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Review: Eagle Eye, The Rocker, The House Bunny, Wild Child, Space Chimps and Mongol

By Cinema and Reviews

Eagle Eye posterThis week I’ve had my intel­li­gence insul­ted by the very best. Steven Spielberg is cred­ited as Executive Producer of Eagle Eye, but if he spent more than one meet­ing over­see­ing this crapitude I would be very sur­prised. Eagle Eye is designed to appeal to cro-magnons who still believe that com­puters are inher­ently malevol­ent self-perpetuating pseudo-organisms and that the US Dept of Defence would invent an all-powerful, sur­veil­lance super-computer that you can’t switch off at the wall. And fans of Shia LaBoeuf. Director D. J. Caruso (last year’s Disturbia) is con­firmed as a name to avoid and Michael Jackson lookalike Michelle Monaghan has done (and will do) bet­ter than this (Gone Baby Gone).

The Rocker posterIn inter­views, Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute in the American “Office”) has admit­ted that he is behind Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson whenev­er the choicest scripts are handed out, so what that says about The Rocker (his first lead­ing role) I’m not sure. Wilson plays a Pete Best-like drum­mer, fired from the band he named (Vesuvius!) just before they shot to star­dom in 1988. Twenty years and twenty dead-end jobs later, he gets a shot at redemp­tion play­ing with his nephew’s high school band. Wilson really doesn’t have enough pres­ence to carry the film but he’s like­able enough and there’s some nice sup­port­ing work from Jeff Garlin (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”) and the lovely Christina Applegate (who really deserves to be a much big­ger star than she is).

The House Bunny posterOne week on from the depress­ing Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, there’s even more mis­placed girl power on dis­play in The House Bunny. Scary Movie star Anna Faris gets to exec­ut­ive pro­duce a vehicle for her­self (writ­ten by Laurie Craig and Karen McCullah Lutz, the female screen­writ­ing duo respons­ible for the pos­sibly Nobel Prize-winning Legally Blonde) and with that power comes great respons­ib­il­ity, respons­ib­il­ity that she puts to good use set­ting back the cause of fem­in­ism nearly 40 years.

Almost-Playmate Shelley (Faris), kicked out of Hef’s man­sion for being too old becomes sor­or­ity house moth­er to a bunch of “ugly” mis­fits (includ­ing Emma Stone from The Rocker and Bruce Willis and Demi Moore’s eld­est daugh­ter Rumer). It’s the lack of ambi­tion that I find so dis­heart­en­ing, although it did con­tain my favour­ite line of the week: “Concentrate on the eyes girls, remem­ber – the eyes are the nipples of the face.”

Wild Child posterRoald Dahl’s daugh­ter Lucy is anoth­er female screen­writer stuck in cliché hell. Her script for Wild Child could have res­ul­ted in pass­able enter­tain­ment, but is let down by poor dir­ec­tion and some odd post-production decisions. Last year’s Nancy Drew, Emma Roberts, plays the fish out of water, Malibu rich-chick, sent away to an English board­ing school run by firm-but-fair Natasha Richardson. There she makes friends and enemies and falls in love with hand­some Roddy, played by the worst act­or I’ve ever seen get his name on a major film: Alex Pettyfer (remem­ber the name, folks).

Space Chimps posterMost fun of the week can be found in Space Chimps, a bois­ter­ous CGI-animated com­edy for kids (and those that might find WALL•E a little too emo­tion­ally demand­ing). Ripping a long at a great pace, it has plenty of gags per minute and bene­fits from hav­ing great voice-actors like Patrick Warburton and Kristin Chenoweth involved rather than big name stars slum­ming it. Recommended.

Mongol posterThe Russo-Sino-Co-pro Mongol really deserves to be seen on a giant screen, as befit­ting the giant land­scape and giant story. The first of a pro­posed tri­logy telling the life story of Genghis Khan, this instal­ment fol­lows the 12th cen­tury war­lord from his own birth to the birth of an empire span­ning half the known world. Uniting the tribes of Mongolia was a bru­tal busi­ness and there’s plenty of CGI blood splash­ing around as young Temudjin (Tadanobu Asano) dis­cov­ers his destiny.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday, 1 October 2008.

Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Forbidden Lies, The Last Magic Show and 4

By Cinema, Conflict of Interest and Reviews

The two uni­verses of Steven Spielberg’s biggest films of the 70’s and 80’s col­lide in Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as Harrison Ford’s age­ing Indie and young pre­tend­er Shia LaBoeuf race Soviet ice Queen Cate Blanchett to the secret rest­ing place of lost extra ter­restri­als in the heart of the Amazon. There’s even a subtle “ET Phone Home” ref­er­ence which I found kind of cute. Entertaining and a little sloppy (in a good way), Indy has a middle-aged pace about it, a notice­able change from the cur­rent trend towards fren­et­ic, per­cuss­ive, music video action, allow­ing plenty of time to devel­op invent­ive ways to get Harrison Ford into, and out of, trouble. I was­n’t too upset with LaBoeuf (he cer­tainly isn’t JarJar Binks bad) but you can see he has a way to go before he can muster the sort of effort­less cha­risma his eld­ers offer.

Following the murder of her best friend by her own fam­ily in an “hon­our killing” in Jordan, Norma Khouri escapes to Greece and hast­ily begins writ­ing a pas­sion­ate book expos­ing the prac­tice. The book, Forbidden Love, is pub­lished in late 2001 to great acclaim and soon achieves best-seller status but some in Jordan (and in Australia where Norma settles) have ques­tions about the book. Further invest­ig­a­tion reveals that noth­ing in the first 32 words of this para­graph is true and that Norma her­self has a more inter­est­ing past than she is pre­pared to own up to. As Norma’s story unravels and the invest­ig­a­tion fol­lows her from Bridie Island in Queensland to Chicago and ulti­mately to Amman in Jordan, you find your­self on a very strange road indeed.

Another non-fiction film, of a com­pletely dif­fer­ent order, is the clas­sic­al music doc­u­ment­ary 4. Attempting to res­cue Vivaldi’s Four Seasons from TVC cliché, dir­ect­or Tim Slade uses the four move­ments as a struc­ture to build a por­trait of four play­ers, four places and the four sea­sons them­selves. At least that’s what I think the idea is. The prob­lem with the film is that there’s not enough music for it to be a great music movie, there’s not enough insight into the play­ers for the por­trait part to work and, while the visu­als are often quite beau­ti­ful, the film seems to miss the point that four sea­sons are influ­en­tial on the human psyche because we see those sea­sons change from our own per­spect­ive and loc­a­tion. Still, 4 is a pleas­ant enough hour and a half.

A new entry in the digi-indie-home-made kiwi bat­tler cat­egory (pre­vi­ous entries include Wairarapa’s When Night Falls last year) is Andy Conlan’s The Last Magic Show. Conlan him­self (who also wrote the script) plays Ronnie Roman, an delu­sion­al illu­sion­ist who may or may not have real mys­tic­al powers. His agent, scenery-chewing Michael Hurst, has set him up for a big come-back show but in the inter­im he is reduced to volun­teer­ing at the loc­al hos­pice and, pos­sibly, fall­ing in love with Nurse March (Georgie Hill). Conlan has a bit of the young Johnny Depp about him in the looks depart­ment but, ulti­mately, his blank per­form­ance cre­ates frus­tra­tion rather than mys­tery. Good-looking, odd, strangely paced, The Last Magic Show is an intriguing art movie. Perhaps next time, Conlan should­n’t try and do all the big cre­at­ive jobs him­self – a bet­ter dir­ect­or might have chal­lenged him to come up with a few more layers.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 28 May, 2008.

I hereby apo­lo­gise to reg­u­lar read­ers for the paucity of updates but a fierce com­bin­a­tion of the flu and man­aging this year’s 48 Hours Furious Filmmaking com­pet­i­tion have wiped me out and I’m only just com­ing up for air. And, I’m well behind on my feature-watching: Mama’s Boy has already been and gone from loc­al screens.

Nature of con­flict: Forbidden Lie$ is dis­trib­uted in New Zealand by Richard Dalton at Palace Films who is a mate and The Last Magic Show and 4 are dis­trib­uted by Arkles Entertainment who are mates and who I do occa­sion­al work for.