Movie News: Batman Begins..... Again

B-Aff to don the Batsuit

Holy reboot Robin! 

After much speculation since the announcement at this year’s Comic-Con that DC Comics’ Superman and Batman would go toe to toe, cape to cape etc in the untitled Man of Steel sequel, the mask is off... Or should that be on?

Warner Bros announced today that Ben Affleck will be the latest to don the Bat-cape of alter ego millionaire Bruce Wayne taking over from Christian Bale. Affleck, who had been rumoured to be directing the superhero mashup ‘Justice League’ at one stage will instead slip into some patented rubber in front of the camera fighting crime in some capacity alongside Henry Cavill’s Superman. And as you’d expect, all involved are excited at the prospect.

 “We knew we needed an extraordinary actor to take on one of DC Comics’ most enduringly popular Super Heroes, and Ben Affleck certainly fits that bill, and then some,” says Warner Bros Greg Silverman, President, Creative Development and Worldwide Production in a statement released by the studio today.

“His outstanding career is a testament to his talent and we know he and Zack will bring new dimension to the duality of this character.”

Zack Snyder returns as director for the sequel and looks to be giddy with anticipation at working with B-Aff;

“Ben provides an interesting counter-balance to Henry’s Superman,” says Snyder. “He has the acting chops to create a layered portrayal of a man who is older and wiser than Clark Kent and bears the scars of a seasoned crime fighter, but retain the charm that the world sees in billionaire Bruce Wayne. I can’t wait to work with him.”

B-Aff, who no doubt was already a WB favourite after winning the studio Oscar glory for last year’s Argo, has some runs on the board when it comes to playing a superhero – he portrayed actor George Reeves who played Superman in the 1950’s in the true Hollywood mystery Hollywoodland  in 2006 and starred as blind swashbuckling superhero Daredevil in 2003.

While that film under performed, Affleck looks like he’s on the money this time with the Man of Steel reboot which has past the $US650 million mark worldwide.

The untitled sequel is scheduled for release in July 2015.

Movie Review: Upstream Colour

Pigs might fly

Drama/Thriller. M. Opens Aug 22

What’s It All About? A mysterious organism brings two lost souls together.

The Verdict: Trippy, beautiful and head-scratching. Did we say trippy?

3.0/5.0

Celluloid hallucinogenics don’t come much trippier than this.

"Unique, beautiful, bizarre and haunting"

When a parasite is forcibly inserted into Kris (Amy Seimetz, You’re Next) a hypnotic state follows, an uncanny transference-laced relationship with the deceptive Jeff (Shane Carruth, Primer) blossoms and telepathy with swine unknowingly develops. 

Have we met before?

This unique, beautiful, bizarre and haunting film from writer/director Carruth defies categorisation, let alone explanation. It’s mostly convincing, but that head-scratching abstractness also induces detachment.

This review appears in the September 2013 issue of Empire Magazine.

Movie Review: We're The Millers

Pot boiler

Comedy. MA15+

What’s It All About? A mismatched quartet pretend to be a clean cut RV holidaying family to sneak a massive drug haul over the Mexican border.

The Verdict: Watch the trailer and you’ve seen the best bits.

2.0/5.0

Imagine if the National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise were rebooted with a semi-subversive edge with the crass factor ramped up to eleven. Subtract much of that series’ lovable bumbling humour and you have a rough idea of how this comedy has turned out. The Millers ain’t the Griswolds.

"With plenty of gross out humour, profanity and ample hard-bodied Aniston flesh on display it’s pretty clear who the target market is – teenage boys."

When down-on-his-luck pot dealer David (Jason Sudeikis, Horrible Bosses) is forced to courier a massive marijuana haul by the surprisingly corporate drug king pin Brad (Ed Helms, The Hangover series, who incidentally is attached to a planned actual Vacation reboot) he comes up with the brainwave to pose as a clean-cut family on vacation to Mexico to escape detection.

Not the Griswolds

He recruits stripper Rose (Jennifer Aniston), dorky Kenny (Brit Will Poulter, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and tearaway Casey (Emma Roberts, Celeste & Jesse Forever) as his fake wife and kids and after a clean-cut makeover for all it’s all aboard a jet plane to pick up an RV haul of weed. Predictably things don’t go to plan, there’s an aggrieved Mexican drug lord (Tomer Sisley, Largo Winch) and a saucy down-home family of RV enthusiasts (Parks & Recreation's Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn) to deal with.

Spot the joke

With plenty of gross out humour (men, gird your loins for there's a There’s Something About Mary moment) profanity and ample hard-bodied Aniston flesh on display it’s pretty clear who director Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story) is targeting – the swarms of teenage boys who supposedly make up the holy grail of Hollywood’s majority movie-going audience.

There’s nothing wrong with crude but it does help to have some genuine wit-laced humour behind it but apart from a handful of genuine laughs and a few clever lines in a lazily crass script from the writers of Wedding Crashers and Hot Tub Time Machine, that’s in short supply. And a fairly late lurch into saccharine-sweet territory does the film no favours.

Jen knew a fart-related catastrophe when she saw one

Sudeikis and Aniston – who have appeared together in The Bounty Hunter and Horrible Bosses and will team up for that film’s sequel - can both be strong comic leads but in this fairly stale screenplay they don’t have a lot to work with. Aniston has some fun with her stripper meets down-home mom role but Sudeikis’ character is mostly unlikable. Their reported improvs don’t amount to much.

The film had reportedly spent almost ten years in development wilderness with the likes of Steve Buscemi, Will Arnett and Jason Bateman attached as the lead with The Full Monty director Peter Cattaneo set to direct at one stage. You wonder what We’re The Millers might have been but as it stands it’s a poor indictment on a film when its best scenes can be found in the trailer and blooper reel. 

For some quality screwball family holiday cinema, revisit the original National Lampoon’s Vacation instead.

Movie Review: Pain & Gain

More is less

True Crime/Comedy MA15+

What's it all about?: Three bodybuilders try to make it rich by kidnapping a millionaire.

The Verdict: More pain than gain.

2.0/5.0

You have to hand it to Michael Bay (Transformers, Armageddon), he’s nothing if not consistent. He snubs subtlety again with this roided-up crime romp based on a true story. 

It's very nipply out here.......

"A mildly entertaining, knuckle-headed outing that falters under the brute force of machismo."

When three opportunistic Miami body builders - Daniel (Mark Wahlberg), Paul (Dwayne Johnson) and Adrian (Anthony Mackie, The Adjustment Bureau) - swindle a millionaire with the cocky, self-help-spouting fitness evangelist Daniel leading the charge, hedonism and violence ensues. 

Rebel Without a Cause

Somewhere amongst the ironic dunderheaded talk of percentage body fat, pecs and “the American dream” is a mildly entertaining, knuckle-headed outing but despite an estrogen hit from Aussie import Rebel Wilson it falters under the brute force of machismo.

This review appears in the September 2013 issue of Empire magazine.

TV Feature: Truth, Lies & Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Truth seeker - Carmel Travers

It was a “spooky” atmosphere in which madness prevailed says writer, director Carmel Travers when the seeds of her latest documentary Truth, Lies & Intelligence were first laid. 

Rewind to March 2003, Australians were being warned to ‘Be Alert, Not Alarmed’ as the Government poised troops to join their US and British counterparts in the invasion of Iraq. Senior Intelligence Officer Andrew Wilkie resigned from the Office of National Assessment with the prescient view that a war based on questionable intelligence would lead to a humanitarian disaster.

“In that couple of months after Wilkie resigned everyone was swept away with the events of the war,” says Travers.

“It was as if people had forgotten the warnings that he was uttering, as were other intelligence analysts in the United States and the UK that ‘Hold on, we don’t really have proof of weapons of mass destruction’.”

Truth, Lies and Intelligence is an incisive investigation into how erroneous intelligence was used by the US led coalition of the willing to reconstruct the truth as an agenda for the Iraqi invasion. It explores the aftermath and lifts the veil on the intelligence community which became a scapegoat to what could be “the biggest foreign policy blunder since Vietnam”. 

Travers secured interviews with top level intelligence analysts, including retired US State Department Intelligence Chief Greg Thielman (a direct advisor to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell), US Ambassador Joseph Wilson and Wilkie, all of whom confirm that there was no concrete evidence that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction or had any link to the 9/11 attacks.

She acknowledges the courage it took these whistleblowers, few of which have escaped vilification, to convey their knowledge on film. At times during the documentary, the strain becomes awkwardly apparent.

“Their personal lives had been thrown into turmoil.” says Travers.

Scapegoat - US Ambassador Joseph Wilson

“That was certainly the case with US Ambassador Joseph Wilson, not only had he been publicly vilified but his wife had been outed as a covert CIA agent which forced her to resign. How often do they really want another film crew to come into their lounge rooms?”

The documentary shifts gears from the political to the deeply personal as Travers accompanies Sydney based Iraqi refugee Guzin Najim back to Iraq in what ultimately becomes an aborted attempt to enter Baghdad. Here Najim spent three years under house arrest and a further three in Jordan, after her diplomat husband was killed on Saddam Hussein’s orders. 

“I decided to include someone like Guzin Najim because she came at it from a completely different perspective to say an Australian woman like me,” says Travers.

“She was prepared to kiss the feet of George Bush for going into Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein. She didn’t care what the reason might have been behind doing that. It was really important to me to not just be sailing off on my own western liberal bandwagon but to actually stop and listen to the point of view of someone like Guzin.”

Travers whose credits include the ground breaking science series Beyond 2000 and the award winning documentaries Refugee Like Me and Climate In Crisis, says she was compelled to make the film because of her own “instinctive disbelief” in the Australian Government’s claims that Iraq posed a national security threat. 

“It was this whole question of what happens to the truth when you have clear government policy imperatives that seem to be so determined to push us to engage in a conflict?” she says.

“I felt that yet again as with Operation Desert Storm we were not going to be told the truth.”

The director admits she feels vindicated that the views expressed in the film have been corroborated by high level independent inquiries in Australia, Britain and the US. But in the end, Travers says she’s disappointed the documentary couldn’t find a more positive outcome, that for Iraqi nationals like Najim, their country’s future remains bleaker than ever.

“What resolution has there been for Guzin? Absolutely none. It’s been ten years since she left Iraq and I don’t think that she really will get any resolution until she finds a patch of earth north of Baghdad where she allows herself to believe that her husband’s been buried.”

This article was first published in The Guide, Sydney Morning Herald, September 5, 2005.

Movie Review: The World's End

Last Drinks

Comedy. MA15+

What’s It All About? An epic pub crawl turns into an epic fight for survival for six old school chums facing off an apocalyptic robot invasion.

The Verdict: An entertaining, if very familiar romp towards the end of the world.

3.5/5.0

Who’d have thought the funny could be found in the apocalypse? 

Last year’s underrated Seeking a Friend for the End of the World starring Steve Carrell and Keira Knightly found plenty of humour in impending doom as does this entertaining romp. It’s the last in the so-called ‘Cornetto Trilogy’ from director/writer Edgar Wright and Brit comedy duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost who brought us Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007).

"There’s plenty of laughs to be had but also an acute sense of déjà vu"

The World's End  shouldn't be confused with This Is The End which it follows hot on the heels of, if only because it’s a superior film than it's predecessor. Where the latter - about a group of Tinseltown actors holed up in James Franco’s house as the world crumbles outside - wallowed in gross-out humour, product placement and ironic Hollywood self absorption that quickly wore thin, the former has a greater wit.

Sign of the times

We’re introduced to middle-aged reprobate Gary King (Pegg) in rehab as he recalls the best night of his life – a messy but ultimately incomplete epic pub crawl (that’s twelve pints in twelve pubs) in his home town of Newton Haven with four school chums over twenty years ago. He skips out of rehab and reunites the group to attempt the beer quest again which will culminate at The World’s End pub.

His estranged pals - Andy (Frost), Steven (Paddy Considine, The Bourne Ultimatum), Peter (Eddie Marsan, The Disappearance of Alice Creed) and Oliver (Martin Freeman, The Hobbit) with Oliver’s younger sister Sam (Rosamund Pike, An Education) tagging along – are all very grown up, or so they think. At any rate, they’re worlds apart from Gary who is in arrested development, a ‘maby’ or man-baby to borrow a pearl from the script, who still dresses like a punk rocker complete with bad black hair dye and Doc Martins and whose only aspiration is to get epically pissed.

Newsflash: Village People policeman swallows mirror ball

But it’s not just that ocean of difference or the disturbing trend that their old haunts have been ‘Starbucked’ that’ll rupture the night. The group unwittingly discover they’re slap bang in the middle of a robot invasion. The townsfolk may look human, in an all-too-perfect kind of way but most have been substituted by robots with flashy blue eyes, blue ink for blood and a terminator-esque fighting acuity, hell bent on recruiting the world’s population.

Have we met?

The seed of the story, co-written by Pegg, lies in Wright’s own failed teenage pub crawl, presumably minus the kick-fighting robots. Where Shaun of The Dead was their tribute to zombie movies and Hot Fuzz to action/buddy flicks, this supposedly final entry tips it’s hat to sci-fi.

There’s plenty of laughs to be had, some witty dialogue and adroit comic performances particularly from Pegg. Yet there’s also an acute sense of déjà vu in content and style, this being the third time we’ve seen the ‘unwitting duo/group bumbling their way through other worldly chaos’ gag.

But The World’s End couldn’t be accused of false advertising. For those familiar with the series and fans alike it'll be like slipping into some comfy, well worn slippers. It’s a fitting lark to conclude the series.

Movie Review: The Way, Way Back

Big Love

Drama/Comedy. M

What’s It All About? During one summer an awkward teen finds his groove and acceptance in an unexpected place - a water fun park.

The Verdict: A feel-good coming of age film with a lot of heart, one that pulls fewer punches than you might expect.

4.0/5.0

Imagine the ignominy of sitting like an outsider, back to everyone else in the bench seat of a Griswold era wood-panelled station wagon. You’re already dreading your way to a blended family vacation when your tosser Stepdad wannabe patronisingly rates you as a person with a withering three... out of ten.

We're going to need a bigger boat.....

Not a great start to the summer for a withdrawn teenage boy. But with the bitterness, things are going to get sweeter for young Duncan (Liam James, 2012) once he, his trodden-upon mum Pam (Toni Collette), said stepfather-in-waiting Trent (Steve Carrell) and his spoilt brat daughter Steph (Zoe Levin, Trust)  settle in to holiday in an east coast US hamlet.

"It's a film with a lot of wit, humour, heart and nostalgia."

For the adults, it’s time to kick the heels up, drink, smoke and be merry while the kids make their own fun – “This place is like spring break for grownups,” Duncan’s love interest Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) tells him. Her mother played by the scene-stealing Allison Janney (The West Wing) is at the steep end of the mildly debaucherous mood as a gregarious, boozy whirling dervish.

Hold me now.... Whoa whoa

With Duncan’s mother all too wrapped up in her relationship with the tactless, arrogant Trent and with Trent riding him like Flipper, Duncan finds solace and acceptance in an unlikely place, the aptly named local water park Water Wizz. Slacker manager Owen (a wonderfully charismatic Sam Rockwell, Iron Man 2) – a mix of manic man-child, generous spirit and aspiring comic – in his quirky way takes Duncan under his wing unconditionally, giving him a much needed distraction in a summer job. Owen becomes the friend, brother and even paternal figure Duncan’s sorely been missing.

It might sound all a bit too schmaltzy but while this is definitely a sentimental film, it also tells it how it is, pulling few punches when it comes to family dynamics – the dysfunctional and those not of blood ties. And it does so with a lot of wit, humour, heart and nostalgia.

Who's your daddy?

The story is based on the summer childhood experiences of writer/director team Nat Faxon and Jim Rash - both well known comedy actors who appear in the film and who, with director Alexander Payne wrote the Oscar winning screenplay for The Descendents - when the adults were a distant presence and the kids frequented a “chlorine, urine infested paradise” (as they put it in the press notes) and made the best of awkwardly blended families. The film’s deflating ‘3/10 scene’ comes direct from Rash’s childhood. The pair were influenced by Little Miss Sunshine and Juno so that gives you a semblance of the comedy-drama mix.

Co-writer/director Nat Faxon makes a splash.

Despite the big ticket reuniting of Sunshine stars Collette (whose Pam is one of her least rounded characters) and Carrell (who effectively plays against type as the ultimate irritant), it’s not the rapprochement between mother and son that ultimately resonates but the joyfully comical, poignant and unconventional friendship between man-child and awkward teen. Liam James and Sam Rockwell have a terrific rapport. This is their film.