Alice in Wonderland (2010)

“I’ve been shrunk, stretched, scratched and stuffed into a teapot!”

Well, it was only a matter of time until Tim Burton had a go at Alice in Wonderland, wasn’t it? Three things were pretty much inevitable: it was going to feature Helena Bonham Carter, it was going to feature Johnny Depp, and it was going to be good. Lo, all three of these things come to pass.

Of course, Tim Burton, being Tim Burton, doesn’t actually make an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland; he jumps straight to Through the Looking Glass, but still calls it Alice in Wonderland anyway. It all looks amazing, and as trippy as all versions made since Jefferson Airplane did White Rabbit have to be by default. The early flashback scenes to Alice’s childhood have a very stylised, uber-Victorian look, while the present day scenes have a very un-Burton realism to be contrasted with the, er, wonders of Wonderland. I only saw this film in 2-D, and I’m gutted; lots of shots were quite clearly composed to look amazing in 3-D, and I’d imagine that the contrast with what I assume would be a 2-D “real” world would be even more effective.

The cast is, obviously, brilliant, and Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen and Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter are both as extraordinary as you’d expect. (Depp effortlessly switches between RP and Scottish; is there any accent he can’t do?) But there are far too many gloriously whimsical performances to. I ought to mention, though, that this is the last ever screen credit for Michael Gough, who was ninety-four years old when he voiced this role.

There’s obviously a moral behind the story: as the White Queen says, “You cannot live to please others. Alice arrives down the rabbit this time in the midst of a very public marriage proposal from an absolute drip of a man, a proposal she’s under huge pressure to accept, and the film shows her gradually coming to realise that she doesn’t need to. In this sense, Wonderland is the “looking glass” of the original title, although the plot is very different. There is also a nice philosophical conversation at the end between Alice and the Hatter in which Alice comes to realise that this world is real, and not a figment of her imagination, subjective though this is; which one of them is real and which dreaming. It’s nice to see the Jabberwocky poem crowbarred in, too; the mosyer itself is a magnificent bit of CGI.

Of course, there’s a heavy dose of feminism in here that was lacking in the novel. There is only a Red Queen and White Queen; kings are absent. The moral of the film presents what would in Victorian times have been a rather shocking message about the role of women. And, of course, the conclusion, in which Alice becomes an apprentice in a huge trading company, is not exactly realistic for the period but is necessary for our modern, and rather more enlightened, sensibilities.

One day I’ll probably give a bad review to a Tim Burton film. But I don’t see that day coming any day soon.

Team America: World Police (2004)

“9/11 x 100?”

“Yes. 91,100!”

This is, essentially, exactly like an episode of South Park, only longer, more cinematic, with different characters and with puppets instead of animation. As my girlfriend pointed out, you can even recognise the voices. It’s clever, though: Matt Stone and Trey Parker have essentially taken the standard Hollywood plot (Protagonist is really good at something. Protagonist suffers personal crisis and loses mojo. Protagonist gets mojo back and saves the day.) and South Parked it up.

The opening scene is well clever: a bit of rubbish puppetry is slowly revealed to be puppetry within the film. The actual puppets are deliberately made to look as Gerry Anderson as possibly, right down to the strings,the lack of genitals and the way they walk. Every possible drop of humour is wrung out of this, from the puppet sex scene (just look at all those positions!) to the fight scenes. Specially the fight scenes. The puppet kung fu just killed me.

Obviously this film can’t avoid being deeply political, considering what it’s about, but there doesn’t seem to be any particular ideological subtext being pushed here, just equal opportunity piss taking. Gung-ho right-wing All-American chauvinism gets well and truly skewered, but so do left-wing Hollywood celebrities who think that being able to act gives them some sort of political role. I realise that the absence of any obvious political viewpoint usually indicates a passive sort of conservatism, but I’m a Guardian reader and I love this film.

I appreciated the Mos Eisley touches to the tavern (although of course a bunch of teetotal Islamic fundamentalists would probably not go anywhere near such a place),but then I’m a geek. I love the songs, particularly “Montage”, which completely skewers any number of Hollywood movies, and, of course, “Pearl Harbor Sucks, and I Miss You”, which is so, so true. But the film is dominated by the real life Bond villain that was the late Kim Jong l, who, bizarrely, was a massive film buff and probably saw this movie. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall…

Personally,I love this movie. Whether or not you do will depend on whether or not you like South Park.

Hot Fuzz (2007)

“Well, I see you’ve arrested the whole village.”

Obviously I love this film. That won’t surprise you; I’m exactly the sort of person who would. I’m a huge fan of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright, I loved Spaced, and I’ve seen enough action films to get the metatextual nods. Plus, more generally, I’m a geek.

I’ve been in more than my share of sleepy English villages like the one in this film- pretty, genuinely nice, but also rather stultifyingly conservative (and, indeed, generally Conservative) and not good for one’s privacy what with all the gossip. Still, I may prefer cities these days (though I actually live in a village at the mo, albeit not one like this), but I remember the relaxed attitude to underage drinking back when I was a lad. Halcyon days. Still, I can’t really quibble with the film’s broad suggestion that there’s something potentially rather dark lying beneath the close-knit conformity of village life. And this is a perfect depiction of this sort of village, so much so that I can even forgive the use of The Kinks’ The Village Green Preservation Society.

The main thing is, though, that this is a brilliant comedy, and Simon Pegg puts in a typically superb performance as Nick Angel, the perfect cop who annoys everyone with his smartass ways but slowly and gradually lightens up a bit. It’s very noticeable that this isn’t the sort of part you’d usually associate with Pegg; he’s a much more versatile actor than one might assume.

Pegg aside, Nick Frost is also excellent, albeit in the sort of role he usually plays; Timothy Dalton twirls his moustache gleefully while also attempting a West Country accent, and there are roles for such British comedy luminaries as (deep breath) Steve Coogan, Bill Nighy, Bill Bailey (whose character is at one point seen reading Iain Banks’ excellently weird and suitably dark and rural The Wasp Factory!!!), Jim Broadbent, etc. For a geeky actor spotter like me this is Heaven indeed.

The conceit of this film is, of course, to take the tropes of the Hollywood buddy buddy cop movie and transplant them to a leafy little village in the West Country, which cannot fail to be funny. The climax to the film absolutely delivers on this score, and throws in a weird cowled cult into the bargain. We get a very, very funny angle on the cliché that is the montage (see the next blog post!!!) and scenes that look uncannily like Operation Wolf (late ‘80s shoot ‘em up game, for all you non-thirtysomethings out there).

See Hot Fuzz. It’s well good.

The Fourth Kind (2009)

“I am God!”

Er, you know how I was confessing in my last blog post that I’d never seen The Exorcist? Well, this is the point where I really can’t avoid confessing to not having seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind either. Please don’t tell anyone; they might take my movie reviewing licence off me. If it’s any consolation then I’m fully prepared to bang on a bit about the effect of The X-Files in reviving all this UFO stuff in both pop culture and conspiracy theories, and how this sort of thing all feels a bit ‘90s by now.

Still, this is a good film, which has been unfairly criticised. The film isn’t actually making claims about real UFO’s: the incident in this film was made up and was never claimed as truth by anyone outside of the film. This film isn’t doing anything substantially different from what Orson Welles did with The War of the Worlds in 1938. It’s cleverly done, with a carefully maintained distinction between a documentary style “reality” and the “reconstruction”, taking up most of the film, which is shot more like a conventional drama. Most major characters are therefore played by two actors, one of whom is much better looking than the other. Clever.

The plot is easy to follow while at the same time being multi-layered and gloriously metatextual. SPOILER ALERT, but the twist at the end, that we may or may not have an unreliable narrator, shakes everything up unexpectedly at the end. The backstory is the usual Erik Von Daniken / Graham Hancock stuff, with a lot about Sumerians and hints towards those old theories about Utnapishtim from The Epic of Gilgamesh being an alien, all of which is familiar enough to need not much exposition so we can get on with the suspense.

This film is utterly terrifying. You will never think of owls in the same way again. Best of all is the way that we never quite see the aliens, or learn more than hints about them and what they want. This isn’t just cheaper but also far more frightening than would have been achieved by actually showing them or fleshing out a backstory. Everything is perfectly pitched to generate just the right level of paranoia.

A few observations: most of the cast were unknowns, but I recognised Corey Johnson from his appearance in Doctor Who. This is the only film I know of to have been set in Alaska, which seems in itself to be a strange, and alien landscape where people must commute to work by private plane: think of the carbon emissions!

And the dialogue over the end credits is possibly the most evil ending to a film in the entire history of cinema.

The Rite (2011)

“What did you expect? Spinning heads? Pea soup?”

And so my journey into the unfamiliar territory of more modern horror continues with this acting tour de force from Anthony Hopkins. A confession, though: I’ve never even seen The Exorcist, let alone blogged it, so I won’t be making any comparisons. Sorry.

I suppose films about demonic possession would be scarier for those who believe in all that stuff; I don’t. Nevertheless, this film is effectively creepy, although it’s first and foremost a character drama and a chance for Hopkins to show us his considerable talents.

This is a very pro-Catholic film: the first thing we see is a quote from Pope John Paul II and the vibe seems to be that such things actually happen. Nonetheless, it’s a solid film, pleasingly structured with a strong cast, including Toby Jones trying out his American accent.

The audience identification character, Michael Kovac, has exactly the sort of theological doubts as to make him ideal for his role in the narrative; we see Hopkins’ Father Lucan almost entirely through his eyes. Lucan himself is full of precisely the sorts of eccentricities that we would expect from such a character. It’s highly convenient, of course, that Lucan would be Welsh, therefore absolving Hopkins from having to put on an accent.

We begin by following Michael through the seminary as he enters the strange, celibate world of the priesthood, but soon the scene switches to the far more gorgeous and cinematic setting of the Vatican, with all the obligatory shots where the camera lingers on the famous tourist sights.

The exorcisms are dramatic, and it’s clever that the supernatural elements are limited to a phantom horse and some creepy, devilish creepy crawlies. The creepiest moments, of course, utilise the psychological side of the supernatural: the most memorable moment in the film is where Michael speaks by phone to his dying father who says that “They’re hurting me”, and is then told that his father died hours earlier.

The climax of the film, where Lucas is himself possessed, conveniently gives Hopkins yet another chance to dazzle us with his acting skills. The conclusion is satisfying, although the fact that it revolves around Michael finding his faith again shows us what the film is trying to say.

This is a rather small scale little film, and essentially a vehicle for Hopkins to do a bit of a turn, but it’s well worth a watch.