Decepiton (2008)
Goodness, what a jolly long time it's been since I did one of these.
Why has it been so long? Honestly, no real reason. Just, I've not really got round to it. Over the years I've amassed quite the collection of TV shows I watch on a regular basis and between that and work and driving lessons and occasionally having a social life and travelling and everything, my love film watching has fallen by the wayside somewhat.
But now it is summer hiatus, and this leaves me with a little more free time with which to indulge. Of course, the observant of you will have noticed that summer hiatus began a while back, so why has it taken so bally long to do this one? (forgive me, I've been reading Jeeves and Wooster fic just now)
Well, see what I have been doing is mostly aquiring new fandoms. You're surprised I can tell.
First new fandom was Hawaii Five-0. The remake. They had a cross over episode with NCIS LA this season and that combined with the recommendations of several people that it was ridiculous in the good way and slashtastic as fuck was enough to convince me to give it a try. And, yeah, I watched the first two seasons in fairly short order. And yes, it is a damn ridiculous show about a special taskforce of 4 people in Hawaii who go around solving crime and not worrying about admissibility of evidence. Seriously, their interrogation techniques leave something to be desired. A colleague described it as being to NCIS LA what NCIS LA is to NCIS, and I have to agree. Less plot, more explosions and more emphasis on pretty mens. And ladies for those so inclined.
And it takes place in Hawaii. Which means surfing. Which means beaches. Which means high probability of this happening:
And this:
So… yeah. Now I have this to help balance out the more serious and gritty crime shows I watch. Which I think brings my total up to about 6. But hey, at least Silent Witness only airs about 8 episodes a year…
Unusually for me, it hasn't made me particularly inclined to go and check out the orignial. Not sure why.
My second new fandom has blindsided me rather. I went to see Rock of Ages a couple of weekends back with a couple of friends thinking it would be quite an entertaining couple of hours. I now have the soundtrack, have compiled a playlist of original tracks and am going to see the West End show in a few weeks. And may have spent part of today’s sick day watching a very dodgy quality extra legal version because my local cinema isn’t showing it any more and I require rocking out occasionally.
When I first heard about the movie I was… not psyched. It was a jukebox musical after all. An excuse to hamfistedly string together some tracks that follow some theme and appeal to the populist masses with overblown tripe and make a tonne of money despite being devoid of artistic merit. (Yeah, I am a bit of a theatre snob. This surprises you? I have strongly held opinions of people who arrive after the curtain, I think that if we must have a televised “search for a star” show, must it be on ITV?, and I firmly believe that Shakespeare is perfectly accessible and people who claim not to like it just haven’t given it a chance.)
And then I caught Russell Brand on Graham Norton and conceded the film looked fun, so was perfectly willing to give it a go when it was suggested.
And yeah. I got hooked. I loved the film. I got the soundtrack stuck in my head for days. In fact, in the last week, I have almost exclusively switched between listening to the OST and my own playlist. Turns out I love 80s Hair Metal a lot more than I thought I did.
And yes, the plot is stupidly predictable and the characters are all one dimensional. And jeez, would it kill you have just one female character who has some sort of reason for being that isn’t to advance the plot of the male characters?
But hey, the character motivations may be paper thin, but at least they are always pretty obvious and make some sort of sense, and there are no particularly gaping plot holes, so it is a step up from Prometheus!
The cast rocks out pretty well, and all seem to be enjoying the fuck out of themselves. Especially Catherine Zita-Jones.
Anyway, I’ve tried to work out why I like this film so much and I think I’ve boiled it down to 3 things:
1.Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand.
Ok, so I’m not as anti-Russell Brand as a lot of people seem to be. I think he’s better at his job than a lot of people give him credit for, and when he actually bothers to try is a *very* funny comedian. In fact, I saw him on his last tour at the O2, and very much enjoyed it. This is mostly because the show focussed on what he does best: taking the media apart piece by piece. Especially when applied to himself. And the segment where he applied the same to the death threats he had received after hosting some awards show in America was truly hilarious. And yes, he is also loud and crude and has entirely too high an opinion of himself, but he can be funny and charming if he wants to be.
And Alec Baldwin? Well he’s never really appeared on my radar before now. When I think of him, the phrase “kind of a douche” springs to mind, but I honestly couldn’t tell you why.
My point, that I am eventually getting to, is that of all the words I would use to describe either of them, the word “cute” is absolutely not one of them.
And yet, the two of them together flips the cute switch in my brain. They have the best duets, whether it’s singing into a hairbrush to I Love Rock and Roll or the hilariously sappy and over blown Can’t Fight This Feeling.
I think it provides one of the funniest and most emotionally warm moment of the whole film.
2) Tom Cruise
Again, if I was going to describe Tom Cruise I’d go with “short”, “batshit insane” and ... I’m not sure really, I think that covers all bases. I’ll go with “unexpectedly funny at times.” Tropic Thunder, anyone?
And again, you’ll notice that a word that is missing from that list is “attractive”.
And then, in this film, he looks like this:
And this:
And, quite frankly, I don’t quite know what do with myself.
It’s not just the look, it’s the whole thing. He *owns* the rock star persona in this film. Strutting about the stage, I was about to say making love to the audience, but no, fucking the audience hard and fast whilst he’s on stage and they’re down there in the arena and knowing that they love it. He… sells it. And my brain finds that hard to compute.
Of course, he has the other part of the rock star thing down pat to. The crazy part. The “I’ve done so many drugs I honestly couldn’t tell you if I’m high or just insane right now” part. It leads me too the slightly meta question of how much of that is really Tom Cruise? Is he simply a better actor than I give him credit for? Or has he managed to channel his own brand of crazy wonderfully into the character of Stacee Jaxx?
Either way. It works. And it shouldn’t. Probably because on top of all of this, boy can sing. I mean, you know, I don’t expect him to be releasing any albums soon, but he has the rock voice to do justice to Bon Jovi and Def Leppard. Although I’m sure there’ll be many music buffs queuing up to disagree with me on that point.
Which brings us on to finally, finally, the very greatest reason why I love this film:
3) The music
What can one say? We’re talking about a soundtrack comprised of Pat Benetar, Poison, Whitesnake, Foreigner, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi and Journey, among others.
There are just some damn fine songs in the film. Songs you can’t help but get your rock on to. I have had some of the finest ear worms in the last week or so. During my driving lesson just now, I spent a large amount of it with Rock You Like A Hurricane in the back of my mind. And I’ve possibly made my neighbours sick of the sound of Wanted Dead Or Alive. Not that I think that is possible.
And, best of all, it finishes with Don’t Stop Believing, which as well as being a damn fine song, is bound up with some very good memories. It always makes me think of The Losers which not only was another great, fun film, as well as being the film that convinced me that maybe, just maybe Chris Evans could be Cap, but it was also the first film I saw after handing in my dissertation, a film that all my friends had seen the week before, but I’d had to cry off because of the aforementioned dissertation and had been told I *had* to see. So it’s intimately bound up with that feeling of relief and freedom of finally being done with it all.
So yeah, this song brings it all back and I love it.
I shouldn’t like this film, but I do. I even find Russell Brand’s surreal and improbably wandering accent charming instead of annoying. Seriously though, I think he was aiming for Brummie, which he hits maybe 1 sentence in 10. The rest of the time it meanders between there and his natural accent. And he sings with an American accent, just to make it even more jarring. But still. I am charmed.
All in all, it’s just a fun film. Not a good film, not by any stretch of the imagination. But it turns out I will forgive a film many things for appropriate use of Journey.
As those who follow me on Twitter will know, the appropriate use of Journey is “in order to rock the fuck out”.
And my final new fandom did the opposite of blindside me. It’s something I knew, I hoped, I prayed I would like. I talk of course of Aaron Sorkin’s new show, The Newsroom. And I’m calling it. 10 minutes into the second episode I called it. Officially, I love the show.
It’s about a news anchor (Jeff Daniels) who is popular because he stays neutral rather than expressing an opinion and thus never offends anyone. He is then pressed into answering the question “What makes America the best country in the world” and has a somewhat spectacular meltdown as he explains, in great detail, why that question is based on a faulty assumption. The network brings in a new Exec Producer, who also happens to be his ex and she has this radical idea: news should not be about entertainment. It should not care about ratings. It should not care about demographics. It should inform. It should explain. It should credit its viewers with a little intelligence.
And basically, the show is about them trying to do just that.
I can only describe it as a cross between The West Wing and Sports Night, but with HBO language*. It has the more idealistic tone of The West Wing but is lighthearted and, as it is about putting on a daily news show, it has a very similar energy and pace as Sports Night.
Which is good, really, as they are my two favourite Sorkin shows.
*HBO language: when everyone swears all the time to show how grown up they are. Actually, that’s a disservice, it’s not *gratuitous*, it just comes as a surprise after being so used to watching shows where you would never hear the word fuck.
Another great thing about it being on HBO is longer episodes. The first one was 1hr 15 and the second a full hour. More space to tell the story, more character development, more Sorkin dialogue.
And I love his way with dialogue. There is a rhythm and cadence to the way he uses words that is, quite simply, stunning. It manages to simultaneously sound like real people talking and have a gorgeous melody that washes into you. You can tell he likes language for language sake and I’m sure the reason so many of his characters are writers is so that he can play.
Of course, it being Sorkin, it is very much an Author Tract, although, I think he, like David E Kelley, never lets character and plot take a backseat for too long when he does so. But as with all these things, I think it is much easier to forgive and ignore when you agree with the views being espoused, and as I do, I don’t much care.
Also, it being Sorkin, I already have 2 conflicting ships. And a third which has already been upgraded to “like burning” on the How-Much-To-I-Ship-It-O-Meter.
And this has also made me realise that yes, yes indeed, 101 Dalmations did make me have a little bit of a crush on Jeff Daniels, and no, no it hasn’t gone away. So there’s that…
And OMG, I’ve only just realised why Mackenzie, the EP, looked so familiar. She was Nina in Bright Young Things which may just very well be my most favouritest film of all time.
Anyway, I have burbled on for far, far too long already. Time to get to the review.
Deception (2008)
So, this was on my list because Ewan McGregor. Somehow the fact that Hugh Jackman was also in this film managed to pass me by and made for a pleasant surprise when I put it on.
It was… alright. The first 10 minutes were good. Then the middle half hour was boring as hell. Then the next forty minutes are pretty interesting. And then in the final 20 minutes, you keep expecting the film to end and it doesn’t. I swear there are, like, 6 different plot twists in that time.
First of all, I do like to try and judge a film based on what other films it advertises on the DVD. This one… did not fill me with hope. First up was that film where Peter Petrelli was a potentially evil doctor who went round killing scumbags. Or something. I only remember it at all because it was called something like Pathology and when I saw the trailer at the cinema, it was what first made me start to believe that there were no good film titles left. That they had all been used up.
And the second was a film where Nic Cage was a hitman. And it did not look to be a good Nic Cage movie.
So the movie opens with Ewan McGregor in glasses, sporting what I can only describe as “dweeb hair”, you know, that sort of combed over look that in Hollywood immediately denotes you are terribly uncool. He is an accountant who goes around auditing different company’s accounts. He is working late in an office block, in a conference room.
Hugh Jackman arrives. He is a lawyer. He is immediately suave and cool. They hit it off. Hugh Jackman produces a joint and they proceed to get high in the conference room. Because that’s what you do with someone you just met. My twitter feed tells me that this happens 4 minutes into the film.
It is somewhat amusing that they are both playing Americans. Their accents aren’t bad, it’s just kinda obvious that it is neither of their natural accents. They blend fine with actual American accents, but when it’s just the two of them it notices.
Anyway, they bump into each other the next day, and Hugh invites Ewan to go and play tennis. Which they do and mmmtenniswhites…. Whut? Ahem, yes, so then in the locker room talk immediately turns to sex because reasons. And then they go to a strip club. Well. First they go back to Hugh’s place so that Ewan can borrow a suit. *Then* they go to the strip club.
After that they meet up for lunch and contrive to swap phones. And that just makes me wonder how often that actually happens. I mean, it’s rare that I have the same phone as someone else, let alone not notice if I picked up the wrong one.
So, it happens, and it also turns out that Hugh Jackman has had to fly to London, so by the time Ewan McGegor notices he is long gone.
Ewan McGregor then starts to get… interesting phonecalls on Hugh Jackman’s phone.
Turns out Mr Jackman is part of a sex club called The List. Basically, you have a list of anonymous numbers, you call someone up, ask if they’re free. If they are, you arrange to meet up at a hotel and have sex. Instigator pays for the room, no names, no conversation etc.
And then Ewan McGregor meets up with lots of different women and has lots of sex and this is the point where my attention started to wander and I wasn’t really paying much attention, and who would have thought a film with lots of naked Ewan McGregor would be boring?
He hooks up with a girl, they hit it off. They start meeting outside the rules. I consider turning off the film and trying to watch it another day. And then (and this is mostly what I picked up on later) they go to meet up, Ewan finds, instead of the girl, an empty room with a lot of blood and then gets hit over the head. When he comes to he calls the police, but they don’t exactly take him seriously as he doesn’t know her real name, or where she lives or anything and someone cleared up the blood.
It was around this point I started paying attention again.
So, turns out Hugh Jackman has taken the girl and if Ewan every wants to see her alive again, he needs to follow his instructions and do a little creative accounting to steal some money from the bank he is auditing.
Ewan does some investigating and discovers that Hugh Jackman is not who he says he is. He was never a lawyer for that firm, he never lived in that apartment, and it’s not his real name. So Ewan tells him to stuff it, and then a woman matching the girl’s description turns up dead, but it’s not her, but serves to a) make the police suspect Ewan and b) makes him decide to do go through with it.
However he knows Hugh’s real name and is pretty sure Mr Jackman is going to kill him for it. So he transfers the money, and heads out. Hugh Jackman has rigged his apartment to blow up and it does so, looking like a gasleak. A body is pulled from the wreckage. The movie seems like it is going to end. (Ending 1)
Cut to Hugh Jackman dressing himself like Ewan and getting on a plane to Madrid where is going to pick up the money. He gets chatting to a guy and it is strongly implied that this guy will be his next victim. The movie seems like it is going to end. (Ending 2)
Hugh Jackman gets to Madrid, where he meets up with the girl from earlier, and it turns out they’d been in it together all along. She expresses misgivings and horror at Ewan McGregor being killed because she genuinely liked him, but Hugh Jackman shrugs it off like the sociopath he is. They go to collect the money. The movie seems like it is going to end. (Ending 3)
However, there is a hold up, as there is a second signatory required on the account. Turns out that Ewan McGregor is a canny lad, and whilst he was transferring the money, added a second signatory to the account, himself. He turns up and demands half the money. Hugh Jackman, being rather over a barrel, agrees. They get the money and walk out of the bank. The girl has disappeared. The movie seems like it is going to end. (Ending 4)
They walk into a slightly secluded park, Ewan explains how he realised that Hugh Jackman and the girl were in it together, and offers half of his share to Hugh Jackman for telling him where she is. Hugh Jackman pulls out a gun and threatens Ewan McGregor to get all the money. The girl turns up and shoots Hugh Jackman in the stomach before she can. And then runs off. Ewan McGregor leaves the money with a dying Hugh Jackman in the park. Close up on Mr Jackman as he dies. The movies seems like it is going to end. (Ending 5)
Cut to Ewan McGregor as he catches up with the girl. They are seen walking into a town square together. Finally, finally the movie ends. (Ending 6)
So, yeah. A not entirely terrible film. But dear god, it goes on at the end. And the middle is just boring. Distinctly Average.