Category Archives: Neil Marshall

Romanes Eunt Domus!

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Though I will happily admit to a bias against the UK film industry that might make any patriots passing through want to throw me out of the country, Shades of Caruso is a big supporter of British filmmaker Neil Marshall, as I mentioned during this review of his third movie, Doomsday. All of my positive feelings towards Marshall are included there, where I praise him for his sly sense of humour, his sense of pace, his love of action cinema history, and his technical know-how. Doomsday may not have set the world alight, and it may have been damned by faint praise from even those critics who enjoy action cinema, but even if it’s not a patch on The Descent — probably my favourite British film of the last decade — I maintain it’s a thoroughly entertaining movie, well worth everyone’s time and patience.

Marshall’s latest, Centurion, is a step back, unfortunately. It revolves around Quintus Dias (Michael “Abs of Steel” Fassbender), a Roman Centurion stationed at the very Northern edge of the Roman Empire, on a line that defends against guerrila attacks from the Picts. Any attempt to invade Scotland/Caledonia has failed by this point, meaning Dias has been stationed there for over two years, long enough to learn the language of his foe. After being captured during an assault on the fort, Dias escapes and meets up with the Ninth Legion, who have been instructed to bring the battle to the Picts instead of merely holding the line. Their secret weapon is a Pict traitor, Etain — played by a mute and scary Olga Kurylenko — who promises to guide them to their enemy. Suffice to say, this does not go according to plan, and soon Dias is left in the company of a small band of Roman soldiers, who are forced to battle their way back to the line before the landscape, wildlife, and indigenous people of Scotland kill them all.

The tale of the Ninth Legion’s disappearance is so low on detail that it is ripe for exploration and redefinition, even more so than other infamous historical tales which have been picked over and explained in greater detail. I’m sure no two tales of the Ninth Legion will be the same, while the battle of Thermopylae leaves far less wiggle room. Marshall has said, in interview, that he fully intended to pitch Centurion as a movie in the same epic mould as Gladiator and 300, though on a much smaller budget. To be honest, though it does feel of a part with those movies, he still seems to be primarily channeling the movies he grew up with. If I were to pitch this movie to a studio, the frame of reference would be Aliens meets Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid meets The Warriors meets Southern Comfort.

Those last two films are key to figuring out what makes the best moments of Centurion work so well. It’s not to Ridley Scott or Zack Snyder/Frank Miller that Marshall owes the greatest debt. The small scale, slow-burning pace and quick, brutal action scenes make this feel more like a Walter Hill movie than anything else I’ve seen in a long time, as the small band of survivors bond and then race through hostile territory with a group of Pict hunters on their tail the whole way. As in many of Hill’s movies the group is made up of badasses and cowards who look out for each other, speak as little as possible, and make quick decisions when backed into a corner. Selling this as an epic is a non-starter, no matter how many aerial shots of macho men running over hills take up the latter half of the movie. The best and most interesting moments echo those clenched-fist ’80s classics, with the big action finale being a well-choreographed and exciting brawl, not a tedious FX blowout between two enormous armies. The decision to spend time getting to know the characters in the otherwise slack mid-section of the movie pays off and makes these showdowns more involving, just as it did in Hill’s films.

Unfortunately, while Marshall borrows the character dynamics and punchy action-style from a master, he also borrows (intentionally or unintentionally, I do not know) his visual template from Marcus Nispel’s woeful Pathfinder, delivering a tedious palette of cold blues, washed-out greens, and the occasional fiery orange. It’s a relief that Marshall doesn’t borrow Nispel’s other awful visual trick: seemingly endless slow-motion action sequences that make your average John Woo dovegasm look like the last ten minutes of Speed Racer. His action scenes play out fast, brutal, and gloriously gory, with axe-to-face being one of his favourite visual motifs. Nevertheless, those miserable colours wear on the eyes: by the end of the movie you’re glad every time a fire is lit just to give your senses a break from the monotony. Admittedly, that could have something to do with the terrible projection at the Cineworld in the West End’s chaotic Trocadero centre — a building where good movies go to die.

The pace of the movie is off as well, slackening to a crawl once the movie turns into an extended chase sequence between the surviving Legionnaires and the vicious Picts. By the time three of our heroes show up at the hut of an exiled Pict (Imogen Poots, sadly without the awesome-name-assistance of her 28 Weeks Later co-star Mackintosh Muggleton), the tension has almost entirely dissipated. It never really recovers, with even a terrific final showdown — featuring some total badassery from Liam Cunningham — feeling like an afterthought. Considering how strongly Marshall has ended his previous movies, this is an unwelcome surprise, though I’m not sure how well a chase movie works when played out on such a large geographical canvas. Claustrophobia and a sense of forward propulsion tends to make these things work better: The Warriors works beautifully because of the gang’s progression through a well-defined New York City towards a definite endpoint. In contrast, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid used this plot and a similar landscape to great effect as it was more about the passing of an age than about action and pace, with several digressions from the chase plot before it kicks in again at the end. Centurion includes some of the notes of George Roy Hill’s movie, and these work well enough, but they betray that original tone of excitement without really adding anything else to the tale.

While some of Marshall’s directorial choices irked, it’s worth praising him for the stuff he got completely right. Most importantly, he pitched the tone at exactly the right level of seriousness: there’s no irony or knowingness here. He’s helped by an excellent cast, who treat the subject matter with sufficient gravitas to give the drama enough extra heft to carry it through the regrettable second act longueurs. The litmus test for this is Dominic West’s performance, which completely dials down the godawful hamminess he showed in Punisher: War Zone and 300. Though he’s not in the movie much, his turn as badass Virilus is good enough that you wish he was onscreen throughout. Ulrich Thomsen chooses to play Gorlacon, king of the Picts, as a quiet man, devoid of blustering histrionics. It’s a choice that pays off later in the movie when you realise the Picts are not the villains of the piece, though his hunters are to be feared. Kurylenko’s mute killer is a memorable foil for our heroes, ably backed up by the equally menacing Dave Legeno and Axelle Carolyn, while Paul “Belloq” Freeman shows up and makes the most of his screentime as the slippery British governor Agricola.

It’s the band of Roman survivors that carry the movie, though. Other than Quintus Dias, the most visible are Bothos and Brick, two lightly sketched characters that are given life by David Morrissey and Liam Cunningham: very clever casting right there, as both actors excel at humanising the otherwise underwritten soldiers. Noel Clarke is surprisingly good as the marathon runner Macros, again making the most of his scant screentime, and JJ Feild deserves praise for selling the duplicitous nature of Thax, even though the writing on that character is a little suspect. Without getting into spoilers, I’m not sure if his under-developed character was a fault of rushed writing or unavoidable editing issues. Whatever it is, the importance of Thax to the plot engine is underplayed a bit too much. It’s one of the main problems with the final act, which is a mixture of mechanical contrivance and fortunate happenstance, all of which leads to a heavily signposted denouement. A shame, when the rest of the movie had played with our expectations so well.

Nevertheless, many of the flaws of Centurion are easily forgotten thanks to the conviction of Michael Fassbender, who really really really should be an enormous star by now. His work as the unblemished hero is strong enough to power the movie past its problems, and proves he can carry an action movie with ease. Though Quintus Dias is a relatively humourless individual (in the classic Hill mode), Fassbender’s charisma and commitment to the role should win audiences over. Marshall is a canny man, and should be commended on getting these serious performances from his cast and leading man, but their good work highlights some script problems. Though his aversion to bombast is notable, his decision to hit certain script beats as delicately as he does is peculiar. Early on we find out that Dias’ father was a gladiator who won his freedom, a point that is a key to his character but is never mentioned again. While I commend Marshall for not ramming this fact down our throats with further exposition, it’s a character element that isn’t put into play thereafter, even though it could make the final scenes of the film more resonant. It’s a shame to see Fassbender not get to play out a heavily-accented arc, even if that would require him to shoot beyond the movie’s often measured tone.

It makes me wonder if we’re seeing Marshall’s own final cut, or something mandated by producers. It wouldn’t surprise me if this happened, as the film has already been treated pretty shoddily. Getting to see it was harder than expected, as it is currently only showing on eleven screens in London, and only one in the West End: the cinematic dumping ground that is the Cineworld Trocadero. Meanwhile, Cemetary Junction and It’s a Wonderful Afterlife both get a 42-screen release through London. If this were the middle of the summer season I could understand a small-scale action movie being released on a few screens, but it was released a week before Iron Man 2 come out. That’s a week where it might have done better business if it were promoted with any kind of effort: what it got was a few invested nerd-sites carrying interviews with Marshall and a quick bit on Sky Movies’ 35mm. There’s an audience out there for this kind of thing, though predominantly male. Yesterday there were only two women in the room preventing it from becoming a total sausage-fest. The UK Film Council backed the movie in production, but as is often the case they have no say in how widely it gets distributed, which just leaves Pathé to do the work. I don’t know why they decided this small release was a good idea: maybe they have an amazing algorithm that explains it perfectly. At least it’s getting better treatment by passionate promoters in the States.

Considering my praise is faint, why would I worry about its treatment in the UK? Despite reservations, I would still recommend it: Marshall’s action scenes are effectively staged, the cast are superb, and the location shooting generates an impressive atmosphere of desolation. Even more importantly, I’m glad that Marshall is continuing to make movies in the action genre that are inextricably tied to British history and culture, and think this is something that audiences and filmmakers in the UK would appreciate and respond to. By now you would expect that Marshall would decamp to America, and yet he stays and makes two quintessentially British action movies that nevertheless have a production gloss and editing style that mimics that of our American cousins. News that he is making Burst with Sam Raimi suggests he’s finally been lured away, but his next movie after that is possibly the most British thing he could possibly do: adapting The Professionals for the big screen. Fingers crossed he doesn’t cast Danny Dyer as Bodie.

Marshall seems to be a believer in the potential of the British film industry, something I have a very hard time with when much of it has so little ambition, or relies too heavily on the usual period trappings or the same old source material. It grieves me to hear that the excellent Andrea Arnold is making yet another adaptation of Wuthering Heights, though — as Daisyhellcakes pointed out to me — there’s more than a good chance that Arnold will really be able to play up the narrative complexity and bleak atmosphere, avoiding the two awful extremes of tourism industry video or sub-gothic Twilight homage. Most other truly talented British filmmakers are getting out of here and doing great work elsewhere, but Marshall is sticking to his guns, taking tropes from US films and reworking them to tell British stories for a British audience. It’s a commitment that is to be commended even when the results are not entirely successful, and to see this latest project rushed into a handful of screens just to have some critic quotes to put on the DVD is utterly disheartening.

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (45-31)

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On with the many many movies I stupidly missed off the Top 106 Movies list (which could well be a Top 165 by the time I get through with it). I’ve gone on about Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf before, and so won’t waste time doing the same here, but I will confirm — much to my delight — that it still works well even when not seen in IMAX Digital 3D. Most of that is down to the thoughtful script by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, which cleverly addresses myth and religion. The visuals still work well in 2D, much better than in Zemeckis’ The Polar Express but not as well as in A Christmas Carol, which veers further away from the not-quite-there realism of Beowulf. This is a good thing: Christmas Carol looks more like a living painting than a flawed rendition of reality, and it’s good to see that the technology has come along enough to add this kind of texture to the imagery. The quality of Zemeckis’ adaptation is one of the most pleasant surprises of this year, as was Beowulf in 2007. Perhaps I should stop assuming he’s going to make bad movies and just learn to look forward to them.

Speaking of Christmas movies, I’ve also missed off Jon Favreau’s Elf. To be honest I’m not sure it belongs on this list: the third act is really underwhelming, and some of the casting is a bit suspect. Nevertheless, it’s become a real favourite here, with our annual rewatch a Christmas tradition (we do the same with Robert Benton’s lovely Nobody’s Fool on Christmas Day). Though Elf falls flat a couple of times, Will Ferrell’s insanely committed performance is essential viewing. For those who avoid him because of his reliance on arrested development characters — and I know there are a lot who feel that way — I’d say that Elf is a lovable enough variation on that stock character to win anyone over. There are countless perfectly timed moments in it, as Ferrell races around New York in a whirl of manic energy. Maybe it doesn’t deserve to crack the Top 106, but it warrants a mention, especially at this time of year.

Actually, I’ll be honest. It should’ve got on the list just for this moment:

And now, fifteen movies that don’t feature Will Ferrell or performance-captured monstah-huntah Ray Winstone.

45. Capturing The Friedmans

Andrew Jarecki’s documentary about a family accused of involvement in child pornography would already be fascinating, but it is Jarecki’s examination of the effect of time on memory and perspective that sets this movie apart. How far are we willing to deceive ourselves and others in order to prevent awful truths from coming to light, and can we ever trust our subjective interpretations?

44. Infernal Affairs

Scorsese’s remake of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s imaginative crime thriller was terrific, and filled with entertaining performances, but the original version is the truly exciting one. Within minutes the tension is ratcheted up, and never flags. Andy Lau and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai have never been better.

43. Lady Vengeance

The final part of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy is less flashy than Oldboy, but it may say more about human behavior than its hyper-stylised predecessor. After two relatively low-key acts, Chan-wook unveils the perfect capper — not just for this movie, but for the trilogy as a whole — as vengeance is visited upon a truly terrible person in a tense and intelligent denouement. Praise is also due Lee Young-ae, who is stunning as the haunted Lee Geum-ja.

42. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

In the hands of Julian Schnabel what could have been grueling and bland becomes an immersive visual masterpiece, just by applying intellectual rigour to the problem of how to make a movie from a story so resolutely uncinematic. Devoid of cynicism and dismissive of despair, Diving Bell has the power to recharge even the most empty heart. Essential viewing.

41. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Released in the same year as No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, Andrew Dominick’s re-telling of the Western myth was initially praised then forgotten by year’s end. For giving us such a breathtakingly luminous vision of desperate man trapped by their infamy — and for showing us that Casey Affleck was capable of actual greatness — we hope time will be kind to it.

40. In Bruges

Martin McDonagh’s wonderful debut feature is profane, scatalogical, and surprisingly moving. A superb cast — including a shockingly funny and lovable Colin Farrell — attacks his superbly constructed screenplay with palpable relish, and McDonagh handles the gradual tonal shift like a seasoned pro. The first two acts may have made me laugh, but the final one made my pulse race.

39. Morvern Callar

Lynne Ramsay’s gorgeous adaptation of Alan Warner’s novel showed youthful disaffection and alienation against a backdrop of blistering, unforgettable images, with a never-better Samantha Morton creating a mysterious protagonist whose motives defy easy explanation. Ramsay’s next project (an adaptation of We Need To Talk About Kevin starring Tilda Swinton) cannot come soon enough.

38. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring

Kim Ki-duk tells a deceptively simple tale of a man whose journey through life takes him from Buddhist training to tragedy to atonement and peace, but every frame vibrates with emotion. The reflective pace and cinematography are hypnotic, the ambitious scope and depiction of spiritual awakening are profoundly moving.

37. Princess Mononoke

Spirited Away might be Hayao Miyazaki’s most celebrated movie, but this was my introduction into the world of Studio Ghibli. Its unfamiliar structure, dismissal of Manichean conflict, and air of infinite possibility were even more appealing at first sight, even considering the terrifying, discordant atmosphere of imminent disaster.

36. Team America: World Police

Trey Parker and Matt Stone may not have hit every target they aimed at (such as celebrity culture, repulsive jingoism, and clueless liberalism), but they hit many of them hard enough to justify a declaration of victory. They also included yet more great songs (“America, Fuck Yeah” might have been obnoxious if it wasn’t so much fun to sing), and filmed the funniest third act character turnaround ever:

35. Black Book

Only Paul Verhoeven could have made a movie as trashy — and classy — as this. Leaving behind the dimishing returns of his Hollywood period, the master of provocation conjured up a morally complicated tale of Nazism, collaboration, and resistance that thrilled and appalled in equal measure. He also introduced us to the magnificent Carice Van Houten, who should be a superstar by now. I’m waiting, Hollywood.

34. Brokeback Mountain

A cultural touchstone, a political statement, a punchline to a million bad jokes. Ang Lee’s love story is also, quite simply, a heartbreaking tale of a man who realises too late that he has wasted his life because of crippling fear. Heath Ledger’s final, devastating scene is burned into my heart, his last promise the best final line of the decade.

33. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The romcom Philip K. Dick would have written were he still alive. Charlie Kaufman supplies the delirious concept, Michel Gondry brings the lo-fi visual wizardry, and Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet bring the soul. A thrilling combination of narrative trickery, philosophical curiosity, and flighty romanticism, and another fascinating exploration of the connection between memory and identity.

32. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Tim Burton’s best film since Ed Wood is also the best screen musical of the decade. His thoughtful tweaks to orchestration and plot transform Stephen Sondheim’s original into a Gothic masterpiece. It helps that his cast — not known for their singing voices — give such committed performances and belt out those beautiful songs with such gusto. This might be Johnny Depp’s best performance to date, playing Todd as a force of nature, almost completely irredeemable but still a tragic figure in the devastating final scene.

31. The Descent

The best British movie of the decade was not a period drama or kitchen-sink wallow from lauded, overrated establishment-approved fakes. It was a balls-to-the-wall, technically perfect rollercoaster. It was also the scariest horror movie since Blatty’s Exorcist III, and that’s even before the monsters appear. Director Neil Marshall remembered that for the horror to work, we had to see humanity at its worst, and it is the final act of protagonist Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) that pushes this movie into classic status.

By now, with the end of the list approaching, I’m beginning to second-guess my choices even more. Should Eternal Sunshine have been higher? I’ve only seen it once and loved it, but from this point on I’ve seen most of the movies numerous times, and so they have had a bigger impact on me. Of course, second-guessing means I’ll never get this done. Best to just finish it as soon as I can. Tomorrow, hopefully. Until then…

Car Shoot Car

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My promised rant about The Mummy 3: How To Waste Jet Li has been postponed momentarily so I can make this horrible confession. Though I don’t want to say it, and feel like I’m betraying everyone I know and love, I watched Paul W. S. Anderson’s Death Race a few hours ago, and I didn’t think it was the worst film of the year. Whether this has anything to do with seeing the truly appalling 88 Minutes a couple of days earlier, I do not know. BTW, if you’re after a synopsis of Death Race, read the Wiki page I just linked to. There’s no way I’m going to go through it again, which means I’m exhibiting as much effort as Anderson did while writing it.


I usually cannot abide anything the guy does. Resident Evil remains one of my least favourite films of all time, Aliens Vs. Predator defecated all over two franchises that even hacks like Stephen Hopkins and Jean-Pierre Jeunet couldn’t soil beyond salvation, and I’ll never forgive the guy for wrecking David Webb Peoples’ script for Soldier. Knowing that he was going to swallow Paul Bartel’s entertaining Death Race 2000 and then regurgitate it out as a hairball of mediocrity angered me a lot, though perhaps not as much as the die-hard fans of the original.

Of course, PWSA has stripped the original tale of its subversive edge and satirical bite, turning in a homogenous tale of wronged convicts and duplicitous wardens, as if crossing Steve Jackson’s Car Wars and John McTiernan’s Rollerball remake with John Flynn’s Lock-Up, adding just a dash of Mario Kart to appeal to the gamers in the audience, while cynically introducing exploitation tropes like exploding people, gratuitous hotties, and Grizzled Old-Timer Ian McShane saying “Bullshit” a lot (but sadly, no “Cocksucker”). The cast aids and abets PWSA in his quest for mediocrity. The usually likable Jason Statham merely scowls and shows off his disconcertingly buff bod, Tyrese Gibson fails to act (as usual), and worst of all, Joan Allen appears as the warden of the prison within which the Death Race takes place. Having had her face filled to bursting with enough botox to kill a blue whale, she is incapable of emoting anything other than muted anger. It’s like she’s trapped behind a mask that looks like a puffy parody of her own face.


This, more than anything else on display, depressed me totally. Joan Allen is a terrific actress (if you don’t believe me check out her turn as Pat Nixon in Oliver Stone’s biopic of the shamed President), but here she has been plastinated so badly that she looks like a cross between Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and a cat with Moebius Syndrome. Just to rub the misery in, she also gets to deliver such lines as “Release the Dreadnought!” and, worst of all, “Okay cocksucker. Fuck with me, and we’ll see who shits on the sidewalk”, which is obviously PWSA trying to please the audience by getting an Oscar-nominated actress to utter profanities in a “shocking” manner, but just ends up sounding desperate, not to mention incomprehensible.


This all might have worked if the whole enterprise wasn’t so joyless and measured, aiming for a Grindhouse aesthetic but blowing it by being too neat and tidy. People explode, cars fly through the air, necks get snapped, and men hoot and holler at the sexy ladies brought in for no other reason than that sexy women attract viewers (an actual bit of meta-exposition from the film, horribly enough), but it feels hollow and gratuitous. That’s saying something, considering Grindhouse movies are supposed to be hollow and gratuitous, but this is like the pod person version of those movies, all sheen and competence instead of enthusiasm and imagination.

And yet I still found myself enjoying it on a lizard-brain level, perhaps because I thought the design on the cars was so sweet. They don’t look particularly battle-hardened, even when peppered with bullet-holes, but they look butch and tooled-up. Who can resist the sight of a car covered with mini-guns, even though, illogically, they fire constantly throughout the movie and never seem to destroy anything?


PWSA has raised his game with the action scenes as well. Though repetitive and often unimaginative, they are at least edited and shot with more coherence than a lot of modern action films, and with more muscular effect than he has exhibited in his previous, lethargic films. They’re not perfect by a long shot, and confusion creeps in from time to time, but for the most part they are mindlessly fun to watch, with the added bonus of seeming to be filmed using real cars, pyrotechnics, and stuntmen (with sporadic CGI blowouts). Sadly, all of the good will generated by that commitment to real stuntwork was erased at the end of the film when Ian McShane addressed the camera. Totally unearned, and utterly embarrassing. You don’t mistreat Al Swearengen like that, Anderson, you tool.


So basically I’m saying the movie does not count as pure FAIL, which is a really insipid bit of praise, but considering how badly this most awful of directors usually screws up, it’s a notable improvement. However, compare it to Neil Marshall’s Doomsday, and the lack of quality becomes apparent. That was exactly the film this wished it was, and once more I urge any readers to watch it immediately. Either that or watch 88 Minutes. I’m serious! That shit is off the mu’fukken chain.

Oh, and for the ladies (and gay fellas) who have just Googled “Jason Statham hot muscles”, here is a screencap of him doing pull-ups, which he does in the middle of the film for no reason other than that his fanbase kinda expects this to happen at least once a film.


It’s a totally insane bod.

Dystopian Sci Fi Movie Face/Off! (Results)

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As ever, my trawl through two similar movies eventually leads to this, an arcane and overcomplicated scoring system designed to show which movie is better on the basis of performances, liveliness (a term I used to describe a theory of film assessment that I have never fully articulated, and so remains semi-mysterious), and six arbitrary criteria that are specific to each different Face/Off. This time around I was considering just saying, look, I got all bummed out when I read The Road as it is miserable and depressing and miserable and really depressing, and the only thing that made me feel better about life was watching a movie that featured several graphic examples of violence to the head, and so plaudits and awards and telepathically-delivered love to all and sundry, but hell no. I have to categorise and quantify everything in life. If I were a Greek God, I would be the God of Filing Cabinets.

Babylon A.D.

Cast: Vin Diesel: -5
Michelle Yeoh: 2
Mélanie Thierry: 2
Mark Strong: 2
Gerard Depardieu: 2
Charlotte Rampling: -7
Total: -4

Much as it pains me to say bad things about Vin Diesel, there’s no getting around how unconvincing his performance is. As I said in the previous Babylon A.D. post, it could be a consequence of the post-production interference, but his flat line-readings wore me down by film’s end. Those editing rumours make it hard for me to assess any part of the movie, which makes this a frustrating experience. As for the rest of the cast, most of them were competent but unremarkable, making enough effort to keep the film afloat but doing nothing to distinguish it. I’m particularly aggrieved by Michelle Yeoh’s lacklustre performance; I never thought I would give her such a low rating. Charlotte Rampling, on the other hand, deserves that mark. She might win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar on Mars, but not on this planet.

Elements specific to these films:
Convincing future vision: 5
Coherence: -7
Badassery: 3
Competence of action scene filming and editing: -1
Funky sci fi concepts: 4
Hair styling: 2

Total: 6

Yes yes, there is a category for hair. I had trouble coming up with six categories that applied to these two movies, and this filled a gap. Obviously, low marks for Diesel, who has none, and a shaky finger of disapproval at Mark Strong’s latest distracting wig, but the day is saved by some lovely styling on Mélanie Thierry. Obviously being on the run via submarine, snowmobile, and Hummer is no impediment to a pretty ‘do. I’ve already railed against the poorly constructed action scenes (it’s the first movie to make Parkour seem mundane), and won’t repeat myself regarding that stupid final act, but I will once more stress that the future is depicted with great rigour.


As for badassery, Diesel does have a cool moment avoiding death by Diesel-seeking missile, and Michelle Yeoh always adds to such a total just by turning up and kicking a couple of faces into mush, but overall, it’s low on proper action beats. The same goes for future concepts. Memory-readers? Cybernetic arms (that look like plastic wrist-guards with some wires glued on)? Only the genetically engineered messiah idea works at all, and even then only in a limited way, i.e. if you don’t think about it at all. I mean, putting artificial intelligence into babies? I suspect they mean putting extra intelligence into them, like topping up their IQs, but AI is a different thing. It’s not like computers are already 30% smart, and AI designers and scientists are trying to make them 100% smart. It’s about sentience, if you’ll forgive me for reducing the definition so far. I’d wager that babies tend to gain sentience on their own without the help of science, you know. The misunderstanding of what AI boggles the mind. The mind which is naturally sentient without needing the help of a plastic-coated Lambert Wilson, I should say.

Miscellaneous:
Originality: -4
Liveliness: -6
Enthusiasm for project: 5
Avoidance of cliche: -4
Unique Selling Points: -5
Production values: 3
Total: -11

Though I feel it only right to knock a couple of points off for originality as it is an adaptation, Babylon A.D. still rehashes and remixes familiar genre tropes and imagery, pilfering ideas from cyberpunk books and films, to such an extent that very little about this feels fresh. How much of that is down to Dantec’s novel and how much is the fault of Kassovitz, I won’t know until I’ve read Babylon Babies. Even before that, there are dozens of brazen lifts from Minority Report and Children Of Men. Cliches riddle the movie, with Diesel’s dialogue in particular sounding like a compilation of hardboiled cheeseball bluster. To make things worse, the pacing is off, scenes begin and end with little explanation, and nothing seems to matter. It’s a hot mess. It’s a genre film made by Fox. What did you expect?

Babylon A.D. overall total = -9

I keep coming back to the question of what a director’s cut would be like. As it is, there’s a lot of fail here, and I can’t call it a good film on faith. For all the occasional glimmers of promise, the soul of the movie appears to be missing. The addition of a couple of extra scenes, or even just some extended versions of what is already onscreen, would go a long way toward enhancing the film, but we might never get to see that. There’s a silver lining, though. That dreadful incoherence in the last twenty minutes means that Hancock no longer has the most exasperating final act of the year. I guess that counts for something.

Doomsday

Cast: Rhona Mitra: -2
Adrian Lester: 5
Craig Conway: 5
David O’Hara: 6
Bob Hoskins: 6
Malcolm McDowell: 2
Total: 22

I feel like a big meanie picking on Rhona Mitra, as her uninspiring performance could well have been the fault of Neil Marshall, who cut a lot of humour from the shooting script in order to make Eden Sinclair tougher without realising that that just makes her dour and uninteresting. Nevertheless, she is completely overshadowed by the rest of the cast. Reasonably good marks for everyone, with special kudos to Hoskins and O’Hara, both of whom commit to the film with enough conviction to give the entire film a lift. Though I’ve not yet mentioned them, I also enjoyed the supporting performances from MyAnna Buring and Darren Morfitt, whose onscreen relationship was endearing, and judged well by Marshall, who sidelined it while not removing it entirely and thus maintained the aggressive tone of the film at the same time that he made the goal of the protagonists (finding a cure) more resonant.

Elements specific to these films:
Convincing future vision: 5
Coherence: 6
Badassery: 6
Competence of action scene filming and editing: 5
Funky sci fi concepts: 2
Hair styling: 6

Total = 30

Doomsday gets points for depicting a decrepit Britain, though it would have been marked higher if it had spent more time showing what English society was like as a result of its pariah status. The one thing Babylon A.D. did well was give the audience a long look at the potential future of Eastern Europe, but then the meandering pace of that film allows for interesting digressions, whereas Doomsday‘s action plot needs to keep moving forward. Speaking of action, the score for it would have been higher if Marshall (co-editor with Andrew MacRitchie) had resisted the temptation to cut every second during the most hectic moments. While they still work well, none of the later action scenes are anywhere near as well-constructed as the hospital siege and rescue, which is taut and exciting.


Lots of score-defying short hair for many of the cast, but some entertaining mohawks on the punks raise the bar just high enough for the unevenly cut chaos on Mitra’s head to knock that bar to the ground. Though I’m glad to see an action heroine look unkempt for a change, a mess is a mess. It seems longer on one side than the other. Intentional? Who knows? This is the future, after all. Low marks for futuristic frippery, sadly. There’s little in the way of sci fi cleverness, other than Mitra’s removable remote control camera eye (though it doesn’t really do much new), but the amount of badassery makes up for that. Much graphic and gratuitous gore fills the screen almost from the first frame. I can imagine Fangoria readers will adore it.

Miscellaneous:
Originality: -8
Liveliness: 6
Enthusiasm for project: 8
Avoidance of cliche: -3
Unique Selling Points: 6
Production values: 6
Total = 15

There is no way I can give Doomsday a high score for originality, even if it tries very hard to do new things with the stolen bits of narrative and iconography. Marshall is unrepentant about what he is doing, even going so far as to list his influences and homages. It seems churlish to criticise the film for doing what it set out to do, but the impassive soul of the Score System does not care. It must be obeyed. There is also a reliance on cliche, again something that can’t be avoided when making that hews so close to the traditional conventions of a genre, but a bit more effort could have maybe subverted some of those familiar moments. However, it looks great, it is well-paced (after a shocking opening it slows down until chaos breaks out about thirty minutes in, that delay in kicking off reminiscent of Aliens), and you can tell Marshall was having the time of his life paying tribute to his heroes. If you’re willing to be forgiving, it’s easy to fall under the spell of that enthusiasm, as I did.

Doomsday overall total = 67

Doomsday was just the tonic for my frail psyche, replacing images of the horror of post-apocalyptic desolation with images of the fun of post-apocalyptic desolation. Where Babylon A.D. almost totally failed to grab the attention of the audience, Doomsday screams in your face, pulls your hair, spits in your drink, and then runs away. Naked. Many thanks to everyone involved for dispelling my funk with crazy violence. Hopefully memories of its anarchic exuberance will keep me going through John Hillcoat’s adaptation of The Road, which will probably trigger seismic emotional turmoil in me. I don’t expect to be seeing anything as peculiar as Malcolm McDowell playing a scientist turned feudal lord in that bleak endurance test. Just ash. Lots and lots of ash. And death. Ash-coated death. ::shudders::

Dystopian Sci Fi Movie Face/Off! (Doomsday)

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Released earlier this year (and on DVD this week), Neil Marshall’s Doomsday was heavily anticipated by those of us who adored his previous movie The Descent. In contrast to the majority of British movies released in recent years, The Descent was ambitious, uncompromising, serious, and unabashedly a genre film. It was cold, brutal, terrifying, and unforgettable. Not only was it ballsy, with its bleak finale and shocking take on female relationships, it was made with consummate skill. Once the protagonists are trapped within a series of caves, all of which are pitch-black, Marshall and cinematographer Sam McCurdy have to come up with ever more inventive ways to light the film. Most British films are not in a position to paint themselves into a corner like that, so we rarely get to see anything but the most perfunctory displays of filmic technique (how do we make this stately home/Hoxton bar look pretty?), which made The Descent doubly impressive. It didn’t back down from a challenge, and the result was cinematic genius. I do not exaggerate when I say it is my favourite British film of the decade so far.


Doomsday could only disappoint. The Descent raised the bar so high, managing to be that rarest of things, a genre movie that didn’t feel like a third-rate cousin of movies made in countries that make more confident product. Too often British genre films are hamstrung by budget constraints or reflexive ironic detachment, as well as the inability of British actors to look like anything other than a posing fool when handling guns (see: Torchwood). Marshall’s confident handling of The Descent, and his seriousness of purpose, were a refreshing change, but even so, that was a psychological thriller that also featured subterranean monstermen. He handled it all brilliantly, but Doomsday was a different kettle of fish.


The action movie is a genre that Britain has never been able to master. Many great British directors have travelled to the US and shown they are capable, but within this country there has been little success. It’s a genre that seems antithetical to the British mindset, depending as it does on a lack of irony which comes naturally to the US but not to us. I’d happily attribute that to an innate snobbery towards US culture, meaning many UK filmmakers have a tendency to add reflexive japery to the movie as an apology for daring to make something that seems so definitively American.


Notably only Hot Fuzz has worked as a homage to US action cinema, and even then it operated as a spoof/homage hybrid that took the tropes of the genre and transposed them to a British locale, complete with incongruous English actors, phrases, and in-jokes. Any other tough guy movie made in Britain has seemed kind of embarrassing, with poorly constructed action scenes and UK actors spouting unconvincing macho dialogue. Don’t forget, it’s because of the British film industry that Paul W.S. Anderson is polluting cinemas even now. Sorry, everyone in the whole world who has ever seen one of his movies.


Doomsday looked to be another attempt to make a straight, unironic actioner mimicking American (and Australian) films, with British actors pretending to be hardcore, low-budget action scenes poorly shot and edited, and no awareness of how embarrassing it is to see our culture trying to jump onto a genre bandwagon that belongs so completely to another culture. Not only that, but Doomsday was also co-opting entire plot threads from other movies. The concept, that a virus breakout in Scotland leads to an enormous quarantine operation that separates the entire country from the rest of the world, leading to the survivors becoming feral punks, is already shamelessly lifted from other movies, before we get to the other similarities. Was Marshall, by trying not only to make a proper US-style action film but also one that evoked some of the most beloved examples of the genre, biting off more than he could chew?


Well, yes, but not only do I bow to him for trying so damn hard to pull off the impossible, but also for figuring out how to make a US-style action movie on UK terms. While Hot Fuzz managed to credibly reference action movie tropes and cliches by taking them out of their usual context and then playing them fairly straight (which of course made the whole thing funnier), Doomsday steals from tongue-in-cheek actioners and then treats them with the same amalgam of irreverence and seriousness as they originally were. By stealing from John Carpenter and George Miller, he can use their sense of humour to stand in for UK irony, while not sacrificing the integrity of the movie. That the film is only funny when it is being grisly or over the top is both a regrettable flaw and one of the best things about it (while the dialogue falls flat, the visual gags, either gruesome or silly, are top-notch).



For the first hour of the movie the “homages” to other movies are shockingly blatant: the central concept from Escape From New York, the denizens of Glasgow from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, the plague visuals from 28 Days Later, a setpiece involving armoured vehicles that Nathan Rabin notes is very similar in rhythm to a scene from Aliens, a battle in a hospital is straight out of the original Assault on Precinct 13, Tyler Bates’ impressive score featuring some hilariously brazen John Carpenter riffs, and on and on.


It’s disconcerting to see how openly Marshall has stolen whole scenes from other movies, with only a few concessions to alteration (Mitra’s character, Eden Sinclair, is a Ripley/Plissken hybrid who was born in Scotland and escaped just as the wall was finished, and the feral Glaswegian survivors are militant cannibals, which manages to top George Miller’s post-apocalyptic crazies). Though I was pleased to see Marshall had actually pulled off some impressively constructed setpieces, it was not enough to salvage it. I was ready to consign it to the dustbin, especially when the “homages” were as in-your-face as this graphic.


And then a funny thing happened. First, cannibal leader Sol whips his followers into a frenzy by dancing to Good Thing by Fine Young Cannibals. Then he joins in a ska-beat can-can with a group of kilt-wearing male dancers, which is all a lead-up to the act of cooking Sean Pertwee (his appearance, seemingly a prerequisite in all British films, is mercifully short), and feeds the masses who are all waving paper plates in the air (coloured red, white and blue; surely a satirical dig at the Union Jack). It was exactly what you would expect from a post-apocalyptic action film, being both morbid and absurd, but it was also quirky. Movies of this type are often sledge-hammer subtle, but this was sneaking in odd visual details that made the experience even sillier.


Not long after that, while being chased by a tooled-out coach called the Beelzebus, Shakespearean actor Adrian Lester exhorts his co-escapee to “leg it!”, and Sol berates his hapless minions by calling them “fucking numpties”. You don’t get that in US actioners. Best of all, neither phrase felt out of place. Usually when UK movies try to pull off action, they end up snarling American phrases with inept sincerity despite the cultural inappropriateness of the lines (worst example ever; Alien 3), rendering their machismo unintentionally comedic. Here Marshall just uses British phrases, and they’re the right kind of funny while being perfectly appropriate. Why has no one else done this before?


It was as if Doomsday suddenly clicked into place. Thinking back to the start of the movie I realised that what had seemed so derivative was a clever play on the natural antagonism between Scots and Englanders, and “the thorny issue of devolution”, with Hadrian’s Wall rebuilt as a 35ft high deathtrap. It’s as if the only way devolution could ever happen with the backing of the English government would be as an act of hostile self-preservation, consigning Scotland to the dustbin of history, the sting in the tail being that England becomes a global pariah into the bargain. Certainly it could be read as a critique of the north/south divide, with both Scotland and London suffering at the hands of a Geordie film director.


It struck me as a funny choice when I saw it, but only because I was under the mistaken impression Marshall was Scottish. Now I know he was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, I’m amazed at the size of his balls. Apparently some Scottish commentators are offended by the suggestion that Scots would become anarchic cannibal thugs in that situation, but seriously, if being isolated from the world as approximately 90% of the population dies of an agonising and grisly viral outbreak, all while being denied medical help, power, and sanitation by an uncaring and selfish English bureaucracy, doesn’t make the surviving populace become a crazed band of anarchic cannibal thugs, then nothing will.


Not only that, but Marshall is quite happy to take the tropes of the post-apocalyptic action genre and either reclaim it for Britain or introduce previously unused British iconography. The feral Glaswegians may look like the post-apocalyptic marauders of George Miller’s Mad Max movies, but those marauders were inspired by the punk fashions of early 80s Britain. The assault on the armoured vehicles might be heavily influenced by Aliens, but that movie was filmed in England, had a crew that was almost entirely English, and was the sequel to a film directed by a Brit.


Later on, our protagonists hook up with a Will-Scarlet style scavenger, prior to travelling through an underground military base in an echo of the trek through the Mines of Moria (Lord of the Rings was, of course, written by an Englishman, though one born in South Africa, which is, coincidentally, where a lot of Doomsday was filmed).


Upon leaving that “mine”, they are ambushed by knights on horseback, which was apparently the image that inspired Marshall to make the film.


They are taken to a castle ruled by Malcolm McDowell in full-on Sheriff of Nottingham mode, and policed by a Guy of Gisborne clone. Eden Sinclair is made to do gladiatorial combat with an enormous warrior, with sackcloth-wearing peasants baying for her blood. It was at this point that I realised resistance was futile. It was not just a proper schlock-action movie, but was also the first British-to-the-bone schlock-action movie I have seen.


The movie ends with a Mad Max homage that sidesteps any technical limitations or budgetary restrictions by being as silly and exaggerated as possible. That the cars are obviously travelling at 5mph matters not a jot; heads fly, cars explode, and blood gushes. It’s a hugely entertaining scene. Following that we get more homages to Escape From New York, though the very final scene owes as much to the end of Chronicles of Riddick and The Descent. Despite the overlong wrap-up (potentially setting up a sequel), it was rather pleasing, and especially after the trauma inflicted by reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it was great to kick back with a post-apocalyptic film that showed how much anarchic fun you could have driving a Bentley (another British icon) while being chased by cannibals. Kudos to McCarthy for illuminating the human condition and whatever, but eating humans and dismembering bodies can be fun too.


Though I was impressed by Marshall’s handling of the action, and his ambition to fill a movie with as much referential iconography as possible, what pleased me most was his handling of tone. Doomsday strikes a perfect balance between earnest machismo, hysterical action, and pitch-black humour, just like the movies it pays homage to. The actors all treat the subject matter with deadly seriousness, never winking at the camera that it is all nonsense, with humour coming from gore or little touches of absurdity (I especially liked the throwaway shot of a medieval archer lazily chewing gum). I’m glad to say that that unironic acting approach is becoming commonplace, as filmmakers realise that, as I said regarding Hot Fuzz earlier, if you play something straight, it’s far more effective than winking at the audience.


That said, he might have made a mistake with the lead character, who is so stoic as to barely register. Rhona Mitra is no one’s idea of a screen icon, despite her striking looks, and the blankness of her performance might have seemed like a good idea at first, but ends up leaving a hole in the middle of the movie where a character should be. Marshall may have been inspired by the action icons of his youth, but though they are often impassive, there’s more going on there.


Snake Plissken, the most obvious inspiration, might be an amoral hardass with a wicked cool eyepatch, but Kurt Russell is incapable of removing his natural charm, and so Snake is lovable despite (or because of) his cynical and cruel nature. Max Rockatansky is even more stone-faced, but he is haunted and tragic, the first in a long line of tortured, messianic characters to be played by Gibson. Ellen Ripley also has her tough guy moments, but she also has vulnerability as well as its emotionally conjoined twin, terrifying ruthlessness.


Eden Sinclair has none of those things. She’s grumpy, and she’ll kill you if you get in her way. Marshall has tried to make the character more compelling (she has flashes of temper when things don’t go her way, for example), and wisely keeps the wisecracking to a minimum, but there’s little going on. Her casting isn’t a disaster, though. If her fight training looks like it wasn’t completed (she’s not the most convincing brawler), she has a physical presence that works perfectly. The definition on her arms puts my sludgy “guns” to shame. Compare her to the sylph-like Milla Jovovich, the go-to gal for lead action femme in shoddy genre shit like the piss-poor Resident Evil movies. Mitra is far more effective as a bruiser than her. Shame Doomsday‘s poor box office will almost certainly put a stop to any franchise dreams Marshall had. Though Eden disappointed, there is room for improvement, especially considering where she ends up.


Luckily, if Mitra is not the ideal action heroine, she is backed up by many other entertaining performances. Bob Hoskins, as her only real ally, is Britain’s Ol’ Dependable. He has a shtick, but it’s a great one, and I’ve been guilty of taking him for granted in the past. Just a couple of weeks ago Canyon finally acquiesced after much annoying prodding and watched Louis Leterrier’s Unleashed (aka Danny The Dog) with me, and it struck me just how much fun Hoskins can be when he sinks his teeth into a role. He was despicably evil yet human in that, and lovable and sad in this. Smart casting from Marshall.


Also spot on is Adrian Lester as Sgt. Norton. Seeing the respectable Lester running around with body armour and roundhouse-kicking bad guys in the head was huge fun. It’s an underwritten role, and most actors would have had trouble making anything of it, but with Lester adding humanity and heft to the part, he supplies the audience empathy that Mitra cannot. As a result, the movie suffers when he’s not on screen. It’s not a killing blow, but it’s noteworthy.


While the heroic side of the cast is a bit unbalanced, the villains are terrific. Alexander Siddig is amusingly bland and oily as a beardy Blairite PM, with a granite-faced second in command played with frightening intensity by David O’Hara. His quiet amoral persona is the tonal opposite of Craig Conway’s Sol, who shrieks and rages and chews all the scenery like a Scottish Vernon Wells, but much closer to the imperious (and obviously insane) Kane, the Colonel Kurtz-like faux-king played by McDowell in sneer-mode.


It’s probably fair to say that all of these characters are exactly as you would expect them to be, but getting serious actors to play them mitigates any charges of unoriginality that can be levelled at Marshall. Even as cliches, there is life in them. Perhaps Babylon A.D. would have benefited from more colourful villains. Instead we get Charlotte Rampling being all confusing and Mark Strong hiding his evilness behind his wig. I’m sure Kassovitz would say that Manichean good/bad dichotomies are not his style, but my God how much a film is enlivened by some shouty villains.


Technically the movie is impressive as well, even on a small budget. Sam McCurdy’s photography is clear, colourful and varied, capturing the carnage with enough clarity to aid in comprehension. This sounds like faint praise, but it’s a rarity to see action photography so dedicated to communicating what the hell is going on. McCurdy’s work is a breath of fresh air, and is worthy of emulation by other directors. He films the battering of many many talented stuntmen with great skill.


Simon Bowles’ production design (and that of the entire crew) is wonderful, turning Glasgow into a desolate, overgrown wilderness that echoes New York in I Am Legend. Praise also to the effects teams Double Negative, Framestore-CFC and The Senate VFX, who create some lovely matte shots that give the movie an epic feel.


I’m getting all emotional here. You can argue that Doomsday should be considered nothing more than an exploitative rehash of better movies, or you could be generous and say Marshall is trying to reclaim these films from the 80s and remake them for a new generation, paying full tribute to their gleefully shlocky nature. It’s a matter of taste, I guess. I expected to be underwhelmed, but even if the dialogue is tin-eared, and even if the lead performance is forgettable, and even if the editing needed to be toned down a lot, the exuberant embrace of the material by everyone involved completely won me over, as did the gratuitous violence. I got all nostalgic by the end, which was surely Marshall’s intention. I’d be lying and crazy if I said it was a total success, but for the most part it is just the ticket, especially after being soul-maimed by McCarthy. Recommended, then, as long as you are likely to laugh at decapitations, well-timed explosions, and crazy clashes of genres instead of actual jokes.

The Mist Is Finally Coming To The UK, But Oobleck Is Already Here

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I can’t believe it’s almost here at last; Frank Darabont’s grueling, nasty, stunning horror classic The Mist is finally coming to UK cinemas, probably on a small release, and almost certainly as a sop to the later DVD release, which should see its reputation grow just as The Shawshank Redemption did (though, of course, for different reasons). I’m so glad it’s getting a release at last (it opens on the fourth of July), as I feel like a crazy person raving about it when most people in the UK don’t even realise it exists.


A quick look at the foreign box office shows we’re one of the last countries to get it, which is nothing new, though I appreciate this is a different case than usual. With such a restricted budget it’s been released gradually, and I can imagine a lot of US prints have been recycled and shipped around to keep costs down. That’s shrewd, and also helps build that reputation as word gets out about it. There is no way a typical wide release onslaught would generate “boffo” box office for this film. You have to let the audience come to it. Much as I rail against the Weinsteins and their bully tactics, they’ve got the release of this absolutely right. It’s a tough sell, one of the toughest ever, but it will eventually get the praise and love it deserves. Hell, it’s already profitable (currently a $50m taking off an $18m investment; not bad), and will only become more notorious, more admired.

I urge anyone who wanders across this blog (and all those who read regularly) to seek the movie out. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but it’s well worth your attention. Canyon and I made a special effort to see it in the States last year, and it affected us profoundly. A recent second viewing, this time of the excellent US DVD release, confirmed my suspicions that it is a horror classic, though Canyon’s reservations about the controversial ending grew. I agree with her suspicion of it, but on a gut level I still love it (apologies for not going into what happens, but I don’t want to spoil it even though it’s technically been available for a while).


Even if you forget about the ending (which is surely impossible), the rest of the movie is horrific and moving. It expertly ratchets up the emotion, mostly without even showing any monsters. The opening half an hour is a masterclass in generating tension, something I’ve only seen done really well a handful of times this century (I’d put Neil Marshall’s The Descent and Balaguero/Plaza’s [Rec] in that short list). I got misty eyed watching it, remembering the brilliantly directed opening scenes of John Carpenter’s The Fog, which expertly crank up the fear using stillness and shadow (even if it falls apart later, I still think the first hour justifies a reappraisal of it).

Of course, the horror is not in the mist itself, but in the shop, as irrationality holds sway and turns good people crazy, driving them to murder and insanity. Though I have begun to rail against Guardian journalist John Patterson’s obsession with political allegory in movies (he seems to think the primary purpose of art is to make glib comments about current affairs that will eventually fade from memory and date the movie), he makes some good points about The Mist in this interview with Frank Darabont, and even gets in a mention of the similarities to the thoroughly entertaining 1988 remake of The Blob, directed by Chuck “Charles” Russell and co-written with Darabont. And yes, I appreciate that I am putting my irritation with Patterson to one side just because he is giving a shout-out to a movie I love, but then that’s the kind of passion The Mist inspires. If you go to that page, check out Phelim O’Neill’s comments about the great Drew Struzan. I also have trouble with O’Neill’s judgements on occasion, but it’s all forgiven now. Wow, this article made me almost love the Guardian like I used to.


So yes, a low-on-content blog post, but I feel it necessary to proselytise on behalf of Mr. Darabont and his bleak, bleak vision. I urge everyone to see it the first chance they get, but take some SSRIs with them, because it will make you despair. In a good way! Imagine a 50s monster movie as directed by Professor Richard Dawkins, except ten times scarier, and featuring some top angsty acting from Thomas “Homeless Dad” Jane (with fine support from Toby Jones, Andre Braugher, Jeffrey DeMunn, William Sadler, Frances Sternhagen, and the astonishing Marcia Gay Harden).

Anyway, speaking of The Blob (which also featured DeMunn as the doomed sheriff of Blobtown, shocking death of the kinds of character you don’t expect to see die in a movie, and a panicky siege scene that ends in bloody horror), apparently Blobs actually exist, and they have a name. Oobleck!

In the words of the immortal theme for the original Blob, it creeps, and leaps, and glides and slides across the floor. I have become obsessed with Oobleck. And I won’t be properly happy until I have ruined a nice set of speakers with cornstarch and water. I love it so much I’m going to have to use it as a standard of excellence against with all other things will be compared. When experiencing things, this is how I will quantify them; is it as good as Oobleck?


Oobleck is my new favourite deity/non-Newtonian liquid/fourth dimensional apparition. Recognise.