'Paul' directed by Greg Mottola.

Produced by: Nira Park, Tim Bevan, and Eric Fellner.

Written by: Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jason Bateman, Blythe Danner, Sigourney Weaver,
John Carroll Lynch,  and Bill Hader.

Distributed by: Universal Pictures.

Year of Release: 2011.

Run time: 104 Minutes.

Budget: $40 Million.

Gross Revenue: $92, 163, 299.

I missed Paul when it was playing at cinemas, which is a shame because I really wanted to see it when I first saw the trailer. I’m a big fan of Simon Pegg’s Blood and Ice-Cream Trilogy, which so far consists Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. According to the imdb, Paul is not part of the trilogy because Edgar Wright—who directed the first two instalments of the trilogy—was not involved in its production.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that it was part of the trilogy though, because Paul follows the same formula as those films mentioned. Whereas Shaun of the Dead playfully pastiched the zombie movie sub-genre, and Hot Fuzz the action genre, this instalment is a loving tribute to sci-fi, but I’m sure you’re already aware of that if you’re a long time Simon Pegg fan. This movie is loaded with references to science-fiction films and television shows, particularly the movies directed by Steven Spielberg in the 80s. Unlike the recently release Super 8 though, Pegg and Frost know that it’s all about having fun.

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost play Graeme and Clive, two British geeks that have made a trip to the United States in order to go on a road-trip to visit all the significant UFO hotspots in America. It is on this road trip that they encounter Paul, an alien that has escaped from Area 51 because the U.S. government are planning to cut out his brain. Paul is computer generated and voiced by Seth Rogan, who uses the opportunity to play the alien the same way he has played all the other characters in his movie. The trio are chased by a sinister man in black (played by Jason Bateman), who reports to the mysterious Big Guy, who is played by Sigourney Weaver in a nod to her standing as the Queen of Sci-Fi. Along the way, the trio meet a fundamentalist born-again Christian, a woman that Paul first met as a young girl when he crash-landed on Earth (played by Bythe Danner), and a variety of other characters. They also get up to some crazy shenanigans.  

Make no mistake, Paul is a geek’s movie through and through, and you really have to be a sci-fi geek to get all of the jokes. You’ll probably still have a good time if you aren’t a geek though, because many of the jokes draw from the golden treasure chest of comedy—the dick and fart joke—but if you are a sci-fi geek, you’ll probably have a lot more fun than someone unintroduced to sci-fi (you know, a moron who doesn’t know what they’re missing).

So how is it? Yeah it’s pretty funny for the most part. Seth Rogan really suits the role of the alien, so much so that you wonder whether they had him in mind when they were writing it. I know there are a lot of people out there that don’t like Seth Rogan, but I think he has great comic timing, and he seems like the kind of guy you would want to get high with. In one scene, Paul the alien warns his friends not to try the pot he’s smoking because it’s really strong: “...[It’s] the stuff that killed Dylan”, he says. “Bob Dylan isn’t dead.” Graeme says. Paul smiles and replies: “Isn’t he?” with typical Seth Rogan cheekiness. It’s all very fun stuff.

It’s also not the type of movie that achieves any over-arching message. There is the typical theme of friendship, which pervades almost all of Pegg’s work. This time it’s made especially touching by Pegg’s performance, particularly in one of the final scenes—which I won’t spoil. The interactions between Graeme and Clive seem authentic and it is apparent that they love each other in a purely heterosexual way. However you definitely get the sense that the theme is just a vehicle for the film-makers to deliver references to various sci-fi media.

Notable examples? Well the best is probably the line delivered by Blythe Danner to Siguorney Weaver near the end of the film. Weaver’s Big Guy is about to kill Graeme’s love interest when Danner yells: “Get away from her you bitch!” before punching her, mimicking Weaver’s immortal words from the end of the iconic Aliens. It’s a nice moment, made especially exceptional because Weaver actually has a somewhat meaty role in Paul. There are numerous other references to sci-fi television shows and movies. As a long-term X-Phile, I was happy when Paul admitted that he was the one that came up with the idea for Agent Mulder.

In spite of all this cool novelty, I did feel that there was something missing from Paul. Maybe it was just because I had hyped the movie up a lot in my head; believing it was going to be the ultimate pastiche of science fiction. In the words of George Bush Snr as depicted in the famous Simpsons episode, it was: “Good...not great...” Shaun of the Dead was the ultimate pastiche, perhaps because it was so unexpected. There was also something about Shaun of the Dead that was quite touching. The friendship between the two characters was better established in Shaun than it is in Paul. There are certainly some touching moments to be had in this film, but I’m afraid Paul just doesn’t reach the same level. Don’t listen to me though, I’m being too nit-picky. You’ll have a good time here, so go rent it.

Four stars:

      

'Somewhere' directed by Sofia Copolla.

Produced by: Fred Roos, Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Coppola, Paul Rassam and G. Mac Brown.

Written by: Sofia Coppola.

Starring: Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning, Michelle Monaghan, Chris Pontius and Simona Ventura.

Music by: Phoenix

Studio: American Zoetrope.

Year of release: 2010.

Run time: 98 Minutes.

Budget: $7 Million.

Gross revenue: $13, 936, 909.

I really loved Lost in Translation and accordingly, I thought I really loved Sofia Copolla as a director. I think it was the overall ambient realism of the film; it was so close to real life yet without being completely mundane. You know, you’ve got Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray making this really intimate personal connection that they probably would never have made if it weren’t for the setting of the film, and yet you totally believe that the story could happen. It’s because the characters were so realistically portrayed that you became so attached to them. By the end of the film, it was almost as if they were real people. I daresay that if Bill Murray had of died in the end, it would have been the saddest film ever created. With the given ending, it must be content to rest as one of the saddest films ever created.

Somewhere is in a very similar style to Lost in Translation. I’ve yet to see Marie Antoinette, and I saw The Virgin Suicides so long ago I can’t even remember what it was about, so I’m not sure if this style of realism pervades Sofia Coppola’s entire oeuvre. However, if we were to go by Lost in Translation and Somewhere on their own, we can kind of uncover what Copolla is all about.

Existential angst is the big issue here, with a heaped teaspoon of ‘celebrity’ just to get the broth simmering well. In Somewhere, Stephen Dorff plays Johnny Marco, a tabloid celebrity who lives the high-life of a famous millionaire, which is actually made pretty mundane through Copolla’s lens. This is nowhere more apparent than in the scene where two blonde identical twin strippers perform a synchronised pole dance for our protagonist. Though popular culture has ingrained into the collective consciousness this idea of the super-sexy woman using her super-sexy pole to be super-sexy, Copolla forces us to watch the entirety of the dance sequence and it’s actually quite clumsy and awkward looking. Apparently, Johnny agrees with us, because he passes out in the middle of it. Scenes like this deconstruct all the media out there that depicts the celebrity life as fabulous and awe-inspiring. It reminds the viewer that real life can never be like life as depicted in movies, and even (perhaps especially) in reality television.

Dancing serves as a recurring visual motif in Somewhere, with the above mentioned pole-dancing twins routine juxtaposed with the much sweeter figure skating of Marco’s estranged daughter, played brilliantly by Elle Fanning. I struggled to come up with what such a motif could mean and settled on the idea that Marco is so saturated by women who want to perform for him that he can’t even tell which performances are meaningful; whilst he can be forgiven for falling asleep during the pole-dancing, he is judged a little more harshly for sending text messages during his daughter’s figure skating routine.  

It’s all very bleak stuff, however the question I think every film-maker must ask before they commence a project is whether or not it’s engaging enough to hold the attention of the audience. This is where Somewhere falls down a bit. I don’t think it’s a complete train wreck by any means, but there was just something so sweet about the intimacy between Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray in Lost in Translation that was missing in this film. You do get a little bit of tenderness between Marco and his daughter, but it’s just not as good. I’m not saying that Copolla should be restricted to composing endless variations on a similar riff, but I just don’t think that Somewhere reaches the same level as Lost in Translation, which was quite simply a classic film in the true sense of the word. 

A few critics condemned Somewhere as the whining of a privileged brat, and I think such allegations are unfair, because Copolla’s celebrity background provides insight into what is really a unique situation: A  man who is allowed to remain a child by virtue of an over-paid and perhaps under-demanding career. If he were a working class man, he would be forced to grow up in order to pay the bills. French magazine Le Monde expressed it far more eloquently when they said that Somewhere details “...the delicate irony of the delinquency of a universe of the happy few.” 

Three and a half stars:

'Hanna' directed by Joe Wright.

Produced by: Leslie Holleran, Marty Adelstein and Scott Nemes.

Written by: David Farr and Seth Lochhead.

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams, Jason Flemyng and Cate Blanchett.

Music by: The Chemical Brothers.

Year of release: 2011.

Run time: 111 Minutes.

Budget: $30 Million.

Gross revenue: $50, 885, 118.

So, I realise that the major countries have had Hanna playing in cinemas for about a month now, but it still hasn't been released in Australia. Just another example of the way Australia is getting screwed in the film department. I guess I could have waited until it is released here on the 28^th of June, but I had the opportunity to catch Hanna at a private screening the other day. And by private screening, I mean a mate of mine downloaded a decent enough rip of it, and we watched it in my lounge room only after we moved my brother's 42 inch flatscreen downstairs.

The trailer for this movie got me pretty excited when I watched it a few months back. The movie is about a teenage girl, the eponymous Hanna, who lives in secluded German forest land with her father played by Eric Bana, who has devoted his life to training Hanna how to be a ruthless killer. It's not for nothing though, she has a target: The mysterious Marissa Wiegler, played by Cate Blanchett. The moment that hooked me in the trailer was when we see the young Hanna break the neck of a CIA agent impersonating Cate Blanchett. Crazy teenage girl that has been taught since birth to be a cold-blooded killer? Count me in. I guess it's sad to say that I didn't enjoy the movie as much as I thought I would.

My first problem is with the way the plot unfolds; everything is shrouded in mystery. I'm not against this at all (The X-Files was my favourite television show), but the way it is handled in Hanna is a little bit shit. In the very beginning of the movie, we don't really know what motivates any of the characters, and when the motivation is revealed in the second (or is it third?) act, it's just kind of too sci-fi-but-not-quite for me. I won't go into it, less I spoil it for some poor Australian out there who has a major jones to see the flick. However, you definitely get the sense that the first draft of the screenplay might have had a lot more exposition regarding why Hanna is in the situation she is in, but the director, who helmed Pride and Prejudice and Atonement before this, thought all the sci-fi stuff was a bit silly. Either that or the writer himself, one Seth Lochead, really struggled to shit or get off the pot regarding whether or not this was going to be a fanciful trip into speculative fiction or a serious piece questioning the nature of Darwinian survival.

The last sentence of that paragraph provides a nice segue way into an analysis of the thematic content of the film (my HSC students would be proud). Basically it's a coming-of-age story about a girl that has grown up sheltered from human contact. So in between the arse kicking (which was rather scant, I thought), we get a lot of dialogue about friendship and learning to be an independent adult. In times like these, the movie has high school English syllabus written all over, and not in good way. It's all very cliché, and none of the actors provide any of the genuine emotional depth that might lift the film out of cliche. It's almost as if they are all just going through the motions. You get the sense that there might have been some sequences that were deleted that might improve this, but overall each performance is very muted. The only real commendable performance is by Eric Bana, who brings significant intensity to the fight scenes. Cate Blanchett is under utilised here, and the lead, Saoirse Ronan, carries the film well without giving us any scenes where she really takes off.

Most of the fight scenes are shockingly shot. The film does that thing where it zooms right in during the martial arts sequences so you don't get to see much of the action. The Bourne movies did this, but managed to counteract it with solid character development, which is lacking in Hanna. Also the editing in Hanna is very choppy. It's cut to a soundtrack performed by The Chemical Brothers, and apparently that's supposed to be cool, but scenes of Hanna escaping a secret underground facility as strobe lights pop all around her leave us confused and a little disorientated. I guess this reflects Hanna's own personal torment, and I'm sure if you mentioned this in a HSC essay, you'd get great marks, but it's just not that enjoyable I'm afraid.

Ultimately, I left Hanna with a feeling of big fat meh! I guess I was really excited to see the movie, and hyped it up too much as a result. Let this be a lesson to you kids; don't get excited about anything, because it won't ever live up to your expectations. Unless it's directed by Quentin Tarantino of course.

Three stars:

'X-Men: First Class' directed by Mathew Vaughn.

Produced by: Gregory Goodman, Simon Kinberg, Lauren Shuler Donner, and Bryan Singer.

Written by: Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz, Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn. (Based on characters by Stan Lee,Jack Kirby and Chris Claremont)

Starring: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Rose Byrne, January Jones, Oliver Platt and Kevin Bacon.

Year of release: 2011.

Run time: 131 Minutes.

Budget: $120 Million.

I think the world all but gave up on X-Men after the shitty third film, which was directed by Brett Ratner-- who has a bad habit of fucking up everything he touches. A few years ago we were, of course, treated to X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which seemed to be the coup-de-grace on the franchise. I liked the first two X-Men movies; I dug all the crazy mutants and the almost Shakespearean character development that occurred between the two great actors, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan. Make no mistake, the first two movies were four star films.

So how did I feel about this latest offering? It was pretty good. I mean, I didn't enjoy it as much as the first two, but it is certainly several rungs above the more recent mutant outings. The best part of the film is the dynamic between Magneto and Professor X, played by two younger actors. In the best scenes, you really get a sense of the tenderness between these two characters, who are due to end up as enemies later in the X-Men universe. The two actors playing these parts, James McAvoy as Professor X and Michael Fassbender as Magneto, shine in their roles. There is a scene where Professor X taps into a memory of Magneto's childhood that is really quite touching. When he is done, a single tear rolls down Professor X's face as he says: “Thank-you for allowing me to view that memory. It was really quite special...” And it's stuff like this that really adds to the intimate connection between both characters.

Where points need to be taken off is in how most of the female characters are portrayed. One of the mutants, who possesses fairy wings and the ability to spit acid, is a stripper who says something along the lines of: “I'd rather have [people] look at my body, than stare at my mutations...” It's supposed to be really sincere, but given the fact that every female character struts around in short skirts and low tops at the best of times, and lingerie at the worst, it's hard to take any of it very seriously. It's almost as if all of the serious dialogue is confined to the two male leads, who get to wear classy suits as opposed to bikinis. I'm sure if I was a woman, I'd probably be a bit offended.

This element of sexism extends to Mystique's character. In the first two X-Men, she was sort of depicted as the ultimate bad-arse. A femme-fatale who, despite her blatant sexuality, managed to punish men that sexualised her. Sure, she was no Clarice Starling, but it was a refreshing change from the more cliched female roles in much of the American action cinema. In this film, Mystique is reduced to an angsty twenty-something with body image issues. We get all the typical: “If only I could look normal...” type dialogue, and it's a bit shit. I realise that it's all part of her character arc, but I think it undermines Mystique as a character a little. The most absurd part of this arc occurs when she speaks to Magneto, who tells her that there is nothing wrong with her body. She sleeps with him, and from that point on accepts that her unusual lizard skin with a blue hue is beautiful after all. So there you go female comic-book fans: You too can accept your body, just like Mystique learns to, but only if a man gives you the nod of approval by sleeping with you. It's tacky, and it sort of makes you wish Jonathan Demme would make an X-Men movie with Jodie Foster in it just to counter-balance all the testosterone.

One of the great things about the X-Men franchise was how it served as somewhat of an allegory for the civil rights movement. You had these mutants who were being persecuted by 'normal' humans and the message was always that difference is something that should be valued. Though I was always skeptical that the message did anything to change the minds of bigoted adults, I always felt that young kids watching the movies were going to take away a positive message, which would resonate with them when confronted with someone who was different to them-- whether they be gay or black, etc. There is that pervading sense of allegory in this film, but I don't think it's as prominent as in the first two movies. That's not necessarily a bad thing though, I mean not every movie has to have some moral agenda attached to it.

I guess the underlying theme of this movie is redemption versus-- not necessarily forgiveness-- but something more along the lines of accepting the tragic events in your life, and using that anger to do good as opposed to bad. It's a universal theme that was a bit of a cliché back when George Lucas was writing Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader's dialogue. Ah, but this is a popcorn flick after all! I can hear some of you collectively mumbling: “If you want some meaning, review a foreign film, not X-Men”, and of course it's true. For the large part, X-Men: First Class is an entertaining piece of escapism. This is despite the fact that some of the mutant powers are a bit lame: Like the guy who can scream at such a high frequency that he smashes stuff, who I shall call Screech because I forget his mutant name. And the guy who hurls hula-hoops of death at his foes. Magneto makes up for this by having the most bad-arse power perhaps imaginable, and the film owes a great debt to Fassbender's moodiness.

In the long run, if you were going to see this movie, you probably would have already done so, and this review is not going to change your mind. However, if you're not fluent in the X-Men mythology, and are looking for some escapism, you could do worse than X-Men: First Class. Oh and I promise my next review will be of a more literary film.

Three stars: