Movies. I’ve watched a lot of them lately. Here are some words about some of them.
Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea
Trailer
This is Hayao Miazaki so it’s obviously Studio Ghibli so you can’t escape how good it’s going to be. Beautiful, fully realised yet simple and easy to watch this re-weaving of Hans Anderson’s Little Mermaid is one of the best things I’ve ever looked at.
Luckily for the UK it’s hitting cinemas soon, although personally I’d ditch the Cate Blanchett headed dub and hold out for a subtitled screening if you don’t want to catch the Disneyfication effect of Noah Cyrus and trying to hard to talk to kids. Either however, is better than not seeing it though. Especially if you have some kids to take with you. They’ll love it just as much, if not more than you.
This movie is quite literally an epic. I know, I know. That’s a word thrown about far too often in relation to cinema and usually actually means ‘had a large budget’ or ‘directed by a fat ham who made a popular movie once'. But at an initially off-putting 4 hours long this offering from beat poet director and mentalist Sion Sono, Love Exposure, to give the film it's English title, is engrossing, charming and amusing and well worth the evening it'll take you to get through it. Honestly you may not think you want to watch a 237 minute treatise on the nature of relationships featuring up skirt photography, panties and one young man's quest for love against a back ground of religious confusion and shady cult activities but you really, really do.
Funky Forest: The First Contact
Trailer
This is another longing Japanese offering but bare with me. It's worth it.
Told as a series of interconnected vignettes this movie is bafflingly cool, endlessly confusing and utterly hilarious. I can't say much more about it that would make sense save the words 'dance numbers' and 'aliens' and if this makes it sound a little 'OMG I AM SO WACKY AND LIKE RANDOM LOL PURPLE MONKEY CHEESE' then that's the fault of my bad reviewing, not the movie. Check it out.
A post modern as fuck black comedy, this is perhaps one of the few things you'll ever see to feature Vampires that's actually enjoyable and meritorious. It may have been made in 1994 but it kicks the tits off True Blood and laughs devilishly in the face of the Twilight Saga.
A terrible vehicle for Thora Birch.
The only reason that this movie appears is because I've been saving that pun for months.
If you've ever had the feeling that a director accidentally managed to film entirely the wrong movie while another far more interesting story was taking place elsewhere on set, somewhere behind the catering tent or just around a set corner then this is the movie for you. Funnier than death, insightful, intelligent and compellingly original this Canadian horror is an example of what movies could be if the people who made them didn't suck. Slickly presented for a horror and perfectly written Pontypool is a gem of a movie that seems to understand the principles of it's genre almost perfectly.
The English speaking highlight of my cinematic year, Moon was hard to track down despite it being a mostly UK made movie. It received no general release in any cinema under 40+ miles from my home and languished, mostly ignored, for months until Jonathon Ross had the decency to mention it briefly in his 2009 movie review of the year, if not the courage to advertise it more than this years terrible block busters.
I didn't see Moon till November, which was aggravating.
It was however, well worth the wait. Commandingly directed and visualised, brilliantly designed and written and featuring the tiny cast of Kevin Spacey as a maintenance droid who communicates in smilies and Same Rockwell as his moon bound charge, this film blows everything else out of the water. Directed by David Bowie's son - Duncan Jones - Moon is like 2001 but good as opposed to being deliberately obtuse and pompous in places.
Utterly Beautiful.
Production, writing, direction, editing, soundtrack composition and costumes designing: these are some of the things performed by Jamin and Kiowa Winans that made Ink happen. Though it's flawed and a little sentimental at times with some ropey acting here and there you can't help but admire the efforts of two people working very hard to bring what was obviously their baby into the world. Something of their dedication and sheer pluck will always leak through and leave you with a good feeling towards their movie which makes it worth seeing, highlighting as it does the ability for independent film companies to secure a well deserved release for their products. New voices are mostly always good. Unless they're terrible. Then they should go away.
This is not the case for the people behind Ink. It may sometimes over reach itself, or perhaps just it's budget, but it's still a charming, visually daring piece of work and well worth the time you might spend having a look at it.
Starring Dennis Quaid and an MMA cage fighter this movie could have gone super wrong, super quickly but luckily for me, as I actually paid to watch it at a cinema, it didn't. Well paced, not entirely predictable and good looking Pandorum is a nice addition to the Space Survival Horror role call like Event Horizon and Alien - and we could always do with more like those.
This is a movie I tried to ignore. Hard. I mean, it's about Roller Derby. Not that Roller Derby isn't kick ass. It's just a very hip sport right now which is bound to mean that some asshole will want to ruin it by making a shitty movie all about it. That's how Hollywood works after all.
But thank God for director Drew Barrymore and writer Shauna Cross who managed to do the almost impossible and produce an actual pro-female movie without ruining Roller Derby in the process.
Whip It is genuinely funny and handled with a lightness and subtlety often missing from the rom-com-chick-flick genre which usually leave you feel bruised and sore after they're done kicking you in the shins with the steel toe capped boots of feminine conformity. This is a movie I would take my teenage niece to - if I had one - and insist she took notes on.
Starring Ellen Paige, Juliette Lewis, Beef Supreme and featuring a show stealing performance by Barrymore as the amazingly named 'Smashly Simpson', Whip It is the sort of life affirming coming of age movie that's easy to stomach and fantastic to watch.
The second of Rob Zombie’s remakes may not be liked by everyone, just like his first attempt. But if you feel that way you are dumb. Powerful, raw, and sexy-interesting Mr Zombie brings reality, an unflinching commitment to violence and his super hot wife to a boring stilted franchise and if you don’t like it then hard cheese to you.