Fears: 2019

The Death and Life of John F Donovan

We have waited long,

Too long, for Dolan anglais,

Now we fear for Snow

 

Captain Marvel

Brie Larson arrives

To save the day, 90s day.

Nick Fury’s phone friend

 

Dumbo

Tim Burton is back

Pointless ‘live action’ remake

This will not fly high

 

Avengers: Endgame

Free at last, says Bob.

Downey Jr’s contract’s up!

Snap away, Thanos!

Godzilla: King of Monsters

Um, may not contain

Godzilla… going by last

bait and switch movie

 

Men in Black: International

Thor plays dumb, again

Reunites with Valkyrie

But where is Will Smith?

 

X-Men: Dark Phoenix

It’s X-3 remade,

with little context for Jean,

who cares? C.G.I!

 

The Lion King

Like the classic one

But now CGI drawings

Why not just re-release?…

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood

QT does Manson.

Bad taste abounds, but also

Pitt, Leo, et al

 

New Mutants

Fox does X-horror.

X-Men that is, obscure ones.

They’re affordable

 

It: Chapter Two

They’re all grown up now.

But fear never does grow old.

Yet may be retread?

 

Joker

Phoenix: Mistah J.

Dark take, from Hangover man.

I’m Still Here: Part two?

The Goldfinch

Dickens in New York,

Bret Easton Ellis Vegas,

Tartt’s chameleon.

 

Zombieland 2

Hey, the gang is back!

But what can they do that’s new?

A needless sequel.

 

Terminator: Dark Fate

Arnie’s back. Again.

All save T-2 not canon.

But Linda H back!

 

Kingsman ‘3’

Hasty sequel two-

Except, gasp, it’s a prequel!

So, but still hasty.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

Critics applaud, not

because the thing is done well,

but because it’s done.

 

Star Wars: Episode IX

Fans don’t give a damn…

Who to kill off next? Lando?

Money grubbing sham.

 

Little Women

Gerwig’s needless film-

(Winona forever!)

-version seven. Sigh.

CinemaCon 2016

Burbank, CA was the location for Warner Bros. Pictures’ CinemaCon 2016, announcing developments in the studio’s wide-ranging slate. Chairman and CEO Kevin Tsujihara announced the headline confirmation that Ben Affleck—who will reprise his Batman in the upcoming Justice League movie—will direct, as well as star in, a new stand-alone Batman.

The WB’s presentation was illustrated by trailers and film clips—including some never-before-seen footage—and appearances by major stars and film-makers involved in the movies.  Tsujihara’s has talked about basing the WB’s future on the key franchises of DC, animated LEGO^® features, and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, but the current slate also encompasses dramas, action adventures, horrors, and comedies. Sue Kroll, new President of Worldwide Marketing and Distribution, and Veronika Kwan Vandenberg, new President of Worldwide Distribution, also spoke. Kroll said, “CinemaCon is always one of the high points of our year: when we get to introduce our upcoming slate to our partners in the exhibition community who are responsible for bringing our films to audiences worldwide,” while Kwan Vandenberg added, “We appreciated the enthusiastic participation of actors and filmmakers from every title, who added tremendous star power to the presentation.”

Ben Affleck and Amy Adams kicked off the presentation with a bang, introducing a reel spotlighting the studio’s ambitious slate of DC films.  The roster includes the new Justice League film, as well as stand-alone Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg features. Embattled Batman v Superman director Zack Snyder closed the reel with a greeting from the Justice League film set, surrounded by his stars. The DC preview also included a glimpse of the summer’s hotly anticipated super-villain team-up Suicide Squad before its writer/director David Ayer took the stage and introduced the main ensemble cast, led by Will Smith, Jared Leto, Margot Robbie, and Joel Kinnaman.  The extended version of the Suicide Squad trailer was met with loud applause and the buzz surrounding the film was palpable.

Host Mario Lopez went through the rest of the summer line-up, with advance footage from the wide range of titles, introduced by stars and filmmakers including Russell Crowe for Shane Black’s action comedy The Nice Guys, Emilia Clarke for the drama Me Before You, director James Wan and stars Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson for the supernatural thriller The Conjuring 2, Teresa Palmer and David F. Sandberg for the horror thriller Lights Out, Kevin Hart and Rawson Marshall Thurber for the action comedy Central Intelligence, Alexander Skarsgård, Margot Robbie, Samuel L. Jackson, and Christoph Waltz for the adventure The Legend of Tarzan, and director Todd Phillips and his Hangover star Bradley Cooper reuniting for the comedic drama War Dogs based on real events.

WB then unveiled films on the drawing board from the Warner Animation Group.  Chris Miller, Phil Lord, and Nicholas Stoller introduced titles in the pipeline, anchored by The LEGO^®Batman Movie, The LEGO^® Movie 2, and Ninjago.  Stoller, who co-directed the next film on the slate, Storks, was joined by fellow director Doug Sweetland and voice talents Andy Samberg and Katie Crown to present new footage from the family adventure.  The animation portion wrapped with never-before-seen footage from The LEGO^® Batman Movie, presented by producers Lord and Miller, and the voice of ‘Batman’ himself, Will Arnett. The presentation closed with a look Warner Bros. closed the presentation with a look at Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, written by Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling.  Four of the film’s stars; Eddie Redmayne, Alison Sudol, Dan Fogler and Colin Farrell; introduced the new teaser trailer and a look behind the scenes of the film.

It is a keen irony that the WB is currently taking flak for launching the Cinematic DC Universe with the humourless dourness of Batman v Superman, while the TV DC Universe is universally beloved for its lightness of touch, almost as if two prime directives are colliding. The need to maintain the WB’s vaunted position as a home for cinematic artists that respects directorial vision – whether that be Kubrick, Nolan, or Affleck – becomes self-defeating when the artist in question is Zack Snyder, and when an entirely less sombre vision, exemplified by writer/producer Greg Berlanti’s roster of Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Supergirl, is available free to air weeknights.

21 and Over

The writers of The Hangover turn  director with another elaborate tale of a drunken night’s debauchery, and the  results are even unfunnier than you’d fear.

Driven pre-med student Jeff Chang (Justin Chon) gets an unwelcome surprise on  his 21^st birthday when his best friends from high school, Miller  (Miles Teller) and Casey (Skylar Astin), arrive on his doorstep to party. He,  however, needs an early night because his fearsome father Dr Chang (Francois  Chau from LOST) has arranged an  interview for medical school at 7am the next morning. Bullied by the coarse  Miller Jeffrey cracks and gets very, very drunk. When he passes out Miller and  Casey realise they don’t know where he lives. And so begins an odyssey thru  sorority houses, frat parties, pep rallies – quite often in the company of  Jeffrey’s friend Nicole (Sarah Wright) – to try and find someone who can give  them an address to deliver the comatose Jeffrey to. But the strained friendships  threaten to fracture from drunkenly revealed secrets…

This is the type of R-rated comedy  which believes that comedy is derived from being crude and being obnoxious, not  from being witty or, God forbid, delivering jokes. If you have to explain a joke  it’s not funny – yet writer/directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore actually do that  for the one successful joke in their movie thereby semi-ruining it. 21 and Over has some mildly amusing moments in  its final act, but then you realise you’re responding to them because they’re  shamelessly cribbed from the finale of Ferris  Bueller’s Day Off – Jeff’s dad roars towards chez Chang while a  semi-conscious Jeff tries to make it home first – not because anything funny is  happening. Russell Hodgkinson has a wonderful character moment as The Chief,  but, like the lyrical image of a buffalo wandering around the campus, it  deserves a better film.

I’ve written before that Seth Rogen and  Jonah Hill always add a rambling absurdity to their R-rated comedy, and this  film actually attempts that approach with a discussion of JGL; but it  fails miserably. There also appears to be a nod to 50 Shades of  Grey in the sorority sequences, but then the pay-off is Eyes Wide Shut. Really this film is all about  Miller – an incredibly obnoxious character who is racist towards Asians,  Latinos, Jews, and, well, everyone really. Amidst the slow-motion vomiting while  riding a bull, the stretchy member involved in an accidental circumcision, and  the inexplicably topless cheerleader, you’ll think two things. Rogen mis-fired  when he tried to use an obnoxious lead in The  Green Hornet, yet this film, like The  Change-Up and The Hangover  doesn’t think it needs to make its protagonist likeable. Or, indeed, the  supporting characters; the abrasive jock Randy (Jonathan Keltz) is as  unnervingly plausible as Bradley Cooper’s Wedding Crashers thug. Characters can be compelling rather than likeable, but  that’s really a dramatic prerogative. And, after The Hangover and The Change-Up, this is yet another paean to permanent adolescence by  Lucas and Moore, and ironically these asinine, simplistic, foul-mouthed and  predictable valorisations of irresponsibility are just getting old…

Did you know that it’s just over 10 years since The Rules of Attraction was released in  Ireland? Why not catch up with that classic of cinematic college debauchery?

0/5

The Watch

Screenwriters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg rescue a Ben Stiller sci-fi comedy from the intended clutches of lamestream auteur Shawn Levy and the results are a hoot and a holler.

Ben Stiller is slightly boring Costco manager Evan, who sets up various clubs to build community spirit in Ohio, and is horrified to find his store’s night-watchman murdered and skinned. He promptly sets up a neighbourhood watch to track down the killer. Much to his displeasure, the only people who show up are loudmouth dad Bob (Vince Vaughn), wannabe vigilante Franklin (Jonah Hill) and British divorcee Jamarcus (Richard Ayoade). (Well, he’s actually pretty pleased with Jamarcus, as Evan’s been looking for a black friend in the name of diversity.) The watch get no respect from slightly crazed police officer (Will Forte), or their neighbours, but when they find destructive alien technology, and then aliens infiltrating the community, there’s only one thing to do. Save the world… And misbehave royally, of course. Who wouldn’t take pictures with a Hawaiian-shirted dead alien?

This movie is Rogen & Goldberg par excellence, so if you don’t like their shtick you’re better off skipping it. I’m one of the very few who appreciated what they were trying to do with The Green Hornet, and this movie confirms the suspicion I first voiced when reviewing Superbad; that hiding behind their scatology is sweetness. I thought then that the scatology might be there purely to get financing but I now realise that it’s an integral if occasionally uncomfortable part of the package, as if Seth Rogen was a big friendly slob of a dog that you just can’t housetrain but you still love him to bits anyway. “She married you, not your dead ****” is the key line of hidden heart as a ruminant Vaughn tries to comfort a depressed Stiller on whether marriage can survive infertility.

The Watch feels exactly like what it is, a structurally sound script rewritten to insert rambling absurdity and profane hilarity. Some elements are familiar: Will Forte’s cop is a close cousin of SNL co-star Bill Hader’s Superbad maniac, while Hill’s lunatic is a riff on Rogen’s character in Observe and Report, and a key final act detail is pure Superbad. Some elements are totally fresh: Richard Ayoade’s equally deadpan delivery of utter nonsense and total logic, Billy Crudup’s glorious cameo as Stiller’s creepily tactile new neighbour, and some serious ballistic overkill with a hard-to-kill alien. The comic invention on display flags in the middle as screenplay structural conventions take over but roars back for a very funny finale; not least because just when you’ve been lamenting Rosemarie DeWitt being underused as Stiller’s wife she gets her own hilarious motif.

The Watch isn’t quite as hilarious as Superbad but it is far better than any proposed PG-13 version could have been and better than any actual Hangover instalment is.

4/5

2011: Fears

The franchise is over, please go home
Man of the hour Andrew Garfield is your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man in Spider-Man 4. If ever a franchise needed a reboot less it was Spider-Man. Inexplicably back in high school Spidey will again bond with Martin Sheen’s ill-fated Uncle Ben, perhaps actually have a relationship with Gwen Stacey at the second cinematic attempt, and once again become a masked crime-fighter. Just like he already did in 2002. Are we operating on dog-years now or something that we’re remaking films we’ve just seen? What’s next, a remake of Sin City using new computer technology to make it good? Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides sees Johnny Depp spend the last remnants of his credibility on another instalment in a now thoroughly despised franchise. Pirates 3: At World’s End was a nigh endless joyless bore that sucked all the comedic energy out of the franchise in favour of convoluted plotting and purely green-screen action to the point of insanity. No one liked it. It’s even embarrassed away nearly its whole cast, and Russell Brand passed on appearing, so why make another one? Mission: Impossible 4 meanwhile sees over-rated Ratatouille director Brad Bird attempt to make Tom Cruise a viable star again despite the obvious fact that no one wants to see him top-lining blockbusters anymore. Mission: Impossible 3 was a damn good blockbuster whereas Mission: Impossible 2 was a bloated disaster, yet, despite the effect of 6 years worth of inflation on the box-office figures, M:I-3 made less money than M:I-2. Cruise’s star has dimmed, he just hasn’t accepted it yet.

A sequel? There wasn’t enough to make one good film
Cars 2 – coming soon. Yes, the very worst film Pixar have ever made gets a sequel. Cars followed the underwhelming The Incredibles and enabled a streak of 4 ho-hum films, with the unbearable Ratatouille and the hit-and-miss Wall-E confirming that not only can Pixar do wrong, but they can do wrong spectacularly. Fear this film. The Hangover 2 meanwhile sees Bill Clinton make an acting cameo beside the re-united original cast. The Hangover wasn’t a very good film, for all its baffling success here. It had some very funny moments but overall it was the same crudely moronic shtick we expect from writer/director Todd Philips, the maker of Starsky & Hutch, one of the very worst films of the last or any other decade. Rise of the Planet of the Apes comes a whopping 10 years after Tim Burton’s lamentable re-make of the Charlton Heston classic. We’re promised genetic engineering by James Franco with Tom Felton, intelligent apes, and apocalyptic war to boot, and who cares?? The endless sequels in the 1970s were riffing off a great film. This is a prequel to one of the very worst films of the 2000s.

You screwed up last time
Michael Bay has actually apologised for the unholy mess that was Transformers 2, and that’s quite something given how ludicrously profitable a movie that was. Transformers 3: The Dark of the Moon sees Megan Fox leaving the franchise, but from the trailer it looks like it still has enough racial profiling in its approach to characterisation to keep the California branch of the ACLU tied up for years. Can it really only be 4 years since the original movie was a surprisingly fun blast? The writers’ strike is largely responsible for the disastrous outing last time but can the properly working writers save things now, and perhaps not introduce about 40 new robots this time round? Scream 4 comes out 11 years after the last movie in the series which suffered greatly from creator Kevin Williamson’s abandonment of his franchise to script his TV show Dawson’s Creek. Williamson has been producing supreme dark popcorn of late in the shape of TV series The Vampire Diaries so fingers crossed that his script for this new combination of the original cast with youngsters including Emma Roberts and Hayden Panettiere lives up to the high standards of its mighty predecessors.

8 Miles High Concept
Cowboys & Aliens may in future years come to be regarded as the moment where the masses totally abandoned cinema in favour of forms of entertainment that were slightly more philosophically challenging, like tiddlywinks. It could be a good film, after all the redoubtable Daniel Craig is starring and Iron Man helmer Jon Favreau is directing, but from just seeing the title and then reading the pitch it seems almost like some drunken executives made a bet as to what the most ludicrous high-concept they could possibly get green-lighted was, and this narrowly beat out Flying Monkeys Vs Crab People in 3-D.