Review: Star Trek Into Darkness 3D

The Pitch: Boldly stalling where no one has stalled before…

The Review: In 2009, a bold new vision for one of sci-fi’s most established franchises warped onto our cinema screens, with enough lens flare to blind Galileo and with a cocksure young cast breathing new life into established roles. Four years on, and more time has elapsed since than the original Kirk and Spock even managed of their five year mission, but Starfleet’s most inexperienced crew – in Starfleet’s newest and most expensive iShip - are still kicking their heels, picking up the odd mission to exploding volcanoes where they can, but still waiting for an extended mission to truly test their talents. With their off-screen leader about to defect to the Dark Side, this could conceivably be the last big-screen adventure under the current leadership, so you’d hope that a four year gap would have given writers Bob Orci, Alex Kurtzmann and Damon Lindelof chance to imagine a truly epic adventure, giving the cast chance to take their old roles in new directions and to make the most of the opportunity that the success of their reboot had given them. If that’s what you were hoping, prepare to be sorely disappointed.

Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) Mark 2 might have spent a year serving with each other, but their team work still leaves a little to be desired. After a mission to a primitive planet goes somewhat awry and the Prime Directive is broken, Kirk finds his captaincy removed and Spock reassigned. But when the Federation comes under attack seemingly from one of its own, a trip to the Klingon homeworld reunites the feuding officers and sets Kirk on a collision course with the powerful, er, John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch). It’s a mission which will test Kirk and Spock’s loyalty, sense of honour and occasionally some of their other crew members as well, but only occasionally. To say any more would deprive you of the opportunity to feel angry and disappointed when you watch it for yourself spoil the major plot twists the film has tried to keep up its sleeve for the past two years.

Much of the joy that resided after the first film was the sense of potential of a universe where literally anything was now possible, where writers seemed willing to take risks, and where rules seem made to be broken. So to see the second film in the series squander that potential so ruthlessly is desperately disappointing, the plot an amalgam of regurgitated elements from at least three different Star Trek TV or film series and the direction based simply on generating enough momentum to attempt to skirt over the massive plot holes. There was a feeling when Star Trek: Enterprise ended that after nearly 700 episodes, Trek might have finally run out of ideas; that’s not only a fault of poor writers, it’s blatantly untrue as the last season of Enterprise was packed full of interesting stories using the wealth of established worlds the series had created (but by then everyone had stopped watching anyway). To see the Klingons reduced to faceless cyphers in service of a hopelessly rehashed plot does show that this creative team cares little about motivations and even less about the intelligence of its viewers. It also suggests that the trilogy of writers have run out of ideas after precisely one film, never mind 700 episodes, and in attempting to pointlessly honour what’s come before – when the whole point was that this crew no longer needed to – the narrative simply disappears up its own impulse engine in the most convoluted and uninteresting way possible.

Most of the science of the film is written by idiots who would likely electrocute themselves if required to require a plug. To a certain extent, the previous film suffered from the same problem, but the characters and plotting were compelling enough that one could feel inclined not to pay that a huge amount of attention. With the plot running in dull circles, the characters are now poorly served: Cumberbatch’s Harrison is all growl and no menace but still acts everyone else (including poor Chris Pine) off the screen, Peter Weller’s stern admiral fares little better and Alice Eve is now infamously misogynised by the shot in her underwear, adding little else of interest. None of the Enterprise crew develops in any way or makes any more of an impression than last time around, most of the action set pieces are throwbacks to earlier movies (from Generations to Star Trek itself) and the plot grinds any attempts at believability into a literal magic sprinkling dust with which the film is liberally covered. About the only element I can offer unreserved praise for is Michael Giacchino’s score; a couple of the action set pieces are exciting, if lifted from earlier films, but any sense of jeopardy goes out the window very early on. There’s a great cast at the service of any other director who’s like to take up the reins (hint, hint) but for now I’m fearful that if left unchecked, J.J. Abrams might be about to ruin another major franchise – and when most people thought George Lucas had fair ruined it already, I fear for the state of cinematic sci-fi in years to come if this is the best we’re capable of.

Why see it at the cinema: Sure, the little bits of whatever that blue stuff is in the warp trail sure do look pretty, and on the cinema screen you should be able to tell the current London landmarks from the fake new ones, but given that this was partly filmed with IMAX cameras everything after the prologue feels remarkably small scale.

Why see it in 3D: For the love of Kahless, just don’t. Into Darkness isn’t just a subtitle, it’s incredibly descriptive, and when the shots are edited for 2D and filmed in darkness, wearing the indoor sunglasses is an incredibly frustrating experience, to the point where I took mine off if all of the characters were in the foreground. See it in 2D only.

What about the rating: Rated 12A for moderate violence and threat. A mite swearier than most previous Treks (possibly excepting the first two Next Gen efforts), this is fairly standard action fare and anyone who can normally cope with a 12A should have relatively few problems here.

My cinema experience: A pretty packed Saturday morning showing at the Cineworld in Bury St. Edmunds. I managed to arrive around 25 minutes after the advertised start time, by which time the prologue was well under way; thankfully, having seen it before The Hobbit last year, I missed nothing. A massive queue at the ticket machine caused me to collect my ticket at the concessions counter (note to all Cineworld staff everywhere: my Unlimited card might be nearly as old as you are, but it still swipes fine in every one of your multiplexes). A packed audience (packed for a Saturday morning, anyway) sat largely silently through the movie which had little in the way of projection or sound issues, other than the 3D issues which were no fault of the cinema.

The Score: 4/10

Review: Olympus Has Fallen

The Pitch: Independence Day 2: Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the White House…

The Review: Remember 1996? It feels like a more innocent time now, when a director could blow up the White House without making the audience feel slightly uncomfortable. The events of September 11, 2001 not only had a profound effect on the world at large but also on the world of action cinema, and the excesses of action cinema of the previous two decades being replaced with the more forceful, intimate approach of the likes of the Taken movies. One other media event that 9/11 undoubtedly had a significant impact on was the TV series 24, which started less than two months after the Twin Towers fell. It also epitomised that more brutal manner, even as began more and more to embrace old school excess in its later seasons. A memorable series of episodes in season 7 saw terrorists from an imagined African nation take over the White House in an effort to further their cause; it seemed a concept ripe for a big screen makeover, and in 2013 we’ll get not one, but two, groups of terrorists taking down the White House.

Part of the reason 24 felt the need to invent African terrorists was the lack of real world threats, as sadly there are no longer convenient superpowers likely to invade at a moment’s notice. Bad guys of choice these days, in a topical move which will hopefully date this film in decades to come, are the North Koreans, and there’s a Korean flavour to the threat placed on the President’s home address. President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) is playing host to a delegation from the south of the peninsula when his residence comes under threat, and with the vice-president also at the talks, the taking of hostages leaves the Speaker Of The House (Morgan Freeman) in charge and quoting the standard non-negotiation speeches. Their only hope appears to be a Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), removed from the President’s personal detail after an earlier tragedy but who just happens to be in the right place… at the wrong time.

Olympus is a curious mix: the first act, including the titular falling, has very much the po-faced seriousness and thumping aggression of Noughties action films. The terrorists themselves have a fairly foolproof plan to get in (i.e. brute force), and don’t skimp on the bullets in their way through the front door. Once there, what they find is almost a relic of the Cold War; this relic, however, is of the Schwarzenegger or Stallone brand, that spouts one liners and deflects bullets by sheer weight of charisma. I believe that Gerard Butler has proven, beyond any reasonable doubt, that he’s capable of making some fairly dreadful romantic comedies; it seems he’s better at making moderate action movies, but certainly this one would have been more enjoyable if it had taken his lead and followed a lighter tone. Consequently it feels as if Butler’s in a different film to everyone else for long stretches, but you’d much rather be watching the one he’s in than the one you end up with.

Apart from Butler, the other thing that seems to be left over from the Nineties is the effects work, as anything in the sky or in broad daylight looks like stock footage from an almost pre-CG era. Much of the rest of Olympus is an exercise in how to assemble a top quality cast and then absolutely waste them, an exercise conducted with almost military efficiency. In addition to Freeman and Echhart, everyone from Oscar nominated talent including Melissa Leo and Angela Bassett to Golden Globe winner Dylan McDermott and even twice Fangoria Chainsaw Award nominated Radha Mitchell get nothing to do, and each and every one conducts themselves with the enthusiasm of someone being forced to work to pay their overdue gas bill. Increasingly Training Day looks like an aberration on Antoine Fuqua’s CV, with the tension and drama of Olympus more in line with his other works such as Shooter or King Arthur. Based on this evidence, it would be worth someone taking a punt on Gerard Butler if you’ve got a cheesy Nineties action movie burning a hole in your desk draw, so long as you invest it – and the supporting cast – with more energy than this managed.

Why see it at the cinema: If you can overlook the early shoddy CGI, then there’s a reasonable amount of spectacle, and Butler’s performance is likely to elicit a good deal of laughs or groans for you to share.

What about the rating: Rated 15 for strong bloody violence and strong language. It’s reasonably sweary and quite stabby, and more satisfying in that sense than the 12A action movie that seems to have become de rigeur these days.

My cinema experience: A reasonably full house at the Cineworld in Bury St. Edmunds. A fairly standard amount of trailers and adverts, no sound or projection issues to speak of, and the audience by and large seemed to enjoy themselves.

The Score: 5/10

The Half Dozen: 6 Most Interesting Looking Trailers For May 2013

May has arrived, and with it warm enough weather for me to be regularly feeling guilty that I’m not doing any gardening and instead spending half my spare time in the cinema. I did spend an afternoon this weekend trimming back a hedge in my garden that hasn’t been touched since I moved in six years ago; hopefully the series of tiny scars on my arms from wrestling overgrown branches into the back of the car to take for recycling have bought me enough time to have a day in the cinema on Bank Holiday Monday, and at least a week of not having to think about doing the same with the hedge on the other side (now leering ominously across the garden as if it’s auditioning for the next Evil Dead remake).

Anyway, before this turns into Gardener’s Question Time, suppose we’d better talk about films. I’ve been keeping detailed records of what I watch since 2008, which enables me to do all manner of pointless analysis on my own cinema habits. For example, the directors who I’ve seen most in the cinema in that time are Steven Soderbergh and Tim Burton (5 films each), followed by Haneke, Hitchcock and the Coen Brothers (4 each). Think that’s pointless? Try this. Here’s a comparison of the average scores I’ve given films in the first four months of each year, compared to their average scores from IMDb users.

What this tells me is I’ve seen more films than I realised this year (only one behind last year, although I do think I’ll struggle to match the 200 I saw in total in 2012), but oddly, while the films have had the best reception with Joe Public of any group I’ve seen in January to April, my enjoyment of them has been significantly less.

Normally May is a big month for blockbusters, and consequently my scores tend to skew lower than popular opinion on the bigger films. With the likes of Star Trek Into Darkness and The Hangover Part III hitting cinemas, both ends of the spectrum could be covered. The material so far for STID hasn’t excited me that much, slightly worrying as I’m a hard core Trekkie; I will not be subjecting myself to another Hangover movie after the last one unless it’s getting 90%+ on Rotten Tomatoes. Let’s hope some of these other May offerings can up the average for the year instead.

Gimme The Loot

Another exciting looking début from a new film maker, and one subject to the curse of London-only release thanks to too many local screens being occupied by summer frippery. Good job I’m working in Norwich and Newcastle this week, then. (D’oh!)

Mud

Mike Nichols’ previous film, Take Shelter, was one of my highlights of 2011 and Matthew McConaughey had a great 2012 with the likes of Killer Joe and Magic Mike. Can’t wait to see what the two of them can do together.

A Hijacking

I’m easily suggestible: there’s a little part of me that does become excited when a caption comes up telling me that this is from the makers of “Something Else That’s Supposed To Be Good”, even when I haven’t seen that thing. So, looks good.

Vehicle 19

Ever wondered what the cast of the Fast & Furious films do between films? The Rock has a steady career in films you’ve actually heard of, but apparently the best Paul Walker can get is other films with cars in. This looks like it will play in precisely one cinema in London from next week. (Also, a missed marketing opportunity: surely the caption after “THE FASTER HE GOES” should read “THE MORE FURIOUS HE GETS”?)

Fast & Furious 6

Or, if you prefer, the real thing. Saw six minutes of this (the tank chase scene) at a Cineworld preview in front of Iron Man 3; both ludicrous and exciting, this could be the guilty pleasure of the summer.

Something In The Air

And one final piece of exciting news (exciting for me, anyway): after becoming a regular guest on Cambridge 105′s film show Bums On Seats since last September (see top of page for links to my appearances), all being well I’ll be taking my first turn in the host’s chair at the end of the month. With both Fast 6 and this in contention for the show, should be a chance to test both my high and low brows. Have a good month, I’m off to get started on my script…

Review: Iron Man Three IMAX 3D

The Pitch: Man Of Steel Plating. 

The Review: Ever had that feeling, after a big event in your life, that it was so great that what follows can’t help but be an anticlimax? It was my eighth wedding anniversary this week, but I still remember my wedding day as if it was yesterday; however I can count on the fingers of one hand the days since which have come close to capturing that level of excitement and spectacle. When you build up to something for so long, what follows cannot help but suffer by comparison. Imagine, then, if your big day involved the culmination of over half a decade of planning and preparation, cost $220 million and went some way to redefining the art of the possible as far as blockbuster cinema goes. Where do you go next? When the current run of Marvel movies started, Iron Man was almost a standalone exercise, with a bolted-on tease after the credits suggesting there might be bigger plans afoot. Unfortunately, Iron Man 2 got lost in the rush to set up sufficient backstory for The Avengers, coming over as little more than a succession of directionless exposition with a fight or two thrown in. Now, with The Avengers having become a global box office behemoth and The Avengers 2 already announced, it’s a huge relief that Iron Man Three has managed avoid the pitfalls of the previous sequel, finding its own rocket-powered feet and deliver a cracking piece of summer entertainment.

That’s not to say that The Avengers doesn’t cast a long shadow over Iron Man, it’s just one that director Shane Black and co-writer Drew Pierce don’t feel the need to sit in for very long. Tony Stark is a hero, but one that’s graduated to the realms of superhero, so when a plain old hero’s needed the American government calls on Col. James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) and his cynically rebranded Iron Patriot suit to help combat the threat of The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). It’s probably just as well, as Tony is still haunted by his demons: those living with him after the almost apocalypse in New York that he and his “superfriends” put an end to, but also those he’s less immediately aware of. An encounter at the turn of the millennium with scientists Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) and Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) barely registers with the Tony of that time, but when both come knocking at the door of Tony’s girlfriend and Stark Industries boss Pepper Potts (Gwynneth Paltrow) thirteen years later, they’re both bringing trouble with them, and soon Tony is having to rely on all of his skills, not just his impressive collection of suits.

Iron Man Three manages to strike an excellent balance between the requirement to tell a self-contained story and the needs of the continuing MCU (that’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, and if you’re surprised it has a name, then clearly you’re not a geek). Even The Avengers fell guilty to the origin story curse that blights so many superhero movies, with almost the first hour pure exposition in an effort to bring the characters together. IM3 gets straight into the story, and after a brief prologue it’s up and running almost immediately, delivering the two key ingredients you want from a summer action-adventure – action and adventure – in spades. Knowing that the appeal of Iron Man is as much about Robert Downey Jr.’s charisma as it is about rocket-powered shiny helmets, Black and Pierce sensibly strike a balance between the amount of time in and out of the suits. It’s to everyone’s credit that both sections work equally well, the pace never being allowed to flag and Black’s trademark whip-smart dialogue keeping the entertainment levels high at all times. The marketing material may have given the impression that this is a darker take on the Iron Man story, but the reality is much lighter – not quite the intensity of the first Lethal Weapon, but avoiding any of the worst excesses of the later Weapon films.

The attraction of the big budget has also assembled a strong cast, and as well as the strength of the returning members (Paltrow especially managing to dial down the unnecessary smiling so often blighting her performances) the new cast are all reasonably well served, with the possible exception of a slightly underused Rebecca Hall. It’s Ben Kingsley’s performance that’s likely to generate most of the discussion after you’ve seen the film, and it’s one that appears to have angered some of the hard core of geekery. Being a soft core geek, and a film fan first and foremost, for me his portrayal of The Mandarin makes perfect sense in the context of the MCU and is one of the highlights of the film. The other is the banter between Downey Jr. and Cheadle, who come across as an effective, believable and still charming pairing, just as most other central pairings have in Shane Black films over the years. It’s the best of the Iron Man movies, avoiding the total inertia that set in once the final suit was built in the original and gaining more momentum in each scene than its sequel ever did, and I’d go as far as to claim that this beats any of the Marvel Phase 1 movies produced (take that, Thor, Hulk and Captain America). It also proves to be another game changer: The Avengers proved it was possible to take the stars of half a dozen big films and successfully blend them together, and IM3 proves you can put them back in their own environments and keep them just as successful. Roll on Thor 2.

Why see it at the cinema: Continuing a fine Marvel tradition, a decent blend of action and humour gives you plenty of reasons to see this on as big a screen as possible.

Why see it in IMAX 3D: It has the advantage of being the biggest screen you can normally find, so if you can do this in any form of IMAX it will help to make sense of some of the busier moments, the final battle looking especially fine on the large format screen. However, none of the film is shot using IMAX cameras, so it doesn’t fill the screen. The 3D is significantly less essential, suffering some of the usual brightness issues and having little or no thought for shot composition.

Should I stay through the credits? If you stay right to the end there’s a cute scene, but it’s more a nice Marvel moment you can take or leave rather than a big set-up for Phase 2.

What about the rating: Rated 12A for moderate violence, threat and language. A fairly MOR movie in terms of 12A output, there’s no F-bomb and it’s certainly not Dark Knight brutal. Anyone who’s had no issue with Marvel films at the same rating before will have no issues here.

My cinema experience: Managed to see this twice, once on a Friday night late showing in 2D at Cineworld Cambridge and then a second time in the company of Mrs Evangelist at an afternoon matinee at the BFI IMAX in London in 3D. Both showings had decent crowds, most of whom stayed to the end of the credits (although feel sorry for the guy sat next to me at the Cineworld, who turned to his girlfriend and exclaimed, “I waited twenty minutes just for that?!”).

The Corridor Of Uncertainty: Just over 25 minutes of ads and trailers at the Cineworld showing, about par for the course. The BFI IMAX start their ads before the advertised start time, so despite having a small lady come out to announce the film at the start, it was still barely fifteen minutes before the film got under way.

The Score: 9/10

Review: Evil Dead (2013)

The Pitch: Re-vil Dead.

The Review: Horror movies have come a long way in the last thirty years. In an era before home video had really taken hold of the world, and so consequently before censorship has taken hold as well, horror was just one step up the food chain from soft core pornography in terms of respectability. The inadvertent poster child of the early VHS years for horror was The Evil Dead, which ended up suffering from the censor’s scissors before being cautiously released. The Evil Dead had one clear intent: to mine a vein of horror deep enough to scare the wits out of you, with just the occasional fleck of dark humour thrown in. The subsequent three decades have seen almost every possible permutation of horror: torture porn such as Hostel or the later Saw movies, self-referential meta-horrors like Scream or The Cabin In The Woods, the rise of the found footage genre from Blair Witch to Paranormal Activity and horror eating itself with remakes of every franchise from Halloween to Elm St. All the while, there’s still been a healthy core of out and out horror, but none have really captured the verve, the insanity and the humour of Evil Dead II. Sam Raimi’s originals are still held with high regard, but the low budget origins of the original have dated it even more than the association with the VHS era, so surely they as much as any horror franchise were due for a remake.

Evil Dead loses the pronoun, but other than that looks to adhere reasonably closely to the template drawn out by Raimi’s original. Once again, five teenagers head to a run down shack in the middle of nowhere, and while there one of them stumbles onto a sinister book. Despite dire warnings written in a suspicious shade of red, that particular teen can’t help but recite passages from the book, unleashing all manner of unpleasantness on the five hapless youngsters. However, rather than the relaxing getaway of the original, this trip has a more direct motive, to attempt to get drug addict Mia (Jane Levy) to go cold turkey. What drives the characters to stay in the cabin is as much the belief that it’s for Mia’s own good, before the obvious evil presents itself and the blood-letting begins.

There’s a back to the original, and a back to basics, approach very much in evidence, with several motifs and moments from the original either lifted directly or teased during the early stages. The big departure from the original is the sense of reality that director Fede Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues attempt to instil in proceedings, not only with the cold turkey rationale but also with more real world influences keeping them trapped (a burst river rather than a mangled bridge, for example). There’s potential from setting horror in a familiar setting, and also from the characters facing a situation that could happen to any of us, but both are squandered here. The cabin itself is a little more squalid, but never as threatening, as the original and I’m not sure about you but it’s been a while since I had to spend a weekend helping a friend try to break their addiction in a deserted cabin, rather than seeking medical assistance for them. None of that would be a big issue if any of the main characters were in any way sympathetic, likeable or even vaguely interesting: they’re not sketched out enough to engage your attention, or even loathsome enough for you to relish their inevitable fate.

There’s one thing completely absent from this remake, and it’s any sort of a sense of humour. Admittedly it would be nigh on impossible for lightning to strike a second time in the way it struck with Evil Dead II as it’s the template of the more restrained original being adhered to here, but this remake is so po-faced that all you’re left with are the scares and the gore, and that never feels enough with a running time slightly longer than the originals. Horror films can thrill in a number of ways: even the torture porn genre shows occasional flashes of imagination, but whether it’s being scared, repulsed or generally amused the most memorable horrors – and those that have previously been remade – have moments that stick long in the memory. It was much easier for horror movies to shock thirty years ago, before they were embraced by the mainstream, and there’s very little here that marks out this Evil Dead from a number of paler imitators. The willingness to pursue traditional make-up effects rather than CGI is commendable, and the blood-soaked finale is bathed in satisfying shades of claret and crimson, but it’s difficult to envisage a world where Mia’s adventures in the woods will be being remade in another thirty years. If Alvarez and co want to take another trip to this well, more boundaries need to be pushed next time.

Why see it at the cinema: A dark room with a group of excitable, hopefully some unsuspecting, other people is always the best way to catch a horror movie, so if you’re easily scared but are looking for a buzz then head to your local rather than waiting for the DVD.

Should I stay for the credits? There’s a very deliberate nod to the origins of the franchise at the end of the credits, which will most likely either bore or frustrate hard core fans. Not worth waiting for.

What about the rating? Rated 18 for strong bloody violence, gory horror and very strong language. Apparently the US release was cut to get an R rating instead of the dreaded NC-17; a brief Google threw up no word on which cut we got, but I can’t help but feel there was a stronger take on the material in here somewhere.

My cinema experience: Seen at one of my locals, Cineworld Cambridge, on a Sunday afternoon. No projection or sound issues to speak of, but the audience in general seemed not to have enjoyed it, remaining fairly silent throughout and becoming generally grumbly on the way to the exit. Can’t say I blame them.

The Corridor Of Uncertainty: Around 25 minutes of ads, trailers and announcements, par for the course and more tolerable for a film only clocking in at 91 minutes.

The Score: 5/10

Review: The Place Beyond The Pines

The Pitch: Sins of the fathers.

The Review: If they ever come to update the Chinese zodiac, then 2011 might need to be revised from rabbit. With Drive, Crazy, Stupid, Love, The Ides Of March and (for UK audiences) Blue Valentine, 2011 was undoubtedly the Year Of The Gosling. Having made a moderate name for himself with earlier character pieces such as Half Nelson and Lars And The Real Girl, Gosling seared himself indelibly into the minds of film loving audiences with a year of high quality roles. 2013 sees him reunite with the directors of two of those works, Nicolas Winding Refn later this year and firstly Derek Cianfrance. Where Blue Valentine, Cianfrance’s previous collaboration with Gosling, was an almost claustrophobically intense two hander on the demise of a relationship, Pines sees Cianfrance set his sights more broadly, with a significantly wider range of characters and a much wider narrative scope. But the key differentiator to Gosling’s back catalogue is the introduction of another heartthrob alpha male in the finely chiselled shape of Bradley Cooper.

This isn’t a Scorcese or Mann style story of crime and families; while both relationships and criminal activity make a strong showing, the good and the bad interact in vastly different ways. The story of Gosling’s Luke is the initial focus, as his career as a motorcycle stunt rider for a local sideshow barely pays the bills. When he discovers he’s fathered a child by ex-girlfriend Romina (Eva Mendes), his attempts to provide a stable financial future lead him to mechanic Robin (Ben Mendelsohn) as the two pull off some audacious bank robberies using Luke’s exceptional riding skills. Inevitably, their activities attract the attention of police officer Avery (Cooper), but his run-in with Luke creates its own set of problems. Romina finds herself being drawn into Avery’s world as well, and the two sets of lives become increasingly linked as time passes.

Once again, his collaboration with Cianfrance serves to extract another top-draw performance from Gosling, who’s got the smouldering thing absolutely nailed, but manages to find another variation on his Drive persona with a more flawed, fractured individual whose violent outbursts are significantly less controlled and productive than his scorpion jacket-wearing counterpart. The real revelation is Cooper, who after becoming stuck somewhat in a rut of big budget but empty comedies and action movies builds on the good work he put in for Silver Linings Playbook, allowing real shading in what could have been a simple role. There’s complex characters across the board, and as well as Cooper and Gosling Mendelsohn and Mendes also shine, and the supporting roles are also well filled by Ray Liotta, Harris Yulin and especially Dane De Haan as a more troubled youngster. That Cianfrance works so well with actors should come as no surprise, but his compositional skills also step up a level from Blue Valentine and from a magnificent establishing shot of Gosling walking through the park to ride his bike into the show, to almost any scene where Luke’s on the run on his bike, the first hour or so crackles with bursts of kinetic energy between the character moments.

It’s a shame that what comes later feels just a shade anticlimactic by comparison. Pines is episodic almost to the point of portmanteau, setting up three distinct chapters where characters take on vastly different perspectives in relation to the respective leads and with stories told in subtly different styles. The big problem is in the final chapter: as soon as the title card comes up for it there’s an inevitability to where the story’s headed, but it takes the two leads at that point so long to join the dots to what the audience already knows it verges on the painful, and by the time it has the narrative resolution of the thread that links the episodes is almost an “oh, is that it?” moment. You almost wish that Cianfrance and fellow scripters Ben Coccio and Darius Marder had avoided the attempt at the epic, sweeping scope and kept their focus tight on Gosling and Cooper, possibly even on just one or the other, as the first act had the makings of a classic but the whole isn’t quite the sum of its parts. It’s rare to see a film that clocks in at two hours and twenty minutes that you feel could have benefited from being longer, but another twenty minutes could have given Pines the room it needed to breathe and develop with the scope it set its sights on. But, once again, it’s most likely Gosling’s performance that will live longest in the memory.

Why see it at the cinema: The tight first hour alone is worth making the trip out for, especially any scene where Gosling is tearing it up on his bike.

What about the rating: Rated 15 for strong language, violence and drug use. There’s a lot of the first and a bit of the other two, and this would have been hacked to death to get anything lower.

My cinema experience: A sparse crowd, somewhat understandably as this was a Saturday morning show at Cambridge Cineworld. No noticeable issues with projection, sound or audience.

The Corridor Of Uncertainty: The captive Saturday morning audience were treated to an extended roster of trailers, including one for the Event Cinema Association for events which have all happened already. That resulted in a gap of 29 minutes before the film started, not ideal for a film running to 141 minutes itself.

The Score: 8/10

An Open Letter To The Competition Commission: Don’t You Mess With My Cinemas!

Got a nice little pop-up when I signed into my blog this morning, saying “Happy Anniversary!” While I thought it nice, if a little creepy and stalkerish, that WordPress knew it was my wedding anniversary yesterday, I then also remembered that last Saturday was the third anniversary of The Movie Evangelist. Seems hard to think that, at the time of my wedding in 2005, the cinema in the picture (Cineworld Birmingham) was one of my two regular haunts, and only even became a Cineworld that year after the merger between the Cineworld and UGC chains. Now I frequent mostly the local cinemas of Cambridge and Bury St. Edmunds, living as I do somewhere in between the two, and a blog that wasn’t even a glint in the milkman’s video shop owner’s eye at the time has now been running for three years, churned out over four hundred posts and been to numerous film festivals and has seen me get on local radio and host Q & A sessions.

The intent to start a blog came nearly three years after I moved to Cambridgeshire with Mrs Evangelist, but despite the wealth of cinemas in both Leicester – where I lived for seven years – and Birmingham, where I spent another three, there was something almost serendipitous about my increased love of cinema and desire to blog about it and the fact I was living where I was. Cambridge and Bury St. Edmunds are both lucky enough to have both a Cineworld and a Picturehouse cinema, and I’m certain this blog wouldn’t have had the depth and breadth it has if that hadn’t been the case. I hope that the Competition Commission isn’t about to put a giant spanner in the works of the Movie Evangelist, because of something that happened a few months back.

There was a certain amount of fear and trepidation when it was announced in December last year that Cineworld had acquired the Picturehouse chain of twenty-one cinemas for a sum of £47.3m. So far, any concerns about what the merger might mean have been unfounded, as it’s been absolutely business as usual for both chains since that date, but now another threat looms. Yesterday, the Office Of Fair Trading referred the purchase to the Competition Commission on the basis that five areas, including Cambridge and Bury, will see a reduction in competition based on the purchase.

There’s actually a total of five areas listed in the news story, so let’s consider the competition for a moment.

Aberdeen: four cinemas, of which two are Cineworld and one is a Picturehouse, the other being owned by Vue, serving a population of 212,000 people.

Brighton: this south coast resort has two Picturehouses, a Cineworld and an Odeon, all serving 155,000 people.

Bury St. Edmunds: an eight screen Cineworld and a two screen Picturehouse only in this smallish market town of 35,000 people.

Cambridge: the university city has a Cineworld, a Picturehouse and a Vue serving around 124,000 inhabitants.

Southampton: there’s an IMAX-ed up Odeon, a Picturehouse and a Cineworld in Southampton and a Vue five miles up the road in Eastleigh, all of which are easily accessible to the 304,000 residents of the Southampton urban area.

So of the five, only one – and by far the smallest of the five – doesn’t have another cinema chain in the immediate vicinity, so in four areas, competition will remain.

But what does it matter if there are two or three cinemas under the same ownership in each area? The argument made as part of the referral is that the Picturehouse chain, while generally offering a diverse range of art house and independent cinema, makes a decent slice of its cash by showing the bigger films that would be on in both cinemas. Consequently, having two cinemas with the same owners could see a rise in prices.

If that were to be the case it would have to see a radical rethink in terms of the pricing policy of one or the other chains. I would make a case that Cineworld and Picturehouse are the two best cinema chains in the UK, because they offer something that the other large chains (Vue, Odeon, Empire, Showcase) don’t: membership rates. Picturehouse members get three free films a year, and no booking fees and discounts on all other tickets, and Cineworld are the all-you-can-eat-buffets of cinema, offering as much as you can watch before your eyeballs dry out for just £16 a month. (Rest assured, I know from personal experience that you can see a LOT of movies before that happens.) It’s also the case at most of the Picturehouses I’ve been to that the big films they’re showing are also filling screens at other cinemas, such as Skyfall and Les Misérables, so it’s a case of supply and demand more than restriction of competition.

But it’s not just about the initial membership rates. Cineworld also reward me for being a long term member with their Unlimited Premium scheme, and I now get 25% off all food and drink as well as no 3D uplift charge. Picturehouse also have a proper bar at every screen, so I can take my decent coffee or my pint in with me or enjoy it, or excellent food, in the bar, all with a member’s discount. There is no doubt in my mind – and I can say this as someone who also makes regular trips to a variety of other cinemas, including Vue, Odeon, Empire, Showcase and Curzon, as well as a few independents – that the Cineworld and Picturehouse chains reward their core audience and are the best at value for money. Picturehouse goes a step further and offers the best cinema experience you’ll get, at affordable prices. If it ain’t broke, OFT, then it don’t need fixing.

I don’t want to lose either of these chains from either of my local cities, not least because it happened once before. The Cineworld chain were forced to sell off seven cinemas from the UGC chain when they merged, including the Cineworld Great Park in Birmingham, my local at the time. It’s now an Empire, and while it’s not a bad cinema experience, you do get charged per visit, which for someone like me starts to ramp up the cost significantly. It’s this that I fear the most from yesterday’s announcement, as it’s the only practical way to attempt to restrict the possibility of competition. While there might be a risk of prices increasing – and losing customer loyalty in the process – under the current set-up, there’s an absolute guarantee that selling any of the cinemas off in the affected cities would guarantee an immediate and significant price rise for anyone seeing more than two films a month, as consumers become forced to pay the higher prices of the other chains.

So please, Competition Commission, allow Cineworld and Picturehouse to carry on operating as they are. Look at restrictions in areas where they’ve yet to expand, rather than restricting their current practice, which has two business models that complement each other and drive costs down for the consumer, as opposed to the other chains who are actually the ones more interested in profit than the consumer experience.

Review: Oblivion

The Pitch: It’s like an Easter egg. No, really. In fact, it’s very  much like this Easter egg:

Black Forest Gateau Egg, from Thorntons

(Mrs Evangelist received this Easter egg from a friend, in case you were wondering.)

The Easter Egg Review:

The Half Dozen: 6 Most Interesting Looking Trailers For April 2013

Not sure if I’ve talked about this before, so apologies if I have, but the genesis of this blog came out of not just a love of film, but a very specific set of circumstances. In 2010 I went to a conference for work, where one of the speakers gave a talk on the benefits of setting yourself long term goals. Returning home inspired, I set myself a group of five goals to try to shape the next five years of my life. I had a view of achieving them somewhere between “when I’m 40″ and within that five years. When I’m 40 is next February, and five years will be April 2015, so some of these have longer to run than others. The goals I set myself were as follows:

1. Do something with my professional body. My actual body is, as I claimed on Bums On Seats when discussing This Is 40, like a bag of badgers, all disturbing bulges and discomfiting noises. Thankfully what I’m referring to is the organisation that provides recognition for and training to people like myself rather than my own physique; in real life I’m a call centre planning manager, thankfully more exciting than it sounds. So far: diddly squat progress on this one, although they are now offering postgraduate courses which still have me tempted if my employer would ever be willing to pay for one.
2. Run at least a half marathon, possibly more. In an effort to address my badger body I have also attempted to overcome my lifelong inability to succeed at any form of competitive sport or exercise and take up running. (You are reading the blog of a man who joined a gym for his wedding and put on fourteen pounds.) I have managed to run as far as 10k on a regular basis (and 9k without stopping), but am currently under treatment by a physio for a nasty heel injury which has kept me off the road for six months and is now leaving me increasingly frustrated.
3. Start a movie blog. Well, duh. Three years to the month from that conference and I’m still going strong. In that time I’ve watched over 500 films at the cinema, expanded my horizons, visited festivals and special screenings, helped with and hosted Q & As and now regularly place my Bum on a Seat on local radio. More exciting developments to come this year, hopefully.
4. Get more going with music at church. I am an Anglican Christian (which I won’t go on about here other than to say that other religions, and indeed not believing in an omniscient sky wizard and his magical son, are available if you’re not so inclined), but as part of that I conduct in and sing with choirs. Over the past two years I’ve begun composing my own music and completed a course in music ministry. Another tick.
5. Get the bathroom re-done. Sadly the bathroom suite we inherited when we moved into our current house is still with us, due to a complicated layout which will require about fifteen years’ cinema ticket budget to put right. If anyone has several grand burning a hole in their pocket, my e-mail address is on the home page.

The one constant on the blog over the last three years has been the trailer page. Each month, and in occasional specials, I’ve collected the most interesting looking trailers around, in an effort to support the evangelism activity that is my reason for being here. So here’s this month’s run-down of the good, the bad and the decidedly ugly, as per my selectively applied rule of excluding those films I’ve already seen (sorry, Spring Breakers, The Place Beyond The Pines and The Gatekeepers).

Scary Movie 5

Here’s bad to kick us off. I’ve included the shortest trailer I can find, and the reason for including it is simple: I will go to watch anything with Mrs Evangelist that she wants. Anything. Three Alvin And The Chipmunks, two St. Trinians and Beverly Hills Chihuahua often get quoted as examples of this, but I’ve also realised thanks to the light of my life I’ve also seen all four Scary Movies at the cinema. The third one’s not utterly dreadful but the rest are, and now Mrs E is threatening to take me to this one. She’s at work this week, so I’m praying it’s out of cinemas before next weekend.

Simon Killer

I would love to have the finances to be able to spend huge amounts of time at the London Film Festival, but sadly only managed a three film taster last year. I still have the Cambridge festival to keep me entertained, but Simon Killer was one of many films that the privileged who live in London and have money would have been able to see six months before me. Maybe this year…

First Position

I’ve always envied people with physical and athletic gifts, but this is the kind of documentary that reassured me the life of a couch potato is at least less stressful.

The Evil Dead

I said good, bad and ugly and this might a bit of all three. (This is the red band trailer, so be warned that it’s not for the faint of heart.) I’m re-watching the original trilogy this week in an effort to be able to successfully compare and contrast, but I can’t help thinking this is yet another unnecessary rehash of a horror standard, even if Sam Raimi himself has been involved.

Bernie

A couple of years ago, a movie starring Jack Black and Matthew McConaughey would have been about as appealing as licking stale popcorn off the floor of the cinema, even if it was directed by Richard Linklater, but the former’s ability to occasionally find the right roles and the latter’s career rehabilitation make this a much more enticing prospect.

Iron Man 3

And April marks the true start of  blockbuster season. Oblivion might have kicked us off this weekend, but the Marvel movies are where the big money’s at, and I couldn’t be more excited for a threequel than one involving the singular talents of Mr Shane Black. Hopefully this will also mark my first proper IMAX visit of the year.

Review: In The House (Dans la maison)

The Pitch: Finished your homework? Maybe there’s time for some extracurricular activities…

The Review: Who’d be a writer? Certainly not me. Sure, I’ve been spewing out my thoughts on films for a shade under three years and I’d like to hope in that time I’ve not split too many infinitives or incorrectly used my tenses, but even when I churn out a 3,000 word feature I tend to have a very direct point of reference to start me off. There’s only a handful of things that would fill me with more trepidation and less pleasure than having to write an extended narrative of my own, but one of them would have to be marking others. I spend a fair chunk of my life coaching people through work or critiquing mostly more skilled and creative film makers in their various endeavours, but somehow teaching has never appealed. For those that do, churning through the faltering efforts of half-formed minds can’t be the only joy, but hopefully getting your kicks from reading the desperate scribblings of adolescence isn’t how too many teachers make it through the day.

It is sustaining Germain (Fabrice Luchini), a teacher at a French senior school, and the drudge of wading through another batch of student essays is only enlivened by the work of one of his class. New student Claude (Ernst Umhauer) writes of his obsession with a fellow student’s family and their family life, and his attempts to ingratiate himself into their lives. Germain, whose enthusiasm had waned to the point where he put no thought into his original topic, is now revitalised, giving private tutelage to Claude and while he shares the ever more provocative writing with his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), he’s less empathetic than he should be to her struggles with her failing art gallery job, and that’s just the start of what rapidly becomes an obsession.

For a film maker to turn his gaze back on his own narrative can be risky, and exploring the nature of writing and the creative process risks alienating the viewer if not handled well, but François Ozon has a solid track record in handling such matters. In The House creates a world of moral ambiguity within which its characters’ motivations are always reasonable, if not always rational, and events are allowed to spiral gently out of control (or further into control, depending on your perspective). While the genitalia and breast themed artworks on the wall of Jeanne’s gallery suggests that absence of morality becoming more prevalent in contemporary society, the motivations of Germain and Claude are more timeless and satisfyingly shaded in grey. The script by succeeds in having its cake and eating it, cocking its nose at trite genre conventions while successfully weaving them into the plot.

In The House thrives on its relationships: between Germain and Jeanne, the couple whose relationship becomes defined by their reactions to Claude’s work; between Germain and Claude, as the line between fact and fiction blurs and the definition of their pupil and mentor relationship blurs with it; and between Claude and the mother of the family at the centre of his writings, Esther (Emmanualle Seigner), defying the age gap between the two to give an additional layer of uncertainty and ambiguity. These relationships are all sold by uniformly excellent performances from the cast, especially newcomer Unhauer, and it’s a step up from the almost forced frivolity of Ozon’s last film, Potiche. There’s just a couple of unfortunate notes, including the insistence on every French film featuring Kristin Scott Thomas feeling the need in some way to draw attention to her English roots (here a reference to Yorkshire), and the ending, an extra portion of cake too much in the having-and-eating-of-cake. But if I had to mark the efforts of Ozon and his cast, they’d be looking at a solid grade this time around. (See below for actual grade.)

Why see it at the cinema: There’s a gentle humour at work at times, and visually Ozon doesn’t shy away from composing arresting images, especially (for all its faults) the final shot.

What about the rating: Rated 15 for strong language and sex and a scene of [SPOILER REDACTED]. Come on, BBFC, I know it’s not a huge spoiler, but even so it does happen in the final act. Wasn’t there another way to say that? It’s also one of those 15 rated films that really wouldn’t require much trimming to get it to a 12A or less. However, if you do head to the link, do be sure to check out the last paragraph of the Insight information, and its comically matter-of-fact descriptions of the artwork on display in Kristin’s gallery near the start.

My cinema experience: Most of my foreign language diet of film is normally taken in at local Picturehouses, but on this occasion the Cineworld in Cambridge obviously felt there wasn’t much else out and added a week’s worth of showings. Sometimes you pay for what you get, and while I don’t normally experience any issues with projection at the Cineworld chain, on this occasion there appeared two be two or three drop-outs of a few seconds in the audio. It also seems that the subtitled nature of the work took at least two other audience members by surprise; as the credits rolled I heard a simple exclamation of, “so that was a French film, then.”

The Corridor Of Uncertainty: Keen to maximise the potential of an audience who may not have realised they were in for a foreign language film, a long procession of resolutely English trailers meant a total of 28 minutes before we were actually in the house, so to speak.

The Score: 8/10