DVD REVIEW

The Hangover

Directed by: Todd Philips
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Heather Graham

THE Hangover was one of the big surprises of last summer. It wasn’t a remake; it wasn’t based on a TV programme and, most shockingly of all, it was funny. Honest to God, slap your thigh, roll in the aisles funny. Well, apart from the slapping and rolling.
Set the day after an epic stag party in Sin City, the three groomsmen wake up in their swanky casino suite wretchedly hungover, in possession of a tiger and a baby and missing their groom.
Also absent is any memory that might have shed light on how they got into such a state and piecing together the previous evening’s exploits may be the only way of tracking down their missing mate.
Unfortunately for the lads and luckily for the audience, the more of their adventure they work out, the weirder things get.
The tiger, for example, turns out to be Mike Tyson’s and the uptight dentist, Stu, as well as missing a tooth, finds he has indulged in that most Las Vegas of clichés and married a stripper in the Chapel of Love.
While The Hangover’s characters are all straight from Central Casting’s Big Book O’Stag Film Stereotypes – the cool guy (Cooper), the total screw-up (Galifianakis) and the nerdy guy in need of some fun (Helms) – the rest of the film does a good job of bucking the norms.
First off, it starts off where most of these flicks end. Secondly it… Actually there is no secondly, The Hangover’s main claim to fame is that its set-up is slightly different to others of its type.
Other than that, it’s just a well written, well meaning, wacky comedy. Kind of like a grown-up Dude, Where’s My Car. Only without that annoying tool, Kutcher.

****

Fight Cub

Directed by: David Fincher
Starring: Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham-Carter, Meatloaf

The sharper readers amongst you might spot the fact that Fight Club isn’t, in the strictest sense of the words, a new release. However, due to its extras-packed 10th anniversary re-issue and the fact that a decade has done little to dull its gritty, vicious edge, there’s never been a better time to rewatch, or enjoy for the first time, David Fincher’s masterpiece.
Edward Norton plays the unnamed narrator, an insomniac wage slave working in a job for an insurance company that’s slowly consuming his soul. After a chance meeting with a travelling soap salesman, Tyler Durden (Pitt), and then the destruction of his flat, Norton ends up living in a dilapidated tenement and finding meaning in his life by fighting. In a club.
The organisation spreads like wildfire through both the blue and white collar underground but then spirals out of control when fellow Fight Club founder, Durden takes things off on the violent, anarchic tangent of Project Mayhem.
Managing to cleverly skewer both the anodyne world of flat pack furniture and self-help novels and the violence-loving meathead, Fight Club’s pitch black sense of humour highlighted a sense of social decay that seems even more relevant today than it did at the end of the last millennium.
Norton is brilliant as a man left feeling numb and impotent (stop sniggering) by the comforts modern life has swaddled him in and Pitt’s Mephistophelean Durden is a hypnotic screen presence.
Dark in tone and dark in cinematography, the 10th anniversary edition comes complete with a brilliant talk track featuring Fincher, Norton, Pitt and Bonham-Carter that is as amusing as it is interesting. It is easily the best aspect of the expanded package, which also features deleted scenes, making of documentaries and cast interviews.
A must-see for any film fan.

*****