The Greatest Trick

Since Mamma Mia! has become such a massive box office success, I decided I really ought to give it a watch. My expectations were not high, but I enjoy musicals. Singin’ in the Rain, West Side Story and Top Hat are among my all time favourites and on a more contemporary note, I thoroughly enjoyed last years Hairspray. Also, as a fan of pop music in general, I am partial to Abba and was curious to see exactly what has made this film such a hit.

I do not wish to be accused of gender prejudice, so I am going to preface this review by saying many of my favourite films are movies that could be termed “women’s pictures” to use old Hollywood vernacular. Classics like All that Heaven Allows, Peyton Place, Mildred Pierce, and of course Gone with the Wind would be among these, along with occasional more contemporary pictures such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones Diary (essentially Jane Austen with lower moral standards). Admittedly contemporary favourites aimed primarily at a female audience are few and far between as generally speaking Hollywood (and Britain) seems to have given up on such films for complex reasons I shan’t go into in this review.

Anyway, to the matter at hand. Mammia Mia! is absolutely ghastly. In case that wasn’t clear enough allow me to reiterate: it is toe-curlingly, mind-bogglingly, headache-inducingly bad. It is an unwieldy mess of gargantuan proportions that didn’t even make me laugh once. At several points, I told myself it couldn’t get any worse, only for the film to reach hideous new lows. By the end of this criminal waste of celluloid, I was ready to gouge out my eyeballs. Time to name and shame those responsible: step forward director Phyllida Lloyd and writer Catherine Johnson.

The plot concerns Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), a girl living on a Greek island who on the eve of her wedding wants to find out who her father is. After reading her mother’s secret diary she discovers it could be one of three men, so she invites them all to the wedding, unknown to her mother. That is merely the hook the entire cast use as an excuse to make complete idiots of themselves. But whilst I’m all in favour of pratfalls and slapstick in silly comedy musicals, this time it simply isn’t funny. The cast use their own singing voices, but this hasn’t the charm or novelty of – for example – Woody Allen’s Everyone says I love you. In between badly choreographed and flatly directed songs, the screenplay is like an episode of a really, really bad Australian soap opera with characters to match, especially the monumentally annoying Sophie and her even more annoying boyfriend Sky (Dominic Cooper), who I found myself wanting to stab to death with a toothpick.

Performances are all over the top, but not in a good way, and only Pierce Brosnan, who should be thoroughly ashamed of himself for starring in such rubbish, emerges with an iota of credibility. The rest of the cast – Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, Julie Walters, Stellan Skarsgard et al – all look like they are having fun, but crucially it is they who are having the fun, not the audience. There is not a shred of interesting character development or depth, and the plot is painfully predictable. No, I don’t care if that’s missing the point. Call me old fashioned, but I like these things, even in such lightweight alleged entertainment. Hairspray was light as a feather, but had characters with a modicum of complexity and even tackled a serious issue (institutional racism). Defenders of Mamma Mia! will counter that it’s supposed to be escapism and that its not what happens but how it happens that’s important. Well, I’m all for escapism, but the world of Mamma Mia! is not somewhere I would like to escape into, but somewhere I would want to escape from before my brain melted. Besides, regardless of whether it’s what happens or how it happens that’s important, in either case, the film is awful.

Since this is a movie aimed primarily at a female audience, I can only urge those women who have not seen it not to subject themselves to this rubbish, and demand that films aimed at them are actually good. However, at this stage, such statements are like shutting stable doors after the horse has bolted. Mamma Mia! has made more money at the international box office than The Dark Knight.

From a Christian perspective, this film represents the latest in a drip drip trend of moral relativism. The message seems to be that it doesn’t matter who Sophie’s father is, as long as her mother had a good time when she was young sleeping with lots of men. Well, that’s all right then. Of course, Christian morality is nowhere to be seen, having been soundly rejected by all concerned. Instead they seem to have swapped it for a kind of Greek neo-Paganism (there’s a silly subplot involving Aphrodite’s fountain). And of course, the obligatory token gay couple are present and politically correct in predictably annoying fashion.

If all this makes me sound like a prudish party pooper, good. The only – and I mean only – thing that prevents me from declaring Mamma Mia! to be the Antichrist, is the fact that I like the songs. This is particularly depressing as I could have stayed at home and listened to an Abba CD in the first place. During particularly excruciating moments in this film, I silently thanked the Lord that I was not watching a Celine Dion musical. Such a horror would not merely be a sign of the impending apocalypse, like this film, but THE apocalypse.

Simon Dillon, October 2008.

No, not the title of an obscure American indie feature (although perhaps it should be), but an indicator that we haven’t reviewed anything fully for some months and have gotten behind. So the following will also not be full reviews, but snapshots which we really want comments and questions on.

Knife in the Water (1962, drama/thriller, 3 stars) - The first feature film directed by Roman Polanski, his only Polish-language production and a pre-cursor to several more modern thrillers by other film-makers, and I’m thinking most readily here of Dead Calm and The Talented Mr Ripley in its plot and themes. A middle-class married couple, he middle-aged and she a fair amount younger, nearly run over a young hitch-hiker carrying a hunting knife and an attitude. Instead of just giving him a lift to his destination, they invite him to spend a day with him on their small yacht, for no discernible reason other than to patronize him. The young man takes all he can get from them, however, in more ways than one, and when competition between old and young men turns more serious, the tension racks up and the stakes are distinctly raised. Despite the wide-open vistas of the lake and surrounding land, it is claustrophobia that one feels more than anything, and that boat looks like the smallest living space ever when there is just one sailor too many.

Alien Autopsy (2006, comedy, 3 stars) - Ant and Dec star in a film documenting the facts behind the alien autopsy hoax revealed in 1995 regarding the dissection of an alien body found in the Roswell crash of 1947 (but it’s not a documentary, clearly). They are the 2 hoaxers, who just happen to come into possession of some sensitive film and see an opportunity to use it. It’s a good laugh, won’t challenge anyone but is most suitable for a Friday night’s viewing with some popcorn. Ant & Dec aren’t really actors any more, even though they started that way in their teens; they just play their charming selves and that’s enough for this story.

Kingdom of Heaven (2005, war/”historical”, 1 star) - Alien. Blade Runner. Thelma and Louise. Gladiator. Ridley Scott directed all these films, and each one is VERY highly thought of in filmic circles, even if they might not be to your tastes. I love all of them except T&L, which I’ve only seen the once. What I refuse to believe is that he also “directed” this unbelievably stinking messy pile of a movie, AND gave it a spiritual-sounding name!! I don’t think I have ever seen a bigger waste of resources thrown together to make a movie that clearly cost a lot of money to end up with such a shoddy result. Problems - there is no plot (need I go further)? No, seriously, until 3/4 of the way through I had no idea what the characters’ major objective was, or their main obstacle either. It was just a film where stuff happened. Orlando Bloom (or, as Mark Kermode regularly refers to him, Orloondo Bland) will never be as interesting and promising as he was in Lord of the Rings, and he couldn’t do anything with the lack of character given to him by the script here. A perfect marriage of crap material and uninspiring actor. I had half an idea that the battle scenes might be worth watching from such a visual master as Scott - I fell asleep during them. UNBELIEVABLE! Watch Gladiator for evidence that Scott can do this brilliantly - what the hell happened? My time is precious to me these days, especially leisure time, and I actually feel angry with Ridley Scott for stealing an evening from me with this indescribable pap.

More mini-reviews to follow soon…

A load of rubbish about an irritating idiot. He’s not charming. He’s a slacker who does stupid things for no discernable reason, and lives out his life in a fantasy world. I have no time for watching men behave like the boys they should have grown out of years before. Supposedly a comedy, but our lounge was decidedly un-ringing with guffaws as we watched this.

Oh boy. Never did I realise that this was in fact a DTV pile of poo disguised as a Hollywood movie. Never before have I wished so violently that someone would just break every violin in the orchestra playing the score. And never before have I cared so little about characters dying.

The Andrea Gail is a sword-fishing trawler which sets out at short notice in an attempt to find the biggest haul of fish that it can. Leading the trip are Captain No-Personality (George Clooney), with Young Rookie Man (Mark Wahlberg), Gruff but Sensitive Man (John C Reilly), Bad Egg Man, Ugly Man and Dispensible Character Man in tow. They all love their captain (in some moments it’s faintly homoerotic), which is why they are stupidly willing to go with him into practically uncharted waters where a big old storm is brewing. Meanwhile their wives, girlfriends, children and people who barely know their names are left at home rubbing their hands together with worry. For the whole film.

The film is based on a true story - the Andrea Gail never did return to Gloucester, Massachusets after being caught in a freak storm in 1991, and the fact that all those on board died is a tragedy. But frankly, so is the fact that their memory is supposedly being honoured by this boring, messy film, in which all the money has been spent on (admittedly good) special effects to make the waves look big and nasty, a fair whack on Warner Bros’ water rates I would imagine, but none on writing a script which caused you to care about any of the characters. In fact, the crew of the coast guard rescue helicopter which we kept inexplicably seeing were more engaging than the crew of the Andrea Gail. The problem with knowing it’s a true story before you watch it is that you know the ending. It should therefore at least be interesting to see how it gets there, but this movie fails abysmally. When one character has to be resuscitated after falling in the sea, I found myself comparing the scene to the resuscitation scene in the Abyss: this movie pales in comparison. I simply couldn’t care less whether he lived or died.

Now, this grudge might sound a little odd, because it is rare for a movie script to only contain ‘realistic’ dialogue, but The Perfect Storm really took the biscuit. In an emergency situation, how many hard-living business-minded fishermen/women do you imagine would exclaim down the radio, “You’re sailing into the middle of the monster!”? There were whole swathes of dialogue where characters were talking and I had no idea what they were going on about, nor did I care, and at some points nor could I hear them! More on the music later… There were cliches involving dreams, letters being read, characters’ thoughts being transmitted to their loved ones via the power of magic or something, and so many odd directorial decisions that I began wondering if this was the same Wolfgang Petersen who had directed another, infinitely superior boat movie, Das Boot, about life aboard a German submarine during WWII. But sadly, yes, the IMDb confirms that it is.

And finally, why oh why do people keep employing James Horner to compose their scores? All the man seems able to do is bathe everything in cloying strings, no matter what the situation on screen (see Titanic for further proof. Or alternatively, don’t bother. It’s mostly crap too. Hmm, spotting a pattern here… Disaster in water + James Horner = terrible film with exception of special effects). There were times when I thought he had composed the music without watching the film. The strings just kept going. And kept going. They swelled. They quietened. They swelled again. Only once was I aware of them not being there, and that was because the characters were listening to some RAWK on their tinny radio. Was Petersen really happy with this? I find it hard to believe.

Everything about this movie screams ‘we deserve Oscars’; thank goodness it only got nominated for two and didn’t win them. There is some justice at the Oscars after all.

I recieved this piece of monumental sarcasm from my good friend Charles Storrar and thought it was too good not to blog. Hopefully Mark won’t mind.

Doom and Doomer:

If you see one movie about a rag tag space SWAT team despatched to investigate something gone horribly wrong at a science facility, possibly involving genetic experiments this year, make sure it’s DOOM. As ever this classic conceit is fresh and original and this offering provides a crisp new take. And as ever sadly the question must be asked, given the slew in the 90s of such well-crafted and well-received releases as Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, why on earth has it taken Hollywood so long to make more movies based on computer games?

The Rock puts in his most convincing performance since 2004’s critically acclaimed, or at least acclaimed critically (What the hell did you rent that for?) Walking Tall. Make no mistake – this man’s eyeballs can act. Their dynamic screen presence alone more than makes up for any supposed trifling inadequacies in the Rock’s other thespian credentials. How Brendan Gleason somehow fluked the part of Moody in Goblet of Fire is anyone’s guess. The Rock for goodness’ sake has not one Mad Eye but two! – Either of which would have excelled in the role. Perhaps he was deemed to be over qualified.

Karl Urban’s portrayal of the brooding Reaper meanwhile demonstrates how his master class in moral fortitude and conflicting loyalties as Eomer in The Two Towers were clearly a mere stepping stone to this similar but much greater role, fuller and more mythic than anything within Tolkien’s limited creative powers.

The skilful handling by the director of some of the story’s trickier points is also worthy of note. For example the fact that of the eighty or so scientists and civilians (including children) the team has been sent to rescue, not one of them escapes being mutilated, eaten and/or turned into zombies – could potentially be problematic. But this difficult issue is brilliantly resolved by having the viewer deeply and genuinely not care about them. Furthermore the inevitable but often unconvincing sciencey explanation bit when it comes, delivered here by that-girl-what’s-her-name-from-the-last-Bond-movie-quite-pretty-but-eyes-a-bit-bulgy in this case is well researched and believable (something about chromosomes?) Other questions are really too straightforward to warrant serious response – we know that scientists are a bit funny and not like the rest of us, so of course they would build their research facility with mazes of dark corridors, sewers and seemingly large and complex areas with only one small airlock in or out. I am embarrassed to even have mentioned it.

But let us not forget the essential humanity of this film, which for this viewer was embodied in the moment near the end when one creature about to be blown up by a proximity mine in the final second realises his plight and performs a comedy double take. In that instant this vile corruption, facing his imminent transport to that Undiscovered Country which we all must undergo, becomes as frightened and vulnerable as a little child.

Great credit must go to the director (whose name I must confess escapes me, anyway I hadn’t heard of him) and his production team for their masterful use of cliché throughout. Everything - every line, reaction, pause, fake shock, real shock, discovery of the truth of what-the-hell’s-really-been-going-on-around-here-anyway to final denouement is so well observed and executed that it is difficult to know if we have even seen this film before or not. Even the noble tradition established in the Alien/Predator franchise of having a black crewmember ill advisedly take on the monster mano a mano in unarmed combat is reprised to good and welcome effect. To create something so artfully contrived that it can slip so easily, indeed barely unnoticed, into its viewer’s consciousness must surely be the work of a master filmmaker.

Open Water: NEVER EVER WATCH THIS. I can’t express quite how poor a film it is, and we stuck it out right to its uselessly limp 80-minute ending. From the trailers it looks like a fun shark attack movie. It’s not. With the exception of a couple of nice shots (split-second shots, I hasten to add), it’s a pile of poo that should never have been made into a film. Also, it has quite a bit of unnecessary swearing and a totally gratuitous nude scene.