Tag Archives: Edgar Wright

Review: Ant-Man – You’ll believe a man can shrink

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Ant-Man is the latest installment into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s about Scott Lang as he becomes the new Ant-Man, but his troubled past catches up with him when he plots a heist with an older inventor bent on saving the world from certain destruction, so this time his criminal skills are put to good use.
This film is directed by Peyton Reed with a screenplay from Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish and Adam McKay & Paul Rudd. The film stars Rudd (as Scott Lang), Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Pena, Tip Harris, Anthony Mackie, Wood Harris, Judy Greer, David Dastmalchian, and Michael Douglas.

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Review: The World’s End – it’s not like a lion eating houmus

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Finally got to see The World’s End this weekend. It’s about old friend reuniting to finish a pub crawl from their youth, but little do they know that their hometown has changed… (dun dun dunnnn).

The good; Edgar Wright reunited with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (among others) for the third installment in the unofficial “cornetto” trilogy.  The three aforementioned  individuals, along with the frozen dessert, being the connective tissue.  I’ve been anticipating what the third movie would be for some time, and here we get it, like seeing some old friends.

The acting is great, I love the chemistry between everyone, it looked like a lot of fun to be on set.  The humor also seems to come along very organically.  The dialog had me laughing out loud, here’s an excerpt, “A man of your legendary prowess drinking f**king rain! It’s like a lion eating houmous.”

The pacing is very spot on, it starts off as a “bringing the team back together” type of movie and then once they’re together it’s an awkward family reunion sort of thing, then once things get going it’s an end of the world survival movie.  The movie just doesn’t let up, the transitions between the moods of the movie are woven in beautifully.  Lately movies have not been blending their scenes, this could be an editing issue, but with The World’s End the writing has to be credited here.
The story moves along with what the characters are going through, so these seemingly different movies can meld in to one and I don’t mind it.

The bad; no one’s seeing this movie?  Could this be attributed to the whole Firefly – Serenity thing?  Where the film was screened for the audience that would pay to see the movie anyway?
This could also be because of the R rating, scaring people from theatre seats.

Overall the wait was worth it.  I enjoyed every minute of this film.  Wright and Pegg manage to pen another script that’s ripe with characters and extreme circumstances, yet allowing it to be relate-able and endearing.  I find it odd, yet refreshing, that I’m able to sympathize with situations and motivations in Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and now The World’s End.  Probably the best movie of the summer that no one is watching.

The Adventures of Tin Tin

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I saw The Adventures of Tin Tin, the short of it; Tin Tin’s a reporter in Europe and he stumbles upon a quest for the Unicorn, a ship.  In the process he meets Captain Haddock whose ship has been hijacked/shanghai’ed by the villainous Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine.  Tin Tin must play catch up to Sakharine in a globe trotting quest for a family secret of Haddock’s.

The good; the animation is amazing.  There are a lot of shots where it looks so photo-realistic, then you have the characters walk in, which I love by the way.  They look like the comic book that they’re based on, which is a great way to adapt it to the feature film realm.  The characters’ renderings look almost real, but then there’s the touch of the cartoony nature of their facial features.

The tone is very balanced between the life or death situations to the comedy relief supplied by the bumbling detectives Thomson and Thompson.  And only in the animated world can you bring about such over the top, almost slapstick, action sequences.

The film really reminded me of an Indiana Jones movie, it also being a period piece adds to that.  Tin Tin was surrounded by thugs wielding German weapons, another giveaway that they’re baddies, also like Indiana Jones, yet he hardly had a weapon to him, he used his wits.

The bad; the story.  In all honesty, as much as I enjoyed the film, it was a little off.  The action was so over the top that there wasn’t escalating action, if everything is life threatening an outlandingish, then there’s nothing to really outdo one another.  I would rather the film had started with smaller, tamer, action and built up to larger more fanciful sequences.

Another problem I have is the climax of the movie, *SPOILER* it’s between Haddock and Sakharine.  Tin Tin almost had nothing to do in this scene, which I get… but he is the main character, he should help Haddock somehow.  The fight could’ve still been left to the men, but Tin Tin should’ve had more of a role in the climax *END SPOILER*.  Another reason that the climax felt so anti-climactic was of all the action, as mentioned above, if they would’ve saved the most over the top sequence and lessened the others, the ending wouldn’t have been so tame.  Moffat contributing early as one of the writers actually does scream out at me, maybe because I know him from Doctor Who, but in this case he had to leave the project early because he became head writer for Doctor Who.  His essence of fast talky scenes remained though.  Makes me wonder why I don’t sense Edgar Wright’s (Shaun of the Dead)  style bleeding through the film?  He and Joe Cornish (Attack The Block) took over the writing tasks whens Moffat left.

Overall, very enjoyable.  Visual eye candy if nothing else.  I hope to see more in this animation style.  It felt like a good old film that brought us on a journey, Spielberg being behind the helm doesn’t hurt this vibe at all, and this is his first animated feature.   Well done sir!