Tag Archives: film

Syriana is a thinky film. Don’t go expecting to switch off your brain and relax in senseless, random violence for an hour or two, or to be spoonfed expository dialogue every fifteen seconds.

In fact, don’t go expecting to understand a word of it. It feels like they took a four-hour film and cut out all the explanation.

Well, obviously the general plot threads are easy to spot. But they stay resolutely apart: one subplot, showing how easily disaffected youths can be turned to terrorism, barely touches the rest of the film.

I suspect this is a slow burner, like The Shawshank Redemption.

Avaragado’s rating: six dates

Ooh, didn’t they smoke a lot in the fifties?

Avaragado’s rating: some ginger

Two entirely unrelated (except chronologically) points.

• Brokeback Mountain. Good. There aren’t enough gay cowboy love stories if you ask me. Avaragado’s rating: two tins of beans.
• Perforce. Not so good. Bonkers command-line UI, terminology all over the place, B&D version control. If only Subversion were a little bit cleverer with merges, we could have moved to that instead. Sigh.

Or, The Chronicles of Yawnia

Or, That was a bit rubbish

Not an auspicious start: a bombing raid on London in what must be 1940, with future Narnia royalty looking out of the window. Not a blackout curtain to be seen! No big Xs on all the windows! And then in the next scene, thousands of kids are being evacuated. Didn’t that happen in 1939 as war actually broke out? Call me picky, but I want my fantasy to be accurate!

The CGI was pretty spectacular. The scenery was fantastic. But the film itself was plodding, dull, dull, dull. All very middle-class home counties accents. It was like The Railway Children with thinly disguised biblical allegory and an infinite budget.

I’m sure it was a faithful adaptation of the book. Maybe that was the problem.

Avaragado’s rating: one mint imperial

I have never read a Harry Potter book. Generally speaking I have no idea of the plot of an HP story before I park myself in the cinema seat. (I know who dies in book six, though.)

I understand that the G of F book is about a million pages long; the film is similarly lengthy. As much as I like Miranda Richardson, her scene as the Glenda Slaggesque Rita someone-or-other could have been excised without, ahem, muggles like myself being any the wiser or the plot suffering in any way.

The films are getting better, and darker. The acting is improving; the gurning is reducing. We’re now starting to get all the soppy stuff, so there’s lots of additional comedy opportunities this time round. Rupert Grint, AKA Ron Weasley, or is it the other way round, will I suspect never win any actual awards for comedy; but he may romp away with the prize for being most ginger.

Avaragado’s rating: two of those little pots of mixed herbs

Just back from seeing Serenity with Louise and Melanie. (Chris demurred, muttering about towns in Arizona in the vicinity of Yawnzville.)

Call me a Joss Whedon fanboy if you want, and I suspect you will, and I suspect the cinema was full of them/us, but I thought it was a cracking film. The characters had, you know, character. There was no po-faced Star Trekkery with Data-learns-to-swear-style japes, nor was there dialogue-by-numbers a la George “Nooooooo-oo-oo-oo!” Lucas.

It got a little Buffyesque in places (s/vampires/reavers/g), and the ensemble cast meant the occasional feeling that it was character X’s turn for the funny line. But those flaws did not, as they say, spoil my enjoyment of the picture/film/movie. And Whedon’s ability to switch the mood in an instant is second to none.

Avaragado’s rating: one packet of dry roasted peanuts

I liked the Fantastic Four comics – the original ones. Indeed I once owned an issue from the early sixties, bought at a comics fair in the late seventies. I remember it cost me £20. I later sold it to my cousin for £25, possibly to fund a skateboard purchase. I forget.

We used to skateboard down a newly tarmacked slice of road near our school, not too far away from where we lived.

Anyhoo. To the film, which we saw last Thursday if you’re taking notes.

Anyone expecting the film to be anything other than a by-numbers summer superhero blockbuster will be disappointed. They take liberties with the origin story, but then that always happens – and Marvel does it too by rebooting and alternative universes and so on.

There is, thankfully, little in the way of schmaltz – at least relative to recent films (yes, I’m talking about you, Spielberg). Ioan Gruffudd, last seen by me as a surprise celebrity guest in The Play What I Wrote, does a plausible accent but his other acting muscles had a few weeks off, not required. Jessica Alba, blah. Julian McMahon as Victor Von Doom chews scenery as directed. Chris “Human Torch” Evans (as opposed to Chris “Big Breakfast” Evans) seems to spend a great deal of the early part of the film topless, a practice I for one welcome.

Apart from Torchy my other favourite character from the comics was Ben Grimm, The Thing. I don’t recall running round the playground shouting “it’s clobbering time!” and generally being very heavy (I did run round shouting “flame on!” and burning people’s shoes with a magnifying glass), but there was something about The Thing that appealed in the comics. Possibly it was the constant bickering with Torchy, or the fact that he was the most complex character of the bunch. Most likely it was the hat and the trenchcoat. Which make it into the film, I’m glad to say. Michael Chiklis, who plays Ben Grimm in the film, and who I’d never heard of, does pretty well. A shoo-in for Best Actor in a Rubber Suit at next year’s Oscars.

My mate Stan Lee makes his usual cameo, with lines. Our geek-infested preview audience chuckled knowingly. I said “I’ve met him, you know,” out loud. No I didn’t, but I thought about it for a microsecond.

I can confirm that the film rose above my notoriously low-hanging enjoyment threshold. Chris thought it was rubbish, but then he does have the A level.

Avaragado’s rating: four packets of crisps (assorted flavours)