Saw this one the other night, a slight and only slightly enjoyable offering from first-time feature director Leon Ford.

Ryan Kwanten (the zero body-fat human prawn from True Blood, Red Hill) plays Griff, a quirky, lonely loser who moonlights as a not-very-good superhero.  When his brother brings round an equally quirky girl who takes a shine to Griff, his life changes and his skewed reality is challenged.

Featuring a decent performance from Kwanten, who is usually idiotically hilarious in True Blood, as the mousy Griff, this film was pretty junior-burger stuff.  It looked like it was filmed on 16mm with very few visual flourishes outside of its colour palette.  As I was watching it I was constantly reminded of the films of Yahoo Serious (not a compliment), but without the halfway decent music.  The film played out all those shitty short films you see over and over again at local festivals, shot at a friend’s place or a partner’s office, using semi-pro actors mugging at the camera like it’s their only chance to be seen.

The script was flabby and lacking in any relevance outside of the screen, which is fine for highly entertaining films, but not for rom-coms which do best when they play to general themes of love and the importance of individuality.  This film is really only relevant to the highly moronic and deluded…which is to say that maybe it could find its audience if it screened at churches around the nation.

Basically, if you have seen Amelie, Benny & Joon and Young Einstein then you have already seen this story done much better and I have to agree with the website blurb;

GRIFF THE INVISIBLE [] will (dis)appear in cinemas nationally March, 2011

http://www.grifftheinvisible.com/

4/10

An interesting piece of marketing has cropped up recently.

Fox’s animated film Rio, from the creators of Ice Age (1-∞) is doing a tie-in with Angry Birds, the first Appzilla tie-in that I can think of.  This isn’t just creating a mini-game for your film, this is hooking up with the biggest app on the planet to make a 3rd version of their massively successful game that is tailored to your film.  What a coup for Fox.  The app is $1.19 (AUD), so 99c in the US and the gameplay is similar to the main two Angry Birds games (Original and Seasons), the only difference being that you knock down cages to free captive birds, rather than annihilate evil egg-stealing pigs.  There is also a free version, with 6 levels (the paid one has 60) to draw people in just like Angry Birds Lite.

The interesting thing here is the Cui Bono factor, Who Benefits?  Are Angry Birds (Rovio) trying to establish a cinema presence ahead of the film they have in development.  Have Fox realised that most movie tie-in games get played once and then deleted, or, if they are paid Apps, played three times, not deleted and then looked at with hatred and disdain forever because of their extreme level of crappiness.  (Yes, I bought King Kong for XBOX 360.  Yes, it sucked balls.)

Another thing worth noting is the trailers that both companies have produced.  Rather than make one trailer that promotes both products, they have done two separate things.  Rovio have made an Angry Birds RIO trailer (which shows none of the gameplay, a bad decision) while FOX have done a “mashup”, inserting the Angry Birds into the scene from the film that inspired the gameplay of the new game.

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“I can’t imagine this is going to be good” – Adrian McFarlane

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