Hunt for the Wilderpeople

What We Do in the Shadows main-man Taika Waititi delivers another blast of New Zealand comedy gold with a warm-hearted and utterly ludicrous chase movie.

Ricky (Julian Dennison) is moved from the big city to the sticks by the state in the grouchy shape of social worker Paula (Rachel House) and her police minder Andy (Oscar Kightley). Ricky is enthusiastically welcomed to farm life by Bella (Rima Te Wiata), and less enthusiastically tolerated by her gruff husband Hector (Sam Neill). Once Ricky stops trying to run away, and not getting very far, he settles in to this last chance foster home. But then tragedy strikes and he runs away into the Bush rather than be institutionalised. Hec pursues to drag him home, but a series of unfortunate events leave them on the run, pursued by self-righteous hunters, Paula and Andy, and the entire forces of the media and law and order of the island. And all that is before they encounter Psycho Sam (Rhys Darby)…

Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Barry Crump’s novel is a visual delight. At times, such as Paula’s listing of Ricky’s previous misdemeanours and some of the action beats, it feels like Edgar Wright is directing the comedy is so visually driven. Indeed as Waititi builds and builds in his finale, things become so hysterically overblown that it feels like the end of The Blues Brothers. But there’s also a rich spread of verbal comedy from Ricky mangling words like ‘Majestical’, and Paula and Rick arguing over who is Sarah Connor and who the Terminator in their relentless pursuit through the Bush, to Waititi’s delirious cameo as an impressive clergyman to rank beside Peter Cook’s in The Princess Bride, and a jaw-droppingly sustained sequence of misunderstood statements by Ricky about Hec that lands Hec in the most serious of hot water imaginable.

Scott Pilgrim died a horrible death at cinemas, if you don’t see this treat in the cinema you can’t complain when the multiplexes are full of Melissa McCarthy dreck.

5/5

Christmas Movies in Meeting House Square

‘Christmas on the Square’ takes place this year in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar from December 17^th – 21^st. 11 festive screenings over 5 days will play Old Hollywood gems such as Some Like it Hot and Holiday Inn alongside more recent classics like Annie Hall and Die Hard and perennial family favourites such as Elf and The Muppet Christmas Carol.

Online booking is now open at www.entertainment.ie/meetinghousesquare. Free blankets will be handed out to keep warm and a selection of hot drinks (including traditional mulled wine, hot chocolate, tea, and coffee) and festive food will all be available for purchase.

Tuesday, December 17^th

How the Grinch Stole Christmas, 5pm

Ron Howard’s remake of the classic cartoon about a creature intent on stealing Christmas throws a ton of CGI and crazy sets at the screen and elides a good deal of the absurdity of Dr Seuss’ original rhymes, but Carrey’s improvisations impress.

Cast: Jim Carrey and Taylor Momsen

Running time: 104 mins

Cert: PG

Holiday Inn, 8pm

At an Inn which is only open on holidays, a crooner and a hoofer vie for the affections of a beautiful up-and-coming performer. Based on a story idea by Broadway song-writing legend Irving Berlin this flick also includes an animated sequence mocking FDR.

Cast: Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire and Marjorie Reynolds

Running Time: 100 mins

Cert: G

Wednesday, December 18^th

Elf, 5pm

After inadvertently wreaking havoc on the elf community due to his ungainly size, a man raised at the North Pole is sent by Santa Claus to the U.S. in search of his true identity. Can he romance a cute colleague (Zooey Deschanel) and reconnect with his father?

Cast: Will Ferrell and James Caan

Running Time: 97mins

Cert: PG

Some Like it Hot, 8pm

When two musicians witness the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, they flee 1920s Chicago in an all female band disguised as women, but complications set in when they meet singer Sugar Kane… Think of it as Billy Wilder doing Shakespeare’s cross-dressing rom-coms.

Cast: Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis

Running Time: 120 mins

Cert: PG

Thursday, December 19^th

Polar Express, 5pm

On Christmas Eve, a doubting boy boards a magical train that’s headed to the North Pole and Santa Claus’ home. Director Robert Zemeckis uses motion capture to allow Tom Hanks play multiple roles but the uncanny valley phenomenon sinks scenes that aren’t spectacular musical numbers.

Cast: Tom Hanks and Chris Coppola

Running Time: 100 mins

Cert: PG

Bridget Jones, 8pm

A British woman is determined to improve herself while she looks for love in a year in which she keeps a personal diary. King of the British rom-com Richard Curtis pens the screenplay for this incredibly commercially successful contemporary riff on Jane Austen scenarios.

Cast: Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth and Hugh Grant

Running Time: 97mins

Cert: 15

Friday, December 20^th

The Muppet Christmas Carol, 5pm

The Muppet characters tell their idiosyncratic version of Charles Dickens’ classic tale of an old and bitter miser’s redemption on Christmas Eve. Michael Caine is rather good as Scrooge, but this is all about Kermit, the Great Gonzo and Miss Piggy as Dickensian characters.

Cast: Michael Caine and Dave Goelz

Running Time: 85

Cert: G

Trading Places, 8pm

A snobbish investor and a wily street con artist find their positions reversed as part of a bet by two callous millionaires. Writer/director John Landis came to this off a streak of classic comedies that included Animal House and The Blues Brothers.

Cast: Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis

Running Time: 116 mins

Cert: 15

Annie Hall, 11pm

Neurotic New York comedian Alvy Singer falls in love with ditzy singer Annie Hall in Woody Allen’s classic 1977 breakthrough. The many highlights include the Marshall MacLuhan cameo, Christopher Walken’s crazed monologue, and Alvy’s flashbacks to his Brooklyn childhood; depressed by the universe’s finite expansion.

Cast: Diane Keaton and Woody Allen

Running Time: 93 mins

Cert:  PG

Saturday, December 21^st

Monty Python’s Life of Brian, 8pm

Brian (Graham Chapman) is born on the original Christmas, in the stable next door to Jesus. He spends his life being mistaken for the messiah, but along the way gets lessons in Latin from a centurion, and ponders Roman’s rule’s good points.

Cast: Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Michael Palin

Running Time:

Cert: 15

Die Hard, 11pm

Vacationing NYPD cop John McClane tries to save estranged wife Holly Gennaro when her office party is taken hostage by German terrorist Hans Gruber during a Christmas party at the Nakatomi Plaza in Los Angeles. Director John McTiernan spectacularly orchestrates arguably the ultimate action film.

Cast: Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman

Running Time: 131 mins

Cert: 15

Ticket prices:

Adults: 5 euro

OAP/Student: 4 euro

Child: 3 euro

Family (2&2): 15 euro

Group of 10 people: 45 euro

Meeting House Square (MHS) is a unique outdoor space and venue in the heart of Temple Bar, Dublin’s Cultural Quarter. You can simply turn off the rain at the flick of a switch as the new bespoke retractable canopy blooms on Meeting House Square.

‘Christmas on the Square’ is presented by Temple Bar Cultural Trust and Dublin City Council.

Black Nativity

Langston Hughes, the Horace of Harlem, wrote Black Nativity as a play, and it’s turned into a sort of musical here with decidedly odd results.

Moody Baltimore teenager Langston (Jacob Latimore) faces eviction just before Christmas. His single mother Naima (Jennifer Hudson) in desperation sends him on a bus to New York City to stay with her estranged parents while she tries to raise $5,000 to save their home. Langston, however, no sooner arrives in NYC than he’s jailed for doing a good deed while black. He’s rescued from sparring with fellow prisoner Tyson (Tyrese Gibson) by the arrival of Rev. Cornell Cobbs (Forest Whitaker), who is more than a bit aggrieved to meet his grandson for the first time when bailing him out of lock-up. Arriving back to their imposing Harlem brownstone grandmother Aretha (Angela Bassett) is overwhelmed with joy by Langston’s arrival, but he is stunned at the wealth on display. Will he be tempted to appropriate some to bail out his mom?

Black Nativity is a sort of musical because, despite writer/director Kasi Lemmons co-writing a number of original songs, it’s as embarrassed at being a musical as 2002’s Chicago. People burst into song, and nobody notices, or (confusingly) some people notice and join them on backing vocals as everyone else continues about their business oblivious, until in the finale everybody notices – and joins in, like a deleted James Brown scene from The Blues Brothers. It’s hard to know what the intention was, initially it seems to be a hip-hop opera, then it reverts to traditional songs, before abandoning music to become a poor man’s riff on Gilmore Girls as Rory Langston gets to know his well-to-do grandparents and understand their estrangement from his single mother. Will he discover the truth about his father? Hard not to, it’s signposted in flashing neon….

There are some things that work amidst the derivativeness, clichés and confusion. Vondie Curtis-Hall is on fine form as a wise pawnbroker, and Romiti has a good scene as compassionate cop McDaniels. A hallucinatory sequence in which the agnostic Langston imagines the pregnant busking couple Jo-Jo (Luke James) and Maria (the distractingly pretty Grace Gibson) transforming into Joseph and Mary, with Mary J Blige becoming an angel and Nas the street prophet Isaiah is interesting. But still it doesn’t come close to the BBC’s barmy but effective ‘Passion to the sounds of Madchester’ from a few years back. Ultimately Rev. Cobbs, at his celebrated Black Nativity, addressing his Christian flock, yet referring to the Nativity story as happening just before the beginning of the ‘Common Era’ by which he means the Birth of Christ, sums up Black Nativity – wilfully perverse.

Despite Kasi Lemmons assembling a veritable A-list of black acting/music talent for her bold Langston Hughes reinvention, this film about a minister’s family must be reckoned a curate’s egg.

2/5

Fanboys Vs Paul

At what point on the homage-o-meter does a film become so dependent for its laughs on just referencing other films that it simply ceases to exist in its own right?

I’m posing this question because I quite recently watched both Paul and Fanboys which are so referentially dependent that taking away that crutch of familiarity would cripple both. Paul would be less hobbled than Fanboys, because it’s operating on a higher level of comedic sureness, but the two films share the same basic DNA – nerds go on a road trip and things get very silly, with copious references to late 1970s/early 1980s pop culture, and Seth Rogen even appearing in both movies. There is obviously a huge difference in budgets between the two films, evident in looking at the star wattage of the casts. Sam Huntington, Jay Baruchel, Dan Fogler, and Kristen Bell for Fanboys weigh in substantially lighter than Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jason Bateman, and Kristen Wiig for Paul. But that’s not that clinching, throwing money at bad jokes doesn’t make them funny.

Huntington is a gifted comedian who was a sublime Jimmy Olsen, Jay Baruchel is a reliable comedic presence, and Kristen Bell rarely gets to be as awesome in film as she was as Veronica Mars but she’s always got that charisma in reserve. Dan Fogler, however, sums up the problem with Fanboys. I’ve been mystified by Fogler’s rise because I don’t think he’s particularly funny in Balls of Fury, Good Luck Chuck, or Fanboys. Indeed the only time I’ve been impressed by him was in Love Happens where in a straighter role than usual he was quite good, even damn good in one serious scene. Fanboys sees him purvey his usual brand of crude, physical humour (constant dry humping) and he puts so much obvious energy and commitment into his performance you actually feel bad singling him out as a synecdoche of the film’s failings.

Fanboys is a film where the script constantly falls back on crudity and slapstick and asks its performers to mug like hell to hide the shortcomings of the material. It is intermittently amusing, but, with some exceptions, those laughs come from references to the Star Wars film, or from the efforts of cameoing stars whose presence are the only reason jokes work – think Carrie Fisher saying “I know” when someone says “I love you”, or William Shatner boasting “I’m William Shatner, I can score anything”. Even Rogen’s dual roles only work because of the sublime moment where as a Trekkie his beloved Kirk statue is destroyed and he cradles it shouting “KHAAAAAAAAAAN!” Take away the famous actors in tiny roles, and you’re left with a deeply suspect attempt to graft an emotionally manipulative arc about a dying friend’s last wishes onto raucous road trip comedy.

Paul by contrast has a far less weighty arc that works much better. It just wants Pegg to get a girlfriend and Frost to finish writing his novel as the transformative result of encounter with runaway alien Paul. It’s a funnier film than Fanboys because, though Paul’s dialogue is crude and the Kristen Wiig sub-plot is foul-mouthed and oddly mean-spirited, there is still more comedic gold left when you sift away the referential gags. Those references to Lucas, Spielberg, Zemeckis and Landis are hysterically funny, not least the moment when our heroes walk into the Roadhouse to find the band playing the Cantina music. But they are equalled by the absurdity of Jason Bateman’s character name, and the peerless Kristen Wiig’s crestfallen reaction to Pegg telling her she ‘should go’, meaning to visit the UK, but she takes it as meaning to just go away.

Paul is better than Fanboys but, while it’s hilarious to see Paul offering Spielberg advice on the phone on creating E.T., does Paul just feature too many referential gags versus original gags compared to the previous two Pegg/Frost movies directed, and crucially co-written, by Edgar Wright? Sigourney Weaver’s appearance saw me start a mental timer until the line ‘Get away from her you bitch!’ was referenced, and of course it was. Are Pegg and Frost compensating for the loss of Wright’s flair for visual absurdity by gripping ever more tightly their pop culture talismans? If, by some miracle, you could find a viewer entirely unfamiliar with cinema and pop culture from 1974 onwards would they still find Paul, and especially Fanboys, funny at all? Or would they merely look baffled and say ‘I don’t get it, what’s meant to be so funny about that line?’ Obviously though such an ideal viewer is impossible as Lucas and Spielberg colonised the popular imagination in a manner most film-makers can only dream of.

Still, it must be asked at what point doffing the cap to Lucas and Spielberg becomes a despairing admittance of defeat at ever conjuring up something equal to their magic?