Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Oh dear…

I honestly was hopeful going into this film. I honestly thought to myself “Maybe without Hayden Christiansen, it might be possible to make a good Star Wars film.” Oh how wrong I was.

There are a lot of things that annoy me about this film. The voice work is poor at best, ranging from the uninspiring to the ridiculously hammy. The opening voice over is particularly poor, and I found myself wondering what exactly would have been so wrong with an opening crawl, even if it didn’t have a John Williams score pounding alongside. The dialogue is appalling, as expected, and the character interactions are just as bad. And, it must be said, the animation simply isn’t up to scratch.

I’m not saying that I have a problem with stylised animation, because I don’t. What I do have a problem with is the fact that the animation appears to have been stylised to make it easier and cheaper to do. I also have a problem with incidental shots being repeated – I spotted a shot near the opening with the cannons firing and a clone surveying the battlefield repeated exactly not a minute later. That’s what I’d expect from a TV show on a tight budget looking to fill up some vital seconds, not from a Hollywood movie from one of the richest men in the movie industry.

The biggest problem with The Clone Wars is that, after Episodes I – III, I don’t really care about these characters anymore. Anakin is an irritating, arrogant character (though thankfully missing the infuriating mopiness of the Hayden Christiansen incarnation), while the Obi-Wan of this film is ridiculously hammy. There’s also the fact that the plot is about securing supply lines. This is so incidental that I find myself struggling to care less.

All in all, this is far worse than any of the prequel trilogy. While those films were not particularly good, this one is downright bad. It looks cheap. It sounds cheap. It feels cheap. The Star Wars name used to carry with it some expectations of standards. With this film, they all disappear. Unless you’re an absolute diehard fan, then don’t bother. C.

Man On Wire

A story of dreams. A story of passion. A story of obsession. Man On Wire tells the story of Philippe Petit, and his high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Directed by James Marsh, the film is a documentary, making use of interviews, reconstructions and file footage to recreate the events on and leading up to the event known as "le coup".

The film plays far more like a heist movie than anything else, detailing the enormously intricate planning and preparation that went into the event: scouting a place for the cable, determining how best to secure it, findings ways to get the equipment to the roof and of bypassing the guards, deciding what clothes to wear to best blend in, securing the man-power to pull off what needed to be done. "Le coup" really is an incredibly apt title for the event.

Petit is nothing short of a fascinating individual, with an infectious passion for his work. His recollections are retold with a fervency that is difficult not to be enthralled by, his physical animation becoming more prominent as he recounts the more tense moments of the story. His head is always in the clouds, his eyes on his dream. His companions - a rag-tag bunch, consisting of childhood friends, his girlfriend and various people he meets along the way - are either in awe of his capability as a funambulist or his daring as an individual, with one exception - his closest friend, Jean-Louis Blondeau. Blondeau acts as the rationality that Petit lacks, and probably saved his life in doing so.

The act itself is truly breathtaking and nothing short of inspiring. Although the act itself is only recounted through still photography, this does nothing to diminish from its effect. In fact, the static nature of the photographs make Petit's achievement seem all the more ethereal and eternal. One of the police officers interviewed at the time sums it up so perfectly when he says that he knew he was watching something that nobody would ever see again.

Although it is never stated in the film, one distinctly gets the impression that the friendship between Petit and Blondeau did not survive the aftermath of "le coup" intact - Jean-Louis' tears towards the end would certainly indicate this. In addition, we know that the relationship between Petit and his girlfriend Annie did not survive Petit's new-found fame - she describes the event as being a beautiful last act to their relationship. These facts only serve to highlight Petit's personality, which seems to cause people to gravitate towards him, to bask in his shadow. Their obsession is with Petit, while Petit's is only ever with his dreams.

Man On Wire is a truly inspiring and wonderfully constructed documentary. It does not try to sell the magnificence of the event to us, knowing full well that the event does that all by itself. Our subject, in Petit, is a fascinating and charismatic individual with a true talent outstripped only by the scale of his dreams. A-.

Get Smart

Yet another 60's TV show film. Thankfully, Get Smart is much more Mission Impossible than Bewitched. (I mean that it's a good film - the spy connection is just a coincidence.) Steve Carell stars as the eponymous Maxwell Smart, chief analyst for CONTROL, a top secret government organisation who closely monitors the actions of KAOS (the bad guys). Max's idol is Agent 23 (Dwayne Johnson), CONTROL's best agent. Max wants to be an agent, and is more than qualified, but is too valuable as an analyst to be promoted. Until, of course, CONTROL is attacked and the identity of all of their agents is revealed. This means that only Max and the recently post-cosmetic surgery Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) are safe in the field, and are dispatched to investigate KAOS' involvement.

What ensues truly is one of the funniest films I've seen this year, filled to the brim with superb visual gags and throwaway one-liners. Hathaway - stunningly beautiful, as ever - mostly acts as the foil to Carell's antics, who truly shines in this role, perfectly suited to his comedic style and timing. Alan Arkin has a good turn with some great moments as the Chief. ("Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" "I don't know. Were you thinking, "Holy shit, holy shit, a sword fish almost went through my head"? If so, then yes.") Bill Murray has a funny little cameo, while Dalip Singh (aka WWE's The Great Khali) marks out a role comparable only to James Bond's Jaws, only bigger and twice as ugly.

One of the things that really makes Get Smart work and that differentiates it from other parodies of the spy genre (like Johnny English, for example) is that Maxwell Smart is actually a very competent, though highly unorthodox, agent. We see him very capably traverse the laser maze (up until the intervention of a rat), prove his marksmanship skills both in training and the field, he is highly knowledgeable about KAOS (perhaps more than anyone else) and he is a good improviser (very unlike Carell's character Michael from The Office). Certainly, he is prone to (highly amusing) blunders, but it is that beneath this there is a skilled, highly likeable individual that makes Smart truly work as a character.

Get Smart is a hugely enjoyable film, packed with laugh-out-loud moments from beginning to end. The plot is fairly incidental and pretty predictable, but that impacts the enjoyment of the film not one iota. One of the funniest films I've seen this year, and well worth the watch. A-.

WALL·E

The people at Pixar have a gift. It's a rare gift, and an incredibly powerful one. The ability to tell wonderfully human stories. The fact that humans rarely play more than a supporting role in telling these stories is irrelevant. Anthropomorphism is a powerful thing.

It is the 29th century, and the Earth has been so overcome by human-created waste that it can no longer support life and has been abandoned by humanity 700 years earlier. WALL·E is a robot left behind to clean up the planet. Once there were many WALL·E robots, but our WALL·E is the only one still active. But due to his long period of operation and perhaps his isolation - he appears to have been alone for a very long time - WALL·E has developed sentience. Defined by two primary characteristics - curiosity and kindness, he has developed a routine for himself. With only a friendly cockroach for company, WALL·E goes about his day job, compacting and stacking humanity's legacy, rescuing items that he finds interesting - lighters, spare parts for himself from deactivated WALL·E units and a single plant. At night, he watches scenes from Hello, Dolly! before shutting down for the night.

This routine is shattered one day when a new robot named EVE arrives on a spaceship. WALL·E is instantly smitten with her, and shows her his collection of trinkets. Upon seeing the plant, EVE places it in a compartment inside her, and instantly shuts down. Her directive is to find life on Earth, and return evidence of it to humanity. WALL·E, however, is inconsolable. He tries everything to get her to restart, but to no avail. Her ship returns, to whisk her back to humanity, waiting in space in huge luxury-liner spaceships, with their every need tended to by the ship's robotic crew. This has left everybody fat, lazy and cocooned in their hoverchairs.

It is here that we see how infectious WALL·E's personality - his humanity, if you will - can be. In the briefest of time periods, he awakens the humanity within two of the people aboard the Axiom as well as the ship's captain, and becomes the leader of a band of rogue robots. The true irony here, of course, is that the only one truly living is a robot, while the humans act like mindless machines.

What ensues from here is one of the most wonderful love stories I have ever seen, highlighted by so many beautiful moments - WALL·E and EVE dancing together around the outside of the Axiom, EVE replaying unseen memories of WALL·E watching over and caring for her while she was waiting to be returned to the Axiom, and EVE desperately trying to repairs WALL·E's circuitry. The fact that it is a love story between two robots who communicate primarily through gesture and single words is simply irrelevant - these two robots are more alive than any of the humans shown in the film.

WALL·E is one of the sweetest, funniest, most delightful, uplifting films I have seen in a very long time. This is Pixar at its best once again, showing quite clearly where the true home of animation resides today. An absolute must see. A+.

The X-Files: I Want To Believe

FBI Agents use a psychic priest to try and find a missing agent.

Desolate locations, minimal fantasy, cerebral storytelling, strong characterisations and no action are the offerings of this little movie. It bombed at the Box Office. And no wonder! What genius decided to release this intimate little thing during the season of Blockbusters?

It looks and feels like a typical episode of the show. And, as such, it's a middle-of-the-road episode. Not going to make anyone's Top Ten list (or even into the the top third of all episodes) but still a bloody good story nonetheless. And, as a movie, it's not like any movie out there right now. Maybe the intimate nature of the tale will work better in the home and it will be a huge hit on DVD. I hope so. It deserves to be seen/appreciated.

It has flaws. Mostly in the staging/directing of some scenes: the Amanda Peet character frequently yells obvious things at the priest ("we need to find her!") for no logical reason other than to create false tension (that's lazy writing, guys), and there is a scene between Scully and the Priest that comes off as staged and false (lots of striking poses in different parts of a room). But - for the most part - this is a very good movie. And it has a great, very tense, climax.

Overall, I give it an "A-".

Here's John Kenneth Muir's review.

The X-Files: I Want To Believe

The subtitle for this second X-Files film, following 1998's Fight The Fear, sums up a lot of what this film is about - the need to believe in something. Events have moved on significantly since the end of the TV series, to the point where the bare minimum of knowledge abut the show proves perfectly adequate to make the film enjoyable. Scully (Gillian Anderson) is now a doctor in a Catholic hospital, treating a boy with a rare degenerative brain disease, Sandhoff disease, for which there is no treatment. Mulder (David Duchovny) is now a fugitive of the FBI, living in rural isolation.

The plot of the film is very much a "monster of the week" style plot, as opposed to the arc-centric plot of the first film. The result of this is that the film is far more accessible, focusing on the intricacies of the plot and the dynamics rather than a grand overall story. The plot itself is in fact rather grizzly, beginning with the abduction of women from isolated areas and taking some wonderfully nasty turns from there.

Billy Connolly takes a hauntingly believable turn as a psychic paedophile priest (try saying that ten times fast), the man who is helping the FBI to find these women, and the nature of his psychic abilities is what seperates Mulder and Scully. Throughout, Mulder is clearly a man who wants to believe, nay, needs to believe in something, anything; while Scully has to reconcile her sceptical nature with the need to believe in something, even if it only herself.

However, the film is not without its flaws. The relationship between Mulder and Scully feels a little muddled and uneven in numerous points, though perhaps if I had followed the series I may have gotten more of this. However, overall, The X-Files is still an enjoyable watch, with a number of chilling scenes. B-.

Baby Mama

I should probably begin this review by saying that I love Tina Fey. Surely, more than any other woman I can think of, she defines that most wonderful of archetypes – the geeky-yet-sexy girl. Her work on TV series 30 Rock and previous big screen outing Mean Girls is wonderfully refreshing and always hilarious. Unlike both of those however, Baby Mama is not written by Fey, so does Baby Mama measure up to work from Fey’s own pen?

Well, the short answer is yes. Baby Mama is the story of Kate Holbrook (Fey) – a successful executive with an organic foods company who has reached the point in her life where every hormone in her body is making her desperately want a baby, except she discovers that she can’t conceive (as her gynaecologist puts it “I don’t like your uterus.”). So she turns to Chaffee Bicknell (Sigourney Weaver, in top form here) who runs a surrogacy agency, putting would-be parents in touch with people willing to carry their child. Enter Amy Poehler as Angie, a white-trash girl who lives with her moron boyfriend, Carl.

All goes well until Angie shows up on Kate’s doorstep, having left Carl, so she moves in with Kate. What follows for the next while is the classic old-couple routine, but with some genuinely hilarious gags which saves the sequence from feeling stale or tired. Also introduced is Kate’s romantic interest Rob (Greg Kinnear), who runs a juice bar. I’ve always liked Greg Kinnear, and I think he does a good job here, providing development for Kate, without ever making the film about them or their relationship, because this film is all about the relationship between Kate and Angie, and how a respect and bond emerges between them.

There’s also a fairly big twist in the movie about halfway in, which I won’t spoil here, but it was a complication to the plot I wasn’t expecting, but it serves to enhance the film and the journey the characters make, so that’s always a good thing. Also falling into the “good thing” category is Steve Martin’s turn as Kate’s boss Barry, a new age hippy type who asks Kate to join him, bowlegged on his desk (despite the fact she’s in a skirt) and to make his new store “exactly like” a small seashell.

Baby Mama is a very funny film (with perhaps some jokes that appeal far more to women than men – the women around me in the cinema were in tears of laughter at lines that simply went over my head, but then again, they were about menstrual cycles, so go figure) that provides both Fey and Poehler the perfect stage to showcase their talents. With one of the funniest women in Hollywood, some great writing and a strong supporting cast, it’s got a lot going for it, making it one of best comedies this year. B+.