Cert 12A 120mins Stars 3

There’s too little life or electricity in this somber period drama which explores Mary Shelley’s inspiration for the writing of her gothic science fiction masterpiece, Frankenstein.

Handsomely staged, it’s strangely heavy footed for a story groaning with passion, booze and characters committed to the concept of free love. 

It covers the extraordinary two years of Mary’s life from her meeting the celebrity radical poet Shelley to the publication, aged only 18, of her great work. 

Elle Fanning is curiously constrained as Mary, despite us being told she’s inherited the fiery independent mind of her mother, the famous feminist author, Mary Wollstonecraft. 

Douglas Booth is suitably dashing and wolfish as Percy Bysshe Shelley, a 21 year old married father who scandalously sweeps the 16 year old off her feet and away from her disapproving father. 

To avoid creditors they accept an invitation to Lord Byron’s Geneva chateau, taking Mary’s younger stepsister with them, and scene stealer Bel Powley, brings a welcome mischievous energy as Claire.

Tom Sturridge tries hard to provide some flamboyance as Byron, and the louche Lord suggests a writing competition and Mary pours her experiences into her novel of abandonment, loss, death and betrayal.

Director Haifaa al-Mansour presents Mary’s life as the story of a young woman of intelligence fighting to assert herself in a world where power and wealth is consolidated by men, for the pleasure and benefit of men.

It’s clearly an issue close to the heart of the female Saudi filmmaker and her film  touches on a lot of interesting, timely and important subjects. These include how the idea of romantic love facilitates male behaviour while entrapping women, the internal conflict between the romantic and rational, and the financial exploitation of women.

Plus it touches upon how the male gaze is used to frame ideas of female beauty and foreshadows the growth of the cosmetic surgery industry.

Unfortunately al-Mansour chooses to emphasises the message of emancipation over the melodrama. Mary and her sister’s swinging summer of sex, drugs and rock and roll with two notorious rakes is played with all the risque urgency of an episode of TV”s Lark Rise to Candleford. 

Disappointingly tame and tasteful, there’s barely a sniff of opium or a glimpse of a chandelier to swing from.

By the end we’re left in no doubt as to who the inspiration for Dr Frankenstein was, I just wish we’d seen more anger from the person who inspired his monster.

 

Not even superpowers can defeat the law of diminishing returns in this insufferably smug comic book action sequel.

Ryan Reynolds indulges his taste for lavish attention seeking and mawkish self pity in his return as the mutant mercenary turned hero, Deadpool.

He creates the X-Force, a team of super-powered people and an alternative to the X-Men, some of who appear here.

X-Force’s mission is to save a fire-starting mutant orphan from being killed by a soldier from the future, called Cable, played by the meaty Josh Brolin.

If the deal for 20th Century Fox to be bought by Disney goes through, Deadpool may soon feature in the Marvel cinematic universe alongside Iron Man and the rest. Which may be problematic as over there Brolin plays the super villain, Thanos.

An X-Force parachute drop is easily the most entertaining sequence but the rest of the film is a slog, being a dull vehicle for Reynolds to banter his way through a series of fights, car crashes and explosions. The sex scenes of the first have been replaced with yet more shoot-em-ups.

Many of the original supporting cast return, bolstered by the winning presence of Zazie Beetz as Domino, a hero with the ability to manipulate luck.

The first Deadpool film was characterised by a bullying sensibility and child abuse jokes. It so successfully pandered to the worst instincts of its target audience of 15 year-old boys, it made over ten times its budget and became the highest grossing X-Men movie.

With a bigger budget, the CGI is more expensive and the jokes are cheaper. Reynolds co-wrote and it’s less than 2 minutes before the first paedophile joke arrives. Most of the rest of the gags mock other superheroes and frequently fall flat.

I wasn’t a fan of the first Deadpool adventure and I enjoyed this one even less.

 

Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey is a monumental epic which explores the evolution of humankind. It is is dense, slow, demanding and not normally judged to be a giggle riot. I see it as Kubrick’s cosmic sex joke.

The key to unlocking the humour and understanding Kubrick’s intentions can be found in the director’s previous film.

Released in 1964, is his wildly funny  and blackly satirical Cold War comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  

Set mostly in US military bunker populated almost exclusively by men, it charts the steps to nuclear armageddon as emotionally bereft warmongers charge into madness.

Terrified by sex and are obsessed with bodily fluids and super-phallic nuclear weapons the politicians and military plan to use an unseen army of women as breeding machines to re-populate the world with a fascistic race of supermen.

This fear drives their retreat into a toxic all-male environment such as a gang, the army, or a space mission. Free from troublesome complexity of emotions, the energy of their sexual insecurities can safely be channeled into violence.

Kubrick is fascinated, appalled and amused by men’s behaviour, their fear of sex and the seeking of sanctuary in combat.

The director delights in repeatedly pointing out these idiocies and finds their behaviour so entertaining, he turned up the dial all the way to eleven for his next work, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Importantly, Kubrick described Dr. Strangelove as possessing a ‘sexual framework from intromission to the last spasm’. So does 2001.

The director employs visual metaphors to explain his thoughts on man’s attitude towards sex. Men are insecure, fearful and in response, violent. Kubrick employs outlandish bombast and an exaggerated self-important tone to satirically mock men’s failings.

In 2001 Kubrick mocks his macho technological aesthetic, by placing it within an over-arching visual framework of sexual reproduction.

The sex in 2001: A Space Odyssey is hidden in plain sight within the trippy and awe inspiring imagery, and the ground-breaking special effects.

2001 begins in humanity’s pre-history with a tribe of starving hominids discovering an immense black monolith

Kubrick uses this void to inform us of how he believes men regard women. Drawn by its mysterious beauty, the hominids regard the powerful and, importantly, silent intruder with fascination and fear. 

Soon the lead ape is banging his bone in an angry frenzy. Here Kubrick explicably links fear, sex, selfishness and violence. A rival tribe is slaughtered and ownership of a water hole is established.

Then we see the triumphant hominid leader banging his bones with orgasmic exultation.

Dutch master Paul Verhoeven applied a similar extravagance when executing the relentless cartoon-like violence in his satirical 1987 sci-fi Robocop.

The hominids ferocious behaviour is set to the militaristic romanticism of Richard Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra, based on Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel of the same name.

The writer’s work was famously co-opted by Nazi’s to justify their beliefs in the Master race, another link back to Dr. Strangleove and underscoring the link between sex, violence and madness.

Anyway, the ape returns to whacking off and courtesy of the most famous match cut in cinema, his bone(r) becomes a nuclear-powered penis, sorry, spacecraft. How’s that for a money shot?

If, by the way, you believe sexual metaphors are beneath the lofty talent of a consummate filmmaker such as Kubrick, you probably don’t recognise the wank jokes in Shakespeare.

We see the rocket manoeuvre to penetrate the spinning space station. So scared of sex and emotions, all men have managed to achieve in three million years is reduce the sex act to a mechanical experience.

In fact, for Kubrick’s men this is progress. Kubrick’s use of the swooningly romantic Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss is a hilariously caustic and ironic accompaniment.

See how tubelike the inside of the space station is. Those corpuscular chairs are engorged blood cells. The men i.e. semen, are deposited in to the female craft. Next stop, the Moon base.

Look at those teeth! Quick, someone google vagina dentata!

The second, larger monolith represents the next stage of the semen’s journey further into the reproductive system. After the sex act the men stand staring in mute incomprehension, until they recoil as the monolith screams at them as if in great pain. 

Gang rape is a theme Kubrick returns to in later film. Men seek comfort in numbers when ‘doing’ sex. Compare the second monolith gathering in 2001 to the ‘sacrifice’ scene in 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut.

Kubrick is always bringing together the sex and violence. See the gang rape in 1971’s A Clockwork Orange, and the penis/gun metaphors employed by the drill sergeant in 1987’s Full Metal Jacket. Yes, that title is a condom metaphor.

Anyway, this encounter prompts the men to attempt to conquer a new monolith near the planet, Jupiter. i.e. they travel further through the reproductive system.

There’s a lot of walking and crawling through tunnels as astronauts make their way through the tubes, sorry, corridors of the spacecraft, Discovery.

Although played by Douglas Rain, the spaceship’s computer HAL 9000 is the dominant female voice in the film.  He’s almost the only ‘female’ voice in the film.

Portrayed by a soft blood-red orb, HAL 9000 is a maternal figure, tasked with keeping the crew warm and snug until their arrival at the next monolith, which is orbiting Jupiter. Only one sperm is necessary to fertilise the egg, and so the crew are killed off.

Kubrick uses HAL to demonstrate the paradox of human reproduction, where a system designed to create and nurture life also involves killing off the unsuccessful contenders.

And once reproduction has been achieved, the female host body is redundant. The ‘winning’ sperm immediately begins to destroy the mind of the woman who nurtured him.

The successful sperm/astronaut, Bowman, literally rips HAL’s brains out. Honestly, the injustice and ingratitude is enough to drive anyone mad.

Once the third monolith is reached, Bowman passes through the Stargate. This trippy passage represents the moment of fertilisation, the creation of a new life.

Here’s another of those vaginal black voids, oh yes, the new life will be pushed out soon enough.

Often misnamed a ‘star child’, The space foetus experiences a pre-birth vision of its life ahead, as an insecure, fearful and violent ape.

Our cyclical journey ends where we began, with Wagner’s music of war dooming us to make the same mistakes all over again.

For all our pretensions and technology, we’re still a bunch of fighting primates. And Kubrick finds all this darkly funny. Men are idiots, he says, and he can’t help pointing and laughing at them.

Men’s irrational fear of women and resultant violence is a theme Kubrick returns to in A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut. They’re all best read through the dark comedic prism, or possibly the monolith, of Dr Strangelove.

From Jack Torrence in 1980’s The Shining to Dr. Bill Harford in Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick’s men are puzzled, frightened and angry. And it’s the women who suffer.

These tables from A Clockwork Orange illustrate how Kubrick believes men prefer women. Naked and subservient. Sexually available and non-threatening. Without intelligence or personality. Mute. As this image is darkly ridiculous, so men are darkly ridiculous.

When people think of Kubrick, it is of the polymath chess master and cinematic genius. A coldly arrogant and detached figure, an irate perfectionist who is dismissive of the day-to-day concerns of ordinary people. He’s probably glowering through a fog of cigarette smoke.

But the Kubrick who reveals himself to me is a satirical successor to Swift. Kubrick is so bewildered by the insanity of man, his barely controlled response is to create wildly exaggerated scenarios to try and explain them. But all he can do is mock and laugh at men’s behaviour because any other response would be mad.

Of all the characters in the history of cinema, there is one who I imagine most captures Kubrick’s manically disbelieving outrage. It belongs to the  little remembered actor Peter Butterworth in the role of Brother Belcher. In particular in the dinner scene in British comedy classic, 1968’s Carry on up the Khyber.

You can watch it here.

Ends.

Postscript: I recommend you read Nicholas Barber’s recent excellent piece on humour in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here

Nemo’s Fury is an exciting digital reinvention of Jules Verne’s classic steampunk adventure novel, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. 

Download for free to your smartphone or tablet, search your app store for ‘Nemo’s Fury’.

A mobile interactive fiction game employing a bespoke combat system and hundreds of original illustrations, Nemo’s Fury is inspired by the 1980’s role-playing gamebooks such as ‘The Warlock of Firetop Mountain’, of the Fighting Fantasy series which celebrated its fortieth anniversary last year.

Each player joins the legendary Captain Nemo on board his fabulous submarine, the Nautilus, on a wild voyage of adventure, intrigue, loyalty, and betrayal.

There’s mayhem, monsters, maelstroms and murder as Nemo takes you from the South Pacific to the Northern Atlantic via Antartica and the Red Sea. And if they survive long enough, the player will of course fight a giant squid.

Available on your smartphone or tablet, (but not yet your desktop), click on your app store below

Or go to Nemo’s Fury for more info

Cert 15 95mins Stars 2

The future of our species is barely at stake in this sci-fi thriller which is characterised by a significant lack of tension or urgency.

Barely remembered for 2009’s Avatar, Sam Worthington is the de facto leader of a group of military volunteers subjected to experimental drugs designed to enhance their evolution.

This is to enable them to survive the hostile environment on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, which humanity must colonise due to the Earth’s over-population and pollution.

However the majority of the film takes place in an idyllic mountaintop retreat, full of infinity pools and barbecues.

Potential side effects of the treatment include increased aggression, hair loss, vomiting blood, and death.

When the test subjects begin to develop tremendous underwater skills, the wife of one smells something fishy and begins a secret investigation of her own.

Chief scientist and modern day Dr Frankenstein is played by the venerable Tom Wilkinson, with former model Agyness Deyn sporting the latest line in laboratory casual wear as his assistant.

 

There’s super-sized monkey business in this all-action video game adaptation.

Powered by Dwayne Johnson’s goofy charm and astonishing ability to keep a straight face amid preposterous carnage, it combines live action with giant CGI creatures and a knowing sense of ridiculous which it takes to mammoth excess.

An evil corporation have developed a pathogen which mutates animals into huge proportions and equally big anger management issues.

So it’s up to Johnson’s special forces gamekeeper turned ape expert to stop the infected monsters and save the life of a rare albino gorilla.

In an interesting inversion of longstanding Hollywood convention he teams up with Naomie Harris’ geneticist, which means we have two non-white actors saving a white ‘guy’ who is a noble savage.

The point is never laboured so it doesn’t get in the way of the audience having a good time.

Harris offers droll commentary on the frequent alpha-male posturing between Johnson and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s mysterious government agent.

There’s a cheery disregard of physics, biology and science in general, in favour of giant lab rats in outer space, enormous wolves attacking military helicopters and huge crocodiles crushing downtown Chicago.

Functional dialogue exists only to link one scene of CGI mayhem to the next.

Director Brad Peyton was also responsible for Johnson’s previous adventure films, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, and San Andreas. And this reinforces the Fast Furious actor’s brand as the go-to-guy for outlandish blockbuster adventure.

Based on the 1986 arcade game, this follows hot on the heels of Johnson’s mega-smash game-based Jumanji sequel.

But where that film cleverly generated gags using the structure and language of video games, Rampage ignores the gaming aspect completely.

This enjoyable numbskull nonsense has the tone and tempo of a Saturday morning cartoon, though due to some of it’s gorier violence it’s probably not for the under-tens.

Steven Spielberg takes on the video game generation and wins in this gloriously entertaining blockbuster sci-fi adventure.
Combining stunning technique and astonishing CGI effects, it rockets along like Christopher Nolan’s brainy thriller Inception remade with the manic energy and humour of The Lego Movie.
And the worlds greatest living director uses cinema to reinvent a book about virtual reality to emphasise the importance of real face-to-face human interaction.
Packed with references to your favourite films, songs and games of the 1980’s, it’s based on Ernest Cline’s best-selling 2011 novel of the same name.
The narrative is streamlined but true to its source and maintains all the major characters.
Tye Sheridan is a hugely likeable lead as Wade Watts, a trailer trash youth who spends all his time in the Oasis.
In 2045 it’s the worlds most popular virtual reality game, where anything is possible.
It was invented by the late James Halliday, whose will stipulated whoever could solve his grand puzzle would inherit the Oasis and its mind boggling wealth.
Everyone uses an online avatar to protect their identity as they compete to win the prize, including the corporate bad guys intent on a hostile takeover.
Spielberg turns Cline’s homage to pop culture into a satirical swipe at the contemporary USA.
There are digs at the monetisation of the health and criminal justice systems, warnings about online trust and celebrity, and a critique of corporate exploitation of the young.
But none of this is allowed to weigh down the fun or the thrills and is full of optimism for the youth of tomorrow.
Mark Rylance appears as Halliday and Spielberg uses the Brit actor as his own avatar, to give us a touching reflection on his own life.
Having invented the summer blockbuster in 1975 with Jaws, Spielberg demonstrates his enduring ability to entertain, while embracing the latest technology and remaining relevant to a modern audience.
Providing an early kick off to the summer season, he proves not only does he still have the moves to compete with kids, but also has a few lives still to play.

Stars 5

Fans of Beatrix Potter’s evergreen children’s books may be disappointed by her classic work being reinvented as this madcap adventure which mixes live action with impressive CGI and some lovely traditional animation.

Only loosely based on her books and possessing none of their subtle grace and whimsy, it combines elements of a Richard Curtis style romcom with the gleefully manically violent slapstick of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

With his usual overbearing smug bravado, James Corden voices the irresponsible Peter Rabbit.

Meanwhile Rose Byrne and Domhnall Gleeson don their most English accents as human countryside neighbours, whose vegetable garden is fought over by Peter and his furry friends.

Potter’s gentle tone has been updated with a self aware irony and jokes about healthy diets. The energy is pumped up with dance routines and pop songs.

Though not as charming, funny or exciting as the recent Paddington Bear adaptations, its cute animals and lively pace will keep younger kids entertained.

 

 

 

Swedish superstar Alicia Vikander swings into action in this big budget reboot of groundbreaking video game character, Lara Croft.

Famously made flesh by fellow Oscar winner Angelina Jolie in 2001 and 2003, Vikander offers a grittier and more punishing interpretation.

This one is based on the 2013 version of the game and explains how Lara becomes a kick-ass globe-trotting explorer.

So we see how she evolves from an aristocratic cycle courier to a cold-hearted killer, cultural vandal and unrepentant destroyer of antiquities.

The script leans heavily on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but lacks any interest in protecting or learning about historical artefacts, which apparently do not belong in a museum.

Dominic West cuts an avuncular dash as her father, Lord Croft, who went missing years ago while searching for a legendary Japanese witch queen. He left Lara a secret home video recording as a clue to his whereabouts.

Proudly pig-headed, Lara refuses to use her inherited millions in finding her father, as she’s angry with him for abandoning her as a teenager to a life of unimaginable privilege.

Walton Goggins plays the bad guy who’s a member of the shadowy Trinity organisation and her rival in the search for the queen’s tomb.

Despite being set in the here and now, the film’s smartest move is pretending the potentially plot-destroying internet doesn’t exist. Smartphones, social media and especially google maps are absent.

There’s no faulting the location work and the film’s highlight is an impressively staged extended stunt sequence involving an ancient aeroplane and a waterfall.

But there’s a lack of urgency and giddy escapism, plus the dialogue and humour fall as flat as Lara frequently does during her attempted heroics.

This is a long backstory to introduce a new franchise and if you want to see the fully formed pistol-packing version of Lara, you’ll have to wait for the sequel.

 

 

Cert 15 90mins Stars 5

A meaty Joaquin Phoenix is the muscle in this lean, mean and brutal thriller.

The three time Oscar nominee is an extraordinary blunt force of nature as a hammer wielding man on a mission, searching for the missing teenage daughter of a US senator.

The Walk The Line star is Joe, a bearded and ponytailed anti-hero offered 50K for successfully closing the case, which includes a stipulation to hurt the people responsible.

15 year old Ekaterina Samsonov is almost wordless as the victim, a pale frail presence with surprising strength of mind.

83 year old Judith Roberts plays Joe’s mischievous and free spirited but physically dependent mum. Their scenes offer the few moments of grace and humour in an otherwise dark and intense affair.

With the war veteran driving through a landscape of politicians, paedophiles and prostitution, this is a stripped down and updated riff on Martin Scorsese’s 1976 classic, Taxi Driver.

Glaswegian director Lynne Ramsay never romanticises her characters, and shows us doing very bad things for a good cause is a soul stripping exercise.

Her previous films included Ratcatcher and We Need To Talk About Kevin, and this is no less harrowing or demanding to watch.

Nor does she make allowances for her audience, she expects us to keep up to speed and refuses to hold our hand or explain events a second time. Her bold creative choices are a very pure form of cinema and make for a anxiety driven and jittery experience.

An extraordinary soundtrack by Johnny Greenwood underscores how the Radiohead guitarist was robbed at last weeks Oscars for his work on Daniel Day-Lewis’ drama, Phantom Thread.

Nasty, nihilistic and nightmarish, this is tight as piano wire and twice as deadly with the violence has a punch in the gut reality. Suffocation is a recurring image and for long periods I could barely breathe.

 

 

This action comedy with a great cast looks great on paper but terrible on the big screen.

Brit actor David Oweyolo plays Harold, a put-upon employee of a US pharmaceutical firm who is kidnapped while working in Mexico.

Joel Edgerton, Amanda Seyfried and Thandie Newton appear alongside Charlize Theron who also produced the film. Edgerton’s brother directs and this cosy set up probably contributed to the general air of indulgence in the filmmaking.

Though offering a reward for Harold’s return, his duplicitous bosses would rather claim on the life insurance and a local drugs cartel become involved.

Never funny, fast or furious enough to entertain, and we’re asked to feel sympathy for too many double-crossing, violent and greedy people, none of whom we care about and all of which are stupid and/or obnoxious.

Tone deaf, sluggishly paced and laugh free, it sees countless bullets wasted on a showdown. And it’s a shame some of the characters survive.