TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE

dMYD DVD

Starring Awesome Welles

Trailer

d

There’s something hugely appealing about depicting Orson Welles, the monumental prototype auteur genius/ professional fat-ass, as a gargantuan winged beast prone to devouring planets whole in a fit of galaxy-sized hunger, complete with a robot mustache the size of Greece to compound his devilishness. All-consuming awfulness acts as both character trait and film synopsis here, as everyone’s favorite Autobots are wiped out in the first eighteen minutes of scratched-out crapimation in a desperate lurch for the wallets of children. They’re all dead, the new characters are terrible, the celebrity voices are terrible, the humour is terrible, the phrase ‘crapimation’ is real now, a genuine phrase, there are 80s rock ballads every twelve seconds, and nobody cares about anything or anyone.

Welles’ final film, its best watched as a direct sequel to Citizen Kane, a meta-fictional dinosaur pile-up of how bad cinema can get, the direct line from the greatest film ever made to a cheap series of images designed to sell plastic. If he wasn’t so fat he’d be spinning in his industrial strength coffin, and if there’s any justice in the cosmos he’ll be back to eat everyone involved in the production, including Leonard Nimoy. Go on, imagine that for a second. Orson Welles, slowly cutting up and devouring a grunting Leonard Nimoy. For dietary pleasure and divine retribution. Chewing slowly, emitting a guttural chuckle as he takes his time over the ears. Wait what? What was happening? A film review? No, it’s terrible. Go outside instead. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO OUTSIDE.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

dMYD

Starring Jesse Eisenberg

Trailer

Y

Facebook: The Movie, scoffed everyone, everywhere, on their Facebook walls. Why are you making a movie about my homepage? Well, because that particular bundle of binary is your life, and this is the historically essential story of the idiot-genius who made it your life, and it’s written by Aaron Sorkin, so it’s the only decent script that’ll be read all year. Let’s go! It’s good! Let’s make ‘Like’ jokes!

It’s funny, it feels fresh, it works as both a gripping boardroom-figures shakedown epic for people who love money and a condemnation of the increasingly insane manner in which we live our ‘personal’ lives for anyone who enjoys the coming apocalypse. Young talent crackling among the actors provides a pleasing dry-run for future success; Andrew Garfield’s going to be a likeable Puny Parker, Jesse Eisenberg should be able to pick and mix projects from now on and J.T forgets his Jackson fetish for two seconds to produce his best work since shooting up spirituality in Southland Tales. Even David Fincher redeems himself for Benjamin ‘Fucking’ Button, muting everything in low hues and autumnal drabness, flicking back and forth through time and relationships for emotional resonance and imbibing the piece as a whole with a sense of surface skimming, an unreality based on flickering screens and shafts of digital code, like the Matrix at Harvard. Those twin-things are definitely a glitch in the system.

It’s a film of fakes and fakery, where everyone save the fall guy has an agenda and a pathological urge to appear as something they’re not to fit into something they don’t really want. Staging the whole thing as a drama allows the film to mirror the weird sub-reality that Facebook itself allows; little of what’s depicted here is real, but audiences the world over will be willing to accept it’s twisting of events as fact because it’s far more gripping than the tired old universe they live in. A great drama about Facebook reflects the site’s warping of boredom itself, a world where profile pictures become epic folly and character traits bulk up into Greek myth. It’s certainly not real life, but who wants that old pile of disappointment for a friend anyway?

THE ILLUSIONIST

dMYD DVD

Starring The Pioneering Spirit of Jacques Tati

Trailer

Y

No, not another entry in Edward Norton’s impressive adventure in career decapitation. It’s a different film entirely…. (This isn’t fancy literary speak. It’s not the film starring Edward Norton. Honestly.)

Rescuing old scripts from the lurching sepia hell of the past should be a more widely accepted form of ratcheting up celluloid gold: though not strictly new or fresh, they’re still original and unseen, unlike the 98% of remakes, rehashes and rewanks currently populating the DVD isles. (This isn’t even willfully hilarious exaggeration.) The Illusionist rips some tatty (JOKES) paper from the corpse of French comedian extraordinaire Jacques Tati (SEE, JOKES) and proceeds to rub loveable Gallic animation all over it, resulting in a… loveable Gallic animation. Minute details of human existence are lovingly rendered in watercolour swathes from the boiling of a kettle to removing ones shoes, whilst the care and attention chucked over the production leads to moments of genuine pathos and the greatest rabbit ever drawn in a glorified flip-book. Brilliantly devoid of dialogue throughout, the characterization relies on movement, expression and talent, whilst the settings of 50s Edinburgh provides wonderfully twee vistas of a lost world of decency. Behind the trappings of intimate beauty sits a sad tale of the death of innocent entertainment, the illusionist himself serving as a beacon of simplicity in a culture searching for something more; the repetition of routines combined with the accepting look on his face throughout the film gives a sense of satisfaction to a lost art that’s missing from the myriad hyper-speed extravaganzas at work elsewhere in the cinema-space. A minor triumph that no one will see, it’s worth watching for the greatest final-frame twist in cinematic history alone. Bring a tear-sucker…

BURKE AND HARE

dMYD

Starring Simon Pegg

Trailer

d

The moral of the story? Stick with your friends and chop up your idols. Not the film, the makers: here a smackering of Spaced-alumni scarper from the comfort and genius of Edgar Wright’s woollen hat sanctuary and straight into the arms of huggable Uncle John Landis, beloved purveyor of their childhood dreams and werewolf fantasies. The result’s a complete fucking disaster.

Real life makes Landis seem a big, frightening, lovable man, adjectives that have no business being bandied about in terms of this latest waste of celluloid, amazingly his first effort for thirty-eight thousand years. A roustabout murder-comedy with the laughs chopped off, it acts as a handy fail-mirror to the giddy heights of Wright’s latest work: Scott Pilgrim casts a motley clutch of youngsters who you’ve never seen or heard before, proceeds to let them say and do astoundingly entertaining things, and basks in the warm afterglow of cult quality. Burke and Hare rips Ronnie Corbett from his cut-price coffin and has him stand there. For two hours. Saying nothing funny. Wearing a hat.

This isn’t the way to make humorous films. Landis has been running around London with an oversized bag stuffing in funny people before having them… exist. On film. Hey, there’s Steven Merchant, the goggle-eyed Office thing-man! He’s smiling! His scene’s done! Papa Lazarou’s walking about, with a gun! And he’s… he’s shouting and… no, he’s gone. He’s gone. What’s happening? Oh thank God, Simon Pegg’s back and... he’s wiggled his ears a bit, and he’s run off and disappeared, and another scene’s ended, and nothing’s happened, and nothing’s funny. Landis has farmed some success in the past (specifically with Carrie Fisher pushing a high-calibre rifle into the pudgy face of a shit-coated John Belushi); it’s why everyone is working with him here. But he’s failed, and so have they: it’s a beyond-rubbish amateur project from a 60 year old man with form and goodwill on his side. So does that make it sadder that only six people turned up to watch it, or that none of them laughed once? Two morals then, three, another one for the road. Never let the men who wrote St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Frittons Gold near pen, paper or oxygen ever again, and have Edgar Wright direct, write and possibly even star in every film made for the next fifty years. GO HOLLYWOOD, GO.

THIS IS ENGLAND '86

dMYD DVD

Starring Vicky McClure

Trailer

(NOTE: THIS IS A TELEVISION SERIES. IT HAS NO BUSINESS BEING REVIEWED HERE)

Y

Flipping Heck, what a corpse-pounding good time that was. Midlands Scorcese Shane Meadows strikes again, deftly clubbing convention to paste with a blood-drenched bouncy castle of laughs, oddity, devastating emotional realism and reality-defying haircuts, all wrapped up in a soundtrack to make forty-year-olds weep. Reinventing realism by the simple realisation that life is both giggles and fists, the maestro hops around effortlessly from mucking about to tragedy, criss-crossing the steady chipping away of teenage abandon and innocence with a boy in a Dogtanion outfit and a parrot called Ian. TV really hasn’t seen anything like it for a bad long time. TV? Oh, yes, that decrepit thing in the corner that’s been pissing out Come Dine With Me on the carpet for the past few years; it’s just been given a shot of adrenaline and a bucket of MDMA. Meadows used to make epic films on his mobile phone, so a simple switch of screen size to allow for a bigger story isn’t exactly flying to Venus in a kitchen cabinet; when you write characters this likeable, compelling and believable it’s a pleasure to spend three hours with them, medium be hung drawn and quartered, characters which are nothing without the modern day troop of players assembled here; all brilliant, but none more so than Vicky McClure, graduating into the aloof bracket of actors who can make you cry with an eyeball movement. And Stephen Graham, who’s always been there anyway and BUY THE DVD OF THE FILM NOW IT’S ABOUT TWO POUND IN HMV. Television so good that it kicked everything else out of the screen and yet more proof of an underrated, home-grown auteur, a man who’s work won’t be truly appreciated for years to come until a decrepit Jamie Theakston wheels out the zimmer for ‘I HAVE REMEMBERED 2010’ and watches his kidneys pack up when he realises how good it was.

SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD

dMYD

Starring Michael Cera

Trailer

D

Anytime spent reading can be spent watching the film again.