Aeroplane panacea.

Watching films on a tiny screen during a hellish twenty-three hour long haul flight is probably the best way to end up hating them. So consider this an experiment: here are the films I watched on the flight from London to Cape Town last weekend. For the most part the theory held true.

Hancock
Will Smith is an alcoholic, self-loathing superhero who can fly faster than a speeding bullet, but can't outrun his own loneliness. Aw.
This had promise: I enjoyed it for the first two acts, with the expectation of a satisfying payoff, but then the whole thing just fell apart. The story felt rushed (Oh, so all of a sudden you're telling me there's backstory stretching over millenia, but we don't get to see any of it?)*. That's problem one. Problem two? Nameless enemies have been trying to kill our heroes for countless centuries. Yet they're mentioned for the first time at the end of the film, and we never see them. Or do we? I still have no idea. Problem three: the ending is incoherent melodrama which effectively cancels out the moderately edgy Arrested Development-style intertextuality. There was a great idea here. Shame it's been wasted.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Ron Perleman bashes his lobster claw through a series of clearly lesser opponents until the allotted time runs out.
A disappointing follow-up to a pretty enjoyable popcorn movie, though possibly I'd have liked this better on a larger screen, as the joys of this film are to be found largely with director Guillermo del Toro's fantastical creatures. The plot itself is a disappointingly bare-bones fairytale. Aside from obviously high production values, this feels more like an episode of a TV show - in which little character development is required because we are assumed to be already familiar with the characters - than a proper feature. This seems to often be the case, I've noticed, with graphic novel adaptations (perhaps because it's presumed that the back-story's known by some of the audience, though a more likely explanation is simple laziness).

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
English media hooligan
Toby
Sidney Young lands a job at NYC's glamourous Vanity Fair Sharps Magazine and fails miserably at everything until, of course, he inexplicably succeeds.
I was surprised by how much fun this was, considering the formulaic structure and by-the-numbers romance. The credit for my enjoyment lies entirely with lead actor Simon Pegg, who is such an irresistably likeable fellow he manages to transform one the most repellent people on the planet (Toby Young**, who penned the autobiographical source material) into a lovable loser. Quite an accomplishment.

The Oxford Murders
Precocious maths whiz Elijah Wood goes to Oxford to learn from his favourite professor, but instead gets mixed up with murders, femme fatales, and nonsensical plotlines.
Dear god, this is awful. Just terrible! Midsummer Murders with some preposterous maths voodoo thrown in. How do scripts like this even get picked up? Why, if the characters are world-class maths geniuses, do their professional debates sound like the ramblings of a drunk Davinci Code fan? Avoid at all costs. Also: dumbest ending since Wild Things. Except I love Wild Things.***
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* I totally wanted a flashback to ancient Persia. Is that too much to ask?

** I'd read that Toby Young bragged of his "negative charisma", but thought it hyperbole until I saw him interview Charlie Kaufman at the BFI at last year's London Film Festival. It's all true.

*** I know I shouldn't, but there you have it.

Alive in Joberg by Neill Blomkamp

Alive in Joberg is a short film by Neill Blomkamp, in which masses of destitute aliens seek refuge Johannesberg in South Africa in kilometre-long, dilapidated spaceships, and then struggle to be treated equitably by the local human inhabitants. It's being expanded to a feature length version called District 9 (a reference to District Six in Cape Town, an inner city suburb from which thousands of non-whites were forcibly removed from their homes in the 70s in accordance with the apartheid regime), slated for release later this year.  I have high hopes.

The art of the tease.

There's an informative (if slightly depressing) article in the New Yorker about Hollywood movie marketing. As you might imagine, it's a business focussed more on getting bums on seats than making great cinema. This bit confirmed my suspicions about one particular film trailer:

The marketing advantage that studios have over other industries is that they can give out free samples of a movie as advertising—promotional material that feels like content. But filmmakers object when a trailer reveals too much of the story, or their best fireball, or their funniest joke. Tony Sella, the Fox marketer, wanted to end his trailer for “The Simpsons Movie” with Homer walking his pet Spider-Pig upside down across the ceiling and singing his Spider-Pig song. “The writers told me, ‘Absolutely not, you can’t use it,’ ” Sella recalls. “I said, ‘O.K., we can not use Spider-Pig, and the theatres will be three-quarters full, and the audience will be tremendously amused when they see it. Or you can have lines around the block, and half the people will be saying, ‘Wait till you see Spider-Pig!’ to the other half.” Spider-Pig stayed in.

I swear I could hear that conversation in my head when I saw the trailer for the Simpsons Movie. Figures.

I Can Read Movies

The I Can Read Movies series is a set of fake film novelisations - or rather, their worn, paperback covers. (This one for Close Encounters is especially good.) They're in a similar vein to Ollie Moss's Videogame Classics, a bunch of pretend video game novelisations with covers in the style of Penguin Classics.