Saved by the Bell

This is the show that reminds me of having days off school, because it was always on at a point in the morning when I would usually be on the way in, so I could only see it when I was ill. That’s probably why I could smell Calpol, dry toast and Lucozade as I re-watched episodes on DVD. The nose never forgets.

The first season aired back in 1989, and it has got to be one of the most important kid’s sitcoms of my generation. And I mean important in the formative rather than the cultural sense. The jokes are deliberately goofy and the kids take a while to develop their acting talents beyond the wooden. But the costumes are amazing, Mr Belding is a hero and I like the idea of the feminist character of Jessie existing to counteract the mach male double-act of Zack and Slater. I also like the fact that teens are frequently sexualised in swimsuit and locker room scenes, proving that this kind of thing has been going on for years and has not yet destroyed society completely. Take that Aldous Huxley.

Saved by the Bell has managed to endure because some of its stars have had interesting lives off-screen. I am of course referring to the recent antics of Dustin Diamond, aka Screech. Mr Diamond was only 12 when he found fame, but now many people will remember him for the sex tape he produced to allegedly pay for his mortgage. Louis CK produced this NSFW sketch to promote his new show that is eerily reminiscent of what Mr Diamond probably had to go through. He has continued to destroy his reputation with appearances on various celeb-focused reality shows, and even wrote a book about his years working on the show that made him famous called ‘Behind the Bell’. Apparently none of the original cast is on speaking terms with him. I wonder how the cast of Boy Meets World are doing…

Street Hawk

If you hadn’t ever seen Knight Rider, or any other 80s action movie, you might think the concept for Street Hawk was moderately original. Rogue motorcycle cop sees his partner killed by baddies, and is nearly topped himself in the process. After his recovery and assignment to deskwork, he is approached by a mysterious government agency (which in this case consists of just one guy) and asked to become a loose cannon justice-dealer, working beyond the law to fight crime on a 300mph hyper bike. Enjoyable nonsense ensues. It’s no sillier than an episode of 24, I promise. And I imagine that in twenty five years all of Jack Bauer’s gadgets will look as outdated as the technology that is on offer here.

Sadly for Street Hawk, it came three years after Knight Rider had established itself, and so after one season it was canned. On the plus side, Christopher Lloyd makes an appearance in the first episode as a pretty convincing drug boss, and this cameo almost makes the whole thing worth a look.

It’s Garry Shandling’s Show

This sit-com is very similar to Saved by the Bell in many ways. Mr Shandling always addresses the audience, and spends most of his time getting into scrapes and ‘chasing tail’, as they say. It feels a little like Seinfeld mixed with Home Improvement and tons of other generic US personality-centred comedies that have come since. Mr Shandling was unknown to me until the DVD popped through my door, but a quick check of IMDB shows that he’s done pretty well for himself in the US. I suppose watching Garry Shandling’s show is the closes a UK citizen can ever come to experiencing what it must be like for foreigners to catch a rerun of Birds of a Feather.

In conclusion, the theme song is really good. Perhaps the show is a little too mediocre for this list.

Saved by the Bell: Season 1, Street Hawk and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show are all getting a full DVD release on the 22^nd of March.

*I refuse to acknowledge Channel 5 because we could never get good reception on it. Oh, and Sky or Cable don’t count either. Terrestrial all the way.

Tim Key

Mr Key first came to my attention on Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe a couple of years ago, and his hilarious poetry, which on Wikipedia is referred to as ‘deliberately bad’, was refreshing in a market so full of repetitive, observational mainstream acts. Then the short run of the BBC sketch comedy Cowards showcased Key and three other young comics. Most of the show was excellent, and a welcome contrast to the beast that sketch comedy has become, with its otherwise universal reliance on poor impersonations of celebrities to get laughs (see Katy Brand and even, dare I say it, Harry and Paul). Most recently Key has been a much more visible personality, taking the role of question master in BBC4’s We Need Answers, as well as appearing on News Wipe from time to time.

Key’s latest one-man show, which happens to be called The Slutcracker, had a sell-out run at the Soho Theatre in London, and I managed to catch it one evening. Key’s style is not stand up in the traditional sense. There are no jokes, but there are definite punch lines. It’s almost performance art, but with an introspective and self-mocking tone that makes the excessive pretentions seem delightfully silly and very, very funny. Key reads his poems from small notebooks stuffed into the various pockets of his ill-fitting suit, and he uses a conductor’s baton to direct the audio and video elements that punctuate the five or so parts into which the hour long performance is divided. Poems are interspersed with almost stream of consciousness musings, coupled with occasional laddish outbursts that jar intentionally with the rest of his act. Keep an eye on Key, and see him live if you can. He lacks the kind of manner that is gradually turning fellow Cambridge graduate David Mitchell into a staple of the living room, but he is one of the most inventive comedy performers on the circuit today.

Ramona

Having not been to a gig for a while (I saw half of a Propagandhi gig in Sheffield last summer before a fire alarm cut it short) I was fairly excited to shake the cobwebs off my eardrums again. And the Portland Arms in Cambridge was the venue to help me with that task. Before talking about the band, I’d like to praise the venue itself. It is basically a pub, but with a small backroom for gigs. I’ve been to tons of tiny venues in the past, and in terms of atmosphere, and more importantly sound quality, this was one of the best. Every element of the groups on stage was evenly balanced, and even the vocals were not totally eclipsed in the miniature listening environment.

Now Ramona is a band at the beginning of its journey, and you could tell that each member was still in the process of finding their own place in the musical machine. Old pop punk is the driving influence here, and the ghost of Blondie floats over them. Lead singer Karen Anne has an impressive natural presence on the stage, holding herself somewhere between nonchalant cool and energetic emotion at all times, but never being overtaken by either. Her vocal is clean and flawlessly executed in technical terms. Lyrically the songs dwell on the typical teenage topics, though there are flashes of more adult themes that transcend the occasionally angsty but generally up-beat tunes.

Guitar, drums, bass and keys/synths complete the Ramona line-up. There are actually distinct personalities that define each band member, though like Karen Anne there is no overriding/distracting level of showmanship to detract from what is an assured group performance. It will be interesting to see how the band develops, and whether their sound will change over time. I believe an album is in the works at the moment, though you can check out good old Myspace for some previews.

I went to see your new film at the weekend. Alice in Wonderland. In 3D. With a Disney stamp on it and that lady who worked on Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King behind the writing desk.

Now, I’m not a 3D-sceptic Tim, let’s get that straightened out. I like the depth it gives to the images, and I like the clarity of picture you get with the digital projection it uses. But I don’t like the price hike and I don’t like having to wear the glasses over the top of my existing ones. Prescription 3D looks like it could be some way off. So I liked the use of 3D in your film, and you didn’t use it as a gimmick like certain sequences of Disney’s recent reimagining of A Christmas Carol did.

The attention to detail in the design of Underland was also good, Tim. Everyone was going on about how James Cameron had made ‘a whole new world’ in Avatar, when all he’d really done was copy/paste five or six animals with a few extra limbs into a rainforest. But there is more than enough imaginative power in the pages of Lewis Carroll’s novels to provide inspiration for a fairly deep onscreen environment, and you and your team have done a pretty good job of reimagining it. I could see that the first Disney version helped a bit as well.

What else is good? Oh yes, using the Jabberwocky poem as a foundation for the plot. I bloody love that poem Tim, and I also gather that you got some of the designs for the beast from old illustrations, which is faithful of you. Not sure you needed to make the beast talk though.

Right, I’ve been quite nice so far Tim, and you’ve deserved every word of encouragement, believe me. But I do have a couple of bones to pick with you. First, why did you cast Barbara Windsor and Matt Lucas? Distracting for a British audience, don’t you think? And a tiny bit irritating, at least for me. Second – Anne Hathaway…she’s awful, isn’t she? And didn’t she have that boyfriend who went to jail for massive fraud and money laundering? She’s not the sharpest of knives. Or whatever that saying is. Thirdly, why was Helena Bonham Carter doing an impression of Queen Elizabeth from series 2 of Blackadder? Frown.

Johnny Depp deserves his own paragraph. I do love Mr Depp, and have always appreciated his quirky roles. But you might have given him a little less control over this one. I don’t know why the Hatter had to become such a central character, and I don’t know why he was so endeared to Alice. I suppose you had to cement the plot to a couple of characters, and Depp is a massive star. But it didn’t work for me. I know you don’t know me Tim, but I think it’s time to put Johnny down. And never let him dance again. You managed to make your movie feel like Shrek in the closing seconds.

Despite criticising your casting a bit, I thought that Alice (Mia Wasikowska) was excellent, and I enjoyed Alan Rickman and Stephen Fry, both of whom managed to perform in an understated manner that didn’t damage the film in the same way that some of the other Brits did.

My biggest problem was that the film was too coherent, if that makes sense. It adhered to the same kind of story arc as other fantastic kid’s films of the past, and in doing so lost a lot of the lunacy and escapism of the source material. Apparently you told some journalist that you couldn’t attach yourself emotionally to the disjointed series of events that make up Carroll’s novels. But you’ve gone too far in the opposite direction with this one.

So you’ve not done too badly with this one Tim. I don’t think I want to see it again anytime soon, and I was a little bored and annoyed at the clichés during the showing. But kids will probably love it. The little girl sitting next to me was on the edge of her booster seat for quite a while.

Solomon Kane

I was actually pleasantly surprised by this film, if only because I went in expecting to witness a macho, blood-covered gore/bore-fest. My expectations were met, but I rather enjoyed the ride.

Solomon Kane is based on a series of trashy stories and a subsequent set of comics, with the latter getting a revamp recently. The story is this: evil naval captain Kane (James Purefoy) has done so many bad deeds that he forfeits his soul to the devil. But before the Dark Lord can take his prize, Kane goes off the radar and hides out with some monks in 16th century England, swearing to become a man of peace. The monks kick him out eventually, and one mutters something about violence being in his destiny or whatever. Then Kane travels aimlessly for a bit, eventually teaming with some pilgrims (including Pete Postlethwaite) heading for the New World, after he is accosted by some bandits, who he refuses to fight. In the end he fights an evil sorcerer to rescue a young female pilgrim whilst simultaneously making up for his previous misdemeanours and reclaiming his familial estate from the forces of darkness.

That summary may make it sound like there is a lot going on, but the film does very little to explain things. This is not a problem, as excessive exposition in a film like this gets boring fast, and flashbacks are kept to a minimum here. It is arguably the action that saves Solomon Kane from being a lumbering dullard of a film. Director Michael Bassett is not as fussy or fast-paced behind the camera as some of his contemporaries, so you get a little longer to savour the action, and at times it almost feels like Gladiator. Almost. The script is also inoffensive and functional, if not enormously original. But the tone of the comics and the books seems to have been faithfully translated onto the screen. Kane is serious and moody, but thankfully this emo outlook never feels too silly. A tentative thumbs up for this one, then.

Wolf Hound

Wolf Hound suffers because of terrible subtitles. They are distracting because they are often hilariously inappropriate or just plain inaccurate, and they detract from the film considerably.

But that’s not the worst thing about this film. I’ll just list the rest to make things easy to digest (and write).

1) It’s too long

2) The female lead screams far too frequently/is too much of a sap

3) The CGI elements are not good enough; old school special effects work well when they are present, and should have been used more

4) There is a terrible, terrible bat sidekick thing that is just terrible. But funny. And terrible

5) Certain elements of the plot will be incomprehensible unless your knowledge of Russian folklore is pretty good.

6) It’s hammier than Brian Blessed

7) Snore

Wolf Hound is basically fantasy on autopilot, and it seems to draw from far too many different sources, creating an inconsistent whole that just does not work.

Solomon Kane is in cinemas nationwide right now, whilst Wolf Hound is out on DVD if you fancy checking it out.

In the late 90s my family acquired around 50 movies on VHS from a friend’s infirm grandmother, who did nothing but watch incredibly violent films that she ordered from a catalogue. I never met this woman, but I imagine that she was an impressive lady. Amongst the titles available to us were various action movies from the 80s and 90s, mixed in with some softcore porn, which the woman in question must have ordered by mistake after reading the innuendo-laced blurbs. Or at least this is what I choose to believe.

Anyway, in amongst this mix were many films that came to shape my childhood, and probably make me the person that I am today. With that in mind, I present to you my next two selections to add to the (slowly) growing library of rubbish films that are actually really good. If you have a fairly broad understanding of that word.

The 13^th Warrior

Antonio Banderas has gone off the radar a little bit of late, but back in 1999 when The 13^th Warrior was released he was hot property. Kids nowadays will know him as ‘that bloke from Spy Kids’, or worse ‘the voice of Puss in Boots off of Shrek’. He takes the leading role as an Arab chap sent to be an ambassador to the Norse colonies because he angered his superiors. It’s basically the ancient equivalent of an FBI agent getting reassigned to Alaska. Based on a book by Michael ‘Jurassic Park’ Crichton, the plot hangs on factual accounts of ancient times with a bit of Beowulf fantasy thrown in for good measure. And it doesn’t really work. But quite a few of the individual elements are delightful.

One particularly bad bit, which is also brilliant, is the process by which Banderas learns the language of the Norsemen, with whom he embarks on a quest to protect a remote village from an unknown evil.* A short montage of Banderas sitting around the camp fires over the course of the journey to the village, listening to the gradually unfolding conversations and understanding a little more each time, is silly. And his final revelation that he has learnt their language and can understand the insults that they throw at him is sillier, if only because he retains his Hispanic/Arab accent throughout the movie. I get what they were trying to do, but I can’t help but find the result funny.

I also like the bit when Banderas cuts down one of the Norse broadswords to make himself a little scimitar.

The rest of the film is messy, forgettable and anticlimactic, but the violence and action are handled well. Apparently Crichton took on directing duties alongside Die Hard director John McTiernan, and whole thing was way over budget and a bit of a disaster during production. But I don’t care, because Banderas, man, you stole my heart on VHS.

The Specialist/Assassins

I’ve grouped these together because they came on a single VHS, as a kind of double feature of trashy filmmaking. The Specialist features Sylvester Stallone working as a master bomber man, lured by Sharon Stone’s lady of vengeance into a plot to kill some wise guys. This film is made worthy of a watch because of the presence of James Woods as a deranged CIA agent who is also looking for vengeance. There is also an excruciating sex scene followed by an even more gratuitous shower scene featuring the Italian Stallion and… Ms Stone. It’s about as appealing as watching a body builder grappling with a member of Mensa. Which is precisely what happens.

Assassins is similar to The Specialist in that Stallone seems to rely on everyone else to act for him, and in this case it is the hyperactive presence of Antonio Bandera’s rival assassin that brings some much needed energy to an otherwise ponderous opening section. This being a Richard Donner picture, it has some pretty decent bang bang moments, but the whole ‘assassin with a heart of gold’ role that Stallone lumbers along in makes for a film that feels less realistic than Avatar. There is an edge of techno-babble added by Julianne Moore’s appropriately named Electra, who doubles as the love interest, and all of the computing equipment is brilliantly archaic and rubbish by today’s standards. Which is always fun.

The best scene in Assassins occurs early on when Stallone gets assigned to kill a man at a funeral. He turns up in his mourning garb with an impossibly large cast on his arm. Inside the cast is a machine gun. He stands a little way away from the group of mourners, and takes aim with his poorly concealed weapon. But before he can pull the trigger, Antonio Banderas takes out the mark from the opposite side of the cemetery. Banderas is dressed as a janitor, and in his attempt to stroll casually away from the scene is spotted by Stallone, who initiates a pitched battle amongst the tombstones. The pair duke it out for a while, and then the cops come and arrest Banderas but miss out on taking Stallone down town for no apparent reason. Probably because he taped over the hole in the cast where the bullets come out with a plaster.

If you have any suggestions for rubbish classics to add to the list, let me know below.

*SPOILER – it turns out to be people dressed as bears, which is nice.

As you might have guessed, it is the presence of Michael Cera which makes the film. Though there are cameos from the likes of Ray Liotta and Zach Galifianakis, these are fairly muted. Cera shines, and I for one do not really care that he is constantly landing fairly similar roles. His sense of comic timing, his delivery of occasionally prosaic lines and his physical presence onscreen all mark him out as unique and oddly alluring. People wonder why he always gets the girl when he is clearly playing such a geek. Go and watch Youth in Revolt and see if you can resist his charms.

Cera plays Nick Twisp, a nervous teen virgin searching for physical satisfaction, love and intellectual stimulation. When he takes a brief trip to a trailer park he meets Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), a temptress with intensely religious parents who leads him into a romance which both seem gagging to consummate. Like any number of teen films, the aim here is to get laid. But this is nothing like American Pie. Cera is returned to his home far from Sheeni, and he realises that the only way to be near to her again is to engineer a situation in which he gets kicked out by his mother and is made to move in with his father. This involves getting into some serious trouble with the law. To force out his dark side, Twisp creates an alter-ego named Francois Dillinger. Whenever a push towards Sheeni is needed, Dillinger is always on hand to intervene. The schizophrenic nature of the two roles is handled well, and is never particularly gimmicky or distracting.

But.

For the first 45 minutes Youth in Revolt clips along nicely, and is undoubtedly funny in a slightly more reserved way than other teen comedies. However, if you don’t like Michael Cera, you will probably want to avoid this one. By the third act things are beginning to feel stilted and bland, with rebellion and meaning obscured by a rush to burn through various disjointed situations towards the films literal and metaphorical climax. The ride is enjoyable, but the execution is inconsistent.

The review is over now, but as a kind of afterthought, or perhaps a little homework assignment, I recommend you go away and watch both Youth in Revolt and the Seth Rogan vehicle Observe and Report. Then let me know if you think the two have anything in common.

Basically the crims are running drugs from Morocco through Spain and on into France, and they have found that the best method for avoiding apprehension is driving incredibly fast in speedboats and supercars. The titular ‘Go-fast’. Seems like that would draw more attention to the whole process.* But apparently not in Continental Europe.

Our dashing lead is a supremely capable detective with a chip on his shoulder (whose distinguished career echoes Hot Fuzz’s Nicholas Angel). Having had his mentor and friend killed by one of the drug runners early on, he gets a transfer to an undercover unit and then goes through a gruelling and hilarious training sequence involving push-ups, rally driving, swimming and being made to wake up early, to which he reacts like a grumpy teenager. The film proceeds, he joins the gang, he takes them down. Bish bash bosh.

Now if this was a Hollywood film it would be near unwatchable, I know. But the plot, dialogue and characters are stripped down to their bare essentials, and so there is very little time to get bored or frustrated with the clichés which litter the film. Transitions in time are instantaneous and deliberately jarring, which is refreshing in its way. Cutting to the chase shaves off the need for scenes that would have been otherwise wasted with boring character development and motive explanation. It’s almost as if the whole film is an extended montage mix-down of a much meatier work. Or a high budget trailer.

The audio is particularly impressive. The cars sound suitably throaty, but all of the gunfire is handled realistically, which is to say in a percussive, subtle manner. You are never beaten into submission with exaggerated gunshots, which paradoxically makes any shootings feel even more callous and arbitrary than in the average action movie. The presence of music is also used effectively. Songs are sparingly intermingled into what is an otherwise sparse aural experience, and are often produced by an identifiable onscreen source such as a radio or hi-fi. This allows the characters to mess about with the audio in real time. At one point a guy fast forwards a CD of classical music he is listening to in his mansion. I’ve never seen anyone fast forward a CD in a movie before. It made me smile.

If you fancy checking out Go Fast, it is out on DVD February 8^th. I think it’s worth a look if you are into your French films but accept that this one is fairly mindless fun. If you liked Taxi or District 13 then Go Fast will float your boat. It’s probably better than those two actually, even though it is far more generic. And a low-fi French action film is still superior to something like the US-produced John Cena vehicle 12 Rounds. Or the UK’s Dead Man Walking.

*To be fair, the film does throw in one cop car on the highways, but the criminals just slow down until it pulls off, then put the pedal to the metal again.

A Prophet

It’s hard to talk about A Prophet without spoiling it for people who haven’t seen it yet. It is complex without being confusing, familiar without being formulaic and violent without being vulgar. Go and see it if you still can. Or get the Mesrine box set on DVD. Even though the two are quite different.

Ninja Assassin

Here are three things you should do just before you go to bed if you want to have a series of violent dreams: watch Ninja Assassin, play Grand Theft Auto 4 and read David Simon’s Homicide. I racked up all three in a row last week, and my mindscape was more than a little warped that night. But there is, of course, a difference between the listed activities. Whilst all three are filled with violence, only GTA4 and Homicide actually have any depth to the visceral images which they create. Ninja Assassin is laboriously light-weight, and its violence is so persistent and frequent that the blood and guts become boring almost instantly. It’s got that bloke from Coupling in it, and that woman from Pirates of the Caribbean who ripped off the Voodoo Lady from the Monkey Island series. It’s almost, but not quite, as low budget and awful as Blood: The Last Vampire. The presence of English people playing Yanks is enough to confirm the cash-strapped status of the production. Though James Cameron has proved time and again that big budgets don’t convert into good movies.

It wasn’t until after I left the cinema that I became aware of a major similarity between Ninja Assassin and A Prophet. The relationship between the young pupil and the old master characters within each are virtually identical. If you see both, you’ll see what I mean. But I’d recommend a good hard look at paint drying over seeing Ninja Assassin.

Up in the Air

With its one plot twist late in the game that flipped common assumptions, Up in the Air managed to become more than mediocre. It’s not that funny, but it doesn’t try to be. As a film it hasn’t got a huge amount to say, and so I’ve not got much to respond with. Instead, please accept a poem about George Clooney’s career as a substitute.

I never watched ER,

It didn’t penetrate my armour.

I was not interested

In that hospital based drama.

But Quentin Tarantino helped

This perennial charmer

Work his magic on my conscience

Like a white Barack Obama.

George Clooney first came to me

Onscreen in From Dusk Til Dawn,

I bet Clooney’s Seth Gecko

Could kill Damon’s Jason Bourne.

But those two were on the same side

In the three Ocean’s flicks,

Proving style without substance

Is like mortar without bricks.

Now Clooney’s pushing 50,

But still spinning many plates.

Let’s hope his eco-campaigning

Can alter all our fates.

Up in the Air was not that bad,

But it ran out of steam.

At least George Clooney’s character

Had quite low self-esteem.

That’ll do.

So The Book of Eli is a post-apocalyptic action-adventure starring Denzel Washington as a cat-eating*, rat-feeding messianic figure who is in possession of the last copy of The Bible. He’s been wandering the wasteland that is America for 30 years since some event (possibly both a war and a climate change type thing) literally ripped a hole in the sky, which turned up the heat a little bit. Some people were blinded by it, but on the plus side it means that everyone else gets to wear sunglasses all the time. Or sun goggles. It’s like if Mad Max was sponsored by Ray Ban.

Anyway, Denzel reluctantly kills his way across the wasteland, only willing to turn the other cheek once before he cuts off limbs. It’s a little like Bruce Willis’ “Touch me again and I’ll kill you” In The Last Boy Scout. Except I’m not sure that Willis’ character was as contradictory as Denzel’s is.

It soon emerges that the last copy of The Bible is something that is also coveted by Gary Oldman’s ambitious but evil settlement leader. He’s had his minions searching for a copy for ages, and though they are able to bring him such great works as The Da Vinci Code he is not satisfied. Apparently he’s a fan of Mussolini though. When Denzel wanders into town, kills a bunch of guys in Oldman’s bar and tries to get Tom Waits to charge up his iPod, Oldman takes an interest, and finds out via Mila Kunis that Denzel has got the book he’s been after.

Long story short, Kunis follows Washington as he gets out of town, and on the road they whittle down the remaining cronies to just one, though Washington eventually gives up his book in order to save Kunis’ life, whilst effectively ending his own.

But then he rises again.

The action is actually fairly infrequent, and whilst time is spent developing the key characters in between, there is nothing that you won’t have seen before. On the face of it The Book of Eli is an underwhelming thriller that is neither frightening nor particularly engrossing. Would you like a grade? C minus. Or a star rating? 2.

However, it does have a few things to say.

There is a very pronounced discourse on faith and religion, or more specifically Christianity, running through The Book of Eli. But it fails to validate any of its arguments about the power and importance of faith, or the importance of The Bible itself, because it goes some way towards revealing just how damaging religion of any kind can be. Oldman wants the book because he believes its word will give him dominion over the hopeless inhabitants of the wasteland, whilst Denzel is reluctant to share it with anyone else, locking its words on the page and in his mind. However, Oldman is revealed as a necessary evil, the only cohesive force in the community that is stopping everything turning into anarchy (which his deposition results in). Though he was after power, he could also have stabilised the region and brought an end to the cavalier killings on the roads.

The main purpose of Washington’s journey is to allow him to rediscover his faith and eventually find hope through Kunis’ young but eager disciple. By the film’s conclusion she has become what must be one of the most frightening things in the world: a missionary with a gun. And cloistered in one of America’s most iconic symbols of oppression, The Bible is reprinted by the barrel load, and an enormous copy takes its place amongst the much smaller copies of other holy tomes on the bookshelf of a scholarly Malcolm McDowell.

I can’t reasonably continue to criticise this film. I was fairly irritated by it during the showing, and at best it is not a particularly helpful work. Let me know how much of an idiot I am below. I think that for rational people it does not offer very much. Which is harsh, but a little true.

*Probably not the follower of an Ancient Egyptian religion then.

The Road

Having not read the book, I now wish I had. I imagine that it’s quite a bit better than this deliberately numbing journey into the death of the American dream. Though there are some striking images formed with CGI tricks, I can’t help feeling that they would have been all the more powerful if I had been forced to conjure them myself in my own head, based on nothing more than the author’s words.

Morality seems to play a significant part in The Road, and it is admirably presented as the confused, mutable force that it is in real life. However, it was difficult to reconcile the simplified ‘good guys vs. bad guys’ motif with the complexities of the themes of sacrifice and suicide which clung to the father-son relationship of the main characters.

Viggo Mortensen holds the film together, though Charlize Theron deserves kudos for her portrayal of his eerily detached wife. Oh, and there is also the best cameo from an actor who was in The Wire that you’ll see all year, but I won’t spoil it by revealing who it is.

The Road skims over some fairly important themes and events whilst repeatedly beating you over the head with others, and it will not be to everyone’s tastes. I appreciated The Road, though it is impossible to say that I ‘enjoyed’ it, because that would suggest a level of sadism that is surely unhealthy. If you want to revel in the fall of man, check it out. And given the number of apocalypse scenarios which are being played out on the silver screen at the moment, that group will include most of you.

Daybreakers

There aren’t many films that can be described as both ‘soppy’ and ‘graphically violent’, but Daybreakers is one of them. If you like your apocalypse scenarios to be explained to you, skip The Road and see this. Vampires are to blame here, and the main side effect seems to be that Chrysler cars with funny hubcaps have become incredibly popular.  If you are willing to ignore the clash of the American accents with the Australian landscape, the cliché-ridden script and the flawed plot, then Daybreakers is actually quite a fun ride. And I’ll explain why.

There is a lot of blood in Daybreakers. Vampires explode, limbs are severed, heads roll and giblets fill the screen from time to time. Despite the moments of CGI-aided carnage, some of the effects feel quite low-fi, and the creatures look like something Sam Raimi would have come up with in the 80s.

After having to sit through New Moon, it’s nice to see a Vampire movie that has more bleeding throats than it does bleeding hearts. Daybreakers is pleasantly rubbish, and the incredibly dramatic orchestral soundtrack seems zanily out of place in the near-future world it portrays, with its cyberpunk pretentions and Matrix-esque themes.

So, two flawed but worthy films, two reviews, one article and not a footnote in sight.