Love in the Past, Present & Future Tense

Whether avoiding pestilence in the Dark Ages, leading a go-getting career-centric life in today's metropolitan urban jungle or planet-hopping in a sleek n' sexy future-verse, one thing is guaranteed: you can't avoid the “L” word. Whether dizzyingly passionate, purely physical or some messy juncture betwixt the two, it's the universal language binding humanity together. It also handily links these three overwise wholly unrelated film reviews into one thematic whole.... sorta.

DVD Review: BARBARELLA: QUEEN OF THE GALAXY
15 – 98mins – 1968

Austin Powers meets Flash Gordon in this sexually liberated sci-fi from the swinging sixties. Classic screen beauty Jane Fonda – who at the time of production was married to the film's director – plays the title role of Earth's alluring unofficial ambassador of love (read: empowered slut) in a future where our planet is a peaceful world favouring harmony and unity over violence and war.

On a mission to locate Milo O'Shea's missing weapon manufacturer Durand Durand (pronounced minus the “d”; yes, this is where the eighties popsters got their name), our hump-tastic heroine is only too happy to sleep her way around the star system, from fur-wearing loners guarding the Ice plains to blind, confidence-lacking angels trapped in labyrinths. The self-appointed “Queen of the Galaxy” finally meets her match in an “excessive machine” – A.K.A. an orgasmotron – which she overloads with her abundant desires.

Aside from the now iconic opening credits where Barbarella strips naked in zero gravity, the rest of the monkey business takes place off screen, leaving director Roger Vadim's adap of Jean-Claude Forest adult comic book in a pointlessly neutered middle ground: too cheesy to be taken seriously as legitimate sci-fi and not perverse enough to qualify as a true erotic farce. It looks snazzy and has a fabulously glitzy soundtrack, but I'm not surprised it flopped disastrously upon release. Furthermore, a long-touted remake has time and again stalled before take off.

CR@B Verdict: aaaaa

Blu Review: BLACK DEATH
15 – 97mins – 2010

England, 1348AD. The country ravaged by the plague, young priest Osmond (Eddie Redmayne) agrees to leave his monastery and act as a guide to a group of soldiers searching for a far-off village rumoured to be miraculously free from pestilence and home to a necromancer who can bring the dead back to life.

Lead by no-nonsense knight Ulric (Sean Bean), the Christian questers must traverse the rotten land and overcome treacherous obstacles before they reach the remote marshland utopia. Suspicious of the god-fearing community, the knights nonetheless accept the hospitality of passive chief Hob (Blackadder’s Tim McInnerny) – but things are not as cordial as they superficially appear…

From cult director Christopher Smith (Severance, Creep), Black Death plays out the medieval-men-on-a-mission concept of Season of the Witch but with Centurion’s gritty aesthetic and proclivity for vividly violent and visceral visuals. When the soldiers reach their destination, things go all Wake Wood – but for all its clandestine superstition, Black Death has its armour-clad feet rooted firmly in the authentic.

Sean Bean’s name may head the marketing campaign and his bristled chops may dominate the cover art, but this is unquestionably Eddie Redmayne’s film. It is Osmond we sympathise with as he holds out hope that he will be reacquainted with the girl he loves (Kimberly Nixon) and the actor’s vulnerability is palpable as Osmond’s heart is broken and body weakened throughout the horrific ordeals he endures. It is this that stays with you long after the bloodshed has subsided.

CR@B Verdict: aaaaa

Cine Review: FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS
15 – 109mins – 2011

Having already hooked up with No Strings Attached (reviewed HERE), I was sceptical of what a second identi-kit sex-com in under a year could possibly offer me; but while the Natalie Portman vehicle won the race to the box office by some months, Mila Kunis reigns supreme in the “babes of Black Swan” battle with the superior fuck buddy funny flick in Friends with Benefits.

It's by no means a clear-cut victory: for all its jovial pokes at the death of the fairytale romance via a purposefully soppy film-within-the-film starring a dopey Jason Segel, this Will Gluck (Fired Up!, Easy A) directed effort still fails to avoid the happily ever after as platonic muckers Dylan (The Social Network's Timberlake) and Jamie (Kunis) realise it's impossible to do the nasty without becoming emotionally invested.

What gives Friends with Benefits the marginal upper hand is in the decent chemistry between bullish exec job recruiter Jamie and her charming magazine editor target Dylan, and the fact that – even when they finally realise they are in love – their first classification of their involvement is “best friends”. It was refreshing to see that it *wasn't* the fornication which fogged their feelings but their close bond.

Much like this rollercoaster relationship, are a few missteps along the way: Woody Harrelson raises some chuckles as Dylan's extravagant GQ art editor, but he's far too in-your-face about his homosexuality to be believable. Dylan's father's (Richard Jenkins) mental deterioration due to Alzheimer's is treated sensitively, yet there are many cruel jibes made about Dylan's difficulty in grasping basic mathematics. Finally, a string of off-hand references to real life emergency landing pilot Captain Sully (see HERE) fall awkwardly flat and lead to no narrative pay-off.

CR@B Verdict: aaaaa

The Road Warrior

DVD Review: THE BOOK OF ELI
15 – 113mins – 2010
Written by: Gary Whitta
Directed by: The Hughes Brothers
Starring: Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, Ray Stevenson, Jennifer Beals, Tom Waits, Frances De La Tour, Michael Gambon, Malcolm McDowell
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[SPOILERS] Thirty years after an unidentified catastrophic event “tore a hole through the sky and made the sun descend”, wiping out the majority of civilisation, lone traveller and exceptional survivalist Eli (Washington) is making his way through the desolate, barren wasteland which once was America , on a private pilgrimage to the West.

Arriving in a tumbledown colony made up of suspicious and scared scraps of society living under the tyrannical rule of founder Carneige (Oldman), Eli’s unwavering belief in his much-revered sole possession (the book of the title) piques Carneige’s interest in the wandering outsider, while Eli’s resistance to handing over the crucifix-adorned text (yep, it’s that book) sees the desperate despot dispatch a band of henchmen to secure the treasure long thought lost.

Washington and Black Swan’s Kunis – as Eli’s tagalong sidekick Solara – quickly build up a platonic chemistry which is easy to accept in spite of their multitude of differences, while Oldman sieves and grits his teeth with overdramatic “e-e-evil” menace throughout. It is hard to envisage how a man as defenceless as he has managed to coerce an army of far more able-bodied grunts into kowtowing to his vile and threatening doctrine, but clearly knowledge is power in a future where currency is irrelevant and illiteracy the standard.

The religious overtones of finding hope in the words of the bible forever hang in the film’s periphery, but it isn’t until the lead duo’s belated arrival at Alcatraz that the spiritual MacGuffin takes centre stage. But any trepidation of being preached at through the screen is diminished by the hammy supporting cast (Gambon and De La Tour, I’m looking at you) and writer Whitta’s intermittent attempts at smirksome humour.

Released in close proximity to another – frankly superior – post apocalyptic drama (The Road), The Book of Eli can’t help but feel like less of a revelation than it might otherwise have been. Strong shades of Mad Max also don’t help its cause; while the protagonist’s remarkably accomplished martial arts skills and a curious green tinge to the clouded skyline give the film a more fantastical edge which detracts from the seriousness of the character’s dystopian dilemma.


In a CR@B Shell: Not as drab as films of a similar ilk, but also nowhere near as grave, this post-apocalyptic theological action flick from the sibling directorial duo behind From Hell is a real mixed bag of genre elements which never bores, but also never quite settles comfortably.
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Tutu Much Pressure

Cine Review: BLACK SWAN
15 – 108mins – 2011
Story by: Andrés Heinz
Screenplay by: Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz, John McLaughlin
Directed by: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Ksenia Solo, Winona Ryder
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I've been squawking it from the top of the Tree of Life since The Fountain enthralled and enchanted me in 2006, but only now with the back-to-back success of 2008's The Wrestler and this year's Black Swan are mainstream audiences (and major award shows) finally starting to recognise Darren Aronofsky as an industry main player and not just an indie luminary with a flair for the eccentric and an eye for visual splendour.

Unlike the clinically clean visuals and microscopic attention to perfection that went in to creating his three-tiered love story from beyond the nebula, Aronofsky paints his ode to performance obsession in shades of grey, the screen speckled in grit and grim; imperfect. But this aesthetic preference is not to the detriment of the content, being as it is perceptibly analogous to our damaged protagonist, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman, on extraordinary form).

Fragile but focused, stunning but sheltered, innocent Nina is the very embodiment of a dedicated dancer: performance dance is not just a hobby or a job; it’s her lifeblood, from the moment she wakes with a bone-crunching stretch of her overworked limbs, to the second she drifts off into reverie to the tones of her trinket box playing Tchaikovsky’s enchanting “Swan Lake”.

Indeed, after years of waiting in the wings of the chorus line, Nina’s dream of playing the Swan Queen in her NYC company’s updated production of said iconic Russian ballet is finally within touching distance – however, her gracefully accomplished White Swan is lacking the raw and rebellious sexuality required for the character’s transformation into the film’s eponymous shadow doppelganger.

Can Nina release the beast and channel her inner darkness or will wild-child newcomer Lily (Mila Kunis) nab the cygnet-ture role from beneath Nina’s fretful bill? With a supporting flock of fame-hungry hasslers and harassers piling on excessive expectations, it is scarcely surprising that cracks in Nina’s delicate personality soon begin to fracture and a breakdown is just around the corner.

From her bitter and smothering “stage school mom” Erica Sayers (Barbara Hershey) to her hypnotically commanding obnoxious barre-stard of a company director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), Nina inhabits a dour and intimidating world where no one is to be trusted, not even her own reflections – and Aronofsky makes sure to litter his stage with a multitude of mirrors so as to further disorientate and distance Nina – and us – from reality and create a world where her perception of the truth is shattered into a thousand contrasting shards.

So mesmerizingly enrapturing is Nina’s psychological decline that every frame is packed with jolting apprehension. Like a figurative ballet tutor, Aronofsky keeps his dancers always on their toes; so on edge are you at what disturbing delusion is hiding just beyond the spotlight, as Nina’s pink and fluffy childlike dream pirouettes dangerously into a sexually-fused, drug-fuelled deviant nightmare.


In a CR@B Shell: Tense, twisted and hauntingly unhinged, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan smears the rough with the smooth, but hidden in the plumage beneath the depravity and theatrics lies a superior and brazen mind-game masterpiece.
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The Couple Who Knew F- All

DVD Review: DATE NIGHT
15 – 87mins – 2010
Written by: Josh Klausner
Directed by: Shawn Levy
Starring: Steve Carrell, Tina Fey, Mark Wahlberg, Taraji P. Henson, Jimmi Simpson, Common, William Fichtner, Ray Liotta, Leighton Meester, J. B. Smoove
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“You took someone’s reservation? What is wrong with you people?!”

Middle-aged comedians de jour Tina 30 Rock Fey and Steve The Office Carrell share a sparkling chemistry and snappy sense of improv (“That’s amazing Jeremy, but I’m gonna go home and fart into a shoe box”) while also conveying a tender authenticity to overworked and undersexed couple Claire and Phil Foster in this farcical mistaken identity yarn from frivolous director Shawn Night at the Museum Levy.

An impressive roster of big name faces game for a laugh – will.i.am, Mark’s Wahlberg and Ruffulo, James Franco, Mila “Meg Griffin” Kunis, that screeching jokester who ruined ’Til Death (J. B. Smoove), to name but a few – pop up for all of a scene or two apiece, but this is undeniably the Fey and Carrell show, as the Foster’s attempt to revitalise their kid-centric marriage takes this unassuming and unworldly couple on an outrageous cross-town adventure.

Their eponymous and supposedly romantic evening goes from bad to barmy as they have to avoid gun-totting lackeys (Jimmi Simpson and rapper Common), break into security buildings, drive taxi’s backwards into rivers and pole dance for corrupt and kinky District Attorney’s (William Fichtner) – and all because they took another couple’s dinner reservation at swish Manhattan seafood restaurant “Claw”. Clearly, it pays to book early. And not pretend to be someone you’re not.

With the purported Mr and Mrs “Tripplehorn” having to retrieve and deliver a stolen flash drive (or “computer sticky thing” as Claire calls it) to mob boss Joe Miletto (stern-faced Ray Liotta), it’s increasingly preposterous – but affable enough – fluff, held together with a sitcom-load of running jokes, call-backs and memorable lines (“For the love of God would you put on a fucking shirt?”).


In a CR@B Shell: Carried by its two leads, Date Night still sparkles with comedic verve even as the plot ties itself in knots. It’s not clever, but it’s never boring, and you won’t have to work too hard to get a chuckle from this zany caper.
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