I guess I first read Prince Caspian when I was about 9 or 10, and far too young to read the subtext.  But of course later on I realised, and the movie is swimming in the same brand of thick & syrupy propaganda.

You already know the story, a whiny little shit (the heir to the throne) is targeted for death by his evil prick uncle (next in line, and newly become a father), and makes his escape, quickly stumbling onto the fact that myths & legends are true, and the land they’re in is full of magical beasties.  The kids from TLTWATW are called back to Narnia, and things go from there.

The CG is really good – the trees are far more realistic than the Ent’s in Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy, and the small animals all move incredibly well…  The smaller cats and dogs in particular are wonderfully executed.  Whoever did them should be brought onto the team for the Hulk sequels, because they’re waaaaay better at nailing realism than whatever cackhanded arsehole is currently doing it.

The boys are all fucking morons (actually, all of the humans are morons, either vicious nasty scum, or vacuous simpletons), the animals are all awesome.

It’s just too bad about the religious propaganda being forced into the story with all the subtlety of a Jarvis HBD-1 Bung Dropper, because it would do a great deal better without it – or with it, but included more sympathetically to the rest of the story.

Remember, way back in like 1995 or 1996 when the totality of mainstream media coverage of “The Internet” was pretty much that it was for bomb making recipes and pedos?  Well that really seems like forever ago now, particularly given that they’ve all embraced what we already knew was a great thing, so things are pretty much as they should be.

(The next battle is “them” trying, increasingly desperately, to take it over from us.  But they’ll fail in the end – because they’re stupid and greedy and closed minded, and we’re smart and greedy and free.  Their greed is for money, ours is for information – and information wants to be free on The Great Big Planetary Copying Machine that we all take such delight in plugging our brains into every day.)

So to have a movie like Untraceable come out, in two thousand and fucking eight, all about the dangers of the Evil Immoral Internet…  It just seems like some sort of bizarre, anachronistic joke.

Evil Genius sets up an untraceable video stream, plumps a victim down in front of the camera, and sets the pace of their death to the number of viewers of the stream – more people watching means faster murder.  So of course the stream goes crazy.  It’s grim as hell.  And utterly ridiculous.  But I tolerate these things for the sake of movies.

But what I don’t necessarily tolerate is dialog in my movies that is serving the interests of the corporate owners of the movie producer.  For instance there’s an interaction at one point, completely out of left field, about network neutrality, and how the killer is in favour of it – because obviously only insane killers want the free, open, level playing field that made the internet the incredible outlet of artistic & technical innovation (and kitten photos) that it is.

This is just dropped into a scene, for no obvious reason.

Not long before that, there’s a brief discussion of a file sharing site  – but if you download the free music, you’ll be infected with a backdoor that steals your bank records and passwords.  Oh, obviously.  That must be why no one downloads TV, movies, or music online – because they’re all instantly pwned by The Evil Blackhats.  Or, millions of people do in fact download exactly such things every single day with only the very occasional piss-weak little virus to be seen, and this is all just complete scaremongering bullshit.

Occams razor comes to our rescue once again.

All of which leads me to believe that the whole damn movie is a nasty stinking piece of vile PR oozed from the backroom of a smokey private club, produced as part of the marketing campaign for a cabal of Big Media Companies, probably written by people who usually provide spin and damage control for the RIAA and MPAA, when they sue solo mothers, crippled children, and laser printers.  (I’m not kidding about that last one, these fucking tools served notice on a laser printer for downloading music.)

Some of the performances are ok, but I just cannot tolerate this kind of bald-faced, anti-individual freedom, pro-Corporate… rhetoric.

(The pro-corporate stuff is only present “between the lines”, the other side of it isn’t nearly as subtle though – it’s a simple rhetorical device, find something that everyone can agree is bad, i.e. torturing a kitten to death, and then pretend that you need to take away everyone’s freedom to vote or fly in an aeroplane, or more kittens will be killed.)

Please, just let this movie, and any others that follow it, die.

Don’t be fooled, this isn’t a sequel to 2003’s Hulk movie, just a weird new movie in its own right.

I mean, the movie isn’t weird, it’s a Hulk movie, but it’s weird to have a reboot within 5 years of the movie being rebooted – I guess the other one didn’t line up right with Iron Man and whoever else is going to be included in an upcoming crossover movie.

And what’s the deal?  Well, pretty much what you expect I reckon.  Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) is irradiated, turns into a super strong, very big, green… Hulk… And The Powers That Be decide they can’t be having him roaming around free and hunt him down, so he goes into hiding.

Conveniently for us, he goes into hiding in the Brazilian favelas – which are friggin’ awesome high density slums, incredibly photogenic in their filthiness, and provide for some life and vibrancy on screen for a while.  While in the favelas he trains himself in meditation, and gets some coaching from someone who looked suspiciously like a Gracie – in self control and BJJ – all in the hopes of getting sufficient control over himself that he can avoid doing the whole “don’t make me hungry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m hungry” thing.  (You’ll get it when you watch the movie.)

The powers that be track him down when he has an accident (not of the HULK SMASH kind though), and send in the thugs.  Trouble is, you see, he’s the motherfucking Hulk.  So it doesn’t matter how bad arse you are, your puny bullets will bounce off his unconvincingly shiny skin, and P.S. stop being dressed up as an American soldier when you’re a British soldier, you giant tool.

The British guy (Tim Roth) gets some upgrades, and turns evil, and then there’s a great big fuck-off battle. The end, and they all live bittersweetly ever after.

It’s all good except the CG – and given that CG plays a pretty big part in modern superhero movies, this is probably a problem they should have spent a bit more time on.  Maybe you’ll be less sensitive to it than I was, but to me most of the Hulkmode stuff – while highly entertaining and action packed – also looked rather more like game cutscenes than I can tolerate in a movie, particularly given the year (it’s less convincing than “that dinosaur movie”, and that came out a loooong time ago).  I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m sure that the Hulk can be presented in his superhuman form, while still looking like something “real”.

Oh, and how hard is it to render a helicopter?  Seriously.

It’s good fun, very entertaining, and I reckon you should check it out – bonus is a Tony Stark cameo, thick with the syrup of foreshadowing for the upcoming crossover.  And if even that isn’t enough, how about a very sexually frustrated girlfriend for the Jolly Green Giant?  Poor girl.  (teehee.)

(Oh, and it’s really time to stop having Stan Lee cameos in every damn Marvel movie, please. Please!)

M. Night Shyamalan’s 5th outing since 6th Sense, and still not meeting up to the mark set by that stellar example of the craft.  (My hair stood on end when you-know-what was revealed.)

This film, perhaps because people like to compare Shyamalan’s films, has suffered from an incredible assault from critics – amateur or professional alike.  If you’ve heard anything about it, what you’ve probably heard is that it’s awful.

The movie as a whole isn’t awful, but some moments definitely are – and shouldn’t have made it into the final cut. For instance there’s a scene where a man ends up in a zoo enclosure with a pride of lions, they attack him and rip his arms off – but the physics just don’t work at all, it’s a completely ludicrous scene, and not one that fits consistently with the internal logic of the movie – they pull his arms off, one then the other, while he remains standing.  It doesn’t make any sense, and is more what I’d expect to see in something like Gore Gore Girls.

The violence is visceral, with numerous gruesomely realistic (excepting the lion scene) deaths portrayed graphically on screen.

The extended sequence with the pistol was quite something.

Mark Wahlberg in probably his worst performance in years, not sure if it’s due to writing, directing, or decisions he made for himself, but he uses an odd tone of voice that doesn’t let up.

Oh and his wife/the love interest (Zoeey Deschanel) has a weird goddamn face, probably all due to her eyes – it’s like she’s on some sort of tranquilisers the whole time, or she’s just woken up from a coma, or who knows what.

If you like movies, go and see it for yourself, don’t just drink second-hand haterade – it’s better than a lot of people are giving it credit for.  (If you don’t like movies, why the hell are you reading this?)

A cheapskate little gutter philosopher is having a hard time getting $20 out of an ATM, so he stumbles into a bank where he gets caught up in a heist.

Apart from the horrible writing, bad acting, and dreadful direction, this is an awful movie that should be avoided at all costs.

Oh I said “apart from”?  No, that’s really all there is to this one.

The first feature film from New Zealand writer/actor/director Andy Conlan.

We meet and follow sympathetic and tragically flawed Ronny Roman (Conlan) — a magician so badly hurt by the infidelity of his former partner and stage assistant, that he weaves a world of magical make-believe around himself – as long as he believes he’s a magician with eerie dark powers, he doesn’t have to face up to the pain of betrayal — while he tries to get his life back on track.

Unfortunately his scumbag manager (a convincingly slimy Michael Hurst) isn’t doing much to help, but his scumbagness does have the accidental benefit of tricking our Ronny into an unpaid gig in a hospice where we meet our delightfully quirky love interest, in the beguiling form of Nurse Sarah (newcomer Georgie Hill), a girl with serious germ issues – she boils bottled water, “just in case” – and a heart with a Ronny Roman shaped hole in it.

Of course while life and love happen around him, Ronny is so distracted by his efforts to make a come-back TV magic show appearance – and his own hidden pain – that he might miss his chance at happiness and love. And lots of games of night time mini golf, if you know what I mean. (I mean mini golf played at night.)

Featuring one of the most surreal umbrella fight scenes between a fry cook in a wifebeater and a dapper gentleman in a top hat ever to be caught on film.

There’s a lot of wonderful weirdness to be had here, which makes for some great laughs and an enjoyable film. Support our fledgling local independent film industry, go see it tonight – at Rialto cinemas nationwide.

Robert Redford’s piercing blue eyes are piercing.  And blue.  (Damn but that’s a hot man right there.)

Tom Cruise plays the very special brand of crazy he’s so gosh darned good at.  (See his clever take-off of religious psychos in the form of the recently released $cientology parody video for another example –  what do you mean that wasn’t a parody?  — Fine, but he’s playing the same kind of crazy-eyed role here.  He really is a very good actor, braincrazy or not.)

Michael Peña, though, helped make this movie much more appealing to me.  He has such warmth about his screen presence.  I reckon he helped make Shooter as well.

The story is two angles of the same story (and two threads of one of those angles), with a political science prof (Redford) talking to a promising but underachieving young student, while two former students of his (Peña & the very good Derek Luke) are on a mission in Waronterroristan, and at the same time a Senator (Cruise) dishes about his new military strategy to a longserving journalist (Meryl Streep), the same military strategy that has dictated the mission the boys are on.

The movie felt short, like it wasn’t even really a movie at all.  Like it was a one shot TV special or something.  These hour and a half movies just don’t taste right to me.

And yet, it was still very good.  (Even if the ending left something to be desired.)

(Parenthesis.)

Indy is back after a hiatus roughly as long as Battlestar Galactica’s mid-season break.

The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull?  More like Indiana Jones – Fight the Future, am I right?

By the way, if you don’t get that reference, don’t look it up – it’s a bit of a spoiler.  Which I don’t think matters too terribly, because the whole movie stunk of foreshadowing.  Indy’s enemy packs a sword, so when Indy’s sidekick The Kid mentions studying fencing at school, what were we meant to guess was coming?  Here’s a hint, The Kid has a sword fight with her.  Even with your eyes squeezed tight shut you’ll see them coming.

It was a fun movie and given the reviews, better than I expected.  I think the reviews are mostly bad because it’s just so incredibly weird.  But there you go.

I(ndy) Want to Believe.

So it turns out that this Steve Carell comedy isn’t a Steve Carell comedy, it’s a steve Carell romance, a total date movie, so that I went with a dude is kind of awkward.

All I’m going to tell you is that it’s really sweet, and very nicely made, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

(Yeah, I liked it.  But you shouldn’t go if you’re not either of 1. a girl, or 2. on a date with a girl.)

YOU’RE A MURDERER!!! OF LOVE!!

Shut up.