Not Books IX- Objection!

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Films-

  Brazil (1985)

I'd been meaning to watch what I've commonly heard referred to as Terry Gilliam's best film for years, but but there's always that sight hesitancy that comes from the director's ability to become just that little bit too zany. I would've watched it sooner had I known that the plot was Gilliam's take on Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty Four- since that's a pretty easy premise to get a handle on- but after I finally did see it I was left underwhelmed. I suppose the key feature of Brazil is the visual aspect, where Gilliam and his team uses their imagination to make the most of his budget, creating am expansive-feeling, futuristic dystopian England. Though I've seen enough later work from Gilliam to expect a certain style, Brazil seems to be the most iconic-looking I've seen.

But unfortunately overall I didn't really like it. Maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention to the details of the plot, something that probably happened when I realised how close to 1984 it was. I also didn't realy care for the performances that much either; Jonathan Pryce was apparently lauded by many for achieving his breakout role, and he is a convincing character, but for me just wasn't a remotely likable one. He had all cowardice needed to play the fairly stereotypical role of unassuming English guy forced to take a stand, but no likability factor. Even worse for this viewer, Michael Palin just was not very good in his role here. That's hard for me to say because I love Palin, I think he's the most talented comedic actor out of all the Pythons, but in this role he was as flat as a pancake.

So, the ending then (spoiler alert, obviously). The key difference in tone between Brazil and 1984 comes down to the ending. In 1984 Winston Smith meets a bleak fate as he is brainwashed to love Big Brother. It's very downbeat. In Brazil, lead character Sam Lowry is similarly captured, his girlfriend presumably murdered and his hopes of escape nil. Rather than resist as Smith does, to defend his ideological values, Lowry simply goes mad instead- drifting off into a fantasy world where he and his love have escaped the clutches of the government once and for all. In a way, I think it's supposed to be a 'happy' ending, but honestly it did very little for me. I'm happy Gilliam didn't totally rewrite 1984 into some sort of heroic toppling of the fascist powers, but the difference between this fate and that of Smiths' seems to suggest a sense of triumph over adversity that I just didn't buy. Lowry happily losing his mind as some sort of victory rings hollow against Smith's constant defence of his.

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How To Train Your Dragon 2 (2014)

I wanted to like this, I really did, but it turned out to be another generic, apathetic waste of time. Well, if you're an adult, anyway. How to Train Your Dragon 2 looks like the billion dollars it probably cost to make, and is probably sure to delight shallow kids everywhere with its combination of said looks, childish humour and hardcore marketing efforts (that sounded bitter). It thoroughly entertained my girlfriend purely on the fact that there were cute dragons in it. Unfortunately I'm way too cynical, easily bored, and totally the wrong audience for the film. That's not going to stop me from a rant about how things were better when I was a youth, etc.

The aspect with this film, and with the majority of Dreamworks (apart from Rise of the Guardians) films that I've seen is down to the lazy treatment of the true target audience by assuming that they can't handle any variance in characterisation, and won't notice inconsistent plot details. As a result, every Dreamworks lead character and their supporting acts act like wisecracking teens from the Disney channel (kind of ironic). If the character isn't human then it doesn't really matter, since they're anthropomorphized to such a degree that they basically are (maybe not so much in this film, but in the hits like Madagascar etc.). The wisecracking little shit who filled the role of lead character here particularly annoyed me, due to his being completely infallible, while the adults around him all act like idiots (another common lazy trick). Annoying me most of all was the fact that all of the adults had strong Scottish accents but the children were all American for some reason. I hate lazy writing like that in children's films. Oh, and there was some kind of plot, or something. Let's speak no more of this silly film.

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 Highlander (1986)

Like Brazil, a film I've meant to watch since time immemorial, but unlike Brazil a film I quite enjoyed for what it was, even though what it was is stupid. The apparent immortality of the Highlander franchise always caught my attention, and the desire to see Christopher Lambert's most famous role (after enjoying him so much in Mortal Kombat) was what finally brought me to it. It was, in almost every way, exactly what I expecte. Lambert appeals as a kind of Jean-Claude Van Damme alternative, and the culmination of his charisma, the intriguing high concept, and the film's dedication to being as 80's an action film as possible all made this fun.

To be a fair critic, most of the acting is appalling, the plot intricacies often don't make sense, and the fight scenes are underwhelming. Also, Sean Connery playing an immortal originally from Egypt? How long would it take for an Egyptian to pick up a Scottish accent, exactly? Ridiculous stuff. Despite all that, there's a certain unquantifiable coolness about the atmosphere, and it all looks pretty nice too, with the contrasting scenes in the Scottish highlands and modern day New York providing a memorable visual effect. Plus, how could I not like a film that starts out with a wrestling show at Madison Square Gardens with the actual real-life Fabulous Freebirds? 

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Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

I really, really wanted to enjoy Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the sequel to the intelligent franchise-reviving blockbuster Rise of the Planet of the Apes and thus the next installment in a re-imagining that jettisoned the cheesy crap of the past forty-or-so years. Since I read and utterly loved Pierre Boulle's one off science fiction adventure original Planet of the Apes, I've grown far more attached to the potential of the idea and also its origins in pseudo-scientific Conan Doyle-like adventure fiction. Rise was a great example of careful, well-planned plotting that suggested that the writers had already compiled their own version of the fictional chronology leading to the full rise of the apes and downfall of humans, and I was anxious to find out the next step through this sequel. Unfortunately, I found it to be a big let down.

The first thing that caught me out was the minimum ten-year jump from the end of Rise and the start of Dawn. I wasn't expecting an immediate sequel, but when it was quickly revealed that the majority of the human race had been wiped out by a deadly Simian-flu virus, I felt like I'd missed a film in between. Again, I wasn't expecting a comprehensive chronological coverage of events, but these are some pretty big parts of the story being missed out. It wouldn't be so bad had the characters explained the events of the past in more detail, but they didn't bother. It also wouldn't have been so bad if it didn't feel to me like the events of this film were far less important and dramatic than the mystery of how exactly this all happened. Instead, we start with the introduction of a status quo where the apes, led by Caesar (the star of the original) are living happily in the forests surrounding San Francisco, riding around on horseback. How exactly Caesar managed to train hundreds of apes into doing things like riding horses and talking in English without the benefit of the special scientific brain potion he received isn't mentioned. Nor is it explained why the pre-Simian flu Human civilisation didn't just go into the jungle and recapture the apes that caused such a fuss on the Golden Gate bridge in the last film.

Anyway, some barely characterised humans inevitably turn up in the jungle, causing friction and strife. As you might expect, some of them are good, altruistic lead characters, and some are selfish, right wing villains like Gary Oldman (which becomes a theme of the film when Caesar must understand the capabilities of apes to be similarly divergent, something I quite liked). Similarly as you might have expected, trouble ensues, as the bad people and apes fuck everything up for the good ones, leaving the two species on the brink of a larger war as the film ends. This is all well and good, but not particularly original. Caesar is a great character, and Gary Oldman is naturally very, very good too, but everybody else, human and ape, falls into the trap of being as boring as possible. The billions of scenes starring two apes sitting in the forest, having meaningful conversations in sign language before finishing their conversation in stunted spoken English became very old very fast, almost insulting in the way that they seemed to demand that I care and respect the sanctity of nature as it was presented, despite the fact this was all a CGI blockbuster Hollywood film.

Ultimately (and in an attempt to cut down the length of this review/critical assault), I think this was a hopefully forgettable misstep in a new franchise still trying to find its feet presenting an admittedly ridiculous concept. I genuinely think the decision to skip the human downfall so dismissively and join the apes at a key point after the development of their society was overly ambitious and didn't make me care about their fate one bit. The humans were also totally forgettable aside from Gary Oldman, and the assumption that I'd care about the CGI-ed apes just because nature was stupid. I can see how the writers were trying to introduce more potential fascist style ape culture development, to presumably lead on to the more recognisable future of the ape dominated world, and I think this film might look better in the future as a piece of a larger puzzle, but for now it was a big let-down to me.

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Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) 

As much as I find myself increasingly annoyed by the blind fanboyism of the majority of people on the Internet regarding Marvel film studios, I was rather excited about Guardians of the Galaxy (though not enough to bother going to the cinema to see it), having been a fan of Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning's comic source material. Both the comics and movie succeeded in livening up the outer-space portion of the Marvel Universe, thanks to a set of very-well matched characters and just the right sense of humour, and it was no surprise to me the ease of which the characters transferred on screen. Lots of credit needs to go to the filmmakers for taking just the right aspects of the comic, then remixing the characters' back stories to fit into the onscreen MU (though when the script turned to the issue of potential intergalactic war thanks to Thanos' obsession with the infinity gems it all sounded notably vacuous), as well as casting a great set of performers to bring them to life.

Chris Pratt hits all the right notes as Star Lord in quite probably my favourite lead performance by any MCU actor yet, hitting his comedic notes perfectly without damaging the emotional subplot about his mother one bit. His supporting cast are all fantastic too, with each of Drax, Rocket Racoon and Groot making a play for the award of funniest supporting superhero character and running away with the top three spots easily. The plot is simple, but well-constructed and paced, with generally superb dialogue. The action scenes look like a billion dollars, which is what they may have cost. I have to admit that I've been completely spoiled by the power of CGI in films, to the point where I find myself switching off during less inventive CGI set-piece. Strangely enough these CGI action scenes were what I found least interesting about the film in general, to the extent where I came out of them barely remembering what I'd just seen.

In conclusion, my favourite Marvel Studios film so far, easily. Still nowhere near as good as Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man films or any of Bryan Singer's X-Men ones though. 

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Video Games-

Ace Attorney- Phoenix Wright- Trials and Tribulations- Nintendo DS (2007)

This third edition of Capcom's ingenious newer take of the classic adventure game genre brings together every long-standing plot and character ark of the series so far into one cohesive, tightly-written continuity fest that had my hooked on every line. The gameplay is exactly the same as the previous two, as spiky-haired defence attourney Phoenix Wright is called into action in an episodic series of court cases, where the player must use their knowledge and intuition to gather evidence in more traditional adventure scenes, before heading into court and cross-examining witness statements to unravel the mysteries and win the case. It's entirely story-based gameplay fueled by dialogue, and challenges the player's detective skills in such a way as it feels very rewarding. Unlike the two previous games, here the five cases are all strongly interconnected to form one long story, the culmination of everything left unsolved to this point.

If you've not played earlier games in the series, this is too mired in continuity to be initially accessible, and similarly if you didn't like the said prior games then this obviously won't change your mind. For fans of the series, however, it's a total joy to experience, as past favourite characters turn up en mass, and the newer ones are equally as memorable. My one slight criticism is that the nature of the longer storyline makes some aspects of the earlier cases frustratingly mysterious and confusing, but everything is eventually explained in the final case; the most dramatic and revelatory case of the series so far. I've already ordered the final two Ace Attourney games for the Nintendo DS,  though I'll try to resist jumping straight in before playing something else first. 

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