October Film Releases

October Film Releases include 88 Minutes, How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, The Mutant Chronicles, What Just Happened?, The Rocker, High School Musical 3: Senior Year, Ghost Town, Where the Wild Things Are, Quantum of Solace.

88 Minutes
Releases 3 October

Al Pacino is undeniably one of the greatest actors in Hollywood history – a star whose name can pretty much ensure a film’s commercial success, and bring cachet to projects that would otherwise barely merit a glance. His strong track record of picking interesting character pieces has given us some of the best performances of the last forty years.

Hopes were high for this latest outing – with Pacino playing a forensic psychologist who helps the police to profile and track down serial killers (think a slimmer Cracker without the Scottish accent) who ends up in a race against time as one of the killers starts hunting him instead, it sounded like it could combine the kinds of psychological depth of character at which an on-form Pacino excels with a genuinely exciting Hitchcockian plot.

Thrillers often share plot elements – that’s what makes them a recognizable genre. What really makes them work is the sense of suspense, the audience’s ability to sympathize and associate with the lead protagonist, the subtleties of the acting and the nature of the twists.

Sympathizing with Al Pacino shouldn’t be hard, right? His A-list, iconic status is more than enough, surely? Well, you’d think so. Sadly, however, this has to be one of his worst performances in years, in a film that singularly fails to live up to its promise. Almost universally slated by critics in the US, and almost entirely avoided by audiences, there’s only one good thing to say about it – the reaction has been so hostile, perhaps Pacino may think a bit more carefully before choosing his next part, stop resting on his laurels, and actually make an effort again for a change.

How To Lose Friends And Alienate People
Releases 3 October

British comedy’s invasion of Hollywood continues apace. But one of the most satisfying breakthroughs for British comedy has got to be the success of Simon Pegg. He’s gone from being a cult TV favourite in the likes of sketch show Big Train and slacker sitcom par excellence Spaced to a rising star of the US comedy film scene. It was his 2004 zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead that first got him noticed Stateside, a near-perfect parody of the George Romero classic series that kicked off with Night of the Living Dead.
It is Pegg’s lovable everyman loser persona that really seems to have hit it off in the States, however. Tom Cruise was so keen on leeching some of Pegg’s cult cool that he asked him to cameo in Mission: Impossible III, while hitmaster du jour JJ Abrams has taken the intriguing decision of casting him as the young Scotty in the upcoming reboot of the Star Trek franchise. David Schwimmer, erstwhile star of Friends, picked Pegg as the loser central character in last year’s passably fun comedy Run Fatboy, Run.

Ahead of Star Trek, sure to propel Pegg further into the big time, this latest starring role should see the likeable comic’s star rise yet higher in Hollywood. Based on Toby Young’s bestselling memoir of an obnoxious Englishman’s attempts to make it big in the world of New York magazines, this is like the anti-The Devil Wears Prada, a tale of a wannabe who fails thanks to his unpleasantness, rather than who succeeds despite everyone else’s.

With co-stars including Kirsten Dunst, Jeff Bridges and Gillian Anderson, it was bound to attract attention – but it is Pegg who has garnered most of the praise from some ecstatic US critics. In Pegg’s hands, a character who could be repulsive becomes engaging and sympathetic – always a mark of a special talent. Little wonder the Americans are so enamoured.

The Mutant Chronicles
Releases 10 October

Films based on computer games have not had a great deal of success at the box office – but what about films based on role-playing games?

The granddaddy of the role-playing games is, of course, Dungeons & Dragons – which itself spawned a truly dire film version back in 2000.

In the UK, the most familiar form of this hobby has long been Games Workshop. It was founded in 1975 as an offshoot of the popular “Fighting Fantasy” series of role-playing novels (in which the reader would flick to different parts of the book to make up their own story), and was an early distributor of Dungeons & Dragons on this side of the Atlantic. It soon spawned its own versions of the game, notably the Tolkien-inspired Warhammer, and the futuristic sci-fi version Warhammer 40,000. Mutant Chronicles, launched in the early 90s, was – it’s fair to say – heavily inspired by the latter, being a role-playing game set in the future, as mankind battles a variety of strange creatures among the stars.

Considering the success of Warhammer 40,000 – which is now doing a roaring trade through a popular series of computer game spin-offs – it seems odd that it is this lesser-known take that is getting the big screen treatment, with John Malkovich and Hellboy himself, Ron Perlman, taking starring roles. The Mutant Chronicles game is a less recognisable brand, with less fervent fans, and so is likely to be a harder sell.

Nonetheless, as a basis for a brainless sci-fi actioner, this is a good starting point. With an emphasis on the “steam punk” style of retro-looking sci-fi, taking its inspiration from the 19th century works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and popularized in recent years by any number of Japanese anime cartoons, the splicing of Victorian-style technology with futuristic weaponry makes for a genuine visual treat.

The end result may not be a classic, but it’s certainly an intriguing addition to the sci-fi cannon, with some impressive (if low-budget) set design and effects. It should be enough to keep the fans happy, even if it’s not true to the source material, and is sufficiently visually different to warrant a look by sci-fi fans. The only question for role-playing fans will be, is it enough to get a long hoped-for Warhammer 40,000 film off the ground? Because that truly could be something special.

What Just Happened?
Releases 10 October

Back in 1976 the young Robert De Niro, at the height of his powers, appeared in a restrained classic movie about moviemaking, The Last Tycoon. Based on the final, unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald it revolved around a workaholic Hollywood hotshot producer and his efforts to form a relationship with a young woman. The parallels between the moviemaking genius of the lead character and that of the masterly young actor portraying him were apparent to all.

Now, more than three decades later, the aging Robert De Niro returns with another film about filmmaking, this time based on the memoirs of The Untouchables producer Art Linson. It revolves around an aging, fading Hollywood producer going through his second divorce while struggling against a system that sees him as past it. Again, the parallels between the character and the star playing him are palpable.

Of course, it’s not that De Niro has lost it entirely. It’s just that he was once so very good that he has a hell of a task trying to live up to both his past successes and the expectations of audiences who, on seeing his name on a film’s poster, expect something truly superb. But the thing that has most frustrated his fans is the fact that his recent comedy outings have so often seemed to mock his glory days, and the earlier, grittier, classic roles for which he is so fondly remembered.

Some may say that this merely shows that he’s not stuck-up, and happy not to take himself so seriously any more. Yet this is the man who was once such a committed method actor that he both learned how to box like a pro and gained 60 pounds in weight for the masterly Raging Bull. The man who ground his teeth down to play a psycho in Cape Fear, and who spent the entire shoot of The King of Comedy hurling anti-semitic abuse at co-star Jerry Lewis to ensure that there would be sufficient on-screen tension and hatred between their two characters.

De Niro’s decision to take the lead here is a very canny one – by playing a fading Hollywood bigwig who everyone reckons is past it, he’s fully acknowledging the public’s shifting opinion of his talents. The only question is, will his performance silence his critics and prove he’s got what it takes – or will this go down as another self-indulgent, self-mocking bit of embarrassment in De Niro’s slow slide into retirement?

Burn After Reading
Releases 17 October

For a while, Coen Brothers fans would always be slavering at the mouth when news of a new Coens movie began to emerge. They had not only proved themselves genuine masters of quirky modern cinema, but had also won a legion of fans. These guys were cult heroes who resolutely refused to sell out to the Hollywood mainstream, even after picking up seven Oscar nominations for 1997’s darkly comic Fargo.
No Country For Old Men was hailed by some as their best film yet, it not only picked up four Oscars (Best Film, Best Directing, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for the powerhouse of oddity that was Javier Bardem’s psychotic assassin) but has also earned by far the most money of any of their movies to date.
But can they keep it up? Their return to working with A-listers for this latest offering – George Clooney and Brad Pitt heading the cast – has likewise caused some concern. Clooney may have excelled in the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but he also starred in the much-maligned Intolerable Cruelty – and the Clooney/Pitt partnership has gone from being quality cool in Ocean’s Eleven to tediously self-indulgent in Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen.
So many fans will be approaching Burn After Reading with some trepidation – a trepidation not helped by mixed critical reactions following its premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival.
Need they worry? Well, only if they’re hoping for something on the dark and brooding lines of some of the Coens’ more serious works – for this is very much a comedy, more in the vein of The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona than Miller’s Crossing or No Country For Old Men.
But, that it’s a Coen Brothers film, there can be no doubt.

The Rocker
Releases 17 October

There’s been a fairly strong tradition of Hollywood comedies revolving around the idea of aspiring rock gods. It’s partly because the excesses and egotistical nature of so many real-life rockers are so amusing – and gloriously parodied in the classic spoof documentary This is Spinal Tap – that these films can work so well. But it’s also thanks to the fact that the world has long been packed out with wannabe stars.

We all like to laugh at the hopelessly deluded – it’s cruel, perhaps. And yet we also always like to root for the underdog and see ordinary, everyday people like ourselves do well and take their place alongside the greats that inspired them. In the US, the idea that anyone can rise to fame and fortune is part of the very basis of American national identity.

In the modern world, the potential for fame is greater than ever before – thanks in part to the plethora of talent and reality TV shows that are doing a roaring trade worldwide, but also due to a little thing called the internet.

So, the aspiration to fame and fortune appeals? Wannabe rock stars have a good track record in Hollywood comedy films? How about we chuck a bit of internet celebrity in there as well and see what happens? The end result may be entirely predictable (aging rocker joins a desperate teen band, gets videoed in the nude and posted on YouTube, becomes famous and gets overwhelmed), and the jokes may mostly be borrowed from a the likes of School of Rock, but star Rainn Wilson is both likeable and pathetic enough to pull it off.

Mindless fun is the order of the day with these things – as with romantic comedies, we all know what’s going to happen, but we enjoy it anyway. So even though this is no classic, there are certainly worse ways to waste a couple of hours on a gloomy Autumn day.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year
Releases 22 October

If you aren’t aware of the phenomenon that is High School Musical, it’s a safe bet that you’re over the age of 15 and don’t yet have any children or grandchildren under that age. For its target demographic – mostly girls in their “tweens” (roughly 8-14) – High School Musical is like Harry Potter, Barbie and Pokémon all mixed together and combined with a serious sugar rush. It seems that they just can’t get enough of this wholesome franchise of sickly-sweet, unbelievably innocent films, where pristine teenagers sing and dance about the joys of young love, close friendship, and being true to yourself.

With such themes at its heart, you can probably guess which company masterminded this new form of kiddie catnip – yep, good old Disney. It’s yet another re-jigging of the tried and tested Disney themes that we’ve seen countless times down the years – only this time successfully updated for the modern age.
Perhaps it’s an indication of Disney’s own loss of confidence in the relevance of its old product that the first High School Musical movie, which only came out less than three years ago, was never intended for the big screen. That’s right – the original film was a TV movie, made for the Disney Channel and first screened back in January 2006. Surely the children of today wouldn’t be interested in anything as old-fashioned and uncool as Disney’s traditional brand of family values and decency?

Well, Disney was wrong. Somehow the old Disney magic had returned without them even realizing it. DVD sales, in turn, were immense – with 1.2 million copies sold in its first six days, the first set a sales record.
And so, in the last three years, High School Musical has snowballed. A concert tour of the Americas was running by the end of 2006, there were numerous singles released, a stage play version, a version done on ice, swiftly followed by a TV movie sequel (which has in turn spawned a stage play), not to mention the six computer games and countless books and other bits of merchandise that the franchise has spawned to date. Not bad for a film whose budget was only $4.2 million.

In other words, it was only a matter of time before the phenomenon hit the big screen – and now, with the third movie, it has. The only odd thing is that the cast – and characters – are now getting a bit old for High School, so this latest outing revolves around their hopes and fears for the future as they approach their move to university. How to deal with such worries? Why – let’s put on a show! It’s hardly original, but fans of the series are unlikely to care. And though it would be easy to criticise a film that’s so sickly sweet and, well, nice, let’s face it – if they enjoy it, why not let the kids maintain their innocence while they can?

Ghost Town
Releases 24 October

Channel Four’s late night comedy series The 11 O’Clock Show may only have run for three years, and may never have overly troubled the ratings, but it somehow proved a test bed for two of the biggest British comedy phenomena of the last decade. At the time, had anyone said that Ali G’s creator Sacha Baron Cohen would go on to great things, viewers of The 11 O’Clock Show would not have been too surprised. Had you predicted global superstardom for Ricky Gervais, however, they’d have laughed in your face. His whole persona was, after all, that of the obnoxious, overly-opinionated man in the pub who everyone hoped would just shut up. Yes, it was funny in small doses, but excruciatingly so.

Gervais’ follow-up to his 11 O’Clock Show outing managed to break new ground in the genre. The Office was so true to life we could all identify, yet at the same time took things to such genuinely awful extremes of embarrassment that we couldn’t look away. It became such a success that it has spawned new versions in several countries.

Now Gervais is taking on his first starring role on the big screen. And, surprise, surprise, he again plays a grumpy, unpleasant and completely self-deluded middle-aged man who nobody much likes. If you don’t like Gervais, you won’t even have read this far. If you do, however, rest assured that although he may not have written this tale of a dentist who has a near-death experience that leaves him able to see – and talk to – dead people, it is classic, spot-on Gervais material.

If that sort of thing is for you, you won’t be disappointed – though you may be disappointed to learn that Gervais has said he’s unlikely to ever accept a starring role in a film again – so catch it now while you still can.

Where the Wild Things Are
Releases 24 October

After the sheer madness of his only two feature films to date, 1999’s Being John Malkovich and 2002’s Adaptation, it’s a safe bet that Spike Jonze must have been low down on anybody’s list as the ideal director for a big screen adaptation of a hit series of children’s books.

But it’s not just Jonze who seems an unlikely choice for a children’s film. What about the biggest name among the cast, Forest Whitaker? He may be a character actor with an uncanny knack for accents, which could well make him ideal for voice work on an animated film (as this partially is), but he’s best-known for his truly chilling, Oscar-winning portrayal of psychotic Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in 2006’s The Last King of Scotland, one of the most brutal films of the last few years. Alongside Whitaker is the similarly unlikely children’s film star James Gandolfini – best known as the sociopathic gangster lead character in the decidedly adult-themed TV series The Sopranos.

So, an actor best known as a violent dictator, an actor best known as a violent gangster, and a director best known for messing with our heads more than they’ve ever been messed with before. You’d surely have to really hate children to set these three loose on the cinemas with a film for the kids?

And yet, somehow, it all makes perfect sense when the film in question is an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 1964 children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are. The book revolved around the adventures of a small boy sent to his room without supper who escapes into an imaginary world full of monsters and madness, where he somehow subdues them and ends up crowned their king. Just ten sentences long, the book’s illustrations caught the imagination of a generation, and continue to be popular to this day, spawning in turn an opera, a musical and a ballet before this big-screen take.

With only ten sentences to play with, Jonze (who co-writes with bestselling novelist Dave Eggers) has plenty of scope to let his notoriously fertile imagination run wild – just perfect for a story largely set in an imaginary world. The end result is yet another bizarre oddity that may not be quite a masterpiece but which will nonetheless achieve the near-impossible of appealing both to fans of Jonze’s previous, decidedly grown-up offerings, and to the children to whom the book is intended to appeal. It’s a genuine movie event, a must-see.

Quantum of Solace
Releases 31 October

Not quite the traditional Halloween movie this, yet somehow it’s still strangely appropriate for the second Daniel Craig-starring Bond film to come out on a date long associated with the dead. Because this is one film series that has well and truly risen from the ashes like some kind of latter-day Dracula. James Bond hasn’t been this cool for years – and to think that just two short years ago, as we awaited the release of Casino Royale with a mixture of hope and dread, many had written off the Bond franchise for good.

Daniel Craig’s selection as Bond seems a superb choice now, but in the run-up to Casino Royale’s release there were petitions aplenty to scrap the blonde Bond, to bring back Brosnan, haul in bigger names (Clive Owen being the fan favourite) – even to scrap the franchise altogether and let it die with what little dignity it had left now that Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne had stolen the title “coolest spy with the initials J.B.”.

Craig was mocked relentlessly – first for turning up to meet the press wearing a decidedly un-Bond-like inflatable life jacket while crossing the Thames on a boat, then for injuring himself on set, then for that infamous photo of him emerging from the sea in tiny swimming trunks looking all the world like a male bimbo, and countless other bits of tabloid gossip all seemingly designed to undermine any chance the film had of doing well.

In the end, the massively reduced expectations only went to work in Casino Royale’s favour. Having been written off as a terrible choice, Craig has become most people’s favourite Bond after Connery – no mean feat for just one film.

And so this time around the expectations are immense. Casino Royale was so good that Quantum of Solace needs to do even better and try even harder – not least because it is the first direct sequel ever seen in the Bond franchise’s 46-year history. Can it live up to expectations? Will it be another Goldfinger or an Octopussy? Can Craig secure his status as one of the best Bonds, or will he end up a Lazenby? You’ll have to go see it to find out – and let’s face it, it’s a Bond film. You’re going to end up seeing it at some point, be it now or some random Bank Holiday weekend in 2037 or so. May as well see what you’re missing.

Click here for information on LOVEFILM DVD Rental

(Visited 73 times)