PAUL - Frost & Pegg, I'd kiss you right now!

I have literally just got back from the cinema after watching Paul (2011), the new Sci-Fi comedy from the team behind Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead. Stars of those afore mentioned films, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, were on writing duties for this one, and despite the change of setting to America (And the lack of Director Edgar Wright, who co-wrote Fuzz and Shaun with Pegg, and directed both), their charm and englo-centricity still shines through.

I want to say ahead of time this film absolutely rocked my world, and cheered me up immeasurably. It was so much fun; a joy to watch; I felt like I was sitting down to watch a film with old friends in it.

Frost and Pegg play Sci-Fi fans/nerds Clive Gollings and Graeme Willy respectively. They are on holiday in America, where, after a visit to ComicCon, they take a road trip in an RV visiting UFO hot spots of America. While on route at night, a car crashes in front of them and when inspecting the wreck, they find it's driver, Paul (Voiced by Seth Rogen), an alien (Moulded on the popular 'Grey' species) who has just escaped from Area 51 and is attempting to to get to a certain national monument (Which I wont spoil for those familiar with Close Encounters of a Third Kind) to be picked by the mother ship.

Clive and Graeme agree to help Paul in his journey, unaware they are being pursued by a team of FBI agents (Jason Bateman, Bill Hader and Joe Lo Trugilo) Along the way they are forced to kidnap a staunch Christian woman, Ruth, with a deformed eye (Kirsten Wiig), who becomes Graeme's love interest.

I don't want to say much else about the film's proceedings as I'd rather you discover them for yourselves, suffice to say their are endless pleasant surprises and great lines (Ie in a scene where Ruth's crazed religious Father is vying for road space with an equally crazed Bill Hader, in pursuit of the escaping RV: Father: "I'm on a misson from God!"; "Tell him you failed!" cries Bill Hader, before promptly shooting the Father in the shoulder - don't fret, he lives!)

Paul is a great character; (Seth Rogen in top form) a sarcastic, easy-going stoner alien who dispenses wisdom to a jealous Clive and rattled Ruth, as freely as he adopts invisibility or brings dead birds to life for a snack. The CGI work on his character is great; he literally is just another part of the film, convincing and solid without being distracting or just for the sake of eye-candy.

A recent Empire review complained that there wasn't enough conflict between Clive and Graeme's character's at the start of the film - ala Fuzz and Shuan, where their character traits rubbed against each other - but they're missing the point: Clive and Graeme are meant to be good friends, simpatico, a strong bond BEFORE Paul enters their lives, it's then their secret rivalries come to the fore - i.e Clive's jealousy at Graeme seeming to always be the first to discover or experience something, first Babylon 5 and then Paul himself. Also the scenes where it's just Clive and Graeme on their own are so brief (ComicCon and few scenes on the road)that it really is a petty complaint.

A more valid complaint from my perspective is the overuse of swearing in the film; Kirsten Wiig's character Ruth gets released from her Christian values when Paul shows her his lifetime's knowledge via telepathy; having no moral compass to fall back on she decides, among other things, to swear her head off. While the device is amusing the first couple of times as she is an tragically ineffective swearer: "Fuck-a-roo, that was the best titty-farting sleep I have ever had"; after a while it just starts to grate and feel unnecessary. The fact that other characters like Jason Bateman's icy-cool agent have to start employing this device;"Motherfuckin' tittysuckin' two-balled bitch!" when he runs out of bullets in a scene; is doubly unwelcome and unfunny.

I suppose another complaint you could direct at the film is it's depiction of Christians as one dimensional, gun-totting, bible-thumping idiots in an all out war against Darwinism. It's a fair complaint, but I admire Frost and Pegg for at least taking a side and voicing their opinion, when they could have played it safe. Although it has to be said (And here I agree with Empire) they could have satirized the nerd-dom of ComicCon with a little more bite; they're brave when it comes to mocking Christianity but not their little fan base.

Overall though, there is so much heart, warmth, good humor and good film making to Paul that these are just minor complaints. Director Greg Mottola (Unlike Edgar Wright) does not impose his presence with attention-seeking devices, he keeps the shots simple allowing the charm of the performances to work their magic; only ramping things up in the thrilling chase scene involving a house explosion. Frost and Pegg are, as usual, brilliant - Frost perhaps getting a little bit lazy and studied at times - but they take more a back seat in this one and let their American co-stars have more of a presence.

I loved this film, it made my night; and to that enormous throng of peons waiting to see the latest mind-numbing installment of the Fast & Furious franchise, shame on you, you SO missed out on a great experience.

Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greys

The Fall - Languid artifice till an emotionally grueling end

The Fall (2006) is sadly a film which only becomes engaging and emotionally satisfying in it's last quarter.

Tarsem (Singh), the mononymous director of this film, is the man responsible for the poorly scripted, acted but lavishly beautiful The Cell starring Jennifer Lopez and Vincent D'Onofrio.

Like that film, The Fall is also elaborately designed; with a gorgeous primary color scheme for the Bandit characters, and clever visual invention; such as the moment when a betraying Preist's face dissolves into a desert landscape with land marks arranged to mirror his features exactly. One feels however that not nearly as much effort and thought went into the design of The Fall as compared to the The Cell, where nearly every moment inside the killers head was filled with dazzling imagery; near bursting at the seams with 'wow' moments, whether macabre or beautiful.

"Perhaps more effort was put into the story; the drama", you ask? Yes, perhaps, but sadly the first two quarters of the film feature rather dull and mawkish moments between a the young protagonist and a stunt man, and a really tepid telling of a story.

The plot deals with a young Romanian girl and an American stunt man, both recovering in a 1920's Los Angeles hospital, from falls they suffered. The girl, Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), has a broken arm from a fall in an orange orchard, and the man, Roy Walker (Lee Pace) has lost the use of his legs. The details of Roy's fall are pertinent to both the story and his mental state:on the set of the film in question, Roy lost his girlfriend to the lead actor, and in attempting to perform a stunt where he would jump from a railway bridge onto a horse, both he and horse end up in the river (In a stunning sepia-tinged opening scene played in slow motion, but unfortunately uses Ludwig van Beethoven's 'Symphony N° 7 in a Major OP.92 - which I cannot listen to now without thinking of the end of Gaspar Noe's Irreversible) In the hospital he and Alexandria form an unlikely friendship, where in exchange for a story: five disparate bandits in search of revenge on a corrupt provincial governor; Roy, deeply depressed, convinces Alexandria to steal a fatal dose of morphine for him.

It is this negotiation, which forms the main thrust of the movie, which lets everything down. The tale Roy tells starts out promisingly enough: imagined sequences, seen in Alexandria's mind, where people from the real world become characters in the story (With even Roy as the principal Black bandit). All five bandits, including a fictionalized Charles Darwin (Leo Bill), are properly motivated against the governor, banished from the kingdom to an island. They escape, and a mystic who emerges from the bowels of a burning tree joins them in their quest (A great scene). Disappointingly, from that point on, the tale descends into slow moving sequences with no tension (The bandits go here, they go there, capture a nun, no-one makes any great attempt to stop them, we are left in no doubt they will succeed...), and self-conscious, stylized acting from Lee Pace in the romantic moments which I found off-putting, rather than I assume the intended humorous, self-aware effect. These story sequences could have had the whimsy, fun and adventure of Terry Gilliam's much more successful, (Forget the critics or the box office - the film is great) The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen, instead the bandits lack any special attributes which might make them interesting, and the tale is dull.

The interactions between Roy and Alexandria are the second weakest link in this section: the debut appearance of Catinca Untaru does not endear; her constant interruptions over Lee Pace ensure these scenes looks improvised (Which I'm certain they were, the intention probably being to make them seem more natural; as children do interrupt people - well fine, but it's also bloody annoying when they do that! Which is precisely the effect achieved by this device), unpolished and un-engaging. Because of this there are no dynamics in their scenes together, no followable progression in the tightening of their relationship; they don't grow closer so much as keep yammering at each other.

All of this however, can be largely forgiven for the extremely satisfying - but grueling - last quarter of the film. Roy flips out after his attempted suicide is thwarted by morphine pills Alexandria got from a nieghbouring patient - evidently the Doctors were giving the man placebos - so Alexandria steals into the dispensary to obtain more pills for Roy (Unaware at all times that he wants to kill himself). She falls, and here Tarsem's skills finally come to the fore: instead of Alexandria hitting the floor, Roy as the masked bandit falls to the floor, missing a leg, a false leg falls after him and shatters on the ground. We then cut to several vignettes of Roy as masked bandit, Roy as a gladiator, Roy as a knight, all having their legs dismembered. The sequence represents the presumably unconscious Alexandria, tumbling through her own mind, her imagination and memories overlapping to form associations between real life and the story; her Father's death and their house burning down; her fall from the orange tree. As clunky as some of the ideas sound, the sequence is genuinely distressing, especially in contrast to the very light-hearted first two thirds of the film. Tension, and thus our interest, finally enter the film. We are even treated to some dark stop motion animation as Alexandria imagines the Doctor's operating on her her fractured skull, and she hears Roy being chastised by the Medical staff for his abuse of her trust. This is the kind of visual detail and audio layering that made The Cell so engaging.

When Alexandria awakes, Roy is by her side, and through his subsequent abuse of the continuing story, she must finally confront the distressed mind that has been lurking behind Roy's outward shows of friendship. Roy is drunk, and as he continues the story, he starts killing off all the bandits in increasingly distressing ways, and despite Alexandria's plees for him to stop Roy continues, before finally his character, the Black Bandit, is the only one left to confront the governor. The scene is disturbing because we know and understand why Roy is acting like this; a heart broken man, depressed and fixated with death; but we are also aware that Alexandria does not understand, and for Roy to be exposing her to this very adult and dark behavior appalls us. We worry for her and while concerned for Roy, morally we demand him to stop torturing this poor child. It is this kind of tension and complexity that is lacking in almost every other frame of the film.

After having the Black Bandit brutally beaten up by the governor, and the character essentially give up on trying to fight back, Roy nearly has him drowned. In doing so he breaks all of Alexandria's childhood illusions of honor and justice, and indeed, her impressions of Roy himself. Again, it is this traumatizing of Alexandria, and exposure to adult concepts entirely inappropriate to her age - from an adult who should know better - which deeply moves and conflicts us as viewers. Finally Roy listens to Alexandria's pleas to let the Black Bandit live, and in doing so he decides to live as well, redeeming himself.

Almost all of the tepid, elaborate puffery from earlier is worth having sat through for this scene, and I wish more films could have as many complex ideas, moral quandaries and emotions as there are in this scene. It is deeply satisfying as an audience member.

Overall, a beautiful film, but not as beautiful as The Cell; a great ending but a shallow first two-thirds.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole - Exceptionally beautiful but not a classic

You can certainly say one thing for director Zack Snyder, he knows how to create beautiful images. There is not one second of this film (Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (2010)where you don't marvel at the qualities of the light (Especially that glorious earthy, amber dusk light that permeates the film), the clarity of each individual feather bristling on the title characters, the epic panoramas surrounding the owls in flight, the hellish red glare of a hungry Tasmanian devil on a forest floor, the quality of the movement in the animation; it all lovingly kisses your vision.

The only visual trick overused by Snyder is his insistence on speed ramping ("ramping", is a process whereby the capture frame rate of the camera changes over time. For example, if in the course of 10 seconds of capture, the capture frame rate is adjusted from 60 frames per second to 24 frames per second, when played back at the standard film rate of 24 frames per second, a unique time-manipulation effect is achieved"), and it's often disorientating effect on the battle scenes at the end of the film. Personally I would like to see the action Animal Logic's (The Company responsible for Happy Feet) team has clearly spent so much time animating.

Guardians is a story of sibling rivalry, betrayal and faith set against the back drop of an ancient feud between legendary rival owl tribes, the evil Pure Ones and the heroic Guardians. Owl brothers Soren and Klud (Voiced by Jim Sturgess and Ryan Kwanten [Of vampire series 'True Blood' fame] respectively) stray from the nest trying to out fly each other, only to be captured by members of the Pure Ones, a tribe of Owls who 'moon blink' their captives into mindless drones to collect magical metal that affects the gizzards or 'souls' or owls, incapacitating them. Soren and an Elf Owl called Gylfie (Emily Barclay - who played that hideous hyena in the overrated Suburban Mayhem; a far cry from her diminutive, endearing character here) join forces to escape, but Klud ultimately sides with the Pure Ones, under the leadership of Metalbeak (Played by an vocally unrecognizable Joel Edgerton - in the sense that you wont recognize either his voice or what type of accent he's meant to be using - what the heck is it; English, Australian, American?)

Soren seeks out the help of the Guardians, an owl tribe described to him by his Father and whose heroic tales have always inspired him. In the course of doing so he learns that battle is not as glamorous as the stories led him to believe, but that honor and self belief can be.

It's hard to say exactly why this film doesn't quite reach 'Classic' status. I was absolutely rapt for the first three quarters of the film; was involved in the sweet partnership of Soren and Gylfie; but when more characters were into the mix (Annoying unnecessary comic relief in the form of Digger (David Wenham) and Twilight (Anthony Lapaglia), and after the Guardians were located, the film lost it's tension, and the manner in which a fellow Gaurdian betrays the tribe is not satisfactorily played out for the dramatic impact it could have had. Metalbeak is also a pretty passive villain; initiating plans behind the scenes yes, but largely just skulking about in the foreground looking dark and mysterious, emerging only to fight in the battle between the Guardians and the Pure Ones at the end of the film. It must be said of that fight that despite the swords and knives and armory strapped to the owls the conflict is lackluster - not because of a lack of gore; understandable given this is a children's film - but because of uninspired staging and Snyder's obscuring speed ramping.

Again, the Australian landscape and it's fauna look amazing, and it was great to see so many Australian actors voicing the characters; among them Bill Hunter, Hugo Weaving, Geoffrey Rush, Angus Sampson and Abie Cornish - though why they felt it necessary to include English accents and actors (Helen Mirren, Miriam Margolyes) as well is beyond me; international appeal, then why not American accents Ala 'Chicken Run'?

Soren as the title character is a bit of a wet blanket, but his enthusiasm and goodness is endearing. I might be expecting too much from an animated children's film, but I was just so swept away by the first three quarters of the film that to descend into such a tried-and-tested battle scenario just seemed a waste of the good will generated by the start. It is a very unusual, eccentric (Owls in Armour), even occasionally dark children's film, and as such it would have to been nice to see the film makers push that uniqueness even further, into a less conventional story line.

Overall spectacular visuals, great first three quarters but lacking in a satisfying dramatic high point or conclusion.

Reference
(1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_ramping#speed_ramping