Shame

In a nutshell: Fassbender puts the phwoarr into addiction.

Popcorn rating: 4/5

Warning: I have just come back from watching Shame. And I’m not quite sure I’m back to myself yet. Cold flannel anyone? Anyway, on with the review. Let me begin by saying that Shame, written and directed by the award winning Steve McQueen (who also made the excellent Hunger), is groundbreaking on many levels. First off, this movie shows off a lot of, well, appendages, of the male variety, which is surely a first for Holly”wood”.

Yes, ladies and gents, make yourself comfortable because you’re soon going to find yourself becoming very acquainted, up close and personal in fact, with Irish stallion, ahem, I mean err, rising star Michael Fassbender’s family jewels (he’s a healthy lad young Fassbanger and, speaking as an Irishman myself, entirely indicative of the rest of us.)

Aside from Fassbender’s prowess, the movie also focuses on sex addiction, as personified by thirty-something New Yorker Brandon (Fassbender once again proving he is one of the best actors of his generation), emotional neediness (Brandon’s annoying, needy sister Cissy, played by Carey Mulligan) and then there’s Fassbender’s annoying, hyper-active boss. With his sister no living with him, Brandon founds himself ever more caged in, needing to break free in ever more extreme ways.

Once you get to meet Brandon’s boss and sister you soon understand why he does what he does. Both on their own are bad, having no concept of the term personal “boundaries” and personal “space”, but together these two are bloody insufferable. No wonder the poor b*****d ends up with a sex addiction.

Anyway, explicitness aside, Shame is a compelling, unflinching movie which explores the wretchedness of sex addiction. Definitely worth a watch. I recommend, and if that’s not enough, the great Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times named it his second best film of 2011. So, go on, off you go to the cinema.

Reviewer: TJ McCabe

Looking for more? Check out the trailer and cast interviews on our Shame storify: http://sfy.co/Uqw

The Muppets

In a nutshell: The Muppets reunite to raise $10 million to save their studio.

Popcorn rating: 4/5

In September 1976, The Muppet Show premiered on television. The show ended up spanning the length of five years, with a total of 120 episodes. Created by Jim Henson starting in 1954-55, The Muppets also spawned feature length films, television specials and a wide array of other television series.

And now, twelve years after The Muppets’ last theatrical release, Muppets From Space (1999), they’re at it again in the new eponymously named The Muppets written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller.

The movie is rife with familiar faces like Segel and Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek). Music and directorial credit go to Bret McKenzie and James Bobin respectively, both of the television series The Flight of the Conchords. The starring roles, Gary and Mary, are held by Segel himself and the beautiful Amy Adams. And of course it wouldn’t be the Muppets without a slew of celebrity cameos throughout the film, from the likes of Neil Patrick Harris to Mickey Rooney, Whoopi Goldberg to Selena Gomez.

So the production had a variety of well-known names attached to it, so what? How does it stand to the history of the Muppets, and how good of a movie was it?

The story focuses on Gary, Mary and Gary’s puppet brother Walter as they are enlisted to help Kermit peace together the disbanded Muppet group in order to save their beloved studio from the oil-crazed Tex Richman (Chris Cooper). They must raise $10 million to buy back the studio and how else do you raise $10 million as The Muppets besides a televised telethon with a surprise guest celebrity host!

The Muppets pulls together a combination of child humor, adult humor and slapstick comedy perfectly to create an all together hysterical film.  Well-deserved applause and laughter echoed through the theatre nonstop during the movie, as small children as young as 3 and adults as old as 50 alike joined in on the festivities of the Muppets.

The Muppet stars and actors opposite them do such a great job with the back and forth, making viewers forget the fact that these are puppets and puppeteers that are interacting on screen. It takes us back to our childhood when we really believed in talking frogs and pigs, instead of looking for signs of the puppet master. It is such a great film, whether you are young in years or just young at heart.

Reviewer: TylerMcCane

Real Steel

In a nutshell: Robots wars, with a little bit of family bonding.

Popcorn rating: 3/5

Fighting robots. Big crashing metal hulks slamming each other, pounding hydraulic fists into steel chest plates, squeezing skulls, ripping and crushing and smashing each other to bits. Seriously, what’s not to love about Real Steel? The game that is. The imagined World Robot Boxing (WRB) championships, set in a not too distant future where 10ftish robots kick the sh*t out of each other in front of a packed stadium.

Real Steel the film, in which said championship games mark a zenith, isn’t quite as must see as Real Steel the game, but, to be honest, it’s actually not half bad. Based, in part, on the 1956 short story ‘Steel’ by Richard Matheson, Real Steel is set in 2020, a world very similar to today with a few small exceptions – humans have been replaced in the boxing ring by robots, operated by high tech hand held devices or, in some cases, by voice control or “shadowing”. Robot boxing is big business in 2020 and, on the fringes of the sport, is former boxer Wolverine (or rather Hugh Jackman as Charlie Kenton). Kenton earns a crust pitting his old, washed up robots against, well, pretty much anything, until one day he finds himself in a predicament – forced to spend the summer babysitting his 11-year-old son, Max (Dakota Goyo), a boy he doesn’t know, and doesn’t want to. Fortunately, the kid takes to the robot boxing game like a duck to water and soon pop and Max are pitting their tired old robot Atom against the big boys.

And that’s where Real Steel shines. See it on the big screen. The biggest screen you can find, with the biggest audio system and the biggest seats with a bucket of popcorn and a gallon of soda. And enjoy.  Cos this is telly’s little Robot Wars gone Hollywood. Robot battles, no, robot annihilations, are what you want. And that’s exactly what you get, from the opening mechanoid versus raging bull to something that looks like a Disney version of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. For mechs.

Aside from the steely fist fights, it’s all rather humdrum in a pleasing enough sort of way. Goyo is a cute kid with a little bit of attitude and a pleasing lack of sacharrine (thankfully sugar king Spielberg doesn’t have his muddy paws on this one). Then there’s the evil baddies with their sharp bones and funny accents. They’re Russian and Japanese btw, for added nasty. Anyone for a harmless love interest? A Dead mum? A random twist forcing daddy and son unhappily together to bond? Tick, tick, tick. Oh, and of course. There’s Wolverine. With his top off. If you like that sort of thing.

Is Jackman a brilliant actor? Well no, probably not, but that doesn’t really matter because there’s just something so damn likable about him, and he suits this kind of role. Sure, Kenton is a bit shifty, you wouldn’t want to loan him any money for one, but you just can’t help  rooting for him and his shoddy fly-by-night antics. And Jackman isn’t overstated here, he doesn’t ham it up (which I know he can. I’ve seen The Prestige). He’s just well, himself, with a slightly funny accent. And it works. It really does.

Real Steel is an old school family yarn. There are so many cliches (bad boy comes good, wise beyond his years kid, underdog wins etc etc) you kinda get bored counting, but that’s okay. Sometimes you just want to suspend your disbelief and enjoy the usual old schmaltz, happy in the knowledge it’ll all come good in the end.

Action junkie little uns will love this movie, they’ll probably want their own 10ft robot for Christmas (hey, who wouldn’t?). For the adults, there isn’t quite as much on offer, the dialogue is a little clunky, everything slots too easily into place, but come on – this film has massive f**k off robots ripping each other to shreds for your entertainment. What’s not to like?

Reviewer: CurlyShirley

We Need To Talk About Kevin

In a nutshell: Thoughtful yet chilling – a worthy companion to the novel.

Popcorn rating: 4/5

Don’t expect any easy answers in We Need To Talk About Kevin.

The film, based on Lionel Shriver’s award-winning novel of the same name, may be about a high school massacre where the culprit is known, but, as the credits roll, your mind will still be ringing with questions about who’s to blame.

Morvern Callar director Lynne Ramsay stamps her unique style on the feature with an evocative and harrowing interpretation of the book.

But what is also brilliant is the cast. Ezra Miller is chilling as teenager Kevin and Tilda Swinton is exceptional as his troubled mum Eva. To a large extent, this is Eva’s story and Swinton’s solid performance is really what gives weight to the film.

Through a series of jumbled present-day sequences and flashbacks – which replace the letters to her husband in the book – you gradually start to see the deconstruction of Eva’s life. Expect painful contrasts between her past life in middle class comfort and her woes in the present day as she is demonised on a daily basis.

You can’t help but feel sympathetic as Eva is constantly stared at and even attacked by members of the victims’ family who hold her responsible. But is she a victim? After all, Eva was a free spirit and it is made abundantly clear she never wanted to be a mum. Her trips around the world are replaced by dirty nappies and a job in a travel agency. Eva feels trapped and you see stages in Kevin’s upbringing where he isn’t given the love and care by her that he probably needs. Then again, Kevin is clearly damaged and disillusioned in much deeper ways than a parent’s neglect, as the film puts a good case forward for the nature versus nurture argument.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is one of those odd films where you know the outcome before it happens but it doesn’t make it any less hard hitting or thought provoking. A haunting work, it is almost a companion piece to Gus Van Sant’s haunting and similarly themed Elephant.

 Reviewer: DavidMorgan