Max Shrek

Third time out for the cantankerous green ogre and his band of merry muppets and while the animated adventures can still raise a laugh, the series is beginning to show signs of fatigue, particularly when it comes to character and storytelling.

In Shrek The Third our anti-hero, (voiced by Mike Myers doing his I Married An Axe Murderer Scottish burr) and his loving wife Fiona (Cameron Diaz) face an ostensibly sad situation with the hilariously protracted death of her father the King of Far Far Away (John Cleese) who has been turned into a frog for reasons I no longer remember. Shrek is his chosen heir, but the Ogre doesn’t want the job, especially after being fitted with the uniform, a periwig, doublet and hose. There is a further complication in that his blushing bride is pregnant, something she is at pains to hide, for the time being, from her hot-tempered husband.

But before he is forced to cope with fatherhood, Shrek must tend to the business of finding a replacement for himself on the throne, so he can go back to the swamp. The next in line is the nerdish teenager Artie (Justin Timberlake), who is in school even further, further away. So Shrek, Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Puss (Antonio Banderas) set sail for a long voyage to return the heir apparent to the kingdom and be done with all of this royal messing about. Helping them in this endeavour is the hippy-ish, absent-minded wizard Merlin (Eric Idle), whose skills in thaumaturgy aren’t what they used to be, leading to some entertaining body-swapping and a few elaborate set pieces. Piling on the pressure, and going some way towards extending the running-time, the pompous Prince Charming (Rupert Everett) gathers together a crew of evil fairy-tale characters (Captain Hook, The Wicked Witch, The Ugly Sisters) to attempt to usurp the throne while Shrek is away. Battling them for control of the kingdom is the Charlie's Angels inspired crew (pictured above) of Princess Fiona, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Queen Lilian and the cross-dressing Doris.

After that zippy, witty first hour, the movie takes a dip towards the finish, when the collected women of fairy-land are gathered to undertake a rescue mission but without much in the way of adventurous animation or clever scripting. Still, the wrap-up does provide a convenient segue into the inevitable third sequel, which might well be the point. Shrek is a multi-billion dollar industry now; with lucrative sidelines in one-off special DVDs, merchandising and tie-ins, a theme-park under construction and a not-so-surprising fourth film already announced by DreamWorks.

The voice work from the entire cast is again top notch, with a constant slew of one-liners and a couple of brilliant extended jokes – especially the Gingerbread Man’s life flashing before his eyes, for my money the best joke in the entire series. I would like to have seen and heard more of Donkey, who simply isn’t given as much to do as in the previous two films, . Visually attractive and brilliantly animated, the production is flawless, with special attention paid to large crowd scenes and tiny, almost invisible, detailing. But there isn’t nearly as much attention paid to crafting a compelling and sustaining story, which follows the Hollywood adage of giving us “the same again, but more”, but is ultimately pretty forgettable.

A Myspace Announcement

Confessions has a Myspace! I know, always at the sharp end of the wedge. Anyways, tip on over there and add me to your friends list so I can feel worthwhile and fulfilled and whatever else I'm supposed to feel.

Shiny Happy Superpeople

The trend in superhero movies is for casting the old spandex crime-fighters in a gloomy post-millennial light (like in the embarassing Spiderman 3, or far better in Christopher Nolan’s Batman series). Fantastic Four doesn't bother with any of this, being the camp and cheerful adventures of mutated pals told in very simple language, and based more around polished special effects and high-handed one-liners than any dark night of the soul.

Returning director Tim Story (whose first film made an unexpected $350 million odd at the international box office) starts his sequel with the arrival of an intergalactic scout – the Silver Surfer – sent by an extraterrestrial monster called Galactacus to travel the cosmos looking for planets that he can eat whole. The surfer – an almost silent, shiny presence on his gravity-defying board – arrives on Earth and quickly causes chaos, changing the weather and digging a series of deep, wide holes for some as yet unknown purpose. Meanwhile, in their laboratory atop an NY skyscraper, the Fantastic Four are preparing for the marriage of two of their members, Reed Richards (a super-scientist who can stretch and bend his body like elastic and is played by Ioan Gruffudd) and Sue Storm (the Invisible Woman, who can turn invisible and create force fields; played by Jessica Alba). Their happy day has been postponed a couple of times due to dire international emergencies where, alongside the other two, The Human Torch (a flying fire-starter played by Chris Evans) and the half-stone Thing (played by Michael Chiklis), they have had to save the world. These interruptions play out like the off-cuts from a Richard Curtis romantic comedy, where eyes are widened and foreheads slapped as the arch mood of farcical camp is heightened. None of it is particularly skillful or memorable.

Filling out the middle are snappy scenes of digital wizardry as the Surfer (played by Doug Jones and voiced by Laurence Fishburne) scoots around the world (a Northwestern forest, the London Eye) causing chaos and the Four attempt to stop him. Although the best of these has the Human Torch flit through a monumental skyline chasing down the silvery, transmuting quarry, there is something underdeveloped about the story's exegesis, not helped by supposedly humourous sidebars about disappearing clothing or extra-lengthy limbs. When the belligerent, secretive US Army gets involved, the Four face the further challenge of battling their old nemesis Dr Victor Von Doom (the daft Julian McMahon), woken from cryo-suspension to help out. Even when split into its various plots, the story is very simply delivered, and coming in at just under an hour and a half is a welcome change from the recent messy leviathans like Pirates and Spiderman. Silver Surfer is bouncy, goofy, old-fashioned stuff, pretty bloodless and tame, aimed more at children than the twenty-something comics cognoscenti that will line out for next year's Watchmen.

We Are Two

Confessions celebrates it's second birthday (I dislike the term 'blogaversary', or whatever it's called. There are too many neologisms nowadays) by settling down to watch the late movie on TV, Takeshi Kitano's Dolls. Or the first hour of it, probably - busy day tomorrow.

A sincere thank you to all those who visit the site regularly, and a special thanks to those few that are impassioned enough to leave a comment. Roll on another year.

And Then There Were Ten

Ten Canoes is a captivating mix of kinked-narrative storytelling, observational anthropology and meditative natural philosophy. Dutch directors Rolf De Heer and Peter Djigirr's film about the aboriginal people of Australia opens with a laugh, as unseen narrator David Gulpilil (who played the teenage guide in Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout, thirty years ago) spins a simple fable about the cycle of birth and death with a palpable grin on his face.

As the camera skims over a stretch of river, we are introduced to the two main characters in the first timeline, which is never identified but is assumed to be thousands of years ago. Minygululu (Peter Minygululu), leads 10 men on a trek through the forest to gather the tree bark needed to make canoes for goose hunting. As they walk, he starts to tell a story, from even further back in the tribes history, to his younger brother Dayindi (Jamie Dayindi), about coping with the frustration of becoming a man and seeking a wife. As the troop makes its way towards the river to start the hunt, the film switches to colour and brings us back to prehistory and a small settlement deep in the outback. There we meet Ridjimiraril (Crusoe Kurddal), a warrior with three wives, one wise, one jealous and one beautiful. He also has an impatient younger brother, Yeeralparil (also played by Dayindi), who has fallen in love with one of his wives. Shortly after a stranger from a nearby village arrives and appears to curse the warriors, one of his wives disappears. Ridjimiraril sets out to find her, and in his confusion does something that requires a sacrifice, if the tribal laws are to be upheld.

Made in close collaboration with the Ramingining people, this is the first feature made in an indigenous Australian language but its inherent otherness is quickly overcome by the universal nature of the themes and the unpretentious nature of the presentation. Delivered in elemental stages and performed by the aboriginal cast with tremendous facility, Ten Canoes further distinguishes itself in its mastery of the twinned stories, the overwhelming, unspoiled beauty of its photography and the unnerving sensation of timelessness that seeps from the screen.

Walking Back To Happiness

A documentary that sets out to unravel the enigma surrounding former pop idol Scott Walker, Stephen Kijak’s film is a well-lit shrine to the reclusive 60s singer. Framed around an exclusive new interview with Walker, the early part of 30th Century Man takes us from his first recording sessions as a 15 year old to fame with the Walker Brothers in swinging 60s London. Although none were called Walker (and weren’t related) they were a boy-band phenomenon, selling millions of albums and besieged by screaming fans including, entertainingly, an overenthusiastic mob in Dublin that turned his van upside down. “In the days before seatbelts”, as the crooner points out.

Encouraged to write songs for publishing revenues from B-sides, Walker, always ready to embrace and co-opt the avant garde, brought Stilltoe and Beckett, Debussy and Jacques Brel to the pop audience. After three hugely successful albums, his career ground to a halt with Scott 4, and Walker retreated into isolation and silence. Various interviewees, including executive producer David Bowie, Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn and Gavin Friday talk about what the songs and the singer meant to them in an entertaining series of sometimes emotional talking heads. No Bono though, he must have been busy.

Like the few scant television clips of Walker's early music, his celebrity fans aren’t given much time to talk but when Walker himself has agreed to be interviewed, for the first time in years, the film’s editing choices are understandable. Added to a comprehensive, and well-realised selection of roundabout archive footage and some interesting digital animations a picture emerges of an intelligent, emotional artist who consciously spurned celebrity as soon as it started to interfere with his work.

One of the film’s few real flaws becomes apparent when it comes to Walker’s recent output; dense fusions of poetry, machine noise and found instruments. The bright, catchy albums of radio-friendly pop are left without much further analysis while the second half of the film explores the singer’s recent musical and metaphysical obsessions. Completing Walker’s emergence from decades of self-enforced isolation, we are now invited in to witness him and his band recording his 2006 album The Drift. It’s an eye-opening peek into Walker’s methodology; as he croons and sighs in the background, we see his drummer thump on wooden boxes or pound, like Rocky, on a side of beef to make unique new percussion sounds.

The results of this experimentation are just as fascinating as the other elements of his story but the film introduces a sniffy intellectual snobbery in skipping over his more accessible back catalogue in favour of the difficult, darker present. I know what I found myself humming later and it wasn’t the tone poem about Mussolini set to the air of bruised roast dinner.

Dazed and Confused

A thin comedy about modern romance from writer director Michael Ian Black, Wedding Daze starts brightly enough but quickly dims into a morass of repetitive jokes and clichéd situations. Jason Biggs plays Anderson, a socially awkward twenty something who, in the opening scene, plans to propose to his beautiful blonde girlfriend (Audra Blaser) while dressed up in a Cupid costume, complete with angel wings and a cute bow and arrow. Just before she accepts, his beloved clutches her chest and drops dead of a heart attack. Bereft, Anderson spends the next year in mourning on his couch, surrounded by junk-food wrappers, despite the best efforts of his worldly best friend Ted (Michael Weston), to shake some sense into him.

Following another well-intentioned lecture about getting on with life, Anderson takes him up on his advice, and proposes marriage to the next girl he meets, a cute waitress in a local restaurant. Astonishingly, Katie (Isla Fisher), accepts his offer, chiefly because she is attempting to escape the sickeningly clingy clutches of her own closeted fiancée, William (Chris Diamantopoulos) and her overly-controlling mother Lois (Joanna Gleason). The path of true love doesn’t run smooth, with more social embarrassments for the adoring strangers manifested in Anderson’s underwritten and oversexed parents, Betsy (Margo Martindale) and Lyle (Edward Herrmann), while Katie’s circus-freak best friends Matador (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Jane (Heather Goldenhersh) tag along in the background, flapping their arms and making funny faces. Joe Pantoliano, playing her Buddhist jailbird father Smitty, delivers some much-needed vigour, even if the script repeatedly fails him and everyone else.

By coasting along in these kind of roles, Biggs should by rights be paying fifteen percent to the writers of American Pie, or perhaps they should be paying him because those films have all but finished him as a viable lead. Fisher, who played a similar role in The Wedding Crashers, again shows her promise as a comedian with a vibrancy and a willingness to goof around, but these are almost entirely wasted as the film runs itself onto the rocks of genre convention and smug, self-referential artifice.

A cynical, overly-mannered exercise in stitching together skits built around the theme of spontaneous passion, Wedding Daze proves to be as corny and unfunny as it’s desperate title, a disappointing and increasingly annoying film with little to recommend it.

Three Of A Kind

Danny Ocean and his smart-mouthed gang of shysters trail Spiderman and Jack Sparrow in this seasonal binge of three-quels (with Shrek, John McClane and Jackie Chan waiting in the wings). You have to have done the groundwork to keep up with today’s Hollywood, even with something as doggedly entertaining and ephemeral as Steven Soderbergh’s hip caper series.

Oceans 13 opens in suitably breezy fashion, with a flashy credits sequence underscored by a rolling jazz beat from returning soundtrack supremo David Holmes. Ocean (George Clooney) and his gang, led by right-hand man Rusty (Brad Pitt) have returned to Las Vegas, scene of their first scam, with vengeance on their minds. Billionaire hotelier Willy Bank (Al Pacino) has screwed their beloved Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould) out of his share in Bank’s latest venture, an enormous double-helix hotel and casino on the cities infamous Strip. Having lost everything on the deal, Reuben collapses from a heart attack, and while laid up in recovery, his faithful acolytes gather to plan their elaborate revenge. The hotel, a museum of ostentation with gold-plated everything, is set to open on the 3^rd of July with a gala extravaganza, so the clock is ticking.

The men quickly put together an outrageously elaborate plan to break the bank at the casino, destroy Bank’s reputation and restore Reuben’s lost millions, all at the same time. The trouble is, Bank has installed an unbeatable security system, installed by Greco Montgomery (Julian Sands), that even their own technical genius Roman (Eddie Izzard) cannot impregnate. Much of the fun, then, comes from watching the gang pit their wits against these seemingly unbeatable odds. Virgil and Turk (Casey Affleck and Scott Caan) are dispatched to Mexico to fiddle with the manufacture of the casino’s dice, before becoming embroiled in an entertaining labour dispute. Geeky Livingston Dell (Eddie Jemison) is asked to construct a phony card-shuffling machine. Pitt’s Rusty goes undercover as a geologist, putting a spy camera in Bank’s office under the nose of his dedicated personal assistant Abigail (Ellen Barkin), while below, phony Brit Basher Tarr (Don Cheadle) is using a giant drill to tunnel towards the hotel. There’s more, including a daft interlude where Linus (Matt Damon) seduces Barkin with the aid of a supernaturally powerful pheromone and a fake plastic nose, but the point of the thing is not really what happens, or how, but when. Ultimately, Ocean and the gang have just three minutes and forty seconds to make each element of their master-plan come together. So timing is crucial with Soderbergh, from Brian Koppellman and David Leiven tight script, constructing an elaborate, closely-geared, mouse-trap of incidents and accidents that follow each other in a smooth, but bewildering, series of moments that lead to that preordained big finale.

The dialogue that strings the thing together is made up for the most part of easy-going banter sessions; gambling slang (“reverse big store”, anybody?), technical speak and sly in-jokes, which gives Oceans 13 an energizing bounce missing from the second film but makes the chatter mostly unimportant. Although the ensemble cast achieve that sense of loose, urbane humour, and have lost that smug sense of entitlement that blighted Oceans 12, it hasn’t the attention or dedication required to make it a comedy, although it has its share of entertaining moments. The best of the sub-plots involves Carl Reiner’s master of disguise Sal Bloom posing as a hotel inspector for the prestigious Five Diamonds award, while the real invigilator (David Paymer) is tormented by all manner of abuse. Oceans 13 is better appreciated as an exercise in cool, an exquisitely tailored, sharp-witted play on fraternity and honour, smarts and sleight-of-hand. Operating his own camera again, under the name Peter Andrews, Soderbergh ramps up the visual flash and dazzle, with a luminous palate, some clever computerised graphics building to a crescendo of massive set-pieces, including a man-made act of God, to send his franchise out on a bang. But that should be it, it's time for these guys to cash in their chips.

Shot Down

When the bank takes his ranch away, drawling cow-poke Blaine Rawlings (James Franco) does what anyone in his position would do, he goes to the movies. There he sees a newsreel about the ongoing war in Europe and decides to enlist in the Lafayette Escadrille, a squadron of American volunteers who joined the newly-formed French air force during WWI in order to fight the invading Germans. A couple of subsequent, improperly hasty, introductions later, and Rawlings is joined by his new comrades in arms, and is on the boat across the Atlantic searching for adventure. Flyboys is a film so old-fashioned it might as well have been photographed in sepia tones and reeled through a hand-cranked projector. Director Tony Bill could have made the movie in the early 1930s, with the simple storyline, stock characters, floral romance and repetitive action never amounting to much more than a patriotic B-movie, a humdrum run through the genre checklist that never rises above the perfectly serviceable but lacks any sense of history or reality.

Franco brings the same happy/sad emotional range to Rawlings that he employed to such mediocre effect in the recent Spiderman 3. He can jut his chin in an approximation of gritty defiance, and luckily that’s about all he is asked to do. His band of fellow fighter pilots are similarly reduced to one-word characteristics, cardboard cut-outs in period uniforms. There’s the rich coward, the earnest God-botherer, the mysterious veteran and the noble black guy. Once these anonymous Americans have arrived in Paris (going by the prominence of the Eiffel Tower in the painted background), they make their way to the rural military airport, an opulent chateau surrounded by a ring of tents. After relating their various life-stories in a round of background-filling, information-heavy flashbacks, the men start their extraordinarily lengthy training under the stern gaze of Captain Thenault (Jean Reno, doing his best Bayonne ham), whose task is to transform these raw recruits into dead-eyed aces through a rigorous regimen of gusty speeches and hard truths. Few of them will survive more than a couple of hours in the sky, especially when we get a look at their weapons of war, plywood and canvas planes held together with spit and thread.

Or rather, zeroes and ones. The film’s only nod to modernism comes in the flying fight sequences, which are all computer generated in that shiny, immediately fake manner we have had to make do with since it became all that’s on offer. There are whole campaigns of these manful aerial battles each pretty much indistinguishable from the last, barring the occasional death (which thins the herd) or supposedly critical mission (which nudges along the plot). The sneering Bosche remain anonymous for the most part, excepting the dread Black Falcon (Gunnar Winbergh), modeled after The Red Baron von Richthofen, a chivalrous flying ace with legendary skills who begins a mid-air mutual appreciation society with the young Rawlings. When not tipping the hat to his Prussian adversary, the laconic Rawlings starts up a soppy relationship with lovely French country girl Lucienne (Jennifer Decker), whose nobility and bravery are underlined by the brood of orphaned relatives she has in her care.

And so it goes. Without much in the way of smarts or excitement, and boasting an epic length it does nothing to deserve, Flyboys becomes a twee exercise in flag-waving nostalgia, in turns dull and mawkish and ever so clean and tidy. Despite being based on fact, not a single frame of it rings true. By coming to praise the volunteers that gave their lives for a foreign nation, it buries them under clods of digital slush and soppy, sanitised fantasy.