Blog

By Louis Baxter.

Piracy of music, film and games is illegal (you should buy DVDs from places like John Lewis) It’s taking money from the pockets of the people in a position to make the culture you love happen, and while their claims of closed down cinemas and imminent destruction are hyperbole to say the least. It does mean that films you could have loved won’t be made. By the same token however, you could say that in our increasingly financially polarized world, an entire generation could be copyrighted out of culture. And if copyright law is being exploited by the monolithic companies as a means to grind out pennies as opposed to protecting artists and encouraging reward for the creators work, then what purpose does it really serve? This is a thorny issue, complicated by the fact that if there’s a person reading this who has never knowingly pirated copyrighted material then my name is Morpheus and I have a red pill you might be interested in.

TPB AFK: Or The Pirate Bay away from the Keyboard documents the three creators of The Pirate Bay, the most successful file sharing site ever to exist and the world’s online piracy mecca, Peter, Gottfrid and Fredrik as they attempt to fight a multi-platform copyright lawsuit worth 13 million. Peter, the front-man of the group has lofty ideas about the internet being a free space and the democratization of culture, as well as being the ‘charming one’. Gottfrid shares Peter’s leftist beliefs but not his love of people, and cuts a paranoid and edgy figure with little time for those beneath him , whilst Fredrik just likes computers and the idea of running a large website. As the legal net closes in, the young technical upstarts/revolutionaries begin to find how unforgiving the current establishment can be.

They hardly cut the imposing figures, these masterminds of piracy. Rarely seen in suits or looking comfortable with or court rooms, they look they went straight from their university dorms to running one of the largest websites in the world. I shouldn’t be surprised though, I’ve seen The Social Network, I know the drill. The film largely avoids using the court case a framing device to expand the conversation about piracy as a whole, although we do get snippets, mostly through Peter, although there is a brief segment involving a professor who opposes copyright law in its current form, and supposes that the mass owning of rights can often serve to hinder creative output rather than help it. I can’t help but feel the film would have been stronger had it expanded its focus to the issue as a whole, instead of choosing to stay entirely focused on the Pirate Bay litigation.

I understand the impulse to stay impartial, to tell the story of these three human beings as the first and foremost prerogative, and as the net begins to tighten the way we discover different facets to our protagonists personalities, particularly Fredrik, who had seemed so impressively normal until a revelation late in the film. But it does suffer from slight documentary by the numbers difficulties, particularly in the middle section once we know our guys and before the consequences can start rolling out, the film lags somewhat.

That said, the magnitude of what the Pirate Bay has done, for better or worse, does make for a compelling story. It’s hard to imagine any other site, human or entity that will have cost corporations more money than The Pirate Bay, and there’s a certain Robin Hood quality to stealing product meant for the privileged and making it available en masse to the public. And the extent of the legal attack on piracy, seeming in this film like a never ending swarm, does beg the question why fraud in the financial sector isn’t being prosecuted with this level of ferocity. I stop with the lionization there though, as they all seem to get shifty eyes when the subject of how their site is used by the public. They seem dishonest about what they actually do, and while there are arguments to be made in defence of it, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor loses a dimension when you won’t admit to the stealing.

Overall though, it’s an engaging, intimate look into the private lives of tech pioneers, and the way the established money makers are trying to shackle them, and a legal system that seems to favour the older generation by design. An interesting way to spend 80 minutes, but I can’t help but feel it could have been more enlightening on piracy itself, as well as the current kings of it.

Rating: 6/10

By Adam Blampied.

John McClane was an underdog. Before his debut in 1988, the community of the action hero was dominated by the superman. They were overwhelmingly-trained elite soldiers (Cobra, Delta Force, Rambo), baby-oiled sculptures of tightened meat (Schwarzenegger in Predator, Raw Deal, Red Heat), or a combination of the two (Schwarzenegger in Commando). They were above us, something we could never hope to be, their wealth of preparedness or cosmic physique incurably alien to the majority of the filmgoing public. Not that this is a bad thing – the success of Bourne and Bond show we still have a compulsion for the unfathomably capable – but when John McClane showed up with his shabby vest, receding hairline and without his shoes, we were introduced to a different kind of hero: the everyman.

To me, and many others I’m sure, the character of John McClane (and perhaps the Die Hard franchise as a whole) is defined in one scene: the bathroom scene. After over an hour of playing cat-and-mouse with Hans Gruber’s cadre of germanic scofflaws, McClane retreats to a bathroom at his lowest ebb. His feet are cut to ribbons, he’s missing his family and, simpler than all that, he’s “feeling like shit”. Picking the glass from his feet in an unfinished toilet, the fatigue just pours from McClane. He’s not black-ops, he’s not a guy who eats green berets for breakfast, he’s just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, using on-the-spot street-smarts in a panicked chase for survival in a claustrophobic metal maze of ducts and steam and glass. He doesn’t even come up with his own catchphrase; he steals it from the movies. But he perseveres, he crawls through the shit, and foul-mouths his way to victory over the highly-trained bad guys. For the workaday masses, for the people who’ve yearned to spit hollywood catchphrases at our suited bosses, for the people who’ve also felt like shit John McClane was a hero they could truly own.

But watching A Good Day To Die Hard made me realise something. John McClane might still be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he’s not an underdog anymore. John McClane is a superman.

Fundamentally speaking, the idea of even one Die Hard sequel doesn’t work, never mind four. People don’t worry about seeing a litany of Bond films, because, although Craig’s tenure has done a lot to humanise the character, James Bond still isn’t a real person. He an android who eats sex and liquor and shits carnage and cruelty, a charismatic vector through a number of set piece action scenes from which we gain vicarious power fantasy thrills. If you’re a franchise player, while you gain recurring symbols, catchphrases and in-jokes, you lose that rich vein of tension that the threat of death gives to an audience. The whole point of John McClane is that he’s out of his element, so it’s possible he might be killed, but as soon as you bring him back for even a second film he’s ‘that guy who survived the first Die Hard movie’

Jumping off the roof is The Big Stunt of Die Hard. The peak of John McClane luck and balls. Wisely the movie shies away from topping it, and the subsequent final showdown is much more low-key – it’s a highnoon duel, after all. Yippie Ki Yay – which is a service to the character, and maintaining his believability. Regular Joes can’t keep jumping off buildings, but over the years I’ve seen John McClane be thrown from the wing of a speeding plane, suft a tidal wave of water in a dump truck, and jump on top of a harrier jet. In A Good Day To Die Hard he survives two spin-out car crashes within ten minutes, evades a helicopter by jumping several stories off a building twice and he’s pushing sixty! Because the UK release of the film was trimmed by the studios to squeak a 12A rating, we can’t even see him bleed! He’s a fucking terminator, so why should we care?

You’ll notice that most of this review isn’t actually about A Good Day To Die Hard, but that’s because there’s almost nothing to say about it. There’s one tremendous car chase at the beginning but the rest of the film is devoid of character nuance, memorable quips or original stunts. Other than Chernobyl, which only really functions as a series of rooms that could be set anywhere, there’s almost no indication we’re in Russia.

Structurally, it’s incredibly rushed. The film feels an act light. The plot twists into a plan to steal uranium but we never find out why. A new villain stepps out of the shadows to complicate the plot but is then immediately killed before he can make an impact. The film just ends. Bad guys die. Done. A Die Hard film should feel like a bloody sweaty slog, this was a 12A breeze. John Moore does a functional enough job making sure the action scenes are comprehensible but there’s very little weight to anything and the few bravura shots are robbed of their power by being shown whole-sale in the trailer.

The whole ‘two McClanes’ thing is underdone too, because McClane Jr is saddled with exactly the same arc as Lucy in the last movie. John was never there, John saves my ass, I finally call him Dad, the end. Worst of all, Skip Woods writes McClane Sr’s “I’ve been such an ass to my family” speech into the first act! That belongs at the end of act two, at the lowest ebb, picking glass out your feet in an unfinished toilet. There is a nice human moment where John McClane Sr is unable to hold his son’s gaze when he tells him he loves him, but it comes out of nowhere and goes right back there when SuperMcClane is hanging out of a chopper before being thrown 50 feet through plate glass and walking it off.

John McClane is still fun company, sure. It’s nice to hear him call bad guys ‘scumbags’, even if there is something unsettlingly right-wing about a 50 year old American travelling to a foreign country to ‘kill all the scumbags’, but there’s barely anything left of the John McClane, and the Die Hard, that once was. The claustrophobia, the unbeatable odds, the elite bad guys, the tension, the blood, it’s all gone, leaving nothing but an ageing charismatic vector through a number of Bond-lite set piece action scenes. Die Hard 6 is being planned (hopefully called Old Habits Die Hard) and don’t get me wrong, I’ll be there to see it. Because maybe they’ll remember what makes this character tick. Maybe they’ll remember why we loved him. Maybe John McClane will remember to feel like shit, so I don’t have to.

By Carys Dennison.

Disney’s 52^nd animated feature comes smashing towards us in the form of an 8-bit, 643 pound all-destroying giant. His name is Wreck-It Ralph, and boy is he angry. It is important to note that your newest dose of family-friendly animated action is oddly refreshing, combining the worlds of movie magic and video-games in a both fascinating and well-executed way.

Directed by Rich Moore and co-written by Jennifer Lee and Phil Johnston, Disney’s new milestone is a heart-warming tale of friendship that has the gooey thematic message of self-acceptance oozing out at its very core. Rich Moore, who you may recognise from directing episodes of The Simpsons and Futurama, excellently orchestrates an entertaining roller-coaster ride packed full of the obligatory bumps and fun action-adventure. In a film that’s very own characters are electronic creations, the script itself is very impressive in how it creates emotive and humanistic dialogue that feels far from artificial in nature. With Pixar’s creative overlord John Lasseter as executive producer, it’s not hard to understand why critics are raving about how Wreck-it Ralph feels like a Pixar film wearing Mickey Mouse ears.

Wreck-It Ralph is set in Litwak’s Arcade, an arguably retro setting for our contemporary times. Similar to the Pixar classic Toy Story, we are given a sneak peek into what happens when the lights go out on an arcade full of video-game characters. After dark, the characters are able to travel freely via electronic circuits connected to the Grand Central Station, a communal platform that allows entrance to every game featured in the arcade. It is creative ideas like this that make the film extremely innovative in its stylised execution.

Ralph (John C. Reilly) is the neighbourhood villain and general terroriser of the game Fix-It Felix. Reversely, hammer-wielding Felix (Jack McBrayer) is the hero who, incidentally, fixes everything Ralph destructs. Tired of his role of repeatedly destroying the same building into pixel pieces, Ralph now wants to become one of the good guys. It is on the 30^th anniversary of Fix-It Felix that he proclaims to the local support group for bad guys, BAD-ANON, that he no longer wants to be a villain. This affirmation spins group leader, Pac-Man’s Clyde, into a blue frenzy. To those not familiar on a first-name basis, it’s one of the blue ghosts that we all ran away from in mad fury when the moment of terror stroke. In fact, a highly enjoyable aspect of Wreck-It Ralph is the video-game character cameos and references that feature regularly throughout, giving you a sense of warm (or cold, depending on how good a player you were) nostalgia each time.

Returning to his bed of bricks that night, Ralph ventures a few feet away to where everyone else in his game resides, the Fix-It Felix mansion. Here, he is hurt to find that he is unwelcome at the anniversary celebration party. Wanting to prove himself as worthy of deserving a place in the mansion, Ralph ventures off into the electric circuits to win a medal and subsequently win the respect of his game’s characters.

Hero’s Duty is Ralph’s first port of call. Hero’s Duty is a first-person-shooter plagued by deadly Cy-Bugs that fly out from a suitably ominous tower that bears a visual resemblance to the terror of Lord of the Ring’s Mount Doom. Leading your mission is Sergeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch), a female gun-wielding hard-ass who is pre-programmed with a tragic back-story to boot. Calhoun just has time to verbally emasculate her soldiers before Ralph’s first battle commences. Needless to say, it is far from a success. Still determined to claim his medal, Ralph later climbs his way to the top of Mount Doom, smashes his way inside and then tap-dances around sleeping Cy- Bugs to retrieve his prize: The Medal of Heroes. The celebration is cut short as he accidentally awakens the Cy-Bugs upon his exit and it is not long before Ralph is hurtling in a spaceship towards his next destination.

Ralph lands up in Sugar Rush, a very pink and very bright kart-racing game that is complete with decorative candy-cane trees and all the sweets you could ever dream of. Here, Ralph meets the aptly named Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman), a snarky child who soon steals Ralph’s medal in order to use it as gold to enter the local race and prove her talent. Vanellope is what is known in the gaming world as a glitch, a fate that brands her as the token underdog to all who reside in the sugar-filled land. Now begins the journey into Ralph’s quest for true heroism and the inevitable havoc it ensues. However, more importantly, here also begins a heart-warming friendship that lays the thematic concrete for the entire film.

The voice-acting throughout the film is executed very well and forms a strong base in bringing the character’s personalities to life. Particular recognition should be given to Sarah Silverman, who completely nails capturing the quintessential essence of a bratty child found in Vanellope. Ralph is also superbly voiced by John C. Reilly, giving him a tired and tried tone that suits well to the character’s frustration. Jane Lynch, who you may know from that musical television series, Glee, voices Sergeant Calhoun in excellent cut-throat fashion. Fans of 30 Rock will also be pleased to see Jack McBrayer voicing your squeaky-toned good guy Felix in suitably high-pitched execution.

Wreck-It Ralph is certainly visually impressive in all its colourful and high-resolution glory. Disney’s new fancy bidirectional reflectance distribution functions are debuted and put to practice, creating tidier reflections for all to see but probably not notice. Special effects work well to mix the retro and new, even utilising a nifty Pac-Man grid to show members of BAD-ANON leaving their weekly session earlier on in the film. With a soundtrack composed by Henry Jackman (Monsters vs. Aliens) and original songs by the likes of Skrillex, Owl City, Buckner & Garcia, Wreck-It Ralph also boasts a hefty music selection that keeps up well with the fast-paced action of the film.

To put it in the appropriate perspective, the film has a centre of mushy sweetness wrapped up in a hard-cased and action-ready shell. The obvious child-friendly message can nicely be summed up with the bad guy affirmation that is featured throughout: I am bad, and that’s good. I will never be good, and that’s not bad. There’s no-one I’d rather be than me.