Born on the Fourth of July

Does anyone else find it funny that Tom Cruise, whose birthday is the third of July, starred in a film called Born on the Fourth of July? No? Just me then.

Olive Stone is one of those film makers that I don't really get. I'm not that much of a Platoon fan, nor can I say I have any affiliation with Wall Street. Natural Born Killers has it's moments, and I can't remember a single scene of Any Given Sunday, though I saw it less than 2 years ago. Other than that, I haven't seen anything he's made, though my hopes are up for JFK, whenever I eventually get around to seeing it. Born on the Fourth of July seems like a typical Stone movie, in that it comes deeply ingrained with a message (war is hell and will mess you up), and though at first glance it may seem patriotic, if you look a little deeper it's really a chance for Stone to voice his own personal feelings about his country.

Spiderman 1 & 2

Never has a film been more squarely aimed at the nerds and outsiders of the world (OK, maybe Revenge of the Nerds), the guys with the smarts but not the brawn, good looks, athletic bodies and hot girlfriends. Fortunately, this description neatly encapsulates the majority of the superhero genre’s existing fanbase.

Tobey Maguire is Peter Parker, the afore-mentioned science nerd with a prolonged crush on Kirsten Dunst’s girl-next-door MJ, but lacking the confidence, wealth, strength and social standing required to do anything about it. After being bitten by a radioactive spider during a class field trip, he acquires some of the spider’s abilities, including wall crawling, mild precognition, shooting webs from his wrists, a vastly improved body and the ability to dangle from the ceiling into your mouth while you sleep. In real life, spider’s shoot the webs from an aperture closer to their posterior. This would have made for a much stranger film, I feel.  Unfortunately, Parker’s transformation occurs around the same time as Parker’s lazy rich kid best friend Harry’s businessman father trials a new super serum on himself, with predictably disastrous results, transforming him into a suped-up madman, terrorising the city in the form of fan favourite villain the Green Goblin.

This is noticeably a genre finding its feet, being one of the earlier modern comic book films (better than Joel Schumacher’s Batman travesties and Daredevil, not as good as X-Men), as it spends more time dealing with the inevitable origin story and too much soppy character drama, something improved upon by the sequel, as with no back story to cover the action gets to kick off straight away. Yes, back stories can be done well, see Batman Begins and Iron Man, but they were both able to learn from Spidey’s mistakes.

Spiderman 2 features a much more memorable and iconic villain in the form of Alfred Molina’s Dr. Otto Octavius who, after another botched experiment (this time involving fusion), he receives four prehensile multi-functional metal arms grafted to his spine, thereby becoming ‘Doc Oc’. As before, Maguire is justifiably bland as Parker, allowing the audience to project themselves onto him, and Dunst is still perfect as the dream girl, now tantalisingly within reach. Director Sam Raimi revels in some nice little in jokes (the chainsaw), casting regular Bruce Campbell as a ring announcer in part 1, a snooty usher in 2 and a helpful French waiter in 3 (not appearing on the list), as well as his brother Ted Raimi in a tiny role. J. K. Simmons is absolutely spot-on casting as J. Jonah Jameson Jr., editor of the Daily Bugle, making the films worth watching for his too few scenes alone.

Fun fact: Alfred Molina has the most incarnations of himself in Lego form, for his roles in Spiderman 2, Prince of Persia and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ok, not that fun.

Spiderman Choose life 5/10

Spiderman 2 Choose film 7/10

Finding Nemo

Taking a simple story, a father searches for his kidnapped son, and although transposing it to tropical fish sounds insane, the concept works, with Albert Brooks overprotective clown fish Marlin travelling to Sydney to rescue his son, who in turn is doing his best to escape the dentist’s fish tank within which he recently became imprisoned. As ever with Pixar, it is the myriad of supporting characters that make the film truly great, here ranging from the cabin fever crazed fish tank gang (voiced by, among others, Willem Dafoe, Stephen Root, Alison Janney and semi-regular collaborator Brad Garrett) to Ellen DeGeneres’ short term memory loss suffering regal tang Dory, probably the most popular and oft-quoted characters from the film.

Pixar rightfully uses the films running time to show off their immense design skills, displaying as many watery environments as possible (sewers, wide open oceans, docks, puddles) and a cornucopia of every widely recognisable aquatic lifeform, including sea turtles, jellyfish, sharks, pelicans, Aardman-inspired seagulls, stingrays, swordfish (fencing with upper class English accents), angler fish, whales and Bostonian lobsters.

It says something of the animating skill of Pixar that they had to degrade the quality of the water in this film, as initial feedback showed it was too realistic. Given enough time, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were able to make a seemingly live action film without anyone noticing.

Choose film 8/10