Doctor Who: Last Christmas: Blu Ray Review

Doctor Who: Last Christmas: Blu Ray Review

Rating: PG
Released by BBC And Roadshow Home Ent

The Doctor and Clara reunite following their apparent break up at the end of the last series in this somewhat traditional base under fire story from the annals of Doctor Who.

When Peter Capaldi's Doctor intercepts Jenna Coleman's Clara as she meets Santa Claus (portrayed with genial joviality by Nick Frost, a perfect piece of casting), the duo's swept into an Arctic base and a seeming conundrum of bizarre proportions as a horde of creatures attacks.

The annual Christmas outing is always a lighter affair for Dr Who, but Last Christmas packs some of the scientific punch as it wraps itself up in its own riddles. Capaldi's softer touch (with occasionally punchy interaction with Nick Frost) is a delight this time around, and once the true reasons for the Doctor and Clara's parting is revealed to each, there's a sense the series has freed itself from its defining shackles of last year - and could go anywhere from now. (Even though to some extent the ending feels abruptly tacked on)

Extras: Bonus BTS features and commentary

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Annabelle: Blu Ray Review

Annabelle: Blu Ray Review

Rating: R16
Released by Warner Home Video

After The Conjuring scared up a major box office success, it was no surprise some kind of follow up would be creeping out of the shadows for us.

But it's into prequel land we go, with the story of how the creepy doll Annabelle ended up in a glass case and being regularly blessed by priests after being handed off to the paranormal investigators The Warrens.

The origins tale focuses on soon-to-be American parents Mia (Wallis) and John (Horton) whose lives are turned upside down when their neighbours are attacked by a Satanic Cult and murdered. The pair are also attacked with one of the would-be-killers shot dead in the soon-to-be nursery clutching a doll given to Mia by her husband.

Shortly afterwards, with Mia recovering from the assault, spooky things begin to happen around the house, forcing the duo to move on. But, despite discarding Annabelle in the dumpster, the pair are spooked when the doll finds its way to their new home...

Annabelle's already been a massive US box office hit, smashing its budget several times over and scaring up totals that some films only aspire to ever reach.

Which is disappointing, given how predictably dull, tedious and unoriginal this latest horror outing is. (And given that horror dolls when used properly, like Chucky, can be the stuff of nightmares)

Annabelle is a list of lazy horror movie cliches which seem to have been thrown into the mix, blended up and served to audiences who are looking for cheap jolts, dire jump scares and an overblown soundtrack building ominously to very little at all.

The problem with Annabelle comes down to really how sidelined the actual doll is - confined to merely getting copious amounts of close ups, sitting on chairs and looking more sinister than it actually is. It's hard to see why this is the doll that's scared so many, but it's clearly wasted in this outing.

Both Wallis and Horton are sadly too bland to remotely stand out either, with Wallis' character Mia prone to going into dark rooms during storms and doing the kinds of things that these days feel cliched, unoriginal and stultifyingly dumb.

While the background story of Charles Manson and satanic cults simmers away (left unexploited), the unoriginality on display does little to create an atmosphere of foreboding, with doors being slammed, creaky noises and close ups of Annabelle being over-exploited to try and build something suspenseful and horrifying. But what emerges is a long series of scenes that are drawn out to tediously predictable effect and which fail to remotely psychologically scare.

Perhaps exploring Mia's potential post-natal depression to a greater effect would have worked better (albeit derivative of other horror tropes) - and while Leonetti manages a couple of effective jump-scare moments (in a basement and with a child running towards a door), there's simply not enough to justify the hype.

Quite simply, Annabelle is dull, massively disappointing and a tedious, monotonously formulaic horror that in no way shape or form hits the mark.

Rating:

The Judge: Blu Ray Review

The Judge: Blu Ray Review

Rating: M
Released by Roadshow Home Ent

Robert Downey Jr moves away from his iron-clad superhero counterpart for more human concerns in this drama outing that's as much about fathers and sons as it is justice.

Robert Downey Jr is cocksure lawyer Hank Palmer, who's the epitome of a big city lawyer; flashy home, flashy court antics, quick fire verbosity and a trophy wife. But when he gets a call that his mother's died, he's forced to head home to a world he left behind years ago - and an estranged father (Robert Duvall) who's also the home town judge.

Things go from bad to worse for this big city fish in the small town pond when his father's accused of murder on the day of his mother's funeral - and soon, Hank's forced into begrudgingly giving his services to try and ensure his father doesn't spend his final days behind bars.

The Judge is less courtroom drama, more matters-of-the-heart kind of piece / home-coming dramatics , with Downey Jr's quick-fire rapid skills taking a dial down for more emotional intensity as we negotiate the waters of home-spun sentimentality.

Sure, all the borderline sentimental / schmaltzy cliches are there - the rift between father and son, the chequered past between a trio of brothers, a home-town love that never really left, a question over paternity and a distant daughter to reconnect to - but Downey Jr's relatively restrained and charismatic turn helps you negotiate through the potential mire of predictability of an ever-so slightly overlong two-and-a-half hour drama.

Duvall and Downey Jr have a good chemistry as the decades-old tension is played out and the hostility of estrangement is worked through; certainly as resentments bubble up and boil over, they're nicely played out (even if they're lazily worked into the narrative and unsubtly hammered home; one major row / metaphor comes just as a storm hits the town and is done by the time it all blows over the next day) but there's never anything short of entirely obvious on the screen.

If there's anything objectionable about The Judge, it's really down to how extraneous some characters end up being; a questionable tryst with Gossip Girl's Leighton Meester's bar keep is glossed over and used only dramatically toward the end, the other two brothers fare the worst, with Mark Strong's mentally handicapped Dale apparently on hand to just ask questions, help the audience out and play-out some home movies to ramp up the sentimentality of the past montages; equally D'Onofrio's towering performance largely being sidelined after some initial promise and Farmiga's love interest is there simply when it suits.

At the end of the day, any objections to abject button-pushing and rank sentimentality are over-ruled by the eminently watchable Duvall and Downey Jr show in their third outing together; their headstrong head-butting proves the main drive and focus for this melodrama and while the outcome is never anything less than obvious, the occasionally meandering journey to the final destination is what (just) raises The Judge above its mawkishness.

Rating:


Extras: BTS featurettes

Super Stardust Ultra: PS4 Review

Super Stardust Ultra: PS4 Review

Developer: d3t Ltd
Platform: PS4

Asteroids, a scrolling yet fixed shoot-em-up and 1080p rendering.

Yep, after the success of the somewhat brilliant Resogun (should actually be called Reso-fun), Super Stardust Ultra blasts onto the PS4 platform in what appears to be its third iteration. (It was first released in 1996)

Utilising the same kind of duel-stick controls that were last seen in Resogun, you get to defend the solar system as the last remaining fighter in the midst of a deadly meteor storm. Choosing from three types of weapon, it's up to you to try and save the day.

Giant floating asteroids which when blasted unveil a green floating nugget and potentially deadly fragments all litter the screen to make things difficult - and if that wasn't bad enough, each planet has a swarm of enemies flying at you, determined to kill you off.

Super Stardust Ultra is arcade gaming in the extreme, given a highly polished HD makeover.

Crisp graphics and high def colours show no sign of struggling when the screen becomes overwhelmed with critters and littered with bits; it's essentially a type of 3D Asteroids with you slap bang in the middle of it all.

Using a choice of weapons from rock-crushers, gold melter and ice splitter, this intergalactic game of scissors, paper and rock requires you to be precise in your calculations or risk being blasted. Though it has to be said, using the rocks to take out the enemies is intensely satisfying.

Blasting the green nuggets housed within the rocks gives you power ups - which degrade down if you leave them too long. Much like Resogun though, you can speed boost your way through rocks to cut them down to size and to power yourself up; though this ability is limited.

Controls are fluid on Super Stardust Ultra and it's certainly playable enough thanks to each level needing five victories before you can move onto another planet. But it's nowhere near as addictive as it could be - granted, I've not played the original so can't comment on whether it's been upgraded for the next gen or simply ported across, but it lacks a little of the buzz you need for playing time and time again.

Additional levels are a little harder to come by - and as ever with these types a lack of a continue function is a real blocker to going through it all again and what seems fun soon becomes a little tedious as you have to re-repeat to blast through to the end. Additional modes (arcade, planet, endless) all add to the action so there's no end of playable content to get through - even if each is simply an add on from the last.

Ultimately, Super Stardust Ultra is a solidly disposable arcade game - it looks great, plays slickly and rewards those simply wanting to pick up and play. That's no bad thing - but compared to the inventive and fresh Resogun, this shooter feels very much of the last generation consoles.

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Jupiter Ascending: Film Review

Jupiter Ascending: Film Review

Cast: Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Eddie Redmayne, Sean Bean
Directors: The Wachowskis

Space opera, stunning visual effects and a big messy plot all collide with limited effect in the Wachowski’s latest outing.

A doe-eyed Mila Kunis  stars as Jupiter, a cleaner who dreams of another life and who finds her dream is more of a reality than she realises when she becomes the victim of a space war.

It turns out Jupiter is actually a princess and an heir to the ownership of the Earth, a fact imparted to her when she’s saved by half-wolf/ half-human Caine (a pointy-eared Tatum). With killers dispatched by Balem Abrasax (Eddie Redmayne, prone to whispering and then shouting for no obvious reason) the tyrant heir of a family, Caine and Jupiter soon find themselves on the run and trying to restore Jupiter’s rightful position in the cosmos.

It’s clear where the money’s gone on the Wachowski’s latest.

Sumptuous space visuals, an array of creatures and alien races all appear to have gobbled up the cash that could have been spent on the story.

Saddled with some laugh-out-loud dialogue (one brutally forced in moment of contrived romance sees Jupiter telling Caine that she loves dogs – another reveals that bees can recognise royalty as they swirl around Kunis), thrown in overt references to the likes of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, some incredibly lazy and missing character development, Jupiter Ascending becomes an incomprehensible visual mess, lacking in coherence and offering nothing more than an assault on the eyeballs.

Kunis manages as best she can in her role, but suffers through some of the indignities of the script and the pacy directing; Tatum is near mute (and pointlessly shirtless) as his bland character grunts his way through continually skating through the skies (no, seriously) to save Jupiter; and Redmayne’s Ming-the-merciless wannabe villain is so underdeveloped that his greatest threat appears to be utilising his over-bite to chew through the scenery as he becomes a last-act villain plot device.

It’s a shame that the Wachowskis who brought us such visual feasts as The Matrix trilogy, Cloud Atlas, Speed Racer are reduced to this near incoherent hot mess. If the story stopped occasionally to breathe once in a while and take in the scenery, it would have been a slightly less flawed execution. Instead by racing breakneck speed between action sequences, having Caine continually save the day, throwing in a leftfield romance simply because, and providing a lack of consequence, this wannabe Star Wars clone has less bite than Tatum’s dog-eared lycan.

Though commendation must be given to one light sequence where Jupiter has to have her ID and regency validated; the Wachowskis’ satirical touch and take on bureaucracy is hilariously on the money and reminiscent of Brazil (replete with Terry Gilliam cameo).

Plundering from the giant treasure trove of sci-fi may have proven a fruitful ground for The Wachowskis in terms of stunning aesthetics and truly out of this world visuals mixed with extravagant costuming and an overly bombastic and overloaded OST.

But by failing to observe some the fact that character is what helps these stand up over the years after the FX have proven outdated, the cinematic folly that is Jupiter Ascending is more facing a descent into cinematic obscurity.

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Life Of Crime: Blu Ray Review

Life Of Crime: Blu Ray Review

Rating: R16
Released by Madman Home Ent

Elmore Leonard makes another outing onto the big screen with this adaptation of one of his novels.

It's your classic crim movie as well, with two down-on-their-luck guys (Def and Hawkes) deciding to kidnap Jennifer Aniston's wealthy woman, confident that her husband (Tim Robbins) will stump up the ransom. But the trouble is, he's on the edge of divorcing her so that he can make his mistress (Isla Fisher) happy...

Soon, the duo is struggling to work out how they can pull this back.

Life Of Crime is solid if unspectacular fare, that really sits within the genre but hardly challenges it.

Aniston's fine as the woman who realises her place in the world has changed; Robbins, though, verges on parody as the cheating hubbie. Def and Hawkes make a watchable enough pair and have enough charm to carry the movie through.

It's not one of the best Leonard adaptations, but it certainly isn't a bad film that's not worthy of your time. It's nice to see Aniston flexing her dramatic muscles, but it's not quite enough to raise Life Of Crime into the higher echelons of the genre because while it looks the part with its 70s recreations, it's lacking the sparkle and fizz that you'd remember from other Elmore Leonard adaptations like Justified and Get Shorty.

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Newstalk ZB Review - Talking Fifty Shades of Grey and Gone Girl

Newstalk ZB Review - Talking Fifty Shades of Grey and Gone Girl

Fifty Shades of Grey was the big release of the Valentine's Day weekend.

And I stepped up to the plate to review Fifty Shades of Grey.

Here's what I said to Jack Tame about it...

http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-mornings-with-jack-tame/audio/darren-bevan-50-shades-of-nay/