Thursday, July 28, 2011

FILM: CAPTAIN AMERICA REVIEW

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER

Captain America: The First Avenger is a fun, thrilling boy’s own adventure that capably delivers exactly what you’d expect from a Captain America origin story. Not a bit more, not a bit less. It’s the 80% student of comic book films – the kid that just coasts on his natural intelligence and charisma without going the extra mile.

This ‘origin’ film tells a story that most Cap fans will be familiar with and the uninitiated will pick up pretty easily. Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is the skinny kid from Brooklyn who can’t get into the army. He volunteers for the Army’s Super Soldier program and soon has to match wits and muscles with the villainous Red Skull (Hugo Weaving). Bookended by codas that set things up for films to come, Captain America is pretty fun, pretty thrilling and pretty satisfying.

The First Avenger’s biggest asset is undoubtedly its cast. Chris Evans is fantastic as both skinny Steve and super Steve, never any less than likeable, charming and passionate – though it feels like the script and suit might just be holding his full range of charisma back. Hugo Weaving gives Loki a run for his money as my favourite Marvel movie villain to date and Hayley Atwell sells the toughness of Agent Peggy Carter beautifully. Having the most fun, though, are Stanley Tucci and Tommy Lee Jones as two of Rogers mentors. Everyone in this film is great, kicking ass and all with just enough of a twinkle in their collective eye.

My main concern going in was director Joe Johnston, who forced out ‘The Wolfman” last year and watched it die both critically and at the box office like the half-formed mutt it was. Would the man behind Jurassic Park 3 turn his recent cold streak around and do justice to the Cap? For the most part, he absolutely does. The film looks great with a nostalgic sheen, great action and beautiful make up and costumes. He doesn’t waste time with two many extraneous characters like the later X-Men films or Spider-man 3 and most of all, focuses clearly on one hero and one villain. This is all good, solid directing that ensures Cap a strong critical and commercial ride.

Here’s my one complaint, though, and it’s not so much a complaint as it is wishful thinking. I feel like Captain America had the opportunity to be truly great but Johnston plays it a little too safe. Considering Captain America’s straight-laced nature, there’s an opportunity to play his adherence to rules and dedication to what’s right a little more for real comedy. There’s an opportunity to really have his romance with Peggy Carter make us feel something, but again Johnston holds back, instead choosing to create false tension with random side characters. Hugo Weaving always feels like he could really go into memorable evil psychopath mode but again, the movie holds back, not wanting to err on the side of being too cartoonish. I would venture that nothing in this film is truly bad, a rare feat, but nothing in this film is truly great, either – and that’s fine. Better the movie pass the commercial and critical tests and set up a sequel rather than go the way of Green Lantern. Maybe those opportunities for greatness will be seized in the sequels now the character has been established, and fans of the comic books will certainly recognize where the groundwork is being laid.

There are some concerns that the film won’t do well overseas because the American patriotism won’t play, and that’s certainly an unavoidable consequence of having a superhero called Captain America. The word of mouth should spread, though, that this is just an old-fashioned good vs. evil movie, and the fact the Americans are the good and the Nazis are the bad doesn’t really come into play. We’re more looking at two divisions of those armies going to head-to-head and Evans is a charming enough lead to make you forget about the more patriotic aspects of the story. It certainly didn’t bother me – I only had one real problem with Captain America and that was the baffling-for-the-uninitiated cosmic cube stuff. Marvel need to release a pamphlet or something on what’s going on there.

Captain America also features a great musical sequence from the deservedly prolific Alan Menken, some nice character work, lots of shout-outs to fan boys and in my screening, a post-credits sequence and trailer for a certain Marvel team-up. While the Avengers trailer only disappointed mildly due to its brevity and short cuts, I would say that the post-credits sequence is not worth hanging around for at all. If your bladder is bursting, just go. It’s not worth the damage.

Captain America: The First Avenger is on par with Thor as far as Marvel’s harder-to-sell heroes go and Johnston and his actors have done a more than credible job. For me, the whole movie was even with Thor on pretty much every level. It’s a really good comic book movie that sets up the mythology with style and has an above-average cast.

I wouldn’t dream of asking more than that.

TELEVISION: Crownies Review

(This review covers Episode 1-3)

The ABC took a pretty age-old approach to selling Crownies. Sex sells. ‘Sex, lies and magistrates’ was the tagline.

Sure enough, there’s lots of cleavage. There’s a set of lingerie. There are a lot of pretty people.

Unfortunately, it’s like when an Australian Idol contestant tries to be sexy. The ‘sexiness’ is all so forced – dropped into the plot purely because it should be there, not because it rises organically from proceedings. That’s to begin with, at least. Episode three manages to create some chemistry between two of the five leads – and that’s far sexier than randomly putting girls in their bra.

A couple of those girls are among our leads for this show – the five young Crownies whose trials (Ha!) and tribulations will form the basis of this show going forward. They’re all pretty good and immediately distinguishable from each other. The standouts at this stage are the continually flustered Hamish Michael who brings a real humanity to his role and Indiana Evans for her breezy charm and casual intelligence. This is not to denigrate any of the other five leads – they’re all very good.

Oh man, though. Midway through the first episode the primary prosecutor of the DPP absolutely smashes apart a defense team during a negotiation, and you can’t help but cheer for her as she does it. Despite the young cast being front and centre, it’s Marta Dusseldorp as Janet King that absolutely sprints away with the show. Disappointingly, she’s barely in the second part of the season pilot.

The rest of the adult cast is professional and competent though they don’t stand out like Dusseldorp does. Essentially, though, Crownies has an attractive, competent, charismatic cast. All that’s left is to do something worthwhile with it. On that basis, I think the show succeeds. While the first two episodes try to tackle way too much the third episode contains the focus somewhat and that results in a much, much better show. The cases are contemporary without feeling ripped-from-the-headlines and the issues involved generally have enough shades of grey to keep them interesting.

It takes slightly longer for the personal storylines to have as much impact as the legal ones. The young cast mostly make horrifyingly idiotic mistakes and sleep with people that shouldn’t be anywhere near their social circles if they had a shred of decency. Those forced plot developments that populate the first episode do make way for more complex storylines as the episodes progress and the characters begin to intertwine in ways that are more fun to watch.

Overall, do I want to watch a fourth episode? You bet I do. Once the third episode was over I was actively looking forward to the fourth and seeing how the series would progress. In fact, Crownies might be one of the best Australian-produced TV shows I’ve seen this year. No hysteria, not too much attention seeking, just classy, decent Aussie drama.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

The Interchange Bench - Round 18

The tangents fly as @ScubaStv Allen and Andrew @Intheboxseat Williams discuss all of the round 18 AFL action! E-mail your badly thought out jobs for AFL players to theinterchangebench@gmail.com.

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Monday, July 25, 2011

TV: Dinner Date Australia Review

Dinner Date Australia features one single girl going on three blind dates with three men – with one twist – they’ll all be cooking for her and she’s picked them out on the basis of their menus.

Let’s get one thing out of the way.

If you’re tuning into Dinner Date Australia because you want to see Manu Feildel, forget it. Feildel spends about one minute onscreen during this and I don’t reckon he would remember any of the names of the people involved. He doesn’t get involved in the segments or offer any cooking advice, he is just the guy top-and-tail-ing the segments. This is a role where his French accent is a bigger asset than any sort of cooking expertise he may or may not have.*

*Hey, and he just won Dancing with the Stars! Isn't that lucky considering he has this new show coming up?

Now that’s out the way, what is Dinner Date Australia? The answer is pretty simple - it’s ‘Perfect Match’ meets ‘My Kitchen Rules’. The production values are MKR 101. The premise is pretty hard to screw up - just capture all the awkward tension and charm of a first date and include lots of delicious looking food. It’s not easy to go wrong - and sure enough Dinner Date Australia is a solid, vaguely amusing, slightly depressing hour of utterly disposable television.

The main problem facing all the 'suitors' is that the dinner is being cooked while the date is happening, so that’s a high degree of difficulty for anyone to overcome. They fare better when they include their date in the cooking proceedings - as does the show - because then it becomes a cooking and dating show, not just a dating show with meals shot in close-up. The casting appears to be pretty good - in the first episode, the dater (Simone) is a very winning, watchable personality* – and that helps immeasurably.**

*She's also completely stunning.

**It’s also really fun to guess why everyone’s single. In the case of our second Romeo, it’s probably the ‘Italian stallion’ shirt. We get it, you’re Italian.

It’s all very pleasant and watchable but the whole experience is a bit soured by the annoying narrator, who takes that ‘Who Dares Wins’ approach to talking directly to contestants. “Oh, Jeff, what are you doing mate?!!!”. That’s annoying. I wanted the My Kitchen Rules narrator to come back and do his trick of creating drama where there was none, rather than admonishing contestants who can't hear him.

Other cheesy moments – the slick second prospect being smooth and the producers making the genius decision to play “Smooth Operator” over it. Really thought out of the box there, everyone. Also once the actual dates are over the show descends into cheesy dates shot with soft lighting that all gets a bit 'dating service ad from 1998'.

Overall, it’s mildly diverting television that doesn’t bring anything new to the dating show table. Would I be compelled to watch another episode? Not remotely. It’s about the gentlest television you could possibly find.

Which probably means it will rate its socks off.

Dinner Date Australia airs on Channel Seven 9:30pm Tuesday.

PS: Not to spoil anything, but the ending of the first episode is kind of depressingly predictable.

TELEVISION: UNDERBELLY RAZOR REVIEW

Set in Sydney in the 1920s, Underbelly: Razor follows the razor gangs of the 1920s and the battle for the underworld between vice queens Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh.

I have an ongoing problem with the Underbelly series – how can I enjoy a program where I hate all the characters?

Every Underbelly series has been almost exclusively populated with the most annoyingly stupid and selfish people known to man. We’ve been asked to sympathise with criminals, prostitutes, crooked cops and so much more. Maybe I’m too straight-laced, but you would need some of the most charming actors on the planet to make me care about what happens to anyone in these shows.

This wasn’t such a problem in the first series, which was genuinely explosive drama and had enough charming actors to see it through – while also being fantastically of the time. It was undeniably Australian television at very close to its finest.

Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities however, was incredibly skeevy – to the point of unwatchability – and descended into completely mad plotting hell in its later episodes.

Underbelly: The Golden Mile was just solid and unspectacular – not as bad as series two but nowhere near as good as series one.

So that brings us to the fourth series of a show with stagnating, if not diminishing returns – Underbelly: Razor. Here we have what is basically the Australian sibling of Boardwalk Empire – a crime series set in the twenties and invoking all the social mores and visual signifiers of that age – flappers, pinstripe suits, hats. So many hats. More importantly, though, this was a chance for a Brand New Underbelly. A chance for the reinvention of the series. A chance to really achieve something.

So what did we get?

We got the same old Underbelly. Just with more hats.

It is certainly beautifully produced. I saw Underbelly: Razor on a cinema screen and there at least it looked stunning. The twenties setting is pretty impressively rendered and the cast is uniformly gorgeously shot and made up.

That’s the height of Razor’s competence though as the script and plot just meander through the usual points. Judging by the first two episodes, Razor is once again saying absolutely nothing new. People are flawed, crime is glamorous and violent, prostitution is common…. etc. The only new point Razor seems to make is that it has been this way for a very long time.

This refusal to change or grow is never more aggravating than in the return of Caroline Craig as narrator. When she was narrating the first series, it was as one of the characters in the story – but from Season 2 onwards she’s just become an omniscient narrator. Not only does this not really make any sense (is the narrator still Craig’s original character? If so, has she retired from real police work and is now just reading old case files to children?), but the device has become lazy and stagnant. Rather than adding a personal layer over the story as it did in Season One, it’s now just a way for the writers to continually abuse the golden rule of television – show, don’t tell. Exposition pretty much exclusively falls to Craig and graphics because the writers don’t trust their actors, the audience or themselves to adequately tell this story without holding the viewer’s hand.

The script is also way too into its colloquialisms. I understand that the Australian lexicon is part of our national charm but that doesn’t mean we have to fit an idiom into every single sentence. After two episodes of this, can’t be far away from a ‘flat out like a lizard drinking’. Once I get hold of a DVD, I’m doing a tally. I’m sure Australians in the 1920s used plenty of this sort of slang - I just don’t think they used it exclusively.

That’s language covered, how about violence and sex? Well, this is Underbelly: Razor so there’s going to be plenty of blood and there’s going to be plenty of slicing and dicing. There’s one scene in particular that, while not shown in full, is still pretty sickeningly gory – but at least the characters all react to it as thus. The first two episodes weren’t all that violent, but I suspect it might get worse once the razors become more prevalent.

As for sex, well, Tilly Devine owns a fair few brothels so there’s going to be plenty of sex. Anna McGahan as notorious prostitute Nellie Cameron does most of the heavy lifting in this area and she brings a coquettish curiosity and sense of fun to her many, many sex scenes. Plenty of people do weird things, but none of it really leads anywhere apart from Nellie realising she likes being a prostitute.

The performances are all pretty solid. Danielle Cormack is a battleaxe as Kate Leigh – there ain’t no feminine grace here whatsoever and fair enough. Chelsie Preston Campbell plays Tilly Devine, all British accent and shrill shrieking. I suspect Anna McGahan will be the breakout star, all bitten lips and sexy eyes. – but for me Felix Williamson as Phil ‘the Jew’ Jeffs is the real charismatic presence onscreen – the show lifts many degrees when he shows up.

This is Underbelly, so Razor isn’t terrible. It’s a more than competent retelling of a crime story from the 1920s. But that’s all it is – just a very well produced re-enactment.

This is Underbelly – not with anything else inside, just a new coat of paint. The litmus test is whether I want to watch a third episode. At this stage it’s pretty fifty-fifty – but the show will have to improve its plotting and characterisation to hold my interest for more than a few episodes more – because sadly, I’ve seen this show before.

Channel Nine is yet to announce an air date for Underbelly: Razor.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

The (Pod) Casting Couch - Harry Potter 7.2 & Top 4 TV shows that should be movie

A really fun podcast this one!

The West Australian's Shannon Harvey (@Choc_Bomb) and Quickflix.com.au movie critic Simon Miraudo (@simonmiraudo) missed last week's review of the final ever Harry Potter film - so here we present their opinions. Also, a very entertaining discussion on our favourite TV shows that we think should get the big screen treatment. Enjoy - and send us your choices or feedback tothepodcastingcouch@gmail.com or @podcastingcouch on Twitter.

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Wednesday, July 20, 2011

CASTING THE GRITTY 'CAPTAIN PLANET' MOVIE

So today it was announced that a Captain Planet movie is in the works - a live-action version of the no less than outstanding 90s edutainment cartoon. Now of course this is in essence ridiculous - BUT. What if rather than teenagers flying around in an utterly un-aerodynamic yellow jet with power rings that bind together to summon the world's greatest 'mullet'-ed superhero - we went with a Batman Begins style gritty reboot with adult stars? Oh, the casting decisions we could make...

THE PLANETEERS

KWAME