Newstalk ZB Jack Tame Film Review

Newstalk ZB Jack Tame Film Review

This weekend, I was discussing Inside Out, Minions and Love & Mercy with Jack.

http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-mornings-with-jack-tame/audio/darren-bevan-inside-out-minions/

Ted 2: Film Review

Ted 2: Film Review

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Seth MacFarlane, Amanda Seyfried, Jessica Barth, Morgan Freeman, Giovanni Ribisi
Director: Seth MacFarlane

The amount of enjoyment you get from the longer, less charming sequel to Ted will be directly proportional to how high your tolerance for having your buttons pressed is.

The sequel, which circles around the idea of civil rights, centres on the idea that Mr Ted Goes To Court after the state of Massachusetts strips him of his rights in the wake of him trying to adopt a child, declaring him not to be a person but actually property. 

Calling in an inexperienced but pot-smoking lawyer (played with ease and earnest warmth by Amanda Seyfried) Samantha, John (a once again game and comic Wahlberg) along with Ted set out to try and recruit a top lawyer (Freeman) to their cause.

The sequel to the most successful R-rated comedy was only ever going to go further down the depravity drain and mine its vulgar excesses as far as it could go - and it's fair to say that on that journey, the mischievous MacFarlane fires off his scatological gun, taking aim at just about everybody and trying to push the envelope for edgy humour, with varying degrees of success.

Packing in celebrity cameos, a raft of crass one-liners that amuse and a sub-plot from the first film involving Hasbro and Donny (Ribisi), Ted 2 unfortunately feels in parts un-bear-able and bloa-ted. 

Legal scenes pack the proceedings and try to inject a degree of seriousness where it's not welcome -though an expeditious edit of the script could have resolved some of those problems. Equally, a Comic-Con final sequence seems unnecessarily shoe-horned in and appears to really only be a chance to give Patrick Warburton and Michael Dorn a visual gag that's serviced to the pop-culture savvy. 

But, it has to be argued that the bromance and banter between John and Ted (such a warm and earnest heart that it had in the first film) suffers the most in this sequel. The scenes where the pair bicker, harmonise over Law and Order's opening titles and generally bond with their puerile arrested adult humour are among the funniest and sweetest of the sequel, a reminder of what's missing from this and why the first film worked so well. 

However, it's MacFarlane's edgy comedic sensibilities which punctuate the lower moments of Ted 2, giving you a feeling that you're not sure what's coming next in some of the shoe-horned in non-sequitur moments within. A Lord of the Rings gag about Amanda Seyfried's eyes is perfectly on the money, and a sequence where Ted and John yell out sad suggestions at an improv night is remarkably close to the bone, but brings some shocking laughs. 

Overlong, about as stuffed as Ted's insides, Ted 2 proves to be a mixed affair; it's a story with bolted on bits of randomness which work better than the main plot. It's true the Family Guy puerile sensibilities soak through into this sequel, but it's not nearly enough to propel it through its near 2 hour run time, but side-lining the main reason the first film worked so well proves to be the fatal flaw.

Rating:

Cobain: Montage of Heck: Blu Ray Review

Cobain: Montage of Heck: Blu Ray Review

Rating: M
Released by Universal Home Ent

Kurt Cobain - legend, junkie, father, suicide victim.

There's already so much which has been said about Cobain's brief 27 years on the earth and so much charted about the rise of Nirvana. So you could be forgiven for thinking this documentary had nothing new to cover, except to rake over the coals of long simmering resentments, reigniting old discussions about whether Courtney was the Yoko of the band and remember the tragedy of his passing.

But Brett Morgen (director of The Kid Stays in the Picture) manages to do something that rejuvenates the musical doco genre and breathes new life into a subject, long presumed fully researched.

Morgen was granted access to home movie footage from the Cobain family, access to Kurt's journals, drawings and tape recordings (which he didn't know existed); it's a wealth of information and one which gives an all access pass to the man's life, fears, hopes, dreams and consequently gets the most intimate insight into Cobain ever committed to celluloid.

Choosing to tell Cobain's story right from the start of his childhood years of misery in Aberdeen, Washington where he was a child of divorce (a rarity of the time) through to the bullying at school before the struggles and ultimate success of the band, this is the classic and time often told story of a tortured genius.

But Morgen chooses to use audio recordings from Cobain come vividly to life with animation, a move that borders on genuinely inspirational.  Animations in the style of Waking Life / Waltz With Bashir flesh out the past, leap off the screen and bring to life what could have simply been dry talking heads. Morgen also opts for a very small number of interviewees (no Dave Grohl though)  - including Cobain's first girlfriend who's never spoken before - which lends further intimacy to the proceedings (though it would have been beneficial to have heard more from Cobain Sr) and means the usual spouting talking heads who've been so outspoken on Cobain are kept quiet.

Pulling together footage from the band's early days through to Cobain's bizarre performance at the Reading Festival where he emerged in a wheelchair, the music is front and centre, guaranteed to give any Nirvana fan the aural thrill they seek.

The exhaustive nature of the doco and the wealth of material occasionally means that Morgen's direction sometimes feels a little overwhelmed, but the narrative thread is nicely woven through; however, it hits a minor stumbling block with a lag at about 90 minutes which is a surprise. Then home video footage from Kurt and Courtney's drug-addled time in their apartment stuns you into realising what was happening to the rocker and it's captivating in its weirdness as the pair loll around like Sid and Nancy before a damning Vanity Fair article takes aim.

Confessions from Love of a potential near-miss affair add new light to Cobain's first suicide attempt and a long bow is drawn to an inference that Cobain's fear of humiliation could have led to suicide (an implication that could have been probed further), but there's never any vilification here of any parties, merely an access to all the materials to help you draw your own conclusions. Eqaully, footage of a clearly drug-addled Cobain with his daughter Frances Bean is upsetting and harrowing, a sign that a father was losing his way.

With the lights out, it's no less dangerous - and Cobain: Montage of Heck, which will become the bar to which all future musical documentaries will be held up, certainly does entertain us. Perhaps in ways that really almost feel a little too close to the subject.

Cobain: Montage of Heck (based on a title from a mixtape Morgen found) is both exhaustive and exhausting (it could have stood to lose maybe 20 minutes) but it's a raw, unflinching, surprisingly intimate portrait of a hyper-sensitive artist and an unwilling spokesman for a generation, who will find new fans some 20 years after his death.

Rating:

Still Alice: Blu Ray Review

Still Alice: Blu Ray Review

Rating: M
Released by Roadshow Home Ent

With Golden Globe success for Julianne Moore and a warning that Still Alice was likely to crumble even the hardest of facades, the adaptation of Lisa Genova's book had a lot to live upto.

Sadly, it plays out like a TV Movie of the week with every emotional mawkish moment milked for effect.

Moore plays Alice Howland, a renowned linguistics professor who finds she's forgetting words during a presentation and teaching. Perturbed by this turn of events, Alice visits a neurologist who surmises that she has early onset Alzheimers and in a tragic turn of events, this disease is a rare familial strain that can be passed on.

As Alice struggles to deal with this and the implications, her family try to come to terms with what's playing out before them - and the inevitability of what lies ahead.

Still Alice has an impressive performance from Moore, whose Alice is really a study in understatement and whose fight is subtly and effectively brought to light and life by the simplest of deliveries.

But the problem is that Still Alice isn't content with letting the true tragedy of what's ahead shape the outcome; it needs to push, prod and provoke through an overly bombastic piano soundtrack that feels formulaic, as well as guilty of pulling on your heart strings.

In Moore's finest moment, the actress is supposed to be extolling the virtues of living with a debilitating disease but the tide of emotion which is intended to sweep you off your feet is derailed by a torrent of piano music twinkling and swelling underneath, leaving you feeling manipulated and hollow.

Equally, some of the more fascinating elements of the film are underdeveloped; potential tension with her husband (solidly played by Baldwin) becomes easily melodramatic - and the fact one daughter chooses to go ahead with a birth despite there being a high chance the disease could be passed on is swept under the carpet, a dramatic morsel left to wither and die by the wayside.

While Still Alice brings out the best in Moore and gives her predicament a relatability that's dire and devastating, the formulaic beats and predictable patter of the movie leaves you feeling very little (regardless of how cynical you may be), derails Moore's work by grounding it in the overtly simplistic and sentimental and that you've simply seen a TV movie up on the big screen.

Rating:

Chappie: Blu Ray Review

Chappie: Blu Ray Review

Rating: M
Released by Sony Home Ent

Director Neill Blomkamp keeps the South African flag flying with another flick that's a curious hybrid of sci-fi, violence and comedy set in and around the ghettos and slums of Johannesburg.

(Chappie's the extended version of Blomkamp's own 80 second short film from 2003, which you can view below)



In Chappie, it's the not too distant future and Jo'burg police are losing the fight against crime. Thankfully, an armed force of robots (designed by Dev Patel's local tech boffin Deon) is helping bring down the scourge from the streets.

But Deon's simultaneously working on an Artifical Intelligence programme to help evolve the cyber cops to the next level. When one of the robots is slated for decommissioning and against the word of CEO Michelle Bradley (Sigourney Weaver, who barely features) Deon takes the robot for his own scientific plans.

However, when Deon's kidnapped by a group of thugs (South African rappers Die AntwoordNinja and Yolandi), the AI's injected into the robot who becomes a mild and meek child-like creation called Chappie - and the lynchpin in a battle between good and evil / nature and nurture begins.

Chappie is not the film perhaps you'd been expecting from the visionary director of Elysium andDistrict 9 Neill Blomkamp.

Which is, in this case, a good thing.

Mixing in his trademark documentary opening style, with some incredible mo-cap work from Sharlto Copley and the CGI wizards at WETA, the robot (as in Johnny Five's Short Circuit) is the centre of the emotional core of a film that juggles some all out guns-blazing Robocop style violence, Terminator musical stylings and some utterly loopy logic that forgoes any kind of sense in favour of a lunatic riff on Transcendence (ironic for a film that's about a robot and AI).

It's Copley's film by half with his overly eager, child-like and catchphrase quotable droid ("Chappie wants his book") providing the laughs -and heart - in what could only be described as a cartoon-like riff on parenting and growing up in the visually appealing ghettos of South Africa.

Inevitably, the tropes of the genre are all infused into this occasionally day-glo pulpy styled film - will the robot follow the creator's ethos or those who raise him just being one of the sci-fi cliches that's rolled out in a fairly simplistic story, that defies logic and belief as the end rolls around. (Complete with character choices and actions which seem out of place from all that's gone on)

Hugh Jackman growls and scowls as the khaki-shorted, mulleted frustrated and sidelined former soldier who advocates more for a shoot them all philosophy from his droids but does little else, Dev Patel brings a degree of warmth as the Frankenstein creator who wants to teach Chappie to paint and read rather than become a gun-toting, chain-wearing, mother-funking gangsta and Sigourney Weaver barely warms the screen as the number-crunching bottom line espousing CEO.

It's perhaps the rappers who offer the weakest one-note performance with Ninja's self-named gangster appearing to think he's in Grand Theft Auto the cinema version and who borders on R-rated parody as he shoots everything around him. Yolandi gives it a little more heart as the mother but ultimately ends up a little too bland to stand out despite the day-glo clothes and coloured weapons they all tout.

In among the action sequences, Blomkamp's eye for detail and co-ordinated chaos comes to the fore again; but it's just a shame that Chappie's intelligent ideas are thrown out of the window in favour of typical action blockbuster fare - the philosophies of nature/nurture are ditched to make way for an R rated fish out of water comedy that humanises the robot and demonises a large percentage of the human population.

Granted, Chappie is, to be fair, a little scrappy.

However, it's also a truly disposable piece of bubblegum blockbuster whose simplistic story, occasional robotic cuteness and execution subverts some of the sci-fi norm and audience expectations, but which wears its disarming heart and humour on its robotic arm.

Rating:

Selma: Blu Ray Review

Selma: Blu Ray Review

Rating: M
Released by Sony Home Ent

A mesmerising David Oyolewo stars as Martin Luther King Jr as we get the inside story of the build up of the 1965 marches from Selma Alabama to Montgomery almost a half century after their time.

By preferring to concentrate on the tension between King Jr and the President Lyndon Johnson (The Full Monty's Tom Wilkinson) over the activism involved, we begin to learn the lengths the FBI went to to ensure that every last detail of the build up was documented.

This juncture in the civil rights movement came at a decisive moment in time with King's advisers at loggerheads and the President starting to feel threatened by the growing weight of the protestors' feelings.

Opening with King Jr's acceptance of the Nobel peace prize before a bomb rips through Birmingham, Selma sets out its stall early on. With the slow mo shot of the bomb's explosion, director DuVernay decides that pushing the buttons is perhaps more important than filling the story with an emotional depth and heart that's needed throughout. (The slow mo is over-used later on in key moments but feels hollow and a desperate attempt to try to convey some emotion when simplicity would have been better)

Selma is never better than when it lets Oyolewo take the stage and deliver impassioned speeches from Martin Luther King Jr. It's here that Oyolewo brings some of the resonance and power of the orator to life, despite never fully capturing the likeness. By delivering a swelling performance and a relatively dialled down turn during negotiations, you really get a sense of the compelling and uniting nature of Dr King as he galvanised people into action and so upset others.

The film's also a growing roster of prestige actors, with the likes of Martin Sheen, Cuba Gooding Jr, Dylan Baker, Tim Roth all turning up for their moment in the cinematic sun.

But DuVernay's piece never fully manages the subtlety needed of a film like this to propel it into the stratosphere; around 90 minutes in, when the first march of the Edmund Pettus Bridge disastrously takes place, rather than simply letting the horror of the visuals strike the deep resonant chord they need, she chooses to have a New York Times reporter who was on the scene narrate by reporting back events to his paper over the ghastly. The end result is a sentimental button pushing montage that tells you what to feel, how to feel and when to emote - given that the film uses actual footage from the final marches to maximum effect, it's a blundering misfire.

Equally, the story is told with such a straight-laced approach that there's never any shade; the conflicts between King and his wife, the conflict with Malcolm X, the conflict with those running the movement in Selma are completely left on the side; this is really where the story of Selma would have been better told, rather than a simple lifting of events from a history book.

There's absolutely no doubting Oyolewo's turn in Selma, but thanks to no directorial flair or flourish from DuVernay, Selma never quite achieves the power it needs for a story that's so worthy and a moment in time that's so vital to be captured on celluloid.

Rating:

Batman: Arkham Knight Launch Trailer

Batman: Arkham Knight Launch Trailer

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and DC Entertainment today revealed the launch trailer for Batman: Arkham Knight.  With the highly anticipated game launching Wednesday, June 24, the trailer highlights what it takes to Be The Batman and features the recently released track “Mercy” from Muse’s seventh studio album, Drones, which debuted at Number One on the ARIA Album Chart last week. 

Batman: Arkham Knight is based on DC Comics’ core Batman license and will be available on June 24, 2015 for the PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system, Xbox One, the all-in-one games and entertainment system from Microsoft, and Windows PC. 

Batman: Arkham Knight brings the award-winning Batman: Arkham trilogy from Rocksteady Studios to its epic conclusion. Developed exclusively for the new generation of consoles and PCs, Batman: Arkham Knight introduces Rocksteady's uniquely designed version of the Batmobile. The highly anticipated addition of this legendary vehicle, combined with the acclaimed gameplay of the Batman: Arkham series, offers gamers the ultimate and complete Batman experience as they tear through the streets and soar across the skyline of the entirety of Gotham City. In this explosive finale, Batman faces the ultimate threat against the city that he is sworn to protect, as Scarecrow returns to unite the super criminals of Gotham City and destroy the Batman forever.