Today’s post in the Debuts Blogathon, hosted by myself and Three Rows Back, comes from Kim at Tranquil Dreams. Kim’s blog covers a wide variety of stuff, not just films, which makes it a really excellent, eclectic read. Here she’s tackling the legendary Hayao Miyazaki and his debut feature, Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro…
HAYAO MIYAZAKI
Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
Hayao Miyazaki`s debut Lupin the Third:The Castle of Cagliostro was the only movie that was not affiliated with Studio Ghibli however, it was good enough to get him involved with bigger project. The Castle of Cagliostro is about Lupin, a 3rd generation thief that encounters with his partner a pursuit of a girl that they end up saving and losing again. However, she leaves behind a ring with a goal symbol on it that Lupin recognizes associated with the Castle of Cagliostro…
The American Dream gets a serious steroid pump in Michael Bay’s black comedy based on a true story as knuckle-headed as its protagonists.
In many ways, Pain & Gain is the perfect vehicle for Bay’s testosterone-fuelled style. However, following an unnecessarily long 129 minutes you’re left wondering what another director with more vision and discipline and less bombast would have done with such promising material
Hardly the most well-respected director to ever step behind the camera, Bay’s reputation in recent years has sunk to uncharted depths with the mind-numbing Transformers movies. Ahead of the fourth installment of a franchise that’s about as hotly anticipated as an axe to the head, he’s knocked out Pain & Gain, his cheapest film since his 1995 debut Bad Boys.
The wheels come off for disgruntled bodybuilder Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) in Pain & Gain
As slick as it is amoral, Pain & Gain has the look and feel of a 1990s Tony Scott film, wherein ultra-ambitious bodybuilder and Sun Gym staffer Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) teams up with fellow personal trainer Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackey) and ex-con and recovering cocaine addict Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) to kidnap obnoxious businessman Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) and force him to sign over his considerable wealth to them. However, they don’t count on wily private detective Ed Du Bois III (Ed Harris) sniffing around, while greed gets the better of them when they decide to go after another target.
Ex-con Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) gets himself in hot water in Pain & Gain
As is the way with most films ‘based’ on a true story, Pain & Gain plays fast and loose with the real life events that took place in Miami more than 15 years ago and adopts an exploitative tone all-too familiar in Bay’s films.
Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackey) consults flirty nurse Robin Peck (Rebel Wilson) in Pain & Gain
Billed as an action comedy, the film can’t seem to decide where its sympathies lie. It portrays Lugo as a meathead with delusions of criminal intelligence and a sense of entitlement to what he sees as the American Dream (ie having lots of cash), but Wahlberg’s likeably wide-eyed performance is such that you find yourself siding with him in spite of the murderous chain of events he sets off.
Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) and Doorbal (Anthony Mackey) live it up in Pain & Gain
There’s no doubt that as an experience it’s head and shoulders above the lowest common denominator flatulence of Transformers, but Bay is too one-dimensional a director not to throw in big-breasted babes and violence-for-laughs when he can.
It’s a shame too, as Pain & Gain has moments that really spark, not least of which the sequence in Doorbal’s house in which Bay shows the wheels coming off for the gang by inventively gliding the camera back and forth between Lugo losing it in one room and Doyle and Doorbal getting increasingly out of control in the other.
Private detective Ed Du Bois III (Ed Harris) on the case in Pain & Gain
Wahlberg has one of those faces that lends itself to playing normal working class guys and he does what he does best here as the naive ringleader Lugo. Mackay plays dumb without winking to the audience as Doorbal; a willing participant in Lugo’s scheme who’s too cowardly and greedy to escape when things get out of hand. There’s an amusing irony in the fact the steroids he’s abused to artificially pump up his body have given him erectile dysfunction, although it doesn’t seem to bother flirty nurse Robin (a great turn by Rebel Wilson).
Sun Gym owner John Mese (Rob Corddry) in Pain & Gain
The star of the show, though, is Johnson as the simple-minded Doyle. Originally pegged as a Schwarzenegger wannabe, Johnson has shown himself to be an actor with a lot more range than he’s often given credit for and here finds the right balance between gentleness and psychosis without ever going too big.
The supporting turns are also largely excellent, from Harris’ kind-hearted detective (bringing to mind Fargo‘s Marge Gunderson) to Shalhoub’s deeply unpleasant victim (“you know who invented salads? Poor people”) and Rob Corddry’s pathetic Sun Gym owner John Mese.
In many ways, Pain & Gain is the perfect vehicle for Bay’s testosterone-fuelled style. However, following an unnecessarily long 129 minutes you’re left wondering what another director with more vision and discipline and less bombast would have done with such promising material.
It’s ‘The Bourne Space Station’ as Matt Damon’s lowly factory worker tries to heal the world with the aid of a big computer game gun in Neill Blomkamp’s long-awaited follow-up to District 9.
Far from engendering a state of perfect happiness, Elysium is a real let down after the promise shown by Blomkamp in District 9
Made for a song compared to today’s mega-budget tent-poles, 2009’s District 9, wherein a ship containing insect-like aliens arrives above Johannesburg in South Africa, seemed to come out of nowhere and announced the presence of a major new talent in sci-fi filmmaking. A major strength of the film is its social themes of racism, segregation, illegal immigration and corruption, all of which carry a greater symbolism when considering the South African roots of the film and its writer-director.
The overpopulated ruins of a future Los Angeles in Elysium
Although handed a much heftier budget this time round, Blomkamp retains the social commentary in his script for Elysium, exploring as it does some of the same issues as District 9, while also touching on such pressing contemporary concerns as universal health care, class divide and the resentment felt towards the one percent-ers.
That it does so in such an unengaging and disappointing fashion, therefore, is a real shame for a film that promises much but, in the end, delivers little.
The unhinged mercenary Kruger (Sharlto Copley) in Elysium
Damon plays ex-car thief Max Da Costa, who’s on parole and living in the ruins of a 2154 Los Angeles that more closely resembles a shanty town. Max has always dreamt of living on Elysium, a space station orbiting Earth for the super rich who (literally) look down on the poor, overpopulated and polluted ruins of the planet. However, he has to settle instead for a factory job and having run-ins with the draconian robo-cops who do the bidding of their wealthy masters. When Max suffers an industrial accident and finds his life hanging in the balance, he agrees to undertake a dangerous mission for smuggler and hacker Spider (Wagner Moura) in exchange for a ticket to the station. But Elysium’s Defense Secretary Jessica Delacourt (Jodie Foster) has other ideas and sends her attack dog, unhinged mercenary Kruger (Sharlto Copley), to track him down.
Smuggler/hacker Spider (Wagner Moura) checks on an exo-skeletal Max (Matt Damon) in Elysium
Blomkamp proves once again that he’s the equal of James Cameron when it comes to world-building. The production design and vision that’s gone into Elysium is superb; whether it be something as grandiose as the 2001-esque spinning wheel look of Elysium , or as down and dirty as the graffiti that adorns the robot parole officer that coldly threatens to extend Max’s parole because it senses he’s being sarcastic. As a vision of the future, it’s dystopic and entirely believable.
However, a film needs more than great production design to succeed and it’s when you look more closely at the script and some of the performances you notice the cracks.
The 2001-esque spinning wheel of Elysium
After a promising start, the film begins to tail off in the middle section and by the time the action moves to Elysium itself it doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing. The final 20-30 minutes are a mess and make you yearn for more successful sci-fi movies like Total Recall and The Terminator. Certain characters suddenly seem to go off in odd directions, leaving you scratching your head as to exactly what’s going on.
Devious Defense Secretary Jessica Delacourt in Elysium
Normally as reliable as they come, Foster’s performance (and accent) is all over the place. She’s not helped by dialogue that’s as stilted as it is cringeworthy (she tells the President to “go off to a fundraiser or something” at one point) and her fate smacks of laziness by Blomkamp. Likewise, Copley must have winced at some of the lines he was forced to spit out, while his character starts off interestingly enough but ends up coming across like he’s in a different movie. And the less said about Moura’s screeching, overblown Spider the better.
Max De Costa (Matt Damon) and his Big F**king Gun in Elysium
Damon goes some way to counterbalancing the poor work of some of his co-stars with a gritty and engaging performance that sess him in Bourne-style kick-ass mode for chunks of the movie. Frankly, without Damon the film would have fallen flat on its face.
On the plus side, Blomkamp handles many of the action sequences well and indulges himself in the kind of splatter-tastic body dismemberment you don’t see too often in blockbusters.
However, far from engendering a state of perfect happiness, Elysium is a real let down after the promise shown by Blomkamp in District 9.
Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski turn their big budget sights from the high seas to the high plains in this revisionist reboot of the TV serial featuring the sort of running time that would put even a Kevin Costner horse opera to shame.
Better than some knife-wielding critics would have you believe, The Lone Ranger still feels like a missed opportunity to reinvigorate a dying genre for a modern blockbuster audience
Actually, strictly speaking, this is their second western following the critically acclaimed 2011 animated movie Rango, in which Depp played a chameleon (appropriate considering the diversity of roles he’s had over the years) who becomes the new sheriff of a town called Dirt.
Tonto (Johnny Depp) and John Reid (Armie Hammer) give a nod to John Ford in The Lone Ranger
Considerably more ambitious, The Lone Ranger desperately tries to cook up the same mix of humour and action that made Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl such a massive hit, but while there are glimmers of a superior summer blockbuster here, it ultimately shoots itself in the foot.
The film seeks to reimagine the origin story of The Lone Ranger, a heroic masked ex-Texas Ranger who fights injustice on the American frontier astride his regal horse Silver and with his trusty Native American sidekick Tonto in tow.
Tonto (Johnny Depp) and “weird” horse Silver in The Lone Ranger
Using the framing device of an aged Comanche Tonto (Depp, a la Little Big Man) relating events to a young boy, his narration tells of how he first met John Reid (Armie Hammer) and how the young lawyer was the sole survivor of a brutal massacre by the feared outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) and his gang. Befriending a comedy horse, Reid is persuaded by Tonto to become the masked Lone Ranger and help him seek justice against Cavendish and a wider, more insidious corruption.
The ruthless outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) in The Lone Ranger
One of the issues with The Lone Ranger is the rather odd and sudden deviation in tone from eyebrow-raising violence to broad humour, sometimes in the same scene. Following the brutal massacre, for instance, that leaves Reid barely alive, the mood is swiftly lightened by a comic interlude involving Tonto and Silver that feels out-of-place in light of what you’ve just seen.
Ivory-legged brothel madam Red Harrington (Helena Bonham-Carter) in The Lone Ranger
It’s a problem that blighted Verbinski’s Pirates… sequels, especially At World’s End (still the most expensive movie ever made), which couldn’t decide what type of film it wanted to be. A reason for this is the presence of Depp, a gifted comic actor whose iconic Jack Sparrow became the foundation on which the Pirates… series was built. Inherently a comic character, Sparrow and the film’s serious storylines created an imbalance (not helped by Depp’s increasingly self-indulgent performances) and it’s an issue that affects The Lone Ranger.
Railroad tycoon Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson) in The Lone Ranger
Depp is terrific as Tonto, channeling Buster Keaton in both his mannerisms and physical performance, not least in the film’s impressively staged final set piece on board a train (bringing to mind Keaton’s The General). If this were a film solely about Tonto and his quest for justice I would be the first in line, but once again Verbinski tries too hard by weaving the Native American around an unengaging plot involving Reid (to be fair to Hammer he’s pretty decent in the title role, but doesn’t stand a chance next to Depp). Verbinski got the balance right with Rango and, as such, produced his most successful and satisfying film to date.
Tonto (Johnny Depp) and John ‘Lone Ranger’ Reid (Armie Hammer) stride purposefully in The Lone Ranger
In what must be his umpteenth film this year, composer Hans Zimmer shows here why he’s one of the very best in the business, delivering a soundtrack that gallops along and brings to mind the Saturday morning TV serials the Lone Ranger previously appeared in. Needless to say, Rossini’s William Tell Overture (used as the theme song in the TV show) brings a smile to the face when it’s finally used in the film’s closing moments.
The original Lone Ranger (Clayton Moore) and Tonto (Jay Silverheels)
Fichtner delivers a typically great performance as the loathsome Cavendish, as does Wilkinson whose railroad tycoon Latham Cole is the sort of role he delivers in his sleep. Helena Bonham-Carter is wasted, however, as ivory-legged brothel owner Red Harrington, who gets too little screen time to make an impact, while British actress Ruth Wilson fares little better as Reid’s love interest Rebecca.
The Lone Ranger wouldn’t be a western if it didn’t tip its pearly white hat to John Ford and does so by filming in the iconic Monument Valley. Cinematographer Bojan Bazelli, whose previous credits haven’t been great (last year’s Rock Of Ages being one example) excels himself here with a number of stunning location shots.
Better than some knife-wielding critics would have you believe, The Lone Ranger still feels like a missed opportunity to reinvigorate a dying genre for a modern blockbuster audience.
One of the greatest comedy creations to come out of East Anglia becomes an accidental hero of typically Partridgidian proportions in this long-awaited big screen outing for Norwich’s premier mid-morning ‘D-Jock’.
More Dog Day Mid-Morning than Dog Day Afternoon, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa is effortlessly funny and a genuine triumph. Back of the net!
Like Corn Flakes or bakes beans, Steve Coogan’s most beloved comic persona has remained an enduring constant in a world of change since he first popped up on Radio 4’s On The Hour more than 20 years ago.
Alan (Steve Coogan) and Sidekick Simon (Tim Key) are forced to stay on air (well, not so much ‘forced’ in Alan’s case) in Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa
His egomaniacal ambition may still be intact, but the cold, hard reality for ruddy Alan Partridge is that his fall from grace has been pretty epic since his heyday as a BBC talk show host. And yet, just as Alan seems to be scraping the bottom of the broadcasting barrel as one half of the Mid Morning Matters show on North Norfolk Digital, he’s unwittingly offered a chance of career redemption thanks to disgruntled former colleague Pat Farrell (Colm Meaney).
The pathetic, petty and lonely Alan (Steve Coogan) in Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa
North Norfolk Digital’s faceless new owners have renamed the station Shape and sacked Pat, who goes off the deep end and holds the station’s staff hostage. The only person he’ll talk to is Alan, whose initial reticence and terror gives way to shameless opportunism when he’s branded the face of the siege by the national media.
Disgruntled ex-DJ Pat Farrell (Colm Meaney) in Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa
Wisely deciding against the lazy old chestnut of relocating a TV show abroad in an attempt to generate some fish-out-of-water chortles, Coogan and co instead remove Alan from his comfort zone while still basing the action in his native Norwich.
Having played him on and off for more than two decades, Coogan slips comfortably into the leather jacket of Alan, a petty, pathetic, lonely and selfish excuse for a human being who you can’t help warming to in spite of yourself.
New station boss Jason Cresswell (Nigel Lindsay), Geordie security guard Michael (Simon Greenall) and ruddy Alan (Steve Coogan) in Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa
The opening credits sequence in which Alan fervently mimes along to Roachford’s Cuddly Toy while sat behind the wheel (and not forgetting to point out to another driver that her fog lamps are mistakenly on) is an inspired moment of physical comedy that perfectly encapsulates Partridge. Likewise, a later scene sees him furiously flicking through dozens of TV channels to find any mention of himself in a pitiable attempt to impress station employee Angela (Monica Dolan). Director Declan Lowney’s camera lingers on Alan’s face as the desperation creeps into his eyes when he starts to think his little stunt may have backfired.
Alan’s long-suffering assistant Lynn (Felicity Montagu) in Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa
Since the character’s earliest radioappearance, the writing by Coogan, Armando Iannucci and numerous others has been as critical to the lasting success of Partridge as Coogan’s inimitable portrayal. There have been a multitude of memorable one-liners and vignettes over the years and Alpha Papa maintains the hit rate. The moment when Alan justifies a panic attack he suffered in a car wash, blaming “a perfect storm of no sleep, no wife and angry brushes whirring towards me” is just one of many quotable lines that will have you chuckling along.
Alan (Steve Coogan) and best friend in Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa
One of the film’s strengths is the time it spends fleshing out the sizeable supporting cast. Tragic DJ Dave Clifton’s (Phil Cornwell) stereotypically upbeat radio voice can’t disguise his near-suicidal ramblings, while Simon Greenall makes a welcome return as simple-minded Geordie Michael, whose lunchbox instigates the film’s crassest joke. Felicity Montagu delivers a lovely performance as Alan’s long-suffering assistant Lynn and comedian Tim Key also impresses, finding a depth to his role as Alan’s bemused sidekick Simon.
With so many comedies having failed this year to raise a titter, the ease with which Alpha Papa has you laughing out loud is testament to the fantastic writing and deft performances.
More Dog Day Mid-Morning than Dog Day Afternoon, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa is effortlessly funny and a genuine triumph. Back of the net!
three rows back 