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.