Tag: Ron Perlman

Conan the Barbarian / The Guard

By إبن البيطار (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsA little bit of a David v Goliath competition this evening with a dinky Irish film competing for my attention against a meaty Hollywood blockbuster. Which will win out?

Conan the Barbarian

“By Crom!”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: barbarian loses family and swears vengeance on the baddie who killed them

See it if you  like: muscley men with long hair hitting people with things

If there’s one good thing to say about Conan the Barbarian, it’s that it isn’t a remake of the old Arnie films. Given the huge detailed history given to Conan by his creator, Robert E. Howard, and successive authors following on from him there is plenty to draw from. How, then, did we end up with such a dull and vapid tale as this one?

Jason Momoa is passable as the bulky Cimmerian, though his facial expressions seem to range from annoyed to angry and not an awful lot else. Mind, this is a little better than Leo Howard who plays Conan as a youth and who seems to have modelled his part on some kind of pissed-off wolf cub. With a pet lip.

The film shows its cheesy intentions from the opening sequence where Conan is born and held aloft on the battlefield. Well, a really shitty obviously rubber fake baby is held aloft anyway. While dad (Ron Perlman) roars. As you do on a battlefield when people are running around you with big bloody swords.

As far as plot goes, it’s about as deep as the 80’s versions. That is to say as deep as a thin film of water spilled on your worktop. It’s pretty predictable, the characters are just as shallow and the action sequences are about the only thing to alleviate the tedium. The “sand creatures” which appear in one sequence are particularly well done, although I swear the exact same piece of footage of a creature jumping in the air is used about five times.

Yeah, you may have guessed I wasn’t that impressed. Gillian summed it up:

“Even Red Sonja was better than that.”

The Guard

“I can’t tell if you’re really motherfucking dumb, or reallymotherfucking smart.”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: A member of the Garda comes up against some seriously nasty drug smugglers.

See it if you like: Good British (yes, I know, it’s Irish but the style’s the same) detective dramas with a heavy hand of quirk.

And here’s David. All set up with a large Irish sling with which to smack Goliath firmly in the temple. $6m up against $90m. That’s a big gulf to cross. How could it possibly hope to compete?

The most simple answer is – by having a far superior script. The Guard actually has a great story. And some wonderful characters, one in particular – Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson). The quote above comes from Don Cheadle‘s FBI agent shortly into the film and I was actually thinking this about Boyle shortly before the question is raised. He’s a wonderfully written enigma and portrayed perfectly by Gleeson.

So, what happens? Boyle is a police officer in the arse end of nowhere in West Ireland. Cheadle arrives with information about some rather nasty drug dealers in the area and things kick off. This isn’t Lethal Weapon in scale, and the humour is far darker than you’d get in most Hollywood movies. In fact, the closest I can think of offhand is In Bruges which, coincidentally I assume, also stars Gleeson.

If I have an issue it’s that the film seems to try too hard to be funny at the start with a bit too much in the way of bad language and forced humour. Once things settle down, roughly around the time Cheedle’s character appears, the humour settles in and becomes far more natural.

As well as the crime and laughs, there’s a lovely side-story relating to Boyle’s mother who is dying of cancer. There’s no real reason for this little splinter of a story to be there other than to develop the protagonist’s personality. And it works.

It’s films like this that restore my faith in cinema at times. Please, if you have the choice of only catching some stupid sword and sandals flick (even worse, the aforementioned crock in 3-flipping-D) and this little pearl, hand your coins to David so he can load them into his sling.

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Season of the Witch / The King’s Speech

The King's Speech
The King's Speech

Two films on a Friday – back to a semi-regular way to round off the week with Gillian. We opted for a nicely opposing pairing this weekend. One silly action film and another deemed somewhat of a classic from the previews.

Season of the Witch

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Absconding knights offer to take an alleged witch across country for trial so they don’t get executed. Like a road movie with armour.

Behmen and Felson (Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman) get a little sick of being told to kill innocents in the name of God, so decide to turn their backs on the Crusades. Popping through a small town, they are discovered as deserters and sentenced to death. As luck would have it, the town is suffering a plague brought on by a witch and in exchange for offering to transport her to a monastery to undergo trial, they’re given their freedom.

That pretty much covers the plot. Other than that it’s moderately average action / medieval fare. Cage and Perlman get all the good lines and there is some decent banter. The effects are passable (until the end when there’s some CGI that makes Doctor Who look big-budget) and the acting’s tolerable.

It’s not a classic, but even by Cage’s standards is just not up to par. Certainly, it’s not a complete heap of arse like Ghost Rider (seriously – they’re making a sequel?), but there’s just not a lot to it. By the end, there’s a feel that you’ve watched an over-long TV drama rather than a decent motion picture.

The King’s Speech

“I have a voice!”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: true story of a king-to-be who has a speech impediment, and the work done by a therapist to get him through it.

Short review: See this film. See it now.

Longer review: This is a heartwarming tale of royalty meets common-folk set in the 1930s as Britain gears up for war and the royal family goes through some upsets. King George V doesn’t have long to live and his son (the soon-to-be King Edward) is filandering with a twice-divorced American. Marrying her would mean he can’t be king, and his younger brother Bertie would take the reins.

Bertie (better known historically as King George VI, and played magnificently by Colin Firth) has a problem. His job is to be head of state, he need to give speeches… and he has a very pronounced stammer. At the insistence of his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) he does the rounds of speech therapists, eventually ending up with the rather unusual Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush).

Thus begins a story that takes us from Bertie’s small speeches as Duke of York through to his first – and famous – speech as King just as Britain announced that it was to go to war with Germany for a second time.

The film very much focusses on the relationship between  Lionel and Bertie. The Australian voice doctor much preferring to be informal with his patients initially sits very badly with the occasionally bad-tempered King-in-waiting, but the two do gel as time goes on.

The dialogue between the two fizzes, even when Firth is stammering away. One of the therapy sessions includes the funniest swearing sequence I think I’ve seen since Steve Martin’s car hire rant in Planes, Trains and Automobiles – a segment which initially earned the film a 15 rating due to the number of “****”s. It was downgraded to a 12A with the warning that it was “language in the setting of speech therapy”. So remember, kids – it’s acceptable to swear at your doctor.

There isn’t a single bad member of cast in the entire movie. A small surprise for me was seeing Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill. A far cry from the labourer he played all those years ago in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. Derek Jacobi is superb as the pompous Archbishop of Canterbury, a man obviously used to getting his own way.

Firth plays the Prince/King very well and the script portrays him as a troubled man who underwent a harsh childhood being by far the second most important behind his elder brother. Despite this, he’s a good father to his two daughters and by all accounts was a popular king before being succeeded by our current monarch.

I’m no royalist, but this is an incredible story and certainly one that deserves two hours of anyone’s time. With some excellent dialogue, funny moments and a story that doesn’t stop with a ton of history and trivia thrown in it’s great value for money.

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