Film Review: Arthur

Arthur is a comedy which relies totally on the terrible jokes of an mostly unlikeable lead who acts inebriated for the whole film. At some point in the movie you realise that you're laughing at an alcoholic, or at least that you're not laughing at an alcoholic and this is before realising that the premise of the movie is ridiculous to the point of being unbelievable.

Arthur, a bored and spoilt multi-millionaire and alcoholic, prides himself on being funny and rich, his inheritance is threatened when he refuses to not marry the suitor his parents choose for him. Marriage, in the eyes of her parents is Arthurs right of passage into adulthood, however his wry, snobbish but loving butler and surrogate father correctly surmises that love will be the catalyst for Arthur's growth.

It is the butler who provides the only pathos and emotional interest in the film, and thankfully some comedy with his sarcasm and casual prejudice toward everything and everyone. After he exits the picture in a way that tonally is not handled well at all, and in fact could go unnoticed if you blink, we are left with the a long wedding scene which is basically and literally the punchline to a joke that was never funny, and is actually quite distasteful.

Maybe alcoholism was inherently funny in a bygone era, funny enough maybe to carry a movie with few jokes, a ridiculous plot and very little charm. Unfortunately for Arthur, he has not aged like a good Scotch, and instead a bitter taste is left in the mouth after watching this.

Film Review: Die Hard

Roy Rogers is a clown, a clown with a performing horse and a guitar. He wears the trappings of a Hollywood hero like John Wayne or Zoro but then cracks wise and burst into song like an outmoded TV host as well as a matinee star and a restauranteur.

He's a pussy cat in comparison to John McClain, so it's strange he would prefer Rogers over Rambo because of the "spangly shirts". But there's something of the performer in McClain too. His modus operandi seems to be shock and awe, combined with sass and cheek. Smack talking his enemies over radio waves and provoking them to reveal their plan or screw up in some other way.

In Die Hard, John get's his ass kicked four ways from Sunday, but he finds the reserves to pull through. Most of Bruce Willis' performance in this film is played alone, with most of the dialogue spoken into a walkie talkie. These moments are great for fleshing our character and to stand as a counterpoint to some hectic action and slow-mo violence (an impromptu kneecapping with the victim then falling through a plate of glass is particularly shocking).

But it's the violence that we came for, the redemption of the broken down old cop, the reconciliation of the broken down marriage and even the foiling of the bad guys plan doesn't matter as much as the guns and explosions that lead up to it. And it's on this count that Roy and John couldn't be further apart and thank god for that.

Yippe Ki Yay!

Film Reviw: The Matrix

It's hard to disassociate a film from the creator's latter works. Francis Ford Coppola will always be celebrated for The Godfather parts I and II but then will he ever be forgiven for part III? Eddie Murphy is a riot in his stand up movies Raw and Delirious and great in Coming to America and even Shrek, but Norbit is surely an indication of a career in decline, right?

Well, imagine being The Wachowski Brothers, a pair of film makers who's first film Bound, a tight and sexy thriller, becomes a cult classic and their second film, The Matrix becomes the success that they just can't match. Two films in and on the slopes to Has-been-ville already, it's a shame.

It's not actually this reviewers opinion that the two follow up films in the Matrix trilogy were abject failures. I believe that the follow ups failed only in matching up to the fanboy hype. Was that hype ever necessary? I don't think so, The Matrix is good, don't get me wrong, but it's not the masterpiece that the fanatic's fervour would lead us to believe.

It got our attention because it was a surprise, it seemed to have come out of nowhere, with new film techniques, a fresh take on kung-fu and enough gun-porn to take make any bullet fetishist wet. It kept our attention because it painted a non-reality so visceral that we could all imagine being inside of it, and escaping our own.

The film's main conceit, that our reality was a construct that we could escape at the drop of a pill spoke to me and my generation, allowed us to fantasise and dream beyond the new messiah story line present in the film. For me, that was the main strength of The Matrix, that the scope was so limited, the ending so open, that as the credit rolled I couldn't stop thinking about the possibilities for the characters and for the story.

Film Review: The Chronicles of Riddick

I find Riddick to be an enigmatic and engaging character. He's stoic in the face of danger, self-preserving and ruthless but has a set of values which in his first story saw him attempt to lead the less capable to safety.

This time around there is more in jeopardy than the lives of a disparate band, there is the diversity of the universe at stake as the religious cult of The Necromancer invade and mind-wash one planet at a time.

Riddick can not manage to avoid the maelstrom of The Necromunger because it has been foretold that he alone will be their downfall, so quite unintelligently the Necromancer peruse their fate instead of letting him to his naturally selfish ways. This sets us up for some awesome set pieces, the most exciting of which is a race against the dawn to the last ship off of a planet where the sunlight will burn you to death.

Dame Judy Dench appears in a career misstep as a ghostly fortune teller, and even with her credentials this movie will only ever be of the B-type. All other principles are capable and the dialogue is chucklesome rather than absurd. But despite the grander setting over the stars and the story about the sanitisation of culture through extremist worship, Chronicles is simply a balls out action movie and probably more enjoyable for it too.