Simon Bradshaw

What this is: a pretty good, very stylish and often quite funny Cold War spy romp.

What this is not: a film with Illya Kuryakin in it.

Oh, it has a character called Illya Kuryakin, but he's not the Kuryakin of the TV series as played in a career-making role by David McCallum. Armie Hammer plays the film version as a suaver version of Arnold Schwarzenegger's character from Red Heat, or perhaps a slightly less psychotic incarnation of Red Grant of From Russia with Love, highly competent but perpetually on the edge of beating someone to a pulp. I'm not quite sure where this character interpretation came from; perhaps, having landed Hammer in the role, Guy Ritchie realised that he was never credibly depict Kuryakin in the McCallum mould, and so went for Hulking Action Hero instead. 

Henry Cavill, by contrast, makes for a surprisingly good Napoleon Solo. purplecthulhu commented to me before I saw the movie that Cavill manages a feat rather like Karl Urban does in respect of DeForest Kelley in the reboot Star Trek, of capturing the essence of another actor's performance of a classic role without anything so crass as a simple impersonation. Cavill isn't Robert Vaughan, but his Napoleon Solo is recognisably Vaughan's Solo. 

There are two poles for Cold War dramas: stylish early 60s, as in early Bond or, more recently, X-Men: First Class (Kevin Bacon's Sebastian Shaw being the best 60s Bond villain we never had) or grim and squalid early 70s, as in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or the BBC's recent spot-the-Birmingham-location-fest The Game. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. plonks itself very firmly in the first camp and the production and design team clearly had a fantastic time. (I would suggest someone run an appropriate classic-cars-and-cosplay event but it already exists.) I was sure the aircraft carrier had to be CGI and I was right, but it's amazing how well-done this was; if only there was an audience to justify remaking The Battle of the River Plate or Sink the Bismarck! with modern effects.

attimes_bracing was surprised at how much she enjoyed The Man from U.N.C.L.E. despite never having seen the original series. In many ways that might help, as if you're not familiar with the source material you won't be thinking "but that's not Kuryakin" all the way through. 

Verdict: fun and visually wonderful, but TMfU purists might enjoy it less than everyone else.

attimes_bracing commented a little while back that she'd seen very few classic sf movies, and wondered about catching up. So, last night, we started with Forbidden Planet.

Now, I hadn't watched FP for literally decades. I have a dim memory of us showing it at a video night at the SF club at university, and I'd definitely seen it before I first went to see Return to the Forbidden Planet (the stage musical) in London in 1989 or so. So my briefing to attimes_bracing was that this was very early in the 'humans explore space' genre (1956), that bits of it would seem familiar because it had been very influential on a number of TV series, and that she should expect it to be, well, a product of the 1950s.

Ouch. I'd forgotten how much a product of the 1950s it was.

We have an all male, all white crew. Well, the C-57D is clearly a military ship (we twice see Commander Adams holding discipline sessions with crewmen) and that would have been typical for small US ship of the era. The real problems start when Altaira, Dr Morbius' daughter, turns up. Everyone from the C-57D, its captain included, immediately start drooling over her to the point of begin blatantly distracted from what they are meant to be doing, and within a very short time one of them is manipulating her into kissing on the grounds that it's meant to be good for her.

Frankly, the more interesting twist the movie could have used would have been to have it turn out that the monster assaulting the crew had been generated by the Krell Machine not from Morbius' subconscious, but from Altaira's.

(Of course, that's not how 1950s scriptwriters would have done it, and if they had it would no doubt have led to a very misogynist denouement.)

Putting that aside for the moment, FP still stands up well in some areas. Morbius' tour of the Krell Machine is one of sf cinema's great visual scenes, and was echoed by Babylon 5; the effects work is surprisingly good for the time, although I'd be interested to know how much it was influenced by pulp sf-magazine covers of the 30s and 40s. The crew's battle with the Id Monster is also done well, and I suspect that any modern CGI remake would actually be less effective by probably being tempted to show more.

Next up: probably 2001, which at least has less creepiness.

Meh.

This film really didn't grab me. Pacific Rim didn't take itself at all seriously, and had a huge sense of fun despite what was actually a very dark scenario. Godzilla is ponderously serious - or rather it tries to have a air of ponderous seriousness, without actually getting any gravitas or serious emotional investment out of its cast, despite having far more supposed human melodrama on screen than actual monster action.

There are some impressive scenes, although they tend not to be ones with the titular monster. The high-altitude parachute drop through a beautifully-rendered stormy sunset cloudscape, accompanied by the Ligati Ligeti chorus from 2001, is amazing, but in hindsight feels as if it was ripped from a much better movie (Monster Apocalypse Now?)

( minor spoilers )

Frankly, I'd like an immediate re-release of Pacific Rim on the big screen so we can refresh our memories of what a cinema outing to a proper monster movie should be.

It's been a long wait, but Part I of cairmen's World of Warcraft Machinima fan movie Death Knight Love Story is now online!



More info at the dedicated film site

Time I think to repost my report on photographing the Brian Blessed recording session.

The Daily Dot asks whether a movie can fail the Bechdel Test but still be respectful of female characters, and suggests that Pacific Rim is evidence that it can.

It's an interesting argument, and I think there is a good case to be made that Pacific Rim does very well as a film with effective female characters except for the Bechdel Test. It certainly manages a lot of non-tokenistic diversity, but in hindsight it does seem unfortunate that Mako is the only female character given any substantial screen time. (There is the female pilot of the Russian jaeger, but she has hardly any dialogue with any of the main characters.)

Looking at the cast, we have three main characters:

Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) - male, white, American
Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) - male, black, British
Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) - female, asian, Japanese

and six supporting characters:

Herc Hansen (Max Martini) - male, white, Australian
Chuck Hansen (Robert Kazinsky) - male, white, Australian
Tendo Choi (Clifton Collins) - male, Asian, Chinese
Dr Newton Gieszler (Charlie Day) - male, white, American
Dr Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) - male, white, Anglo-German
Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman) - male, white, God alone knows

That's a reasonable amount of ethnic diversity, rather less cultural diversity (Gottlieb, despite his name, is depicted as being as British as they come) and no gender diversity. Pacific Rim fails the Bechdel Test because the writers created a well-developed female character and then forget to give her any other women to talk to. (She does, as that article notes, get a lot of time talking to another non-white character about matters that have nothing to do with sex or race.)

I think the lesson to be drawn from this is that the Bechdel Test may allow for the odd exception, but that it is still a good litmus test, and that if a film is respectful to its female characters in all other respects then it will look even odder if it doesn't show two of them holding a conversation that's not about men.

Shaun of the Dead meets Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. This is one of those films that pretty much does what it says on the tin; highbrow it isn't, but darth_hamster and I nearly fell of the sofa laughing. (Mind you, we had the extra fun of watching the zombie invasion of Tower Hamlets - when we weren't laughing, we were playing spot-the-location around Poplar and Bow.)

Not recommended if you don't like low-cost SFX gore. Highly recommended if you like to see Honor Blackman and Richard Briers machine-gunning the undead through E14.

Rather better than I'd feared it might be, and, according to darth_hamster, far better than she'd expected.

I normally try to avoid 3D because I find it's usually a gimmicky distraction, but as Dredd seems almost impossible to find other than in 3D we decided to put up with it. I was pleasantly surprised: 3D is actually used well for a change - about the first time I've seen it used decently since Avatar.

Alex Garland and Pete Travis have done a remarkably good job in striking a balance between keeping Dredd grounded enough to feel realistic while still making it clear that this is a futuristic dystopia. We still have the Cursed Earth, psychic mutants and 200-floor arcology Blocks, but clothing, vehicles and weapons (other than the Judges' Lawgiver) are strictly contemporary. Mega-City 1 is depicted as far more open than in the comic strip - more of an endless, scaled-up LA - but that actually adds to the realism; you get the feeling this is a vast, grim conurbation covering several states rather than just a very big city. At times Dredd feels reminiscent in its grittiness of District 9; at other times, an updated version of the balletic gore of 300 (it should be noted that Dredd is an extremely violent movie.)

Karl Urban nails Joe Dredd, impressively acting through his stubbly chin which, quite rightly for the part (we are still staring hard at you, Stallone), is all we see of his face. If his portrayal is rather one-note, that's because Dredd is a one-note character, but that note is played and held perfectly. Olivia Thirlby is good as Anderson, a rookie Judge tougher and more resourceful than she thinks she is, while Lena Headey is as excellent as usual, portraying a crime boss who is exactly as tough and resourceful as she thinks she is.

Dredd seems to have garnered good reviews, getting a remarkable 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Hopefully it will do as well internationally as it seems to have done here, because it's crying out for a sequel.

I think we need a new term for works that are somewhere between a true sequel (or prequel) that sits fully within continuity, and a reboot that takes some of the original's situations and characters but starts over. The Incredible Hulk, for instance, is not really a sequel to Ang Lee's Hulk as details of Bruce Banner's background are different, but it nonetheless works as one in that features the same core characters who have experienced in broad, essential terms the events of the first film.

X-Men: First Class is very much in this category in respect of its relationship to the X-Men trilogy (albeit as a prequel rather than sequel). It's not entirely consistent with the existing films, but for the most part the differences are relatively minor, the sort that can be explained by our assuming that a character who describes an event in one way that we later see taking place in another was simplifying or misremembering. True, there are a couple of times in First Class when we can only assume that certain characters forget rather a lot over the subsequent forty years, but it's not as if long-running TV shows with supposedly solid internal consistency haven't pulled the same stunt - Babylon 5 being a particularly egregious example thanks to In The Beginning. The two really glaring continuity issues both related to one scene - the 'twenty years earlier' prologue to X3 - and perhaps the price of accepting First Class as being in the same continuity as the other films is to quietly pretend that scene didn't happen.

So what does First Class give us? The best Sixties spy-thriller aesthetic in a long time, for starters. (I'd say 'since The Incredibles', but that's in a class of its own what with being completely animated.) You know every aspect of Bond-era spy films that the Austin Powers movies mercilessly parodied? First Class reclaims them all and plays them as near to straight as anyone could manage. Indeed, as ( spoilers abound )

Fortuitous timing moment: darth_hamster had never been around Oxford until our mini-holiday the other weekend, which was just in time for her to gleefully recognise some of the locations of Charles Xavier's student (and drinking) days. (Genuine Oxonians will be a little confused though by the conversion of the building on the corner in front of the Bridge of Sighs into a pub. Surely he would have been just around the corner in either the Kings Arms or the Turf Tavern?)

( Spoilerly Nitpicks )

So, overall very impressed. It's great fun, well-acted, respects continuity without being a slave to it and manages to be cool and serious at the same time. Also, thanks to the Big Bad, a whole load of young actors now have a Bacon Number of 1...

Very, very funny if you have any experience of fandom, and like most Pegg/Frost films you lose track of the in-jokes and references. Hardly highbrow, but it left darth_hamster and me in stitches.