Behind the Candleabra: Danny's Take

This is a biopic of someone I've hardly heard of, but that doesn't matter. Liberace is a crazy character, and that's what makes the film fun, and what made Lincoln boring. Lincoln's idea of humour is a lengthy story about a portrait of George Washington. But Michael Douglas plays Liberace in a free and wild way, and you can't take your eyes off him.

My favourite bit is when Liberace and Matt Damon, both dressed in glitzy suits and enormous white fur coats, take the limousine to a seedy gay porn shop. They're stoned out their minds, and Matt Damon collapses in a hallway. After a second Liberace pops his head up from behind a door, and spots his friend lying there. In a camp and childish sing-song voice he asks innocently "Hey, what you doooo-ing?" He's absolutely mad.

The story starts with Matt Damon playing Scott, a country bumpkin, who gets lured into Liberace's Vegas lifestyle. There's some rather uncomfortable moments when Liberace is looking him over like a sexual predator, and soon enough Scott becomes his latest live-in lover. Surprisingly, it turns out that Liberace is actually fairly well grounded, and knows what he wants in life. It's Scott who gets addicted to Rob Lowe's prescription drugs and goes off the rails.

It's fascinating to watch the relationship unfold on the big screen. Although of course the official message was that Liberace wasn't gay, and was just "waiting for that special woman", we get to see everything in his private life. There's a thrill of voyeurism, seeing into his dressing room and bedroom. You even get to see the plastic surgery, which is pretty unpleasant and I had to look away. It's a smart idea inviting us to stare, acknowledging that celebrities really do get work done to their faces.

The asymmetry of Scott and Liberace's relationship proves too much in the end, and Scott goes the way of the others and gets kicked out the big house. There's a slight lull when you think the movie might be over now, but then a decent epilogue when Scott sues Liberace, then gets a minimum wage job and a haircut. Years later Liberace calls him up from his deathbed to say that of all the men in his life, Scott was the best one. I'm not sure if I like this - I prefer to think of Scott being just another guy who gets sucked in by Liberace's charisma. I expect this scene about how special Scott is was invented either by Scott himself, on whose memoirs this might be based, or by the film-makers.

There's a lot of sympathy for Liberace, and I'm glad that his demise is from dying, rather than just fading into obscurity. It's what he would have wanted. It's a bit like William Shatner, desperate to keep working and stay famous for as long as possible, and people loving him for it.

Man of Steel: by SuperDanny

This looked pretty good in the trailers, and I was excited.

I liked the start on Krypton, with Russell Crowe as Jor-El. It's a pretty strange, almost incomprehensible place, and looked great on the big screen. But the super-advanced citizens have been extremely irresponsible in letting their planet go to waste. They've clearly not watched enough Steven Seagal eco-thrillers. In fact they've been so stupid that even though everyone knows the planet is about to explode, only one baby is able to leave, along with some criminals who are 'sentenced' to a space ship outside the blast radius. They must be laughing on the inside.

When Superbaby gets to Earth he has the excellent fortune to be adopted by Kevin Costner. At this point the person next to me in the cinema leant over and informed me that this was Kal-el's second Robin Hood father, an excellent point. The best scenes in the film are the ones with the two Robin Hoods. I think that's because you get lots of juicy revelations about the history and back story, and that's what's interesting. Superboy has a tough time not revealing his powers, as he gets into a surprising amount of tricky situations (I've not seen Smallville, but imagine it happens a lot there too). It's not very convincing though when Jor-El bangs on about how important humans are, and that they must be saved. We all know he only decided to sent the baby to Earth two minutes before he went. For all he knew, it could have been a planet inhabited by two foot tall people.

I enjoyed Superteen's roaming around Alaska, like Christian Bale in Batman Begins. There was a great moment when he's humbly working in a bar and someone insults him, but he decides not to reveal his superpowers and just stands there getting beer thrown at him. He walks away with dignity, a true hero. Unfortunately this is all undone when outside the bar we see he's pushed ten trees through the guy's truck. This destroyed the point of the scene, just for a cheap laugh at the bad guy's expense - criminal. I like to think this addition was the doing of an evil Hollywood executive, who insisted on putting in some lighter moments, and the Director had no choice but to agree.

I liked Lois Lane, and her interplay with Superman was good. She would do anything for a story, including leaking it to Julian Assange, but once she heard about Superman's story she decided not to tell anyone. This was nicely established but not overdone, and there were actually not many scenes of them together. When Lois was in the Arctic two things occurred to me that need explanations, can you help? Firstly, is it just coincidence that Clark Kent is working on the site where the Scout Ship, which has been there for 20,000 years, is finally found? And why does the Scout Ship contain a Superman outfit?

As for General Zod - he's OK. A very serious man, who often looks more sad than angry. I enjoyed it when he whimsically recounted his journey's round the Universe: "once, we even discovered an Earth Engine...", he says nostalgically. There's room for a good spin-off series there. By the end you actually feel a bit sorry for him.

In summary then, the first half was good. The big problem is in the second half, when Zod gets to Earth. His henchman are faithful to the original (Superman 2), with an Eastern European woman and a massive guy. The woman here is rubbish though, and seems to be in a totally different film (a Steven Seagal film). She claims she has no morals, and screams that "Evolution always wins!".

Zod's plan to attack Earth is ridiculous, but that's to be expected. I wish it was a smaller plan though, that didn't involve such huge special effects generating machines. This film was partly written by Christopher Nolan, I thought he was against CGI? By the end so many huge buildings have been toppled with big crunches you're just waiting for the tiresome fight scenes to be over so the story can move on. It's like Transformers 2 mixed with The Incredible Hulk. Everyone knows that bullets don't harm Superman, and that he fights really hard. So I can do without seeing that twenty times. In fact, if we got rid of all the scenes involving the army, and Zod's henchmen, you'd get a much tighter drama between the big actors.

The Earth scientist eagerly keeps up with the alien technology, and is soon able to inform us about countering the threat by combining two mega-devices into a Black Hole. He puts his plan to the army commander, who clearly has no idea what's going on, but nods approval. The only relief in the ensuing action-fest is seeing Laurence Fishburne running. After Zod's ship is destroyed I had no appetite for the final showdown with Zod himself, but got it anyway. I was only curious how they would show that a super-being had died, and was impressed Superman went for a simple neck-breaker. Afterwards he's pretty sad, as he's wiped out the last of his people. Although given the magic codex, and the necessity of a sequel to this remake, I bet he wasn't really the last.

Behind the Candelabra - Jamie's review

It’s a sad indictment of US movie studios that none of them would pick up the story of Liberace’s love affair with his chauffeur Scott (played by Matt Damon), so the film had to appear on HBO in America, not the cinema where it belongs.

Michael Douglas is always worth watching. Even in The Sentinel. No wonder Soderbergh forced him to wait a year after he got the cancer all-clear before shooting this film. Liberace is the role of his lifetime, and requires, well, a lot of life. Douglas does it justice. By turns creepy and guileless, loving and cruel, funny and egotistical, blind and self-aware, his Liberace is brilliant. He should get an Oscar just for the bit in a porn shop where he pops his head above a video booth door, simultaneously high, demonic and angelic, his eyes ablaze with virility and joie de vivre, and laughs at his far-younger lover who has passed out on the floor, out-paced and out-sexed by a buzzing pensioner.

Though there are plenty of scenes where Douglas looks just fabulous, there are many more requiring him to leave vanity at the door. It's a breathtaking moment when he presents a sagging, wattled body and balding pate for the camera’s scrutiny, stripped of costume and wig.

Energy suffuses the film, driving it headlong from the dizzying introduction of rural Scott to Liberace’s gilded world (full of male “helpers” who are well aware that Scott is about to replace them, as they replaced the young men who came before them), to the pianist's death from an AIDS-related illness.

And it is always funny, even when he dies. There’s a shocking sequence where Liberace persuades Scott to have plastic surgery to look more like him. It could have been played, with some justification, to make Liberace look like a monster. Instead, yes, it is gross, but also very funny.

Even Rob Lowe, given a stretched face with tiny, watery eye-slits to play Liberace’s unscrupulous plastic surgeon, is too fun to hate, despite readily agreeing to cut naïve Scott, and happily getting him addicted to drugs.

The ageing and de-aging effects look seamless (except when the seams are meant to show) as Scott and Liberace get older, younger, fatter, thinner, ill. But behind the amazing make-up, and the costumes and the camp, is a grown-up love story. Neither is innocent, though both are innocents. Scott absolutely, in the beginning, and Liberace always, in his way, clumsily wielding his material wealth and affections, addicted to love but allergic to constancy. We're used to the clichéd rise and fall, but Liberace (unexpectedly considering), offers something less superficial, and more subtle, an undulating depiction of a relationship, full of rhinestone peaks and buttock-shaped valleys.

Plus it features Dan Ackroyd, Scott Bakula and Carter Burke from Aliens. Can’t argue with that.

The Stone Roses: Made of Stone: by Danny

I didn't mean to watch this film. I thought I was going to see Byzantium, but walked into the wrong screen. I should have known something was up, as there were only ten other people in there, all middle aged men in big coats sitting on their own. I joined them, and ate a sandwich before the film started (it was lunch time). We all looked quite shifty.

I'm not a Stone Roses fan, and would never have watched this film deliberately. I know all of their songs though, and quite enjoyed it. Here's a brief history of the band: In the 1980s they were mad kids who went round on scooters. They got really popular in Manchester, a few of them left, and they released a massive album. Then they had a six year legal wrangle, released an acrimonious second album, and split up for twenty years.

The director, Shane Meadows, is obviously a massive fan, and it was more of a tribute than a documentary. The sort of thing that might be released if they all died. I liked that he put himself into the film, and we got to see his face, rather than pretending we were magically behind the scenes without any cameras present. In fact, I think Shane is the main interviewee, as the band never talk to him.

The best bit is the build up to a special free comeback gig in Warrington. They give away free tickers if you bring along old merchandise, and loads of the fans are interviewed being really excited. Inside the gig the atmosphere is brilliant, and rather than clips we get complete songs, which sound great.

After this high the other gigs, on the European tour, look like hard work. There's one bit of drama when the comeback stalls in Amsterdam, when the drummer decides to go home. Instead of talking to the band Mr Meadows just interviews himself, saying that he really hopes they get back together (again), which they do.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: By Danny

I saw this a while ago, just after reading the book. The book's only got about ten pages, but this movie was three hours long and is only the first one of a trilogy, so ought to feel epic. Sadly though, it doesn't. There's nothing like the sense of foreboding that you get in the proper Lord of the Rings films. The villain here is some sort of misshapen orc, who just grunts and looks very ugly.

The band of dwarves are not especially amusing, and could do with a heavy editing. They're from various parts of the British Isles, and the people I watched it with (in Belfast) were upset the only good looking one was English. There's a few Middle Earth stalwarts popping up - in one strange scene Elrond, Gladriel and Saruman (an impossibly old Christopher Lee) gather in Rivendell for no good reason. Ian McKellen as Gandalf is good, but seems to be doing a lot of work to hold it together.

My highlight was the Goblin King's song, which was mad. But I also hold him responsible for the low point in the film - the tremendously tiresome underground chase. I watched the film in 2D, maybe action scenes like that would have been great in 3D?

Overall then, I'm saying the film was a failure. But I still enjoyed it at the time. It's a big lavish production, with lots of good actors, and it moves along fairly well. I like fantasy films, and in fact I could take hours and hours of this kind of thing before I got bored. Wouldn't even mind watching it again.

The Purge: by Danny

This review, and all the other reviews, contains spoilers.

It's not about enemas. It's about enemies. That should have been the tagline.

I was a little worried this was going go be a horror movie, but Sci-Fi was mentioned somewhere in the description, along with Ethan Hawke, so I went to see it. The Purge has a really strong central idea - every year for one night all crime is legal and anything goes. Ethan is a contented rich guy who can afford protection, and locks down his big house for Purge Night. There's other rich guys who enjoy the The Purge and go outside their houses for a little 'hunting', to let off steam or take out someone they don't like. The few poor people left in society end up killing each other or just trying to stag safe.

Ethan plays a different role to usual. I'm so used to him being nice and innocent that I gave him the benefit of the doubt for a long time, before realising that actually his character really is supposed to be a bit of a prick. The give away is that he keeps fist pumping when he mentions his bonus from work. I also found Ethan's wife quite annoying, but I'm not sure if I was supposed to. It may be partly because she plays evil Cersei Lannister. There were certainly suggestions that the family were a little 'too perfect', which is why all the neighbours hated them. When Ethan got home she was cooking dinner, wearing high heels (do women do that?), and claimed "Dinner's nearly ready honey" or something like that, even though she'd only just begun chopping some vegetables.

Ethan's family were very casual about putting down the shutters for Purge Night, I guess to imply that they were usually totally safe and it was exceptional for anything to go wrong. But of course it did go wrong. The moral son opens their shutters to let in a desperate man, and a mob of masked preppy kids out enjoying The Purge demand his release so they can exercise their right to Purge, or they'll get Ethan's family too. The director (James DeMonaco) wrote The Negotiator and Assault on Precinct 13, so I should have known a siege was coming up.

Ethan is hard-nosed and wants to toss the poor black guy out the window for the mob to kill, but then has a cathartic change of heart and decides not to. Seconds later the poor guy says "no, you should throw me out the window", which shows that he's a nice guy too, so Ethan was right to save him. Ethan then decides his family will fight the mob, but they do it very cack-handedly. Can't they just wind down one of their windows and shoot the smug Joker-ish guy in the face? His wife, who played Sarah Connor in the Sarah Connor Chronicles, is surprisingly deadwood and Ethan has to slay about eight of them himself before getting stabbed, good work for a middle aged salesman.

An interesting idea about The Purge is that everyone needs to feel the release, even those who think they don't. This was hinted at by Ethan in his control room, and turned out to be true when at the end of the night his jealous neighbours take advantage of the mayhem to come round and take out Ethan's family. A minor query, was the Asian guy involved at the end? He was definitely in one scene, then didn't appear again.

There's a subplot about Ethan's daughter's boyfriend Henry, who tries to take advantage of the amnesty on Purge Night to shoot Ethan. This is a nice idea, and probably could have done with happening in a separate household, if the script could have stretched to two families rather than cramming everything into one house. The problem with Henry's plan, is that even though he won't get prosecuted for the crime, there's still going to be consequences. There's going to be a strain on the relationship if everyone knows he shot her father in front of the family.

That's a general problem with Purge Night - you might not be convicted for crimes but everyone will still know, for example, that you killed your boss with an axe. Maybe that's OK though, they'll just bottle up their feelings then try and kill you next year. Or maybe people who've grown up with The Purge have gotten so used to it they can forget about what happens for the other 364 days of the year, and what happens on Purge Night stays on Purge Night?

I'm focusing on the idea, as the action itself was fairly poor. I counted four times when someone was about to be killed, only for their potential assassin to be surprisingly shot in the back just in time. Ethan's son introduces two things early on, that you know will appear later on. Firstly, he has a radio controlled car, which he boasts "can now see in infra-red, and I've muffled the motor so it's virtually silent!" Not very subtle. Secondly, he shows everyone his strange habit of recording his own pulse with a heart rate monitor on his watch. It's a little harder to work out where that's going to reappear. Turns out that he rather morbidly attaches it to his Dad's wrist as he is expiring, so we can all hear Ethan's final pulses. A nice touch.

The single night of madness, and the scary masks, makes Purge Night feel a lot like Halloween. This genuinely is a night where more crime is gotten away with. My house was burgled once on Halloween, and the police were too busy to come and deal with it because of other 'mischief'. The next year the house was again burgled on Halloween. But Purge Night is definitely not Halloween, in the end credits they reveal it's March 21st. Afterwards, while I was purging myself in the bathroom, I wondered why they'd chosen 21st March. Then it became clear to me, it's the night before William Shatner's birthday! In fact, Shatner's Eve would be a much better title.

Star Trek Into Darkness: Jamie's take

STID suggests that JJ Abrams and his team got lucky when they made the first film. This sequel suffers from the same problems but more so (caricatures of the original actors instead of characters, incomprehensible action, nonsensical plot), and, sadly, makes the first film look worse in retrospect. Those over-obvious references to Spock's logical nature and Kirk's rashness that we forgave and even kind of enjoyed in the first reboot? STID is slathered in them, and makes you think Star Trek wasn't setting the scene to drill deep into these characters - it had them fully-formed, and they're staying paper thin.

So we get 2 hours of Bones being grumpy and nothing else, Uhura being keen to speak foreign languages and nothing else, Scotty getting anxious and - well, there's some Pegg comedy shtick - and Kirk. Oh Kirk. Shatner's Kirk was impetuous, yes, but he was also brainy. This Kirk is so rash and dumb it's just annoying. Credit to Quinto - his Spock is excellent. But the only way people interact with him is to note that he's very logical. Get over it guys. Worse is when they seem to wink to camera when they note each other's defining characteristics. It makes you realise you're watching a pandering show.

There's also a scary suggestion that Alice Eve has joined the crew. If so, I hope she gets a lot better at acting before the next film. Even in the background she drew the eye pulling unconvincing faces. Hopefully she'll be the franchise's Tasha Yar (non-Trekkies: she died).

And for all the critical love he's deservedly got for his other roles, here Cumberbtach is just...hammy. When he announces that his...name...is...Khan, he shakes and sweats and rolls it around his mouth like we're all in the very back row of the royal circle, not watching him on a movie screen where his face is 8 stories high and will bear a bit of subtlety. Although he's not helped by Abrams who, for some reason, shoots everyone in extreme close-up. Oftentimes I wanted to tell them to take a step back. If it were a conversation, they'd be invading your personal space. You'd think they were weird.

The first half of the film is really confusing, with a domino-fall of plot revelations that don't make sense and aren't really explained. You're just pulled through hoping all will become clear. It never does, because it's dropped when the film reveals what it really is -  a poor rehash of Wrath of Khan. Which is terrible news for anyone who's seen the original, since the emotional climax is lifted from that film, which means anyone with knowledge of Wrath is pulled right out of this one. They even hammer home the theft with dialogue ("I'm being you, Spock" "Yes, and I'm doing what you would usually do Jim") that is so on-the-nose and nod-nod wink-wink that it guarantees there's no space for engagement in the moment on its own terms.

Kirk doesn't even have the decency to wait until the next film to get resurrected. This diluted Wrath is a bloodless parody.

Some of the action sequences are good (the anti-grav run through the ship, Kirk and Khan's hurtle between ships), although they're shot using the crack cocaine of the modern Hollywood action director, shakycam, so the good ideas are only ever half-realised, the other half is blurry.

Other action sequences are too obviously superfluous to the plot to look like anything other than "an action bit". They don't move on the plot, they just tick a box. I counted four different situations where they created peril by adding a countdown. By the third literal ticking clock, the stakes looked hollow.

But do watch the end credits  - in 3D (which elsewhere is often blurry and doesn't improve the viewing experience) they are brilliant and make you feel like you're flying through space.

Star Trek Into Darkness: by Danny

I liked the first new Star Trek movie (even though Shatner wasn't in it), and thought this one would be good too. The best parts of Into Darkness are that it's slickly made, as expected, and the characters are mostly very good. The new villain is great too, although most of his actions seem nonsensical if you have time to think about them, which you don't. In fact by the end of it I felt bludgeoned by action, and slightly bewildered. Call me feeble, but I've not felt like this since the shakycam in Bourne Ultimatum forced me to lie down across three seats to cope.

Peter Weller was good, and of course Nimoy was excellent. But what was his special advice on how to beat Khan? Exploit his weakness, was that it? In Wrath of Khan (a much better film, than all other films), they defeat Khan by thinking in three dimensions. What did they do here, send some bombs across with a knowing wink because Spock wasn't really lying? The English woman was rubbish too.

The worst bit was that it felt like J.J.Abrams hadn't really got that Star Trek takes place in remote space, and instead made it feel like a standard Sci-Fi film, set in Earth's near future where we have a bit more technology. He dropped in Star Trek references in a slapdash way. I'm worried that when he makes the new Star Wars films they'll be nearly the same, but instead of things like Tribbles popping up here and there it'll be Ewoks instead.