The Green Hornet

The whole world knows by now that if you're going to make a superhero movie, make it different. Make it stand out. Make it special. So who better to direct potentially ordinary-as-cornflakes The Green Hornet than über-barmlord Michel Gondry, of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and The Science Of Sleep fame, and director of more crackers music videos than you can shake a hammer and tongs at?

Well, probably anyone. In fact The Green Hornet feels like it was made entirely by the second unit director, except for two or three visually staggering sequences that Gondry was woken up for to justify his hiring. Apart from those, all you're left with is an adequate but entirely predictable, seen-it-all-before, non-super hero film.

It's not all bad: Christoph Waltz is massively watchable despite being saddled with the one-dimensional villain role, and Jay Chou as Kato is a laconic genius, although his ass-kicking displays occasionally get lost in amongst the FX. Still, he does possess some miraculous skillz:

Now I'm not the biggest Seth Rogen fan in the world (that would probably be Seth Rogen), but it's pretty obvious to anyone with eyes that he's tragically miscast in this. His grating, growly shouting thing becomes tiresome pretty quickly, and for an action-comedy with one of the world's highest-profile comedy stars, it's a bit of a LOL-vaccuum.

As for Cameron Diaz, the world's least believable temp secretary and pretty much the only woman with a speaking part in the whole film, well, she gets the most thankless role going. She gets no action (literally) and no laffs, and even McG knows she's perfectly capable of both.

Oh and unsurprisingly the 3D is utterly pointless until the animated end credits, which are amazaboggling.

Still, ain't none of it as bad as the IMDb's The Green Hornet page which, to promote the film, has been rendered completely unreadable by the design monkeys, who've gone for a clever green-writing-on-a-green-background theme:

In short: This week's second-best film with a colour in the title. Blue Valentine doesn't have super-slo-mo smackdowns but it is funnier.

Knight And Day

The ineptly designed posters, embarrassingly abysmal viral videos and turgid press interviews farted out to promote Knight And Day have long been a mystery, apparently cunningly crafted to keep as many people away as possible. However, having now seen the film, it's clear what they were up to.

What we have witnessed is a textbook exercise in expectation-lowering, to the point where the inevitably average end result is a considerable improvement on the craptaculous cascade of cabbages the world expected. It's a bit like being phoned up at work by someone telling you your entire house has been demolished by a meteor, only to rush home and feel relief that at least the shed's still standing.

Let's not fanny about: Knight And Day is not a great film. All the money has been spent on the stars, and director James Mangold spends so much time on lingering close-ups to prove that it really is Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz that you eventually start to realise how old Tom's looking, and ooh dear I hope he doesn't put his back out making Mission: Impossible 4. Meanwhile genuine talents like Peter Sarsgaard and Paul Dano are left twiddling their thumbs in case they overshadow the Tom 'n' Cam Show.

Early dubious claims that Knight And Day was some kind of Hitchcockian romp are flimsily backed up by the fact that there's a scene on a train, a chase across some European rooftops and a MacGuffin. Well, The A-Team has a tall building in it but that doesn't make it Vertigo.

In its defence, the unspectacular and unoriginal set-pieces are at least shot and edited so that it's possible to work out what's going on, which is a bonus these days, the score is jazzy and interesting for the first half before it descends into bog-standard lowest common denominator tuneage and Tom does at least look back at an explosion on one occasion, which as we all know is against all accepted action movie rules:

Knight And Day's problem is that it's just so ordinary, with nothing new to add to the genre and nothing to elevate it above any other summer movie from the last fifteen years. As for the title, it's almost completely meaningless. You may as well name a film blog The Incredible Suit and then make it neither incredible nor in any way sartorial. And that would just be stupid.

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Tom Cruizzzz & Cameron Diazzzz

There's an interview in this month's Empire magazine with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz about their forthcoming action comedy Knight And Day. It's possibly the dullest thing I've read for yonks, and in fact I had to read it in shifts as I literally fell asleep half way through. I had been up past my bedtime the night before so maybe it was my fault, but seriously, Tom 'n' Cam - both of whom The Incredible Suit enjoys watching on screen - could bore for England. If they were English.

Things start badly when they talk about Alfred Hitchcock as a reference for Knight And Day, and specifically North By Northwest. Now this is a very dangerous thing to do. If you're going to invite comparisons between your film and what is clearly one of the greatest ever made, you had better be sure you can live up to that promise.

After that Cruise and Diaz ramble incoherently over another three pages about how great each other is, how great making movies is, how great the crew is, how great various legendary actors and directors are, blah blah blah. That's not an interesting interview, that's autopilot actorspeak.

The article's crowning glory, however, is a picture of a handwritten note by Tom Cruise using five words to describe his co-star:

Quite revealing, I think you'll agree. Apparently Cruise finds Diaz talented, wom, furrrig, armnutteal and seriewu2. Now that's a scoop.

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A Big Pair Of Funbags With Cherries On Top

Well if there’s one thing that Movie Santa delved deep into his sack for over Christmas, it’s a sleighload of trailers for filmy delights we can look forward to, or look forward to ignoring, over 2010. Let’s have a look at some of them together, shall we?

Clash Of The Titans

Everything inside me tells me this is going to be so awful that I’d rather have carnal relations with Medusa, but this trailer’s quite good isn’t it? I can’t be doing with all that rock music, and I think they’ve blown it by showing the Kraken, but this looks like silly fabness on toast to me.

Iron Man 2

I can take or leave the first one, but Iron Man 2, or Iron 2 Man as it appears to be called at the end of the trailer, looks like it might be taking things a bit more seriously. Let’s hope it’s more Spider-Man 2 than The Dark Knight, eh? Oooh, controversial.

Robin Hood

It’s Gladiator 2, set in the East Midlands! Groovy. I can’t bear Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott doesn’t do it for me any more, but I’ll go and see this because you have to go and see a new Ridders film, it’s the law. Rubbish trailer though.

Alice In Wonderland

New Tim Burton films must also be seen by law despite their decreasing quality levels, although this one actually looks quite spectacular. In a hallucinogenic acid trip kind of way. I imagine.

Knight & Day

Cruise and Diaz are slowly edging away from ‘must-see’ to ‘barely tolerable’, but this looks like a big pair of funbags with cherries on top. And no, I’m not referring to Cameron Diaz’s hooters.

Cop Out

I don’t know what in the name of John McClane is going on here. Bruce Willis appears to have regressed to Hudson Hawk levels of comedy, and that other guy, who seems to be called Tracy, is about as funny as medieval methods of haemorrhoid removal. Has Kevin Smith made a good film since Clerks? No.

Hot Tub Time Machine

John Cusack! Time travel! The 1980s! Chevy Chase! What’s not to love? Nothing, that’s what. Best film of 2010. That’s a cast-iron The Incredible Suit guarantee.

Inception

OK, so obviously this is clearly going to be the best film of 2010. I never said the Hot Tub Time Machine guarantee was cast iron, did I? I did? Oh. Well forget it. Inception is going to be a mind-blowing cake with brain-frazzling icing and hundreds and thousands made of tiny shards of holy crap that's amazingness. That’s a cast-iron The Incredible Suit guarantee.

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A Poo In A Teacup

Imagine walking into your bathroom and finding a load of toenail clippings in the sink. Pretty grim, right? But imagine if the sink was the interweb, and the toenails were actually little nuggets of noteworthy movie news. Now you’ve turned a revolting imaginary scenario into one that’s almost worth blogging about. Hooray for you! Well, hooray for me actually, I wrote the thing. All you do is sit there and read it while shovelling chocolate digestives into your face.

Here are the toenails I found in my sink today which I thought share-worthy:

Nicolas Cage won’t star in Green Hornet!
While it’s hardly news to say that somebody isn’t going to be in something, unless it’s “Shia LaBeouf will not star in anything ever again,” it’s always good to know Mr Cage and his wig of the week won’t be in a movie.

I’ve been alternately interested by and apathetic about Green Hornet since it was announced. My thought process went something like this:
Michel Gondry's making a Green Hornet movie: That sounds good. Seth Rogen’s in it: Oh. Not so interested.
Stephen Chow will play Kato: Groovy. Stephen Chow was ace in Kung Fu Hustle.
Stephen Chow won’t play Kato: Oh for heaven’s sake.
Cameron Diaz will be in it: Well that’s slightly better.
Nicolas Cage might be in it: That’s it, I’ve had it with all these Green Hornet shenanigans.
Nicolas Cage won’t be in it: Right, good, but just make the film and stop announcing who isn’t in it! This is becoming tedious.

Alex Garland is writing a new Judge Dredd movie!
I thought I was excited about this but then I realised I was just mildly curious about a new Judge Dredd film. After all a poo in a teacup would be better than the 1995 Sylvester Stallone version. I mean, hello, he takes his helmet off! Wrong, just wrong.

Alex Garland has only actually written half a good movie, The Beach. The rest have been a bit rubbish, so this particular toenail goes in the ‘Wait And See’ cupboard.

The A-Team movie has found its BA Baracus!
Liam Neeson is Hannibal. Bradley Cooper is Face. And now it appears the ludicrously named (although I probably wouldn’t say it to his face) Quinton Ramone “Rampage” Jackson is BA Baracus. I’m still looking forward to the film but I can’t help feeling like the best BA would have been Blighty’s own Matt Lucas:


And the big toenail in the sink is…
The announcement of the programme for the 2009 London Film Festival, on which I am duty-bound to report now that I run an award-winning blog*. There are about 20 films I want to see so it looks like I’ll have to resign from my job for the last fortnight in October. I’m sure they’ll cope without me, all I do is use their facilities to write my blog. Ssshh!

*Blog not actually award-winning

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