What will be the Rotten Tomatoes film of the summer?

So far we’ve had the surpise hit of Thor, along with the critically panned but blockbuster ruling The Hangover: Part 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. But which film will be left as the “fresh-ist” come the end of the summer rush for the cinema?

This week X-Men: First Class has landed with impossibly perfect critical reception, largely at least, with the average approval rating way into the 90% zone. I would wager that this will remain the best superhero smash of the season, at least according to the critics.

In terms of box office takings, nothing will surely be able to touch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2? The much anticipated and long awaited conclusion to the series will be devoured greedily by millions. Whether or not it will be a hit with critics is far less clear cut. There’s a chance it will be too over the top, descending into one drawn out epic battle. Or it could finally nail it, getting the best out of the book for diehard fans and the best out of the cast for cinema lovers.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the only mainstream release I can see surpassing X-Men is JJ Abrams’ Super 8. Many of the reviews already emerging have criticisms of this film but most critics are likely to be seduced by the ambition of the project and tributes to 80s hits and Spielberg-esque filmmaking. This will be a story with the thrills a modern day blockbuster requires, as well as some old fashioned character development and emotional investment, fuelled in all probability, by nostalgia.

Total Film, one of the first key sites to review, gives it 5 stars: http://www.totalfilm.com/reviews/cinema/super-8

The dark horse of the summer, in terms of combining critical and audience support, may well be Jon Favreau’s Cowboys and Aliens.

What are you most looking forward to?

Film news: Dark Peter Pan reimagining to star Eckhart and Bean

Longstanding big names Aaron Eckhart and Sean Bean are to add clout to the cast of a modern retelling of children’s classic Peter Pan. They’ve both joined a project to be directed by Ben Hibon, with the working title Pan, which is set to turn the traditional fantasy tale of Neverland on its head.

Evil pirate Hook will be transformed into a troubled, disturbed and obsessed police detective searching for a childlike kidnapper with a knack for both snatching and dispatching little ones. Hapless sidekick Smee is a chief detective and Hook’s only friend on the force, with innocent Wendy a traumatised survivor keen to help find the criminal.

The role of Wendy will be played by AnnaSophia Robb (Race to Witch Mountain/Jumper). Eckhart will take the key role of Hook and Bean that of sympathetic Smee. Director Hibon, who masterminded the creation of the universally praised animation sequence in Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows: Part 1, will be tasked with bringing an interesting idea to life, that’s been simmering in the development stages for a long time. According to Empire Magazine the film, once the property of New Line, is being promoted at Cannes by Essential Entertainment with October the target for the start of principal photography.

It might be important for those behind Pan to get their skates on, given that Peter Pan Begins with Channing Tatum is also in the pipeline. This would be a reinterpreted origin story for J.M Barrie’s character, with Hook rumoured to be Pan’s brother. I know which vision of the iconic story I’d rather see successfully realised.

Hibon’s concise storytelling ability and visual flair are evident from his brief touches to the Harry Potter franchise, so he could have exactly the right capabilities to pull off a tantalising and ambitious concept. Eckhart has played a determined and stressed lawman before in global phenomenon The Dark Knight and certainly has the acting chops to be a good, well meaning Hook. The dependency of the film on Robb’s role as Wendy will be interesting, given her less inspiring CV.

Let’s hope this is a clever new slant on the fairytale that does get the backing it needs to grow up and leave Neverland for theatres.

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows: First Part 2 Trailer Hits The Web

I never got round to reviewing the first part of the conclusion to the Harry Potter franchise. I shall perhaps have to buy it on DVD and have another crack at it before the final FINAL part of the series comes out in cinemas. But the reason I was reluctant to record my thoughts on it is because these thoughts were confused and conflicting.

On the one hand Harry has been freed from Hogwarts and there was a merciful change in format. He was chasing after the Horcruxes and there was some interesting internal conflict between the three friends. But as usual I had my gripes about changes from the book, in particular from memory I can recall my outrage that Hedwig was inexplicably flying about, rather than in her cage at Harry’s feet, when she is killed. Some of the action scenes were not as wonderfully realised as they should have been. But setting aside my picky annoyance at changes from the books, there was something that didn’t quite sit right about the change in tone. Putting my critic’s hat well and truly on, there were definitely downsides to endless teen angst in forests and fields that looked as though they were advertising English Heritage.

So it was refreshing, but like all the Potter films really, somehow disappointing too. It would be a real shame if the series didn’t end with one final film that really matched the enjoyment of the book.

Here is a link to the trailer, which predictably focuses on action scenes. Most of them look suitably epic.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/apr/28/harry-potter-deathly-hallows-part-2

Only one shot really worries me: what the hell is Harry doing grabbing Voldemort and then jumping off some tower with him? Did that happen? I don’t think he did. Voldemort has to be terrifying, believably so, and Harry should have to struggle to get near him. A real weakness of the films has been their failure to paint the Dark Lord as a truly all powerful menace.

Share your thoughts, hopes and fears.

Macho Antidotes to the Royal Wedding – Part 3: Bargain DVDs – Trainspotting and The Wrestler

The big day is upon us. The masculine apocalypse is now. The horsemen will round the corner towards Westminster Abbey any moment, dragging their cargo of the merry middle class and nostalgic Eton boy politicians, right into our living rooms. Oh my god it’s not long until we get to see Kate’s dress!

Shoot me now. I am apprehensive, a little scared even, because I may have been advocating alternatives to the big day but I know I’m fighting an entity so vast that it will inevitably stray into my line of sight at some point. I won’t be able to flee the hordes living and breathing the ceremony like it was their own. It wouldn’t even do any good to flee abroad, if anything they’re more marriage mad than the most devout British Royalist. So I definitely cannot outrun this and in addition I have another problem. I can’t hide from it either, because I’ve already consumed the alternatives in order to point them out to all of you. Blokes, guys and lads everywhere, I hope you appreciate my sacrifice.

We’ve reached the final alternative step and its one I like to think of as the emergency measure. Thor at the cinema requires venturing out and United on iPlayer requires dangerous proximity to internet coverage, but these two films on DVD, available on the bargain shelves of any local high street, merely need a TV. I know, believe me I know, the wedding is on all the channels.  But if you have an even more serious aversion to confetti and vows than me, just pull the aerial out and stick these two very manly films in to play, one after another.

Firstly then a film I’ve been meaning to see for a long while, the Scottish breakthrough piece for Danny Boyle, Trainspotting. Despite all the hype, from critics and friends alike, I really didn’t know what to expect from this exactly. I knew there was drug taking, in all likelihood sex, and an awful lot of accented foul language. I knew it starred an emaciated Ewan McGregor. I knew it would have both fun and filth. I knew Boyle’s playful style would scrawl a signature in every scene. I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so hilarious and true to life as it was.

Much of the humour comes from the characters of McGregor’s Mark Renton’s “so called mates”. Johnny Lee Miller, now starring fifteen years on in Boyle’s critically acclaimed Frankenstein opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in the theatre, plays a Sean Connery obsessed, seemingly streetwise fellow crack addict. His assessments of Connery’s performances as James Bond and his astonishing grasp of box office data, were particularly surreal for a fellow Bond fan like me, as he helped friends to inject heroin. He turns out to be far less clued up than he pretends to be though. Then there’s Spud, a guy who is very plainly clueless from the start, who lands up throwing his shit all over his girlfriend’s family at breakfast. Don’t ask how. Slapstick perhaps, but I laughed for several minutes.

There’s also Tommy, a guy McGregor’s surprisingly appealing narration informs us has the fault of being honest and not addicted to any banned substance. I assume the visceral poetry of Renton’s narration is so attractive because it is transplanted largely untouched from Irvine Walsh’s novel, which is infamous for its use of Scottish dialect. A scene where Tommy and Spud discuss the pitfalls of their respective women at a club, and the girlfriends do likewise about the boys in the toilets, presumably also has its roots in the book. But it’s wonderfully adapted by Boyle, with subtitles not quite necessary because of the noise and very capable comic acting depicting the darkly funny give and take realities of relationships.

Finally there’s a young Kelly Macdonald, who has since appeared in No Country For Old Men, in her first film. Renton catches sight of her in a club as she’s leaving, with his sex drive rapidly returning as he attempts to give up his habit. He follows her outside, as his narration tells us he’s fallen in love, and tries it on with her. She confidently shoots him down, only to snog his face off in the taxi and subsequently shag him rampantly in her room. In the morning Renton discovers she’s a schoolgirl, and the people he presumes to be flatmates are her parents. It’s the sort of cheeky scene present throughout the film but it centres on deeper, more disturbing truths about youths trapped in a certain limited form of existence.

Renton is undoubtedly trapped by his addiction and his school girl lover is trapped by her age, a desire to break free and be independent. We all know what it’s like to feel trapped; it’s a very human feeling, despite our supposed freedom. Whether you’re a nurse at a crowded hospital running a gauntlet of noses going off like shotguns of snot, a doctor watching patients with crash dummy heads and vacant eyes or one of thousands of the unemployed youths in this country retreading the same old paths, the same old trenches of memory through the earth, with no concept of a future. We can all get that feeling, and recognise it in others.

Ay na donne get all political pal? Keep it light! Ay?

Ah yes I forgot a character. Robert Carlyle plays Begbie, a moustachioed Scott whose job description reads thus: “playing pool and drinking at the bar, until a minor action by another customer causes him to lose his rag and beat everyone shitless”. Begbie’s probably trapped too, but to be honest his character never seemed much more than smashing entertainment. Literally.

The thing about Renton is that he thinks he’s beaten the rest of us buggers trapped in the game of life, chasing after fat televisions and fancy cars. He thinks that by choosing drugs he’s chosen nothingness and some sort of purer, pleasure filled existence. But like every revolutionary he comes to realise he is as trapped by the system as those embracing it. He needs money for his hits, friends for his sanity. Or maybe not friends, as you’ll see if you watch the film.

Trainspotting is a damn good ride through the monotony of modern existence, with eccentric but hilarious and extremely likeable tour guides. It’s more than your average tourist experience because at times it really gets you to think. And as an exploration of drug culture, Boyle’s direction is suitably dirty, bizarre and haunting, but also responsible and not over the top. You’ll flinch at some of the filth, the needles and most of all McGregor screaming his lungs out at a hallucination of a baby. Trainspotting is not simply a mash-up of visual clichés about getting high though, perhaps because it has such a strong grounding in character.

And so we come to The Wrestler, directed by Darren Aronofsky. Now Darren, as I like to call him, is someone I have a love/hate relationship with. First came the love, as I fell head over heels for the sensuality of Black Swan (https://mrtsblog.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/black-swan/) and then came the hate, when I followed this up with his earlier much praised work, Requiem for a Dream (https://mrtsblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/an-open-letter-to-darren-aronofsky/).

One of the reasons I found Trainspotting so refreshing was that whilst it dealt with drugs and it had its strange and psychedelic scenes of intoxication; it did not become the pretentious exercise in filmmaking that was Requiem for a Dream. I will probably be slated for saying it, and it may merely have been the context in which I first saw it (see link), but I really didn’t like that film. I did not see the point to it. Trainspotting seemed to say something far truer about addiction, despite its tongue often being firmly in cheek.

I only bring this up because it all meant that I didn’t know what I was going to get from The Wrestler; dazzling Darren or dopey Darren. The critical buzz around Mickey Rourke’s resurrected corpse meant not a jot, because some of them hated Black Swan and some of them loved Requiem.

I would not go as far as the five star quotes plastered over the cover. I would not call it the “ultimate man film” as FHM did. But it’s undoubtedly a film about a man and ageing, whereas Trainspotting, with hindsight, was a film for boys. Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson is someone trapped by his past, the legacy of his prime, and the mistakes he made during that ripe period of life.

Perhaps Rourke put in such a praiseworthy performance because he could really inhabit his character. He has been there, more or less. Rather than playing a caricature or a gun toting gangster, Rourke is simply a person here; a human being in decline, or as he says in one moving speech “a broken down piece of meat”. At first I didn’t see what all the fuss about his performance was, but then after a few emotional scenes with a potential lover and ageing stripper (Marisa Tomei) and particularly some heartbreaking confrontations with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), Rourke brings Randy to life.

There’s always the danger of melodramatic sentimentality, but the film manages to avoid it, primarily because of the masculine restraint of Rourke’s portrayal. Aside from some brutal wrestling scenes and one careless fuck, this is rather pedestrian territory for Darren after the frenzied, frenetic highs of Requiem and the disorientating dash for beautiful perfection in Black Swan. The Wrestler certainly didn’t grab me and it didn’t inspire the extremes of emotion that Darren’s two other efforts did. It has sporting parallels with Black Swan but lacks the wow factor of that film.

I don’t think there’s necessarily anything that wrong with The Wrestler. In some ways it is refreshing to see a film that shows so many sides of a man’s ordinary life, making his escape from that routine via his passion all the more meaningful. There’s no doubt that performing as a wrestler requires a certain level of very manly commitment to the drama. This film will offset any feminine activities like dusting icing sugar on cupcakes or fashioning paper chains with ease. But it’s so realistic, so dreary and so grim, that this antidote might lead to a dangerous and depressing overdose.

If you watch these back to back, watch Trainspotting last. It’s fun as well as not for the faint hearted. Either film is preferable to pointless precessions though, I’m sure you’ll agree. Never mind God Save the Queen, God save male souls everywhere and best of luck!