Film #43 - The Amazing Spider-man

Well if you’re going to call your film The Amazing Spider-man, you’re really setting the bar quite high for yourself. Fortunately Amazing Spider-man delivers, at least with regard to its central character.

Yes, it hasn’t been that long since Sam Raimi’s take on the friendly neighbourhood webslinger wrapped up with Spider-man 3. The entire Internet and its dog has already commented on this. But two things are worth thinking about. It’s still a whole decade since the franchise was rebooted (possibly this was timed so Sony could retain the character rights? I’m unclear on that) and a whole five years since we last saw Spidey onscreen (I think the gap between Batman and Robin and Batman Begins was only eight years, and B&R was a much more thorough franchise destroyer than Spider-man 3).

So we’ve got a whole new team on board, including the surprising directorial choice of Marc Webb, who’s probably best known for the making the romcom genre momentarily bearable with 500 Days of Summer who not typically necessarily be anyone’s first choice to direct a superhero film.

And especially not a superhero film that’s so in touch with modern tastes. The Amazing Spider-man wears its debt of gratitude to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy on its sleeve, eschewing the brighter palette of Raimi’s take on the character for a grimmer greyer New York.

Stunts this time round are more acrobatic less web slingy enabling
Webb to shoot some impressive action sequences in tight quarters

It may be the grittiest of the Marvel adaptations of recent years (an interesting choice given that Spider-man’s appeal to younger children). Of course the Spider-man franchise takes place in a separate universe to the Marvels other Avengers-building films (so no Spidey in Avengers 2 L), which may give Webb a bit freer rein than some of his counterparts on Iron Man or Thor.

The change of gear yields interesting, enjoyable results. I have to confess, I’ve never been a fan of Raimi’s run on Spider-man  (particularly Spider-man 2 which subjects us to the dire ‘Spider-man no more storyline, where cinemagoers pay good money to see a movie about a man who is not a superhero and does not want to be one), so treating Spider-man as a more serious, less cartoony superbeing felt like a breath of fresh air.

As is normal, the firm film in this franchise is the origin story. Normally origin stories are more chore than pleasure (kudos to Tim Burton for starting his 1989 Batman with Batman already Batman, the origin dealt with in the briefest of introductions). Such is the familiarity of audiences with superhero origins, that most of these films are just treading water waiting for the protagonist to finally catch up to where the audience has been all along (aside from occasionally wondering why Sebastian Stan is inexplicably homoerotic in absolutely everything that he does).

Luckily, Webb (was he chosen entirely for the pun?)again manages to take a leaf out of Nolan’s book and tells an origin story that is actually engaging.

Let’s get the basics of the plot sorted out quickly before moving on. Mild mannered teenager Peter Parker gets bitten by a genetically modified spider and subsequently gains some spider-like abilities. Concurrently, arrogant scientist Curt Connors attempts to utilise similar gene modifications to use lizards’ regeneration genes to grow back his missing arm and subsequently turns into a were-lizard hellbent on destruction of some form.

As I have kind of implied, the origin of Spider-man has been extensively covered across genres and isn’t really that complicated to begin with. What’s remarkable about Webb’s vision is that Spider-man’s origin has never been this tight before, nor have the story beats ever made this much sense.

What are the improvements? Nothing is as coincidental as it used to be.

Mechanical web-shooters are back this time round, and show
a lot more versatility than just the web-slinging we've come to expect

It’s not a coincidence that Peter Parker is at Oscorp that day he gets bitten; he’s just learned his father’s long-term business partner Curt Connors works there. It’s no longer coincidence that he gets bitten by a genetically modified spider; he’s snooping for answers among the research his father and Connors had been working on at the time of the former’s disappearance.

It’s not a coincidence that Peter is out on the street the night his uncle dies, nor a coincidence that the same gunman Peter lets escape is the one that kills his Uncle Ben (Ben is following Peter at the time and is willing to act in the greater good when Peter is not). Peter doesn’t start his superhero career out of altruism, he is hunting down his uncle’s murderer and he doesn’t upgrade to hero until another of his mistakes spills out of control.

Everything that takes place throughout the first half of the film is very tightly plotted and very much tied into who Peter Parker is and the circumstances that caused him to be that way. Spider-man’s famous credo “with great power comes great responsibility” is never said in the film. It isn’t needed. After the film’s instigating incident, a fairly innocuous basement flood, Peter’s actions drive pretty much every single event of the film , including the creation of its villain – and he knows it.

In short, it’s been a long time since the character of Peter Parker was ever this interesting and an even longer time since Peter Parker was more interesting than his masked counterpart.

Spider-man loses his mask a lot in this film -
apparently no one wants to cover up that face

It doesn’t hurt at all of course that Parker (and Spidey) are portrayed by Andrew Garfield, one of this generations best young male actors. Though Tobery Maguire acquitted himself well in Raimi’s exuberant, over-earnest Spider-man universe, Garfield carries a lot more in terms of nuance, internal conflict and the realization of his crushing responsibility – often with subtle inflections in his gaze alone. I have to confess, I’m somewhat of a hipster douchebag when it comes to Garfield (I’ve been a fan since his earlier turn in indie fave Boy A) but he acquits himself admirably as the centerpiece of a mainstream Hollywood hit.

Gwen, attempting to stand by her man.

Actually, the acting is one of the strongest facets of the new Spider-man franchise. I’m not so ready to dismiss Kirsten Dunst as some are, but Emma Stone certainly shines as Gwen Stacy, the love interest this time round (in comic continuity, Gwen was one of Peter’s early big name girlfriends). She’s goofy, she’s funny and just geeky enough to explain why the hottest girl in school would be drawn to a blustering shy introvert whose genius apparently only nearly rivals her own.

Of course we can expect Peter’s surrogate parents Uncle Ben and Aunt May to be impressive given that they’re portrayed by Hollywood stalwarts Martin Sheen and Sally Field respectively. Sheen, in particular, deserves credit here. Uncle Ben gets less screen time than May but is responsible for giving Spider-man his whole raison d’être and the mixture of humility, courage, and authority that Sheen brings to the role completely sells Peter’s guilt at failing his too-all-intents father and the lesson he finally learns from him on a bridge in Manhattan.

If the acting falls down anywhere, it may be with Rhys Ifans as the intermittently villainous Dr Curt Connors/The Lizard. I have to back down here a little as I’ve never been a fan of Ifans and may be clouded in my judgement. To Ifans’ credit he handles the Connors side of the role relatively well given the way it is written (I’m used to the Lizard’s human side being slightly less aloof and miss Dylan Baker’s fatherly concern a bit) but falls apart once the Lizard personality starts taking over.

As I imply, this may even be an issue with the script because if there is one area that The Amazing Spider-man falls down (and it’s possible there is only one), it’s the execution of the villain. But that’s a big stumbling block.

Credit where it's due, the CGI is pretty seamless here.

To be blunt, The Lizard doesn’t work. Although the script does its best work in the set-up (Connor’s research into transgenic gene splicing is the same technology that drives Peter’s spider bite) after Connor’s hotheaded decision to test his technology on himself (has the man never read Jekyll and Hyde?) it all falls apart. The Lizard’s motives are not clear for the most part. His initial rampage seems an ill guided attempt to save some veterans from experimentation but his subsequent plot is to turn everyone into lizards. It doesn’t mesh. There’s a vaguely Nazi-esque desire to see humanity purged of imperfection but n explanation as to how being an enormous gecko might represent that goal.

Also, in this day and age it’s a little hard to buy into the idea that being an amputee would cause such a single-minded obsession with cellular regrowth. If I were an amputee I’d be a little offended that the script thinks I’m so incapable of coping (though again, to be fair, Connor’s motivation dates back to the Silver Age).

All in all, I think The Amazing Spider-man is an extremely healthy start to the franchise’s reboot and has set itself up well for what I hope to be an even tighter sequel.

Film #42 - Brave

I suppose I owe you a review on Brave then, given it’s nearly a week since I saw it and over a month since it came out?

When I first heard that Pixar had been taken over by Disney in 2006, I was a mite concerned. This was the studio that had churned out stellar animated features like Finding Nemo and The Incredible (which  do love, despite my severe misgivings about the elitist ideology in the subtext). But then Ratatouille (2007) came out, then Wall-E (2008), then Up(2009) and it appeared that any doubts I might have had were just me feeling over-protective of a beloved property.

So, given that I skipped out on both Toy Story 3 and Cars 2, it wasn’t until 2012 that I really saw the shadow of the Mouse House loom large over Pixar – and that was with this year’s outing Brave.

I make that sound like a bad thing but it’s really not. Disney has its run in the early 90s of nailing the animated feature and since then may have fallen behind the times in terms of knocking things out of the park but has still managed to produce some regularly entertaining features even right up to last year’s Tangled (I’m a big fan of The Princess and the Frog for example).

It’s just that Pixar had set the bar so, so much higher.

Again, I make it sound like Brave is a bad film. It’s not. It’s actually quite good. It’s just not the treat you spend all year waiting for, marking days off your calendar with a thick red pen until release date is finally here.

Let’s talk about what the film actually is about for a moment.

Brave is the story of 10^th century Scottish highland princess Merida (one wonders if the emphasis on ‘princess’ is a Disney innovation and whether Merida will be joining the Disney Princess merchandising line up soon).

Far from being a standard princess, Merida is instead the standard rebellious young woman. She chafes at the expectations placed on her gender, preferring to ride horses bareback, firing arrows (all the proto-feminists in the post-Katniss world need to be archers apparently) and clambering over the picturesque Scottish landscape.

This picture pretty much sums up Act One.

Back at home, Merida frequently butts heads where her mother Queen Elinor over the latter’s attempts to prepare her for her impending womanhood and the vagaries of being of the ‘fairer’ sex in a society where wildness is still something to be prized – if you’re a man.

Learning that she is shortly to be married off against her will to one of three equally unappealing rival princes, Merida takes matters into her own hands and flees into the wilderness, stumbling across a witch living deep within the forest who promises to change Merida’s fate - by changing Elinor.

Unfortunately the change is rather more drastic than Merida had planned and she unwittingly places her mother under a dire curse that will cause Elinor to be hunted down by her own husband and the entire Scottish court. Forced to flee from home, the pair must finally work together to discover how the curse on Elinor works – and how to break it – before the effect of the curse becomes permanent.

As you can probably tell, the focus here isn’t really on the action of the piece so much as it is the examination of the strained relationship between too strong-willed women, though there certainly are more than enough set-pieces to keep boys engaged in Brave’s narrative. Merida is feisty, athletic, quick-witted and particularly good with her bow (there’s a nice nod to Robin Hood in Act One that leaves little doubt that this girl means business). That’s probably just as well as, while the action sequences are engaging, they rarely feel like they’re building to a grand finale so much just bridging the gaps between the last and next heartfelt conversation between Merida and Elinor.

And that may be my main beef with Brave, if I can be said to have a beef at all. It seems to pull its punches when it comes to the more objectives threats offered up by the narrative. For Elinor, Merida’s upcoming nuptials are vital to keeping the peace between the disparate clans on the highlands. We’re told that, if Merida does not marry one of the princes on offer, all-out war will break out and destroy them all. Yet, when the various factions arrive, they are all treated comically and the supposed threat that keeps Elinor up at night comes across as a fairly good-natured rambunctious barroom brawl.

There's just enough of the supernatural in Brave to keep things
humming without it turning into a film about the supernatural

Similarly, a subplot about an evil prince of yesteryear who may still be haunting the area today is threaded into the narrative in Act One. There’s a sense that Merida’s contract with the witch may have unbalanced the world in a way that will enable this villain to rise again and conquer all. Yet, when the threat does emerge, the villain is in such a degraded state that he becomes the catalyst for an action sequence for Merida and Elinor to escape rather than something they will have to team up to overcome.

There’s a reason for this of course. Pixar movies have long been known for their ability to inject real heart into their storylines – and Brave is no exception. The real stakes in Brave  aren’t the threat of violence or conquest but rather the sense that what Merida has done to her mother will permanently end the relationship between them and the film does an excellent job of setting up how devastating that would be.

I guess I just want my cake and to eat it to; to have a film where the emotional stakes and the dramatic stakes hold equal importance and Brave just doesn’t tread this line as well as Wall-E or Up did. Maybe it’s just that I’m a boy, and this is definitely a film with female audience members in mind.

And so we get to the thing I’m always banging on about: the feminist underpinnings in Brave.

I’ve been a bit flip in my comparison between Merida and Katniss Everdeen earlier in that we seem to have established a cliché of what the feminist hero is and how she acts. In the post-Buffy world, she’s become almost commonplace (even the confectionery TV series Teen Wolf has its bow-wielding heroine Alison) which has been a great thing for young women to grow up alongside.

And that’s kind of the downfall of the cliché in many ways, it’s no longer enough to just shout “Girl Power!” and consider patriarchal narratives to be turned on their heads. The figure is now too commonplace and too many movies and TV shows do it too lazily for it to be ffective anymore (I’m reminded of Lisa Simpson valiantly applying to the Little League football team only to be chagrined to discover that it already has several female members).

Feisty girl with archery equipment? Stop me if
you've heard this before.

So, is Brave guilty of this? Putting a bow in a girl’s hand and calling itself provocative when it’s just derivative? Having a protagonist say ‘I will not marry’ and expecting to say something girls haven’t already heard several times before?

In a word, no. But it’s not necessarily obvious from the outside.

Because Merida does do all of these things and a less subtle film may leave it at that. But instead, Brave offers a counterpoint strong female character in Queen Elinor, who is also a potential feminist icon but who brings in a totally different understanding of gender and power.  Where Merida seeks to gain agency by bucking against a patriarchal system, Elinor has already gained it by working within the same system.

Technically, these are characters. You really
don't need to know anything about them though

There is never any question about it, Elinor is absolutely the real ruler of the Scottish highlands. Although she exhibits a genuine affection for her husband King Fergus, he defers to her in the administering of his state. 

When the first brawl breaks out between the various Scottish clans, Fergus can’t help but join in; it is Elinor who has the authority to make them cease. When Merida’s rejection of all suitors threatens civil war, the clan chiefs do not call upon Fergus for mediation, they demand to know what Elinor has decided to do about it. When Merida tries to pacify them, she does not call on her father for help, she channels her mother’s words and wisdom to get her point across.  

Men in Brave are almost an afterthought, it is the women’s narratives that count.

Too often, the cliché of a feminist hero is merely a cheap call of fury against an established power and not an examination of how that established power works. If Brave were not a good film, Elinor would be an out-and-out villain, an unsympathetic mother unheeding of her daughter’s desperate need to be her own person. But she’s not.

Goddamnit, stop trying to gain agency by
contradicting my attempts to give you agency.

Elinor never comes across as anything other than a caring mother. She has attained her agency from the rituals of femininity and that has shaped how she understands power to be attained. Her attempts to tutor Merida in womanhood is less an attempt to constrain her agency but rather an effort to show her how to reach a position where she can channel it more effectively. We know from the storyline that Elinor went through the same dilemma ahead of her marriage to Fergus that Merida faces now (amusingly, Fergus has never considered this point before Elinor blithely lets it slip out) but has come through the other side with a richer life and the ability to call the shots from within the expectations placed on her gender.

It’s just that Merida sees a completely different way to achieve the same goal.

That’s one of the really delightful and interesting things about Brave – that both characters want the same thing for Merida but are at loggerheads over how to achieve them. They each come from a position that seems at eternal conflict with the other but, as the film’s narrative progresses, develop mutual respect for the other and reach a point where the barriers between their ideals become malleable.

I like this, not just as a message for young women but for anyone. You don’t have to choose between being Merida, outside society demanding a world of your own, and Elinor, wielding great power but always peripherally. You can be a blend of them creating you own version of your identity without having to go to either extreme. That is essentially Merida’s journey throughout the film and I think Brave is richer for it.

Indeed, if the actual narrative of Brave had matched the sophistication of its emotional narrative, I’d probably say that Brave was among the stronger of Pixar’s films to date. But that slip up on the action side isn’t a small one in a film like this and I’ve seen Pixar do this much better several times before.

All in all, Brave is well worth seeing, particularly for young’uns, but don’t be surprised if you don’t feel compelled to watch it again even a few years later.

Film #41 - V/H/S

Seriously, why VHS?
Let's go B/e/t/a/m/a/x!

Following the high ambition and dramatic failings of Detention, the second hald of my double bill at the Toronto After Dark fest’s summer sessions was the decidedly more modest V/H/S.

If Detention was the surprise hit that people weren’t looking forward to but ended up loving (I’ve already described why I disagree with the crowd here), then I think it’s safe to say that V/H/S was its polar opposite. Which is not to say that V/H/S is a bad film – it’s not. Just after more than two weeks of intense curiosity about the film, I think the crowd may have been a little underwhelmed when it turned out to be pretty much exactly what it said on the tin.

V/H/S is another horror anthology film along the lines of Creepshow or, more recently, Theatre Bizarre, where different horror-oriented filmmakers team up to tell a selection of shorter unconnected horror pieces within a broader loose narrative framework.

The anthology approach works well for the horror genre, which may explain why this type of film is so thick on the ground for horror and not for, say, romantic comedies. Horror is a genre that can start to feel repetitive in long form (think of all those slasher films with basically identical kills before Final Girl and Masked Killer do their last confrontation) so shorter grabs allow the scares to be punchier and more direct. And, with so many things we as a species find inherently creepy, there’s a much smaller chance that individual pieces will have significant thematic overlap (aside from the universal theme that things are scary and want to hurt you).

The fifth installment is classic haunted house style scares

Of course there are good horror anthologies and bad ones (I’m looking at you Creepshow 3), and V/H/S definitely leans towards the former camp but perhaps not as significantly as might have been hoped.

Unlike Theatre Bizarre, which really was just a more or less random collection of horror shorts, V/H/S at least ties its sub-films together with a universal device. Capitalising on the recent found-footage trend in horror that Paranormal Activity perhaps most famously introduced as a trend (Blair Witch being too long ago and Cloverfield sitting slightly more in the sci-fi camp), each of V/H/S’ vignettes works off of footage largely taken by the victims themselves.

The central conceit and framing device of V/H/S is that a group of burglars have been given the task of ransacking a suburban home to retrieve a specific VHS tape. When they arrive they find the supposed owner of the house dead in front of a bank of television screens and more tapes than they know what to do with. Left with the reassurance that they’ll know which tape is the correct one when they see it, they individually start watching the tapes – and hence our sub-films.

It’s a neat trick, as finding an excuse for video cameras to be present during the recording of each vignette puts a limitation on the film makers that they have to find a creative way to work around, which often guides the films storylines and yields more interesting results.  It’s not accidental that the cleverer excuses for the camera’s presence tend to be found in the more interesting of the sub-films.

Among the techniques used are: a trio of jock boys determined to make homemade porn via a spy camera embedded in the most-nebbish one’s glasses going out to pick up strange girls in a new city; a woman alone at home talking to her boyfriend in a series of Skype conversations about the presence she thinks may be hidden within her house; and a man dressing up as a nanny cam for Halloween before heading out to a party at a “haunted house” that they only think they have the right address for.

For the most parts the sub-films are slow burners, taking their time to establish atmosphere and character before ramping up to the big scares. In general it works well as horror tends to function best when you either put yourself in the main character’s shoes or at least sympathise with their plight as things beyond their control start menacing their lives. It wasn’t a universal success – I know that some audience members struggled with the lengthy depiction of a couple on holiday in the second installment (I think Innkeeper director Ti West’s?), but for me it actually helped get drawn into the emotion a lot more. Aside from enjoying the holidaymakers as one of the more realistic depictions in the film, it would have been nearly impossible to feel any sympathy for the date-rapey jocks as they get their comeuppance, if the time spent getting to know them hadn’t revealed them to be just overgrown kids first (for the record, they’re not technically date rapists, they just give off that vibe when you first meet them).

This girl could not die fast enough
for my tastes - what a horrible friend.

Not every film is a success of course, the third (?) installment, set in a forest, is overwhelmingly disappointing (and nonsensical!) and the framing device itself is a little hard to get on board (those guys are potential rapists).

But in general, V/H/S does exactly what it sets out to do without pretension or self-hype, and while it will never appeal to anyone who’s not already a horror fan, it should probably soon pass through the Netflix queue of anyone who is on their next dark night alone.

Film #40 - Detention

I have to admit that I was surprised it would take so little time to find a film that was so incoherent it makes Ted look like a Syd Fields example of structure within screenplays – but here we are. With Detention – a film that’s been marketed as a horror, sits much closer to being a teen comedy and winds up in neither camp largely because it can’t stop patting itself on the back over how awesomely clever/funny it thinks it is to ever actually make any sense.

Detention comes to us from director Joseph Kahn, whose last big screen adventure was Torque, a film so maligned that even Detention itself makes a crack about how awful it is.

To his credit, Kahn has clearly put a lot of energy into this film. It comes across as both a personal labour of love and a love letter to the 90s (1992, specifically). This makes it a bit of a tricky proposition given that the teen audience it is most likely to find favour with were typically learning to walk during the time many of its most heartfelt references were actually valid. 

Although I saw it with an adult audience who were a bit savvier to Kahn’s in-jokes, in general they fell into the traps that Seth MacFarlane’s analogous love of the 1980s seem to sidestep in Family Guy (and Ted for that matter) – they are too specific and divorced from context.

And this is kind of typical of the tenor of film we’re working with in Detention – some great creative ideas that fall apart because they haven’t been thought through properly. To say that the film suffers from a case of ADD is to put it rather mildly.

Edgy - thy name is Clapton "Clapton Davis" Davis

Although the film is more correctly viewed as a teen comedy, the basic plotline does indeed come straight out of horror. Riley (Shanley Caswell) is a stereotypical outcast at high school which has seen its head bitch fall victim to a violent killer dressed as the villain of a horror franchise whose latest instalment is due to be released in cinemas shortly. Her thwarted affections for local slacker/delinquent Clapton” Clapton Davis” Davis (played as the safest JD you’ll ever meet by Josh Hutcherson), sexual harassment by school geek Sander Sanderson (Aaron David Johnson) and antagonism with new Queen Bee Ione (Spencer Locke) lead her to attempt suicide. Midway through hanging herself in the school corridor, she comes face-to-face with the serial killer and promptly gets cast in the role of Final Girl.

This may be what a feminist looks like, Riley -
but it's not how a protagonist behaves

Right there we have the crux of one of the film’s major problems. It’s central protagonist isn’t just passive, she’s completely unlikeable. In the first act there is not a single scene where Riley is not subjected to some humiliation or other, usually of the slapstick variety, and is an abject failure in every aspect of her life. 

And, if the hallmark of a protagonist is that they take action, then how can we get on board a film where the supposed protagonist attempts suicide a third of the way through?

I’m almost attempted to make some kind of Lost conspiracy theory up about Riley’s suicide attempt though, as it’s after that point that the film loses all sense whatsoever. From here we’re treated to films-within-films-within-films, body swapping stories, time travels, a Flyesque mutation subplot, alien abductions and invasion, characters changing motivation for no reason and so on.

None of these would necessarily be problematic if they somehow felt like part of a whole movie (see Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks as an example of a kitchen-sinker that still somehow maintains comprehensibility) but Kahn just doesn’t seem to interested in making the effort.

As with Ted, you must accept that each moment of the film has its own rules that don’t necessarily have anything to do with any of the others in order to make it through without going insane. Watch Riley grow a backbone for no reason, now Clapton Davis (full name only allowed!) is living in 1992 (and, of course, loving it), now the new character emerging in the detention room’s predictions of doom will be taken as gospel, now everyone respects Riley etc. etc. If it works it’s because we have no short term memory.

The cast of Detention midway through a lengthy joke
that goes nowhere

Long story short, for all its wit, Detention has no heart. So, for me at least, it can never rise above the rank of being a mere confection.

All of that said, what the hell do I know? Certainly the rest of the audience seemed to enjoy the jokes and 90s references (this was at Toronto After Dark which skews both older and hipster) and the film isn’t universally terrible.

Credit should at least be given to Kahn for keeping the movie visually interesting and some of the jokes would be witty if they were given any room to breathe.

From what I can tell Detention is already dead at the box office and, as much I hate to kick an old dog while it’s down, perhaps it's time we quietly took this puppy behind the woodshed?

Film #39: Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World

Perhaps the best summation of Lorene Scafaria’s Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World occurs in the very first lines of the script itself. A radio news announcer sombrely announces that the last hopes for humanity have been dashed and the 70 mile wide asteroid Matilda is scheduled to collide with the Earth in 21 days, obliterating all life on the planet. The announcer then promises that he will be back with regular updates and “aaaaaaaall your classic rock favourites”.

The drama isn’t funny and the joke isn’t dramatic but they sit besides each other without much transition between the two. It was the best of times and the worst of times, indeed.

That’s pretty much the core dynamic of Seeking A Friend, a film that is sometimes a comedy, sometimes a drama but never the dramedy to which I suspect it aspires. Whether or not you think that is a problem really comes down to how willing you are to accept the sudden jerks from one tone to another and then back again.

To be fair to Scafaria (who also wrote the screenplay), she’s got her work cut out for her on the comedy side of things. The end of all life on the planet is not usually considered a laughing matter and, while apocalypse comedies do indeed exist they usually offer at least some hope for survival in some form for the protagonists. Seeking A Friend makes it very clear that this is just not an option.

Against the backdrop of the end of days, Seeking A Friend focuses on Steve Carrell’s everyman character Dodge (because he’s always avoided life, geddit?) whose wife abruptly leaves him when the upcoming human extinction is announced. Content to spend the rest of his life in soul-crushing despair, he is jolted into action when his upstairs neighbour Penny (played by Keira Knightley) confesses she has been holding on to some of his mis-delivered mail – including a letter from his high school girlfriend professing him to be the love of her life.

Dodge and Penny strike a deal, she will drive him to his former lover’s home if he arranges a charter flight to take her back to see her family before the world ends (presumably in the UK). From there, the film switches up genres and becomes a road movie for its second and third acts.

Road movies being episodic in nature, the changeover actually helps address the dichotomy between the comedy and drama and the film moves much more smoothly as a result. It doesn’t hurt that this is Scafaria’s native ground (she also wrote the screenplay for Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, which is also basically a road movie).

Nearly every minor role is a cameo by
an actor you've seen in something else

Ultimately, though, there can apparently be only one winner and, I’m sorry to say but the drama side wins out by a considerable margin. Scafaria manages to inject poignancy into nearly every scene of the second half of the movie without it ever feeling heavy handed or cloying – a feat we’ve all seen many other directors fuck up and so is doubly impressive for her debut effort in the big chair.

Scafaria is helped out here by some marvellously solid work from her two lead actors. Carrell has effectively played the dislocated Dodge many times before (Little Miss Sunshine, Crazy Stupid Love, presumably Dan In Real Life) but he’s good at his schtick and consistently strikes the right balance between pessimism and dawning hope.  Tackling a harder role though, and knocking it out of the park, is Keira Knightley whose performance is so developed that I completely forgot I normally avoid films with her in them (I suspect Elizabeth Swann has a lot to answer for there).

On the page Penny is a total washout of a cliché; the kooky hipster girl who touts vinyl LPs everywhere (don’t forget Scafaria is also a musician), wears macramé shawls and just can’t seem to get her life together (it might be all the drugs, Penny). Under Knightley’s watch though, she’s transformed into what these characters’ writers actually want them to be: sassy-but-vulnerable, savvy-but-oblivious, likeable-yet-anarchic. Knightley’s performance is an absolute delight and neatly covers up some of the abrupt changes in motivation her character is required to make to make the story function.

Keira Knightley - dispensing charm since 2012

Outside the central pair, there’s still a lot to like about Scafaria’s apocalyptic vision. Seeking A Friend seems to make the assumption that the end of the world might actually bring out the best in people. After all, if you know you’re going to die in three weeks and you have no hope or avoiding your fate, why not just be kind to each other? Why not have a party? Why not show up to work anyway? There’s a lovely scene in the first act where Melanie Lynskey plays a party guest who decides to wear everything she always said she’d wear someday; tiara, gloves, fur coat etc. I think it’s meant to be a joke but for me, it was actually uplifting to see characters determined to pack their last days full of experiences rather than despair.

Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is ultimately not as solid a film as Safety Not Guaranteed was (I see them as being made for roughly the same audience) but is nonetheless a fairly solid summer movie and a nice break from the typical rom-com you might expect.

Film #38 - Ted

Well that was a lot of things. Funny. Entertaining. A goldmine of quotes for slackers for years to come. But one thing it really wasn’t is a film.

In the actual film, Ted is
more often holding a bong.

And I’m not sure it was even trying. Heavily touted as the first feature film from Seth MacFarlane, the creator of animated sitcom Family Guy (among others), Ted doesn’t really stray too far from its television roots, feeling more like a series of loosely connected vignettes rather than a thing in its own right with an overarching story to tell.

Ted is the story (and I use the term loosely) of a boy whose wish for his plush bear friend to come to life is magically granted one Christmas night. Flashing forward 27 years, we find that the boy in question (John Bennett, played by Mark Wahlberg) has become a minimum wage slacker in a co-dependent relationship with the now foul-mouthed teddy bear Ted (voiced by Seth MacFarlane himself), much to the consternation of his long-suffering girlfriend Lori (Mila Kunis, reunited with Wahlberg after 2008’s Max Payne).

And that’s about it. Everything else that happens in the movie is either completely dispensable, or actually dispensed with, usually within minutes of being introduced. It’s a bit unclear whether MacFarlane is either so used to writing for television that he’s struggling to break his habits, or whether he just doesn’t get that cinema is a different medium altogether.

The other thing that seems to be a carryover from television sitcom writing is the relative lack of stakes. I believe we’re meant to take Joel McHale’s smarmy Rex or Giovanni Ribisi’s creepy stalker Donny as serious threats to John and Ted respectively but the film just doesn't spend enough time building either of them up for them to be anything other than sideshow attractions. In the case of Rex especially, we’re specifically told not to be threatened by him and then, just as he finally is getting some traction in his pursuit of Lori, his “menace” is completely evaporated through an unnecessary fart gag.

Yeah, I'm not even going to touch how women are treated in Ted

It’s not like the film couldn’t jettison some material to make room for a fuller story either. You get the feeling that John and Lori’s respective workmates were intended to be something more than they are in the final cut. In John’s case in particular, we seem to spend a suspicious amount of time setting them up (what is Laura Vandervoort even doing here?) with specific clichés but only Patrick Warburton’s Guy gets anything like a story  - and it’s a one-note joke.

Speaking of jokes, I guess we come to the central question of Ted for most cinemagoers – is it funny? Yes. It actually is. It’s the kind of humour you’re already familiar with thanks to Family Guy but, hey, that’s why you’re here right?

There is a slight tendency to confuse ‘shocking’ with ‘funny’ of course, but there always has been in MacFarlane’s ouvre and the central joke of an adorable teddy bear saying incredibly crude things probably doesn’t have the punch that it might have had MacFarlane not already introduced us to an evil genius baby, a leftist intellectual dog, an East German goldfish etc. etc.

But, by and large, MacFarlane knows his stuff and fans of his work know what they’re getting in for. There is, of course, an emphasis on pop culture of the 80s which still hasn’t completely lost its charm for those of us who remember that decade and MacFarlane’s poking at social mores can still be highly amusing even it’s a well trodden road. Some of it can be a little mean spirited (did we really need to kick Brandon Routh while he’s down?).

And, the problem with “nothing is sacred” as a writing technique is that, well, nothing is sacred. When everything is on the table to be mocked the film has nowhere to go when it needs to ask you to take it seriously. But that’s par for the course in MacFarlane’s universe and most cinemagoers are savvy enough to expect that going in.

No, the only real issue with the comedy in Ted is that it often detracts from the story. MacFarlane pretty much never deepens a moment when he can just blast past it with a joke and so we just don’t give a shit if John and Lori stay together or Ted gets kidnapped by Donny until the film specifically tells us to. And it literally has to stop in the middle of its ‘climax’ to tell us to.

Ultimately, Ted will be very popular with audiences. It’s funny, it at least keeps things moving, and the character animation of Ted himself is indeed adorable. Given that it’s MacFarlane’s first feature (and that I still have a lot of good will for the man from the early seasons of Family Guy and American Dad), I’m tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that the teething issues on display in Ted are sorted out by the time he does his next feature.

And, if nothing else, watching Giovanni Ribisi dancing to Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now” is possibly the sexiest I’ve seen him in years.