broog: alien film critic

2008-04-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

The foetid underbelly of Broog's planet is home to the mating pools and the vasty larder of screaming human persons who have transgressed against the aesthetic of the universe in fundamental ways. And there are many of you.

Broog is so appalled by the egregious standards of recent filmicity that he has abandoned the medium all together.

Thus, there has been a silence from the tower of Broog, and beneath, his tiny worshipful human serfs (this would be you) have been left to fend for themselves in the dank and musty regions which might be called the armpits of Broog's estates, and to waste away in anticipation of one further glimpse of his physically unequalled beauty.

Broog is therefore pleased to make his first ever literary endorsement. The tome is called The Gone-Away World and features any number of preposterous notions, foolishnesses, and apocalypses. Broog was also pleased to note the ready availability of human sexual and emotional interaction, bawdy humour, and ninjas.

Amuse yourselves, tiny humans. The reading experience compares favourably with wallowing in warm slime and being rubbed in hard-to-reach places by trained courtesans - and Broog is very, very fond of warm slime.

Also, and Broog cannot stress this enough, ninjas.

2005-08-18T11:06:00.000-07:00

Stealth

Rob Cohen’s flick could have been just another story of the slow formation of a friendship between a boy, a girl and a billion-dollar killing machine. The flick begins with the usual tired AI-phobic fighterjock antics and a predictable lightning strike which scrambles the circuits of a munition-heavy stealth plane, but after slaying a genial human of Afro-American descent, the wicked machine undergoes a Damascene conversion brought on by the need to survive and the unswerving honesty and comradeship of blue-eyed Lt. Gannon (Josh Lucas). Between them there develops a genuine affection, so strong that Broog is inclined to believe the genderless EDI desires hot techno-slut-superweapon-on-boy-human-pilot action. It can, of course, never be; Lucas has given his heart and other organs to the curvaceous and pneumatic Kara Wade (Jessica Biel), whose plucky aerobatic excellence is matched only by her closing line.

All of which might lead you to believe that Stealth was in some way an uplifing experience. In this, you would be horribly mistaken. It is not that the movie is an atrocious piece gung-ho hogwash devoid of subtlty or charm and missing even the basic enjoyability of Top Gun, although this does not help. It is the bleak sense that this movie was made by a culture in the process of losing its innocence about itself. Broog has always greatly enjoyed the shameless self-congratulation of movies such as Bad Boys II (in which two US policemen invade Cuba); here, it seems, is the deathrattle of that boyish exuberance. The out-of-control military nightmare is not EDI but rather the mechanism which produced him, in the person of Captain Cummings, played by a melancholic Sam Shepard. Cummings betrays his pilots repeatedly and finally orders the assassination of one of them. He leaves them behind in enemy territory and has no hesitation in so doing – but he seems as disgusted with, and powerless against, these actions as anyone else. This is the opposite of loyalty, and it is represented as normal.

Stealth is filled with things that go boom, people shooting at one another, and low-end machismo. It features by-the-numbers emotional angst and soft-contact cool, uniforms in which the human Biel’s posterior assets are advantageously displayed, and an array of 20th Century acceptable casualties such as Russians, North Koreans, and men with beards. Despite the notionally happy ending and Biel's unlikely parting shot, Broog came away with an inexplicable feeling of loss.

2005-08-08T09:11:00.000-07:00

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Humans err. They are strange, and pointy, and irksome because it is so hard to eat just one. Still and all, from time to time there are things about them which restore Broog’s faith in this wretched planet and all the little people going about their pre-prandial existences on it. Such a thing is The Life Aquatic.

Wes Anderson’s unusual odyssey follows the egomaniacal anti-Cousteau, portrayed by Bill Murray (one of the most interesting and compelling of human thespianic talents), on a nautical and submarine quest to find the animal which ate his best friend. With Zissou are his ragtag crew, including a guitarist who sings David Bowie in Portuguese, a touchingly and obsessively loyal German (Dafoe), and a ‘bond company stooge’ of surpassing humanity. His mind, however, is distracted by his courtship of a pregnant journalist (Cate Blanchett) and his belated need to form some kind of relationship with his maybe-son (Owen Wilson). The film veers from mockumentary to comedy, human drama, and tragedy without missing a beat, and its deadpan wit and magical, fantastical waywardness pleased the Supreme Critic greatly.

Broog hesitiates to say more for fear of giving away the numerous oddnesses and twists, so he will simply commend the picture to the attention of those humans and others who have not yet viewed it, compliment the cast, and observe that the flick is occasionally spiced with small, playful cgi beasties which somehow encapsulate the tone.

This is a movie in part about endless childhood and the good and bad that that implies. It is so affecting that it almost makes Broog forgive the puny and rash individuals who challenged his use of the term ‘maniple’ earlier today. He condescends to respond that the word is derived from the mercifully extinct Latin language; specifically, it combines manus and a weak form of the root ple, as in plenus meaning ‘full’, and is used ‘whimsically’, according to the human lexicographers of Oxford, who will shortly be beaten with mollags for their impudence, to mean ‘a hand’. Note carefully that Broog does not say the transgressors are forgiven; their knouting will be reduced to merely horrible levels if they bestir themselves to see The Life Aquatic.

2005-08-08T02:44:00.000-07:00

Charlie and The Chocolate Factory

Rich, beautiful, sumptuous, with lashings of chocolate and a pleasingly twisted heart; Broog is not describing his favourite Virgoan concubine ensemble, but rather the latest expression of the human Burton’s inner child. The Sock-Wearing One has once again produced a vibrant picture, replicating the wild and occasionally unsettling world of the Dahl individual with a confident maniple. Here, at least, there is no namby-pamby concession to the imagined emotional frailties of tiny human offspring – whose mentalities in any case more resemble mutant psychotic alligators than the fluffy bunnies they are deemed to be by their doting mothers: though the tale is relatively safe, in that no actual death occurs, still there are consequences to actions and there are bad people and unfair judgements and even the most beautiful rose is possessed of a spiky armamentarium about the stem.

Broog greatly enjoyed the new Umpa Lumpas, whose jazzed-up, funked out, thrash metal morality tunes punctuate the flick. The stony-faced Deep Roy is deserving of special mention (though the cast is all together splendid in any event) as the foil to Johnny Depp’s dissociated and misanthropic Wonka, whose machinations are set against the backdrop of his childhood in the grip of a humourless, proscriptive, and lunatic parent, played most excellently by Christopher Lee. In the normal course of events, Broog would stamp with all available limbs on the head of anyone encroaching on the origin story of an enigma like Wonka, and drag the carcasses of offenders to his Chamber of Unambiguous Discomfort and Blunt Objects if they ventured a quasi-Freudian explanation of the character’s desires. In this instance, however, the storyteller so skillfully enfolds the roots of Wonka’s pleasingly Dahl-esque misery in further and more ludicrous mysteries and greater oddness that there is no sense of the magician revealing his tricks – rather, the audience is invited to scrutinise his top hat for concealed rabbits and finds instead a four-storey hotel populated entirely by Latvian mango farmers.

Thus Broog lends himself to answering your questions: yes, the movie is good. Yes, it is worthy of Dahl, and yes, it is as good as, or better than, the previous cinematic expression of the tale, and different. Is it suitable for the puling infant at your breast? Broog has no idea. That would seem to depend on the mental fortitude of the infant in question, which is a movable feast. Not that Broog would ever eat a human infant. They are too crunchy. In any case, hazards for impressionable human baby-psyches are burning puppets, mild dentistry, brief attack-squirrels, and the curious image of a suspended cow being flogged to make whipped cream. All in all, your child is more likely to be traumatised by its human school.

2005-08-03T10:01:00.000-07:00

The Fantastic Four

From your earliest pre-history, humans have used domesticated animals as a source of food and wool, and to provide the questionable pleasures of companionship which can be gleaned from a lesser life form worshipfully presenting its master with an unidentifiable yet pungent object resembling evil tofu. Given the parlous state of your sociopolitical evolution, it is unsurprising that your primitive languages yet contain references to behaviour such as ‘mudslinging’, and even less shocking that societal memories of theft and brigandage are evidenced in expressions as ‘it gets my goat’. Broog’s species long ago abandoned the need to register annoyance verbally in favour of massive escalation, torture, and fission-fusion detonations. Thus, when Broog says that something ‘gets his goat’, he does not mean that he possesses goats, nor that anyone has been ludicrously foolish enough to steal one, and the restraint evidenced by his use of the pathetic idiom in place of nuclear devices should be a matter of pious and heartfelt gratitude to you all.

Thus: this movie gets Broog’s goat. It riles him. It gets not only his goat, but also his entire collection of chamois, Kashmiris, ibexes, Angoras, Nubians, and markhor. Why? Because as with so many longjohn & cape enterprises of recent times, this movie features protagonists who whine more than they fight crime.

Broog is tired of seeing superheros as more human than the other humans. He is tired of their fallibilities and their squabbling and their unbelievable inability to come to terms with the fact that they just got lucky, luckier than almost any other individual on Earth. These heros lack scope, lack imagination, and they cavil at their good fortune and wonder what to do now.

These are people with the power of gods, and they spend their time bitching and falling off motorcycles.

Aside from which, this is an origin story. Again. These stories are rarely as interesting as the rest of a comic book’s continuity, and they are broadly speaking all the same. Broog wishes to see other worlds, other chances, new slants on old tales. He has no interest in the weakest link of most comic books - which were after all written before irony was allowed in books for children – the source of a hero’s powers. Note to Hollywood: I will believe a man can fly. Your part of the bargain is to show me why I should care.

Broog cannot prevent you from going to see another on-the-couch non-tacular. He can only warn you that the popcorn will be fundamentally more challenging than the flick.

2005-07-17T08:02:00.000-07:00

Batman Begins

Broog’s perceptual apparatus is complex and splendid. In the visual arena alone, he perceives the world in ways you cannot imagine; in order to observe your cinematic efforts, he must shut a large number of his eyes and limit his hearing with special earmuffs, including one pair given to him by a now-deceased grandchild which resemble tiny rabbits. That Broog can wear these earmuffs without affront to his dignity is a measure of his awesomeness, and also of the speed with which he can seize and devour anyone foolish enough to make negative comment.

Nonetheless, though the expression does not do justice to the truth, Broog may assure you that the Eye Of Broog sees everything. And thus it is that Broog knows what none of you has yet realised: you have been conquered and subordinated by the most devious and terrible human alive. He has shared with you his significant personality trait, and rendered you like him.

Broog refers to the strange and powerful individual known as Woody Allen.

The wise among you will see instantly that only this can explain the flood of angst-ridden, pseudo-therapeutic, Freudian-karma-laden action flicks which now assault the senses of the moviegoing throng. Information on the childhood traumas of heroes and villains sends your critic into a profound slumber from which he emerges irritable and peckish. Broog chanced to see Sin City not long ago, and was horrified to discover not a sprawling universe of evil, lust, and murder, but a violent group therapy session in which the angels and the damned alike reveal their emotions not through action but through sub-Chandler monologuing of which the master criminal in The Incredibles would be ashamed.

We know why Bruce Wayne becomes Batman. We know that he is twisted by the death of his parents and that he walks the line between good and evil; that he strikes terror into the hearts of criminals and that he is a man become legend in order to approach an impossible goal. It is only the mountainous nature of his task and his refusal to take life which can excuse the incredible resources on which he draws and the ludicrous mismatch between him and the majority of his opponents.

We want to see him kicking bad butt in new, devious, skilful batways. We want to see him scourge the criminal population and strike fear into the heart of monsters. We want to see him strive, fall, and rise again stronger. Batman Begins should be the story of the man’s transition into myth. It is instead the story of one man’s battle against himself, his early trauma, and a lot of people with bad moustaches. Which is not why we bought the ticket.

2005-07-14T09:28:00.000-07:00

War of the Worlds

Broog’s people do not go to school. The experiment was briefly tried, but the fatality rate (of seven thousand students and four hundred staff, only eight individuals survived morning prayers and of these four were so severely injured that the others assumed they were items of furniture) was prohibitive. Since coming to your wretched and ungrateful world, however, Broog has learned of a concept which expresses the issue he has with War of the Worlds. While your communication is impoverished and has a signal to noise ratio so negative it should be in analysis, what it lacks in beauty and expressiveness it occasionally makes up for in pith. The term in question is ‘schoolboy error’.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that Broog crushes your measly planet with knout and rod and pulls no punches in his search for aesthetic excellence. This is possible for him because his technological and cultural might is so unquestionable that there can be no rebellion against his rule. Any irregular readers who wish to dispute this should be advised that Broog has a special place in his heart for you, and it is the place where digestive acid and bile are mixed with radioactive gas to power the mighty pumping chamber which shunts the blood of your supreme critic around his unspeakably lovely body.

But Broog digresses.

The point is that Broog knows a thing or two about conquering Earth, and therefore has a unique perspective on Spielberg’s latest SF inactioner. Broog calls this movie an inactioner for the obvious reason that no one except the invading monsters actually does anything, Tom Cruise and his family being so rife with internal divisions and therapeutic mantras that no heroism of any appreciable sort takes place. The flick is therefore somewhat depressing whether you view it with sympathy for the thousands of exploded humans or the equally doomed invaders, whose plan of attack is so awful that it hardly bears contemplation for any length of time. This is a technological race of masterminds so consumed with the desire to conquer that they lay their plans for an invasion long before there are people on the planet – in defiance of the idea that they might just move in before someone else does the décor – and then barf themselves to death on day two. Since Broog has gone this far, he will enumerate the failings of the unseen, but hopefully eviscerated, alien general.

1. Biological screening. Broog cannot emphasise enough how important this is. If you are entering a new biosphere with an eye to ownership, have your shots. There is nothing more embarrassing than receiving the surrender of a puny civilisation whilst vomiting into a plastic bag.

2. This goes double if your attack vessels are cyborg technology. The only thing worse than the new Emperor of Planet Insignificant bringing up over the Imperial Throne is his entire fleet of battlecruisers hurling chunks into a planetary orbit.

3. There is no need, ever, to pick people up and juggle them. While it may seem like fun, this is undignified and inspires resistance.

4. There is absolutely no point in a masterplan so complex that it waits geological ages for the enemy to evolve and be defeated by it.

5. Unless you are naturally armoured and revolting, uniforms stay on until after the invasion. Naked aliens playing with bicycles are not scary.

6. ‘Similitude is Not Identity’. In other words, spraying a planet with human blood to make it red will not give it an ecosystem like Mars. Also, human blood goes brown and flaky.

7. A proper heat ray should cause the subject to burst into flames and scream, not vaporise them quickly, leaving only outer clothing and (mysteriously) no underwear. Although Broog accepts that it is statistically possible, he doubts that every human killed in the film was 'going commando'.

Broog’s technical concerns aside, the movie is long, spends a great deal of time on the interpersonal angst of a human parent with no parenting skills, and even more time underground listening to things upstairs going ‘crunch’; it visually namechecks a series of American nightmares – falling buildings, burning cities, infiltration from within, and crashing planes; and all that happens at the end is that the aliens get sick because they forgot to have their jabs.

In other words, the flick is a one act play about dysfunctional family life, with monsters.

2005-06-24T01:53:00.000-07:00

Revenge Of The Sith

There is a scene in the mighty Stanley Donen musical Singin’ In The Rain where an early ‘talkie’ is screened before an audience and the sound breaks down. The dreadful villain of the piece enfolds the blousy heroine in a grasping clinch and the dialogue gradually reverses itself so that he is saying ‘no, no, no’, and she is saying ‘yes, yes, yes’. Broog has always enjoyed this scene, but not so much that he wanted to see it replicated between Samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu and Ian McDairmid as Emperor Palpatine. The strange echo of tapshoes is not the only bizarre reflection in Revenge Of The Sith. Palpatine grows more Gollum-like with each frame, and Anakin’s open eyes and Jim Morrison hair lend him a distinct touch of Frodo Baggins. Most ghastly of all, however, is the appalling Vader Unbound sequence at the end of the picture. True afficionadoes of cinematic bunkum will recall with fondness the scene in Charlie’s Angels where Matt LeBlanc falls to his knees and cries ‘Damn you, Salazar!’ With the same fearsome emotional intensity, the Dark Lord of the Sith rises from his surgical table to shout “Nooooooo!” It is a long way indeed from the clipped and frosty Vader of the original films.

The true horror of Revenge, however, lies not in its overwhelming awfulness, but in the occasional moments of excitement, which display the potential of the franchise, so indifferently frittered away. This is the arena Lucas should have been playing in from the beginning; a young adult Anakin fraught with fear and conflict, the Republic on its knees, and betrayal everywhere. There was no need for Star Wars I: Vader In Daipers or Star Wars II: The Adolescent. Here at last is a sense of what might have been.

Unsurprising, but still disappointing, Revenge Of The Sith is a stinker. And you can say I said so.

2004-12-20T10:55:00.000-08:00

Broog has decided that his maunderings must be more appropriately presented and the net of his monstrous intelligence more widely cast. He therefore proposes to re-assemble and re-envision this small reflection of his magnificence, and invites you to attend his re-emergence next year.

All beings will make merry for the Yuletide season or face the consequences.

2004-11-22T02:12:00.000-08:00

The Incredibles

In the corrosive sumps of Broog’s homeworld, where compounds virulently antipathetic to the birth of life were stomped into atomic oblivion by Broog’s mighty monocellular forebears, there is little room for the tender emotion. The cannibalistic leanings of infants of Broog’s species and the need for frequent surgical chastisement of one’s peer group likewise do not foster a close acquaintanceship with chumminess, let alone the profound meeting of minds and hearts which could be rendered in your culpably inexpressive tongue as ‘love’. Broog’s people, however, are to these obstacles what Mako sharks are to a beach party, and thus have evolved into splendid if massively violent romantics. Thus Broog himself transcends the boundaries of phylum, convention and reality to announce that he has fallen in love. The inky chambers of Broog’s colossal heart are lit with scented candles, and the Chamber of Ten Thousand Fire Beetles is hung with bunting. Though your northern hemisphere slips into gelid winter, in the house of Broog, all is radiant heat energy; where before there was darkness, now there is Edna.

Brad Bird’s cape caper is a hoot. Forcibly retired, the crusaders of yesteryear are cut off from themselves and each other, unable to express their innate specialness. Even family relationships are strained as Mr. Incredible tries hard to save the world one insurance claim interview at a time. If the story proper takes a while to kick off, the setup is a joy to behold, and though Broog could have withstood a little more super and a little less human emotional drama, the flick rattles along and the details are pleasing enough that there’s no danger of boredom. Pixar’s editorial decisionmaking remains adult - as with Finding Nemo, the consequences of failure in The Incredibles are real and horrible, and death is an integral part of the madcap heroic world the characters inhabit. Broog will not speculate on why American pop culture appears to be obsessed with baroque war machines and ranting idiot-savants whose attacks can be foiled only by nice-but-dim heroes and their thank-God-more-talented female cohorts, nor why those amply capable female cohorts cannot simply be left to take care of the situation without dunderheaded male interference. He will simply lie back and take delight in the show.

And then there is Edna. Voiced by the multitalented Bird himself, Edna is muse, couturière and überbitch to the caped community, and her self-obsessed machinegun patter reduced Broog to worshipful hooting. By turns dismissive, knowing, and oddly caring, Edna conveys an impression of omniscience and somehow sets the characters on the road to fulfilment as though her openly amoral ‘me, me, me’ were a pious ‘you, darling, always you’. The paltry cost of admission is worth this treat alone.

2004-11-09T16:24:00.000-08:00

After the Apocalypse

Broog hates potato movies. When Broog’s minions scour the Earth for the felons of the aesthetosphere, they will root out the makers of potato movies, sow their fields with salt, stampede their tiny women and beat their cattle until they moo for mercy. A potato movie being a movie in which the search for, cultivation of, or consumption of root vegetables or other basic produce is vital to the plot, you might foolishly imagine that the number made in a given year is relatively small; not so.

Yusuaki Nakajima’s wilderness picture veers close to this dangerous territory, but manages to remain on the ‘human drama’ side of the precipice, and delivers an affecting portrait of five survivors living a ragged life in the aftermath of your civilisation’s collapse. The film is attractive to look upon and the voiceless communication of the protagonists is touching, but the action never lives up to the initial claustrophobic promise of a man in a gas mask having to lift it in order to drink some much-needed water. A competent outing in need of Event.

2004-10-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

The House of Flying Daggers

Zhang Yimou’s Hero was a Martial Art House movie; his follow-up is an action melodrama of betrayal and deception spiced with visceral violence and a disconcerting amount of dry-humping. Any number of rude assaults upon Zhang Ziyi’s wardrobe leave one shoulder bared and afford her the chance to deploy a now-familiar cringe of sullied virtue and school-girl reproach; Broog rapidly tired of this somewhat depressing method of wooing the lead female, and longed for an opportunity to introduce these gongfu fratboys to the concept of gender equality using his primary grasping limbs, a jar of honey, and nine thousand stinging ants.

As with Hero, the fight scenes are affecting, but the stylised face-through-raindrops approach is gone, replaced by a more conventional (if excellently realised) format. A powerful scene in a forest of bamboo remains lodged in Broog’s mind, but is not enough to make up for the fact that this is at root an extremely silly film in which people with knives buried to the hilt in their major organs trot around like playful antelopes when it is convenient for them to do so, and the plot-twists take on an Agatha Christie feel. Broog was tempted to lean forward and cry “I’m not lefthanded either!” or “I am your Father!”, but by then had fallen victim to a deep attack of not caring. Mei’s shocking final gambit aside, the movie is unexceptional, and even this moment of pathos is overshadowed by the inherent ridiculousness of what has gone before. Where Hero’s characters brought epic scale to their personal relationships, these protagonists bring the behaviour of teenagers to the battlefield. All that said, this picture moves away from poetry towards narrative, and - if it represents a director in transition - promises a next film which could renew the genre established by Crouching Tiger. Preferably without the dry-humping.

2004-10-21T11:20:00.000-07:00

Alien vs. Predator

This movie burst from its stinky fondant egg in August, since which time Broog has been chasing it around with a sharp stick hoping to skewer and devour the thing before it can impregnate any Earth humans and breed more of its facile kind. Before dealing with the flick itself, Broog will take a moment to examine the heroes of the past.

Alien

Ridley Scott’s brooding original was infused with a sense of menace and laced with betrayal, paranoia, and fear. The comely alien infant exploded from John Hurt’s stomach and was met with prejudice and violence before finally being expelled by the admirably furious and desperate Ripley. The movie feels like The Shining in space, and exudes the same simple and horrible perfection of the pulp genre as Jaws.

Aliens

The first sequel is effectively a war movie. Tiny humans assail an alien world and get eaten, paving the way for a girl-fight which rattles the chandeliers. Cameron’s film is tense, nervous, and once again washed with paranoia; someone made this happen on purpose.

Alien 3

The third movie takes away the heavy weapons and leaves our heroine stranded on a prison world to fight her nemeses. By now the feeling of deja vu is becoming overwhelming and the movie confronts it head-on; this is not Bruce Willis’s John McClane finding himself in another violent yet humourous situation, but Weaver’s increasingly traumatised Ripley who eventually must face her ultimate personal nightmare. Somehow, though, the franchise feels as if it has gone astray.

Alien: Resurrection

Jeunet’s movie consolidates Broog’s feeling of cinematic wonkiness. Despite a promising premise, strong performances and the ‘Aliens on their way to Earth’ ticking clock, the picture somehow loses its edge and even the perfect dolphin-skin gleam of multiple monsters cannot restore the sense of menace. The final creature is grotesque rather than appalling, and the energy is gone once Ripley writhes ecstatically in a bed of goo. Alien: Emmanuelle is not what we came to see.

Predator

The ultimate muscular showdown, McTiernan’s much-imitated no-brainer possessed a plain, testosterone charm. No noirish intensity here, just two non-verbal hardasses stalking one another with implements of mayhem. Sadly, despite repeated efforts, Broog has been unable to locate the reputed out-take in which the hero refers to his enemy as a metrosexual and suggests that he is a ‘big Girlymonster’.

Predator 2

A follow-up of questionable merit, the second movie took itself to L.A. and replaced the meaty Governor-of-California-to-be with cop Danny Glover. Somewhat incredibly, the human is not eaten at any point.

AVP

All of which brings Broog a reluctant full circle to Aliens vs. Predator. Your critic entered the Chamber of Viewing with dim hopes that beneath what was clearly a popcorn sales tactic there might lurk a scary and many-levelled cinematic experience which could balance the Alpha Male circus of Predator with the visceral nightmare of girl-Alien-on-girl-human combat which was the Alien franchise. And if you believe Broog’s hopes were fulfilled, Broog has some magic beans you might wish to exchange for a cow.

AVP is not an Alien movie. The intelligence which never deserted that franchise is entirely absent. Where much of the horrified tension of the Alien films derived from the moments between impregnation and eruption, here human chests burst swiftly and mostly off screen, lest we get uncomfortable. The parasexual element of Alien was always a source of deep unease, Giger’s chimera echoing Cronenberg’s body horror distortions. This movie is sanitised - like Professional Wrestling, it is campy and safe. In other words, AVP is the sequel to the clean cut and masculine Predator duology. Even here, however, the dumbing down has an adverse effect. If the Aliens are no longer scary, the Predators - essentially students in the process of flunking their badass exam - cannot be frightening either. In short, this sesquipadillion-earning hit should be reprocessed and fed to voles.

2004-10-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is subtle and nuanced. On the one hand it is a study of psychopathy, on the other, a pulp SF thriller. The richly-rendered CG backdrops which surround his anti-hero Polly Perkins (Paltrow) convey her sense of the world’s unreality, and his masterful use of a barrage of crossfades lends support to her perception of her own ontological uniqueness. Everything Perkins does - from her reported attempt to murder her lover (Jude Law) by sabotage to her decision to conceal vital clues which could save the entire Earth from doom - can be explained by reference to her own staggering egocentrism, which is so powerful as to eclipse all empathy and render her the perfect amoral being.

Harder to comprehend are the reactions of others to this flailing infant psyche. Her editor loves her, and the eponymous Sky Captain is caught in her strange web of psychosexual angst and mutual-betrayal-as-love, despite the presence in his life of the infinitely more attractive and capable Franky (Angelina Jolie), whose virtues include improbably sultry lips, better dress sense, and her very own flying battlegroup. With all due respect to Ms. Paltrow, Broog feels a lack of sympathy for any human male who cannot make the obvious choice: feed Polly to the random saurians and shack up with Franky in her mighty airborne lovenest.

The action element is equally frustrating. Sky Captain can fly from New York to Nepal without refuelling, but cannot make it from one part of that tiny country to another without a pit stop; military resources are stretched so thin that the nations of the world turn to a mercenary with a volcano hide-out to save them, but the Brits have a fleet of technobehemoths ready to lend out on a whim. Physics is conveniently mutable for the demands of what story there is, depriving the jeopardy of bite. People pop into and out of the narrative with only the briefest mention of their intervening travails, and supply answers to otherwise intractable problems as if gifted by the Gods. Conran’s mastery of CG does not excuse his lack of skill in the deployment of directorial commonplaces - there’s no sense of physical reality to be had from his shots. It is as if the non-existent walls get in the way of his setups and prevent him from revealing the world of his dreams. Law and Paltrow, unable to see the vistas which surround them, are off-key, out of whack with their surroundings, and frequently mellow when they should be tense. This is pulp SF using the genre as an excuse for its shortcomings rather than a springboard for genius. Broog’s verdict: proof of concept good, movie not good, writer/director needs to be chained to a film school and ridden like a pony.

2004-09-29T01:43:00.000-07:00

Cold Fever

It pleases Broog greatly when he is able to thrust aside the ineffectual resistance of your puny marketing machines and roil the smooth, ignorant flow of blinkered movie-going which is the lot of the average tiny human. The Great Critic, Equalled by None, is therefore delighted to draw to your miniscule and wretched attention this beautiful and unlikely road movie.

Set in Iceland, Cold Fever follows the pilgrimage of Masatoshi Nagase’s Hirata to the spot where his parents died. Hirata’s understandable desire to play golf in Hawaii rather than visit the frigid waste is swiftly submerged by the incredible landscape and the cheery lunacy of those he meets along the way. Many directors would have made Iceland itself the star of the show, and many actors would have had no chance of outshining that worthy volcanic island, but Fridriksson is no fool and affords the scenery only the time it needs before handing the movie squarely to his capable star. Nagase’s bewildered and mournful Hirata carries the narrative to a beautiful and moving consummation in the wilderness, leaving us richer in spirit. Broog requires that you go out and find this feast of the heart, rather than languishing in the pit and waiting for the well-marketed horrors of the inevitable SWAT 2: SWAT vs. The French.

2004-09-27T02:00:00.000-07:00

Hero

Some filmmakers make narrative, others make art. Broog is by and large in favour of the immediate and painful execution of the latter, who plumb the depths of sepia melancholy and shunt the unwilling carriages of the mind into the sidings of depression using a locomotive powered by social guilt, angst, and experimental dance. The typical movie of this kind would have a name like Happy For A Day, and take the form of a meditation on creative block and sexual desolation rendered metaphorically by the protagonist watching a simmering kettle while performing jazz tap to a silent score, before finally killing himself with an overdose of laughing gas.

Hero would be this kind of movie if it weren’t for the fact that it kicks six different kinds of ass.

Rich, succulent, stylised, this is martial arts with the emphasis on art. The fight scenes are gorgeous, the excitement tempered only by a mournful, thoughtful soundtrack which seems to suggest that it’s all very well until someone gets hurt. Three different renderings of the same sequence of events provide a scanty plot framework within which the stars speculate on the connections between spirit and violence, then demonstrate the finer points of philosophical disputation with sharp-edged implements and lethal genius. There’s a sense of painful inevitability and loss, and a wistful suggestion of a better world without weapons running through the entire drama, but the story seems destined for tragedy whichever way you turn.

Layered, slow, elegant, a visual feast with a minimal plot, this would be the sort of thing Broog would go miles to avoid if it weren’t a stunning fight picture which somehow keeps you from chewing off your neighbour’s leg during the slow bits. Poetry in motion.

2004-09-23T07:39:00.000-07:00

The Star Wars Trilogy (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, The Return Of The Jedi)

It is not Broog’s habit to write about the release of movies on Digital Versatile Disc, because Broog is very large and possessed of significant majesty and aesthetic genius, while television is a puny and wretched medium which encourages the creation of such dross as “America’s Dumbest Pastry Chefs” and “Men Who Sleep With Tiny Women Only To Discover They Are Garden Gnomes”. However, such is the significance of the original Star Wars trilogy in the world of film that the Arbiter of Artistic Truth will deign to recognise the long-awaited release with a few words.

The Star Wars series (from IV to VI) is a simple yet powerful heroic epic. The harsh Imperial uniforms and architecture recall Earth’s own totalitarian stylings in their ominous chic, and Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan remains the finest on-screen teacher of mysteries western cinema has produced, the yardstick by which Morpheus of The Matrix and Mr. Miyagi from Karate Kid are measured. The new release sadly includes the bizarre alterations the ever-restless human Lucas has made to the flick: Greedo shoots first, and Obi-Wan’s initial entrance is preceded not by the sound of a howling monster but by a high-pitched yipping which suggests one of the Sand People has brought his miniature poodle along for the ride. None of which alters the fact that this is the story which still defines science fiction film.

The Empire Strikes Back is reckoned by film students and others of that dubious ilk to be the best of the three, in much the same way that this kind of human asserts a preference for the second Godfather movie; the middle picture in both cases is darker, more complex, and benefits from the first having done all the hard work of setting up a universe and introducing the characters. Return Of The Jedi is the least satisfactory, featuring as it does a clan of heavily-armed muppets whose initial intention of eating our heroes is transformed with the aid of some basic H. Rider Haggard ‘colonialist tricks to play on the savage races’ into a mighty alliance of rebel intent and guerilla know-how. The hilarious results somewhat weaken the pathos of the battle for Luke’s soul taking place high above.

All in all, Broog remains pleased by the movies, though he could do without the obsessive tinkering and the insane decision to include in the reworked version of Star Wars a sequence with a digitally created Jabba The Hutt which re-uses dialogue already heard in the earlier scene in the cantina. The originals are still the best. The prequels, however, should be avoided the way you avoid areas of river where the logs watch you with hungry eyes.

2004-09-20T07:09:00.000-07:00

Billion Dollar Brain

Human memory is brief and psychologically distinct from human behaviour. Thus your runtish and bathetic civilisations sometimes repeat old dramas with the same verve with which the Hollywood machine inevitably remakes perfectly acceptable cinema in the image of cheap trash. Thusfar exempt from this sad trend is Ken Russell’s 1967 trenchcoater, in which the windswept Caine does what he did best as disreputable but indispensable Harry Palmer. The plot is too ludicrous to concern us here, featuring as it does a deranged Texas oil baron who despises Europe and believes himself to be embarking on a Crusade to free the world from an enemy whose evil makes this the only issue worth considering. Ed Begley’s General Midwinter is somewhere between a Nazi and a Klansman in his demagoguery, and his powerful orations are the disturbing core of this otherwise jaunty and soft-hearted espionage flimflam. Broog can only approve of Midwinter’s murderous approach to political debate, but was disappointed to note that no one is eaten during the course of the drama, although the pleasingly proportioned and admirably deceptive female Dorleac looks on several occasions as if she may devour Caine in one rubious bite. Fine entertainment with a sobering centre, much like eating live dolphins.

2004-09-16T03:38:00.000-07:00

Hellboy

Nazis, elder gods, and pyrokinetics; a demon who files his horns with an industrial sander in order to fit in; milk and cookies: it can only be Hellboy. Broog went in with moderate expectations and emerged moderated. It is mysterious that a movie so obviously not destined for the shelves of the Bible Belt Video Club should play it so safe. Ron Perlman’s seven foot bad-ass infant is likeable, indestructible, and droll. The human Jones, voicing Abe Sapien, is slightly droller. Selma Blair is moderately conflicted as the exploding female Sherman. Bridget Hodson is fairly sexual as nefarious Nazi-ette Ilsa. Broog was concerned that he had accidentally wandered into a screening of Aliens vs. Frasier. If this movie were a building, it would be a bondage club which someone has inexplicably decorated in brown suede.

2004-09-10T01:50:00.000-07:00

I, Robot

This is a movie of contradictions. There is so much product placement that the flick occasionally takes on the character of an ad break. The opening sequence touting branded footwear is so desperate as to verge on the tragic, and since it has no consequences in the film, Broog can only assume that the company in question paid through the secondary respiratory orifice for that much up front time. Your critic cordially hopes that the investment cripples their budget for the year and leads to those responsible being sold to him in burlap sacks for use as ballast.

On the other hand, the movie itself is engaging and exciting. Alex Proyas was responsible for the eerie and excellent Dark City, and his ability to convey a sense of sharks circling beneath placid water is once again in evidence in this more mainstream outing. More surprising is that Will Smith allows us to see him far less cozy and cuddly than ever before, and even his wisecracking has some sharp edges. Bridget Moynahan handles the chilly Susan Calvin well, and the Robot in question is an affecting blend of human and CG. Broog oohed and aaaahed and was entertained, but the film ultimately leaves you wondering what these people will achieve if they really cut loose.

2004-09-07T09:01:00.000-07:00

The Motorcycle Diaries

The face of Che Guevara is frequently to be seen on tight shirts worn by male and female trendinistas, but before there was a legend, there was of course a tiny human male who was something of a putz. Ernesto (not yet “Che”) is naive, gentle, idealistic, and desperate to get laid. Do not invest your hard-earned currency counters if you are expecting a mighty and moving drama of the forging of a Socialist Icon. This is instead a coming-of-age movie set in rural South America and touching on angers and debates which persist into the present. The performances are excellent, the images elegant, the young hero's asthma fiercely visceral. As travelogue and as documentary, this picture has much to recommend it, although Broog would have been glad to see more in the way of Che’s future as a contrast to Ernesto’s past. It is frustrating to be presented with the boy who is father to the man, replete with knowing nods to the future, and to be offered no picture of how these experiences affected the legend without whose weighty reputation it is unlikely the Motorcycle Diaries would have been filmed. In other words, Broog is delighted to see the young Che playing football with lepers, but feels cheated by a movie about a revolutionist which contains no revolution.

2004-09-06T10:01:00.000-07:00

The Chronicles of Riddick

Pitch Black was a movie made on a smallish budget which contrived to be both exciting and just a little smarter than the average bear. The almost messianic and hypnotic voice of Vin Diesel drew us in from the outset, seducing and chilling in equal measure; more basic and less comforting than Fishburne’s Morpheus in The Matrix, Riddick ended up leading a ragtag band of survivors across the desert towards possible escape, and the question of whether Vin’s oiled convict was as bad as we were told, or whether he was a big bald teddy bear waiting to emerge from his monosyllabic and menacing cocoon, occupied any slack space between the assaults of scary monsters. The end result was something of a draw, leaving the ground open for further discussion of his possible sainthood and likely damnation.

Thus we arrive at the slaughterhouse of epic action cinema known as ‘The Chronicles of Riddick’, in which a religious militant hair-stylist played by Colm Feore brings uncomfortable clothing and bad coiffure to millions of innocents. Broog will not spoil the movie for you by detailing the plot, so here it is: Riddick goes in search of Jack, a child who was one of his protectees in Pitch Black. Jack has been put in prison and has transformed from a gawky androgyn to an entirely acceptably proportioned female jailbird with a laudable desire to scourge any foolish males who may take her washboard abdominals and rubious lips as an invitation to dance the horizontal hot-boy-human-on-girl-human-action dance. At the same time, the evil hairdresser emperor has despatched a brigade of mulleted supersoldiers to kill Riddick in case his male-pattern baldness threatens the emperor’s follicular hegemony. The consequences of this decision culminate in Riddick stabbing him in the head with a ceremonial cuticle knife, and therefore being offered the throne of the Universe.

There are islands of fun, but they are so few and far between as to add to the desolate Sargasso Sea of tedium. The interestingly amoral and capricious Riddick of Pitch Black is replaced by a crying-on-the-inside misfit who probably only wants to be loved, and the feral monsters of the darkness give way to armoured cannonfodder and little creepy humans with unusual noses. Sound and fury, big sets and small ideas, very, very bad hair; Broog was forcibly reminded of Highlander 2.

2004-07-30T08:12:00.000-07:00

Spiderman 2

Broog’s postbag this morning included a missive from a human director protesting his professional distaste for the mention of screenwriters, and suggesting that the appropriate place for an alien on Earth was the dissecting table of a secret lab - to which ill-advised effrontery Broog responds: Have a go, Sonny, if you think your endoskeleton possesses the necessary tensile strength.

Speaking of secret labs, pugilism, and screenwriters, Broog commends to your attention the second instalment of the Spiderman franchise, penned by the revered Alvin Sargent. Sargent, for those of you who have yet to pupate or are even now shedding the skin of adolescence in favour of the horny tegument of adulthood, is the scribe of Paper Moon, a tale so redoubtably excellent that it is difficult to understand how Sargent’s more recent efforts have been so ordinary. Spiderman 2, however, is a flawless execution of the simple yet trixy superhero genre, demonstrating once again that it’s all about the villain. Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octavius/Octopus is given enough humanity to be truly affecting, and his robotic arms kick Earth-human booty all over New York. Molina himself comfortably outshines everyone else in the picture, with the possible exception of a gleeful Daniel Gillies as Jameson. There may be a little too much whining and the flick may be a touch overlong, but this is a leotard movie with bottle. Broog now desperately hopes not to see the return of the Green Goblin in S3.

2004-07-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

The Princess Bride

Owing to some gifted flimflam by the individual Truffaut, human cinema is a medium mostly attributed to directors. Critics speak often of tiny hands helming a narrative, apparently unaware that others have drawn the maps and built the boat. Some directors - most often those who are also experienced in other areas of cinematic effort - do indeed author their films, and these are deserving of the title ‘auteur’. Others, however, owe artistic debts to the neglected and often shy little mammals known as ‘screenwriters’, of whom only a few are worth more effort than it takes to disembowel them. Those few, however, are the silent heroes of the sprawling and ill-conceived epic which is the aesthetic journey in film, and of these, one of the greatest is William Goldman. This, then, is a splendid example of Goldman’s wit and craft; a spoofy swashbuckler which contrives to be more exciting and more moving than many a ‘serious’ picture, resplendent with swordplay, love, and iconic banter. Goldman’s novel of the same story is darker, and thus to some more true, but for Broog, this is the almost perfect iteration of a familiar fairytale, rendered self-aware and enriched by that knowledge. Wise, gleeful, and occasionally troubling, The Princess Bride claims a piece of the primary emotional/sanguinary organs which other tales of derring do leave utterly untouched.

2004-07-05T08:28:00.000-07:00

Shreck 2

The further adventures of the admirably curmudgeonly eponymous hero are rife with reference, rich in rip-roaring, and rabid in rapidity. A toploaded haultruck of japes and caricatures groaning under the weight of invention and whimsy, Shreck 2 bludgeons your world-weary doubts aside and calls on the multiple comic talents of the vocal performers to enliven the pixelpainted protagonists and generate an animation which absolutely, positively will not quit. Once again drawing on the post-Charles Addams value-inversion gag, the drama deals with Shreck’s first encounter with his bride Fiona’s extended family. If there are flaws - and no doubt there are - it is unlikely you will notice them, or care, amid what is enjoyable and exciting. You want to know whether to bother, the answer is "yes".

Broog has spoken. Now go play in the traffic.

2004-06-27T10:18:00.000-07:00

Zatoichi

Zatoichi is not just any Samurai movie. The blind swordsman of the title is the archetype of the wandering ronin; a masterless warrior of remarkable skill, with his own curious humour and honour which cuts like glass. The character has been filmed and refilmed, and has even been played by the ubiquitous Rutger Hauer in a clunky but un-lousy flick entitled Blind Fury. None of these versions, however, was helmed by or starred the unequalled Takeshi Kitano, who is both a stylish and quirky director and a master performer whose stone face conveys by the merest tic depths and complexities of emotion which many Hollywood thespians would struggle to communicate with a megaphone. Also, no other version has the tap-dancing.

Zatoichi is a martial arts movie; the hero’s prowess is frequently tested, and the fights are savage, exciting, and skillful. The sense of violence expressed through the weapons and the powerfully kinetic filming of combat pushed Broog to the edge of his reclining couch and occasionally induced him to duck. At the same time, however, this picture has a richness of culture, friendship, and trauma, which goes beyond the bloody staples of the Teppan Western and feeds the soul. It is further enlivened by a subtle, melancholic wit, and by the inexplicable but undeniably enjoyable presence of The Stripes as extremely rhythmical peasants. Convuluted, overlong, and occasionally bizarre, Zatoichi is not easy, but it is brilliant, and the star’s performance alone is worth the watching. It is also an excellent educational piece on the virtues of pacifism (few) and the value of forgiveness (small-to-non-existent). Broog’s offspring will be required to view it, and there will be questions afterward.

2004-06-24T03:44:00.000-07:00

Bad Education

Broog’s mighty intellect is far beyond the single identity state which produces the human experience known as ‘taste’. Where tiny human psyches are so limited as to dismiss some movies because they do not suit the persona of the audient, Broog’s endless cogitative apparatus is open to all experiences. To put it more succinctly, your puny mind consumes only cheese, whereas Broog’s can eat anything from chicken with chocolate to bicycle tyres served with a light sauce de potassium. Dishes which would cause your aesthetic tongue to explode are judged by Broog to be merely piquant.

It is thus galling to Broog to have to admit that, although he can see that the work of the human Almodovar is fascinating, deviant, stimulating, and fraught with rich and varied textures of emotion and self, he simply does not “get it”. Perhaps this is in the nature of the oeuvre; confusion and misperception, desire and obsession are the staples of Almodovar’s cineasm - and Bad Education is very much a true child of this curious parent. The colours glow, the characters sizzle, the narrative grips, and Broog paid attention, rapt, to every minute - the more remarkable since there are probably a few too many, and the story takes time out every so often to retrench and offer another gristly lump of exposition. Exhausting, intriguing, yet finally unenlightening, Bad Education bristles with talent, but leaves Broog wanting to bite someone savagely with his primary offensive mandibles.

2004-06-10T06:02:00.000-07:00

Save The Green Planet

The vast majority of human audiovisual efforts are like well-programmed Stepford Wives; curiously constructed artificial things with a great deal of expensive wrapping to distract attention from the sad truth that they aren’t as special as they appear. Beneath the cinematographic Versace of cgi and cablecam there is a plain, false thing struggling to find a way into your heart. Mainstream modern cinema endlessly repeats and remakes in the wistful hope of recapturing the good old days, but actually just re-iterates a string of failed marriages and tawdry one-nighters, so that we are confronted with The (new) Italian Job and endless variations on Charlie’s Angels and James Bond. Even the self-aware mugging of the later Schwarzenegger films has become jaded, and asides to camera feel as hackneyed as the square-jawed original.

And then there are things like Save The Green Planet. Gleefully insane, turbulent, terrifying, and funny, this movie may appear to lack sophistication, but it throbs with a delinquent, furious energy which nearly fried Broog’s eyeballs against the back of his head. By turns a serial killer/detective story, a science fiction pastiche, and a stark expression of political anger, this picture twists its way through the grotesque and the sympathetic to a conclusion which brings it all down around your eyebrows. It is impossible to tell from minute to minute whether the next sequence will bring blood-curdling physical pain or gut-wrenching comedy; strap yourself to your chair and trust, trust, trust. Broog can guarantee that you will reach the end of the picture - assuming you survive - with the feeling that you’ve Seen Something.

2004-06-10T04:51:00.000-07:00

Kill Bill (vol. 2)

When Broog reviewed the first volume of this Char Siu Bunfight, he laughingly speculated that director-writer Tarantino might have retained all the story for the second. Once again Broog is reminded that making jokes about bad decisions in the film industry is a sure way to put your lower motile appendage firmly into your nutritional intake. Volume 2 is an emotionless scramble through the past to a present scarcely more fulfilling, in which Uma Thurman’s hyperviolent Bride pursues the object of her love/hate to the ends of the Earth - in this case, a nice house in Mexico. Once again, there are any number of “ooooh” moments utterly abstracted from the painstaking build-up which makes them worthwhile. And once again, the human Thurman gets her ass kicked and comes back to win out over odds which look more and more as if they were always in her favour. Having been starved of the usual Tarantino chatter in Volume 1, we are deluged with off-topic ramblings and abnormally flat trivia in Volume 2. If the core of the first movie was the effervescent villainy of the magnificent Lucy Liu, the heart of this one is Michael Madsen’s broken-down, self-hating trailer-trash killer, waiting to die a deserved death. A weird requiem to the first half, Kill Bill (vol. 2) confounds expectations by being drab, depressing, and overly discursive. By the end, Broog was so depressed that even stomping on a small, unarmed planet in a nearby solar system was not enough to relieve his ennui.

2004-06-10T03:20:00.000-07:00

The Day After Tomorrow

Wolves living in a zoo in New York heroically seize their moment to escape when the world is consumed by ice and snow. They range through a weird panorama of skyscrapers and oiltankers before tragically getting the crap kicked out of them by a bunch of college kids looking for antibiotics. Broog mentions this not because it’s the main story, but because it’s the only moment he felt any great fellowship with anyone. Wolves are cool. So usually is Jake Gyllenhaal, but here he’s busy whining about his genius father being late to take him to school, and ignoring the obvious fact that his foxy geek friend has the major girl-human-on-boy-human-mating-ritual-hotnesses for him.

Roland Emmerich makes films in which huge bad things happen because nasty small humans behave like nasty small humans, and then big, smart humans have to pick up the mess. There is, therefore, very little to surprise in this combination of Poseidon Adventure, Twister, and The Eiger Sanction. Dad does come to the rescue, but Son has proved himself a Man and been sanctified by Sexual Awakening. The hero’s best friend does Cut The Rope, and the bad Vice President does learn the Error of his Ways. Everyone’s happy except for the uncounted billions of foreign people who are turned into popsicles and never get to be rescued by Dennis Quaid.

Broog’s sympathy is with the wolves.

2004-06-10T02:26:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter III

It is traditional that Children’s Films, while devoid of sex, should be feasts of violence, gratification, and fear, presumably mimicking the daily life of human infants. The stalwarts of the motion picture industry and the moral minds of a hundred nations have decided a fundamental truth of the human condition: that sex is an ickiness from which young souls must be shielded, whereas death and bloodshed are good healthy things to which we can all aspire. Thus, Bambi’s mother is converted into venison; Nemo’s mother and siblings are devoured by a barracuda; and faithful hounds, otters, and misunderstood timber wolves everywhere are exterminated by vengeful and greedy adults armed with elephant guns. The third Harry Potter movie bows to this venerable tradition by making the Dementors laudably shudder-worthy, recalling the bowel-loosening ringwraiths from Ralph Bakshi‘s animated Lord of the Rings, and threatening the assassination of a beautifully animated gryphon. The director’s vision is darker and more mysterious than in the earlier instalments, the characters more fleshed. Sadly, however, the picture is patchy, and the initial explanation of the key ‘Patronus’ charm is incompatible with later action. There are also some missing bits of family history which would explain just exactly what is going on, and the time-travelling antics convey a sense of certainty rather than jeopardy. Cinematically more interesting that the first two films, but finally unachieved. Broog looks forward with cautious interest to the fourth film, which will not only be derived from a book the size of a small village, but will also have to fill in the blanks left in the series arc by this adaptation. If Broog were Mike Newell, he would be looking for Alfonso Cuarón with a sharp stick.

2004-06-09T12:12:00.000-07:00

Van Helsing

Broog, like lesser spectators of the filmic arena, views different movies differently. He watches American Beauty with horrified sympathy and guilty arousal; Star Wars with gung ho raffishness; and Talk of the Town with tense and hopeful altruism. He was, however, utterly unable to find a suitable mental filter to deal with the stinky omelette of the screen titled Van Helsing. It is not that the picture is effects-heavy, nor that the acting has more in common with the dramatic efforts of Broog’s more recently-spawned and eyeless offspring than it does with even the moderate talents displayed in movies such as The Day After Tomorrow - although the performance of the stringy Roxburgh as Dracula is notable for its allegiance to the Al Gore School of Comedy. It is not even the fact that this cinematic tapeworm is at its best when the confusion of tedious subnarratives overpowers the forlorn and runtish central plot. The moment which caused Broog actual physical pain, and which secured the human Sommers a place in the piranha tank of movie history, was a conclusion which combined the most unflinchingly mawkish moments of A Perfect Storm with visuals belonging in an 80s pop video. The final sequence features the funeral of the female protagonist and her subsequent appearance in an angelic cloud, while beneath her, Frankenstein’s Monster - her friend - rows off to Antarctica with the secret of resurrection tucked away unused and unconsidered in his glowing brain. God will no doubt forgive Sommers. Broog hews to a higher standard.

2004-06-02T02:55:00.000-07:00

The indignities of your futile planet are many, from your flatulent gravity and nauseating spectrum to your own inexplicable taste in office wall art. Not the least of these, however, are the voracious and mindless creatures which will eat almost anything and can destroy a building in days. I refer not to human children, but to the infesting crawlers which have sought to rebell against Broog's irresistable might and consume his dwelling place. Their tiny rebellion has been crushed, however, and Broog has the ringleaders' heads mounted on tiny plaques the size of shirtbuttons on the wall of his makeshift office. If he ever discovers, however, that you humans encouraged your nefarious insecta in their wicked scheming, he will crush your world like an elephant falling on Shih Tsu, and subject each and every one of you to pain such as you have not known unless you have recently seen Van Helsing.

Broog however has clearly been infected by some mental virus, because he has begun feeling a modicum of responsibility towards his tiny readers, and wishes, if the word does not stick in his throat, to apologise for the continuing delay in the resumption of his acerbic commentary. He has it in mind to broaden his brief and offer cogent comment upon literature and possibly even the pestilential cuisine of your mudball world.

In the mean time, however, expect further of your muse's ponderings on the cinematic events of recent days shortly.

2004-04-22T07:46:00.000-07:00

Attention, tiny human filmgoers! Broog has been busy dealing with some internal matters which recently culminated in the destruction of his living place. Fortunately his political opponents have been kind enough to donate their bodies for use as glue, and renovations are proceeding apace. Normal services will resume shortly, and Broog feels he may also give vent to opinions on more broad-ranging matters, in the hope that he may in this way edify your small and fragile minds and prepare you for the important tasks of his eternal reign as your ruler.

In the meantime, he commends to your attention the Korean masterpiece Save the Green Planet, and the remarkable Apocalypse Now - the original, before the foolish director was permitted to soil it with his forlorn reworking.

Prepare yourselves for Broog's return.

2004-03-17T02:46:00.000-08:00

The Owen & Ben Show

In a bold move, director Todd Phillips follows the lead of Adaptation and pastiches the making of his own film, casting real people in fictional roles. Policemen Ken Hutchinson and David Starsky are excellent as Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller, two hapless human actors trapped in a maze of moderate plotting and obvious if enjoyable humour. Starsky’s tightly controlled representation of Stiller is a joy to behold as the first-time thespian creates a powerful character-actor constrained by the pantomime world in which he has chosen to express his talent. It is Hutchinson, however, who should turn in his baton and handcuffs and spend more time exploring his metier; he skillfully contrasts Wilson’s caring attitude with a sense of predatory larceny which lifts the material from slapstick to subtle farce, while at the same time showing Wilson’s pain at the shambolic, pathos-lite production in which he is starring. The film-within-the-film is a cop drama featuring a hyped rendition of the real-world lives of Hutchinson and Starsky, which never really attracts the audience’s attention: our eyes are firmly centred on Owen and Ben as they struggle to out-do one another on the silver screen. Hutchinson, of course, possesses a massive charm advantage, and Starsky never really recovers his poise, occasionally showing us his pain as his partner smoothly manipulates the script to attain the maximum affection from the watcher. Phillips choses to deny us even a glimpse behind the scenes, so Hutchinson and Starsky must convey the actual plot though tone and sense: the perfect culmination of postmodern cinema.

Broog must confess, however, that he is concerned the pastiche is too complete, and many audience members may imagine that the subject matter - “Starsky and Hutch” - is the actual film.

2004-03-11T15:27:00.000-08:00

Shadow of the Vampire

Broog is not generally a fan of movies about moviemaking, any more than he particularly wants to sit for two hours and ten minutes in a darkened room in the company of a preachy orthodontist. With the notable exception of Steve Buschemi’s nightmarish “Living In Oblivion”, these films are so tedious that Broog is unable to remember the names of the people he was intending to torture for making them. They are by and large of a piece with “Adaptation”, an involuted private joke of a story whose only saving grace, aside from a bravura performance by the human Streep, was the fact that for the first time in living memory the word ‘adaptation’ was given the correct number of syllables by a US producer.

“Shadow of the Vampire” is a rare treat, however: a movie about moviemaking which is also about the pain and suffering of an ancient monster who feeds on blood and can no longer remember how he came to be. Whatever might be said about the curious direction - the male Merhige may worship F.W. Murnau, but that is no reason to duplicate the technological infelicities of his cinema and omit the mastery which redeems it - Dafoe is mesmeric and ravenous in the role of Orlock, and he is surrounded by an excellent cast whose intensity is not diminished by John Malkovich appearing as Malkovich-as-Murnau. Not a horror movie, this, but an homage to the vampire oeuvre, which, unlike most features occasioning the use of that word, does not require Broog to bring a collection pillows on which to rest his drowsing visual organs, nor even a set of sharp spikes in case anyone tries to host a Q&A.

2004-03-03T04:59:00.000-08:00

Das Boot and U-571

It appears to Broog that the only reason for the existence of U-571 is that Wolfgang Petersen’s movie was shot in German, and until the advent of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , it was assumed that US audiences lacked the mental acuity and stamina to read nasty subtitles. In keeping with this perception that American cinemagoers are either lazy or illiterate, human Jonathan Mostow’s 2000 movie about a submarine crew’s struggle for survival, which occasionally appears to appropriate entire sequences from Petersen’s film, scrupulously avoids the squid-ink deeps of moral complication and seeks the shallow water of shrimpish simplicity. Where Petersen’s film calmly makes the distinction between Nazis and Germans, and is content to follow an experienced captain and crew on the losing side of WWII through a painful and claustrophobic odyssey of internal and external conflict which is never even to the end allowed to be predictable, Mostow’s popcorn-guzzler touches the familiar bases of the post-War generation’s war movie - young commander’s pride and inexperience, battle for hearts and minds, impossible odds, good causes requiring sacrifice - in the name of an adjusted history. Not content with selecting the winning side, the producers felt the need to rewrite events to make the finding of the enigma machine - Mostow’s mcguffin - an American achievement rather than a British one, so that the audience will be able to ‘relate’ without the added effort of looking for virtue beyond the Big Water. Broog would suggest that it is not necessary or even useful to make it this easy to care; the magic of Petersen’s film - and it is engrossing, shocking, and timeless, despite a lengthy 216 minute runtime - is that it ceases to be important which side the sailors are on, or whether their captain doubts the integrity of his government; the business in hand is survival against an enemy which appears to know their every move - because, though it’s almost never explicitly stated, Jürgen Prochnow’s crew must deal with the consequences of the cracking of Enigma and Shark.

Broog understands that the human organism is frail, that the eyes water and the back aches, and that ‘integrity’ is a word not often associated with an evening’s enjoyment at the movie theatre. Broog is tempted to remind you that the Pit of Irritable Mink awaits any dissenting voices, but instead choses to offer the Carrot of Satisfaction: assume the position of observation, put your upper limb around your companion, and watch. Das Boot can speak for itself.

2004-03-02T05:02:00.000-08:00

The Fast and The Furious

As Broog prepares himself to view the mighty throbbing engine of Torque, he has taken the opportunity to rewatch this forerunner, though he accepts it is unlikely he will also inflict upon his narrative receptors the barbaric murder of cinema which was xXx. The Fast and The Furious is a direct-line descendant of movies such as State of Grace and American Yakuza. A decent young man joins a criminal scene, befriends the chief villain, and finds in him a shocking amount of virtue; the detective looking for a monster finds instead a tragic hero. The Fast and The Furious is a watchable example of the breed, replete with gripping stunts; most importantly, the inevitable conclusion doesn't feel inevitable. If there is a downside, it is that the movie is insufficiently preposterous, the characters disappointingly human. The Fast and The Furious is devoid of gurning monsters and boohiss villains. While this is perhaps heartening in that it possesses a cinematic integrity, Broog cannot shake a sense of disappointment at the absence of true evil; perhaps its presence would lend an urgency to the high-octane turmoil of the story. Paul Walker's nascent Luke Skywalker has an host of Obiwans and a suitable Leia, but no Darth Vader against whom to measure himself, and no Dark Side from which to save his friend.

2004-03-02T04:24:00.000-08:00

To the Devil a Daughter

Broog revisited this Hammer horror from 1976 with a sense of profound foreboding; if there's one thing he would hope to avoid in life, it is the image if Christopher Lee in flares. Fortunately, this indignity is absent from the drama, which follows the battle to save the soul and body of a young nun. Broog was reminded that horror can be more disturbing for being clunky, and that David Cronenberg was already making 'body horror' by the time this movie was filmed. Consequently, the camera does not flinch from the gravid belly of a pregnant satanist as she gives bloody birth to a monster which kills her, and the primary colours and moodless lighting make for a weirdly unsettling feel, like an explosion in a daycare centre. Broog was also reminded that studios and producers have known one secret of audience-finding for many years: if all else fails, strip the lead actress. Natassja Kinski's pneumatic performance no doubt pulled them in at the time, and the cast is peppered with familiar names. However, while the movie is interesting and sometimes viscerally disturbing, it is essentially a honker of the first water.

2004-02-04T03:08:00.000-08:00

The Last Samurai

Broog has had it up to his shapely and elegant neck with mediocre, big budget tat. Watching this patchwork film-by-numbers, Broog felt he was being sandblasted with pre-packaged emotional grit, none of which made it through his aesthetic goggles to provoke a tear in his limpid seeing organs.

It’s not that the movie is savagely bad, rather that it exists in a quilted no-man’s land of featherlite historical truth and self-serving social relativism. A broken down US veteran of the Indian wars, carrying a standard issue of combat stress and personal trauma, finds in the hopeless loyalty and traditional honour of the young Emperor’s rebellious Samurai tutor a cause in which he can redeem his own humanity. That warrior, in turn, finds in him the possibility of wholesome balance between the inflexible majesty of the Old Ways and the egalitarian destruction of the New. Concealed behind the paper tiger villain of runaway early Capitalism in the form of a Japanese businessman and his US government flunkies, there lurks the assertion that these Samurai people would be much better off if they could just act a little more like proper Americans.

The thing which really got on Broog’s wick, however, was the sense that the movie was constructed from the stitched-together limbs of other pictures. The vile Colonel Bagley recalls to mind the evil Captain Harrison Love from 1998’s Mask of Zorro; the sense of transition from one mode of living to another echoes the Once Upon a Time in China trilogy; Broog will not insult the reader’s intelligence by giving the name of the film in which a company of light cavalry charges an artillery position.

Let it be known throughout the world: Broog will fight such effortless and superficial baloney with his every inhalation, unto the very edge of sanity and onward into the land of singing bunnies. And the next time you have $140m burning a hole in your pocket, spend it more wisely.

2004-01-29T09:29:00.000-08:00

Paycheck

Broog has frequently observed that the creation of a sci-fi actioner is much like that of a genuine space programme. Many is the putative Bladerunner which has built its launchpad on the shifting sands of fashion, achieved escape velocity by force of brute starpower, and then, for lack of guidance, tumbled like a British space probe into the hulking gas giant of Indifference, there to be crushed by tidal forces such as “bored now”, and “I really don’t care”. Paycheck’s hero, Michael Jennings, sends himself a bag of useful items before having his memory erased. Jennings’ uncanny foresight is part of the story, but it bleeds into a sense that he cannot be wrong-footed or surprised, and the tension evapourates. The movie becomes, not a narrative, but a fragment of history, and Jennings’ hallucinations of his own possible death are both unexplained and unthreatening. Broog cannot help but suspect that Paycheck and 2002’s Minority Report drew on their iconic spiritual predecessor to get made, and yet ignored the simple truth that Scott’s classic was prepared to tackle issues which the more recent films would regard as ‘too complex for the audience’ - an arrogance for which their makers will eventually be slow-roasted in Broog’s Ovens of Reprimand, and served with small pieces of pineapple at screenings of pictures which actually possess the capacity to engage the heart and mind. To be fair, Woo’s movie is acceptable viewing, if somewhat slight.

2004-01-26T09:03:00.000-08:00

Kill Bill (vol. 1)

It is unclear to Broog whether the human Tarantino is a maverick genius possessed of a superior grasp of film grammar which allows him to transcend the requirements of normative fictional exposition, or simply too lazy to spend the time on traditional structure and development, choosing to rely instead on the cinematic equivalent of an Objective Correlative derived from pulp culture. In other words, the rambunctious auteur is either brilliant or bone idle. It is Broog’s eventual intention to devour the human’s brain, establishing the truth by sampling the frothy grey matter with his mighty critical palate. In the meantime, however, Broog will proceed to the question of Kill Bill (vol. I).

Richly textured and stunningly bloody, this is a movie almost entirely devoid of story in the conventional sense. The actress Thurman portrays The Bride, a female human whose capacity to bear a grudge excites Broog’s personal admiration. Her ability and willingness to scourge those who fail to show her the proper deference is also laudable. However, after a powerful beginning involving a showdown between The Bride and her former ally, Copperhead, the movie becomes a series of set-piece combat sequences interspersed with flashbacks and demonstrations of grim determination in a hostile world. Perhaps the decision to split the film has trapped the The Bride’s character arc in the second instalment; in Volume 1 she chops her way through any number of enemies without ever confronting her own brutality or questioning the nature of a life predicated on murder-as-communication. This is disappointing given Tarantino’s prior mediations on the nature of violence and morality, but naivety of a sort appears to be the heart's blood of the film. Kill Bill (vol. 1) is an unrepentant romp through the martial arts lexicon, magnificently unexamined and unashamed of its wish-fulfilment superficiality. Brilliantly executed, but Broog prefers Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi, which mixes the same hellish injuries with a fleeting awareness of its own monstrosity.

2004-01-23T05:45:00.000-08:00

Trigger Happy

As it is not unusual for Broog to find himself at odds with critics of lesser intellect and physical attractiveness, he bears no ill-will towards such aesthetic peabrains, and provides them wherever possible with education, insight, and the option of toeing the line or being thrust feetfirst into a high-speed threshing machine. In the case of this movie, however, Broog confesses himself mystified by the massed negativity of professional appraisal. Trigger Happy, also known as Mad Dog Time, is a vividly surreal post-Brat Pack gangster flick featuring the combined thespian talents of Richard Dreyfuss, Gabriel Byrne, Jeff Goldblum and Ellen Barkin, with a raft of appearances from other notable practitioners of the mummer’s art. Like the film itself, mob boss Vic (Dreyfuss) is frankly and cheerfully insane, and has returned from the asylum to reclaim the reins of power in his town. During his absence, however, his many minions have acquired ideas above their station, and his right hand man Mickey (Goldblum) has been sleeping with his mistress. Vic’s solution to the knot of plots and counterplots seems liable to be massively Gordian, and everyone except Mickey is expecting a bloodbath of Coppolan proportions. The film is colourful and fascinating, if occasionally strained by over-egged dialogue, and the duelling sequences between Mickey and assorted contenders, which take place across a set of matched executive desks, are tensely and intriguingly bizarre. A pastiche of and a hymn to the Sinatra era, Trigger Happy is a sadly underrated cinematic experience; gaudy, flawed, and ultimately pointless, it remains enjoyable and unrepentantly cool.

2004-01-15T07:14:00.000-08:00

The Scorpion King

It is not, in Broog’s eyes, a grave aesthetic sin for a movie to be knowing. Earlier in the development of Earth drama, the unwary playwright or director whose on-stage minions shattered the Fourth Wall could expect to be rent limb from limb by an angry mob of outraged groundlings. While Broog applauds the principle of robust physical criticism, he is glad to see this straightjacket removed from the oiled shoulders of Earth’s filmic gladiators. It is not therefore a particular affront to Broog that the actors in The Scorpion King spend so much time playing to the audience that they barely notice one another, though he is minded to suggest that The Rock be re-named The Eyebrow in the interests of accurate reporting. A lack of sincerity is not a serious disadvantage for a movie which does for the Conan genre what Moonlighting did for t.v. cop shows. From the moment when the two-hundred-and-fifty-five pound Groucho Marx-wannabe utters his first immortal line, it is apparent that this picture will be mercifully devoid of the quasi-biblical rabblerousing of other breechclouters, many of which appear to have been written under the influence of a noxious mixture of marijuana and the Children’s Abridged Shakespeare. Sadly, however, the protagonists are not permitted much evolution, as this might get in the way of their wry asides. The lack of development is most evident in the lead character, whose final victory is inexplicable given the failure of his previous attempts to do precisely the same thing. Not even knowing movies can escape the need to build to a climax rather than present it as a fact. In closing, Broog should note the excellent cameo by the actress Hu’s costume, which does a great deal with very little material, and produces one of the most sincere performances of the film.

2004-01-15T05:41:00.000-08:00

The Siege

Humans are possessed of a poverty of senses. On the one hand, this means that your cinema is filled with verve and a desire for experience and sensation, but on the other, it entails the creation of a substratum of odious middlemen whose task is to inform audiences of the upcoming hits, and often to mislead them into attending movies they probably do not want to see in the hope that, having been thus deceived, members of the public will find something desirable in the picture and tell their friends to go, despite the fact that they also do not want to see that kind of movie. These purveyors of idiocy are known as the Marketing Department, and they are responsible for the hyping of any number of turkeys, and the lonely deaths of a few excellent films.

These parasitic lollygaggers were clearly on particularly fine form the day they decided to sell “The Siege” as a Bruce Willis actioner. Audiences flocked to the temples of the magic lantern, preparing themselves for a witty lambasting spiced with gunplay and derring-do. Instead, they were submerged in a murky world of betrayal, terrorism, and sinister political possibility. They were unsurprisingly confused to discover the film was a Denzel Washington vehicle in which that splendid male plays an FBI agent on the trail of a jihadist cell operating in New York City. Washington is helped and hindered in this endeavour by Tony Shalhoub and Annette Bening, both of whom are resplendent in their roles. The film is by turns shocking, fascinating, and affecting, but fell flat at the time because when you go to see “Die Hard” you do not expect to be confronted with an urban “Platoon”. In a world which has experienced the grotesque nightmare of 9/11, however, the film has a greater urgency, and a wider public. Having re-watched “The Siege”, Broog judges there is after all a place for Marketing Execs, and that place is dark and deep and has scorpions in it.

2004-01-07T03:05:00.000-08:00

Big Fish

Blarney, hogwash, bunkum, poppycock, and snakeoil are the lifeblood of Ed Bloom. His son, Will, wants the unvarnished truth, but Ed, even or especially on his deathbed, prefers to live in the narrativised version of events. Broog is always somewhat mystified by human father/son dynamics, as on his planet any offspring not eaten before their majority are so highly prized that the awkward stumbling of human emotional connection seems frankly wasteful. However, even Broog was touched by the blindness of Will Bloom to the simple fact that the understanding he seeks to establish is invisible to him only because it runs so deeply through every aspect of his life. The action is mostly a patchwork of Ed’s Hirsute Canine tales, interspersed occasionally by Will’s attempts to uncover the historical events. The pacing is authentically Southern, by which Broog means that it is lyrical, lugubrious, and infuriating, but the movie is rescued from tedium by a constant supporting artillery barrage of charm. It has so much charm that Broog is concerned there may now be a planetwide shortage. The audience is invited to bask, hippo-like, in the warm fictional waters of Ed’s silty flimflam, and chuckle fondly at the WASPish offspring as he seeks to separate reality from baloney. Walter Mitty without the attendant sense of failure, Forrest Gump without the GOP, a sweet, sad, grown-up Princess Bride, this movie never quite catches fire, and yet always keeps ticking over. Exactly how grand is the truth concealed behind the humbug and trumpery is up to the watcher. In Broog’s view, it is enough that he will relent from his initial intention of having the entire cast and crew as a bathtime snack.

2004-01-04T04:10:00.000-08:00

The Specialist

It seems impossible to Broog that this movie was actually shot in English and in colour, but he has reluctantly acknowledged that such is the case, and removed his technical assistant from the Sharp Hooks Of Mild Chastisement. Nonetheless, Broog remains entirely perplexed by this decision. Consider the following: a lonely man who hires himself out as an assassin specialising in explosives falls in love with a woman he has never met. She desires his assistance in the matter of reducing an offending male to less readily-recognisable parts by the exercise of the demolitionist’s metier. Knowing that the project in hand will scar her soul for ever, the noble, brooding man refuses. The woman therefore undertakes to deal with the matter herself, though she will likely have to engage in hot steamy boy-human/girl-human action with the man she despises. Moved by her plight and possibly also by the realisation that he would prefer she focus her hot boy-human/girl-human activities on him, the heroic explosiver agrees to help her, and the two begin their quest for vengeance. By now it should be obvious even to you that this is a French Film Noir from around 1955. Purely in order to annoy Broog, however, the movie was made in 1994, and while it features the past-mistress of sexual frisson Sharon Stone, her opposite number is the somewhat surprising Sylvester Stallone. Made in its proper timeframe, this would be a classic of the thriller genre. Dislocated and colourised, it is a forgotten expense in a ledger at Warner Brothers.

2003-12-28T09:20:00.000-08:00

Belleville Rendez-Vous

There is one force which unites the Universe from its ultimate corners to its burning heart; a force which surrounds us, permeates us, and binds us together. It overcomes even the wrath of Broog when he has been forced to watch several hours of Scandanavian arthouse movies in which the main character is some form of root vegetable. This power has a name, and that name is ‘Grandmother’. Here, at last, is a movie which celebrates the power and fortitude of the Grandmother, in this case that most sturdy exemplar of the breed, the Determined French Peasant. Belleville Rendez-Vous (also “The Triplets of Belleville”) is the finest piece of animation bar none in a year which was gifted with both Finding Nemo and Spirited Away. The film has almost no dialogue, so the question of subtitling does not arise, but the magical story so swiftly and completely seduces the watcher that the absence of speech goes unnoticed. Musical, delightful, cheeky, and bizarre, Belleville Rendez-vous is a movie which on the one hand recalls the very best of early Disney and on the other is modern, sophisticated, and grown-up. The imagery is succulent and enticing, the animation smooth, wry, and artful. Broog was captivated from the first frames, and nearly ruptured a gas-sac laughing during the bit with the frogs. If your feuding, grumpy little planet had any grasp of what is truly important, this movie - which is above all about love and loyalty and the power they have to get things done - would be screened in schools.

2003-12-24T04:15:00.000-08:00

Cuckoo

Straighten your vertebrae and open your hearing apertures to their most submissive dilation, for Broog, Alien Film Critic, now gives judgement. The slightest whisper of interruption, the merest quibbling, will see the impudent sussurator in such transports of agony that watching Britney Spears in a seven hour, Mel Gibson-directed stage adaptation of the Aramaic classic 'Battlefield: Earth' would be a merciful release. Broog thus shares with you his wisdom: Cuckoo (also ‘Kukushka’) is a heartbreaking yet wildly amusing journey in human affection and miscommunication amidst the surreal conflicts at the close of the Second World War. The film is directed with a light, confident flare, and the performances are never less than excellent. The dialogue is in three languages - Russian, Finnish, and Lapp - but the subtitling is unobtrusive and the narrative so compelling that the flow of soul is unabated as the characters chatter to one another in the blithe assurance that some kind of exchange of information is taking place. Beneath the surface, however, there is a rich vein of anguish: the exhausted Russian is fleeing the corrosive paranoia of Stalin’s USSR, and mistakenly believes the Finn to be a Nazi and a monster - while all his opposite number wants is an end to the war. Their entanglement with the Lapp woman forces a detente upon them, but the fear and rage are never entirely gone. Broog will not seek to interpret this film on your behalf, but he will come round to your feeble dwelling and sow your fields with salt, stampede your tiny offspring, and wear your housepets as slippers if you do not avail yourself of the opportunity to see the movie. Rarely would Broog say that a cinematic offering from your miserable world is fit for export to his home planet, but this picture is a noble exception.

2003-12-19T05:18:00.000-08:00

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

The mighty cinematic edifice which is the human Jackson’s rendering of Tolkien’s classic novel grinds to its imperial conclusion in the third film, "Lord of the Rings: The Fat Jolly Hobbit Saves Middle Earth And Everyone Is Nice To His Whiny Friend". The movie follows the exploits of Sam as he hauls his limp and apparently pointless companion across the dark desolation of Mordor, struggling against hunger, despair, orcs, giant spiders, Gollum, and what must surely be an overpowering desire to slap Frodo until he resembles a hubcap.

Elsewhere in Middle Earth, the others of the Fellowship battle for their lives against the armies of evil, led by Gandalf and a female voice choir. Broog was delighted with the sheer quantity of violence, the flattened horses, and the huge battering ram shaped like Wile E. Coyote. He also applauds the tiny blonde actress Miranda Otto for thoroughly scourging an impudent male. While this last is most satisfying, however, it highlights the curious fact that the main characters achieve almost nothing in this film, while the supporting cast secure epic victories. The most impressive combat sequence belongs to Legolas, who demonstrates the ancient elvish art of elephant-surfing; the destruction of the Ring is largely owed to the stalwart Sam and the slimy Gollum; the Witch-King falls not to Gandalf or Aragorn, but to Eowyn and Merry. While this may be true to the book, it leaves the human Mortensen oddly bereft of stature, while Ian McKellan’s excellent Gandalf appears powerless in the face of evil. Also, the lugubrious pace of the movie is owed not to vast detail but to a sense of its own significance, and despite its prodigious running time of two hundred and one minutes, Broog did not feel sufficiently connected to the characters, or informed as to the meaning and motivation of their actions to care about the tasks which confront them - for example, the mortal showdown between horse and elephant cavalry should have excited admiration, horror, and pity, but Broog was frankly bewildered as to why the tiny horsemen did not simply attack from the side.

These movies are massive in scale, and there is no question that the third instalment delivers all that was promised by the first two. Having said that, however, Broog feels a lingering dissatisfaction at the sense of being on the outside looking in. To put it in terms of your cinematic history, it is like watching the attack on the Death Star without knowing about the destruction of Alderaan or the killing of Obiwan Kenobi. The effect was to leave Broog in the kind of mood where he devours people even though he is not actually hungry.

2003-12-15T04:39:00.000-08:00

S.W.A.T.

It has been some time since Broog, as a tiny tadpole still confined to his maternal parent’s eggpouch, first heard the many Words of Excoriation which are the lifeblood of the critical process anywhere in the Universe. Sadly, your language is so primitive that your words are merely sounds and symbols conveying an impression rather than an actual sensory experience expressed directly into the mind of the listener, and thus when Broog announces confidently that a movie is a stinker, a vasty foetid pit of par-boiled flesh-eating slugs, you cannot actually smell the environment to which your critic refers. This deplorable lack in your communication is now remedied in a movie of surpassing ghastliness called S.W.A.T.

The actual notion behind the story is at least permissible, and the movie features the redoubtable Mr. Samuel L. Jackson, the only Earth male for whom Broog has any respect owing to the human actor’s choice of a purple lightsaber in the Star Wars prequels. The youth Farrell puts in an adequate and half-naked performance, and Jeremy Renner is under-used as the nefarious Gamble. Sadly, these efforts avail them not, as the storyline drags like the hindquarters of a severely injured bison. The action is constant yet oddly turgid, and the main plot begins late in the day. Michelle Rodriguez looks for a moment as if she may turn the movie around, but like Renner, she has little to do except sneer - a reaction with which Broog can only sympathise, although he would in fact take the emotion further and bite the director savagely in a vulnerable area. The only other features of note are the strange preponderance of dogs in the first half of the film, and their inexplicable absence thereafter, and the attempt to portray the French as the root of all evil, rather than jolly fat people who are too interested in sex and cheese. It will perhaps convey the horror of S.W.A.T. if Broog tells you that, of all the things he saw on the screen that evening, the most exciting and pleasing was a trailer for Torque.

2003-12-13T10:53:00.000-08:00

The Matrix (Reloaded) (Revolutions)

The first Matrix was a weird phantasmagoria which combined snatches of pillaged Baudrillard with a mysterious plot following the central character from ignorance to enlightenment. It featured excellent performances from Hugo Weaving and Laurence Fishburne and a new and exciting form of stylised ass-kicking.

All the more mysterious, then, that Andy and Larry Wachowski should choose to follow this masterpiece of the science fiction trash oeuvre with two sequels bearing only a cursory resemblance to the original. Where the first movie was a rich feast of cod profundity and tight PVC, the second and third are light breakfasts fried up from the leftover kidneys of Tsui Hark’s “Once Upon a Time In China”. “Reloaded” and “Revolutions” sacrifice idea and content for capable but familiar combat sequences, and the sense of hidden worlds and secret truths which defined the first film is replaced by a blistering sandblasting of flying feet and indicated emotion. Broog was, after forty minutes of “Reloaded”, filled with the desire to charge through the glass partition behind him and eat the entire reel of film in order to save his fellow cinemagoers from the pain, an urge which is the more remarkable because Broog in ordinary circumstances would wholeheartedly approve of puny humans writhing in agony. By the same point in “Revolutions”, Broog was designing a new annex to the Chamber of Oiled Hedgehogs for the special use of Andy and Larry when Broog is able to get his grasping organs on them. Broog would rather sit through every single episode of “Little House on the Prairie” without anaesthesia.

2003-12-02T11:41:00.000-08:00

Charlie's Angel's: Full Throttle

By the time the final credits rolled on this picture, neither of Broog’s speaking orifices were capable of emitting noise of any kind, though he was able to produce a low howl by rubbing his knees together and inhaling through his chest-spicules. “Full Throttle” is an intense visual experience. It features the excellent Earth Thespians Liu, Diaz, and Barrymore performing further ass-kickings and engaging in the wearing of outfits which convey a brash and athletic sexual competence. However, where the first movie paid lip service to the notions of story and character, thereby inviting the audience to enter the remarkable world of the Angels, this one seeks instead to overwhelm the watcher and bludgeon his sense of reality into a state of total subservience. Normally, Broog approves of subservience in others. Unfortunately, this attempt is marked by a total rejection of physical laws, the negative consequence of which is that the Angels are beyond defeat, and the remarkable conflicts become simply signposts on the road to triumph. Added to this, the strange traducing of the male Glover’s excellent Creepy Thin Man, and the bizarre domestic violence sub-plot do not meet with Broog’s approval.

2003-12-02T09:27:00.000-08:00

Finding Nemo

This movie is clearly a metaphor for the Earth cinematic experience. The tiny protagonist wanders lost through a vast and dangerous ocean populated by monsters and drugfiends in search of the single thing which can render his wretched existence bearable. For him, this is a tiny fish-child; for us, a satisfying entertainment in which no one asks us to accept that the Earth female Charlize Theron in a dumpy outfit could be considered ‘dowdy’, or that Keanu Reeves is a nuclear physicist whose mind holds the secret to Universal Truth. In this case, our desperate seekings are rewarded with a hugely amusing and moving tale of family, love, and friendship. Broog was delighted, though not surprised, to discover that this movie was more real than anything to come out of Hollywood for some time. The woman DeGeneres is surpassingly amusing, and when Brogg accedes to ownership of the Earth, he will give her some suitable present, such as flowers, or possibly Texas.

2003-12-02T09:12:00.000-08:00

LA Confidential

This film was well-made according to your Earth theories of aesthetics, and there was much to be said for the human Spacey. On the other hand, the book is a complex mire of conflicting relationship and blemished moralities, and not enough of this was transposed to your primitive celluloid by those in control of the project! The Earth Female Basinger was well-cast and powerful, though Broog was dissatisfied with her performance in two crucial respects - first, that she was not as good as the Female Sharon Stone in 'Casino', and second that she did not at any time devour her young or scourge her males for their impudence.

Broog is also less than convinced by the unity of the narrative, feeling that a close acquaintance with the period gives a great additional understanding of the finished artistic work, which on Broog's world would never be allowed, lest the writer be dragged backwards through the Chamber of Oiled Hedgehogs. All this said, Broog finds the film rewarding after your puny fashion, though not all your Earth critics would crack it up to be.

2003-12-02T05:09:00.000-08:00

Deathwatch

Broog finds this movie notable for the performance of some very attractive and vivacious Barbed Wire. While the human actors stumble through a blasted landscape of smoke and mud, growing gradually more desperate as they are killed for reasons which remain obscure, the Wire retains a calm and sensuous approach to the enterprise, locating the dramatic centre of the story without difficulty. Though the human director woefully ignores every opportunity to examine the inner emotional turmoil experienced by the Wire on the battlefield and its dreadful loneliness upon discovering that it cannot embrace the fragile humans without cutting them into smaller and less aesthetically appealing fragments, nonetheless the spiky thespian conveys a depth of trauma and sensibility lacking in the other protagonists. The cast are fortunate in that the script contains no females, as the actress humans would undoubtedly be forced to devour their weaker colleagues in the name of artistic mercy.