Chris At The Pictures

The Best 10 Films of 2014 (Ascending order)

10. Noah – Conquered all my issues with the original Biblical story with incredible spectacle, visual grace and powerhouse performances.

9. Pride – Wonderful historical drama with more than enough laughs and a cast so enjoyable you’ll want to hug them all…twice.

8. Gone Girl – Delicately crafted and gorgeously mounted ‘who-dunnit’ which brings David Fincher back to his A-game.

7. Lone Survivor – Brutal, nihilistic and avoids flag-waving throughout. Career performances from all involved and a well-handled tribute to those who lost their lives is the blood-soaked icing on the cake.

6. The LEGO Movie – Funny, flashy and sumptuously creative. Other toy-based franchises could learn an awful lot from this…I’m looking at you, Transformers.

5. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – State-of-the-art special effects genre picture meets political and philosophical drama. The director risks placing the simians over the human characters and the film is all the better for it.

4. X-Men: Days of Future Past – Simultaneously paves a new path for the franchise and effectively erases the worst parts of it. Bryan Singer’s return is more than a cause to celebrate.

3. The Raid 2 – Flawlessly executed martial arts picture that fuses the thematic structure of The Departed with the one-man army of The Dark Knight (minus rubber suit).

2. The Guest – Helmed by people who know exactly what they’re doing and how to get the best reaction from an audience. It’s gorgeous, gory and an absolute ball from start to finish.

1. Interstellar – As much as I hate to sound like a stuck record, there’s really no competition here: Nolan has crafted a monumental sci-fi drama that brings the works of Lucas, Spielberg and Kubrick into a glorious melange of brains and heart.

The Worst 10 Films of 2014 (Descending order)

10. Divergent – Another dystopian teen franchise that feels dead on arrival. Key features are bland leads and a void-like abyss of humour and wit.

9. If I Stay – Chloe Grace Moretz bats her eyelashes and swishes her hair at the camera for 90 minutes while everyone around her sobs rather annoyingly.

8. A Million Ways to Die in the West – Witless, done-to-death comedy tropes fall flat while Charlize Theron and co. look on in horror. Go back to TV, Seth.

7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Heroes in a half-assed shell of a movie: ugly to look at, irritating to listen to, it’s a chore from start to finish.

6. Annabelle – A prequel no-one wanted that has a total lack of visual flair, good scares and interesting characters, making it either painful to sit through or bliss to sleep through.

5. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones – Painfully slow, not scary in the slightest, and all over the place. Paramount, please stop funding these; you’re only making it worse.

4. Devil’s Due – Vomit-inducing garbage to which the label ‘horror’ only applies once you’ve seen the box-office takings.

3. Transformers: Age of Extinction – Michael Bay continues in his quest to burn the nostalgia of the 80’s to the ground and modern action cinema along with it.

2. Tarzan – Childhood-destroying rubbish that looks like the Postman Pat movie trying to mate with the corpse of Avatar.

1. The Other Woman – A handbag full of sick.

Tarzan is an animated re-telling of the Edgar Rice-Burroughs story of a boy raised in the jungle by apes, his adventures, and his eventual contact with other humans. The initial trailer aroused a lot of scepticism from myself and others of my age group, particularly as most of us have grown up with the 1999 Disney animation of the same name very close to our hearts. This new interpretation of the story is brought to us by E-One Entertainment and Constantin films, and features up-and-coming star Kellan Lutz (Legend of Hercules) as the voice of the eponymous ape-man.

The film begins in space (no, really) as we see a meteorite crash on earth and wipe out the dinosaurs. Embedded in the rock is a rare mineral that – much like ‘unobtanium’ in Avatar – can be used as a power source. A pair of explorers brings their young son with them as they investigate the meteorite. A helicopter crash leaves the boy stranded in the forest, and before long he is discovered by a mother gorilla who – having lost her own child – adopts him as her own and raises him amongst the other gorillas, much to the disdain of an ‘evil’ silverback who is now the head of the pack.

Tarzan is a terrible film. Not funny bad, not even mediocre….just abominable. The one good thing that can be said in its favour is that amongst the audience I was with, one young boy whispered to his mother that the animation looked ‘amazing’, so I can’t deny that the visual element is at least working for the target audience. As far as everything else goes, it’s a real mess. The entire film is given a cringe-inducing voice-over that makes the term ‘Captain Obvious’ seem redundant, spelling out Tarzan’s inner emotions and the complexities of the story in terms that are offensively simple. Children are not stupid; they do not need everything that’s going on to be spelled out for them, that’s what the visuals are there for.

Speaking of which, the gorillas are indistinguishable and all blend into one endless mass of screaming, photo-realistic black-furred chaos, the human characters (and I use the word ‘character’ in its loosest possible sense) all look like cartoons, Professor Porter in particular looking like a reject from the upcoming Postman Pat movie. The key to the ’99 film’s success was that every character and location had their own unique features, but the jungle in this film is a mangled mess of vines that could all be set in the same square mile for all I know. 

The dialogue is primary school amateur dramatics level, Jane (the supposed love interest) simply spouting various inflections of ‘Wow’ every time Tarzan swings into view, the latter forgetting very now and then that before he was lost in the jungle he could speak perfect English, then suddenly speaking in full sentences for a bit then lapsing into simple ‘Jane no leave Tarzan’ mode. To use the phrase ‘cartoon villain’ to describe Clayton would be an insult to cartoons, his whole aura and motivations stolen – like the meteorite element – from Avatar. 

The plot is all over the place, the gorillas are dropped twenty minutes in and not seen again until the end, set-pieces from the Disney film are carelessly thrown around in the hopes of ‘paying homage’ but merely come off as desperate, and the end battle could give James Cameron even more reason to sue. The moment at which I abandoned all hope was when they brought in Coldplay’s ‘Paradise’ to emphasize how beautiful the forest is as Tarzan shows it to Jane. So that’s a film I love, a film I casually like, and a song I really like all ruined within about 45 minutes.

There’s a popular mantra among film critics about films that are over two hours long: ‘Your head goes with it, but your bum gives up’. Ten minutes into Tarzan, (a 90-minute film) my bum was screaming at me to leave and my head was about ready to explode with exasperation, rage, embarrassment, and – above everything else – depression. Leave this film well alone, and let it die a slow and painful death.

0.5 Stars

My experience of watching The Other Woman can best be equated to being presented with a large iced cake, only to take a forkful and realise that beneath a miniscule layer of icing there lies nothing but impacted excrement. The film comes courtesy of director Nick Cassavetes (whose previous crime against celluloid was 2004’s The Notebook) and is intended as a story of female empowerment as one woman (Cameron Diaz) who, upon discovering that her boyfriend is married, teams up with the wife (Leslie Mann) and another secret lover (Kate Upton) to take revenge.

The biggest of many, many problems with the film is that it pretends to be a story of female empowerment: I’m not sure if I missed a meeting, but since when has swooning over every male character, getting drunk and being sick into handbags been the mainstay of strong female characters? There is also a horrific display of double standards: could you imagine a film where a group of men get their own back on a cheating woman by suggesting that they kick her in between the legs or supply her with hormone pills designed for pre-op trans-sexuals? The initial promise portrayed by the film’s poster (a knuckleduster sporting a wedding ring in place of a spike) is scuppered within the first five minutes.

The three leads actresses are incessantly annoying, Diaz sporting a possibly plastic-enhanced smile all the way through, Leslie Mann apparently under the belief that any line of dialogue can be made funnier simply by shouting it, and Kate Upton is there purely for set dressing. The second Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (playing the cheating husband) walks into frame, the women (even the ones he has cheated on and lied to) can’t help but fall instantly in love with him. Nicki Minaj is cast as an assistant to Diaz’ lawyer character (no, I’m not making that up), and spends her scenes plastered in grotesque layers of make-up and doing her best to shove her bottom at the camera.

As if that last piece of casting wasn’t enough, the entire film seems to be populated by the interior decoration of Maxim magazine, everyone looking perfectly tanned with perfect hair and nails and sporting snow-white teeth. None of the events or the dialogue bears anything even resembling real life, at best looking slightly tacky and at worst giving characters lines like ‘you need to cry on the inside, like winners do’. I guess that makes me the biggest winner in the entire universe, because I left the cinema positively bursting with internal tears.

At best, one could say that the film is coherently put together…and that’s it. There is nothing else in this vacuous, grotesque, star-studded pile of crap to redeem it, and the fact that it has just taken around $25 million in America is a depressing reminder of the state of modern cinema. At least Devil’s Due had the decency to make me feel so ill that I could have prematurely left the cinema with my integrity intact, but The Other Woman kept me pinned, mentally kicking and screaming for the entirety of its’ unbearable 110 minutes. 

0.5 Stars