Remember the Dungeons & Dragons film from 2000? To say it went down badly is an understatement. Nonetheless, they made a sequel with some returning cast (which I’ve not seen), which I doubt fared any better and maybe went straight to DVD. This one is again low-budget, and possibly was made for TV, but it’s all-new; and though form hardly suggests it will be any good, I was on a bit of a fantasy binge and it was on TV, so…
And yes, it is rubbish… I suppose… Thing is, it sort of grew on me. For all I know they may’ve shot it in order, because it feels like the production grows in competency as it goes on. From a start that looks like a fan film shot in someone’s garden, by the time our hero teams up with a ragtag gang of evil-doers it begins to come together. Such is the plot: a band of adventurers do some adventuring. Proper D&D, I guess. In a neat twist on the usual formula, the gang we follow for most of the film are nearly all villains, the only exception being our hero who has infiltrated them. Are there even badder baddies who’ll make the (remaining) members of the gang turn out good after all? Well, of course.
Even though I ended up liking it, let’s be honest: The acting never gets good, though one chap, Barry Aird, delivers his handful of good lines with aplomb, even managing to make the ludicrously clichéd ones sound half decent. He’s easily the best thing in the film. The screenplay isn’t much cop, the story and dialogue both riddled with clichés and the like… though I think some of the dialogue is better than the actors can manage with it. And for all the laughable stuff, I’m sure some of it was meant to be humorous, like when Sexy Witch Lady pushes Random Strumpet aside and there’s an almighty crash. And there’s an undead kid who is properly creepy.
Director Gerry Lively helmed the preceding D&D movie and some stuff you’ve never heard of, as well as serving as DoP on such auspicious-sounding films as Son of Darkness: To Die For II, Waxwork II: Lost in Time, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, Return of the Living Dead III, and Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest. Clearly cheap-sequels-no-one-wanted are his stomping ground. His direction is never more than television-y, although that’s an increasingly unfair description as more and more TV programmes become more and more movie-like; but as that’s still the high-end ones, I guess the derogatoriness holds for now. It’s not helped by editing that is occasionally bizarrely jumpy, as if someone thought it would be OK to skip a second or two just to speed things up.
One area I’m happy to flatly praise are the computer effects. Done by a Bulgarian company (which is where the film was shot), these are largely very good. No, we’re not talking Avatar level here, obviously, but for a direct-to-DVD/TV film they were pretty classy.
Despite its low-rent stylings across the board, The Book of Vile Darkness somehow won me round. It’s not going to compete for genre break-out status, never mind anything greater, but for anyone after a well-intentioned sword-and-sorcery movie, they could do worse.
Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness is on Syfy UK (Sky 114; Virgin 135, HD 165) tonight at 12:10am, and again on Thursday at 11pm.
* IMDb says this is the US rating, but that seems improbable: they list it as direct to TV, which wouldn’t use the MPAA system; and even if it wasn’t, it contains breasts. Americans don’t seem to like their under-17s seeing breasts. ^
Their main weapon is Dolores Umbridge, perhaps the series’ most despicable villain, because she is so horrendously plausible. She seems to be all sweetness and light, but it masks a dangerous streak that sees her eliminate any fun from the school and, in one of the most sadistic sequences in either the novels or the films, she has Harry write lines with a magic quill that cuts each one into the skin of his left hand. The Potter series actually has its share of nuanced villains, but Umbridge is thoroughly unlikeable. Though she’s defeated and carted off at the end of Phoenix, she resurfaces in 
But not so. Yates approached his follow-up with a stated aim of introducing more comedy, believing the three leads to be talented in that area but not having had a chance to show it in his dour first film. So here we get a whole subplot given over to Ron’s attempts to join the Quidditch team, as well as much focus on the trio’s romantic entanglements — teenage love always being a good topic for humour. The film is not without its dark side, but peppered liberally throughout are those comedic subplots and scenes that are liable to see the viewer laugh perhaps more than in any other Potter film. It’s easy to miss this element — the main plot is, as always, getting darker and more serious — but once it’s been highlighted (as the makers do in the film’s special features) I think it becomes very noticeable.
grading the film in perfectly-calibrated conditions so they can really push it to extremes, not considering how most end-users will view it; and, much like fast-cut action scenes, an over-familiarity with the material that means the director/editor/grader can see what’s going on because they’ve watched it dozens (or hundreds) of times, which doesn’t work for a first-time viewer in the middle of the film. As you may be able to guess, I’m not a fan.
not a sudden smash-cut to a few decades on where we see how some characters’ lives have developed. I know some people complain about 
It’s hard to offer a final summary of the Harry Potter series. Some people see them as mediocre and overblown; for others, they are their life. Personally, I think they develop from sometimes-uncertain roots in the early films, to a flourishing series of epic fantasy movies. There are often niggles of one kind or another, be it acting (I forgot to discuss Emma Watson’s eyebrows!), or cartoonish designs, or too-faithful adaptation, or abbreviated adaptation, or what have you — but none of these are ever-present. More importantly, every film offers something to enjoy, and the growing maturity — of not only the cast, but also the filmmaking — means their impact only increases when viewed as an entire eight-film saga.
September 1881: after admiring their leader for years through cheap magazine stories, 19-year-old Robert Ford manages to hook up with the James Gang. Little does he suspect that, just seven months later, he will be responsible for the murder of his idol, Jesse James. (That’s not a spoiler, it’s in the title.)
Let’s be clear, though: this is not a film for everyone. This is not an action movie set in the Wild West, which might be what’s expected from a Hollywood studio movie starring Brad Pitt. Apparently director Andrew Dominik intended to make a film with a Terence Malick vibe, so I read after viewing, which chimed with me because “Malick-esque” was one of my foremost thoughts during viewing. This is a slowly-paced two-hours-and-forty-minutes, with more shots of crops blowing gently in the breeze or riders approaching gradually over distant hills as there are flashes of violence. Despite what the studio wanted, this is not a fast-paced action Western, it’s a considered, sometimes meditative, exploration of character and theme.
Jesse’s mood swings are more obvious than Ford’s, but Pitt makes them no less unlikely. At times charming and a clear leader, at others he is a genuinely tense, frightening presence, without ever needing to resort to the grandstanding horror-movie grotesques offered by (Oscar winners) Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem in There Will Be Blood and No Country respectively.
This must also be thanks in part to director Andrew Dominik. Every last shot feels precisely chosen and paced. Of course, every shot in every film has been chosen and placed where it is, but the amount of thought that’s gone into that might vary. Jesse James somehow carries extra weight in this department, with no frame in its not-inconsiderable running time wasted on an unnecessary angle or take that’s allowed to run even a second too long. Somewhat famously, there was a lot of wrangling over the film’s final cut (delaying its release by a year or more), with the aforementioned debate between something faster and something even slower: a four-hour version screened at the Venice Film Festival, to a strong reception. Sadly, the intervening years haven’t seen that cut, or any of its parts, resurface (to my knowledge). That’s an hour and twenty minutes of material and I’d love to know what’s in them.
because he’s obsessed with the notoriety of Jesse. Later, once the titular deed is done, he becomes an actor (not without talent, as the narration informs us) and re-performs the act that made him famous hundreds of times. It’s his legacy, however, to not be as well-remembered as his victim; to not be as well-liked, even; not even close. There’s something there about the pursuit of fame for its own sake, if nothing else.
The first Monty Python theatrical release (four more would follow; five if you count last year’s 
For my money, it becomes a bit tiring watching sketches for so long, even with the attempts made to link them together — it doesn’t form a narrative, so much as a series of casual crossovers that would make re-arrangement in an edit impossible. In and of themselves, however, many of the skits hit their mark.
Reportedly the Pythons didn’t consider the film a success, hampered by interfering higher-ups and a ludicrously low budget (
Directed by the inestimable Billy Wilder, winner of the Grand Prix (forerunner to the Palme d’Or) at the first Cannes, winner of the Best Picture Oscar in 1946, and also Best Actor, Director, and Screenplay, it’s a wonder that The Lost Weekend isn’t better known. I don’t think I’d even heard of it until Masters of Cinema announced their Blu-ray release 
all of them thwarted at the last possible moment, when victory seems assured. The film isn’t preachy, but if it does teach us a lesson then this is how it does it.
Milland is astounding. The film rides on him and he really carries it. It’s easy to play a comic drunk, but Milland doesn’t sink to that. Indeed he doesn’t do one type of drunk at all, swaying back and forth across various levels of inebriation as required. I often find films of this era contain performances we assess as great, but if you put them in a film today no one would buy it; they’d find it stagey and fake. Milland’s transcends that — it fits the era, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find it would play just as potently today. I think it’s fair to say that Milland is not widely known today, but with every film of his I become more convinced that history has been unkind.
There’s also able support from Howard Da Silva as barman Nat and Doris Dowling as Gloria (is she a whore of some kind? Just an escort? A bar-crawler? Did I miss something?), whose slang is oddly infectious. No offence to Jane Wyman, but her lovelorn-but-strong girlfriend character only seems to really come alive in the closing minutes, when she considers abandoning Birnam to his fate.
but from what I do know of other conditions of addiction and mental health, this feels as if it’s still thoroughly relevant.
After 
“Hype” has to be one of the biggest factors in how we view films these days. Technically it’s defined as “extravagant or intensive publicity”, I suppose thereby meaning something to “positive expectation”, but I think it also works the other way: if you’ve heard nothing but awful things about a film, its weakness has been ‘hyped’. It’s this latter point that applies to Green Lantern, which has an almost insurmountable degree of negative expectation attached. To summarise the headline points, it’s got a woeful rating of 
But I digress. Cocky jocky Hal is whisked off to the other side of the galaxy to learn how to be a Hero and use his ‘magic’ ring, which can conjure stuff up, then returns to Earth to save it from some menace(s). As superhero origin stories go, at least it’s got a couple of differences.
There are positives. The action sequences are good, which is a definite plus in this kind of film. The inventiveness with what the ring can do is fun. There’s a lack of relation to the sketchily-drawn characters that stands in the way of us truly engaging with them, and there’s a certain brevity and lack of scale that undersells the alleged threat to Earth (it’s a giant evil space-cloud that can barely cover a few city blocks, let alone the entire planet) — but, that aside, they’re entertaining enough. That said, much as the film pulls its punches with characterisation and threat, so it does with awe and spectacle. The Lanterns’ planet Oa doesn’t have the same impact as Asgard in 
Indeed, I’d say the Extended Cut doesn’t go far enough, with some of the disc’s deleted scenes meriting inclusion. However, the main one occurs on Oa, meaning an effects-heavy scene that hasn’t had CG work done or all the voices recorded, so couldn’t just be dropped back into the finished film as-is. I imagine that’s why it wasn’t. That said, even if they’d done such work, those scenes are minor points, not game-changers.
Still, I think there’s a better film lurking in Green Lantern, and it’s a shame it didn’t get the screenwriter(s) or director(s) required to bring it out. It’s even more of a shame that worse films than this have received a kinder critical consensus or huge box office. That leaves some suit feeling vindicated and churning out the same rubbish again, whereas with a bit more effort Green Lantern 2 could’ve been worthwhile.
The fourth Harry Potter film is the pivot around which the series revolves, in oh so many ways. Most obviously, it’s book 4 of 7 — the halfway point. It’s also where the books switch from short ‘children’s novel’ lengths to the huge tomes they eventually became. More importantly, it’s the instalment on which the overarching plot of the entire series hangs. Although each previous entry in the Potter canon contributed something to the mythology (even if sometimes its significance wouldn’t become apparent until much later), they’re still viewable as discrete adventures. So too is Goblet of Fire, for the most part — the exception being its final act, which kicks off the story that will consume the rest of the series.
It makes sense: at this point the series was moving beyond your stock franchise length of “trilogy” and into less frequently charted waters, amid speculation that the leads would be recast. With Goblet of Fire being the last point you could reasonably pull that off, I imagine it paid to emphasise that these were the same kids — that we see a cast age in more-or-less real time throughout their childhood, including many small supporting roles as well as the leads, is one of the Potter films’ more unique highlights.
I can’t remember if Diggory’s meant to be a nice guy or an irritating jock, but here he’s played by Robert Pattinson, proving it’s not only his involvement with 
but her Quick-Quotes Quill — which, essentially, just makes stuff up — is present and correct. The next tale, 
Prisoner of Azkaban marks a significant turning point for the Harry Potter film series. Viewed now, it’s easy to see it as just Episode 3 of 8; a saga still getting underway. At the time, coming off the back of two incredibly successful films, it felt like a grand shake-up of an established formula.
Cuarón and screenwriter Steve Kloves (who would pen every Potter film bar 
The film series doesn’t treat either of them particularly well compared to the books, but then supporting characters and subplots are the first things to go (quite rightly). 
100Films.co.uk 