Author: Alex Doenau

“McLovin! Whyyyyyy?!”

Sadly, sometimes the greatest film can only be as good as its audience. Superbad is the sort of film whose target audience is a group that I do not normally associate with. At the start of the film I made the conscious decision not to sit in front of some teenagers with their feet on the seats, who had somehow timed their conversation to include, just as I was walking past, one saying to another “you’re a homo” (although, with the state of the modern teenager, you could probably expect something to this degree from them in any given conversation). Unfortunately, I still ended up with the worst audience since the second time I saw Brick. Answering their mobiles during the movie, talking across several rows, coming in and out, complaining loudly that the movie was boring. Listen here, kids! You were the ones who bought tickets to different movies so that you could sneak into this one, so shut up and watch the movie. If I ever have children, I’m going to teach them how to watch movies in a cinema, and coach them in the arts of not being vapid bigots with stupid hair and loud mouths.

As to the movie itself, though: it was everything I dreamed of and more. I’m thoroughly convinced that Seth Rogen cannot write a movie without making it somehow ridiculously homoerotic. Superbad is the sort of movie so charged that an ending with the guys getting the girls is sad because they lose each other in the process. This made the audience distinctly uncomfortable. More than this, the credits end with a procession of drawings of penises done by Seth, including a team of penises raising the flag at Iwo Jima. The teenaged boys in the audience left in audible disgust. Remember, folks: it’s impossible to be morally outraged if you don’t have morals.

“Good Morning Baltimore!”

Movie watching should not come with caveats. I’m not going to say “Hairspray is great, but it’s a musical: be forewarned!”. Screw that; I love musicals, and Hairspray is a consistently and thoroughly awesome, heartwarming and well executed piece of musical cinema (and it says something for me that I didn’t even think until a week later, after confronting many people who don’t like the idea of the movie, that another caveat would be “John Travolta wears a dress”).

There’s no one set of things that I look for in movies, and this allows me to see a variety of films like Black Book, Ratatouille, Shortbus and C.R.A.Z.Y. and to be able to say of each of them that they are precisely why I watch movies. Hairspray, too, is why I watch movies.

Oh dear. I appear to have grown weary of “dopey showgirls in gooey gowns” and come out the other side. After months of the same trailers attacking me from all sides, I’ve been struck by a few new works that prove that the art of trailer sculpting.

First up is Juno, which I admittedly did not see in the cinema:

Until I realised the secret sentimentality of Thank You For Smoking which detracted only slightly from its total … “rockitude”, I was quite in love with Jason Reitman’s work. Juno looks like another one of those films that fit into the incredibly malleable list of “movies made for Alex”. It looks like the right sort of melanchomedy that I eat right up – and, of course, I love Michael Cera. And … well, pretty much the whole cast. Jennifer Garner ain’t quite Jennifer Connelly, but hey! She can have my love anyway.

Anticipation: high.

The next trailer up is something that I was a bit more dubious on, Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium:

Yeah, I saw this trailer and I could only really think “what?”. It was seen before Hairspray, and Ajay turned to me and said “Let’s go see Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium!” I was forced to reply “I think we already did.”
I’m assuming that this is a movie about a fellow lacking imagination (Jason Bateman – keep on working, friend!), who rediscovers the spirit of wonder through Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Portman and a magical toy store. If you watch the trailer very carefully, you can pinpoint Jason Bateman rediscovering the spirit of wonder!

So I don’t really know what to make of Magorium, save to say that I find no greater joy than in Natalie Portman in this mode, and that the reason Dustin Hoffman is looking as he did in Stranger than Fiction is because this is written by Zach Helm, who also wrote that fine film. So I’m going on talent, “Magic” (you know), and the fact that, yeah, Jason Bateman rediscovering the spirit of wonder warms my heart.

Also, in relation to Hollywood’s newfound passion for converting children’s fantasy novels into movies, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising is being made into The Seeker: The Dark is Rising. I had assumed it was some newfangled kid’s franchise, but my mother assures me that it’s from 1974. Apparently it’s been rewritten beyond recognition, so that’s a moot point, but I don’t think I can really fit in another “American kid surrounded by British actors” movie.
Will they never end?

I would complain that Robert Downey Jr. plays all of his roles in exactly the same fashion, but he does it so damned well. I’d say he was the best thing about Zodiac, but everyone in that movie played their parts well, they just couldn’t make them interesting.

Keeping in mind Downey Jr.’s quality (quite different to Faramir’s quality), I am pleased to see that the first Iron Man trailer is online. If you listen very carefully, it’s impossible to miss … that song.

I like the idea of Iron Man’s origin story: that, rather than creating a super weapon for a terrorist cell, he turns himself into a super weapon and beats up the terrorist cell. Now I understand that Iron Man has, in recent comics, turned into a kind of one man hero registry, ready to round up everyone and tell them what for. The film series (and, who knows, it might be a Hulk level disaster, although I think it takes a lot of effort to make a movie that incoherent) is not yet at that point. We don’t even see Samuel L. Jackson storming onto the scene as Nick Fury. But I’m excited, and I have virtually no knowledge of this franchise at all.

Strangely enough, it’s almost impossible to tell that this is a Marvel movie. Obviously they’ve got the title at the beginning, but it doesn’t have any of the “importance” of Spider-Man or the “high budget masquerading as low budget fake whimsy” of Fantastic Four behind it.

I’m quite looking forward to Iron Man now, and it gets extra bonus points for being directed by Jon Favreau, who was smote down by the mighty fists of karma wielded by Jason Lee. There’s hope for this world yet, my friends.

“CIA, mate.”

The other lesson that we can learn from the cinema is that any given US governmental body has a couple of corrupt bastards in it who bend the innocents to their whims. Naturally, only one man can right this wrong!

Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Ultimatum never lets up. With no downtime, the ending sneaks up on you and bites your face off. Despite its lack of cinematic structure for comfort, this is still an exciting film. I’ve never held much stock in Matt Damon, but he’s more accomplished than I’ve given him credit for.

“T.I.E., mate.”

From all that I know and have seen on England in the eighties, I’m incredibly surprised that anyone lived to write or make films about it. This Is England is a movie about when lighthearted, victimless destruction takes a turn toward the dark heart of nationalism.

Yippee Ki-yay!

I’ve seen a lot of “educational” movies in the last couple of weeks. What all movies tell us is that it takes only one man to bring down a corrupt system. Wise men know that this man is John McClane, although some might argue that his name is John Rambo (those same people, I would argue, have faces paralysed by years of steroid abuse).

I don’t feel like I do a lot of action movies; they have to have something going for them. If every action movie starred Bruce Willis, maybe that would change. I felt pumped for Die Hard 4.0 (yeah, its working title was retained for Australia). My pumpedness was paid well in explosions, gunfire, crashing people into walls, and crashing people into walls which then proceed to explode. This movie has everything.