Daniel Minahan | 87 mins | TV | 16:9 | USA / English | 18 / R
The debut of director Daniel Minahan — who’s since helmed episodes of over a dozen TV shows, including HBO hits Six Feet Under and Game of Thrones — is, ironically, styled as a faux TV programme. Another entry in the Battle Royale, etc. subgenre, it sees six randomly-selected people forced by law to participate in a kill-or-be-killed reality TV contest.
More grounded than most of its genre compatriots thanks to its filler-TV visual aesthetic and middle-America setting, both courtesy of low-budget roots, its TV satire marks it out from the crowd. However, that same low-rent production renders it primarily a cult curio.
In the interests of completing my ever-growing backlog, I decided to post ‘drabble reviews’ of some films. For those unfamiliar with the concept, a drabble is a complete piece of writing exactly 100 words long. You’ve just read one.
After being dumped by his long-time girlfriend, Joe (
It’s a fine line to tread, and it seems to me that Knights of Badassdom manages it well. You get a sense of why people choose to do this and the fun that it can be — indeed, the final epic battle between the two factions of LARPers, complete with grand pre-fight speeches from each army’s general, and an awesome surprise, is kinda cool. Equally, the film doesn’t hold back from riffing off the sillier aspects of LARPing, including the rules of combat.
if that’s your bag, there are plenty of films to cater for it; is a comedy about role-players really the occasion? There are elements of the film that could do with tightening up — the beginning is a little slow, as well as the issues with the middle, and towards the climax it’s sporadically jumpy in a way that makes it clear something has been excised — but just adding gore is not what this film needs to improve it.
As it stands, Knights of Badassdom is an entertaining way to spend just under 90 minutes. A more restrained approach might yield a tighter movie, one that could be funnier by percentage (the trailer remains popular, and you don’t get more condensed than that), but I think it’s still well enough constructed to keep genre-minded viewers entertained.
Husband-and-wife detective duo Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) — now with a baby in tow — are once again coerced into investigating a crime when the manager of Nora’s estate fears a dismissed employee is plotting murder.
Screenwriter James Moran doesn’t like it when people compare Cockneys vs Zombies to 
And why is their imagination so stunted that they can’t accept them anyway?
Much maligned on its release, I thought The Tourist was actually a decently entertaining light thriller.
An unnamed woman (Martina Gedeck) goes to stay with some friends at their lodge in the Alps. The friends pop into town, leaving their dog behind with the woman. When she wakes up the next morning, they’ve not returned, and she finds an invisible wall surrounding the mountain. Exploring its boundaries, she sees people outside, paused mid-life, as if frozen. As hours turn into days turn into weeks, she begins to realise the need to fend for herself, farming the land and caring for her animals, which come to also include a cow and a cat. As weeks turn into years, she comes to accept her new life, from which it seems there may be no end…
The Wall starts out with a compelling mysterious premise, but seems to have no interest in exploring it or answering the many questions it raises. In some respects that’s better than the kinds of rote explanation offered by lesser films — you know, “Aliens did it. Why? Because.” — but it’s a bit like a joke without a punchline. Taking the setup as a mere excuse for an exploration of the human condition, I don’t know that it’s that illuminating. Either way, it makes for a sporadically interesting but ultimately unsatisfying experience.
25 years before Jennifer Lawrence had to 
Quirky cult-y director Wes Anderson tries his hand at stop motion animation with this Roald Dahl adaptation, in which an all-star cast voice the tribulations of a gaggle of talking animals — led by the eponymous vulpine — who come into conflict with three vicious farmers.
Compositionally, I thought I’d get sick of the squared-off 2D style, but Anderson’s cleverer than that. It might look flat and lacking in dimension at first, but that’s the starting point for variation, including some great bits of depth (farmer Bean trashing a caravan is a particular highlight of this), and when it breaks form (like a rabid dog chase) it’s all the more effective. There’s also a fantastic score by Alexandre Desplat. Not your usual plinky-plonky Quirky Kids’ Movie music (though there are instances of that), but something more raucous. Nice spaghetti Western riffs, too.
Fantastic Mr. Fox is the kind of film I feel I may enjoy more on a re-watch. Indeed, some comments on film social networking sites (e.g. 
You know the kind of people who wait ages and ages for something and really want it and pre-order it or whatever and then when it finally arrives they… add it to a pile and don’t get round to watching/reading/listening to it for even longer than the ‘forever’ they were waiting in the first place? If you don’t, you do now — that’s me.
To be precise, Panahi’s ban is from filmmaking, writing screenplays, leaving the country, or giving interviews, so they conclude that reading aloud an existing screenplay while someone else films him doesn’t contravene any of those rules. Nonetheless, the edited (not-a-)film was smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick hidden in a cake in time for its Cannes premiere.
In fact, despite the singular input and focus put into this ‘project’, it could be used quite successfully as part of an argument against auteur theory. But that isn’t what it sets out to do either.
questions that are always worth asking about purported documentaries.
By 1947, Hergé’s boy reporter/adventurer Tintin had already been around and increasingly popular for nearly two decades; had survived World War 2 and the controversy of being published in a Nazi-controlled newspaper; and the release of his adventures had recently been transferred to a dedicated magazine, Le Journal de Tintin. What better time to bring the character to the big screen?
In 
makes it look as if he’s permanently shocked by everything.
100Films.co.uk 