Wonder Woman (2009)

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

Tags

Alfred Molina, Amazon, Animation, DC Universe, Diana, Gods and Mortals, Keri Russell, Lauren Montgomery, Nathan Fillion, Review, Rosario Dawson, Steve Trevor, Superhero

D: Lauren Montgomery / 74m

Cast: Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Alfred Molina, Rosario Dawson, Marg Helgenberger, Oliver Platt, Virginia Madsen

An origin story for everyone’s favourite Amazon, Wonder Woman starts before Diana (Russell) is even born. Ares, the god of War (Molina) is waging war against the Amazons; with each act of violence he grows stronger. However he is defeated and sentenced to be bound by magical bonds and imprisoned on the hidden island where the Amazons live, led by Hippolyta (Madsen), and having no contact with the outside world.

Diana (whose mother and father we discover are Hippolyta and Ares), grows up to be a talented warrior with a longing to do more than be a princess. She gets her chance when fighter pilot Steve Trevor (Fillion) is shot down over the island and crash lands there. Despite some initial mistrust it is decided he should be returned to his own land and an Amazon should ensure he gets there. Cue a tournament to decide who accompanies him. (Guess who wins?) While all this is going on however, Ares escapes his prison and the world is threatened once again by his insatiable lust for power. But first he must rid himself of the magical bonds…

The animated DC Universe has become an impressive place to visit over the last ten years, with its Batman movies being particularly well-made. Here, the origin of Wonder Woman – largely adapted from 1987’s Gods and Mortals comics storyline – is given a thoroughly entertaining and robust presentation with strong voice casting (Molina steals the show as Ares), a fight-heavy storyline that keeps things inventive and involving, and which isn’t afraid to kill off some of its characters along the way (there’s even a couple of beheadings). Alongside Diana’s adapting to “outside” ways, there’s a meeting with Hades (Platt), concise examinations of sisterhood and family, and a terrible choice made by one of the supporting characters. Wonder Woman is almost wholly sure-footed from start to finish. The only stumble it makes is with the character of Trevor. He’s so casually sexist it grates against the otherwise laudable feminism displayed elsewhere; what Diana would see in him is hard to fathom.

Montgomery is an old hand at directing DC Universe movies now, but this was only her second outing after Superman/Doomsday (2007). She handles the material with confidence, marshalling the visual elements with flair and eliciting strong performances from the cast. The script, by Michael Jelenic, is spare, with often succinct dialogue (apart from Trevor’s), and a generous respect for the source material. And of course, the animation, while not as accomplished as some of the more recent DC Universe movies, is still polished and pleasing to the eye with rich primary colours and deceptively detailed backgrounds.

Rating: 7/10 – a small triumph for Warner Bros. with Russell filling Wonder Woman’s boots with aplomb, and a visual style that never fails to hold the attention.

Originally posted on thedullwoodexperiment website.

The Butler (2013)

29 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Cecil Gaines, Civil rights movement, David Oyelowo, Drama, Eugene Allen, Forest Whitaker, History, Lee Daniels, Martin Luther King, Oprah Winfrey, Presidents, Racism, Review, True story, White House

D: Lee Daniels / 132m

Cast: Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, Cuba Gooding Jr, Lenny Kravitz, David Oyelowo, Terrence Howard, Olivia Washington, Yaya DaCosta, Clarence Williams III, Vanessa Redgrave, Alex Pettyfer, Robin Williams, John Cusack, James Marsden, Liev Schreiber, Alan Rickman, Jane Fonda

Based on the life of Eugene Allen (here re-named Cecil Gaines), The Butler covers over eighty years of American history, and focuses on the civil rights movement as seen through the eyes of Gaines, his family, and the various Presidents he served in the White House. Beginning in 1926 where the young Gaines and his mother and father work on a cotton plantation, the film progresses through the decades touching on various important political events and attempts to establish the effect these events have on Gaines (Whitaker) and his family – wife Gloria (Winfrey), and two sons, Louis (Oyelowo) and Charlie (Isaac White, Elijah Kelley).

While Cecil’s climb from plantation worker’s son to White House servant takes up the first part of the movie, and reflects the prevailing attitudes surrounding race and social integration (or lack of it), there’s a hint throughout these scenes that this is merely the build up to the central story; there’s a lack of real incident once Cecil leaves the plantation and too much time passes as well. Once he begins work at the White House it becomes clear that Louis isn’t as impressed by his father’s job, and sees his father’s easy acceptance of his place within a society struggling to achieve equality as a betrayal.

As Louis becomes more and more involved in the civil rights movement – he rides the Freedom Bus, works for Martin Luther King, joins the Black Panthers – we see the widening gulf between father and son at the same time as a nation begins to unify itself. It’s this disparity that offers the most drama, while the political machinations and behind the scenes decision-making make for an interesting counterpoint to the home-spun drama being played out.

It’s an interesting story, and one that shines a rare light on the personal side of political and social upheaval witnessed in the US during the 50s, 60s and 70s, and features strong performances from all concerned. However – and it’s a big however – the movie has one major flaw: in attempting to cover so much ground it ends up being largely superficial and only fleetingly involving. Thanks to Danny Strong’s wayward script, scenes pass with little purpose other than to reinforce Gaines’ apathy with regard to the fight for racial equality, and after the sixth or seventh or eighth time they become tedious and wearing (we get it already!). Likewise for Louis’s involvement with the movement: yes, he’s committed, yes he sees his father as a sell-out, yes he feels with his head rather than his heart – all this is laboured and needlessly pedantic. Gloria and Charlie are given small moments throughout as a result, and the larger family dynamic is reduced to odd scenes set around the dinner table; the only problem is there’s no meat being served. There are scenes that never amount to much: Gaines’ friend Howard (Howard) trying to seduce Gloria; a late-night encounter in the kitchens with Nixon (Cusack).

And then there are the Presidents, Eisenhower (Williams), Kennedy (Marsden), Johnson (Schreiber), Nixon and Reagan (Rickman). Each actor has only two or three scenes to work with, and while each does well with what he’s given, they all suffer from the same approach: show the man in the highest office in the land struggling to decide what to do (though Kennedy comes off best in this regard). At least the movie stops short of Gaines acting as some kind of authoritative guide, offering the best advice at the right time; but he does remain annoyingly non-partisan, except for the issue of equal pay between the white and the black employees at the White House (his own small battle for equality that is shown as the only part of the struggle he’s ever interested in).

The performances, though, are good, and while some of the cast are given little to work with – Kravitz, Washington, Howard, and surprisingly, Winfrey – they rise above the script’s limitations to convey a sense of what it was like to live during those troubled times. Whitaker carries the movie with ease, and while it’s a little difficult to accept him as a man in his late twenties (when he takes over the part from Aml Ameen, himself a twenty-eight year old playing a fifteen year old), he displays a confidence and conviction that helps his character immensely. Whitaker is an actor who can be unpredictable at times, but here he reins in any of his usual eccentricities and maintains the stolid, often resigned approach of a man who feels he has found his place in the world and doesn’t need to reach any further.

As with all historical dramas where real events are being portrayed there are inaccuracies and fabrications galore, but while this is sometimes glaring – Reagan’s indifference to civil rights, Eugene Allen’s son Charles wasn’t the political activist Louis is – they’re not so glaring that they detract from the story that’s being told. This is based on the life of Eugene Allen, and if people are offended or upset by any deviation from “the truth” or historical fact, then they should avoid this movie completely.

On the technical side, Daniels directs with an increasingly confident flair but is hampered by the script’s lack of dramatic focus (it still feels odd to say that about a movie that appears to be all drama), and has no answer for its often stop/start structure. That said, the movie is beautifully lensed by Andrew Dunn, and the production design by Tim Galvin, allied with Lori Agostino, Erik Polczwartek and Jason Baldwin Stewart’s art direction, means the movie is always handsome to look at. Alas, Rodrigo Leão’s score is intrusive and overcooks the emotional beats.

Rating: 5/10 – not the incisive overview of the civil rights movement it should have been, nor the family drama it could have been, The Butler will probably do well in the Awards season, but there’s a lack of substance, and focus, here that holds it back from being a truly good movie; good performances aside, this has little to recommend it if you already know enough about its subject matter.

My Top 10 Movies – Part Three

28 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Arletty, Boulevard du Crime, Children of Paradise, Debureau, Drama, French cinema, Garance, Jacques Prévert, Jean-Louis Barrault, Louis Brasseur, Marcel Carné, Marcel Herrand, Mime, Review, Romance

Les enfants du paradis (1945)

aka Children of Paradise

D: Marcel Carné / 190m

Cast: Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur, Marcel Herrand, Pierre Renoir, Maria Casares, Louis Salou, Gaston Modot, Fabien Loris

When I first heard about Les enfants du paradis I was fifteen and working my way through that year’s edition of Halliwell’s Film Guide, picking out all the 5-star movies and adding them to a list of “must-see” movies that I was compiling. It was a long list as it turned out, and although Halliwell’s review was overwhelmingly positive, there were so many others that Les enfants didn’t stand out from the crowd. Slowly but surely – this was in the days before video – I worked my way through the list, until around a couple of years later, Les enfants was given an airing on BBC2. It was on a Bank Holiday afternoon, and if memory serves, was shown with a fifteen-minute programme added during the interval.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. The setting was unusual: Paris’s Boulevard du Crime in the 1830s and 40s, and the background was intriguing as well: the life and loves and personal trials of a theatre troupe and associated individuals. The sets, the costumes, the hair and make up, all had an impact on me that was as unexpected as it was welcome. Up until then, these aspects of the movie making process and end product hadn’t made much of an impression on me; I took it all for granted. But having an idea of the difficulty the filmmakers had in making the movie made me more aware of these details, and so, for the first time I found myself watching a movie where the details became as important as the overall mise-en-scène.

There are times still when I watch Les enfants du paradis and find myself gazing in awe at the level of detail in any one frame, even a closeup. And then there are the characters, the alluring, love-weary Garance (Arletty), the tragic-faced mime Debureau (Barrault), the carefree, preening actor Lemaître (Brasseur), the suave yet amoral Lacenaire (Herrand), the jealously scheming Nathalie (Casares), all of them so memorable and so superbly played. Seeing these characters live and breathe on screen, seeing them behave credibly and realistically (if a trifle theatrically as well) was an enduring joy to watch. I became swept up in the growing tumult of emotions as the plot unfolded and the various story lines blossomed, as the welter of finely observed detail complimented the highs and lows of the script. By the interval, when everything seems to say “there will be no happy ending here”, I was desperate to see the rest of the movie, and cursed the BBC for adding an extra programme at its middle.

Of course, the second part was as captivating as the first, and the denouement as affecting and powerful as could have been hoped for. When the movie ended I gave silent thanks to director Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert for making such an enchanting, magical, gripping experience, and under such incredible circumstances: filming in Vichy France at a time when all the materials needed to create the Boulevard du Crime were being directed towards the war effort, somehow Carné and his team achieved a small miracle in constructing a set that looks so realistic you can believe the characters actually inhabit it when the camera isn’t rolling.

Having seen Les enfants du paradis several more times now, I still get carried away with the love stories, the dizzying photography of the opening minutes (courtesy of Roger Hubert), the threats of danger and violence that lurk at every turn, the peaceful moments that add soothing counterpoints to the frenzy of emotions on display, the disarming elegance of Arletty and Barrault’s performances, Carné’s amazing ability to frame and depict each scene with such skill and dexterity, and the perfect harmony between the visuals and Prévert’s exquisite dialogue. This is – like the two previous movies discussed in my Top 10 – a masterpiece, pure and simple. It’s often described or advertised as the “best French film ever made”, and while I think that title belongs to Napoleon (1927), let’s qualify it in order to give it its proper due: it’s the “best French language film ever made”.

Rating: 9/10 – miles upon miles ahead of every other historical romantic drama ever made and one of the true masterpieces of French cinema; a movie to lose yourself in over and over again and to never tire of.

NOTE: The trailer below is an extended promotional piece from 1945.

Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie (2013)

26 Thursday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

3D, Animation, Barry Cook, BBC series, CGI, Dinosaurs, Drama, John Leguizamo, Justin Long, Karl Urban, Neil Nightingale, Pachyrhinosaurus, Patchi, Review

D: Barry Cook, Neil Nightingale / 87m

Cast: John Leguizamo, Justin Long, Tiya Sircar, Skyler Stone, Karl Urban, Charlie Rowe, Angourie Rice

Taking his kids Ricky (Rowe) and Jade (Rice) to an archaeological dig, Zack (Urban) fails to engage a reluctant Ricky into moving far from the car. While he waits for his dad and sis to come back, Ricky is greeted by a talking bird, Alex (Leguizamo). Alex chides Ricky for his lack of interest in the past and begins to tell him a story set 70 million years before, the story of Patchi (Long), a pachyrhinosaurus. Born the runt of a litter, Patchi has trouble fitting in, especially with his brother Scowler (Stone); they are at odds from day one. After a run-in with a predator leaves him with a hole in his frill, Patchi’s efforts to fit in become even harder. When the weather changes, an older Patchi must join his herd on a great migration; thus begins Patchi’s road to acceptance not only by the herd, but by his brother and by love interest Juniper (Sircar).

Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie is a mash-up of The Land Before Time (1988) and The Incredible Journey (1963). The mix of live action and CGI is impressive, with several of the dinosaurs achieving a level of photo-realism that bodes well for the forthcoming Jurassic World (2015). Their “interaction” with the real world is well-staged and handled, and there is a pleasing sense of verisimilitude throughout. Taking its cue from the BBC TV series of the same name, Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie looks amazing from start to finish (and in 3D it looks even better – despite being converted in post-production). The detail is nothing less than breathtaking. The backgrounds, shot in Alaska and New Zealand, are spectacular, and add a pleasing sense of scope to the movie despite its (relatively) small budget of $85m.

What isn’t so pleasing, however, is the script by John Collee (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Happy Feet), a dialogue-driven disaster that manages to make dinosaurs seem un-cool and almost entirely lame in their pea-brained outlook. That their lips don’t deliberately move in sync with their lines isn’t as distracting as the fact that what’s being said is so childish and immature (it’s actually amazing there isn’t a fart gag in there somewhere). While Leguizamo fares better than the rest, even he can’t pull off some of his dialogue, and Long is saddled with some of the dopiest, silliest lines he may ever have to deal with. Granted Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie is meant to be a children’s movie, but do kids really respond to, or appreciate, this level of half-baked, jokey, verbal simplicity? If I was over the age of eight and watching this movie I might feel so insulted I’d want to chuck my popcorn at the screen in protest.

With things so hampered by the script, everything else suffers. The plotting and story arcs are simplistic and predictable, the characterisations equally so, and the sense of danger provided by a pursuing trio of Gorgosauruses is never allowed to accrue too much tension. Directors Cook and Nightingale at least ensure that things move along at a decent pace (helped by their editor, John Carnochan), but fail to inject much of note into proceedings. The photography, as already mentioned, is impressive, and the scenery often breathtaking, but these aspects are unable to offer a distraction from the awkwardness of the movie as a whole.

Rating: 5/10 – saved from a lower score by its visuals, Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie is a movie that will probably impress very young children, but will frustrate teens and adults alike; a missed opportunity that sounds as if the producers lost faith in it somewhere during the production.

Xmas Greetings

24 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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To everyone who’s visited thedullwoodexperiment (in either of its versions) in 2013, and especially to those of you that are following this blog, may I take this opportunity to wish all of you a very

MERRY XMAS

Nigel

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

23 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Benedict Cumberbatch, Bilbo Baggins, Evangeline Lilly, Ian McKellen, J.R.R. Tolkien, Legolas, Literary adaptation, Martin Freeman, Orlando Bloom, Review, Smaug, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings

D: Peter Jackson / 161m

Cast: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, Ken Stott, Benedict Cumberbatch, Orlando Bloom, Evangeline Lilly, Lee Pace, Luke Evans, Stephen Fry, Sylvester McCoy

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) was, in some ways, a difficult movie to appreciate. As the beginning of what is effectively now a six-film series, the difference in tone and approach threw some viewers who were expecting a match for The Lord of the Rings (2001-3). Jackson and co-scriptwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, and Guillermo del Toro, took the more humorous elements of Tolkien’s novel and weaved them into the story with accomplished ease. They made several key decisions with the characterisations of the dwarves that left audiences unsure if the comedic aspects were appropriate or in keeping with the overall tone of the trilogy (not to mention the darker trilogy that follows it). What seemed to be forgotten in the rush to criticise the movie was that it was the first of three: making any kind of criticism at this early stage was actually irrelevant. As the first two Lord of the Rings movies were largely ignored at the Oscars, only for the third to be so heavily rewarded, so we should wait until all three parts of The Hobbit are released. Then we can make a proper decision.

What is clear is that with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Jackson has hit his stride, and as a result, the trilogy has hit its stride as well. The exposition of the first movie is largely dismissed with, and the introduction of new characters such as Thranduil (Pace) and Tauriel (Lilly) is handled concisely and with greater attention than before. There is an even greater focus on action, with the barrel-rolling sequence a highlight, and a greater sense that this movie’s events fit in with, or more appropriately foreshadow, the events of The Lord of the Rings.

Having survived the attack by orcs at the end of the first movie, Bilbo (Freeman), Thorin (Armitage) and the rest of the dwarves set off into Mirkwood where spiders – and not just any spiders – inhabit the forest. Meanwhile, Gandalf (McKellen) heads off to Dol Guldur to face the rising power of the Necromancer (Cumberbatch). The dwarf company, or überfellowship, make it out of Mirkwood only to find themselves captured by elves. With Bilbo’s help, they escape, and are pursued by orcs, Tauriel – who has developed a bit of a crush on dwarf Kili (Adrian Turner) – and Thranduil’s son Legolas (Bloom). At Dol Guldur, Gandalf meets up with Radagast the Brown (McCoy) and finds that the Necromancer is preparing an orc army to march against the lands of the west. The dwarves evade the orcs with the help of Bard the Bowman (Evans). Bard lives in Lake-town, and he takes Thorin and his band there where they can both tend to Kili, who has been hit by a poisoned orc arrow, and plan the next step of their journey to the Lonely Mountain. The orcs attack again but not before Thorin has left; Bard helps the dwarves that have been left behind and Tauriel and Legolas join the fray as well. Bilbo finds the way into the Lonely Mountain where he encounters the dragon Smaug (Cumberbatch), and despite their best attempts the dwarves fail to kill him. Enraged, Smaug breaks free of the mountain and heads to Lake-town to wreak his revenge.

The movie ends there, rather abruptly too, with only Bilbo’s anguished “What have we done?” to see out proceedings. As might be expected there has been a large amount of criticism of the movie ending this way, but watching The Desolation of Smaug, and with Smaug’s entrance occurring around the two-hour mark, anyone even half aware of the movie’s running time would have known a resolution to the problem of Smaug was always going to be unlikely. And it means that The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) is going to have one hell of a start.

The ending aside, the movie does still suffer from “middle child syndrome”, with too many storylines set up to be resolved in the next one, and the running time feeling a little too long. Gandalf is sidelined for much of the movie (fairly reflecting the novel), while some of the dwarves are given very little to do indeed – anyone know something specific that Ori or Bifor did? Radagast gets a cameo this time round (and repeats his bird under the hat trick), Azog (Manu Bennett) cedes his quest for Thorin’s head to Bolg (Lawrence Makoare), and the worst kept secret in town: the identity of the Necromancer, is revealed at last. Oh, and there’s the weird matter of Legolas sporting contact lenses; it makes him look slightly alien rather than Elvish.

These minor quibbles aside, The Desolation of Smaug is a terrific addition to the complete saga, thrilling, intense, spectacular to look at with even more beautiful New Zealand scenery to devour, a continued line of humour that complements the increasing sombre tone (Legolas’ dismay at seeing a picture of Gloin’s son), the introduction of Lilly as Tauriel (this trilogy’s Arwen), Jackson’s complete mastery of both the material and the visual language needed to present it, a cast that more than matches him for commitment and artistry, and of course, the mighty Smaug, without doubt the most realistic, most impressive dragon ever imagined. Voiced by Cumberbatch, Smaug is the movie’s highlight: an arrogant, vain, greedy, vicious, preening monster who trades verbal barbs with Bilbo in the movie’s best scenes. Both Freeman and Cumberbatch are on superb form here, adding layers to their performances that bring out all the subtleties of the dialogue, and keeping the audience riveted as they spar back and forth.

With another year to go before the trilogy’s conclusion, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is a more than satisfying instalment that works well and impresses on a regular basis. There’s little doubt that Jackson and co are firing on all cylinders, and if the purists out there are still complaining about the increasing lack of fidelity to the original novel then they’re missing the point: this is an adaptation, and a wonderful one at that.

Rating: 9/10 – a rousing blend of action and spectacle that moves at breakneck pace, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug rarely disappoints; event cinema that we see too little of these days and absolutely best seen in 48hfr on an IMAX screen.

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013)

21 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Alan Partridge, Colm Meaney, Comedy, Declan Lowney, North Norfolk Radio, Pat Farrell, Radio presenter, Review, Siege movie, Steve Coogan, TV series

D: Declan Lowney / 90m

Cast: Steve Coogan, Colm Meaney, Felicity Montagu, Simon Greenall, Simon Delaney, Sean Pertwee, Tim Key, Monica Dolan, Phil Cornwell, Anna Maxwell Martin, Darren Boyd

When North Norfolk Radio is taken over by an American who wants to revamp the schedules and weed out the below-par presenters, Alan Partridge (Coogan) suggests they get rid of fellow presenter Pat Farrell (Meaney). Pat doesn’t take too kindly to being fired and returns to the radio station armed with a shotgun. Soon he’s taken the rest of the staff hostage and Partridge finds himself helping the police by being their “man on the inside”. What follows are several attempts by Partridge to get Pat to surrender, interspersed with scenes where Partridge seeks to boost his profile via the media attention surrounding the siege.

It was only a matter of time, and presumably the right script, before the TV legend that is Alan Partridge would be given his cinematic debut. Big screen incarnations of small screen successes don’t always get it right, though, and Coogan’s monstrous creation is another example to add to the pile. Too often the humour is forced by either circumstance or the need to inject a big laugh every ten minutes or so; it doesn’t arise organically so much from the characters, as from the situation they find themselves in. That’s not to say that the movie isn’t funny, it’s just that the jokes lack the inventiveness of Partridge’s TV outings, and the parts that do work are unpredictable and inconsistent. The script, by Coogan, Peter Baynham, Armando Iannucci, and Neil and Rob Gibbons, is a bit of a patchwork, with some scenes struggling and/or failing to make much of an impact.

Despite the script’s obvious shortcomings, Coogan is excellent – as expected – as the repellent yet strangely likeable Partridge, while Meaney is given little to do other than act menacing and wax lyrical about the “good old days” of radio broadcasting. Of the other cast members, Key shines as Partridge’s producer/assistant, Simon, and there are returning faces from the TV series’ such as Montagu as Lynn Benfield. There’s also a running joke involving the drummer of Marillion.

Lowney’s direction is flat and unrewarding, while the photography by Ben Smithard is drab and unremarkable. The confines of the radio station seem larger than the building appears from the outside, and the whole movie has that contrasting claustrophobic low budget feel of so many TV-to-movie adaptations. Partridge is a brilliant creation, spitting egotistical soundbites and ill-considered personal comments at every move, but on this occasion the feature-length format fails to add anything to the character and serves only to illustrate the strengths of the TV shows.

Rating: 5/10 – a misfire, and one that remains fitfully amusing; one for the fans, certainly, but newcomers to the world of Alan Partridge should beware: there’s less here than meets the eye.

10 Reasons to Remember Peter O’Toole (1932-2013)

20 Friday Dec 2013

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Henry II, Lawrence of Arabia, My Favorite Year, Peter O'Toole

Peter O’Toole (2 August 1932 – 14 December 2014)

My first encounter with Peter O’Toole took place in 1982. My girlfriend at the time wanted to go to the cinema one Saturday night, and the choice was between Amityville II The Possession and My Favorite Year. As my girlfriend had an aversion to horror movies, a comedy set around a TV show’s attempts to woo a faded movie star into being the guest performer on a live show was the preferred alternative. My girlfriend sat stony-faced for most of the movie while I laughed like I was watching the funniest thing since Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (1979) – which I was. (To be fair I got more of the in-jokes than she did.) I knew who O’Toole was, but I was unprepared for just how funny he was; my knowledge of his career began and ended with Lawrence of Arabia (1962), which I hadn’t seen yet.

What I liked about this gangly, slightly physically emaciated actor was the gleam in his eye, that sense of fun some actors never quite manage to shed as their careers progress. It was obvious O’Toole was having a ball, and later, when I looked back over his filmography, I discovered that comic roles were thin on the ground. Why, I wondered, was this actor not offered more roles like this? And then I did see Lawrence of Arabia, followed quickly by The Lion in Winter (1967). Now I understood. When an actor is that good in dramatic roles, especially when playing real people, the instinct to typecast him must be almost insurmountable. And then there was Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968), where he played Henry II in both movies; there were subtle shadings between the two performances, and O’Toole was as hypnotic in both as he was as the messianic Lawrence.

There was a fierce intelligence about O’Toole that made his screen outings all the more rewarding; even late on in his career, in minor fare such as Phantoms (1998) and Global Heresy (2002), he was still able to rise above often poor material and fashion a performance worth watching. He had a natural instinct for making a character come to life as if fully formed, with the weight of a whole lifetime’s experience to fall back on, and then to project that character so that an audience would know them completely. It was – and remains – a rare gift, and one that O’Toole unselfishly shared with us on many wonderful occasions.

1 – Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

2 – Becket (1964)

3 – Lord Jim (1965)

4 – The Lion in Winter (1968)

5 – Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969)

6 – The Ruling Class (1972)

7 – The Stunt Man (1980)

8 – My Favorite Year (1982)

9 – The Last Emperor (1987)

10 – Venus (2006)

10 Reasons to Remember Joan Fontaine (1917-2013)

19 Thursday Dec 2013

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Actress, Born to Be Bad, Career, Joan Fontaine, Movies, Suspicion

Joan Fontaine (22 October 1917 – 15 December 2013)

It’s surprising sometimes when you hear that a certain actor or actress has died. A lengthy retirement can often lead to the assumption that someone has died a lot earlier than is actually the case. This was the case – for me, at least – with Joan Fontaine. Her last movie, Good King Wenceslas (1994) was made for TV. During the Eighties she made a handful of TV appearances, and just two in the Seventies. Before then she turned up in Hammer’s The Witches (1966), and it was this movie that introduced me to an actress whose screen presence projected a vulnerable tenacity. In Suspicion (1941), the movie for which she won an Oscar, she was perfectly cast as the shy, emotionally imperilled newlywed “menaced” by Cary Grant. Watching her in further movies it was evident that Fontaine was a talented actress with a much wider range than her earlier performances might have suggested.

My favourite role of hers is Christabel Caine Carey in Nicholas Ray’s Born to Be Bad (1950). As the predatory, unrepentant Christabel, Fontaine was startling. She varied her roles quite successfully throughout her career, and she was dependable even in the most unrewarding of movies – You Gotta Stay Happy (1948) – providing a strong focus for the audience and making the most of the material. She perhaps worked best under the guidance of strong directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Ida Lupino.

She had a famous feud with her sister, Olivia de Havilland, was a pilot and prize winning tuna fisherman, worked as a nurse’s aide during World War II, and was born in Tokyo. She married four times – second husband William Dozier remarked her autobiography, No Bed of Roses, should have been called No Shred of Truth – and lost out on the role of Karen Holmes in From Here to Eternity (1953) because she was embroiled in a custody case involving her daughter Deborah. Her own life would have made for a compelling drama.

1 – The Women (1939)

2 – Rebecca (1940)

3 – Suspicion (1941)

4 – The Constant Nymph (1943)

5 – Jane Eyre (1943)

6 – Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)

7 – Born to Be Bad (1950)

8 – Ivanhoe (1952)

9 – The Bigamist (1953)

10 – Tender Is the Night (1962)

My Top 10 Movies – Part Two

18 Wednesday Dec 2013

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Abel Gance, Albert Dieudonné, Drama, French movie, History, Kevin Brownlow, Napoleon, Review, Silent film, Triptych, True story

Napoléon (1927)

D: Abel Gance / 330m

Cast: Albert Dieudonné, Vladimir Roudenko, Edmond Van Daële, Gina Manès, Antonin Artaud, Alexandre Koubitzky, Marguerite Gance, Yvette Dieudonné, Philippe Hériat, Abel Gance

A five and a half hour silent movie? One that’s unavailable in any home video format, and is unlikely to be for the very foreseeable future? A rich visual spectacle that impresses from its opening snow fight sequence to its stunning triptych finale? I have only one word as my answer: Absolutely!

Before I saw Napoléon, my exposure to silent movies had been restricted largely to comedies featuring the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Larry Semon etc. The Keystone Kops were a favourite, and Harold Lloyd impressed me even more when I discovered he’d lost his right thumb and forefinger in an accident involving a bomb prop (I know, it’s a bit shallow, but in mitigation I was around nine or ten). I remember seeing most of The Iron Horse (1924) on TV, and it had the effect of making me realise that silent movies could last longer than twenty minutes, but UK TV wasn’t in the habit of showing anything other than the short films already mentioned. When Napoléon was shown as part of a nationwide tour in 1980 at my local arts theatre – with live piano accompaniment – I saw the advert for it and took out my trusty copy of Halliwell’s Film Guide to find out more about it.

It was the length of the movie that intrigued me. At that time – and my memory is a bit hazy on this – the available print ran to just over five hours. The idea of sitting in a theatre for that length of time, plus interval, was daunting, but equally an attractive one. It’s a little shallow (again) but I wanted to see if I could “stay the course” and be able to say – if anyone I knew had even cared! – that I had seen, all the way through, the five hour plus silent movie set during the French Revolution and beyond. It was like having a badge of honour.

Imagine my surprise (and delight) when the movie began and I found myself swept up by the depth and breadth of Gance’s technical mastery of the silent medium. By the intensity of the performances, the sweep of the narrative, the visual panache of the battle scenes – Gance put his camera in the middle of the action, unheard of up until then – and the effectiveness of the quieter moments against the stirring swirl of historical events. Those five hours flew by. At the interval, I can remember coming out of the auditorium (and into the light) and feeling overwhelmed. Aside from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), I’d never been affected as much by a movie, and definitely not by a silent movie. I was seeing techniques and a visual language that were truly amazing; this was breathtaking stuff and I couldn’t wait to go back in and see if the rest of the movie was as incredible. And, of course, it was.

Since then I’ve seen Napoléon four more times. (Sadly, I was out of the country for its most recent UK screening, on 30 November 2013.) Each time I’ve revelled in its complexity and the sheer joy it provides, and each time I’ve come away wanting someone, anyone – but preferably Kevin Brownlow – to come along and say, “We’ve found all the missing footage, and will be presenting the original premiere version of Napoléon in just a few months’ time”. I know this is unlikely, and Brownlow has said himself that the current version is probably the longest it will be for some time to come. (But, what’s the world without a little hope, eh?) Perhaps the best screening was the premiere of Carl Davis’s score for the movie shown at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s south bank. The addition of an orchestra made the whole event even more wonderful and fulfilling.

Napoléon was the first movie that really engaged my heart and my mind and wouldn’t let go. It holds a special place for me as the one movie that remains an event each time I see it. In these days of instant streaming and fast downloads and blu ray discs, the notion of only being able to see a film at a cinema or a concert hall is somehow reassuring, that we haven’t lost that true element of spectacle that we take now for granted. This was how audiences were first exposed to movies, not with ads for the latest trainers or holiday destinations, but with a sense of scale and excitement, a palpable tension at being swept away by what was unfolding on screen. The language of cinema was being created by these movies, and it’s this aspect that shouldn’t be overlooked or forgotten. Without trailblazers such as Gance, a lot of what we take for granted about movies today (or don’t even notice), would be missing. That we’ve lost some of that grandeur is simply disappointing.

Sadly, it will be some time before Napoléon will be seen again on the big screen. But when it is, you can rest assured that I’ll be there (if it’s in the UK), and ready to be enthralled and transported and amazed all over again.

Shame the Devil (2013)

18 Wednesday Dec 2013

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Doug Bradley, Horror, Juliette Bennett, Lie detector, Murders, Paul Tanter, Profiler, Review, Serial killer, Simon Phillips, Thriller

D: Paul Tanter / 94m

Cast: Simon Phillips, Juliette Bennett, Will de Meo, Bradford West, Lucy Clements, Doug Bradley, Kellie Shirley, Peter Woodward

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. Really. It’s that bad. I mean, really bad. Sooooo bad.

And once again, it’s all down to THE SCRIPT. An awful… no, god-awful, unholy mess of a script that makes no effort to be coherent, has a passing acquaintance with competence, and contains some of the worst dialogue ever committed to celluloid. The sad thing about Shame the Devil is that the cast and crew are actually trying their best…and failing miserably.

The plot concerns the hunt for a serial killer who hooks his victims up to lie detectors and then asks them a series of questions that will cause them to be killed if they lie. The killer tells them, “The truth will set you free; tell the truth and shame the devil”. The first victim is a supermarket manager, the second a doctor (Woodward), and the third a priest. The police officer investigating the murders, Trent (Phillips) is suspended because he appears to be linked to the victims, and heads to New York to seek help from an old flame (Bennett) who is a profiler. But while he’s there, the murders continue…

Ten things that are wrong with Shame the Devil:

1 – Simon Phillips demonstrates every emotion required of his character by shouting.

2 – Writer/director Paul Tanter allows each actor to play their part independently of any other actor that might be in the same scene with them.

3 – The whole concept of the serial killer being one step ahead is made laughable by the circumstances surrounding the death of the first New York victim.

4 – Lucy Clements demonstrates every emotion required of her character by pouting.

5 – Despite jetting off to New York after being suspended, none of Trent’s superiors have any idea of where he is.

6 – Lines of dialogue are repeated by characters in a vain effort to reinforce the seriousness of the relevant situation.

7 – The photography by Haider Zafar is bland and uninspired.

8 – Writer/director Tanter and editor Richard Colton have no awareness of what makes a scene tense, thrilling, and/or dramatic.

9 – Doug Bradley, one of the few actors capable of injecting credibility into this kind of thing, is reduced to appearing in only one scene.

10 – The music is intrusive and fails to add any menace to the proceedings.

11 – There are moments of childish humour that even the Chuckle Brothers would have steered clear of (apologies to any non-UK readers for the reference).

I know, I know, that was eleven things but that just serves to illustrate how bad this movie really is: I could go on and on and on and on… But I won’t. Suffice it to say, Shame the Devil is an unmitigated disaster – poorly directed and acted, appallingly written, unimaginatively shot and edited, and completely unable to drag itself out of the mire of its own making. Even the nihilistic ending – though welcome by the time it arrives – is badly staged and requires more of Phillips as an actor than he has to give.

Rating: 1/10 – another car crash of a movie from the writer/director of the White Collar Hooligan movies, Shame the Devil founders from its opening scene and never quite breaks the surface; an amateurish, dismaying waste of everyone’s time and patience.

The Shadow of Silk Lennox (1935)

14 Saturday Dec 2013

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Bank robbery, Creighton Chaney, Crime drama, FBI, Gangster, Lon Chaney Jr, Murder, Nightclub, Ray Kirkwood, Review

D: Ray Kirkwood / 60m

Cast: Lon Chaney Jr, Dean Benton, Marie Burton, Jack Mulhall, Eddie Gribbon, Larry McGrath, Allen Greer, Theodore Lorch

After four years of being billed as Creighton Chaney in an effort to make his own way in movies, Lon Chaney Jr finally landed his first lead role in this below average potboiler. As nightclub owner cum gangster John Arthur “Silk” Lennox, Chaney does his best to appear urbane and charming, and there are moments when he almost pulls it off, but mostly he looks uncomfortable; when he’s being an out and out villain, Chaney appears more relaxed. It was inevitable perhaps that Chaney’s career – outside of Of Mice and Men (1939) and The Wolf Man (1941) – would be given over to playing villains. He wasn’t blessed with matinee idol looks, and often his delivery was a little off, but he was a formidable screen presence, and it’s interesting to see him here finding his feet.

Lennox and his gang rob banks. He tricks the police into giving him a cast-iron alibi for his latest robbery, and when they fail to make any headway, it’s down to the FBI to lend a hand. Fortuitously, one of Lennox’s gang, the Deacon (Budd Buster), tries to leave town with the money from the robbery. Lennox tracks him down and has him killed; this provides the FBI with the opportunity they need to bring Lennox to justice.

The short running time reflects the slightness of the plot, and the by-the-numbers filmmaking. The script, adapted by Norman Springer from his story The Riot Squad, is too weak to make much of an impact, and Kirkwood directs without attempting to make any of it appear interesting. There’s a sub-plot involving an act at the nightclub – played by Benton and Burton – that plays as unconvincingly as Lennox’s trademark saying “It’s all going as smooth as silk”. The sets are functional and look entirely too flimsy, and the photography, by the usually reliable Robert F. Cline, is flat and uninspired, leaving the movie a chore to look at. There’s a chirpy performance from Mulhall that raises the stakes when he’s onscreen but this isn’t until the last twenty minutes or so; before then, everyone else fails to ignite the soggy material.

From here, Chaney would go on to a succession of uncredited roles in movies such as Slave Ship (1937) and Love and Hisses (also 1937). He had other, credited, roles but it wasn’t until Of Mice and Men that he finally broke out as a leading man, even if it was largely in low budget horror movies. Chaney was capable of giving strong performances when needed, but all too often his personal demons got in the way of his career. Seeing Chaney in The Shadow of Silk Lennox is like watching a fighter early on in his career who’ll maybe only get that one chance at a title shot. It’s reassuring to know that, even with his eventual decline as an actor – Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964) anyone? – Chaney had his time in the sun. He was sometimes an unpredictable actor, and that often makes watching some of his movies more rewarding than they should be (although that can’t be said here).

Rating: 3/10 – low budget doesn’t have to mean low quality but it does here; ponderous and underwhelming, The Shadow of Silk Lennox fails to rise above its mediocre origins.

My Top 10 Movies – Part One

13 Friday Dec 2013

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Also Sprach Zarathustra, Arthur C. Clarke, Gary Lockwood, HAL 9000, Keir Dullea, Monolith, Moonwatcher, Review, Sci-fi, Spaceship, Stanley Kubrick, Star Child, The Sentinel

Having seen an unholy amount of movies in my life so far – over 13,000 – I do have my favourites, movies I can watch over and over and over again and never tire of. Over the next ten weeks I’ll be posting my personal Top 10, the movies that have had either a tremendous impact on me, or that have struck a chord to such a degree that I keep returning to them. These posts won’t be reviews as such, but a summing up of how and why they’re important to me, and – in some cases – what was happening in my life at the time that meant they ended up having such a lasting effect. I hope some of them are your favourites too. And at the top of the list:

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

D: Stanley Kubrick / 141m

Cast: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter, Leonard Rossiter, Margaret Tyzack, Robert Beatty, Sean Sullivan, Douglas Rain

This, more than any other film, is the one that cemented my love of movies. I first saw it in 1977, when it was on its second re-release. My local cinema showed it for a week with three daily showings. Back in those days you could go see a film at any time, even go in part way through; the best part was that you could then stay there and watch what you’d missed when the next showing started. I saw 2001 at its first showing on the Saturday afternoon – I was 14 at the time – and I was so impressed, so overwhelmed, that I stayed and watched it again. I was seriously tempted to stay and watch it a third time but sense(?) prevailed, and I left the cinema. My head was reeling. What had I just seen? And why was it having such a profound effect on me?

And why couldn’t I get my friends to see how amazing it was? Because to them it sounded boring. A film approaching two and a half hours, with very little dialogue, no real laughs, no fights or car chases or shootouts, and whose main antagonist is a computer? No, my friends said, we’ll stick with Doctor Who – that’s real science fiction.

Looking back, I don’t blame them. I think 2001 is an acquired taste, and it’s not for everybody. A lot of people I’ve watched it with have given up before the Dawn of Man sequence is barely five minutes old. They look at me as if to say, Are you serious? And yes, I am. This is a film I could watch every day and not tire of it. Since its arrival on home video in 1980, I have watched 2001 at least once a year without fail, with at least six other trips to the cinema just to see it, as well. Every time I see it I notice or see something new, some small detail perhaps, that I haven’t seen before but which has been there all along. I hum along to the music, and get goosebumps every time I hear Also Sprach Zarathustra. I wait for those classic moments: when Moon-Watcher first realises what he can use the animal bones for; the jump-cut; the moment when the stewardess turns and begins walking upwards; the first sight of the orbiting space station; seeing the Monolith surrounded by our “modern” technology; HAL’s first close up; Poole running in the centrifuge; the realisation that HAL can read lips; Bowman entering the air lock; “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do”; the journey through the Stargate; and the Star Child looking down on Earth.

2001 is the only film that merits – for me – a score of 10/10. It was the first film that really made me sit up and realise just how powerful and inspiring a single film could be. I found out everything I could about its production, read Arthur C. Clarke’s original story The Sentinel, promoted it as much as I could to my friends – still not buying it, though – and fell in love with this amazing director called Stanley Kubrick. Thirty-six years and umpteen thousand movies have passed since that first viewing, but 2001 still impresses me with its verisimilitude and its adherence to strict scientific rules (no sound in space – take that Gravity!). I love the film’s pace, the almost languid approach that allows the viewer to take in so much detail, and the beauty inherent in space travel. 2001 is often regarded as sterile and unemotional, but there is joy to be had here, humour as well (the toilet instructions), and a sense that destiny is only a leap of faith away. There is awe, and wonder, and expectation and that very human of characteristics, the need to explore, to broaden and expand one’s horizons, to see what lies over the next hill.

I was asked once if the timing of when I saw 2001 for the first time was in any way important in terms of how much I liked it. And I think the timing was vitally important. Up ’til then, my movie diet consisted of old black and white movies, silents and serials. Modern film had failed to have any kind of impact, and in some ways I distrusted it (or perhaps I didn’t understand it), and I only saw 2001 because it was a science fiction film, and those kinds of movies I could deal with. But, what did I know? It opened up a whole new world for me, and set me on the path to watching movies with a greater passion and enthusiasm than I ever would have done before then. In effect, it helped me chart my own growth, as an individual and as a film buff. And I will be eternally grateful to it, and to Mr Kubrick.

Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York (2006)

13 Friday Dec 2013

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Alexandra Paul, Construction team, Costas Mandylor, Disaster movie, Drama, Michael Ironside, Review, Robert Lee, Thriller, Volcano

D: Robert Lee / 90m

Cast: Costas Mandylor, Alexandra Paul, Michael Ironside, Michael Boisvert, Eric Breker, Ron Selmour, Pascale Hutton, Kevin McNulty, Zak Santiago, Robert Moloney, Kaj-Erik Eriksen, Matthew Bennett, William S. Taylor

What looks like a SyFy movie, sounds like a SyFy movie, has a script and direction like a SyFy movie, and special effects like a SyFy movie, and yet isn’t a SyFy movie? The answer, of course, is Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York. Shot on a predictably low budget, Disaster Zone begins well, showing the camaraderie of a construction team working on a new water supply tunnel for the Manhattan area. Two newbies, Joey (Eriksen) and Karen (Hutton) are thrown in the deep end when a routine blasting goes wrong and three members of the team are killed. The ensuing enquiry – which seems to take place the very next day – sees team leader Matt McLaughlin (Mandylor) sacked, despite his having seen lava break through the tunnel wall just before he got out. No one believes his story, least of all the NY authorities, who authorise his team to continue working on the tunnel. Enter a team from the US Geological Service to investigate (and immediately dismiss) Matt’s claims. On the USGS team is Matt’s ex-wife Susan (Paul). At first they butt heads, but soon enough they’ve made up their differences and are trying to work out if what Matt saw is just an isolated incident or something presaging a bigger problem.

Experienced viewers will now be shouting, “Of course there’s a bigger problem!”, and the cause of it all is pill-popping mad scientist Dr Levering (Ironside). He’s drilled down seven miles into the earth’s crust (from a warehouse, no less!), and has caused major instability as well as aggravating the volcano that no one has ever been aware of previously. For some reason this is a highly secret operation, backed by mysterious investors, and overseen by oily politician Kavanagh (McNulty). Levering’s plan is to harness the earth’s geo-thermal energy and do away with fossil fuels. But in the drive to meet his backers’ deadline, Levering ignores the warning signs and presses on. Eventually it’s up to Matt and his remaining crew to save the day.

Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York has two main problems and they are both fundamental to the movie’s success (or lack of it). Firstly, there is the script by Sarah Watson, which, as expected, is as scientifically accurate as saying that water falls upwards, and is littered with lines even the best actors in the world couldn’t give credibility to. One sequence, and perhaps the most laughable in a movie riddled with laughable moments, shows a man watering a lawn who goes to open a neighbour’s door and finds the handle is red hot. He uses his sleeve to open the door, lava pours out, engulfs him, and then causes an explosion in the house. Minutes later we’re told that seventy-two people died in the explosion, in what is being described as a “terrorist incident”. By this point you’re reduced to mouthing WTF? almost every couple of minutes in sheer astonishment at the script’s determined implausibility. The second problem is Lee’s scattershot attempts at direction. Lee is more often employed as a first assistant director or a second unit director, and his lack of ability shows throughout. Few scenes are handled with any appreciable skill and his decision to shoot the bulk of the movie using various headache-inducing camera techniques such as whip-pans makes it unpleasant to watch. He’s also unable to frame a shot properly or provide his cast with enough support; sometimes it seems he’s shot a rehearsal rather than the finished scene.

Woeful as this movie is, it’s further undercut by the dreadful special effects – there’s even a couple of shots lifted from footage taken on 9/11 – and lighting that makes everyone look ill. There’s also a ludicrous subplot involving an anti-terrorist unit led by Agent Walters (Bennett), who believes everything is down to terrorists. Of the cast, Mandylor and Paul show real chemistry, and while Ironside ends up chewing the scenery with relish, he’s still the best thing in the movie. The supporting cast do their best against insurmountable odds, and the score hits every beat with leaden predictability. And to cap it all off, there isn’t even a proper eruption.

Rating: 3/10 – watchable only if you’re in the mood to check your brain at the door; or for the opportunity to witness so much that is witless and stupid in such a short space of time.

Originally posted on thedullwoodexperiment website.

Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

13 Friday Dec 2013

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Annie Rose Buckley, Australia, Colin Farrell, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Emma Thompson, John Lee Hancock, Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers, Review, Tom Hanks, True story, Walt Disney

D: John Lee Hancock / 125m

Cast: Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Annie Rose Buckley, Colin Farrell, Paul Giamatti, Ruth Wilson, Bradley Whitford, Jason Schwartzman, B.J. Novak, Rachel Griffiths, Kathy Baker, Ronan Vibert

Based on the true story of Walt Disney’s attempts to secure the film rights to P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins, Saving Mr. Banks opens with the financially compromised author (Thompson) telling her agent she has absolutely no intention of flying to Los Angeles and letting Disney (Hanks) ruin her creation. One quick turnaround later and we see Travers arriving in La La Land and being met by her driver for the duration of her stay, Ralph (Giamatti). One dispiriting car journey (for her) later and she is introduced to the charming and sincere Disney. Her doubts assuaged for the time being, she agrees to work with the proposed movie’s writers (Whitford, Schwartzman and Novak). As they work through the script and songs we’ve all come to know – and perhaps love – Travers’ objections remain largely in place, but gradually her resistance is worn down by a combination of the writers’ enthusiasm, Disney’s determination not to renege on a promise made to his daughters twenty years before, and memories of her childhood that resurface during the visit.

It’s these flashbacks that add meat to the otherwise thin story of “a writer taking on the system”. As portrayed by Thompson – and superbly, I might add – Travers is presented as a bit of an old dragon: scathing, contemptuous of her American “cousins”, rude, condescending and almost completely out of her depth. Hancock and writers Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith, instead of making the movie a “fish out of water” story where the fish wins out by virtue of personal fortitude and stubbornness, have wisely chosen to look at the reasons for Travers’ animosity towards Disney, and why the character of Mr Banks was so important to her. As Travers’ back story unfolds through the depiction of her childhood, so we come to learn the fundamental truth behind the characters of Mr Banks and of Mary Poppins herself, and the long-term effect Travers’ childhood has had on her. These scenes give a much-needed depth to the movie, and allows Thompson to provide a richer, more psychological approach to P.L. Travers than may have been expected. Thompson dominates the movie, reducing even Tom Hanks to the level of humble onlooker in their scenes together, and gives a masterclass in screen acting, her voice and mannerisms and facial expressions all perfectly pitched to leave the audience in no doubt as to her thoughts and feelings at any time.

Matching Thompson in terms of screen performance, and presence, is her younger counterpart, Annie Rose Buckley. With only an episode of Aussie soap Home and Away back in 2010 under her belt, Buckley’s performance as Ginty is intuitive, mesmerising and a minor revelation. As her scenes transform from pastoral idyllic to domestic unstable, Buckley displays a maturity and command of the material that few actresses her age would be capable of achieving, let alone maintaining, over the course of a two hour movie. She’s a remarkable find, and all credit to the casting director Ronna Kress for picking her out.

As Disney, Tom Hanks gives a comfortable performance but the script often sidelines him, so that he pops up only now and again to urge on Travers and perform a little light damage control when required. It’s effectively a supporting role, and one that doesn’t stretch him in any way. In other roles, Farrell as the inspiration for Mr Banks plays against type for the first half of the movie, while Wilson is given little to do as his wife other than look disappointed or, in one scene, have a five minute breakdown. Giamatti is good as Travers’ driver, and he provides several deft comic ripostes to Thompson’s sarcastic jibes. And in perhaps the most sublime casting decision of all, Rachel Griffiths messes with our acceptance of Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins by portraying the “real” Mary.

Saving Mr. Banks is lovely to watch, courtesy of bright, colourful photography by John Schwartzman (half-brother of Jason), and a pleasing recreation both of turn-of-the-20th-century Australia and 60’s Los Angeles. Disneyland is given an effective retro makeover, and the music by Thomas Newman – incorporating several of the songs from Mary Poppins (1964) – adds extra emotional elements to both storylines. If there is a lightness of touch, a slight distancing from the more dramatic aspects of Ginty’s childhood, then it should be remembered that this is still a Disney movie, and the studio that works hard to sanitise almost all of its family-oriented movies – and at heart this is still one of them, make no mistake – isn’t about to let people leave the cinema feeling saddened or depressed. Fortunately, Saving Mr. Banks carries enough emotional heft to offset its more calculated hilarity, and if there are moments where you wonder just how much of it all is true or not, the fact that Disney were banking on a much-loved “product” in Mary Poppins, also informs this movie as well.

Rating: 8/10 – enjoyable, handsomely mounted movie that avoids being as original as say, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”; and without Thompson in the lead role providing a strong point of reference for the audience, would have struggled to stand out from the crowd of other “true stories” set in Hollywood.

21/12/12 (2010)

10 Tuesday Dec 2013

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Chris Scheuerman, Drama, End of the world, Murders, New Image College of the Arts, Review, Short film, Suicide, Taylor Hastings

D: Chris Scheuerman / 16m

Cast: Taylor Hastings, Chris Donoghue, Aaron Baker, Edna Rojas, Beth Cantor, Anthony MacLean, Jordan Smith, Marianne Tikkanen

An intriguing short film from the New Image College of the Arts in Vancouver, 21/12/12 is set an hour before a mysterious event is due to bring about the end of the world. Various individuals’ lives collide and interconnect, and each tries to deal with what’s happening in different ways. One man tries to unburden himself by telling the woman he loves about two murders he committed, another gets himself shot while visiting an apartment to buy drugs, and the woman who shoots him finds herself stopping another man from jumping off their building. At the end, two women witness for themselves the mysterious event.

The question, What would you do if you only had an hour to live, is answered here in a variety of ways. The would-be suicide is reminded he doesn’t have to go to all the trouble when the event is bound to kill him anyway. A woman leaves her deluded boss – he wants to make last-minute transactions on the stock market to make himself a rich man when he dies – to find the woman she has been looking for for some time; it’s they who witness the mysterious event. And the woman who shoots the drug addict, goes out for some air.

A collection of untidy vignettes that vary in quality and significance, what stops 21/12/12 from being the small gem its writer/director/producer Scheuerman probably hoped for are its unexceptional characters, one-note for the most part, and matter-of-fact approach to the end of the world. Nobody displays any signs of panic or look upset, everybody is going about their business – the murderer aside – almost as if it were just another normal day in the big city. On the soundtrack there’s the sounds of rioting and looting, but again, the characters remain unaffected by it. If Scheuerman is saying that, even facing impending doom, people will remain self-centred and insular – even with the end of the world an hour away – then as an hypothesis he has a sound anthropological idea.

However, the dialogue is awkward and occasionally stilted, and not all the cast are as adept at coping with its idiosyncrasies as the rest. Two scenes, meant to be overtly dramatic, are undermined by the cast – and Scheuerman’s – inexperience. One is rushed, the other played more for laughs than it should be. The photography helps isolate the characters as they face the end, but the editing could have been a bit tighter: some scenes play out a little longer than necessary.

Rating: 5/10 – not bad for a college short film but 21/12/12 is worryingly vague about its intentions; a good idea that works intermittently and at the expense of a cohesive narrative.

X-Men: Apocalypse and Cinema’s Dependency on Superheroes

10 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Batman, Bryan Singer, Captain Phillips, DC, DC Universe, Iron Man, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Opinion piece, Paul Greengrass, Review, Superhero movies, Superman, Thor, Tom Hanks, X-Men

The announcement a couple of days ago that Bryan Singer would be directing another X-Men movie, due to be released in 2016, seemed equally exciting and dispiriting at the same time. When I first heard the news, my reaction was mixed: if the forthcoming Days of Future Past is as good as it looks then another X-Men movie, especially if it involves Apocalypse (a fan favourite), will be worth looking forward to. But then I also thought, they’re talking about a movie that won’t be here for another three years. Three years! Can anyone really be that excited by the prospect? And then I realised that yes, there probably was: that rare breed of upright ape, studio executives.

Ever since Marvel went all Phase One on us and released Iron Man (2008), the big studios have lagged behind in their efforts to match the returns that Marvel have made at the box office (at time of writing, the eight Marvel movies that have made it out of the gate so far – Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010), Thor (2011), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Marvel’s The Avengers (2012), Iron Man 3 (2013), and Thor: The Dark World (2013), have amassed over five and a half billion dollars). That level of success has definitely got the suits at Warner Bros., Sony and Fox practically scrambling to catch up. So now, in various stages of development we have the follow-up to Man of Steel (2013) which we now know will also feature Batman and Wonder Woman as well as Superman, reboots of Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and the upcoming X-Men movies, as well as the Spider-Man franchise which is going to run to at least four movies and may even spawn some off-shoot movies featuring characters from that particular strand of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

With Marvel committed to a Phase Three that will begin in 2015 with Ant Man, and continue with two movies in 2016 and one in 2017, it seems that we’ll be wading through big-budget superhero movies for some time to come. And while it’s true Marvel has been canny enough to attract the right talent both behind and in front of the camera – Kenneth Branagh? Did anyone see that coming? – and as a result have garnered a degree of critical acclaim, the fact is that the movies that the majority of people on the planet want to go and see at the moment involve weird men and women in weirder costumes. Now, I’m not some cineaste who thinks the only good movie is one that examines the plight of the dispossessed or that one ten minute static shot of an actor’s face eclipses any CGI-fuelled spectacle hands down, but I do have to question whether or not we’re losing some kind of perspective here. Don’t get me wrong, I look forward to seeing a Marvel movie as much as the next person (providing they’re not still living with their mum at the age of forty), but what are we missing when the adventures of a man in a high-tech tin suit, or an ex-wimp with a shiny shield command so much of our attention and excite us so much?

Is it the grand scale on which this particular brand of escapism is served up? Is it a combination of seeing characters previously only seen to good effect in comic books, now looking incredibly real on the big screen, and having them do all the things we’ve had to settle for seeing in flat old 2D? Perhaps. Or is it because the rest of the movies out there are pale and uninteresting in comparison, the skinny kid on the beach to Marvel’s Charles Atlas? I think it’s all these things, plus one more, one very important part of the whole package that Marvel have done, and continue to do, since Tony Stark first stomped out of that cave in 2008: tell the audience what they can expect next time…and then the time after that. Not in detail, but just enough to keep their attention from waning, and carefully spaced out between movies so that it’s always there, that knowledge that, like the legendary bus of English urban mythology, there’ll be another one along soon.

Which brings us back to the announcement that in 2016 we can all head down to our local multiplex and revel in the antics of a wheelchair-bound mind reader, a psychotic spoon bender, and their merry bands of malcontents. If I’m being a bit facetious with my descriptions of Professor Xavier and Magneto, it’s because I can’t help but think it comes back to perspective. The best film I’ve seen so far this year – by a nautical mile – is Captain Phillips. It is one of the most gripping, emotional, tension-filled dramas you’re ever likely to see, and despite the high drama depicted, it’s a relatively small-scale movie (until the US Navy arrives). It’s filmed with an emphasis on tight close-ups and even tighter locations: the bridge of the ship and its confines, and most of all, the lifeboat that houses Phillips and the four Somali pirates for about an hour. It’s tour-de-force filmmaking, bravura in its style and scope, and an emotional rollercoaster ride to boot; it’s quite simply, breathtaking. And yet, despite glowing reviews, an Oscar-worthy performance from Tom Hanks, and the exceptional directing talents of Paul Greengrass, more attention will have been paid to some blond bloke with a hammer and his sneaky adopted brother than to the real life story of a captain forced to engage tactically with Somali pirates.

Yes, but Marvel are making “entertainment”, I hear you say, their movies don’t have be deep and/or meaningful. And I would agree with you, except that Marvel themselves are trying their best to make sure their movies have some depth and/or meaning to them. These are largely tragic heroes, each trapped by fate or destiny into being the heroes that they are, and yet longing for peace, and mostly for themselves. But ultimately, and in spite of Marvel’s good intentions, the focus will always remain on blowing things up, or knocking things down, or fighting. The spectacle is what matters most. Imagine turning up to see the next Thor movie, only to find it’s two hours of Thor and Jane Foster discussing their relationship à la Before Midnight (2013). The fans would stay away in their millions. Ultimately, Marvel are giving people what they want, and the other studios will follow suit until the sight of yet another superhero crashing unscathed through yet another building is considered passé, and we all move on to the next big genre, whether it’s Westerns, or musicals, or play-doh animation.

For me, the news that Bryan Singer will be directing X-Men: Apocalypse for release in 2016 is neither good nor bad. At this stage it’s very much an unknown quantity; it may not even happen. What frightens me most, I guess, is that, already, too many people care about the announcement and the proposed movie for it to be a truly good thing. Call me an old curmudgeon but if you’re excited by a movie that you won’t see for three years, and you can’t wait for it to get here, then the marketers and the sales guys and the executives and the CEOs have all won the jackpot in advance… only you’ll be providing the winnings. Opt for a kind of studied indifference instead. Damn it, make them work really hard for your attention!

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to let me know.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

10 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, District 12, Donald Sutherland, Drama, Francis Lawrence, Gale, Haymitch, Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Katniss Everdeen, Mockingjay, Peeta, Philip Seymour Hoffman, President Snow, Review, Sci-fi, Suzanne Collins, Woody Harrelson

D: Francis Lawrence / 146m

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, Lenny Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Amanda Plummer, Sam Claflin, Toby Jones, Jena Malone, Willow Shields

Picking up from the end of The Hunger Games, part two of the franchise – Mockingjay is being adapted into two parts, due in 2014 and 2015 respectively – sees Katniss Everdeen (Lawrence) trying to fit in to a post-Games world where she is now seen as a symbol of hope for the beleaguered districts. Becoming increasingly aware of the social injustice around her, Katniss tries her best to balance protecting her family from the less-than-veiled threats of President Snow (Sutherland) against the increasing demands made of her to be the symbol that promotes the resistance. With things made even more difficult by her mixed feelings for Peeta (Hutcherson), and the attentions of Gale (Hemsworth), Katniss finds herself struggling to find her way in a world that is changing rapidly both around her, and because of her.

Aware of her increasing importance to the resistance movement, President Snow plots to destroy her with the help of new Games Master Plutarch Heavensbee (Hoffman). In order to do this the next Hunger Games is designed to pit Katniss against the remaining winners in a kind of Best of the Best tournament. She also has to contend with Peeta taking part as well and trying to keep him safe. For his part, Peeta wants to keep Katniss safe in order for her to remain a beacon of hope. With both of them striking deals with Haymitch (Harrelson) to protect the other, Katniss is unaware that their are deeper political manoeuvrings going on behind the scenes, manoeuvrings that will have a greater effect on her life than she could ever imagine.

As that awkward beast, the middle part of a trilogy, Catching Fire builds on the first movie’s strengths and benefits immensely from an even more assured and commanding turn from Lawrence. She dominates proceedings from start to finish, eclipsing her co-stars with ease – no mean feat given the calibre of actors such as Hoffman and Sutherland – and gives such a layered, intelligent performance that it almost threatens to overwhelm the rest of the movie. Full marks to director Lawrence and screenwriters Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt then for making Catching Fire such an exciting, dramatic episode that grips throughout, and successfully juggles the widening story arc with more intimate moments and the kind of cutting-edge visuals we’ve come to expect from big-budget sci-fi movies.

With the movie in such assured hands, Catching Fire is free to impress on even further levels: the gritty realism of District 12 contrasted with the spectacular opulence of the Capitol, both triumphs of art direction and production design; the costumes courtesy of Trish Summerville (her costumes for Effie Trinket (Banks) are even more outlandish than those of the first movie); the score by James Newton Howard, by turns austere, stirring and richly evocative from scene to scene, supporting effortlessly the emotional and physical elements; and the superb photography by Jo Willems, a feast for the eyes and even more impressive when seen at an IMAX cinema – the Hunger Games tournament is played out in the full IMAX format; it adds a whole new dimension to the movie, and the scale is suitably impressive: the lagoon seems impossibly huge and the forest thickly impenetrable.

But the scale of the movie is nothing without the characters that inhabit it, and here the cast display a greater confidence in their roles, while newcomers such as Hoffman, Claflin and Malone fit in with ease. As already noted, Lawrence is excellent, while Hutcherson and Hemsworth overcome the limitations of the source material to forge much stronger characters than you’d expect. Sutherland is as icy as the President’s name implies, and Hoffman creates a devious sadist in Heavensbee: all self-satisfied smiles and preening behaviour. Tucci excels (as always) as the overly coiffed broadcaster Caesar Flickerman, Wright and Plummer have small but important roles as fellow Victors Beetee and Wiress, and once again, as Haymitch, Harrelson proves what a versatile actor he is by nearly stealing the movie out from under Lawrence – but only nearly.

With two more films to come, the producers have given themselves a hard task to overcome. Catching Fire, in terms of the novels, was the point at which author Suzanne Collins began to lose her grip on the overall storyline. Where Katniss and Peeta and Gale go from here is already known by millions; the trick will be to turn what was a largely disappointing resolution to Katniss’s story into something as exhilarating as this adaptation. It will be interesting to see if they manage it.

Rating: 9/10 – a bold adaptation that retains all the strengths of the novel, and manages to jettison all the aspects that marred it; a rare sequel that stands on its own and towers over its predecessor.

The Family (2013)

08 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Comedy, Drama, Hitman, Luc Besson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Normandy, Review, Robert DeNiro, the Mob, Tommy Lee Jones, Witness Protection

D: Luc Besson / 111m

Cast: Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tommy Lee Jones, Dianna Agron, John D’Leo, Jimmy Palumbo, Domenick Lombardozzi, Stan Carp, Vincent Pastore, Jon Freda

Having ratted on his bosses in the Mob, Giovanni Manzoni (De Niro) and his family – wife Maggie (Pfeiffer), daughter Belle (Agron) and son Warren (D’Leo) – are living in France under the Witness Protection Program. Following an incident at their placement on the Riviera, the Manzonis are moved to a quiet Normandy town where their handler, CIA agent Robert Stansfield (Jones), hopes they’ll settle down and stay out of trouble. While the Manzonis (now the Blakes) try to fit in, a hitman (Freda) is trying to track them down.

Each member of the family does their best to adapt to their new surroundings but with varied results. Giovanni begins writing his memoirs, Maggie takes an interest in a nearby church, Belle fends off the advances of the local teenage boys and falls in love with a mature student, while Warren takes over the various rackets at their school. They all encounter problems along the way, and each deals with these problems in their own way: Giovanni with violence, Belle with violence, Warren with violence, and Maggie with violence but then followed by her making confession. It’s their inability to fit in without reverting to their Mob ways that causes Stansfield to threaten them with yet another relocation, especially after he reads Giovanni’s memoirs and realises how dangerous they could be if anyone outside the family were to read them. But then the hitman and his gang find them, and everyone has to pull together to keep the Manzonis alive.

Ostensibly a comedy, The Family is ultimately a bit of a mixed bag. Besson, directing from a script co-written with Michael Caleo, adds drama, romance, action, a lot of casual violence, a wonderful moment for De Niro at a film screening, and a soupçon of domestic troubles. The main characters are well-drawn: Giovanni is both naturally aggressive and yet also quite melancholy and thoughtful, while Maggie appears lonely and struggling to adjust; she’s a mother whose role is no longer as clearly defined as it was back in New York. Belle is sophisticated and yet naïve at the same time: she misunderstands the situation with the mature student, and takes too much for granted. And Warren finds he’s not quite the clever gangster he thought he was. All four actors are on top form, De Niro providing a world-weary performance that belies the uncompromising mobster he’ll always be at heart; he’s a joy to watch. Pfeiffer revisits her character from Married to the Mob (1987), and gives a shaded turn where her unhappiness at her family’s situation is offset by her obvious pride and love for them. As the children, Agron (from TV’s Glee) is confident, poised and vulnerable, and D’Leo plays Warren with an equal confidence that is impressive for his age.

What spoils the movie though is the continuing shifts in tone. Beginning with a hit on a family (and providing Freda with a great entrance) that is horribly violent, the movie shifts uneasily between moments of light humour – there are no really laugh-out-loud moments in the movie – and more and more extreme bouts of violence: Belle taking a tennis racket to a teenage boy’s face, Giovanni fantasising about pushing a man’s face onto a barbecue grill. These episodes, meant to remind the audience perhaps that these people, after all, were part of the Mob and have done some horrible things in the past, serve only to show that, Giovanni’s writing aside, the experience of being in the Witness Protection Program hasn’t changed them at all; if anything, they are using their unique skill-sets to dominate their community just as they used to do. It’s this lack of personal improvement or growth that undermines the characters and makes them appear close to stereotypes. There’s also an unpleasant whiff of institutionalised racism that runs throughout the movie, with the Manzonis the target of some unvarnished cultural attacks (“they eat hamburgers morning, noon and night”); the family’s only response is to have a barbecue for their neighbours where they serve only American food, and of course, the French all go away very happy.

The movie also isn’t quite as funny as it thinks it is, and shifts in tone aside, fails to hit the mark too often. It’s largely predictable and while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing with this type of movie, with the cast involved you’d hope for something a little richer, and with more surprises. The final shootout is well-staged and shows Besson is still more than adept at shooting action scenes. The preceding set-up is equally well-staged and quite gripping. If only the previous hour and a half had been the same. That said, Thierry Arbogast’s photography is deceptively fluid and gives certain scenes an almost painterly finish, and the score by Sacha and Evgueni Galperine subtly enhances things throughout.

Rating: 6/10 – only fitfully entertaining, and saved by strong performances; The Family won’t change your life, but then it hasn’t changed theirs either.

Zombex (2013)

07 Saturday Dec 2013

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Chandler Pharmaceuticals, David Christopher, Drama, Emily Kaye, Horror, Jesse Dayton, Lew Temple, Malcolm McDowell, New Orleans, Review, Zombies

D: Jesse Dayton / 81m

Cast: Lew Temple, Malcolm McDowell, David Christopher, Emily Kaye, Desiree McKinney, Pierre Kennel, Sid Haig, John Doe, Corey Feldman

An attempt at bringing something new to the zombie genre, Zombex has a fast-tracked drug devised to help the residents of New Orleans worst affected by the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, brought front and centre as the reason why people are transformed into flesh-eating monsters (the word zombie isn’t actually used in the movie). The drug is the brainchild of Dr Soulis (McDowell); he works for Chandler Pharmaceuticals. The company, led by Rush Chandler (Kennel), refuses to accept any blame for the chaos and death happening in New Orleans and employs a private security consultant Katie Ann (Kaye) to provide a “final solution” involving the killing and removal of all the affected. Also caught up in Chandler’s rearguard action are radio DJ Aldous Huxtable (Temple), and musician Charlie Thibideaux (Christopher). Huxtable uses his radio show to rail against Chandler Pharmaceuticals; when he receives a package from the military containing an antidote to the drug created by Soulis, he determines to travel to Austin, Texas where there are further supplies, and to bring more of the antidote back to New Orleans. Thibideaux, whose parents are among the first victims of the drug, agrees to help him.

For the first thirty minutes or so, Zombex succeeds in its aim of telling a different story from the standard zombie outing. The characters are introduced with an economy and flair that bodes well for the rest of the movie, and Dayton’s script, while keeping the narrative fragmented at first, is sure-footed and absorbing. Some of the dialogue isn’t quite as convincing but Huxtable’s on-air rants are certainly entertaining. Then Thibideaux and Huxtable hit the road for Austin, and the movie’s confidence in itself begins to wane.

As a road movie, Zombex is where things begin to go seriously wrong. The tension drains away, Huxtable and Thibideaux pick up Katie Ann and her subordinate Thea (McKinney), and the journey is peppered with random attacks that serve to thin the cast and provide a series of gory moments that are an awkward mix of practical effects and CGI. There are equally awkward digressions: an unnecessary sex scene between Katie Ann and Thea (watched by Thibideaux), a repeat of a scene involving Thibideaux outside his parents’ house, and the attack on Rush Chandler and his family (this last example is troubling because it’s never clear where Chandler lives or works but the impression is given that it’s outside New Orleans and the affected are supposed to be restricted to that area). And the movie ends abruptly, with the rug pulled out from under the audience.

Budgetary considerations aside, Dayton, making his first outing as a writer/director, manages to keep things (mostly) interesting throughout, though events become increasingly risible. There’s the small matter of Katie Ann being a dancer in a club as well as a security consultant – it’s how she and Thibideaux first meet – and the issue of her wearing hot pants and a low-cut top from the time she meets Thibideaux and Huxtable despite having been seen killing the affected in faux-combat gear. (Thea’s change of costume is even more revealing.) The affected pop up all over the place: at the side of the road, out of lakes, even appearing suddenly in a room in a secure building. And one character’s fate – while packing an emotional heft lacking from the rest of the movie – comes across as an idea Dayton had while writing the script and decided to keep in, even though the reason behind it is tenuous at best.

The cast provide mixed performances, with Temple a stand out as the verbose, never-quite-knowing-when-to-keep-quiet DJ. Christopher copes fairly well with the dialogue but uses only a couple of expressions from start to finish, while Kaye has the amateur’s talent for stressing the wrong syllables and distorting the meaning of what’s being said. McDowell looks bored but still manages to shine in a role that requires him to spout a terrible amount of exposition, Kennel plays it one-note as the self-centred Chandler, while Haig reminds everyone why he only gets cameo roles these days: he’s just plain bad (and in possibly the world’s worst military outfit; he looks more like the commandante of a South American dictatorship than an army man). And let’s not forget Feldman, who enters the first of his two scenes as if he’s late and the scene’s been filming past his entrance.

The photography by Allan Curtis is bright and energetic, and Dayton frames each scene with a more experienced eye than you’d expect. Further on the technical side, Zombex features some good make up effects, and the music by Stuart Rau is quietly atmospheric and supports the action well. Zombex is well-mounted from start to finish, and looks like a movie with a much bigger budget.

Rating: 5/10 – let down by its road movie mentality, Zombex struggles to maintain and capitalise on its early promise; not the car wreck it could have been but still a disappointment.

Illegal Aliens (2007)

05 Thursday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Aliens taking over the world, Anna Nicole Smith, Chyna, Comedy, David Giancola, Joanie Laurer, Megagravitron, Review, Sci-fi

D: David Giancola / 96m

Cast: Lenise Sorén, Gladise Jimenez, Anna Nicole Smith, Joanie Laurer, Kevin McGuire, Patrick Burleigh, Dennis Lemoine, Woody Keppel, Michael J. Valentine

This low-budget mash-up of Charlie’s Angels and Men in Black deserves some kind of award for the most movie references shoved – sometimes unwillingly – into one movie. From random shots to one-liners to visual effects to footage lifted from other movies, Illegal Aliens proves to be a surprisingly enjoyable experience; it even raises a smile with its fart jokes.

Three aliens – Cameron (Sorén), Drew (Jimenez) and Lucy (Smith) – are sent to Earth to protect it from potential invasion by other aliens. They set up shop in Hollywood as stunt coordinators (did I mention how far-fetched this movie was?), and for three years all is quiet until a renegade alien (Laurer) lands on Earth and takes over the body of a mob boss’s wife. The alien, Rex, takes over as mob boss and uses the mob to help her (yes, Rex is a she, even in alien form) steal various items which, together, will allow her to build a megagravitron, a device that will pull the Moon into the Earth and destroy all life. Backed by holographic know-it-all Syntax (McGuire), our three heroines vow to stop Rex’s plan and save the Earth.

That Illegal Aliens is cheesy, cheap and chock-full of over-acting, often woeful special effects and too many “Jeez, they didn’t!” moments, is actually to miss the point. This movie is deliberately cheesy and cheap etc. What else can you say about a movie that has a Main Villian Monologue Timer appear on screen when Rex explains her motivation for what she’s doing? (And yes, that is how ‘villain’ is spelt onscreen.) And how else do you explain the occasional breaking of the fourth wall, particularly at the movie’s end? And yet, for the most part, it works. If you take the movie for what it is, and not try to make too much out of it, then it’s actually a rewarding experience. But you also have to have a liking for this kind of movie already. If you go into this one blind, then all you’ll see is a silly spoof that makes too much of Lucy being brainless, Laurer adding a maniacal laugh at the end of almost every sentence, and underling Ray (Lemoine) being shot several times over and yet still going strong at the movie’s end.

As for the acting, Sorén and Jimenez do well in spoofing the Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith roles from the original Charlie’s Angels, while Smith – in what was her last movie – does the ditzy klutz role (worryingly) to perfection; she’s like a child that’s too distracted to learn things properly. Laurer, better known as WWE wrestler Chyna, is surprisingly good as Rex, downplaying her physicality and using her voice and facial expressions to good effect, and channelling her inner Vincent D’Onofrio. Giancola keeps it all moving at a good pace, and and the action sequences, again, are better than expected – especially the one lifted from Red Heat (1987). The humour is broad, there is a fair amount of slapstick, and the whole thing is done with a knowing wink to the audience: look out for the guard who won’t fight Jimenez because his shift has just ended.

NOTE: This was a troubled shoot, with Smith proving unreliable within the first few days of filming; at the time she had personal issues surrounding her marriage. If you’re interested in finding out more about the movie’s production and what was going on behind the scenes then watch Addicted to Fame (2012).

Rating: 6/10 – a silly sci-fi spoof that hits the mark more often than it (perhaps) has a right to do; one for the fans and anyone who likes frat humour.

Originally posted on thedullwoodexperiment website.

Paranoia (2013)

04 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Amber Heard, Commercial fraud, Communications, Drama, Gary Oldman, Harrison Ford, Liam Hemsworth, Review, Robert Luketic, Smart phone, Thriller

D: Robert Luketic / 106m

Cast: Liam Hemsworth, Gary Oldman, Amber Heard, Harrison Ford, Lucas Till, Embeth Davidtz, Julian McMahon, Josh Holloway, Richard Dreyfuss

When the final history of movies comes to be written, and all the various genres and sub-genres are assessed and valued, one type of movie will probably be given short shrift by its assessors: the industrial espionage thriller. In the real world, the cut and thrust of commercial enterprise, with often billions – and companies’ reputations – at stake, must play out with some degree of dramatic potential, but when it comes to the movies, this dramatic potential is all too often squandered for the sake of cinematic familiarity. And so it goes with Paranoia, a thriller based around the power play between two communications empires and the youngish would-be player who gets caught in the middle.

The player is Adam Cassidy (Hemsworth), an entry-level employee working for Nicolas Wyatt (Oldman). When a pitch to secure a position at Wyatt’s company fails disastrously, Adam decides to have one last splurge on his company credit card. $16,000 later, he finds himself being blackmailed by Wyatt into going to work for Wyatt’s long-time rival, Jock Goddard (Ford). Once he has Goddard’s trust and knows his way around the company, Adam’s task is to steal details of the new, revolutionary smart phone that Goddard is planning to release onto the market. Along the way Adam meets and falls for Emma Jennings (Heard), an executive at Goddard’s company. As Wyatt increases the pressure on Adam to get the info he needs, Adam must decide if the path he has chosen is the right one.

The problem with Paranoia – aside from the fact that the movie is mis-titled – is that we don’t care about anyone in the movie…at all. We’re supposed to feel sorry for Adam because his dad Frank (Dreyfuss) is ill and it’s a struggle for them to pay for the mounting medical bills. But Frank, who is on oxygen a lot of the time, continues to smoke; it’s this that gets him hospitalised and pushes the costs up. When Adam loses his job with Wyatt he doesn’t consider his responsibilities, he just goes out with his team and runs up a huge bill, another one he can’t pay. So when Wyatt blackmails Adam into working for him as an industrial spy, there’s no sympathy for him at all. (I wanted him to really suffer as the movie went on but Adam is the “hero” in the movie, so that only goes so far.) Even when Wyatt threatens to hurt Frank if Adam doesn’t go along with his plan, you’re left thinking “yeah, that’s fair enough”. Adam is a slightly older version of the ‘callow youth’ the movies like to put in peril every so often, but here it doesn’t work. He’s simply not a good enough person for the audience to get behind. Even when he begins to realise the real position he’s in, it’s still a case of “you got yourself into this mess…”.

As Adam, Hemsworth fails to make any connection with the audience, playing him as someone who thinks he’s smart but who actually hasn’t learnt anything in his twenty-seven years on the planet. Hemsworth is not the greatest actor in the world – watch how he tries to explain to Emma that he’s done some things he should have told her about – and there are times when the relevant emotion comes along a beat or two after it’s required, but as the character isn’t fully formed anyway – thanks to Jason Dean Hall and Barry L. Levy’s unconvincing screenplay – he does the best he can under the circumstances. Oldman uses an awkward mix of Cockney and mid-Atlantic vocal swagger as the keystone of his performance, while Heard, an actress who has yet to realise her full potential, is given little to do other than appear vapid and superficially strong. It’s Ford who impresses most, although that’s not saying much; he’s saddled with some of the most turgid dialogue this side of Star Wars (so he’s probably used to it), but at least he puts some energy and commitment into his performance, even if it counts, ultimately, for nothing. In a supporting role, McMahon exudes icy menace as Wyatt’s enforcer, Meechum, but Davidtz, as Wyatt’s PA, looks embarrassed throughout.

The direction by Robert Luketic is low-key and close to pedestrian, while the photography offers an almost wintry, subdued look that matches the downbeat aspects of the storyline and the grubby nature of the proceedings. The script struggles to add depth or texture to both events and characters, and the outcome can be seen from a mile off (you could even say it was phoned in). As a thriller, Paranoia never really hits the mark, and as a drama it’s too undercooked to be effective. Everyone involved has done better elsewhere, and probably will do again. What matters here is whether or not a hundred and five minutes of your time could be used doing something better instead.

Rating: 5/10 – an unimaginative thriller that goes through the motions for most of its running time, Paranoia never engages its audience or provides a way in to become involved; a shame then considering the talent taking part.

Un prince (presque) charmant (2013)

04 Wednesday Dec 2013

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Comedy, French movie, Jacques Weber, Luc Besson, Philippe Lellouche, Review, Road trip, Romance, Romantic comedy, Vahina Giocante, Vincent Perez

aka A Prince (Not Very) Charming

D: Philippe Lellouche / 88m

Cast: Vincent Perez, Vahina Giocante, Jérôme Kircher, Chloé Coulloud, Jacques Weber, Nicole Calfan, Côme Levin, Judith Siboni, Astrid Veillon

Businessman Jean-Marc (Perez), along with his partner Bertrand (Kircher), has clinched an important deal with a Russian company, but at the expense of a small, family-run business he’s dealt with for years. Incensed by his attitude, and the fact that her father’s company won’t survive without Jean-Marc’s patronage, Marie (Giocante) heads to Paris to confront him. However, Jean-Marc is heading out of Paris for his daughter’s wedding; her name is also Marie (Coulloud), and she is sure her father won’t make it, so focused is he on his work. A general strike doesn’t help matters, and with one mishap after another – including having to abandon his car and use an electric car instead – Jean-Marc and Marie end up travelling together, he to the wedding, she back to her home town and her parents’ farmhouse. When they arrive at Marie’s parents’, Jean-Marc discovers who Marie is but keeps quiet about his own identity, having begun to realise he is in love with her. With the wedding getting ever closer, and still more hold-ups to come, can Jean-Marc get there on time, and can he find a way to keep his budding romance with Marie from failing when she, inevitably, finds out who he is.

With a script by Luc Besson, this is a charming romantic comedy with a modicum of dramatic moments dotted here and there. Besson packs a lot in to the short running time, and the story is ably realised by Lellouche, showing off the French countryside to beautiful effect, and his two leads in the same manner. Perez is wonderful, arrogant and egotistical at the beginning but gradually coming to terms with what he’s missed by being so fixated on his work. Giocante matches Perez in the performance stakes, and makes her aggrieved daughter a more fully-rounded character than at first might be expected. The dialogue, while not really that original or sparkling, is still affecting in places and Besson is clever enough to avoid the potential pitfalls from such a clichéd scenario. The supporting cast provide much of the laughs, but it’s a gentle humour that runs throughout the movie, and it never overwhelms the romantic storyline.

To be fair, this is the kind of movie the French can do in their sleep, and if it’s not the most original of storylines or plots, it doesn’t really matter. The familiar set up, the predictable outcome, the warmth even estranged characters have for each other – Jean-Marc and his ex-wife Liliane (Veillon) – all these things act to reassure the viewer that there won’t be any nasty surprises, and the course of true love, while never quite running smooth, will have a satisfactory ending, whatever the obstacles in its way.

Rating: 6/10 – a minor but enjoyable effort, heart-warming and inoffensive at the same time; perfect for a romantic evening in with your partner of choice.

Sharknado (2013)

03 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Drama, Hurricane, Ian Ziering, John Heard, Review, Sci-fi, Sharks, SyFy Channel, Tara Reid, The Asylum, Thriller, Tornados

D: Anthony C. Ferrante / 86m

Cast: Ian Ziering, Tara Reid, Cassie Scerbo, Jaason Simmons, John Heard, Alex Arleo, Chuck Hittinger, Aubrey Peeples

With a title like Sharknado, this movie already has one strike against it. That it’s also made by The Asylum for the SyFy Channel makes two more. And… it’s out!

Any movie should be given the benefit of the doubt. As the saying correctly has it, don’t criticise what you haven’t seen. But there are times when to say this would be wrong, when the whole concept of a fair hearing, and leaving your prejudices at the door, is completely, totally and utterly a lost cause. And ladies and gentlemen, here is one of those times.

Let’s not beat around the bush: Sharknado isn’t so bad it’s good, it’s just plain awful, and in ways that you can’t anticipate. It takes the idea of low-concept movie making to somewhere below the acceptable nadir, and stakes its claim as the most inept, appalling movie ever made. There are levels of bad this movie practically races past in its efforts to be dreadful. If there was a clear intention to make the worst movie possible, and the filmmakers actually sat down and planned it to look and sound like this then, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there can be only one verdict handed down this day: life imprisonment without hope of parole.

Beginning with a confusing scene set aboard a fishing boat, Sharknado sets out its stall of fake goods from the start. A storm hoves into view and before you can say “holy flying sharks” the crew are all eaten by sharks that are being thrown about like tooth picks by the violent winds. The movie then switches focus to the California coastline and bar owner/surfer Fin (Ziering). When sharks that are attempting to outrun the storm – hey, I’m guessing here – start chewing on the local surfers and swimmers, including Fin’s pal Baz (Simmons), Fin, along with feisty bar girl Nova (Scerbo) and permanent lush George (Heard), decides that everyone needs to get to higher ground, as it’s a sure thing the storm – now upgraded to a hurricane – is going to cause untold devastation and, wait a minute! Aren’t those sharks swirling around in the hurricane? And aren’t they liable to just fall out of the sky at any minute and chomp on whoever’s unfortunate to hang around for dinner?

With his estranged family – ex-wife April (Reid), son Matt (Hittinger), and daughter Claudia (Peeples) – living up in the hills, Fin and his entourage head over to rescue them. With all sorts of obstacles in their way – flooded roads, marauding sharks popping up at every turn, the hurricane getting nearer as well – it looks unlikely they’ll live long enough to make it. But they’re a plucky bunch, and before you can say “holy plot contrivances” they reach Fin’s family; once April’s new boyfriend is reduced to so much chum, they make a break for the airbase where Matt is doing some ATC work, and from there devise a plan to kill all the sharks, stop the hurricane in its tracks (it’s now subdivided into three huge water spouts), and save the California coastline from further devastation/a colossal insurance bill/being the source of the end of the world. (Any of these could be true.)

Just writing that synopsis is difficult enough. Seeing Sharknado in all its non-glory is harder still. Yes, The Asylum make bad movies, yes the SyFy Channel is home to some of the worst monster mash-ups in recent history (Sharktopus (2010) anyone?), but this is just the worst kind of cynical movie making, with a script that makes no sense at all, where the characters behave like they were lobotomised a short while before everything went wrong, where the direction has all the style and originality of a toddler’s tea party, where the cast struggle and then give up quickly with any attempts at real acting (“just say the lines, keep your head down and it’ll all soon be over”), where the woeful special effects plumb new depths of ineptitude, where cutaways and inserts provide most of the photographic style, where the editing seems less fluid and more cut and splice with a hacksaw, and where the occasional gore effects are – surprise! – the only halfway decent aspect of the movie. Sharknado is so bad it’s appalling, and so appalling it’s devoid of any worth at all.

If you have to watch Sharknado, and I suspect there are plenty of you out there for whom this will be as much a challenge as a must-see, then take this one piece of advice with you into the living room/lounge/den/bedroom/wherever: have no expectations whatsoever; that way you’ll survive the experience relatively intact.

Rating: 1/10 – saved from my first ever 0/10 rating by the acceptable gore effects (too few and far between though); atrocious, incompetent and utterly irredeemable as cinema, all those involved should hang their heads in shame.

Jekhane Bhooter Bhoy (2012)

03 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Anath Babur Bhoy, Bhut Bhabishyat, Brown Saheber Bari, Drama, Ghost stories, Ghosts, Horror, India, Paran Banerjee, Review, Sandip Ray, Satyajit Ray, Tarini Khuro

D: Sandip Ray / 105m

Cast: Paran Banerjee, Dwijen Banerjee, Abir Chatterjee, Bhaswar Chatterjee, Biswajit Chakraborty, Saswata Chatterjee, Abanti Mohan Bandyopadhyay

A trio of ghost stories – two by Satyajit Ray, one by Saradindu Bandopadhyay – Jekhane Bhooter Bhoy (roughly translated it means “where there is a fear of ghosts”) opens with a character created by Satyajit Ray, Tarini Khuro (Paran Banerjee), travelling to the home of a friend. There are five children there and once settled with tea, Khuro begins to tell the first of the three stories, Anath Babur Bhoy. On a trip to Raghunathpur, a writer meets Anath Babu (Dwijen Banerjee), a semi-famous ghost hunter on his way to visit the reputedly haunted Halder Bari, a dilapidated mansion on the outskirts of the town. Babu aims to spend the night there and see for himself if the story that no one who spends the night there is alive the next morning.

The second tale, Brown Saheber Bari, concerns a diary that has come into the possession of a bank employee, Ranjan Sengupta (Abir Chatterjee). The diary was written by a man named Brown, and in it there are constant references to someone called Simon. Ranjan is convinced that Simon’s ghost haunts the house where Brown lived, and with his friend Aneek (Bhaswar Chatterjee) and associate Mr Banerjee (Chakraborty), arranges to stay there for the night in the hope of proving his theory.

The final tale, Bhut Bhabishyat, sees a writer, Pratap Sarkar (Saswata Chatterjee), renting a place in Raipur where he aims to write his latest novel. One night he is surprised by a ghost, Nandadulal Nandy (also Paran Banerjee). Initially astonished but unafraid, when the ghost reappears, Sarkar speaks to him, and so discovers a tale of woe that leads him to helping the ghost ensure his family, who are struggling financially, are taken care of.

As a compendium of classic ghost stories, Jekhane Bhooter Bhoy works only occasionally, with the framing device of only minimal interest, and each story lacking any real scares. There’s a reverence to the material that undermines the effectiveness of each tale, and while Ray directs efficiently and elicits good performances from all concerned, the movie fails to make much of an impact. The first tale has an impressive haunted house, the location being creepy all by itself, and the set up is well handled but the payoff is predictable and banal. The second tale takes quite a while to get going, and though the cast in this segment do their best to “sell” the supernatural elements, the twist in the tale is badly executed and skirts dangerously close to being unintentionally humorous. Humour, though, is essential to the third tale, as the machinations of Nandy are played deliberately for laughs, and of the three stories, this is the most successful. That said, it sits uneasily against the other stories, played as they are for their scare factors, and while the playing by both Saswata Chatterjee and Paran Banerjee is a delight to watch, it’s this change in direction that undercuts the (minor) power of the two previous segments.

Visually, the movie isn’t all that impressive either. It’s a bit murky at times, and while the lighting of the first two tales is shadowy in relation to the mood and content of the stories, it serves only to make things look unnecessarily gloomy. A spooky atmosphere is supplied only in the first tale (courtesy of the dilapidated mansion and its locale), while any sense of unease is diminished due to a distancing from the material that doesn’t help the viewer get involved in what’s happening on screen. It’s almost as if Ray was loathe to try anything new with the material. As a result it’s hard to feel anything other than a kind of creeping lassitude.

Rating: 5/10 – an overly safe retelling of three classic Indian ghost stories, bolstered by good performances but ultimately falling short in its ambition; worth a look to see how it’s done elsewhere, just don’t expect anything too compelling, or scary.

10 Reasons to Remember Paul Walker (1973-2013)

03 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Actor, Brian Conner, Career, Movies, Paul Walker

Paul Walker (12 September 1973 – 30 November 2013)

I first encountered Walker in The Fast and the Furious (2001), but he’d been working solidly in film and TV since 1986 (his debut movie was Monster in the Closet). My first reaction was that he might get typecast as the “pretty boy” hero, and while subsequent Fast and Furious movies did little to dispel that idea, it was in some of his non-franchise work that you could see an actor able to give a lot more than might have been expected. The underrated The Death and Life of Bobby Z (2007) showed he had the kind of acting ability that would stand him in good stead as he grew older, while his supporting turn in Flags of Our Fathers (2006) proved that he could respond to and step up for a strong director (in this case, Clint Eastwood). Even in the testosterone-filled and entirely risible Takers (2010) he managed to stand out from a very impressive crowd.

Walker was a likeable actor, unfussy perhaps in his style and performances but always confident and rarely disappointing. It’s always difficult to envisage a young actor – I was surprised to learn he was recently forty, God did he have good genes! – when they’re older and what work they’ll be doing. But I think if Walker were still with us, he’d have matured into a fine character actor.

1 – Pleasantville (1998)

2 – She’s All That (1999)

3 – The Fast and the Furious (2001)

4 – Joy Ride (2001)

5 – Running Scared (2006)

6 – Eight Below (2006)

7 – The Death and Life of Bobby Z (2007)

8 – The Lazarus Project (2008)

9 – Fast Five (2011)

10 – Hours (2013)

1812: Lancers Ballad (2012)

03 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Borodino, Dirigible, Drama, French history, History, Napoleon, Oleg Fesenko, Period movie, Review, Russian history, Sergey Bezrukov, The Three Musketeers

Original title: 1812 Ulanskaya ballada

aka 1812: Ballad of the Uhlans

D: Oleg Fesenko / 98m

Cast: Anton Sokolov, Anna Chipovskaya, Sergey Bezrukov, Valeriy Nikolaev, Pawel Delag, Gediminas Adomaitis, Anatoliy Belyy, Olga Kabo, Eric Fraticelli, Sergei Zhuravel

Napoleon Bonaparte (Fraticelli) is planning to do battle with the Russians at Borodino. An unscrupulous nobleman, De Vitte (Nikolaev) steals the details of the Russian positions and presents them to the French leader. The treachery is overheard by young Russian Aleksey (Sokolov), who has come to assassinate Bonaparte but finds himself chased back to the Russian lines. There he informs Field Marshal Kutuzov (Zhuravel) of the diminutive invader’s plans. Kutuzov rewards Aleksey with a commission in the Lancers, where he meets Gorzhevskiy (Bezrukov), de Kolenkur (Adomaitis) and Kiknadze (Belyy). Together, the quartet are sent behind enemy lines to retrieve the Empress’s crown which has been appropriated by Napoleon. They discover De Vitte has stolen the crown for himself, and determine to retrieve it. All the while they are being chased by Polish officer Ledokhovskiy (Delag).

With a love interest for Aleksey provided by Beata (Chipovskaya), a maid of the Countess Walewska, and fight sequences/explosions galore, 1812: Lancers Ballad is a lunatic reworking of the Three Musketeers with De Vitte in the Milady de Winter role, and any pretense of originality or logic dispensed with within the first few minutes. The script by Gleb Shprigov is amateurish, with dreadful dialogue (even worse probably when subtitled), implausible motivations, lifeless characters, shoddy plotting, and the sense that whole pages were torn out just prior to filming. Scenes stumble and collide with each other, and Arunas Baraznauskas’ photography comes complete with arbitrary angles and desultory, washed-out lighting so bad the cast all look ill. The movie gives a home to a jumble of poorly choreographed and edited action scenes – Fesenkov loves his slo-mo – while the cast drown under a welter of unconvincing good intentions, and subsequently, no turn should be left unstoned. Sokolov, in particular, serves up a prime slice of ham pie, while everyone else does their best not to look too embarrassed (and fail).

Fesenkov directs proceedings with all the flair and accuracy of a blind man at a firing range, leaving the plot to hang out to dry in favour of one more underwhelming explosion. He leaves the cast to find their own way, shows no interest in constructing a coherent visual narrative, and fails to grasp the fact that even the most ridiculous of action movies has to have action sequences that are exciting. Here they’re a reminder that it’s all been done before and better, even in Paul W.S. Anderson’s laughable The Three Musketeers (2011). (Hang on, does that count as an achievement?) And let’s not even mention the glaring historical errors and inconsistencies.

As an historical drama, the movie makes for a decent comedy, and if you’re a connoisseur of bad movies then this will be right up your стреэт. Inept, nonsensical, incoherent, witless, 1812: Lancers Ballad is such a misfire that it really has to be seen to be believed.

Rating: 3/10 – car crash movie making from the country that gave us Battleship Potemkin (1925) and War and Peace (1967-8), 1812: Lancers Ballad, complete with stirring songs played – oddly – over the action scenes, deserves some kind of place in movie history as the one time an exploding dirigible is more a cause for yawning than excitement.

NOTE: The trailer below is in Russian without English subtitles but they’re not really needed as the focus is mainly on the movie’s action scenes.

Blind Detective (2013)

03 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Andy Lau, Blind Detective, Crime, Drama, Hong Kong, Johnnie To, Review, Sammi Cheng, Serial killer

Original title: Man Tam

D: Johnnie To / 130m

Cast: Andy Lau, Sammi Cheng, Tao Guo, Yuanyuan Gao

Notable for the re-teaming of Lau and Cheng – they last appeared together in 2004’s Yesterday Once More, also by To – Blind Detective is a mad, eclectic mix of crime thriller, romance, humour Hong Kong style, action, and whodunnit. Lau plays Johnston, a retired detective who lost his sight while chasing a criminal. This setback doesn’t stop him from investigating cases, though, and while attempting to apprehend the perpetrator behind a series of acid attacks he meets Officer Ho (Cheng). She realises Johnston has a gift: that even though he is blind he can still “see” in a way that allows him to solve crimes. Tormented by the disappearance ten years before of a childhood friend, Minnie, Ho asks Johnston to look into the case; she is certain that Minnie was abducted and killed, and hopes Johnston will be able to find the culprit. He agrees to help her but for a fee, and with the proviso that he instructs her in how to become a better detective.

This means Ho finds herself helping Johnston solving a variety of cold cases instead before she manages to get him to focus on Minnie. As events unfold, Ho finds herself drawn to Johnston, and despite his methods being highly irregular, she also finds her respect for him deepen. And one of the cold cases leads them to a serial killer…

For the most part, Blind Detective has all the hallmarks of a first-rate Hong Kong crime thriller: moody photography and lighting (courtesy of Siu-keung Cheng), strong yet unambiguous characters, a linear narrative punctuated by explanatory flashbacks, an unhurried pace, and a serious approach leavened by a combination of often very dark humour and strangely apt slapstick. What it also has is a compelling narrative, a clever visual style – witness Johnston’s “imagining” of the crimes he and Ho investigate – superb performances from Lau and Cheng, and a central mystery that is as challenging as it is artfully resolved. To directs with a sure hand, making each scene count both individually and as part of the whole, taking risks with the material and coming up trumps each time; it’s a bravura display from a director who rarely gets it wrong and whose movies almost always surprise with their virtuosity and confidence.

You can tell that Lau is having a ball playing Johnston, whether he’s instructing Ho to let him hit her with a hammer, or gradually piecing the clues together surrounding Minnie’s disappearance, or realising how dependent he’s become on Ho, with each successive scene Lau brings us a character we grow to like and empathise with, and this despite an initial arrogance that is mostly off-putting. This isn’t the type of role that Lau usually plays and it’s good to see him broaden his range. Cheng more than matches Lau, giving us a rookie officer who grows in both stature and experience, while retaining a soulful vulnerability that makes Ho all the more endearing. Both performances are accomplished, and the chemistry between the two actors adds to the movie’s (already substantial) surfeit of riches. The supporting cast, including Tao as the unfortunately named Fatbo, are uniformly good, and there’s yet another outstanding performance, this time from the young actress who plays the teenage Minnie (alas, finding her name amongst the few available credits is really difficult). It’s a small role but well handled and convincingly played.

On the downside, there are too many “foodie” scenes – it’s supposed to be one of Johnston’s character traits – and the denouement is a trifle rushed, while Johnston makes as many implausible leaps of faith in his deductive reasoning as he does actually interpret the clues around him. You might also question the punishment that Ho allows Johnston to put her through but the guilt she feels for doing nothing when Minnie was in trouble acts as an emotional counterweight for this. There’s also a subplot involving a woman (Yuanyuan) Johnston was in love with before he became blind, but which adds nothing to the movie overall. These problems aside, Blind Detective remains another impressive string to To’s bow.

Rating: 8/10 – given a less than rapturous welcome in its homeland, Blind Detective nevertheless works well on many levels and is entertaining throughout; at times anarchic, the movie presents a new twist on the disabled detective genre and deserves a wider audience.

thedullwoodexperiment

~ Viewing movies in a different light

Monthly Archives: December 2013

Wonder Woman (2009)

The Butler (2013)

My Top 10 Movies – Part Three

Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie (2013)

Xmas Greetings

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013)

10 Reasons to Remember Peter O’Toole (1932-2013)

10 Reasons to Remember Joan Fontaine (1917-2013)

My Top 10 Movies – Part Two

Shame the Devil (2013)

The Shadow of Silk Lennox (1935)

My Top 10 Movies – Part One

Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York (2006)

Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

21/12/12 (2010)

X-Men: Apocalypse and Cinema’s Dependency on Superheroes

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

The Family (2013)

Zombex (2013)

Illegal Aliens (2007)

Paranoia (2013)

Un prince (presque) charmant (2013)

Sharknado (2013)

Jekhane Bhooter Bhoy (2012)

10 Reasons to Remember Paul Walker (1973-2013)

1812: Lancers Ballad (2012)

Blind Detective (2013)

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