Guns, One Liners And Guy Pearce = Fun – Lockout Review

In the Lockout trailer, a man with a very deep voice explains the plot, and then a character in the movie says “There’s only one man who can get her out”.  And of course, that man is Jason Statha….wait, is that Guy Pearce?!

So here’s the plot of Lockout.  There’s a maximum security prison in space, where the world’s most dangerous men serve their sentences in cryogenic stasis (in other words, they are frozen and locked up), and on one particular day, the president’s daughter Emily (Maggie Grace) is there to find out if the prisoners are being treated humanely, or if they are being experimented on.  She interviews one prisoner, Hydell (who for whatever reason is a psychopathic Glaswegian, but is played by Englishman Joseph Gilgun) about his experience of the prison, but it goes wrong when he manages to get hold of a gun from a secret service agent.  He quickly finds a way to wake up all the prisoners, including his older brother Alex (Vincent Regan, who’s actually Welsh).  The prisoners soon take over the prison, and once they realise that Grace is in fact the daughter of the president of the United States, they have their bargaining tool.

Enter Snow, a recently prosecuted former government agent, who is set to become of the prisoners on MS One, unless he chooses to rescue Emily.  Snow clearly attended the same sarcasm classes as Snake Plissken, as he is less than enthused by the prospect of boarding a maximum security prison under the control of thousands of dangerous criminals.  In fact, he’d rather castrate himself with rocks than do it.  It would be a very short film if he just walked away and the president just blew up the prison, so he eventually agrees to the mission.

Lockout is based on a story by Luc Besson, and a quick look through Besson’s filmography will tell you that his ideas vary wildly from the brilliant to the bloody awful.  Lockout probably comes in somewhere around the middle, it’s certainly not original or clever, but it is entertaining, thanks mostly to Guy Pearce.  It’s a different look and type of movie for Pearce, as we’re used to seeing him in more upmarket roles such as Ed Exley in L.A. Confidential, or Leonard Shelby in Memento.  He’s buffed himself up to play Snow, and is clearly having a great time as a wise-cracking, arse kicking anti-hero.  Snow just doesn’t care who he annoys as long as he gets what he wants, something that is particularly enjoyable in the way he abuses Emily, despite being sent into space to rescue her.  Whether it’s forcibly dying her hair, or making inappropriate gags about oral sex, he just doesn’t really care about Emily’s well-being, just getting off the prison and back down to Earth alive.  He has plenty of memorable lines, and handles the action with ease too.

There’s nothing in Lockout that will surprise you, but directors James Mather and Stephen St. Leger do a good job of making the film look more expensive than it probably was, and have the kind of stylish flourish to their shots that would suggest a more experienced director was in charge.  An early car/bike chase features some shonky CGI, but other than that the film looks great.  Lockout is a movie that doesn’t require much from a viewer.  You can sit back, relax and just enjoy the ride as Pearce delivers the kind of lines Arnie and Bruce specialised in during the 80s, and beats the crap out of guys like they used to too.

It won’t become your favourite movie, but you could certainly find worse ways to pass 90 minutes.

@TheGlassCase

Blockbusters Don’t Get Much Bigger (Or Better) Than This – Avengers Assemble Review

Okay, first things first.  Avengers Assemble sets a VERY high bench mark for 2012 blockbusters.  The likes of Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spiderman have enough hype surrounding them as it is, but Joss Whedon’s Marvel extravaganza gives the producers of those movies a lot to think about.

Whedon has already produced one of the movies of the year with The Cabin In The Woods, but the sheer size of Avengers Assemble is a daunting task to take on, but Whedon has absolutely nailed it.  This movie instantly catapults itself into the reckoning amongst the greatest superhero movies ever made, no mean feat when you consider the size of the movie, and that’s in terms of budget, ambition and cast.  Because this is a movie with a very strong (and very big) cast, all of whom need to have substantial amounts of screen time, without slowing the pace of the movie and sucking the excitement out of it.

This is something that Whedon has handled extremely well.  The movie begins with Thor’s (Chris Hemsworth) bitter and angry brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) stealing an energy source known as ‘the tesseract’ (although it could just as easily be called the Macguffin), as well as Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Dr. Erik Selveg (Stellan Skarsgård reprising his role in Thor) from Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and S.H.I.E.L.D.  He has plans to conquer and rule Earth, and as the title of the movie suggests, Fury is forced to reactivate the ‘Avengers initiative’ and sends Agent Coulston (Clark Gregg) and the Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) to bring Captain America (a freshly thawed Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), Bruce Banner aka The Incredible Hulk (not Eric Bana, not Edward Norton, but Mark Ruffalo) and Thor together to save humanity.

That leads to an awful lot of ego all in the one place, and it’s no surprise when the newly formed team doesn’t gel immediately.  Thor in particular is less than happy, and wants Loki to return to Asgard rather than be killed or held on Earth.

And that’s about as much of the plot as I care to reveal.  I could probably get away with saying more without straying into dangerous spoiler territory, but while Avengers Assemble is a great movie, it doesn’t take a genius to work out where the plot goes.  So without saying more about the plot, I’ll concentrate on the writing.

With so many characters so heavily involved in the film, it would be easy for Whedon to sideline a few of them, and give all the action and dialogue and hero shots over to one or two.  But this is not the case in Avengers Assemble, and everyone gets plenty to do.  The film has all the action and drama you’d expect from a superhero movie, but is also consistently hilarious, with lots of memorable lines and moments for almost every character.  As we know from his own movies, Tony Stark is the most sarcastic superhero of all time, but he’s not the only one with sharp wit and comic timing.  Whedon’s script is smart, funny and most importantly, never boring.  The film may be almost two and a half hours long, but it never drags and while there’s many dialogue-heavy scenes, they never last too long before something BIG and EXCITING happens.

The acting is great across the board too.  Mark Ruffalo is the only newcomer to the Marvel universe, replacing Edward Norton as Bruce Banner, but gives a quietly assured (except when he’s massive and green, obviously) performance as the highly intelligent physicist.  You know what you’re getting with the rest of the cast, having seen their characters in their own movies already, and all of them play it straight, avoiding the hammy histrionics that could easily come while playing superheroes, gods or giant green angry monsters.  There are no complaints on the CGI front either, with everything looking spectacular and the set pieces are huge and hugely impressive.

So all this makes Avengers Assemble the first must-see movie of the year.  It will make huge amounts of money worldwide, and with every character capable of carrying a movie on their own, you can expect to see a lot more of the Avengers, alone or together in the next five years.  Blockbusters don’t get much bigger (or better) than this.

@TheGlassCase

You’ll Get A Sinking Feeling Watching This Movie – Battleship Review

Battleship is a movie that starts dumb, and gets progressively dumber as it progress.  It’s high on unintentional comedy, and low on excitement, originality and particularly, a decent plot.  It’s a cliché-fest in which you’ll have no sympathy for any of the characters, or be able to decide if you’re supposed to be on the side of the good old US Navy, or the (apparently) really terribly nasty aliens.

So here’s how the plot of Battleship plays out.  Scientists discover a planet in another galaxy that has the potential to host life in the way Earth does.  They design super-mega communication devices that allow them to beam messages to this planet.  Apparently it works, as five spacecraft make their way to earth, one of which collides with a satellite, breaking into pieces which scatter across the globe, most notably in Hong Kong, where it causes devastation.  Meanwhile, the other four ships land off the coast of Hawaii, where the annual RIMPAC War Games event is taking place between rival navies (although to make things simple, it’s just the US and Japanese navies that actually get screen time).

After that, the aliens and the navy have a nice chat about life on each other’s planets then watch Jersey Shore together before parting ways and exchanging emails.  Okay, not really.  Unsurprisingly, they don’t get along, and proceed to spend the next 90 minutes blowing each other up in new and (un)exciting ways.  It seems that the craft that crash landed in Hong Kong was designed as a kind of communications ship, and since it is now destroyed, the aliens intend to use the communication devices in Hawaii to send for back up.  As you can imagine, America is well upset about that, so their navy, lead by Taylor Kitsch (who plays a dick) and a Japanese captain who Kitsch has developed a rivalry with which may result in him being kicked out of the navy, but was rescued after his ship was sunk and knows a way to track the enemy without radar or satellite.

Anyway, enough about the plot.  And if I’m being honest, you can pretty much fill in the gaps yourself, there’s no surprises coming your way.  Battleship is just really, really rubbish.  As I mentioned before, Taylor Kitsch becomes the hero in the film, but he’s actually totally unlikeable.  At the beginning of the film he’s drunk and while trying to impress a girl (Brooklyn Decker), he breaks into a garage to get her a chicken burrito before being tazed.  His brother thinks he’s a dick (because he is), and tells him he’s joining the navy.  That Kitsch’s character ends up becoming captain of the one remaining ship tells you just what happens to his brother.  Kitsch has already suffered a career setback after John Carter’s horrific flop just a few weeks ago, and this movie is not going to do him any favours either.  His character actually says (without irony) ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this’, AFTER his brother has been killed and the aliens have destroyed any number of ships.

Which leads me on to savaging the script and the other characters in the film, all of which are rubbish.  Decker plays an army physio, who just happens to take a hike up the hill where the communications satellites are with an army veteran who feels he is no longer a man after losing both his legs in battle, and coming to terms with his new prosthetic limbs.   They inevitably become involved in the effort to stop the aliens, and of course the veteran finds himself and leads the way.  One of the biggest problems with the script is that it makes the aliens out to be the bad guys, when it’s actually the US navy that fires the first shot.  It may only be a warning shot, but they don’t tell the aliens that, and it basically gives them no choice but to fire back, which they do of course, with their technically superior weaponry.

The CGI in the movie is actually very good, with the alien space craft looking particularly shiny and wonderful, and the aliens themselves having a reasonably unique look.  But lovely explosions and green screen wizardry do not a good movie make, and Battleship is most definitely not a good movie. It’s far too long, it’s clichéd to the point of parody, and most importantly, it’s boring.  Director Peter Berg has made some good films, with Friday Night Lights (which is one of the great American sports movies) and The Kingdom, but Battleship is not a career highlight.

This is one dull and uninspiring movie, and in a year packed with blockbusters that seem certain to deliver (Avengers Assemble, The Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus and Skyfall in particular), Battleship seems set to sink without a trace.  Miss!

@TheGlassCase

We Need To Talk About Celtic – How I Gave An Opinion And Suffered The Consequences

Last summer I started writing about football for a website called ThisisFutbol.com.  I don’t get paid to write there, but the editor liked the first piece I submitted (an article about the Old Firm providing value for money as a result of several last game of the season SPL deciders), and we agreed that I’d write two articles a week.

Since then I’ve written Scottish and English football, and occasionally European football too.  Some of the articles have had a lot of hits and comments, and some haven’t, such is the life of a football ‘journalist’ (I can’t really call myself a journalist; I’ve never been paid for my opinion).  Of course, during that time I’ve had some negative feedback to my articles and have been called ‘gutter press’ and a ‘tosser’ (by Wolves fans on two different articles!), and had other people disagreeing with my point in more sociable ways.  It’s not something that I can’t handle, in fact, I rather enjoy it.  I’d rather have an angry, negative reaction than no reaction at all, and I can’t deny that I’ve occasionally written articles that I knew might be considered controversial, or at least the opposite of popular opinion.

Last week, an article I’d written about Neil Lennon and his recent spate of angry reactions to refereeing decisions was published on the site (you can read the full article here: http://thisisfutbol.com/2012/04/blogs/scottish-premier-league/why-the-sfa-have-to-punish-neil-lennon-now).  In particular, the article was about Lennon’s actions and comments following the Scottish Cup semi-final defeat against Hearts.  Referee Euan Norris awarded Hearts a controversial late penalty, after Celtic midfielder Victor Wanyama appeared to handle in the box.  It was originally believed that Norris had awarded the penalty after Joe Ledley had blocked a shot with his hand, but Norris apparently told Celtic players that he’d awarded it for Wanyama’s handball, something television replays appear to confirm.

Lennon didn’t participate in post-match interviews, sending first team coach Alan Thompson to do them instead, but later in the afternoon he took to Twitter and said that he believed that the refereeing decisions going against Celtic were ‘personal’.  In addition to his previous comments about Willie Collum after the League Cup semi-final, and being sent to the stands at half-time during the last Old Firm match, I felt it was time for the SFA to punish Lennon with a lengthy touchline ban.

I enjoy writing about football, and if you regularly read my blog, you’ll know that I write about television and film, music and other sports too, and I also write for an online magazine, Vulturehound (vulturehound.co.uk).  Ultimately I would like to be paid for my writing, so I try to write impartially on all topics, and even football, although I don’t attempt to hide that I am a Rangers supporter when I’m on Twitter or in any other aspect of my life.

On Thisisfutbol, you can approve comments left on your articles yourself, and for the most part, I approve them all.  As I said earlier, I welcome any reaction to what I’ve written, and the more hits my articles get, the more the site gets, which increases my chances of being spotted and becoming Britain’s next top journalist (or something).  I knew that my article about Lennon would get plenty of hits, as most of my previous articles about Celtic or Rangers have had a decent amount of hits compared with other articles on the site.

But I still wasn’t quite prepared for how extreme the reaction would be.  And that is the reason why I’m writing these words now.  I’ve decided that I will use my blog to highlight some of these reactions, and anything I quote in this blog will be unedited, and can also be seen below the original article.

The first comment on the article was rather tame, although certainly not flattering.  ‘Laughing’ wrote:

What a lazy piece of journalism…yawn…

Nothing I can’t handle, and the same was true of the second comment, from ‘Shooglenifty’, who said:

You should get a job in the Daily Record.

Now I’m not sure how one gets a job ‘in’ a newspaper (perhaps by being an advert?), but it could have been worse, at least they didn’t say The Sun.

Then things started to get a little bit more ‘interesting’.  And by interesting, I mean mad.

Don’t forget to blame the Catholic schools & the Pope! Personally I blame Jesus! If it wasn’t for him and his whole inventing Christianity thing Catholics wouldn’t exist and then we wouldn’t have people like that horrible little Neil Lennon!

Don’t forget to leave those important points out of your next anti-Celtic piece you care to write.

On a serious note, even Goebbels would have struggled to write an article this one-sided! It’s sad that with Rangers dying the only thing their fans can think to do is launch personal attack after personal attack against Neil Lennon!

WE ARE ALL NEIL LENNON! HAIL HAIL!

Wise words, ‘KevDP4L’, wise words.  Was my article really a ‘personal attack’ on Neil Lennon, or was it really just a condemnation of the way he reacts to defeat and what he perceives as being incorrect refereeing decisions?  I replied to his comment by saying:

Why are you bringing up religion? It’s a very strange angle to take.

And that was my first reaction.  I’d made no reference to Neil Lennon’s religion, or his nationality (something I’ll be accused of later), so why bring it up?  ‘KevDP4L’ had this to say:

To emphasize that if you’re going to write the same old anti-Celtic, anti-Neil Lennon drivel other Rangers fans do you may as well come out and say what you really mean.

Lets not act like it’s a secret that the hatred towards Neil Lennon comes from the fact that he is a Catholic from Northern Ireland who had the audacity to play for and then manage Celtic!

Now this is a standard defence of Neil Lennon from Celtic fans.  They simply cannot comprehend that people would dislike Lennon for any reason other than his religion and his association with Celtic.  I won’t deny, and can’t deny, that there are Rangers fans who do hate him for these reasons, but I am not one of them.  As a Rangers fan, of course I dislike him because he played for Celtic, they are our biggest (and really only) rivals, I’m hardly going to cheer for them, am I?  His behaviour on the pitch as a player made me dislike him, and that was intensified by him being part of a Celtic team that was winning more trophies than they had for a long time.  Again, this is a natural reaction for a rival fan.  Barcelona fans probably hate Sergio Ramos in the same way, or Liverpool fans hate Paul Scholes.  It’s part of football, and football supporters judge players by what they do on the pitch, not their religion or race.

The negative comments continued to flood in, but this one from ‘Adam Rush’ caught my attention more than others:

Collum refuses pen for Celtic at League Cup Final(result sealing decision) Collum 12 pens for Rangers in 22 games and ONE to opposition. 3pens for Celtic in 20 games and 3 to opposition. Murray in OF game at Ibrox (Cha red card LUDICROUS-hateful decision),Wanyama wins ball cleanly without touching opposition player-red card (should be yellow),.Rangers 2nd goal clearly off-side-GIVEN,Samaras constantly fouled (largely unpunished)
Calum Murray SHAFTS Celtic. Cup semi Euan Norris fails to send off Black,awards Hearts ludicrous pen (neither Celtic player moves towards flight of ball-NOT DELIBERATE) then refuses Celtic similar.Hooper goal incredibly close-perhaps 5″ off-side-not discernible in real time.
NORRIS 5 pens for RANGERS in 3 games (hello hello)
That’s 3 massive games in a short space of time where ALL match-turning decisions went against Celtic.Lightning keeps striking in the same place ? Unnatural I say. I THINK NEIL LENNON IS ENTITLRD TO BE ANGRY,VERY VERY VERY FF-ING ANGRY. ANYONE THINK THAT COLLUM,MURRAY AND NORRIS WOULD HAVE GIVEN THOSE DECISIONS AGAINST RANGERS ?
Your article Dougan is a huge distortion thus you are obviously of the lap-top loyal persuasion.Forget your hatred for a few mins and just LOOK at the facts. Celtic fans-send DVDs of the action to Michel Platini and start lobbying UEFA-for a 100 years THEY’VE been out to get US and THEY STILL ARE.For 25 years I have been saying TAKE THE ISSUE TO THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS.
We Celtic supporters are totally,utterly,completely sick to death of these Celtic hating West of Scotland bigots masquerading as referees with the authorities completely passive in the issue.Cheat away is the order of the day.Most countries refer to it as racism in Scotland they have a convenient euphemism-SECTARIANISM.Notice NO Hearts fans arrested for sectarian abuse ?

It must be so much fun sorting through Michel Platini’s mail every morning.  The ‘they’ who have been ‘out to get’ Celtic are of course the SFA, but surely they aren’t doing a very good job of ‘getting’ Celtic, when they have won more league titles and trophies than any team other than Rangers?  And claiming that all referees are ‘West of Scotland bigots’ seems unlikely when several of them aren’t from the west of Scotland, and some are even known to be catholic themselves.

The comments continued, most of them a variation on the same theme; the SFA and referees are out to get Celtic, there’s evidence of bias against Celtic and Catholics and the Irish in Scotland, and of course, ‘Rangers will be out of business soon haha get it up ye!’

This was another comment that stood out, from ‘margaretblack’:

All the non celtic supports who have commented on here this is what we expected of you lot bigoted pish comments. Would suit u better to go help save ur own club from distiction instead of spouting ur bigoted comments about our club. Our manager has had to put up with shite all the time he has been here something no one else has had to go through. Why dont u go crawl back to where u came from and help ur club survive but then when do u ever u run hide like always.

Now, as has been widely reported, Neil Lennon has not always had the easiest of times in Scotland.  He’s been assaulted in the street and on the touchline, and of course two men were convicted recently after attempting to send Lennon home-made ‘bombs’ (although it was shown in court that the devices were not capable of exploding).  I’ve never said that Lennon deserved any of that, and never would.  But the mention of ‘bigoted comments’ was utter nonsense.  Being critical of Celtic or Lennon is not automatically bigoted, and for that matter, neither is criticism of Catholicism.  Supporters of Celtic or Catholics may not like to see or read criticism of them, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be valid, rational critique.  I asked Margaret to point out some of the bigoted comments, but she never did.

One of the most outrageous and extreme comments came from ‘paul colfer’:

its not lazy journalism its brush it under the carpet journalism Well Mr Dougan Lennon will not go away. you fail to mention it was ledleys hand the ball hit. your article does not have one sentence that does not try to put Celtiuc down. do you realise people take that sort of shite in and it causes trouble on the streets lennon and his family were threatened with bombs bullets attacks because of journalist like you writing blataltly prvocative comments. you obviously dislike lennon and everything about celtic you do not have the balls to attack so you stir the knuckledraggers up you have blood on your hands shame on you

I don’t know which of my comments were ‘provocative’ or how any of them would incite violence on the streets.  To say that my comments would lead to ‘blood on your hands’ was astonishing to me, as it suggests that all Rangers fans are violent psychopaths who cannot wait to go out and attack Celtic fans.  Once again I have to remind you that it is perfectly possible to be critical of Celtic, and it’s pretty obvious that the kind of extreme violence Paul suggests happens regularly just doesn’t exist.

To date, there are 90 comments on the article.  Some of them are my own in response to comments left by Celtic supporters, while a few others are from Rangers fans.  Some are distasteful for lots of reasons, and not just because they personally abuse me.  But the final comment was again from ‘Adam Rush’:

Dear Dougan- Hooper off-side ? by 5 cms ? My TV pictures showed Hooper in line with the Tarts defenders-have you got some sort of special TV ? furthermore I listened to a Scottish Premier League podcast and they suggested that the “thing” Norris gave the pen because the Hearts players appealed along with the Hearts support.Norris couldn’t see the incident anyway.So you explain to me how that could possibly be given other than th e ref has his own rotten agenda ? Of course Norris knows that he doesn’t have to answer to anyone so he and the rest of the Refs Loyal know it’s business as usual.As regards pens it isn’t so much how many,but the state of the game when you get them.On two of the very rare occasions that Rangers were two goals down,Norris produced 2 pens for Rangers in each case (Kilie &ICT).Name me two gsmes where Celtic were 0-2 and got two pens ? Yeah right ! Name me two games where Celtic got 3 pens ? as Collum produced at D.UTD and St Mirren recently for Rangers ! Right-gotcha again. Re Lennon- he’s the only manager who shows his anger at referees.GET REAL YOU STUPID RACIST IMBECILIC CRETIN.Stop hanging out with buffoons fueled by Tennents and racial hatred.Watch Red Nose at Man Utd snarling etc-I’m not knocking him but leave Lennon alone.He’s been provoked beyond any reasonable limit,but Proddy Scotland HAS to REMIND the Tims of WHO has the POWER.Can’t we have HONEST application of the rules ?

So now I was a racist too.  Apparently being critical of Neil Lennon, who is a white Irishman, is racist.  That’s hard to comprehend, but is apparently true.

Anyway, as I’ve stated, the full article is still available on ThisisFutbol.com, and all 90 comments are below it to read too.  I’ll continue to write articles and give opinion on the site, and will continue to try and write impartially as much as possible.  What I wanted to do with this blog was to highlight how difficult it is to write about Scottish football, and I think some of the comments show that the culture surrounding Rangers and Celtic can often be reactionary and lead people to make comments that they can’t back up with any real evidence.

I’ll try to embrace my bigoted and racist lifestyle now though.

@TheGlassCase

A Reminder That You Can Make Films About Real Life – The Kid With A Bike Review

If you believe everything George Lucas and James Cameron say, you can’t make a good movie unless it’s got millions of dollars worth of CGI, massive explosions, and a budget in the hundreds of millions, and shiny 3D clumsily stuck on at the end.

So, if you believe everything they say, then you’re never going to watch The Kid With A Bike.  There are no explosions or massive robots, there’s just people living real lives, and to make things even more complicated, it’s all in foreign!  But I’m going to trust that if you read this review, you might consider watching The Kid With A Bike at some point in the future, and you really should.

Written and directed by Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, The Kid With A Bike is the story of Cyril, a young boy abandoned by his father, who is now living in a foster care home and pining for his bike.  The movie opens with Cyril attempting to phone his father’s apartment, but the number has been disconnected.  He refuses to believe that his father would have moved without bringing him his bike, and at school the next day, he skips out and tries to get into the apartment to get it.  He is soon tracked down by the home caretakers, and he tries to hide in a medical centre in the building before holding onto a woman in the waiting room until the janitor of the building agrees to let him in.

The flat is empty, and the next morning he stays in bed late, depressed that his bike has been lost.  But Samantha, the woman he held onto in the medical office, comes to the home, having bought the bike from the man his father had sold the bike to.  Cyril is delighted to be reunited with his beloved bike, and when Samantha is leaving, he asks her if he can stay with her on weekends.  She agrees and also helps him to track down his father.  Unfortunately for Cyril, his father doesn’t want to take care of him, pleading with Samantha to do it for him.

While staying with Samantha, Cyril runs into a local gang, and it is his relationship with the leader of the gang, known as ‘The Dealer’ that leads him down the wrong paths.

Thomas Doret gives a wonderfully natural performance as the troubled and angry Cyril, a boy who wants to rebel against the rejection by his father, while at the same time yearning to have a normal life where he can ride his bike with his friends.  Cecile De France also excels as Samantha, struggling to deal with Cyril’s mood swings, but clearly wanting to take care of him and help him become a happy child.

The Kid With A Bike is not an action packed CGI-fest, it’s just a well acted, scripted and directed little movie that shows it is still possible to make great films with a small budget and people talking.  Seek it out and you will be rewarded.

@TheGlassCase

Not Perfect, But Perfectly Watchable – Jo Nesbø’s Headhunters

You might not know his name, but in Norway, Jo Nesbø is a pretty big deal.  His novels have sold well over 1 million copies, and now his 2008 novel Hodejegerne (Headhunters) has been adapted into a movie.

The first thing to say about the movie is that the lead character is called Roger Brown.  Now, if this were an English language movie, that would be fine, but it’s a Norwegian film set in Norway and Roger Brown isn’t exactly a very Norwegiany name (not that Norwegiany is a word).  It’s not really an important issue, but it does stick out when all the other characters do have Scandinavian or European sounding names.  Roger is played by Aksel Hennie, an award winning Norwegian actor and director, and his character in Headhunters is indeed a headhunter, but not in an exciting way.  Roger works as a headhunter in recruitment, looking for the right men for the job at the highest level of business.  But that is not all he does.  He lives in an expensive house, with a beautiful wife who he thinks is out of his league, so in order to fund a lavish lifestyle, he is also an art thief.

Frustrated that his latest theft has only brought him 20,000 Krone, he starts to hope for the one big theft that could give him enough money to get out of the game.  When he meets Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) at the opening of his wife’s art gallery, it appears that he might have found his last job.  Greve is in the country after the death of his grandmother, and Roger discovers that Greve has a Rubens painting worth millions in his possession after it was found in his grandmother’s belongings.  Roger has a partner, Ove, who works for a security firm and has access to control panels for home alarm systems which allows Roger to sneak in undetected.  The pair devise a plan to steal the painting when Clas is in Amsterdam to bring his dog to Norway.

Before leaving Greve’s apartment with the painting, Roger hears children playing outside.  He has been reluctant to have a child with his wife, fearing that she would love the child more than him, and after they’ve recently argued about it, he decides to call her.  But her phone rings in the apartment, and from then on, Roger’s life is changed, possibly for good.

The next morning, he finds Ove in his car, apparently dead.  Panicking, Roger stuffs Ove into the boot of his car, and drives into the countryside.  He gets another shock when Ove comes to in the lake Roger has just dumped him into, and Roger starts to realise he is in serious trouble.  Roger and Ove argue, and this time Ove definitely does end up dead.  When Roger leaves though, he is confronted by Clas, and barely escapes.

The rest of the movie is mostly given over to Clas’ attempts to hunt Roger down, and it’s this part of the movie that was problematic for me.  While Roger is trying to stay out of Clas’ clutches, he has to hide in a shit pit under an outdoor toilet, then when his car won’t start, he’s forced to drive off on a tractor (that happens to have Clas’ dead dog impaled on the front of it), and after a spell in hospital when he crashes the tractor, Roger ends up in the back of a police car, sandwiched between two obese twin Norwegian police officers, allowing him to survive almost unharmed when Clas drives a massive truck into the car, sending it flying off a cliff and down onto some rocks beside a river.

These moments seem alternatively slapstick and just far-fetched, especially as every other person in the car when Clas hits it is killed when it lands.  But while parts of Clas’ hunt for Roger are a bit odd in the context of the film, Hennie’s performance as Roger is consistently excellent.  He’s forced to radically change his appearance and approach to life as he desperately tries to survive, and this transformation is convincingly portrayed.

Despite Hennie’s strong performance, the ending of the film doesn’t quite work.  The reason why Clas is hunting Roger doesn’t quite ring true, and the way it is revealed is somewhat clichéd.  But despite its flaws, Headhunters is a decent film, and you won’t have wasted your time if you decide to watch it.

@TheGlassCase

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists! Review

It’s confession time:  The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists is the first Aardman film I’ve ever watched.  I never saw the appeal of Wallace and Gromit, and their other movies just passed me by.  But I’ve heard nothing but good things about The Pirates! so I decided to give it a go.

And that was definitely a good decision.

Aardman films take a long time to make it to cinemas, with seconds of on-screen action taking weeks to capture.  Such intricate production values could lead to Aardman forgetting about the script, but The Pirates! is extremely entertaining.  It’s consistently funny, moves along at a quick pace, and is never boring.  There are a lot of visual jokes too, and you might find yourself watching the film where the action isn’t as there are often posters, street names and other background gags to look out for.

Although the film has a U rating in the UK, it really isn’t a kids film.  That’s not to say that the humour is particularly dirty, but the plot isn’t really simple enough for young children to enjoy or understand, although what’s actually happening on the screen should keep their attention.

The basics of the plot are this.  Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant, who sounds like he’s having a great time) is a pirate who works very hard on his pirating, but in over 20 years on the seas, he’s never managed to win Pirate Of The Year.  He’s determined to do it this year, and sets out to loot and plunder like there’s no tomorrow.  But he has a really bad run of form, encountering plague ships, ghost ships and a ship with school children on a geography trip.  Despondent, he has to be talked out of quitting piracy (to set up a baby clothes business) by his faithful number two, Pirate with Scarf (Martin Freeman).

But the next ship he attempts to plunder doesn’t have any gold on it either.  He boards the Beagle, where he meets a bored (and sexually frustrated) Charles Darwin (David Tennant).  To cheer himself up, he makes Darwin walk the plank, only to rescue him when Darwin realises that Pirate Captain’s ‘parrot’ Polly is actually a dodo.  Hailing it as the scientific discovery of the year, he informs the captain that he could win untold riches at the Scientist Of The Year awards, so they set sail for London to claim the prize.

Of course, it would be a rather boring film if that was the end of things.  So when the pirates reach London, they have to disguise themselves, as Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) hates pirates and also have to keep an eye on Darwin, as he attempts to steal Polly and claim the Scientist Of The Year award for himself.  During this stage of the film, there’s a fantastic set piece as the pirates chase Darwin and his monkey butler as they attempt to steal Polly.  It involves a bath, stairs, one of the heads from Easter Island and is thrilling and funny.

The finale of the film is similarly exciting, and overall the film is really entertaining and fun to watch.  The voice talent is great, with Brendan Gleeson (as Pirate With Gout), Ashley Jensen (as the cross dressing Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate), Russell Tovey (as Albino Pirate), and Lenny Henry, Salma Hayek and Jeremy Piven as rival pirate captains Peg Leg Hastings, Cutlass Liz and Black Bellamy.  Hugh Grant is great as Pirate Captain, and with the film certain to be a success, especially in the UK, a sequel already seems inevitable.

While The Pirates! won’t prompt me to watch the Aardman back catalogue, I enjoyed it a lot, and recommend it whether you’re a fan of their work or not.

@TheGlassCase

A Fresh And Unique Horror – The Cabin In The Woods Review

The problem with reviewing horror movies is that it’s very difficult to get through them without getting spoilerific.  It’s very easy to accidentally let a ‘…and the killer is her brother!’ or ‘It was revenge for the death of his son’ slip out and make everyone reading the review before seeing the film hate you.

So it is with some trepidation that I come to review The Cabin in the Woods.  There’s so much going on in the film that letting a major plot point sneak into the review could happen without me even realising it.  What I do feel confident in saying is that this is not a bog standard ‘young people get picked off in the night’ horror.  It’s clever and funny, and like Scream in the past (but better), it has its tongue in its cheek, with horror standards played up to and twisted to make the film fresh and entertaining.

And The Cabin in the Woods is certainly never dull.  It’s a sharp 95 minutes long, and wastes no time in getting to the action, when the 5 college kids out for a fun weekend encounter the ultimate surly redneck gas station owner on their way to the titular cabin.  He’s a cliché in many ways, appearing out of nowhere to spool one of the kids, chewing tobacco and spitting it in their direction, and insulting the girls, but perhaps he is not all that he seems….

That’s the one big difference between The Cabin in the Woods and other horror movies.  The evil force offing the lead characters is not necessarily THE evil force in control of events.  So there’s a lot of the movie that takes place away from the cabin, and not involving the people inside it.  To try and explain that further would involve revealing key plot points from the final act of the film, so I won’t.  But what this does do is keep things interesting, so that the film is not just a merciless slaughter of the lead characters.

Another plus point for the film is that those lead characters (who again are deliberately clichéd, or forced to be clichéd at least) all give good performances.  Chris Hemsworth (as Curt) is the most recognisable actor in the film, and he of course teams up with producer Joss Whedon in the forthcoming The Avengers as Thor, with Kristen Connolly (Dana), Anna Hutchison (Jules) and Jess Williams (Holden) all relative newcomers, while Fran Kranz (Marty) has worked with Whedon before on Dollhouse.  They are all manipulated into becoming horror movie clichés, as Curt becomes the alpha male jock type, Dana the innocent, Jules the NOT innocent, Holden the smart sensitive one, and Marty the stoner waster.

As I said earlier, the pace of the film ensures that it is never dull, but it is the final act that really makes the film a success.  It’s a chaotic orgy of bloody violence, where what is really going on is revealed, and gives the film a satisfying (albeit bizarre) ending.  Director Drew Goddard handles his debut well, and the movie is stylishly shot.  Goddard co-wrote the film with Whedon, and his experience of writing for Lost and Buffy, as well as the brilliant Cloverfield, means the script is fun, clever and tongue in cheek.  A special mention for the always great Richard Jenkins who gives another strong performance as a guy who does things (I told you I don’t want to spoil it).

The Cabin in the Woods takes a familiar horror film premise and gives it a fresh and unique twist.  There will inevitably be comparisons to Sam Raimi’s classic Evil Dead series, and those are entirely justified.  It’s not as good as those movies (how could it be?), but it’s very good indeed, and almost certainly the best horror movie you’ll see this year.

@TheGlassCase

A Spectacular Misfire From Ricky Gervais – Derek Review

When Ricky Gervais returned to Twitter last year, he did so by posting a series of photos of himself posing as what he described as a ‘mong’.  It wasn’t big and it wasn’t clever, and he soon found himself in a bit of bother, as many people objected to his use of the word and its connotations with regards to people with learning difficulties.  Although he at first tried to bat away any criticism, he eventually apologised and appeared to move on.

Unfortunately he moved on to the dreadful Life’s Too Short, the third sitcom he’s created with writing partner Stephen Merchant, about Warwick Davis’ life as a celebrity dwarf about town.  It was a complete mess, lacking in laughs and relying on forced celebrity cameos, most of which didn’t even directly involve Davis, who was supposed to be the lead actor in the show.  Ratings for the show dropped over its 7 episodes, with Gervais taking to Twitter to defend it, claiming that ‘haters’ were out to get him.  His fall from grace continued with his weak hosting of this year’s Golden Globe awards, which was tame and predictable after he’d shocked everyone with a savage (but importantly very funny) routine last year.

His latest project is Derek, described as a comedy-drama, in which he plays the titular character, who appears to have learning difficulties.  It also stars Karl Pilkington, the former producer of Gervais’ XFM radio show, who shot to fame after Gervais started podcasting, allowing Pilkington to air his outlandish and crazed sounding thoughts on almost everything.  The trailers for it are hardly inspiring, in fact they make the show look like a disaster in the making, so it is not something that I’ve approached with excitement.

And here’s the worrying thing, Derek is actually much worse than I could have imagined.  Unless it’s a very clever joke, Gervais has tried to make something poignant and touching, but it’s such a horrific misfire that he really should come out and tell everyone that it was a prank.

Derek works in a retirement home, where he’s nice to the people living there, and makes Hannah (Kerrie Godliman) who runs the home laugh.  He’s friends with Douglas (Karl Pilkington), who likes to moan.  Derek is played out as a documentary, a format Gervais has of course explored before, but there’s literally nothing about the show that will draw you in like The Office did.  It’s a laboured exercise, with Gervais trying to show that he can act and has depth, but the program plays out with a series of clichés and is never funny or touching or sweet.

Douglas is basically just Karl being Karl, albeit in a ridiculous wig.  If you’ve listened to their podcasts or watched An Idiot Abroad, you’ll know how much Gervais enjoys annoying Karl, and that’s what Derek does to Douglas, whether it’s asking him who’d win out of a ‘suicide bomber and a shark’, or setting Douglas off on a rant about letting old people just die instead of trying to fix them all the time (again, this is something covered extensively in their podcasts), it’s familiar ground, with the only difference being Gervais is in character and Karl is wearing glasses.

The incidental music throughout the program is grating too, with heartstring plucking piano music over most of it, trying to make everything seem oh so tragic and moving.  But it never is, and instead you’ll just feel patronized if you have the misfortune of watching Derek, with Gervais holding your hand as he signposts the moments when you’re supposed to laugh and when you’re supposed to cry or be moved by what’s happening on screen.

But the show just isn’t funny at all, it’s not clever and it’s not moving.  Gervais doesn’t cover much new terrority in Derek either.  When a new arrival is shown around, Hannah takes a shine to her son Tom, and she later asks Derek to find out if he’s gay or not, by asking what TV shows and films he likes.  Derek gets confused, and blurts out that Hannah wants to know if he is gay or not, and it’s a reminder of the kind of social awkwardness that’s always been a feature of Gervais’ work.  You’ll recognise the moment from Darren’s date with Maggie in Extras, or the infamous Brent dance in The Office, but it just doesn’t ring true, especially when it’s made clear that Tom suddenly fancies Hannah and comes to the home to see her and not his mum.

The show ends with Joan, a woman Derek is closer to than the others, dying.  This gives Gervais a chance to show off his acting chops, which he does by crying a bit and looking all sad and that.  It’s a desperate move, and one which requires little effort on Gervais’ part.  It rather sums up the whole sorry half hour.  Whatever Gervais wanted Derek to be, it isn’t.  It’s not funny, it’s not moving and it doesn’t make you think.  He’s claimed that it’s a comment on Britain today, but it’s really just a failed experiment from a man struggling to maintain the success of his recent past.

I’m absolutely certain Ricky Gervais will take to Twitter and the media to rant that people just didn’t get it and that he is proud of Derek, but I don’t think anyone will be listening.

@TheGlassCase