A totally alien form of sci-fi

Low budget, thoughtful and with little need for makeup - not usually the first characteristics that spring to mind when considering sci-fi. Another Earth has reworked the genre, replacing lasers with wii remotes, space duels with teary exchanges, and Sigourney Weaver with the lovely Brit Marling.
The young writer and actress has created a film of unique quality and consideration, presenting the spooky concept of a second you in a bare and human light. As mind-blowing as the premise is, it’s the earthly aspects of Another Earth that made my skin tingle. You won’t find any slimey aliens, and the one onscreen romance is far from intergalactic. The film does well to show that it only takes mopping a floor or playing a computer game to let the mundane trivialities of this earthly life unveil deeper truths on guilt, love, regret and the human condition.
Presented in stop-start, dusty, almost retro cinematic style, the film shows events as if artifacts of memory, conceptions of a world that is impossibly complex and haunted only by tragedies which are very real. This lack of Hollywood pizazz may catch the viewer off guard, allowing him or her to totally buy into the one aspect of the plot which is truly science fiction.
But even without this story of a second world, the destructive passion of protagonists Rhoda and John’s love story would make a painfully good drama in itself. The film gives us so much more than we need, exceeding standard expectations of sci-fi cinema and leaving its audience with unshakable questions to consider.
And so, hours after leaving the cinema, I’m finding myself gazing into my cup of tea, wondering: Who am I? Could I be better? Have I done things right? Would I change things if I could?
And more importantly, could this be my film of the year?

Here's the scoop - Feature Length Havana Advert Pulls in Crowds at Local Cinema

Locusts, liquor, beasts and bastards; it breathes with rum-tinged breath a gonzo vernacular that can only mean the work of one man - Hunter S. Thompson.

The writer’s only published work of fiction, The Rum Diary, has been adapted for the big screen, and will be the much appreciated drug of choice for addicts of Thompson’s work who prefer to let his wackiness wash over them in audio-visual form. Starring Hollywood’s own version of the man, ageing Cherokee dreamboat Johnny Depp, the simplest of viewers couldn’t be blamed for (like thinking that Val Kilmer is actually the real guy out the Doors) believing that Johnny and Hunter and one and the same.

Sorry, I’m being utterly cynical. It’s always tempting to be cynical when one individual has a whole genre pinned on him. Gonzo journalism is a definition only ever really given credit by the work of Thomson. He created it, after all, monopolising on his eccentricity and a vocabulary as colourful as his weekends.

Depp’s character, aspiring (but failing) novelist Paul Kemp, in many ways mirrors the life of its original creator. Thompson also spent time looking for work in Puerto Rico, and he too took on journalism as a preliminary career, hoping to later graduate to the golden realms of fiction. Depp fits the bill comfortably, with his innately kooky gait and camp demeanour. Recently, I have almost been thinking that his distinctive style would suit well a retirement to the stage, so theatrical are his expressions. It was this slapstick element that made me walk out of The Tourist barely halfway through, laughing bitterly. But here, in vibrant Puerto Rico, it works. He’s ‘artistic’, as his editor, played by Richard Jenkins, may have put it.

I doubt that the film will do the same for the field of journalism as it no doubt has for rum sales. The journalism film is a genre of its own, from His Girl Friday to Never Been Kissed, and academic literature can even be found on this representation of a professional reality in the arts (see Brian McNair’s Journalists in Film: Heroes and Villians). But perhaps ‘reality’ is not the right word. Invariably, journalists are portrayed on the silver screen as hackneyed, chain-smoking characters with no respect for their liver or deadlines. Health warning, kids: don’t trust this myth. Work on your shorthand before you start on the hard stuff.

Although, in saying that, Thompson offered a compelling argument when he said, “Does it look like drugs have fucked me up? I’m sitting here on a beautiful beach in Mexico; I’ve written three books. I’ve got a fine one-hundred acre fortress in Colorado. On that evidence, I’d have to advise the use of drugs.” So go on, if you’re brave enough, try it.

Having gone off on a tangent here, I’ll return to the film to say that it’s giggly entertainment, made charming by performances from Michael Rispoli and Giovanni Ribisi, who, combined with a pari of bloodshot contacts, makes a hilarious and startlingly believable drunk.

The one downside is the woman-shaped hole in the plot. There is a fluffy romance, with Amber Heard playing the lucky lady who gets to snog Depp. But her character is disappointingly hollow.

It seems that portrayal of the female in cinema suffers the same sort of 2D misrepresentation as that of the ubiquitous journalist.

A Plea

I’VE HAD ENOUGH!

I can’t take this anymore! Just give me it baaaaaack! Take everything else and give me it BACK!

Someone has taken my cine-pass. It’s a small plastic rectangle of wonderment, having given me much cinematic pleasure over the years. I turn to it in times of need. I think of it as a friend. And now it’s gone.

Some thoughtless idiot stole my purse last weekend, and in it was my cine-pass. I pay monthly for my cinema, you see, in order that I can grace the theatre seats of my local picture house whenever I please. I also lost my bank cards, driver’s license, student and library cards, all of which have to be replaced. But none of that matters. I’ve lost my cine-pass.

In this time of despair, I turn to fond memories; Showing up impromptu and ending up watching The Troll Hunter, only to sit perplexed and mildly astounded, thinking, ‘What the hell is this?’; Heading straight to the dark warmth of the cinema after one too many gins the night before to let the mindless sentiment of It’s Complicated wash over my pounding headache (thank you, Meryl.); Reluctantly opting for the cheesily titled Going the Distance, and then ending up grinning with joy in a complete u-turn while Charlie Day makes me giggle and Drew Barrymore redeems herself following the utterly awful Whip It.

The point is - there is absolutely no way that I would have seen these films if it hadn’t have been for my cine-pass. Granted, I’ve also seen a lot of crap. But the joy of being a cinema regular is in challenging your trailer-influenced impressions. Posters on the sides of busses can only reveal so much.

So PLEASE - ! - Just give me it back.

Pssssst...

I have a crush.

He’s smart, almost geeky, but in not to the extent that he’s wearing mega thick glasses and using nasal spray. No, he’s intelligent. Mature and articulate, he’s a family man, the rock for a group of flawed people.

Sometimes, he makes me laugh. He works in a big company but also has this banana stand business on the go. Sweet, eh? And he cycles. Something cute about a man that cycles.

Talk, dark and handsome, but not in an obvious way, he has a face that looks warm. Does that make sense? Oh, I can’t describe it. You wouldn’t understand anyway. He’s not your average guy.

He’s fictional.

He’s Michael Bluth.

I love Arrested Development.

Don't judge a book by its colour.

Evil has a new face; it’s powdered, blushed, preened and void of cold sores (well, mostly), auburn hair swings at a totally non-accidental angle around its milk-white jaw and it speaks at you from tastefully painted lips: ‘There are some real racists in this town.’

A snigger is heard from the film theatre. The ubiquitous hypocrisy of cushty suburban life reaches racial-political heights in Tate Taylor’s The Help, a screen adaptation of the novel by Kathryn Stockett.

The evil in question is personified by the inherently racist town bitch, Hilly Holbrook. In between the sop-induced tears and sniffles in the film theatre, you’ll hear almost equal amounts of tuts and sighs of disapproval, most of which will be aimed at Miss Hilly. Played by the stoney-faced Bryce Dallas Howard, she is the focal point of our moral indignation, which the audience is encouraged to relish from its relatively fair and right-thinking historical stance. Heads quietly shake and popcorn falls from mouth as the entirely nonfictional injustices of the 1960‘s are revealed.

Emma Stone plays the young aspiring writer in The Help who secretly assists the local black maids of her PC-backward town to tell their story - something which seems to come naturally to a character brought up among rife gossip and telltales. Finally, this gossip has a just cause.

So far, we have the baddy, the goody and the down-trodden socially disadvantaged. Sounds like a pretty black and white tearjecker so far (please excuse the pun).

Enter Celia Foote. Played by Jessica Chastain, Celia plays the role of thwarting our prejudices; a two-dimensional bimbo to begin with, her heart-breaking story becomes the unlikely one to give the film its real warmth.

Kids can be cruel...

Type the words ‘every parents nightmare’ into the movie blogosphere right now and guaranteed you’ll end up staring Tilda Swinton in the face, this time - in her pendular swings between glam and gaunt - resembling more the latter. Lynne Ramsay’s screen adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, about the mother of a teenage boy who commits a high school massacre, is an absolutely terrifying film, and the baddy isn’t the obvious. Forget the sinister murdering son - the real horror is suburban life, with its eternal clutches and sleekit facade, as it tricks wanderlust protagonist Eva into thinking that having a family and settling down won’t ruin her life.

Family is binding. Many young people, just back from their gap year and planning to hug a chimpanzee in Thailand next summer, have that thought at the back of their head that one day they’ll do the parent thing; fulfill their lives conventionally. We Need to Talk About Kevin isn’t going to let you do this. You’ll be too damn scared that the bundle of joy you give birth too will actively and persistently ruin your life.

Just why we find children so terrifying is open to speculation. For me, it is the potential; that lovely little princess niece of yours might go on to become a doctor! Yeah, a Haroldette Shipman maybe... You just don’t know. It reminds me of a short story called ‘Genesis and Catastrophe’ in Roald Dahl’s Kiss Kiss, a collection of short stories for adults. The story tells of a mother’s difficult birth, and both she and baby pull through. How lovely. Plot spoiler alert: the baby’s name is Adolf Hitler.

Visually, the film is obviously a book adaption. The whole thing reads like prose from a page shoved up on the screen. Much of the mood and discomfort is told in aesthetics. Packed with repulsive imagery, food is repeatedly shown spilling and festering, giving an air of decay and unease, and also providing a symbol for the ubiquitous everyday consumerism that forces us to choose tame, materialistic, suburban life.

The consumerism that so often grates moody teenagers up the wrong way.

Meadows and Considine, the real stars

Hot off the brain-cell-killing press, the Sun has reported that the 2011 Stone Roses reunion is to be accompanied by a movie made by Shane Meadows. It’s all looking good according to the newspaper that never ever lies.

At first, I read this feeling pessimistic as to what sort of value a rockumentary reunion movie would actually offer your average movie fan, or Stone Roses fan, or like me, movie and Stone Roses fan. I’ve been to an Ian Brown solo gig, and, still today, the only bits that people care about are Waterfall and I am the Resurrection. I skeptically await any descent new material. So all this can really be is another money-milking pump on the sore-nippled cow that rock reunions have become, no?

No. I have every faith in Shane Meadows. Obviously he’s perfect for this working class, gruff sort of ‘elizabeth-my-dear’ stuff. I mean, of course they wouldn’t get Disney Pixar to do it. This could be quite exciting.

More importantly, the Meadows/Considine synergy that keeps churning out such awesome kitchen sink dramas is the British film industry’s most exciting working relationship today, and by default, I find myself watching one film of theirs and reestablishing my appreciation of them both relatively.

Paddy Considine’s directorial debut in Tyrannosaur is astounding. He reportedly kept in close contact with Meadows, friend and collaborator, throughout the making of the film. It’s been a while since I last left a film theatre so dumbstruck. Of course, it’s nasty and full of cruelty and violence and poverty and it’s hard to watch; but the real bits that make you want to wail and insanely embrace the nearest human being are moments of heart-breaking kindness in the face of resistance. This is symbolised through the protagonists’ relationship - Joseph (Peter Mullan, an actor who never struggles to play a part at the bottom of the council tax band) and Hannah (Olivia Colman).

Aw aye, that’s that bird fae Peepshow, eh?

She is absolutely perfect, horrifyingly so. I want to run round to her house right now and make sure that she isn’t actually a real-life victim of domestic torment. Dialogue never falls below spot-on. She is so utterly convincing and real.

It was this real-ness that kept us fixed while Considine’s enraged character sought bloody revenge in Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes, and instilled endearment in Meadows’ This is England, and, in a break from tradition, caused a smirk at Considine as rapper twat in Meadows’ Le Donk and Scor-zay-zee.

With any luck, Meadows’ take on the Stone Roses won’t give the band members the same laughable qualities as the mock-rockstars in Le Donk. But who knows - maybe Mani’s dug will end up mauling Brown on a council estate between gigs.

The specs mess up my mane.

THE king has returned, and this time in a whole new dimension. Watch Zazu fly right over your head towards Pride Rock. Sit back as Rafiki shakes his magical staff just inches before your eyes. Be amazed as stampedes of wildebeest tumble unnervingly closer to your cinema seat. Or simply chew over your popcorn wondering if this 3D malarky is really any better than your old VHS.

Very few children of the 90‘s will be disappointed by The Lion King rerelease. Some may even notice the odd 3D tweak in the animation, and a few will be left wondering what is the point.

Money, of course. The Lion King made nearly $900 million at the box office when it was first released in 1994, making it Disney’s most successful film and the highest grossing traditionally animated feature film of all time. Try to find someone who hasn’t yet seen it and, with 1.5 billion sales and rentals of it on DVD and video, you’ll find your work cut out for you. And don’t worry, a 3D blueray release is on its way.

Amid widespread criticism of 3D’s contribution to the film-going experience, Lion King director Rob Minkoff believes that his Disney colleagues’ rerelease is an Avatar-like exception to flout these concerns. He admitted in a recent interview with Movie Muser blog that 3D, when not done right, can be disappointing. However, when browsing the latest box office figures, it is hard to believe that he would even care.

At best the Lion King’s new 3D element is unnecessary and slight, at worst it’s kind of distracting. The pain-staking process of marrying 3D with hand drawn animation may have been a financial success for Disney, but the effects are underwhelming in terms of entertainment. By all means, get out there and see it. No one could argue that the opening Circle of Life sequence and the tragedy of Mufasa’s death are not emotionally charged scenes to enjoy on the big screen. However, if you have the opportunity to save on a couple of quid for 3D glasses, then you won’t be missing out on much, and if you’re taking kids, it won’t be the demensionalisation of Mufasa that leaves them grinning from ear to ear.

Matt Bochenski of British film magazine Little White Lies, for me, sums up the problem with the 3D boom perfectly: film-makers are trying “to poke us in the eye rather than pierce us in the heart”. 

Meanwhile, I’m joining Mark Kermode, in “the 2D fightback”. Perhaps 3D’s noisiest critic, he claims that the new technology is “phoney-baloney gimmickry” and that 3D glasses result in a 30% colour loss. Watch ‘How to enjoy a 3D movie’, and you will find a short presentation from Kermode, showing the anti-3D masses how to alter their glasses to reverse the effects of 3D (replace the left lens with a second right one, or vice versa, so that both are the same.) I’m working on mine right now.

It won’t stop with the Lion King. Love it or loathe it, or indeed remain indifferent, 3D has well and truly found its way into today’s cinema listings, allowing for not just guts-over-substance horrors like Piranha 3D, but also reworked versions of our old favourites. One of the original Lion King producers, Don Hahn, recently told film blog HeyYouGuys that Disney has been considering 3D technology since The Princess and the Frog back in 2009. He gushed that Peter Pan would be his favourite Disney film to see in 3D, and admitted that work had already been done on Beauty and the Beast, while Alladin is also being considered.

Until those make it to the cinema, hakuna matata and hang on to your specs.

Crazy and stupid, but no love

These people don’t exist! Okay, I understand, it’s only a film. I know, I know, this is work of fiction. But come on! A 13-year-old boy with a firmly devoted grasp on the concept of true love? A man who at first appears only aesthetically perfect, but in the end turns out to have a heart of gold too?!

And then we have the Steve Carell entity; a mystical product of saccharine characterisation that shimmies from one romcom to the next, slowly burrowing its way into the this-is-what-happens-in-the-real-world understanding of a viewer who is existentially there. Bewitching, really. Crazy, Stupid Love is hollywood witchcraft at it’s most manipulative. Do not well up; do not grin at the screen; do not be fooled.

The characters in Carell’s latest film are not merely fiction, they’re fantasy. Sitting bemused as you watch these polished cardboard cutouts of a hollywood reality, you may wonder to yourself why you have never encountered anyone like this in your own true experiences, while probably expecting a Lord of the Rings Orc and a Star Wars Stormtrooper to burst on screen and simultaneously profess in a sweet but funny way that they are each others soul mates.

But what is there to expect? You’ve seen Carell romcoms before. Damn it, you’ve seen any romcom before. These guys know what they’re doing. Like big fuzzy bullies, they know the gags that’ll make your heart leap with contrived sentiment. They’ve watched you in your sleep. They know you’ve read that Jodi Picoult novel.

And they got me. At some point in the film, my bottom lip quivered and a tear rolled down my cheek. Formulaic feel-good films of hollywood, I hate you.

Synth versus Silence - a Gary Numan Cars production

Ladies, Noah from the Notebook is in revolt. Like post-Cry-Baby Depp, Ryan Gosling refuses to slot into the pretty-boy pigeonhole. He’s struggling to shake off the 50’s heartthrob vibe, resonant of Dean and Brando, while straight women across the world wait with dread for his inevitable statement film; his venture into the unsexy; his devoted commitment to obesity or his desire to play a creepy outcast with scissors for hands...

So enjoy it while you can and worry not - he is still painfully sexy in Drive.

It’s a smart film, in which Gosling’s quiet solemnity is a parody of all chiseled frontmen. Every aspect of the film is shrewdly selected and stylised with the 80’s in mind. The pink font used for the opening credits glares at you in preparation for scenes that lionise the bomber jacket and resemble an A-ha music video (and I hope you like synth-heavy pop). The whole thing reads like an homage to the car chase, a staple ingredient in 80’s action.

Amid a cultural “born in the 80’s” resurrection, Drive is current and slick, the latter quality achieved in very few words. You see, when someone asks me a question and I pause for a sustained length of time, people think I’m slow. When Gosling does the same as the unnamed driver, he pulls it off entirely. There’s no way he’s thinking about something as banal as the pizza he had for lunch. His portrayal as a quiet working class babe says: I’ve got a novel inside me but I’m just not ready for talk. This equates to awesome street cred, both in the film and externally as an actor who seems to be everywhere at the moment.

Crawl back under your rock if all this rugged perfection grates your nerves. Or join us and enter the Golden Age of silence and Gosling.

Cry at weddings, laugh at funerals.

‘Uhhh, I might make it to the thing on Friday. Not sure yet, need to check the diary. Or something might come up. In fact, I can’t come. I’m sorry. I’m, uh, really busy.’

Sound familiar? Then you’ve probably just purchased a shiny new DVD boxset. Stroking the smooth cardboard, slipping the top on and off, carefully buffing the discs with your quickening breath - people will worry about you. Better make it a good one then...

Six Feet Under has taken over my life, helped largely by the fact that it’s brilliant and honest and real. My last HBO endeavour was Sex and the City, which I would only recommend to highly sedated people who have had no previous urges to kill the Carrie Bradshaws of our world. God, that woman will annoy you. Six Feet Under shares only the tense exposition of the HBO hum, and thankfully nothing else.

Each one of the Fisher family and their lovers/business partners/friends/massage clients will have you signing away your days to a life of simultaneous laughter and tears. Some people will think you’re crazy, because who wants to watch a drama in which no five minutes pass without a mention of the word ‘funeral’. As one of those crazies, I have to say, funerals turn out to be pretty funny.

I never know whether to laugh or cry, but I know it’s at least one of them. For a drama doused in death, it makes for a surprisingly lively viewer.

Cortés thinks inside the box

Anyone who has ever seen Phone Booth will understand that a film about a man in a box can only last so long. Director Rodrigo Cortés’ claustrophobic thriller, Buried, takes this idea and confines it further. The end result is fleeting moments of suspenseful brilliance, sadly lost in 90 minutes of slow action.

The cinema sits in darkness, hearing nothing but increasingly panicked breathing. Truck driver Paul Conroy, played by Ryan Reynolds, awakens to find himself buried in a coffin with only a mobile phone and a lighter. A race against both time and battery life ensues as he tries desperately to get rescued from a situation that will leave you with the curious urge to stretch your legs.

Reynolds’ performance is, at times, darkly comic. At one point we are treated to what must be the most frustrated portrayal of being put on hold, while more tender parts of the plot are handled convincingly with a gruff but emotional quality. Combine this with Buried’s shudder-at-the-thought concept, and the tension can really draw you in.

Nevertheless, the real tragedy of this film is that the tiny cast and crew really did have their work cut out for them. Just how do you hold an audience’s attention for so long with only one man? Often I found my mind wandering, waiting for the next bout of action and thinking, ‘does this guy ever need to go for a pee?’.

Buried is a valiant effort at breaking blockbuster convention, but sometimes you need to think outside the box.

Bradley Cooper high on life? Whitey...

So, some guy that you barely kind of know offers you a drug that lets you access the whole of your potential, you become extremely successful but not without a price - you become addicted, discover that it poses grave risks to your health, end up in a dangerous world of crime and the shifty guy your dealing to suddenly transforms himself into a sinister surgeon with nasty intentions.

Good plot, right? And now to wrap it up; 12 months later it all just works itself out.

Neil Burger’s Limitless has a very lazy ending which fails to answer the questions brought up by its fast-paced and inventive plot. Too many issues are thrown up in the air amid sweeping shots of a buzzing metropolis and a slew of suspicious looking minor characters. That satisfying feeling of it all clicking into place is an enlightenment that never comes.

A more forgiving viewer could see this as a representation of the quick pace of city life, but many will just see an incoherent story. There is something deeply unfair about putting the protagonist at the centre of a murder enquiry - another casually dropped bombshell in the plot - and then never resolving whether he did it or not.

The action scenes make it almost worth it, convincingly handled by Bradley Cooper as zero-to-hero Eddie Morra. The drug abuse theme is quite interesting as well, as his slick lifestyle takes all the twist of any other addict’s; picking up leggy women in a Maserati one minute, and looking rough as a badger’s arse the next, all accompanied with cheesy go-get-em rhetoric, dreamlike CGI and trippy camerawork.

Yet even the film’s flashy cast and unusual storyline can’t complete the tethered plot. If Limitless were to be any drug, it would be one with a hard comedown.

Why you should watch the X Factor

IT’s Sunday morning on the bus and you hear: ‘Aye maybe, but the lassie could dance.’ Now you’re queuing for a coffee and hear a squeal: ‘BAAAAH! OMG, I was like, nut, he is NOT for real!’ Then you overhear a heated conversation while on the subway: ‘No way, they were well better than that group you voted for last year.’

Eventually you meet your friend and he opens his mouth to greet you: ‘Did you watch the X Factor last night?’

Oh for god’s sake.

It’s that time of year again, when the few who haven’t yet seen the X Factor will be driven mental by its dominance in everyday chat. It’s time to face the music, a fan of the show might say. X Factor should be watched, if only so that you know what the O’Leary everyone is on about.

Of course, it’s not exactly of cult status, and it won’t gain you intellectual cred at a dinner party, but the X Factor is car-crash telly, and it’s painfully difficult not to enjoy. With a celebrity judging panel re-shuffle and a new American-style audition format, the show is slowly filling the boots that its adoring public has stretched out for it.

Occasionally, you might even be impressed. Gary Barlow produces regular nuggets of stellar pop advice. Dermot O’Leary is a genuinely funny man. Tulisa Contostavlos is a pretty inspiring woman, with an endearing sense of realness to her personality. Sure, the cynic inside you may think they’re all soulless sell-outs, but you’re in your jammies at eight o’clock on a Saturday night. Sell-outs are the least of your problems.

So sit back, place your tongue firmly in cheek and enjoy. I hate to say it, but you’ll probably thank me for it.