Welcome back to 2015: Part Deux – as the summer season continues with more CGI shenanigans for those of you who, for some reason, haven’t fallen victim to the epidemic of superhero fatigue currently sweeping popcorn munchers the world over.
This week’s big release is Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four which, with respect to the low-budget efforts in 1994, is an improvement on all previous incarnations of the comic book classic. However, anyone who saw The Rise of the Silver Surfer would agree that this was a bar set not particularly high.
At some point during Avengers: Age of Ultron, I started to feel like a comic book enthusiast version of Monty Python’s Mr Creosote in The Meaning of Life, so you can imagine my unprintable response to “Un petit Quatre Fantastique Monsieur?”. See this week’s review for an elaboration.
Elsewhere on release there’s Pitch Perfect 2, which as I understand is a bit like a fictional X Factor, only in the cinema and funnier. Allegedly.
My advice, providing you can read Danish or understand German, French and Italian, is to see Alice Rohrwacher’s wacky family drama The Wonders (Le Meraviglie). It was one of my favourites from this year’s CPH: PIX and, with a Fellini-esque sense of observed comedy and aesthetics, it is my pick of the week.
Recently there has been talk in the media about the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing and the improbability of another major city not falling foul of a nuclear bomb at some point in the near future. Cinemateket has acknowledged the occasion with a season of films on the topic from the philosophical Hiroshima, Mon Amour to the allegorical (and decidedly more fun) Godzilla. On Thursday you can see 1983’s cautionary Cold War nightmare The Day After at 21:15.
If you’re looking for a more optimistic future as seen through the Cold War prism, you couldn’t do better than using the eyes of Arthur C Clarke. Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey and Peter Hyam’s underrated sequel, 2010, are both showing this week – also at Cinemateket.
See you next week – providing no-one presses that big red button.
