Channelblog

STRAIGHTUP...

Straightheads... now available on Broadband and DVD. look behind the scenes to see why this is a must-see British film.

      

Watch it Now!

Sunshiney

It is the very near future and the Sun is dying. Faced with extermination a multi-national crew have been sent on a mission to restart the Sun’s dying core by means of a bomb, although this is put less brutally as ‘the payload’. From the beginning Sunshine conveys a sense of spectacle you wouldn’t expect from a British film (ok, with help from Fox). It sets up a procedural space journey tone very close to Alien. While never quite troubling the Sci-fi classics that have gone before there is a contemporary edge to Danny Boyle’s direction that is light years from such turgid efforts as the Solaris remake, The Core, or Armageddon. It’s true that after an atmospheric opening which is content to make its case purely on the basis of film technique and minimal plot the crew of the Icarus 2 find themselves a little too crudely at the mercy of a dubious arrival of genre. That they happen on a distress call from the first Icarus, an attempt 7 years before to kickstart the Sun which failed, isn’t the problem. Indeed, the notion of the SOS is explored with a psychological depth which recalls Tarkovsky’s Solaris and 2001, however the execution falls some way short. For exposition it could have taken a few lessons from Hal Holbrook in Capricorn 1 who tells the astronauts that the intended Mars landing is a fit-up job. Cillian Murphy is the de facto lead and he meets the challenge well but he’s poorly served by Alex Garland in a crucial scene where he must decide which course the Icarus must take. As Sunshine lurches into a disaster movie the action ratchets up impressively, always there is an abundance of stylish design and special mention has to be given to the soundtrack; Underworld like Orbital, are a dab hand at lending a film a mysterious gravitas. Although in the same manner the film is a very adept tour through its influences so it might be said Underworld’s cosmic syth-wash floats a lot like Brian Eno. There is a playful confluence of genre which leaves the serious metaphysical stuff for the more commercial thrills of Hollywood cinema. Sunshine never plays anything quite sincerely: the hard science drama, psychological character game, the disaster film, the serious reflection on mortality, and the horror all end up vying for contention. Certainly, there is an ambition here that comes of wanting a film to have the scope of truly memorable cinema. Danny Boyle has looked back at earlier classic films and some of their quality has rubbed off. Next to Kubrick’s 2001 it might not be so wise to revisit Sunshine but it has a relevance in the tenuous plight of mankind theme and its looks alone are enough to make this Boyle’s best effort since Trainspotting.

Charles Maclean

Hot Fuzz

After the success of their spin on George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright have returned, and this time they’ve aimed much bigger. This takes in the differences between the US style of cop movie and the British as well as going on a tour of genre itself as though attempting rival Tarantino. Perhaps that is the ideal refuge for these autuers today who have been so nourished on the positives of less serious cinema. We now get talented film-makers who give us a reflexive fascination for originality rather than originality itself. As much as Hot Fuzz wants be to a no-holds barred, adrenaline fuelled thrill ride, it’s also a very adept film which shows a conceptual flair far above the mediocrity of British film comedy and those Hollywood skits on French and Saunders where Edgar Wright began his career. Although, I have to say I was having my doubts for a bit with Hot Fuzz. 

Simon Pegg is such a good cop they’ve decided he needs to be relocated to the quieter and less criminal outback of provincial Somerset. Critics haven’t been particularly bothered about the opening but it had nothing of the sureness of Shaun of the Dead. Even Nick Frost’s arrival doesn’t spark the film out of first gear. As much as Hot Fuzz wants to show its mastery over genre cop movies it fails to even begin a proper set-up. The action-style flourishes of editing feel forced and jar against the inactivity of the film. It soon becomes clear we’re getting a dose of small-time village life as the quintessential tone for British Horror. The Wicker Man and Straw Dogs are as much a part of Hot Fuzz as overblown Hollywood action movies like Point Break and Bad Boys. A chase after a petty shoplifter leads to an inspired moment as Pegg and Wright quote Shaun of the Dead (and Point-Break) with a wooden row of backyard fences to overcome. Nick Frost is at last stealing the film. Simon Pegg is very good, there is a striking ‘Omen’ moment where his reaction saves the scene from being merely parasitic, but its Nick Frost, the sidekick, who is the stand-out actor in Hot Fuzz.

If Shaun of the Dead ends on a truly lovely moment as a zombie movie mutated into a Buddy movie with Queen’s ‘You’re my Best Friend’ then Hot Fuzz is a joy when Pegg and Frost at last get to go to the pub properly, for beers and not the cranberry Pegg’s starchy policeman has been drinking previously. Afterwards, both asleep on the couch after an evening of cosy male-bonding, drinking and watching cop movies we hear Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys 2 intone, “Shit just got real”. Indeed, things are now hotting up. There are a series of grisly murders to be investigated that only Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) can solve. As a detective story it holds up surprisingly well, and invites a satisfying second viewing even though the best clues are in spotting the numerous references outside the plot. 

The supporting cast features Edward Woodward, Billie Whitelaw, Timothy Dalton, Paddy Considine, Jim Broadbent – I expected to see Peter Vaughn somewhere but alas he’s absent. The tone is all over the place, at times it’s virtuosic. The score repeatedly underlines this as an accomplished and well-realised film. Okay, it’s isn’t anything more than an expert work-through of soundtrack clichés but David Arnold at last gets a film that is ideal for his talents. The drama is cranked up and plays out in the kind of absurd endgame that has been so pent up it works more as a resounding in-joke than as the kind of dramatic pay-off seen in the films it’s gleefully ripping off. As a comedy it works but raises the stakes rather with the games it plays. When Angel falls into a secret catacomb it’s a bravura moment of subversion which is a good deal more complex than most comedies. There is an impressive swagger to the story, it does go past parody but I think the caricature element left me wondering if Edgar Wright will ever direct anything sincere. It gets so filmic it feels artificial in the protracted finish. Still, it’s easily the best British film since Dead Man’s Shoes, and the double act of Pegg and Frost are as good as any in cinema today. Like Shaun of the Dead it never quite escapes the cinematic world but who cares when it’s done so well. 

Charles Maclean

Solar Cinema Experience

From Cannes to Camden, "..sun charged shorts" at Camden Green Fair this Sun-day in Regents Park. Programme from 12.30 - 6.45. Intriguing, take a stroll. Looks impressive, well done Camden Film Office - didn't know we had one?

Richard

The Scent of Transcendence

Rumor has it that Stanley Kubrick considered adapting Patrick Süskind's novel Das Perfum, but ultimately considered it unfilmable. Only a lunatic would rush in where an old master like Kubrick feared to tread. Accordingly, Tom Tykwer’s foolhardy adaptation of Süskind's novel is crazy with ambition, crazy with audacity, and more often than not, just plain crazy. Tykwer's adaptation falls somewhere between lurid pulp and arty surrealism in its hyperventilating tale of a scentless apprentice whose obsession with capturing the essence of femininity in olfactory form.

A multimillion-euro adaptation of a bestselling German novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer relates the life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), born in 18th-century Paris with a uniquely puissant sense of smell. He begins life as an orphan, sold into servitude to a brutal tanner, but in Toucan Sam fashion follows his nose into the rarefied world of perfumers, where his superhuman gift proves highly valuable. However, Grenouille has little interest in financial reward. After a brief yet intense infatuation with the bodily smell of a comely fruitmonger leads to her sudden death, Grenouille becomes obsessed with discovering the means to create a permanent record of an individual's scent and to concoct the ultimate "scent of all things," the most powerful perfume possible.

The pungent plot may sound preposterous, and indeed it's hard not to snicker early on, when Grenouille is introduced as a mere nose hanging in darkness, his inner life revealed via a digital zoom up his nostril. When the action shifts to the vial-clinking realm of perfumeries, the film is filled with slightly ludicrous close-ups of dainty noses sniffing at the air, followed by orgasmic coos of feminine delight. A face-powdered Dustin Hoffman plays Grenouille's mentor, the once legendary but now moribund perfumer Giuseppe Baldini; one wonders whether the casting hinged on the actor's near legendary schnozz, since his Methodish grumbling through stilted Augustan diction plays against the straight-faced classical training of the otherwise British cast.

Perfume is easily the most nasally fixated movie to hit theaters since John Waters distributed "Odorama" scratch-and-sniff cards for Polyester, but here the olfactory theme is pursued with costumed gravitas and whispered awe. Despite dealing a few unintentionally silly moments, director Tom Tykwer (best known for the rave-era novelty Run, Lola, Run) avoids whimsy, opting instead for a dead-serious brand of magic realism.

The film's most intriguing and successful aspect is its attempt to depict what its narrator (gravel-voiced John Hurt) calls "the fleeting world of scent" through audio and images. Cinema, as Siegfried Kracauer put it, is pure externality, and smell is an internal sensation with a physical kick. Tykwer attempts to convey smell synesthetically, evoking the missing sense with fleshy sights and sounds. Grenouille's genesis in a fish market is filled with sloppy squishes and bloody halibut heads, and his super-snoot allows him to discern the components of everyday air, depicted in quick mental flashes as he catalogs each distinctive aroma. When the young lad discovers the pleasures of woman, it is through his prodding proboscis, which he gently snuffles up and down one lady's naked corpus.

But Perfume's hyper-fragrant world strives beyond mere physical sensuality toward a spiritual erotic. Indeed, Baldini explains the legend of an ancient perfume, discovered in an Egyptian tomb, whose intoxicating qualities caused millions to see paradise. And Grenouille's eventual devolution into serial killer arrives not so much as a consequence of his sniffling animality, but as an extension of his Proustian quest for the lost scent of his first love, which he pursues with a series of experiments on human bodies. Once he discovers the secret, the perfume is so powerful that others think he is an angel; Tykwer expresses the intensity of its efflorescence through cascades of golden light and spine-shivering drones of Dolby bass-boom.

It's a noble experiment in pushing the limits of cinema, but Tykwer never achieves true profundity. Despite the fixation on depicting interior experience, the film's characters are mere storybook ciphers, and the film's final third moves perfunctorily through the murders touted in its title. The attempts at synesthesia never quite reach the empyrean heights we are supposed to imagine. One too many sequences of ruffling silks and dreamy flower bouquets evoke little more than the ad-agency clichés of an elongated Chanel No. 5 commercial.

Commander Travis

Ex-Rentals

Apologies to all our Ex-Rental customers... we've ceased selling them from our site. BUT you can buy from our Amazon Z shop where a man in overalls, in a warehouse somewhere in deepest Hertfordshire is shipping lots of goodies!

Martin Scorsese – Still the Outsider

At last, thank God, I’m accepted, Martin Scorsese must have thought as he finally won his Oscar for Best Director. For a filmmaker so preoccupied with the outsider, and with such clear virtuosity he was the last guy who needed the stamp of approval. After all, Hitchcock missed out and for sheer technique Scorsese is his heir. But to really step into his world is to walk into a widescreen love affair with a tradition. There is a Hollywood royalty he has always aspired to, he wants to take his place alongside George Stevens, Billy Wilder, Nicholas Ray, John Ford, Frank Capra. All of his recent films have been an attempt to make a successful studio picture. Although already the most influential director of his generation, arguably the single most influential ever, he has yet to make the film that stands as an unqualified success both critically and commercially. His insistence on using Leonardo DiCaprio like his new DeNiro is obviously inviting comparisons with his far superior work. Leo may help him carry studio backing but he’s entirely lacking in presence as a grand actor. You only have to compare how much more effective Tony Leung was in the same role in Infernal Affairs , the original version of The Departed.
Scorsese’s best films all have a remarkable intimacy. The camera-work is startling, but it works with the actors not against them. Often there is a languid quality, as though stoned and a sense of reality, which is highly musical. There is the trademark jukebox soundtrack. But more skilled is the sense of timing in connecting the song to the image. No matter how much Tarantino shows how much good music he listens to he’ll never match the way Scorsese can choreograph a scene to a song. For every time the gangster is regarded as his metier you can also read musical. New York, New York, his only Musical may have been a lesson in the drawbacks of excessive substance abuse but everything he’s worked on since Woodstock is an attempt to show how profoundly drama is music – after all, apparently he thinks he was a guitar player in another life.
The opening of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore brilliantly conveys a sense of the new Hollywood married with the old. The set design, the colour, the music all say, this is Cinema, this is a world of magic. And yet this also brims with the kind of non-Hollywood reality Scorsese admired so much in Cassavetes. It was made more that 30 years before Departed and nothing he has done recently comes faintly close. Although it’s supposed to be untypical, because its central character is a woman, and never gets mentioned in the same breath as Mean Streets, this is a film that could only be by Martin Scorsese. There is an intimacy to the ensemble that only Altman can match. Ellen Burstyn deservedly won an Oscar. The story of a singer who finds herself working in a dead-end diner, living in motels with her 11 year old son dreaming of a better life in Monterey, has nothing to do with male angst or the street, or being an American Italian, but it has soul.
The Last Waltz, released between Taxi Driver and Raging Bull is another overlooked film. So much more than a document of the last concert given by The Band at Winterland, San Francisco in 1976, its full realisation arose out of a very extended post concert session; Scorsese thought it should be elaborated to tell the story of The Band. He had one of the greatest rock concerts ready to be edited, and whilst making New York, New York in the daytime he figured he could put The Last Waltz together at night and worry about sleep later. It would end up taking him two years but in that time he expanded on the music and produced a masterpiece of a documentary on music. It is about drugs, about Rock n’roll, and performance. Levon Helm giving Martin Scorsese a lecture about music is as captivating as anything in Casino. The intensity on show here is the build-up to Raging Bull.
Unlike anything else released in the 80s it was still a film of the 70s that got stranded after the decade finished and still in defiance to the track of lesser times King Of Comedy in 1983 really is the last movie of the 70s. It’s worth remembering that none of these films enjoyed the kind of box office of the more recent films. Another portrait of the extreme subject, and another collaboration with De Niro, set in New York – obviously - the story of a stalker who kidnaps his comedy hero has a particular prescience for our celebrity obsessed times and the kind of derangement that lies behind a need for fame no matter what.
In 1986 he proved he could cut it in mainstream Hollywood with The Color of Money, helping Paul Newman get his own overdue Oscar. Looking back this really does fly. A revisiting of his role in The Hustler many critics saw it as the lesser film when in fact it is much more complex formally. Robert Rossen’s 1961 film is absolutely a first class sport film that knocks you out the first time you see it which takes Pool very seriously whereas Scorsese isn’t so bothered with Pool. Textured with ambivalence, it plays out as a game of a veteran actor who gets back in the fray when he sees a young tyro who is all about success but still has a lot to learn. Never has Tom Cruise being a dick worked so well for a film (excepting Magnolia). This has to be his most underrated film and rewards repeated viewings. The awful 80s cover can be disregarded. This is Scorsese moving with the times but on his own terms. He deliberately denies an 80s style denouement and keeps the soul of the film very much in the 70s. One can only wonder why he hasn’t been able to repeat the formula recently.

Charles Maclean

Ghost Rider

Cheers , to Sony for the invite to Ghost Rider the other night, I'm not  Nick Cage fan in fact apart from  Wild at Heart  his performances have been , bloody auful, overplayed and predictable.
So I guessed Ghost Rider would be right up his street, I'd not heard of this Marvel Comic strip before, a bit suprising as I'm a bit of a biker, I have to say the Chopper prior to changing into some fire driven nightmare looked really cool, in fact if I'm not mistaken it was as near as damn a copy of The Captian Ameria bike in Easy Rider,without the stars and stripes, there are few Easy Rider references not least the appearance of  Peter Fonda as the Devil,  where was Dennis ?? and I'm sure and please check this out, the ending shot, was shot on the same road where it all ends for Captain America and Billy in Easy Rider, does that road still exist, and looking exactly the same as it did in the sixties, or are we using some kind of trickery, at least it was the real world, unlike the dodgy Monument Valley scenes that looked like a QOTSA video, only not as good. 
Two words, don't bother, it's proabably  not even worth the rental fee, there have been some pretty poor comic book adaptations over the years , this has to be about the worst.
Anyway, time to go, flight to catch and some wind hopefully, blowing in off the Atalntic.

Smithy

BOBBY

Went to a screening of the Emilio Estevez film BOBBY last night... and felt incredibly ignorant not realizing the historical significance of Bobby Kennedy in general! The storyline is based around various characters living, loving & laughing at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968, culminating with his success in the Californian primaries and tragic assassination at the height of the celebrations. Great cast, especially Sharon Stone, in an otherwise rather sad film - although some very funny moments involving some young election volunteers dropping acid. Good to see the rrp and Momentum Pictures gang again. Lots happening in our industry at the moment, which we'll have to try and cover in our little blog... Filmnight gone into administration - the end of two-tier on the horizon? - PS3 coming up - BlueRay/HD-DVD battle commences - more entrants to the download arena - and some great films. Which leads me to mention our VOLVER promotion... we're offering a FREE rental on any other Almodovar film when hiring Volver, which is out this coming Monday! This is his sixteenth title currently available on DVD! And of course Penelope Cruz is up for an Oscar for her role.                  

OSCARS

It's that time of year again, to cheer us out of the winter wilderness...  and some great films to see on DVD, like Little Miss Sunshine, a lovely happy quirkey film that captures something in all of us, nominated for Best Film! It's amazing that we go what seems like half a year with rubbish product and suddenly it's all change with the advent of the award season. An some great foreign films coming from both Verve Pictures and Soda Pictures... all of which we'll be proud to offer for download! Both these outfits have product nominated for Oscars would you believe - who needs Tartan or Artyficial Eye!    
Also The Devil Wears Prada, for which Meryl Streep is nominated for Best Actress, out next week on DVD. Then we've got the renowned The Departed  directed by Martin Scorsese, for which he's up for a Gong. Our very own Paul Greengrass is also nominated in the Best Director category for United 93 which out now on DVD! And then of course there's the dame Helen Mirren who surely will win Best Actress for her role in The Queen... coming soon