Film Review: Drive (2011)

Drive, Nicholas Winding Refn’s minimalist action movie about a stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) who moonlights as a getaway driver, feels like a film out of time. Its methodical pacing, neon-soaked vision of L.A. and electronic soundtrack give it the feel of a lost Michael Mann film and it’s easy to see why the film received such a mixed response from audiences on its theatrical release. Anyone expecting Fast Five would be sorely disappointed by its lack of traditional spectacle in favour of a slow, chaste love affair between Driver and his neighbour, Irene (Carey Mulligan), broken up by scenes of startlingly brutal violence.

Things I Learned From Movie X: Green Lantern

Mark Strong, failing to look anywhere near as ashamed as he should for appearing in this film.

For the lastest Things I Learned From Movie X, I turned my attention to one of the few genuine flops from last year, Green Lantern, in which Ryan Reynolds does his level best to use his abs to distract from the turgid mess surrounding him. In all fairness, it's a valiant effort on his part, but that doesn't stop the film from being a plodding overload of CGI that fails to make the character of Hal Jordan interesting and doesn't take advantage of his ability to create anything he can imagine.

In its defense, I did watch Green Lantern in a double-bill with Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and I have to admit that it is marginally better than Michael Bay's opus. Then again, so is having glass shoved under your eyelids, so take that hesitant endorsement with a pinch of salt.

Film Review: Haywire (2011)

As he hurtles towards 50, the age at which he claims he will retire, or at the very least will take a prolonged break, from film-making, Steven Soderbergh seems intent on burning through as many genres as possible. The already prolific director, who has made 25 feature films in 23 years, will have released three films in the space of twelve months before this year is out, all of which are radically different. Contagion was a stark and bleak look at what could happen in the case of a cataclysmic pandemic, the forthcoming Magic Mike is a comedy about a male stripper played by Channing Tatum, and the recently-released Haywire is an action-thriller that, on the surface at least, seems pretty standard.

You've Got To Accentuate The Positive: What's Good About The 2012 Oscar Nominations?

The Oscar nominations were announced today - not that anyone would notice since it's not like everybody is talking about it all the damn time - and they confirmed once again that the Oscars are worthless. And I don't mean that in the sense that all human endeavour is worthless because one day we'll all die and no one will care about anything we did in life, and besides which the sun will one day implode and destroy the Earth, eradicating all trace of all humanity, making our irritation at Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close getting an Oscar nomination seem pretty trivial.

No, I mean that the Oscars are worthless because they fail to do the thing that they are meant to, which is recognise the exceptional films released in any given year. Sure, they sometimes get it right - the nomination for The Tree of Life, in particular, strikes me as unusually spot on for once - but for the most part they celebrate the merely okay, rather than the excellent.

Considering that last year saw some truly great films released, ones that were bold, daring and strange, it would be easy to write about the many, many great films that were snubbed in favour of mediocrity. However, since everyone is going to be doing that, I've decided to set cynicism aside and focus on the positive, looking at the little delights sprinkled amongst the dullness.

Film Review: John Carpenter's The Ward (2010)

Considering that John Carpenter had not made a film in nine years when he made The Ward, it doesn't really feel like he went away, primarily because his back catalogue has been so efficiently strip-mined in the intervening years. Starting with Assault on Precinct 13 in 2005, there has been a steady stream of remakes of Carpenter's seminal work from the '70s and '80s that has simultaneously burnished and cheapened his legacy as one of the great genre film-makers. Whilst some of those remakes turned out to be entertaining and functional (Assault on Precinct 13) and others wound up being dreadful, witless retreads (The Fog), none of them displayed the same sense of a personal vision that Carpenter's best work did, and his return to film-making following the utterly awful Ghosts of Mars should be cause for celebration.

Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 2 - The Future

After the first episode proper of Shot/Reverse Shot proved to be a resounding success, in that we actually managed to record it and release it to wider world, we settled down for Episode 2 - though, if you count the pilot which we recorded as The Martini Shot, the episode that we recorded which was lost due to a technical fault, and that Episode 1 was split in half, you could argue that this is really Episode 5 - in which we decided to talk about The Future, meaning images of the future in cinema, the year ahead and the future of cinema in general. So it's pretty packed.

Our conflicting schedules meant that Adam, Joe and myself couldn't all be in the same room at the same time for the recording session, so we decided to split it up. The first 45 minutes consist of Joe and I talking about forthcoming films, then visions of the future in films like Starship Troopers and Alien. I then step aside and let Joe, Adam and Alex Rowland of Front Row Reviews talk about the future of cinema itself. I'm biased, obviously, but I think this a really very good episode that comes closest to realising the potential of what we want the podcast to be than any of the others we have done so far.

You can stream the episode using the player below, or alternatively, you can download the episode from iTunes by searching for "SRS Podcast."

Hope Lies on Television #13 - Two Detectives, One Name

To commemorate, if that is the right word, the end of the second series of Sherlock, which airs on BBC1 tonight and on PBS from Januray 15, I wrote an article for Hope Lies comparing the two current iterations of the great detective: Sherlock and Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films. As a big fan of the series, someone who like the films and who burned through all the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories last year, this was immensely fun to write, especially since I felt that it worked within the framework of the columns - writing about the differences between television and film on a grander scale - very well.

Film Review: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Ever since Brian DePalma almost silently dangled Tom Cruise above a pressure-sensitive floor in the first Mission: Impossible, each subsequent film in the series has come to be defined by its most exhilarating and audacious set-piece. Whilst the series has added a fair deal of comedy and something resembling emotional development for Ethan Hunt (Cruise) since coming under the eye of J.J. Abrams, who directed the third film and serves as a producer on Ghost Protocol, those are still little more than spice. The meat of these films lies in their ability to deliver breathless spectacle. It's no coincidence that Mission: Impossible II, directed by the once-brilliant John Woo, was both the weakest film in the series and the one with no single standout action sequence. Without those wow moments, these films are little more than lumps of exposition broken up by running.

Things I Learned From Movie X: Transformers: Dark of the Moon

This new version Doctor Strangelove is really, really shitty.

For the first Things I Learned From Movie X column of 2012, I decided to mark the New Year by watching a film routinely described as the worst of 2011. Far be it for me to argue with the majority, but I have to say, I didn't think that Transformers: Dark of the Moon was that bad. I mean, it's horrible. Absolutely abysmal, in fact. A terrible cultural artifact with no redeeming qualities whatsoever which wastes some talented actors, a whole lot of money and the potentially awesome concept of giant robots punching each other by focusing on how the recession has affected Sam Witwicky. Sure, it's crass, sexist, stupid, dull and generally makes you wonder whether, if they were brought from the 19th century and made to watch it, the Lumiere brothers would have bothered to invent cinema if this is what it is going to be used for. It's all those things, but at least it's not Revenge of The Fallen. Admittedly that's the difference between first and second-degree murder, but it's an important distinction nonetheless.

Anyway, here's the column, which I would say is about 40% jokes and 60% pure, unbridled rage.

The film that scared me the most as a child and still does, sort of

One of small pleasures of New Year's Day is seeing what old films the various terrestrial and digital channels dig out of their vaults to give a fresh airing since they don't have any original programming to fill the schedule. It's usually the same four or five old war films or comedies from the 1960s, but every so often an interesting little curio slips through. Such was the case this year, as Channel 5 decided to air a double-bill of The Wizard of Oz and its belated sequel, Return to Oz.

Ed's Top 20 Films of 2011

They sure are happy to have the Number One spot.

First off, I'd just like to wish everyone reading this a Happy New Year. I hope that you all had a great couple of days and are quietly dreading the return to the normal grind of working life as much as I am. (If you work in a capacity that meant that you have not had any time off over the last few weeks, my heart goes out to you. I worked over Christmas and New Year the last few years and it is the worst.) I saw the New Year in by getting ferociously drunk in a cottage just outside of Blackpool with a bunch of my friends, and it was terrific.