A musical nod to diminishing returns for sequels opens Muppets Most Wanted, and while this is an overall inferior product compared to its immediate forerunner, as well as other earlier films starring the felt motley crew, there’s enough entertainment here to separate it from nadirs like Muppets from Space and that Wizard of Oz TV movie with Quentin Tarantino.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller, 2013)
Based on James Thurber’s short story, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty stars its director Ben Stiller as an inexpressive, daydreaming underachiever who, provoked by a takeover at the print magazine he works for, finally takes risks and embarks on a convoluted global journey. The takeover is led by a felt-bearded Adam Scott, who plays an even more one-dimensional bastard than his character in Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers. Two hours of gloopy, insipid, narcissistic wish fulfilment ensues, alongside an uncomfortably extended promotion for dating site eHarmony…
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Though still brimming with some narrative bloat, the second Hobbit feature is overall a considerable improvement on its meandering, tonally scattered predecessor. Less shapeless, though not free of venturing down uninteresting tangents (Hi, Legolas), it feels much more confident and moves with a greater sense of urgency…
Scotland Loves Anime 2013: The Fourth Impact
The Scotland Loves Anime festival returns to Glasgow and Edinburgh in October for a fourth year of screenings and talks, and that rare opportunity to watch Japanese animation on the big screen – the place where so much of it begs to be seen. Over two consecutive weekends, Glasgow Film Theatre (11-13 Oct) and Edinburgh Filmhouse (18-20 Oct) will showcase some of the best of contemporary and classic anime for both the well-versed and those completely new to the medium…
Elysium (Neill Blomkamp, 2013)
South Africa-set District 9 had a clear apartheid allegory built into its hyper-violent sci-fi stylings, and writer-director Neill Blomkamp’s follow-up film is similarly concerned with social commentary, this time to do with accessible healthcare and immigration. District 9 wasn’t subtle, but the solemn Elysium is even more thinly veiled and oppressive with its socialist slant; it also proves a much weaker film overall…
One. On. One: Filmmaker Mania Akbari in conversation
The last few years have seen a noticeable rise in Iranian cinema’s international profile, both through relatively mainstream breakthrough success for films like the Oscar-winning A Separation and thanks to publicised restrictions on the country’s filmmakers, most notably the house arrest of director Jafar Panahi, as documented in 2011’s This Is Not a Film. With artistic expression so heavily monitored, many of the country’s best have chosen to depart and make films elsewhere, Abbas Kiarostami (Close-Up, Taste of Cherry) among them, whose most recent films – Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love – have been part financed in France and shot in Italy and Japan.
Mania Akbari is another filmmaker who has chosen to leave her homeland to continue her work, in her case spurred by concerns that her cast and crew on her film, which would end up being named From Tehran to London due to the circumstances of its completion, would face arrest on the basis of what has happened to Panahi and others. Now a resident in the UK, she is perhaps still best known to audiences here as the star of Kiarostami’s acclaimed 2002 film Ten, but various sources – the BFI, writer-director Mark Cousins and the Edinburgh International Film Festival among them – are serving to raise the profile of this most exciting filmmaker…
Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro, 2013)
Fantasy man Guillermo del Toro’s latest, Pacific Rim, is a large-scale love letter to Japanese sci-fi, but also an accessible blockbuster imbued with delightful eccentricities amid its broad elements…
Natan (Paul Duane/David Cairns, 2013)
When a person is murdered and the body burned, all that is left is a name and a sum total of everything said about them; distort the shape of their life’s outline and the truth will become lost. Cairns and Duane’s documentary implies that early film innovator Bernard Natan died a second death through becoming largely forgotten and misremembered through exaggerated misinformation, spread both during his life and much later. An inventively told film, Natan seeks to rehabilitate the image of an arguable giant of French cinema, who once had ownership of the still prominent Pathé Studios, and advanced colour and sound filmmaking…
This Is Martin Bonner (Chad Hartigan, 2013)
Martin Bonner (Eenhoorn) is at a lull in his life. An Aussie expat, he finds himself leaving his grown-up east-coast family and moving to Reno, Nevada for the only job he can get after three years of searching – transitioning ex-convicts into society. Through this new position, he forms a friendship with one of the people he mentors, Travis (Arquette), who’s been released into a city he does not know, following a 12-year stretch for involuntary manslaughter, and is desperate for help in getting a fresh start…
We Are the Freaks (Justin Edgar, 2013)
Following three teenage friends on a night out in 1990, after Thatcher has just stepped down, We Are the Freaks opens with self-reflexive narration that posits that “this is not a teen movie”; this follows an opening tirade that includes the lead expressing contempt for films where people talk to camera, right after doing so himself. It’s a film that, through meta stylistic tics (“Got any music that won’t be in wanky nostalgic films in 20 years time?”), constantly draws attention to itself; the problem is that it never provides anything to warrant the viewer’s attention…
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