Toy Story 3 is so besotted with brand names and product-placement that it stops being about the innocent pleasures of imagination—the usefulness of toys—and strictly celebrates consumerism.

Yeah, I’m sure Fisher-Price are making a mint out of all that juicy promotion for the fucking 1962 Chatter Telephone. How crass, for a film about the experience of childhood play, to feature anything anyone actually played with.

The toys wage battle with the daycare center’s cynical veteran cast-offs: Hamm the Piggy Bank pig, Lotsa Hugs and Big Baby.

The fact that you’re listing Hamm the piggy bank as one of the daycare’s toys seems to suggest that you either didn’t watch or failed to comprehend the child’s film you’re reviewing. It also means you haven’t seen the previous two, which would be surprising but not criminal if you didn’t dismiss them both in your intro.

But none of these digital-cartoon characters reflect human experience; it’s essentially a bored game that only the brainwashed will buy into.

Uses of the term “human experience”: 1,960,001.
Meaningful uses of the term “human experience”: 0.

Besides, Transformers 2 already explored the same plot to greater thrill and opulence.

Wow, I hadn’t noticed the connection. Here, then, is the entire plot of Toy Story 3 – click to reveal, since it’s obviously a major spoiler.

While Toy Story 3’s various hazards and cliffhangers evidence more creativity than typical Pixar product (an inferno scene was promising, Lotsa Hugs’ cannily evokes mundane insensitivity), I admit to simply not digging the toys-come-to-life fantasy (I don’t babysit children, so I don’t have to) nor their inevitable repetition of narrative formula: the gang of animated, talking objects journey from one place to another and back—again and again.

Hi. You dropped these: ………..

(You also dropped a ’ , but it landed on Lotsa Hugs).

It recalls how Tim Burton’s atrocious Alice in Wonderland repeated narrative stasis without exercising the famous line: “It takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place.”

This is exactly right, for anyone and everyone under the impression that ‘recalls’ means ‘has nothing to do with what I’m about to waste this review giving you my opinion on:’

Burton’s omission of that legendary, therapeutic slogan parallels how Toy Story 3 suckers fans to think they can accept this drivel without paying for it politically, aesthetically or spiritually.

Deranged as this review already was, it did lack the special kind of crazy it takes to imply that people are going to ‘pay’. Thanks for completing the set.

My own review isn’t going to be much cop either, so I’ll just add it here. Spoilers.

It was lovely. The new toys introduced are so colourful, exciting and instantly funny that the returning characters started to look a bit uninspired. Big Baby goes from being truly horrific to powerfully sympathetic without really changing. Until Mr Chuckles, I’d never seen an animated character who could crack up an entire audience on sight. And the fiery, twitching pupils of the vigilant security monkey instilled more stress, anxiety and genuine fear than the Eye of Sauron ever has.

The story itself succeeds by creating a more interesting conflict than the whims of an asshole child, intelligently borrowing the most entertaining bits of prison breakout movies, and milking the basic conceit for more fun than it has any right to. There’s that, and there’s Timothy Dalton as Mr Pricklepants.

Many of them, happily, are just terrible. This isn’t a round up of negative reviews. Some of them, like Salon’s, do a good job of explaining their opinion without whining, lying or embarrassing themselves. This is a round up of the other ones.

Inception gave me a strange sense of déjà vu, I felt like I saw this movie earlier in the year and didn’t like it when it was called Shutter Island.

D

Your words gave me a strange sense of deja vu, Eclipse Magazine. I felt like I’d read words about movies before, and I didn’t like them when they were your A-grade review of Shutter Island.

While many critics are raving about Inception, I’ve never heard so many expressions like “What in the BLEEP was that about?” upon leaving the theater after seeing the film. And, although I don’t believe moviegoers are unintelligent, I can’t help comparing this movie’s transitions to someone reading the Cliff Notes of a Shakespeare play to a pre-school class. Inception becomes its own nightmare by trying to be “too smart.”

2/4

Who are you even quoting there?

You’ll sit in your seat, possibly with overly salted popcorn, and immediately become bewildered. But then you’ll tell yourself the creative force behind Following (1998) and Memento (2000) is always in control. Of course you’ll soon know what’s happening. But a half hour later exasperation will start settling in over you like a cup of cherry Jell-o firming up in your fridge. Then another 20 minutes will pass, and you’ll start feeling like Timothy Leary’s severed, cryogenically preserved head. Will there be any relief arriving at all?

Your similes, like Timothy Leary’s severed head in a salty popcorn box of ill-set exasperation jell-o, are flimsy and smell bad.

And what about Dom Cobb himself? Is his unlikely moniker meant to suggest Dummkopf, the German word for a dope? That would seem entirely counterintuitive. But, as I say, whatever.

Inception is basically a complicated heist flick — there is no mystery to ponder and penetrate.

Thanks for taking the time to highlight that this is now the second time you have summarised your own point, in a review, as “Whatever”.

For all of Nolan’s attention to detail, major logic holes jump off the screen without 3-D glasses. At one point someone is firing at the bad guys with a standard-issue weapon when another character suggests he ‘dream’ up a better gun.

Voila, a massive gun is suddenly on screen. Why don’t all the heroes try that trick?

For all your attention to detail, you didn’t pay any attention to detail. That isn’t what happens, and it’s explained several times why changing the dream too much is dangerous.

Reviews are ideally an assessment of a film’s value as entertainment or enlightenment, and should never be a necessary guide when attempting to figure out what in the world is going on in a movie. Such is the case with Christopher Nolan’s mind over matter blockbuster with a back to basics indie soul Inception, a confounding riddle of a story where the characters are lost inside one another’s dreams without a clue.

2/4

Such is what? What is the case? What? Inception is a review that isn’t a guide? Your review is a review that doesn’t need to be a guide? Isn’t that a good thing? Or are you saying your review is a necessary guide? Any of the nine ways to salvage the verbsputum you’ve dribbled there into a working paragraph result in a false one.

It may still be impervious to criticism, simply because no one short of a NASA systems analyst will be able to articulate the plot.

The sometimes hallucinatory images erupting out of the narrative murk of Inception suggest that the entire enterprise was contrived as an alibi for special-effects wizardry.

I did it in two sentences, and I play computer games for a living. For my next trick, I will know what the word alibi means.

In(c)ept(ion)
At one point, well into the film’s (anti-)conflict, a newbie accomplice to Cobb, Ariadne (Ellen Page, an odd casting choice), lays groundwork with him over rapid gunfire – they can barely get out the explanations in between blasts. The shape of the scene is as odd as the choice to put them on what looks too much like Planet Hoth.

It may look like Planet Hoth because Planet Hoth was shot on planet Earth. In Norway. Star Wars didn’t actually make a planet.

It’s emotionally icy, without a recognizable human being in it, and the story feels like nothing more than a con – an ambitious con to be sure, but one that’s made up as it goes along.

The accomplishments of ‘Inception’ are mainly technical, which is faint praise only if you insist on expecting something more from commercial entertainment. That audiences do – and should – expect more is partly, I suspect, what has inspired some of the feverish early notices hailing Inception as a masterpiece, just as the desire for a certifiably great superhero movie led to the wild overrating of The Dark Knight.

Yes, that’s what happens when you go into something with high expectations and they’re not met. You hail it as a masterpiece.

If the career of Christopher Nolan is any indication, we’ve entered an era in which movies can no longer be great. They can only be awesome, which isn’t nearly the same thing.

Wouldn’t it have been easier just to make a movie?

He’s got you, Chris. You should have made a movie! Why didn’t you think of it? You Dom Cobb, which MTV tell me is the same as a German insult. Truly, we live in a dark age of cinema where everything is depressingly awesome.

It boils down to an ordinary spy flick anyway, with laughable dialogue.

One way to salvage some fun with this blunderbuss would be to fall asleep while watching and dream up a better movie yourself. Try it. You’ll avoid a headache.

Given that this is his third film in a row in which he deals with a wife who’s unbalanced to some degree (see also Shutter Island, Revolutionary Road), this loop looks to be spilling out from the frames of this feature. Back away from the unhinged women, Leo, before it’s too late. Maybe try a role addressing an alternate lifestyle for a change? Something like, um, J. Edgar Hoover? (*Note: the Hoover project, with Clint Eastwood directing, is supposedly DiCaprio’s next project.)

The best closing jokes are the ones you have to explain in parentheses afterwards.

In a telling moment at this reviewer’s screening, after a character asked, “Whose dream is it this time?” the audience chuckled in unison. Our thoughts exactly.

2.5/5

The audience laughing at that line is indeed telling: it’s telling you that was a joke. Misquoting and misunderstanding it doesn’t make it work as a gag in your review.

But this is a movie, an elaborate construct of illusions designed to extract money from paying audiences – or, in more ambitious cases, to implant something in their imaginations, such as a moral or a fantasy. Or a product placement. How like the line of work of our hero, Cobb (DiCaprio), since he and his colleagues extricate secret information from a target by entangling themselves in a deceiving dream.

Wow. A lot of the reviews I’ve quoted here make ponderous, cringe-worthy attempts to force some of the movies themes into their conclusion, but this – wow. It’s like you started, then changed your mind, then forged ahead anyway, then added a laborious explanation, but one that really only explains why the two things are completely different. I’m sort of in awe.

And now, the motherlode. The New York Observer’s sprawling, frothing, delusional and atrociously written rant. It is both too monstrous to quote whole, and too egregious to single out just one part, so here are just some of the worst offenders.

At the movies, incomprehensible gibberish has become a way of life, but it usually takes time before it’s clear that a movie really stinks. Inception, Christopher Nolan’s latest assault on rational coherence, wastes no time. It cuts straight to the chase that leads to the junkpile without passing go, although before it drags its sorry butt to a merciful finale, you’ll be desperately in need of a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.

It’s sort of weirdly poetic that you open your review with a point about how immediately bad Inception is, and do so with a Monopoly metaphor so miserably shoehorned that no-one could think they were about to read a good review.

Like other Christopher Nolan head scratchers – the brainless Memento, the perilously inert Insomnia, the contrived illusionist thriller The Prestige, the idiotic Batman Begins and the mechanical, maniacally baffling and laughably overrated The Dark Knight – this latest deadly exercise in smart-aleck filmmaking without purpose from Mr. Nolan’s scrambled eggs for brains makes no sense whatsoever. Is it clear that I have consistently hated his movies without exception, and I have yet to see one of them that makes one lick of sense.

I don’t know, is it? Your sentence about the movie not making a lick of sense doesn’t, you know, that.

It’s the easiest kind of movie to make, because all you have to do is strike poses and change expressions. It all culminates on skis in the middle of a blizzard, as Leo is pursued by machine-gun-equipped snowmobiles, but you don’t even know who’s driving them. I have no idea what the market is for this jabbering twaddle-probably people who fritter away their time playing video games, which I’m willing to bet pretty much describes Christopher Nolan. He labors over turning out arty horror films and sci-fi action thrillers with pretensions to alternate reality, but he’s clueless about how to deal with reality, honest emotions or relevant issues.

It’s kind of hard to grapple with all of the crimes this paragraph commits, so let’s stick to the simplest: what arty horror films?

Here’s a summary of his encounters with all of the replicants he’s apparently the only one good enough to kill. Stills by Pikturz.

1. Snake Lady. He fails to convince her to let him check her dressing room, gets in a fight with her, loses and is nearly killed. The replicant stops short when she hears voices approaching, and runs away. Deckard shoots her.

2. Leon. He fails to recognise Leon until it’s too late, gets into a fight with him, loses and is nearly killed. Another replicant shoots Leon for him.

3. Rachel. He tells her she’s a replicant, forces her to kiss him, then helps her evade capture.

4. Pris. He fails to recognise Pris because she is sitting still, gets into a fight with her, loses and is nearly killed. Pris takes a break to do some acrobatics and he shoots her.

5. Roy. He fails to shoot Roy, loses his gun, gets into a fight with him, loses, runs away and nearly kills himself. Roy saves his life and then dies of his own accord.

Nice job, twat.

Jesus Christ. That was a bit exciting.

Tony called it “the Matrix for grown-ups,” which I like. Because it’s important that this isn’t just smart, it’s cool. It’s exactly the film you’d want from a guy with the brains to make something as convoluted as Memento, and the flair to make an action film as spectacular and compelling as The Dark Knight.

I’ve never really seen anything that keeps my higher brain functions chewing on new ideas the whole way through, while still being a ferocious and stylish action film. This guy should be a director or something.

There’s a lot to spoil, so everything from here on out is hidden until you’ve seen the film and clicked here.

Do you ever find yourself with a backlog of worthy, critically lauded films you’re almost certain you’d like but almost certain not to watch? Yes, I do, and I even worm my way out of the guilt for neglecting them. Because in my mental filing cabinet, they’re all under “Will watch”. It’s just that the films I’m actually going to watch aren’t in that file, they’re in the “Ooh, lasers!” one.

Even before it won the best documentary Oscar, this apparently brilliant film about the slaughter of dolphins was in the “Will watch” file. But actually, it should have been in the “Ooh, lasers!” file. Or at least the “Ooh, midnight stealth missions with an international team of specialists using thermal optics to dodge guard patrols and infiltrate an enemy compound with geographical fortification to plant hydrophones and cameras disguised as rocks” file. Because there’s honestly not much in that one yet.

You’ve probably already heard that it’s brilliant, and it is, but don’t assume as I did that means ‘brilliantly important’ or ‘brilliantly depressing’. It’s actually a hugely exciting piece of film from the opening credits to the end, revolving around the bizarre story of the man who captured and trained Flipper. That show sparked a global fascination with Bottlenose dolphins that led to the macabre events in a well-hidden cove in Japan, and the climax of the film is his own mission to infiltrate that cove and record what happens there.

It’s simultaneously an amazing biopic, a tense espionage thriller and a fascinating expose of the Japanese government’s cover-up. And giving a shit about dolphins is optional – the story’s compelling enough without empathy to drive it.

Craig Mullins’ extraordinary BioShock 2 tribute art: ’1959′. The first image in years to immediately become my desktop background at home and at work. I love that he can make such a concealed place feel spacious and calm, and it makes me want a game where we see Rapture in its glory – even if it has to be without the people. He’s a concept artist who’s worked on Halo, Fallout 3 and one of the Matrix films.

Hard On, by Withered Hand. The name would have put me off, but this came up on shuffle when I was going through Said The Gramaphone’s songs of the year. I love the friendly advice tone of the lyrics.

Amazon customer reviews of a steering-wheel mounted laptop desk: everyone’s a comedian, most of them pretty good ones.

Man earns every World of Warcraft achievement: I won’t link it, but this was one of those strange stories where the only thing about the story isn’t true, and the people reporting the story all know it isn’t true. If it were mainstream sources, you’d assume it was ignorance. If it were the guy himself, you’d assume it was mendacity. When it’s disinterested parties who know their stuff, you can only imagine its borne of some kind of news desperation. It’s okay, guys, there’s plenty of news out there that actually did happen! You could report that! Long story short, he hadn’t got every achievement: a bug caused his total to be reported one higher than it is. The story therefore becomes: …

The Onion named Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind their film of the decade. An interesting choice – it would have been easy to go with There Will Be Blood without really thinking about it. They also make a good case for their equally surprising #2, another film I love. My list would be Memento, Serenity, Adaptation.

Just Cause 2 Vehicle Stunts Trailer: on top of everything else, I’m really excited by how good Just Cause 2 feels – the first game was only really fluid when you were parachuting. Here vehicles seem to have that same smoothness and momentum. Watch for the awesome jump at 2m52s.

Just Cause 2 Island In Chaos Trailer: Worth it for what he does after the end titles.

Jonty explains the London Underground’s mysterious Inspector Sands. I love codes.

Star Trek Online gives you ridiculously good in-game stuff for pre-ordering at various places. The worst use of game content and development time – as bribes to take sides in the puerile retail wars. Got me so annoyed I started an argument about it, which’ll be in the next issue of PC Gamer.

IGN’s Rogue Warrior review: “the hit detection is extremely hit or miss”.

A Claptrap in a tux. I just like this shot. I still haven’t played any of the Borderlands DLC.

Andy Dufresne is tweeting the Shawshank Redemption in first person, in order. “Oh dear God.” is a common update.

There really is a gnome of Noam Chomsky. Sad news via @icouldbeahero.

LightBox’s Trent Polack finds there’s a thread on the Avatar forums to help fans cope with the depression of returning to the real world after the awesomeness of the movie.

Cute but dark short by a Pixar animator, via Waxy.

roBurky notes that Calvin and Hobbes did the ‘where’s the future?’ joke everyone’s been driving into the ground back in 1989. As an eight year old, I don’t think I was actually tired of it then.

@ex0′s stupendous Captain Forever ship: like a flying cathedral made of rainbows and pain.

Facebook is now the size of the entire internet ten years ago. The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes on it a day.

Having said that, for those who’ve seen it, once The Thing is acquired, why does The Person put suspicion on The Other Person, and how does the latter get out of it?

Supporting Role goes to Giamatti for a spectacularly frothing take on a very Ballmer-like CEO.

Supporting Role goes either to rat, for being amazing, or Michael Gambon for: “You wrote a bad song, Petey!”

Also I really like the way the phasers have a disc that swivels when switching between stun and kill.

Anyone see anything good I missed?

Is a sci-fi multiplayer shooter out this week, extremely like Battlefield 2142. Battlefield 2142 was awesome, and so is this. You literally dive into the battlefield from orbit, with no parachute, then pound each other with raucous guns and squabble over objectives.

I like it because you can design your own class in a powerful and elegant way, choose where to drop down and angle your descent, and the dynamic missions that pop up are clear, fun and varied.

Enemies get dynamic missions too, and in one round they were coming very close to capturing our intelligence. I’d died, so chose my custom Assault Sniper class, and picked their intel capture point to drop in on. I smacked into the ground just as the intel carrier reached the walkway leading to the capture point, and knelt there nailing him with sniper shots as he ran toward me until he buckled. It occured to me afterwards that I was the final boss in some AI dude’s epic quest to take our intelligence across this huge warzone. Sorry AI dude! Boss fights suck!

Aside: I got to see this game at an event in Texas once, and ran into the developers in the hotel the next morning, on my way out from breakfast. I asked them how they felt the presentation went, which is a stupid thing to ask developers because that’s exactly what they want to know from you. So they invited me to sit down and tell them.

Previously I knew them only as the guys responsible for a FEAR expansion so drab I openly mocked it on this site (sorry!). But after my oat bran French toast stuffed with maple banana cream-cheese with them, I was left with the impression that they were smart, fun guys who play all the games I play and have most of the same loves and gripes about them. I’m really pleased to see that actually comes out in their game.

Is a film released in the UK this week about aliens living alongside humans in Johannesburg. It’s unusual in that the aliens are powerless: only the workers survived their accidental arrival, and they don’t have the wit to stand up for themselves. It’s also unusual in that the protagonist is both dorky and unsympathetic. He’s a smiling bureaucrat who goes about his unpleasant task with equal parts relish, cruelty and incompetence.

The horrors that befall him, initially satisfying, soon become hard to watch, and the whole film threatens to become darker than its slightly flimsy premise warrants. Mercifully it stops short of that, and instead explodes in a giddy celebration of slapstick ultraguns and splattery comeuppance. The gritty unease of the first half sets off the geeky indulgence of the second satisfyingly, mixing moods and genres and smart and dumb in ways we rarely see, but should more often.

Aside: Mark Kermode said this week that all good sci-fi has to be a metaphor for something, make a point about reality. He’s an idiot. District 9 wilfully draws parallels to social rifts in Johannesburg, but like much good sci-fi, does it to add potency to its alien imagery, rather than say something about the source. You don’t need to replace black people with aliens for us to recognise cruelty and oppression.

Is Bletchley Park, which became known in wartime as Station X partly because it was the tenth wireless communications station established, and partly because if they went around calling it Bletchley Park people might realise it was in Bletchley.

It’s where the first programmable electronic computer was invented, not to crack the Enigma code but the Lorenz cipher, a much harder encryption that no-one seems to have heard of.

It’s also where the war was won, a good two years earlier than it otherwise might have been, thanks essentially to mathematicians there being better at maths than the Germans thought anyone possibly could be. The ability to read communications they assumed were undecipherable was such an enormous advantage that the Allies had to pretend they didn’t have it. They’d send scout planes to locations they already knew contained German fleets, just to give the Germans a feasible explanation for why they were about to be destroyed.

Kim and I went there last weekend. It’s falling apart. They can’t afford to maintain it, and no-one’s willing to help. Some thieves stole a German Enigma machine from there a while back, wrongly assuming that the site of one of Britain’s greatest contributions to humanity would have government money to pay the ransom. They couldn’t. The thieves gave up and posted the machine to Jeremy Paxman, who returned it with what we must assume was an expression of some bemusement.

Aside: This week the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown capitulated to an online petition by coder John Graham-Cumming for the government to apologise for sentencing the man primarily responsible for breaking the Enigma code to chemical castration for being homosexual. I don’t follow my own country’s politics closely enough to be conversant in the many reasons I should hate Gordon Brown, but the slimy, repulsive way he or his writers attempted to turn that apology into an excuse to boast, bafflingly claiming that he’s ‘pleased and proud’ to have to apologise for our country’s mutilation of its hero, is officially one.

Best not to know much about this film going in, so I’ll be vague.

• I thought it was going to be primarily about madness, and I’m glad it wasn’t.
• I thought it wouldn’t make sense, and I’m glad it did.
• I thought nothing would happen, and I was glad something did.

It’s not a twist film; the quirk occurs early and almost casually. But it keeps dodging expectations by straying close to clichés is has no intention of treading in. That makes events feel natural rather than contrived, which is disarming.

Also on the positive side, it’s awesome.

The people responsible for the tech side of porting GTA IV to the PC should be fired in a kiln, but I must admit the video editor they’ve added is a joy. Directing even the most aimless acts of violence into an obnoxiously slick Michael Bay spasgasm is one of the most rewarding creative projects I’ve taken on in games all year – up there with forging new life in Spore.

This is my loud, buzzing, shoddy first try. That YouTube link is actually good quality – you can add &fmt=22 to the URL of a video that was uploaded high-res to link the HD version now – but if like me you loathe the very principle of streaming video, here‘s the full 34MB download.

I honestly thought I’d care about directing, and The Movies certainly never inspired one in me, but GTA IV has turned me around. It’s because the raw footage has such force and impact to it, it’s always tempting me to find a way to better show it off. Suddenly tips I found boring in DVD commentaries are flooding back, and I’m immediately and enthusiastically dissatisfied with everything I make.

I think that’s the litmus test for whether you truly love doing something. Not whether you like what you’ve made – most of us never do – but when you spot the flaws in what you’ve done, are you despirited that you suck, or excited to get on with fixing them? Unfortunately I tend to hit the “record what just happened” key ten times every time I play GTA, and it takes so long to render clips into uploadable .wmv files that at some point during the creative process, you just have to say “Fuck it, that’ll do.”

Update: Steve’s much better one is up now. Cracks me up every time.

‘Supdate: Neither YouTube or CVG are working for me right now, but another great one of Steve’s went up on the new PC Gamer YouTube channel yesterday, and I’ve got a download link to one more of mine that’s not really good enough for official publication. Have a good Christmas.

Despite being an English word in front of a Belgian placename, the title manages to make this sound like ponderous French arthouse cinema. Really, they should have called it: In Fockin Bruges? Wit You?

Because it’s very much not ponderous. It’s a comedy thriller about two hitmen forced to bide their time in a quaint European city while awaiting further instructions. It’s fantastic. The funniest film I’ve seen in ages, including Wall-E and the last Futurama one.

Situational comedy apparently means unfunny, often grave situations with gags inserted forcibly into them, but In Bruges exmplifies what the term ought to mean: comedy that derives almost solely from the volatile absurdity of the situation. There’s one scene in particular where you have no idea if you’re about to witness a murder, a suicide or a manly heart-to-heart. And later, one of my favourite mid gunfight conversations between antagonists, taking the crown from the bit in Grosse Pointe Blank where Dan Aykroyd offers to sell John Cusack an ammo clip.

I think the film’s a little mean towards its short guy, and the ending felt just a tiny bit too inevitable before it happened, but the latter is more than made up for by the last line. Colin Farrell’s an unexpectedly adept comic actor, but Ralph Fiennes steals it utterly as the frothing London crimelord.

Wall-E

I didn’t believe the people telling me this was incredible, was wrong yet again. It is. Not so much for Wall-E himself, as the bizarrely affecting romance between him and Eve (or Eva, as Wall-E seems to say it). I don’t find robots cute and I almost never like romance, so the story had some serious work to do to win me over, but it accomplished it within about thirty seconds of the pair first appearing on screen together. Eve blows things up! That’s all I need to see to get invested in this love story. Some scenes just made me beam.

It’s my favourite Pixar film, beating the Incredibles partly by being about robots, and partly because I’ve always resented the message of the Incredibles. You know that central line, where the kid complains that at school they’re always being told that everyone’s special, “But that’s the same as no-one being special at all.” Oh yeah, you’re right. People who aren’t genetically superior aren’t special. And it’s about time normal people were seen for the interchangable, expendable drones they are compared to you mighty ubermen.

The Dark Knight

I enjoyed this a lot, but I did find myself sitting there thinking “Why aren’t I more invested in this? Why don’t I care?” I cared throughout Batman Begins, and that had a lot more flaws and downtime than this. I think it’s because, while they’re both ideas movies, the first film just had one idea: fear. Batman’s origin is all about fear, the plot was all about fear, and the villain was the embodiment of fear. Dark Knight is about whether people need a white knight more than a dark one, but its main feature, the Joker, doesn’t have much to do with that, so it doesn’t feel as focused.

I’ve heard a few people have mention that it feels stretched to include the two villians, usually with the caveat that they do realise it was necessary. I don’t think it strictly was: I think there could have been a movie entirely about Batman and Two Face, with the Joker just an unseen spectre in the background, teasing for a film of his own to crown the trilogy. Of course, this is the worst suggestion ever, given the circumstances regarding one of the cast necessary to enact it.

The other thing I liked about Begins was that it explained Batman to me, because I honestly didn’t know what he was about. And I thought the Dark Knight was explaining the Joker to me – because again, I’ve never felt I got him – with the line “Do I look like a man with a plan?” But then every caper he pulls is a masterpiece of proposterously convoluted planning. The bit that did paint an evocative picture of him was the best scene of the film, with the line: “I enjoy dynamite, gunpowder, gasoline. You know what they all have in common? They’re cheap.”

I give your film the worst grade imaginable: an A minus minus! Futurama will probably never be bad, but this lacked spark in exactly the way Bender’s Big Score didn’t. There’s a difference between fan service and what plays more like fan fic. The plot is entirely about a single, weak conceit that doesn’t really work as a joke, and makes no sense as a serious plot element. The drama is lazy, mean-spirited stuff that falls back on the character’s clichés, then takes them to out-of-character extremes for the sake of laughs that never come. A highly spoilerific example will appear if you hover over this image:

“Oldman kidnaps the most closely guarded man on the planet in order to negotiate the release of a dictator who’s being held by … Russia. That’s right, he’s threatening to kill the President of the United States to scare a country that just spent the better part of a century glaring across the Bering Strait and muttering ‘motherfucker’ under its breath.”

There Will Be Blood: I’m not sure I could say I enjoyed this. People who haven’t seen it keep asking me what it’s like. What’s it like? It’s a masterpiece. It’s an extraordinary piece of cinema, a phenomenal performance, a work of art. Did I like it? No, not really.

I’m just not that interested in cinema, or performances, or art. I was gripped all the way through, and as critics have said, what’s exciting about it is that you have no idea where it’s going. But by the end – which is macabre, surreal, comic, and utterly sick – I just thought “Oh. Nowhere, then.”

No Country For Old Men: This I did enjoy, a lot, but I still choke on my popcorn whenever someone calls it the Coens’ best. Are we talking about the same Coens? The Fargo, Lebowski, Fink, O Brother, Hudsucker Coens? Maybe there are other Coens.

Again, it’s extraordinarily cinematic and artistically beautiful in a whole set of ways I don’t care about. What I did love about its direction was the fetishistic attention to detail: the sweeping black scuff-marks on the police station floor from the cop thrashing as he choked, the burn-splatters around close-range gunshot-wounds when they’re stripped bare for treatment, the way one character’s fate is only communicated to us by whether or not another checks the soles of his shoes.

It’s also probably the most excruciatingly tense thriller I’ve ever seen – there are long scenes where you know precisely what will happen, but not precisely when, and I felt like I lost years of my heart-healthy life to each.

What I liked most about it was that it felt like how a thriller premise would play out in the real world: the major plot events are determined by brutal, random chance that doesn’t bias the hero or villain, and when a character dies, it’s not always a poetic defeat at the hands of his nemesis.

But unlike most of its fans, I didn’t think the ending was profound or interesting. I get it. I got it a while back. I got it from the title of the movie. I didn’t need the credits to roll on some absurd symbolic chin-stroking introspection to tell me what the point of the film was.

Gone Baby Gone: This absolutely deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the above two, but rarely is. It’s a noir private-detective thriller starring Casey Affleck, who is a dramatically better actor than Ben in both sense of the word; and directed by Ben, who is a dramatically better director than actor, again in both senses.

It revolves around a missing child, and the length and breadth of dilemma they mine from that scenario is alarming. It culminates in a decision so tough that you’re left with no idea who you’re rooting for, even as it tears all the good guys apart. That’s the hardest part of noir to achieve: true moral ambiguity, a situation so sticky it’s no longer clear who’s doing the right thing. Gone has a resolution of sorts, but it’s so hard won that it feels sobering rather than victorious.

Charlie Wilson’s War: Very much liked this, but given that it was written by Aaron Sorkin and prominently featured Seymour Hoffman, I’d expected to love it. Hoffman is superb – a whole film about his character rather than Hanks’ would have been magnificent. I just didn’t care all that much about Wilson’s private life, or Roberts’ character’s subplot, and those took up a lot of the running time.

Knocked Up: This is the only one I did see last year, twice in fact. It’s the funniest I’ve seen in ages, and emotionally honest with it. The premise is cheap – “Ha ha what if an ugly guy got you pregnant? Lol.” – but then the film never flinches from the awkward, unhappy consequences of that.

It pays for that poster by having to tackle a really hard question: what do you do if it’s not working out but there’s a kid? And it doesn’t dodge it by having them magically turn out to be soulmates or by killing off the baby (you laugh, but it’s been done). It actually gives an answer, comes out and says “This unhappy compromise is slightly less unhappy than the other unhappy compromises.”

Also, lol. Jack and Jill – the network executives who alternately congratulate and neurotically demean Katherine Heigl’s character – are worth the ticket price alone. And the weird, slight-too-friendly relationship between Seth Rogen’s character and Paul Rudd’s – the only real soul-mates of the film – just gets funnier and funnier. There’s also a lot of good relationship philosophy, meditations on chairs, a fantastic performance from a kid, and the seriousness of Steve Martin vehicles. In fact, quotes:

“Marriage is like a tense, unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond, only it doesn’t last 22 minutes. It lasts forever.”

“Oh, Matthew Fox? The Lost guy? You know what’s interesting about him?”
“What?”
“NOTHING.”

“Where do babies come from?”
“Where do you think they come from?”
“Well. I think a stork, he umm, he drops it down and then, and then, a hole goes in your body and there’s blood everywhere, coming out of your head and then you push your belly button and then your butt falls off and then you hold your butt and you have to dig and you find the little baby.”
“That’s exactly right.”

Dan In Real Life: I don’t even know why I saw this, the best I’d heard was that it wasn’t as bad as it might seem. That’s true; it’s wonderful.

It’s so damn hard to make me care about a character, let alone root for them, but Dan (Steve Carrell) treads a tightrope between pathetic victim and jerk that just about keeps him clear of either – a rare feat.

Each time it builds excruciating emotional tension, it doesn’t so much diffuse it with humour as release it in a controlled explosion. I’m sure most of the things I laughed weren’t funny at all, the script just has an uncanny knack for poking me in the ribs when I’m most vulnerable.

Like Knocked Up, it takes a really tricky mess of plot points and doesn’t shy away from picking a line of best-fit through them, but its unflinching acceptance of the consequences of that doesn’t hold up all the way to the end. There’s just one, brief, tired old trope for resolving a love triangle that they roll out towards the end to keep everyone happy, and it does marr the otherwise impressive awkwardness of the whole ordeal.

Bee Movie: What the hell? Why did everyone tell me this sucked? I caught this on a plane, because one person of five had told me it was ‘okay’. It was great! I laughed ten times more than I did during Ratatouille, none of the characters were anything like as annoying, and it was actually rather original. There’s a bit where Jerry Seinfeld bee flies repeatedly into the same pane of glass about ten times before stopping, looking at it for the first time and muttering, “Oh that is just diabolical.”

Enchanted: I really thought I would loathe this, and I didn’t. It’s about a Disney princess who comes to life, so you can imagine what else was on the plane that I ended up watching it. But it’s sort of almost halfway charming. All I’d seen before was a clip of that awful “That’s How You Know” song on the Oscars, which Once rightly pounded into the dust and snatched the award from. But when that number actually came around in the film, with the slightly absurd way it starts, and the reggae buskers – I tried not to smile and was unsuccessful.

Futurama: Bender’s Big Score: if you’ve seen Score and felt that it’s a little heavy on the fan-service – hi. I’m one of those fans it was servicing, and it did it very well. I didn’t need that much Leeloo, and the songs were needless and clumsy, but other than that it was joyous.

I’m the sort of fan who gets an enormous kick out of the new theme tune, the triumph of bureaucracy, the explanation for how Gore lost the election, the obsessive retconning of the pilot episode’s pivotal moment, the cyclic timeline mathematics and the titular payoff at the very end. Speaking of the theme tune, have you heard the 1967 original? It’s surprisingly awesome.

“Are you free?”
“You have no idea.”

Dexter Season Finale: the only thing wrong with this season of Dexter (apart from the unaccountable soap-opera interlude that was Rita’s mother) is a certain character lapsing into a hideous crazy-stalker stereotype. But the finale got so much mileage out of the mess this created that I can almost forgive it. The scene with three people and a large black bag was almost unbearable to watch. More spoilerific discussion should probably go in the original comments thread.

But yes, fantastic. The leadup to this over the last handful of episodes is the best Dexter has ever been, and Dexter is itself near-perfect television.

“Let’s see if the best bed in Kaer Morhen can hold us!”

The Witcher: broken sexist porno that’s coming up in a lot of game-of-the-year lists, and got huge review scores everywhere but with us. You play a badly scarred grey-haired old man in leather trousers, to whom a procession of identically-shaped redheads surrender themselves sexually after three lines of astonishingly bad dialogue. Post-deed, you are awarded an achievement souvenir card showing the girl naked, just in case you didn’t already feel like a pathetic mysognist.

Somehow it’s even more wretched than the despicable Leisure Suit Larry games – the last of which revolved around date rape. The fact that Larry’s love interests even needed to be date-raped before they’d sleep with the idiot hero automatically makes them stronger characters than the Witcher’s.

It’s not that I can’t imagine what people see in the Witcher – I haven’t played it through, maybe it gets amazing after four hours of insufferable dross. I’m just appalled at what they can ignore. The huge script cutbacks before release have been achieved by simply deleting swathes of lines, so conversations are riddled with bizarre, glaring holes that not just make for abysmal fiction, but in many cases render events truly incomprehensible.

“Laurent ran guns for the resistance.”
“Which resistance?”
“He won’t say – apparently they didn’t win.”

Ratatouille: I hate to be down on such a sweet film, but I’m so tired of that nervous kid cliché and the angry boss who’s supposed to be funny because he’s short. Brad Bird has uncharacteristically little to add to those grating, ancient stereotypes, and the central conceit is just surreal.

The premise is a rat who can cook, and a kitchen boy who cannot, but the film has no workable idea for how the two can collaborate. It ends up inventing a physiological mechanic so utterly nonsensical that it’s downright creepy to watch.

The rat and dough physics modelling is fantastic, and it made me laugh perhaps twice, but it’s so far from the spark of The Incredibles.

Duke Nukem Forever Trailer: after ten years of development, the first movie of the incarnation that’s actually likely to be released has come out. It features no dialogue until, at the end, protagonist Nukem stands up and says, essentially, “I want to shit on you.”

I am at a loss.

Right, that’s it. If Transformers isn’t any good on Sunday, I’m giving up on fun-but-dumb films altogether – I no longer enjoy them. I didn’t like the latest Pirates of the Carribean, I hated Die Hard 4, and last night even Harry Potter left me cold. My brain just doesn’t have enough to do during these, which is really saying something given that I enjoyed Gerry, a film where the memorable quotes page on IMDB constitutes the entire script, and the only two characters have the same name.

So I either think about other things entirely (is this seating arrangement socially optimal? Almost, I decided), or pick holes. That CGI object isn’t correctly synced with the actor’s hand. The next line is going to be “Something to fight for.” Emma Watson can only act during even-numbered minutes of the odd-numbered Harry Potter films.

When I read the same story in book form, I cared about everything. And really, it’s a story that suits cinema better than literature in a lot of ways – the fizz and crackle of wizardly battling comes across very poorly in text. But this director’s concept of being faithful to the book seems to be checking all the subplot boxes, which is impossible to do well in under six hours. So the three most affecting elements of Phoenix are all glossed over with almost comic brevity. Those being:

• Delores Umbridge’s torture: I thought the actress here was great at portraying her syrupy strain of institutionalised evil, but the real potency of the character comes from the horror of what she makes Harry do. He has to claw her words in his own flesh over and over and over again every night, writing in blood over his scar tissue before it can heal. It’s the repetition that’s galling – that’s why it’s such a wonderfully fiendish play on the familiar punishment of ‘doing lines’ – but in the film we see him do it once. Misses the point, dissolves the horror, defangs Delores.
  
   
• Neville Longbottom becoming more than comic relief: after mocking his idiocy for four whole books, Rowling adds a streak of genuine tragedy to Neville, and a sad little stirring of redemption. It’s an easy pluck of your heartstrings, but a resounding one. Here’s how this story is told in the film:

  (Neville Longbottom is standing in front a wall looking at a newspaper clipping that shows a photo of his parents. Harry joins him)
  Neville: Hi Harry my parents were killed by Bellatrix LeStrange after she tortured them for information I’m proud to be their son but worried that I won’t live up to their good name thanks bye.
  

  Fin
   
• Harry’s increasingly conflicted relationship with Snape: the entertaining thing about Snape as a villain is that he isn’t one, he’s just an extremely unpleasant good guy. Or so Dumbledore insists, and since he’s virtually God in the Harry Potter universe, we tend to trust his word over even Harry’s judgement.

  In Phoenix, Snape is the only one able to teach Harry to defend his mind from Voldemort’s invasive telepathy, an arrangement they both resent enormously. But also a great device not only to force Harry to see Snape as a good guy, but to let both of them find out the truth about each other.

  

  By repeatedly invading Harry’s thoughts, Snape quietly has to face that most of his conspiracy theories about Harry have been wrong. But when Harry inadvertantly gets into Snape’s mind, he has to face that more or less every disparaging thing Snape has said about Harry’s father is true, and a lot worse besides. This is a huge deal, a genuinely quite brave twist, and the most devastating thing that’s happened to Harry so far. His only reason for enduring the increasingly horrible things life puts him through is this dream of living up to the example of his parents, and avenging them.

  We do get the moment of discovery itself in the film, inside Snape’s mind, but it’s topped and tailed: it happens almost immediately after the lessons are started, so we get nothing of the way Harry and Snape’s relationship has changed, which is probably the most interesting thing in the book. And we get nothing of the aftermath, which is easily the most important thing in the book.

It feels like they think fans are more interested in seeing every subplot paid lip-service than in any of them being done justice. I could be entirely happy with a film of Phoenix that left out all three of my favourite things about the book, if it just did anything else well. If it just had some downtime, some of the day-to-day stuff that lets you get to like the characters before they get knocked around, I’d care.

The fun of Harry Potter is never the plots, it’s getting to live in their world for a bit. It’s enduring the Dursley’s long enough at the start of each book to be relieved and excited to get back to Hogwarts and his friends. It’s butter-beer in Hogsmeade, non-plot-critical Quidditch. This ruthless, workmanlike cramming the films are so hellbent on is wrecking the magic.

Visually it’s marvelous; another adoring tribute to the universe that matches my imagination beautifully. The effects guys really do care about doing everything justice, and they’ve got the creative juice to manage it all and more. That just makes it more irritating that they’re still using directors who waste it incompetently, when in Alfonso Cuaron they’ve already found the guy who can give the rest of film the character its effects already have.

It’s depressing to think that in my life, I will never write anything as funny as this logo. What the hell is it? The first thing I thought when I saw it, once I’d dried my eyes, was “What does the R stand for?” If the oblique angles that make up 95% of this image are supposed to represent the digits of 2012, what’s this:

It’s so typically British to have the only bit we could be proud of – that it’s in England – written in all-lower case seventies sci-fi script on the underside of something that might once have been a two.

Also hilariously dismal and quintessentially British is the ad they made to capture the spirit of these Olympic Games. It shows shining examples of the heights of excellence that the British spirit can achieve: a woman who’s managed to slim down to a mere fourteen stone, a disabled boy who can now ride horse without falling off more than three times, and a mother who, when she really tries, can cycle almost as fast as an OAP-buggy. It ends by speculating that she might one day be good enough to hand a bottle of water to a real cyclist. To sleep, perchance to dream.

This is why this is not the post about season finales. Instead, it is about these things:

Pirates of the Caribbean 3: Dead Man’s World Of End-Sparrow. In one of those things that didn’t really happen to me much when I worked in a warehouse building skateboards, I was taken to a preview screening of this on Wednesday in a stretch limo with free champagne, which I did my level best to pour on the editor of Disney Girl magazine. It is, I thought, ‘okay’. I would stretch to ‘quite good’ if this was the first one, but it lacks so much of the fun of the second that I find it hard to recommend. Particularly since everyone hated the second.

The first one was the zombie pirates one, and was good because it was breezier and funnier than you expected. The second was the fish pirates one and was great for its absurdly long, wildly overdone, bloody-minded physics-driven set pieces on gorgeous tropical islands. The third is about a big book of rules and some crabs that look like rocks.

None of them make a whole lot of sense, and I don’t recall what actually happened, plot-wise, in any of them (at the start of 3, everyone is alive and roaming around, so I assume nothing of import happened in the last two). But the third one doesn’t use its license to be absurd to do anything very fun. All the spectacular bits are just ship battles, which we’ve seen in some depth before.

I actually love ship battles, but they can’t hold my attention for long in dumb films. The reason they’re exciting is that they’re so physical – you can see the cannonballs, you can see which bits of the ships they smash, the damage is all evident and so the outcome is believable. In dumb films, such as this one, captains are idiots and the hero’s ship wins because it’s made of magic.

At one point a billion-strong armada retreat from two enemy ships, because they destroyed the flagship (because, for no reason, the captain couldn’t decide whether to fire or not). John, who loved it, argues that this is normal film logic, but the whole setup for the scene is “They can take this guy, but what do they do about the billion ships?” It’s hard to enjoy a dumb film about naval combat, politics and trickery if you’ve ever seen Hornblower, which was eight non-dumb films about naval combat, politics and trickery, with characters it is possible – nay, easy – to like.

Aside: Geoffrey Rush is still such a watchable pirate. While Depp’s drunken eyebrow-work on Sparrow gets tiresome, Rush can still just say “Arr” or a sentence of the form “X be Y”, and I am immediately happy.

Score: okay.

The reaction to my Galactic Civilizations 2 War Diary: which has been surreal. This is a ten-thousand word account of a single match of an expansion pack to a little-known turn-based strategy game with poor graphics, and no-one seems to mind. It’s not the hits or links that it got, surprising as they were, but the extraordinary comments. I just read someone saying- well, I’ll quote: “My brother and I would read the blog, then get together to discuss what he was doing right, what he was doing wrong, and what he needed to do to win.” This makes me feel amazing.

I like very much that I work on a magazine where I’m allowed to give stupid ideas like this a try. I did most of it at home or after work, but only because I love writing this kind of stuff so much. I had some New Years Objectives this year, one of which was to write something that got the same kind of reaction as my report on the Eve Online assassins – which has always frustrated me by being better-received than almost everything I’ve written since. This got a different kind of reaction altogether.

Comments at PC Gamer
Comments at Joystiq
Comments at the GalCiv site
Comments at Kotaku

Facebook: it’s like social networking, except that I like it. I’m on everything – MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, Technorati, Tumblr, Flickr, Last.fm – but Facebook is the only one that seems really smartly designed in terms of how it connects you to people. It’s good at knowing what you’ll find interesting about what your friends are up to (almost anything), so the main news feed you get from it is incredibly fast-flowing and rich in interesting goings-on.

Now I have to watch TV.

It’s the 1978 remake I’m talking about, with Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy and a very young and very excellent Jeff Goldblum. It is a strange concept to me that a movie released before I was born could be a modernisation of something even older (were eyes even invented before then? Mine weren’t), but from what little I know of the original, it doesn’t seem like a remake the way they do them today. It’s darker, truer to its premise and closer to the original novel than the first film version, almost a de-Hollywoodisation by comparison.

Oh, I should probably explain why I’m suddenly talking about an incredibly well-known 1978 classic sci-fi film. Er, it was on TV last night. And I hadn’t seen it before, and thought I should, even though I rarely like old films, and I even less often like old films that are considered classics. Classic seems to mean ‘no longer any good’. I have some classic cheese in my fridge.

But I was amazed by this, and more importantly horrified by it – I think more so than at the Ring films. The cultural touchstone it spawned was about this idea of everyone going about business as usual, but somehow not being themselves, lacking emotion. That’s not very scary. It doesn’t get scary until so many humans have been replaced by ‘pod people’ that the humans are trying to blend in with the pod people rather than vice versa.

People have to pretend to be people pretending to be people. The film is never explicit about how many have changed, partly because the ambiguity is part of the menace, but there is a distinct turning point. Because from that point on, whenever a pod person discovers a human in public, they point at them and scream.

It feeds on two potent psychological tricks that don’t get used enough: firstly, that there’s nothing more horrifying than something that’s absolutely horrified of you. And secondly, the scariest images are also the most absurd – and potentially comic.

I came across an incredibly spoilerific screenshot from the film while digging out the image above (which is not spoilerific – it never happens in the film), which captures the most brilliant, horrible and chilling moment, but just looks hilarious out of context. It’s hard to imagine a more modern film daring to do something so easy to mock, but Body Snatchers leads up to it gradually and creepily, so that when you’re actually watching it (alone, or with people who can shut the hell up), it’s terrifying.

There’s also an extraordinary scene where pod people hatch all around Donald Sutherland as he sleeps in a deckchair outside, all born adult but malformed, and they’re oddly convincing. They make odd noises as they hatch, but not the bland sci-fi squelching almost every other film involving aliens succumbs to. It’s remarkable what a difference that makes – these things were done with puppets thirty years ago, and they’re creepier than any CGI I’ve seen.

Then there’s the dog thing. I have no earthly idea what the dog thing is all about. The film is otherwise very consistent, and even corrects some nonsenses of the original. Then there’s a dog thing, and it’s sudden and unexplained and utterly horrible, but again, probably just funny out of context. I would think if you have seen the film, it would have been a long time ago, so I’d be intrigued to know if anyone remembers the dog thing.