**********************

Drive Angry is a terrible film. Beyond the pale for awfulness, it is hopefully another nail in the derelict career of one Nicolas Cage, a man for whom it seems no role is too stupid, nor any script too dreadfully inept. What on Earth can Hollywood hope to gain by promoting the man’s sheer lack of cinematic credibility? Yes, Cage once won an Oscar for Best Actor, but then, so did Robert DeNiro, and all he’s done since then is terribly stupid Parenting comedies, dull Cop Dramas and less-than-stellar “horror” films. Drive Angry is one of those films that probably seemed like a good idea at the time, if you think “the time” was that crazy night in Vegas when you were high on acid and the hookers were doing a threesome in the second bedroom while you bathed in a recently slaughtered ox’s blood. I was so tempted to do this film as one of our Mini Reviews, but I feel so violated by the imagery and concepts I’ve just witnessed, I need to purge myself of this… trash – I refuse to continue to call this turd a film – so I can continue my exploration of the fine medium of cinema unburdened. Therefore, prepare for a long form review of one of the worst films I’ve seen in the last week or so: Drive Angry.

Drive through this review and get very, very angry….

**********************

If there’s one thing I hate more than romantic comedies starring Jennifer Lopez/Jennifer Anniston/Kate Hudson/Diane Keaton, it’s overly manipulative “animal movies”, where the star animal in the film is inevitably the one which is killed/maimed/mistreated/funnier than the humans. Films where you can feel the director reaching into your chest or tear ducts to try giving the bits inside you that work the awwww and tug them gently, prodding an unsustainable emotional bond with you that, while occurring feels real and genuine, but after the credits roll feels a little like you’ve been manhandled. Water For Elephants, to a large degree, feels like manhandling to me. Based on the book by Sara Gruen, Water For Elephants is story set in the Great Depression, trying desperately to evoke the Great Depression, while managing to also feel the need to rise above the Great Depression in its emotional core. It’s a mismatch of a film, a film trying to find its center, yet not quite being able to deliver the genuine heart it so desperately aches for. It’s almost good, if that’s quantification enough for you.

Click here to bring the elephant in!

**********************

Truly great action films come along only once in a while – and in the 2000′s, even less often than that. You could list on the fingers of one hand the number of universally admired films in which driving stunts, gunplay and bloody violence are actually helpful to the story, or in any way universally appealing. Drive makes a welcome addition to the fingers on that hand, even if describing it as an Action Film is perhaps a little disingenuous on my part. Drive isn’t a typical Hollywood action movie, although there are moments of gut-wrenching action, helmed with close-up ferocity by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. It’s not really a deep dramatic piece either, with the characters atypically using glances, longing stares and nods of the head for the majority of their communication – often, it’s the unsaid that’s more important. As a thriller, you’d class it as a sleeper, the kind of thriller for intellectuals who enjoy a film less about cheap thrills than about intelligent screenwriting and storytelling. What I’d say is that Drive is a mix of all three, a very successful mix, if the critical reception this movie received originally is anything to go by. Current It Man, Ryan Gosling, who seems to be in every great film coming out at the moment, leads a great cast through this stylish genre piece with a performance easily described as “intense”, saying more in a twenty second kiss with Carey Mulligan than most actors do in an entire film. So, is Drive a film able to live up to the hype; is it able to resist the urge for those wondering what all the hype is about to dismiss it out of hand as just another Edge Of Darkness style thriller?

Click here to take a Drive.

**********************

It truly does take a brave viewer to watch a Christmas film and actually feel good about it. Most Christmas films end up being saccharine-infested Holiday cheer-heavy schmaltz-fests, or dull, stupidly conceived and ill-executed “Christmas-comedies”  in the vein of crap like Four Christmases, Christmas With The Kranks, or Fred Claus, to name only three off the top of my head. The Santa Clause managed to deliver a Christmas movie that balanced the schmaltz and actual emotional content with extraordinary success – even more surprising considering the film came out in the 90′s, a decade in which films became increasingly marketed towards big-budgets and shitty-stories. The inevitable sequel to The Santa Clause came out a few years later, with the original cast returning and adding in a few new surprises, and to everyone’s complete shock, it too wasn’t that bad a film, even for a sequel. Tim Allen’s best film franchise ever actually improved on the original, surpassing the aww-shucks cutesy whimsy of film 1 and building on the magical, fantastical elements that made that film so good.

Click here to jingle all the way to the Mrs Clause!

**********************

There’s something charming about stop-motion animation, isn’t there? Particularly the kind where an entire film is made with it, just like The Nightmare Before Christmas. Long before Wallace & Gromit took on the Were-Rabbit, Jack Skellington took on the Christmas season and owned it for about fifteen minutes. Skellington, of course, being the king of Halloween, the most un-Christmassy holiday ever devised. From a story by Tim Burton, Hollywood’s weirdest mainstream director, and directed by Burton understudy Henry Salick (who’s debut stop-motion film James & The Giant Peach was a standout!), Nightmare Before Christmas is a whimsical, lyrical, visual delight. The characters are strange, in the most manic Tim Burton way, and the world they inhabit is equally kooky: but the Halloween-styled Christmas riffs elevate this above simple animated mockery to actual art. Jack Skellington, the depressed and anorexic king of Halloweentown, is fed up with the holiday he’s ruler of. Halloween has lost its charm, so when he sees how happy folks are over Christmas, he decides to steal the holiday for himself. Capturing Santa, devising his own set of Christmassy-halloween versions of the holiday seasons cliches, and proclaiming himself the new “Sandy Claws”, Jack becomes a victim of his own covetousness.

Wanna read more about the Nightmare? Click here!!!

**********************

Shakespeare blah blah Romeo and Juliet blah blah animated films blah blah star casting blah blah. You know, most reviews of major animated films these days tend to focus on two things: the casting, and the story. What do you write about then, when the story is one of the greatest ever written, and the cast is made up of almost entirely legendary cinema icons both young and old?At least the animation is cool. Gnomeo & Juliet is based on Shakespeare’s classic tale of Romeo and Juliet, told from the point of view of – and here’s the weird part – garden gnomes. And Elton John songs. Two gardens, both alike in looks, in fair London, were this film is set, bear an ancient grudge to which we’re never privy to the origins, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean – the owners of two joined houses in suburban London have an enmity which has spread to even their back gardens, gardens populated by gnomes which come alive when their owners are out. One the one side, the Reds, and on the other, the Blues, both battle each other over a cause unknown. Thus begins the tale of Gnomeo and Juliet.

Click here for gnomic comedy gold….

**********************

In what can only be described as horrific, The Cove brings to light Japan’s shocking attempts to cover-up their annual dolphin slaughter near the tiny costal town of Taiji, on the southern edge of that country. This documentary, directed by Oceanic Preservation Society co-founder Louie Psihoyos, shows the quest by former dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry to end the annual slaughter of thousands of innocent marine mammals, using hidden cameras, stealth technology, deep-diving champions, and a disregard for personal safety. The Cove won the Oscar for best Documentary Feature at the 82^nd Academy Awards (held in 2010), and perhaps rightly so. It’s confronting, wrenching and entirely terrible to witness the slaughter of hundreds upon hundreds of dolphins, all carved up to feed the masses and potentially create a new problem for Japan to endure. More on this in a moment.

Click here to delve deeper into The Cove…

**********************

Anyone who’s invested even the slightest amount of time in understanding popular culture will recognize the famous image of Princess Leia, played by Carrie Fisher, lazing about in that golden bikini slave outfit in the Star Wars film Return of The Jedi. Undeniably one of cinema’s most celebrated and iconic images, as well as perhaps a masturbatory aide for boys aged thirteen to thirty, the Slave Leia look is among the more popular homages perpetrated at San Diego’s annual Comic Con – that once-a-year event in which thousands of people descend on the city to check out new films, new comic books, locate old and rare items of geek value, and generally nerd around. Paul, directed by Superbad helmer Greg Mottola, and starring geek-icons Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, uses this warm-huggy feeling of nerd camaraderie to generate plenty of laughs based around the culture of science fiction and aliens. It’s a loose comedy adventure film, playing both homage to, and stealing from, some of science fictions most holy cows – lines from Star Wars, references to Star Trek, aliens at Roswell (and many others), all of which adds up to a rich tapestry of love for the genre – although non-sci-fi geeks may find much of the humor slips right over their heads.

Click here to find out what we thought of Paul!!

**********************

Legal minefields might make awesome Hollywood fodder, but often, they can feel a lot like “been there, done that” a fair amount of the time. Blockbuster courtroom flicks like A Few Good Men, 12 Angry Men, A Time To Kill, The Verdict and Presumed Innocent all stand tall among the very best of the justice system playing out on film, and we’ve had decades of television shows doing the same (Law & Order among the most prominent current iterations), so we’ve all become accustomed to the American legal system in due course. The Lincoln Lawyer, based on a novel by Michael Connelly (who also wrote Blood Work, which itself was turned into a film by Clint Eastwood back in 2002), is yet another variation on a theme – a well-worn theme of a defense lawyer having to defend a man who could actually be guilty of a horrendous crime.

Click here to see Matthew McConaughey NOT take off his shirt…

**********************

Ahh, the good old gangster film. Dark coats, fedoras, tommy-guns and sharp-as-a-whip broads all speakin’ the lingo of 30’s America, mixed with the heady brew of violence and sex, usually makes up a fine cocktail of crime and runnin’ from the law. Bonnie & Clyde, perhaps the most famous of all films to glorify a pair of real-life criminals, was noted at the time for its then-shocking depiction of violence and raw sexuality, and is by most modern standards the benchmark for all films of the genre. The screen presence of Warren Beatty in that film, as Clyde Barrow, was searing to say the least, while Faye Dunaway ably backed him up as the sultry muse to his violent artistry. Capturing the era, the feeling of disassociation of the time, and the dusty, grimy humanity struggling to survive the wrenching heartache of Depression era America, director Arthur Penn nailed it perfectly. Michael Mann, delivering his own version of the crime film set during the Depression, and retelling key moments in the life of John Dillinger, brings Public Enemies close to that benchmark, yet falls short in the end. While the film often skirts greatness, with some terrific dialogue, Public Enemies feels too aloof and inaccessible for all, save viewers intimately familiar with the era.

Click here to open fire and read on!