Daybreakers

Just what the world needs at the minute, right? More vampires. Well, that’s what I was thinking (that and a slight feeling of confusion when the trailer for Legion played before the main feature because I half-thought that was the movie I’d gone to watch; angels, vampires…easy mistake to make). But anyway, yeah, vampires. Thanks to the recent literary and cinematic phenomenon named after a certain time of day, it seems we’re up to our necks in the pointy-teethed folks once again (some might say they never went away in the first place). Thankfully, there’s no cushy and vaguely questionable romance to be found here, and Daybreakers keeps a reasonable distance from the typical portrayal of vampires. Mostly by just pretending that they’re zombies instead.

Nowhere Boy

Bleedin’ hell, The Beatles are just about everywhere these days, aren’t they? From repackaged, remastered remixes of their already digitally remastered but still somehow not quite remastered enough albums, to video games that let you don a plastic pudding bowl haircut (if only) and wield a plastic Rickenbacker/Gretsch/Hofner/Ludwig drumkit, and pretend to play some pandiatonic clusters while hoping to pass the audition, it might as well be 1962 – 1970 again.

As a Beatles fan since, oooooo, ages ago, I can’t say I really mind, because it’s refreshing to hear a “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” come blasting from your radio where moments before there was a “Puh-puh-puh pokerface.” But films about the Fab Four such as this latest offering from director Sam Taylor Wood have typically failed to raise my interest, as they never seemed to capture the spark present either in their music or in the films they themselves made.

Avatar (3D)

So here it is. Allegedly some ten years in the making and with an estimated budget somewhere in the region of the GDP of several small European nations combined, it’s James Cameron’s Avatar. They say it’ll revolutionise cinema. They say it’s a whole new way of doing things, with advanced technology used to both capture and display the action in a way never before seen or contemplated. The tag-line might as well have been “It’ll blow your freakin’ mind,” since that’s been the general thrust of the marketing push behind it.

There’s a lot riding on Avatar‘s box office take. Cameron’s career, the existence of 20th Century Fox (probably; $300 million is a lot of moolah), the very way in which big mainstream blockbuster movies get made in future. So it’s both something of a relief but also vaguely disappointing that Avatar has turned out to be quite good, actually.

Where The Wild Things Are

I suppose technically this is a children’s/family movie, given the source material and the big, hairy, friendly monsters. That said, it’s not exactly a typical family movie, since it’s directed by Spike Jonze and scored (partly) by Karen O of the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. So if you happen to have an indie hipster kid to whom such things will likely appeal (and who isn’t going to feel too cheated by the fact that the version of Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” used in the trailer isn’t in the movie itself), this could be just the movie for them. And you.

The Men Who Stare At Goats

Of the five films currently sitting in top spot in the Irish box office, three are based on books, and that’s before taking into account the second instalment of the Twilight series, which just opened yesterday. Wikipedia has helpfully compiled the highest-grossing movies of the last decade; eight of the top ten are adaptations of books (or comics, in the case of The Dark Knight, which are just as valid a literary form, if you ask me). Books are obviously Good Business at the minute.

Based on the book of the same name, The Men Who Stare At Goats is unlikely to make a late run for inclusion in the list of big money blockbuster book adaptations. This might be because it doesn’t include enough vampires/boy wizards/orcs/all of the above. It might also be because, as an early title slide warns us, all too many of the events it portrays have their basis in fact.