Scream, Wolf Children

Scream

The first thing I notice about Scream is how 90s it is. I think it’s because it’s about teenagers, who are I guess the trendiest group of people. There are bad hairstyles everywhere; curtains, too much gel and those thin fringes girls used to have. I love it because it reminds me of being a kid, watching stuff like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the show) and the Kerrang! music channel circa 2000. It’s a horror comedy, but it’s not that funny or scary. The opening scene is the scariest thing in it; Drew Barrymore’s acting – reacting is fantastic. The funniest parts for me aren’t the references to other horror films because I’m not a huge horror fan and they’re heavy handed; characters just talk about other movies, which may have been smart 19 years ago but I find it pretentious and embarrassing. What I do find funny is Mathew Lillard who later went on to play Shaggy in the Scooby Doo movies and cartoons in a role he was seemingly born to play. He’s an over the top ‘90s high school dude in this, all hair gel and beads.  Kind of like Corey Feldman in The ‘Burbs or Poochie, but horny He’s awesome. 

Wolf Children

Wolf Children is an award-winning Japanese animation about a single mum who has to raise two kids who are werewolves. They’re not the bad kind; they don’t eat people and there’s no full moon stuff, they just turn into wolves when they feel like it. So the mum moves out of the city to live out in a big house in the countryside so her kids can be free to run around and be wolves. It’s quite a low-key story, it takes place over 12 years or so as you see the kids grow up. What I liked about it was you have so much time with this family, you really feel like you get to know them. Not that they’re particularly deep characters, you just feel like you’ve been intimate with them for a long time. The story is so simple I don't know why it's so captivating. I guess like most anime it's just so different to what we're used to in the west. It reminded me of Studio Ghibli, I guess partly because I don't have many reference points for anime, though the animation, the high saturation and the piano lead orchestral score very much reminded me of something like Spirited Away. The storytelling is different though, less magical and confusing and I think more accessible to western audiences. It's a sweet, beautiful movie.

The Man from Uncle: not very good

Okay so I don’t really like Guy Ritchie. The Sherlock Holmes films were okay (he didn’t write them) but I don’t think I’ve seen either of them more than once. So my expectations were low here. But that’s sometimes the best way to go into a movie isn’t it? So it’s based on the ‘60s TV show of the same name, and it stars Henry Cavill as Napoleon Solo, a CIA agent with a criminal past, with Armie Hammer playing KGB agent Illya Kuryakin, who is the best thing in the movie because he actually seems like a character in a film opposed to Cavill’s personality void. They have to do spy shit in post-war Europe, and they're supposed to have chemistry or something, they're like transnational frenemies.

So I just don't get it. People in the cinema were laughing - at what exactly I'm not sure. Most of the jokes are double entendre that would end up on the cutting room floor of a Carry On, and the jokes that do work go to the point of annoyance. Cavill was completely unmemorable, though it's not really his fault, he didn't have much to work with, and the main problem is that he's never really rattled, everything that happens to him he just shrugs off, which makes him totally unrelatable.  It's one of those movies that doesn't take its threat seriously enough and everyone just has a laugh throughout, which is a pet peeve of mine. If the characters don’t look like they care what’s going on why should I?

What annoyed me most though was the whole Guy Ritchieness of it, the style without intent, the cool for the sake of cool. There were flashback/revelations to scenes minutes ago, example: Napoleon Solo pickpockets someone but you’re not supposed to notice. A few minutes later the scene is played showing the pick-pocketing. There were way too many of them, seemingly placed in the script willy-nilly and to no effect. At various points the screen is divided into different shots, which confused the shit out of me as I didn't know where to look, and they were proper action scenes too, things that looked like they could have been cool to watch. There is a really annoying scene where a character starts dancing unannounced like it was from another movie. It's pure style over substance, and Ritchie's biggest fault is thinking you can baffle an audience into being entertained by having all this stupid shit going on, and that story is secondary to that. It was like what you'd get if you gave a multi-million dollar budget to a 16 year old who thought he was Quentin Tarantino; it's nonsense, don't watch it.

PS the name Solo should be off limits really, I know the show came before Star Wars but it’s so distracting. You wouldn’t name a character Vader or Skywalker, would you?