Author: Alex Doenau

Inglourious Basterds, entirely apart from having a title that's painful to type, entirely separate from the not-entirely-favourable reception it had at Cannes, is Quentin Tarantino's latest movie.

I'm too young to really remember him being cinema's enfant terrible, and I recall being sent upstairs by my aunt while she and my brother watched Reservoir Dogs … unfortunately, the TV was at the bottom of the stairs so I could hear every damn word she was protecting me from … but I know his work, if not overly well.

I realise that it's becoming a sort of recurring motif for me, labelling things as "not movies” … but Tarantino doesn't so much make "not movies” as he does "genre movies” … films in bold and italics. They're more movie than movie.

Tarantino is in the business of making replicants, is what I'm saying.

I saw this trailer for it at Bruno, and immediately afterwards my occasional comrade said "that looks shit”. But it doesn't to my eyes. It looks somewhat splendid, and I say that as someone who thought that Death Proof was self-indulgent clap trap only partly redeemed by a great ending. As Tony said to Dittman, "it's Tarantino, man!”

There don't seem to have been a lot of World War II movies out of America lately, particularly not ones that have dealt with Nazi fighting adventures.  Spike Lee had his, which never saw release here and, in the interest of academic honesty, I can't be bothered looking up the name of it. The other was Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, which dared to answer the question "how do you make an assassination plot against Hitler boring?”

Inglourious Basterds, on the other hand, is unambiguous: it's about the olden days when people were allowed to kill Nazis on film and do so in elaborate and bloody ways. What's so bad about that? It looks fun, and it looks like once again Tarantino has indulged his love for film. Some may say that Kill Bill Volume 2 was better than the first, but what I most remember about it was that the credits doubled as the credits for Volume 1, and reminded me of how much fun I had the day I saw it.

Inglourious Basterds features everything that anyone could ever ask of this type of movie: Brad Pitt shooting Nazis, and at least a little bit of participation from Samuel L. Jackson. What could possibly go wrong? This is me setting up a hubristic goal: I am going to see Inglourious Basterds and I am going to enjoy it. 2009 has been so disappointing and underwhelming so far that it has to deliver.

It should also be noted that the trailer I've posted above is slightly different to the one I saw, but largely the same, and totally different to the most widely available trailer which makes the movie look boring as all get out. I know that some … my father, for one -  think that one shouldn't treat Nazi Germany as a simple matter of gung ho guns, render it a "boy's own” adventure, but I think that, as long as we don't try to deny it, it's right to try to get as much out of the experience as we can. By rendering Hitler ridiculous … and there's no one better at that than Mel Brooks … we disrespect not the memories of those who died in the war, but those of Hitler himself.

Please don't disappoint me again, Mister Tarantino: I know you have the power, through this movie, to save my American summer.

The Harry Potter movie franchise is an odd duck: it's not so much about movies as it is about the intellectual property. You expect a certain degree of something, and you generally receive it. After Christopher Columbus's twee bogs of the first two, the films have improved in most every way, although of course they've never been an adequate substitute for the books, instead being a series of realisations of key scenes. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is no different, although my choice to view it in a cinema full of teenaged girls was.

This is a bad idea and I would not recommend it to anyone unless, of course, they find themselves somehow knee deep in fandom and anything approaching romance makes them titter. The movie itself is okay, though!

For the moment, imagine there’s a picture of Megan Fox’s boobs here.

Oh, there they are. Very good.

There is practically no purpose served by writing about Revenge of the Fallen, because it’s already been said. The bombast has been brought, and it has been good, from Roger Ebert’s “horrible experience of unbearable length” to the Awl’s "fall[ing] into a city sized Cuisinart” and io9’s argument of the film’s merit as a breakthrough piece of avant-garde movie making. I have a certain barometer in my office, a man of diplomatically different tastes to my own. Even he was unhappy with the film, thinking that Michael Bay should maybe have dialed it back a bit so that he could have an idea of what was happening. That said, he liked the twins, so we're all doomed despite the little beams of hope that penetrate the dense canopy of hopelessness that is the modern cinema.

I have since learned to stop asking people what they thought of it because so many responses I have received have been depressing in their likeness: how “awesome” is a word that could ever be applied to this visual and narrative mess is entirely beyond my ken. One of my best friends informed me in a text that it was good, "not as good as [the] first but that often happens”. You can never really know a person …

The fact of the matter is that Revenge of the Fallen is so bad that after a time I started feeling nostalgic for the first movie, which is odd considering that I’ve spent the last two years bitching about it on street corners to whomever will grant me an audience. I don’t know if there’s such a strain as “Super Stockholm Syndrome”, whereby your present captor is so bad that you find yourself longing for the tender embrace of your last, but I think I got myself a case of that.

This movie gets so exponentially worse as it progresses that you long for the minutes when it was absolute shite rather than whatever expletive it evolves into. Sam’s mother ended up becoming a highlight of the movie, and she was really just crude and shrill up to that point. I’ll probably go to my grave not knowing what the point of the French interlude was, or why the audience hung on every word that Sam's idiot parents spew forth from their gormless gullets.

I got the impression after a while that Megan Fox was the only person on the film actually trying, and her performance actually endeared me to an actress whom I traditionally see as an inexplicable holy grail for heterosexual men. When she started bouncing away from explosions in slow motion, I laughed legitimately for the first time. She brings a sort of warmth to the role of Mikaela (Mikaela … Bay?) that is lacking in the remainder of the movie, no matter how many times we see Shia LaBoeuf shed tears for his precious robot chums.

This was truly a schadenfreude experience for me, seeing it with a friend who thought that the first film was a masterpiece, without exaggeration. He ended up comparing Revenge of the Fallen to the Matrix sequels. My friend Tony declared that Dragonball Evolution was a better film, and we came out of that in a waking dream that we only shook an hour and a half later. I’ve also heard unfavourable comparisons to Speed Racer, which isn't fair at all. Speed Racer tested credulity, challenging me to acknowledge and accept and at least try to understand its existence. Eventually I came to terms with it as something that should not exist but was awesome purely because it was able to gain a foothold in our dimension. I understand why Revenge of the Fallen was made, and it depresses the Hell out of me.

There's probably some rider in my contract that says I have to go into more detail about the movie itself. You may have detected that I don't really give a damn about this execrable excursion into the cinematic form, so it goes without saying that there will be spoilers.

The craynarbians drank freely of their caffeel, spliced with slipsharp oil, for Circle's sake …

I'm not normally much of a one to read fantasy or science fiction, with my toes only dipping as deep as Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett … special men, and special exceptions. It's not a failing of the genre so much as it's a failing of the self: I find so much of the material I've tried so dry that I haven't been able to immerse myself much further than a few pages. Combine that with the authors' tendencies to prolificacy, which makes it dang near impossible to find a place to start, and then in sequence, and it's something that I generally stay clear of.

Let's ignore entirely SF and fantasy writers' other tendency, after their works get a bit long in the tooth: that of transforming their series into a collection of rape, incest and paedophilic fantasies … which is a wild generalisation, but common enough to note … and let me focus on something good.

The other week, browsing in my favourite "surprise” bookstore (there's no point going there for anything specific, it's a pot luck affair), I saw Stephen Hunt's The Kingdom Beyond The Waves on the shelves. Intrigued by its cover, featuring a steampunk u-boat trailing an ancient diving suit, I meditated on the book and its promise of an archaeology professor seeking the lost civilisation of "Camlantis”. I didn't buy it immediately, but rather came back a few days later and purchased it after the allure of a Victorian submarine could no longer be resisted.

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves turned out to be well worth it, but I had some initial misgivings. It soon became clear to me that this was not the first book that Hunt had written in this world. It turned out later that it's a case of world and history sharing, rather than character sharing, but this still poses a problem because if you're unprepared you can drown in terms for races and places and drinks that you've never heard of. Hunt is a good enough writer that soon enough you'll realise that there are apparently a race of four armed crab people operating alongside humanity and … more importantly … "steammen” who subscribe to a voodoo like religion.

Once I'd figured all of this out, the book became one giant ball of "yes” for me. Hunt hits so many of my buttons that it's almost as if he cut into my head and realised so much of the stuff I've always wanted and then overlaid it with things I never knew I was even allowed to want. Look at it like this: it's kind of like Indiana Jones in a fantasy setting with crabs and robots. Mix this in with a traditional Atlantis/Laputa quest, add disgraced royalty reduced to swashbuckling beneath the sea and then season with an eccentric man of high standing who has a thousand false faces and one "true” one, and you have a great book. There are eventually three plot threads running at a time, and every time I reached a new one I'd be cursing because I wanted to know what was going to happen next in the last one. It's a particularly vicious cycle, and one that can only be solved by continuing to read.

What does fantasy have to offer us? Lost technology is one of the greatest lynchpins: people operating machinery and other devices that they simply do not have the wherewithal to produce in their own context: relics of ages long gone. Hunt offers that here with the oil powered car of "Diesela-Khan”, not to mention the pure excellence that abides in the steammen and their feral siltempter enemies.

You also have people who "aren't what they seem to be” and who, under Hunt's tutelage, manage to be both exciting and surprising despite their obvious mystery: early in the book a blind man with awesome power manifests his awesome powers. Soon thereafter a blind man with uncanny sonar ability joins the u-boat's crew. Coincidence? Perhaps. Perhaps not!

I should also mention that not only are we treated to steam powered robots, but steam powered robots who have made mortal enemies of thunder lizards. Yes, dinosaurs versus robots. I realise I sound like I'm being flippant here but all of this material works very well together and achieves precisely what it should do: it captured my imagination in a way that forced me to run to the final destination and find out precisely what was going on.

Hunt takes many old ideas, blends them together and creates something that is at once both compelling and familiar. I think that the reason a lot of people stick with genre writing of any sort is because they're given something that is reassuring but hopefully also invigorating, something that reminds them why they follow whatever it is they follow in the first place (for crime, for instance see Ian Rankin's Rebus books). Even now, reading through Terry Pratchett's books again, I'm frequently floored by paragraphs of insight or turns of phrase that resonate deep in my core, and have for the twelve years that I've been reading his work.
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves is the second of what presently stands at three books. I've only just barely touched on what makes the book so good, but I think it's clear that I wholeheartedly recommend it.

While Dragon Ball Evolution left me without words, Fast & Furious left me wondering if I should even bother with words. For a big movie allegedly about fast cars and explosions, the whole exercise is surprisingly boring: tedious plotting and cashing in on nostalgia for a movie that I never saw are the key ingredients. To stretch an analogy, it’s like making a cake out of Vin Diesel.

Yeah. You wouldn’t want to eat it, would you?

Bad movies need to stop being made or else I am going to die. Today’s plan was to write a screed about reviews in response to Shamus‘ review lore. But first I am going to have to kill X-Men Origins: Wolverine in the face for being such a slipshod, lazy and uninteresting movie. Even as someone who doesn’t have an investment in the X-Men franchise, it wouldn’t have taken much to make this movie enjoyable. The premise of the franchise is sound: dudes have cool powers, get discriminated against because of it, and blow shit up in a variety of ways using those powers.

If you’ve seen the trailer for Wolverine you’ve seen all of the cool bits. The extent of the long awaited Gambit’s involvement is really throwing a few cards and using a sort of shock stick (I’m not a scholar; I don’t know the technical terms). What you have left after that is a total lack of momentum and a lot of smirking from Liev Schreiber. Hugh Jackman’s arms really cannot carry a movie by themselves, not even in conjunction with the unmercifully brief showing of Ryan Reynolds’ arms. It’s just not on.

Twitter is the place to go if you want a fairly instantaneous review from me, and I said all that needed to be said in 123 characters:

Wolverine was poorly shot, badly motivated and the characters seemed little more than cameos. I would recommend against it.

But I’ll write a little more and get the word out. I would suggest that if you were a kneejerk reactionary who doesn’t think about his choice of words, you could suggest that several of your favourite X-Men characters have been “raped” by this movie. If you want to say stuff like that, I’ll see you for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in a couple of months!

The optimism with which I approached Monsters vs Aliens was not cautious. I was not expecting great things, but I had a quiet confidence in Dreamworks, despite my abiding hatred for Shrek and its hideous bastard offspring.  When the opening credits finished with the line “and Stephen Colbert as The President”, I lost it. I was determined to enjoy Monsters vs Aliens, and that’s precisely what I came away with.

I should probably make clear once more that I am a fan of animation. While that means I can be a harsh critic of “cartoons”, it also means that I’m more inclined to like them than Joe Q. Public who is indifferent to the whole exercise. It’s an important distinction, because it’s not a form (animation is not a genre) that I simply view as “take or leave”. Wall-E and The Incredibles are included among my favourite films in general, not just in the field of animation.

Having said that, Monsters vs Aliens is not a Pixar level film (then again, neither was Cars). That doesn’t stop it from being a consistently entertaining movie with a semi-clear to somewhat muddied moral. As a general audience movie, I don’t know how it would fare and, as is always the case with this sort of stuff, many of the best jokes likely won’t be understood by the target audience of children. (Axel F., for crying out loud!)