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An action film from the director of “Farewell My Concubine”? No. It”s a drama. The DVD artwork that is advertising director Kaige Chen”s 2010″ s “Zhao shi gu er” (or “Sacrifice” as it is known abroad) is similar to most of the Asian releases you”ll have spotted in your local supermarket. Swords drawn, an unstoppable army in the background and words like “Dying”, “Fighting” and “Revenge” might lead you to reckon on a blood and guts military themed action extravaganza. “Sacrifice” is no such film.

Yes there”s a couple of sword fights here and there but ultimately “Sacrifice” is a sprawling drama played out over several decades dealing with politics, vendettas, father-son bonds and, you guessed it, sacrifices. The story involves a faithful doctor Cheng Ying (Ge You) who saves the only child of Zhao dynasty, the rest having been wiped out by a malicious minister Tu”an Gu (Wang Xue Qi – who you may recognize if you”ve managed to see the Chinese version of Iron Man 3). The coup basically involves poisonous  insects, ravage dogs, spiked wine and rounding up all the infant children. It”s fool proof and biblical to boot. To ensure the survival of the Zhao clan Ying swaps it”s newest arrival with his own terminally ill child, who is swiftly murdered by Gu. To take revenge of Gu for his despicable acts Ying decides to make him Godfather to the small Zhao child who he has named Bo”er, with the intent of revealing the truth to the boy one day so that he will take his revenge on Gu the killing of his family. Once again it”s fool proof, not impracticable or convoluted in any way. Actually watching it play out works better than writing it After the 2012 Victorias Secret Fashion Show, youtube justin bieber reportedly hooked up with Kerr. out.

The opening half hour of the film plays like a conspiracy drama as General Gu plots the downfall of the Zhao family. It”s seems odd when he actually pulls it off and characters you thought would become your protagonists for the rest of the film are quickly dealt a death blow. Some of the death scenes are genuinely quite shocking, particularly the moment when Ying”s actual son is cold-heartedly murdered in front of it”s mother. Into the second act the film slows right down as it becomes the tale of a man trying to raise a boy the best way he can… whilst plotting to turn him into a killing machine with a former scarfaced-bodyguard of the Zhao clan – did I forget to mention him? Yeah, well he doesn”t add much.

Of course a revenge plot as delicious as this hits some bumps on the way as Bo”er goes through phases of liking his murderous Godfather more than Ying the man who is raising him, plus the scarfaced guy become a little unhinged himself and threatening to kill Ying and Bo”er. The drama is played remarkable straight and aims for an air of tragedy. Ge You puts in a sympathetic performance as Ying, making a character who raises a child under a blanket of lies in order to eventually turn him into a murderer, surprisingly likable to the point that you forget that”s the whole purpose of the film. Some of the climatic moments are effect heart-string pullers but overall the film seems to missing something than can only really described as “Omph”. Maybe if a few more swords and spears were thrown it could have heightened the tension. Or as Peter Griffin would say “somebody throw a pie!”. Actually I feel as though I”m talking Sacrifice down. It”s a perfectly fine drama with it”s moments but I think I was expecting something more from the director of Farewell My Concubine. If only it found it”s… “Omph”.

Horror films make money. An incredible amount of money. Of all the moviegoing sub-cultures, the horror audience is the most reliable to turn up and pay up at the box office, the relentless hunger of the horror crowd made all the more baffling by the fact that they’re being served the same thing over and over and over again. Paranormal Activity, Saw, Final Destination, Halloween, Friday the 13^th, each franchise just a series of variations on the original (except Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, which is nuts). For god’s sake, there are ELEVEN Amityville Horror films out there, and all of these movies I’ve mentioned make money not in spite of adhering to their own strict formulas, but because they adhere to them. Even excluding franchises how many times have we seen the following templates: “teens assemble in a place and are killed in that place”, “struggling writer moves to a new place and is troubled by an urban legend”, or “aren’t little girls f***king terrifying?”

The pavlovian reliability of the horror box-office almost entirely removes the onus normally placed upon filmmakers to constantly reinvent, subvert, and master the founding tenants of filmic storytelling: premise, script, cinematography, score, sound design. Knowing that the rote is profitable and that audiences have an inexplicable attraction to the familiar, most horrors simply pick a plot template and clothe it in a different gimmick. This killer uses puppets! This one’s set in a circus! This one has a f***king terrifying little girl in it! These are generalisations of course and there’s no doubt some innovative and exciting filmmakers working in horror today – Peter Strickland, Ben Wheatly, Ti West to name but three – but so often the conventions of horror bully and constrict an otherwise intriguing premise until it resembles just one more of the staid horror movie templates. Take, for example, Mama, which, for the first half an hour or so of its running time, was one of the best horror films I’d seen this year, but over time became hampered by trying to fulfil the expectations of what a horror film ‘has to include these days’. It’s not a bad film by any stretch but it could have been something truly unique.

Mama stars Jessica Chastain playing nicely against ethereal type as Annabel, an alternative rock musician resolutely against starting a family, who finds herself becoming surrogate mother by a macabre twist of circumstance. Her lover’s nieces, Lilly and Victoria, have been found, after 5 years of being missing presumed dead, seemingly alone in a cabin in the woods. With no parents left to care for them, Annabel and her partner Luke take them in, but the girls are a little … off. Displaying far more animal characteristics than human – eating moths, scuttling on all fours – they claim to have been nurtured all this time by a mysterious entity known only as ‘Mama’ and, as Annabel struggles to acclimatise the traumatised girls to civilised life (more out of guilt and duty than genuine care) ‘Mama’ returns and, dammit, she wants her kids back.

The film’s directed by Andy Muschietti, but more importantly – as the marketing would have you believe – executively produced by Guillermo Del Toro, which comes as no surprise given the macabre fairytale nature of the film’s premise. It’s also based on Muscietti’s 2008 short film, Mamá,(from which one of the film’s most heart-stopping sequences is recreated shot for shot) which was discovered by Del Toro, who pushed for a feature.

So what makes Mama good? The craftsmanship. The premise is brilliantly unique, unnerving in its corruption of the terrifying little girl cliché (the scary girls aren’t the source of the horror, but have rather become scary because of being nurtured by horror) and it’s genuinely hard to predict. The script is great, themes of motherhood, madness and the thin line between the two nicely explored with plenty of warm, human dialogue for its leads. The cinematography is beautifully shot and intelligently composed throughout, a few dreamlike sequences especially showing the welcome influence of Del Toro’s ornate and visually poetic fantasy. The score mixes childhood refrains with brooding menace (more Del Toro) and the sound design – of ‘Mama’ especially – is bloody wonderful, managing to be melodic but inhuman and terrifying all at once. In a genre where the bare minimum still reaps in the dollar (I’m looking at you, Paranormal Activity 4, you lazy bugger, you) seeing this much effort and craft from those in production is a joy.

But Mama is by no means perfect. For starters, it’s far too in love with its monster, showing ‘Mama’ early and often. In small doses, ‘Mama’ as wonderful beast, sprawling hair, jerky-limbed, with a chillingly drowned voice, but the film is so overeager to punctuate its running time with jump-scares that it just keeps throwing her at us, in all her iffy CG glory, to the point that we become accustomed to her, leaving the film no way to visually raise the stakes when it comes to the climax. Muschietti knows how to subtly scare – a beautiful protracted shot of one of the girls playing tug-of-war with something that never quite makes it into the shot is a nerve-shredder – so it’s disappointing that he cheapens his film with ‘boo! loud music’ moments so often. A previously intelligent character’s choice to break into an abandoned mental hospital at night, when there was no reason not to wait for the daytime, provides for a well-engineered scare or two, but is so dumb and such a formulaic setup that it only serves to suck personality from the film and creep closer to generic horror territory.

The overabundance of ‘Mama’ also squanders a potentially brilliant dynamic. When the elder of the feral sisters are being psychoanalysed about the creature who kept them alive all this time, the psychiatrist posits that maybe the girl is in fact ‘Mama’ and that the beast is merely a product of her trauma. This tension between the supernatural and the psychological never comes to pass however, because we’ve already seen ‘Mama’ in the very first scene.

Finally, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s character is so needless awkwardly handled that it ruins some of the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Coster-Waldau is a great actor, but aside from the first five minutes of the movie he’s given virtually nothing to do. He’s set up as a lead, our way into the plot, then, when the movie realises its Annabel’s story, bumps him off to hospital for the majority of the running time. He wakes just in time to have a dream, go to the woods, then happen to stumble into his partner in the forest so that he can be present at the climax. It’s contrived and really takes you out of the film just when you need to be invested most.

But still, I recommend Mama. It can’t escape the trappings of its genre, but it’s made with love, effort and genuine spark. It’s flawed, beautiful, frustrating and bold, with a bittersweet ending that’ll knock you for six. It also has two of the best performances from children that I have ever seen in a movie, horror or otherwise.

I’m glad to see it’s become a financial success. Not surprised in the slightest, but glad.

By the awesome James Connors from SouthWalesMassive.

When watching magic live, or even filmed live for TV, you get caught either in an air of wonder or studying every possible angle to work out how the trick is done. Maybe to try and feel smarter than the magician, or just to try your hand at it yourself. there’s often many reasons to remain entertained. The problem with a movie that revolves around magic is keeping the illusion alive, while the audience are aware of the nature of filmmaking. Films like ‘The Prestige’ add wonderful storytelling and intriguing characters to the foray, putting less emphasis on the tricks themselves and more on the story, but with a comedy your only real option is to go larger than life and provide audiences something beyond what they’ve ever seen before.

Starting in flashback, first impressions are actually pretty good. Burt (Steve Carrell) is often left to his own devices, to the point where at a young age he’s making the dinner his mother supposedly left out for him, until he receives a magic set for his birthday. He then meets Anton (Steve Buscemi), another nerdy kid at his school, who is wowed by Burt’s skills and the two pair up to become a magic double act. Expectations are of a heartwarming tale – two social misfits whose love of magic bonds them in spite of their surroundings, yadda yadda yadda then the happy ending.

Unfortunately, as soon as we’re taken into the present day, everything starts to fall apart.

Burt is now, frankly, an asshole and the friendship between the two is at breaking point when the act starts waning in popularity due to ‘extreme’ magicians appearing on the scene. There’s no subtlety in who they’re portraying, to the point where David Copperfield cameos and Criss Angel is an advisor on the film, which probably stops the filmmakers from taking too many swipes. By this point, despite decent performances by everyone involved, Burt is unlikable, Anton is out of the picture and Jim Carrey’s ‘Steve Gray’ is obviously the villain of the piece. The only person to side with is Jane (Olivia Wilde) who comes and goes, and isn’t considered an important enough character to make the poster.

Obviously there’s a path to redemption story taking place, but there’s not enough excitement or laughs to keep things interesting. If you know how a movie ends within the first 15 minutes, it has to be a great trip to get to the inevitable conclusion. There’s a huge opportunity to take things above and beyond anything realistic, in the sense that ‘Dodgeball’ pushes the envelope on how important a game nobody plays is, but ‘The Incredible Burt Wonderstone’ doesn’t really go there. Beyond the ‘Brain Rapist Steve Gray’ tricks, which generally involve a gross out scene which gives Carrey the opportunity to be his wacky self again, everything seems a bit grounded and stale.

So, despite the potential for a really fun, silly movie, we’re left with a great cast putting on a good performance of a lacking script. With the recent, sad passing of James Gandolfini, it’s a shame that one of his last films is a bit of a dud. It’s hard to be unbiased in the appraisal of his performance, but it’s fair to say that Gandolfini’s screen time is definitely among the more entertaining sequences, but he’s only a minor character and doesn’t appear that often. There will undoubtedly be worse comedies released this year, and fans of the cast might take something away (like Will Ferrell, Steve Carrell is capable of doing a lot with poor source material), but Burt Wonderstone is just a bit too average to be memorable, and that’s a pity.