Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen | 112 mins | download (HD) | 2.35:1 | USA / English & Korean | 15 / R
Six months on from all the kerfuffle, the storm-in-a-teacup (as it turned out) controversy of The Interview’s initial release has been consigned to the (film-)history books, leaving us with a movie to be judged on its own merits… albeit a movie being judged by a lot of people who probably wouldn’t’ve bothered with it otherwise, just because of the aforementioned controversy.
The story — lest you need reminding — sees James Franco as a trashy TV interviewer and Seth Rogen as his producer who’d hoped for a more high-brow career. When they find out North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (Randall Park) is a fan of the show, they set out to land the interview that everyone wants. Much to their surprise, they get it… but before they travel to Pyongyang, CIA agent Lizzy Caplan turns up with a request: assassinate Kim. So the pair set off to a brutally oppressed country in order to murder someone — hilarity ensues!
As with so many comedies, your mileage will vary on whether what follows is indeed hilarity or merely inanity. For me, it contained a weight of obvious ‘gags’ and crass ‘humour’, but also enough genuinely amusing bits to keep it ticking over. Park is excellent as the affable Kim, a misunderstood social outcast who bonds with Franco over basketball, tanks, margaritas, and Katy Perry songs. The latter in particular has a great pay-off at the climax.
Some plot beats may feel over-familiar (the nasty guy is actually nice! It leads to our best-mates heroes falling out!), but then you’re not going to get much comedy out of them turning up to find out that 
no, really, he’s definitely as evil as everyone thought. On the bright side, co-writer/directors Rogen and Evan Goldberg also pull off a surprisingly well-constructed through-line about honeypotting/honeydicking, even if it doesn’t wholly hang together if you think about it too much (if Kim was just honeydicking Dave, would those things really make him cry?)
The real-world incidents that dogged The Interview mean it gained far more scrutiny than it ever would have normally, and the final result proves that such faff wasn’t necessary: it’s a Seth Rogen comedy, not some biting political indictment of the North Korean regime — anyone who expected it would be is clearly deluded in some way. Perhaps it’s a shame it wasn’t secretly a genius satire that deserved the extra attention, but at least it’s not bad.
The debut feature from the director of all-conquering box office behemoth 
Maybe I’m missing something, I don’t know, but where other directors currently making a similar transition (Gareth Edwards, Josh Trank, Duncan Jones) showed some signs of a reason for the upgrade in their debut and/or sophomore features, I can’t fathom what singled Trevorrow out. He seems to have done alright with it though, so never mind.
Pixar’s fourth sequel is more 
Oscar-nominated screenwriter Sylvester Stallone continues his examination of masculinity and machismo amongst older men in this trilogy-forming instalment of his Expendables franchise.
though occasionally obscured by camerawork and editing that turns it into a cacophony of violence. The Blu-ray release helps expose this: the special features include an extended version of Statham’s main battle from the climax, and in that focused form you can see how it’s been carefully constructed and designed. In the film itself, it’s chopped up into ten-second chunks and intercut with everyone else’s duels. It becomes like an impressionistic painting of shooting, punching, kicking, stabbing, running, jumping… It’s a war, as the now-double-sized team of heroes takes on a literal army, and some will revel in the over-the-top-ness of it all. The sheer excess does have a certain charm.
The best addition, unquestionably, is Antonio Banderas. He’s a parkour-performing blabbermouth who keeps pestering Grammer for a job, but no one wants him because he won’t stop talking. And he’s hilarious. Of the 93 changes in the five-minutes-longer extended version (yes, 
I kind of hope they do make more. The Expendables movies aren’t great films — heck, they aren’t even really great action films — and they’re a bit too cheesy and in-joke-y for the own good — and yet, somehow, I can’t resist them, and I’ll be happy to keep watching them for as long as Stallone and co can keep making them. After all, there are an awful lot of ageing action actors who’ve not appeared yet…
The first of Summer 2013’s “
In fact, it takes itself very seriously indeed — Fuqua even puts characters’ names and jobs up on screen, as well as timecodes and locations, as if it’s a dramatisation of a real event. Obviously we all know it isn’t, making it feel incredibly odd. The CGI is just as bad as White House Down’s, though the exterior White House stuff looks more real than the obviously-greenscreen locales of the other film. Strikingly, this cost less than half as much ($70m vs. $150m).
however, Olympus Has Fallen looks like a far lesser movie. It’s a shame it made it out of the gate first, and that some viewers are not blessed with enough of a sense of humour, because their comparative success has left some quarters with the impression this is the better movie and White House Down is just a clone. Hopefully that’s a wrong we can eventually right.
The Black Cauldron is best remembered as an intriguing footnote in the history of Disney animation. Their 25th ‘official’ film, it was the first with no songs, the first to earn a PG (after being cut — twice — to avoid a PG-13), and flopped so badly they disowned it for over a decade. Fully-animated sequences were cut after disastrous test screenings for parents, and famed exec Jeffrey Katzenberg, who came into Disney management during the film’s production, reportedly ordered 12 minutes cut, muddling the film’s story. What a mess.
It’s always interesting when a company like Disney break outside of the norm, and it’s certainly brought them some degree of success in recent years with the likes of 
Possibly-crazy people offer definitely-crazy theories on the subtextual meaning of 
After winning the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for 
Here, Fletcher either needs to settle on one or the other, or clearly signal his intentions earlier.
The writer-director and star of 
mainly via references to Farrell’s endeavours to pen a movie called, you guessed it, Seven Psychopaths. One wonders if there’s a hefty dose of autobiography in the writer’s struggle…
A Czech noir animation, set around Christmas 1989 to the backdrop of the country’s Velvet Revolution. Eponymous character Alois Nebel is a train station guard whose flashbacks to an event at the end of World War 2 see him sectioned, though possibly for other nefarious purposes. Having lost his job, he travels to head office in Prague to try to reclaim it, where he meets a ragtag gang of social misfits. Finally returning home, the mystery of what happened 44 years earlier may be resolved…
Perhaps the whole film is Deeply Thematic, then? It may be to do with the country moving on and making peace with its past, seen in a microcosm in the actions of Nebel (moving past the flashbacks, having new experiences, finding love, etc) and the people around him (finally getting revenge for something that happened nearly half a century ago). Maybe that’s all more clear if you know the Czech mindset, or the history of the Velvet Revolution. The second post in 
With some attractive black-and-white animation and a sporadically engaging mystery plot, Alois Nebel is far from meritless. However, its firm grounding in a wide spread of Czech history and attitudes suggests it may be best suited to those already well-versed in that country’s history and culture.
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