What to Watch – May 2013

At the tail end of last month Iron Man 3 was released here in the UK… it signalled the start of summer. In May, the huge blockbusters continue.
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I’m So Excited – 3rd May

I’m sure it will be interesting to see what makes the Spaniards laugh. This is the latest feature from Oscar winning director Pedro Almodovar.
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Star Trek Into Darkness – 9th May

This could be JJ Abrams last Star Trek film and it looks as though he’s left us with a treat. I predict that this will be the best film to come out this summer.
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Mud – 10th May

I’ve been looking forward to Mud since I first read about it. Two boys help a fugitive evade the law on a quest to reunite him with his true love.
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The Great Gatsby – 16th May

And I’ve been waiting for this even longer. Gatsby was supposed to have been released back in January but got pushed back here. But with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role it’s bound to do well.
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Fast & Furious 6 – 17th May

Fast Five took this franchise in a much needed change of direction. Now it feels like Ocean’s Eleven with cars and guns and what’s not to like about that? And if you needed another reason to go see this: The. Rock.
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Epic – 22nd May

Every trailer I have seen for Epic just looks beautiful. I’m expecting one of the best animated films of all time right here.
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The Hangover Part III – 24th May

Another trilogy draws to a close at the end of May and it looks as though this might be the best Hangover film yet. Although, no hangover is actually featured by the looks of things.

Side Effects Review

Steven Soderbergh, director Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Thirteen (Ocean’s Twelve too but I’m trying to build him up, not condemn him) and more recently Magic Mike, has previously stated that Side Effects marks the end of his directorial career for a few years as he intends to take a sabbatical. So with Side Effects, is Soderbergh going out on a high?

It’s probably best to go into Side Effects knowing very little about it and prepare to just be taken with it. But at it’s very basic the story can be split into two parts: the first half chronicles Emily Taylor’s (Rooney Mara) battle with depression and the meetings she has with her psychiatrist before she suffers traumatic side effects of a new anti-depressant; the second half is about her psychiatrist (Jude Law) as he attempts to unravel the truth and find out who is guilty of the events caused by the drugs.

As a psychological neo-thriller Side Effects requires some top notch acting from its headline stars. And Mara and Law do not disappoint at all. All I could think while Rooney Mara was on screen was “this is the same girl from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?” because she is completely different but still puts in a wonderful performance. Based on her performances that I have seen so far she is set to become one of the best, most versatile actresses of her generation. At only 27, she has the whole world of film at her feet.
I will admit that I am guilty of absolutely lambasting Jude Law in the early years of this century, but since about 2009 my opinion of him could not have changed more. In recent years he has emerged as one of my favourite actors to watch now; his performances are consistently good and that does not change here with one of his best performances to date in Side Effects as the obsessed psychiatrist.

Side Effects really does crank up the tension and suspense in a way that Hitchcock would be proud of. The story is very well thought out and once the first twist hits the audience it’s as if you’re on a roller coaster with twists and turns coming thick and fast, you can never really be sure what it actually happening. There are a lot of clever plot points that are made and this helps to make it such a compelling watch.

Unfortunately though, the twist and turn nature also lets the film down a little. In a film such as this there always comes the inevitable point where you have to tell everything to the audience, which sort of takes away the point of making such a clever film. And in Side Effects, Emily Taylor’s narration does not make it as interesting as it should and could be. The underlying back story that is given at this point does not seem strong enough for the rest of the actions that took place.

Jude Law’s character makes some very good commentaries on the state of counseling and depression which are well worth considering, the whole cast put in very good dramatic performances and while I was in the cinema I was truly gripped. However, after leaving I felt like I was missing out, that I had been unfulfilled and underwhelmed.

Multiple viewings are prescribed.

My Rating: 7/10.

In Some Instances Death May Occur – Side Effects Trailer

UK Release Date: 15th March 2013

Stars: Steven Soderbergh (director), Rooney Mara, Channing Tatum, Jude Law, Catherine Zeta-Jones, David Costabile.

Plot: A woman turns to prescription medication as a way of handling her anxiety concerning her husband’s upcoming release from prison.

That synopsis doesn’t really do Side Effects any justice; from reading the plot outline Side Effects sounds like a film that could induce sleep by itself, but upon watching the trailer it becomes clear there is certainly more to it than meets the eye: a shadowy organisation creating drugs with hidden dangers, Jude Law’s murky past… “everyone knows everything” – there are bigger things happening here than just anxiety problems.

Directed by the man behind so many great films (Ocean’s Eleven, Che, Traffic, Contagion, Haywire, Magic Mike) Steven Soderbergh’s latest reunites him with one of the hottest names around at the minute: Channing Tatum. Combine that winning combination with Oscar nominated star of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Rooney Mara, and what you have here is a fine combination of talents. It will also be pleasing to hear the man who wrote the script, Scott Z. Burns, also wrote The Bourne Ultimatum. Between them, the cast and crew have knocked up some pretty huge hits!

So the trailer itself, how good is it? It’s good enough to make the audience ask questions and wonder what is going on, that’s for sure. However, it perhaps tries to hold a little too much back and I would have liked to have found out more about Side Effects. Saying that, it’s a good four or five months until release here in the UK and with a first trailer it’s okay to hold things back a little. I look forward to seeing more of this in the coming months.

Gangster Squad Will Be The Coolest Movie of 2013

Gangster Squad was originally set to be released this year (2012) back in September, yet due to the tragic Aurora shootings the release date was pushed back and Hollywood execs felt the need to re-shoot what would no doubt have become an iconic scene in film history. The scene in question featured several of the characters shooting in to a packed screening at the cinema from behind the screen; obviously, this was changed as to not be associated with the Aurora shootings. However, now that everything has been amended Gangster Squad has a new trailer and a new release date of January 2013.

Gangster Squad is inspired by true events (although when a film says that you can never be sure just what is true and what has been fabricated) and Sean Penn plays famous gangster Mickey Cohen. The LAPD are undertaking an operation to keep the Los Angeles area free of gangsters in the 1940s and 50s and Cohen is at the centre of this scheme as he seems to be the most wanted gangster out there. Here is the trailer, you’ll get a better taste of the story from that:

 

 

The trailer does raise a couple of questions: Why does Ryan Gosling have such a squeaky voice? Did Emma Stone really believe that Ryan Gosling was a bible salesman? Is Emma Stone the most attractive actress working today? Who is the main good guy? But one thing the trailer does make clear is that Gangster Squad is determined to be a very stylish and quintessentially cool film.

The cast is one of the most exciting that I have probably ever seen. You’ve got the seasoned professionals in the form of Nick Nolte and Sean Penn; actors who have been around for a while but are now enjoying a reboot in their careers such as Josh Brolin and Ryan Gosling, the latter of whom has established himself this year as one of the coolest men on the planet. Then you have the rising stars of the bunch with Emma Stone and Anthony Mackie all topped up with those actors you see in a lot of movies but never have a main role; Michael Pena and Giovanni Ribisi.

 

With a cast this good, this experienced and this versatile you need a director who is going to be able to get the best out of every single one of them whilst telling a brilliant story and giving the audience a real sense of being in the mid-twentieth century LA. In Ruben Fleischer I am not sure if they have that kind of director. Fleischer is pretty inexperienced and Gangster Squad looks as though it should be aiming to become one of the best gangster films of all time, yet Fleischer has mainly worked on comedies up until now so it could be a risk with him at the helm. If he gets it wrong the majority of the blame will fall his way, but if it goes right then this could be where Fleischer’s career really takes off.

Gangster Squad resembles Ocean’s Eleven in the way it carries itself and oozes style and substance and it has a cast to rival the George Clooney film as well. I am a fan of gangster and crime films and I am very excited to see how Gangster Squad turns out; I have a very high expectation for this one and am sure that it will not disappoint!

Fast Five (2011) Review.

Fast Five was the latest instalment in the Fast & Furious franchise which saw its main cast return, directed by Justin Lin and written by Chris Morgan (the duo previously worked on The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift and Fast & Furious). It is time that this franchise had some new life injected into it as it had began to grow stale and audience may be getting bored with seeing the same thing over and over again so what was changed and how good is Fast Five really?

The official synopsis of Fast Five is thus: Dominic and his crew find themselves on the wrong side of the law once again as they try to switch lanes between a ruthless drug lord and a relentless federal agent. However, this doesn’t tell the whole story; Fast Five is not just a simple ‘you chase me, I’ll chase you’ story like the original films as the brief synopsis would suggest, instead the characters are put into a different world in South America where they attempt to pull off a huge heist and but their freedom.

The main cast of Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster all return with some very familiar faces in the world of The Fast & The Furious; Ludacris, Tyrese Gibson, Gia Gadot, Matt Schulze and Sung Kang. The return of all these cast members are very obvious nods to the previous films and an acknowledgement of where the franchise has come from. New additions to the cast include Dwayne Johnson, Elsa Pataky and Michael Irby who all come to the franchise with very different qualifications: Johnson is the ‘tough guy’, Pataky is the ‘beautiful woman’ and Irby is the ‘evil foreigner’ and anyone who has watched the rest of these films should be more than familiar with those stereotypes.

So the same cast are back and they’re still driving fast cars and parading around beautiful woman so what exactly makes Fast Five so different to the rest of the films? The heist. This is the first memorable opportunity for us to see just how clever these guys are; obviously Brian O’Conner (Walker) is a former cop and clearly is quite smart but now we get to see Domini Toretto’s intelligence as he plans the heist to perfection and we can now understand how it is that Turetto has managed to outrun the law for so long. There is a great montage where the main trio of characters are talking about different members of the team they are going to need which plays over the scenes of all the characters coming together to meet at the arranged location and the editing is just fantastic. The high quality of editing goes much unnoticed by most people but it is there and it is subtle in Fast Five and it just helps the film to run so smoothly.

Of course, if the main heist at the end of the movie was the only action we got to see many fans of the Fast & Furious franchise would be disappointed. There is plenty of action and enough explosions to entertain audiences increasing in scale right from the off: to being we have a small scale prison break, then a mid-scale train robbery, then we get to see Vin Diesel and ‘the Rock’ take each other on in a great fight scene before the huge scale heist which involves driving away with a safe attached to the back of two cars… from a police station. Some things that happen really do ask the audience to suspend their disbelief for a few moments but it wouldn’t be the great popcorn action flick that it is if it didn’t.

There is a lot here to enjoy for fans of the franchise and is an easy jump-in point for anyone looking to get involved; there isn’t exactly a deep running storyline through these films but Fast Five is well worth watching. It’s pretty much Ocean’s Eleven in cars and one of the best action films of recent years.

Channing Tatum Strips Off: ‘Magic Mike’ Trailer

UK Release Date: 11th July 2012.

Plot: A male stripper teaches a younger performer how to party, pick up women, and make easy money.

Magic Mike is a comedy drama which has pulled a pretty mismatched cast together to be directed by Steven Soderbergh, the man who was at the helm of the Ocean’s trilogy. In the lead role is Channing Tatum; pretty boy turned actor, supporting him is Alex Pettyfer; teenage superspy Alex Rider from Stormbreaker; the wonderful Matt Bomer; charming con artist from the brilliant television series White Collar and finally all round bad actor Matthew McConaughey.

No doubt this is probably a film for the female audience to enjoy but I think that it could turn out be a great laugh for all audiences. I think that the trailer picks up on some pretty good points (the opening scene in the trailer of the strippers arriving at the party was pretty amusing) and there is no doubt that Steven Soderbergh can inject humour into his films as he did with Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Thirteen (the less said about Ocean’s Twelve the better).

It feels as if this role will suit Channing Tatum perfectly; he used to be a model, he has a big female fan base and he showed his comedy credentials earlier this year in 21 Jump Street. He should be able to excel in the title role and I think he could have some fun with the role because I highly doubt this is going to be a film that takes itself 100% seriously.

I think its a film that could go either way but it does have a lot of positives going for it and hopefully it will be a great laugh for everyone.

Why is it so Difficult to Make a Good Sequel?

Arrested for making such a horrible sequel.

When audiences enjoy a film, sometimes they want more, they feel like the character’s journey is not complete. They want to see their favourite characters on the big screen more than once and fall in love with them all over again. Yet when they get their wishes there is always a section of the fans who lambast the producers and film makers for daring to make a sequel and, in some cases, for ruining the first movie as well. So why is it difficult to make a sequel work? Below are some of the reasons I have picked out.

Attempts to be too clever: Ocean’s Twelve is the epitome of awful sequels. The first, Ocean’s Eleven, was brilliant; it brought charm, wit, humour, style and smooth to the screen. It was everything Ocean’s Twelve wasn’t. Twelve tried to run a clever storyline with a twist at the end and it didn’t work at all. It just ended up being a horrible, boring film and the less said about it, the better.

Iron Man 2 tried to run too many storylines with too many new characters.

Trying to do too much: A lot of sequels fall into this category. The first film sets up the characters and completes a story and then, in order to make the sequel better, writers, producers and directors try to cram too much into the next film and it takes away the experience because the storyline runs too thin. This is the case with sequels such as Iron Man 2, in which a lot of work is needed to be done in order to tie in to The Avengers appropriately and so that storyline is thinned out as well as the other storyline involving Whiplash and audiences are left with a boring, lacklustre sequel to a film that promised so much.

No returning cast members: Sometimes, the big wigs at production companies decide that they can make a sequel work even without the stars of the first film. The classic case of this is Grease 2. Grease had charm, loveable characters and great humour and the two leads were perfect: John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. But the two decided they would not return for a sequel and it was made without them. In a sequel audiences want to see their favourite characters return to the screen, not be introduced to more random people.

Cashing in: It doesn’t take a genius to realise that a lot of sequels, if not all of them, are made to cash in on the commercial success of the original film. This leads to film makers taking good parts of the original film and making it more important in the sequel. An example of this is Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End; everyone loves Captain Jack Sparrow in the first film, but he plays in support to the main story of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann and his appearances make the film comical.  In At World’s End, we are given too much Jack Sparrow to the point of huge annoyance.

The best of Bourne was saved for the third instalment.

The above are just a selection of some of the various reasons sequels do not work and a few examples of bad sequels. This is not to say that all sequels are bad. When done right they can add character development, build up great storylines and become some of the best films ever made. The Bourne Ultimatum, Spider-man 2, The Dark Knight and X2: X-men United are all examples of sequels getting it right.