Apocalypse Now – review

The 1970s was Coppola's decade. He was involved in a succession of masterly films, as screenwriter on Patton, producer of American Graffiti, director of the first two Godfather films and The Conversation, and finally, in 1979, as true auteur of Apocalypse Now. They illuminated our times, and we can now see that Apocalypse Now is not merely the greatest film to come out of the Vietnam experience but one of the great works about the madness of our times. He immediately followed the early morning preview screening of Apocalypse Now at Cannes with a press conference which he began by saying: "My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam," and he went on to state that during the shooting "little by little we went insane". How brave and prophetic he was.

Apocalypse NowProduction year: 1979Countries: UK, USA Cert (UK): 18Runtime: 153 minsDirectors: Francis Coppola, Francis Ford CoppolaCast: Dennis Hopper, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Laurence Fishburne, Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Rpobert DuvallMore on this film

Coppola took Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's enigmatic story about the cruelties of colonialism, and turned it into a 20th-century fable about neocolonialism in which the story's eminently sane narrator, Marlow, becomes Captain Willard, the Special Services hitman, as crazy as his assigned quarry, Colonel Kurtz. The difference is that unlike everyone else around him, from the top brass down, Willard knows he's mad. Everything about the Taliban, al-Qaida, the pressures that took us into Afghanistan and Iraq, the assault on Abbottabad and the deadly troubles that lie ahead are to be found here in Willard's journey. It's a work of genius that may falter a little towards the end, though not fatally. This newly released version is more or less the one shown at Cannes and is definitive. The half-hour of material introduced 10 years ago in Apocalypse Now Redux is of no value, it diminishes the film and is to be avoided.

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New Web Site

Just a wee post to let you know I've got a new site Learn Guitar 365.

The Hangover Part II – review

We all enjoyed ourselves during that first movie. But now … well, the hangover has begun. And begun so powerfully, so oppressively, that you might almost suspect the success of the original was created specifically to engender this comedown as a piece of conceptual art. Each reminder of the original, each repetition, each desperate, hair-of-the-dog attempt to recapture the party feeling: it's exactly like living through a hungover flashback-memory of what had once seemed so great.

The Hangover Part IIProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): 15Runtime: 102 minsDirectors: Todd PhillipsCast: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Jamie Chung, Justin Bartha, Ken Jeong, Mike Tyson, Paul Giamatti, Zach GalifianakisMore on this film

In Hollywood, said William Goldman, nobody knows anything. Who knew The Hangover, from fratpack comedy director Todd Phillips, was going to be such a huge hit? Nobody – perhaps not even the people involved. The story of a Vegas bachelor party that goes horribly wrong looked pretty ropey on paper, and yet it was great. Some thought it was sort of a monkey-typing-Hamlet fluke, but it's actually the sort of fluke that only happens to smart people who keep trying.

The Hangover was funny and the structure was daring. Act one: pre-party – then we jump straight to act three, post-party, and the movie is about the bleary, amnesiac guys trying to piece together act two: what the hell happened? This is not definitively revealed until the sequence of digital photos over the final credits. Brilliant! It showed the spirit of movies like The Usual Suspects or Reservoir Dogs.Bradley Cooper had the chops – he had been a forgettable, almost invisible presence in many movies before this, but he blossomed in H1. There were some cracking comedy turns. Zach Galifianakis was great as the weirdo brother-in-law Alan and Ken Jeong was a real find as the abusive comedy gangster Mr Chow. Everything came together.

Sadly, H2 can't even quite claim the credit of being the first Hangover sequel: the road-movie comedy Due Date, directed by Todd Phillips and starring Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr, attempted to cash in on its success, none too successfully. At least it tried a vaguely different plot. Hangover Part II seeks only to repeat almost every element of the first movie. It's not a sequel, closer to a shot-for-shot remake. This time, the guys go to Thailand for a wedding, in the same shark-jumping way that the Sex and the City girls whooshed off to Abu Dhabi for their profoundly depressing sequel. It feels a bit like a feature-length Christmas special of a well-loved British sitcom.

The original's quirks have now become a formula. The grim daytime shots of Vegas at the beginning are now grim daytime shots of Bangkok; the tiger is now a monkey; there's a different sequence of photos over the final credits. Pretty much everything has its equivalent. Infuriatingly, all the fun has been drained from the movie, simply in repeating almost every trick. The same: but lame, and lame because the same.

Now it's the nerdy dentist Stu (Ed Helms) getting hitched, to a beautiful Thai woman Lauren (Jamie Chung), whose father hates Stu. Slightly insultingly for Justin Barth, his character Doug was the groom-to-be who disappeared in the first movie but he doesn't get a turn at participating in the hi-jinks now.

Stu stays in the story and Barth's nice-but-dull character is sidelined. Stu's goofiness is evidently considered more important to the action, and Phillips perhaps considers that the gang already has a handsome guy in the form of Cooper's Phil. Now it's the bride's sweet younger brother Teddy who tags along on the stag night, disappears, and has to be found at all costs, because he is the apple of his father's eye: he is played by 21-year-old Mason Lee, son of the director Ang Lee. Jeong and Galifianakis seem very subdued and under-par compared to their earlier appearances.

Then there's the question of the big non-PC cameo to match Mike Tyson's bizarre performance in the original. Rumours have been rife. We had heard about Mel Gibson (that idea was abandoned), Liam Neeson (reportedly cut) and even Bill Clinton.

Actually, Paul Giamatti makes an appearance as a bad-tempered tough guy, but this isn't the big cameo – that comes in the form of the celebrity booked to sing at Stu's wedding. You may be hoping for Liza Minnelli. Well, no spoilers, but suffice it to say, this too is a bit of a letdown.

Making The Hangover Part II must have been like going up to a great guitarist who'd just pulled off a brilliant improvised solo, and telling him he had to repeat the performance the next night, note-for-note. The result is self-conscious to say the least.

I have to admit that there are one or two nice lines. When the guys gather outside Alan's bedroom, preparing to invite him along, Jeffrey Tambor, playing Alan's father, tells them to "Go in slowly; let him acclimatise." When Stu defiantly claims: "There's a demon in me!", Alan hits him with a zinging comeback in the bad-taste spirit of the first film. Flashes of fun like this are rare. It's a sobering experience.

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X-Men: First Class reveals a series in need of mutation

One can't help feeling that the X-Men movies have enjoyed a rather charmed life. Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class, which opens in the UK on Wednesday, will be the fifth film about Professor X and his merry band of mutants to hit the big screen in only 11 years. That's as many as Superman, two more than Spider-Man and only one fewer than Batman. Critical drubbings for various instalments in those other "franchises" have led to drastic regime changes at the top, often coupled with years of soul searching over which direction to go in next. Yet Twentieth Century Fox cheerfully goes about its business of making sure a new film arrives in multiplexes every couple of years, even after non-starters such as 2006's Brett Ratner-directed X-Men: The Final Stand and 2009's insipid Wolverine.

X-Men: First ClassProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): 12ARuntime: 131 minsDirectors: Matthew VaughnCast: James McAvoy, January Jones, Jason Flemyng, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Rose ByrneMore on this film

X-Men: First Class may be a prequel set in a new era (the early 60s) with a new cast, but it is not nearly as much of a genuine mutation from the norm as might be expected. Nor is it quite as good as some early reviews have suggested.

Whereas Christopher Nolan breezily ignored all the previous Batman films with his genre-defining Batman Begins, Vaughn and screenwriter Jane Goldman's script is based on a story by Bryan Singer, who made the first two X-Men movies. The film ends up being not so much a radical reinvention of the series as an affirmation of those earlier features: it has their DNA running through its system, and we're left in no doubt that events are intended to prefigure those we've already seen pan out on screen.

Had X-Men: First Class arrived back in 2000, when Singer's first film hit cinemas, it might have been revolutionary. Arriving as it does in 2011, it feels like a throwback to an earlier, simpler era where audiences were willing to accept cardboard cut-out villains and one-dimensional heroes. It's the sort of film for which the caveat "it's only a comic book movie" will be constantly offered in conversation.

There are nonetheless some excellent aspects. Vaughn convincingly introduces us to the young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), and shows us why the two might just as easily have been friends as enemies. Lehnsherr (the future Magneto) has a cracking stony-faced early escapade to Argentina to track down some retired Nazis, coming off like James Bond with superpowers (and a mean, lean, Daniel Craig-style 007 at that). McAvoy is typically lovable as the cocky yet earnest Xavier, the sort of geeky posh bloke who might have ended up as a charismatic, well-meaning charity boss had he not been gifted with mutant genes. Of the remaining cast, Jennifer Lawrence, January Jones and Rose Byrne all do well to flesh out meagre material, though the film rather limits their involvement to that of classy eye candy.

Kevin Bacon makes a suitably sinister villain, but it's here that the film begins to reveal its limited ambition. The 60s setting almost compels the film-makers to pay homage to Bond et al, but the villains in X-Men: First Class are like bad guys in cheap James Bond movies. They want to take over the world because they want to take over the world. There are efforts to explain their hatred of humans, but they are the same arguments used in the earlier films, and there's very little complexity to them.

I forget whether the line: "Mutant and proud" appears in the original films or comic books, but its use here by Lawrence's Mystique feels contrived and unnecessary. So, too, the scene in which Fassbender, addressed by his given name, utters: "I prefer Magneto." At these moments, it's impossible not to shudder at the cargo load of obscenely stinky, sweaty cheese that has just been driven right through the centre of the movie. Did some suit at Fox insist on these lines being used, or did Singer, Vaughn and Goldman genuinely think they were a good idea?

I've often berated studios such as Warner Bros on this blog for umming and ahhing over what to do with Superman in the wake of Singer's prosaic Superman Returns in 2006, but the opposite end of the spectrum is Fox's attitude that you don't mess with a good (or even a bad) thing. Had the money men who oversee X-Men been in charge of Batman, George Clooney would still be sporting rubber batnipples and Joel Schumacher would be planning his fifth or sixth instalment. Hence, X-Men: First Class is not so much a reboot as a gentle reroute.

For this series to reach the heights of great comic book movies, it requires a real DNA change. No more Singer, and no more idiotic one-liners, please. It's time for a genuine mutation.

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