It may be a hackneyed old plot which is rarely dragged out today (bar tomboyish starring teen movies*), but cross dressing women trying to pass as men has been around for a while. And the difficulty with this age old plot is that when it was all the rage, the only thing to dress up as, as a woman, would be some sort of soldier. Hence Mulan. Spot question, one of these people is not, as you might think in first view, a man. Look closely, see if you can guess which one is actually, and I know its hard to believe, a woman dressed up as a bloke. Answer below the cut. more »
I had to constantly remind myself before I went to see World’s Greatest Dad that when I saw Sleeping Dogs (nee Stay / Sleeping Dogs Lie) I had no expectations. Bobcat Goldthwait’s scabrously sweet dog sex satire turned out to be one of my favourite films of 2007 and when I heard of the premise of World’s Greatest Dad I was sold. Even with Robin Williams in the lead. But I had no expectations for Sleeping Dogs, and do remember that tonally it could easily shift, shimmy and sometimes undermine its nicely black content. The good news is that World’s Greatest Dad is still at its heart a pretty dark comedy with plenty of laughs and a world view like Sleeping Dogs that can still have heart in a misanthropic world view. But, and its a big but, its not as good as I wanted it to be. more »
I saw two films on Sunday. They were quite different but oddly they both featured strong female characters whose basically wear the same outfit throughout the entire film. As both films take place of a considerable period of time, it perhaps brings up an odd suggestion that perhaps strong women think less about their wardrobes than the average put-up second fiddle love interest. Fashion is for flibberty-gibbets perhaps? Though perhaps a closer look at both films would feed us a decent reason for them wearing just the one ensemble. And yes, closer examination may suggest that these women, whose single item of clothes coincidentally also get covered in blood at various stages in their respective films, do have some excuse to be wearing just the one item. One is a older woman, in a cold town who is wearing her most respectable outfit as she goes about clearing her sons name. And the other is a genetically altered superheroine dragging her franchise into its unbelievable fourth film. These twin movies? Boon-Jung Ho’s Mother and Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil: Afterlife of course. more »
Scott Pilgrim vs The World is a musical. It is a therefore somewhat of a pity that much of the music in it is pretty anonymous, there are no showstoppers here. It is exactly of a sort, though, the sort that you might imagine no mark Toronto indie bands making. This should therefore be successful within the movie, since the movie is partial about the travails of a no-mark Torontonian (Torontian? Torontoed? Torontinoed?) indie band. And thus, happily in the music within Scott Pilgrim vs The World (The Movie) we have a perfect metaphor for the problem with the film Scott Pilgrim vs The World. It is too faithful to its source, its internal world and its own sense of doing its on story justice to succeed. Edgar Wright has delivered a stupendously entertaining movie, but one which you know could have been better. Just as the music played by Sex Bob-Omb in the film is good, and correct and accurate could also, in a perfect world, also be catchy and fun and sing along on the way home. more »
Some characters thump awake, panting, in a snarl of sweaty sheets. Some characters open their eyes with a snap, hold the pose for a full two camera seconds, sigh. Depends what it’s been – lurid wish-fulfilment, vicious tragedy, traumatic flashback. A shortcut to backstory, a cheap bit of misdirection. Rarely surreal, no abrupt shifts of scene or familiar places in illogical shapes. High emotion. The reason dreams in films so often don’t convince isn’t that they’re unrealistic. It’s that they aren’t unrealistic enough.
No surprise, really. This is the economy of fiction, and what exists must work in service to the plot or it’s out on its ear. But, still, all these characters on all these screens who seem to spend every night staring at a slideshow of memory – after a while you start to wonder if the screenwriters have actual dreams at all.
So what’s great about Inception is that there aren’t any real dreams in it. more »
In our first installment of Buy Me You’re Sick we looked at products that offer to serve the same psychological function as high-end prostitutes. Today it’s about consumables whose commercials basically say “our loyal customers have mental health issues.”
Please note the distinction with Crazy Eddie’s Used Cars – “I must be insane to offer prices this low!” No, these products tell you that you’re the insane one. These products are so great – they inspire such fervour and loyalty – you will pride them over family, over friendship, over even sex or sleep.
In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Russell Brand had it easy playing Aldous Snow. His was a bit part, ripe for scene stealing and he played a stereotypical British rock star, all excess and showboating. All he had to be was more exciting, interesting and funnier than Jason Segal, which isn’t all that hard. He performs one song in the film, Inside Of You, which is just a trojan horse for crude innuendo, pleasant enough but easily written off as a slapdash track written for his girlfriend watch it below. But the song is played straight. This will be important.
Aldous Snow returns in Get Him From The Greek, as a lead character, and the film does not quite know what to do with his music. more »
At some point ages ago I tried to write a thing about comfort pop, after listening to ‘Fight For This Love’ 28674987 million times on repeat but ultimately, saying ‘some songs are quite pappily nice and occasionally necessary to avert a mental breakdown’ is nothing new. There may yet be some distance in the genre, though: I read an article awhile ago about Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’ which said that in times of economic strife songs with more uniform beats chart, making the success of such a steady song a major indicator of the recession (as opposed to, y’know, the recession being a major indicator of the recession but nevermind) and I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong. Equally, it’s probably not statistically unlikely that the biggest popstar to emerge out of dire times is not some miserabilist twat with a guitar moaning about having to get a real job but a great fairy godmother who calls her devotees ‘little monsters.’ And one of the biggest songs for the last 18-months has been the decades-old ‘Don’t Stop Believin” by hoary rockers Journey- not necessarily because of, since it seemed to be having a slight renaissance before it but certainly in association with a show about losers. more »
I completely fell for Tina Fey when she pulled her sweater off as a schoolteacher in Mean Girls, accidentally lifting her shirt with it. This of course was strongly reinforced by the wonderful 30 Rock, and she was soon by far the biggest celeb crush I have ever had. I would marry Liz Lemon tomorrow, given the chance, and that may be true of Tina Fey too.
So I didn’t care about whether any reviews said Date Night was good or not. An hour and a half where I could reasonably expect Fey on screen most of the time => I wanna see it. Frankly knowing more might have put me off a little: the idea of an ordinary couple getting drawn into big-league mob violence sounds like a ’70s movie version of a British sitcom, The Terry and June Movie or some such. And do I really want a big car chase starring Fey and Steve Carell?
The plot is ludicrous: mistaken identity, killer cops, mob bigwigs, corrupt politicians, and our heroes battling to survive them. It is hardly plausible, but in the way that Bringing Up Baby was barely plausible, so that was fine with me. more »
If you can see it, then you can read about it here. Do You See? is the visual media section of Freaky Trigger. Cinema, TV, videogames, adverts, flash animations which really slow down your computer - are all covered by our wide ranging team of writers.
I had to constantly remind myself before I went to see World’s Greatest Dad that when I saw 
Scott Pilgrim vs The World is a musical. It is a therefore somewhat of a pity that much of the music in it is pretty anonymous, there are no showstoppers here. It is exactly of a sort, though, the sort that you might imagine no mark Toronto indie bands making. This should therefore be successful within the movie, since the movie is partial about the travails of a no-mark Torontonian (Torontian? Torontoed? Torontinoed?) indie band. And thus, happily in the music within Scott Pilgrim vs The World (The Movie) we have a perfect metaphor for the problem with the film Scott Pilgrim vs The World. It is too faithful to its source, its internal world and its own sense of doing its on story justice to succeed. Edgar Wright has delivered a stupendously entertaining movie, but one which you know could have been better. Just as the music played by Sex Bob-Omb in the film is good, and correct and accurate could also, in a perfect world, also be catchy and fun and sing along on the way home. 
In 
