The Trouble with Robots - CHAPPiE and The Avengers: Age of Ultron

A movie update, while we're all waiting for Star Wars to turn up in December. This time it's all about robots and their relationship with their creators (without Mary Shelley, where would the film industry be?).

First up, CHAPPiE from District 9 and Elysium director Neill Blomkamp. To cope with the increasing crime rate in Johannesburg, the police turn to Tetravaal and their latest robot invention, created by Deon Wilson (Dev Patel), while Deon has a bright idea...

With a workable, if rather slow, story and decent enough effects, with a few A-List names to pull in the punters (Sigourney Weaver as Deon's boss and Hugh Jackman as his rival), this is a pretty good pizza movie IF you can stomach the idea of Afrikaaner Punks, which is where it falls down for me. And, for South Africa, surprisingly few black people.

Continuing the theme, I watched the latest Marvel release (Antman hasn't come out on DVD yet). After a successful raid by the Avengers on a Hydra fortress, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) experiments with what appears to be a new form of intelligence.

With lots of bangs and crashes we've become accustomed to by now, the plot is reasonable and tries to include a softer side, with the unlikely romance between Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), and Hawkeye's (Jeremy Renner) domesticity. James Spader provides the wit as the voice of Ultron, and I liked Iron Man's Hulk Smasher suit, but this felt to me like a mash-up of previous films, a film between other films. Plus this looks just awesome in comparison!

Powers, Lucy and Grand Budapest Hotel

Over the Easter break I've been watching a few films. First up, a sci-fi film from Luc Besson starring Scarlett Johansson.

Lucy

Lucy (Johansson), while being forced to smuggle a designer drug, accidentally takes a massive overdose.

Based on the joke that only 10% of the brain is used by the average human (in Chelmsford it's a lot less), imagine that someone had re-written Johnny Depp's film Transcendence, but had thought "throw out all the existential stuff, put Scarlett Johansson in it as a drug-enhanced psychic Ninja and a load of Chinese gangsters shooting things up with French police. And keep Morgan Freeman in it." It makes District 13 look like it had been written by Jean-Paul Sartre. Even a pizza movie has some standards, but if you only want to use 10% of your brain, one way would be to watch this.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

An author reflects on his stay at an odd hotel in a fictional eastern bloc country during it's communist days and his encounter with the owner.

Wes Andersen specialises in making odd films, (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Royal Tenenbaums), and this is no less weird. It's a story within a story within a story, the main one being of the Concierge of the Hotel (Ralph Fiennes) back in the 1930's, being framed for the murder of one of his aged "clients", an unrecognisable Tilda Swinton. It's not a bad yarn and the supporting cast is stuffed with A-Listers, most of whom have been in Andersens films before. It got a few Oscars and Bafta's, but you can see that the oddness would be a bit too much for a jury's taste. I liked it, but I can't actually figure out why.

Powers

To finish off, I thought I'd mention a comic book TV adaption, available only through your Sony PlayStation, if you have one.

Former super-hero Christian Walker a.k.a. Diamond (Sharlto Copley) is now a detective with the L.A.P.D. Powers Division.

It's a variation of the "if people really did have super-powers, who would police them?" idea (like The Boys). I've not read the comics, although I've heard good things, and anything where Eddy Izzard plays Hannibal Lecter with super-powers can't be all bad. Worth a watch, although not enough to get you to actually buy a PlayStation.