Highlander: Director's Cut

Director: Russel Mulcahy
Writers: Gregory Widen, Peter Bellwood, Larry Ferguson
Released: 1986
Cast: Christopher Lambert, Clancy Brown, Roxanne Hart, Sean Connery, Beatie Edney

Futurama: Bender's Game

Director: Dwayne Carey-Hill
Writers: Michael Rowe, Patric Verrone
Released: 2008
Cast: Billy West, Katey Sagal, John Di Maggio, Tress MacNielle, Maurice LaMarche, Phil LaMarr, Lauren Tom, David Herman, Kath Soucie, Frank Welker

NIKKI says:
Okay, that's better. I enjoyed this one a whole lot more than the giant pink thing in the last Futurama movie. This one was relentless. It moved quickly and stayed on course and was just the right amount of ridiculous for 90 minutes. I liked it. I especially liked Bender's absession with Dungeons and Dragons and his quest for an active imagination.

"When will people learn that playing "Dungeons and Dragons" doesn't make you cool!"

3/5

Dellamorte Dellamore

Director: Michele Soavi
Writer: Gianni Romoli
Released: 1994
Cast: Rupert Everett, Anna Falchi, François Hadji-Lazaro, Mickey Knox

STEVE says: Sorry, did I say things could only go downhill after The Exorcist? My mistake. I didn't anticipate Dellamorte Dellamore being our second film.

Released in the States as Cemetery Man in 1996, I gave it a miss because the ads just made it look silly, and even back then I was sick to death of horror comedies. Five years later, my friend M'ike coerced me into watching his imported copy of the original Dellamorte cut, and I'll never be able to repay him. It was so incredible, so beautiful, so fucking amazing, I sat through the credits, rewound the tape, and watched it again. I watched it again the next day, and again the day after that, never tiring of it, never ceasing to find it enthralling.

And to this day, I still have no idea what it's really all about. To be honest, I don't want to know. It's like a Rorschach test: different people are going to see different things. But Martin Scorsese reckons it's one of the best Italian films of the 1990s, and if Marty likes it, I feel pretty secure in rating it as I do.

4.5/5

Twilight Zone: The Movie, dir. John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante & George Miller (1983)

NIKKI says:
Somehow, I'd never seen this movie. But then, I guess I'd not seen that many classic sci-fi flicks before meeting Steve. What was I doing with my time? Oh yeah, I was watching The Breakfast Club again.

This one didn't really do it for me. Apart from the final segment, directed by George Miller, about the gremlin on the plane wing, I can pretty much take or leave the rest. In fact, I think I'll take Joe Dante's and pretty much just leave Spielberg's and Landis's. I thought the ideas in Landis's were interesting, about the bigot forced to endure damnation at the hands of Nazi extremists, American soldiers in Vietnam, and the Ku Klux Klan. But his brief time with each group really doesn't teach him anything. He'd already be fearful that he'd slipped into an alternate reality, so the specifics of those realities aren't really going to alert him to his bigotry. So, it becomes a bit fanciful rather than meaningful. I would have made him prejudiced against one group, and then perhaps the story could have focused on that. The way it is, it's a hodge-podge of ideas that trivializes, in a way, prejudice and bigotry.

The Spielberg story was too whimsical for me. It reminded me of the more cloying Amazing Stories episodes, where magic is at the hands of everything. Dante's was better, but ran on too long, and didn't explain enough about what was going on. Not that I suppose a Twilight Zone episode needs to explain itself, but I didn't get a sense of overall purpose beyond "be careful what you wish for", which is bor-ring. And Steve is right that some of it was more over the top than it needed to be.

But the gremlin on the wing is just perfect. Scary and freaky, with a performance from John Lithgow that could go over the top, but doesn't. And the gremlin is damn scary. The shots outside the plane are so realistic. It's something else that makes me never want to fly again. If only they could have extended that scene maybe 80 minutes -- that would have been a movie!

2.5/5

Re-Cycle (aka. Gwai wik), dir. Pang Brothers (2006)

NIKKI says:
So, Oxide Pang says it's not an anti-abortion film. And while that makes me feel a bit better about the whole experience, I don't know if he's entirely telling the truth.

Consider: Angelica Lee runs through a giant red blubber hole full of aborted fetuses that she's told are "discarded" things along the same lines as her childhood toys. She is informed of this by a little girl who reveals herself to be Angelica's aborted baby. "It's not that I didn't love you," Angelica says to the little girl, holding her, and crying. And she resists following up that thought, but we're aware by this stage of the danger of discarding things.

The whole movie about the place things go when casually tossed aside. Is it irresponsible of the Pangs to compare childhood toys with aborted fetuses? The movie is about a woman who is forced to confront the supernatural world where her discarded things reside -- most prominently, her discarded story ideas. She's a novelist suffering writer's block brought on by the pressures of writing another blockbuster. She's not in the best frame of mind to create, and what she does write, she invariably deletes or tosses into her wastepaper basket. The basket begins to stir, and she starts seeing weird things like dark figures and a broken elevator.

Soon, she's in a fantasy world where dead bodies hang in trees and deformed human figures squirm, twitch and unnaturally bend, following her, stalking her. She must get to the a place called the Transit for safety, and must venture through this land of discarded things. She meets characters from books she hasn't finished writing, images and ideas left hanging when she's hit the delete key. There's even a giant pyramid of discarded books, from which other books fall and slide -- so many discarded ideas, she could have written hundreds of bestsellers.

The Ideas Hell is a fascinating concept. And that part of the film kept me interested. As a non-practicing fiction writer myself, I know the hell of ideas conceived and lost, invented and left to languish. I know the horrors of the blank page. I have the repertoire of excuses. And I felt genuinely creeped out at the prospect of my ideas living in me somewhere, waiting for their opportunity to develop and grow.

But is this the same as the babies my body waits to have? I just don't think it is. If Oxide Pang is truthful in that he meant nothing more by the fetus-bubble than simply as a plot device that causes issue for Angelica, then fair enough. But it's the part of the movie that struck me the most. I can't free myself of it. When you choose to say something like that in your movie, you have to be aware of the wider effects. It goes beyond story telling and starts to become something else. Too sensitive? Maybe. Or maybe I just wanted my Pang movie to feature Angelica running from ghosts and bloody things, and not charging headlong into them.

It's an interesting idea. It's provocative, and absolutely beautiful to watch. It, too, makes me want to get some ideas out of my head, lest they fester and mould and start twitching.

2.5/5

STEVE says:
After watching the piss-weak remake of The Eye earlier this week, I was excited - nay, burning to see another horror movie from the Pang Brothers.

This, however, wasn't it.

Re-Cycle starts out as a conventional HK-horror flick - young female writer, haunted by visions, etc. - but then takes a quick, unexpected turn into the land of Dark Fantasy. There were elements of horror all the way through, but elements don't make the whole, and I was left with a bit of cinematic whiplash, which is maybe why I didn't get into this one so much.

The concept was great - the writer finds herself in the Land of the Discarded, confronted with things from her past ranging from toys and books she had as a child to characters from her own unfinished stories and her own aborted daughter - but it got very heavy in the end, almost a Pro-Life PSA, which, having been duped once already by the Horror/Dark Fantasy bait-and-switch, I wasn't at all into.

2.5/5

The Good Night, dir. Jake Paltrow (2007)

NIKKI says:

Sometimes I wish that you could just hit the sack and never wake up. If your favorite song never ended, or your best book never closed, if the emotions mustered from these things would just go on and on, who wouldn't want to stay asleep? The guy who discovers that perpetual dream, he's my man.

There are some really truthful moments in this film, particularly between Gary and Dora, as they hit the wall in their life together that reveals to each just how boring and selfish the other can be. Dora responds by taking some time away from the relationship. Gary responds by trying to find a way to permanently live inside his dreams where the perfect woman waits to arouse him every time he falls asleep.

Their diverging paths are the best thing about this movie, which is essentially an absurdist take on reality, living life to the fullest, and recognising the good around us.

The movie was written and directed by Gwyneth's brother, Jake Paltrow, and if this is anything to go by, he's a writer with some strange and interesting ideas. There's a lot of artistry in this film, a lot of small and clever details that strengthen character and plot development. The Danny DeVito character is particularly affecting, especially near the end of the film when his true existence is revealed to Gary. Paltrow has a great ability to create complete characters, with idiosyncrasies and nuanced behaviour. This could have been a film that was all ideas, instead it's a full story about people at personal crossroads who go to extreme lengths to recapture the meaning in their lives.

I don't know if I agreed with the ending, but it definitely made me think about dreams and reality, and how each ultimately affects the other.

3/5

Penelope, dir. Mark Palansky (2006)

NIKKI says:
And the movie about the girl with the pig nose goes straight into my Top 5 for the year. It even makes me kind of mad that an overly-whimsical, bite-less, so-called subversive picture like Enchanted should be the hottest thing on the rental wall this month when this movie exists.

Penelope is a colourful, beautiful mix of fantasy and comedy, a fairytale with an edge. I expected something cute, but I just adored everything about this movie. The story is great, the actors are sensational, the production design is like nothing I've ever seen before, and the vibes the movie gives off just make you feel so good. I was fully wrapped up in it, and will be raving about it forever.

The stand-out things for me were:

1. James McAvoy's brilliant American accent.
2. The New York-or-London guessing game the movie plays, with its royal characters and old-timey buildings, set in and around a sprawling city populated with Americans.
3. Penelope's make-up -- it looked so real, it was her normal face that looked wrong.
4. Christina Ricci's eyes -- I challenge anyone not to completely love her after this movie. She's just a little fairytale princess, with the most expressive face. You can just tell this role means a lot to her -- she's so into it, and seems to really be this person, with these insecurities.
5. Reese Witherspoon NOT annoying me. I have a hard time with her in most movies, but here she was great. And I loved her hair.
6. Peter Dinklage getting hit in the face with a car door. He is so funny in this movie.
7. The colours -- everything in red and green and purple. It's SO beautiful. It's like you're in a picture-book.
8. The Joby Talbot music -- all the songs are great, especially Joby's, and the final one by James Greenspun.
9. Ronni Ancona from The Sketch Show in a real movie?! Awesome.
10. The overall theme of self-acceptance, which just had me wanting to cry every time they showed poor Penelope locked in her room, away from the world.
11. Penelope's purple coat.

Just a great movie. Absolutely loved it. Everyone should see it.

5/5

Angel-A, dir. Luc Besson (2005)

NIKKI says:
I haven't seen Wings of Desire, which this apparently borrows from in terms of theme and style. Had I seen that film, my perceptions of this one might have been different. In any case, I enjoyed Besson's little fable, and while I realise Angela's eventual means of making Andre believe in himself are a little simplistic, I still found it moving.

The style, too, adds much. What a beautiful picture to watch. The Parisian streets, the landmarks, the quadrangles overlooked by the Eiffel Tower, the bridges. I think Angela comments several times in the film just how beautiful Paris is, and at the end, when she's rising above this gorgeous backdrop, in full flight, it's even more exquisite, with this heavenly feel.

I remember reading that Angela's "job" was supposed to be some great secret. As if knowing she was an angel would ruin the thing like finding out Bruce Willis was actually dead the whole time. I don't think that's true. You'd have to be quite the simpleton not to see what was going on. She shows up out of nowhere, she's absolutely stunning, her name is ANGELa, and, at one point, she stands up against a statue, the statue's cement wings protruding up as though out of her back. It's a brilliant shot, and purposely reminding you this woman is otherworldly.

So, visually it's brilliant. The story is funny and touching, and a tiny bit inspirational. I thought the end was a bit too easy. I think Andre should have taken Angela's advice and gone off to live his life. But the movie chooses a different fate for him. If only what happens to him could happen to us all. Suicide might be eradicated, that's for sure.

3/5