10 Reasons to see Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon

The latest Transformers movie has been critically panned from virtually every corner. Danny Leigh off that BBC show with Claudia Winkleface is even calling for strike action to boycott the movie in The Guardian and thus send a message to studio execs. But outside elite film critics there must still be a demand for Michael Bay’s franchise. And I bet those of you that are glass half full kind of people, are crying out for some positivity. Wail no more optimistic readers.

1)      Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon is based on a pretty sound and promising premise. It draws on one of the most historic moments in human civilization, the 1969 moon landing, to give a story about toys some narrative heft for the adults. The space race, we discover, was not just a competitive dash to the stars but a sprint for the wreckage of an Autobot ship, containing some alien tech with Godlike powers. But hang on the astronauts look round for a bit and then come home again rather uneventfully…

Aside from the idea there’s the title itself. I mean it’s pretty damn cool to make a film with the same name as a legendary Pink Floyd album! Oh wait, there’s a word missing. But they say Dark Side of the Moon in the movie? Maybe Michael Bay (or some lawyers) decided it was snappier to drop a word.

2)      Or perhaps no one wanted to limit this film to just the one “side”. There are at least three sides available because Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon is out in 3D. In fact with the juggernaut of 3D films slowing, its supporters in the industry are said to be pinning their hopes on Bay’s blockbuster because his trademark CGI pyrotechnics look stunning via the magic shades. I saw it in 2D because I wasn’t keen on paying more for a film I didn’t really want to endure. But let’s stick with the positives.

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen makes a case for being one of the worst films of all time. I haven’t even seen it (mostly because of the sheer force of the derision) but you know a film is bad when its director and star use words like “shit” and “crap” just seconds after they are no longer contractually obliged to promote it. The original Transformers was surprisingly good though and critical consensus is that this is substantially better than the sequel. The downside for Michael “Boom-Bang-Bam” Bay is that most reviewers are merely saying Transformers 3 is better to illustrate how atrociously bad the second instalment was.

3)      Damn I said I would stick with the positives didn’t I? Well there are always two big ticks alongside Michael Bay’s name. He is consistent and he always provides plenty of bangs for your buck. I saw the first Transformers by accident all those years ago and I was won over primarily by Bay’s competent handling of stuff frequently exploding into thousands of shards of glass and chunks of concrete. In Transformers 3, if you stick with it for over an hour, you get to see Chicago flattened. In one scene the human characters slide through a skyscraper as it collapses. Then they slide through it again. Then more stuff blows up. Then some more. Then there’s some slow mo. And a bit more. Something else goes bang. You lose interest.

4)      Alright there are some negatives. Like the constantly annoying and yelping Shia LaBeouf.

5)      But surely these are more than outweighed by the presence of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley? It was a big ask to find someone to replace Megan Fox’s assets but British lingerie model Rosie was named FHM’s sexiest woman of 2011. Physically she easily fills the implausibly hot girlfriend role. Bay knows he’s working with a thing of beauty, panning the camera down her body in the middle of action sequences.

Unfortunately her performance has been chewed, swallowed, digested and vomited onto a pile of steaming fresh elephant dung by every single critic. Surprisingly I thought her acting was worse when she was simply required to scream. We see her getting dressed from behind briefly at one point and in a couple of revealing dresses but not sufficiently unclothed to warrant the price of admission. Having said that Bay does his best to reduce every single female extra to eye candy by ordering them to strut about or look scared in something short.

6)      On the plus side! John Malkovich appears in what might be a mildly amusing but pointless cameo in a film that was at least an hour shorter.

7)      Ken Jeong also shows up as essentially his character from The Hangover, minus any of the sometimes funny rudeness. He is vital to one of the many baffling and needless sub plots. Which leads me to reason number eight…

8)      A glorious two and a half hour runtime may make any of the microscopically good things in this film meaningless but it has its beneficial effects as a sedative. You’ll be capable of falling into a sleep so deep that a succession of nuclear wars wouldn’t wake you after Bay has left you numbed and extremely bored by repetitive scenes of endless destruction.

9)      Actually there aren’t even 10 fake reasons to see it.

I have completely failed to live up to my nickname of Optimist Prime…

The Hangover: Part 2

It’s not as shit as lots of critics are saying it is. But it is mostly shit.

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Right? That’s a solid rule of life, tried and tested and formed from extensive experience. We trust such wise old mottos for a reason. They must work.

Well they work to an extent. This sequel takes the rule to the extreme. It takes it much too far. As many have already said, Part 2 is pretty much a scene by scene remake of the original. If you’ve seen The Hangover this will be predictable. The jokes might initially force a smile, a smile of recollection, a hint of the laughter from your first viewing of Part 1. Then they will become torturously tiresome.

Most of the attempts at humour in the film left me absolutely cold. I watched, aware that this was meant to be funny, conscious of idiotic laughter elsewhere in the cinema, feeling completely uninterested. The times that you are tempted to the verge of a giggle feel as if they are due to an uncontrollable infectious reaction, a mindless physical spasm, spreading from a gaffawing buffoon or someone who hasn’t seen The Hangover. Or someone who laughs at the first syllable of country.

Actually on a few occassions, no more than three, I felt compelled to genuinely laugh. For whatever reason, be it my easily shocked innocence or taste for inappropriate jokes, I wanted to let myself chuckle. BUT so appalled was I by the lack of creativity, the sheer cheek of the filmmakers to release a sequel with EXACTLY the same format and plot, I forced myself to conceal my pleasure. Or limit it to the slightest “ha”. Quite apart from the fact I knew in my head it was awful, there were also some gags that strayed over my (usually rather wide) line of decency on issues from sexuality to race.

There are a handful of enjoyable things in Part 2 however. Chief among them is the wife-in-waiting, played by Jamie Chung. She is delightfully pretty and sexy, and not in the crude way you might expect from these films. Her character is not spectacuarly rounded, lifelike or convincing, but simply the stereotypically perfect girlfriend/partner/wife. She is gorgeous, intelligent, caring, understanding, perhaps even submissive. It’s briefly nice to indulge the impossible daydream of having such a devoted soul mate.

Bangkok is pretty much the perfect location for this film. But I’m not going to indulge it any further by picking out the positives. It is mostly irritating. When I saw Holy Rollers, I realised Justin Bartha could act and play interesting characters. Here he goes back to his career of missing out on crazy happenings, this time not on a roof but by a turquoise resort pool, fretting over five star breakfast. Seriously couldn’t they have shuffled the Wolf pack to include him this time? Just shake things up with a little change?

A handful of reviews have speculated that this sequel must surely be a piece of high concept art, mirroring the actual weary effects of a hangover. The first film was the wild night out and this is the comedown. These 102 minutes of my life aren’t refunded with such creative criticism though.

This has turned into a pointless rant. All I meant to say is that the critics are 90% right about The Hangover: Part 2. And the 10% they’re wrong about is not worth your time or money.

3D Cinema Review – Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

You can rely on Disney’s well known Pirate franchise for one of the universal laws of cinema. As sure as night follows day and the tide washes in and out, each successive film in the Pirates of the Caribbean series will be worse than the last. Like a basket of juicy fruit left to rot on a sunny beach, the individual ingredients that made the first film so fun gradually lose their enjoyment. You can also bet your house that in increasingly more desperate attempts to recapture the magic of the Black Pearl’s virgin voyage, the plots will acquire more baffling layers with each new instalment. And this film’s ending proves once again that there will always be room for yet another adventure.

However this film does break some new ground. For example for the first time ever, the title is as confusing and vague as the many competing strands of the story. The tides are certainly no more or less important than before and there is nothing strange about the film; within Captain Jack’s world at least mermaids and myths are pretty standard fare.

Things get off to a familiar but promising start. Our beloved scallywag Jack Sparrow is in London to rescue sidekick Mr Gibbs from a trial, which would be swiftly followed by a hanging if the bloodthirsty crowd had their way. After some costumed shenanigans and typically camp stalking about, Jack and Gibbs find themselves at the King’s palace. The crown wish to find the fountain of youth before the crafty Catholics in Spain and they’ve heard Sparrow knows the way.

Jack gets an audience with the King in a sumptuous room and Depp gets ample opportunity to showcase the physical comedy and wordplay audiences have come to love. The King is played by Richard Griffiths in a delightful cameo. Needless to say Jack manages an escape. Later in the film Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa takes the time to mentally plan an escape route, presuming that’s what Depp’s madcap Sparrow does, only for Jack to reply that he sometimes “improvises”. The running and jumping through an impressive CGI London in the film’s opening segment, is ad hoc Jack Sparrow action at its best.

Sadly the film simply cannot maintain the entertainment levels as chase follows chase and sword fight follows sword fight. Most of the action is surprisingly inventive, especially since we’ve had three films already but at times even Jack’s luck over judgment leaps of faith enter ridiculous territory. The stunts become monotonous by the end because of the film’s relentless opening barrage, tarnishing the drama of the finale. There are no explosive cannon battles for those who love their ships and nautical duels. Instead of boarding we get an awful lot of trekking through the jungle.

Having said this, two standout scenes are exciting and engaging. I’ve already mentioned Captain Jack prancing his way around London but the first mermaid attack scene is also terrific. Only the Pirates franchise could deliver such a scene. It’s got frights and bites, fangs and bangs. The mermaids are less interesting by the end, but here they are introduced in a lengthy scene as seductive and dangerous. The attack comes as a real shock and well managed change in pace after they are lured in to enchant some pirates left as bait.

The mermaid battle is an epic, long scene and the film is so long that it loses much of its epic feel. Sub plots like a half formed romance between a mermaid and clergy man could have been slimmed considerably or dropped altogether .The runtime is literally bladder bursting, as a friend of mine dashed from the room as soon as the credits rolled. I was content to sit and watch the names of the cast fly at me in 3D however, because of Hans Zimmer’s magnificent music, which remains the best thing about the Pirates of the Caribbean. There are some nice variations and new additions to the main theme in this instalment but I can’t help feeling it’s time he focused his talents on new projects, rather than continually recycling one stunning track.

Hang on though; surely this is still worth seeing just for another outing from Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow? Isn’t he the single most important pillar upon which the blockbusters are based? I always assumed, like many critics, that the romantic pairing of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley in the previous films was holding back Depp’s brilliance. But having seen On Stranger Tides, in which Depp must mostly steer proceedings alone, his performance is somehow less effective without them.

He is at his best in this film when dancing around other characters, making light of them. Penelope Cruz is suitably sassy and sexy as a pirate, albeit with an unrealistically attractive cleavage for a hardened sailor, and she and Depp have some fun exchanges, but putting Sparrow at the heart of a love story doesn’t work. Even the filmmakers realise this by backing out of it somewhat at the end. Captain Jack Sparrow is not the emotional type. And what made him so attractive to audiences, was the way he mocked the clichéd relationship between Bloom and Knightley. Making him part of the conventional storyline robs his performance of some of its power.

Depp is still fantastic fun at points though, rising above an overcomplicated script with a bizarre fascination for throwing in random and rubbish rhymes. This film may just go through the motions and it may be far too long, but it’s undeniably grand and fairly pleasing despite the odd yawn.

Rather than fork out for its occasional 3D gimmicks of a sword jutting out of the screen though, I would recommend ditching the high seas for inner city London and Joe Cornish’s critically acclaimed directorial debut, Attack the Block. I saw this just hours before Pirates 4 and without adding anything new to the chorus of praise around it, I will just say go and see it. It is funnier and more thrilling than Rob Marshall’s blockbuster and doesn’t deserve to sink.

The King Maker

Last year the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg was dubbed a “King Maker” by many in the press, due to the historic power afforded to him as a result of a hung parliament. He could either prop up grumpy Gordon or crack open the party poppers for Dave’s coronation. The public rejoiced in watching the usual big boys squirm and a new man get a chance to pull the strings. But now no one agrees with Nick and he’s plummeted from the heights of Britain’s most popular to the land’s favourite burning effigy. Thousands genuinely hate him and want to scratch out his entrails for his sickening, unnatural marriage to the Tories. They despise him for drunkenly tossing away longstanding pledges to the public on his stag night and loathe him for cutting chunks from the country’s finances lustfully on honeymoon. For many it’s a painful, all consuming dislike of this one yellow tied Westminster suit amongst hundreds.

It’s sometimes easy to accept the idea that in today’s world, truly bad films don’t get made anymore. It’s impossible to find two hours in front of a screen with some flickering images completely unsatisfying. You can’t hate a piece of filmmaking like you hate a man. You can’t find it as painfully offensive to your artistic taste and morality as swathes of reckless, damaging government spending cuts. This may be true. Even the most misguided projects I review usually have some kind of redeeming quality, at least one moment of real enjoyment or an admirable aim. But The King Maker is a film that took only 60 seconds for me to want the blessed release of the end credits. It’s an absolute and total turkey, the sort of film that goes straight to the bottom shelf at Tesco for a reason, the sort of film that without qualification deserves the label: BAD.

Out of scores and scores of poor movies, The King Maker is one of the few that if you have any sense of quality and taste, you’ll rapidly be able to regard with something close to hate. Seriously you should heed my warning if you want to avoid an excruciating hour and a half; do not watch The King Maker. Certainly DO NOT PAY ANY (real) MONEY TO SEE THIS. You might think its 88 minute running time short, but it feels a hell of a lot longer and you’ll never get those precious minutes back. There is nothing at all to justify spending time on this lifeless, empty shell of a film.

Literally nothing at all, everything about The King Maker is purely bad. As I’ve said it takes less than a minute for the shoddy editing and woefully low production standards present throughout to raise their ugly, persistent heads. The film opens with an action chase sequence peppered with ludicrous ninja/karate style high kicks and flips. There are jumps and landings that would be laughable were the tone not so serious or the camerawork and execution not so dire. In fact much of the action in The King Maker could be from a masterful slice of slapstick Charlie Chaplin or a ridiculous Monty Python sketch. But The King Maker is not even so bad it is funny. At times it ought to be hilarious. I did not laugh or smile once at its awfulness though. Afterwards my face hurt from the exhaustive efforts of a non-stop grimace.

The main reason I can’t even recommend The King Maker as refreshing fest of unintentional LOL moments is because it’s evident that the actors are trying so damn hard. You can’t have a good old heartening chuckle at all those involved in the film when it’s so obvious that they were trying to make something good; they have no idea how shit it is and you’re left with an endless feeling of painful pity. Every element of the movie is bad, every acting performance poor at best and agonisingly awful at worst. In fairness to the cast they are not helped by the script. Rather than rant about its failures one quote sums up the clunky, grating quality of the dialogue: “Look it’s the king’s emissary, I wonder what he wants?”.

For what it’s worth the film chronicles the story of Portuguese mercenary Fernando De Gama (Gary Stretch), who is shipwrecked in Siam and rescued from slavery by his love interest. He works his way up through the ranks of society, stumbles across a plot, and has scores of his own to settle blah blah blah…it’s really not worth it.

There are continuity errors aplenty, an out of place soundtrack that will make you cringe, silly stunts and cliché black and white flashbacks. CGI of a port full of ships looks like it’s been taken from an unsuccessful computer game with unconvincing Windows 98 graphics (the water in particular looks atrocious). In fact the plot and action set pieces and horrible attempts at a historical setting all seem like ingredients from an out of date, bargain basement video game. There are even punch and kick sound effects ripped straight from cartoon archives.

Despite my partial defence of the actors earlier, the standout flaws of this film are their totally unbelievable performances. The worst offender is the plotting Queen and her lover as they fail to convey the passion of their secret affair. The majority of their scenes together seem like a disappointing porno with an inexplicable lack of flesh on show. Another potentially career devastating turn comes from lead Gary Stretch. His limp delivery of lines serves as the final nail in the coffin for The King Maker. Even a film so badly executed could have salvaged some likeability with a charismatic turn from the lead actor. Stretch merely drags things further into painful depths of disappointment and dismalness.

The King Maker was supposed to be a spectacular showcase of Thailand. It’s only the third Thai film to be made in the English language, and the first since 1941. There are some superb, beautiful locations occasionally visible in the background amongst the appalling action of the story. But they don’t deserve to be associated with the worst film I’ve seen this year and I suspect the favourite by a mile in the race for worst film of 2011.

Do Something Funny for Money

http://www.rednoseday.com/fundraise

Comic Relief is an incredible event. It’s far more inclusive than any fundraising fixture on the British calendar. You needn’t reach a certain level of fitness or want to play games as you might feel obliged to for Sport Relief. You don’t have to think Pudsey is a national treasure. You don’t have to buy a crap single you don’t want to listen to. All you have to do is laugh. Comic Relief celebrates the pure intoxicating, uplifting infectiousness of laughter. It’s actually an excellent night of entertainment and fun, somehow conquering the gloomy serious sections that make us all feel guilty. It doesn’t set out to be morally superior and demand your donation. It aims to unite and inspire and if nothing else, make the less fortunate smile and recall what makes life remarkably and undeniably worthwhile.

To take part all you have to do is embrace your silly side and don a Red Nose. Maybe get sponsored to wear something red. It needn’t be much. But Comic Relief also offers wonderful opportunities for closet creative types and comedians to flex their most imaginative and daft muscles. This year I’m seriously intending to do something for the cause. I hope I can make it happen. But at the very least I’ll be buying a Red Nose and trying to spread the word. Order your fundraising pack as I have, they’re free! Surrender to the laughter and feel the happiness light up your life. If you can, try to give something back for worthy causes. And be thankful for the good you’re lucky enough to have.

http://www.rednoseday.com/fundraise