District 9

District 9

USA, 2009, cert 15, director: Neill Blomkamp, 112 minutes. Cast: Sharlto Copley, Vanessa Haywood

Take City of God, fill it with the bugs from Starship Troopers and throw in a ton of gross body horror that’s straight out of The Fly, and you’ve got District 9. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of concepts and images, but Neill Blomkamp stitches the creature together with such precision that it doesn’t lurch or moan. It glides, and it sings.

A flying saucer appears over Johannesburg, but when human scientists finally pluck up the courage to cut their way inside, it’s more like the New Orleans Superdome after hurricane Katrina than anything from Close Encounters or 2001. My God... it’s full of shit! Nicknamed ‘prawns’ by the unsympathetic locals, thousands of destitute ETs are tossed into a shanty town where they pawn their ray guns to feed their cat food addiction. Don’t judge them, we’ve all been there...

Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is a middle-management drip sent to trick the ghetto prawns into signing documents so that their forced eviction looks a little less like what it is. Sure, he torches a few fetuses, and he raps on the aliens’ shack doors like the hellish spawn of Inglorious Basterds’ Jew Hunter and the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but he’s not a bad man. He’s just a moron. Then one day he’s sprayed with a weird alien goop, and before long Wikus starts going through some serious changes.

Copley’s stellar performance makes Wikus’ transformation far more real than the film’s formidable special effects ever could. It’s absolutely necessary too, in order to give the silly little dork any depth or emotional resonance. Wikus, goes from laughing stock to action hero within the space of about an hour, and it’s totally, rivetingly credible. Not an easy feat when your costar is a six-foot computer generated prawn, but Copley pulls it off magnificently. The design of the prawns is equally perfect; they’re utterly alien, but there’s a nuance to their movements and expressions that suggests a genuine soul. You really feel for the poor, stinking buggers.

Of course, the movie is all about apartheid. This is old-school sci-fi, making us see familiar problems from new perspectives. Racial hatred is more palatable if you throw in a few prawns. Peter Jackson’s influence is felt throughout; the sci-fi elements aren’t thrust at the audience as an empty spectacle - every special effect and futuristic flourish has a purpose, and the result is a clever, satisfying movie experience with action sequences that are more thrilling than most of the summer’s cash-bloated epics.

Wikus winds up with body parts that don’t match, but he’s far better off that way. And that’s District 9 all over. After Moon I thought that we’d had this year’s quota of cool, intelligent science fiction, but I was wrong. District 9 is sensational.

8/10

-James

Ponyo

Review: Ponyo

Japan, 2008, cert U, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. 100 minutes. Cast: Liam Neeson, Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Noah Lindsey Cyrus, Frankie Jonas

The downside to being a bona fide genius with a reputation for producing masterpieces is that your audience becomes spoiled. Miyazaki’s latest is lovely. Of course.

Sosuke (Jonas) is a little boy who lives with his mother on a cliff by the sea. It’s not just any sea, of course; it’s Miyazaki’s sea, the most vibrantly animated ocean I’ve seen since Monstro the whale swallowed Pinocchio. It’s not Disney’s sea, which as we know is full to the gills with calypso crabs, cute clownfish and Angela Lansbury, but a foaming blue maelstrom of frightening beauty. Miyazaki, famous for his love of the sky, has turned his hand to the ocean with breathtaking results. This sea is also home to Sosuke’s father (Damon), captain of a ship, and to Ponyo, who is... less easily defined.

Ponyo (Cyrus) is some kind of humanoid goldfish girl who happens upon Sosuke one day while he’s playing by the shore. Picking her up in his plastic bucket, Sosuke immediately and unquestioningly falls in love with Ponyo, and the two embark on a thoroughly trippy adventure. Sosuke and Ponyo love eachother with a childish intensity that is both moderately insane and positively enchanting. The film doesn’t try to do anything terribly complicated, but it doesn’t need to; for one thing, it’s aimed at a very young but very lucky audience. Ponyo is such a visually rich movie that kids will be absorbed right from the opening credits (as always with Ghibli films these are a delight). It’s the cinematic equivalent of being wrapped up in a warm blanket, a world in which the most mundane sequences are so lovingly rendered that it’s impossible not be swept up. Whether it’s Sosuke’s father telling his wife that he loves her by blinking a morse code message across the dark sea, or Ponyo messily eating noodles for the first time, the film manages to inject tangible joy into every scene. Every scrap of Sosuke’s little town is brought to life by the film’s meticulous attention to detail, and the result is a world you could almost reach out and touch. There’s a wonderful honesty at work in these simple sequences that almost outshines the raging sea just beyond Sosuke’s garden fence.

Ponyo’s dad (Liam Neeson) is an ill-defined sea wizard straight out of Yellow Submarine, and her mother (Cate Blanchett) is a 100 foot tall ocean goddess, the story revolving around Ponyo’s wish to become human so that she can be with Sosuke. There’s no great philosophical battle here - she simply wants it with a mad, childish zeal that is all too familiar to anyone who has kids. Sosuke too acts like a real five year old, and typically of a Miyazaki hero learns self-reliance and responsibility in the course of his loopy escapades.

Impressively for such a weird movie, Ponyo doesn’t talk down to kids... but it sure isn’t afraid to baffle them. As with Howl’s Moving Castle, story takes a back seat to the awesome visuals. That’s the one downside to Ponyo, and it’s one I saw coming; a lot of it just doesn’t make much sense. The third act is simply mystifying, and like Howl the film ends so abruptly you’ll walk out wondering who decided to cut the last 20 minutes. It’d be more tolerable if we hadn’t already seen that Miyazaki is more than capable of weaving a great story into his gorgeous imagery (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke). But it’s entirely possible that there’s a sublime kiddie logic at work here that’s lost on an old guy like me.

If you know who Miyazaki is, you’ll be seeing this movie regardless. If you don’t, Ponyo will show you why you should. He builds worlds of such texture and substance that they dizzy the senses, even if they’re not always the most accessible. Dive in.

7/10

-James

Moon

Review: Moon

UK 2009, cert 15. Dir. Duncan Jones. 97 minutes. Cast: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey

Moon. Once in a blue one, we get intelligent, considered, beautiful science fiction movies.

Sam Rockwell rattles off a virtuoso performance as Sam Bell, a lone space-miner stuck in a small moonbase. Sam’s mind-numbing job is to keep track of the base’s largely automated systems, with only GERTIE, the base’s motherly artificial intelligence, for company. Unsurprisingly, Sam starts to go a little bonkers and winds up crashing his lunar rover. And then things get weird (I refuse to spoil this clever little movie).

Rockwell’s Bell is an endearingly optimistic guy who makes the most of his lousy lot, but he’s clearly getting a bad case of the space-crazies. Sam’s due to return to earth in two weeks’ time, desperate to reconnect with his wife and a daughter he’s never met. The base is plastered with photos of his loved ones, and Sam has spent interminable hours whittling a model town that sits proudly on some upturned crates. He’s a guy in a vacuum, desperately trying to populate his alien environment with something familiar. It’s sad, funny and touching, and Rockwell plays it magnificently. There’s a breathtaking loneliness to every sequence in which he climbs into his lightly soiled spacesuit and trundles off into the darkness. Is there any wonder the poor guy turned to whittling?

There were moments when I worried that the film was going to turn into some kind of 2001 pastiche - there’s ornate furniture sitting in a bleached white room, a bright yellow quilted spacesuit that’s straight out of Kubrick’s wardrobe and a computer that just won’t open the bloody doors. But Moon is bold enough to follow its own trajectory, with a plot that’s fascinating, creepy and moving. And Sam Rockwell... wow.

This is what science fiction is supposed to do.

9/10

-James

Bruno

Review: Bruno

Dir. Larry Charles

81 Minutes

2009

Cert. 18

I knew Borat. Borat was a friend of mine. And you, Bruno, are no Borat.

All the time I was with Bruno, I was thinking of someone else; Borat, doing a better job. The shtick is closely related to that of Sacha Baron Cohen’s other, more famous alter-ego. Like Borat, Bruno exploits the vices and prejudices that simmer below the surface of modern America. Ironically, the corrosively sexual Bruno is no match for Borat when it comes to teasing out salacious foibles. The bumbling oaf from Khazakstan performed the sensual act of satire with far more delicacy than this shrieking pantomime of homosexuality. I never felt any sympathy for Borat’s victims - they were pretty much all asking for it. But it’s hard not to pity a lot of the people jumped by Bruno.

Borat may have been a homophobic anti-semite who screwed his sister. He may have crapped in a plastic grocery bag at a dinner party. But he never meant any harm. This was the beauty of Borat - it was almost impossible for his targets to question the unspeakable things he said and did, because Borat was innocent. He elicited more tolerance than his terrible views merited because he was a foreigner who ‘just didn’t know better’. The hideous blue suit and the manic, over-friendly smile - it all worked to inform people what a poor, ignorant soul this boob was, and made them let their guard down. How can we question the political views of a man with such an unfashionable moustache? Poor guy.

Nobody could feel sorry for Bruno. Firstly, he’s the host of an insipid Austrian fashion TV show called ‘Funkyzeit’, which informs us that this season ‘Autism is in’. It’s not even a pastiche of MTV. It is MTV. There’s really no parodying a channel that runs a reality TV show about Hulk Hogan’s daughter. Secondly, Bruno, a kind of gay bogeyman, is too vain and bombastic to accommodate the gems that some of his victims come out with. In an audition for babies to appear in a tasteless photoshoot with Bruno’s adopted son ‘OJ’, one eager dad declares that his young son ‘loves’ being around lit phosphorous. It’s unbearably funny, but there’s just not enough space for this stuff in the movie. How can such run-of the-mill atrocities compete with the sight of Bruno and his assistant shackled together in bondage gear, shuffling through a hate march organised by the delightful people who protest at the funerals of soldiers because ‘God hates fags’?

The gay angle doesn’t work perfectly either. Sure, it’s wrong for people to be intimidated purely by someone else’s sexual orientation, just as it was wrong for people to join in with the second verse of ‘throw the Jew down the well’. But is it as wrong to be intimidated by a man lunging at you with a dildo flopping around in each hand? The people that react badly to him aren’t really reacting badly to gays - just to Bruno.

This said, Bruno remains riotously funny. The film isn’t as acutely targeted as Borat, and makes a furtive stab at a whole kaleidoscope of modern nightmares, ranging from celebrity adoptions to ‘leaked’ sex tapes. Bruno’s attempt to seduce presidential candidate Ron Paul on film does not go well; ‘oops’, he coyly intones as his trousers slip down around his ankles. It’s also a little obvious that some scenes are staged. One standout moment that could not have been set up, however, sees Bruno inform the leader of the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades (who is now hopping mad at being depicted as a terrorist) that Osama Bin Laden looks like ‘a homeless Santa Claus’ as he asks to be kidnapped for publicity purposes. Say what you will, Baron Cohen has balls. In fact, you get to see them in a pilot Bruno produces for US TV, swinging rhythmically to pounding techno music. The test screening returns the verdict ‘worse than cancer’.

Bruno is a strong contender for funniest movie of the year. It’s just a shame that Baron Cohen doesn’t allow the targets of his setups to provide more of the laughs, relying too heavily on Bruno’s shrillness and hyper-camp. Bruno is a vile, vile man and works better when provoking people into saying terrible things than as the star in his own right. His squealing Germanic twang, punctuated by an unsettling giggle, becomes pretty grating pretty fast and doesn’t measure up to Borat’s loopy lilt. The endless gay sex gags (as in jokes) also wear a little thin.

Bruno, it’s been fun. But I never want to see you again.

7/10

-James

Watchmen

Review:Watchmen

Dir. Zach Snyder

2009

Runtime: 162 mins

Cert. 18

Watching the Watchmen is thrilling, but can also be difficult. Not just because they represent the uncomfortable unravelling of the superhero, one of our most enduring modern myths; the film, although often dazzling, is also a dizzying, unforgiving torrent of cinema that can be as nauseating as it is intoxicating.

Boldly setting itself up in an alternate 1985, in which rising cold war tensions threaten the world with fiery Armageddon, Watchmen concerns a screwed-up bunch of retired superheroes doing their best to solve a murder and stop the superpowers from nuking us all to kingdom come. And by ‘screwed up’, I mean in ways beyond struggling to pluck up the courage to ask Mary Jane to the high school dance. Take the Comedian (Jeffery Dean Morgan), a neo-fascist assassin for president Nixon (the closest the film gets to a traditional supervillain), who has a taste for murder and sexual violence. The magnetic Morgan makes the Comedian one charismatic bastard, and makes you feel dirty just for enjoying his scenes. Patrick Wilson plays Dan Dreiberg, or ‘Nite Owl’, a nice guy who writes for ornithology journals in his spare time. Poor old Dan also can’t get an erection unless dressed in his kinky Nite Owl get-up, and watching this awkward middle aged man come alive and kick/grab serious ass through the magic of playing dress-up is one of the film’s many surprising pleasures.

Watchmen manages, for the most part, to beat the odds and emerge from its labyrinthine source material intact. Despite being a lot of fun, it’s a long and exhausting film, but one that could have easily filled several more hours if not for Snyder’s deft editing choices. The twisting narrative arrives through frequent flashbacks that take us through the imagined history of American superheroes, and also through the book’s main protagonist, the sociopathic ‘hero’ Rorshach. Rorshach, played by Jackie Earle Haley, is more terrifying than the new emo Joker, a man whose commitment to his mission as a crimefighter has eroded his psyche leaving him an almost feral predator. Haley’s performance is riveting as he shows us the depths to which a hero’s iron will can drag him, and Rorshach devours almost every scene he’s in.

The film’s other noteworthy performance comes form Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, the apparent offspring of Michelangelo’s David and a Smurf. Manhattan is the world’s only superhero to possess actual superpowers (the rest describing themselves as ‘costumed heroes’), and my, what powers he has. With complete control over all matter, Dr. Manhattan’s emergence from an old-fashioned scientific mishap (think radioactive spider bite) changes the world in a myriad of ways. Most significantly of these, the USA hopes that in Dr. Manhattan lies the ultimate nuclear deterrent. He may well be all these things and more, but is he still just a man? Crudup gives Manhattan just the right level of eerie detachment, even through layers of cgi nakedness, for a hero who has outgrown his world. Less inspiring are the performances of Matthew Goode as Ozymandias, the ‘world’s smartest man’, and Malin Ackerman as the Silk Spectre, failing to outperform her skintight latex stockings. Which are excellent.

On the downside, the film is uneven and the pacing, based heavily on the source material, alternates wildly between cape-and-cowl fisticuffs and drawn-out sitting room conversations. The plot lurches jarringly from New York to Mars and back, and loses some of its momentum along the way. Diehard fans will undoubtedly notice the cuts made by Snyder in order to fit Watchmen into 162 minutes, but his choices, as I said, could not have been much better.

Watchmen is a book that demands to be revisited, and the film will most certainly reward this too. Although the bone-crunching action sequences trundle the plot along at a steady rate, there is a wealth of colour and depth packed into each frame that can only be appreciated when the viewer has a little breathing space, something that the film does not give away freely. The DVD release, likely to include a much lengthier cut, will most probably give us that chance. This is a film about how the world messes people up, and the wacky things they do to cope with it. A feast for the eyes and an ordeal for the senses, Watchmen winds up these eccentric do-gooders we call superheroes, pulls off their masks and asks what makes them tick.

8/10

-James

I Love You Man

Review: I Love You Man

Dir. John Hamburg

Cert. 15

105 mins

2009

Is Paul Rudd assembling a how-to manual for the modern man? Just a few months after showing us how to be a dad in the inoffensively silly Role Models, Anchorman’s Brian Fantana is now learning to be a Real Man™ in I Love You Man.

Peter (Rudd) is getting married, but his fiancee is shocked to realise that despite being well into his thirties, Peter has no male friends to serve as his best man. He's loved by women for being such a damned nice guy, but he's as clueless about other guys as a teenage boy is about women. Peter embarks on an absurd mission to pick up guys on so-called ‘man-dates’, and after a few lousy experiences (including the obligatory mistaken gay encounter), he bumps into Sidney (played with filthy charm by Jason Segel). Whereas Peter is sensitive, well-mannered and frankly more than a little tiresome, Sidney is a roaring, big-faced bon viveur, who lives in a gleeful state of arrested development and gradually teaches Peter to rock, drink, and do the revolting things that (apparently) make men ‘men’.

As a thoroughly juvenile, Apatow-esque comedy I Love You Man does an impressive job (boasting a supporting cast that includes Jon Favreau and the always excellent J.K. Simmons), although it's a little too reliant on the humour of embarrassment. The film plays on the totally unwritten code of straight male interactions that we're expected to pick up as kids - Peter just hasn't. He sucks at banter, repartee, and the language that men frequently speak to their buddies (the word "repartee" for example is a big no-no). Rudd, finally given the leading role that he's deserved for far too long, does such a convincing job as this hopeless fluffer of lines that you might wind up squirming in your seat at the clunkers the poor guy blurts out. As Sidney, Segel manages to charm and disgust simultaneously, and to be honest it's a little difficult to understand what this sexually confident, uninhibited beach bum sees in Rudd's awkward estate agent. Still, the two have good onscreen chemistry, Rudd's slight frame and delicate features a funny contrast to Segel, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Gerard Dépardieu.

Speaking of real estate, the film's ace in the hole is a weird surprise appearance by Lou Ferrigno, aka the Hulk, as himself. Yes, Peter is somehow Ferrigno's estate agent. I Love You Man is a film about men learning to be with other men. What better way to man up and join the global fraternity of testosterone than to sell the Incredible Hulk's house?

I Love You Man raises a ton of laughs, and the thin plot is carried almost entirely by the strength of the central performances. I'm not entirely sold on the idea that the only 'real' man is a caveman, but if I had to spend an evening with either Peter or Sidney, I would choose the troglodyte every time.

7/10

-James

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen

Review: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Dir. Michael Bay

2009

150mins

Cert 12a

Transformers: ROTF is like bad pornography; simultaneously boring and obscene. It’s hard to imagine how a movie about asexual alien robots can be so nauseatingly, unrelentingly horny.

The first Transformers film was poorly scripted, plotted and acted, and featured huge, overly intricate robots pummeling eachother senseless in an orgy of cgi violence. And orgy is the right word for this hideous sequel. It’s like stumbling into a dimly lit hotel room and witnessing a bewildering jumble of vaguely recognisable body parts writhing around in a distorted heap. You can’t see what belongs to whom, and it’s impossible to tell what specifically is going on... but it’s clear that you need to get out. Fast.

Sam Witwicky (Shia Leboeuf, making a damn fool of himself), is preparing to leave home and start college. This means leaving behind his wacky parents, his pet Autobot Bumblebee, and his girlfriend Mikaela (popular sex object Megan Fox). The Autobots have their hands full too, cooperating with the human military to rid the world of the evil Decepticons. There’s a plot, swinging around uncontrollably, that involves the recovery of some object or other to prevent the destruction of the earth’s sun, but it’s nothing more than a pretext for over two hours of mindless robot-on-robot brawling and juvenile sexual imagery.

The Transformers are legion in this film, but are all indistinguishable from eachother. Every one of them looks like a wad of squashed paperclips, and when they decide to rumble (every few minutes), the camera lunges so violently into the midst of the action that it’s not even worth the effort to try to comprehend what’s going on. The robots aren’t the only victims of this ungodly thrusting of lenses and apertures; Fox, whose mouth is locked in a permanent pout for the duration of the film, is practically violated by the camera, which leers at her pneumatic body with all the subtlety of a frat boy in the girls’ locker room.

Why the heck is the film so oversexed? Sam and Mikaela are horny. Mikaela’s pet Decepticon is horny. Sam’s parents are horny. Sam’s parents’ dogs are horny. Soundwave, the Decepticon communications ‘bot, rapes an orbiting satellite. One colossal Transformer has wrecking balls for testicles, which he dangles cheerfully over the great pyramid of Giza. Seriously. The film shakes a pair of giant robot balls in the audience’s face. I think that pretty much says it all.

Maybe all this ball-shaking is the film’s way of compensating for something. The complete absence of characterisation, for example; the only Transformers to exhibit any distinguishing traits are miserable racial stereotypes - two jive-talking Autobots in particular are just appalling. As the ‘comic relief’, they lurch around spouting toe-curling ghetto speak and foul language. And oh yes, they’re illiterate and one has a protruding gold tooth! Good God.

Perhaps all the sex is to distract us from the film’s diabolical script - practically every line is a woeful clunker. Or it might be to distract us from the soundtrack, which blasts across the film as though every single scene is a climax. Or maybe the sex is linked to the film’s weird military fetish (do we really need to see the entire contents of the US army’s toy box?)

Crude, dumb and very long, Transformers: ROTF is a juvenile mess. If, walking blindly into the wrong movie theatre, you should find yourself transfixed by this baffling obscenity, just back out slowly and pretend that you didn’t see anything.

3/10

-James

The Hangover

Review: The Hangover

Dir. Todd Phillips

100mins

Cert 18

2009

It sucks to wake up not recalling what you did last night. You rummage in your pockets, check for evidence of whatever the hell happened, and prepare yourself to make hurried apologies to people whom you don’t even remember.

Turns out that from an outsider’s perspective, this looks freakin’ hilarious.

After a heavy night on the booze in Las Vegas, three guys realise that their bachelor party has gone monstrously wrong; they’ve lost the groom. A sharply-scripted combination of buddy comedy and light mystery, it’s the funniest thing I’ve seen all year. To their credit, the guys (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianikis) do an incredible job of piecing together the previous night’s events through what is clearly a waking nightmare of a hangover. Their mission is simple: retrace their liquored-up steps and recover the missing groom (Justin Bartha) in time for his wedding. Frankly, anyone who can solve a mystery despite feeling like they have a rat in their brain has my respect. This might be how any great detective would operate in the throes of the morning after; who’s to say that Sherlock Holmes would have performed any better after a heavy night on the opium?

But there’s more to the movie that simply finding the groom; it’s an absolute riot to watch these poor guys realise that after a few hours on the sauce, they all become complete animals. Their hazy journey of self-discovery - all the while bickering and screwing things up even worse than they were before - reveals the depth of their alcohol-fueled error. The laughs keep coming at a steady rate, each fragment of the night before a self-contained anecdote and a lead onto the next loopy revelation. Why is there a live tiger in the bathroom? Where is Stu’s missing tooth? And why is a naked Chinese gangster (Ken Jeong) trying to beat the guys to death with a crowbar? Our queasy Quincys embark on a scavenger hunt across Vegas to rediscover their lost memories - and hopefully Doug, the groom. It’s a pretty smart set-up; as a movie the night in question would quickly have become tedious, but as a madcap tangle of bizarre evidence, it hits all the right comedy notes.

The cast is far from A-list, but together they become more than the sum of their generic parts. The de facto leader, Phil (Cooper) is a married schoolteacher who’s thrilled at the chance to misbehave with a reckless abandon that suggests that he never intends to go back to his life; Stu (Helms) is a dorky dentist whose spirit is being slowly crushed by his bitch of a girlfriend, but who, after a few drinks, becomes one of the coolest guys you’ll ever meet. And then there’s Alan (Galifianikis). Alan defies definition; describing himself as ‘a one-man wolf pack’, he’s just plain weird. A chunky, bearded, overgrown child and implied sexual deviant, Alan winds up stealing half the film with his sub-normal antics.

The Hangover is about as good as dumb summer comedies come, and the added element of mystery is the icing on the cake. It’s nicely acted, cleverly scripted (aside from a painful guest spot by Mike Tyson, who handles comedy about as gently as he handles women) and most importantly is uproariously funny. Despite the appalling state in which the guys find themselves, it’s hard not to wish that you could have joined in the night before. By the looks of things, it was well worth the price of the morning after.

8/10

-James

Drag Me To Hell

Review: Drag Me to Hell

Dir. Sam Raimi

Cert 15

99 mins

2009

Sam Raimi’s wickedly entertaining return to slapstick horror doesn’t need to drag me to hell. This glorious pantomime of giggle-inducing terror will have audiences queuing up to cross the Styx and sip cocktails with Satan himself.

It’s been a long time since horror was this much fun. Drag Me To Hell is in every way a successor to the Evil Dead series that cemented Raimi as king of the splatter-happy spook show. Christine (Alison Lohman), a simple country girl trying to make it in the big city, is told by her boss that she’s just too nice for the mean ol’ world of banking. Unfortunately, Christine’s opportunity to prove herself takes the form of turning down a loan extension to a foul gypsy crone (Lorna Raver, sensationally revolting). The wild-eyed hag sneaks into Christine’s car after work, and the poor girl winds up slapped with a particularly nasty gypsy curse.

Christine spends the next three days being deliciously tormented by a demon called the Lamia, who likes to toy with its victims before literally dragging them to hell. The Lamia’s playful cruelty is a delight: it swings Christine around like a yo-yo, sprays her with ooze and gleefully drives the wholesome farm girl just a little bit bonkers. It’s easy to feel slightly guilty watching all of this… but not enough to stop smiling.

Drag Me To Hell is a perfect marriage of ghoulish shocks to gross-out comedy. Set to a nerve-grating soundtrack, a typical scene builds tension in a classic slow burn, culminating in a sudden fright that’s dripping with several shades of first-rate supernatural goop. The beauty is that once Raimi achieves his big scare, he doesn’t just let the scene drop and move on. After scaring the pants off us, he turns our fear into fits of hysterics at the sheer foulness of his imagination. Eyeballs, gallons of fake blood and buckets of slime are hurled around like some Satanic food fight. The comedic timing of these atrocities is sublime, and more than a little camp.

It’s a horror that plays on the anxieties of the mostly good. Christine is no saint, but she’s a decent person. A former fat kid, she struggles to resist slipping into a bakery for some illicit pastry lovin’ on her way to work. Despite an alcoholic mother and a difficult childhood, she’s managed to become a well adjusted adult and is committed to bettering herself. She’s trying painfully hard to impress her professor boyfriend (Justin Long)’s judgemental WASP parents, who share Christine’s obvious belief that she’s punching above her weight. But one small ethical compromise and she’s being audited by hell’s bank manager. And he has a sense of humour!

Scary, silly and above all fun, this little ghost-train of a film is hysterical, plain and simple. Drag Me To Hell is a blast.

8/10

-James

Star Trek

Star Trek

Dir. J.J. Abrams

127mins

Cert 12a

2009

It just became cool to like Star Trek.

J.J. Abrams’ new take on the franchise does the impossible. Star Trek is cool. Star Trek is sexy. Star Trek rocks. For the longest time this property has been mired in a slavish devotion to its own dreary rulebook. This film dares to be something else. It dares to be fun.

There’s a whole new cast. There’s a whole new ship. In fact there’s a whole new universe, and it’s wonderful. This is a Star Trek free of the burden of its own weight, free of the creaking yoke of decades-worth of trivia, hubris and idiosyncrasies. It’s a lean, agile film that is, for the first time in years, able to bring Star Trek somewhere that is truly unexplored. Take the tired musical score that has accompanied Trek for the past 20 years. It’s been replaced by... the Beastie Boys? Brilliant! And yet it feels like Star Trek. In a good way. The optimism, the humour and the humanity that made the series great in the first place are all back on centre stage.

I won’t overburden this review with the details of the plot, which are minimal in any case. The story is dependent on some unlikely coincidences and involves time travel, but for Star Trek it’s all par for the course, and the film’s so much fun that it’s easily forgiven. The film’s villain, a vengeful Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana, underutilised), is a two-dimensional baddie, but at least his makeup is good and his motives are clear. Nero is bloody ugly, and wants to kill everybody. It works.

The film is really about Kirk and Spock, both of whom are terrifically recast. By its end, Star Trek proves that these characters can outlive their former inhabitants. Chris Pine is now Captain Kirk, and Zachary Quinto is now Mr. Spock. It’s as simple as that. And they’re the same, but different. Pine exudes an insolence, irreverence and horniness that are unmistakably Kirk; at the same time, he’s a more erudite and driven young man than Shatner ever was. The same goes for Quinto’s Spock. Although a close physical match for Leonard Nimoy, this Spock is an intense new presence defined by his mixed heritage, battling to reconcile his human emotions with Vulcan logic (something that, disappointingly, Mr. Spock hasn’t done since the 1960s – this often wound up with a crazed Spock slapping Kirk around, which is always fun).

The remainder of the cast are each given stand-out moments in the film that redefine their characters for the 21^st century. Some work better than others; Chekov’s (Anton Yelchin’s) boyish eagerness to please is endearing, but the new wild-eyed Scotty (Simon Pegg) falls a little flat. Shining brighter than the rest is Karl Urban’s take on ‘Bones’ McCoy, the ship’s crotchety doctor. In a cast made up of bold new interpretations, Urban alone impersonates his predecessor (the late Deforest Kelley). But Urban is such a joy to watch that it doesn’t feel remotely cheap or lazy.

The Enterprise has also undergone a facelift. The bridge is all smooth, Ipod white surfaces, splashed with primary colours. This is a refreshing change from the cloying pastel shades of the past few TV series, with their living-room like bridges and Holiday Inn style crew quarters. This Trek isn’t afraid to be dirty either, the bowels of the Enterprise looking for all the world like they actually have something to do with engineering. The world of Star Trek is no longer limited to painted backdrops and cardboard sets – this universe is on a grand scale, complete with soaring alien skyscrapers, cavernous starships and space battles that actually feel dangerous. Budget well spent.

Aside from putting a big, big smile on my face, Star Trek’s greatest triumph is that it shrugs off that crippling condition of being a prequel, the foregone conclusion. By jerking around with time, the future of the Trek universe is undone, releasing any forthcoming films or TV series from the shackles of their own ponderous history. Simply put, the future is no longer written. As Spock says, ‘our destiny has changed’.

How cool is Star Trek? I would not be ashamed to take a date to see this film. It’s Star Trek, and I would take a girl.

9/10

-James