Film
ce Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Directors: Carlos Saldanha,
Michael Thurmeier
In the first Ice Age movie, a misfit herd of a sloth, a mammoth and a sabre tooth tiger co-existed alongside humans. Two sequels later, they are hanging out in a verdant landscape supposedly under the ice with a group of dinosaurs. In their world, does time go backwards?
Hush now, it’s just an animated children’s movie. However, Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs plays havoc not just with chronology, but also with the patience of the audience. Its biggest miscalculation is to introduce a female counterpart to Scrat, the original squeaking squirrel rat who forever struggled to retrieve, hang onto and secrete away his beloved acorn.
Suddenly, the series’ meditation on the failure of the loner to maintain his secret store – moral: endeavour for the sake of the individual is not worth it – is dissipated by a bushy-haired female. The screenwriters (four are credited) are messing with the perfect counterpoint to the herd story and its moral that collective endeavour is good.
Otherwise Ice Age 3 is pretty much like its two predecessors. There’s a quest – this time for Sid the Sloth (voiced by John Leguizamo) who has been whisked away by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The sabre tooth, Diego (Denis Leary), still cannot behave like a hunter. Apparently he’s losing his edge, but really this series cannot handle carnivores. Manny the Mammoth (Ray Romano) has parenting issues. He is about to become a father. For some strange reason the dinosaurs can’t speak. What is it with the internal logic of this movie? The only new character is one-eyed weasel Buck (Simon Pegg) who helps the herd to track down Sid.
With Scrat providing no comic relief this time round, it is fortunate that the motley herd is likeable. Nevertheless, there is more sliding down slopes and walking close to lava, familiar from the original.
The big gimmick this time is that it is in 3D, thereby introducing a new movie equation: one more dimension equals 50 per cent less imagination. l
Patrick Mulcahy
Film
Away with hooligans
Awaydays
Director: Pat Holden
sleep furiously
Director: Gideon Koppel
“Like The Catcher in the Rye with Stanley knives” was one critic’s irresistible description of Kevin Sampson’s 1998 novel Awaydays, still generally regarded as perhaps the best novel written about football hooliganism – with the possible exception of John King’s The Football Factory (1997). The latter formed the basis for a hit film adaptation in 2004, but the progress of Awaydays from page to screen has proven slow and tortuous – not least because Tranmere Rovers, the team which the book’s characters so passionately follow, reportedly refused to allow any mention of the club in Sampson’s script.
This gives an oddly evasive air to a movie which takes great pains to locate itself chronologically at the very end of the 1970s, an era evoked by a notably strong and eclectic period soundtrack stylishly integrated with feature-debutant Curtis Lee Mitchell’s moody cinematography.
Cocky, 20-ish Carty (Nicky Bell) and Elvis (Liam Boyle) traverse the Wirral’s gloomy streets and Merseyside’s atmospheric waterfronts. While Elvis dreams of escape while listening to the latest new wave singles in his bedsit, he’s also a fringe member of local mob “The Pack”.
Grieving after the death of his mother, the confused, creatively-inclined Carty seeks to lose himself in the gang’s ultraviolence. But we never really come to understand why Carty is so obsessed with terrace brutality – nor does his “bromantic” relationship with Elvis, the pivot on which the whole film turns, come into sufficient focus.
Awaydays’ swaggering ambition is evident: “Quadrophenia meets Control” is the aim, or perhaps “Trainspotting meets Stand By Me.” A closer comparison is the much-reviled Elijah Wood vehicle Green Street, at least in terms of the plausibility of its mild-mannered protagonists so suddenly turning into bloodthirsty thugs. Awaydays achieves lukewarm, mid-league respectability, with only fleeting glimpses of Premiership class.
Gideon Koppel’s disarming debut sleep furiously won’t be the best new British release of 2009, but it’s perhaps the most heartening. In an ideal world, there’d be a receptive climate for reflectively quiet, intensely personal, experimentally poetic documentaries such as this. Sight and Sound hailed Koppel, a Liverpool-born, Slade-educated artist who teaches in London and Paris, as “the unfussiest film-maker since Bresson”, describing his film as “quite simply, a masterpiece.”
Koppel has crafted a sensitive and beautifully-composed work, one which respects and mimics the unhurried rhythms of rural life, and which is studded with breathtaking grace-notes and truly remarkable shots – including a particularly stunning image of sheep moving across a hillside which runs for several minutes, but which most viewers, one suspects, could happily endure for considerably longer.
This is one of several sequences which are cut frustratingly short – in that specific case, the director has admitted, because he inadvertently ran out of film. Elsewhere, however, editor Mario Battistel is a little too energetic with his scissors, resulting in an occasional abruptness that disrupts the flow of the picture.
Nevertheless, sleep furiously, although not without its minor pretensions – including that title all in lower case letters (a reference to a linguistic jeu d’esprit by Noam Chomsky) – is a film of such observant charm that everyone should at least give it a go – if they get the chance. l
Neil Young
Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Directors: Carlos Saldanha,
Michael Thurmeier
In the first Ice Age movie, a misfit herd of a sloth, a mammoth and a sabre tooth tiger co-existed alongside humans. Two sequels later, they are hanging out in a verdant landscape supposedly under the ice with a group of dinosaurs. In their world, does time go backwards?
Hush now, it’s just an animated children’s movie. However, Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs plays havoc not just with chronology, but also with the patience of the audience. Its biggest miscalculation is to introduce a female counterpart to Scrat, the original squeaking squirrel rat who forever struggled to retrieve, hang onto and secrete away his beloved acorn.
Suddenly, the series’ meditation on the failure of the loner to maintain his secret store – moral: endeavour for the sake of the individual is not worth it – is dissipated by a bushy-haired female. The screenwriters (four are credited) are messing with the perfect counterpoint to the herd story and its moral that collective endeavour is good.
Otherwise Ice Age 3 is pretty much like its two predecessors. There’s a quest – this time for Sid the Sloth (voiced by John Leguizamo) who has been whisked away by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The sabre tooth, Diego (Denis Leary), still cannot behave like a hunter. Apparently he’s losing his edge, but really this series cannot handle carnivores. Manny the Mammoth (Ray Romano) has parenting issues. He is about to become a father. For some strange reason the dinosaurs can’t speak. What is it with the internal logic of this movie? The only new character is one-eyed weasel Buck (Simon Pegg) who helps the herd to track down Sid.
With Scrat providing no comic relief this time round, it is fortunate that the motley herd is likeable. Nevertheless, there is more sliding down slopes and walking close to lava, familiar from the original.
The big gimmick this time is that it is in 3D, thereby introducing a new movie equation: one more dimension equals 50 per cent less imagination. l
Patrick Mulcahy
Awaydays
Director: Pat Holden
sleep furiously
Director: Gideon Koppel
“Like The Catcher in the Rye with Stanley knives” was one critic’s irresistible description of Kevin Sampson’s 1998 novel Awaydays, still generally regarded as perhaps the best novel written about football hooliganism – with the possible exception of John King’s The Football Factory (1997). The latter formed the basis for a hit film adaptation in 2004, but the progress of Awaydays from page to screen has proven slow and tortuous – not least because Tranmere Rovers, the team which the book’s characters so passionately follow, reportedly refused to allow any mention of the club in Sampson’s script.
This gives an oddly evasive air to a movie which takes great pains to locate itself chronologically at the very end of the 1970s, an era evoked by a notably strong and eclectic period soundtrack stylishly integrated with feature-debutant Curtis Lee Mitchell’s moody cinematography.
Cocky, 20-ish Carty (Nicky Bell) and Elvis (Liam Boyle) traverse the Wirral’s gloomy streets and Merseyside’s atmospheric waterfronts. While Elvis dreams of escape while listening to the latest new wave singles in his bedsit, he’s also a fringe member of local mob “The Pack”.
Grieving after the death of his mother, the confused, creatively-inclined Carty seeks to lose himself in the gang’s ultraviolence. But we never really come to understand why Carty is so obsessed with terrace brutality – nor does his “bromantic” relationship with Elvis, the pivot on which the whole film turns, come into sufficient focus.
Awaydays’ swaggering ambition is evident: “Quadrophenia meets Control” is the aim, or perhaps “Trainspotting meets Stand By Me.” A closer comparison is the much-reviled Elijah Wood vehicle Green Street, at least in terms of the plausibility of its mild-mannered protagonists so suddenly turning into bloodthirsty thugs. Awaydays achieves lukewarm, mid-league respectability, with only fleeting glimpses of Premiership class.
Gideon Koppel’s disarming debut sleep furiously won’t be the best new British release of 2009, but it’s perhaps the most heartening. In an ideal world, there’d be a receptive climate for reflectively quiet, intensely personal, experimentally poetic documentaries such as this. Sight and Sound hailed Koppel, a Liverpool-born, Slade-educated artist who teaches in London and Paris, as “the unfussiest film-maker since Bresson”, describing his film as “quite simply, a masterpiece.”
Koppel has crafted a sensitive and beautifully-composed work, one which respects and mimics the unhurried rhythms of rural life, and which is studded with breathtaking grace-notes and truly remarkable shots – including a particularly stunning image of sheep moving across a hillside which runs for several minutes, but which most viewers, one suspects, could happily endure for considerably longer.
This is one of several sequences which are cut frustratingly short – in that specific case, the director has admitted, because he inadvertently ran out of film. Elsewhere, however, editor Mario Battistel is a little too energetic with his scissors, resulting in an occasional abruptness that disrupts the flow of the picture.
Nevertheless, sleep furiously, although not without its minor pretensions – including that title all in lower case letters (a reference to a linguistic jeu d’esprit by Noam Chomsky) – is a film of such observant charm that everyone should at least give it a go – if they get the chance.
Neil Young
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