Top 5 films worth another look

Hollywood marketing is akin to being propositioned by a 300-ft hooker - terrifying, magnificent and utterly overwhelming. For those plugged in to the monolithic hype network that fizzes around the interweb and adorns our billboards with gurning celebrities and obnoxious animated gerbils (now in 3D!!), the stream of information moves at such a pace that it's hard to slow down and take stock. After all, it's hard to concentrate when James Cameron's grabbing you by the ear-holes and screaming, "AVATAR! IT'S A GAME CHANGER! NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME AGAIN! NOT EVEN YOUR SHOES! AVATAR!!!"

So here are five movies definitely worth spending a couple of hours with, no matter what you've heard. Some of them were met with lukewarm reviews on release but are worth reassessing; others were simply swept away in the undertow. All I know is that once in a while, it's therapeutic to look back rather than forward for once.

1. REDBELT (2008) - Dir. David Mamet

As a playwright first and foremost, David Mamet has had a patchy history as a writer and director of movies. But he delivered something special last year with Redbelt, a studied look at the world of mixed martial arts and the tension between living a life of physical and mental discipline and entering televised tournament bouts for cold, hard cash. The fight scenes are kinetic and authentic, but it's the underlying philosophical struggle that gives the punches real weight.

2. SUBWAY (1985) - Dir. Luc Besson

For my money, Luc Besson's best film. It's just that no one agrees with me, so apparently my money is worth less than a slap in the chops. Cooler than Leon and smarter than The Fifth Element, Subway is Besson's purest contribution to the cinema du look movement. Christophe Lambert puts in a career-best performance (that's not saying much, admittedly) as Fred, a thief with an utterly obsessive personality, who takes refuge from pursuers in the Paris Metro, which is home to a menagerie of subterranean denizens. This film is hopelessly romantic, painfully idealistic and thrillingly youthful. But, based on past experience, you'll probably disagree with me. You hateful bastards.

3. DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) - Dir. Terence Malick

Well, you can't make a list of misunderstood movies without at least one Malick film, can you? He's also my favourite director and I swear to God I will fight you if you say any different. Days of Heaven is the dreamiest film in a career of dreamy films. Its lack of a focused storyline meant no money and little recognition (apart from a richly-deserved Oscar for Nestor Almendros' awe-inspiring cinematography), but this movie was always going to be too good to make any money. Malick's tale of transient rural labourers in the early 20th century is a masterclass in what movies can do that books can't. Eschewing reams of dialogue and exposition frees the film to tell its story and convey its mood using performance and cinematography. The end result is a poem which doesn't have to resort to anything so clumsy as words. The best kind of poem.

4. ONLY YESTERDAY (1991) - Dir. Isao Takahata

While Hayao Miyazaki continues to (justifiably) garner acclaim with his escapist, fantasy-themed parables, Studio Ghibli's other co-head has created some of the studio's most powerful work too. Takahata's films are more grounded in reality than Miyazaki's and tend to be less visually flashy, but there's always an undercurrent of raw emotion pushing them forward. Only Yesterday follows a directionless 27 year-old as she considers her future and looks back on her childhood. The film serenely exploits the human impulse to recall the purity our youth and mourn how the world has warped us. Only it's nowhere near as much of a bummer as that sounds.




5. SERENITY (2005) - Dir. Joss Whedon

Firefly is pretty high on the list of awesome shows that got cut short before their prime, and it took a feature film continutation to fill that Mal Reynolds-shaped hole in fans' dreary lives. Clearly there wasn't enough of us, however, as the film failed to make back its budget. All I know is that I couldn't convince my girlfriend, or anyone else, to see it with me. I may have just stumbled upon the realisation that Serenity failed commercially because of the crushing social isolation of its fans. Sorry, Joss!

What I can't figure out is why no-one else was interested in seeing it. Serenity is a supremely entertaining sci-fi blockbuster which combines thrilling action scenes with compelling characters and a healthy dose of the funnies. Perhaps it was the perception that you had to have watched Firefly to follow it (which is incorrect; Serenity's story is completely self-contained). In any case it's certainly worth seeing if you missed it; in a just world, this film would have gone on to become a summer tentpole franchise. Particularly gushing superlatives must be thrust at Nathan Fillion's Mal Reynolds, arguably science fiction's best leading man since Han Solo.

Louis CK live review

My review of Louis CK's live set at the Bloomsbury theatre about a month ago has just gone live at Londoners. Make your soul fat with vicariously-experienced amusement by clicking here.

It takes a very funny man or woman to make me slither from my crusty bedsheets and stalk the streets like some mad squid. It turns out that Louis CK is that man or woman.

Zombieland: A (shuffling) step too far

It’s no secret that Hollywood, and by extension the Western world, is in the grip of full-fledged zombie fever (does anyone else like the idea of Spike Lee writing and directing Zombie Fever?). As one of the world’s foremost zombie fetishists, this is a trend I can I absolutely get behind. I’m sometimes even tempted to give this trend a little reach around.

I love zombie movies. I love the slow, creeping threat they represent; I love that they can be hilarious and terrifying at the same time; I love the shambling ones and I love the snarly, sprinty ones. I’m glad the zombie sub-genre has made such an emphatic return since its heyday in the ‘70s, and the likes of 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and a host of zombie-dismembering videogames have done an admirable job of keeping that fetid fire alive.

I reckon the zombie genre’s still got legs, too. Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead comic books are a great read and could provide the basis for a brilliant, brutal HBO series. News is also just breaking that Natalie Portman is set to star in the film version of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a parody novel that splices our favourite face-gnashers into our favourite book that we’ll get around to reading someday, in our own bloody time. That’s exactly the kind of iconoclastic middle finger to the establishment for which zombies make the perfect foil.

However, as with all trends, zombie fever™ does encourage a certain amount of rose-tinted gush-o-vision. We all saw it with Romero’s recent Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead – despite being mostly incoherent rubbish (sentient zombies? Dennis Hopper as an authority figure? Come on!), reviewers at the time displayed a leniency that, looking back in ten years, simply won’t make sense.

The most recent beneficiary of the zombies+camera=awesome formula? This year’s hugely overrated Zombieland. Both Empire and Total Film, two UK publications not usually given to hype-manipulation or excessive giddiness, awarded the film four stars. All over the internet, reviewers happily swapped out their critical faculties for more of an “Ooh, Woody Harrelson and zombies! LOLZ!” approach. Aintitcool’s Quint neatly exemplified this brainless hype-train in the first couple of lines of his Fantastic Fest review: “Basically ZOMBIELAND is Woody Allen and John Wayne paired together in a buddy road trip zombie apocalypse comedy. If you’re not sold you don’t exist to me.”

Zombieland is the anti-Shaun of the Dead, stripping away all the elements that made Edgar Wright’s zom-com such a charming and riveting watch and replacing it with a bland, gutless, emotionally hollow product which reeks of the middle of the road. The film is competently directed and acted, with some amusing slapstick and, admittedly, an extremely fun cameo, but that’s almost all I’ll say for it.

Every element of Zombieland feels like it has been workshopped and pieced together by studio committee, from Harrelson’s character Tallahassee, who is little more than a cipher for all the characteristics that 14 year-olds might think of as cool, down to the absence of any genuine threat posed by the zombies, undoubtedly the film’s most serious misstep. Shaun’s zombies are slow and shambolic but, like cinema’s best zombies, represent a merciless meatgrinder that’ll suck your bones dry if you make one wrong move. Zombieland’s deadheads have been so thoroughly de-fanged that the film loses any dramatic tension, resulting in a neutered experience akin to a zombie videogame that you can’t actually play. All the characters are so blissfully, effortlessly alive (including Tallahassee, who seemed a character practically tailor-made for a heroic death scene) at the end of the movie that you can’t help but feel that the movie’s producers were more interested in protecting a new franchise than creating an involving story.

I could go on and on about this movie’s flaws (oh, the plot contrivances! Why would LA, one of the world’s most densely populated urban areas, be entirely empty after a zombie holocaust? Answer: because several million zombies would be inconvenient for the characters), but I have to end this at some point. Suffice to say, zombie fever™ is one of the best pandemics to sweep the world in years, but it’s still a trend, and trends need to be carefully monitored or we’ll all end up indoctrinated and no better than...well, you know.

Mickey Rourke makes my motherfuckin' day

By all accounts Rogue Warrior is a dreadful piece of gaming detritus, a rotten barnacle hanging limply on to gaming's gleaming yacht. But, you know what they say about silver linings...

They say "nighty night, you sweet piece of shit", apparently. Mickey Rourke stars in the game as Dick Marcinko, a frankly rabid capitalist murderface who, terrifyingly, is based on a real-life Cold Warrior. For the end credits, the development team stitched together some of his lines in the game and set it to some jazzy muzak, in what will undoubtedly become the highlight of the game. Yeah, you know you're in trouble when the game's highlight occurs during the credits.

Still, any rap that features the line "I own your fuckin' soul, you fuckin' commie bitch" gets two thumbs up from me. And now you can listen to it without having to slog through the game!

Follow this link to 1UP for the track in all its glory. As Dick Marcinko would say, "there's gonna be fuckin' asses bleeding all over the place". Indeed.

IN DEFENCE OF: Modern Warfare 2's brief campaign

This is the first of a regular(ish) series of articles defending the unfairly maligned across all forms of entertainment. The web tends to be so rammed with relentless, specious, and often downright delusional negativity that it’s high time for a healthy dose of specious, delusional positivity. Like TV psychics, except without quite as much outright fraud and exploitation of the desperate and thick.

Now, Modern Warfare 2 might seem like an odd first choice. After all, the game has been roundly praised by critics and with the game selling 4.7 million copies in the first 24 hours, gamers have clearly been voting with their feet like a nest of drug-addled millipedes.

But amongst all the glowing reviews, critics and forum posters have been expressing bitter disappointment with the brevity and incoherence of the single-player campaign. Many players and games writers have noted that the story doesn’t match up to the standards set by the first Modern Warfare. Game site Boomtown even described the single-player section of the game as ‘insultingly short’, as if the game’s developers had personally broken into the reviewer’s home and poked him in the eye with a giant middle finger.

Clearly, the latest instalment in the Call of Duty franchise isn’t going to be winning any awards for innovative storytelling. The story, viewed in isolation, is a malnourished husk. The overarching plot exists purely as an excuse to stitch together the game’s scenarios. For the most part, players are so busy dodging flaming helicopters falling out of the sky or separating Russian Ultranationalists from their guts that they’re only foggily aware of the wider context of their actions. That airport scene was based on a good idea, but it was so half-baked and disconnected from the main plot that it ended up being an opportunity wasted.

So, we’ll leave the interactive storytelling to Valve, Naughty Dog, Bioware and all the other egg-heads who love to spin a yarn and do it so well. What Modern Warfare 2’s campaign has is drama, and it has it in spades. While we’re not bothered exactly why we’re dishing out all this gunishment, we’re sure as hell going to remember what it felt like tearing up Washington DC from the side of a chopper, or fighting through the bowels of a remote Russian gulag to rescue a grizzled old bastard who you might just remember, or leaping a gorge in a goddamn skidoo. Both Modern Warfare games are drenched in the kind of muscle-bound melodrama that’ll put fire in your eyes and sweat on your balls.

I get the feeling that a certain amount of selective memory is at play here. When critics say that MW2’s story doesn’t meet the first game’s standards, to what are they referring, exactly? Does anyone else remember what the overarching plot was in the first Modern Warfare? All I remember is the great moments: the AC-130; the nuclear detonation; black ops in the abandoned city of Pripyat. Just like MW2, the focus was on big, dramatic moments, and to retrospectively paint Modern Warfare as a superb example of interactive narrative which its sequel failed to match is simply deluded.

Critics moaning about the relative shortness of the campaign (about 5-6 hours for a playthrough on Normal or Hardened, by my count) are also failing to grasp MW2’s structure. On booting the game up, the first menu asks the player to choose between three modes: single-player, spec ops and multiplayer. No single mode is given centre stage, and that’s the point. Infinity Ward clearly spent as much time refining the co-op and competitive multiplayer aspects of the game as they did creating the story, so to judge the campaign as if it was the game’s undisputed centrepiece, as the Boomtown review does, is to judge it on the wrong terms. Sure, I’ll be disappointed if Mass Effect 2 or Heavy Rain turn out to be five-hour experiences, but Modern Warfare 2 is unmistakably presented as a three-tiered treasure trove of content, of which the campaign is but one part. Over a month after the game’s release, I’ve bought no other game. That’s because online multiplayer has taken precedence over sleeping, leaving my flat, or even basic hygiene standards at this point. It’ll probably be at least six more months before I get this perfectly-honed multiplayer out of my system. To call this game a rip-off would be like kicking a puppy to death for not being able to do a hand-stand. It makes no sense.

Anyway, rant over and out. Until next time, stay frosty and I’ll see you online.

Londoners: custom designed for your eyes and brain

Spawned from the nubile young minds of a roving gang of hawk-eyed city dwellers, Londoners is an arts and culture website with one eye on the clear stars and one eye on the sticky pavement.

We've got news, reviews and features concerning London life and all its precious minerals. I write fairly regularly on the site, including my habitual nerd-blog, Geekazoid!.

Please explore the site and let me know what you think. Click here for my most recent Geekazoid! post; that should get you started.

BBC music reviews

I recently started contributing to the BBC's new, revamped music site. It's still early days, but here are the links to the two reviews I have written for them so far.

For a review of Pete Molinari's reissued debut album, during which he does his very best Bob Dylan impression, click here.

I reviewed another reissued debut album, Max Richter's decidedly magnificent Memoryhouse. Fans of neoclassical music, yeah both of you, click here.

A tidy introduction

Welcome to Escape Artist's very first post! Come in, come in, make yourself comfy.

I created this blog for two reasons. The first is as an extra outlet for my uncontrollable urge to spout nonsense, specifically on subjects relating to music, film, videogames and other escapist activities which have provided a sliver of justification for my existence thus far.

The second reason is to create a neat and brutally-monitored hub linking to my scrawls all over the web. I help run a culture website called Londoners, which I'll be linking to fairly religiously (http://www.london-ers.com). I'll also be linking to any other pieces I write elsewhere, because for God's sake someone's got to read them, and it might as well be you.

I'm going to try to update the site with news, reviews and whimsical prose every day, so be sure to check back regularly if this brand of giddy hogwash sounds like your thing.