The Raid

 Admittedly I haven’t seen many films that would be classed as ‘action’; Jason Statham and Bruce Willis just seem to pass me by and it’s probably due to the endless fight scenes and lack of coherent plot that make these films so uninteresting. Even the martial arts films of Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan hold little appeal. There’s an Indonesian film out this week however, that stands far above what has come before – The Raid, by Welsh director Gareth Evans, which features some of the most ‘entertaining’ violence I’ve ever seen.

 A SWAT team is sent into a derelict block of apartments that houses some of the country’s most dangerous criminals. Their mission is to take down the owner of the tower block: a drug lord named Tama, and to kill everyone they meet on the way up. Simple premise, simple script – The Raid seems like an average action movie to begin with, but as soon as the team enter the building, you realise exactly what everyone’s been so excited about.

 The fight sequences are phenomenally good. As the team moves quickly from floor to floor picking off anyone that gets in their way, bullets start to run out and a few of them get split up from the main group. The amazingly choreographed, martial arts inspired violence, coupled with the constant dubstep pumping in the background makes this film not only fast moving, but also a pleasure to watch. Evans has a history of directing martial arts movies and The Raid seems to be his finest achievement yet, for the camera work is equally as impressive, flicking incessantly from one action sequence to the next, while managing to capture the claustrophobic atmosphere of the apartment block simultaneously. An extraordinary film.

Thoughts on the upcoming Hobbit movie.

 21^st December 2012: the end of the world, according to Mayan prediction, but through the darkness shines a small ray of hope; seven days before, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will be released in UK cinemas. Granted, this may seem a small comfort to a lot of people, but to Tolkien fans everywhere, it’ll be worth dying for, especially since Peter Jackson’s behind it. Shrouded in mystery from the beginning, the project slipped through the hands of a number of directors due to issues with copyright, until Jackson, who had previously stated he wanted nothing to do with The Hobbit, finally agreed to take it on. After some consideration, it was decided that the film would be split into two parts, the second, aptly named The Hobbit: There and Back Again. Many though, will be wondering how Jackson will pull it off; he has the abilities, certainly, but what can we expect from this long awaited set of films?

 The crucial difference between Jackson’s previous venture - The Lord of the Rings trilogy – and The Hobbit, is the change of tone. While The Lord of the Rings is based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s thousand page epic and features heavily the themes of death, evil and the impending doom of an entire nation, The Hobbit is more of a fairy tale; a treasure hunt intended primarily for children. There are certainly a few darker moments in the original book (the chapter ‘Riddles in the Dark’, for example, in which Bilbo meets the creature Gollum is particularly unnerving), but they are nothing compared to the hoards of orcs and black riders that threaten the fellowship throughout The Lord of the Rings. The question is will Jackson take full advantage of these darker aspects and use them to create a more sinister piece, or will the focus be mainly on the story’s childish qualities? Interestingly enough, the trailer hints at both. On one hand we see shots of Gandalf walking through a ruined, grey stone courtyard, possibly Dol Guldor, the dark lord’s stronghold in Mirkwood: a place only mentioned a few times in the book, yet which seems to feature strongly in the film. The lighter aspects, on the other hand, come in the form of dwarves; introduced in a high-speed montage with various different beards and face-shapes, they look to embody the film’s much needed comical side.

  Another unanswered question on everybody’s lips is when the cut-off point will be. At what moment will the first film end and the second begin? It’s more than likely that the film will not end on a cliffhanger, but instead come to a close on a quieter note, with a slightly ominous feeling to it: a foreshadowing of things to come, as was the case with The Lord of the Rings films; although it’s hard to even speculate at this point – who knows what the scriptwriters have come up with?

  Aside from tone, something that must be mentioned is the ridiculous amount of creatures in The Hobbit that talk using human voices. From the Cockney accents of the three trolls that the company stumble upon, to the whispering spiders of Mirkwood, Jackson is going to have to be careful not to make this film seem like a trip into Narnia; he will need to maintain the intelligent gravity that The Lord of the Rings so clearly demonstrates and not let it stray into the land of childish absurdity. The cast list does however include Benedict Cumberbatch, best known for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, who will be playing the voice of Smaug, the dragon that inhabits the Lonely Mountain. Considering Smaug’s character in the book and also Cumberbatch’s previous roles, we can expect the unveiling of the dragon to be a scene full both of magnificence and comic sarcasm. It’ll also be interesting to see how Jackson approaches the filming of this scene, for he has to take into account the fact that Bilbo will be wearing the ring, and will therefore be invisible. No doubt he’ll think of something.

  

 A quick glance at the official cast list reveals not only Martin Freeman playing the hobbit himself, Bilbo Baggins, but a whole host of characters that do not appear in the original book. Whether this is Peter Jackon’s attempt at fleshing the plot out (bearing in mind the book is only three hundred pages long), or an ingenious marketing strategy to get more people to pay to watch it, it will be interesting to discover when and where these extra characters turn up. Easily recognisable Lord of the Rings actors such as Orlando Bloom (Legolas), Cate Blanchett (Galadriel) and Christopher Lee (Saruman) do not actually appear in The Hobbit. Neither does the character of Radagast – a wizard and nature enthusiast with similar powers to Gandalf – played by Sylvester McCoy. Even in the most insignificant of roles, it seems that every famous face possible is in these two films in one way or another; both Evangaline Lily and Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie are set to play elves, and even comedian Billy Connolly will turn up as dwarf-lord Dain Ironfoot.

 
 Eyebrows may be raised at this celebrity cast list, maybe even causing a few sceptical critics to label the films as ‘commercial spin-offs of the Tolkien franchise’, but The Hobbit is something entirely different – a film that has the potential to be even bigger than The Lord of the Rings, for not only will current fans flock to see it in their masses, but parents will drag their children; there are very few people who can say that The Hobbit has not been a part of their childhood in some form or another. Fans have been waiting years for these films to be made, so with only seven months until An Unexpected Journey is released, levels of anticipation are set to reach breaking point.

Dark Shadows

A film starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, scored by Danny Elfman and featuring vampires, witches and ghosts, Dark Shadows is Tim Burton at his most comfortable. Based on an early 70’s soap opera of the same name, the film is essentially a revisitation of Burton and Depp’s childhood and shows them create something both nostalgic and unique.

 It begins, as most Burton films do, with a prologue; a fantastically gothic montage detailing the mortal life of Barnabas Collins (Depp), his transformation into a vampire and the subsequent curse laid upon his entire family by a witch (Eva Green). Then in 1972, two centuries later, Barnabas is freed from his imprisonment and returns to his mansion, Collinwood, to find a family even more dysfunctional than the one he left. 

 While Dark Shadows is Burton and Depp’s eighth collaboration together, they have still managed to create a film that feels very different to any of their previous work. Yes the dark humour still remains, as does the isolated, misunderstood protagonist that instantly conjures up images of Edward Scissorhands, Willy Wonka and Sweeney Todd, but there’s something else that stands out. Perhaps it’s the fact that (as surprising as it sounds) the two have never made a vampire movie before, or possibly because the cast does such a good job at portraying the strangest group of people since the Addams family; Chloe Grace Moretz is brilliant as the angst-ridden teenager, as is Helena Bonham Carter’s role of the alcoholic psychiatrist, Dr Hoffman, and Depp, the main attraction, never lets his standards fall.

 Scripted by Seth Grahame-Smith (author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), the film certainly boasts the feel of a soap opera, with various affairs and family scandals being discovered at every turn, but diehard fans of the original television show are bound to be disappointed. This is the world of Tim Burton: a place packed with gothic imagery and tortured characters, a world in which absurdity prevails – Dark Shadows is more a re-imagining than a remake. It’s not completely different from its predecessor however – the characters are the same, the plot is vaguely similar and Jonathan Frid (the original Barnabas Collins, who sadly passed away last month) even has a small cameo – but when Alice Cooper makes an appearance on stage at the Collinwood house party singing ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy’, you know you’re dealing with a Tim Burton project.

Okay, it might not be Burton’s finest moment; it may lack the gravity of Ed Wood and the simplicity of Edward Scissorhands, but Dark Shadows is a fast moving, character driven piece of entertainment and certainly an interesting addition to the already varied portrayal of the vampire legend.

Thoughts on Avengers Assemble

Marvel's Avengers Assemble: Joss Whedon attempts to write and direct a film which combines the screen presence of six or seven different superheroes - not an easy task to overcome, but does he pull it off?

 Yes, to an extent, but that's about the only thing he gets right. Most of the characters, be it Thor, Captain America or Iron Man, have previously been made into feature films that have all been (with the exception of Iron Man) largely unexciting, so apparently Marvel think it a good idea to combine them all into an unstoppable alien-fighting, costume-wearing, egotistical super-team. Granted it did exceptionally well on its opening week; yes, Joss Whedon is behind it (writer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and The Cabin in the Woods), but a lot of it just doesn't work.

 It was unoriginal and a lot of the time uninteresting. Whedon is known for his genre-bending screen writing (see The Cabin in the Woods) and his sometimes overly complicated plots, but with Avengers, he seems to have ignored this reputation and created something mind-numbingly basic, centered around a small glowing cube called the Tesseract which essentially acts as an unlimited source of energy. Disappointingly, it's as if Whedon has just simplified his abilities to attract a wider audience, maximising fighting scenes and downplaying his creative genius; half way through the film, all that had been achieved was that the Avengers had fought Loki on a boat. That is all.

 One of the other main problems was the characters themselves. The best superhero films in my opinion are the Batman and Spiderman series and this is not just because of their 'darker sides', it's due to the fact that their true identities are kept secret; both Batman and Spiderman lead double lives and that's what makes them so interesting as characters. The same cannot be said for any of the Avengers, whose superhero identities are their lives - everyone knows who they are and what they can do and the film lacks this quality, especially with the characters of Loki and Thor, who, due to their statuses as gods, are left without any credibility at all.

 The film's redemptive features include Robert Downey Jr, whose role as Iron Man made it as funny as a film like this is allowed to be - constantly belittling his fellow Avengers and making jokes at inappropriate times. Also Tom Hiddleston as Loki, while unbelievable as a character, is definitely worth watching.

 Having said all this, I didn't expect any less. Throwing as many mediocre superhero movies as possible into one film didn't seem like a good idea in the first place, but at least Marvel have made a lot of money, right..?

The Cabin in the Woods

 When talking about The Cabin in the Woods, the new horror from writer Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Avengers Assemble) and director Drew Goddard, it’s difficult not to give anything away. However, odds are if you’ve watched the spoiler-full trailer, you’ll know what I mean when I say that this film isn’t exactly normal.

 Five American teenage stereotypes: a jock, his ‘dumb blonde’ girlfriend, a nerd, a ‘virgin’ and a hippy all decide to spend a week or two of their summer holiday in an isolated cabin in the middle of nowhere – in other words, we’ve seen it all before. Obviously they all ignore the words of warning the local red-neck who owns the gas station spits out, but it’s only when they reach the cabin itself that they get the feeling that something isn’t quite right.

 “If you hear a strange sound outside… have sex,” reads one of the film’s many taglines, but this isn’t a mockery of horror, it’s more of an exploration, a film that asks the question ‘why?’. Why is it that the unsuspecting teenagers always choose the barely accessible cabin in the woods? Why, when put in life-threatening situations, do they always choose to split up? And why do the virgins always survive? It’s no coincidence that the long haired, weed smoking liberalist looks a lot like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, or that the virgin reminds you of the girl from Scream, because they’re supposed to; if you’re going to mess around with a genre, you have to start with the basics. Containing elements of other horror films, particularly ‘cabin in the woods’ classics such as Friday 13^th, Cabin Fever and The Evil Dead series, it twists your expectations to such an extent that you’ll never watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre again in the same way.

 The Cabin in the Woods is intelligent, shocking and brilliantly self-aware, showing you just what Joss Whedon is capable of when set loose in the world of horror and if by the end it doesn’t answer all your questions, it’ll certainly leave you feeling impressed.

Director Profile: Dario Argento

With a career spanning over forty years Dario Argento has directed and written a whole host of creative and disturbing masterpieces, and in the process has worked with and inspired a generation of filmmakers, from John Carpenter to Tobe Hooper, so whether you’ve heard of him or not, don’t dismiss him as just another horror director, for he’s much, much more than that.

Argento’s obsession with horror began, unsurprisingly, during his childhood. Born in Rome in 1940, his mother was a professional photographer and his father was a film producer, so he was involved in the goings on of the world of cinema from an early age. Due to occasional bouts of illness he spent the majority of his time reading, but it wasn’t until he picked up a collection of Edgar Allan Poe short stories that he really developed a passion for the themes of murder and the grotesque with which he would become so well associated. Interestingly enough, he didn’t dive straight into the cinema business like his father, but instead chose to be a film critic, writing for a variety of magazines throughout and beyond high school. It was through this job that Argento eventually met and became good friends with spaghetti western director Sergio Leone, for whom he wrote the original story of Once Upon a Time in the West with Bernardo Bertolucci. Encouraged by this experience, Argento began to write, and in time direct, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and as he became increasingly enthusiastic about making films, his career began to take shape.

 By far his most successful film is Suspiria. Both graphic murder mystery and haunting fairy tale, it tells the story of a series of murders within a girls’ dancing school and sees Argento experiment with the idea of the horror genre being an art form and not simply mindless entertainment. He subverted the previous assumption that ‘slasher’ films are shallow and predictable, to such an extent that the film becomes a work of art: a multilayered painting that succeeds in hypnotising the viewer with its sinister use of colour and sound. There is no doubt that Suspiria is where Aronofsky got most of his inspiration for Black Swan, for they both convey an unnerving tension, a feeling of conspiracy in the isolated world of a ballet school.
 
 As with most of Argento’s films (Inferno especially), Suspiria’s soundtrack is terrifying; written and performed by Italian rock band Goblin, it has a childish, nursery rhyme quality to it, full of loud whispers and distant screams that burrow deep into the brain and stay there long after the film ends.

 Also set in a girls’ school, Phenomena (or Creepers, as it’s known in America) is a film definitely worth mentioning. It stars a young Jennifer Connelly as a girl with the ability to communicate with insects, who tries to solve a bizarre string of murders connected to a nearby criminal sanatorium. As with a lot of Argento’s work, the plot makes little sense (her closest friend is an elderly scientist with a monkey as an assistant), but the characters are so well crafted, the atmosphere so unsettling, that you begin to wonder whether the film needs a coherent plot at all.

 Think of a way of killing someone, and Dario Argento has already come up with it. Of course the bizarre methods of inflicting death that he imagines are disgusting, but there’s a certain beauty in the way he presents them: a body crashing through a stained-glass ceiling; a knife piercing an exposed heart; a girl diving into a sea of barbed wire. What’s intriguing though, is that most of the violence in Argento’s films is directed at women. He isn’t a misogynist, he once explained in an interview, but he finds that women are more interesting to kill; their deaths give his films a sexual beauty, one that is directly connected with the entire genre of horror. This astonishing imagination of his was able to run wild when he teamed up with fellow horror director George A. Romero. The two had met previously when Argento offered to help finance and produce Romero’s zombie sequel Dawn of the Dead and they came together again a decade later to make Due Occhi Diabolici, or Two Dead Eyes, a film based on two Edgar Allan Poe short stories, taking the gothic tales to a disturbing new level  – what more could you ask for in a film?

 There are short periods when Argento moves away from horror slightly and focuses on his fascination with ‘giallo’, an Italian genre concerned mainly with crime and mystery, similar to a lot of Alfred Hitchcock’s work. As a matter of fact, due to the fluidity of camera shots, the creative plots and heavy use of handheld cameras, Argento has a number of times been hailed as the Italian Hitchcock, which isn’t a bad description, especially considering films such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Cat O’ Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet.

 Sadly his presence in film is dwindling slightly, for while he continues to direct (Dracula 3D is his current project, which isn’t expected to have a very wide release), he seems to have lost a lot of the reputation and celebrity status he once had in the ‘80s and ‘90s. There’s also talk of director David Gordon Green wanting to remake Suspiria, doing what Gus Van Sant did with Psycho in 1998 and reproducing most of the scenes shot-for-shot; it hardly seems necessary and even slightly insulting – why not just re-release the original Suspiria in all its glory?

 Nevertheless, his imagination lives on in people’s nightmares and his legacy is still very much alive in these fantastically unique horror films. Go forth and watch.