Mini Review #1

Mini Reviews

For this week, I have decided to review the four films which I’ve watched this holiday in... (wait for it) miniature form. I’ve set myself some guidelines for this; 1) Reviews have to be written in 250 words or less. End of rules. Also, I have decided that it would be quite fun for people to tell me a film that I should watch, and then I follow through by reviewing it. So if you have any ideas for me (and please, be kind with your choices) then please tell me. Enjoy.

Wrath of the Titans

Before I watched Louis Leterrier’s 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans, I was anticipating an experience which would be entertainingly rubbish. It turned out to be rubbishly rubbish. I was expecting hackneyed writing and an idiotic plot, but awful CGI and boring action scenes... Sir Leterrier, you go too far! It is with great pleasure, ladies and gentlemen, that I can conclude that Wrath of the Titans is not completely awful. Just mostly.

One of the main problems with the first instalment was that it took itself so seriously, when really it’s dumber than fans of dubstep. They clearly took this criticism on board, as there is the addition of a comic-relief character this time in the form of Poseidon’s son, who turns out to be both unfunny and really, really annoying. The writing and acting are just as poor as before, but it betters its sequel for three reasons; 1. The CG monsters no longer look like something I draw in History when bored, 2. The Greek God family drama subplot, (of course, Greek family tragedy inspired Shakespeare’s own family dramas ironically enough) is basically now a soap opera with bushy beards and genocide, and therefore, interesting, 3. Sam Worthington now boasts a perm as opposed to a shaved head, which is far more Greek-hero (read, camp). So. It’s not terrible. If this narrow improvement is progressive, by the 23^rd sequel, Breakfast of the Titans, we might genuinely have a good end-product on our screens.

Drive

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, best known for his violently bleak, and criminally underrated, Norse tale, Valhalla Rising, received a standing ovation at Cannes last year, followed by a nifty Best Director win, for this (already) cult classic. One of my favourite films of 2011, this is blockbuster entertainment of the best kind; stylish, intelligent, moving, and frequently awe-inspiring.

It’s visually stunning, Los Angeles and the labyrinthine architecture of its roads and routes is one of the primary characters in the story, and the synth, 80’s pop inspired soundtrack is nothing short of incredible, substantiating the dreamy atmosphere of the images, as well as the poignancy of the themes through the lyrics. Screenwriter Hossein Amini uses minimal dialogue to develop his characters, and Refn prefers simple framing of the scenes as opposed to complex camera shots. Instead, both rely upon the performances to succeed, namely those of Ryan Gosling, whose eyes would turn Mitt Romney gay, and Carey Mulligan, and they pull it off remarkably; they reveal more in a single look than most films do in five pages of dialogue. The romance between the two of them is beautifully paced. The fairy-tale love story soon descends into cold reality, and the scenes of shocking brutality which follow in the second half of the film act as an extremely effective, and very tragic, contrast to the poetically innocent affair which preceded it. Drive is ultimately a lesson in the importance of human connection in today’s computerised, distinctly isolationist world.

Yes, man-crush. Of course it's only a man-crush...

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Zak ‘That’s good, but slow-mo’s even better’ Snyder made this utterly pointless remake while clearly missing the entire point of Romero’s masterpiece. The original was not a unintelligible gore-fest, but an immensely clever satire on the commercialism of modern society; by staging it in a shopping mall, we see the remaining un-undead mindlessly take delight in having access to every materialistic good in the building for free, despite them taking part in the small factor of an Apocalypse, not to mention the shots of the zombies themselves shambling around the shops. Romero highlights our unnatural and immoral consumerist greed.

The 2004 Dawn of the Dead is an unintelligible gore-fest. It’s not terrible; as far as unintelligible gore-fests go, this is shallowly entertaining; with decent production values and enough over-the-top violence to satiate the blood-thirstiness of all you sadists out there and a bit-part for Modern Family’s Ty Burrell (Phil Dunphy) as a one-dimensionally selfish playboy, made me chuckle, but this does not excuse the enormous disservice it does to the original. It’s insulting Romero, to be frank. Excusing the hideously caricatured characterisations, (the token badass, the aforementioned self-obsessed businessman, the well-intended leader who lost his family to Zombitis), there simply isn’t anything to recommend it thematically. Nothing. Squat. It’s an embarrassment to the Zombie mini-genre, which gets an unfair amount of shtick as it is for not being intellectually rewarding. You know what? Just watch Zombieland. It’s better in every conceivable way. And it has Bill Murray.

Donkey Punch

A title inspired by a sex move which I’ve decided on the grounds of common decency not to describe here. As a film, it’s very average. As an experience, it’s very awkward. When I heard about it initially, I thought to myself ‘Ew that sounds horrible, I’m never watching that.’ Last week I saw that it was scheduled to be on Film 4, and my annoyingly human sense of curiosity got the better of me. I recorded it. I watched it. I, inevitably, regret doing so.

Honestly, this picture tells you all you need to know

It starts off well; the characters, clearly inspired by the rise of British ‘lad’ culture, are believable and realistic, if most of them aren’t at all likable. Most of them are incredibly shallow; their dream is along the lines of having a thousand-person ‘sex and drugs’ orgy at a DJ Scizzle Frizzle gig, which carries on until they die from either a cocaine overdose, body-fluid loss or a crushed pelvis. It’s surprisingly gripping. A docu-drama on this uniquely British lifestyle, it’s almost fascinating. I think to myself; ‘hey, maybe you were wrong.’ Then a girl dies in a freak sex accident, it falls into mind-numbing stupidity, and myself thinks to I ‘HA! Take that!’ Seriously, the decisions these people make will make you scream things at your television. It’s like what would happen if the cast of Hollyoaks cameod in an episode of CSI. So, in conclusion, it’s a film with two differing halves and an incredibly weird plot. Watch it with your parents.