THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

Alongside Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (utterly forgettable) The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was one of Disney’s two tent pole releases this summer – both of which flopped. It sees an increasingly bedraggled Nicolas Cage (no, it’s not just the makeup) team up with bombastic producer Jerry Bruckheimer once more. The pair previously worked together on the National Treasure franchise, which unsuccessfully attempted to emulate the Indiana Jones series. Now, however, they’ve narrowed their focus unto the Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment found within Disney’s Fantasia and have expanded it, removed the Mouse and built a world around it. 

That’s the one segment that everybody seems to remember from Fantasia. Many cherish and adore it, but does this expanded version of it work and was Jerry Bruckheimer the right man for the job?

The simple answer to both questions is “no”. The film lacks in the subtly and genuine sense of terror that the original Disney segment mustered so effortlessly. Bruckheimer squeezes the $150 million budget for all it’s worth, but isn’t capable of conjuring anything other than a nice looking mess.

Cage plays Balthazar Blake a sorcerer who shuns the red cloak, blue hat look for something approaching Hobo-chic. After being imprisoned inside an urn for 1250 years, he awakens in modern-day New York to find himself re-embroiled in a battle between good and evil that has been raging throughout time. His arch-nemesis Maxim Horvath (Alfred Molina – who channels Oscar Wilde at his most menacing) is attempting to reawaken the Sorceress Morgana le Fay (Alice Krige) who in turn hopes to use her powers to destroy the world. At no point does the film attempt to establish why she’d want to do this. It’s clunky, tab A into slot B stuff.

Blake’s only ally in this battle is Mickey Mouse’s human avatar, Dave Stutler (played by Knocked Up’s Jay Baruchel) who he believes to be a descendent of Merlin himself – or a ‘prime Merlinian’, as he’s referred to at one point. Baruchel does a good job injecting his character with a kind of nerdy eagerness but is unable to create any real chemistry with co-star Nic Cage.

The money that was thrown at this film is evident. It looks good, the CGI is great (apart from a questionable looking CGI dragon) and the action whizzes by nicely. Unfortunately, there’s little to support the impressive visuals. The story manages to be both convoluted and predictable. There’s no sense of impending doom or catastrophe and none of these characters ever appear to be under real threat. It never once summons the sense of dread that the original Disney segment did within moments.

Then there’s the soppy romance between Baruchel and Teresa Palmer, who plays Rebecca Barnes, an icy blonde who Dave has had his eyes on ever since he was a little nipper. The film opens with a sequence where ten year old Dave hands Rebecca a piece of paper asking whether she wants to be his girlfriend, she hands the paper back, but alas! It’s caught by the wind and Dave is forced to give chase. Thus begins an overly elaborate chase sequence which ends with young Dave humiliating himself in front of the girl of his dreams (he pees his pants – there’s no coming back from that). The sequence occurs only because it’s necessary to move the plot forward. Most normal human-beings would choose to simply interact with their loved ones using their vocal chords and not put so much stock in a piece of paper, but there you are.

It’s endemic of the lengths that this film will go to crowbar in one action sequence after another instead of developing character. When Rebecca reveals what she wrote on that little slip of paper towards the end of the film, did director Jon Turteltaub really expect us to care? Palmer’s character is allowed to utter only clichés and she does so with all the conviction of a bored call-centre worker.

If the actors aren’t invested in this little money-spinner how are we supposed to be? The Sorcerer’s Apprentice got the kicking it deserved in the box office and I hope Bruckheimer scurried away with his tail between his legs. I hold out little hope for Pirates of the Caribbean 4.

LAST TRAIN HOME

The pace of economic change in China is nothing short of astonishing. Economic reforms began some 30 years ago, triggering a period of sustained growth that many consider to be a ‘miracle’. This surge of capital is unlike anything any nation state has been subject to for the last 50 years and it’s clear that it’s going to continue. Here’s a fun fact: every month China produces so much excess cash that they could easily use such money to head out into the international market and buy two or three of Britain’s biggest companies and corporations. This month they could easily snap up British Petroleum, Vodafone and Tesco, next month they could go for Barclays, British Telecom and J Sainsbury. Remember the fuss that was generated when American-owned Kraft purchased our beloved Cadburys? China could have produced the surplus cash needed for such an investment in the space of about a week; indeed, the purchase would have amounted to them spending a small amount of pocket change.

Whether China goes the way of Japan, who some twenty years ago had their own economic growth spurt brought to an abrupt end after a serious and fatal asset bubble (whereby the price of Japanese assets saw themselves seriously over-inflated due to surplus-demand) or if it continues along the path towards being an economic superpower remains to be seen. One thing we do know for sure is that any growth of this nature is sure to increase the gap between the rich and the poor significantly. These monetary changes have effected a period of rapid urbanization, which has seen millions of farmers and rural workers move to the cities, bringing about environmental retrogression, a large amount of unemployment and a gap in income that is growing unthinkably large. This is the story of Last Train Home, director Lixin Fan’s documentary film that gives life and character to the detrimental effects of China’s rapid, uncontrolled growth. It throws light on the dark heart of China’s economic miracle.

Every year 130 million or so migrant Chinese workers make a living in dank, soulless, and de-humanising factories producing the goods which power the Chinese economy. In most cases this requires the worker to be away from their family for the space of an entire year – returning home only during the Chinese New Year. It is by this mass human exodus of Chinese migrant workers that the film receives its title – these individuals have to scrabble on board a train that is too compact and too slow and suffer through the largest human migration in the world.

By choosing to focus on this journey, on the separation of families and on the distance and differences between China’s rural past and industrial future, Last Train Home can be seen as document regarding the gaps of all shapes and sizes that have been formed in Chinese society by their economic miracle. Not just the gap that has formed between the rich and the poor, or between industry and agriculture, but also the gap that such economic toils create between individuals that love each other. Perhaps this is why Last Train Home is such an affecting film – it operates on a uniquely human level. We take it for granted that what matters most is not money, but the human relationships that we form over the course of our lives and yet for many in China it is an economic necessity that these relationships be waylaid.

Lixin Fan smartly chose to detail this struggle by focusing on the story of one family trapped in these demoralizing and soul-crushingly glum circumstances. It follows the Zhang family, the mother and father of which left their two children to be raised by their Grandma for 16 years, as they followed a seemingly endless cycle whereby they would work for a year, return for the New Year and head back out to work soon after. Such sacrifices were made in the name of seeing their children through school and hopefully onwards to a life. However, their teenage daughter Qin does not see things this way. She is wracked with a sense of abandonment and rejection which soon manifests into an unerring desire to escape from both her parent’s expectations (that she goes to school, makes a living for herself and doesn’t have to suffer in the same manner that they have to) and from a future that she has no control over. Some of her decisions may appear at first to be disarmingly selfish, but deeper thought reveals them to be entirely natural. There are no bad people in this film; there are only people who are trapped by their own dependence on a broken, manipulative system that throws lives into disrepute. Even when the father, Mr Yang Zhang loses his way and lashes out brutally at his daughter, it’s easy to see it as the consequence of his own tragic embroilment within this system that has left him beleaguered and emotionally insecure.

Lixin Fan’s film went down pretty well with the critics at Sundance this year (it still has 100% on rottentomatoes) and you can see why. This is an undeniably powerful and gently forceful film. It gets its point across without being shouty, pointy or polemical. It is all the more affective for being a simple but effective story about one family’s misfortunes set against the background of a much wider tragedy. Whilst not exactly pleasant or feel-good viewing, Last Train Home remains essential viewing for anyone with any interest in the workings of the economy, cultural anthropology and the manner in which human beings relate to one another.

THE SECRET OF KELLS

Whoever pitched The Secret of Kells as an animated children’s movie must have received a few stony-faces. The film re-imagines the creation of the Book of Kells, an illuminated Gospel manuscript created by Celtic Monks around 800 A.D., and still considered to be the zenith of western calligraphy. Of course a movie about calligraphy wouldn’t sit too well with groups of hyper-active kids, so The Secret of Kells combines the historical with a sense of imagination and adventure. Taking its cues from Irish folklore and the likes, the movie plays like an amalgamation of a number of different fairy tales. It hops along at a giddy pace, bouncing ideas around and looking beautiful all the while.

The story is set in an isolated Irish Abbey community which is trying desperately to improve its defences against viking attack.  However, the Abbot’s nephew, 12-year-old Brandon isn’t interested in aiding his uncle’s attempt to build a huge wall around the abbey, preferring instead to illustrate manuscripts with a gang of monks in the scriptorium. Soon Brother Aidan, a master illuminator, joins the community after being forced out of his home by the vikings, and he soon takes Brandon under his wing. He brings with him a book which he hopes to complete during his stay at the Abbey of Kells. Soon enough, in order to help Brother Aidan, Brandon is forced to venture outside the abbey walls into a world of forest spirits, mythical creatures and deadly vikings.

The visuals are something to behold. The animators must have studied the look and aesthetic of the Book of Kells and attempted to mimic a similar yet contemporary style. It has an antique, decorative feeling unnatural amongst most animated movies. There’s a particularly stunning sequence when the vikings finally break through the defences at the Abbey of Kells, where the animators limit themselves to a palette of red, black and white, with brilliantly striking effect. As for the vikings themselves, they are represented by fearsome, shadowlike, horned spectres that drift across the scenery with a regal ease.

The story’s imaginative, if a little convoluted. One criticism that I might level towards the film is that it attempts to get too much into its short 75 minute running time. Regardless of this, there’s a reason why the film was nominated for the 2009 Oscar for Best Animated Feature. It’s a true original, in terms of style and attitude. Children are sure to be entertained and adults will be glad that it’s something a little different from the usual family fare they are forced to take their kids to. Even if the story leaves you a little cold, the visuals give you more than a little to hang on to.

IRON MAN 2

The original Iron Man film, released in back in 2008, formed a pretty solid one-two punch with The Dark Knight. Together they reasserted the Superhero movie as a critically viable and commercially successful enterprise. Yet, Iron Man differed significantly in terms of mood from Nolan’s Batman offering.  The Dark Knight was about as broody as a fertility clinic and as cheerful as a morgue, Favreau’s Iron Man attempted to capture the comic’s sense of fun. In terms of mood, it’s much closer to Raimi’s Spiderman films. This was a breath of fresh air for critics who were growing tired of these grandiose and ‘worthy’ Superhero origin stories that lock onto a serious mood from the very first scene and rarely relent for a smile throughout.

The film had a naturalistic feel uncommon to superhero flicks and the dialogue was zippy and spontaneous. The whole production felt as fresh as a squirt of Febreeze. It was also a fantastic and deserved success which, of course, necessitated a sequel. As is often the case with follow-up efforts, Iron Man 2 aims for the sky, but is weighed down by a lack of focus, a cocktail of contrary moods and a general lack of bonhomie. If I could ask Iron Man 2 one question, it would be this: Why so serious?

The film begins with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) announcing his identity as Iron Man to the press. Across the world in Russia, Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) mourning the recent death of his father regards the announcement with interest and begins work on constructing similar technology. His plan is to use the technology to destroy Tony Stark – the son of the man he holds directly responsible for his father’s undeserved life of abject poverty. You may think that the whole father-son dichotomy that underlies Tony’s Russian rivalry would be meaty enough to fill a film. Unfortunately, Iron Man 2 has sequelitus and chooses instead to pull in about 3-4 different directions.

Where do you start? There’s the complicated relationship between Tony Stark and the long suffering Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) which isn't ever granted any great importance. Whilst the first film was a good showcase for the chemistry between Downey Jr. and Paltrow, the flair and energy that once existed between them seems spent. Sure there’s still the snappy dialogue, but it seems less witty and dynamic than before. Tony Stark also has to contend with his own mortality – the palladium core in his chest that keeps him alive is slowly poisoning his body and there is seemingly nothing he can do to stop it. Such realisations can be difficult on a man, and Stark is led down a dark path for much of the film – he starts drinking, alienating his friends and self-sabotaging his business. It’s a far-cry from the self-aware, it’s-nonsense-but-you-love-it tone of the first film. It’s a shame that this path doesn’t really go anywhere and that all these different strands are resolved with such ease. Iron Man 2 is a bit of a mood roulette – you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get next.

Tony also has to contend with a rivalry between himself and a rival defence contractor Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell – who looks like he’s having a good time throughout – at least someone is) that is threatening to bubble over into violence. All this and I haven’t even mentioned Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson’s roles in the film. I do so for good reason – they are almost entirely superfluous – they are here to service The Avengers, Marvel’s next big superhero project. It’s almost as though Favreau were told that he had to include these two characters and made no real effort to ingratiate them into Iron Man 2’s wider story. Despite this, Scarlett Johansson is responsible for one of the films better scenes. Late on in the film, she dons a skin-tight black catsuit, infiltrates Justin Hammer’s compound and in doing so kicks all kinds of ass. It’s a stand-out scene because for once, it’s action that doesn’t merely involve robots hitting each other.  

RED

Director Robert Schwentke was the man who brought us the sketchy, overly coy adaptation of The Time Traveller’s Wife. As such, the gun-toting Red is something of a change of pace for him. Based, apparently on a graphic novel of the same name by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner – although it could have just as easily been based on an early draft of Stallone’s script for The Expendables – Red sees a group of elderly James Bond types band together to prevent their own extermination. It’s all an excuse to see the likes of Helen Mirren, Brian Cox, Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich brandishing automatic weapons, quipping nifty one-liners and smashing heads. And why not? We love to see actors trying something a little out of their comfort zone and we as a nation sure as heck love watching action films, so the likes of Red and The Expendables end up being almost inevitable. Unfortunately, Red isn’t half as much fun as its premise.

By all rights Bruce Willis is now the king of aging tough guys, so naturally he’s the star of this film. He still looks and acts the part with ease and emits sass with every breath. Willis plays Frank Moses (a much better name than Sly’s Barney Ross in The Expendables) a retired former C.I.A. black ops agent, who spends his days flirting with Sarah (Mary Louise Parker - the star of Weeds) a phone operator for a pension’s office in Kansas City. When Willis discovers that there are people who want him dead, any way anyhow, he heads to Kansas City and fearing for Sarah’s life, kidnaps her in order to keep her safe. Frank soon discovers that the C.I.A are hunting down everybody connected with a secret mission that occurred in Guatemala during 1981. Thus ensues is a whistle-stop tour across the United States as Frank gets in touch with his old contacts and tries to get to the bottom of the attempt on their lives.

The plot’s almost as superfluous as the plot for The Expendables and it’s even more episodic. If you know the cast list for the film, you’ll sit there checking off the appearance of each and every big name. Once they’ve established Bruce Willis as Frank Moses, you prepare yourself for the next star, and so on and so forth. It’s circular, lifeless and uninspired stuff. Why when everything is being forced so neatly into the proceedings and each character is given their own fair amount of screen time does the whole thing feel so uncomfortable? The screenplay seems to lack a sense of inspiration or improvisation that could set it apart from the slew of action movies that work their way into cinemas every year.

It just goes to show, it’s not enough to have an all-star cast and expect them to do all the work. This film may have a good box office, but will it remain in our memories for long? All the big players acquit themselves well, but they do so within such formulaic and predictable confines as to make the whole thing null and void. What’s the sense in getting all these stars together for a movie with a silly premise if you’re not even going to have any fun with it? As it is, it’s just one contrivance piled on another, which amounts to little and grows stale very quick. When you’re reaching the half-way mark of the film and you start thinking, “well, that’s everybody on the cast list except Helen Mirren, so I guess we’ll see her next”, you know something’s gone wrong.

It’s not helped by interspersing the action with clunky CGI. At one stage a car chase occurs between Frank Moses and the C.I.A agent sent out to terminate him (Karl Urban). Moses pulls on the handbrake, steps out of his car as it completes a 360 and ambles away to avoid the backside of the vehicle before it impacts with his torso. This could have been a neat little stunt, but the movement of the car is so obviously done with CGI and you can tell the whole thing was done with absolutely no risk to Bruce’s person. That kind of sucks the whole enjoyment out of the affair and renders any chance of excitement negligible. Later in the film, Morgan Freeman ties up the man he believes to be behind the assassination attempts on their lives and slaps him across the face. Am I being paranoid or was this slap actually computer generated? The slap lacked any sense of ‘meat’ – just like the film itself. The whole thing is one big missed opportunity and yet it’s difficult to get worked up about a film like Red. The truth is, I’m not angry about its failings, I’m just disappointed.

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE)

This film starts off by paying its dues to a number of horror movie conventions. We are introduced to two dotty, sexed-up American ladies road-tripping through Germany. As is often the way when Americans venture into foreign climbs, their car receives a flat tyre and they find themselves hobbling on their high-heels through woodland in the dead-of-night. It’s when they make their way through the woods and find Dr. Heiter’s house of residence that things start to get a little strange. Not that director Tommy Six’s vision of Germany isn’t a little perplexing from the get go. When the two girls are left stranded by their flat tyre, another car pulls up next to them, rolls down its window and reveals a rotund, heavily-perspiring German looking to take advantage of the hapless duo. The only normal Germans we see during the course of the entire film are two policemen introduced towards the end of the film and even they are characterised by a kind of bumbling inadequacy. 

Not that our two American representatives fair much better – they are loud, screechy and generally annoying who inspire no sympathy whatsoever. They aren’t helped by some horrendously clunky dialogue (sample: “There’s no signal” – “What? There’s always a signal!”). It comes as something of a relief when at the films midpoint, the two girls find their mouths clamped to the back-end of another human being thus removing their ability to talk. This is all part of Dr Heiter’s (played by the sinister Dieter Laser) twisted design. He seeks to create a self-sustaining human Siamese-triplet – or as it comes to be known the Human Centipede. The mechanisms and the manner in which these humans connect to one another are almost too horrible to describe, but if you’ve seen the trailer or heard any rumblings about this film, you’ll likely already know about it. There are times during the course of this movie that you’ll need an iron stomach just to persist with this film’s brutal distastefulness. Cinema-goers have been subject to toilet humour for some time now (thanks Adam Sandler) but now it seems we have to be subject to toilet horror too?

The question of whether this is something that we as an audience want to see is somewhat null and void (although the film survived only on the basis of a strong word of mouth campaign – “did you hear about the film where a crazy doctor sews together three human beings by their...”). It’s void because The Human Caterpillar is a badly put together film. Tommy Six, whilst making a brave decision to persist in the creation of this film and not to water down the central plot-conceit delivers a rather conventional film. The camerawork is your typical made-for-TV kind of fare (Six has his roots in Dutch television). The characters are dull and are only there to serve the plot. There’s no real sense of location – the film is set in Germany only because it allows Six to draw from and make comparisons to the various atrocities the Nazis committed revolving around experimenting on humans.

 In some respects this film is critic-proof. There will always be an audience for this film, because it’s so damn niche. There’s just nothing out there that plays on such a uniquely, stomach-churning and plain revolting level. The trouble is that viewers may arrive at this film expecting it to be equally as provocative and as unique as its premise and it really isn’t. There will be very few repeat-viewings of this film. Maybe a more talented cast and crew could create something equally distasteful yet exponentially more watchable. I can say now that I don’t think this will be the case with The Human Centipede II (The Final Sequence).

BURIED

There’s a scene in Kill Bill 2 where ‘The Bride’ is buried alive. It's tense, exciting and visually appealing and yet the possibility that such a sequence could be stretched to feature-film length never hit me. This brings us to Buried, a film with a neat, if not entirely unprecedented premise. Yet, I’m not sure if this kind of thing has ever been done in such a visceral, unrelenting and uncomfortable fashion. Cinema at its best should transport us away from our own life - be it to a more wonderful world, or, as in the case of Buried to a brutal, nightmarish reality. Indeed watching Buried in the darkness of the cinema as I writhed about uncomfortably in my chair, I had the unsettling sensation that the walls were closing in on me and the air was becoming steadily thicker. Don’t be surprised if when you leave your seat at the end of the movie you find yourself praising some higher power for simply having the ability to get up and leave. Buried is the kind of film that grips you right from the start and doesn’t let go until like its protagonist, you have been shed of all hope.

Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) an American contractor working as a truck-driver in Iraq awakens in complete darkness. Like Paul, we see nothing and can hear only the sound of his increasingly frantic breath as he scrabbles around in the darkness realising the full horror of his situation. He is buried some distance under the ground (though not so deep that he has no phone signal) in a wooden coffin with only a lighter, a torch that doesn’t work particularly well, a couple of glow sticks, a knife, a flask of alcohol and most importantly – a mobile phone. Unlike The Bride, Paul cannot focus all his energy into a punch and break his way out of the coffin. If you haven’t seen the trailer or heard anything about this film beforehand, all you need to know is that Buried is 94 minutes long and that all 94 minutes occur inside the coffin. There need be no further plot analysis – indeed to find out any more may impair your enjoyment of the film.

Buried, like any film of its ilk owes a debt of gratitude towards Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in which Jimmy Stewart’s broken leg keeps him confined to the rear room of his house until the end of the film. Despite having placed these restrictions on the scope of the film (an experiment he would later repeat with Rope) Hitchcock was able to engineer what might be his most suspenseful film. Three years later audiences saw and loved 12 Angry Men, which was set solely in a jury room as the titular men attempt to argue out a verdict for a particularly tricky murder case. In recent years we’ve had Flightplan, Panic Room, Devil and best of all, little seen Spanish thriller Fermat’s Room, all of which keep their protagonists trapped in a fixed location. However, the key point of comparison for this film is 2002’s Phone Booth – an intriguing concept which saw its star Colin Farrell, held against his will inside a telephone booth as he attempted to negotiate his escape without being shot down by the sniper surveilling him.

Buried and Phone Booth share a few things in common. They are both, primarily, star-vehicles. It was in Phone Booth that Colin Farrell first proved he had the potential to be a decent actor. However, more impressive still is Ryan Reynold’s performance in Buried. What’s incredible about the performance is the surprising range that Reynold’s is able to showcase despite extremely limiting extraneous circumstances. Running the full emotional gauntlet without a psychological gambit left unexplored Reynold’s proves here that there’s a future for him in the movies that lies outside playing the Romantic lead in the latest dreary Hollywood rom-com.

Moreover, both Buried and Phone Booth confine their characters and force them to use the phone to attempt to save their lives. Where Buried differs from Phone Booth and a key reason why it is a significantly better film lies in the adept directorial handiwork of Rodrigo Cortés. His camerawork in particular deserves some plaudits – there isn’t an inch of the coffin left unscathed. By fixing the location and having only one real character on screen for the course of the whole film, the director always runs the risk of boring the audience. I can happily confess that I wasn’t bored once; I was too busy sharing in Paul’s fear, hope and desperation. This kind of sustained suspense is a real rarity. Just don't be fooled into thinking that the premise of this film isn't weighty enough to support it's 94-minute running time.