W.

An interesting, if somewhat blinked view on one of the most controversial presidents that the USA has seen. I too was a little perplexed that the film concentrated solely on the Iraq war for the segments set during his presidency, but I realised that Oliver Stone was not trying to make a documentary. There are plenty of those about Bush Jr. already. Stone is trying to show the man behind the presidency.

I really really hope that the characters of Cheney and Rumsfeld are exaggerated, because if they're like that in real life, then the world is a far scarier place than I thought it was. Cheney is portrayed as some kind of sinister puppet master, pulling at W's strings, and Rumsfeld comes across as someone you'd normally see in a straight jacket.

Probably the most disturbing part is when the group are in the situation room and discussing the invasion of Iraq. Colin Powell's desperate attempts to bring some kind of sanity to the situation, repeatedly pointing out that Bin Laden is hiding in a cave in Pakistan somewhere, and being told by Dick Cheney that the American people want revenge for 9/11 and don't particularly care if Iraq was involved or not.

The special features are well worth a look. They too are shorter than I'd have liked, but are very interesting, especially the section about how many believe that Bush nearly broke the American government system by assigning too much power to the executive branch. There's not too much about the breakdown of intelligent gathering that lead to the invasion, except to say that it is incredulous that the US military would defer to a report from British intelligence, which came from a single source, rather than their own intel gathering network which was actually contradicting that report.

Angels & Demons

Brief Review

Saw this at the weekend with my sister. It's good. I enjoyed the first one, and I liked this one. It's a tad darker in places, both in story, visuals and physical lighting.

Soundtrack is a bit over the top at times, otherwise it's well scored.

Still think I liked the first one better, the mystery was done with a little more thought, but overall it's very enjoyable. Critics are saying that Ron Howard has managed to make running between a museum and a church seem exciting. Which is kind of a stupid flaw to pick upon, since plenty of entertaining films involve a race between a researcher and 'the bad guy'.

Ewan McGregor is very good in this, easily outshining Tom Hanks. Female lead is fairly forgettable.

Score: B-
Entertaining, worth a watch and has a brilliant climax.

OQ:
I'm sure you will serve him wisely.
I will serve him briefly...

Star Trek

Disclaimer: This review may be coloured by the fact that I had organised to see this on Saturday with friends, only to be thwarted by a dodgy electrical fault in Cineworld's emergency lighting system which closed the multiplex for most of the day. You'll have to use your own judgement on this matter.

I just know I'm going to get flamed for this......

There's a lot to like about the new Star Trek film. The ships look AMAZING. The special effects are brilliant. The new transporter effect in particular is very nice. The acting of the main cast is superb, and the jokes are well paced, appropriate and kept in line. McCoy in particular is excellently portrayed. The action is....actiony. It's full of whizz bang poppery. It's very well done, is what I'm trying to convey.

Sadly, as a Trekkie, there's also a lot not to like.

When it comes to breathing new life into a series, there are four commonly recognised way to do it:

• Spin-off In a spin off you create a new show based on characters or concepts from the old show. Sometimes works well (Stargate: Atlantis, CSI, and of course Star Trek itself), sometimes is a horrendous mistake (Joey or Team Knight Rider*).
• Rebrand Replace some or all of the principle cast, possible alter the name slightly and relaunch in a new season. Can be fantastic (Stargate SG-1), can also be a disaster (SeaQuest 2032**).
• Reboot Reset the universe and declare that the original show does not exist in this context. This is probably the trickiest to pull off, but can reap the most benefits because it doesn't have to concern itself with canon rules established in the original and can tell the stories the way it wants to. Best example would be Battlestar Galactica, but also Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (which ignores Terminator 3).
• Revamp In a revamp, you still create a new series, but tell the stories in a different format while keeping the original series "canon". In other words, you bring the series "up to date". Examples would be Enterprise, which revamps the Trek universe, but keeps everything that follows it chronologically essentially intact. The new Knight Rider is another example. Both old and new Knight Rider were set in the time they were made, so they reflect the culture at the time, but they both exist in the same timeline.

The trouble I have with the new Star Trek film, is that it is trying to revamp and reboot itself at the same time. And I'm not sure, but I think it may be throwing in a little rebranding into the process too.

I think if this film had just been about Kirk, Spock and McCoy's first mission, I would have accepted it more, even if the ship looked different, because it would have been a revamp. Or if they'd decided to ignore all of Trek canonicity and reboot the series, I'd have been fine with that too. But in creating what is a highly tenuous link to the Trek we all know, they've tried to have their cake and eat it too.

Why is this a problem, you may ask. Well, it's because Star Trek fans are geeks, and it is here that I must digress into a brief side alley. As long as there has been Trek, there has been a divide between Trekkies and Trekkers. No-one will be able to tell you the difference, because frankly no-one really knows. Kate Mulgrew, Leonard Nimoy and Gene Roddenberry all had radically different ideas, but the way it was explained to me was Trekkers are fans of the original TV show (and films). Trekkies are fans of all of Star Trek. Because of the events that follow Star Trek: Nemesis, creating an alternate timeline, for many Trekkies, is sacrilege. Because it either implies that the events leading up to and after Nemesis are no longer going to happen, or that the events you are currently watching are part of a "doomed" timeline that the future Federation is going to correct. However, for Trekkers, this isn't a problem because they largely ignore everything that happened after the original series. So time travel that undoes everything after Kirk's era isn't a issue for them.

And that's the problem. Time travel in a Star Trek film. It's got to be the biggest cliché imaginable, and they don't do it well.

And it's not just that. The film is full of absurd plotholes. A transporter that can compensate for a ship travelling at warp speed, but can't deal with someone accelerating through gravity. While Zachary Quinto's Spock is excellent 90% of the time, the 10% of the time it doesn't work, it really doesn't work. I can accept a Spock emotionally compromised by the destruction of his home world, but a Spock that is engaged in a romantic relationship?

Star Trek doesn't just ignore Trek canon (which I would have been fine with), it also ignores the physical rules of the universe already described in detail. So you've got warp drive that behaves more like Star Wars' hyperdrive, you've got shields that don't seem to do anything, you've got phaser pistols which for the first time in history seem to have a recoil and you've got a transporter that operates on a range of different principles during the film depending on what it needs to do to progress the plot. Perhaps one of the most obscure ideas introduced is that the viewscreen on the bridge is now literally a window.

This entire argument may sound very beardy, but we are talking about Star Trek fans here. We are some of the beardiest people on the planet, and enjoy nothing more than debating philosophical differences between the series, testing each others' knowledge of all things Trek and generally trying to out-beard each other; a task which I regularly outshine my peers at, much to the dismay of my mother who hasn't quite given up hope of being a grandmother one day.

This film is like Never Say Never Again. It's James Bond, and yet it's not James Bond. It features familiar characters, and yet is missing equally essential characters. It's instantly recognisable, yet at the same time it is weird and foreign.

So while I cannot say for certainty that I liked the film (I honestly don't know), it does raise some difficult questions for me. Which as a Star Trek fan is brilliant, because it means I get to argue with people on the Internet***.

Score: [error]
I'm planning to see this again on Wednesday. That should say something about the film. Although your guess is as good as mine as to what it says.

OQ: I take it you have prepared new insults?

*I still get a bad taste in my mouth when I think about Team Knight Rider. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst television show I have ever watched and the people responsible should be hunted down and shot.
**Actually SeaQuest did this at the start of both season 2 and 3 when they changed cast members. It's just that the rebrand at the start of season 3 was so much bigger and managed to wreck the original concept so utterly.
***I can actually hear my mother's groan of despair at that concept, which is quite a feat because she's 450 miles away.

Lesbian Vampire Killers

Probably should have read the IMDB entry for this before I went to see it. The entry reads as: a director who's hardly done anything before in film* directs a bunch of never-heard-of-them-before actors in a film written by people more used to writing sketches for TV, with a couple of up and coming comedy stars thrown in to commercialise it. And Paul McGann.

From IMDB:

Writers Stewart Williams and Paul Hupfield were challenged to think of the dumbest and yet most commercial title possible for a film, Lesbian Vampire Killers was the answer. They then went away and wrote the script.

Can I just take a moment here to say that this is quite evident in the finished product. And although it says they wrote the script after coming up with the name, it fails to say what they wrote the script on. I've got money on it being a napkin. And I can't be the only one who's getting an image of large amounts of alcohol being consumed prior to this "challenge" being thrown down.

I don't know what I was expecting going in to see this, but I think I can safely say I was expecting something better. Horne and Corden are basically playing their respective characters from Gavin and Stacy, and given their comic abilities, I was expecting more laughs. Paul McGann is entertaining as the vampire obsessed vicar but the rest of the cast are largely forgettable. The plot is, well let's face it; fairly unimportant. The acting is pretty dire and to steal a phrase; the special effects aren't. A couple of decent effects, and for the most part the rest is white gunge being thrown about, largely at James Corden**.

Blokes all know why they go to see a vampire film. There's certain things they want to see;

• Gorey blood-sucking.
• Vampire's getting staked in the heart.
• Other vampires getting 'offed' in entertaining ways.
• and if there's any time left, maybe some T&A.

Lesbian Vampire Killers is very light on all of these key measures. There's precious few vampire deaths, and even then they all die like the wicked witch from Oz; dissolving into pools of goo. Almost no-one is ever seen being bitten and the only nudity on show is in the opening few minutes of the info-dump narration, after which it is gone forever. Honestly, it's like they've brought back rationing.

To be honest, given the quality of the script and the effort put into the special effects, I would honestly have expected a film with a name like this to turn up in my other DVD collection, which actually already features a vampire film.***

Score: D
A couple of giggles, but for the most part you're looking at the screen watching stuff happen. Uninteresting stuff.

OQ: It's like a medieval gay bar...

*I mean it. he's directed three films, this being the second, and is listed about four other times as various film crew.
**If I were being cruel, I'd say it's because he's the easiest target to hit.
***Dark Angels in case you're interested, or have a very understanding missus. Bizarrely, it's probably a better "vampire" genre film than this was...

Monsters vs. Aliens 3D

Meh.

Would have been an average animated film if not for the 3D effect, which is used quite well in most places.

Aliens arrive on Earth and the only defence the US has is to send monsters in to battle. There's the Big Giant Susan, aka Ginormica, the Missing Link, a mad scientist cockroach, an indestructible blob and Insectasaurus.

Some good parts, the President making first contact was hilarious. Set pieces were pretty and very detailed. Susan roller-skating with cars was very well done.

Plot's not the most original, score is instantly forgettable and the cast are reasonably well known. Reese Witherspoon, Hugh Laurie and Kiefer Sutherland being most obvious, but Renée Zellweger was in there and I didn't spot her.

Score: C
Entertaining, but nothing new and the ending contains that stupid "accept who you are" rubbish that every animated film has to have BY LAW.

OQ:
News reporter: Once again, a UFO has landed in America, the only country UFOs ever seem to land in.

Bolt (3D)

A young girl called Penny, armed with high tech gadgetry and her faithful dog, goes head to head against an evil scientist with a cat and his minions.

Hang on, isn't that the plot to Inspector Gadget?

Cineworld actually have more showings of this film per day in 3D than in regular format., which makes sense because this is the first Disney animated film to be designed and 'filmed' in 3D. Their other efforts; Chicken Little (2005) and Meet the Robinsons (2007) were both converted to 3D after they were produced. As such, the 3D effect is used very well in this movie. The last film I saw in 3D was Beowulf, which I felt didn't work well. It only used the 3D effect in about half of the film, and the effect was to add depth to objects and people who still looked flat and two-dimensional. It was very distracting. Bolt has none of that . It doesn't rely on throwing things at the audience to exaggerate the depth illusion, but instead uses it in a subtle and effective way to add depth to each and every scene.

You've probably heard the basic plot. Star of a hit TV show, Bolt thinks everything is real, mostly due to the production crew maintaining that illusion for him. When an accident separates him from Penny, he sets out across the country to rescue her with a couple of companions he picks up on the way. Now if that sounds formulaic and predictable, then think again. Bolt takes a fresh approach to this story, Mittens the cat desperately trying to convince him his powers aren't real, while Rhone the hamster believes Bolt is the genuine article.

For those of you planning to see this at the weekend, be warned: The screen last night was almost sold out, and the Orange Wednesday folk were trailed all through the zip-barriers, all the way to the cinema door and out to the complex's door. Anyone coming to the queue after I got there would have been queueing outside. Luckily, I'd picked up both the tickets and the glasses for this on the way home last night, so I bypassed the lot of them. I had to work very hard to hold in the evil laugh. Seriously, I nearly gave myself a hernia.

In a rather interesting twist, all the trailers for other Disney/Pixar movies were also shown in 3D. Monsters vs Aliens looks to be a hoot, and as usual the Pixar trailer for Up gives away almost nothing of the plot while still managing to instill a deep desire to go and see it when it's out.

Score: A -
A genuinely funny movie, light on the Disney touch and a fabulously realised world. Extra points for the comedy hamster.

OQ: Now I'm concerned on a number of levels.

Frost / Nixon

This was the Orange Wednesday film my friends went to see, and the last in the current round that I was eager to watch. That was, until I read the reviews of Milk.

Unlike most of the people watching this, I actually have a pretty good impression about what Watergate was about, which wasn't as helpful as I'd thought it would be. The opening sequence consists of a montage of news-reel clips about the Watergate scandal, cut with excerpts from Frank Langella as Nixon giving his resignation speech live on television. What is conveyed well in these opening moments is the anger of the American people towards a president who was not going to be held to account for his criminal actions.

How much of the plot is factual and how much is embellished is always going to be hard to tell. Initially Frost is only interested in interviewing the former president as he would interview anyone else. A chat show interview. He has no intention of eliciting an apology or confession from him. But the appearance fee he needs to pay Nixon means that for various reasons, no network will buy the show he is producing and slowly he comes round to the idea from his team that the interview must give Nixon the trial he never had. Nixon looks on the interview as a means to rebuild his reputation, regain the public trust and move back into politics. However the historical accuracy is largely irrelevant. This film may be about a historical event, but it is not a documentary. It's a character biopic. Both Frank Langella and Michael Sheen repeat the roles they created on the stage play. Ron Howard said he would only agree to direct if the studio would allow both actors to appear in the film version. Sheen, better known to most as Tony Blair in The Queen, shows that he really can get a person's inflections and mannerisms down to a tee. And Langella's performance as Nixon is so convincing, it's chilling. The two actors kept up their character even between filming, so as to maintain the rivalry between them.

One of the lasting themes is the differences and similarities between Frost and Nixon. Both want accolades that may be forever beyond their grasp, yet while David Frost is shown as constantly attending parties and galas and Richard Nixon is shown as a private man surrounded by only a few friends and colleagues, they are both portrayed rather excellently as lonely men. There's a beautiful contrast between an opening shot of Nixon boarding Marine One as Frost watches on television and sees the smile for the cameras fade as he turns away, and a similar falling smile on David's face later in the film.

In many ways, this is like a boxing film between two fading champions. Both want to destroy the opposition, both want a comeback, but only one of them can win.

Ultimately, it is possible to leave the cinema feeling pity for both men. Nixon's realisation that he can never regain what he lost and Frost knowing that he may never achieve anything this historic again.

There is also a mention at the end, overplayed on a close-up of Nixon's face in the interview, that while television is used as an entertainment tool for the masses it can, if used correctly, accomplish something that no journalist, no prosecutor could ever manage. To show a man in complete defeat, ravaged by loneliness and self-loathing in defeat. It's a message that comes across in another of my favourite films Good Night, and Good Luck and that, if nothing else, would be reason enough to add it to my DVD shelf.

Score: A

OQ:
David Frost: It wasn't that bad....
James Reston: Wasn't that bad?!? I overheard two crew in there saying they hadn't voted for Nixon but if he was running for office today, they'd vote for him!