DVD Rental: Reviews

The Hangover was a surprise hit both sides of the pond, despite the formulaic nature of the story, and it succeeded because it was genuinely funny and an entertaining bout of mayhem. The group dynamic was well balanced with Bradley Cooper’s nice guy player Phil contrasting well with Ed Helms as the anxious, under-the-thumb Stu Price, who, it turns out, is some kind of absolute heathen when he hits the drink.

The Hangover’s group of protagonists was rounded off by unstable, clingy chaos magnet Alan Garner (Zach Galifianakis), brother-in-law to missing groom Doug.

The three of them spent the film trying to find their friend who was lost during a night of madness, fuelled by Alan’s illicit addition of rohypnol to the guys’ drinks.

They eventually found Doug on the roof and got him safely to his wedding, albeit frighteningly orange from his time trapped in the blaring sun. Alan came clean about his part in the widespread memory loss and got belted by Mike Tyson, they all befriended a semi-psychotic, highly excitable gangster called Chow (Ken Jeong) and Stu left his wife after realising she was a very angry and unpleasant woman.

So, it made loads of money (loads and loads of money) and the inevitable was, well, inevitable. The Hangover Part II sees our guys move the same situation to a different location, in a move that was guaranteed to make money, and odds-on to prove disappointing.

This time Stu is getting married to Lauren in Thailand, despite her father’s opinion that he is a waste of space and unfit to marry her. Alan manages to tag along, and they meet Lauren’s brother Teddy, who is an exceptional student and well-mannered, but sheltered, good little boy.

They have some drinks on a beach, and then wake up in the midst of hell, also known as a Bangkok hotel room, with no Doug (again), a pet monkey and Teddy’s finger, with no Teddy. They quickly find out that Doug left early when things got hectic, so once more it is Phil, Stu and Alan trying to piece together the night before, whilst looking for the missing brother. Without Lauren’s brother, who is somewhere missing a finger, the wedding is sure to hit a slight snag…

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Kenneth Branagh - director of Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, As You Like It, Love’s Labour’s Lost and… er… Thor.

It is perhaps unfair to pigeonhole Mr. Branagh, and he has plenty of movie titles to his name, but his work in performing and directing Shakespeare has dominated his career, so his selection for a Marvel Comics adaptation that has been a long time coming certainly baffled many. But then they gave the Hulk job to Ang Lee, a man known for directing Sense and Sensibility and The Wedding Banquet, and that worked out great.

No wait, that’s not right. Oh dear.

Moving on, Thor is one of the classic comic characters, but has been denied even a single big screen treatment before this effort, whilst Batman is awaiting his seventh Hollywood outing, Superman gets his sixth in 2013 and Spider-Man is chasing the pack with number four.

In all fairness, the man uses a big hammer as his weapon of choice, and it just isn’t as obviously cool as an array of Bat Gadgets, bullet- beating speed or the ability to sling spider-webbing from your wrists. Still, Thor is actually based on the Norse mythological God of the same name, and once you bring deities in, you can have plenty of fun with a big budget.

Branagh’s movie adaptation of Thor sees the eponymous character (played by Chis Hemsworth) banished from the Godly realm of Asgard by his all-conquering uber-powerful father Odin (Anthony Hopkins). He is slapped with this punishment when his rash actions bring about the threat of war with the neighbouring Frost Giants of Jotunheim. He was all set to be handed the title of King, but felt the urge to start a ruckus due to an overabundance of machismo.

His scheming brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) takes the opportunity to bring about his own plans for ruling the kingdom, once Odin suffers some kind of random collapse. Meanwhile, a disgruntled Thor finds himself landing on Earth with the commoners, much to his displeasure, but his father Odin was kind enough to send his big beast of a hammer, called Mjolnir for some reason, along with him. In a little bit of Sword in the Stone-type drama, Thor will only be able to wield this weapon and its power once he is worthy.

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Bethesda’s latest instalment in the Elder Scrolls saga has arrived, and Skyrim sets this new story around 200 years after the events of predecessor Oblivion. You play one of the Dragonborn; a rare occurrence of a human with the soul of a dragon, that only appears whenever the world is in danger.

So begins your adventure of dragon-slaying, dungeon-crawling, bandit-beating fun that will take you across a map of epic proportions. From the frozen peaks of the mountains, to the luscious greenery that adorns the forests, every corner of the world that is Skyrim feels unique, boasting breathtaking detail and a mind-bending array of intricate touches.
The hundreds, if not thousands, of dungeons, ruins and tombs that fill the world of Skyrim create a grand and immersive setting. Once you’ve completed one dungeon, there always seems to be another to conquer, and each has its own original aesthetic. The gameplay also involves a new, convenient mechanism which means that you will always be sent to places you haven’t already visited, so you will always be encountering new locations and dungeons.

Clearly, dungeons are only one aspect of this truly open-world experience. Within this world you are able to create your own weapons and armour, and adorn your bodily defence with special enchantments to improve your abilities. You can mix potions to strengthen you and your skills or weaken your enemies, as well as hunt animals for the skins and meat to create food with healing properties and even join a number of guilds to perform special tasks. The game’s progression, and that of your character, appears infinite.

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Leading online movie rental service Lovefilm has adjusted one of its popular subscriptions to give customers better value for money for DVD rental. The Film Lovers pay monthly plans have been altered to allow film fanatics two or three discs at home at the same time, instead of just one or two, without any change in the prices.

The Unlimited packages from Lovefilm give customers as many movies as they want over the course of each month, but each package differs in terms of the number of discs that can be rented at one time. The packages have now been streamlined so there are only two variations.

Customers can now have either two discs at home or three, with the one disc deal being removed, and those that originally had the one disc deal get the extra film at home without any change to their monthly fee.

Along with the increasingly popular home rental service, Lovefilm will continue to offer online movie streaming through Lovefilm Player, with access and inclusive films dependent on a customer’s chosen package.

Lovefilm also offers Pay As You Go movie packages, which let customers buy credits for renting at home as and when they choose, with no monthly subscription to pay.

Lovefilm currently has a library of over 70,000 titles, with both DVD and Blu-ray formats available.

Anyone who claims to be able to resist Captain Jack’s inimitable mix of swagger, swordsmanship, salamander and anti-sobriety must be off their Jolly Roger. It is a testament to the character and the actor that Jack ‘Sparrah’ can almost single-handedly pull this franchise through some serious scriptwriting issues and the excruciating presence of Orlando Bloom’s William Turner.

It is hard to believe that Johnny Depp nearly walked because the execs at Disney thought he had gone mad when they saw early footage of his daft pirate. The series would have experienced a short drop and a sudden stop had Sparrow been sacrificed, or played straight by a less creative and more submissive actor.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was a refreshing surprise blockbuster, whilst follow-up Dead Man’s Chest had some great moments but got a bit tangled in its own fishing net. The second part of that story, and third entry in the series, At World’s End, also had some nice set-pieces but the story was contrived and needlessly complex thanks to the writers’ attempts to have everybody double-cross each other to the point of storytelling redundancy. All the way through, Jack Sparrow was great, thankfully.

A wise move, then, to give Jack a new stand-alone story without the irksome William Turner or his posh tomboy squeeze Katherine Swann. The general plan of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was to reduce the needless complexity, keep up the laughs and action and give Sparrow plenty of screen time. Too much of a good thing could be bad, but never with Jack… sorry, Captain Jack.

Loosely (very loosely) based on a novel called On Stranger Tides, this film sees Jack in search of the Fountain of Youth, with the Spanish and King George II also keen on the prize that would see skincare products wiped off the face of the Earth. King George II sends his surprise employee Captain Hector Barbossa, once again played by the wonderful Geoffrey Rush, on an expedition to beat the Spanish to the Fountain. In general, everyone wants to get to the Fountain, but there is a little more to this legendary elixir of life than meets the eye-patch.

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Rage is one of those games that didn’t seem to get much justice when it came to advertisement, but that doesn’t mean it disappoints. Developed by the guys at Id Software (Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein), and produced by Bethesda Softworks (Fallout, Elder Scrolls), this game boasts one of the most famous teams in the games industry, and you can tell that there was a lot of loving attention paid to every aspect of this game.

Now, before I get started, I would recommend anyone playing this game to install it to the hard drive of their console. Standing in at 22GB on 3 disks for the Xbox 360 version (or 8GB per disk on the PS3), it is a huge game, with the graphics making up for most of the size, and you will see why.

The Rage intro does a great job of showing the story so far; an asteroid is on a collision course with earth, and everyone is put into stasis chambers called Arks (Fallout’s vaults anyone?). Straight from the get go you can see how visually beautiful this game is, and my other half thought she was watching the start of some mega-bucks blockbuster. Everything from packs of sweets to mutated bosses has had each detail considered, examined and rendered to perfection. In short, Rage has definitely set a new bar for the standards of video gaming graphics.

There is, as with 99% of games, a little tutorial on the controls (look up, look down, run around in circles, blah blah blah) followed by a little mission to introduce you to the game’s mechanics. The controls are about as straightforward as they come; anyone accustomed to playing FPS games will feel right at home. However, even though there are plenty of areas you will be running and gunning (Rage isn’t another run-of-the-mill cover shooter), this isn’t where Rage truly shines, although this aspect remains great fun. Being a sandbox game, inevitably some areas are limited at first until you do a mission to blow/open up whatever is in your way. As a result, vehicles are a must, and the controls for driving are as responsive as ever, making it easy and entertaining to drive.

Throughout the course of playing the game you will find a lot of influences from the projects that both companies have under their belt, most notably of which are Bethesda’s open-world RPGs. There aren’t any RPG elements within Rage but there is still the option for side quests as well as the main story missions. This means that you can make that little bit more money, enabling you to be more prepared when engaging the main missions. This also means that you won’t be getting bored anytime soon, and will probably be spending a lot of time doing the side quests just to upgrade your guns/armour/vehicles.

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Any one of us can remember seeing the appetising trailer for this game almost two years ago; it was beautifully crafted as a non-linear sequence of a little girl’s transformation through death to zombie, before attacking what would appear to be her parents. So began a plethora of rumours and speculation that was the intense hype for Dead Island.

Created by Polish company Techland, most famous for their Call of Juarez series of games, Dead Island can be best described as Dead Rising, Borderlands and Left 4 Dead having a messed up party on a tropical island. Calling it an FPS/RPG/horror survival hybrid would just be too much.

Where to begin? The first thing you’ll see when starting the disc up is the typical intro. Now I would personally recommend watching this, if not for the brief introductions to each character, or the extremely poor, but undeniably amusing Australian accents, then just for the music. Central character Sam B’s sole rap hit Who Do You Voodoo? offers a playful reference to the earliest known mention of a ‘zombie’, as voodoo witch doctors were thought to create mindless slaves using reanimated corpses.

From here you will enter the main menu and upon choosing New Game you will be met by the 4 protagonists; Sam B, Xian, Purna and Logan. Each character has a very different, and quite interesting, backstory. Unfortunately, these stories aren’t explored in the game itself; there aren’t any skeletons in the closet for these guys. The characters’ differences are defined by their strengths, weaknesses and entertaining observational anecdotes. Each character also levels up RPG-style, and with each level comes a point to use in one of three skill trees, and these differ between characters. There is no way to reselect your skills, but just because you’re stronger doesn’t mean things get easier, not a chance! The enemies level up with you, meaning the difficulty can actually increase.

Aesthetically, this game is a breathtaking spectacle; after the typical tutorial you can pretty much go wherever you want, and you are treated to a rendering masterclass as you explore this sinister location and its unwelcome surprises. The zombies themselves have a multi-layer damage system, which means that as you push them further into the eternal rest, they actually show the signs of physical damage – marks from a good old fashion club-beating, vicious slash wounds from your trusty blade and even the complete loss of limbs.

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Fresh from playing Face in the high-octane, brilliantly bonkers A-Team Movie, Bradley Cooper continues with the running, jumping and relentless grinning in novel adaptation Limitless. Based on techno-thriller The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn, Limitless follows writer Eddie Morra as he discovers a sneaky shortcut to Enlightenment…

Drug peddler and Eddie’s ex-brother-in-law Vernon Grant offers our scruffy protagonist a random sample of NZT, which the obviously trustworthy and reliable gent says will allow any user to open up 100% of their brain’s potential. Eddie, suffering from writer’s block and laziness, drops his magic bean and becomes Super Eddie.

He finishes his book, impresses his agent and generally shifts up several gears in all facets of his life. The grisly demon that is withdrawal leads him back to Vernon who, oddly, asks Eddie to do his dry cleaning before he can have more NZT. Upon Eddie’s return Vernon is dead, and so begins a sort of cat and mouse game where there are lots of cats, some of them Russian, and the mouse has nice hair.

Along the way, Eddie encounters wealthy businessman Carl van Loon, who looks suspiciously like Robert De Niro, and must also contend with the erratic nature of his relationship with Lindy, played by Aussie stunner Abbie Cornish (Somersault, Sucker Punch), as well as the attentions of a mafia thug called Gennady, and a man in a tan coat who can only be described as persistent.

The premise of Limitless relies on a now defunct myth that once claimed we only use 10-20% of our brain power. This fanciful bit of fallacy has been pounded into pulp by scientific overlords such as Barry Gordon and Barry Beyerstein, as well as those blokes on MythBusters. This leaves the story in a bit of a shambles. But then if we want to go down that route then we aren’t allowed explosions in space, and no-one wants that.

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Billed as a cross between Saving Private Ryan and Independence Day, this latest alien invasion epic actually offered up one of the most impressive trailers of the last few years.

A few startling shots of an obliterated Los Angeles, a screaming Marine dragged away by an unseen menace, hordes of meteoric vessels striking Earth with such force that they blast rings through the sky, and of course large clusters of confused sheep-like people running around amidst the raging anarchy; all complimented by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s beautiful, yet haunting and eerily mechanical piece ‘The Sun’s Gone Dim and the Sky’s Turned Black’.

It is, without doubt, an awesome movie teaser, with plenty to get excited about, and a real sense that maybe this could offer something a little different, whilst maintaining the essence of a summer sci-fi blockbuster.

Such a shame that Battle: Los Angeles is actually as bland as a beige Volvo.

That’s not to say it’s a terrible movie; there’s some remarkable visuals, and even a couple of rousing performances, but clichéd doesn’t even begin to describe this film and its by-the-numbers storyline, direction and dialogue.

As Battle: Los Angeles begins, no time is wasted in pointing out that the Earth is currently being pelted by strange objects from space, thought to be meteorites. All the well known cities are casually referenced in a half-hearted attempt to steer clear of ‘Roland Emmerich Syndrome’, which is a devastating virus that renders large scale disaster movies devoid of multicultural awareness (when the world is under attack, only the USA is affected, and only the USA can save us - sigh).

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In 2003, American mountain climber Aaron Ralston was hiking Blue John Canyon in Utah when he fell, and a dislodged boulder pinned his right arm to a rock wall.  The feat of human endurance that followed quite seriously deserved the movie treatment, if only to highlight the incredible resilience, determination and willpower that one man can possess.

Aaron Ralston spent an astonishing amount of time stuck in a standing position, unable to free himself, slowly sipping his bottle of water at around 150ml a day, and eventually choosing to consume his own urine in order to prolong his survival.  The majority that have heard of the story of Aaron Ralston and 127 Hours also knew that in order to escape his seemingly inescapable situation, the adventurer fashioned a tournequet, snapped his arm and then cut it off below the elbow using a poor quality multi-tool.  This may sound grisly, but the fact the he managed to survive this ordeal, and then hiked several miles afterwards, losing around a quarter of his blood, should actually serve as an inspiration to us all.

In the wrong hands, the big screen version could simply be a cack-handed build-up to the inevitable grotesque scene that everyone is waiting to see.

So it’s a good job the world has Danny Boyle.

It’s impossible to overstate this director’s abilities as a filmmaker; he is different class, and his innovative style and genius craftmanship, both as an original storyteller and a technical maestro, are rightly being held in the highest regard, and his reputation is growing exponentially with each movie he makes; his résumé which lists Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Slumdog Millionaire, to name but a few, is undeniably impressive.

Enough Boyle worship, 127 Hours is quite literally a faultless film; it stays close to the truth of its immense source material, the pacing is perfect, the scope of the scenery emphasises the man’s sapping solitude and the performance of James Franco (Pineapple Express, Spiderman) as Aaron is as good a piece of acting as you will see this year.

Franco’s irrespressibly upbeat performance in the first fifteen minutes truly characterises a man focused on freedom and exploration; a real adventurer so determined to do things by himself that he doesn’t so much as leave a note to say where he is going.  We don’t know Aaron, but Franco makes us believe we do, and it’s hard to think anyone could have done a better job of bringing Aaron Ralston to the screen and making us care so sincerely about his fate.

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