Directed and written: Paul W.S. Anderson.
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Wentworth Miller.
How did news of Resident Evil 4: Afterlife pass me by?
The end of Apocalpse was left open-ended but it great to see Alice (Milla Jovovich) and Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) are back. with the addition of Chris Redfield (Wentworth Miller). Afterlife is set five years after the first film, including of the usual stumble and groan type, there’s mutated zombies which are a bit cooler.
A bonus is that it seems kinda like Kill Bill, as swords hugely feature in the trailer. This film is also earmarked with the filmed exclusively for 3D tagline, let’s see how that works out for them.
Zombies + Swords = A very good combination.
My question is why keep shooting after you’ve jumped out the window?
Hitting cinemas in tomorrow.
It’s very sad news here at ITM Towers to hear that promenient anime director, writer and animator Satoshi Kon passed away yesterday at the age of 46. The interwebs is spreading this unfortunate news quickly, first broken by a tweet from Yasuhiro Takeda from animation studio Gainax.
Kon’s directorial debut was with the anime Perfect Blue, an action filled thriller questioning the main character’s grounding in reality. He later worked on Millenium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paranoia Agent and was the writer and director of Paprika. The works of Satoshi Kon were some of the few that broke into the mainstream. Each production he worked was a breath of fresh air and innovative in it’s own right. Even if you couldn’t understand the underlying complexities, it looked pretty and had a re-watchable quality. His latest creation The Dream Machine is currently in production by Studio Madhouse; I presume this feature length film will go ahead.
It’s a sad day for anime.
Update: Madhouse officially confirmed the news. Satoshi Kon’s wife thanked everyone for their support. He passed away due to pancreatic cancer.
The Illusionist/L’Illusionniste directed by Sylvain Chomet,is being released at Smithfield’s Lighthouse in Dublin today. We thought we’d take a look at his previous feature-length work The Triplets of Belleville/Les Triplettes de Belleville. This film was a collaborative work between France, Canada, Belgium and the UK and it was nominated for two Oscars.
At the bopping of the opening tune, you know there’s a party and you’re heading to it. We’re introduced to Madame Souza, a grandmother trying her best to please her listless young grandson. He has a passing interest in pianos so Souza plays the piano horribly, when that doesn’t succeed she buys him a puppy. Nothing is too much to please the young boy. She discovers that bicycles are his thing, so she buys him a tricycle. Many years later, her grandson has grown up and she helps him to train for the Tour de France.
At the Tour de France, her grandson gets kidnapped by the mafia and taken to America for a betting ring. Madame Souza gives chase in her little pedal boat after her grandson. Grandma meets the Triplets Belleville – and I like their style – everything can be sorted with a grenade. Comic relief is served up by Triplet Belleville’s OCD. Nods to inanimate objects including fridges, papers and hoovers. Seasons pass and the quartet play ensemble at a restaurant where the mafia boss attends. Together the four women and Bruno the dog strive to free her grandson from the clutches of the mafia.
There is hardly any speech in this film, it’s not required to understand the intention of the characters. The lack of speech relies on the emotive response and actions of the characters. At times Madame Souza driove me demented with the whistle but it’s understandable as it conveyed her wishes without speech; speaking what she wanted would have detracted fom the film somehow. Everything is over stated in this film. If it’s tall, it’s too tall, large, it’s extra extra large.
If this film is high standard of the rest of Chomet’s work then I’m looking foward to The Illusionist.
There is a Jewish proverb that goes, ‘God could not be everywhere so he created mothers’. Vincenzo Natali’s mad-science horror flick Splice is not just a case of man playing God but also a dark look at motherhood.
Natali’s picture stars Sarah Polley far from the hills of Avonlea as Elsa and He Seems To Be in Everything This Year, Adrien Brody as Clive – a pair of scientists and lovers skating the dark side of genetics. Elsa and Clive are mavericks in their field of advanced genetics. Together they splice, dice and reassemble animal DNA into hybrids – think weird Altered States-esque goops of matter. Having pushed the bounds of science further than anyone else, they go that further mile and cook up a human-animal hybrid named Dren. And here’s when the creepometer gets cranked up twelve notches.
Polley’s Elsa is a woman living on the edge. Her fractured relationship with her own mother is magnified and reflected to tragic effect. At odds even with the First Principles of the movie, Natali decides that Nature overrules nurture. Elsa’s protectiveness of Dren grates at times and it’s then Polley sounds tinny to the Nth degree. In these moments, it’s difficult to escape the fact that Splice would be a much more effective horror movie with less exposition on how Elsa is a bad mother and more exploration into how her experiences have warped her world-view and ethics.
In stark contrast to mother figure Elsa, Brody’s Clive feels like an emasculated plot device. God knows Brody tries to carve out a performance, but Polley’s Elsa gives him little room to breathe and he ends up being a sounding board for her fucked up Id.
Natali’s movie asks interesting questions about forbidden sexuality, motherhood and God Complex of modern science in the first half but I can’t help feeling that the film woke up in the last thirty minutes with its socks on and realising it is a creature feature and that requires lots of blood splatty action. By then, Dren has grown up and the movie is fast running out of time and ideas! It’s especially disappointing when you realise Natali wrote and directed Cube and is donning the same hats in the eagerly-awaited adaptation of Gibson’s Neuromancer due next year.
A parting shoutout to adult Dren actress Delphine Chanéac who deftly portrays the hybrid with operatic grace subverting the Frankenmonster norms with aplomb!
Verdict: Not enough blood for horror fans, not enough originality for goatee strokers.
If you’re not a fan of Megan Fox, you’ll hate it; if you are a fan of Megan Fox, you’ll hate it.
Simple.
As.
That.
Megan Fox stars as Jennifer Check, y’know one of those stereotypical cheerleader types. What makes her slightly different is her ‘lasting’ friendship with geeky childhood friend Needy Lesnicky (Amanda Seyfried). It’s obvious who the dominant personality is in that relationship, it would be an interesting twist to have the geek in charge. Jennifer and Needy head along to a gig in a grimey bar on the outskirts of town and the bar burns down. Jennifer leaves with the band, abandoning Needy. Fast forward, Jennifer has developed a taste for boys to keep her alive.
I’m not going to get pulled into mythical inaccuracies, she’s labeled as a succubus on the back of the DVD cover but really she just eats boys to live. There’s no consistency, with scenes leaping from one to another. It would have been interesting if she was naturally a demon instead of some hocus pocus by a third-rate band.
Remember Juno? Of course you do. It turns out that Diablo Cody wrote both Juno and Jennifer’s Body. Obviously this film was produced off the back of her previous success…
Obscure pop-culture reference to band Maroon 5, which ironically we haven’t heard much from over the past few years. That reference dates the film immedately. (In case you’re wondering Maroon 5 are set to release their third album in September 2010.)
Jennifer’s Body was going to score an abysmal 0/5, yes no rating at all. The only aspect of the film which manages to grasp itself a score a single star is the soundtrack.
Verdict: The soundtrack is all that’s going for this pile of celluloid.
Here’s something that we’re looking forward to and it’s Sucker Punch!
Sucker Punch is about a girl whose nefarious and evil stepfather institutionalises her. She creates an alternative reality for herself as a coping mechanism, splitting into five different personas. It distinctly reminds me of Identity except instead of ten strangers at a motel, it’s five girlies kicking major booty with swords, guns and explosions. I’m looking forward to Sucker Punch. Let’s hope it’s not a dead cat like Knight and Day.
Directed by Zack Snyder who also directed Watchmen and 300 which means he’s just jumped leaps and bounds in my estimation. I’ll be expecting great things. Sucker Punch stars Emily Browning, Jenna Malone and Abbie Cornish just to name a few. John Hamm, our fave star in Mad Men makes an appearance in this movie too.
Please excuse me while I get sick into my popcorn bucket.
I saw the trailer for Knight and Day back in March when I headed along to see Prince of Persia. It was extremely entertaining and promised a lot but little did I know that the best bits from the film were succinctly shoved into a two minute trailer. It was a waste of months of anticipation.
Diaz plays June Haven, a mechanic rushing to get to her sister’s wedding. As a mechanic, surely Diaz could have injected a bit more spine in Haven, I would’ve thought her apparent grease monkey skills would be put to better use. She doesn’t know how to use a gun and it’s primarily set in America. Any tomboy worth her salt would’ve already jumped on the gun culture, what could possibly convey more phallic symbolism?
Tom Cruise is Roy Miller, the suave secret agent who uses Diaz as a decoy and eventually falls in love with her. Obviously, there’s the tension between them, adventure, action, conflict which splits them up and resolution of conflict at the conclusion. It’s the typical make-n-bake Mills and Boon Intrigue or Harlequin novel. There’s comedy in spurts and fits but nothing memorable. It’ll easily be forgotten as it doesn’t make much of an impression.
**Geek Speak**
Remember Buffy The Vampire Slayer? The actor who played Riley, Buffy’s former boyfriend around season five? He makes an appearance as Haven’s old flame.
Verdict: It doesn’t warrant a second viewing unless exceptionally inebriated at a hen party gone wrong. Real wrong.
You just have to love when Youtube weighs in on the act for movie promos. Sylvester Stallone tells Youtube about his new actioner The Expendables which opens in Ireland on August 20th.
Nowadays, rom-coms come with an edge of tripidation. So much tripe has been labeled rom-com in the last decade, that’s it difficult to gather the strength to sit down and hope for something better than a car crash. Unfortunately, The Rebound serves the genre little more to change this.
Catherine Zeta-Jones plays Sandy, a soccer mom wronged by a philandering husband. Finding a video of his indiscretions, she moves to the Big City, kids in tow and finds a new job and apartment over a coffee house in double quick time. The coffeehouse serves up young, underachieving barista Aram (Justin Bartha) Sandy’s way, time and time again. He’s 24, she’s 40. We’re reminded of this time and time again. Eschewing the ambitions of his parents, Aram falls for Sandy’s MILFY charms and we’re squarely in a ladymag feature – 12 Things You’re Paranoid About When Robbing a Cradle. It’s tailormade for a glass of Chardonnay with the girls, don’t you know.
Casting is a major pet peeve in The Rebound. Zeta-Jones is woefully miscast. She plays against type. In the golden years of Hollywood, Zeta-Jones would be properly cast as a femme fatale or aging vamp on the run. She’s just too glamourous as the wronged wife with kids in-tow. As a stay-at-home mom, who’s desparate to make it on her own terms, we never really see her struggle to make ends meet. Her kids are cookie-cutter munchkins on the edge of teenagerhood. Were it the 80′s, her son Frank Jr would be sporting a bowl cut.
Ignoring the high-maintenance image, Zeta-Jones attempts to wash over her natural Welsh accent to unnerving effect. It’s Uncle Buck trying to avoid shouting “WART!”. Add to this the relative ease with which she set up her new life while somehow finding it hard to confront her ex, it’s hard to believe Sandy is as helpless as she pretends. Zeta-Jones stays within the icy confines of her usual on-screen persona. What, Sandy can’t speak up for herself in front of her knotty-haired husband? LIES, I tell you! It’s difficult to suspend your belief that far and so you never give her performance the credibility it craves. No amount of gurly glasses of vino can help you overcome the comic book characterisations!
Rebounding from this pastiche of misjudged MILFyness. NEXT!
