Quadruple Bill Mini Musings: Parties, Submarines, Dreams, and Venice...

Project X:
What's it about?
Three increasingly vulgar and cliched American teens look to become high school legends by throwing an epic house party in this documentary style comedy.
Who would I recognise in it?
Nobody, but you'll be familiar enough with the endless cliches, and it's produced by Todd "The Hangover" Phillips as well as co-written by Michael "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World" Bacall.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
Being a first person movie (think Cloverfield), it naturally suffers from all the problems and impossibilities that are ever-present in this annoyingly over-used presentation style. Please stop making 'found footage' movies! Beyond that, the central trio (with a fourth behind the camera) are all grating suburban white boys who fancy themselves as 'players', when in reality they're total losers, and their way of upping their school yard cache crosses all kinds of lines of moral comfort. We have the 'average' lead who is overly influenced by his exceptionally vulgar (and in this instance quite nasty) right-hand-man, while being accompanied by the token fat kid, and a creepy goth on camera duties. The set-up of the main trio strains to imitate the vulgar-but-harmless (not-to mention fairly realistic) teens of Superbad, but Project X fails miserably in establishing characters to root for - not least because their hijinks ultimately destroys the home of the protagonist's parents - their entire lives ruined, all for one stupid night to increase their cred in the dying days of school. Indeed, the resulting lack of real consequence proves quite disturbing - the lead has destroyed the home that his innocent parents have worked hard for, and in-the-process, lost his college tuition money (so there goes his prospects for a better future). Meanwhile, the real instigator gets off on all charges thanks to an expensive lawyer - and never mind that their trail of destruction nearly burned down a neighbourhood populated by innocent people.

Click "READ MORE" for more Project X, Das Boot, Paprika, and Don't Look Now...

Batman: Gotham Knight...

As is my way, when I get into something, I really get into it and practically - to all intents and purposes - become obsessed with it.

Case in point - The Dark Knight - since seeing it, I've rarely been able to stop thinking about it and how bloody good it was. My desktop background has been a series of Dark Knight promos since viewing the film also ... and yep, I went and snatched up the Batman Begins/Gotham Knight box set.

Batman Begins, as anybody with half a brain knows, is an incredible piece of superhero filmmaking - and a great piece of filmmaking in general too. So it was cool to get to check out the extra features at long last. Then - Gotham Knight. There seems to be a bit of a tradition starting up now, Anime-style films (mostly shorts collected together) acting as prequels to big releases - or indeed just to get a bunch of pre-plot story out of the way (seemingly in the case of Dead Space, a new videogame coming soon).

Anyway, I guess I should finally talk about Gotham Knight - I dug it quite simply. I liked the story of the first one as an idea, but I didn't really like the first story over all. It certainly stood out from the others visually ... but I don't think the look quite suited the franchise.

Fortunately the rest of the films followed the franchises roots and stylings a bit more closely and came up with interesting new 'in between' stories that pre-date the events of The Dark Knight. It's a neat idea, although clearly some aspects wouldn't have fitted into the 'Nolanverse' (I'm mainly talking about the giant Crocodile bloke).

A great little accompanying piece, and quite enjoyable for someone like me who digs Anime, but isn't really, really into it. Basically, if you dug The Animatrix, check out Gotham Knight (especially if you dug the 1990s cartoon).