Ghostbusters

I would give Ghostbusters a sold 7 out of 10, it wasn’t as funny as I had hoped although there were some good moments, but the storyline was good, I loved the four female Ghostbusters because there was something very powerful and moving about the uncomplicated female friendships portrayed, particularly Abby and Erin reuniting, and the film wasn’t weighed down by boring bro jokes or the sort of douchebag behaviour of the original film.

I tried to watch that recently because I couldn’t remember if I ever had, and was put off by the tawdry attempts of Bill Murray’s character to flirt inappropriately with a female student at the beginning and then his date-rape of Sigourney Weaver’s character. Yes, that’s what it is. He had sex with a woman possessed by a spirit who was coming onto him sexually and behaving in a way the normal woman didn’t, without ever getting consent from the woman herself. Yuck. None of those guys were at all likeable.

Kate McKinnon played a wonderfully zany Jillian Holtzmann, Abby’s eccentric ghost-hunting aficionado, completely unconcerned with her own weirdness, feisty, super-smart, and best of all, a gifted engineer and physicist.

Melissa McCarthy was the irrepressibly chirpy Abby, whose initially strained relationship with childhood friend Erin and their joyful eventual reconciliation was totally believable, and again, she’s clearly a sharp scientist who believes in what she’s doing and works hard.

Leslie Jones was Patty, who joins the group later but brings sassy energy, a strong grounding force and a level head, and a lot of comedy from her reactions to bizarre things.

Kristen Wiig was Erin, who I felt I understood completely in her struggle to be appreciated by staid patriarchal academic figures, a career woman who grafted hard to get where she is, but displayed she’s deeply loyal, compassionate and self-sacrificing after she decides that she’ll do everything on her own terms from now on.

Light, fluffy, lots of visual spectacle, references to the original film, a fresh new take, Chris Hemsworth as the dopey receptionist brought some laughs, overall a film very gentle on the soul without stretching the brain.

The Neon Demon

The Neon Demon was curiously disappointing affair. I’m giving it a 4 out of 10, and most of those points are for the visuals, for the darkly atmospheric settings, the great use of colour and contrast and imagery, the glamourous sinister sensuous beauty of the film, and the soundtrack which accompanied the film perfectly.

Despite the hype, however, with crowds booing it at Cannes and walk-outs of the audience when it was first shown, it wasn’t frightening.

The film drifts through the surreal entry of naïve sixteen year-old Jesse (Elle Fanning) to the LA modelling industry, with no parents or family, living in an eerie motel run by a pervy scumbag (Keanu Reeves). Jesse builds an uneasy friendship with Ruby (Jena Malone) who grabs the psycho lesbian baton and runs with it right from the start where she eyes up Jesse with a lusty, over-lingering stare, but it’s also pretty clear that she doesn’t have Jesse’s best interests at heart after continually steering her into uncomfortable encounters with two veteran models: Gigi (Bella Heathcote) whose beauty is artificially constructed by extensive plastic surgery, and Sarah (Abbey Lee), whose mental stability is crumbling as it becomes clear that she’s yesterday’s “sour milk” and the industry increasingly prefers “fresh meat” like Jesse.

As the film progresses and Jesse’s star rises with the interest of a top fashion designer and a famous photographer, she becomes more detached from the ordinary life represented by her almost boyfriend Dean and becomes more egotistical and arrogant, rubbing her natural loveliness in the face of Gigi’s plasticity and her fresh youthfulness against Sarah’s rapidly approaching expiry date.

Jesse rejects a come-on by Ruby, who goes to her second job as a morgue make-up artist and masturbates while kissing a female corpse, fantasising about untouchable Jesse. Ruby later joins Gigi and Sarah in chasing Jesse through a mansion in the dark until they corner her by an empty pool and push her in. Ruby is later seen bathing in Jesse’s blood while Gigi and Sarah shower together to wash off the gory murder, and we find out at the end of the film that they cannibalised Jesse when Gigi throws up an eyeball, which looks so fake that it’s not even gross.

Breaking it down, there are startlingly few real “horror” moments in the film: (1) Jesse has a nightmare about the motel manager forcing a knife down her throat as a grotesque metaphor for oral sodomy; (2) Jesse listens against the wall while the motel manager rapes the thirteen year old runaway next door, depicted only in her muffled screams, after the motel manager failed to break into Jesse’s room; (3) Ruby’s cringeworthy masturbation scene on the corpse, which includes spitting into its mouth so kissing it seems more like kissing a person; (4) Jesse’s death, where she is shown broken and disarrayed like a dropped marionette on the floor of the pool in spreading blood; (5) the bloody shower and bath; (6) Gigi throwing up an eyeball and stabbing herself to death in the stomach; (7) and a weird scene of Ruby lying naked in a room, blood flooding from her shadowed genitals, like a man’s odd idea of menstruation.

These all take place in the last quarter of the film and there’s nothing that made me horrified – just an “ew” reaction like finding a rotting bird in the grass full of maggots. No one’s sympathetic and it all just feels contrived. The film doesn’t bother to go deep into anyone’s motivations or why Ruby suddenly turned against Jesse and incited Gigi and Sarah to turn up to kill her.

Independence Day: Resurgence

I do think Independence Day: Resurgence suffered from the absence of Will Smith, because while the film was equally as cheesy as its predecessor, it was less funny, a deficit that the massively improved special effects couldn’t hope to fill, and the simplicity of the original film’s plot was replaced by a more convoluted attempt at backstory and an unashamed sequel plug that fell flat. Overall I would probably give it a 5 out of 10, being very generous with my rating, because the new faces in the cast did not inspire any emotional reactions from me. If they had perished, I wouldn’t have cared.

Those of the original cast who remained were somewhat criminally underused – David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) didn’t have enough screentime or the right kind of surrounding characters to play his sarcastic humour off on; former president Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman) wasn’t around long enough or shown with his daughter enough to make his heroic sacrifice more affecting; and Julius Levinson (Judd Hirsch) has some sweet moments with a family of orphaned kids who rescue him, but he doesn’t have any comedic moments like the first film.

Resurgence is set twenty years after the first film. Most of the world has recovered, deconstructing alien technology from the destroyed ships in order to achieve the technological advances we have in the 21^st century plus better weapons, a base on the moon, anti-gravity, and faster space travel. In Africa, one of the ships actually landed, and the local people fought for ten years to defeat the surviving aliens under the command of a warlord. Thomas Whitmore, older and physically debilitated, is still deferentially looked after as a VIP with a security team, with his now grown-up daughter Patricia an aide in the White House to the current president (Sela Ward). Steven Hiller (Will Smith) died in the period between the films in an accident during a test flight of an alien-human technological hybrid ship, but his stepson Dylan has grown up to become a commander in a legacy squadron. Dylan has an ongoing feud with Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth), a cocky pilot who aspired to the status Dylan has achieved but nearly got Dylan killed in a training accident several years ago.

David Levinson runs the Space Defence Force – his ex-wife having conveniently disappeared into a plot hole so he could have a contrived flirting romance with some woman with a French surname – and he travels to that bit of Africa to speak to the warlord’s son, where he discovers that the ship there has been transmitting a distress signal into deep space, which someone is now apparently answering. Thomas Whitmore is suffering from peculiar visions and portents of doom, attributed to the residual effect of the alien’s mind invasion twenty years ago, and Dr Okun, who everyone thought was killed, has actually been in a coma from his encounter with the alien at Area 51, from which he now awakens with the same doom visions as Whitmore. The aliens conveniently return in time for Independence Day, this time with a 3,000 mile wide ship that actually lands on the Earth, its gravity sweeping chunks of Asian cities into the air and dropping them down on London. Better armed and better prepared, they quickly overwhelm Earth’s abortive response to the new threat, destroying the moon base, taking out the President and her cabinet in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex bunkers, and causing an even bigger death toll than before.

The film reveals new information about the aliens, which become known as the “Harvesters” – not locusts as originally envisioned, but eusocial like ants, the invasion fleets are led by a Harvester Queen and they actually intend to drill into Earth’s core and drain it off to use as fuel for their vast civilization-ship, which is big enough to contain its own ecosystem. (We get to see it when the band of young heroes we don’t give a shit about end up trapped in there for a while.)

The ship that landed in Africa had started this drilling process but the destruction of the mothership twenty years ago ended its operations. The aliens pick up this right where they left off, giving the film an arbitrary deadline to defeat them by before the core is drained and the Earth destroyed in the process. The Harvester Queen, much larger than her drones, is smarter than her predecessor and manages to lure the bombers of the counterattack into a trap, disable global communications, take out Earth’s space defences, assassinate the President and almost every in the line of presidential succession, all within a fraction of the time taken by the city-destroyers first time around. The key to defeating them is found within a craft that arrived – and was shot down, mistakenly under the belief it was a scout for the Harvesters – just before the Harvesters turned up over the moon. It contains a Sphere holding an artificial intelligence from another world. The Harvesters have spent thousands of years fighting an interstellar war with other alien civilizations, including the Sphere’s own, who shed their biological bodies to become computer brains, with the Sphere’s remnant people now aiding refugees of another wrecked worlds in training to fight the Harvesters, developing technology that could defeat them.

The Harvester Queen discovers the Sphere’s presence on Earth when it is activated at Area 51 to talk to the humans, which leads to her swiftly moving in that direction to take it out (“now, Princess, we will discuss the location of your secret Rebel base”). If they can take out the Queen, the other alien ships will sod off, because they will be “recalled” by other Harvester Queens who for some reason won’t be interested in finishing what the current Queen started. That’s a gaping plot hole if ever I saw one.

Cue the race against time to use the Sphere to bait the Queen into a trap and destroy her before the Earth’s molten core is sucked down by her ship. At the end of the film, the Sphere invites the survivors of humanity to spearhead the fightback against the Harvesters by joining the other alien refugees to take the war direct to the enemy, and thus is announced the intention to produce another sequel.

Yawn. If there’s a third film, I don’t think I will bother to watch it. The Jungle Book, while equally an attempt by the studios to capitalise on a classic film, was a much better watch. I’m glad I saw it but it wasn’t good enough to invest in a DVD as I have no desire ever to watch it again.

The Jungle Book

I loved the original Jungle Book as a child. My dad liked to sing Baloo’s songs to my sisters and I to amuse us. Given this nostalgia, I was reluctant to see the remake, for fear it would taint those happy childhood memories, but I ended up watching it because I couldn’t find anything else I wanted to see at the cinema, and one of my sisters had given it a decent review after seeing it with her boyfriend.

I would give it a 7 out of 10. It wavers between being more faithful to the original Jungle Books of Rudyard Kipling and being faithful to the original Disney animated film of 1967. They kept two of the animated film’s most famous songs – Bare Necessities and I Want to Be Like You – but altered to keep to the slightly darker tone of the live-action film. I disagreed with some of the voice casting, although Mowgli was well played by his young actor, much closer to Kipling’s stroppy character who wore constantly at the nerves of his predatory guardians, always questioning and quarrelling and winding the animals up.

I had to look up afterwards who voiced Bagheera, which turned out to be Ben Kingsley, because he sounded disturbingly like Ralph Fiennes at times, and I dislike him. Bill Murray voiced Baloo, not quite so jarring, except when he used slang like “cool” that made me wonder what the scriptwriters had been thinking.

Scarlett Johansson managed to carry off a superbly sinister turn on Kaa, who in the books was a powerful figure that terrified the entire jungle, including Bagheera and Baloo when they reluctantly approached him for help rescuing Mowgli from the monkeys. Idris Elba voiced Shere Khan, which I didn’t realise either, because he gave the tiger a voice that wouldn’t be out of place from a sneering football hooligan with a pint of beer in one hand and a bloody-knuckled fist of the other. I preferred the sleekly sinister English accent of the original voice actor, although the burned, blind in one eye Shere Khan of the live action remake was a bit closer to the Kipling original (where he was born with a crippled leg and went by the derogatory nickname Lungri, or “The Lame One”.

King Louie, voiced by Christopher Walken, was reimagined not as an orangutan, which are native to Borneo and not India where the story is set, but as a Gigantopithecus, an extinct species of great ape that had survived in the abandoned temple city inhabited by the monkeys. The monkeys themselves are generally larger than their real-life counterparts, with the stronger enforcers of Louie’s troupe actually the size of adult humans when compared to Mowgli.

All the animals in the film are CGI, conspicuously so, but computer technology has advanced enough that they look closer and closer to real animals and birds, and it’s apparent that huge amounts of studying have gone into the production of the beasts: their bodies, fur, feathers, and muscle structure are all sharply realised. Bagheera was rendered moving exactly as a real melanistic leopard would, with that distinctive cat gait, as was Shere Khan, even when they fought, and I thought this achievement was very impressive. I was also really impressed that they used so many different species of monkey in Louie’s tribe – pig-tailed macaques, hoolock gibbons and grey langurs, rather than just sticking to one generic looking monkey species.

Deadpool

Deadpool was brilliant. Plenty of laugh out loud moments, very tongue-in-cheek, sending itself up, in the same vein as Ant-Man but with a prison’s worth of swearing and a substantial gout of gore. People don’t just get meatily punched or kicked into things, they get their brains blown out, their flesh burnt, bones broken, heads cut off and Deadpool himself actually gets a metal pipe rammed through his body immediately post-transformation and a knife stuck into his skull. My sister and I had a disagreement about whether or not the film could be considered to have a plot, and if the bad guys were just evil for the sake of it, which is always laziness.

The humour is intentionally crude, and the slightly misogynistic comment I saw as just another send-up of people jumping onto the comic bandwagon since the Marvel Cinematic Universe started up. I disagree that the bad guys were ‘evil for the sake of evil’ – it was pretty clear to me that they were merchants of war, supplying illicit arms to various terrorist organisations and countries at war, and the creation of the ‘super-slaves’ was part of this agenda. That was their evil plan, chugging along in the background: making a profit from turning strangers into mutants and enslaving them to be used as disposable weapons in global conflicts.

The main plot of the film hasn’t got anything to do with the motivations of the bad guys – it’s basically Wade Wilson’s roaring rampage of revenge, to punish Ajax for the torture he was subjected to that made him a mutant, and to force him to reverse the hideous scarring he suffered from the mutagenic process. It only gets more personal after Ajax kidnaps Wilson’s girlfriend Vanessa to try and use her as a bargaining chip to bring Wilson’s violent predations on his organisation to an end.

On a subtler level, I can see that another part of the plot is Wilson having to come to terms with the consequences of seeking a cure for his terminal cancer rather than accepting that he might die young. He chose the opportunity to better himself over his love for Vanessa, which he comes to regret after his transformation, having become so deformed that he doubts Vanessa’s feelings will remain if she sees what he has become. He chose a selfish path and was punished; he ignored Vanessa’s pleas to stay with her, fight the cancer, perhaps die as gracefully as possible, sure in the knowledge of her love, and lost her.

His journey to getting back what he’d given up is not just about confronting Ajax, it is about finding the courage to see Vanessa face to face and let her see him, to let her decide if she can still love him in spite of his terrible deformities. Another subplot is the X-Men attempting to recruit Deadpool, and while he spurns them for the umpteenth time at the start, he eventually goes to them for help and they accompany him into the final fight as his back-up against Ajax. This is my long-winded way of saying there’s definitely a plot and the bad guys definitely have their reasons. What, do you not think that greed is a reason for action? Greed and war-mongering and sadism? I do.

Jessica Jones

I should have watched this series earlier. I love Jessica. She’s vulnerable, friable, frayed at the edges, drifting with her personal connections trailing damaged behind her like loose cables, drinking spirits at low moments. But she’s still feisty and full of fire, sarcastic, cynical, but good-hearted in her protection of her drug addict neighbour, her tolerance of the idiots that live upstairs and the manipulations of the hot-shot lawyer Jeri Hogarth who she occasionally works for. (I like Hogarth. She’s a cool customer, a glamorous lesbian who has an affair with her secretary and later divorces her doctor wife, always dressed to the nines, sharp, sympathetic, but not afraid to cut a few bitches  and step on some necks to get her way.)

She started out as a super confident girl with superpowers who wanted to make a difference in the world, tried being a hero, and ended up falling prey to a predator called Kilgrave who by the awfulness of random chance walked by as she was beating up some thugs. A petty sociopath with the ability to control others by giving them verbal orders (although it appears he has to do so in person, and they wear off if not renewed), Kilgrave put Jessica under his thrall and by what’s hinted made her do some seriously unpleasant shit to herself and other people. Including murdering a woman just before the climactic bus crash that freed her from Kilgrave, although it left her believing that he was dead, and that she was safe. She suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder which has left her a shadow of herself.

So Jessica reinvents herself as a private investigator, living in a dive, taking pictures of adulterers to keep the bills paid, until a case comes along in the first episode (AKA: Ladies Night) that leads to her discovering Kilgrave is still alive and still preying on others. He’s taken prisoner a fresh-faced college student from Omaha, manipulating her to do the same things he forced Jessica to do, from selling her apartment to give him money to having sex with him, and when Jessica finds her, she’s been lying in a bed for five hours in her own urine because Kilgrave told her not to move. Shortly afterwards, she murders her own parents on Kilgrave’s last order to her, leaving Jessica with a mission – to capture Kilgrave and somehow prove his abilities to the world in order to rescue the girl from a double homicide.

Jessica gets allies: her previously estranged adoptive sister, a famous talk-show host with a talent for krav maga; a police officer that Kilgrave tried to use to murder her sister, later her sister’s lover; and Luke Cage, who shares Jessica’s enhanced strength and has skin that can’t be damaged, even by a rotary saw. Jessica’s quest to vindicate the girl – the ironically named Hope – involves supporting her through the post-Kilgrave trauma, including finding that she’s pregnant with his child, which leads Hope to pay a fellow prisoner to punch her repeatedly in the stomach in order to try and induce a miscarriage. The psychological horror aspect of what Kilgrave does is understated compared to the megalomaniac drama queen shit that Loki and Hydra pull, but it’s infinitely scarier, and that is one of the great things about this show.

X-Men: Apocalypse

When I saw this film, I hadn’t seen Days of Future Past, although I had seen First Class and the original trilogy of X-Men films plus Deadpool in February, so I was looking forward to another X-Men outing but also unsure if this would be the misstep too far for the reboot. The ancient Egyptian opening only intensified this early feeling of scepticism. It reminded me too much of the grandly hammy openings of The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, and don’t get me wrong, I enjoy those films, but I enjoy them because they are pure cheese. I wasn’t committed to the film until after this bit had transitioned away and the background to Apocalypse’s revival had been set up.

Magneto continues to get absolutely no breaks in his attempt to get some normalcy back and distance himself from being a supervillain; in this film, having settled anonymously in Poland where he has a wife and a young daughter who herself has some mutant powers (control over animals), his new family are killed accidentally when he’s exposed to the local authorities as the fugitive Magneto. Charles has merrily gotten on with his school for baby mutants, with the latest recruits being the hapless Scott Summers, who discovered his powers when cornered by a bully in the toilets at his school, and Jean Grey (Sophie Turner who plays Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones) who scares everyone else with her nightmares which shake the whole school. Mystique is working alone, rescuing mutants like Nightcrawler who have been oppressed and enslaved.

I thought the new takes on familiar characters were interesting. Nightcrawler offered comic relief alternating between plucky and timid; Angel was reimagined as a cagefighter in a ring that sets imprisoned mutants against each other; Jean impressed with the final, dramatic display of her Phoenix powers, with much less drippy romance angst than Famke Jansen in the third original X-Men film; and Quicksilver made a pretty sharp appearance as Magneto’s chippy long-lost teenage son, completely casual about his super-speed powers to the point of pure comedy. I give it 8/10.