MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

I haven’t managed to get to the cinemas much this year for a variety of reasons. But I did make it at least twice since the last time I posted something in this category.

Inside Out

Odds are you’ll be sick of hearing about this film before the year is out, but for once the hype is justified – at least to me.

By now you know the premise – five anthropomorphic emotions run the control room inside the head of 11-year-old Riley, with Joy the primary leader. When Riley’s family moves to San Francisco, Sadness starts taking over. After Joy and Sadness – along with Riley’s core memories – are accidentally dumped into her long-term memory, they must find their way back to HQ through Riley’s mind before she experiences an emotional breakdown and loses her personality.

This is easily the most inventive and creative film Pixar has done in years, and the most layered and complex film they’ve done it their entire history. Directors Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen do a great job of distilling complex psychological concepts and distilling them into a simplified but clever story and a weird but recognizable metaphoric landscape. And sure, it’s a little heavy on the emo – the main characters are emotions, after all – but it’s never really forced or overdone, and it works thanks to a great voiceover cast that really sells the characters.

After six years of slipping into franchise retreads and pedestrian princess films (i.e. Brave – good film, but didn’t raise the bar the way I’ve come to expect Pixar films to do), it’s good to see Pixar back on form and proving it's possible to make smart, creative films and still be successful.

What We Do In The Shadows

Mockumentary from Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement (based on a short film they did in 2006) that’s basically The Real World with vampires, only it’s a comedy.

Rooted in the premise that a New Zealand film crew was granted access to the super-secret Unholy Masquerade, the film focuses on four vampire roommates who are somewhat out of touch with the modern world. That changes after they turn would-be victim Nick into a vampire, after which Nick gets them up to speed on things like The Internet while they teach him (not entirely successfully) about being a vampire. There are arguments over dishes, attempts to get invited into nightclubs, batfights and encounters with responsible werewolves.

I confess I’m not a big fan of mockumentaries, if only because it’s an overdone format. But this is rather well done. The improvised humor doesn’t always work for me, but there are a lot of genuinely funny scenes. And they have a lot of fun with the standard vampire tropes (lack of reflection, turning into bats, requiring to be invited into a building, etc) without really mocking the genre as a whole. In fact, it’s one of the better vampire films to come out in awhile.

FUN FACT: Here in HK, they actually went to the trouble of hiring local voiceover actors to do a dubbed Cantonese version. 

Behold.



This is unusual – they typically only do that for animated films. Evidently they thought this would be a big enough film in HK that they thought it was worth the expense of dubbing. 

Bite me,

This is dF

So.

What have we learned from watching the Twilight Saga?

Ultimately, the five Twilight films add up to nine hours of emo mumbling and every romance cliché you can possibly think of, and 90 minutes of actual vampire-werewolf movie, most of it in the final film. Indeed, if you took the last reel of the first three movies and edited them into about two-thirds of Breaking Dawn Part 2, you could probably assemble a halfway decent vampire-werewolf movie. It would still be cheesy, and the ending would suck, but it would at least be more watchable.

As they stand, most of the films are a very hard slog for anyone not there for the romance angle. But even if you are, the films are pretty average as big-budget franchise films go in terms of mise-en-scène, craftsmanship, CGI usage, etc. I will say that of the four directors, Bill Condon (who did Breaking Dawn) does the best job of giving the franchise some kind of distinctive personality. But it’s too little too late by then.

Now, it’s worth reiterating that I am not the core demographic for either the books or the films. They were written for boy-crazy high-school girls who wish that high school was way more interesting than it really is, and that they had a gorgeous boyfriend.

And that’s what the Twilight Saga essentially breaks down to – a teenage girl who is the center of attention for the entire story, where two really cute boys vie for her hand in marriage, and their extended families all love her (barring a few token holdouts who eventually come to love her), and she makes friends in school easily, and she basically becomes the center of everyone’s collective love and affection, and despite the struggles involved, no one dies in the end (at least no one you like). It’s wish-fulfillment on an epic scale, with gratuitous vampires and werewolves thrown in.

The story is realistic in at least one sense: Bella constantly makes really bad decisions despite being obviously in over her head – as many characters, Edward included, point out to her repeatedly. Humans don’t integrate into the vampire world for a very good reason (i.e. the food chain) and it’s dangerous to even try. But Bella just ignores all this because LOVEY DOVEY. And she wouldn’t be the first high school student to make really bad decisions at that age for that reason. (To be fair, plenty of grown-ups do the same thing.) But the fact that it all works out in the end is tantamount to telling teenagers, “When yr in love, stick by yr decisions, and don’t let anyone tell you how stupid yr acting because love will never steer you wrong, so what do they know?”

There was a quote circulating the social webs (often misattributed to Stephen King) awhile back comparing Twilight to the Harry Potter series in terms of the overall core message the story arc sends to its young-adult audience:


That’s a little simplistic, but close enough.

It’s all over now,

This is dF

Breaking Dawn Part 1

Wedding! Honeymoon! Babies!

It’s not often I spend the first hour of a film thinking, “Please kill me.” This is one of those films. Okay, the first film also starts really slow. But this is the kind of pure schmaltz that you could only get from a teenage dream wedding and subsequent honeymoon (with money).

About midway through you start getting into vampire-human mutant baby problems, which is nice, and does present a few challenges for everyone because no vampire has ever gotten a human lady pregnant before – largely because human ladies generally don’t survive vampire sex, apparently, although luckily for Bella, Edward is sensitive to her needs (though not to the point of giving her more sex when she needs it for safety reasons, which is a shame as she was a virgin until their wedding night and WHERE ELSE IS SHE GOING TO GET THE SWEET LOVING NOW, EDWARD?).

So anyway, now Bella has a mutant baby in her tummy and the gestation period is apparently just a couple of weeks, and it’s also apparently drinking her blood from the inside. Which would be a great movie if it wasn’t this one, which takes a premise like that and makes it about as scary as an average family soap opera.

And that’s pretty much all that happens (though this is only Part 1, which means the studio wanted to include as much boring detail from the final book as possible, so they made two movies instead of one, which is all Harry Potter’s fault for being a better series).

I'm keeping my baby,

This is dF

New Moon

Mopefest! Werewolves! Shakespearean allegory!

This one has somewhat more vamp action, partly because of the unfinished business from the first film, and partly because of the werewolf angle – which turns out to be unintentionally funny.

Bella spends the first third of the film moping sadly sadly sadly because Edward pulls the old “I’m breaking up with you because I love you and it’s the only way to keep you safe from harm” routine, and after spending three months sitting in her room looking sad (LITERALLY), she eventually seeks solace with her BFF Jacob, only to find out he’s actually a werewolf.

We laughed a lot at this. I mean, how unlucky can a girl be? “Jesus, is there ANY beautiful guy in this town who isn’t a supernatural creature?”

Only Bella doesn’t say that, because (1) vampires are sparkly and (2) werewolves are big cuddly werewolves who also looks dreamy (and cuddly) without a shirt on when they’re in human form. And Jacob is shirtless for most of the film, so hurray.

This is where we get into what could be a promising vampire/werewolf feud, but isn’t. It’s mostly treaties and speeches and a little snarling, and Bella spends the rest of the film doing really dangerous things just to get Edward to pay attention to her (which is both sad and a little pathetic), which inevitably leads to the Romeo/Juliet “I thought you were dead” routine, only no one dies – not even Edward, who is technically not alive but tries to commit suicide anyway. And this being Twilight, his suicide plan involves going to Italy, taking his shirt off and sparkling in public until either real vampires or fans of real vampires beat him to death for being annoying. Which, sadly, does not happen.

Oh, and Michael Sheen turns up as the Vampire King. He’s the best part of the whole film, and he’s only in it for the last ten minutes or so. So basically, everything just gets sillier and more cliché-ridden as it goes along, and it is in no way scary at all.

Nice doggy,

This is dF

Or, “The Things I Do To Entertain You People”.

One of the interesting things about being married is that yr film-watching habits don’t so much change as evolve into a barter system of sorts. The scope of this evolution depends on how much yr film tastes overlap, but it essentially comes down to “I’ll go watch this sappy romcom with you if you go watch this hyperviolent sexploitation grindhouse film with me.”

This generally isn’t much of an issue with The Bride and me, as we both tend to agree that films are worth trying when they have monsters, vampires, aliens, spaceships, magic and heavy violence in them.

Unfortunately for me, that also includes the Twilight franchise, which technically has vampires and werewolves in it, and The Bride does not possess the pop-cultural barriers that make me cringe at the very thought of seeing any of those films, and her reasoning has been, “It’s got vampires and werewolves, how bad can it be?”

We found out.

They recently showed the first two films on free-to-air TV, and we ended up getting very cheap copies of the remaining three movies, because The Bride wanted to see how the saga ended.

And I figured, if I have to watch these, I might as well get some blog material out of it.

Besides, I suppose if I’m going to be critical of Stephanie Meyer’s Sparkly Vampire franchise, I might as well be an informed critic.

What that means for you is Twilight film reviews for the next few days. They won’t necessarily be serious, but they will be sincere and (hopefully) mildly entertaining.

It’s twilight time,

This is dF

Just like you can't have a Halloween without vampires or Dracula, you can't have a Halloween playlist without Screaming Lord Sutch.



PRODUCTION NOTE: Not to be confused with the recent Redd Kross song of the same name.




She gave me a peck that left me a wreck, 

This is dF

And my mother is a mummy.



All in the family,

This is dF

Continuing our countdown to Halloween:

As we mentioned last episode, dead girls are easy. But vampire girls are popular.

At least with Jonathan Richman.



Evil now, scary now,

This is dF

Continuing our music countdown to Halloween, we haven’t mentioned vampires yet. 

And interestingly, one of my favorite vampire songs doesn’t mention vampires at all.

It’s an instrumental, you see. Produced by Joe Meek, yet.



FUN FACT: The footage in the video is not from a vampire film, or even a horror movie. It’s from The Last Laugh, a silent film from FW Murnau (of Nosferatu fame, so okay, there's sort of a vampire connection here) and one of the biggest films of the German Expressionist movement in the 1920s. It’s about a doorman at a posh hotel who gets demoted to lavatory attendant, and he lives in dread of everyone finding out the truth. Which they do.

I knew that film history class I took at grad school would pay off one day.

Don’t tell a soul,

This is dF

I watch movies. And you know what that means.

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

The title says it all, and having enjoyed the book, I was looking forward to this, not least because of Timur Bekmambetov helming the director’s chair. I tend to enjoy his films, no matter how much he steals from the Wachowski Brothers.

However.

The story is as straightforward as the book – young Abe Lincoln leads a secret life as a vampire killer, and as he learns of the real reason for slavery in the South (easy vampire food!), he dedicates his political career to putting an end to it.

It’s interesting that some people I know hated the movie just because they found whole idea both offensive and disrespectful to Lincoln. Personally I think if that’s yr beef with the film, yr taking it too seriously.

On the other hand, the same could be said for Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote the screenplay from his own book, which was written as a straight-faced secret diary and a pretty grim read, given Lincoln’s tragic life. That’s hard to translate to film, especially when most moviegoers offered a chance to see Abe Lincoln kill vampires would expect something that’s more in the Naked Gun/Scary Movie genre, or at least Evil Dead 2.

Despite Bekmambetov’s ability to deliver some ridiculously cheesy action scenes (although let’s admit the horse stampede scene is too OTT even by Bekbanmetov standards), AL:VH is too serious to work as a B-movie mashup. At the same time, it falls short as an alt.history bio, not least because it spends too little time developing and explaining Lincoln’s real-life political ambitions. 

Ice Age 4: Continental Drift

The latest installment in the Ice Age franchise featuring Manny the mammoth, Sid the sloth, Diego the saber-toothed tiger and Scrat the prehistoric squirrel doing pretty much everything they did in the first three films. Only with pirates.

No, really.

Okay, that’s a little snarky. And I’ll admit I spent a quite a bit of time laughing. But basically it is a series of good slapstick scenes interspersed between a predictable and tedious story about how a teenage mammoth learns that family and friends are important than acting cool to impress guys (which also means Ray Romano is really in his element here – they could have called this one Ice Age: Everyone Loves Manny).

As a kids film, it’s okay, but for grown-ups there’s not much to like that they didn’t already see in the first film.

Hell freezes over,

This is dF