Review: Submarine

I guess the surface-level Wes Anderson comparisons were inevitable. A cast of highly literate outcasts? Check. Dry, understated dialogue? Check. Use of stylish title screens to separate acts? Check. If you'd never seen Submarine, Richard Ayoade's big screen debut, you might assume that all the components were in place for a cynical exercise in indie tweeism.

You'd be wrong, though. While Ayoade has clearly been sharing some of Anderson's cinematic syringes, Submarine bobs along to its own ebbs and eddies, seemingly informed as much by books as by other films (not least Joe Dunthorpe's novel, on which the movie is based). Set in Swansea, the film follows hyper-obsessive teenage misfit Oliver Tate as he attempts to woo his red-coated, pyromaniac femme fatale of a classmate Jordana Bevan and takes it upon himself to save the failing marriage of his stately, quietly desperate parents.

Ayoade, having gained recognition through acting in great TV comedies like The IT Crowd, The Mighty Boosh and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (which he also co-wrote and directed), has settled snugly into the bigger boots of feature film direction. Despite his having graduated from TV work and music videos, there's no hint of the small screen anywhere in Submarine.

The film's visual style is well-defined and stunningly executed, Ayoade capturing the hazy essence of teenage summer holidays with lovingly crafted sunset shots of kids rattling around empty industrial estates and Swansea beaches. But far from Wes Anderson's immaculately poised sequences, Ayoade's camera often breaks away from the widescreen reverie to follow the film's characters by hand, imbuing many sequences with a vibrancy and dynamism that keeps the film from feeling too detached.

Submarine's enviable aesthetics are matched by an attention to character that provides the drive for an otherwise laconic narrative. Oliver's bookishness and pretensions to high culture hide an extreme social ineptitude that borders on disability. In fact, the character often brought to mind Mark Haddon's 2003 book about a child with Asperger's Syndrome The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in his inability to relate to the world around him and his attempts to repair complex problems with simplistic solutions. Oliver's faking of love letters between his parents and telling his mother, earnestly, with hand on shoulder, that his dad "still wants to make love to you" provides some of the film's comedic highlights. Similarly, his relentless shadowing of Graham Purvis, a sleazy self-help guru (seriously, how useful are sleazy self-help gurus for comedy?) and old flame of his mother's, draws out the character's extremities without seeming contrived.

Oliver's personality disorders make for a satisfying burgeoning relationship with his confident, regal crush Jordana, as he struggles to come to terms with the fact that real-life relationships don't sync up with the grand fantasies he has borrowed from novels and movies. Still, while Oliver and Jordana's relationship faces real-life knocks and compromises, it's brimming with an affecting, old-fashioned romanticism that's primarily concerned with the unique sentiment of young love, no matter how short-lived it's destined to be.

Although Oliver's relationship with his parents, who have resigned themselves to a joyless marriage of barely masked irritation, provides the film's most socially realistic moments, it doesn't feel jarring. Viewing the world almost exclusively through the bizarre kaleidoscope that is Oliver's perspective has a unifying effect on the scenes. Even when the film is exploring depression and despondency (which Oliver's dad likens to being underwater - water being a theme that runs through the film from its title to its final scene), there's always a winning surrealism at work that regularly draws humour from the most unlikely situations.

Impressive performances abound. Craig Roberts's portrayal of Oliver is the standout - Roberts displays an incredible gift for comic timing as well as a rock-solid grasp of character, and carries the film effortlessly. Yasmin Paige imbues Jordana with a teenage mystery that makes it easy to understand why Oliver has fallen under her spell, and a frostiness that gives her scenes with Roberts a sharp edge. Paddy Considine ably performs as the film's comedic powerhouse, making Graham Purvis as garish and unappealing as the ridiculous van he drives, while Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor wring the drama from their understated performances as Oliver's parents.

That Submarine mixes touching human drama with genuine hilarity with such precision and expertise speaks to its director's confidence on the big screen. Just like Edgar Wright before him, Ayoade has made the transition from TV to the silver screen with his own style and a sensibility that's both distinctly British and unapologetically cinematic.

The mathematics of reviewing II: taking the I out of criticism

The rise of the internet has changed criticism forever. The online world detonated the media landscape once dominated by the likes of the NME, Melody Maker and Rolling Stone, scattering its millions of pieces to settle in unoccupied areas of cyberspace. While magazines and newspaper supplements continue to exert some influence on more traditional readers, our attention has now been split among the thousands of websites and blogs that vie to capture our eyeballs for a few moments before they flit off to find another moment of entertainment in our infinite playground.

In many ways this change is a positive one. Access to new music, movie trailers or gameplay footage is now a mere mouse-click away. Gone are the days of suffering through two hours of inane drivel and recycled bullshit on the radio before getting to the one song premiere that was promised. If we've just read an online review of an album or film that sounds interesting, it has never been easier to instantly check out trailers, interviews or songs for ourselves, usually without even having to switch sites. Through sites like Pitchfork, Drowned in Sound, Ain't It Cool News, IGN and streaming services like SoundCloud and Spotify, the world is at our fingertips.

One of the only drawbacks to democratising arts writing is the effect it tends to have on reviews and comments online. Although there are many sites that run really excellent reviews within their fields, the inevitable byproduct of creating a never-ending space where anyone can pick up a loudspeaker is an awful lot of white noise. Garbled, barely comprehensible, egocentric white noise.

Of course, in an environment that's essentially made up of millions of people screaming into the abyss, the natural tendency is to focus on the self. This can have strange and insulating repercussions for our sense of perspective. What separates good reviews from the never-ending waterfall of consciousness is the ability to think outside of the self, to some extent make the self invisible.

I'm not talking about removing "I"s and "me"s and all that stuff we were trained out of when writing essays in school or university. I think one of the things that makes a great review is understanding that an album, movie or game exists to transmit the vision of whoever created it, and it should be judged based on the degree to which it succeeds in carrying out that vision. A piece of art doesn't exist solely to interact positively with its audience, and good reviewers should understand that an album or film not eliciting a personal response doesn't necessarily mean that it didn't succeed at what it set out to do (although it often does).

Stepping outside of one's own perspective to measure the successes and failures of a film, for example, immediately marks a review out from the frothing rabble of fanboys that plagues the net. Bryan Singer's 2006 movie Superman Returns is an example of a film that has been horrendously mistreated online, despite the generally glowing reception it received on its release.

Fanboys decided that it didn't have enough action to sate the cartoon fantasies playing in their heads and railed like petulant princesses against the fact that it didn't cater to their own visions for the character. Despite not being perfect (the secret child ending overcomplicated the film's message and Kate Bosworth was an inadequate Lois Lane), Superman Returns was hugely successful at translating the classic, innate qualities of America's homespun messiah. It's particularly depressing that the fanboy tantrums managed to soil popular perception of this film to the point where Zack Snyder's upcoming reboot is considered not only necessary, but an opportunity to get the character back to his roots, something Returns had already done spectacularly well.

This is something I always try to keep in mind when reading or writing reviews (with limited success, to be sure). To take this argument to its extreme, there's no point complaining that an album by Fleet Foxes doesn't have enough jungle beats or that an Odd Future mixtape wouldn't be suitable for a dinner party. These are the concerns of the listener, not the album. For a review to justify its name and be more definitive than simple comment, the reviewer has to shake off prejudices and bugbears to make a judgement based on something more universal than just opinion.

Killzone 3 review: looks expensive, feels cheap

This has been a pretty pivotal console generation for first-person shooters. Developers like Infinity Ward, Bungie and DICE have dragged the genre away from its PC roots, tailoring controls for thumbs rather than mouse and keyboard fingers. In the process, shooters have become one of the most recognisable faces of gaming (as we're reminded every time an isolated psychopath decides to turn his high school into a shooting gallery), with the triple-A development costs, and expected profits, skyrocketing.

As a result, the FPS arena has become one dominated by a few platinum-gilded blockbuster franchises (Call of Duty, Halo, Battlefield, Half-Life) and clogged by the chaff of many more that couldn't make back their huge costs and died on the vine. The Killzone franchise, developed by Guerrilla Games and exclusive to the Playstation 3, has probably done well enough to step up to the big boys' table in gaming Valhalla, but for many has never quite lived up to expectations.

Killzone 3 represents Guerrilla's latest attempt to firmly mark out its own spot in the FPS big leagues. The story of a war between the earth-based ISA forces and a horde of militant offworld exiles called the Helghast has reached a head by the third game, with the ISA beating a retreat from an aborted invasion of the Helghast homeworld, leaving the player (Sgt. "Sev" Sevchenko) and a few stragglers marooned on a hostile planet trying to work out how to escape.

Killzone 3 certainly has compelling core mechanics, with the chug of the weaponry feeling satisfying and industrial, and the controls slightly tuned-up after the intentionally sluggish movements of the second game (although, in this day and age, it still feels strange to look down iron sights by clicking the right stick). Enemies are suitably engaging to fight, diving behind cover and reacting to the player's movements to maintain a dynamism that's essential in the modern shooter. So far, so triple-A.

It's almost everything outside of the core combat that falls flat with Killzone 3. The visuals are impressive and speak to the immense amount of time and money that was undoubtedly spent on providing an appropriately high-res (and 3-D if you can afford it, which you can't) experience. But the art behind all the textures and lighting is as dull and featurelessly industrial as a never-ending chamber filled with spanners.

Much was made of the new jungle and snow environments, but the overriding visual tone here is still one of bleak austerity and axle grease, an issue from which Guerrilla now can't escape as they've woven it into the canon of the game. Level design remains the same linear experience as the last games, in that it takes pains to constrict player movement through trenches and corridors rather than find a way to direct gamers while giving the illusion of freedom (Guerrilla could take a few Bungie masterclasses in this regard).

Far more troubling, however, are the downright amateurish elements of the game, from both a technical and a game direction standpoint. The sound design, while mostly excellent when it comes to the beefy clatter of the weapons, regularly suffers in other areas. Cut-scenes occasionally lose their impact because something that should be deafening is bafflingly quiet. The ambient chatter of your regular squad-mate Rico is constantly cut off before the end of sentences.

Game direction is a hugely important part of development, especially in FPS titles that should thrive on total immersion. Here it seems to have been virtually ignored, with plot points and basic rivets in the gameplay seemingly abandoned entirely. I'll give a couple of examples, without spoiling anything (although I'm probably doing a fair job of spoiling this game for you anyway).

After a daring rescue attempt and escape from a snow-capped Helghast fortress, Sev and Rico need to figure out a way of getting away. The game then simply cuts to giving the player control of the two of them speeding away on Helghast vehicles, with no connective tissue provided in between. I don't know if a cutscene was skipped because of a glitch or if time or money constraints forced a scene to be dropped, but it was a jarring moment that entirely broke the game's already faltering spell.

In another instance, a crane that's essential to player progress fails to work, giving the Helghast a chance to attack Sev and Rico from below. After the Helghast attack is held off, it magically fixes itself with no explanation. Don't worry reader, you haven't woken up in 2001. This is just a modern game with moments of 2001 game design. All these issues seem to point to the fact that, despite its blockbuster budget, elements of the game feel rushed and incomplete, propped up so they're just about playable and shoved onto store shelves.

The story also feels like a blast from the past, and a small step backwards from even Killzone 2, not a game revered for its narrative. The protagonist is a painfully dull, transparent cypher. Rico is an irritating military rebel pastiche whose bickering with higher-up Narville (himself a borderline parody of the good commander held back by his own rigidity) quickly descends into broken-record territory. There's a hot chick, because hey, games need hot chicks. Shame they forget to turn her into an actual character.

The premise of a stranded platoon of soldiers trying to co-ordinate a fighting retreat provides a great opportunity to force players onto the back foot with a battle that revolves around survival rather than victory. I envisaged the daring raids, supply line attacks and covert assassinations that would surely come with this kind of mismatched conflict. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes clear that this is a familiar brand of Killzone action (complete with a grand plot to foil and cackling villains), during which you'll feel no more under threat than in the previous games in the series.

Of course, Guerrilla have also crafted some impressive set-pieces, with walking war buildings to destroy, mechs and space ships to pilot and jet packs to get introduced to and barely use again. But for all the game's amazing polygon count, it seems emblematic of everything that's wrong with blockbuster game development when it turns sour. Big bangs, big bucks and a gaping hole in the middle where the personality should be.

This is a single-player review only. Will update if the multiplayer is worth an update.

Smells like team spirit: music's best collaborators

The rock star is the bloated corpse of another musical reality, one where musicians were revered as unto gods, where tales of drug use and casual chauvinism cast their decadent shadow and dimmed the glow of the songs. Yes, the rock star is dead; let us throw rocks at his withered carcass and laugh at ourselves for ever falling in thrall to these idols of pomp and circumstance.

Long live the humble musician. Long live teamwork and creative friendship. Long live fucking and making music babies. Long live music where the concept is the thing, rather than the dude in the skinny jeans who made it. Most of all, long live laying it on really thick for a couple of paragraphs for no real reason at all.

In other words, we should be celebrating the gradual diminishment of the almighty ego from popular music (or at least our kowtowing to such ego). Some amazing music has come to us through unexpected collaborations or musical projects where an artist's cultivated identity has been laid aside. Here are some specialists of double-teaming ideas to create delicious sonic spit-roasts.

Mike Patton (Faith No More; Tomahawk; Fantomas; Mr. Bungle; countless others)

The god-king of restless spirits, Mike Patton might be most famous for lending his elasto-spastic vocal chords to Faith No More after the departure of Chuck Mosely. Patton's performances on FNM albums stretched miraculously from angelic warbling to hacking up chunks of atavistic deathscreech. It's this versatility and enthusiasm for the new that has propelled the post-FNM Patton, skipping spryly from singing Italian pop songs with a 40-piece orchestra (his solo album Mondo Cane) to evoking the horror of surgery without anaesthetic on Delirium Cordia, a concept album with Fantomas, the band Patton presides over with members of Slayer, The Melvins and his first band Mr. Bungle.

If there's one thing that unites Patton's scattershot approach to recording, it's a fascination with the extreme and the absurd. From Tomahawk's self-titled debut album, on which he deliriously inhabits a frothing, Leatherface-esque backwoods madman, to the name of the label he somehow found time to establish (Ipecac), Patton is clearly a first-class fantasist obsessed with the bizarre intersection of humour and nightmare. The amazing thing is that across all his varied releases, the slimy, dribbling dimensions that he creates are consistently as enticing as they are repulsive.

Click here for my retrospective review of Tomahawk, possibly my favourite Patton-led album, on the MOJO website. It even made my top 10 albums of the 21st century.

Danger Mouse (Solo; Gnarls Barkley; Danger Doom; Dark Night of the Soul; Broken Bells)

This might be a bit of a cheat, given that Danger Mouse is a producer as well as an artist. After all, a producer who doesn't collaborate with artists is just a guy sitting on a park bench trying to conduct the pigeons. But Brian Burton is more than just a producer; he's an engine room of ideas, a project leader who clearly thrives on matching collaborators with exactly the right material and bending expectations of genre (most obviously with his Grey Album in 2004, which mixed samples from the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album to startling effect).

Outside of his production work, Danger Mouse has presided over a host of great, original projects. Dark Night of the Soul, a collaborative record he curated with Sparklehorse's now sadly departed Mark Linkous with visual accompaniments (and two songs) from legendary surrealist David Lynch. Despite other contributions ranging from Wayne Coyne to Black Francis to Suzanne Vega and beyond, the album felt united under an umbrella of existential angst and spiritual doubt (and a none-more biblical title). He also knows when to stand back and let other personalities shine - Dark Night bears Linkous' fingerprints all over it, which is appropriate both because doubt was much more his territory and because the album ended up as his epitaph.

Even on the projects that go tits up, Danger Mouse tends to find a way to salvage the situation. Though his inspired idea to team minimalist blues-rock duo The Black Keys and Ike Turner may have been disrupted by Turner's inconsiderately timed death, the material was used to create the Keys' funkiest and most spirited album to date (Attack and Release, 2008). Exquisite judgement, good people skills and the ability to operate behind the scenes and out of the spotlight makes Danger Mouse the music world's ultimate project manager.

Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees; Queens of the Stone Age; Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan; The Gutter Twins)

Mark Lanegan might be the ultimate collaborator, as he seems to make his best music when he partners up. With his cement-mixer voice and a jaw so set that it appears to have spent the last 40 years chewing on asbestos, Lanegan might appear the epitome of the lone wolf, but he has spent much of his career as a wandering muse. As a man who looks and talks like he's stepped out of a detective novel, he's not been short of dance partners.

With three excellent albums under their belt, his perfectly mismatched partnership with Isobel Campbell (small and sweet and used to play in Belle & Sebastian) has certainly borne fruit, his bleeding baritone mixing with her wispy croon to create a spectral interplay that's reminiscent of pulpy folk tales and old ghost stories. He's also contributed lead vocals to some of Queens of the Stone Age's most memorable tracks ('Hanging Tree', 'In The Fade') and teamed up with pal from the old grunge days Greg Dulli (Afghan Whigs) to create the gloriously scuzzy and curiously eerie rock opus Saturnalia as The Gutter Twins (not to mention his recurring appearances with Dulli's Twilight Singers). Lanegan might have been at grunge's ground zero in the early 90s (check out his collaboration with Kurt Cobain), but he was never trapped by it. He wandered onwards and upwards, seeking inspiration and the ability to inspire.

The Lonely Island

The Lonely Island make stupid music. Glorious, ridiculous, stupid music. Conceived by Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer as a comedy sketch group, The Lonely Island began to focus more on musical shorts after the phenomenal success of the songs like the mercurial 'Lazy Sunday' and the elegant 'Dick In A Box' on Saturday Night Live. Now there's a hit album, Incredibad, with follow-up The Dudes on the way.

The popularity of Samberg and his hombres can be partly chalked up to the fact that although the songs are hip hop parodies, there's a genuine love of the genre in evidence that boosts their credibility as catchy, well-written tracks as well as effective comedy vehicles. The insane collaborations probably helped, too. Using SNL as the perfect celebrity contact book, The Lonely Island gleefully manipulate their guests' public personas to give the jokes a pleasing meta quality, or just to shock the fuck out of anybody listening. You haven't quite lived until you've heard Natalie Portman threaten to sit on your face and take a shit ('Natalie's Rap'), witnessed Julian Casablancas deliver the deadpan line "I saw a Spanish guy doing the Bartman" ('Boombox'), or watched a music video that features Akon launching fireworks from his dick ('I Just Had Sex'). With the aforementioned Akon team-up and a deliciously grotesque collaboration with Nicki Minaj ('The Creep'), signs suggest that the joke-well hasn't run dry just yet and The Lonely Island will continue to reign supreme in the admittedly underpopulated kingdom of Good-Natured Hip Hop Spoofdom.

Comedy review: Aziz Ansari

Aziz Ansari may be the latest breakout comedy star in the US, having been officially enshrined in American pop culture by hosting the 2010 MTV Movie Awards, but he's still relatively anonymous in the UK. He's most recognisable from small roles in recent Apatow-sponsored comedy movies like Funny People and Get Him to the Greek, as well as a memorable one episode appearance on Flight of the Conchords as a racist fruit vendor ("Great speech; too bad New Zealanders are a bunch of cocky A-holes descended from criminals and retarded monkeys"). His most meaty roles, on US sitcom Parks & Recreation and as co-creator of MTV sketch show Human Giant (with Rob Huebel and Paul Scheer) are still niche viewing in the UK, blighted by British broadcasters' bizarre hesitance to purchase or effectively schedule American comedy shows.

Still, Ansari's UK anonymity was gleefully and ruthlessly exploited by the crowd that gathered to see his stand-up set within the confines of the Soho Theatre on Saturday night. After all, seeing Ansari in such a small room (with the stage set of a recent play hastily covered over in the style of a Dexter kill room, no less) is probably an increasingly rare prospect in LA or New York.

Support act Dan Levy is an effective introduction to the slick comedy patter of which Ansari is a master. In his short set, Levy breathlessly covers getting obsessed with random extras in pornos, tripping balls on magic cookies and encountering vengeful Twilight fans with nary a misplaced syllable. It's funny stuff, and one of the rare stand-up instances where I might have appreciated another five minutes of a support act rather than readying a pre-prepared bag of staplers to throw at their head if they stray beyond the 10 minute mark.

But within two minutes of Aziz Ansari taking the stage, we're reminded why it's him we came to see. In some ways, it's hard to define Ansari's appeal to someone unfamiliar with his style. There are other stand-ups who have smarter, better material. There are other stand-ups who are more innovative and unpredictable in their performances. But no one delivers a gag better than Aziz Ansari. The South Carolina native is a massive hip hop fan, and his ability to zip through jokes at a pace that threatens to break the sound barrier while maintaining nuance and clarity would make any rapper proud.

A recent Independent review of Ansari's London show described his tone as "mildly pissed off". With respect, that's bollocks. What's so refreshing about Ansari is his refusal to lunge for the easy laughs with the kind of faux-embittered vitriol that's so common in modern comedy. His set is peppered with a wide-eyed bewilderment that keeps the tone firmly whimsical, even when he's describing shooting a pair of puppies in the face to teach their owners a lesson about respecting one's elders. The jokes centre around his lack of success with women ("I'm gonna hang out with Brian; he's never mean to me"), his abiding love of meaty snacks ("It's scientifically proven that a quesadilla at 3am is 'delicious'. That research was done by me, last night") and the magical insanity of rap stars (one stand-out anecdote sees 50 Cent stubbornly refusing to get the difference between grapes and grapefruit), for the most part delivered with a pep that suggests Ansari is amused by the weirdness of life rather than infuriated by it.

You'd have thought the son of an Indian immigrant raised in the American South would have a preoccupation with race relations, but Ansari bears no grudges here. When he does focus on racism he's more absorbed in the inane details, like how almost any phrase can be interpreted as racist if it's delivered aggressively enough (a risky joke, Ansari explains, because it requires a non-white person to be in the front row at every show) or the sheer randomness of obscure racial slurs ("touched with the tar brush" comes to mind, especially as it apparently applies to me).

There are some nice, personal touches scattered here and there, like the moment at the very beginning of the set when Ansari positions himself in contrived stand-up poses to give the audience a photo op before the show starts, or when he shoehorns a Marks & Spencer reference into a gag before launching into a tirade about how tired that technique is.

For the encore, Ansari does an impromptu Q&A and wheels out Raaaaaaaandy (with eight A's) for us one more time. But he acknowledges that the character has passed his sell-by date. Randy was a moment in time, a stand-up so epically inane that he came full circle back to making us laugh our dicks off. Randy's still a part of Ansari's set to a degree - we get a peek of him in the occasional drawn out syllable or exaggerated movement - but with Aziz the man, we get so much more.

(Picture courtesy of Jakob Lodwick)