 |
Follow @ultraculture | Sky Movies HD - Blog of the Year 2011 |
|||||
The Woman in Blackdir. James Watkins |
 |
I was so busy organising a teen film festival last week that I completely forgot to mention what a bonkers clocks week it was for new teen movies. Young Adult, Martha Marcy May Marlene and Chronicle all more or less fit the profile, and two of them already feature in my Best Movies of 2012 list. Cinemas showing all three are few and far between, but if you happen to live near the West India Quay Cineworld then there’s a hell of a triple bill waiting for you one night this week.
| Methodically watching and ranking every Hugh Grant movie in order of Grantiness in a contrived effort to convey my love for the man. |
Armie Hammer in J. Edgar |
Max Headroom |
A bulldog |
||
Old Marty McFly from |
Pop-Pea from |
Nick Hewer from |
||
A scrunched-up newspaper |
A trash humper |
Rupert Murdoch |
||
A cauliflower |
Her Majesty The Queen |
A lemon-shaped rock |
||
Clint Eastwood |
Johnny Knoxville dressed up as an old man |
This guy |
||
Like the rest of you, I’m pretty stoked for Moonrise Kingdom, the new symmetrical masterpiece from Wes Anderson starring Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Jason Schwartzman. So stoked in fact, that I’ve one-upped Anderson and horizontally mirrored the entire trailer straight down the middle. See if you can spot the difference.
By some strange coincidence, a courier arrived on Wednesday afternoon while I was writing my review of The Darkest Hour to deliver me the film’s poster. As you’ll know if you’ve read the review, my impartiality was not affected by this generous offering.
Because I have little interest in devoting any more of my life to the film, I’ve decided to auction off the poster to raise money for the Red Cross. And to make the prospect more attractive I’ve torn it in half, scrunched one piece into a ball and thrown in some Drive toothpicks and a Crunchie.
To make an offer on all of the above, simply go to THIS EBAY AUCTION at any point in the next three days and place your bid.
With your help, at least some good can come of this unspeakable atrocity.
The one accusation most commonly levelled at films like Transformers is that they’re big on budget but light on ideas. This is indeed a serious problem facing mainstream action filmmaking today. Much worse, however, are films that fall short on both fronts. Speaking of which, The Darkest Hour is released nationwide this Thursday.
Produced by cult Kazakhstani director Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch) and made for a relatively modest $30million, the film is part of a growing horde of contemporary science fiction B-movies like Skyline and Battle: LA, all out to prove that you don’t need half a billion dollars and a megalomaniac Michael Bay type to make a serviceable action romp. Sadly, all The Darkest Hour really proves is Emile Hirsch’s need for a new agent.
Hirsch and Max Minghella (from The Social Network) star as a pair of headstrong American entrepreneurs travelling to Moscow to present their fledgling social network to European investors. Upon arrival, they discover that a hitherto agreeable business partner (played by Swedish star Joel Kinnaman) has gone rogue and created his own, superior version of the site. To be honest, you’d think Minghella would have seen it coming.
Taking solace in the company of two attractive but essentially superfluous female characters (including The Wackness‘s Olivia Thirlby) in a Russian club, the pair are all set to return home the following morning. Unfortunately for them, fate has other plans.
A flock of mysterious ‘energy beings’ promptly descend to Earth and though they’re invisible and therefore visually unimpressive, their ability to atomise human beings on contact makes them a serious threat to mankind. It’s quickly established that our heroes’ only hope of survival is to stay hidden during the day and explore the city by night, when they can be alerted to the energy beings’ presence by lit street lamps, blaring car alarms, etc. etc. etc. Basically wherever these things go, shit powers up. (Where are they when my iPhone dies on the night bus home, amiright?)
This ‘light is dangerous, darkness is safe’ conceit is a bold but interesting one in a genre that’s built on precisely the opposite theory. Sadly, The Darkest Hour‘s antagonists are far too vague a threat to really imbue any confidence in the idea, especially when it goes against hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary programming. And Paranormal Activity.
Eventually the team work out a way of fighting back at the extraterrestrials, using a ‘microwave gun’ to weaken their powers of invisibility and then shooting them when they become visible. A bit like how you get Mew in the final level of Pokémon Snap. This revelation leads to one of the most dreary, undramatic third acts in recent memory — notable only for its spectacularly high volume of plot holes. Still, even a decrease in tension is quite interesting compared to the relentless monotony of the rest of the film.
In short, The Darkest Hour might just give you newfound respect for Michael Bay. And that’s no mean feat considering that he’s really, really awful.
The winner will be announced along with all of the real Bafta awards on February 12th.