases “sex-grenade” and “stabbing himself with his own todger” on the site. Truly, I am a serious writer Twitter does not have to be reciprocal. You do not have to follow me if you think I am a tedious arse - and vice versa. That is all.
Story idea: WAX is a washed-up cop- WAYNE is a going-nowhere stoner. Apart, they’re trouble. Together, they are: WAX & WAYNE! Da-der-derr!! If it gets any colder in the office, we’ll have to eat the huskies.

“Granddad, what were you doing when Obama was elected?” “Yeaaahhh… I was watching Crank”

defenestration (dē-ˌfe-nə-ˈstrā-shən) n. throwing of a person or thing out of a window

@CupCate S’OK, I’ll slip you the answers: 1.Cricket 2.Bangers’n'mash 3.Jeremy Kyle 4.Old Compton St 5.Paying over the odds for everything

Carter USM: hooks to take your eye out. Housebricks in the pick’n'nix

Next LifeOnMars spin-off: some cunt off Hollyoaks goes to 1992. EMF beat him to death with a cricket bat and a 303. SOLD

And yes, I appreciate the irony of Twitter scraping my blog slating @ replies while in the middle of an @ conversation
Have decided I want a tattoo of the swearing from Asterix: skull and crossbones+dagger+lightning bolt
Last night: bounce-punk of A, pedal-to-the-floor gonzo-rock of the Wildhearts. Tonight: Jarvis Cocker & Mary Margaret O’Hara… carolling?
Notice secret service didn’t break speed records leaping in front of Bush. Honestly, who throws a shoe?
Love stickers in gym: “Limited to 20 mins @ peak times”. If I’m on an exercise machine longer than 20 minutes it’s because I’ve died on it
Tempted to spend 3 days living off champagne & sleeping on escalators in Westfield neonoptican as practise for CES

Nailed by Internet commenter: I am not only a “sanctimonious nutter”, but also a “deranged far-left lunatic”. Hurray! http://bit.ly/jDu3


Christmas: potatoes turkey chocolate DoctorWho pintsintheBassett naps nephew&CallofDuty Travelodge niece&sparklypresents potatoes Porridge

Rich is giving up drinking for 1 year after CES. For reals this time.

http://twitter.com/rich_trenholm

listen you metal moron, why don’t you take the scratch you’re wasting on these crank calls and spend it on something worthwhile like a giant space cannon with enough firepower to blow up an entire planet… probably shouldn’t have said that

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

awaydays’ development hell: guy ritchie, rewrites and near-death by strimmer

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

Reading Kevin Sampson’s account of Awaydays’ decade in development hell goes to show what an achievement it was to get the film made at all.

On a personal level, I didn’t know the book was published the day before my 18th birthday. I do remember seeing it when it came out because I worked in a bookshop. I was drawn in by the great cover — Trainspotting-style design combined with cool trainers. When I read the back I went cold — it was about a young Tranmere fan on the Wirral! I was a young Tranmere fan on the Wirral! It was about a young Tranmere fan on the Wirral going to loads of cool gigs! I was a young Tranmere fan on the Wirral going to loads of cool gigs!

Now I learn the film will premiere on my actual birthday, March 5th 2009. I have to be there.

gran torino trailer

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Now I love Clint, but Gran Torino just looks ridiculous.

Clint Eastwood stamping on a gang-banger’s face, that I’m on board with. But the whole family in danger thing just looks a bit boring, and the trailer makes it seem as if the whole thing happens in his front garden.

star trekkin’

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

Some Star Trek movie stills from MTV. Looking pretty cool.

on the enterprise bridge

The bridge is the wrong colour! It’s supposed to be black and red!

vulcan nerve grip

Vulcan nerve pinch! Stitch that! Or is that Kirk and he’s doing some mystical alien CPR or something?

nero

Eric Bana as the evil Romulan Nero. Boo! Hiss!

enterprise crew

The uniforms look spot on. Kirk’s black shirt is explained in the story, apparently. I really like Chris Pine in Smokin’ Aces, but here he looks like a Furby.

Look at Simon Pegg though! I’m actually genuinely excited about this.

Source: MTV Movies Blog

crave: does not compute: the 10 most annoying kid + robot team-ups

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

I wrote this a while back and it never really took off traffic-wise, but it still makes me laugh. Does not compute: The 10 most annoying kid + robot team-ups grew out of a lunchtime conversation with Nick about how lame Scott Trakker and T-Bob were. It was primarily fuelled by my longstanding hatred of Telemachus, and features a bunch of irritating little terrors and their sidekick metallic morons.

So are all crime-fighting/spacefaring kids annoying? Only when they’re a genius and there’s a robot involved, clearly. Inspector Gadget is technically a cyborg, not a robot, which may explain why Penny is so great at solving crimes, all the while stirring new and unfamiliar longings in our pre-adolescent loins. But here’s the true, undisputed daddy of kids with robot sidekicks, the exception that proves the rule by stealing the rule’s money and having his pet cyborg killing machine shoot the rule in its rule knees.

Also I should point out, having now become a massive fan of Wil Wheaton, that Wesley Crusher and Data were annoying because of the sappy crap they had to spout, when they were both awesome in so many ways. That is all.

jcvd trailer

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

It’s Being Jean-Claude Van Damme

he does take his jihad seriously though, doesn’t he?

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Chris Morris‘ next project, Four Lions, sounds every bit as potentially controversial as past highlights like Brass Eye. It appears, from the sketchy details emerging on the intowebs, that the film will tell the story of a British jihadi terrorist cell.

Morris has apparently been researching Four Lions for three years, during which “even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce.” The story will show that “terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks”, with terrorist cells having “the same group dynamics as stag parties and five a side football teams.” The choice of title must be deliberate, echoing the none-more-English, cry-God-for-Harry-England-and-Saint-George Three Lions, to get past “seeing these young men as unfathomably alien”.

I can’t wait to see it. Reminds me of this, from the blackly brilliant Monkey Dust

…but knowing Morris, turned up to 11.

Source: Warren Ellis

the life fantastic with mr fox

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

There’s a film being made of Fantastic Mr Fox. Cool. But wait, it gets better.

It’s being directed by Wes Anderson! And Bill Murray’s in it! And George Clooney, Anjelica Huston, Cate Blanchett and Jason Schwartzman. WANT.

repo! a genetic opera

Monday, September 29th, 2008

Somewhere between Doomsday and Sweeney Todd, Once More With Feeling and Moulin Rouge, skulks and spits…

the pitch that taste forgot

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

Bit short of anything to write about, and I’ve just found my abortive attempt to think of something when my friend tried to convince me to pitch to Front (“BRITAIN’S FUNNIEST MAGAZINE”), so, for your amusement:

Dumbledore’s Beard - Other famous fictional characters who were blatantly gayers

I’m inordinately proud of that headline — the Dumbledore pun, not the use of the word ‘gayer’, please bear in mind I was trying to fit in with the style of the magazine

Mr Benn may have spent the daily nine-to-five as a straight-laced businessmen, but after-hours he dolled himself up and went on all sorts of exotic adventures.

…er, that’s it. Suggestions in the comments…

Mancrush: We know it’s wrong…

…but we still would. From Steve McQueen to Johnny Depp and Dave Grohl, we can’t help but see the ladies’ point.

On reflection the list would also include Simon Pegg, Pete Cashmore, Jason Perry and, I don’t know, Jack Bauer or someone.

awaydays: the movie

Saturday, September 13th, 2008

I loved Awaydays by Kevin Sampson when I was in my late teens. It was about several of my favourite things: Tranmere Rovers, punk rock, the Wirral, and football hooliganism. Not so much the hooliganism actually.

I once started a screen adaptation of Awaydays. It was a bit of a Trainspotting rip-off with an opening monologue. But now someone else has done it properly…

And yes, Stephen Graham is in it.

Update: But thankfully not, as Andy points out, Danny Dyer.

sukiyaki western django

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

OMFG, etc:

this week’s trailer wtf

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008

As good as it is to see rugby on the big screen, what the heck is this about?

Update: Astonishingly, this is based partly on a true story.

rich trenholm vs godzilla

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

Won’t be around much next week, as I am invading the Far East. Tomorrow I’m flying to Hong Kong to look at Epson projectors. On Wednesday we get bussed over to mainland China for a day trip, during which we have to try not to look like journalists, and then we hit Tokyo Godzilla-style. We’ll be in the hotel from Lost In Translation. Back Sunday for three days, then off to Germany for IFA.

It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

Update:
Couldn’t get hold of Lost In Translation before I went — no time to torrent even if I did understand torrenting, and iTunes don’t have it. Then I get back and bosh: three quid in Asda which I’d only wandered into on a whim. Obviously life really does have a funny way of helping you out (which reminds me).

dark knight: rachel dawes in a refridgerator

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

“A little fight in you. I like that…”

***SPOILERS!***

At the risk of harping on about The Dark Knight, I was reading the excellent Girl-Wonder.org, and it got me thinking about the gender politics of Christopher Nolan’s Bat-opus. I’m a sucker for masculine bonding and professional, or men-on-a-mission, stories. But why did Rachel Dawes have to die?

Skipping the snarky jokes about killing the Katie Holmes version being OK, it’s obvious in narrative terms why Dawes dies. She’s the one thing that all the characters care about. Harvey Dent loves her; Bruce Wayne sees her as symbolic of his someday/maybe release from the mantle of the Bat; and Jim Gordon trusts her, a pretty exclusive honour in this troubled town. And someone we care about has to die, otherwise the Joker’s sense of menace isn’t validated — killing faceless extras doesn’t carry the same weight.

Everybody loves Dawes, so her death has far-reaching implications. And she’s the only character not entrenched in the Batman mythos. Dent, Gordon, or Alfred can’t die because they can’t be replaced. Lucius Fox maybe, but as the most benign presence in the film that would just be cruel. So we kill the girl.

Because that’s what she is. She’s the girl. She’s the moral centre for the men taking care of business, but she has no role in moving the story forward except to provide motivation for the men. Holmes’ limp incarnation didn’t convince for a second that she was a crusading lawyer, so credit to Gyllenhall’s more authoritative take. Yet the one point when the script calls for her to do some lawyering, when she interviews Lau in the MCU holding cell, could have been given to Dent and the story wouldn’t have skipped a beat. As such, she’s replaceable.

Just as Vicki Vale, Chase Meridien, Julie Madison, Vesper Fairchild, Silver St. Cloud and the rest are disposable and replacable, Dawes is the only who can go. Then there’s Judge Freel, who gets blown up, and Ramirez, who is a corrupt cop. But not even a cool, badass corrupt cop, just one who loves her dear old mum, gawd bless’er.

It’s galling that a female character — the female lead, no less, can’t be more than the voice of reason who provides motivation for the men, by looking pretty and then dying. It’s called Girlfriend in a Refridgerator Syndrome.

What makes it worse in this context, is Gordon’s death. When Gordon dies, I felt that the gloves were off. Holy shit, they’ve killed one of the main characters from the comic! Anything can happen! Except, of course, he isn’t dead. The guys don’t die.

Incidentally, see if you can guess if Dawes shows up in IMDb’s memorable quotes from The Dark Knight, which is stuffed full of great lines. When a character called Tattooed Prisoner gets better dialogue than the female lead, there’s something wrong.

How to right this? Talia al Ghul kicking the shit out of everybody.

how can frank miller get it so wrong?

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

I love Frank Miller. But come on: