Tomorrow, When the War Began

This grammatically-interestingly-titled offering from Down Under is adapted from a best selling series of books by John Marsden (8 books so far and counting). (The tense-bending title seems to come from a line that's in the trailer, but not the actual film). The story follows 7 Australian teenagers who go on a camping trip to the enticingly named Hell, only to discover on their return that their part of Australia has been overrun by the evil invading armies of The Coalition (the political jokes here are too obvious, so I'll pass over them) and decide to become guerilla fighters in the Outback.

The Characters are more stock-types than fully-fleshed individuals - think The Breakfast Club goes to War. And the character arcs are equally predictable - you know the posh girl is going to end up falling for the rebel, who in turn will respond well to the crisis and become a leader and you know that at some point the Christian who refuses to kill will at some point pick up a gun and mow down everything in front of her.

However, where the film succeeds are in the action sequences - a genuinely thrilling car chase around the town and the climactic attempt to blow up the bridge are handled as well as many a Hollywood blockbuster with a much larger budget. Its when things slow down and get talky that you start to notice the patchy acting talent and the leaden script (at one point a character really does say "what's the worse that can happen?" without a hint of irony). Still that doesn't stop the whole being rather entertaining fun. Part 2 is already in the works.

Overall - 6/10 Counter-intuitively for what is a low-budget take on a Hollywood staple genre, the action scenes rock, but the talky bits drag. Not bad though.

What a Choice...

I will be voting on May 5th as I want my vote to count both in the regional list vote for Holyrood (for the Greens) and in the AV referendum (Yes). However, when it comes to the constituency vote for Holyrood I'm faced with a completely uninspiring choice - in my particular constituency (as in many this year) the choice is just the candidates from the main 4 Scottish parties. In all cases, I can come up with very good reasons not to vote for them, but am struggling to come up with a single decent reason to vote for any of them.

The Conservatives seem to have put together a manifesto that is totally blind to real issues of poverty and inequality that Scotland faces, not to mention a head in the sand approach to pressures on the environment. Labour still seem to be in absolute denial about their role in damaging the UK economy and creating the pressure for the cuts and have come up with a bunch of crowd-pleasing slogans and no money to pay for them. The SNP also have a huge unexplained financial hole in their plans and are an environmental disaster with their support for more fossil fuel use and more road-building. As for the Lib-Dems, who would normally be my default choice, not only are there the compromises of coalition, which in themselves wouldn't put me off, but actually more importantly, the absolute insanity of what seems to be their central campaign idea of financing their ideas by selling off Scottish Water's debt. That's not going to end well in the long term. If Labour mortgaged our children's future, the Scottish Lib-Dems now seem to want to re-mortgage it.

So, the choice is do I hold my nose and put the cross beside one of the above or do I, for the first time in my voting life, spoil the ballot paper. Its not a practice that I normally approve of, but if I was to do it, I'd like to do it quite imaginatively by, for example, writing in a candidate that I would genuinely like to see elected to the Scottish parliament. Any suggestions?

The Eagle

It is rather hard to believe that The Eagle is directed by the same man (Kevin MacDonald) who brought us excellent films such as The Last King of Scotland, State of Play and Touching the Void. This adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliffe's well-loved novel The Eagle of the Ninth concerns the quest to re-capture the lost eagle of the ninth legion from the barbaric lands north of Hadrian's wall. As such it covers very similar ground to last year's Centurion (directed by Neil Marshall), but whilst Centurion had a certain visceral thrill to it and a sense of fun at times (mainly when Dominic West was on screen), The Eagle has, well, not a lot really.

What should be at its heart is a tale of an unlikely friendship between Roman Marcus Flavius Aquila (Channing Tatum) and his British slave, Esca (Jamie Bell). However, the film gives very little in way of credibility as to how the friendship forms and how they move from mutual mistrust and enmity to surprising loyalty. When Sutcliffe wrote the character of Marcus it is doubtful that she envisaged muscle-bound and decidedly American Tatum talking of his family's honour being pissed on. However, Tatum's not the worst thing here (although his presence does seem to lead to the crazy fact that all the Romans, even those played by British actors, now have American accents). If anything, he holds his part better than Bell, who looks a bit lost searching for some believability in his role.

Structurally the film suffers from having the best set-piece battles at the start, leaving what follows as feeling rather flat, although the last stand of the remnants of the Ninth at the end briefly raises spirits. Also, whilst Centurion had some genuine tension and sense of threat in the chase across the Highlands to avoid the pursuing tribes, here things feel peculiarly tension-less. And then there's the problems with the tribes themselves - MacDonald seems to have put great effort into the historical accuracy of the Romans and their tactics (although there was one moment early on when the Romans were sitting huddled in their fort, afraid to send a patrol out because a druid had been seen when I did wonder if I walked into Asterix by mistake) and against them we have these British tribes who look and act more like they belong in Polynesia or the plains of Africa. Woeful.

Several of the films best moments come courtesy of  twinkle-eyed Donald Sutherland and that, by itself, says a lot about how disappointing this really is. The landscape is well shot and the fights well-handled, but the characters lack depth and its generally dreary fare.

Overall 5.5/10 Disappointingly flat and unconvincing.

Coming soon...

As I received some positive feedback on the policy comparisons I did before last year's general election, I'm aiming to try and do something similar for this year's Scottish elections - watch this space.

Killing Bono

Killing Bono is the loosely based on true story of the McCormick brothers. I'm not well enough informed to know how much is true and, frankly, I don't care enough to find out, so I'll concentrate on what's in the film. The McCormick brothers, Neil (Ben Barnes) and Ivan (Robert Sheehan) went to school with the members of U2. Ivan had the opportunity to join U2, but Neil blocked this without telling him, preferring to have Ivan in his own band. As U2 become increasingly big and globally successful, Neil is driven by guilt and desparation to try and make it too.

As a film its an entertaining little yarn, with a smart script, some OK tunes and likeable leads. Barnes, in particular, shines, not only maintaining a fairly good accent, but bringing a degree of humanity and likeability to a character who is basically a self-delusional ass. There are a series of amusing cameos and bit parts, most notably from Pete Postlethwaite as the boy's landlord when they move to London. And the films rolls gently on - consistently amusing, but rarely outright funny. By the end, it feels overlong and over-familiar. The whole Irish gangster sub-plot feels rather unnecessary and only adds coarse stereotypes, coarser humour and gratuitous nudity. Credit then to the two leads for holding things together so well and for Martin McCann for making a pretty good Bono.

Overall - 6/10 Gently amusing, but overlong tale that feels like it should have been tighter and funnier.

The Best Argument Against Proportional Representation???

Many of you may not recognise the woman opposite - she's Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie and leader of France's far-right Le Front National (in other words you could see her as a blonde Nick Griffin, but that's probably not a particularly pleasant mental picture). She's also been doing rather well in the polls recently - at least well in terms of getting votes, but not seats.

The last two weekends in March saw the Cantonal elections in France for about 2000 seats. The French system works rather differently - over two rounds of voting on successive weekends. After the first round:
- If any candidate gets over 50% of the vote, they are elected without a second round
- Any candidate securing votes of over 12.5% of those registered to vote (NB not those who actually vote) proceeds to the second round
- If less than two candidates meet this requirement, the top two automatically proceed to the second round.

Le Front National polled over 20% in the first round nationally, winning them places in about 400 second round contests. In the second round, they polled almost 12% (at an average of over 30% for each candidate they actually had standing). And how many seats did they win - just 2. That's right - 2 or roughly 0.1% of seats. By contrast the Greens managed to double their first round vote to about 8%, but ultimately won 27 seats. Under a proportional system, Le Front National would have won 300-400 seats probably.

Now, in reality i don't think that keeping any party (however obnoxious they are) out of power should be the deciding factor in choosing an electoral system (something that neither campaign in the upcoming referendum seem to agree with me about - both seem to be arguing that a vote for the other gives the BNP more power), but it is food for thought. And with Ms Le Pen currently polling around the same levels as M Sarkozy and the leading socialist contenders, it looks likely that she might make quite a splash in next year's presidential elections.

Elsewhere in Europe (using a proportional system) there was better news for Greens. Two German state elections also at the end of March saw them increase their number of seats in Baden-Wurttemberg from 17 to 36 and in Rhineland Palatinate from 0 to 18.

Meanwhile, closer to home, our own  nasty far-right seems to be struggling somewhat - it looks like the BNP will fielding well under half the number of candidates in this year's English local elections as they did in the last equivalent elections.

Limitless

Limitless is a competently entertaining thriller that is probably most noteworthy for one thing. It marks the emergence of Bradley Cooper as a genuine leading man. After strong performances in ensemble pieces (The A Team; The Hangover) and miraculously coming through Sandra Bullock disaster All About Steve with his career more or less intact, here he has to carry a film for the first time and proves himself comfortably up to the task. He may not ever be troubling the Academy voters, but showd he has enough charisma and sparkle to keep an audience with him, even when his character is doing things that may not be altogether likeable.

Cooper plays Eddie Morra, a struggling writer whose life is transformed when he is offered a drug that enables him to tap into more of his brain's capacity. Needless to say, in good Faustian trandition, there are consequences to this path to success, including blackouts, headaches and many a nasty thug to deal with.

Director Neil Burger delivered a competent thriller in The Illusionist, but this is better and the action holds together well, although some of visual flourishes to show the effects of the drug are a bit too showy for their own good. Burger also leaves pleasing ambiguities in the ending, like is or isn't Eddie still using and was he guilty of killing a girl during one of his blackouts. Make your own mind up. Cooper is ably supported by Abby Cornish, who has more of a character to work with than in Sucker Punch, but drifts out of the film towards the end. Its also nice to see De Niro acting as if he actually cares about the role for a change as Cooper's mentor-nemesis.

There are weaknesses here too - the stereotypical Eastern European rent-a-thugs add little to proceeding other than to muddy the plot a little and up the violence levels.

Overall - 7.5/10 A confidently engaging thriller which marks the emergence of a true leading man.

Source Code

Source Code is director Duncan Jones follow-up to intelligent indie sci-fi success Moon. This time he's got a bigger budget, bigger stars and a script that's not his own idea. The good news is that he's still managed to produce a gripping film thats's above average in both intelligence and execution, even if it lacks a little of the originality and charm of Moon.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens - a US air force chopper pilot, who wakes up on a train, opposite an atttractive woman who's talking to him as a friend and with another man's face. Eight minutes later the train blows up and Colter finds himself inside a capsule somewhere talking to military types (Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright) on a screen, who explain that they have the technology to send him into the last eight minutes of somebody's life in order for him to work out who planted the bomb in order to stop a bigger attack threatened to happpen later (this is, of course, classic movie bad guy mistake #7 - start with a small attack to give the authorities time to respond and catch you before you can pull off your catastrophic masterplan). So we get the same 8 minutes repeated with differences as Gyllenhaal looks at different likely suspects to try and catch the villain, all the while falling more and more for Michelle Monaghan's fellow passenger. Here the film throws up some good red herrings alongside the real clues before finally revealing its hand. All the while there are interesting questions in the background about where Gyllenhaal's capsule really is and how he got there from flying missions in Afghanistan. And, most importantly, about whether he can actually change what has already happened.

The explanations for the science part of this are rather glossed over, which is probably a good thing as they would probably have sounded even more ridiculous than the do if it had been explained at any length. As it is, its a interesting movie idea that works in the world of the movie. Even then, the ending raises all sorts of questions and suggests several paradoxes and wholes in the plot that the film can't quite answer. However, by this point, the film will have taken you along with it enough that you won't really complain bout being given the ending you feel it deserves (even if it doesn't make a lot of sense).

The cast are great - Monaghan believably fallable for, Farmiga touchingly human in the uniform, Wright unusually hard for him and Gyllenhaal carrying proceedings very well both in believable character and in action. Jones keeps things brief and moving to good effect and whilst this might not be as good as his debut, it shows enough to prove it was no fluke.

Overall - 7.5/10 Thoroughly engaging film built around some good ideas and strong performances.

Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch is the mutant offspring of Girl, Interrupted; Moulin Rouge; Casshern  and countless Japanese Mangas. If that sounds a mess, broadly speaking it is. The story, such as it is, follows the heroine Babydoll (Emily Browning) as she is pit in an asylum by her abusive step-father and faces the prospect of a lobotomy in 5 days time unless she can work out a way of escape. She retreats into a fantasy world, where the asylum becomes a brothel where she dances for the clients to distract them, whilst her companions (Abby Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung) go about pilfering the various things they need to make their escape. Except we don't see the dance, but rather enter into a deeper layer of Babydoll's fantasy where the girls are fighting giant samurai robots, clockwork steam-powered German zombies, dragon and yet more robots.

Director Zack Snyder's previous films (300, Watchmen) have suffered from a triumph of style over substance, but at least the style was impressive and there was some kind of coherent story to hang it. Here, there are impressive images but there are all thrown together so haphazardly in a blur of action that what you end up with is lots of things that might look good as still images getting lost in the blender with none of the steampunk, gothic, burlesque, martial arts, anime, fantasy, sci-fi or just plain weird elements having enough room to actually shine. As for the story, well, by the end you might well be scratching your head. In other filmd with multiple layers of reality (most recently and notably, Inception) the links between the layers are managed well, here -they feel clumsy to the extent that we're left wondering what happened to three characters in reality (is it actually reality) after events at one fantasy level. By the end, you might even be wondering whose head this is all happening in. Of the characters, only Browning, Cornish and Malone are allowed anything anywhere near depth or nuance.

That said, each individual set piece is well enough handled in terms of the action to be engaging and interesting, even exciting at times. The performances are on the whole not bad and there's a cheesy charm to Scott Glenn (channeling the late David Carradine) turning up and offering advice and corny aphorisms.

Overall - 5.5/10 Noisy and messy, but not without some good features and invention, but maybe needed a more disciplined hand in putting it all together.