26 February 2010
Cam Gigandet (did I stutter?) started out as a young hunk on the Young and the Restless, moved on to playing a young hunk on the OC, kicked off his movie career as young hunk James in Twilight, and now turns up as a young hunk with blindingly white teeth in Pandorum, a pleasingly second-rate sci fi action horror flick set far in the future when Earth has finally groaned and broken under the weight of all its pesky human inhabitants and one last, colossal spaceship has taken off with the last of the human race.
Yes this is also how Wall-E starts. But where Wall-E gave us a good 30 dialogue-free minutes on the desolation of a post-human Earth, this movie starts deep in the bowels of the de rigeur giant spaceship where everyone except rotating teams of flight crew are deep in “hypersleep”, waiting to touch down on a pre-identified Earth-like planet that lies several thousand light years away.
A member of the flight crew awakens fitfully, his memory a fog. He peers around. No lights. He snaps a glow-stick. A thick layer of dust covers the room. Suffice to say, he doesn’t yet know about the evil alien clowns aboard who can run like greased lightning and who like nothing better than snacking on fresh human. more »
Tracer Hand in Do You See / FT • 3 Comments
2 February 2010
The main event.
It was a perishingly cold Saturday night on Mare Street, and the Empire was sold out.
Staff were taking photos of each other, old friends were hugging and saying hello, before saying goodbye. It was the last hurrah for the current staff and management. The gang of mates that had run the place since it rose from the ashes of Mecca Bingo’s stewardship in the mid-1980s was getting the heave-ho. But first there would be a show.
more »
Tracer Hand in Do You See / FT • 1 Comment
31 January 2010
The short answer would be the Secret Vampire Soundtrack, but it would only be a superficial answer. Sure Secret Vampires makes explicit the link between vampirism and pop music, but you would be hard pushed to think that it is any particular clarion call for more vampires in the media. Except at this point of 1995, vampires were at a pretty low ebb. A couple of years after Francis Ford Coppola’s disappointing Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the poor Interview With The Vampire adaptation and the ropey Buffy film, vampires couldn’t be caught dead in the media. Which since they are undead is possibly the point but I digress.
The Secret Vampire Soundtrack contained Kandy Pop which was the track that broke Bis and was responsible for making them the first unsigned band on Top Of The Pops*. As such Bis not only made Vampires fashionable again, they toyed with the idea of vampires not being scary. If Manda Rin, chirpy chanteuse, was a vampire then suddenly the idea of the gothic immortal vampire was turned on its head. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See • 3 Comments
8 January 2010
Sherlock Holmes does give the reviewer plenty of options on the Holmes based puns. In probing the homoerotic subtext we even get the Guardian crying about Holmesophobia (nice work – cheers). And all of this is hung on some sort of idea that the film either is, or isn’t, faithful to the source and that this is important. My take on this is as follows:
a) It is not important
b) It is not that faithful
c) It is as faithful as other versions
d) It is very entertaining.
And d) is what matters right? So what has surprised me in reading reviews, particularly British reviews, that fiathfulness to the book be damned. FAITHFULNESS TO LONDON is to be demanded. And whilst much has been said about them capturing a certain kind of grimy historical Victoriana, they lose every humanities brownie point for all of its assaults on geography. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See • 9 Comments
7 January 2010
I vaguely remember Where The Wild Things Are as a kid. I don’t think it was a sanctioned kids book in my house, and there was a very small window for picture books to flourish before I went for the word only hard stuff. But I so remember leafing through it at a friends (clearly being disapproving*) and wondering why there was a boy dressed as a wolf with a crown on playing with these giant creatures. And why didn’t they eat him.
All the way through the film of Where The Wild Things Are I kept wondering, why don’t they eat him. Seriously, he is fucking annoying. Of course the reason they don’t eat him (or indeed eat anything through the film) is they are a bunch of BIG EMO WILD THINGS, too worried about being sad and lonely rather than noshing down on some fine kiddie snack. Max, who is the little bundle of ten year old rage, may not have much good eating in it, but even so the decision to make him their king, rather than dinner, seems perverse. Why only the other day I decided not to eat a bit of fish that looked a bit off. I did not however bow down to it, and make a giant camp cum World War 1 trench system at its behest. Admittedly it wasn’t asking. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See / FT • 4 Comments
4 January 2010
So here’s the last batch, from March onwards where ones new Years Resolutions start drifting away. And rather than great, or bad movies, these are all a bit of both, rather reliable and stolid rather than stuff worth writing about. All films i would recomend people saw without out trying to tell them that they are the best film ever. You know, the bread and butter of the film industry, even if they all potentially offered a lot more.
Watchmen: One of my favourite movie going experiences of 2009, merely because it made good one of my other New Years Resolutions. Namely I saw it with a lot of people. I think about eight of use sat in a prime location in a packed Vue Islington, and enjoyed watching a comic we had all read being turned into a film which was nearly exactly like the comic we had all read. And in retrospect, what more did we want? We all came out with very few complaints, we all agreed that the one significant change (SQUID) made lots of sense and then also agreed that Watchmen is Ok but not the best thing ever anyway. In a year that I would characterise for its excellent credit sequences, Watchmen had one of the best, a masterclass is effortless world building. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See / FT • 9 Comments
28 December 2009
Three more unreviewed. Two good one TERRIBLE. From which I think you are starting to get the view that I really like writing about mediocre films, or films that almost made it. Find me an interesting flaw and I will be all over you like a badger with binbag (full). Make a film I really liked, I want to keep that to myself. Which, as noted regarding Frozen River below, I really shouldn’t do.
District 9: Sometimes there is no point to writing about a film. Usually there is something interesting to say, or at least some sort of critical dialogue, but with a film like District 9 all the interesting angles are really obvious. So Blah blah – apartheid analogy, blah blah alien invasion, blah blah low budget Peter Jackson. Even the interesting stuff I though I was the only one to notice was quickly battered to death by the media. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See / FT • No Comments
24 December 2009
My new years resolution in 2009 was to review every film I saw in the cinema that year. That came to 114 films (so far) of which I managed to say at least something about 97 of them. So over the next few year ending days I will run down the films I did not review, with a general thought, and perhaps an explanation why they ended up being unwritten about. It soon turns out that it wasn’t necessarily due to them being unloved.
So working in reverse order, based on the theory that the most recent films I have had less time to write about… more »
Pete Baran in Do You See / FT • 1 Comment
15 December 2009
The point and click puzzle game these days seems almost as dead as the text adventure. And in the case of the text adventure (interactive fiction darhling) perhaps they have just reverted to their core audiences oblivious of the technological progress that seemingly made them obsolete. Well today’s is a beautiful thing to look at, and to play. Short, sweet and very very pretty. Starring this geezer – but what is he looking at?
more »
Pete Baran in Do You See / FT • No Comments
Indeed it is a perfectly fine movie, telling a terrific backstage story with a central capture of a young Welles which tells you a hell of a lot more about the man than any trad biopic would. The film comes on like a Woody Allen period piece, with an eye (and ear) for period detail but filmed on a pretty closed set for budget and story reasons. This is a backstage story you can imagine taking place down the street from Bullets Over Broadway, and shares a generous sense of humour with that film, whilst managing to do Orson Welles the kind of justice that a grand biopic couldn’t do. Indeed Citizen Kane contains within it the best reason not to make such a film about Welles, and not just his own talent for self deceits and fakery. And what better way to discover who Welles really was, but with a fake story starring Zac Efron.
Efron does his job well here, he is pretty, he is a proper male lead which allows Christian McKay to do his extremely impressive Welles. Clearly there is some impersonation here, but there is more of a sense of quicksilver wit, of capricity of a very clever man before the world had battered him into submission. Showing that even at his high point what an egomaniac he was, whilst showing why everyone wanted to work with him and even a sense of the man whose last film would be Transformers The Movie. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See / FT • 1 Comment
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