Life in dark rooms

Zombieland

Coming from out of nowhere, newbie director Ruben Fleischer chucks another zombie comedy onto the ever growing blood-dripping pile and manages a memorable, inventive and genuinely funny picture.

America has become overrun with the undead leading it to be dubbed Zombieland. Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) is so neurotic and paranoid that he has developed a list of rules that, if followed, will guarantee survival. While trying to make it to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio (which, as with every other main character, gives rise to his name), he meets the gun-toting cowboy Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson). They start travelling together but get more than they bargain for when they meet sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin).

As a zombie film that puts comedy before horror, it plays like an American version of Edgar Wright’s Sean of the Dead. Fleischer enlivens what could have been a bog-standard road movie with sparky dialogue and fun quirks (Columbus is more terrified of clowns than zombies, Tallahassee is obsessed with finding Twinkies and there’s an imaginative device in which Columbus’ rules appear on screen and interact with the surroundings which also makes for an impressive slow-mo credit sequence).

It’s essentially a buddy road movie, but the two leads (and the female supporting characters) are so mismatched that the groundwork is laid for some great moments. Jump cuts of the four of them arguing in the car on a night drive are disarmingly realistic, more like a family on a holiday than apocalypse survivors making good their escape.

Then there’s The Cameo. It comes from out of nowhere and goes nowhere. The film hangs off it like a Dali clockface on a branch, but it’s great fun and rivals Tom Cruise’s surprising turn in Tropic Thunder.

However, it does have weak points. There’s an unfortunate the love story which seems to be have been injected to give it some real world grounding. It’s less convincing than the idea of America being overrun with zombies and is only there to give Colorado a character arc which it doesn’t really need. Plus with each passing year, it’s becoming more and more apparent that Abigail Breslin, despite being a growing talent, will sadly never look like an adult and will be perpetually stuck with those creepy childish features for life in much the same way that Macauley Culkin is.

Still, these quibbles aside, the film more than gets by on amped-up excitement and the quality of its two leads. 4/5

A Christmas Carol (another overdue cinema review)

As one of the most adapted works of fiction ever, Dickens’ classic yuletide cautionary tale has been filmed in so many ways from live action to animation and has even provided a vehicle for Mickey Mouse and the Muppets. With its famously rigid structure, it must have seemed to Robert Zemeckis a perfect way to practice his motion capture 3D thing.

The result is fairly successful but more thrilling than the story warrants. Jim Carrey is great as Scrooge but not so much as other characters – his Brian Blessed-alike Ghost of Christmas Present has a strange accent and his candle Ghost of Christmas Past is just plain weird. Other characters look disconcertingly like their real life counterparts, especially Colin Firth as Scrooge’s nephew Fred and Gary Oldman as Scrooge’s put upon clerk Bob Cratchit.

Everyone knows the story back to front which allows Zemeckis to detract from the story by having Scrooge fly around on a giant candle snuffer and run in miniaturised form from the genuinely frightening Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come through the streets of London. All this madcap stuff may look impressive but we never really needed another version of this story. (3/5)

The Men Who Stare At Goats (another overdue cinema review)

When Charlie Kaufman was tasked with adapting Susan Orlean’s best-selling book The Orchid Thief, he struggled so much that he ended up writing Adaptation – a fictionalised version of his struggle and invented a twin brother. The reason? Drawing an engaging narrative from a work of non-fiction proved all but impossible.

Writer Peter Straughan, who previously scripted How to Lose Friends and Alienate People from Toby Young’s memoirs, seems to be carving himself a niche for fictionalising real life stories, but has similar problems to Kaufman.

Local reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor, with another of his questionable American accents) decides he needs an adventure when his life leaves him for his boss. So he packs off to Iraq looking for a story. By chance he meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) who claims to have once belonged to the US Army’s New Earth Army that harnessed the power of the paranormal as a weapon and the two set off on a mission to find the unit’s founder Bill Django (Jeff Bridges).

The fact that it’s all based on a true story is neither here nor there – this is a messy film. It’s all over the place. Ewan’s telling the story, no George is, no Jeff is. It’s a flashback within a memory wrapped up in flashback, so much so that the appearance of a proper finale catches you off guard and feels forced.

Still it’s a decent MASH-esque satire of the insanity of war with some decent performances from George Clooney (who can do madcap in his sleep but plays it cool here), the wonderful Bridges and a return to comic form from Kevin Spacey as the spiteful bad guy. (3/5)

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (a long overdue cinema review)

Terry Gilliam’s career seems like a long stream of thankless ordeals in which he strives for quality only to be thwarted by money-grabbing studios and cynical audiences. All of his films take more painstaking effort and look more impressive than a thousand Michael bay films, but still they reap the most meagre rewards. But he doesn’t seem to care since his films are defiantly non-commercial – he is the thinking man’s Tim Burton.

His latest Sisyphean task has been to finish a passion project that does justice to the talents of one of its supporting stars who died almost two years previously. He pulls it off with a combination of Hurculean effort and team spirit. Billed in the end credits as ‘A film from Heath Ledger and friends’, this film boasts more camaraderie than High School Musical.

Hundreds of years old, the titular doctor (Christopher Plummer) takes his travelling show around modern day London to show a jaded audience their deepest darkest desires. But he has a dark secret himself, having made a bet with the devil (Tom Waits) with his daughter Valentina’s (Lily Cole) soul as the prize. When the mysterious and talented Tony (Heath Ledger) shows up, Parnassus thinks that success is in the bag, but Tony has his own dark and disastrous secrets.

The story is intricate but carefully told. The trouble with many of Gilliam’s films is that they tend to be impenetrable, but this takes you by the hand and walks you through it while always remembering to give you enough to look at. While the plot plods a little, the direction never does.

The visuals are typically stunning. The scenes inside the imaginarium are purposely cartoonish CGI, while outside it’s so grounded in the real world as to have the trailer pack in a Homebase car park.

The performances are terrific across the board – Lily Cole and Andrew Garfield are particularly good as Valentina and Parnassus’ employee Anton. For every dramatic flourish that Ledger and Plummer gives, a wry turn of phrase by the two younger actors keeps the film grounded.

It’s a testament to Gilliam’s power that Ledger is not the lead and you don’t spend the entire film swooning over the loss of his majestic powers. Kudos also to Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell for making Tony’s three alter-egos rounded and unique rather than fawning impersonations.

But perhaps what’s most impressive is that despite it being Ledger’s final performance, the film is not defined by it, but by Gilliam’s ever impressive mastery. (4/5)

Paranormal Activity

Low-fi horrors never really became popular. Despite Daniel Myrick and Ed Sánchez’s handmade horror The Blair Witch Project making haunted shed-loads of cash in 1999, the concept of ‘found footage’ frightfests didn’t really take off.

However, the YouTube generation is probably more appreciative of the ‘You’ve Been Framed’-style approach to filmmaking. As if by way of celebrating the ten year anniversary of Blair Witch, Oren Peli pays a tribute with a similarly slow-burning shocker.

Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat) have just moved into a fancy new house. Katie is concerned about a few minor strange noises and events that have happened, so in a cynical attempt to humour her, Micah buys an expensive digital camcorder with which to capture the phenomena. But soon enough, it becomes clear that Katie isn’t paranoid and something very sinister shares their house with them.

Comparisons to The Blair Witch Project are inevitable – the unknown actors use their real names and have been conspicuously absent from the promotional trail. However, where the film differs from its older, more outdoorsy cousin is in its location. Blair Witch’s scares came easy – a sense of prickly terror is inherent in the idea of three people lost in the woods becoming hunted by an unseen force. But the comfortable, familiar, suburban setting jars with our basic human understanding that we’re safe in our own home. So when things start to happen, this fundamental belief is shattered.

When things do start to go bump in the night they are tantalisingly few and far between. Initially at least, Peli relies on a more all-encompassing sense of real dread, and the ease with which he manipulates his audience is quite commendable. Things that wouldn’t normally cause terror become chilling – the mysterious appearance of an old photograph, a broken picture frame. The scares are effective in their simplicity – the early ones (moving doors, banging, lights going on and off) are easily achieved by any director with a modicum of imagination. You have to wait until the second half before the scares become more amplified, more audacious, more shocking.

Although not an experienced filmmaker, Peli knows that what’s more bloodcurdling than an invisible malevolent force is when an audience feels powerless. When the lights go out, Micah’s camera is placed on a tripod in such a location that it captures the entire bedroom and the dark hallway beyond. With a scene this static for this long, any tiny movement is closely scrutinised. The rolling time clock in the bottom right speeds up to remind you how long a night’s sleep actually is – it’s when it slows to real time that you need to reach for your neighbour’s hand.

The audience is conditioned to relaxing in the daytime scenes and tensing up when the lights go out. This natural reaction is briefly subverted a couple of times but the stop-start rhythm of nocturnal terrors and sunny intervals is important – the fears are for the night, but the drama is for the day. Because, scary or not – and if you don’t buy into the ‘reality’ of the film, it’s not actually that sickening – this ghost train is actually about a wobbly relationship. It may pull off the same home-grown scare tactics as Blair Witch, and with aplomb, but at its heart Paranormal Activity is about two people trying to believe in, and rely on each other in the midst of a genuine, ever-growing and seemingly unsolvable crisis. The house isn’t haunted, they are. It’s enough to keep anyone awake at night. (4/5)

The Invention of Lying

When you were a child and you first discovered how to lie, the chances are that it was a while before it took hold, before you could lie skilfully. Not Mark Bellison, Ricky Gervais’ latest ‘chubby, snub-nosed loser’ who lives in an alternative reality in which mankind hasn’t evolved the ability to lie.

Mark is a failing screenwriter, which in a world that has no concept of fiction means that he is assigned a century in Earth’s history to write about. He has just been fired (unfortunately for him, he had been given the 13^th century which contained nothing of note but the Black Plague) and his date with ‘genetically superior’ Anna (Jennifer Garner, who may not have evolved the ability to lie, but she has worked out how to contort her mouth into the strangest shapes when looking confused) has gone particularly badly. Just as he is about to be evicted, something snaps in his brain and he is suddenly an expert liar, which he uses to become rich, famous and all powerful.

A film with such a high concept was always going to attract critics to its internal logic. In an effort to get the idea across quickly, even the title must be self-explanatory and bald. However, it’s difficult to get past the film’s coherence as it does make it appear simple. A version of today without ever having had the concept of untruth would look and feel very different to the familiar one we see. The television and film industry exist, as does the cola war – could they really exist in a world of brutal honesty?

The main problem, though, is the dialogue. We all know that lying constitutes wilfully holding your tongue as well as telling porkies, which means that everyone has honesty Tourette’s, blurting out any true thing that happens to come into their head from confessions of masturbation to admitting that you don’t like someone. While this may, strangely, make sense in this world, it makes its people come across as simple and the film itself comes across as childish and mawkish.

Still, ignore the flaws in the film’s logic, and it is quite funny, if not particularly sophisticated. Gervais is a comic talent and does well in only his second lead role. Using his fame to fill the film out with big stars – Rob Lowe features in a prominent role and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Edward Norton show up as wasted cameos – but, as with Extras (the second series especially), they feel crowbarred in and smack of desperation.

A neat comedy premise it may be (sort of Liar Liar in reverse), but it only works intermittently and is fumbled all too often. By the time Mark ‘invents’ religion by reading out his commandments from the back of two pizza boxes to a suspiciously modest crowd, the film has already irretrievably lost its way. (2/5)

Up

Animated films used to be exclusively for children, full of talking animals, fast action and poorly disguised life lessons to keep the little ones quiet for an hour and a half leaving their parents to blissfully relax. Then Pixar came along and changed everything. All of a sudden grown-ups were just as excited about going to the cinema as their ice cream-craving offspring.

How does the studio manage such a feat? It’s not the ‘focusing on story’ that Hawaiian-shirted boss John Lasseter keeps asserting, but something even more subtle. The generation spanning appeal is not because the films feature some bits for adults and some for children, but because they are able to cater to both at the same time.

This isn’t immediately obvious with Up, the studio’s tenth beautifully crafted and immersive feature. As a child, Carl Fredricksen is a wannabe adventurer, obsessed with famous explorer Charles Muntz (voiced by Christopher Plummer). By chance he meets kindred spirit Ellie and they grow up together. As they get older, their dreams of moving to Paradise Falls in South America become increasingly unlikely due to financial and health problems, but at least they have each other.

When Ellie dies, Carl (voiced as a geriatric by Edward Asner) faces the prospect of giving up the house they built to greedy property developers, he decides to fulfil their dream and take his house with him by tethering thousands of helium balloons to it. But enthusiastic boy scout Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai), a colourful rare bird, some ‘talking’ dogs and an encounter with his treacherous childhood hero all get in the way of Carl achieving a lifelong ambition.

The first 15 minutes or so will break your heart. It is such a fully-formed introduction that it could easily have made a perfect short to precede another of the studio’s films. Like WALL•E’s first half, it is told with minimal dialogue proving that Pixar know how to tell a solid story purely through imagery.

And what imagery. The South American landscape is beautifully rendered, but as ever the grand vistas are peppered with intricate detail – the rainbow in Paradise Falls, the stubble on Carl’s chin, the fur on the dogs. The image of Carl’s house, both quaint and colourful, attached to a rainbow of balloons, drifting up into a bright blue sky will soon be as ingrained in our consciousness as Elliott and ET flying past the moon on a bike and Indiana Jones contemplating stealing a gleaming Aztec idol. No single image in Pixar’s entire catalogue represents its film as well.

The common element in all the studio’s pictures, though, is magical realism – grown up stories told with a childlike sense of make-believe – and here they really let the fantasy in. If parts of the film were clearly made to sell Happy Meals (the dogs’ displaying such human characteristics as deception and sarcasm are very funny if a little hard to take), they are there to lighten the tone of an otherwise frankly depressing tale.

At its heart, Up is a film full of adult themes – grief, friendship, letting go, obsession. While it is one of Pixar’s most exhilarating films, recurring motifs – Ellie’s scrapbook, a makeshift pin badge made from a bottle top – bring Carl and the audience back down to earth with the memory of his beloved. These constant peripheral reminders give Up both its radiant light and its profound shade. Uplifting. (4/5)