Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides & Win Win reviews (BBC Radio Scotland Movie Cafe)

Click here to listen to the show on BBC iPlayer

Click the link above to hear me, along with Scotland on Sunday film critic Siobhan Synnot and the show's host Janice Forsyth, reviewing the new Pirates of the Caribbean film and the third film from The Station Agent director Tom McCarthy, Win Win. We also discussed the newly-announced Edinburgh International Film Festival programme and the reception in Cannes to Terrence Malick's Tree of Life (which went on to win the Palmes d'Or a few days later). Also on the show is an interview with Vidal Sassoon, the trend-setting hairdresser who is the subject of a new documentary. The programme is available to listen to until Sunday 29th May.

Both films are in UK cinemas now. Watch the trailers below.

Joe Cornish interview: Attack The Block (The List, Issue 680)

Brit sci-fi film Attack The Block has done a good turn for the asbo generation, by making aliens seem much worse. First time director Joe ‘Adam and Joe’ Cornish (pictured above right, with Edgar Wright) talks to Paul Gallagher about turning the hoodie horror genre on its head

These are interesting times for British film comedy. Last year Chris Morris’ suicide bomber farce Four Lions presented an intelligent reflection on a thorny problem, while earlier this year Richard Ayoade’s Submarine proved that British comedy could tackle peculiar and poignant as well as the best American independents. Now Joe Cornish, half of cult TV and radio duo Adam and Joe, makes his writing and directing debut with Attack The Block, a joyously exciting action sci-fi that imagines the outcome when a bunch of vengeful extra-terrestrials face off against a gang of teenage hoodies in an inner-city London tower block.

There are laughs on hand, but Cornish also has a serious point to make about his protagonists’ exclusion from society, particularly in the character of Moses, the gang’s hotheaded leader, played by newcomer John Boyega. Moses is the kind of character that has become shorthand in recent British cinema for pure evil, thanks to a spate of ‘hoodie horrors’, including the Michael Caine revenge flick Harry Brown and Paul Andrew Williams’s Cherry Tree Lane. It’s a perspective that Cornish hopes to counter with Attack The Block.

‘This is certainly a reaction to [those] often brilliantly-made and well-crafted movies that I think take a slightly inhuman approach to an issue that, actually, involves very young kids. I think that’s the easy option, to take something in the world that already is demonised and frightens people, and just make it even more scary and horrible.’ Cornish favours a more compassionate view: ‘I don’t think it’s an incredibly radical premise to try and have sympathy for someone who has made a mistake. I think you’ll find it in the Bible quite a lot, and in various faiths; for me it’s quite a simple dramatic premise, and I’d be alarmed if contemporary society decided that it could only have absolutely clean-cut, morally pure characters in its narratives. If you went through the history of art and literature doing that, you’d lose most of it!’

Cornish’s upbeat and engaging manner – familiar from the weekly 6 Music radio show in which he and co-host Adam Buxton frequently collapse in fits of giggles – conveys his positivity about humanity, which is both infectious and very welcome in the often bleak world of UK film. It’s an outlook he shares with his filmmaker friend Edgar Wright, and it is what enabled him to see the potential for science fiction storytelling in these unlikely characters and settings, just as Wright did for zombies in Shaun of the Dead.

‘I totally looked at all these amazing tower blocks that have been around me all my life’ enthuses Cornish, ‘and I thought “wow, these are like huge clapped-out spaceships, or they’re like Nakatomi Plaza [from Die Hard], or the Nostromo [from Alien]!”’ He saw similar cinematic potential in the street slang regularly used by London gangs. ‘I was excited by the language, it was another place where this scenario that’s usually used for downbeat depressing social realism could be taken in another direction, towards all the kind of escapist, joyful, science-fictional things that I love, and I think probably the kids who live in those places love too.’

To achieve authenticity Cornish, who admits to being ‘a tiny bit less “street” than Prince Charles’ spent months visiting youth groups in south London, telling them the story of Attack The Block and recording everything they said, ‘as if it was a linguaphone course and I was learning Italian’. The result of that investment is obvious on screen, with the kids’ sometimes-impenetrable dialogue sounding as far from Cornish’s own precise enunciation as possible. Meeting with those groups had a secondary value too, as it cemented Cornish’s conviction that these ‘hoodies’ were worthy of better treatment on film: ‘We did find some who were quite similar to Moses, who’d been excluded from school or got involved with bad stuff. And they’re not monsters. They’re very empathic, and when you spend a bit of time with them they’re normal and sweet, enthusiastic and bright. But they’ve just been cornered a bit by life, and I think that often the way they’re portrayed doesn’t help with that. Culturally, it makes the problem worse, not better.’

Apart from the imminent release of his debut movie there is another not-insignificant string to Cornish’s filmmaking bow; he is co-writer of one of 2011’s most anticipated blockbusters, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s The Adventures of Tintin, shot in motion-captured 3D and due for release this October. Cornish plays down his involvement (‘really you’re talking to the lowest person on the food chain’) but it raises the question, how did that happen? It was, he says ‘purely about being friends with clever people and sticking with them. Peter Jackson had called Edgar [Wright], because they needed some work done on the Tintin script, and Edgar knew I was a Tintin fan, and before I knew it I was sitting round a table with Mr Spielberg and Mr Jackson.’ And what was it like being slotted in beside the biggest cogs in the Hollywood machine? For Cornish it basically meant ‘very hard work; those guys are very clever and bright, and they don’t beat around the bush in terms of telling you what they think. In a very nice polite way, of course.’

For Tintin fans the prospect of Spielberg’s long-gestating film has been exciting and nerve-wracking in equal measure, but Cornish and Wright’s involvement is a promising indicator that this won’t be a mangled studio version of the beloved books. ‘In terms of the [film’s] world,’ says Cornish, ‘it’s pretty true to the books. There are things you have to do to the narrative just because of the way those books were written; structurally they climax on every page, and the characters take a while to get introduced throughout the series. So there’s stuff one has to compress a bit, to make work over a feature-length running time, but I think [fans] will be happy with how faithful it is.’

As for directing again, Cornish has ‘lots of ideas’ and seems firmly bitten by the filmmaking bug: ‘I loved it. It’s all consuming, but it’s really enjoyable. The lack of sleep is tough, but I feel I’ve spent so much of my life being lazy that I can deal with a couple of years of sleepless nights.’

Attack The Block is in cinemas now. Read my review here. This interview first published in The List magazine.

Attack The Block review (The List, Issue 680)

Coming from the same production team as Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs the World, this confident debut from Joe Cornish (one half of duo Adam and Joe) is much less a comedy than might have been expected. Rather it’s a very accomplished sci-fi horror, and a properly exciting one at that, evidencing Cornish’s clear love of the genre classics from its atmospheric synth soundtrack to its flourishes of gory splatter.

Sitting between Aliens and Gremlins in terms of tone, the story straddles reality and fantasy as a gang of errant teenagers attempt to defend their inner-city tower block against an army of bloodthirsty alien monsters. Cornish’s breathlessly-paced script entwines thrilling action set-pieces with a gently provocative portrayal of urban youth, effectively challenging audience preconceptions while never letting up on the entertainment. It’s sporadically funny (most often when accurately skewering the attitudes of modern teenagers) but the science-fiction scenario is played straight rather than as parody, and as the body count rises Cornish generates palpable tension and scares. Despite shaky acting from some of the young cast, leads Jodie Whitaker and newcomer John Boyega are excellent, providing strong characters amidst the action.

General release from Weds 11th May. This review first published in The List magazine.

Your Highness review (The List, Issue 679)

Before Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy heralded a resurgence of the ‘fantasy quest’ movie, this much-derided genre enjoyed a kind of golden age in the late 1980s, when Labyrinth, The Princess Bride and Willow captured the imaginations of thousands of young moviegoers. Danny McBride and David Gordon Green, respectively writer/star and director of Your Highness, were clearly front and centre in that bewitched audience, and in its best moments this film recaptures a hint of the magical, adventurous power that those films possessed. Unfortunately that is the only positive thing to be said about Your Highness, which is otherwise a vulgar, unoriginal, soulless, stupid folly, featuring a squandered cast of such quality that their involvement and co-operation must surely have been secured by means of dark magic.

McBride, recognisable from memorable bit-parts in Due Date, Up in the Air and Gordon Green’s previous film, stoner-comedy Pineapple Express, here steps up to leading-man duties as Prince Thadeous, the slovenly brother of the kingdom’s favourite warrior Prince Fabeous (James Franco, literally looking as if he could fall asleep any moment). When Fabeous’ bride-to-be Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel, vacant) is kidnapped by the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux, actually quite funny), the King (Charles Dance, bored) sends the brothers off to rescue Belladonna and rid the kingdom of Leezar forever. Along the way they are first saved then joined by a mysterious female warrior (Natalie Portman, rigid) whose quest becomes entwined with theirs.

If you think the plot sounds slapdash, just wait until you hear what passes for dialogue. There’s barely a line uttered in Your Highness that doesn’t contain either the word ‘fuck’, a mention of genitalia or some reference to sex. Vulgarity is substituted for wit, and it’s conclusively not funny. Evidently, McBride and Gordon Green have forgotten that a key element of those aforementioned films’ success was their innocence, an epithet that emphatically does not apply to Your Highness. For Gordon Green, who began his career with the excellent character studies George Washington and All The Real Girls, this is surely as low as he can go. His Lowness, you might say.

Your Highness is out now on general release. This review first published at list.co.uk.

Monsters DVD review (futuremovies.co.uk)

Released into cinemas at the end of 2010 to glowing reviews and lots of ‘next big thing’ talk, British filmmaker Gareth Edwards’ impressive debut feature failed to prove as big a hit with audiences as with critics, comfortably recouping its small budget at the UK box office, but arguably falling short of the peaks of success that some critics (this one included) may have expected. So the release of Monsters on dvd brings a twofold opportunity; firstly for the film to find a new audience in a more significant way, and secondly for a reappraisal: to ask if the film really is as good as we all thought on first viewing, and whether it stands up to repeat plays.

Monsters takes place in an alternate version of our world where alien life has made its way to earth, and the resulting titular beasts – massive octopus-like creatures hundreds of feet tall - are contained in what used to be Mexico, now known as the ‘infected zone’. This sci-fi scenario is the backdrop to a very simple story - part mismatched romance, part road movie – in which photojournalist Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) is given the thankless task of escorting his boss’s stranded daughter Sam (Whitney Able) back home to America, preferably avoiding the infected zone en route. Of course, events conspire to force them through the zone, where they face attacks by the monsters, and ultimately discover a surprising truth about these alien creatures.

Writer/director Edwards’ real triumph with the film is his use of subtle visual effects in real-world locations, creating a wholly convincing alternate reality. Happily, this is just as effective on the small screen as it was in cinemas. ‘Subtle’ is the operative word when describing Monsters, as the creatures themselves play very much a supporting role in the film, always in the background apart from in one brilliantly realised attack sequence and at the film’s striking conclusion. Edwards is much more interested in what is happening with his human characters, and the film is possessed of a pensive, atmospheric mood, achieved in no small part thanks to the brooding score from Jon Hopkins, complementing Edwards’ dazzling photography very well.

On the downside, the flimsiness of the characters and story become much clearer on second viewing, and it is evident that the sci-fi scenario is actually much more interesting than the couple leading us through it. The performances are good - McNairy is really convincing - but Edwards doesn’t give them much of consequence to actually say to each other; the development of their relationship feels more like a conventional inevitability than a realistic occurrence.

This is not a major flaw though, especially in the context of what is an otherwise incredible achievement in budget filmmaking; Monsters looks and feels like a major studio film, and Edwards is clearly a talent to watch. The dvd/Blu-ray will also prove incredibly useful to anyone keen to follow in Edwards’ footsteps, as the exhaustive feature-length making-of - covering pre-production, shooting, editing and visual effects - shows in no uncertain terms how they pulled it off, as well as showing how important it is to get the right team in place. Editor Colin Goudie deserves particular praise, as it’s clear from the special features that without his tireless contribution, Edwards would have had a significantly harder time bringing his vision to the screen.

Monsters is released on DVD and Blu-ray on Monday 11th April. This review first published on futuremovies.co.uk. Read my Monsters interview feature from December 2010 here.