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A BITTERSWEET LIFE
Director:
Kim Ji-woon
Cast: Lee Byung-hun, Ku Jin, Hwang Jeong-min,
Lee Gi-yeong
Certificate: 18 (TBC)
Released: TBC
Cranking
South Korea’s reputation for breathtaking
violence up another couple of notches, this stylised
revenge thriller from A Tale of Two Sisters director
Ji-woon closely follows the Hong Kong ‘Heroic
Bloodshed’ blueprint perfected by John Woo,
but adds a couple of sadistic twists into the
mix. The first half is gentle build-up, as ice-cool
gangland enforcer Byung-hun (JSA) unexpectedly
falters in carrying out his duty and doesn’t
execute his boss’ two-timing girlfriend.
He’s soon paying a horrific price (including
a skin-crawling live burial sequence), but the
mayhem truly begins when Byung-hun decides to
fight back, leading to some of the most ludicrously
ballistic action to hit the screen in years. Psychological
depth and realism may not be high on the film’s
agenda, and it doesn’t reach the towering
heights of Oldboy– but if you’re going
for style over substance, it might as well be
as slick, gripping and blissfully violent as this.
Rating:
* * * *
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APPLESEED
Director:
Shinji Aramaki
Cast: (Voice) Jennifer Proud, Jamieson Price,
Kirsty Pape
Certificate: 12
Released: August 19th 2005
CGI
animation gets a shiny new upgrade in this Japanese
sci-fi epic, as a female soldier and her cybernetically
enhanced ex-boyfriend tackle a conflict between
humanity and artificially generated ‘bioroids’
in a gleaming future city. Based on a Manga comic
from the author of Ghost In The Shell, it’s
a similar mix of philosophy and brain-frazzling
action, all rendered in a cel-shaded CGI style
that’s part cartoon, part photo-realism.
It can’t avoid running into the twin curses
of an overwritten, melodramatic script and an
ear-splittingly horrible English dub, but turn
off your ears and the result is frenetic, gob-smacking
eye-candy like nothing you’ve ever seen
before.
Rating:
* * *
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BAADASSSSS!
Director:
Mario Van Peebles
Cast: Mario Van Peebles, Ossie Davis, Nia Long,
Joy Bryant
Certificate: 15
Price: £19.99
Release: 28th November 2005
Playing
his own father and recreating the circumstances
of his first sex scene at the age of 13, the tale
behind the filming of Blaxploitation landmark
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is obviously
a labour of love for actor/director Mario Van
Peebles. Commendably, he doesn’t sugar-coat
the Seventies-set story, showing how Melvin Van
Peebles risked his position as a rising Hollywood
director to make an incendiary film crammed with
sex, violence and confrontational politics. It’s
a luridly entertaining story, but while Van Peebles
Snr.’s passionate anger shines through,
Van Peebles Jr. relies too heavily on voice-over
to connect the dots, ending up with an occasionally
awkward blend of documentary and drama.
Extras:
Commentary, Q+A session, Featurette, Biographies
The
‘Making of’ featurette is a little
over-earnest, but contains superb input from Executive
Producer Michael Mann. Elsewhere, Melvin Van Peebles
gives great value in the half-hour Q+A, and also
backs up his son in the in-depth and absorbing
commentary.
Rating:
* * * Extras:
* * * *
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BOB ROBERTS
Director:
Tim Robbins
Cast: Tim Robbins, Giancarlo Esposito, Alan Rickman,
Ray Wise
Certificate: 15
Price: £9.99
Release: 2nd January 2006
Showing
that the darker side of American Politics never
goes out of fashion, Tim Robbins’ 1992 directorial
debut casts himself as the titular Senatorial
candidate. Following this creepy, self-made millionaire
folk singer on the campaign trail as he courts
the common vote with charming smiles and a fascistic
“Greed is Good” outlook, it’s
a Spinal Tap-style fake documentary full of cameos
(including James Spader, John Cusack and Jack
Black) and with a powerfully relevant edge of
bitter anger at corporate media manipulation.
Some jokes fall flat, and there’s the occasional
hint of lecturing, but Robbins’ barbed satire
of the American Dream is still funny, disturbing
and hugely provocative.
Extras:
None.
Rating:
* * * *
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THE CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO
Director:
Hayao Miyazaki
Cast: (Voices) Yasuo Yamada, Eiko Masuyama, Kiyoshi
Kobayashi, Makio Inoue
Certificate: PG
Price: £19.99
Released: 17th October 2005
Animation
giant Hayao Miyzaki’s debut movie features
all the lush backdrops, quasi-Euro settings and
fairy tale atmosphere you’d expect, and
then adds plenty of nutty slapstick. Spun off
from one of the Anime TV shows where Miyazaki
made his name, the story follows flamboyant criminal
Lupin III as he protects a princess from an evil
Count. End result? Laughs, thrills, and an imaginative
caper that’s like an episode of TinTin on
some seriously weird drugs.
Extras: Introduction, Storyboard Comparison,
Design Sketches, Trailer
There’s
a hesitant but hugely informative intro from Anime
expert Jonathan Clements, the storyboards for
the whole movie, and a rewarding gallery of design
sketches. th.
Rating:
* * * * Extras:
* * *
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CRYING FIST
Director:
Ryu Seung-wan
Cast: Choi Min-sik, Ryu Seung-beom, Jeon Ho-jin,
Lim Won-hie
Certificate: TBC
Released: 2nd December 2005
Anyone
expecting a hardcore version of Rocky from this
Korean boxing drama should think again–
instead, it’s a meandering tale of redemption
that simply doesn’t exert a powerful enough
grip. Following a failed Olympic boxer (Oldboy’s
Min-Sik) and a young convict learning the sport
(Seung-beom), the first half lingers way too long
on the protagonists hitting rock bottom, before
finally building up to the climax where they meet
as competitors in the ring. The boxing action
itself is full-blooded and brutal, and while the
film delivers a strong emotional punch when it
counts, shaving half an hour from the running
time would have been a better idea.
Rating:
* *
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DEADWOOD: SEASON ONE
Directors:
Various
Cast: Timothy Olyphant, Ian McShane, Molly Parker,
Brad Dourif
Certificate: 18
Released: 4th July 2005
Price: £49.99
Crammed
full of blood, brutality, and more creative uses
of the word “cocksucker” than you
could possibly imagine, Deadwood is not your average
Western. Set in 1876 during the Gold Rush, it’s
the gritty tale of a lawless South Dakota town
where everything is for sale, and where the ‘heroes’
are just as likely to get blood on their hands
as the criminals. Using the same censorship-baiting
cocktail of nudity and amoral violence as fellow
HBO series The Sopranos, the opening episodes
may be a little too slow, but once the show hits
its stride, it exerts a vice-like grip. Performances
are stunning across the board, and yet it’s
Ian Lovejoy McShane who proves the unlikely trump
card, turning his every scene into a lip-smacking
master-class in charismatic, double-crossing villainy.
Twelve episodes of rich, full-blooded drama, this
is adult TV of the finest kind- – and for
Western fans, it simply doesn’t get much
better than this.
Extras:
None.
Rating:
* * * *
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DISTRICT 13
Director:
Pierre Morel
Cast: Cyril Raffaelli, David Belle, Tony D’Amario,
Bibi Naceri
Certificate: 18 (TBC)
Released: TBC
Producer
Luc Besson obviously co-wrote this derivative
French actioner in a spare afternoon, and yet
it gets away with blatantly pilfering John Carpenter’s
back catalogue thanks to some jaw-dropping stunt
sequences. Set in a walled-off Parisian ghetto
in the near-future, it’s a typical mis-matched
buddy movie, as dedicated cop Raffaelli and cynical
rebel Belle try to recover a stolen nuke from
a coke-fiend crime lord. There’s dodgy pacing
and creaky dialogue, but this barely matters when
the heroes are pounding the hell out of villains,
vaulting across the urban landscape like pinballs,
and begging the question “How the HELL did
they do that?” at every opportunity.
Rating:
* * *
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DOOM
Director:
Andrzej Bartkowiak
Cast: Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, Dwayne “The
Rock” Johnson, Dexter Fletcher
Certificate: 15
Released: 2nd December 2005
Something
monstrous is on the loose in the Olduavi Research
Station on Mars, and the only men for the job
are Sarge (The Rock) and his gang of heavily armed
Marines. Along for the ride is the troubled John
Grimm (Karl Urban) aka Reaper, who’s uneasy
about returning to the site of his parents’
death, but he and the other Marines are soon battling
nightmarish odds…
For old-school gamers, the arrival of Doom in
1993 was a full-on quantum leap of blood-spurting,
demon-mashing proportions. Giving you the chance
to run wild in a fully 3-D, immersive environment
where there was only one rule- kill everything
that moves- it kicked off the “First Person
Shooter” revolution and went on to spawn
two action-heavy sequels.
The one thing it didn’t feature was any
kind of plot, but that’s never stopped enterprising
movie producers in their search for the next big
franchise. Now, Doom the motion picture has officially
arrived– question is, has it escaped the
fate of so many crappy computer game movies before
it, or is it just another House of the Dead?
The answer turns out to be yes and no, as Doom
has the potential to be a rip-roaring B-movie,
and yet never quite gets around to realising it.
A film that features mad scientists tearing their
own ears off, severed hands, the line “If
it breathes, kill it!” and a scene where
the Rock almost has an orgasm at the sight of
the heavy-hitting BFG (He helpfully spells out
“Big Fucking Gun” for anyone who doesn’t
get the joke) should be trash cinema of the highest
order, but there’s a whole host of problems
standing in its way.
Top of the list is a screenplay that’d give
George Lucas pause for thought in the abysmal
dialogue stakes. Featuring gob-smacking clangers
like an attempt to rhyme ‘microscope’
with ‘sniper scope’, the script tries
bolstering up the plotless, kill-em-all nature
of the game by plundering Aliens, Predator and
The Thing, and switching the monsters from official
Demons of Hell™ to genetic mutations.
Unfortunately, instead of James Cameron-style
meaty dialogue or majestic “I ain’t
got time to bleed” one-liners, Doom spends
most of its time making everybody state the stunningly
obvious (“She’s not answering!”
“Your pupils are dilated!”), while
the majority of characters are one-dimensional
flat-packed stereotypes (Creepy Pervert, Black
Dude, Inexperienced Rookie) there to act as fodder
for the monster sequences.
Even The Rock himself is a disappointing presence,
getting a few interesting character twists but
generally looking lost and confused in a role
that’s 100% hard-ass. At no point does he
get to indulge his quirkier side in a film that
desperately needs it, and the actual hero of the
piece (both in the movie and reality) turns out
to be Karl Urban as John Grimm.
With peaks and troughs like Lord of the Rings
and Chronicles of Riddick on his CV, Urban’s
quality control may need some adjustment, but
following his attention-grabbing role in The Bourne
Supremacy, he’s turned a sketchy character
into a fully-fledged performance that’s
far better than the movie deserves. The scenes
between him and Samantha Grimm (Rosamund Pike,
gamely struggling with a US accent) may be cheesy
in places, but both actors give the film a sense
of reality that’s completely absent elsewhere.
Trouble is, nobody’s turning up to Doom
for the emotional sub-plot. What audiences want
is a fistful of monster mayhem, and when the film
finally shuts up and concentrates on building
suspense, it’s the most accurate computer
game movie yet, capturing the clammy claustrophobia
of Doom’s darkened corridors and smoke-filled
tunnels. The peak of this accuracy comes in the
showcase First Person Shooter sequence, which
locks the audience in the head of John Grimm for
five minutes of monster-killing mayhem, and it’s
here gaming fans get the boom-stick wielding,
chainsaw-slicing action they deserve.
Of course, it can’t last forever, and we’re
soon in the middle of a dull fist-fight conclusion
apparently hi-jacked from Demolition Man. Never
quite making up its mind whether it’s a
guilty pleasure or a flaccid disaster, Doom isn’t
the fatal bullet in the head for the computer
game movie sub-genre– but staying home with
your Xbox still seems a more appealing choice.
Rating:
* *
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