Assassins Creed: Blu Ray Review

Assassins Creed: Blu Ray Review

Re-teaming with MacBeth director Justin Kurzel for their second outing together, not even the star power of Fassbender and Cotillard can save the Assassin's Creed movie from being a muddled mess that's slavish to the phenomenally popular Ubisoft computer game series.

Fassbender is criminal Cal Lynch, who's summarily executed via lethal injection as the movie begins.

When he awakes, he finds himself in a room inside a shadowy cabal who are hunting for the Apple of Eden as they desperately try to wipe out violence in the world. The Abstergo group of Templars believes that holds the secret to unlocking the DNA of all life and could change the face of the Earth for the better.

Leading Cal into a machine to regress him is scientist Sofia (Cotillard in severe wig and saddled with obligatory exposition) and soon Cal finds himself back in 15th Century Spain in the body of his own ancestor, a trained Assassin.

But the further Cal goes into this world, the more the truth appears out of the shadows - is Abstergo doing the right thing?

Assassin's Creed does little to break the chain of unsuccessful video games committed to the big screen.

While the game's trademark aesthetics and nods are wrapped up in a swathe of moments that fans of the games will recognise with ease (the Leap of Faith, the building top scrabbling, the parkour and the posing post fights), non-fans may feel the cursory solid action sequences are muddied and unspectacular.

Both Fassbender and Cotillard deliver video game dialogue and explanation with little to no emotion, and Rampling, Irons and Gleeson are completely wasted in their supporting roles.

With a bombastic OST, an eagle soaring high above used repeatedly to segue between scenes, there are plenty of nods to the video game series and the centuries old fight between the Assassins and the Templars, but there's never any scope or depth delivered to the weight of the fight, other than through rote explanatory dialogue.

If anything's successful in Assassin's Creed, it's the action sequences which stop the surge of sci-fi mumbo jumbo being clinically delivered, but the more they are rolled out, the more it's a diminishing return.

Ultimately, Assassin's Creed is a C-movie with A-listers - it fails to deliver on anything in terms of spectacle and a muddied plot doesn't help things. While the Spanish setting may have delivered more depth if it had been built up more, the chop and change aesthetics and flat denouement mark it out as the first major flop of 2017. Despite its insistence on using the Leap of Faith from the games, it seems unlikely many in the audience will take the Leap of Faith needed.

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter: DVD Review

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter: DVD Review

Much like the Underworld series, the Resident Evil movie franchise staggers on with no sign of abating, thanks largely to industrial sized box office returns.

As the sixth film in the Resident Evil series, The Final Chapter at least dangles the prospect of closure in audiences' faces by way of its title. (But this turns out to be a lie.)

However, in providing a generic awfully muddy and dark action zombie set film, The Final Chapter ends up feeling like a bridge too far.
Picking up right after events from Retribution, Milla Jovovich's Alice is forced into taking a chance to wipe out the T virus that mutated the world  once and for all.

The twist is she has only 48 hours to do it and needs to race across a Mad Max style landscape to head back into Raccoon City to get the antidote.

But standing in her way once again is Game of Thrones' Iain Glen's villainous religious zealot Dr Isaacs, who chews as much scenery as the undead do flesh. (However, he gets points for inadvertently invoking one of the great lines about the Winchester and a pint in one laughably cheesy shot toward the end)...

So with the clock racing and the fate of all humanity in her hands, Alice faces her last great battle...

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is a muddied mess of a video game film that feels limp in comparison to the rest of its series. Thanks to a dark aesthetic and a continual desire to visually soak everything in a blackness, it's hard to remotely care about proceedings - nowhere more so than when fight sequences happen and characters are picked off.

There's no emotional gut punch to this film where there should be; and there's no feeling of closure or an epic end when there should be either. It's just a mesh of video game stylings (big boss battle atop a tank, rescue the colleagues from traps, escape the bad guys) and some awfully frenetic editing in the action sequences which mar proceedings.

Anderson's desire to put in repeated rapid cuts during fight sections leads to a feeling of choppiness and robs them of the fluidity needed to give admiration to the work going on. In this aspect, he's his own worst enemy of the film - a director with clear signs of ADD desiring nothing more than yet another angle on the same section.

Jovovich is convincing enough as Alice, and there's a certain weariness to her outlook that's endearing as the film and its fight against an evil mega-conglomerate go on. There are answers coming in this "last" part but they're not worth the investment to be frank.

However, not nearly enough has been done to flesh out the characters around her and it shows, lending no sense of suspense or tension to various quandaries and no feelings at all when they're dispatched.

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is not quite in stinker territory, but it dangerously dips its toes into the water.

3D adds nothing to it, making the action murky as the talk of clones, zombies and shooting gets underway after the starting recap. There aren't enough nods to the creatures of the iconic series and while some of the earlier action sequences pack a punch, there's no freshness in this as it trudges wearily on.

To make matters worse, the ending makes it patently clear that this is not a franchise the box office wants to die and you can't help but feel cheated as it ends. But that said, there's also a palpable sense of relief it's over, because Resident Evil: The Final Chapter squanders a lot of its promise and brings you nothing you've not seen before. 

Sing: Blu Ray Review

Sing: Blu Ray Review

With a note saying Sing contains 85 songs during its 110 minute duration, you could be forgiven for feigning apathy after doing the maths of how often they'd appear.

(Maths purists - it's about 1 every 1 minute or so)

But Illumination's latest animated foray manages to pack in some zaniness around the music and the relatively 2 dimensional characters in this thinly veiled tribute to vaudeville and music audition shows.

Matthew McConaughey plays Buster Moon, a koala theatre impresario whose love of the boards has seen him put on several less than successful shows. With the bank about to foreclose on his theatre and with ideas running out, Moon decides to put on a singing audition competition to attract some interest. But things go further than planned when his lizard secretary accidentally puts onto the fliers that there's a $100K at stake...

It's easy to see why Sing's crammed its run time with classic songs - it's simply because there's nothing more than a terribly basic plot to flesh proceedings out. But that's not to take away from the fun moments that permeate the screen - from auditions with endlessly familiar pop songs blasting out to wacky sight gags, there's enough to keep the younger end happy and enough to ensure the adults recognise the music.

However, it's not quite enough.

Given Zootopia made real its anthropomorphic world with depth and insight, this tale feels lacking in anything other than a simple bubblegum formulaic animation that ticks the boxes and does little else as it zips between what feels like episodic moments stuck loosely together.

It's a shame as the vocal talent is more than sensational - McConaughey's laid back drawl makes Moon an affable and perky presence, MacFarlane's parlance is perfectly suited to a jazz playing mouse, whose rat-pack pretensions and sass are on display from the beginning and John C Reilly's perfectly cast as the slacker mate of Moon.

But it all feels so by the numbers, a medley of melodies being its only real saving grace. And to be frank, the idea of putting one last show on with a menagerie of oddballs has repeatedly been done to death by The Muppet Show.

There are no messages here other than a little self-belief and a hastily bolting on bonding between a father and son gorilla - but Sing is perfectly happy to carry on regardless.

Where it wins is once again indulging the wackiness of the Illumination brand, pioneered by Despicable Me and expanded by Minions. Simple wacky moments add a levity to the film but also serve to highlight the weaknesses in the overall story and lack of real personality.

When Moon announces his intention to put on a singing audition, there's a meta moment where one character intones "Who wants to see another one of those?"

It's a prescient moment, and if the world-weary and slightly cynical among us nod our heads in agreement, there's an almost tacit acknowledgement that younger audiences will lap up the unabashed feel-good simplicity of it all and its formulaic edges, because it all comes wrapped in a perfectly dayglo blast of music and well-visualised fluffy characters.

Sing may aspire to hit the high notes, but in truth, it actually manages to solidly hit a mid-range, never quite veering into essential territory but never quite making itself feel unwanted.

Win an Alien: Covenant prize pack!

Win an ALIEN: COVENANT prize pack!

To celebrate the unmissable big screen release of ALIEN: COVENANT, out in cinemas May 11th, you can win a prize pack!

Alien: Covenant, from Ridley Scott, in cinemas May 11

The thrilling prize pack includes:

An Alien Covenant Double pass

Alien Day poster

An Alien Covenant T.Shirt

An Alien Covenant  Mobile Phone cover

About  ALIEN: COVENANT

Ridley Scott returns to the universe he created, with ALIEN: COVENANT, a new chapter in his ground-breaking ALIEN franchise. The crew of the colony ship Covenant, bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world. When they uncover a threat beyond their imagination, they must attempt a harrowing escape.

IN CINEMAS MAY 11

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterson, Danny McBride

Rating: TBC

Web:www.AlienMovie.co.nz

To win a Alien Covenant prize pack, all you have to do is enter simply email your details to this  address: darrensworldofentertainment@gmail.com or CLICK HERE NOW!

Include your name and address and title your email COVENANT!
Competition closes May 11th

Good luck!

Play with your childhood fears with LITTLE NIGHTMARES™ available today

Play with your childhood fears with LITTLE NIGHTMARES™ available today

 

Play with your childhood fears with LITTLE NIGHTMARES™ available today

Will you be able to save the girl in the yellow raincoat from her watch?

To celebrate the release of LITTLE NIGHTMARES, BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Europe and Tarsier Studios are delighted to reveal their launch trailer introducing the graceful Lady, the ruler of The Maw and the biggest threat to Six’s survival ensuring the smooth running of the place from her private quarters. Will you be able to save the girl in the yellow raincoat from her watch?

LITTLE NIGHTMARES is now available in digital and physical format on PlayStation®4, Xbox One, STEAM® and GOG.com for PC. For all players who have pre-purchased the game*, they receive The Scarecrow Sack and the Upside-down Teapot Masks. PS4™ and PC users also get the original soundtrack in digital format, an exclusive PS4™ theme or a PC wallpaper featuring The Janitor. The standard boxed version includes the Original Soundtrack composed by Tobias Lilja from Tarsier Studios and the Six Edition, available at GAME retailers, contains a 10 cm high figurine trapped in a themed cage box as well as the original soundtrack, an exclusive A3 poster and a sticker board.

Autumn Events Q&A - with Bill Gosden

Autumn Events Q&A - with Bill Gosden

It's here - the Autumn Events spectacular from the New Zealand International Film Festival!
You can get all the dates of the events in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland here - www.nziff.co.nz

Festival director Bill Gosden was happy enough to brave a brief Q&A about the programming - so read on to see what he reckons will be worth slipping into the warmth of a cinema for as winter approaches.

Welcome back, we've missed you - what have you been doing since the end of the festival?
The lousy summer weather was perfect for getting a head start on film selection for Autumn Events and for NZIFF 2017.

Autumn events is now here, and there's a bit of difference with the regional arenas with Christchurch getting the local premiere of Pecking Order. How exciting! (And appreciate how I avoid the clucking puns)

You’ve spotted the major difference. We’d have loved to have toured the chickens, but if you’re not living in Christchurch your first chance to catch Pecking Order is on release on May 18. It’s a hoot.

The premiere of Terrence Malick's latest too - what can you tell us about this - is it Tree of Life-esque? And how stunning does it look on the big screen?

Stunning? Totally. It mixes the microcosmic and the macrocosmic to quite dizzying effect. The ‘history of life’ sections of Tree of Life only hint at the extravaganza on display here.

It seems appropriate that in these escalating times of potential nuclear war, we're heading back to the hedonism and freedom of Woodstock too...

Woodstock is so often cited as a pivotal cultural moment that it seemed worth revisiting in a present that is almost the polar opposite of the future it envisaged. The legendary performances have kept the film permanently in the Home Ent repertory, but the documentary content now feels more captivating than ever. It provides a vivid picture of a time when the American middle class was ascendant and the boomers began to feel their oats. There’s no shortage of conscious myth making going on in the film, but plenty of evidence too of some uncomfortable realities. The film’s release was a massive affair – the big sound and the multi-screens. Without those there’s no way to appreciate the original impact.

Le Roi et L'Oiseau has had quite a journey to the screen, and having seen, it's a gorgeous animation with all ages appeal - how would you best describe it?

Surreal is a word I seldom use, but it fits here. Children can explain the delightfully perplexing interplay of fiction and reality to their literal-minded adult companions.

Woody Allen's Manhattan too - perhaps the epitome of what he's achieved...?

It’s such a movie-movie, overflowing with references to the Hollywood past: the luminous B&W imagery, the shamelessly romantic settings – even a horse and carriage ride in Central Park - and the George Gershwin score. It’s easy to forget that it was made at a time when the world’s idea of New York City looked a lot more like Taxi Driver. But within this beautifully wrought setting and a roundelay of romantic dilemmas befitting a screwball comedy, the insecurities and missteps of the wise-cracker characters feel authentic, and ultimately quite isolating and painful. Is there another Woody Allen film where that is true?

And Werner Herzog, Judy Garland - really, we're being spoilt...

I’m looking forward very much to Fitzcarraldo. I remember we had to wait a whole year for it in New Zealand after Les Blank and Chris Simon had already been to the festival with Burden of Dreams. In the day the cool thing to say was that Burden of Dreams was better anyway, but who’d want to be without either of these ?

What's the plan for the main festival - give us a tease of what lies ahead....

Aha! It’s not too soon to say that the releases this month of Meat and Pecking Order mark the beginning of a great year for New Zealand documentaries on New Zealand cinema screens.

Get more about the Autumn Events and find the dates for the annual New Zealand International Film Festival at nziff.co.nz

Jackie: Blu Ray Review

Jackie: Blu Ray Review

Natalie Portman shines as Jackie Kennedy in this intriguing and at times, unconventional, biopic about the President's wife after the death of her husband JFK.

In an unusual move, it feels at times like a coming of age film as Jackie negotiates the treachery of life afterwards as people swarm around her suggesting what's best for both her and her husband's immediate legacy.

The film though, begins with Jackie welcoming a reporter (Billy Crudup, based on biographer Theodore H White) to her retreat and who's clearly there to get her side of the story (in perhaps a nod to the article which appeared a week after JFK's death in Life).

But flashbacks, and present day flashes mean that Jackie's also shown gaining her White House legs as well as her exposure to television by bringing cameras into the White House to demonstrate how their home is. In a move that simulates both the desire to be accepted by the public and into the history of the White House, Portman's Jackie tentatively begins a journey into our collective consciousness.

Mixing archival footage along with Portman's powerful vocal affectations (which, admittedly, take time to get accustomed to) as Kennedy proves to be a heady mix for Jackie. With its drained aesthetics and faded looks, Larrain's strength in the film comes from the subtleties of the scenes and the rhythmic feel of the prose played out on the screen.

From blood stains on Jackie's dress to the absolutely earth-shattering visceral sound of the bullet ringing out across the motorcade when the inevitable flashback occurs, everything about this film screams detail.

It's undoubtedly a classy affair, albeit one which takes a little time to adjust to as its groove begins to wash over you with its funereal feel.

As the ebbs and flows of post JFK life come into sharp focus, the initial portrait of a fragile and vulnerable First Lady drains away to present a figure borne of fire, and bereft initially of power but content once again to rise from the ashes.

Portman commits to this wholeheartedly as a mother struggling to tell her kids what's happened, as a stateswoman determined to not be undermined and as a newly crowned widow, fighting to ensure her husband is fairly farewelled (NB - a lot of time is spent on funeral arrangements).

But as she staggers out into the cinematic light and from the screen, Portman emerges as the character building her own myth; it's clear to see why she's been nominated for an award in this almost chameleonic turn.

While there are moments when it feels showy initially, once the bluster is stripped away, the ebbs and flows of the character portrayal are laid down and the bombastic OST silences itself, Jackie becomes a clear portrait of power, led by an utterly commanding turn.

Chilean director Pablo Larrain's film frees itself from the shackles of a conventional biopic and emerges as a hauntingly different and striking way to tell a story that's so familiar to so many. And with a central powerhouse of a performance, it lingers long in the mind after the lights have gone up.