The Trip to Italy - Danny's review

In 2010 Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon went on a tour of restaurants in the Lake District. It was filmed by Michael Winterbottom and made into a short series and normal length film. In 2014 they repeated the same thing, but in Italy. The film versions of these Trips wasn't widely released in the UK, but I saw The Trip to Italy as part of a special synchronised screening. After the film Coogan and Brydon went on stage live at a cinema in Hackney, and answered audience questions while we all watched in our different cinemas.

The basic premise is that the pair of them have been commissioned to go around Italy to visit six expensive restaurants and write reviews about them. A large proportion of the film is them at dinner, engaged in conversation trying to do down each other's careers, and competing to see who can do the best impressions. Although Rob Brydon is known as an impersonator Coogan began his career twenty five years ago working on Spitting Image (Brydon says his Neil Kinnock is "The best thing he does.") and is also very good. There's a little bit of plot involved but it's basically just them talking and being funny.

Winterbottom previously directed Coogan on 24 Hour Party People and them both in A Cock and Bull story, and this has a similar anarchic style. It's a hybrid of documentary and fiction. You're not quite sure how real it is, as Brydon and Coogan play lightly fictionalised versions of themselves. Coogan says his character is very like him but slightly more annoying. The interviews after the film made me realise it's a bit more scripted than I first thought. For example, their one week holiday in Italy was actually filmed over about six weeks, and Brydon was supplied with music to produce to listen to on the journey - Alanis Morrissette, an inspired choice.

Coogan said in the interview that it's often cut at counter-intuitive points, continuing long after the natural end of a scene once a joke is no longer funny. This gives it an odd sense of reality, and surprisingly works well. What's interesting about the film version compared to the TV version is that despite being half as long it maintains the same slow pacing, with lots of same establishing shots. This still works because the dialogue is so fast paced and bewildering that it's OK to have a minute of relaxation in between.

For the record, my favourite bit is on the boat when they are doing Anthony Hopkins from Mutiny on the Bounty.

Godzilla - Danny's review

Warning - this review contains lots of spoilers.

Godzilla is a big movie. Right from the beginning it feels like you're watching something important.

In the first half hour the tension builds up nicely with some eery unexplained phenomena. Some people say they're earthquakes, but we know better and so does scientist Bryan Cranston. He's on top form, and the movie loses a lot when he goes and his son Ford takes over as the lead. Whereas Cranston is obsessed with the conspiracy of what's actually going on, the son doesn't care and just wants to get home to his family, but by a series of tenuous coincidences he repeatedly ends up at the heart of the action. Worse again than Ford is his irritating wife, played by Elizabeth Olsen. There's one scene where Ford phones her and is trying to explain something but keeps getting interrupted by her hysterical blubbering. He looks pretty pissed off at having to wait for her to calm herself down so he can continue, and I felt the same way.

It's revealed that Godzilla has been around for ages, and the nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s were actually failed attempts to blow him up. The major twist in this movie is that there are some other big monsters, who are known as MUTOs. Their story begins when some archaeological team somewhere find a couple of big eggs. One of these contains the first MUTO, who trundles off to Fukushima Power Station (not actually called that) and causes a meltdown. He hangs around at the power station feeding off the radiation. The other one is put in storage and years later bursts out, fully 300 feet high. The two MUTOs try and meet up, for some incestuous breeding, but they have to deal with the ineffective US military and also Godzilla.

I've a few problems with this. How did the second MUTO get so big while being stored in a box? Secondly, why does Godzilla wants to kill the MUTOs?. It's certainly not to eat them. Also, the MUTOs feed on background radiation from the meltdown, but also seem to literally eat nuclear warheads. How do they even know there's radiation in a sealed warhead, unless it's leaking? It's not clear if Godzilla eats radiation; he does have some pretty fierce atomic breath but has no interest in eating the warheads.

Ken Watanabe plays a monster expert who when called upon reveals what the MUTOs and Godzilla are up to. As the movie goes into the endgame there's no need for his explanation, so he's a bit redundant, and just wistfully talks about restoring the balance of nature. That's right, it's an eco thriller. There's a suggestion I think that Godzilla, who is referred to as a God a few times, really is some sort of furious avenger, who kills the MUTOs as they are messing things up. There's one scene where Godzilla's big spines protect some humans and it looks a bit deliberate. So is Godzilla actually not so much a protector of nature, but a protector of humans? A giant green batman in the sea? He certainly has a nice look about him, scary but also quite chunky and lovable, compared to the spiky and nasty MUTOs. I wonder what his BMI is.

When the monsters are fighting at the end it's a bit like Pacific Rim (see our reviews here and here); the fighting is good and solid and lots of fun, but you don't really feel a lot of danger or excitement.

For me the most interesting bits were the scenes shot from the perspective of kids. There's also a few nice quiet bids in the middle where Elizabeth Olsen isn't in it, and the tension slowly cranks up.

Finally, I should mention the most remarkable aspect of the film - the tremendous amount of rumbling. It's nearly constant. There's rumbling during the seismic activity, rumbling when the score is menacing, and lots and lots of rumbling when there's giant fighting. If you watch this at home it's going to sound terrible on your TV.

Overall, a competently handled big budget thriller, but ultimately disappointing. I'd have liked a bit more suspense.

Sabotage - Danny's review

I'm a massive Arnie fan. I just had a look on IMDB and the only Schwarzenegger films I've not seen are a TV movie from 1980 and his two post-governorship comeback films: The Last Stand with Johnny Knoxville and Escape Plan with Sylvester Stallone. I've not seen these two as I've been ignoring his comeback so far, until I couldn't resist Sabotage. It proved to be a bit of a disappointment.

It's a shame as Arnie gets a plumb role as the captain of a DEA attack squad. It's acknowledged by his team that he's a bit older, and he is a father figure to them all. He's rugged but approachable. The premise of the film is quite interesting too. The DEA squad decide its time to get paid, and after a typically violent drug bust on a cartel they steal $10 million for themselves. But one of the team double crosses them all and the money disappears. There's an internal investigation which reveals nothing, and the rest of the film is spent in mild suspense wondering who did it and why. Then the team start dying one by one, and Arnie teams up with a cop to investigate.

Arnie's team all have nicknames and have a lot of macho banter. The most exciting one is the woman, who is extremely feisty. In fact considering its a film aimed at boys the women have quite good roles throughout.

David Ayer previously directed End of Watch and wrote Training Day and makes a good cop drama. Everyone is dirty, even Arnie for a change. Here they're actually more army than cops, and there's a lot of special operations. These mostly consist of someone pushing open a door and screaming "Cover me!" or "Breach!" then the rest coming through. They go through a lot of doors like this, and it's no surprise Arnie's tough guy nickname is Breacher, presumably because he breaches so many doors. If you hate closed doors, you'll like this movie.

The plot details gradually become clear in quite a steady way which I like. There's no dramatic reveal. Unfortunately, the character motivations are totally at odds with how they behave. This is a shame, as if the mystery of who dunnit was well handled this would be the sort of film that would reward a second watch. As it is, I'm scared to even think about all the things that don't make sense.

Of course any film with Arnie in is primarily an Arnie film, and as I've said he's on poor form. This pretty much cripples the film. He's got weird eyebrows and a haircut that makes him look like a boy from the 1950s. He's quite hard to understand, and at one point when he tells another cop that they "like cups" I thought he'd said "like caps" which also made no sense. If he uses any sort of slang it's hard to work it out. And worst of all is when Arnie delivers a tough guy swearing bit, he speaks so slowly it just sounds awful and there's no zing at all. However, all this is very nearly redeemed with a very cool final section, which is strongly reminiscent of his underrated 2002 film Collateral Damage [Edit - I called it Collateral by mistake the first time]

Overall then, a bit of a disappointment, but seeing Arnie's face again did lift my spirits. Finally it's worth noting there are no acts of sabotage at any point in the film.

Pompeii - Danny's review

At the start of the year I selected twenty films to watch in 2014 (see here). I now wish I'd picked this list more carefully. There's some real duds, including Pompeii. What was I thinking? I duly went to watch it last week, but with very little enthusiasm. However, I was pleasantly surprised, as my minuscule expectations were slightly surpassed.

The film starts in a pleasingly olde worlde way with lots of ancient fonts and a quote from Pliny the Younger, who wrote about the volcano's eruption in 79 AD (Spoiler Alert). The evil Romans are wiping out some doughty but ill equipped Celts. The chief Roman is a splendidly dressed Kiefer Sutherland, who relishes the chance to ham it up. He talks in an English accent, keeps referring to the Majesty of Rome and raising an eyebrow, and wears increasingly splendid gold tunics. The doughty Celts are all wiped out apart from a big-eyed child, who survives by acting limply so they assume he's dead. This child grows up to be Kit Harrington, better known as John Snow from Game of Thrones. I could have said that he also spends the rest of the film acting limply, which would be a good joke but not quite fair. He's OK. His acting style is to steadfastly ignore everything and carry on with his business in a stern way, which for a stoic hero works quite well.

Once Kit has grown up he becomes a gladiator and gets transported to Pompeii, with echoes of Conan the Barbarian but obviously falling well short of that. On the way to Pompeii he passes a foxy Roman princess whose horse gets injured. Because he's from a horse tribe Kit is able to gently comfort the horse and then manfully break it's neck. The princess is naturally overwhelmed by both his sensitivity and power.

Needless to say, their love does not run smooth, as Kiefer also fancies her, and he's got the Majesty of Rome behind him. Alongside the blossoming romance Kit is also getting ready to fight another gladiator. They are both so manly though they quickly becomes pals and are soon calling each other brother and killing lots of Romans together. This is all intercut with shots of Mount Vesuvius, which you see every ten minutes rumbling in the background. There's no missing it. Only the greasy slave dealer Graecus senses the danger of the volcano, and there's a fun scene of accidental comedy where he is in a hurry to leave town but insists on being carried in a litter, which goes at barely walking pace while he shouts to go faster.

When the eruption finally happens there's a succession of dangers to avoid. First it's shaky ground, then crumbling buildings, flying fireballs, tsunami and finally a wave of ash. There's some scenes towards the end where they are running away from destruction that are entirely CGI and you might as well be watching an animation. At least most of it is quite exciting. The key for a film like this is the pacing, you've got to have the right amount of build up pre-disaster then keep the excitement up while the disaster is happening, and I think Pompeii acheives this.

The very end of the film is stylishly done, and only a horse survives (presumably he then wrote it all down so the film could be made). Overall, I'd say it's a nicely put together action film, as you'd expect from the director of Resident Evil and AVP (Paul WS Anderson). Having said that I'm pretty sure it will be a massive flop.

Transcendence - Danny's review

We all live in two worlds. The physical world of sounds and sights and smells, and the digital world of the internet. Transcendence is about a dying guy uploading his mind onto a machine, to move entirely from the physical to the digital world. It's an entertaining idea, and is vaguely relevant to science today as Artificial Intelligence is improving.

However, the film suffers from the widely held but annoying idea that there is a nice dividing line between being a dumb machine (Skynet before 2:14 am) and being sentient (Skynet after 2:14 am). There's a thought provoking bit where a machine is challenged to prove it's self aware, and gives a killer comeback that humans also can't prove they're self aware. I think as science improves actually we will realise that there is no threshold to cross, just increasingly complex computers which are more and more capable of 'human intuition' and making 'the mistakes that make us human'.

But back to the film. Johnny Depp plays the main scruffy scientist, and Paul Bettany is in good stooping stuttery form as his genius pal. Rebecca Hall is less convincing as a scientist, and more convincing at looking like Scarlett Johansson.

Early on there's a science demonstration with lots of weird equations and graphs spinning round behind each speaker, which probably means they thought what they were saying was too boring. The director, Wally Pfister, is a Cinematographer who worked on some Christopher Nolan films. I knew this already and maybe it influenced me, but it certainly seemed like a lot of time was spent on establishing shots and visual cues. Science scenes begin with lots of computers, when the FBI are tired they carry big cups of coffee, and terrorists unnecessarily dye their hair blonde.

It's an interesting journey seeing Johnny Depp uploaded. It's not clear how much of the sentient face on the monitor is really Johnny (human and compassionate), and how much is the basic computer program they mixed in (cold, calculating and evil). The wife believes it's definitely really him, but she's bound to say that. There's also a subplot of neo-Luddites trying shut him down, and possibly a hint of a love triangle. That would all be enough for me, but unfortunately there's loads more plot thrown in now and the film really goes downhill.

Having made the transcendence from physical to digital, Cyber-Johnny then makes the transition back to physical. I expect this is because the film-makers didn't want just a cerebral internet-enemy, they wanted more of an action film with some real physical baddies. This transition back to physical consists of creating an army of zombies and some ridiculous nanobots. I didn't like the nanobots at all.

Another complaint - in the first half of the film it's clearly established that Cyber-Johnny is trying to connect to the internet, and will link in every connected device. The film then forgets this rule, and before long he can simply control anything electric, even if it's not a networked device. At this point the neo-Luddites start reading books by candle light.

In the bizarre finale Johnny releases his nanobots across the whole world, and they are even seen swimming in the water and replicating. I don't understand how/why this is cured by Paul Bettany releasing a virus and shutting down the internet. The purpose of shutting down the internet seems only to be able to finish with a post-apocolyptic world with no electricity, which is portrayed as actually quite nice. I think this shows the film coming down on the side of 'computers are bad', and indeed Paul Bettany mutters some guff about the human spirit.

It's better than Robocop but worse than everything else I've seen this year. Afterwards I planned to watch Pompeii but couldn't face it.