Get to the chopper!

Alien Vs Predator: Requiem
In cinemas now

Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (the “Requiem” makes it sound smart) didn’t surprise me in any way at all. It was exactly what I was expecting it to be – for the most part. Glossy looks, decent enough special effects, a crap ending, rubbish dialogue, and characters I couldn’t give a fig about (the fact that I was more bothered about what happened to the Predator character than any of the humans speaks volumes). And it wasn’t a patch on any of the other Alien/Predator films (well, except maybe Predator 2 and Alien Resurrection). Although it was, as I predicted before I saw it, better than the first one – which wasn’t particularly hard since the original, which saw an Aztec temple full of Aliens in the Arctic, was directed by Paul WS Anderson, mother of such cinematic abortions as Resident Evil.

Yet amidst all the stupid lines (someone makes the hilarious quip “It’s not Halloween for another six months” – to someone in his pizza delivery uniform. Is he infamous for his rubbish Halloween costumes, or is it just bad writing? Considering the staggering lack of back story, we may never know), the murkiness (yes, there’s a Predator fighting multiple Aliens – but it’s at night time, and it’s always raining, and the Aliens are black, so you can’t see a God-damned thing), and the ideas which sound like they’ve been come up by a twelve-year-old, who provided sketches in crayon (ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the Predalien!), there’s something other big budget horror films tend to lack nowadays – balls.

Big old hairy testicles. While some of the violence in AVPR (which, when you say it out loud, sounds like a noise a baby would make) is rather tame and rubbish, some of it is actually quite daring – a kid dies within the first twenty minutes (which made up for that annoying-as-hell kid in The War Of The Worlds, who really deserved to die), the Aliens invade a hospital and start killing pregnant women, and there’s allusions to babies being eaten. You don’t see that in The Grudge, do you? No, you just get cat-children.

For the most part, however, the film plays out like a Greatest Hits package of the Alien and Predator films – there’s the skinned guy hanging from a tree (see Predator), the Alien swimming (see Alien Resurrection – or better yet, don’t) – but only for the Alien/Predator characters. Unlike the beefcake Arnie and co/actually interesting Sigourney Weaver and Bill Paxton characters from the other films, the characters in are more broad caricatures – but that’s okay, because then they’re usually exploded/eviscerated. There sure are a lot of multiple choices separated by dashes in this review – and maybe that’s a good analogy to wrap up Alien vs. Predator: Requiem – a lot of multiple choices separated by dashes. Actually, no, that’s crap.

Alien vs. Predator: Requiem – it’s alright.

Why, God, why?

 

The Devil Wears Prada
For some reason, you can buy it on DVD

They say never to judge a book by it’s cover. However, this is a film, and the DVD cover offers some very good clues as to the quality of said film contained within this seemingly innocent case:

Clue #1 -  There is a positive quote from Heat magazine on it  (“EXCELLENT! 5 STARS!”). Heat. The magazine which consist mostly of pictures of Z-list celebrities and their cellulite. And not a lot else.

Clue #2 – I nearly fell asleep halfway through reading the plot synopsis on the back.

So, as I (attempt to) provide my own synopsis of this ‘film’, I’ll try to make it more exciting – mainly by using UNECESSARY BLOCK CAPITALS IN BOLD, so you don’t start to nod off.

Andrea ‘Andy’ Sacks (Anne Hathaway) is an aspiring journalist who lands a job at the fashion magazine Runway OH MY GOD MONKEYS ON FIRE RIDING MOTORCYCLES, where her ’hilarious’ lack of fashion knowledge is mocked by colleague Emily (Emily Blunt) ROBOT NINJAS FIGHTING ZOMBIE PIRATES IN SPACE and her boss, and head of Runway, the sarky Cruella de Ville-alike Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) AND MR T IS WRESTLING GODZILLA IN A NO-HOLDS BARRED CAGE MATCH. Oh, and Stanley Tucci turns up playing the funny gay character out of Ugly Betty, only not gay, and not funny.

Then Andy starts to fit in more, turns vapid and mean like her colleagues, loses friends/love interest because of this, gets new boyfriend, he’s also mean and vapid, she sees the error of her ways, she quits the job, Miranda and Emily suddenly respect her, yadayadayada. The end.

In fact, the film follows such a cliché chick-flick plotline, I had to come up with ways to stave off the boredom – I thought of ways the film could be improved (mainly by inserting a sequence wherein a police car is driven into a helicopter, ala Die Hard 4.0); then I did that thing where you draw your finger to your nose and it makes you go cross-eyed; then I flew my biro around like a rocket (with appropriate sound effects); then I thought about how this subject matter is handled so much better by Ugly Betty; then I just gave up and fast-forwarded a large portion of the middle of the film.

(Also, Torchwood was on, and I didn’t want to miss it because I was watching this. Now there’s something that would have made this film better – bi-sexual, time-travelling aliens).

But since, as I said, the plot is so clichéd and all the action (if you could call it that) is so inconsequential, it didn’t really matter. I could follow the story, even at twenty times the speed.

The Devil Wears Prada is just so…lame. Not even offensively bad, just lame. The supposedly ’witty’ banter between one-dimensional characters I couldn’t give a monkey’s about, the dull love-triangle which lasts about five seconds (literally for me, since I was still fast-forwarding at that point). Also, Anne Hathaway is probably the least convincing ‘ugly duckling’ character ever. I can sort of handle the mocking of her supposedly ‘dorky’ dress sense, but calling her fat? She’s Anne Hathaway! I could see her collarbone at one point, she’s so skinny! Gah!

Maybe it’s just some satirizing of the whole size-zero, crazily impossible pressure they put on girls in the fashion industry – but I doubt it. This film isn’t that smart.

In the end, The Devil Wears Prada is just as empty, vapid and shallow as the fashion industry which it attempts to satirize.

(Note: Torchwood wasn’t actually that good. But still worth fast-forwarding this for)

(Second note: Christ knows why I watched this. The person who lent me it also lent me Freddie Got Fingered, for God’s sake) 

The Fresh Prince vs Vampires

I Am Legend (2007) – In cinemas now

That’s probably a poor choice of headline, seeing as the film being reviewed here is nowhere near as interesting as said headline may make it seem. There’s certainly no rapping, hilarious quips or, arguably, any vampires. But we’ll get to that later.

I Am Legend is the sophomore effort from former music video director Francis Lawrence. Lawrence’s first film, Constantine, was a rubbish adaptation of the rather brilliant comic book Hellblazer, which saw a blonde, charasmatic, witty Liverpuldian being turned into black-haired, monotone American Keanu Reeves, paragon of plank-based technology. With I Am Legend, Lawrence turns this startling abiltiy to ruin perfectly good source material to Richard Matheson’s classic 1950s story of the last man on earth.

The last man in question, Dr Robert Neville, is played by the Fresh Prince himself, Will Smith. Under most circumstances, Will Smith could have been the least convincing movie scientist this side of the Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1994 ‘comedy’ Junior. However, this is Will Smith in acting mode – as previously seen in 2003 biopic Ali and last year’s The Pursuit Of Happyness – so he is, relativley, convincing.

No quipping, no cheesy smiles – in fact, very little humour at all. None, in fact. At all.

This is probably because, in this film, there is very little for old Wills to make jokes about – he is, after all, the only human left alive, since a viral infection turned the rest of the world’s population into vampires. Neville (Smith) stalks the empty streets of New York by day, his trusty dog Sam by his side, hunting deer, talking to mannequins and looking for supplies. It’s actually a very well acted study of a man’s slow descent into madness – which, as Neville hasn’t had any human contact in three years, is understandable.

However, while these scenes are well acted, written, lit etc. etc., once the good doctor returns to his home base, has boarded up his doors and windows and retreated to hide in the bathtub with a rifle, does the film start to falter. It’s mainly due to the vampires attacking the walls of Neville’s house every night.

Well, I say vampires. That’s what they were in the book. In the film, they resemble little more than pale, skinny slapheads, who are averse to sunlight. Sort of like bald goths, then. Bald goths rendered in absolutley God-awful, sub-Playstation 2-cut-scene CGI. It’s soon after the first encounter with these night-walkers that the film starts it’s steady descent downhill, picking up speed at each ill-advised plot turn and rubbish special effect. Which is quite disappointing, really, for a film with so much potential.

Then, the film just ends. Will Smith wanders about a bit, sees some vampires, tries to come up with a cure, and then the film ends. Nothing else happens. Well, some stuff happens, but it’s fairly inconsiquential. The it ends. It’s the most anti-climactic ending since the I went to see Fantastic Four on holiday, and the print broke ten minutes in. It’s like getting halfway along a session of good old fashioned self-abuse, when, suddenly, your hand falls off. Or blows up.

And Will Smith didn’t even do a song about fighting vampires, or nodding your head, or whatever, over the credits.

If the story of I Am Legend intrigued you, however, I’d recommend either eading Richard Matheson’s original book, tracking down the BBC Radio 4 reading of the novel, or downloading the Vincent Price-starring 1960s adapt The Last Man On Earth, which you can get, legally, from the Internet Archive.

Just don’t, whatever you do, watch The Asylum’s 100% unrelated, not-at-all-a-cash-in film I Am Omega. Just because it stars Mark Dacascos doesn’t mean it’s going to be good. And that’s an important life lesson, I think.